St David's Day (2014)

I remember saying this on St David's Day this year: that education is what holds the world of humanity together, and it is not only carried out in schools — but schools have chosen that task, and must be held accountable.

I used to feel a mystical sensation about this day. But what I feel, mostly, is a kind of sadness for an era that has been passing for a while. From 1886 to 1986, a century of work and toilsome labour in the vineyards. After 1986, the slow despoiling of a realm.

Then again, the soil remains fertile and I see many new shoots.

In Earnest

Today I spent the afternoon carefully opening many books, the collection of my late principal, a man of great integrity, hugely varied interests, and a magpie mind which seized on facts and built palaces out of them. We were looking through the books in order to sort them out and think of a new home for them. There were more than a thousand of them.

In the curious, vacant disorder that accompanies the departure of a man who lived alone, I found an unopened drawer. It contained little brown notebooks.

They were his travel diaries; more than that, they were shared diaries co-written by his late wife, a wonderful lady who had passed on in untimely fashion decades ago. They chronicled the mundane events and the wonderful events of each day in small, meticulous writing. They had pizza one day. They spent £5 on a souvenir for an uncle. They had lists, and tables, and terse descriptions of days which they had clearly enjoyed together.

The books had not been touched for a very long while. I shut their drawer carefully, stabbed by a moment of melancholy sharpened to a sudden point.

Horses

I sometimes feel an odd blend of schadenfreude and pity when I look at the sad Maseratis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis and whatnots which roam disconsolate around my estate. They come in many colours, and they are all thoroughbreds. But they whicker and grumble at the speed bumps, they mourn in their stalls, they are forced to trot through narrow paths where they should be galloping along.

Poor blighters. All those horses, and no action.

Masculine and Feminine

I remember Lewis's description of the eldila; they were not merely male nor female, but masculine and feminine. It is now fashionable to denigrate and deride Lewis's Space Trilogy as naïve and simplistic, moralising and overly Christian. But some of his insights remain; one has only to read Ransom's translation of Weston's speech to the Malacandrans to realise how profoundly our world has affected our values.

We are not just man and woman, but masculine and feminine. All that we are is all that is human, and yet what we think of as human is less that what we were, are, and can be. This is what I think when I look at my fellow humans with my grandfathers' eyes, with my grandmothers' eyes. I see now with deeper and deeper sight as my eyes see less and less. I was taught to look for the good and the real in everyone else, as well as in myself.

And there it is: men can be more than merely men; women more than merely women. We can be many things, and some of those things do not necessarily fit the world's own simple conceptions of man and woman. What were our Adam-father and Eve-mother like in Eden, before they fell into knowledge of good and evil? For a while, they ruled all creation, and named all living things.

Closure (Redux)

In my mind's eye, I still look upon the great climax of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. In the last section of that book, entitled The Return of the King, we see the defeat of Sauron, as mad Gollum falls into Orodruin and brings the Great Ring with him into the fires of creation.

The eagles are coming. The hosts of Sauron are scattered. The Servants of the Ring, once feared through all the lands of Middle-Earth — they are turned to shadows and dust.

And yet, as Brian Duffy says in Tim Powers's The Drawing of the Dark, "Much has been lost, and there is much yet to lose."

Certain things have gone on too long. Saruman's foul experiments and his corruption of the halflings have sequelae that must be dealt with. Though he was cast out of the Order and his staff broken, his poisonous tongue still holds power. The snake pit needs to be cleansed, the captives must be freed from the dungeons that they allowed to be built.

Having read the novel, we remember that the true heartbreak comes at the end, when the hobbits return to their homeland and find that it is scarred, damaged, corrupted beyond belief. They must fight to bring sanity and wholesomeness to what was lost and broken. And some wounds, as has been said before, will never heal until the ending of the world.

Workday

My working day used to begin around 6 am and end around 1 am, with breaks in between. Now it begins around 8 am and ends around 7 pm, with breaks in between. Less work is getting done. I am a more relaxed person (then again, some who know me might want to know how that's even possible).

But I don't think, on reflection, that I'm that much happier. I just have fewer reasons to be melancholic about my working life.

Legacies in the Rain

It's one of those melancholic nights. You sit in the shushing rush of the rain around your cold walls and you sit in the warm light that does not warm you, and you ask if anything is left of you when all of you is gone.

And then, you read the little comments and traces from people like the Teaman and the Wyvern Girl, and the older ones from people like Wolfberry and the Dancer, and those that came in between and before.

Perhaps, at that moment, you feel a little happiness. It is not little in a quantitative sense, but it is small and compact and fits under your breastbone and will never leave you. It is more powerful than a pacemaker, it is more powerful than a Peacemaker. It is the little grain of faith that God gives you to tell you that at some point, you made a difference, and it doesn't matter if you are forgotten or not.

Because the memory that streams away in the cold and midnight rain is a nothingness, beside the fact that it is draining into the rivers of the world and all the after life of it. O God, I am so grateful!

Guitars and Education

Yes, I know it dates me. But one of my favourite songs, which in its time used to be called a rock ballad, is George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps. It's a song that I've had running in my head sometimes during the time I was teaching in various classrooms. Here are the words:

I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps
I don't know why nobody told you how to unfold your love
I don't know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you.

I look at the world and I notice it's turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps
I don't know how you were diverted
You were perverted too
I don't know how you were inverted
No one alerted you.

