Geological Time

1

Current estimates on the Grand Canyon suggest that the Colorado River has been gouging its way through the Colorado bedrock for about 17 million years.

The position now is that with the uplifting of the plateau the river has been able to cut down through nearly 2 billion years’ worth of rock strata.

 

That means that sediment has been laid down there for more than 2 billion years; that the area was a fairly level, fairly stable sea or lake bed for that time.

It means that the sediment has been weathered from neighbouring rock formations, then washed down there, laid down there, built up over, over that amount of time.

It means that previous rock formations existed there, and were weathered down. Which means those previous rock formations were uplifted rocks before the weathering began.

 

It means the sediment was fossilized by tremendous weight , creating frictional heat bonding the sediment together, to form rock minerals and crystals. To create a rock landscape.

And it also means that this fairly level, stable area has also been uplifted to its current height above the plain.

 

2

The time scale is phenomenal – how can we begin to imagine that length of time? And the energies needed to uplift that weight of rock – greater than any earthquake or volcanic activity we have ever known.

 

It is estimated that 25 to 30 million years ago the ape -monkey-man split occurred. This was around the time the great African Rift Valley… rifted. Previously to this it was a fairly level sedimentary plain. The rock layers crumpled and pulled apart. The upper region of this rift can still be seen and active on the Somali/Red Sea coast.

 

It is estimated that plate tectonics, which accounts for all this rifting and lifting, has been going on for about 3 billion years. It has also been estimated the most active tectonic period was about 1.1 billion years ago; after which it has slowed down as the earth cooled, as the plates became thicker, heavier.

The Good Old Days

1

There was a time it was strenuously ignored, denied even, that women had such as desires, sexual appetites, a normalcy of sexuality.

People, the Freuds, the Ibsens etc, had been battering at that wall a good while, before the gates were at last opened, the cat let out of the bag, and the whole roundedness of human behaviour allowed.

In the 1960s it became a duty to free oneself; for a woman especially the duty was a pressing matter: if one did not partake then one was still inhibited, still in the trap. If one did not particularly like or have an interest in everything one was supposed to in the sexual field, then the cloud was there, the doubt cast, the reputation and the cat-calls and names ready to be applied.

It was thought best for a younger woman to be liberated early to be entirely ‘free’; the age crept back and back: Goodmorning, Little Schoolgirl! Otherwise breaking out of the ‘strait-jacket’ of adulthood would be only so much more difficult, painful, even. So ran the thinking. The thinking always had a poor relationship with actuality.

There was always the proselytising: I remember Student meetings where self-styled demagogues would hold the stage and lay into the audience for half an hour or more for their being apathetic, that is, not doing what he thought they should be doing to support this strike, that sit-in, somewhere else’s something. The Underground Press became full of this, the International Times was taken over by a Red Faction who thought they held the key to everything, and people stopped reading.

For women and girls it became de rigeur to be someone’s ‘chick’, or ‘little lady’. I remember squirming at the time myself, young as I was, at this kind of talk and acting. And then there was all the compartmentalising of behaviour, expectation, circumscribed range of interests. Thank heavens for Women’s Lib, it lifted the lid on the circular thinking and self-interest.

There are always predators, the groomers and the defilers. And of yes some of them had long hair, fancy clothes.

2

Look back at some of the publications, the names that keep cropping up: the sheer egotism needed to drive oneself on, through the gaolings, leading demos, instigating happenings and actions – standing up above the crowd, speaking out, making oneself noticed, heard, listened to, engaged with, taken seriously. The egotistical belief in one’s sheer invincibility, importance – and along with that the belief the world was yours, its fruits were yours for the picking. And for some that included the young girls.

These were a few. Most had more scruples, saw scruples as necessary: the morality of freedom, it is a strange oxymoron, but it is a very potent mix. If anyone made a difference it was the ones with scruples.

This period did not last long – long enough for untold damage to be done to girls, though. No wonder women were so angry – all the ‘new society’ did was in many ways perpetuate the same abuse of women and girls that had been going on so long

The period that followed the sixties summer was one of involvement with self: to free the self first; but the circular, recursive trap caught many. Drugs took a greater hold. Where before had been a youth movement now everyone splintered into cliques, cults. And the reactions set in. Ugliness.

You wonder in retrospect whether the thinking came first, the spirit of thought, if you like, that was experienced in the coffee bars, the all-night talk sessions – or was the thinking just used to justify selfishness and indulgence of ego-appetites. Freedom as the ultimate in self indulgence.

