I can’t pretend that all my reading is at the level described here but this passage from Annie Dillard’s ‘Abundance’ does resonate very strongly. Who’s up for amassing half dressed in a long line and shaking a gourd together?
“Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaning, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than the power which, from time to time, seizes our lives and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half-dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at one another, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”
I should say, Abundance does wake you up (and make you laugh!)
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!
I’ve been feeling very Donne-ish lately, largely prompted by Katherine Rundell’s recent biography of him, Super-Infinite (which I heartily recommend).
I’d long loved his poems (though I now realise I’d barely skimmed the surface of them) but the prose quoted in the book has been a revelation. I used to be a funeral celebrant, so have an idea of what writing for the voice means, but Donne’s sermons are of a different order. In his day he was the equivalent of a rockstar, attracting huge crowds; read his words – the combination of poetry and rhetoric – and you can see why.
Some of the prose is famous. The much quoted ‘No man is an island’ for example, often presented as a poem but actually from one of Donne’s Meditations:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Some, though, I’d never come across before. This is quoted by Rundell from one of Donne’s sermons. Read aloud it’s irresistible!
We ask our daily bread, and God never says you should have come yesterday. He never says you must again to-morrow, but to-day if ye will hear His voice, to-day He will hear you … He brought light out of darkness, not out of a lesser light; He can bring thy summer out of winter, though thou have no spring; though in the ways of fortune, or understanding, or conscience, thou have been benighted till now, wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed, damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied till now, now God comes to thee, not as in the dawning of the day, not as in the bud of the spring, but as the sun at noon, to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest, to fill all penuries, all occasions invite His mercies, and all times are His seasons.
Coincidentally, while reading Rundell’s biography, I came across more of Donne’s prose quoted in a collection of short stories by Andrea Lundgren called, Nordic Fauna. The quote appears in a story about a man possessed by the idea of angels. This is Donne’s take on them:
They are creatures, that have not so much of a body as flesh is, as froth is, as a vapour is, as a sigh is, and yet with a touch they shall moulder a rock into less atoms, than the sand that it stands upon; and a millstone into smaller flour, than it grinds. They are creatures made, and yet not a minute elder now, than when they were first made, if they were made before all measure of time began…
Reminds me of Philip Pullman’s angels in his Northern Lights trilogy.
In Margaret Kennedy’s historical novel, Troy Chimneys, there’s a scene where a storm obliges our narrator – Miles Lufton – to spend the night in William Hawker’s small cottage and even split the only bed with William and his wife Mary. It’s a homely scene – full of laughter and the warmth of mutual regard. William – although living simply as a cottager – is an educated man, a reader, keen to keep up with current thought and ideas. His wife, Mary, has not had his advantages, but, with a natural intelligence, she is learning to read – they are a devoted couple. Lufton describes their marriage, saying:
“Since his marriage he [William Hawker] had been very happy. Mary, too, had had a hard and solitary life. An orphan, brought up by the Parish, she had been put to work at eight years old. When William first saw her she was servant to a farmer at Gulley’s Cross. William was the first creature who ever spoke a kind word to her. I think his love must have begun in compassion, but, by the time that I knew them, it had become a strong and tender attachment.
For her he was the whole world. She could neither read nor write, but she was by no means a stupid girl. She turned out to be an excellent manager and she had, in her own way, a strong poetic strain. She was the sweetest singer I ever heard. I suppose that music had been her only joy, the only release that she had ever known, in the brutish slavery of her life. She had but to hear a song or ballad once to remember it; she knew scores. And there was, in the tones of her voice, a kind of wild pathos, and an attention to the sense of what she sang, which is unusual, even in the finest singers. William loved to hear her, and so did I, once we had overcome her natural shyness and got her to sing for me. For the most part she sang the rhymed psalms, or old country songs, simple ditties of parted sweethearts, old battles, harvesting, sheep-shearing and the like, that you may hear in any ale-house or farm kitchen. But to many she imparted a strong degree of feeling, as though she gave a voice to those countless myriads who have worked, and loved, and died, leaving no memorial behind them save these strains of “the unlettered Muse.’
There was one in particular, a favourite with me, for which I often asked. I wish now that I had not done so, and had not learnt to remember it so well. It was a kind of dialogue between a girl and her drowned sweetheart, whose phantom appears to her in the dead of night. He complains that he cannot rest for her endless lamentations and asks when she will have done weeping for him. She replies:
When acorns fall from the mulberry tree/ And the sun rises up in the West.
It is but a country jingle, but the pathetic note in her voice always brought tears to my eyes.”
