I’ve been thinking about why I would or would not bring the Elena Ferrante ‘Neapolitan’ novels I’ve been reading lately to a Shared Reading group (I thought ‘yes’ at first but now I’m thinking ‘no’, and wondering why I’ve changed my mind).
What am I looking for when I choose something?
Let me set up an imaginary example.
I am to go to read in a centre for women who have been involved in the criminal justice system. I need to decide what to take with me that first week, when I don’t know the women with whom I will be reading.
I do know (from experience or by talking to staff at the Centre) that for some women literacy will be a problem, they won’t be able to read or won’t be able to read easily. If they can read, they may rarely do so. I know that some of the women will be very highly intelligent, there may well be someone with a Ph.D here but mostly they will have failed at school. Also, I know that some or many of the women will be angry and distressed, that women with children may have had them taken away from them, that many of the women will have been in, sometimes since childhood, abusive and damaging relationships. If they’ve worked, they’ll usually have worked in service jobs, including sex-work, though there may be a minority who are or have been professionals . Some will be living with addictions, some will be living with chronic physical conditions, most will have enduring mental health problems. None of these ‘categories’ are straightforward or predictable or singular, and when we meet, I won’t know, and I won’t be able to tell, which of the women has done time for murder, who has bowel cancer, which of the women were abused as children, how are many involved with mental health services, or who has the Economics Ph.D.
There is no way that forming a Shared Reading group in this situation is simply ‘facilitation’. This is about leadership, however discretely that leadership is exercised.
My first task is to persuade women to attend the session – that’s a hard task, often the hardest bit of setting up the group – but I’m going to pass over that here because I want to press on to think about reading matter. I’m in this centre and somehow I have managed to persuade – let’s say – five women to attend.
What goes into the choice of reading?
The Shared Reading group is not just about reading but also about a way of being together. I’m here to create a particular kind of community. The reading material, whatever it is, will be in service to that community, just as I will. I’m going to choose whatever we read with a view to it helping me build the community.
I want to find something that will have a half-decent chance of speaking to each of these five people, so I need something humanly recognisable, something that translates easily into particular and specific and different lives.
At the same time, I don’t want it to be too immediately demanding because immediately difficult stuff will put people off and in the early days my job is to build – to demonstrate, to make happen – the group.
So something from Tolstoy or Dostoevsky or George Eliot or Shakespeare will have a half-decent chance of speaking to as many people as I can get into the room, and I know there will be things that are humanly recognisable in all of those authors, but they will be hard to translate into contemporary here and now. So I probably won’t pick them, though later I might. In another group, with different people, and so long as I was confident, an extract from War and Peace or Crime and Punishment might be a great starter.
But here, I want to address the anxieties of women who have never read and think they can’t, I want to interest women who can read but don’t, and I want to surprise someone who is thinking they’ve already got this. I want to engage everyone at the highest point of their intelligence and I want to make sure that everyone enjoys themselves and feels involved. I want us to have a laugh, but also to be a bit shocked. I want literature to be surprising. Not like school.
And I want some poetry because – experience shows, over and over again – that poetry gets to places that prose often cannot find. That might be Invictus – great poem for any group, but especially for people who have had big trouble, ( Reader friend and volunteer and long-standing group member, Louise Jones, blogs about her relation to this poem here) or it might be Sweet Content, because I bet a lot of these women have trouble sleeping. But finding a poem will be relatively easy, because lots of poems are touching and powerful. Charles Bukowski’s poemBluebird would be great.
And for a story: Wheelbarrow Kings by Jess Walter. It’s from his terrific collection, We Live in Water. I’ve given my copy away – twice now – so this is from memory: two guys, addicts I think, have come by a huge monster of a TV set, and are wheeling it about in a wheelbarrow they’ve found, in hope of selling it to someone. It’s hopeless task, because these days, everyone who can afford a TV already has a monster flat screen: so they can’t sell it to anyone. That’s about it.
It’s got quite a lot of swearing in it, so that will make us laugh. And it’s a bit like having a dead-end job, so for those of us who have done time as waitresses and washers-up, it will be familiar, and for anyone who’s ever tried but not profited from a crime or scam, it’s brilliant. And about having a mate. And about being an idiot. And about being stuck. So we’ll all go through those recognitions in our own particular ways and we’ll have a laugh together.
This is week one. I want a powerful and immediate experience for as many of my group as possible. Next week I might want to start Pastoralia by George Saunders: what it’s like working in a theme park and should you ever snitch? But if I can keep this group together I might head towards Jane Eyre or The Winter’s Tale or Othello. Or maybe The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban, because we’re all on a journey and all need a home.
These are my choices, choices of books I find great. I want to share them, partly because I think they are great. Partly because I know they will help build that very specific Shared Reading magic which makes private experience feel profound, knowable, and – should you choose – shareable. Such works create the realms of gold I want to find.
Sometimes in novels you can get pages and pages of story or plot which is fine for a solitary, in the head, fast reader – you just flick on through, fast, and no problem. But in a Shared Reading group a novel that has a lot of sheer fast narrative really slows a group down. You are just reading and reading and reading… and reading aloud six or more times slower than if you were reading in your head. Six times slower is great if the stuff is really rich and interesting, and terrible if it is not, like the difference between walking for five miles round and round a derelict industrial estate and walking for five miles on the Pembroke Coastal Path. That makes it seems as in Ferrante is derelict industrail estate but she’s not – it’s just that I’m not convinced it would stand being read aloud all the way through. Extracts, yes, for sure. then you could lend the whole books out for private reading.
That experience of narrative with no stopping place, no great sea views, no lovely wild-flower close-ups, doesn’t happen much in great novels because in the greatest novels most sentences are poetry, deep and full. You can stop almost anywhere and let the words sink in and blossom to realms of gold. Short stories, perhaps because of pressure of form, can often create those realms, too. ‘Wheelbarrow Kings’ – with its derelicts and derelict landscape – certainly creates them for me. It’s power of language that does it.
Great! Damsons coming along nicely in a Perast garden, 24 July
Been reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, My Brilliant Friend and The Story of A New Name, and enjoying them. And I’ve been asking myself : would I take them to a Shared Reading group?
People often – always – ask the question, how do you choose what you read?
The answer is: the Reader Leader chooses. The Reader Leader has that responsibility, though they sometimes involves group members in the choosing. So, if choosing a novel, a group leader might bring along a bagful of novels and a group spend a session reading bits of them, seeing what people fancy. But the Reader Leader will have chosen the books in the bag. Many groups only read short stories and poems – the Reader Leader chooses them.
Sometimes, some Reader Leaders will choose to let group members decide. I think that’s a mistake – and undemocratic – because often the group members have no basis on which to make a choice, and the person with the most determined voice wins the toss. ‘I read a really great book once, called The Da Vinci Code,’ said a guy in a hostel. ‘We should read that! ‘
It’s the Reader Leaders job to be tactful – be kind – but to make sure that a book s/he thinks is a good book, a book of high quality is brought to the table – so you have also to be bold. For me, as a Reader Leader, a great book could never be The Da Vinci Code. And yes, I have read it. It is one of the few books I’ve ever finished and – literally – put in the bin. So I have to stand by that, saying, tactfully, but maybe equally forcefully, ‘No! what about ….’ and that is my responsibility.
Because I must take responsibility for the hours and hours of reading and talking that lie ahead. We can’t go on a long pointless journey.
