The Prince of Change:

Wittgenstein at Rosroe Pier, June 1948

A Dialogue

Bill Richardson

What can be shown cannot be said.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

At a swerve in the silent harbour, a family of swans.

Finely balanced movement in the turning stream

witnessed by a worn-out trader in ideas.

Here at the edge of Europe, memories of home

rattle in his head, like a guncarriage drawn

through the mud of trenches. And the echoes of

more recent war are muted by the steady shiftings

of the swans that drift along a Connemara fjord.

The riddle painted by the swans beguiles him –

question-marks they make

ask him who he is and what he’s from.

He wants to probe what logic is,

test the rationale of language,

know what numbers mean, like when six becomes four

as, say, when two siblings take their lives.

The seascape and the softness of the light

hint at meanings that are here now,

insects captured in a web of breath that spins out

and back, insistent not stable,

designed to take him to the limit

where chinks of light break through,

the way Norwegian sun surprises.

“Swan-mother, how do you keep them turning?

Three dun cygnets in your wake

and that long-necked one beside you, cob to pen,

all five melting into patterned waves.

Is three as real as your children here?

Are you all surface gliding on,

or are you what you do?

And where precisely is the swan-resemblance

between you and your three offspring, mother-swan?

Is it a thing, the way you and they are things?

Chick to resplendant shining white,

are you just a multitude of tiny alterations,

an image never fixed or still except in memory,

cygnet-self no less a swirl of fuzz

than infant turning to logician?

Webbed feet march invisibly beneath,

troops eager for battle:

a unity of five, pretty as a picture.

But the picture won’t stand still.

Moment to moment it’s becoming, past fusing

with present as images transform.

And I am shifting too,

time and space naggingly within me,

reflected in that sweeping curve you print along the bay.

The lines you’re tracing can’t sum up your being:

soon the surface left behind is smooth.”

“We are fruit of fertility, exuberance of lust,

tuned to consummately swim.

Locomotion of clandestine web, we are the difference

and you, the favoured son, the prince of change.

Philosopher of weary times, uncoverer of order,

whereof you cannot speak you won’t be silent.

Take in this picture here and now: this is what is.

Bring all you do to bear upon the games we play,

and play the game you know, now as you master silence.

We swans project a yearning to be free,

yet each sustains the group.

Like the resemblance you don’t see,

atoms of meaning you can’t find,

and principles of logic too well hidden,

these things are there as night and day,

imprinted relevance keeping us together.”

“Let’s put wrong labels everywhere,

dump the ladder when no one’s watching,

go to the moon for a bit and back,

make the trees seem grass-like, and compel

the hopeful birds to let us breathe.

Adolescent cygnets at your play,

what do you know about mortality, absorbed

in the busy task of riding over ripples,

eyeing the water and the water’s edge,

vying with siblings for whatever’s going?

I cling to the shore of an Irish inlet,

with, beyond, three thousand miles of sea.

I tinker with a trove of old ideas

and feel the world revising as I go.

Only the universe can make the meanings linger.

Only the mute can heal the prince of change.”