“Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.”
~ Oscar Wilde
Philosophers, if they obey the creed
Of Socrates, may concentrate upon
The archaeology of primal need
Where it is buried, waiting to be drawn
Out from the depths below the conscious mind.
They should not dig into their blindfold souls
For esoteric visions or to find
In psychoanalytic sacred scrolls
The revelations therapy would grope.
Religion will not help. It never delves,
But seeks to lift above the reptile’s scope—
Deep strata of our dark subconscious selves.
..Instead clear-sighted searchers will enquire
….No further than their shallowest desire.
Nice! Of course, this philosophical/searching poem subverts itself in pretending to tell us to be satisfied with shallowness and NOT thinking/searching. It’s message undertakes cynically to celebrate a reductive psychology in which everything is reduced to its/our base subconscious level of “reptile” desires/wishes. I am a materialist also, but simply because the mind is formed of unconscious atoms doesn’t mean that larger structures which ARE alive and which DO think and feel and create meaning, and philosophy, and religion . . . as “emergent” things in their own right, made out of those “lower” things, are not also actual, also real. Sure, there is “reductive” materialism, but the materialism of, say, a “poetic naturalist” such as Sean Carroll is . . . “productive,” is “generative” of the very sort of thing we see here: a poem! Meaning! Philosophy! And, yes, perhaps even the sort of thing religion broods upon, albeit here in another form, another name. (This the sort of thing people bred on religion continue to do, or think, or wrestle with: questions of BEING and, yes, of . . . morality and conscience and guilt and so on, perhaps also, implicit here in this rationalization of the underlying id (which elsewhere this poet will excoriate certain current politicians/megalomaniacs for allowing to rule their actions instead of our minds and better selves (“better angels”??) which are “emergent” from the atoms and neurons and systems of our material brains also.
We are in agreement, Tom. Thanks.