Descarte's Discourse on Method

PREFATORY

If this discourse asks for too much breath, let it be split
Through six, the first of which will treat diversities
Of star-mused eruditions; the second, of the regulations
That confined the author's researched ways; third,
The morals he extracted from his method – followed by
The rationale of God and God in man, upon which
Metaphysics rests; and then to physic inquiries,
The movements of the heart, and various
Complexities, and how man's soul might differ
From the beasts'; and sixth what he believes
Is requisite to fare a longer path, to drag these studies
Further than he thought, and finally (of course)
Why he hath wrought.

FIRST PART

Of all things on this earth, good sense is most equitably
Divided, since each man bethinks himself so well disposed
That even those who pick and whine at every other lack
Desire of this boon no greater share. And they're surely not
Mistaken, so that here we have a witness to the equal
Distribution of good sense, of reason to distinguish
Right and wrong in every man. Therefore if our opinions
Are diverse, we needn't think that common sense is proper
To the few, but simply that the many ponder many paths,
And rarely likewise muse; but it is not enough
To have a mind that's sound, if you should twist it into
Torturous cacophonies – you must apply it well:
The greatest minds conceive the greatest benefactions
And the greatest crimes alike, so those who scoot ahead
With care surpass the labors of the fools who greatly err
Down the wrong path.

Myself, I never thought my intellect was better wrought
Than other men's, I've even more than often hoped
For lightning insights, clear illuminations, distinct
Imagination flooded to the brim
With present memories, in short to see
As others see – I know no other quality
That renders knowledge right – because,
Concerning reason (rather, sense),
As it alone rends mankind from the beasts,
I would believe that it is all entirely in each
Man, and in this trail the regular opinion
Of philosophers who say nothing that is,
Is more or less, except with accidents, and hardly
Among forms and natures from a unique gens.

But I'm not afraid to say I've found a lot of time
Since youth to travel far enough down certain roads
Which led me to concatenations, maxims that I've used
To mold and hold a method, through which it seems
I have the means to penetrate the heights
Of my acquaintance, little by little to raise myself aloft
As far as mediocrity and mortal nature
Will allow. But even now I've harvested such fruits
That though I try, in self-considerations, for a lowly
Self-esteem as over arrogance and pride, and though,
Peeping with a wisdom loving eye at other men's
Performances and varied enterprise, it seems that none
Appears but futile, vain, still, among the occupations
That are man's and purely man's, there is this one
That seems – yes – worthy, good, and I dare believe
It is philosophy, the one I chose.

Of course, I could be wrong, could have, perhaps, mistaken
A little bit of brass and glass for diamonds, gold; I know
How often we are subject to misjudge ourselves
And everything we touch, how much we should mistrust
Our friends' opinions, since they're well disposed
To us. But I will nonetheless be pleased to open up
The passages I've kept in my discourse, and to represent
A painting like my life, so every reader might
Judge, and I can learn, through apprehension of the common
Din, what people think, and thus embark on novel explorations,
Which will supplement and augment those I've used 'til now.

Thus my design is not to here assign a way
Along which you should all conduct your minds,
But just to show how I have followed mine.
Those who don the precepts of a preceptor, a don
Must think themselves much better dressed
Than those they test, and if they miss the slightest mark
Are marked below the rest; but I, intending only
History, or, if you like, to stretch a yarn
In which you'll hear inimitable feats, but also,
Those you might, with better common sense, repeat,
Hope my story be, at very least, just usefully received
By some, but reprehensible to none, and everyone
Will praise what I have frankly done.

