Dante’s Divine Comedy

Look Up!

drjanedavis1 Comment

Big Dipper.jpgToday a poem that is new to me, by William Habington, a poet I’ve never read.

I chose it from the OBEV (Gardner) because I am trying to find poems in the anthology which are new to me and which offer me something I’ve ignored or passed over quickly in the past. I’m not finding many of them, perhaps not surprisingly, as I have been using the book for, gosh,  nearly forty years. Most of the poems that have something  for me have called out to me by now.

This one – possibly the Latin title has put me off,  possibly the fact that I’ve never heard of Sir William. Not proud of that, but think it is a factor.

But today those pushaways were outweighed by the fact that last night was a surprisingly clear night, and when I came home it was extremely dark and I could see many stars. I was moved by the sight of them, and exhilarated. I don’t know if it was because I haven’t noticed the stars for a while but I suddenly found myself thinking, (excuse my inner voice) ‘dear stars! I’ve always loved you, the heavens, the universe…’ That thought – a kind of prayer of thanks? – took a fraction of a second then I put the key in the door and got on with getting home.

Yet it was a strong experience despite its short time-frame and, now I see, still in me when I opened the book this morning. I got past the title, and read  the opening line,  was  attracted, and read on.

(Getting past the title: I had to look it up.  ‘Nox nocti indicat Scientiam’ (‘Night after night they display knowledge’) The title is taken from Psalm 19 – the Vulgate, Catholic version which the King James version translates as ‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.’ If you know Haydn’s Creation, it’s that.)

When I survey the bright
Celestial sphere;
So rich with jewels hung, that Night
Doth like an Ethiop bride appear:

My soul her wings doth spread
And heavenward flies,
Th’ Almighty’s mysteries to read
In the large volumes of the skies.

For the bright firmament
Shoots forth no flame
So silent, but is eloquent
In speaking the Creator’s name.

No unregarded star
Contracts its light
Into so small a character,
Removed far from our human sight,

But if we steadfast look
We shall discern
In it, as in some holy book,
How man may heavenly knowledge learn.

It tells the conqueror
That far-stretch’d power,
Which his proud dangers traffic for,
Is but the triumph of an hour:

That from the farthest North,
Some nation may,
Yet undiscover’d, issue forth,
And o’er his new-got conquest sway:

Some nation yet shut in
With hills of ice
May be let out to scourge his sin,
Till they shall equal him in vice.

And then they likewise shall
Their ruin have;
For as yourselves your empires fall,
And every kingdom hath a grave.

Thus those celestial fires,
Though seeming mute,
The fallacy of our desires
And all the pride of life confute:–

For they have watch’d since first
The World had birth:
And found sin in itself accurst,
And nothing permanent on Earth

Looking at it again as I write, I see it wasn’t the first line but the second stanza that drew me in;

My soul her wings doth spread
And heavenward flies,
Th’ Almighty’s mysteries to read
In the large volumes of the skies.

That’s exactly what happened to me on the path last night when I looked up. Somewhere in the back of my mind is something George Saunders said when I saw him reading and talking at Liverpool University the night before last. He spoke about being brought up as a working class Catholic on the south side of Chicago, and how Catholicism – though he had turned away from it in later life – had created a space inside him – a place for mystery. Childhood religion didn’t do that for me much – the Catholicism I experienced was more to do with unkind discipline than mystery and wonder. But later in my life, in my twenties and thirties and onwards from there, religious poetry  did create such a space in me.

When I read ‘the Almighty ‘ and ‘Creator’ the words go into that space for mystery.

I accept that for Habington they mean something about purposiveness and control or consciousness (God as the deliberate maker). It doesn’t matter  that I don’t feel this, don’t believe it. I don’t seem at odds with the words or the concept. Actually, I nearly feel it to be true. Just not quite. So when I read ‘the Almighty’ I translate it as ‘mystery’ and when I read ‘Creator’ I translate it into ‘force or energy or power’. the differences feel superficial. I know what he is talking about, I saw it with my own eyes when I looked up last night.

No unregarded star
Contracts its light
Into so small a character,
Removed far from our human sight,

But if we steadfast look
We shall discern
In it, as in some holy book,
How man may heavenly knowledge learn.

I do not really have language for what I learn at such a moment, but I do have the actual experience. At the point of staring at the stars  I am ‘heavenly knowledge’ learning.

Language helps, does it? I think of myself doing some other thing which is instinctive and experiential – cooking let’s say. I can do it without language. But with language I can share the experience with another person. That makes me think that the fact that I don’t have religious language myself doesn’t matter, so long as I can, for the purpose of communication, learn Habington’s, or Milton’s, or Dante’s or T.S.Eliot’s. Or George Saunders.

What was mildly surprising in the poem was its deliberate turning away from worldliness, from power and politics. Habington lived through the English civil war, was a Catholic at a time of Catholic persecution, family members were executed.  Politics and power were real and terrible forces. Yet he looks up at the stars and sees it all as not much, as the stuff of a ‘moment’;

It tells the conqueror
That far-stretch’d power,
Which his proud dangers traffic for,
Is but the triumph of an hour:

Habington’s stars tell him, in a way that feels helpful to him; ‘And nothing permanent on Earth’

At a time of turmoil and uncertainty, the glance up, the feelings of the size and mystery of it all, our smallness here below. I recognise my experience in his poem, and thank him for  it.

