Saturday, March 30, 2002

Caliban Trashing Ariel

In the Nocturnal crews
of gaping Nightjars,
drugged and split,
there are black Saints
of learning confusion,
here for themselves
in permanent ice
or slow, glass liquid,
hungry for experience,
trashing the civilized ancient
with technology.

There is Victoria,
a refugee of Blues and Jazz
with coloured hair.
Victoria falls to Earth
unreasoned,
understanding all
until I break her arm
twisting her into fragments.
And the bone bleeds white
those naked arms;
white in the ice,
white in the city casualty
(The poor at the A & E).

And her arms match her hair
in the ambulance impaled
within the winter trees,
alert but dead.

Russian in fog
turns rebel
in the coloured gaze
to break my sentences,
stealing the armaments
away for transformation.

Falling with the Widow-Maker
at my back,
contempt returns
from Soviets.

As you can see, I found "Caliban Trashing Ariel" It is so long since I wrote it that I am not sure what a lot of it actually means. I'm not even sure who is Ariel and who is Caliban. Anyway, the effort of location and OCR is enough for this evening so more later.

Thursday, March 28, 2002

Four Dimensional Owl

I am reading Rudy Rucker's "The Fourth Dimension and how to get there " AGAIN. This must be the er.... fourth time so I should be able to see something this time. Mr Rucker says that he has had about 15 minutes of direct visibility of the fourth dimension in his lifetime (well he had had in 1984 when he wrote that). I have been trying to see the fourth dimension for some time and only very occasionally do I even begin to understand the real situation. Once or twice, while looking at a rotating Stereo version of the three dimensional projection of a Hypercube, I have managed to understand what exactly was happening to the 4d version without actually seeing the extra dimension. It must be possible to train your mind to handle this extra perpendicularity (nice word). Intellectually it is always possible; the maths works easily but we have the inbuilt view of a world of only 3 dimensions. I can imagine all three dimensions of many objects - inside as well as out so my mind has the spherical 3d retina that Mr Rucker describes as being required to see the fourth dimension. I like to think it is only then, a matter of training to be able to 'see' things in 4d space. Maybe I just don't have the rigour to be able to do it.

Our maths teacher at school got us to calculate distances between points in four dimensions and the calculations are simple pythagoras ( I think our physics teacher was surprised when we started writing programs to carry out the calculations). I suppose that this simple existence of maths relating to the fourth dimension means that it must exist even if we cannot see it. It's a bit like the bit I wrote about being able to imagine places outside the Universe which we are physically able to reach or touch with our senses, remember Bishop Berkeley's "Tree in the quad" :-

There was a young man who said: "God
Must find it extremely odd,
When he sees that this tree
Continues to be,
When there's no one about in the quad."

And the reply:

"Dear Sir, Your astonishment's odd,
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why this tree
Continues to be,
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God

This always reminds me of the world's lonliest tree which was hundreds of miles from any other tree somewhere in the North African desert. Its fate was to be run into by a man driving a truck. I cannot find a link other than a very tenuous one with just a hand drawn picture of the said incident. At least there was someone there to see and hear the tree fall. Now if it had been Bishop Berkeley who had run into it ....

The Bishop Berkeley page reminds me in turn of the conversations with StarGlider from "The Fountains of Paradise" because of its references to Thomas Aquinas and further to "Apologia pro vita sua" not because I have actually read any of them apart from "The Fountains of Paradise" but because of some circular memory of academic life that is encompassed by Aquinas, Newman and Berkeley. How to make yourself sound clever without actually knowing anything.

A final question. What is my blog when no-one is reading it? I know that this is most of the time and probably even all the time when I am not actually logged in. The information is there and there are two ways of looking at it; one is the physical electrical image of this data which is tiny and the other is the actual information which just hangs around in some intellectual mind space outside of the world of the senses. This is dangerously like what I think is probably Greek Philosophy so it is time to go for now.

Friday, March 22, 2002

Support for The Poetry Society.

