536 Philosophy poems

drawing a breath between each sentence, trailing closely every word. — James Hoch, ‘Draft’ in Miscreants 1. some things, I knew, were beyond choosing: didu — grandmother — wilting under cancer’s terminal care. mama — my uncle’s — mysterious disappearance — ventilator vibrating, severed silently, in the hospital’s unkempt dark. an old friend’s biting silence — unexplained — promised loyalties melting for profit abandoning long familial presences of trust. devi’s jealous heart      misreading emails hacked carefully under cover, her fingernails ripping unformed poems, bloodied, scarred — my diary pages weeping wordlessly — my children aborted, my poetry breathless forever. 2. these are acts that enact themselves, regardless — helpless, as I am, torn asunder permanently, drugged, numbed. strange love, this is — a salving: what medics and nurses do. i live buddha-like, unblinking, a painted vacant smile — one that stores pain and painlessness — someone else’s nirvana thrust upon me. some things I once believed in are beyond my choosing — choosing is a choice unavailable to me.

from Mustapha O wearisome condition of humanity! Born under one law, to another bound; Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity; Created sick, commanded to be sound. What meaneth nature by these diverse laws? Passion and reason, self-division cause. Is it the mark or majesty of power To make offenses that it may forgive? Nature herself doth her own self deflower To hate those errors she herself doth give. For how should man think that he may not do, If nature did not fail and punish, too? Tyrant to others, to herself unjust, Only commands things difficult and hard, Forbids us all things which it knows is lust, Makes easy pains, unpossible reward. If nature did not take delight in blood, She would have made more easy ways to good. We that are bound by vows and by promotion, With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites, To teach belief in good and still devotion, To preach of heaven’s wonders and delights; Yet when each of us in his own heart looks He finds the God there, far unlike his books.

A Greek I worked for once would always say that tragedies which still appall and thrill happen daily on a village scale. Except that he put it the other way: dark doings in the sleepiest small town loom dire and histrionic as a play. Cosmic? Perhaps. Unprecedented? Not to the old women sitting in the sun, the old men planted in cafes till noon or midnight taking in the human scene, connoisseurs of past-passing-and-to-come. These watchers locate in their repertory mythic fragments of some kindred story and draw them dripping out of memory’s well. Incest and adultery; exile and murder; divine punishment; disgrace: the trick is to locate the right-sized piece of the vast puzzle-patterned tapestry from which one ripped-out patch makes tragedy. This highly skilled and patient process—find a larger context, match and patch and mend— is what the chorus in Greek tragedy has always done. And to this very day spectators comb the tangles of a tale, compare, remember, comment—not ideal, but middle-aged or older, and alert. Beyond the hero’s rashness or the hurt heart of the heroine, they’ve reached the age when only stars still lust for center stage. The chorus, at a point midway between the limelight and the audience, is seen and unseen. Lady chaperones at balls once sat on brittle chairs against the walls. “My dancing days are over,” they’d both sigh and smile. Or take the case of poetry. Mine used to play the heroine—me me me— but lately, having had its fill of “I,” tries to discern, despite its vision’s flaws, a shape. A piece of myth. A pattern. Laws.

for Stanley Cavell I Must we mean what we say? Stick to it, Be bound to, chained up beside the house, Teased by boys on bicycles, fireflies, The seasons as they pass out of reach? We could try meaning nothing, a way Favored in the brightest corridors By those who pass from life to death through Halls of learning and replace marriage With justice. To mean nothing is to Have nothing at heart, to be chained up To the right of and a bit behind The body: without marriage, justice Prevails as the clenched hand of culture On the most brutal bridle prevails Against the motion beneath that wants To claim the hand of culture. Against The Horse in the horse, the Rider in The rider, the heart beneath the tongue. II In the anarchies of the sensuous Hands the order of love is leaping. In a far corner of the landscape A lover’s hands leap in the skin’s light, And heroes’ hands lap like tongues on necks Curved with significance. The horses Stamp and whinny, hint of caprioles As urgently as our mute souls And it is impossible to mean Anything but motion. A dispatch From the graceful landscape will arrive: “He must be told.” Lovers will obey Thus leaving terror and time alone To fend for themselves. I will obey, Am obeying now, making poems From chains, leaving the season alone— You must be told(already your horse Leaps beneath you!)what you meant to say.