3

It is now hard to imagine the commitment of the young before this period. Take, for instance, the Easter Marches, from 1958 to 1963,  London to Aldermaston: 52 miles each way. Four days on the road. The March was also reversed, to end up in rallies in London, the seat of power.

The CND Rallies – it was very urgent, committed, and very moral. Scruples, again. There were the outside cliques, groupings, gangs: Teddy Boys with their knuckledusters, purple hearts and flick knives; bikers with their bike chains, knives; Beatniks with their reefers. But there was also a fragile idealism.

‘You are all being manipulated!’ – by The Man, no doubt. I remember parents and papers saying this. It was convenient: Security Services letting slip that CND leaders were closet Stalinists. Probably some were, and of course Moscow made it that it was their duty to recruit.

The vast majority of people, from all backgrounds, were caught up in the urgency only, they had a focus, and impact. Young people recognising themselves, that they were young together, full of hope for a different future, full of enthusiasm and life. Summers in St Ives, sleeping on the beach: English summers, sunshine slanting through window slats, in a modernist light, colours fresh and full. Because it may be your last. The Bomb, the Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain. The Cuban Missile Crisis. There could be only the Now. Made doubly, trebly more potent.

3

What was the difference between those times and the violence of Mods and Rockers that followed? And later the Skinheads and increase in violence levels of the 1970s? How did these periods devolve; what was the dynamic behind it, what was the nature of the entropic movement?

Ask that kind of question and you require an answer on a similar basis, using similar phrasings and concepts. But what if the question itself was wrongly constructed, wrongly directed, wrongly weighted – what if its propositions should not be propositions at all but more multi-based, multi-faceted constructions? I have long doubted the veracity of the approach that broke down a question to its simplest forms, as though it were possible to disentangle it and still see it as a whole.

We cannot talk or think about generations – and there are no branches on the trees of genealogies: there is only foliage, leaves overlapping that make a whole cover – there are too many intermediary stages to make compartmentalism useful. I loved the Monkees – and Velvet Underground; I loved frothy pop, as well as early electronic music.

And I hated Star Trek – because it proposed a future of just the same mental attitudes and gender roles and self-righteous Westerner-think. And just the same limited range of solutions: bang-bang, thump and kill.

CABBAGES AND KINGS: a chiasmus

 1

Alciabades

i

Pisander in Athens, in time of war

with armsful of presents (labelled ‘If’,

labelled ‘Trust Me’, ‘Guaranteed’),

 

says: “Alciabades …”,  (whoa, place him later – )

“…should be recalled, and the democratic

whatyoucallit, bodypolitic

thingy…” – (slight misdirection) – “… you know,

the constitution,  changed…”  (madness, surely)…

 

but they were counting off, like he was

on fingers – how they loved newfangleness -

now placed his, and they with him, this point, thus,

-  the sophist’s snake in the attic vase – this Then:

“…then they would have the king their ally.”

 

(Read: Paymaster, and read: Buy Me, Cheap;

read Desperate, Patched, and Thin.)

 

ii

Though Phrynichus, intrigued against intriguer,

said Alciabades cared little for cause

so long as he was recalled: democracy, oligarchy…

-  what we were free to do, what we were bound to do …

 

and how he feared the discovery of his inability,

and how that was what woke him constantly.

 

But no one listened nor wanted knowledge,

only peace, and so Phrynichus, the worn

and compromised rag that was their conscience,

readied himself for the assassin’s knife.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2

Cromwell

i

“That we may understand really

the bottom of our desires…” …

“…not just plausible and good things

but seasonable and honest…”…

“…what we were, where we are,

what we were bound to do, what we are free to do….”

he paused, for he understood, then,

desires can change.

And when offered the crown

“…three times he put it by, each time

a little more reluctantly…”

I noticed this.

“Time was we had not boggled at this word.”

he said. To kill a king is no newfangleness.

ii

The Divine Rights of Kings – and of assassins;

Pascal’s Provincial Letters, their quiet reading,

subversively plots out the reasoning -

like a knot garden, a quiet strength

in the midst of tumult, where God

is the repository of conscience, and conscience

the true measure of action.

When God is wrenched out of gesture

let conscience be questioned

I would like to think

by each cut, slash… despatch.

iii

Naseby Hill, and the King coming on

from before, Prince Rupert from the right -

auxiliaries challenged their phalanx

and it broke.

