Knowledge, line 22: weather maps - an annoyance of mine. Previously, newspapers et al published weather forecasts complete with isobars etc. Then, to be 'user-friendly' they abandoned the isobars and used silly pictograms of sun and rain etc instead, effectively dumbing down the reader/viewer who could not now analyse the forecast for himself.
Note: There is little new under the sun. Shortly after writing this poem I reread T. S. Eliot's 'Choruses from The Rock', written in 1934, and was surprised to find in the first chorus: "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?/ Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" - which rather adumbrates my own poem in reverse.
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1. Information
What purpose thumb-jerk scrolling as the train
Embattles over points, its office horde
Sweat-weary on their day-end haul to suburbs
Mute under purple skies? The byte-fed skein
Of information, shrilled with panic verbs,
Enwebs the gorging mind, agog but bored:
There’s texting, surfing, tweeting, sampling feeds
Whilst breasting mayhem on pitched tablet games,
Neck-cricked to earphoned hip-hop all the while.
Through flaring windows starlings bate their needs
Flocked in the fields, prodding a dead-seed dung pile
Like fingers stabbing icons; flashed in the flames
Of twilight they lurch like cartoon combatants
Made infant by ungratified desires:
Likewise, their sapped observers blurting by,
By finger-interest provoke their wants
Of leisure, news and sport, which mob the eye,
Led by emoticons to grins or ires.
Where once a federated happenstance
Gave scope and limit to the throb of facts,
Now dressed-down integers 'embrace their space'
Cravingly unfulfilled by scroll and glance.
For these have never sat before the mace,
Distincting grounded truths from claims and acts;
Worlded in information like a fog,
Only a cleft which swords the torqueing mass
Can gift a vision of the land’s outstretch,
Spying a path to homesteads in the smog;
For facts themselves in mindless pitch and fetch
Are lump as Caliban not bright as glass,
Untooled to context which alone yields light.
So, sunk in surfeit, these loafish feeders bloat,
Suborned by data like the unfree free,
And when that train shrieks to the platform’s bight
It groans the slave song of autonomy,
Void data throttling what it should denote.
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1. Information
What purpose thumb-jerk scrolling as the train
Embattles over points, its office horde
Sweat-weary on their day-end haul to suburbs
Mute under purple skies? The byte-fed skein
Of information, shrilled with panic verbs,
Enwebs the gorging mind, agog but bored:
There’s texting, surfing, tweeting, sampling feeds
Whilst breasting mayhem on pitched tablet games,
Neck-cricked to earphoned hip-hop all the while.
Through flaring windows starlings bate their needs
Flocked in the fields, prodding a dead-seed dung pile
Like fingers stabbing icons; flashed in the flames
Of twilight they lurch like cartoon combatants
Made infant by ungratified desires:
Likewise, their sapped observers blurting by,
By finger-interest provoke their wants
Of leisure, news and sport, which mob the eye,
Led by emoticons to grins or ires.
Where once a federated happenstance
Gave scope and limit to the throb of facts,
Now dressed-down integers 'embrace their space'
Cravingly unfulfilled by scroll and glance.
For these have never sat before the mace,
Distincting grounded truths from claims and acts;
Worlded in information like a fog,
Only a cleft which swords the torqueing mass
Can gift a vision of the land’s outstretch,
Spying a path to homesteads in the smog;
For facts themselves in mindless pitch and fetch
Are lump as Caliban not bright as glass,
Untooled to context which alone yields light.
So, sunk in surfeit, these loafish feeders bloat,
Suborned by data like the unfree free,
And when that train shrieks to the platform’s bight
It groans the slave song of autonomy,
Void data throttling what it should denote.
2. Knowledge
A morning break, the canteen blurs with noise,
Staff and students douse personhood in phones;
A health and safety tutor scrolls her notes
For module three on Protocols for Toys;
It’s packaged stuff – assumptions, facts and quotes,
Impressed to pass exams and mould-stamp clones.
Doubtless it gifts an income, though at cost
Of push-pull shaping which impugns the mind
With stereotypes of fact and social meaning.
But knowledge bodies more, like drudge-stuff glossed:
It’s context, priming scopes for search and gleaning,
Assessing matter’s parts and what’s opined;
By test and opposition structures grow
Which coral-like floresce to self-bind fact,
Concluding meaning adequate to all
Those facts imply. As clear-wiped glass will show
A morning break, the canteen blurs with noise,
Staff and students douse personhood in phones;
A health and safety tutor scrolls her notes
For module three on Protocols for Toys;
It’s packaged stuff – assumptions, facts and quotes,
Impressed to pass exams and mould-stamp clones.
Doubtless it gifts an income, though at cost
Of push-pull shaping which impugns the mind
With stereotypes of fact and social meaning.
