to Kathleen Raine

RHMS Australis

 

Dearest Kathleen,

 

The lavender water has been appreciated on this voyage which is quite a cheap way of getting to Greece - £28 each, including everything. But like all things cheap one has to share them with a crowd, and this crowd is an emigrant one on its way to a new life in Australia - one thousand eight hundred of them, and all their children babies and baggage. Some of them are very nice, some look hunted as if the new life and leaving their old way, distressed them. The Greek crew laugh and joke and try to cheer them up - e.g. entertainment is offered them and it's like Butlin's camp' Kate has made friends with some Greek girls and barefoot on the sunny decks is learning the wonderful steps of Greek dances - behind them the blue Mediterranean and the blue mountains of Africa, under their bare feet the bodies of the sun-bathers, but neither the dancers like Greek nymphs nor the naked sunbathers like Blackpool sands, seem to heed one another.

 

There has not been much quiet or space to think anything out, but in a little dark rabbit burrow of my cabin I have been thinking deeper into the conversation we had - conversations should never stop, should they, on that superficial layer of everyday necessity, but attempt to go deeper into our common earth goddess depths - of the underworld, and the upper regions of angel clouds and blue eternity - those two always talk to one another – as they did on Jacob’s ladder - the angel thoughts ascending and descending, and as they did in the labyrinth of the Cretan palaces where the labyrinth was not a flat maze but a spiral staircase ascending to the high terraces from which one viewed the sacred twin peaks of Mount Ida, spiralling down to the cave vault shrine, underground, of the Snake Goddess of the underworld.

 

God is slow, you say - is he? Only when we slow him up and put a barrier to the free flow and activity of His Will. That Will is certain arid ultimate and our happiness, and the welfare of us all in any situation. Our own will is often selfish, often blind to what others need sometimes it has the vision to see God's Will, even if only in part and is willing to let that will operate even if in ways that are unexpected, and even against our preconceived beliefs.

 

I know very well, when I was trying to work out my own problem, how I held that marriage was sacred . . . Then I discovered that perhaps I could follow out certain trains of thought better on my own . . .

 

Marriage in fact is not sacred in the way that the orthodox church teaches, but a happiness of this earth, which can be happy if one is happy inside or unhappy if one is unhappy. If [one] was unhappy before [one] married [one] will be unhappy if [one's] marriage breaks - until one finds the inner happiness. A happy marriage like health is an effect, not a cause - and like ill health can only be dealt with at the creative source of being.

 

If one says, I can only be happy if I have brandy, or a motor car, or a different lover, or a thousand pounds, or kill my mother-in-law - one is limiting God's working the thing out, and it is just like playing a game of chess, only the white knight may not move - on any account. The game of chess will only evolve if all the pieces are in the interplay of the intelligence that has the game in mind from beginning to end . . .

 

Love and forgiveness for this rigmarole from Winifred