THE JOURNEY OF THE MAGI

With Christmas in mind, T.S. Eliot's contemplative Journey of the Magi.

The Journey Of The Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kiking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

NORFOLK

How did the Devil come? When first attack?
    These Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence,
The years fall off and find me walking back
    Dragging a stick along the wooden fence
Down this same path, where, forty years ago,
My father strolled behind me, calm and slow.

I used to fill my hands with sorrel seeds
    And shower him with them from the tops of stiles,
I used to butt my head into his tweeds
    To make him hurry down those languorous miles
Of ash and alder-shaded lanes, till here
Our moorings and the masthead would appear.

There after supper lit by lantern light
    Warm in the cabin I could lie secure
And hear against the polished sides at night
    The lap lap lapping of the weedy Bure,
A whispering and watery Norfolk sound
Telling of all the moonlit reeds around.

How did the Devil come? When first attack?
    The church is just the same, though now I know
Fowler of Louth restored it. Time, bring back
    The rapturous ignorance of long ago,
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.

John Betjamen

AT BUXTON LIBRARY

In the library until they throw me out at 7,  finishing some research and keeping warm.  

CHILDREN'S SONG

A lovely poem from the great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, recalling the mysterious world of childhood and how adults are excluded from it.   I particularly like the fact that the poem is  from a child's perspective.

Children’s Song

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R S Thomas

Hannah Arendt

A truly remarkable woman I would have liked to have met.   Her philosophy is profound and positive,  offering hope in the uniqueness of people and of their capacity to change.   We are not commodities or merely homogenised  units of consumption but truly remarkable and different from the animals by our capacity to forgive and to make and keep promises.

A woman who experienced great personal loss and turmoil including her need to flee Nazi Germany and to witness her former lover and former lecturer Heidegger condone through inactivity,  National Socialism and it's anti-semitic policies.   Forced to flee Germany she eventually settled in the USA becoming the first female professor of politics at Princeton University.

Arendt coined the phrase the 'banality of evil'  and her seminal book Eichmann in Jerusalem follows this theme.  


"Your birth was a truly new beginning, an opportunity for something to come into being that was not there before."

Keys to the door by Mohsin Hamid

I loved your age of wonder: your third and fourth 
and fifth years spent astonished, widening your eyes 
at each new trick of the world – and me standing there, 
solemnly explaining how it was done. The moon and stars,
rainbows, photographs, gravity, the birds in the air, 
the difference between blood and water.
In true life? you would say, looking up 
and I would nod, like some broken-hearted sage, 
knowing there would be no answers soon
to all the big questions that were left, to cruelty and fear,
to age and grief and death, and no words either. 
And you, like me, will sit and shake your head.
In true life? Yes, my sweet, strong daughter, I’m afraid 
there is all this as well, and this is it: true life.

(2012)

A BREAK FROM WRITING

I always carry a note-book to catch any thoughts that might decide to visit, usually at the unlikeliest of moments and places, as yesterday proved, whilst on a bus.  The bus was full, so I sat on the back seats, the ones that face in the opposite direction from the one the bus is travelling.  I started to think how strange it is to see where we have been rather than where we are going, so out came the book to jot down some thoughts and impressions. 

Of course many of the people sat on the rear seats facing me thought it strange, especially as I was writing into a book rather than reading one, and more strange that I was not playing with my mobile, or listening to music, or both.  Another issue is of course, that people think you may be writing down your impressions of them, a justifiable suspicion, as I generally am.  A degree of tact and discretion is therefore called upon, with one hand discreetly placed above the pages, in order to deflect prying eyes.  Coffee shops are also good places to think and to people watch, jotting down mannerisms and verbal ticks. I find a short or a long walk is also really good to get the ideas flowing,  

The picture below was taken outside a coffee shop, the note-book within reach but out of sight.

Do you have any strategies that you find help you clear the mind or cultivate thoughts?  I would welcome your own insights into your own creative processes.  

UNFINISHED POEM BY PHILIP LARKIN

Philip Larkin in a library. Photograph by Fay Godwin. © The British Library Board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A wonderful poem from a poet who had by 1951 pulled off the yoke of Hardy and come out of Auden's shadow.  I particularly enjoy how it confounds our expectations, especially in the final stanza which never fails to bring a lump to my throat.  What do you think, I'd love to hear your comments.

I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof
And lay on the bed there with my jacket off.
Seeds of light were sown on the failure of evening.
The dew came down. I lay in the quiet, smoking.

That was a way to live—newspaper for sheets,
A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts
From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!
That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!

For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind,
Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;
To keep out of his thought was my whole care,
Yet down among the sunlit courts, yes, he was there,

Taking his rents; yes, I had only to look
To see the shape of his head and the shine of his book,
And the creep of the world under his sparrow-trap sky,
To know how little slips his immortal memory.

So it was stale time then, day in, day out,
Blue fug in the room, nothing to do but wait
The start of his feet on the stair, that sad sound
Climbing to cut me from his restless mind

With a sign that the air should stick in my nose like bread,
The light swell up and turn black—so I shammed dead,
Still as a stuck pig, hoping he’d keep concerned
With boys who were making the fig when his back was turned;

And the sun and the stove and the mice and the gnawed paper
Made up the days and nights when I missed supper,
Paring my nails, looking over the farbelow street
Of tramways and bells. But one night I heard the feet.

Step after step they mounted with confidence.
Time shrank. They paused at the top. There was no defence.
I sprawled to my knees. Now they came straight at my door.
This, then, the famous eclipse? The crack in the floor

Widening for one long plunge? In a sharp trice,
The world, lifted and wrung, dipped with remorse.
The fact of breathing tightened into a shroud.
Light cringed. The door swung inwards. Over the threshold

Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,
Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised.
Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?
Why is he not here? What summer have you broken from?

Philip Larkin

SHAKE HANDS

Shake Hands Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over;      I only vex you the more I try. All's wrong that ever I've done or said, And nought to help it in this dull head:      Shake hands, here's luck, good-bye. But if you come to a road where danger      Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share, Be good to the lad that loves you true And the soul that was born to die for you,      And whistle and I'll be there.   A.E. Housman

GREAT LETTER FROM HOUSMAN