A Narrative

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Two poets stood side by side under a sunny spring shower. Above them, a rainbow shyly made its way into the heavens.   

‘Ah, Spring – the morning of the world!’ said one. He wore a silvery, metallic jacket, baggy jeans (with rips), a baggy t-shirt. There was something effeminate and slight about his posture. On perception, one could tell he sought pleasure in life as people seek treasure. He was like a silvery bit of light sliding through water – entirely inconsistent and totally unstable. Constantly ‘reinventing’ himself, this young man had a laughing face but took almost everything seriously. He liked the old ‘Greats’ but only because they were dear and bumbling, not because they had anything to offer his liberated self. He was comfortable with his relativism – as comfy as he was daggy in it, like the t-shirt he wore. He had a handsome countenance and was laughably serious.  

His companion, on the other hand, was seriously laughable. It would be a travesty to describe him as anything other than traditionalist – hints of normalcy were about him, but there was also oddity, a severity which made one chuckle to see it. Despite his serious looks, he himself took nearly nothing seriously and didn’t expect others to either. He wore brown tweed and grey trousers, like an English university don. There was suggestive of him something of the old paintings – chubby hands and cupped lips and dark hair completed this appearance. He was stuffy, but he was right. Of course, this astounded his younger companion. For one can be right in the wrong way, you know. There was all of Truth about him, but he wore Love as an ill-fitting garment. His heart had no pleasure. Unless he drank whiskey. And then his laughter bubbled up sarcastically from somewhere far, far below. But on this spring morning, he was particularly disagreeable.      

‘Of course – there is no room for self-expression in art,’ he said to the young man beside him. For the two had fallen to discussing the nature of art, as poets tend to do.  

‘Ha. Ahhahaha!’ the young man laughed, his silvery jacket catching splices of light as he did so. ‘You are unbelievable!’  

‘Am I?’ 

‘Yes – you say there is no room for self-expression in art? But look around you at Spring herself. She has inspired much of the world’s art and here she is…’  

At this, he threw his arms out wide and cried out in a mad, laughing manner,  

‘…expressing herself! Take Beethoven’s fifth. The first time I heard it, I thought: Ah, here is one who understands me; and self-expression was the medium you see. You could just hear his inner tumult.’ And the young man’s face was raptured sky-ward in a burst of misguided sentiment.   

The old don was not impressed. 

‘Right,’ he said rather stodgily. ‘You say self-expression is art, whereas Beethoven did not for evident reasons. And so I ask you, if one were expressing murderous thoughts and debauchery and smutty, oppressive lust – is there room for that to line the halls of our galleries? To hang before the eyes of children. To launder about half-dressed, indecent, depraved in its crudeness; because when the soul expresses herself…’ 

The young snip of a man waved his hand dismissively at this outdated, irrelevant being who clearly didn’t know a thing about anything anymore.  

‘Real art, sir, will always be generated by feeling, will resemble the self that created it.’  

‘Ah, but there you see – that is the problem.’  

‘Wherefore?’ the young man said and crossed his arms across his chest. He had a perfectly chiseled beard, trimmed to a statue-like precision, which he scratched nervously. Being a relativist, he believed that nothing was sure and so he lacked a certain confidence in almost everything he did.  

‘Anything is art.’ And with that the old man spat at the young man’s feet. 

‘That,’ he said ‘is art.’ 

‘Now you’re just being stupid.’    

‘I am not. I am merely trying to express the stupidity of your idea. And creating art while I am at it.’  

And the flash of a wink jumped from the old don’s left eye. The silvery-jacketed man stood there for a bit embarrassed and frazzled. He stared at the spit on the ground. And then a flash of brilliant ideology came to him, which in his ignorance, he mistook for argument. 

‘Old don – I am happy to admit your spit is art. In fact, if that’s how it is, art is anything and anything is art.’  

‘When anything is art, nothing is.’  

The young man was beginning to feel quite lost.  

