Poeta Doctus

Combing through with no small pleasure the Seculum trilogy of Peter Dale Scott, preparing a talk I’m to give at a humanities conference at the end of May, I wound up at the same time in a short Facebook thread back and forth with a teaching colleague, which inspires the improvised poem, dedicated to him, below:

So many aspects of life

For Shawn Bell, composer

We read the same Guardian article

this morning, though you chose to share it.

Mayer Hillman, 86: We’re doomed

…making a case for [re?]cycling…

is almost irrelevant. We’ve got to stop

burning fossil fuels. I commented

you’d forgotten his most important words:

Standing in the way is capitalism

Your reply in its current form

and though I am not unacquainted

with Isaiah’s singing the lion shall lie down

with the lamb and I’m the first

to remark the confusion of first

and second nature in Adorno’s

If the lion had a consciousness

his rage at the antelope he wants

to eat would be ideology

I answered The dream of postwar

social democracy that capitalism

could be tamed by the rule of law

is as realistic as thinking

a lion can be trained to be vegan

And though we continued twisting into

that thread strands of current models

of socio-economic organization

in particular capitalism and socialism

big data and AI

The Communist Hypothesis

and the Enlightenment’s faith

in its overcoming its own

fateful dialectic Hillman’s words

free of the snarl

of our disagreement

need here be repeated

So many aspects of life

depend on fossil fuels

except for music

and love and education

and happiness. These things

we must focus on.