inner life

Becoming George Herbert : the transfer of human experience across time and death

drjanedavis
two paths
Two Paths Diverging in Calderstones Park 2 May 2017

Yesterday, you left me with my fingers in my ears and my heels dug in,  shouting, ‘I don’t believe in any sort of afterlife!’ Not an edifying sight. I wish I could amend that to, ‘I don’t know if I believe in any sort of afterlife.’ I feel that would be a more reasonable, even more logical,  place to be. But reasonable, logical, as it may be, I’m not there. I’m here, in this Mayfly experience of being a human living on planet earth. It’s short and I’ve no sense of anything for me before or after. That ‘for me’ really matters.

To the universe I may look like a goldfish, swimming round and round in my bowl, forgetting I’ve been here before, not realising I’ll be coming round again. (Though they say that scientists now believe goldfish do have memory and consciousness: they are not as simple as we once thought. All of which is not a fact, but possibly fake news I probably read on the internet. I’ve no idea if it is true. But I believe it. Why?). To visit this area of thinking, reasons to consider the possibility  of an afterlife and many other oddities, read the much derided Rupert Sheldrake  – is he crazy, bad or just outside the box?).

I’ve been reading George Herbert’s poem, Affliction III. Here it is, don’t forget to read it aloud to get back into it. Nice and slowly, please.

MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !”
By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :
Hadst Thou not had Thy part,                                                             5
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape,                                                       10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me,                                         15
And in Thy members suffer ill.
They who lament one cross,
Thou dying daily, praise Thee to Thy loss.

My heels got dug in at the point where Herbert calls death ‘my bliss.’ That’s all very well for a Christian, I was shouting. For me it’s just game over!

I can’t get out of that state of mind. I’m stuck at some distance from the poem. Though this is a difficult place to find myself in, I’m  glad that this has happened because I think this is a common experience for many readers and that we thus  lose lots of good stuff because it doesn’t match our mindset. I love George Herbert, and I’ve known him long enough, and in some very hard circumstances, to know that I can rely on him. I trust him. Therefore, as a responsible person, I need to do something to fix this breakage in our relationship.

So now I have to do that thing that literature exists to make happen.

Just as I would have to do in a real-time relationship, I have to lend myself to him by allowing my imagination to draw on my own experience to help me understand his.  I have to enter George Herbert’s heart and mind, his being.

I’m going to transfer over. I’m going to be him. I read again, this time, reading as if I was George Herbert, not myself;

So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape,                                                       10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me,                                         15
And in Thy members suffer ill.
They who lament one cross,
Thou dying daily, praise Thee to Thy loss.

The mortal agony of his broken state of mind, his ‘sighs’ seeming to bring him towards death (my modern self noting, like a doctor, ‘an almost life-ending depression’. This takes places even as  I am trying to read as GH).  As Herbert, I have to rest some time at ‘bliss’. (As Jane I rush away from it). I imagine the ‘bliss’ of escape from this pain, and of a greater bliss, the being one with ‘Thou’, who despite the pain  of this poem, is yet loving and kind. There are only two good words (by good I mean perhaps not pain-filled) words in the whole poem: they are ‘relief’ and ‘bliss’.  They both point to something, someone, ‘Thou’, outside of Herbert’s  pain-filled experience. That you might reach the bliss through being blown about by a gale is  still frightening. The main thing I have, as GH, is trouble, pain, fear, hurt, but I do believe there is an end to it. I do believe there is ‘bliss’ – somewhere.

As a reader, I note the full stop after that word. (The poem is five sentences long. It is worth reading each of them, as a sentence, as a thought in its own right). As Herbert rests for a little while with this thought of bliss the storm of his thoughts  seems to die down a little. Another thought arises. Still being GH, I read on:

Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me,                                         15

Now GH is feeling himself connected to ‘Thou’ through the pain, the grief, he suffers. God is constant to the nature of the life he lived as Christ, a man of sorrows. I wonder (as myself) if there is a third ‘good’ word in this poem: ‘constant’. and a fourth: ‘honour’. The pain does not abate, but this sentence offers a meaning for it. A paraphrase: God suffered as  man  on earth and that experience remains constant. Where Christ is in GH so pain also is, must be. And this is deliberate, necessary, right ‘a point of honour’. The grief is God. This is an amplification of the feeling I had at the beginning that God ‘was in’ the grief. At that point GH could hardly see God. Now he sees God’s suffering in his own suffering and is in fact at one with God in it. That’s a kind of relief.  It brings a meaning to a place where there was no meaning.

I’ve lent myself to GH to try to understand his experience as he tells me about it in the poem. I’ve no longer got my fingers in my ears, and given the level of his suffering and sorrow, I’m glad of that.

I’m going to leave the last two lines til tomorrow.

George Herbert, a Blackbird, the Midwife and still battling Couchgrass

drjanedavis

blackbird

I am going to continue my reading of George Herbert’s ‘Affliction III’. Anyone here yesterday will have seen that I spent nearly an hour on the first line, a record of slowness, even for me. Today I’ll try to do line two!

MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !”
By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :
Hadst Thou not had Thy part,
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape,
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me,
And in Thy members suffer ill.
They who lament one cross,
Thou dying daily, praise Thee to Thy loss.

I’m struck by Herbert’s idea of God being ‘in’ the grief. As if grief were a complex mixture of  compounded elements that only seems, at first glance, to be one solid thing. When you look more carefully, or in more dimensions, ‘grief’ contains lots of different elements, time-zones, experiences, meanings.

An example: yesterday and the day before I was complaining about my battle with couchgrass, an interminable struggle which I know I can’t win. It’s grief all right.  But if I only see it as grief (which I’m afraid is oftentimes the case) then I can feel overcome. It’s a one-dimensional experience, which is all sadness. Yesterday when I was working at it, a young male blackbird started visiting the patch I’d cleared, picking out worms and grubs to take back to his demanding  family in the big Hebe at the side of the garden. We spent a companionable hour or more  together, working alongside each other. I’ve never seen a blackbird so close. He came with inches of my boot and then of my hand.

I  love blackbirds, the sharpness of their outline and eye, the determination of their songs flung  from the high gable, the top branch, the telegraph pole. They are usually rather distant birds. So I was moved by his presence and as he worked  right beside me, I thought this wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for the battle against couchgrass.

