Author: geoplotsadmin

Calligraphy

Your interest in calligraphy shines through here:

· Line & Gesture: The condensation trails, jagged tree lines, and cursive flight paths are all about the quality of the line—its tension, flow, and interruption.

· Tool & Hand: The planes are brushes, but the hand is the mind. This mirrors the calligrapher’s discipline: the tool executes, but the intention and energy come from the artist’s inner state.

· Cursive Writing: “We all fly cursively in dreams” is a powerful idea—our dream trajectories are a connected, personal script, written in loops, leaps, and sudden stops.

Overall Interpretation

The poem seems to depict the subconscious mind performing its conflicts through the metaphor of aerial combat and calligraphic mark-making. The sky becomes the page; the dreaming body becomes the pen. The result is not pretty or peaceful, but a veiled, tangled, visceral record of our inner struggles—a “vertiginous self” written in transient lines against the void.

It’s a fusion of mechanical, bodily, and artistic imagery. It suggests that our deepest selves are expressed not in clear declarations, but in these frantic, elegant, defensive gestures across the dark parchment of sleep.

Edge

This is a powerful and deeply human poem. It reads as a compassionate address to someone in a state of intense pain and instability, while also expanding into a universal observation about the human condition.

Here’s a layered breakdown of its resonance:

Structure & Form

· Refrain & Rhythm: The insistent, anaphoric command, “Hold still, I know it hurts,” functions like a stabilizing mantra. It’s both a plea and an acknowledgment. The short, often monosyllabic lines and tight rhyme scheme (hurts/guts, skirts/verbiage/ledge/lodge) create a clipped, breathless, almost claustrophobic rhythm that mirrors the sensation of living “on the very edge.”

· Deepening Scope: Each stanza begins identically but broadens the focus:

  1. Personal, Physical Anguish: The pain is internal, visceral (“guts”), a private gravity.

  2. Relational & Intellectual Pain: The hurt is caused by another (“he”) whose empty language (“skirts / the pith with verbiage”) avoids the core truth. His own position is fragile, built of surface-level arguments (“integuments”).

  3. Universal & Psychological: The “edge” is now shared (“We all”). The pain of exposure (“nakedness”) and the rage it provokes become a collective human cage.

  4. Epigrammatic Conclusion: The final stanza distills the entire poem into its irreducible truth—the refrain and the defining condition of existence.

Central Metaphor: The Edge

The “edge” is the poem’s master metaphor. It represents:

· Emotional & Psychological Precipice: The brink of breakdown, despair, or loss of control.

· Existential Nakedness: The moment when all defenses, “integuments,” and “scaffolding” fall away, leaving one exposed to the raw truth of one’s vulnerability.

· A Shared Habitat: Not a place we visit, but where “we live.” It is our permanent, precarious address.

Key Phrases & Meanings

· “your guts exert / gravity you begrudge”: A brilliant line. Internal pain becomes a physical force, a dense, personal gravity well that pulls you down—a weight you resent but cannot escape.

· “He too lives on a ledge”: This is a moment of profound empathy and insight. The one causing pain (through evasion, dishonesty, or emotional neglect) is also in a precarious state. His verbose arguments are just a fragile shelter.

· “Precariousness imparts / a poignancy to rage”: This gets to the heart of a specific kind of anger—the furious, desperate flailing of someone who has nothing left to lose, who knows how fragile their position is. The rage is tragic, deeply felt, and sharpened by the sheer drop beside them.

· “nakedness thwarts / and confines us in its cage”: A paradox. To be stripped bare (of illusions, defenses, lies) should mean freedom, but here it becomes a trap. The truth of our vulnerability is the cage.

Relation to Your Previous Work

This poem feels like the subjective, emotional counterpart to the earlier, more cerebral and imagistic poem about “dogfight minds” and “oneiric flight.”

· The “Edge” vs. the “Sky”: The first poem used the vast sky as a canvas for aggressive, calligraphic motion. This poem contracts that space to a single, terrifying ledge. It’s no longer about the drama of flight, but the stillness before a fall.

