The Multiverse

by Andrew Wynn Owen

  Who deals regression, leaves you with regret,

  And turns your favourite fashion out-of-vogue.

  He slurs a broad, unedifying brogue.

  Say ‘time’s a-flying’? But it is discrete!

  It’s wings are flightworthy, unlike my feet.

  Or is its passage down to my perspective?

  I like to think I’m looking from a train:

  When peering forward, trees (this is subjective)

  Appear to pass more slowly, to my brain,

  Than when I spin around to watch them wane

  Horizonwards. And so it is with days,

  Which run more quickly when one resurveys.

  The metaphors I have for time are spatial

  And this conformity is not a fluke.

  The house of time is structured and palatial

  And passing through its walls, my mind’s a spook –

  A gobbly ghoul, a speaker of degook.

  The time’s a-changing? Unsurprisingly!

  I wasted time and now doth time waste me.

  The comedy of time is what sustains it.

  The audience responses all agree

  That time’s a joker. Tragedy arraigns it

  But teaches folks to live inventively

  And dig the whirligig’s tomfoolery.

  So ‘tempus fugit’? Oh, well let it go.

  I would it were not, but it must be so.

  3. Self

  ‘To seek what is ‘logically required’ for sameness of person under unprecedented circumstances is to suggest that words have some logical force beyond what our past needs have invested them with.’

  W.V. Quine, reviewing Identity and Individuation (ed. Milton K. Munitz) in The Journal of Philosophy, 1972

  Imagine I am spinning in a bottle,

  Whipped and whirled until my parts divide.

  Leave me there! Do not release the throttle

  Until my particles have disallied.

  You will agree, I think, that I have died?

  But now imagine, friend, that you recorded

  An image of the man you smorgasborded.

  From that recording, you could make me new!

  From soup, you could reaggregate my frame.

  If organised correctly, from the stew

  Of molecules, I could return the same!

  But would that creature choose to bear my name?

  Would guilt for what was lost keep him awake

  And would he feel forever like a fake?

  In that transmission, would I be transmuted?

  And would things change for anyone but ‘me’?

  Could I survive the process, comminuted

  To be reconstituted perfectly?

  I would be flesh again, for all to see,

  So that could be a kind of resurrection –

  Or, really, would it simply be reflection?

  I hear that particles are all entangled

  By quantum ties, to others far away.

  Imagine if my entity were mangled –

  Hidden out there in the recherché

  Backwaters of the sky, a speck might sway!

  Could such a web, attuned to rhyme with me,

  Ensure, unchanged, my precious hope ‘to be’?

  Consider, now, ‘The Rooster’ by Miró:

  Its undulant geometries attest

  How form can govern meaning. All things flow

  But I believe the orderly flow best.

  What is a mind, when formless or at rest?

  And is my brain more ‘of me’ than my bones?

  Is architecture patterning, or stones?

  4. Weight and Lightness

  ‘In practical life one will hardly find a person who, if he wants to travel to Berlin, gets off the train in Regensburg! In spiritual life, getting off the train in Regensburg is a rather usual thing.’

  Wassily Kandinsky, ‘On the Problem of Form’

  Kandinsky was a centrifugal artist:

  The slush of east and west, the circled world

  Beyond which nothing, but the set-apart-est

  Colours that are crumpled, cramped, and curled,

  And fight to keep their secrets tightly furled –

  A puzzling sea that girds the supernoval

  Inventiveness of life into an oval.

  Think of the balances in ‘Counter Weights’,

  Painted round the time of ‘Transverse Line’:

  A grumbling background hue recriminates

  The coloured blocks that seem to shift and shine

  As if to semaphore some secret sign.

  They look like city blueprints from above

  But, equally, might be a map of love.

  With weight and lightness in proximity,

  It’s difficult to disentangle sense

  Since sense becomes its own examinee.

  Weight is the daring future perfect tense

  That purposes to augur and condense,

  While lightness is the mode of butterflies –

  A mood to live in, hone, and improvise.

  I side with lightness. Lightness always wins.

  The eye is drawn to lightness first and last.

  Weight’s interruptive brunt vibrates and spins

  But lightness can deflect its strongest blast.

  Lightness is the sail that pulls the mast!

  It is the force of jocular endeavour.

  It is the only prize for being clever.

  ‘Anyone whose goal is something higher,’

  Quips Kundera, ‘must suffer vertigo.’

  But is it weight to which his thoughts aspire

  Or lightness? Well, the first will group below

  The latter, as the centrifuge can show –

  And so this gadget clarifies my trouble:

  Weight sinks, but lightness rises like a bubble.

