The Golden Thread
Poems and Thoughts from the Anxious Poet
The Golden Thread
I first found
the thread when
Santa Claus gave me
Five Go To Smuggler’s Top;
I was six and I haven’t stopped reading since.
This thread of life,
wherever you find it
will inexorably wind itself
around its dark, foreboding twin.
The famous five
met the twins
a dark-haired boy called Sooty
and his sister, Marybelle.
Beauty and
the beast, Sooty said,
in this existence both are your friends.
I have found
in my life’s book each chapter
has puzzling things, strange happenings,
curious discoveries, and a rescuing dog.
The children
had to go through the hill –
not round it or over it, but through it.
The worst we can do is ignore the hill.
When a boy
I entered two worlds:
books and the belly
of a beast named loss;
both gave birth to the adult.
Jesus used
grown-up language
for it: he spoke of the sign:
reluctant Jonah’s great-bellied fish.
Now, I read
books on deserts; one
said bewilderment occasions
a different way of knowing.
My golden thread
is always entwined around
its darker sibling, but my first
book still says things come right at last.
As a small boy one of the great pleasures of my young life was being read to by my mother. She had an earthy north London accent and would put real feeling into her voice. I think it was helped by the fact that she was an avid reader. Both my parents and my grandma were regulars at the local library; I have strong memories of them discussing authors they liked such as Jean Plaidy and Alistair MacLean. They would withdraw seven books every month and that meant my mother was familiar with the rhythms and tones of fictional narrative. This translated to her reading of CS. Lewis’s Narnia stories or Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows. Part of my nighttime routine was nestling into my bed and her perching on the end of it, her voice carrying me to new worlds full of talking animals and adventure.
As the poem above recounts this all began to come to an end when I went to visit Santa Claus in one of our wonderful Sheffield department stores; I was around six years old. Cockaynes was one of many stout retail palaces that were part of the shopping scene in those days. They are, sadly, all gone now - leaving the city all the poorer. The price that city centres have paid for the rise of online retail convenience.
As a little child you were ushered into a makeshift grotto and placed on the knee of the putative Farther Christmas with the requisite red suit and false beard. One knew this was not the pukka Saint Nick but it was all part of the magic, all leading to Christmas Eve and the reindeer pulled real McCoy!
My mum accompanied me as I sat looking into the great sack next to the red clad gift giver. I answered the standard questions about my behaviour that year and hoped I would merit a clean bill of ethical health.
Then after some perfunctory ho-ho-ho-ing he reached into the bag of unwrapped gifts and presented me with a toy of some description. I am not sure what rose up in my unconscious but I looked the merry fellow in the eye and pronounced ‘I don’t want that’. My mother gasped and the man ho-hoed and commented on my clarity of desire and replaced the first toy with another from his cornucopia of presents. ‘I don’t want that either’ I proclaimed. My mother stiffened and caught my eye with a look that said ‘whatever comes out of that sack next you will take it and express extreme gratitude for it .’
Out came Five Go To Smuggler’s Top by Enid Blyton - a book. My heart sank - I definitely did not want a book, why would I, when I had such a great narrater in my mother. However I knew her frown meant there would be severe consequences to any deviation from her unspoken but clear directive.
I took the book and made the required noises of gratitude. On the bus on the way home she informed me that she was not keen on Enid Blyton and that if I wanted to hear the story I would have to read it to myself. I sighed, as that was yet another aspect of this disappointing gift. However, when I went to bed and after she had read a chapter of whatever book we were working through, I asked if I could read my book for a few minutes. There was a devious logic to my request as this would also extend the time before the light was extinguished.
‘One fine day, right at the beginning of the Easter holidays, four children and a dog travelled by train together.’ I read. I was transported into the world of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and most crucially Timmy the dog. I have not stopped reading since that night. As the poem notes this is the world of archetypal movements and characters that populate myths, fairly tales and of course our dreams. When I was writing the poem I went back to my copy of the book and was astonished at just how archetypal the chapter titles were, Enid knew her stuff. No matter how frowned upon by the literati and school teachers she might have been and how dated and somewhat unsavoury some of her themes are now considered, they did instil in me some of the powerful truths of the psyche’s journey.
The dark side of life has to be faced, not ignored, avoided, or circumvented. The tunnels riddling Smuggler’s Top, and the dark forces at work have to be entered and confronted. The last three chapter headings say a lot - Timmy to the Rescue, A Journey Through the Hill, and finally Things come Right at Last. Not long after the events I recounted above, my father had a severe stroke and then died three years later. This was the underworld that the tunnels prefigured. I entered it and it gave birth to the adult I became. The poem invites curiosity about the two threads in every life. The book on Deserts I mention is The Solace of Fierce Landscapes by my good friend Belden C Lane.
He says that the great desert tradition in Christianity recognised the power of starkness and fierceness - the dark thread and that the bewilderment this occasions is in fact a way of knowing. If we are able to sit with our bewilderment at the turns of life then a different reality opens to us. That of the ferocity and powerful generosity of the deep Self in which powers are moving in golden and dark plaiting.
Here is Rainer Maria Rilke:
You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people-
and it is possible a great presence is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
I would add a penultimate thought that was planted in me in those early days - as you can see from the picture I still have faith in Santa as an image from the collective unconscious - that of the great gift giver, the magical spirit of this dark time of the year.
Finally I want to say - I have faith in dogs.
