Towards a Culture of Poetic Objectivity

Poets! Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Rouze up

We need a science that goes beyond an abstract objectivity of the mind to embrace, as well, an objectivity of the living organism. Poetic objectivity is that kind of objectivity. It refers to our shared condition of embodied beings – the conditio vitae. Poetic objectivityis possible because of empirical subjectivity. Being a body as an irreducible fact and experience – as opposed to “having a body,” which implies that our body is an “other”, separate from the self – subverts the old dogma of Descartes’ that we can only be sure about our mind (“Cogito ergo sum”, I think, therefore I am). It is possible to assert a subjective, first-person certainty about our body and experience to which even Descartes’ famous phrase can be traced back. This is exactly the switch from the Enlightenment to the Enlivenment. Being a body and having feelings and socially expressed, nonverbal interactions, are empirical facts. They are also dimensions of living that are shared with all other animate beings. Poetic objectivityis about this subjective core self: the existential meaning that any organic being produces from its center of concern that is its self.

The crucial point is that we all – and I mean all of us living beings, from the most modest bacterial cell in our guts to you, the reader – share the experience of a meaningful core self that is concerned with what happens to it and strives to keep itself alive. As living beings, we all have a genuine interest in continuing to live, and we know the joy and light-footed exuberance of just being. Poetic objectivityseeks to understand how expressiveness-in-our-body feels and can be communicated, and elaborated upon. ^{https://www.shareable.net/first-person-science-towards-a-culture-of-poetic-objectivity/}

Tom o' Bedlam's Song
Anonymous ballad, circa 1620

From the hag and hungry goblin
That into rags would rend ye,
And the spirit that stands
By the naked man
In the Book of Moons, defend ye, [a book of astrology]
That of your five sound senses
You never be forsaken,
Nor wander from
Your selves with Tom
Abroad to beg your bacon.

    While I do sing,
    Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing?
    Come, dame or maid,
    Be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

Of thirty bare years have I
Twice twenty been enragèd,
And of forty been
Three times fifteen
In durance soundly cagèd [durance = confinement]
On the lordly lofts of Bedlam
With stubble soft and dainty,
Brave bracelets strong, [bracelets = handcuffs]
Sweet whips, ding-dong,
With wholesome hunger plenty.

    And now I sing,
    Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing?
    Come, dame or maid,
    Be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

With a thought I took for Maudlin, [Maudlin = Mary Magdalene]
And a cruse of cockle pottage,
With a thing thus tall,
Sky bless you all,
I befell into this dotage.
I slept not since the Conquest, [England's defeat in 1066]
Ere then I never wakèd,
Till the roguish boy [Cupid]
Of love where I lay
Me found and stripped me nakèd,

    And now I sing,
    Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing?
    Come, dame or maid,
    Be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

When I short have shorn my sow's face
And swigged my horny barrel,
At an oaken inn
I impound my skin
In a suit of gilt apparel; ["gilt" may be a pun on "guilt"]
The moon's my constant mistress,
And the lowly owl my marrow; ["marrow" suggests "mate" and "semen"]
The flaming drake
And the night-crow make
Me music to my sorrow.

    While I do sing,
    Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing?
    Come, dame or maid,
    Be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

The palsy plagues my pulses
When I prig your pigs or pullen, [prig = steal, pullen = chicken]
Your culvers take [culvers = pigeons]
Or matchless make
Your Chanticleer or Sullen. [i.e., leave your rooster without a mate]
When I want provant, with Humphry [provant = food]
I sup, and when benighted,
I repose in Paul's [St. Paul's Cathedral in London]
With waking souls,
Yet never am affrighted.

    But  I do sing,
    Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing?
    Come, dame or maid,
    Be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

I know more than Apollo,
For oft when he lies sleeping
I see the stars
At bloody wars
In the wounded welkin weeping. [welkin = sky]
The moon embrace her shepherd, [the Moon loved Endymion]
And the Queen of Love her warrior, [Venus loved Mars]
While the first doth horn
The star of morn,
And the next, the heavenly Farrier. [Venus cuckolded Hephaestus, the smith god]

    While I do sing,
    Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing?
    Come, dame or maid,
    Be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

The Gypsies, Snap and Pedro,
Are none of Tom's comradoes,
The punk I scorn, [punk = prostitute]
And the cutpurse sworn, [cutpurse=pickpocket]
And the roaring boy's bravadoes.
The meek, the white, the gentle,
Me handle, touch and spare not;
But those that cross
Tom Rynosseross
Do what the Panther dare not.

    Although I sing,
    Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing?
    Come, dame or maid,
    Be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.

With an host of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear
And a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to Tourney;
Ten leagues beyond
The wide world's end:
Methinks it is no journey.

    Yet will I sing,
    Any food, any feeding,
    Feeding, drink or clothing?
    Come, dame or maid,
    Be not afraid,
    Poor Tom will injure nothing.
https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity