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.

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.

Unresting, unhasting and silent as light

“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation…while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

The Book of Job opens Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and its questions and choruses inhabit the whole film. In particular, “Where were you?” echoes. It is the question asked of God, and it is also God’s answer. Other questions, whispered, intimate, draw lines through the film’s chaotic beauty. Where are you? What are we to you? Why should I be good? How can I get back to where they are? These questions resonate through the life of an ordinary family, reckoned in aeons, honeycombed with oppositions: grace and nature, mother and father, innocence and knowledge, music and silence. One brother’s death brings memories throbbing to the surface and makes the questions urgent. The response, flung across the heavens, is a shout of joy.

For me the film has a correlative in a well-known nineteenth-century hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith. Without the chaos and silence of the film, the hymn enacts the same truths: to grow is to die, yet life’s mystery is bright, not dark.

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes,
Most blessèd, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,
Almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.

Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light,
Nor wanting, nor wasting, thou rulest in might;
Thy justice like mountains high soaring above
Thy clouds which are fountains of goodness and love.

To all life thou givest—to both great and small;
In all life thou livest, the true life of all;
We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree,
And wither and perish—but naught changeth thee.

Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Thine angels adore thee, all veiling their sight;
All laud we would render: O help us to see
’Tis only the splendour of light hideth thee.

Cracked

Since posting about creativity versus health, I've been feeling some misgiving, deepened by reading Virginia Woolf. Because it's not exactly a choice, is it? Whether to be mad or not. And mental health and good behaviour are not always what they're cracked up to be.  They are guarantors of happiness only insofar as happiness is constituted in conformity, in treading the via media. I think as I get older I'm growing less tolerant of social transgression, more plaintive about disturbance of the peace. This happens, no doubt, when we get comfortable, when we become elder to the new generation. But when we become elder still, we face the final unravelling of everything we've woven so tightly, so decorously round ourselves.

Dementia, the long goodbye, is a horrible darkness, but in some cases that darkness is ever so slightly illuminated by creation. Dementia patients can find in themselves a sudden sensitivity to art, a sudden ability to paint or compose that they never had before. Ravel's Bolero is the notable example: a piece made by a demented mind that has a driving rhythm and a strange, lurching magnificence. We would be poorer without it. Oliver Sacks has been criticised for exploiting his patients' stories of neural anomaly, but I think he's added immeasurably to our stock of human experience. Experiences on the perilous edge of human consciousness, which we might never know except by reading about them, challenge our notions of what it means to be human, what it means to be healthy or happy or good, how much our notions of normal are constituted in perception. And Woolf, gifted and afflicted, lyrically afloat in the full-fed stream of her consciousness, wrote at a depth few of us reach. We would be poorer without her.

She's one of many artists - the ones Sonya Chung was harking back to - that embody Shakespeare's compounding of the lunatic, the lover and the poet. And of course, as the poets would testify, we would be poorer without a spectrum of experience that involves the unconforming, the unbodied, the inexplicable. Keats saw it in Shakespeare, but the coinage, ‘negative capability,' is his. “When man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." When experience of all kinds is welcome evidence of existence, and the fuel of creative fire. While I might personally fear an exile from the middle way, collectively we need the experience of these border rangers. We need the negatively capable to testify to the enduring mystery of existence. To find the hard shell of normal and crack it open.