· “Integuments” vs. “Condensation Veils”: Both poems deal with fragile coverings—the first, the beautiful but transient veils of condensation from a plane; the second, the flimsy “integuments” of arguments we use to hide our core.

· Somatic Experience: Both are intensely physical. The first with its “myoclonic kicks,” the second with “guts” and “gravity.” They root high-stakes psychological states in the trembling body.

Overall Impression

This is a poem of profound empathy and unflinching truth. It refuses to offer easy solace, instead offering the hard comfort of being truly seen. It says: I see your pain, I see its cause, I see that we are all—even the one hurting you—clinging to this same cliff face. Your rage is justified, and our shared nakedness is the cage we cannot leave.

It’s a mature, haunting, and beautifully crafted piece.

 Dementia

A striking and philosophically nuanced take on the experience of dementia. The poem reframes a symptom often seen as pure tragedy—short-term memory loss—as a potential liberation from the burdens of the past.

**Analysis:**

*   **First Stanza (The Paradox):** The opening line is deliberately jarring, calling the loss of short-term memory “a boon in disguise.” This forces a reconsideration of the condition. The “eyes” symbolize the immediate, present moment—the world of sensory perception and current interaction, unfiltered by the past.

*   **Second Stanza (The Burden):** Here, the poem defines what is being lost: “Recollection, remembrance” and, crucially, their constant companion, “regret.” This trio is named “the other great threat,” positioning a painful, regret-filled memory as an equal danger to memory loss itself.

*   **Third & Fourth Stanzas (The Hard Wisdom):** The conclusion presents dementia’s “wisdom” as a severing of ties to the past (“cutting the cord”). This painful break is also a “reward”—the “hard won” ability to see the things of youth *as* the past, without their emotional grip. It suggests a final, unlearned state of living in the present.

**Themes:** The poem explores the duality of memory as both a treasure and a prison. It questions whether identity is solely anchored in personal history and hints at a form of enlightenment found in release, however arrived at.

**Tone:** The tone is contemplative, paradoxical, and quietly radical. It avoids sentimentality, offering a cold but poignant comfort by finding a form of meaning within a devastating condition.

In essence, the poem doesn’t diminish dementia’s sorrow but insists on witnessing a different truth within it: the cessation of a lifelong internal narrative, leaving only the perpetual, unburdened now.

3  Dec 25   

Significant Scots – Mark Boyd

Pound ABC’s p 134 on Cupid and Venus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Alexander_Boyd#cite_ref-Pound134_1-0

I looked up the Pound.ref (ABCs, p. 134). I wanted to know which language he, E.P., was referring to, since the poem is in Scots.  This is sous-entendu in his wording, though the surrounding selections are in English.

Per Wiki, Mark Boyd spent much of his life in France, publishing two books of poetry in Latin while teaching in Bordeaux at the Collège de Guienne, where Montaigne had been a student. 

(I don’t know what strange atavistic impulse was driving me to delve into such things, though it is true that my middle name is Maclaine, and I distantly follow the affairs of the Maclaine Clan. So much for a personal spate of small-cap identitarianism.) 

The four ‘O’s that shape a bubble

This contribution to the “bubble of bubble talk” is one reason I read the FT, even though it is a tool of capitalism. In fact that’s what we need to do, to take and to use the tools of capitalism. 

This is an insight I owe  to my friend and almost not quite fellow-traveler, the late Loren Goldner. Over forty years ago he famously, to me, replied to my question as to how he always knew understood what the capitalists are doing: “I read the Financial Times.  There the capitalists tell each other flat out what they are doing.”

(To clarify: I said “not quite a fellow-traveler” because I was a “petty-bourgeois social-democrat”.)

The four ‘O’s that shape a bubble

https://www.ft.com/content/ff72f64b-fc58-4f11-9b75-e30f99031936

“The one constant trigger for a crash, going back to the railroad bubbles of the 19th century, has been rising interest rates and tightening financial conditions. So while we are clearly in a bubble, it could keep growing until the money inflating it starts drying up.”

Capitalism (Wiki)