Cherry tree

I’ve been wanting to dedicate a whole post to my cherry tree but couldn’t justify it. When commenting on other people’s blogs, I have fewer inhibitions, as in this, to Michael Peverett, re his post “Prunus continued”:

“. . . I was interested in your prunus pictures because I bought a small fruiting cherry tree and planted it recently. I don’t know whether it will produce cherries though. It has pretty white single flowers. To me the wonder of it is to plant my own tree which will outgrow and outlive me, and provide a perch for birds. Since I planted it in February, I have stood next to it almost daily, to examine its buds.

“Sorry to be mystical but it feels as though it has a greater wisdom than its human observer. As its leaves and blossoms unfold, it fulfils itself perfectly, with a perfection that I can only perceive with its, and the rest of Nature’s, help.”

After writing that, I went into Woolworth’s looking for plant pots. Some pop music blared and the shop was warm, deprived of natural lighting, stuffed with spuriously ornamented merchandise. Amongst all this were some cherry trees packaged in cellophane, still for sale. I looked through the beads of condensation to the branches inside. They longed to put forth seasonal leaves and blossoms, but in such conditions these had decomposed to black slime. Carl Rogers had seen something comparable which inspired him to found a school of psychotherapy. In his own words:

“I remember that in my boyhood the potato bin in which we stored our winter supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small basement window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout---pale white sprouts so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring. But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow two or three feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. They were, in their bizarre futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing. They would never become a plant, never mature, never fulfill their real potentiality. But under the most adverse circumstances they were striving to become. Life would not give up even if it could not flourish. In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped, in working with men and women on the back wards of state hospitals, I often think of those potato sprouts. So unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people have developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet the directional tendency in them is to be trusted.”

In the news, we hear of the man who kept his daughter in a cellar for 24 years.

As Hayden writes: “kindness practised in consideration of the welfare of a bumble bee helps acclimatize the human heart to the practice of compassion and kindness to fellow humans.

“At the root of this will-to-good is connectedness, which it appears we once had in abundance. In many cultures throughout the world man saw himself as brother to crow, to wolf. My Christian readers may forgive me for the observation that, in the west, the heart of the disconnect was excused by the religious teaching that nature and man were distinct, separable, and nature was to be used for man’s ease.
. . .
“The other disruptor was that other western god, Science, which feeds off hubris and, while telling us we are inseparable with nature and cannot live alone, contradictorily is continually pushing us towards the attempt to do so.”

Both science and religions insist that we need their insights. We see the results. A child in rural Jamaica had its own chicken to look after, or a goat if older. Then came the battery farms, and the bauxite company to take the land. And now the biofuel interests to take what’s left.

The cherry tree and the bumble bee know how to be connected.

And when I think of those cherry trees languishing in Woolworth’s, missing the springtime, it reminds me of a story by Ghetufool (his blog is no longer public otherwise I could link you to it), which tells of a sparrow trapped in an office block. Here’s a short extract:

“It had given up its struggle and just looked intently through the window, where a flock of sparrows twittered in the darkened sky. This district was virtually treeless, as if nature were a just a memory. But there was still romance. It was the sparrows’ mating season.”

Will the man watching understand that he too is trapped, in a web of his own making?

I had planned to write a much harder piece, to try and convey the sense of pathos I felt walking through the town, seeing the faces of . . . I cannot call them “the poor”. It would imply that money would replace what they lacked, when such is not the case.

Every cherry tree has the wisdom to blossom forth in spring if it is not trapped in a close dark place.

Brain damage

Please don’t imagine that the barrenness of these pages lately means that I have not been thinking of you. On the contrary. Though afflicted by a species of writer’s block, I’m not bereft of thoughts and inspirations, and each day scribble them: in Word, on voice recorder, in the black notebook, and failing those, they may still be inscribed on the Akashic Records. Or perhaps they are borrowed from the Akashic Records as from a lending library. They come fast, they sparkle, they astonish with their beauty; and cannot be captured.

