Words against pandemics

The Flaggy Shore, County Clare, Ireland

In Seamus Heaney’s 1996 poem, Postscript, he invites the reader to visit the Flaggy Shore in County Clare, Ireland. In 2018, on a flat, lilac-grey morning, some five years to the day after the death of the poet, I took him up on the invitation. Standing in quiet contemplation, I listened to a recital of Postscript by the man himself. Heaney won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 “for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” His poetry makes me think of Robert Frost, I’ve since discovered Heaney cites the American as an influence. Newsweek reviewer, Malcolm Jones, of Heaney’s work said: “Heaney’s own poetic vernacular – muscular language so rich with tones and smell of earth that you almost expect to find a few crumbs of dirt clinging to the lines.”

It’s now 2020, and the world is seized in the grip of the Covid-19 pandemic. Through these times we all, perhaps, are given to moments of uncertainty and despair. Heaney was once asked about the value of poetry in times of crisis. His answer offers some hope we might be able to fight external forces from within. “If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.”

Thinking back on that morning standing on the Flaggy Shore with Seamus Heaney’s sweet lilting voice, I offer that we, all of us, might seek out the small and precious moments in life and allow them to “catch the heart off guard and blow it open”.

Postscript

By Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Link to Seamus Heaney reading ‘Postscript’:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhSUj7ixYTk

I’ve forgotten what day it is

Thirteenth Beach, Barwon Heads, Australia.

Today marked Day#44 of the Covid-19 imposed lockdown here in Victoria, Australia. The photograph is Thirteenth Beach, standing on which, one looks south to Bass Strait. Apart from the island of Tasmania, next stop from here is Antarctica. A remote part of the planet, then, and a splendid place to find oneself in relative isolation. I’ve begun each morning, religiously, with a stroll along the shore. Check the tide on my clever app before leaving the house so I know whether I’ll be walking at low tide, over a wide plain of hardened sand or picking through the rocks and splashing waves when the water’s high.

I read that it’s the gravitational pulls of the moon and sun that cause our seas to bulge and thereby create the high seas. I have time to check up on such things these days. These very different days, these endlessly-the-same days. Life has taken an unexpected turn for us all. How suddenly we’ve had to re-consider every aspect of our lives. Who could have expected the world would experience a pandemic that would shut down the very concept of human society? Something we’d taken for granted; a given. A right. The impact has been devastating for certain parts of the planet – for those people I grieve and hope for the speedy flattening of the curve. ‘Flattening of the curve’ – a new, insidious expression that has crept, virus-like, into our collective vernacular.

I am blessed to be here in this place through this time. It’s appropriate, then, that I not squander; but ponder. Breathe deeply and wonder at all things. Things like the tide. The sucking sound the sea makes as it retreats down the bank of the shore. The world of life left behind in a sea pool. The Sooty Oystercatcher picking away at the exposed reef with its long letterbox red beak. The Hooded Plovers scurrying on their rapid stilts at the water’s edge. The line of pale sodium light marking the coming dawn of another wondrous day. A day to be wholeheartedly and vigorously seized.

Farewell, Mister Cromwell.

Final part of the trilogy. Hilary Mantel, take a bow.

In anticipation of reading The Mirror & the Light, the final instalment in Hilary Mantel’s Tudor trilogy – tales told from inside the mind of one of history’s most intriguing characters, Thomas Cromwell – I went back and looked at some of the lines I had annotated in the first two volumes.

Wolf Hall, the first in the trio, gets its name from the ancestral home of the Seymour family, (and of Jane Seymour) – the place King Henry VIII visits at the very end of the book. Jane is the woman Henry will betroth once he can rid himself, with Cromwell’s assistance, of his current wife, Anne Boleyn. The story tracks the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell from lowborn blacksmith’s son to his position of tremendous power as principal secretary and chief minister in the court of King Henry VIII.

Bring up the Bodies explores the downfall of Anne Boleyn, with whom Henry has become disenchanted. An intriguing tale of deception, adultery, treason, the Boleyn family do not yield without a ferocious struggle. The title gets its name from the order given to go to the Tower: ‘Bring up the bodies’ – deliver, that is, the accused for trial.

The Mirror & the Light was a long time in gestation. Initially due to be released mid 2019, Hilary Mantel delayed publication because of the sheer enormity of the task in wrangling the complexity and intrigues of this tempestuous time in British history. Running at a weighty 863 pages, Mantel says, ‘it is about all the big important things that matter, about sex and power and high politics, statecraft and forgery and delusion and lies.’ This final book will chart the fall of Thomas Cromwell.

***

Some lines from Wolf Hall:

‘It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant of the cardinal is apt – ready with a text if the abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed.’

‘He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.’

‘Henry stirs into life. “Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of this realm.” He drops his voice. “Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your patience? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents.” ’

***

Some lines from Bring up the Bodies:

‘His petitioners send him malmsey and muscatel, geldings, game and gold; gifts and grants and warrants, lucky charms and spells. They want favours and they expect to pay for them. This has been going on since first he came into the king’s favour. He is rich.’

‘I would back you in any assemblage this side of heaven. You are an eloquent and learned man. If I wanted an advocate to argue for my life, I would give you the brief.’

‘Elizabeth is a forward child, he tells the ambassador. But then you must remember that, when he was hardly a year older than his daughter is now, the young Henry rode through London, perched on the saddle of a warhorse, six feet from the ground and gripping the pommel with fat infant fists. You should not discount her, he tells Chapuys, just because she is young. The Tudors are warriors from their cradles.’

‘Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you can even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.’

***

And now, I look forward to the final part of the trilogy, The Mirror & the Light:

Hilary Mantel found the title while researching the story, a phrase in a letter from Thomas Cromwell to his regent, Henry VIII: ‘Your Majesty is the mirror and the light of all other kings.’ Oh, Cromwell, you sweet talking sycophant, you knew what side your bread was buttered on. I am going to miss you.