So since I was speechless, I have suckled letters, and, assured
Their darkened tracks could lead me to a clarity secured
By these black bars, a vantage with a view to utile life,
Conceived a boundless hope to read. But soon
As I'd achieved my studies' course, upon whose head
One climbs into the doctored ranks, my fickle passions
Changed. Hampered by new doubts, my thought
Began to stray, my only progress, that I knew
How little that I knew. But I was in the best of Europe's
Schools, and as I thought, if there were savant men on earth
They would be here. I'd learned all the others learned, and,
Discontent with what my teachers taught, had even rushed
Through every book that dealt with things occult
And rare which fell between my hands. I knew
How my companions judged me, professors both
And peers, and none had deemed me second class,
Even if it wasn't mine to someday take a chair
And teach. And such a vital age, more fertile in the intellect
Than ever yet! And so I felt at liberty to judge my times:
Nothing on this earth seemed worthy of my hopes.

Toothpaste

Three Revisions

1.

Forms are what I call
This system of profligate shades
And shapes, this geometry
Of architectures, variegated
And various, whose collisions
Invoking and provoking sound,
Echo and re-echo in the corridors
Of my precipitate memory,
Where the architecture of these forms
Is already their horizon, already the Form
That shapes them like tooth-paste
Is shaped, tunneling through the caverns
Of an aluminum volume.

2.

Forms I call them, these architectures
Profligate of shapes and their horizons,
Whose hue and cries re-echo
Through the corridors of the mind,
An oblique plane, a patterning of linens
Tinsel-strewn through the apt recesses
Formed and falling off; their mute application
Returns me to my being,
The place where I was born.

3.

Forms, or so I call them, these profligate
Horizons, architectures rich
With the stirrings of thought, volutions whose echos
And cries, calls and appellations redound
Through the caverns of my memory,
Resinate already with the shapes
Of an idea whose tunneling structures
Have wrought what these aluminum volumes squeeze.

A Dialogue

There is a river of large volume, whose rushing currents
Wash the dry banks and push their swollen silt
Into a sea that granulates these forces
And drives them back again shoreward.
I was sitting by the bank, on the hump
Of a rough stone, apt with moss, bending
My eyes to the point where horizon
Meets the circuit of the ocean, trailing
Ligate swirls and zags of ruby sand
Into the amethyst and diamond gold
Of a surf stirred by the pattering sun,
While a sonorous breeze, heavy with the fruit
Of tides, the sand-swell, the lamprey's gait,
Strode into the recesses of my mouth
And freshened my tongue, when I noticed
A pale wanderer, a scrap of dusty rags,
A deflated knob of sagging skin,
Struggling up the dunes ragged with sea-weed
And torn by a lucence of shells.

Who was the man? His nose
Thrust out ahead of him,
As if a hook, jagged with the brittle
Barbs of time, had been cast
From that convexity of cruel brine,
And now extended past
The line of sunken prints that
Fell across his gait as silently
As curvaceous reciprocities
Of rose petals melting through the clarity
Of an amber glass, into the air.

His eyes reflected tessellings of cloud
Smattered like cream puffs in a cup
Of wispy tea for which his head
Served as the ladle and the kettle
Simultaneously, a bitter brew
Of sassafrastic sweet,
The kind that leaves a meat
On the edge of the tasteful tongue,
Between the teeth. His lips
Were all the wretched world, only moist
Where a word could struggle to speak.

***

We speak, I said, with words,
Words are a conduit of information.
Not so, spake the seer:
For how can information carry,
Sag and spread through the aimless air?
Is knowledge like a trickle, does wisdom
Filter from the denser to the merely dense
Container? Instruction is an accident,
A spill? If you drop these vessels
Will they shatter, will the gourd
Smash into fruitless cords,
Water-lorn and empty? Reform
The clay that you shaped
With your tongue, "inform":

Is not informing information? How-so?
My lazy eye, distracted, was attracted
To a bee, a fuzz of golden amber
Gathering the tinctures of the sun
And flinging them,
With languorous limbs
That buzzed and hummed,
Onto its carapace, a ragged drum
For transport.

A Love Poem

This is meant to be pastiche,
A motley collection of borrowed imaginings,
Set together in unschooled lines; the aims
(Since every collocation commences with the muse)
Are to write as clearly as possible, and to speak the truth.

