Secret Sharers

Here is one way of looking at how we abide in the world:

"Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.  Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."

Walter Pater, "Conclusion," The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (Macmillan 1893), page 249.

I thought of Pater's passage after reading this:

                       Man in a Park

One lost in thought of what his life might mean

Sat in a park and watched the children play,

Did nothing, spoke to no one, but all day

Composed his life around the happy scene.

And when the sun went down and keepers came

To lock the gates, and all the voices were

Swept to a distance where no sounds could stir,

This man continued playing his odd game.

Thus, without protest, he went to the gate,

Heard the key turn and shut his eyes until

He felt that he had made the whole place still,

Being content simply to watch and wait.

So one can live, like patterns under glass,

And, like those patterns, not committing harm.

This man continued faithful to his calm,

Watching the children playing on the grass.

But what if someone else should also sit

Beside him on the bench and play the same

Watching and counting, self-preserving game,

Building a world with him no part of it?

If he is truthful to his vision he

Will let the dark intruder push him from 

His place, and in the softly gathering gloom

Add one more note to his philosophy.

Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), Recoveries (Andre Deutsch 1964).

Pater's observation is one of the stepping stones that takes him, two paragraphs (and a few more stepping stones) later, to his well-known prescription for how to live: "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."  (Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, page 251.)  But burning with a gem-like flame is not our concern at the moment, dear readers.  (Mind you, I say that as one who is quite fond of Pater.)

Rather, our concern is how to get through "an ordinary Wednesday afternoon" (to borrow from Walker Percy).  In her own quiet, lovely fashion, Jennings shows us a "mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."  The man in the park may not be a complete stranger to some of us.  I suspect he was not a complete stranger to Jennings.  Like Pater, she goes a step further (but in her own way), and gives us those wonderful, beautiful, and mysterious final eight lines, which seem to be about getting through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. 

James Paterson (1854-1932), "Moniaive" (1885)

An observation by Thomas Hardy comes to mind: "The most prosaic man becomes a poem when you stand by his grave at his funeral and think of him."  (Thomas Hardy, notebook entry for May 29, 1871, in Richard Taylor (editor), The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (Macmillan 1978), page 10.)  In saying this, Hardy knew full well that he, too, was a "prosaic man."  (I base this thought on having read accounts of Hardy by those who met him.  Selections of these accounts may be found in Martin Ray (editor), Thomas Hardy Remembered (Ashgate 2007) and James Gibson (editor), Thomas Hardy: Interviews and Recollections (Macmillan 1999).  Both books are delightful.)

Well, we are all prosaic women and men, aren't we?  To think otherwise is self-deception.  Perhaps Elizabeth Jennings' wonderful closing lines are relevant: ". . . and in the softly gathering gloom/Add one more note to his philosophy."  Isn't this a variation upon Hardy's thought?  Are we indeed all strangers to one another?

       Lot 304: Various Books

There are always lives

Left between the leaves

Scattering as I dust

The honeymoon edelweiss

Pressed ferns from prayer-books

Seed lists and hints on puddings

Deprecatory letters from old cousins

Proposing to come for Easter

And always clouded negatives

The ghost dogs in the vanishing gardens:

Fading ephemera of non-events,

Whoever owned it

(Dead or cut adrift or homeless in a home)

Nothing to me, a number, or if a name

Then meaningless,

Yet always as I touch a current flows,

The poles connect, the wards latch into place,

A life extends me --

Love-hate; grief; faith; wonder;

Tenderness.

Joan Barton (1908-1986), The Mistress and Other Poems (The Sonus Press 1972).

Joan Barton wrote poems from an early age, but she did not become well-known as a poet until Philip Larkin chose to include one of her poems in The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (Oxford University Press 1973), which he edited.  With respect to "Lot 304: Various Books," it may be helpful to know that Barton was a bookseller for much of her life.

Charles Holmes (1868-1936), "A Warehouse" (1921)

     A summer shower;

A woman sits alone,

     Gazing outside.

Kikaku (1661-1707) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn (Hokuseido Press 1952), page 67.

What is one to do about "that thick wall of personality"?  Is it possible to abandon, or to escape from, our "own dream of a world"?  I'm not wise enough to provide answers to either of those questions.  I'm afraid the best I can do is to return to these lines, which have appeared here on several occasions over the years: ". . . we should be careful//Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time."  (Philip Larkin, "The Mower.")

     The long night;

A light passes along

     Outside the shõji.

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by R. H. Blyth), in R. H. Blyth, Haiku, Volume 3: Summer-Autumn, page 356.

