When I was a young and bursting with energy and exuberant life-force I was eager to travel far and wide, more than ready to range around the world discovering new places and meeting people of every kind, outlook and temper. But as I have grown older and footloose enthusiasm has settled into a quieter frame of mind, slowly but surely the itching love of travel has diminished to vanishing point.
It is not just that the pure hassle and boredom and tense uncertainty of getting from place to place is becoming harder and harder to bear; it is also because I have come to realize that I do not have to travel, no one does, to find places of beauty and strangeness, encounter fascinating and multi-talented people, experience vivid and enduring emotions and events or contemplate infinity in a suddenly discovered insight or enchanted perception. In other words I am sure I could write a book entitled Travels Around My Armchair and make it interesting with scenes and heroes/heroines and incidents and philosophies from afar culled from all the books piled up nearby.
*Any place is exotic to someone who lives a few thousand, or even a few hundred, miles away. When you travel half way round the earth you enter the commonplace world of the people who live there. And what poetry does is try to capture the exotic and the commonplace and make them the same. I like how the Estonian Jaan Kaplinski’s poem ‘Once I Got a Postcard’ puts it:
Once I got a postcard from the Fiji Islands
With a picture of the sugar cane harvest. Then I
Realised that nothing at all is exotic in itself.
There is no difference between digging potatoes
in our Muriku garden
and sugar cane harvesting in Viti Levu.
Everything that is is very ordinary.
Or, rather, neither ordinary nor strange.
Far-off lands and foreign people are a dream,
a dreaming with open eyes
somebody does not wake from.
It’s the same with poetry – seen from afar
it’s something special, mysterious, festive.
No, poetry is even less
Special than a sugar cane plantation or potato field.
Poetry is like sawdust coming from under the saw
or soft yellowish shavings from a plane.
Poetry is washing hands in the evening
or a clean handkerchief that my late aunt
never forgot to put in my pocket.
*Long excursions are not needed to discover beauty which often enough is there in your own backyard or not many miles beyond. A couple of hours out of home up the Essequibo there is enough beauty to last a lifetime without going anywhere else. Sitting on the shore of that great river – and, believe me, it is a shore and not a bank – late evening time I know almost exactly what the poet Robinson Jeffers must have experienced in his home by the sea in California years ago and expressed in one of his most quiet, greatest lyrics:
Evening Ebb
The ocean has not been so quiet for a long while; five night-herons
Fly shorelong voiceless in the hush of the air
Over the calm of an ebb that almost mirrors their wings.
The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down
From the weed-clad rock, but the distant cloud-wall rises. The ebb whispers.
Great cloud-shadows float in the opal water.
Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams, and the evening
Star suddenly glides like a flying torch.
As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind
The screen of the world for another audience.
Peace and beauty at home is the best experience of all since it soaks every day of life with contentment. When the moon grows big my wife and I place chairs under the trees in our garden to sit and watch the goddess of the night hold court amidst the flying clouds.
Think of all the thousands of years men and women have done this, looking in wonder at the moon come up tangled in clouds in company of a star or two – whether above the pyramids of Egypt or the slopes of the sacred mountains of Greece or the remote outback of aboriginal Australia or afloat on a gleaming Kashmir lake or amidst the flurrying snows of Antarctica – or outside in your own garden in Georgetown, Guyana.
*Reading in our garden I noticed a particularly strange and wonderful gathering of colours in the sky as the sun set. Blood-red clouds shot with gold massed over the seawall and serpentine black shadows escaped from the night to come weaving in and out of the flames of red and gold. It was soon over, but what a wondrous sight while it lasted.
And then the stars began to appear in the rain-washed sky and not by any means for the first time I thought of how the starlight seen is immeasurably old and so we never see the stars that send the light but only what they were immensely long ago – and the thought set me to wonder how much in life of what we love and find beautiful may also be a star’s throw away from what it’s real meaning is. Elizabeth Jennings’s mysterious poem ‘Delay’ stays in my mind:
The radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eye may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with how
Love that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.
