Inkblot Moon: The Complete Quantum Poetry

In this profound and evocative book, Marcus takes us on a vertical journey inwards with his poetry and contextual commentary. At the beginning, he writes: ‘Sometimes, writing is like a step ladder into the inwardness of myself. Other times, it feels as though I am being written into being by a poem maybe even over a few decades. The air flies the bird. The water swims the fish. The path walks the pilgrim. The poem writes the poet.’ He further explains that

‘I am what happens to me And I am what happens through me. What forms another, forms each other, forms itself, forms me.

For there are forces at work in me great and without name and although I cannot conceive of them, I follow them. I am them, day by day.

I am a river and a river flows through me. It’s not that I am lazy. I just despise all effort beyond being what I already am, my true nature.

Poetry is essentially about inwardness, as Marcus elaborates, but it needs to connect with the outer, linking vertical and horizontal, individual and universal. In the epilogue, he writes about what he calls depth and transcendence tradition, the topic of his next book, in a critique of the left hemisphere dominance of ‘rationalism, materialism, secularism, linearism, mechanism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, individualism.’ (p. 114) What he means is ‘a sense of depth, meaning, and sacredness of the human experience… which is about being in service to life through nurturing the heart and soul. It is about a profound exploration of the relational, embodied, spiritual, archetypal, and transcendent aspects of being human.’

Essential to this process is the recovery of feeling and the primacy of a right hemisphere disposition involving a holistic outer openness and inner coherence. (p. 128) This is sometimes revealed in portal experiences or through music (Marcus refers to Bach’s sublime Ciaconne from his Sonata in D minor for solo violin, highlighted for me by Paul Robertson.) The work of Christopher Alexander is also central – a number of years ago, I reviewed his magisterial series The Nature of Order, with its emphasis on the immediacy of embodied felt experience unmediated by abstractions. A poem entitled The Explainer Bird evokes a bird who

‘became a most renowned professor of flight Still having never actually flown, but having thought about flight In every which way thought will allow…’ He is unable to explain his way out of his cage.

There is much more that I could write, but suffice to encourage you to embark on an adventure with Marcus, in which you will also find yourself meeting your own depths of awareness as a microcosm of life.