THE CRAZINESS OF The Whole Thing

The most unpublishable form of writing is surely the long poem, for the simple reason that this is also the most unreadable. Few read poems and no one reads long poems. This has been especially true in the last century, which favoured the short imagistic poem hinting at meanings and depths, (often not actually there). The ultimate ideal was the haiku, which I suspect many poets, myself included, have attempted to write.

So when the idea for a long poem came to me I pushed it away in horror. In the first place it would never be published, in the second place even if it was published no one would read it, and in the third place it would never be published in the first place. Let pass from me this cup, I prayed. But the cup kept coming back, saying, ‘Go on, try a sip.’ The poem kept demanding to be written and finally I said to myself, fatally, I’ll just start and see how it goes, though of course without committing. Ten years later I was still at it.

It was never finished, only abandoned, first expanding with the exuberance of the early universe after the big bang, then shrinking back to a fraction of this size and going through countless drafts. Now that it’s being published by Mica Press (details at micapress.co.uk) and no more revising is possible I can step back and attempt to understand the insanity (or maybe, drawing on the great human talent for justification, try to justify it). I enjoyed and admired many short imagistic poems with genuine depth and tried to write poems like these but finally realised that this was not my thing, and besides, these short, indirect, enigmatic poems omitted so much of the plenitudinousness of the world.

As the title suggests, The Whole Thing abandons minimalism for the opposite extreme of maximalism. The basic premise is that everything is connected, so in order to understand anything it is necessary to understand everything, and to use every means of understanding, especially history, philosophy and science.  In particular, attempting to understand the activities of an ordinary day requires understanding the life and in turn the history of the universe. All the boundaries, whether of discipline or significance, are artificial, and chopping carrots is as mysterious as photosynthesis, the immune system, black holes and the meaning of life.

But some boundaries are zealously guarded. Another twentieth-century belief was that ideas are fatal to literature, especially poetry, and must be avoided like the plague. I too believed this for a long time but began to be secretively drawn to philosophy, and eventually came out of the closet with philosophically-oriented prose books, which inevitably horrified writer and poet friends. It began with what I believed to be an original insight – that everything is relation and process – but soon discovered was a strong contender for oldest idea ever, espoused by early thinkers (Heraclitus and Marcus Aurelius), poets (Ovid and Lucretius) and even religions (Buddhism and Daoism), and popping up regularly through the centuries, including our own. This process-relational way of thinking has influenced my perspective on most things, and has inevitably permeated my poetry, especially The Whole Thing.

And it turns out that the twentieth century prohibition on ideas in poetry was not always observed. Wallace Stevens was a great admirer of the modern process philosopher, Henri Bergson, going so far as to claim that Bergson was the greatest philosopher since Plato, and Bergson’s ideas are all through Stevens’ poetry. This does not seem to have done the work any harm. (And for a more recent example of process-relation philosophy enriching poetry, check out the marvellous Corsons Inlet by A. R. Ammons, Corsons Inlet by A. R. Ammons | Poetry Foundation). Nor did Stevens have anything against philosophy in general. ‘… if we say that the philosopher pursues the truth in one way and the poet in another, it is implied that both are pursuing the same thing’. Or: ‘A realization of the infinity of the world is equally a perception of philosophy and a typical metamorphosis of poetry.’

Stevens could have added science as another realization of the infinity of the world. Philosophy, science and the arts are all ways to surprise and delight with speculation and revelation. But they have become separated into mutually antagonistic camps. Scientists, including Stephen Hawking, have dismissed philosophy with contempt. Philosophers, including Ludwig Wittgenstein, have dismissed science with equal contempt. And many poets are contemptuous of both philosophy and science, but especially science, abhorred as the work of philistine materialists who have not only disenchanted the world but are responsible for its accelerating degradation and may even be responsible for its eventual annihilation.

Yet what greater realization of the infinity of the world than the revelation that the universe is not a single static galaxy but billions of galaxies, all accelerating away from each other at increasing rates, and not a void but a seething swarm of bizarre phenomena like black holes, dark energy and dark matter, while earth matter is not inert substance, or indeed any substance, but a vibrating quantum field of foam? And what greater realization of the infinity of the human body than the revelation that it is not autonomous but a colony of microbes more numerous than the stars of the galaxy, all with different DNA, maintaining the body in ways not fully understood and even influencing the mind? Or that the body is a perpetual battlefield, with cunning viruses constantly adopting new tactics and disguises to infiltrate, and equally intelligent T cells constantly patrolling to identify and eliminate invaders, in a war so sophisticated it makes actual war look crude?