The original URL for The Poetry Society was bought by a company for use in pointing people to their many pronged venture, including online gambling and debt consolidation. I thought I would mention this here to show some sort of solidarity for The Poetry Society and my feelings about the sort of people who do these things. Bomb me if you like but visit before you do.

When I used to visit our shop floor, I was taken by the rhythms of the machinery. One of the machines created sequenced bandoliers of electronic compenents for use by other assembly machines. The sequencer played complex staccato rhythms like the variable length bars of Indian Music ( from which Philip Glass got so much inspiration ). The strange beats of so much modern poetry has made me think of this again. There is a lot of poetry (especially on the net) that has no discernible metre and is therefore just a long string of prose with the lines broken at convenient points. The machines seemed to have a metre even when the rhythm changed every few components. Maybe "Concerto for Bandolier Sequencer" would be a good piece to write. Some people of course speak their prose as if it is poetry. Jonathan Miller is one and he is helped by having a memorable voice as well.

Thursday, March 21, 2002

Loki to Light

What are you most afraid of? I lie awake in fear sometimes but now, in the daytime, I cannot think of anything to be frightened of at all. I suppose I am quite lucky because there are many people who have something very real to be afraid of. Even in the depths of my misanthropy, I must admit to being upset by the situations that some people actually have to survive in. That is the only fear I could have; the closeness of so much fear among other people. I like to think of myself as quite outward looking but like most everybody I look to my own situation above all others. You pass an age when ignoring the problems of the world doesn't feel right and you have to start filtering out all the bad stuff to stop yourself from going mad. I think my job is a microcosm of society both local and world wide; just a tiny amount of effort and change on the part of everyone could make the whole planet so much better. Idealistic I suppose. Ho hum.

My colleague Martin says "Ho Hum" quite often. The problem is that he sounds like the horn of a Deltic. I had an idea for a poem called "Deltic Blues" but I lost inspiration. Only the title was worth it. Anyway, WGUC are about to play "The Chairman Dances" so its time to go.


Never get into a cab from a company called ATAXIS

or the new science of Semiopathy. There has been a wave of egg kings around here recently and one who likes to sit in a chair on the beach down by the coastguard station. Canute ( or do we have to call him Cnut now?) has reverse bad press. Being discerning readers I am sure you know that he wasn't trying to hold back the waves; he was demonstrating, very successfully, that he could NOT and that he wasn't totally infallible. Great idea. Just bad after-event PR. All this is, of course, a good thing.

My history teacher at school was a thickly accented Welshman who invariably started each lesson with the words "Just go down to my car and ... ". The minutes between one of us scuttling down to the car park to fetch some papers which had been left behind and their return, were occupied with a small description of his own personal history usually relating to some age old event in the school (which he seemed to have been at since Canute himself). I can only drag shadows of these stories from the fog of memory, but one almost certainly referred to the headmaster's small baby starting early on the Cricket pitch by catching a ball while still in its pram. Or maybe not. Anyway, it all made the Great reform act of 1832 a bit more bearable. We were lucky to go to our school. It was located in a small village and the arrival of the pupils in the morning quadrupled the population. Actually the arrival of the staff probably quadrupled the population. The Sixth form had their own house set apart from the main school. It was made of wattle and daub; honestly; there was a large framed piece of glass showing the construction of the walls just to the left of one of the fire doors in the main corridor. I don't think that they meant to have the glass; it was just that the handle of the fire door had caused the wall to disintegrate and rather than locate a "Wattler" (or whatever they are called) the woodwork teacher tidied up the rough edges and fitted the frame at a fraction of the cost of repairs.

Further list of strange things at school.

- Our German Physics teacher (He was a physics teacher who was German) who made tea in a sock and got us to weigh the fire extinguishers.
- One pupil who while wearing a large external brace on her teeth one Christmas, fitted the contraption with tinsel and Tree decorations.
- A biology teacher who delighted in dissecting any dead animal brought to him. He once found an 40 cm tapeworm in a rabbit and I never saw anyone so happy.

