Who deals regression, leaves you with regret,
And turns your favourite fashion out-of-vogue.
He slurs a broad, unedifying brogue.
Say ‘time’s a-flying’? But it is discrete!
It’s wings are flightworthy, unlike my feet.
Or is its passage down to my perspective?
I like to think I’m looking from a train:
When peering forward, trees (this is subjective)
Appear to pass more slowly, to my brain,
Than when I spin around to watch them wane
Horizonwards. And so it is with days,
Which run more quickly when one resurveys.
The metaphors I have for time are spatial
And this conformity is not a fluke.
The house of time is structured and palatial
And passing through its walls, my mind’s a spook –
A gobbly ghoul, a speaker of degook.
The time’s a-changing? Unsurprisingly!
I wasted time and now doth time waste me.
The comedy of time is what sustains it.
The audience responses all agree
That time’s a joker. Tragedy arraigns it
But teaches folks to live inventively
And dig the whirligig’s tomfoolery.
So ‘tempus fugit’? Oh, well let it go.
I would it were not, but it must be so.
3. Self
‘To seek what is ‘logically required’ for sameness of person under unprecedented circumstances is to suggest that words have some logical force beyond what our past needs have invested them with.’
W.V. Quine, reviewing Identity and Individuation (ed. Milton K. Munitz) in The Journal of Philosophy, 1972
Imagine I am spinning in a bottle,
Whipped and whirled until my parts divide.
Leave me there! Do not release the throttle
Until my particles have disallied.
You will agree, I think, that I have died?
But now imagine, friend, that you recorded
An image of the man you smorgasborded.
From that recording, you could make me new!
From soup, you could reaggregate my frame.
If organised correctly, from the stew
Of molecules, I could return the same!
But would that creature choose to bear my name?
Would guilt for what was lost keep him awake
And would he feel forever like a fake?
In that transmission, would I be transmuted?
And would things change for anyone but ‘me’?
Could I survive the process, comminuted
To be reconstituted perfectly?
I would be flesh again, for all to see,
So that could be a kind of resurrection –
Or, really, would it simply be reflection?
I hear that particles are all entangled
By quantum ties, to others far away.
Imagine if my entity were mangled –
Hidden out there in the recherché
Backwaters of the sky, a speck might sway!
Could such a web, attuned to rhyme with me,
Ensure, unchanged, my precious hope ‘to be’?
Consider, now, ‘The Rooster’ by Miró:
Its undulant geometries attest
How form can govern meaning. All things flow
But I believe the orderly flow best.
What is a mind, when formless or at rest?
And is my brain more ‘of me’ than my bones?
Is architecture patterning, or stones?
4. Weight and Lightness
‘In practical life one will hardly find a person who, if he wants to travel to Berlin, gets off the train in Regensburg! In spiritual life, getting off the train in Regensburg is a rather usual thing.’
Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the Problem of Form’
Kandinsky was a centrifugal artist:
The slush of east and west, the circled world
Beyond which nothing, but the set-apart-est
Colours that are crumpled, cramped, and curled,
And fight to keep their secrets tightly furled –
A puzzling sea that girds the supernoval
Inventiveness of life into an oval.
Think of the balances in ‘Counter Weights’,
Painted round the time of ‘Transverse Line’:
A grumbling background hue recriminates
The coloured blocks that seem to shift and shine
As if to semaphore some secret sign.
They look like city blueprints from above
But, equally, might be a map of love.
With weight and lightness in proximity,
It’s difficult to disentangle sense
Weight is the daring future perfect tense
That purposes to augur and condense,
While lightness is the mode of butterflies –
A mood to live in, hone, and improvise.
I side with lightness. Lightness always wins.
The eye is drawn to lightness first and last.
Weight’s interruptive brunt vibrates and spins
But lightness can deflect its strongest blast.
Lightness is the sail that pulls the mast!
It is the force of jocular endeavour.
It is the only prize for being clever.
‘Anyone whose goal is something higher,’
Quips Kundera, ‘must suffer vertigo.’
But is it weight to which his thoughts aspire
Or lightness? Well, the first will group below
The latter, as the centrifuge can show –
And so this gadget clarifies my trouble:
Weight sinks, but lightness rises like a bubble.
5. The Unconscious
‘The centre that I cannot find
Is known to my Unconscious Mind;
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.’
