The Imaginary Burglar

Titian, The Tribute Money (ca. 1516)

“The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem . . . may be [to keep the mind diverted while the poem does its work] . . . much as the imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for the house-dog.”—T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

Most meaning lies in words' ongoing vibe,

Reverberating stories of our tribe.

Makers contrive to mate 'em with Platonic sense,

Unfeasible conjunction, though tangible—intense

Across live music's fine fantastic fence.

Information's like sugar, drugs, and nicotine addicting,

A cocktail of sapient matters wildly contradicting

Our deep-seated common feel for good and right,

For what it's like to live—and how you

might

Uncover art's delight.

Dante died of his wounds in History, and so did Virgil, his ciceronē.

Their corpus looms, too great to be consumèd,* undescried outside

—no longer such a handy guide.

Tip-toeing through that somnolent Deity's umpteenth McMansion

Note, I pray, the doomy scansion!

Unto Fido render Fido's house—

But to the Infinite, Her mouse.**

*Habitat destruction and the indiscriminate use of insecticides moreover threaten endangered blowfly populations.

**Cf. Matthew 22:21: Ἀπόδοτε οὖν τὰ Καίσαρος Καίσαρι καὶ τὰ τοῦ Θεοῦ τῷ Θεῷ.

Lest We Forget

“Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder.”—Elizabeth Anscombe

Misusing our inscrutable capacity for negative capability--“being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” as Keats puts it--we all too easily lose sight of this.

So doing, however, we may well find ourselves accessories to murder before and after the fact.

Here endeth the first--and perhaps it should be the only necessary--lesson: Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.*

*Matthew 6:34 KJV. An equivalent proverb in rabbinic Hebrew is reported: dyya l'tzara b'shaata,דיה לצרה בשעתה, "the suffering of [this] hour is enough for it."

Elizabeth Anscombe: British analytic philosopher (1919-2001).

The Yahoos

Sawrey Gilpin, Gulliver reprimanded and silenced by his master when describing the horrors of war (1805). Photo credit: York Museums Trust.

When Swift painted our picture for us in Gulliver, His Travels,

We found it most amusing and laughed to beat the band.

Now some centuries on, we are Yahoos still

As vile as ever, if not more so, and all the Houyhnhnms are dead.

Swift, I think, would understand!