familiasyncopation

Tags

2016, 7*, apartment, baby, breeze, brother, cactus, children, cotton, family, father, Granada, laughing, meal, passing, portrait, running, sound, streets, sun, Sunday, talking, tragedy, uncle, walls

                                familiasyncopation

                                down
down in the narrow streetways of the Gran Realjo of always sunny Granada

                                                                clak
                                                vacuum clak whines
                                quickly clak scrapescrape around
                the ap – clak – ment

                light cotton cloth hangs
                                back into the room
                                                hangs
                                                relents
                                                hangs                hangs

                family
                                sits
                                                variably
                                                                for the
                                                                                meal
                father’s sentence – chairscrape –
                                ri – co – ch – e – t – s
                                                around four walls
                                                                in warm and all-inclusive statemental embrace                
                                                                                and continues – despite interruptions – all the while                

                children lament a chasing game
                                of plakplak sandals
                                with surprising tragedy
                                                in the street below an uncle

                pushing the baby
                                half on the pebbles                from time to time
                                                “a^hahahaha … herrr”
                                                                talks staccato with his brother

                light cotton cloth
                                billowing out, not quite
                                                          not quite
                                                snagging
                                on the cactus

                leans back into the room

 

the title runs together the Spanish word for family (which ends in the useful prefix ‘a’ which links) with syncopation to provide a gloriously arrhythmic portrait of a family meeting for midday dinner on a Sunday through the wide open windows of the apartiemento; I’m not even sure if all the noises I heard were from the same family, but that doesn’t matter, they were, they were;

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

breeze wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Simon Upon The Downs
family wormhole: ‘field of corn …’
father wormhole: Doctor Strange III – the needs of billions
passing wormhole: industrial estate
sound wormhole: … swap round
streets & walls wormhole: passersby
sun wormhole: woven-through
Sunday wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Olly
talking wormhole: sleep now
uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – from arm to nature, doing nothing

 

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Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – from arm to nature, doing nothing

Tags

'scape, 2016, 5*, bench, blackbird, blue, breeze, childhood, cuckoo, daffodil, dinner, echo, field, garden, green, kitchen, lightning, looking, nature, no thought, non-doing, past, present, shadow, sound, speech, thought, time, trees, uncle, walls, wood, writing

 

 

 

                ‘when’s uncle coming back?’ tin-
                colander-clnkscrape-against-
                enamel ‘he’ll be back soon; run

                along now’ plate-shuffling ‘where
                IS Mick, he was going to check
                on something …’ cutlery-placed-

                on-wood ‘oh, he’ll be standing
                in a field somewhere, looking …’
                from arm to nature, doing nothing

                I wish I had more time to float
                about on the surface; I made a
                garden seat from the wood

                of an ancient cottage, six hundred
                years old, a daffodil in the breeze,
                the echo mocking the cuckoo

                in the blue shadows, green pasture
                walls of tree acknowledged by
                no conscious thought; lightning,

                magnetism of blackbird commentary,
                the paper I write on through time left
                not empty-handed as the present slips

                                              through
                                                              sensory
                                                                                 fingers
                                                                                              to the
                                                                                                            dead past

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – On Doing Nothing

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

bench & blackbird & blue & breeze & echo & garden & green & shadow & time & trees & wood wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – On Doing Nothing
childhood wormhole: the / bright yellow / world
field wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – moment&
kitchen wormhole: early evening
lightning wormhole: “Darling” – poewieview #28
looking wormhole: El Palacio, 1946
sound & speech wormhole: my seat // now
thought wormhole: Doctor Strange II – … things are the same again
uncle wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Precious Moment
walls wormhole: constant hummm
writing wormhole: tiling

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Precious Moment

Tags

1967, 3*, air, answers, beauty, being, bells, black, breath, breeze, brown, bull, cause and effect, childhood, clarity, clouds, cows, curtains, dancing, dawn, dew, doing, dusk, earth, east, Einstein, elm, energy, evening, field, freedom, grass, green, grey, heat, hedge, hills, horizon, identity, Jupiter, leaves, life, light, logic, meadow, mind, moment, months, moon, morning, mother, mouse, nature, night, nightjar, noise, openness, order, owl, questions, quiet, rabbit, rebirth, scarlet, September, silence, silhouette, silver, sky, slow, space, stars, summer, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, time, truth, ultimate reality, uncle, universe, valley, velvet, white, wind, wings, woodland, words

