Remembering the Future: Edwin Morgan's Science Fiction Poetry.

By addressing in its first and last lines the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz, whose Divan is one of the classics of that country, and maintaining a periodic dialogue with him, 'The New Divan', Edwin Morgan's ambitious and sometimes historical, sometimes pre-historical and futuristic 1970s poem sequence centring on his 1940s wartime service with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Middle East, extends a flexible time-frame to contrast wealth and poverty across age-old and continuing subjection of the many by the few:

   Thousands
   are in hunger, see no glory, and
   all are in desire so great and ancient
   nothing heaven brings round, nothing behind
   or present or to come can fill their house
   with what they feel they need, or quieten them.[1]

Repressive violence figured on antique stonework read as 'a grand inverse foreboding | of running feet under redder skies' (CP,p.302) connects with desert ruins seen in a snow-storm: a 'dangerous | place without hope | that anyone millenium-old in the sleet who | glistened there was glazed with | the peace of the grave or any human trust' (CP,p.305); and forward to images from living memory of 'people | [. . .] running down the world's roads among | columns of smoke, with no more belongings than | a back can take'. Charred bodies now compose a seemingly endless 'braille conducting | us silently from country to country | to country to country' (CP,p.316). Across its unfolding narration a shifting 'I' speaking sometimes in a remembering present, sometimes of a remembered past, sometimes in speculative temporalities, now mourns the death of a child, now recalls a son's behaviour, celebrates now a marriage, now homoerotic desire in a monastery. Dissolving conventions of character and narrative time, and so reading more like a postmodern fantasia on traditional form, 'The New Divan' tangentially preserves classic dimension and epic scope in a clearly marked beginning, middle, and end; in the sequence's extended memory and vision; its warfare, journeyings, feastings, arrivals, and departures; its ironized gestures to transcendent belief systems and its inclusions of future event as speculative (and sometimes radioactive) possibility: 'ships like peacocks | spread vanes near Mars, wear out, are souvenirs. | Their very scrap's too active yet by half' (CP,p.304).

In a 1995 lecture Morgan described Wolfgang Iser's inclusion of narrative indeterminacies as an enabling condition for the 'constitution of an imaginary object during the act of reading': Iser is not saying that the reader can fill in the blanks with anything he likes, in jumping from one section to another, but that the author should [. . .] be tempting the reader to sniff the air between the sections and relate this to the atmosphere of other sections or of the whole work.[2]

A 'ruffian sage' in poem 68 continuing his tale over a long night's drinking begun in poem 67 embeds and connects storytelling in self-reflexive ways: 'space arches, | I call them, the continuum's different, | thinner', and the sequence grew as it was written:

I spent almost the whole of the war in the Middle East and got to know something about their arts, and this word Divan is used by them in ways not common with us. From its meaning as couch or sofa, the same word is also used for a council chamber. And the other meaning is a collection of poems. It's the same word and comes from the same meaning in that the poems are all sitting talking together, as it were, in these collections. They can sit where they like on these sofas, these divans, but there's something going on between each of these poems, there's some kind of mysterious conversation going on between them.[3]

'I think my attitude,' he said on another occasion, 'is not one of theory [. . .] so much as one of practice.'[4] Theories assumed into the structural practices of 'The New Divan' and subsequent poem sequences connect Iser with textual elements that Salman Rushdie over a decade after the publication of Morgan's complete poem would be describing as constitutive of narrative itself in the new dispensations of post-modernity: 'hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs.'[5] Nearly twenty years on, Andrew Gibson is citing Paul Virilio on what was now being called the 'current crisis of "whole" dimensions [. . .] in which our traditional notions of surface, of limit and separation, have decayed, and given way to those of interface, commutation, intermittence and interruption'.[6] In 'The New Divan's pluralistic epistemology, for a world of impressions where 'nothing that was not past could ever be dull' (CP,p.303), where 'the way of | the thing was all prodigal' (CP,p.326) and where any 'pattern | a swirling moment gave went quickly' (CP,p.319), archaeological imagery and futuristic vision assemble meditations on time and change to persuade us among other things that 'many and great delusions is the history | of the desert' (CP,p.306). As the emotional infrastructure of an autobiography is elliptically plotted and partially pieced, a free-flowing structure incorporates war ('the night is Rommel's tree: | searchlights cut it, history the secretion' (CP,p.328)), guerrilla activity closer to the writing present (as in poem 77), and a range of remembered excitements: 'Wartime Cairo gave the flesh a buzz, | Pegged the young soul out full length' (CP,p.329). Reconstructing that soul in ways not religious in any accepted sense, Morgan agrees that the sequence stretches immediate contexts: 'Out in the desert at night you certainly are aware of the vast extent of stars which in our islands you can hardly ever see.'[7]

