Cornwall
In matter, our view is populated with things of lesser value than the soul. Stars, solar systems, trees, the turn of the river inward. Over the garden wall I can see the noonday light begin to refract from the surface of the sea – the start of the noonday marbling, the sound of wind, the territorial negotiations of birds (blue-tits, robins), the passage of life through the pines and rivers. The wood is ripe with potential, it may one day spark a fox. Being made of matter, surrounded by matter, my eye is drawn to the material things that populate the earth like words populate a page. This, Thomas Merton says, is the first method of contemplation, that we first may see the world to be beautiful and to be beautiful wholly sperate from us. I shall live and die, and it will have nothing to do with the passage of deer over the hill. To be contemplative in nature is to read between the lines, to read the passage of shadow over the path, to turn your eyes away from the crash of waves against Gurnard’s Head and back towards the shallow bogs that line where the road meets the moor.
“if I find in myself a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the answer is that I was made for another world”
Night came and has passed here in Cornwall – to become contemplative is to treat the world as a poem, a magnificent series of inferences, the origami of one original world, one original nature folded again and again until it has the features of something we may recognise but is not that thing at all. C.S. Lewis shoves it down his readers throat – if I find in myself a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the answer is that I was made for another world. The steps down to the guest house are damp with rain, for a moment there is light – spectacular light – you know the type I mean – I mean a light so cool, so brilliant, so heaven-sent it may as well be music. It runs itself through the lace of a spider’s web, it catches on the nude shine of the oyster shell. Being a creature of matter, I am deeply concerned and deeply annoyed by matter. I am both one and separate from the world I embody. Soul, not matter, has no need for spatiality, it is this dumb body, with these slender fingers, that stifles the good, the true, the real life beyond the doorway.
To leave the confines of matter is to leave behind this journey of association. Nothing remains for you, not even a name – to write of a room, to embody a room, to experience a room and then use these hands to drag it down to the page, as a shore dragged from the sea, is a desperate attempt to grope between the atoms. This is the mechanism Merton talks about, to encounter the world as simultaneously alive and dying, to understand all this as temporary. To lean back on the wind atop Zennor Hill and say this is mercy. The sea at a distance – distance, being the soul of the beautiful. I, a being of matter, associating with matter, in that moment, no longer require gesture. I breath very deeply, so deep it may be a sigh. The light of the day and the passage of rain over the coast washes the distance to a dark braid of islands. I am alive, being the only horizontal thing for miles.
“I am alive, being the only horizontal thing for miles.”
My life is adorned. Frankly, reader, I love it. I take pleasure in the place I write. The wind and rain bat against the glass. Caspar’s light is on – the house atop the hill is dark. Wind and rain. Wind and rain. The night bell. The sound of the sea’s deep instance that it is a thing alive. To be a thing of matter, to despise matter, to work with matter. I am other than what I imagine myself to be, to know this is forgiveness.