'A man in a wheel chair by the side of a road gets a fleeting glimpse of a girl in the hub cap of a car. He becomes obsessed with her and tries to find her..'

Yes, to be … but how to make it worthwhile to be and to go on being is the question tormenting the man in the wheelchair whose pinioned, paraplegic condition is perhaps a metaphor representing a more universal state in our overstimulated age in which millions of people who can have everything but can touch nothing as they become transfixed by an after-image on a screen, a reflection in a shop window, a ripple in a puddle, a face glimpsed through a train or bus window, or a fleeting glimpse of a girl in the hub cap of a car, seek to find a yogic stillness through focus, and somewhere in that focus a soul that fits them like an upholstered suit of psychological armour, rigid and protective, calming their expressions of twitching agitation in the face of endless distraction and alienation.

And thus the chimeric girl in the hub cap provides the narrator with what turns out to be a kind of meditation – a quest not to find the actual girl but the ongoing inspiration for the poem her loss inspires for a man ‘in a wheelchair’ who can find no place where he himself can exist and become visible as he is swept along by the haunting hypnosis of the ocean of words swirling in the eerie, other-worldly under-currents of music of Michael J Stewart in which the human envelope finally tears apart with a lacerating cry revealing a world that is wounded, mutilated, torn in two as he drowns, and, in drowning this insignificant individual surfaces and rises to the grandness of a mythical experience: to a condition that transforms an infinitude of empirical experiences into the tragic story of mankind.

Brian Fogarty