Daniel Cowper, "Kingdom of the Clock" and Our Schizophrenic Minds

​Kingdom of the Clock: A Novel in Verse (The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series, Volume 262. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2025)

I’ve just begun reading an interesting novel in verse, Daniel Cowper’s Kingdom of the Clock. I’ve read three of the twenty-four chapters, enough to admire the poet’s versecraft (a term I’ve stolen from the title of the excellent substack by Elijah Perseus Blumov) and his skill in portraying interesting characters and initiating many strands of action. As one of the blurbs says, the book is both “minutely detailed and fast-paced.”

I will probably comment more once I’ve finished, but I wanted to drawn attention to an interesting passage from the end of the third hour, “Commute.” The character here is a single mother, a barrister on her way to the office to prepare for a case. She is a close observer of her fellow commuters, given to speculation about what they are thinking and feeling, a secret writer who records “what she witnessed” once she gets to the office. At this early point in the poem, she is a stand in the for the poet, perhaps.

Not long ago, I finished reading Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary. It is a mountain of a book that I read a spoonful at a time. An argument that struck me forcefully is his characterization of the mentality of our time as in many ways similar to schizophrenia. He relies to a great extent on a study by Louis A. Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and the Schizophrenic Mind (Cornell, 1994), a book I just completed. These books have helped me begin a difficult writing project, describing my father’s mental condition, diagnosed before his death in 1977 as affective schizophrenia with paranoia.

Schizophrenics often feel that their thoughts or feelings are not their own but are under the control of someone else and can be inserted, changed, deleted, or interrupted. It is the goal of propaganda and algorithms to exert that kind of control. This passage from Cowper’s poem, from the point of the view of the barrister, rings true to me:

                          many minds
synchronize unknowingly, unite

in wondering: How’d we get this way,
souls dug into us like ants in sandy clay?

Could we be stripped of selfhood by natural process
or black miracle, transformed to ghostless

machines! O Lord, each petitions, self-pity
moving them to prayer, however these souls first formed,

let them thrive, let their anchors and branches ramify,
thread deeper in – until, one by one,

each rebels against these alien ideas,
startled into asking
                                  wait, am I thinking

my own thoughts still or has some malware
seized control?
 
*****

​I look forward to finishing the poem.

Posted 21 May 2026