Aquilegias nodding a welcome at the front door 18 May
Continuing my slow reading of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. You’ll find a whole e-text here and previous posts can be found by typing ‘Silas Marner’ into the search box.
We are in chapter two, and reading a paragraph beginning ‘Silas now found himself and his cottage suddenly beset’, which is giving us an account of how Silas became completely cut-off from his neighbours. People think he can work magic cures:
But the hope in his wisdom was at length changed into dread, for no one believed him when he said he knew no charms and could work no cures, and every man and woman who had an accident or a new attack after applying to him, set the misfortune down to Master Marner’s ill-will and irritated glances. Thus it came to pass that his movement of pity towards Sally Oates, which had given him a transient sense of brotherhood, heightened the repulsion between him and his neighbours, and made his isolation more complete.
I’m interested in the second sentence here, ‘thus is came to pass…’ which points to another in a series of misfortunes which have hit Silas and broken his life. Silas has suffered expulsion from his original community on Lantern Yard, now without ever having been properly connected to them Silas is increasingly cut off from his neighbours in Raveloe. The fact that he has had a ‘transient sense of brotherhood’ and lost it again is painful, and may be part of that strong word, ‘repulsion’ – which is not one way – Silas feels it as much as the villagers.
The next paragraph takes on the analysis of the growth of habit. Silas weaves to comfort himself and is paid in gold, and he ‘loves’ the gold as a kind of companion. Is it impossible to imagine how man might come to love coins? George Eliot asks us to look at our own habits and extrapolate from what we do know:
Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit? That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it.
It’s interesting that her analysis of a habit is ‘repetition has bred a want’, which I think is almost exactly what contemporary psychology believes about the formation of habit. I’ve been reading Charles Duhig’s book Habit, (don’t have it with me as I write so can’t look it up) a really fascinating account of what habits are and how they form and may be broken. Becoming a miser, George Eliot seems to be saying, is not about deliberate will, based in imagination (I want to be….) but rather more like becoming an alcoholic. The repetition creates a need, which becomes the habit.
Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a square, and then into a larger square; and every added guinea, while it was itself a satisfaction, bred a new desire. In this strange world, made a hopeless riddle to him, he might, if he had had a less intense nature, have sat weaving, weaving–looking towards the end of his pattern, or towards the end of his web, till he forgot the riddle, and everything else but his immediate sensations; but the money had come to mark off his weaving into periods, and the money not only grew, but it remained with him.
Something lovely about the golden faces of the coins breaks up the robotic compulsion to weave. ‘The money had come’ and the money ‘remained with him.’ They very fact of not losing it, it being a constant in Silas’ broken life, creates an emotional bond for him:
He began to think it was conscious of him, as his loom was, and he would on no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces. He handled them, he counted them, till their form and colour were like the satisfaction of a thirst to him; but it was only in the night, when his work was done, that he drew them out to enjoy their companionship.
Of course the loom is not conscious of him and neither are the coins: that attribution of consciousness is a kind of love, an animation of inanimate objects into companions, or to use George Eliot’s word, ‘familiars‘. He is not a witch, and yet the word is used in both its senses here – they are members of his family, they are his intimate associates. And they are in some sense his creatures that do his bidding. They stack up. They make patterns. They are an external manifestation of something within Silas.They provide order. This makes a sort of life.
So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from faith and love–only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory.
Here we come to a sort of nub – remember a few days ago I wrote about ‘what counts?’ ‘Faith and love’ affect life and without them, all lives, not just the lives of simple men like Silas become ‘reduced’ to mere ‘functions’. Those ‘functions’ may look more interesting or respectable, ‘some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory’ but the mechanical ‘pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being’ is the problem, not the nature of the work. ‘Faith and love’ and ‘any other being’ are the key components George Eliot recognises here as part of the character of a fulfilled life. Silas’ life is ‘narrowing and hardening itself’ into one channel.
One of the things George Eliot is almost obsessed by is how, as in this part of the story, small daily actions lead to big life-breaking consequences. I’m suddenly struck, as I read this morning, with the thought that Silas is himself like something caught in a web. Gradually, he is losing the ability to move – or be moved by anything but his gold. But not quite:
Yet even in this stage of withering a little incident happened, which showed that the sap of affection was not all gone. It was one of his daily tasks to fetch his water from a well a couple of fields off, and for this purpose, ever since he came to Raveloe, he had had a brown earthenware pot, which he held as his most precious utensil among the very few conveniences he had granted himself. It had been his companion for twelve years, always standing on the same spot, always lending its handle to him in the early morning, so that its form had an expression for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its handle on his palm gave a satisfaction mingled with that of having the fresh clear water. One day as he was returning from the well, he stumbled against the step of the stile, and his brown pot, falling with force against the stones that overarched the ditch below him, was broken in three pieces. Silas picked up the pieces and carried them home with grief in his heart. The brown pot could never be of use to him any more, but he stuck the bits together and propped the ruin in its old place for a memorial.
So, objects seem to have expressions and attitudes and to call up emotions:the pot ‘had an expression for him of willing helpfulness, and the impress of its handle on his palm gave a satisfaction mingled with that of having the fresh clear water’. Silas is still alive to feeling and when he sticks the bits back together it is almost an act of love or of thanks or gratitude. He props the ruin ‘in its old place for a memorial’. If he has human friends, so he would mark their passing.
If we were together in a group now, we would spend some time thinking about ways in which we imbue objects with personality ? Does your mug seem friendly, does your sink full of dishes look accusing? And what does this mean for the human tendency/necessity for ‘relationship’?