You may be wondering who I am. Have you seen
A bare brunette, skinny, yawning eyes,
Asleep in the pit or picking his nose?
He was hunched over a long book, his attention
Split: one thought lingered over cool Greek assonance,
Homeric rhythms; another marshaled fingers
Through flaking hair, a pock-marked face; but a lazy eye
Had reservations, a special thought for your zebra scalp,
Your gaunt face, body almost a child’s, hoping to hear
A surprising bellow, a skater’s voice, chill tones.

But I always see you, slumped on a step, or smoking
Over a cold, stone bench, chatting with a hip girl,
A shag-haired friend. I ventured a word, once,
An ill-timed whisper. You were sitting at a computer,
Piecing together an essay on Faust.
I don’t remember what I said, only the feeling of regret
When you dismissed me; but secretly I was pleased.

I’m always pleased to fall short of beauty:
It’s absolute beauty that I crave, the extravagant blaze
That burns me, or, to borrow a phrase,
The candle engulfed in a double-edged flame,
A fiery finger jammed through the wax
Devouring it from both sides. The guys I see

Are useless, worthless, but I endow them
With an infinite worth, my imagination works them
Into glistening pewter, shined steel, all the delights
Of the perfect word. I may be ugly, but I aspire
To live in a glossed cage, a crystal palace
That gives an angry arc to the dawn, a sudden embellishment
Or augmentation that scatters the spectrum
Into fracturing geometries of sound.

I’m getting carried away; my olive-skinned muse
Is slippery as oil, my object always sliding out
From greasy hands. What was my whisper?
Beautiful boys, your own beauty I was hoping
To skeletonize in mere words. I am in danger of losing
Both my intellect and the exterior structures
That intellect craves – that is to say, myself.

I think too much; my thought diminishes me,
It has made me sickly and pale, I brood like a corpse,
I am razor thin. Dissection has turned me
Into a skilled dissembler, knowing every word
Can be replaced, in any case, with something
Just as appropriate, if not more-so. What do I want?
What plan is imminent in this scalpel sharpness,
When even the words are impassive and cold?
To freeze moments, to recapture, in someone else’s frame,
The body and real presence of my past?

I remember a frozen lake, music and snow;
The feel of gliding, pushing always
From the left, all the seduction of freedom in motion,
Until, through the stupor of my blind thoughts,
A speed, a rush that lifted me into the air,
My dad’s descending swoop, large hands
Lifting a small boy abruptly into the sky,
And the burgeoning eaglet soared.

I miss those other days,
Curled between mother and father,
The double progenitive force,
In an impossibly wide bed, working
Back into my seeds, the stark enclosure of beginnings
In a universe too large. When I hold a boy
My body longs for this –
To become the surface of another seed,
Container of ethereal secrets.

I have transformed love into a great secret,
A delicate, jeweled box that remains always clasped,
A precious cachet of emeralds and diamonds,
Staining my imagination alternately green
Or entirely blue, while I whine, howl, slobber, and cry
At the lid, gilded, at the hour-glass keyhole,
Whose secret is simple and vast as time.

So you are staring into an uneven blaze of traveling photons,
That somehow, perhaps even through chaos and reticence,
Have assembled themselves into this presentation of words,
A language of incorrigible loops and neat circles
That represents what I would never say,

Especially not if the pressure of my gawky body
Were to impress what I imagine is a smooth, pale chest
And two slight iridescences, projecting
From milky skin like little knobs that I could turn
(Ludicrous) to bury myself in your heart:

For even then I would not bite your ear-lobe, and sob
This nothing strain into your skull, the intricate knots
Of your brain. I would be too shy, the rituals of sex
Would weigh me down, even as what weight I have
Pushed you into the foam, impaled you on a pillow
Of close-stitched thread. So why do I write?

