‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’
—W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
THE BEAST AND PLATO’S THEORY OF FORMS
For Nicolas Cavaillès
‘In the knowledgeable realm, the form of the good is the last thing to be seen, and it is
reached with difficulty.
—Plato
On a rare day in which you feel less than
good, maladroit in fact, human-headed, and
unable to see life through:
we rediscover you, unsure of the circumstances
that have you still
slouching the world…
hence, the reason why, in a library, you
begin to study it:
Plato’s Theory of Forms.
Thus, each dawn,
we find you training
your non-self to reach that
higher, but parachuteless
terrain beyond the sky…
But how exactly?
By becoming this:
an incalculably deft acrobat
who, for all eternity,
flips up and catches
only himself…
and/or a celestial magician, who pulls
God infinitely out
of a diaphanous hat!
that, or as a hypnotist
who tricks his own
soul into a trance of
cataleptic silence.
But what then when these improbable tasks have been accomplished?
Check for signs of vertigo
by holding a spirit-level containing Aristotle’s blood,
while not listening out
for the thud of your body back on vertiginous matter…
As you, grinning from ear
to ear, you get
ready finally to disappear…
(to depart now every brain),
disguised as Plato garbed
in his shadowy rags of flesh…
disguised as Plato garbed
as an Ideal Being; wearing
what you would not have been
seen dead in back on Earth.
AFTER READING GEORGE ORWELL’S 1984
‘You asked once, what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already.
Everybody knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’
—George Orwell
After reading 1984
you decide on only this
conclusion to untruth
in Oceania: God strapped and howling in a leather chair in Room 101,
and you torturing him,
there, where, with your new improved versions of his universe,
you send in, subliminally,
not rats, but your thoughts
through the memory holes inside his head, ‘thoughts’ to reset his definitions
until he can only see
you in place of himself!
But for what purpose?
For the improvements of the arts, literature, philosophy,
science, politics, media, and above all, religious education!
Turning Newspeak into
(simply) Beastspeak…
by transmitting on the telescreens in every room
‘Five Easy Steps’ (for all lapsed megalomaniacs)
on how best to scrub their skin
of their last totalitarian sins…
Until when in THE MINISTRY OF BEAST
a document is signed off by every beastly
paper-pusher that you, and you alone
are all there is, and all there (forever)
can be…
to confirm (now) that from this day on in every zone in every city
2 + 2 will equal Beast, not 5!
And that (likewise) all historical
records will now be doctored
until it is confirmed that you
(and no one else)
began, won, and ended every human war;
to ensure that all oligarchical activity is over…
Up to the day when there is no one left in the universe to interrogate,
and you, the beast, you have
no choice but to interrogate yourself!
(ripping out your own spine
to use now as a microphone)
To talk and talk and talk your
body into truth’s final corpse…
until man’s last lies drop like
dead flies from the remains of it.
THE BEAST REFUTES THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
‘I am the apocalypse itself, that is to say, the ultimate and first event of the end, the unveiling
and the verdict’
—Jacques Derrida
You refute it
by silencing grammarians
who believe that they
can still anatomise you,
—but how exactly?
By prying free each name
as if a barnacle from every object
in the world, to dislodge all nouns, until expectorating (even?)
the final full-stop in the Bible
—but to ensure what?
That language itself is stripped
of its meaning: so that logocentrism now can
only be undone by your tongue!
To bring you to the metaleptic
conclusion of all idioms? Yes,
to deconstruct deconstruction:
by cocking your ear to Christ’s
2000-year silence, to fossilise, at once, the holiest
tongues of all men in your palate…
and by rolling, like a dung beetle,
the last strips of landmass on Earth
into a ball to prevent even one
linguist from approaching you…
to guarantee you remain the only
object to exist ‘outside the text’!
You, who (you conclude)
have become the first post-
grammatical anomaly to survive it, what? The
black death of meaninglessness!
which you celebrate
by ventriloquising Yeats’
jawbones back into speech,
to shred instantaneously the last critical text?
yes, and to force (again?)
yourself into becoming
both signifier and signified…
because refusing to be compared with anything else!
You, who, having utterly
ended semiotics,
feel free now to practice
your own set of new body signs in the mirror,
signs interpretable only to those
wearing your face mask on
the other side of reflection.