Epiblog for the First Sunday of Lent

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. The mad winds of March have arrived with a vengeance, with a positive vendetta, in fact. Thursday was the sort of wild, blustery day that almost made me glad to be confined to barracks, except that, of course, Thursday was the one day when I had to actually venture forth, to physio. On my way there, from the window of the ambulance, I saw my first municipal daffodils of 2011. Not fluttering and dancing in the breeze, so much as being flattened by it, like the ones in Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale”

“Faire daffadils, that come before the swallow dares
And take the winds of March with beauty.”

Maybe Spring has sprung. It is too early to tell. This was also the week when (getting our money’s worth as a family out of the NHS) Debbie’s Dad received the results of his recent visit to Papworth. He needs something called a Pulmonary Endarterectomy, which is not nearly so much fun as it sounds. It involves them cutting through your breastbone, and fiddling around with your ventricles, there is a 5% chance that you might not survive the experience, and all sorts of side effects are possible during the prolonged recovery period, including going temporarily loopy, apparently. On the other hand, if he doesn’t have it done, in a couple of years’ time, he might be carrying a tank of oxygen around with him wherever he goes. I don’t envy him his choice, to be honest.

While Mike was travelling down to Papworth to learn this drastic news, Zak and Freddie were staying with us, which involves communal feeding, an activity often akin to trying to get all the little silver balls in the centre of the maze.

What should happen is that Kitty eats Kitty’s food, Tig eats Tiggy’s food, Zak eats Zak’s food, and Freddie eats Freddie’s food. Simple enough. What actually happens, however, more often as not, is that Kitty eats Tig’s food, and Tiggy starts off by eating her own food, sometimes at the same time as Kitty, then moves over to the cat food. Freddie sniffs his own food, then moves in to finish off Tiggy’s food. Zak, meanwhile, eats his own food, but when he’s finished it, he goes round and hoovers up everyone else’s leftovers. Sometimes, when Freddie’s moved over to Tiggy’s food, Kitty starts eating Freddie’s food, and he comes back, wanting to finish it off, but instead, he stands idly by, whimpering for sympathy, because he doesn’t dare barge her off it. Kitty has eaten so much dog food of late, I fully expect her to produce a lead from somewhere and ask to go “walkies.”

We have also acquired another pet, albeit a wild one, a fine speckled thrush that now visits the bird table on the decking daily. The other morning, as Debbie came through, it was there, and I remarked to her that the thrush was back again, and she replied that I shouldn’t worry, as these days you can get cream for it. The thrush is not so much a Thomas Hardy “Darkling Thrush” as a Robert Browning "wise thrush that sings each song twice over, in case he never might repeat his first careless rapture" - and every time I see it, I think inevitably of the lines from Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins,

“Glory be to God for dappled things”.

The thrush is engaged in a long term project which involves eating the remains of an old Christmas pudding that we put out on the bird table back in January, still in its plastic bowl. Given the gusto with which it tucks into this on a daily basis, there is of course always the alarming possibility that the thrush will grow correspondingly huge as the Christmas pudding diminishes, and one day we will find a thrush the size of a football resting on the decking, too big to take off.

Debbie has been getting all trepidacious this week about the prospect if having to possibly teach Shakespeare as part of a pre-GCSE course next year (this is the academic year, starting from September. Academics have different years to the rest of us, in the same way as farmers have different weather, because they get up early and they work hard). She only likes one Shakespeare play – Macbeth. We were quoting bits of it to each other the other night while watching Jamie Oliver. I know, it’s just one white-knuckle ride of excitement round at ours. The last couple to have a life like ours were Blake and his wife, who used to sit in the garden reciting Milton to each other, Mind you, to spice it up, they did it in the nude, and of course, famously, in the middle of it, Blake was arrested for sedition, so we’ve got a long way to go yet. Anyway, I digress. We were reciting Macbeth, and I did the bit about life being a poor player

“A tale told by an idiot
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Which moved Deb to observe that it wasn’t very “nice”, as a speech. And I said no, it wasn’t. Shakespeare wasn’t known for his political correctness, but to be fair, "King Lear" would be a lot less interesting if Lear got taken in by social services or care in the community, rather than being allowed to wander about on the blasted heath, raving in a thunderstorm. Actually, in Kirklees, that probably would have happened even if he had been taken in by social services, but we’ll leave that for now.

She has also completed the third in her trilogy of disasters, when she switched on her laptop on Friday morning and it was dead as mutton. I have been telling her for ages to back up all her teaching stuff, but I may as well have saved my breath to cool my porridge. Mind you, I have no room to talk, it is only since my own laptop scare that I have been zealously backing things up left, right, and centre, with the resounding clang of a stable door being bolted, long after the horse has fled. After considering various “Domesday” scenarios, a quick phone blitz by me found someone who would allegedly fix it, or at least look at it, that day (a different someone to the someone we found to look at mine, who still hasn’t come back to me after two weeks). The laptop was duly transported to their premises on Chapel Hill, and lo! It was fixed by the simple expedient of removing the battery, which had become flatter than a flat thing on a flat day in flatchester. A new battery costs £65.00 (ridiculous! At least Dick Turpin wore a mask!) so for now, she’s running it without one, straight off the mains. A narrow escape, though. Phew.