The vast extent of stars, often associated with time-travelling speakers, is a long-term fascination. In 1964 he wrote 'In Sobieski's Shield' to get inside the responses of a deep-space survivor of dematerialization and subsequent molecular reconstruction set in train on an earth at the entropic extreme of 'the day before solar withdrawal' (CP,p.196). Through a fluid uncertainty of deleted punctuation, the poem registers a speaker's anxiety at anatomical alteration in himself, in his son's single reconstituted nipple and in the mutation of his partner's 'strange and beautiful crown of bright red hair'. Specific detail gives 'In Sobieski's Shield' an uncanny verisimilitude, with human memory the inner space where trans-individual narrative continuities are inscribed. Associative alterity is differently configured when a 1965 poem takes off from Edgar Allen Poe to project alien space-visitors in a primitive human settlement where 'of course | they could see nothing, on their time-scale'. 'From the Domain of Arnheim' ends with an inter-galactic voyager reflecting that 'from time the souvenirs are deeds' (CP,p.199). For tape-recording time-travellers in 'Memories of Earth' it might read 'within time souvenirs are emotional responses to experiential witness'. An epigraph spoken by Oothoon, ideal of physical freedom and figure of thwarted love, after her rape by Bromion (incarnation of instrumental reason), while on her way to Theotormon (realm of love), relates 'Memories of Earth' to William Blake's speculative myth-figures in 'Visions of the Daughters of Albion'. Bromion is the transgressor who pursues knowledge 'spread in the infinite microscope, | In places yet unvisited by the voyager, and in worlds | Over other kinds of seas, and in atmospheres unknown',[8] from where 'Memories of Earth' in turn is spoken. Bromion and Oothoon are 'bound back to back' in mutual hostility and Oothoon thus becomes a figurative voice caught between desire (Theotormon) and legislative rationalism (Bromion); a network 'Memories of Earth' modernizes. Developing his precursor text's concern with ideological tyranny and physical slavery, Morgan's exercise of memory across space composes a futuristic meditation on the republic of desire and its discontents. It constitutes in the process a postmodern report on the fate of narrative strategies associated with European realism and the outward colonization of territorial space that its canonical avatars proposed. Fascinated like some of his contemporaries by the difficulty of bringing together 'the idea of a lengthy work and the idea of quickness or simultaneity' (NNGM,p.56), Morgan deploys a continuous blank verse medium to problematize the progressive expansion in time and consequent specific ordering implied by linear narration. If memory's normative synthesis of past and present as simultaneous contradicts the logic of linear progression through time, narrativization conventionally proposes both the linear construction of event synchronically and the reconstruction of historical sequence diachronically. To set a verbal stage for linkage and differentiation, the cosmically expansive journey Morgan's other-wordly time-trippers take is simultaneously miniaturizing, into a fist-sized stone on 'the north shore' of an inland sea (CP,p.331). Paradigmatic of entry into the symbolic order of language, 'Memories of Earth' dramatizes by internalizing a narratorial conflict between duty to rational sequence and emerging dissident sensibility. While suspension between simultaneity, linear narrativity, and reconstructive recall further complicates our time-travellers' encounters, their experience of sensation beyond approved discourse alienates them from a prescriptive home environment and reduces them, as Erlkon's closing monologue puts it, to presenting their report 'in a troubled confusion', because 'memories flashing between sentences | [. . .] make us falter' (CP,p.339). They came to earth to decode its messages, its system of signs; and textual signs are compounds of signifiers and signifieds. The poem prescribes Baudrillard's conviction that the methodology of the separation of the signifier and signified holds no better than the methodology of the separation of the mind and the body: 'the same imaginary in both cases. In one case, psychoanalysis came to say what this was, as, in the other, did poetics.'[9] Dematerialization in 'In Sobieski's Shield' is here replaced by micro-miniaturization in which, playing different variations on Poe's 'In the Domain of Arnheim', the landscape seems to explode: 'upwards, outwards, the waves rise up | and loom like waterfalls, and where we stand | our stone blots out the light above us' (CP,p.331). 'Have we moved at all?' wonders Erlkon, and then: 'I am not to speculate, only to explore | as commanded', which is the contradictory nub of his situation. As part of the text's problematic co-ordination of narrative progress, simultaneity and recall, the visitors' time-scale and earth's 'can never be in phase, | its images, its messages, its life | must come to us like an eternal present' (CP,p.333); and so they do. With the thought that Tromro, the team's systems analyst and code-breaker will have his work cut out, the first tape does the same. The second fragment opens with confusion, questioning, and a mobilizing acknowledgement that 'nothing | can quite put down susceptibility' ['capability of receiving, being affected by, or undergoing something', OED]. What is 'put down' in the first time-phase they witness is Gyorgy Dozsa, leader of an unsuccessful Hungarian peasant revolt in 1514 (remembered by our narrator as belonging to distant but politically resonant 'red days of action'), for which, as here described, Dozsa wearing a crown of fire was burned on a mock-throne. Not here supplied (but later, 'Tromro has taught us much' about the value of decoding messages), is the information that the Hungarian Council (Diet) of the day, imposing like Bromion 'one law for the lion and the ox', condemned the entire peasant class to 'real and perpetual servitude', bound it permanently to the soil, increased the number of days peasants had to work for their lords, imposed heavy taxes on them, and ordered them to pay damages for the rebellion. In a finely executed transition we next see Wordsworth, 'one gaunt man', separated from his companions on the summit of Snowdon; then American teenagers at a drive-in movie where a Tom and Jerry cartoon 'howls distorted sound at love-bites' in 'erotic jalopies'; then a Nazi death-camp presented in such telling yet apparently disengaged detail that one of the group, Baltaz, weeps 'as if she was a woman of the earth'. After Baltaz looks at a butterfly 'as if she would cup its frailty for ever | against the eerie furnaces', an effectively rendered sunset 'in shapes we'd never give a name to in | a hundred days of watching them dissolve' (this a speaker originating from a place where clouds don't move), gives way to a screen-image of what might be a scene of famine or of post-nuclear survivors: 'All in such a case | we can but take as last or next to last | in desperation, and the time unknown | past, future, or the myriad-to-one | unthinkable and terrible present.' At which a speaker who earlier insists 'we have no pain, we cannot suffer pain', now says 'what we feel must surely be pain'.

