the queer conceptuals, and the profile of
the queen in a circle, her finger bossing
up. I’m mad. But the telephone, ringing
with a sort of mannerist or neoclassic
preciosity in my radioactive head because
I’m funnily on the other side of the
world, has only news of the brilliant
dead. Generally these latter do lodge
themselves in smudge land, where its easy,
once you’ve practised, to cross across to
a charcoal nightmare of a cat lion or a
god - bull transforming a swan into a
multicoloured parsiphae of fire that evils
intself inside your nerve’s nerve: some
agony or so of Pollock. Now. These hunk
pieces go there, this red here, and this
bright blue over there there: at this
immediate veer, it will or should , as you
could would or might not, be observed into
one of the fractures that the vast,
useless shield expands itself into a new
world ... under stones, they shudder, and
the leopard snarls as you get arrrowed
into your heels, but of this there is not
much known except perhaps a contradiction,
deeply in discourse with itself.
A page from Through the Looking Glass - a book that so fascinated me as a 9 year old. Caroll himself was a mathematician and a logician. The book is based on a chess game. Alice is a pawn I didn't then know what chess was. This book started me on a "journey"into my huge obsession with Chess. A game I play competitively. I was second in the NZ Schools Champs in 1961.
Here the board is seen sweeping way to infinity in Carrol's impossible but magical world
Later I would write a poem when I did "Carolingian categorical logic"as a part of philosophy, as Caroll himself was logician also, and the weirdness of logic is right throughout his book,as is the metaphysical mystery of the "smile" remaining of the Cheshire cat when the cat's face is gone... still a puzzle to philosophers. Hence in this book, mathematics, logic, mystery, magic, art time, metaphysics, poetry, literature :
Human Hands
Illogic logic dreams
Its logic in logical logs.
The illogic logic logs
Know that babies are illogical.
Illogic logic wakes and screams.
The night is turning red and black,
And I wake into a fear:
But logic, and that queer space,
Rises, and horses are sleek,
And fleet, so that the gathering hooves.
And chocolate is beautiful
But illogical.
We struggle, each with their torment,
For it is April, and winter windeth quick.
What is that car that bus that truck,
And many travel, and many return.
Illogic logic rocks the cradle’s hand,
And kind is the agèd face
That the eagle descend
To devour the brains
That were so busy then.
This is a dark and will become
Not so in illogic logic time
That floweth so in wills so sweet.
Illogic logic knows the unseen waterfall,
The heaved, gnarled rocks, basaltic bubbles.
Illogic logic searches with bright light,
Gloves droop drop —
And human hands emerge.
“I declare it’s marked out just like a large chess-board “ Alice said at last.
"There ought to be some men moving
out somewhere—and so there are!"
She added in a tone of delight, and
her heart began to beat quick with excitement
she went on. “It’s a great huge
game of chess that’s being played—all
over the world—if this is the world at
all, you know. Oh, what fun it is
How I with I was one of them I
wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I
might join—though of course I should
like to be a Queen, best.”
She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen...
Not a microwave tower (on which I have worked) , but a "construction". What is it? It is that question that makes such engineering things"beautiful to me. The functional beauty, the shape and stucture, and the"mystery" of the what and why of what they are. As with mathematical symbols and equations...
My mother was born in 1917, in Bedford, England, and spent her early years in Kettering, but she moved to school in Melbourne, Australia before coming here.. Both my parents are now dead and I now live in the house in where I grew up in the 50s, in Panmure, Auckland. I moved here when my wife left and we sold our large house in Cockle Bay. Around about that time I was considering becoming an Engineer. I was interested in Telecommunications and Electronics and had worked as a Lineman, but as I had an NZCE I would have been able to credit some of that towards a BE My interest was mainly microwave and other radio systems, and of course PCM and other multiplexing systems. PCM had been used by the NZPO since the 70s at least. It (or similar analogue to digital encoding) is basically the back-bone of any network. Long before the Internet (in fact even before the WWll these ideas were being shaped) the concepts and technologies (of what is now called “broad band” (not new thing at all)) were laid down for telegraph and other uses. And by the, 70s coaxial cables were being widely used, as well as (or in conjunction with) microwave networks (for Television and communications of all kinds.) Digital electronics and computing systems were being used. By about 1986 the first "cell phones" - then called "car phones" had arrived, and cordless phones were a fairly new phenomena also. For while I serviced these and also installed phones as part of a small business I had in Howick. Fibre optic cables were being jointed in N.Z. in the 80s.
But I am pretty certain not much would have come of it. O.k. I may have got some routine job somewhere testing batteries and or UPS systems, or costing projects, but I had been writing poems at the time and barely passed a strange paper (by correspondence) called Linear Algebra. I passed it but I had no idea what it was about! (I used various algorithms and “exam technique”, but it was a nightmare…) Not that such maths is essential to a BE but it is a heavily mathematical degree, and I think I knew I was out of my depth. I was perhaps as fascinated as much by the accoutrements of the trade, and by measuring equipment, and the devices as well as the fascinating symbols of mathematics and engineering. It is a vast field.
But why death? O.k. we are all getting old, but is that not a morbid subject? Yes and no. I agree it is not a happy topic. But there are some reasons - some are good, some not so.
I have been thinking about death more or less intensely all my life. (In fact I had nervous collapse in 1967, which was centred around an intense obsession with death and dying But this event wasn’t totally a negative one, and in fact has directly or indirectly fueled what I am, and perhaps also the “creative” side of me, as I like to think I have.) But as I get older the subject seems to predominate more. Sometimes I find everything reminds me of death. And the questions, not always anguished, are endless. What is this thing extinction? Do we somehow exist after death. Is there a God? Why do we become conscious beings, make, and then and do all these wonderful (or terrible) things and then die and ultimately vanish? Why should I be concerned about the world if I am going to soon - relatively soon - be nothing? Why should I not concern myself with myself? Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, in one of his great essays, claims he thinks of death all the time. His reasons are that in that way one is prepared for death. And in his time (and really in ours) death was a constant. Life was more or less "nasty, brutal, and short". We tend perhaps in our own time to be insulated from death.
Not a primary cause of such musings, but concerning me and bringing me back to such thoughts - my sister had to have an operation for a bowel cancer tumour just before Xmas. My other sister also had (the same) cancer a few years ago and survived it. I had a check for that a few years ago. I visited my older sister in Whangarei and took her Wystan Curnow's Cancer Daybook. In fact she appreciated that book which documents Wystan's "struggle" with cancer (he had a different term for the process or experience.)
I like Wystan Curnow's writing, and when I "managed" Ron Riddell's book shop in Balmoral, in 1996 to 1997 before it moved to K' Road, I organised a series of readings of notable and less well known writers. Wystan was one of the guest readers. He read well as he always does and he had some fascinating stuff, some or much of which hasn't appeared, I don't think, in print. Ron (and his then wife Kate) arranged for my second book of poetry to be published. Kate designed the cover for the book, which I called RED.
I am very thankful for that.
Here is poem from that book -