Words for the journey

Philip Gross looks at travelling and the arrival home

On the face of it, if you want a verse for a corporate Christmas card, I’d be the last person to ask. The phrase ‘greetings card verse’ could sum up most things a serious working poet would want not to be.

More than that, I’m a Quaker, and one of our historical particularities is that Quakers don’t set special store by Christmas –­ not more special, that is, than every other day of the year. I am more than averagely sceptical about 25 December. I am happy to share a sense of deep winter, of the solstice, when the sun begins its journey back, with many faiths and stories – the Norse Yule, Hindu Diwali, Roman Saturnalia to name a few. But Jesus’s birthday? Unlikely, most Biblical scholars would agree… and that’s without the awkward inconsistencies between the New Testament narratives, the ones, that is, that mention it at all. Meanwhile, the massive commercial blackmail modern Christmas exerts on families… Do I need to go on?

And yet… this doesn’t speak much to the young-child part of me that soaked up this most pervasive of seasonal stories and inhabited it in a way that felt true to me. Adults can underestimate the extent to which a child co-creates their world. When something chimes with our true experience and feelings, we make it our own.

Close my eyes, and I’m six or seven. What’s the image of Christmas-past that clings? Not Santa. Not presents. Not choirs of angels, either, but a small stark image of the least of families – mother, father, child-to-be. They are on a journey. They are far from home.

I know that shape of family. I was an only child. My father was a refugee. He had already lost his home and family in the tides of occupations – Russian, German and Russian again – that swept across the Baltic states. In modern parlance, call him an asylum seeker. Like other displaced persons he had been dispersed, in his case to a camp outside a small north Cornish village… where he met my mother. By the time of my earliest memories, they had moved again, looking for a place to settle in the nearest city, Plymouth. There was never anything obvious for us about the word ‘home.’

Not that he talked about the often terrifying journeys that had brought him there. The fact that he didn’t worked on me more tellingly than words.

Winter stars, uncertain journey – strangers,
anywhere… 
          The miracle of home.

Last month my university approached me with a near-impossibility: could I find a short verse that could speak to anybody in our multi-faith and -age and -class community, lines that were neither culturally exclusive nor bland? My mind went blank. On my way home that evening (yes, a journey) these words came in out of the blankness. They sounded like a fragment, but that was right. People coming as strangers, among strangers, to a new place feel like a fragment of an unknown story. The words have silence round the edges, a silence in which many kinds of journey might be guessed. The idea of the journey by night has resonance anywhere, not least in Islam.

People in flight, people crossing deserts, might well move by night. The image is deep inside us; we arrive at it in many ways.

If the centre of that Bible story is a baby, for me that means any baby, without human language, without nationality: the basic unit of new life and human need.

Start from the humblest true thing that you can
imagine. 
Think: the whole world’s good might hang on this.

By the end of my short journey home, this second fragment arrived. In the nature of fragments, this is not a statement; it’s a question. Almost a riddle, in fact. When a third arrived, it brought a title: Three Riddles for Peace.

As a Quaker, I don’t see peace as mere absence of war. By preference I would make it not a noun, not an abstraction, but a verb, a thing we do or it’s not there at all.

On the other hand, that doing might be just in the astonishment at, and sharing of,  something that won’t fit in words. The third piece is visibly a fragment, with ragged dots to start and end it.

    … as we might turn to each other,  
    friend or stranger, in the moment 
    after the great music. 
                            Or in the moment before…

Those silences aren’t absence; they are full of possibility. I hope they are for everyone – travellers and homeless people anywhere, the many asylum seekers Cardiff has received, the foreign students welcome at Glamorgan University, anybody starting on a new direction. They are a greeting on the journey, in any language: Salaam, shalom, peace…

Three riddles for peace

1

Start from the humblest true thing that you can imagine. 
Think: the whole world’s good might hang on this.

2

Winter stars, uncertain journey – strangers,
anywhere… 
              The miracle of home.

3

        …as we might turn to each other,  
    friend or stranger, in the moment 
after the great music. 
                            Or in the moment before…

Philip’s book Deep Field is published by Bloodaxe Books. ISBN: 9781852249199. £8.95.

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Comments

Magical. Words like this can really make a difference to my experience of life. It has stopped me in my tracks - first day back at work - and given me a deep and wonderful meanings moment. What a true gift at Christmas. Clare

By Clare Wigzell on 30th December 2011 - 14:16

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