You might well say about this question, ‘Who cares?’ but you would be surprised at how many do care. Poetry is a special thing to many people, and not just literate, intelligent people. Nearly everyone likes songs and songs have lyrics and lyrics are a type (sub-category?) of poetry. Humorous verse is always popular. Hymns are sung at cup finals. American Presidents are inaugurated to the sounds of poetry. Riots are blamed on Rap. The man on the street will argue with the woman on the street about contemporary poetry. Yes really! It goes like this.

 Woman: ‘Look what our Tanya’s wrote at school today. A lovely poem about her Blackberry.’

Man: ‘That ain’t poetry. Don’t rhyme for one thing.’

Woman: ‘Doesn’t have to, stupid. It’s free expression. They all do it like that these days.’

Man: ‘Not Snoop Dogg, he don’t.’

and so on…..

 If knowing the difference between poetry and prose is that important, we should not dismiss the question lightly.

 Perhaps this is like water and ice. Here there is a describable change from one thing to another. Temperature causes it. At 4⁰ C hexagonal crystals start to form in the liquid water and at 0⁰ C a solid mass has formed, 9% less dense than water, which is why ice floats. The elements are unchanged; hydrogen and oxygen, but the appearance and properties are different. You can’t carve water into swans and fill them with caviar, nor can you swim in ice.

 If we are going to answer the question we should first define what we mean by prose and what we mean by poetry. It shouldn’t be difficult; we can tell ice from water, after all. Here’s a typical dictionary definition of prose: the ordinary form of spoken or written language, without metrical structure, as distinguished from poetry or verse; and as for poetry: a metrical composition usually concerned with feeling or imaginative description; the art or work of a poet.

 Unfortunately, there are as many variations of definition as there are dictionaries and, no doubt, you will have your own. There are no sharp edges and perhaps this is the problem. That there is a difference is self-evident; try substituting one word for the other in this writing and see what a mess it makes of any sense. What that difference is may be definable but it may also be variable and require qualification. Age, education, class, gender and occupation will all have a bearing on what an individual means by prose and poetry, especially if their occupation is writer. There is nothing like a vested interest to form a strong opinion.

 Let’s go back to ice and water. Ice is solid and water is liquid. It’s a clear (!) difference; a difference in state, because, remember, the elements of the substance H²O do not change, although the molecular structure does. The elements of prose and poetry are words; the structure of prose is different from the structure of poetry. Taking prose as water, how do the ‘ice crystals’ form so that the prose becomes poetry?  Conveniently, crystals turns out to be an analogy for structure. Think of rhythm, rhyme, metre, line, verse, stanza, strophe, cadence, form, beat and pulse and you will be seeing the atomic bonds forming as water turns to ice. They are all latent in prose but become evident in poetry. Don’t take this analogy too far – yet.  Chew on it, like an ice cube, which means roll it round on your tongue and feel the neuralgia.

 However, I am – because I can – now going to take the analogy a bit further. We learnt that it is temperature that causes the change in the structure of water and ice. Is there a similar force in writing?  What is the equivalent of the ‘drop in temperature’?  One would expect poetry to be hotter than prose, wouldn’t one? What do we find instead? The cooling properties of metaphor, simile, image, surprise and emotion, properties which are to be found in prose of course, but weaker and less obviously. In poetry they can change the fluid words of prose into the crystal mass of meaning, complex and possibly multi-faceted.

 Ah, I’ve used that word, meaning and before you get irritated or upset, I’ll tell you what I mean by meaning. It will save time. I mean something that makes psychological or moral sense and has purpose or significance. This ‘meaning’ is often imbued with a mystical pleasure, although both pain and puzzlement are possible. It is like the scent of a dog rose, the hit of malt whiskey and the feeling of love. You can’t do much with it except hope it comes again. It is the reason that both reading and writing poetry is so addictive. It’s the feeling of an ice cube against your hot cheek.

 Now we have got the definitions out of the way, we can attempt to answer the question, ‘Where does poetry become prose?’  Actually, we can’t answer it. Have you ever watched water freeze? If you have had the time, patience and opportunity you will know that it is not a sudden process. The ice crystals start form at 4⁰ C and some water is present until 0⁰ C when solidity is achieved. In this period there is some ice and some water and some water changing in time from water to ice. There is also a matter of scale to consider. An ocean takes a long time to freeze. Two water molecules will take a microsecond. Similarly, a large passage of prose will contain no poetry or perhaps a crystal or two. A prose poem could be described as prose at below 4⁰ C but above zero. From zero on down it’s solid poetry.

 I think my analogy has held up well. So well, indeed, that I am going to bring in the subject of free verse, or unstructured verse as it sometimes called.  You will have guessed what I am going to say and you will be right. Yes, free verse is above zero and below 4⁰ C! It is losing the elements of poetry as it melts; it will pass a prose poem coming the other way as it makes its journey towards the watery grave of prose.

 All this is very fine and theoretical, but what is it like in practice?   I believe that theory should be backed up with evidence so I am giving you three poems which I think give some veracity to my theory. As I wrote them myself, you might think that this is doctored evidence and therefore invalid. However, I think I can get over that problem by exposing them to peer review. I submit my theory and my evidence and wait your judgement.

 I wrote the prose poem a couple of years ago. I have now re-written it, both in free verse and  in formed poetry. While I have been writing this, I have thought of titles to this triptych of poems: ‘Water Freezing’, ‘Ice Melting’ and ‘ Ice strong enough to skate on.’  The last one comes with a warning sign –  ‘Danger. Thin Ice!’

 This first piece is prose. I think we can all agree on that. I wrote it last of all to show how one thing can melt or freeze into another.

 Water  prose

I was daydreaming again and, for no apparent reason, I thought of holly, a tree I love for being evergreen but without needles. The leaves are dark green, leathery, hints of blue green sometimes and, when young, bright Lincoln green. The comfort of a club armchair came to mind and a writing desk, old mahaogany with a green leather inlay. Soft light from a brass lamp shone into a glass of malt whiskey. I sniffed the musky scent of the spirit and realised that I was in Jamaica, on a plantation; a man of substance, and, I’m ashamed to say, slaves and trade in sugar. Then I was on the beach, the breakers white against the blue-green ocean, the terrible ocean. I thought of my journey home to another study in a country house in Leicestershire. From Falmouth, where my ship would lie in the Roads, safe from the Atlantic storms, I would take the coach, expecting nothing. I would plant trees this autumn; oak, beech, holly. The leaves of young holly are soft, their spikes not yet hardened by fear of browsing cattle, like young thistle leaves, vulnerable yet latently fierce.  They would grow, like I have grown from a soft child to a trade-hardened man, their roots clutching at the rock beneath, leathery leaves resisting storm and predation, brave, sad and cruel in the dying light.

