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Note on De Rerum Natura

The title, ‘On the Nature of Things’, is that of the poem by the Roman Lucretius (c.99–55BC) which expounds the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. I have borrowed only the title, though by accident many of the ideas in Lucretius do seem much like my own. I believe he holds that the soul is but a state of mind which has no afterlife; and that the world is not controlled by supernatural forces. Mine too is an impenitently didactic poem. I had a growing mob of them, they embarrassed me but required notice. They muse along—but do they know what they’re talking about?

We try to learn about what’s behind appearance. It’s an extension of our reality which is often spectacularly if only partially unveiled by science. Science and the arts take us beyond the dark glass of appearance. But there’s another wall beyond the dark glass, much farther out and never accessible to science, music or even, in my opinion, to religious trance. Philosophical theologians have said God is unknowable; philosophical scientists say, for different reasons, that reality is stranger than we can know. We don’t have the psychosomatic equipment for taking in what’s really there. It’s intuitively obvious that the thing-in-itself is unknowable. Kant said so, and in this I’ve come to believe him. Some haven’t, including Hegel, I read.

Part 3 is a repeat of Part 1, but it sees our limited reality inside a tube, the side of which is the first glass wall. But we’re probably, physicists tell us, living in more dimensions than we know, surrounded by more universes than the one we’re in, and even that one we can’t understand. So to give some idea of the complexity within which our perception is twisted, I’ve imagined the tube rolled up like one of those balls of wool which have a doughnut hole in the middle, a torus. A Möbius strip is a ring-band which is cut, twisted once, and stuck back together again. A torus which has also been ‘möbiused’ is in a hell of a state. Why should we think that Nature is angelically, sexlessly simple, when the reachable is so varied and complicated? The whole torus is Nature, the thing-in-itself.

Part 2 is a real life (mine) between the two metaphors of reality. For the idea of writing a poetic letter to one’s mother: well, there was George Barker’s poem, but I had just translated Salvatore Quasimodo’s Lettera alla madre, so that’s how the subject came. The theme-image is that of a magic garment which a man wears all his life. As it was made by his mother it could be seen as his skin, though I’ve not said that. It’s shiny when he’s happy and a hair shirt when he’s not. The Black Inquisitors are the enemy bomber planes of World War 2. The chains are surveyor’s chains—I was a surveyor for three years. ‘Another city’ is London, where I was at King’s College from 1955-58 reading English. ‘Learnt … to praise’: if you haven’t then English is the wrong subject for you. ‘Anxious trauma’: around 1963, the start of anxiety attacks kicked in. ‘A woman’: generic and specific (Lise). ‘I loved the here and now’: you do, when things go well. ‘The praise went there and here’: when you’re happy the world loves you back. I’m pessimistically Hardyesque in believing Nature to be of no significance to us, nor we to it. But I think I’m buoyant in a Humean way, though Hume sounds very hard to rival in the good cheer department.

Alan Marshfield

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