The Dragons of Paris

(Upon reading Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ 
Abuse of Science, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont)

By Christopher Bernard


Once upon a time, 
in the glamorous, notorious City of Lights
that lies across the sinuous Seine
like a seductive odalisque
of reason and sensuality,
beauty, style, good taste, and sense,
there appeared a foul and toxic fog,
a smoke that belched and bound the town
in mental night.
The citizens wandered, stunned and blind
and crying out in random shouts
in words no one could understand:
“Le petit a! Jouissance! Différance!
Pastout! Afemme! Séméiotiké!”
that filled the air all over France
from caves deep down in old Lutéce
(“Mudville,” once called, now called again),
where the Dragons of Paris disbursed, in smog,
dank volumes of mephitic breath.

The Dragons’ names put terror in
the hearts of all good citizens:
Lacan le Gros, Foucault le Mal, 
grinning Baudrillard le Bouffon,
Kristeva la Sorciére,
Jacques Derrida l’Indécidable,
Gilles Deleuze, la Porte Sublime
du Dindon de la Charabia, 
and more, with a host of dragonettes
pursuing the work of their dark masters
cooking in their dens a glorious madness
of chopped dictionaries and tossed 
charlatanry, spiced with cynicism,
that sickened two generations
of impressionable, clueless, half-educated youth,
most of them – hélas! – American.
	
One day two knights rode from the west –
Sir Alan and Sir Jean by name,
“Follow the Science!” writ on one shield,
“Physics to the Rescue!” upon the other –
and bravely stormed the fetid caves
whose floors and walls were lined with texts
with dragon sweat and guano thick,
unreadable, yet cruelly read
by generations of undergrads
and graduate students until they squealed,
“There is no truth, there is no Real,
no good not always already a weapon,
Big Other, subject, sexual relation
(sorry, mom, dad! I never really happened!),
no meaning not infinitely deferred,
no science, objectivity, facts
(“no facts but only interpretations,”
as unholiest St. Fritz of Nietzsche said);
‘Il n’y a rien hors de texte!’; no world,
nothing whatsoever beyond the Word!”
(because, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t get
a degree (in English) so they could teach
in a nice, respectable university, 
and maybe someday get tenure – but then, my friends,
they wouldn’t even get that – poor dears! – in the end).

With a thousand bold strokes, Sir Jean and Sir Alan
pierced the hides of the Parisian dragons
(“Mathematical gaffes! Scientific misunderstanding!
Bad logic, worse grammar, bad French and worse English!
Logical dead ends! Arithmetical nonsense! Hang it, just meaningless gibberish!”)
and out of the holes in those green slippery skins
hot air hissed away in a gale o’er the Seine,
and the dragons – the two Jacques, the one Julie,
Jean, Gilles, Michel, and a crowd of others – 
shrieking death cries, flew about in a panic
as they shrank like a frantic mob of balloons,
gnashing and frothing and hopelessly flying
from darkness to darkness – one felt sorry for them,
almost – till they shriveled down to what they had been
all along: a few inches of thin rubber, with mouths
agape, and nothing whatever inside them but air.

Sir Alan and Sir Jean, armor dented and scarred,
swords flecked with balloons punctured, and smeared with ink,
exited the caverns out to the light
and the acclaim of a grateful city. “At last!”
rose the cry on all sides, “We can again see the sun!
We can breathe! We are freed from the impenetrable night
that threatened to destroy us – above all, our minds!”

The two knights, bloodied, exhausted, but victorious, 
took their modest bows. “You are really too kind!”
Then glanced at each other: it wouldn’t do now
to tell these people they were partly to blame
for nursing the dragons with their own folly:
spare the critic and spoil the intellectual.
Don’t get them in the crib, and give them a fight?
When (if!) they grow up, they’ll give you a bite!

At the banquet that followed, they had stories to tell:
close calls with the enemies of thought and light,
genuine creation, and piety for the human:
intellectual pretentiousness in a shotgun wedding
with despotic professional intimidation
fueled, on the one hand, by status anxiety
and, on the other, by narcissistic delight.

Unhappily, they had not gotten
all the dragons in the end:
one sly dragonette from the Balkans fled,
escaping to Slovenia,
his innocent home, where he remains,
cooking his oracles for the next set
of gullible college students, if there are any left!

_____


"Christopher Bernard’s most recent book of poems, The Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Boks of 2021.”