feminism

Silas Marner Day 39: Truth, Lies & Life before psychology was invented

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muscari
Muscari March 18

The women in Silas Marner  (full text here) are humans who struggle under the  difficulty of not being emancipated in different ways: Eppie’s drug-addicted mother Molly, the scrub-polish-make-bake-and-run-your-household-like-an-army Dolly Winthrop, and here, Nancy Lammeter. She is somewhat educated, but for no purpose, and having  no children, her days are emptier than  her childed sister’s, her  consciousness left to ruminate on  what seem at first to be the smallest  and least significant of things.

What I get interested in here, as I read about Nancy, is how the author, George Eliot, an exceptionally well (self) educated woman of immense intelligence imagines the movements of the human mind. This is psychology before William James, before Freud.

Watch the way we go in and in:

Her mind not being courted by a great variety of subjects, she filled the vacant moments by living inwardly, again and again, through all her remembered experience, especially through the fifteen years of her married time, in which her life and its significance had been doubled.

Nancy’s like a  woman in prison, imprisoned in her life. There is no stimulation, only repetitive reflection on her ‘remembered experience’. But what else is there for her mind to dwell on? Having little external stimulation, she must live ‘inwardly’. The only subject matter of  depth she has is her relationship with her husband.  At First we have no idea what Nancy is going to think about.  Only very gladually do we  dig down the the realiy of what is bothering her.

She recalled the small details, the words, tones, and looks, in the critical scenes which had opened a new epoch for her by giving her a deeper insight into the relations and trials of life, or which had called on her for some little effort of forbearance, or of painful adherence to an imagined or real duty– asking herself continually whether she had been in any respect blamable.

She won’t say – Nancy won’t think, won’t put into words – whatever it is we are talking about. we’re going roundthe houses.

At the same time as George Eliot is observing this action of a mind turned in on itself, she’s also noting that this is a kind of norm. This is likely, in the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century, to be the lot of a middle class woman: inwardness, self-judging, obsessive, the mind pacing like a caged polar bear, in its too-small arena:

This excessive rumination and self-questioning is perhaps a morbid habit inevitable to a mind of much moral sensibility when shut out from its due share of outward activity and of practical claims on its affections–inevitable to a noble-hearted, childless woman, when her lot is narrow.

Later, George Eliot will pick up this idea in the persons of other women  – the Aunts’ Glegg in Mill on the Floss, obsessed with the designs of their china and muslin, the only choices they have really had, Romola, who comes to massive life  through calls from without in a national tragedy in the novel of her name, Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. For an under-occupied childless man of a similar class there was study, Darwinian collecting, politics, horses, gambling or  other dissipations. For a woman? The mind turning in on itself:

“I can do so little–have I done it all well?” is the perpetually recurring thought; and there are no voices calling her away from that soliloquy, no peremptory demands to divert energy from vain regret or superfluous scruple.

I notice now that George Eliot doesn’t seem quite to be talking about Nancy.  She has looked up from the story, from the character  she’s writing about, to  think on a more generalised level about laws of being.  She’s taken an example, but drawing a wider conclusion. ‘And there are no voices calling her away from that soliloquy’  The pronoun ‘her’ in that sentence is not simply referring to Nancy.

But now we turn back to Nancy, and see some of the precise and particular moments of Nancy’s particular experience, and uncover something painful and hard to admit:

There was one main thread of painful experience in Nancy’s married life, and on it hung certain deeply-felt scenes, which were the oftenest revived in retrospect. The short dialogue with Priscilla in the garden had determined the current of retrospect in that frequent direction this particular Sunday afternoon. The first wandering of her thought from the text, which she still attempted dutifully to follow with her eyes and silent lips, was into an imaginary enlargement of the defence she had set up for her husband against Priscilla’s implied blame. The vindication of the loved object is the best balm affection can find for its wounds:–“A man must have so much on his mind,” is the belief by which a wife often supports a cheerful face under rough answers and unfeeling words. And Nancy’s deepest wounds had all come from the perception that the absence of children from their hearth was dwelt on in her husband’s mind as a privation to which he could not reconcile himself.

Oh dear.  Her sister finds fault with Godfrey because Godfrey is not happy about having no children – that was the conversation in the garden. I wonder, does he blame Nancy? ‘The vindication of the loved object is the best balm affection can find for its wounds’ Sounds like  she is wounded, and wounded by the loved object – Godfrey – she now defends. He cannot ‘reconcile’ himself to no children. How does that make her feel?

But of course we, unlike Nancy,  know that one of the drivers for Godfrey’s inability to reconcile himself is the fact that he has a child, a child he  cannot acknowledge, and that child lives with Silas Marner, in the village outside Godfrey’s house. Godfrey  has seen his daughter every week at church for the last ten, twelve, fourteen years.

