"Pop's" she said,
And that was Rosie
"You have a patch
That is no posy
Of flowers,
Because no hair
Grows there."
"Pop's" said Rosie
"Is that fair?"


David Applin

August 2018

The Garden of Gethsemane takes many forms,
All different from our usual norms,
Reflecting was and what will be
As was and are translate to me.

Surrendering self on this sacred ground,
Is perhaps one step that I have found
Hard; to disengage the self that was
From the self that is before the cross.

Understanding helps us know
Humility, so that we can grow
To replace old ambitions
With new ones, in the same traditions.

The Garden allows the Revelations
That help us make these translations
From old to new, so that in repose
We hold true to purpose and resolve.


David Applin
August 2018

Is there anything glorious about August the twelfth?
When people privileged with exceptional wealth
Think it their right, to blast the sky
And the birds that fly, ne'er so high.

Is there dignity to the flurry that follows?
To be first delivering corpses to fellows
And consorts, dining in fair London town
On the shot blasted flesh, fallen down ...

To British soil, the land of the free!
So free, to be trapped in iniquity,
In pursuit of what some think to be glorious
But surely Blake's heaven would be furious.

David Applin
2018

Rosie’s World

Up, up, up to where?
To mummy’s shoulder so I can stare
Upon my world below,
On books, on toys and teddy, so
Bought belovedly for me to share
With mummy, daddy and those who care
For a world of love, fit to live in
My world, your world, a place so thrilling
Lest we forget the joy of living.

David Applin …… 21st October 2011

Copyright David Applin 2015

Night Cries....

Night shadows darken my wall of dreams
Shading my thoughts, or so it seems
TO me, as misty sleep wakens to goblins and elves
Lurking in corners, and on the shelves
Where teddy sits and dolly too
Their shapes all lumpy, as they grew
Grotesque in my mind, started with themes
That only come in night time dreams.

But here is mummy, and daddy as well
To startle the dark which quickly fell
From my mind now clear,
Of the shadows that cause night time fear.

David Applin … 4.30am
August 4th 2012

Copyright David Applin 2015

Mr Darwin, please explain

Reading TS Eliot is to be drawn into timeless space where images of past and future combine in a continuous stream of thinking …. perhaps the immortality of ideas. The genetic material of life, DNA, is immortal, an unbroken thread linking life’s origins 4 billion years ago to the present ….. and future.

Sequence upon sequence of symbolic letters encoding countless forms of bodies, built to the same principles inherent in the genetic code, yet morphing in endless variety according to the tenets of natural selection ….. Darwin’s idea that transformed our thinking from a moment of purposeful creation to how life changes through time.

Cosmologists suggest we live in one of many possible universes perhaps in parallel time allowing parallel lives, one not knowing of the other’s existence because of the limitations of our three dimensional view of the world and its existence in the cosmos. We see in three dimensions and no more, but we are aware of more because mathematics tells us so.

Mr Darwin, please explain explores the seamless continuity of Darwinian thinking with the timelessness of Eliot’s poetry…..

I In my beginning is my end …. V In my end is my beginning.
(East Coker, Four Quartets, TS Eliot)


Mr Darwin, please explain

I

What is this selection of love so natural
To drive men insane and women to purgatory
Can Mr Darwin explain?
Some ask the question
But I doubt not, that his meaning is clear
Why love one to one remains so dear,
Though Karl denied it, Lenin too
And Uncle Joe dismissed it
As a plot to subvert what was good for the proletariat.
But in that recent time when ******’s darkness shadowed The Earth
Love glowed in the gloom of the despair of nations’ Terezíns
Which to-day helps to repair our broken dreams
Of why we love one to one.

Keats loved one ***** Brawne
And Coleridge his Asra
But what is ecstasy’s advantage?
When comes the pain of separation
Mr Darwin, please explain.
Is it lust, is it reproduction?
But then when love is thwarted
We cannot function,
Where is the advantage
Mr D --- what is the aim, can you explain?
How the coiled spiral passing from time to time
Its immortal message which condemns each generation
To the pain of separation
When the reaper calls, or the rival sunders
The coils of love’s message we’ve inherited
Since the beginning of time
Why? What is the advantage?
Mr D, please tell me your answer.

