A wayfarer’s notes

The Presence of the Past

2008-07-23T09:33:00.008+01:00

Many are they who suppose a blog---such a today thing!---to be ephemeral (“beginning and ending in a day”) in its subject-matter and interest to others. Why should it be so? I celebrate the past, like this stately galleon on the ocean of time, its stern riding proud and high, its prow dipping into the billows of the present, becalmed or stormy, no matter; slowly inching its way into the future. It is a place of glory, gilded in the memory. The older you get, the more the past is precious.

The old are guardians of the old ways, watchful of changes for the worse. There was a time when gerontocracy, not democracy, was the rule. The elders were in charge. There are worse ways to govern. On the radio this morning, they were interviewing people in the streets, in Cuba. Were they chafing for more democracy, political freedom? No! There were those who desired a better standard of living, or the freedom to start their own businesses. Yet not a word was said against the country or its systems for education and health. In 1962 as a student in France I grew a patchy black beard and wore a NATO surplus jacket and when I hitch-hiked got accustomed to lorry-drivers shouting “Castro!” Fidel is still alive, as indeed am I, though unlike him, I gave up the beard and jacket later that same year.

Brothers and sisters in the West, we have been brainwashed to think we have the best of all possible systems. We have nothing to lose but our slavery to greedy competing politicians, greedy competing corporations.

My anti-library tirade the other week was prompted by a sense that the past was being forgotten, just when we needed it most. Our new branch library is in the Eden Shopping Centre, which in this venerable town is a stark barren island, a cursed place swept free of retrospect, a “now” place, colonised by remote retail chains which peddle their baubles and ersatz to natives bereft of historical sense. In tune with its host, the library hastens to purge itself of yesterday, to stay obedient to this week’s view, hardly concerned with anything outside the horizon of its imagined readers. The town’s sole bookshop has also moved to Eden, this Orwellian zone washed clean of memory. Like the library, it’s enslaved to the flavours of the month, more devoted to freshly-minted produce than the fruit-and-vegetable section of the supermarket. Waterstone’s is its name. I think of a stone newly dredged from the ocean where it has lain ten thousand years. In an hour it’s as dry as a pebble which has never been submerged; worthy symbol of a store with no memory. And how appropriate to use the name “Eden”, that realm with no past, where Adam and Eve had no navels, no antecedents. They arrived naked, owning nothing but their openness to temptation. This other Eden (“demi-paradise”? Huh!) forbids its fruit and gilded fig-leaves only to those with no money.

There are actually good things about the library-I-love-to-hate, which don't require me to actually go there (except to collect). I can access the Oxford English Dictionary free from my desk at home, just by entering my library ticket number as a user ID and logging into the Net. By the same means, I can order books from the library’s County Reserve Stock, which is where they dump all the out-of-fashion books of perennial value for readers like me. Having recently watched the film Carrington, I was curious about Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians. Now I can luxuriate in Strachey’s understated irony, as from the viewpoint of 1918 he surveys the lives of four grand “celebs” of the nineteenth century: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold, General Gordon. When I have finished that, I propose to borrow his biography of Queen Victoria.

Last weekend I planned to have an orgy of reading. The actuality was less intense than anticipated, as is doubtless the case with all orgies. The thought was delicious though, and as I returned from the library with Strachey, and a biography of Swedenborg which had caught my eye, I found myself doing something that took me back to teenage years. In those days, I’d start to read whilst waiting for the bus, and continue whilst sitting on the bus; as if there were nothing in my immediate surroundings worthy of note. But now it’s only a short walk from the library to my house and I found myself trying to read whilst dawdling on the street.

Something at least has changed since then. I’ve learned to get my nose out of books and more directly consult the library of Creation, in which everything, except the Eden Shopping Centre, reveals its own roots in time immemorial. In their lineaments the passers-by, my close cousins all, display their ancestry, something which all the trees and smaller plants do also, and the tiniest insects, which are more distant cousins. Persons! One glance gives a peek at their glorious individuality, which owes so much to personal history and genealogy. And their divine depth outshines: an eternal mystery.