Setting an alien narrator from a planet where questions are forbidden and thought-control internalized -- 'even to think of those days is a reproach' (CP,p.334); a narrator ideologically programmed against the impact of alterity required to report from a human lifeworld of flux and difference on an earth 'labouring in memories', does more than satirize the sterilized managerial discourse of administrative control. The injunction to compile value-free reports solely from fragmentary and incomplete tapes or voice-prints places a narrator in a postmodern predicament here turned to constructive resistance by memory: 'Since we came back from earth, nothing's the same' (CP,p.330). Narrative here is voyage, where metaphors of clouds, flows, turbulences, help to destabilize the schematizing rationality of mastery it is the travellers' duty to replicate. The process of remembering their encounters with earth's 'other' cultures introduces different forms of knowing into the ordered space of their distant present. For these now returned and erstwhile obedient subjects the 'other' is internalized as memory itself which 'spatializes' time by seeing the past as an aspect of the present, and so disrupts the logic of their inherited proceduralism. Decoding is a form of analysis, and analysis a form of involved participation: rather than distance themselves from the object of their study, these visitors become active in it.[10] So must the reader. Deconstructing realism's assumed equation of epistemology and the representation of external facticity for experiencing subjects, 'Memories of Earth' adapts Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle where 'by our very meagrest interfering | we trigger fragments of the vanished prints | but have no key to make the sequence clear' (CP,p.333):

