Wormsong and Descant

by David Rose

I awoke late and moved through the morning tainted with sleep.

I prepared a light breakfast then prepared for the day: dressed carefully, a little something for everyone – light worsted suit, needle-stripe shirt with knitted silk tie, my vintage Da Vincis.

After the prospect of a monotonous morning, I faced an important assessment and an even more important date, with Vanessa from Analysis. I rubbed a duster over the vamps of my Da Vincis and left the flat humming the scherzo from the Trout Quintet.

It was warmer out than I expected, but freshened by overnight rain. I decided to shun the bus, cut across the park and flex in late. Expanses of blue sky were beginning to emerge. I hoped the walk, the air, the brief hiatus would alter perspectives on the assessment, settle mind and stomach.

In midstride, I noticed a stranded worm on the path. I looked round for a puddle, dipped my fingers and picked up the worm, cupped it wriggling and coiling in my palm, and carried it to a flower bed, decanting it onto the newly-turned soil where it could burrow to safety; give it a sporting chance against the birds.

A sporting chance against the birds.

Walking on, I began to wonder, Did I need to wet my my fingers before handling the worm? Do they have the same protective mucus as fish? The Trout had awakened memories of youthful fishing, and the guiding rule – never handle fish with dry hands; use a wet cloth or at least wet hands.

It wasn’t trout I used to catch then; mostly roach, perch, the occasional tench. But feeling that pulse of life as I held them in the water in the safety of the keepnet to disgorge the hook still thrilled me in recall. The same pulse and shiver as the worm’s coiling as I released it to the earth.

I was struck by the irony of it: saving a worm from dehydration and death when in earlier times I would use it as bait, either bought or freshly dug.

A sense of irony. This is promising.

One thing led illogically to another and I felt suddenly dizzy. I sat on a bench and stared. The sky had almost wholly cleared, wholly blued. I once read somewhere that the ancient Greeks were blind to blue and green. I thought that odd at the time; now it astounded me.

I stared up at the blue, I stared at the grass, the flower beds, I thought of the rescued worm joining thousands of others underground – more than two hundred and fifty thousand per acre, I remembered reading in Angling Times – and I felt suddenly . . . happy? That didn't seem the right word. Silly seemd the word, in its original sense of innocently, blessedly happy. The only way I could put it: absurdly silly.

Silly indeed. This could lead somewhere.

The spreadsheets, the analyses, even my assessment felt insubstantial, weightless. I had lost my bearings, slipped my tether. I decided to flex off the whole morning, process it all.

I remained on the bench for a while, looking at the sky, the last retreating clouds, then walked to the kiosk for a coffee.

Our young journeyman appears to be experiencing a mild form of that radical astonishment at Being, as Heidegger put it, in which we restrain ourselves, step back. In this case, he sits back, sipping his coffee, warming his hands, humming maybe; a response to this unexpected development in a routine day.

He fails, however, in his blessed innocence, to realize his category error, the illogic that Wittgenstein alluded to: namely, that astonishment is provoked by the extraordinary, but the extraordinary is normally something we can imagine not being the case. Can we, can he, genuinely imagine the world not existing?

My coffee was too hot to drink so I left it on the bench to cool while I returned to the kiosk for additional sachets of sweetener and a stirrer; I felt in need of extra dextrose. I emptied them into the coffee and stirred and stirred until I could feel no grit. With the stirrer withdrawn, the natural froth – the crema – continued to swirl. Gazing into that swirl conjured up that earlier strangeness. It became almost mystical: I saw galaxies, nebulae, primordial soup; I thought, what if the Bang had been a damp squib? Or if the world had turned out differently? But I remember a philosopher saying that it’s not how the world is that is mystical but the fact of its existence. Even so, it did now seem odd that the world should be exactly as it is – worms, clouds, blue sky . . . What if the sky had turned out Fauve violet, Van Gogh green, Munch crimson? Would I find that odder or less odd? I had no way of deciding.

Touché: the philosopher he quotes is indeed Wittgenstein, but the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus; I refer to the later Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations. In which he does make the same point about the sky, but more mundanely: being blue as opposed to being cloudy. And this for W. introduced another logical flaw: wonder at the sky being whatever it is, is to be astonished at what is the case, i.e. a tautology, so by definition not extraordinary. But our young hero is no fool; he will, I feel sure, hit upon a solution.

