But the nymph will entice this lover
With the faintest glimmerings she sheds upon history and lives;
The more guarded she is, the more earnestly I pray that she thrives.
When the boat falls quiet and I am the night watch on deck,
The loving mood will come:
My roving eyes will follow the nixie’s beck
To scan her tits and bum,
And then every hitch and fold in her shift-ing values,¹
Judged to be unreal and ephemeral by more stable statues.²
‘Now genie,name me your truth - but not if you’re slandered,’
With these words I will gently rebuke her,
‘If your values are wrong-headed or dying, what sets my standard?’
‘Humanitarian values and lucre,’
She’ll reply, ‘both have transcultural meaning - only one
Will lead you to the Erewhon of steadfast truth, where the sun
‘Stands ever at the zenith of lives, like an eye, to shed
Rays of fondness and pity
Upon Earth and humanity. Wherein is that fancy bred?
In your culturally-forged identity?
Or bred, less fatefully, in what effigies, good omens and notions
Soever you choose to fill the sails of your emotions?’
‘I’m the sole disposer of the buoyant loops of my signature,
Things that inspire are the flourish;
What I enter in the log of the progress and heading of Culture
Feeds on the thoughts that nourish
Each valiant soul. Is there a shoal to be sounded
At land’s end, dear Nixie? - to be en route is already to have found it.³
³ To judge our culture, we need to step outside the assumptions that shape it and consider what shaped our outlook on life (the hate objects,
hopes and ideas, the search for self-validation), informed, as it should be, by all the good that people have tried to do in the world.
Is there truth at the end of history? Yes; to be seeking it implies that one already knows what to look for.