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TWENTY FIVE

[the illustration of the Tibetan letter is not included in this text]

The only language I know of (though there are surely many others) which formally

acknowledges sound as enshrined in a kingdom of its own is Tibetan, which also, although not an

ideographic language, takes the physical process of writing seriously so much so that I can tellyou who wrote the syllable with which this section starts, since that information is included with it

in the book from which Ive reproduced it:

The letter A on the cover of this book was written by the Venerable Kalu Rinpoche. Thisletter symbolizes the uncreated, utterly pure expanse of the Void (Dharmadhatu) and itssound is the basis of the sounds of all the others.

For a Tibetan, at least in theory, the griefs and joys of individual human lives, and theindividualised meanings of the terms of the sacred language itself, are written (though carefully

written) in invisible ink on the void; and sound, though it may lend itself for the purposes ofmeaning to be segmented and varied and twisted into patterns, is never other than lent and seeks

always by repetition, the incessant repetition of prayer formulae for instance, to remind us that its

true place and function is to be void of all these griefs and joys and meanings.

I find that my heart clings to individuals, to their separate reality, so much that Imnot willing to be a Buddhist. I find that I want to defy the void; but that Im glad its there to be

defied. I find that to think of human language as an act of defiance

That in black ink my love may still shine bright-

causes one to value it differently. - a time will come (as perhaps it has almost come with Welsh)when the language I am writing now, the shapes and sounds it has known and found to have

meaning, will have utterly disappeared from human view. The particular complicated marriage

between sound and human meaning which constituted the English language will be unrepeatable.And yet I am not a Buddhist; I dont think (or want to think, which is the same thing perhaps) that

that particular specialisation of sound that existed in English was illusory and meaningless.- If I

did, this might be a way, curiously, of finding myself back with the linguistic theorists who think of

the sounds of words as arbitrary: except, of course, that to say the sounds are arbitrary and of noimportance (linguist) is actually very different from saying the sounds are arbitrary and sound

symbolises final importance (Buddhist).

The importance and the independence of sound I feel to be undeniable. But I feel,too, that when approached by a human mind and invited to the act called language it truly discovers

things about itself that partly acknowledge the intention of the mind that stirred it but also partly are

themselves and require of that stirring mind in its turn acknowledgement. So openness to theunexpected is required on both sides; as it is between friends who are close in understanding and

who connive together in understanding, but who are also pleased to discover difference,

strangeness. - Or let me say it is like the handful of mud and water that made my body: Im sure

the slime was surprised, as I was, to discover that we could walk, and when it is slime again willtreasure that memory, along with other less conniving slimy experiences it is perhaps the Christian

doctrine of the resurrection of the body which most clearly asserts that the memory of a human

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individual is indelibly stamped on the slime, even as Alexander passes through the guts of a beggar

or stops a hole in a wall.

All this is not a theory, or a position. It is more a determined holding in the arena ofall the things I want to be so, no matter how much they make faces at each other, or growl. -

Keeping the peace between them may today mean I must argue in one way, tomorrow in another.

And I may discover something else I want to be there as well, and have to find room for it. - Andstill there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy; so I hope that

by my showing my working (like children doing arithmetic) rather than any presenting of

conclusions, your dreams may find some point of connivance with mine.

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Jacobs ladder:

he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so heopeneth not his mouth.

The lamb must yield to slaughter, not only the animal to the deed but the word to the word, and tothe suffering man. But this slaughter is not of the kind to produce lamb chops, as you can tell by the

formality with which slaughter moves in its part, accompanied by its definite article, conferring

dignity on what is associated with it:

There is no flock, however watched and tended,But one dead lamb is there!

There is no fireside, howsoeer defended,But has one vacant chair!

The light is dimmer here, I think, but the poet is aware that there are other places that word has been

in:

As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

And what a ludicrously trivial thing to be hanged for in any case, an assemblage of tasty chops, no

more. - I very much doubt whether the self-reflective text could ever recover from the butchers

slab; too conscious of its dignity; but about the shabby words that knock around in the language,available for many purposes, there is an enormous power of regeneration, the constantly present

possibility of being new-born out of the womb and in the embrace of the old.

* * * * *

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TWENTY SEVEN

The difference between words and music as language is that music, unlike words, isnot paraphrasable. - This is commonly said, but Im not sure how far the difference will survive

contemplation, or in what form. The gap can be narrowed by proceeding in two opposed directions;

towards a feeling that this verbal assembly, whatever it may be, is unique and cannot be changedwithout vital loss, so that any reordering of it into other words will have less life, or a different life;

and towards a feeling that in this piece of music there is a strivingto express something, a series ofrepeated attempts, an accumulation round a common core, so that one attempt in sound isreplaceable by another.

A musical sound is perhaps more nearly the thing itself than a word: in its natural

state, as it were. A perfect fifth is a house with only a few rather small rooms inside, a house

consisting mostly of its own outer walls, and so very quickly filled with significance, whose flavouris likely only to be rather marginally affected by the neighbours and the same goes for a horrid

sound, a diminished fifth. - And can it be said that the very unwillingness of a musical sound to be

much other than itself accounts for the extraordinary suggestiveness of a large group of musical

sounds, a symphony or a concerto? The imagination of the hearer very soon tires of sitting docilelyin these small rooms and begins sitting on the roof instead, or climbing the chimney for a better

view of who knows what country.The composer may have had some country in his mind, but he has chosen a means of

communication that stops its ears to his precise demands of it or perhaps he has chosen this means

because he had no precise enough demand to make, no clear sense of the country too far beyond

his furthest view. And indeed music which seems to set out to paint a fairly precise scene, or toconvey a fairly definable emotion, always has about it a sense that it isnt functioning in a fully

musical sense, with full freedom. - When music is itself, then its limitations offer themselves for

constant transgression, the imagination of composer, player and hearer flooding out beyond themand meeting together in a friendly unwillingness to define what it is that must be meant.

There can be a similar generosity about language when it is extremely simply used:

And when queen Guenever understood that king Arthur was slain, and all the noble knights,Sir Mordred and all the remnant, then the queen stole away, and five ladies with her, and soshe went to Almesbury, and there she let make herself a nun, and wore white clothes andblack, and great penance she took, as ever did sinful lady in this land, and never creaturecould make her merry, but lived in fasting, prayers, and alms-deeds, that all manner ofpeople marvelled how virtuously she was changed.

There is a simplicity not unlike that of music here, not only of language but of life

and deed. The queen becomes a nun when her king is slain and his noble knights; she wore white

and black, and did penance for her sin, and so became a queen in virtue where before she was queenin Camelot.

If this were a novel by George Eliot instead of a story by Malory, then words like sin

and virtue, or states of life that seemed simple, would very likely be vast houses, full of unexpectedcorridors, or (like the castle I spend part of my life in) with whole staircases under the floorboards.

A guide would be needed so that the reader would not be lost in the complexity of possibility

consciously offered. - The house would be big inside, certainly, but there would be no getting away

from the guide; and getting out on to the roof would be very much frowned on.If I ask myself why, of all the Arthurian romances of the European Middle Ages, it is

Malory in English which has survived as still alive, then the answer may have to do with Malorys

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simplicity. With a tale forsooth he cometh unto you, just a story of what happened, no elaborate

interpretation, no attempt at saying what it all might ultimately mean but the events, and the

words, suggestive beyond and because of their own limited boundaries. And what is suggestive canjump like a spark from mind to mind where the heavier traffic needs pretty good roads.

Perhaps, like Cobbett, Im against turnpike roads. For the moment, at any rate, I am;

and am aware that even heavy traffic will not arrive in the condition in which it was despatched, oraffect the receiver exactly as it did the sender. - Of course I might be glad to find a stretch of

turnpike late at night, and in the rain, even though it had been laid down by the tax-eating critics.

* * * * *

TWENTY EIGHT

The supposition that education is more about doing something than being something

can be traced like a muddy stream with many unexpected little tributary rills through the whole of

our school and university system, through the whole of our society. If you are born intensely

musical, then it is not taking proper advantage of these gifts to be a lover of music; you must learnan instrument and be for ever doing proficiency exams.