But I don’t want to give the couchgrass too much credit, that’s to say it could have been any pernicious weed: it was my struggle, not the enemy, that contained the potential for the lovely experience. But there is no denying my struggle was provoked by the enemy. Thus evil has a place in creation? I always find I baulk against that – in the end  I’d like no evil, only good. I want a garden without couchgrass!

But a yin and yang view of the universe and all that’s in it is certainly part of George Herbert’s experience. For me, the blackbird experience was ‘in’ the couchgrass experience. Other things, too. The comforting smell of the spring earth was ‘in’ it, the close-up contemplation of  the ornamental strawberry plant root-system, the finding my favourite geranium in flower, hidden there amongst  choking weed. (Read a good post about Geranium Pyrenaicum ‘Bill Wallis’ here.)

If you translate Herbert’s word ‘God’ into ‘good’ (as I do) then you have a helpful thought. If ‘good’ is ‘in’ any bad experience, then bad does not have such great, such overpowering, dominion. I am resolved to  weed out the couch, but in a more accepting frame of mind. I’ll be looking for (and finding) good while I am doing it. 

When Herbert sighs ‘Oh God’ and realises God is ‘in’ the situation, it  presages  relief. Something beyond him and his pain is in control of (guiding) what is happening. From ‘guide’ Herbert’s mind leaps to the word ‘govern’. It’s almost as if he feels now someone else (‘Thou’) has the management of the situation, will handle it. For us it’s a hard leap to King (ultimate leader) but  for George Herbert, with the word ‘govern’ comes the idea of King. Thus in  line 4, the punishing ‘rod’ of a  bullying schoolteacher, donkey-beater, becomes the symbol of power, not the violent use of it.

To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :

If you feel something awful is being done to you by someone with power over you, it will feel like ‘rod’, a big stick to beat you with. If you feel you are being led, guided, even (hard word/thought for a modern person?) ‘ruled’ by someone who has no need to beat you, someone who has natural authority, symbolised by ‘sceptre’… might you feel someone else is in control, and might that help?

I waver back and forth here. I want to be in control of my self and my life, and grown-up enough to take responsibility for situations in which I find myself, but I can think of situations in life where I was glad to know there was someone else who was in control – for example the midwife, when I was giving birth.  When we are pushed to the limit, and are breaking, it is good to know someone else is going to care for us and help hold it together. For George Herbert, fearing the ‘unruly’ elements inside himself, the presence of ‘Thou’ is a lifesaver.

Hadst Thou not had Thy part,                                                               5
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.

The next three lines seem difficult. 

But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?

I’ll leave it there for today and get back to the garden.

Slowly Unfurling Structure

drjanedavis
feren
Magnificent Buckler Fern ( I think it is called ) unfurling its structure

Yesterday I said I’d be reading George Herbert, and so  here I am, a little later than usual because I slept way beyond my normal waking time, for which I am, as a five and sometimes four a.m. waker, always grateful.

This quiet country village pastor, a poet whose time falls somewhere between Shakespeare and Milton and whose poetry is like neither of them, has influenced my life as if he were a real person, known to me, knowing me for thirty years. If the dead live they live in poetry: here I’ve had a mentor  who has given good counsel, a shoulder to cry on cry, and recognition of my experience.  From him I have learned there are underlying structures in human inner experience, just there are in all nature.

It is hard (for me it was, in the beginning) to get past his religion. Here is a structure I cannot see. But I can see that George Herbert sees it, and that it orders chaos for him. I follow his human footsteps, all the time thinking (as it were in brackets) ‘don’t believe in God’. Translating his religious experience into some kind of analogue for my own inner life has become second nature after all these years, and I am hardly aware of the need to translate. But I can remember the need to do so at the beginning of our relationship.

During some of the very hardest times of my life Herbert was a, literally, inspiration. He breathed spirit into me. I was inspired through  the breath of his poetry. I learned to  believe that  the survival of the heart, scarred but ultimately undamaged, was possible because of his poems. The underlying message: trust in love.  I’m not very good at that, but he is a great teacher and I am a willing pupil.

There are many favourites. Today I’m going to start to read one I have not read for a good long time – maybe ten years.

Affliction III

MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !”
By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :
Hadst Thou not had Thy part,
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape,
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me,
And in Thy members suffer ill.
They who lament one cross,
Thou dying daily, praise Thee to Thy loss.

I am going to look at the first six lines:

MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !”
By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :
Hadst Thou not had Thy part,
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.

Have you ever had a blow, unexpected, frightening? and did you say, ‘Oh God’?

The starting point of this poem is a moment of utter sadness or depression, or brokenness: one of those times when ‘my heart did heave’. I’m interested in that phrase now – because thinking actually of retching, isn’t ‘heave’ another word for ‘retch’ and could Herbert have  meant that? (Online Etymological dictionary). So, to lift up… and yes. retch is in there; your stomach heaves, because it lifts itself up. So, to go back to the poem, ‘my heart did heave’: this physical response to some situation (we don’t know what caused any of it) of a retching sensation, a huge sigh, results in a cry ‘Oh God.’

As it does, under such a blow, or a huge sadness, even for a non-believer like me. But where for me that cry would be understood as meaningless (I say ‘oh god’ because it is a  habit lots of people have: doesn’t mean anything, I don’t take any notice of it) for Herbert, it is a real sign.

By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,

For a believer, a practising Christian like Herbert, those words could never be meaningless, even if they were uttered without deliberate consciousness as a wordless cry might be uttered. For Herbert this realisation (that the words are a cry to someone, to Thou, that the words put God in the mix, make God part of it, even though, interesting to note here Herbert doesn’t now call him ‘God’, he calls him ‘Thou’) ) is itself an immediate relief. (Remember Wordsworth’s ‘a timely utterance gave that thought relief’ in Intimations? )

What can this mean for me?

