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Note on Cedar Key

The mathematician Ian Stewart was explaining two different sorts of maths on Jeremy Paxman’s Start The Week radio broadcast (6/3/00). One sort of order is the ‘regular’ one which has served well from Euclid to Einstein. Here any change of input (i.e. value of a variable) in a system produces an expectedly commensurate change in the output (overall evaluation or result) of the system. Speed = miles per hour, also written ‘velocity = distance divided by time’, or symbolically, v = d / t. Feed in d=100 (miles) and t=25 (hours), then v = 4, i.e. speed equals 100/25 = 4 mph. Feed in any numbers for d and t and you’ll get a boringly predictable answer. A small change usually gives a small result, or at least one ‘expectedly commensurate’.

But there is a class of systems (found in electric circuits, dripping taps, gears, epidemics, heart rhythms etc) which are sensitive to initial conditions, and in which not all the relevant variables can be included in mathematical expressions of their behaviour. These systems are rather misleading called ‘chaotic’. Changes of input can lead to unexpectedly incommensurate outputs, the ‘butterfly producing a hurricane’ effect. The graphs of these systems can look like a tangled ball of string, but over a long enough period of time certain regularities appear. There is, in fact, a weird sort of ‘order’ in what is popularly called ‘chaos’.

One of the participants in the Paxman talk, trying to grasp what this meant, said something like, ‘So it’s as if there are two sides of the coin in nature, with one sort of order on one side and a different but related sort on the other.’ Stewart replied somewhat as follows: ‘Well, yes, except that there is no coin and no two sides.’ This layman, lying in the dark and listening to all this, felt that something paradoxical and Zen-like was implied. And I use this picture of ‘two sorts of order’ to illustrate my own much vaguer belief that life and death ‘are two sides of the same coin’.

This thing life, over which most poets are quite rightly much exercised, is only one sort of order. The patterns of life, about which we feel a lot and know a little, are worth bothering about because they are explicable only in the context of death, about which we are fearful and know nothing. Death is the non-existence of things that have existed, not the non-existence of abstract impossibilities. We see things die all the time. Living things die, but so do species, religions, civilisations, stars and even protons.

In the case of inorganic things we use ‘death’ as a metaphor. Real death we share with dogs and amoebas, and the bit about it that we as conscious beings think about most is the lack of the physical wherewithal to be conscious of self. For all we know, our planet, in all the universes, might be the only place where consciousness, and our sort of death, are found. If we assumed this the case, would it make us value life as unique, or write it off as an accident?

A ‘poet of life’ need not also be a ‘poet of death’ but it should not be surprising if death is a recurrent theme in one’s work. Anybody who thinks the subject unhealthy is blind to or at least wrong-headed about the significance of life.

So let’s see what I’ve made of death in this poem, which is so clearly centred on the subject, yet was written at a time when I don’t think I would have expressed my beliefs as I have done above. I wrote the poem after a stay with my friend Jim Donalson in Florida in 1974. His friend Paul Fagundo, who was born in Cuba, had supplied me with much of the background which I used in Black Queen, not included here. Jim drove me from St Augustine Beach on the north-east coast of Florida across the neck of the isthmus to Cedar Key on the Gulf of Mexico.

Section 1 (‘It rains…’) describes the beginning of the journey, the St Augustine Beach side, its children and creamy surf and the topless, pregnant, bar-top dancer: all pretty much full of life, except maybe when you reread this after reaching the end.

Section 2 (‘The roads…’) describes the journey, all but devoid of traffic, and its signs of life: swamp cypresses, alligators and armadillos—we only saw these as squashed bumps on the highway. It’s the nigh-empty feeling that’s important.

In 3 (‘Broken insect…’) we are in the town of Cedar Key, a paint-peeled, white-hot, vacant place. Everything looks dead, the factory, the museum, the mud-grey water, the off-shore islands (‘key’ is Spanish cayo ‘shoal, reef’).

Section 4 (‘There are…’) brings out the difference between this and the other side of Florida’s north. The postcards on sale here are ‘hand-drawn ... unexciting ... dead ... pictures’.

Section 5 (‘It is…’) is unequivocal. This is ‘a place of death’ and for me, symbolically, the place of death. That’s not really true of course; by its very nature death cannot be ‘known’ from the inside. This is its antechamber. When you’re put in this sort of waiting room, ‘your children will not visit often’. This is not, however, to suggest an old-people’s home or hospice. The place is an intimation of death to someone in his prime, with a very good tan. I as observer am very sanguine (‘but you may nonetheless be content’). When we reach the end, the idea of ending won’t be upsetting.

Section 6, the 3-line coda,

Goodbye, Cedar Key,

I know you are waiting

at the end of the earned world,

has to be seen (or so I think now) in the light of the poem as a whole, which seems pretty restful, dazzled, dispassionate, its images bright and sedate. Even the empty salt cauldron, one of the marks of desolation, is as substantially there, as ultra-real and corporeal, as the children in the surf at the beginning. There’s no dwelling on putrefaction, no horror. The meaning or gist is in the whole feeling, and this gathers around one word at the end, ‘earned’: ‘the earned world’.

I hope it’s agreed that ‘intention’ is not a useful guide, and indeed I don’t think I could adequately express what I did intend to say here. In poetry, statement is only part of saying. An earning is a reward for doing something. The payment might be good or bad, deserved or not. ‘Home art gone and ta’en thy wages.’¹ I might have meant ‘it’s a comfort that death awaits us, when we have served our time.’ There is nothing fearsome about this end-station. Decrepitude seems not too awful, and things outworn had once a use. After a quiescent journey along a sunny road ‘as straight as honour’, there is nothing to lament.

I’d be lucky to find myself eventually so calm and accepting. Many exits are painful. Of that the poem says nothing. It has looked at life without reference to pain, giving only one snapshot of the two-sided coin. It’s a peaceful vision from which complexity and fierceness have been disbarred. It’s soothing.

Alan Marshfield

¹ Shakespeare, Cymbeline, 4.2.258: ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’. The worthiest ditty of them all. (back)

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