A Precious Moment

As after the heat of a summer’s day the face glows in the mildness of evening, so the face of the countryside glows in the mildness of early autumn.   The summer months have infused the merest suggestion of brown in the deepening green of the foliage and the face of the earth gives up its warmth to the stars above to see them dance.   It was into this calm that I walked one late September’s eve.   The evening star cast her unblinking eye across the heavenly dome to Jupiter in the darkening east and the nightjar echoed its song above the empty fields.   I stood at the end of the stack-yard and returned the disinterested gaze of a cow in the field beyond.

It is during these slow hours when the pace of the day has declined, that the smaller noises of the land become apparent.   The bull, who was tethered a full two hundred yards away in the next field could be heard to rattle his chain and blow down his nose at a particularly juicy clump of grass he has found.   Behind me in the ‘maternity’ box, a freshly calved heifer mooed huskily yet very softly as its offspring raised its head suddenly at a strange sound.   Perhaps it was the sound of ancient timbers creaking under the weight of centuries, or that of the leaves above whispering to the bowed stems in the hay meadow below.   Or maybe it was the very silence that enshrouded these small sounds that attracted its attention, for silence is so startling in its rarity and its beauty.   Dusk gave way to night and I became aware of the immense depths of space, the dizzy height of the mackerel sky, and although it was the clouds that moved, it seemed they were stationary against the clear black silhouettes of the elms and that it was the motion of the gibbous moon behind the clouds that alternately blackened and silver-plated the night.   Even at the tender and romantic age of sixteen I was aware of this quietude, and in one enlightened moment jotted down these few words on an old envelope:

         Soft, soft, the bell that tolls the evensong
         Across full summer’s empty fields serene.
         And slowly draws the scarlet cloak, the hem’s
         Black velvet, diamond specked, communes me with
         The white barn owl, who with his noiseless wings
         Doth glide and swoop upon the luckless mouse.
         Selene set within the lap of dusk
         Transmutes the living green to silver plate,
         Enshrouds my world with immobility.
         And with a quietude that frees the mind
         Of bondage from the peering eyes of day,
         I fain become the earth, the sky, the all.

But it wasn’t until my late teens that I realised there are two times during the twenty four hour cycle when such a quietude exists. One is just before the dusk and the other just before dawn.   Although both seem to be divisions between day and night, the prelude to dawn seems to me to be the more startling and more satisfying to experience.   In the evening the mind is released into a reverie bound by personal conscious thought, but during the morning pause one experiences a freedom and profundity of thought that is rarely to be found in any other part of time.

It is barely half past five in the morning when I start milking, but often I arrive at the cowshed half an hour before in order to experience this precious moment.   Although at this hour the ‘Stone that puts the stars to flight’ has yet to be flung, I can sense the great spaciousness of the valley before me.   Again the trees move softly and the long grass in the hay meadow sifts the breath of night, and I wait.   I wait for that incorporeal beauty that is the union of soul and nature.   It begins where the breezes end and the rustling leaves are stilled.   A serene stillness envelopes the woods and meadows and even I am not conscious of breathing.   I am drawn into the quietude and become part of it; become part of the very earth on which I stand; part of the universe through which I move.   I have become part of each blade of grass in the valley before me, part of every hill.   I feel myself part of the earth, feel its very movement through space.   Unfortunately mere words can no longer be the conveyance of the emotions involved (and I use the word ‘emotions’ for want of a better noun) for they become so expansive and so personal.   No longer can mere words impress the reader’s soul with such profundity of emotion that this experience releases within me.   Each must go his own way, search alone and experience it first hand and with an open mind.

A thought is born and from that thought comes two more.   The two are made four and the four made eight, a self-multiplying chain reaction of thoughts has been set in motion that flows with great haste through the mind; in fact a torrent of thoughts in one brief second, and yet each one is startlingly clear and leads the mind one step nearer the truth.   The heavenly dome is vast above the valley and the stars, thrown into their mythological patterns by the great cosmic hand, impress their presence on the mind with unusual brilliance and time is no more.   Now the mental hosts are converging, and step by step I am racing towards that vertex which is the ultimate truth.   The questions are being answered at an ever increasing rate, the startling, brutal logic disclosing the result of a preceding reaction which itself, reveals a cause.   So through to the highest plane the mind soars upon an ever accelerating reversal of the law of causation. But the pace is too much.   The mind flags and begins to flounder.   At this juncture the mind can be likened to a water skier who, while the pace is kept up skims along the surface in the sun, but immediately he slows down he begins to sink, until at length he finds himself floundering with no forward movement.   Now the mind has become weak and cannot comprehend the unfathomable thought.   But I have brushed the grey curtain; I have seen a light faint though it may be and both my physical and spiritual selves have been revitalised and my cup runneth over.