So while I’m thinking about the Elena Ferrante novels, I’m also thinking, I may only have one chance at a novel with four of these people in this high-turnover group. Is this the right novel for that one chance? Maybe I’d be better reading George Saunders’ short stories, Pastoralia? Anna Karenina? Jane Eyre? Hester? The Golden Notebook? As far as I am able I want to be sure the book we start is going to yield good stuff, and stuff that is good for this particular group of people. But what is ‘good stuff’? What is ‘good’?
It’s the Reader Leader’s responsibility to decide on that, knowing the reading matter, knowing, however slightly, the people in the group.
Is it possible that someone could lead a nine month Shared Reading of The Da Vinci Code? I’m really afraid it is possible – because we have to trust the Reader Leader to think about what will work for their group: we don’t have laws, in Shared Reading, we can’t stop people. We trust that if it doesn’t work, people will vote with their feet, or say something. And we try, through Read to Lead and through Masterclasses and the Reader blog, and the Spark Series and the Membership website and The Reader magazine and this blog of mine to show what ‘good’ might look like in lots of different guises.
To return to the Neapolitan novels…These are compelling stories and they’ve been making me think a lot about my past, growing up the in the pub in Parliament Place where my mum was the landlady, and our street was a place of strange transition between nineteenth century slum and the modern world. I went to Blackburne House High School in a green blazer and a hat, and people in the pub said ‘She goes to college!’ Men went ‘down the pool’ to get a ship, some of the women had beehive hairdos and sometimes black eyes, two teenage girls in across the road from us were prostitutes, a powerful and unapologetic racism played out amongst us, and I was taken to the pictures by a boy who paid for everything in sixpences: when we got back the police were waiting. He’d robbed the phone box on the corner to take me out.
I’m enjoying thinking about all that as I read and learning about the world and people Ferrante presents me with. There’s a lot in these novels about what being a woman under constrained circumstances means. You’re really brainy and you get married at sixteen because nothing else can happen. Could I imagine reading these novels then in a women’s hostel, a women’s prison? Perhaps I could. Yes, think I would do that. I’d be choosing on behalf of the women, who might really enjoy the story, and possibly, like me, recognise some of it. and that’s important first off, but I’d be choosing also because the books offer the opportunity to open a conversation about serious choices, serious blockages, what a life is, how you make it.
For me – personally – the important choices have been about learning about morality. Funny word, hard to use in public. Going to try.
I’d start with whatever would work to get my group together and into Shared Reading but always want to get to a point where I was sharing what seems to me the very best stuff, for example Silas Marner ( a book that has worked well in a women’s prison, by the way) or The Winter’s Tale – truly, from my point of view, these are the great books. I don’t mind standing by the word great, or my ability to use it. And such works being so great, I naturally want to share them. Just as I want to share a great Albanaian dessert I’ve eaten here in the Bay of Kotor – I don’t have link to the Daily Mail from this site, but here’s a good recipe for Tri Leche from Rick Stein…
It’s natural, isnt it, to want to share something fantastic? So it is I want to encourage other people to read thses books which h vae been great to me, and that includes my fellow Reader Leaders who might not yet fancy a Shakespeare play, a Victorian novel.
Why do I love them so? because they put me on a spot where I can think about how to be good, how to live a good life. Not that I do, but I do want to learn. So here I learn from George Eliot and Godfrey Cass about how hard bravery is, and what being weak feels like. He waits outside Silas ‘ cottage while the doctor pronounces Molly dead or alive:
He walked up and down, unconscious that he was plunging ankle-deep in snow, unconscious of everything but trembling suspense about what was going on in the cottage, and the effect of each alternative on his future lot. No, not quite unconscious of everything else. Deeper down, and half-smothered by passionate desire and dread, there was the sense that he ought not to be waiting on these alternatives; that he ought to accept the consequences of his deeds, own the miserable wife, and fulfil the claims of the helpless child. But he had not moral courage enough to contemplate that active renunciation of Nancy as possible for him: he had only conscience and heart enough to make him for ever uneasy under the weakness that forbade the renunciation. And at this moment his mind leaped away from all restraint toward the sudden prospect of deliverance from his long bondage.
I’ve run out of time today, but tomorrow I want to read this alongside some of the Emerson.
Yesterday I started a reading of Tennyson’s great poem for those who won’t give up, ‘Ulysses’. I’ll continue that reading today. Find the whole poem here.
I have been meeting with some of our volunteer Reader Leaders to learn how our new volunteer-led model is working, to hear what needs fixing, to understand what’s working. A really good morning yesterday meeting Reader Leaders from across the North West – including Crewe, Middlewich, Bootle, Knowsley Liverpool and Wirral. The key problem is reading material – how to choose, and how to get hold of it. We have a selection online on our membership site but people need more. The Reader is planning a series of anthologies over the coming years, and think it would be great to get them into every pubic library… but that is a huge project, so for now, please hold on! There are loads of poems that are out of copyright. If you are looking online, the wonderful Poetry Foundation is a great place to start.
I’ve written a number of posts here with ‘What to read in a Shared Reading group’ in the title – maybe something worth you reading there. But they are not all poems!
In The Reader magazine, you’ll find a brilliant section called ‘The Old Poem’ where my old University tutor, Mr Brian Nellist, chooses and old poem and writes a little about it. That might be a good place to start. As a Reader Leader, or anyone who has done our Read to Lead training course, you should receive the mag free for the first year after your training – if you haven’t had it, please let our membership man know!
People can be nervous about introducing old poems to groups of people who have not been readers. I can understand that because I’ve run hundreds of such groups myself. I know that nervous feeling when your three or four first punters trickle into the room and you think… agh… this is not going to work. And then, to quote James Baldwin, you read. And once you start to read the thing one of our Reader Leader’s called ‘the alchemy’ begins to happen. Agh to ah in an hour and a half.
The key to getting from ‘agh’ to ‘ah’ is the trust and confidence of the Reader Leader. How do you develop trust and confidence? Controlled experiments in trying have always worked for me, and I’d recommend that method.
But let’s assume you’ve chosen an old poem – let’s say it’s Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ – and you want to try the controlled experiment of taking it to an open community group… you need to do some work on it yourself before you go, because the main ingredient in encouraging your group enjoy it is you and your enthusiasm. So get into it!
It’s really important to make the poem alive to yourself and your group members – it can’t be, must not be, an old dead thing that’s too fancy and hard to understand. Look for good things, look for things that will spark conversation, or that people will recognise as human experience. Whatever our clothes, class, or classroom experience, in human, emotional terms our lives are very similar. No one wants to feel redundant. That’s what ‘Ulysses’ feels and fights against. I started here, and am picking up at ‘I am become a name’ ;
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
When he says ‘I am a become a name’ he means ‘I’m famous’. This is a point where, say, working in an addiction unit with three older men in recovery from serious, life threatening addictions, I would try to relate the poem to recognisable contemporary characters. Mentioning David Beckham anywhere in Liverpool will raise hoots of derision, so that might be a good ice-breaker – David Beckham is a ‘name’ and if he doesn’t have football to be seen to be good at, what is he? Sells undies, doesnt he? one of the men will say. Scent, innit?
Ok – let’s be serious, I’ll say. what about Stevie G? He’s not a brand man like Beckham – his life, his name has been totally about football. How is he going to be himself without it? What’s he going to do?