Something George Herbert understands by the word ‘God’ (I don’t know what that is, but I know he believes in it and that it helps him) is present. When it’s just me, no Herbert and no God, and I am struck a blow and my heart heaves and I cry out ‘Oh God’, I might now have an extra moment of consciousness, which is hard to see while it is happening but which might be broken down into the following movements:

  1. Though I do not believe in God, and the cry I’ve just uttered is an animal noise, yet it was not an animal noise (though, oh, I’ve made them, too in my time, with griefs). It was the word ‘God’. I  instinctively made a sort of unconscious, undeliberate prayer.
  2. For George Herbert and millions of other humans of all religious persuasions and over thousands of years, such cries have been uttered at times of troubles: people believe help will come. I may not believe as they believe, but their reality is part of my consciousness.
  3. Help is now in my mind as possibility
  4. Instead of only thinking fear, pain and other bad thoughts the thought ‘help’ is now in my mind

Oh dear, time’s up. This is the slowest close reading in the history of reading. Feels sub-atomic in its slowness. I’ll carry on tomorrow.

If you are willing to try him, you’ll find a great resource for reading George Herbert here. But I would recommend buying a book. Slim volume it may be, but going this slowly, it will last, usefully, the rest of your life.

A Room Full of Snakes and a Very Big Bird: How To Read A Poem

drjanedavis3 Comments
20160913_111656.jpg
Agnes playing with leaves, Calderstones, September 2016

How do you read a poem?

Many of us, readers and non-readers, seem to believe that knowledge, expertise, years of practice are needed to understand those human artefacts we call poems. A world industry has evolved to promote that  view.

Attentive readers will have noted how I have slipped from ‘read’ to ‘understand’.

‘Bah,’ as D.H. Lawrence may well have said (don’t  have time to check this morning) ‘the mind understands and there’s an end to it.’

Is reading poetry an art? Is it a skill? It is certainly true that, as in almost all human actions, practice helps. We can talk about that another time. But for today, because the question arose for me yesterday, I ask myself what does a novice need?  Look at the picture of Agnes playing with leaves. That’s what we’re aiming for today. Get the feel of poems. Gaze at them a lot. Chuck ’em about.

Here are 9 tips for reading a poem:

1. Enter the room

If you said to a snake-fearer, ‘Enter this room with a snakes in it…’ your snake-fearer would probably say, ‘No thanks.’

That’s what most people say to reading poetry.

But you are reading this. You are over your fear enough to have looked in this place for help. You are in the room with a live poem!

And here it is, chosen because it was the first or second grown up poem I ever read, and it came to mind in conversation yesterday. I was ten  when I found it in Palgraves Golden Treasury, which I’d been given  for my birthday. Almost every poem in the book seemed incomprehensible, though I wasn’t yet old enough to be afraid of them. I simply couldn’t get into them at all, and despite its lovely name, the Treasury seemed to me like reading an engineering manual, or Chinese. But I could read this one, I thought, and it was about something I could picture. And it was short;

                             The Eagle
                             He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
                                                                             Alfred, Lord Tennyson

(Note to self – need to write a separate post on  how to choose a poem)

2. Read it aloud

Poems are songs and it is good when they pass through your body and out of your mouth. You want to feel the rhythm, not by counting syllables, but by tapping your feet or fingers. Often, in poems, the rhythm does something, I mean, it makes something happen, and you want eventually to know what that is, so you need to get into the habit of feeling it.

Read the poem aloud, as slowly as you can. Where there is punctuation, take a pause. In this poem that is easy because the commas and semicolons come at the line endings. That means you only have to think in one dimension, which is helpful for a beginner. Later we’ll come to poems where the line-endings and punctuation work together in a different way.

3. Check how you are feeling

Poems are messages, communications, from other people’s hearts and minds. As with any human communication, you need to be aware of  how you feel as it unfolds. In this poem, as I read it aloud, now, as I write, I feel exhilarated at the end of the first three lines, ‘Ring’d with the azure world he stands’, but I feel afraid  at the end of the poem ‘And like a thunderbolt he falls.’ I thought he might be a very dangerous creature. And he felt quite close. ‘Thunderbolt’= Aiieee.

One of the things that has been so wonderful about running Shared Reading groups, or listening to other people telling me about their Shared Reading groups, has been seeing how  often people who are new to poetry are astonished and delighted by the strong feelings they feel when they recognise themselves in a poem.

But I didn’t see myself in this poem when I was ten. I only felt something like (and it was a feeling,  not words) ‘I get it!’ then I felt the feelings of the poem, which are:  wow, and then, agh. Which may be something close to what Tennyson may have wanted his readers to feel.

Don’t get stuck on, or too attached to, these opening feelings: reading is a dynamic exchange, a live unfolding. You want to be free to go with whatever the flow of this day’s reading turns out to be.

4. Read it aloud again

Check in, see if anything has changed, see if you see more as the  mental film of the poem unfolds. Try to notice something you didn’t notice before. I notice ‘hands’, because eagles don’t have hands, they have claws. Humans have hands. When you’ve noticed something,  have a pause and think about it.

5. Believe the poet  did what s/he did on purpose

You might say, ‘Ah, it only says ‘hands’ because he’s got to find a rhyme for ‘lands’…’

And if you said that, I’d say, ‘Well-noticed! they do rhyme, don’t they?’  But I’d try to persuade you that even a half decent poet could either find another rhyme for ‘lands’ or have put the word ‘claws’ and found word to rhyme with that. This poet chose ‘hands’, on purpose, because he wanted to put the word ‘hands’ (with all their associated human powers of action perhaps) in our minds. Why?  Perhaps because this poem is not simply about The Eagle?

6. Read it aloud again.

Reading the poem is the reality of it. Go back to it as often as you can. In this respect reading a poem is a meditation. You wander, which is natural, and then you say to yourself, now go back to the poem.

7. Notice things

You started by noticing a word, (‘hands’) so now notice another in line two.

Poems work in 3-D, up and down, back and forward, as well as in a linear, narrative fashion. Having seen the human word  in line one, you’ll have noticed the human word in two: yep, it’s ‘lonely’.

This adjective, ‘lonely’ (yes, it’s good to know some technical words such as ‘noun’ ‘verb’ ‘adjective’ and  ‘enjambement’. You don’t need them. But they can be useful, just as a Guide to Snake Markings could be useful in the Snake Room. More of this another day)…

This adjective, ‘lonely’ is a human word. Yet  it’s used to describe an inhuman landscape. The eagle is about as far from human settlement as it is possible to be, in fact, he seems almost a god, ‘ring’d with the azure world, he stands.’

