Nerys Johnson, at Abbot Hall, Kendal
It’s Spring Equinox and I’m thinking about beginnings again. They are a koan and inspiration in my life, as I sense myself starting again, over and over, every morning when I wake up, at each moment of decision and transition throughout the day or taking the next step on a road that seems familiar but I know might take me anywhere, into unknown territory.
I have a new Muji notebook, its blank creamy-white pages calling out to be filled with words, my increasingly scrawly handwriting. I always need to teeter for some time on this particular threshold – breathing in the blankness, adoring the tabula rasa, before I can make the first mark. Part of me is hesitant to intrude upon the space, mar what was perfect with my aimless meanderings, unfinished thoughts, false starts.
We call something that never fulfils its promise or reaches its conclusion a ‘false start’. As far as I can tell, nothing completely fulfils its promise or reaches its conclusion. Isn’t there always some awkwardness or disappointment? I don’t know where the notion comes from – among the whole morass of dualistic world views – but I still find myself caught up in the conditioned belief that beginnings = good and endings = bad. They are both simply phenomena, shifts in energy, each with difficult to trace boundaries. It’s as tricky to say when something has ended as it is to precisely mark its origin.
In her enchantingly meandering essay ‘On Beginnings’ (in Madness, Rack, and Honey, Wave Books 2002), Mary Ruefle writes:
‘…the poem ends on the page, but it begins off the page, it begins in the mind.’
She doesn’t presume to say where the mind begins and ends.
‘It is exactly like tracing the moment of the big bang – we can go back to a nanosecond before the beginning, before the universe burst into being, but we can’t go back to the precise beginning because that would precede knowledge, and we can’t ‘know’ anything before ‘knowing’ itself was born.’
Because I find beginnings fascinating and alluring, easier than endings (and middles), I find them easier to write – all that potential, like sowing the concentrated source of energy that is a seed. In a poem, the ending comes quickly, maybe only fourteen short lines from the off. It’s a stretch you can hold in your mind, carry around with you as you go through your day’s stops and starts. I know that rhythm and how it works, how we can dance together.
Currently the writing that’s taking up most of my time and attention at my desk (and en plein air) is prose so there is an enormous expanse – a chasm it seems at times – between the beginning and what at this point I can only imagine as an ending. I feel ill-equipped. I missed the lesson about the long middle, the training required to build sufficient stamina to sustain one idea over many thousands of words, page after page. I am no longer a dancer, with a partner I love and trust, listening to beautiful music. I am a sole wanderer, lost in the woods, with only birdsong for company. Literally – the focus of my inquiry being a wild, abandoned patch of woodland here in the North’s debateable lands.
Instinctively, I have created a structure that allows me lots of new beginnings; enough I hope to get me across the finishing line. Of course, it’s also apparent that these are ‘false starts’ – like the so-called finishing line itself – an illusion to make something complicated manageable, a container to fill with my attention, something with limits, finite, so it doesn’t spill over, so I don’t spill over. When it comes to words, how much of form is magical thinking?
Beginnings and endings are more liquid than solid. Like a river you can trace back to its source, although often with some difficulty, on uneven terrain. Once found, you see that its real starting point is underground, invisible, beyond your reach and open to change, at the mercy of time.
At the other end, where a river meets the sea is a wide, tidal margin, neither quite one thing or another; and the sea itself coming and going with the moon’s phases, the shoreline shifting, In his labyrinth, Borges wrote about the labyrinth:
‘Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it os a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.’
River, tiger, fire, you are beginning and ending, more than one thing happening at once. You are the Spring, growing out of the dark seed of Winter, carrying the fruits of Autumn inside you. Form and emptiness, you are much bigger than you think you are, waking up to another day full of moment-by-moment new births and rehearsals for death.
Ornithogalum umbellatum – Star of Bethlehem
Not spring cleaning and not not-spring cleaning, I’m having a major clear-out and found an old cutting from the Guardian – a wonderful piece by Lavinia Greenlaw about her 2011 Artangel installation Audio Obscura – encouragement perhaps to be on the alert for those moments – between beginnings and endings, poetry and prose – when we might allow ourselves ‘to disintegrate, to be taken up and transported’– and for that to be okay.
‘The way I know something might become a poem has nothing to do with thinking about it. It’s a physical sensation rather like the first instant of a memory before you’ve made sense of it. Perhaps this is when the poem gives me most pleasure. I’m gripped by this thing without having looked for it and without trying to hold onto it. It’s overwhelming and perfect, and the entire writing of the poem is towards conveying this first effect.
Paul Valéry describes this as the “initial and invariably accidental shock which will construct the poetic instrument within us”. The shock is one of recognition, only you don’t know yet what it is you’ve recognised, as Robert Frost describes: “the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialised from cloud or risen out of the ground.” He is saying that the poet enters the poem rather than vice versa, and in order to do so the poet has to allow himself or herself to disintegrate, to be taken up and transported.’