Nancy, imagining and feeling her way through this complex  and  not entirely known emotional situation, has only part of the story.  She makes excuses for her husband but retains  great control over her own emotional life:

Yet sweet Nancy might have been expected to feel still more keenly the denial of a blessing to which she had looked forward with all the varied expectations and preparations, solemn and prettily trivial, which fill the mind of a loving woman when she expects to become a mother. Was there not a drawer filled with the neat work of her hands, all unworn and untouched, just as she had arranged it there fourteen years ago–just, but for one little dress, which had been made the burial-dress? But under this immediate personal trial Nancy was so firmly unmurmuring, that years ago she had suddenly renounced the habit of visiting this drawer, lest she should in this way be cherishing a longing for what was not given.

Did I not notice it before or have I only just learned that Nancy had indeed had a baby but  that baby had died?

I  read back and realise that this is the first I’ve heard of Nancy’s lost baby. Here is the  information, packed away in the drawer, at the centre of the emotional  problem. There was a burial dress, and that burial dress memory is the clue to Nancy’s loss and her somewhat rigid reaction to it:

years ago she had suddenly renounced the habit of visiting this drawer, lest she should in this way be cherishing a longing for what was not given –

She is religious, and desires to do and be right. Other children have not been ‘given’, and she believes it would be wrong of her to long for them. Therefore she denies herself  the possible comfort of looking at the baby clothes.  This is sad and possibly self-damamging.

I find myself thinking back to Silas’ trauma and wondering  what connections may lie between these two very different people. Silas’ cutting himself off feels much more animalistic – he retreated to a cave to lick his wounds and got stuck there, licking,  for ever, til Eppie wandered into his life.  Nancy’s response to her trauma seems more controlled but is it? ‘years ago she had suddenly renounced the habit’ –  is that control or a desperate measure to prevent pain?

Now, having opened the drawer with  the baby clothes in it, we get to see the lost baby and other potential children, too, as the problem at the centre of the problem is slowly revealed: a years’ experienced psychotherapist could not have done it better:

Perhaps it was this very severity towards any indulgence of what she held to be sinful regret in herself, that made her shrink from applying her own standard to her husband. “It is very different– it is much worse for a man to be disappointed in that way: a woman can always be satisfied with devoting herself to her husband, but a man wants something that will make him look forward more–and sitting by the fire is so much duller to him than to a woman.”

And always, when Nancy reached this point in her meditations–trying, with predetermined sympathy, to see everything as Godfrey saw it– there came a renewal of self-questioning. _Had_ she done everything in her power to lighten Godfrey’s privation? Had she really been right in the resistance which had cost her so much pain six years ago, and again four years ago–the resistance to her husband’s wish that they should adopt a child?

Now, like the lost baby, we find another layer of secret pain – the marital battle over adoption. Godfrey has wanted to adopt and she has resisted that idea. Twice. He longs for a child.  That she knows.  Of course she questions herself. Has she done what she can to make him happy? Everything but agree to adoption.

The question for Nancy, as she meditates over her Bible, is  did she really do her duty by refusing to adopt a child when her husband told her he wanted to do so?

    Had she really been right in the resistance which had cost her so much pain six years ago, and again four years ago–the resistance to her husband’s wish that they should adopt a child? Adoption was more remote from the ideas and habits of that time than of our own; still Nancy had her opinion on it. It was as necessary to her mind to have an opinion on all topics, not exclusively masculine, that had come under her notice, as for her to have a precisely marked place for every article of her personal property: and her opinions were always principles to be unwaveringly acted on. They were firm, not because of their basis, but because she held them with a tenacity inseparable from her mental action. On all the duties and proprieties of life, from filial behaviour to the arrangements of the evening toilette, pretty Nancy Lammeter, by the time she was three-and-twenty, had her unalterable little code, and had formed every one of her habits in strict accordance with that code.

When we read the first sentence we are reading  in Nancy’s own voice,

  Had she really been right in the resistance which had cost her so much pain six years ago, and again four years ago–the resistance to her husband’s wish that they should adopt a child?

But then something odd happens, and we suddenly find ourselves  seeing Nancy’s decision from outside herself. Dutiful she may be, by she’s also rigid, perhaps life-denyingly so:

Adoption was more remote from the ideas and habits of that time than of our own; still Nancy had her opinion on it. It was as necessary to her mind to have an opinion on all topics, not exclusively masculine, that had come under her notice, as for her to have a precisely marked place for every article of her personal property: and her opinions were always principles to be unwaveringly acted on.