For most of our lives we are lost beings out of tune with life around us.   Only during such precious moments as these do we fit into the great harmonious chord; all things round and above have their special place in it, from the fat brown rabbit throbbing in the cornfields to the fleecy pieces of golden cloud that sail upon the pale green skies of dusk.   Worries, anxieties, tensions, all are reduced to their proper size in relation to life, and as the imperceptible ‘Left hand of dawn’ lifts the veil on the eastern horizon, we are cleansed and reborn with the stripling day.

It is only during such periods that nature can be reduced to anything approaching order, and that there is an order I am in no doubt.   Einstein’s inquiring mind was working on the universal equation when the workings of that very same equation stilled his physical being; perhaps now he has solved it, we in this life never shall.   The perpetual motion of nature is the perfect machine and we are part of that machine.   It is complete within itself, recreating its own new parts from the debris of the old.   No energy is wasted or lost, just charged in form.   Nature permits us a marginal tolerance within which we may make one or two adjustments to suit our needs and requirements, but beyond this we dare not go for we merely create more problems than we solve.

         So does she pass, the gentle night,
         Slow seeps the dawn upon the scene.
         Dew sparkling in the first light of
         The new day shows where she has been.
         The eyes of day now open on
         The dewy sward and gossamer
         Bows low beneath its pearly load,
         And hedgerows faintly scent the air
         With green along the unused road.
         And I am born once more and see
         The day as I once first beheld –
         A child within his mother’s arms,
         Another, within its mother’s arms.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air & field & morning wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
beauty wormhole: the policies came to nothing
being wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
black & wind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
breath wormhole: inbreath
breeze wormhole: and that’s where I are
brown wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
childhood wormhole: 1964
clouds wormhole: reaching branch
evening & silhouette wormhole: tired
green & space & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:
grey & horizon wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
hedge & hills & life & light wormhole: tag cloud poem IX – haiku is awkward / the more that is left in / like uncombed hair
identity wormhole: with endless love
leaves & mother wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
moon wormhole: don’t look / at her eyes – poewieview #18
night & silence & sky wormhole: a crack of lightning / in the dark of night
openness wormhole: ‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27
quiet wormhole: Jericho
silver wormhole: Jon
thought & time wormhole: inbreath
white wormhole: mauve
words wormhole: bloogying

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:

Tags

'scape, 1783, 2016, 8*, balloon, beginning, Bois de Boulnogne, breathing, circle, clouds, colour, creativity, dark, death, distance, earth, end, Eternity, eyes, fate, glass, gourds, green, growth, heart, humanity, identity, letter, life, light, line, machine, Mars, meadow, Milky Way, name, now, numbers, oak, orange, pattern, questioning, shape, silence, solar system, song, space, speech, speed, stars, table, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, time, toad, uncle, universe, windows, wood, yellow

 

 

 

a bowl of gourds on the dark-wood table
before the window before the paddock to the
piggery, unadorned, and cultivated through
chance and heel, forgotten beside the trellis;

a bowl of colour and varied shape: Bishop’s
Mitre, Red Turk’s Cap; one looks like the
old orange toad who lives behind the
water butt and likes to be called Bebe;

but the Montgolfiere balloon of yellow
and green took me up through slated
cloud in 1783 from the Bois de Boulogne,
so came the silence on the way to the stars

such a time away at ions of eyes per hour,
rivulets in tributary down the inside of the
flask by letter and equation far beyond my
jiggery and pokery, round ticket through

time …   I breathed in back from the mass
so distant that its light would never return,
back in through milky way and system,
faster than any quantum of backward light,

back past giants and Mars, back into
Earth’s sweet atmosphere and the waiting
bowl brimming with the circles and undulate
trajectory of every plot surmised beyond

my paned windows; where meadow fescue
curves like blackened oak and manual
labour, abhorrent of vacuum and straightened
line (those harbingers of discontinuance):

they almost screamed at me, “This is now,
this is NOW;” mind confined by time grades
eternity by linear thought which always
misses the soft canticle of the gourds:

                                                                      “So man, upon his world so great
                                                                      Has always wanted to create
                                                                      Machines which, started once will never
                                                                      Cease but carry on for ever.

