Sinister: Not all those who wander are lost.

[Ruvi Simmons]

I feel I really ought to clarify my apparently inflammatory remarks about
pretty girls and their capacity to be intellectuals. I doubt it need even be
said, but I made a broad generalisation which, of course, is not universally
applicable. No generalisations are. However, I offered a possible reason as
to why girls more fortunately endowed with physical attributes than others
are less likely to feel the need to develop their mental skills. It is
certainly not a situation I accept with pleasure, and nor is it one that is
confined to women. I will leave the castigation of men for another day,
though. As for "pigeon-holing" or stigmatising, that only applies to those
who already derive a certain identity with broad social groups. To those who
don't, such general, and obviously no infallible, observations wash away
like water off duck in a wet suit's back. Since I am sure that what I wrote
was not interesting or worthy enough to warrant being paraphrased, I will
leave it at that.

Besides which, such intellectual semantics are entirely too unromantic and
tedious to bother with, although many do (many of them women, I might add).
So I shall, if I may, offer a slightly more beautiful anecdote up for
whosoever may be interested. On Thursday I visited a friend at King's
College in Cambridge and just as I was leaving a fog descended on the
quadrangle. It was so thick that the buildings seemed to become less
tangible and take on an ethereal mantle. Around the square open ground lay
lamps, and they shone through the mist like little moons trapped on earth.
Such a scene was enough to make me feel a rising joy, as if I was witnessing
a truly precious moment of beauty passing over the earth. But then, to make
matters even better (you see, I am not always so negative; things do get
better), the organ in King's Chapel began to flood the quadrangle with
sonorous sound, like a hypnotic voice beyond speech. I felt, as I stood
rooted there, that there are special times, and they occur all over the
world and probably have done since the earth itself was a young thing, when
events coallesce to form a natural poetry, as if the world itself were
conjuring its own verse.

And the point of all that? Oh yes, there was a point, it was not just
self-indulgence. The point is, I think, to seek those moments out. They can
find you, as this one did me, but sometimes they are elusive. They may be
elusive, but they are always worth finding. Trawl the world, rove the sky,
climb hills, move your body until you find yourself in the centre of natural
poetry in action, when the earth recites its own lines of verse. That, I
think, was what Walter Pater meant when he said "to burn always with this
hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life". Seek
and ye shall find, if I may be so Biblical.

Finally, I thought I'd mention one more thing about my dearly departed
darling Sylvia Plath. The aforementioned friend once attended a tea party
she held when she was studying in Cambridge, and he described her as a
self-centred, arrogant litte prig. He was probably right, but that didn't
prevent her from being one of the most brilliant, sincere and lyrical poets
of the 20th century. I suppose there is another lesson: not all poets are
capable of holding congenial tea parties. A lesson worth learning.

Ruvi.



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