We’ll talk about Beckham or Steven Gerrard for awhile, and one of the men might speak about what happened when he was made redundant but at some point, I, or one of the men, will say, let’s get back on with the poem. Back to the text. And at the point, we’ll go back to thinking about Ulysses.
We’ll go back with our minds primed with models we know. We’ll be more ready to think about Ulysses predicament. We’ll read ‘for always roaming with a hungry heart’ and I hope someone in the group will know the Bruce Springsteen song, because that too will give us a connection. We might even sing it! But then we will go back – again – to the poem.
What’s the mantra: back to the text!
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
Here’s Ulysses remembering his life as a professional ( we think of Steven Gerrard and his shirts and trophies…) Ulysses ‘job’ was explorer, statesman, soldier…and in all these roles, he was the best, ‘honour’d of them all’. Everyone will know someone who was ‘honour’d of them all’, really good at whatever it was they did, the master craftsman who teased you in your apprenticeship but could paint a Georgian window frame steady-handed, the calm and fearless boss of the fire-fighters crew, Tommy the union man at Lime Street. To make the old poem real we have to be able to connect it to real lives, to real experience. Only later, when people do this automatically, can we try to do more abstract literary reading (but I never want to do that myself, I like staying in the every day reality).
What’s hard is constantly making the connection to ordinary reality and to complex language. Here, in these lines, I’d be concentrating on the music, the rhythm of Ulysses’ voice. I’d be getting my three men to pretend to be great Greek warriors heavy in bronze armour and saying these lines. Read them aloud!
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
Next bit is brilliant, but out of time for today… what a pity!
Libertia doing its energetic thing in the front garden
This weekend I met a reader who said, ‘I love Silas Marner and reread it this year, but I liked it on the blog when you were reading a poem a day from the Oxford Book of English Verse and finding things that were new to you!’
For that reader, I’ll turn now to the Helen Gardner edition of the OBEV and I’m lighting on a Shakespeare poem I’ve never read: ‘Courser and Jennet‘.Why have I passed this poem over hundreds of times when flicking through the anthology looking for something to read (read myself, or read with a Shared Reading group?) Well, the name. Sorry but I am in a rush and it sounds unlikely. Secondly, if I did stop to look, it’s about a horse… I like horses but is that the kind of poem I want to read today? Always – until now – the answer has been ‘No!’ I’m usually looking for something human, which I can recognise as having to do with me. But when looking for a poem I’ve never read I have to go outside of my specialist area. And here I am. How do I decide to choose it over the other three poems I’ve never read that I’ve looked at this morning? A quick read through and it seems full of energy. That’ll do.
Need to know – Courser is a swift strong horse, as ridden by knights in battle, a warhorse. A Jennet is a light spanish horse.
As I re-read I notice ‘Adonis’ and realise the poem must be part of the longer poem Venus and Adonis, (1593) which I’ve also not read. Or if have read, have forgotten.
But before we look it up – let’s just read the thing and see what we can make of it, just us! With no footnotes and no critical apparatus. Roll your sleeves up, readers.
Read aloud!
Courser and Jennet
But, lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by,
A breeding jennet, lusty, young, and proud,
Adonis’ trampling courser doth espy,
And forth she rushes, snorts and neighs aloud:
The strong-necked steed, being tied unto a tree,
Breaketh his rein, and to her straight goes he.
Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds,
And now his woven girths he breaks asunder;
The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds,
Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven’s thunder;
The iron bit he crusheth ‘tween his teeth,
Controlling what he was controlled with.
His ears up-pricked, his braided hanging mane,
Upon his compassed crest now stand on end;
His nostrils drink the air, and forth again,
As from a furnace, vapours doth he send:
His eye, which scornfully glisters like fire,
Shows his hot courage and his high desire.
Sometime he trots, as if he told the steps,
With gentle majesty and modest pride;
Anon he rears upright, curvets and leaps,
As who should say, “Lo! thus my strength is tried;
And this I do to captivate the eye
Of the fair breeder that is standing by.’
What recketh he his rider’s angry stir,
His flattering “Holla’, or his “Stand, I say’?
What cares he now for curb or pricking spur,
For rich caparisons or trappings gay?
He sees his love, and nothing else he sees,
For nothing else with his proud sight agrees.
Look, when a painter would surpass the life,
In limning out a well-proportioned steed,
His art with nature’s workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed;
So did this horse excel a common one,
In shape, in courage, colour, pace and bone.
Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:
Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.
Sometime he scuds far off, and there he stares;
Anon he starts at stirring of a feather;
To bid the wind a base he now prepares,
And whether he run or fly they know not whether;
For through his mane and tail the high wind sings,
Fanning the hairs, who wave like feathered wings.
He looks upon his love, and neighs unto her;
She answers him as if she knew his mind;
Being proud, as females are, to see him woo her,
She puts on outward strangeness, seems unkind,
Spurns at his love and scorns the heat he feels,
Beating his kind embracements with her heels.
Then, like a melancholy malcontent,
He vails his tail that, like a falling plume,
Cool shadow to his melting buttock lent:
He stamps, and bites the poor flies in his fume.
His love, perceiving how he was enraged,
Grew kinder, and his fury was assuaged.
His testy master goeth about to take him;
When lo! the unbacked breeder, full of fear,
Jealous of catching, swiftly doth forsake him,
With her the horse, and left Adonis there.
As they were mad, unto the wood they hie them,
Out-stripping crows that strive to over-fly them.
The ‘But lo!’ opening tells us that we are in the middle of something. We don’t know what is going on in the bit of the picture that is out of shot: we can only see the horses.
But, lo! from forth a copse that neighbours by,
A breeding jennet, lusty, young, and proud,
Adonis’ trampling courser doth espy,
And forth she rushes, snorts and neighs aloud:
The strong-necked steed, being tied unto a tree,
Breaketh his rein, and to her straight goes he.
Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds,
And now his woven girths he breaks asunder;
The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds,
Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven’s thunder;
The iron bit he crusheth ‘tween his teeth,
Controlling what he was controlled with.
See what I mean about the energy: the poem seems to be in very fast pentameter (five beats) – look at this line: ‘And forth she rushes, snorts and neighs aloud’. what I vaguely remember about Venus and Adonis is that Venus pursued Adonis, who wasn’t interested. The horses are in a different state of mind, or body. The Courses is so affected by the appearance of the lively Jennet that he breaks the bonds his human captivity has put on him, rein, girth and bit. Like the Jennet, the Course too is alive with uncontrolled energy ‘Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds’.
Would you talk about sex in a Shared Reading group? Sometimes it has happened to me that I’ve tactfully averted my eyes from sexual implications in a text, only to find a group member quite willing to broach the subject. That might happen here, because this is sexual energy Shakespeare is describing. Makes me wonder how this extract sits in the bigger poem, which (I’m guessing) must partly be about frustrated sexual energy?
But let me go back to the poem, where you’ll see I’m not reading anything into it that isn’t there:
His ears up-pricked, his braided hanging mane,
Upon his compassed crest now stand on end;
His nostrils drink the air, and forth again,
As from a furnace, vapours doth he send:
His eye, which scornfully glisters like fire,
Shows his hot courage and his high desire.
Sometime he trots, as if he told the steps,
With gentle majesty and modest pride;
Anon he rears upright, curvets and leaps,
As who should say, “Lo! thus my strength is tried;
And this I do to captivate the eye
Of the fair breeder that is standing by.’