There are plenty of other things but this is a weblog after all.

Wednesday, March 20, 2002

No-one expects ...

I followed a van into work today. It had the word "Slimming" in large letters down one side and the company name - "Health Rack". Of course putting someone on the rack would make them slimmer, though I think the side-effects might be a bit overwhelming. I imagine Michael Palin in a red cape and wide-brimmed hat leaning over the poor victim menacingly (welll as menacingly as Michael Palin can) and claiming that they were fat and that they should admit it so they could all go home. There is a Solicitor in my town called Black Norman who I suspect is advocate to a few local pirates ( and we do have a few). I suppose that Black Norman can't help it because of course they are the names of the two main partners but "Health Rack"? No-one expects that.

What if there were two bands - one called just "Archimedes" and one called "Archimedes Aunt". Discuss the expected music of each (3 marks) with special reference to the imaginary band which John Peel announces before his show. I was convinced that Crispy Ambulance were one of these imaginary bands but as you can see from the link, they actually existed. Unless of course, someone has invented all the Internet references to them like the idea that all the Dinosaur fossils were placed in the ground as a test of faith in the age of the world being only 6000 years. On the same subject, what about the light from stars which are more than 6000 light years away. Was this placed on its journey at the time of creation again as a test of faith. The argument is that the Universe was created as a Mature universe. I would counter with Doctor Invinciblis again. Don't posit plurality where a single entity will suffice. The Universe is amazing as it is whether it has a creator or not and to introduce plainly counter-intuitive ideas ("Rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty"?) detracts from the extra-ordinaryness of all that detail. Anyway, all that recent stuff about string theory and 11 dimensions has introduced a great window for any creator. It appears that the Big Bang was NOT that start of all time and space which pushes back the question "What was before the Big Bang? - Old answer - nothing - no time - no space. The Big Bang still happened but all the time and space which we can see in our universe is the result of a collisions between two Membranes (or 'Branes in the parlance) which exist in higher dimensions to which we do not have access. The lumpiness of our Universe which gives rise to the clumps of matter which we see is the result of ripples in the 'Branes. This introduces the idea of who created the 'Branes? It apparently even gives rise to the possibility of creating a completely new and separate Universe in the Laboratory. I suppose, expanding the ideas of Rudy Rucker, it promotes the possibility of an extra-dimensional link between physical space - Souls and Telepathy even. Do we cross the boundaries of our Universe which we cannot cross physically, by being able to imagine (and define mathematically) the realms outside those boundaries? I suppose it is a case of God, not the Devil is in the Detail. Chaos Ex Machina!

Anyway my answer to the above more simple question is that "Archimedes" would be a sort of alternative Jazz from the seventies a bit like Steve Davis' favourite group " Magma " and "Archimedes Aunt" would be a late eighties - early nineties indie Rock band - Mark and Lard would play them but Peel might think them a little too light

Tuesday, March 19, 2002

La Rocque 'n' Roll and Dewi Sri

Get this and feel happy. Feel smug that something so old can make you feel just as good as OMD or Stereolab. I heard one of the tunes on a Radio program called "Music restored" and while the radio version was very good and even promoted a certain amount of foot tapping, it didn't have the manic abandon of the version by the Baltimore consort. Everywhere you go in the world, the best music is the local equivalent of rock. The fastest Balinese stuff is pure rock. Some of the interlocking parts are like the most complex special effect in Western techno. When I was there I listened to the Balinese/Western fusion on the radio and it was stunning. Jah Wobble did this with Molam Dub and although its not Balinese, the idea is the same.

I like to consider myself rational (as rational as you can be in Yossarian's Quantum universe) but in Bali I believed outright in the existence of the animist spirits. They are right for the world in which they live. Peter Pan said "No. You see children know such a lot now, they soon don't believe in fairies, and every time a child says, `I don't believe in fairies,' there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.". I like to think that I kep a lot of Balinese Spirits alive while I was there. It wasn't spooky or anything. Even with the big air of Western Tourism, it just seemed part of what was all about.

