Note by JRW: The following is an extract from a handwritten letter by Myatt, addressed to me. He dated it Nearing Mid-September.


 

Nearing Mid-September

 

A glorious warm day of full, hot, Sun and I have been lying in the warm still growing greening grass by the edge of one field at the back of the Farm - sometimes asleep - for what is probably an hour. And yet, I still do not know.

 

Beneath and around the old tall Oak, acorns have fallen, eaten or stored, or both, by Squirrels, for I can find and see only the top which once held them on the tree. The small pond with its incumbent still living branches, is smaller, greener now, home to algae and slime, and the large Dragonfly hovers above the greenish water, to fly around to return to hover. A fly - or something, for I cannot quite see from here - passes it by and the Dragonfly darts around, chasing it away from the water. It is a chase, for I see this happen twice, three times. Then the Dragonfly is gone, toward the bushes, the branches.

In the field, a single tall Cornflower amid the yellow buttercups, the purple Clover, the Vetchling and Hawksbeard. Field-walking, I can see the Church in the two-mile distant village whose bell I can hear, here, come Sunday morning. And now, at last, I am here in the neglected one-acre strip whose fruit-giving, flowering hedges have been untrimmed for years.

 

But already the desecration has started. For, five fields to my left, is a lane which winds toward an orchard, a Farm, whose fields have hedges newly, murderously, flailed by a brutish machine. The berries, the fruits, the dormant buds - all gone. No wonder there that each year the life-giving, life-holding, life-sheltering, hedge dies a little more.

Alas, I have no land, no field or fields, to call my own where I can tend and care as life, field-grown, field-sown, field-fare, should and must be tended with care born from dwelling, feeling, there. I only work, toiling, for another, to keep me fed, housed, clothed, tired and, sometimes, content, as now where two small brown butterflies spiral and dance around the greening growing grass where I have sat to sit crossed legged writing this, chewing on a sweet stalk of grass.

 

So warm the Sun I can forget what should-be in the what-is of warmth: in the gentle music of leaves, breeze-brought. A few small cumulus clouds drift West to East over the nearby wooded hill, and I know, sense, feel, that here in this field, under this Sun, is Paradise.

My desires, hopes, dreams, have been a distraction. All that is good, beautiful, right, is here and I might need only a small plot of land, a woman as wife, a shack, to make my world complete. Thus it is that I have again the knowing of what I should know. But have I the patience to stay, enduring the calm to the peace - knowing, but bereft of woman, shack, field, faith? Or have I to go, must I go, to live to settle to marry she, in that hot distant land, who loves me?

So I settle myself down again to sleep in the warm greening growing grass. But there is no rest, only a world beyond brought briefly alive by change in wind - for I can hear the festering vehicles upon the festering road two - more - miles distant. There is no Paradise, there. Can I strive to make some difference? Should I strive? Should I change - exchange my peace, my lonely Paradise here, on Earth - to strive against the suffering, the tyranny, the wrong, that blights and festers on this Earth?

There is no answer, even in the Ruddy Darter that here, quite far from water, skims the greening growing blades of grass.

 

DW Myatt