The Right Attitude to Rain

My title is nicked! I admit it without shame. It belongs to a book by Alexander McCall Smith that I hoped would provide me with a little wisdom. I was attracted by its title which turned out to have no discernible connection with the storyline or debate held within its pages. Maybe I missed something. I am fascinated by weather of all shapes and sizes. My blogs are full of it. Apologies to those who do not share my obsession. However, it is a part of my English heritage that I cannot shake. I am sitting today with a view out of my window over the Welsh hills. The hills are beautiful: not craggy, but escaping domesticity by their sharp outline and steep inclines. But they are not the primary object in view today. Today I am seeing, with some regret, the rain. It pours incessantly down, tainting everything around me with a greyish tinge and a misty quality. The earth is already saturated and the footpaths are caked in mud. It is a Romantic artist's dream but it just isn't doing it for me today. I am reaching the end of my tether with its drabness, wetness and depressing permanence.

 

I am a newcomer to Wales and well aware that Wales can be wet. Of course it's wet. We are slap bang in the course of the warm, wet Westerlies! Blessed with a hot, dry (short) summer, we were lulled into a false sense of security at first, but we knew in our hearts that this was beginners' luck and that the rain would surely come. And come it has. We can comfort ourselves that in this freak winter the whole country is sharing our misfortune this year and some with far worse consequences than ours. However, we know that this steady influx of dampness is normal here and it is no good being surprised, indignant or unprepared.

 

With this thought in mind, I picked Alexander's volume off the shelf with some eagerness, but found only the ongoing deliberations of its protagonist concerning the pros and cons of embarking on an affair with a much younger man. Not much about rain. Isabel Dalhousie can be relied upon to debate the rights and wrongs of moral philosophy in her life and everyone else's with as much diligence and enthusiasm as Mr. Cameron, although with less dogmatic certainty, but sadly she offered me no wisdom on the right attitude to rain. I am therefore forced, as I gaze out on an over-abundance of the stuff, to concoct my own cocktail of home-grown remedies. Having gone to the trouble, I might as well try them out on you.

 

Positive thinking is all the rage nowadays and very beneficial it can be. So perhaps it would help to dwell, if I can, on the positive aspects of rain. Let us begin by rearranging our vocabulary on the subject. Dull, depressing and grey will be scrubbed from the list immediately. No, rain is clear, cool and refreshing. It does not drip annoyingly down, and it does not flood. Rain pours, engulfs, forms white torrents, fills things that were empty, replenishes things that were in need, lubricates and loosens and, best of all, it goes with the flow... (It is harder to think of these things in a positive light when it is a chilly winter's day - better in the hot days of summer when dry and weary matter and people are in need of refreshment. Oh for those balmy days of summer...)

 

To continue, water must be thought of as a positive benefit... (This is a little tricky right now, with thoughts of unnaturally high tides, rising river levels, flooded homes and damaged promenades rise to the surface. However, the case is far from hopeless.) Just think of the concept of 'flow' alone. Where would we writers be without it? Gushing, pouring, flowing and over-abundance are transformed into heavenly visions when considered beside the ideas of thirst, drought, parched river beds, Water Aid or even writer's block! So, the right attitude to rain! I have done my best. I have tried to channel my thoughts, my vocabulary and my attitudes to the best of my ability. I have tried not to give in to the common mistakes of always complaining that there is too much or too little of something. I have tried to maintain a balanced viewpoint.

 

Are you convinced yet?

Life, Stand Still Here!

So, why do we do it? We wrestle with paint, clay or poetry to create that perfect design, that shape, that collage of textures and colours, or that perfect orchestration of words and phrases - why? What is it that drives us to agonise, to cudgel our poor overworked brains, to polish, to draft and redraft until we have achieved something as close as we can manage to the vision that lies before us, taunting us and drawing us on to create. We are artists, all of us, in our different ways. We create. It is in our nature. But why?

