Now we are 90

“Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred.”

Pooh thought for a little.

“How old shall I be then?”

“Ninety-nine.”

Pooh nodded.

“I promise,” he said.

I've known Pooh as long as I can remember. I don't know which way round it was, but I felt Pooh as kindred. I felt his humility and patience, his friendliness, his awe of the busy, bustling characters. His penchant for poetry, his passion for honey and condensed milk, his deep, unshakeable loyalty to his friends. His gratitude for simple things like birdsong and sunshine. His musy, mazy life. To me he was not a stuffed bear but a person, a person I recognised. No other childhood characters have endured in me the way he has.

So happy 90th birthday, Pooh. I haven't forgotten.

Split the lark

When she died at 55 in May of 1886, Emily Dickinson’s white dress (the only colour she would wear) was tiny. About the size of a twelve-year-old child’s. Also tiny were the cloth packets, sewn up with twine, that were found hidden in her bedroom afterwards. Tightly bound with red and white thread, they contained more than 800 poems on leaves stitched together, or in loose fragments. While she lived, seven of her poems appeared in print, most likely without her consent. She’s now known to have written more than 1700. Unlike her diminutive frame and reclusive life, her poetry is vast in scope as in scale. It is wild, prolific, kinetic, staccato, aposeopetic. It is full of awe and magnitude, though often condensed to a few broken lines.

Split the Lark – and you'll find the Music –
Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled –
Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning
Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old. 

Loose the Flood – you shall find it patent –
Gush after Gush, reserved for you –
Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!
Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

This poem, quick and sharp, is a picture of largeness hidden in little. It’s also a lance, piercing scepticism that kills things to see inside them. For Emily, as for Christ the Bird, death loosed the flood, split the lark, and found the music.

Many will prophesy in my name

It's easy to be disheartened by the religious right, especially since they seem to get so much air time, and especially now that Michele Bachmann is a surprising frontrunner in the 2012 GOP field, bringing the extreme and the mainstream ever closer. Unlike Bush, whom Alan Wolfe calls ‘capable of finding God on his side no matter which side he was on,' the new breed seem less supple, with their sights on full blown theocracy. Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast employs the useful term ‘Christianist' to distinguish these advocates of a Christian jihad from followers of Christ. While Christianists are befouling and befuddling the air waves, I would rather find refreshment in other channels than give their nonsense the credit of rational attention. Instead, I'll be looking for thoughtful and literate commentary from people like Rowan Williams, who gave this lovely explanation of grace in a recent address to a conference on Christianity and literature:

“If the text of a native language is to be in some sense hospitable ... it must be a text with a shadow or margin, conscious of a strangeness that surrounds it and is not captured by it, a strangeness that interprets it or at least offers the possibility of a meaning to be uncovered, on the far side of questioning. And the paradoxical conclusion is that the person who 'inhabits' with integrity the place where they find themselves, in such a way as to make it possible for others to inhabit it in peaceable company with them is always the person who is aware of the possibility of an alien yet recognizable judgement being passed, aware of the stranger already sensed in the self's territory. To be, in the Augustinian phrase, a question to oneself is what makes it possible to be oneself without anxiety and so with the possibility of welcome for the other.”

Or from novelist Tobias Wolff, a Catholic, who described his own sense of grace at work:

“The things that touch me are not sectarian. What are they, then? Gracious, I guess. I respond to something gracious in the writer. That doesn’t mean nice, or kind, or consoling, though it can have that effect. It has to do with a certain courage and verve and even sense of play in facing things as they are ... To the extent that I can feel the presence of grace—the operation of some kind of grace in the world—I often feel it in music ... where the words God or revolution or even soul are not to be heard. And what does music accomplish, after all? Can it be said to offer a plan for improving us, can it be said to give us new political visions, can it be said to make an argument for this or that faith? No. It is a good purely in itself, and that is a sufficient justification for its existence.”

Amen.

Little stalk without wrinkle

Today I'm going to Melbourne to meet my small nephew, now three weeks old. I probably won't find Sylvia Plath's poem “Child” in a Hallmark card, but it has a truth and troubled joy about it that I find moving. It ends uneasily, but it has said something astonishing about childhood.

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate ---
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

Related news

Another busy week in which my Google Reader threw up more than I could blog about, so here’s a quick digest.

1. Publisher Melville House is releasing a hybrid of book and ebook. Point your smart phone at a barcode on the book’s back to get what they're calling “illuminations”: essays, extracts, maps, cartoons, recipes, photographs, paintings that relate to the text. Great, but I worry that more and more at our fingertips means less and less in our heads. An illuminated book might spell a darkened intellect.


2. Speaking of darkness, “It was a dark and stormy night” seems to me a fine way to begin a novel, but the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, named for the author who pioneered this opening gambit, disagrees. Its annual challenge to better (worsen?) this corker has produced some great (awful) first lines.


3. Speaking of opening gambits, according to this article the junk we've left in space includes some zany 1970s attempts at intergalatic diplomacy. My favourite is the Pioneer probes’ golden plaques, which advertise our whereabouts in space, and have a picture of a naked couple raising their hands in a gesture (we assume) of friendship. You have to admire their wild optimism.


4. Speaking of optimism, I’ve noticed that when you type “synonyms for...” into Google, it suggests “nice,” “good,” “happy,” “amazing,” “beautiful” as the words you’re most likely to be looking for. What does this say about our state of mind? Or our vocabularies?


5. Speaking of vocabularies, I'm thinking of taking a leaf from Darryl Campbell, who rejects book review cliches in favour of more imaginative superlatives. Among other things, he advocates using past presidents as adjectival modifiers: a book might have “Taft-like excess,” “Cleveland-esque genre-bending”or “Clintonian eroticism.”


6. Speaking of presidents, as well as a shiny new debt ceiling, and a new credit rating, America has a new poet laureate. A small reassurance that poetry matters, even if money matters more.


7. Speaking of money, in yet another example of the soulless insensitivity of banks, my bank won't let me put exclamation marks in the description field for a funds transfer. I protest against this stifling of creativity, emotion, exuberance, this suppression of a simple expression of human joy, in my transferring of funds.

Thank you and good night.