What is the significance of this rambling verse,
Impassive and way-less minutiae, gravitating
To the center of a confession which doubtless
Is not even true, since I betray
My own thoughts, the real weave of myself
In these translations?

When I began, I admit it was formless,
I followed my thoughts, I chased them
Like half-remembered dreams – or night-mares,
And I was pursued: spider-webs, ivy tendrils,
Snares snapped at my progress, all my negotiations
Of the fameless landscape dripped across sleepy eyes
Like a gauze of a tear-stained vision, while my hands
Grasped at the dissonance, pursuing these figments,
These frightening pigmies. Of course I knew

That I was going to write a great poem,
And I was going to write about love, and your form
Which was rapidly swelling from cupidinous bud
Into bitter fruit, a crab-apple, a little lump in my heart
That throbbed whenever I saw you, yet would not allow itself
Extension into fantasies, the imagined lover who raps on the door
Twice, then enters, scrapes off his clothes, lies in my arms
Like a passing bliss, like headlights
That illuminate a ghostly room just as quickly
To disappear, to rejoin the night, to become nothing more
Than a dim palpitation of crickets, the slight soprano
Of screeching wheels, a night-wanderer or the shrill bass
Of his broken bottle, and gruff laughter – this would be my theme.

I would write about all my lovers, or rather
Every beloved who for a time had captured my brain
Like an engine roaring in a muddy rut; I would relive
The dull sense of expectation, the impatience,
The sheer frustration of it all, but this time
It would be set it out in verse – verse which is never eternal,
But maintains the appearance of changeless stability because,
Even if Poland was twice not Poland, yet a Slavic Shakespeare
Remained to weather the tyrants, the parade of enlightened despots
And Holocaust victims, these people with their angry, pale faces
Clambering en masse for a bit of blood-stained earth; yes, through it all,
Some poor, hopelessly idiosyncratic Shakespeare,
Refitted to a harsh, stranger’s tongue remained
In that ram-shackled hobble of a library
To inspire Czeslaw Milosz, whom I’ll admit I’ve never read.
But it was there – it survived like a faint ember,
Ready to ignite it all again, ready to devour
Miles of frozen tundra and impoverished crops, the shtetls
Pogrom weary, licking their wounded limbs like flies
Resting on a bit of old dung;
In this hope I decided to record my loves.

So now I have sent it to you, a preliminary sketch,
These mottled pages glistening with the sap and dew
Of my excrescence. I imagine your eyes
(I’ve never even seen you closely enough
To ascertain a color – if brown,
Then the soil of my form; or are they milky blue,
The snot-green sea? A composite,
A mixture of porn and pent observations,
Agonies in a stolen glance later reassembled, scratched
With a thick, dark chalk – imprecise lines
Blurring into shadows, a dull frame, a black height)
I imagine your eyes will scan now, puzzled.
Is this a stranger, some half-forgotten friend,
A drunken acquaintance? A lover lost,
A prank, some idle sport? A poet
Or composer of occasional verse, an obsessively
Criminal mind? The clock and the calendar
Have their private reasons for dismay: the other day

A girl was raped. A waddler, albine hair, tattooed
Skull and dragons, eyes obscure, emerged
From an unsuspecting car and seized her
To sate something growing inside him, ugly, pale
As his scalp, nourished of moonlight, pruned
With each divination, inconspicuous cruisings
Round Eliot Circle, under a frowning sky.
Did he especially worship one lithe beauty,
A celery stalk, bursting blond, with attractive eyes?
Or was his harvest for grapes that, squeezed,
Ferment into the punishments of wine? Perhaps,
Like a dawdler at a fruit-stand, he tucked an apple
Under his coat and ran, only to discover, on the street,
That it was pulp, pounded meat, but he in his hunger
Ate her, dropped the sullen core like a sack
Of sapless sticks, and now he drifts by the cold
Risings of the sun, and the heart-breaking moon.