I love the movement from the unconstrained energy of ‘hot courage’ and ‘high desire’ to those little mincing movements we’ve seen in racehorses at Aintree. And the account of the deliberate attraction behaviour of any animal in hot pursuit – ‘and this I do to captivate the eye’! This is fiction, but Shakespeare has drawn it from real horses. And people? Are you thinking only of horses as the images come into your mind? Or are you thinking of women tossing their hair and cracking jokes, men flaunting wit or muscles?
What recketh he his rider’s angry stir,
His flattering “Holla’, or his “Stand, I say’?
What cares he now for curb or pricking spur,
For rich caparisons or trappings gay?
He sees his love, and nothing else he sees,
For nothing else with his proud sight agrees.
Actually what I’m seeing here is my dog Davy heading off over the hill towards Caldy when either a bitch or a ditch by smell was calling him.
What recketh he his rider’s angry stir,
His flattering “Holla’, or his “Stand, I say’?
He could not hear me. My voice was nothing against those smells. There comes a point in any animal life where human commands are as nothing. And what is true for animals is also true for humans: ‘He sees his love, and nothing else he sees’.
If we were reading in a Shared Reading group now, people might have accounts of bold deeds done for love, how he came back from Brazil or she ignored her father’s command. That conversation could well run and run but at some point, we’d have to say, ‘let’s get back to the poem.’
Look, when a painter would surpass the life,
In limning out a well-proportioned steed,
His art with nature’s workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed;
So did this horse excel a common one,
In shape, in courage, colour, pace and bone.
Round-hoofed, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head, and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:
Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back.
This is an interesting bit, because Shakespeare seems to become aware of himself as the writer, or as a maker of art, a maker of an image of a horse – ‘so did this horse excel a common one’. And the language here becomes the kind of language I associate with Shakespeare. In fact there are recognisable rhythms – (‘inch thick, knee deep’, The Winter’s Tale) there’s a kind of play, of pleasure in the way the words can be lined up: ‘thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide’.
Oh, time’s up. More tomorrow. Or maybe I go back to Silas.
A tree with blossom I haven’t been able to identify. Calderstones Park 9 May
I’m reading Silas Marner …we’re at the end of Chapter 1. If you want to join this Shared Reading from the beginning search for the tag ‘Silas Marner’. You’ll find an online version here.
Yesterday I ended my hour of reading practice with a thought about the relation of feelings to thought and my sense that a distance between feeling and what we are able to think, is one of things that cause many people to suffer mental/inner/spiritual distress. ‘We have our feelings but we can’t match them up with what we believe about reality.’ What we think is often of poor quality and many times downright wrong (speaking for myself at least) but what we feel is, however possibly misdirected, a genuine and direct personal experience. Yesterday’s reading reminded me of a thought from psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion which I have been turning over in my mind for a good number of years. It seems related to what happens in Shared Reading:
If a person cannot ‘think’ with his thoughts, that is to say that he has thoughts but lacks the apparatus of ‘thinking’ which enables him to use his thoughts, to think them as it were, then the personality is incapable of learning from experience. This failure is serious. Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality.
W.R.Bion, Learning From Experience
The key word in that first sentence must be ‘with’ – Bion’s suggestion is that there are things (as it were, objects) we call ‘thoughts’ and there is an action which may be performed with them (verb) which we call ‘thinking’. There are things you can do something with. Sometimes we don’t do it. Stuff gets stuck.
The thought jolts into a new perspective when we get to the fourth sentence – ‘failure to use emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality’ – and thoughts and emotion are understood to be part of the same biological system. They are like eating and breathing part of our survival kit. Not using feeling and thought, the action of thinking, can damage, even kill, us.
I want to use an example of something from real life. Say you have a child who has been part of a badly functioning family. Child is suffers at hands of parents, is taken away by social workers, placed in foster care. Lives with ten, fifteen sets of foster carers as things continue to go wrong, child is distressed, uncontrollable. Foster carers can’t cope for long. Child gets moved a lot. many broken relationships. By the time I meet him aged twelve this child has a mass of huge emotional experience, like a tangle of threads, ripped out telephone wires, lumps of stuff, broken bottles, smashed hopes… child has more of this inner debris than most adults will accumulate in a lifetime. Child has emotional experience but he cannot use it because he cannot think his thoughts. He doesn’t have a good story to explain his feelings. He is very unlikely to be able to face the truth (mum and dad were a mess/ill/couldn’t help me). This child is (emotionally) starving, he is unable to ‘use’ his emotional experience. He’s had the experience, but as T.S.Eliot says, ‘missed the meaning’.
I turn back to Silas. Yesterday we saw that Silas had feelings but no way of thinking about what was happening to him as he was falsely accused and cast out by his social group, the sect in Lantern Yard. Numb and unable to ‘think’, Silas seems to enter a state of frozen animation, losing his fiance, was well as his wider community:
Marner went home, and for a whole day sat alone, stunned by despair,
without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in
his innocence. The second day he took refuge from benumbing
unbelief, by getting into his loom and working away as usual; and
before many hours were past, the minister and one of the deacons
came to him with the message from Sarah, that she held her
engagement to him at an end. Silas received the message mutely, and
then turned away from the messengers to work at his loom again. In
little more than a month from that time, Sarah was married to
William Dane; and not long afterwards it was known to the brethren
in Lantern Yard that Silas Marner had departed from the town.
I ask myself what it would be like to sit for a whole day, ‘stunned by despair’. I think ‘stunned’ indicates absence of the ability to think, perhaps the needful absence of feeling. Trying to imagine his state, I recall Emily Dickinson’s poem;
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
In terms of preserving himself, his love, Silas cannot act and does not seem to feel. He is ‘without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in
his innocence’. That impulse might eventually take the form of a thought but it would start as a feeling – I love her, she loves me, I need her, she’ll love me – but there is no feeling. Silas is a dead man walking. The only thing he can do is his work. The mechanical labour of the hand-loom is like a safe place for him. I was struck by George Eliot calling it ‘a refuge’ and that he gets into it.
Mechanical labour is a comfort when you feel bad – how many people furiously clean their kitchen in the middle of a domestic row? Cleaning the stove! Wire wool! Bleach that sink! I don’t think these are only my habits. there is a need to let some other rhythm take over. For Silas, letting the loom take over is a refuge. It makes a clacking noise. There is a rhythm to it. The problem is, of course, that temporary refuges we create in our distress – the child running away, glue sniffing, our adult drugs or silences – while they begin as things we get into to escape, become things we can’t get out of. The refuge becomes a prison.
This is what Bion calls ‘a disaster in the development of the personality’ equivalent to the failure to breathe or eat. George Eliot has set us up with a story of a man whose life is completely smashed up, which sits alongside The Winters’ Tale as one of the great stories of human breakage and repair. Why on earth any school curriculum inventors, examination setters, ever thought this was a suitable book for twelve-year-olds I cannot imagine. They ruined George Eliot for several generations of readers.
I said that Bion’s thought seems connected to what happens in Shared Reading. This is a thought I’ll try to come back to another day. But I think before going on to Chapter Two I’ll have a poetry day tomorrow. Something delightful.
