The Multiverse

by Andrew Wynn Owen

  As quantum physics have a different tone

  From Newton’s clockwork laws of motion, so

  The universe itself is primed and prone

  To vanish when discussed minutely. Show

  Me matter and I’ll conjure energy.

  Bring thought and I will find uncertainty.

  Here is the end of curiosity

  (Of which there is no end): to ascertain

  That there is more to life than what we see,

  And there is much that runs against the grain.

  Is life a question? Can we choose to be

  Or not? There is, on logic’s abstract plane,

  A placeless point to which existence tends,

  The final end of all our final ends.

  3. Memory

  Here laurels susurrate between the cedars.

  Here nettles have invaded childhood haunts.

  House martins peck, implacable, at feeders.

  I recollect adventures, games, and jaunts

  Between the hedgerows. Here, with picnic, readers

  Arrange themselves, discovering detentes

  From all the pressures after which they hanker.

  Meanwhile I study memory, my anchor.

  I see a clearing where three siblings hacked,

  With tent-pegs for machetes, through the thorns

  That now, gnarled opportunists, have attacked

  A trainer-flattened patch. The clearing mourns

  For what has passed from it: long mornings stacked

  With water-pistols, tag, and tales of fawns

  Or stranger mythological delights

  Which thronged my daydreams and my dreams at night.

  Where are the ducks a cousin brought from market

  And I, intrepid saviour, snuck to save?

  Where is the trusty catgut tennis racket

  I loved, with sheer ineptitude, to wave?

  I camped once in this field, the night so dark it

  Seemed like a simulation of the grave

  But airy and, electrifyingly,

  A darkness that permitted me to see

  The outlines of my environs more clearly:

  The trees were stark against the wheeling stars,

  The trees were courtiers bowing cavalierly,

  The trees were like titanic avatars.

  Nearby, the river swished along austerely

  And, distant, I would catch the sound of cars

  Vrooming across a local carriageway,

  A noise that strengthened with oncoming day.

  I recollect a journey to a kitchen

  To make a surreptitious midnight snack,

  An enterprise that now, I guess, seems kitsch in

  Its innocent delight. I’d made a stack

  Of tidbits when, erupting through a glitch in

  The curtains, something threw me out of whack

  And lured me from my lush nocturnal feast:

  The morning star was rising in the east.

  4. Heart

  Backflipping summer courses through my veins,

  Reviving a fearless self I used to be.

  It plashes raindrops on my desert plains

  And sprouts elation out of lethargy.

  What is it beating underneath our brains?

  Between the lungs? A pumping urgency,

  Admonishing those doublings when we doubt

  That pattern’s what this life is all about.

  It surely knows the end that we are chasing.

  It is a radar, spotting better days,

  But has been, in its work, so self-effacing

  That often we’ve forgotten that it sways

  The movement of our movements, interlacing

  Paraboloid elation with the maze

  That we inhabit from our hour of birth

  Until we float, on wings, above the Earth.

  The stream it channels, which is nowhere near

  Or far and yet is everywhere at once,

  Emits a sound we feel but hardly hear.

  It’s been a cap to designate the dunce

  But none yet have not wished it to appear,

  This hope the king pursues, the nomad hunts.

  Aromatherapist and New York cop

  Start when it says and, when it says, must stop.

  Often I think about it and I smile.

  It carousels. It rips me at the seams.

  I feel both sad and happy. Muddled style,

  Perception. Roaring world. Sometimes, in dreams,

  I’ll wander through a garden, peristyle

  Enclosing. Centremost, a fountain teems

  With fish. Approaching there, to my surprise,

  I find they are not fish, but swimming eyes.

  And there they dapple, optic nerves for tails,

  And I am at a loss for what to think.

  They are about the size of fledgling quails.

  I stoop – not knowing why – as if to drink.

  They meet me, splashing up. My balance fails

  And, tottering, I trip – and then I sink

  Into this basin. Visions split and spread:

  It seems my eyes have wriggled from my head.

  5. Order

  The fractallating branches of an elm

  Spread their relieving shade above a bench

  Where light and love of landscape overwhelm

  My vacant mind. Here is a view to quench

  An Alexander’s craving for a realm

  No one would sink to spoil with tank or trench.

  In my mind’s eye, two figures are debating

  Which of their worldviews should have greater weighting.

  One says, ‘The world’s chaotic. I assert

  That order-making is the human lot.

  There is a waste that we must needs convert

  To pasture. We shall sober up the sot.

  The wilderness of aggravated hurt

  Never relents. To beat it, we must not

  Be hazy. We must battle not to see

  The simple facts misnamed simplicity.

