GO FIGURE

‘Solon used to say that men who surrounded tyrants were like the pebbles used in calculations.’

Diogenes Laertius

 

‘When shall we have men of a universal spirit?’

Oliver Cromwell

 

‘Without him Caesar would have stood alone…
He’s the universal soldier and he really is to blame…’

Buffy Sainte-Marie

 

          ‘I have never reached the true centre,
          where art is pure politics.’

Tom Raworth

GO FIGURE

     For every blemish of determinate song

     come fallen drifts upon untold bitters

     and shall be some equal and opposing

     with the infinite sadness of families

     carrying the dead by them so lightly

     here a fear, there a broken down promise

     as if some law of excluded middles

     disproves the early bucket of the just

     and callous digits ill at these numbers

     now fall breaking in upon hostage news

                                     *

This imperium’s eagle spreads ancient wings

as the saying goes ahem friends Romans

and globalists most dextrous ego-surfers

of the remotest control say go figure

let slip the bristling clusters and gas

from each harsh Doric column stabbed long

and hard into a ruin of sea and dimpled air

most cleaving indifference over physical

features that depict no political borders

all the solids gone the way of amalgam

lost upon spicy chicken wings as claws

do special resolutions in pink cartoons

nails down tankers the chalk on board thing

and the gas is all for oil, galley slave

of this grade class fellow-guzzling petrol

and not to bury Caesar or mock his father

but stacks of cheap beer waiting to party

till even a spangle-toed smoke akimbo

can’t fully wipe the thought of a pretzel

turned t.v. assassin exploding Cubans

spread far across the axis of nonsense

a.k.a. the death squads of those with most

squeezing the life out of those with nothing

the words bang to hearts turning real hard

so scream now or forever hold up paws

for the cut chaser doing that’s all folks

still counting on meltdowns to explosion

on the ghosted spread-sheets of Halifax

the embrace as plausible as a love train

of leaf-peepers off to blushing Vermont

so much chasing after reddening glory

and the little matter of chemical yarns

      Onward to the contrary it is

                  syntax troop motions

      standing orders in a phalanx

                  tipping the remainders

      and small lips calling revenge

                  be prim with the primer

      come distant and knitted brows

                  then autumn folds take

      to scupper the jokingly warped

                  azure scale of the trait

      but hardly illumined by same

                  faked to a sad choker

      with a grammar of solidarity

                  under an aegis of nouns

      bled to stable bit and foam and

                  then sacrificed, frankly

      further to the up and coming

                  for which thorny witness

      read in the obvious fresh aura

                  such that flushing roots

      spread their exponential terror

                  right up on schematism

      and each interrogative chamber

                  scrubbed and sleeping

      among good but tortured doves

                                     *

Sort codes move on slaying in costive eyes

thou stock and spool thinned out to drapery

and well shook tracings in name or crumble

while a saving trace is put down to salt

hardly raging as they lay claim to fields

then spreads for the pulp of leaving parties

down through nibbles and a short trivium

chipped and spun to gossip, food and t.v.

