Morning, readers. Today I’ve changed my site format and that’s done something odd with my photos in previous posts. Hope to sort this double vision soon. Advice gratefully received.
But don’t want to let that glitch interrupt my morning reading and writing.
I am still thinking about Thursday’s meeting with Sonya Hale, and about Daniel Magariel’s novel, One of The Boys, (see yesterday’s post) and about the deep resonances and ancient feelings that meeting and that novel provoked into life. For that reason, this poem by William Shakespeare caught my attention this morning. I must have read it before but I really don’t remember it. Why not? Today it is full of meanings. If you are new to Shakespeare read it aloud. Read it aloud anyway.
Sonnet 110
Alas, ’tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.
Most true it is that I have look’d on truth
Askance and strangely: but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.
Now all is done, have what shall have no end!
Mine appetite, I never more will grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confin’d.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.
I felt a delight in the opening line. There is nothing like recognition for provoking pleasure, even when it is recognition of having made a fool of yourself.
As I read on the poem seems to be about having been unfaithful yet it didn’t feel to me only about sexual fidelity.
The shame of the opening is about having been disloyal to yourself. And ‘Here and there’ made me think of things Sonya said about the moving about from town to town when she was street homeless. There is real, sad recognition (as much as guilt) in ‘made myself a motley to the view’. (‘Motley’ is the name given to clothing worn by fools). It’s not only the humiliation of that idiocy but the shame of having done it to myself.
By the time I got to line 3, ‘Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear’, I was thinking about old mistakes and infidelities, not to my beloved, but to my better self. The violence of ‘gored’ gave me pause to reflect on the self-injury of bad thinking.
Alas, ’tis true I have gone here and there
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new.
Now I read the next four lines together, another little lump of thought:
Most true it is that I have look’d on truth
Askance and strangely: but, by all above,
These blenches gave my heart another youth,
And worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.
Is Shakespeare is responding to something another person has said – in a row, perhaps? ‘You’ve looked on truth askance and strangely!!’ Thus he begins ‘Most true it is…’ but going off after others, or dishonesties, or cheating or whatever he means by ‘these blenches‘ , it ‘gave my heart another youth/and worse essays prov’d thee my best of love.’ Thus, out of bad something good may come? I realised you were the one for me!
The ‘askance and strangely’ is resonant of the ways in which, when you are not able to be true, all things are twisted. In Magariel’s novel, the father’s love for his sons is a twisted ‘askance’ version of something which is more like ownership. Will he one day go into recovery and see what he has done to his sons?
Now all is done, have what shall have no end!
Mine appetite, I never more will grind
On newer proof, to try an older friend,
A god in love, to whom I am confin’d.
Shakespeare’s saying he’s never going to go off with someone else, never again! I’m back, forever. Would you believe him? Well, no, I wouldn’t, much as I often don’t believe myself when I promise myself I’m going to keep my room tidy. What? After all these decades of chaos? You’re really going to change?
No, this is the return of a philanderer. Don’t give him welcome. As my friend Shelley once memorably said, ‘Chuck him, love, he’s a loser.’
But say I overrode these thoughts and feelings about the top-level experience of the poem, the unfaithful lover, and went to something under the lines, something about not being true, not necessarily about love or sexual relationship.
There are many ways in which a person can be unfaithful. Because of my conversation with Sonya, because of Magariel’s book I’ve been thinking about the way in which one is required to practice faithfulness to a true ideal (I want to be a decent person, I want to be responsible and honest). How many times in that long effort have I ‘gone here and there/ And made myself a motley to the view’? if you a re not going to get stuck at that point, you absolutely need to believe there is a place to which to return.
Thinking of Daniel Magariel’s book; the addicted parent may try to clean up, to get sober, to become good parent (in another book!). The boys may grow up and want to learn to be decent men, not easy after growing up with a Dad like that. But these desires for change can and do happen even after we have ‘sold cheap what is most dear/made old offences of affections new.’
Believing in hope and change, you’d have to find a way to say ‘welcome back’ to the sinner that repenteth, wouldn’t you? When that sinner is yourself, when the offences are against your self, the only place you have to come back to is your self. I see the poem is ‘about’ a lover returning after shenanigans with others, and I read that at one level, as if it were a story I can lend myself to. But to understand it, and to feel it, I have to make the underlying connection with my own experience. So I read as myself, returning to myself, after messing up again. It would be good to be welcoming, pure, loving.
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.
And that makes me think of Derek Walcott’s poem, Love After Love.
I visited the wise Karen Biggs, CEO of Phoenix Futures, one of the UK’s leading addiction/housing charities. We’ve done some great work with Phoenix over the years, and it’s always a joy to spend time with the energetic heart and brain that is Karen.
Later in the day I spent time talking to playwright Sonya Hale, a truly remarkable woman. Sonya became an addict in her early twenties, and was street homeless for a decade. Much later she changed her life, partly through meeting the charity Clean Break. She won the Synergy Theatre’s national prison writing competition with her play, Glory Whispers. She spoke to me of the pain of losing her son, when her addiction became unmanageable, and he went to live with his Dad, and how that finally helped her confront her addiction and get into recovery. The interview will be published in The Reader magazine at a later date.
It was a long chat with Sonya. We’ve a lot of common and I’m always interested in learning how people live and why they sometimes learn to change. I feel as if something new has entered my bloodstream and I’ll be processing the conversation for weeks ahead.
On the train on the way down to London I finished (a two-sitting book) Daniel Magariel’s One of The Boys. I think I found this through a recommendation on twitter by the exceptionally emotionally intelligent writer, @carysbray. It also came with a blurb from my top-rated author, George Saunders. Those are two very remarkable writers, so I ordered my copy. I thought Karen or others at Phoenix might be interested in it so I when I arrived at her office in Elephant and Castle, I gave my copy to Karen Biggs.
