We that are hedgerow folk

In the wake of alarm about Britain, here is CS Lewis with two alarming (and alarmed) poems. Lewis' poetry is little regarded now, but he produced some very clever and inventive verse, much of it celebrating what seems lost or leaving and lamenting what's arriving or arrived.

Lines During a General Election

Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear
All that; it is their promises that bring despair.
If beauty, that anomaly, is left us still,
The cause lies in their poverty, not in their will.
If they had power ('amenities are bunk'), conceive
How their insatiate gadgetry by this would leave
No green, nor growth, nor quietude, no sap at all
In England from The Land's-End to the Roman Wall.
Think of their roads - broad as the road to Hell - by now
Murdering a million acres that demand the plough,
The thick-voiced Tannoy blaring over Arthur's grave,
And all our coasts one Camp till not the tiniest wave
Stole from the beach unburdened with its festal scum
Of cigarette-ends, orange-peel, and chewing gum.
Nor would one island's rape suffice. Their visions are
Global; they mean the desecration of a Star;
Their happiest fancies dwell upon a time when Earth,
Flickering with sky-signs, gibbering with mechanic mirth,
One huge celestial charabanc, will stink and roll
Through patient heaven, subtopianized from pole to pole.

The Condemned

There is a wildness still in England that will not feed
In cages; it shrinks away from the touch of the trainer's hand,
Easy to kill, not easy to tame. It will never breed
In a zoo for the public pleasure. It will not be planned.

Do not blame us too much if we that are hedgerow folk
Cannot swell the rejoicings at this new world you make -
We, hedge-hogged as Johnson or Borrow, strange to the yoke
As Landor, surly as Cobbett (that badger), birdlike as Blake.

A new scent troubles the air - to you, friendly perhaps -
But we with animal wisdom have understood that smell.
To all our kind its message is Guns, Ferrets, and Traps,
And a Ministry gassing the little holes in which we dwell.

Cut, cut

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read this story.

‘The Business Council of Australia has urged the Government to consider making cuts to the disability pension to pay for flood damage in Queensland and Victoria.'

The BCA represents the top 100 companies in Australia, and they seemed to be advocating taking money from disabled people (and from foreign aid) to pay for flood damage, rather than pay the proposed flood tax themselves.

A closer look at their budget submission suggests that this was a crude representation of their actual proposal. In a 136-page recommendation on general fiscal management, there is one paragraph which suggests an overhaul of the welfare system as part of broader economic reforms. In his radio interview on ABC’s AM, BCA chief Graham Bradley was betrayed into some oversimplifications and misapprehensions of a system which he probably has little need to understand, yet his remarks were still more moderate than the storm they feulled implied.

Nevertheless the thrust of the BCA’s submission is an exhortation to the government to fulfil its promise of a return to budget surplus by 2013, and to do this through decreased spending rather than increased tax.  Like the coalition government in the UK (Margaret Thatcher with a green rinse) and the school-closing Republicans in the US (things really were better before civil rights), many in Australia would rather the government used our taxes to pay our debt (which is comparatively low) than to pay for things we need.

Compassionate spending, where there is little return on the dollar, is the privilege of a generous and humane society – and one of the low-hanging cherries easily plucked when rigour is de rigueur. But even if disability pensions and foreign aid fall into this category (they might not), surely schools, libraries, clinics, post offices and trains don’t? Aren’t these basic to our civilisation? As Ross Gittins argued last year, “Everything comes at an (opportunity) cost. So successful has Costello been at demonising all government debt - state and federal - that we've failed to invest in enough economic and social infrastructure. Our debt level is minor, but we're living in the worst house in the street.”

I wonder how long the experiment will last (here, there, and anywhere) before it fulfils Margaret Thatcher’s dark vision of society: that there is no such thing.

Addendum

Having posted the last, I've just come across these thoughts from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor imprisoned for opposing Hitler.

He wrote from prison to a friend that the Christian should live “unreservedly in life's duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world - watching with Christ in Gethsemane.” And later, to the same friend: “It is only when one loves life and the world so much that without them everything would be gone, that one can believe in the resurrection and a new world.”

After his execution, in April 1945, a fellow prisoner wrote of him that he “always seemed to diffuse an atmosphere of happiness, of joy in every smallest event in life, and a deep gratitude for the mere fact that he was alive.”

Intimations of mortality

I confess to returning Brenda Walker’s Reading by Moonlight to the library unfinished. It’s an intimate, meandering meditation on how books helped her survive breast cancer and its treatment, at points very lyrical. Adrift in dark waters, her lights are works of imaginative literature and what others have written about death, love, family, and loss. I read the first few chapters and found myself a tearful mess. I resolved not to finish it, but still there followed one of the most piteous and unshakeable moods of gloom I’ve had this many a day; a realisation that though nothing’s wrong yet, by getting married I’ve knowingly signed up for eventual wrenching loss; combined with a generalised regret at the lot of humans who must all bid a bittersweet goodbye - for me never far from the surface.  Dawkins or Hitchens or somebody like that wonders why Christians don’t look eagerly for death. At one level he’s right, and we do, but at another, we could hardly be human if we didn’t feel the pathos of this ultimate severance. John Ames, the hero of Gilead, is sure of his salvation, but nonetheless filled with sadness at the ending of his long loved life.  In Gethsemane, Jesus is ‘overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,’ a state which must have comprehended more than the simple fear of pain or loss of friends. I believe in the resurrection – the remedy for mortality – but that belief has never made my heart hard to the thought of going. Like Walker, I find that literature helps. My gloom was dissipated by a good sleep, a kind spouse, and a dose of poetry. This is that skylark Hopkins (a better guide than Hitchens or Dawkins) and his poem “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection.”

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indignation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief's gasping, joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Paradise Lost?

Growing up in a house with lots of books, our trips to the public library were occasional. Post-school, I always had access to university libraries which seemed much more plentiful than the public libraries in the kinds of things I wanted to read. But now, with more limited access to the university, I’ve turned to the public ones and found them lovely. There are queues, but I don’t have to stand in them; I simply watch my progress in them via my personalised online account, and when I get to the top, I stroll over to my library of choice in my lunch hour, pick up my books, flash my card and I’m on my way. 

It seems I’m not the only one to have discovered public libraries. So, apparently, has David Cameron, who plans to close 350 of them in the UK (“Do you mean we're actually paying for people to read?” he might have spluttered) as part of a broader program of slashing the legs off society in order to make it bigger. To the economic rationalist libraries are sitting ducks. Their only source of revenue is the twenty cent fines they are so reluctant to impose (one Canberra library offers patrons the choice of a fine or a donation to the Salvos) and their services, attractive spaces and expansive collections are provided free to their users, with no apparent dividend except unmeasurable (if not immeasurable) enjoyment. If, as Borges imagined, paradise will be a kind of library, libraries are, in their way, a kind of paradise.

The thing about economic rationalists is that they rarely take the long view, or the deep view; that old line about the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Philip Pullman has recently risen to impassioned defense of the public libraries, citing not only what they do but what they represent as compelling reasons to keep them open. He’s right: as well as preserving the knowledge and wisdom of the ages, libraries provide democratic access to them, fostering community and civility and many other things that a ‘big society’ might be thought to comprehend. And if one were still looking for a dividend, what about the potential of a society with free and unfettered access to learning? A view both long and deep, but not without some precedent. Before shooting these sitting ducks, Cameron should have checked for golden eggs.