Note by JRW: The following is taken from a handwritten letter, by Myatt, addressed to me and dated Early March.


 

 

Wir setzen uns mit Tranen Nieder

 

There is a brief spell of warm Sun after a heavy storm of hail, and I am sitting by a hedge between a Chestnut tree and the entrance to a Badger sett on a day that has been mostly rainy, and, in this brief respite from work and rain, I shall endevour to answer your question.

Sometimes I am like parts of the first and last movements of JS Bach's Concerto in D Minor BWV 1052 reconstructed for violin where the violin soars into new realms beyond our mundane causal world: realms where we have, for the present, to suspend our ordinary concepts because the words, the ideas, even the images, we possess cannot do justice to these realms. We can perhaps, and sometimes, grasp part of such realms through the feelings, the intuition, the empathy that such profound music can produce in us. And in such music, JS Bach is still the undisputed master.

These realms are the promise of our future: the futures that can be possible if we use our will to change ourselves in a noble, honourable way while pursuing a numinous vision.

Thus, sometimes I myself and my deeds, my life, my works, cannot be understood in the conventional causal sense. My sorrow is in Erbame dich from the Matthew Passion (BWV 244); my soaring Promethean quest is in the Allegro of BWV 1052; my yearning for a better, more noble world in the opening bars of the John Passion; my vision of a Galactic Empire resonates in part of BWV 565 - heard where it should be heard, in an great Cathedral or vast concert hall - and in parts of BWV 1043.

 

What can I say except strive to express the memory of a beautiful, peaceful, rural scene of the kind that still exists in parts of England, Germany and elsewhere, on a warm Spring, Summer or Autumn's day when we who work there, with our toiling hands, rest awhile while a warm Sun pleases us, and all we can hear are the sounds of birds, the breeze in the trees, and the insects - bees, flies - that move around us?

A thousand years of our culture has allowed this, has produced this: such serene, beautiful, numinous places. A thousand years of toil, suffering, warfare, striving and death. And now - now we possess the means, the understanding, the wisdom, to be in such places without some of those suffering, killing, harming, things which created them. For such places - and especially the life-giving fertile soil of small fields - are now a balance, between our own immediate, simple, needs, and the needs of Nature. We have created this balance; we have had this balance, this beautiful fertile soil of Yeoman-type fields, available to us, for the last eighty or so years. With this balance we can live, simply, without causing undue harm to Nature and the life which is an emanation of Nature.

But are we doing this? No: we are destroying such places, such soil, through our greed, through our inability to transcended beyond our animalistic self, through our lack of empathy; through the insatiable growth and urbanization that is fuelled by industry, usury and capitalism. Wir setzen uns mit Tranen nieder.

Is there any wonder then that I detest the modern world with its mechanistic progress, with its rapacious, Nature-destroying, empathy-destroying, machines and means of transportation, with its self-indulgent, dishonourable people?

Is it surprising, then, that I have been, these last two years, returning occasionally - and out of a sense of duty - to the world of politics, of religion, to try in some small way to agitate for a change toward the numinous?

But such a returning is, I hope, finally over, although I know you will be skeptical about this. But my duty now is surely to strive to live only as the ethics and ideals of Folk Culture dictate. Anything else just seems a compromise with the ignoble causal world.

So yes, to finally answer your question: there is for me now only Folk Culture; only a rural way of life, only the slow being where empathy and numinosity can live and grow. Yet I know this may not be the end of the quest: that a restless, wandering, questing, yearning seeking may yet return to lead me somewhere else, for I have no woman now, to share my dream, no plot of land, alas, no field of soil to call my own to cultivate and dwell as I would love to cultivate and dwell.

But what are words after Bach's Erbame dich? Listen, and you may hear my thoughts, feel the feelings I now feel, even as the Sun becomes once again covered by cloud and it is time to return to my toiling work.

 

DW Myatt