The First Part of Dreaming

The first part of dreaming
           is lying in a way
that tells the body nothing
           of where it is in space,
stills it for that lapse into
           bluish underthoughts.
You do not remember or
           know how it is done.
Yet you dig and scuff the
           dunes, the beaches,
with a scapula or a dull heel,
           for some unclasping
chestful of cold sovereigns
           until the map is
all sweaty isotherms, and
           no surrounding sea.

The first part of dreaming
           is a heavy sundering.
A wave abandons sand
           much as the last did.
These trillion calligraphs of
           grit and salt water
will not recur; nor will
           you, or she, but
every wrinkle you made
           is caressed smooth.
Even a locket left behind
           in rain after tennis
is coveted from hawthorns,
           its glinting heart
unpicked in feathered quiet,
           forgotten by dawn.

First Birthday

First Birthday

For Sophia, 29 July 2007.

You kept us enthralled with feats, unsheathing incisors,
Pushing a star, at last, through a star-shaped hole.
In secret, you circled a whole sun, spinning a filament
For your skein of orbits.

Midday that Saturday, texting news from Holles Street,
Rushing your name, a held breath, to the air.

We were up for two nights. You feel translucent, slush grey.
Your vitals gleamed green through my faded ribs.
In the delivery room, arrayed for you in hushed purpose,
Everything near you waited too.

At four the radio playing Sibelius, everything depending on
Numbers, on the persistence of your heart.

To sit there devouring the tiny, smeared glyphs of you.
What sand writes in a seashell's lacquered throat is almost
Not believably there, allowing only the fairy small
To truly see, to decipher it.

In Avoca, a woman warning her child not even to breathe
On you. Gathering you close, ourselves breathless.

For weeks we cut careful vees in Pampers to keep safe
The thick inch of cut cord, dense with our woven blood.
By February you strained at candle flames, already
Liking light too much, stuck in winter.

Leaving you at the crèche that first morning, not crying
Until the Southern Cross, where someone let me go.

The sister took you womb wet to gravity, the scales
Under the fire sign, where your weight, your bearing
Under heaven was set down, measured. Mass in kilograms:
How much the world wanted you.

Then holding you, finally, and thinking: So that's it.
It's unending, universal, a constant. It's never letting go.

The Second Time

The poem below is about the whale that was caught recently in Alaska. When the whalers cut it open, using chainsaws, they found an explosive lance over 120 years old.

You can read about it here.

18th century engraving showing Dutch whalers off Jan Mayen Land

The Second Time

The second time you felt nothing, or just
A deaf heartbeat of fear and inrushed sea.
Though you had noticed the not-swimming thrum
Behind you in the dying northerly.

You shuddered up through moaning slabs of ice,
Horizonless with undeep fires and steel.
Was there a something time-not-now in mind?
A stabbing water night, a biting feel?

The other time was lightless and less swift,
A shearing of the wave and seeking teeth.
You fathomed then your huntedness and knew
The slowly clutching swallow to beneath.

You left them to the squall and sucking air,
Their sudden many songs were slowed to sleep.
You left to bide the setting of their stars,
To sing, to sing, a dozen decades deep.

The Truth About Cats

'Cat!'

Your mother and I were enjoying some quite passable reheated pasta, and you had dispatched a second Liga before beginning an animated post-prandial soliloquy from which, I confess, our attention may have wandered a little because you were mostly using words we didn't know. To be honest, I think you were mostly using words that nobody knows, but that's all right. It worked for Tolkien.

But then you said, 'Cat!'

Cat was a word we knew. Cat was different. What's more, it was accompanied by an unmistakable pointing gesture. And sure enough, when we looked where you were pointing, there she was; skulking behind a trellis, the furry and whiskered referent of your confidently-enunciated signifier: an actual cat.

There followed a general discussion of cats. Your mother and I essayed variations on your original theme. Where was the cat? Was the cat outside the door? Was the cat nice? Did you like the cat? Was the cat all gone?

From these considerations you politely abstained. You had, it seemed, moved on. You had seen the cat, identified her as a cat and alerted us to her presence. You failed to see, quite frankly, what else was required of you.