                                                                      Yet all the time O foolish man,
                                                                      You’re merely part of that great plan,
                                                                      A tiny part, hast thou not seen
                                                                      This wondrous universe machine?

                                                                      This motion so perpetual
                                                                      Is the universe and all
                                                                      That lies beyond in time and space,
                                                                      E’en down to us, the human race.

                                                                      There’ll be no end, there was no start,
                                                                      There is no shape therefore no heart.
                                                                      And to create it doth aspire
                                                                      To use the debris of its ire.

                                                                      Poor mortal look deep in your heart
                                                                      And realise that you’re just a part
                                                                      Of that which knows no boundaries,
                                                                      Heeds not your trivial quandaries.

                                                                      Servants of the cosmos vow
                                                                      To play your part and take your bow,
                                                                      Or servants you will always be –
                                                                      Until you die, ‘tis then you’re free.”

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to : The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

breathing wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
clouds & creativity & green & life & oak & orange & silence & space & stars & thought & uncle & yellow wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
death & windows wormhole: the policies came to nothing
eyes wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
glass wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
identity & light & time wormhole: tired
speech wormhole: constant hummm
wood wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds

Tags

1967, balloon, black, blue, buildings, clouds, colour, cottage, countryside, creativity, distance, earth, end, garden, gourds, green, heart, herbs, humanity, Kent, life, light, line, Mars, mathematics, meadow, Milky Way, name, nature, now, oak, orange, pattern, poem, shape, silence, slugs, solar system, space, speed, stars, start, sun, thought, time, toad, uncle, universe, valley, vow, wind, windows, yellow

A Bowl of Gourds

On the kitchen table in front of the window that looks across the paddock to the piggery reposes a bowl of gourds.   I had always associated ornamental gourds with the exhibitionistic bric-a-brac of Victoriana, something which I could well do without in my small cottage.   Then one day a friend gave me some seeds among which were those of ten gourds.   Having never before imposed censorship on any form of life, I heeled them into the soil beside a trellis and forgot them.

Now, here upon the table is a bowl of colour, a bowl of shapes so varied that it seems quite illogical that they should all come from the same type of plant.   Their names also are just as demanding for attention: Bishop’s Mitre, Ohio Squash, Red Turk’s Cap, Squirting Cucumber and numerous others.   In the centre of the bowl is a warted gourd which, despite its bright orange colour, reminds me of the old fat toad who lives behind the water butt in the yard.   We call the toad Bebe after the initials of her species Bufo Bufo, and if the sun is particularly fierce, I water her retreat to prevent her becoming dehydrated from loss of water through her skin.   After all, one must take care of a creature such as Bebe who appears to be more effective of clearing the lawn of slugs than a hundredweight of poison and who knows, if it wasn’t for Bebe, perhaps I might not be gazing at a warted gourd at this very moment.

My thoughts are diverted from the toad to a Montgolfiere balloon of yellow and green vertical bands, and soon I am rising gently through slate coloured clouds into the deep blue beyond.   What were the thoughts, I wonder, of the Marquis d’Orlandes and Pilatre de Rozier as they saw the Bois de Boulogne slip smoothly from beneath them in 1783.   As the cheers faded, so came the silence.   For the very first time man had lost all tangible contact with mother earth and the first step on man’s long journey to the stars began.   The stars?   I questioned the thought, for it would still take all of three thousand years to reach Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to Earth (apart from the sun, that is) should we travel at the impossible speed of one million miles per hour.   Even at optical velocity it would still take four years and four months to reach our destination.   The problem then is not so much one of distance, but one of time.   Theoretically it is possible to condense time, and if we could condense it to a sufficient degree, man could circumnavigate the universe within his own lifetime.   A paper by L.R. Shepherd, Ph.D., read to the British Interplanetary Society in 1952 explains through the medium of mathematics far beyond my comprehension, how a time distillation effect is produced at near optic velocities.   If, for example, an astronaut makes a round trip to a local star and records a journey of three years, on his return to Earth he will have found that twenty one years have in actual fact passed.   All the mathematical jiggery and pokery in the world however cannot possibly reverse the procedure; nature still gives us a one way ticket through time.

