In which I have no answers.

When the disasters come, I never know what to do. There is a vast sense of powerlessness. Sometimes the disaster is so big and so ugly and so destructive that I can hardly listen to the reports or look at the pictures. Then I despise myself for my softness and privilege. If the people who are in it can go through it, I damn well can look. But what good does that do? One can send a paltry extra bit of cash to the Red Cross, but it feels like a plaster on an open wound. Debates fire up, like hares set running, about whether extreme weather is thanks to global warming, and so entirely the fault of rapacious and heedless humans. I’m not sure that does much good either.

I tried, this morning, to imagine what it must be like to find, from one moment to the next, that you have nothing. I tried to imagine what it would be like to come back from the field and find my house gone. All my clothes and books and pieces of paper saying that I exist; every word I ever wrote, every photograph I ever cherished. If the village had gone and my sister’s house had gone and the water was gushing out of broken pipes and there was no electricity, what would we do? How would a person survive even one day in such circumstances. My brain ran into a brick wall. There is no imagining. I had absolutely no idea what I would do. I have no idea what the people of the Eastern Visayas are doing now, with their ten thousand dead and their ravaged land.

At eleven o’clock, as I stood silent for two minutes, I tried to imagine those boys in Flanders field, those waves of young men on the Somme, in mud and terror and death. On Remembrance Sunday, I think of all the wars. On Armistice Day, for some reason, I think only of the First World War. That, too, is beyond imagining. I don’t care how many books you read or how many facts you know or how many pictures you see or how much Wilfred Owen you can recite, the sheer numbers still make it go beyond human comprehension. One may have a sketch of it, but not the whole thing.

I think about the horses of that war, of course I do, as I gentle my red mare in the November sunshine. I think of the bonny hunters who were taken to front almost as a lark, and the work horses who were led from the quiet green fields of home and shipped into an incomprehensible hades of mire and gas and cannon shot.

When the silence is over, I go and do my HorseBack work and look out over the bright hills, lit with the glancing November sun. I speak to a veteran who was twenty-two years on submarines, who joined up when he was twenty and the cold war was still raging, and can remember the eerie sight of Russian boats going silently by, in the days when people really believed that the Soviets might blow up the whole world.

And then I come back and the Philippines is on the news again, and my brain stretches once more in incomprehension, and I hear one sentence, standing out – that the pitiless storm has destroyed a region which was already poor and deprived to start with. They had very little; now they have nothing. Perhaps because I do not know what to do when the disasters come, and impotence often leads to rage, I feel suddenly, shakingly furious. What world has this much sorrow and pity in it?

I do not know what to do when the disasters come, so I write paltry words, because words are all I have. I scratch a mark upon the page. I will go back, steadily, slowly, to the small things, because in the end those are all that humans may hold on to. I will look at the hills and the trees and gaze on the handsome, eager face of Stanley the Dog, and stroke the teddy bear neck of Red the Mare, as she grows warm and woolly for the winter to come. I will think of the small, potent loves which get a person through the day. I will put my feet on the good Scottish earth, one step after the other. I will realise that I shall never, ever know the answer to The Universal Why. The rage will settle and fall.

I want, as always, to find a fine sentence to finish this. There must always be a ringing final line, which neatly gathers the whole and brings a proper full stop. Today, I do not have one.

I’ll just leave you with the hill, which is always there, as blue and eternal as a blue eternal thing.

Where the heart is

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about death lately. It’s just over two years since I lost my father. I speak on the telephone to my darling old godfather, who is ninety years old and gravely ill. I am at the age when I struggle with the concept of mortality. I thought I’d got my mid-life crisis over; dealt with that moment, as Martin Amis says, when death is more than just a rumour. I actually planned it, ran full tilt into it when I was thirty-nine (why wait for forty?), dusted off my hands, and decided I’d got that one out of the way. Oh, how the sound of hollow laughter echoes round these hills.

So when something like Oklahoma happens - so savage, so violent, so ruthlessly, finally fatal - it feels personal and close, rather than an event in a far-away country of whose people I know nothing.

The internet is funny at times like this. Strangers put up messages of condolence, marking the passing of people they never met. It is lovely, in some ways. In some ways, I find some of it difficult – that kind of thing can be trite and too easy, a paltry sentimental interlude, in between the cute puppy pictures and the stop animal exports campaigns. Yet, today, people are doing it rather beautifully, with restraint and human feeling.

I saw one picture of a cowboy out on the range, in silhouette, posted by a ranch in Colorado, which just said: Our hearts are with Oklahoma.

I saw one devastating photograph, of a wet expanse of blasted concrete, where a house and a stable and a horse barn had been. It was someone’s life’s work, the words said, and everything had gone in ten minutes; wiped out, as if it had never existed. One hundred horses – eventers, Quarter Horses, rehabilitated ex-racehorses – had perished. Hug your own mounts close tonight, said the writer.

In the end, it can’t really matter, in the wild, untamed scheme of things, where your heart is. For the people mourning, the grief will still be sharp as a serpent’s tooth. And yet, I think perhaps it does matter. I think it means something. I think it reminds us that we are all human, we are all fragile, we all want to love well, and be loved in return. Our hearts are tender things, easily broken.

I rarely use the Universal We, but I sometimes think it is more universal than some people think. We are a human family, after all, on this unpredictable blue planet.

John Donne knew this and said it best, all those hundreds of years ago:

‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’

Today, my heart too is with Oklahoma.

 

And I shall be hugging this person close: