A Book of Lives Read online

  Uselessness. I help it to take thought.

  It must expand. It can’t expand.

  It suddenly – and I mean suddenly –

  Finds itself synthesising proteins

  That generate blood-vessels, capillaries,

  Tiny but broad enough for a breakthrough

  Into nutrients, into voyages,

  Into invasion and all that that implies.

  Our human hosts are baffled: a thinking tumour?

  Well, would you prefer an effect without a cause?

  BEAU You could say something about this, I’m sure.

  GORGO Could, but won’t. There’s a war on, you know.

  BEAU Justify your armies, justify your battles.

  GORGO Did you not hear what I said about power?

  Are your ears clean, or you keep them half-closed

  Against infection from a satanic tempter?

  You may not even think I am a tempter,

  But I am the insidious one, hissing Listen listen.

  Every tumour begins with a single cell

  Which divides and divides and is its own boss.

  It laughs to feel its freedom, to hell with blueprints,

  It shoulders and jostles its way in the organ-jungle.

  Even on a glass in the lab it’s huddling and layering

  Like caviar, and does caviar have to justify

  Its juicy rolling formless proliferations?

  The joy of kicking decent cells away,

  Sucking their precious nutrients, piercing

  Membranes that try to keep you from the waves

  Of lymph and blood you long to navigate –

  Through unimaginable dangers, be robust! –

  Until you reach those Islands of the Blest –

  I hear you snort, Beau, don’t explode! –

  The distant organs where you plant your flag

  And start a colony. Those cells are heroes,

  Homer would hymn them, but I do my best!

  BEAU Heroes! If anything so small can be a monster,

  That’s what you and your mates are. You sound like –

  GORGO Forgive the interruption. I have a few words

  On monsters to give you later. Carry on –

  BEAU – sound like Jenghiz Khan at the sack of Baghdad –

  GORGO – at least he got into the history books –

  BEAU Will you let me speak?

  GORGO All right all right.

  But I know what you are going to say.

  BEAU You do not, but even if you did

  It would be worth saying. Imagine the baby

  Still in the womb, the image screened by ultrasound

  Flickering and shifting, not sharp but unmistakably

  Alive, the soft hand at the mouth, the dome

  Above it, that forehead of a million secrets

  Waiting to be born, everything vulnerable

  To the last degree, but with the strength

  That attends vulnerability in its beginnings.

  It grows, it emerges, it grows, not a single

  Bad gene in its body (your turn to snort,

  All right Gorgo, but listen, listen now).

  GORGO (sings) The oncogene, the oncogene, it squats in the DNA

  As proud and mim as a puddock, and will not go away.

  – Sorry, Beau. Continue.

  BEAU As I was saying, imagine his growth,

  He is strong, well formed, not brilliant but bright,

  Explores the sea-bed, writes a book, has children,

  Tells them stories sitting on the terrace.

  Vibrations of health and harmony

  Are like a talisman he gives back to nature.

  His cells are in order, dying when they should.

  He measures power by love, given and taken.

  Your power does not tempt him.

  GORGO So Pollyanna

  Put on her skis, and was never seen again.

  It is a nice picture, but you made it all up.

  If there are such people, I must see what I can do

  To infiltrate, subvert, and overthrow them.

  Health and harmony? What a yawn.

  I promised you a word on monsters.

  I was helping one day to tie a knot

  In a long tumour which had got itself twisted

  (Deliberately, I’m sure) like a Möbius strip

  In a body cavity of a pleasant young woman:

  She was flapping and shrieking on the hospital bed

  In what I imagine was very great pain.

  Doctors brought students, teratologists were tingling.

  There was a sharp ferocity in the air

  That put all thoughts of the ordinary to flight.

  – A microscope will show you a different monster:

  A nucleus too gigantic for the cell,

  Ragged, pulsing, encroaching, a bloodshot eye

  Staring at a wreckage of filaments and blobs,

  Bursting with DNA, breaking apart

  In a maelstrom of wild distorted chromosomes –

  That was a sight to make you think, friend Beau!

  BEAU I am thinking, of how these observations

  Have twisted your mind like the tumour you described.

  It is death to want to make the abnormal normal.

  Suppose you and your assiduous myrmidons

  Had made a body into one whole tumour,

  Pulsating on a slab like a Damien Hirst exhibit,

  A gross post-human slug, a thing of wonder,

  What then? It dies, it is not immortal.

  Preserve it? Mummies tell the future

  How terrible the past was. Your goal and god

  Is death, and that is why I oppose you.

  GORGO And how will you get rid of me,

  If it is not too delicate a question?

