No Philosopher
‘I’m no philosopher,’ says she
‘I like this life too much, I just do’,
and she stands outside Tesco
with a trolley-load, piles of tins,
frozen meals, chocolate desserts, dog-food,
Cokes family-size, New Zealand wine.
She wants to cling to what she has
not go seeking other worlds,
abstractions and the like as she once did,
hidden truths always somewhere else,
nowhere near the Tesco carpark that’s for sure.
And death always hanging around
forever expecting to be solved
as the soul jumps clear of the body
to live on in its perfect realm
free from the smell of Glade and cabbage.
To think, she says, I was once wrapped up in all that,
trying to look up, always up
and not looking where I put my feet
treading dog-shit into the house.
How did we ever come to think
experience is not real?
She scans the entrance looking for Jay
and his 4x4 coming to collect her and the shop.
She’s stranded with not much else to do but think
which she’s barely done for years,
not since that finals class with Mike
who showed her what metaphysics could be
to someone who was a shopgirl two years before.
Socrates’ mother was a midwife,
but even so she still thinks he was a rum old bugger,
managing to die happy because his soul is free,
the whole world and its storecard points
‘dematerialised’ into the eternal.
So the remedy for death is death
which doesn’t get us very far,
and as for the dream of reason
and the hope of justice both disappointed,
well of course they are,
and now it’s coming on to rain,
he’d better get here in a minute.
And this wind as well,
not the wind of thought, oh no,
I should have brought a coat.
She tries to push her trolley undercover
but one of its wheels has just got jammed
and is hard to move. Is this
what they meant by ‘Being?’ she wants to know
as the wheel turns sideways
and resists a kick from her newest pumps.
No it’s only appearance, the way things
seem to be, inconvenient, noticeable
like birth with its blood and mess
but not important and soon forgotten
for higher thoughts and things.
I liked these pumps now look at them.
She struggles with her phone but Jay’s
not picking up. She’d call an Uber
but you need a password, yes?
Where is Jay? Did he get the girls from Gym?
He can do his bit now – he stuck it out
in the labour ward, looking for any chance
to feel excluded but always a help.
He picks the girls up, remembers
their Coke and favourite snack,
tries to notice what they are wearing.
He knows that none of us will live forever,
that it’s all downhill like when he had to
give up five a-side last year – there’s
Philosophy for you, Man and mutability! –
that procreation is the best that we can do.
Here comes another Ford Fiesta to collect
a woman and her stuff. Come on Jay
you can’t leave me here thinking.
Philippa and Lizzie, both good kids,
polite to their grandparents, do their homework
every night. What will they make of us?
Will they realise that everything they are,
every thought they take has its origin
in the chance of me and Jay getting together?
That’s what it follows from, like me,
in the meeting of mum and dad
one night by the sound-desk they said,
and so on backwards,
back and back and back?
‘Poor Reason’ amid that much chance,
‘a child angered by tiredness that will not sleep.’
I can see that alright.
Our Lizzie was a terrible sleeper
but now she’s top in Maths.
‘Reason seeks an ending’ but also loves endlessness,
wants to close things up, or down,
but then says an argument can have no ending.
That’s Lizzie all over, arguing the toss,
never giving in. Jay says she takes after me.
God help her teachers, she must be a nightmare
to have in class. What would – or will
she make of Hegel and the causality of history,
eliminating free will. She’ll not have that –
‘the unfreedom of the human mind’ and
‘the compulsions of nature’, not likely,
her and her purple hair, bless her.
She’s an understander. But suppose it can’t be done,
that we must live with the impossibility of truth,
does that mean we cannot be at home
in the world, never could have been?
So what’s her Dad up to?
He’s a good half hour late now.
How would it be if we had no concept of time?
If we had no concept of change, nor past
present and future and that all we had had to do
was keep things the way they’ve always been.
I made a note about this and
Australian Aborigines
but Jay’s nothing like them
unless he’s changed a lot this morning.
It’s belting down now and getting cold as well.
Why do we care about that so much|?
It’s only material after all.
A daft question.
The truth is that’s the way we are,
ontologically speaking. We’ll not get past it.
Phil and Lizzie can do a salto
on the vault but only defy the earth
for a moment. They can’t stay aloft
no matter how good their spring
and the landing has to be just right.
No transcendence in gymnastics
whatever it looks like!
Even if they learn the Yuschenko
they won’t be able to do it forever
but will stumble into death
probably not getting the landing right.
Enough of that, I’ve forgotten the hand-wipes again
I’m not going back now. Jay doesn’t use them anyway.
I forgot them. Am I responsible?
I stopped worrying about the Good Life years ago.
My dissertation on it was good
but what did that amount to?
Is this the Good Life, being able to fill
this trolley, buy the girls new leotards,
have it off with Jay once or twice a week.
That’s eudaimonia for you!
But there has to be more to it than that.
We’ve taken on these girls and they must live
virtuously. They’ll not learn that by reasoning,
or by looking after #1,
they’ll learn by acts, what we do and what
they learn to do. What I thought about
and wrote about is still busy round the back.
I could do wrong, there’s plenty of chance at work.
So sometime could the girls,
and Jay though he’d sleepwalk into it.
But he’d be ready to take the rap,
not think that since the universe is silent
he could get away with it, no one
and nothing to notice and judge
what he has done, or left undone
what he ought to have done.
I made him give up church when he met me
so he probably won’t think about it
this way, but he knows he should live
as though there’s judgement waiting.
But what’s judgement, what’s virtue?
The trouble starts with the nouns.
What do I think? Even Plato and
Aristotle believed we could get it right
eventually, that we could perfect Reason
at least enough to make sense of life, understand
how we can live here as we would want.
But there are others, literary types mostly,
who think it will always be chaos, that the world
will never be amenable to our reason
and to what we can do, what we are capable of.
It’s not a world to be good in.
That’s why I gave up thinking.
I’d rather be painting the kitchen.
Ah here he is at last
Philly in the front seat for once
and both of them waving like mad.
They must have something to tell me.