We are of course at the mercy of our bodies. A neurologist might tell me it’s a mild abnormality to have these brainstorms of excited creativity, where experience is exquisite but nothing is left in terms of action to show for it. Brain doctors at least from the time of William James have been ascribing the varieties of religious experience to medical conditions. Hildegard of Bingen’s graphic art has been seen as evidence of migraine. Shostakovich got his tunes from a piece of shrapnel lodged in his brain. When he turned his head a little, the music would play: he was just the arranger, not the original composer. Does this diminish anything, to have these explanations? Not at all. Does it mean that I might like Timothy Leary take LSD for my Eucharist? No, he might have used Acid as his holy wafer and wine but I prefer to be intoxicated on life, specifically fresh air. I could not have asked for better when I drank from the spring (that we called the Wishing Well) as a child. For the essence of religion is to be universal, open to all, at least as I conceive it in its ideal purity. There’s a contrary element that tries to make it exclusive, as we can easily observe: sometimes by a racial or local selectivity, sometimes simply by the filter of belief. Leaving aside the forms of fundamentalism, which seem to obsess Americans (I’m not denying they have good reason), I think for example of Rastafarianism. From a distance I am very fond of it: comes from Jamaica, same as my beloved; dreadlocks are pretty, though I couldn’t grow ’em myself, being a white man with thinning grey hair; involves the smoking of ganja, which I can’t be bothered with, especially the illegality; is full of “reasoning” which means hanging out instructing one another on the wonder of it all. But then there is one huge central belief, which strikes me as laughable: that the late Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, a most unRastafarian type of personage (apart from one of his titles, which was Ras Tafari) was actually God Incarnate. Is, I should say, because he never died. Credo quia impossibile, indeed.

Yesterday, you see, I walked out for half an hour, on a mission to buy an oilstone to sharpen my chisel to make a mortise and hinge-recesses to fit a door. The fresh air hit my senses and brain and spirit in such a manner as in the first few seconds to vouchsafe a stunning revelation, enough to change a life: my own or the entire planet’s. But sometimes the most immense thoughts, I find, are the most easily forgotten. Anyhow, I went into the ironmonger’s which is actually the best toolshop in England, and came out with a new chisel as well, for the old one was fit only for opening tins of paint. As soon as I got home, I hastened to write my thought. I hadn’t forgotten it, but it seemed of equal value to another theme I had developed on my brief outing: the relative beauty of young women of different races, about which I have well-formed views. Yes, it’s a fascinating topic. Even now, it draws me like a magnet, and I could expatiate on the confluence of spiritual and physical charms amongst the ----. Enough. Oh, it’s hard to be a philosopher!

Let me try. Stepping out, sniffing the sharp pure elixir of fresh air, viewing the clarity of day, whose light illuminated every brick---and yes, every young woman’s face and body---I wondered how it was that certain kinds of abstraction are given such high value that they are labelled Truth. Certainly a long complex educational process is required to batter a child’s brain so that he grows up to be a scientist. Some of course grow to it naturally, but not enough to satisfy the policy-makers. “More scientists!” they cry, like a co-ordinator of ritual sacrifice from the top of an Aztec sacrifice-pyramid. Oh well, give a child an electronic game: he will prefer to look at illuminated screens than at the miracle of daylight.

Science explains things. It produces the most effective witch-doctors. The radio tells me about spinal cord injuries. Child falls off bike, is paralysed for life. You could take a child to Lourdes, bathe it in the holy waters, but it won’t walk again, because scientists know that God can’t sew that spinal cord back together. Only scientists can, except that they can’t yet: not till I donate to some charity (they imply) so they can do the research which may take a long time because it is difficult even for a scientist but at least the child will have Hope and that is more than religion can offer.

So this has crystallized my own sense of purpose. In this world the truth most worshipped is the truth which gives most power: over material things like science or over man’s mind like religion, including the atheist kinds. But in my world, what I most worship is the fleeting wisdom of fresh air, the infinite miracle of daylight, the appreciation of being still alive.
-----

* Painting by Anne Adams, an ex-scientist who became afflicted with a partial dementia which has affected her verbal powers, both speech and understanding speech.

Stories of animal sagacity

As a child I read Stories of Animal Sagacity, a set of Victorian anecdotes by William Henry Giles Kingston. I didn’t remember his name of course: the World-Wide Web, bless it, has the full text in facsimile and OCR transcription, with the illustrations reproduced too. Sagacity is a lovely word: it was many years till I came across it again.

Oh yes, animals are cute and pets especially exploit it, though it’s wildlife I admire most, for surviving on their own without the dubious blessing of a human brain. Our neighbourhood black cat is somewhere on the borderline of wild or tame. No one knows who “owns” it, though everyone assumes that someone does. Our next-door neighbours let it into their house sometimes. I see them do it: our kitchens face one another across a five-foot fence on which it perches, pleading into their windows with its big eyes.