The wonderful green wall at Elephant and Castle
It’s slight in terms of pages, a novella, but it is enormous in its content and concentrated experience, not unlike my two-hour conversation with Sonya. I felt I had been reading for a week, not two one-hour sessions. Reading with eyes glued to the page, full-pelt, non-stop. Told through the eyes of a child, the younger of two in a family where the father is a drug-user and is a manipulative, violent man, it’s a slice of real time, an immersion in an experience you might not want to know about. It’s not an easy read but its a real good one, with exceptionally careful writing about emotions.
The story is almost all about ‘the boys’, the father and his two sons; we don’t see the mother much and we don’t know her story, but the scene where she dances ‘salt and pepper shaker’ had a grim and utterly real graveyard humour. Apart from that, I did not laugh. I found the book frightening and true to life. Like Frank Alpine in Malamud’s The Assistant, when he is reading Crime and Punishment, I had the crazy feeling I was reading about myself.
When you have parents who do not parent you, you live a cycle of caring for them when they need looking after, craving their attention when they don’t and then suffering when they don’t look after themselves, or when they turn on you. All that is carefully detailed here, in under 170 pages.
Every care worker, every social worker or children’s home assistant, every teacher, should read this book.
Scrub that, it’s a big problem with wide ramifications. Everyone should read it.
Neither of my parents were straightforwardly ‘like’ the parents in this book but there are certain underlying resemblances, the bone structure of addiction remaining the same whatever the flesh looks like. An addict is not a grown up, is not responsible, is broken, is ill. As the child you carry a lot of weight for them. You think their thoughts, feel their feelings. As a result you never really know where your own emotions begin and your parents’ end. That’s what most struck the chimes here.
After a particularly bad night, where the father and younger son (‘we’ in the quotation below) have attacked and threatened to kill the older son, the younger struggles with guilt, anger and loneliness:
That night after we had cleaned up and dragged the coffee table to the Dumpster, my father called him into his room. I listened outside the door as he told my brother that he should never have contacted our mom. That we’d felt betrayed and did not know what else to do. “I would never hurt you,” my father said. “We only meant to scare you. Please forgive me. Do you forgive me?” Then he said, “Thank you, I forgive you, too. Can I have a hug?” The bed squeaked as my father scooted closer, I guessed, because a moment later he said, “Put your arms around me, son.”
I stepped outside to the park.
Overhead the moon was hidden. Clouds were backlit at their feathery edges. A strong wind from the east, from the Sandias, swept over the grass. I winced at the thought of today. My father turned us against each other – it was his method of control. And I’d fallen for it again. Any remorse I had for the Polaroids now felt false. I had let down my brother just as I had my mom. I was so disappointed in myself and I swore then that I would never again choose my father. I never again wanted to harm anyone I loved. I was on my brother’s side now. He was my brother for life. I’d been lucky today that he had not been not more seriously hurt.
A flock of birds came to rest on a nearby pinon tree, populating its limbs like leaves. and though I could hardly see them, hear them, I was happy for their quiet company and hoped they would not leave me soon.
Frightening, touching and educative – highly recommended.
I don’t know who created the management theory that time is elastic, and that you can fit in whatever you want to fit in, but it’s not true. It is true that time changes as we experience it, but there are still only 24 hours in a day, 168 in a week. but there are two types of time: there is time-experience which speeds up or slows down depending on the amount of flow-concentration-energy you are putting into whatever is happening, and there is clock time, which ticks on whatever is happening.
Three thoughts I’ve picked up on this topic which have been helpful have been (i) how slowly time would go if you were sitting on a hot stove (thanks Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap) (ii) how you’d find time to deal to deal with a flood in your house, whatever was happening at work (thanks Laura Vanderkam at TED). These thoughts are both about priorities and pain – it hurts if you don’t attend to either of them, and so they shoot to the top of the list of priorities. Time management isn’t about time so much as what matters most. You can’t do everything. Unless perhaps your name is Tim Ferris but even then… from Tim Ferris I picked up the third thought: (iii) it matters how you start your day. I used to know this once, but somehow over the last twenty years had forgotten. Writing this blog every day is helping me remember. I’m giving an hour a day to reading, and writing about a poem. That’s seven hours reading I wasn’t previously doing. This choice has made me happy (and only a little bit late on a couple of occasions).
Perhaps some of our inability to manage time comes from the refusal to accept the necessity of choice, and the subsequent inability then to act on such (unmade, perhaps unacknowledged) choices. Time management might be more helpfully called choice management. No poem does the simple sums about time, life and choices better than this, from A. E. Housman:
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
Believe me, this is a scary poem to read when you are sixty-one! That middle stanza is remorseless.
I do hope to live beyond 70, but everything now frankly feels a blessing: I know quite people of my age who have died. So I’ll stick bravely with Housman’s computation and recast it for myself: Now, of my threescore years and ten, / Sixty-one will not come again… only leaves me nine more! Ouch and aieee! Why the hell would I be doing anything that wasn’t vitally important to me? Have I seen the cherry blossom?
I run out into the garden for another look.
Last time I read this poem was in an NHS addiction service centre, sometime in the last ten years. I thought then it was a bit of a risky poem to take, given quite a lot of us in the room were over 50, and I guessed that like me, quite a few people might feel (a little) frightened by the poem, after all we’d all wasted quite a lot of time one way or another. But I thought you might only be a little frightened by the poem. And indeed, there’s something so tender and quiet in its tone, something so strong in its resolve, that no one was scared, and everyone agreed they would go for a walk and look for cherry blossom this week. Does making that choice affect one’s chances of recovery? I think every strong choice affects one’s chances.
