The University of the Self #59 Part 1

Finding the Way: when words are not enough

Image description: this is a photograph I took in a downstairs room when I visited Dove Cottage, where the Wordsorths lived for a while. At the back. is a huge, plain dark brown wooden hearth with panelling at each side. On the mantlepiece are books, a copper pan and two candles. A fire burns in the small black iron grate and there are two pans and a ktlle in front, all blackened by soot. Ther is a wooden scuttle to the left. In front of the fire are a grey stone slab floor and a rag rug, mainly blue with red ovals on it. To the far left is a brown wooden table with a wicker workbasket and papers on it. There is a wooden chair with a straw seat. To the right is a smaller round, brown wooden occasinal table and a chair, with a beige jacket hanging on its back. In the table are two books, an inkwell and quill, and a candle in a grey metal holder.

Finding the Way: when words are not enough

Note: As I began to write this essay, I quickly realised that it would be of sufficient lenght to require it be offered in two or more parts, as there is a limit on this site for article length.

I have recently finished reading two books about place. Although the books were both about place, they handled the topic so differently. I have learned so much from each of them in many ways, and always, one book has a way of nourishing another. It takes me so long to read books, and I am overjoyed when this cross-pollination of subject matter occurs. In fact, now that I think about it, these threads go back even further to other words, thoughts and ideas. I am tying myself in knots now! Allow me to unravel. Or try to.

A while ago, I read a really interesting book called The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels, by Adam Nicolson (William Collins, 2019) and it really got me thinking, amongst other things, of Sarah Coleridge. I did some more reading, such as this article here, and to cut a long story short, I ended up writing a poem about them, which is shortly to be published in Stand Magazine. I then wrote another poem, imagining Dorothy Wordsworth on a winter’s night walk, and this poem appeared in the Candlestick Press pamphlet, Christmas Walk: Twelve Poems for Rosy Cheeks (2023). After this, I went to Wordsworth Grasmere to teach a writing workshop and give a poetry reading, and the Wordsworths sank a little further underneath my skin. I didn’t mean to become drawn when I did — it just happened, as these things often do. I shan’t say that the Wordsworths have become a scholarly passion, but I am enjoying the times we seem to keep, across the centuries, crossing paths. I think that is a wonderful notion — that we are intersecting with other creatives and pulling new work from these conversations.

I moved onto other books. One of my two most recent place-themed reads was All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworth’s Lake District, a memoir of an important, restorative year, by Esther Rutter (Granta, 2024). I found myself once again connecting to the Wordsworths through a deep and meaningful connection made to them by another writer, and the conversation grew more interesting again. The ripples spread. This book, which focuses on Rutter’s year spent working at Wordsworth Grasmere, and how it helped her recover, is not just about the importance of the Wordsworths, but the importance of place as well. I find it really important to experience place through ‘eyes’ that are not mine — another writer’s understanding of place helps me navigate my own thoughts. Rutter writes of how much we need stories — not just invented stories or other people’s stories (like the ones lived by the Wordsworths), but a story of our own: a “kernel around which we build our lives.” (Rutter, 2024, p. 136)

“…the story of each of us is the driving force that can turn fortune to disaster, or tragedy into triumph…If our story doesn’t quite make sense to ourselves, we can lose our sense of who we are. Without that narrative thread, our experiences can seem random, unenriching, even frightening in their unpredictability. We risk feeling reduced to someone things happen to, rather than one who makes them happen.” (Rutter, 2024, p.p. 136-137)

Perhaps I have metaphorically been stretching my skin over the ghosts of Sarah Coleridge and Dorothy Wordsworth to see if I could make it fit – of course it did not – the shape of our stories will never be the perfect size when tried on someone else’s life. There will be the odd area, here and there, which seems to settle into a pre-worn groove or a comfortable crease– after all, we are all women who have a desire for words, for nature. We have hearts that have loved and lost, we have all experienced trauma, the patriarchy, hardship, disappointment, joy. We have dug our hands into muck, bread and soil. But I am not them, and they are not me.

I am thinking of stories, which has sent me to my shelves to seek another book – one of my treasured ones – Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Carolyn Forché and Phillip Gerard (Story Press, 2001). I could basically quote every single line from this book, it is so incredible, but I can’t – copyright, space and all that. But there are some fabulous insights into what stories are and how they might be written. I thought this quote about pulling together connections was particularly apt:

“The world is chaotic, certainly, and always clichéd. Face it: our lives are full of stories already told…what is new is not what we tell, but how we tell it…we stay awake to the chance associations and intuitive connections that make life bearable…create those very connections through the act of writing, to follow a chain of those connections as far as they will go and pinch them together at the end.” (Brenda Miller, A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay, from Writing Creative Nonfiction, 2001, p.21)

I do not know what my story is, nor how to read it sensibly, or write it down legibly. I feel as if my life is a manuscript someone dropped by accident – the pages scattered to the winds, were hastily gathered up in a panic. They are completely out of order. Some of the pages landed in puddles and the ink has blurred. Some of the pages are lost, and I cannot recall what was written there. Perhaps I will never make perfect sense out of them. Memory is an unreliable creature anyway – I often wish I had made a real effort to diary every day. At least then I would have an accurate timeline to pin my memories upon, and maybe a fact barometer too, to verify each memory’s content, as memory can be a mutable creature. There’s no denying the importance of our pasts:

“…danger lurked in the past, so we got on with life in the present, hoping that what had happened would remain behind us. What none of us realised was that the past is the only territory we know. Laid out before us like a map, it is a landscape we revisit throughout our lives to navigate our way through the unseen future. The past might be another country, but it is the only land we feel we possess…the closest thing we have to knowing where we belong – and where we want to go.” (Rutter, 2024, p.143)

After I had finished reading Rutter’s book, I completed another poem about Dorothy Wordworth, in which I had buried something of myself. Through the words I write, I learn a little more to belong to the world. I wholeheartedly agree with Rutter’s quote, “…poetry showed me the world, and promised me a place in it.” (Rutter, 2024, p.108)

I love the way this book draws to a close – in spending the year with the history of the Wordsworths, other writers and the stunning scenery of the Lake District around them, Rutter rediscovered joy.

“The joy of living has been returned to me during this year. I feel at home again: not just in Grasmere, but in myself. I am anchored to life once more…in Grasmere the elements of life that I hold dear – love, language, landscape, stories, people and purpose – have cohered.” (Rutter, 2024, p.309)

When I spent my brief weekend in Grasmere, as I mentioned earlier, I had felt something of this. Of course, my time in its paradise was just a short dose, but I haven’t forgotten how it felt to be there. How I felt different – me, but another version of me. This hint of potential I sensed in my bones, what I might be capable of, of the pieces I might think, write and paint. One the one hand, it made me feel sad – I felt as if I must grieve for this other me, though she had only existed in a flash. On the other hand, at least I know that there is something more inside me, that may, one day, if I find myself in the right place, for the right length of time, be given a chance to thrive. Perhaps the lesson for me here is to keep a hold of her, nurture her and rediscover her, no matter which place I am in.

I’ll take a break from this essay now, and will continue my thoughts when I have taken a little time out.

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