The Turning World

Looking for a sense of perspective.....

Birds scrawl across the sky above the muddy flats of the Wash, dots on my vision, each to his or her own.  Distant trees and pylons speak of the old and the new.  

Conflated ideas of time rise towards the clouds.

It is the first time I have been out for three weeks.  My world is flat and empty.  It has rained.  The winds have thrashed against my walls and the roads have been under water.

A brief respite and I walk down the broken concrete path towards the flood bank. To one side I see a Muntjac pointing her dark eyes at me.  

A Marsh Harrier strafes the muddy field for hapless prey.

Along the hedgerow the blackthorn fires its salvoes, frosting the scrub in thousands of bright flowers, luring sleepy bees from their winter repose.

In the lagoon I spot a lonely young male goldeneye, diving amongst a waggle of heavy greylags.  The best is yet to come; I wish him luck in his watery life.

And not far away a pair of wigeon float along, bobbing sedately in the security of their partnership.  

The pink-feet have gone from the Wash now, making their ways to the deep north.  I miss their chattering skeins at dawn over the village, families of geese that whiffle together to the sugar-beet fields inland.  And I miss their returning flights in the dusk, their voices quieter as they slip toward their sleep. 

But there are plenty of waders out on the mud and at the tide line.  Bar-tailed Godwits:

Swarms of them, flickering above the Shelduck, Oystercatchers and Curlew that are not quite so flighty.

It is peaceful here.  Many times I walked this way with Amanda, and last Autumn I brought her here in her wheelchair, no longer able to support her own weight.  I am sad as I watch the world turning, as the cycle of life revolves.  But that is the way it is.  I am not alone.  We will all lose someone, or they will lose us.  There is no other way.

I know that.

But it doesn't make it easier.....

The clouds build up.

And then they will disperse.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

T.S. Eliot

Burnt Norton

And as the darkness intensifies, peace comes dropping slow.  

Take my hand. 

 God is love.

Or maybe, Love is God.....

Visiting Norwich (Naaarj)

 At the still point of the turning world. 

I am in Sainsbury’s.  

Not the store, despite my fond memories of their long-vanished hall in Berkhamsted, where mum would queue from counter to counter, dairy here, meat there, and then file to pay at the desk at the end, where a busy woman added and cashed and said thank you, and everyone was so nice in a post-war kind of way....

No, I am in Lord Robert Sainsbury’s sitting room, or a reconstruction of such, darkened by Francis Bacon, lightened by Degas.  

Robert Sainsbury (1906 - 2000)
 by Francis Bacon

Here, in the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia, I wander under Norman Foster’s roof, bumping into Anish Kapoor, Modigliani and Picasso, wondering where the exit is, and thinking that if this is their drawing room, how could their kitchen be?  Frink in the Frigidaire (who uses that word now?) or Giacometti on the draining board (bit of a stretch there....)?

Head (1997)
John Davies

I am on my way to Norwich, where there is a queue about a quarter of a mile long to get into Norwich Cathedral.  

The line is slow moving, but patient, like the obligatory shuffle passing an extinct dictator.  Some of the file have a tonnage to rival an ocean-going tug, others sail turgidly as if dressed in barrage balloons – and I say this as an impartial observer; no judgement intended.  Children are either asleep in parental clutches, or squawking about being fed treats.  

 

It is a long time since I have seen such a queue for a Cathedral, but this is not to admire the intricate stonework and the bosses of the fan vaulting, 

nor the Hanging Chrismatory, 

nor even the Despenser Reredos, a late 14th century retable by a Norwich artist and thought to have been commissioned by Bishop le Despenser to celebrate his suppression of local support for the Peasants' Revolt in 1381 (but we'll dispense with the context for the moment....)

– no, this is a queue to enter through the cloisters to the nave where “Dippy” is on display.  Please see https://youtu.be/QourkgYSgtA for more on how this a cast of a Diplodocus, one of the largest creatures ever to roam the earth, that lived about 150 million years ago, was assembled, and https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=fKWBeCy5wgu to see how it looks now.