I find the poem’s sums strengthening. You could ignore or not notice the first stanza, yeah, yeah, blossoms, again, so what. It’s a normal verse about normal blossom. you are in a normal state of mind as you read it. But the killer second stanza, quite unexpected – yet not really unexpected, is it? Because the key thing about cherry blossom is its transience, it’s there and gone. Fifty chances to see it? That’s not enough!
‘Fifty springs are little room’ and I sure as hell don’t have fifty ahead of me. Maybe twenty, maybe none for all I know. Therefore I finish writing a little early today, so I can get to Calderstones Park before I need to be in the office. I will go walk around and see the blossom. What could be more important?
See the late, great Denis Potter, two months before his death, discuss this blossom with Melvyn Bragg, here.
Baby Grace leaping up in her mothers arms in an office at The Reader
Been reading – very slowly – Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality here all week and not got very far. You’ll find the whole poem here. But I’m only up to this bit;
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Today I’ve got a piece in the Comment section of The Observer about why we need a reading revolution. In it, I remember seeing a baby, one of those gorgeous chunky one-year-olds, leaping up in his mother’s arms on a doorstep in North Birkenhead and thinking ‘that baby will never read Wordsworth’. That thought (or was it a feeling?) helped propel me into creating The Reader.
But why, in a hard life, and that baby’s was almost certainly going to be a hard life, would Wordsworth matter at all? Why not concentrate on housing and vegetables? Of course, we need those things but as Rose Schneiderman famously said, we need bread and roses. And we need them at the same time. Humans have inner lives and those inner lives have profound effect on our ability to renew roofs and grow vegetables, to create a sour-dough bakery in an area down-on-its-uppers, to develop a rose-growing business out of a wasteland.
Poetry matters because we might have forgotten, as Gillian Clarke writes in Miracle on St Davids Day, that we have anything to say. Of a mute labouring man in a mental health ward, moved to speech by poetry, she writes;
Since the dumbness of misery fell
he has remembered there was a music
of speech and that once he had something to say.
What we, in the our time, call ‘mental health’ or ’emotional experience’ is really about inner being, the most complicated, uncharted, rewarding and dangerous parts of human experience. I wish we had other names for this stuff. Our present vocabulary feels as unhelpful as grunts would be in working out the impact of black holes on the development of the universe. For one thing, calling it ‘mental health’ allows a good half of the population to think it is nothing to do with them. But everyone has inner life, emotional experience. Our ability to understand and learn from it is a vital part of our human survival kit, as the psychotherapist Wilfred Bion writes;
If a person cannot ‘think’ with his thoughts, that is to say that he has thoughts but lacks the apparatus of ‘thinking’ which enables him to use his thoughts, to think them as it were, then the personality is incapable of learning from experience. This failure is serious. Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality.
W.R.Bion, Learning From Experience
The World Health Organisation tells us that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. We are failing to learn from our own emotional experience partly because we do not have the language to think about it; at best we talk about this stuff in terms of ‘mental health’. But we should be speaking of ‘human experience’.
That’s why we need great literature – Wordsworth, Kate Beaton, George Herbert, George Eliot, George Saunders, Frank O’Hara, Frank O’Connor, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Anton Chekov, Jeanette Winterson, Tolstoi, Dave McKee, Shirley Hughes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Shakespeare, Jon Klassen, Marilynne Robinson and all the rest of them.
We need great literature and we need to relate to it in a different way. Our current way organising education so often turns it into dead stuff, despite the best efforts of good teachers. Great literature isn’t dead, it is just waiting for readers to make contact. Pupils who are being taught there are correct answers are not readers, they are exam-passers.
As a young mature student of twenty-five, the previously benefits-living single mother of a five-year old child, I first read Wordsworth in the summer between first and second year when I was thinking of dropping out of my university course due to class-dislocation. My goodness, but I felt unhappy and out-of-place.I can remember, across a lifetime now, the shock of recognition I felt when I first read these words;
—But there’s a Tree, of many, one,
A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
Though I felt massively excited by these lines, I did not ‘understand’ a word.
I did not know what the ‘Tree’ was.
I did not know whether the ‘single field’ was real or not.
I did not know why it was a ‘pansy’.
Not knowing doesn’t matter.
Being moved, being touched, being excited in ways you don’t understand is what matters. It leaves you in a place where you can ask questions. And why is asking questions good? Because that’s how we learn!
I did not know what ‘the visionary gleam’ was but I knew I knew about its absence.
I did not know what ‘the glory’ was, nor ‘the dream’ neither, but I knew I missed them both.
The words spoke to some feeling I had and did not understand.
The feeling was about ‘something that is gone’.
There is no amount of on-curriculum study that would have made any of this clearer to me – I had to absorb the questions and realise, over years, that they were clues to hard-to-reach parts of my self. I’ve been reading this poem for thirty-six years. It still works, I still don’t understand it, it still gets me to ask questions!
What we’ve found in sixteen years of Shared Reading is that working out feelings and language with other people is easier than doing it on your own. I am grateful to the University curriculum for making me read Wordsworth and I’ve tried to translate that into Shared Reading (don’t just read what you already know and like). Without that looming second-year course on Romantics I’d never have read Wordsworth of my own volition, because it was too far, it seemed from my own experience. But that’s the thing about great writing, it is never far from your own experience. That’s what makes it great.
Euphorbia asserting its noble beauty in an unkind world
March has been a difficult month on almost every front, but I don’t want to describe or even list any of those difficulties.
Instead, after a particularly difficult day yesterday, in which I felt a lot of feelings I did not wish to feel, including – rare one for me – rage, and in which the good that happened (Teamwork, time with Megg, euphorbias, Carys Bray, my dear and loving husband) all seemed overshadowed by bad stuff, I woke up with these words in my mind;
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
These words come from the Bible, Letter to Phillipians 4:8, but I first got them from Iris Murdoch, in her strange, wonderful and difficult book, Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. She’s talking about what you can do if you don’t have religion to assist with difficulties of living, and writes about filling your mind up, deliberately, with good things.
