Dreams

Algorithms

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Algorithms
Wednesday Workshop
26 April 2017

I want to begin by confessing that I don’t know what they are. Algorithm: it sounds like a word pulled out of a lexicographer’s top hat or a question from a Grade 9 Spelling Bee.

“May I have the definition?”

“Certainly: it’s ‘a step-by-step procedure for solving a problem or accomplishing some end especially by a computer’ …” (Merriam-Webster).

Before we go any further, please watch this brief, very explicit (self-explaining, sorry) video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ

So, if I understand the video correctly, an algorithm, applied to literature, is a program that (a) analyses the structure of texts and (b) establishes whether or not a specific text follows the necessary steps or procedures for that text to become (b.1) a best seller or (b.2) an acceptable potential book in which an investor (aka publisher) could or should invest his / her money.

Where does this leave us as writers? We have spoken before about the Guardians at the Gates and the Judges who determine our fate when we enter literary competitions (see below)

https://rogermoorepoet.com/2016/05/31/winning-not-whining/

Suddenly, these Guardians are no longer fallible flesh and blood but infallible wires, nuts, and bolts joined by electronic circuits.

So, we have a story. Right? Right length. Right theme. We think it is good. We submit it to an editorial house. What happens next? Well, it depends. A major house won’t touch it unless put forward by an agent. No agent? It molders to a prolonged, slow, very slow death on someone’s desk. Electronic submission? Wait a minute. Some secretary may read the first five pages and find them good. Then, your submission may be sent to Death by Algorithm.

How is that algorithm prepared? Thousands of best-sellers and classics are fed into the computer program, analyzed, sorted into lines and curves, highs and lows … then your manuscript is fed in. If its computerized profile matches their computerized profile (the algorithm) then BINGO … you may have a foothold on the first rung of the lowest ladder that leads to winning the literary lottery!

Or not.

What can we, as writers, do about this? Absolutely nothing. We must believe in ourselves. We must believe in our writing. We must keep on writing. We must publish where and when we can … and, above all, along with Albert Camus and Sisyphus and his rock, il faut imaginer l’écrivain heureux / we must pretend that, as writers, we are happy.

And that, ladies and gentlemen and others, is a pretty sorry state of affairs and a pretty lousy (but very interesting) piece of translation.

Glass Man

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Glass Man

“I am made of glass,” I said.
“You can see right through me.”

But the harder you looked,
the less you saw.
You claimed
there was nothing there,
just empty air.

“Your glass is an illusion,” you said.
“It’s not half full
and it’s not half empty.”

“Glass is fragile,
I break easily.
Drop me, I shatter;
hot and cold will
make me crack.”

“Your fragility is in your mind,
not in the fact of your existence.”

“When light passes through me
I break into a million colors,”
I said.

“You are a prism,
the colors that you cast
change you and rain
rainbow  lights
that change others
too.”

 

Shadows

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Shadows

My front door stood open,
but I thought it was closed.
I tip-toed in and called:
“Is anyone there?”
Echo answered
‘there, there, there …”
then silence.

I walked from room to room,
startled by shadows.
I opened doors,
looked under the table,
searched behind chairs,
no one.

The house stood silent and empty,
save for the fear,
the silent fear,
that lurked
like a remembered cancer
and occupied each room.

Sous-Chef

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Sous-chef

“I’ll be your sous-chef,” she said,
with a twinkle in her eye,
and she was as good as her word.

She brought me all the ingredients,
laid them out in the right order,
peeled potatoes and carrots,
sliced onions under cold water
to ensure that neither of us cried.

She added crushed garlic into hot
oil, measuring spices and slicing
the chicken into chunks.

I extracted the cork so the wine
could breathe. We sipped sherry
and talked of wind and weather,
of our time together, and how
we would grieve when, early next
day life would force us to part.

Later that night, after dessert
and liqueurs, we climbed up
the stairs and she joined me
in bed, in a sur-chef adventure

that went to my head, with me
as the sous-chef, her as the head.

Comment: Very rare, raw, naughty poem. I wrote it in the garage this morning, waiting for my tires to be rotated. It was cold, I was bored, and I needed warming up. This is one of those poems that I might regret later. I certainly hope not. The rhythms aren’t quite what I wanted, so I may re-do it, and possibly sharpen up the recipe. Your comments and advice will be welcome.

