What kept me going during the 11 months of intensive composition from 1 January 1996 was the hope that in writing poetry I would find a way of expressing a personal vision which would somehow change the way I thought and felt and save me from nihilistic despair. What I did not expect was that I would be articulating for myself all the ways in which I had benefited from my faith, employing standards of philosophical rigour that I had freely accepted for myself and could not afterwards gainsay.This was significant in view of the circumstances in which I lost my faith six years earlier.
I have to confess that I had been a typical convert from atheism, proselytizing with ungainly zeal. But by the end of the eighties I had begun to feel that God was not reciprocating, and so I gave Him an ultimatum - to prove his love for me by a miracle or I would be forced to make the inevitable inference. When He failed to answer within the time frame, I realised that I not only had the evidence I needed for atheism, but also had re-secured my old independence of thought, long mourned for. It was liberating to report my change of heart to those in Bethesda I had earlier tried to evangelize. To parade my indecision still further by reporting my later change of heart would have been too irritating for them, and I have since moved to relative anonymity in another village, where the supposition now is that God has proved His love for me by turning my demand for intellectual autonomy to my ultimate advantage in bolstering my convictions by the only means that I would accept. My one regret is the straining of poetry then by a dialectical adventure it was not designed for, and of reason now by still unrevised dogma (Mat.13:52).
To Dr Chris Freeman I want to express my appreciation for supporting the idea of a poet-scientist on his staff with humour, flexibility, tolerance and understanding.
pick-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps task, while the conditions for successful revolution could not be foreseen. I would have been less depressed by his negativity, if it had not brought to light an aspect of the Christian faith which had given me comfort since my conversion from atheism in 1981 and which no longer did so (since I had abandoned it in disgust nine years later): namely, that it satisfied my hankering for a better world. I was still unsure of my philosophical position, but certain that truth was absolute and definable.
I was privileged to join Dr Chris Freeman’s Department of Wetland Biogeochemistry at UWB in the spring of 1995. Here, recalling an early sense of poetic vocation, I thought of using poetry to work through deep questions about truth, humanity and the self in a thrust to find a new philosophical direction for myself. But the negative prompting for The Quest and the unforeseeable direction it took (I wrote each poem like a bloodhound after a scent, not knowing where it would lead) have made me renounce my earlier renunciation.
I graduated in Society and Technology at Middlesex Polytechnic in 1981 (after a placement at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Monks Wood Experimental Station, Abbots Ripton). I then read MSc Ecology at the University of Wales, Bangor, and undertook further ecological research at Bangor ITE. I followed this with conservation work, tried teaching in 1989, then returned to work at the UWB as a lab assistant in the Chemistry Department in 1994.
While in the Department I was asked by my old English master, Dr Pierre Watter, with whom I had enjoyed a long friendship and correspondence on philosophical issues, to comment on the draft of his long-awaited magnum opus.
For a copy of The Quest, please email me at georgeprl@aol.com. Supplies are limited. Please understand that my work commitments away from home prevent me from replying promptly or at length.
The Pentland Press folded sadly withn months of publication. They had produced a fine book, a credit to the production team, the editor and proof-reader.
This welcome break from the Elemental Analyser was its solid, epistemological equivalent - a case for saying that revisionism, applied to the ills of capitalism, would be an impossible,