Old Eden
It broke 40°F today! * And it was BLUE and SUNNY! It was amazing! This also meant however–first nice day we’ve had in weeks and a Sunday with it–that every moron with his loose-cannon dog was out for a walk**–but we had a gorgeous if rather slippery, as the mud begins to melt, hurtle anyway. The weather report said it’s going to cloud over and RAIN tonight–rain! Fancy! The geranium won’t know what’s hit it! –Nor all the things frozen solid in their pots. Sigh. I was out there this afternoon with my secateurs pretending to get on with the–ahem, ahem–somewhat delayed late autumn/early winter clean-up, and you can cut things down but you can’t pull things up: the ground’s solid too. Oh dear. Peter says think of the inevitable losses as an opportunity. I am thinking of them as an opportunity: I’m thinking of that Peter Beales’ roses 20% off till the end of the month sale. . . .
But . . . you’ve got it by now that I’m a total sap about this landscape, right? I bitch and moan about the weather and the mud and the rain and the brambles and the nettles and the getting whacked from the rear by pairs of hellhounds carrying logs, and all the things that die in my garden even without the assistance/excuse of unseemly polar blasts, and so on, but I find this landscape utterly glorious and uplifting and smile-making and I daily feel lucky (and rather astonished) to live here. But I have not been holding up too well the last few weeks–I’m not only out of practise with anything resembling real winter***, there’s also been flu and ME using me for basketball practise†–and today was like Paradise Regained.††
Because I’d been having flu and therefore been kind of a captive audience I started out listening to Radio Three’s complete Milton’s Paradise Lost–about three weeks ago, I think–because I felt too feeble to turn it off when it came on, and then the last few days of it found myself walking hellhounds around being back in time to listen to the next instalment.††† I’ve been thinking of fishing out our old Milton and doing a blog entry on it. I had to read it in college, and hated the freller of course, and I sure remember why I hated it, young feminist with a flaming sword that I was and all, and thundering patriarchal thug that Milton is, who, when he wasn’t being inspired was perfectly happy to crank out pompous tub-thumping moralistic twaddle by the yard. ‡ But while I also coldly remembered that there’s some very remarkable writing in it I had totally forgotten, or possibly never allowed myself to experience just how visceral some of it is.‡‡ This is not an influence I especially want to admit to, but I think some of my mundane world-building got a kick along the way from Milton’s pious semi-flapdoodle. And Tolkien has Milton scrawled all over Middle-Earth, although Milton would have been horrified to have inspired a Catholic.
But they’ve stuck with me these last few weeks, some of those recalled rolling periods,‡‡‡ and I was thinking about it today, under the blue sky, caressed by (relatively) soft breezes (very glad not to be naked though). Maybe it’s just my having moved around a lot, and finding home late, and in a foreign country. But I keep remembering that last scene, when they’re thrown out of Paradise, they who have known nothing else, who have barely digested their forbidden apples, who’ve had to watch their peaceful domain suddenly turn savage, who’ve got God mad at them, who haven’t a clue:
‘High in Front advanc’t,
The brandisht Sword of God before them blaz’d
Fierce as a Comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the LIBYAN Air adust,
Began to parch that temperate Clime; whereat
In either hand the hastning Angel caught
Our lingring Parents, and to th’ Eastern Gate
Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer’d.
They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng’d and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through EDEN took thir solitarie way.’
. . . Imagine. Imagine.
* * *
* And the famous geranium is still alive. Apparently. And in spite of the last forty-eight hours of up to ten degrees below freezing and being locked up in the dark. I have no idea why, and I’m still thinking that it’ll just reach the end of its rope one of these days, possibly even a mild spring day when the worst is over, and say, okay, that’s it, and pop its clogs. And I will burst into tears and carry on as if my oldest friend had died. It’s only an ordinary apple-blossom geranium! It would cost me £3 to replace it! They do vary, plant to plant, and it did bloom like crazy last summer, so it certainly earned its keep, but at the same time, speaking of varying plant to plant, this one has an unusually bad case of the first flowers in one of those big heads of masses of tiny individual blossoms dying disgustingly while the later ones are still coming out, which means a LOT of fabulously boring upkeep. But at this point it and the rose and I have been through a lot together and this creates a bond. And next year I’m going to be so prepared.^
^ HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. I have never been so prepared in my life. Maybe I can be a little bit prepared, however, so if we have another attack of, you know, winter, it won’t catch me quite so much like a kick in the head next year.
** Some of them in freaking REGIMENTS. Great columns of walkers, well embellished with livestock. My favourite, however, was this guy who was so buried in his map reading at a crossroads^ that he didn’t hear me as I howled for the third time, IS YOUR DOG OKAY WITH OTHER DOGS, which it clearly was not. He finally looked up and said, oh, we’re going this way . . . and strode off the way we were going to go. –Pardon me, you jerk, you do not own the countryside–and we hurtle faster than pretty much anybody, so if he’d had the frelling thing on a lead we could have got past them pretty smartly. But he didn’t and we didn’t and we went some other way. And met more walkers with more dogs. Sigh.
^ Tell me where you want to go and I will take pleasure in sending you wrong, because I don’t like people with aggressive off-lead dogs, I’m funny that way.
*** The grass grows all year round here, remember?
† And does anyone else’s fingertips split in cold weather, so typing involves blood and screaming?
†† Briefly. Before the next thing. This being ordinary post-Fall mortal Earth and all.
††† The hellhounds have quite liked Milton too because once or twice I was too sick to go through the whole taking coat and shoes off, etc, and have simply turned the radio on and curled up in the dog bed with them. There is room if you have a reasonably flexible spine and hellhounds are of course only too happy to help. –I hadn’t fully realised just how well accoutred hellhounds are. Their padded beds are extremely comfortable.
‡ I hadn’t forgotten what an absolute whining worm Adam is–he’s so appalling I keep thinking Milton must know he’s appalling, in which case why is it still Adam who gets taken up on the mountaintops for long views with archangels?–but I was a little disconcerted by the feeling that under all the ‘I am as dirt beneath your feet master’ from Eve that she gets some of the better lines, while Adam is busy mewling and snivelling.
‡‡ Is this the face of someone you want to have round to dinner? I don’t think so.
http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/milton/
‡‡‡ And if you’re at all curious I recommend you check this out of the library: http://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Lost-Naxos-AudioBooks-Milton/dp/9626343508 which I think is the one Radio Three was using. You can peel Brussels sprouts during the perorations, and Lesser reads aloud really well, like a good Shakespearean actor, making all that weird old fashioned stuff sound everyday and normal. When you look at it on the page . . . well, it looks more like Milton: ‘. . . though all by mee is lost, Such favour I unworthy am voutsaft, By mee the Promis’d Seed shall all restore.’ Speaking of Eve’s great lines. Gak.
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