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My father was a 'Renaissance' man, Headteacher, lay-preacher, Anglican, Darwinian, Gouldian, Bot/Zoo degree, perceptive, deep and kind, impish too, who could speak to a cathedral of primary children in his symbolist prophetic style, no dogmas beyond the moral message, Huddlestone fan, David Jenkins too - that bishop who didn't believe a word of it - that was my dad's party, lefty, enlightened.
He could build and roof, paint and draw, write and teach poetry, botany... anything, just about, technologist, made me a sten which rattled with tin flanges, taka-taka when you turned a wheel.
When he broke, some, and retired to poetry, music, dog-walking, gardening, his library still grew, as did his wood-store, and his woodwork kitted books out well with custom shelving floor to ceiling of this retirement bungalow's 'front room'.
The bottoms, hatch-lidded magnetically, stacked periodicals I was told: never really looked till today.
The spaces were packed so tightly, a mouse couldn't wriggle a nest in, apart from one section where some stuff of mine had been stored, a looser space left for personal matters, that someone might actually get at, one thinks.
He was happier with these vaults, we know, for his many years of quality periodicals, than tea-chests in the attic, heretofore; but he never had anything valued, nor left instructions for the disposal of his library.
Well... thinned out the big shed soon after his death, chucked out the wood choking it to the rafters, made room for mum to get to pots and what-not, and tools for me to cut the hedge annually, but it's only now the library's been addressed.
Wonder if the books have been talking to themselves, these two decades, tongued with fire beyond our living language, or just keeping mum, quiet company, potentials I unlocked declaiming pages like reading spells on Egyptian tomb-walls.
Think of these stacks of periodicals as mud-bricks or base blocks of some layered shales or slates, where the pinnacle tip's an English Dictionary from the seventeenth century, or Voltaire's pocket philosophy first translated.
................................
Sometimes you have to talk, not sing. Despite this volume's title, there is a time. This is written with what I read as four stresses in a line, otherwise blank as to rhyme - a prosaic and narrative style with it.
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. One of his big ideas was Punctuated Equilibrium - that evolution proceeded mostly conservatively during quiet periods but quickly and radiatively during crises.
Bishop Trevor Huddlestone was a human rights activist notably against apartheid. David Jenkins, bishop of Durham was not much of a believer in traditional Christian Dogma. He also opposed first Margaret Thatcher and then New Labour under Blair. Jenkins was a skeptic of rampant capitalism and neoliberalism, mocking market economists for their pseudo-theological thinking.
Stanza 8 echoes T S Eliot' (from 'The Four Quartets': 'Little Gidding' - The communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.') but not as an assertion.
