Month: August 2023

Paradise Regained

We might think that we live in a world that has left its marvels behind – every continent is mapped, (almost) every insect, plant and creature has been observed, classified, catalogued. We know now that the Monopods and Anthropophagi that inhabited the Terra Incognita across the sea or beyond the mountains were just travellers tales; the camelopard a giraffe, the unicorn a fancy, and the phoenix only ashes.

an Anthropophagi

But what of the marvels that are closer to home, so familiar that we’ve stopped looking? Katherine Rundell, in her book, The Golden Mole, is on a mission to make us look again – really look – at the creatures that do share this planet with us and find a new sense of wonder less in imagination and more in our newly complete knowledge.

She writes:

“The world is so rare, and so wildly fine: populated with such strangenesses and imperilled astonishments.”

And sets about describing them to us in a book where each chapter describes a different creature – not through a dull recounting of the science though, instead, Rundell invites us to wonder with her at these ordinary marvels of the natural world. Reading her you feel as though you are, together, restoring these creatures to their proper place in creation.

Did you know that,

A French pilot during the first world war, flying by the light of a full moon, on a reconnaissance mission near the Vosges, saw a ghostly cloud of swifts, apparently hovering entirely still in the air:

As we came to about 10,000 feet [he reported] We suddenly found ourselves among a strange flight of birds, which seem to be motionless, or at least showed no noticeable reaction They were widely scattered and only a few yards below the aircraft, showing up against the white sea of cloud underneath. None was visible above us. We were soon in the middle of the flock.”

He wasn’t believed at the time yet Swifts are able to switch off half of their brain to rest and stay vigilant holding their position in the sky even as they sleep.”

Or that there is a Middle English poem called the Name of the Hare (there are 77 given) amongst which are:

The creep-along, the sitter-still,
The pintail, the ring-the-hill,
The sudden start,
The shake-the-heart,
The belly-white,
The lambs-in-flight.
The gobshite, the gum-sucker,
The scare-the-man, the faith-breaker,
The snuff-the-ground, the baldy skull
(his chief name is scoundrel.)

Trans. Seamus Heaney

Rundell writes about the strangeness of the Lemur, the ageless and mysterious Greenland Shark. She writes about Wolves and Wombats, Bats and Spiders, hedgehogs and elephants. The penultimate account is of the creature that gives the book its name, The Golden Mole, which lives, secretly under the sands and yet, unaccountably, has a fur that glows with a unique iridescence, ‘under different lights, and from different angles’ Rundell writes, ‘their fur shifts through turquoise, navy, purple, gold.’

Every account is fronted by one of Talya Baldwin’s marvellous illustrations:

Every creature, every account of its charm or strangeness or wonder is bracketed by the impact – whether by accident or intent – we are having upon its future survival which is why, Rundell says, she wants her book to be a ‘wooing’. It has, she says,

‘been an asking for your attention, and for your wonder. Because so much can still be saved. Fear and fury are galvanic, but they will not suffice alone: our competent and attentive love will have to be what fuels us. For what is the finest treasure? Life. It is everything that lives, and the earth upon which they depend: narwhal, spider, pangolin, swift, faulted and shining human. It calls out for our more furious, more iron-willed treasuring.’

She hopes for our commitment and makes one herself – half the proceeds of every book sold in perpetuity will be given to ‘charities working to push back at climate change and environmental destruction’.

There was never better reason to buy a book, not that anyone reading it needs any inducement. Rundell gave me, at least, a feeling that by reading, I was joining her in her hymn to the joy and wonder of creation and could begin begin myself to imagine the possibility of a new Eden, where humans and creatures might could enter into a new companionship. It would, truly, be paradise regained!

Better than a dog

Charles Darwin before the beard

Charles Darwin – in his orderly and scientific way – set out the pros and cons of marriage. This is what he noted:

Marry

Children — (if it Please God) — Constant companion, (& friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, — object to be beloved & played with. — better than a dog anyhow.– Home, & someone to take care of house — Charms of music & female chit-chat. — These things good for one’s health. — but terrible loss of time. —

My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, & nothing after all. — No, no won’t do. — Imagine living all one’s day solitarily in smoky dirty London House. — Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music perhaps — Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’ St.

Not Marry

Freedom to go where one liked — choice of Society & little of it. — Conversation of clever men at clubs — Not forced to visit relatives, & to bend in every trifle. — to have the expense & anxiety of children — perhaps quarelling — Loss of time. — cannot read in the Evenings — fatness & idleness — Anxiety & responsibility — less money for books &c — if many children forced to gain one’s bread. — (But then it is very bad for ones health[19] to work too much)

Perhaps my wife wont like London; then the sentence is banishment & degradation into indolent, idle fool —

Reader Mr Darwin did marry and saved himself from indolence, idleness and folly. I only hope that Emma thought she had made a good bargain in marrying Charles: that he was better than a dog at any rate.