The book came out in 1992 and I think I first read it then or the following year. Soon after that I was in the thick of the hardest time of my life and in my desperation I found her advice helpful. I particularly found the quotation from Philippians helpful and what’s more, it seemed to stick. I used it like a mantra but it also gave me something active to do. When bad stuff came into my head I would recite, ‘whatever is good…whatever is honest…whatever is just…’ and the very presence of such words, and the thoughts associated with them, seemed to help me. As one of our readers in a special project where volunteers read with children in extremely difficult situations said, ‘when Jess reads with me it makes all the bad memories go away and good memories come in…’ I know that feeling well.
So, whatever is good, think on these things.The habit is a useful one. It also works with poetry.
Well, grandchildren – all babies! – are good and make me feel great joy. I think on them, and see them whenever I can. Birdsong is heartening at this time of year. Dogs rarely fail to delight me (you know who you are, you dogs who don’t delight). Euphorbias display such energy that I find they restore my faith in life, and the small pink viburnum (don’t know what variety it is and need to know because I want one in my garden) on the right of the gate into the walled gardens at Calderstones Park is currently providing daily inner restoration through its gentle colour therapy. I do think on these things.
An unequivocal good has been changing my morning routine so that I read and write about my reading every day before I go to work. There is never enough time but even the smallest amount of it seems to do me some good. After years of ‘no time to write’ and reading while falling asleep, it feels a breakthrough. This change is the result of a chance meeting with a kind stranger on a train the day Bearhunt blew away. That’s how it happens isn’t it?
I’ve been reading Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality for the past three mornings. The whole poem is here. But I’ve been reading a few lines each day. Yesterday we got to the point where Wordsworth, feeling some ‘glory’ is lost from life, finds something ‘glorious’ in the world and tells himself
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
The word ‘sullen’ seems to do for bad feeling what ‘whatever is good’ does for good. It puts it in my mind. It’s foul. And then I see it, hiding behind ‘sullen’, ‘Oh evil day’ as if Wordsworth first feels the evil before he has identified where/what it is. Evil emanating from my sullenness. Ouch. Thinking bad things is not good. Is that how ‘evil’ starts?
Instead of continuing with his feeling (‘sullen’) he lets it go, looks around, looks for good and sees it;
…Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm:
I love that line, ‘the Babe leaps up on his Mother’s arm’ and it is an important one for me, but I am out of time and need to carry on tomorrow.
Tall Magnolia in huge blossom at Calderstones March 28 2017
Still reading Intimations of Immortality, and into the next section now. Read the whole poem here.
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.
The timing is interesting in this poem. We began in the present, looking back to a golden past (‘there was a time…it is not now as it hath been of yore’). It’s hard to know, now, as we begin this third stanza, where the opening word, ‘Now’ places us. Has any time passed between the opening of the poem and this moment? Or is Wordsworth grounding himself (and us) in one specific – present – ‘now’ moment? He is out-of-doors, in the fields, which may be where he was when he started…or that may have been ages ago. Then I wonder – has all this (thought) happened in an instant, is there no time here? The poem seems to be mapping out, putting into slow words, a feeling that anyone might have, and which – if you are not a poet might well pass, nameless, unexpressed, hardly known. How do such feelings, thoughts, fit with time? They often seem instanteous.
But to go back to the poem…’Now’ puts us in a definite place in time, when something extraordinary has happened /is happening right now:
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
So: he had the feeling (though I’m wrong in calling it that, because Wordsworth calls it ‘a thought’) then said something (‘a timely utterance’) then felt better (‘and I again am strong.’). This is a pattern many of us will recognise.
But what was it, ‘the ‘utterance’? Have we had it already in the poem? I don’t think so, but let’s go back and see;
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day.
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Perhaps the ‘utterance’ is simply that last line, ‘That there hath past away a glory from the earth’. I suddenly notice the structure Wordsworth is giving this poem – this account of the working of his feelings, mind, thought, self;
Stanza One – sense of some glory lost
Stanza Two – remember certain other, more specific glories (moon, rose, heavens, sunshine) and calibrate one’s feelings – yes, they are good but still something lost.
Stanza Three – note how saying something, getting it into words, ‘an utterance’, has changed the way I feel.
Having found strength in saying something, in getting his thought into words, Wordsworth is strong enough again to look up and see that world, which suddenly feels ‘glorious’ again;
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.
Something has shifted, those cataracts blowing their trumpets are quite glorious, annoucing something, and they are loud, they are ‘trumpets’! Wordsworth now seems in a different relation to his own feelings. Whatever the glory was at the beginning is still gone, but at least now he seems able to be glad of what he can see and hear and feel. The shouts of the Shepherd boy bring ‘joy’, not the opening sense of dislocation.
For me this is about a kind of readjustment you have to make – repeatedly – in life. Something is lost, you feel the loss, and the pain of loss is sometimes overwhelming. You lose more than the original loss with the loss of your capacity to feel joy. Over time the loss doesn’t go away, but you recalibrate and somehow that allows ‘joy’ to re-enter your universe.
What I love about Wordsworth is that he is like a brain scanner, tracking feeling, thought and language, showing how it moves and changes in us. You have to read him very slowly for this to happen. Most of us are not neuroscientists and don’t have access to that big tech. This is the next best thing.
Cherry Blossom in Calderstones Park 6.00pm 24 March 2017
A day with Paul Sinton-Hewit, founder, parkrun
For those who come for the poem, here it is:
From Later Life: A Double Sonnet of Sonnets
VI
We lack, yet cannot fix upon the lack:
Not this, nor that; yet somewhat, certainly.
