Haiku?

From time to time I take the notion to write Haiku. Except, they are not 17 syllables long, and observe none of the rules of Haiku. They do, however, arise out of a moment of perception. Sometimes. What Zen might call Kensho. Or they might be Senryu. Execpt they are not satirical, and not particularly concerned with people. Anyway, I'll post them, for what they are.

Who am I?
What am I?
The day slides by outside:
A cold and distant plaque of light and noise.

I was running.
A flower!
I hurtled past it along an adrenalin corridor.

Snowdrop
Photography of an instant
Clear, real

Reality-coordinate:
Snowdrop’s
Magnesium bell.

The fly-cobra
That danced in front of me at twenty fathoms
Breath in
Breath out

Preserved by the retina
The lightbulb’s
Bones

Wet pebble, evening star:
Small pieces
Of a high-fidelity world.

What luck
My teeth deflected
The bee!

Yawning, the dog
Reveals
A Romanesque interior.

Granular earth
Patrolled
By mighty-headed ants.

Odours of earth
Released
By the impact of raindrops.

Leaf-shadow
Inscribed on stone:
Sunreality.

Querying
Decapitated torso
Breath in
Breath out

In the mirror: an iris,
Etched there
By Lysergic Acid Diethalymide.

Inward detonation!
Where we eavesdrop and lipread
As if through a microscope.

Ground-Zero hush
That photographs
The bones of the soul.

Spiral staircase
Centred
On an ion.

Where the membrane
Flares to ash
And, blinking, open-mouthed, we receive.

In it’s jewelled vestments
Born of the meat of this world:
The adjective.

A glimpsed Goldfinch
Releases this
From the Ego-machine!

At the brittle horizon:
Our dead,
with their infitesimal gestures.

Petroleum meadows.
Through a heat-warp
An ascension of larks.

Adrenalin supernova
Fuelled by
The grains of our dust!

We are flies! We are flies!
Electron detailing
In the eye of the Mantis, watching.

Cape Cod, 1971. Wave bye-bye to the camera….
Childhood
Encased in silence.

The click of a flea
In a quiet room.
Truly, I am hunted by things that are glossy and implacable.

Who am I?
What am I?
Fractal galleries
Of Self…

Electron micrograph of speech:
Moonscape
In which the virus moves, in search of our best intentions.

October. Trees
Disintegrating
In a cold wind.

Mighty sky of depth and stars
Regard me, here,
thin-armed and squeaky voiced.

As if Sirius was it’s tool
Silence engraves
Across a clear sensorium.

Big sky. Little me.
My cilia
Stir in the wind.

So cold the Quince tree, now it is November.
My spine
Recognises it.

Boneless mind, rejoice!
Those peristaltic
Rivers of limestone…

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee………!
Time-lapse
Review of life.

Woodgrain, teacup, rise up
Renewed,
Hard and detailed, beyond my jurisdiction.

Like a knuckle
The mind,
Under a migraine’s glistening ceiling.

Lightning, ragged landscape. Where the demiurge
Cuts shapes
With a chainsaw.

There it is! My Tonka truck,
Frozen into
Memory’s floor.

The luminous plaque of the Insect-O-cutor
Coolly imbues
The nearby willow.

All night long, the pop
And sizzle
Of exoskelatanous insects.

A rain of parts…where grasses
Crunch
Underfoot.

Stitching a marshmallow
Into the grass:
Threads of fungi.

Cracked, golden interior
Of the willow
Hit by lightning!

Attic floorboards spiced
With dust…gone!
How upright and offices I have become!

Full moon. Willow trees
Animate
With waterfall and skeleton.

Under streetlamps, our neighbours
Chrysler
With its metal fish-face.

On the concrete wall:
My shadow.
Just one thing more in this world

On the retina:
Zig-zags.
Fireflies on the verge of cuneiform.

Who or what is writing this?
Again he tries
To read his own eyesight.

Speeded-up crowds
On Saint Peter’s Square: they shimmer
Like rain.

On the floor of the Duomo:
Migratory
Plates of shadow.

Dying even as I unhook it:
Zinc trout, cold,
Ontology’s monstrance.

Even so, choreiform butterflies
Wobble onwards
With their busted gyroscopes.

Cabbage White: fragile dignity
Dogged at the heels
By life’s lopsided wobble.

In the hot glare of the desk-lamp:
Slow plunge
Of a dust speck.

In the eyepiece: viscuos
Miicroscopic world.
But our mouths disintegrate even as we cry in wonder.

I advance, loosening
Like river foam
Or a creature made of Alka Seltzer.