Very new pine cones in Japanese Garden at Calderstones Park May 2017
I’m returning to Silas Marner today for my daily reading practice. We’re in chapter two and starting at the paragraph that begins ‘About this time an incident happened…’
You can catch up by using the search box to find posts tagged ‘Silas Marner’. Here George Eliot is showing us how Silas, traumatised by a terrible experience, and having settled far from the site of that trauma, is settling into a cut-off, solitary, state of suspended animation where we’ve seen only the ‘bright faces’ of gold coins seem to make him happy:
One day, taking a pair of shoes to be mended, he saw the cobbler’s wife seated by the fire, suffering from the terrible symptoms of heart-disease and dropsy, which he had witnessed as the precursors of his mother’s death. He felt a rush of pity at the mingled sight and remembrance, and, recalling the relief his mother had found from a simple preparation of foxglove, he promised Sally Oates to bring her something that would ease her, since the doctor did her no good. In this office of charity, Silas felt, for the first time since he had come to Raveloe, a sense of unity between his past and present life, which might have been the beginning of his rescue from the insect-like existence into which his nature had shrunk.
First we want to notice that the cobbler’s wife reminds Silas of his mother. We don’t know much about her but we learned earlier that she and Silas were very close, and she had taught him herbal remedies, and he had loved collected the herbs long ago. This connection may be a knitting up: ‘in this office of charity, Silas felt, for the first time since coming to Raveloe, a sense of unity between his past and present life…’
Yesterday, at work, I spent some time thinking about principles underlying Shared Reading and one of the things I thought about, suggested by a colleague, was that the Reader Leader must always get to ‘what counts’ in a piece of literature. I was struck by the simplicity of the phrase ‘what counts’ and also by the impossibility of defining it. It relies on the instinct of the Reader Leader: she or he must know ‘what counts’.
In this respect the movement of Shared Reading is very different to say Girlguiding or The Scouts or the slow food movement or Parkrun. It is possible to quantify what makes a good camp or slow experience or a Parkrun run. It is not possible to say – in the abstract, in general – ‘what counts’ in a piece of literature. Yet I write that sentence and am really not at all sure if it is true. It may be possible but difficult. I may be being lazy.
Certainly ‘what counts’ is not – sorry, aesthetes – ‘achingly beautiful prose’ nor anything else that is purely about the ways in which literature may be beautiful . (I have nothing against beauty, in fact, I am for it, as I hope my photos of plants show). But in literature beauty is a second-level consideration. The understanding of human experience comes first. Finding ‘what counts’ requires the reader to check their own life experience and to recognise key moments in their experience and the experience of others (the others that feature in the literature, either as characters or as the author, the poet).
In a novel by a great novelist, many things ‘count’. Here, in today’s reading, what counts is the act of kindness and the sense of unity between past and present . A discussion of the heart-helping properties of foxglove and its relation to modern heart disease pharmaceuticals may start up in a Shared Reading group, and the Reader Leader would almost certainly let that run, because it’s interesting and people in the group might have stuff to share about it, or about their other medications, or health situations etc. But the bit you’ve absolutely got to get to is
a sense of unity between his past and present life, which might have been the beginning of his rescue
Silas has closed down. He no longer lives a full human existence. That counts more than a discussion of the healing properties of foxglove. In a Shared Reading group I might be balancing my sense of ‘what counts’ with the conversational offerings of a man who is recovering from major heart surgery. That man, his story, his contribution is very important. I must bring his voice into the circle of attention. But at some point – as a general rule, and there are always exceptions – I must take the responsibility of getting to ‘what counts’ not only amongst group members but also in the text.
Perhaps I would link these two pressing matters – asking something like ‘did you feel a different person before it happened?’ – which might offer way back to the text. I must find that way. That’s my job, as the Reader Leader.
The question I want to get to here is: why is it important that our lives are whole? For surely it does matter that we do not have a great gash separating us into before and after, that love and energetic engagement with others should survive our traumas? A human being is not an insect. As a reader, I want silas to come back to human life.
We don’t know enough about insects, of course, and for thousands of years humans have told themselves we’re special and to be seen as distinct from all other life-forms. That seems an increasingly untenable position, but say we were able to accept what George Eliot might have understood as the difference between a man and an insect…that difference might be love, consciousness, creativity.
What are human beings for? This was an evolutionary and spiritual question Doris Lessing asked me long ago on a train at Lime Street Station. I had no idea of an answer then, but now I think that those three words – love, consciousness, creativity – would do for a start.
Silas needs to be rescued from a mechanical existence into human life. What a big word that is: rescue. It doesn’t look as though it can come from within. In The Winter’s Tale, Hermione, wherever she has been for the past sixteen years, cannot come back to life unaided, she is a statue until Paulina cries ‘Music, awake her; strike!’ Following that sound, Hermione moves, but she does not, cannot speak until Paulina says ‘Our Perdita is found!’ Perdita, the lost baby, whose loss was the partial reason for the original traumatic break.
The successful knitting up of trauma – healing the gap of before the bad thing and after it – often depends on something outside the sufferer. Here in Silas’ case, the possibility of reconnecting with his old self through the practice of herbalism might have done it, but, as you’ll see when you read the next paragraphs, that possibility is blighted by the villagers ignorance and mild and not even unkindly meant allegations of something like witchcraft. An avenue for potential regeneration is thus closed off.
Large leaves of unknown plant in Calderstones Park
This morning I’m continuing my slow reading of Silas Marner by George Eliot. You can find the whole text here, and you’ll find my previous readings by searching for ‘Silas Marner’. We are in Chapter Two.