How many stumbled, caught, vulnerable, died

in that garden, the rabbit warren

they charged across? The underground chambers

palpitating with life.

 

 

OLD EMPIRE

The refurb on the Regal Ballroom was done with the wrong shade,

using youthful and dynamic hues. It should be faded glory.

The tale it is telling the world of supplements, glossy mags

is now of the primped and preened, when its real story

is one all recognise: decline, and old grandeur; the rags

of State and empire, that still adhere in a place like this:

the peeling  of frescoes, gilt  cornices; the loss of prestige, trade.

 

The Jubilee Line rattles the foundations; a dust ghost

with glinting buttons, bayonet, in auditorium, on stairs.

The ballroom built over previous habitations; it replaced

a minor palace, Girls’ Academy. From those stairs

we watched the building of our dream of State, and how we placed

ourselves within it; both pros and cons raised in one toast.

 

Doorway sleepers choose here for the warm draughts at night;

that they are here at all is still appalling: ‘The homeless,’

we now say, ‘are always with us.’; cite this as right.

How all now sleep in the glow from old warmth, alone;

the half-life of old empire continues to light us

long after it’s left us. ‘Dead is the right of might!’, we blithely recite.

Rabbi Neumann’s Hesitation

That morning the elder of the synagogue

turned, appalled from the night’s work

a line of swastikas in red

along the side wall.

 

Already the children were collecting for tuition.

Outside the window, as he phoned over

he heard laughter. Laughter?

And the bump, bump of a football.

 

Why does this day differ? At the door he observed them

at ease in the light: one a footballer,

one who asked him, “What are these marks, Rabbi?”

the other ones, happy in the sun.

 

And he hesitated. Remember the slavery in Egypt,

the history of torment…. But on the red brick

bright sun was bleaching the paint out. Next year,

- is it possible – a year of the innocent?

 

The English contingent

 

A new Pope. What’s more an Argentinian Pope, a Latin American Pope. A first in many ways; and the one no pundit ever expected.

He was revealed to the crowd that evening in St Peter’s Square. Great cheering anyway for The New Pope, any Pope – and then, when his identity was revealed and his chosen name much cheering from the Latin Americans: vuvuzelas, whoops and noise!

The ubiquitous camera crews and journalists were all there to record it. The English tv news went around the crowds recording responses: all were happy, in some cases ecstatic. And then they came to the English Roman Catholic contingent: Oh, we are all pleased. Though I don’t think many here have ever heard of him.

All around them uproar, happy faces, unmistakable vuvezelas from Latin Americans. And the typical English dash of cold water on it all: typical English small-mindedness; typical English schmucks. They just could not put aside for a moment their arrogance and assumed superiority, their coldness; they could not be as international as their religion: all had to be small and parochial.

It is as though the English consider themselves to be always on show, always setting an example: nothing undignified like happiness must ever be allowed expression. Over time that has been taken deep inside so that even one’s normal instincts are monitored, constrained. This coldness I mentioned is very much a part of this. What was once the ‘English reserve’ becomes over time stasis; it was only ever a temporal state, it was never meant to be a permanent facet of a nation’s personality.

The flip side of this, and there is always a flip side, is that in reaction one must Let Go, to use the parlance of the time: where one generation would value the capacity to ‘take one’s drink’ as a virtue, another sees the loss of control as equally expressive. Occasionally there is a medium way, but not often. It is not a generational thing either – oh, no, that’s far too simple – these trends are mixed in the same time-scales, similar temperaments. One person can as easily splurge on drink, drugs, sex etc and yet be tight-laced in other areas, for example be sexist, misogynistic, and discriminatory towards the disabled. Age does not reflect much differentiation, either. Older people subconsciously copy younger trends; and the younger react against, as if mirroring, what they perceive to be adult ways. Nothing new in that – nothing new in any of this.

And so we had a display like Diana’s funeral – that took a great many people by surprise, me included. I watched and watched amazed as English people wept openly on the street. A thing unknown a few years’ before. Was this another insular volte face? Or had the example of continental travel and other customs of open grief had their influence as well? Unfortunately it is now almost our daily diet to see other country’s grieving methods for their dead. Has there been a covert internationalism going on? Have the unbuttoned ways of ‘warmer’ climates offered alternatives that were felt to be needed?

Are people… enjoying themselves at last? Well, not really; it starts off that way, but… is it the chosen medium of enjoyment that ruins it all? Drink and drugs… anything in excess over time ruins it all. No, enjoyment has become more like a duty, now. Pity the guy who doesn’t want to join in; pity the girl who has something else to do. Because… One Must, or suffer on social media.