George Eliot finds something appalling in this:  ‘opinion’, ‘precisely’ ‘every’ ‘unwaveringly’; all these words colour the sentences above and show us that Nancy is  limiting her self and her possible reactions by her inflexible sticking to what come down to  – not thoughts, not feelings but opinions. How  thin ‘opinions’ feel as a basis for life.

They were firm, not because of their basis, but because she held them with a tenacity inseparable from her mental action. On all the duties and proprieties of life, from filial behaviour to the arrangements of the evening toilette, pretty Nancy Lammeter, by the time she was three-and-twenty, had her unalterable little code, and had formed every one of her habits in strict accordance with that code.

Some terrible words alert me to a judgement being made by author: tenacity (which might in other circumstances be a good thing) pretty (again, could be good but here point to something merely external and at odds with the inflexible inner Nancy…) and finally, damningly, little. ‘Her unalterable  little code’. There’s something appalling to George Eliot in the coming together in one person of  girlish prettiness and rigid tenacity and smallness of mind. It’s a type of being that she will return to many times in her work over  the years of her writing life, most notably in Rosamund Vincy in Middlemarch.

Is it partly the result of the subjugation of women?  How can you grow fully rounded when  the space around you is so powerfully restricted? Yet if there is power there… and it displays itself in mental rigidity,  an inability to grow, or to change with circumstance.

pretty Nancy Lammeter, by the time she was three-and-twenty, had her unalterable little code, and had formed every one of her habits in strict accordance with that code.

that the setting out of your dressing table should be ordered in the same way as your  thoughts on adoption – I’ve always thought this and so I stick to it – is a damning indictment.  or is it an indictment?  Is it simply an investigation into  a particular person?

More next week.

Splitting The World Open: Celebrating International Women’s Day With A Poem

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women's press (2)Sometime in the late seventies I bought an anthology of women’s poetry,  The World Split Open, edited by Louise Bernikow, published by The Women’s Press. That’s an easy sentence  to write in 2018  but it might have been nearly impossibly fifty years ago in the year of  the world’s youth revolution, 1968.  Earlier this week I opened The Faber Book of C20 Verse, edited  by J.Heath-Stubbs and D. Wright (1953), to find that only 6 of the more than 90 poets included were  women.  At University in the 1980’s a teacher, a man, told me that women weren’t concentrated enough for poetry.  I think that was a pretty widespread view.

Ah, the dear old Women’s Press. How I loved that little  iron, its logo.

I’d go to a bookshop and look for Womens Press books then choose from amongst them, books I knew might be of interest to me.  Virago was a women’s publisher, too, but The Women’s Press list was odder, more homemade, less corporate, more extreme. And all that seemed summed in that little steam-iron logo.

I was trying to become myself as a young adult, and that self was a woman writer and reader. I wanted books  to help me build my self up.  I wanted role models. But I hardly remember any of those books now (Gaining Ground, a novel by Joan Barfoot, notable exception.) But this excellent anthology of poetry has been  with me through nearly forty years reading.  I’ve just had to buy another copy, as the first literally fell to pieces in my  hand.

I had two books of poetry by women. This, and the Penguin Book of Women Poets. That was  it.

bernikow

Looking her up, I see Louise Bernikow is still going strong, writing and talking about women (also dogs).    Looking at the book’s cover now, I remember that it made me uncomfortable. That women in the photograph looks a bit  too masculine, I don’t know what the two metal balls are doing there and I can’t figure out the perspective. The cover may have unsettled me, but the contents inspired. Realising that Queen Elizabeth I, the centre of the Elizabethan age, an age of great poetry, was herself a poet delighted me.

 

 

 

 

The Doubt of Future Foes
The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy,
And wit me warns to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy;
For falsehood now doth flow, and subjects’ faith doth ebb,
Which should not be if reason ruled or wisdom weaved the web.
But clouds of joys untried do cloak aspiring minds,
Which turn to rain of late repent by changed course of winds.
The top of hope supposed the root upreared shall be,
And fruitless all their grafted guile, as shortly ye shall see.
The dazzled eyes with pride, which great ambition blinds,
Shall be unsealed by worthy wights whose foresight falsehood finds.
The daughter of debate that discord aye doth sow
Shall reap no gain where former rule still peace hath taught to know.
No foreign banished wight shall anchor in this port;
Our realm brooks not seditious sects, let them elsewhere resort.
My rusty sword through rest shall first his edge employ
To poll their tops that seek such change or gape for future joy.
Yes, the sonnet is long-distance interesting in the psychological cost of political trouble, but I didn’t connect with it: there’s was nothing here to latch onto my own experience at that time.  But this fragment, written with a diamond on her window at Woodstock, where she was being held prisoner,  seemed to zap through time, connecting her to me:

Much suspected by me,
Nothing proved can be,
Quoth Elizabeth prisoner.

