I open the door to the world and a wan sky, then instantly everything changes. Sunlight bursts onto the massive sculptures furling leaves – synchronicity or magical powers?
I take a couple of photographs of the light, so seductive, then everything changes again. Big black cockatoos unhook from the branches and manoeuvre through the wash of air, now full of noise.
One meaning of the I ching, and not the Book of Changes, nor a term of a Chinese pilgrim, is a harrowing state of doubt. An antonym to the phrase that has washed down to us from Keats, ‘Negative Capability’. He wanted to be a man ‘capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.’[i] Keats never quite became that man, failing to live ‘a life of Sensations, rather than thoughts.’ [ii]
A poet these days must have doubts, now that poetry has been a sidelined art for so long, now that the world is becoming wrecked, and so unfair, Now that words are foaming.
[i] Keats, Letter to his brothers, December, 1817.
[ii] Keats, ‘Oh for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!’ Letter to Benjamin Bailey. November, 1817.
