The Being of Being

In his recent blog Being and Heidegger Frederick Turner questions the existence of "being," seeing poetry does well in China where the verb to be does not exist. One response to him was by someone who questioned the motives of professors in college who won't accept papers written with to be, or "helper" verbs as we used to call them. I wrote:

Professors who are not accepting papers with to be verbs in them are just trying to be followers of scripts given to them forty years ago which in essence stated all to-be verbs must be suspect, because we want our language to be expedient, and not necessarily merely human. To be or not to be, Hamlet couldn’t decide; but he meant live or die, or both and surely more too. Can being stand for everything, and when missing from a language stand for nothing? Its absence from language is only slightly limiting on reality--that which exists in a human being's mind.



BEING

Being human is to be human
But are human beings to be
Or to just have been, forever amen?
I am that I am that I am
By any tense just was just for then
And only then, and not again.