Archives for posts with tag: Redemption

Wislawa Szymborska

September 25, 2014 //
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One of my absolute favourite poets.

And thus, in the aftermath of watching Night Will Fall, I looked to Szymborska for a redemption of sorts, a rekindling of my faith in humanity and in life.

This is what I found.

 

The Ball

 

As long as nothing can be known for sure

(no signals have been picked up yet),

 

as long as Earth is still unlike

the nearer and more distant planets,

 

as long as there’s neither hide nor hair

of other grasses graced by other winds,

of other treetops bearing other crowns,

other animals as well-grounded as our own,

 

as long as only the local echo

has been known to speak in syllables,

 

as long as we still haven’t heard word

of better or worse mozarts,

platos, edisons somewhere,

 

as long as our inhuman crimes

are still committed only between humans,

 

as long as our kindness

is still comparable,

peerless even in its imperfection,

 

as long as our heads packed with illusions

still pass for the only heads so packed,

 

as long as the roofs of our mouths alone

still raise voices to high heaven –

 

let’s act like very special guests of honor

at the district-firemen’s ball,

dance to the beat of the local oompah band

and pretend that it’s the ball

to end all balls.

 

I can’t speak for others –

for me this is

misery and happiness enough.

 

just this sleepy backwater

where even the stars have time to burn

while winking at us

unintentionally.’

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Categories Art & Suffering, Poetry

Niall Williams – ‘Only Say the Word’

April 26, 2014 //
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Although long aware of the Irish author Niall Williams, I had never read any of his novels. The arrival of his current book History of the Rain prompted me to explore his earlier work.

I started with Only Say the Word, and loved it, finishing it in less that 24 hours. It feels as if every book this year reminds of another author’s work, coincidentally also Williams, John, and his novel Stoner, which I have previously spoken about here [https://sufferingandthearts.wordpress.com/2013/12/16/stoner/]. Only Say the Word and Stoner are very different, but they do share a common theme of following one man’s life, and the influences and events that impacted on the life in question. In addition, both John Williams and Niall Williams are masters of a style of prose that seduces the reader willingly and complicitly into the life of the protagonist.

Niall William’s narrative tells the story of Jim, opening with the words:

‘I do not know what to write. There have been so many words written already. So many endings and beginnings. I have lost my faith.’

We are immediately introduced to the acute cause of Jim’s sadness, which is the loss of his wife Kate, mother of his young children:

‘And so I sit here, and feel your absence and wonder how to begin to live without you.’

As Jim commits his story to the blank page, his life up to now is revealed. We learn of his childhood in Ireland, with his devout mother who seemed to exist in a haze of sadness, his kind but distant father, his genius and troubled brother, and his baby sister Louise. It is a relatively calm and untroubled childhood, until:

‘And in that same passing of time, the same even measurement in which one moment seems identical to the next but is not, our life is struck and falls apart.’

Tragedy happens, from which nobody truly recovers. Jim partly blamed himself, as children tend to do, and it was not a family where such feelings were expressed or acknowledged:

‘In our family we are each like boats slipped from the moorings, out in deep water, and utterly separate or tangled in our own nets of grief and loss. We live together in the house but are each alone.’

Jim copes by escaping, initially through books and reading, and later physically, when he leaves school.

We follow Jim’s life, and his attempt to make sense of it as he commits the telling of it to the page. Jim is a more accessible character than John William’s Stoner, yet that is not the point. Liking someone is not critical for empathy, which only demands an authentic emotional connection with the suffering of another. Jim (and in essence Niall Williams) goes a step further. By sharing his story, and in particular the redemptive possibilities of caring and of love, hope is ultimately acknowledged and embraced.

 

CQ

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Categories Bereavement, Empathy, Families, Fiction, Grief, Illness, Literature, Loss, Love, Stories, Suffering

Grace McCleen’s ‘The Professor of Poetry’…

September 17, 2013 //
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This book comes recommended, mostly notably perhaps by Hilary Mantel, who describes it as ‘an astonishing and luminous novel’.

I liked it. It resonated with me in ways that were not initially obvious. It grew on me, as did the main character, ‘The Professor of Poetry’ Elizabeth, who I empathised with much more with as I progressed through the book than I had at the outset. There is much to consider here, even after, or perhaps particularly after, reading the final sentence.

Elizabeth is an academic, a serious academic in her early 50s whose single life revolves around her work, which is poetry, particularly Milton and Eliot. She becomes ill, and is subsequently diagnosed and treated for a brain tumour. Her post treatment scans reveal a remission, something Elizabeth was not expecting. In the light of this news, and reprieve, she decides uncharacteristically to do something different, to be spontaneous, and to seize something from the gift of time that she has just been granted. She decides to revisit her past, the university of her younger years, and also her tutor of that time, who still teaches there.

‘The day was perfect and it was her own, had been wrapped and presented to her, and she smiled at the pleasing coincidence: the present, for once, being precisely where she found herself.’

We learn much about Elizabeth’s character as she commences her journey, and as she reminisces on her present and on her past. We discover that, for example, ‘Elizabeth doesn’t ‘do’ love poetry’. She also doesn’t ‘do’ summer. But we also learn that as a child growing up, her mother used to retreat ‘from the everyday world by a process of not-being, not-saying, not-doing’.

Elizabeth has mastered, at least in her professional life but one also suspects in her personal life, ‘The Art of Detachment’:

‘It was easier to eschew human beings than interact with them.’

She had a troubled and a tragic childhood, memories of which flood persistently Elizabeth’s consciousness.

‘The sea taught the child that pain takes place only in time, that it was impossible to hurt and be truly occupied, but if your hours were empty, pain could be felt very clearly indeed. Pain had much in common with the sea. Both ebbed, both went unnoticed for hours on end, then reared up and took your breath, and neither pain nor the sea was ever completely at rest.’

From an early age, poetry was her consolation, her safety net.

‘A poem could usually be counted upon to shatter the quiet, carry them through the wilderness and bring the knight back safe.’

As she considers her childhood, lost moments and regrets of her time as a university student, and also explores the poetry of Eliot, Elizabeth gradually experiences an epiphany of sorts:

‘What must it be like to produce a living creature instead of one made of paper and ink? A creature that became a real entity, no longer merely an appendage to its creator.’

 ‘She was suddenly reminded of something Eliot had written somewhere, that most people were ‘only very little alive’. Eliot was obsessed with buried lives, unlived lives, the life of the living dead.’

This realisation culminates in one night of inescapable and painful self-reflection:

‘It suddenly occurred to her that she had travelled further this night than she had her whole life.’

Speaking to her body, which she mostly ignored all her life until illness happened (although ‘For as long as she could remember Professor Stone had lived with a pain in her chest’):

‘I am sorry, hands, because you served me well and I have not been good to you.’

‘And I am sorry, arms, because you never wore bracelets and never hugged and never saw much of the sun.’

‘And I am sorry, heart, because you beat fast for fear many more times than for joy, and never for love.’

There is much tenderness in the book’s denouement, and McCleen’s style throughout is as poetic as the poetry she refers to. So much of the prose passages made me stop and think, not just about Elizabeth, but also about who or what I might be and have become:

‘It was strange to see people one had known a long time ago: they were always unchanged and changed completely, and somewhere within that contradiction lay the state of ourselves, she supposed.’

CQ

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Categories Art & Suffering, Cancer, Illness, Literature, Loss, Love, Memory, Suffering