   It seems this is a world of change, where we,
   observing, can scarcely fix the observed
   and are unfixed ourselves.
   (CP,p.337)

As the narrative ruptures linear sequence but preserves a sense of ontological development, a prior lack in the visitors from space issues in a self-motivating expansion of sensibility and consequent desire to negate the frozen hierarchy of their world. Sympathetic identification with some of his earthly perceptions and impressions, most strikingly with early Polynesian voyagers out into the 'dangerous immensity' of the Pacific (CP,p.338), and against the passionless imperative, the 'plain figure of promised order', issued by his governing Council, leads Erlkon (together with his five companions) to recognize (in the poem's recursive structure he has already recognized) the value of change and uncertainty. Wordsworth on Snowdon is heard contemplating:

   The emblem of a mind that feeds upon
   Infinity, that broods over the dark abyss,
   Intent to hear its voices issuing forth
   To silent light in one continuous stream.
   (CP,p.335)[11]

This is not how their flickering impressions impact on Erlkon and his team, for whom the journey is more formatively an inner than an outer one. Memory of the exploitation and control they witness produces excluded feelings that evolve as an oppositional strategy. For characters thus intent to hear, the silent light of one continuous stream is too much like their home condition. 'Mine have voice', says Erlkon of his tapes, and the dissident cadre the returned six now compose work together to transform their governing Council's continuing priorities. So in necessarily partial ways, because here politicized in the sense of actively participating in social systems of interpersonal communication, 'Tintern Abbey' becomes more relevant than Book xiv of 'The Prelude', both for its imbrication of returning memory with what Erlkon terms 'the sheer presence' of 'here, here, here', and for its now existential engagement with 'all the mighty world | Of eye, and ear, --both what they half create, | And what perceive'.[12] 'Dialectic', says Roy Bhaskar in different discursive mode but also in terms that seem applicable to Erlkon and his friends, 'is the yearning for freedom and the transformative negation of constraints on it. [. . .] The strength of its presence is the measure of the pulse of freedom --of its health, or transforming power'.[13] In the structure of the poem we are considering, the ineluctable modality of the visible is held in tension between event of record and recording sensibility and, mindful of the imagined communities being remembered and formed, it then seems inter-textually and transhistorically appropriate to suggest that 'Memories of Earth' sings of aliens' 'first disobedience, and the fruit | Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste | Brought pain into their world, and all their woe', a transgression that expands the subject towards political freedoms.