I used to let it in too sometimes, till it discovered how to leap through an open window, or slink through an open door uninvited. Then I tried to teach it morality, i.e. the difference between graciously accepting an invitation and being a cat-burglar. I had to give up. Deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation---nothing worked. I tried waving a stick and spraying water; it reluctantly fled but its big eyes were accusing: “You are temporarily deranged, but you can’t fool me. You are kind really.”

My neighbours have admitted to occasionally feeding it and letting it sleep on their bed at night. That sounds to me like ownership, I mean its ownership of them.

They are at work all day, but periodically it comes to sit on the fence looking in. It knows I am in too but has given up expecting me to offer hospitality. I see it in the streets too, ours and the one at the back. It roams everywhere, preoccupied, purposeful, living on its wits. I’ve seen it limping lately, not wanting to put down its left front paw. I tried to examine it and it bit me lightly when I touched the spot. I was ready to play Androcles but could see no thorn, only a lacerated foot-pad. That’s when a cat really wants an owner, for it can hardly pay its own vet’s bills.

It was in its spot on the fence when I went to the backyard, so I stroked it and the neighbour came out. He said, “Do you know there are two black cats? We found out yesterday morning. It was sleeping on our bed and when we looked out the window it was on the fence too.”

All my careful cat-conditioning---pretending to be a psychopath to deter it from ever sneaking into our house, or trying to teach it morality---had been based on the axiom that there was one cat, who would learn over time. I’d also prided myself on distinguishing the personality of one cat from another, based on their different life-experience and/or different DNA. Could I believe a tale of two black cats with the same pattern of behaviour? Perhaps they were from the same litter, identical twins.

Last night at dusk I heard a squeal of rage and pain. I ran out in time to see two black cats on that favoured piece of fence which gives a view into the kitchens of both houses. It’s a narrow wobbly perch to you and me, but a privileged begging-spot for a cat with big eyes. The fight was furious till one of them fled with a torn ear: whether that was the one with the wounded paw I could not tell.

Is there a God who looks down on man as bewilderedly as I do, looking down upon these interchangeable cats?

Something of the Night

To one who follows his nose as a general principle of life, especially to seek inspiration, it matters when and where the ideas come. Most of the pieces in this blog have been conceived under the sky, preferably walking. “Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about,” wrote Nietzsche.

When not wayfaring I may flirt with the Night, that realm of fancy, irreconcilable with daytime brightness and clarity: till Reason sews up Days and Nights together in the patchwork chequer-board of life and rolls them into the scrolled archive of Time. When Reason’s away, primal impulses play. In dreams’ unfettered playground, no daytime rules apply. To an optimist, worshipper of Day, dreams are no more than a crop to be harvested, distilled perhaps to medicine for improving noonday health. Such a one may snatch dream-narratives by the nightshirt before they flee; then launders and irons the torn-off fragment, to play with it as a puzzle-piece: where does it fit to daytime understanding? Such an optimist ignores an array of vast unremembered sagas, too disjointed and evanescent to survive the sceptical light of day. Few are those who heed them, and drain to the dregs their fantastical atmospheres.

What if sleep shrinks from us and we lie too tired to get up but unable to melt into that shadowy land? Then our lucubrations are disordered in a different way, presenting problems without solutions: the state we call worry. The loose ends of day-life---debts unpaid, slanders unanswered, fears unresolved, the world’s future---bully us in the night; fuelled I suppose by nocturnal brain-chemicals. And so it should be: for the night is no time to act---only to reflect.

I snatched a fragment of dream and tore it away from other phantasmagoria. I was in the House of Commons, a windowless cavern of sophistry, in the small hours. The normal Parliamentary session was over. Members were lolling about in little cliques and I passed a row of Tory Opposition spokesmen, recognizing them vaguely and giving them a cheeky smile, knowing they would not recognize me. Politicians love a challenge and my smile threw down the gauntlet. “We’ll see about that!” they responded, smiling back enigmatically. ---Which put me on the defensive. I managed to find a dark corridor in the middle of the Chamber, a kind of tunnel or cook’s galley, and hid safe there, congratulating myself.

This notion of smile as a weapon arose from an incident the other day in a narrow alley, leading from a dead-end street, a cul-de-sac of decaying factories, broken tarmac and refuse. I suppose I was scowling, for my face falls into it naturally, belying the cheerful soul inside. The rest of my life has been transformed, only the surface still betrays history. A belligerent-looking man approached from the other direction and seemed to take it personally. This was despite (or because of?) my declining to look him in the eye as he drew near. He yelled a remark at the moment of passing. We didn’t slow our pace, so there was no time to “refute him point by point” as P G Wodehouse would have expressed it. I yelled back “Yay!”: a little proud of my repartee.