Seen in a monstrance of sunlight
A frosted tree
Makes a meaning. I am illiterate.

On the darkening lawn
A blackbird
Reads the grass.

Dead pig hanging
From a butchers hook. It, too, is part of
The world-mobile.

Butcher’s shop: dead chickens dangling
From their snapped
Chains of being.

Dead leaves disperse…
Are we just nourishing
Our spines?

A blackbird at dawn
Presents itself
As a liquid.

On the forest path: a bird’s
Intact skeleton.
Daylight a slow Hiroshima.

In the wood of the threshold:
Bullet holes
Of Spirochaeta Pallida.

Dry, granular snow
Sizzles
In the fir tree.

Distant snowhills:
Eternity’s
Contingent ceramics.

January. A cold wind
Enhances
My hard skull.

Seen from the Intercity train at night:
The lit interiors
Of other people’s homes.

At the graveside:
Rows of polished shoes,
Hard-soled.

World-mountain of iron.
Blood on
My forehead.

Vale of Leven cemetary.
Polished gravestones
Wink in the passing lights of cars.

Ribonucleic birdsong!
An alien hermeneutic
Infects me.

Uspstreet, a dog’s barking
Amplified
In a concrete stairwell.

Hard sheets of sound
Blank out
The mouthed prayer.

He reinterprets himself,
Thinly reflected
In storm windows.

The breath, boxed
In warm timber, where it hides
Under Anna’s porch.

Rubber!

I'm an enthusiastic but wildly incompetent mountain biker. I cycle locally across Forestry Commission land, which is the site of a wind farm. My normal route is a 30 mile loop, and is not technically demanding. Nevertheless, I fall off regularly. On one occasion, I simply fell over when the cumulative rattle of cycling over frozen tyre tread indentations left there by the local farmer's tractor gradually and gently robbed me of control. Still clipped in, and holding the handlebars with a rigor mortis grip, I lay tipped onto my side. More spectacularly, I frequently get launched head first over the handlebars on steep descents. This incompetence has led to an immoderate fascination with off road tyres. They are the point of contact between me on the bike, and the ground. Their choice has a bearing on how successfully I maintain that contact. I generally cycle singlespeed. I enjoy the simplicity of it, having, so to speak, only two gears: sitting down, and standing up. When I come to a steep hill, I stand up. When on the flat, or descending a not-too-bumpy hill, I sit down. Foolproof. Gears, 21 of them on my 'geared' mountain bike, can be confusing and distracting. So long as the terrain is not to hilly, or the route too long, I default to my On-One Inbred. This bike is also fully rigid: it has no suspension at all. This is also a preference, as a rigid fork steers and tracks more accurately. A suspension fork has lateral 'flutter'. It also has the unnerving habit of altering the bike's geometry as it compresses or rebounds through it's travel, and shifts your body weight forward and back over the bike. I find a bike without suspension more predictable, and as I am not a freerider or downhiller, my riding rarely exceeds the capabilities of such a simple bike.

On my singlespeed I use a WTB Weirwolf 2.1 up front, and a 1.9 Nano Raptor on the rear. This size of Nano Raptor is no longer available, I bought 10 of them as new old stock. They are very light, 380g on my scales, and have a low rolling resistance due to the raised centre line. Their lightness is ideal for singlespeeding because it reduces the rotating mass of the wheel. The difference tyre weight makes to the effort it requires to pedal is masked on a geared bike, on a singlespeed it is readily felt. Hills I can climb on this bike with these tyres are insurmountable if I swap to heavier tyres.

What I also like about these tyres is the flexibility of the carcass. I run them at 30psi, and this allows them to conform to the terrain. Their low profile tread has many working edges, and these provide a surprising amount of grip as the tyre moulds to the ground

Up front, I use the 2.1 WeirWolf because of it's aggressive array of teeth along the shoulder of the tyre. If your rear wheel slips, it generally isn't disastrous: you can catch the slide, or, at worst, you find yourself having to put a foot down or crashing onto your bum. If your front wheel slides from under you, the resultant crash tends to be much heavier and head forward. The Nano Raptor wouldn't work up front because it's shoulder tread is puny. The WeirWolf is designed to rail into corners and actually increases grip when tilted.

I have these in a massive 2.5 downhill version, and out of interest fitted them to my singlespeed to see what difference they would make to the effort needed to get up my local hills. I washed out on most of them.

