The winding stair

I was in Toronto with my wife to attend the wedding of a favourite niece. It was a truly delightful occasion – a beautiful ceremony and a festive Caribbean party combined to create a memorable time for all concerned. A few weeks previously we had attended the christening of our grand-daughter and seven other infants by Bishop Francis at Brickdam Cathedral in another supremely happy occasion – everyone smiling and exchanging good wishes after the traditional religious ceremonies of welcoming new life. So good, for a change, to enjoy two very happy rites of passage in such close succession when the usual rite of passage I attend these days are funerals with their dismal rituals of loss and final departure.

so140112ianUp there in Toronto for the wedding, it was bitter cold. The place submerged in late winter snow and the roads slithery with ice. Spun glass and hanging crystal in the bare branches. The Great Lakes froze for the first time in decades. Ah, back home the blessings of the sun and warmth and a garden of hibiscus and hummingbirds to sit in at sunset with the wind in the green trees and the ricocheting sounds of the bull-frogs – such things are worth an addition to annual GDP of, say US$10,000 if you want to deal in statistics.

But, one has to say, in a place like Toronto there are always the bookstores where one can seek refuge from the bitter weather and where these days comfortable chairs await and coffee shops are often on the premises to accompany the pleasures of browsing. In just a day or two of discoveries in these havens there is a great deal to share. Today I quickly give some examples.

●            I read the words of American scholar Stephen Greenblatt which exactly reflect what I think of great writing which makes more remarkable this most remarkable world we live in:

“Literature is the most astonishing technological means that humans have created, and now practised for thousands of years, to capture experience. For me the thrill of literature involves entering into the life worlds of others. I’m from a particular, constricted place in time, and I suddenly am part of a huge world – other times, other places, other inner lives that I otherwise would have no access to.”

●            I rummage in Coleman Barks’s translations of the 13th century Sufi mystic and Persian poet Rumi. Here is one of the poems, very simple:

 

I reach for a piece of wood. It turns into a lute.

I do some meanness. It turns out helpful.

I say one must not travel during the holy month.

Then I start out, and wonderful things happen.

 

And here is another poem of that remarkable

poet-saint:

Who makes these changes?

I shoot an arrow right.

It lands left.

I ride after a deer

and find myself chased by a hog.

I plot to get what I want

and end up in prison.

I dig pits to trap others

And fall in.

I should be suspicious

of what I want.

 

●            I pick up a book of Yeats’s poetry and read again a poem I have read a hundred times, a poem Martin also liked very much, ‘The Winding Stair.’ Do not be too hard on yourself, its concluding lines say, life is for living to the hilt and enjoying to the limit. Listen:

 

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.

 

●            In a new Anthology I read a poem unknown to me by Joseph Brodsky, the great Russian Nobel Laureate.

 

In Villages God Does Not Live In Corners

 

In villages God does not live in corners

as skeptics think. He’s everywhere.

He blesses the roof, he blesses the dishes,

he holds his half of the double doors.

He’s plentiful. In the iron pot there.

Cooking the lentils on Saturday.

He sleepily jigs and bops in the fire,

he winks at me, his witness. He

assembles a fence, he marries some sweetheart

off to the woodsman. Then for a joke

he makes the warden’s every potshot

fall just short of a passing duck.

The chance to watch all this up close,

while autumn’s whistling in the mist,

is the only blessed gift there is

in villages, for the atheist.

 

I could go on. A bookstore is an endless room of wonders – somehow even more lovely with the snow falling heavily outside.