The Weight of Autumn

My non-blogging has been haunting me again lately: haunting being appropriate to the season. The original purpose of this blog, to reflect on my reading for research and writing purposes, remains, but the research itself is hampered by other responsibilities. That’s the way it is in this job, always: there is always something more important to do than to care for the important things.

The dreariness of these sentiments has lately been matched by the expected, and late, changing of the season here in the Northeast. Friends in my previous Northeast have told me it is similar, but worse, there: we have rain and more rain, they have snow made leaden by rain.

Thank goodness for the Beeb. This afternoon I got to listen to Radio 4’s “Poetry Please” – if you follow the link, you can listen to the current week’s show on the internet. Two beautifully read poems well-captured my mood today and gave me a severe optimism for the shorter and colder days to come. One was from Emily Bronte:

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night's decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

What I love about this is the way that Bronte does not spend time mourning the passing of the pleasant summer warmth but rather embraces the coming hard cold. I read this and can feel the piercing icy wind and drenched clothes and think that living means to fight to be alive.

The other lovely poem is “The Burning of the Leaves,” by Laurence Binyon. This poem seized me on so many levels: personally (“Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare”), politically and socially (“The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more”), ecologically (“Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours”).

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves,
They go to the fire; the nostrils prick with smoke
Wandering slowly into the weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin, and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.
The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust:
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! the reddest rose is a ghost.
Spark whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.
Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before,
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there:
Let them go to the fire with never a look behind.
That world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.
They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

Binyon’s near contemporary would have been Antonio Gramsci and there is really no particular reason to link them except for Gramsci's famous, if clichéd, maxim: optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect. Binyon lets me grip the pessimism of the season because he reminds me that the wheel keeps turning: “That world that was ours is ours no more./They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise…”

I think these two poems will be echoing in my head at least until the winter solstice here, when the sun sets around 3:30 in the afternoon and the hardest part begins, made easier by noticing that each day we get about 4 more minutes of sunshine than we had the previous day. Then poems more suited to the warming of the spirit should spring up with the sap and snowdrops.

What am I reading?

So far, apparently, not much. At least not much that I have wanted to write about. This will all change soon -- it has to.

Goodbye, August. Here's hoping that September manages to make me begin again.

Work

The idea that ties together several of my current projects is the idea of “work.” If you are not fortunate enough to be able to contemplate life from the peak of a mountain of money, it is likely that work is one of your most important activities. You probably give more time to it than you do just about anything else. If you consider the time you spend looking for work, preparing for work, travelling to and from work, and recovering from work, it would be very plausible to say that work is your core preoccupation. It seems to me that this is the case even for people who derive their satisfactions or build their identities around parts of their lives that seem to them not to be work-related, such as family or sports or politics or hobbies.

The idea that work is so crucial in defining who we are and what kind of life we can live is – bizarrely – controversial. There are all kinds of definitions of contemporary societies that specifically deny the importance of work: a “consumer society,” for instance, is one in which people are supposed to realize themselves and their potential through the free expression of their desires in the marketplace, or an “information society” is one in which communication and information technologies are supposed to reduce the burdens of work. It seems to me that the people who came up with these notions did not have to spend much time working for miserable wages in call-centres. But the element of truth in such descriptions is that if work is the most important part of life in terms of shaping our identities and life-chances, it is also something many working people try very hard not to think about. For most people in the world – including people who don’t have jobs – work is a burden to be dispensed with as briefly as possible in order to get on with living.

One implication of this is that much of the work that people do is not very fulfilling; another is that work is organized socially, and right on up to the global scale, in such a way that it can’t be very fulfilling. I’m interested in thinking about why this might be the case and how these implications are connected to each other, for example, how the experience of work in daily life is connected to the organization of work at the workplace or in a city or through the international division of labour. Right now I am reading Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis, which attempts to address these connections. In a few days, I should be posting a few annotations on his ideas. I have started out here making some extremely general statements about work; I’ll be trying to explore some of these ideas more concretely in order to be more sensitive to how work is different for people in different circumstances, as well as how the experience of work as compelled labour is related to and different from the work we invest into our friends and relationships, into our home environments, into our larger communities and into our personal development.