  BEAU There’s always regular hormone injections –

  GORGO – make you fat and sexless –

  BEAU A pinpoint zap with radiotherapy –

  GORGO – leaves you tired and listless –

  BEAU The swirl and drip of chemotherapy –

  GORGO – you’re sick as a dog and your hair falls out –

  BEAU How about nano-bullets of silica

  Plated with gold and heated with infra-red light –

  GORGO – oh please –

  BEAU Plants offer extracts; they get cancer too,

  So they should know what they are talking about.

  (sings) Sow periwinkle and the mistletoe,

  For these are fields where cancer cannot grow.

  GORGO – you’ve got a point there –

  BEAU Of course we are living now in a New Age –

  GORGO – this should be hilarious –

  BEAU Since mind and body can scarcely be separated,

  We shall not cease from mental fight etcetera.

  I can see my cells as nimble stylish knights

  While yours are clumsy dragons on the prowl.

  I can see my tumour as an old bunch of grapes

  From which I pick one rotten fruit each day

  Until the bad cells have all got the message

  And shrivel into invisibility.

  Some take it further; if there are good vibrations

  There must also be bad. How come you got the cancer

  And not Mr Robinson down the road?

  You must have self-suppressions, inhibitions,

  Guilts black or bleak or blistering, promises unkept,

  Hatreds unspoken, festering coils

  With their fangs and toxins destabilising

  Cells that are as open to emotion as to disease.

  If you want to dip further into the cesspit of causes,

  Remember those who believe in reincarnation.

  You send a poison-pen letter in one life

  And in the next it’s returned with a sarcoma –

  Consequences are not to be escaped!

  What think you of all this, friend Gorgo?
<
br />   GORGO I think it is nonsense and I don’t believe it.

  Mind you, if it was true, I’ve no complaint

  When disillusioned visualisers

  Still sick, or more sick, go suicidal.

  BEAU I don’t believe it either, but I’m loath

  To brush any possibility aside.

  In Celtic tradition, poets had the power

  (It is said) to rhyme an enemy to death.

  He was attacked in ruthless public verse,

  And through suggestion and fear did actually

  Fall ill and die. Cases are recorded.

  GORGO I must watch what I say.

  BEAU You take it lightly, but there are mysteries –

  GORGO Of course there are mysteries. I give you leave,

  Indeed I encourage it, to examine everything,

  Fact, rumour, faith, fantasy, cutting edges

  Of science (pretty blunt cut so far),

  Cutting edges of imagination (look: a tumour transplant!).

  I am so confident, we are so confident,

  We black sheep are so confident (and remember

  Black sheep are natural) that we challenge you

  To ever catch up as we race ahead.

  I said there was a war on, and so there is,

  But let me recommend William Blake to you:

  ‘Without contraries is no progression.’

  Where would medical science be without us?

  BEAU So pain, suffering, fear, death, bereavement

  Are grist to the mill of the universe,

  And the devotees of progress cry with joy

  As Juggernaut crushes them in its murderous wheels

  Down to the sea?

  GORGO Is it monsters again?

  You are overheated. Think calmly. Thank me

  For opening many secrets of the body.

  Thank me for forcing your thought into channels

  Of what is at once minute and vast speculation,

  Our place, your place, in the scheme of things,

  Should there be a scheme of things, which I doubt!

  My hordes, my billions, my workers

  Have added imperfection to any design

  You might impute to some beneficence –

  Beneficence without maleficence, no go! –

  You’ll find us in the elephant, the cricket,

  The flatworm, the pine-tree, not stones yet

  But who knows? Medieval spheres

  Gliding on crystal gimbals could not last.

  The rough inimical perilous world is better.

  We rule; you rule; back and forward it goes.

  Your hosts, your victims, have their obituaries

  Closed in the figure of a hard-fought fight.

  I leave you with the thought that we too,

  We wicked ones, we errant cells

  Have held our battleground for millions of years,

  Uncounted millions of years.

  BEAU The past is not the future. We are ready

  To give you the hardest of hard times.

  My host is walking gently in the sun.

  Will you grit your teeth, and think of her?

  We shall surely speak again. Arrivederci.

  Questions I

  If mony a pickle maks a puckle

  Does mony a mickle mak a muckle?

  If we are aw Jock Tamson’s bairns

  Whit’s the pynt o biggin cairns?

  If yir face is trippin you

  Zat mean it’s really cripplin you?

  Let that flee stick tae the waw –

  Wull it no come aff an aw?

  Zeenty teenty tethery dumpty –

  Kin ye no say wan two three, ya numpty?

  If sumdy cries, Yir baw’s on the slates,

  Dae ye luk fur a ledder or pit oan yir skates?

  If facts are chiels that winna ding

  Dae dreams no go their dinger an sing?

  They say a gaun fit is ay gettin:

  D’ ye think aik an yew stert sweatin?

