Inheritance

 

Dear Friend,

I was/am very upset upon hearing that Jason Arday, the Cambridge Professor, had taken his life. He had been so hounded by the press and social media that he couldn’t stand it, obviously,  any longer.   If you didn’t already know, Jason was black. 

What he had done was to invent qualifications for himself in order to become an academic of the highest order.  He invented himself and probably believed his own inventions.

My point here is :   that don’t we all invent ourselves to an extent?  WE tell stories and add bits here and there to enrich them, we boast of things we haven’t really done, and we know celebities well when we have never met them.  We might feel in ourselves that we are a triffle dull and that exaggerating ourselves makes us more interesting.

In Jason’s case he probably just wanted to be a professor with such intesnsity that the truth of him became a fantasy, he simply invented himself to be the man he so wanted to be.  Was this such a terrible crime that he was made to take his own life?  Surely not or many of us coud be implicated in this way for an understanable crime.  

Cambridge University has many questions to answer.  I hope they are made to.

                                                                                                

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From Dorothy Wordsworth     August 31st   1800 in Westmorland

‘A great deal of corn is cut in the vale,  and the whole prospect, though not tinged with a general autumnal yellow, yet softened down into a mellowness of colouring, which seems to impart softness to the forms of hills, and mountains.  At 11o’clock Coleridge came, when I was walking in the still clear moonshine in the garden. He came over Helvellyn.   William was gone to bed, and John also, worn out with his ride round Coniston.   We sate and chatted till half past three.  Coleridge read us a part of Christabel.’

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Inheritance

 

 

 

 

What was it that made me

think of you, who

are bone-dust now,

with no statue or monument

to bear your witness?

Was it the apple-bruised spots

on the Gloucester Old Spot pigs,

their legacy from apple orchards, long ago,

to mark them out?

 

In the afternoon sunlight

as I bent to touch their skin

I saw that my hands, brown-spotted,

were your hands, identical.

Was this your legacy to me,

something to say that you were here?

 

More precious than possessions,

you passed to me our inheritance

from some ancient eastern shore.

Your browness, your hands, brown spotted,

which marked you.

 

 

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With best wishes and love to you all

Patricia