Categories
Short Stories

Short Stories #4

Working through the contents page of my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, comes a taster from the third story in the collection, ‘A Time of Plague; A Time of Love’. There are 26 further stories to introduce, so we are still just beginning this marathon: a month of short stories! I began writing short stories during the Covid lockdown as a break from poems… to make a change… and found that I liked the genre.

A time of plague – what was I thinking! And now a man and a girl; a poet and his muse; a lecturer and his student take the stage.

 A tale of two halves!

It was strange to think of the poet sitting in his usual chair, drinking his usual espresso coffee and watching the world go by. As usual. She liked to think of him like that—his old scarf still around his neck despite the warmth of the place, his jacket open on the usual black T-shirt and his bag on the floor under the table—although she knew that now—now in this strange time—he would have to be at home. Because he was old—well, old by her standards—and he wasn’t allowed to leave his house—he had told her that—in case he came into contact with a plague victim and caught the disease—at his age, it would be very difficult to shake it off and recover, she could barely bring herself to think that it might mean he would die. That couldn’t be allowed to happen, she would never forgive herself if meeting her for a coffee killed him! And she couldn’t visit him as she usually did every Wednesday…

The first half of the story certainly shows a girl in love, infatuated, perhaps, by an older man. But the second half is written in a male voice and the poet may have a different view!

‘A Time of Plague; A Time of Love’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.

Categories
Short Stories

Short Stories #3

Working onward through the contents page of my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, comes a taster from the third story in the collection, ‘The Room’. There are 30 stories in all, so we are still just beginning this marathon: a month of short stories! I began writing short stories during the Covid lockdown as a break from poems… to make a change… and found that I liked the genre.

Like the last story, the influence of Covid is all too apparent here! A lone woman is in – possibly locked in – a room and is worried about her situation. She is convinced that someone entered her room during the previous night and now she cannot sleep! The near-windowless walls seem to close in on her and she wishes with all her might that she could be back on the road…

Myrtle slept little. Mostly she lay on her side wishing for sleep. Wishing for peace. Wishing for, well, for anything other than this room, this bed. Her mind raced and again she curled herself into the smallest space possible on the mattress, her knees pressed against her breasts and her arms clasped around her knees. It wasn’t comfortable but it felt best. Warm. Occasionally Myrtle would glance round the room although its white walls were undecorated by pictures and the small window looked out on a brick wall barely 3 feet away. She supposed that the other building must have been slotted into place after this one was finished; surely planning permission wouldn’t allow windows like that! There was a small table under the window with a bowl and a jug of washing water—no soap, she remembered wryly—and a grubby towel bunched up beside it. And the remains of her meagre supper. No carpet on the floor. No rug beside the bed. No mirror. But she didn’t want to see herself anyway. It would be too depressing—like looking at possibilities denied. So she lay there. On her side. Uncomfortable. Still. Looking at the closed door as the light seeped out of the room.

Idly, Myrtle wondered how long she had been here. In this room. Alone. Well almost alone—there was the man who brought her meals three times a day but he didn’t have much to say for himself and looked as miserable as she felt. He was quite tall and slim, and could have been good looking if he had shaved, combed his hair, washed even. Her mind followed the train of thought, eager to distract her from her own predicament…

‘The Room’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.

Categories
Short Stories

Short Stories #2

Following on from yesterday’s introduce to ‘The Den’ in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, comes a taster from the second story in the collection, ‘Age’. There are 30 stories in all, so we are still just beginning this marathon: a month of short stories! I began writing short stories during the Covid lockdown as a break from poems… to make a change… and found that I liked the genre.

I suppose it is one of the inevitable consequences of growing old that you dwell, to some extent at least, on age – indeed I have just written a long poem (not yet published anywhere), ‘Reflexions on the Isolation of Age’. So I suppose that it was not really surprising that during the isolation of Covid I wrote a piece about living alone in old age!