  Better a wee bush than nae bield:

  Bare-scud Picts on the battlefield?

  Speak o the Deil an he appears.

  Speak o Gode – nae fears, nae fears!

  Questions II

  What is that gorgeous blue gold-bordered gown, if it is a gown, doing as it folds and unfolds itself above the rooftops?

  It is waiting impatiently for a poet to draw the sunset down to earth and put it on and join the ball of all.

  Is it a dance? Can you hear the music? Have you got the beat?

  Of course we hear the music and the beat is loud and sweet and our feet are on the street.

  Is it a dance of earth and sky, and why?

  Yes it’s a dance of earth and sky and I don’t know why, but you must keep asking!

  Why?

  Because the universe goes from door to door begging for questions. It hates a sullen tongue. It has unimaginable riches – except that it wants you to imagine them,

  Are you trying to tell me that an awesome muster of galaxies, throbbing and spinning its glamour of dust and hydrogen and fire, is nothing but a beggar on the doorstep?

  Yes. Think about it. Your very question is a step forward. How can it be, etcetera. I like that. Strike the paradoxes together and wait for the flame.

  Did things begin, and will they end?

  Take it to yourself that the double answer is no, and start from there.

  What is blue?

  I think I can say that blue is very good.

  And gold?

  Low in the west, in the evening, it will not harm you.

  Can children join the dance?

  Of course. Children are very good.

  But are there not some bad children?

  No no no. There are burrs of badness that come flying through the air and attach themselves to children – you must pick them off!

  Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?

  Ah, you have that great dark questioner, King Lear, with his dead daughter in his arms. Why indeed? Let no minister or priest or rabbi or imam palm you off with a tale of ‘if we knew the whole story, everything would fall into place’. Perhaps it would, perhaps it wouldn’t! But take nothing on trust. Keep pushing the questions, and it may be that someday some sharply piercing query will open the tiniest of chinks in the lattice and let a star of light shine through.

  Will it?

  I said maybe. But never ask, never find.

  The Welcome

  A fanfare for librarians, in verse –

  With no bum notes, whether florid or terse –

  That’s what the poet engages to deliver,

  The word-enroller and the rhythm-giver.

  Books have come and gone and come again,

  Though some are written by a virtual pen.

  Guard your Elzevirs, but also log

  Titles from Pantagruel’s catalogue:

  The Bagpipe of the Prelates, The Ape’s Paternoster,

  Or any other monster from the roster.

  Borges thought the great starry array,

  The universe, was but a library.

  Muster and master its infinite folios

  And you could think you knew what no one knows.

  We want it all; the universe itself

  Expands, shelf beyond Hubble-bubbling shelf!

  Starbursts of outreach – access – information –

  We’re on the very edge of a space station

  Where ignorance will not be bliss but drastic,

  Where learning curves must learn to be elastic,

  Where we must search, and find, and use the things

  That our search engine – oh, be patient! – brings.

  Digitise a gilded Book of Hours,

  It’s not the same, but there it is, it’s ours,

  And long-dead times revive and look at us

  As we interrogate their calculus.

  Page or tape or disk or means unknown


  Lie in wait wherever light is thrown,

  To spread that light for everyone to see

  And step by step enter immensity.

  Glasgow, London, Europe, everywhere –

  The poet’s words may vanish into air

  But they are words of welcome. May your meetings

  Flourish braced by good old Mungo’s greetings.

  Perhaps he hears you, snoring by the Clyde,

  With tree and bird, fish and bell at his side.

  Well, you may find his story in a book,

  In a library, if you know where to look.

  From Mungo’s cell to cyberspace, reality

  Is a tango of intertextuality.

  Have a fine dance with it this week, unlock

  Your word-hoards, take heart and take stock

  Of everything a library can do

  To let the future shimmer and show through.

  Brothers and Keepers

  It was heard all right; that was not the argument.

  Day or night it echoed from wall to wall,

  A voice, never incomprehensible,

  But a question many found intolerable:

  ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Some with scorn,

  Some with anger, some with quick dismissal

  Some with the half-uneasy consciousness

  Of being put on the spot, some blustering,

  Some brazen, some bound to macho boasts,

  Kicking the can of pity out of play,

  ‘Each to his own, let them get on with it!’

  Conflicting shouts and voices did not stop us.

  Threats were grist to the mill. We wanted

  The record of what was and is and may be

  To be set down if not in letters of fire

  At least in good black print and clicks of mouse

  To open up what’s wrong, what’s right, texting,

  Probing, shaming, dreaming, countering

  The last indifference.

  Who could be indifferent

  When we took psychotic Steve from his filthy bolthole

  Into a modest hostel room and he murmured