The Question, Is It?

We the People
of the great North American
societal provenience
await with hope
the hazard of high endeavour
with a good deal of uncertainty,
not to say misgiving.
Especially when we recall
that James Abbott McNeill Whistler,
to whom so many were in the habit of deferring
in the declining decades of the last century,
said that art happens,
and how could we tell
whether it would happen to us?
‘Some of you folks,’
- pronounced the learned sociologist,
speaking, at this year’s annual
meeting of the Society,
with all the assurance
of an Egyptian soothsayer
at the court of Rameses the Second,
‘may find yourselves
in the way of attaining the maximum.’
All of us, say the nihilists
who go to the taverns
to practice their wit on the waiters
and proclaim in voices, artificially loud,
their voluble contraries.
The question arises, therefore,
whether the dogmatism of the nihilists
is or 1s not preferable to the persistent
ambiguities of the learned academics.
If enlightenment could not be found
in having recourse to the habits of the ant
and the beetle,
or even in the voluminous monographs
of the celebrated anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss,
then one might take what comfort one could
from the contemplation of Raphael
copying the works of his mentors with the
frenzy
of a divinity in the act of making himself
visible.
Well, you know, you know, you know,
no matter what age you were born in,
nor how carefully instructed in the
principles of the dialectics,
simple recognition, even belated,
of the inadequacies of the biological analogy,
might start cogitations
that it would not be well to abandon,
(let us say)
for a trip to the woods in Spring
to admire the skill of the trailing arbutus
in decanting its fragrance.