Genealogy

This is a 'genealogy' of those parts of Western (and hence the world's most important) thought which seem crucial to me. There is no place for Marx (a minor dead-end derivative of Hegel) or Freud (a mere artist rather than a philosopher/enquirer) - and certainly none for post- and post-post-modernists. Incidentally, I too am a mere artist; I do not have a great opinion of the breed.

-----------------

   A man is many-minded
And so the first philosopher:
   To start, in myths was blinded,
A butter-tongued récitateur.

   Democritus set atoms
A’flinging like the abacus,
   From this came self-hug patterns
Which spun themselves in knots to us.

   And Heraclitus, grim,
Proclaimed knee-deep in matter’s river
   That all was flux; for him
Life was a fugue upon the zither.

   Parmenides dismissed
Such airs convinced that nothing changed;
   What was was one, a cyst
Of being, unmotioned, unimpinged.

   Then Plato’s pandect thought
Put men in caves and Forms above;
   The sooth-eyed few, he taught,
Should the Republic’s herd betruth.

   But Aristotle knelt,
Stared starkly at the gist of things,
   Pondered why sweet herbs smelt
And why ground-running birds had wings.

   Elsewhere rough Moses marched
His tribes to swell in Nebo’s view;
   Milk, honey for the parched,
But also Law, thorn of the True.

   Christ brought to crux all this,
Stretched-armed seizer of times and place,
   Purified the world’s kiss,
Its what and why in His bruised face.

   Later, Aquinas wove
Tart Gospels and philosophy
   To show the struts of Love
Which pinned Creation’s jewel and sty.

   At length, Descartes’ “I am”
Proclaimed the individual,
   That thought machine whose frame
Was mind-geared through the pineal.

   And Newton turned the planets
And the dropped apple in his mind,
   Quantified all their habits
And mass to clockwork laws consigned.

   Came Hegel, dour like snow,
Convinced the world’s work had a goal,
   That man and thought must grow
To the self-knowing of world soul.

   Darwin exploded all;
His finches, flags of fecund chance,
   Self-grew through push and pull
Of parlous food and hot-flesh wants.

   So Nietzsche screamed that God
And man’s mere rational thought are dead,
   And Zarathustra trod
With Will on good and evil’s head.

   Then Einstein, placid-eyed,
Equation-led, made relative
   Space-time, and cosmos-wide
Linked each to all with light-speed’s weave.

   Heidegger rescued Being,
Enworlded and defined by death;
   Through truth-told self-descrying
Its thrown work is both wreath and sheaf.

   But Bohr in deep-root physics
Found quanta, waves, shape-shifting states;
   The probable had fidgets
And dodged when probed by lab-men’s lights.

   Last, Monod made summation
That man is thinking chemistry,
   A freak absurd mutation
Lacking all point or destiny.

   So, in a thrash of atoms
Torn by unchanging ruthless flux,
   Man wrestles in the fathoms
Seeking a handhold on the rocks.

   Among the dunes a cave,
Inside, a shelf with Cross and rose:
   What makes the world behave,
Blind force or Mind? The hermit chose.

====================
© February 2016

Penwith Sea

Penwith is the most westerly part of Cornwall, with Penzance as its main town. Wherry Town is the small area and beach on the west of Penzance, leading into the fishing port of Newlyn. Penlee Point is west of Newlyn on the way to Mousehole.

---------------

   The sea is many-mooded,
A grey and restless sojourner,
   Like weather fronts occluded,
Part lout and part philosopher.

   At Wherry Town it’s mild,
Innocuous like warming gruel,
   But will seize a thoughtless child
And drown it in a knee-deep pool.

   At Penlee Point it’s wild,
Striking the cliff with land-shake shocks;
   A boat by it beguiled
Will splinter, torn upon the rocks.

   Like any Tar at sprawl,
Half-drunk it puts the jug about;
   A wink – there’s fish in trawl,
A snarl – and widows’ lights go out.

====================
© January 2016

Snow Stuns All

Sunday 17 January 2016, 8.30 am

Snow stuns all:
Black-wet earth,
Bark-soaked limes,
Mist-blanched bush,
Ice-crisped grass,
Haunt-hunched birds,
Melt-dripped roofs,
White-stretched streets,
Noise-mute cars,
Grey-lumped sky,
Lead-weight sea,
Freeze-breath man,
Life-death’s gasp:
Snow stuns all.

====================
© January 2016

Europe Blues

I stride to my desk in the mornings

To study absicht and donnée,
But soon I take pause to consider
Herr Professeur has little to say.
        Oh the gruff good sense of Old England.

Come evening I twirl my spaghetti
Or dabble a thin Tuscan wine,
But really I find it’s all rat food
Not hearty and struck from the chine.
        Oh the ale and roast beef of Old England.

On Sundays I turn to my Maker
To acknowledge good fortune received,
But appalled at thought of the priest-hagged
I give thanks for what Cranmer achieved.
        Oh the matins and psalms of Old England.

And sometimes I struggle with paroles
Or drang which a dichter has sung,
But they clog my exasperate vision
Like chaff which madmen have flung.
        Oh the part-songs and tales of Old England.