(I’ve suddenly thought of the American Eagle and have no idea if there is any connection and don’t have time to look it up, but if I was reading this poem with more than minutes at my command I would now Google the American eagle, its dates, whether Tennyson was interested in the USA etc. But these things are merely facts. I don’t need them to read the poem. If it was just me and the poem, locked in the room, I’d simply note the god-like loneliness of the eagle with his head  ringed by ‘the azure world’.

Why world? When azure refers to the blue of the sky?

8. Let the questions proliferate

Reading a poem is like entering a room full of snakes and like meditating. (Also, sometimes,  a bit like a more or less controlled bomb-explosion. But we are not exploding today. As far as I know.)

9. Aim for flexible stretch, poetry as pilates

As you read you are moving between modes: sometimes being afraid, not knowing, not understanding. Sometimes you are saying to yourself, ‘Back to the poem’, and breathing and reading and feeling rhythm and feeling unnamed feelings. Sometimes you are asking lots of questions: questions which arise from your core, like bubbles in water or sparks from a fire. They don’t necessarily need answers. They need dwell time, space. They need to be asked. ‘Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.’ Think about your core. How are you feeling now?

Time and word count are up for today – finish this one tomorrow. Then back to Spenser.

A Slight Glitch and Shakey

drjanedavis1 Comment

Morning, readers. Today I’ve changed my site format and that’s done something odd with my photos in previous posts. Hope to sort this double vision soon. Advice gratefully received.

But don’t want to let that glitch interrupt my morning reading and writing.

I am still thinking about Thursday’s meeting with Sonya Hale, and about Daniel Magariel’s novel, One of The Boys, (see yesterday’s post) and about the deep resonances and ancient feelings that meeting and that novel provoked into life. For that reason, this poem by William Shakespeare caught my attention this morning. I must have read it before but I really don’t remember it. Why not? Today it is full of meanings. If you are new to Shakespeare read it aloud. Read it aloud anyway.

Sonnet 110
Alas, ’tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.
Most true it is that I have look’d on truth
Askance and strangely: but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.
Now all is done, have what shall have no end!
Mine appetite, I never more will grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confin’d.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.
I felt a delight in the opening line. There is nothing like recognition for provoking pleasure, even when it is recognition of having made a fool of yourself.
As I read on  the poem seems to be about having been unfaithful yet it didn’t feel to me only about sexual fidelity.
The shame of the opening is about having been disloyal to yourself. And ‘Here and there’ made me think of things Sonya said about the moving about from town to town when she was street homeless.  There is real, sad recognition (as much as guilt) in  ‘made myself a motley to the view’. (‘Motley’ is the name given to clothing worn by fools). It’s not only the humiliation of that idiocy but the shame of having done it to myself.
By the time I got to line 3, ‘Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear’, I was thinking about old mistakes and infidelities, not to my beloved, but to my better self. The violence of ‘gored’ gave me pause to reflect on the self-injury of bad thinking.
Alas, ’tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.
Now I read the next four lines together, another  little lump of thought:
Most true it is that I have look’d on truth
Askance and strangely: but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.
Is Shakespeare is responding to something another person has said – in a row, perhaps?  ‘You’ve looked on truth askance and strangely!!’ Thus he begins ‘Most true it is…’ but going off after others, or dishonesties, or cheating  or whatever he means by ‘these blenches‘ , it  ‘gave my heart another youth/and worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.’ Thus, out of bad something good may come? I realised you were the one for me!
The ‘askance and strangely’ is resonant of the ways in which, when you are not able to be true, all things are twisted. In Magariel’s novel, the father’s love for his sons is a twisted ‘askance’ version of something which is more like ownership. Will he one day go into recovery and see what he has done to his sons?
Now all is done, have what shall have no end!
Mine appetite, I never more will grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confin’d.
Shakespeare’s saying he’s never going to go off with someone else, never again! I’m back, forever. Would you believe him? Well, no, I wouldn’t, much as I often don’t believe myself when I promise myself I’m going to keep my room tidy.  What? After all these decades of chaos? You’re really going to change?
No, this is the return of a philanderer. Don’t give him welcome. As my friend Shelley once memorably said, ‘Chuck him, love, he’s a loser.’
But say I overrode these thoughts and feelings about the top-level  experience of the poem, the  unfaithful lover, and  went to something under the  lines, something about not being true, not necessarily about love or sexual relationship.
There are many ways in which a person can be unfaithful. Because of my conversation with Sonya, because of Magariel’s book  I’ve been thinking about the way in which one is required to practice faithfulness to a true ideal (I want to be a decent person, I want to be responsible and honest). How many times in that long effort have I ‘gone here and there/ And made myself a motley to the view’?  if you a re not going to get stuck at that point, you absolutely need to believe there is a place to which to return.
Thinking of Daniel Magariel’s book; the addicted parent may try to clean up, to get sober, to become  good parent (in another book!). The boys may grow up and want to learn to be decent men, not easy after growing up with a Dad like that. But these desires for change can and do happen even after we have ‘sold cheap what is most dear/made old offences of affections new.’
Believing in hope and change, you’d have to find a way to say ‘welcome back’ to the sinner that repenteth, wouldn’t you? When that sinner is yourself, when the offences are against your self, the only place you have to come back to is your self. I see the poem is ‘about’  a lover returning after shenanigans with others, and I read that at one level, as if it were a story I can lend myself to. But to understand it, and to feel it, I have to make the underlying connection with my own experience. So  I read as myself, returning to myself, after messing up again.  It would be good to be welcoming, pure, loving.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.
And that makes me think of Derek Walcott’s poem, Love After Love.
Excuse me, I need to tidy my room.

Early experiences in Shared Reading: Crossing the Bar

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crossing

Today’s poem is an important one for me because, quite aside from its moving power in its own right,  it characterises my move from University English to Shared Reading and The Reader.

I don’t say, as I nearly did,  my move from the University to  the real world, because a University is as real as anything else, and is certainly part of ‘the world’  –  in fact you might say, the world is too much in them, to borrow and change a line from Wordsworth.

Before, during and after University  I  was a personal reader, and for that I have to thank my outsider status and the Women’s Movement of the 1970s. ‘The personal is political’ was one of our slogans  a key thought for me, and I took it with me when I moved away from the radical feminism from which I had gained so much. ( ‘War is Menstrual Envy’ was another slogan that I loved, for some reason particularly annoying my very few male friends).

