I was a very sickly child. Lots of days spent wearing a red felt vest with prest studs to ward off the spectre of possible TB. It wasn't TB but I remember the daily exercises I was given to do in order to drain my lungs and in the midst of the school days missed there was a magical friend whose genius seemed to reshape every daily detail into something special and fated. I felt I had  a secret correspondence with Treasure Island's creator and Robert Louis Stevenson with his bursting creativity and weak chest! He  stood side by side me during my childhood and then went away until seven years ago he came back and named my tuition site Tusitala- 'teller of tales' in Samoan!

So this morning I started to reread Kidnapped once again and found the resourcefulness and drive for adventure infectious and compelling. And how magically David Balfour gives shape to his experience early in the novel when he reflects:

''As if was, I could find no words, neither black nor white, but handed him the letter...''

Reading is an adventure. Writing can halt us in our tracks and throw us out of tired complacency into the new; just as Keats so memorably said in his Ode on a Grecian Urn, we can be 'teas'd out of thought'. Here I was struck by the admision that 'I could find no words, neither black nor white' and this resonated so vividly! How falsely we sabotage the possibilities of possibility through binary oppositions which masquerade as choice. We see nothing other than this or that, hemming ourselves into cul-de-sacs of disappointment  when actually there are far far more shades than just the choice between 'black' or 'white'.

The adventure from Tusitala aka Robert Louis Stevenson is that words can captivate and liberate. ..'From time to time his eyes came coasting round to me...'Here is cunning, here is transgression and perhaps criminality and yet here perhaps is the rugged, evasive geography too of an individual whose response to his time is his won.

Kidnapped indeed!

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 

Sometimes only rage will do.

My father was Welsh and his favourite listening was Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood on an LP that has long been lost. My father was a wanderer in so many ways and on Sunday I found a letter I had written to him nearly 28 years ago when he was again living somewhere else, trying to build once again another new life, having no knowledge whatsoever, that within two years he would be dead. Reading the poem this morning to my son as he ate his cereal for school, I was suddenly aware of my father and  aware of his own profound sorrow about his tragically early death; his wrongful attachments to careless people whose sincerity proved unenduring and illusory and whom he loved because he didn't dare to love himself at all.

In the poem the sense of visceral despair at the father's impending mortality is spat out in this villanelle, where the poet tries to order his father's life force to resist his illness and fight back for life.How ironic the 'good night' might be when what it represents is desertion, the abject loneliness of being the one left behind. The final stanza declares the desolate desperation of the poet for any communication from his father, be it savage or sane enough to save him from the dying light. 

Dylan Thomas was a poet who got so many things wrong in his life and perhaps even in his Art. Yet here he is absolutely right.

Sometimes only rage will do.

1801. - I have just returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist's heaven: and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name. 'Mr. Heathcliff?' I said.

A nod was the answer.

Lockwood's language here at the opening of his narrative reveals his complacent lack of rapport with the world he is visiting, a 'tourist' to both the emotions and geography of this misanthropic, uncivilised world and its violently passionate words.  His attempts to mirror and match Heathcliff's lonely temperament are palpably hollow as he litters his narrative with exclamatory remarks and a register which may 'name' certain behaviours but cannot 'know' them in any imaginative way. Heathcliff's autonomy and self-preservation is both concealment and  barely latent threat, yet Lockwood's artificial exhilaration treats Heathcliff as a challenge and almost a 'tease' . He even aligns them as a pair, bringing the essence of Heathcliff to himself as sameness when it is intensely not the case at all.

So this is a masquerade of rapport,  a tourist's excursion to another world's otherness, where civilities have no value. The  narrator, Lockwoood mistakenly belives that Heathcliff's character is a mirror of his own and 'sees' Heathcliff as some rustic, awkward individual who he will align himself with and charm on this temporary visit.

Union is thus mistaken, rapport is absent, though one individual believes it approximate and nearly present. Bronte reveals her distaste for the superficial mores of a world beyond her imagination, whose words appear glancing and insubstantial.

That said, who could establish rapport with Heathcliff and what would such a rapport consist of? The physical separateness of Heathcliff and his desire for  autonomy must always despise a figure like Lockwood  for there  is no recognition of difference here and Lockwood has no respect for the singularity of another human being, an irony which Bronte explores and exploits in the rest of the narrative.