Alexander the Great in a diving bell. Scene from the Roman d'Alexandre (1170)
“Philosophy ought really to be written as poetry.”—Ludwig Wittgenstein
Witters wrote this in a notebook in the '30s. Carnap'd
called metaphysicians “musicians without musical
musical abilityӠ; and by equal argument
philosophers are poets unbussed by Calliope,
born tergiversators, in want of a poetic map.
In consequence, to put it bluntly, they’re all badly bent—
bluntness inevitably is as bluntness does (tee-hee);
poetic genius's, then, to put it mildly, heaven-sent.
Write about what you know, wiseacres fondly recommend.
Contrariwise, I choose to write about what I don’t know.
This is called “agnotology”—the pursuit of ignorance.
I don’t know why I hid under that hedge when I was four
and clung so tightly to my father’s back when six, surfing
at Muizenberg, he back from the war up North and drinking
his way down to disaster, so that at eight I had to
bid adieu to Cape Town, growing up in the Great Karoo.
Those are the kinds of things I don’t know, and why, too, to love
has always been so hard for me. But of such confessions
enough! Let’s look rather at the knowledge poetry grants.
Say you are sailing the Aegean, and that a Triton
sprung from the waves demands, “Where is the Great Alexander?”
Knowing the correct answer is important: your caïque
and your life may depend on it! Say simply, though untrue,
“The Great Alexander lives and reigns.” The water spirit
will reply, “Thanks much!” and sink back into the sea. Or say
atheists fustigate the Donation of Constantine
by which Rome, Italy, and all the Western Empire’s lands
were bestowed on the dragon-slaying Pope Saint Sylvester;
but for which we’d all be Unitarians. Note merely
that it was forged and's replete with bad Latin and fake facts.
In the Renaissance, Lorenzo Valla called it “idiot speech,”
stultiloquium.‡ These are things a wise poet knows.
Bad English and fake facts multiply around us today
by which the world could well be warped a similar way.
I love strange words, don’t you? Stultiloquium, Latin
for “foolish talk,” might help us, fearful moderns, walk the walk.
Envoi
Franz Kafka died—he starved to death—in 1924,
asking that his diaries and MSS be burned unread.
Now, in 2024, readings from his diaries in St Andrew's
Church, Holborn, grace the Goody Two-Shoes LRB.*
If I were Kafka, I'd probably be annoyed!
†Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language” (1932), trans. Arthur Pap, in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer (New York: Free Press, 1959), 60–81.
‡Lorenzo Valla, Elegantiarum linguae Latinae Libri VI / “Six Books on Latin Style” (ca. 1450.)
*LRB = London Review of Books.
Fresco illustrating the purported Donation by the emperor Constantine of Rome, Italy, and the Western Empire to Pope Sylvester I. 13th century. Santi Quattro Coronati, Rome.