Thanks to Mike for this astounding photograph
Here it is
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After him
The gravity of loss brought me to earth
Beneath the rotting leaves, I lay with worms.
I wondered if I were of any worth
No more to be enchanted by love’s mirth,
I with unnamed particles was turned.
The weight of loss bears down the heart to earth.
The weight of love has readied us for birth
The fragments moulded with the love that burns.
I learned we need not wonder over worth
My sorrow brought no guilt nor fear of wrath
I am both sharp eyed eagle ,twisted worm.
In my little grave, I loved the earth.
Like the adder, shocked into rebirth.
I from silent underworld had learned
Not to judge my soul nor think of worth.
I shall not fear the flames of hell that burn.
When blackness is accepted, may one learn?
The weight of loss breaks down the soul to earth
With dusty shredded leaves, we then convers
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I suck upon this lump
I suck upon this lump, this errant growth
As if it were a sweet or tooth unbroke
It cannot be removed but will it die
Ot getting spiteful ,will it multiply?
I suck on it though never on my thumb
Being deprived by mouth will make me dumb
It’s cheaper than a cigarette or sweet
Next I’ll be a cannibal,my meat,
I suck it hoping I can make it die
And then the world will feel much less awry
I want back my own mouth as a clear space
Not this horrid monster of disgrace
Yet how divert my self from its own thoughts
Feeling toothless, humour can’t be bought
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Little hands
Ten thousand words, a million diagrams
Noone can know others nor themselves
Nor the errant ways, the wavering spans
Flee the fluttering of a diaphragm
Blind the eyes and ears to all this wealth
Ten million days, a thousand diamonds
Fifty million cells in a doll’s pram
Life is touch and go and needs our stealth
Not the errant ways, the wavering plans
No matter how I speak I can’t command
The instant of his death,his plangent depths
Ten thousand gasps, the weight about a gram
God below, with worms he understands
He needs no words, no pictures, nor new hells
The trains to Auschwitz, had no waving hands
By Dunwich Beach we hear submerged church bells
Golden angels fly from one, Cromwell
Ten mighty words show less than one diagram
See the watery childrens’ little hands
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Feel the woodland beauty as in prayer
The hurricane has turned into a breeze
The sun shines on a squirrel leaping high
The birds are hiding in the holly tree
Every human being will agree
We’d better live, if soon we knew we’d die
The hurricane has turned into a breeze
Soon will come the butterfly and bee
And every little insect that can fly
The birds are hiding in the holly tree
I like hills.my lover likes the sea…..
Different people different loves arise
The hurricane has shrunk into a breeze
Lilies hide, so deep, love’s mystery
Then its offspring decorate our days
The blackbird sings atop the holly tree
Feel the woodland beauty as in prayer
Trust the unknown darkness at its core
The scary wind has turned into a breeze
The doves are cooing from the maple tree
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Touching
I let my entire being take you in
Surround you like it were second skin
I made an astral cloak to give your peace
Where I could share the burden and release
How hard it is to find the words that say
How we live and die afresh each day
When we get a foothold on the hill
We must not hurry , pressed on by our will
Every instant,every time we breathe
Eternal life is here, we’re not deceived
God appears and disappears ,he flames
The Burning Bush, the prophet and their rage.
Enlightenment comes after we have crossed
The avenues of suffering and the cost
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I dreamed I rode a tricycle last night
I dreamed I rode a tricycle last night
Large and painted blue without a bell
Then I met my doctor,what a sight
He told me he had lately seen the light
And wished to be a monk inside a cell
I dreamed I rode a tricycle last night
Ted Hughes had gone out fishing for a pike
The army in my head was doing drill
Then I met my doctor,what a sight
I see the almond blossom, what delight
My sister thinks I’ve left her in my Will
I dreamed I rode a tricycle last night
Yet I am weary with my oversight
I am rarely mad enough to kill
Unless I met a doctor out on strike
Because of such a strike I lost my sight
The Eye emergency was left too late
They say that if I sue I’ll feel a chill
Surgeons with knives on my window sill
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Eternal love and hate
Everyone wants to be normal
But nobody knows what it is
It must be ouside of us
Or we’d feel what it was
So is it that we are all God?
