Note by JRW
: The following is taken from a letter, written by Myatt,
and addressed to me. He dated it Almost Mid-May.
Too Much, Too Soon
On the trees around - now all almost full in leaf and almost all Oak -
the Cuckoo does his rounds, calling from tree to tree to tree.
I lie in the damp long Meadow grass, almost hidden, on this middle
morning of almost the middle of May, as begins another beautiful rural
English day where warming Sun becomes sometimes hidden by the growing
Cumulus clouds and a coolish breeze ripples the grass, wave after wave after slow
wave. Here - where the Fox-path of trodden grass is clear among
their height and where Bluebells cluster along the hedge which hid the
Deer I startled as I walked, slowly, savouring each scent, each sound,
each sight.
This is real: this field on this day, and I am once again at peace,
here where I sense, know, I belong, and where I can touch, feel, see
this belonging. There are no politics here; and nor are such abstracted
lifeless things needed. Here I hear the birds calling, tree to tree,
bush to bush, hedge to hedge, sky to sky: Thrush, Blackbird, Robin,
Skylark... and other songs and calls from birds, and beings, whose
generic names I do not know, and do not desire to know. For they all
live, each a life which is their life, just as the Oak behind, the fly
that warms itself on my boot, are each a life, one nexus of energy,
nameless because un-named in their profusion. What if I named them?
What if we named them all - from the beginning of their life to their
own, individual, ending? Is that too much, too soon?
Yet - not a million miles away people die, killed; are confined,
tortured, abused, humiliated, oppressed. No empathy there; no beings of
compassion who, having lived, know the knowing of suffering and feel
that slowness of honour, light to a night, as a crescent moon at clear
Dusk, bringing perhaps some thought for, some feeling of, the worlds beyond -
beyond the pain, the suffering, that still endures, for no reason.
There is no realness - there, in such places. Only ideas, binding,
where sight is not the sight of breeze rippling grass, and where
feeling is not the feeling of warm Sun on face, hands, arms, peaceful
following the cold dampness of Winter. No - there there is only the
seeing of Forms, created, abstracted, which seek to, and which do,
restrict, constrain, distort, subdue, destroy the life that lives, the
living which is - the lifes which are - the myriad nexions presenced here
on one planet among so many billions of stars.
Will it end? Yes, such suffering should. Perhaps it is just one cloud,
transient, obscuring
this one warming giving star which is our Sun? But I do not think so: so many
clouds, so many thousands of years... And thus is even this one small missive of mine too much,
too soon: too late?
DW Myatt