XIV
| Do I foresee the day? | |
| Calling his counsellors and medicos, | |
| do I foresee a day, when Unus Plurium | |
| World Ruler Absolute, and yet the august hulk | |
| is wearing out—do I foresee such time? |
| Calling his counsellors and medicos together, | |
| "That lad who won the race so valiantly," | |
| he tells them, and His Word is Law, | |
| "I'd like that bright lad's kidneys— | |
| and either honor him by changing his with mine | |
| or find some others for him, as opportunity offers." |
| No sooner said than done. | |
| Thus once again The State is rescued— | |
| and Unus over all, drags on till next time. | |
― 324 ― | |
| Do I foresee that day, while gazing across, as though that realm was alien | |
| Forfend forfending of my prayer | |
| that if and when and as such things should be | |
| those (from here) silent monsters (over there) | |
| will have by then gone crumbled into rubble, | |
| and nothing all abroad | |
| but ancient Egypt's pyramidal piles of empire-building hierarchal stylized | |
| dung remains. | |
| Oh, I have haggled nearly sixty years | |
| in all the seventies I've moved along. | |
| My country, as my aimless ending nears, | |
| oh, dear my country, may I be proved wrong! | |
Gloss XIV
The conceit on which this section is built is not offered as "prophecy." I include it on the grounds of what I would call its "entelechial" aspect. For instance, a satire would be "entelechial" insofar as it treated certain logical conclusions in terms of reduction to absurdity. Thus, when confronting problems of pollution due to unwanted residues of highly developed technology, one might logically advocate the development of methods (with corresponding attitudes) designed to reverse this process. But a satire could treat of the same situation "entelechially," by proposing a burlesqued rationale that carried such potentialities to the end of the line, rather than proposing to correct it. In the name of "progress" one might sloganize: "Let us not turn back the clock. Rather, let us find ways to accelerate the technological polluting of the natural conditions we inherited from the days of our primitive, ignorant past. Let us instead move forward towards a new way of life" (as with a realm of interplanetary travel that transcended man's earth-bound origins).
But also, at several places in my Philosophy of Literary Form, I discussed such "end of the line" thinking in other literary modes (James Joyce's later works, for example). I did not until much later decide that I had been groping towards an ironically non-Aristotelian application of the Aristotelian term "entelechy," used by him to designate a movement towards the formal fulfillment of potentialities peculiar to some particular species of being.
Thus the conceit informing this section would be "entelechial" (though grotesquely rather than satirically so) in that it imagines the "perfecting" of certain trends already "imperfectly" present among us, though first of all would be the need for further purely scientific progress in the technique of organ transplants, whereby the healthy parts of human specimens could be obtained either legally or illegally and stored in "body banks," to be used on demand. The most "perfectly" grotesque summarizing of such conditions would prevail if: (a) the world becomes "one world"; (b) as with the step from republic to empire in ancient Rome, rule becomes headed in a central authority whose word is law; (c) the "irreplaceable" ruler needs to replace some of his worn-out parts.
The purely "formal" or "entelechial" justification forth issummational conceit is that it would be the "perfecting" of these elements already indigenous to our times: dictatorship, organized police-protected crime, the technical resourcefulness already exemplified in the Nazi doctors' experiments on Jews, and in the purely pragmatic contributions of applied science to the unconstitutional invasion and ravishment of Indochina.