luka

Well-known member
some more rough notes...

lights burn brim to surge or wave a crass suiting foreshore
[...]
in socket trim, hot white partition cryolite

brim / trim

from Chaucer: brimme n. "shore, bank (of a river),"

brim, originally: The border, margin, edge, or brink: Of the sea, or any piece of water: Coast, shore, bank, brink

trim - To fit out (a ship, etc.) for sea

surge / wave - both sea / water related


if alembic refers to alchemy then so far I can identify fire, air, and water elements ( maybe cryolite is the earth element? or the "foreshore" which would be earth / land? )
And so the leitmotiv of revolution is played off against its analytical counterpart, the idea of a change of state, political, geographical and, finally, chemical. Alchemy may function as a model simultaneously of radical change but also social upheaval, placing the ‘Patience’ of the ‘Great Work’ with its contrary, the revolutionary upsurge of the ‘Great Year’, in which attentisme is brought to term by a millennial suspension of the ethical order. (Observe how Of Sanguine Fire makes knowing use of that childish injunction, ‘wait for it’.) Alchemical theory contended that metals were anxious to improve their status but were forced into hierarchy, by way of a connected chain of correspondences, with gold as their Sun King. In Of Sanguine Fire, alchemy is contrasted with the more mundane task of bakery. “Soul is a good sodden word, of the old verbal dough” as Wyndham Lewis puts it in The Enemy of the Stars, though that deflationary comparison soon re-expands in the mind, by way of what astronomers used to call the ‘currant bun’ model of the universe (‘currant bun’ is rhyming slang for sun), in which each currant represents a galaxy and the surrounding dough is the intervening space between them, so that, when cooked, the dough expands and the currants move further apart from one another.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The new poems book arrived today, and I'm reading Of the Abyss - seems to be about immigration on small boats. Very harrowing vibes.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
MULBERRY

ripe to shake to fallen spread here go round
bush like tree way, foolhardy off
piste silken sleeve woven mull sheen
motile mulatto mercy be eristic fit
cold and frosty, trusty merry ultimate
branch age seize rich colourant fool
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
Here we go round the mulberry bush,
The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.
Here we go round the mulberry bush
On a cold and frosty morning.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
silken sleeve woven

Another possible interpretation of the rhyme is that it references Britain's struggles to produce silk, mulberry trees being a key habitat for the cultivation of silkworms. As Bill Bryson explains, Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tried to emulate the success of the Chinese in silk production but the industry was held back by periodic harsh winters and mulberry trees proved too sensitive to frost to thrive.[8] The traditional lyrics "Here we go round the mulberry bush / On a cold and frosty morning" may therefore be a joke about the problems faced by the industry.
 
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