 Water freezing     prose poem

Holly, the green evergreen, blue green, Lincoln green, leather-shiny green armchair, tabletop, blotter; in its mahogany empire whisky deep soft embrace all musky traces of women from the darker places of this sweet earth’s face, which I want for more than gold or ink that fades to sepia or indigo that tattoos my instep with a soft footfall of patience,  love and continuity; from the ink squid deeps to the soft shell sand-strewn shallows of a sea so distant, so warm, so blue it reaches to the cumulus and blows, billows and thunders up the grey Atlantic into this blank haven where, with time and birds and rain and little interference, it grows from a soft thistle leaf to a hard tree properly set into stone and is water-withstanding as the curtained sun falls down in confusion.

 Ice Melting     free verse

 Holly, the green evergreen, blue green, Lincoln green,

leather-shiny green armchair, tabletop blotter;

in its mahogany empire whisky deep soft embrace all musky traces of women

from the darker places of this sweet earth’s face,

 which I want for more than gold

 or ink that fades to sepia

or indigo that

tattoos

my instep with a soft footfall of patience,  love and continuity;

from the ink squid deeps to the soft shell

sand-strewn shallows of a sea so distant, so warm, so blue it

reaches to the cumulus and blows,

billows and thunders up the grey Atlantic into this blank haven where

with time

 and birds and rain and little interference,

it grows from a soft thistle leaf to a hard tree properly set into stone

and is water-

withstanding as the curtained sun falls down

 in confusion.

Ice strong enough to skate on   a poem

Holly – the green evergreen the blue green                        

Lincoln leathery arm-chair and table top               

mahogany empire whisky embracing                                     

soft musky traces of women’s darkness

on this sweet earth face which I want for more

than gold or ink-fade to sepia or indigo

Tattoo my instep with a pattern of patience

love’s continuity from the ink squid deeps

to the soft shell sand strewn shallow sea

sky distant so warm so blue in the cumulus

My life billows and thunders up the grey

Atlantic for haven where time and birds

rain and little interference grow soft thistle

to a hard tree properly set into stone

water-withstanding as the sun falls down

The obvious first step in this enquiry (see how difficult it already is to avoid walking metaphors!) would be to undertake a worldwide survey of poets and, by use of a cleverly constructed questionnaire, reveal by statistics the influence of walking on poetry writing. What a surprise it would be if our questionnaire revealed that late-rising, afternoon-TV-watching, sofa-loving poets who only ever wear fluffy slippers and always compose in bed, write the most and the best poetry and even write the most and best poetry about walking. Surely, that can’t be true? We shall never know because in these recessionary times we have no hope of getting that vital research grant which would, coincidentally, give us a nice income so that we could spend more time writing poetry.

A saner alternative would be to look at what we do know and see if that gives us any indication that there may be an association. Likelihoods are not certainties, but sometimes they just have to do.

Creationists and anyone who has an aversion to evolutionary psychology should now go and make a cup of tea and think of something to do that is more congenial to their temperaments. If anyone is left, here is what we know.

Humans are a primate species whose brain has evolved at a faster rate than anything other than – no, it has not evolved at a faster rate than anything in particular. It is just that what it turned out to be, after evolutionary pressures had accidentally moulded it into a convoluted, soggy walnut that contains two hundred and forty thousand billion neural connections (synapses) in its cerebral cortex alone, was a mind with what might be modestly called excess capacity. It was mind that was good at surviving long enough to have sex and then die, which is basically all you need from a mind, and a mind that was very good at finding novel ways of ensuring that it got to the sex bit before the dying bit. When life was simple, honest and true about 200,000 years ago, this was mainly a matter of killing other animals and plants and eating them. Legs were useful then, particularly if they were attached to eyes, ears, taste buds, a nose that could smell tiger poo and a skin surface that could feel pleasure and pain. Oh, and a brain that could interpret everything and make decisions so as to give the best possible chance of living until dawn, finding breakfast and, hopefully a shag before dusk. It’s more complicated than this of course, but you knew that didn’t you?

I doubt if these early thinkers had much time for poetry composition which in any case requires language and language came later than walking. What they had to have time for was observing, noticing, feeling and being aware of odd things and changes. Walking is travel. It has purpose; to find food, water, shelter, the opposite sex, companions and to avoid danger, difficulty and unpleasantness. Anyone with a better than average alertness and an ability to interpret the signals of the senses has a better chance of reaching the next safe place safely. Association becomes vital. If you want to run away from a noise it’s worth knowing where that noise is coming from. When it comes from a sabre-tooth tiger’s slavering maw, then running straight up the nearest cliff face is the thing to do, but when it is the sweet mumblings of a young female gathering bilberries then walking tall and handsome towards the noise has been known to be an effective route to consummation.

So brains that developed alertness and the ability to associate and interpret when they were being carried along on legs would survive and the ancestors of some of these survivors would become poets. The thinking part of poetry requires just those qualities that are associated with the state of walking – alertness, association and interpretation. In fact we might say that walking induces this brain state in certain individuals. Imminent death, sex and anxiety are still with us as all poets will testify after a long walk in the countryside.

We know so much about the material world through science. The evidence supporting the facts that science has revealed is vast; the testing of that evidence is continuous; the veracity of what is known is unassailable by anything other than reason. The literature is compendious and convincing; it is a handbook of perception and knowledge. It is not a book of boasts and it asks to be disproved so that knowledge can be verified. It is a city, made of silt making bricks, making walls, making towers. No single fault can bring down the whole edifice. It is not a Tower of Babel, yet it is the mind of man – manifest as artefact.

I’m thinking of life on the old Leicester estates; seems strange
To look back on that pale English world. I’m glad it’s changed.

 People worry about morality; well, people who worry about such things do, anyway. They worry about what is the right morality and about who makes the rules. They worry because other people are not acting in the morally right way and they worry that their own consciences are not as clean as they might be. They worry about the consequences of behaving wrongly and worry even more that being in the right, morally, does not seem to make them any the happier. They worry that some people do not seem to have any sense of morality and are getting away with something and they worry that there may be no one around to punish these immoral people.

I do not know how many of these worriers there are in the world at the moment but I would guess that it’s quite a lot. Most human behaviour seems to be driven by moral principles of some sort or another. Politics, religion, popular opinion, education, child rearing, social interaction and personal relationships all contain a plethora of oughts and ought not tos. It’s true that there are many millions of us and that our societies have become increasingly complex structures far beyond the capacity of any individual human to understand. Nevertheless, you would think that we would have a simple set of behavioural rules to use by now, wouldn’t you; ones that we all agree on, or do automatically, because it’s in our nature?

If morality is innate, the worriers think, then everything should be perfect; we would have a set of rules for all occasions and, barring a few freak accidents, we would all get on quite harmoniously.  Unfortunately, life as we know it day to day tells another story, one where numerous acts of an ‘immoral’ nature occur. We know this from our own personal experience of life as well, where doing the right thing (or doing the wrong thing and hoping to get away with it) is a constant preoccupation. Life simply does not run on moral rails.

