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


One Sunday Morning in July

 

This field-side pond is less than half its normal size, dried and murky-green through the warm, dry, June, and the resident Coot clacks in alarm as I, not so quietly it seems, approach on this hot Sunday morning of an English Summer.

Around the edges, scores, hundreds, of two-winged flies hop, buzz, skip, dance, to fan and display their narrow, spotted, wings. There is a pattern to their movement, revealed as I wait, and watch - so many of them their sounds combine, a low drone below the leaf-breeze rustle. The edges of this pond are partially shaded by Ask, Oak and that large oak broken branch, clingingly attached to its life-giving centuries old hedge-dwelling trunk, a branch whose trailing parts are half-in, half-out, of the water: leafy, green, toward the branch's top, and dead where it lies, in, just above, that still drying murky water.

There is pain from two broken ribs as I sit amid the grass, one yard of four Fox-footprints from the edge, chewing on a juicy stalk of grass. There is Sun to warm, heal; insects, to come, go; a white butterfly to descend to briefly drink; grasshoppers, birds, to call. Time flows, unmeasured, unmissed - the drifted sound of the village Church bells, two miles distant; a small but growing Summer Cumulus cloud to briefly dispel the warmth of Sun, intimating the cold, darker, seasons, to come...

Such pain a reminder; and I have no excuses if I fail to change my life. So much learnt these past two years of wandering and of work. There can be no harming and no one harmed - I, we, have will, knowledge, empathy, enough, to be that which we should, must be; to grow as we must grow, up from the empathy, born of honour, toward a maturity of life; up from a simple dwelling where we are a harmony of consciousness with the land.

I smile, because I am not alone. Here, there is time, quietness, calmness, empathy, life, enough to know, feel, the Life beyond our life, the Life which bore us with so much wordless hope which we, selfish children, so stupidly, ignorantly, scorn. One tree, more of less; one human bludgeoned by words, deeds, streaming forth unchecked; one Coot killed for sport; one field lost to build one part of one road joining one empathyless place to another. One more person tortured, killed, starved, maimed through one more lifeless idea carried, like a deadly virus, by one more talking upright-walking childish being.

There are no excuses for our failures - we have knowledge enough. Thousand year upon thousand year of suffering, death, destruction, torment, torture; thousand year upon thousand year of music, literature, memoirs, poetry, art; thousand year upon thousand year of individuals striving, learning, as I have learnt, strived, beyond, between, the light and the dark There are no excuses - we have ability, potential, will, enough to discover, find, know, to become the empathy, the honour, we need, genesis as these two are of the higher, numinous, life which awaits. There can be no more excuses.

So I lie still in the warming grass; peaceful in my pain while the hot Sun of this Sunday lasts.

 

DW Myatt