Emma Darwin nee Wedgewood

Untying the string

I don’t know if I’ve posted this poem before but it came into my mind again today after seeing a photo of Robert Graves, with his wife Nancy and their young family outside – at a guess – their cottage in Islip. The family lived there in the early 1920s while Graves completed his degree at Oxford and began the lifelong task of processing his experiences in the trenches in the First World War.

He describes his and Nancy’s life together in his autobiography, Goodbye to All That:

“By the end of 1925, we had lived for eight successive years in an atmosphere of teething, minor accidents, epidemics, and perpetual washing of babies’ napkins. I did not dislike this sort of life, except for the money difficulties and almost never getting away to London. ‘Love in a cottage, I’m afraid’ had been the prophetic phrase current at our wedding. The strain told on Nancy, who was constantly ill, and I often had to take charge of everything. She tried to draw; but by the time she got her materials together some alarm from the nursery would always disturb her. At last she decided not to start again until all the children were house-trained and old enough for school. I kept on with my work because the responsibility for making money rested with me, and because nothing has ever stopped me writing.

[…]

I worked through constant interruptions. I could recognize the principal varieties of babies’ screams: hunger, indigestion, wetness, pins, boredom, wanting to be played with; and learned to disregard all but the more important ones. Most of my prose books published in those four years betray the conditions under which I wrote: they are scrappy, not properly considered, and obviously written out of reach of a reference library.

Poetry alone did not suffer. When working at a poem in my head, I went on doing my mechanical tasks in a trance until I had time to sit down and record it. At one period I could allow myself only half an hour’s writing a day, and then had to scribble hard in an effort to disburden my mind – I never sat chewing a pen. My poetry-writing has always been a painful process of continual corrections, corrections on top of corrections, and persistent dissatisfaction.”

I suppose that gives a context to this poem, surely written with his own children in mind. I love it for that particular quality of mystery and playfulness that I always associate with Graves. Its called, Warning to Children.

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel —
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives –he then unties the string.

Follow Friday

Friday is always a little bit brighter for the arrival of Helen Lewis’ weekly substack newsletter, The Bluestocking. This week’s is no exception. She’s reminded me of the Terry Pratchett quote,

“Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.”

And introduced to another Substack newsletter, from Brian Klass. It’s called, Garden of Forking Paths, and I was hooked by these opening paragraphs:

Here’s a strange fact about me: I once had to get a rabies vaccine after I was bitten by a lemur in Madagascar the day after I had breakfast with the former president—a yogurt kingpin who got overthrown by a 34 year-old radio DJ in a 2009 coup d’etat.

Fourteen years after that coup, the radio DJ—a secret French citizen ineligible to serve in public office—is again the president and the yogurt kingpin is trying to unseat him in elections later this year. Another coup is not out of the question.

I feel another subscription coming on.

Metaphor, Symbol, Predicament?

I smiled when I stumbled across this old photograph. Was it meant as a joke? Or could it have been a serious attempt to harness that new-fangled internal combustion engine? Either way it struck me as a great example of the way we all respond to the new: horses = personal transport, internal combustion opens up new possibilities … so horse + engine = …something ridiculous.

I thought of the photo when I read a piece by Helen Thompson in the Times about the climate crisis the world is facing. She wrote:

Fossil fuel energy has been the material basis of modern civilisation. The Industrial Revolution was the start of an energy revolution that transformed how human beings could live. Today the four basic physical pillars of our society — ammonia, cement, plastics and steel — are largely produced using fossil fuels. So net zero requires reinventing modern civilisation. It requires transforming the energy basis of our way of life within less than three decades. There is no precedent in human history…

Why net zero requires a reinvention of civilisation
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a552929e-339a-11ee-bd0d-b217d7a83feb?shareToken=98bfe0966f2e4aad9cc56e203afb1a9c

The headline for the piece was ‘Why Net Zero Requires a Reinvention of Civilisation’. It’s worth reading as a whole because it tries to spell out – in a way that our leaders are afraid to – just how hard achieving Net Zero will be.

The very foundation of the modern world – an energy source that is ubiquitous, reliable and enormously powerful – will have to be remade. As Helen Thompson says, ‘there is no precedent.’

And all I’ve seen so far are horses with motors stuck to them. We need something better; thinking engages fully in reimagining our world – before the world itself starts reimagining us.

Honeysuckle surprise

We were walking through the long grass in Elmdon Park, following a rough path but looking down to watch where we were treading, when a gust of delicious fragrance rolled around us. Looking up we saw the source – honeysuckle growing wild through a hedge of hawthorne. I always think it is a regal plant, profuse in gold and red.

If I was asked to design a crown I might choose a chaplet of honeysuckle. It would surely grace a royal forehead more richly than any golden crown.