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Note on Chimes  

A simple piece with big ideas.  If it could speak it would say that Sealed Room was abetted by obscurantism.  My poems knife one another.  It’s a business that has to do with the selfish meme, that cultural element, such as an idea, which is passed on by imitation.  This poem is as clear as its tubular bells.  Except in what it means.

It’s metaphysical.  What it says is that we live in a world where disaster is present or impends.  If you think me pessimistic, revisit the 20^th century, even as late as 1999 in Timor, Rwanda, Kosovo.  Actually, the disasters in this poem are not those bred by the Divine Chemist in the culture-dishes of genocidal wars.  In the news not long before I wrote this were the El Niño effects (fires, tsunamis) in Malaysia and Indonesia.  Tubular bells are common in Eastern temples and homes, and symbolise harmony, I think.  We bought ours in the local Garden Centre.  In a night when the metal tubes were clinking overtime in a noisy wind, I thought of those volcanic fires and high seas that bring untimely death to thousands.  Many things, tubular bells included, remind me that I should, for my own peace and goodness, believe in something.  But in what?  In

                                what cannot possibly be / believed.

It’s a problem I’ve discussed with friends.  Don’t you wish, I ask, that you could still believe in the faith you were brought up in?  Since many, like me, might enjoy but can’t actually believe in fairy stories, we’d like the word ‘believe’ to suggest a contradictory admiration, and not have to put up with Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’.  I’ve heard one radical Dean argue that ‘believing in’ what the Niceno-Constantinopolitan¹ Creed attests is not the same as ‘believing that’ what it attests is true.  That doesn’t explain, to me, what ‘believing in’ actually means.  But I’m on his side and I’d say that it means ‘admire’.  One admires a fable, like ‘He rose again on the third day’, but not a Divine Chemist who’s out of his skull.  If the world is not intelligible in principle, what else but Nature’s ‘insanity’ is responsible?  All right, equating the incomprehensible with insanity is wrong, a category error, but you might get my drift anyway.

Alan Marshfield

¹ Usually called the Nicene Creed: ‘I believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost…’.  (back)

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