My mind came back slowly from its extra-galactic wanderings, back through our own milky way, through the local cluster to the fringes of our solar system.   Thoughts travel faster than any quantum of light.   Out there beyond the human eye, is a mass so distant that it is hurtling away from our own island universe at such a velocity that its light will never reach us.   Yet the mind can flick to all corners of the universe in a second.   Back come my thoughts past the giant planets, the asteroids and Mars, back into Earth’s sweet atmosphere, through the slate grey clouds and so once more to my bowl of gourds.

It is a bowl brimming with curves and circles reminding me of the rolling countryside beyond my window.   It reminds me also of the time I stayed at a friend’s house in Kent.   From his garden, heavy scented with herbs, I could see but one building across the small valley.   It was a modern house of straight and severe line, not at all part of the natural scene.   The lines of the countryside are soft and moving as the blue distant swell of the undulating hills; as the stem of the meadow fescue curved from the prevailing winds like the archer’s bow; as the blackened oak beams that rise from floor to gable of the labourer’s cottage and indeed as the back of the labourer himself whose broad shoulders have borne the weight of many years’ work.   Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does she abhor a straight line.   But for that house across the valley time would not have existed.   Its rigid lines cut across the flow and caused discontinuance.   They shocked the mind back to the present from its meandering in eternity.   They almost screamed, “This is now, this is NOW,” imprisoning the mind in the confines of time.   We can release our minds into space, we can cast our thoughts out beyond the constellations and beyond the faintest nebula where time is meaningless, for the patterns above have altered but little since the dawn of man but we cannot plumb the depths of time with the same freedom.   The mind is confined to now; always there is something to remind us that this is the present.   Time is a gradation of eternity by conscious thought, therefore it is only when our bodies decay and conscious thought is no more that we can be truly free.

So man, upon his world so great
Has always wanted to create
Machines which, started once will never
Cease but carry on for ever.

Yet all the time O foolish man,
You’re merely part of that great plan,
A tiny part, hast thou not seen
This wondrous universe machine?

This motion so perpetual
Is the universe and all
That lies beyond in time and space,
E’en down to us, the human race.

There’ll be no end, there was no start,
There is no shape therefore no heart.
And to create it doth aspire
To use the debris of its ire.

Poor mortal look deep in your heart
And realise that you’re just a part
Of that which knows no boundaries,
Heeds not your trivial quandaries.

Servants of the cosmos vow
To play your part and take your bow,
Or servants you will always be –
Until you die, ‘tis then your free.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

black & blue & green & light & orange wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
buildings wormhole: constant hummm
clouds wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
creativity wormhole: the both passive and transitive / non-presumptive pre-conceptualist attenuation of being
garden & life & sun & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
oak & silence & time wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
space wormhole: Saturday – poewieview #3
thought wormhole: ‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27
wind wormhole: furl-reach
windows wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
yellow wormhole: between thoughts

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn

Tags

2016, Africa, air, autumn, book, colour, digging, earth, emerald, eyes, faces, field, garden, gold, grass, hill, horse, lawn, life, lunch, morning, peas, plough, poetry, reading, sky, skyline, sleep, sound, spiders, starlings, sun, sunlight, the Boats of Vallisneria, trees, uncle, wheat

 

 

 

autumn

                young wheat and emerald, in sese vertitur annus,
                reading an old poet in the garden, the sky is clear as face –

                                I had mown the lawn that morning just before lunch
                                and turned over the plot where the peas had been cleared –

                                                              on the steep hill opposite a horse pulled forward from a plough
                                                              moving slowly towards the skyline, jingle of the traces,

                                the book fell, the starlings flew, suddenly, I came awake
                                as the plough turned the field and spark of sunlight leapt,

                shoulder to mine eye, while the earth lay opened and dark-folded;
                                              (visitors had arrived, in quietude, invasion of linyphiids,

                                                              a thin gossamer between ridges – lapping under the sun –
                                                              bristles of random colour, a hundred yards long