W.H. Auden, ‘The Labyrinth’
Jack Yeats I’d call a centripetalist.
Much like his brother, William, he was striving
To find the reason patternings exist
And reinvigorate them. What I’m driving
At with all this pictographic jiving
Can reckon Horace as an endorsee:
As painting is, so poetry can be.
The aquifer from which each draws its water
Is hidden in the shadows of the head.
It is the womb where Zeus conceived his daughter
Who parleyed with Apollo when the red
Rivers ran at Troy, where Paris fled.
It is a land of dream-catchers and kvetches,
It is a hunter’s cave adorned with sketches.
Freud called it ‘the unconscious’, which I guess is
As accurate a name for it as any –
This ignis fatuus that luminesces
To lure a thinker where the footing’s fenny.
It is imagination’s spinning jenny:
Its workers yearn for room, to roar and roam
Or rise like Aphrodite from the foam.
Thoughts come like actors on the conscious stage.
They chatter in the wings before a show –
‘To die before the interval!’ ‘I’d gauge
The punters well tonight.’ ‘Duck, do you know
The author? Why so heavy? What’s his woe?’
And so their season dredges, drags, and drudges
Until, as one, they wipe off make-up’s smudges
And cry, ‘Enough despair! Today we change
Our tragic buskin for the comic sock.
It’s time to flaunt our full, unfettered range
And let the audience see how we rock.
We’ve had our fill of threnody and shock
And now it’s time to scratch the record book –
&
nbsp; To farce it up, mistake and be mistook!’
6. Sleep
‘The righteous are those who can control their dreams.’
John Fuller, ‘Logical Exercises’
The house Picasso stayed in by the sea
Surveys Antibes, across from Juan-les-Pins.
Up there the painter sharpened his esprit
And slowly found ses images Africains
Mingling with his chèvres and sylvains.
There he found new symbols for his dreams
And drew them into life in doodled reams.
Dreams! What are they? What defines a dream?
Dreams are strict, contracted universes
Composed on synapses. Their laws can seem
Less comprehensible than witches’ curses,
More recondite than doubtful nonsense verses.
Dreams are our own and yet they are surprises:
They are the speckled shells of our surmises.
In daylight, dreams lurk on the edge of vision
Or saunter past, apparelled as a charmer.
It is their pride to jettison misprision
And lift the visor of our fancy’s armour.
Dreams are the cerebellum’s private drama!
A bluffer’s answer to the double bluff,
Dreams prove imagination is enough.
Sleep’s the feasthall where the dreamer sups,
Sleep blends the day’s bonne bouches with its slops.
Sleep is the rich replenisher of cups.
Sleep is a terminus where nothing stops,
A Broadway hit that thrives and never flops!
Sleep is the mind’s recalibrating sieve,
Sleep is the minx we’ve all been sleeping with.
Sleep makes this life a string of jamborees,
Each one engrossing, graced, and garlanded.
Sleep is the fortune teller’s tannic lees,
The happy hypnotist inside my head,
The one who backs or beckons me to bed.
It is the clown, stunt-double, and the stooge.
Sleep is the mind’s self-sorting centrifuge.
7. The Page
‘There is one knowledge which it is every man’s duty and interest to acquire, namely, self-knowledge.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection
Say I’m the subject, and the object’s me.
Better that than nature, men and women,
Astrophysics, truth, or gravity –
I need a subject large enough to swim in
And yet a cut of garment I’ll look slim in.
I need a space to try my hand at order:
I need, before a reader, a recorder.
You, Page, my boundless partner, word-bound lover,
My space to swim and dive and paddle free,
You hold my note, you close me in your cover,
You are my as-it-was and my shall-be!
I am your supplicant, your refugee
And you, my soft, mind-melting carrycot,
My constant, flourishing forget-me-not.
You are my strange estranger and my strength,
My storyteller and my as-it-seems,
You stretch me through the future without length,
You flutter reams of colour through my dreams,
You sweep my winter frost into your streams –
My one reliability, my trust,
My galvanizer, guarding me from rust.
You, endless sinecure, my sin-forgiven,
My last sincerity, my carry-on,
The ruptures that your rivulets have driven
Between my body’s sprung automaton
And thinking’s evanescent eidolon
Have broken what I was, but kept the pieces –
You ward the Me my presence predeceases.