  ‘To set in order is to be in love.

  Delight requires construction and control.

  Delight’s a ladder tumbling from above.

  Delight’s a clean and everlasting coal.

  Delight’s the push that escalates to shove.

  We are precarious. We are a shoal

  At risk from nets and tides. You must allow

  Our task is fixing. Order-making’s how.’

  The other laughs. ‘Far from it. I believe

  That order-praising is the only way.

  I wear this optimism on my sleeve

  And sing it to the skyline every day.

  The mind’s a loom for logic. We must weave

  A tapestry adapted to display

  The patterns of molecular convention.

  I’ll parse the world from first to last declension.

  ‘It is the trick of every organism

  To be alive by being organised.

  White light will scatter rainbows through a prism.

  White light is made of photons methodised.

  It is a sing-and-echo catechism

  Between the cries of which is it comprised.

  My task: to praise all shapes, before I’m gone,

  Proportion and precision have put on.’

  6. Disorder

  A giddy shriek of rupture – no, a rapture

  Upturning and rewiring all it touches.

  It is a scene no camera can capture.

  Such are the heart’s elusive such and suches.

  In every floating feeling there’s a catch or

  A moment when it seems to slip our clutches.

  Two voices in my cortex shout it out,

  Insistent each knows what it’s all about.

  The former roars, ‘Away with all this order!

  Be ruffled, be deprogrammed, be undone.

  A rigid mind becomes a theory-hoarder.

  The fundame
ntal thing is having fun –

  By broadsiding a ship and trying to board her,

  By staring in a frenzy at the sun.

  It’s swell to lob one’s cat among the pigeons.

  Such is the message of the great religions.

  ‘Resistance to the tyranny of plot

  Is how we differentiate our lives

  From sickly pap they fed us in the cot.

  In total desolation, there survives

  More life-affirming force than all the rot

  That hatches from the order-maker’s hives.

  My task is to waylay the rule of law

  And pin the lion of order’s monstrous paw.’

  The other frowns: ‘What order? I don’t see it.

  I mean to show things truly as they are.

  Chaotic and lopsided and so free it

  Explodes with contradictions, life is far

  More strange and stubborn than your type would tee it.

  We’ve hell and heaven in our repertoire.

  What living mind would opt for fixed and dead

  When topsy joy cavorts with turvy head?

  ‘Of water I will sing – not H2O.

  Water includes some duckweed and a fish.

  Pure categories are too abstruse to know.

  I like some spices in my lunchtime dish.

  I’d take The Leasowes over Fontainebleau.

  Stars pass not with dull whirrs, but with a swish.

  At heart, our only universal fixture

  Is Mother Nature’s hankering for mixture.’

  7. Calm

  A kestrel hovers by a roadside. Calm

  Encompasses my body. I am free

  And it is summer. Others fell to harm,

  Others I cared for, but, so far, not me.

  Even the puddles glint a rumpled charm.

  From here to the horizon I can see

  A landscape flushed with fugitive events.

  This is the everlasting present tense.

  Thanks be for morning’s slowly-clearing mist.

  Thanks be for stonework, earth’s apotheosis.

  Thanks be for crystallizing amethyst,

  And thanks for precious cellular osmosis.

  Thanks be when work and wonder coexist

  In grounded but uplifting symbiosis.

  Enthusing and suffusing, happiness

  Trickles like apple through a cider-press.

  I picture consciousness as running water:

  It bubbles on a mountain and descends,

  Dividing to its tasks like an aorta

  That branches into intertangled bends,

  Capillaries to furnish every quarter

  With oxygen that enervates and mends.

  It fuels the landscape it meanders in

  And feeds the border that I call the skin.

  I visualise my thoughts as v-tailed swallows

  That vault where nowhere meets the now and here.

  They drift, dispersed and low, across the hollows

  And then a speck ascends toward the clear.

  Irresolute, a single fledgling follows

  But soon the lot commingle and cohere:

  A meaningful formation, they unite

  And I feel calm, the apex of delight.

  Yes, I feel calm: an all-pervading Yes

  For triple-bladed windmills, traffic, cranes,

  And all the tchotchkes of inventiveness.

  A giant’s leap above me, aeroplanes

  Careen across the stratosphere, caress

  Those bounds hardwired to energise our brains,

  And signal how it is that we must cope:

  By learning, living well, and having hope.

  Reveries

  ‘Be secret and exult,

  Because of all things known

  That is most difficult.’

  W. B. Yeats, ‘To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing’

  i. On Beauty

  Some days, out in a field, it hits my mind

  Like wind wings up a bird.