Scarecrow

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Scarecrow

Flash Fiction
Friday, 21 April 2017

            Sometimes at night I hear nocturnal animals walking across the lawn outside my bedroom window. Intruders in the garden, they rattle the feeders, walk dark through the woods, and sometimes howl at the coyote moon. My heart pumps sudden blood, rapid, through my veins and toes and fingers twitch as I toss around, restless, in my bed.

            Below me, in the hall, the grandfather clock ticks the night away. I stitch myself up in my dreams, count the black sheep in the family, and iron old ghosts upon the ironing board until they are as flat as the white shirts we wore in boarding school on Sundays.

            If I close my eyes, they rise up before me, those Sunday shirts, flapping their arms, and mouthing their apologies for the sorry life they made me lead. No, I didn’t need to spend those days praying on my knees before the stations of the cross. Nor did I need to ask forgiveness for all the transgressions pulled from me, like teeth, in the weekly confessional.

            Marooned in a catholic cul-de-sac, I went around and around in rigid circles like an academic puppet trapped in the squared circle of an endless syllogism. Who locked me into this labyrinth of shifting rooms where sticky cobwebs bind windows, doors, and lips? Why does the razor blade whisper a love song to the scars crisscrossing my treacherous wrist? Who sealed my lips and swore me to secrecy?  And why?

            A tramp with a three-legged dog, I sleep beneath a pier at midnight and watch the waves rolling up the summer beach to catch me out. Sometimes I steal a deckchair, place it at the edge of the sea and bid the tide to cease its climb. The moon winks a knowing eye and the waves continue to rise. Toes and ankles grow wet with wonderment and I shiver at the thought of that rising tide that will sweep me away to what unknown end?

            Last night I wrapped myself in a coward’s coat of many-colored dreams. My senses deceived me and I fell asleep in a sticky web spider-spun by that self-same moon that hid among the clouds and showed her face from time to time. My fragile fingers failed to unravel all those knots and lashings and I was a child again walking the balance beam that led from doubt to knowledge.

            A thin line divides the shark from the whale and who knows what swims beneath the keel when the night is dark and the coracle slides sightless across the sea? I gathered the loose ends of my life, wove them into a subtle thread, and made myself a life-line that would bind my bones and lash my soul to my body’s fragile craft.

            What could I possibly have dreamed as I paraded the promenade a stone’s throw from the barracuda? I crossed my fingers and the beggar at the gate rolled up his sleeves and bore witness to my penitential wounds.

            “How many times,” he asked, “can you pay those thirty silver pence? Don’t they lie heavy on your eyes and heavier on your heart?”

            “Indeed they do,” I answered. “Yet the debt must be paid, but I don’t know how, and where, and when, and to whom?”

            Carnivorous was the carnival he promised and he turned my small world upside down. With coals for eyes and a carrot nose, a scarecrow descended and devoured my town in a clash of flashing teeth. Beneath the waves, the conga stamped its sudden feet of flame. A sea parrot scraped its red and yellow beak against a rainbow of crusty, feathered rage. I awoke to the dog’s sudden tongue in my mouth: an invasion of salt, saliva, and wet, crumbling biscuit.

            That night I opened a bottle of Scotch and drained it dry. I took no prisoners. Around me, the dead and dying licked their wounds as they sank lifeless to the bottom of the glass.

            “Hickory-dickory-dock,” said the mouse as he ran up the grand-father clock. But that particular clock stopped long ago, at midnight, when the Queen of Hearts tied a dead rat to the pendulum, the house slipped sideways, and my heart was filled with woe.

            This morning, fresh snow. The garden basks white beneath pale sunshine. The back porch bears no footprints. The raccoon has abandoned me and chipmunk and squirrel have turned their backs. Today, the scarecrow will scare those nightmare crows away and not a memory will survive to haunt my waking dreams.

Skeleton in the Cupboard: Flash Fiction

 

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Skeleton in the Cupboard

Spring sunshine and I pull out my old summer coat, the one with its pockets stuffed full of memories and dreams. It hides all winter in the clothes cupboard and I free it each spring with the melting snow and the tiny tongues of grass that push through the winter debris that covers the lawn in early April.

