Note by JRW: The following is an extract from a handwritten letter by Myatt, addressed to me. He dated it One June.


The Sounds of Falling Rain

 

A warm, sunny, evening to end this day, and I have wandered around the fields of the farm where I live in the few hours of daylight remaining following ten hours of work. Such a beautiful blue - the sky; and such beauty in the growing white cumulus horizon clouds which presage a change in this weather.

A day of mostly cloud, only lifted this past hour, leaving this warmth, this blue, this pleasure of peace here in the small fields of old level meadows, hedge, pond, and tree. How many times have I sat here, notebook and pen in hand, on this old oak branch, broken from its living three years ago? How many times has the peace of such a rural silence, such an England, seeped deep down to bring a peace to this living being? How many times does this being drift, from land, to sky, to dream, to sea, while the low slow sounds of another English Summer sound to bring one more restful sleep? Flies, birds, bees, breeze - all here, all so distant, so different, from the desire, the rhetoric, of a stark temporal action returned to, briefly, in weeks passed. And just what have those words, those meets, those conversations, those journeys, such assignations, achieved?

Very little - or so it seems. Was it only one final salvo aimed, one last chance - to outwardly inspire, to start a storm of fire, of radical change? One more means to strive to bring-into-being one new type of being, one archetype, by presencing that dark within the light which brings the light within such dark, which is genesis itself?

But is it only the warmth, the Sun, that allows such languid thought?...

Now, two days later, it is raining, with a rising wind, and I sit at this desk near a window showing only a dull overcast sky. It is much less than an hour since I browsed a web-site containing my poetry - some selections of single poems, chosen by a person or persons, unknown (or at least, unknown in person) and chosen perhaps according to their own aesthetic awareness. So I read this small collection of poems - reading them for the first time in months; in some cases, years. Some of my poems are not that good - but there are some, a few, I would choose myself, to give to others, and of those few, a few were there, in that aethereal place.

How strange that someone, somewhere in Europe (Sweden?) had selected these, and that I - reading them via the medium of some earth-bound aether - would be strongly reminded of times, feelings, past: knowing through this remembering some truths discovered, discarded, discovered again, presaging perhaps some change back toward a tranquil rural path strayed from last year, and strayed from yet again, some weeks, or more, ago. 

For there is truth, there, in those poems - more truth perhaps than in many of my other words. Or, perhaps more correctly, there is a valid perspective there, in such poems - a perspective to balance the rhetoric, the vision, the dream, the presencing, of that questing, restless, inquisitive, reckless, violent, warrior nature. There is certainly beauty, there, in those collocations of sometimes poetic words - a beauty occasionally, perhaps, made more poignant because enwreathed in sadness, born of sadness. Most definitely, there is humanity there.

What does this imply, or mean - for me? I do not know; I really have ceased to concern myself about such things. Life passes in transformation, as Rilke wrote. Change; genesis; growth. But perhaps the real implication, and meaning, lies in what is communicated to others by means of such things. Perchance such words of mine bring, or can bring, to others a glimpse - maybe just one glimpse - of beauty, of humanity, of those things that transform us to what is beyond what we are: what we can and should be if we are to fulfill our potential. As for me, how many more Summers will pass before the beauty of slowness, of slow, rural change, is never disturbed again by warrior desires and dreams? Once again, I do not know, and can only hope to use the days, the weeks, the months, the years of experiencing, of living, to transform such living into words which might, just might, capture an aspect of the essence - for that is what I have done, these past three decades: one poem, perhaps, to distill the essence of ten years.

Thus do I hear amid the sounds of falling rain, of wind strong enough to shake the trees, that low seductive sibilation calling me back to wander alone again among the hills, fields and fells, of England...

So, yes, I have broken my promise, my hope, not to write again - but only now to so briefly if hopefully presence through this writing act one small emanation of the essence.

DW Myatt