A strange month - and an even stranger past ten days - with only a few
walks away from the Farm, and even fewer visits beyond this village
where I dwell. Today - three months on from Fran's death - there
is the warming Sun between early Autumn showers, and it is good to be
still, again, where the streaming silence of Nature is heard in voice
and song: leaves, breeze moved; flies, seeking warmth and food; birds,
calling; sheep, in the distant field where the two Buzzards hover,
almost playing over the large tree of oak.
For over a month a return to those abstractions that so often held me
in
thrall, despite the rare journey and trek in company that found me
sitting above the sea while small ragged Cumulus clouds grew, upwards,
to move across the horizon, and a Sparrow Hawk, swift, pursued three
small birds, dipping, over bramble and bush, until one died, caught,
that another life might live.
A month, and more, betrayed, as I, in my stupidity and remorse and
weakness and
forgetting and desire for duty, provoked by dishonourable events,
saught to return to one discarded answer. One Hawk pursuing one nexion
of Life. But now, the clouds, here, build, to rise again to cover such
a warming Sun as brings a joy to life; covering, to bring, in a few
hours, the rain, much needed to seed the dry ground with life. Now: so
many numinous moments to remember it is as if the sleep beyond the
brief life we lead desires to claim me when I can recall in smiling
peaceful joy the passing of times shared when love lived as it lives
between two people whose horizon is the limit of their dwelling and
their dreams.
For twenty days, a vacuous striving perhaps stirring suffering,
conflict.
But there was no belief, anymore - only a drab dryness, the inhuman
concealing of that love, that compassion, that empathy, that
understanding so painfully, so remorsefully gained. Yet there was a
desire to believe; a hope of belief that kept me there, day after day,
sometimes writing. But it was only one forgetting -
ten days, then another ten days, then another ten days long. Why? No
God, Allah, no Angels,
no lover, to oversee,
castigate, remind. Only the memory of the past days, weeks, months;
only the struggle during those ten days to seek the warmth of Nature
and of Sun. But now, by sea, Sun, dreams, moments remembered, I am
rescued; returned: he was no longer me, never could be me, again, for
there is, in Nature, no straight, perfect, abstract line, only the
growing that grows, turning, as it grows in its own way, its own slow
Time.
The trap was mine, and I fell into it: the trap of duty, of forgetting
suffering caused or nascent in the illusive striving to redeem; in the
striving to strive to right some perceived wrong, in the striving born
of desire to be more than a man, waiting, half-dead from grief, content
with field, Farm, bereavement, the darker days as Summer cooled to
change to Autumn's cloudful rain. There is - was - no excuse: the
failure, the weakness, the forgetting, was, and is, mine. And so, I ask
again: how shall I never forget, again?
Now, I shall walk to where Summer's long heat has dried the pond -
there, where the Willows gather round to shade a man who has slept so
many moments in peaceful dreams while the Church bells, two miles
distant from the meadows, tolled as they toll, each Sunday, decade upon
century, here in this English land I love. Would that she were here to
greet me, to share such rebirth as this humbled man walks joyfully back
toward compassion...
How can I never forget, again?
DW Myatt
The Sun of
Mid-September