Note by JRW:  The following is an extract from an E-Mail by Myatt, sent to me. 

Julie: Once again, I have copied this from my "field" Notebook, and once again it was written early on a sunny morning.


Leap Day Sun

Two days - and all the snow has gone. The pond, though, is still frozen and the warm sunlight reflects from it as I sit again on my chosen branch hearing the cawing of Crows, the song and calls of birds - Blackbird, Thrush, Robin, and others. In the ice, bubbles of air are frozen in moments of causal time.

So warm in the Sun a fly buzzes by me, and the frost of night is all gone even in this morning hour - except in the shadow of hedge and tree. A rustle, there where the spreading Hawthorn bush in its corner is edging out the old and broken Holly tree. On the pond edge, a young living Nettle encased in cold ice. It is Sunday, again,  and so begins the bells in the Church, their sounds two miles carried on the cool breeze under the unbroken blue of the sky. And I am so still the reclusive resident Coot ambles forth there from the tangle of tree, bush, of that shading coverful corner as small midges twist, turn, spiral in the life-breathing rays of the Sun here amid the clear pond edge where mud meets frost-wetted grass. Gradual - ungraded - time flows, and there is movement to distract me, for some of the trapped bubbles move as the ice slowly melts from the edge.

Nearby, two Wrens rummage among the unrotted fallen leaves of Oak - so small I often cannot see them among the tufts of grass. Is that their call I hear? Or another bird, elsewhere? Certainly, the buzzards are back - no mistaking them; high, calling, circling. And that bird of prey - which hovers two fields distant to swoop to kill. A Kestrel? I do not know for I cannot quite see from here where a midge, like a Whitefly, lands on the sleeve of my oilskin coat. So minute this insect it seems perfection in miniature.

It would be so easy to kill, this brief, minimal, emanation of Nature's life. But why? It is only resting, perhaps, and a brief breeze of the cold air catches it to snatch it away, away from my world. Is there a truth here, a revealing revealed by so sitting still? For this my slow often reclusive way is not the way of the city nor of they who know no toil. How easy it was, is, how necessary because of their disconnected being - for those who did not toil, who neither worked nor dwelt among Nature - to despoil, to kill. For they had indeed become distracted, and needed goals to measure out their days, just as their thoughts themselves became abstracted, measuring out their lives in abstract ways as time itself became measured out into smaller and smaller segments until this time itself because a measure for many of those who lived, disconnected from ancestral ways.

Chiefs, leaders, monarchs - whomsoever in some position of power, unworking - able through wealth, spoils, booty or war-like gain to rampage forth for any cause or none; able to sally forth from their desire, known and unknown, to test themselves, pit themselves, occupy themselves. And how many others - oh how so many day upon day, year upon year, century upon century - followed them, even needed them, being, becoming thus armies, gangs, legions, movements, groups. Killing, maiming, dying - each generation had its cause, or created one; each century its ideas, its traditions and its ways. Disconnected; inauthentic - all. There was no Nature, there; no silent knowing of the wisdom of dark night when the child-within was pleased but lightly fearing, hearing the Owl. There was no Nature, there, no silent seeing toiling to nurture forth through free working hands the food, the bare essential things that kept hunger, exposure, away and made one happy in the moments of one's own labour. No, no Nature there in those abstract things, genesis of cities with their measured time. No, no evolution, no empathy there: except in a few. But are and were those necessary few worth the many: worth the damage done by so many? Possibly; probably - in the past. But surely things have changed with such an understanding as this...

Thus am I, here, thinking of the need for dwelling and for toil - a toil just enough and born of freedom to keep us tired, connected and still, content to be where we dwell, undamaging of life and especially of Nature. And yet - yet there lives even within me here still the memories, the feelings, of a warrior; the knowing of the quest and the joy of combat, of struggling passionately through endurance when life flows (as when in love) into that ecstasy that takes one far beyond one's self, unfearful of failure. There is such life there; such an ecstatic unthinking living; such a surpassing, consuming joy; such life in and through struggle; such life in and through questing after new vistas, new adventures, plunging into living...

Should we, should I - can we, I - go beyond even this? To that balance that might be possible, synthesis of change, dwelling, toil, combat, honour, exploration, adventure, empathy - and Art?

There are clouds now, forming on the horizon, threatening to cover the warmth of the Sun, and I stretch my numbing limbs, wondering if in the Numinous Way of Folk Culture, there is wisdom, and synthesis, enough.


DW Myatt