Morgan moves language beyond discursive norms and across whatever boundaries turn up. His literary criticism argues an historical inseparability for experimental science and imaginative writing and he spins work out of recent discovery. Six 'Particle Poems' were published in 1977 when hunting the quark, thought to be a more fundamental building block of matter than any then known, was a major effort in particle physics. 'Particle Poems' were included in the science fiction collection Star Gate (1979) which opens with a Russian moon-buggy discovering a lunar plinth partially inscribed with Stanley Kubrick's name, and registers, in 'The Worlds', an excitement of the moment: 'Time has entered space. | Earth is again the centre and the favoured place.' 'Foundation' makes entertainingly clear that language articulates these discoveries and that a clarifying arena for language is the poem: a later one thinks of 'Imagination' as 'the nose-cone of the race'.[14] Transformational continuities at the frontier of otherness are technically caught when a 'band of tranquil defiers' somewhere in orbit finally cut the cord with earth and launch out towards 'A Home in Space'. In a British Academy lecture on the modern sublime, Morgan traces its survival in nineteenth-century texts where technology and change were re-ordering everyday perception and practice, and finds 'really productive use being made of the "new sublime" of the enlarged time-scale shown by science': 'vastness and obscurity, darkness and terror, power and astonishment, all discover a new lease of life', and he notes of the growth of industrial cities that 'a heightening, often an alienated heightening, of human experience was associated with them'.[15] Enlarged scales of time and space and terror too, in 'The Moons of Jupiter' sequence, suggest a relevance to some of his own practices: writer's block on 'Amalthea', industrial unrest on 'Io', explorers on 'Europa', settlers on 'Callisto'; each interface with alterity, making personal encounter out of imaginative enterprise by staging speaking subjects in alien space. Morgan generalizes a praxis of individuated speech (but elsewhere including ludic sound-worlds of seeming nonsense) as the basis for social life, developing an anarchic poetics of communicative rationality against the dominance of instrumental reason. Political community exists through the inter-subjectivity made possible through communicative action: on which accounting freedom is projected as pure politics.[16] If mimesis as a figure of what is destroyed by instrumental reason suggests an alternative relation between persons 'in which one accommodates to the other, identifies with the other, emphathises with the other',[17] then making the language of self-creation as public and shared as the language of social justice entails confrontation. Morgan's poem about the Falklands conflict, 'Vereshchagin's Barrow' pictures war-artists repeatedly buried by the outbreak of hostilities. Rebuking voices in Eliot's 'The Waste Land' that suggest desolation can be revived by a fertility ritual ('There in the permafrost you cannot | read, much of the night, or go south in the winter' (CP,p.537)), a chorus here ends:

   Don't listen to us,
   Nothing can tell you whether we are Furies
   or Eumenides. Go off, draw war.
   If you have cameras, give them care.
   In this world from which we speak to you
   we do not trust artists any more.
   (CP,p.538)

So Morgan's residual optimism is a necessarily self-aware condition: deploying syntactic autonomy against engrossing determinisms, terrestrially powerful otherworldly foundations for social and political practice are scrutinized; Islamic retribution in 'Iran' (CP,p.420), or the psychic subjection 'Dom Raja' requires on the banks of the Ganges (CP, pp. 534-35). with the same open-ended sense of possibility that 'Ariel Freed' quits the last page of Virtual and Other Realities (1997), 'Twilight of a Tyranny' sets polyphony at large: 'Your thrones are death. Ours is the reign of speech' (CP,p.346).

Generally understood as the use of computer modelling and simulation to enable a person to interact with an artificial, three-dimensional visual or other sensory environment, in Morgan's handling Virtual Reality has been both metaphoric resource and textual practice for some time. Incorporating rhythms that are referentially dependent on prior representation, the imaginary space of 'Variations on Omar Khayyam' (CP, pp. 503-07) introduces ancient text to multi-media futurity when a vividly rendered yet minimally sketched desert camel train's dawn awakening transpires as a film, 'almost like life, | in close-up or in long-shot, wound off a reel | in the dark archive bay' being watched by an unruly crew in an intergalactic flotilla itself under surveillance via a cosmically distant but textually promixate console 'hung one moment in annihilation's waste'. Subsequently, 'rolling dead young men' from twentieth-century warfare are 'left for film crews'. 'Variations', presenting animated images of a linguistically simulated environment to move a reader through changing viewpoints and perspectives, identifies not a prior text by name but the twelfth-century Persian mathematician and astronomer who wrote it. Then, rhythms and phrases deployed by 'Variations' as sensors to guide contact with printed precedent are taken from a nineteenth-century English translation that became popular enough to be known as 'Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat'. Morgan's poem ends not in deep space but ancient desert, where Khayyam and his lover couple under the stars and speak decidedly modern idiom. But 'Shaft me' also reaches back, from penis-signifier to Anglo-Saxon roots in creation, origin; to make or constitute nature or species (OED): because its medium is linguistic, 'Variations' additionally constructs a mirror of its own production.