  Chiming with nature, fervours find

  Release. It has conferred

  Eye-rhapsody, neck-shivers, fear-and-trembling

  As though the stable cosmos blurred

  And burst with smudgy unity, resembling

  The better hits

  Of Turner, all assembling

  Around a blitz

  Of tireless light, which cannot die

  But simply splits

  And sprawls. The well is deep. It will not dry.

  ii. A Soulful Choice

  Let’s say there’s evidence that ‘souls’ exist.

  What’s more, they transmigrate

  Eternally, but will desist

  And die if in a state

  Of frozenness for more than half an hour.

  Meanwhile, you’re plague-wracked. Grim, the great

  Physicians tending you present a sour

  And strange decision:

  Be frozen while they scour

  Every division

  Of human knowledge for a cure;

  Or make provision

  For bodily death, assured your soul’s secure.

  What’s more, before you choose, consider this:

  It’s thought the soul may be

  Some influence (it’s hit-and-miss,

  Soul-theory, currently)

  On character – but minimal, much less

  Than fallouts that we’ve learned to see

  From genes and nurture. Asked to second-guess

  A person’s actions,

  Most scientists profess

  That soul-subtraction’s

  Quite trivial. So it’s up to you:

  Call souls ‘distractions’

  And freeze, or trust in what you can’t construe.

  iii. Laughter

  ‘Aha-haha-haha-haha-hahah –’

  Today I feel so free.

  There’s no disaster could disbar

  The pointblank euphany

  And dizzy fanfare of this boundless sky,

  Whose indecipherability

  Has set me reeling, rolling. ‘Who am I?’

  ‘What is a mind?’

  One day (the day I die)

  I guess I’ll find

  No more to laugh at, yet this sound

  Of laughter, blind

  And blissful and unselfing, will resound.

  iv. The Hopes of a Naturalist

  It’s when I stumble from the usual track

  And catch the light just so,

  Rebounding, quick and dauntless, back

  Off water – then I know,

  Staggered again, the feel of good, and smile

  At glimmering gusts, the things that grow

  Exuberant in their being all the while,

  As I in mine,

  Observing clouds compile

  Columns of fine

  Prismatic mist. Wish-clarity

  Sizzles: a line

  Of linkage, nature’s, warms the heart of me.

  v. Joy

  Stark jumping jacks of sunlight and suspension,

  Updrafting dust, conspire

  To spin my spaced-out thoughts to a tension.

  I trip along the wire,

  Marvelling at the gravitational

  Defiances of that green fire,

  This growthy herbage, bristling as it shall

  Forever – no,

  Whenever wished-for, pal

  Of all who know

  The joy observances can strew.

  Were this not so,

  How could I hope to write these lines for you?

  vi. De-extinction

  The Harvard mammoth team are at it now.

  Inspecting strands of goop

  And using micro-blades to plough

  Divisions through a soup

  Of soon-to-be-cell-melded DNA.

  Though dino-spawn cluck in a coop,

  Their ancestors still rear to see the day,

  Trapped on a p
lane

  Where ghosts and gone things play.

  They’ll rise again.

  Sharp pterodactyl wings will swoop

  Through fields of grain,

  And restive hooves will muster in a troop.

  vii. Four-dimensional Crystals

  They operate through time as well, repeating

  In patterns pre-arranged,

  According to the force and seating

  Of particles unchanged

  Since when, in the beginning, all was set

  By what we know not. Some deranged

  Creator-figure maybe –? I would bet

  Perhaps all-good

  But fathomless, the threat

  Of harm that should

  Not happen being what it is.

  Oh sure, I could

  Go on, but look! This life. Its force, its fizz.

  viii. A Shape, a Shade

  A shape, a shade, brushed by me in the dusk

  And, at its touch, I knew

  Glutting unknownness, Hades musk:

  A bolt from out the blue!

  Destroyingly, it swelled the streetlights and

  Grew mischievous, immersive, new

  With reconstruing strangeness. All the land

  Fell back from it

  Till, rushing up, a grand

  Eeriness lit

  The city where I live and love.

  Deep sky unknit,

  Unleashing massive music from above.

  ix. Others

  Have others other lives? Why, naturally.

  Others have other hopes

  And other knowledges. To be

  Is to be one who copes,

  An undivided individual

  Surefooted on the pebbly slopes

  Of chancy choice – and yet, the rationale

  For what we are

  Can root in the locale

  Of any star:

  Life is the consequence of laws.

  Though lightyear far

  Apart in spirit, we are close in cause.

  x. Mitteleuropa

  A sleepy village built around steep alleys