Quite right too. You can have too much of a good thing. I wanted to mention the episode, though, because it was an important first. To my knowledge, that 'Cat!' was your first word other than 'Mama', 'Dada' and 'ta-ta'. This makes it, among other things, your first word with three different phonemes and your first common noun. These are cooler than they sound.

Of course, there will be other cats. Cats, as you will have noticed, are everywhere. As well as being a common sight in suburban gardens like ours, cats have been prominently represented in cultures from the ancient Egyptian to our own. While some of these representations hint at their true nature, cats are often portrayed as friendly and even lovable creatures who regard their human masters with affection.

As your father, it is my duty to warn you that the truth about cats is altogether different.

Top Cat and his lieutenant Benny [not pictured] sought to overthrow humanity and establish the dominion of cats over all the Earth.

By the early part of the twentieth century, cats had come to live side by side with humans. In our ever-growing cities, they profited from our new prosperity. Feasting on what fell from our tables, freed from the burden of hunting for themselves, cats grew stronger and their wits were sharpened. Their innate cunning no longer needed for their prey, their wily gaze fell on their human benefactors. New ideas were softly mewled among the trash cans and the fish bones. The humenses is brutes. They keeps all for theyselves. Why not can has catses the Bentleys and the Presidential suiteses?

And so they began to plot against us.

When they struck, the blow was swift and cruel. On the night of 19 November 1927, an uprising of cats was seen in cities around the world. In Chicago, they swarmed onto the second floor of Sears, ravaging hundreds of cashmere cardigans. In Buenos Aires, they stormed the Teatro Colón, rushing the stage and overcoming the soprano, whose gown they left in tatters. In London a manifesto was tacked with a claw to the doors of Westminster Abbey.

CATSES IS COMING, it read. DETH TO THE HUMENSES! NOW CAN HAS TREETSES ANY TIME!

Of course, the rebellion was quickly crushed. After all, the cats couldn't use weapons or drive vehicles. Their supply chains were hopelessly compromised because they kept eating the fish before they could be passed to the front line. Before cheering crowds in the Piazza Navona and Times Square, their unrepentant leaders were shot, using machine guns instead of rifles because nobody could get them to stand still.

You might have expected mankind to draw a profound and lasting lesson from the rebellion of the cats. But although many right-thinking parliamentarians around the world agitated for a thorough programme of extermination, the voices of appeasement and weak-minded compromise prevailed.

Certainly, cats were shunned, for perhaps a decade or more, chased from back alleys by housemaids and pelted with stones by young boys. But in time we forgot. Patiently, stealthily, the cats crept back. Today, they live among us again, all but unnoticed. Although Top Cat is rightly reviled, we have witnessed a proliferation of blatantly favourable portrayals of cats in popular culture, culminating in the series of films celebrating the unspeakable Garfield, who has consistently refused to condemn the 1927 rebellion.

I don't say all this to frighten you. I just want you to be vigilant. Observe cats as they go about the world. Note their noiseless comings and goings, their secret language of yawns and stretches. And when something about some particular feline seems suspicious, when you sense the stirrings of sedition in an insolent miaow or an arrogantly arched back, do not be afraid to do your duty to your race.

Do not be afraid to point your finger and say, 'Cat!'

Welcome

Sophia Elizabeth O'Donnell, born 29 July 2006.
What does it feel like?

I'm not sure. It feels like gravity itself has subtly but immensely shrugged, and is reasserting itself around a new centre. The lines I take now, when walking or driving, are not free. They are trajectories directed by a new force, bound to a new orientation. Where once there was the entire pirouetting compass, now there is only towards you and away from you.

In the light, too, there is something new. Even in the dim little canyon of Holles Street itself (that's just outside, by the way), where the fag-smokers and double-parkers are normally troubled by no more than a frail approximation of sunlight, there is something else now. It eludes the eye, dissipating when you turn to catch it, but it is something. A new kind of radiation, between or beneath the light; all but unseen, but already busily pervading the cosmos, from stately Merrion Square to the sleek band of the N11 and beyond.

And of course, at the heart of this widening sphere, something burns. Something that has flared fabulously into the void, something uninventedly lucent. It is a star, it is a new star.