                                                              and twenty inches wide and bare of future gold);
                                among the nemesia the book is retrieved, many lives

                                              will be lost, just enough will be saved, restless; this is
                                              thistle-down upon the air, here are crackle and pop

                                                                                 beneath the sky; the tree tops will be dipped in
                                                                                 old gold, and the swallows will be off for Africa

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to : The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air & autumn & eyes & field & garden & gold & morning & poetry & reading & sky & skyline & sleep & sunlight & trees wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
faces wormhole: a theremin note – poewieview #21
life & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – introdepthion
sound wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
sun wormhole: between thoughts

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – introdepthion

Tags

2016, contact, currents, dark, diagram, floating, growth, identity, kiss, knowledge, life, light, London, movement, opening, pattern, perspective, petals, roots, soil, stanza, surface, swimming, the Boats of Vallisneria, uncle, vallisneria, waiting, war, water, waves, work, writing

 

 

 

                                introdepthion

                                filigree roots dissimulate the soil
                                at the bottom of shallow waters
                                (like a diagram – no contact, with
                                 sheath of border); a stalk will grow

                                through water, sure twists towards
                                the light; on the surface petals will
                                open wide without shame and wait
                                for the floret to rise from the bract

                                then release just three boats for to
                                float the potent cargo where the
                                movement of water will hazard the
                                inexorable kiss; but there is no

                                morphology or physiology of
                                vallisneria, only certain quest from
                                darkness to light, and the surface-
                                knowledge retrieved back; I am

                                a Londoner born through war to
                                work the land to look for pattern in
                                life to make, trusting it is there to
                                swim through, but lost in currents

                                to and `fro with only adventitious
                                and god-like perspective when I
                                contemplate in four-line stanza …
                                sometimes

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to : The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

1967 & life & uncle & work wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
identity & knowledge & light & London & water & writing wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
waiting wormhole: and that’s where I are
war wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
waves wormhole: Quiver of / Tiffany – poewieview #20

 

The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts

Tags

1967, Africa, afternoon, air, Apollo, autumn, awakening, beans, bees, beginning, birth, blue, book, bracken, bronze, caterpillar, child, colour, cottage, crickets, dark, death, digging, earth, emerald, end, eyes, face, field, flowers, forest, garden, generation, gold, gorse, grass, hazel, hedgehog, hill, hive, honeysuckle, horse, house martin, ivy, January, journey, joy, lambs, land, lawn, leaves, life, March, memory, migration, mind, moorhen, moorland, morning, mother, nemesia, Norway, oak, plough, poetry, purple, reading, redwing, sadness, seasons, seeds, silence, sitting, sky, skyline, sleep, smell, sound, spiders, starlings, sunlight, the Boats of Vallisneria, thistles, thought, time, transition, trees, uncle, valley, web, wheat, winter, woodlark, work

 

Chapter 1

The Wandering Mind

Autumn Thoughts

I sat in the garden one autumn afternoon reading an old poet.   The sky was unblemished, clear and pure as the face of a child and starlings were deep in conversation close by.   I had mown the lawn that morning just before lunch and turned over the plot where the peas had been cleared.   After this exertion and a good meal, I felt no pang of conscience as I turned my back upon the many other chores that cried for attention and took my book into the garden and relaxed in the warm soporific scent of honeysuckle and freshly cut grass.   After an indeterminable period my thoughts were lifted from the page upon my knee and I drifted across the valley to the hill opposite.   There the grade was steep, too steep for tractor or any other mechanical tool.   A horse therefore was leaning from a plough, moving slowly, almost imperceptively towards the skyline.   The cottage in which I then lived was very old and the hills opposite even older; no doubt at one time they were covered with forest, but many men must have witnessed that same scene before me, many men and many generations.   To them it was a common sight, but to me it was a rare and beautiful sight that spanned the centuries. The scene was timeless.

I felt my head nod forward quite suddenly and I came awake.   The book fell onto the grass and the starlings flew off more in indignation than fright.   In the silence that followed, there filtered through the warmth of the valley the faint jingle of the traces, and as the plough turned upon the headland, a spark of sunlight leapt from the polished harness; it was an impish child of Apollo that danced upon the horse’s back one moment, then without warning, leapt the great expanse of the valley and entered my eye within the same split second.   I realised then that here was a beginning; here, before the old year was done, was another just starting.   Here the earth was being opened up to let in winter’s icy fingers so that she might the better prepare the seed bed for next year’s crop.   Then as the mind’s awareness expanded, I felt that this was not the only beginning taking place, there were many more throughout the changing land.