There is a theory in cosmology, I believe, that there may be an infinity of universes, each different, which would allow for skies of every colour of the spectrum. In which case it was pure chance that I happened into the blue-sky version. But that didn’t seem to reduce the mystical nub of being anywhere at all. Would I be as suddenly surprised in the green-sky world?

He’s snuffled out the snag in record time. So he's back to Wittgenstein's position of wondering at the world – his world – being as it is. But does he really know the world as it is? Take his little annelidan protégés. Our hero was right about population density – 250,000 per acre. Right in wondering if he should have moistened his hands – they do indeed have a mucous coating enabling them to glide and breathe. Right and humane to place it safely on soil – they die from exposure to sunlight. Does he also know they can push ten times their bodyweight of earth? That they herd together if threatened? That although earless, they ‘hear’ by detecting vibrations? That, as Darwin observed, they respond to the piano?

Casting further afield, does he know that some shore birds detect the presence of worms from the distortion of pressure waves in the sand caused by the birds’ probing bills? That pit vipers detect the warmth of rodents a metre away? That fin whales can communicate across thirten thousand miles of ocean by infrasonic waves? That dolphins’ ultrasound can distinguish by density between water and wine?

The world is various beyond our imagination. But it is and remains ‘the case’, and thus a tautology. This array of arcane facts leaves our narrator still in his impasse and still in the park.

With a start I realized my coffee was cold and time getting on. I was in danger of being late for my assessment. I headed across the park and power-walked to work, arriving with minutes to spare. Yet as I ascended the stairs I felt strangely distant, both relaxed and charged. I’m naturally reticent, would normally understate my aims and abilities – my ‘pluses to the team’ – but as the assessor took me through the role projections for the next quarter, I was unhesitant in my answers, positive with my pluses. I quite startled myself.

As I came out, I worried. Had I been over-assertive, egotistical, writing cheques I couldn't cash? I walked down to the canteen for a fresh coffee. I decided to take it sans milk and sugar. I carried it over to the window sofa, but as I sat down, Vanessa came in. Our date was for later; I was caught off guard.

She said, Where were you? I was worried all morning. I expected to see you grinding data, gearing up for your assessment. Were you ill?

The effect of my perspectival jolt was beginning to wear off, I was more my old reticent self. But I had to give her some explanation and only the approximate truth came to hand. I said, Well, I rescued a worm, then noticed the sky and decided to sit and think for a while.

She said, Meditate? On your assessment?

I said, No, on the worm and the sky.

She said, That’s absurd, darling. What if you’d been late?

She had never addressed me as darling before.

She said, I must get back. I only came in to look for you. Don’t be late for our date, ignore any worms in distress. Promise?

She was wearing heels instead of pumps, I noticed, and I could follow her progress along the corridor and up the stairs. The sun had lowered sufficiently to flood through the window directly onto me, my exposed nape, my alopecic crown. I felt my guts coiling. I longed for the moist earth, the green sod. I thought, No, sod it, sod the date.

There is nothing so isolating as a mystical experience. Even a Joycean epiphany can render one tongue-tied. So what has it all availed our young Heldentenor? Maybe the enrichment of the poetry of thought? But poetry, said Auden, makes nothing happen. Philosophy, said Wittgenstein, leaves everything as it is. But perhaps the acknowledgment of the absurdity of absurdity is the beginning of grace, and grace the escape from tautology and story.

There remains, however, a danger: that this nuntius ex machina may end up like Kafka’s leopards – whose regular breakings into the temple and drinking of the wine eventually became incorporated into the ritual.

David Rose was born in 1949 and spent his working life in the Post Office. His debut story was published in the Literary Review (1989), since when he has been widely published in magazines in the UK and Canada. He was joint owner and fiction editor of Main Street Journal. He is the author of two novels, Vault (2011) and Meridian (2015) and one collection, Posthumous Stories (2013). Recent stories have appeared in Gorse, and The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story (Penguin 2018). A new collection of stories, Interpolated Stories, featuring images by Leah Leaf, was published by Confingo in 2022.