The parable of the talents is perhaps for us the source of the feeling that gifts must beturned to measurable account, though that parable had to wait until the Protestant reformation and

the doctrine that God himself took no account of human effort or achievement, to be most

passionately embraced: as though man would supply the interest that God did not feel. For so long

as God was interested in talents breeding profit, as he was in the Catholic Middle Ages, then hiseye, which saw finely into the heart of man and could measure with a subtlety and even a tricksiness

beyond human measuring, could see and so define profit with a delicacy that had no need to demand

evident action rather than hidden being. The man who hid his talent in the earth and so made noprofit was not then to be confused with the man who went secretly to his chamber to pray.

The Protestant, or more precisely Calvinist, idea that the predestinating will of God,

for good or ill, heaven or hell, was fixed for all eternity and took no account of human merit ordemerit seems to have released Western man, at any rate, in the last four hundred years, into a

frenzy of autonomous self-justification. - One is told that in Muslim cultures the doctrine of the

overriding will of Allah has made for fatalism, a sense that nothing much need be done or can bedone. But Christianity for most of its course has not been a fatalistic religion, and has succeeded

rather extraordinarily in reconciling the omniscience and omnipotence of the Almighty with the

genuine independence of man and an assertion that he can merit the reward of salvation. - Though

to be sure there have had to be anxious adjustments, and the ball of orthodoxy, to use Gibbonsimage, has vibrated between the extremes of an Augustinian predestinating pessimism about mans

will and a Pelagian optimism which seemed to define Gods omnipotence as irrelevant.

Since the Reformation the idea of human merit has sprung free of the hidden eye ofGod who sees in secret, because Gods now wholly predestinating eye sees only the secrets of his

own heart; and the feeling that an individual man can steer his own way to salvation, for which

there was always necessary space in the Christian religion, has become either (in rather rare cases) arelentless and undiluted individualism which cares nothing for other judgements, or a freedom to act

which is now under the appraising eye of other men, who naturally have eyes for what is solid and

visible, for money made, virtues practised, reputation gained, examinations passed; and who are

often not unwilling, if they are still believers, to bring in God in a walk-on part to confirm the valueof what they see as good or bad. The Calvinist God who judged men without reference to their

merit and sent them to heaven or hell as the result of a decision about them made before they were

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born has, unlike Allah, luckily dropped entirely out of sight. Indeed he only had a very short run of

about a hundred years.

Neither an opaquely individualistic God nor undiluted human individualism muchattract me, though the latter as a human response to tyranny can make the trumpets sound. - The

tyranny is now not of God but of man. Or one could say this if we think in terms of the shape

sketched out in these last pages, which no doubt has as much and as little to do with the experienceof a human life lived then or now as a landscape painting has to do with hedging and ditching in

that same stretch of country.

We pull away from the tyranny of authoritative external human judgement and yetkeep ourselves from isolation, by valuing in ourselves and in others being rather than doing

because perhaps doing is a bad translation of being into the common current coinage which can be

weighed and counted by the common measures; whereas what I am, or you are, is in fact unique

untranslatable reality. - And so with books, or pictures, or whatever: the reason why I like ordislike hasnt to do with the story, with what its doing its not the information youre giving me,

but something deeper, something less tangible, that Im responding to, which I dont consciously

weigh and judge but rather try to understand. - In this area of experience the ordinarily

recognisable human hierarchies disappear, and the most vital part of the communication is what ismost elusive, diaphanous, most difficult to see, visible only in a certain angle of the light. Two

speakers may repeat the same line, or tell the same joke in identical words, and the resemblancebetween the two things heard will to a sensitive audience be what is of least importance. And what

variously is prized about the one speaker or the other, or both, will not be something put against a

yardstick and so found excellent, but rather will be simply the thing prized; reasons why,

explanations for, will be losing their grip and sliding off. - Im reminded that Lord Melbourneliked the Order of the Garter because there was no damned merit in it.

* * * * *

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TWENTY NINE

Understanding and explanation are often found linked together, the one permitting orenabling the other. But it seems important to emphasise how different they are. An explanation

thoroughly absorbed is not itself an understanding of what is explained, though it may provide the

conditions in which an understanding may arise. And again there may be an understanding, forinstance of the particular force of meaning of a word in a certain context, or of the effect of a certain

tone or inflexion, which tries in vain to equip itself with an explanation, or which may have to make

do with a form of explanation which is felt to fall far short of adequacy.It is true I suppose that a request for an explanation, even a pressing for an

explanation, can exercise and develop an understanding; true also that an explanation ruthlessly

enough required or too readily produced can drown the understanding. I seem to see quite distinctly

what kind of impulse of belief in the untrammelled mystery of God it was that caused William ofOccam at the end of the Middle Ages to sweep away the whole system of scholastic explanation of

the Almighty, all the ladders and scaffolding leading up to God and criss-crossing the face of

heaven, by asserting that universals, the main structural feature of the whole system, were not real

but just names: universalia sunt nomina. This nominalism it must have been that gave birth to, orrather rebirth to, the idea we know as Calvinist that God is wholly inexplicable in his ways, whichare not our ways.

The drift of what I have been writing in this section is friendly to this development,

where in the last section it was hostile: as can be seen in the melodious way I have just described

the Calvinist God. William of Occam said that God could, if he had chosen, just as well have

become incarnate in a donkey as in a man, and Calvin gave him a form of moral judgement no morelucid to us than a donkeys would be. There is a defencelessness about the absurdity of Occams

boundless belief in, understanding of, the mysteriousness of God why did he choose a donkey?

Perhaps because Christ rode on a donkey into Jerusalem, he himself choosing the absurdlyinappropriate and giving this laughably ungainly animal his far fierce hour and sweet.

It is Occams defencelessness, his pursuit of the direction that led towards release,

that makes him sympathetic as he dismantles the structure of explanation, and leaves onlyapprehension of God. But there are equally times and circumstances when it is explanation which

leads in the direction of release. A mystery, an incommunicable, inchoate understanding, can be a

kind of imprisonment as well as a kind of freedom: and it may be characteristic of human beings, orof whole cultures, to oscillate between understanding and explanation as their main emphasis. The

turning from one to the other may have to do with the degree to which one feels bullied by the one

or the other. If the God of the Protestant reformation had decided mysteriously from all eternity that

all men were finally to come to bliss; that, in Dame Julians words, all would be well; then howgladly would one have abandoned any attempt to explain how this might be, with what sensitivity

could one simply have understood in some way beyond explanation that the very unlikelihood that

all this evil and suffering with which we are surrounded could come to good made it the morecertain that it would.

It was not to be. The Christian God (though doubtless not the true God) drags hell

behind him like Marleys chain. And we must as a consequence devise explanations which willdefend us against him, keep him under control, or best of all explain him away entirely as any sort

of genuinely independent reality. An explanation, thank God, is not an understanding; and may in

this instance keep our feet clear, fence round the quicksand of mystery that invites our intuitive

response. - Perhaps the scholastic philosophy of the end of the Middle Ages sprang in part fromfear; and perhaps simply Occam wasnt afraid of God. And perhaps the one extreme bred the other

as the Middle Ages ended. There are certainly extremes of fear, in the dance of death for instance,

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and of familiar, almost domestic love of Christ in his suffering humanity, as the fifteenth century

comes to a close.

What of our modern literary scholastics? - The face of literature is now, after thelast hundred years or so, densely criss-crossed by the judgings and explainings and theorisings.

There is no doubt who is the bully boy now. Children at school trying to pass A level are equipped

with an explanation ofKing Lear. They dont see or read the play, they study it. The play becomesmatter for the explanation, a useful quarry for quotes to prove things. - Better to look at the sun,the friendly sun, with ignorant eyes:

You must become an ignorant man againAnd see the sun again with an ignorant eye

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THIRTY

I find I no longer want to say what I have written in this section. Time passes, understandingchanges.

* * * * *

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THIRTY ONE

I remember when I was at Oxford that an acquaintance of mine gave his hair for afirst in Mods. He worked so hard for the two terms before the exam that his hair fell out. A

different case, I think, from that of Eucolpus the centurions servant in Martials epigram, who

vowed his boys long curls to Phoebus so that his master should get the desired promotion. - Thereis a different context for self-sacrifice here, aside from the fact that the boys hair would have grown

again.

