Tortoise by Andrew Motion (Salt Water, Faber & Faber)

Here is a man who served his generals faithfully
and over the years had everything shot away
starting from the feet and working upwards:
feet, legs, chest, arms, neck, head.
In the end he was just a rusting helmet
on the lip of a trench. Then his chin-strap went.

So he became a sort of miraculous stone,
miraculous not just for the fine varnish
which shows every colour right to the depths –
black, topaz, yellow, white, grey, green –
but for the fact it can move. You see?
Four legs and a head and off he goes.

There’s only one place to find the future now –
right under his nose – and no question either
where the next meal might be coming from:
jasmine, rose, cactus, marigold, iris, fuchsia,
all snow their flowers around him constantly
and all in their different ways are so delicious.

It explains why there is no reason to hurry.
The breeze blows, the blossoms fall, and the head
shambles in and out as the mouth munches:
remorseless, tight, crinkled, silent, toothless, pink.
Life is not difficult any more, oh no; life is simple.
It makes you pause, doesn’t it? It makes you think?

Once upon a time the tortoise was someone else, and has now earned a second life in what remains of his previous incarnation: a helmet. Having done what he was meant to do – be a soldier serving his generals – for as long as he could and to the best of his ability, and after being shot away a piece at a time, fate has rewarded him with an extension of life in this new and different form. Evolution is altered by the power of the imagination to suggest an alternative origin in the development of the tortoise.

The great thing about imagination is that we can picture things as we want to; we can imagine the soldier as a cartoonish human being because, when he goes missing in pieces, he is still somehow able to function right up until there’s nothing left but a rusting skull-bucket. We know the poet did not mean us to imagine anything dire or gratuitously violent because this is a friendly poem about a creature that doubles as a decorative rock when it sleeps, and moves at a pace that makes watching paint dry seem an exciting prospect. We could boil and eat lobster in the time it takes for a tortoise to think perhaps (if the wind is behind it and blowing strongly) of walking ten paces.

Sometimes, when the poem itself doesn’t need a great deal of deciphering, it allows the mind to attach other ideas, even extending to a point where the final thought bears no relation to the poem. Motion’s imagination was ignited by the shape of the tortoise shell. In his mind he saw the shell as a helmet on the head of a soldier, and the helmet remaining as part of the soldier even when there was nothing of the soldier left. So “he became a sort of miraculous stone”; miraculous for possessing legs and thereby recycling the helmet in a way that should set us all a good example.

I compare the way the poem talks about the “man who has served his generals” being blown away a bit at a time without any implication of bloodshed, to the violent computer games that gratuitously spill as many red pixels as possible. This thought interests me because the working of our minds interests me, and I find it puzzling that anyone would wilfully inflict impediments and obstacles that might forever divert precious mental abilities into dead-ends.

If an individual (a child, in particular) plays computer games until his (or her) thumbs drop off, they are a lot less likely to become a poet; they will be a passive digester of material processed by others, not creators and inventors. It is the mental equivalent of living on nothing but sugar and processed junk food without ever touching the raw produce out of which a real meal can be made.

Everything is done for them; the action is all a foregone conclusion, the imagery is all invented for them by someone else, and all they have to do is press buttons. It’s the same thing with a junk meal; stick it in the microwave and press a button. And where is the creativity in reflecting the most inane and sickening in terms of violence that we know of in a computer game? To smash and break things takes no imagination, so I can’t even accord the inventors with imagination, only cynicism in using an easily accessible device to market their product.

Hours, days and weeks are used up on fruitless button-pushing. Imaginations shrivel and dry up. Nothing is learnt, no kit cars are built, no go-karts made, no sketching done, no football played. No walking, no running, no skipping . . . just sitting. The players’ adrenalin races for no good reason because the gunman isn’t really after them, and the thing on the screen is only a mean representation of someone else’s impoverished idea. I would like to collect all those millions of hours and give them to people who could really use them.

The ability to construct one’s own ideas, to imagine how others feel, to consider action versus reaction, becomes eroded. I realise I’m talking generally, and about extremes, but there is an enormous number of people (children in particular) who can’t keep away from their computer games. (I know; I have friends with children who thought their preoccupation was a blessing until they realised it seemed to be permanent.) And I’m not just talking about violent games, I’m talking about any game-playing that takes over from real life, and, therefore, the ability to think and create for oneself; to free oneself from the confines of the product of someone else’s influence, as represented in the games.

All this from the idea of a helmet that becomes a tortoise; but for the tortoise, the future is right under his nose, as the flowers bestow their colourful dressings on his palate. His life is now simple. “It makes you pause, doesn’t it? It makes you think?” And it did.

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