We see the things we do not yearn to see
Around us: and what see we glancing back?
Lost hopes that leave our hearts upon the rack,
Hopes that were never ours yet seem’d to be,
For which we steer’d on life’s salt stormy sea
Braving the sunstroke and the frozen pack.
If thus to look behind is all in vain,
And all in vain to look to left or right,
Why face we not our future once again,
Launching with hardier hearts across the main,
Straining dim eyes to catch the invisible sight,
And strong to bear ourselves in patient pain?
Christina Rossetti
Searching for a copy online, I came across a great 2012 blog post from Casi Dylan who was the person who set up our training at The Reader – always a good read, anything Casi writes about her reading.
I wanted to read this poem this morning because yesterday I spent the day with Paul Sinton-Hewit, ‘father, husband, runner, parkrun founder, Ashoka Fellow and CBE’, as he describes himself on his twitter homepage.
We met last year following Paul’s election to Ashoka, when I realised, hearing Paul talk about the parkrun set-up, that The Reader could learn a lot from him. Yesterday he spent the day with us at Calderstones, talking to staff about developing a truly volunteer-run model, answering questions about log-ins and quality control and race directors and sponsorship, and later we held an open event for people – mainly parkrunners – who wanted to come to meet Paul and hear his remarkable story. You can read it here.
There are many parallels with The Reader, not least the mid-life crisis, to give it a shorthand title, that we both endured in our different ways and from which our respective vocations emerged.
‘I had no plans for this,’ Paul said, yesterday. ‘I didn’t set out to create this movement. I just wanted to spend time with my friends and I couldn’t run because of injury.’
I have a similar relation to The Reader – it grew organically from something I wanted , or perhaps needed, to do. I didn’t plan to set up a charity, didn’t think of creating a Shared Reading movement across Europe, I didn’t imagine ‘one day we’ll build the International Centre for Shared Reading at Calderstones.’ I just wanted to read with people who weren’t into reading and to get them into it. I had very powerful personal reasons for wanting to do so. Necessity, as they say, is the mother…
Certainly it was for Paul, who spoke to Reader staffers about a broken relationship, having lost his job… and the one thing he relied on for mental wellbeing, running, being lost to him because of injury. In such a crisis, you might have flopped into misery, got bitter or given up and turned to drink. Instead, Paul created parkrun, by getting mates into a park and timing their runs…
Almost everyone , by the time they are thirty, forty, fifty… will have experienced what Christina Rossetti describes , looking back
Lost hopes that leave our hearts upon the rack,
Hopes that were never ours yet seem’d to be,
For which we steer’d on life’s salt stormy sea
Braving the sunstroke and the frozen pack.
What a waste of time! What a waste of effort! What a mess! That is how things were, when I started The Reader. Partly in my professional life – my teaching life at the University of Liverpool was unsatisfactory for reasons I won’t go into here; my life as writer (I had written five novels over a fifteen year period and they had all been rejected by scores of publishers); and in my personal life, for a decade or more, I was living with grave and distressing life-rocking problems.
I had no sense of future with anything in it, and the day I decided to stop writing and give up the defining mode of my life to date, I had no sense of a future that I longed to bring about or could imagine. I did love my garden and worked on it. But professionally, I had nothing.
I had – I can see it now, but it didn’t look like that then – a blank slate.
On that slate, slowly, and without a plan, The Reader began to be formed. In 1997, the first issue of The Reader magazine was launched, and by 2003 the first manifestation of Shared Reading – 11 groups meeting weekly in Wirral – was happening. I do not know what it is that makes a person willing, able or desperate enough to create a future. It is partly the trappedness of nowhere else to go, as Christina Rossetti says;
If thus to look behind is all in vain,
And all in vain to look to left or right,
Why face we not our future once again,
Launching with hardier hearts across the main,
Straining dim eyes to catch the invisible sight,
And strong to bear ourselves in patient pain?
Can’t go back, can’t go left, can’t go right…there is only either stop and be frozen or keep going. She puts it, as she must, as a question;
‘Why face we not our future once again?’
And some hard answers follow.
Sometimes when we can’t act, it is because ‘Launching with hardier hearts across the main’ (main=sea) is too hard, because our heart is not hardy, never mind ‘hardier’.
Sometimes, it is because we are tired and ‘Straining dim eyes to catch the invisible sight’ is just asking too much of our tired selves.
Sometimes we are simply not strong enough to be ‘strong to bear ourselves in patient pain’. Sometimes the pain is overwhelming.
Later life is not easy. The sense of ‘something missing’ and having no idea what that ‘something’ might be can become more than painful;
We lack, yet cannot fix upon the lack:
Not this, nor that; yet somewhat, certainly.
You feel juddery. You can’t concentrate. Things go flying off. You feel your facial expressions give you away. You feel scared. At those times we need to hunker down and wait, (see George Herbert, ‘The Flower’), let time pass, get stronger. ‘Grief melts away/like snow in May/ As if there were no such cold thing.’
During those down times, I found, regular hard reading built up my mental and spiritual muscles. Still find that. Also, good people.
‘I needed to be with my friends,’ said Paul yesterday. ‘My friends were runners, those people suited me.’
‘Parkrun and The Reader do the same thing,’ said Paul. ‘We do it through running, and The Reader does it through reading. It is about community.’
I woke up with that thought of Paul’s in my mind. My reading friends ( Phil, Angie, Brian, my colleagues at The Reader, you people here reading these daily poems alongside me, the hundreds of people I have read with over the past thirty years…) as much as my reading, have given me strength and purpose, meaning and community. My hard-won advice to the stuck: connect, realise, change – through Shared Reading, or parkrun or whatever it is that offers connection. It is finding the connector that matters.