The scenes and atmosphere reminded me of Wordsworth’s Reaper, his poem about the girl he hears singing in the fields the girl he hears and, although he cannot understand her words, is moved. Perhaps, he wonders,
“the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago. Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day? Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain…”
Later in the story Miles has to sing Mary’s song himself. The verses run:
I found myself wondering what the tune might be, and whether there is any version collected – perhaps known to Margaret Kennedy – by Vaughan-Williams or Cecil Sharp or Percy Grainger
I’ve been reading High Wind to Jamaica by Richard Hughes. It’s a children’s classic – but so far it had passed me by. Perhaps, when I was the right age, the ‘classic’ tag put me off, or the dull binding on the shelves of the school library.
Hearing it discussed recently on ‘ A Good Read’ piqued my interest and I decided to give it a try. I’m glad I did. We see the world chiefly through the children’s eyes, interpreted by a sympathetic narrator. This odd perspective transforms Jamaica and, later, the pirate ship, into random places governed by strange riles and events that are only half understood or explained. It isn’t an amoral universe, but judgments are skewed limited by the children’s understanding.
They are kidnapped – but accept their new life as readily as they accepted the prospect of being sent overseas by their parents to go to school in England. The one event makes as much sense – to the child – as the other.
The adult world intrudes on theirs quite randomly and with little comment. One of them falls to their death, another – the eldest girl – disappears into realm of the pirates and though we see her fear, we have no insight (in the book at least) into what might be happening to her. The world it draws for us isn’t kind or safe or nice and you have the sense – as any slightly feral child must have – precariousness where falling into pleasure or utter disaster are equally likely and equally outside of your control or understanding.
I think this gives a sense of the author’s view of the children he describes:
The inside of Laura was different indeed: something vast, complicated, and nebulous that can hardly be put into language. To take a metaphor from tadpoles, though legs were growing her gills had not yet dropped off. Being nearly four years old, she was certainly a child: and children are human (if one allows the term ‘human’ a wide sense): but she had not altogether ceased to be a baby: and babies of course are not human – they are animals, and have a very ancient and ramified culture, as cats have, and fishes, and even snakes: the same in kind as these, but much more complicated and vivid, since babies are, after all, one of the most developed species of the lower vertebrates. In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind. It is true they look human – but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys. Subconsciously, too, every one recognises they are animals – why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a praying mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely. Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either: but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad, in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination, think like a child, at least in a partial degree – and even if one’s success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a bee.
Hughes, Richard. A High Wind In Jamaica (Vintage Classics) (p. 98). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, in The Third Eye, describes how a Tibetan Lama would make themselves invisible. The trick, he said, was to concentrate so completely that you ceased to be present. The subtle energies that surround us – that give us away even when we are hidden – would be drawn inward. People would simply not see or sense you. You would become – effectively – invisible.
Tuesday has long been exposed as a fraud, along with his esoteric wisdom, but I was 13 years old when I read him, already fascinated by the east, and quite uncritical. And besides, I proved to myself that the invisibility trick really worked.
It happened one afternoon in the school holidays. It wasn’t planned. I was lying stretched out on the sofa in the living room while my mother vacuumed around me and, somehow, didn’t notice me at all. Apparently I’d become invisible – so much so that when, a little later, I went out into the kitchen, she jumped – convinced she’d been alone in the house.
The thing is I had been reading while mum vacuumed, as unaware of her as she was of me.
I suspect Coleridge was an invisible reader too. He wrote that, in his boyhood, his:
Whole being was, with eyes closed to every object of present sense, to crumple myself up in a sunny corner and read, read, read, – fancying myself into Robinson Crusoe’s island, finding it mountain of plum-cake and eating a room for myself and then eating it into the shapes of tables and chairs.’
In it she contrasts reading today – online and onscreen, across social media and endless news sites, with old fashioned reading. She writes:
Books were once my refuge. To be in bed with a Highsmith novel was a salve. To read was to disappear, become enrobed in something beyond my own jittery ego. To read was to shutter myself and, in so doing, discover a larger experience. I do think old, book-oriented styles of reading opened the world to me – by closing it. And new, screen-oriented styles of reading seem to have the opposite effect: They close the world to me, by opening it.
In a very real way, to lose old styles of reading is to lose a part of ourselves.
For most of modern life, printed matter was, as the media critic Neil Postman put it, “the model, the metaphor, and the measure of all discourse.” The resonance of printed books – their lineal structure, the demands they make on our attention – touches every corner of the world we’ve inherited. But online life makes me into a different kind of reader – a cynical one. I scrounge, now, for the useful fact; I zero in on the shareable link. My attention – and thus my experience – fractures. Online reading is about clicks, and comments, and points. When I take that mindset and try to apply it to a beaten-up paperback, my mind bucks.
This struck home. I too find it harder to read in the old fashioned way, sustaining that steady attention, the self forgetfulness that you need. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like.
The good news is that I have given up Facebook and Twitter for Lent. The better thought is that I may not go back. Pass me my book.
a boy's head 