from Jamie’s Book of Ingenuity: an imagined life of James Watt, engineer 1736-1819
(moments from the life of James Watt)
How to rise
(advice culled from biographies, inscriptions and laudatory speeches)
Have genius.
Be Scotch.
A braw mother helps.
Illness can offer
time to reflect.
Experiment.
When inspiration comes
put it to work.
Make money –
Fortune favours
the brave inventor.
Your fingers are your wealth.
Write down your trade
as “engineer.”
Be above trade.
Achieve a cheerful wife
– a good domestic –
when she dies
look for a dowry
and a fetching way,
with good Scotch sense.
Business is not
for such as you
so find good partners.
If they fail
be kind, but free yourself.
For work,
select industrious men
who make no trouble.
They must be exact.
Music’s for profit
but a snare
to idleness (best left behind).
And most of all, select
the ancestry you need:
not high
nor low
but middling sort
for solid worth:
a steady source of cash
and training
good connections
good reserves
for then you’ll be
most apt to rise
as all can
who work hard.
Yes, I say all.
No waste allowed.
No idleness.
Jamie dreams: 3 September – 13 September 1752
There are days between days.
Greenock. And in his dreams
slow Jamie's striding out
and he does not pause
not once though
the child is trapped in the womb
and the dying woman is still
for eleven days of nothing
caught on a fractured breath.
Jamie is over the hills
and away.
Out there
he's ready, strong. He takes to the height
sets the theodolite,
places his eye
close to the spyglass
certain, employs his mind
in swift calculation.
There's not a grass-blade stirs
just Jamie
Jamie, who holds wide space
and steadies it, careful, to track
both distance and depth
here, in this windless world
where the kingdom of number moves
and it alone (Jamie its conqueror)
where every weight has a height
and every depth a mass
and all can be measured, all
so Jamie thinks in his dreams
till he sneezes, breathes
and recalls.
Motion returns
with day
and leaps
over distance and depth
refuses to be surveyed
and scrambles
away from his dream
It's out of Jamie's hands
and sight now, moves
with the rasp, rattle, and screech
of steam forced from a kettle
across the waste of time.
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Copyright © Kathleen Bell, 2017. |
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