Battered and bruised, its elbows discolored where the dry cleaner’s chemicals left disfiguring splodges, it has served me for twelve long summers. It is my constant warm-weather companion, hanging on my arm, my shoulders, gracing me with its comforting presence. Everywhere I travelled for the last twelve years, it has accompanied me.

It is shabby now and grubby. Wine from the bars in El Rincón, El Rastro, El Portalón, Casa Guillermo and many other landmarks have fallen upon it. Octopus, squid rings, mussels, clams, shrimp, goose barnacles, and various types of omelet have left their marks upon it. The English language, with its fish and chips, its bangers and mash, and its sosi, jegg and chips, all bourgeois meals, can never do justice to the pure poetry of Spanish tapas whose names roll off the tongue: pulpo, calamares, mejillones, almejas a la marinera, gambas a la plancha, percebes, tortillas españolas y vegetales. Here I spot a golden stain from riñones al jerez and there a black one from calamares en su tinta.

Weathered by wind and rain, this coat has climbed El Zapatero and walked with the transhumance herds up and down the old Roman road of the Puerto del Pico. It has followed the Ruta de la Plata, the silver trail that led from South America to Sevilla and up the Silver Road past Ávila to Madrid. It has walked through the house in El Barco de Ávila and seen the kitchen where they tore down a wall and found a walled up library, just like the one described by Miguel de Cervantes in the Quixote. It held books proscribed by the Spanish Inquisition that had been hidden away since 1556. It has walked through Piedrahita, San Miguel de Corneja, and Villatoro. It has walked the streets and squares of St. Teresa’s walled city of Ávila on multiple occasions and knelt with me, in prayer, before many a saint on many an altar.

It kept me warm in the hills around Gredos when the mists dropped suddenly down and turned warm day into freezing night. It accompanied me to the Monasterio de Yuste, where the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles the Fifth, retired to live out his days in prayer. It visited the spice towns of La Vera, and ventured into Garganta de Olla, to walk those ancient streets with me. It walked with me in the birthplace of St. John of the Cross and entered with me the depths of the earth where the verdejo is stored in huge oak barrels deep below the town of La Seca.

This old coat keeps its secrets. It remembers the moon hanging its lantern above the battlements on the Paseo del Rastro. We wandered there, she and I, arm in arm, entranced by the shadows that danced on the Medieval walls. When she shivered, I wrapped her in that coat and still it holds the perfumes of her body, the warm touch of her skin, the enchantment of those magic nights when the world stood still and we lay alone at its centre. Oh, and that green stain, there, at the back: that’s where I lay my coat on the grass in the little park under the walls by El Puerto de San Vicente, the one where the lovers go, late at night, beneath the trees, to be together in their loneliness …

Comment: A long time after posting this story, enlightenment knocked at my door. The new cartoon that I had used to illustrate My Old Coat was called Skeleton. Surely, I thought to myself, given the story’s ending, Skeleton in the Cupboard would make a better title. And it would. And I have changed it. A little bit of serendipity at a time (+3C outside the week after Easter) when I need some sunshine in my life. Any comments on the use (or overuse) of Spanish in this story would be very welcome. Best wishes to all my faithful (and unfaithful) readers.

Scribblings

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Scribblings

Words and thoughts
and symbols and images and
metaphors and myths
and all things missing and
some present in-between sheets
lined and unlined as a line of ants
crosses the kitchen floor
in search of sugar so sweet
these dreams where truth
and lies and smiles and
sighs seize highs and lows
and the light and
dark of a life as it might
have been and was perhaps
on another planet
in my darkest dreams
and my sharpest awakenings and
if I am dreaming then let me sleep
on and on and never wake up
to what passes as reality

 

Sinister

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Sinister

What the left hand does
when the right hand doesn’t
know what it’s doing
is an attempt to re-pattern
the brain, to slow it down,
as the pencil spider-walks
its wandering way over the page
like my father’s did when,
stroke-stricken in the right hand,
he transferred his pencil to the left
and sought to-re-establish control
over tiny, manageable things,
and yes, he often cut himself
shaving, but he didn’t like beards
so he never gave in and shaved
every day, died fighting,
and did not go gentle,
and neither will I.

