When Intuition goes to battle with Reason,
these are usually quick skirmishesā
but this one has broken into war.
The campaign unfolds on the soil of abstraction,
reality, spirituality, and poetry.
Intuition begins with overwhelming superiorityā
three of the four fields are hers.
But Reason is insatiable:
guarding the kingdom,
minimizing the losses,
holding the troopsā morale.
Its advisor is Faithā
the Eternal Outsider.
Usually Faith stands by Intuition,
but now he has slipped quietly
to the opposite box,
losing his own faithā¦ one could say.
Intuition without Faith is dangerous.
Her box is always draped in dark lace curtains;
only her voice comes throughā
no one has ever seen her face,
except Faith,
who would never stoop so low as to speak of it.
Some claim she is not even human,
others say faceless,
and in the inner circles it is whispered
she wears Janusā faceā
(probably only for Faith,
a mocking trick against hypocrisy).
Yet for the audience outside,
listening from afar,
plain common sense whispers only one thing:
she is a shapeshifter.
Heresy.
Maybe thatās why they are so quiet.
Why is Intuition so dangerous
without her two-faced advisor?
One might suppose the real danger
is the opposite:
that religious fervor seeps into her field
and sprouts the weeds of fanaticism.
For Faith hides not only
fat volumes of sermon under his cassock,
but the stone tablets of morality.
He has, they say,
even used them in close combat.
Effective: the laws of physics themselves
lend the swing its momentum;
at the moment of impact
it already speaks the language of Force.
A cudgel in Faithās hand,
a drumhead tribunalā
the kind that applies laws literally.
When he sits beside Intuition,
his chair glows in full illumination,
stage-lights blazing,
the glare descending like a halo.
From that light,
behind Intuitionās baroque curtains,
she too takes on formā
not just a whisper,
but an active member of the council.
Without him,
Intuition grows overconfident.
If no one sees her,
perhaps she isnāt even there.
Her influence falters.
In her own words:
she has free rein.
In such moments,
Intuition dons the mask of the prophetā
a mask that grants
a dangerous confidence.
āThe prophet does not errā
he is only insufficiently zealous.ā
And at the final word, help arrives.
It is Obsession.
She lays her hand lightly
on Intuitionās shoulder
and says nothing but:
āYou are right.ā