After Heisenberg

Still here? Still unchanged? What is your momentum and your location? If you can't be certain about that then how can you be certain about anything?

Philip Glass from WGUC, Uncertainty on the mind and poetry in the air. A sort of triple point don't you think. I am still trying to find "Caliban Trashing Ariel" for you. I even crawled into the garage last night to find it but there may be better results from the handwritten drafts. I have noticed the existence of other poems which I have not yet typed up. They are often fragments which I discarded because they did not fit a theme but now there does seem to be some link between all the bits.

I tried to write something last night but I wasn't in the right frame of mind and it all sounded un-convincing. I think however, that I should go back to using a notebook and pen rather than writing directly on the computer as even the crossings out can come back later. If you use the computer and backspace, then all the attempts are lost. Strangely, this does not apply to this stuff as I just seem to be able to keep writing without the need for much editing (other than the spelling mistakes). All of that is probably rather obvious. The poetry resulting from direct computer entry is polished but rather sterile I think.

Monday, March 18, 2002

Architecture and Morality

Apologies for the further OMD related title. It's all I can think of at the moment. Maybe it will change when I edit out the inevitable spelling mistakes. Everything should be pictures. How do animals think? Come to think of it, how do we think. I am sure that not all my thoughts contain words. Actually I am not sure that more than a few of my thoughts contain words. The problem is that every time I try to think of how I think, the whole system collapses back to some default state and you have to rebuild the whole train of ideas. Sometimes I will get to a point in a train of thought and wonder how I got there. If I think of something happening in the world and I cannot trace back to why I might have thought of it, it worries me that the final thought has arisen fully formed in my head without any cause and that it is premonition. I will then spend ages tracing back to the start of the sequence - the current transaction as it were - to make sure that there is a reason for the final earth shattering thing. I know that on the point of sleep, the brain can throw up random images - so disconnected from anything else that they can't be said to be bizarre or otherwise, they just "are".

I don't believe in premonition by the way. The world has 6 billion people in it and each has thousands of thoughts a day along with a number of dreams each consisting of many additional concepts and other quite concrete components. It would be bizarre if NONE of them actually happened to the person thinking them within a day of the actual thought. I begin to wonder if the supposedly learned people who think of these things (and you know who I am talking about don't you) actually spend any time carrying out a simple, rational analysis of what they are saying. (Hypnagogic dreams).

I used to have a theory about strangeness. If I was away from home for a short time (a week or two), when I returned there was an element of strangeness to everything and everyone (Have you ever decided that it is weird that your parents are your parents?) I surmised that it was down to some sort of Quantum effect along the lines of the people involved changing because they were not being observed by me; keeping an eye on someone keeps them the same whereas if they are left to their own devices, they change. Try reading the third Policeman which I have just thought has some of the elements of these ideas - The policemen are becoming one with their own bicycles. Anyway, some extreme versions of cosmology go further than saying that the reason that the universe is like it is, is because if it wasn't, life would not have arisen and be able to observe it. These extreme visions, seem to suggest that our actual observation of the Universe ( and this includes our observation of the Universe as it was just after it was created) defines the way the Universe is. If the universe is cyclic (Time IS only an illusion) then the Universe just exists. It has start and end points in time but time is just a dimension and although it is uni-directional for us, it is bi-directional for the Universe itself. Therefore we can see ALL of the Universe in time and space at from one point in time and space (within the limits of Relativity and Quantum theory of course. It is not too strange to think that by observing something we change it.

I suspect that one or two of my "Therefore" statements may not be as intellectually rigourous as they could be. The spirit is there.

Souvenir

I Listened to "Julia's song" on a very old tape coming into work this morning. There is something quite unreal about it and for me it has one of those deep brain links which brings back all sorts of clouded memories - funnily enough like another OMD song - Souvenir. That is absolutely mind blowing in terms of recalling Summers long since past.

