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