(—God’s Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Sally Bayley
From the age of four, when I acquired words, I knew there was the visible world, the printed word on the page, and the invisible, the world beyond. Actual things existed and then the things beyond my seeing: ‘… the dearest freshness deep down things’ says Gerard Manley Hopkins.
He meant the patterns within leaves that hold them together; the architecture of the atomic and subatomic world; those infinitesimal fractions of the material world that remain invisible to us, but we know are there because we firmly believe in a deep material existence.
Needs must. What else is there? In order to live in the material world, we must take certain things for granted; we have no choice. We must believe those invisible structures are there if we are to continue to participate in being. Belief in a deep reality is the root of the verb to be.
Metaphysical reality has always been a given. I was handed that view as a child from poetry and song, from hymns, and all those old Biblical stories about preposterous overreaching patriarchs, those tragi-comic myths. Humans meddling with the divine and wishing for more of that sort of thing. Absurd stories for an absurd condition: the human desire to see and know.
I look from the bus window on this beautiful afternoon in May and I am reminded of those Tintoretto paintings of impossibly soft clouds on church ceilings. Paintings meant for cricked necks to look up and sway at the sight of cherubs peering down at them. It’s partly the angle, acute and vertiginous, but it’s also that sixteenth century Italian blue — the undaunted Mannerist way of seeing too much all at once — that heavenly ceiling, ceiling marked out as heaven. It’s a given that a domed vault can yield that much, a blue heaven, revelation. Why not? My bus window doesn’t expect as much, but I suppose I do. I expect to see something beyond the tufty white clouds — and I do — I see my painting, the one I’m making in my head, no doubt baroque. And I feel the urge of natural beauty pointing towards the rest — the invisible world — what my humble imagination, which turns out to be not so humble after all, anticipates. Which is beauty and the rest of her captives: the lime green of the lime trees over the churchyard wall and the silvery birch of the bark running like a clear brook in the sharp afternoon light. ah! bright wings, extolled the poet, singing his hymn of praise to the made world. Because what else is there but praise? That is all we can bring to the occasion, and it is all I bring to my friend as I step off the bus with my tiny crushed tulips — a paltry offering in the face of that hymn. Today, the world is so beautiful it hurts, I say, and she agrees, because we learnt those old hymns a long time ago and we haven’t forgotten them; and I know we are both glad it was so.
For Nanu and Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 519 • July 2022
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW
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