Rose and Clematis almost overpowering a support at Calderstones 8 May
Continuing my slow read of Silas Marner …we’re in Chapter 1. If you want to join this Shared Reading from the beginning search for the tag ‘Silas Marner’. You’ll find an online version here. We pick up at this point, where George Eliot is explaining Silas’ back story:
Among the members of his church there was one young man, a little
older than himself, with whom he had long lived in such close
friendship that it was the custom of their Lantern Yard brethren to
call them David and Jonathan. The real name of the friend was
William Dane, and he, too, was regarded as a shining instance of
youthful piety, though somewhat given to over-severity towards
weaker brethren, and to be so dazzled by his own light as to hold
himself wiser than his teachers. But whatever blemishes others
might discern in William, to his friend’s mind he was faultless; for
Marner had one of those impressible self-doubting natures which, at
an inexperienced age, admire imperativeness and lean on
contradiction. The expression of trusting simplicity in Marner’s
face, heightened by that absence of special observation, that
defenceless, deer-like gaze which belongs to large prominent eyes,
was strongly contrasted by the self-complacent suppression of inward
triumph that lurked in the narrow slanting eyes and compressed lips
of William Dane. One of the most frequent topics of conversation
between the two friends was Assurance of salvation: Silas confessed
that he could never arrive at anything higher than hope mingled with
fear, and listened with longing wonder when William declared that he
had possessed unshaken assurance ever since, in the period of his
conversion, he had dreamed that he saw the words “calling and
election sure” standing by themselves on a white page in the open
Bible. Such colloquies have occupied many a pair of pale-faced
weavers, whose unnurtured souls have been like young winged things,
fluttering forsaken in the twilight.
Two members of an extreme sect, uneducated but committed to their faith, one more extreme in his views than the other, certain of his place in paradise because of his dream, and his belief in that dream. Silas essentially a ‘self-doubting’ man, William ‘self-complacent’. I feel worried! There’s something particularly worrying about this relationship being mixed up in the sectarian belief, as if emotions from different parts/modes/arenas of life are bleeding into one another. I read on. The next paragraph is a very long one, so I am going to break up into chunks:
It had seemed to the unsuspecting Silas that the friendship had
suffered no chill even from his formation of another attachment of a
closer kind. For some months he had been engaged to a young
servant-woman, waiting only for a little increase to their mutual
savings in order to their marriage; and it was a great delight to
him that Sarah did not object to William’s occasional presence in
their Sunday interviews.
Of course I am nervous because of the opening words – Silas is ‘unsuspecting’ – but of what? That his friendship had suffered ‘no chill’ despite him forming a greater attachment. If William Dane is secretly made cold to Silas because Silas has a lover then a serious problem is brewing, and it is:
It was at this point in their history that
Silas’s cataleptic fit occurred during the prayer-meeting; and
amidst the various queries and expressions of interest addressed to
him by his fellow-members, William’s suggestion alone jarred with
the general sympathy towards a brother thus singled out for special
dealings. He observed that, to him, this trance looked more like a
visitation of Satan than a proof of divine favour, and exhorted his
friend to see that he hid no accursed thing within his soul. Silas,
feeling bound to accept rebuke and admonition as a brotherly office,
felt no resentment, but only pain, at his friend’s doubts concerning
him; and to this was soon added some anxiety at the perception that
Sarah’s manner towards him began to exhibit a strange fluctuation
between an effort at an increased manifestation of regard and
involuntary signs of shrinking and dislike. He asked her if she
wished to break off their engagement; but she denied this: their
engagement was known to the church, and had been recognized in the
prayer-meetings; it could not be broken off without strict
investigation, and Sarah could render no reason that would be
sanctioned by the feeling of the community.
William, who is ‘self-complacent’ is the only member of the sect who believes Silas’ trance the work of the devil. This has got to be connected to the threat to their friendship from Silas’s engagement. but this isn’t just about loss of friendship. It’s about William, who had previously been the recipient of ‘divine favour’ in the vision of the Bible, being shifted from the centre of attention – Silas’ attention, or the community’s attention.
At this time the senior
deacon was taken dangerously ill, and, being a childless widower, he
was tended night and day by some of the younger brethren or sisters.
Silas frequently took his turn in the night-watching with William,
the one relieving the other at two in the morning. The old man,
contrary to expectation, seemed to be on the way to recovery, when
one night Silas, sitting up by his bedside, observed that his usual
audible breathing had ceased. The candle was burning low, and he
had to lift it to see the patient’s face distinctly. Examination
convinced him that the deacon was dead–had been dead some time,
for the limbs were rigid. Silas asked himself if he had been
asleep, and looked at the clock: it was already four in the morning.
How was it that William had not come? In much anxiety he went to
seek for help, and soon there were several friends assembled in the
house, the minister among them, while Silas went away to his work,
wishing he could have met William to know the reason of his
non-appearance. But at six o’clock, as he was thinking of going to
seek his friend, William came, and with him the minister. They came
to summon him to Lantern Yard, to meet the church members there; and
to his inquiry concerning the cause of the summons the only reply
was, “You will hear.” Nothing further was said until Silas was
seated in the vestry, in front of the minister, with the eyes of
those who to him represented God’s people fixed solemnly upon him.
Then the minister, taking out a pocket-knife, showed it to Silas,
and asked him if he knew where he had left that knife? Silas said,
he did not know that he had left it anywhere out of his own pocket–
but he was trembling at this strange interrogation. He was then
exhorted not to hide his sin, but to confess and repent. The knife
had been found in the bureau by the departed deacon’s bedside–
found in the place where the little bag of church money had lain,
which the minister himself had seen the day before. Some hand had
removed that bag; and whose hand could it be, if not that of the man
to whom the knife belonged? For some time Silas was mute with
astonishment: then he said, “God will clear me: I know nothing
about the knife being there, or the money being gone. Search me and
my dwelling; you will find nothing but three pound five of my own
savings, which William Dane knows I have had these six months.” At
this William groaned, but the minister said, “The proof is heavy
against you, brother Marner. The money was taken in the night last
past, and no man was with our departed brother but you, for William
Dane declares to us that he was hindered by sudden sickness from
going to take his place as usual, and you yourself said that he had
not come; and, moreover, you neglected the dead body.”
I’m reading the story fast here, noticing as much as I can, but this mainly plot, and easy to follow, so I am speeding up.
“I must have slept,” said Silas. Then, after a pause, he added,
“Or I must have had another visitation like that which you have all
seen me under, so that the thief must have come and gone while I was
not in the body, but out of the body. But, I say again, search me
and my dwelling, for I have been nowhere else.”
The search was made, and it ended–in William Dane’s finding the
well-known bag, empty, tucked behind the chest of drawers in Silas’s
chamber! On this William exhorted his friend to confess, and not to
hide his sin any longer. Silas turned a look of keen reproach on
him, and said, “William, for nine years that we have gone in and
out together, have you ever known me tell a lie? But God will clear
me.”
“Brother,” said William, “how do I know what you may have done in
the secret chambers of your heart, to give Satan an advantage over
you?”
Silas was still looking at his friend. Suddenly a deep flush came
over his face, and he was about to speak impetuously, when he seemed
checked again by some inward shock, that sent the flush back and
made him tremble. But at last he spoke feebly, looking at William.
“I remember now–the knife wasn’t in my pocket.”
William said, “I know nothing of what you mean.” The other
persons present, however, began to inquire where Silas meant to say
that the knife was, but he would give no further explanation: he
only said, “I am sore stricken; I can say nothing. God will clear
me.”
