Page 67 - The Irony Board

Into the World

Marx’s bull

To earth fixed,
The first thought
Must explain

How the plow
Through the hand
Tills the brain.

This, perhaps Gluckman’s most perfectly-realized poem, concisely
melds two theories of determinism with a very down-to-earth image.
The bull is pulling a plow, a means of production; here is Marx the
prophet of economic determinism. His first, or basic, thought is
fixed to the physical circumstances of man’s existence. How we
relate to our livelihood, he claimed, will become translated mentally
into our conceptions of truth, justice, and beauty. Since labor is
divided by a class structure, different classes will have different
ideas. This reversal of causality (against the evident case of the brain
tilling the earth through the hand and plow) is typical of Marx’s
“turning Hegel on his head,” of rejecting idealism. Of course,
psychological and economic reality cannot be so rigidly described:
“bull” is also an impolite expression of disagreement.
The second determinism is astrological. Taurus, the zodiacal sign
under which Marx was born, is typified by certain bull-headed traits.
Among those characteristics is a proclivity to create deterministic
systems of thought; Freud and Russell are other examples of this
natal solar position in the zodiac. Each of the twelve thirty-degree
geocentric segments of the ecliptic plane exhibits a unique
combination of membership in the quadruplicity of energy (cardinal,
fixed, and mutable) and the triplicity of elements (fire, earth, air, and
water). Taurus is the fixed earth sign; thus the second meaning
hinges on an astrological reading of the first line; of the twelve
creatures in the “wheel of animals,” it is the bull whose mind would
devise a theory of motivation flowing from the ground up. “To
earth fixed” shifts from a harnessed animal literally fixed to the

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