I had a dream last night - a poem read by Mr. Ivor Cutler (You must never call him just Ivor). I was actually standing at the racks of CDs in a big record store when I heard this Poem read over the Tannoy by Mr Cutler himself :-

You know when you are standing on the beach
on some Scottish Island
and you are next to Mr Ivor Cutler.
Well, he asks you if you have any money
but you say you never have any.
That is the way of all life.
You never have enough of the things you need.

I suspect that this was the result of watching the first part of "Century of the Self" last night, the bottom line of which is that PR and advertising agents strive to make you buy more of what you want as well as or even instead of what you need - Advertisers have switched from getting you to buy their brands over any others to trying to make you buy lots of irrelevant rubbish; a bit like a lot of the internet really. Well do you actually really need most of what you read here? You certainly don't need this page at all. It is purely entertainment or tryng to be.

Friday, March 15, 2002

Descartes' daughter or the Electronic Prayer Wheel.

Namaste

I am not limited to mechanics to build artificial life. I can simulate anything on this machine, all possible worlds, all possible programs, all nine billion names of God and more. Try a neural net to recognise your handwriting from scans - it can be done on this PC. A Fractal form more complex than the entire universe - its here. This port is a window to everything there is. Isn't that frightening and exciting? Descartes supposedly built a clockwork child which so scared the sailors on a ship he was travelling on, that the Captain had it thrown overboard because he thought it was the cause of the bad weather they were experiencing. The child was called Francine after his own daughter who had died when she was five. I must state that it is not clear if this story is true or just a tale that gets trotted out whenever someone talks about Automata. I have access to power far beyond what Descartes could imagine and I don't use it. I should. We all should. I am setting myself a task. A neural net to do something - anything.

I have not done any trigonometry for years and all I did I have forgotten. Did you know that sin 0.5 x 360 = Pi approximately? I was trying to do what Archimedes did to estimate Pi using Hexagons and Dodecagons etc. However I got side tracked into using Trig instead of estimating and that is what I worked out. Boring for all of those of you who know it already. Anyway off to the Pythagoras way of doing it. Ho hum.


Thursday, March 14, 2002

Phoebe Caulfield and the Death of Reason

I have met Phoebe Caulfield several times. Holden is like Yossarian - disheartened by the insanity of modern life (The 'Phoney' Bits) but unable to do anything to change it. Phoebe has the same intelligence but is either too young to be worried by the madness or too clever to let it affect her. Is "The Catcher in the Rye" really an introduction to a book all about Phoebe? a sort of extension to the Glass family. Even when I was being forced to read TCITR, and not liking it one bit, the sections with Phoebe in stood out as more interesting. She is an adept in the making though what at I don't know.

Doctor Invincibilis

There is too much madness in the world - in the main we are all sane but for some reason the collective result of all this is an insane society. We all know it is wrong and are striving for simplicity (Do not Posit Plurality) but cannot go against the general complicated flow. When I was young I used to try and think about all the Universe in one go and then think about nothing - Everything and Nothing - a sort of mega binary state. This was long before I had heard of the big bang and the possible non-existence of time and space but at the time it was easy to imagine and exhilirating to think that I could understand what I thought was the ultimate in cosmology. Doing the same thing now gives me a headache; I have to break the ideas down into something smaller but even then these smaller components of everything and nothing are far more complicated than my childhood thoughts. Maybe, like Picasso we need to be like Children again to bring out the most wonderful ideas and designs for living.

The Rice Goddess

Split seritou seritou and more,
The rice Goddess, linked in four dimensions,
Visits every tiny house
To taste the offerings, these daily gifts
So freely spared, so placed as music is;
Once placed is gone
As proof of animism, dynamism joined,
A major world religion
Hidden in the homes and food.
It’s in the trees, the air, the rice field.
There we find the takers of the offerings,
The fragrant flowers, spiritless without their scent.
Special flowers, damp with sea and salt,
With trails to light the way
Along the paths of ancestors.

