George Herbert

Overnight Thoughts, Knitting Up Those Raveled Sleeves and Doing My Expenses, Late.

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expenses.JPG

‘Sleep,’ says Macbeth, who hasn’t had any,  ‘knits up the raveled sleeve of care.’

I love overnight thoughts and the fact that my brain keeps trying even when I go to sleep. It’s as if everything does not depend on consciousness, a great relief when you haven’t got or can’t summon enough of that vital commodity to deal with all the things you’ve got to sort out.

This morning I woke up with some lines of George Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ playing in my mind. I’ve written about that poem before  (search George Herbert and you’ll find it) but here it is again today.  Great poems come back and prove useful over and over.

It’s a religious poem and must come with my usual caveat: I’m not a Christian and have to translate what George Herbert is able to think as a Christian into something that makes sense to me. I borrow his language and try to understand my own situation through it.

Let’s read it quickly through:

Teach me, my God and King,
         In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
         To do it as for Thee.
         Not rudely, as a beast,
         To run into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
         And give it his perfection.
         A man that looks on glass,
         On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
         And then the heav’n espy.
         All may of Thee partake:
         Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture—”for Thy sake”—
         Will not grow bright and clean.
         A servant with this clause
         Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
         Makes that and th’ action fine.
         This is the famous stone
         That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
         Cannot for less be told.

Why did I wake with the following lines quietly but insistently  reciting themselves  in my mind?

Not rudely, as a beast,
         To run into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
         And give it his perfection.

I had been dreaming, or perhaps better to say, unconsciously thinking, about some work problems and my brain was offering me ‘The Elixir’ as a solution.  It was saying  ‘You already know this! Think on!’

I say ‘problems’ but these weren’t the gut-wrenching problems of leadership common to every charity (and non-charity?) CEO. For me those problems,  real problems, the worst, the 2.47 a.m. and I’m wide awake problems, always involve people and their individual sensibilities.  Other kinds of worries sometimes wake me up but  it is the people problems that make me sweat. I think this  is connected to what William Stafford is talking about in his poem ‘A Ritual To Read To Each Other’ (which you’ll find here) when he speaks of  ‘the horrible errors of childhood’

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.

When I’m reading ‘A Ritual To Read To Each Other’ with other people , this stanza is always a tricky one. You need a lot of trust to be willing to go into ‘the horrible errors of childhood/storming out to play through the broken dyke.’

Stafford is talking about people trying to make a new pattern in the world, people following each other or  sticking together, trying to get somewhere together. Everything depends on trust.  And this stanza about the ‘horrible errors of childhood’ is a stanza about moments when our trusting fails.

‘Betrayal’, which is a big thing, starts small,  a private, even secret thought, ‘ in the mind’. No one would even know what you were thinking.  But that small betrayal results in a physical action in the world: ‘a shrug’, which doesn’t at first seem much.

You think something bad about someone (which is how I take the word ‘betrayal’ – but we might argue about that) and you stop bothering. You let it go. Some things can’t be fixed. That shrug doesn’t seem much, and might even be sensible.

But it is the shrug that  ‘lets the fragile sequence break’ and suddenly all hell is let loose.

We become as children, in dangerous adult bodies/lives. To have the emotional needs of unhappy children, but to have them in adult lives, with adult powers of language and memory and behaviour and power, is a terrible thing. We become a raging flood, breaking the dam, the dyke, out of control.

Working on problems like that, the work of the priest or psychotherapist, is hard in a workplace where we don’t have time to slowly unravel  reasons and face them in our own time. We have to decide to do something today, now.

Poetry can help at work. You don’t need hours, you need a couple of lines. You need a different feeling round a table. You may only need one thought.

None of that was my problem last night, however. I didn’t wake up sweating. I slept through and woke with ‘The Elixir’ in my mind.

The problems of  last night are creative problems about trying to make Calderstones a place where the horrible errors of childhood are not storming around too much and where all our tasks, from picking up litter to serving soup, from reading the poems to reading the people, from filing our accounts with the Charities Commission to submitting expenses forms on time are all done as if they all mattered.

 A servant with this clause
         Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
         Makes that and th’ action fine.

The floor-sweeping, housekeeping, of filing my expenses on time saves the finance team trouble and that is as much a part of the vision of Calderstones as  good communication or fine literature or delicious soup.  Shrug  those small things off at your peril. Next thing, we’re all lost. ‘The Elixir’ came into my mind to tell me so.