"As certain also of your own poets have said"— (Acts 17.28) Cleon the poet (from the sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea And laugh their pride when the light wave lisps "Greece")— To Protus in his Tyranny: much health! They give thy letter to me, even now: I read and seem as if I heard thee speak. The master of thy galley still unlades Gift after gift; they block my court at last And pile themselves along its portico Royal with sunset, like a thought of thee: And one white she-slave from the group dispersed Of black and white slaves (like the chequer-work Pavement, at once my nation's work and gift, Now covered with this settle-down of doves), One lyric woman, in her crocus vest Woven of sea-wools, with her two white hands Commends to me the strainer and the cup Thy lip hath bettered ere it blesses mine. Well-counselled, king, in thy munificence! For so shall men remark, in such an act Of love for him whose song gives life its joy,— Thy recognition of the use of life; Nor call thy spirit barely adequate To help on life in straight ways, broad enough For vulgar souls, by ruling and the rest. Thou, in the daily building of thy tower,— Whether in fierce and sudden spasms of toil, Or through dim lulls of unapparent growth, Or when the general work 'mid good acclaim Climbed with the eye to cheer the architect,— Didst ne'er engage in work for mere work's sake— Hadst ever in thy heart the luring hope Of some eventual rest a-top of it, Whence, all the tumult of the building hushed, Thou first of men might'st look out to the East: The vulgar saw thy tower, thou sawest the sun. For this, I promise on thy festival To pour libation, looking o'er the sea, Making this slave narrate thy fortunes, speak Thy great words, and describe thy royal face— Wishing thee wholly where Zeus lives the most, Within the eventual element of calm. Thy letter's first requirement meets me here. It is as thou hast heard: in one short life I, Cleon, have effected all those things Thou wonderingly dost enumerate. That epos on thy hundred plates of gold Is mine,—and also mine the little chant, So sure to rise from every fishing-bark When, lights at prow, the seamen haul their net. The image of the sun-god on the phare, Men turn from the sun's self to see, is mine; The Pœcile o'er-storied its whole length, As thou didst hear, with painting, is mine too. I know the true proportions of a man And woman also, not observed before; And I have written three books on the soul, Proving absurd all written hitherto, And putting us to ignorance again. For music,—why, I have combined the moods, Inventing one. In brief, all arts are mine; Thus much the people know and recognize, Throughout our seventeen islands. Marvel not. We of these latter days, with greater mind Than our forerunners, since more composite, Look not so great, beside their simple way, To a judge who only sees one way at once, One mind-point and no other at a time,— Compares the small part of a man of us With some whole man of the heroic age, Great in his way—not ours, nor meant for ours. And ours is greater, had we skill to know: For, what we call this life of men on earth, This sequence of the soul's achievements here Being, as I find much reason to conceive, Intended to be viewed eventually As a great whole, not analyzed to parts, But each part having reference to all,— How shall a certain part, pronounced complete, Endure effacement by another part? Was the thing done?—then, what's to do again? See, in the chequered pavement opposite, Suppose the artist made a perfect rhomb, And next a lozenge, then a trapezoid— He did not overlay them, superimpose The new upon the old and blot it out, But laid them on a level in his work, Making at last a picture; there it lies. So, first the perfect separate forms were made, The portions of mankind; and after, so, Occurred the combination of the same. For where had been a progress, otherwise? Mankind, made up of all the single men,— In such a synthesis the labour ends. Now mark me! those divine men of old time Have reached, thou sayest well, each at one point The outside verge that rounds our faculty; And where they reached, who can do more than reach? It takes but little water just to touch At some one point the inside of a sphere, And, as we turn the sphere, touch all the rest In due succession: but the finer air Which not so palpably nor obviously, Though no less universally, can touch The whole circumference of that emptied sphere, Fills it more fully than the water did; Holds thrice the weight of water in itself Resolved into a subtler element. And yet the vulgar call the sphere first full Up to the visible height—and after, void; Not knowing air's more hidden properties. And thus our soul, misknown, cries out to Zeus To vindicate his purpose in our life: Why stay we on the earth unless to grow? Long since, I imaged, wrote the fiction out, That he or other god descended here And, once for all, showed simultaneously What, in its nature, never can be shown, Piecemeal or in