Here is a little poem, another sonnet, in which I am trying to feel my way through the intuition that there is something delimiting and stultifying about the way our knowledge, our self awareness, our very location on the globe are all expressed nowadays through networks, web locations, universal resource locators. A poem which began with the need to slip past these meshes, go offline, and feel for a knowledge that cannot be digitised ended in a meditation on fruitful darkness, via negativa, finding God in absence and otherness. Here it is, for what its worth, I present it, fully embracing the irony that this poem about escaping ‘the wireless meshes of tenacious networks’, comes to you wirelessly over just such a network. But perhaps it will encourage you, like me, to be sometimes unplugged and offline, to be earthed instead to the unearthly.
As always you can hear it by clicking on the title or the play button
Lost and Found
Slip past the scanners and creep in between
The wireless meshes of tenacious networks,
Stay with the mystery, remain unseen,
Unfindable behind these shadowed earthworks.
Wait till the waves are gone, the way is clear,
The one location, always unlocated,
The last of earth, is always somewhere near.
Time out of time, uncounted and undated,
Awaits you there, but you must come unknown
Through your own shadow, crouched and hushed and deathly.
You lose the light, and find yourself alone,
Feeling your way beyond the only path
Through that dark wood, until you catch your breath
And your lost heart is earthed to the unearthly.
Thought you might appreciate this man.
Gregg
Sent from my iPhone
Much obliged.
Wow. Thanks. Beautiful.
Kind regards, Marga Jann, RIBS
Thanks 🙂
Thanks
Beautiful. Just where I am . . . today. Thank you Malcom!
Malcolm 🙂 Don’t you hate typos?
Thanks
The last line is really meaningful. Thank you!
A wonderful image for an elusive place…almost the stuff of dreams. I went on a wildflower hike with a few people and it was idyllic…till the sound of a jet overhead reminded us that we were not beyond the reach of modern civilization. This inspires me to keep looking for that still secret place. Thanks ever so much!
Thanks
Love the prison-break imagery here – lots to think about! Thanks.
Lisa
Thanks
i read your poem soon after reading Will Self’s essay in the Guardian on the death of the novel http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction and somehow the two connected in my mind. It seems to me that you touch on a reality here that goes deeper than any form of expression of it, even your poetry much as I love it!
That’s interesting. Perhaps the first time I find myself singing from the same hymn sheet as Will Self! But I think he has a point. I heard him speaking about it on news night.