There is still no sign of my ramp, in fact not even so much as a response to the ranting email I sent to Kirklees Council on Monday. So I have now invoked the nuclear option, I have written them a letter. For the moment, I have contented myself with posting them a copy. They will not like it. They will like it even less if they ignore the posted letter and find me nailing a copy to their door, a la Martin Luther, having first invited the Huddersfield Daily Examiner to watch me do it. My letter was prompted by my receipt of a missive from them, during the week. Aha, I thought, at last, something is happening, - but no, it turned out that it was as msilshot from the head of social care saying that, despite what I may have read in the press about the Tory cuts affecting social care budgets, not to worry, because in Kirklees the service would be just the same. In my reply, I have asked if this is intended to be the good news, or the bad news.

Anyway, that is enough about the ramp – last week I was admonished for having no patience, and I take that criticism constructively, in the spirit in which it was intended. I guess Big G does have a lot on his plate right now. First Christchurch, then Japan, a lot to clear up.

That is true, though, about me having no patience. I am not a patient man. But it does have a good side, because I have no patience, I am not willing to wait for a better life for the downtrodden; I also believe in life before death. Because I have no patience, I am not willing to tolerate the injustice of homelessness. Because I have no patience, I am not prepared to put up with people being shoved around by the Government, and kicked when they are down and on the ground through no fault of their own.

On Sunday, I woke up to rain hammering against the window, and lay there, listening to the patterns of its pattering, as I was thankful for the roof over my head. It was a bit like waking up to rain in a tent, in fact, that moment when you are grateful for the invention of the sewn-in groundsheet. Then I thought about all those who are out in the rain right now, but don’t want to be.

I stood amazed, during the week, at the proposal by Westminster Council to ban the “soup run” to homeless people in their area. Of course, on one level, we should not be surprised at a bunch of self-serving, fat burghers and Pharisees have concocted such an idea. They have “form” in that respect, after all. Was it not Westminster Council that banned the run in their hallowed precincts at Christmas the other year? Unbelievably, on that occasion, it was supported by the editor of “The Big Issue” and I wrote to him and told him he was an idiot. He never replied. Perhaps he already knew.

To the councillors of Westminster, it would seem that the homeless are a sort of wilful and tiresome irritation, so obsessed with the taste of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato that they are willing to leave their homes and their jobs, hitch-hike to London, and sleep rough in a doorway in Covent Garden just for a sniff of the stuff. It is an indicator of just how far those set in authority over us take us for mugs, that this kind of bollocks is actually served up as some sort of justification for the ban.

The truth, I suspect, lies nearer to the fact that rich people who live in Westminster don’t like seeing poor and homeless people as they go about their daily social round. It grates on the residual node of what used to be their shame gene, before they had it surgically removed. It reminds them of the fundamental injustice of their continued existence, compared to the people in our society who are really struggling. Johann Hari, writing tellingly about this in The Independent, points to the distant view of Canary Wharf and all its glittering towers, from the perspective of the homeless who “live” – or rather, exist – in Covent Garden.

Anyway, I have written to the Worshipful the Lord Mayor of Westminster asking her what she intends to do about the homeless, because you can’t ban them from existing. Now that no one will feed them, will they be left, in some cases no doubt, to starve in the gutter? I await the reply (if any) with interest. Because, as it says in my Bible, if they cared to look, “the poor are always with us”.

So, I have not been a happy bunny this week, no change there then. It was not until late on in the week that I actually turned to studying the collect, epistle and gospel for the First Sunday in Lent. (I am glad to be back in synch with the Church, in ordinary time, or whatever, but for a while, Quinquagesima was quite a sexy word…) In fact, before looking at the scriptures, on Ash Wednesday itself, I read T S Eliot’s poem of that name, something I try and do every Ash Wednesday, in the same way as every Good Friday, I try and read “Goodfriday 1613, Riding Westward” by John Donne. For me, the hallmark of a great poem is that each time you read it, it gives you something new, and for me, "Ash Wednesday" certainly passes that test. It is one of the great religious poems of the Twentieth Century, or indeed, probably of any century, steeped in the language and rhythms of the King James Bible, and prefiguring in many ways the later flowering of some of the same themes and ideas in “Four Quartets”.

This year, though, I tried to read it in a slightly different way. One of my problems with Eliot is I know too much about him. I spent three years studying the man at University, and have resolutely kept up my interest ever since. So I know that Eliot wrote the poem as part of the process of becoming reconciled and joining the Church of England, in 1936, and that it is in some ways an agonising mixture of remorse and regret for him, renouncing his previous life up to that point with all its rights and wrongs, including the guilt over the collapse of his marriage and the mental illness of his first wife.

