Machines

(after Rilke’s ‘Alles Erworbne’)

In conquered hollow spaces of the mind

You make your palaces, O slaves set free,

Creations worshipped, Golden Calves, MACHINES!

Not for an instant are you left alone

To lubricate in silent workshop-prisons;

Set up like Gods, you order, make, destroy

With equal grim resolve. Our yesterdays

Are stripped of grace; your buildings rise immense

In rigid lines of stone that craftsmen once

Cut hesitant, in shapes of beauty.  You suppress

Both nature’s play and human words, whose fewness

Drifted once to silence, and where human

Music conjured hope in empty space,

Yours drowns our souls in repetitious newness.

 

Four Poems written for The Journal of Consciousness Studies (2000).

 

1. Prelude: Consciousness.
   

 

I woke from dreaming I was a frog

To consciousness.  A message came to me

(from somewhere in my brain):

Go get your breakfast.  I obeyed.  Over my newspaper, I read

Of a man called Fred, who killed his children

In search of short relief (perhaps)

From conscious pain.

 

Oddly confident of my own consciousness,

I took my dog, who does not seem to possess the faculty of reason

(though to call him unconscious would seem an abuse of language and himself,

so busily does he seek out diverse information, and his own satisfactions)

For a walk.

 

While chasing squirrels

(who seem short on that extraordinary quality known as empathy,

something my dog certainly has, though perhaps he does not know it)

My dog acquired a tick, whose complex sense of warmth and smell enabled it

To burrow in his flesh and drink his (tasty?) blood.

 

I surmised:

The consciousness of ticks may be less than that of squirrels

(who gather nuts with an oft-admired foreknowledge)

Lacking, as it does, an awareness of seasons.

 

I watch the water of the lake, while

The tick feasts on his diet of blood

(and Fred has killed his children)

 

Reflecting:

How great and many faceted the consciousness of ticks is,

Compared to that of trees

Which, lacking an animal’s complex organs of perception,

Rely on concerted cell reactions

To make their mighty hymns to the Creation –

 

That shared and primal mystery

Whose solitary and eternal being

Is the unprovable, undisprovable axiom

Around which all our are worlds are built,

 

In front of which all posturings, save an offering of self,

Are laughable and self-deceiving folly.

 

2. Dead-Ends in Evolution

 

When peacocks spread their showy tails

The jungle holds its breath:

Such brazen self-advertisement’s

A knife-edge walk with death.

 

Now that Man’s intelligence

Admits no greater master,

‘His’ progress gains momentum and

May lead us to disaster.

 

Such strange self-hatred, seeking power!

We should bear in mind:

The human brain was born of chance,

The alley it leads us is blind.

 

 

3. Unconscious

 

Unconscious and the city:

Two things that never sleep.

 

Depths of night:

Streets are cleaned,

Computers whirr,

Planes land.

Cars are on the highway,

Things are being planned.

 

Is my unconscious conscious in my head?

Distinct – another being,

One I’m not aware of (besides my dreams and its commands)?

 

The thing called ‘I’

turns off at night

like an electric light;

 

Yet while I sleep, something

Sorts,

Makes good,

Assesses what’s best for us both.

 

Do I belong to it, or it to me?

 

That’s a problem I may need to sleep on.

 

 

4. Threnos for Mystery

(with borrowings from Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’)

 

Fleeing his dependency,

Man, by ingenuity,

Built a pyre for mystery.

 

Beauty, truth and rarity,

Grace in all simplicity

Here reduced, in cinders lie.

 

In his worship of machines,

Which give to every cur the means

To manifest his wildest dreams

 

Man imagines he is free,

Each in his obliquity

Using ‘I’ to pleasure ‘Me’:

 

Virtue lost to history;

Devilment to impery;

All become banality.

 

Truth may seem, but cannot be;

Beauty brag, but ‘tis not she;

Truth and beauty buried be.

 

Yet still is mystery all we know.

Banish it? Then with it go

Spirit, freedom and the soul.

 

To these words let those repair

That are either true or fair;

And for our futures, breathe a prayer.