Darkling Mornings

 

We enter the time of year when the mornings are slow to rise. We wake when it's completely dark. The seasonal shift is starting. It may not feeling like it outside yet - wait, was that a drop of 3 degrees overnight? A little happy dance proceeds in my head. Still, it comes slowly. Subtlety. Do we notice? I try to shake the vibes of summer off with some autumnal decor inside my home, but it only goes so far. It fools me inside, but stepping out I am jolted back to reality.

Atmosphere. That's one of my favourite things about Autumn. We are moved into the atmosphere of warmth and spices, sweaters and academic beginnings. I always loved the start of a new academic year with new pens, notebooks, and fresh classes. Do you ever miss anything about a new school year or are you glad those days are well behind you?

Isn't there something mysterious and inviting about a beginning? Even if it's not a beginning for us, we are well out of school perhaps, and yet, a seasonal shift can remind us of new beginnings. We can make a new beginning anytime, mark the calendar. No need for a new year, simply call it a new day. The Autumn season of fruitfulness and harvest reminds me that it's something new (the paradox of being annually new to us, the revolving cycle we seem to need reminders of) and something mysterious in that aspect of life. As T.S. Eliot wrote - But our beginnings never know our ends!

Yet each start to a season gently reminds us that a beginning is hopeful. A darkling morning is shrouded in darkness. It may seem like the darkness goes on and on, but it doesn't. Just below the horizon is a star that will rise as a gift of a new day. And every day is a new beginning. We start everyday not knowing how that day will end. Sure, we have our calendar and schedules set. We plan it out. Yet there may be a good or perhaps an unwelcomed interruption that takes us off to an alternative.  

Welcome Autumn. Welcome darkling mornings. I reach for my thick black notebook and deep navy pen to sketch out the jots of my mind. Balancing sips of coffee and ink marks on the pages, I hold dear these quiet spaces that the start of a day can give me. Meditative, thoughtful, mind awakened. Reflections on the past and present - they collide on the page sometimes in an ink explosion fueled by the mind at work. It's here in the darkling space that I prepare most diligently for the light and duty of a new day. 

Emily Brontë - Notebook of Poems

 

I have fallen into the world of amazing manuscripts. These are images of the original manuscript (notebook of poems) of Emily Brontë. The British Library has these kinds of images of priceless manuscripts online, and this was the first one I clicked on to view. These were the first set of random pages I turned to, and as I took a moment to look closely, I felt  like I had just stepped into the reading room at the British Library in London. I am here to do research for the book I am writing, which of course required me to view the original notebook of Emily Brontë's poems. How amazing that more an 180 years later, I can view this handwritten notebook from a secluded poet who lived in Yorkshire England?

The manuscript is in her handwriting of course, and it is a bit difficult to read some words, same with all my notebooks. So I am practicing my transcription skills for my future self to visit The British Library or Bodleian Library, you know, for when I am writing a book and need to do research by viewing several original manuscripts or rare copies of books. Here is a little bit of one of the poems above, which I had never read before, and couldn't find in my Emily Brontë collection of poems.

October 29, 1839

The wind I hear it sighing
With Autumn's saddest sound
Withered leaves as thick are lying
As Spring-flowers on the ground.

This dark night has won me
To wander far away.
Old feelings gather fast upon me
Like vulture round their prey.

Emily invokes all those Autumnal feelings of melancholy and nostalgia for something dear that has been lost. The wind and withered leaves sweep around her like memories which remind her of such a loss. Perhaps her walk on the windswept moors that early evening brought these words into her head swirling with the leaves on the ground. She hears the sighing wind, the sad sounds. She associates the withered leaves to a time of Spring time blooms which hold an abundance of promise, whereas Autumn takes the bloom away. It's a darkening night and she is caught into a time of melancholy. Wrapped in a shawl perhaps, sitting over a slowly diminishing candlestick, she scribbles these words in her notebook. Sitting near a window she hears and sees the Autumnal night grow deeper and more raw.

She climbs into her comfort - her words - flowing out of her pen with ease. It's her source of getting feelings out. Onto the page and out of her cluttered mind. She still has chores to do, but the poem only takes the time of drinking a cup of tea to write. She empties her cup and closes her notebook, sliding it into a small alcove of the bookshelf. Then, rises with a stretch, takes her tea cup to wash up, and works on making bread for the next day, with these words still rummaging around in her mind. 

Tea Break Daydream (Oxford)

 

Pausing for a happy tea break daydream moment. Oxford style.

When life brings along a cold/sinus situation and you feel somewhat disheartened because you just don't feel your best and as a result carry that pretty worthless vibe, you might start to daydream about a time and place where you are simply filled with joy and in the happy-mode. 

