More on the cycle of life
Donner is still in a lot of discomfort. He is only a little eight months old kitten and doesn't understand why his foreleg is hurting and why he has an ungainly white plastic collar around his neck. He slept quietly on the bed during the night and this morning when I was writing seminar notes he lay beside me on the furry bed throw, eyes big and sad. I feel so bad for him. Two weeks is a long time to be constricted when you're such a young cat, and although he clearly needs his wound to heal a bit I worry about the psychological distress he's suffering because we can't explain we're trying to help him. Blitzen has been quite good and even tried to wash his brother a bit, but Donner is clearly depressed. I was on the verge of cancelling my tutorials this afternoon so I could sit with him until K- returned, but I did leave in the end. I think they both just slept for most of the afternoon.
Knowing that anyone or anything you love is suffering is the most awful thing. You would do anything to help, but sometimes there is nothing more that can be done, and that is hard. The thing that helps is knowing that it will pass; this too.
Meanwhile the poor thing is unaware of anything but his own discomfort.
Still human life has to continue, so after tutorials, Dylan Thomas it was. Sometimes you've got to hand it to YouTube. Where would I be without recordings of Eliot, Sitwell, and tonight, the wonderfully sonorous Dylan Thomas himself? We started off with Fern Hill (long enough to allow me to get my notes in order too) and then backtracked to the early 'The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower' heading right up until 'Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night'. I think that after the rather serious and stripped down work of thirties Auden we looked at last week, Thomas' love of resonant, alliterative, visionary-rhetorical language was a refreshing shift. I tried not to hark on too much about the biographical stuff - the whiskey-drinking bard, which was largely a constructed myth anyway.
And he saw all life as one and death as a part of life. Time is a benevolent entity in childhood, becoming a relentless force in adulthood. One way to address the condition is through writing, through the flow of images Thomas described in answer to Henry Treece's critical book. 'An image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions...Out of the inevitable conflict of images...I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem'. As though the flow of images in a poem can most accurately evoke the flow of forms and states through which life itself is manifest.
Anyway, here's the ending of Fern Hill, the strange image-set of transformation into adulthood and adult knowledge.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Singing in chains. The job of the poet. Well. I shouldn't say it but I can't help thinking it: let time roll on towards Christmas, when lessons will have flown, and kittens will be well again, and let it pause there so K- and I can catch our breath; in the mercy of his means.
Knowing that anyone or anything you love is suffering is the most awful thing. You would do anything to help, but sometimes there is nothing more that can be done, and that is hard. The thing that helps is knowing that it will pass; this too.
Meanwhile the poor thing is unaware of anything but his own discomfort.
Still human life has to continue, so after tutorials, Dylan Thomas it was. Sometimes you've got to hand it to YouTube. Where would I be without recordings of Eliot, Sitwell, and tonight, the wonderfully sonorous Dylan Thomas himself? We started off with Fern Hill (long enough to allow me to get my notes in order too) and then backtracked to the early 'The Force that through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower' heading right up until 'Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night'. I think that after the rather serious and stripped down work of thirties Auden we looked at last week, Thomas' love of resonant, alliterative, visionary-rhetorical language was a refreshing shift. I tried not to hark on too much about the biographical stuff - the whiskey-drinking bard, which was largely a constructed myth anyway.
And he saw all life as one and death as a part of life. Time is a benevolent entity in childhood, becoming a relentless force in adulthood. One way to address the condition is through writing, through the flow of images Thomas described in answer to Henry Treece's critical book. 'An image must be born and die in another; and any sequence of my images must be a sequence of creations, recreations, destructions, contradictions...Out of the inevitable conflict of images...I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem'. As though the flow of images in a poem can most accurately evoke the flow of forms and states through which life itself is manifest.
Anyway, here's the ending of Fern Hill, the strange image-set of transformation into adulthood and adult knowledge.
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Singing in chains. The job of the poet. Well. I shouldn't say it but I can't help thinking it: let time roll on towards Christmas, when lessons will have flown, and kittens will be well again, and let it pause there so K- and I can catch our breath; in the mercy of his means.
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