Poets' Corner

Number Fourteen : 20^th October 2013

Bathtub Thoughts

Rare reader , a communication channel exists between the two of us. That's nothing new in this electronic age but the odd thing about our mutual situation is that we are exercising processes inherited over the last fifty thousand years or so. I thought as I wrote , you as you read and although we are otherwise unacquainted , we are sharing some common grounds of language and interest. Otherwise you wouldn't have got to the end of this sentence. We also make up a stranger pairing : you are the sole member of the class of your own self , just as I am the solitary inhabitant of the island of my self. Like the Big Bang and black holes , we are each in our own way what scientists call singularities , briefly bumping into one another like a pair of elementary particles in the Large Hadron Collider. Perhaps your name is Higgs ?

In the 1950s , W.H. Auden wrote the poem he titled Bathtub Thoughts (c.500 – c.1950) , in which he imagines an equally unlikely dialogue across that timespan :

Hail , future friend , whose present I
With gratitude now prophesy ,
Kind first to whom it shall occur
My past existence to infer.
Brief salutation best beseems
Two nameless ordinal extremes :
Hail and farewell ! Chance only knows
The length of our respective rows ,
But our numeric bond is such
As gods nor love nor death can touch.

So thought , I thought , the last Romano-Briton
To take his last hot bath.

We voyage across the millenia ourselves when we peruse Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Dead Sea Scrolls. We may then ponder whether some sort of encounter may not reach across the unimaginably vast reaches of cosmic space. Lets get an idea of the numbers involved. Astronomers have speculated (using probability theory) that any extra-terrestrials watching us are unlikely to be able to see any light that left Earth later than two hundred or so years ago , after our old friend Samuel Johnson was writing by candle light. This minimum distance between their world and ours implies that even travelling at the speed of light , it would take 200 years to make the physical journey between us and them. What could be the purpose of such a journey ? Film-makers have depicted flying saucers doing little more than frightening some hapless chaps in a pick-up truck on a lonely desert road in Arizona or abducting a few scattered earthlings for closer investigation. We may picture some alien version of the great lexicographer gripping the lapels of his high-collared cloak as he addresses the Galactic Federation thus :

Let observation with extensive view
Survey mankind from China to Peru.
How nations sink , by darling schemes oppressed
When Vengeance listens to the fool's request …..

Archive

Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13^th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10^th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12^th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14^th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25^th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19^th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20^th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21^st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20^th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19^th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21^st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts , 20^th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20^th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20^th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20^th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia & Emily, 20^th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of Icarus, 16^th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone Before, 20^th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard Kipling, 20^th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell, 20^th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest Proposal, 20^th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray and The Eighteenth Century, 20^th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan Poe, 18^th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly, 19^th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be Saved, 24^th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants, 20^th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel Johnson, 15^th February 2016
Poets' Corner #28 – T.S.Eliot, 10^th March 2016
Poets' Corner #29 – Alfred Lord Tennyson, 18^th April 2016
Poets' Corner #30 – Leonard Cohen, 12^th November 2016