Descartes and the Broom

and returning to our senses

The other day, noticing a broom leaning at a particularly charismatic angle, I began a poem about it, only to find Rene Descartes show up in the second stanza. Descartes was the renaissance philosopher generally credited with laying the groundwork for what is called “The Age of Reason,” a revealing phrase given that it assumes reasoning to be a purely human capability, only realized once Europeans discovered it. His most remembered utterance is Cogito Ergo Sum, I think, therefor I am.

“I think, therefor I am” may seem a harmless, if egoic, recognition of the thinking self, a kind of intellectual puffery, bit it attaches to something odder, and darker—a general suspicion of and disconnection from anything but the thinking mind. In Descartes’ intellectual formulation, earthly things are seen as soulless objects, mechanical puzzles to be figured out by humans, as though put there for that very purpose. Animals, he believed, could not feel pain as they lacked souls and human intellect. With his associates, he conducted public vivisections, usually on neighborhood dogs, the spread paws of whom would be nailed on planks while he cut their chests open to show onlookers the beating hearts, assuring them that the cries they heard were not cries of pain but mere noises of a machine, like the whines of metal cogs for oil.

Despite such gruesome capacity for cruelty, he was and still is considered a brilliant and important philosopher. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy heralds him for offering “a new vision of the natural world,” That’s one way to put it. The notion seems to be that one should know the whole of his work, how it led to the deductive method and algebraic geometry, revolutionizing the human ability to put natural forces to human use, before judging the more grotesque manifestations of his “philosophy.” In other words, “intellectually separate your emotions from the subject,” just like he did, and as we’re all taught to do. How else do we account for our ability to blithely continue destroying what’s left of the natural world other than by our ability to dissociate ourselves from it?

You can look around and make your own judgements about how the Reason experiment has gone. As for the poem, it follows a persistent inner urging, which is to flip Descartes on his celebrated head, to draw a line 180 perfect degrees to the opposite of his “new vision of the nature world,” and return to nature it’s true stature, for which emotional states such as awe, wonder, and humility are essential if we seek true comprehension. As for the high and exalted mind, it’s the last thing we should plant our ultimate trust in, with it’s resident ego and frightening capacity to dissociate from the suffering of others. Gaza anyone?

I’m not the first to think these thoughts. Much has been written, and much more needs to be written, about what’s called Cartesian Dualism, the formalized estrangement of humans from the world. This poem is a sand grain on the scales.

DESCARTES AND THE BROOM

By angle of mood 
I assess the angle of the broom
and so tilt the true angle
defined only by the broom itself
worn down to its blue sutures
and a final curl of bristles
shaped like a story
or a law

which makes me think of Descartes
who couldn't be sure of anything
and how the broom now exceeds him
every time it sweeps fallen detritus
out the door 

and is at the same time swept
by the floor, proving itself
by sweeping itself      away, 
temporal and precise,
like all good reality.

Imagine a man
who would distrust everything around him
but his own thoughts.
Even while breathing.

Next to the broom one boot
tilts against another
the laces relaxed and waiting.
I go madly out the door
and never credit them their fidelity
to the little metal hooks.

When I come back 
the broom has not shifted
it opinion
and still knows
what it knows. 
Precisely.

The broom leans, therefor I am.

A certainty I lean on
just as I depend on this pen
it's dark blue liquid flow
to reconcile into line
the vague cloud of my thoughts
and the occasional words that are given
not imagined.

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