I have made  an  odd number of mistakes
How can you get even?

What’s odd about a mistake?
It’s the error

I dream while I’m awake
Better take a sleeping pill after breakfast then

The ghost always comes at midnight
Can it tell the time?

I think the light made me jump
I  just can’t believe in those photons attacking you any more.
Why not?
I’ve seem the light

Numbers can also be operations
I wish my lump could need only a number to remove it
A number of operations?
The number is the operation but it might be complex
I love your imagination
Which proves you have one too

Dirac does not sound like an English name
Neither does Battenberg

Was he Jewish?
He still is.
But he’s dead
Like Jesus isn’t?

Why did Heisenberg laugh?
It should be, when not why
Why?
You can’t laugh and cry simultaneously
Are you absolutely certain?
No,I am  a postmodernist
Are you sure?
You’ve got me now.
Why, am I  playing   dumb?
Put the lid  on it
I’m not a piano, yet. 
I’m mute with shock
Was it electric?
No, it was  visual.
I see nothing wrong
That’s denial
You can’t prove it
What, is it right and wrong together?
It’s  fuzzy
I half believe
If only we’d done algebra
Why?
It uses letters

https://physicsworld.com/a/paul-dirac-the-purest-soul-in-physics/

Extract

1st Extract

Like all scientists at the highest level, Dirac was not afraid to descend from the pinnacle and discuss more down-to-earth matters. Here are two examples. Much of our knowledge comes from light scattered by matter; in particular, that is how we see. In a clever stroke of lateral thinking, Dirac realized that the quantum symmetry between waves of light and waves of matter implied that it is also possible for material particles to be scattered by light, a ghostly possibility that could be observed, as he showed in 1933 in a paper with Peter Kapitza. This was observed for the first time about ten years ago and the manipulation of atoms by laser beams is now a thriving area of applied quantum mechanics – a fact recognized with a Nobel prize last year (Physics World November 1997 p51, print version).

2nd extract

Dirac stories

It is not my intention to write about what sort of person Dirac was. But I must mention the genre of “Dirac stories”. He was so unusual in the logic and precision of his interaction with the world, both in and out of physics, that tales have become attached to him and have acquired a life of their own. I suppose it matters to a historian whether they are true or apocryphal (or as Norman Mailer says, “factoids”), but to us they have a deeper resonance that transcends fact. Resisting temptation, I retell just two less well known ones.

Like many scientists, Dirac was known to sleep during (other people’s) lectures, and then wake and suddenly make a penetrating remark. Once, a speaker stopped, scratched his head and declared: “Here is a minus where there should be a plus. I seem to have made an error of sign.” Dirac opened one eye and said: “Or an odd number of them.” Another time, Dirac was at a meeting in a castle, when another guest remarked that a certain room was haunted: at midnight, a ghost appeared. In his only reported utterance on matters paranormal, Dirac asked: “Is that midnight Greenwich time, or daylight saving time?”

People slept in  A & E last night
Sunderland, oh what a ghastly site
I can beat that, my man died
In A & E four years ago,surprised?

He was only there for 18 hours
When he ran out of  any  kind of power
He smiled benignly ,closed his eyes so  blue
I thought, this is the end of me and you

 In fact I did  not realise the truth
The nurse apologised  with bated breath
The cubicle was small but very clean
But not much privacy   for those who scream

So when I  sang   the psalms  the whole place heard
Perhaps they all had nightmares, being scared
No Chaplain came, it’s changed to D I Y
After that it’s  cherries in the sky

After death the patient is  released
From all the tubes and bottles, wonders cease
So then I met the audience outside
Ten doctors listening  to my singing voice

I do not think  a  better death could come
And anyway my precious man was gone
They expressed their sadness  at the lack
Of beds in wards where men could die dumb struck

The papers make a picture that gives fear
It matters not where we sleep,is that clear?

What you mean is I should comfort you 
You  are grieving for the man so kind
You miss my husband, that is  merely true

I know the loss has made your  heart feel  blue
 I didn’t realise it  also makes you blind
What you ask is I should comfort you

I wish that you would   find cures for   Chinese Flu
That you would be forced to  change your mind
You miss my only husband,  is that true?

What d’y mean. .. you don’t know what to do?
Don’t ask ,me  for guidance,I’ve resigned
Why do  you ask  what I can do for you?

I only wish that I had married two.
But here   it is not  legal so to bind
You miss my only husband,  will you sue?

Do you write on paper filled with lines?
Do you  feel beneath this ground are mines?
Why do you ask that I should comfort you?
I’m the one bereaved and I am through

I’m getting some new glasses
To wear upon my head
I think they’re multicoloured
Better red than dead.

