by Ann Wroe
Even Clare, with his bird-like sensibilities, did not infallibly know where his bearings should be.24 On his long journey north and homewards from the Essex madhouse he was careful to sleep with his head in that direction, to steer him in the morning. Nevertheless at one crossroads he missed his way, began to sense that he had, and limped at last to a tollgate where he asked the man whether he was going northward; ‘& the man said “when you get through the gate you are”,’ so he thanked him and went through on the other side, humming and singing.
In order to avoid such uncertainties, Thoreau kept his surveyor’s compass ready, delicately sighted with a horse-hair; and his friend Emerson, too, never failed to carry his pocket compass with him. He told a fellow passenger, as he returned by steamship from Liverpool to New York in 1873, that he liked to ‘hold the god in my hands’. While in England, he had learned that the first compass had been given to Hercules directly by the sun god, in the form of a golden cup in which a magnet floated. His own small brass instrument was divine for a different reason. In an early poem called ‘Self-Reliance’ he had equated the little needle that ‘always knows the North’ with a bird that always remembered its note, as well as with God’s constant voice at the bottom of his heart. As he flicked open the case the needle would be set quivering, by invisible force, like the singing throat of a bird; but then it would settle along a straight line, star to star. Any man or woman could steer that way, aligning as the frost did ‘N and S’ by unwavering Polaris. It happened to Dante among the intersecting compass lines of Paradise, drawn to the beauty of a voice at the heart of a light – that light being a bird-like blessed soul – ‘as the needle to the north star’,
Che l’ago a la stella
Parer mi fece in volgermi al suo dove.
For some years, at primary school, I too carried a compass. It was very small, no bigger than my thumbnail; I had found it outside my teacher’s house where I waited to be walked to school, lying beside the wicket gate that led into her garden. I never thought to ask Mrs Whitlock, with her red face and brassy curls and prominent blue eyes, whether it was hers. It seemed impossible. Where it had come from I never knew, and did not really wonder. It lay there for me to find: not visibly part of any other object, simply itself. It was backed with a mirror, equally small; but behind the glass face the blue needle had become detached from the pivot and could never be reattached, for all my shaking.
Nonetheless I had the world in there, north, south, east, west, and a blue Polaris to point me through it in a crooked fashion, and a mirror to see how I got on. And the mirror itself, being so tiny, reflected back only my fingertip of ridges and valleys or my cheek looming like a hill, a giant’s curious face bending over a miniature pool of light.
This magic thing I kept in the pocket of my blazer or my school dress, with handkerchiefs and holy pictures and sticky sweets removed from my mouth before lessons, preserving it so carefully that I have it still. It was not God as far as I was concerned, for He was in heaven, bearded, severe and cushioned in clouds. But when the blue-star-needle caught for a second or two on the pivot and, in a lopsided way, see-sawed as I held it, its trembling energy seemed to tend both infinitely high, and infinitely far –
IN THE BEGINNING
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light –
My writing-perch was on the grass beside the track that winds from Firle up to the Beacon. A Sussex friend described Firle Beacon to me as ‘our Mont St Victoire’ – the mountain in Provence that Cézanne repeatedly painted, never tiring of the way the light changed on it. Firle, at 800 feet or so, is not quite a mountain, but as Gilbert White implied, the Downs have that feel about them. This is the hill that every artist paints, which nonetheless stabs the heart with each encounter because it is so silently grand, and so much loved. Local clergy go up there to celebrate Pentecost, the feast of light.
My notebook was new, open to the first page: plump, tight, slightly convex, with the white paper winking minutely in the sun as though thoughts were already held there. ‘I shall now begin a new sketchbook,’ wrote Palmer in 1824 on a similar fresh page, ‘and I hope, try to work with a child’s simple feeling.’1 The same thought struck Traherne, as he opened the notebook which his ‘Excellent’ friend Susannah Hopton had put into his hands – the book in which he was to write, for her, his Centuries of Meditations. ‘An Empty Book is like an Infants Soul … It is Capable of all Things, but containeth Nothing. I have a Mind to fill this with Profitable Wonders.’ There is always a sense, with an unwritten book, of returning to the beginning of everything.