Interactive sequencing is part of Morgan's practice, and his recent experiment in the mode called 'Virtual and Other Realities' identifies connections in ways that make interface a condition of scripted existence as it now is for many people across a spectrum of message transmission and reception. Thus, 'In Night City' includes signifiers from William Gibson's Neuromancer, a science-fiction adventure that helped to integrate cyberspace into novel-writing territory,[18] since when film technique has familiarized and acclimatized audiences to the machine assimilation of human subjectivity to a degree that troubles some real world analysts: screen cyborgs, cybernauts, and self-programming (and therefore autonomous) computers are now staple representational fare, where forms of simulation routinely shape and transmit versions of the actual. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Virtual Reality came of age in the 1980s, when the US military and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began creating new systems for computer-generated imagery: 'In 1989 the U.S. Department of Defense launched Simnet (simulator network), an experimental network of microcomputer-based workstations that enabled military personnel to practice combat operations on interactive, real-time training systems; Simnet was used to prepare U.S. troops for the Persian Gulf War in 1991.'[19]

Virtual was always already a moulding of other realities. There is no community in Neuromancer, only relations of dominance in which human figures, some invested with flesh and blood, some partly so, and others holographic projections from memory banks mediating feral power, move through an urban jungle where flora and fauna are computer-designed and cloned replacements for originals lost in a distant and now hardly remembered past. Gibson's cyberpunk protagonist Henry Case, managing to give as good as he gets before his final assumption into the Net that locates and specifies much of the novel's action, is a paradigm reified hero of postmodernism, transformed into the simulations that articulate his being. Neural technology occupies his body and invades his mind, and the environment through which he moves alters sometimes decisively his behavioural possibilities. In his world as ours electronic space is where context-changing transactions are routinely communicated, and jacking in to its virtually existent global network as 'real' an activity as any other, including for access to the black and grey markets where Case survives. Gibson's prose takes Case flatlining into a plural and predatory cyberspace where human and machine intelligence become inseparable and where rival corporations resolve market dominance. The narrative delivers a spatialized world of audio and visual projection, holographic, and undetectably simulated so that Case and the reader have difficulty discriminating one virtual reality from another. Meanwhile, under a 'hologram sky glittered with fanciful constellations suggesting playing cards, the faces of dice, a top hat, a martini glass' (Neuromancer,p.180), technologically reproduced subjectivity is refined to the point where Neuromancer himself, avatar of a successor generation, can say in robotic staccato that ironizes as it enables his assertion: 'Unlike my brother. I create my own personality. Personality is my medium' (p. 305).

In a lecture called 'Poetry and Virtual Realities' given at a 1998 Edinburgh Science Festival, Morgan quoted Phil Tippett, who runs an animation studio in Berkeley, California:

We now have the ability and the technology to make things look photorealistic using the computer. But this revolution is going to surpass the industrial revolution, and there's going to be a lot of blood on the floor. [. . .] The computer demands that you be very procedural and use specific language. [. . .] It's not the same thing at all as having a relationship with materials. My concern is that [. . .] one can tend to lose touch and sight of the real physical world.[20]

The concern is shared by others: 'For Jean Baudrillard, for example, the repetitive structure of what he calls the simulacrum (that is, the reproduction of "copies" which have no original) characterizes the commodity production of consumer capitalism and marks our object world with an unreality and a free-floating absence of "the referent" (e.g., the place hitherto taken by nature, by raw materials and primary production, or by the "originals" of artisanal production or handicraft) utterly unlike anything experienced in any earlier social formation.'[21] The printed word is now included as part of a vestigial order we are moving away from; away from the patterns and habits of the printed page and towards a new world distinguished by its reliance on electronic communication.[22] With the emergence of cyberspace in the late twentieth century, it has now been suggested, cognitive moulding will free learning from coercion: 'The essence of the coming integrated, universal, multi-media, digital network is discovery -- the empowerment of human minds to learn spontaneously, both independently and co-operatively. The focus is on learning as an action that is "done by," not "done to," the actor.'[23] A demotic, knowing Glaswegian personality whose medium is 'In Night City' has his doubts:

   Ur aw thae radgy nuts in Cybernippon
   guys and dolls yer hauns kin get a grip on,
   an if they're no, whit screens ur they a blip on?