Hearing the voices, raising the standard

drjanedavis2 Comments

 

Hard to know what to read and write about today. Still got Lincoln in the Bardo in my mind but want to finish reading the Marvell poem. Also, have a lot of work to do and want to spend some time in the garden and am going to the match later. Can LFC beat Burnley? You know, I can’t stake my reputation on predicting that, despite my respect for – belief in – Mr Klopp.

Ok, LITB first. It’s voices. I’ve started listening to it Audible – Nick Offerman (my hero from Parks and Rec ) reads one of the lead parts, very well. Looking forward to that on my commute.

Re-reading the text  this morning, I was reminded of these lines from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, ‘Burnt Norton’:

Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.

That’s how it feels to read the book, which builds and  gets faster and heavier as it goes. Voices of the past, in the form of quotations from real and (I imagine) fictional ‘histories’, come at you, and tell us what we’ve known for some time now – no one view or memory is the truth. It was a moonlit night, say several accounts,  there was no moon that night, others contradict.  It’s like reading the Nehls biography of D.H.Lawrence. You see the whole reality through the multifaceted bits that all sorts of people contribute. And then the ‘characters’, like characters in a T.S.Eliot play, or in Becket or in Under Milk Wood, are not characters as we know them in a novel. They are their voices. As the reader, you have to do a lot of the work. Not complaining, I like hard book-work.

Hard but this is George Saunders so there’s also comedy and slapstick and rude bits from farting and poop to  small-scale orgies. There’s wryness, quite a lot of it. But I do not know why people say GS is a satirist. There’s heart here, there’s always heart, and there’s a  sort of disappointment too. Humans! Ha! You silly, bad people. But there is always belief in us, too. As Sian Cain writes in The Guardian, George Saunders makes us love people again. I think of  satirists as making us mock them. I want books that care about humans and  raise the standard. This book does  both.

So, how do we get to love more and mock less? We feel each other’s feelings, we imagine or experience life in someone else’s  life. When two of the book’s  leading presences enter President Lincoln in order to help him change something (I’m not telling you the story here!) a side-effect of their collaboration is  a kind of exchange of self, sympathy, empathy: feeling how if feels to be someone else, to have their particular set of experiences:

Because we were as yet intermingled with one another, traces of Mr Vollman naturally began arising in my mind and traces of me naturally began arising in his.

roger bevans iii

Never having found ourselves in that configuration before –

hans vollman

This effect was an astonishment.

roger bevans iii

I saw, as if for the first time, the great beauty of the things of this world: waterdrops in the woods around us plopped from leaf to ground; the stars were low, blue-white, tentative; the wind-scent bore traces of fire, dryweed, rivermuck; the tssking drybush rattles swelled with a peaking breeze, as some distant cross-creek sleigh-nag tossed its neck-bells.

hans vollman

I saw his Anna’s face, and understood his reluctance to leave her behind.

roger bevans iii

I desired the man-smell and the strong hold of a man.

hans vollman

The end (don’t want to spoil it) asks us to believe that it is possible for one spirit to enter another spirit’s being, thus  changing the course of human history. That’s not the final move of a satirist, that’s the move of a believer. But why wouldn’t a great writer believe this?  Isn’t putting the experiential knowledge of others lives, other centres of consciousness, into our own minds what great writing is for? Isn’t that what writing is for?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘This is for everyone’ made me feel patriotic for the first time ever

drjanedavis1 Comment

I recognised  the Great Britain of the Olympic opening ceremony in a way I hadn’t expected. I recognised a country I  live in and I loved feeling proud of that country. I don’t think that has ever happened to me before, certainly  not on a National Occasion, though once, returning to England after a month in the Cyclades, I  was moved to tears by the greenness of England.

‘Did you love it because it was by Frank?’ asked my husband. He meant ‘Would you have loved the same thing if someone else had been the writer?’

‘No, I loved it because  I love –  feel – a lot of what Frank thinks…’

I don’t remember exactly when Frank Cottrell Boyce told me  he was working on  the Olympics’ Opening Ceremony as the writer on Danny Boyle’s  creative team, only that it was on  a train from Chester  to London, not my usual route, and that he got on at Crewe, not his usual starting place, and that we met in one of those between-compartment-spaces as we both searched for somewhere pick up  signal on the  notoriously poor-coverage Crewe-Stafford section of the track.  I’m not much of a sports fan and to me the Olympics meant little more than a couple of weeks of reduced eye-contact and increased grunting from the males of my family. So I was glad for Frank, but not  very excited by his news, and neither could I imagine what it meant for him as a writer – I mean,  how do you write a ceremony? I imagined troops of synchronised twirlers with  ribbons ( I stopped watching those ceremonies  round about Tokyo).