succession;—showed, I say, The worth both absolute and relative Of all his children from the birth of time, His instruments for all appointed work. I now go on to image,—might we hear The judgment which should give the due to each, Show where the labour lay and where the ease, And prove Zeus' self, the latent everywhere! This is a dream:—but no dream, let us hope, That years and days, the summers and the springs, Follow each other with unwaning powers. The grapes which dye thy wine are richer far, Through culture, than the wild wealth of the rock; The suave plum than the savage-tasted drupe; The pastured honey-bee drops choicer sweet; The flowers turn double, and the leaves turn flowers; That young and tender crescent-moon, thy slave, Sleeping above her robe as buoyed by clouds, Refines upon the women of my youth. What, and the soul alone deteriorates? I have not chanted verse like Homer, no— Nor swept string like Terpander, no—nor carved And painted men like Phidias and his friend: I am not great as they are, point by point. But I have entered into sympathy With these four, running these into one soul, Who, separate, ignored each other's art. Say, is it nothing that I know them all? The wild flower was the larger; I have dashed Rose-blood upon its petals, pricked its cup's Honey with wine, and driven its seed to fruit, And show a better flower if not so large: I stand myself. Refer this to the gods Whose gift alone it is! which, shall I dare (All pride apart) upon the absurd pretext That such a gift by chance lay in my hand, Discourse of lightly or depreciate? It might have fallen to another's hand: what then? I pass too surely: let at least truth stay! And next, of what thou followest on to ask. This being with me as I declare, O king, My works, in all these varicoloured kinds, So done by me, accepted so by men— Thou askest, if (my soul thus in men's hearts) I must not be accounted to attain The very crown and proper end of life? Inquiring thence how, now life closeth up, I face death with success in my right hand: Whether I fear death less than dost thyself The fortunate of men? "For" (writest thou) "Thou leavest much behind, while I leave nought. Thy life stays in the poems men shall sing, The pictures men shall study; while my life, Complete and whole now in its power and joy, Dies altogether with my brain and arm, Is lost indeed; since, what survives myself? The brazen statue to o'erlook my grave, Set on the promontory which I named. And that—some supple courtier of my heir Shall use its robed and sceptred arm, perhaps, To fix the rope to, which best drags it down. I go then: triumph thou, who dost not go!" Nay, thou art worthy of hearing my whole mind. Is this apparent, when thou turn'st to muse Upon the scheme of earth and man in chief, That admiration grows as knowledge grows? That imperfection means perfection hid, Reserved in part, to grace the after-time? If, in the morning of philosophy, Ere aught had been recorded, nay perceived, Thou, with the light now in thee, couldst have looked On all earth's tenantry, from worm to bird, Ere man, her last, appeared upon the stage— Thou wouldst have seen them perfect, and deduced The perfectness of others yet unseen. Conceding which,—had Zeus then questioned thee, "Shall I go on a step, improve on this, Do more for visible creatures than is done?" Thou wouldst have answered, "Ay, by making each Grow conscious in himself—by that alone. All's perfect else: the shell sucks fast the rock, The fish strikes through the sea, the snake both swims And slides, forth range the beasts, the birds take flight, Till life's mechanics can no further go— And all this joy in natural life is put Like fire from off thy finger into each, So exquisitely perfect is the same. But 'tis pure fire, and they mere matter are; It has them, not they it: and so I choose For man, thy last premeditated work (If I might add a glory to the scheme), That a third thing should stand apart from both, A quality arise within his soul, Which, intro-active, made to supervise And feel the force it has, may view itself, And so be happy." Man might live at first The animal life: but is there nothing more? In due time, let him critically learn How he lives; and, the more he gets to know Of his own life's adaptabilities, The more joy-giving will his life become. Thus man, who hath this quality, is best. But thou, king, hadst more reasonably said: "Let progress end at once,—man make no step Beyond the natural man, the better beast, Using his senses, not the sense of sense." In man there's failure, only since he left The lower and inconscious forms of life. We called it an advance, the rendering plain Man's spirit might grow conscious of man's life, And, by new lore so added to the old, Take each step higher over the brute's head. This grew the only life, the pleasure-house, Watch-tower and treasure-fortress of the soul, Which whole surrounding flats of natural life Seemed only fit to yield subsistence to; A tower that crowns a country. But alas, The soul now climbs it