  5. The Unconscious

  ‘The centre that I cannot find

  Is known to my Unconscious Mind;

  I have no reason to despair

  Because I am already there.’

  W.H. Auden, ‘The Labyrinth’

  Jack Yeats I’d call a centripetalist.

  Much like his brother, William, he was striving

  To find the reason patternings exist

  And reinvigorate them. What I’m driving

  At with all this pictographic jiving

  Can reckon Horace as an endorsee:

  As painting is, so poetry can be.

  The aquifer from which each draws its water

  Is hidden in the shadows of the head.

  It is the womb where Zeus conceived his daughter

  Who parleyed with Apollo when the red

  Rivers ran at Troy, where Paris fled.

  It is a land of dream-catchers and kvetches,

  It is a hunter’s cave adorned with sketches.

  Freud called it ‘the unconscious’, which I guess is

  As accurate a name for it as any –

  This ignis fatuus that luminesces

  To lure a thinker where the footing’s fenny.

  It is imagination’s spinning jenny:

  Its workers yearn for room, to roar and roam

  Or rise like Aphrodite from the foam.

  Thoughts come like actors on the conscious stage.

  They chatter in the wings before a show –

  ‘To die before the interval!’ ‘I’d gauge

  The punters well tonight.’ ‘Duck, do you know

  The author? Why so heavy? What’s his woe?’

  And so their season dredges, drags, and drudges

  Until, as one, they wipe off make-up’s smudges

  And cry, ‘Enough despair! Today we change

  Our tragic buskin for the comic sock.

  It’s time to flaunt our full, unfettered range

  And let the audience see how we rock.

  We’ve had our fill of threnody and shock

  And now it’s time to scratch the record book –

&
nbsp; To farce it up, mistake and be mistook!’

  6. Sleep

  ‘The righteous are those who can control their dreams.’

  John Fuller, ‘Logical Exercises’

  The house Picasso stayed in by the sea

  Surveys Antibes, across from Juan-les-Pins.

  Up there the painter sharpened his esprit

  And slowly found ses images Africains

  Mingling with his chèvres and sylvains.

  There he found new symbols for his dreams

  And drew them into life in doodled reams.

  Dreams! What are they? What defines a dream?

  Dreams are strict, contracted universes

  Composed on synapses. Their laws can seem

  Less comprehensible than witches’ curses,

  More recondite than doubtful nonsense verses.

  Dreams are our own and yet they are surprises:

  They are the speckled shells of our surmises.

  In daylight, dreams lurk on the edge of vision

  Or saunter past, apparelled as a charmer.

  It is their pride to jettison misprision

  And lift the visor of our fancy’s armour.

  Dreams are the cerebellum’s private drama!

  A bluffer’s answer to the double bluff,

  Dreams prove imagination is enough.

  Sleep’s the feasthall where the dreamer sups,

  Sleep blends the day’s bonne bouches with its slops.

  Sleep is the rich replenisher of cups.

  Sleep is a terminus where nothing stops,

  A Broadway hit that thrives and never flops!

  Sleep is the mind’s recalibrating sieve,

  Sleep is the minx we’ve all been sleeping with.

  Sleep makes this life a string of jamborees,

  Each one engrossing, graced, and garlanded.

  Sleep is the fortune teller’s tannic lees,

  The happy hypnotist inside my head,

  The one who backs or beckons me to bed.

  It is the clown, stunt-double, and the stooge.

  Sleep is the mind’s self-sorting centrifuge.

  7. The Page

  ‘There is one knowledge which it is every man’s duty and interest to acquire, namely, self-knowledge.’

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection

  Say I’m the subject, and the object’s me.

  Better that than nature, men and women,

  Astrophysics, truth, or gravity –

  I need a subject large enough to swim in

  And yet a cut of garment I’ll look slim in.

  I need a space to try my hand at order:

  I need, before a reader, a recorder.

  You, Page, my boundless partner, word-bound lover,

  My space to swim and dive and paddle free,

  You hold my note, you close me in your cover,

  You are my as-it-was and my shall-be!

  I am your supplicant, your refugee

  And you, my soft, mind-melting carrycot,

  My constant, flourishing forget-me-not.

  You are my strange estranger and my strength,

  My storyteller and my as-it-seems,

  You stretch me through the future without length,

  You flutter reams of colour through my dreams,

  You sweep my winter frost into your streams –

  My one reliability, my trust,

  My galvanizer, guarding me from rust.

  You, endless sinecure, my sin-forgiven,

  My last sincerity, my carry-on,

  The ruptures that your rivulets have driven

  Between my body’s sprung automaton

  And thinking’s evanescent eidolon

  Have broken what I was, but kept the pieces –

  You ward the Me my presence predeceases.