Why do we want to be normal
Instead of being ourself?
We want acceptance
For sure and not by chance
Not to mention we all want more wealth
Maybe there is nobody normal
The median, the mean or the mode
We all need to deviate
From eternal love and hate
See here what the Greek Gods still owed
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Charles Hermite and transcendental numbers
The story of numbers is enough to make one believe in a Higher Power or even a transcendental Power?
A Concise History of Mathematics [Fourth Revised Edition] Paperback – 1 Nov 1987
This topic will take your mind off Brexit and help you regain a sense of awe and wonder.This cartoon has an equation on it.But some numbers are never found as the answer to such an equation.And that can be proved.And some of the proofs are quite easy.
http://mrburkemath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/x-why-mini-algebra-problems.html
http://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Hermite
Hermite might not have succeeded nowadays as passing exams was not easy for him.I suspect he was a person who preferred to spend his time on his own interests in Mathematics and to neglect his wider studies
I have referred in some of my Stan stories to the number “e”.Hermite was the first to prove that e is not an algebraic number.
http://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/transcendental-numbers.html
{ see the article].
It may surprise many people that there are different kinds of numbers ,beginning with the integers 1.2.3…… and the rational numbers [fractions like 1/2 4/5 89/54 etc.]
The Babylonians discovered the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter was fixed regardless of the size of the circle.We call it pi.It is not an integer nor a raional number.The number of integers is infinite.
“The ancient Babylonians calculated the area of a circle by taking 3 times the square of its radius, which gave a value of pi = 3. One Babylonian tablet (ca. 1900–1680 BC) indicates a value of 3.125 for pi, which is a closer approximation.” [from link below]
They used 3 as an approximation and in the Hebrew Bible 400 BCE the Temple was made using 3 as an approximation. Archimedes got closer.But. like e, pi cannot be expressed as a fraction.
Some other numbers like the square root of 2 are irrational [ that is,not fractions[ but they are algebraic.As in x squared =2
Relating to Solomon’s temple.They used pi =3.It is in the Hebrew Bible
Real numbers are all numbers from integers to the transcendental and they are uncountably infinite
Pi and e are called transcendental numbers.We don’t know many other
Yet
“The set of transcendental numbers is uncountably infinite. Since the polynomials with rational coefficients are countable, and since each such polynomial has a finite number ofzeroes, the algebraic numbers must also be countable. However, Cantor’s diagonal argument proves that the real numbers (and therefore also the complex numbers) are uncountable. Since the real numbers are the union of algebraic and transcendental numbers, they cannot both be countable. This makes the transcendental numbers uncountably infinfte
Quote from article below {Euler is usually credited with this]
:In 1706 a little-known mathematics teacher named William Jones first used a symbol to represent the platonic concept of pi, an ideal that in numerical terms can be approached, but never reached.
William Jones, mathematician from Wales, 1740
The history of the constant ratio of the circumference to the diameter of any circle is as old as man’s desire to measure; whereas the symbol for this ratio known today as π (pi) dates from the early 18th century. Before this the ratio had been awkwardly referred to in medieval Latin as: quantitas in quam cum multiflicetur diameter, proveniet circumferencia (the quantity which, when the diameter is multiplied by it, yields the circumference).
– See more at: http://www.historytoday.com/patricia-rothman/william-jones-and-his-circle-man-who-invented-pi#sthash.4bbJtftH.dpuf
http://www.historytoday.com/patricia-rothman/william-jones-and-his-circle-man-who-invented-pi
https://www.exploratorium.edu/pi/history_of_pi/
http://mrburkemath.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/x-why-mini-algebra-problems.html
This is meant to be humorous
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The King’s Head!
You’re looking well, the doctor said ironically as I stumbled into his office
Don’t mention it,I replied,It’all Greek to me
Are you drunk, he said solicitously
No and I am not a tart either,I lied truthfully
What a pity,I fancy an apple, he shared
Doctor, keep you voice down.The patients will think you are a pervert.
