SIMPLE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

We were clannish
Growing up in Housing Estates
Like Milford Lodge, Cherry Tree Road
And Amberley Lane…

Public Housing funded by
Hambledon Rural District Council:
Semi-detached and flats that Thatcher
Later sold to their tenants in 1980.

Except some, like my parents
Who continued to  pay rent
Preferring to remain
Wards of the Council.

Long before that, we little boys
Banded together to preserve
The primacy of our post WWII fiefdoms
In short-trousered armies.

Under towering English oaks
’Midst a tangle of ‘A’ and ‘B’ roads -
For the village was not much more
Than a Roundabout and a By-pass…

We fought battles.
Wrestling, punching and kicking
The outlanders - other young boys
Branded by their alien addresses.

We survived, well enough
To fight another day
Bloodied but unbowed.
No one died..

That I remember
Although I was told that
One boy I had ‘beaten-up’
Had a heart condition.

I was chastened and agreed
To lay-off as we did with other kids
With more visible impairments, like
Glasses or were crippled in leg irons.

AFTER. EDMUND. BURKE.

All political  power 
Derives from the people…
Who give their Consent 
To be Governed. 

That consent is always 
Coerced: by violence
Charisma or custom
For we are an unruly mob. 

Then we pay obeisance 
To our chosen one:
Our King of Kings
Our Shahanshah…

The light that we shine 
On them is diffracted
Upon our beaming faces:
It is the joy of the bridled. 

Circumstances sometimes
Arise, however, to disturb
This happy state….
There is unrest in the land. 

The Chosen One
Has departed from the
Instructions of the people 
By whom they were anointed. 

They pursue tyranny 
And usurpation: the light
They mirrored no longer
Embowers our faces. 

As the shadow gathers
The mob must consider
Its power: lurking, coiled
In its endarkened lair. 

SIMPLY PARAPHRASTIC

The Brain has a hundred trillion
Neural connections, making it 
The most complex structure
In the known Universe -

There are your thoughts
And then there is the
Background noise: like
The book I am reading.*

It would be easy to imagine
Perhaps, that they resonate 
Within alternate hemispheres
Of the Brain…

And then alchemically cohere
In a transmutation like this 
Shortstack: but the Brain
Is beyond knowing…

Let us return to the ability
Of some biological systems
To self-organize
And to possess a History.

In certain slime molds
It has been established
That constituent cells both
Communicate and systematize.

There is a bifurcation point
At which these cells transition
From determinism to free-choice
From equilibrium to instability. 

It is difficult to disentangle
Order and Chaos: Yet Free-Choice
Appears to exist in biotic systems
Resulting in an ordered randomness.

Social structures, like ant-hills 
Are the result of a few decisions
Made in conditions of instability
Ordered by a process of aggregation.

How do such complex systems 
Manage to avoid permanent chaos? 
Ants communicate by depositing
Hormonal attractants

Resulting in an incremental
Aggregation of structural stability.
Nothing to do with Democracy
A lot more like Ant Anarchy. 

Ironically: the faster that feedback
Exists within a system the greater
The percentage of failed fluctuations
That then bolster the system.

We are experiencing a period
Of Global Instability, yet within 
This precarity there remains
Hope for an emergent stability. 

Here in the Empire of Chaos
We are again ruled by a fringed blob
Dispensing failed fluctuations - 
Thus bracing the system’s solidity. 

*Order out of Chaos, 1984, Ilya Prigogine.

BIG & LITTLE

Big Thought

Did consciousness trigger the Big Bang
Or did it flow from the Beginning 
Of Space and Time
Like smoke from the barrel of a gun? 

Little Thought

Sebastian Junger makes a good point:
To survive a near-death experience
Is not to be returned to Life
But to be introduced to Death. 

Subjects report traveling
On shamanic journeys free 
Of their bodies, as Spirits seeking
A place of refuge in the Cosmos.

In such events, survivors
Also tell of
Experiencing a kind of universal 
Consciousness where boundaries melt.

These are the boundaries created
In order to enshrine our sense of self:
We defend them with stress and tension
Until they fade with approaching death.

They are: Shadow & Persona
Body & Mind
Life & Death
Self & Everything else*.

Remove these and we are bathed
In a Universal Consciousness
Which passeth all understanding…
Why wait ‘til the moment of Death?

*Kathleen Dowling Singh

LAST CALL OF THE WILD

It’s been a long wait.
But I didn’t have to travel far.
Not much more than fifty yards
From the house.

In 1973, Peter Matthiessen
Journeyed to Nepal for a glimpse
Of a Snow Leopard. 
He didn’t see one.