The religious, by which I mean those who believe or at least accept that there is a supernatural force of some kind at work guiding us towards acts of moral goodness and warning us away from turpitude, find the human world a disturbing and disappointing place. For one thing, not everyone knows the rules, or if they do they are not following them properly, or else they are quibbling over the interpretation. The supernatural force does not seem to be of much help as its guidance comes through hard-to-interpret texts which more often than not give contradictory advice. Sometimes the supernatural force guides through the voice of conscience; apparently some tintinnabulation in the brain that helps you decide what choices to make. Worrying, in other words.

Agnostics, atheists, humanitarians and practically everyone else who is not either an unformed child, mentally incompetent or totally preoccupied with other more important things like trying to fly when then have fallen off a cliff, or watching England lose the Ashes to the Aussies (or win them with the aid of the above supernatural force) will all have the same problem. Why is the world the way it is (a moral mess) if morality is innate and natural? Everyone seems to agree that morality, ethics, good behaviour, call it what you will, has to be taught. This should be unnecessary if it is innate. So we are born with it and then promptly forget it and have to be repeatedly re-taught it all through our lives?  Maybe. More likely, perhaps, the moral sense is like language. We are born with the ability to talk a language but cannot actually do so until taught. The language taught may be any one, or possibly two, of the seven hundred and seventy three that are currently alive and in use. The number of moral code variations that can be taught is probably of a similar order or even greater. If we do have an innate capacity to act morally but need to be taught it as we grow up, like a language, no wonder the world is a confusing place. It’s a moral Tower of Babel.

Perhaps we should pause here and take a look at what is really meant by morality. Humans have a tendency to split hairs and count the number of angels on the head of a pin so it’s helpful sometimes to get to basics and agree what we are talking about, which in this case, of course means agreeing with me as to what I am talking about.  You can talk about ethics and morality until the sun goes out but you can also take a short cut and examine yourself to find the answers. After all, the best guide to your own impenetrable mind is your own mind, the self conscious bit of it. If you are like me you will be aware of a part of your mind that is intermittently observing and analysing what is going on in your conscious mind. The chances are that you are like me in that respect. If you are not, then not much of this will make sense. Please feel free to stop reading now and write to me telling me what your experience of being alive is like. On second thoughts, don’t; you may be a sociopathic murderer and I would rather you just stopped reading this and got on with pulling the wings off flies or whatever it is you do as a hobby.

So what does it feel like, first hand, to act morally? Now, by ‘ acting morally’, I mean making the decision between the choices that appear before you when desires, wishes, needs and compulsions conflict with other impulses in yourself or other humans. These may be real events in real time, like, should I run up to that teenager who has just thrown a crushed-up drinks can into the gutter and strangle him with my bare hands or can I be bothered?  Or they may be imaginary or speculative, like, should I spend money on insulating my house to reduce my carbon footprint or fly to Venice for the holiday of a lifetime?  Or should I put my aging mother into a care home where she would probably be miserable but well cared for and I would feel guilty but relieved of having to worry about her, or, should I care for her in my own home where she might or might not be happy but I would not be and would get irritable and resentful?  Give any cursory consideration to these matters and you will realise that there is no code or moral rule that will help you. ‘Do unto others as you would have done to you?’  Well, you can apply this to both horns of the dilemma and it will be just as useless and it will not blunt the sharp points one bit.

When you get down to it, moral behaviour has nothing much to do with rational choices or obeying rules. It is what you feel like inside that counts; probably what the supernaturalists would call the conscience. There seem to me, as I let my self-consciousness loose on this problem, two emotions that are at work in making these decisions. Firstly there is ‘feeling good’, which is a warm pleasant emotion akin to joy and love. This is a reinforcing emotion; if you get this buzz from following a choice path, it’s great and you will probably make the same choice again. Then there is ‘feeling bad’, an emotion akin to guilt, shame or embarrassment and in extreme cases, disgust. If you feel these emotions they are likely to deter you from a particular choice path and you are unlikely to repeat the choice.  Put simply, your rational self-conscious mind is putting the choices before you; your emotions are making the decisions as to which way to go.  This is how it works for me. I’ll put my mortgage on it being very much the same for you (not you, sociopathic murderer, if you are still reading this). Any supernaturalists, still reading this, may substitute ‘god’ , ‘devil’ or ‘conscience’ where appropriate and still be in the game, but, be warned, it will get rougher for you later.

It’s easy to see how this works with the big choices, the ones that keep you awake at night or send you out walking for miles round dark city streets or straight to the pub. Most moral choices are not of the big variety, though. Most are rather trivial and have trivial consequences. They are quickly forgotten, or if remembered, glossed over with a quick coat of self deception. We are good at rewriting history, especially our own moral decisions history. This is a good thing. If we worried endlessly about every decision we have made we would have no time to make more decisions in the here and now. Come to think of it, I do know one or two people who do live like that. They don’t seem to be very happy. An awareness of one’s emotions and an ability to forget are all that is needed to act morally. Moral action oils the wheels of the choice machine – your brain. Most of the time, very little moral oil in the form of emotion is needed. No one goes around feeling extremes of joy or disgust every five minutes just to get through the choices of the day. The vast majority of the emotions that ‘make the decision’ are mild and almost unnoticeable. [1]

I can hear discontented murmurings at this point. “This is not morality, surely?  There must be more to it than random emotions. Are we not human? Intelligent, planning, decision making animals – well not animals exactly; it is our moral sensibilities that distinguish us from animals, make us human and superior. What happened to conscience, rules, right and wrong, good and evil? If it is just emotions driving the choices, why aren’t we all killing each other? Morality can’t just be individual selfish behaviour can it? It just doesn’t feel right!”   

I hear you all and sympathise.  After all, we do have moral codes; we do teach our children ‘right and wrong’; we do run our complex societies in a way that has the intention, at least, of embracing the good and punishing the bad. That can’t just be the result of random behaviour by individuals driven by their own selfish emotions can it? Well, yes it can.

There is another human trait at work here. We are very good at making sense of things; seeing over the horizon, guessing what is behind the door. We spend most of our lives looking at the past checking what we did and learning from it and looking into the future planning for all eventualities; you remembered that you had won a particularly satisfying argument with a work colleague last Tuesday and you also made a shopping list for tomorrow, didn’t you? Case proven.  I call this life structuring and it takes up a lot of our waking hours. Idealists who ‘live for the moment’ don’t survive long. There’s too much fast traffic for one thing and people find you really, really boring for another.

