Axioms, Postulates and Proverbs
Tom Sauk Teaches us a truth
The Three Stooges get plenty of recognition for their eye-pokes, pie fights, nyuk-nyuks and nose-twists, but they don’t get enough credit for their wordplay.
For instance, in one episode Moe asks Curly what is wrong. Curly says that he is apprehensive. Moe is confounded and asks what apprehensive means. “It means that I’m scared with a college degree,” responds Curly. Then Moe pokes him in the eye.
The same can be said with the words words axiom and assumption. What is an axiom? It is an assumption with a college degree.
Of course, everyone has heard the old saw about assumptions and how they can make a donkey out of you and me. To avoid joining the burrow family, let’s turn the word assumption into postulate and try the joke again:
What is a postulate? An axiom with a college degree.
Somehow, that pairing doesn’t work. I think the effectiveness is lost because the word postulate has gone on to graduate school and fattened its head with extra letters while the word axiom is content with its undergraduate degree. No one likes a pretentious anything.
Of course, if the phrase or word has gone to a religious school and been educated by people who call each other father or sister, then the axiom or assumption or postulate is a proverb. A proverb may or may not have graduated from anything, but it sounds old and wise, something that gained its knowledge from experience rather than a book. Examples might be “Sluggards do not plow in season; so at harvest they look but find nothing” (Proverbs 20:4) and “Wine is a mocker and beer is a brawler; whoever is lead astray by them is not wise” (Proverbs 20:1).
But I veer off track: Perhaps I should just keep everything on the high school level and say that Mentor Mike and I were testing a truth recently, that truth being that “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.”
Why were we putting an old saying to the test? Human nature.
No matter how true ideas seem, it is the human condition to challenge axioms and assumptions and postulates in order to prove that such things apply to other people and not to ourselves.
As to proverbs—or even simple commands—it seems to be human nature to outright ignore them. Adam and Eve exemplify this. They might have been thinking that certainly God meant a different tree or a different fruit. Just a nibble from the fruit in hand would prove the absurdity of the situation.
So it goes.
“A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” The advice is simple enough: Don’t gamble. Be happy with the thing that you have rather than throwing it down and going after the two items you may or may not get. I taught in a high school for 32 years and many students would fret over the idea of leaving the current boyfriend/girlfriend for the possibility of a more prestigious one. Usually the only thing they won in this gamble was a lowered reputation.
The problem arrives when an axiom runs into an adage. For us, the adage was “reach for the stars.” OK, maybe that’s not an adage, but the proverbial police are not here to make rulings on such things. All I know is that “Keep reaching for the stars” is something inspirational that Casey Kasem used to say at the end of each of his American Top 40 countdowns, and I listened to that show for years. Like an assumption, it sounds right.
The goal, or star we were reaching for, was to photograph the Mina Sauk waterfall at Taum Sauk Mountain State Park. We thought we had chosen a perfect time to make the attempt: it was Spring, the area had recent rains and the air was unseasonably cool. What makes this waterfall special is that it is the highest one in Missouri with a continuous flow. The nearby Black Mountain Falls is taller, but it gets parched on occasion.
After Mike and I had hiked more than a mile over football-sized stones and steep granite paths we wished that the word police had been around to define “flow.” What we saw was a trickle. Old men in the middle of the night do better.
Somehow, we had an inkling that this would happen. During our mile-hike in, we passed through a handful of glades. A glade is like a bald spot on a hill. The dirt is too thin to grow many trees, but the lichen-covered rocks, wild grasses and wildflowers love the area and its constant sunlight. On a cool day it is magical stepping from the forest into a glade. On a hot day it is like stepping into a pizza oven.
Within each glade we noticed several compositions that would make nice photos: lush green grasses surrounding pink granite boulders, oceans of wildflowers dancing in the breeze, a collection of purple blooms sending out bursts of yellow that are mindful of a fireworks display. All of this was our bird in hand.
Yet, we continued walking toward our two birds in the bush, the waterfall. Even though the sky was overcast as we were hiking, we knew that the light might be different on our way back up the mountain. In case you don’t know, the quality of light is very important to photography—morning and evening gold light being the best while high-noon light is the worst. We were gambling that the falls would be good and that the clouds would stick around to block the high-noon sun.
Obviously, if we had all of the facts as we started our quest to the falls, we would not have gone there. I can forgive Mentor Mike for pushing us to “reach for the stars” because he went to photography school and learned how to turn his camera into something akin to a musical instrument. Myself? I studied and taught English Literature and know that the best laid plans of mice and men gang oft agley. If only I had someone like Moe to knock me around to remind me of that bit of Robert Burns advice, then I would have stopped and spent my morning photographing wildflowers rather than twisting my ankles trying to get to the trickle-falls.
Yes, we still took some photos of the glades on our way back to the truck after the waterfall let us down, and some of the images are pretty good. We were able to get a few because we have adopted our own adage/axiom/postulate/proverb: Take what is given.
God gave us gorgeous Ozark glades generously filled with pink granite, colorful wildflowers, lush green plants and birds galore. Even if we had not snapped a single frame, it was a joy to see such things.
Take—and enjoy—what is given. That was and is the Truth of the Day.
