Allen Fisher
Black Bottom [extract]
Black Bottom [extract]
The Engineer rakes sand over
oil burns on the path
to the windmill. He spreads dust on snow
and readjusts his watch.
A man in a raincoat
taps his stick down the path
recites Góngora.
His ears are burning.
He sees the Photographer’s arms around an elm trunk.
One hand can be discerned: it trembles.
Between her hands he images an equator
her body a sphere of energy
perhaps equal to the elm’s it
bounds without meeting
until knotted in a six-dimensional space.
Blake closes his door
for a long time turns a key
in a delicate lock
and listens.
Six-space?
A Mathematician, a Poet and
the Engineer sit across a map table
on the High Road
to begin analysis of the ice.
The Mathematician opens an English copy of
Klopstock, 1811.
A running walk can be checked from
ground prints
alternative hind-foot-hind-foot footfall sequence
reads as one foot close to the surface to take
body weight should the support foot slide.
Every so often saliva has frozen, formed discs on the path.
Six-space is a delusion, the Poet says, It’s
noise, reminated each moment.
Information, the Engineer notes, transmitted over long
periods of time, deteriorates.
The noise can be heat, or radiation, right?
It can be mutagenic chemical. The molecular
clock runs faster than the genetic, It relies
on noise for the controlled introduction of novelty.
You mean balance of conserving and radical change?
What’s that mean? the Poet seems irritated.
There are problems of measurement and scale.
And imagination, the Poet adds.
Are we talking, asks the Engineer leaning back on his chair,
About resilience, persistence, or resistance?
Perturbations need to be stated spatially, the Mathematician
turns to the Poet, Your richness, connectance, and
interaction makes instability. My evidence suggests
that local stability can be observed.
But you won’t wake up to the complexity of observation as
participation.
I’m not concerned, the Mathematician says, With
the successive destruction of individuals. Entire generations
will be grovelling on the Earth. All volition assembles
to form schemes for destruction. We are here to examine
the ice, the cracks, and the shape of this great cloud
of opinion points.
Energy and time cannot be simultaneously measured, you know that.
From the cloud we can integrate over one variable
to get the probability of the other.
I am on an equal footing with what I see, the Poet says.
No, the Engineer interrupts.
The Poet turn to the Engineer, Your system
is acceptance of death.
The Mathematician laughs, he rides a horse into the
green path glowing with golden cane in his left, a
storm bursting from his right, towards a riot of flowers
that enamel his Paradise.
The melons are flat, ready for serving, buttercups
have straight stems, raspberries
spring into baskets between their bushes.
The Mathematician's breath visibly leaves his nostrils
freezes on the tabletop.
Without deliberate perception, what he sees
repeats and trembles.
I stride out onto this plane, feel vertigo,
until I induce a horizontal depth.
I can shatter this ice, this encased sublimnity:
I can prevent your sleep’s expiation and encourage
curbs to your euphoria.
The Mathematician ignores this, walks over to the ice
to contemplate its structure
as if its crystals focussed his energy for thought
The Engineer walks across his contemplation
to triturate this illusion. The Mathematician watches
through his windscreen, then laughs.
I question, the Poet calls, the temporality of narrative,
and use its maps to make their records obsolete.
The Engineer lifts a bundle and carries it to the table,
A thousand confident threads, he says, Hold friends
and not one of them would break that.
That’s an illusion of the future, the Poet argues.
The Photographer interrupts, We reject
stoicism as vanity. All that impedes lucidity
and hampers confidence crenellates the present.
It’s a roll of film, the Engineer jokes, spilling
his tea. His cup leaves a white circle. The Mathematician
starts to draw a tangent to it. The Photographer doodles
a shopping list on the tangent line,
writes, HYPNOSIS,
across the Mathematician’s copy of The Interpretation
of Dreams. I picked up one of the Klopstock volumes
Blake had marked. I was crying
and wouldn’t say whether it was joy
or a sorrow of amazement
In pleasing confusion,
We’re breaking we other’s bones.
The Mathematician and Engineer contested
strength in an arm wrestle across,
what the Engineer called, the concentration table.
A storm hung over the High Road as I wheeled
my bike up the walkway for repair...
