REVISITING SPIRIT - read revitalising
or some variant, enhancing fructose levels
with eminent distinction. Who
couldn't use a pick-me-up? Make
reparations in secret, lakeside
excursions, the wild and tangled air
coaxing the medulla. I see him now
pacing, hunched, in coat and boots; retracing
damaged pathways, traversing broken ground.
---
This poem is a small act of literary criticism, inasmuch as it tries
to connect Philip Wakeham's visits to the Red Deeps where he used to
meet Maggie Tulliver with the "spots of time" passage in Wordsworth's
Prelude.
As I've been re-reading George Eliot, I've been very struck by the way
the "realist" novel draws on a Wordsworthian psychological vocabulary
which is in many ways quite at odds with Eliot's deterministic
theories of social development. There is a supplement of spirit - a
Wordsworthian "gleam" or "glimmer" - that keeps flickering out across
the text: always some ghost, perhaps not firmly installed in the
machine but hovering in the vicinity of the mechanism.
The reference to "medulla" is probably opaque; it points to David
Hartley's theory of consciousness, in which fluctuations in the
"aether" stir the "medullary substance" of the brain into thought.
Roger Penrose's notion that microtubules in the brain are doing clever
things with Quantum Stuff is to my mind an updated version of the same
idea. Hartley was the philosopher after whom Hartley Coleridge, son of
Sam, was named - he was quite an influence on W. and C.
Dominic
--
Shall we be pure or impure? Today
we shall be very pure. It must always
be possible to contain
impurities in a pure way.
--Tarmo Uustalu and Varmo Vene
|