  So I’m the ‘centre’ I’ve been satelliting.

  A force that pulls me one way is the ‘-fugal’

  And ‘-petal’ is the other, self-alighting.

  Between them, I shall keep my lapses frugal,

  Sing the margins, sound the paper’s bugle!

  I’m in the centrifuge of pen and ink –

  It shows me what I am, and how I think.

  8. Love

  ‘All thoughts, all passions, all delights,

  Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

  All are but ministers of Love,

  And feed his sacred flame.’

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Love’

  Between my on-off amorous endeavours,

  The centrifuge has moved but stayed the same.

  It has outlived my ardentest ‘Forever!’s

  And still it plays a fascinating game.

  It bridles time and turns my temper tame.

  It hands me levers, reins, and steering wheels.

  It tells me what love gives and what it steals.

  Two butterflies whip over where I sit,

  Then double back as if to check on me.

  I say, ‘You funny flappers, go a bit

  On further down the garden and you’ll see

  A clematis I sowed when I was three –

  How many periods of buttertime

  Have passed between that planting and this rhyme?’

  They flounce away with silent disbeliefs

  That anyone could be so silly-minded.

  They are the morning’s lightest of motifs,

  Disturbing petals recently unwinded

  With instincts playful, fearless, and unbinded.

  They seem like animations of some huge

  Offcentring system like the centrifuge.

  The centrifuge, which shows me what I’m thinking,

  Caresses me asleep, shakes me awake,

  Propels me soaring when I feel like sinking,

  And turns my feet to flippers in the lake

  Of thought, to splash and tidalwave and slake

  The thirst I have for what this world conceals,

  For what the space of thought alone reveals.

  The summer falls in long festoons of heat.

  My heart, I have been careless, loose, with you,

  But when your rhythms tumble out of beat,

  The centrifuge can set their levels true –

  Since this is turning’s purpose: to construe.

  And so I pledge my tongue to song and dance.

  I’ll welcome what will come and call it chance.

  Observances

  1. Water

  When jetpacks overshoot their destination

  And zip us through the meadows like a bee,

  When trains arrive before we’ve built the station

  And find us dishing tickets out for free,

  When rivers are dispersed by irrigation

  And we are emptied to capacity

  But then replenished with a drenching drought,

  What will we say this life is all about?

  A river torrents on to feed the ocean.

  It tears from tributary down to delta.

  It roils from turmoil into new commotion.

  About it, enterprising willows swelter.

  Its swirling prompts a current of emotion,

  A naturally-occurring stasis-melter.

  The delta is the river at its close,

  An end that forks and widens as it flows.

  I sprawl here, on a mossy riverbank

  And contemplate the calming play of light.

  A cattle bell, not far off, starts to clank

  As all the water’s pristine rills ignite

  With quick reflections of the sun, which shrank

  Just moments previously out of sight

  And now rebursts. It is a nagging idyll.

  The luck of life on Earth seems such a riddle.

  Perhaps, a trillion lightyears distant, spiders

  Weave orange webs above a frozen sea,

  Curvaceous seedpods swerving by on gliders,

  Their windborne mission the discovery

>   Of future groves. What governs the deciders,

  Celestial equations they must be,

  That pick what proteins nature won’t erase

  And balance out the blisses of our days?

  Tilting at windmills in my inner mind,

  I had not planned on coming here to think

  But heart and foot, by accident, combined

  To lead me here, the river’s tumbling brink,

  A sun-kissed verge where life is undefined.

  I’ll sit here, while the eddies rise and sink,

  Where water pacifies my racing thoughts

  And sorts my senses, which were out of sorts.

  2. Time

  Opinions and possessions pass away

  But nothing can reduce the memory

  Of lounging, on a sunlit Saturday

  In tussocked fields below a creaking tree.

  The sparrows dive, and what is it they say?

  ‘Tomorrow-wards is our trajectory.

  Time is an emanation of our movement.

  On life-in-time, there can be no improvement.’

  Time is an emanation of our lives.

  Life emanates, in turn, from empty space.

  From expectation, space itself derives.

  Through all of this, our wishes interlace

  Their silver filigree. This pattern thrives

  And, stepping back, it stares us in the face.

  Millennia are needed to describe

  This tapestry we breathe and circumscribe.

  When young, sat in the back seat of a car,

  I used to quiz my weary parents, ‘Why?’,

  In answer to some answer. We were far

  Still from our destination, so they’d try

  Explaining. Thus, I learned the sun’s a star

  And that a magnet could be travelled by.

  Their answers always led to other questions,

  An endless chain of curious suggestions

  That drifted, as we drove, into a zone

  One cannot zero in on, cannot know.