A Responsibility to Awe

by Rebecca Elson

With the rhetoric of great discoveries,

  That our journey here has ended.

  But after the pride,

  Might we not grow restless,

  Digging our own ten toes

  In the soft sand,

  Feel something missing

  From our private numerology?

  And dreaming a bubble chamber

  To record the tracks of lost thoughts,

  We might forget to count the waves,

  To measure each one spilling individually

  Its charge of weed and white foam,

  And consider only ocean.

  ...

  Polytheism vs monotheism

  Marigolds from Turkey, Ephesus, the temple of Artemis, going to the mosque, the old man at the public toilets, with scented water, giving us each a flower, and how seeds can spread, and what they spread.

  1 July

  Butterfly on a warm brick, flexing its wings

  Leaf lands on a tuft of grass

  Faint breeze

  Walking home by moonlight through the temple of Artemis

  The solitary column, piece upon piece

  Then by day, the man asking us to buy his coins

  The road from Ephesus

  The horse with its colt

  Passing us in the dying light

  Big September moon, full and round, rising

  Over the empty sacred space of Artemis

  With her one column

  2 August

  Finally, some energy returning.

  Days at the beach, mornings

  The waves rolling in, sun biting

  The ocean primordial somehow

  Seething with weedbeds and

  Animals, and the surfers like seals

  Slippery and black and waiting

  For waves

  And along the rock shore

  The waves coming higher than

  You, filling the rock pools

  Each crack a crab waiting

  Just out of the sun

  The anemones blossoming green

  And primitive, and the seals

  With their wise heads

  Moving through the surface of weeds

  Walking forever up and down this shore

  I could sit endlessly here and

  Listen to the surf repeating itself

  To the horizon which swallows

  You up in its enormity

  To the reds and greens of the

  Coast hills, how this planet

  Must once have been

  When the rains stopped

  And the ocean had become

  And there were not yet mammals

  Shedding fur and gathering lice

  Only smooth fins and slippery

  Skins and the underwater leather

  And pearly husk of shells

  And the air unbroken by

  Even a bird cry

  Though what must the insects

  Have sounded like then

  With wings like ferns, towering?

  How did they sing?

  ...

  13 August

  Father’s Prayers for Sons & Daughters

  Strange to think that even a god

  Might bring himself to slit

  The soft throat of a sacred ram

  And then, closing his eyes

  As if against the smoke,

  Imagine a thousand miles away

  A telephone not ringing

  In a dark room.

  ...

  30 October

  Sunday morning, Mozart somewhere, a wind, and grey clouds. Black bare branches, though still there are hopeful places where yellow leaves wait to be bathed in sunlight against a black sky, and make people pause, and think of something other than their next appointment, or their last. There are still cows along the paths of the town, though the sheep have been replaced by a running track. Locomotion is the drug of these times, to make the body move quickly from place to place, as if it were all in the destination, nothing in the getting there, nothing in the journey. But all the things you pass by, leave unnoticed. So absorbed in what of the universe can be projected on your screen, you have not seen there is a plant beside you, trying to grow. We are becoming absent from this world, hardly anything touches us now, from beyond our own constructions and effluence. How we speak of ‘volunteers’, small emissaries from a world we have almost forgotten, these are plants which forsake the comfort of their own kind, and come to try to make us remember what else there is.

  ...

  9 November [Santa Monica]

  Cirque du Soleil:

  The man flying and turning in his cube

  The singing

  The two small contortionists,

  Bodies melting in and out of each other

  While the angel on stilts with torn, ragged wings

  Looked on from the shadows

  Wishing to be a small body

  Knowing no limits of pliancy and balance

  The clown in love with the coat

  Five yellow balloons rising out of his old suitcase

  The torn scraps of paper from the letter

  There will always be letters

  Travelling in thin envelopes with foreign stamps

  Unfold me, hold me between two pairs of thumb and finger

  What are we trying to say with all these curves

  That we are great admirers of order and reason

  That we have behaved like detectives from the start

  And are presenting you with all the evidence

  Avoiding always the question why

  And presenting it as if we were not there

  As if it just happened by itself

  And would have happened the same way for

  Someone else or someone else

  We are anonymous, but OK how we fight to add our name to the list

  What are we really looking for?