This time, though, I was looking for concordances with my own plight, and I just let the lines wash over me, only pausing where I found something that resonated particularly with me. It turned out, not unexpectedly, to be the lines about renouncing things, something I have been forced into doing rather a lot of in the last six months. I am not giving up anything for Lent, I have already given up far too much.

I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessèd face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.

It is all about sitting still and accepting your fate, two things I am singularly bad at. To say that Eliot wrote it when he was busy embracing Anglicanism, it is a very Zen idea. And yes, I do have “matters that with myself I too much discuss”, like will I ever get out of this wheelchair.

The next passage that seemed positively to glow off the page for me was the famous section which starts:

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.

A critic once asked Eliot what he had meant when he wrote the line, “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree”, and Eliot calmly replied that he had meant “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree.” A warning against reading too much into poetry, perhaps. But these lines for me signify the (again very Zen) idea that there is no “me” as such, or at least, whatever constitutes “me” is not my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained in the hollow round of my skull. And in the same way that Big G doesn’t go in for intervention, fiery chariots, and sending St Peter around with a cement mixer and a gang of disciples, but instead works through mankind, so the leopards in this case are God's agents of destruction. God’s cats-paws, separating what is me from what is not me, like the wheat and the chaff. Perhaps the late, great Dr Spooner was nearer the truth than he thought when he stood up at Oxford that day and solemnly intoned “Our Lord is a shoving leopard.”

Then there are some of the saddest lines in the poem, where Eliot renounces the sensual life. Lilacs and hyacinths always seem to stand for ideas of sex in Eliot’s writing, for reasons probably to do with his habit of wandering around in rose gardens with Emily Hale. Not that I am suggesting any impropriety.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

T S is not wrong. Brown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown. And blonde hair, too – especially blonde hair, sometimes. I do not know if my Lenten life from now on, having given up walking, at least temporarily, will also entail giving up other things, I look forward to the sweetness of May, my favourite month of all the year, and, sad as it may seem for my spiritual development, right now, I would rather be out in the garden listening to the antique flute, than struggling to climb the third stair, especially if it isn't wheelchair accessible.

And so I left Eliot to his own self-recriminations, and turned to the Prayerbook, and to 2 Corinthians 6:1-10 (King James Version), which seems to be about not receiving the grace of God in vain, and which I have to confess passed me by, almost completely. I didn’t know quite what to make of it, neither a hat nor a brooch. All flowery stuff, King James language and all that, but I still don’t get it. Obviously I need to read it again on a day when I am not so bitter, so cribbed, cabin’d and confined, and not feeling so hard done by, if such a day ever comes.

The New Testament text, Matthew 4 1-11 (King James Version) is the famous passage where Satan takes Jesus out into the Wilderness and alternately taunts and tempts him. I’m not entirely convinced about Satan, the Devil, call him what you will. I don’t think I believe in an actual bloke in furry jodphurs, with horns and a tail, carrying a pitchfork. I think it stands for the part of us that is capable of doing evil nasty things, the pebble in our shoe, the grit in the oyster. In other words, it’s a personification of the bad that is in all of us. And, I suppose, part of the principle of Lent is that in fasting, in giving something up, we are showing that we have the will power, the capability, to deny that in ourselves. So instead of just turning the stones into bread, Jesus points out that man shall not live by bread alone.

So the devil takes Jesus “ up into an exceeding high mountain”, and shows him “all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them”, and basically offers them all to Jesus if he will give up and worship him instead. Jesus, of course, not to be swayed from his purpose, tells Satan to “do one” and after that “Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him”.

I wish I had Jesus’s ability to forego all of these temptations. I have had to give up many things in the last six months, but I have not done it willingly, I have not offered these things up to God, they have been taken from me, and I have held on to them until they were finally wrested from my grasp, and even then I have carried on lusting after them, and bemoaning the fact. In Lent, it seems, I am being asked to accept these losses, even maybe to add to them, albeit temporarily.

So, once again, I have found myself in the same stony ground, the same rock, the same hard place, my tempter still at my elbow saying “use your impatience for your own ends and not those of others”, telling me to feel sorry for myself and to complain long and loud when things don’t go my way. And do I have the strength to say no, and renounce these things, in Zen terms, to let it go with both hands, not to care that I am giving up so much of the world I used to inhabit, to sit still and wait for the Spring to come?

The only true, honest answer I have this afternoon, on the first Sunday of Lent, is, I do not know if I have the strength within me to vanquish the tempting foe, or to acknowledge that one day my bones might be nibbled by leopards. So, in the meantime, I continue to bleat about my fate, and remain a shadow of my former self. In fact, to be honest, I am not even happy with this Epiblog, I don't really know why I wrote it, or how you had the patience to get this far reading it, if indeed you did. Sorry.


T. S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday by poetictouch