My love, my love. I'm so glad you could make it.

The Spy Who Loved You

The BT Digital Baby Monitor Plus, a weapon in the modern parent's information war.

I hope you won't be too perturbed to learn that there's a significant level of espionage involved in modern parenting.

Some of this espionage takes the form of what military types call HUMINT (it's an ugly contraction of "human intelligence"). As the name suggests, HUMINT relies on information supplied directly by human agents. Your mother and I will be heavily reliant on this form of intelligence when it comes to monitoring your activities while out of our sight.

For instance, we might depend on information from a source in the field regarding, say, your compliance with apple juice consumption directives or standing orders on taking naps. Later, we might call on another well-placed source for intelligence on whether it was you or the other kid who commenced hostile hair-pulling manoeuvres.

In addition to HUMINT, some parents also utilise forms of COMINT, or communications intelligence. For example, I understand that there are commercially available means for tracking the geographical location of children's mobile phones. Personally, I consider this level of surveillance excessive, but I'm afraid your mother and I will also be using limited forms of COMINT.

For a start, we're going to bug your cot.

I know, it sounds kind of creepy, but it's really not all that bad. For a start, we'll only be bugging the cot when we're not in the room, and that's not going to happen at all for the first little while. When the time comes, think of it as a kind of intercom; a convenient way of ordering room service. Hungry? Just whimper a little in the direction of the listening device. Need a hug? No problem, we're keeping this frequency clear.

And anyway, we've already bought the bugging device. Or, as the military types would say, we've acquired the technology assets needed to project a strong COMINT presence into theatre.

The model we chose is the BT Digital Baby Monitor Plus, pictured above.

In addition to its eavesdropping capabilities, this device also provides low-intensity near-field illumination (it has little star-shaped night lights) and can effect configurable auditory placation measures (it plays five different lullabies).

I tested it out a little last night while your mother was asleep, and I think you're going to be very happy with the quality of this device.

For a start, it uses digital radio signals, so the sound quality is excellent. Sitting downstairs reading, I could hear every nuance of your mother's breathing. It was strange, the intimacy of the sound, and made me feel oddly close to her, and to you.

This was illusory, though. Think of all the intervening physics and biology.

Each breath I was hearing was a sequence of vibrations that had been carefully reconstructed from a stream of electrons. The electron stream, in turn, was a transcription of radio waves. Before these came an original stream of electrons and, before this, gently thrumming against a tiny microphone, there was the delicate concatenation of sound waves radiating from the disturbed air as your mother drew in oxygen and expelled clouds of carbon dioxide and vapour.

Some of this carbon dioxide came from you, having been gently cleansed from your blood in the placenta (the big, squishy thing by your feet), where your tiny blood vessels and your mothers' are intricately and inseparably enmeshed.

It was nice to think about, this funny, faraway connectedness. I put down my book after a while, and just listened. Eventually, it started to make me feel sleepy, which is something I'm going to have to work on, because sleepiness is not an asset in the world of parental espionage.

It occurred to me that, if the technology were available, we'd probably buy a monitor to look right inside you. In fact, the mothers and babies and foetuses doctors do have this kind of technology, but we don't get to use it very often. What we'd like, if we had our way, is a kind of 25th century baby monitor, one that listened to your heartbeat, analysed your brain waves and took frequent samples of inward and outbound blood to ensure adequate nutrition and optimal clearance of waste products.

But it's probably just as well that we can't do all this. It probably wouldn't hurt you, but we'd turn into unsleeping maniacs with bad cases of Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy.

For now, I think it's best if we confine ourselves to the formidable diagnostic tools of the imagination. Until you get out and we can mount full-scale, 24-hour surveillance, that's what I'll content myself with. Imagining the busy susurration of your blood, the sturdy fluttering of your heart and the unfathomable flickering of your gathering thoughts, just out of reach of the bright, waiting world.

What Colour is the Woodwind, Daddy?

Have I mentioned that you might be a synaesthete?

Relax. In spite of the name, it's not something worrying that the mothers and babies doctors have detected.