                                     *

            Swiftly on the hook of x

            the opponent of the latter

            falls just as opus grudges

            crack up fractions of day

            cast off and left for knives

            as in plaster or patter fire

            no tomorrow and coming

            so soon comes to nought

            blonde or gone as around

            it pleases all the sack log

            and still plangent parade

            as the call to an executed

            summary not what least

            throws beauty off the tick

            tongue to wag ooh so not

            and come off it says next

                                     *

How so ever but through equilibrium

lost then turned to a fabulous scalpel

or feed tending to scale up calmer ties

so wrapped around an attention scaffold

that to you is gurgle and burnt hotpants

a beach of bruised pleasure going too far

beyond pavilions and the setting rain

who is not ground out nor come together

                                     *

                What bias fixed

                or how passed

                in liquid aether

                thy coop active

                lo wise lobe or

                obsequious orb

                among ministers

                and right weary

                fair image of the

                flood of bounty

                said the ferment

                said ruined deep

                                     *

                  Drawn till infinites stale

                  then hideous light crawls

                  off gracile to sloth touch

                  no pearl but larded fives

                  whereas once sung brine

                  falls in a speeding crust

                  showing napkin economy

                  and nothing to finger but

                  sunk without volte plaque

                  where the focus for firing

                  goes starkers for the call

                  tuned to a foaming ellipse

                                     *

                  Sing death to parallelism

                  sir spiked colon chirping

                  flock mannerisms flexed

                  to harping gruel or such

                 such arrogation fiddling

                 over the grinding poor

                 a hymn to the prevailing

                 batteries spent on tributes

                 for the crested screamers

                 the unsighted basilisques

                 shaking each turret scoop

                 called to the mine fields

                 next stop Damascus

                                     *

                 After Jenin what song of

                 songs seeps still through

                 the scrip and pearl till

                 dark breath fills on lung

                 but one more cypress tiara

                 spelt down a wig or two

                 would what water and melon

                 bleed on in a strange land

                 before laying down to sleep

                 among ancient diseases

                 hawks upon willows who

                 cannot lay themselves to rest

                                     *

     Put to pieces and spark in the window

     gone all pointilliste over stress pixels

     the bundle upon bundle shifting noises

     and the example given makes a pity

     for the slight slipped in as a placeholder

     among streamers turning that pink curtain

     where the it so held shows up property

     and there’s a sign saying mended blazing

     equals haze and fenced with fenestrations

     over much that scolds but never comes last

                                     *

                 rounding up option

                 swabs to a near ruin

                 does personal airing

                 but less clandestine

                 and without pouring

                 out the sloppy slump

                 predicted by beauties

                 of the moral novella

                 leave each undercut

                 to its lucky bleeding

                 and thrown measure

                 to its brightest place

                                     *

                                     *

                And in the consoling fabric

                do la fleuve’s runny vowels

                unbound to the dreams run

                aground to darned abrasion

                monstrous Roman progeny

                of church and the latinate

                long claws of what bookish

                and reverent matrix in idols

                the hints of doubling texture

                one white space on another

                as darkly bred punk gnosis

                tittering in a plush back row

                how gripe shouts delirium

                and squeezes the syllabary

                into the brood and comfort

                ragdoll of its mislaid babies

                one more linear B calculus

                held up for the exemplary

                how not to come on boyish

                sundering bricolage raptors

                with the FBI tyepwriter scan

                churning over the merest em

                and tithes of professionalism

                as the rivers run fair to dry

                parchment burning up isles

                dropped to palling scripture

                recycling its bloody run-on

                                     *

So much for the plain sung champagne moment

                whose rebuked unicorn tendency

                shows up an uncanny free crony

                still laxer somehow in interview

                                 the veil flaring trench

                spread among unbelieving scores

                turned to his beatific tooth crown

                and with so much fertile pasture

                positive sciences aching to seed

                why spoil the dividend with any

                but the general’s special flavour

                with a crux set upon such cracks

                                     *

           Seen from under a hooded ravage cape

           the maths given out formal tyrannies

           are smuggled praxis in figures no more

           attuned to submission than divine parts

           turn another striking full grown feature

           staggering to dandy up frozen blooms

           but oh how crude in the azure parting

           the pocket princess out for number one

           and subfusc myrmidons drilled to an inch

           of sweet wrangling cue spent biology

                                     *

                      gone to trawl all grim

                      number and dead prices

                      poisoning the reserve

                      upon door long blame

                      and the old score cloak

                      flighty proof to dismal

                      then catastrophe loops

                      bending on the arabic

                      over crescents of zero

                                     *

           The minus carried on under your eyes

           how the free scoring knows no fermata

           but strips to a lightfast and rakish lap

           before the men from influence studies

           show how liberal they are with the dead

           and the darkest circles turn back summers

           then whack one off the list on an index

           to share in bruising with what held it up

           or so the poor soul drowns in catalogues

           whatsoever trimmed from empty sets

                                     *

                      for all that falling spoils

                      tablets to lime composed

                      war on word fur on worse

                      the names we cannot sing

                      but no the scroll lays the

                      fatal stretch in huffy lays

                      stiff in etched epaulettes

                      shaking in a bloody sash

                      that softly crows of pain

                                     *

Not, then, to subsist upon possessions

             struck by the fixed run and crime

                          in which aptness trembles

                          as much as the purest cold

             once quipped of as slight technicians

                          turning character to exact

                          the fray in bold, as when

                          the burst into luminosity

                          is no more a cheap rigour

             it merely shows silhouettes of the unloved

                          or as pulses set showering

                          again finds curtains wanting

                          where science is dead right

                          and dead to the ensuing leak

             it strikes a dying cloud found monstrous

                          in a sort of fading caprice

                          who smells sabotage in any

                          question of reasoned traces

                          there chilled in engineering

             to testify how the structures can encroach

                          and do the organism’s will

                          even spread to infections

                          because they become real

                          and become the particular

             as if there the concepts are natural language

                          spread like a canopy over

                          an index of what gives out

                          a most culling fiery mantra

                                     *

                             The call is dirty news

                             so feathered barking

                             to curve from shaggy

                             then savagery bland

                             again sweet stricture

                             bold as bright rains

                             done for bludgeoning

                             and all is quite through

                             the fang still showing

                             how sliver-tip proofs

                             take each gut or lyre

                             on quatsch or starch

                             for a speeding rubble

                             come formalist loves

                             then rip from a heart

                             a frond and its spleen

                                     *

                    from out a sinister parenthesis