The belief that scientists are necessarily philistines is obvious nonsense. To take only one example, the Italian physicist, Carlo Rovelli, has written with love about music, philosophy and poetry, and lamented the separations. ‘A science that closes its ears to philosophy fades into superficiality; a philosophy that pays no attention to the scientific knowledge of its time is obtuse and sterile.’ Rovelli grieves especially over the separation of science and literature and so admires the Roman poet Lucretius for including science and philosophy in his long poem De Rerum Natura, that he quotes extensively from it in three of his popular physics books.

De Rerum Natura is also so revered by the contemporary American process philosopher, Thomas Nail, that he has devoted three substantial books to it. And Nail neatly closes the philosophy-science-poetry triangle by discussing quantum physics and quoting Carlo Rovelli in the first of his books on Lucretius. In fact De Rerum Natura seems to have become highly fashionable, which suggests an encouraging acceptance of long poems, poetry that draws on philosophy and science, and a process-relational view of life.

The major autobiographical strand in The Whole Thing also violates the twentieth-century belief that poetry should be impersonal, an edict issued most papally by T.S. Eliot, though his own poetry is permeated by a personal disillusionment, disgust and disdain. As there is no view from nowhere, so there is no view from no one. All poetry is personal. Wallace Stevens again: ‘There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet’. For me the personality is the attraction. I read to engage with a person not a ‘text’. Reading is a contact sport.

Personality is inescapable. So all the above fine talk of wishing to combine poetry, history, philosophy and science is indeed just after the fact rationalisation of a personal impulse based on personal interests. We can write only what personality and experience have given us to write. Anything else, any attempt to follow fashion, is bound to fail. Write for the world and it will matter to no one. Write for yourself and it may matter to everyone. As Emerson, frequently quoted in The Whole Thing, put it: ‘Happy is he who looks only into his work to know if it will succeed, never into the times or the public opinion; and who writes from the love of imparting certain thoughts and not from the necessity of sale – who writes always to the unknown friend.’ Or more tersely from Patrick Kavanagh: ‘You haven’t got a chance with fraud/ And might as well be true to God.’

So in the end I decided to let rip and run with it, enjoy the writing for its own sake, value the process rather than the product, forget about publication, try for what I have called ‘the senescent sublime’. This is the late style that, goaded by acute awareness of mortality, no longer gives a shit and just crazily goes for bust, oblivious to fashion, opinion, reception, good taste and decorum. Great examples include late Picasso and late Yeats.

Here are the first pages of The Whole Thing:

Again a day as, undiminished and unwearied by its journey

from the sun, ardent light slips with ease around

the curtains fully drawn to radiate over the ceiling in spokes

and emblazon the wall with a strip of bright gold,

and the great tree just outside the window, though rooted,

and lacking a breeze to inspire it, is once more excited.

In the shock waves that emanate still from creation

the branches are trembling, the leaves are astir,

and now is heard a jubilant clarion, herald of morning,

a trumpet blast to summon forth from slumber the soul,

complementing aurally the rays on the ceiling -

a succinct but wholly distinctive fart from Ray next door.

There is no obligation to rise - and with the beloved

still away I can spread in a star shape to revel in bed space.

This just after waking is the inspiration time. Dreams exercise

the mind with random associating, making work those

lazy synapses, training them, so that, when consciousness returns,

new and unlikely but thrilling connections spark and hum.

And here comes today’s new idea (in fact very old) -

that everything is related and everything is process.

There is nothing substantial (no ultimate stuff),

nothing conclusive or final (no endstates), nothing immutable

(never a fixity), nothing reducible (no independent parts),

nothing predictable (never necessity), nothing repeatable

(never a same), and no absolute or ideal (no beyond).

There is only the unity in process of everything connected to

everything, everything changed by and changing everything.

And the whole thing is therefore to be a whole thing

that is wholly immersed in the greater whole thing.

So give yourself. Strip naked. Step in. Get under

the glittering sunflower and gasp once again at

cold impact on sweating soiled shivering bare flesh.

This is reality. This is the cold truth. Bear it …

Wear it. Don with pride the flashing silver cloak

of flow that clothes the Gods, that is the Gods.

Be only flow to be divine. It is all a flowing,

all a flow. Not a thing permanent. Not a thing solid.

The bare creature also a creation of flow,

a mere vortex of energy flowing through.