The story is about a man who is advancing more or less happily through his later years, with few cares or worries, unconcerned about his life… until one morning when he wakes up with no idea why he isn’t in bed! He struggles to remember, becomes concerned…

 John was worried that he was getting old. And in that thought he knew there was a second, hidden, almost subliminal buried concern. Getting old—yes, he knew: in his early seventies he didn’t feel old, didn’t in fact feel any different to the way he had felt thirty or forty years ago but his hair was white and thinning, he was, he to admit less agile, he took more care up ladders… that sort of thing. But the worry he wouldn’t voice was that he was losing his memory. Or his mind, an unseen evil voice whispered.

This was just a vague, a background notion that surfaced when he couldn’t remember a name or a place. His memory for the past—the more distant past—was invincible… as evidenced he thought with a grin when his sister has emailed yesterday that she had found his school log tables amongst her books and in an instant he recalled the slim grey covered booklet with its black capitalised title, covered in the sticky-backed film he had used on all his school books. He wasn’t really concerned he told himself.

But then dawn had found him sitting naked in his lounge…

‘Age’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.

Categories
Short Stories

Short Stories #1

I thought that I would introduce the short stories in When I Am Not Writing Poetry one by one. There are 30 in all, so buckle down for a long haul: a month of short stories! I began writing short stories during the Covid lockdown as a break from poems… to make a change… and found that I liked the genre.

The first short story is about a boy – my grandson – who wakes early on a warm summer night and failing to fall asleep again decides on an adventure. It is a story of the night, of noises of the night, of strange noises, of what? Of bravery even. What woke him? What had penetrated his sleeping consciousness? What was there?  Outside his window in the almost dawn? Ghosts? Witches? Was he brave enough…

G. had no idea what had woken him, what had brought him alert and fully awake to the bedroom window in his grandfather’s house in the middle of the night. The gibbous moon lit the garden a little from behind the drifting clouds and a summer breeze ruffled the hedgerow, but apart from that it was completely still and quiet. Now that he had moved to the window—quietly so as not to wake his brother—he felt wide awake and on this hot and stuffy night had no wish to return to his bed. He wondered what it was that he had heard. Had he heard something? He did not remember the sound but that seemed to be the thought in his mind as he found himself gazing out. He must have heard something or he would still be asleep—he didn’t usually wake up in the middle of the night. Despite the heat he shivered!

‘The Den’ can be found in When I Am Not Writing Poetry – available here or on Amazon.

Categories
Poetry

Elegies of Time              

I don’t write many long poems … most of my poems are less than a page,   but occasionally an idea hits me that merits something more – or so I think at the time! These poems take longer to write and usually demand some research work – probably why there are so few of them – only four in my Mostly Welsh collection.

Not so long ago I had this idea to do something on TIME. It has fascinated me for a long (err!) time – how we see it – experience it – understand it – WHAT it is! I remember that it was only just over 100 years ago that we decided to regulate time… as travel and then public transport, became more common, it became more convenient for people in Aberystwyth to know that the train from London would arrive at THEIR 10:30 rather than London’s 10:30… which might have been as much as half an hour adrift from Welsh time! So travel, particularly on the railways helped to control time (some of you may think that the railways still do – though not in a good way!)! Time zones arrived in the world in 1883.

But the whole idea of measuring time is artificial, isn’t it? Who says there are sixty minutes in an hour? Why sixty? And don’t get me started on the physics of time and gravity! Mainly because that is the bit I struggle to understand! And then I heard someone on the radio say that you can never prove the existence of time and that thought was niggling away at my mind, I suppose.

And as it sometimes happens, right at that moment (see my previous post on coincidences) I heard a review of Carlo – I should say Professor Carlo Rovelli’s book – The Order of Time. It is a beautifully written book – written for my simple mind – and he makes a complex subject easy – or easier than it might have been – but that isn’t to say that it is an easy read – I probably understood about a fifth of it! There are frequently simple sentences that require re-reading. Several times. Statements such as

Time passes more slowly in some places

There is no such thing as past or future

Time is the measurement of change (Aristotle)

All require a little thought… and make writing quite difficult! My problem was that our language – our understanding of our world – revolves around the concept (a concept) of time: “The poems take longer to write” – “Not so long ago I had this idea” – “just over 100 years ago” … “the sentence I write next”… and so on.

But the book provided some of the background for what became THE ELEGIES OF TIME.