Catching the Japanese/American axis of the novel, idiomatic reference here to the 1955 Hollywood film version of a 1931 Damon Runyon story 'Guys and Dolls' suggests that recession is endemic to both speech and story and the perceptions they encode. Rhyme-adjusted reference to Marcel Duchamp's 'La Mariee mise a nu par ses celibataires, meme' (The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even) suggests something similar and different by creating other contexts for one of the great enigmas in twentieth-century image projection that began in 1912 as a pencil sketch on tracing paper, developed into a compound of literary and graphic forms including a 'Musical Erratum' and comprised elements that had been independent artworks. The so-called 'Large Glass' was begun in America in 1915 and by 1923 had reached the 'definitively unfinished' state in which it was exhibited; a construct surrounded by a cluster of associated productions each having its own validity and each contributing to a work that has been described as one of the most mysterious of all time.[24] Contingency took early revenge when the 'Large Glass' was smashed on its way from exhibition in 1926: ten years later Duchamp put the shattered pieces together. 'It's a lot better with the breaks', he told Pierre Cabanne, 'a hundred times better. It's the destiny of things.'[25] Morgan's poem layers art and technology's entanglements with actuality and when Case in cyberspace 'hit[s] the representation of his deck [keypad]' to context-changing effect, or 'look[s] at the representation of the

Finn' who sometimes guides his actions (Neuromancer,p.303), further interactions are triggered. Any active reader registers a double take at these printed representations of visual representations, and one doubting Scot wants to know more:

   Is it blid, is it juice, is it a chairge, ur they randy?
   Is their denner pretend-sampura wi trash-shandy?
   Whit d'ye mean ye're no sure. That's handy!
   (VR,p.76)

This will be a strategy across the 'Virtual and Other Realities' sequence; bringing into language alternative space for subjectivity as knowable site of comprehending power and motivating agency.

'Epic' occupation of deep space is now a continuing function of technology, and colonization of discursive space a daily composition of local and global telecommunications. Morgan moulds expansive scale to an everyday world where faxing is an already normalized evolution in the speed and range of document transmission; but where, despite the charms of elusive signifiers, it is the sentient world of 'March' that measures the real in triplet time. Measuring slow chugging through water against rapid skimming over it, the integrated circuit of 'The Ferry' contrasts participation in the interactive energy of linguistic image production ('your landing on a place so virtual') with the magical immediacy of computer simulation, to project real world time in invented images. A fundamental simulation in this work, the illusion that mediates many of its effects, is a linguistic animation of speaking voices. A high-technology sequence advertizing the shift from orality through literacy and print to electronic media is necessarily tuned into printed words as visual coding of the elusive world of sound. 'The Pen' that speaks its formal composition through ink on paper in hope of arresting time ('I'm holding fast to everlasting snows') brings speech and script together as recognition that the visible signs of writing can never dispense with orality. But because speech dies in the breath of its transmission, for its speaking subjects orality is transient: 'gone into the world of sound' as the voice of a poem addressing itself 'Into Silence' acknowledges: 'There is no cutting-room floor, no ground. | I speak, and I am nowhere to be found'. Transforming the loss that scripted language enacts into sound-waves of a speaking present, 'Into Silence' inscribes a utopian space where 'Words lap then zap the circuit' and orality survives both printed and electronic systems of reproduction. In its interplay between virtual imaging and simulating script, 'Virtual and Other Realities' provides for seemingly random access both to a real-time present and to surreal contexts where 'Rhetoric, like colour, melts off the edge'. Opening with technological apocalypse, 'Brisk Thoughts Towards Town' expresses solidarity with 'the run of things as grateful to be rife | as ever mouse and cursor were' (VR,p.57); and a run of things that can be grateful and rife animates the reified order Marx saw as market society inevitability. Lukacs subsequently traced commodity-structure in relations between people that assume the character of a thinghood connecting and identifying them, 'and thus acquir[ing] a "phantom objectivity", an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people'. An expanding valorization of commodity relations within and across political boundaries becomes a determinant in the formation of what Lukacs calls a 'second nature'.[26] To a significant degree that nature is a discursive formation inscribed in the subject partly by the cultural practice of printed writing, once the dominant mode of image-production and reproduction. Proliferating sophistications of electronic representation and transmission led Guy Debord to argue that the prevalent form of commodity reification is now the replicating image itself; an omnipresent saturation of semiotic space reinforcing what has become a phantom subjectivity lived in pursuit of constantly reproduced simulacra.[27] Antonio Gramsci's 'We have increasingly become phantoms' is the opening line for 'Marginalisation' to set a poem on the page in defiance of shrinkage, and where literacy provides the referential precedent for both textualized reason and printed apocalypse: 'We flit from Areopagus to Patmos' (VR,p.93).