A conduit of divinity. God is flow. Raise open

palms in acceptance and gratitude, lift up the face

for a vehement, pointillist head massage

that brings an alert trance, a rigorous associating

reverie as notions incompatible find forbidden love

and breed. It is all flowing oneness, though a unity

of opposites, relaxant and stimulant, a surrender to

flow that yet stands up to flow, immerses to transcend,

goes deep to get high and conforms to transgress.

To the song of the sunflower my tuneless croak.

To the silver shower my yellow piss. I am one

with the oneness, everything and its opposite,

God and a nobody, powerless but monarch of all

I survey. Enough revelation for one day. A towel

to cover the creature that can’t tolerate long exposure

but must dress again for its role as a person of substance,

departing the vortex that swirls round the plughole,

convinced it will flourish for ever but going abruptly

down the drain with a gurgle of disbelief, rage and despair.

Aflow in the process, at one with the oneness

I gladly partake of the wealth of this promised land

flowing with pasteurised semi-skimmed milk and organic honey

of forest bees. For the first of my daily five pieces of fruit,

I snap from a bunch a long banana, fat and firm, its brown stalk

the prow of a Polynesian war canoe painted yellow

for a festival and conveying in tribute to a king

fruit to slice in his luxury muesli. Yellow is the colour

of happiness so I bare yellow teeth in a grateful grin.

And here is the first sacrament of the day. ‘Body and blood

of Christ,’ I intone, to transubstantiate mint tea and multigrain toast

and make this day a quest for the hidden quotidian,

the eternal diurnal, not its macro desires and frustrations

but its micro adventures and satisfactions, its sacraments

and rituals from matins to vespers, their utensils and vessels,

and the multiple rewards of unitasking, the practice, subversive

and spiritual, of doing, alone and in silence, one thing at a time.

Today there is time. For the Lord hath anointed me

with the balm of retirement. I toil not and neither do I spin

mission statements nor project proposals and neither go in

with dissemblers and sit with vain persons in meetings

but here in my own home commune with my heart

in my own swivel chair and be still. Now in

the cool serenity of morning everything is possible.

There is time … whole, uncalibrated. This is about time.

Intending to take my time, I commence with the writing

preparation rite - sharpening three pencils one by one, carefully,

in an old sharpener, full of old shavings but still releasing

fragrance when I thrust in the soiled, blunted head and give

the body a twist, which the blade at first delightfully resists …

but then dull grey surface skin springs off like apple peel over a knife

to release a fresh wood scent, reveal zesty brightness

beneath and a surgical point that can prick and pierce,

although this is no longer the point because neither

disgust nor contempt but praise alone renews the soul.

So give praise and take heart, I say once again as I drive the old head

deeper in and impart to the old wood and lead a sharp twist.

Then I place the last pencil point-up in a jar and incant

the propitiatory morning prayer: God, Goddess, Ground of Being,

Demiurge, World Spirit, Shiva, Tao, Beloved, whatever the name,

you who invest with such richness and mystery cosmos and earth,

possess me, inspire me, endow me and fire me.

                        Bestow on me now a late break.

                        I’m sixty-nine for fuck’s sake

                        But only just seeing how strange it all is.

                        I want to make a whole song and dance about this.

               So raise up my passionate benison

                        To the falsetto heights of Roy Orbison,

               Grace my shamanic dance

                        With Fred Astaire elegance.

                        Let’s make The Whole Thing

                        Shamble, soar, sing and swing.

But to celebrate the small is no small undertaking. Since everything is connected to everything else and possesses a history conditioned by and conditioning everything else, in order to understand anything it is necessary not just to understand everything but also the history of everything, including one’s own unique, complex and constantly unfolding history.

‘All things are interwoven with one another,’ said Aurelius. ‘Everything is linked and works together giving form to the one universe.’

So, to explain the minutiae of a day requires the chronicle of a life, which in turn requires the history of the universe to date. 

Therefore, to try to grasp everything, let mingle high and low, micro and macro, far and near, east and west, present and past, sub-atomic and supra-galactic, mythic and mundane, divine and profane, the historical sweep and the daily creep, the tales of a fleeting speck of dust and the enduring immensity in which it floats, the absurd and sublime.

And let mingle disciplines, genres and specialisms. Come at it every way possible - it takes a shitload of epistemological diversity to get any kind of grip on ontological unity. Many and winding are the ways to the One.

With a telescope at one eye and a microscope at the other, in the left hand Chuang Tzu and in the right hand a physics book, the left brain fretfully enquiring if this is science or a fairy tale, philosophy or religion, history or mythology, reverence or blasphemy, fiction or naked truth, poetry or prose, and the freely-associating right brain replying that The Whole Thing is all these and much more, plus jokes.