A Whistling Woman (2002)

For Steve Jones and Frances Ashcroft

"This is the last tree", said the thrush.

". . . he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a highprice for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at anunfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts,breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees."
Frederica admired this passage [from The Great Gatsby], and had made tidy notes on it, as the
culmination of her lecture. Note, she had said, the implications for
American literature, of the phrase about the 'new world', 'material without
being real'. Note, she had written, that Gatsby has created his whole world
out of his Platonic idea of himself; his romantic dream, and it is
disintegrating.

But as she read it out, she caught the full force of the achieved simplicity
of every word in that perfectly created paragraph about destruction, that
perfectly, easily coherent paragraph about disintegration. She felt
something she had always supposed was mythical, the fine hairs on the back
of her neck rising and pricking in a primitive response to a civilised
perfection, body recognising mind.

She stopped in mid-sentence, and began again, urgently. Look, she told them,
I've just really seen how good this paragraph is. Think about the
adjectives, how simple they look, how right every single one is, out of all
the adjectives that could have been chosen. Look at 'unfamiliar' and think
about a man who had made up his own heaven and earth, who was his own
family. Look at 'frightening leaves' which are flatly bald and menacing, but
lightly so. 'What a grotesque thing a rose is.' The idea of intricate
natural perfection undone in one atmospheric and one psychological adjective
which is also an ancient aesthetic adjective.

And then, 'raw' describing sunlight where did he find that? Raw is cold, not
heated, raw is bare and open, raw is unripe and with 'scarcely created' it
suggests a virgin world either at the shivering beginning or the end of
time, when it doesn't hold together. And from these sensuous adjectives
grotesque, raw we move to mental ones new, material, not real and the solid
creation disintegrates into phantasmagoria, fimtasms, ghosts, dreams like
air, not even really air, and then finally, the wonderful rendering of
shapelessness, the 'amorphous' trees.

And if you use the negative Greek word, amorphous, you carry with it all the
positive Greek words for shape, and form, metamorphosis, morphology,
Morpheus the God of Sleep. What Fitzgerald has done, quickly, briefly, and
clearly, is to undo what art and literature have done over and over again,
the image of the human mind at home in the beauty of the created garden,
with the forms of trees and the colour of the sky and the grass, and the
intricate natural beauty of the rose.

Frederica stared almost wildly at the class, which stared back at her, and
then smiled, a common smile of pleasure and understanding. For the rest of
her life, she came back and back to this moment, the change in the air, the
pricking of the hairs, of *really reading* every word of something she had
believed she 'knew'. And at that moment, she knew what she should do was
teach, for what she understood - the thing she was both by accident and by
inheritance constructed to understand - was the setting of words in order,
to make worlds, to make ideas.

"We shall think of something", said Luk Lysgaard-Peacock.