George Eliot is beginning to think about work and money and the relation between the two:
His first movement after the shock had been to work in his loom; and he went on with this unremittingly, never asking himself why, now he was come to Raveloe, he worked far on into the night to finish the tale of Mrs. Osgood’s table-linen sooner than she expected– without contemplating beforehand the money she would put into his hand for the work. He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.
Silas, in his need for routine, for the click-clack of the loom ,works without thinking of the money. He works ‘like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection’. I have experienced this kind of work-impulse at home when something difficult is happening – someone in hospital, a crisis, and (though I’m not a house-proud person and rarely clean up when everything is o.k.) I find myself washing the dishes , drying them, putting away, wiping down, cleaning the stove, brushing the floor… and so on, each act seeming to naturally lead on to the next. All of them are really there to stop thought, or perhaps that’s wrong, perhaps it is more to do with the imposition of a kind of rhythm, the rhythm become something outside the problem on which you can concentrate.
On larger time scale, work is like this for many of us. But George Eliot takes that further and makes it a sort of law: ‘Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.’ The implication is that every man has ‘loveless chasms’. True ? I’m reading that as true for some, but also there are great stretches of time which are ordinary, dull, even? Work carries you over. This is hard to understand until you have worked for a long time. It is why so many people, particularly, I think, men, struggle with retirement, whether they have liked their jobs or not. For some people work becomes routine,and routines carry us over difficulties.
Silas’s hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the calls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well, and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him. Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, now its old narrow pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves.
Silas is trapped in no-time, he has no access to the past, feels nothing in the present and has no sense of a future. He is frozen, stuck. I keep thinking of Hermione in The Winters Tale and want to do a Spark Series on these two works read together. Let’s read on – don’t forget, keep reading it aloud, you’ll notice more:
But at last Mrs. Osgood’s table-linen was finished, and Silas was paid in gold. His earnings in his native town, where he worked for a wholesale dealer, had been after a lower rate; he had been paid weekly, and of his weekly earnings a large proportion had gone to objects of piety and charity. Now, for the first time in his life, he had five bright guineas put into his hand; no man expected a share of them, and he loved no man that he should offer him a share. But what were the guineas to him who saw no vista beyond countless days of weaving? It was needless for him to ask that, for it was pleasant to him to feel them in his palm, and look at their bright faces, which were all his own: it was another element of life, like the weaving and the satisfaction of hunger, subsisting quite aloof from the life of belief and love from which he had been cut off. The weaver’s hand had known the touch of hard-won money even before the palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire; and as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew out the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.
This is analysis of the beginnings of glitch in a personality. We’re pre-psychoanalysis here, and before even the beginnings of psychology as set out by William James. Of course, poets have always been thinking about the human mind, and William Wordsworth (use the search box to find my readings of Intimation of Immortality) had done much work in The Prelude, which George Eliot knew well, on thinking about how man’s mind grows, and had begun the long task of understanding that process in the poem:
But who shall parcel out
His intellect, by geometric rules,
Split, like a province, into round and square?
Who knows the individual hour in which
His habits were first sown, even as a seed,
Who that shall point, as with a wand, and say,
’This portion of the river of my mind
Came from yon fountain?’
The Prelude, Book Two
Now George Eliot, a huge reader of Wordsworth, picks up the baton. How does a man become himself? Silas is going to become a miser and develop a habit of loving gold for no reason other than that is gold. But why? First, he is in close contact with the coins: ‘it was pleasant to him to feel them in his palm, and look at their bright faces, which were all his own’. That physical connection is primal and about the need to love. Silas has been earning money for labour since he was a child but, it seems, he never loved it, never before saw coins as having ‘faces’, it was merely a means to an end:
The weaver’s hand had known the touch of hard-won money even before the palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then.
When he was a member of the Lantern-yard church, money had been about subsistence and doing good, tithes, supporting the church-community. He didn’t care for the money itself. ‘He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then.’ His purpose, which was both human and religious, had shaped his life. But now there is no human shape, no purpose, only the three basic elements of his reduced spider-like existence: work, eating and gold.
But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire; and as Silas walked homeward across the fields in the twilight, he drew out the money and thought it was brighter in the gathering gloom.
So habit plays a part. There are no continuing relationships – all that human feeling has been cut off as if with a knife. The original habit was ‘of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort’. despite the loss of friends, of his Lantern-yard church community, the habit of feeling survives and makes ‘a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire’. I notice here the growing metaphor, which we first saw in Chapter One. Even though Silas is closed down, something is at work, something small, something that grows. It’s not going to grow right, because what can grow right in the absence of human relationship? It is about growing towards love, though, isn’t it?
Apple or Pear tree in Calderstones Park, looking ‘lazy with neglected plenty’
I’m continuing my reading of Silas Marner today. You’ll find a full text here. Search previous posts looking for the tag ‘Silas Marner’.
What’s happened so far (in under thirty words): Silas – a hand-loom weaver – has been unfairly accused and cast out by his city community, now lives in country village Raveloe, where he is an object of suspicion.
Chapter Two
Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas– where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished.
I think one of the reasons many people find George Eliot hard to read is that there isn’t much padding, every sentence is generally doing something important. You have to keep concentrating. It’s like highwire walking – every step is important and you must keep your confidence up. Here at the opening of Chapter Two the first sentence asks us to do a lot of imagining. I’m going to take it slowly, bit by bit.