Teach me, my God and King,
         In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
         To do it as for Thee.

 

 

Gerorge Herbert: prepping like Joe Wicks, sweeping the floor for good.

drjanedavis7 Comments
calds 30 May
A long view in the Old English Garden at Calderstones 30 May

Continuing from yesterday….On Saturday I’ll be leading a day of Shared Reading at the Ashoka Headquarters on Old Ford Road,  Bethnall Green, London. You can sign up for it here. We’ll be reading parts of Jeanette Winterson’s powerful memoir and meditation on inner life, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and some poems by a favourite poet of hers, and mine, George Herbert.  I’m interested in seeing how ancient and modern languages for what we call ‘mental health’ or George Herbert called his ‘soul’, can fit together.

Today I’m continuing reading ‘The Elixir’  by George Herbert,

I started from the uncomfortable position of being someone who doesn’t have a religion, faced with trying to understand a message from someone who does.  I have to translate Herbert’s ‘God’ into something I can understand.

Yesterday Loubyjo commented, ‘True wisdom is a loss of misconceptions rather than an accumulation of knowledge do not hoard facts and call your self wise sages realise when they know enough !!’

I agree!

Think you were thinking Lou, give yourself a break ,Jane and don’t over think. But I want to think, or rest, or meditate, on a word. Realise that might make reading what I’m writing slow or dull, and I do feel some compulsion to try to move it along for the sake of readers, but really, I’m writing for myself, to deepen my own reading practice. Sometimes staying still in one word allows me to do exactly what you suggest, Lou, and ‘lose misconceptions’. They are always with me when I start reading, and the slow  thinking helps me  lose them.

I agree that knowledge is not wisdom, facts are not wisdom (see the post about footnotes). But understanding the words, understanding what they mean to me, doesn’t seem like ‘knowledge’ to me. All of which is to say – thanks for comment – no worries, and no need to say ‘sorry’ at all, always glad to hear from you – the frustration was more to do with running out of time yesterday.

But I add your thought into the mix: the discipline to do my hour’s practice and accept without frustration when time us up!

Back to the poem: for readers only joining today, here it is, ‘The Elixir’:

         Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
         To do it as for Thee.
         Not rudely, as a beast,
         To run into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
         And give it his perfection.
         A man that looks on glass,
         On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
         And then the heav’n espy.
         All may of Thee partake:
         Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture—”for Thy sake”—
         Will not grow bright and clean.
         A servant with this clause
         Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
         Makes that and th’ action fine.
         This is the famous stone
         That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
         Cannot for less be told.

I had got, in my snail -like way, to the word ‘prepossest’ in line 7 and was about to think through the change of pronouns connected to that word. I think that  ‘Thee’  and ‘his’ refer to the same person (God) but am not sure.

       Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
And give it his perfection.

There are three people in those four lines : George Herbert (understood though not named) , the beast and God. Only God could have the perfection, which is why I think ‘his’ refers to God. but if so there is an odd switch from Herbert talking directly to God (Thee) to talking about him (his perfection).

Various thoughts:

  • it’s a mistake, printing error etc and should read ‘Your perfection’
  • there’s something I don’t understand
  • his perfection refers to the beast.

I work through these possibilities and arrive back at the second explanation.  Is it s switch from talking directly to God – to the ideal – to being outside and seeing God/the ideal as something to achieve?

Bear with me – say I watch Dave our Chef at Calderstones cooking rice and I am with him, and talking to him, I’d be saying ‘Thee’ and ‘Chef’… but when I get home by myself and  remember him and the way he does it, and then he is not ‘Thee’ and ‘Chef’ but ‘Him’ and ‘his’… ach, that doesn’t really work because if ‘his’ was  referring to ‘God’, it would have a capital.

I’m going to ask my teacher, Brian Nellist, about this. I’m stumped. Start again.

To be  ‘prepossest’ is to have ownership in advance – particularly of a thought. Think Herbert is saying he aims to give the future shape of his action over to God in advance, to dedicate it, to let God be part of it.

In my own experience that might be thinking ahead about the best way to do something: not going with my immediate emotion in a situation (angry because…) but encouraging the ideal to take possession of my actions before they happen (how do I want, ideally, to behave). Thinking it through, setting my intention, having a strong picture of the ideal.