The wind has taken incense,
Lifted it across the island
To please the God of the Caldera,
The ruler of the cool dyspeptic earth,
And closed his smoking mouth.
His eye is high and seems to boil
The water in the air.
My arms steam in rays
That link me to the azimuth.
I’ve pressed a switch and all is white,
A stop or seven up the dial.
My rice, my flowers, my incense fail me
Within my reasoning.


The room is full of whirling crying spirits,
Drilling through the tiles to me.
They know my smell, my taste of milk and oil.
My colour, being no deception
To these networked gods
Has made me disappear against the sand,
Against the sky.
With my books, the milk,
The foreign office linen,
The diplomatic core.

Tuesday, March 12, 2002

The park analogy works.
Analogies of the world as it is.

Imagine a park - a park is not a natural thing; it looks natural but it has been nurtured, pulled into shape, constructed by human beings. But it looks good and seems to stick to some grand plan without having any of the workings exposed. That is how business should be. Everything should fall into place and work in the way it is supposed to. There are no cogs sticking up requiring oiling. Something else which looks like part of the park does the oiling for you. The thing that it oils then performs its own function which in after a few turns of the cycle will carry out something for the benefit of the original process. You just know it is right. There is no effort involved in using the park, maintaining the park or even just simply appreciating the park. The park just "is" and "is" is all it needs to be.

You haven't been to the parks near here have you? They look like parks. Well almost.

Reading Log without actually having read the book I am writing about.

I re-read "The Catcher In The Rye" recently (and then "The Bell Jar" straight after). The first time I read TCITR, I was at school and I go along with the reviewer who said that it was not a book to be forced to read. Anyway, I appreciated it a bit more this time. I am going to buy "Franny and Zooey" I can't say why: it just seems like a good idea. I don't think I am with all this "I can soooo identify with Holden Caulfield" but it was a good book and Holden had a great depth. The end was sad and happy.



Monday, March 11, 2002

How does Poetry Work?

For me it involves writing something really good (Caliban Trashing Ariel) and then losing it. I was hoping to find the typed text for CTA and OCR it but I can only find the hand written stuff with the crossings out etc. I would like at some time to write a neural net and train it to recognise my handwriting but thats for another day after the complete MandelBrot/Julia set display program and the the random midi to tunes stuff. Anyway - enough of bad polymathematics. Why the title? I found a book yesterday and that was what it was called. Simple really.




Friday, March 08, 2002

Thoughts for today with no structure or Grammar

Pre-Raphaelite ... Isabella ... Russian Icons ... Caliban is Gollum or is Gollum Caliban? ... Why are so many cats called Samwise Gamgee? ... My friend has registered www.samwise.co.uk but there is nothing there yet so don't bother clicking it ... Today was a good day ... It's been a quiet week in Lake Wavertree - an old Native American Name for 'small place near a large river' - Nothing to do with trees at all. Sylvia Plath ... Ted Hughes ( Naturally ) ... where to go now? ... What to do. Maybe "The shipping News" ?

What has one of these people got to do with ships' instruments? ( which by the way seem to very fashionable )?

All of this is the great, grey-green greasy hypothalamus or the crossing of the Corpus Cavernosum.

Thursday, March 07, 2002

Thoughts on the name of this Blog.

I once wrote a poem called Caliban trashing Ariel. If I can dig it out I will post it. I was going to give that as the name for the blog but the first poem I posted is "Proteus" so I made a hybrid name.

Reading Log - More Frida

Last night I read about Frida's accident, a slow motion bus and trolley crash. It reminded me of the artist who got the army to blow up a wooden garden shed and then suspended the thousands of fragments in a gallery with a light somewhere in the middle like something from "The Matrix" but with no time element. Frida was pierced by one of these fragments and so seriously injured that it was not thought that she would survive. She did a drawing of the scene and in some funny way, it is quite comforting.