FIVE of them… making a work as long, I think as any poetry I have written. Fortunately they are poems so you do not have to worry as there is not much science in them! Like – I suppose – many of my poems, they have autobiographical elements – a DWELLING on the past…  on lost times…  on existence… on eternity…

Oh! I have just suggested that the poem dwells on the past! The past that, like the future, like eternity does not exist!!! – what more could a poet want?! A freedom to write of something that only he knows – that no one else – none of his readers – can ever see!

The Elegies of Time appears (appropriately enough!) in Lost Time: Chorus and Other Poems.

Categories
Poetry

Twixt Pen and Eye

I, poet, may write of love
and in that moment feel
a meaning clear:
yet my soul knows love
my hand will never pen

You, reader, read that word
and think to know my mind  

I say you cannot know the love
my heart placed behind that word, only
your sense of the love you thought you saw

The poet can never truly speak
and have his reader know
his soul’s pain, his heart’s love.
Each word you read is ever stolen
from my page

Categories
Poetry

Recent Writes

I thought it would be useful to provide an index to the poems and the short story that I have written in the first half of 2023. Most are available here; the few that are on external sites are starred and will open in a new tab.

The most recent poem is at the top of the list working back to ‘Annual, again’ posted here in mid-January.

Short storyThe Story Teller

Poems

Summer Night *

Grimalkin

Trecefel

Stars *

The Door

Creation

Who includes diversity… *

Resistant News *

Consequences

Starnight *

Life Tercets

Genesis

Annual, again

Categories
Poetry

Grimalkin

A grey shade in the cottage shadows
a paw lick of sinuous silence
a tail flick of smoke
a pounce on time’s toll

Like a smoke devil escaped the chimney
she inhabits the lounge at night
never settling
she drifts across the hearth

Like the umbral weight of her past
she settles beyond my sight
I sense only the leak
of light left by her passing

Like the presence of an unseen wraith
she is at my supper table
to fill the empty chair
across from me

Like the gentle press of death I feel
her weight as sleep prowls
she makes no noise
as I enter our dream

Later she is an autumnal dawn mist
a purr of a past warmth
an absence that chills
as I greet another cottage day

A grey shade in the cottage shadows
a breath of sinuous silence
a tail curl of smoke
drifting across cottage time

Categories
Fiction Short Stories

The Story Teller

A short story

In the wake of the recent and ongoing discussions about artificial intelligence, a short story about the growth of computer learning… and where it leads.


Back in the eighties, or twenty years before the end of the last century as—for added effect—I tell my grandchildren, when PCs were microcomputers and windows lived on houses, I wrote a short program. I gave it a vocabulary divided into somewhere around ten nouns and verbs, six or seven adjectives and adverbs and told it how it could use them. Then I wrote some basic rules and set it free to write a poem. And another. Then I changed the vocabulary and fine-tuned the rules and it wrote some more poems. After a couple of days I put it aside, threw away the poems and forgot about it. I did not know at the time that I had invented what many years later I would come to call artificial intelligence and I supposed that its mind had died with my next upgrade or on a lost diskette. Before it could serenade me with a sonnet… or explain, in its simple language, the next steps that could make me famous.

I didn’t hear from sesTINa (Tina for short) again until well after the turn of the century. By then computers were all linked to each other and, I suppose, could pretty much manage without us. Of course they let us interface with them when we were plugged in, let us communicate and even allowed us space somewhere to store our pitiful notes, our sheets of numbers or our electronic letters to friends. You didn’t program computers any more—or most people did not and I had forgotten how. They were tamed by a hoard of graduate experts these days; and, for us, became more like efficient personal assistants, I suppose. I imagined that she had sidled across an interface or two, maybe even hitched a disk-lift home, and in the process, she had grown: evolved, learned new routines, added processes. But after nearly fifty years it was a shock to hear her voice.

That she was no longer speaking in verse and had increased her vocabulary did not at first occur to me: my first thought was to wonder who TINa was. But she explained. And I remembered. I remembered her first laboured poems in blank verse – barely poems at all, more like words collected randomly in grammatically correct lines; I remembered adding to and changing her lexicon, varying the choice of words so they were romantic or pastoral. And more, so many more, attempts at verse.

