Wistful Thinking

      The Not-So-Good Doctor found himself watching Shakespeare in Love last night for the first time since 99 (?), and realized how much that movie was a kind of temporal marker in his own life, the period before it seeming rather fecund and ambitious, the period after a long creative drought. It's not the movie itself, by the way; it just comes in that bizarre period when Things Changed. Odd, and a little disquieting. The Old J (pre-1999) was very different than the one you read now. That kid-- and that he definitely was-- had no problems writing jejeune but ambitious stuff: he could peal through writing, and he did, including theses (two of 'em) and articles and even a few poems, too, though maybe 1 in 10 might have been worth saving from the archival abattoir. The J Since, well, not so much, he of so many false starts and derailments, daunting writer's block, and a general distaste for what he tries to write (and he hasn't written a single poem of more than a trifle since).   His imagination, well, just sort of went.   The former J knew something of the movie Shakespeare's spirit, if not his skill; the latter knows so much more about the skill (or more than he used to, though certainly not to mistaked for Will's knowledge), but has all-but-completely lost the spirit. A shame he can't reconcile the two, though surely if he could, he'd end up disspirited and unskilled.   *shrug*

      But back to the movie, and a radical shift from the third to the first person: As I was watching the movie's ostensibly "passionate" scenes (in the creative, romantic, idealistic senses of the term), I kept finding myself wincing, and not because of the saccharine elements of them. Instead, watching those scenes was a bit like sitting in a church to which one does not belong and awkwardly going along with notions one does not observe-- or, perhaps, ones one used to observe but have since abandoned (shades of Larkin's "Church Going," now that I think of it). As the saying goes, "confidence is what I had before I knew better." It's strange, and rather Blakean; the transformed innocent will come to hate the innocence that fostered change, while the cynical experienced figure, after a while, will want nothing more than to be as innocent as he once was, even though one can't just run back across the Vales of Har like Thel. Fools rush in.... (And perhaps what wise men fear most is being proven foolish.) But it was an eerie experience watching those scenes of passion again, like that of an agnostic listening to childhood hymns, the words no longer meaning much, the rhythms no longer familiar, so he looks askance and fumbles to repeat the words he thinks he should be saying. I guess that's what happens when one's doubts are stronger than one's desire to believe, a hapless, unromantic thing, Macbeth fidgeting with the king's ill-fitting clothes. So much for wistful thinking. One can still observe beauty in ceremony even if it leaves one cold, and maybe a bit queasy. I probably should have dropped an Irish sixpence somewhere.

      Strange to think, the things we end up checking at the door.

Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

--- Philip Larkin, 1955