I generally prefer tyres with low profile tread, and run them at low pressure, 30psi rear, 25psi on the front, thinking that the amount of deformation a tyre undergoes as it moulds itself to the contours of the ground is the best source of grip. [Unless, of course, you are dealing with mud.] Tread patterns that consist of knobs can sometimes feel fidgety over loose terrain, especially if the lugs are weak. They tend to rebound and deflect off stones and other loose rubbish, making handling unpredictable. There is also the issue of lugs folding suddenly if you lean into a corner, which is more likely to happen if you run tyres at low pressure as I do. My two favourite tyres with knobs are the WTB Stout, which avoids some of the above criticisms by having it's lugs squat and well spaced out, and Panaracer's Cinder, which has a stepped lug pattern and an especially grippy compound. The side knobs on both tyres are well supported at their base and unlikely to fold.

Dostoyevsky Notes

Marmeladov. Man's capacity for suffering being far greater than what is required by evolutionary adaptation, surely it must be of metaphysical import? How do we find out? How do we react to being the captive, tortured insects of such a capacity for suffering? You push it to it's limit, like Marmeladov, you search it's depths for some form of illumination. You refuse to be an unwilling victim, and, instead, will it's intensification. But only, of course, if you are Marmeladov, cradled in the benign providence of Dostoyevsky.

Boxing Notes

Flicking through Charles Hoff's work, I remembered I had jotted down miscellaneous notes on the subject of Boxing, some years ago when I was intrigued by it's history and by the nature of the fascination it held for me. One of the reasons I became interested in boxing was that it presents itself as a lineage, a tradition, and that this tradition has it's own 'reading list', the library of fight movies that are available from collectors. Times, places, protagonists, all captured on film, and part of a chronological order. I could set this reading list of fighters alongside and in parallel to the list of great 20th century poets. Both provide windows onto their times, particular points of entry into the strangeness of history. I had also been reading about the practical application of Zen to various arts, and was being made aware of the fact that there are many different kinds of intelligence, not simply the literary and philosophical, or mathematical and scientific. Takuan Soho [1573-1645] is particularly instructive on the application of Zen to fight strategy, the integration of bodily knowledge to the point where it's execution is unselfconscious, where mind is no longer hindered and does not 'stop' anywhere, but responds instantly and appropriately to each situation. It seemed to me that the best boxers embodied principles similar to this. I've posted some of my jottings below. Does anyone remember Naseem Hamed? I wrote these before Barrera defeated him. It turned out that loss in the ring was something he could not rebound from, unlike Ali.

Boxing Notes

Boxing is a language, a physical language. It appears as a glissando of violence, but it has a depth of inscape equal to that of birdsong. What we hear of birdsong is the surface elision, not the vertical structure that playback at slower speeds reveals. The photographs of Charles Hoff read boxing vertically, as a composition of discrete moments. We have difficulty reading boxing in real times because of the sovereignty of it's own means of expression, and the sheer speed of it's utterance.

Boxing is primarily about biography, character, what it is that shapes a man, ands his training, his forging himself into an instrument.

Much of a boxer's training and preparation has to do with an inward psychological bolstering against anticipated opponents. Note Ali's love of the mirror. Joe Frazier shadow boxing: fractional movements, completed inwardly. A form of mental visualisation and interior rehearsal

Joe Frazier: burrows forward under the surface of an opponents defence, like a mole, or man in the trenches. He undermines the walls of his opponents defense.

Joe Louis: stalks his opponent, his cautious and remorselessly incremental crabwise approach.

Boxers invest so heavily in their self belief, and encourage others to do so, that when they say 'I cannot be beaten', they mean it, as an abbreviated form of 'I cannot afford to be beaten'. This applies with particular relevance to Hamed. How will he react to his inevitable first defeat?

Floyd Mayweather: 'ticks over'as a way of maintaining reaction times, his entry to music and constant bravado, wiggling and posturing are a way of keeping the gap between will and act, conception and execution, closed.

For the boxer, reflexive analyses constitutes a hiatus.

Boxers must eliminate the gap between will and act, conception and execution. To do this, they first of all invest in their physicality through an act of will so that the body obeys the will. But what they are attempting to attain is a point in this process of investment at which the body repays with a surfeit of energy and response, when it blossoms with an embodied inspiration.

Boxers then think in the body, and reflexive analyses is replaced by interpretative action.

This constitutes the formalisation of instinct, it's gardening, and is part of the grace of violence which is the attraction of boxing: the way training and discipline elevate a man above raw instinct in just a situation in which raw instinct is at it's most insistent.

