Evolutionary genetics
The following poems / prose emerged from a creative writing workshop on computational neuroscience. Part of the stemistryPLUS programme of workshops.
Computation
Take a pinch of the unreal and sprinkle it deftly.
Everything you know becomes taller, out of reach,
looms large over alleyways you thought you knew.
Even the roads should become a mystery – how far
can you get before seeing a thing you did not expect?
What about that speck of emerald in the grit at your feet,
underfoot, underfoot – stop. There is beauty in this,
like a Monet painting of snow made from tutti-frutti icecream.
There is reason for considered approach. It might drive you mad
and you’d be right to go there:
computation of everything slows even the best of us down.
But I am wrong to assume. What if
this is all you’ve been longing, like a cat-stretch
through complexities after days in the car?
There is nothing I can say that leads to answers, only:
take a look, take a look – then look again
with the heat of the sun on your back
with the cold of the shade on your toes.
The wheel of fortune
spins on Saturday night. A lady
wearing gold and a uniform of tan
stands (or is it time slowing down).
Cut to contestant praying hands to chin
and man-dog the nodding presenter.
Lying by four bar fire (two bars on)
jeans burn the back of my knees
and nana’s there in her recliner,
the paper beside her turned bingo,
the school blue dictionary on top of it.
She looks at me too and swings
me a laugh as the applause gets louder
and the clicking of the wheel –
I can’t remember whether this was before
or after the oxygen apparatus.
Family tree
He’s chopping wood in the farmyard –
wanting heads to roll, well one, at least.
This can’t have happened,
not to her. But she won’t name the rat.
So he makes do with logs, splitting them
as he’d like to split the culprit’s skull.
His grandfather’s clock ticks loudly in the kitchen.
She’s wearing royal blue, a loose gown,
with lace cuffs; she’s smaller than I thought.
They want to cast their sister into holy limbo,
these elder daughters, righteous matrons,
standing, straight, behind the scrubbed table,
folded arms across their starched aprons.
Only Sarah, her aunt by marriage, pleads her cause,
Let Christian Charity hold sway.
Let her raise the child within his family,
work as housekeeper for her widowed father.
A non-conformist shiver in the solar plexus,
the stench of thrilled, respectable anticipation
as they await the falling axe of his decision.
The sky turns black, the rain comes.
Sticky numbers
Binary protocols for analysis of superfamilies.
Observation of behavioural patterns.
Search sequences of site profiles.
Random and deliberate function features.
Analysis contours.
The house flies didn’t know how interesting they were.
The long curling brown ribbons
Of sticky paper hanging from the lamp bracket
Unfurled gently as the wrapper came off.
Not pretty, but innocently deadly,
Gathering clusters of blue-sheened insects.
The frantic waving of wings and legs
Slowly ceasing – bodies now inert.
Frenzied buzzing hushed.
Fly superfamilies – sticky numbers of data
Glued onto brown paper licensed to kill.
But what attracted them?
Perhaps they weren’t attracted at all,
Just victims of wonky behavioural patterns.
Two plus two ain't four
This equation’s easy
1 equals you
1 equals me
1 plus 1 makes 2, but really
1 plus 1 is simply 1
With nothing new added
To make a 2-sum
Needs somewhere to get new bits from
Perhaps try
1 of you
And 3 of fly
And that’ll bring number 2 to life
On the impossibility of producing a Venn diagram of human emotion
Sounds easy, yeah –
just list emotions, his, then hers,
then circle where they coalesce.
They’ve been together years, so many years,
family and friends refer to them as one,
and she signs ‘MAD’ in texts
when contacting the kids (grown up, of course).
But think how many lives are run in parallel,
shouting across the tracks –
so what, we know that opposites attract
and now and then, when some controller moves the points,
their chassis almost touch and kiss,
then part again;
they’re not apart, just not together, quite.
It’s all straight lines and Venn requires
some curves, some give, some meeting
of the mind, the heart, the soul.
Maybe our couple have that in the ether,
in the feel of things,
something that can’t be listed, quantified,
corralled.
Mr Bayers is in-knots thanks To Windows 7 nervous breakdown
The Venn diagram of mortal excitement
Is wonk wooked.
Our interactive unveiling pout-smirked,
An unputdownable gurn.
A glade in the plantation floating psychotically
Twinkled – another hook up
Between sexual chemistry and cars;
His nipper summons ‘nasty computer oats’.
When conk outs escapade in mathematical modelling
There’s like-a-shot throughput,
Unsequencing knuckling insights
But chaos resents a theory.
The universe and me
They can give us the facts
The truth, with mathematical proof
And bring sequence and order
To theories and musings.
Do you think they can say
Where I’m going?
And what I will find when I get there?
Will it be, as was promised to me?
Or will the essence of me, simply cease to be?
What will it be?
Can they prove it to me?
Neuron, Nicolas P. Rougier