In search of the same landfall

Most of us have come here from somewhere else, fleeing war, or just looking for a better life. But now we watch women and children, in search of the same landfall, drown within our reach. Like the Anzacs, our gods, they are war-addled and adrift, far from home. Unlike the Anzacs, they come in peace, for peace. But we don't know or own them, and so they perish. We pull their bodies from the water, and sail home.

This is “Beach Burial,” by Kenneth Slessor.  

Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs

The convoys of dead sailors come;

At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,

But morning rolls them in the foam.

Between the sob and clubbing of gunfire

Someone, it seems, has time for this,

To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows

And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,

Bears the last signature of men,

Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,

The words choke as they begin -

'Unknown seaman' - the ghostly pencil

Wavers and fades, the purple drips,

The breath of wet season has washed their inscriptions

As blue as drowned men's lips,

Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,

Whether as enemies they fought,

Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,

Enlisted on the other front.

One thousand monkeys

I couldn't agree more with this. It has always seemed absurd to me that in the world of work, money and value so rarely align. It's easy to get paid large sums to do work of very dubious value, and conversely, pursuing value very often entails quite deliberately walking away from money. Why? The answers are complex and historical, but that doesn't mean the phalanx of valueless jobs is inevitable or necessary. David Graeber, whose piece in Strike! has gone somewhat viral, argues that our finance-skewed economy creates these jobs in order to keep us occupied and obedient while we serve the interests of the 1 per cent. It's at least keeping us occupied, even if it also generates the rage and resentment Graeber says is a psychological scar on our collective soul.

On the other hand, the narrative of creative breakthrough has a lot of traction, perhaps because we know in our hearts the makework non-jobs we're doing don't really stack up against value-laden creative work. The story of successful escape - ditching your non-job for your foodie blog or your screen prints or your best-selling tree-change memoir - is everywhere, encouraging us to think that all we need to do is close our eyes and jump, and the dream will catch us. But is this real? How many people actually make it? Of all the people with talent, how many devote time and energy to seriously pursuing it? And of those, how many will ever make a decent living from it? Vanishingly few. Which makes the non-jobs we're mostly trapped in all the more ineluctable.

In the greenwood quires the thrush

Spring comes quietly but surely. The days are longer and warmer, the blossoms are profuse. We're not quite out of the chill, and no doubt it will get cold again, perhaps even freezing, between now and summer, but the calendar says spring, so spring it is. Winter now has notice to vacate. I've looked at lots of spring poems but the one that caught me was Robert Louis Stevenson's “A Spring Carol.” It has the requisite gush and flutter of spring delight, the panoply of plants and creatures spring calls up, but it also has a lovely, musy meter. The song of the meadow. Heartsease.

When loud by landside streamlets gush,
And clear in the greenwood quires the thrush,
With sun on the meadows
And songs in the shadows
Comes again to me
The gift of the tongues of the lea,
The gift of the tongues of meadows.

Straightway my olden heart returns
And dances with the dancing burns;
It sings with the sparrows;
To the rain and the (grimy) barrows
Sings my heart aloud -
To the silver-bellied cloud,
To the silver rainy arrows.

It bears the song of the skylark down,
And it hears the singing of the town;
And youth on the highways
And lovers in byways
Follows and sees:
And hearkens the song of the leas
And sings the songs of the highways.

So when the earth is alive with gods,
And the lusty ploughman breaks the sod,
And the grass sings in the meadows,
And the flowers smile in the shadows,
Sits my heart at ease,
Hearing the song of the leas,
Singing the songs of the meadows.

Vale Seamus Heaney

Heaney, the son of a cowman from County Derry who grew up to win the Nobel Prize for literature, died yesterday. I first encountered him as the verse translator of Beowulf, who’d recaptured the thumping rhythm and thick, gutteral roll of the original in a way that made other translations seem finicky and quaint. His own poetry pays a similar attention to timbre: to the sound and taste of words in the mouth. “Blackberry Picking,” apt for an August elegy, has a tactile, sensuous joy that’s threaded through with mortality. As good a poem as any to remember him by.

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Though much is taken, much abides

When she was confused and incoherent and aggressive, it was consoling to think that this was not really Elaine. This was a disease having its way with her. She was still there, in there somewhere, but this was not her. This was not real. I still think that was true, and tonic for our distress, but at the same time she demanded and deserved care because she was still herself. Though ravaged and fouled, her personhood was undiminished. 

This is the thinking behind a reconsideration of dementia care in the US, based on the work of British social psychologist Thomas Kitwood, a pioneer of what it seems strange anyone should have had to pioneer: person-centric care. It's a view that critiques our prizing of cognition over other aspects of human being, like sensuality, intimacy, pleasure, which survive the dereliction of the mind. A view that returns us to the mystery of human life, the more mysterious at the moment of its unravelling.

A recent New Yorker piece describes what Kitwood saw as the problem. “In advanced Western societies, where a sense of community is often weak, the evident frailty of people with dementia generates fear; this unease is socially managed by turning the demented into nonpersons, who are warehoused in nursing homes and pathologized with terms like 'resisting care.' The problem, Kitwood concluded, 'is not that of changing people with dementia, or of “managing” their behavior; it is that of moving beyond our own anxieties and defences, so that true meeting can occur, and life-giving relationships can grow.' Only in this way could the personhood of people with dementia be conserved, even as their intellection declined." This is about seeing people for what they keep, not what they lose. Though much is taken, much abides.

None of this does away with the indignities of showering and feeding and changing nappies, but perhaps it transforms them from mechanised processes into acts of grace. Acceptance instead of anxiety. Love instead of fear.