What's in a beating heart?  Karl Ove Knausgaard, in the first volume of his massive six volume Proustian-like autobiographical tome, asks this question, repeatedly and often as he takes the reader into the beginnings of his childhood.  It is a question well worth asking, for much depends on it.  When a heart beats, life reigns; when it does not, life ends.  When a heart beats, we move and breathe; when it stops, we do neither.  It is on the heart that all life depends.  It is on the heart that nations rise and fall, it is on the heart that history unfolds, it is on the heart that time itself is filled.
     For the ancient Hebrews, the heart was more than the physical organ.  It circumscribed the whole of intention and desire; the heart was the center of who a person was.  It invested and presented its holder in and to the world.  Though we moderns view the heart as foremost a physical organ, we cannot help but view it metaphorically as well, making it the instigator of emotion and longing, the seat of our deepest dreams.
     We all are poets of ourselves.  We survive with science, but we live with our hearts.  We need our brains, but we need our hearts to be fully human, in the broadest sense. for we  see with far more than our eyes.  If the universe were only a brain, it would still need a heart.  We are more than particles and chemicals.
     As the Romantics once observed, we err if we suppose we can live on reason and logic and materiality only.  We need the poetry of our hearts.  And we need the personal transcendence from which it can only come.