The pressure of some externally proposed ideal, whether of youth, or beauty, orholiness, or learning, can sometimes so bear upon the spirit of a man that he clicks suddenly into

obsession, that he yields all of himself to it. The real trouble with an ideal is that it isntgratefulforthis yielding of self, it gives nothing in return, unlike the centurion. An ideal, whether good or bad,

will steadily consume a man, yielding none of its allegorical power to his various and non-allegorical humanity, until there is no humanity left, until an observer casting about for the man will

find him embodying the ideal, or in reality embodied by it. The higher the ideal, the more deadly

the danger.

Real contact with another real human being protects us from the ideal. Im sure theboy looked awful with his hair cut off and that the centurion thought so, his sense of the act of self-

sacrifice having to compete with the actual result of it. His admiration for the virtuous act qualified,brought into the muddle of humanity, by the wish that the boys hair had not been cut off, by his

now even greater love for the boy which made him wish all the more that he hadnt had his hair cut

off, that he had selfishly kept it and damn the promotion. - I wonder whether anyone said to the

Oxford man that he looked awful without his hair, or whether teachers and parents and friendsinstead congratulated him on his first and kept their opinion as to his appearance to themselves.

Probably the latter; and he was afterwards a first-class man, even a first-class mind, and not a first-

class bald mind.The reality that surrounds our human muddle has much of it an allegorical quality; in

this sense, that the cat on my desk, tree or sky outside my window, the instinct of the tiger with his

prey or the hen with her chicks, are all of them centrally and no more than what they are. What wegenerally call allegory is perhaps the attempt to turn the world of the human psyche into a collection

of things like this, unworked upon by the tricksy spirit of man. So that we have the moral vices and

virtues carefully planted, like cut flowers in sand, in a schematised version of a humanpsychological landscape. Some writers, Bunyan for instance with his ear and eye for the real human

being brought with truly appalling skills to the service of an inhumanly allegoric creed, some

writers are able to animate these landscapes quite convincingly. - I remember spending months

when I was writing my thesis (itself an activity, like being put to the galleys, that no human beingshould have to suffer) being obsessed by the picture of the holiness of a young counter-Reformation

saint painted in the hagiographical account I read of his life. My sense of the indisputable reality of

myself, which no one ought to deny, was already badly drained by scholarly labour in the readingroom of the British Museum; an inextinguishable voice asked me why I was not holy like that. I

knew the answer already then; it was just that I had no courage to formulate it, because of the inner

tumult I feared if the authority of these external categories was cast off Because allegory, although I have spoken of it as working against humanity, is a

humanly imported presence within us imported, I suppose, precisely as a controlling agent, like

the graphite or whatever it is that keeps a nuclear reactor within bounds, or the ash with which I half

choke my big stove during the winter to stop it becoming red hot. - This is not quite the image Iwant. Better a version of one Ive used before, with the entrance of a schoolmaster quelling chat.

If this awful stuff that makes your hair fall out is so vital a control mechanism, then

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we can perhaps see why allegory should have arisen like a giant within literature in the plays and

poems of the end of the Middle Ages, at just the moment when it was losing ground in philosophy

under the influence of William of Occam. Or why - I venture further into the bog of speculation no one cares about allegory at all today in its old recognisable form, because it now surrounds and

grips us in the shape of Schedule E tax forms, one of which is authoritatively and unintelligibly (or

shall I say with unapproachable intelligibility?) sitting on my desk at this moment. I guess that wemay only start to talk about a control mechanism as allegory when we cease to acknowledge its

authority.

Jacobean drama, for instance, is writhing with allegory wherever you look. Like akind of bindweed it grows round and through the human characters, cauterising their variousness

with a hint of paradise or a touch of the rake, forcing them into silence and deep ambiguity if they

are to preserve themselves from becoming creatures in a morality play. The struggle, sometimes

lost sometimes won, won at the cost, willingly paid, of moral intelligibility, is to shake off themorality play. - Perhaps because the Kings head was about to drop into a basket to make way for

the doctrinal state and the Protector, which all looks allegorical enough to us now in its turn in

retrospect.

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THIRTY TWO

I went home to see my mother the other day and was talking about willow trees to agardener in the village. He was shaking his head at the tree twenty yards from the corner of the

house. He wouldn't have one within a hundred yards because of the distance the roots will travel for

water and the havoc they make of foundations. - It was the blindness of that extraordinary acuityof energy that struck me. Mole vision not eagle vision, to borrow an image from Blake; the tree

comes abroad upon the earth so generously, offers itself so variously to the imagination, and birds

shelter in its branches; but below, furious, detailed, short-sighted, long distance grubbing.All created things, like Richard III in reality, are in some sense born with teeth, but

flourish more gloriously to the extent that they learn not to use them. This is as true of what is born

of the mind as what is born of the earth. We can all of us feel the overwhelming presence of power

laid aside, and by contrast the mucky little kingdom of an argument that will for ever be excavatingones words for its own purposes, clinging to what youve said and feeling for the cracks in it, all

with a terrible mockery of proper attentiveness.

The cherry trees in the woods near Heidelberg in mid-summer may have had dark

roots, but I think of them rather as offering me what they had received in more casual abundancefrom the common sun not water from a leak in another mans cistern. You could in a way not

trace the path by which their fruit had ripened as you could trace the green leaf of the willow tree tothe poking tentacle of root.

All this playing with pictures in search of a meaning that might by chance arise from

them is, of course, at another extreme from allegory, and allows the kind of independence to the

pictures themselves, the kind of primacy in their own sphere, that Blake desired and got for his sickrose and his worm that flies in the night. - It is the willow tree after water like a lawyer in search

of his fee, and standing in the hot sun with Martin eating cherries, that are most energetically in my

imagination, and I dip them more or less at random into my thought for the pleasure of theircompany as though I were entranced by the whizzing round of a circular saw and cut this and that

with it to have an excuse for keeping it going.

The consecrated attention to the experience of the moment or to the memory of itconfers a wholly anarchic freedom, for good or ill. Blake perhaps of all poets conveys the force and

wildness of that freedom as he steps out of the golden cage of meaning prepared for him by the

conventions of his contemporary culture. But there is wildness somewhere in all great poetry, to bemissed the more certainly, the more painstakingly its meaning is attended to.

Blake, though, has always made me uneasy because I want an anarchic freedom for

love and not for hatred. Blake likes teeth:

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.

and he would not have minded, as I do, the willow root concentrating on its own nosing. I wonder

even, at times, whether he is not outraged by the suffering of the oppressed in the Songs ofExperience because it allows him to strip the disguising and falsely explanatory and justifyingsystem from the oppressors to reveal them naked and tigerish in their energy.

I will have the freedom to love without the freedom to hate and if you explain that

freedom must be confined by custom, law, explanation, meaning and the sacrifice of spontaneouslove so that hatred may be kept in check, I shall ignore you and trust some obscure instinct that this

need not be so. - What if everybody had the same opinion? There would be chaos! - Well,

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there might or there might not be worse chaos than there is now; but in any case they wont.

And after all, the great creations of the human mind and imagination are also always

on the outer edge of the possible:

His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem

Of a slender palm, stood but a day;

there are those that fall and those that do not, but it is perhaps those that fall which intrigue and

affect one most, the boundary of the possible not moving out beyond them. The spire in WilliamGoldings novel is more potent in its half collapsed state than if the bracings of wood and stone had

fully answered the demand of the wildly driving imagination. And towers that do stand attract our

attention, our love, our loyalty because they oughtnot to stand: the bits of stone not built for flight,the words not designed for any mysteries, ought not to inhabit the regions they do. Itstemperament, perhaps, that decides whether it is the towers that just stand or those that just fall

which most attract us, but in neither case could it have been planned by any sane man, it was a

possibility snatched from beyond the reach of art.