The best route from Firle village had taken me a while to find. The more easterly path is a struggle in its last section, breath-catchingly steep to the stirrup gate that barely, stiffly pushes open. The more westerly track up Beddingham Hill, on the other hand, running past the lane to the farmhouse at Furlongs where Ravilious stayed with his lover Helen Binyon, is too long.2 It winds round the bowl of the valley, every field evoking his brushwork on white paper, and each twist of the view echoing his remark that he could draw a local geography, starred with asterisks, of all the spots where he had kissed her.
The old blessing thorn stood behind me, precipitous chalk combes before me, the wide, wide sea beyond the ridge. Purple orchids were flowering everywhere, small beacons in the grass. A couple in summer clothes and sun hats, plausibly from the 1930s, plausibly Helen and Eric, paused on the path to admire them. For if all the light by which we see is ancient, having journeyed from the first crack of time, it surely carries with it all manner of memories, disturbances and ghosts.
The words from Genesis, as I wrote them down, were meant to provoke me into writing more on that clean, expectant page. Instead I just thought how good they were, simple and unstinting as the sun above me. God said, Let there be light. And there was light. The first act of creation was a word: the Word, as St John explained. Light and word emerged together, the same thing, the first thing. The primeval light, wrote Robert Grosseteste with his candlelit medieval clarity, ‘was begotten at God the Father’s speaking’. And light, being uttered by God the Father – not once uttered but being uttered, never stopping since – made all forms: as the cock maps the morning world, or as certain tribes we call primitive believe their ancestors sang into being their own geography, from basking lizard to gum tree to broken, red-rock hill.
God’s speaking, Grosseteste cautioned, was inaudible, for it was made of light and no ears heard it. Yet many presumed that sound came too: not necessarily just one almighty delayed thunderclap, as after lightning, but the tonic note of the chord from which all music sprang, and goes on springing.
Hermes Trismegistus, the Greek-Egyptian demigod of writing and magic, claimed to have heard about the first moments of light.3 It was sent ‘inarticulately’ out of the darkness, together with smoke ‘as if from fire’ and the strange, ineffable, mournful sound of darkness itself. By this account the birth of light seemed difficult, confusing, as if something was unwillingly pushed into view. Yet it was hard to believe that light had not been there for ever: and easier to imagine that God, rather than brooding in His own dark, was in Meister Eckhart’s phrase ‘a light shining in itself in silent stillness … self-poised in absolute stillness’, before He spoke.
That word – that light – was in the beginning with God, said St John. Not separate from Him, as if He struck a match, or drew with a sparkler on the yet-to-be-created air; nor as if, like Ravilious once, He sat enthroned in ‘a magnificent Chinese chair’ in the old Belle Tout lighthouse above Beachy Head, up in the lantern, imagining how the great beam of the lower light would suddenly stab and sweep through the night-time land and sea. Light was ‘Bright effluence of bright essence increate’ in Milton’s formula, rippling out like a solar flare. The uncreated from the unbegotten. As Hopkins saw it, light – or word – was ‘the first outstress of God’s power’. As Böhme believed it, the word at the centre of God’s heart simply opened, and ‘the love-light world’
began –4
[the couple in sun hats have sat down just below me, among the orchids; she lies back and laughs, he tickles her with grass]
– that love-light world which Ravilious, walking here, called ‘the extreme brightness of everything’.
Genesis placed God in charge. But God’s shoulders seem too broad here, His shadow too heavy with human history. Instead perhaps the First Cause, like a night spider – potentially light-like already, frisky, nimble, ubiquitous – spun light out of itself. The image seems modern. But Traherne came up with it earlier, describing the ‘Quick and Tender’ love-light of God as ‘able to feel like the longlegged Spider, at the utmost End of its Divaricated feet: and to be wholy present in every place where any Beam of it self extends’.