Well, one tart is as good as another to a dead man
Is that a trope or a simile?
What a pointed question.
But not disappointed?
Who was Adonis?
Mrs Thatcher’s husband with a Lancashire accent
No, it DIS I am thinking of
You seem to be imitating a racist film
Fancy that, without even knowing!
Well, you are a real doctor,I hope
No, but I am rational
I’m afraid you can be counted
But who could count an infinite set?
It’s in theory
That’s intellectuals for you.It can be done in Theory.But where is Theory?
Where intellectuals hang out using their imaginations.
Well, blow me down
Why can’t you jump?
I can only do it in theory
Well, better get on with the surgery.Which head are we cutting off today?
The King’s Head!
Well, it is his turn now….how will he take it?
Under his arm
Like a deodorant?
I can think of better alternatives
Not a pig’s head?
No, an apple in his mouth
See,apples again.Why not go to an Art Class and paint some?
Because my wife won’t eat them painted
How will she know?
Because I have no artist’s palate
Well, it’s never to late to grow your own
I have my own palate
How is that?
It’s like a bed before beds were invented
How come?
It is a bag of straw
But nowadays they don’t sell straw
In case it’s china?
How can one sleep on china?
Go to a Tea Service and ask the Vicar
Ooh, you are artful
You do look well today
Am I the doctor or not?
I don’t know Not
You know Nothing!
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What a load of old tropes
Extract
Metaphor is only one kind of trope. Trope is any rhetorical technique that describes something in non-literal ways.
For example, metonymy is a technique where one word is replaced with a phrase that is related but is literally different, such as “the law” for police.
Synecdoche is using a part to describe the whole: “Can you give me a hand?”.
Irony is the use of words with opposite meaning, such as saying “You’re looking well.” to someone who is clearly quite sick.
There are also some expressions that are not considered as fully fledged tropes but as sub-tropes.
Here are two websites to get started on tropes: http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S4B/sem07.html http://www.academia.edu/3793667/The_Fourth_Master_Trope
(The latter website may explain the information you have been given: “The late-twentieth-centurywidespread reduction to one master trope, metaphor, especially under the influence of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), is the most radical (and absurd) of these projects.”
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Quivering in the meadows of the heart
We saw the cows at Easter freed from barn
We were on a hill beside our lane
They were running in the meadow’s fresh green charm
Renting a small cottage on a farm
Dorset has its literary fame
We saw the beasts at Easter freed from barn
Beasts will share their feelings and their heart
Not for them the clever,wordy games
But dancing in the meadow’s alien charm
These images annihilate the harm
Suffered by the sick and by the lame
We saw the beasts at Easter freed from barn
The green of spring, the green thoughts, the great calm
Thus poverty brings us emptiness for gain
Running to shelter of your arms
Was it not a right to be insane
Freed from prison when the summer came?
We saw the cows at Easter freed from barn
They were quivering in the meadow while I yearned
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The unthought known
 |
There is a very strange concept now in psychoanalysis called
” the unthought known”, I think it refers to something in the patient which they experienced and so know but they had not then learned words ,so if it was too painful it constantly bothers them yet they can’t explain it or tell anyone.This is why psychoanalysis takes so long and even then I am unsure if a therapist can supply what the mother couldn’t Perhaps if we know that we will never understand some of our feelings and worries but can accept them even if we don’t want to. then we can live with them |
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The churchbells shuddered
When God came down , the rivers overflowed
Great trees were floating ,angled and exposed
The houses broke up like a loaf to crumbs
The hearts of humans trembled till they hummed
The winds deceived, the gusts unmeasured stung
The churchbells shuddered then untimely rang
The power was cut and all our screens were dark
Where were the rulers, where the saving Ark?
