New Blog: Meditations

I've decided to move all my sermons to a new blog. Its name is Kirkwood-Meditations. I hope it will be helpful and interesting.

Four ordinary people: Quartet in Atumn (Barbara Pym)

Barbara Pym. Quartet in Autumn (1977) Pym seems to be a nice lady who tells stories of nice and not so nice people of little consequence. That niceness hides a sharp and ruthless intelligence that sees and understands how people fail to live as fully as they may wish. Here, three of four single people who work together realise they may have rather more consequential ties than they have believed. The catalyst for this insight is the death by self-starvation of Marcia, one of the two women who’ve retired. Letty’s the other one. Norman and Edwin remain behind and when they retire, their department will cease to exist.

     The tone is calm and low-key. The four people’s characters emerge slowly from the apparently unimportant details of their apparently unimportant lives. Their links to the larger world threaten to break, but remain because of events they don’t and couldn’t control.

     It’s Pym’s strength that she makes you wonder and eventually care for these people who’ve worked all their lives at tasks (never described) whose importance to the company has long since been forgotten. Pym’s calm and matter-of-fact tone disguises a sharp insight into the unintentional cruelties inflicted on harmless people both by their circumstances and by each other. These are people who’ve let life pass them by. In the end, they’ve endured. That may be as close to a victory as they are capable of achieving.

     The questions is, have we, the readers, any better claim to success in our lives? Pym manages to insinuate at least the nagging ghost of that unwelcome question. 

     Recommended. ***

I'm an old man now (A poem)

 A Poem

I’m an old man now.
The weight of my memories
bears down on my days.
The truck there carries freight,
I carry my thoughts.
They pool like a lake.
The wind fractures the past.

The news showed a broken building
sliding into the street like water.
Gravity pulls the water over the edge;
a missile nudged the wall into silence.

I don’t hear much these days, cunning devices
in my ears catch the sound as it passes,
add and subtract. The words gleam
like crystals. But it’s not the light
of insight that dazzles.
The years have carried me
past too much indifference.

I’m granted nonsense,
cool and joyful, foam on the lake,
nudged by the wind
towards the silent stony shore.

I hold the coffee cup
and gaze at the garden.
Daylilies gleam like words.
They will fade before nightfall.
They will not know the dark.

2023-06-23 & 08-04/2024-03-21

 © W. Kirchmeir

The Cure For All Diseases (Reginald Hill, 2008)

 Reginald Hill. The Cure For All Diseases. (2008) Dalziel is recuperating at Sandytown from a near-lethal injury. The local patroness of the healing arts has teamed up with the local promoter of holistic healing to create a health-spa that will rejuvenate the town’s economy and add a considerable chunk to the patroness’s not inconsiderable fortune. She’s had two husbands, and is working on acquiring a third. Unfortunately, she’s murdered and rather grotesquely encaged in a contraption designed to roast the pig that’s the center piece of a commemoration of her first husband’s source of wealth. That’s not the only grotesquerie, but you’ll have to read the book yourself to find out who dun what to whom and what for.
      Another nicely plotted, wonderfully convoluted and narrated police procedural. Hill has taken Austen as his inspiration this time, labelling the book’s sections as “volumes”, and basing the cast loosely on Austen’s Sanditon. Pascoe is in charge while his boss recuperates, Wield steadies his new boss as skilfully as he’s steadied Dalziel. An assortment of Yorkshire eccentrics (are there any other kind?) tangle and untangle their relationships and the skein of clues that eventually lead to a satisfying solution. Recommended. ****

There's No History Here (poem)

There’s No History Here
Above Kama Bay

This country has no history,
they say.

Then what’s that breathing there?

There are no stories told
more than a generation old.

Musty papers in old libraries,
read by odd fellows
who believe they can rebuild the past.

Frail quilts stored on high dusty shelves,
brought out into bright air
and fingered by old women,
as they tell who pieced the patchwork,
who ran the needle through the batt,
made arcs and whorls that hold
the coverlet together.

These tales made up
of memories, misremembered
names and half-remembered facts –
they don’t make a history,
they say.

Nor do those fragments
of a myth the elders tell.

Oral history’s not history,
they say.

Each teller adds his notions
of what was truly done.
Each teller makes a tale
of what she knows must,
not might, have been.

And if these tales are true enough
(for truth in history’s a guess,
a fiction built on facts),
if then these tales are true,
as any history may be,
that doesn’t signify –
a generation or two back
is as far as memory
and memories of memories may reach.

The land seems empty,
the sound of the truck
working up the hill remote, muted
by the space enfolding it.

The ghosts of those who came before us
do not speak in the wind,
their language does not
echo in the water-filled canyons,
their songs have long since faded
into silent distances.

And yet
        and yet.

Something moves behind me,
touches my neck.
Something like a word,
half heard,
catches my ears.

The heat feels loud as a shout,
the pines’ sweetness hangs
in the sun-stilled air –

There is history here.

There was history here.

What’s left of it –
a few flakes struck from stone
the rusty stain of blood
bleached
by indifferent rain and sun.

©WEK:2005-2020

Murder Being Once Done (Rendell, 1972)

Ruth Rendell. Murder Being Once Done. (1972) A re-read. I also vaguely recall the video version. Dr Crocker has ordered Reg to take a break from work, with a complete change of scene. He and Dora visit Reg’s nephew Howard and his wife Denise in London. Dora and Denise get on very well supervising Reg’s diet and exercise, but Reg is bored.
     Howard happens to be a Detective Superintendent.  He avoids talking shop with his uncle, under the impression that it would excite his heart into sudden failure. A corpse turns up in a graveyard in an insalubrious quarter of London. When Howard finds Reg at the crime scene, obviously intent on finding out what he can, he asks Reg to help him. There follows the typical Rendell plot, with red herrings, errors in judgement and interpretation, with-holding of respectability-damaging evidence, and the final revelation that rearranges everything into a psychologically plausible story.
     Rendell understands the dark places of the human heart, and the fears and jealousies that fester there. Here, she also sketches the cruel effects of pleasure-denying religionism. Recommended. ***½

Remember Me (Weldon 1976)

 Fay Weldon. Remember Me (1976) Madeleine, Jarvis’s ex-wife, wants revenge. She’s obsesses about him and his new wife Lily, who is a self-centred horror. Their circle includes Philip, a doctor (somewhat of a cold fish) and Margot his wife, who once many years ago made love with Jarvis, on the coats stacked in the spare bedroom during a party when Madeleine was still married to him. That’s the setup. Weldon tells their interlaced stories with a mix of universal and character points of view. About halfway through the story, Madeleine dies in car crash, and her ghost hangs around making trouble. Eventually loose ends are nicely knotted, some poetic justice dishes appropriate retribution, loves are rekindled, and ghostly Madeleine rests in peace.

     IOW, this is a romance, but with sharp elbows. Weldon is very good at skewering moral failings, and acute in observing how people avoid painful but healing insights. An enjoyable read that raises questions that most of us need to ask about ourselves and our relationships.
     Recommended. ***