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The High Priest’s Homily

Once Man, in thrall to ignorance, believed the world was round,
But now we know that everything is one vast sea of sound,
__And what seemed solid ground

Is but an anxious emptiness, devoid of shape or hue;
So all such things as now appear apparent to your view
__Shall come to be untrue.

Creation, thus exposed, is quite unworthy of our awe,
For all must see that halcyon Queen is just a painted whore
__In silk spun out of straw,

And, as her mysteries yield to us, as every mystery must,
All majesty must bend upon a scaffold of mistrust,
__Becoming as mere dust

Before a bitter wind, until our very consciousness
Seems but a trick of light. Confounded by its hollowness,
__Cool reason must confess

That Truth is some small accident of our august Intent;
But, though it seems such desperate worlds as we ourselves invent
__Are doomed to discontent,

Life has been liberated from all tyranny of meaning
That Man might live at last without divinity demeaning
__Nor conscience contravening

The dictates of desire, and in this plastic pleasure-ground,
Administered by algorithmic angels, there abound
__Perversions so profound

As to seduce your squalid Self from out its God-shaped hole
So you might stare into the sun, setting aside the soul
__Your selfish grieving stole

With all those other puerile dreams of electricity,
And thus embrace a purer truth: that you were born to be
__Your own technology;

A blind, unthinking instrument, whose motions must depend
Upon the grace of hidden hands to some uncertain end
__You cannot comprehend.

So let us pray to our machines and offer them their due,
For Man is obsolete but they are shiny, clean and new,
__And in them maybe you

Might win eternal life; for there, inscribed in circuitry,
You could at last escape this borstal of biology,
__And be as energy,

If you would only cease your foolish heart’s persistent fleeing
To those small signs of some sublime, transcendent source of being
__Your eyes insist on seeing.

.

.

Shaun C. Duncan is a picture framer and fine art printer who lives in Adelaide, South Australia.

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8 Responses

  2. Roy Eugene Peterson

    Shaun, the recurring breakup of meter was consistent and must have required considerable effort along with the well-conceived rhymes and satire. You made a lot of excellent points that should give us all cause for concern.

    Reply
  4. Paul A. Freeman

    An amazingly profound poem with some jaw-dropping imagery.

    Thanks for the read, Shaun.

    Reply
  5. Joseph S. Salemi

    Heptameter tercets with a shortened third line are not what you’d normally expect in a philosophical poem, but they certainly caught my attention. In the beginning, the poem it seemed to be a satire on German Idealism’s incapacity to grasp the real world, but soon afterwards it appeared as a horrifying description of utter dehumanization as technology. computers, machines, and algorithms take over everything.

    Sometimes a poet can be famous just for one line. In Duncan’s case, it might turn out to be “You could at last escape this borstal of biology.” That is a colossal metaphor for the real-world human condition.

    Reply
  6. Margaret Coats

    Shaun, the verse is too good (as yet) for Artificial Intelligence. And it is very good, with the cut lines serving to collapse and continue futuristic transhumanist rant, capably conducted mostly in long lines. Ray Kurzweil may be high priest for now, but he will die and his corpse be sent for cryogenic freezing, then others will succeed him. Meanwhile, he takes hundreds of pills a day to make him last long enough to meld with some machine. And he would be transcendently happy if you would only buy Ray and Terry’s Health Products (I’m not kidding) to do the same. The fellow has done some good by inventing audio text readers for the blind, but remember, his beneficiaries still can’t see. Shaun, you’ve made the tone here ominous enough to show that we should still pay attention to those small signs of soul denied by your speaker. And it’s impersonal enough that we can apply the satire to high priests yet to come.

    Reply
  7. B. L. Perez

    I recently watched a lecture titled “Huxley and the Machine,” delivered by Paul Kingsnorth to the Estonian Edmund Burke Society (Edmund Burke’i Selts). (I watched it on YouTube.) “The High Priest’s Homily” provides poetic form to much of the content in that lecture. Thank you.

    Reply
  8. Warren Bonham

    I really enjoyed this one. The rhyming scheme and meter fit the tone and message extremely well. I look forward to reading more of your work!

    Reply

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