Note by JRW: This is an extract from a handwritten letter, by Myatt, addressed to me. He dated it Soon It Will Be May


Soon It Will Be May

 

This may well be  - hopefully will be - the last letter you receive from me for quite a while, for the simple truth is that I have little desire to write anymore. What I feel, I feel; what I know, I know; what I am, I am.

My letters to you these past two years - and my poems - express a great deal of what needs and needed to be expressed: what I have learnt, felt, discovered. As for the rest, The Numinous Way, with its Cosmic Ethics and morality of honour, its reason, its empathy, its folkish ideals and rural folkish Way of Life, expresses what I wish to express, now and for perhaps some time, for there is wisdom, there. As for myself, my life, there are clues enough, if others are prepared to look, to ponder, to reason. What I am now, why I am, is all there, in those poems, letters, in my various writings. My life is not even one day among the so many which have passed, as this day toward the end of April is but one intimation of Paradise, warm as it is here in a small field of the quiet rural England I love.

There shall be no more, except perhaps some poems, because I am peaceful again now, feeling as I do the numinosity of existence, even though force of circumstance not of my doing has taken me away, a few months ago, from the outdoor labour I had become accustomed to. But what is, is - through the working of life, and in some ways I am as I was when I wandered my homeland, those decades ago - a poor, often boyish man, bereft of responsibility and of somewhere of my own to call my home, as a mendicant monk might have been, centuries ago. In those days, of my youth, I often wandered barefoot, feeling the Earth, carrying my few possessions upon my back. It may well come to this wandering, homelessness, again - indeed, I may want it to come to this, again, and soon.

Yet I am even more peaceful now than I was, then: more deeply rooted in the world, the time, that is my world, my time - that of empathy, compassion, honour. So I have no desire to belong to, to conform to, this modern mostly urban world with its tyrannical, dishonourable, Nature-destroying, governments, its pursuit of materialism and its manic style of life.

As for what others write, or may write - what they say or may say - about me, I do not care. It has been a hard learning, a long journey, to arrive here; to know where I am; to place myself in perspective - one small emanation on one small planet on the edge of one Galaxy among millions upon millions of such places in the Cosmos. One breath, and I am gone, as we all are.

There seems more truth here, certainly more reality, here - by this pond, in a field warmed by the Sun of an emergent Summer. But we must go on, upward, outward, learning from the five or more thousands of years of our mistakes, thus evolving, and willing ourselves not to repeat the costly, brutal, stupid, sad, dishonourable, suffering mistakes of our past.

We certainly can do this - we can evolve; we have potential, will, reason, learning, knowledge, enough. But will we develope, use, empathy, honour, reason, and feel a compassion for all life, placing ourselves in the cosmic perspective? Will we feel, be, the connexion, the nexus, that we are?

But, for now, I shall tear this page from my notebook, and, as I often have, walk the mile or so to where a small postbox stands beside a noise-full road.....

 

DW Myatt