O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
O fat white woman whom nobody loves,
Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
When the grass is soft as the breast of doves
And shivering sweet to the touch?
O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
Missing so much and so much?
Frances Cornford, To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train
Why do we see and feel so little?
Partly because we do not need to be so acutely aware in order to survive – we require little guile to get our daily food, we have no potential predators except viruses and bacteria our senses are too coarse to detect anyway. Partly because we are fascinated by our social, acculturated world – the new temple we have constructed in the precincts of the old – and believe with blind devotion in the sufficiency of its conditional reality. Partly out of sheer boredom – it may be ‘a new world every heart-beat’ but it’s not that different from the previous one, not enough to get excited about. ‘This may be a film I haven’t seen before, but it looks much the same as yesterday’s film, and I can guess what’s going to happen next.’ It all seems pretty repetitive.
We want novelty. Some years ago, former President Bill Clinton came to Hay-on-Wye. Although the town, with its famous festival, is not short of celebrity visitors, people still talk with some pride about the fact that Bill Clinton came to Hay.
Every morning the sun rises on Hay-on-Wye. It shows us the world around us, warms us, grows our food, declines in the sky with exquisite grace, doubtless performs many other vital services without which we’d all be dead, and no-one pays a blind bit of notice.
Bill Clinton.
We value rarity – in experience as in stones. But this is a calculating, capitalist, narcissistic attitude. We value diamonds not solely because they are beautiful (few of us could tell them apart from good imitations) and certainly not for their usefulness, but because they are rare. If we could get them, other people would envy us, would be impressed that we owned them, and might offer us lots of money for them (which would give us the pleasure of saying ‘No’). It’s an ignoble business, which again demonstrates our strangely wilful ‘beside-the-pointness’: we reject the universe as it is in front of us (almost as though we suspected a trick) and seek out something of no greater intrinsic value, simply because it is uncommon. Traherne isn’t fooled: he scorns nothing and celebrates everything: ‘Some things are little on the outside and rough and common, but I remember the time when the dust of the streets were as precious as Gold to my infant eyes, and now they are more precious to the eye of reason.’
Bill sodding Clinton.
Another reason ‘easy wonder’ is derided is that it is seen as childish. A properly developed adult, it is thought, should have acquired knowledge and opinions in much the same way as he has acquired a job, a car and a mortgage. ‘Wonder’ should have been put away with all his other ‘childish things’ to be brought out again only on special occasions when he re-infantilises himself at a football stadium, a rock gig or a Star Wars movie.
Certainly ‘easy wonder’ is almost universal in young children (which explains Christ’s teachings about children – ‘Unless you change and become like little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven’ is a STA belief couched in theological terms). This innocent awareness is innate in every creature, and is not superseded, dulled or invalidated by experience – lions and toadstools do not grow cynical. Sophisticated human society, however, spends a fortune trying to stop or, at best, canalise it – and usually succeeds. Compare a roomful of 6 year-olds with one of 16 year-olds or 56 year-olds if you need proof. [Footnote: most adults think that sitting in an office looking at a screen is not only more lucrative but more important than sitting by a river or reading a book. (This is part of the same dark creed teaching that misery is more profound than joy, tragedy than comedy.) They are confusing ‘importance’ with ‘grimness’. It is telling that we use the same word – ‘serious’ – to mean both ‘important’ and ‘dour’.]
But this weary ‘worldliness’ is a cultural habit rather than inevitable. Eliot’s ‘cruellest month’ was, as he knew, a time of great delight and wonder for his predecessors. Chaucer bubbles with benign pleasure (rather than the more earnest worship of the Romantics and most nature-writers since), celebrating God, the world, flowers, people, the gloriousness of diversity; everything down to the hairy wart on the miller’s nose is a marvel to him. And this is not the ignorant raving of a simpleton in simpler times. He lived through the Black Death (which killed a third of his countrymen), wars, rebellions, massacres, famine, usurpations and assassinations. His were very much more ‘uncertain’ times than our own, and lived more viscerally. He was closely connected to the Court but, perhaps because of this, he did not see politics as the essence of life. In our time, paying attention to nature (or reality, for that is what nature is) is seen as trivial or escapist unless approached from a political, and probably gloomy, perspective. Chaucer looks through nature as through a window and sees God so plainly he barely remarks on it; in our age we look and see ourselves reflected as though something (the ‘Dissociation of Sensibility’ perhaps) had darkened the world outside.
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blissful martir for to seke
That them hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.
But the world (though polluted, degraded and threatened) is still as wonderful as Chaucer (and Shakespeare) told us. And as enchanted. Cobweb and Peaseblossom were only personifications of the miracles and mysteries which are still enacted every second in the woods. (Some are apparent to our senses and can be studied as science; others may be super-sensory, for humans at least; some, like joy, beauty and wonder are unquantifiable, but no less real for that.) The woods and the world do not need re-enchanting; we do. We need to alter our perspective so that we can see reality as children and Chaucer do – to see, as Dorothy finally did, that Kansas is in Technicolor too.
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