Just so, between the flowering heads of timothy grass more than a yard apart on either side of me, a small brown spider races to and fro at eye level, improbably tilting on his humped back, front legs feverishly working to build new barely visible worlds. He hangs before the scene – the chalk punchbowl, the blue woods, the lovers half-hidden, Firle’s bulwark massed behind – throws out a filament and scrambles along it, much as I throw out thoughts and scribble after. I will break them when I move, both web and thoughts – he will start again –
‘A noiseless patient spider,’ wrote Whitman, saluting him,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.5
One morning in September 1741 Gilbert White woke to a world made of gossamer. It began with meshes of dewy cobweb in the stubbles and clover grounds (they wrapped the eyes and muzzles of his foraging dogs, driving them wild), and continued with showers of rags of web from the sky, ‘falling into sight, and twinkling like stars as they turned their sides towards the sun’. Over an area of some twenty square miles of Hampshire chalk country from Bradley, to Alresford, to Selborne, the gossamers fell all day, hanging in the trees and hedges ‘so thick, that a diligent person sent out might have gathered baskets full’. Each filament of this web-landscape was made by a minute spider shooting out a thread – once from White’s finger, once from a page of his book, as he watched in astonishment.
Coleridge in 1804, earthed and bowel-bound, had evidently seen the same: ‘Like the Gossamer Spider, we may float upon air and seem to fly in mid heaven, but we have spun the slender Thread out of our own fancies, & it is always fastened to something below. –’
Perhaps to nothing more, though, than sky-feathering leaves of grass.
Thinly then, perhaps barely visible, that first line of light leapt out across its own unbounded space, chaos and the dark. (In wind and low sun it is the rays or spokes of a spider’s web that shake out light, rather than the lateral connecting threads; so that the impression is of sparkling energy ever renewing itself, from the centre outwards.) But at once light branched and multiplied, instantly everywhere, like Hopkins’s many-faceted creasings and forked-lightning, or Messiaen’s birdsong and leaf veins, as well as spider silk. ‘It has what I might call a self-generativity of its own substance,’ wrote Grosseteste, ‘filling the place around it all at once.’6
Though light’s rays were assumed to travel through emptiness in straight lines, the most efficient way, they were easily deflected. Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century held that light left its straight path, as soon as beasts and men were created, to twist through the tunnels of the optic nerves ‘consistent with the soul’s operations’. Newton’s light moved to and fro, back and forth, reflected and transmitted from any matter in its way, like a tailor stitching a wavering seam of sparks. Einstein affirmed that light bent as it travelled to follow the curvature of space.
Straight, curved or haphazard, the effect was the same: creation by illumination. In Dante’s Paradiso the images of curve and line came together in a wheel of light, the centre spreading out in spokes, spandrels and traceries that suggested cathedral rose windows or the workings of clocks, revolving eternally in that harmonic hum of praise that persists from the organ even when the stops are muted. (In Rodez in south-west France, where I was deputy organist in my mid-twenties, the bats in the cathedral loft would fly out and clutter round me as I played, like fragments of night astonished.) All things were now eternally sounding and eternally becoming, each new creation mirrored from the last. Dante, from his Paradise-perch, learned the secret of that beginning: form and matter, he wrote, came into being as a ray shone in a glass, or in amber or crystal, with ‘no interval between its coming and its pervading everything, all at once’. As St Paul put it, ‘All that was made manifest was light.’
And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. Chaos, or night, which existed before light visible, did not understand it and could not contain it. Yet nor could the two be separated. Still they clung together. Astronomers now think they can find evidence of that moment: a ‘surface of last scattering’ in which photons reveal the long-ago conversions of the forming universe: density fluctuations, inflation and waves of gravity in which light’s pulses or particles wobbled, rocked and finally aligned themselves, like boats on a rough sea. And it was perhaps at this point that Genesis described light as brooding on the dark, mantling its wings over it, as when birds that have bathed briskly in dust stretch out their feathers to cool them; or when a swimmer on bottomless water, rising a little and falling, embraces the infinite curve of it with tired white arms.
That sea, though, did not remain the same. The child-light now contained the mother-dark, pressing it into an infinitude of forms, much as Coleridge watched the waves change on his voyage to Malta:7
every form so transitory, so for the instant, & yet for that instant so substantial in all its sharp lines, steep surfaces, & hair-deep indentures, just as if it were cut glass, glass cut into ten thousand varieties …
O what an Ocean of lovely forms! … the mind within me was struggling to express the marvellous distinctness and unconfounded personality of each of the million millions of forms, and yet the undivided Unity in which they subsisted.