Margaret Thatcher

It was a “wake-up call”. As women know better than men, change your face to change your life. A man is more stubborn and it took the dream to show me the way. Since then, I’ve been secretly composing my face into a smile, practising in private. When the sun shines in my eyes or the cold rain runs down my cheeks, my face screws up unprompted.

Ann Widdecombe

All I need do is obey the dream’s prompting and adopt this rictus unprompted.

What is it about Tory politicians? Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister hardly used to sleep. And this:

“Something of the night

. . .

Michael Howard

“Michael Howard, once Britain's home minister and now [in 2003] leader of the Conservative Party, had a phrase hung around his neck six years ago that he cannot shake. A Tory rival, Ann Widdecombe, who served as his prisons minister at a time when crime declined markedly under Howard's hard-line policy, said in 1997 that there was ‘something of the night in his personality.’

. . .

“Whence the phrase? In 1900, the literary critic Lewis E. Gates wrote that the novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne ‘had in fact something of the night in his disposition . . . a suggestion of the discolored temperateness of night.’ John Baker, a Washington lawyer, found this citation from Henri Frederic Amiel’s ‘Intimate Journal,’ published about 1886: ‘The relation of thought to action filled my mind on waking, and I found myself carried toward a bizarre formula, which seems to have something of the night still clinging about it.’”

Source: Taipei Times

Night breaks the links of Reason. What we call sanity is nothing but daylight. No wonder sleeping pills are popular to buy oblivion from the insistent voices of darkness. What happens when our day-world itself, under the sun, becomes a nightmare? For example when “Science” tells us what to think, how to populate the secret vault of poetic imagination? Professor Evans, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for medicine, goes public with an impassioned plea for the cultivation of embryo monsters (“legendary animals combining features of animal and human form”): “Please look at the evidence. Don’t immediately go for the knee-jerk reaction mainly powered by the ‘yuck’ factor,” says the Professor. Well, I wish the “yuck” factor could halt his research, just as it prevents most of the world from eating babies and other horrors.

Postscript:

I did not know how to end this piece, mainly because the night ran out and much of it was drafted in daylight. So I waited till the next night. I woke at 4 and lay quietly until the blackbirds started their pre-dawn chorus, echoing from the chimney-tops. My dreams retreated into their dark corners, and of all things I started to worry about 2012. The Olympic Games in London, only 30 miles away! A great festival of security, hype, politics and terrorist attempts. A looming catastrophe, with no sane purpose, a symbol of all that’s wrong in the world. Could it not be cancelled, in the name of sanity?

Dawn is lighting up the sky and these thoughts will soon disperse, as surely as day follows night.

PPS: The above post is not about politics!

How to be radical

Outside the supermarket a three-year-old boy was expressing his distress in voice and reddened face. Solicitous, his mother bent down to him. No doubt he had wanted something in the shop and been denied it. He looked like me at that age and in a flash I recalled how I used to behave: a lot worse. My rage was not about wanting the thing, which tended to be arbitrary or even inappropriate for a small child. My mother should want to please me: that was the real issue, and it was never resolved because she had no maternal feelings, well some only: she did want to be proud of me and not ashamed. So I had a very definite sense of lack, that remained stable so long as I was at home or boarding school, places where life is ritualised routine. At university it took a while to find a niche, a few good friends. Then that ended and I lost touch with them all, and the world was an uncharted desert, and I was unnerved.

I do have a very definite purpose in life, even when I don’t know what it is, which is most of the time really. Well, all the time. I mean my purpose is instinctive and it has been constant, though obviously I was unable to express it at the age of three. The tantrums were not surprising. I have to follow my nose, like a dog suddenly unleashed. On Sunday morning we had a good snowfall and I had to go and walk out in it, saying to myself “Where is a grandchild when you need one? We could build a snowman, go tobogganing.” But the nearest grandchild was 35 miles away and the snow would melt by afternoon. So I walked in it and when I took the public footpaths that criss-cross the hillside, going behind back-gardens and in between old factories, I did manage to get lost which was nice, for the usual landmarks were altered. But I was listening to the altered sounds most of all: not just the crunch of snow under my boots, but a certain hush, for the snow deadens sound. The effect was not as noticeable as I remembered but today as I set out in sunshine, I listened to the ambience with no expectations, which is the only sensible way, and I realised that this---savouring the underlying hush behind all sound to taste its attributes---is a way to get beyond the normal consciousness to another dimension co-existent with the ordinary ones. Beyond that, I don’t have words for it.

