Alan Halsey

Dichotomedes called himself the Casual Dogmatist. He said sleep is the mother of all and the father of all and Will by necessity calls forth the unwilled. He liked to speak of ‘abundant chaos’ and said the four elements are pleasure, pain, intention and resistance. The saying ‘The polis falling out with itself looks for enemies everywhere’ is attributed to him and also the fragment ‘Heraclitus was wrong when he said that the sun will not overstep his measure because everything does’.

‘Speaking up, talking down.’ This remark, supposedly referring to Plato’s epis- temology, is cited as the reason for Dichotomedes’ expulsion from the Academy.

Dichotomedes also said ‘The void fills [itself] as smoke [does].’ And: ‘disparateness is only sometimes disparity’.

‘First traveller from Dismay,’ Beddoes told his notebook on 10th November 1821.
‘33 Coventry Street.’

‘The expectation determines the event,’ said Dichotomedes.

you’ll find Mercurialis’ house at the edge

of the city - protected by two stone dogs

either side of his front door -

everybody knows he’s found his true lover

and they’ve planted their garden on a ledge

above the road with aconite, borage,

clematis and hellebore -

say they prefer to manage

a modest estate with a bog

they call a pond and a symposium of frogs

Those dizzy oysters said the lizopard

had eaten their Christmas Roses.

Their magic so politely professed while they passed

an heap of other accidents, etc., talked of metempsychosis.

As to Odysseus but as the bats squeak in different voices:

coherent light as tensor to shadow recension

where meaning is the function of fixed phase difference

or the news they thoughght [ sic ] to print.

‘Myself being the person I am’

I and I as distinct as the ostensibly

identical species of Pipistrellus pipistrellus.

‘The bat people have measured everything you can think of measuring.’

Everybody is about to forget whose name his soul was.

(It looks as if a high-risk daub

became an off-the-books debauch.)

(When all the ducks are in a line

all the golden parachutes will open.)

An intense sultry furnace-glow had replaced the flood of sunlight: thunder, jagged clouds, oily-looking fields. A sort of luminous fringe in a net woven of dew-beams.

Black lines, dirty rushing rags hanging splendour, and a Shape: the smoke on the water tempering the light.

Moved, as I moved. The million with fierce song. Phosphoric. When they turned to look back it was a mere little glittering patch.

Shelley, the sea is all coming down. It’s only our friend Tre. I’d go to Leghorn or anywhere in her. Sail to America.

They had seen her founder at four o’clock [var. about 5] and in their vessel Roberts found spars [var. an English-made oar]

var. Roberts recognized on board a ship at the Port of [ ] a spar & other equipments belonging to Shellys boat

var. Trelawny’s Genoese mate pointed out an English-made oar and various timbers, but the entire crew swore by all the saints in the calendar

var. the sailors gave a very embarassed account & said they saw a boat with men in her before them, & never saw them again. They afterwards denied that there were men in her

var. at 4 o’clock they saw that the boy had climbed the mainmast, when a violent gust of wind took the sails crosswise

They cd not they said get near her. It blew too hard for him to haul his wind. In a few minutes after, she had disappeared and [ deletion ] foundered.

...but what of the details of common perception language endeavours when written to devour? ‘Wrong words, how can we tell but we can.’ Little slips of the pen become spells calling demons (nomadic) from the spillage constantly threatening religious and secular authority. Excessive mistake or mystique? The pen stalks letters or pens talk or they did until as children were warned in the 1950s Biro’s invention killed the art of fair writing an example perhaps of the fall as broken enchantment re-enacted. ‘Theoretically starlings could compose in counterpoint’ shows how theory might reveal the way things used to be. An alien voiceprint, let’s suppose, which records that speech was the only substance the visitors identified on earth and no more connected with the practice the locals call ‘writing’ than painting a picture or blowing through a tube. Not as such to be considered as a sign as of commandment. Here as elsewhere the letter Y makes supplication (broken attachment re-enacted) .