Light had a power, the ancients believed, to make random particles coalesce into shapes already idealised by the First Cause; and subsequently, in Böhme’s words, to move the forms themselves ‘always to make that very thing with which the spirit is impregnated’.8
Above all, light imposed order. So said Genesis, for that strictly organised first week of divine work all sprang from the original spark. So said the Greeks, for Apollonian light was metre, measure and music, as perfectly spaced and set as the arrows of the god. As Traherne explained the process to Susannah with his usual hectic enthusiasm, light drew design from confusion. And this generated more light; as forms took shape, light was ‘Expresst’, and grew ‘Activ around them’. Brightness increased as creation was arranged. Traherne had noted that in the midst of smoky, roiling human occupations, order was ‘a Bright Star in an obscure Night … a summers day in the Depth of Winter … a Sun shining among the clouds’. What was true on earth must have held true from the beginning, as the universe unfolded.
Order the Beauty even of Beauty is,
It is the Rule of Bliss …
Hopkins understood this instinctively. His was a world in which everything was regulated by repeated patterns of light, even in the apparent chaos of falling water or bramble-tangled ground. ‘All the world is full of inscape,’ he concluded in 1873, ‘and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as purpose.’ It was not, then, chance at all. From his teenage years he recorded in pencil, chalk and words the curling regular strands of waterfalls, the webbing and ‘chain-work’ of sea waves, snow-dust gliding in rows ‘like so many silvery worms’, clouds showing ‘beautiful and rare curves like curds … arranged of course in parallels’. On the fells near Stonyhurst in gritty snow he saw ‘green-white tufts of long bleached
grass … each a whorl of slender curves, one tuft taking up another’, like nebulae. In a mown hayfield at Pendle in September he found ‘an inscape as flowing and well marked almost as the frosting on glass and slabs’; and in ‘random clods and broken heaps of snow’ swept by a broom, ripples perfectly spaced.
These patterns into which the world fell did not go unnoticed by others. Ravilious’s clouds almost always moved in series and in parallel. He also found a curious regularity in the footprints of customers in the sawdust of a butcher’s shop; in the dark parallel swerves of sledges and pram wheels in snow; in the rough but even spacing of clumps of grass in a field; and on the sea, like Coleridge and Hopkins, the perfect geometrical latticework that covered the surface of the waves.9
His influence persists here on Firle, too. Overhead near-identical clouds drift in quiet procession, formed and blown from the same source; the fields below run in even, parallel terracing, like contour lines on a map; and the finches that flock past are in bands arrayed as neatly as, in their far grey vapour trails, the faint displays of fighter jets at the Eastbourne air show. Either I am arranging this or, if that seems dubious, light is –
Traherne insisted that immaculate order applied at the tiniest and humblest level.10 A drop of water, he wrote, ‘an Apple or a Sand, an Ear of Corn, or an Herb’ (to mention only his immediate favourites, those within sight of his church porch at Credenhill), were all established as they were ‘by the best of Means to the Best of Ends’. When things were in their proper places they shone, ‘Admirable Deep and Glorious’; a mere spire of grass, ‘in useful Virtu, native Green/ An Em’rald doth surpass’. By contrast, out of their place they were ‘like a Wandering Bird … Desolat and Good for Nothing’.
Clare, wandering down a lane, recorded with delight old farm implements in their places: ‘a pair of harrows painted red standing on end against the thorn hedge … an old plough … on its beam ends against a dotterel tree … & an old gate off the hooks waiting to be repaired’, all blending with Nature and ‘pleasing in the fields’. Jefferies echoed this thought with his vivid appreciation of a cart outside the wright’s, ‘wet with colour and delicately pencilled at the edges’; Ravilious did so with his rollers and harrows, his serenely mismatched chairs, his serviceable tools and coils of rope, and cups set on the table for the ritual of tea. To reduce confusion to order, in the words of Alfred Rich in Water Colour Painting – a manual he particularly followed – was to place round the most commonplace object ‘a halo of beauty’. Even at eleven, doing his art homework, Ravilious could portray perfect order and clarity in a pencilled egg nestled in a pencilled cup. Inevitably, perhaps, he also drew a perfect teapot, its knobbed lid finished with exacting care. These objects shone where they had been useful, and would be again, with their own bounding line and stillness, in their place.