Actually, over the last couple of weeks my study is littered with scraps of half-written ideas: in my notebook, on tapes, in “My documents”. We still use the old iconic notions like "tapes". They are not tapes these days, but digital voice recordings that I can copy on to the hard disc. Just as we use the old dial telephone as an icon, though ’phones don’t look like that any more, we still visualize the writer loading blank sheets into his typewriter, or pulling out abandoned sheets from the platen, crumpling them and flinging them into a full basket with the other sheets. Sadly the computer is less physical: its “desktop” isn’t one. And I think of Hank Bukowski whose childhood was as peculiar as mine and whose “typer” was his faithful friend:

"I can hear you typing at night," says
my neighbor.

"oh, I'm sorry."

"no," he says, "it's a pleasant sound..."

he's right, it is.
and when I don't cause that sound for
two or three days
I become fitful
my face gets an unhealthy sag, and--
you must believe me--
I have visions of the way that
I will die.

when typing I'm
immortal.

well, maybe not immortal.
but habitually
this old typewriter and
this old man
live well together.

For manuscript facsimile of whole poem click here.

So anyway yesterday I went on another bus ride and I nearly lost my nerve on the way. When you have time to follow your nose and listen to the sound of silence you can easily fall into the illusion that you have gone mad. Perhaps this is the reason that most people unconsciously seek structure in their lives and social contact. And perhaps the reason people keep company, good or bad, is to get feedback that they are not insane loners or losers, which is fair enough but I have paid my dues to that and am grown-up now, and it’s only occasionally that everything seeps away, like there on the bus.

I was looking for a junk shop to get ideas for my latest construction project or perhaps even parts I could use for it. Never mind what the project is, and anyway, it was a vague excuse for a purpose. I went to the antique shop where I’d been a couple of times before. They always put a few bits of furniture out the front. I liked the new sign above the windows: “Curios”. But it was unfamiliar when I went in and I asked the man. “Oh, yes,” he said, “You were expecting more? But the next-door shop has taken over half the space and so the previous owner moved out and we’ve taken over.” Yes, it was true, there were hastily-erected partitions so that you could not wander into lots of nooks like before. There were only a few books left: I wondered where the other ones had gone. It was a little disorienting, so I thanked the man and left. It was sad to have found a wonderful curiosity shop, only to come back two weeks later and find it much changed. Continuing down the street for twenty yards I saw another set of furniture outside another shop. I walked in. A miracle! It was the shop I was actually looking for, the one I had thought I was in two minutes earlier. No walls had been moved, the merchandise, including those books, was all in its familiar place. But there was a fat man in the books section, wide in the middle like a spinning-top, looking at the music CDs, muttering to himself, emanating a faint odour. I pretended to look at other things for ten minutes till he left the space free. Then I found the treasure which justified my entire outing, including that time on the bus when I had briefly felt unnerved with a nausea like Jean-Paul Sartre’s character Antoine Roquentin in the novel of that name, I mean La Nausée. The treasure? Prefaces by Bernard Shaw, first edition, 1934.

A most imposing volume: big, good paper, nicely bound. And when I started to read it properly on the bus home, it fulfilled intellectually the promise of its physicality. Like meeting a woman with beauty of spirit as well as body. Like my Bible, I love to hold it in my hand, turn its pages, consult it randomly. Unlike my Bible, it is witty, wry, delightful; it engages the modern mind, it has relevance. Some of the pieces were written a hundred years ago, which is still in my grandparents’ lifetime: a good place to get perspective on today’s world.

Bukowski and George Bernard Shaw: you wouldn’t think of them in the same breath but I do. Both radical critics of society, rooting out prejudice and lazy mind, holding nothing sacred except the truly sacred. Serious writers, as I too cannot help but be.

PS George Bernard Shaw has a special place in my life. I have hardly read anything by him till now, but the news of his death created a snapshot memory. I know exactly where I was when I heard of his death, though I was eight years old at the time. It was announced on the radio and meant nothing to me of course, but a lot to my stepfather (whom I call Kenneth in these memoirs) though he was not a literary man. He shared some of GBS's views, for example that most of medicine was quackery. Nature cure was the thing.

The constant spring

Sunday morning: I’ve taken my writing-book out to the backyard, where I can sit on this bench and be warmed like a lizard for the first day this year. Surely Spring has arrived!

