Have you ever wanted to see someone suffer a misfortune? Not a serious one, but a slight one, just enough to cause a little embarrassment to the person involved and humour for everyone who witnesses it. I confess that at times I have those thoughts, although I don’t verbalise them. One of those thoughts popped into my head not long ago.
It was a lovely autumn day, bright but cold, and I relaxed as far as I could on the wooden thwart of a punt and watched history slip past me on the banks of the river. To be fair there were bright red cushions on top of the thwarts for comfort, but the depth of material was insufficient to stave off the inevitable onset of numbness in my backside. Nevertheless, it was an enjoyable time. I was on the river Cam, punting down through Cambridge. Actually, I wasn’t the one doing the punting, we were on a guided trip, our helmsman lifting and dropping his pole with ease propelling us down the river at a leisurely pace. It was very pleasant. As he worked, our guide regaled us with stories about the people who had built and occupied the various colleges; some amusing, some sad, some from the distant past and some more recently.
Punting on the Cam
Although it was mid-week in late October there were still plenty of punters (I know) around to fill a number of boats for guided trips up and down the river. There were a few “non-professional” punters on the water too, and it was particularly with them my hope of seeing misfortune lay. But alas it was not to be. What was this misfortune? To see someone lose their pole, preferably stuck upright in the river bottom while the punt and punter continued on down the river leaving it tantalisingly out of reach. I know this is not an original idea of mine, no doubt I have seen it done in a film or comedy show, but I was rather hoping to see it in person. Fortunately, I didn’t articulate my thoughts, although I was tempted to ask our helmsman if he had ever witnessed such a situation.
As we slipped under Magdalene Bridge, the original crossing point of the Cam, our guide told us the story of Xu Zhimo. Zhimo who articulated his feelings through poetry. Zhimo was from China and resided in Cambridge on a couple of occasions in the 1920’s. On his last departure in 1928 he wrote the poem, “Saying goodbye to Cambridge again.” Below is an English translation refreshed by Geoffrey Brock.
I’ll leave as quiet as I came,
quietly waving goodbye
to the quiet evening clouds
hung in the western sky.
Golden willows by the river
are brides in the setting sun;
they glitter on the shining water,
and shall in my heart shine on.
Those lily pads are rooted in mud,
more rooted than I now am;
oh, to sway in the current there
in the gentle flow of the Cam!
The pool that’s shaded by these elms
is full of not water but sky;
rainbows spangle the duckweed where
a spectrum of visions lie.
Chasing a dream? Pole up the river
where grass is the brightest green;
fill your punt with a haul of starlight
and sing in its radiant sheen.
But as for me, I sing no longer—
silent is the song of my leaving;
the crickets have fallen silent too;
all Cambridge is silent this evening.
I’ll leave as gently as I came,
and gently I’ll wave goodbye,
flicking my wrist as I turn to go,
leaving each cloud in the sky.[i]
Zu Zhimo lived a somewhat controversial and short life, dying in a plane crash in 1931 aged 34. But his poetry lives on, especially in China where it is part of the school curriculum and indeed students are taught to memorise “Saying goodbye to Cambridge again.”
A memorial garden to Zhimo was opened in 2018 at King’s College in which a stone was placed with the first and last two lines of the poem in Chinese ascribed on it. Thousands of people visit Cambridge each year to see the buildings and discover its history, and surprisingly a significant proportion of the visitors are from China. They are drawn not so much by the history and architecture but by the poet who planted his pole in their hearts and captured their imagination with far off images of a river, willows and punts. I wonder if it lives up to their anticipation. Words have an enormous impact on us, even in our age where visuals are all important, words move us, they propel us for good or for bad. They can draw us from thousands of miles away to come and see for ourselves what somebody wrote about nearly a century ago or they can bring about great misfortune and drive us away. It all depends on how and what words are delivered.
Zhimo’s Garden
Although my secret desire for misfortune never materialised, I did notice a few somewhat amusing misadventures. The professional punters make it look so easy; raising and dropping the pole in a steady, effortless, rhythm. But there were a several amateurs who were making it look rather difficult; struggling to keep their craft in a consistent correction, having near misses and indeed not so near misses with other boats and banging into the bank. Of course, it is easy to judge when you are the passenger and I know if I tried to punt, I would be the one fulfilling someone else’s desire to see misfortune. It can’t be easy propelling a twenty-four-foot boat, filled with people in the direction you want it to go with only what is basically a stick. It seems a very imprecise means of propulsion, liable to go off the desired direction at any moment. All it takes is someone shifting their weight, the merest hint of a breeze or adverse ripple on the water and suddenly the helms person finds themselves going in an entirely unintended direction.
