Plurality by Louis MacNeice

I'm still feeling miserable and sick, so I'm going to indulge in another post about poetry. This one won't be a lamentation, though.

Today (as so often) I found myself thinking about the poem "Plurality" by Louis MacNeice. I don't understand why this poem isn't more famous. Perhaps because it has some dense philosophical passages, and I'll admit I don't understand them all. But I think anyone could understand the basic thrust.

I'm going to reproduce the whole poem here. I hope the MacNeice estate doesn't come after me. I'll take it down if they do. It's easily available elsewhere on the web, anyway, so I don't see the harm.

(I've just realized I posted it before. Well, it's worth posting again.)

Most of my readers probably know who Parmenides was, but just in case: he was a pre-Socratic philosopher who believed only the One existed, and that plurality was an illusion. It sounds ridiculous until you try to meet his arguments (a challenge out of which the Aristotelian system grew, or so I have read).

The whole poem is good but I think the conclusion, from "Man is surely mad with discontent" is the cherry. It brings me to tears. I think it's a powerful expression of humanism (and personally I've always been a humanist). I am indeed proud to belong to the human race, as MacNeice asserts here.

This is a great poem because the reader could apply it to any number of aspects of the human condition. For instance, it probably won't be a surprise to my readers that it makes me think about political correctness and globalism. Especially these lines:

The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,
His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means he chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal...

I think it's fair to say that this is what everybody who tends towards Burkean conservatism (or libertarianism) hates about political correctness and globalism; the relentless push towards sameness, for all their mendacious talk of "diversity". The belief that all the glorious imperfections of humanity, all the historical accidents and cultural quirks, have to be flattened out by the rolling pin of equality, diversity and inclusion. To quote another great poem, "The Rolling English Road" by G.K. Chesterton:

I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,

Before I became a Christian, I think it's fair to say that Louis MacNeice's worldview was the closest I had to a religion. I told myself I preferred imperfection to perfection (and even wrote stories and poems expressing this theme) This, however, doesn't seem tenable for a Christian, considering Christ told us to be perfect and our goal as Christians is the Beatific Vision. But I tell myself that this might probably include all desirable goods, including those we associate with imperfection.

Notice the incredible intricacy of the poem, especially the internal rhymes.

But enough of my yakking. Here's MacNeice!

Plurality

It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun
The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one;
World is other and other, world is here and there,
Parmenides would smother life for lack of air
Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks—
No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes,
Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights,
All your foes are friends and all your days are nights
And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all
And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball.
The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives
And nothing that we do, make or become survives,

His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream
Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme
Completeness means he chokes each orifice with tight
Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white
All-white Universal, refusing to allow
Division or dispersal—Eternity is now
And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see
Postulating a dumb static identity
Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without
Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt,
Action along with error, growth along with gaps;
If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse.
No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear
That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year,
That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because
It is something that began and is not what it was,
Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled,
Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world,
Its entity a denial of all that is not it,
Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit,
An absolute and so defiant of the One
Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done,
Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought
And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought.
World is not like that, world is full of blind
Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind,
Swollen or diminished according to the dice,
Foaming, never finished, never the same twice.
You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form—
Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm
And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained,
Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained,
Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet
Would not be worth achieving if the world were set
Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb
World should find its voice for good and God become
Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means
Something but must fall unless there intervenes
Between that meaning and the matter it should fill
Time’s revolving hand that never can be still.
Which being so and life a ferment, you and I
Can only live by strife in that the living die,
And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim
Only to what a bird can find within the frame
Of momentary flight (the value will persist
But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).
Man is man because he might have been a beast
And is not what he was and feels himself increased,
Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet
Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget
The means within the end and man is truly man
In that he would transcend and flout the human span:
A species become rich by seeing things as wrong
And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong.
Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled
By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world,
Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux,
Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux
And so he must continue, raiding the abyss
With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss,
Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick
Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick,
Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate,
Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate,
But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,
Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch,
Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.