‘Even people whose lives have been made various by learning…’ In Chapter One I had noticed that education was a key part of the thinking about how human minds work, why sometimes people seek magical or superstitious explanations and what a hard thin life does to the imagination. Now comes this sentence which seems to pick up that thought and continue a conversation the author has been having. Beginning the sentence with ‘even’ places it in full flow, as it were, as if responding to something that has already been said. What is that which is already understood? It is that Silas – while full of feeling and with a gift for herbal medicine – has no formal learning, doesn’t know anything beyond his own experience, can’t think widely, is narrow. People ‘whose lives have been made various by learning’ have expanded their horizons and their imagining selves. But even such people
sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land
I thought immediately of refugees, because of our current world problem, because of ‘suddenly transported to a new land’. I also thought of what George Eliot would have been imagining as she wrote those words. Of course, there were refugees in 1860 (and her great last novel, Daniel Deronda, is about European Jewish settlers in London and the founding of the Jewish state.) I thought more personally of Marian Evans ( as the author was called in her non-writing life) falling in love with a married man, and deciding to throw everything over in living with him, and escaping to the Continent in order to avoid gossip and opprobrium. She was cast out by a wider society and by her own family. suddenly, after days of hectic couch travel you are in Switerzerland, and no longer have anything or anyone you previously knew. A person finding themselves in that position, might well find it ‘hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience.’ Of course, for arian, there was even so, the joy of loving and being loved by her life partner, George Henry Lewes.
The implied comparison is coming. If an educated person, with lots of experience to draw on, can feel so badly dislocated, how much harder must it be for Silas?
And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the world in Raveloe?–orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the large church in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at their own doors in service-time; the purple-faced farmers jogging along the lanes or turning in at the Rainbow; homesteads, where men supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life to come.
Raveloe is another world compared to the hard northern town from Silas has had to escape. It seems another time, earlier, pastoral, pre-industrial revolution, almost in the paradisal golden age. There is ‘church’ here, but like everything else it seems pretty laid-back (men lounge at their doors rather than go there), an there’s plenty of eating and drinking, and a profound love of linen! and then this demanding sentence:
There were no lips in Raveloe from which a word could fall that would stir Silas Marner’s benumbed faith to a sense of pain.
No one here believes as he believed? No one here is a person whose speech can affect him? He is cut off from his past, from the people who made his world and his faith real. He is not feeling anything. He’s gone into something like a state of suspended animation.
I’m drawing on my own experience for imagination here. I remember when I lost faith with the feminist commune I lived in during my early twenties. That losing of faith seemed a massive jarring wrench from one kind of life and set of beliefs to another. It had been – or my involvement in it had been – sect-like. Then I changed my mind. If I was in my new world, it didn’t jar or hurt but if I met one of my erstwhile sisters on the street, or saw her approaching in the supermarket, then great pain, agitation, sense of the brokenness. Of course you don’t want that painful ripped apart feeling. I avoided seeing those women for a very long time. In Raveloe, Silas doesn’t have to remember, doesn’t have to think doesn’t have to feel.
I am also remembering the Gillian Clarke poem ‘Miracle on St David’s Day’ which I wrote about here.
a woman
sits not listening, not seeing, not feeling.
In her neat clothes, the woman is absent
This is Silas. He has mechanical work to do, inside the safe space of his loom. Nothing reminds him of the past. And why would you want the numbness to wear off? Why not go on, numb to pain? The people here don’t seem to need God in the same way the town people did, their country lives are more generously filled, ‘orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty’. And the women’s desire for stocks of linen means that Silas can stay at his loom for ever if he wants.
I’m thinking back yesterday to The Winter’s Tale, and Hermione in a similar state of suspended animation. A human who has entered such a state of lock-down perhaps needs an external power to break it open, because if you’ve closed down because of great pain, and close down is mechanism that saves you feeling great hurt, how would you ever get out of it by yourself?
I think if I had to decide one big question for my life it would be: ‘how do people change?’ What needs to happen to bring change about? All this lies ahead.
A tree with blossom I haven’t been able to identify. Calderstones Park 9 May
I’m reading Silas Marner …we’re at the end of Chapter 1. If you want to join this Shared Reading from the beginning search for the tag ‘Silas Marner’. You’ll find an online version here.
Yesterday I ended my hour of reading practice with a thought about the relation of feelings to thought and my sense that a distance between feeling and what we are able to think, is one of things that cause many people to suffer mental/inner/spiritual distress. ‘We have our feelings but we can’t match them up with what we believe about reality.’ What we think is often of poor quality and many times downright wrong (speaking for myself at least) but what we feel is, however possibly misdirected, a genuine and direct personal experience. Yesterday’s reading reminded me of a thought from psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion which I have been turning over in my mind for a good number of years. It seems related to what happens in Shared Reading:
If a person cannot ‘think’ with his thoughts, that is to say that he has thoughts but lacks the apparatus of ‘thinking’ which enables him to use his thoughts, to think them as it were, then the personality is incapable of learning from experience. This failure is serious. Failure to eat, drink or breathe properly has disastrous consequences for life itself. Failure to use emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality.
W.R.Bion, Learning From Experience
The key word in that first sentence must be ‘with’ – Bion’s suggestion is that there are things (as it were, objects) we call ‘thoughts’ and there is an action which may be performed with them (verb) which we call ‘thinking’. There are things you can do something with. Sometimes we don’t do it. Stuff gets stuck.
The thought jolts into a new perspective when we get to the fourth sentence – ‘failure to use emotional experience produces a comparable disaster in the development of the personality’ – and thoughts and emotion are understood to be part of the same biological system. They are like eating and breathing part of our survival kit. Not using feeling and thought, the action of thinking, can damage, even kill, us.
