Were You Lucky Enough to Have Parents Who Read to You?
My parents read to me and to each other, a spectacular gift t
hat rings in me still. It was poetry for the most part — and I loved it so much I never went to bed a night without memorizing a poem, or at least a group of verses. If the poem was lengthy like The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, I’d memorize a stanza a night, my hands-down favorite at age 10, was this:
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: Nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all thy Tears wash out a word of it.”
If that sounds a bit morbid for a 10 year old, just remember what Catholic School was like back in the day and it will all make sense.
There were amazing, grown-uppity woodcuts in the set of books my father had given me for my birthday…the Rubaiyat and the Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman (both these treasures I still own and cherish despite the tatters of time.) But the woman in the woodcut next to this stanza of the Rubaiyat riveted me in a way I can’t describe.
She was draped dispiritedly across the giant Book of Fate, which had been blotted by some inexorable blooper… a sin, perhaps, or a terrible loss. I could taste the desperation in her rag doll body, wildly streaming hair and claw-like fingers clutching at the ruined page that catalogued life’s mysterious vicissitudes.
So this was what your Permanent Record looked like! I surmised. No wonder everybody was so worried about it. (Nuns were particularly vocal when it came to the dangers of inexorable follies.)
The Rubaiyat thrilled me as no other single volume. The words gave life a slightly sinister, tawdry tinge; they implied a vulnerable underbelly I hadn’t suspected. And those pictures! Lusty men with wine flasks fondling women’s breasts. Sickle-scythed Death stalkin
g a carefree young couple as they played together. Gorgeously artful, but heady stuff for a 10 year old artist with a romantic, Cancerian nature, who had fantasies of being a writer… an artwork filled with splendid poetry to stir the soul.
If life could be like this for Irish Catholics as well as Arabs and Victorian poets, there was a lot to look forward to!
I can still recite most of the poetry from memory… strange, the bits and pieces of life that defy time utterly. “No one can ever take from you what you’ve memorized,” my father said, and he was right about that, as about so many other things.
© Cathy Cash Spellman/The Wild Harp & Co. Inc 2010
« What I Think About Life, So Far | A Native American Perspective on the Body of Mother Earth »