My nights are taken up with the first volume of the Letters of Samuel Beckett and I am so enthralled (all over again) with his bleak but bracing vision that I wander around muttering phrases and lines from letters as I dip my puppies to ward off parasites, and make up food parcels, and dust tables and shelves in an unmindful way. I have been here before: reading Murphy as I walked home from Kingston’s corner bookshop and pausing under flamboyant trees to get the ring of the sentences. Sitting in a darkened theatre and watching two dishevelled tramps on a stage, goosebumps running up and down my arms as I heard the unanswerable questions of Waiting for Godot. Listening to a radio broadcast of Endgame, the soliloquies on despair.
To try again and fail better.
The young Beckett is gaunt and hungry and restless. Full of lively obscenities and jokes and self-deprecating comments. He sits lightly to his own polyglot erudition. Footloose and penurious in a Europe on the brink of war, he spends a great deal of time listening to music and looking at artworks (many of which disappeared in the conflagrations of World War II). He reads widely and deeply, noting his response to Proust, Holderlin and Fielding. He works for James Joyce (Shem the Penman) on Finnegans Wake while trifling with Joyce’s disturbed daughter Lucia, something he will live to regret. He grieves almost wordlessly over his father dying at the age of 61. He grieves too when his fat asthmatic dog dies at the age of 10. He excuses the debts of his hard-up friends. He goes into psychoanalysis with the great Wilfred Bion and is able to acknowledge of his difficult mother: ‘her savage loving has made me what I am’. His creative work is rejected by publisher after publisher. He fears he is unemployable.
This scrupulous but somehow freewheeling education of a writer reminds me in so many ways of the apprenticeship many of us have undertaken in the ways of the Craft. (I can see the pedantic editors of the Beckett oeuvre raising their eyebrows in condescension. Never mind.). But I think of myself memorising books on dendrology back in 1996 so that I might recognise a particular quiver tree in the deserts of the Northern Cape where the mist banks are called malmokkies. Writing long and sometimes despairing letters to other hedgewitches. What were we to call ourselves when no words exist for this kind of becoming? Learning from the gracious animals who shared our lives for too brief a space. Travelling, and searching out the forgotten folk lore and leylines of old drovers’ roads and Roman bridges. Visiting museums and looking at ancient verdegris goblets and playing cards locked away in glass cabinets. Learning to grow herbs and cook vegan dishes to entice carnivores. Learning deep ecology, beginning with the tree next door. Making pilgrimages to Knossos and Stonehenge or the Kalahari Gemsbok Park, and the Dorset village where Sylvia Townsend-Warner and Valentine Ackland lived, the Grasmere cottage where Dorothy Wordsworth wrote her nature notes.
An ongoing apprenticeship. And along the way many of us became writers and artists and musicians and botanists and healers. Astrologers and herbalists. But we also became whatever it is we call ourselves when the dark moon lures us out into the garden once a month.
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