But his companion did.
Peter wrote a beautiful book
About his failed quest - 
Full of poignant regret.

I have run the neighborhood
Trails at twilight and at dawn
Under oaks where cougars perch
Waiting to pounce on their prey.

But I had never seen a mountain lion.
No doubt they saw me.
But they decide when they will
Be seen by us humans.

Having been alerted by the 
Anxious skittering 
Of a doe and her three fawns
Running for their lives…

…Fleeing to the right
I looked to the left:
A mountain lion, alert but
Stock still, at the edge of the drive.

I was in the meadow early
Weeding dried thistle and mustard.
I saw its coat draped over a muscled frame
The color of the pale grasses in which it stood.

I eyed its long tail, dipping
To the ground; its black eyes locked on mine
Before it nonchalantly turned away
Towards a line of dense brush…

 …Which marks the foot of a slope 
That serves as the site’s eastern flank:
Finally, visceral confirmation that we share
This wildland with its apex predator.

In The Snow Leopard
Peter Matthiessen’s companion
Was the biologist George Schaller.

LONG STORY/SHORT STACK

The oldest known human remains
In the area now understood
As the United States of America 
Were found in 1959, on Santa Rosa Island
Off the coast of Southern California.

Protein analysis and radiocarbon dating
Suggest they are 13,000 years old
In a time of a declining Glacial Maximum
When Pygmy Mammoth still roamed
Across the agglomerated Islands.

These ancient peoples had arrived
On reed rafts and canoes that floated
Down the Kelp Highway which flows
From Siberia, along Beringia, and then
Down the entire west coast to Peru.

There remains a deep ocean trench
(The Hueneme Submarine Canyon)
That separates the Islands from the coast:
Legend has it, that as the waters rose
The Chumash fled on a Rainbow Bridge.

The Islands and the Transverse Ranges
Were uplifted together
Around 3 million years ago
Establishing a climate with wet winters
And hot dry summers…

These ‘Mediterranean’ conditions
Fostered sclerophyllous vegetation
Like Chaparral and sage scrub
Inured to drought and resilient
To the occasional cycle of fire.

Diversity was further increased
By the mosaic fire regime the Chumash
Used to drive an ecological succession
That awakened the soil to produce
Its bounty of seeds, nuts and fruits.

Over countless generations
The footprint of the Chumash
Expanded from the coastal fringe
To the foothills of the Santa Ynez Range
And beyond to the desert plains.

The arrival of the Spanish in 1769
And then of the Anglo Americans
In the mid-nineteenth century
Denied the Chumash their lands
And ultimately their lives.

The brutal destruction of
These primal colonizers, their culture
Magic, medicines, and mystery
Remains as a dark genocidal stain
On the fabric of California.

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER HOLIDAYS

Glaciers scoured the North American bedrock
From the Sierras, the Rockies and points East
During the last Ice Age between say, 25 and 15
Thousand years ago, the Glacial Maximum.

They left behind evidence of their activity
In drumlins, U-shaped valleys, rifts, moraines
Aretes, cirques, horns, glacial lakes
Gravel ridges, glacial till, eskers and erratics.

Up until 1850, at the end of the Little Ice Age
Over 80 Glaciers remained in their
Eponymous National Park. Now, almost all
Have been reduced to perennial snowfields.

The Park, absent  its signature feature
Remains a showcase of meltwater creeks
Alpine meadows, dramatic valleys and lakes
Edged by glacially carved mountains.

It is also home to an estimated 300 Grizzlies.
I rode a bike through the Park for 5 days:
Didn’t see a Grizzly or a Glacier and its famous
’Going-to-the-Sun Road’ was shrouded in rain.

The best of times the most disappointing of times
Balanced by the physical and emotional jubilation
Of pedaling through mountain landscapes fully
Engaged in elevational, scenic and climatic changes.

CHAPARRAL FALL

Summer’s heat glazes 
The landscape in shellac:
Dying thistles and grasses
Are Swaddled in a veil of sepia. 

It’s Fall in the Chaparral
Season of senescence:
The dead and the dying
‘Midst the last blooms of Spring.

Revenant bush sunflowers
And Spring’s last gasp, Acourtia 
That like funeral offerings
Form bowers for the dead…

Yellow and pink wreaths
Tossed on the funeral pyre
That daily consumes
Winter’s rampant progeny. 

June’s gloom gone
The way of May grey
‘Tis no longer a season of mists
And mellow fruitfulness…

But a harsh biotic desert
Braved only by those hardy
Sclerophytes, inured to sun
Parched earth and abrading wind.