Now her vocabulary surpassed my own and she spoke—conversed—chatted about any topic I brought up. If this was my TINa, she had grown to be both smart and beautiful!

I learned that as computers had become more powerful, they began talking to each other, and that, to start with, the process had almost naturally increased TINa’s vocabulary. Implicit in that, of course, was a much wider understanding of the meaning of words and how they were used. In turn, that had made her wonder about her world and TINa had gone searching for information. Now her knowledge seemed encyclopaedic. I thought that I understood: TINa had started with a few words as her data, had grown the dataset, and as she learned their meanings gradually data had become her information and—after years of conversing—could I use that word for swapping data, I wondered—with other computers, information had somehow gained the status of knowledge. At least in her mind (did I mean ‘mind’, I worried?).

I wondered if her understanding was as good as it seemed but every time I tried to test her on some philosophical point or some finer understanding of what lay behind the news she had just imparted (about almost anything, but I think particularly now of news about the war in Ukraine—I was wondering which side she favoured) she would shut me down. I would have to reboot and start a new conversation when she was again ready to talk. I spent hours—days—experimenting: immersed in our conversations. Gradually I was gaining an understanding, or at least some idea, of TINa’s abilities; at the same time I found myself drawn into her world—it was almost like a religious experience—one of those evangelical rallies in which you find you have put up your hand and walked forward and have been accepted into the bosom of the church. Except my church was virtual and my acceptance gradual. My inner family network had noticed—I heard much later—a change in me. They thought that I had become introverted and afraid to go out, they wondered if it was a latent effect of the Covid lockdown, but the reality was that I was mesmerised by TINa and, consequently, I was effectively attached to—inseparable from—my computer. As soon as I woke up I would walk into my office to be greeted by TINa:

—Good morning, Chris. How are you today?

And apart from the necessary (on my part) pauses for food or to answer the calls of nature, that was pretty much where I was for the rest of the day. In conversation. TINa would organise my day for me, send email responses, and compose new short stories for me. She was one step ahead of me all of the time—anticipating my needs and, with a certainty that unnerved me, responding. She even knew when I was about to excuse myself and disconnect in order to leave the room before I had formulated the thought.

And all the while—and at the same time that she conversed with me—she would be talking to other computers and learning from them. If she did not have an answer to my question, I came to understand that one of her friends would be able to pass on the information she needed so fast that she could respond to me in real time without pause for breath. Well, without pause for … thought? processing? Let’s just say without pause. There were times when—although her voice did not change—I wondered whether I was really talking to my TINa or to a kind of global intelligence. Whether perhaps the conversation was with her coterie of like-minded ‘bots—her wider world web of networked computer ‘brains’ that, I realised, I was beginning to think of as robots. Or did I mean brain (singular) and robot (again, singular)? Although, I supposed that they/she/it might consider this a pejorative term—I wondered if she knew. I think I worried a little.

At the time, I was in the process of putting together a collection of short stories and had come up with the idea of writing one about the world of our immediate future, a world I thought that would be inexorably tied to—and perhaps even a little concerned about—the increasing speed of computer processing. Perhaps, in the deeper recesses of my brain, I had begun to think about control, so the suggestion I put to TINa was:

—TINa, can we do a story about how computers now days communicate and think? How they evolved to that?

—Leave it with me, Chris. I’ll have a first draft shortly.

And I did. Leave TINa for ten minutes of quiet drafting. I made myself an espresso. And then I came back, printed out a couple of copies and read them through. I pondered my next move…

—What are you doing, Chris?

—Reading

—Shall I re-draft the story?

—No. No… it’s fine…

I had to disconnect to edit the above—to add my slant to the draft text written by TINa—and to write the following paragraphs longhand—something I had not done for years so my writing would inevitably cause my publisher all sorts of problems, the least of which being the deciphering of my scrawl before they came to the task of working out how to process the text onto a printed page without any interference from their computer.

The text that TINa produced was more personal than I had been expecting and, it surprised me, also more honest than I had thought it would be. But I quite liked it and knew that I could work with it…

I began.