                    formula hundreds and thousands

                    dawn finds a puzzler fraternity

                    insulting vitalism’s cartridge

                    then gone to tiny round robins

                                in a losing regime

                    or whole crumbs gone to drips

                    shaving in a blazing dipthong

                    contra to some cubic songster

                    as painting to sparkling dogs

                    are a worrying kind of abstract

                                in the pastoral wax

                    but the bloody park takes off

                    showing mathematical beauty

                    for a contradiction in terms

                    how willed to hustled brevity

                    runs up and really good to go

                                springs into ruin

                                     *

            Before numbered among weather reports

            yet more footnotes to the arc plausible

            be a good little soldier be some flaw

            squalid state then ribbons spun to disarm

            when the atomic dog goes off on branches

            that’s the figurine cut to breathing in

            and you must not think of live refulgence

            or feathered detours through London leaves

                                     *

                      Rough as innumerable wound

                      then wail and drip locution

                      off loving hides quite false

                      while new blood conceals

                      a lead thorn veiling tyranny

                      is number and legion in the

                      long grass with not a bean

                      burnt on thy furrowed brow

                      nothing but bubbling under

                      spoken of as light exercise

                      a streak of argutezza rising

                      to all the trawl and so forth

                                     *

          One more gantry which cannot be excluded

          worrying the corpse formerly known as law

          nor the shade seeking data without persons

          the trace of the first harbour left to balloon

          into the powerful part of the old argument

          tripping off the flush box marked as local

          of this million times fitter than some germ

          shuffling one more zero through the needle

                                     *

                              Prank shame rising

                              burns ice berg uplit

                              from flowing locks

                              turning loop scree

                              figure and end torn

                              the smile sun melts

                              who arrives for the

                              triple win bonus tip

                              upon dank defection

                              and so fills the arch

                              of the sent is a dune

                              brigade turning files

                                     *

          As on a night thrown upon glass houses

          minimalist pah not minimal enough

          and scarcely a dissonant squawking parp

          but scenery chewed to dusty prancing

          amid the half-baked smoke and monitor

          to the counter-what is it caterwauling

          blissed out in reverb to all lost vulgars

          who shivers a square dance latin circled

                                     *

                                     *

               driving rain breaks the cover

               out of fresh eye and best left

               as in a certain sense the thing

               is become quite another calm

               not to be sewn up for brands

               so says the aporia merchant

               on a rare stroke crashing bore

               that can ill afford its civilian

               but cut throat by appointment

               come the purpling exponents

               and cultural studies crawling

               over every little fruitful gross

                                     *

                    How do the virgin nine

                    plot their blowsy rags

                    so said souls unfurled

                    marbling biscuit runes

                    gone stale then reveal

                    violls so softly plucked

                    as all quite arctic sent

                    come off it sow & muse

                    it’s pile and sally tyre

                    burnt to thermal sponge

                    or dagger strewn awe

                    flourishing ruby altars

                    Scales have at first the figure

                    and extent of the cuticular

                    let them eat small pastries

                    pronounces its sugary balm

                    over encircling mediators

                    all made to break the wind

                    and lay on your gold leaf

                    ribbing the glass window

                    pebble breath done quarry

                    diagonal terracotta weaves

                    such calculated ornaments

                    and formalism out of sorts

                                     *

     Whose shards are but aftermaths spilt

                    and tendered beyond the limits

                    of so-called concrete univerals

                    where concrete matches the cut

                    beneath a heavy paddling foot

     now sense done for in speculative congress

                    how a dice-throwing fraternity

                    holds soft to shoot the bruise

                    in cherished briefs or thongs

                    the hazard in its quality razor

     just as precursors haunt the dying collection

                    with thumb prints, dimensions

                    etched into a scheming motto

                    how much, how long, how on

                    with the still cult and lineage

     and this is indeed hardly the bacchanalian

                    spent inserting a geometry

                    come stations of the plaque

                    unspeakable then so restless

                    on a relic done to time lines

     with all eyes on the sparkling bottom line

                    when Mammon met Kylie

                    or some other poetic shower

                    for belated sparks of their

                    language game that is none

     and never a game doing its texture on you

                    but the birth of its discretion

                    that would be late or singular

                    and out beyond the numbers

                                     *

     Till right when you thought ah the nadir

     inquisition difference turning no noes

     yet cannot take to beatings darkly tamped

     beyond even the nihilist’s most refined

     reluctance to goose said flaps of irony

     was is so concrete as to form a place

     and not the sheer jaw-dropping quadratics

     that tat could so fester the belief squeeze

     whose strange beauty is a dead cat bounce

     now that the bar is lower than rarebit

                                     *

               vowel to decree nought

               what price obsolescence

               who would but bone up

               and deep soul soft soap

               for concept provenance

               were the the to actual

               so sweeps the plastic

               palm spar or rapt carpet

               as a bark sped to bronze

                                     *

     Every best guess hedges the back and forth

     on each person table and spindling pulsar

     gliding on what misses from out spelt pads

     on a full set of digits two up two down

     bunks in its element and who’d be that pelt

     with stifled babies living the floor boards

     how many and asunder show up through-puts

     driving each proper break down mighty

     on spam satin arrays spooning spooning

     and against touch tones doing their own thing

                                     *

                    Firmly among munchkin

                    shavers the little seconds

                    but not quite firing on all

                    the picturesque middens

                    for the broker shed gloss

                    one to one draw comfort

                    the crippling debt to sun

                    leaking phlegm and swan

                    weaving mulch in its nest

                                     *

                    Another one Mr totality

                    gags fend off the image

                    of chlorofluorocarbons

                    done chip from blocked

                    links held above glassy

                    ceilings and simple blue

                    that nibbling at blinding

                    rope feed sans witness

                    who eats away the sky

                    from the definite article

                    under her grieving but

                    still swashbuckled halo

                    then chaps the backpack

                    one more heart warming

                    bolt on fractal odd bod

                    then blips for the spent

                                     *

     And flexed to dispell non-intuitive quanta

     come graffito off snazzy bruises who yelps

     for a man with a wand sleaving it sleaving

     what margin then is this so purple edge

     so shiftily bowling the crush and scything

     elbows and each train to commuting drift

     into the repellents beyond cut borders

     or humanly burnt into unravelled clothes

                                     *

                           Disenchanted

                           at the getting

                           edge to smile

                           scarper dusts

                           shirk the gory

                           and das Volk

                           now showing

                           Euclid alone

                           gazing on her

                           bare beauties

                           when madame

                           simian twister

                           to lark or guts

                           then a wrench

                           do but lay off

                           ye silver dogs

                                     *

The lozenge, the triangle, the egg:

