All Things Visible and Invisible

 

It has been brought to my attention recently that a large number of people, possibly a majority, actually believe that the physical world is the real world. Not just that the physical world is real—which is debatable—but that there is nothing beyond the physical world—which is stark insanity.

What brings me most immediately to this thought is some poems appearing in my email box from the League of Canadian Poets, under their “Poetry Pause” programme (you can sign up free here). One was just the poet describing her body:

Most loyal beautiful body

--Who aches only for your love.

 Another was the poet describing her desk.

A surplus teacher’s desk, 

solid oak, three heavy drawers

on each side of a skirted knee-hole.

There is no poem to such poems. Poetry speaks of the transcendent. We do not need it to talk about what is before our eyes.

Another example of materialism, in the textbook from which I taught this morning: it took pains to distinguish between “fact” and “opinion,” but never noticed or noted that there is a more important third category, truth that is not fact. Here’s an obvious example:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Not a trivial point.

In the wider world of truths, facts are trivial; yet only facts are acknowledged by the standard textbooks.

Another example: most people are quick to deride “materialism,” but then they think that materialism simply means wanting or having wealth. A purely materialistic concept of materialism, a cartoon. They are not out of the box. They just resent people who have more material than they do.

I read a poem at a recent meeting of a poetry society, which asserted, in rhyme, that the delusions of the mentally ill had truth in them beyond the ken of psychiatrists. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

And if he asks in riddle who you are

You must lie as dead as paper-thin straight line

Assume a name--say, one you took at birth

And pretend you only know of space and time.

Surely a group of poets would get it.

The first reaction from an audience member: it reminded them of Ogden Nash, or Alexander Pope.

What? Either meaningless nonsense, then, or mere clever wordplay. Pope is conspicuous for never speaking of the transcendent. For this Blake mocked him.

I can’t decide whether that respondent was trying to deny the existence of anything beyond the senses, or whether he was really so lobotomized in his view of existence.

Another listener chimed in that she liked the poem, and had often written herself about social justice.

Another common modern tack. Poets now all always either talk about “nature,” meaning the purely material world, or politics, the quest for power over others. Neither is worth an honest poem. 

It seems to me necessarily true that anyone who is not fully aware of the world beyond the visible is lacking a soul. More or less by definition. They are only robots.

Yet realizing that many are at this spiritual level explains the common conflation of just about everything with sex and power.