It is funny (in the sense of peculiar rather than jocular) what things you remember from your youth. There are many things that can suddenly pop back into your minds eye decades after they first were laid in the cellar of memory to mature like dry port or the most gum shrinking tannin laden red wine in the hope it will develop some finesse.
Memories of first things for example. Like a first kiss. Or that teacher you first loved in a boyish or girly crush. The first bike. The first communion or the drone of the Catechism as you first learnt it by rote. Your first school. The first book?
Of course as you grow up you have more first's like the first car, first house, first job. First pay packet. First realisation that money was taken from you in your first taxes!
I cannot remember the first book I read independently. I do however remember quite distinctly reading voraciously at age of 11 the fiction of Jules Verne; Around the World in Eighty Days; Journey to the centre of the Earth; 20,000 Leagues under the sea that I thought was a brilliant story at the time. I was enthralled by Jules Verne when 11/12 years old.
Of course I cannot omit the bible: both the Old Testament and New Testament, that I also read consistently throughout the teen years and beyond. Their stories an important tapestry panel in my life gifting much cross cultural and religious foundations that are accessible, comprehended throughout the world. Perhaps now increasingly dismissed in the Western countries like my own as irrelevant or worse, bigoted.
The fruits of secularisation: seeing anything but its own view as bigoted or fascist or nazi without irony. So aptly demonstrated last week by an ex football player turned pundit on national television in Britain.
In school I found the formal teaching, in regards to reading, to be itself at best mundane. I remember being fed “Kes” which seemed to me to have been a fixation in schools in late 70s going into early 80s. I found it depressing. “Joby” I found boring. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ was better and interesting I recall. All in all not exactly a shining memory of school reading.
I do not recall, however, poets and poetry in school? There simply must have been poems! I must have read poetry and poets in class surely? Perhaps my school friend Phillip can jog my memory in that regard. Yet I have as of the moment no memory of them!
Yet they swept me up once I had left school and sought out materials for myself. Enter into my life post school, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and works of Andrew Marvell, Geoffrey Chaucer, George Herbert, Ted Hughes, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and Ezra Pound, Wendell Berry, and Robert Graves amongst the many other clusters of star systems in my poetic mind and experience.
History books of course I have read and continue to do so. It is a subject of more than passing interest so I suppose I read more, and continue to read more of it as a consequence. Thus when I was in my early twenties I voraciously read as many of the Penguin Editions in paperback that I could get hold of (Luckily Hastings in those days had a plethora of second hand bookshops) regarding the Graeco Romano classics. Euripides and Apuleius, Aeschylus and Aristophanes, Plato and Plutarch. Thucydides and even Herodotus. Plato introducing me with his vivid descriptions to the irascible Socrates and therefore to this subject called philosophy.
Once again Robert Graves came into my consciousness. I never watched the serialisation made by the BBC I think, of I Claudius. I remember seeing in passing the actor Derek Jacobi in the lead role in the 1980s. It was not that work by Robert Graves that impacted my consciousness.
It was his works called the ‘Greek Myths’ that captured my imagination and I consumed the volumes with alacrity. It is on my bookshelf still. A delight to dip into when I cant recall Thetis’ sisters or how many Muses there are exactly or something similar!
Why am I recalling all this seemingly fustian stuff now? I have just bought a new book (nowadays that is mainly in an electronic format). It is a book I have been aware of for years by Robert Graves but have never felt I wanted to read and study. Yet last week I thought I was ready. I have already waded my through the thorough introduction and am about ready to begin Robert Graves work ‘The White Goddess’ for the first time.
The book is his examination of poetic myths centred on the Celtic traditions but linked to so many more! I am expecting him to take me on a journey similar to what I enjoyed in the ‘Greek Myths’ and in his poetry. Yet after reading the introduction, I am not quite so sure!
The White Goddess is on my kobo at page 1. Only one way to understand a work…. Start!
By the way…. I still have not watched Gotterdammerung yet! Keep you posted as to when I get over this mental tick!
Blessings,
Syre Byrd