A Life of William Shenstone

I have no idea but what comes in at my eyes which is a landskip garden

(an alcove six elegies a seat two epitaphs and a serpentine river)

my Inactivity’s enchantment a precipitate cascade in my (Virgil’s) Grove

a thousand antic motions around Indolence a kind of centripetal force

ONEVERLASTARTLETTERMINALIENDLESSONG

Colquhoun and MacBryde

they went for a ride

MacBryde and Colquhoun

by the light of the moon

We set out to make

of whatever we take

to be some kind of order

over the border

said Colquhoun or MacBryde

for you’ll have to decide

if MacBryde or Colquhoun

was the speaker or whom

Colquhoun and MacBryde

they both

MacBryde and Colquhoun

they both

No excuse nexus, discuss to excess, spruce as surprise. Placebo and scan who can, remembering a headache or noise in the ear in a sudden silence: welcome to Wales and the Big Pit. Gwent in the grip of, Gwent’s always in the grip of something. A postal strike or an outbid, edible or flat, tally essence of the new white bridge deriving Loegr in a sunshine shuffle ex Logres. Today’s football with commentary by Aaron Williamson and Geraldine Monk, better mention to swell his primal and her scream. ‘One for one and the other for the other but what for whom?’ A moment in some such text is extra when compounded with a footnote dilemma to a BM shelfmark in one whose keeper let get away.

The lucky thing for me was that being an author I could always

plead absence and so I wasn’t there that day when there was all

that trouble in Matthias’s office. Nor, you will notice, was

Matthias. But the story goes that

The boys came in by mistake. Thought it was a brothel

Thought we were printing seditious

Thought it was a smell

from hell

Thought it was

It was a time when the forests were being eroded from within by enclosure of land for out-of-town development and ring-roads. As the century came to an end retail parks and industrial estates proliferated. Between February **** and July **** there were fifteen commissions of oyer and terminer occasioned by raids on business parks, Tescos and Texas Homecare and attacks on quangoists and hypermarketeers. And Robyn hod in scherewod stod, hodud and hathud and hosut and schod: his four and thuynti arowus like jingling spells against prestige employment developers. He gadered and assembled unto him many misdoers beynge of his clothinge and, in manere of insurrection, wente into the wodes and strange contrays as outlawes, waitynge a tyme to murdre, sclee, and other grete harmes in that contray to do.

...that the book contained false and malicious

matter about time...

and in the other’s dream

paranoia blended with a special disguise,

a trap had been set in the refusal.

‘They loved power and the Anglo-Saxon world’

thus blurring those passages with battle-

shot gossip and disintegrating spirit, human being

in the process which was ‘nature’, or the routine

excess they had hoped for.

All the rung notes and the spirit of the ladder, avoiding pitifulls, etc.: for you have few wordes but they signifie divers things distinguished only by their tunes that are sung in the utterance. One woman's head of hair is a halo of holly as the wordland slips through the faults of the dreamtime and reified intention becomes Tenerife: a great Mystery and worthier the searching then you would imagine.

Anarchist insomniacs who raised hell in the wordland are pushed off the balcony of dreamtime. It will be one of those weeks like the one last autumn when everyone was looking at Birmingham from Denmark and apology was recognised as knowledge of something : the enemy of substance, or shadow of a style.

Where rumour’s the coin the penny

drops a bit late. The cost is what the land

which in this case means the hills

and valleys when unveiled pay the price

of off. Some muse or other

memory-resident

...

If a keyword turns and calls

the beam-ends names with Eleatic

precision at the roadhouse on

the bypass which is locally

known as the Brotherhood of Man

will they meet? With universal

acclaim? At no particular time?

As if the great white Whole were

absolutely human I'm telling

you everything and nothing O

Theomachismo even seems

to me to want to change

this tune and start a praise-song.

Vows are refashioned as the voice

dies out along the flightpath. The paradox

points back to the problem arrow. The voice

dying out describes the view

whereas the view describes more than

the limits of the voice. Reconnaissance looks

westward: renaissance dies out along

the flightpath. Can I out-describe you

or you me? It is the arrow on a map,

pointing west of the page, which the paradox

points back to. Isn’t all time lost by definition?

It points back along the flightpath, refashioned.

There being nothing doing here I am

wholly resigned to. The flags

flak & flak. Every word has a sense

of what’s about to have happened.

Beyond this we can advance

a proposition which slides

as a rule into

place and no further

than the art of flight

or fugue will allow

us to mark or remark

in passing

describes an impasse

between identical figures of

its own contrivance as natural

numbers no mind

can exhaust but will

add one term

the same as itself

to the progression that

can but be but

advances beyond this

point

that it follows

So that

everything he ever had known was another state of mind.

It is 1984

the miners’ strike & the mini-skirt

more waiting for eternal recurrence

but the sepia fades

at once

in the period flavour

as the red shift shades

into purple

à la Spengler

in the cabinet

reshuffle. Footnotes to

as the anxious angel

of the agent soul

its survival.