The yard is so tiny, the fences so high, that in winter the sun never reaches the ground: the best it can do is light up the fence, or the washing when I peg it out on the line and lift it with the prop. Then like a schooner in full sail it catches any breeze. The grass has been mossy and waterlogged for lack of sunlight. In February I bought a small cherry tree, hoping in a few years, even at the Winter Solstice, it would reach up and catch the feeblest rays. Today it still stands in shade, being, at five feet, shorter than I. Most days we stand side by side, for I go to inspect its buds, imperceptibly swelling but still not burst open. The garden has few other features. My gaze goes past the washing, through still-bare neighbouring trees, to the sky, this yard’s most precious element, today a glorious blue.

I hear a rush and gurgle, like a mountain stream. It reminds me of the spring near my grandmother’s house, housed in a sandstone grotto. The water flowed from a granite lion’s mouth into a granite bowl and overflowed to a gravel floor where ferns grew. We always drank with cupped hands from the lion’s mouth, not the bowl. Then we kept silent till we went up the hill to the Wishing Tree and walked round it three times. Perhaps our wishes were fulfilled but I’ve forgotten mine. Today’s rush and gurgle is bathwater sluicing down the outside drain. When it stops, my ears are tuned to the Sunday morning hush, a blest ambience in which friendly sounds are carried: the drone of a bee, the murmurs of conversations, birdsong, faint cries in the distance, children’s excited footsteps up an alley, somewhere a radio. At a tangent, I think of Richard Feynman’s childhood in Far Rockaway---the very name evokes that blessed place:

“On foot or on their bicycles, Far Rockaway’s children had free run of a self-contained world: ivy-covered houses, fields, and vacant lots. No one has yet isolated the circumstances that help a child grow whole and independent, but they were present. ... In Far Rockaway boys and girls still percolated through the neighborhood and established their own paths through backyards and empty lots behind the houses and streets.”

This is from James Gleick’s biography, Genius. It was that distant radio that put me in mind of Feynman, that and backyards and children playing. For he gained a special reputation in his Far Rockaway childhood: “He fixes radios by thinking!” *

Here in my backyard, something glints on a fence-post: it’s resin oozed from a knot in the wood, that reflects the sun like a cluster of tiny topaz. A large yellow butterfly, a Brimstone, flutters over the fence and back again, a couple of times. I’m glad this solid high fence (I wish it were lower and less solid) doesn’t keep out wild visitors. The butterfly’s coming-and-going reminds me of something: a haiku! the first one I ever heard. The words escape me but I see an image retained for fifty years: a butterfly going up and down, back and forth, along a row of crops, like a seamstress sewing a hem. I know it’s not my imagination, for I see the context: a classroom, my English teacher, the Rev. Robert Bowyer. We are doing Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. I don’t see the connection but he suddenly recites us this haiku and enthuses about it.

Today I go indoors to search on Google for the actual words, lost through the sieve of memory. An article from Time Magazine comes up. The date corresponds accurately to that point in my school career, that classroom, that teacher. I was sixteen:

“Haiku Is Here
“Monday, Feb. 02, 1959

“Up the barley rows, stitching, stitching them together, a butterfly goes.---Sora (1648-1710)

“In the U.S., poetry reading is left mostly to poets -and there are not many poets around. Magazines devoted exclusively to verse are frail, poverty-stricken, ephemeral publishing ventures, subject to sudden collapse; Poetry, largest (5,500 subscribers) of about ten U.S. poetry magazines, must beg constantly to stay alive. In book circles, the sale of 5,000 copies of a volume of poetry is considered unusually brisk. Yet by last week An Introduction to Haiku, a book on one form of Japanese poetry released two months ago by Doubleday, had sold 9,500 copies and was still going strong.”

And so it goes on, before finishing with:

“Above all, Henderson’s patient translations (one took him 25 years) capture, unimpaired, the evanescent haiku spirit, which has enchanted Japan for untold centuries:

“There a beggar goes!

“Heaven and earth he’s wearing for his summer clothes.---Kikaku (1661-1707)”


You can read the rest here.

Dear departed Rev. Bowyer! Born too early for the World-Wide Web, he still had Time.

My backyard is linked to the world, is part of the world, contains the world. Including the past? Ah, it is gone. Nothing is left but remembrance. As in these Notes. As in the Web. Life is precious and slips through our fingers like the water from a constant spring.

- - -

* Title of a chapter in Feynman’s book of reminiscences: Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman: adventures of a curious character