            strung out finite to scorching c/o

            vulgar idealism in transfiguration

            dirty anastasis from quick impress

            in which slow brushes fall fallow

            to moss or licks of a daily plunge

placed at a door marked perpetual accumulation

clouds of words as slogans bursting into soul

            or some ogre flayed into vitality

            when slurry dries out its figurine

            impasto for the surgeon doing

            the sphere the cone the cylinder

            encircling mantlepiece decorum

            in plasters subsiding for gravity

            or prisons of hot point literalism

            in fresh talk of sexing the trinity

pneuma on heat so naked in a modalist dawn

that rust drips wishes for nomina as numina

            numbered stars drizzled in oils

            painted over an inisidous gloss

            with parent child and paraclete

            striking Arian flavours in a mix

            glued to yours truly the parsing

            rapiers among the substantives

            air-brushed to mockney monsters

            of a synoptic gospel whose merest

            mention sends up budding artistes

            how the whirlpool exaggerates

                        with the spirit as a bird

                        mired in the accostings

                        on pain of triangulation

                        and dissolving plumage

                                     *

              the repeat take arabesque

              at face value and argues

              for the two state solution

              each strip of taken earth

              spelt out along trig points

              while sorry opens more

              square brackets than death

              as though the sheer weight

              makes a critique of resolve

              and the state shadowed by

              lost amends in the blaming

              as though origins mattered

                                     *

     The books withdrawn for spat marginalia

     down hollows of laddered falling falling

     encore for the budgetary rabbit paddle

     one more nebula rising another star utensil

     curling to autumn compost and so composed

     before more congestion for tiring tiring

     cut a divider into sleep now stretched

     on the canvas whose will to skeleton

     would shed the bed sores of the horizon

     and leave only dawn to its ashen grips

              Abstractly conceived

                         as slave ships swoon

              in the baptismal broth

                         idem to indifference

              ground out in axioms

                         principled to a gunner

              thus one more tapering apex

                            signor pyramid smiling

              at his heroic divertissement

                            that and concepts of being

              snug in the good dip stupor

                            before knifed by theories

              or for the ripped under belly

                            shoulder ham trembling

              calling occidental deference

                            or who dares doffs

              to the massing missiles

                            and by nature porous

              till flipsides show raw blood

                            thrown the lights of oil

              and a queue of martyrs

                            set for stoning or bored

              with mooning scripture

                            set to bronze in exile

                                     *

     Low screen numbers lift up in vortices

     as the orange hums that liquid resolves

     polished and ironed by the architecture

     where sinks in marshy woollens how order

     couples with property rights and sleepers

     rumbling over rails do steady whispers

     all prepped and primed above slated echoes

     and the mother of all crackling plasters

                                     *

              Sweeter as rivetting iron

              one heroic damp patch

              lifts the whole ensemble

              and threshes on in steam

              so allow me quoth Sancho

              you are chained to a wall

              the rest is sleep and then

              pebbles amid the tyrant’s

              calculus who would shrug

              off bonds until well clear

              of fact’s autumn flowering

              where daggers breed limbs

                                     *

White walls bleeding, inked for bitter tort

                        ripping doves to lime, the more

                        the struggle, the more belimed

                        till set once more to fluttering

          gridlock and false dawn in-powred

          or in-blown keying in the net gross

          whole volumes of rude stuff taking

          to commodities like a triune abacus

                    the lost aches of avian cinema

                    and its younger technologies

                    going pale well before its time

          leaving well what else but leaving

          the body politic stripped to biscuits

          singing cakes suicided to humanism

                    a merest well-tempered squeak

                    sounding civics or skulduggery

                    cue the priests trading in death

          even to bonded stars in arks rampant

          breeding -nesses, -tudes, and –ties

          plurals out of lucid intervals yawning

          between initial stock and future crop

          how worth is if in motion and only if

                    then in price wars the dusters

                    in a cleaning regime of grief

                    with food for the passing rats

                    or poisons breeding antidotes

                    to box office and pension but

                              all calculations are off

                                     *

                    White then as peace

                    can be in the account

                    of stank equilibrium

                    and soft as the birds

                    nor rightly summons

                    but as near to piercing

                    and fat busting chances

                    take on its oxymoron

                    over the consoling stats

                                     *

     How crawling glazes blister into night

     then one day or another it will break

     from days docked into a passion of clocks

     and even out the bonding counterfeit

     where more to its curvy than opts to turn

     out winded nimbly under evening’s cowl

     then gone on end on to dancing quadrants

     one even and then pretty much another

     though never oddly the quirk left ironing

     its stock of lean years drawn to infinites

                                     *

                      Stringer curbs

                      bloom & flake

                      and you plump

                      for guess turf

                      damp sparklers

                      and wind gown

                      shivering goose

                      slip and bumper

                                     *

     Squaring up over from left-handedness

     measured out in traces floored by stupor

     who can but spell out cod labour and scores

     upon scores to the paper’s scarred profit

     how even’s not the barrier it once seemed

     once broken into marching mezzanines

     come threads and tanks set upon embracing

     conceptual veneers with precision skies

     there regulars set to bridge the triumph

     and spring lists of things not done by morning

                                     *

     How old rain gives a chill around the socks

     but so soon trembled by cooking and ashes

     or just killing its brief arch till evening

     where supple tankers do modern muses

     stewing for treasure the opening soils

     their matinée and pale models passing

     so the power blows then evens up logs

     over a smokeless dune that skin turns dry

                                     *

     Gone cold upon the incoming swarm

                  or flung back to prime flux

                  how swaggering multitudes

                  will freshen up absolution

     but come out to show out whom pacify

                  their flags of convenience

                  the good ship counterfeit

                  tuned contra sung dances