This could work in any situation:
A man that looks on glass,
         On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
         And then the heav’n espy.

You can see the thing directly in front of you or you can see beyond it and see more. I am angry with a cafe which has produced a very poor cake for Brian Nellists’ birthday day. The cafe people are stupid and their customer service is bad. That’s the surface of the glass. I can have a row there and then, or I can take Brian off  and continue our happy birthday mood, making a joke of the cake and his  poor worn out teeth. That continuation of happy mood was the ‘heav’n’.

To finish today  by  arriving at my favourite lines – many people’s favourites, I’m sure:

Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
         Makes that and th’ action fine.

This is the case whenever an ideal is in play.

I  remember 1974 using the cyclostyler, a more frustrating machine there never was, to reproduce women’s liberation leaflets in the front room of Liverpool Women’s Centre. That was a horrible job, messy, frustrating, hot and  hours long. But for the cause! We were amazons, making those fliers!

Thinking of The Reader’s life at Calderstones, where there will be much sweeping of rooms to be done, and we need to develop a shared spirit about the ways in which we all work.

Thinking more generally about trying to be good, and the foresight needed, the fore-thinking.  If you follow the instructions of Bodycoach Joe Wicks, you’ll know it is important to ‘prep like a boss’. To think ahead about what you are going to eat, and get it ready, so that when 11.00 am hunger strikes, you’ve got some carrot sticks and  don’t need to go and buy a doughnut.

Herbert’s poem gives me the chance to imagine putting that amount of care into all the actions of my life, helps me realise it’s what you do everyday, not on the grand occasion, that counts.  Everything is an opportunity for practising the ideal.

This is the famous stone
         That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
         Cannot for less be told.

Wholeheartedly for the Ideal: George Herbert, The Elixir

drjanedavis1 Comment
Albertine and Hops .JPG
Flourishing: Albertine Rose and Golden Hop, 1 June

On Saturday I’ll be leading a day of Shared Reading at the Ashoka Headquarters on Old Ford Road,  Bethnall Green, London. You can sign up for it here. We’ll be reading parts of Jeanette Winterson’s powerful memoir and meditation on inner life, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, and some poems by a favourite poet of hers, and mine, George Herbert.  I’m interested in seeing how ancient and modern languages for what we call ‘mental health’ or George Herbert called his ‘soul’, can fit together.

Today I’m reading ‘The Elixir’  by George Herbert,

As usual, I start from the uncomfortable position of being someone who doesn’t have a religion, faced with trying to understand a message from someone who does.  I have to translate Herbert’s ‘God’ into something I can understand.

This morning I’m thinking about the  place of Shared Reading at Calderstones – so sorry if my reading is peculiarly biased towards my own obsession. I’ll try to think outside my box as well as from deep within it!

The Elixir

Teach me, my God and King,

         In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in anything
         To do it as for Thee.
         Not rudely, as a beast,
         To run into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
         And give it his perfection.
         A man that looks on glass,
         On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
         And then the heav’n espy.
         All may of Thee partake:
         Nothing can be so mean,
Which with his tincture—”for Thy sake”—
         Will not grow bright and clean.
         A servant with this clause
         Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,
         Makes that and th’ action fine.
         This is the famous stone
         That turneth all to gold;
For that which God doth touch and own
         Cannot for less be told.
When I begin reading I have to read a couple of times to get into a non-sing song mind-set, and start concentrating deeply on the words.  for someone like me., with no God, what can the first lines, ‘Teach me, my God and King/ In all things Thee to see’
mean?
If I think of ‘God ‘ as  highest aspiration, best endeavour, an ideal, then I can begin to read the line as about learning to concentrate, the development of a sort of devotion to seeing the best that can be. For Calderstones, I’m thinking, how can I keep Shared Reading at the forefront of my mind, while developing businesses, a shop, the heritage centre?
In our time we have to find a way of re-understanding what ‘King’ might mean as well as ‘God’. I imagine a boss that I could really look up to, someone who was my leader,  and whom I would obey, utterly admirable, commanding respect. If I try to transfer to translate that thought to an ideal of set of ideals, then I feel I can read the poem’s opening as about demanding from myself a commitment to seeing and doing and being the best that can be. The poem begins with the word ‘teach’: in this endeavour I am, and need to see myself as a learner.  This boss is asking everything of me and I don’t know how to do it! Or am I asking my boss to ask everything of me? ‘Teach me, my God and King’.
The second couplet in that first verse is about the creation of habits. It is incredibly hard to do everything well, or even not badly. To aim for ‘anything’ (by implication, everything) is a massive ambition, and dedication. No wonder you have keep learning it every day, every time you do something.
Having a ‘God and King’, Herbert seems in  happier position than me,  because there is teaching, not just learning. Having a teacher can be a marvelous thing: learning by yourself alone is hard. I wonder if there is any way I can use those ideals, that sense of ‘the best it could possibly be’, to teach me? I’d have to keep them in mind, which is hard to do, as the days  unfold so busily.
I look at the next stanza:
Not rudely, as a beast,
         To run into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest,
         And give it his perfection.
First, there’s an odd thing happening with pronouns here in the third and fourth line. I’m not sure if it is important. But come back to that – start with the beast!  hhmm, keeping the good, the best, the ideal of anything in mind and not running ‘into an action’… oh dear, yes. I recognise this problem.
Now I like beasts and am in favour of them and think humans underestimate them. But I do think that humans have, or seem to have, more consciousness of a particular sort. This is our special quality – we  are conscious, we have language and forethought and we seek meaning.  Why then, do I so heartily recognise the rushing into action without thought Herbert describes here?
Is the poem asking me to develop extra consciousness, to be more conscious and more dedicated to consciousness than I have been?
I begin to think about the word ‘prepossest’ but I’m late – how frustrating – and my time is up – more tomorrow.

