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Previous poem - In Praise of Francis Crick
BEATING TIME
Putting down a thought I think
'this beats time'. Oh I don't mean
Exegi monumentum aere perennius - that my
particular formulation of this thought
will last - oh no - rather
it is the thought itself that goes
beyond the moment, that could have been thought
a thousand years ago, that will be thought
a thousand years hence - any old thought,
doesn't matter if it's true,
it couldn't exist without a mind and yet
it exists independent
of any particular mind,
not a Platonic idea or transcendental, just
a banal and everyday
triumph over entropy,
for the thought that recurs naturally
in time, independent of any particular
mechanism (any particular brain)
argues the existence of a vibratory reality not yet
seized by any of our instruments
(other of course than the brain) but nonetheless
seen in a moment of genius, ie revealed
to Richard Dawkins in his
notion of the 'meme' - familiar of course already
to theologians down the ages
who have long known that
we on earth are the battlefield of a
war in Heaven - and that the sum
total of the thoughts that occur to us
individually, here and now,
form a pattern that will last
longer than brass.