The Roots That Clutch

 

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,/ You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/A heap of broken images…” 

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922.

The last days of summer are the loveliest in this fishing village along the east coast of Scotland. The warm wind blows in the right direction, the invisible larks are twittering, the sea is calm and the rocks and cliffs are washed by the gentle tides and dried afterwards in genial sunshine. 

We are blessed with daily blossoming flowers and ripening fruits in the garden. A kind fisherman brings the gifts from the sea and leaves them in the doorstep at a solitary hour of the morning.  

There is also a sense of deeper appreciation for things in nature that are slowly vanishing as the season of autumn is in fact already fairly advanced. I shall miss the wildflowers in the meadows, the sunflowers, the primroses that grow on the rugged rocks and the beautiful fragrance of the wild roses that comes with the lovely blue salty sea air. 

When I pick the last roses of the summer in the garden, I often tell them that I shall miss seeing them until the next summer. 

Porcelain and petals

Linguine with lobster

Teatime treat - Coffee and orange poke cake (Nadiya Hussain's recipe) with tea in the garden

The calls for midday meals in the garden are now slowly replaced by the triumphant call of the migrating birds, the harbinger of storms and rain, before they return to the wider world. 

But there is still a great crowd of visitors in the village making the most of the last days of the summer. The children with their buckets, spades and nets are having their adventures among the rocks. They remind me of my own childhood adventure of the family seaside holidays and the books I read while I stayed at my grandparents’ seaside home.

There are often things in our lives which are not at once clear to us at first encounter. We only come to realisation its beautiful mystery after we live with them for awhile and establish our roots and acquire an outlook that is more in tune and intertwined with a sense of place.

I have always wondered about the question that T. S. Eliot asked in his poem, "The Waste Land": What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish? As a young man, I left my parents’ home at the age of seventeen. I have never lived in one place for more than five years until, at the age of thirty-two. So, an opportunity for the natural grounding was not available to me. I never really understood people’s feelings or attachment to a geographic place until I listened to the stories about people in this village.

T. S. Eliot asked in his poem, The Waste Land: What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish?

They told me the stories about how a man met his future wife at the village dance, the neighbour of so-and-so was the bridesmaid, the groom’s right-hand man, who also lives in the village, built their first house as a wedding gift, and they expect one day their pallbearers will also be their close friends from the same community. 

These stories are not sentimental tales in this age of rapid technological change and social media which becomes a divisive force in our society.   

They feel strongly about these authentic connections and ties to neighbourhood and the communal bond. 

They probably know the stories of their forebears, how they coped with their trials and tribulations and how they rose back up together in the end. They are the stories that bind us according to the psychologist, Dr. Marshall Duke from Emory University. 

Dr. Duke called these stories “the oscillating family narrative” that can provide a stabling sense of belonging and these narratives help build a shared capacity for resilience. His research study in the mid-1990s found that the single most important thing you can do for your family is to develop a strong family narrative. 

The children who grow up with the oscillating family narrative, "the most healthful narrative" showed more resilience, confidence and “higher levels of emotional well-being, and also higher levels of identity achievement”. They have what he called a strong “intergenerational self” and “they know they belong to something bigger than themselves.”

The sense of time in the country is agrarian rather than mechanical. We learn to tell the time not by looking at the clock but by the natural appearances of the season; ploughing, sowing, harvesting, the arrival or departure of birds or sprays of flowers. 

I keep Miss Read's Country Bunch, a book of anthology about country living on my bedside table so that it can be taken in homeopathic doses each night before retiring.

I suppose that my home in this fishing village is the only source of any rooted feeling I have ever had. As I grow older, I do not find any inclination or temptation in geographical mobility, moving from place to place. I can cope without the excitements and enterprises of the city which always seem to me mechanical and impersonal. 

The sense of time in the country is agrarian rather than mechanical. We learn to tell the time not by looking at the clock but by the natural appearances of the season; ploughing, sowing, harvesting, the arrival or departure of birds or sprays of flowers. And so, I will settle for things that are reassuringly fixed in the old homestead, in a little world to itself.

A ready supply of seasoned logs for the cold winter months to come...

The harvest of early season apples from the garden

I have everything that I need and I can live happily without needing to go to the shops or the supermarkets. The village shop has all the essentials that I need for my daily existence. 

The poet, Alexander Pope wrote in Ode on Solitude: “Happy the man, whose wish and care/a few paternal acres bound,/Content to breathe his native air,/In his own ground.” When I first read this poem as a child, it did not have any impact or revelation to me. I thought that it was charming but quaintly dated. 

After many years later, I explored this poem appreciatively and critically with my mind’s eye. I realised that Pope could be referring to the intergenerational self (“a self that is defined as much by one’s place in a familial history as a personal past”) when he invoked the idea that happy is the man who finds a sense of continuity, of enduring relationships and values in a place he lives. 

I have also learned the wisdom of these following words in the poem: “Blest, who can unconcernedly find/Hours, days, and years slide soft away,/In health of body, peace of minds…” 

A similar idea can be found in another of Pope’s poem, Eloisa to Abelard: “The world forgetting, by the world forgot./Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!” 

The first line speaks to me as it reflects a facet of my introvert personality. Perhaps, there is no harm in learning to forget the worldly matters once in a while so that we can rediscover “eternal sunshine” and ultimately the angelic mind.

"Dream of no heaven but that which lies about you." ~ Henry Thoreau ~

The eternal sunshine can also be a metaphor for ordinary happiness that resides in the commonplaces of life. 

I shall find these moments of ordinary happiness; cherish and clutch every moment of it while it lasts, in a timeless walk under the summer skies and in the flying clouds, the silent grandeur of the sunrise, the blue sea, the red sunset and the green hills. 

So, you may ask Eliot's question of “the roots that clutch” that has echoed down the years for me. I can tell you in one sentence...I am happy to be here. 

As seen by angels, the tree's crowns perhaps
Are roots, drinking the sky;
And in the earth, the deep roots of a beech
seem silent summits.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~ 
Orchards (XXXVIII)