Being put to the fire and talking about it: reading George Herbert

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albertine.JPG
Albertine Roses enjoying the rain, May 30 

On Saturday 3 June, I’ll be leading a day of Shared Reading  in London, and really looking forward to a day in the company of fellow readers, with poems by one of my favourite poets, George Herbert, and prose from Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal by Reader Patron, Jeanette Winterson. I’ll be reprising the reading day in Liverpool on Thursday 15th June in Liverpool. I thought I could do a little prep for those days here by reading some  George Herbert this  week. For more on this read yesterday’s post.

I’d started reading The Windows, a George Herbert poem I’m not very familiar with, and am carrying on with that reading today. Sorry to say, yesterday I only got as far as line two.

The Windows

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glory
More reverend grows, and more doth win;
Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

I’d been thinking about ‘brittle crazy glass’ and most my energy had been directed at ‘brittle’ and ‘crazy’ but now we come to ‘glass’.  The glass is brittle and crazy and that is its nature, but there is another part of its nature – light gets through – that is equally important. And it is for this that this that people are chosen to preach, are put in this position, ‘This glorious and transcendent place/To be a window’.  Even though  brittle and crazy is still the first thing.

This is the translation I’m making – because I am myself one of those people I wrote about yesterday who might be  struggling to believe in church or preacher. Yet I know from past direct experience, that if I can tune in to George Herbert, he has something to say to me that will be helpful to me. I have to get past my stuck thought, and into a freer, more open-minded place.

As a Shared Reading leader I first have to do this for myself – physician heal thyself! – then I have to be able to do it for any group members who might be struggling in the same way.  The way to do it is by offering imaginative translation that get you from one place to another.

I want to return to my analogy of yesterday about being asked to speak in public  about something.  I wrote about people who are members of Shared Reading groups who sometimes speak about their experiences in Shared Reading at conferences, or to funders or other supporters on behalf of the organisation. Most people – including myself – find that experience worrisome or even frightening, in advance. Let me just talk about myself  –  say I got a call from Cabinet office and someone said, they want to hear about Shared Reading, you’ve got eight mins to tell them.  I’d be excited at the opportunity and terrified of making a mess of it. I’d be thinking of the ways in which I am brittle and crazy (when speaking in public I am so nervous that I cannot look at my notes, therefore I  don’t use notes, therefore I have to remember what I am trying to say…) and I would have to force myself also to remember I am also a glass, that through whatever I manage to say, the human value of Shared Reading, may come through. The opportunity to speak is as Denise Levertov writes in ‘Variation on a theme by Rilke’ , ‘honour and a task’. Or as Herbert puts it here, it is ‘glorious and transcendent’.  Doing it, as I have learned over time, also changes you.  Some onf the internal weaknesses are burned out.

Thinking like this helps me stop feeling that a preacher is a foreign idea to me, and something I don’t want to understand.  I go on, to the second stanza.