It wasn’t so much the words, as the act of graffitti, of being moved in a strange way to write. I could almost feel that diamond in my fingers as I scratched.

behn

 

I was glad to meet Aphra Behn in this anthology, the first English women to make her living from writing.  I never really liked her poetry but I liked her, her drinking in taverns and brawling with the lads. And I remember later  getting involved in her novel, Oorinoko, which perhaps I’ll read again.

 

 

Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,
Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed,
For whom Fresh pains he did Create,
And strange Tyrannic power he showed;
From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,
Which round about, in sport he hurled;
But ’twas from mine he took desire
Enough to undo the Amorous World.
From me he took his sighs and tears,
From thee his Pride and Cruelty;
From me his Languishments and Fears,
And every Killing Dart from thee;
Thus thou and I, the God have armed,
And set him up a Deity;
But my poor Heart alone is harmed,
Whilst thine the Victor is, and free.

Emily Bronte, Anne Bradstreet, Sylvvia Plath are names that come to mindwhen I try to remember the anthohlogy but I don’t remember reading the poem from which the book’s title is taken.

What would happen if one woman told the truth about
        her life?
     The world would split open

Muriel Ruksayer’s words are famous – you’ll find them embroidered on Pinterest and made into posters. You’ll find the poem they come from, honouring the German artist Kathe Kollwitz here. Worth reading on this International Women’s Day.

And for growing humans everywhere, my poem of the day, Denise Levertov’s The Metier Of Blossoming.

I’ll be celebrating International Women’s Day  by visiting Greater Manchester Mental Health Trust , to talk and read with women in the Forensic Unit there. I’ll be taking Levertov’s Metier with me.

 

 

 

 

Once contraception became reliable, all human life changed – and what’s that got to do with Poetry and Social Enterprise?

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grass in japanese gdn.jpg
Some sort of ornamental grass living life to full just outside the Japanese Garden at Calderstones, 17 October

Yesterday I went off on one, in a mild way, I hope, about women, woman, womanliness, being female, making a female shape in a world that has been, until very recently, rather male. I was asking myself if Shared Reading was a thing that a woman would make in the world, as opposed to say rugby football, which I bet was invented by a man or men. I was being a bit nervous of my own line of thought  because some women love rugby and some men love Shared Reading  and some women and men love both rugby and Shared Reading. I don’t think huge generalisations are generally helpful,  as humans are more varied and individual than such generalisations allow. I ought to be connecting this to  my reading of  Rebecca Solnit’s The Mother of All Questions, but my morning reading hour is not long enough for that.

Why did I start thinking about this?  First, I was thinking about the Women in Social Enterprise 100 (WISE 100) and  about the disparity between number of women leaders in normal life (not many)  and in the Social Enterprise sector (many). Then I started to wonder whether Shared Reading was a ‘female’ product – and if so why?

I don’t think feelings are the province solely of women – feelings are a key piece of  human equipment for living, like lips or lungs.  Because  of the way we’ve split human survival work up,  in general, men have gone more for action and women for relationship/emotional mapping/support though this generalisation of the female/male split  is belied by exceptions such as women warriors and  male contemplative monks. But that was in the millennia  before birth control:  once contraception became reliable and widespread, all human life changed.

Poetry has always been a place where exceptions find a home –  from Sappho to Sharon Olds, women have found a place for strong voices there, and men have found a place for feeling.

This poem by Matthew Arnold is a key text for Shared Reading because it holds a massive underlying truth: whatever we look like on the surface, there is something else in us, out of sight. Sometimes we don’t know what that is, where it is, or why it is making us weep.

If I was taking this to a Shared Reading group, I’d set aside the whole session, maybe two sessions for it. I’d read the whole poem through, telling people to just go with it without understanding it all and just to try to get the sense of the different movements of the poem in the first instance.

So, a read through:

The Buried Life
Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there’s a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!
But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb?
Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain’d;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain’d!
Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be—
By what distractions he would be possess’d,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity—
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ‘t is not true!
And then we will no more be rack’d
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Only—but this is rare—
When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

Now I’d be asking my group to go back to the beginning and to try to situate it – how did this poem get started? What was happening? Where did it come from? Where are we? If we were making a film of this poem, what wold the scene look like, where is it and who is  there?

Read the opening again:

Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there’s a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.

People will suggest various readings but someone in any group will begin to see this as a pair of lovers, sham-arguing or teasing each other. Encourage that person! Yes, it’s just light-hearted banter:

 

and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!