I want to use an example of something from real life. Say you have a child who has been part of a badly functioning family. Child is suffers at hands of parents, is taken away by social workers, placed in foster care. Lives with ten, fifteen sets of foster carers as things continue to go wrong, child is distressed, uncontrollable. Foster carers can’t cope for long. Child gets moved a lot. many broken relationships. By the time I meet him aged twelve this child has a mass of huge emotional experience, like a tangle of threads, ripped out telephone wires, lumps of stuff, broken bottles, smashed hopes… child has more of this inner debris than most adults will accumulate in a lifetime. Child has emotional experience but he cannot use it because he cannot think his thoughts. He doesn’t have a good story to explain his feelings. He is very unlikely to be able to face the truth (mum and dad were a mess/ill/couldn’t help me). This child is (emotionally) starving, he is unable to ‘use’ his emotional experience. He’s had the experience, but as T.S.Eliot says, ‘missed the meaning’.
I turn back to Silas. Yesterday we saw that Silas had feelings but no way of thinking about what was happening to him as he was falsely accused and cast out by his social group, the sect in Lantern Yard. Numb and unable to ‘think’, Silas seems to enter a state of frozen animation, losing his fiance, was well as his wider community:
Marner went home, and for a whole day sat alone, stunned by despair,
without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in
his innocence. The second day he took refuge from benumbing
unbelief, by getting into his loom and working away as usual; and
before many hours were past, the minister and one of the deacons
came to him with the message from Sarah, that she held her
engagement to him at an end. Silas received the message mutely, and
then turned away from the messengers to work at his loom again. In
little more than a month from that time, Sarah was married to
William Dane; and not long afterwards it was known to the brethren
in Lantern Yard that Silas Marner had departed from the town.
I ask myself what it would be like to sit for a whole day, ‘stunned by despair’. I think ‘stunned’ indicates absence of the ability to think, perhaps the needful absence of feeling. Trying to imagine his state, I recall Emily Dickinson’s poem;
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
In terms of preserving himself, his love, Silas cannot act and does not seem to feel. He is ‘without any impulse to go to Sarah and attempt to win her belief in
his innocence’. That impulse might eventually take the form of a thought but it would start as a feeling – I love her, she loves me, I need her, she’ll love me – but there is no feeling. Silas is a dead man walking. The only thing he can do is his work. The mechanical labour of the hand-loom is like a safe place for him. I was struck by George Eliot calling it ‘a refuge’ and that he gets into it.
Mechanical labour is a comfort when you feel bad – how many people furiously clean their kitchen in the middle of a domestic row? Cleaning the stove! Wire wool! Bleach that sink! I don’t think these are only my habits. there is a need to let some other rhythm take over. For Silas, letting the loom take over is a refuge. It makes a clacking noise. There is a rhythm to it. The problem is, of course, that temporary refuges we create in our distress – the child running away, glue sniffing, our adult drugs or silences – while they begin as things we get into to escape, become things we can’t get out of. The refuge becomes a prison.
This is what Bion calls ‘a disaster in the development of the personality’ equivalent to the failure to breathe or eat. George Eliot has set us up with a story of a man whose life is completely smashed up, which sits alongside The Winters’ Tale as one of the great stories of human breakage and repair. Why on earth any school curriculum inventors, examination setters, ever thought this was a suitable book for twelve-year-olds I cannot imagine. They ruined George Eliot for several generations of readers.
I said that Bion’s thought seems connected to what happens in Shared Reading. This is a thought I’ll try to come back to another day. But I think before going on to Chapter Two I’ll have a poetry day tomorrow. Something delightful.
Rose and Clematis almost overpowering a support at Calderstones 8 May
Continuing my slow read of Silas Marner …we’re in Chapter 1. If you want to join this Shared Reading from the beginning search for the tag ‘Silas Marner’. You’ll find an online version here. We pick up at this point, where George Eliot is explaining Silas’ back story:
Among the members of his church there was one young man, a little
older than himself, with whom he had long lived in such close
friendship that it was the custom of their Lantern Yard brethren to
call them David and Jonathan. The real name of the friend was
William Dane, and he, too, was regarded as a shining instance of
youthful piety, though somewhat given to over-severity towards
weaker brethren, and to be so dazzled by his own light as to hold
himself wiser than his teachers. But whatever blemishes others
might discern in William, to his friend’s mind he was faultless; for
Marner had one of those impressible self-doubting natures which, at
an inexperienced age, admire imperativeness and lean on
contradiction. The expression of trusting simplicity in Marner’s
face, heightened by that absence of special observation, that
defenceless, deer-like gaze which belongs to large prominent eyes,
was strongly contrasted by the self-complacent suppression of inward
triumph that lurked in the narrow slanting eyes and compressed lips
of William Dane. One of the most frequent topics of conversation
between the two friends was Assurance of salvation: Silas confessed
that he could never arrive at anything higher than hope mingled with
fear, and listened with longing wonder when William declared that he
had possessed unshaken assurance ever since, in the period of his
conversion, he had dreamed that he saw the words “calling and
election sure” standing by themselves on a white page in the open
Bible. Such colloquies have occupied many a pair of pale-faced
weavers, whose unnurtured souls have been like young winged things,
fluttering forsaken in the twilight.
Two members of an extreme sect, uneducated but committed to their faith, one more extreme in his views than the other, certain of his place in paradise because of his dream, and his belief in that dream. Silas essentially a ‘self-doubting’ man, William ‘self-complacent’. I feel worried! There’s something particularly worrying about this relationship being mixed up in the sectarian belief, as if emotions from different parts/modes/arenas of life are bleeding into one another. I read on. The next paragraph is a very long one, so I am going to break up into chunks:
It had seemed to the unsuspecting Silas that the friendship had
suffered no chill even from his formation of another attachment of a
closer kind. For some months he had been engaged to a young
servant-woman, waiting only for a little increase to their mutual
savings in order to their marriage; and it was a great delight to
him that Sarah did not object to William’s occasional presence in
their Sunday interviews.