‘So, nothing is art. Is it?’ the old don asked, carefully eyeing his companion. 

‘Well, you tell me, you old codger. I’m afraid you’re trying far too hard to be smart.’  

‘And succeeding clearly,’ the don replied dryly.  

There was a longer pause.  

‘Do you pride yourself on giving offense like this?’ said the offended young man. 

‘And the unstable man falls apart like his feelings,’ the don replied nastily. He just couldn’t help himself – a lack of self-control had always plagued him and now it was coming out. The don’s patience had finally collapsed, taking with it his virtue.    

The young man sat down on a protruding rock and burst into tears. The old don did not know what to say or do. This mountain of hysteria was not what he had prepared himself for when he’d left his front door earlier that morning.  

The earth shook with all the violence of misunderstandings and disturbed human nature. And while the two men were occupied thus, one in fits of undignified weeping, the other rendered immobile by bewilderment, there came a delightful shivering of light. The clouds cleared and Spring appeared – the very spring which had inspired these two pathetic poets to begin dialoging – and she wrapped her slender arms around each and took them with her to journey the world’s end. It was a long, long way to the world’s end. And the journey meant impending poetic disaster for both men…      

*** 

While Lady Spring carried these two poets across the Ages, she cried for them. Cried for the young man’s blindness and cried for the old don’s pride. And she carried the young man off to somewhere and left him for a bit while she went to teach the old don a lesson.  

She stood in front of him for a moment – her arms dripping blossom and her skin shining pale gold. The don stared back at her. And then Lady Spring spoke.     

‘If Winter were the world’s evening, Autumn the deep afternoon, and Summer the stifling midday, then I am the world’s glorious, unsullied morning. I know that look, old man! What is it about me that holds such nostalgia for you? Why does Spring carry you forward to summer’s restless, care-free days lengthened by the dry light and pink moonshine; to those times when we were unhurried? Oh, you scoff on the inside, but you know it to be true all the same. I often come without warning, catching you asleep in your den, perhaps waiting out the winter, or wishing for longer, brighter days. And when I do, Herbert’s prayer rings truer yet: O Lord, thy blessings hang in clusters, they come pouring upon us, they break forth like mighty waters on every side.’     

‘Amen,’ muttered the don with incredulous reverence and confusion. He was never quite composed in front of a pretty face. He’d go stupid and lose all his wit. Spring laughed at him. ‘For all your dignity, you don’t know a thing about anything.’ But she said it with such a gracious smile, the don did not feel a bit mad, only sheepish.   

‘My companion was right, I see,’ he said.   

‘So why don’t you just stick to writing poetry? Come now. Tell me something True and Good and Lovely.’ 

The don had a terrible sick feeling of inadequacy (something he’d not felt in a long time), for how in heaven’s name was he to come up with something beautiful whilst standing before the very specimen of Beauty itself? But he dared not disobey. So he gathered up his courage and addressed her who stood before him.   

‘Lady Spring: I will try to compose what I wanted to write about you this morning, before I gave it up, thinking it below me to express such things…’  

It was a very lame introduction, but Lady Spring only stared at him benevolently and kindly and so the old don had to carry on.   

‘Spring carries…ah, the ready breeze, like warm fluff…’ At this terrible simile the don looked nervously at Lady Spring who stifled a smile but beckoned with her hand for him to continue.  

‘…the sun like the beaming face of the beloved, and the happy world to witness. Those old, wonderful feelings of Christmas come chiming in, but we are not quite there yet. And so we wait expectant…’ 

Here, the don placed both hands deep in his pockets and began to pace back and forth with his eyes on the ground.  