You also need to think about what moral actions driven by emotions actually do. We do not live in a vacuum; we live in an environment made up of other living things, some of them human, and a vast universe of things nearly all of which get in the way of freedom of action. Thinking about it, there is not much you can do compared with what you can’t do, starting with travelling at the speed of light and ending with scratching that itchy spot  halfway between the nape of your neck and your coccyx without the aid of a rough post stuck in the ground!  So, before we have even got to the point of making moral choices we are 99%[2] restricted in what we can do.

It is also a dangerous world out there. Quite apart from the frustration of not being able to walk through brick walls we also have to suffer the restrictions that other human beings impose on us by their actions and restraints on us. You only have to spill a young man’s beer once to know that apologising and buying him another one works better than laughing in his face and then turning your back on him. Most of our actions, including moral actions are focussed on keeping us alive. Don’t walk on pavement cracks; don’t put thawed food back in the freezer; don’t cross the road when the little man is red; do go to the doctor about that nasty rash; do be polite to the boss; do run away from your boyfriend when he is drunk, jealous and angry (unless there is that murdering sociopath round the corner – still with us, mate?), do be nice to the waiter lest he spit in your soup. Our freedom of action is really very small and dilemmas of a moral kind are unusual rather than the norm. It’s beginning to look like a deterministic bungalow we live in with free will running out the door but I’m not going to argue that one here. Later. When you’ve calmed down after the inevitable outburst of anxiety followed by depression that  will follow hard on the speculations and assertions that come next.

First, an assertion or two. The theory of evolution[3] as set out by Darwin is true. It is a fact. The method of transmission of information from organism to replicated organism by genes is also a fact.  There are no supernatural forces at work in these processes nor do there need to be.  If you don’t believe me, fair enough, but the evidence for this is overwhelming, well documented and widely available. It also makes for fascinating reading but the thoughts about life and death that arise from it are disturbing and confusing to an animal that has evolved to have a big brain with a sense of it’s own importance, and, even more so, a sense of purpose, meaning and destiny. (The Australian cricket team can be excused from having any of these feelings this year because they lost the Ashes, didn’t they?).

If you are familiar with the theory and accept it as fact, then you will already know what I am on about. For those who are not, here is a brief and rather crude summary.

• Life starts somewhere on a continuum between inert matter and replicating[4], active matter.
• This must be the case if everything comes from the Big Bang and there is no supernatural intervention – which is highly improbable.[5]
• Life is the ability of matter to replicate itself and carry forward. information on how to replicate itself again and again. This is the genes bit.
• Very little individual replicated matter survives to replicate again.
• Natural selection occurs when small changes in the code for replication occur which result in the individual life matter gaining an advantage in terms of survival so that it can replicate again.
• Most alive matter dies[6] before it can replicate.
• Small changes in living matter result in diversification of life forms into different species and further changes within those species over time which eventually result in them become other species or becoming extinct.
• Most changes in the replication system are neutral or harmful to the organism.
• All this takes a heck of a long time.
• Humans, you and I, are part of this process. Most of life on earth has occurred without us being there as a species.
• There is no purpose apparent or inherent in the process.
• There is no progress apparent or inherent in the process.
• Organisms tend to become more complex over time (long time) but this is not inevitable nor is it a necessity for survival.

Next, given the above, there are logical consequences which follow and may present themselves to the human mind should it happen to be thinking about these things.  Some of these consequences are anti-intuitive and disturbing to the even path of our assumptions about life as we know and feel it.

 For instance, we feel a sense of progress and purpose in life. (Sorry, Aussies, but it will come back again when you next beat us and snatch back the Ashes, which you inevitably will). However, as we are the product of the evolutionary process – entirely – we cannot in reality have any ‘purpose’[7].  In everyday life, this does not matter. Having a sense of purpose and progress is such fun that we are unlikely to stop having it simply because it isn’t true!  However, it may prove to be a bit embarrassing in the next hundred years or so if we become extinct as a species[8].

A further consequence is that all your thoughts, feelings, moods, sensations, awareness, memories and so on are made by this process called evolution. I did say that there is a tendency to the complex, didn’t I, but I bet you never dreamt I would mean that complex. To make matters worse, understanding evolution, morality, cricket and anything else at all is all part of the process as well.  The brain that you do your thinking with has come about because life has evolved and one of the billions of things that has evolved is you, a replicating organism made up of billions of cells and descended directly from the Big Bang.[9] Don’t let that fool you into feeling too unique and special though.  It’s you and millions of other life forms; you just happen to be the one alive at this blink in the time ogre’s eye. It is a remarkable feeling, though, to be here; again, it’s a feeling produced by matter worked on by evolution over a very, very, long time and ‘you’ who are experiencing that feeling are also matter worked on by evolution over a very long time, though your conscious bit is only here for an ephemeral second so make the most of it.[10] How I feel about this, you can gauge from the poem that follows:

Dead Lucky

There is only one way to be alive,

though an infinity of paths lead to “not alive.”

By “not alive,” I don’t mean dead-

that is having been “once alive”

and though there are many ways to die

from the flailing wriggle of a sperm

to the flickering of centenarian candles,

there is only one way to be alive.

It is, make no mistake – it’s true -

to have not been one of the “not alive”,

ever! it’s the zillion to one chance

proof that your forbears did not die.

Imagine falling from a cloud

and turning into a swallow

three feet above the golden corn -

it’s that sort of chance. Dead lucky.

We were talking, well, I was talking, about morality and you will now realise that I haven’t drifted off the subject after all but am about to credit it to evolution, specifically, human evolution.  Humans as we are have not been around long; I’m sure you have all heard about us being in the last sliver of ivory on the last key of the piano and all know by heart which fauna and flora come between middle C and D sharp.  In fact, it is not such an accurate image. We are really the last sliver of ivory on E sharp in the upper octave or thereabouts. In other words, we come into being and become extinct about three quarters of the way towards the end of life on the planet when the sun draws it into to its hungry, very hot, maw.  Here we are, anyway, in 2009 AD,[11] only 200,000 years  or a mere 8000 generations away from our East African homeland and only 70,000 years, or 2800 generations,  from the great diaspora which sent us wandering round the planet causing trouble.[12]

Most of what follows is speculation. Fossil records are rare and we can never know what it was like to be human 200,000 years ago by direct means. However, we can make some pretty good assumptions. Evolution takes a long time and 200,000 years is a very short time; take the trouble to divide a billion by 2 million and you will see what I mean.  We divided from our Chimpanzee ancestors about 5 million years ago, and we can be sure that it took around 3 million years for our brains to have developed to recognisable human brains. No doubt there have been further developments in the last 8000 generations, but the chances are that most of what we have in the cranial black box now, we had back then. It would have been doing different things then, of course. No mobile phones, television soaps, books, dustbins or Christmas then. However, relationships, hunger, thirst, excitement, fatigue, resting, sexual pleasure, anxiety, fear, loving babies, irritating neighbours and the input of the five senses would all have been going strong. There would have been thinking and feeling just as there is now, but perhaps more usefully employed. If you think that all our thought processes are here for us to deal with the modern world of today, you are almost certainly wrong. They are essentially well made to deal with what life was like 200,000 years ago. Amazingly, they still work reasonably well today in terms of survival if not overall happiness. The fact remains that we have a set of equipment that was made for a donkey cart and we are using it to drive a Porsche down the motorway at 150 mph. Some crashing is likely.

