In the beginning
By Harry Eyres
Published: January 8 2010 23:12 | Last updated: January 8 2010 23:12
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| A learner remains unfazed in adverse weather |
The now little-read Victorian poet Coventry Patmore, in the beautiful poem “Winter”, found a particular loveliness and serenity in the apparent low point of the year. January’s chill and dark were to him merely signs of “warmth and light asleep”.
In fact everything that is to come, in more obvious form, in warmer, later seasons, is already present, in dormant chrysalis mode, in the year’s coldest phase: “But sweeter yet than dream or song of Summer or Spring/ Are Winter’s sometime smiles, that seem to well/ From infancy ineffable.”
January is the unloved, stumbling beginner among the months of the year. Beginners are often treated with condescension; they are not expected to know much or be able to do much; we overtake beginner drivers with a cluck of impatience immediately swallowed as we remember we were once there ourselves.
But being a beginner is not such a bad place to find yourself. A beginner carries no baggage. Babies, in their “infancy ineffable”, attract us because of their wonderful, almost scary, openness; their bodies and minds have not yet been warped by custom and habit; Wordsworth’s “shades of the prison-house” have not yet closed upon them. They, alone among human beings, do not need to do yoga.
As a yoga practitioner, I am a perpetual beginner. I very much doubt that I shall ever reach the heady heights of what is called the Gentle Intermediate class at my local yoga centre. But with yoga this does not seem to matter. Rather in the manner of the London society women cited by Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest “who, by their own free choice, have remained thirty-five for years”, it appears that people can remain almost indefinitely and without shame in a Beginner’s yoga class.
More or less the same goes for meditation. But here I do feel more sense of shame, because having attended various Beginner’s courses I felt I should move on to a more advanced level. But Intermediate Meditation was not for me; the most basic steps of the practice, being able to find what my teacher calls “a quality of stillness,” or just being able to sit quietly for half an hour, scanning my body for tension and unnecessary holding, the unconscious grimace, the lock of the hips, and then mindfulness of breathing, counting breaths up to 10, are still more than enough for me.
But then another voice tells me there is nothing shameful about being a perpetual beginner. Near the heart of both yoga and meditation, and other spiritual and artistic practices, is the rediscovery of the perpetual freshness and newness of each moment.
This is what Zen teachers call shoshin, or beginner’s mind. Shunryn Suzuki began his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind with these words: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” However advanced a yogi or meditator, poet, painter or pianist you may be, each new moment is a beginning and in it, with any luck, you are a beginner again. The most accomplished pianist playing a piece for the umpteenth time is faced with the challenge of making it sound new, and newly encountered.
This is no simple task, though it is about the recovery of simplicity. The fine Scottish poet WS Graham wrote to his friend Robin Skelton, in the depths of the cold winter of 1972: “After one finishes a poem which seems to work one says ... I’ll write another because I know how to do it, but it is not so. There is the silence before one just as difficult to disturb significantly as before.”
Graham’s body of poetic work shows a man with an inordinate respect for silence and beginnings. For him, a poem needed to start in an utterly arresting manner, or it was no poem. Between 1955 and 1970 he published no work; his publishers, Faber, did not realise he was still writing. His fierce self-criticism ultimately led him to effect a holocaust of drafts, rather like Sibelius’ burning of the manuscript of his Eighth Symphony. What it must have felt like to be him, or live with him, is heartbreakingly conveyed, between the lines, in a prefatory note to the posthumous collection “Aimed at Nobody” by his widow Nessie: “At various times it was suggested to Sydney that the poetry was progressing better. But no. He said repeatedly to different people that earlier poems were not necessarily less good than later ones.”
Of course he was right. Graham with his respect for beginnings so intense that he could hardly bring himself to break the silence stands at one extreme. At the other are babies who don’t find it difficult to disturb the silence significantly; they simply bawl their heads off when they need to. Perhaps we can situate ourselves somewhere between the two, and use the year’s quiet, cold, slow start to imitate bulbs and plants, bears and insects, to rest a little, so that we can begin again with renewed vigour.
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
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