But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glory
More reverend grows, and more doth win;
Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.

The word I must look up is anneal – to heat in order to remove internal stresses. And from the etymological dictionary, to put to the fire, but also with echoes of burning, fire and firebrand. Isn’t etymology wonderful?

Herbert is talking about the actual physical process of making glass – that’s his analogy – and I’m assuming this is stained glass, because of the ‘story’ being contained in it. Yes, I see later in stanza three, Herbert speaks of ‘colours’. But then he let’s the analogy go as he goes back to the  task of preachers, which is to hold that story, that light. The key thought is in the annealing – which is the process of being baked, burned, fired.  Without such a process the light coming through looks ‘waterish, bleak, and thin’.

This is to do with the pain that goes into real experience. A civil servant, a grants manager, a professional, may be able to coolly summarise Shared Reading in the language and tone normally used in Cabinet office. But a group member who has a story to tell about their experience – however nervous, unprofessional, or initially low-voiced – will speak with fire. Let’s read on;

Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

Here’s a powerful chemical mixture: ‘Doctrine and life, colors and light’. ‘Doctrine’ is one of those words that need a translation before the anti-religon person in our group kicks off on one.  Simply – a doctrine is a body of teachings.

Any sort of body of teachings without life added is dull.  I had to go on a speed awareness course. Two men were trying to teach thirty grumpy and self-righteous miscreants like myself why is was important to obey the law on speed when driving. What we were most grumpy about, to a man and woman, was the waste of our time on this silly course. But the two men running the course were very funny and  good at imparting the information and they liked driving, loved cars. They made it live, and that made it bearable. Our grumpiness dissipated. Doctrine – obey the speed limit – and life, when they combine… Good teachers at school were always like that, weren’t they? Something in them shone through, love of their subject or of us, energy in voice, in gesture, liveliness.

                          but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the ear, not conscience, ring

Words alone, what Macbeth calls ‘mouth-honour’, is never good. The word ‘flaring’ is a great choice here, implicitly compared to ‘anneal’. Flaring is temporary, is over and done, however momentarily bright. ‘Anneal’ is agony and it transforms you. Flaring gets to the ear, but the voice of ‘anneal’ gets in to the heart, to ‘conscience‘.  I love it  that a thought which starts in self-doubt, in an estimation of our flaws, ‘brittle, crazy’, ends by reaching, through those very attributes, to the inmost part of another human.

Perhaps a little Jeanette Winterson tomorrow?

 

