A Poetic Skylark and an Introspective Snake

Tuesday

Here are two paired animal fables by my father to stimulate your mind.  In the first, a Romantic poet, Shelley’s skylark, goes soaring into the ether to find a transcendent truth. (“Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert” is how Shelley announces him.)  In the second, a sagacious snake, following Socrates’s injunction to “know thyself,” indulges in a bit of Eastern mysticism and searches for truth within the nooks and crannies of himself.

In my father’s vision of things, idealists can go looking for a higher or a deeper truth all they want, but ultimately they will find themselves stumbling over common sense material reality. Up there is nothing more than a very cold stratosphere. In there we will simply find guts.

As one who is a seeker after such truths, I don’t agree with my father that the material is all that there is.  Nevertheless, there is something bracing about a good skeptic, who can bring us back to earth and pull us out of ourselves. Besides, for all his Swiftian or La Rochefoucauldian cynicism, I think my father is a secret romantic whose heart soars when he watches skylarks.  Plus, he’s got a great wit.

The two French phrases in “Transcendent Skylark,” by the way, mean “out of this world” (hors de ce monde) and “a bourgeois nest” (un nid bourgeois).  The satiric target of the poem, written decades ago, may be the Freud-influenced anti-capitalism-anti-technology-anti-science beatnik poets:

The Transcendent Skylark

By Scott Bates

A Skylark bored by what he saw
Of earth’s unalterable law
And painfully afflicted by
A scientific sea and sky
Resolved to abdicate the here
In favor of a higher sphere
Anywhere he often groaned
Just so it lies hors de ce monde

(I must remark in his defense
That early sex experience
His father’s death when he was three
A vitamin deficiency
A double yoke un nid bourgeois
Had helped to complicate his moi
And make his pure artistic mind
Intolerant of the other kind)

Ergo he soared and as he went
Intoned a dirge of discontent
Which changed in substance as he flew
And more horizon hove in view
Until at twenty thousand feet
It Overflow’d as Pure and Sweet
As any Ariel could wish
Who wrote a book on Percy Bysshe

But scarcely had he passed outside
The five-mile zone when rarefied
And scientific atmosphere
Put two tail-feathers out of gear
And cast a coat of ice upon
His secondary aileron
So that he ceased all upward flight
At minus forty Fahrenheit
Pulled in his wings began to doze
Sang three discouraged chords and froze

You’d think this fate might have deterred
Ambitions in another bird
To flee the earth and earthly things
By means of vocal chords and wings
But such is not the case for still
From every meadow moor and hill
Transcendent birds go upward wheeling
To bash their brains out on the ceiling

The Self-Searching Serpent

By Scott Bates

A serpent on the
Other hand
Condemned to spend
His days on land

But like our Skylark
Bored to tears
From having spent
So many years

Among our earthly
Vanities
Recalled the words
Of Socrates

And turning in
To flee the dust
Went down his own
Esophagus

With gun and camera

But after he
Began to take
Internally

Himself
and after
Touring glands
And other strange
Exotic lands

He lost control
Of the world about
And turned completely
Inside out!

So all the lovely
Things inside
Came out into the sun
And dried.

From Lupo’s Fables (Sewanee, TN: Jump-Off Mountain Press, 1983).