One Hundred Sonnets

By Arthur Bull

This collection, Arthur Bull sixth poetry book, isa series of mediations on topics that range from from history to art, justice to love philosophy to laughter, grief to memory, each one a tiny essaie. The chapters titles are: philosophy, history, laughter, art, nature, grief, memory.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arthur Bull
• Release date: Aug 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781777809119

Book preview

philosophy

We think we know what we need to know, but what

we need to know is always a lot more interesting

than what we think, and what we’re never knowing

about ourselves is more than enough to fill the lot.

So, what we need to be thinking really ought

to be not about how we need to know if this thing

or that is what we need, but that it brings

us back to our needing to think about what brought

this need to think about our needs at all,

especially the need to know about ourselves

which seems such a natural need at first,

until we know the way it makes us fall

backwards and down the never ending hall

of mirrors reflecting needs. Then it gets worse.

That what we said we did and what we thought

we did and what we did were never completely

the same is something on which we may agree

or disagree, but the fact remains it’s not

that what we say we do in some ways ought

to reflect at least what we’d like to think to be

the better way of doing it to some degree

or of thinking how to best align the three

without ever stumbling or getting caught

in some dilemma, while minding the gap

between our idea of what we did and what

we tell the world we did that’s quite apart

from what we actually did. It never stops

this mismatch of wishes, acts and words but

you have to wonder: where did this trouble start?

We wanted some kind of symmetry to shape

everything that happened and what we’d seen,

some balance to the plot, five acts, each scene

formed to follow some underlying map,

fit to the next, unbroken by a gap,

an ordered version of what we thought we’d been,

uninterrupted as in a waking dream,

re-written in our memories to escape

the pain of life, and lift the heavy yoke.

But do we really have to say it’s fine?

What is this need to always make it neat?

Do overflowing ornaments of Baroque

require the laws of clear and classic line?

Accept this world, imperfect and incomplete.

We didn’t know there were different ways to know

since knowing does not have a way to take

another way of knowing in order to make

it make sense as another way to go

into the knowing the way that it might show

itself like raindrops on the surface of a lake,

the intersecting circles the ripples make

interlacing patterns, perfect and with no

permanence, each different and each the same

in how they share the coming and the going.

Although we know that we will likely never

completely know or understand, or claim,

to know another’s different way of knowing,

being alive means getting to know the other.

The Master told us that there is no such thing

as a private language, so that must be true,

I guess, for private superstitions too.

In light of this I think it’s worth noting

that people do have them, and embarrassing

to admit that I myself have quite a few

of these small auguries and tiny miscues:

a favourite pen mysteriously gone missing,

a book upside down on the shelf, a disk

in the wrong sleeve, a crumpled paper ball

wide of the basket. And these