Being Brittle Crazy Glass: translating two lines of George Herbert

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glass
On Saturday 3 June, I’ll be leading a day of Shared Reading  in London, and really looking forward to a day in the company of fellow readers, with poems by one of my favourite poets, George Herbert, and prose from Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal by Reader Patron, Jeanette Winterson. I’ll be reprising the reading day in Liverpool on Thursday 15th June in Liverpool. I thought I could do a little prep for those days here by reading some  George Herbert this  week.
Why these two writers together? George Herbert writes about what I’ll call his inner life, and is expert in observing and analysing the movements of his spirit, his own thought, and feeling.  He has a lot to offer a world that is struggling with ‘mental health problems’.
I feel I need to put inverted commas around  that phrase, so little justice does it do to experience of  real people living with their real feelings.
We need to start developing a new way of talking and thinking about our inner lives that gets away from that destructive and deadening language. Jeanette’s memoir offers, in telling a large portion of her life story,  a rethink about what ‘mental health experiences’ are, and how humans might think and talk about them.
As regular readers of this blog know, I believe that a key power of literature is its ability to translate between people, across time and culture. An individual has an experience which seems to be  tied to that individuality.  Getting that experience into language means it can be shared – word by word – by another human. Language translates out of one person and into another: when we try to read someone, in writing, in conversation, or by body language, we are translating them into us. That act of translation is taking place all the time, but is more obvious when people are separated by hundreds of years, by being dead or alive, by having reductive and mismatched labels attached to them.
I’ll be looking for connections, for moments of  meeting, for light cast on George Herbert by Jeanette Winterson, and on Jeanette Winterson by George Herbert. By their works we shall know them, and we’ll see them speaking to each other, I hope, through those works.
This morning after writing the above, none of  which counts as my hour of Daily Practice,  I clicked through George Herbert’s Works, looking for something I’ve not read often before.  Here it is.
I’m not going to  pretend I don’t know a thing about George Herbert.  He’s a man who might have been an advisor to the Crown who has chosen to make a life as a very small town country parson, in the parish of Bemerton, in Wiltshire. You can read about him here.
So, I begin to read the poem, which likens the parson to the windows in a church, knowing that it is written by a man who works in such a church, whose job is preaching.
I read the poem through once, aloud.
The Windows
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
    He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
    This glorious and transcendent place,
    To be a window, through thy grace.
But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
    Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glory
    More reverend grows, and more doth win;
    Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.
Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
    When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
    Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
    And in the ear, not conscience, ring.
Yesterday Jamie commented on the Silas Marner reading:
It’s great how Eliot slowing strips away the external stuff so that by the end we’re no longer looking at ‘rural forefathers’, ‘them’ but ‘native human’ ,’men’, ‘circumstances common to us all’ – we are in the internal world, the emotional world
I hadn’t noticed  this until Jamie pointed it (one of the many benefits of reading with others). But with her thought in still in my mind now,  I see how, after I have located the poem in a particular man – George Herbert, preaching in Bemerton Parish Church – Herbert himself de-personalises  himself and writes about us all –  we are not in world of time and place and person, but as Jamie says, the internal, emotional world.
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
He is a brittle crazy glass;
Herbert may be  writing from his own experience, but he is here at pains to make that experience universal: it is ‘man’ not ‘me’.  The experience George Herbert may have had , as a particular man, in a particular place,  in a particular time becomes an experience we might all understand or share.
But for those of us who have no religion, or are actively against it, simply the word ‘preach’ might be a difficulty. How do  you translate such a thought into your own experience if you hate the idea of preaching, of preachers, of priests, of church, of religion? This might be an immediate difficulty on Shared Reading group.
One of things we learn when reading is the practice of imagination. So if I was leading a group and a person was bothered about the idea of religion,  and finding it a barrier to reaidng, I’d try to ask the group to  imagine what preaching, without all the paraphernalia and cultural history both acknowledged and unacknowledged, of the church, of  religions, what in the golden age, in the ideal state, a preacher might be.
I look up the word ‘preacher’. It’s about saying in public.  It’s ‘to say before’ (everyone). We might connect the idea to teaching, or to public health or even to Shared Reading. If you we goingto speak ,as members of groups soetimes do, about the value of Shared REading ,and you were going to speak in public, say, at an NHS conference – you might find yourself in a similar positon to George Herbert. He’s got to pass on a message to others. Something has to come through him.
I  that is what I do at first when I read, I imagine it as a story. When I read those first two lines I mentally see George Herbert entering his church, looking at the windows, thinking of his own position, both ‘brittle, crazy’ but also ‘glass’ through which God’s light must shine.
‘Man’ is mortal and temporary and far from god, but the preachr must preach ‘thy eternal word’. That is his job, and a job he feels not well fitted for: he is a ‘brittle crazy glass.’
I want to understandthe word ‘crazy’, which I think  here must mean broken, as in crazy paving.  Again I check the dictionary, looking at ‘craze’, where it is the verb we need to look at, crasen: shattered. I also look at crazy. It seems as if that connection to disease has been for a long time. If a pane was glass was ‘crazy’ is would be shattered, crazed (as in a glaze) but not necessarily totally broken. The brittleness, the propensity to break, to be broken is what we need to think on. It’s as if the very nature of man is to be broken, shattered, and not a clear medium through which anything might pass.
To go back to imagining being a Shared Reading leader and trying to get someone over the hump of barrier that is ‘I hate religion’ , I’d ask, can you imagine being asked to speak about something to people who really need to hear (let’s say mental health budget holders)  and knowing that you ere not a very good public speaker? Yes! we can almost all imagine that.  But can we also imagine really wanting to do it? Yes. Really feeling the people we were speaking to really needed to hear what we were going to say? Yes!
Then we can imagine what it feels like to be this preacher.  Let’s just reread the first stanza:
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
    He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
    This glorious and transcendent place,
    To be a window, through thy grace.
Ah no, time is up: more tomorrow.
Keep reading:
I interviewed Jeanette  for The Reader magazine and you can read that interview here.
You can read Jeanette’s Times article about The Reader here.
There’s a good interview by Matt Haig, another writer I admire,  with Jeanette here.