On their return to the vestry there was further deliberation. Any
resort to legal measures for ascertaining the culprit was contrary
to the principles of the church in Lantern Yard, according to which
prosecution was forbidden to Christians, even had the case held less
scandal to the community. But the members were bound to take other
measures for finding out the truth, and they resolved on praying and
drawing lots. This resolution can be a ground of surprise only to
those who are unacquainted with that obscure religious life which
has gone on in the alleys of our towns. Silas knelt with his
brethren, relying on his own innocence being certified by immediate
divine interference, but feeling that there was sorrow and mourning
behind for him even then–that his trust in man had been cruelly
bruised. _The lots declared that Silas Marner was guilty._ He was
solemnly suspended from church-membership, and called upon to render
up the stolen money: only on confession, as the sign of repentance,
could he be received once more within the folds of the church.
Marner listened in silence. At last, when everyone rose to depart,
he went towards William Dane and said, in a voice shaken by agitation–
“The last time I remember using my knife, was when I took it out to
cut a strap for you. I don’t remember putting it in my pocket
again. _You_ stole the money, and you have woven a plot to lay the
sin at my door. But you may prosper, for all that: there is no just
God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that
bears witness against the innocent.”
There was a general shudder at this blasphemy.
William said meekly, “I leave our brethren to judge whether this is
the voice of Satan or not. I can do nothing but pray for you, Silas.”
Poor Marner went out with that despair in his soul–that shaken
trust in God and man, which is little short of madness to a loving
nature. In the bitterness of his wounded spirit, he said to
himself, “_She_ will cast me off too.” And he reflected that, if
she did not believe the testimony against him, her whole faith must
be upset as his was. To people accustomed to reason about the forms
in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is
difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which
the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of
reflection. We are apt to think it inevitable that a man in
Marner’s position should have begun to question the validity of an
appeal to the divine judgment by drawing lots; but to him this would
have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never
known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his
energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith. If
there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their
sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from
false ideas for which no man is culpable.
Poor Silas! And how serious it is , ‘little short of madness’. I said yesterday that I was going to make myself concentrate on the most difficult sentences – and there is one in the section above that needs some time:
To people accustomed to reason about the forms
in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is
difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which
the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of
reflection.
We, George Eliot’s readers, are assumed to be people ‘accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself’.
If I was reading this a room with an actual group of people, I’d definitely be stopping here to open a conversation about what part reason plays in our religious feeling – whether that be absolute atheism or devout religious belief. Whatever our state of belief, it is likely that most of us have thought about it. But Silas and other members of the Lantern Yard sect have not applied rational thought to their beliefs. They live in a ‘simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection’. Can we, as modern, educated people, imagine that?
Where would such an act of reflection even begin? It is hard enough to think outside of your normal box when you know there are boxes. But in Silas’s world, there is only the belief of the Lantern Yard church. If you go outside – what will there be? Nothing. Yet something does begin to make Silas think.
Earlier, when he was awaiting judgement by the drawing of lots, he had begun to apply rationality to his situation, and that rationality arises in feeling:
Silas knelt with his brethren, relying on his own innocence being certified by immediate divine interference, but feeling that there was sorrow and mourning
behind for him even then–that his trust in man had been cruelly
bruised.
Key words here are ‘relying’ and ‘feeling’. The relying is to do with his belief, crumbling even as he kneels, that God takes an active part in the doings of men and in particular of men in Lantern Yard. But as he kneels there, he has no faith in that belief: his feeling is one of mis-trust. He is ‘feeling that there was sorrow and mourning behind for him even then’. His trust is, quite rightly, located in his own direct experience. He knows he is innocent. Now his belief in the church of Lantern Yard must go. And with it, everything he holds dear.
And now we come to the hardest part of today’s reading:
We are apt to think it inevitable that a man in
Marner’s position should have begun to question the validity of an
appeal to the divine judgment by drawing lots; but to him this would
have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never
known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his
energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith. If
there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their
sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from
false ideas for which no man is culpable.
Marner doesn’t ‘question’, he ‘feels’.
I think this is one of the key contributions George Eliot makes to human understanding- that feeling is the genesis of potential consciousness. (Nearly ten years later, in Middlemarch, George Eliot will write, ‘if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’)
It starts here with feeling, but it can take a long time to work its way up into consciousness and perhaps never does. For Silas there is only the feeling (the feeling is: this is not good and is hurting me) possible thoughts about that feeling are too painful. He cannot reconcile them because he can’t bear the thought. It is too much to ask, too suddenly, and at point where he is broken: ‘to him this would have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith.’
I’m thinking of instances where I have felt broken, and how difficult, perhaps impossible rational thought is at such times. I suffer the feelings I am feeling, and only later will I have the thoughts. Perhaps those thoughts will come from someone else in the first instance. someone may talk to me. Am I even able to hear what they are saying? Not in the thick of painful feeling. I may be incapable of hearing, thinking, understanding because of the brokenness.
I believe this often happens to people in ordinary real life, and that one of the reasons we have so much in the way of poor mental health (as a general population) is that we are not good at connecting the reality of feeling with the emergence of consciousness or the process of thought. We have our feelings but we can’t match them up with what we believe about reality. This leads me to think of a very useful bit of thinking from the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, but I’ll write about that tomorrow.
Time’s up.
I’m conscious that by including Silas Marner text in these postings, the length of the blog post becomes huge. I’d be glad of feedback as to whether this is working. Let me know.
Yesterday I mentioned Marilynne Robinson’s Home and Joshua Ferris’ The Unnamed as examples of novels which are the kind of book I want to read. Not entertainment, and definitely not escapism. In fact, these two are the opposite, coming as close to life as it gets. Are they great books? I’m very alive while reading them, and that feels great! If the hairs stand up on the back your neck, said Les Murray, that’s poetry. That’s a sort of definition.
People often ask me about what we mean by ‘great books’ at The Reader. ‘Great’ is a relative and malleable word. Great as they may be, no books can easily be pressed on people who don’t want to read them (hence the sad state of our national literary education). So is it a canon? If so, it’s a very elastic one, decided week by week by whoever has the leadership of each group.
Our work is about passing on our love of literature, and trying to demonstrate that pwerful literature about real life is compelling and opens new areas of self (and good fun, too, a lot of the time – there’s plenty of laughing in Shared Reading). It’s not so easy to create such meaning with books that are mainly there for entertainment or escapism – no offence to them, but most murders, romances, spies, thrillers, shopping or porn stories have a different purpose. They might be ‘well written’ but it is not about ‘well written’ in the end. It’s not about technique, or ‘achingly beautiful prose’ (a phrase which makes me put down a book immediately), it’s about opening up the actual experience of human beings. If that’s happening, it might be a good book for a Shared Reading group.
We use the word ‘great’ to raise a flag for trying hard stuff. A walk in the local park is good, and beyond that, hillwalking is terrific but a trip to Everest is a completely different thing. Yet a walk in the park will be a hard task for someone who hasn’t been out in years. And walking in the Dales might be a doddle to someone who does it every weekend. Is Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 a great book? Is War and Peace ? Is E.H. Young’s Miss Mole? What about Hamlet? Are they the same kind of ‘great’ ? No! They are all good in different ways.
I grew up with adults who were looking away. Alcohol put up reality crash barriers and felt good. Pub not sorrow. Pub a laugh! Pub not bills, not money worries. Pub borrow a few bob! Pub not dull by yourselfness. Pub jokes and laughing. Sing songs! Pub paarrty ! Or drink at home! Off licence, miniature whisky if broke. Cans of lager. Smoke dope, smoke, smoke, smoke.