I don’t remember ‘the personal is political’ being applied to book-reading in the Women’s movement – there was a lot of heavy political theory there, as everywhere. But we read everything women had written, novels, poetry in order to try to build up a sense of a womens’ tradition. Through novels and poetry I got the personal experience of women, and at interview for University the exasperated inquisitor  asked me crossly, ‘Haven’t you read any books by men?’

Being a ‘personal reader’  in a University English department in the period 1980-2002 was no mean feat. People were trying to make literature part of the social and political sciences, to make it inhuman, de-personalised (and therefore perhaps budgetarily defensible, not a softee humanities thing  but hard as science, a brother to theoretical physics or plastics engineering). They were not happy times and I’m afraid the effect still lingers. I was lucky in that my teacher at University, Mr Brian Nellist  (I had others, but he was The One, and you can meet him here) was an old-fashioned non-theoretical reader, and he encouraged me to be one myself, and to read as myself, rather than always in terms of women and men. Though by then, I had stopped being motivated by gender inequality. Perhaps need to think more about that another time.

I did not have a Theory of Reading. I did not want to be self-conscious about my reading,  I just wanted to read literature and see what happened, what I could learn, what touched me, what I cared about.  Brian encouraged me, both as my third year tutor and as my Ph.D supervisor to to do that, finding out stuff that was useful and interesting to me. Essentially, he laid out this huge buffet of literature and said let’s walk up and down this, and see what strikes your fancy.

Even so, what happened was at a formal distance. I’d like to think more about what that means another time.

But to the poem. When I first began to have the idea of taking ‘great literature out of the university and into the hands of people who need it’ (not a snappy slogan but mine own) I had no idea of the power of the stuff I was going to unleash. Despite reading personally myself since I was child, and despite having chosen pieces that I thought most adults would find moving, I wasn’t prepared for tears. In nearly twenty years in the University, I had never seen anyone moved to tears by a poem.

In the very first shared reading groups, which were called ‘Get Into Reading’ (there were two, on different days of the week, one at Ganneys Meadow Early Years Centre, on Woodchurch Estate, and one at the Community College on Laird Street, Birkenhead. Both mixed, open community groups) and before that, before 2000, in the prototype experimental groups I ran before the Get Into Reading , which took place in St Cath’s Hospital Birkenhead and in Waterstones, Bold Street, Liverpool,  I read this poem.

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 In each group as I read, someone was moved to tears. In Waterstones’ after work reading group, a nurse who had come straight from Arrow Park hospital filled up with tears as I read. She said it was the line, ‘But such a tide as moving seems asleep’, which had got to her, because her Dad had died  when she was a teenager, and when he was alive they used to walk sometimes along the riverside and the tide…poetic image and reality had crashed together for her. Nothing has ever put it into words, she said, as if seeing ‘ it’ in words had caused the release of tears.

There are things you need to know (what a bar is, how it functions, what a pilot is in harbour terms…) to understand the poem but like all great poems, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know them. The music of the poem will carry most listeners far.

What is interesting to me as I look at it this morning is how Tennyson, writing about death, (all the people who cried in those early groups spoke of someone they loved who had died: the poem seemed to speak to them of particular deaths) is actually writing about, anticipating, his own death. Yet the poem reads – sounds – like an elegy for another. Or perhaps it simply touches all death by thinking of one particular one.

The ‘one clear call’ of the opening line is open to much interpretation. People in Shared Reading groups have said to me over the years, that it might be any kind of sign, just something that reminds you of mortality. The ‘call’ is now but the death is in the future;

And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea

As I read these lines, they are coloured for me by the people I have read the poem with over many years –  the nurse (cannot remember her name) and Dorrie at Ganneys Meadow and a young woman with blond hair in the Laird Street group, and others. I think also of my own death – so much closer  now that when I read the poem in Ganneys Meadow, and the need for ‘no moaning’ seems more real and more pressing. Of course, ‘moaning of the bar’  in purely linguistic terms may be the noise made by waves  crashing against ‘the bar’ – the sandbar built up by currents in a harbour mouth or estuary… but is anything in a poem ever purely linguistic?  A word in a language  is like a bundle of sticks, a bundle of meanings (whose thought is this, please?). We put the sticks in the bundle according to our experience, memory. So I may  partly think of waves crashing far out in the  estuary, partly of my own complaining, partly of the sobbing of a bereaved friend.

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

The poem, for all its sadness, is a brave one. ‘when I put out to sea’ does not feel like the end but rather a beginning.  It is a brave setting out on adventure, however terrifying.  The fact that the first two stanzas are one sentence seems to matter – there is no full stop after sea, but thethought caries on, after the line ending, after the ending of the stanza. and the second stanza is full of comfort.

But it is time to stop! oh dear. More tomorrow.

A bit more time management, plus the Cherry, hung with snow

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cherry 18.04.JPG
Cherry blossom in my garden 18.04.17
I don’t know who created the management theory that time is elastic, and that you can fit in whatever you want to fit in, but it’s not true. It is true that time changes as we experience it, but there are still only 24 hours in a day, 168 in a week. but there are two types of time: there is time-experience which speeds up or slows down depending on the amount of  flow-concentration-energy you are putting into whatever is happening, and there is clock time, which ticks on whatever is happening.

Three thoughts I’ve picked up on this topic which have been helpful have  been (i) how slowly time would go if you were sitting on a hot stove (thanks Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap) (ii) how you’d find time to deal to deal  with a flood in your house, whatever was happening at work (thanks Laura Vanderkam at TED). These thoughts are both about priorities and pain – it hurts if you don’t attend to either of them, and so they shoot to the top of the list of priorities. Time management isn’t about  time  so much as what matters most.  You can’t do everything. Unless perhaps your name is Tim Ferris but even then… from Tim Ferris I picked up the third thought: (iii) it matters how you start your day. I used to know this once, but somehow  over the last twenty years had forgotten. Writing this blog every day is helping me remember. I’m giving an hour a day to reading, and writing about a poem. That’s seven hours reading I wasn’t previously doing. This choice has made me happy (and only a little bit late on a  couple of occasions).

Perhaps some of our inability to manage time comes from the refusal to accept the necessity of choice, and the subsequent inability then to act on such (unmade, perhaps unacknowledged) choices. Time management might be more helpfully called choice management. No poem does the simple sums about time, life and choices better than this, from A. E. Housman:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

Believe me, this is a scary poem to read when you are sixty-one! That middle stanza is remorseless.