They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
How hard it is, sometimes, to have the gift of life. Most of the Universe, astronomers tell us is nothing. Nature doesn’t abhor a vacuum, it mostly is one. Only in the rarest flecks of the universe is something, is matter. We are tiny bits of that matter and we have what seems even rarer, consciousness and self-awareness. It is the greatest, shortest, most spectacular and powerful, rare thing: the chance to be alive and become yourself, your life. And yet how hard it is to endure the struggle that Herman Hesse describes here, in the struggle of solitary, individual trees to be themselves;
they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.
This is a task all humans take on, more or less consciously. Unlike trees (I speak in trepidation, not certain of my ground here, for who knows what mystery there is in trees…) we have conscious minds and that brings us a mighty burden as well as great power. Sometimes it feels as if having a mind, by which I mean a self-conscious centre of consciousness, is like have a super-powered roaring engine strapped onto our body, an engine that makes us buzz around like a balloon flying round with air coming out of it at speed, high-powered, but with no controller, no purpose.
Trees, I am sure, do not ever feel like that.
I myself hardly ever feel like that these days, but when I think back to the hard years of my teens, my twenties, my thirties and, sorry to say, my forties, my blurry memories of that long period of becoming my self (no, not finished yet but going now at a different pace, and going in a particular way, which wasn’t the case then) I cannot imagine weathering some of those storms, winters which went on for what seemed a decade, without George Herbert. For some of us becoming what we are often feels impossibly difficult. George Herbert seemed to stand beside me offering an arm while I tried to stand upright.
During a period of years when I had no idea how to make anything of my life – that possibility wasn’t even on the map, so I didn’t think about it – I walked the dog every morning, wrote poems, and read poems. The poems I read in the hardest of those winters were religious because they opened a space in which it was possible to recognise my shape, and they offered a structured language for the experience I was living through. All the ‘Affliction’ poems were leaning posts for me. They helped shape me for the future, they held me up. Now they are part of me, in my bones.
Affliction 1
When first thou didst entice to thee my heart,
I thought the service brave;
So many joys I writ down for my part,
Besides what I might have
Out of my stock of natural delights,
Augmented with thy gracious benefits.
I looked on thy furniture so fine,
And made it fine to me;
Thy glorious household-stuff did me entwine,
And ‘tice me unto thee.
Such stars I counted mine: both heav’n and earth;
Paid me my wages in a world of mirth.
What pleasures could I want, whose King I serv’d,
Where joys my fellows were?
Thus argu’d into hopes, my thoughts reserv’d
No place for grief or fear.
Therefore my sudden soul caught at the place,
And made her youth and fierceness seek thy face.
At first thou gav’st me milk and sweetnesses;
I had my wish and way;
My days were straw’d with flow’rs and happiness;
There was no month but May.
But with my years sorrow did twist and grow,
And made a party unawares for woe
My flesh began unto my soul in pain,
Sicknesses cleave my bones;
Consuming agues dwell in ev’ry vein,
And tune my breath to groans.
Sorrow was all my soul; I scarce believ’d,
Till grief did tell me roundly, that I liv’d.
When I got health, thou took’st away my life,
And more, for my friends die;
My mirth and edge was lost, a blunted knife
Was of more use than I.
Thus thin and lean without a fence or friend,
I was blown through with ev’ry storm and wind.
Whereas my birth and spirit rather took
The way that takes the town;
Thou didst betray me to a ling’ring book,
And wrap me in a gown.
I was entangled in the world of strife,
Before I had the power to change my life.
Yet, for I threaten’d oft the siege to raise,
Not simp’ring all mine age,
Thou often didst with academic praise
Melt and dissolve my rage.
I took thy sweet’ned pill, till I came where
I could not go away, nor persevere.
Yet lest perchance I should too happy be
In my unhappiness,
Turning my purge to food, thou throwest me
Into more sicknesses.
Thus doth thy power cross-bias me, not making
Thine own gift good, yet me from my ways taking.
Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me
None of my books will show;
I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree,
For sure then I should grow
To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust
Her household to me, and I should be just.
Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek;
In weakness must be stout;
Well, I will change the service, and go seek
Some other master out.
Ah my dear God! though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
No time, this morning to read through the whole poem, but only to point to a few lines that still touch my with their truth:
…a blunted knife
Was of more use than I.
Thus thin and lean without a fence or friend,
I was blown through with ev’ry storm and wind.
Why did it help me to read these lines? When you are not in good shape (see good shape in picture above and compare to when your life is out of joint) not being ‘of use’ is one of the burdens. And a knife is dangerous – sometimes a blunt knife more dangerous than a sharp one. Then he turns sideways and you see – oddly, brilliantly – ‘without a fence’ is he cast out? Yes. Is he unprotected? Yes. Is he stick thin? Yes. Does the slightest thing set him off? Yes. Is he easily blown about by any wind? Yes.
Recognise it all ? Yes. I love the time he arrives at the tree-thought, right now, as if the poem is living through terrible real-time:
None of my books will show;
I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree,
For sure then I should grow
To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust
Her household to me, and I should be just.
Now. Now Now. Can’t get out of it. He treads water. ‘I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree.’ But the imagination of being a tree is a tiny, tiny moment of change. A tree is not a bit of thin lath in a fence. A tree is not a blunted knife. The lovely hope that a bird might nest in him, some living creature might ‘trust’ him, is a possible future. But George Herbert doesn’t get there in this poem, which is written in medias res, in the absolute thick of it. The last stanza is frustrated, stuck, going round in circles;
Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek;
In weakness must be stout;
He knows intellectually what he is supposed to do – be stout – but, angrily, childishly, frustratedly, can’t do that;
Well, I will change the service, and go seek
Some other master out.
