Literature’s miraculous god-child

What would it be like to be someone else? I suppose this is why we read literature, to see through others’ eyes, gaze into their souls. I like unusual views and the best way to find them in books is to avoid what’s popular today by delving into the past, or seeking out those who’ve chosen a solitary trail, previously untrodden. In ordinary conversation, we look for topics of common interest. In the best literature, the author’s word-skill takes us effortlessly to places we’ve never been, places worth visiting and making our own.

I think of Gerard Manley Hopkins: famous for his sprung rhythm and inventive use of language; for being a Jesuit priest; and for expressing ecstasy and despair in his poems.

When I was someone else, that I am not now, I used to read for spiritual enlightenment, as if the very act of reading would make connections, give flesh to the bones of my vague intuitions. There was no pattern to my reading, but if I stumbled on a famous mystic, like Meister Eckhart, I would see therein the teachings I was already following, but in a different light, from a different angle, such as from the inside, when I had only been looking at the surface. If I retraced my steps now, I’d extract value from the same texts by being deeply critical. Once I saw commonality—“All paths lead to God; one blind man is holding the elephant’s trunk, one hugs its leg, one clings to its tail, so they all have different ideas of the elephant, but so what?” But later, it became interesting to see differences—and reject all views. I would tell myself that I don’t need someone else’s insights.

I was introduced to a few poems of Hopkins at school, by my teacher, the Rev. Bowyer. They included The Wreck of the Deutschland and The Windhover. Bowyer was a Church of England country parson, with a passionate interest in literature. He was fortunate to have in his parish J.B. Priestley, celebrated novelist and playwright. I imagine them joining for literary soirées. Might Tennyson have joined them, if he had been still alive? Rev. Bowyer had scant respect for Tennyson, who was unfashionable in the Fifties among the literati. My headmaster on the other hand cared nothing for literary fashion. He loved old England, Chaucer, Milton; perhaps Tennyson above all.

It was three decades later that I discovered Hopkins’ poem, The Blessed Virgin compared to the Air we Breathe. At that time, I practised breath-meditation till it seemed bleak and dry; till it hurt.

To find this poem was truly “a breath of fresh air”:

WILD air, world-mothering air,
Nestling me everywhere,
That each eyelash or hair
Girdles; goes home betwixt
The fleeciest, frailest-flixed
Snowflake;

It starts as above, expressing in different words a sentiment I mentioned in my last post: “I see the highest fulfilment in being consciously part of my environment. It wraps us on all sides like a blanket, and caresses us on the inside too, for we breathe the ambient air, and use it to re-energize our cells.”

But Hopkins, committed to his religion as only a Jesuit who has taken the three monastic vows can be, carries baggage that will either weigh him down in sleepless nights, or liberate him with visions of loveliness. He makes the best of it, dedicating his gift on the altar of his life’s sacrifice. In the poem, he universalises the dogma of his church till it dissolves into the world’s beauty and wonder, much as his fellow-Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin did, in a later generation, with his Mass on the World. To Hopkins, Mary is the world, in the shapeless shape of air embracing all creatures:

I say that we are wound
With mercy round and round
As if with air: the same
Is Mary, more by name.
She, wild web, wondrous robe,
Mantles the guilty globe,
Since God has let dispense
Her prayers his providence:
Nay, more than almoner,
The sweet alms’ self is her
And men are meant to share
Her life as life does air.

What would I do without literature, this tourism into others’ souls? Not forgetting literature’s miraculous god-child, the weblog.