* * * * *

THIRTY THREE

I know that the undiluted terror that waits within me has really been only mythicallyfaced and overcome and will be held off for just so long as the myths hold true (and I think perhaps

they are). For so long as I am young (and youth is a belief which though not difficult now, will be

so, and more so), for so long as I am open to desire, reached and held by desire, mine and others,then there will be enough human presence crowded within me to keep the darkness at bay, and we

shall say bravely irresponsible things about it. But if I grow old and am left master of my own

judgements and experience, if I see (or rather cannot persuade others any longer that I dont,because it would be preposterously undignified in an old man not to) that my views have weight,

then I shall no longer be desired but respected, my crowds of friends (those in bodies and those in

books) will melt away to a respectful distance, I shall be left alone in the dark, and that will be theend.

As I write this in the middle of the night I dont feel very brave about the dark,

though writing and speech itself has mythic strength against it just as, whether he believed it or

not the instant before he said it, and out of the unpromising material of Gonerils and Regans lust,the bastard inKing Learcould be gallant fair knight to his lady - Yours in the ranks of death - andcould exclaim in wonder against his darkness:

Yet Edmund was belovd

Shakespeare saw that to be a king was a death sentence, the freedom and the poweronly a mocking voice enforcing the irony. I seem to understand that Lear needed Cordelias wordsat the beginning of the play, not the purity of her nothing, needed her to be reckless with words,

not to care about moral ambiguity, not to care that the desire that had just before, in her sisters

speeches, flowed in those channels of words was corrupt needed her desire for him if he was notto be king and in the dark. His ineffectual attempt as the play opens at struggling with himself to

shake off kingship, all the ritual flim flam, was actually going to stand or fall by Cordelias desire

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for him. And when Cordelia can only manage to articulate respect, the more profound the worse,

for him as father and king, then those roles which he is desperate to abandon snap round him and

trap him with terrible allegorical force and he banishes her in an autocratic fury. - Morality is notenough.

The outward and evident shape of the situation at the beginning of the play is that the

king proposes to exchange life for death, to give away his kingdom so that he may unburdendcrawl toward death. Even in that phrase, however, there is something odd, since unburdend

removes a good deal of the force of crawl; and many people have seen in this first scene a king

preparing to dance along the primrose path a bit under cover of formal crawling. I want also tothink of the possibility that there is an attempt at a more radical reversal of the formal, surface

situation, that clumsily and more than a little unwillingly Lear is trying to turn from power to love,

from death to life. In all the wrong ways he tries to give himself by giving his kingdom, unaware

that there is no real giving until that is given away, but he is trying, and Cordelia doesnt seem tounderstand, and so rejects or seems to him to reject the love he offers. He is heartbroken before he

is again a king:

But goes thy heart with this?

Only the anarchy of a blindly instinctive love, of a rush of unpremeditated kindnesson Cordelias part could save Lear now; but she has found goodness and love in a system of

morality which gives it reasons, parcels and weights it out for all the world as though it were the

land her sisters were after:

Haply, when I shall wed,That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carryHalf my love with him, half my care and duty:Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,To love my father all.

That the act of love is untamedly present, forgetful of even immediate past and

future, that love is not a fixed finite commodity but springs new born out of this or that other

moment of union which for this or that moment is all, Shakespeare understood and Cordelia did not and Shakespeare with his typically subtle eye for the odd complexity of things allows her sisters at

any rate to say it. Whoever could not say in some moment to his beloved:

Dearer than eye-sight, space, and liberty;Beyond what can be valud, rich or rare;No less than life

has never loved.

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THIRTY FOUR

To be permanently possessed by disciplined thought, to be the slave of a linearprocess which leads from premises one thought pleasant and with a good view to conclusions one

hadnt quite expected and doesnt much like; or to find reality in belief and not in oneself the

sentence hardly needs concluding.But there is a kind of linear mind, the mind of a novelist perhaps, a George Eliotish

mind, which can achieve great strength and subtlety of understanding by a pitilessly disciplined

elaboration of what inevitably follows, in all its ramification of closely related detail. A novel of thekind I have in mind is born only once, and thereafter grows, flourishes, matures, and dies into a

conclusion, its task completed. It doesnt, of course, have the ghastly after-life of a theory, which

will not so easily consent to die when its book is finished. The novel may possess the reader, as it

did the writer, as it is being read; it may ask that the reader should accompany it and not take part,should listen and not speak; but in the end, after the reading is over and the novel is settling into the

hills and valleys of memory, it becomes in its turn the possession of the rememberer. And it may

just turn out to be that the linearity of its procedure was only the accomplishing of a rather long

drawn out instant, not different except in its extension from the multiple instants of a poem or aplay, the multiple births, the unexpectedness.

I acknowledge the imaginative power of a novel like Middlemarch by understandingit as the microscopically elaborated investigation of an instant. To a mind habitually moving in a

reality slower than mine by many orders of magnitude the reading of a novel of that length might

seem over in a flash of time, it might seem no more than a word in a line of poetry. To a mind

moving in immeasurably faster circumstances than mine the reading of a word in a line of poetrymight seem to take up half a lifetime of linear effort as the pattern of sound slowly accomplished

itself.

In saying this I am suggesting that even the apparently sturdiest linearity of mindmust allow that to remain alive means undergoing again and again the trauma of birth. To sink so

deep into a linearity of thought as to forget that what you are doing is simply writing a word, to

imagine that you are set upon a path that leads onwards to some final goal in the distance rather thanupon a path which will be reborn unpredictably as a path leading now somewhere else, is to be like

Casaubon with his Key to All Mythologies. The tenacity of his mind was for Casaubon a deathsentence. He was not the poet that in some way or another, at some speed or another, all the livinghave to be.

A man must be born again if he is to live, and again, and again. Each time it will be

as awful as we are told it was for each of us the first time. The floor of the world gave way, the

foundations of the world were shaken and the ground opened beneath us and pitched us into thedarkness of light. After a while we became so used to our mothers arms and to the world of our

family that the womb by contrast would have seemed the terrifying and imprisoning darkness. -

And so as we grow up and are educated there comes the point where that pattern is repeated andwhat we have learnt is the womb that opens, naturally or by Caesarian section; and for a time

understanding seems a process of unlearning what we thought we knew.

Some books will be more womb-like for us and some more willing to be midwives.There is room for both because premature birth is dangerous, and we may need a prolonged

immersion in a long instant. A poem perhaps, or a play by Shakespeare will always be more likely

to make the infant kick and wriggle than a novel, which feeds him more steadily, though we may

experience many little daily births in our mind and heart without precipitating anything morecataclysmic.

Physical birth is cataclysmic for the child. Later births may lack the physical

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collapse and reordering, they may take much longer than the physical labour of childbearing

(though some may be accomplished in a much shorter time, a moments thought or experience); but

they may well involve credal or emotional collapse, perhaps to such a degree that it is difficult tosee what it is of the old that is reincarnated in the new. The persisting sense of continuity across the

change of rebirth, not embodiable in a formulation, is evidence of ones self, a mysterious area not

to be grasped, only experienced, not to be caught and defined in the criss-crossing lines of thepsychological graph, as though one were to try to say that my self is the point through which the

lines of whatever I have or will love or believe will pass. That point, I fancy, would seem bloodless

and minimal, and not the all-pervading sense. You might just as well set out to say what Hamletessentially was by selecting the most commonly recurring features of a hundred critical views. -

What you would get would be precisely what he was not. The heart of the mystery is only to be

known if it is left untouched, unthreatened by understanding, treated as the most fragile of things;

once its fragility is respected, its strength and persistence (which is no mere surface tenacity) mayseem miraculous.

* * * * *

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THIRTY FIVE

As Eliot says in theFour Quartets:

Words after speech, reach

Into the silence.

When you understand and are understood (by which I mean love and are loved) well enough, then

that understanding can drift in and out of words, and the silences are a delicate counterbanlancing ofthe sounds, almost allowing the words more speech as they reach into the silence. The words reach

even as they fade, reach a further freedom, unexpected or perhaps envisaged but only shyly and

apprehensively by the speaker.

