Time By the Numbers

I read a review of a “The Folded Clock: 100 Number Poems” that made this poetry collection peculiar enough to be intriguing. I recommend the review as a great introduction.

The author is Gerhard Rühm, an author, composer and visual artist; he’s regarded as one of the key figures in the postwar European (neo)avant-garde, and his work crosses boundaries. He explores the intersection of various art forms involving music, language, text and image – and the results encompass everything from poetry and prose to music and visual compositions, collages and graphic art … I think it’s like nothing else I’ve read before! https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2025/11/15/i-was-never-younger-or-older-twistedspoonpress/

Poems made up of numbers. What? So I went to take a look and Kaggsy was right.  There is something almost mesmerizing about them. What on the surface makes zero sense begins to add up to meaning when you hear it in your head or through your ears.

So – intrigued – I went to seek out more. I found some excerpts online. There’s certainly some distinctively odd and strangely appealing work here.

Never Younger or Older

However, the lines that end the poem birthday took me off in another direction:

i was never younger or older
than NOW

Old Possum and Chard Whitlow

What that poem brought to mind was Old Possum himself  – or more precisely a parody of T.S.Eliot that was so pitch-perfect Eliot himself admired it.  

“Chard Whitlow (Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Evening Postscript)” by Henry Reed won first prize in the New Statesman and Nation 21, no. 533 (10 May 1941) weekend competition as set by by Mr. Fish himself – G.W.Stonier.  See (.pdf).

Eliot apparently appreciated the parody:

“Most parodies of one’s own work strike one as very poor. In fact, one is apt to think one could parody oneself much better. (As a matter of fact, some critics have said that I have done so.) But there is one which deserves the success it has had, Henry Reed’s Chard Whitlow”

So first the parody, then some of the real thing:

‘Chard Whitlow’ (Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Evening Postscript)

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and to-day I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again – if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded tube.

There are certain precautions – though none of them very reliable –
Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.
I think you will find this put,
Better than I could ever hope to express it,
In the words of Kharma: ‘It is, we believe,
Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell.’
Oh, listeners,
And you especially who have turned off the wireless,
And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to
the silence,
(Which is also the silence of hell) pray, not for your skins,
but for your souls.

And pray for me also under the draughty stair.
As we get older we do not get any younger.
And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

Henry Reed

When Reed wrote his parody, Burnt Norton had been out for five years, East Coker for one, and The Dry Salvages had just appeared; Little Gidding was still unpublished. Reed therefore knew most of Four Quartets well enough to mimic it with brilliant, affectionate precision. He echoes Eliot’s cadences, his rhetorical structures, and his characteristic drift into philosophical musing:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
— Burnt Norton

What Reed captures so cleverly is not only Eliot’s style- those looping meditations on time and place- but also the weightiness of Eliot’s manner, which he gently deflates. References to the humdrum realities of the Blitz pull the high style back down to earth:

Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell.

Heavyweight pseudo-quotations puncture the self-importance and preachy admonitions of the original with respectful mockery, revealing how Eliot’s spiritual seriousness can be uncoupled from its substance. Reed’s perfect mimicry shows how a manner can survive even when meaning is swapped with the humdrum. Lofty reflections on life and death give way to Stoke and Basingstoke, to the wireless and to fires no stirrup-pump can put out – fears familiar to anyone in 1941 sheltering from the Blitz under draughty stairs or passing sleepless nights in a crowded Tube station.

For a real pitch perfect treat listen to Dylan Thomas reading it in Eliot’s lugubrious, sonorous tone:

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” – Burnt Norton

Back to Gerhard Rühm

I came across this by the Polish artist Roman Opalka that presents a little of my impression of aspects of Rühm‘s work

Opalka started the work in 1965 and he worked on this relentless digital progression for forty six years. Now that’s persistence. Or obsession.

“The numbers are about 5mm high, painted with a size 0 brush. He started painting white on a black background and from 1972 he added 1% white to each background of new canvases. In 2008 came the moment when he logically ended up painting white on white. He called it the “deserved white”…This work is the result of an artistic energy dedicated to the search for the truest representation of the concept of time, in art … His work reflects a lifetime of reflection on the best way to distill “time” in physical form. https://www.artmajeur.com/en/magazine/5-art-history/the-representation-of-time-passing-in-art/330158

The review also led me to look at the other offerings from the Twisted Spoon Press and one in particular caught my attention: The Unfinished Life of Phoebe Hicks by Agnieszka Taborska translated from the Polish by Ursula Phillips with collage artwork by Selena Kimball

I’ve just ordered it from Book Culture on 112th Street.

Featured image: Three paintings:
Clock and Telephone, Rufino Tamayo, 1925
Rene Magritte, Time Transfixed (1938)
An Allegory of Prudence (between c. 1550 and c. 1565) Titian