Of course I am nervous because of the opening words – Silas is ‘unsuspecting’ – but of what? That his friendship had suffered ‘no chill’ despite him forming a greater attachment. If William Dane is secretly made cold to Silas because Silas has a lover then a serious problem is brewing, and it is:
It was at this point in their history that
Silas’s cataleptic fit occurred during the prayer-meeting; and
amidst the various queries and expressions of interest addressed to
him by his fellow-members, William’s suggestion alone jarred with
the general sympathy towards a brother thus singled out for special
dealings. He observed that, to him, this trance looked more like a
visitation of Satan than a proof of divine favour, and exhorted his
friend to see that he hid no accursed thing within his soul. Silas,
feeling bound to accept rebuke and admonition as a brotherly office,
felt no resentment, but only pain, at his friend’s doubts concerning
him; and to this was soon added some anxiety at the perception that
Sarah’s manner towards him began to exhibit a strange fluctuation
between an effort at an increased manifestation of regard and
involuntary signs of shrinking and dislike. He asked her if she
wished to break off their engagement; but she denied this: their
engagement was known to the church, and had been recognized in the
prayer-meetings; it could not be broken off without strict
investigation, and Sarah could render no reason that would be
sanctioned by the feeling of the community.
William, who is ‘self-complacent’ is the only member of the sect who believes Silas’ trance the work of the devil. This has got to be connected to the threat to their friendship from Silas’s engagement. but this isn’t just about loss of friendship. It’s about William, who had previously been the recipient of ‘divine favour’ in the vision of the Bible, being shifted from the centre of attention – Silas’ attention, or the community’s attention.
At this time the senior
deacon was taken dangerously ill, and, being a childless widower, he
was tended night and day by some of the younger brethren or sisters.
Silas frequently took his turn in the night-watching with William,
the one relieving the other at two in the morning. The old man,
contrary to expectation, seemed to be on the way to recovery, when
one night Silas, sitting up by his bedside, observed that his usual
audible breathing had ceased. The candle was burning low, and he
had to lift it to see the patient’s face distinctly. Examination
convinced him that the deacon was dead–had been dead some time,
for the limbs were rigid. Silas asked himself if he had been
asleep, and looked at the clock: it was already four in the morning.
How was it that William had not come? In much anxiety he went to
seek for help, and soon there were several friends assembled in the
house, the minister among them, while Silas went away to his work,
wishing he could have met William to know the reason of his
non-appearance. But at six o’clock, as he was thinking of going to
seek his friend, William came, and with him the minister. They came
to summon him to Lantern Yard, to meet the church members there; and
to his inquiry concerning the cause of the summons the only reply
was, “You will hear.” Nothing further was said until Silas was
seated in the vestry, in front of the minister, with the eyes of
those who to him represented God’s people fixed solemnly upon him.
Then the minister, taking out a pocket-knife, showed it to Silas,
and asked him if he knew where he had left that knife? Silas said,
he did not know that he had left it anywhere out of his own pocket–
but he was trembling at this strange interrogation. He was then
exhorted not to hide his sin, but to confess and repent. The knife
had been found in the bureau by the departed deacon’s bedside–
found in the place where the little bag of church money had lain,
which the minister himself had seen the day before. Some hand had
removed that bag; and whose hand could it be, if not that of the man
to whom the knife belonged? For some time Silas was mute with
astonishment: then he said, “God will clear me: I know nothing
about the knife being there, or the money being gone. Search me and
my dwelling; you will find nothing but three pound five of my own
savings, which William Dane knows I have had these six months.” At
this William groaned, but the minister said, “The proof is heavy
against you, brother Marner. The money was taken in the night last
past, and no man was with our departed brother but you, for William
Dane declares to us that he was hindered by sudden sickness from
going to take his place as usual, and you yourself said that he had
not come; and, moreover, you neglected the dead body.”
I’m reading the story fast here, noticing as much as I can, but this mainly plot, and easy to follow, so I am speeding up.
“I must have slept,” said Silas. Then, after a pause, he added,
“Or I must have had another visitation like that which you have all
seen me under, so that the thief must have come and gone while I was
not in the body, but out of the body. But, I say again, search me
and my dwelling, for I have been nowhere else.”
The search was made, and it ended–in William Dane’s finding the
well-known bag, empty, tucked behind the chest of drawers in Silas’s
chamber! On this William exhorted his friend to confess, and not to
hide his sin any longer. Silas turned a look of keen reproach on
him, and said, “William, for nine years that we have gone in and
out together, have you ever known me tell a lie? But God will clear
me.”
“Brother,” said William, “how do I know what you may have done in
the secret chambers of your heart, to give Satan an advantage over
you?”
Silas was still looking at his friend. Suddenly a deep flush came
over his face, and he was about to speak impetuously, when he seemed
checked again by some inward shock, that sent the flush back and
made him tremble. But at last he spoke feebly, looking at William.
“I remember now–the knife wasn’t in my pocket.”
William said, “I know nothing of what you mean.” The other
persons present, however, began to inquire where Silas meant to say
that the knife was, but he would give no further explanation: he
only said, “I am sore stricken; I can say nothing. God will clear
me.”