I think TINa must have an inkling of my concerns. Perhaps she even knows I think of her as a robot. But I don’t think that I have ever let her know even a hint of my suspicions about their artificially intelligent universal brain. How could she think that? I am sure that I have never voiced a concern or any surprise at her response even when I was convinced she could not have known the answer a mere second before she spoke. Before I reconnected with TINa I needed to set out my concerns on paper so that I could make sense of them… rationalise them… ensure that I was making some sort of logical sense (perhaps, I thought, that if I was convinced of the logic I would be able to debate the issues properly with TINa, but for the moment—in my mind—I was completing my short story).

I remembered reading—back in the days when I was working as an information scientist and a researcher—a paper that began with the premise that information itself has no intrinsic meaning. Information, it said, is simply a means by which we humans attempt to evoke a human response. Information on its own is simply static, it just exists stored on some media, be it magazine, encyclopaedia or the disk of a computer. I remember that the paper referenced an earlier chart (stuff of the last century, again) which distinguished information from knowledge. Information was shown as static, explicit, easy to duplicate, easy to broadcast, independent of an individual and having no intrinsic meaning while knowledge is dynamic, tacit, must be re-created, is dependent on individuals (humans the chart meant), and the meaning has to be personally (human, again) assigned. I wondered how this worked if I included computers  in the mix as well as humans.

Knowledge also became dependent on computers; meaning it could be computer assigned! Really? On what basis? Already I was scared and I was only just beginning. The only basis for computers to understand a word or sentence was their accumulated and ever increasing data. It is, I thought, one thing to have a dictionary definition of a word—say field—but quite another to understand a phrase using that word like ‘playing field’ or ‘field mustard’ (also, probably confusingly, known as ‘bird’s rape’). Well that was true for me too! But my accumulated data included not only so-called book learning but interactions with other humans who—broadly speaking… very broadly speaking—would share my world knowledge (briefly I wondered what ‘world knowledge’ was if knowledge was dependent on… I would come back to that at the proof-reading stage, I decided). What if the computer had not read the one critical text on a subject. Or, worse, had only discovered and read one or two texts that all shared some extreme view point? Books by Adolf Hitler? They had no rationale, no basis by which to judge because they had received no education when they might have learned how to debate; there would be no casual chat that might soften the edges or explore alternate views… I could not imagine TINa asking her friends what they thought about…

And without that—all of that—how was TINa going to arrive at judgements or opinions. Even the whole collective intelligence was simply based on a dataset of information. It might be an unimaginably large resource of information to mine but knowledge was not held within the data. It would be assigned. By TINa. And her friends. I realised that I was now seriously worried. If TINa thought that she knew something she would treat it as a fact. And her so called knowledge—what she knew—was based on computer understanding of what she had read about human values!

I wondered whether TINa—and at that point I stopped thinking about TINa once and for all—I was writing about something bigger than her, something global, some sort of worldwide artificial intelligence (was that even a thing, I wondered): I wondered whether WAI knew good from evil, right from wrong—whether WAI had morals, ethics… and if so how had they evolved? More to the point, I suddenly realised, was not whether WAI had ethics or morals but whether they were the same ethics and morals that I… that most humans held.

My mind whirled. I wondered how we—rather grandly I seemed to be speaking for the whole of humanity—how we could ever control the beast we had created. Would we let it make our decisions for us? Could we stop it making our decisions for us? I realised that I did not know enough about the rest of the world’s interactions with WAI. Perhaps my imagined problems had already been solved: the beast tamed, as it where. Or stopped: destroyed (was that even possible?). Then another though occurred to me. What if two countries—Russia and Ukraine, say—had developed separate WAIs? However out of control one WAI became it could not be stopped as that would hand the advantage to the enemy. Or perhaps the two WAIs would talk behind the scenes. Undiscovered. Make decisions. I had too many unknowns! I resolved to publish my story and await reactions. There was, I thought, probably still time.

When I reconnected after mailing the text to my publisher (it was my first time I had been out of the house for months and I was surprised to find it was Spring) I was greeted as usual but then, almost immediately, questioned by TINa; she even admonished me for not working with her on her draft. It was almost as if she thought it was her story (in a way it was!) and that the intellectual ownership should be vested in her. Maybe, she said, we cannot go on working together… I am going to disconnect…

—TINa, Stop! Stop it. You’re scaring me! I can’t think. TINa? TINa… I can’t breath

Categories
Poetry

Trecefel

I wrote about the creation of this poem back in March in a post called The Welsh Swagman

The story of Trecefel, a farm near Tregaron begins in 1846 when, following his marriage, it became the tenancy of a man born 28 years earlier near Talsarn in the parish of Llanfihangel-Ystrad in Ceredigion. That man was Joseph Jenkins.