It may seem rather unstartling to say that not everything is sayable. It is commonenough not to be able to get something into words; and common enough to meet people who think

some things ought not to be said, whether about sex, or race, or whatever. But the silence that

reigns in these cases is a negative one, the silence of frustration or denial, imprisoning, cramping,

disciplining. - What I mean to suggest, by contrast, is that there are circumstances in which theimprisoning thing is to speak. I remember Sunday after Sunday when I was small hearing the vicar

talk from the pulpit about love. He was a good man and I have no doubt that he spoke with greatearnestness and sincerity, but he had simply spoken about this thing far too often and it seemed to

have died on him, the love of God choked out of existence by preaching about it, by constant

handling and carrying about in the little suitcase of words. Even the word love itself, by constant

repetition, had taken on an oddly distorted sound quality, the suitcase a bit out of shape, and thedistortion is all I remember of the many sermons I heard; it was a constant private unofficial delight

when I was a child which would have evaporated instantly if I had remarked upon it, because my

perception of it was not unkind, or even irreverent, as it would have had to be in words, when thedelight would have become a little sarcastic or spiteful as it drove the engine of language.

Religion, which is (where Christianity is concerned at any rate) the outer and

authoritative saying of so many intangible things, can easily, it seems, lose the sense of beingsurrounded and interpenetrated by the unspoken, the unevident, the inexplicit. It can set up its

empire of words, attitudes and practices and think there is nothing beyond, no angels silently

weeping. Mary McCarthy was right perhaps to suggest, as she looked back on her own Catholicchildhood and the confidently ghastly pious relations who looked after her, that religion was only

good for people who were already good, for the others it is too great a temptation a temptation to

the deadly sins of pride and anger. - And it is true, that it is when God is spoken about by thosewho are on his side that he becomes truly intolerable: arguments are used to clear him ofresponsibility which wouldnt hold water in any court of law, his unquestionable authority is

invoked to enable outrageous conclusions.

The power of words can be used to challenge the power of God, and then one seemsto be rather on the side of words (unless of course they defeat God entirely and he becomes

unknown because disregarded); or words can be put supinely at his disposal, and then one is

against, for that unholy alliance of power with power, of the word with the Word, threatens todestroy the freedom to be silent, reserved, exploratory, tentative. And as that freedom is threatened

we see with great clarity that what will not or cannot be known is a reality in its own right and not

just barbarian darkness beyond the empire of making sense. Religious words at their best are at

neither extreme, but use their human confidence to conclude that God is incomprehensible and thenplay with that unknowable silence which has created their understanding

as any word in a line should play with the space about it. Its not altogether trivial to

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say that what distinguishes poetry from prose is that it occupies less of the space on the page, nor

does it seem irrelevant that a page of handwriting with no margins is selfish and claustrophobic. Its

a good idea to try sometimes quite deliberately to read the spaces, or to listen to the silences in apiece of music.

Some words, some musical sounds, some sights interact more with the space about

them than others, advancing and withdrawing, oscillating within it. A safety pin, for instance, is nota great mover, whereas God is, as the reader will have noticed in reading this section. Indeed God

really is the most energetic mover of all since the word can draw upon the realisation both that there

is nothing that is not God and that there is nothing that is. Words of the energetically moving kindsort very uneasily with rigidly defined shapes of argument, either held in some defined position with

a force that seems damagingly to limit their significance, or perhaps quietly exploited to give a

measure of freedom the argument refuses to acknowledge relying on. - It seems better to accept

that such words bring manoeuvring space with them even into apparently the most watertight ofarguments, that kind of argument that fills all the margins by shrinking the size of the page. And to

accept them for what they are. It may be difficult to build houses with bricks that continually

change shape (though no doubt a sufficiently subtle view of a brick would see that it does constantly

change shape, so that the house is not an unmoving entity); but persuasive sentences are much moreobviously alive and moving than houses and they will hold on to the moving words they contain as

a sailor uses the pocket of wind in his sails.A sailor reaches forward in the direction in which he wants to go by constant

indirection. He is a point of interaction between many forces as I am at the moment of writing this.

If I were to try to drive my argument in a straight line I would sink as the sailor would if he sailed

his boat in a straight line. To describe how it is that a sailor produces direction from indirectionwould be impossibly complicated, but someone born to be a good sailor will quite rapidly develop a

feel for the way you do it. And the same is to be said of the good talker or writer, I think; he will

know from instant to instant whether words are needed or not, whether to throw his weight againstthe tiller or let other forces arrange themselves about him.

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THIRTY SIX

I once delivered a truly disastrous sermon in the college chapel it was anexperiment on the part of the chaplain which was not repeated. I chose to think about the raising

from the dead of the son of the widow of Nain, and I couldnt help speculating, not on the goodness

of God in doing that, but on its curiouslyfocussedquality. Why that dead son of a widow and notthe previous one, or the next? How could any singleness of good demonstrate, as in this case it wasalleged to do, the boundless goodness of God? The goodness of God is supposed by theologians to

be systematic, extensive, and significant, to admit of no qualification, but there is no help for it, if itis to appear at all on earth it must be in isolated and motiveless occurrences and acts and God must

consent (but will he?) to be meaningless. There is an almost total breakdown of communication

between God and man in this vital matter. If it had been simply a man doing a good act in the story

of the widows son we would be content with its goodness because we apprehend goodness in itsunmixed form as anarchic, almost motiveless or causeless, as standing outside or coming from

beyond the nexus of reasons why things are done otherwise it isnt truly good. To be good so as

to be rewarded, on earth or in heaven, is enlightened (even though perhaps very enlightened) self-

interest. Real goodness, by contrast, just arises within us and is almost impersonal in its owninternal force of love the delight we feel in it is the delight in being its channel. To take a good

action and use it to demonstrate something else, or even to speculate about it, is to corrupt it.Goodness goes off very easily, like chicken in aspic. As soon as it begins to be used it rots away,

falls to bits. Theologise the bringing back to life of that dead boy and it becomes evidence of the

malice of God who like some Oriental potentate chooses to confer his favours here and not there for

his own amusement, in order to enjoy his power.I wonder whether excellence of any sort can be commented on, as distinct from

being acknowledged and contemplated. The function of the guide is not to expound and explain, to

surround with words and his own bustle, like those guides in great cathedrals who seem to supposethat in some way the beauties they inhabit are to their own credit. The function of the guide is to

bring you to the best vantage point and then leave you alone. Anything else is in the strict as well as

the not so strict sense impertinent. - Proper literature, or painting, or music cant be used, put to apurpose, any more than goodness. It doesnt perhaps so much rot away in such circumstances as

quietly conspire to disappear. Indeed it might be one of the touchstones of genuine excellence of

this sort that it is impatient of comment.I remember a year or two ago seeing a boy standing at Carfax in Oxford one summer

evening not going anywhere, not doing anything but full of a beauty he seemed unconscious of. It

was then not the freedom of beauty from the practical concerns of the world that struck me, not that

it wouldnt be put to use, but that it was useless, pointless. Human life was scampering away at thecrossroads of the city and the beauty that made you catch your breath was of no benefit to the

possessor, the temporary possessor. - The dark side of the freedom of beauty or of goodness is that

the naughty world mocks it, and quite rightly. It sees (what is true) that it is of no consequence.Beauty, or goodness, cannot both assert a freedom and compel a following.

Those who do follow can only keep to the track so long as they are in no expectation

of gain, or so long as that inevitably present expectation is muffled or lost, allowed itself to wanderoff. To try to convert beauty into the currency of money or status (social or intellectual) or

possessed knowledge is to attempt what is simply impossible. A plainly ambitious academic

quoting some great line is stripped naked by it or perhaps more often turns it into something tedious

or hideous that his audience must recover from the memory of. I seem to have heard a lot oflectures that one could only do ones best to forget.

There must be some subjects cultivated within universities which are generally

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unaffected by the selfishness of the cultivator. It is those subjects which can make the strongest

claim for objectivity which are least at the mercy of the motives of those who profess them. To do

chemical experiments for personal gain seems (if unpleasant) not evidently absurd; to talk or writeabout poetry or music or painting for personal gain is to allow a distortion of focus upon an object

so much more delicately and tentatively present than hydrochloric acid, so much more dependent

for its existence on the variety of ways in which it is seen, that it may begin to disappear or sufferstrange mutations.

