Page 14 - The Irony Board

Into the Mind

Picking the
Brain pans out
In a stream;

Finding it
Fools gold rush
From the dream.

Ambiguous syntax and overlapping idioms highlight this piece.
Mining images (picking, pans, stream, gold rush) mix with
intellectual concerns (brain, fools, dream), linked by puns (picking
the brain, brain pans, pans out, fool’s gold). One interpretation is
that the material found in the stream of consciousness originating in
lower strata turns out, like iron pyrite, not to be as valuable as it
appears; the response is to get away from the source of illusion as
quickly as possible. It can also be read that ignorant discoverers of
that stream hurry hastily away in order to begin exploiting it. The
hinge lies in the penultimate line.
Gluckman may have been influenced in his metaphorical choice
by FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “And those who
husbanded the Golden Grain,/And those who flung it to the Winds
like Rain,/Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn’d/As, buried
once, Men want dug up again.”

12