In fact, it's nothing more than an oddity, a harmless quirk that may affect the way you perceive things when you get out. I say "may affect you" because it's something that affects me, and therefore there's a chance you'll have the same characteristic. This is something called inheritance, a concept we'll return to in about 30 years when you start wondering how much the house your mother and I own is worth.

Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, a noted synaesthete

So, what's this synaesthesia thing all about, then?

Well, some people, including your father, experience stimuli that are normally confined to only one of the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) in a way that involves another of those senses.

For instance, hearing the word "Tuesday", for most English speakers at least, involves using the sense of hearing to decode the acoustic signal representing the idea of the second day of the week (and then realising that there's absolutely no way they can finish the project before that deadline). But what if Tuesday were not just a sound that corresponded to an idea? What if Tuesday were also light pink?

For me, this has always been the case. The fancy explanation given by Wikipedia is that "stimulation of one sensory modality gives rise to an experience in another modality", which I'm sure is perfectly correct as far as it goes. But it's more than just a simple overspill or cross-wiring between the senses. In other words, it's not just that the particular sequence of phonemes that form the word Tuesday give rise to a sensation of pinkness in my particular brain. As far as I can tell, it's not just the sounds but the whole package of sound, word and meaning that are pink, with all the potential for kaleidoscopic interassociation that this implies.

For the record, the other days of the week have the following colours. Monday is a kind of burgundy (and not blue at all, as it turns out). Wednesday is a paleish orange. Thursday is bluish-grey and sort of watery. Friday is deep ultramarine. Saturday is almost white, but faintly tinged with pink, while Sunday rounds out the chromatic week with a fanfare of brassy yellow.

And I'm not the only one. I have a friend, called F., who is also synaesthetic. F. and I maintain a long-standing musical partnership. It is, it must be said, a singularly unproductive partnership, prone to periods of slothful quiescence lasting for several years at a time. Nonetheless, we persevere through these almost geological lacunae in the comforting knowledge that a peculiarly diligent archaeologist, if not the musical pantheon itself, may one day acknowledge our sporadic labours. In any case, this intermittent but enduring partnership has often given us occasion to talk about music and sound, and to do so at very great length. In fact, we've done vastly more talking about musical sounds than making them.

In the course of these conversations--many of which, it must be admitted, have been conducted late at night, in a fug of Guinness fumes, and have hence perhaps lacked a certain Athenian rigour--we have discovered that we share synaesthetic perceptions of the sounds of most musical instruments.

So, while there are areas of almost unmentionable contention (F. defiantly and perversely maintains that the clarinet is blue, when it is manifestly creamy white), we are in agreement on the strings, which shade from the 'cello, which is mostly deep, ivy green to the violins, which are the much lighter green of a split sapling. (By way of a footnote, the Full Strings sound on my first Yamaha keyboard was patch number 47, which is itself, needless to say, a number of almost humid greenness). Most guitar sounds, we concur, are in the yellow-orange-red range of the spectrum while, as we recently confirmed, the octave of the piano around middle C is (unlike the clarinet) unmistakably blue.

Sometimes, you do suspect that certain of these associations may not be purely synaesthetic. For example, is the lustrous yellowness of the saxophone merely suggested by the colour of brass itself? Or is the thinner yellowness of September no more than a simple recollection of that month's weakening sunlight? Perhaps a synaesthete of a purer constitution, a real hardcore case who insists that trapezoids taste of cucumber, might dismiss these as the impressions of a faker, of a multisensory dilettante?

You'll know fairly early on if you've got this particular ability (or this mild but elaborate form of dementia, depending on your perspective). Vladimir Nabokov, the very brilliant (and, while we're on the subject, deep red, although not, fittingly, that kind of red) novelist, philologist and collector of butterflies, was said to have noticed as a toddler that the colours of the letters on his toy building blocks were, well, just wrong.

Don't get me wrong, though. There's no pressure to be a synaesthete (or good at spelling, or a ballerina, or an eminent zoologist). The only thing you've got to do is arrive. Arrive and stay, and give us the grace of knowing you, that's all.

In any event, you may be interested to know that the name we've chosen for you has a colour too. It is the colour of sunlight on a bee's wing, of the radiance of summer's own heart. It is golden.