Not in the now

Here are some more wonderful insights from the fantastic David Riley.

We're the only creatures in the universe with a real humdinger of a sense of the future. That and the past are the places we live in the most, rarely in the here and now. Also, isn't living in the  future always seen as the best? Think of the everyday phrases that have praise for living in the future built in. from forward thinker, planner to "ahead of the curve" and the almost business-speak, "I'm on it." Whole industries are predicated on it, advertising for example, not to mention the multi-trillions in the stock exchanges betting lives on what will happen from the next few seconds to few months. In fact, think of the way time infiltrates language dragging along its simple praise and blame classifications with it. From "he lives in the past" to "old school," there's a whole subtle set of implications as to how labels are placed to sum up others, it's the essence of spin doctoring, sound bites and a modernity based on planning for whatever colour of future your lords and masters think is good for you. They'll indoctrinate you about it on Twitter if that's not out of date yet.

The future is a very egalitarian tyranny, gripping most of us. There's the obnoxious middle class idea of the "gap year" (gap between what exactly - and how come they know there'll be a thing for there to be a gap in?) and the ludicrous notion of youthful hedonism - apparently living for the moment but actually built on ideas about the future (the ant and the grasshopper were both creatures tied to the hands of a clock in someone's head). Or if that nonsense doesn't appeal you could be nostalgic (aww bless), or, "yes nice Christmas, quiet but OK thanks." What do you think of them, eh?

We're also the only creatures we know of with a sophisticated language, tied to time. That's not to say that language changes over time, even though it obviously does but to suggest that in all our thinking, time is there allowing us to make judgements about people based on attitude to time.

And in poetry? Time has been there, implicitly and explicitly, the future doing its job as assistant seducer in time's winged chariot or a place for reminiscence where the clocks have been stopped. Not surprisingly poetry too changes over time - but how much are its attitudes to time itself altered, especially the time as aide to implicit judgement mentioned above? It has the possibility to do so, with its inventive approach to meaning it could stretch the tired metaphors of spin, past and future, give us a new language and new attitudes to each other.

Perhaps we could make new year resolutions to see if we could remake language and thought for the future. Don't put it off for another time.

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Thoughts for Christmas

Here is the second post from David Riley as he covers for the Tuesday Blog

Is poetry always religious?

Is religion always influenced by the politics of the day? 

Therefore, is Christmas poetry always political? 

Do you need to understand religion before you can understand most poetry, from Beowulf to the Canterbury Tales to Eliot? 

Do you need to know the nativity story to understand Coleridge, Rossetti and Wordsworth?

How much Christmas themed poetry have you seen in the shops recently? 

Are poets making Christmas commercial?

Is there extra exposure for poetry at this time of year? 

Does it help poetry?

Are Christmas carols poetry?

Are some more Catholic than Protestant (and vice versa)?

Do they all have the same message?

Is Christmas relevant any more? Is Christmas poetry important?

Is it as saccharine as Christmas card verses?

Are these big questions? 

Happy Christmas.

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Numbers are the closest thing to God

This week the Tuesday Blog has been written by the wonderful David Riley


Numbers are the closest thing to God since the old chap's sad demise in the nineteenth century. Or so some would say. They claim the little fellows have a whole realm to themselves in which they exist independent of our minds and no matter what we do they will always persist in this other world - and no, I'm not making this up, I had a logic teacher who believed such an idea (that's been hanging around since at least the time of the ancient Greeks.) Numbers are  then perhaps one of the most familiar and at the same time strangest of our everyday companions. In our trying to work out what they get up to when we're not looking they've also managed to drive quite a few people round the bend. This special favour is particularly granted to those who dealt with infinities. Yes, plural. Some infinities are bigger than others. Don't ask.

I like numbers even though I'm useless at trying to do anything special with them. I do recognize their importance to us, perhaps their transcendence and that they have more and more influence in the modern day from explaining how the world works to computers and e-commerce. They've also been highly influential in the lives of some of the people I've studied. For example the early astronomer Johannes Kepler believed his work using mathematics allowed him to "think God's thoughts after him."

Interesting enough but what about maths, numbers and the arts? Well for a long time (yes, at least the Greeks again) people have recognised how close numbers and music are for example. In mathematics there are special symbols; there are in music too. They are even closer than this, of course. The way strings and things vibrate is the key to the way Western music has been interpreted since Pythagoras experimented on jars containing  various amounts of liquid and discovered what we call beautiful sounds had a specific link to the amount of liquid the jars contained. The same went for strings, stop them in certain places and the sound changes.

And as for poetry one of the most important things about it is rhythm, much more so than rhyming. As Neil Astley says, "the essence of all poetry has always been rhythm." Most of Shakespeare is written in blank verse, which does not rhyme - but it does have metre - whether the dee dum X 5 of much of the Bard's to the feel of the ballad's driving force. People may  not know much about the technicalities but they know the flow. What makes a good football chant? It doesn't have to rhyme but it does have rhythm and rhythm is all about numbers with a  smattering of beauty and truth, Much the same as those who've played with numbers, poets are on the edge of a wonderful world that they explore and guide us lesser mortals in an exploration of it and ourselves. Will you see what you can find?

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