     now grids encircled till breaking diction

                  how public rebel yell boy

                  in would-be slime mould

                  turns against pall bearing

     each to their own private money lung

                  or yet bled to rehearsals

                  where the finite armies

                  harden to callous scores

     it is a bad infinity for finite friends

                  when nature calls or off

                  bred to within an ounce

                  of this life, this massing

     down corridors in which idealism stalks

                  and you are bound upon

                  such laughing matters as

                  one such among so many

                                     *

                  such coverage sans phrase

                  scrambling in the labours

                  just leaping little dangers

                  of which to least can need

                  done oh bread run blusher

                  on waves held to bosom

                  the fighting talk and cuff

                  in a prelude to brochures

                  first exhibit turning brisk

                  inert manger in one eye

                  on both ends in creases

                  said vested and such like

                                     *

                  Another speculative good Friday

                  now starring improved tyranny

                  set to get one over on the money

                  somewhere between the sensible

                  and the curse of a curdling shade

                  or beached upon summer graphs

                  free to reckon with no family tree

                  viz. a mathematician hell bent on

                  disproving the trinity against the

                  god-botherer versed in fuzzy logic

                  till a triumphant queuing system

                  turns the probable into trolley rage

                  as when the number crunching set

                  truly decline their pre-paid tickets

                  for the massacre of the innocents

     Another socking half hour until toughs

     fall into rough details still forthcoming

     with no can do put beyond open fruits

     that livid night preens the angled pillow

     what with cruel mercies set upon the shelf

     and more aid shrubbery in star chambers

     than how the savour calculus turns pale

     or what in semi-detached folkish stains

     can ground out or beckon in the cameras

     and catch bleeding dust after the thunder

                                     *

     As a book bleeds out of its broken spine

     a cool look rubbed into a cross hatching

     the rayons leaping out of one language

     and the miserable fruits in sterile grafts

     or the small of the back turned to cupping

     slop and pall under cover of oceans

     before breaking into spilling pallettes

     that deck its unprimed bed of wilted flax

     to the cut of the blundering currents

     spelt out so each one speaks out of the wrong

                  So much of duration

                  to laugh answering

                  revolutions of spur

                  flame thrown once

                  on its tire the usual

                  periods thing or big

                  fruit so likewise by

                  single or slow tread

                  poring into the field

                  hardly lush to endure

                  but neat braced skein

                  for burning diagrams

                  elbow to finger grime

                  uh-huh my crunchers

                  wrinkling leather dash

                  under the masked raw

                                     *

     As another wave brushes each fibre

     the wash tumbles and set upon bruises

     it barely merits the nubile counters

     as glasses cloud that once were in faces

     etched then in the fallen reef and our years

     its tender marbling struck to rosy spools

     the brush of stacks practised in a contempt

     that partly for that reason stands up loose

                                     *

     Quite literally little by little

                 amid late digits whom glossy

     that and DNA skirting blouses

                 finds fine siblings triple fold

     high above the lung cancel

                 and the hard saying bastard

     that being and nothing rhyme

                 pooled once fur and leaky

     till gripped in terror morsels

                 a novella moon slow pasted

     to bloom repeater point 99

                 who would not sack cloth

     the scam comfy or clutchy

                 wrangled into cork nude folds

     shone to scratch burnt moles

                 where from boules weep nails

     finger dipped in ocean salsa

                 till later came stilling salt

                                     *

                                     *

      But the direct address to the serial

      name, rank and number remaining

      strangely silenced or in this respect

      the behaviour true to form and few

      it is indeed remarkable how daily

      and constant encounter bears upon

      moist reliance in concepts of whose

      possession yet content with its uses

      only passing acquaintance by name

      the alien slave valued at mute face

      can pass over on the homeland bus

      nor sprung from the rattle & shake

      but none will admit their belongings

      out by the hundreds in hypothetical

      and graphic lounge or figurative wig

      showering duty on tons of split land

                                     *

        A supreme note shines forth a uniform

        suburb of how many glances gone south

        the special touch of the habit and scarf

        now the fourth wall inches a damp ruin

        holding the peaceable upon the spent

        tracers with autographed plungers of light

        and a sense of proportion thrown up through

        a streamed horizon in which love plunged

                                     *

                 Hey fiddle the count

                 or the burnt creative

                 all the way to a rose

                 or budding metaphor

                 stripped of hedging

                 till the raw calculus

                 says hand over fist

                 in brief nasty brutish

                 and short arrays sing

                 dog the curt entrepôt

                 stay with me, stay the

                 buttoned toothy bulk

                                     *

     then hardly a day waltzes by in anything

                   but the history of its accumulation

                   fever to touch what smoking flesh

                   that would eat itself rather than rest

                   triumphant in a cosmopolitan dish

     it is what makes it stick or wounded soul

                   left for the dark birds to feed upon

                   when graves call for dancing zip

                   and whatever left in us owes zilch

                   but force fed flirtations with work

     as if bowing to abstraction could keep up

                           off ancient spurs and spoils

                                     *

     When you fold in domestic burial

     any detail of disturbance stares back

     a puncture tailing out beyond the frame

     on crowded grounds bled back in the dark

     so that even an odd smiling kills light

     and lolls forward upon a merging case

     shut to seem tenuous with best practice

     that turns into doors bearing up branches

     who would plane down even all so fussy

     out of solidarity with scare quotes

                                     *

                    and merely a three

                    in one spatial tatty

                    yes that scar each

                    is limited to zoom

                    like it the quantum

                    yawn broke tender

                    an alp for a sphere

                    these pieces frank

                    opular column lists

                    the simply drying

                    and brazen coming

                    strips the pure idea

                                     *

     And there is no more speculative proposition

     than the balletic claim that anything equals

     anything else: viz. maths unequal to its own

     claims as the very glitch previously gleaned

     showers down honeyed fronds and cue dance:

