In my T. S. Eliot lecture in 2005 I took a poem by a relatively neglected Georgian poet — "The Midnight Skaters" by Edmund Blunden — which describes skaters at night on a frozen village pond. The pond itself is deep and treacherous and at the bottom of it sits death 'with his engines set' waiting for the ice to crack. At the end of the poem Blunden encourages his skaters to skate on, to use death as though they loved him, and to

Court him, elude him, reel and pass,
And let him hate you through the glass.

I argued that language was something like the ice over a frozen pond. That language was thin, slippery, and liable to crack; that everything about language was contingent; that words were not things or events in in themselves except in their own uncertain realm; that even the relations between words in syntax (the basic form of pattern) was far from assured. I argued that the task of the poet was to execute a dance on that ice, and that often the thinnest parts of the ice were most exciting. The point is that skates cut patterns on ice which is itself a pattern and that the pond beneath was a kind of death without which there would be no ice; that the patterned crystals of ice itself, ice as language, were the products of the metaphysical cold that is our planetary condition.

All forms of communication are contingent, the arts above all. In a very early poem a good friend of mine, the poet Peter Scupham, wrote about a puppet play in which a child asks whether the puppets moved by magic or string. The answer for the children in the poem is: magic. My adult answer would be — must be — string, but would assert that string itself is miraculous, an extraordinary ordinary thing whose sheer existence in both the world of things and in the word that conjures it, is a form of magic. That the string that holds the arts together is much like the string that holds any language together. That string is magic, in short, simply by being string, much like the ice which is just ice. [PoNE]