You can’t see it or hear or read it by staring at the page, but a tick or a click runs all the way through the poem, the song, and the images—a rhythm of life? of death? of song? of a mechanism? The cog of the clock ticks every second, in the silence of the night the death-watch beetle clicks loudly to its mate in rotting wood, and a street homeless man around the worktable clicks dextrously the rhythm that sets the song in motion and then after the song ceases, stretches it further into silence. Around the workshop table, rhythms of song are felt deeply (with eyes raised or lowered) by participants and produced by them; rhythm becomes a trance in dream-space, sacred space. Two major images imported to the page — a medieval plague doctor and an equally archaic death-watch beetle — look down upon and support from below the text of the poem inscribed as plain black print contrasting with the title’s calligraphic gold. The same dull greenish gold finds its way to outlines of leafy design up the right margin and in the legs and claws of the beetle. The gold hints of the sun, the cog of a sunbeam. At the same time, the images beam death and decay across the text: the ineffectual medical treatments of plague doctors and the beetles’ softening of the support structures of old buildings. The clock inked by Lawrence on the beetle’s back links mechanical ticking to death, death’s proximity. As another voice in a line somewhere in the Calendar has it: “Death rushes into the church.” The poem is written in three groups of triplets, beginning with the three-word lines—“Friends of darkness / Gather round me”—leading to an eight-word line that announces the poem’s experiential centre, sad and incontrovertible: “I am a prisoner of my own Mind.” Such a bleak statement channels one of the oldest tropes in poetry: “I cannot speak; I will speak,” the crisis of the poet’s “broken tongue” (Sappho) appears here as the speaker’s mental imprisonment. Other participants have written: “I’m sorry I have nothing to say,” “I tried to write but / my mind doesn’t work / any more,” “I’ve lost my frame of mind.” (These lines begin another song, Sleep Til The Spring.) Lawrence’s mind was in a bad way when he spoke the first three lines to Phil, speaking and not remembering what he said; Phil wrote them down and lineated them into a triplet. And now the poem, as form and social speech, takes off. Friends become demons, “gather round me” repeats and deepens, sounds gather, particularly the ‘m’s and ‘I’s and ‘d’s of the second triplet. By the time the poem reaches its first major metaphor, prisoner of the mind, acute characterization and interpretation of self, released in poetic rhythm and sound, the prisoner demanded of the speaker is no longer a prisoner. Matt, the composer, arranger, and singer, linked this line musically to the next, erasing the triplet break:
I am a prisoner of my own Mind
I live in my own strange Ways
In this poem “Strangeways” is a heavily loaded word and point of reference. Within site of the Booth Centre, Strangeways is a prison, infamous for its many executions since opening in 1868 and for its high suicide rate. As recently as 2017 an Independent Board called it “squalid, vermin infested.” Booth Centre attendees have spent time there. The name “Strangeways on this site goes back to 1322 when “strangwas,” derived from Anglo-Saxon “Strang” plus “gaewaesc” (a place by a stream with a strong current”): its roots are in the archaic. Yet Strangeways the prison was designed by a mid-nineteenth-century architect Alfred Waterhouse best known for his designs for the Manchester Town Hall with its clock tower and clock bell and clock face bearing the inscription, “Teach us to number our Days (Psalm 90:12). Strangeways has made its way into popular culture; Lawrence himself particularly likes the 1980s rock band The Smiths' album Strangeways, Here We Come.
Not so far behind the name Strangeways lies trauma, mental and physical, personal and collective, broadcast in society and in culture. Songs also recast it as does Lawrence as a pathway off the familiar and predictable, the reassuring: “I live in my own strange ways”: at once frighteningly without boundaries and guidelines but also on “my own” (a repeated phrase) track, the tenuously free space “owned” but not controlled by neoliberal demands. For a poem grounded in the vertigo of mental derangement, “The Gold Cog of the Clock” reaches beyond that enormous stricture. And that gold cog?—it’s a tiny object, one with no individuality, unnoticeable, invisible, a mere function, and yet . . . it thinks! It can forget! And it forgets someone even less visible than it, the speaker of the poem. Perversely, the clock tower dominates Manchester, a symbol of the city’s organization, wealth, and the visibility of its enfranchised citizens. But forgetting stands behind the massive act that is A Book of Ours: resistance against the forgottenness of the homeless. Poetic sounds beat out the rhythm in ‘o’s: own, forgot, gold, cog, clock. The metaphor of the gold cog of the clock, that has the power to forget, is a tremendous act of projective imagination. This poem seeks to fulfil an ancient function of poetry, to work “against our vanishing” (Allen Grossman).
HEAR: songs, recitations and chants
From Book of Changes Chapter, by Lawrence & various. A BOOK OF OURS.
Photograph Lois Blackburn
A BOOK OF OURS was exhibited at Bury Art Museum May-July 2021, then Manchester Cathedral Oct 2021-March 2022, after which it went permanently into the collection at John Rylands Library, where it can now be viewed. It is the final project by arthur+martha CIC.
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