The women giving birth were paralysed
The babies in the womb took ill and died
Their cradles rocked the world, they swung so fast
And in a moment all of life had passed
In the void, God started his new world
Rich and strange, the grit and then the pearls
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When God came down
We may know what’s right and still do wrong
Greed and envy run our inner world
Like a crazed drunk bee we like to sting
Even as the blackbird is in song
The darkness of the heart will on it fall
We may know what’s right and still do wrong
We love to think we are the Queen or King
Perfect in our power , oh iron the walls
Yet crazed drunk bees can float on high to sting
The hurt inside the heart can last too long
The self retreats , the matador has failed
We know the end , the bull will kill the throng
When God came down, our spies soon had him nailed
The burning bush , the little voice, the tales.
We may know what’s right and do the wrong
Take pleasure in our violence, kill and sting
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Take your love and in your arms enfold.
Did anyone believe blind rage expressed
Could benefit the agent without harm?
Did anyone read Freud and then digest?
Feelings need the heat of blacksmith’s fires
Held inside until they find their form
An image worthy of our right desire
As well as rage, we should mistrust love too
Be backward in expression till more’s known
Or risk an avalanche of cruelty.
Take care of others, they are not our fools
From sacred meetings all mankind has grown
We misuse folk to test our worth and tools
Holding in the inner fires our wish
The blackness of the heart can turn to gold
No contradiction hides such sacredness
Take your love and in your arms enfold.
The future of the world is growing cold
We liked to have the choice for rage and death
Until we found the charred remains of bliss
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The hidden workings
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/29/nick-laird-poetry-religion
EXTRACT:
Though an atheist – in that I believe we’re here only by happy accident – my sensibility is religious. I like ritual and heightened states. I like mind-altering drugs. I believe in invisible forces – radioactivity, magnetism, sound waves – and I’m more than willing to sit for an hour listening to a church organist practice, which I did just last week. And I’ll let myself shiver along with the immense chord changes. I don’t like faith but I’m fond of its trappings- the kitschy icons, the candles, the paintings, the architecture and, especially, the poetry. Though many great religious figures, from Augustine to Screwtape, have taken prose as their instrument for confessing or cajoling, when it comes to praise, poetry’s the usual choice. I’ve been reading Robert Alter’s magnificent new translations of The Book of Psalms, and “My heart is astir with a goodly word”.
The relationship between poetry, those goodly words, and religion is hard to quantify. Both involve the hidden, working at the borders of the sayable. They share an experiential dimension. Personal religion involves a private speech act (prayer), chanting (psalms), heightened states achieved by ritualised words. The Lord’s prayer is one of the first poems I learned. Leached of its import by years of mindless recital, it’s almost a Sitwellian sound poem to me.
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On a poem by Sylvia Plath about her baby son
Photo by Mike Flemming 2017 copyright
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/143643/sylvia-plath-nick-and-the-candlestick
“In “Nick and the Candlestick,” a woman walks through a dark house toward her sleeping infant, and this ordinary action becomes fused with a metaphoric descent into a ghostly otherworld. Addressed to Plath’s son, Nicholas, the poem belongs to the tradition of poems such as Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” and Yeats’s “A Prayer for my Daughter” that directly address a poet’s sleeping infant. “Nick and the Candlestick,” however, teems with evocations of the speaker’s pregnancy and continually merges these images with descriptions of the baby himself. Like the poem’s opening fusion of metaphor and reality, this conflation collapses the boundaries between two things: past and present, memory and experience. In the poem, pregnancy is, itself, a time when two individuals are contained in one strangely altered body. As such, pregnancy, like metaphor itself, becomes emblematic of both the tenuousness of distinctions and of the inevitability of transformation.
As in many her poems, Plath borrows language and imagery from nursery rhymes, harnessing their peculiar mixture of menace and cheerful, linguistic playfulness—a juxtaposition that mirrors the poem’s insistence that seemingly disparate emotions or states of being are often closely entwined. This poem’s title recalls an old rhyme:
Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
The candlestick.
If Jack is not nimble, after all, he risks setting himself on fire
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Where are men when I need buttered bread?
I broke three back teeth while in my bed
I prefer to love but where’s my choice?
What nonsense am I chewing in my head?