Bah! Give up!And then, a bigger, more difficult problem and a restating of it as GH’s own responsibility:
Ah my dear God! though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
Does it matter what God (read ‘life’) is doing to him? No. The responsibility rests with he who is living that life. Got to go with the flow, got to act with it.
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
How do I love thee? Ah life, let me count the ways. Wake up, count blessings, look at a tree, a bird, a baby. There is an infinite universe of nothing. Then there is this, this spark of life, this us. Painful, worth having. Keep going.
Me, doing Shared Reading with a colleague on the phone. It’s not form that matters, it’s content. Be close to the text but be moved, be personal: ‘Feast on your life’.
I wanted to write about Derek Walcott today, as he has just died, ‘called home’, to take a phrase from one of his great poems.
When I heard the news, two poems came immediately to mind. ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ (which you can read in today’s Sunday Times) and ‘Love After Love’, a poem that has been read in many Shared Reading groups over the years.
‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ was the first of Derek Walcott’s poems I read, when I was still teaching at the University. I found it – in an anthology of some sort, name now lost to me – and took it to my Friday Afternoon Poetry class. That class was one of the strands of DNA that went into the mix to bring The Reader and Shared Reading into being.
I started it – hhhm, don’t remember, so far back it goes, but it may have been in the 1980s. It was still quite near to the time when I had finished my Ph.D and was finding my feet as a teacher of literature. I knew I was afraid of poetry, and thought that if I was so afraid, other people would be suffering the same anxiety. So I advertised the class as ‘Afraid of poetry? come along to share your fears and read together in a relaxed group.’ Ten, fifteen, maybe eighteen of us would meet from 1.00-5.00 on the last Friday of the month for four hours of (what I’d now call) Shared Reading. I think that class is where I first met my long-time colleague, Kate McDonnell.
The morning of the class, I would choose a poem – or possibly two – in the same way I do for this blog – am I interested in this? Does it touch something? Is there a match for something live in me? Can I enter it?
And then for a whole afternoon, the group would sit and read together, teasing out meanings, a concentrated, collaborative experience.
‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ seems to come at a time when the poet is uncertain about his work, and the letter is an unlikely blessing, a benediction, call to arms.Like the religious poetry of the seventeenth century, this poem helps create a space in me, where something religious might happen. I have read the poem many times since that first time, and remain moved by the word ‘home’, as Walcott himself is:
The strength of one frail hand in a dim room
Somewhere in Brooklyn, patient and assured,
Restores my sacred duty to the Word.
‘Home, home,’ she can write, with such short time to live,
Alone as she spins the blessings of her years;
It’s a poem about what survives death and what survives life, too. How thin and frail the threads that sometimes hold us in place, yet how, despite their frailty, they sometimes are ‘steel.’
The other poem, ‘Love after Love’, I think I first had from Kate McDonnell, once we had got The Reader going ( in the days when we still called it ‘Get Into Reading’).
No, no – now I remember also reading this in those Continuing Education classes at the University. Perhaps having found ‘A Letter from Brooklyn’ I went and sought more of Derek Walcott’s work. I recall the room I read it in. Perhaps Kate was present. It’s a well-known, much-anthologised poem, but that doesn’t take away from its strength or reality at all. Many times I have seen new readers profoundly moved to recognition by the poem.
Recently someone told me they had had an occasion in their Share Reading group when the conversation had become very personal, group members sharing profoundly personal information. This didn’t usually happen, they told me. We’re very good about sticking closely to the text, not going off. I was surprised by this. Yes, of course, – we need to stick closely to the text, but what does the text stick to, if not to us?
It may be that in a group where little personal thought is shared it is still happening – inside the individual readers – but I’d hope all group members would speak from the personal: because, really, what else is there?
When I read a poem , I’m trying to match it against what I know, so as I start this one, I see my own front door – both literally and metaphorically – I see my life’s time and my sense of self:
Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
I can hardly imagine what anyone could do with such a poem if not read it personally, connecting it to your own experience. ‘You will love again the stranger who was yourself.’ Surely , readers are required by the very language – ‘you’, ‘yourself’ – in this line to think of themselves? To remember times when we didn’t love ourselves, when we were self-estranged?
This leads me to ask myself, are only some pieces of literature suitable for Shared Reading? A colleagues recently told me how much better a book was working out in his group than a previous novel. Why? Because it allows more of the personal?
So though anyone might enjoy a thriller, a thriller wont yield much to a Shared Reading group because it is not about real things. This isn’t about form – look again, Lincoln in The Bardo, not at all ‘realism’ – it’s about content, meaning, belief and thought. Lincoln in the Bardo is made in fancy dress, but it is absolutely about types of deepest reality. This is what we look for in good reading for Shared Reading groups. You’ve got to want to look in the mirror.
It may not be necessary to confess everything you see there: some or all of that recognition might remain private. But the most powerful groups I’ve been in have shared not only the literature through slow reading aloud, but also direct, real personal response and recognition, the most serious of which have always, like the poem ‘Love After Love’, involved some pain;
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.Feast on your life.
The peeling of that image from the mirror always hurts. But those moments of true intimacy, of revelation, are always the best moments of the best groups: they create the steel threads which help hold us in place.
Shared Reading is about sharing not only the reading, but also ourselves.
(This lovely thing came from etsy and I haven’t bought it yet!)
Once upon a time, there was a man, call him Joe, who had started out his adult life as an eighteen-year-old in a teacher training college, with a cheerful conviction that he’d be ok and life was fun and he was going to enjoy it. He enjoyed the student bar. But now Joe was 47, and that conviction about life being for living (Drinking! Bars! Pubs!) felt shaky, maybe even broken, Certainly rusty and not actually any use to him in the Anytown Drug and Alcohol Centre in which he now found himself.
