It is difficult if you believe as do the Jews that History is the simulacrum of God’s thoughts to be by turns a simple man or woman. Scientifically minded people believe in turn that the Cosmos (which we have inherited from the Egyptians and the Greeks) is the template of knowledge. That’s a useful view if you value scientific inquiry. Finally you have the Sweet Metaphysicians–William Blake, Emerson, Whitman, Swedenborg, Jakob Boehme, etc, all of whom imagined that Nature with a capital “N” was the local neighborhood of God and accordingly the sole purpose of life is essentially to keep your eyes and ears open.
Category 2 above suggests that if you study the stars and the creatures in the ocean you will not know much about divinity but you’ll gather a heck of a lot about the experiential digest we call knowledge. I’m a big fan of this category.
But hang on–don’t we need Category 1 if we’re to have things like ethics and civil rights laws? Yes. I’m a big fan of this category.
Alright, but William Blake and the poets are so persuasive! Surely the hand of God is discernible in the darkening beach grasses of Nantucket? Ah! God is the only suitable explanation for our loneliness, a matter that gives the human imagination all its steep necessity. Can anybody really live without Number 3? Plenty have tried. How did that Soviet “thing” work for ya Comrades?
What’s to do? It’s Sunday and mild, late Autumn sunlight courses through the yellow leaves that hang in the poplar trees outside my window. How do we slow ourselves? How can we secede from the inventions of mind? And isn’t that the work of poetry in the last analysis? The world of poetry says we can be full of admiration for things that are insufficient. And isn’t this the experience of “being” in all its tangled, mispronounced, embarrassing exactitude? Poets are fools. We need them. We need to dunk our bread in the cheap wine along with the greengrocer who shows us that it’s good. We need intimations of our unanticipated moments of happiness. How hopelessly foolish!
Thomas Osbert Mordaunt, a very minor 18th century English poet wrote:
Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
Throughout the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
For my kopecs, that’s a good Sunday reflection. I shall conduct myself as naively on Sundays as I should wish. I’m going to toot on my fife some business of a crowded and glorious hour.
That’s what’s meant by “rest” I should imagine.
Isn’t Thomas Osbert Mordaunt a fabulous name?
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 