The accident drawing amongst other paintings ( in pdf )

"Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View" - The exploding shed

Biography is the real medium. Nothing can come close to even the driest description of someone's life because it is ALL real - well as real as it is possible to be with history, after all, once a thing has happened, its actual details become more blurred, the edge of the light cone - the event horizon becomes less defined. Even a recorded event can be interpreted in many ways (remember the Guardian advert with the Skinhead and the Businessman!) and even if all facts and images and sounds are available to you, the attitude of the time in which something is analysed can colour its interpretation. A serious re-creation of historical events as drama will not capture a real feeling of the time it portrays because of the re-interpretation that occurs. Part of this is Political Correctness and part is just plain changes in attitude. Life for us was hard and now it is easier.


Tuesday, March 05, 2002

So many things in the world.

Today is like swimming through treacle, there is so much going on in the world, not that I'm going to make any value judgements about it all (Though some things are quite upsetting). How to perform triage on it all? I suppose I should just let most of it go as it has no relevance. Either that or go crazy.

So many things in the world.
Preparatoria - Remembering Frida Kahlo

Can school ever be this exciting? I am not sure that all aspects of the National Preparatory School would be welcome these days but the desire for education is quite attractive. It draws me towards reading more philosophy and where can I get a copy of Imaginary lives by Marcel Schwob? Is it the inspiration for Nat Tate? I get the feeling that so many novels are just imaginary lives; what someone wanted their life to be rather than what it actually is. If it is exciting enough then write a biography.

Frida Kahlo - contemporary thoughts

I remember things which never happened. I remember great libraries of art in some sunny 1960s summer, great glass buildings with rows of shelves all filled with art books. I can see myself under ten, sitting amongst many of these books, just looking at the pictures, never reading the boring analyses that went with them. I don't think our family was particularly interested in modern art but the feeling of a liking for contemporary things has never left me. Anything is art, but some today is just plain stupid or exploitative.


Monday, March 04, 2002

I am looking at Rogier Van de Weyden's picture of Mary Magdalen. She wears a dress like the one in "The Arnolfini Marriage". It flows across the picture and suggests its own heaviness, like a smooth blanket. From the picture you would think she has an easy life, one of reading, albeit from very pious books - No pictures for Mary you might say unless you count the illustrated letters at the start of each Chapter.

Like to see it?

Click Here

I don't think this does the colours justice but if you find it elsewhere it may be better.

October 2001

National Theatre of Wales

Metaphysics yields to art and I discover angels in the sea,
an eyeless threat to silence; a chemical refined by doubt.
Her name; Camille for all I know these years away,
a picture dropped in all these storms and voices.

I fall enchanted, unmechanical, to love her like a seabird;
a white Pacific Tern, a delicate and brilliant thing,
forever flying, given sustenance through air and sun,
brought exhausted to the edge of islands at the limits of this day.

And in the dark of puppetry, the sea makes accidents
of dresses, feeble clothes that spark at any touch.
The hidden hands bring light to us, and drums, a heart
to match my own, the easy Civil war of couples.

The sea defines the world for us, this white noise,
the tangled beds, the long imagined passion;
it magnifies, makes real the dreamt embrace of loss
of love, and paler skin, of illness and religion.

Friday, March 01, 2002

Jenny Ondioline and the soundtrack to everything.

Listening to Jenny Ondioline, you begin to wonder what is real. It repeats phrases so often until the phrases become meaningless apart from their sound. Try it with a word. I first noticed it when I was about eight when I tried to say the word "Chain" over and over again which is of course self-referential and rather apt for this medium being used to describe it.

Pieces by Philip Glass are already there. They repeat phrases for the sake of themselves and meld with the environment, fitting anything which they are set to accompany. I once saw this done with music by Michael Nyman. It was "fitted" to a short film sequence of a river bank with no narrative context at all. And it worked. It would work with anything. Try it.
All that follows is self-referential