There aren’t any mentions of punts in the Bible, but there are a lot of references to steering our vessels. Jesus’ half-brother James, never went in a punt (as far as I know), but in the third chapter of a letter which he wrote he describes the dangers of something which might seem rather innocuous and yet has tremendous influence of not only the direction of our lives but the lives of those around us. It is our tongues. Tucked away in our mouths out of sight, which is a good thing as no one wants to see it, it does the job of helping to get food ready to swallow and telling us the taste of what is in our mouths. But while the tongue is out of sight it is not out of sound. Its other main job is to help form the words which we utter. But who is at the helm of our tongues? We like to think we are, but we discover it only takes a slight wash of adversity, a breath of opposition, or a change in balance and suddenly we realise our tongues are not nearly as under our control as we like to think. But do these outside elements really have so much agency over this one member of our body? James says no they don’t. It’s not the outside which forms the words released but rather what is inside us. “I didn’t mean to say that,” “I only said it in the heat of the moment,” or “I was provoked and had to say something,” are excuses we make, blaming the misdirection of our tongues on the climate around us. But James says that doesn’t wash; the outside environment simply reveals our inside disposition. We are responsible for the words we release and the direction they lead us and those around us. Words have an incredible unseen force which can either propel us in the right direction or drive us completely off course.
Further on down the river after passing under a number of other bridges, some more historical and beautiful than others we came to the Mathematical bridge. The only wooden bridge on the river it is made out of straight timbers of various length all held together by the forces imposed on the abutments on the opposite banks. Legend has it that Sir Isaac Newton designed and built the bridge but that cannot be true unless he constructed it from beyond the grave. The bridge was first constructed in 1749, 22 years after Newton died in 1727.
Mathematical Bridge
What does have a closer association with Newton can be found outside Trinity College. It is an apple tree, “the flower of Kent” to be precise, and it commemorates Newton’s time in Cambridge when he arrived in 1661. Newton didn’t articulate his thoughts through poetry, but rather wrote down words which spoke about his theory of gravity in three laws of motion.
The first states, “An object will not change its motion unless an outside force acts on it.” (Law of inertia)
The second; “The force on an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration.” (Law of acceleration)
The third law says, “When two objects interact, they apply forces to each other of equal magnitude and opposite direction.” (Law of action and reaction).
Newton supposedly arrived at these laws from watching an apple fall from a tree. Not the tree outside Trinity College but a tree at Newton’s family home of Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire. The tree outside the College was planted in 1954 from a scion of the original tree.
Nearby the tree some apples had been conveniently left for tourists to use as props for photos. I saw one woman place an apple on her head; perhaps she had mistaken Newton for William Tell.
Just as surely as Newton’s laws of motions the words we release from our tongues have force. They can fall through space like a stone taking us and others down with them.
Yet another tree with a connection (if somewhat tenuous) to a former student can be found in the fellows’ garden of Christ College. It is known as Milton’s Mulberry, although John Milton who was born in 1608 and attended Christ College later in 1625 had no association with it, unless he sat under its shade on a warm afternoon, or could it be the image of it’s long dark dangling fruit hung in his mind as he wrote his epic “Paradise Lost.”
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
Milton in his poem captures the gravity of the force of words gone wrong. As I am writing this wildfires are consuming buildings and homes by their thousands in Los Angeles, and this is what James says is the law of the tongue when it is unleashed. It starts as a just a word, sometimes it is just careless, other times deliberate, a spark we throw out but in the incendiary environment we live in before we know where we are an uncontrollable inferno is raging.
King’s College Cambridge
Disembarking from our punt we made our way over to King’s College Chapel. Built between 1446 and 1515 it boasts the world’s largest fan vault ceiling. Combined with the stained glass, gothic architecture and art it is a beautiful building. In the middle of the building my eyes were drawn to the organ, its golden pipes towering upwards. The chapel is known and loved for its music and especially for its celebration of “A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols” every Christmas Eve recalling the story of Paradise lost and the promise of how it is to be regained through the birth and life of God’s messiah in this world, and ultimately His death, burial and resurrection. The word of God (just think of that force for a moment, the word which spoke into existence this world) became a human being, every word which came out of Jesus’ mouth was perfectly formed. Not that His words didn’t cause some sparks and set people ablaze, but the reason for their flames was because they were drawing from a different source to steer their lives.
We might say, “well, it was easy for Jesus, after all He is God,” yet Jesus was confronted by the same environment as us, even more so as what He found was an affront to the goodness in which the world had been created and was intended to thrive. The difference is the source of Jesus’ words.
James says we can tell the source of our words; either they will sound like Jesus and belong in Christ’s chapel or they won’t and will have the same gravitational pull of the fall.
Navigating through life can look easy, that is until we try to steer our lives with such a small implement which has such great force. Most of us hope our words will lead to pools shaded by elms full or a sky where rainbows spangle the duckweed and a spectrum of vision lies. How successful we are rather depends on who is at our helm.
{$NOTE_LABEL} https://www.wolfson.cam.ac.uk/news/exclusive-poetry-saying-goodbye-cambridge-again
