Class and Journals on the Chalk Cliffs

It seems like the clouds are closer to the land here in England, and it makes for very dramatic skyscapes. We walked up, up, and up over the green turf to the stone cross on the hilltop, and the sun streamed through the brilliantly edged clouds behind. Huge cloud shadows moved over the wrinkled sea half a thousand feet below; seabirds shrieked as they wheeled out from the cliffs hundreds of feet beneath us. (1997)

Jane Austen (2003)

If I am envious, Jane Austen was not, at least not in her letters or her other writing. She seems to be perfectly happy being single, middle class (or lower gentry, I suppose—I don’t understand the class gradations).

I think it is great that young women enjoy her writing still. Maybe because of the excellent films, but also because she still speaks to young women, in her clever, kind, engaging voice. How could one be anything but sensible about romance (but romantic as well) after reading her stories? We read them and wish that we had friends or sisters like that, and then we realize that we do.

What can I learn as a writer and as a woman from Jane Austen? That people around me are interesting, eccentric, different from each other and from my stereotypes and expectations. That accuracy and light and willingness to see detail create good art. That I should write what I’m interested in and what I know. Also that charity and clarity can go together and both are better for it—are transcended by the combination. That Jane was a genius, is my sister. That I am sister to all women, and to all men. (And eventually, auntie to them, perhaps).

Care with detail, caring about detail, is important for her type of art. She was probably more social than I am, more interested in society—but maybe not. I like to think that I am like her, but that may also be evidence of her genius, that everyone who reads her feels connected. The other thing I can learn is method. She wrote a little at a time when she was able, and didn’t impose her work on her household. She was not an artiste (nothing wrong with them, just not her or my style). She was both direct and disarming.

Rush Write - Xanadu (2007)

I dreamed of journeys. Every night I walked
Slog-foot through mountain passes in the snow.
Alone or in a draggled band we'd go
A thousand miles. The easier ways were blocked.
I dreamed arrivals: stumbling to a place,
An unexpected home behind the door,
The windows, gardens, wall, the stony floor,
Familiar as long-lost, loving face.

What has happened to the Journey and the Arrival, my own metaphorical path? I miss having the dreams. I feel like I'm floundering--a little--again--and maybe another journey is before me. It is frightening because I was so welcomed, loved, warm, and safe at my destination. This time the Journay doesn't feel so much toward a longed-for place of refuge, but out into the unknown, no end in sight, maybe no end at all.

Then, peace. But late I have begun to hear
The faint unsettling echo of a call.
It whispers to my soul, and my soul fears
That answering will cost, could lose me all.
I hear the echo in the dimming light,
Open the door and walk into the night.

Maybe I need to learn Buddhism and meditation. Maybe I need some kind of new Christianity. Maybe I need to study death. But the next step has something to do with spirituality--a word I've had little use for in the past--in my mind there was religion and there were actions, and all that vague spirituality talk was talk of air and nothing. I have friends and acquaintances who are always finding a new shaman or discovering a new meditation technique and getting in touch with their inner Goddess and so forth. (Obligatory nod to cutting-edge neuroscience and the right temporal lobe's association with human religiosity--assume that I've already mentioned the caveats, etc.)

Something about it still matters. Something about Christianity still matters to me, and I can't figure it out. It has all my life been elusive. My mind skitters away from it--maybe it is antipathetic to analysis and logic. Sometimes I feel like my logical, analytic, decision-making self is nearly disconnected from my emotional, creative self. Or my creativity is so much under the control of analytic intellect that it is not creative at all. Little seems to get through from my dream-self.

But the content-focus right now seems to be death. That is also unsettling. God and death.

2007 blog link on the left...

...if you wonder why I'm not including many photos from the 2007 trip. Check out that blog--everybody took a turn posting, and it's in the correct order, first of the trip to the last. Lots of fun photos and comments.

Thought Paper, 1st Draft (2007)

John and I have visited the Lake District so often that the visits blur together in my memory: sunny, rainy, cold, humid, dry; youth hostels or B&Bs in Ambleside, Keswick, Wastwater, Grasmere; Dove Cottage was open but they were refurbishing the museum; Rydal Mount was closed, we missed the bus, we had to walk back to the hotel beneath the trees. The years flow past like ripples in a river. The forest birds sing, the geese honk, the sheep bleat in the meadows.

One horrible year the sheep were missing; acrid smoke rose from the death pyres in fields across the valleys and hillsides; we tramped over bleach-soaked straw mats to get to historical houses; footpaths were blocked by signs saying "no access due to foot-and-mouth." Worst of all were the farmers' faces: the ongoing catastrophe had stunned them into stone and engraven them with grief.

I had a grief once, as small as one tiny girl, "and oh, the difference to me." Another thing that died in June 18 years ago--

Here I'm brought to a standstill. I was going to write... "my unquestioning faith," but it's not entirely true. What is faith? Something died in me that June with my dear Lucy, but I'm not sure it was my faith. "Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will." That river, which I think must be faith, glides on, deep and glad and life-affirming.

What I lost was the comfort of confidence in my own understanding. My intellect, my rationality, stands since then on shaky ground. All the universe I believed so closely knit fades and frays to transparency. The abyss opens beneath my feet and I stand upon a floor of stars.

And I don't want certitude! I don't want to believe. If I believed again I could lose again--I won't allow it. But I'm uneasy with this impasse (although why should I in particular be at ease?)

Next in my quest/journey: the connected issues of refusing to understand, and the matter of God. I refuse to accept the goodness of a God who includes the suffering of innocents in his plan. Is that blunt enough? I'm not angry at him, I just don't believe in him. My definition of "goodness" not not include causing such harm or allowing such harm to occur when you have the power to stop it.

But I begin to have the terrible fear that maybe my faith in my understanding of "goodness" is as misplaced as faith in my understanding of God. Maybe I don't even know what causing harm is, in the long run--the eternal long-run, when all the consequences have been felt and the rewards and punishments given out. Not that I believe in a God who doles out rewards and punishments either, like brownie points and demerits. So who or what deals out the consequences (what eternal blackjack dealer, in what eternal Vegas, dressed in black vest, green eye shade, striped garter on his sleeve)? Is it God?

What or who is the impetus for my river of faith? Not the blackjack dealer. But maybe the river is merely the fortuitous balance of neurotransmitters or the effects of a happy childhood. (So my discontented intellect protests the contentment of my soul). Why am I happy, when elsewhere childish warriors fight, loved ones vanish and reappear as tortured corpses, men whose greatest good is money sit in paneled rooms and plan where next to drop the bombs that kill another mother's child?

Why isn't it fair! The child's cry. I will not be put off by easy answers, or hard answers either, to the problem of suffering. No articulated argument is worth one hour of suffering--not the arguments of philosophers, of churchmen, of patriots, of saints. I will not accept a rationale for it. I don't know and you don't know and they don't know and they are deceiving you and possible themselves if they say they do understand. God may understand, but at the death of his friend Lazarus even Jesus wept.

But--the God I know, the God of my experience (and even as I write, the little niggling doubt of intellect insists "neurotransmitters! endorphins! self-hypnosis!"), is very large. Perhaps he can encompasses sorrow and suffering. It is frightening. I don't know what I want to be true.