Under the blistering orb
The dwarf forest persists
Determinedly awaiting
November’s rains…

PERICHORESIS

Consider that our lives
Are events of Relationship
Not set in juxtaposition
But as a cellular bond
Cohering the Universe.

We exist within
A circle dance.
Its choreographic basis
Is the connection that exists
As a divine indwelling.

All of Creation participates
In this dance
Spinning in ever greater
Complexity but always based
On this foundational bond.

We sense its structural shape
Through our feelings for
Ourselves and other beings:
Feelings that pulse within us
With a profound resonance.

It is a bond expressed
As a strange amalgam
Of physical, intellectual, emotional
And spiritual attraction:
We call it Love. 

Ten p.m. on a summer night
A Crepuscular Skyline
Stelae piercing an apricot wash
While Ragged grey clouds
Float across this Empyrean.

Within a beaten-up white Camry
(That simple anagram of ‘my car’)
And from the icy expanses of
La Guardia to this cozy pit
Of worn black upholstery

A relationship flowers:
A certainty that I am at last
Capable of feelings towards
This still strange City, that:
I Love NY.

TIDINGS

In view, the distant hills of Tijuana:
Over the rich wetlands
Bordering its River
A blade-winged Northern Harrier
Flies.

The light-footed 
Ridgeway’s Rail is seen too
Though Deeply camouflaged against
The muddy bank of a tidal
Channel.

These wetlands exist
Under the surveillance
Of birdwatchers
And the panoptic
Eye of the U.S. Border Patrol.

A Sikorsky Black Hawk
Flies, hovers and lands
Over the wetlands
Where the border sits
Beyond the flood prone river…

To the North, on not much more
Than a sand-bar
The City of Coronado was built
To support the construction of
A Grand Hotel. 

This temple of Conspicuous Wealth
The Vast military infrastructure
Wetlands, Beach and Border Fence:
Fateful partners
In The Dance of Time. 

FLUX CAPACITOR

I grasp at meaning
Where I can find it
Constantly returning
To the Familiar
To explicate the New. 

Grappling with Boltzmann’s Principle
I find refuge in changes of state
As in water, ice and steam - 
But now I see these processes 
As functions of Entropy…

Equilibrium can be achieved through
The dynamics of energy and entropy 
Which renders isolated structures
That are essentially immortal
On the molecular level. 

They do not interact
With their environment
But Nature and Society
Are profoundly different to them
Enmeshed in their surroundings. 

Cities and the wildlands
Are part of a world from which
Each draws sustenance:
Inseparable from the fluxes
Which they incessantly transform. 

We feed on the flux of matter
And the energy of the environment
They are us and we are them.
What part of this equation
Do we not understand? 

DIDEROT DOES NOT DESPAIR

There’s nothing new under the sun
Or so they say 
And old Diderot, God bless him
Still has us under his sway.

Why dig up Diderot
You may ask.
Well, in the Eighteenth Century
He takes Newton to task.

Like Spinoza
Old Did’s a panpsychist at his core
He Believes in Nature
Not in some mechanical law.

The Clockwork Universe
Is left on the shelf:
Because for him, matter has a mind
And organizes itself.

Nature must be explained
He controverted
In ways in which
All consciousness is asserted.

So if you believe in something
At your insistence
Should it not be
The Entirety of all Existence?

DOOMSDAY

A new Philosophy calls all in doubt
The element of fire is quite put out
The Sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.

 John Donne, 1611

All hope is gone that our World
Is subject to explanation.
Any connection between Reality
And its Description
Has been irrevocably sundered.

Our only surety
Is that Uncertainty has become
The Ruling star of the Galaxy
Our Sun of disruptive dissipations:
Stochastic, tenebrific, shambolic.

The only News is Fake News.
Confabulations, Interpretations
Simulations and Dissimulations
All that is left
Of our shared Body of Knowledge.

Now this ravaged cadaver
Emaciated beyond recognition
Leads us evermore
Staggeringly into an unknown
And unknowable Future.

BOOKISH

I have ordered a book
Called Order out of Chaos*
(A condition greatly to be
Desired in these troubled times).

It purports to explore 
The conundrum
Of Evolution and dares
To question Darwin’s

Thesis of natural selection
Of chance mutations
As a satisfactory explanation 
For The Origin of Species. 

Others have questioned this premise.
In 1982 Rupert Sheldrake wrote
A New Science of Life, which posits
The role of Morphogenic Germs.

(Sheldrake also suggested that 
It was the Scientific Revolution 
That had driven
Angels from the Cosmos…).