It seems to me, that the brain that evolved to enable Savannah Man to survive and thrive was so good that most of its capacity was underused. How this might have come about is more speculation than I would care to dream up in this essay but that underused capacity gradually became useful for more and more things that enabled survival and then many more things that were extra to survival. Some, like building a shelter, would have survival value, but would develop into more than that to become palaces, train stations and public conveniences, none of which have any direct value in passing on genetic code molecules. By now, the world is full of this extraneous stuff and our minds are full of thoughts that have nothing to do with making sure we don’t die today.

The moral bit from 2 million years ago would need more than 2000 years to change and adapt to the circumstances of the brains creation that have come about to bring us to the state of affairs we are now in. By which I mean, at the macro level largely urban populations, exploding exponentially towards 12 billion and onwards, using mineral and organic resources like they are infinite, and sending any other species into the whirlwind of extinction without mercy. We can’t help it, of course. It’s me big brain, yer ‘onour! At the micro level, we find ourselves troubled and anxious about whom we are and why we are here. All those emotions and that conscious awareness can give us the pleasures of Elysium and the despondency of Hades and everything else in between. It is so intense an experience, being alive, that we think there must be some meaning, some significance to our lives. Tell that to the Dodo!

Homo Sapiens of the Savannah, were he able to look forward into his future 200,000 years hence would be astounded and possibly embarrassed that he had become this extraordinarily beautiful plague rat spreading joy, delusion and destruction around the planet.

Back to morality, which is where I started.  A moral imperative (useful for survival of the genes) that has evolved at one time, say 1 million years ago, and succeeded and helped the organism to survive, may in future generations (say in the last 400 generations) not be useful any more but it will still be there clocking on like a factory worker who should be made redundant, only the management have forgotten about him.  They have forgotten about him, because survival is being taken care of by antibiotics now (also the product of the brain factory) or gas central heating (ditto).  Management gets puzzled from time to time by presence of this worker who keeps attending meetings and giving his opinions. Other workers seem to respect him and he seems a nice chap, but what does he really do here? What is his purpose? He must have one, surely, otherwise why would he be here?

Here is a speculative example from 200,000 years ago. It’s a bit of a ‘Just So’ story, but will serve to get you thinking anti-intuitively, which you have to get the knack of when thinking about evolution. It doesn’t make sense  otherwise.

200,000 years ago, Homo Sap. had evolved into a tribal animal that relied on group loyalty and sharing to enhance its chances of survival. Killing other humans was alright, necessary sometimes, as long as it was not people in your group, most of whom would be closely related to you. Between you, you would be carrying around a pack of common genes and killing each other would put that packet at risk. You got to this place because, purely by accident, you, homo sap, had found that those of you that had the genes that inhibited you from killing your close friends and relatives, even when extremely hungry or irritable, survived  by virtue of your mutual support and succour and therefore reproduced and passed those traits on to future generations, for their benefit too. Those unfortunates, who did not possess this modification to their instinct to kill anything that smelt of sweet meat, initially dined well, but then died out from loneliness and being eaten by bigger beasts without the comfort of their nearest and dearest[13].

The inhibition against killing family and friends(IKFF) proved to be a winning formula, but it was a close run thing. KFF worked as well! But not as well. Over time, IKFF became dominant and any KFF adherents had to get clever and do their dirty deeds in the dark. That was 200,000 years ago but the IKFF inheritance is still with us as is the KFF (if Sociopathic Killer is still listening this may interest you; don’t come round for further discussion, please. I am a dyed in the wool IKFF and you would make me feel uncomfortable – not that you would care).

IKFF is with us, but is it still useful and doing its job of helping our family genes to survive?  Or, is it redundant?  Or is it even harmful to our survival? IKFF has become a general inhibition against killing other humans. It has been accorded the status of Moral Law – Thou Shalt Not Kill!  We do kill each other, of course. We are allowed to kill people from other tribes from time to time and most of us sanction the killing of other animals on our behalf, although we prefer others with less refined inhibitions to do it. Nevertheless, it is a strong inhibition and its translation into a general prohibition at the family, neighbourhood and national levels undoubtedly increases our chances of surviving to reproduce.  Contrary to popular belief, you are far more likely to be killed by a nice man or woman in a car than by a vicious drunken young man on a Saturday night in town.

The mutual support in the tribe that the IKFF gave is now not needed as it was. There are many alternative ways of supporting the individual and kith and kin are just one of them. Women need family bonds less and less to ensure the survival of their children. There is now adequate, indeed some would say, copious, support from the state (the wider tribe) in the form of health care, shelter, money, status, education and physical protection. On this reading, the inhibition against KFF is redundant.  This does not mean that the world will soon be full of family killers. There is no real advantage in being a KFF either, these days. You tend to get caught and sent to unisex prison for one thing, and it’s not attractive to the modern woman for another.

Is being a IKFF a disadvantage now? In some ways, yes, though only time will tell. The threats to individual survival have become globalised and the big threats to the survival of our individual gene packages come from the future; overpopulation, climate change, food shortages, disease, all of which come from our brains. We are more likely to accidentally kill ourselves as a species than revert to killing our families. Nevertheless, should apocalypse occur and we start again from baseline of 200,000 years ago then the old battle between the IKFFs and the KFFs may start up again, and who knows  which would dominate second time around.

One thing is clear. Morals do not have a higher purpose. Like anything else that has evolved they have no ‘purpose’. They have effects, is all. The morals that are here are the ones that have survived along with the genes that gave rise to them. That is why morals are a messy business.  But whilst it is true that we don’t make our morals it is also true that our morals make us. 

It is unbelievable, isn’t it? It doesn’t feel right. You won’t believe this. You will carry on as if the world is your Garden of Eden and that I am trying to give you poison fruit. You will believe in good and evil. You will continue to worry about morality. I know. I am Cassandro and my ears have been licked clean by snakes. I tell and foretell the truth.

[2] Not exactly 99%. The theoretical possibilities of what we can do are infinite and the restrictions and restraints cover between 0% and 100% of what we theoretically could do. 99% has a nice ring to it and probably isn’t too far wrong, though 99.9999999999999% is possibly nearer the mark if you are a teacher or local government worker.

[3] Your gasp of amazement at this apparent non-sequitur of Darwin’s entrance into the sitting room is noted. However, if you want to know where our moral imperatives come from you do need to know the theory of evolution; such a lot hangs from it and you can’t pick the fruit until you know which tree it’s on.