  13 November

  How Renoir loved his father’s olive trees

  Honour your grandfather’s olives

  And how many centuries there might have been fathers planting olives

  And grandfathers, and sons playing like goats in their grey-green shade

  Art is a way of taking joy in life

  How the house would be filled with music

  You, taking your grandparents to the mountains, after all the sullen years

  Grandmother praying loudly in the afternoon, and as if in answer to her prayers

  You are there, and the sun shines through all the month of November, and

  You are all in the old car, going to the mountains

  Something in that high air could lift them above all their angers

  And you knew that by instinct, they were suffocating themselves

  With fears and resentments down there in the city

  Honour above all the trees your grandfather planted there in the garden

  Where you now stand, making plans

  How this chain keeps going, one link at a time, asking whether

  Our bodies are strong enough at some point in our life to

  Make another link, and the luck of it, that small boy playing in

  The garden, and his grandfather chasing him out of the vines.

  ...

  20 November

  Wind moving the branches of the trees. Strange how warm for November. How is it possible to take this for granted? What does it mean? Monday morning. Wake up, dress, eat breakfast, set off on my rattling old bicycle, through the Grafton Centre, across the common, to the black iron footbridge where the swans are waiting to be fed, past Castle Hill, through St Edmund’s Gardens, & up to the old stone walls of the observatory building. Put up a picture on the screen of part of a small swarm of stars seen by a telescope that hundreds of people, using the accumulated knowledge of thousands of thinkers, put into orbit around our planet. Think about what it means. What does it mean? And is it just, in the end, a discipline like anything, like building brick walls, or balancing accounts, o
r sitting at an altar in a pose of meditation? This is what I practise, practise it with compassion, with honesty, with dignity, with dedication to some ideals.

  13 December

  And dreams coming in like storm clouds

  And an orange tree bearing fruit

  And rain

  And a car putting into the driveway

  Flying, we leave England, and the Irish coast, all green and angular with its small fields.

  And some time later, there is Greenland, in a deep twilight, hexagonal ice on a dark mat of ocean, and some few edges raised high enough to catch the last sun offered from the south. You will never be close enough to this land. It goes on like this, and on, all the whiteness, all the clean cold nothingness, snow dunes, tracks of animals, maybe, maybe nothing, mile after mile, hour after hour, broken ice & a shore, and land, and then, a house, two houses, two small pools of light coming out of the doors, the windows of a place where someone lives, onto the snow which must drift and pack and squeak underfoot when they make their way, whoever they are, from one house to the other, and around them, nothing, for so many, many miles, nothing but snow and the curving earth, and dreams coming in like blizzards, winds, spindrift, building dunes, & packing and muffling, all in the darkness [Does the moon rise in the Arctic winter?] No colours, maybe a deep blue, stars from time to time, so far away, so very far away and cold and bright. And what is it that draws you so, wondering who they are, as if they were the only people on earth, the only ones, so far from all this green. From anything that seems as if it could sustain life, and yet life goes on, somebody’s. Maybe because of the impossibility of doing anything, of doing any of the hundreds of little things there are that spring up like weeds in green places. There is all that space to absorb motion, all that whiteness to absorb colour, all that twilight to absorb light, so you could sink into stillness and obliteration, you could shout, and all that sky would take away the sound. Nothing to bear fruit, nothing to struggle, nothing to take shape in your hands, nothing to be created, long long nights and the patience of all that space. Imagine the wind at your door, the generosity of all that yellow light collecting in a small drift, a long meditation, nothing to send ripples over your thoughts, nothing. How would you progress in such a place, with nothing to mark the time, the days, no clock, no calendar, an absence of axes, absolute space, one would be moving at last in proper time, the observer’s clock, the inner clock, inner space, not stopping to wonder about hours of the day, is it midnight, or morning, or Tuesday, or Sunday, perhaps is it January now, or February, and when will the light return, watching towards the south, always your back to the pole, and one day, one inexpressible day, a small bit of red over the rim of the snow, there for a moment and then gone, something foreign, almost incomprehensible, you would sleep again, and wait, and find it again, and realise with a start that it is high noon on Baffin Bay, and one day, perhaps, a bird.

  ...

  14 December

  What you want is something more like this.

  A bit of sun falling on your face.

  More of this, sleeping on a sofa in a stranger’s room

  How quickly we move into spaces

  And inhabit them, as if it really were

  More a question of being than beings

  Of self than selves

  What is the relation between a human being and a space?

  ...