Perhaps you think I am going to rape you,
That the bulk of my body, so familiar to me,
Every inch explored and melancholy,
Aims at the target of your flesh with a singular intent,
That my eyes are a binocular extension, cutting
Through the rays of space into the between
Of your drapes, of your lanced shadow,
So that my wicked, clutching fingers, cramped
On the device, might feed into a gyro-scoping brain
The peeling layers of your dress, until only the skin,
Shaved of all accoutrement, revealed in its true form,
Sang a helpless song; and you think that I am an impatient
Connoisseur of this music that dangles between the sinking
Sunlight and the oblique perorations of your body, unmarred
And aloft in the speckling hues of dust; well,

Beauty could not accuse me of ignorance, and I keep
A heady cult of music like a flask about me; I yearn
For the strong drink of intoxication that is vouchsafed
Not to the profane, but only the man of delicate fingers
Who plays over each stop with the consummate skill
Of an eloper, never interloping, but he is always held
Close to the eternal heart of things and glimpses
Their half-secrets veiled in the fortunate cache of the stars;

Nevertheless, it is my ambition never to violate,
To handle each manifestation with the care
Of a Ming vase. Yes, I would like to turn it over
In my hands: who doesn’t want a chance to trace
The margins of pale China like ridges
On a whirling dragon’s back – the dragon
Who is the river, and the river that is the dragon?
But the taming delicacies of music forbid
The incestuous turmoil of hearts, these cascades
Of air mingling with rapids and rapid despair
Bursting over the prairies like a thunder
To sweep them away in a cloud of dust.
I could never use you, my lust is quicksilver
Art that I can never touch, the messenger
Of podiums and promenades behind the velvet rope.

So I end where I began: what have I been able to say
About love in an hour, a week, these twelve days’
Labour? Or what can I say to you? Surely I will awaken
From this verse like a strange dream, vexed,
A half revealed mirage of mixed imaginations,
A sculpture quarter-formed in the bleeding rock,
Whose eyes are not yet and forever tears
Rough with the ash and sweltering decay
Of the desert, whose lips are puckered brittle
With the song of a lost land fading
To an echo of tuneless sand.

Oh, if there were a name I could call here twice
A magic word that would reveal all this talk of love
Redounded finally and wholly on myself, that my song
In double apostrophe closed into a formless globe,
A protean myth whose every change revealed the truth
More truly and more strange – but love is a journey
Outside of the self, love is the soul in shackles
Revealed, love is the fleeting leaf turned gold
In an autumn of peerless shadows. If my sail now fattens
In the ripe wind, if my keel flattens out towards the horizon
And I float across unknown seas,
Then let these words be a prologue, the seers’ guidance,
Prophecy of another realm beyond verse, beyond self,
Boundless, infinite, and eternal, a latitude of pure aesthesis
Unrealized, undreamt, forgotten, and misremembered,
At which I will aim my catch, unbaited and alone.

Novel (Rimbaud)

I

You can't be serious at seventeen.
One pretty night, to hell with beer and limeade,
The bustling cafés' by the bursting glitz!
You'll walk the promenade under linden trees.

The lindens smell fine on these fine June nights!
The air is so perfectly gentle that you close your eyes;
The wind, sagging with noise (the city's not far),
Contains vineyard perfumes and sentiments of beer.

II

Just then you see an entirely tiny rag
Of somber blue, framed by a little branch,
Irked by an evil star, which merges
With gentle currents, small, completely white.

A June night! Seventeen! You're a little giddy,
There's a champagne sap clambering into your brain...
And rambling; on your lips you feel a kiss
That quivers there like a bug...

III

An insane heart Crusoes across novels
– Until, in the clarity of pale reverberations,
A damsel passes with her petite, charming airs,
Beneath the terrifying shadow of her father's false collar...

And, since she thinks you're tremendously naive,
She keeps her bootlets at a gallop all the while,
But twists herself around, alert, a sudden move...
– And cavatinas die upon your lips...