This led to death, as all life does, but what I saw was that pub joy ran out while life itself ran on to the bitter end. I wanted to learn how to live differently. So the underlying flavour of my reading got serious. I’ve written about my book-turning-point, Doris Lessing’s Shikasta, elsewhere. After that came the novels of George Eliot, through my third-year university reading with Brian Nellist.
Daniel Deronda clarified things for me. I was in my mid-twenties and at a stage where decisions about the kind of person I wanted to be, the kind of life I wanted to live were more or less consciously pressing on me. I saw my self and my own existential problems in Gwendolen Harleth and in Daniel Deronda. They are very different people, but there I was in both of them…it’s a book about choices and purpose in life.
When I first read the book my mother was in her late forties and it was clear her life was coming to an end. It was a long frightening time, that approach to death. Daniel Deronda shone light on lots of things I hadn’t known how to look at, think about. The predicament of Gwendolen Harleth, forced to learn by the uncontrollable consequences of her own behaviour, terrified me into thinking seriously about the way in which I made choices.
I grew to love George Eliot and read everything she’d written, including, while I was writing my Ph.D. the nine volumes of her Complete Letters. This was (and still is) like having a parent who teaches you stuff. George Eliot helped me to grow up.
She can be hard to read – she has a rhythm that is long-sentenced and she uses complex syntax to work out complex things about human experience. Some people find the tone ponderous. I don’t. For me it is like spending time with a very clever person who knows a lot more than me. I have to keep saying, ‘Say that again!’ and I don’t understand it all, but I love being with her because I learn things.
Here’s Gwendolen (still a very young woman) at the end of the book, realising the man she loves has a bigger purpose in life than looking after her. You can’t read this stuff fast. Read it like a poem, slow and aloud.
That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in Gwendolen’s small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward of an existence with which her own was revolving. All the troubles of her wifehood and widowhood had still left her with the implicit impression which had accompanied her from childhood, that whatever surrounded her was somehow specially for her, and it was because of this that no personal jealousy had been roused in her relation to Deronda: she could not spontaneously think of him as rightfully belonging to others more than to her. But here had come a shock which went deeper than personal jealousy—something spiritual and vaguely tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all her anger into self-humiliation.
I wouldnt start (as I did) in the deep end with Daniel Deronda. I’d start with Silas Marner. If you read it at school and hated it (so many people did!) please give it another go. Perhaps I’ll have a look at it tomorrow.
A number of problems about writing each day are becoming clear.
First, there’s a problem about copyright which restricts my daily reading and writing. The question, dear readers, is: would you mind if I simply offered a link to a poem which you can find elsewhere ? I’d read it and think about it, and quote from it but I would not reprint it…so you wouldn’t quite have it in front of you as you read. Does that matter or not? I think it probably does.
Second, there’s the problem of long poems. I’m not suggesting a reading The Divine Comedy or The Prelude here (yet) but I’m not sure if readers got sick of, bored with my reading of Intimations of Immortality, which was spread over about two weeks.
I’d like to read some contemporary poems, and I’d like to read some long poems. So tell me what you think, please!
Meanwhile I’m going to jump the gun a little by starting a longish poem. As well as old favourites, long, short, ancient and modern, I also want to read poems that are new to me. So here is one, which I found while browsing in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.
My third problem concerns the length of these posts. Some days I am very constrained by time but I try to have an hour for reading and writing. If that includes choosing, too, then I am definitely short on time. But I am more bothered about when I’ve got longer. I don’t want these posts to be long. I want to keep them under 1000 words. Going to try to stick to that, which will mean stopping short some days. Today probably.
So, to the poem.
I’m sorry to admit I’ve never found a clear way through to Edmund Spenser, though my great literary mentor, Brian Nellist, has always been vocal in his love for everything Spenserian. I struggled with The Faerie Queene at University and don’t think I’ve ever read it since. Brian also loves Sir Walter Scott and I’ve never happily read Scott either, so it may be that these are things particularly appealing to Brian’s personality and anti my own. But I wanted to give it another go.
I don’t know much about Spenser, and I’m interested to see if it is necessary to ‘know’. I mainly don’t want to ‘know’ things about poets or their worlds, I want to read the stuff itself, not about the stuff. For me it is a practical art and I want it to work practically, moving or enlightening or astounding me. So I’m not going to look up any facts about Spenser or the poem. I’m going to just going to read, ignorantly or innocently, a bit at a time, and see what happens. (Reserving the right to stop, or even to look up some facts if things get desperate).
Prothalamion
CALM was the day, and through the trembling air
Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play—
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titan’s beams, which then did glister fair;
When I, (whom sullen care, 5
Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
In princes’ court, and expectation vain
Of idle hopes, which still do fly away
Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,)
Walk’d forth to ease my pain 10
Along the shore of silver-streaming Thames,
Whose rutty bank, the which his river hems,
Was painted all with variable flowers,
And all the meads adorn’d with dainty gems
Fit to deck maidens’ bowers, 15
And crown their paramours
Against the bridal day, which is not long:
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
I have read Spenser’s poem about his marriage (Epithalamion) and remember that ‘epithalamion’ means something like marriage, so quickly glanced at the dictionary to see what the difference is (epi is written specifically for the bride, pro simply in celebration of a marriage). There! I am quickly past the off-putting title and into the first stanza. All’s well.
CALM was the day, and through the trembling air
Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play—
A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay
Hot Titan’s beams, which then did glister fair;
If you are not a confident reader you might want to look up words that are strange to you, for security, as I did the title above. In which case, look up ‘Zephyrus’. I didn’t look that one – it’s something Greek-god-ish to do with wind, gently blowing (I assure myself and carry on) and Titan is (from the lines here) the sun, and I remember-ish from my (oh so long ago, so forgotten) study of the Classics, that the Titans were the children of the Gods.
I tell you all this so you can see I am no expert, and am just using the ragbag of stuff I’ve got in my mind already to get through the opening of the poem. I believe this is the best way to read. Get the gist, then look more closely at some of the words.
The gist here is, it is a lovely, lovely day. And our hero, Edmund Spenser, of whom we know virtually nothing, walks into view:
When I, (whom sullen care, 5
Through discontent of my long fruitless stay
In princes’ court, and expectation vain
Of idle hopes, which still do fly away
Like empty shadows, did afflict my brain,)
Walk’d forth to ease my pain
We don’t get a full stop anywhere here. I look up at the stanza, yes, it is one long sentence. But it breaks down into what in music, and on a larger scale, would be called movements. This second movement brings human discontent and mental affliction into direct confrontation with the lovely day. Spenser is still suffering whatever has been the matter, though it is hard to tell what is being referred to by ‘which’. It could be any or all of ‘sullen care’, ‘discontent’, ‘long fruitless stay’,’expectation vain’, ‘idle hopes’ – any or all of these, perhaps, but whatever it is/they are, they ‘still do fly away/like empty shadows’.
Bad feeling, that feeling of flickering discontent, things getting away from you.
My word count has got away from me – time to stop for today.
