The book of lost tales

I'm utterly enchanted by the story that a book of lost fairy tales has been found. A contemporary of Grimm, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth collected five hundred tales by asking folk about their lore, but neglected to publish them. I find this magical, not because an unknown nineteenth-century book has come to light (exciting as that is), but because it might contain unguessed tales many centuries older. Stories from the long, long ago that have lain untold. Stories that walked among our ancestors, once upon a time.

Spelling trouble

In year 2, spelling tests were not uncommon. One day, introducing one of these tests, and doubtless to take the sting from it, my teacher said it was ok if we spelt the words wrong. Accordingly, I deliberately misspelled every word on the test with, as I remember, some glee. Later in the day, we were in the library having a story read to us when I was summoned back to our classroom for an interview with the teacher. Disappointed and terrified, I made my way back alone through the deserted school grounds. My teacher asked with concern why I had spelled wrongly words he knew I could spell correctly. Through my sobs I answered ‘You said we could!’  

At the time I was mostly grief-stricken that I had misunderstood, and that I had missed the end of the story. Looking back, I’m intrigued by this episode and what it was that motivated me to misspell. (And I wonder what my teacher made of it.) During the test I think I enjoyed the creative act of coming up with novel ways to spell known words; experimenting with - had I known it - morphology. Perhaps some part of me enjoyed the act of impersonating a child who knew less than I did, inhabiting for a time the world and intelligence of an other.  More than this, I think I enjoyed the freedom of what I (mistakenly) thought was a momentary reprieve from the whole scholastic morality, from the knife-edge between accuracy and failure that so dominated our days and separated us into impenetrable categories of ‘good’ students and bad ones. For once, it seemed, we were offered the freedom of artists and the communion of brothers. Who could resist such grace? Not I, though I paid for my error with bitter tears. And I never found out how the story ended. 

In libris

I’m sitting in the National Library, sucking down latte and wi-fi in about equal quantities. This is because we have moved house and so far have no internet at home. Hence the blog silence. I’ll be back soon with more posts and a fresh look for the blog; apologies in the interim.

I’ve posted about moving before, since I seem to do it about annually. Being married to a minimalist has curbed my tendency to keep everything in case it matters later. His view is: if in doubt, throw it out. So this move was a bit leaner than previous ones. And it was, I admit, pretty cathartic to throw away letters, papers, notes that I’ve been carting for a couple of decades that really won’t ever matter again.

I also threw away some books (gasp!) but I find books are a bit like the magic pudding. No matter how many you give away, you always seem to have just as many – way too many to make moving easy. But it’s good to keep one’s book collection dynamic. As you add to it, you can cut away some of the dead wood. You can think seriously about whether this or that book matters now in the way it did then, and if it ever did at all. You can audit your reading habits and history. You can cleanse your reading palate, and thus your intellect, and your imagination. It’s a way to ensure your books live and breathe in your life, that your library is not a museum.

Stars and shells

Since next week is Christmas, this feels like the last Friday of the year. I wanted to find a poem that somehow drew together the pulse and tumult, the calamity and the promise of what has been, in many ways, a year of wonders.

The old empires, Britain and Europe, falter and tremble, while India and China, crouching tiger and hidden dragon, rise to new preeminence.

Rising waters threatened to light a nuclear fuse in Japan, even as the will to tackle warming seems to ebb.

Ten years after the attacks on Washington and Wall St in which 3000 people died, America packs up in Iraq. Of the numbered dead, 5000 are Americans, and 100,000 are Iraqis. Mission accomplished.

Meanwhile a vegetable vendor in Tunisia, roughed up by corrupt police, sets himself on fire and the Arab world catches alight.

“Rain Song,” by the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, doesn't touch everything that happened this year (how could it?) but it has a sense of the spring that's possible after ruin. Here's the end of it:

Do you know how lost a solitary person feels in the rain?
Endless, like spilt blood, like hungry people, like love,
Like children, like the dead, endless the rain.
Your two eyes take me wandering with the rain,
Lightning from across the Gulf sweeps the shores of Iraq
With stars and shells,
As if a dawn were about to break from them,
But night pulls over them a coverlet of blood.
I cry out to the Gulf: “O Gulf,
Giver of pearls, shells and death!”
And the echo replies,
As if lamenting:
“O Gulf,
Giver of shells and death.
[...]
And across the sands from among its lavish gifts
The Gulf scatters fuming froth and shells
And the skeletons of miserable drowned emigrants
Who drank death forever
From the depths of the Gulf, from the ground of its silence,
And in Iraq a thousand serpents drink the nectar
From a flower the Euphrates has nourished with dew.
I hear the echo
Ringing in the Gulf:
“Rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip, drop.”
In every drop of rain
A red or yellow colour buds from the seeds of flowers.
Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people
And every spilt drop of slaves' blood
Is a smile aimed at a new dawn,
A nipple turning rosy in an infant's lips
In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.
And still the rain pours down.

Is everything sacred?

Wendell Berry has a line that there are no places that are not sacred; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. I like this thought. It accords with a view that sees the earth as irrevocably blessed, and a view of landscape as enchanted.

I've been listening to Geraldine Brooks' lyrical lecture on “Home,” the first in her Boyer series (here). She muses that our word “home” comes from a root meaning “haunt,” and I like that too. The places we call home are haunted, not only by us, but by memory, history, association, and affection. Earth as home is haunted, enchanted, blessed. Sacred in a way we can't efface, though we can desecrate it.

The disenchantment of the world, said Weber, characterised the fate of our times. Our fate seems now to be indelibly linked to a warming climate and a planet in decline. The darkest vision of the climate catastrophisers has humans as ghosts. I wonder if the reversal of climate damage will come in part through re-enchantment, through a reconsideration of the sacredness of our home.