  1995

  16 February 1995

  These are hard times

  Wanting nights without dreams

  Or dreams like roads

  Saying, come this way, or this way

  And across town somewhere

  Someone shouting, anger, or hate

  And his voice coming into my room

  Through the open window

  These are hard times

  Asking what, really, do you want

  To know from the Universe

  That would make a difference

  And what is a few years

  A few more breakfasts

  Or understanding something

  And to the slow stars

  How fast our lives must go

  Like the blades of a fan

  So fast they are invisible.

  27 February

  Uniform grey, cold, a rain falling from time to time

  No spring, though there are daffodils gesturing

  Luck for the dead in the comfort of their graves

  Not going cold footed down to the shops

  Returning with bread to all the cold houses of the world

  Other years have passed like this

  And we have almost survived another February

  You must be thankful for a small room with a garden view

  For friends who come and go

  Yesterday we walked along a lonely dyke above the marshes

  The wind coming cold off the sea

  And not a thing between us and some Roman soldier

  Walking there, wishing, also, for warmer times

  And even a day like this, you know that the trees

  Are getting ready to stun you with their leaves

  And the forsythia is preparing to catch you just like sun

  In the corner of your eye, though you can’t see it

  All the deepening roots & the swelling columns of sap

  And is there something like this going on within?

  Something like this, washing out of the old, the toxic,

  The unnecessary.

  ...

  28 April

  Travelling light

  Now like a wave Or bagpipes starting up

  Now like particles

  We can only say like

  Not knowing how to see

  Two things as one

  And asking why that speed

  And not another

  8 May [Saffron Walden]

  This is VE day. Here stood my mother with a glass of champagne, and so many dead ones, and sorrow, so easy to cry like that over those parted by death. And here outside is spring, a clear May sky, a bird at twilight singing his heart out. How long do birds live? And life returning even to my bones, after the half death of these months, the moments not lived, if living is to sing and dance & let your body fly through spring nights, & make love in the winter while wind rattles the windows. Live while you are still young, and be beautiful, & sparkle like diamond, like the sun on the moving ocean, because before long you will be old, if not already. And don’t worry about what might happen in the future if this or that – there will be a house full of life & friends & space & music & love. J.C. going wistfully to Paris, afraid to be lonely, why is it that we need each other so, that we kill each other. Each with his curse, of loneliness, of tragedy, of self-hate, of fear. And how lucky I am to lie down each night with an angel underneath my eaves, and be folded in the warmth of his wings.

  ...

  [7 August 1995 – 9 June 1996 is published in Oxford Poets 2000]

  1996

  Monday 10 June 1996

  The sky like a firework

  Stopped mid-shower

  A bee causes a shower of rose petals provokes an avalanche of petals

  Me in the row boat, not going far

  Or around the meadow

  Through the middle of the meadow

  Connecting with something

  Some joyfulness, the generosity of meadows

  Be like the small lizard on the warm stone

  Still, then darting, then still

  The frog floating limply

  Letting the green water hold it

  Let the Earth hold you

  And (if not the Earth), the sky

  Willow spilling itself towards the green water

  These have been long years

  To feel again the body slipping nymph like

  Through a green pond

  In the company of fish, water bugs

  A little panic of frogs

  Wednesday 12 June

  Frogs skipping themselves like sto
nes

  Across a weedy pond

  ...

  Missing matter

  Dark matter is an unseen filament of spider’s floss

  Suspending a slowly spinning leaf above a pond

  It is the lips of a fish touching the surface

  Sending out ripples

  Dark matter inside us – memory, associations

  It is what makes you remember something from your childhood

  The damp smell of a basement,

  The mothball smell of an old trunk

  The brittle dusty smell of an attic

  The smell of a certain herb

  That makes you feel sudden sadness, sudden joy

  Sweet clover, heat, a poplar breeze

  Everything inside you that you cannot see, that makes you move

  It is unconscious

  The known human forces, love & hunger, fear and hope faith forces of attraction

  Each of us moving in the field of these forces

  A unified theory of these human forces

  But what these forces arise from are our dark wells of memories

  Of instincts, of collective signs, of deities

  All the invisible things in this world

  That leave their traces

  A night frost leaving blackened leaves

  It is the black stuff of coal that glows orange in an ember

  If an air bubble breaks the surface, sends out ripples

  Then dark matter is the passing fish

  ...

  Dark Matter II

  In this, our galaxy of human ways

  Each of us, point-like, luminous

  Bends the path of those whose lives we touch.

  But there is something more.

  That keeps us circling a common centre,

  Stops us spinning off into the void

  You feel it in an unexpected pull

  A sudden swerve of thought, mid-stride:

  The deep well of almost weightless memory.