More in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in philosophy
Is a banality and goes without saying
For many a philosopher would reduce the world
To a catalog of forces and particles
When of course there is more than E or M
The latter multiplied by a suspiciously regular C squared
A decadent age that conflates truth and information
Consigning the world to a menu or tabulation
Mind in column B and matter in column A
A death and B delusion
And their science which thrives upon measurement
However beneficial in theory
Ignores the transcendence of geometry of arithmetic
Arrogantly deeming them components of technology
A contraption contrived by primate ingenuity
At least they say an open question subject to further research
Maybe humans did invent mathematics
And would they then make adjustments to pi
Repair perhaps the hypotenuse
Or will they finally concede that there are entities
Not bound by space and time
And that among these let us not delay
Are moral facts
For this vaunted technology
Truly indispensable for human life
Can as well cure a suffering infant
As devise a weapon of mass destruction
While it advances ever and anon
The economy of better mousetraps
And they scoff how do you equate morality and pi
When everybody knows there’s no universal standard
As if measurement were things
Matter only mass and energy but joules
Regardless of the architecture of the thing
And the goodness of a thing merely the human reaction to it
The reaction of one little species
In one little biome
On one little planet
In one little solar system
In one little galaxy
In one little universe
The cowardly churls
The narrow provincials
The pathetic lazy cowardice of claiming the universe devoid of goodness
First I say universe is too small a word
And thus do I employ the word and concept world
Of all that is and obtains and happens
For in no universe nor in any interstice can it be the case
That the sum of seven and five
Is anything other than twelve
For mathematical facts do not belong to any universe
Nor in whatever space obtains between spaces
Even so in the greater cosmos can there be no place
Such as is depicted on Star Trek
In which whole planets foster but a single culture
Where it could be okay to torture small children for fun
I am more certain of the wrongness of inflicting gratuitous pain
Than in any proposition of science
Because value
Value inheres in the child
Value inheres in every person
Value inheres in everything good
In pleasure for example
That we hold the child to be precious as we certainly do
The contrary being the definition of monstrosity
Does not confer value upon the child
How we hold something does not give it value
That’s the word with which sci-tech cannot cope
With which our invisible hands cannot cope
Our arrogant little hands to seize control
Paradise paved
And oh what have we done to our green and pleasant earth
Where land emerges from the vasty seas
Where sprightly bats propel themselves in infinite obliques
Cutting and turning in the middle height
With rapidity to amaze
With intelligence and sensory apparatus
Utterly alien to the primate brain
I should respect though I will never fully know
The experience of bat
And behold the aerial dance incomparable
Beside the street lamps and above the trees
Before the plague of the white nose
And now they are many fewer
But is their diminishment an effect
Of the explosion of human habitations
Fungi have been around since early time
Who convert waste to nutrient
So maybe lovely bats but go the way of the world
But what of rocky toads
Representative of those vulnerables the amphibians
Brilliant deployers of toxic defense
Prey only for the hognose snake
At dusk you would see them
Near the creeks on the sidewalks amid the lawns
In the streets where they were sometimes flattened by cars
Of humid Jacksonville fragrant of salt marsh and factory
Mill for paper and mill for coffee
Estuary for the mothers and the larvae
But now they are many fewer
Receivers of greater toxicity
For those lawns thrive but poorly
Grass planted where trees should grow
And to green those patchy carpets demands
Generous application of weed ‘n feed
That leaches into the pools and eddies
Where tadpoles tumble upward to breathe
Possessed awhile of lungs and filtering gills both
And as they undergo interestingly their wonted metamorphosis
Monstrous deformity of limb and abdomen occurs
And early death
And science knows the loss of species after species
Through the arrogant dominion of one of them
Which has wreaked harm upon the darling planet
We don’t appreciate
We don’t register the value of things before our selfish selves
And imagine arrogant monsters that we are
That we make things valuable or not
As whim or greed elect
Pah
We are monstrously deformed
By poisons in the cultural environment
Now hear the truth
To appreciate is to experience to respect to bow in distinct humility
Before that which is truly precious
As a child
As a nurturing mother
As a green and pleasant earth
As a noble work of art
As a toad tree or bat
As the backbreaking work of gaining knowledge as a person as a species
As a smile of gratitude a nod of understanding
And there used to be two cultures in our universities
That obtained in uneasy coexistence
One concerned quite legitimately with the phenomena of nature
As knowledge for its own sake is a beautiful thing
And technology conducive to wellbeing is a needful thing
And the other with the something something of man
Self-described as a piece of work
And the one took an interest in phenomena
Primarily as a source of materials for tech
As a nitrate radical can feed a crop
Or blow up a federal building
Or a piece of flint can bring down the quarry
Or slash Achilles’ heel
And the other took an interest in something human
Primarily as a source of moral uplift
Beginning of course with one’s own culture
Regarded narrowly provincially as familiar and hence superior
But see universities had begun with the other
That is with man self-described as center and purpose
A little less than the angels
Until the whole world was subsumed within the one
And science became the only game in town
For the humanities had never
In the absence of alternative discovered themselves
Nor freed themselves from the hierarchies of priest and king
Of self-designated leader rousing disciples to murder and hate
With their films their broadsides their radio broadcasts
And I tell you now
That while scientists try to understand phenomena
Somebody must try to understand value