I need  a pair of new ones
In case I lose my this pair
I think they are transitional
Does anybody care?

I went to Cafe Nero
I could have been in Rome
The people were so beautiful
I’m reluctant to stay home

Then I went to visit Lorna
A friend with three degrees
She  has orchids on her mantelpiece
Thank God, they never freeze

 I left the heater in the hall
In case the cat was cold
Blacky cannot speak  yet
But he is growing bold

He runs out via the kitchen
When my back is turned
He’s like a  nuclear weapon
So fast he causes burns

I listen to Mr Cohen
I like Jenny Warnes
She sings  his famous songs  again
I feel like I’m reborn

Now it is the weekend
I   like the book reviews
I like to be with my old friend
Forget about the News

I love you Mr Cohen ,yes I do
I see you and hear you every single day
I have a secret passion just for you

I felt  deep sorrow ,I was feeling blue
I tried to see and hear it  in your  way
I love you Leonard ,yes I do,I do

The End of Love is never, in my view
I love your band when  you all  sing and play
I have a secret passion, it is you!

I seem to follow like you are a clue
If we met I wonder what we’d say
I love you Eliezer,  yes I do.

The puzzlements of love  and hate  are due
We who feel your questions ,feel half crazed
We  all have  secret passions just for you

I love Picasso,and I love Paul Klee
I love the blossom trees that bloom  in May
I love you Mr Cohen ,how I do!
I  cannot hide my passion, it’s your due

The only way out of the cycle of violence is to listen to the pain of the other.

Dr Chris L,Minnick

It is too often forgotten that the gift of speech, so centrally employed, has been elaborated as much   for the purpose of concealing thought by dissimulation and lying as for the purpose of elucidating and communicating thought. – Wilfred Bion

Freud and the Imagination

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“I should perhaps here state explicitly something that will, I suspect, already have become  clear; that I have no wish to dilate on the psychodynamics of the literary imagination. I must, however, state my impression, my conviction, that people who possess negative capability to a high degree seem not to conceive of themselves as opposed to an alien environment which they have to master by “irritable reaching after fact and reason,”    but   rather as a part of the universe which is capable of absorbing the whole into itself and then re-creating it by distillation in imaginative works; in other and psychoanalytical words, their relationship to “external reality” remains identificatory, without any drawing of impermeable ego boundaries between themselves and other people and other things. And secondly, they seem to be refreshingly free from the conventional notion that activity is masculine and passivity is feminine, and can therefore oscillate between active and passive states of being without feeling that their identity is threatened by doing so. As a result they can, for instance, imagine themselves into characters of the opposite—or rather other—sex as readily as into characters of their own.”

I wrote this in November but I reproduce it as it relates to my post about Dreams

This photo is by Mike Flemming 2020 copyright

Enlightened by  the    feel of  soft sunbeams
Knowing it is  stronger to sit still
The entrance  opens to the  hall of dreams

The eye grows wide. our vision   limpid leans
Until our  reverie has   got its fill 
The mind’s intentions and its wandering schemes

Warnings come in nightmares, how to heed?
The pain grows stronger like a workman’s drill
The pathway   leads to far more fearsome dreams

Are we  puppets strangling on our leads?
Who ‘s the master, who  must pay the bill,
Receive the mind’s intentions and its schemes?

High and low  let interact  and  tell
How  to find our way  and what   to kill
The entrance  opens to world of dreams
The mind’s intentions, its mutating schemes

You need a subscription to read all of the review below

 

FROM:

The Last Wilderness

Charles Rycroft

MAY 29, 1997 ISSUE

Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming

by Anthony Stevens

Harvard University Press, 385 pp., $15.95 (paper)

 

EXTRACT

We must heed Liam Hudson’s (1985) warning that dreams are our “last wilderness,” to be protected with the same fervour as the rain forests, the ozone layer, and the whale. As the only natural oases of spiritual vitality left to us, dreams are among our most precious possessions and we must stand up to those who would diminish the value that we place on them.

Image by Mike Flemming 2020 copyright

So my copse has  ripened to a wood
How many living creatures dwell within?
The shades of green, the sunshine, and  the Good

Once we  had three apple trees,a glut
Today, too old to fruit, they stand there still
My copse has turned into a  little wood

Neighbours  hint that I get  my trees cut
Yet these leaves of green make my heart full
The shades of green, the sun the wind ,the gods

Once we read there was a total Flood
Now we have the bush fires and their will
Still, my copse has turned into a wood

Trees have their green sap where we have blood
They will never wound,  will never kill
The shades of green, the sun the wind ,the gods

Just like Eve and Adam we may sin
The maple waves away my mental pain
My copse has turned into my private wood
The shades of green,  the long path, come my Love.