Subjects which have to do with beauty or goodness (and perhaps even the most

evidently objective study can in certain circumstances come to be such, as even a brick may changeshape, given the heady freedom of the sympathetic space of a loving and tactful attention), such

subjects are the justification for the existence of universities in their own understanding of

themselves as disinterested institutions. But both these subjects properly pursued and the

disinterested ideal that goes with them are rather rarely actually to be encountered.- I instantly feel uneasy at having reached the inhumane idealistic self-satisfaction of

that last sentence, and I want to admit my mistake and say that the path away from selfishness is not

disinterestedness but something less bloodless, something with desire about it, desire muddy as well

as shining better a Yahoo than a Houyhnhnm. It is perhaps that what I have called the expectationof gain has come to expect too little gain, has come to be too fastidious, too much reduced to simply

money or reputation. There is such a depth and extent of pleasure, of gain, in beauty and goodness such a muddy as well as shining pleasure even in goodness that it seems a sin to shrink either to

self-interest on the one hand or to disinterestedness on the other. The raising of the widows son

somehow shows God shining as well as muddy and not a plaster-cast God who does everything by

the book as God ought to do - God good but God also partial, to this woman, this boy; attracted tomanifest his goodness in these striking circumstances. - One would naturally be more intensely

kind and selfless with another human being who aroused ones lust. - Im reminded of the monk

asked whether his devotion to a life of penance wasnt as much in expectation of the reward ofheaven as in the serving of God, who replied that of course it was.

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THIRTY SEVEN

In 1805/6 while he was living in Knigsberg, Kleist wrote a letter to Rhle vonLilienstern about the way thought gradually accomplishes itself in the act of speaking - ber dieallmhliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden speech, and of course writing, not being the

vehicle for the publication of a knowledge or a shape already arrived at, but intimately part of theprocess of arriving. He thinks of the way, too, in which the precise relationship between two human

beings can determine to an unsuspected degree what is said, just as the relationship between two

electrical bodies will determine how the current flows, with what voltage, in what direction, at whatinstigation.

We have little idea, before the event, of what may be the things which trigger or

determine the course of an experience, thinking of all experience as a kind of conversation. The

overwhelming may be separated from the ordinary, not by the intervening space normallyprescribed, but by what seems to be almost nothing, a comma, a fractional hesitation. To have this

in ones mind is to live in a state of constant excited anticipation amid the ordinary. Kleist considers

the possibility that what precipitated the overthrow of the old order in France was a twitching lip or

an ambiguous playing with a cuff as Mirabeau was speaking what emerged as his famous words.After he had unburdened himself of that excitement of words against the King he

was empty, like one of Kleists bottles, and there was room again for fear and caution. - I feelsometimes, too, after a lecture, that speech has taken thought away with it, so that theres nothing in

my mind at all as I go back to my room, as I retreat from the encounter. - Words spoken full in the

act of thinking and of feeling are irreparable, like human life in Vergil, and one may often feel, even

if a kingdom is not at stake, a little apprehensive at having said them. - Its not that what isimportant must flow out from the self, but that what is important, in speech or writing, is the self

flowing out, and the result is a temporarily alarming exhaustion and sense of having gone outside

the walls.Little things bring one back to ordinariness, just as little things may have jolted one

out of it, but whereas before it was the sudden significance of littleness that was evident, afterwards

it is littleness itself which is significant. One returns to the ordinary with a sense not only that thereis much that lies beyond it, but also that it is itself of incalculable value, like the common air we

breathe. Passing and repassing the boundary between the prosaic and the poetic makes one

increasingly uncertain what the boundary is and where it is, though the feeling ofpassage remains:

To me the meanest flower that blows can giveThoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The more one thinks about the two worlds, mean and deep, the closer they are woven

together in ones mind, not by becoming similar but by differences that answer each other, warp and

woof. The ordinary world, coffee inside me this morning, the flame bubbling quietly away in myfire, this ordinary world is common in the sense large, everywhere to be experienced. That tiny

bubbling in the middle of black coals, struggling for its devouring life, could also open to me a

poetic world that would be momentary, strange, specialised, not a big shape but a sliver of possibility. - And the reverse of this contrast is also true, making a chiasmus. That the poetic

world is unconfined in possibility and extent though the door into it may be tiny and difficult to

find; whereas the prosaic world, barn doors swinging invitingly and obviously open, exists as a set

of circumstances, physically and psychologically, of the most highly specialised kind.Raise or lower the ambient temperature by a fractional amount and I die. Alter the

intensity of light by a fraction of the possible range and I am blind. Change my acoustic

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circumstances by the smallest degree in certain directions and I become laughable and then

incomprehensible. With small variations these constricting boundaries are the same for all of us,

but perhaps for each individual the set of psychological circumstances which can be called ordinarylife is even more delicately pin-pointed. I had a very large, very old wireless set in my bedroom as

a child that would receive really distant stations very well if the weather was right and if it was

propped at an angle and some of the knobs tapped delicately in certain ways. Sometimes it seemedto benefit from a general shake; and all the time it appeared to be melting because there was steadily

more wax on the floor of the cabinet. - This seems a good image for my own psychological state. I

can think of half a dozen words that would knock out the wedge and reduce me to silence or a jumble of atmospherics; and I suppose other peoples equipment is in different ways just as

temperamental

and that thought or feeling has a lot to do with twitching things. The plan soberly

and carefully thought out beforehand and then smoothly put into operation doesnt exist. The essaycarefully planned in advance and sturdily unresponsive to mood or the fluctuations of insight is

invulnerable to the changes and chances of life only because it is not itself alive. - But I must

remember, too, that we need to know that ordinariness is ordinary, that plans can be securely put

together, that essays can be thought out in detail. This reliance on something more than the instinctof the moment is a human distinguishing mark. The sensitive man will speak out of what he really

is at this moment; another, or he at another time, will wisely say nothing that has not been weightedbeforehand. Kleist was just as wrong as right.

* * * * *

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THIRTY EIGHT

Richard of Haldinghams map of the world, made about the year 1290, hangs abovethe stove in my study. The world consists of Europe, Asia and Africa, with Jerusalem in the middle,

and can bear no relation to anything he knew though to a good deal that he believed. - Little is

known about him apart from his map, the original of which now hangs (still I hope) in the northaisle of the choir of Hereford Cathedral where, though a Lincolnshire man, he held the prebend of

Norton.

When it was made, everyone who knew anything must have known it was no goodas a geographical map. He must have known it himself if he had any sense of the shape of his own

country and its position in relation to neighbouring countries. - Of course, he was a long way from

the sea in Hereford and it is the shifting shapelessness of the sea against which the shape of the land

can be defined the sea being shapeless not because it has no shape but because human beingsdont inhabit the shape as they do the shape of the land. Even though it is actually in the vertical not

the horizontal plane that the shape of the land we inhabit most engages us, we are very aware of the

horizontal. We are even clear, I think, that the horizontal plane is what most takes the impress of

authority, consisting more largely as it does of legal and other boundaries. Looking up and down,you might say, is free; looking round is not.

It was the horizontal Richard of Haldingham was concerned with in his map, soexclusively that his land looks pretty much as docile and lifeless, as uninhabitable, as his sea.

Human beings normally are content that the sea should be docile, horizontal, and think of that (as it

is) as its proper state. But flat land, even to a Lincolnshire man who would be easily contented with

the most modest of rolling country, is a bore; nothing, to use the psalmists words, to lift up youreyes to.

Of course, perspective is difficult in maps, even undesirable, since (whether

geographically, legally, or as here theologically) they have it as their usual function to carry theimpress of authority. They are not landscape paintings, but pedagogic, admonitory. Richards map

speaks with a theological authority that has flattened it into a pedagogic instrument. The vertical

extension here, to God, has steamrollered the land. - Normally we like hills, even lift up our eyesto them, because they are distant, they have to do with aspiration, with what is not immediately

pressing, they are invested with past and future. We dont at all like them falling on us. Indeed the

tendency of hills of water to rush towards sailors and fall on them is the reason why we prefer thesea horizontal.

