The good fellowship of dust

Reading George Herbert and teaching Shakespeare I became intrigued by one of the period's most insistent images: dust. It stands in for death, decay, futility, vanity - many things of which they found it necessary to remind themselves. It's both the stuff and the doom of human life. Hamlet’s ‘quintessence of dust’ is everywhere in Herbert. The dust of worldliness ‘stings his eyes’ whenever he’s tempted to want the world. His habits and frailties make him ‘guilty of dust and sinne’ when Love invites him in. Christ’s death makes his heart dust, before it can be transmuted into gold by the resurrection. One of my favourite poems is the slightly strange “Church Monuments”, where he bids his wayward body take acquaintance of a heap of dust, so it can grow accustomed to its fate. I wonder if Herbert's parishioners very often came into the church to find their pastor lying on the floor, or in earnest contemplation of a monument.

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,
Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes
May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;
To which the blast of death's incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,
Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust
 
My body to this school, that it may learn
To spell his elements, and find his birth
Written in dusty heraldry and lines;
Which dissolution sure doth best discern,
Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.
These laugh at jet and marble put for signs,
 
To sever the good fellowship of dust,
And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,
When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat
To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?
Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem
And true descent; that when thou shalt grow fat,
 
And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know
That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust
That measures all our time; which also shall
Be crumbled into dust. Mark here below
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

The humane imagination

One of the great pleasures of the reading life is buying the latest book of a loved living author. This is a rare pleasure for me, as there are only about four living authors I like. But it’s a keen one. Knowing a new book is coming, finding out the day of its release, calculating how soon it could be found in one’s local bookshop; then seeing it, laying hands on it, feeling the weight and texture of it, purchasing it, taking it home and cracking it open, placing it on the shelf next to its brethren, watching the loved collection grow, ever so slowly, book by book. 

I had that pleasure last week, when I bought Marilynne Robinson’s new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books. Fans of Robinson’s fiction usually have a longer wait than most; there were twenty-four years between her first novel and her second. Her non-fiction, though, is getting faster. It’s only two years since her last offering: Absence of Mind: the Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self. The new collection, as its title suggests, is somewhat more personal and colloquial than its predecessors, but it lacks none of her characteristic cogency and authority. It’s based on lectures she’s given over a lifetime, but it feels very current, a wise and lucid rebuke to the various social and political and philosophical afflictions of present-day America. 

I haven’t got to the title essay yet, but I’m utterly persuaded by an early essay called “Austerity as Ideology.” This is a brilliant though mild fulmination against “the march of Austerity”: the economic dogma that has grown up in the wake of the financial crisis, and in spite of all its most obvious lessons. Blame for the disaster has somehow been shifted from the shoulders of highly paid capitalists onto governments and the wider population; venerable public institutions and services are being sacrificed to a hyper-capitalist ideology that bears little relation to the facts of recent history or the culpabilities of recent events. 

Robinson points, I suspect in all the essays more or less, to a present “dearth of humane imagination for the integrity and mystery of other lives.” The capacity to imagine and embrace the other, even when radically different from oneself, is the engine of democracy. Democracy today is threatened by the preeminence of the new economics, and by a perverse politics that claims to value America’s history and founding doctrines, but takes no account of the deeply-rooted collectivism that has in fact made America great. It is instead divisive and ignorant, unable to imagine its others, intent on tearing up the roots of America’s rich common life. 

Democracy, community, humanity. All these are under attack in America and ailing elsewhere. Robinson is their ardent and eloquent defender. Though much of civil and common life is precarious, a book like this reminds us how much potency humane and imaginative discourse still commands. 

Leaves look pale

It’s hard to close a book like Bring Up the Bodies and leave the lustre and terror of that Tudor world behind. It’s hard, too, not to want to read ahead. I know what happens afterwards – Henry marries three more wives; his three surviving children each take a turn on the throne; it’s Boleyn’s daughter that gives her name to the next age. But I want Hilary Mantel to tell it to me again. I want the rich, breathless pulse of her voice, the turn of the seasons in her hands. Alas there’s only one more book to come: her story ends when Cromwell’s does, so Henry and his heirs are left to their own devices.

I almost wish some copycat would take up the story, giving us Elizabeth’s court in the same fashion. The one thing I felt wanting in Mantel’s world was what happened sixty years later: the great flourishing of English letters at the turn of the sixteenth into the seventeenth century. What’s missing in Cromwell’s ambit is the intoxication of lyric, longing, complex verse. Wyatt and Surrey are well enough in their way, but they are to Sidney and Shakespeare what betamax is to the ipad. The Elizabethans, given in Mantel’s manner, would be a treat. 

Yet nothing in my experience leads me to expect success from attempts to fictionalise poetry. To wit: Shakespeare in Love. Or worse: Anonymous. I’d better content myself with poetry unfiltered by fiction. So here’s a wintry sonnet from Shakespeare, number 97, which fits the season outside my window, and might as well stand for the desolation of leaving a lover as for finishing a good book.

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness every where!
And yet this time removed was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seemed to me
But hope of orphans and unfathered fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.

Tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings

I once took a class in watercolour painting. About the only thing I remember is that we learned the colour of shadows. The shadow of a green apple, for example, is not grey but blue; the shadow of an orange is violet, and so on. This strikes me as an apt image for the genius of Hilary Mantel: she can paint not only the things themselves but the colour of their shadows.

Her rendering of Tudor England, (anything but a still life), is deep and dense; not because she’s at pains to render every detail, but because she isn’t. Such is the vivacity of her recreation that when she writes “window” you picture lead-latticed casements without being told to. Glances through such windows are enough to suggest a totally different relationship to gardens, weather, herbs and crops. The materials of the Tudor world are very present: cold stone, embroidered silk, scented wood, air that’s damp, or clean, or plague-ridden. But the immaterial is equally present. Minds, spirits, consciences all straddling the break with Rome, the new gospel, the frailty of a divinely appointed king; it’s frightening how easily one acquiesces in the casual misogyny and debauchery of the court. Mantel’s characters, though necessarily fictive, bestride their world authentically. It’s the opposite of that strange quality that makes CGI animation never feel quite right, no matter how lifelike - figures look solid but seem weightless. Her figures, particularly her Cromwell, move in three dimensions, every movement fully weighted, every shadow faithfully coloured.

This, I think, is what sets her apart from the generality of historical fiction writers. Authenticity, far more than accuracy, is the real pull of successful historical fiction. It's fiction loosed in history, but not unmoored from truth. Fiction that kicks away the struts of accuracy without falling into error. This is what Shakespeare knew, when he shoved an actor onto the stage at the beginning of Henry V to deliver this prologue. It sounds like an apology for lack, but it's really a defense of the kind of imagination Mantel brings to her little kingdom.

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide one man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i'the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

He's made the things that bring him near

Some while back I mentioned poet Christian Wiman. I like his work, and his story even more. In the space of a few years in his early thirties, he found God, fell in love and married, and was diagnosed with incurable blood cancer. He writes, as you’d imagine, with attention and poignancy, and, as you might not expect from a contemporary poet, with a good deal of investment in things like rhythm and structure. As a way into this poem, here’s a line or two from a biographical essay he wrote called “Love bade me welcome” (a quote from George Herbert): “I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought.” This poem, with its echo of Hopkins and its Herbertesque conceit, is called “Every riven thing”, a title which on its own tells multitudes about a view of the world.  

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made 
sing his being simply by being 
the thing it is: 
stone and tree and sky, 
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.