Yesterday, sitting on the cliff tops about half way between Soar Mill Cove and Bolt Head, I had the intense awareness of the sheer joy that is life, the giftedness that is life.
The air was clear, the sea a noble iron blue, the world accessible, distances condensed.
Today I had the thought that the moment (any moment?) is both totally empty and totally pregnant.
[Oh look at that. A woman, walking along the platform opposite where I sit, has a strange support on her leg – some sort of white covering (a bandage?) with a cross brace (metal or plastic?) It induces in me something like vertigo and it comes to me that there is an emptiness – no bone or flesh – that connects the functioning leg to the functioning foot. The foot must be operated by some ghastly memory of legness. She walks with the aid of two sticks and is somewhat overweight. A railway porter carries her case.]
On page 9 of the LRB 19/6/08 Terry Eagleton refers to Samuel Beckett’s life as devoted to silence, exile and cunning. Which makes one think of his time in the French wartime resistance. Easgleton later goes on:
“One must speak while preserving in one’s words a core of silence, in homage to the millions whose tongues have been silenced.”
Hope, he thinks, can still remain, but based on indeterminacy and failure. And that seems to me to link back to the cliff-top experience of joy and giftedness, in the sense that hope is simply an integral part of that particular package.
The problem might arise when we try to do manipulate that hope, to turn it into a washing machine, for example.