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from CONTRARIES
Without contraries
there is no progression.
William Blake
1.
A bed, two hands, spectacles grasped in the right, the left limp,
unemployed. Only a bed and a desk, we are told, naught more
where naught is enough, naught being more than nothing.
There is nothing to finish and no tools with which to finish.
Language is more suited to poetry than to analysis.
There he’s in the water and he will swim.
2.
Pick a red geranium place it in a cracked fawn mug. Look out
the window to see a funeral procession, black and blue. Wade
in the same two hours: twice the time.
Nothing to be done or can be done, inert, unable to be
intrusive, others would say unable to care. Neither sickness of
bone nor flesh, nor organ, nor brain; disease of the soul.
Rhythm: how to accommodate rhythm/s, how to live together.
Play every day and every day is played, child’s play.
The attic; the mauve berries not to be eaten, crushed. The 78
crackling Trumpet Tango, wind up machine.
Green base cloth, door closed, raised two steps up from the
main part of the eyrie like a stage with an entrance.
Always alone, no one else came.
Bay window overlooking sloping garden where he played and
scored goals through the coal house door.
3.
Political faith replaced by the tribe as political faith replaced
the religious. What could be next?
Living together, living alone; the gap in between.
The room, the hideout on a desert island.
The desert monks on high, the hotel where everyone is a
convalescent, the dark side of an apartment building in Paris.
A blind man begging assisted by a boy. The boy gestures to
passers-by take pity, he cannot see.
To be a philosopher:
A degree in Arabic.
Travel.
Contact with other philosophers.
To be far from real life eg on a beach
Old workmen like ancient insects rake the sand.
Colin Campbell Robinson is a writer and photographer living in Edinburgh and on the Isle of Bute. Knives Forks and Spoons Press (UK) published his books Blue Solitude (2018), Footnotes from History – the Debord Variations (2021) and Resistance (2025).
Copyright © 2026 by Colin Robinson, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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