Thank God for these green rocky islands,
For the wolds and the homesteads and lanes,
Though now swarming with Europe’s children
Like a locust army of Cains.
        Oh the fair fields and towns of Old England.

----------

Note: "Herr Professeur" is deliberate.

====================
© January 2016

David Varney

"David Varney" - I changed his name - was indeed annoying! But his end, a lonely wanderer of the streets, was sad. The poem makes obvious reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Felix Randal" and, perhaps less obviously but important to me, Yeats's "Paudeen." One of those little poetic felicities occurred in the writing when I found that the rhyme sound of lines 9 and 11 in the first stanza was repeated in the same lines in the second stanza.

--------------

David Varney, the shop help, ah is he dead?
Tiresome, he’d dog your side with gibbous eyes
And purchase patter – words, but nothing said,
Squabbling the while with staff like boys at shies.
Put out by management he limped the streets
With heavy coat and hat and plastic bags;
Years passed, a pulled-down shade with scowls and bleats
He dredged recycling bins, collecting rags.
Last seen on Christmas Eve, a bitter nought
Among the glee, I heard by New Year’s Day
He’d died; who knows if he sweet ransom sought
Before that sea change from his heavy clay?

How do the unendearing find their peace,
The crank, the spiteful or the blank as snow?
That’s you, that’s me. At death, each growth, each crease
Of soul is polished like a glacier’s flow.
Cold light, a curlew’s cry are metaphors
For the Sun’s burning which expels all trash,
So that the billionth person, once in sores,
Is purified in an eternal flash.
That sear of light, made simple as a thought,
Becomes an offering to That which gives,
And David Varney, who in life was fraught,
Beyond all being, now in Being lives.

====================
© January 2016

After Christmas

The days after Christmas were dull;
The sea licked the beach like a cat
Its paws, and the herring gulls hung
   In the soft damp air;
The wagtails like williwaws ran
From rain pool to rock on the sand,
And, turning, the tide slowly swung
   The pool weed like hair.
 
But nothing can halt winter’s cull;
Old men coughed to death in their beds,
Young women had seizures and died,
   And the gulls gave tongue;
They scorned carolled claims of new birth,
And fought for the left-over food;
Then virus dug claws in their side,
   And their death begun.

====================
© January 2016 

Here's an alternative ending to the second stanza for those who like variety:

They scorned the bells’ chimes of new birth,
And gorged on men’s left-over food;
Then virus dug claws in their side,
   And they, too, died young.

In December

Saint Lucy's Day is 13 December, previously considered the shortest day of the year. She was martyred with a knife on the orders of the Roman prefect for defending her virginity. She is often shown carrying a lamp and is the patron saint of the blind and of writers (how ironically appropriate!)

   Anyone who knows the cliffs around Lamorna Cove to the west of Penzance, will have thought on the disastrous consequences of a fall onto the rocks and sea below.

   For poison in the ears see Shakespeare's 'Hamlet.'

--------------------

The years pass by, though speeding up in age;
December and the shortest day are here;
The twelve months gone have quit and claimed their wage
And left a twilight trough that’s more a bier.
Saint Lucy’s day is slow to light and soon
To dark, the hours between are brown and stale;
Like brittle leaves those hours are dead by noon
And after that the dusk is mute as braille.
An age-pained body and a mind in woe –
These things I muse on, Yeats’s “life and work,”
Both unperfected; one as cold as snow,
The other blustered up from trick and quirk.
But worse is thought of these past fifty years
In which an island culture killed itself,
Smashed its temples, poured poison in its ears,
And flung its bones upon a dusty shelf;
It thereby stole the context which might give
Meaning to my failure, and orphaned me
To stumble mud-bound, anguished how to live
In fair fields flooded by a foreign sea.
No polity survives without a creed
That’s Other-based. And yet the western church
Let slip elite and mass: the mustard seed
Become – self-stranded on a stony perch –
A thing of women and falsetto men.
And now a book-fomented angry roar
That’s bound to catechize the state again
Makes hajj through field and town and strikes the door.
Ah, where find succour in an age so foul?
Might Orthodoxy’s icons calm the brow,
Their cool-eyed staring from a martyr’s cowl
Which peace and stiff-backed piety endow?
Or might Plotinus with his trance-like thought,
Tough analyst of Truth’s economy,
Give comfort whilst the self in matter caught
Seeks flight to That whose essence is to be?
Perhaps, when standing on the split-faced cliffs
Beyond Lamorna, thundering pagan winds
Will throw me to the sea’s mad hieroglyphs
Which, frenzied, tear the flesh and life rescinds;
And then, at one with rock and sand and sea,
My scattered molecules all shared about,
The helpless questions of finality
Will hang in the wind’s laugh and the waves’ shout.
Well, Lucy’s night has fallen. With my books
And sad regrets I crouch upon a flame
And warm my fingers, their arthritic crooks,
Palsied in mind with self-deriding shame.
My window flares a moment with a lamp
As someone treks the dark like Will-o’-wisp,
Though pray it’s Lucy in the frost and damp,
Her footsteps lisping on the grasses crisp.
Her death-crowned ardency before the knife,
Prefect-defying with a maiden’s might,
Gives balm to one whose each-way-driven life
Sags like a shroud this deep December night.

====================

© December 2015