On their return to the vestry there was further deliberation. Any
resort to legal measures for ascertaining the culprit was contrary
to the principles of the church in Lantern Yard, according to which
prosecution was forbidden to Christians, even had the case held less
scandal to the community. But the members were bound to take other
measures for finding out the truth, and they resolved on praying and
drawing lots. This resolution can be a ground of surprise only to
those who are unacquainted with that obscure religious life which
has gone on in the alleys of our towns. Silas knelt with his
brethren, relying on his own innocence being certified by immediate
divine interference, but feeling that there was sorrow and mourning
behind for him even then–that his trust in man had been cruelly
bruised. _The lots declared that Silas Marner was guilty._ He was
solemnly suspended from church-membership, and called upon to render
up the stolen money: only on confession, as the sign of repentance,
could he be received once more within the folds of the church.
Marner listened in silence. At last, when everyone rose to depart,
he went towards William Dane and said, in a voice shaken by agitation–
“The last time I remember using my knife, was when I took it out to
cut a strap for you. I don’t remember putting it in my pocket
again. _You_ stole the money, and you have woven a plot to lay the
sin at my door. But you may prosper, for all that: there is no just
God that governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that
bears witness against the innocent.”
There was a general shudder at this blasphemy.
William said meekly, “I leave our brethren to judge whether this is
the voice of Satan or not. I can do nothing but pray for you, Silas.”
Poor Marner went out with that despair in his soul–that shaken
trust in God and man, which is little short of madness to a loving
nature. In the bitterness of his wounded spirit, he said to
himself, “_She_ will cast me off too.” And he reflected that, if
she did not believe the testimony against him, her whole faith must
be upset as his was. To people accustomed to reason about the forms
in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is
difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which
the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of
reflection. We are apt to think it inevitable that a man in
Marner’s position should have begun to question the validity of an
appeal to the divine judgment by drawing lots; but to him this would
have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never
known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his
energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith. If
there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their
sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from
false ideas for which no man is culpable.
Poor Silas! And how serious it is , ‘little short of madness’. I said yesterday that I was going to make myself concentrate on the most difficult sentences – and there is one in the section above that needs some time:
To people accustomed to reason about the forms
in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is
difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which
the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of
reflection.
We, George Eliot’s readers, are assumed to be people ‘accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself’.
If I was reading this a room with an actual group of people, I’d definitely be stopping here to open a conversation about what part reason plays in our religious feeling – whether that be absolute atheism or devout religious belief. Whatever our state of belief, it is likely that most of us have thought about it. But Silas and other members of the Lantern Yard sect have not applied rational thought to their beliefs. They live in a ‘simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection’. Can we, as modern, educated people, imagine that?
Where would such an act of reflection even begin? It is hard enough to think outside of your normal box when you know there are boxes. But in Silas’s world, there is only the belief of the Lantern Yard church. If you go outside – what will there be? Nothing. Yet something does begin to make Silas think.
Earlier, when he was awaiting judgement by the drawing of lots, he had begun to apply rationality to his situation, and that rationality arises in feeling:
Silas knelt with his brethren, relying on his own innocence being certified by immediate divine interference, but feeling that there was sorrow and mourning
behind for him even then–that his trust in man had been cruelly
bruised.
Key words here are ‘relying’ and ‘feeling’. The relying is to do with his belief, crumbling even as he kneels, that God takes an active part in the doings of men and in particular of men in Lantern Yard. But as he kneels there, he has no faith in that belief: his feeling is one of mis-trust. He is ‘feeling that there was sorrow and mourning behind for him even then’. His trust is, quite rightly, located in his own direct experience. He knows he is innocent. Now his belief in the church of Lantern Yard must go. And with it, everything he holds dear.
And now we come to the hardest part of today’s reading:
We are apt to think it inevitable that a man in
Marner’s position should have begun to question the validity of an
appeal to the divine judgment by drawing lots; but to him this would
have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never
known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his
energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith. If
there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their
sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from
false ideas for which no man is culpable.
Marner doesn’t ‘question’, he ‘feels’.
I think this is one of the key contributions George Eliot makes to human understanding- that feeling is the genesis of potential consciousness. (Nearly ten years later, in Middlemarch, George Eliot will write, ‘if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’)
It starts here with feeling, but it can take a long time to work its way up into consciousness and perhaps never does. For Silas there is only the feeling (the feeling is: this is not good and is hurting me) possible thoughts about that feeling are too painful. He cannot reconcile them because he can’t bear the thought. It is too much to ask, too suddenly, and at point where he is broken: ‘to him this would have been an effort of independent thought such as he had never known; and he must have made the effort at a moment when all his energies were turned into the anguish of disappointed faith.’
I’m thinking of instances where I have felt broken, and how difficult, perhaps impossible rational thought is at such times. I suffer the feelings I am feeling, and only later will I have the thoughts. Perhaps those thoughts will come from someone else in the first instance. someone may talk to me. Am I even able to hear what they are saying? Not in the thick of painful feeling. I may be incapable of hearing, thinking, understanding because of the brokenness.
I believe this often happens to people in ordinary real life, and that one of the reasons we have so much in the way of poor mental health (as a general population) is that we are not good at connecting the reality of feeling with the emergence of consciousness or the process of thought. We have our feelings but we can’t match them up with what we believe about reality. This leads me to think of a very useful bit of thinking from the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, but I’ll write about that tomorrow.
Time’s up.
I’m conscious that by including Silas Marner text in these postings, the length of the blog post becomes huge. I’d be glad of feedback as to whether this is working. Let me know.
Forget-Me-Nots remind me of my maternal Grandfather, Syd Smith
Today I’m continuing to read Silas Marner very slowly…we’re in Chapter 1. If you want to read from the beginning search for the tag ‘Silas Marner’.
