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concerning the nature of things |
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The items here have been written in intermittent bursts over a roughly fifty-year period in the belief that poetry and commentary belong together and that the two form an essence, a potential to influence, which changes over time as new rules to the game of reading and interpretation come into play. Central to the themes is the common human interest in the nature of things. These pieces are on the side of those who hold that, deep down, the world cannot, in principle, be understood. Science, religion and art concern themselves with appearance. Nature, the word here for all there is, the seen and the unseen, is entirely physical: there is no disembodied mind in control. The vision in these works is two-fold, unconsoling yet celebratory, nihilistic and affirmative at once, in love with energy and the dance of ideas, grim in the face of life’s accidents and cruelty. The insights come in many styles, from simple minimalism to intricate, evocative ornamentation. The whole is an oeuvre which is a plum pudding of high and low flavours, of ersatz and bona fide erudition. It mythologises a lot, and even apparently real-life characters, mainly marginalised detritus within ‘infernal fictions’, are on the brink of legendary. The Nature of Things comprises such obtrusive corporeality as suburban snow seen as a ‘white poultice sewn / with crow’s-foot stitch / onto the lawn’, and a car driver ‘watching the lights ahead nose down, and on / dim stalks grow out of the coiled pitch beneath / of road gouged round the Devil’s Bowl’. This occurs alongside the capricious surreality of the anti-bourgeois Dragonfly who ‘zooms in like an |
ancient biplane laden with bombs to accrete like stately vol-au-vents in the leprous drawing rooms, in the concentrations of death’, and alongside the sexy pulp poetry of Wych Hazel, who arrives to copulate some sense into Planet Terror where, after biological Armageddon, ‘the nubile daughters lie groaning on their backs as their milky skins give vent to the soft plosives of Rocky Mountain Fever’. The poetry is ablaze with quack but revealing arcana, reflections of a mind that first came to life amid piles of comics in dusty bookshops and continued to see the world filtered through smudged maps and contradictory literature. The notes are a necessary adjunct to the poetry. The author says, ‘I was voicing an idea which I’d read somewhere, that perhaps the only end which the laws of the universe implied was extinction. The arrow of entropy … was towards increasing disorder; and life, far from providing local pools or order that momentarily ran counter to the ultimate journey into night, actually aided the disintegrative “purpose” by helping to use up energy faster. Complexity self-destructs.’ Endnotes are added to footnotes in this rich mix—one reading: ‘Schneider, Eric and Kay, James: Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in Mathematical and Computer Modelling Vol 19, No 6–8, pp. 25–48. And www.fes.uwaterloo.ca/u/jjkay/pubs/Life _as/text.html. The ideas are summed up by J.R.Minkel in The Meaning of Life, New Scientist 5th Oct 2002, p.30.’
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