It is Beltane. I did not get up at dawn to wash my face in the dew. I forgot to step out and salute the moon at full. I did dream of seas full of white water and crashing waves and trying to out-run the tide. The moon pulls at me, at the water in my body, at the tides of my life, even when I’m not paying
attention.
In the afternoon, in the hot sun, after dance classes and walking, I lay a table-cloth on a rusting bistro table, pick at cold chicken and naked salad leaves and pickles. In amongst the picnic I am trying to write.
I can hear blue tits, traffic on the Bowthorpe Road, my Turkish neighbours speaking softly in their own idioms. If I look up, I am faced with the bramble hedge that has suddenly rejected its fence support and keeled over towards the lawn, leaving me uncertain as to whether to tie it up, cut it back or leave it be. Holly Blue butterflies dance with some variety of Whites. Sneezes tell me the air is pollinated. Forgotten chives have put on a spurt in the herb bed. The strawberries are looking optimistic. I feel the sun on my skin, the soft breeze. Beneath my feet, the ridged slats of the decking that needs painting again. Under my arms the soft linen cloth and my mother’s stitchwork. The gingko, in full leaf now, sways uncertainly. I must remember to water things tonight.
None of this is what I came to write. I came to write about being at Cley on a windy Spring morning, about walking out along the bank to find the sea in an exuberant catch-chase game with the sunlight. I came to write about the five elements, or the four, or a counting down through three and two elements into a non-duality. I wanted to write about where our definitions of elements begins and where it might end now that we are making them up – inventing them in labs. I wanted to talk about Celtic philosophy and Chinese philosophy and was thrown off course when I found that a lot of Celtic belief might have begun in ancient Greece. It is no wonder that trying to distil all of this, left me floundering.
I came to make sense of an “elemental” poem, a sequence poem. It refuses to be helped. I have the structure, I have the poem. I just don’t like it. It feels contrived and over-written. It needs a brutal edit that I cannot see how to do without losing the essence of what I wanted it to be. Like my bramble hedge, it is keeling over, presumably wanting to be something other than what I had in mind. It is wanting to be something else and I don’t know whether to tie it up, cut it back or let
it be.
Instead I start to write about writing.
Author of The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron, says that when we don’t know what to write, we should write about that: the not knowing. I pull a card from oracle deck. It says “embrace not knowing”.
Nan Shepherd tells us that we should only write what needs to be written, which implies that if we’re not finding it or pinning it down, we should let it fly away.
Natalie Goldberg says we can write our way into writing, only start and it will come.
F. Scott Fitzgerald advocated writing for the trash can. Just get it down, you can always throw it away.
Every writer, every teacher of writing, has their own methodology.
Sometimes listening to other people’s process helps. Sometimes it still leaves me with a pen in my hand and nothing happening.
A small insight of my own – not to writers but to those people who keep telling me that the mind never shuts up, it’s what it does, it just keeps on chattering – I have news for them, and for all those who want to still their minds through meditation and cannot do so – here’s a technique: take a blank sheet of paper and a pen and tell yourself you are going to spend the next 30 minutes writing. I promise you that unless you are on drugs your mind will suddenly learn how to be still and empty.
Or perhaps that is just me.
It gets me nowhere.
So the only thing to do is to go back to the beginning, on the approach to Beltane, on the packed land-bank footpath above, and within, the marsh, heading towards the wild sea, the exuberance of arctic waters making landfall, the blustery wind echoing in the swoop of sand martins and the
sunlight gilding the reedbeds in the soft hues of summer wheat.
Go back to the classroom and the prompt to think about the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. That is my heartland, my rooted earth, but in recent years I have been pulled more into the five-element tradition of China, a place I have never been.
I start researching.
It’s always a bad idea.
The more deeply I dive into information, the more I lose my hold on truth.
Information:-
The ancient Greeks, if we will let Aristotle stand for them, would tell us that the correct order of the elements is: Earth > Water > Air > Fire. It is a layering of the elemental world. Earth at the centre, surrounded by water, enveloped by air, warmed by the fire of the sun.
According to the Chinese, the order is cyclical, you can start at any point. There is a nourishing cycle: water feeds wood, wood feeds fire, fire cleanses and fertilises earth, which bears metal, which mineralises to enrich the water…which feeds the wood…
…as with all things in Eastern philosophy, everything has its opposite. If we reverse the order, we discover a disruptive or destructive cycle in which water rusts metal which poisons earth which dowses fire which burns wood which sucks up water.
It seems to me that the nourishing cycle is self-sustaining and that the destructive one embeds its own end. Perhaps that is the lesson we are meant to take.
The Celts and Anglo-Saxons (at least in their modern reincarnation) are more inclined to the cyclical way of being. They order the four: Earth > Air > Fire > Water. The solidity and stillness of earth attunes to the quieter season of winter, the gestating season, in particular between Samhain and Midwinter, it flows into Air, the breath of new beginnings in the Spring around the Vernal Equinox. Fire takes its cue from the sun, from Beltane through the Summer solstice into the first fruit harvests of Lammas. Water is quixotic. It insists on a double visit – early in the year around Imbolc to feed the coming growth and then later around Mabon (the autumnal equinox) in the washing away the dusty endings of the year, a cleansing before the returning rest of Winter.
In all of these philosophies I find things that make sense and things that are contrived. I find truth and an overlaying of information that obscures it.
Trying to make my poem work by taking out all of the information, I find it is not one thing at all, it is several and each needs its own tending. I feel there might be another lesson to be learned buried in that.