 

Ok, there are positives indeed, such as interesting young people in the natural world, and, possibly, in introducing them to a fine cathedral which they might otherwise have not entered.  But....

 

 

 

Art and artefacts, architecture and archaeology, all things bright and beautiful (did the Lord God really make them all?) The city, one of the five largest settlements in Norman England, and then in the seventeenth century the second richest city in the country (after London), has seen better days.  The splendour of its cathedral (its spire second only to Salisbury), 

the imposing nature of its castle, the scattering of some thirty flinty medieval churches 

amongst its complex of lanes and market places, the curling river Wensum 

and the brutalist sprawl of its university all commend it to the visitor, 

but there is a post-pandemic, perhaps post-Brexit, tiredness about it just now.  

Museums and churches are partly closed, 

the Royal Arcade sports "to let" signs in its windows, 

the Market Place lacks vitality and Tombland is choked with traffic, going nowhere.

 

On the river a couple embrace as their motor boat, blaring what some might call popular music, careers toward the bank.  By the Cow Tower, 

a fifty foot remain of the city’s two miles of defensive walls, families wander past, regardless.

 

There are fossils and remains and reminders of the past everywhere.  A pub called The Wild Man recalls the mysterious appearance in Norwich of Peter the Wild Boy in 1751.  Strangely this is a story connected with my own past as Peter resided for much of his life on Northchurch Common, near where I grew up, and he is buried in the graveyard of St Mary’s there, where my grandfather was organist and choirmaster for many years.

 

Even stranger, perhaps, is that in wandering up Pottergate I bump into another Wild Boy, a local resident who I recognise as also hailing from Hertfordshire.  

This antiquated ruin accosts me for the price of a pint, and together we piece together our histories over beer and sausages.  

[Good to see you, Joe!]

 

 

There are fossils in the cathedral, and ruins in the streets.  The once grand city has its attractions but somehow seems tired and lacklustre.  Is this the state of the United Kingdom as a whole today, or is this merely a blip in the wake of disease and politics?  Over the door of the 13th century chapel of St Catherine of Alexandria, in the south transept of the cathedral, someone has inscribed a line from T S Eliot’s Four Quartets: 

At the still point of the turning world.  

The quotation is from Burnt Norton, and it continues:

Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, 
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance....

 

It’s near midnight. Alcopop shrieks and tiddly giggles fill the street as three girls share something crazy. One dances provocatively, and laughs, the world so light and dark. 

It is Tuesday night in Norwich, and the rest is silence....

Earliest Human Relatives (1994)
from The Origins of Love portfolio (2004)
Hiroshi Sugimoto

....I can only say, there we have been....

 

 

 

 

The Turning World

Poetry walks

Sheep may safely graze on pasture
When the shepherd guards them well.
Where rulers govern well
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy

The Turning World is the title of an anthology of poems complied by D J Brinley in 1968 when he found, as a young teacher, that there was a total lack of suitable textbooks to interest teenagers in poetry.

At my school, poetry was delivered and consumed in a variety of ways.  At an early stage we were made to memorise The Brook,  in Nigel Molesworth fashion (Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes.) 

i come from haunts of coot and hern

i make a sudden sally

and-er-hem-er-hem-the fern

to bicker down a valley….

Down with Skool!  

Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

Though in How to be Topp, Molesworth offers some conciliation to English teachers….

However there are other poems which creep in from time to time there is one which go

Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward

Into the er rode the 600

            There are as well lars porsena of clusium elegy in country churchyard loss of the royal george and chevy chase.  Anything to do with daffodils is also grate favourite of English masters…..

As pupils we were issued with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and I still have my copy – it is in remarkably good condition; rarely used, I think a bookseller might say.