Comment: This is a very raw poem, in more senses than one. I fell over on Tuesday, on the back porch. One of the porch nails, forced up by the winter ice, caught in my open-toed sandal and over I went. My head had hit the deck before I even knew I was falling. It wasn’t as bad as the tumble I had when chasing the black bear and trying to photograph it, but this fall left me quite stunned. You can read about the fall HERE. The actual bruising, not the fictional ones, can be found in #3 of that sequence. I wrote the above poem, on Thursday evening, with my left hand, while my right hand was being iced. Funny how we think of one thing while doing another: I had visions of my father, stroke-stricken as I say, trying to write with his left hand. He fought so hard to do just the smallest things. Oh yes, I have a nice bump on my head, too, and as I told the chiropractor when I visited her later that Tuesday afternoon: “I think I have already had my back adjusted once today.” The other thought that comes to me: how slow we are to heal, once we pass a certain age, or, as my good friend Jan the Stoneist says, “an uncertain age.” With that latest fall, I have indeed entered into The Age of Uncertainty.

Love Poem @ 70

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Love Poem @ 70

1
We walk on tiptoe round the garden,
peeling free the sunlight cloud by cloud.

Sometimes, the heart is a sacrifice of feathers,
bound with blood to an ornate altar.

Petrus:
this rock cold against my chest.
Piedra:
centuries of stone carvings
come alive in your face.

If our arms were to meet
around these columns
of sun-warmed flesh and stone,
what would become of us?

2
Beneath my skin, the woad
flows as blue as this evening sky.
Your skin is bronzed
in the warmth of my gaze.

Yellow light bends
low in the fields below us,
each darkening pool
a warrior fallen
beneath time’s scythe.

The moon paints a delicate circle.
Its great round eye opens out
above the rooftops,
a cathedral window
opening on the sky.

Tonight it bears
the wisp of an eye lid
carved from  cloud.

Your teeth are diadems of whiteness
aglow in your face.

We tie shadows to our heels
and dance in triumph
to the village music
sounding in street and square.

3
Daylight bends itself round rock
and turns into shadow.
We flourish in blocks of flickering flames.

Dreaming new selves from roots and branches,
we clasp each creation with greedy fingers.

Dark angel bodies with butterfly wings,
our shadows have eloped together.
They sit side by side holding hands
at a table in the central square.

4
Church bells gild the barrio’s rooftops.
Our fingers reach to the skies and hold back light.
We draw shadow blinds to shut out the sun.
Night fills us with stars and a sudden sadness.

We dream ourselves together in a silent movie,
closed flesh woven from cobwebs
lies open to a tongue-slash of madness.

The neighbor’s dog wakes up on the azotea.
He barks bright colors as dawn declares day
and windows and balconies welcome the sun.

Can anyone see the dew-fresh flowers
growing from our tangled limbs?

Your fingers sew a padlock on my lips:
We listen to the crackle of the rising sun.

Why?

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Why?

Curiouser and curiouser
the vanishing smile
on the ginger cat
and wild dog dingo
grinning like a coal-scuttle,
why, oh why?

Who put the cur in curious?
Why was the dog-watch curtailed?
Cynicism, some say, and why
do we kneel before him,
heads bowed, waiting
the thumbs up, thumbs down,
of placet, placetne,
why, oh why?

Comment: Raw poem. I dreamed it up last night, but it wasn’t like this when it started. Cur: means why or what for in Latin and curs were large, mongrel dogs, bred for herding cattle in the Middle Ages. Cynicsm: because the cynics were also called ‘dogs’ partly for their shamelessness and partly for the faithful way they guarded their philosophical tenets. In Mexico, the Dominicans were often portrayed with dogs at their sides. The explanation: domini / of the Lord, -can / dog; hence they were the faithful guard dogs of the Lord. Placet: it pleases in Latin; the thumbs up sign that allowed the defeated gladiator to live, not die. “In any event, the final decision of death or life belonged to the editor, who signalled his choice with a gesture described by Roman sources as pollice verso meaning ‘with a turned thumb’ a description too imprecise for reconstruction of the gesture or its symbolism” (Gladiator: Wikipedia).