The whales they sing one to one
Like Eliot’s mermaids singing
Not to Prufrock but perhaps to you and me
The message of communication.
Is this love as one to one
Each supports another wounded
By the enormity of the harpoon?
The dictator’s message in another form
Devoid of love, sundered, never whole
Coming from that Terezín we never solve.
Dysfunctional Mr D, where’s the advantage
For such conflicting feelings to evolve?

David Applin
March 2012

II

Genes are the immortal ones
The links between past and future
But ever present
Unintentionally directing the future and fate of humankind.

Silent, unobserved yet Gods of their domain
Which is us and life past and future
Coiled threads of eternity that determine our happenings
Including our loving one to one.

Yet ….

In their entirety and interaction
Do they, in their interaction
Determine our loving one to one?
The bond that binds each to each
Perpetual celebration.

Or ….

Is their selfish blindness which some accord to be
Inconsequential
Like boats tossed helplessly on storm driven seas
Subject to the whims of wind and rain
No more than replicators housed in vehicles
Subject only to the chances of a changing world.


III

Bodies are vehicles, genes the replicators
Bodies and genes indivisible
At least in the present
But separated as bodies die after
Genes have passed to their immortal future.
Perhaps this is what is meant when they say
That the gene is selfish.

Accommodated in the selfless body at a particular time
But then discarded as genes pass its immortality
From past to future
Changes slow, quick depending on stasis or acceleration
According to Darwinian tenets that enfold the changes
In genes and therefore bodies
Through all time.


IV

Cycle upon cycle of genes and bodies
One perpetual, the other discarded each generation
By the unseen hand of an uncaring Nature.

Our nature, all nature, the beauty of sunsets
Driven by the mechanical clocks of cosmic cycles.

Yet Relative to other Dimensions where
What we see, we do not see
Because of the profound limitations
Of three dimensions.
We see only dimly what might be past
And what could be future
As we struggle in the presence of tautological explanation.

Body and gene, gene and body the temporary and perpetual
Bound in the dance of a living presence
The one ensuring the other’s future
For all time.
Circle upon circle, tautological argument
Explaining everything and nothing but all powerful
In its reductionism of humankind
And life kind as whales support the one
Wounded by the enormity of the harpoon
Loosed by the bodies of genes
Storm tossed and directionless
When thinking that others’ bodies
Can be discarded without thought or thinking
Perpetual damnation.

Tautomeric interaction.
We say the same thing in different ways,
Recycled ideas that parody the twenty different plots of novels
That return to the same point,
Come back to the common question

Why do we love one to one?

People ask…. ‘Can Mr Darwin explain?’

Perhaps not through bodies and genes
But instead, understanding the epistasis of genes and where we live.
We live in this world because of our past
As genes dance to the chance of environmental shifts
The whims of wind and rain, sea and wave
That blow and toss the genes
In their bodies, in random patterns,
Some sinking, others floating
Not always by chance
But because they float and fight
Yielding to the pressures of an uncaring nature.
Like soft down yielding to the thud of falling bodies
Softening their impact.

So to yield as well as fight
Is part of the selection of one by another
In the perpetual
Celebration of loving one to one.

We yield to the blandishments of the soft embrace
We fight to attain it

And once attained, what we do is all we do
To keep a hold on what we love
Only to lose it to the grim reaper of all our dreams
In this present world,
But to regain it in worlds to come
The link between past and future
For immortal genes
Of transitory bodies which is how
We think and see our presence
In time without end.



V

General relativity and quantum mechanics
The combination of infinity and the very small
Do not replace the Newtonian meaning of the day to day.
Just, that Newton is displaced to another time and place
Where description is precise but with uncertainty according to
Heisenberg.

To be certain is to fix ideas in time
Like natural selection in the Darwinian mind
To be propitiated without exception, else suffer extinction of self
And of all that matters to self and others
Sacrificed on the alter to propitiate the Gods of our certainty.

That is not to say that an idea cannot be fixed in time
That its central tenet is not true for eternity.
But truth is relative and uncertain
To be strengthened or cast aside
By better truths or developments of the same.

Our understanding expands with time
But often returns to something that was said before
And said again as if it were newly minted
In the mind of its creator
To become dogma
And as all dogmas
The truth unchanged in people’s minds.
Yet the central tenet survives, as survival is the result of natural selection
But with added components as
Understanding expands as to what is meant by surviving and survival.
To inherit the coils of love’s message is to survive.


