In a pentameter line, Derek Walcott writes in “Midsummer XIV”: “There’s childhood, and there’s childhood’s aftermath.”
We do not write of childhood when we are children. As writers, we always begin in aftermath. The “math” in “aftermath” is an Old English word for mowing–that is, the aftermath is the second mowing, “a second crop of grass in the same season” (American Heritage Dictionary). The Oxford English Dictionary records that in the 16th century, it was also called in dialect the “lattermath,” the later mowing. We return to the harvest field, after the harvest, after labor, after experience, and there we find a second crop of grass in the same season. This is the crop that we harvest. And perhaps we also find a space haunted by all the human labor that was invested in plowing, planting, tending, and the first harvest. [Keats' "To Autumn"--haunted by what he has excluded.]
In that the “math” in “aftermath” is also a kind of equation, we hear the mere chance of word history. We always begin by searching for a kind of equation that will represent what happened during the harvest. Therefore when we write poetry and fiction we are writing in a peculiarly compressed way–no matter how lengthy the work in progress, for the compression is not in length but in the mental process by which we move from image to image, from feeling to feeling, from scene to scene.
We do not explain everything. We arrange symbols to say what can be said in no other way, and our arrangements of symbols are in turn larger symbols.
In another mood, “aftermath” has the connotation of something unpleasant. Perhaps this came from the difference between the scantiness of the second harvest compared to the first. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes this 1834 sentence by the Romantic poet Robert Southey: “No aftermath has the fragrance and the sweetness of the first crop.” Our first harvest is living and thinking and feeling, according to our chances and our temperaments, while our second harvest, as writers, is something that we take from the field that grew back again, in part, a little while later–the field that tried to remember itself after the mowing men had passed swinging their scythes. The first harvest is the sustenance, the living; the after-harvest, we weave into some shape, some little straw doll that stands for what happened, or what might have happened or what might happen.
In the aftermath, we remember some of what we saw, and we look around in search of reminders–we don’t know what they will be–of what we have already forgotten that we saw. This looking around can find its reward in unexpected places–perhaps in the street as we walk; perhaps in a book that we are reading; perhaps in our reverie or dreams. We poke about. In the language of the English poet John Clare, we “prog.” His untitled poem set after haying time, now called “The Mouse’s Nest,” written sometime between 1832 and 1837, portrays a moment of looking for nothing in particular, but looking, while wandering through the already mown fields, and finding something:
I found a ball of grass among the hay
And progged it as I passed and went away [progged = prodded]
And when I looked I fancied something stirred
And turned agen and hoped to catch the bird
When out an old mouse bolted in the wheat
With all her young ones hanging at her teats[.]
She looked so odd and so grotesque to me
I ran and wondered what the thing could be
And pushed the knapweed bunches where I stood[.]
When the mouse hurried from the crawling brood
The young ones squeaked[,] and when I went away
She found her nest again among the hay[.]
The water oer the pebbles scarce could run
And broad old cesspools glittered in the sun
[According to the OED, “craking” would mean making a harsh cry; some editors have “squeaking” and others “crawling”; Again, the OED says that cesspools = a dug pit for catching sediment for a stream, or refuse from waste water.[
He does not analyze what he finds, but follows his feeling into a new moment. His feeling does not need any comment. Whereas most of the time, as Dickinson writes, “‘Tis many a tiny Mill / Turns unperceived beneath our feet” (Johnson 1097; Franklin 1102), Clare’s tiny mouse has unfettered the whole world, in his spirit.
Reading Clare’s poem, which was written amidst the drastic social change and suffering caused by the private appropriation of public lands and the resulting displacement and impoverishment of poor laborers, I cannot help feeling that in the utter otherness of the mouse, he saw himself. Like the mouse, he had many children to support by his physical labor, since he could not do so by his verses. And perhaps he felt he himself was considered “odd and grotesque.” Certainly he was pained in his awareness of being different from those among whom he lived–Clare was unlike other farm laborers in being a poet, and in being a farm laborer, he was very unlike other poets. Of all the little things he sees while meandering through the field in a thoughtful mood, it is the peculiar overburdened mouse which in some way he in particular is predisposed to notice. Noticing it–merely seeing it–he has accomplished the work that his imagination was ready to do, and this accomplishment makes him feel exalted. The world appears to him in a different way. He has been given, or rather he has given himself, an intensely awake moment simply because the vague and unconscious availability of his feeling, of his mind, has found that which it was available for–the symbol of his feeling, rather than the analysis of it or the naming of it.
Since we writers begin in aftermath, we might look carefully over the mown field for whatever we may happen to notice, and we might listen for any echo of what was said when the field was filled with men and women and children laboring. We will see something, and hear something, even if what is there is mostly nothing and silence. We listen for what others heard, and also for what was not heard by anyone–what we ourselves did not hear, or once heard and then could no longer hear until in the aftermath we listened once more. And when suddenly we see our own mouse, and perceive it fully, we are taken by a feeling of exaltation because we gain access to another world inside the world. Even muddy rain puddles then glitter in the sun. Clare’s responsiveness to what he sees, this seeing of that to which he is responsive, this acknowledging of his own response, is who Clare is; and in finishing the poem, he has brought himself into the truth of his being.
This is the first of a series of posts that inaugurate the blog on writing, reading, learning and teaching at the Center for the Writing Arts. Contributors will include faculty who teach writing at Northwestern, visitors to the university, former students, and others. The subjects will include both creative and expository writing, writing in various disciplines of study, from science to music, and general comments on contemporary writing. My own particular focus in this series of posts will be on aspects of writing that lie below or beyond the level of the art and craft of poetry or fiction.