I do hope to live beyond 70, but everything now frankly  feels a blessing: I know quite people of my age who have died. So I’ll stick bravely with Housman’s computation and recast it for myself: Now, of my threescore years and ten, / Sixty-one will not come again… only leaves me nine more! Ouch and aieee! Why the hell would I be  doing anything that wasn’t vitally important to me? Have I seen the cherry blossom?

I run out into the garden for another look.

Last time I read this poem was in an NHS addiction service centre, sometime in the last ten years. I thought then it was a bit of a risky poem to take, given quite a lot of us in the room were over 50, and I guessed that like me, quite a few people might feel (a little) frightened by the poem,  after all we’d all wasted quite a lot of time one way or another. But I thought you might only be a little frightened by the poem. And indeed, there’s something so tender and quiet in its tone, something so strong in its resolve, that no one was scared, and everyone agreed they would go for a walk and look for cherry blossom this week. Does making that choice affect one’s chances of recovery? I think every strong choice affects one’s chances.

I find the poem’s sums strengthening. You could ignore or not notice the first stanza, yeah, yeah, blossoms, again, so what. It’s a normal verse about normal blossom. you are in a normal state of mind as you read it. But the killer second stanza, quite unexpected  – yet not really unexpected, is it? Because the key thing about cherry blossom is its transience, it’s there and gone. Fifty chances to see it? That’s not enough!

‘Fifty springs are little room’ and I sure as hell don’t have  fifty ahead of me. Maybe twenty, maybe none for all I know. Therefore I finish writing a little early today, so I can get to Calderstones Park before I need to be in the office. I will go walk around and see the blossom. What could be more important?
See the late, great Denis Potter, two months before his death, discuss this blossom with Melvyn Bragg, here.

Dearest Freshness: iridescent feeling, urgent syntax

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horse chestnut
Horse Chestnuts opening afresh for Easter, London 15.04.17

Yesterday I started reading G.M.Hopkins’ poem, God’s Grandeur, which I’m going to continue today.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

 

I’d got to the point of having to  go back and read all the first four lines together;

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

From a full-on start, I thought by this point, something’s gone wrong! Hopkins’ sees the ‘grandeur of God’ but is troubled by others not recognising ‘his rod’, which I thought  yesterday was power, rule and  ‘rood’ (Christ’s cross, the symbol of that rule for Christians). Suddenly, instead of grandeur Hopkins is seeing very human mess. In the midst of that I have to notice the fifth line, with its weary, deliberate, treading repetition;

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

I’m not sure if  ‘generations have trod, have trod, have trod’ is about previous generations following God’s rule, (the rhyme with ‘rod’ makes me feel the connection), or simply having got us here, to this point.  Because the line seems also to turn to modern days, to our generation, where ‘all is seared with trade’. ‘Seared’ connects back to ‘flame’.  It’s as if things are going wrong in all directions – I’m thinking the fall; the tendency of things to always go wrong, go off.  But it’s hard to believe I am only only in line 6, only that short distance  from ‘the world is charged with the grandeur of God.’  Is Hopkins, am I, having both thoughts, feelings at once?  This is feeling as iridescence, always moving, highly-coloured, always changing. You notice  it and it is almost gone. We’ve moved from the apprehension of the dynamism of spirit to the sear, blear, smear, toil, smudge, smell, soil… of this common day world. By the end of the stanza, those feet that trod for thousands of years and felt the reality of a connection to earth, they feel nothing, ‘being shod.’ You’d think this might be the end of it. You’d have that movement from ‘grandeur’ to ‘smudge and smell’ and think, that’s the end of this poem. Can’t go on from there. And yet – he takes a break, feels something else, picks up his pen and continues:

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

The verb ‘spent’ picks up a different sort of economy to the blear smear toil world of filthy  trade which seems only to despoil the world. Even as toil is going on and  humans are wrestling coal out of the ground and tilling the earth in painful labour, yet ‘nature is never spent’,  promising us renewal every time we notice it, even in despair.

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

The adjective, ‘dearest’,  is so tender, as if even as he notices, re-notices, the freshness Hopkins is comforted, loved by it and able to love in return. It is ‘deep down things’  – urgent syntax this,  rushing to the main point, the under-presence, the centre, where the heart (heart of nature, heart of Hopkins, heart of me) remains fresh.

This thought pauses and gathers strength at the semicolon, more is coming. Hopkins sees the ‘black’ night lighten to a ‘brown’ dawn. wonderfully not golden like the shook foil at the opening – just a minor modulation of (what in other poems we know is his night despair) the dark to less dark.  That will do. The ‘brown brink’ gives way to the powerful verb ‘springs’.

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Now the bad feeling, the awful feeling of smear and blear, of the soil, is only in  the tiny moment of the colour ‘brown’ and is freed from it.  Now Hopkins feels, and reports as if it were knowledge (‘because’) the presence of  the ‘Holy Ghost’.

For me, reading from without the Christian tradition, the poem is yet a powerful expression of faith, which I live through as I read. It seems slightly odd to keep referring to ‘Hopkins’ when most of my experience of the poem is my experience.  I borrow his experience, live in it.

…the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

When Hopkins writes of the Holy Ghost, I read something about my experience of love as a power and a possibility and that there is comfort, rest and solace (ah, that warm breast, that hug) and ‘ah! bright wings’.

That exclamation mark! It is as if putting ourselves ( Hopkins and me) in the present, right now, feeling love and hope, being lifted up. He always wants to make experience alive. That leads to all this fast movement through  the crackle of powerful electric joy, the flaming out, to the weird concentration of men on trade and  toil and making mess then back to  nature’s replenishing freshness and even to the rise of spirit… in twelve lines.  Powerful, realistic, live.

 

 

 

 

It’s not what it looks like

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gods grandeur.JPG
The Shook Foil of the World’s Grandeur,  Portugal 2014
Graham Ward’s book Unbelievable: why we believe and why we don’t has made me think,  for several days now, about the ways in which I can understand the word ‘belief’  and so I thought it might be worth looking the word up in my old favourite The Online Etymological Dictionary:

belief (n.) late 12c., bileave, replacing Old English geleafa “belief, faith,” from West Germanic *ga-laubon “to hold dear, esteem, trust” (source also of Old Saxon gilobo, Middle Dutch gelove, Old High German giloubo, German Glaube), from *galaub- “dear, esteemed,” from intensive prefix *ga- + *leubh- “to care, desire, like, love” (see love (v.)). The prefix was altered on analogy of the verb believe. The distinction of the final consonant from that of believe developed 15c.