[4] Replication means making a copy of itself; it can be an asexual or a sexual process.

[5] The chance of there being a supernatural force which intervenes in any of this is really so tiny it can be ignored. I speak as one who never has won and never will win the National Lottery rollover.

[6] It could well be argued that death is a reversion to the inert state of matter. It seems to be a sharper divide than coming into life, though. There seems to be a definite switch from being alive to being dead. Near-death states induced by watching avant-garde art video installations for more than five minutes do not refute this.

[7] Richard Dawkins seemed to give ‘purpose’ back to the gene – the selfish gene. He didn’t mean to, of course; he is far too good a scientist and thinker for that. Nevertheless, the sense of purpose and progress hangs around like a bad smell. It is a good illustration of my point, however, because if a man like Dawkins can smell faintly of purpose and progress it shows how hard it is for the rest of us to not stink the place out with it. We can’t help it, I’m afraid. The fact remains though – life is pointless. There, I’ve said it.

[8] The odds on humans becoming extinct in the next 200 years are good. I intend to put a bet on it to the value of all my assets when I die. It will be an instruction in my will. It will, of course, be difficult for anyone to collect the winnings on my behalf for a number of reasons.

[9] I take our ancestry beyond the beginnings of life on earth for two reasons. Firstly, the life/ inert matter continuum suggests that we should. Secondly, I like the feeling of being that old.

[10] If you don’t, won’t or are incapable of feeling this, I’m sorry. You really are missing out on the greatest of highs.

[11] I am not a Christian (you might have guessed this)  but I have no objection to a dating system that starts from an arbitrary year, in this case the birth of Jesus, Anno Domini.The only really true dating would be from the Big Bang and, apart from the problem of not knowing exactly how long ago that was, it would make my birthday  8. 8. 14,000,000,048 or thereabouts which is a bit clumsy to use. Looks good, though.

[12] Not too much trouble at first as there were not enough of us and we had not yet worked out how to dominate our environment. Things really got under way 2000 years ago when the human population was about 2500th of what it is today. That growth has only taken about 400 generations to come about.

[13] This is a story and may lack rigour as good science.

 a+ b = c is a simple equation that even the most maths phobic person can grasp. So why is it that humans are blithely carrying on as if they are going to live for ever instead of becoming extinct?  Here is the equation:

 a is world human population growth

b  is world energy  and food  resources diminishing

c  is mass extinction  driven by climate change and resource depletion

 So, a + b = c  get it?

 Let me explain. The world population of humans is growing at an exponential rate. Exponential means increasing at an ever faster rate. Here are the facts as measured and recorded by clever and careful people: The world population in 1800 was around 1 billion. It took about 125 years to reach 2 billion, which is a doubling. The next doubling up to 4 billion took less than 40 years; the doubling after that to 8 billion will have taken about another 50 years and will occur in around 20 years time. Now, it is true that the wealthier countries become then the slower  population growth becomes, so the next doubling is likely to be slower than the first three; even so by the end of the 21st century the world population is very likely to be around 12 billion, all else being equal – which is not often the case, of course.

Just in case you are in any doubt about the numbers, that is 12,000,000,000 people who, when standing hand in hand in a typically friendly human way, would go round the equator 300 times. Each one of these lovable little pixies would have a patch of earth  of about 100 metres by 100 metres to call their own, unless of course they have learnt to breath underwater, which might be necessary by 2100 A D as I have  worked my maths on the land mass areas that were there before the icecaps have melted.  There may be some competition for places in the temperate zones to take into account as well, but, as human beings are so well behaved and considerate as a species, I expect everything will turn out O K.

 Alas, world energy resources are diminishing rapidly . Non-renewable resources such as oil and gas will be the first to go and will have pretty well disappeared in this century. Nuclear fuel is not unlimited, but there is a lot left and it could last us a long time.  Renewables like wave, wind and solar power are theoretically unlimited but will there ever be enough for a population of 12 billion all wanting to be as wealthy and comfortable and as long lived as the most prosperous of us now are?  I doubt it, and even if there is, the environmental impact on the rest of the world will be so great that half the species that were alive a century ago will be extinct by the end of this century and that is not taking into account the further impact of climate change.

 So you think you can feed 12 billion people?  By all sorts of clever fixes and genetic modifications of plants and animals? Without adding more disastrous effects onto the environment? Without further huge demands on energy use? By going organic? Come on!

 Humans have got to this state of affairs due to one thing – the big, intelligent brain. That is what has made all this possible. Unfortunately, it is a brain that is not well equipped to go in the opposite direction, to go in reverse as it were. It is a brain that has evolved, like any other organ in any other species to do one thing really, really well and that is to enable the reproduction of itself.  6 billion and rising is pretty good, you must admit, except that this success is already on the turn to failure.  The brain is no good at being ‘unclever’. It will always try to find new ways of succeeding until it is wiped out by death and extinction which is nature’s way of saying ‘You’re the weakest link. Goodbye!’

 Are humans going to stop reproducing? No. Are humans going to give up eating? No. Are humans going to go back to live in caves when they have discovered how to live in warm, clean houses with carpets and televisions? No. Are humans going to stop amassing wealth for themselves and their children for status and for rainy days? No. Are humans going to destroy all medicines and forget all  therapeutic practice so that they can control their populations by dying before they can reproduce? No. Are humans going to live in environmentally sustainable, low impact, vegetarian, communes in harmony with their natural surroundings and only reproducing one child per generation until the world population is sustainable and all other species are blessing us for letting them live in peace? No.

 Why not, I hear some idiots saying under their breath? Well, dummies, if you had been keeping up you would realise by now that man is not made like that. His big successful brain makes him a  greedy, rapacious, warlike, and self deceiving animal. Cooperation and altruism only exist on occasions because they bring further ‘success’ not because they are morally good. Ethics are a perfect example of self deception which I will not be tempted to diverge into right now; you’ve got enough to deal with in realising that your children’s children are going to live in a world that sucks, even if they live at all.

 The human species may, or it may not, become extinct in the  near future, by which I mean the next hundred years or so.  I’m not a Cassandro who can see the future. Nor am I a judgmental apocalyptic.  My brain makes me like being human, alive, self conscious and with a future. I enjoy living a healthy, long life in western Europe in the time of the greatest prosperity for humans the world has ever seen. Or will probably ever see. I am as programmed as the next human ape to welcome this good fortune while crossing my fingers and feeling ever so slightly guilty about the less fortunate . Like everyone else, I worry about the size of my gas bill rather more than about the effects of global warming.  My foolish, passionate altruism is directed towards those who are close and dear to me – you know, the ones you would go back into the burning house for. With all others, it is conditional; what I do for you is conditional on what you do for me but fluffed up enough to make me feel like a nice guy.  Genes and luck have meant that I am the type who succeeds without offending people but that does not make me any more or any less responsible for the fate of humanity than the most self centred capitalist shark swimming in the hedge fund pool.  We are all at it one way or another. It’s what we are. It’s what we do. It won’t change in time for Christmas 2100, which probably won’t be a white one and the turkey will have to go a long way between 12 billion humans desperate for a taste of meat.