Yesterday we’d just been thinking about the boys pestering Marner and their fear that he might be able to put some kind of spell on them.
They had, perhaps, heard their fathers and mothers hint
that Silas Marner could cure folks’ rheumatism if he had a mind, and
add, still more darkly, that if you could only speak the devil fair
enough, he might save you the cost of the doctor. Such strange
lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be
caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for
the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and
benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion
can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most
easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who
have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a
life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic
religious faith. To them pain and mishap present a far wider range
of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is
almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all
overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.
“Is there anything you can fancy that you would like to eat?” I
once said to an old labouring man, who was in his last illness, and
who had refused all the food his wife had offered him. “No,” he
answered, “I’ve never been used to nothing but common victual, and
I can’t eat that.” Experience had bred no fancies in him that
could raise the phantasm of appetite.
Lots of things could go wrong here and I’ve had experiences in Shared Reading groups where they have. Sometimes readers think the writer is snob. But we’ve come a long way since George Eliot wrote the book in 1861. Then, the class of people known for hundreds of years as the ‘peasantry’ still existed, uneducated country people whose lives were often of intense drudgery and hardship. I think we’d have to go to an undeveloped third world country to find such people now, though lots of us, educated to a greater or lesser degree extent here in the first world, still share some of the superstitions George Eliot is talking about here. Thinking also about a general red-top sense of paranoia about world conspiracies, the popularity of The Da Vinci Code and a lingering popular interest in horoscopes. But this is more serious than that, isn’t it? This is about the restrictions caused by true hardship on the growth of the imagination:
To them pain and mishap present a far wider range of possibilities than gladness and enjoyment: their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.
This is one of those moments of human understanding I love finding in George Eliot, and why it is necessary to go so slowly.
My first job is to make the translation into something I can picture and which will make the writing live for me. I try to think about such minds… where have I met them?
This sentence might have been written about some of the children in Care of Local Authority that I’ve met over the years. The experience of such children, especially children who have been in many foster-placements, and with whom adults have failed to make bonds, is one of ‘pain and mishap’ ; that is the very material from which their lives seem to have been made. How should such children imagine other types of experience?
Their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope.
What are ‘the images’ that feed desire and hope?
If I think back to my own childhood, the images often centre about my grandparents. Moments of love or pleasure, say, travelling with my grandmother on the bus round Wirral as she took me with her to her cleaning jobs in posh ladies houses (I am such a person now myself, she might come here to clean), stopping off at various country pubs for a half of bitter for her, packet of crisps and a bottle of pop for me. The names of those pubs: The Seven Stars, The Fish, The Malt Shovel, The Shrew. Her love shown in the food she bought for me, sausages, a custard slice, mixed broken biscuits. The time she spent with me as we cleanedthe brasses on a Saturday morning. My grandfather, Syd, showing me how much he enjoyed a pear and so I loved pears too, and Forget-Me-Knots, and Blackbirds. the images then – things put into my mind by experience – are people, time, love and language.
One of The Reader’s Patrons, Frank Cottrell Boyce, told me that when making the film ‘Welcome to Sarajevo’, he had met a woman who had been in a child in the terrible orphanages of Ceaisescu’s Romania. She had grown up to be a lovely, and loving woman, working to rescue children from the war zone. ‘How did you learn to love?’ he asked her. ‘Growing up in those conditions?’. ‘I had Heidi,’ the woman replied. ‘In the orphanage there was a copy of Heidi, so I knew that adults could be loving and kind, that children could be loved.’
But of course to read Heidi, or any book, you need to be literate: you need a basic education. I’m going back to Silas in a moment but before I do, I want to mention The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class by Jonathan Rose. If you don’t know this terrific book, go and get hold of a copy right away. There are some amazingly moving accounts of what education meant to the poorest people – people like my grandparents, and their parents, (factory-hands, labourers, domestic servants). Learning to read, says one man, was ‘like coming up from the bottom of the ocean and seeing the universe for the first time.’
I go back to the text and reread that sentence and notice this time that George Eliot is using a metaphor of growth.
their imagination is almost barren of the images that feed desire and hope, but is all overgrown by recollections that are a perpetual pasture to fear.
‘Barren,’ ‘overgrown’ and ‘pasture’ all point to an implied potential cycle of growth in the human mind. It isn’t that the peasantry are fixed as ‘rude'( basic, rough) minds: that’s how experience has grown them. Experience, as in the life of the old man who had only eaten ‘common victual’, determines our appetites.
Just going to read the next paragraph before closing the book for today; it’s really a quick sketch of the village: a bit cut-off from the world, old-fashioned and middle-of-the-road:
And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered,
undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren
parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization–inhabited by
meagre sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay
in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry
England, and held farms which, speaking from a spiritual point of
view, paid highly-desirable tithes. But it was nestled in a snug
well-wooded hollow, quite an hour’s journey on horseback from any
turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the
coach-horn, or of public opinion. It was an important-looking
village, with a fine old church and large churchyard in the heart of
it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, with
well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing close
upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the rectory,
which peeped from among the trees on the other side of the
churchyard:–a village which showed at once the summits of its
social life, and told the practised eye that there was no great park
and manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefs
in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough
money from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a
rollicking fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter
tide.
The irritation at bad farming by the ‘several chiefs’ who lived in ‘a rollicking fashion’ comes direct from George Eliot’s own experience. As herself, as Mary Ann Evans, she was the daughter of a very competent and hard-working Estate Manager in just such a part of the Midlands. She’s describing something like the very place she grew up. Imagination comes from real experience.
readerjanedavis 