Note by JRW : The following is taken from a letter, written by Myatt, and addressed to me. He dated it Almost Mid-May.


Too Much, Too Soon



On the trees around - now all almost full in leaf and almost all Oak - the Cuckoo does his rounds, calling from tree to tree to tree.

I lie in the damp long Meadow grass, almost hidden, on this middle morning of almost the middle of May, as begins another beautiful rural English day where warming Sun becomes sometimes hidden by the growing Cumulus clouds and a coolish breeze ripples the grass, wave after wave after slow wave. Here - where the Fox-path of trodden grass  is clear among their height and where Bluebells cluster along the hedge which hid the Deer I startled as I walked, slowly, savouring each scent, each sound, each sight.


This is real: this field on this day, and I am once again at peace, here where I sense, know, I belong, and where I can touch, feel, see this belonging. There are no politics here; and nor are such abstracted lifeless things needed. Here I hear the birds calling, tree to tree, bush to bush, hedge to hedge, sky to sky: Thrush, Blackbird, Robin, Skylark... and other songs and calls from birds, and beings, whose generic names I do not know, and do not desire to know. For they all live, each a life which is their life, just as the Oak behind, the fly that warms itself on my boot, are each a life, one nexus of energy, nameless because un-named in their profusion. What if I named them? What if we named them all - from the beginning of their life to their own, individual, ending? Is that too much, too soon?


Yet - not a million miles away people die, killed; are confined, tortured, abused, humiliated, oppressed. No empathy there; no beings of compassion who, having lived, know the knowing of suffering and feel that slowness of honour, light to a night, as a crescent moon at clear Dusk, bringing perhaps some thought for, some feeling of, the worlds beyond - beyond the pain, the suffering, that still endures, for no reason.

There is no realness - there, in such places. Only ideas, binding, where sight is not the sight of breeze rippling grass, and where feeling is not the feeling of warm Sun on face, hands, arms, peaceful following the cold dampness of Winter. No - there there is only the seeing of Forms, created, abstracted, which seek to, and which do, restrict, constrain, distort, subdue, destroy the life that lives, the living which is - the lifes which are - the myriad nexions presenced here on one planet among so many billions of stars.

Will it end? Yes, such suffering should.  Perhaps it is just one cloud, transient, obscuring this one warming giving star which is our Sun? But I do not think so: so many clouds, so many thousands of years... And thus is even this one small missive of mine too much, too soon: too late?  


DW Myatt