 

In her novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf grappled with this question of what it is that drives us to take disparate objects, colours, shapes or even people and bring them together into order, to create a thing of beauty. For Woolf, it is the bringing together of words that drives her. Mrs Ramsay, modelled on the author's mother, brings people together in the novel in a series of unforgettable moments and strives to create harmony out of the chaos of everyday life.

For Lily Briscoe moments must be made permanent on canvas. Paint is Lily's medium with which she transforms the fluidity of life to the fixity and permanence of art. Deeply aware of the struggles of her sex to count for something in the world that is more than the inevitability of romance, marriage, child-bearing and domesticity, Lily's work is her art. It is her reason for being. She knows that her efforts to master artistic form 'roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted'. Nevertheless, she persisted. 'Why then did she do it?' she asked herself.

Walking along the wooded shores of one of our local estuaries, fascinated by the wintry outline of the trees, the colours, the misty quality of the hills and the loneliness of the landscape, I ask myself a similar question. Why do I feel this continual urge to write what I see around me? What am I trying to achieve? What am I trying to prove to myself? What is it that drives me? The more one looks, with the eyes of an artist, at the world around us, the more one sees out there. Every day brings new discoveries to the artist. The trees are no longer just 'brown and green'. The lacy patterns of their outlines in winter are no longer dull and depressing, but infinitely varied, as they stretch up their branches against the subtle colours of a winter's sunset.

Painter, sculptor, wordsmith alike, we are all the same in our painstaking search for that elusive design which will make life stand still. Life moves too fast. Each moment, for the artist, brings fresh cornucopias of impressions, fresh bounty, a superfluity of beautiful moments to record. We are desperate to fix them on canvas, paper, stone, or whatever medium we choose, lest they escape. "Slow down!" we cry. "Life, stand still here!" But the infinite escapes us once more, finite mortals that we are, and we are forced to try again.

 

January Lament

January! How quickly the new year turns! The blink of an eye and everything is changed, at least in the subtle moodiness of our subjectivity, if not in cold, objective terms. The gloom descends, with festivities put away for another year, and all the talk of tides and floods, unnatural weather and miserable predictions of six months of ice and snow. Six months of Arctic conditions - surely not! But the mere thought of it is enough to dampen our spirits, darken our thoughts and allow into the corners of our consciousness just a hint of belief. What if they're right?

And for us literary types, steeped in the doom and gloom of the past, how easy it is to fall into step with the poets of yesterday and share all their miserable misgivings about the year that lies ahead. Maybe in our middle years, in the midst of a dark wood, we have lost our way. Maybe a waste land of ice and snow, as well as moral degeneration, lies out there ahead of us with the falling towers, crumbling cities. Maybe...

So happy New Year, one and all! Join me in a moment's mournful meditation before we make ourselves a cheery cup of tea and get on with putting the Christmas decorations back in the box...

 

Eliot's Lament

 

January! At a stroke

December's magic falls away.

Sweet-smelling hay,

Warm swaddling bands

And a choir of glittering angels

Give way to bleak midwinter.

 

Thirty-one days of leanness,

Marked out one by one,

The New Year's calendar

Empty, unused, on the wall

Where Christmas stockings hung,

Bright with hope and longing,

Memory and desire.

 

January! Harbinger of ice and snow.

No longer Christmas.

No more the bright Advent candles

Illumine our way,

Our festive days.

No! Sprung from the Virgin's womb,

A hard and bitter winter

One dark day at a time.

 

A birth and yet a death:

Gold, frankincense and myrrh,

Coming late to the party,

Borne by tall, dark strangers,

Sweep us onward, unknowing,

Toward Easter's passion

And the dark night of the soul.

 

Thrust headlong

Into an uncertain future,

We stumble in the darkness

Pause on the threshold,

Yearning, struggling, onwards

For those first green shoots of spring.

 

Yet, April may yet be the cruellest month.