George Bernard Shaw said 'All professions are conspiracies against the laity.' In my darker moods, I sometimes think that the entire legal and economic system is a civilised fraud imposed upon people. It makes civilisation seem real - even though held together by rules, procedures and mechanisms that exist entirely in people's minds. In its favour, it displaces the madness of nature with the happy fiction of decency and self-respect. On an existential level, it clothes the rude purposelessness that bleakly surrounds us all.
By contrast, Auden wrote that "In so far as poetry, or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate." While most people associate poetry with fancy and fantasy, throughout English literature there has been a vital strand that disenchants: from Chaucer's Wife of Bath through Skelton, Swift, Pope, Byron, Auden and now poets like Geoffrey Hill (e.g. 'To the High Court of Parliament November 1994'). Don Paterson would be another good choice, with his richly sardonic meditations on the transacting darkness (note the economic pun).
In certain directions, my understanding of poetry and law pull me in exactly opposite ways. And I rather like this sensation - this vertigo-like sense of freefall. On the one hand, I'm utterly compelled by the need to maintain what people have, to prevent all human societies going to pot; on the other, when you look at our relationship to nature, you realise a lot of our human arrangements are all nonsense.
The final line of Paterson's most recent volume 'Rain' have little or no rational justification, and yet they sum up this position well:
"and none of this, none of this matters."
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