Raw instinct, untrained, is a weakness in a fighter. And there is a way in which each fight can be interpreted as a process of sounding out between opponents of each others' depth of training. A fighter will attempt to elicit and map involuntary reactions in his opponent, in order to exploit these. He will attempt to attack up to, and past, the limits of his opponents defense, and then augment his attack manoeuvres with additional moves, in response to the blindspots and weaknesses thus revealed. The better a boxer is, the more disciplined, the more difficult it is for his opponent to force him to reveal his involuntary reactions, his raw, untrained instincts.

The space between two fighters...What is going on in that space? Ali: constant motion, circling his opponent. This charges the space between him and his opponent with a field of potential angles. As he moves, he is mapping these, examining their viability.

A 'tight' boxer, such as Ernie Terrel, or the Welsh boxer Steve Robinson from whom Naseem Hamed won the WBO title, operates wit thin a narrow cone of potential angles. When confronted with Hamed, Robinson was unable to focus him within the diameter of this cone. In addition, Hamed's 360 degrees field of attack meant that Robinson was alternately blind to his approaches, or had his attention dispersed beyond the mechanics of his own counterattack. He couldn't see to hit him, and when he could see him, he couldn't hit him.

Muhammed Ali boxed on a bow wave of constant surprise, buoyed up and carried forward by a physical intelligence more spontaneous than incremental problem solving, which is a slave to terms dictated.

In the opening rounds a man is bright with fear. He is made of breath, a pulse, and powerful elastics. He bounces from foot to foot in a small, severe kingdom of vertical light, where details are registered with a micro-chisel and time has a paved, expansive feel to it.

He sharpens to acuity in his Cerebellum, reaches crisis by a process of radical deletion. He has his spine, and it's pathways.

He faces a man as instrumental as himself. Who will try to beat him into pieces of thinking. The segments breaking off will destabilise his poise, and begin to wobble him toward total disintegration.

To avoid this, he periodically tests his body in the free spaces available to it, dipping, bobbing, dancing, healing it's integrity between flurries of blows, or by armouring his advance, detaching himself from peripheral pain as if it were a bombardment on the distant horizon.

As the rounds advance, weariness begins to deposit it's minerals.

His shoulder sockets begin to manifest themselves as iron, as do his ribs. The arch of each eye socket begins to heat into prominence, and a hot, ragged tar rises up in his lungs. He is lathed in veneers of sweat. Now the man is wearing a coat of meat, heavy, and the cables at the back of his heels are beginning to whine in distress. His consciousness begins to fog up like a bar room mirror.

Boxing is a form of self knowledge, a physical examination of conscience. Floyd Patterson knew this. Hence his provisional manner, the hesitancy of his character outside the ring, and the monastic, contemplative fervour of his training.

A man only knows himself in extremis, when he pushes, or is pushed, past his armchair conceptions of himself, to how he is revealed in the last analyses of his acts. The thing itself. Bathed in a Sui Generis light.

Each fight is an X-ray.

Each fight is a densely worded text, like a page of runes. It invites and resists decipherment. It attracts and appals, like barbarian metalwork, embryonic, animalmorphic, bubbling with chimeras struggling to get loose, and recycled under in the thrash of muscle.

A great fight demands total self-absorption in it's riddle, and a solution to a problem with the same magnitude as life and death. The magnitudes are equal because the fighter has sacrificed everything to the riddle. He has invested his total psychic energy in it, it encapsulates his value system, is the absolute yardstick by which he will be judged. Everything else outside the ring floats free in a zero gravity, until that time the riddle is solved, temporarily.

Charles Hoff

Bumbling around the Internet today I came across a link that mentioned Charles Hoff, and Sotheby's. It turns out that Sotheby's are auctioning some 70 vintage boxing prints from the archive of the New York Daily News. Charles Hoff was a sports photographer with the paper during the 30's, 40's and 50's. He is the only photographer who's work I am at all familiar with. His black and white photographs of boxers are things of sudden beauty. They reveal the depth of compressed inscape below a surface elision of violence and excitement. In boxing, every instant counts, because at any instant a failure to attend fully can have devastating consequences. It is this depth of concentration, and of the reach of consequence, that these photographs capture. There is a book of Hoff's boxing photographs available: The Fights, With a forward by Richard Ford and an accompanying essay by A.J. Liebling, amongst others. Liebling is another one who's work I would never have encountered except through my interest in boxing. He is a tremendous writer who treats boxing not simply as a sport, but as a subculture. I always feel I am in excellent company when I read him. His books include The Sweet Science, and A Neutral Corner, both collections of his journalistic pieces. There is also another book of his called Back where I Came From, which is less concerned with boxing and ranges more widely over his own life. Pop over to http://www.dailynewspix.com/ and have a look at Hoff's photographs, then decide if you want to hunt down a copy of The Fights.

Celan: a possible reading.