Since then,  Frankie, the  first and the most devoted Writer-Patron at The Reader Organisation, has let little slip, though we have met several times on the London train, coming or going, as we lay waste our powers in the Capital. Several times he has been, with hindsight, incredibly disciplined:  ‘I can’t tell you a thing. It’s Top Secret.’ ( That should have given me a clue about the Bond element but I was  still mainly   imagining ribbon twirlers). One time a conversation about Shakespeare had  him twisting like a  caught fish on a line and I thought to myself, ‘Blimey – they are  building the opening ceremony on The Tempest! How brilliant!’

Last time we met – which must have been at the inauguration dinner for his Professorship of Reading at Liverpool Hope University, he said something like, ‘It’s all  books.’  I imagined giant books opening but it didn’t seem Olympic so I filed the comment away and we continued our  talked about developing reading  for pleasure in schools….and I sat down to watch the opening ceremony last night feeling curious but expecting boredom or disappointment. I have no patriotism bone, or I live in another country or in my own head, and I don’t like formal shows. They ain’t natural.

Frank, on the other hand, is natural. He’s also a great writer.

I first met Frank  when we chose his novel, Millions, as our Liverpool Reads book in 2005. I’d read the novel, in the lovely original hardback edition with the golden cover, with my son Ben, the summer he left school. At 18, anyone might have thought he was a little old for  Millions, but no – and neither was I –  we started reading it aloud to each other on the motorail train down to the South of France and had to strictly ration ourselves  to a chapter a day. It is a wonderful book, profound and ordinary and funny, which is what Frank is absolutely brilliant at. Profound, ordinary and funny and utterly believing. And there’s the  rub. It was what comes from that  – from believing – that gave this ceremony/performance the  funny, generous,  small-scale, magnificent feeling that I recognised as my country.  It was knowing and witty but it was never cynical or merely clever. In his address, as the ceremony got underway, Danny Boyle said what might have seemed to some a strange thing; ‘I don’t believe in God but I believe in the people who do – this is their show, they really are the best of us.’  I thought of Frank when I read those words in the paper this morning, because all Frank’s work is about believing. In Millions, the power of belief actually changes actual reality.

Frank Cottrell Boyce, Patron of The Reader Organisation, with his novel, Millions

I should have realised, when  Frank  kept keeping his mouth shut on all those trains, that he and the rest of the creative team  would be cooking up something  massively imaginative for everyone. He did tell me it was  going to be massive but I was still thinking ordinary Olympic ceremonies, the unreal worldly realism of   ribbon twirling and uniformed masses marching in time. I should have known there would be none of that. Drumming in time, yes. Dancing, yes. Fond history including Votes for Women (and I was glad to read this morning that at this Games, for the first time ever, all participating countries are fielding women athletes)  and believing music,  Jerusalem and Nimrod and a wonderfully powerful and very quiet  Abide With Me, yes.  What we got was  music, poetry, story and belief.  I loved the sight of  300 apparently sick children jumping joyfully on beds. I loved  the twee pastoral scenes with real sheep and geese and those magnificent carthorses,  crazy Glastonbury Tor and the lovely English Oak atop it. I was hugely moved by the raising of  the industrial northern chimneys,  my chimneys, for I lived in Hyde, Lancashire as a child, and remembered skylines full of those great belchers.  I loved the factory-hands, the  huge numbers of individuals moving only more or less together,  and who were allowed to be individuals, even in the mechanised industrial revolution scenes. I loved  the hammering  Pandemonium of Paradise Lost,  the Blakean furnaces heating up the molten metal into heavenly golden rings. Above all I loved that it was a literary ceremony! It was all about books! The Olympic cauldron  was out of Dante’s Paradiso, surely? the whole of everything comes together in one enormous flower-like fire?

I prefer  the C.H. Sission translation, published by Oxford University Press in the World’s Classics series.

I saw gathered there in the depths of it,

Bound up by love into a single volume,

all the leaves scattered through the Universe;

Substance and accidents and their relations,

But yet fused together in such a manner

That what I am talking of  is a simple light

…

…

At this high point my imagination failed;

But already my desire and my will

Were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
By the love which moves the sun and the other stars.

Perhaps most of all I loved the appearance of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, with the message ‘This is for everyone’ in lights behind him. Why did I find that so hugely moving?

The decision to let the future, represented by those 7 apparently anonymous young athletes, light the fire in the Olympic cauldron avoided a single celebrity handover, and cleverly prevented splitting the nation into Beckhamites and Redgravites, but will also have been an image of  the collaborative creative process  in which Frank, Danny and their colleagues have been engaged. I remember seeing the pair of them on stage at a filmfest, discussing the making of Millions before a screening of the film. Any advice for young film-makers, someone in the audience asked. Yes, said Danny: pick your team, get a band together, have good mates.

‘And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make’ sang Sir Paul, the lyrics totally overcoming my mild irritation that such a hammy  old trouper should be closing the show. It was a like the perfectly positioned quotation that sets a tone around everything else that has been written. Love and belief, belief and love, with Frank Cottrell Boyce at  the writer’s keyboard, of course they were the key words. The show made me glad to be British – a phrase I never thought to use. Thanks, Frank.