just to perish there! For thence we have discovered ('tis no dream— We know this, which we had not else perceived) That there's a world of capability For joy, spread round about us, meant for us, Inviting us; and still the soul craves all, And still the flesh replies, "Take no jot more Than ere thou clombst the tower to look abroad! Nay, so much less as that fatigue has brought Deduction to it." We struggle, fain to enlarge Our bounded physical recipiency, Increase our power, supply fresh oil to life, Repair the waste of age and sickness: no, It skills not! life's inadequate to joy, As the soul sees joy, tempting life to take. They praise a fountain in my garden here Wherein a Naiad sends the water-bow Thin from her tube; she smiles to see it rise. What if I told her, it is just a thread From that great river which the hills shut up, And mock her with my leave to take the same? The artificer has given her one small tube Past power to widen or exchange—what boots To know she might spout oceans if she could? She cannot lift beyond her first thin thread: And so a man can use but a man's joy While he sees God's. Is it for Zeus to boast, "See, man, how happy I live, and despair— That I may be still happier—for thy use!" If this were so, we could not thank our lord, As hearts beat on to doing; 'tis not so— Malice it is not. Is it carelessness? Still, no. If care—where is the sign? I ask, And get no answer, and agree in sum, O king, with thy profound discouragement, Who seest the wider but to sigh the more. Most progress is most failure: thou sayest well. The last point now:—thou dost except a case— Holding joy not impossible to one With artist-gifts—to such a man as I Who leave behind me living works indeed; For, such a poem, such a painting lives. What? dost thou verily trip upon a word, Confound the accurate view of what joy is (Caught somewhat clearer by my eyes than thine) With feeling joy? confound the knowing how And showing how to live (my faculty) With actually living?—Otherwise Where is the artist's vantage o'er the king? Because in my great epos I display How divers men young, strong, fair, wise, can act— Is this as though I acted? if I paint, Carve the young Phoebus, am I therefore young? Methinks I'm older that I bowed myself The many years of pain that taught me art! Indeed, to know is something, and to prove How all this beauty might be enjoyed, is more: But, knowing nought, to enjoy is something too. Yon rower, with the moulded muscles there, Lowering the sail, is nearer it than I. I can write love-odes: thy fair slave's an ode. I get to sing of love, when grown too grey For being beloved: she turns to that young man, The muscles all a-ripple on his back. I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king! "But," sayest thou—(and I marvel, I repeat, To find thee trip on such a mere word) "what Thou writest, paintest, stays; that does not die: Sappho survives, because we sing her songs, And Aeschylus, because we read his plays!" Why, if they live still, let them come and take Thy slave in my despite, drink from thy cup, Speak in my place. Thou diest while I survive? Say rather that my fate is deadlier still, In this, that every day my sense of joy Grows more acute, my soul (intensified By power and insight) more enlarged, more keen; While every day my hairs fall more and more, My hand shakes, and the heavy years increase— The horror quickening still from year to year, The consummation coming past escape, When I shall know most, and yet least enjoy— When all my works wherein I prove my worth, Being present still to mock me in men's mouths, Alive still, in the praise of such as thou, I, I the feeling, thinking, acting man, The man who loved his life so over-much, Sleep in my urn. It is so horrible, I dare at times imagine to my need Some future state revealed to us by Zeus, Unlimited in capability For joy, as this is in desire for joy, —To seek which, the joy-hunger forces us: That, stung by straitness of our life, made strait On purpose to make prized the life at large— Freed by the throbbing impulse we call death, We burst there as the worm into the fly, Who, while a worm still, wants his wings. But no! Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas, He must have done so, were it possible! Live long and happy, and in that thought die: Glad for what was! Farewell. And for the rest, I cannot tell thy messenger aright Where to deliver what he bears of thine To one called Paulus; we have heard his fame Indeed, if Christus be not one with him— I know not, nor am troubled much to know. Thou canst not think a mere barbarian Jew, As Paulus proves to be, one circumcised, Hath access to a secret shut from us? Thou wrongest our philosophy, O king, In stooping to inquire of such an one, As if his answer could impose at all! He writeth, doth he? well, and he may write. Oh, the Jew findeth scholars! certain slaves Who touched on this same isle, preached him and Christ; And (as I gathered from a bystander) Their doctrine could be held by no sane man.