But knowledge bodies more, like drudge-stuff glossed:
It’s context, priming scopes for search and gleaning,
Assessing matter’s parts and what’s opined;
By test and opposition structures grow
Which coral-like floresce to self-bind fact,
Concluding meaning adequate to all
Those facts imply. As clear-wiped glass will show
The bone and flesh of things, and thought at trawl
With feeling limn the psyche’s errant tract,
Knowledge bestows a surety, it waives
The ego, balks the sect, and so allows
The freeboot mind to reckon for itself.
Hence, weather maps betimes had pressure staves,
Enabling users to deduce a shelf
Of rain and wind, or dome of sun’s carouse;
But now, usurped by sun-rain pictograms,
They trap the lubber to accept on trust
What can’t be tested by the isobars.
Knowledge is action, a hunter on his hams,
Seeking conclusions before the break of stars,
Disdaining camp-types who shirk the taste of dust;
But it’s unstable, pitchforked easily
By big-eyed gabbers who with coarse-cut ropes
Fling ideology to secure its bounds:
What sweets the haze among the stones of Delphi
Is moral thought, befriending facts, which sounds
Like birdsong urgent in a thousand tropes.
3. Wisdom
With feeling limn the psyche’s errant tract,
Knowledge bestows a surety, it waives
The ego, balks the sect, and so allows
The freeboot mind to reckon for itself.
Hence, weather maps betimes had pressure staves,
Enabling users to deduce a shelf
Of rain and wind, or dome of sun’s carouse;
But now, usurped by sun-rain pictograms,
They trap the lubber to accept on trust
What can’t be tested by the isobars.
Knowledge is action, a hunter on his hams,
Seeking conclusions before the break of stars,
Disdaining camp-types who shirk the taste of dust;
But it’s unstable, pitchforked easily
By big-eyed gabbers who with coarse-cut ropes
Fling ideology to secure its bounds:
What sweets the haze among the stones of Delphi
Is moral thought, befriending facts, which sounds
Like birdsong urgent in a thousand tropes.
3. Wisdom
At dawn, the sun stands dominant, immense
Above the tide-out sea; the ozone sand
And shingle, worm-cast pitted, stretches nude
Beneath a blueing sky. The breeze is tense
With slack waves crunching, gulls at scream and feud;
Observed, all shows a unison, like a hand.
But this systolic melding which enrapts
The mind is hobbled for it lacks the crux
Contextualizing context, which allows
The scales of value poised, for ills or apts.
And this is recognition, not of ‘hows’
But ‘whys’, for knowing, raftlike in the flux
Above the tide-out sea; the ozone sand
And shingle, worm-cast pitted, stretches nude
Beneath a blueing sky. The breeze is tense
With slack waves crunching, gulls at scream and feud;
Observed, all shows a unison, like a hand.
But this systolic melding which enrapts
The mind is hobbled for it lacks the crux
Contextualizing context, which allows
The scales of value poised, for ills or apts.
And this is recognition, not of ‘hows’
But ‘whys’, for knowing, raftlike in the flux
Of facts and systems, finds its firm-sand ground
In judging; parleying with consequence,
Its categoric ‘ought’; hence, when the world’s
In judging; parleying with consequence,
Its categoric ‘ought’; hence, when the world’s
Appraised, morality, like pearl, is found.
It’s bile to coffee-cartoned thumpers in their guilds,
For like a fresh-crust babe’s mewed eloquence
It pricks to virtue – wroughting good, unpriced.
This purposed life, sap-rich of goals and reason,
Wraps wisdom’s heartwood, strutting justful choice,
That ring-tough solid of discernment, spliced
Of practice, knowledge, sentence; proportion’s voice
And meaning’s thrifty guide. So, like a leaven
Stiff wisdom validates experience –
Right disposition in event and use,
Achieved not snatched, healthed being’s jointed twin.
It’s truth, thus caritas in immanence,
For all coheres in compact, like a pin,
Makes mutual claim that’s known in clues and cues.
At last, all’s justice, each is fitly placed,
Whole in relation, like the lock to key,
An ‘Is’ where things in crestfall churn had been;
And wisdom, always by this fullness graced,
Disposes in the world, made both serene
And restless like the now-inswelling sea.
====================
© June 2018 – August 2018
It’s bile to coffee-cartoned thumpers in their guilds,
For like a fresh-crust babe’s mewed eloquence
It pricks to virtue – wroughting good, unpriced.
This purposed life, sap-rich of goals and reason,
Wraps wisdom’s heartwood, strutting justful choice,
That ring-tough solid of discernment, spliced
Of practice, knowledge, sentence; proportion’s voice
And meaning’s thrifty guide. So, like a leaven
Stiff wisdom validates experience –
Right disposition in event and use,
Achieved not snatched, healthed being’s jointed twin.
It’s truth, thus caritas in immanence,
For all coheres in compact, like a pin,
Makes mutual claim that’s known in clues and cues.
At last, all’s justice, each is fitly placed,
Whole in relation, like the lock to key,
An ‘Is’ where things in crestfall churn had been;
And wisdom, always by this fullness graced,
Disposes in the world, made both serene
And restless like the now-inswelling sea.
====================
© June 2018 – August 2018