 So why am I rambling on about this doom scenario as if I care? When I don’t care? And why should I? I’m alive and well in a time of prosperity in a very pleasant suburb of a peaceful city in a country with a moderate climate, good public service television and radio and great food in nearby supermarkets. I’m mentally healthy and find life intellectually and emotionally interesting and ,most days, satisfying. I don’t have children and I’ll be dead well before this disaster kicks off big time and even if it comes sooner than expected, well, I’ve had a good life for 60 years which is  twice as long as your average stone age chap and far more comfortable. Nothing lasts for ever and I don’t feel a debt to future generations to be paid off  in my lifetime by me. Oh, no!  So why this concern with things which I claim aren’t my business?

 Well, to be honest, I like to preach a bit and I am that rather smug schoolboy who  has the right answer because he’s been paying attention and now wants the whole class and especially teacher to know it. I expect to (and deserve to) get beaten up in the playground after school. This sort of thing doesn’t make boy popular but I can’t help myself , I’m afraid.  Plus, there’s is an element of the emperor’s new clothes about this and I am enjoying being the little boy in the crowd, ” Yes, humanity, you are naked, naked, naked as the silly old ape you are!” The adult in me, though, is also genuinely curious. The brain that has brought us to this place is also one which has made us interested in ourselves and the world we live in and that has, ironically contributed to both our success and downfall.

 That downfall will come one way or another. Our extinction as a species is certain at sometime even if we have to wait until the sun burns up the earth; if you are bothered, it’s a question of when, not if. 99.9% of all species that ever lived on this planet are now extinct and, as extinction is defined as the death of last survivor of any particular species, it does seem to reduce the chances of eternal life for the human race somewhat. ‘When’ has usually been about 10 million years after the species first appeared, so, clearing out the human bungalow following the sad death of the occupier at the turn of the next century may be a bit premature.  But maybe we are in a new era of extinctions. You will already have gasped in horror at the fact that half the species alive a century ago are already extinct or on the way to extinction. Oh, you missed that, did you?  Never mind, we humans have not gone yet or evolved into any other form of ape either.

 The chances are that humans will survive into the next century and beyond in some numbers. What those numbers will be is impossible to predict. What is certain from the maths is that there will be, at sometime, a radical reduction in the human population. How reduced it becomes will depend on the outcome of a catastrophe event  that we do not know how to prevent and cannot now alter.  The aftermath is equally unpredictable; will the human population recover to do the whole thing all over again? Possible. Will humans behave any differently in the future ? Not very likely unless only the very, very unintelligent or the stupidly over-altruistic ones survive.  How will the population be reduced? Oh, the usual ways;  war, famine, poison, disease, fire, flood and terminal boredom. How will it increase again?  The usual ways; sex, sex, sex.

So back to the maths lesson. Remember;

  a is world human population growth

b  is world energy  and food  resources diminishing

c  is mass extinction  driven by climate change and resource depletion

 So, a + b = c 

And don’t worry, there is no exam this term. This is just teacher chuntering on at the end of the lesson on a hot and sticky June afternoon. Now go off and play and don’t run in the corridors!

Life is a racehorse ridden by the gene jockey.  Nevertheless, the horse has bolted and the stable door is swinging in the wind.

So my question is; how do you write this poetry for a general audience? Is it possible? What does it require – footnotes, prefaces, end notes, links to websites?  The poem that follows is about Taxonomy, an important scientific tool for categorising life forms.  I understand what I am talking about in the poem. Do you, as the reader?  Help me out by telling me!

TAXONOMY

Sed quaero a Te et Toto orbe differentiam genericam inter hominem et Simiam, quae ex principiis Historiae naturalis. Ego certissime nullam novi. Utinam aliquis mihi unicam diceret! Si vocassem hominem simiam vel vice versa omnes in me conjecissem theologos. Debuissem forte ex lege artis.

But I seek from you and from the whole world a generic difference between man and simian that follows from the principles of Natural History. I absolutely know of none. If only someone might tell me a single one! If I would have called man a simian or vice versa, I would have brought together all the theologians against me. Perhaps I ought to have by virtue of the law of the discipline.

Carl Linnaeus, from a letter to Johann Georg Gmelin dated February 25, 1747

Carl Linnaeus, seventeen o’seven to seventeen seventy eight

unknown to himself killed God and the Devil and most, if not all,

lesser known spirits and sprites ; for this the Holy Swedish State

honoured him with the title Carl Von Linné,  the best joke since the Fall,

for by taxonomy, he distinguished and categorised and in doing so axed

the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and planted the Tree of Life;

Although the deaths came later he sharpened and held out the knife.

What is man?  Where does he fit? What is he here for? What is it

that seems to make him yearn to be god, yet  dance with the devil

and then excuse himself by his mortality to die in blood and shit?

There’s a taxonomic answer , one which will bring down to a level

All leapings of the spiritual ones – they will fall on the cold hard facts.

Here is the order of relationship, compare them, if you please;

Gods and humans, Homo Sapiens and Pan Troglodytes.

 We  chimpanzees and humans inhabit the same Domain, eukaryotic,

made up of cells with nuclei, and we are subjects in a Kingdom of Animalia,

which makes us not plants but mobile and hungry to tear, lick

and suck the life from others . Next we share the Phylum, cordata

No one is sure of the extent of a phylum but this one’s packed

with invertebrates , with all the soft bits hanging from a bendy stick

but you don’t need too much of a brain yet, so don’t let’s  panic.

We are getting there  closer together as a Class of mammalian

children who must find a breast and cling to it for dear sweet life,

a warm milky innocent life – it’s later it will get bacchanalian,

for Homo and Pan, but for now we need our improving brain for strife

and we’re learning how to lie, deceive and cover our tracks

on the way to meet our Family members, the hominidae,

the great apes. The neocortex is growing; the tail has said goodbye.

The gorilla, orang-utan, human and chimpanzee, we’re Family,

orang-utan  departs,  leaving Subfamily homininae, just the three of us,

then Guy lumbers off leaving the chimp and human Hominini

Tribe and then we shake hands ,part company maybe kiss

goodbye,  Hominina and Panina  still with hair on our backs

and a common gene pool to swim in and a tribal memory

of things we did together , human and chimpanzee.

Now we are two species, Pan Troglodytes and Homo Sapiens.

Seems like we’ve become sworn enemies, denying

each others birthright, fighting a vendetta without ends.

