A Baker's Dozen - Quareness Series 165th "Lecture".
Bach's Gift.
With those even-tempered chromatic notes
And well-tempered gaps, sounding sonorities
In mirror-like reversals, the beauty unrolls
In plain, knotted and double-knotted folds.
Melodies accompanying themselves emerge
With interactive multiple musical swerves,
All independently and collectively coherent
In the harmonic unfolding of counterpoint.
Much too is given to hidden musical code,
Beautiful layers with deep meaning, and
Framing the magic more than the maker
With the symmetrical swirls of a master.
Bach's gift lives on, still reflecting
Converging intervals in performance,
Wherever chords and hearts resonate
With temperament hiding in plain sight.
Footnote: - On the wonderful work of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Redwing Migration.
It's that fading time of year when
Daylight draws the curtains early
And with small thrushes whistling
Their way over our frosty frontlines,
Heralding those early signs of winter.
It's when those weather vane redwings
With their fellow travelling fieldfares
Go stripping the holly bushes bare
In fallen orchards and elsewhere,
Leaving little of the festive fare.
Such hunger brings them soon enough
To scarlet berried suburban wildness,
Brushed with a thin remote sound and
Glistening in high-pitched strangeness.
And when whistling callers move on,
We see here again the solitary robin
Stoutly defending its territory with
An orderly reconnaissance.
Footnote: - Aerial migrants refuelling after long journeys.
In Favour of Stopping and Looking.
There's a world of beauty that exists
Independently of our will and purpose
Where our frame of cultural pragmatism
Cannot easily comprehend or justify
That natural impulse to look intently
For no good reason...
Skipping the world of duties and destinations,
Escaping the constriction of egoic concerns,
And merging with depth and stillness.
Immersing ourselves in this imaginative space
We can experience a deep self-forgetfulness
Healing our habit of seeing only separateness.
And we can carry this healing back with us
Into the demands and distractions of our lives
When allowing ourselves simply to stop and look.
Footnote: - Everything appreciates attention.
Fake Farmering.
Farmerless farms manned by driverless machines,
Monitored by drones and doused with chemicals,
Producing commodity crops from patented seeds
Genetically engineered for industrial biomatter
To be processed into something resembling food,
This be the big agribusiness vision of our future...
A future of data-driven and climate-friendly culture
They say is needed to feed a growing population.
But an environment of data platforms and private equity firms
Feeding e-commerce giants and AI controlled farming systems
Could see us all hungry for and starved of human scale living,
And bereft of any real future at all.
Footnote: - Controlling the food supply.
Quantumnal.
Look upon these words on this page
Carrying all of history within them,
And each a mere particle of sand
On a vast shoreline of existence
Where all events are part of
Interactive disturbances
In a field of fluctuations.
Look at love, that quantum experience
Full of potentialities and possibilities
Through anxious and restless passion,
Amid the tension of a possible spark
And crackling of embers catching air,
Glowing as they are consumed within
Uncertainty embodied.
Simultaneously existing in two places at once
Hails the thrust of a double-slit single particle
Inducing an interference pattern in its wake,
Multiplying and expanding like fractals
Maximising the freedom it creates.
But love seeking to combine, blend and fuse,
Finds a homogeneous mix emerging, and as
The flicker subsides, the catalyst is consumed
And entropy reaches its maximum.
Movement continuing with unchanged appearance
Sees life's living grow uniform and bland, where
We no longer know if lovers are creating poetry
Or if the poetry is creating them...and yet...
Like for a goldfish inside a round fishbowl
My view too is a distorted lens on reality,
In my wondering which may be trapped
Inside or outside.
My two existences forming a continuum
Must appear distorted, when seen together,
With one set to collapse almost completely
When the other is cornered into observation,
Removing borders between dreaming and reality.
My observing is key in any event
Altering it through merely looking,
As does a reader investing meaning
In words, sentences and paragraphs
Involving emotions and perceptions,
And changing viewing angles.
A text exists only through reading
Being interpretation, extension,
Comparison and construction,
A matter of active engagement,
Of coauthoring and of creation.
Footnote: - There's a limitless horizon of change, in which more potential exists as more variables are born...complicating the network of relations and possibilities.
Why?
Maybe you are a politician, a representative,
A manager, a committee or board member,
Who asks occasionally "Any Questions?"
And always I do have one question...
Why do you want power over me?
Maybe you want to serve the greater good,
To add value through your social activism
Or to foster cohesive public responsibility,
But my question still remains unanswered...
Why do you want power over me?
When you return home in the late evening, and
Your mind is easy with having "done your duty"
And convinced that you have truly listened,
Do you ever wonder about my only question...
Why do YOU want power over ME?
Footnote: - There are none so blind as those who will not see.
Liquid Assets.
Imagine the body as being like water
Manifesting in three distinct states,
Flowing...freezing...steaming...as...