     splint hoop then rolling which withers doesn’t

     not counting the room now running on empty

     verging on into purest essentials, the very cog

     swung aloft in distant insight, blue to external

     to the thing or things thus altered as its means

     neither concrete sense crowds nor even love

     creams the least stretching lines of equality

     till setting jessant falls short of its jeté mumble

     and all in turns cloudy, crisp, yes scar rampant

                                     *

                    Tis neon now fiery crush

                    on starkest smithereens

                    squealing come rest track

                    as beaming traces show

                    lost pay to moth masque

                    and smugger captions

                    beguile each shut lively

                    now sent beyond in furs

                    or go garland the wrath

                    dice in hot dashing rivet

                    with hammy drills racing

                    on old warp factor blush

                    hand to geld wax mouth

                    spangled to windscreen

                    diamonds gone to crown

                    its veil in mergent blue

                                     *

                                     *

     As the double sack fits the mendicant

                    done to a yielding purée

     in thousands so offered up for burning

                    so stripped of muscle tone

     the world of the firstest bursting its gut

                    come slurry and ordinance

     as number locks onto incoming souls

                    the prosaic but bright light

     spread to how floral leaflets of practice

                    flow weary ways or waters

     and how the mass destruction eagerly

                    spreads its cynical umbrella

     awaited with everything up in smoke

                    and conventional weapons

     in the latest mockery and cakewalk

                    for an audience of one

                                     *

     Both burnt and dilating in the usual

     and that in general the bottom edges

     as would plainly meet as much in return

     some dazzled cuff or a quick of trouser

     but dragging nothing into view save sleep

     while physical bulk weathers out the loss

     as depicts your unseen profile or scream

     begging for crosses to amount to less

                                     *

                                     *

     But no, that pathos has finally burst

     and to speak of unsettling reassures

     only a parched shower often counted on

     as if blooming stains can be repainted

     or overscore what will pass for coping

     though nothing can ever settle again

     whenever their crash breaks in a new sense

     of what milder day or moulded harness

     once mounted on rusting tracks of global

     proportion and coats trailing capitals

                                     *

     Lozenges out of lousy slab tombstone

     showing rectilineal planes, two acute

     and two obtuse with a diamond rhomb

     common to brilliants and roses why then

     the theodicy of the self-styled pure

     sticking with parties and faith in numbers

     even irrational ones grown so absurd

     their speculative wings melted to clippers

     but strictly tuned to heraldic draughstmen

     as gardens of virus make out each cell

                                     *

                    And only the semantic

                    tongue fire persiflage

                    tucks a green goddess

                    crumbs upon crumble

                    from the top table and

                    as sticklers fall to beg

                    the shades shot from

                    a drop dead beret and

                    the glass is half empty

                                     *

     Thrown to rise upon yellowing paper

     ups the massaging to graphic fibres

     each sawn diskette chiselling fiery dust

     in forgotten formats calling dead labour

     furred up and quite broken to duration

     but just as the bottom falls out of life

     there but for the grace finds its pentagon

     bonds as blank splits in the chilliest sky

     and fallen as intimate scars of blue

     so easily blown and yet to no floor

                                     *

          The trough implies some

                       dimmer viz. the cool

          latter retiring jinxed but

                       who’s to know spruce

          the true kiddy well

                       spark that craving scheme

          sunk flatly and bitter

                       shines in gross cruise

          over crowded jitters stooping

                       where orange clearly huffs

          who’s the envy now

                       spent brand spanking new

          flutters to confetti caprice

                       religion pants right enough

          where great laxity speaks

                       kinder there’s much hostage

          and group scruples huddling

                       in said analyzer braid

          branches shouting qui vive

                       never mind which pique

                                     *

                       Territory fired

                       out of the hides

                       and parchment

                       still to scrolling

                       but even alight

                       is no single file

                       nor even temper

                       but a spending

                       only a quick fix

                       the still in view

                       varnished and lit

                       by satellite states

                                     *

                                     *

                 Figure one quoth bastard

                 with sharp pointy stick

                 as all the yards run quick

                 pooling draff to swarm

                 the ledgers taking count

                 and lighter to shuddering

                 its spent tremble in beads

                 which shun the dragon boy

                 in his song of dungeons

                                     *

                 And abandons fruity coughs

                              beneath the phrase lime

                 how glass eyes make over

                              each spare tucked atom

                 from whose spilling orchestra

                              shoots triple headed rules

                 come fine jewel shorting

                               daft for machine sticks

                 or swords of modest petal

                               ravished puts things proud

                 with euphonic porn parades

                               the lofty key grazing

                 back come mirrored stocks

                               each from lightened loads

                 the ancient lyric shuffle

                               sprained by cold quoting

                 that stroke steer derided

                               her ethos stirring liquids

                  Still comes quick billing

                  down grafts fairly sterile

                  the prodigal sung surplus

                  strikes awe then resumes

                  its lessening stale ellipsis

                  fortressed for the duration

                  like strangers and alloyed

                  antiques of civilian ardour

                  the dimming left uneven

                  boned and plucked scraping

                  now blanker shone grounds

                  showing feather to sunny

                  least middles in disputes

                  called stupid and singled

                  out from franker foliage

                  that dance for oblivions

                  obliging a fried snapshot

                  and most finite protocols

                  so jubilant for slipstreams

                  among the receding lines

AFTERMATHS

‘Your last proportion is that of figure, so called for that it yields an ocular representation, your meeters being by good symmetrie reduced into certaine Geometricall figures, whereby the maker is restrained to keepe him within his bounds, and sheweth not only more art, but serveth also much better for briefenesse and subtiltie of device.’

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie

‘This conflict between the general form of the proposition and the unity of the Notion which destroys it is similar to the conflict that occurs in rhythm between metre and accent. Rhythm results from the floating centre and the unification of the two. So, too, in the philosophical proposition the identification of Subject and Predicate is not meant to destroy the difference between them, which the form of the proposition expresses; their unity, rather, is meant to emerge as a harmony.’

Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit

‘The effort that is required to grasp new music is not one of abstract knowledge, nor is it one of acquaintance with some systems or other, with theorems, much less with mathematical procedures. It is essentially imagination, what Kierkegaard called the speculative ear…’

Adorno, Essays on Music

Few things are more disappointing than apologies disguised as theoretical confessions. Apologies nevertheless seem called for, even at the risk of lessening otherwise necessary resistances to public taste. But let slip the dogs of articulation and there are costly tithes to be paid to the gods of utilitarianism heralded by the armies of capital. Who would not true infotainment see, come hype or academic audit. Demands for promotional paraphernalia can then be acknowledged as interrogative tortures set on consigning what would be public to the long arms of private property relations. One response to the invasive protocols of publicity and identification is that recommended to prisoners of war: acknowledge only name, rank and serial number. No blurbs, no pack-drill: and no pretence at fireside chats with the armchair generals.

Resistances weaken in the face of sustained interrogation, but the anxiety of the merest title, pseudonym or mnemonic is reflected in the honour accorded to the anonymity of the unknown soldier and the unsung legends of dead labour. Even if titles seem like a sorry vestige of privilege or, better still, Adamic hubris, there is more than a tincture of puritan self-congratulation evidenced by works announcing themselves as beings without allegiance, kin or title – untitled, sans titre, ohne Titel – or as beings of merely numerical classifications such as opus numbers and their attendant chapters, pages, opuscules, sub-sections, enjambments, ceasuras and so on to the dawn of infinite shade. They flee from me that sometime heard each call to frozen postures amid the sordid machinations of interior decor.

Between the demands of vocation, conscription and commodification, the limits of what can be professed by way of oeuvre offer as much room for generous reconstruction as the humane interrogator affords victims. Once executed, the corpse can look forward to virtual graveyards scattered among the fields of socially divided labours. Without some indication of willed or intuitive prejudices, it is perhaps too much to expect anyone to understand, beyond dutiful recognition, what might have been implied but is constrained to remain sub judice. Against seals of arithmetical identification, however, there is something to be said for the unlikely possibility that prisoners reveal more than they intend or can sum up. Not so much, then, between the lines, blanks in the breach or sous rature, but in the flight from the law of unwitting oversights where vision loses the privilege of hieratic divination and all the theological regimes of reading eager to supply the relevant ordinance, but would rather no more than as set down to the immanent torque, the productive bents so framed by restricting confession to acknowledgments of due process.

Beyond inevitable testimonies to the historical conditions of contemporary production, not least defeats of reason in the face of the new global imperium, the above writings thus owe some of their genesis to a reflexive restlessness with the tyranny of number and of psuedo-mathematical procedures in the making of art. Whereas the modern world of prose revels in its supposed freedom from formality, tradition suggests that mathematical patterns of various kinds are conditions of the possibility of art, perhaps most explicitly in Pythagorean conceptions of music and the physics of sound. As Adorno once suggested, every triad that a composer still uses today already sounds like a negation of the dissonances that have meanwhile been set free. But soft, hear the songs of mass destruction come marching in who speak of quantum mechanics and unfurling radiation over the desert sky.

Between the extremes of avowedly intuitive and non-intuitive approaches to musical form, recent works developed out of the shadow of totalised compositional technique and post-minimalist whimsy indicate an impasse analogous to difficulties in other arts. It is not unmediated accession to the qualities and angles of the sphere, thing or object-ball that animates the recurrence of diverse, largely automatic acts of wannabe recognition. Much of what passes for minimalism might more accurately be understood as ironic literalism, the knowingly monotonous formalism in which all cows are indeed cows, but if and only if seen as such. Conceptualism is no less literal-minded, recycling received ideas rather than engaging with anything quite so conceptual as the concept itself. There is nevertheless a necessary negativity at work in such isms, even if not with the epochal largesse beloved of paradigm-shifters. As a negative principle, the spirit of the letter abjures the autonomy of positivistically misconceived hermeneutics or philology, and when the letter exceeds even the claims of aesthetic spirit, this is not positive transcendence but wrung violation.

The heroic avant-garde succeeded in hollowing out the dignity of speculative identification. Affirmative synchronicities – such as myth and modernity, freedom and harmony, love and prosody – are revealed as category mistakes rather than engaging ruins of spirit. See history to mathematics fly, now vainly gaze, turn giddy, rave and die. One of the unintended consequences of avant-garde ambition is the pervasive pleasure taken in reductive but avowedly radical forms of contextualisation, from situationism to cultural studies. Oscillations between purification and transgressive collation fall victim to the abstract identity of purity and impurity. Pure maths is no less impure, uncertain, or plain useless than the most pure compositional formulae. Calls for aesthetic autonomy and for the radicalism of tradition are sung from the same messy hymn sheet, as if the costume of the globe were Galileo’s Great Book of the World, with its silent discourse charactered by triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, and as if writing were scripture or the handwriting of some god.