So it was that when I became an English teacher myself, the compilation by Mr Brinley was most welcome (pace Palgrave – I do actually treasure it).  I doubt whether I influenced many young minds, but perhaps some of my pupils found words and rhythms in these pages to amuse or console.  I learned that at times the clarity of D H Lawrence worked well:

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon

Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water

sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Mountain Lion

Thomas Hardy’s Christmas: 1924 gave us something to contemplate:

‘Peace upon earth!’ was said.  We sing it,

And pay a million priests to bring it.

After two thousand years of mass

We’ve got as far as poison-gas.

At the going down of the sun...

And T.S.Eliot’s Preludes always led to sparks of creativity:

The winter evening settles down

With smells of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days….

Red Kite hunting

I did not know it then, but it was Eliot, rehearsing the word burnt, that gave my text-book its name.  In Burnt Norton, the first of  his Four Quartets, written in 1935, he wrote:

At the still point of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement…..

Kestrel hunting

One time the world hangs still is the depth of winter, the short days of Christmas in the north, when time seems to stall, and days hardly get off the ground.  There is a sense, just after Christmas, that things have come to a halt; the excesses of the celebrations merge with the darkness and the world seems stuck.  Then, almost suddenly, into the New Year, and days seem to lengthen, the birds seem to sing; the air is more alive…..  Eliot’s theme of air blends with the wood smoke of Burnt Norton’s winter fires, and the dance begins again…..

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always –

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

Peotry (sic) perhaps has had its day – the young, no longer in one another’s arms (though very much online), may not have the time to decipher the codes of learned bards, but the art of composing words into shapes and lines is not yet dead.

There is a green hill....

Wordsworth gave good advice, in Up! Up! My Friend!

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:-

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

O still, small voice of calm

So we walk in the turning world, watching birds making the most of air. Winter has not yet done its worst, perhaps, and fortune smiles for a day or two.  While earnest poets compete this weekend for the Poetry Book Society T S Eliot Prize, this year, the fiftieth anniversary of Eliot’s death, amounting to £20,000 for the winner and £1,500 for each of the ten short-listed competitors, we look for poetry in the landscape and wildlife around us.  

Though it is 98 years since the death of Edward Thomas, his words are still alive:

But these things also are Spring’s –

On banks by the roadside the grass

Long-dead that is greyer now

Than all the Winter it was….

While the North blows, and starling flocks

By chattering on and on

Keep their spirits up in the mist,

And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.

But These Things Also

The countryside is full of life, and death.  I watch the birds of prey as they scan the fields for voles, unsuspecting lives to take.  

Kestrel hovering

I watch the blackbird as he cleans his beak from wormy residues.  

We scatter flocks of starlings, 

goldfinches, 

fieldfare.  

Larks rise up in alarm, twitter and flit, then fall again to earth.  

Skylark

Pigeons strip the new shoots from the crops; 

Woodpigeon en masse

crows grasp and stab all things they can.  

In the air, flights criss and cross, from late late dawn to early dusk.  The greatest gift, perhaps, is that life goes on.

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die.

Burnt Norton

Just as we turned for home, I caught a sequence of aerial combat that could have shown real feathers flying, but which, as if to show us how, ended in peace.

Buzzard to Base, tumbleweed, OK?

Bandit on tail

Check six

Locking on, BFM

Dive dive dive

Holding hands?

OK Kestrel, RTB

B-LOC, Bingo

A final image from these walks is these two lovebirds.  Spring is in the air! And poetry is love.....

Jack and Jill Daw

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time

Burnt Norton

T S Eliot

However, the final final last word must be Nigel Molesworth's, as he reads to the class from The Burial Sir of Sir John Moore Sir at Corunna Sir (A titter from 2B they are wet and i will tuough them up after.)

Notadrumwasheardnotafuneralnote

shut up peason larffing

As his corse

As his corse

what is a corse sir? gosh is it

to the rampart we carried

(whisper you did not kno your voice was so lovely)

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot.

PING!

Shut up peason i know sir he's blowing peas at me

Oer the grave where our hero was buried.

(A pause a grave bow i retire and Egad! peason hav placed a dainty pin upon mine seat. Fie!)