I look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
Look at you all...
Still my guitar gently weeps.

The song has to be heard to be believed. You can get it here. Just try to remember that I was there when the White Album was launched.

Dover Road

Tonight I feel an aching melancholy. It is almost as if the elves are going back into the uttermost west and I shall not see them again. I sat in a wood-panelled room on the High Hill, with my kinsfolk. The red wine was deep with spiced oak, and so was the light. We ate, we talked, and I was homesick for the isles and the cold and the damp.

And behind it all, I realised that here too was part of the Family. In the things they said and the secret knowledge that they shared, the Family traits and the family traits shone clear. I felt at home, and yet I knew that I was not, and unlikely ever to go home. Part of me wanted to follow them across the seas, but they wanted me to stay and keep the flame burning.

And that great old masterful poem came to mind, that anchor and touchstone of the long, melancholy, faithless 19th century. You can see for yourself what significance has been attributed to it.

That poem has always filled me with wanderlust and discontent. I remember one evening, having just thrown the garbage out for the night, it came to mind. Before I could stop, I had walked to the boundary of the north and was looking at the narrow causeway to another land.

Why should I stay? I stayed in this country to the loss of my citizenship in the Far Place. I worked, I strove, I used my mind and wasted my body for the cause. I fought under the banner of the Wyvern, I wore the blue and red and gold, I was both hero and champion, and eventually, ronin. I watched as things lost their meaning and their shape.

And so, I leave you with Matthew Arnold, as he watches one form of thought take the meaning out of another.

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Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Cornwall

There are a few poems which touch me personally, and occasionally I come across one which strikes like a knife through unguarded armour – unexpectedly and poignantly. Three Lunulae, Truro Museum.

I saw one the other day, about thin gold and the faded trappings of a distant age, about a diminishing people holding on grimly to the smallest remnants of old power, the Lady in three aspects. I saw in a postcard the captured image of something that very soon would be nothing more than image; I saw in the threat of a spider something perhaps lethal but mostly to be ignored. And over it all, the patina, the dust of ages, suffocating the ghosts that remained in a dark museum in Truro.

Three moons, one Lady. Brittany, Cornwall, Wales; lost lands which were once Britain and the root of the Matter of Britain. When a nation has this kind of history, it is possible to fill it with tangled things and texts and aching eyes – and dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise, as Chesterton says.

You can only see the matter properly if the web is approached by its many strands – archaeology as science, myth, legend, history, sociology; poetry as elegy, memorial, photograph, tapestry; jewellery as totem, token, emblem of what is gone and what might yet be again one day.

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Three Lunulae, Truro Museum
by Penelope Shuttle

Gold so thin,
only an old woman
would notice its weight

Crescent moons of gold
from the sunken district
of the dark,
out of the archaeologist's earth

The women of the lunulae
threw no barbaric shadows
yet a vivid dance
lit up their bones

I sense the mood
of many women
who wore the new moon
like a necklace

They have got over
the winter
while I still freeze

The slight quick tap
of a clock
goes on
like the rhythm
of an insect's leg
in the grass

I linger
in the locked room
of the gold,

trying to see,
beyond the sickle shapes,
the faces of three women

Sharp shadows breathe hard,
shedding skins like dusty snakes
Light twists in a violent retching

For an instant
there is the fragment of a lip,
an eyebrow fine as a spider's threat

A face like a frost fern

The custodian
locks the lunulae
in the safe once more

Cornish, they are,
he says,
dug up at St Juliot,
regalia of this soil,
and not for the British Museum

You buy me
a postcard of the lunulae
and we leave the museum,
enter the thin gold remains
of autumn

How Should I Presume?

I know this poem very well, have known it very well for a long time. Every bit of it is part of the foundation of my heart, even at the hour of doom or any other hour; even at the hour for tea, for coffee, or for nothing at all.

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

I cannot presume, and I never have. I am always alone in this, as is each who does this task, though mostly not lonely. Adults become old and stale, or tough, or any one of a thousand states of agedness. And yet we too were young, like Phlebas or like you. We no longer live in the same realms; what is life and death and joy or terrible pain to you is not the same for me. But we are human too, and sometimes we have met at the tangential touching of our worlds, mostly to the good, though sometimes to the bad.

And in the dying days of the year, I remember the fallen and the risen, the quick and the dead, the brave and the timorous. I write testimonials; I keep a copy of every one of them just for the distant and unlikely eventuality that someday somebody might want another copy. Though nobody sees it, the seasoned mercenaries of the shadow world are not mercenary enough to take money for lives. We are daft that way.

We do not have to write songs that nobody hears or watch for dangers that nobody sees. It is enough that the songs are sung and the dangers are baulked. It is enough that we make ourselves small and disposable so that we can be forgotten without loss. It is always enough because it has to be; if there were rewards, it might tempt us too much. And yet, we do gain, we do receive, we are rewarded. And it is very sweet although we must learn never to think in anticipation of it.

The year dies. With it, some hopes fade, some faces elope. It will never be the same again, but then it never has been. We learn to live on through the loss. And one more state of age passes. We must forgive each other for what was well-intended but not well-accomplished, for what was well-accomplished but not well-executed, for what was well-executed but not well-intended. We are all faithless to some extent. But God remains true, and to Him we must turn. Alone.