Once There Was a Way....

"Once there was a way...."

The idea has been expressed everywhere from Heraclitus to the Beatles and Keane.  How did Heraclitus (500 BCE) put it?

τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί
ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
1. p.77. Fr.2

“Although all hold the Word in common, the people
live as if they had a private understanding.”

That's Heraclitus longing for a world that had already disappeared in his day.  It is the same sense remarked in Isaiah: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we've turned each to his own way."  These sentiments express something of a society detached from a common thread, a binding ideal: the feeling of anomie -- of not belonging to or within one's own society due to the absence of common values, ideals that are shared, are agreed upon, and which exist as the people's common ground.  But there is something more: the lost personal, individual attachment to another person and lost moments of connection.  Anomie.

From the Beatles, there is not only "Golden Slumbers," linked above, but this from John Lennon:

Whatever happened to
The love that we once knew
Can we really live without each other
When did we loose the touch
That seemed to mean so much
It always made me feel so

Free, as a bird

 And from Keane:

Oh simple thing where have you gone?
I'm getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you're gonna let me in
I'm getting tired and I need somewhere to begin

I came across a fallen tree
I felt the branches of it looking at me
Is this the place we used to love?
Is this the place that I've been dreaming of?

Is it mere nostalgia, as moving as nostalgia may be?  No.  It's deeper; it carries a greater import that speaks to us about our inner lives and identities.  The Romantics called such a thing Sehnsucht, an inconsolable longing, a longing for something or someone beyond ourselves.

C. S. Lewis described Sehnsucht as a longing for something from another world -- or at least a longing for something beyond what this world can satisfy: 

'Ιουλιανπαθω

and 

"O! I desire too much!"

A word similar in meaning is Suadade -- a sense of people, places, moments, deeply loved and tied to our identity, but now gone, missing.  Remembering them isn't mere nostalgia; it's deeper, having, I believe, something to do with our very being -- with our souls.  That is, someone has been so important to us that without that person we are somehow not quite complete, and we remember....  A word said in just the right way, a sound, a look, a song, a smell...and there they are.  Or, rather, there they aren't.  And we feel their absence as we remember.

One more: hiraeth (from Welsh: hir, "long" and aeth, "sorrow, grief").  It connotes a homesickness, a longing for a home or a person that is no more or, as someone put it, "which maybe never was."  It is for something "irretrievably lost"; one Welsh language official said, "It’s a kind of longing for a person, a place or a time that you can’t get back to, a kind of unattainable longing" (Brosschot).

As author, J. L. Carr put it in his remarkable novel A Month in the Country,

     We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours forever -- the way things looked, [...] a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face.  They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. (104)

Hiraeth can also denote a longing for the past.  That is most certainly what Tennyson called his "passion of the past," expressed in his poem "Tears, Idle Tears" from The Princess:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

All the above lyrics -- song or poetry -- carry a sense of hiraeth, Suadade and Sehnsucht.  There are others.

 Vianney's song, Pas La:

 

 En Francais:

Je suis une cruche,
percée de plus,
j’ai la peau craquelée
depuis toi, desséchée
Quand vient la lune
et le vent frais,
par habitude,
j’te cherche sur le canapé

mais t’es pas là, mais t’es où?
mais t’es ou ? (pas là, pas là pas là…)

Part of his (translated) lyrics:

I am a broken jar
totally in holes
My skin is cracking
since you faded away
when the moon shows up
and I feel a cold wind
I am still searching [for] you laying on the sofa

But you're not here, where are you then?
but where are you? (not here, not here, not here)

The past is a struggle: it's loaded with all sorts of things that have carried significant import into our present condition, the way we think now about things (even as opposed to how we used to think about them).  There are things back there we idealize, things we also dismiss as irrelevant...but perhaps shouldn't.  The Germans have a funny word here: Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: "the trouble you go through when trying to come to terms with the past."

