A Cloudy Panorama

This starts with the word random - really random things start this and we are off into the far-off kingdoms, the lands and times that times and lands forgot, Jurassic plains, flowerless plants to the horizon, and broken time lines from before life existed, showing us glimpses of how we came to be like light through a fence around a construction site we speed by on the motorway. This is the time of Americanisms used for the sake of it, to sound cool, for no outlay, just to be with girls we like back in the days when girls we liked liked us back - sometimes.

Now it's all trying to keep the anxieties back, Canute-like on the edge of the ocean of worry, pouring in from the exotic, the distant, colourful, hot lands we imagine must exist but for which we have no proof because we have never been there. Maybe some of us have, recalling dreamlike walks through screaming heat, the sweat trailing down to earth inside our clothes, making us seem simultaneously dirty and cool, dirty, pretty and young in the worlds we inhabited then. And they might as well be different universes, for there is no method of crossing to them these days. We are stuck here in the present, without the technology or the imagination to return to those days. The memories are just a cloudy panorama, a vista seen through the self-cleaning glass on stainless concrete buildings, places of no soul, of no raised voices and no oceans.

This is our lot, the sea of worry, the desire for routine in our obsessive corridors of chaos. We will have no closure of the stacks, popped and pushed outside the rules until there is no track of anything. And here is the struggle to get past the wish to finish, the cliche of the ending without ending, the giving up of everything. And I'll go off and listen to some loud music, some rock and roll made by someone just trying to be as cool as me but succeeding. I volunteer as the accused, the call to arms, to be the tester of new methods of trail in the green shade of the trees around the courtroom complex. Out on the lawn, the classes lie in rapture to their teachers, eyes not rolling but fixed and pointed at the beautiful faces of these clever men and women. And here in the depths of this prose I decide on the best way to say things, the subtle ways to make prose become poetry and in the collapse of the wave equations, everything that is not verse becomes just words with no hooks, a river of meaning and no-meaning without form and void.

Speak forever in verse, stream poetry into the air, out into the universe for ever. Post this and it travels to servers in far continents - maybe up to the geo-synchronous satellites and back down to sunny streets in California. But in this hop and hoopla, it leaks from the paths, the straight lines up and down, fizzing off and out of this locality - all the protons subject to Special and General Theories age not in their journey, time shrunk to nothing so that they retain meaning from big-bang to heat-death, throughout the steady state and the breathless tales of human history, tales that are no more than dots in the scale of all time.

All these stories of passion, the mundanity of obsession, streams of numbers, train serials, aircraft serials, bus serials, details of the strangest collections, the poems and letters of love and lust, the proclamations of desire, the descent into the darker avenues of half the Internet, all streaking away out in a 3d wave front that takes this information to anyone who might be looking for it. And this is no sentence but maybe it is poetry, and in this poetry lies hidden other meanings, random patterns so that in a pornographic picture beamed from soulless warehouses in yellowing concrete estates we find a profession of love, a random rearrangement of the empty wilderness of one life into the depth of being at one with another. We love everybody, dream of everything beautiful and everyone happy, a stream of smiling faces brought happy into this world and leaving it contented with what happens in between.

But in all this we know that time goes not one way but two, a continuous traffic in both directions, and though we know this we cannot sense it, like we know how to calculate in more than three dimensions, we cannot see any more than three. And so we end limited in a limitless world.