Joe had had an interesting range of jobs over the years – he had been a teacher, and then a (commission-based) financial advisor, and a tyre shop manager (yipes, the paperwork, the messy, messy paperwork) and a butcher’s assistant (good eating) and man who worked in DIY superstore (nailed it!) and he been latterly a security guard on derelict council office site, at last Joe had been unemployed. There were other times in between all this but they were long blanks of dreamless sleep lasting days or months. In his twenties and thirties Joe had had a wife and children and a home, with a big garden where he had grown vegetables and he had wellies and dogs and played golf sometimes and went fishing and he had a toolbox and he could put up shelves and build a loft extension with the best of them.
But as time went on, the drinking took up more and more room in his life so there wasn’t room or time in the day for his job (whatever it happened to be at that particular time), or for his toolbox which was actually stolen from his car in a pub car park, or for going fishing with his son, Johnny. And it seemed as if there wasn’t really room in his head for his children because they drifted away from him. And one day his wife left his stuff in the garden and changed the locks and called the police on him, and there was the divorce and he lost the house and lived with a mate but then he suddenly woke up one morning under a bridge by the canal. The man next to him under the cardboard stank badly of piss and rot, and Joe thought, as he watched the ripples on the canal, ‘I don’t want to smell like that. I am a man who is sleeping rough under a bridge, with half a bottle of vodka in my pocket, but once I was teacher and I haven’t seen any of my kids for over a year and what if one of them walked past me now?’ And so he rolled up the cardboard, and drank the vodka and threw the bottle into the canal and went to see a doctor, who referred him to the Anytown Drug and Alcohol Service.
Where, over the next six months, Joe began to recover: with medical and psychiatric help, he got off the drink and he attended sessions of mindfulness and meditation, he tried the AA and had some counselling, and he found the fellowship of other people in recovery inspiring and helpful and one day he wrote a letter to his son, Johnny, and two months later they met up for a coffee. Johnny wasn’t that keen on meeting because Joe had done some very bad things when he was at his worst, though, of course, he had no memory of most of them, but Johnny hadn’t forgotten and Johnny wasn’t able to forgive his father, particularly for the way he had treated Mum. So after the coffee, which passed off quite well, Joe thought, Johnny went back to university and Joe went back to his bedsit, and they didn’t meet again for quite a long time.
Joe lives in a block of social housing at the back of the canal. He doesn’t have any friends because for years his friends were drinking mates and he doesn’t want to see them anymore. He doesn’t see his family because they have all been badly hurt by Joe-the-demon drinker. He doesn’t have the confidence to apply for a job so he hasn’t got any colleagues. That’s why he only meets people more or less in recovery from addictions or people who provide services to people with addictions. They mainly talk about recovering from addiction, or about people who are doing well at that, or people who have fallen back into bad places and who its best not to see any more because they smell of alcohol. Sometimes he tries Internet dating but when he meets the women they don’t seem to take to him, or if they do, he can’t quite take to them, and anyway, it can’t last because he can’t go to bars. He misses his wife and kids. He can’t remember whole chunks of their lives or his own. There’s a refrain from a Bob Dylan song going through his mind most of the time:
Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand
And rivers that ran through every day,
I must have been mad, I never knew what I had
Til I threw it all away…
I threw it all away
He’s 47. He’s not going to get it back.
At the Canalside D+A Centre, they have a shared reading group and one of the counsellors says to Joe, ‘Why don’t you give it a try?’ Joe remembers he used to like reading years ago in that other life before his life collapsed under that pile of cardboard under the bridge. He has nothing to do on Friday mornings. He gives it a go.
In the group they are reading a story about a couple of men on some sort of expedition. It’s a story by Rudyard Kipling. It’s hard to concentrate but the woman reads it well, and after she’s been reading for a while they all start talking about it. Why did he do that? Did whatisname say something? Can you trust the other fellow? Have you ever been that scared? Joe doesn’t say anything but a guy he’s seen in AA asks him if he wants to help him get the cups and they make the teas and coffees and have a smoke together and the bloke says ‘ It’s good, you’ll get into it…’
‘Good story,’ says Joe. ‘I like Kipling – The Jungle Book…If, all that.’
The words feel like vomit. He can’t believe they are coming out of him. Truth is he’s forgotten that he had ever known or even heard of Kipling or that such a thing as The Jungle Book or If existed. He feels a weird sensation, like something gently cracking open, like light coming in. Kipling, yes, The Jungle Book. If. ‘You’ll be a man my son.’ Ouch. He turns his mind to the coffee cups.
They go back in and the woman asks if anyone else wants to read. Frankie starts reading, hesitant, but it’s ok. I could do that, Joe thinks. The story is about two friends who don’t trust each other. Joe thinks back to a bit of his life he can remember, something that happened with one of his friends. He doesn’t like to remember that thing. He turns away from the scene playing out in his head and back to the story. The story is hard to follow – ‘I’m out of practice,’ he jokes and someone else laughs and says ‘I haven’t got a effin clue, mate.’
Frankie continues to read from The Man Who Would Be King. Joe drifts in and out, his mind awhirl. ‘Awhirl.’ He thinks to himself ‘Awhirl and sober, haven’t felt like that for a long time.’
———————————————————————————————————
For 15 years The Reader has been developing an outreach model, creating warm, welcoming spaces in which people can come together and experience being part of a community-like-family. We sit in a circle, usually round a table, sharing a book by reading it aloud. The atmosphere is both social and personal, kind, as if we were kin. We share our human experiences through the book.
‘I read about others,’ says one group member,’ but I learn about myself.’
‘For two hours a week,’ says a man, call him Joe, who has lost wife, children, home and job and is struggling to remain in recovery. ‘I have meaning in my life. More please!’
We’re raising money to build our International Centre for Shared Reading at Calderstones. Give Joe somewhere to go to come back to life. Please donate what you can.
readerjanedavis 