Justluckie

From Botany Bay to Zion in the Company of Two Poets

Yesterday saw one of those 'I wish I had thought of that two months ago' moments when I listened to two excellent poets at the Edinburgh International Book Festival who were exploring very different kinds of journey which are both represented in the medium of embroidery in the Cathedral's exhibition of the great tapestry of the Scottish Diaspora. But more of that later. Let me introduce the poets and their journeys.

Tom Pow has written of the 'Wild Adventure' of Thomas Watling from Dumfries, an artist and forger who was sent to Botany Bay for forging bank notes in 1788. While he was there, he was put to work cataloguing the flora and fauna of this 'new' land and Pow's book shows some of this work. He had to pay his own way home via Calcutta and part of the journey relfects on that stopover too. It's a story of exile and homecoming, of crime and punishment, of hardship and opportunity, of the making of an artist, of the journeys of an alien people to a 'new world'.

Kei Miller's journey is a 'journey to the heart' and charts a conversation between a rastaman and a cartographer who explore the inner and outer geography of Jamaica. His book, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, also contains poems reflecting on the place names of Jamaica. Together, these poems explore what can be mapped on paper - always an exercise in control, acquisition and power, but also an act of naming and shaping - and what can only be navigated by other, inner means. That other journey, the journey to Zion, is a journey undertaken by a disposition of 'upfullness', by a receptive heart that finds Zion coming to us in even the midst of Babylon's toils.

 These two poets show us something of the contested worlds and complex journeys - enforced or freely chosen - that are the fabric of our human story of empire and dispersion. The Diaspora Tapestry also depicts this complexity and I wish I'd known about these two poets when we were planning the exhibition - their readings would have enriched our understanding of the worldwide dispersion of Scots considerably. But their books are still available as a different kind of guide to these marvellous panels and I commend them all to you. Here is a flavour of Kei Miller's work as he explores the Jamaican place name, 'Edinburgh Castle':

Edinburgh Castle, at which grave and terrible site was once
found 43 gold watches. Also an assortment of clothing:
petticoats, waistcoats, 2 loose smocks of osnaburg, 3
beaver hats, and 1 splendocious red frock - its panniers
so wide, missus must did think herself was Queen of
some great island. By then the bodies had rotted.
Facsimiled Castle - Jamaican home of Lewis Hutchison,
alias the Mad Doctor, alias the Mad Master, surgeon and
slave-owner, red-haired immigrant who nights found
crouched on towers, squinting one-eyed at pale bodies
that floated like ghosts through Pedro District
gloaming. O skilful marksman who shot his way deep
into the annals of West Indian history - bestow new title
unto him who had such audacity to aim death at more
than just niggers. Caribbean's first serial killer.

Rowan Williams and the Serious Business of Poetry

On Sunday evening, Rowan Williams introduced his new collection of poems, The Other Mountain, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. After his reading, one questioner asked about how he managed to combine his poetry writing with his previous onerous duties as Archbishop of Canterbury. Among other things, he responded that one should not imagine the writing of poetry to be a less serious business than being head of a large religious organisation. Williams takes his poetry seriously and writes with flair, authority and considerable care. Here are some of the reasons I think he is right about the importance of that work.

Some aspects of being human demand a different response. Poetry, like painting, frames an aspect of reality so as to invite us to linger over it and see it more clearly. There are some realities that we would rather not look at. One example of this is a poem Williams read on Sunday about a shell casing, an object that is too prevalent in our world. To invite us to consider its form through the medium of poetry is to refuse to allow it an uncontested space in that world and to demand that we consider its grim utility. This object is not neutral and poetry wrenches it out of any neutrality our acceptance of it may afford.

Beauty invites beauty. Poetry is also a response to the beauty of our world and an invitation to linger over it. The beauty of well crafted words is art's response to wonder. Is life without beauty a good life?

Language is more than just a vehicle for information. If language is merely a technology, a tool for achieving productive ends, it has become somewhat dehumanised. The poem is no less a thing than the order form, the profit report, the piece of legislation, the news bulletin, the catalogue entry, and the human capacity to tell stories, recite poems and plumb the depths of the spirit is closer to the heart of who we are than the writing that is a means of transacting business.

As words are proliferated and truth made less accessible through our wide-and-thin communications media, the poem stands as a testament to attention and depth. In its call to attention, the poem is a contemplative medium. It bids us bear with a reality until its meanings begin to break through not through mere explication but through the density of sound-with-sign clusters of words that invite us to hear. The poem seeks not so much to fix things as to re-present them to us in new ways so that we can encounter them afresh.

But too much prose about poetry is a foolish thing, so here are some words from the poet. This was written for the National Churches Trust:

Please Close This Door Quietly

The slow, loud door: pushing against
a mound of dust, dust floating
heavily in a still room; step
slowly,

Stones can deceive. The ground looks
firm, but the dust makes you blink
and feel for purchase. This is
marshland,

Difficult light to sting eyes, terrain
whose spring and tangle hides deep
gaps, cold pools, old workings;
careful.

