Note by JRW: The following is an extract from a handwritten letter by Myatt, addressed to me. He dated it One Sunday in May.
We Have Been Led Astray
We have been led astray; we have led ourselves astray - away from the simple but profound beauty that is, can be, human life. Not long ago I was traveling on a long train journey. Outside, there was warm late Spring sun, the green fields and hills of rural England; white cumulus clouds passing beneath that so beautiful blue which is our sky; inside and not far from me, a young man and woman, obviously in love, their faces full of hope, dreams and, yes, goodness. Not far from me, a mother, smiling as her two children played, and her partner/husband/lover - whose arms were festooned with tattoos - seeking her hand in a simple gesture of affection. And I? All I could hear was numinous remembered music - the slow movement from an Oboe concerto by Alessandro Marcello; the Andante from Schubert's String Quartet in D Minor; Bach's Erbame dich..... There, around me, was our humanity; there, around me, was the beauty of Nature; there, around me, within me, was the potential for us to evolve. For such a simple, sharing, love is one of our most profound, our most human and noble, traits.
How many times have I myself known the simple, gentle, warmth of a love shared? And how many times have I turned away from that toward what I assumed or believed or felt was a duty, thus hardening myself? So much lost, for so little. So much suffering and sadness created by me, in others, in the world: and for what? So much sadness and suffering caused within myself by such a loss.
The truth I have painfully, slowly, discovered in this, the fifth decade of my strange wandering life, is that there is no noble, no good, no honourable duty to anything or anyone which can contradict such love, or reject it, or place it second. What honourable, noble, duty there is can only arise from such love or join with that love in a natural, dwelling, way as when two people, a family, settle to dwell on the land and through their dwelling, their labour, their toil, their love, they create a way of life which is in harmony with all other life, with Nature, and especially with their own loving, rational, honourable, human nature.
This is the quiet numinous way of restraining ourselves by concentrating on what is beyond words, beyond ideas: the way that some of the beautiful music of the past several hundred years is an intimation of, reminding us as it can of the greatest suffering, the greatest joy, and of our own place among Nature, in the Cosmos.
This is the quiet return that is needed - beyond all rhetoric; beyond all propaganda; beyond all ideas, political, religious, otherwise - and beyond all the forms that constrain and try to mould our human nature to some abstract theory or construct. For what is human is this love, this symbiosis between such love, such dwelling, such a gentle seeking yearning born of our questioning nature. All else - all other types of yearning, seeking, striving, duty - detract us and distance us from, or even destroy and negate, our true human nature, and from that evolution of this nature of ours which great music, great Art, great literature, rational ethical Science itself, provide us with an intimation of, a gentle yearning for.
To sacrifice life for, to strive to mould our life in artificial, abstract, ways, is wrong because it is denial of this human nature of ours: a dwelling in our barbaric past; a negation of our human potential to evolve into rational, honourable, numinous, beings who are not only a connexion to Nature and the Cosmos but who are consciously aware of this connexion in both an empathic and a rational way. A human, noble, allegiance is and can only be to that which we know, deeply; to that which we deeply love - our partner; our family; the small area of Earth, the folk community, where we dwell and where we feel at home, which is our home, our homeland, small as this must be to be known as it should be known. And if ever there is conflict, between human beings, we must use our will, the guidelines of honour and empathy, to strive to resolve things, transcending beyond the instincts, the feelings, of our barbaric, animal, past. All other allegiances are wrong because they are to what is not-human: what is artificial, lifeless, abstract.
So, yes, I have been wrong, wrong, wrong. It is just so easy to give in to our instincts, our barbaric, animal, nature. For so many thousands of years we have lived torn between our inhuman, dishonourable, past and the human, civilized, future, that can be, should be, must be, ours. We do not need politics, governments, economics, religions or even nations as we know them. Such things are all artificial; constraining; wrong because inhuman. The mistake is and has been to try and mould our human nature to such forms, rather than evolve our natural human nature itself. What is our true, natural, human nature? To be loving; to be empathic; to be rational; to be honourable. What is the primitive nature of our barbaric past? To be selfish; to be dishonourable; to allow our instincts to control us; to lose our individuality by losing ourselves in some idea, some form, some large group or grouping, to follow and accept without question some supra-personal "authority".
All we do really need is to cultivate in ourselves that empathy which is the genesis of compassion and which brings a knowledge of our connexion to all life, here on Earth, and to the Cosmos itself; all we need is a simple code of honour; a simple acceptance of the power, the necessary, the beauty, of human love between two people who by their very being, their very nature, can be the genesis of new human life; all we need is the simple dwelling which is a symbiosis with Nature.
Is this learning too late? I did, on that journey, wonder - for the train slowed as it entered a teeming city where primitive emotions seethed and where people rushed, following and seeking strange primitive gods, and where some supra-personal "authority" assumed it knew best, seeking as it did to control people's lives....
Here, on a warm Sunny morning in late May in the rural fields of England where I sit on a fallen oak branch beside a small pond with the song of birds around, is the truth, which I now know in my very being I cannot ever forget again.
DW Myatt