REVISITING SPIRIT - read revitalising

or some variant, enhancing fructose levels

with eminent distinction. Who

couldn’t use a pick-me-up? Make

reparations in secret, lakeside

excursions, the wild and tangled air

coaxing the medulla. I see him now

pacing, hunched, in coat and boots; retracing

damaged pathways, traversing broken ground.

—

This poem is a small act of literary criticism, inasmuch as it tries to connect Philip Wakeham’s visits to the Red Deeps where he used to meet Maggie Tulliver with the “spots of time” passage in Wordsworth’s Prelude. As I’ve been re-reading George Eliot, I’ve been very struck by the way the “realist” novel draws on a Wordsworthian psychological vocabulary which is in many ways quite at odds with Eliot’s deterministic theories of social development. There is a supplement of spirit - a Wordsworthian “gleam” or “glimmer” - that keeps flickering out across the text: always some ghost, perhaps not firmly installed in the machine but hovering in the vicinity of the mechanism. The reference to “medulla” is probably opaque; it points to David Hartley’s theory of consciousness, in which fluctuations in the “aether” stir the “medullary substance” of the brain into thought. Roger Penrose’s notion that microtubules in the brain are doing clever things with Quantum Stuff is to my mind an updated version of the same idea. Hartley was the philosopher after whom Hartley Coleridge, son of Sam, was named - he was quite an influence on W. and C.