It’s the second day of March, with a bit of blue sky but a biting damp wind. I walk along Desborough Road to the bus station, destination and agenda undecided. Why? Because I can. Whatever I can now do, one day I won’t be able to. No one knows the day, or the hour. Thanks, whispering angel! You have given me an agenda. I shall see beyond appearances, at least I think I can. These people I pass, who don’t smile, I shall see beyond that and smile first, if I can. As if this were my last day. When I left the house, K was on the phone to her Mom. She never likes being interrupted on the phone, but when I mimed that I was going out, she mimed me to come and kiss her, while we both can. That’s understood. No one knows the day, or the hour.I get off the bus with a vague notion of walking up Cock Lane to Tyler’s Green, but then the wind blows stronger and there’s a squally shower which defeats my umbrella and makes my face ache. I take refuge in a large electronics shop at The Marsh, wander round it merely to get warm again, then try walking on a familiar footpath, but it’s no fun in this cold. I don’t have to do this. I’ll take the bus back—because I can. I’ll dash off quick posts on my blog when the fancy takes, for the same reason.
When I get back home the postman delivers two books, one of them being Etty, its front cover as illustrated at the end of my last. There’s a fascinating complexity to her life, whose details she limpidly sets out in her diary. It is 1941, a year after the capitulation to German forces in Holland. She is reflecting how many people she knows are recently gone: dead or to concentration camps. Yesterday she was talking to her professor in the street. He seemed a broken man. Today she has just heard that he put a bullet through his head an hour later.
A world is in the process of collapse. But the world will go on and so for the present shall I, full of good heart and good will. Nevertheless, we who are left behind are just a little bit destitute, though inwardly I still feel so rich that the destitution is not fully brought home to me. However, one must keep in touch with the real world and know one’s place in it.
“Because I can” has become a mantra to pronounce from time to time, a lens for seeing the world and my place in it. It’s a kind of green light, as if I stood at a crossroads for a long time, and never noticed the lights had changed from red.
Etty’s involved with a man she calls S, he a psychotherapist, she a patient. She has some kind of depressive illness, part physical. The treatment, too, is part physical, and includes wrestling on the floor. They are erotically drawn to one another and yet she recoils from him physically. He is trying to stay professional, plus he has a girlfriend in London waiting till his divorce comes through. He is a German Jew and there’s a lot of hate in the air, caused by the occupation of Holland, the concentration camps . . .
All this helps put Etty in a turmoil. When S tells her that body and soul are one, it illuminates her understanding. She is trying to live a spiritual life. Everything is pushing her in this direction. The treatment offered by S has made Etty more alive.
Monday 4th August, 1941, 2:30pm. He said that love of mankind is greater than love of one man. For when you love one person you are merely loving yourself.
He is a mature 55-year-old and has reached the stage where he can love all mankind, having loved many individuals in the past. I am an ordinary 27-year-old girl and I, too, am filled with love for all mankind, but for all I know I shall always be in search of my one man.
Here’s a good piece on Etty Hillesum; which also points to the video alongside. Please especially note the quotes which appear in the form of subtitles, and which I’ve decided not to copy and paste here, but leave them to be discovered in the context of this short film which pays homage to her life.
Because I can . . . It was only the other day that I recalled the task I’d finished last autumn, during my “indefinite sabbatical”. It had taken months of effort and years before that, full of red herrings and false starts, to gather all these posts together into a single formatted document. Then it was finished; I merely filed it away and forgot it. And now, in just a couple of days, the processes to publish it on Kindle are completed, as simply and cheaply as possible; i.e. at no cost to the author, and for those who want to buy, at the lowest price that Amazon will allow. I have no thought of promoting it or trying to say “what it’s about”. Other such attempts over the years to publish and promote have failed because they were too complicated. They tried to shape the material into something it was not, all to make the project “a success” in competing against the other reading-matter being offered in the world. What I can is enough, and I’ve done it.
The present post isn’t included in the e-book just published, the “first edition March 2016”. There is no technical reason why I can’t go on fiddling with that edition: correcting the one known typo still outstanding and others yet to be discovered; adding new posts . . . but I won’t. Many are the things we can do, but don’t have to. I could supersede the first edition with later editions, but I won’t do that either. Any new and better editions can sit alongside. They can all stay on sale in tandem—because they can.
Finally, a little more from Etty. A diary is not the same thing as a blog, but her words could almost be mine, if I had her courage:
This writing is a sort of rough draft; I try things out, discard this and that and hope all the pieces will fit together in the end. But I mustn’t run away from myself, or from difficult problems, and I don’t really—what I do run away from is the difficulty of writing it all down. It all comes out so clumsily. But then you don’t put things down to produce masterpieces, but to gain some clarity. I am still ashamed of myself, afraid to let myself go, to let things pour out of me; I am dreadfully inhibited, and that is because I have not yet learned to accept myself as I am.
By the end, I believe she had not only learned to accept herself, but her entire world too, in some of that century’s direst moments.
a wayfarer’s notes 
“Gather ye rosebuds while you may…” At the moment I'm stumped. And exhausted. This was a beautiful post though. You make it look easy, like you just open it your mind and pour it out. But we both know it isn't ever quite as simple as that. I appreciate the work you put into these posts. Thank you.