VI

Can Mr Darwin explain?
Perhaps is not a whole question
In the same sense that answers depend on
The question asked and who is asking.

The truths that questions seek to answer
The truths of love, beauty and heating systems
Arise from answers to questions in different languages,
And languages translate imperfectly from one to one
As genes imperfectly translate proteins and therefore love in the
Darwinian world of our dreams.

Truth comes in different forms
And Darwinian truth is true to the questions it addresses.
But these are not the only questions of why we are,
Who we are, what we are
Who, what, why are we?

Questions past and future asked in the present
For all eternity.


Christmas (25th-28th) 2012
David Applin

Copyright David Applin 2015

I

These are hard materials
Sharp edged, inflexible
To a degree
That unfolds the truth,
And one truth
Leads to the next
In linear sequence.


Each from the others, isolated
Yet dependent
On what has gone before,
And what follows for the confirmation of truth’s verity.


Various truths are the data set of probability,
Flexible to a degree
Because of the uncertainty of absolute verity
That only singularity allows.
The statistic of one
That even when wrong
Its absoluteness is unquestionable
Because to question is not to know
What has gone before.



To know is singular in its effect,
Its purpose sustained by the uncertainty of data sets
From which truth derives.
The metaphysics of it all
Betrays the conceit of knowledge
And those that claim knowledge
Such that they impose their understanding
On others do not know
And care even less,
Except when their ignorance
Results in what is cared for….
All suppressed by the singularity of knowing
By those who acknowledge a statistic of one.
Preferring the comfort of its certainty
Rather than the uncertainty
That arises form the truth of data sets.


II

Data sets determine league tables
Positions of football clubs
And universities
Where those learning to know
Know what they are learning
And rate it accordingly.
Because as customers
It is said that
They are entitled to know
Even if they are learning
The data sets that allow them to understand
What they are attempting to know
Perhaps without conscious thought of
The void of ignorance that learning attempts to fill.


Yet in their unknowing, the certainty of the learning
Determines the positions of institutions in league tables
In turn compiled from the data sets
Of incomplete knowledge
Asserted with conviction
Establishing what is said to be true
In ignorance of sure foundations.


I wish that I had the conviction of others
To be certain of what I know
Without doubt
Without hesitation
Untrammelled by thoughts of the uncertainty of data sets
Compiled by the compilation of singularities.


Which itself compels another thought
That we all derive from a single small point,
Infinitesimally small but infinitely massive
Exploding once or perhaps in series
Like the popping of a two-stroke petrol engine
That propelled motorbikes and lawn mowers
In yesteryear.


And yet we are saying the same thing
In different ways
Unrelenting in the stream of thought
And consciousness
But ….
Please allow the words’ meanings to breath.
Where is the pause
To allow the assimilation of meaning?

The punctuation of time and space
The meaning of words
Arises from their spacing
And timing.


David Applin August 23rd 8:00am-ish 2014


III

Yet the certainty of data sets
Give us comfort
Those who await the miracle of birth
Calculate the probability of certainty
From statistics derived from the accumulation
Of data
To give the certainty of a happy outcome
A statistic of one…. or at most two or three
To which we all cling and which data
Accumulated in sets allows to be certain…
Or at least to hope to be certain
That the outcome will be happy
And reinforce our faith in belief
Itself knowledge in the absence of evidence
Truth uncurled by those hard materials
Derived from numbers
Each in itself a number
And therefore a singularity
Which hard materials cannot uncurl
Only their interpretation
Can reveal the truth of data sets
Each consisting of the singular truths
That interpretation cannot uncurl,
Because to do so would give us a statistic of one
Which cannot be questioned
Because it stands alone
Inflexible, somewhat obtuse without the context
Of the other singularities that make up the data set.


Befriended of one another, the collective now represents a version of truth
Because each singularity gives context to its companions
So that collectively their truth is revealed
As a statistic.


One as a statistic cannot be
Because it lacks the context of its companions,


QED

David Applin
Queen Victoria
North Sea
Lying off Ostend
25th October (evening) 2014

Copyright David Applin 2015