Much rests on the viability of projective appropriation through strategies of phenomeno-logical reduction, from the supposed politics of formal innovation to the wounded allegories of sensuous damage, or from witty but sceptical dramatisations of parallel universes to ironic disavowals of recognised necessity. Einstein could not believe that God played dice, and yet it is more suprising still to find so many residues of secular superstition at the end of the line. What seems hard to acknowledge amid the reduction of aesthetic intentionality to strategies of restless differentiation, micro-differentiation and nihilistic irony – all the various hymns to difference, to the Other and to the quasi-transcendental impossibility of reconciliation – are the underlying affirmations accruing as the determinate consequences of so much scepticism and negativity. Herein lie the traceries strung out by the phenomenology of anti-geist or anti-spirit.

Art carries on like some beautiful soul that neither affirms nor denies its complicity with the engagements it lovingly prolongs. One of the many ruses by which the spirit of speculation is bracketed or continued by other means is the embrace of mathematical reason – arm in arm and row on row, till legs are cut to logs and ribbons – but recognising this hardly frees speculation from the gambles invested in it. Terrible things have been done in the name of breaking with the tyranny of compositional hierarchies and so much painting by numbers. Blanched formalisms have proclaimed the triumph of chance procedures, as if improvisation could be more than a merely negative freedom to tinker with standards thereby reinscribed. Constitutive binaries – according to which synthetic compositions with hubristic ambitions oppose the differentials of free play – leave a broken middle where once dwelt content.

As if to confirm the resulting conformities, it is often hard to tell whether strained disjunctions are produced according to an underlying scheme or according to a logic of what might again be called accidents. The most classically schematic forms were animated by a forrest of accidentals just as the most romantically fluid organisms were often blind to the enclosure movements and agricultural mechanics enabling their pastoral fancies. If polemics more often become tedious bookends – prologues and epilogues to be ignored by all but the accountants of the imagination – then recent developments suggest the triumph of accountancy at the heart of the social text.

Put differently, there is no more speculative proposition than the claim that anything equals anything else. Even this statement errs towards the romance of tautological evasion, a chiasmus too far. Metaphor toys with the speculative rewards of identification, but lacks the legislative grammar demanded of rationality. Mathematics, for example, is not equal to its own claims. The rebuke is not new. Plato put into Socrates’ mouth the observation that even those who are only slightly conversant with geometry will not dispute us in saying that this science holds a position the very opposite from that implied in the language of those who practise it. More recently, Daniel E. Styer notes that physicists are often clumsy in their use and understanding of quantum mechanics’s central concepts, indeed they are protected from them by a screen of mathematics. What once ventured forth as processual mathesis becomes the reified calculus of administration, a logic of numerical sameness screened from nihilistic relativity. Negation is no less unequal to the task of speculative scepticism, especially in any inquiry into the poetics of experience seeking to delimit the phenomenological illusions involved in recourse to number as the mood, or will to power, of aesthetic reason.

Hegel is perhaps the harshest critic of the defective cognition of which mathematics is so proud. He declares that in mathematical cognition insight is an activity external to the thing it thus alters. The means employed, construction and proof, no doubt contain true propositions, but the content is false. With non-actual things like the objects of mathematics neither concrete sense-intuition nor philosophy has the least concern. This least cries out for attention, but why the righteousness of pure maths among its adherents? From the perspective of the damage done, mathematics is a form of biological tyranny, an anthropomorphic fiction no more divine or deserving of submission than any other biological form. Insofar as such tyrannies take hold of social action, the logic of capital and its military shield represent the priority of numeracy over literacy, of counting over the Heraclitean river. Even this metaphorical displacement calls on a frame in which the apex drawn into the middle distance claims its own theatrical geometry, as if the landscape could be so singled out and captured for intuition. As Barthes puts it, the stage is the line which stands across the path of the optic pencil, tracing at once the point at which it is brought to a stop and, as it were, the threshold of its ramification. Thus is founded – against music (against the text) – representation.

Writ large, there is a struggle between logoi and mathemata which maps graphs over the living expression of being and its speculative life in language. When has maths not been an adjutant in the massacre of the innocents? Contrary to the hopes of cubism, such as those intimated by Apollinaire, geometry is to painting as dogs are to sheep. The staging of geometry so as to encircle the nude model staring back is more candidly betrayed by Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Lest this be taken awry, the pastoral fantasies of abstract expressionism suggest that it is not really shepherds or sheep that pull the strings. Berating the stretched canvas for its supporting role is only a way of worrying sheepish illusions with intimations of materialism. The axis of the fourth wall assumes the domestication of what would be more open air passages through political music, a problem for which the conditions of representation cannot be ruled architectonically. Mathematical beauty is a contradiction in terms. The beauty of contradiction, moreover, rests in the ruin of form’s will to power. The succinct quality of great equations does not justify hymns to formalism.

As Husserl once quipped, the mathematician is not really the pure theoretician, but only the ingenious technician. Heidegger boldly pointed out that mathematical knowledge is no more rigorous than philological-historical knowledge. It merely has the character of exactness. In its radical unity, the trinitarianism of science’s world-projection brings a luminous simplicity and aptness, and beyond that – nothing. The nothing – what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? One thing is sure, science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. Unspeakable experiments have been conducted along such lines. Adorno also highlights the way the primacy of mathematics reduces the question of meaning to a sort of faded, technical thought activity. As he puts it, the mathematician smells sabotage to the machinery in any question of meaning. The mathematician is concerned with ideal objects like the paleontologist is concerned with fossils.

Heisenberg provides chilling evidence that the concern of the scientist’s objectivity confuses objective truth with social engineering. He admits, for example, that the power of natural and technical sciences has fundamentally changed the conditions of life on earth, but suggests that whether one calls it progress or danger, one must realize that it has gone far beyond any control through human forces. According to him, one may rather consider it as a biological process on the largest scale whereby structures active in the human organism encroach on larger parts of matter and transform it into states suited for the increasing human population. Substitute one with a vain particular disguising its will to power as a universal recognition and you have a pocket calculator with which to perform ideology critique. What one is becomes the integral calculus of social being, an entry in the index of worldly prose whose appendices are taking over the asylum. Where on Olympus is there a telescope capable of magnifying oversights into overviews? Who will educate such educators if the species is so conceived as if the organism were passively suited to statistical lies?