Bush, Blair and the ‘Special Relationship’

 

I heard a radio playing in Westminster

a blowy dappled day in March

 

‘Radio, radio, will you tell me the weather,

I must know if I am to marry tomorrow?’

 

-          I will tell you who plotted, who hid, who died;

I will not tell you the weather, it said.

-          I will tell you a tale to make your toes curl,

and another to make you despair, it said,

but not the weather.

 

‘Radio, radio, your music’s the music of my life;

your rock n roll, Motown, the life I know.’ I said

 

-    You’re the kind of man we like on our station:

dependable, a follower. Yes, you’ll get a mention

on the late night news amongst the dead.

But I will not tell you if you are to wed.

 

‘Radio, radio, I’ll turn on the telly, I will!’

I said, ‘I’ve wide screen, cable, satellite dish;

I’ve four directional speakers,

with woofers to make you spin on a finger!’ I said

 

‘I’ll not ask you again, now tell me the weather!’

 

And just as the weather was being read

three rendition flights flew overhead, I said,

‘If that’s the tone of the wedding, I’ll think again.’

-     You’ll go ahead. the radio said.

 

Poem reponse to narrowness

There are three of us together here

the window, myself and the garden

as if we are one, a looking moment.

The same light falls on each

though differently.

 

The garden readies itself for the Spring surge;

a bird-shaped smudge on the glass – blackbird

or hawk? prey or predator? -

throws the hue of old hydrangeas through

the whole spectrum, as that old owl

Newton named it.

 

I am blinded equally by colour

and clear air, in wintry sun -

it confuses and exhilarates

with its profusion; its commentary

adding textures that contextualise

everything.

Mallarme’s Mirror

 

To be disembodied is to be emboldened

to allow that face he could not own

a maliciousness, that, admit it,

only life loves.

 

Highlights on nose, forehead, chin;

the lights of a man cluster like bees,

the molecules and atoms of the fact of him,

a writhing of idea with facility….

To be an eye sees in whilst looking out,

the room, reversed, opens within his face:

table, window, a white deal chair with pipe,

irrevocable in their positioning,

nouns sounding darkly in space….

 

A purposefulness appalling in its purposes,

a gorgeousness for so cheap a display:

this mirror ornately framed for mere glassiness.

So little of him left in its laid-bare room;

he is gloss on glass, the room’s order reporting

every thought-lapse from its purpose as a room.

Is it the glass construes him

from ornamentation, reporting his trespass

to Lords of Lapses, who lift

bears muzzles to the mirror, to that hive

of clustering lights?

 

Provence night swallows the neighbouring olive of Tournon;

stars whirl within his own frame,

the Great Bear treading the gas-light’s glare to fix

itself in him, a starry distortion of him….

Then if that beast should set in, say Fiji, Tahiti –

the impossible Gauguin of him – what would remain?

 

A mirror. And a maliciousness

that shatters light. A yellow radiance breaking through,

clothed in clustering admonishments

of light, to re-create him in oils of light,

breaking his root in that room altogether until

yellow fades to white and he is cleansed

even of that, runs clear and pure through

unwritten literatures of light.

 

 

PARAMETERS BOOK FOR SALE

So, it goes like this:

for some mad, far-fetched reason I thought it would be a ‘good idea’ to collect all the PARAMETER stuff together, polish it up a bit, and Lulu it as a full book collection.

PARAMETERS was originally a book, a collection of magazine pieces, printed in book form in 2010. I just couldn’t crack the selling ‘thing’: how to sell it, other than nagging work colleagues (which I did, and they bought).

No, I needed a kind of shop-front approach. But first I needed to re-do it, and re-book it all again.

So, with recommendation I went for Lulu. And it was not as straight forward as I thought: there were still tags in pieces I thought I had ironed out, but didn’t show up in text form. To and fro – but now it’s here.

And so, from book to blog-bits to ebook – where next?

Ok, so it can be read as blogs – ah but, wouldn’t you rather have the whole lot together? Course you would! More browser-friendly for a start.

Rather like the goldy-look cover, too.

The ‘sell’ is:

‘From Argentina to USA, via medieval England, modern Europe, and contemporary Western Europe. Reviews and articles on the Arts and Literature. Idiosyncratic, but also always questioning and exploring.’

http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?type=eBooks&keyWords=PARAMETERS&sitesearch=lulu.com&q=&x=5&y=6