But here he is putting in a successive appearance and with an excerpt of his poetry too. True, his inclusion is due to the author's hand, but he doesn't just have the one admirer then who felt he deserved a mention. And for what it's worth I like the little I've seen of his poetry – it strikes the right chord for this particular novel about a Reverend writing a letter to his son since it's sermon-like and Creationist.
Herbert's second coming unlike the first has ceased and seized my writing in a way I couldn't have anticipated and hadn't tried to imagine, though maybe that's because I hadn't (and still haven't!) realised his significance. To me; to this chapter of life. Why this entry now? Why not before? Is it not just a case of universal knowingness, that sense you're unaware you're tapping into, attracting to you, that seems so much bigger than you when occurrences collide and makes them seem all the more mystical?
Did the Universe know Herbert would interest me? Or that novels are the places I'm more open to and accepting of signs? A sign of what? A curious case of physic phenomena and interconnectivity between all matter.
Or perhaps it's nothing like that. It has nothing do with his person and everything to do with the fact that coincidently, at the time of reading but long after selection, the family had adopted a 12-year-old Staffie called George. There'd been some deliberation over his name and the keeping of it because he'd been rechristened so that Georges unlooked for were cropping up everywhere as if to advise us to retain it. George it is then, Gorgeous George. George of the Sofas. Not that he ever answers. He knows rabbit and scratchy.
Is that it – serendipity territory? The path you're on is the one for you to follow, you're heading in the right, though perhaps not altogether sane, direction. Still, carry on, as you were.
It should be heartening then, so why when it occurs does it weird me out? Because there have been rare instances where it's worked against me: Get Out! Don't Do It! This Is A Red Herring! Abort, Abort! not that that realisation has hit until progress has been made so far, further than I would normally go so that a changing of tracks (or tact) would almost certainly provoke an awkward situation that just thinking about gives me cause to regret my earlier actions, even if when those decisions were made the information I had on which to base them was shady. Why is it we, the ones kept in the dark, always feel in the wrong? That we didn't ask the right questions when those answers should have been given without prompting. To not provide when you have it within your power to do so seems dishonourable somehow, unless the circumstances are such that not doing so protects that individual.
How I've got on to this topic I cannot fathom. What has dishonour got to do with George Herbert or George of the Sofas, or any Georges at all? Except they all throw my thinking into disarray. Disorienting Georges. And although it's been largely entertaining coming across them I hope that's the last of them for a good while.
George of the Sofas is happy at least, in what will be his last years. Which bears another similarity to the novel in which Herbert made his second appearance, since the Reverend who professed a liking for his poetry is towards the end of his life too, and DOG is GOD reversed, not that I mean that disrespectfully but as a mild observation. Maybe smaller coincidences matter more than we think, or even give us some clue as to universal laws, rather like the ten commandments.
Picture credit: George Feeling at Home, P R Francis