Why, I wonder (and in my group, I’d be wondering this aloud)  does the pronoun switch between the plural (‘our’, ‘we’, ‘we’, ‘we’, ‘we’) and the singular (‘mine’, ‘I’, ‘thy’ ,’thy’,’thy’,’thy’) so much?

What would it be like to feel be using those pronouns – you, me, us –  in a conversation  where we were  massively distressed?

So many questions have to be asked to get the poem into our imaginations – what is a ‘nameless sadness’ – what  does it feel like? Why or how does it stroke so suddenly?The poem gets serious very suddenly. We’re in light loving play chat and then we’re out of our depth, and drowning, in that nameless sadness. And the fact there is still the possibility of light heartedness doesn’t help. That experience exists elsewhere and Matthew Arnold seems almost angry as he acknowledges, yes, it is possible to laugh it off:

Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!

To anyone who has been depressed ( funny word – we experience it now as if it were now a medical condition, like Chicken Pox, but it is a word about feeling: to be pressed down) to anyone who has been pressed down by a sad nameless feeling, the poem will be a jarring remembrance of a painful experience. For some readers it is liberating to find someone else getting the experience into words.

This first movement, section, stanza, ends with Arnold turning to his beloved and looking into her eyes in order to ‘read there, love! thy inmost soul’.  It is as if he hopes to read some message of hope or understanding or any match of any sort: are we connected? Do you know me? They gaze.

Now we get the break in the stanza, a space between the verses (what’s happening now in the room? He is sitting on the couch staring into her eyes, her face, she’s looking back but  nothing’s happening, he can’t find it, whatever it is… ) the  white space between the stanzas comes to an end, and

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
Failure.

No amount of someone loving you will reach that place where feeling exerts its power. Can we get feelings into words? Even lovers – the closest relationship humans  probably have – cannot jump the gap.

I ask myself  what is the word ‘indeed’ doing there? I read the four lines again to feel if it has a place in the rhythm.

Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?

As I read, I feel the word ‘even’ is linked to the ‘indeed’ in some way.  The first of these four lines is shorter than those which follow. I start to look at the poem’s metre. The lines seem to  alternate – not in a fixed pattern between lines with five stresses and lines with four. Let’s look back to the beginning:

Where  /  = a strong beat and  –  = a less strong beat
Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
/           /           –     /       –      /       –       /          –        /
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
/       /        –        /          –       /        –       /

Metre is a funny thing to talk about in Shared Reading because it’s technical, like talking about 4/4 time in music when you’ve been listening to The Beatles.  It’s not the normal  conversation you’d have but nevertheless, 4/4 time is  there and may be worth noticing. So with poetry,  metre underpins and makes meaning.  It’s worth noticing even if you don’t understand anything about it.  Try tapping.  Are some of the taps strong and others less strong? In the lines above I felt that  both ‘light’ and ‘flows’ were strong taps, whereas  ‘our’ didn’t seem so.   There’s  no law about this, you have to feel it in your body.  That can be hard to do at first, but it’s (call me  weird) good fun.

More to say on what metre does the meaning, but that’s for tomorrow. I’ve gone over my time.

(A good book for this stuff, which I’ve had since it came out in 1996 is John Lennard’s  The Poetry Handbook. Looks like it is expensive and hard to come by secondhand,  but worth seeking out. )

 

WISE 100 : what women (and men) may bring to Social Enterprise

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strong woman.jpg

Very pleased yesterday (but sorry I’m behind the times, it was announced on the 12th and I missed both the announcement and the party!) to find I have been listed in the WISE 100, a list of 100 women working in Social Enterprise.

All lists are silly, I might say in another mood, but this was one I was glad to have made, not so much for myself as for my work at The Reader, not a women-only organisation though many  of our readers are women. And many of The Reader’s staff members and volunteers are women.  And all of  our leadership group at The Reader are (currently) women.

This interests me, as in my twenties I spent some time living in a women-only commune and strongly identified as a feminist. Being that feminist helped me become a woman in my own right and I’d recommend some feminism for all beginner-women – you want to be able to knock your own nails in, lift  heavy things, play in your own band, fight your corner, learn to knit, read books by women, stand on your own two feet, know your own experience and live without a lover for as long as necessary.

These days I wouldn’t describe myself as a feminist, though I still get bothered about the problems of a male world view as the norm and the  resulting problems women (and some men) face.  And though I wouldn’t use the word (or any sort of  classification ending in ‘ist’) for myself, yet I have built or accidentally stumbled into or attracted a woman-only senior leadership team. If I was a man this would be called ‘unconscious bias’ (you pick people like yourself whether you mean to or not). It is more practical than that, I hope.

