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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Thank you for proposing so powerfully that “returning to our senses” is the bottom line if we are to regain any sanity at all. “Descartes and the Broom” is such a great title! And the poem does what the essay is proposing. “Balancing the pain with a poem”—I love that, Mica!
Rob, this poem transmuted some of that pain. Thank you for the imagery and the broom as a focus.
I frequently think about what thoughts must be thrown out because a certain person thought them, or at least wrote them. Descartes is an obvious example. I read about him years ago, in my animal activism days, and can hardly think of a more despicable human. Yet I know he made great contributions to mathematics. I am glad you took a few words here to convey the extreme horror of his actions; I find many people have been unaware.
J.J. Audubon is another. A miraculous artist, yet he wrote proudly of reporting an escaped slave family he encountered while exploring, returning them to certain torture and death.
The list of course goes on and on. The question is for me, how much can the art or logic presented be separated from the utterly depraved morals of a person. I suppose it's an individual question, but I guess one line I could draw is that those, like Descartes and Audubon, who proudly show their cruelty as something perhaps aspirational, are not welcome in my world.
Thanks for this. You've given me something to think about.