Coming To The Light
by
Book Cover & Preview Text
Coming to the light
At midnight's wakeful moment
Mind is an unscreened open window
And words come fluttering in.
Great mothy words
Propelled by shadowed antecedents and
Having only virtual existence
Until embraced by context
And mated to a meaning.
Words land on the walls of my room.
They bounce against my mental furnishings.
Their dusty trails fluoresce
And connect my isolated thoughts
Thereby
Completing them.
Whose words are these
That fan the embers of awareness
And make their magic in my mind?
Evidence perhaps that the retiring Scout
Did not put the campfire fully out
And now has set a blaze beyond
Intent or dream; beyond
All fear and wonder;
Dream sparks struck
Into the tinder of a sleepless mind.
Conversely, did Blake have it right?
Perhaps not moths around the mental candle surge
But fearfully symmetric tigers
Burning bright
Have slipped the Immortal's leash
And hunting gone throughout
The forests of the night
For sustenance from human thoughts
To keep their own fires at full blaze.
In the beginning was not the Word.
Rather, the coming of the Word
Allowed beginnings to begin.
When the prenaissence of thought
Expanded from nothing
Into a memic fireball
Searching toward cognition
And the bigger Bang into Knowing
The Word tamed the wildness.
Words framed with power
Cloaked in civility
And graced with truth.
Whose Words are these
That make their magic in my mind?
Coming home from a meeting with Roger Penrose
What was the sin of this Perfect Square,
Now banished from the company of mankind
Into the abstraction of mathy space?
Did the jutting angles give offense
To the friendly fogginess of feeling?
Were its lines too straight, lacking humour?
Did it humiliate a braggart?
* * *
Imagine Euclid staggering home
After meeting Roger Penrose;
A hall of mirrors visit
Into hyperbolic space
Where he tessellated with five squares.
God grant him now to know
What a straight line may be.
* * *
When x factors into many values,
Which is the true story of my life
Within this complex space?
Whatever happens to the other lines,
The times that never are or were,
But might have been my own as well?
But then again, perhaps somewhere they are.
Is there some desert in n-space in which
They bloom and blush unseen
And factor into nothing at the end?
Is there a reconciliation coming?
* * *
Who could have foreseen that
Common sense stands dumb before reality; That entangled quanta and their kin
Do hold the keys
To the simple beauty of the universe; that
Quanglements would reach through time to us
Everywhere dragging that damned dead cat
And carrying messages that we can't read yet!
Strings hang from the frazzled edges
Of a fraying universe.
Will there be light in a twister?
Is there more at stake
Than just the poetry of numbers?
A visit to the Art Gallery
The eagle that is forever flying out of the canvas
Into my face
Has achieved a sort of Promethian immortality;
Forever to be airborne
But never free of the confining paint.
The robin that flew into my window
Broke its neck and rots by the roses.
It is out of the competition.
Eternal life, it seems,
Is a consolation prize
For those who never really lived.
Things are becoming more clear.
The pictures are turning into mirrors
That reflect me into each other.
There would have been
No chance for the robin in here.
A change in the weather
Last evening
While dogs and people walked the park
Uneasily
Wind was preaching audible sedition
To the trees
Birds had already packed anxieties
And flown.
One could sense clouds muttering back stage
Waiting for the cue to rumble.
Later
Lightning licked the village spire
And the dogs barked back
At thunder.
Convocation at the school of hard knocks
After the last history lesson
When the end of the world is announced
Will there be detentions
For those at the back of the class
Who weren't paying attention?
Formats
Book Details
About the Book
The primary stimuli for what became the contents of this book were deeply embedded in the combination of a fulfilling and privileged professional life, textured by strong family supports and the author's curiosity about the mysterious underpinnings of the natural universe. The distinction between the human and the merely bestial seems to lie in language (both spoken and written), the mystery of curiosity and the compulsion to pass acquired perspectives on to others of our species; surely a trilogy of traits to be celebrated in every way possible.
About the Author
Albert (Al) Driedger was born in Saskatchewan and graduated there in both Medicine and Biochemistry. He has been active in nuclear biosciences and medicine at the University of Western Ontario since 1972. These days he spends more time cultivating his role as grandfather and lover of the natural world than in his former role as investigator/clinician.