IV

You're in love. Leased out 'til August.
You're in love. – Your sonnets make Her laugh.
Your friends all leave, you're in bad taste.
– Then the beloved, one night, has deigned to correspond...!

– This night...you return to the exploding cafés,
You demand your beers and your limeades...
– You can't be serious at seventeen
When there are green lindens by the promenade.

Sacrifice

I would like to make sacrifices – sleep, nourishment, happiness – if those sacrifices meant a brush with greatness. What miseries would I not endure if I knew they would guarantee a fine style, something worthwhile? Worthwhile is the key – because time splits into smaller infinities, wasted – because every day can be quantified, and I feel that with all the rushing sand, my life is ebbing away. So I would gladly give this time, which is wasted and useless, for some eternal quality beyond time, a timelessness saturate of time, something I could hold in my hands and keep. This is useless.

Suppose that I did write my great work, my chef-d'oeuvre, where even the paper is vellum thick, and the ink is stainless gold, and the sounds are like charming music, and the meanings are like magic – with the power to move mountains, turn back streams, draw the moon and blot the skies with an inky blackness – even so, what will become of me? What will become of it?

These sounds will decay as soon as they are heard, even the most precious ink is wasted, the paper will be worm-eaten dust, and in a thousand years, little will be left of me. My corpse will be ashes, my flesh corrupt, my bones rotten and brittle, barely preserved; further, the civilization in which I lived will be decayed and rubble strewn – already new homes are sprouting up like weeds, already children are born with their hungry eyes – nature is like a giant fungal growth, springing constantly from itself, always giving way to the new, and the old are eaten and utterly dispersed, so that even if the totality is the same, nothing is recognizable, all is constant flux. At best perhaps we are like coral – but I do not want my dead words to accumulate like so many monstrous skeletons. I will never be alive again.

So perhaps this is a ritual of redemption – these words that stream unceasingly, possibly even to vexation, time evaporating, so many half-remembered sentences from other books contributing to the awkward mass such that it itself appears already like the accretions of meaningless coral, the spectacular waste of centuries; perhaps this is a ritual of redemption in which I slaughter time, and myself, and finally my breath, so that my spirit will rise to the gods, who I think do not hear our prayers, as some sweet incense, before its dispersal in the winds, before it becomes mixed with everything else in the earth. This I know: it pleases me. I would sacrifice on the altar of my own ambition if it would bring me peace.

Proust

I wish I were Marcel Proust:
Paris, the gilded architecture of so many memories,
Intimations of immortality sparkling through the glitz,
The champagne that makes the room amber,
Elaborate silk gowns and ties,
Waxed mustaches and wily suits, laughter.

And then to go home to a room of slanting moon-light,
A cold bed propped by a draft,
The almost palpable faces of adjunct buildings,
Sentinels with yawning eyes who would tirelessly watch
While I re-inscribed the world's inverse reflections

As if onto one of those snow globes,
The kind you turn and shake
And there is a stillness,
Sparkling flakes strewing a field of embedded forms
With their soft, mechanical music.

Glossalia

From the lyric poets I have taken love,
The fear of death, and boredom; in heroic verse
I witnessed metered struggle, the fates of men
And states; tragedy taught me that our life
Breaks hearts; from didactic I learned how to fix them:
This is what I know, the subtle art
Of imitations, the Alexandrian flare
For speaking tongues. But what I do not know,
What I have not learned or found
Is myself hidden behind the masks,
And sometimes I wonder whether
Behind the fabric of poetry
I'm saying anything at all --
If, when I take off the accouterments
Of assonance, rhythm, rhetoric and rhyme,
To name just a few, there is anything left,
Anything that I've grasped beforehand
Or brought to be on this page. Ex nihilo, nihil fit:
Perhaps my doubts are making me deeper,
But I feel like I'm becoming void.