A Continuity Problem

About this poem

To celebrate the Quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, twenty-one Scottish poets were commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library to write poems inspired by the College’s collections and work. Like surgeons they have used ‘the hand that sees’, but in this case the writing hand that acts at the prompting of insight and imagination. The poems and their comments, alongside photographs of items that inspired them, were published in The Hand that Sees: Poems for the quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, edited by Stewart Conn, and published by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in association with the Scottish Poetry Library in 2005.

Author’s note:

Over a thousand years ago, or so one gathers, Japanese writers noticed that the language they were using had a strong tendency to come out in units of five and seven syllables.  This feature provided them with a useful natural principle for organising literary utterances.  One of the numerous forms which eventually blossomed from this insight was the miniature nowadays widely if rather loosely known as the haiku—a three-line poem in which an initial line of five syllables (e.g. The op-er-a-tion) is followed by one of seven syllables (e.g. was com-plete-ly succ-ess-ful) and the whole is then concluded by another five-syllable line (e.g. but for one de-tail).

Of course, there is more to it than that, and there is much which such a form, however allusively and expertly handled, (and despite its immense present-day international popularity), is simply too short to deal with—but there are certainly some subtle and exquisite tasks which, whether alone or in company, it can perform particularly well.  And if so many haiku are, like so many poems in general, hardly worth bothering one’s troubled head about—well, at least they make extremely modest demands on a busy personality’s time.  (And, actually, one is just as likely these days to find any poem of three short lines called a haiku: a procedure which my former lifestyle advisor swears, I suspect inaccurately, has certain similarities to playing table tennis without a table.)

In the present instance, as far as I remember, I have used the form to do little if anything more than to indicate a few tiny points on a terrain which is vast in extent and almost as vastly a mystery to me.  A fairly familiar situation in human life in general, I suppose—though I admit I am using some guesswork here.  Join the dots and identify the mystery object or objects!  Reconstruct the huge skeleton of the fortunately not yet extinct wonder from a few toes and something that may possibly be an elbow.  Or is it conceivably a back-tooth?  I don’t know what it may be for the surgeon, but I should think that for the patient the crucial moment is usually the point of rejoining the normal world as a merely normal being.

Since I too have benefited from the skill of surgeons, though I assume it would take a trained eye to notice, I do regret it a little that this production seems to have provoked slightly too much from the nil admirari side of one’s unique and unrepeatable nature.  But I trust that at least it cannot be quite as bad as the book’s far from 100% pretension-free title.  Still: how wonderful it is anyway, that we can joke about such vital things in a mature and responsible manner.  Or isn’t it?  Hmm.  All right.  Maybe it isn’t.