Too much left here of unseen lumber
dropped, knowingly or not, behind
the door to trip you while you rub
awkwardly

At naked eyes, opened on thick,
still, damp, scented air, imprinted
used and recycled, not clearing up,
catching:

The weather of memory. Underfoot
lost tracks wind round an ankle
and abandoned diggings, wells, mines,
foundations,

Wait for your foot to find them,
drop you into the unexpected chill,
the snatched breath and swift
seeing,

The bird's flap at the edge
of your eye's world: things left
but alive; a space shared; a stone
yielding.

 

 

A Dearer Darkness

I recently rediscovered my copy of a 1951 translation of St John of the Cross's poems. Roy Campbell renders John's Spanish into accessible and poetic English which captures the erotic and subtle aspects of these dense and lively works. This poem is the basis of John's later work, the Ascent of Mount Carmel. It sets out a number of characteristic aspects of John's spirituality, which are also the classic themes of Christian mystical tradition: the darkness that speaks of a setting aside of our relilance on sensory knowledge; the ascent that tells of our Godward orientation; the union of the lover and the beloved; the focus on letting go rather than strenuous effort. The poem also shows us more specific features of John's spirituality, such as the use of  the language of 'wounding' to express the intensity and painful opening up that can be the experience of one who seeks God.

There is always a tension involved in expressing such ineffable truths in language, especially when the mystic constantly warns us of the danger of over-confidence in our ability to express such things at all. However, poetry's facility for open-ended and allusive expression can lead us into silence - the language does not close off our reaching out towards God but opens up a new space.

Upon a gloomy night,
With all my cares to loving ardours flushed,
(O venture of delight!)
With nobody in sight
I went abroad when all my house was hushed.

In safety, in disguise,
In darkness up the secret stair I crept,
(O happy enterprise)
Concealed from other eyes
When all my house at length in silence slept.

Upon that lucky night
In secrecy, inscrutable to sight,
I went without discerning
And with no other light
Except for that which in my heart was burning.

It lit and led me through
More certain than the light of noonday clear
To where One waited near
Whose presence well I knew,
There where no other presence might appear.

Oh night that was my guide!
Oh darkness dearer than the morning's pride,
Oh night that joined the lover
To the beloved bride
Transfiguring them each into the other.

Within my flowering breast
Which only for himself entire I save
He sank into his rest
And all my gifts I gave
Lulled by the airs with which the cedars wave.

Over the ramparts fanned
While the fresh wind was fluttering his tresses,
With his serenest hand
My neck he wounded, and
Suspended every sense with its caresses.

Lost to myself I stayed
My face upon my lover having laid
From all endeavour ceasing:
And all my cares releasing
Threw them amongst the lilies there to fade.

A Song For Nobody

I'm preparing for our parish retreat looking at Thomas Merton's contemplative approach to nature. Here's one of the poems I'll be using, which I'll let speak for itself.

A Song For Nobody

A yellow flower
(Light and spirit)
Sings by itself
For nobody.

A golden spirit
(Light and emptiness)
Sings without a word
By itself.

Let no one touch this gentle sun
In whose dark eye
Someone is awake.

(No light, no gold, no name, no color
And no thought:
O, wide awake!)

A golden heaven
Sings by itself
A song to nobody.

 

Remembered Bodies

Pressed into the shining black hardness
of this marble altar,
the remembered bodies of sea creatures
from a time of the earth's youthfulness;

carapace, exoskeleton, membrane,
the brittle white contours
of life in its primitive simplicity.

And on the surface of this rock,
the excised symbol
of the brutal extinction
of another remembered body,
brought here among us again
in the brittle white contours
of a disc of bread.

Primal history, ancient history, salvation history
all remembered on this one dense table
in order that broken bodies
might taste once more
the gift of life's simplicity.

Remembering our Dust

Kathleen Jamie is a writer of poetry and prose of unusual clarity, thoughtfulness and attention. Her most recent prose work, Sightlines, is a series of 'meditations' on the phenomena of our world, big and small, and on our reactions to them. She does not restrict her range to the phenomena of the 'natural world' of TV nature shows, but includes human interactions with the world in her scope. For example, in her consideration of the phenomena of the Arctic, she reflects on the 'driven', energetic nature of the aurora borealis and recalls an exchange with a friend about human drivenness. In response to her question of why he was so driven, her friend said that it was more remarkable that we are not more driven, given the fleeting nature of our existence. The words he uses to pose this question are wonderful:

...the atoms of you have been fizzing about for a bit less than five billion years, and for forty-odd of those years, they've been pretty well as self-aware as you. But soon enough they'll go fizzing off again into the grasses and whatever, and they'll never ever know themselves as the sum of you again.