For all its over-determined logocentrism, Wittgenstein's proposition that the limit of our words is the limit of our world does at least recognize language as instrumental guidance system for sentient thought.[28] That words limited to fields of reference sanctioned by governing practice thereby sanction governing practice is an intellectual environment ironized in a poem called 'Realism' as 'a mind too green | to kick-start action from the dream machine'. Exploiting the techniques it satirizes as cultural convenience, 'Realism' turns to a seeing and saying generally preferred by Morgan; an investment of scientific discovery (in this case neutrinos) in fictive form and a mode that transfigures the object world, not into a fantastic narrative but as a metamorphosis in perception and in things perceived:

   Ah but transcending it
   are specks we see, and specks we cannot see
   but must imagine, in that immensity.
   It is reason sets imagination free.
   (VR,p.91)

[1] Edwin Morgan, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1990), p. 297. Hereafter CP.

[2] Edwin Morgan, 'Long Poems -- But How Long', W. D. Thomas Memorial Lecture (University of Wales Swansea, 1995), pp. 9, 14.

[3] Colin Nicholson, Poem, Purpose and Place (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1992), p. 70.

[4] Edwin Morgan, Nothing Not Giving Messages, ed. by Hamish Whyte (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990), p. 116. Hereafter NNGM.

[5] Salman Rushdie, In Good Faith (London: Granta, 1990), p. 14.

[6] Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 110. Cited in Andrew Gibson, Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 8.

[7] Nicholson, Poem, Purpose and Place,p.72.

[8] William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. by D. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 48.

[9] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. by I. H. Grant (London: Sage, 1993), p. 222.

[10] I borrow these sentences from Claire Colebrook's discussion of Michel de Certeau in New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 125-26.

[11] William Wordsworth, The Prelude: or Growth of a Poet's Mind, ed. by Ernest de Selincourt, rev. by Helen Darbishire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), pp. 483-85.

[12] William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works, ed. by E. de Selincourt, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1944), ii, 262.

[13] Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993), p. 378.

[14] Edwin Morgan, Virtual and Other Realities (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), p. 75. Hereafter VR.

[15] Edwin Morgan: 'Provenance and Problematics of "Sublime and Alarming Images" in Poetry', Proceedings of the British Academy, 63 (1978), 293-313 (p. 301).

[16] J. M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 37.

[17] Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society, trans. by Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1984), p. 390.

[18] William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984; repr. London: Harper Collins, 1995).

[19] 'Virtual reality', Britannica Online ([less than]http://www.eb.com.180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/709/ 12.html[greater than]).

[20] Typescript supplied by Morgan; the lecture is to be published in a collection of essays on poetry and science, edited by Robert Crawford.

[21] Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 17.

[22] Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (Boston: Faber, 1994), p. 128.

[23] Lewis Perelman, School's Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education (New York: Morrow, 1992), p. 23.

[24] Richard Hamilton, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even Again: A Reconstruction (University of Newcastle upon Tyne: Department of Fine Art, 1966), n.p.

[25] Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. by Ron Padgett (New York: Viking, 1971), p. 75.

[26] George Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (London: Merlin, 1971), pp. 85-86.

[27] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994).

[28] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. by D. Pears and B. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 56.