Liquid...solid...gas.
In a liquid state we are both still and flowing,
Like an active neural platform when we feel
Safe enough being open to that connection
Joining the heart with our faces and voices.
Feeling secure in the state of connectedness
Experiencing this liquid version of ourselves,
We gain the deepest access to our qualities
And avoid recoiling into a state of defence.
As with liquid water changed into vapour
We are different when safety is absent,
Steamed up with fight or flight energy
In determined response to threats.
And if steam doesn't make us safe
Immobilising ice may do the trick,
Reflecting metabolic withdrawal
Correlating with dissociation.
With state changes triggering intense
Pushing and pulling across thresholds,
We contain unruly energies through
Shifting between liquid, gas or solid.
And yet we constantly yearn to flow
With the most capable parts of our brain,
Only available when we're in the liquid state
Loosed from the restricting hold of steam or ice.
Deprived of reciprocal social cues operating
To provide us with consistent connection,
Leaves little wonder that so many have
Lately drifted into toxic steam or ice.
When we are steam, we see as steam sees
And likewise when we're frozen solid, but
Change the state and the world looks different
As reverting to liquid gets to shift perspective.
Footnote: - Seeing the emotional continuum of steam as anger and fear, and that of ice as akin to depression.
Sometimes.
Sometimes when I wake in the morning
I think of those good times of yore,
Before the cares of the day
Shush the memories away
Taking over my mind once more.
I see the soft light of day's dawning
Slipping in through the shadows outside,
And that smile on her face
Brightening up the whole place
As our ship sailed away on the tide.
Those days of our youth I do treasure
And that sharing of love we enjoyed,
In a life we lived full without measure
Before the music around us had died.
Now when starlight above us breaks cover
Or the moon greets the dimming of day,
I still yearn for that time long since over
As those dreams we both shared fade away.
Footnote: - Remembering when the frames of our belonging were large enough for the dreams of our souls.
Mandate Madness.
The rapists are putting back on their pants
And leaving...for now.
The masters are giving us back our freedom
After taking it away in the first place.
With self-appointed lords getting away with abuse,
Where did our privacy go?
Lacking rhyme, reason, compassion or truth
Mandates have been wrong regardless.
And why were they wrong?
Because segregation is wrong,
Betraying the very heart of art.
Why did they "flatten the curve"
Of our freedom to think and talk?
For our own good they said
But it ain't for anyone's good,
We've seen that movie before.
We must figure out for ourselves
What's good for everyone of us,
Isn't that what free people do?
With something fundamental betrayed
Healing needs to be faced from the heart,
And by all parties...when all are ready.
We are all of spirit and flowing water
Not of fear and mechanical clocking,
And these attacks on our sovereignty
Simply have to stop.
Footnote: - Turning basic independent existence into a privilege to be earned is surely wrongheaded?
A Blackbird Sat.
St. Kevin of Glendalough living in a hut
Which sheltered him in his devotions,
One day raised his hand to the heavens
And a blackbird sat thereon, laying an egg.
Kevin neither closing nor withdrawing his hand
In solidarity held it thus, until the egg hatched.
Now many a bird in Ireland, and particularly the robin,
Discovering unexpected nest sites in unmade beds,
In desk pigeon holes and coat pockets in old sheds,
Finds mankind leaving them undisturbed.
Footnote: - Various images of the holy man show him with a bird on his open hand.
Deepest Inspiration.
We did it for tens of thousands of years
With no need of an instruction manual,
As we humans fumbled our way
And figured it out anyway...
Naturally reproducing, shedding trauma,
Alleviating pain, lessening depression
And heightening connection.
As soon as we discovered fire
And then discovered language,
We might also have uncovered
A resounding backbeat...
With a magical musical fumbling providing
A way to remember what we'd forgotten,
To tend our bones and mend our bothers
Within rhythmic systems of living.
And in helping each other to remember
We stand a chance of reclaiming
The deepest inspiration.
Footnote: - Tuning into the rhythms of life.
Hairless.
They say you can feel the cold in your veins,
but that isn't all.
They say you can lose all the hair on your head,
even if eyebrows hang on for a long time.
But what about the hair in your nose...if gone...
leaving the tap constantly running.
Nobody tells you about that.
Footnote: - The naked nose taboo.
To Choose.
The yin has the eye of yang and the yang the eye of yin.
In looking at the Void with the One seeing its own eye
And the Void seeing its eye in the One, we get to see
Consciousness as a never-ending mystery to itself.
And with reality seeming to bend toward
Whatever we get to think of and express,
It may be wise to take care in our choosing
To believe or not in life's limitless potential.
In deciding which delusions to follow...
Those imprisoning or freeing the mind...
We each get to choose our quality of life.
Footnote: - A comment on the conceptual structures that we humans overlay onto reality.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
May, 2022.