Philosophical Verses # 4

Harvey Natalis, of Nedellec, defended the doctrine,
Harvey would write in response to opponents of Thomistic teaching.
Busy was he as the general of the Dominican Order.
But what they called the doctrine of Thomas was more Aristotle,
properly dressed to fit the Creed professed by all Christians.
Failing to distinguish between the fact of existence
then, and the whatness and essence, that dictionaries expound on.
Real existence cannot be swept away all that lightly.

* * *


How to pronounce? Ha-tá-no Shei-í-chi? That is a question.
So I guess that’ll do, Hatano Sheiichi of Japan.
Mister Hatano received the Christian baptismal anointing.
Mister Sheiichi taught philosophy of the religions,
téaching ín Kyóto únivérsity courses.
Mister Hatano Sheiichi thought that experience argued
with greater strength that did reason in questions concerning if God was.
Turning toward God, then feeling His absolute holiness higher,
then at the third stage, standing directly, person-to-person.
Here we can feel the passing of time, and the time of our culture,
but in the end is time that’s eternal, the time of agape.

* * *

Losing your mind can prolong your life and untie all your tangles.
Hatha yoga can slow your combustion down to a simmer.
Subject and object will disappear in the stream of awareness.
Strange are the postures and strange are the gestures to straighten your eyeballs.
All your desires will flee from you, but again, so will selfhood.

* * *

Terror mighty be red, might be white, broken eggs make an omelet for breakfast;
Arnold Hauser worked for the Reds and fled with the others.
The Whole nasty business with Bela Kun, the bolshevik Magyar
is Best swept under the rug and flushed like a drug down the drain-pipe.
Arnold Hauser returned before he died to his homeland,
held once again by the Reds, died in Budapest, honored by comrades.
Most of his life he enjoyed the liberty he would deny to opponents
England provided his citizens papers, he freely lectured and published.
Social movements, he says, are the key to the work of the artist.
Like the smile of the Mona could all be explained by the currency rising.
Still, he would say, true artists rise above their conditions.
Queen of the sciences now sociology, making a rational order.
Never trust sociologists’s talk, for they have an agenda.

* * *

Manners make the man, and Hayashi Razan was mannered,
neo-Confucian, observing minutely good manners in all things.
He liked a will of iron and believed in seeking perfection.
Shinto he accepted. Christianity never.

* * *

Friedrich Alexander von Hayek defended the cosmos.
That’s what he called an order where multiple agents are active,
people who pool their knowledge and seek what they need by their wisdom.
Makers of wisdom can spoil the game with too many rules,
hair-splitting regulations deprive us of our own volition.
Taxes, protections, insurance, all nibble away at our freedom,
all in the name of a rational order of bureaucrat tyrants.

* * *

Paul Hazard returned to France despite the Nazis.
Why he returned to France from America in those conditions
must remain a question, but he was a patriot loyal
to the land he loved, and supported resistance fighters.
After the plagues the times were changing, an epoch of crisis,
European Consciousness shifted radically sideways.
It started with the Comet Great of sixteen and eighty,
Like the Renaissance, different though, and void of all joy.
Descartes had died and the wax was melting unwatched in the fire.
Dogmas were dull, and for the dull. The clever had reason,
dear Queen Reason, darkness called light, followed by blind men.
Every idea can flip on its back and emerge in new garments.
Victory can be defeat, and some defeats lead to glory.
Liberty, all such slogans, may have come from the rebels,
rebels who skinned their foes and guillotined their own rulers,
yet when the dust has settled, something true yet remains.

* * *

Hé Yàn was old and handed the palm to Wang Bi his junior.
This was outstanding in China, because old men received honor.
Hé Yàn was all for following nature, impulsively honest.
Others accused him of spreading the drinking of liquor and smoking
sweet bitter sap of the poppy, in union with nature,
and perhaps they were right, but Hé Yàn the poet drew verses,
in the style he helped create, fengliu, wind and the rivers.

* * *

Hedonists must have beads to tally up all of their pleasures.
Maybe they make little notches, lest they forget to remember,
how to forget how the thought of the future can mess with the present.

* * * *