Thoughts After Thoreau

First written May 10th 2012 in Kelling, Norfolk

On recommendation from an old friend, I have taken to listening to Radio Four’s “Something Understood“. This week’s programme was dedicated to the transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.   ( Link to synopsis here )

In listening, I enjoyed hearing that Thoreau achieved a balance, a middle ground, in the cabin he built near Walden Pond Massachusetts, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. The austerity evolving from ideas of transcendentalism always risks a disappearance into an abyss of anarchy otherwise. Yes it is true that too much attachment to civilisation and its “progress” eats away at the soul, but it is very necessary to be intelligent about how this is all managed in the time-bound state.

I was taken by the extract from the essay “Life Without Principle” which mentioned the “panting of the steam train” which interrupted his sleep and was a reminder of the push of progress and “business”.

That was then. Now, as I stand in my garden and rake the ground to prepare for the runner-bean sticks, I hear in the distance that self-same “panting”, by now a friendly “chuff-chuff” and short tooting whistle as the North Norfolk  Poppy Line steam train takes holidaymakers on their short journey to the beach and pubs of Sheringham.

This is the ”glory”  which Thoreau sought:  to see “mankind at leisure for once”.  The circle comes around, the hard prices have been paid, and the essence of human endeavour seems not so aggressively unhappy: it becomes a matter of attachment to the right bits, if one is to survive realistically and not as some kind of mad Eremite.

I reflect also in the same essay, on his discussion of the man walking in the woods being perceived either as a “loafer”  or as “industrious” . Will he enjoy the  beauty of the woods, or will he despoil them in the name of “business”? Making the earth “bald before its time” of course brings about this inevitable result  caused by too much industrious and enterprising endeavour.

This reminded me of Hopkins’ poem below      ( and yes, Hopkins is found among  myriad others, who were attuned to the essence of what was coming, as the industrial age developed apace,  and saw  its insidiousness weaving into the old rhythms of existence).

Binsey Poplars, felled 1879
Gerard Manley Hopkins

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew—
Hack and rack the growing green!
Since country is so tender
To touch, her being so slender,
That, like this sleek and seeing ball
But a prick will make no eye at all,
Where we, even where we mean
To mend her we end her,
When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweet especial scene,
Rural scene, a rural scene,
Sweet especial rural scene.

But actually, Hopkins was more of a Romantic than an Environmentalist. Poplars last only about 60 – 100 years or just a little more depending on type, and the ones at Binsey were replanted immediately. They  have similarly since been cropped and managed, as is required for trees which are prone to canker and other pests. I also read somewhere, that the wood from the Poplars in Hopkins’ day was taken and used for brake shoes on locomotives on Brunel’s Great Western Railway. So I guess this would have further dismayed the Romantic.

But I am sure Hopkins would have enjoyed the sound of similar steam trains wafting across the fields from Weybourne yesterday afternoon.

John Craske - A Delicate Life

I am reading a book by Julia Blackburn, who spends her time between Suffolk and Italy. Her book pursues the life and art of one John Craske, local man to Norfolk: fish- and sea-connected born 1881 and who after the 1914-18 war at the age of 36, fell into some kind of mental stupor, from which he hardly recovered.

c. John Craske Postcard Painting
- The Duigan Collection

The book, suitably enough, is called “Threads” and is a meditation on loss and memory, with scenes local to North Norfolk, and reports of conversations in her pursuit of this man’s story.

John Craske spent most of his “saner”  time from 1923 painting images of the sea, and later, when too ill even to stand, he took to his bed and embroidered instead of using paints for these images. They are extraordinary in detail.  He is more or less forgotten, and Julia Blackburn has written in an affectionate and often moving way about her attempt to find traces of him in the memory of local people, and in museums / homes where his work remains scattered, abused and forgotten.

More about John Craske is here.

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In homage to John Craske, I made the picture below. It takes the shape of one of his boats, on a sea of my own making. The top bit was chiselled by God over time – it is the grain and the colour of the wood I am using.

Brown / White Study

The Cruellest Month

London Bridge 1896 

The adage “April is the cruellest month” proliferates at this time of year: we are exposed to the greatness of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land through this popular line expressing distress at the prospect of springtime and renewal.  When pushed to find another famous line from the poem, I find most folk who have some acquaintance with the poem will recall the image:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge..

The crowd flowing over London Bridge is taken straight out of Dante. Eliot’s notes at the end of the poem  acknowledge this, referring to Canto III  (“sì lunga tratta di gente, ch'i' non averei creduto
 che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta”). Eliot saw this crowd every morning, and I feel sure sometimes was part of it, in his commute to LLoyds Bank in Lombard Street.

In Dante’s Inferno, these souls are forever trapped in limbo ( but see * below ), since they have lived in a moral neutrality, just half-alive in this life, and so having no hopes of death. Death, of course, is just a step on the path to unified consciousness. Such souls have no hope of this, and so their death undoes them. “I had never thought death had undone so many”. and they are left in a void, symbolised by the Waste Land. Folk in the Waste Land do not participate in the great cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth toward that elusive unified consciousness.

There is a great beauty in such fragments. Eliot weaves into the poem, bits from Western and Eastern culture and philosophy. It is a “heap”.

The Waste Land - Images from a Walk 1998

I like the image of a “heap”. Looking at the heap, you can see the occasional glint of hope, amongst the dross. Each glint, each shard of light, references a major body of traditional thought, culture, legend,
myth and belief system. cf Dante, the Bible, the Upanishads, Shakespeare, St. Augustine, Buddha, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Webster etc. etc.  and leads you onwards. But the poem also – and primarily – stands uniquely by itself, enabling an emotional response such as those evoked by the idea of a “flow” in those few lines.

And so, amongst lines evoking isolation and despair, there are also instances of a perceived and exquisite harmony – eg a small section  from Line 257 in Lower Thames Street and Magnus Martyr Church .

The Church of Magnus Martyr

O City city, I can sometimes hear
Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street,
The pleasant whining of a mandoline
And a clatter and a chatter from within
Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls
Of Magnus Martyr hold
Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold

Sadly of course, in our modern era, all that river-facing activity has gone. How much of it was it there in the 1920′s? I don’t know, but it was there in the poet’s imagination. And it maps anyway to a time when Lower Thames Street was full of folk from nearby Billingsgate Market (the old one, of course),  where fish was traded and the place teemed with life and purpose and which looked out towards the water, sea and hope. So these rich images are now only echoes of a past of promise and fortune against a present dullness.  And so the voices which speak of the cruelty of April are locked against the opportunity to renew towards a life of promise.

Note * My old friend Nick Parker ( il miglior studente ) pointed out to me quite rightly that one should be careful with the word "limbo". The ideas expressed here come from observations in the scholarship ( e.g. Elizabeth Drew T.S.Eliot: The design of His Poetry 1950 p99 ; F.O. Mathiesson "The Achievement of T.S.Eliot 1935 p22). But as Nick pointed out, it is not correct to associate these lines with Limbo (capital "L"). They refer to 'gli ignavi' who appear in Canto 3 and not those who are "dinanzi al cristianismo".