I dinna ken it a’, but I kenned enouch to gang on with.

I think that would make a pretty tombstone for most people, “I didn’t understand everything, but I understood enough to get along.” I read George MacDonald’s Malcolm over my winter break (and skimmed through the wretched sequel), and then of course had to write poems and think in meter for the next 24 hours because reading such lovely prosery, and thinking about the ebb and flow of words – which is unavoidable when most of the dialogue is in Scots – does put my mind in a fidget. Of course, all the beautiful nature was also a bit intoxicating. It has been an unbroken silence of gray here for the past few days, with only a breath of muted rain late one evening. The same day on repeat.

I’m conflicted about MacDonald (at least his fiction. I love his allegories), but I am not conflicted about loving Malcolm. The first line stole my heart. Miss Horn and her vociferous thanksgiving over being made with no feelings! She is naturally my favorite character, followed by the ocean, the sky, and then Duncan. But of course the book is not about her, it’s about somebody else. I don’t dislike Malcolm (only vicariously, in the sequel, but this Malcom can’t be blamed for that). Malcolm is fine when you’re in the book, but when you’re out of it he can’t come with you. He is like faerie gold that dissapears in the morning, or like that first snowflake that you carefully carry home only to find it’s already melted once you’ve arrived. The ocean and the sky are more real than he is, I can dream of going to find them. But there never was and never will be a Malcolm in this world. I like the narrator better, because I can argue with him. I dearly love to argue, and the narrator is so opinionated I’m sure he would oblige me. I feel that we would get along, whereas Malcolm and Graham would find me a poor companion: Too impatient to watch the dawn for hours. Or to sit and work out the Eculid in the original Greek. To prosaic to find resolution in an abstraction.

I love the absurdity of the uneveness of the past. Our minds even things out so much, they’re always supprised to find dips and peaks in reality. We want to find things better or worse and so do, when often they are only rearranged. We think about the oppurtuinty for education now, and imagine there was little of it available before. But sometimes reading old books it seems that it’s always been an uneven mixed bag. Here’s a fishing village with a school master who knows greek and latin (duh. Doesn’t every college educated man?), so naturally anyone with a desire to learn a little more than the basics will, between catching herring and mending nets, pick up those languages too. Oh, but let us not talk about education. The word is so dual in my mouth it makes my head swim, and so hard and cold it makes my teeth ache.

And let’s not talk about poetics either. The way colors can be all cast up together in a paragraph, bunched up tightly to fit, to describe a single night sky. Certainly, lets not talk about the soul-poetic, for that would leave me out of my depth. I’m afraid I have a hard time believing in it, and must go on faith that it does exist in some people. It’s much easier to talk about a book’s internal inconsistencies than about it ecstasies, just like I suppose it’s easier to point out someone is wearing mismatched socks than to put into words the effect of their outfit on the whole.

I think that’s the genius of the poetic mind. They can take the soul of a thing and put it in flat, ink-printed (only, I read it on my ipad) words, where it’s preserved until it enters someone’s brain and is there rehydrated, in a sense. I suppose that means there must be some extra soul in the reader for the soul of the original to come out right. A sunset is after all only a sunset. But a moment is a thing with history and context and feeling and meaning, and the poet has to put the one in the other, and then trust the reader is able to unpack and assemble it.