What does it all mean? What doesn't it mean?  Here are meanings beyond mere "feelings" -- here are signficances to our being past and present.  We cannot explain them: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy," says Hamlet.   And yet we come against them (as I wrote elsewhere about time [LINK]).  "Here, there, and everywhere" -- we are reminded....

~~~~~~~~~~~

 Carr, J. L. A Month in the Country. Penguin, 2000.

A Swan Dive, If You Reaaally Wanna Know

As a graduate student in London 1984: that was the first time I went to the Swan in Cosmo place.  At that pub you could meet locals, lawyers from nearby Lincoln's Inn, people who had children in the nearby children's hospital, and who not?  Of an evening, tables and people would spill onto the pavement on both sides of Cosmo Place, just leaving a path wide enough for families on their evening walk, parents slowly drifting by with their kids in strollers and jammies.

One warm evening in summer, two men invited me to bring my pint and sit at a table on the pavement with them.  They both treated me kindly and to pints -- sternly refusing to let me take my turn at buying a round ("yoo're a stoodent and need yur mooney" said one),   So I learned pubs: it's about people, a "public house" in the real sense.  It's not an American bar.  Even dogs are welcome (every type), but they all -- canine or human -- must behave.

The Swan, flowered on a Sunday
first to the left on Cosmo Place.
The Queen's Larder, further on, by the phoneboxes

One man was from Glasgow, the other from Exeter, in the south.  A true Scot, the man from Glasgow was, and Glaswegian [link] is a language far from Edinburgh's smoother notes even if these towns are but a wee hop apart by train. In short, Exeter had to translate almost everything Glasgow said to me, and what things those two lads taught me.

Exeter's job: he sold camping gear for Lowe and asked if I'd seen Lowe bags in the states.  Saying that, "yeah--in the states they sell anything from large frame packs to fanny-packs," I saw them both suddenly wince, look round at the crowd and shush me.  Glasgow said, as I recall, "ghrthpuntichlock, ween abrightlightkitinyourattic," which Exeter gave me to understand was Scots for "we dinna say that in polite company here, laddie: 'fanny-pack' is impolite slang for the most intimate part of the female anatomy."  And so the two traveling salesmen, one from north, one from south, and a green student from America met up and spent a long evening talking about America and Britain, comparing expressions of each country, philosophizing about wives and jobs (neither of which I had as a student), and trying to imbibe yet another pint.

At a late point, a woman hovered by us who, to all indications of decimation and fogginess, was working on a habit more heroin than ale.  A seat was open at the table and, wishing to sit, in her perpetual movement of slow and relative motion, she asked, "D'yamoind if Oy siddown 'eeuh?"

The guys had already noted her lolling and swaying to the cosmic forces.  It was not a warm "Yeah--awroight."  She sat -- immediately bummed a cigarette from Glasgow, and announced "I'm nawt from round 'eeuh, if ya reaaaly wanna know."  No one took notice.  She repeated this a number of times before Exeter shot back in the middle of a story he was telling: "well, we didn't ask, did we, so we really don't want to know -- if you really wanna know." The slight seemed to bounce off her.  She only waited silently a bit, smoking, until Glasgow rose to get another round for us all.  She was on again: "well a girl could really fancy a pint 'ereself, if ya reaaaaly wanna know."  Exeter said "get yer own pint, eh?"  Glasgow came back with three pints and a half-pint for her.  She said "Well I would've loiked a full poynt, if you reaally wanna know," which set not only Exeter into a remark, but made Glasgow smolder a bit as well.

By the end of the evening (perhaps it was the ale), the two men took occasional and then more frequent glances at her.  They delayed their departures -- the game of "whocanstaylongestandgetthegirl?" had begun.  I was the first to rise to take my leave.  There were hand shakes all round and many thanks from me and wishes of good luck from them.  Glasgow looked to be leaving as well.  I don't know when, or if alone, Exeter left.  But I've often wondered what happened to the other human there, the woman whose life had wound down to a thin thread of "if you reaaaaly wanna know." In the decades since, her phrase has remained a regular linguistic feature at my home -- used to offer information that a listener didn't ask for, as in "Yes, it was I, indeed, who cleaned the fireplace this morning, if you reaaaally wanna know...."

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

Saturday, one of the group -- having a severely injured back -- could stand no more walking about London and needed to rest her back (and had endured a trip to the hospital on Sunday).  So she and I made our way (slowly) back to the flats from the group outing to Notting Hill market.  While she rested, I went to Greenwich to catch up to the group, missed them by minutes, and then trudged back to Bedford Place to check on the patient, who, as it was now around 6:00 p.m., would need food.  To the grocery store, then back to the flat.  "Do you want curry chicken salad I can make here and you can continue to rest, or do you want to go to the pub round the corner for fish and chips?"

So...at the Swan over fish and chips we sat and talked of England, Bloomsbury, books, and everything.  She is a bright soul, an astute being, and she listened kindly to a few tales of my student days while sipping her cider.

And another evening, a few of us went to The Queen's Larder, another pub at the end of Cosmo Place, and enjoyed a pint -- but more: talk with an elderly couple from Newcastle on Tyne, down to London for a short holiday.  With them there was much delightful talk about England in the 60s, and Newcastle, and Sting (who is from Newcastle).  Sting was highly admired by the couple because he goes back to his "Local" (pub) occasionally to see his working-class mates in the northern town. The couple cared not at all about the Beatles who, unlike Sting, stayed in the posh south -- London -- and do not go back to visit their old mates in Liverpool.  A lovely couple in their autumn, they are, and the old guy gave me a thumbs-up when they left, saying "it war very nice ta meet ya."  And so to meet them also!

It's a public house, not a bar.  And everyone petted the little dog who courteously nosed round and greeted newcomers.  If you reaaaaaaly wanna know.