So I’m the ‘centre’ I’ve been satelliting.
A force that pulls me one way is the ‘-fugal’
And ‘-petal’ is the other, self-alighting.
Between them, I shall keep my lapses frugal,
Sing the margins, sound the paper’s bugle!
I’m in the centrifuge of pen and ink –
It shows me what I am, and how I think.
8. Love
‘All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Love’
Between my on-off amorous endeavours,
The centrifuge has moved but stayed the same.
It has outlived my ardentest ‘Forever!’s
And still it plays a fascinating game.
It bridles time and turns my temper tame.
It hands me levers, reins, and steering wheels.
It tells me what love gives and what it steals.
Two butterflies whip over where I sit,
Then double back as if to check on me.
I say, ‘You funny flappers, go a bit
On further down the garden and you’ll see
A clematis I sowed when I was three –
How many periods of buttertime
Have passed between that planting and this rhyme?’
They flounce away with silent disbeliefs
That anyone could be so silly-minded.
They are the morning’s lightest of motifs,
Disturbing petals recently unwinded
With instincts playful, fearless, and unbinded.
They seem like animations of some huge
Offcentring system like the centrifuge.
The centrifuge, which shows me what I’m thinking,
Caresses me asleep, shakes me awake,
Propels me soaring when I feel like sinking,
And turns my feet to flippers in the lake
Of thought, to splash and tidalwave and slake
The thirst I have for what this world conceals,
For what the space of thought alone reveals.
The summer falls in long festoons of heat.
My heart, I have been careless, loose, with you,
But when your rhythms tumble out of beat,
The centrifuge can set their levels true –
Since this is turning’s purpose: to construe.
And so I pledge my tongue to song and dance.
I’ll welcome what will come and call it chance.
Observances
1. Water
When jetpacks overshoot their destination
And zip us through the meadows like a bee,
When trains arrive before we’ve built the station
And find us dishing tickets out for free,
When rivers are dispersed by irrigation
And we are emptied to capacity
But then replenished with a drenching drought,
What will we say this life is all about?
A river torrents on to feed the ocean.
It tears from tributary down to delta.
It roils from turmoil into new commotion.
About it, enterprising willows swelter.
Its swirling prompts a current of emotion,
A naturally-occurring stasis-melter.
The delta is the river at its close,
An end that forks and widens as it flows.
I sprawl here, on a mossy riverbank
And contemplate the calming play of light.
A cattle bell, not far off, starts to clank
As all the water’s pristine rills ignite
With quick reflections of the sun, which shrank
Just moments previously out of sight
And now rebursts. It is a nagging idyll.
The luck of life on Earth seems such a riddle.
Perhaps, a trillion lightyears distant, spiders
Weave orange webs above a frozen sea,
Curvaceous seedpods swerving by on gliders,
Their windborne mission the discovery
Of future groves. What governs the deciders,
Celestial equations they must be,
That pick what proteins nature won’t erase
And balance out the blisses of our days?
Tilting at windmills in my inner mind,
I had not planned on coming here to think
But heart and foot, by accident, combined
To lead me here, the river’s tumbling brink,
A sun-kissed verge where life is undefined.
I’ll sit here, while the eddies rise and sink,
Where water pacifies my racing thoughts
And sorts my senses, which were out of sorts.
2. Time
Opinions and possessions pass away
But nothing can reduce the memory
Of lounging, on a sunlit Saturday
In tussocked fields below a creaking tree.
The sparrows dive, and what is it they say?
‘Tomorrow-wards is our trajectory.
Time is an emanation of our movement.
On life-in-time, there can be no improvement.’
Time is an emanation of our lives.
Life emanates, in turn, from empty space.
From expectation, space itself derives.
Through all of this, our wishes interlace
Their silver filigree. This pattern thrives
And, stepping back, it stares us in the face.
Millennia are needed to describe
This tapestry we breathe and circumscribe.
When young, sat in the back seat of a car,
I used to quiz my weary parents, ‘Why?’,
In answer to some answer. We were far
Still from our destination, so they’d try
Explaining. Thus, I learned the sun’s a star
And that a magnet could be travelled by.
Their answers always led to other questions,
An endless chain of curious suggestions
That drifted, as we drove, into a zone
One cannot zero in on, cannot know.