Tag Archives: history

A Thoughtful Poem from Historian, William Irwin Thompson

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Am I more than I “know I am”? Historian, and former MIT professor, William Irwin Thompson thinks so and makes a powerful argument in his poem, “Four In the Morning.”  Thompson was just coming on the scene in history studies in the early 1980’s when I was doing graduate work in history at the University of Arkansas.  Thompson was an avant-garde historian, thinking out of the box and even “out side of the box that the box was in.”  The following poem demonstrates this “global” perspective on life, a view that could also be described as cosmic.

FOUR IN THE MORNING

The universe is crawling with unseen life:
angels and djinn and spiritual guides.
Like the excess in a stagnant pond,
this abscess of the Absolute
is obscenely corpulent
in every nook and cranny,
armpit and crotch
of the Great Mother
of dark energy and dark matter
we do not see anymore
than the germs in our guts see us,
because they are not germs
but neurons of a larger brain
in which an I is only an organ,
or rather an artificially imposed
membrane drawn arbitrarily
amid a mass of interactive
molecular gates with ions
coming and going as they please
without a thought of me.
Savages knew this once
and could feel it like an itch
beyond the reach of scratch.
Christian missionaries called it animism
and tried to beat it out of them,
bringing brassieres to contain breasts,
and bibles to contain minds,
but nights when I cannot sleep,
I wake at something the clock
marks as three or four,
with my mind teeming and itching
with alien cosmologies
of journeys through other galaxies
and I wake, knowing more than I am.

“Four in the Morning” comes from his blog, “Meta-psychosis” and appears to be a descent into a maelstrom which could be taken for lunacy, other than for his ability to wrap a perspective around disparate verbal imagery and tie it all together to make his point; what would otherwise be closely akin to psychotic word-salad is a thoughtful, poetic look at the intricate complexity of the beautiful world we live in.  Thompson’s study of history, and the liberal arts, and science, allowed him to present this beautiful poetic essay about the process of life itself in which our individual life is seen as but a component dimension of the pulsating energy field that is life itself.  He makes a persuasive argument that we are “more” than we think that we are, driven by something akin to what Shakespeare had in mind when he noted, “There is a divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”

Reason and Politics

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I’ve followed politics closely for the past 28 years or so and I’ve noticed each time that on some level I merely want “my pony to win the race.” I merely want to be on the winning side and oh how disappointing it is when “my pony”, particularly in a Presidential campaign, does not win.  But in this same 28 years I’ve been increasingly conscious that the drama being played out is far greater than my youthful desire to be on the winning side and even in crushing defeats I’ve always maintained that there is some “method to this madness” or that there is a “Divinity that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.”  In other words, the picture is always much bigger than I can see and the “picture” before me is always merely the latest screen shot of the historical drama that is ongoing.

I have a bevy of close friends here in Taos, NM  who I see quite often and we are on the same page, being fearful of what lies before us but having firm confidence that “the process” will prevail, even if we are disappointed on this occasion.  For life itself is a process, a “flow”, and it will continue even if catastrophe should come, be that a personal catastrophe and my life is suddenly snuffed out, or even if the whole species is wiped out!  The picture is always bigger than the one I see or even bigger than the one that humankind sees at the moment.  We are always caught up in the historical moment and have no idea of what actually is going on.

Of course, some think that they do and have firm confidence in their perspective, often vowing that God has declared it to them.  To them I would merely note that when the flat earth view of the world was crumbling, most people clung tenaciously to their antiquated world view and even put to death many of those who saw things otherwise.  And, of course, “God was leading them.”  We have only a finite view of the world, but understanding and experiencing this finitude is so frightening that we usually disallow it from every seeping into our awareness.

No one’s reason is autonomous.  We think we employ reason to draw correct conclusions but science has proven that reason is always under the control of our preconceptions so that we are inclined to see only what we want to see.  W. H. Auden emphasized the need of our reasoning being, “redeemed from incestuous fixation on her own logic.”  Auden recognized that our reason was subservient to an “incestuous logic” which always provides us justification for our conscious rational grasp of our world.  When we are subservient only to reason, we need to recall the wisdom of Goethe who noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”