I find being praised an uncomfortable experience. There are possibly several reasons for this, such as the inevitable injustice of elevating any one person’s efforts when so much excellent work goes unacknowledged and unseen. There is also the danger that praise is a tool of patronage and amounts to little more than a loan which will one day be called in. Lastly, the words used in praise inevitably fail to fully capture the deeds they describe: they are either too capacious or too perfunctory. Among other writers, Shakespeare is notable for his exploration of the ‘precarious correspondence between words and meanings’ (Sicherman, C. M. 1972. Coriolanus: the failure of words. ELH, 39(2), 189-207). Of course, praise can be genuine and well-intentioned – but I would much prefer not to be subjected to it.

Recently I watched a film adaptation of Coriolanus. The character of the play’s title is not a sympathetic figure. He is a stubborn, able and determined fighter, admired greatly by his troops. But he has very little time for ordinary people – the plebs – or their leaders. When he is seeking to become consul, encouraged by his mother, the Senate meets to recount the many worthy deeds which substantiate his appointment, Coriolanus moves to leave the chamber:

Your Honors, pardon.
I had rather have my wounds to heal again
Than hear say how I got them.

Coriolanus Act 2 scene 2

Despite attempting to persuade him to stay, Coriolanus eventually leaves the Senate. Perhaps he finds it impossible to remain when words sound so hollow compared with the deeds they describe. Warfare is a reality that none can imagine who have not stood within it, or know what it is to be such a danger to the lives of others. Oratory risks tidying away complex affairs and obliterating the wounds they leave. Before departing Coriolanus adds:

I had rather have one scratch my head i’ th’ sun
When the alarum were struck than idly sit
To hear my nothings monstered.

Ibid.

Perhaps surviving appears to be a nothing in the context of war. Many people caught up in the chance nature of conflicts, know that a decision to turn left, rather than right, is the difference between life and death. When I heard the remarkable Arek Hersh speaking about his time in a concentration camp, while standing in Auschwitz next to one of the kind of cattle trucks in which he was forced to travel decades before, it was a powerful testament to the apparent arbitrariness of survival.

USSR – CIRCA 1980: Postcard shows Italian Majolica from Hermitage Plate “Coriolanus’s mother and wife implore Coriolanus to spare Rome”, Faenza, 1523, workshop of Casa Priora, circa 1980

Shakespeare appears to have been very interested in ‘nothing’. The title of Much Ado is a play on the word, and ‘nothing’ occurs 34 times in King Lear. In Coriolanus’ bitter sense of rejection as he is sent away from Rome, he undergoes a fundamental crisis of identity. He has been a loyal and outstanding warrior for the Republic – his decision to cross into the camp of his enemy is a ‘Damascus Road’ transformation. His former commanding officer, Cominius, goes to entreat him to be at peace with Rome – and is rejected. Returning to the capital, Cominius describes the state in which he found his late deputy:

“Coriolanus”
He would not answer to, forbade all names.
He was a kind of nothing, titleless,
Till he had forged himself a name o’ th’ fire
Of burning Rome.

Shakespeare, W. Coriolanus Act 5 scene 1.

Forging a name in battle is a long-standing tradition in many cultures. As a result of his service in WWII Montgomery’s most senior title was ‘1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein’. For Marcius it is the heat of battle that creates for him a title earned in combat, and takes a form of the name of the city where the battle occurred: Corioli. There appears to be genuine modesty in the response of Coriolanus to the gifts that are showered upon him in the moment of victory. He refuses the offer of a tithe of all the treasure in the city, and instead wants to receive the same portion as every other soldier. As he says: ‘I have done as you have done – that’s what I can’. However, refusing to play the game of reward and gratitude can be a dangerous course of action, as Coriolanus comes to discover. He is banished.

Renouncing his past titles and honours, walking away from his citizenship, leaves the resigned general in extreme isolation. I’m not sure that I agree with Ibsen that, “The strongest man upon the earth is he who stands most alone.” Nevertheless, Coriolanus sacrifices an enormity of rank and resources when he sides with his former enemy. As his mother tells him at one point: ‘You are too absolute’. In Shakespeare’s lifetime, people who took an absolute view about religion and the state could find themselves losing titles and property, not to mention their lives. The playwright was familiar with those who could, in a moment, become ‘a kind of nothing’. A state of loss which is perhaps the precursor of a wisdom that comes to us, all too often, far too late:

For wisdom is the property of the dead,
A something incompatible with life; and power, Like everything that has the stain of blood,
A property of the living …

William Butler Yeats, “Blood and Moon”

Recently I was given charge of a baby. Thankfully this was only temporary, as mum went with her older son for the start of his first day at school. We were visiting family in Scotland and I was delighted to spend a short while with this delightful child. However, it is some time since I last looked after a baby, and this level of responsibility does not come without anxiety! In my attempts to entertain the bairn, I wondered what nursery rhymes might be familiar to him – and this is when I discovered the ‘Three Craws’ (described as a Scots classic).