Celan is one of those poets I have an ongoing engagement with, based on a faith that there is an extraordinary depth of meaning there to be discovered. Not, of course, that once discovered you could ever paraphrase such meaning in terms other than as it manifests itself in the poems themselves. Almost unlike any other poet, you cannot even begin to describe a Celan poem. You must simply go there, and read, re-read, listen, and wait. However, that's not prevented me jotting this: Celan- not 'meaning', but object, as a crafted piece of crystal has viability, refracting images. This would account for the metaphors involving crystals in his poems. The poem not as a conveyance of meaning, but a refraction, a reorganisation, of the word and world.: a word-world, a third space equidistant between the two, where word and world are intimately enmeshed as light and image in a crystal. Keeping this space open was his best option for continuing to use German, on terms more his own.

.

.

All those sleep shapes, crystalline,

that you assumed

in the language shadow,

.

to those

I lead my blood

.

.

The translation is Michael Hamburger's, which suddenly reveals to me the debt I owe to his work: my faith that Paul Celan repays continued reading is mediated by the faith I have in Hamburger's translations, most of which I have thoroughly internalised. In fact, I clearly associate his translations with a particular time and place: Belfast, Walnut street, off Donegall pass, 1989, Winter into Spring.

Cato of Utica

I'm a big fan of Dante. To the modern day poet, accustomed to the open-ended and provisional in both form and content, his powers of systematic exposition and integration are...humbling. Mind you, he had certain advantages: his universe was finite, heierarchical, and comprehensively mapped out by Scholastic Theology, especially by that of St Thomas Aquinas. I take holidays in Dante, extended periods of reading that are like visiting a foreign country [I also take yearly a holiday to Moby Dick, but that's for another post]. Once, while unemployed and living in Belfast, and during a particularly intense period of reading the Divine Comedy, I dreamed that I was led backwards through the Inferno, in fast reverse, and abandoned in the limbo that is the antechamber to Hell. The limbo, that is, for the indecisive. I wrote about it, as below:

Canto III

The damned are not those shades embedded within the stratified torments of Hell itself, but those excluded from it’s schema:

The indecisive disintegrating into prose.

I had, I know, intended to say something about the sea, about how the moon and the sea, their anxious metals tangling, achieve
A glorification

But it was a deux ex machina of the language that did not, for some reason, sound justified.

A diferent metaphor could have been found to describe that sudden escalation of brightness.

Some other poet, not me, could have been walking the shore of Belfast Lough when the cloud cover parted.

....

But that's an aside. What I want to write about is the figure of Cato of Utica, who appears in Canto 1 of Purgatory, as something of an allegorical figure. What is done to him is troubling: a loss, a small erasing of love which I find difficult to accept. A tiny part of Cato has been blanked out, lobotimised.

“Marcia”, said he, “when I lived over there,
So pleased the eyes of me, that whatsoever
She asked me, that I did, and did not spare.

Now that she dwells beyond the evil river
She may not move me, by the edict made
When I was taken thence – not now, nor ever.

He remembers, but is anaethetised to his former feelings. Cato at the foot of Mount Purgatory is no less excluded and tortureless than Cato in the first circle of Hell, he is no closer to admittance to God, never will be admitted to God, and, worse, is rendered companionless and emptied to a degree of his former personality. He is depersonalised by the machinary of Allegory. It might have been my mental state at the time, but his inability even to feel loneliness, when he had been so thoroughly robbed, left unable to emotionally register his loss, prompted me to dissent. Whoa......! Craig Coyle dissents from Dante! Pass the Lithium.

1.

He spoke, and then hesitated, as if
something about what he had just said troubled him…

I sneaked a quick drag on my spliff,
coughed, and looked round at the other two, Slim

Shady and his idealistic sidekick,
Amazingly neither of whom

seemed moved to interject.
So I voiced an inquiry and dogma of my own.

Is it right of God to alter or to reject
the loves of a creature simply to fulfill a function?

Rather be damned and retain love
than, what, brought to the slopes of purgation,

anaethetised, and left unsaved?……!!



2.

If a creature sins finitely, within the span of it’s lifetime and the limited scope of it’s powers
Why is it damned for eternity?

He constructed an experiment: an act,
And it’s lightbulb.

Then flicked the switch and marvelled at the shadows: dendrites magnified big as spidercrabs!
Infitesimal maneouvres, absurd:

Archimedes, knitting with stilts,
Or the planetary regress of small acts of kindness.

He who lives by the Aubergine dies by the sword…..

Will Cato of Utica be returned
To the First Circle on the Final Day,

His love restored?