In my home, a step down off the dining room, overlooking the beautiful garden my wife has created, I have my studiolo. A studiolo in Renaissance times in Italy was either a piece of furniture or, in the case I have in mind, a small room in which to write and read and listen to music and think. It was, in miniature, a study cum library which offered privacy and a minimum of space for books and personal memorabilia and writing material.
In mine I have a comfortable chair and a desk looking out the window on the garden, lawn and trees with a view of the ocean over the top of the seawall. I note with no particular Luddite pride but certainly with no feeling of deprivation either, that this private room has no computer, fax, telephone or cell. On the shelves that surround me I have the special books I am currently browsing through or studying. I read and write there in blessed peace. I am distanced from trouble in the streets. The virulent and contemptible exchanges of distrust and hostility between fellow Guyanese can be forgotten for a while.
The perilous state of the nation is for another day’s, another week’s, another month’s consideration. I find myself retreating more and more into this quiet room, my books within easy reach, possessing the kingdom of the imagination beyond all squalor.
I am increasingly reluctant to exchange such benison of private place for the boring and acrimonious turmoil of the world at work and play.
And so I sit there and write, far from the madding crowd. And often enough I put down my pen to savour the infinite sweets of reading. Never a day passes without a discovery, a revelation, a wondrous fact, an incitement to further study, further reading, some spur to the imagination to go off in extraordinary directions or just stay still and quietly enjoy the infinite ramification of mankind’s astonishing passage from silence to silence.
● But what books to read? Franz Kafka, the great Czech allegorical novelist, is a stern adviser. “Although,” he wrote in 1904 to a friend, “I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us.
If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, at a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we love more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”
● I am continually reminded of the limitless joy of books which those who hardly read cannot seem to fathom. Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and treasurer and chancellor to King Edward II of England in the 13th century, loved and collected books with a passion: “In books,” he wrote, “I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace.
All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates: all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.”
Six centuries later Virginia Woolf understood his passion and described a similar love of books: “I have sometimes dreamt,” she wrote, “that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward.
We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.’”
● I read and love Michael Ryan’s poem about looking forward ungracefully to the time when he must write his last poems before departing.
Extended Care
I’m not ready to write my last poem –
paeans to the glory of sun porch and duck pond
and inner peace that comes to me at last
when, out of terror, I begin to pray incessantly
and love all my neighbours as I love myself,
including the unknown one who steals my crackers
and the former state senator who sings
“God Bless America” for every meal and snack time.
I’ll have to be ninety plus, maybe over a hundred,
nine-tenths blind and needing a fresh diaper,
before my blinding fear of losing and not-getting
lifts like the huge purple curtain at the Metropolitan Opera
to reveal the extraordinary blessings of an ordinary day.
Maybe my hearing will also be so far gone
that I finally understand the voices in my head
debating whether or not I deserve to live,
when in fact – I’ll realise – I’m living O.K. right now,
although I may still believe life could be better
if someone installed a lock on my snack box
and gave that state senator a laryngectomy.
How lovely (I’ll think) every person I’ve known.
Even the egocentric shit heels had a kind of charm,
and the ones who lied purposely to cause me damage –
maybe they had kids they loved or parents they took care of.
They surely did something worse than the worst things I did.
Everyone will appear to me as a scared soul
struggling with the same sort of torments and disappointments,
as death rises like a dinosaur out of the duck pond
and lumbers dripping toward me on the sunporch
where I glow with the modest good I did with my life,
grateful this gorgeous world will be here for others when I am gone.
And then, after travelling far in just a few hours, I am brought back home abruptly. I come across a quotation from Plato’s discourses: “When issues, definitions, sights and other sense-impressions are rubbed together and tested amicably by men employing questions and answers with no malicious rivalry, suddenly there shines forth understanding.” Sadly, in Guyana these days issues are “rubbed together” with so much suspicion, hostility, malice and deep ill-will that there is absolutely no chance of clear understanding shining forth. The only hope there has ever seemed to be lies in the politicians on all sides setting an example in their dialogue and thereby gradually bringing about a return to civil discourse throughout society – but at election time that flickering hope it seems is quite extinguished.
And when that hope fades what other option is there to finding some retreat and withdrawing from a world gone unnecessarily mad.