‘The wide, southern skies clear and the canola blooms bright. Come nightfall, the gentle screech of a train can be heard amid the night-smells and windless air – we listen to the whistle, the moan, the beating of wheels running on iron, and it calls to us… All the world may be beckoning to me, but I would not follow because the call for Home runs just as strong, the call that grows louder when the seasons change, showing me goodness again. Certain books and characters charge about in my mind – they are all there with their charming looks and vivid descriptions and mighty lives. I am vague and sore for all that runs about in my head. The poet will never be at peace, I’m afraid. And certain ‘atmospheres’ wake up in spring. Why’, he added to himself in a sort of daze as if it were the most important revelation he’d ever had (and indeed it was), ‘I always feel the urge to rusticate when spring comes.’ He looked up. But Lady Spring had vanished. His shoulders sagged and he coughed once. He brushed his eyes with the back of his hand. He felt incredibly sad. But it was a sadness that led him forwards, not inwards. And there he stood still as a statue. For all his intellectual striving, the old don had finally come home.  

Meanwhile, the young man found himself left in a place where grey seas of nothingness engulfed him, kept tipping him about like an ocean. Deep down he went and then up, up, up to tip back to the edge of the world and then down again in dizzying swirls. And the horrid grey billows were suffocating him, while all the time his thoughts were straining wildly for common sense. Deep down, he knew the reason. For when he thought about his past – his every shrug and noncommittal ‘Oh, well’ – had been leading him closer to wherever it was he now found himself. And it was awful.     

‘Oh, dear – not this. I never wanted this!’ he cried out in panic. ‘Please, make it stop!’ 

The grey billows swept over his head once more and he was crushed by their weight so that he sunk down beyond their depths onto something hard, where he lay waiting, for how long he knew not. All around him was darkness; a strange peace there also was. And hope, he realised. Hope that still clung stubbornly to some part of his disturbed soul. Miles above his head the grey chaos billowed, but it was a long way above him and the young man hardly perceived it. Time passed, and then along the edges of the darkness came a glimmer of yellow warmth. The young man saw it, gasped, and sat up. And the sound of his breath was like the sighing of millions. The light came closer and when it reached the young man, he saw that it was Lady Spring. He stood up and accosted her.  

‘Why did you take me to that ghastly place of nothing?’ he spat out. ‘You are unfair and cruel and…and a fiend!’            

‘That place was not Nothing,’ Spring answered calmly. ‘It was Chaos. The land of Nothing does not exist. What you thought was Nothing when you went to university and decided Truth didn’t exist was actually beastliness and utter disorder. But you were stalwart in your going after this supposed Nothing, so you got it in the end. Though you did not experience the full of it, nor was all of Chaos there to meet you when you got there.’ 

‘You could have done something to stop it. You could have…’, the young man grew incoherent and beside himself in his distress. Lady Spring looked at him with pity.  

‘You had it in your head that Nothing was the safest option.’ 

The young man, after his being beaten by the seas of Chaos was more ready to accept his error. All of a sudden he grew uncharacteristically sober and sat down at the feet of Lady Spring.  

‘I was a fool,’ he admitted. And with that, his shoulders straightened. And he sat a little bit taller.     

‘We are all fools. Like your friend I’ve just been talking to.’ 

‘The old don? Well, he’s alright. Just a bit stuffy.’ 

Lady Spring smiled. It was just this sort of friendly jab that she loved, because it was truth coming out adorned in such splendid simplicity and love. She watched as the young man grew charming under his new garment of honesty.     

She turned her back to him, and on the hard, bare ground on which the young man stood, she caused a springy grass to grow with clover and violets in amongst it. And she raised up several daffodils for a touch of sunshine.  

The young man looked about like a child does at some new thing it has found. And he muttered softly to himself.  

‘Green lawn to stand upon. Truth to live upon. Why, it’s glorious.’   

And he stood there, steadfast, beautiful in his newfound dignity. For all his empty airs, the young man had finally come home.  

And so the young relativist and the old traditionalist became even better friends in the end. Though not without leaving a little of themselves behind with Lady Spring for safekeeping. For, as truth would have it, weakness cannot hold up a bridge, and pride cannot bend to create its arch.