Poem of the Day

drjanedavis2 Comments

Avarice by George Herbert

MONEY, thou bane of bliss, and source of woe,
Whence com’st thou, that thou art so fresh and fine ?
I know thy parentage is base and low:
Man found thee poor and dirty in a mine.

Surely thou didst so little contribute
To this great kingdom, which thou now hast got,
That he was fain, when thou wert destitute,
To dig thee out of thy dark cave and grot.

Then forcing thee, by fire he made thee bright :
Nay, thou hast got the face of man; for we
Have with our stamp and seal transferr’d our right :
Thou art the man, and man but dross to thee.

Man calleth thee his wealth, who made thee rich ;
And while he digs out thee, falls in the ditch.

I spent two weeks in on the Croatian island of Mljet, in a hermit-like seclusion, doing nothing but reading, walking, swimming and spending time with my husband. Ok, we did eat in the Polace harbourside restaurants most days, and our own home made meals consisted of tomatoes and local peppers, salami and goat cheese and beer, bought at the shop. So not not at all frugal, but the period of time had a clarity derived from its stripped down nature. It was a sort of mindlessness holiday. Which we needed because of two very different sadnesses we were carrying with us.

The water on the island (this is the eastern Adriatic) is clean and very clear, causing, on the coast a sharply delightful intake of breath, but in the calm sea-water lakes on the north west side of the island, it’s warm and shallow enough to encourage you to simply drift, floating for half an hour at a time. Something about this drift, in the aqua-green water, surrounded by forested hills and breathing the scent of hot pines,feels to me deeply restorative. And was perhaps felt also by Benedictine monks in the twelfth century, who came to build a now ruined monastery on the tiny islet now known as Santa Maria, set in extreme west of the larger of the two lakes. This place is mildly remote now, but then? I spent some time imagining the quiet of those Benedictine lives, and the power of their plainsong in the ringing acoustic space that is the church.

So then I came home, rested and looking forward to resuming my busy life, with a strong new year resolution feeling about keeping hold of the deep quiet I had enjoyed, of making a place for quiet downtime in my non-holiday life. And the next day, my MacBook Air having a glitchy problem to do with being totally out of memory, I made my way into the city centre, to visit the Applestore in Liverpool One. Was it too sudden a transition? The streets were full of people buying clothes, shouting at their small children, drinking. It looked like an animated Bosche painting and the soundtrack was a blurry cacophony of stupid broken noises. Outside a summertime pub drinkers smoked and their faces seemed monstrous, bulbous, huge-pored, red. Poor boys in black anoraks pushed through the crowds looking like trouble. Fat women wore revealing strapless sundresses. Everyone was obsessed with stuff. It is not good to feel so apart from one’s fellow creatures and I felt repulsion and then something like shame, because why shouldn’t Liverpool be going on just as it always does, just because I’ve been on holiday? I bought an external hard drive and fled. Oh, I did my shopping.

I hate not feeling part of the world. I want to be fond of my fellows. But this was too much, too sudden, too messy and too pointlessly buying. Everything seemed about getting stuff. I know I am part of it. I was in the Applestore like everyone else, getting and spending, as Wordsworth says, and laying waste my powers. I know we cannot all be transported to a rural idyll. I know this world is here to stay and that I want my money as much as the next man, more than some.

But I want more than this, too. I want my peace. I thought while I was away that one of the ways of getting some slow downtime would be to read a poem a day. So this morning – I’d forgotten about town almost as soon as I got back to my garden in West Kirby – I opened my Everyman George Herbert and looked for a poem I did not already know. This was it. I remembered my disgusted feeling. I thought of my own desire for stuff, things, new walking boots, a snorkel, music, a season ticket for Anfield, the Phil, eating out, new clothes…

I particularly like the lines,

Nay, thou hast got the face of man; for we
Have with our stamp and seal transferr’d our right :

Which gave me the strongest sense of having exchanged something of my self for money and stuff. And I like the use of pronouns in the poem – I , we , he… as if they are all pretty much the same – the ancient history of money and stuff, the current state of it… it’s a general human problem and mess, almost a species problem, caused by ‘man’ and over a very long time.

I read it and the question is – how can I live a good life in the world, this world of money and stuff, of shopping and getting, of not having and wanting, and not retire to a Benedictine or some other monastery?

Sunday morning. I spend £4 on going for a swim in West Kirby swimming baths. The water is nothing like the small salt lake on Mljet, but after 30 lengths I feel ok.

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