CosmiKnot

  The house is built for days like this I think as we step through the upvc front door and walk past two small hatch-back cars. You had been worried about your hay-fever and feeling sneezy. I tell myself that you will enjoy this when you get there but also remind myself that saying this out loud would not be helpful. In my patronising way I imagine I am with a horse that needs calming. Just get on the road I think and we do. Turning left out of the drive down the anti-clockwise curving descent of the crescent. Our home stands halfway around this arc. We pass the children’s chalk drawings reminding us to stay cheerful and happy. Then it’s on to the junction at the end of the road where a rich swathe of grass opens up. A football pitch where both of us played for teams and with each other. What’s your favourite memory of the seaside I ask inspired by the blue-sky breeziness filling the air? I don’t like the seaside remember? Oh but we had fun playing cricket outside the triangle cabi...

This programme “The One” distils or reduces love and human identity to a DNA codification. We seem to have wholly accepted, like evangelical science Christians, an idea that our perceptual sense of self is shaped by a code akin to the algorithm which conveniently shapes our human relations. The very idea that there might be other factors in the cosmos beyond the hard-wiring of DNA and the genes seems to be a heretical suggestion. The suggestion that that we are not individual units of power shaped by a numerical sequence is again akin to saying I believe in leprechauns or even God. perhaps the code has replaced God. I would say that this faith in the rational shaping of code is a clinging to the raft of Medusa as the ship of progress sails into the sunset. We apply our Botox whilst devouring each other’s limbs. It is faith we have in binary switching systems and we find it cleaner and more wholesome to believe that our one true love could be shaped by the pairing of our DNA-sequence st...

  I’m like a fish out of water Think about it for a moment Do you see a fish on a bicycle? Gliding through the medieval theme tune Of an English university town? Or do you perhaps see a dace? Glistening in the small pale wet hands of a 13-year-old boy Offering up the catch to the lens of his father’s smart-phone A grin spreading like mildew over a photograph in the attic J R Hartley remains stock still in his grave at this moment  A fish out of water floundering on the unhooking mat on the bank It is not necessary to use one but against regulations not to As I wake into each day I am such a fish Lured from the velvety depths of my freshwater natural habitat Dreaming of my other son’s desire to buy a sports car Or my own promotion to transgender Professor I flounder motionless under the duvet and gasp for something. Air? A reason? A light? My gills flap as I struggle to readjust  to my new circumstances in a world of actual pain. Living is the oxygen of pain see. My gills ...

   This instant   This instant she is Craning her neck Sight reading the starlings on the aerial She fears the sound of The ceramic glazed lustre A side dish of olive stones Exploding into the cosmic Void of the walk-in kiln Does the light go on? The bulb above your head Does the penny drop? The dripping alchemy Of this stickle brick universe Is somehow all wrong An inverted syrup Am I losing my hair?   Come here this instant Your escape velocity  Is terminal four The quick sand conveyor belt Is up to your neck in it Squelch went the dying sun She says sticking a finger in her cheek A plastic spade blade gamely Patting the top of the old block Plastic flag at the ready Seagulls whirl and crow Expounding obvious pride in The I told you so of it The that which every mother knows The new dog old tricks Pavlov’s bell ringing certainty of it Of it all of it all of it all   this instant instantly explodes a highly improbable moment   then this one then the n...

  God is in his cubbyhole  a place usually concealed the slatted chubb-lock doors are today flung wide open   like God’s man spread as he sits performing one-person show a couple stand before him for all eternity I too am invited to partake in a round   this much I gather from the array  of score cards, balls and anti-bac spray with cast-off selection of diecast putters  leaning invitingly against catering table   putting green shimmers with holy portent eighteen solar systems waiting each undulating around dead suns sucking down soft dimpled moons with   down the drain, death-rattle endings pastel draped couple stand ready moon scythes in hand before God discussing something beyond perception         In this vacuum of Summer I feel my chest fill with boundless hope fed by times spent inside finite models of the cosmos   didn’t ever want to fall off the edge of the putting green but knew I would find it waiting even before...

The following is a story translated by Prof. Kimey Peckpo from the original Finnish version published in the 1940s as part of a scheme to encourage intuitive empathy in what was regarded as an increasingly secular life. The title itself is a rough translation of a word "Etsivä" that is perhaps more nuanced than this singular version suggests. The anonymous author may have been thinking about Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above a Sea of Fog but this is a playful piece of speculation. A man who considered himself to be both wise and humble would set off each day walking briskly towards the craggy slope of a climb up to a summit above his home. I’m going to find enlightenment he said to himself and sometimes to other people he met on his way or even when he was just out shopping on the high street. He strode purposefully through the fields, which always looked so inviting from the back garden of the house where he lived in the valley. Once you were on the slopes...