Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

In middle life I grew to love the Way

In the recent storms the rain was heavy and the wind strong. I took a walk down the muddy track above the river one afternoon, and, just before I had reached the place where the pigsty is, I came to a tree that had been blown over and had fallen across the path.

When Gerard Manley Hopkins encountered the sight of an ash tree being chopped down, some time before composing a poem on a similar theme, he wrote of the event:

...looking out and seeing it maimed there came at the moment a great pang and I wished to die and not see the inscapes of the world destroyed any more

Although the tree before me had been felled by natural causes (perhaps one could argue that the freak weather of those days, bringing floods to Wales and the South West, was not natural), I felt something like the pang that Hopkins described. It was as if the future itself were felled and blocked my way forward. I sighed. There was nothing I could do. I contemplated the scene and looked around, not wanting merely to dismiss it from my thoughts. Of course, it occurred to me, the tree itself probably doesn't mind. Then again, I can't be sure of that. But as I looked to the side of the path, I envied those trees that were still standing, and, by extension, even that which had fallen.



Their roots delve straight into the good earth. They spring directly from it, and die directly into it.

I've long felt an almost erotic attraction to the soil. Perhaps 'erotic' is a wilfully inaccurate word, or perhaps not, but, anyway, rather than 'eros', the word 'thanatos' might have more bearing here. The thought of burying myself in rich, wet soil, there to decay, fills me with joy. This is by no means a recent attraction. One of the earliest poets in whom I took an interest, in my early teens, was Baudelaire, and of his poems, one of my favourites was 'The Happy Corpse', which starts with the lines:

Wherever the soil is rich and full of snails
I want to dig myself a nice deep grave -
Deep enough to stretch out these old bones

Thinking about my own return to the soil is more and more what sustains me. I just wonder why I have had to have the bit in between birth and earth.

Another of life's depressing little frustrations - I've looked all around and can't find the book containing the poem from which I took the title of this entry. It is, anyway, a poem from 300 Tang Poems as translated by Innes Herdan, one of my most cherished volumes. 'The Way', of course, is 'the Dao'. When I think of Daoism, I think of roots and earth, roots taking me down, down, into the earth.

Let me die before I die.

Labels: Baudelaire, Gerard Manley Hopkins, soil, Taoism, trees