And truth of work’s physical context, while dogma taught suspicion
Of my interpersonal and cultural environment, from which no meaning
Or truth could ever be retrieved , except by betrayal of passion.
Preoccupied with practice all the more as I saw how imperfect
It was, I put up shutters on any attempt to unite my present
Experience with my past and my former goals, dreams and hopes,
For being bored again or born again disrupts the narrative.
It is as if the personal development profile the heart is writing
Has blanks for the times when we have not been affirming self
But stifling it, entrusting to blind fate the oversight of what we may
Become, in order to concentrate on what we should be doing -
Like determined sun-loving Canute, swamped by his lunar ignorance.¹
My six months in amenity horticulture - busy as a JCB ² - gave me
Few opportunities to negotiate the meaning of my experiences
To myself (who was one with the Waste Land, when I attempted
To sow the seeds of a love of poetry in my sex-obsessed mates -
For it was all torque³ to JCBs); and the channel for l’eau de vie
Was too busy spreading Another’s truth to discover his own.
Only afterwards does the rebuilt self and underwhelmed mind
Realize that truth is less the recollection in tranquillity
Denied to the bored and distracted grafter or the practising
Of a creed than a principle of growth, a habit of finding
Meaningful coherences in our lives, leavening our understanding
Of the world, helping us to assimilate reality, as we grow.
Science planted a garden and there it put the man it had made,
Dr Adam. Now Adam was a practised botanist and had been taught
A proper respect for names*. Names were Science’s first child -
But a mere tool for personalizing the subjects of change
In the field of becoming. Names did not repeal Biology’s decree
To study life: they pinned down not on emptiness, but subtle clockwork
¹ According to the metaphor, the practice of commanding even the waves belonged to the day, understanding the procession of the tides to the night, especially as the moon controls it.
² busy as an earth-moving bee, feeling wasted by waste land I was clearing, yet reciting T.S Eliot to fellow workers in an attempt to temper and alleviate the drudgery.