When did it start? (Geoffrey Hill’s poetry)

A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost sound …

The blaze of death goes out, the mind leaps
for its salvation, is at once extinct … — Geoffrey Hill,
another poet the admiral liked to read when he was young

Dear friends and readers,

Yesterday a friend reminded me of a trip Jim and I took to Cleveland last March where I met her in a restaurant, and he didn’t come to dinner with us. That was not unusual, as he often avoided social occasions, but he had had the additional excuse of it being hard for him to swallow. She wrote she was “so clueless about the significance of this. It was indeed the calm before the storm; or did you have premonitions about what was to come … ”

In retrospect yes. People will say retrospect doesn’t count, but upon being told on April 28th, he had cancer, I remembered back to August 2012 when highly unusually before the set vacation time in Vermont (we were staying in a Landmark house, built first in the 18th century), Jim had turned round to me and said, “it’s time to go home.” And began making preparations. And so I did too.

I admit I didn’t mind, I never minded going home with or to him. He was the one who insisted on lengthening out the vacation time to say the afternoon of the last day so we would rush off to some museum or last experience in the morning (luggage stowed behind a stairway or inn counter) and have to wait for a plane in the evening. I admit we had lost electricity there and the house being so isolated and in the dark left us frightened. But the people taking care of the property had come by within a couple of hours and the power had come back by morning.

So it did strike me. Something about his tone felt ominous. The utterance bothered me. I thought I dismissed it from my mind, but I didn’t, couldn’t.

For some reason I find myself remembering Jim liked the poetry of Geoffrey Hill when we lived in Leeds together and Ji reading to me the text of The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy by Geoffrey Hill:

Hill reading his poem upon the place a huge carnage took place

I told Cheryl that no one who had know Jim fully or for real was at the funeral — but me. “What a shame,” says she, I believe, seemingly blaming him, suggesting to me you don’t want to be that way. But few could have understood him. The selection from a poem sent by a friend who spent an afternoon with us and had a brief meal out, as appropriate for Jim, Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, XXIII, 27-38), I read aloud, but no one but me understood it.

I must stop listening to people. He did manage to say “goodbye” to Yvette on that Monday, October 7th. She was off to work, and for once she came in to look and take his hand. He came out of consciousness and said to her, “Goodbye, Isobel,” smiled and fell back.

He told me not to care about what other people think (shades of Feynman) but try to follow my instincts, which are strong however hard it may be to come up to this.

Sylvia