Visitors were arriving, flowers were blooming, animals were being born.   All about me, as I sat half asleep in the quietude, a great movement of life was in progress, and I thought of another great movement of life that had occurred the previous autumn.   It was an invasion of our fields by the linyphiids or gossamer spiders.   We were drilling wheat at the time and as I crouched low on the footboard of the drill to clear a coulter that had clogged up, I beheld a silken counterpane of gossamer stretched between the faint ridges of the harrowed earth.   The effect, if the eye was held low enough, was that of a thin layer of water shimmering in the early morning sun sending off sparks of individual colour selected at random from all parts of the spectrum.   So taken was I with this scene that all thoughts of clearing the coulters left me as we rattled and jogged across the field, and when harvesting the same field this year, there, as a reminder of that small moment, was a strip bare of swaying gold a hundred yards long and twenty inches wide.

I retrieved the book and placed it on the seat beside me.   The starlings had returned and were even noisier than before and the bees were hurrying to and fro among the nemesia in the hope of collecting and storing that little extra for the months ahead.   Soon they will end their toil; soon they would maim and expel the unfortunate drones and retire to the centre of the hive with the queen in their midst.   The day was magnificent, more like mid-summer than autumn, small wonder indeed that the careless cricket continued to ‘sing’ unaware of the imminent peril of winter.   Many small lives will be lost in the approaching days of darkness yet, through it all, just enough will be saved.   Beneath the apparent calm of autumn is a restlessness; and urgency sweeps through the fields and woodlands as the wiser creatures prepare for flight or lay in stores for sustenance through the long twilight of winter yet to come.

Autumn is a season of transition, a season of intense activity; of flowers flowering and flowers dying, of drilling wheat and cutting beans.   Autumn is a time of birth and death; a time of awakening and a time of going to sleep.   It is a time for the young and a time for the old, a time of both joy and sadness.

This is the time of thistle-down upon the air and goose-grass burrs upon the stockings; when the gorse and broom crackle and pop beneath a March-blue sky and scatter their tiny seeds among the dry stems of the sapless grass.   Now the moors are stained a deeper purple, bracken becomes bronzed and the tree tops dipped in old gold.   In the derries the young caterpillar of the Purple Emperor wraps itself in dead oak leaves and sleeps until the great awakening.   When gossamer fills the air and hazel nuts turn brown the young swallows start on that amazing flight to the shores of Africa, a journey undertaken by their parents a year before who, curiously enough, do not show their offspring the way, but follow on some days later.   How many thousand autumns have witnessed this exodus?   Yet to what blocks of logic and fact can we in all our wisdom attribute this common thing.   The redwing and fieldfare arrive from Norway urging on the lingering house martin.   The woodlark sings, the ivy flowers and the honeysuckle blooms again.   And as the somnolent hedgehog rolls himself in his blanket of leaves, the last brood of moorhen is hatched.   Something sleeps, something awakes; something dies, something is born.

There is no real beginning or end to the year.   Even on the first of January the lambs are growing; leaves are forming within the bud and the young wheat carpets the bare fields with emerald.   But for those whose minds cannot accept the existence of that which has no beginning and no end, then let the division between the years be drawn through autumn, for the onset of winter is really the beginning of the year, not the end.   The young year is born into a cold and sometimes frightening world just as the infant child is released from the warm security of the mother’s womb, and like the child, the infant year begins its life before it is born.   It begins in the womb of autumn.   It is here then (if anywhere) that one thing ends and another begins.   It is here In Sese Vertiture Annus.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

1967 & garden & life & mind & thought & uncle wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
afternoon wormhole: “walking …”
air & sound & time wormhole: constant hummm
autumn & gold & sky & smell & trees & work wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
blue & reading wormhole: between thoughts
child & sleep wormhole: 1968
death & eyes wormhole: too late:
field & skyline wormhole: impressionism
leaves wormhole: work
morning wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
mother wormhole: and that’s where I are
oak wormhole: dog bark
poetry wormhole: after all?
purple wormhole: 1967
silence wormhole: the missing chord // the now-silent seagull
sitting wormhole: zero
winter wormhole: 1963