As someone who has struggled to get toddlers and pushchairs and bags of shopping on and off the bus, if I were a designer I’d design buses and pushchairs and shopping bags to work differently. If I were the Prime Minister, parents of new babies would be issued with 3 camo-boiler suits and  encouraged to wear them until after their children start school. What time and energy that would save, what smears, what slarts would go  unnoticed.  How quickly you could get dressed each day. Maybe the babies and children  could also  have the same kind of  overalls! Dirt-hiding, food-concealing, coveralls – just pull ’em on and start the day. Massive savings to the economy/new industry developed in the design and manufacture of the suits.  Get them made from some self-composting green fabric and we have an eco-solution to the problem of some laughing child chucking  mushy weetabix at you at 7.10 a.m. Etc.

Ok,  but I do know the practical problems posed by pushchairs and shopping and buses and getting up in the morning . As someone who has had children and a job, I’m naturally trying to design work differently.  There are five of us in  The Reader’s Director Group: we all take advantage of flexible working, and the majority of us are not full-time.  (I haven’t worked in the camo-boilersuits yet but give me time). At The Reader, since our staffers started having children, we’ve had a bias towards making a sympathetic environment for working parents.  As Benedict cries in Much Ado , ‘The world must be peopled!’  We’ve also tried to make a flexible  working environment for those of us who live with physical and mental health conditions. These are basic matters, which any  organisation dependent on people must face, and which help us retain brilliant staffers, if we  can get it right.  Utilise what we’ve got. Make the most of our talents. Create workarounds.

CC cooking lunch
Chris, our ex-MD, one of The Reader men, cooking Friday lunch  in the basement of our first-ever office. Shared Eating has always been important at The Reader. Think this was Chilli  con Carne.

But does this  go further? I mean, into the actual work of The Reader?

Is Shared Reading, and the reading and Social Enterprise community we are building at Calderstones, influenced by woman-experience?  Thinking of some of the men I have worked with over the years, I know it is not just a woman thing.  Ah, this is all  too complicated for an hour’s thinking.

These are horribly crude generalisations, but I’ll go on with them for a moment.

I’m thinking about feeling and access to  the emotions, and whether – generally, roughly, crudely speaking – women are  closer to their own feelings, and to expressing them, than men. That’s not necessarily a given, it is just the way we’ve worked it over the last  few million years. Some of us got muscles and hunted meat for weeks on end, others stayed on the trail, picked the daily  berries and roots, looked after the children and held the tribe together.

Of course this is not fixed – it is learned and cultural,  but learned and cultural  is a powerful inhibitor. Yet, what is learned and cultural may be changed, is changeable. I think Shared Reading helps to change it, both for men who don’t speak much of their emotions, and for women who struggle with them, too.

There are three elements here :

  • feelings themselves as they exist in our hearts, guts, brains – wherever they are
  • consciousness of feelings or the willingness to allow consciousness
  • the ability to get feelings into words.

Of course this process is dependent on getting emotion into the reading room.  That’s not an easy ask –  much easier to stay with talking about the ‘characters’, the ‘poet’, the ‘Victorians’ ‘Shakespeare’s time’ and other distancing measures.  But  this is a mistake. Dangerous as it may seem, we have to make feeling happen.

This morning I have been back-searching the blog to see if I’ve written about Matthew Arnold’s poem  ‘The Buried Life’, which came to mind because Helen commented yesterday  on my absence here for the past two weeks saying ‘we’re all human, wander off our line and back on to it’.

It was the idea of everyone having a line they were on (or off) that reminded me of ‘The Buried Life’.

While I was searching I came upon an old post, from 2012, back in the days when we still called Shared Reading ‘Get Into Reading’.  It’s about what can go wrong (or is it right?) in a Shared Reading session and I think it is worth a  look because it talks about one of the key  things about Shared Reading: the need to get emotion into the room. (‘Trust and the Risk of Reading’,  find it here).

Feel as if I have wandered into dangerous and spouty territory today.

Here’s The Buried Life, by Matthew Arnold, which I’ll start reading tomorrow.

The Buried Life
Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet,
Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet!
I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll.
Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,
We know, we know that we can smile!
But there’s a something in this breast,
To which thy light words bring no rest,
And thy gay smiles no anodyne.
Give me thy hand, and hush awhile,
And turn those limpid eyes on mine,
And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul.
Alas! is even love too weak
To unlock the heart, and let it speak?
Are even lovers powerless to reveal
To one another what indeed they feel?
I knew the mass of men conceal’d
Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal’d
They would by other men be met
With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;
I knew they lived and moved
Trick’d in disguises, alien to the rest
Of men, and alien to themselves—and yet
The same heart beats in every human breast!
But we, my love!—doth a like spell benumb
Our hearts, our voices?—must we too be dumb?
Ah! well for us, if even we,
Even for a moment, can get free
Our heart, and have our lips unchain’d;
For that which seals them hath been deep-ordain’d!
Fate, which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be—
By what distractions he would be possess’d,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well-nigh change his own identity—
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ‘t is not true!
And then we will no more be rack’d
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Only—but this is rare—
When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

