I remember being a young girl, dreaming of the house that would one day be mine. It was by the sea (of course), was small, white,had a fireplace and outside there were flower laden window boxes, a small garden and in it I was happy.
I started collecting things for that house when I was about seventeen. But the house has not yet materialized and I am far from young. It dawned on me not that long ago that that house was in all likelihood never going to materialize and that I had carted books, trinkets and piles of art made by friends across continents and countries that for decades have been packed tightly in boxes. They would never see the light of day until after my own demise. This realization woke me up.
Over my lifetime I have lived the full gamut. I have slept on African dirt with palm fronds, I have slept in a brothel for want of anywhere else that would take me and my Japanese lover on a 1972 pilgrimage to Charleville in the Ardennes of Belgium, to the birthplace of the poet Arthur Rimbaud; I have slept on train station benches, and under the stars and when I was married I lived in an historic castle in France where quite frankly I was not very happy at all. I need a place to lay my head of course and I would love to live in peace, without worry of such basic matters such as where exactly that head will lie next, the subject being of quite alarming and dubious question. The long and short of it is that I am lucky to have what I have, not in the material sense, but the lack of the need for much of anything at all and the knowledge that things always work out one way or another. Letting go of the need for things to be different was a huge relief.
I have let go of the material world collected for that imaginary little cottage. I realized what I want in my house now is quite different to what I envisioned earlier in my life. The house is me, really being me where ever I am, and what I love having by my side is that which I find in the natural world. What could be more beautiful than this:
A broken winged cicada skeleton
In all the letting go, one might well ask, what do I want to keep or what am I taking with me on this journey? It is so simple. I am first and foremost taking with me an important life lesson that I learned from the English Romantic poet, John Keats.
His life haunts mine. One cannot pick up a handful of his poems and understand who he really was, and without an understanding of Romanticism they will mean little. One has to delve quite deeply to find his real treasure.
No writer has affected me as profoundly as John Keats. He's played a pivotal role in my own letting go, for his letters guided me towards understanding what was really important in life. Aside from living it as acutely and sensitively as possible it was his dying wish that has brought me to my knees.
John Keats died from tuberculosis when he was barely twenty-five years of age. When Keats lay dying in Rome and had really and truly let go himself, in the deepest sense, he asked his friend, Joseph Severn, to have an epitaph written on his tombstone. And it is these last and most beautiful of all his words that both haunts and guides me:
Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ In Water.
Fin
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A sampling of some of the better bibliographical references about John Keats or
the European Romantic Movement pertaining to him that I have read and loved,
Sidney Colvin and Susan Wolfson the best:
Auerbach, Erich. Introduction to Romance Languages and Literature. NYC, 1961
Breckman, Warren. European romanticism, A Brief History with Documents. Boston,
2008
Colvin, Sidney. John Keats, His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics and After-Fame.
1917. http://englishhistory.net/keats/colvinkeats.html. No other information available
Eberle-Sinatra, Michael. Leigh Hunt and The London Literary Scene: A Reception
History of his Major Works, 1805-1828 (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)
Farmer, Alan. Hampstead Heath. Hong Kong, 1984
Hirsch, Edward. Complete Poems and Selected Letters of John Keats, NYC, 2001
Kandl, John. Private Lyrics in the Public Sphere: Leigh Hunt’s “Examiner” and the
Construction of a public “John Keats”, Keats Shelley Journal, Vol. 44, pp. 84-101
(article 18 pages) Keats-Shelley Association of America, Inc. Stable URL:
http;www.jstor.org/stable/30212994, 1995
Keats, John. The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge, MA,
1899. No other information available
Rodriguez, Andres. Book of the Heart, the Poetics, Letters, and Life of John Keats,
Hudson, NY, 1993
Rosetti, William Michael. Life of John Keats. Memphis, 2010
Vaughan, William. Romantic Art, Oxford, 1978
Wolfson, Susan J. The Cambridge Companion to Keats, Cambridge, UK, 2001
The National Gallery. “The Enchanted Castle.”
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/claude-the-enchanted-castle. No date
Cuny College. “John Keats.”
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/keats.html. September 21, 2010