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction

Tags

1967, being, consciousness, countryside, dark, experience, farm, flower, garden, identity, kiss, knowledge, life, light, living, London, mind, now, pattern, petals, plants, pond, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, uncle, unconscious, vallisneria, water, writing

 

INTRODUCTION

The Boats of Vallisneria.   Not the fishing fleet of some remote principality or the landing forces of an invading alien.   Vallisneria is an aquatic plant, the roots of which grow in the soil at the bottom of shallow waters.   The pistillate flower is found at the top of a long stalk which grows up through the water towards the light of day.   Upon reaching the surface, the petals unfold in sheer abandonment to expose the stigmas that await the procreative advances of its male counterpart which is the staminate floret that grows below the surface in a large bract.   When ripe, it emerges and floats to the top where three small petals unfold and curl back to produce the three tiny boats that keep the stamens afloat where, through the movement of the water, the stamens gently kiss the stigmas of the awaiting flower in that final act of consummation.

But this small volume does not concern itself with the morphology or physiology of vallisneria or that of any other flower, in fact there is no direct connection between the title of this book and its contents.   Suffice it to say that the mind is a pond, but a pond of such depth that the sediment of our experiences lays in the bottom in utter darkness.   Every so often a thought is born and speeds hastily from the soil in which it grows to the light of consciousness.   After a brief spell of blossoming the flower returns to the depths taking with it a little food that is the knowledge of the eternal ‘now’.

I am a farm labourer, not because I was born to it (for I am a Londoner by birth) but because I desired from an early age a completion of my being that I knew I could not attain in the artifices of town life.   But soon I fear I shall be leaving the farming life, not through desire or choice, but through the evolvement of that particular pattern that is laid down for each and every one of us, the unalterable pattern that we must all follow no matter how limitless our own personal bounds of freedom.   I shall however, still be living in the countryside and will retain the sense of fulfilment this way of life has afforded me until the end of my days, no matter where I go or what I do in the years to come.

It was while gazing vacantly at a pool one evening two years ago that I first beheld the boats of vallisneria and thought of them as random thoughts released from the depths of the mind for brief spells in the light of consciousness, and it was then that I decided to capture these thoughts and to the best of my ability place them on paper.   This small book then, is a collection of thoughts, a collection of the reflections of a farm labourer who has reaped more than corn from his own particular way of life.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

1967 & mind & uncle wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
being & identity wormhole: zero
garden & life & London & writing wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
knowledge wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
light wormhole: like ink – poewieview #23
living wormhole: balancing // with a whole lot of deft
thought wormhole: between thoughts
water wormhole: aghh – we’ve been infected / it’s spreading through the system / we’re losing our files … / it’s taken out the processor … / I, I can’t open with this program anymore … / it’s scanning me – / I’ve got to buy a Virus Protection Program / from it …

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents

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'scape, 1967, autumn, breathing, candle, contents, cottage, cows, gold, gourds, home, introduction, journey, lawn, letter, memory, mind, moment, non-doing, people, piano, pigs, rain, safety, sky, smell, snow, the Boats of Vallisneria, time, trees, uncle, valley, walking, work

The Boats of Vallisneria

by Michael J. Redford

 

—~~~\___ “O” ___/~~~—

 

Contents

Introduction

The Wandering Mind
Autumn Thoughts
A Bowl of Gourds
A Precious Moment
On Doing Nothing

People
Olly
Simon upon the Downs
Safe Home

Walking
A Sign of the Times
Snow
Follow your Nose
The Agricultural Show

Working
A letter of Two Parts
Making Hay
With Cows
With Pigs

Out of Doors
Trees
Sky
Rain
The Valley

Around the Country Cottage
An Old Piano
Candlelight
The English Lawn

Memories
Going Back
Distant Journeys
The Breath of Memory
The Golden Hour

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

1967 & uncle wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
autumn wormhole: dog bark
breathing wormhole: too late:
gold wormhole: bookmark
mind wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
people wormhole: impressionism
piano & smell wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
rain wormhole: between thoughts
sky wormhole: constant hummm
snow wormhole: stacked
time wormhole: Hurst Green
trees wormhole: Le Pont Royal, 1909
valley wormhole: Desolation Angels
walking wormhole: nothing to say
work wormhole: dry rot