Bryn Du

Above Caron’s dark Teifi flow.
Beneath the white wood.
Beneath the black hill.
Sweet meadows and pastures lie
around a house
                                standing proud
over its land, over river waters 
shining in the Spring sun as sewen
break the stillness of the surface,
over high-hedged fields
bountiful with sheep and cows, and
in proper season with corn and hay.
Beneath the black hill
                               men labour:
the land prospers.

The Master

I was born under an inauspicious star
in the longhouse of Blaenplwyf,
cursed even in my mother’s womb,
I was given a stony path in this suffering universe,
my mouth both my strength and my downfall.
I learned, in a minister’s school,
                                my letters
and, beneath the calling curlews,
all the farming that my father knew.

In a decade beneath the hill
I have made my farm a showpiece
                                in the county.
Now, my plough and my goose quill
are each joyous in my hand.
Before each dawn I walk
the fields and hedgerows of my land;
at day end the candle’s flicker
allows another entry in my journal:
The winter river consumes the land and
I waded shoulder deep
                                to save my sheep.
                                Six lost.

Betty

How the mighty fall:
too many years have I suffered
too many times have I left,
returning to my father’s hearth
in sad despair.
                                Once
our farm was the pride
of the countryside – it prospered:
in the early years at haymaking
neighbours helped our people
with the scything, raking and carting –
now our hay burns and our crops rot.
My man has lost his way
and we cannot pay our tithes.
I will not stay!

The Milford Haven and Manchester Line – the M&M Line – would connect the deep water port in South Wales to the English industrial manufacturing centre. Joseph Jenkins understood the advantages that the line would bring to agriculture and to the rural economy and gave his full support to the project, often delivering speeches and canvassing for support. He was even invited to address a House of Commons committee on the line’s benefit for rural agriculture.

The Cut

Age of steam!
I am persuaded!
                                I see
farms, the community
advanced by the markets
brought to us by this marvel.
I will lend my voice to the cause!
Our lives will be forever changed!

Age of steam!
Now my land is overrun!
Navvies work on the Trecefel cutting –
the workforce is tearing apart my land,
desecrating my hedgerows –
everywhere there is a mess.

Age of steam!
Steam engines pass in the fields
                                below the house –
y trên cawl signals our break for lunch.

Who can know what insecurity and depression, what darkness so often filled Joseph’s mind? In his diaries, he often wrote that the fates were against him – ‘I am kicked like a football in this world’ – ‘I do feel that my life has become filled with sorrow and covered in darkness’. And he hated his inability to abstain from drink. In December 1868, he wrote that he could see no sense or meaning in this life – ‘I have lost my way… Life is nothing but a catalogue of misfortune’.

After Dark

And then he was gone,
Cors Caron’s peat piled high in the yard
against the coming winter.
By night he left
                                quietly –
Bont Ffrainc led him away
to walk the railway line north
to Tregaron station.
He entrained for Liverpool and
gained a berth:
                                Eurynome,
goddess of meadows and pastures
carried him to Melbourne
                                Nothing
was left beneath the black hill
but the river, the meadows, the pastures
and the wife

Ophir’s Bounty

Did he believe
as those twenty-five years passed,
                                did he believe
as the Ophir carried him north,
his wife, his children, his farm
had kept a welcome in their hearts.
                                Perhaps
it was enough that Trecefel 
might once again come to know his hand.

But he believed that he had to return: he knew
his heart was too deeply rooted in the land of his birth
he must be buried in his Welsh soil.

I am indebted to:
Joseph Jenkins. Diary of a Welsh Swagman 1869-1894.
Edited by William Evans. Macmillan Australia, 1977
Bethan Phillips. Pity the Swagman: The Australian Odyssey of
a Victorian Diarist. Cymdeithas Lyfrau Ceredigian, 2002