Heisenberg even suggests that it may take many years to distinguish truth and error, but finally the questions will be decided, and not by scientists but by nature itself, as if scientific ideas only spread like a true fungus. It is strange how the theory of relativity and its perspectival aporia lend themselves to the dogma that science still knows best. Heisenberg concedes that an important feature of the development of modern physics is the experience that concepts of natural language, vaguely defined as they are, seem to be more stable in the expansion of knowledge than scientific language. Apparently, for him, the concepts of natural language are formed by more immediate connections with reality, as if language could be natural, and as if the attempt to idealize science in and through language were not the expression of forces doing violence to their own otherwise unacknowledged temporizing and unnatural history.

Seen more generously, the objects of mathematics are merely ideal objects on which to waste free moments. What matters is the difference between an equation and the data it would circumscribe. Transfer to the private sector of the mathematical mapping of the human genome corrupts the meaning of data and threatens humanity with yet more creative accounting. The way creativity is over-rated reflects the alienation of finite spirit, the natural history built into the word creation. Where humans are concerned, the straightest line between two points requires dialectical thought. Families, friends and lovers continually demonstrate the stupidity of applying arithmetic to situations that matter: mathematical solutions cannot be endured. The theorem that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles takes no account of love triangles or the triune shape of spirit. And what can the spirit of geometry offer an inquiry into Proclus, for whom the truly existent has the trinity of beauty, truth and symmetry. Despite protestations of innocence among recent exponents of trinitarianism, Hegel remains the unthought condition for understanding how the Christian mysteries were rendered incomprehensible to understanding and how reason now comprehends their speculative and historical revelation.

Meanwhile, Kepler’s ambition to show that the heavens are a kind of clockwork has its own half-life in the continuing way in which the humanism of the analogue clock is underestimated. The claim that Dirac’s equation predicted how almost half of all material existence at the time of the so-called big bang was made up of antimatter suggests that purveyors of popular science should read more Zeno. God may have been a remarkable mathematician, but whether the theology is Platonic or astrophysical, the ideas of before and after built into creationism are mathematical illusions better understood as grammatical fancies. Mindful, perhaps, of the violence of geometrical method in thinkers such as Descartes and Leibniz, Hobbes and Spinoza, Kant observed that nothing has been more harmful to philosophy than the imitation of mathematics, but forgot to mention the harm done mathematics by imitating itself. Just as Schlegel declared that a good preface is at once the square root and the square of its book, so a good aphorism shrugs off the desire for symmetry and merely mathematical balance. Afterwords become the bad infinities of hindsight. Schlegel also declared that publishing is to thinking as the maternity ward is to the first kiss: so the poem is to its aftermaths. While bullets fly and caterpillar tracks hum to the rhythms of blue grass, poems dream of more edifying occasions, more edifying even than the workshops and dissection laboratories of sundry literary geneticists.

There is no account adequate to describe the reification of everyday life according to accountancy: the calculus of profit makes for dull reading. As David Harvey has suggested, space and time have to be understood as social metrics produced through capital accumulation. Enthusiasts of telecommunication have even claimed that geography is history. But the symptoms of convergence within capitalist idealism are fuelled by a totality of antagonistic differentiation that would eat itself rather than rest triumphant in a cosmopolitan empire. The other projected into its final frontier is also its self-inflicted wound, the essence of what makes it tick. The attempt to reduce music to maths nevertheless shows the wisdom of birds who sing on without deference to human perception or to the paralyzed abstractions of numerical negativity. Similarly, in the era of its global diffusion, lyric’s social metrics pretend to fall in love with numerical quantities so as to disguise fragile flirtations with the latest catastrophe.

In his meditations on metaphysics after Auschwitz, Adorno gives restless testimony to the historically conditioned enormity of the situation. Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience. Quantity recoiling into quality scores unspeakable triumphs. But such provocations are themselves wagers mortgaged upon speculative delimitations of experience. Beckett went for broke: … nothing more restful than arithmetic, in a hundred thousand, in a million, it’s too much, too little, we’ve gone wrong somewhere, no matter, there is no great difference here between one expression and the next, when you’ve grasped one you’ve grasped them all, I am not in that fortunate position, all, how you exaggerate, always out for the whole hog, the all of all and the all of nothing, never in the happy golden…. But satire is wasted on mathematical process because the codes involved lack the moral fibre for humour or reform. There is more to language, however, than the witty metamorphoses of binary codes. What is is more than grammar makes it seem. Even this more is more or less a logical shape or tendency, rather than an abstract quantity. It might be described as an inclination towards the parallel identity of finite and infinite being.

One of the ancient spurs to mathematical ingenuity was the desire to divide loaves of bread fairly, but it is a mistake to confuse justice with equal shares. Great political slogans, such as From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, point beyond mathematics to the spirit of recognition. Wisdom sees that justice is more than the sum of sentences and compensation packages: judgment is an art, not mathematical juggling. Speculative poetics transgress the limits of concrete sense-intuition without succumbing to fantasies of mathematical infallibility, exactitude or universality, but critics all too often behave like estate agents who do. As Beckett noted, literary criticism is not book-keeping. Proponents of non-intuitive poetics might try to claim Mallarmé’s dice-throwing as a precursor for their assault on the hazards of quality, but they forget his cult of the old verse line. So much for the dance notations of free verse. The page and the screen assert geometrical frames whatever liberties are taken with straight-ahead linearity, the relentless progress from left to right, and all that justification according to the law of margins and the bottom line. But such fictions are relics of the cult of the old prose line.

The ends can no more ambush the means into new beginnings than the middle can massage its broken back. And despite the fascination with inventing rules to play with, language is not a game. The circular reasoning of poetic sequences provides a consoling exit strategy. What it loses in the recurrence of family resemblances it makes up for in the rewards of familiarity. While the great faiths invested in the poetry of number-crunching deserve the opprobrium of our latter-day priests, no-one has yet managed to write in such a way as to free us from the violence of metrical necessity. Language remains, however, the medium through which the speculative identity of logic and number reveals its antagonisms and its aftermaths. More is less. Against all the evidence that we won’t stop believing in God until we stop believing in grammar, there’s a lot to be said for the view that language knows more than it lets on, and loves nothing more than a good non sequitur amid the absurdity of surds. In the face of so many warring fractions, you could do worse than mutter sweet nothings and drop off to the music of infinite regress, and more often than not you do, you do your worst, before plunging into the full stop.