Upon awareness and free choice he has founded self-mastery.
Yet the backwash of the spine and the rudderlike tail
Are more inconceivable and prodigious than the ripples
Of our navigational equivalents,¹
Because of the ambivalence
To experienced values of reptilian cripples.-
What should you fear, Mijbil?²
The plain truth's hobnail!
(I then wondered what would happen if contempt for inwardly valid norms became elevated to State policy, and drew my conclusions in my next poem, Nihilism Rules, OK? (I had read Thus Spake Zarathustra in my youth.)
While The Plain Truth was about the best interests of the self (the otter with his conviction of ‘what is true for me’ outswimming the realist-turtle), Beauty and the Beast, Cogitator 2 and Nihilism Rules, OK? were about the best interests of the community (what is true for all, not just true from one point of view, say, a conqueror’s, an economist’s or a psychologist’s or the view of a person of great gifts or vision, say, a Goethe or Nietzsche.)
Personal conviction must be altruistic, if it is not to degenerate into mere self-interest; so it needs firm values and good standards (hence, the opening first stanza of The Plain Truth). It also needs the balm of mythology (as a counter-irritant to all factualizing and digitizing things, Login OPERAtionally Undefined) and cultic symbols (the nixie figurehead in Gone Sailing in the Vera) to soften the harshness of reality, to strengthen the feeling of participating in a common culture and inculcate tolerant understanding of others (‘Now genie, name me your truth - but not if you’re.slandered’ - stanza 11 in Gone Sailing in the Vera). Cultural relativism still does not rule out the possibility of some truths being absolute (the “heading and progress of Culture” can be logged by the educated).
When we become aware that we are part of a wider community, there is a danger of becoming enslaved
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to the dictates of the military-industrial complex (leading, allegorically, to robot-Armageddon, Cogitator2)
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to the imperatives of empire and powerful leaders (say, a Bligh or Hitler, Nihilism Rules, OK?)
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to wealth (Ideal Eyes, where the Eyes claim the moral high ground over the Ego)
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to media spin and the mindless pursuits of an image-rich, consumer society (Wide Eyes)
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² In Gavin Maxwell’s classic, “Ring of Bright Water”, Mijbil the otter was accidentally killed by a workman.