 

One for Sally Porter: ‘Wives In The Sere’, a poem by Thomas Hardy

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herbgarden to be.JPG
Where Nasturtiums Rule, back garden 21 August

I was looking through the Helen Gardiner OBEV  for something to read this morning and came upon this short lyric by Thomas Hardy which I’ve not read before. I was  lingering around TH because I’d noticed a tweet from Sally Porter, English teacher extraordinaire of this parish, in which she was searching twitter for Thomas Hardy memes.

I don’t  think I  really understand what a meme is, but I got Sally’s drift. No memes, she says, mention his novels or poetry… and somewhere in back of my mind, I thought, I’ll mention him.

I suppose it is because I am approaching my 34th wedding anniversary  that I was struck – almost offended I might say – by the title of this poem. ‘Sere’ is a word I only know from Macbeth – ‘My way of life/ Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf’ – and I think it means dried up. Let’s check. Yep, dry or withered. Wives in the Sere. Oh dear, not a good start to Monday. But let’s read it. Let’s read it in the spirit of meeting someone on the road and wanting to know – who are you?

Wives in the Sere

I

Never a careworn wife but shows,
If a joy suffuse her,
Something beautiful to those
Patient to peruse her,
Some one charm the world unknows
Precious to a muser,
Haply what, ere years were foes,
Moved her mate to choose her.

II

But, be it a hint of rose
That an instant hues her,
Or some early light or pose
Wherewith thought renews her –
Seen by him at full, ere woes
Practised to abuse her –
Sparely comes it, swiftly goes,
Time again subdues her.

Some lovely things in this, despite my initial grim feminist annoyance at TH  looking at me in this way. Yes, it felt that personal.

But… thinking of the poem as a fellow-creature I might meet on the road… I know Tom Hardy of old and can forgive him much. After all, he did also write ‘I Look Into My Glass’:

I LOOK into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, “Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!”

For then, I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.

But back to ‘Wives in the Sere’. let’s read the first stanza:

Never a careworn wife but shows,
If a joy suffuse her,
Something beautiful to those
Patient to peruse her,
Some one charm the world unknows
Precious to a muser,
Haply what, ere years were foes,
Moved her mate to choose her.

It is cares that do us in, not just the passing of time. I’ve been reading a book about play (search Just Started) and have in the back if my mind the  famous quote (from variously wrongly attributed sources) ‘children are young because they play, and not vice versa; and he might have added, men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely, for play is, at bottom, growth,’ (Wikipedia tells me these words  actually come from G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904). Could playfulness be the long-sought anti-ageing serum? But back to the poem.

The poem starts  with the doom-laden bell clanging word  ‘Never’ and yet by the end of the line something else is happening. By the end of the line we get to ‘but shows’. You see the pattern but something can break it. As cares attach to us, so they wear us down. And this is a norm. ‘Never a careworn wife’  points at a class of human beings. There are many of us.  Against ‘careworn’ Thomas Hardy sets ‘joy’ and between them, that small balancing act, tipping point, ‘if’. And by the end of the verse we are back in youth, at the moment when someone fell in love with her – moved to choose her.

But I want to look at the rhymes! I don’t know what it is called when a rhyme spreads over several words, but it is a characteristic of  Hardy’s verse-making:

suffuse her/peruse her/a muser/choose her

You’ve got to be patient, looking at her, to catch this swift rollback of years.  Good that ‘shows’ rhymes with ‘unknows’, isn’t it? Something is shown that the world cannot (or cannot any longer?) see. The world  knew it once, and now it unknows, because the woman is careworn, sere.  But it is still there.

I’m still fighting the idea that ‘years are foes’. I’ve been fighting this thought in this part of Thomas Hardy since I first met it in ‘I look into my glass’ in  thirty-five years ago. Of course, these days, I do look into my glass and I do view (what a horribly true word) my wasting skin. But I fight it! Not so much with anti-ageing cream, though I do  slap that on from time to time, but mentally, I fight it. I do not want to embrace myself as wasted, sere, no, nor feel the years as ‘foes’.  So that’s why I balk at the second verse, where Hardy rubs my nose in it:

But, be it a hint of rose
That an instant hues her,
Or some early light or pose
Wherewith thought renews her –
Seen by him at full, ere woes
Practised to abuse her –
Sparely comes it, swiftly goes,
Time again subdues her.