I once had a husband,but he’s dead
Now and then I seem to hear his voice
I broke three back teeth while in my bed
Where are men when I need buttered bread?
Can I have one here, I would rejoice?
What nonsense am I stewing in my head?
I used to keep my husband so well fed
I thought he’d never go ,I am annoyed
I broke three back teeth while in my bed
I guess he’s chosen Raphael instead
So I am free to go out with a buoy
What rubbish am I brewing in my head?
- If I am your mistress, am I coy?
Andrew Marvell, whom did he employ?
I broke three back teeth while in my bed
What substance am I grinding in my head?
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When you’re lonely
Mary was feeling lonely on Sunday so she decided to go to the Urgent Care Centre in a cab.There were not many people there but enough to give her 2 hours in the Waiting Room.Having signed in ,by claiming to have a UTI, she took off her red coat bought in 1992 in a Sale, and opened her phone.What to read?
Hitler’s Downfall
Quick Cakes
A few novels by Margaret Drabble
Freud the Fraud
Sex crimes in therapy
The rise of Fascism in Europe
How to care for a husband
The Second Sex
Feminism and Sexual Orders
How to enjoy your body before it is too late
Differential operators and their followers
After 2 hours Mary went to the Unisex toilets.While inside she hear her name called
I’m in here, she shouted.
Take your time
She handed the kind doctor her sample which was very pale
He went out and came in again
You have a nasty infection, he said calmly
What shall I do?
We have some antibiotics here on Sundays.The pharmacy is shut
Thank goodness
He went to see what he could find and handed her a box of pills
It wa nice to meet you doctor, thank you.No wonder I felt odd
Yes, it makes you feel confused and less smart
Indeed.I meant to go to Church but came here by accident
How lucky
Mary went outside and ordered a cab
Well, that was a blessing, she told herself until she saw Annie dressed in purple velvet running down the corridor followed by Emile on a bicycle
Well, that’s what I saw before I took those pills
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No words
If we had no language,we’d be good
No communication but by sense
What devil conjured up the demon word
Made our dealings complex and intense?
No Tower of Babel, nothing but mud huts
Caressing,kissing,kicking, real contact
Boxing,wrestling,killing the unjust
No law except the fist. no guilt.no wrack
No religion but a sense of awe
The rising sun, the moon, the distant stars
Oh,bow before the Cedar and the Oak
Anything that is taller than we are
No books, no news no media,no war
It makes me wonder what live words are for
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Banal to hide the strife
Wandering roung the local brancb of Boots
Shall I buy a moisturising cream
Maybe Astral, or E45 ?
Many choices, who can bear to dream?
Shall I wear red lipstick dye my hair
Boots or shoes, a skirt or velvet shorts
Trousers of black wool or sky blue tights
Shall I keep the baby or abort?
Shall I take an M.Sc. in Art?
What about my car,shall I replace?
Which man shall I marry or repulse
Will the baby now have grown its face?
Underneath the common wastes of time
The real concerns are pushed out from the mind
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Happiness was like a golden shawl
The pebbled beach on which we walked at dawn
The sun was dancing singing stone to stone
The sea was pale as silk and gently ran
The tide was coming in, the day began
Why is my memory so deficient here?
I remember little but you near
I remember Portland Bill at dusk
The sea was wilder then with many thrusts
Happiness was like a golden shawl
A world like Eden, man before the Fall
Today they say, illusion, I say, no
What matters is where this insight makes you go
The fruits of meditation are its test
May we be generous, may our souls be blessed
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The astral body
Tenderly I held him took him in
As though we touched each other skin to skin
Dying is what everyone must do
Even when it splits the Me from You
What we took for granted every day
Had its end like any mortal’s play
The length of life is just enough to lie
It’s not here forever, don’t you cry
We are on no plateau but a slope
Slight at first, so we don’t see and note
Gently we are led to where it ends
Beautiful and foolish like ourselves
How can we be split when we are one?
