Inbetween Days

 The striped caterpillar my daughter found in the garden and kept in a jam-jar has now entered the pupa stage and formed a cocoon among the ragwort leaves. Despite her impatience, I have told her it may take two weeks before a beautiful, black-and-red cinnabar moth emerges. "So what's inside there now? A caterpillar or a butterfly?" she asks, "Do we still need to feed it?" As so often, I'm stuck for an answer and resort to word-games: "Well, you see now it's turned into a caterfly; no, a butterpillar." 

  Of course, science tells us it's neither one creature nor the other at the moment, a liminal, metamorphic between-state where the cells of the larva are gradually reconfiguring and repurposing themselves into the new form of the moth. This incredible feat of nature, taking place within a small dark casing hidden among leaves in a jam-jar on a shelf, is hard enough for this adult to comprehend as a commonplace occurrence, let alone a three year old. But then again her ability to accept the world at face value, full of discoveries and marvels which often don't seem strange or implausible because she has so little to compare them with, almost certainly exceeds mine, continually jolted out of acceptance of a world that seems more bizarre by the day, I suppose in comparison to a more settled, more "normal" existence that got established in my consciousness some time in the past 51 years (although when and what those old norms were I also find increasingly difficult to formulate or remember).

   I may well be labouring this metaphor now, but we also seem to be living through a transitional state this summer, struggling to emerge from the cocoon of lockdown while still surrounded by a climate of apprehension, caution and frequent setback which at times makes us want to climb back inside again. Neither in lockdown nor quite out of it yet, you could say, and the prevailing air of uncertainty hasn't lifted, hardly helped by the government's tendency towards sudden U-turns and about-faces. Are our children all going back to school in September and are we teachers all going back to start preparing in a few weeks? How come it was safe to go shopping without a mask at the height of the epidemic in April, but now, when so many other restrictions have been eased, it isn't?

  Thinking onward, wouldn't it perhaps be better if we could look at life as one long transitional, metamorphic state, accepting that the more stable periods we fondly remember with the euphemising lenses of nostalgia were probably just as flawed and difficult to get through as the present and that the long-anticipated future of secure, calm days doing exactly what we want to do will almost certainly never arrive. You only have to watch nature going through its almost daily shifts and changes, its continuous process of making, unmaking and remaking, to understand this on a pre-verbal level. It's high summer now but yellow leaves are already beginning to drift down from the acacia tree at the bottom of the garden, just as in early spring I noted autumnal colours on beeches and poplars coming into leaf. 

  And poetry reconfigures itself out of a parallel process, finding a liminal shape for its own metaphormosis*, coming alive in the moment of its saying before resting back into a pattern of mute stasis as the wings of the book fall closed. It shows us how we can live in "uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after facts and reasons"; how we can continue to value the quiet, inward-looking, home-bound days of lockdown even as we struggle back out into the world again.

  

*The title of a poem from my first volume which summed up a central theory of mine about transforming the world through metaphor, revivifying reality through the tropes and leaps of poetic form