Us – we humans with the big brains, always relying

on a new idea to get us out of trouble. The chimps have more sex

and are shouting down the jungle halls, it seems a fun

thing to do on the crucifix road  to extinction.

So, God and the Devil, who are their long lost antecedents?

God’s Domain is the universe, though he clearly doesn’t live there

and Heaven is his Kingdom, no signs of any life there, or recent

occupation by humans or chimps, and as for Phyla,

Well there’s a ragtaggle collection of gods around somewhere, don’t ask

me to catalogue them, please!  and as for family or tribe

all he’s done is kill off with plagues, make commandments and bribe

all the priests to contend he’s got good on his side as his forté

which is useless, we’re Homina and Panina, don’t do good or evil,

we just do limited success and more often failure. Comprende?

Which is why the taxonomy of the nasty, foolish old Devil

is a bit closer to home. But he seems to be a loner and we look askance

at outsiders, though the lifestyle can attract on occasion

but it’s far too show- offy really, a one day sensation.

The Tree of Life, where we sit on a thin twig, just looking

at the starry sky; all around us are others are settling to roost

for the night  and some will not be there in the morning,

for in the end we are all gone,  all descended, all lost

again on the jungle floor with the fungi  and usual suspects

for death and destruction, though they too are cited

as family and friends when we all stand together, separate and united.

I took these two poems to a poetry workshop; there is usually good feedback to be had from the poets who attend; technical advice, constructive criticism,  wit and humour, sometimes, and you come away feeling that your work has had a fair appraisal. I had a disappointing reaction to these two poems. Can you tell me why?

Body Language

I

We like to see this happen in a cocktail bar

Where she’s sitting on a plump red leather stool

In a sequinned dress, making it obvious

To any man who’s not a total fool.

But this is the bus station waiting room.

She came in after him, sat close,

Not next to him, reached out for a magazine

When he did. Their faces rose

Together. Eye contact made. A smile.

Now, magazines forgotten, they talk

And she turns towards him, pretty knees

Where her skirt has moved up somewhat.

He makes a joke. She nods her head and laughs.

He leans back, legs wider.

She gathers in, opens out her wrists.

He’s thinking what it’s like to be inside her.

Her eyes have Belladonna now,

Her lips are moist and riper.

She moves her shoulders with a little shrug;

He fancies. He might even like her.

You know what happens next;

It’s the rule of four – return and count them.

She’s backed a certainty, a one horse race,

Led him by the nose, hot and handsome.

II

The looks that women give you! They can’t help it

can they? Sadness, disapproval, happiness, desire;

obvious , you think but the thing is their mind’s not

telling them the same story as their

face is saying.  Last Saturday, for instance,

she’s giving me this look, you know the one,

the straight lipped one that takes the edge from

her good features. She says, ‘You go off and chance

our marriage down the pub, right. I’ll be fine,

could do with being quiet, don’t have much time

to call my own.’ And then she gives a smile

like a prosecution lawyer does when you’re on trial

for murder.  Then you know you ought to pay

a big deposit on your future guilt; say sorry now,

not go to the George and Dragon, drink all day.

You see, although she loves you, now she hates you,

or maybe simply disapproves on principle

or she’s thinking  of her mother, or just blue,

who knows?  She’s given your dick a pull

to let you know she’s there. As if you didn’t know.

So you shrug and get your coat and off you go.

I was disappointed that there was no more interest in the content poems than there was. They got a low key, flat response. Why? Was the audience embarrassed by the sexual content? Perhaps they did not recognise the human behaviour described, or were just not interested in the subject or thought it was badly, or incorrectly observed. I expect, unrealistically, that other people will observe and enjoy life with the same interested detachment that I have. Nevertheless, it was disappointing.

I want definite opinions from a poetry workshop group, for or against. If for, then tell me why it is good. If against, again, tell me why; be technical or if you disagree with the sentiments expressed, let me know. Silence is not as polite as it sounds and is very frustrating. I thought the poems were very good, clever, well constructed and well told. They were saying just what I wanted to say.  If I am wrong in that, tell me.

I have noticed that poets are not very good at understanding feelings and emotions; they think they are as it’s supposed to be their field. Subjectively speaking, they are probably sensitive, empathetic people who feel a lot. They are not able to be objective about their feelings or anyone elses’s, which is a failing in a poet.

I made a bonfire in the garden last weekend.  These days it’s just another thing to feel guilty about; smoke annoyance to the neighbours, carcinogens in the toxic smoke and, of course, carbon dioxide, probably a few kilograms to add to the world tonnage. Yes, that’s how we’ve been made to feel these days.  Would chipping and composting be better?  Well, the electric chipper would indirectly send up a bit of CO2 from the power station at Retford, near Nottingham, though , of course, you can’t really say where your electricity comes from these days; it might be a nuclear power station in France or a homely wind turbine pumping its heart out with good green energy. Now I like composting, it has a schoolboy pleasure about it. Bugs, slugs, worms and mould and a rotting process that produces heat. You can cook porridge or even a stew in a good compost heap, like a hay box. That’s moderately exciting to a schoolboy, even a grown up one like me.   Our local council allows you to put green waste in the bin. It is taken off and processed with all the other rubbish and ends up either as fuel for a cement works or as compost at the sewage works.  All that energy that goes into transporting it around tends to take the green edge off it.

The truth is, I love a bonfire. I don’t just mean that I have a gentle pleasure in  a bonfire; it’s deeper than that. It’s the evocation of all man made fires that I see in the red spectrum light and hear in the hiss and crackle, feel on my face as I bend over to peer into the inferno. The scent of wood smoke. Can you describe it? I doubt it, scents don’t transcribe into words easily but I am certain you know exactly what it is when you smell it and that it pumps memories into you head like an adrenaline rush.

Now this particular bonfire came about because I had cut some branches off my cherry tree. This is not something I normally do or want to do. The tree in question stands about ten metres high and has a spreading canopy that bursts out with white pink blossom in about six weeks time. You can see that I am looking forward to it and would do nothing to harm a single blossom if I could avoid it. However, a few branches overhang my neighbours garden and I had agreed to take them off in a spirit of neighbourly good relations. My neighbour and I had worked on it together over the fence, he, sawing away at the less branches with a flimsy panel saw while I did a proper woodcutter job with a bow saw and hand axe. I was left with a pile of branches, leafless as yet, and had chopped them up into a three stack of twigs, medium branches and thicker, heavier boughs. I used the latter as props for a forsythia and laid a few in a pile to rot down as a home for toads and mice.

The bonfire came on the next weekend. I was looking for the right weather of course a light breeze blowing away from my own house and my wife resting quietly out of sight and earshot. She disapproves of bonfires and I did not want to her to be yet again disappointed with my character. Secrecy added an extra thrill . For now I was left with anticipation.