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Hey Bryan, I hope by the time you read this, you’re feeling refreshed. And the opposite of stumped, whatever that is. Perhaps you could say?
Reading your comment refreshed me instantly. You’re quite right that of course it’s not just a question of pouring it out. There is work in it, but the process is mysterious, there are different components and one of the most important is to wait patiently for when it just clicks and then to stay with it without the awareness of time passing, for it just feels right and one’s following the inspiration & playing a subordinate role, like getting prompted for the right word in Roget’s Thesaurus & checking the OED.
I also know from your “Counted Sheep” posts that you put a great deal of work to make them so readable, vivid & open-endedly meaningful.
Open-endedness is a wonderful thing in writing, don’t you think? I don’t know if I can define it. Open-endedness is such an open-ended term.
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As you may suspect Blake had something to say about this subject too:
Letters, To Butts, (E 724)
“But if we fear to do the dictates of our
Angels & tremble at the Tasks set before us. if we refuse to do
Spiritual Acts. because of Natural Fears or Natural Desires! Who
can describe the dismal torments of such a state!–I too well
remember the Threats I heard!–If you who are organized by Divine
Providence for Spiritual communion. Refuse & bury your Talent in
the Earth even tho you should want Natural Bread. Sorrow &
Desperation
pursues you thro life! & after death shame & confusion of face to
eternity–Every one in Eternity will leave you aghast at the Man
who was crownd with glory & honour by his brethren & betrayd
their cause to their enemies.”
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Perhaps it is not 'Because I can,' but 'Because I must.'
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Vincent, congratulations for producing the Kindle version. Even if it's not the 'final' one (whatever final means) it now exists in this form in the outside world, it has a life of its own, it's a created creature. I don't have a Kindle so I can't look it up but I do have the manuscript you kindly sent me quite a while ago. I'm sure it's changed and may still change, for all of which: bravo!
The video above is heartbreaking, too sad to watch more than once. Etty's courage and her beautiful soul are uplifting indeed but the tragedy of her death and of all those other innocent people boarding that death-train overwhems me. It becomes impossible to speak in the same breath or think in the same way about the evil that we humans perpetrate on each other, and the good that we do.
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Vincent, congratulations for producing the Kindle version. Even if it's not the 'final' one (whatever final means) it now exists in this form in the outside world, it has a life of its own, it's a created creature. I don't have a Kindle so I can't look it up but I do have the manuscript you kindly sent me quite a while ago. I'm sure it's changed and may still change, for all of which: bravo!The video above is heartbreaking, too sad to watch more than once. Etty's courage and her beautiful soul are uplifting indeed but the tragedy of her death and of all those other innocent people boarding that death-train overwhems me. It becomes impossible to speak in the same breath or think in the same way about the evil that we humans perpetrate on each other, and the good that we do.
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Ellie, it does seem that for Blake it was “because I must”; but it’s not that way for me. I don’t feel that inner struggle at all. “Because I can” is like a vacuum that gently draws me forward, at a point where opportunity and capability meet and join.
The sting that spurs me on is the desire to raise my game, to improve what I’ve done before. It doesn’t mean that it will ever be good enough to gain recognition or have any influence. No angel threatens, it’s not a question of betrayal, or anyone else being aghast at wasted talent. That clearly was Blake’s destiny as a top-class pro at the summit of art, literature and western mysticism; not that anyone knew it at the time.
I’m currently looking at stuff I wrote ten years ago, and see that I’m still trying to say the same things, but I could do it less clumsily now, so it seems worth having a go, to be kind to some future reader. That’s what the second edition is about: giving a more experienced editor the chance to tackle a younger writer’s work, both being myself.
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My problem was my linux OS. The solution is to use Kindle Cloud Reader which is also free. How many pages in hard copy would equal your ebook?
I appreciate all the work which this project represents. I hope you will reach many readers now and in future ages.
SONGS 51
“A Little GIRL Lost
Children of the future Age,
Reading this indignant page;
Know that in a former time.
Love! sweet Love! was thought a crime.”
With Gratitude
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The trouble with reading the book is what you wrote ten years ago is still as fresh. I have long believed that all living creatures have souls, but of none is this more certain than of mackerel! Medieval theology would give plants a vegetable soul, animals would have this plus an animal soul, and humans would have triple soul, building on the others. Is there a Donne poem about this? Anyway, it seems to me a good structure, so far as it “explains” the wonder and reverence we instinctively feel for all life, and explains how both plants and animals can be better at certain things than more advanced creatures: clearly, their souls are more specialized!
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Your comment is timely, Michael as I go through ten-year-old material like a curator for the National Trust, spring-cleaning the upholstery, hoovering up the fluff to make it all seem fresh & relevant today. It’s nice to meet one’s younger self and be reminded by him of some founding ideas. For example the second sentence in the first post says plainly that the reader may influence the agenda: a phenomenon manifesting prominently in the past few months. How could I have contemplated publishing in another medium while leaving readers’ input behind? They will forgive, I hope, the pruning and paraphrasing of their comments. In this, I do unto others as I do unto myself.
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Finding time to smell the roses.
I was plugged into this post, it was unexpectedly magnetic.
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Then you have found its essence.
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