Social Matter

They lit the candle at both ends
With a pan to catch the burning wax
Raised up as a dilemma suspends
Which belief shall accord with the facts
All throw their coins in a sophist’s hat
For to know the past is not enough

The past isn’t truly made of star-stuff
But the future is — nothing to scoff at
To power his unprofitable turbine farm
Did man sow the wind – to no alarm
‘The whirlwind comes of its own accord’
It sustains, if it only sustains in harm

They lit the candle at both ends
A race of fire against fire
As a note before the resolve suspends
A harmonic waits on the piano wire
When they tired of God’s hard laws
They turned again to the bright Gods

But now made body again against all odds
Athena, Ares, Zeus, ideas without flaws
Later comes the terror turn, it depends
On how soon Thunder sleeps, who defends
The city? It is upside-down, a map, Unreal-
They lit the candle at both ends.

Author’s note:

‘Burning a candle at both ends’ is an idiom that is equivalent to ‘burning the midnight oil’. Since a candle has two ends, it is in theory possible to light both of them and produce double the light for half the candle’s normal life (being relatively free of drafts, of course.) However, the mechanism to achieve this in practice is understandably awkward; moreover, even clean burning candles whose wax drips little will drip down messily in the process.

The relation between the side-arranged candle and the ‘horns’ of the dilemma is clear; which side shall burn down first? Far from understanding the past, great profit seems to reside in guessing the future. Soothsaying, which is just an old way of saying ‘truth telling’ is a set of various arts of predicting the future. Not all of them involved understanding anything about the past.

The irony of the presently very-poor-performing wind farms is presented here with a sense of sarcasm; the whirlwind, which is nothing more than the consequence of human error, turns out to be quite ‘sustainable’ – by which I mean, constant, unrelenting and seeming to go on without end. Wind turbines do not so much get power from the wind as they do power from a certain sort of wind; the whirlwind would naturally break them.

The way that musical ‘suspensions’, which are more recently an invention of Western musicians since the so-called renaissance, work is that the implicit harmonics within the strings pull towards the resting form; but in the suspension, this is not yet apparent. Likewise, during a suspension such as Pax Americana, of the normal course of history, the resonances that will occur when the pitch falls a half step are not yet apparent.

In the 19th century it was common for the intellectual set to turn towards a pagan fancy, a sort of resurrection of worship or patronage of the old deities. In Ovid, he records that Echo became echo because her body shriveled up and she went from being a ‘god’ to just an abstract idea. But in technology, ‘wisdom’, ‘war’ and ‘lightning’ have become incarnate as material forces, often given service more dedicated than was ever given the deities of old.

However, like the deities of old, as flawless as the idea is, the reality is not so; and as Chesterton relates, since the deities do not seem to deliver the goods, a ‘terror turn’ must happen wherein the demons are consulted. This is the meaning behind Lovecraft’s nightmares about Nyarlathotep, the demonic messenger who appeared as a sophist. There is some question as to whether he was or was not inspired by Nikolai Tesla, who definitely is Nyarlathotepian in The Prestige.

Regardless, the final stage ‘when thunder sleeps’ is indeed, somewhat like Yeats’ imagined near the same time (The Second Coming). This illusion is to the vulnerability of power grids. The rest of the images allude to The Wasteland – V, Unreal City as well as to the accusation against technocracy of seeing the map instead of the territory. The map is an upside-down city, full of spent cisterns.

These notes far exceed the length of the poem. If you can count at least 1000 words, then we have painted without color. These notes do not exhaust possibilities of interpretation, they are merely a set of
guideposts.