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The High Priest’s Homily
Once Man, in thrall to ignorance, believed the world was round,
But now we know that everything is one vast sea of sound,
__And what seemed solid ground
Is but an anxious emptiness, devoid of shape or hue;
So all such things as now appear apparent to your view
__Shall come to be untrue.
Creation, thus exposed, is quite unworthy of our awe,
For all must see that halcyon Queen is just a painted whore
__In silk spun out of straw,
And, as her mysteries yield to us, as every mystery must,
All majesty must bend upon a scaffold of mistrust,
__Becoming as mere dust
Before a bitter wind, until our very consciousness
Seems but a trick of light. Confounded by its hollowness,
__Cool reason must confess
That Truth is some small accident of our august Intent;
But, though it seems such desperate worlds as we ourselves invent
__Are doomed to discontent,
Life has been liberated from all tyranny of meaning
That Man might live at last without divinity demeaning
__Nor conscience contravening
The dictates of desire, and in this plastic pleasure-ground,
Administered by algorithmic angels, there abound
__Perversions so profound
As to seduce your squalid Self from out its God-shaped hole
So you might stare into the sun, setting aside the soul
__Your selfish grieving stole
With all those other puerile dreams of electricity,
And thus embrace a purer truth: that you were born to be
__Your own technology;
A blind, unthinking instrument, whose motions must depend
Upon the grace of hidden hands to some uncertain end
__You cannot comprehend.
So let us pray to our machines and offer them their due,
For Man is obsolete but they are shiny, clean and new,
__And in them maybe you
Might win eternal life; for there, inscribed in circuitry,
You could at last escape this borstal of biology,
__And be as energy,
If you would only cease your foolish heart’s persistent fleeing
To those small signs of some sublime, transcendent source of being
__Your eyes insist on seeing.
.
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Shaun C. Duncan is a picture framer and fine art printer who lives in Adelaide, South Australia.
that is a wonderful poem!
Thank you for taking the time to read it, Leslie!
Shaun, the recurring breakup of meter was consistent and must have required considerable effort along with the well-conceived rhymes and satire. You made a lot of excellent points that should give us all cause for concern.
Thank you, Roy. Yes, a couple of stanzas did go through quite a few rewrites before I was happy with them.
There is much to contemplate here, and the rhymes are excellent.
Thank you, David. It was a bit of a challenge to maintain the structure whilst trying to make sense of what is ultimately an incoherent philosophy.
An amazingly profound poem with some jaw-dropping imagery.
Thanks for the read, Shaun.
Thank you for taking the time to read it and comment, Paul – I really appreciate it!
Heptameter tercets with a shortened third line are not what you’d normally expect in a philosophical poem, but they certainly caught my attention. In the beginning, the poem it seemed to be a satire on German Idealism’s incapacity to grasp the real world, but soon afterwards it appeared as a horrifying description of utter dehumanization as technology. computers, machines, and algorithms take over everything.
Sometimes a poet can be famous just for one line. In Duncan’s case, it might turn out to be “You could at last escape this borstal of biology.” That is a colossal metaphor for the real-world human condition.
Thank you, Joe. I can’t remember exactly why I chose this form, and I did regret it at several points during the writing process. I find the tenets of transhumanism to be quite ridiculous, so trying to present them in a way which made sense (to the high priest, at least) whilst and adhering to the strict form was a challenge. I’m glad you liked “borstal of biology” – I was quite proud of that one.
Shaun, the verse is too good (as yet) for Artificial Intelligence. And it is very good, with the cut lines serving to collapse and continue futuristic transhumanist rant, capably conducted mostly in long lines. Ray Kurzweil may be high priest for now, but he will die and his corpse be sent for cryogenic freezing, then others will succeed him. Meanwhile, he takes hundreds of pills a day to make him last long enough to meld with some machine. And he would be transcendently happy if you would only buy Ray and Terry’s Health Products (I’m not kidding) to do the same. The fellow has done some good by inventing audio text readers for the blind, but remember, his beneficiaries still can’t see. Shaun, you’ve made the tone here ominous enough to show that we should still pay attention to those small signs of soul denied by your speaker. And it’s impersonal enough that we can apply the satire to high priests yet to come.
I have experimented with AI and even wrote a short essay about it which I’ve done nothing with. My opinion on the matter is that it will never be able to write decent poetry because it cannot speak out loud and thus will never experience the feeling of words in its mouth. I’m also not convinced it will be able to create an original metaphor.
I had no one in particular in mind for this satire, though Kurzweil did occur to me. I see transhumanism as a kind of lunatic philosophy which is easily dismissed when we focus on the rambling of any one thinker but there’s a kind of ersatz theology which has crept into the culture at large via osmosis. It is this theology which I was trying to articulate and critique.
I recently watched a lecture titled “Huxley and the Machine,” delivered by Paul Kingsnorth to the Estonian Edmund Burke Society (Edmund Burke’i Selts). (I watched it on YouTube.) “The High Priest’s Homily” provides poetic form to much of the content in that lecture. Thank you.
Thank you for commenting – I will look up that lecture and I’m sure I’ll wish I could revise the poem once I’ve watched it!
I really enjoyed this one. The rhyming scheme and meter fit the tone and message extremely well. I look forward to reading more of your work!
Thank you, Warren. It felt like an odd fit by the time I was half way through writing it, so I’m glad you think it works!
Shaun, I love the form, I love the imagery, I love the message and the creative way you deliver it. Your stanzas of monorhyme, your smooth employment of enjambment, your effective use of alliteration (“Administered by algorithmic angels” to name but one marvel) all add to the enjoyment of this thrilling and disturbing poem for our times. The intriguing title showcases the message perfectly and I only wish I’d written it. Great stuff!
You do me a great honour once again with your comment, Susan. That I could write a single line you’d wish were yours is about the highest praise I could hope to receive!
Whoa, Shaun — as I was reading this, my eyes were opening widely and my mouth was in the “wow” shape; and when I got to the end, all I could say was, “Wow, this is profound!” “That halcyon Queen is just a painted whore / In silk spun out of straw” is, I’m guessing, a wonderful reference to Rumplestiltskin (who spun gold from straw); it emphasizes the dystopian fairy-tale sense of your poem. Other amazing phrases include: “a scaffold of mistrust”; “algorhythmic angels” (as Susan noted); “you were born to be your own technology”; “inscribed in circuitry”. There’s a lot of wisdom here!
Thank you for this most generous comment, Cynthia. I honestly hadn’t thought of Rumpelstiltskin but the phrase “silk spun out of straw” stuck hard enough in my mind that I knew I’d plucked it from somehwhere – I can’t believe I didn’t make the connection. I was wedded to that phrase from the first draft though even though it took a few attempts to make that stanza work. “Scaffold of mistrust” was intended an oblique reference to the mania of the French Revolution – I can’t tell if it’s too cryptic or too obvious at this point.