This strikes me as a perfect modern way of recasting the biblical phrase, 'dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return' and it makes sense in both a scientific and a spiritual sense to think of how we are composed not so much of inert stuff as of energy. Surely an awareness of our finitude and of our sharing in the common stuff of all creation is one of the most vital spiritual insights we ever gain, whatever our belief system.

A further spiritual question lingers for me: what, then, do we make of this knowledge? Is it a source of constant and urgent motivation, as it is with Jamie's friend, or is it a call to further and deeper awareness of all that is? Is it a matter of creative restlessness or creative restedness? I suspect that it is both but that our choice of where we are between these poles is strongly a matter of temperament. And I suspect that this dichotomy is not the main issue here. What is far more important is that we are awake to the fact of our energetic dustiness. I think that is the chief purpose of Lent.

 

Humility and Art

The words of two writers this week have made me think a little more about the place of humility in art. The first was a short interview on the BBC News channel with the British Pakistani writer, Nadeem Aslam, who was speaking about his latest novel, The Blind Man's Garden. I don't recall his exact words, but he said that what was most important about him as a novelist was not that he was different from everyone else but that he was just like anyone else, with the same thougths, fears, curiosities. He has also said that novelists are not there to tell us what to think, but to tell us what to think about.  In both of these statements, Aslam is showing that the power of fiction lies in its ability to explore our common humanity, to present what we already know in such a way as to make us look at it anew.

The second writer is one I would, if pushed, describe as my favourite writer of the 20th century, George Mackay Brown. I have just finished reading Ron Ferguson's excellent biographical book on Brown, The Wound and the Gift. Brown, like Aslam, was intensely aware of his own humanity and Ferguson's book does not shy away from describing his complexities and struggles. He regarded his art as being something quite humble, a craft to be practised with the same care and diligence as a carpenter or ploughman. He regarded publicity as something toxic to a writer and never attended literary events. This does not mean he was any kind of misanthrop. Indeed, he appears to have been very generous with his time. For him, the writer depended on what went before and on the rhythms of the earth. No one writes in a vacuum and the gift of the one who writes is the same as the gift of the one who paints and the one who prays - simple attention to what is there.

The humility of these two writers is a powerful testament to me of the purpose of Lent - to recognise the dust whereof we are made, the common soil of our human flourishing and the dust to which we return, from silence to silence.

 

A Face Not Fearing Light

The title of this post is from George Herbert's poem, Lent, a season he describes as a 'feast' to be loved and welcomed. Part of the poem belongs to a particular religious context in which he felt it necessary to offer a justification for the observance of Lent, presumably over against a Puritan suspicion of such practices. But there are other moments where he offers simple, but characteristically rich imagery for the season we begin today. Here is the full text:

WElcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie,
                                     But is compos'd of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church sayes, now:
Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow 
                                     To ev'ry Corporation.

The humble soul compos'd of love and fear
Begins at home, and layes the burden there,
                                     When doctrines disagree.
He sayes, in things which use hath justly got,
I am a scandall to the Church, and not 
                                     The Church is so to me.
                
True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,
                                     When good is seasonable;
Unlesse Authoritie, which should increase
The obligation in us, make it lesse,
                                     And Power it self disable.

Besides the cleannesse of sweet abstinence,
Quick thoughts and motions at a small expense,
                                     A face not fearing light:
Whereas in fulnesse there are sluttish fumes,
Sowre exhalations, and dishonest rheumes,
                                     Revenging the delight.

Then those same pendant profits, which the spring
And Easter intimate, enlarge the thing,
                                     And goodnesse of the deed.
Neither ought other mens abuse of Lent
Spoil the good use; lest by that argument
                                     We forfeit all our Creed.

It 's true, we cannot reach Christ's fortieth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
                                     Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Savior's purity;
Yet are bid, Be holy ev'n as he.
                                     In both let 's do our best.

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
                                     That travelleth by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
                                     May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast
                                     As may our faults control:
That ev'ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,
                                     And among those his soul.

Among the images that appeal to me in this poem, those of the journey and of 'banqueting the poor' stand out. I am drawn to the subtle balance Herbert achieves of urging us to undertake a disciplined journey, knowing that it is only in setting out that we more surely meet with God, while recognising the God who 'may turn and take us by the hand'. It is both in seeking and in being found that we meet with God. The image of banqueting the poor is remarkable in that it recognises the poverty of one who may seek to feed the poor. Lent is a time for us to rediscover our inner poverty, that condition of dependence, humility and simplicity that we strive to hard to reject, and to discover in that humility our fundamental unity with all people, and, indeed, with all creation. That was what was in my mind as my head was marked with ash this morning and I was reminded of the dust from which I came and to which I will return. We are of the dust, of the earth. And it is from the same earth that a new kind of life will blossom forty days hence.