The be-, which is not a natural prefix of nouns, was prefixed on the analogy of the vb. (where it is naturally an intensive) …. [OED]

Belief used to mean “trust in God,” while faith meant “loyalty to a person based on promise or duty” (a sense preserved in keep one’s faith, in good (or bad) faith and in common usage of faithful, faithless, which contain no notion of divinity). But faith, as cognate of Latin fides, took on the religious sense beginning in 14c. translations, and belief had by 16c. become limited to “mental acceptance of something as true,” from the religious use in the sense of “things held to be true as a matter of religious doctrine” (a sense attested from early 13c.).

I was particularly surprised by  the connection to love and trust. Can I accept this: that what I believe is what I trust to be true ? But also esteem seems a vital element – what I hold in high regard, what I believe to be of value. Perhaps what I believe is what I trust or value to be true, to be  valuable.

Feel as if there are two types of worlds – one material, the other mental. The material world is vast and huge but I believe limited ( I mean limited on this planet, not talking about the entire universe here). The mental world, the world we can think seems, though I’ve no proof, feels unlimited. The two worlds, modes, interlock  (or sometimes, jarringly, don’t). World of  roads, rocks, work, journey, food and water. World of belief, outlook, understanding. World of  the physical planet and my physical presence on it. World of my emotions, feelings, interpretations. The warp and weft of  being in both worlds locks the two together, the strands  of each becoming the fabric of  my experience, my existence. Literature is a transitional object.

These rough thoughts have been linked to some others about poetry. While reading Intimations of Immortality this last week, and  trying to re-think what  such a poem is, I’ve been thinking there are different types of poem:  (don’t know why, or if, this matters) poem that is mainly  story   – The Lady of Shallot, The Canterbury Tales  – though of course many of these are also thoughts.  A poem that is mainly thought or feeling experience – I’d count  Intimations as  one of these, and Four Quartets. There are also lyrics, poems  that are more like songs: My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose and those may also have thought in them but will put a lot of energy, and meaning,  into rhythm and form. I’ve been thinking too about what makes a poem different to a story,   even when the poem is a story, and I think it is to do with thought or feeling or belief and the way the poem asks its reader to follow, mentally, and perhaps physiologically, its thought patterns.  A story feels a lot  further off. But when I am reading a poem – but that’s dead language.  That doesn’t describe the experience.  It’s not like that. The  experience is one of immersion, of flow (see Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi much-watched Ted talk here). Once you go in and immerse – it is no longer ‘reading literature’ but experiencing the movements,  the shape, the liveness  of someone else’s mind.

Because I’ve spent a lot of time out-of-doors this week, this poem has been in my mind. Don’t be put off by ‘God’ ! if you don’t like the word, or don’t understand it, just cross it out and replace with an ‘x’. The rest of the poem’s language will  fill in the blank.

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I have read Hopkins’ poetry since I first encountered it at ‘A’ level when I was a half-hearted student at Liverpool City College in the late 1970s.  I had little belief in myself as a student, and none in the world’s offer to me, so education, though it held a vague sort of theoretical promise, also felt unlikely to yield much for me. Aged  22, 23, 24 I dabbled in it.  Time and money on drink and drugs and weyhey! might be a better bet? But when, through the A level syllabus, I met The Wreck of The Deutschland, I knew I had  bumped into something powerful that  I wanted to  comprehend. I wanted to make what Hopkins had part of me. I would learn it! In fact I learned the whole poem off by heart. How very odd, to be  so much moved by something which apparently had no relation to me – I did not  share any of Hopkins’ ‘beliefs’. Or did I?

But back to the poem.  First, the verb ‘charged’ : it’s about energy, pulsing, ready to burn. But it is also ‘charged’ as in ‘charged with’ = has the task of, perhaps even more strongly than that, carries the burden of…yes, the world cannot do other than pulse with this fullness of energy.  That is its load. ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ I leave  the second half of that line for now, because  though I like the word ‘grandeur’, I don’t know about ‘God’.  I pass over it. The world is charged with something.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

Ah yes, this is why I love Hopkins, always the surprise, the ‘think harder’, the ‘picture it’.  what does the pronoun ‘it’ refer to? The  grandeur? the charge? God? the world? all of the above? And then ‘ like shining from shook foil’ !!! Go on, see it!  a live active verb, ‘shining’, but it is  becoming a noun even as we see it happen, and a second verb, ‘shook’. the functional shift of ‘shining’ has  sent my brain activity soaring! Feel the world is crackling with live energy. I am excited! He keeps the pressure up, with his gathering ‘to a greatness’, and I’m rolling with it, until I get to the oil. What?  I have to go back and read all the first four lines together;

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

I feel the oil – though charged with the same iridescence as the foil, and rhyming with it – slows things down, maybe it is the ‘ooze’ doing the slowing. But I find it hard to  make an image here. Maybe I see one drop of oil,  shimmering, in psychedelic close-up, but I can see beyond the line ending and know ‘crushed’ is coming. And the full stop. Something’s going wrong!

And surely for Hopkins, it is; ‘Why do men then now not reck his rod?’ (= Why don’t people these days take notice of  god’s power? there’s an edge, too, of fear, I think , in ‘rod’  it’s a weapon, a club, a beating stick, and it is also probably  ‘rood’ = old english ‘cross’ Why don’t people now take notice of God’s suffering for us?). Well,  I am one of them, but as I read, I don’t count myself so, because I have partly become Hopkins, but also partly because I stand off from the criticism and feel  I do ‘reck’ some of the ‘rod’ because I do believe in everything in this poem up to the word ‘oil’. There I stop.

‘Crushed’  – a bit like ‘god’ at the beginning, I ignore. Don’t want to feel I am crushing, spoiling, breaking up that shook out grandeur of the opening lines.

Ah, time’s up. More tomorrow. That was  like a very refreshing swim. I climb dripping out of the water and back into air.  Breakfast!