The ‘craws’ would be known in England as crows. In Scots it is a fine onomatopoeic rendition of the cry which the birds make. The craws in the rhyme are not doing very well. The first craw is crying for its mother; the second has broken its beak; the third is unable to fly. With the kind of simple repetition that makes the most effective nursery songs, each verse describes the crows sitting on a wall, sharing their woes on a cold and frosty morning. (It should be noted that the content of these verses varies, and people add their own).

At the end of one of the versions of the Three Craws, there is reference to a fourth craw – The fourth craw wasnae there at a’. It is an intriguing way to end. The rhyme is known as the Three Craws. The final craw never makes an appearance. Does this craw even exist – is it part of the gang? The song has a fourth craw, and yet it doesn’t. This bird is lacking, and seems to be the culmination of the losses that precede it. The craw missing its mother; the craw whose health has been impaired by a broken beak; and the craw unable to fly. It is an odd conclusion for our attention to be drawn to what is wholly absent.

A poetic response to this missing figure has been created by the Glasgow-based academic and writer Nalina Paul. The work is entitled The Fourth Craw and perhaps reflects the power of narratives as they emerge from the darkness of absence – the sparks of our imagination kindled by our earliest encounters with song and story:

Too much is said about night –
its fullness jug-heavy with distance
poured out into star-mapped flight.

But in the sky, protecting her addled head,
was a strange sense of grounding –
as if light were solid, for standing.

And from these things –
sparks in the high darkness
a smouldering moon –
came music, the raven’s song.

Its sound could wither the feathers of eagles
make fire from ice
play tricks with existence
changing form at a whim.

In the dim-lit great hall of glittering stories
the broken shine of the moon crackles.

Nalini Paul ‘The Fourth Craw’ 2015

The fourth craw is an absence and also an invitation. Travelling through Glencoe a couple of weeks ago I was reminded how much the landscape of Scotland fires the imagination, and has inspired many different forms of art. The colours and textures of the mountains; burns that gush with great force after the regular downpours; and trees lousy with lichen, branches encrusted in moss. Glencoe can hold a magical, childlike, atmosphere – even before it is layered with human narratives of heroism and betrayal. Sadly, as walkers and climbers discover every year, it can also be a very dangerous place.

The Three Craws suggests that, when we lament or suffer injury, being in company can make a difference. The birds are a small community of sorrow, who end by sharing an experience of the fourth bird’s absence. Even at a young age it appears that we prepare people for one of the central experiences of life, as well as providing the space for wonder, and the work of our imagination.

In a parish I once knew, long ago, there was a splendid cabinet in the vestry. Made from fine timber, it was a large chest with many drawers – in which, liturgical vestments were stowed. It had been given in memory of their father by two members of the choir.

When I was present to lead worship on a Sunday I often spent time in the vestry before the liturgy began. On several occasions these members of the choir would voice concern about something to do with ‘father’s chest’. An alien object had been placed on the top; or a drawer was sticking out; on more than one occasion it appeared to have been moved an inch one way or the other. The cry would go up: ‘what have they done to father’s chest?’

Over time a question began to form in my mind. Had this object really been given? The continuing bonds of attachment seemed so great, so proprietary, that it was hard to think of this as a gift that was given free, unencumbered and without strings.

“But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you”.

Matthew 6: 3-4 NRSV

On Ash Wednesday I think there is much to consider about giving and detachment. The ashes remind us that our physical life is temporary, and that all we own will one day be dust. More significantly, God gives Jesus without any sense or implication of ownership. Horrifically, human beings did with this gift what happens to far too many lives. Even on the cross and hearing the cry of despair, God is silent. This is a gift – a true gift, and therefore God can make no claim even on that desperate day we shall mark six weeks on Friday.

All out genuine acts of letting go echo something of this divine gift. If we give we can never claim ownership or, indeed, any greater interest than anyone else. Perhaps this is why gifts are so rare. In his poem ‘Walking Away’ C Day-Lewis reflects on the moment his young child disappears, momentarily, for the first time:

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show –
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.