Hills of water dont make their impress upon the sea from outside, but arise from

within its ordinary horizontal nature; and so the real sea is full of dangerous and unpredictable life

as Richards map is not, which contains none of the authority impressed upon it. Authority arisingunpredictably, volcanically, from within an experience, a picture, a set of words, is dangerous but

exciting; what makes for the deathly quality of the thing we normally call authority is the fact that it

bears down from outside rather than arising from within. What has arisen, of course, may itselfoppress someone else (thus my imaginings may do that) and drown or choke him; or, like the

eternal hills, it may simply display itself as having arisen and intend no more than to encourage a

similar arising within the onlooker.There may have been a time when to write down Jerusalem as the centre of the world

was yeasty and imaginative, not docile. I dont feel it here, but I can recreate the possibility by the

analogy of England as the centre of the world. - In all flat maps England is in fact central, by the

casual external authority of the historical accident of the Greenwich meridian, but I see more thanaccident in the pen that draws the world like this; and this island and the sea that surrounds it seem

not just flat but instinct with human significance, as the English language is. All becomes shapely

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and precious:

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herselfAgainst infection and the hand of war,This happy breed of men, this little world,This precious stone set in the silver sea,Which serves it in the office of a wall,Or as a moat defensive to a house,Against the envy of less happier lands,This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

For those born in different parts of the world, whose loves will be different,

significance will accumulate and arise differently beneath the surface of the map they draw, on

paper or in their minds eye. And one significance should call to another, like distant hills, so thatthe whole earth is variously transformed, criss-crossed not by the dreary lines of longitude and

latitude but by the contours of familiarity and affection, each with its accompanying strangenessesand distances.

My affection, my imagination, should not overshadow another; nor should anything I

write block out the sun for anyone else. At least one reason for writing is rather to shed light and

warmth on someone elses patch of earth, so that the seed which nothing can drag up from the soil,as Wittgenstein said, may be encouraged to climb for itself, in its own way:

Du kannst den Keim nicht aus dem Boden ziehen. Du kannst ihm nur Wrme undFeuchtigkeit und Licht geben und dann muss er wachsen.

* * * * *

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THIRTY NINE

Over the west door of Staunton Harold church in Leicestershire can be read thesewords:

In the year 1653 when all things sacred were throughout the nation either demolished orprofaned, Sir Robert Shirley baronet founded this church, whose singular praise it is to havedone the best things in the worst times and hoped them in the most calamitous.

This was the last, as it were, mediaeval church in England, the last that could be built by rote, by

instinct and out of instinct; and it was perhaps that deeply instinctive act that made Sir Robert somuch an offence to the proponents of the new ideas then newly in power. He went to the Tower for

it and died there at the age of twenty-nine.It may be that what the proponents of new ideas most object to is not the old ideas

they apparently oppose, but the fact that the old ideas are not ideas but ways of life. New ideas

seem in part to aspire to this, to become so much a part of the fabric of things that people will act

unthinkingly out of the midst of them rather than self-consciously in some ratiocinative relationshipwith them; but of course for an idea this is also to aspire to self-annihilation. The old way of things

will very often defend itself by other than ratiocinative means, by rhetorical and imaginative means;which may be as sharp a defence as the ratiocinative, as poised, as subtle more so often. So Sir

Robert Shirley building his church, or the recusant Lady Cecily Stonor nearly a century earlier

before the justices at Oxford:

I was born in such a time when Holy Mass was in great reverence and was brought up in thesame faith. In King Edwards time this reverence was neglected and reproved by such asgoverned. In Queen Marys it was restored with much applause, and now in this time itpleaseth the State to question them, as they now do me, who continue in this Catholicprofession. The State would have the several changes, which I have seen with mine eyes,good and laudable. Whether it can be so I refer to your Lordships consideration. I hold mestill that wherein I was born and bred, and find nothing taught in it but great virtue andsanctity, and so by the grace of God I will live and die in it.

What is baffling to the revolutionary is that the old order will not argue its case in a

recognisably rational way. This is itself often thought to be a powerful reason for the abolition of

the old order. If it cannot or will not justify itself rationally then it is an affront to the dignity of

rational beings. - But the matter is more complicated in the business of deciding between the oldand the new.

In weighing the one against the other one is not weighing like with like. Rather one

is weighing experience had against experience yet to be had; and whereas an idea is something inweighable and measurable form, testable against other ideas, and only real in the measure that it

constantly survives the comparative world it inhabits, experience is unconditionally real. We rejoice

in this when an experience has been pleasant; we try by contrast to reduce unpleasant experiences tonotions that can be given insecure and conditional existence.

Conditional existence sounds thin when put against the unconditional sort; and it is

true that in some circumstances it seems so. The breadth and inevitability of something long

experienced, especially the sense that it makes up a whole order of things, will contrast often richlywith a monomaniac quality about the new. This is particularly true for me if the old order (as it was

for Sir Robert and for Lady Cecily Stonor) is in process of succumbing to the new way. - But it is

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also true that there is something exhilarating about the conditional, something exciting and

penetrating about the idea that is careless of any history, concerned with present conviction, the

thing of this moment, a tensely concentrated tightrope walker who must be continually moving tostay upright. - It looks like life, since life is unpredictable and always moving; just as the other

looked like life, since life is survival against the odds.

The new idea will tend to be all the more passionately seized on and believed in, tothe extent that it lacks history; and conviction of a certain very intense sort, paradoxically, is as

much evidence of the conditional, tentative, temporary, as more obvious hesitation. By contrast

the willingness to qualify, to acquiesce in other possibilities, may in certain circumstances be verycharacteristic of the old and settled order. Here is the tightrope walker not continually moving in

order to stay upright, but able to move in many directions because already confident of not

overbalancing. The quality of movement is different. - I think the Restoration gives us a good

example of this. The bringing back of the king shortly after Cromwells death was not thesupplanting of one idea by another but the supplanting of intense and self-conscious thought by a

returning ordinariness of life. The king once on his throne again, there could be many different

attitudes to him, all of which agreed he was king. In poems written about King Charles the thought

is easily fantastic, the comparisons far-fetched, because really there is no proper function for it tofulfil. It seems to have been added onto and not derived from the reality of the king returned, as

though there were a sense that something more than the bare fact of return ought to be described,even though the rather bare fact, embarrassingly, was all there was. - We think of the theatre and of

comedy as the most characteristic sort of Restoration literature, and we see that Restoration comedy

is not a marriage of imagination and thought but of imagination and devising. Any particular

Restoration comedy cannot in fact even be much thought about, although the way it discouragesthought is different from Sir Roberts or Lady Cecilys way.

One might say that Lady Cecily Stonor spoke at Oxford in instinctive and not

ratiocinative terms (distinguishing herself in this respect from the Jesuit missionaries for whom theCounter-Reformation was an argument first of all) because she knew by heart the ideas that

informed the order she described. When she refers to your Lordships consideration the several

changes which the State would have good and laudable, she invites herjudges to think if they will,but she is not thinking herself, she has no need of it. If you like, the order she expounds has its own

fundamental ideas in a solution of human experience. Ones feeling about the Restoration, by

contrast, is that the years of the Cromwellian interregnum had rather seriously damaged the capacityof the ordinary human experience of the traditional state of things to hold its own fundamental ideas

in solution. The solution was rather thin and insubstantial, so that the returning ordinariness of life,

as Ive described it, was expected and asserted to be more complete in its re-establishing of the old

reality than it really was.In a play, then, like The Country Wife, the texture of experience seems trivial, and

this not because its a comedy, though comedy has less constant need of deep water than tragedy,

but because no one ever seems to have thought about the urban life it depicts. So that theintriguings and the smart opinions about life and manners discourage thought, ideas, rather than

making them unnecessary. - The characters in this play would have been as hostile to Sir Robert

Shirleys undertaking as any republican sectary, though theirs would have been a blank hostilityexpressed in a stylish laugh and not a newly and consciously principled anger.

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FORTY

I have been trying with a Japanese friend to translate into English some Japanesepoems about the coming of autumn, knowing not a syllable of Japanese myself.

atevening in autumna

crow sitsona

withered branch

There is the sense here that Im making an effort, not very successfully, to say

something that wont be said in English. The poem is carefully odd, like a ship strangely rigged for

some barely possible advantage of wind and weather. - The obvious first difficulty about most

Japanese poems is that they are very short, so that in English theyre over too quickly and seem to provoke the response so what? - Here Im trying to reproduce the brevity while slowing the

speed.As weve been translating, Ive talked to Kyoichi a lot about this and related things.