I know, I know! ‘sparely it comes, swiftly it goes’ that whatever we had that was lovely once and yes, ‘time again subdues her’. Hhm. It is a way of seeing but I want to object. I want something else.  Though when I read this I think of my Nan, Annie Smith, and my grandad Syd, and I wonder if these words work in my memory of them together? I think they do.

But on Saturday when my son arrived and I was in the garden happily lopping off the sere and yellow leaves of old geraniums, he said ‘Mum! you’ve turned yourself into one of those old gardening ladies!’ He meant my  garden boots and unkempt hair ( no time, it might rain soon) and those very unattractive – but no one will be looking at me –  long  khaki shorts, which I’d slightly rolled up, and that handy  but horrible sleeveless deep-pocketed jacket.  Hhm, there I was,  not so much  at that moment care-worn as careless, though perhaps weather-beaten.

And yes –  I had  turned myself into that old gardening lady.  And to my own surprise I later  went to the shops that get-up.  I didn’t care! I  needed some horticultural grit for my gardening game! But you know what, I thought my 21-year-old self would have recognised me. She didn’t care, either.

So what is lost – if it is not simply what Shakespeare called rosy lips and cheeks? What does time wipe out? Well,  yes, it shows in looks, Tom, but as you know,  the damage takes place much deeper. As you say in ‘I look into my glass’

‘…Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;’

and that’s the painful mix. I’m sixty-one and twenty-one at the same time. It’s the grieving that does us in. Let’s not grieve for looks!

Is there anyone writing  poetry about this kind of thing?

Perhaps some Sharon Olds will help?

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.

In a petrol blue boiler suit, I rejected George Eliot (who could’ve helped me)

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Ok, time to start getting out the good stuff. Enough with the childish. We’ve got to talk about George. It’s just I have this feeling that if I start I might not be able to stop. Going to keep this first mention of her short. Think of it as taster.

I’ve been sewing all day, a long rhythm of creative play with bits of cloth, cutting and looking and stitching in silence. And while I’ve been working, in silence, I have been thinking about this list and all lists of great books, and about George Eliot. But I’m not ready to write about her books yet. This post is just a memory, a fragment of thought.

I first tried to read Middlemarch when a teacher recommended it with the intriguing line ‘You should read Middlemarch, it’s the watershed of the English novel.’ What the hell is a watershed, I wondered.  Does something good happen in there? And why ‘should’? I was bolshy: ‘should’ didn’t attract me. And yet I obeyed.

So I set off with a copy from the library. I’d be doing ‘A’ levels, at that time, maybe about 23 years old. My daughter aged four.  I’d be living in or just come out of Lysistrata Coop, a women’s commune. I had pretty much only been reading women for past three or four years. But working my way through the Brontes (of which much more, much later) Jane Austen (yes, we’ll get to her), all contemporary women fiction writers, and The Female Eunuch (will I include it in this list? I don’t know yet) plus Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto (Google it, young things, but have a sick bag with you) and everything by Doris Lessing, Ursula le Guin, Jean Rhys, Iris Murdoch and even Barbara Pym. Shelf miles of Women’s Press and Virago paperbacks. The Yellow Wallpaper.

But George Eliot? She had not featured, and I don’t think I saw her on anybody’s shelves. Did we think she was a man? It’s highly possible I did. Did we disapprove of a woman taking a man’s name to write – you bet (Yeah yeah but Currer Bell was androgynous). We were wimmin, we lived in boiler suits.

Ok – when I say ‘we’ I am talking mainly about myself.

So, the watershed of the English novel. Hum. Girl in it, bit of Christian prig, I know I’m not interested. Hum. Now there is a doctor. Oh, I see, they are going to get married. How predictable! Page 60 – I can see what’s going to happen, I can’t be bothered with this. I closed the book, ‘ the watershed’. What one earth did that man mean? Why didn’t he say  ‘It’s about a girl who is a bit like you, a bit mad. Likely to go wrong. It’s about how it goes wrong.’

Well, he didn’t and more to the point, I didn’t see it coming, so another 3 years had to go by before I read Middlemarch and that was pity. Because there was a lot of information in that novel that I needed to get into my head as soon as possible and I missed it. That kind of thing – me at 23 needing George Eliot and   passing her up, and looking back now from a distance of 35 years and seeing the shape of my missing it and its effect on young me – that kind of thing is what great novels record:  that is the kind of data great literature collects and analyses.

If George Eliot had been a man – but of course, it is impossible to imagine those books written by a man, they are utterly womanly. And as intellectually innovative as Marx or Darwin. But they don’t look as if they are, because they are novels, and that kind of data isn’t much acknowledged in the public world. Which is – even now – quite man’s world.

Women: read George Eliot.

Men: read George Eliot.

Be human. She will explain everything.