Decentered

'Gainst furies of ghastly stars we'd flailed,
Through worldly waters of time onto moonlit shores;
Where we crawled, and rose in arms, unveiled,
Orders of opaque midst deepest soul.

We stood on brinks, knew thus sphere had spun,
Its trails transparent to the mountain's eyes,
They pale as plain pages to twilight's sun;
'Twas clear to pure Reason dear Beauty's demise...

"O' infinity surrounds in false heavens' stead,
And so life grows from within what's dead,
Witless, elemental, inert bits on grid -
It stands to pure Reason as always all did!"

"They change in ways as sane substance sure does,
In madness of forms yet ordained to these laws;
Are these then ends thy metaphors meet?
Are they lost or endless worse, thy poetry deceit?"

Unsurely time awaits a-ears, 'tis then Beauty spake,
"In wholeness of cause you're blind to fractious mistake;
Of everything that never was, you say 'It couldn't be',
Why then I, bearer of lies, appear yours truly?"

And tell-tale-signs call from many-a-miles ago,
To wander without past or fate we nameless shadows,
Dissolve in dark; vain this fleeting pulse follows,
Whence partial beings play in stale afterglow.

Reviews

[John the Baptist]

The penultimate verse seems to be a refutation of the materialist view stated previously, but then the last lines sound like existentialism. Not sure what stance the poem is taking.

[Swagato Saha]

The first 4 stanzas conform to some kind of Spinozan Realism - transparency of Reason, or even a particular kind of Hegelian thought, having to do with Absolute Knowing. 'All that is Real is Rational, All that is Rational is Real.'
The penultimate stanza basically draws from a particular Hegel (not the same as before), and from hermeneutics of suspicion, and is about the reality of appearance - the same way someone like Marx insists on analysis of commodity form. So it's not like all that precedes is materialist, and thereon it's not.
I don't want to say a lot about the last stanza, because once again it's perhaps more important to sustain appearances than question what it all means in strict denotative terms. But it goes back to Hegel (Night of the world), with some nods to David Lynch's Mullholand Drive (in terms of visuals); the problem being what to make of agency of self, free will, etc. when psychic reality is itself decentered (Decentered Subject goes back to Freud, but there's interesting work in this direction by Schelling too.)
So what we get is a kind of subversion of the self-transparent rational agency of old, in the face of the new and decentered unconscious.

[John the Baptist]

Heavy stuff. Spinoza's Perennial Philosophy is enough for me.

[Swagato Saha]

Do try Kant if you are interested. It's relevant, to say the least, to modern science of the mind.