This trace, if it exists, is alms for delusion. An arch uncurls from the floor scented with the scent of a tapestry, housed here. I recall the hour but not its passage unless dream captures and ties it to sleep: a fat bellhop smiles, shows me to the tower where I can watch the departure. But some days settle so that nothing crosses the horizon; stare as I will, no star needles the air. Now I am left on the outskirts of a forest hemmed in by wheat where plump trees hide the image, its symmetry shot up and blown across the ground like feathers. The unicorn, the grail, blue and red wings of kneeling musicians, these are embroidered elsewhere. Perseverance was crowned. Hope and Pity prayed for success. How fast is this camera? Can it record a trace? There was a voyage. Four mounted horses strain against centuries. To each is allotted: dust kicked up, smoke, plumage.

Man, the egregious egoist, (In mystery the twig is bent,) Imagines, by some mental twist, That he alone is sentient Of the intolerable load Which on all living creatures lies, Nor stoops to pity in the toad The speechless sorrow of its eyes. He asks no questions of the snake, Nor plumbs the phosphorescent gloom Where lidless fishes, broad awake, Swim staring at a night-mare doom.

One man prays: How shall I be able to lie with this woman? Do thou pray thus: How shall I not desire to lie with her? Another prays thus: How shall I be released from this? Another prays: How shall I not desire to be released? —Marcus Aurelius When we are lost in our longings, Aurelius, already it is too late: there is already nothing we can do. I have rarely desired an end to my desires. We are so in love with our wanting. Last week, though doctors were quick to repair it, a baby in India was born grasping her own beating heart in her fist. Today, a Dumpster arrives from Dave’s Trash Removal & I begin to fill it. I toss in a transistor radio that hasn’t worked in years. A man walking past asks if he can take it. Later, he returns & carries off a broken TV. A neighbor salvages the dented gray fuse box; a girl wants a window, a paper bag full of tangled cords. All night I listen to the wind & the echoes of feet kicking through rubbish, like a mouse nesting inside a drum. My older brother is dead a decade. Yet here in its enormous gold frame is the familiar, pastel portrait someone named Maxwell drew for our mother, an inaccurate rendering of the two of us when we were small. I can’t look at it; I can’t throw it away.Every change is a death, you tell yourself, turn thy thoughts now to thy life as a child. . . . One day, I tell myself, I will shut all the doors, leave everything behind. The museum is showing a hundred tricked-out Victorian photographs of that other world: the hoax of floating fairies, women haunted by ghostly blurs. Another century & still we want to believe in what we know cannot be true. Your words, Aurelius, have found me, but you could not. If we are disappointed, we have only ourselves to blame:Wipe out thy imagination. We fill our hands when they are empty. We empty ourselves when we have held too much too long.