 

 

Quietening the noisy years

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thrush outside
Thrush near the back porch, Tyreso 11 April

Yesterday in my reading of Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality Ode’  I had got to this point;

Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,

You can read the whole poem here.  Read it aloud.

I was thinking about our experiences when we are on the very edge of what we can know, how often that must feel like knowing nothing, or being afraid, or at least, to use Wordsworth’s words, like ‘blank misgivings’. A misgiving = a feeling of doubt. Wordsworth’s poem helps me think that doubts are the very thing  I should be most glad of because they  give the clue to ‘something’ else. I am thinking about my own doubt – sorry, endlessly repeated here – about my ability to use the words ‘soul’ and ‘God’.  That inability, which  might be also be identified as under the heading  ‘fallings from us, vanishings’ might be a clue that there is something evading my current language, something my mind does not understand. Hence ‘misgiving’ rather than outright rejection.

Thus, Wordsworth gives thanks,

…for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
He continues;
High instincts before which our mortal Nature

Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:

Agh  – so much to  take in, so much to  understand and think through. I tell myself it doesn’t matter how much reading I get done each day, so long as the reading itself is happening. But I am going to try to read this whole section today. Take a breath, it might be a long posting.

The ‘obstinate questionings’ are, he now understands, ‘high instincts’. Brilliant to name them as ‘high’  because of course we usually think of instincts as ‘low’, as ‘animal. These blank misgiving /high instincts are not part of ‘our mortal Nature’, they are from, as he says in the opening stanza, ‘elsewhere’. Wordsworth gets the poem (and me, reading) to a point between experienced knowledge and language. When we give them their due, those ‘blank misgivings’ become or are clues to something else. When we feel that kind of feeling, unnameable, powerful, not in language, bigger than us then it seems our mortal Nature feels worried, small and, in Wordsworth feeling of it, guilty,  as if it had done something wrong. (I’m thinking of the novel The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris, a novel profoundly influenced by Wordsworth, I’d guess.  My book of the year last year, terrific story of a man troubled by High Instincts)

High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:

I don’t know about the guilty feeling so I’m leaving that aside for the time being, trying to go with the flow of Wordsworth’s mind, not against it. When do I feel like this?  I think,

Gazing into the eyes of a new-born baby.
Looking at the earth from the top of a mountain.
At the edge of the ocean.
When faced with azure blue in sky or water.
Looking at the stars, the moon on a cold clear night.
Flying over Greenland.
Sometimes when walking.
Seeing Earth stir to life after winter.
Gardening or looking closely at plants as they change
When lost in reading  or writing at the edge of my ability.

The feelings of ‘more than normal’ , these ‘high instincts’, are about (for me) the spreading of   – growth of – consciousness to its very limits. You can’t think, you can only experience without language to express the experience.  At such moments that we are operating beyond what the poem calls ‘the light of common day.’ This can be frightening. maybe that is why he says ‘High instincts before which our mortal Nature / Did tremble’?

I’m still hanging back from the word ‘guilty’! And I’m going to go on now…

As I’ve been reading something has been  bothering me. I wanted to know  if Wordsworth was writing from direct experience –   the experience of very young children seems so central to the poem. I had to look it up on Wikipedia. Wordsworth had had two children by the time he wrote Intimations (Caroline, born to Annette Vallon, France 1792, and  John, born to Wordsworth’s  wife Mary Hutchinson,  born 1803) I wondered if that 11 year gap between his first child and his second affected his thinking about babies. Certainly possible to imagine that  it made him  concentrate very hard on his little son.

But back to the poem.  Wordsworth picks up again the thread about  what exactly it is that he gives thanks for – not the straightforward happy stuff of childhood, ‘delight and liberty’, but, the sense continues (let’s take a run at it, shall we?)

… for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

It’s as if Wordsworth stops trying to work it out and accepts that he can’t know what those intimations are  – ‘Those shadowy recollections,/ Which, be they what they may’ and yet – even if we don’t know what they are, they

Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence:

These moments of intimations of something ‘more than, whatever they are, are now ‘a fountain-light…a master-light’.  They move into  the present tense, indeed beyond that, into what feels a permanent present, with that repetition of ‘are yet’. When you plug into this mode there’s a shift, ‘common day’ is absolutely gone (and yet are we still in it?)

The intimations now seem both the source of light (‘fountain-light’) and also the key to the way we see things (‘master-light of all our seeing’). They feel like parents  – as opposed perhaps to   the ‘homely Nurse’, Earth, who tries to help us settle into her foster-care earlier in the poem.  These original feelings – ‘which, be they what they may’ – ‘uphold us, cherish…’

Yes, I’m thinking it is as if we have something in us, innate, often long-lost, like instinct, that holds on the to the super-natural – not just of Earth – part of us.  These experiences, look after us , cherish … and when we connect  with that innate, instinct part of self, then  ‘our noisy years’ (daily life, common day, all that we do in our busy-ness) are reduced to

…moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence:

When I’m reading this, I am trying all the time to think  ‘Do I know this?’ Partly the poem helps me know it  – by sharing its experience, by putting me through it. I’m thinking of times when I feel the ‘noisy years’ are quietened and I feel my life is a moment  ‘in the being of the eternal Silence’. (Is that another word for God? I think it is, and one I am much more easy with using). There are such moments. I recall them now as I write.

I’m going to finish this section.

…moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

It’s as if now Wordsworth has  established to himself his own sense of what those intimations are, as if he has cleared a path to them, can hear, feel, see, experience them, and he knows that once he has  experienced this clarity, he’ll not lose it again. These are ‘truths that wake/to perish never.’

Then he remembers ordinary life, the common day (listlessness/mad endeavour/man/boy), feels its threat, is finally untroubled by it  – nothing can now destroy what he knows.

Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

We can go to that place, to that experience of more-than-this, we can re-find the source, the sea, and, wonderfully, can ‘in a moment travel thither’.  This seems a very different feeling to the place the poem started, when the pressure of such a move frightened Wordsworth and seemed to hurt him with loss. Remember…

But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Yet now the glory is available to him, in a moment, he can experience the original powerful feeling of connection to something/somewhere ‘afar’. He’s got to this by or through the course of the poem – and so  have I, following his movements of thought and feeling.

There’s more for tomorrow but time to stop now.