Note by JRW: The following is an extract from a handwritten letter by Myatt, addressed to me. He dated it One Week Beyond Mid-Spring.


One Week Beyond Mid-Spring

 

Another warm beautiful Spring day in the English fields of the kind that reminds how wonderful and simple life can and should be: there seem to be no problems here, by this small stream, and I sit on the now longish, greening grass beside it beneath a sky of variegated blue with only the sounds of birds for company. No breeze to stir the trees of the overgrown copse behind.

There, three yards away, a bare grass-free patch where animals have come to drink, leaving prints in the now dried mud: two deer, a fox.

There is no human-made war here; no rockets, missiles, bombs; and I am left again to wonder with sadness why our species never learns. Once, many times, anger at such injustice would have roused me, all but controlled me, and I would have sallied forth to try and make things better. But now: now, I feel only the centuries of longing that have brought some of our species to that perspective, that compassion, that empathy that has grown within me as grass grows with each warming Spring. Such a gift, this soil.....

Is this lack of action, by me, really the wisdom of age, experience, or only the weariness born of three decades of strife? Or even caused because of feelings of personal love?

Yes, there was, is, a new love for me, but it is not returned as I dreamed and hoped, and so I strive to console myself by resting in places such as this, sensing the living being which is this world, and staring forth into sky and Space as if my own longing for worlds, lives, beyond might change what is into what can, should be: a world of reason, honour, empathy. And I am again as I was, nearly three decades ago, at times so suffused with a personal love that I have run miles bearing the only real gift I have, a love, word-wrought as a poem.

Who would have believed that I, with my past, at my age, would do such things, again? Love is strange: I was trembling when she telephoned..... but there was no meeting wherein the essence might flow between us again, and all I could do was sit, staring without thought out of the window of my room, listening to the Art of Fugue as if my listening might still the feelings that only a street-hardened, killing-forged, striving, honourable, Will kept damned. And all we who feel like this can ever do is hope.

It was hope - and another lost love - which took me, once and a decade or more ago, to Egypt to travel in the desert as if such traveling might bring a forgetful peace. It did not work, despite the grim toil of that long journey, and it was only when I returned to Cairo that I forgot. I remember it so well: I had gone, out of politeness, to a concert to see and listen to some singer which some Egyptian I had met enthused about. And there was such beauty there, in her, her voice, in the music, as she sang of many things. Such sadness; such joy, such an embracing, for me, of another world, another culture. I was at home there, listening, feeling, with the audience as the beautiful Samira Said sang, and ever since - in times of personal sadness, rejection, such as this - I remember her concert, or listen to her songs(1), reminding me of how I am not alone, of how others have, and do, suffer, and have cried, and laughed, and sang of their problems, personal, political, social and otherwise. But most of all I remember that there is another world out there of different, vibrant, cultures, of good people striving in their daily mostly toiling lives with hope for a better more honourable world for themselves, their family, their children, their land.

Such beauty in this world; such a wonderful diversity. And yet such a terrible continuation of the barbarism that should by now belong to our past. All I have are the answers of the ethics, the Way, my experience and thought have wrought. But is Folk Culture, the Cosmic Ethic, the small rural communities that such a Way would bring, enough?

But I am pompously rambling now, and once again.....

 

DW Myatt



(1) In a recent letter Myatt added: "In the past few years she has changed her style somewhat, less Arabic, more Western. While this new style is interesting, some - myself included - prefer her earlier songs and recordings."