In deep darkness dies the winter sun
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Like babies
Sunday dinner. roasted spuds and meat
Yorkshire puddings, gravy,pepper,salt
These are what the English like to eat
Though microwaves may bring it to a halt
Roly poly,syrup sponge and cream
Apple dumplings,marmalade on toast
Men adore hot puddings gently steamed
Though who will have the time to be a host?
Now we buy sponge puddings ready made
Bread and butter custard ,raisins,hot
How did women manage in past days?
Spotted Dick, brown sugar,that’s the lot
We seem to love the sweet yet we are rude
Still like babies, ignorant and confused
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The labour and the hurt that life will cure
I found a pair of knickers on the chair
They must be mine,oh dear, that is bizarre
I did not take them off,I am quite sure
They make the entire room seem quite impure
Yet why are knickers thought to be like porn
When they adorn the place where life is born?
If you hung the washing out to dry
You might see an angel in the sky
Most of us traversed the holy path
We suffered pain but hope it did not last
Mothers too have struggled and endured
The labour and the hurt that life will cure
The simplest items, pretty, well designed
Tomorrow I shall hang them on the line
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Fortunately, he cannot bite
I dream at nights of my old friends
My husband and his loving hands
I dream of all the cats we had
Alfred who slept on the bed
He laid his head upon my foot
As I wrote a poem of love
Jimmy who was small and black
She bit my hand if I got up
I did not wish to wet the bed
She did not understand a word I said
The last night here she gazed at me
I think she knew she would not be
Lucky was the nervous one
Black and white , apartheid none
He liked my husband’s shoulder dear
He draped himself and lost all fear
Now the cats have all gone off
I am frightened by a cough
My husband comes to me at night
Fortunately he cannot bite
He touches me with tenderness
Smiles and wished me,God Bless.
When I waken I feel lost
So I have to wear a watch
I seem to have no solid self
I feel nervous of an elf
I don’t mind an angel sweet
He could rub my aching feet
I will have no other man
They are frightened of women
They don’t like to lose at Chess
They don’t like to wash my dress
They will brush my winter coat
Never ask me what I wrote
I do not wish to anger men
They might shout and bawl again
I think maybe I will turn gay
Ask a lady, what to say?
They may not understand my needs
Killing flowers to help the weeds
Talking all the weary night
On the whole they’re parasites
Also they may menstruate
I can’t give them seeds to take
So they will leave and get a man
This is where it all began
Eve and Adam,God and man
Cain and Abel, apple flan
Noah and his Ark so fine
I wish I had one in the rain
I wonder when the world will end?
I am old so be my friend
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Beyond
Of Genocide. who could sing or write
Just silence,impossible and stark
Yet was transmuted in a poet’s mind
Into a dance of final light and dark
Walking to their death by Mozart’s sound
Their special prayers were offered,what great trust
In Cohen’s mind the source of love engraved
Like Job before, he knew the sacred dust
Mysterious is the Lord with his demands
Christians went to Mass, reviled the Jews
Few of us will suffer, understand
Past pure reason ,feeling…God help who?
Beyond that flickering candle flame called God
We see the shadows lost, we see the Dead.
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Cliches
He got his hooks into my bleeding heart
He trapped me with a stone which had no moss
In Plato’s Cave I saw but shadows long
I wondered why I let him be my boss
All my eggs were in one ovary
I had no baskets in my abdomen
More haste has made me backwards in my tasks
I did not know my husband was a man
Innocence prolonged led me astray
The early birds had stolen all the worms
Well, let tomorrow be another day
My utter foolishness has made me squirm
The time for preparation is a need
Not much good has come from haste or speed.
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Awesome now means medium at best
Rubbish is just something we don’t need
Or something not worth mending we believe
Where nonsense may be foolish talk or jest
Or English humour at its lethal best
There is no Judge, it’s people who decide
Whether it is nonsense to deride
The message of the media online
Which like the Consecration, is divine
Awesome now means medium at best
That is, you have barely passed the test
What a lot of stupid people say
Appears on someone’s T shirt the same day
Nonsense can give pleasure,make us loose
Sometimes it can make us feel confused.