Pardon my daydreaming - these were all photos from this last visit in March 2023, but I hadn't shared yet. I take a lot of photos, you know, every few steps offers another stunning view, building, or quintessential scene of Oxford that fills me with joy. Even if I have seen that view 1,000 times before, the light is different that day, the mood of the sky changes, the people passing differs. It makes for the best kind of photography - always something interesting to observe. I love watching academic scenes in an ancient city. It's just marvelous. Bikes clacking by (I still don't know how they bike along High Street in all the hectic bike/bus chaos - I watch in amazement), students with books filling their satchels/backpacks, raincoats and trenches adorn everyone if there's a cloud in the sky, but when it's bright out, everyone's outside clinging to the sunshine. The flowers burst a bit more openly when the sun comes out. Yet even in a shadier spot at the base of an old tree, the Hellebores look quite lovely and content.

I love the way the light slants into big windows at Christ Church and along the narrow roads and how the light shifts through the day. I love how some of the best people and city watching spots are at Waterstone's bookstore and Black Sheep Coffee on two of the very busy corners in the centre of the city. They are essential places to spend some time. I love moody and picture perfect Turl Street, my favourite street in the city. It gets filled quickly each day with delivery trucks but if you can catch it without any cars looking down toward the grand Lincoln College Library spire (used to be a church) with the craggy branches of the huge horse chestnut tree peaking into the periphery you just can't help but smile at how beautiful it all is.

I wish we paused more. In England it is a culturally normal thing to take a tea break - I'm talking a fresh brewed pot of tea and maybe a treat to go with it, multiple times a day. Maybe not everyone does that, I am totally romanizing my experiences, but there's a reason why there are countless cafes - because people go there all hours of the day, for a tea/coffee break. I love it so much. I'm going to go make a small pot of Earl Grey in honour of this paragraph. 

Oxford has secrets - doors and passages that are ornate and inviting but you may not know what lies beyond. Sure, the street view is a stunner, but the colleges themselves are within walls as you walk by on the streets. Pass through the doorway and you enter another world. It might be a garden so quiet and peaceful. It might be a chapel, ancient and beautiful. It might be a dining hall buzzing with students and clanging tea cups and saucers filled with tea. 

I could carry on with this tea break daydream for awhile. but eventually one runs out of tea in the pot. Until the next tea break... 

Freshly Brewed Reads

 

Philosophers say that nothing is visible that is not endowed with light and colour. 

- Leon Battista Alberti

The coffee is freshly brewed (working on my barista skills over here), but the books are quite old. Older than this country. But I love when old books lean into this modern age speaking to the reader from the past in ways we don't pay attention to these days. Funnily, I have read these two books right alongside each other, and they are roughly written from the same time period, around 1400-1435.

I have been aching to go to one of the amazing art museums I have been to in England. My favourites being The Ashmolean in Oxford, the V&A in London, and the National Gallery in London. Note, I am not including the libraries in this listing - I am thinking of art and artifacts. Books and libraries are their own category which I need not even say how I yearn for places like The Bodleian in Oxford and the British Library in London all the time. I need to go back to The British Museum as I only saw some of the ground floor on my one visit there. 

Painting was honoured by our ancestors with this special distinction that, whereas all other artists were called craftsman, the painter alone was not counted among their number.

When I stumbled on this slim volume On Painting by Leon Battista Alberti, it felt providential to meet with a master of the art of painting, to give me just a glimpse of that world I am seeking to enjoy more of. The cover painting, by the way is "The Hunt in the Forest" by Paolo Uccello, which is in The Ashmolean, so I have seen on several occasions in person. From 1435, Alberti sets out his theories of dimension and perspective on painting. It is written for the painter, and was hugely influential to the Italian Renaissance artists and Leonardo da Vinci later on. It brought me back to geometry class in high school, which I enjoyed, and he notes that you cannot be a painter without having skills and knowledge of geometry. After a geometry lesson, he details some of his thoughts on the conviction that it's our human duty to make praiseworthy and beautiful things. These creations arise mathematically, yet are rooted in nature. 

Alberti adopted what may be broadly described as a Christianized Stoic viewpoint in his advocacy of the inherent and divinely ordained rationale within nature as the ultimate source for our standards in art as in life.

Delightfully revisiting Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in a translation I haven't read in recent years, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The version I have read more recently a few times is Simon Armitage's translation, which he signed for me when I met him at his talk in Oxford years ago. I loved Simon's style of his translation, which focused more on the alliterative qualities of this anonymous ancient poem dated around 1400. Tolkien's translation still embraces the alliterative qualities and yet in true Tolkien style there is a beauty and flow to the language, so it feels very different. 

Then they looked for a long while, on that lord gazing;
for every man marvelled what it could mean indeed
that horseman and horse such a hue should come by
as to grow green as the grass, and greener it seemed,
than green enamel on gold glowing far brighter.
All stared that stood there and stole up nearer,
watching him and wondering what in the world he would do.

It is so interesting to read the same poem by different translators. Each version invokes a different feeling of the poem, language, story, and emotion. Sir Gawain is a great example of that. His journey is emotional, as he travels into the unknown he has to face his fears, overcome temptation, and face the huge green knight in the end carrying a guilt with him. At the centre is this medieval idea of morals and chivalry with a Christian perspective, in contrast to the world and its morals. Gawain had to fight that as he was pushed into situations that challenged him. He stayed honourable and true, going against the grain and ultimately that is what saves his life.