By Richard Mather
... and Cartesians on foot from Carlisle to Canterbury
for a conference on what it means to be
a xenophobe in a secular world
are discussing the cultural fallout of “phase three scholasticism.”
Their excursion is being filmed by Newsnight, which has taken
a curious interest in matters relating to what it calls
‘escalating post-historical hybridity on the move.’
… Among you is a man called Applewheel
whose Spenserian sonnet cycle about St Francis and Spinoza
is going to receive bad reviews
and there’s nothing you can say to convince the scoundrels
that St Francis and Spinoza belong in the same set. (In his hotel room,
Applewheel glances through the mirror, sees a dead fly stuck to the glass,
mistakes it for his reflection, wipes it blank with his sleeve.)
…Timid Timo, ‘a committed bijection specialist,’ is walking,
but now he is walking and thinking, thinking of eating
an ostrich egg, shell included.
Sets are shells too and this is true in all worlds.
And yet the consubstantialist in the next room has other ideas about what is
and isn’t the case, and the void that separates the one from the many,
the substance from the accident, is final proof that Abraham Lincoln
didn’t exist in the real sense of the word, a sentiment shared
by the majority of Russians, according to a new survey.*
*“Twenty times this summer I’ve handled rough edges like they were old friends,” / boasts Big Shelley Cooper to the Right Reverend Jesus Ramirez, / who is still unable (even after all these years!) to disprove Leibniz’s theory / that the sky is “Left” and the earth is “Right.”
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