So you can marvel

Give Your Writing The Edge's Nugget No.26, November 2022 reflects upon the value of work done with the hands. 

Not everyone has hands, not everyone has the use of both. 

Ever since I penned that Nugget, however, Brian Walter's poem Workman #2 has hummed in my brain. It's a perfect demonstration of how a man's mind, heart and body are integrated and fully engaged, as he is "grounded in his purpose, balanced in his humanity."

Workman #2

i.

I have to choose today

- whether to walk the forests

or get on with house repairs,

and soon I find myself out

buying a window frame,

a tad too big, so I must devise

ways to fit the casement to its space:

this cottage window, small

and pretty, for our bathroom.

I like to repair, to set things

to rights. I may turn from words

to maintenance, but am a dreamer,

too, and I wonder at the roads

I will not take today,

the paths I am not getting to pick,

between the right, untrodden,

or the well-worn left.

ii.

I glaze the window,

setting glass into the mullions,

tapping home the glazier's points,

thumbing in the softened putty:

I've been working this repair for days

and now it's almost done,

a new window frame set

and glazed so that one day

upon a time, morning bathed, you

can slip the bathroom window open

and marvel at the fresh outside,

at what metaphors do in spring.

 - by Brian Walter, in What It Is, Ecca Poets, Plettenberg Bay: 2020

The unhurried momentum of these lines speaks so well the non-machine, the un-preprogammed, living action emerging out of a moment's instinctual choice - "soon I find myself out/ buying a window frame"; which leads, then, to the work of blood and flesh - and continuous, self-conscious thought - "I wonder at the roads/ I will not take today".

This dreamer's dreaming does not delay his action, he glazes, sets, taps home, thumbs in - what a lovely roll of verbs to tell the process; even as the poet joys in the jargon and techniques of "mullions," "glazier's points" and "softened putty". Steady, patient, he gets there - "now it's almost done".

The penultimate stanza creates a garden of fairytale charm, allowing the sensual dreamer his in as he imagines his loved one "upon a time, morning bathed" opening the window he has fitted. The word "slip" in the third-last line adds the most delicate degree of mischief, as the poet at work slips himself into the frame, as it were, and walks off with the prize: the window glazed and set, the loved one bathed, it's the marvel at "what metaphors can do in spring" that flowers the finale.

It's the dignity of fulfilling work, creative action saves our souls and makes us smile.

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash

 

 

Labour is blossoming or dancing where?

I have always loved to work. The work I have done - I mean here in the main my art and writing - has built, and over and again repaired, my mind, body, heart and soul.

The following small, personal selection of poems and extracts are a tribute to the beauty of committed human work. Whether it be sewing or carpentry, web design, computer programming, mining, gardening, catering or trading. There is no end to human talent and no end to the quest to get whatever it is you are doing right. To begin with, I've chosen one of my favourite stanzas from my old master, Yeats, for you to enjoy -

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

- from Among School Children by W.B.Yeats 

Not bruised, not born of despair, not blear-eyed, but dancing and at one: that is when a human being can attain a wholeness that compares to the completeness in the life of a tree.

I've always loved Herman Charles Bosman's poem, Seed, which be-sings the integration of a farmer's body, mind and soul by means of the process of working -

Seed

The farmer ploughs into the ground
More than the wheat-seed strewn on the ground
The farmer ploughs into the ground
The plough and the oxen and his body
He ploughs into the ground the farmstead and the cattle
And the pigs and the poultry and the kitchen utensils
And the afternoon sunlight shining into the window panes of the voorhuis
And the light entangled in the eyes of the children
He ploughs into the ground his wife's brown body
And the windmill above the borehole
And the borehole and the wind driving the windmill.
The farmer ploughs the blue clouds into the ground;
And as a tribute to the holocaust of the ploughshare -
To the sowing that was the parting of the Juggernaut -
The earth renders the farmer in due season
Corn.

- Herman Charles Bosman 

The shock of not being able to work anymore, due to a stroke, and the frailty of illness and old age, hit my mother and my husband respectively very hard - both were people who had been hard-working, who grieved the loss of their capacities to do even menial chores. My husband's frailty loaded on me more than is usual, and taught me - 

Beautiful body

My fingertips -
rough
from washing and rubbing -

rust in the whorls,
from scrubbing the pan, my back aches
from cleaning the floors,

my neck and shoulders are stiff
from sitting at the computer.
or maybe

from peeling and coring the apples;
my underarms sweaty and fragrant
from labour.

How beautiful
when your body
can work.

I think of my mother -
helpless after her stroke;
my husband so frail it's an effort to walk.

I shan't complain
about work, but give thanks
my body can.

- Silke Heiss 

Norman [Morrissey, my late husband] often quoted the following line from one of his favourite books and authors, and his passion for their meaning engraved itself into me -

"[They] came and went without fear of necessity, working hard because of the life that was in them, not for want of the money."

- from The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence

The great emphasis, with which Norman used to pronounce the phrase working hard because of the life that was in them leaps me straight to Maria Montessori's exploration of the human instinct to work - 

"The most important discovery is that a child returns to a normal state through work. Countless experiments made upon children of every race throughout the world have shown that this is the most certain datum that we have in the field of psychology and education. A child's desire to work represents a vital instinct since he cannot organise his personality without working: a man builds himself through working. There can be no substitute for work, neither affection nor physical well-being can replace it. [...] A child's instinct for work is a proof that work is instinctive to man and characteristic of the species."

- from The Instinct to Work in The Secret of Childhood  by Maria Montessori 

None of the above eulogies and thoughts about work concern themselves with forced labour, or with ugly struggles between "deviated men" (in Montessori's words) who have "lost the proper motives for work".

Just about every human has it in them to do something well. Each human has something to offer, which will help in however small a way to serve the whole. I never believed those who told me it's only about filling my stomach: they were trying to reduce my spirit to a machine.

Photo by Clark Young on Unsplash