Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
LAW OF
MUNDANITY
Very
well, patient reader, I know that putting one of my own poems in this “Something
Thoughtful” slot is rather egotistical, but I’m carried on by my last posting
in which I accused Steven Pinker, in his polemic Enlightenment Now, of ignoring the “law of mundanity”. By this I
mean our tendency to accept our everyday reality as boringly normal while
(often) assuming that other times and places were not only exotic and
pcturesque, but far more entertaining and stimulating for the people who lived
there. In this poem I suggest that the real people in such apparently exotic
places would simply see them as boring normality, just as we consider our own
time and place. I don’t wish to over-explain the poem, which I hope says many
other things about history, but here it is (from my first collection The Little Enemy, published in 2012)
Law of Mundanity
i
Law
of mundanity. The quinquireme
powered
by Nubian slaves is just one more
patrolling
ship. Re-paint it battle grey.
The
busy port is commerce and raw deals.
Wide
view, a backdrop; up close, men at work;
the
rattling abacus a p.c’s. clack.
Toga
or sari, burnous, roquelaure,
clothes
for the rich – their suits and matching sets.
Loincloths
and rags are jeans and last year’s shirts.
The
tourist thinks the scene’s exotic. Those
who
live from hour to hour on the same street
flick
flies, scratch itches, hear a barking dog.
ii
“Of humble birth he rose from cabin boy
to admiral and sailed the seven seas,
mapping and conqu’ring for his country’s good.”
(He
waited on the ward room, was abused
by
officers of rank and watched his chance.
He
studied long between decks, gritting teeth.)
“He never lost his curiosity
about the nat’ral world. He was as fresh
and lively at eighty as at eighteen.”
(And
the forced smile to quality. The hours
on
watch alone, relieving rich middies,
upset
of storm and boredom of the breeze).
“A pattern to all yeomen and town boys,
proof that true quality will rise and win
a place when equity’s the commonwealth.”
(In
lace and epaulettes now, why complain?
All
crews are politics and jockeying.
Pattern?
But what he won was won by graft.)
iii
The
cheap Voltaire shot, then - no man hero
to
his own valet, and sweat and pimples,
in hard close-up, trump nobility?
Law
of mundanity. Work outwards from
the
everyday, try constancy and see
spring
water in the mud, quotidian good.
The
flicked fly is a goad, the abacus
a
measure of the real – that estate where
life
falls and rises, easy as a breath.
The
surface survey of an ancient street
pans
its humanity and puts in place
an
unreal antiquary theatre scene.
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