- Speed (or better say brevity, which is speed in a slightly different aspect) may say all if the focus

of intensity is right, the image passing through the shutter of the mind shorn of all but itself because

all is gathered up within it, so no outworks, no foothills or scaffolding. Intense like that it can, need,never be other than itself, never return the all it has gathered up. It requires, enables, no response

other than profound acknowledgement - and in Japan it will be instantly accorded it by everyone.

Kyoichi told me that when the first autumn wind is felt each year in Japan, the news bulletinsmention it, and all Japanese feel instantly the same response - rather different from the semi-comic

first cuckoo of spring in England. Such a community of response is only possible when nothing is

to be done about it, and its true that nothing is to be done about a Japanese poem.The spots of intensity in Japanese are known and public; in English by and large they

are private and to be discovered and then communicated English poetry seems to be working

harder than Japanese. Perhaps once found all intensity is brief, a flash, but in English there aremany tracks to and from by which people come looking and go, whereas in Japanese the people are

already there, so there are no tracks to be seen. Or say better the few tracks are well enough known

for the most cursory signposting to be adequate, and Japanese poetry specialises in a cursoriness of

signposting which emphasises commonness of understanding.It is difficult for me to understand how intensity can be common, known, possessed,

especially since what is to this degree common in English culture is now tawdry, half-dead, the

psychic equivalent of municipal offices or government information. Perhaps there was a time whenthe great cathedrals had some psychic counterpart, but the time is long gone, and I gaze at the

cathedral here in Durham in isolation and quiet.

In the West we must admit to being surprised that it is municipal offices and notcathedrals which have been received from us into Japan as a kind of locus communis like thecoming of autumn. We are in turn urged by our own governments, who have an interest in the

matter, to emulate the fervour with which the Japanese identify as intensely real and important the

government and industrial enterprises to which they have so successfully extended their culture ofcommunal intensities.

The attempt of governments here in the West is likely to fail, and they are

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likely to face more and more what seem to them baffling and ironic privacies, just at the moment

when computers and the data they store seem to promise agreed centres of importance and authority.

- Theyve fed it into a computer has become, as it were, an attempt at a modern Japanese poem inWestern dress. What it is intended to convey is a sense of completeness, of something well and

effectively executed, a sense of control and understanding achieved. - It is true that there is

something exciting about the shorn and abbreviated language of computers, language that is soconfident of being understood, so confident that it will magnetise its audience, that it need make no

concession to the common courtesies. What to a hostile onlooker seems the crudity of gross

simplification will seem to the devotee the abrupt economy of speech associated with power. Eventhe computers habit of proceeding relentlessly step by step through a process, omitting no stage,

seems like the formalised movement, the marching and the ritual attitudinising, of human beings in

power or at the service of power.

It is worth remarking that the computers habit is to abbreviate its language andelaborate its system of procedure, never omitting a stage. Both abbreviation and elaboration are

characteristic of the distancing effect of power. One has only to think of a parade ground or a

bureaucracy: the parade ground uses vestigial language to accomplish self-consciously redundant

and fixed elaborations of movement; a bureaucracy will tend to work with acronyms and formulaicexpressions in moving through an accumulation of committees. The Japanese tea ceremony seems

not irrelevant here too.One might say perhaps that the desire to be simple and the desire to be elaborate

dance attendance on each other in properly human activity, in proper human language, rather as the

semantic complexity, the tonal indirections, of a poem may conspire with the predictability of metre

or rhyme. To separate these impulses so that the one is not allowed to affect the other in anyintimate way, or so that the border between them is not allowed constantly to shift its position, with

a complexity appearing out of a simplicity or the other way about; to make such a separation is to

make what is human more predictable, more machine-like. - It seems best not quite to know whatis simple and what complex, but to feel that simplicity and complexity go always hand in hand. If I

were an educated Japanese I could understand just how long the poem is with which I began this

section, how complicated and unending its privacy.

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FORTY ONE

Obligation sufficiently dispensed with between the obliged and the obliger creates afine and delicate mist of goodwill. I give you what you asked to borrow and beg so earnestly thatyou will forget any debt, that between us there hovers an almost impersonal, unlocated pleasure of

good. I do not in this instant own the goodness I have so much beseeched you not to endow mewith; you are not in this instant an owner; so the goodness is present but not anyones possession

In a poem by Ezra Pound called The Study in Aesthetics:

The very small children in patched clothing,Being smitten with an unusual wisdom,Stopped in their play as she passed themAnd cried up from their cobbles:

Guarda! Ahi, guarda! Che bea!

And the girls beauty is liberated into a space between her and them, in part no doubt because they

are children, not sexually desiring. This is not liberation into an abstraction, an idea of beauty, norinto an ideal; the beauty, like the flower of a plant, does not only in some other than biological way

confer life on the girl, it also derives life from her and would not survive without her. The capillarythread of possession is as necessary as having the air at freedom, as a kite will not fly without its

string.

Three years after, the poet hears the young Dante, whose last name I do not know

stroking the bright fish packed ready for the market in Brescia:

Murmuring for his own satisfactionThis identical phrase:Che bea.

The phrase as the boy uses it partly belongs still to that meeting of children and girlwith which the poem started; and partly it arises again independently, three years later, in the

meeting of boy and fish. Just so, every beauty is itself, and is linked, indebted, by capillary lines to

each other beauty.I am surprised that there is no word for this unpossessing possessing, but very glad

that there is not. The power of it is in the acuity of focus, affected always by the variability of other

factors, and a single word would be too stolid a presence to account for it. Not that there is

anything tentative about the focussed reality while the focus is held.Ones acutest sense of something real understood is often, I think, at the moment of

feeling that the word used is not quite right, but that there is no other; or at the moment of feeling

that a word is filling a function, occupying a place, which is not quite in its range of advertisedpossibilities:

The very small children in patched clothing,Being smitten with an unusual wisdom.

The force of wisdom in those lines has to do with our sense that Pound has

determined to use the word in spite of its inappropriateness. Wisdom has to do with maturereflection, with age, is not carried away by the experience of a moment. One is not smitten by

wisdom but inhabited by it. The wisdom of these children is, the poet allows, of an unusual kind,

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but (and this he insists on more) is also penetrating to an unusual degree. The noun is not slackly

used; the semantic equivalent here is of taking a coin intended to be spent and standing it on its edge

so all can see that that was what it was meant to be for, not for common spending. The perceptionquivers on the edge of pointlessness, almost but not quite denaturing the common function, but

needing it nevertheless so that the sense of fine-drawn extension, of deliberately claimed freedom,

should be there, as the kite needs its string.We understand properly in the interstices of our common possessed understanding

as Eliot put it, between two waves of the sea. And this world of understanding that is neither mine

nor yours, neither what I know nor what I can be told by you, is, I think, more extensive than thecommon world, for all that we see it only in glimpses. - The children are not small but very small,

and they wear patched clothing. And we must say that the poet conveys by these words a

capaciousness of undamaged, unqualified, unpatched reaction. Capaciousness, seamlessness, is

found where we would not expect it; this is not where our experience would teach us to look for it.We are made, though, to look again at the smallness of the children (they are not small but very

small) and to see great size in it. What we see, in fact, is a world not to be described by the word

small or the word large, which is free of the categories of understanding we approach it with.

I am reminded of the clever animals in Rilkes first Duino elegy:

Die findingen Tiere merken es schon,Dass wir nicht sehr verlsslich zu Haus sindIn der gedeuteten Welt.

It takes these clever animals (with their limited animal understanding) to notice thathuman beings are not as comfortable as they might be with the world they have made intelligible,

significant. We have built our house of understanding but we are not altogether at home in it. And

as, in a good poem or in some other act of love, the intelligible slips away from us, it rejoices, andwe may share its rejoicing if only we will not lumber after it with the nets of our mind. We should

not try recapture, we should try instead to sing a re