Alfred Parsons (1857-1920), "Meadows by the Avon"

How Little We Know

Ah, what bundles of quirks and tics, impulses and imaginings, hopes and delusions, we are.  In short, individual human souls.  Abiding for a brief time in "the vale of Soul-making."

On the other hand, we live in a politicized culture in which a predominant tendency is to place people into groups based upon various characteristics.  This taxonomization of human souls proceeds apace.  History tells us something about where this sort of thing leads, but I shall refrain from commenting further.

A haiku by Masaoka Shiki comes to mind:

   After I'm Dead

Tell them
I was a persimmon eater
who liked haiku.

Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) (translated by Burton Watson), in Masaoka Shiki, Selected Poems (Columbia University Press 1997), page 63.

Shiki wrote the poem in the autumn of 1897.  He had contracted tuberculosis in 1889, and had been in nearly constant pain since that time.  He died in 1902 at the age of thirty-four.  He did indeed love to eat persimmons.  And he did indeed love haiku.  In 2009, the Japanese postal system issued a stamp with an illustration of two persimmons hanging on a branch, accompanied by one of Shiki's best-known haiku:

   Stopping at a Teashop
      at Hōryū-ji Temple

I eat a persimmon
and a bell starts booming --
Hōryū-ji.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by Burton Watson), in Masaoka Shiki, Selected Poems, page 42.

I am wholly in favor of placing oneself into categories such as "persimmon eater" or "lover of haiku."  Or "rain gazer."

Evening shower --
and gazing out into it,
a woman alone.

Kikaku (1661-1707) (translated by Steven Carter), in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology (Stanford University Press 1991), page 377.

Or "snow watcher."  Two centuries after Kikaku wrote his haiku, Shiki wrote this:

From a rear window
in the falling snow
a woman's face looks out.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by Burton Watson), in Masaoka Shiki, Selected Poems, page 22.

Helen Johnstone (1888-1931), "Tolbooth Close"

Back in early December, I wrote about the robins that gather here in small flocks in winter.  I have grown increasingly fond of them.  For now, they still congregate in flocks, but, when spring arrives, I expect to see them pair off into couples.  On a sunny afternoon earlier this week, I saw a group of them spread out across a wide field of grass (green from the winter rain), feeding.  The robin world seems a simple world, but I'm sure it is not.  Yet, on that warm, nearly-spring day, they seemed at peace in their robin lives.

          Once Seen, and No More

Thousands each day pass by, which we,
Once past and gone, no more shall see.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides, Poem 671, in Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (editors), The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, Volume 1 (Oxford University Press 2013).

As I walked beside the flock, I focused my attention on one of the robins.  I believe it was a female, because her breast feathers were a paler orange.  She made her way across the field with her companions, slowly but steadily, pecking the ground, occasionally lifting her head to look around, hopping forwards and sideways, chattering now and then.  I thought of the spark of Life she was.  I suddenly realized that she was this robin, not a robin.  There was nothing else like her in the world.

               The Railway Junction

From here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; and one of these
Wheels onward into darkening hills,
And one toward distant seas.

How still it is; the signal light
At set of sun shines palely green;
A thrush sings; other sound there's none,
Nor traveller to be seen --

Where late there was a throng.  And now,
In peace awhile, I sit alone;
Though soon, at the appointed hour,
I shall myself be gone.

But not their way:  the bow-legged groom,
The parson in black, the widow and son,
The sailor with his cage, the gaunt
Gamekeeper with his gun,

That fair one, too, discreetly veiled --
All, who so mutely came, and went,
Will reach those far nocturnal hills,
Or shores, ere night is spent.

I nothing know why thus we met --
Their thoughts, their longings, hopes, their fate:
And what shall I remember, except --
The evening growing late --

That here through tunnelled gloom the track
Forks into two; of these
One into darkening hills leads on,
And one toward distant seas?

Walter de la Mare, The Fleeting and Other Poems (Constable 1933).

Catriona Barnett (1934-1972), Untitled

Rain gazers.  Persimmon eaters.  Snow watchers.  Haiku lovers.

The crocuses have now arrived in earnest.  A bit late due to an unusually cold winter.  They border the sidewalks in the neighborhood:  dark purple; white; deep yellow; pale purple streaked with white.  After I'm dead, tell them I waited each year for the crocuses.  And watched the flocks of robins in the winter.

   Written on Seeing the Garden Pines in the Rain
                    on the Morning of May 21st

Pine needles,
each needle strung with its
drop of bright dew,
forming, then falling,
falling, then forming again.

Masaoka Shiki (translated by Burton Watson), in Masaoka Shiki, Selected Poems, page 104.  Shiki wrote the poem in 1900.

Mary McCrossan (1865-1934), "Umbrellas and Barges, Venice"