Note by JRW: The following is an extract from a handwritten letter by Myatt, addressed to me. He dated it One Late June Day.


I Have No Excuses

 

So many brown butterflies: I have not seen so many in such a small area before. Twenty, thirty - I gave up counting as they fed on the newly opened and newly opening purple flowers of the patch of thistles at this fields' edge, a meadow field of tall grasses, five or more in variety, whose two often wet small depressions are dry after the heat of this June, distinguished as those wet areas now are only by the different, courser, greener, grass flourishing there.

As I walked to this drying pond - trying to follow the Fox and Deer paths of trodden grass - with each step insects, disturbed, flew away. It is too hot to sit other than in the shade, so I squat down on the warm grass underneath the old leaning Willow tree as small well-spaced Cumulus clouds drift, quite slowly, below sky-blue, never seeming to break the flow of hot sunlight. Spiders, green, brown, black but mostly small, pass often itchingly over my arms, hands, while I wait amid the breezeless silence of this field whose old hedges are replete with spreading, tall, trees of Ash and Oak. There, down amid the forest of grass stalks, green, alien, insects - antennae twitching - climb, up, down, to no purpose I, their giant, know. Even the birds seem strangely quiet in this heat.

I wait, covered in seeds from grass, and there is sadness - a memory of a recent love, now lost; a memory of nights alone: of that last argument, with so many things still needing to be said so that I might redeem my mistakes of the past. But she - having weeks ago severed our connexion - will listen no more. And yet, here, I sense and know my smallness, aware as I am of things beyond my own limited life - beyond my personal feelings, dreams, hope of finding someone, of living happy in harmony, of dwelling together as our lives flow in closeness toward their natural end. For there is a horizon beyond the desire, the need, for the shared warmth of personal love - a horizon beginning here where, under Sun, small field meets vast sky to form but one beginning of one presencing, and where life flows, century upon century, upon, below, above the gift of this now increasingly wounded land.

She and I have both lost. Have I lost less, or more, because I am, as I need to believe, through words such as these more than my one life, trying as I am, have done, will do, to understand, capture, distill, that essence, which will be here when I am gone? Will I, can I, transform through such a capture, such a gentle distilling, myself, others, to what awaits when we refuse out of empathy and understanding to destroy, injure, harm, hurt whatever, whomsoever, whatever the excuse?

I was wrong; not restrained enough. Too emotive in my love. I have no excuses, having unintentionally hurt through my persistence of love, my naive hope, a person whom I loved. Thus do I know I am not as enlightened as I wanted and want to believe. My love was a gift, created from the years of sadness, and yet its rejection can be, should be, the strange genesis of growth. Thus does the slow, painful, learning of this man - dwarfed by tree, sky, centuries, Sun - flow on. To where? Yet I am fortunate, to be here, in such a beautiful land, under a hot Sun which pleases and begins, even if so slowly, to heal one wound. 

Nearby, in its forest of stalks, the small brown spider, web-waiting, brings to one end one life.

 

DW Myatt