And a candle set...

As a reflection for the feast of Candelmas, I would like to offer George Mackay Brown's lovely poem, Feast of Candles. It shows the whole of human life, in its joy, fragility and hope, offered in the simple, worldess rituals of the feast. It doesn't need any commentary from me:

Here a candle was set, for a cure on the hill
And there a candle, a shy flame, for a cradled
    one at the shore
And there now, a candle, swiftly set, the flame
    draught-flung: for a sailor in
    Ireland
A candle, laving pure flame on a face: and
    the mouth moved with a name and
    names, a sorrow
Such a procession of flowers-of-flame, in winter
One by one, out of the bitter black night, under
    the stars
And an old woman, sifting names of else forgotten
    dead, with a bleak brown candle
And girls from the big farm, leaving their empty
    mirth outside, each girl a candle-
    bearer, and there children-brides-
    mothers-deathfolders-mourners
    (those five girls) beautifully
    lighted about the eyes and the
    hushed mouths
And after, a shepherd, sheilding his flame, whispering
    'Saint Agnes'
Then fishermern from the boat Fulmar, each
    lighting his candle from the
    boat's lantern
And a candle set, as if the laird's face was
    kissed by an angel, the man's
    rock-hard face, and the mouth
    unlocked with a prayer
And another flame of candle that seemed to go
    out and gulped for life and
    folded wings like a summer
    butterfly: and that was the
    hen-wife and her candle
(And the monk gathered the folds of his cloak
    together at the altar and bent
    and prayed between two tall
    set-apart candles: in Latin
    whispers and a boy replied,
    hesitant with the Latin syllables,
    in country whispers)
And a flame set, and a flame set, and a flame
    set...
Then was the cry heard down at the shore
And there were whispers, 'The Skipper'
For the ship Olaf would weigh that night for
    Trondheim, with news of Magnus
    and the light at his tomb beyond
    sun or stars or candles
Yet a dozen candles would be lit for that voyage,
    and brought from keel to kirk, for
    a blessing on the voyage
And there again a candle set, the flame borne by the earl's
    poet purer than words he would ever
    strike, but he had no sorrow for that:
    who shall say whom wax-and-
    wick-and-petal was set there for, a
    lady or a light to welcome the spring,
    or a drop to be lost in the ocean of
    the first and last Light
Then two children from the hill, one crying for his
    candle was out, but the other rekindled
    it, and the tallow rooted in warm
    dribblings
(And the altar-boy turned a page for the priest)
And a wave of lights, with sea breath, broke
    upon the door. And that was
    the sailors...
Then the priest, in the stone ship, turned and
    blessed that feast of candles on
    Candlemas night.

The Interrogation of Silence

George Mackay Brown desribed the work of the poet in these words. They come at the end of his poem, The Poet:

Therefore he no more troubled the pool of silence.
But put on a mask and cloak,
Strung a guitar
And moved among the folk.
Dancing they cried,
'Ah, how our sober islands
Are gay again, since this blind lyrical tramp
Invaded the fair!'

Under the last dead lamp
When all the dancers and masks had gone inside
His cold stare
Returned to its true task, interrogation of silence.

In a later poem, he also described the poet's work in similar terms: 'Carve the runes / Then be content with silence.' GMB refers often to silence and I suspect that this is one of the more significant clues about his covnersion to Catholicism. His biographer, Ron Ferguson, explored a number of other factors - his self-definition as an outsider, his romantic love for continuity with the past, his aversion to the stern censures of Calvinism - but I think it is his instinctive mystical sense that comes through most powerfully in his poems and I would like to think that this is the most compelling factor that led him to seek an expression of Christianity that is at home with its mystical strand.

I am fascinated by his appreciation of silence. In another poem, Epiphany Poem, he talks of how the three kings 'Suffered salt, snow, skulls. / They suffered the silence / Before the first word.' I assume this is an allusion to Wisdom 18, which isa text that has found its way into the liturgy of the hours for Christmastide:

For while gentle silence enveloped all things,
and night in its swift course was now half gone,
your all-powerful word leapt from heaven, from the royal throne,
into the midst of the land that was doomed,
a stern warrior
carrying the sharp sword of your authentic command,
and stood and filled all things with death,
and touched heaven while standing on the earth.

The process of writing poetry is a journey from silence and to silence. Distilled words condense and intensify experience to the point where it falls into silence; in turn, experience is heard, teased out, drawn tenderly from the pool of silence and shaped into words. Words may be the tools of poets, but silence is their primary material.

 

When I have a little longer, I would like to look more fully at the range of silences in George Mackay Brown's poems - the 'good silence' of the dead, the silence of winter, the silence of the Via Dolorosa or Pieta - because I am sure that we see here the silence of a practised contemplative who treasures his words, but treasures yet more the silence to which they lead.