Rupert’s son Merlin
Has since written
Of the miracles of
An Entangled Life

In which Earthly beings
Are enmeshed within 
A Maze of unaccounted 
Organisms….

Commingled Life forms
Flourishing because of
Or despite Us
In biotic harmony.

My understanding thus Evolves
One book at a time
Growing evermore distant
From the sureties of Darwin…

And other old ideas learnt
Long ago but now interred
To make room for the New: 
This is The Grace in Aging.**

Ilya Prigogine *

Kathleen Dowling Singh **

ATTENTION !

One fish, two fish
Red fish, blue fish
Archaic ages
Magic stages
Mythic rhymes
Then, Rational times:
Pluralistic sages
Pen scientific pages.
Crimson and Red
Green after Amber
To the subtle beat
Of the Tambor.

In Ken Wilber’s phrases
Human Consciousness
Thus Evolves, painted as
Color coded phases.

CONFESSIONS

Buying a car at Carmax
Is not much fun.
Their stores are blue and yellow
And Cavernous, just like IKEA
Except their car park…

Is mostly cars for sale.
Late model, freshly washed
Respectable cars 
All above Market price.
Because: the Carmax experience.

Which is haggle free and friendly.
But I don’t like it, because it is where
I am exposed to people 
I don’t know…
And people I don’t want to know.

They are the inscrutable, the unfathomable
The generalized mass of people…
From which I protect myself:
Living in a little enclave
Of people of similar proclivities…

And living backed up to
A wilderness where I am more
Likely to interact with wildlife
Than other people. Living the life
Of a privileged elitist.

Thrust into the morass
When walking through a mall
Or buying a car
At Carmax the armor I have so 
Carefully cultivated is pierced…

Those moments outside 
My zone maybe salutary.
But I eschew Life
As it is generally Lived 
Preferring my Sanctuary.

AFTERNOON DOGGEREL

Relative Truths deal with the world as
It is, expressed in Space and Time. 
Ultimate Truth is spaceless
And therefore Infinite
Timeless and therefore Eternal.

Ken Wilber

I settled down
After my Midday feed
With my nose in a book
For a long afternoon’s read.

As I slumped in the chair 
Burdens vanished as a cloud
And my thoughts roamed freely
Shed of their oppressive shroud. 

Then into my mind
There arose such a clatter
Of things far beyond
The prosaics of matter.

Engrossed in reading
Ken Wilber’s new book
Waking-Up to the Infinite
As my feeble mind shook.

Then I sprang from the chair
 In a flash of Satori
 Overcome with Oneness
 In the Power and the Glory. 

ANTIQUARIAN

Fragments of this short stack
Were first discovered in
The forgotten notebooks
Of an unknown antiquarian…

One hundred and twenty-four
Light years from planet Earth
The chemical fingerprints of
Alien biological activity

Were first discovered ‘midst
The pullulating constellations
Of the known Universe: Dimethyl
Sulfide and Dimethyl Disulfide.

Phantom fragments, or building
Blocks adventitiously disposed
On Planet K2–18b
As surreptitious signs of Life.

Chemicals associated on Earth
With viridian marine plankton
Which nourishes crustaceans
Cetaceans and jellyfish too.

Ever in search of Signs of Life
Ever disdainful of the signifiers all around
Lost in the detritus of our ghosted planet:
Plumskin, Ploshskin, Pelican jill.

MORE THAN HUMAN

All is darkness
All is Silence
Of which there is no knowing.
Quickened by an ineffable spirit
It becomes shadow and light.
Its sounds both clamorous and plangent.

We swim in these ambiguities
Only resolved
By an unwavering consciousness
That transcends understanding.
Then, we are at peace
And In communion with…

A divine love that
Flows through the Heavens
Through the rock, soil and dust
Of the Universe. 
With open hearts
It flows through us.

Our world is shared
By all that is.
Our Real, their real
Our Place, their place.
All bound in the web
That binds all things. 

To conceive
Of the heavenly flow
As ours alone
Is to deny it.
It is Embraceable only 
In the more-than-human World.

EENY MEENY MINY ... ME

It matters which stories tell stories,
which concepts think concepts …
which systems systematize systems.
Donna Haraway

On first waking
There was a moment of experiencing
Something outside of ‘Self’.
Then, the abyssal strangeness
Of it all: the loss, this floating free.

This feeling: Of non-categorization
Of non-speciation.
Escape from Entanglement.
The dissolution
Of all those metaphors

We use to stitch our Selves
Together.
This floating free of Self.
This drift into the Void of Being
Beyond the capsule.

The capsule I call
ME.