Baby Grace leaping up in her mothers arms in an office at The Reader
Been reading – very slowly – Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality here all week and not got very far. You’ll find the whole poem here. But I’m only up to this bit;
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Today I’ve got a piece in the Comment section of The Observer about why we need a reading revolution. In it, I remember seeing a baby, one of those gorgeous chunky one-year-olds, leaping up in his mother’s arms on a doorstep in North Birkenhead and thinking ‘that baby will never read Wordsworth’. That thought (or was it a feeling?) helped propel me into creating The Reader.
But why, in a hard life, and that baby’s was almost certainly going to be a hard life, would Wordsworth matter at all? Why not concentrate on housing and vegetables? Of course, we need those things but as Rose Schneiderman famously said, we need bread and roses. And we need them at the same time. Humans have inner lives and those inner lives have profound effect on our ability to renew roofs and grow vegetables, to create a sour-dough bakery in an area down-on-its-uppers, to develop a rose-growing business out of a wasteland.
Poetry matters because we might have forgotten, as Gillian Clarke writes in Miracle on St Davids Day, that we have anything to say. Of a mute labouring man in a mental health ward, moved to speech by poetry, she writes;
Since the dumbness of misery fell
he has remembered there was a music
of speech and that once he had something to say.
What we, in the our time, call ‘mental health’ or ’emotional experience’ is really about inner being, the most complicated, uncharted, rewarding and dangerous parts of human experience. I wish we had other names for this stuff. Our present vocabulary feels as unhelpful as grunts would be in working out the impact of black holes on the development of the universe. For one thing, calling it ‘mental health’ allows a good half of the population to think it is nothing to do with them. But everyone has inner life, emotional experience. Our ability to understand and learn from it is a vital part of our human survival kit, as the psychotherapist Wilfred Bion writes;
If a person cannot ‘think’ with his thoughts, that is to say that he has thoughts but lacks the apparatus of ‘thinking’ which enables him to use his thoughts, to think them as it were, then the personality is incapable of learning from experience. This failure is serious. Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality.
W.R.Bion, Learning From Experience
The World Health Organisation tells us that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. We are failing to learn from our own emotional experience partly because we do not have the language to think about it; at best we talk about this stuff in terms of ‘mental health’. But we should be speaking of ‘human experience’.
That’s why we need great literature – Wordsworth, Kate Beaton, George Herbert, George Eliot, George Saunders, Frank O’Hara, Frank O’Connor, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Anton Chekov, Jeanette Winterson, Tolstoi, Dave McKee, Shirley Hughes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Jon Klassen, Marilynne Robinson and all the rest of them.
We need great literature and we need to relate to it in a different way. Our current way organising education so often turns it into dead stuff, despite the best efforts of good teachers. Great literature isn’t dead, it is just waiting for readers to make contact. Pupils who are being taught there are correct answers are not readers, they are exam-passers.
As a young mature student of twenty-five, the previously benefits-living single mother of a five-year old child, I first read Wordsworth in the summer between first and second year when I was thinking of dropping out of my university course due to class-dislocation. My goodness, but I felt unhappy and out-of-place.I can remember, across a lifetime now, the shock of recognition I felt when I first read these words;
—But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Though I felt massively excited by these lines, I did not ‘understand’ a word.
I did not know what the ‘Tree’ was.
I did not know whether the ‘single field’ was real or not.
I did not know why it was a ‘pansy’.
Not knowing doesn’t matter.
Being moved, being touched, being excited in ways you don’t understand is what matters. It leaves you in a place where you can ask questions. And why is asking questions good? Because that’s how we learn!
I did not know what ‘the visionary gleam’ was but I knew I knew about its absence.
I did not know what ‘the glory’ was, nor ‘the dream’ neither, but I knew I missed them both.
The words spoke to some feeling I had and did not understand.
The feeling was about ‘something that is gone’.
There is no amount of on-curriculum study that would have made any of this clearer to me – I had to absorb the questions and realise, over years, that they were clues to hard-to-reach parts of my self. I’ve been reading this poem for thirty-six years. It still works, I still don’t understand it, it still gets me to ask questions!
What we’ve found in sixteen years of Shared Reading is that working out feelings and language with other people is easier than doing it on your own. I am grateful to the University curriculum for making me read Wordsworth and I’ve tried to translate that into Shared Reading (don’t just read what you already know and like). Without that looming second-year course on Romantics I’d never have read Wordsworth of my own volition, because it was too far, it seemed from my own experience. But that’s the thing about great writing, it is never far from your own experience. That’s what makes it great.
Euphorbia asserting its noble beauty in an unkind world
March has been a difficult month on almost every front, but I don’t want to describe or even list any of those difficulties.
Instead, after a particularly difficult day yesterday, in which I felt a lot of feelings I did not wish to feel, including – rare one for me – rage, and in which the good that happened (Teamwork, time with Megg, euphorbias, Carys Bray, my dear and loving husband) all seemed overshadowed by bad stuff, I woke up with these words in my mind;
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
These words come from the Bible, Letter to Phillipians 4:8, but I first got them from Iris Murdoch, in her strange, wonderful and difficult book, Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. She’s talking about what you can do if you don’t have religion to assist with difficulties of living, and writes about filling your mind up, deliberately, with good things.
The book came out in 1992 and I think I first read it then or the following year. Soon after that I was in the thick of the hardest time of my life and in my desperation I found her advice helpful. I particularly found the quotation from Philippians helpful and what’s more, it seemed to stick. I used it like a mantra but it also gave me something active to do. When bad stuff came into my head I would recite, ‘whatever is good…whatever is honest…whatever is just…’ and the very presence of such words, and the thoughts associated with them, seemed to help me. As one of our readers in a special project where volunteers read with children in extremely difficult situations said, ‘when Jess reads with me it makes all the bad memories go away and good memories come in…’ I know that feeling well.
So, whatever is good, think on these things.The habit is a useful one. It also works with poetry.
Well, grandchildren – all babies! – are good and make me feel great joy. I think on them, and see them whenever I can. Birdsong is heartening at this time of year. Dogs rarely fail to delight me (you know who you are, you dogs who don’t delight). Euphorbias display such energy that I find they restore my faith in life, and the small pink viburnum (don’t know what variety it is and need to know because I want one in my garden) on the right of the gate into the walled gardens at Calderstones Park is currently providing daily inner restoration through its gentle colour therapy. I do think on these things.
An unequivocal good has been changing my morning routine so that I read and write about my reading every day before I go to work. There is never enough time but even the smallest amount of it seems to do me some good. After years of ‘no time to write’ and reading while falling asleep, it feels a breakthrough. This change is the result of a chance meeting with a kind stranger on a train the day Bearhunt blew away. That’s how it happens isn’t it?
I’ve been reading Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality for the past three mornings. The whole poem is here. But I’ve been reading a few lines each day. Yesterday we got to the point where Wordsworth, feeling some ‘glory’ is lost from life, finds something ‘glorious’ in the world and tells himself
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
The word ‘sullen’ seems to do for bad feeling what ‘whatever is good’ does for good. It puts it in my mind. It’s foul. And then I see it, hiding behind ‘sullen’, ‘Oh evil day’ as if Wordsworth first feels the evil before he has identified where/what it is. Evil emanating from my sullenness. Ouch. Thinking bad things is not good. Is that how ‘evil’ starts?
Instead of continuing with his feeling (‘sullen’) he lets it go, looks around, looks for good and sees it;
…Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:
I love that line, ‘the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm’ and it is an important one for me, but I am out of time and need to carry on tomorrow.
readerjanedavis 