In the last book of The Republic Plato turns to poetry, implicitly contrasts it with philosophy, and argues that it shouldn’t even exist in the ideal city he’s meticulously constructed. His reasoning is liable to strike us now as quaint: poets traffic in appearances, not essences, and write of things they don’t know anything about, like military strategy and battles; they portray heroic figures in the grip of powerful, deranged emotions, to which their readers must inevitably succumb; and there’s a metaphysical complaint: all art, including poetry, is essentially mimetic, and representations are inherently inferior to what they represent. You need to make some changes if you want to know what’s going on. Poetry for Plato wasn’t what you’d probably think of if you’re reading this, a marginalized enactment of experience and subjectivity in which the medium itself is half the point. Nor was philosophy the systematic study of the possibility of meaning we’ve become accustomed to, but sought instead to penetrate the veil of appearances, arriving at a vision of the good that shows us how we ought to try to live. It’s been suggested that to understand him, think of movies and TV instead of poetry, for they’re what occupy the space that poetry occupied in Athens. I agree, but then the question ultimately becomes: Should how we try to live be based on fantasies and feelings, or known facts and reason? And the suspicion that the latter aren’t much fun shows just how troubling the question really is. Yet even in their late, attenuated forms philosophy and poetry pose a problem, Plato’s problem.Write what you know: an admonition that concedes the point that poets usually don’t. And what exactly does one know, in the intended sense? I guess what’s meant is something like a lived identity within a social world, and yet behind those limited identities lies something larger, something commonplace and ordinary, but at the same time utterly unique. Like the hedgehog, each of us knows just one big thing, a thing philosophy can’t capture and that poetry can at best remind us of or intimate, but can’t describe. As it extends itself in time the individual life remains a captive of its point of view, confined to what it knows, cut off from all those others that resemble it in all respects but one. It’s what I know and everything I know, it’s something that I know so thoroughly I can’t imagine or describe it, though it fills my eyes. But there’s no need for imagery or words: you know it too, for it lies floating in your eyes. Would Plato even recognize a poetry of consciousness? And what of consciousness itself? It’s sometimes said to have a history, a recent one, and to have been unknown to Homer’s Greeks. But that’s a fallacy, inferring how you feel from what you write; moreover, Bernard Williams showed that what they wrote shows that they felt like us. And yet the poems of the articulated consciousness lay in the blank, unwritten future, poised to spring from Hamlet’s mind, not Oedipus’s; and their challenge to Book X was still to be imagined, still to come. “There’s the part where you say it, and the part where you take it back” (J.L. Austin). I say these things because I want to, and sometimes even think they’re true; but now I want to take them back. Knowledge is factive, meaning one can’t know what isn’t true, and truth is simply correspondence with the facts. What are the facts of consciousness? They’re all analogies and metaphors, a feeling of existence but without reality’s defining contours, like a sense of something hesitating on the brink of being said, or hiding in the shadows of an inner room. They’re all appearances, but appearances of what? Something that wanders up your limbs and nerves and blossoms in your brain? They’re all just figments of perspective, of a point of view from which the time is always now, the place is always here, and the thought of something hiding underneath the surface a seductive spell. The harder I try to pin them down the more elusive they become, as gradually the shadows disappear, the words turn into syllables, the face becomes anonymous and leaves me staring at a silver sheet of glass. What starts out as self-scrutiny becomes a study in self-pity, and instead of something tangible and true one winds up chasing the chimeras of Book X: the fruitless quarrel between philosophy and poetry, reason and unreason, and that tedious myth about the soul, of what becomes of it at death, then of its journey and rebirth. I’m tired, I’m far from home, I’m waiting in a chamber in a castle on a mountaintop in Umbria (poets get to do this), seven hundred miles from Athens as the crow flies, where perhaps “the sun still shines upon the hills and has not yet set.” I write the way I do because I want it to exist, but then the spell breaks and it dries up like a dream, leaving me with just this smooth, unvariegated surface, which remains. “His words made us ashamed, and we checked our tears. He walked around, and when he said his legs were heavy he lay on his back as he had been told to do, and the man who had given him the poison touched his body, and after a while tested his feet and legs, pressed hard upon his foot and asked him if he felt this, and Socrates said no. Then he pressed his calves, and made his way up his body and showed us that it was cold and stiff. He felt it himself and said that when the cold reached his heart he would be gone. As his belly was getting cold Socrates uncovered his head—he had covered it—and said—these were his last words—‘Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius; make this offering to him and do not forget.’—‘It shall be done,’ said Crito, ‘tell us if there is anything else.’ But there was no answer. Shortly afterwards Socrates made a movement; the man uncovered him and his eyes were fixed. Seeing this Crito closed his mouth and his eyes.”

You would expect an uncountable number, Acres and acres of books in rows Like wheat or gold bullion. Or that the words just Appear in the mind, like banner headlines. In fact there is one shelf Holding a modest number, ten or twelve volumes. No dust jackets, because — no dust. Covers made of gold or skin Or golden skin, or creosote or rain- Soaked macadam, or some Mix of salt & glass. You turn a page & mountains rise, clouds drawn by children Bubble in the sky, you are twenty Again, trying to read a map Dissolving in your hands. I say You& mean Me, say God& mean Librarian— who after long research Offers you a glass of water and an apple — You, grateful to discover your name, A footnote in that book.