A: What it is Like to be a Philosopher

Driving down 2nd Concession, Amherstburg,

Snow-dusted fields.

and whispy clouds

frame silos,

tractors and trucks,

and fading red barns.

August’s 12 foot corn stocks

have been cut down to stubble

that will not grow again

’till May.

If I could I would

drive down long County roads

looking for places to bring my telescope

when January night falls early,

or walk along the river,

or follow the plot of a novel,

or watch a movie,

or read the paper,

or listen to someone speak,

or see kids playing,

or buy a shirt,

or have a tea,

or look at a painting,

without my mind’s gravity

pulling in questions

about why people do as they do

and did as they did

and will be as they will be,

and what does this mean,

and what that;

could things be otherwise than they are

and if so, why, and if not,

why not

and how do I make my case

and unmake yours

one way or the other?

I have made my point enough

for one life.

But thoughts come when they want to come.

Driving down 2nd Concession, Amherstburg I think:

“Who conceded what to whom?”

Were all parties satisfied,

or were there recalcitrants

who– faces reddening and fists pounding–

shouted:

‘If we concede so much at the 2nd

how much more will be taken at the 3rd, 4th and 5th?!”‘

The door once opened, more thoughts rush in:

“”Concession” can’t mean ‘concession.’

Somewhere in a dusty

County museum

that not even school kids get dragged to anymore

there must be an archivist,

in a grey sweater, Andy Capp cap,

and maybe a pipe

who knows the difference between

a Side Road and a Concession,

who it was that numbered the drain ditches

and the names of the parties to the dispute over Disputed Road.”

But I won’t stop and ask him today.

If I must be cursed by Socrates’ daemon

to think before I feel

I can at least amuse myself with equivocation

and keep some questions open

for my own delectation.

B: Mill and Pigs

It takes energy

to refract every light wave of an idea

and subject it to the test

of evidence or reason,

coherence or correspondence,

and to ask how context

shapes the seeing and the seen

and to worry about how charitable I should be

when something stupid comes my way.

If I could I would

just let the ideas play in mind

and not worry which one wants to be a paper

and which one a book.

Every particle of the world

does not need to be doubled

in writing.

I am getting tired;

all I want to do is drive

down lonely roads

and look at Andromeda,

2 million light years away

not looking back.

I want to walk in the silence

of flat straight space,

breath in the lilacs of spring,

watch the ships in the river,

take a drink on the patio,

and close my eyes at night

without pondering, posing,

or wondering how to prove.

It takes energy to refract every light wave

of an idea;

I am tired;

I don’t want to argue any more.

Mill said: it is better to be Socrates unsatisfied

than to be a pig satisfied.

But did he ask the pig?

Maybe it has been this search for something

Higher

something absolutely True

that we believe in but pigs don’t

that has been the problem all along.

Socrates,

our patron saint,

taught tyrants

who knew what they knew

and were not afraid

to prove it,

not with elenchus and syllogism

but exile and death.

The truck and the abbatoir await us all:

Mill and pigs

Socrates and Critias

me and you.

(But who is “I”

and who “you”

not to mention

“We” and “they).”

There really is only this moment,

or rather, not:

when you think about it,

it has already slipped away

and gone forever.

But no worries:

there is another,

and another

and another

until there is not.

To be and let be,

that is the answer.

To be neither selfless nor selfish

but a self

appropriating the wealth

of the magnificent surfaces of the world

without removing them from the commons.

_____________

“Thoughts come when they want to come” is borrowed from Nietzsche, somewhere in Beyond Good and Evil.

“Better to be Socrates unsatisfied …” is asserted by J.S. Mill in Utilitarianism.

“Socrates taught tyrants…” alludes to Critias, one of the leaders of the Thirty Tyrants who overthrew the Athenian democracy after Athen’s defeat by Sparta in 405 BCE. He had been a student of Socrates.