Others may marvel at the impending future, the achievements and problems of the day, forgetting that as Murphy’s Law states, “Most problems are caused by solutions”. But give me the past, don’t throw it away. It still has much to teach us.

I need no library, really. It’s just a bonus. This external world, with the continuing exception of our new shopping centre, is rooted in its own past, which we can learn to read like a book from the relics which survive in the present. If I lose touch with that, there’s still the archive of memory. And if I lose that on top of the rest, it’s probably time to leave.

Seeing from a height

2008-07-17T05:26:00.019+01:00

What do you do with the rest of your life when in early adulthood you are admitted to a vision of universal oneness, in which what seems like God’s love is poured down and you can sensuously swim in it?

Paul Maurice Martin wrote notes: diary entries to be expanded later. He went on to study theology and be a schoolteacher, giving extra coaching to those who needed it, outside the normal hours. He would get up hours before dawn, sacrificing sleep in order to write. The result, many years later, is a magnificent book: Original Faith.

Whilst waiting for publication, he started a blog of the same name and gathered a number of readers to discuss spiritual topics of his choosing. I was one of them, a rather argumentative one at times, not sure I wanted to read his book when it finally got published, for I did not see myself as part of his target audience. But he won me over, and since receiving the finished work a few days ago I have been excited by its contents.

It’s not the done thing to write a review when you are only half-way through. So let’s not call this a review. It’s just another blog post, in which I record whatever I feel like. So I have to say that even after reaching page 105, the book still grips me like a “page-turner” novel. What next? I can’t imagine. In the genre of spiritual self-help books, which I have been mentioning here lately, Original Faith stands out from the throng. It certainly needs to, because it’s a member of a populous genre, mostly of little value because lacking originality. They don’t stick to personal experience. Their authors, moreover, imagine that they can tell a reader how to attain fulfilment.

I find Paul’s book to be written with a fresh honesty and originality that makes it a rare pleasure, whether to embrace the words in long-lost recognition of truths not previously articulated, or find something to pick on and challenge. Or simply to admire and absorb the poetry, often in exquisite verse, of his vision.

He writes beautifully about love. He is convincingly confident that what he has experienced can be the common possession of everyone. As a common reader I was lifted up by his vision. I had expected him to write from a religious background, with lots of biblical references, say, or taking some aspect of Christianity as his starting point. No. He is lyrical and flowing about his memories of cycling and jogging in communion with Nature, and the visions and dreams that became the basis of his inspiration. His inspiration, literally: I feel that in addition to the mystical encounters visited upon him, whose memories guide his thoughts, a clear, sure voice seems to speak through his words. I’m so convinced by the authenticity of his source that the other times stand out in contrast, when it seems to be just Paul, enunciating his personal theory, which doesn’t agree with my personal theory. Never mind that: something to take up at another time, another place. I mention the contentious side only to emphasize the sense of authoritative truth (experiential and not scripture-based) that comes from the rest.

The book is brilliant on despair and hope. For this alone it deserves wide popularity, perhaps immortality. In one reminiscence, he is suddenly transported by an experience in an old cemetery.

… a level of despair I had not previously known. I feel as if I could lie there forever, literally never bothering to get up again. Every muscle is lax and unwilling to move. Why bother? seems written across my soul, or in the place my soul had been.

Then something happens---I won’t attempt to paraphrase his account---and he is transformed.

It is hope as outroar---directed to the whole graying sky over that little graveyard, rooted from the floor of who I am and widening to include the whole overarching universe. I seem all at once to become hope for the world called into flight by love for the world.

Paul’s blog is here, and the book can be ordered here. To reiterate, this isn’t a book review. I’ve only read half of it to date and it’s too important to rush through.

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The picture is taken from one of my recent walks (see Blazing a Trail). I believe it is a platform from which to shoot pheasants. But I climbed up and sat there for a while, imagining myself some old-time hermit or pillar-saint.

Lucky

2008-07-10T06:34:00.009+01:00

Lucky clover by Crochettes
Thanks Alícia on flickr

It rained continually yesterday, didn’t stop but went through varying intensities. It reached the point that everyone ignored the light drizzle. Before the day was over I was taking no notice of the moderate rain either. I was fixing the car standing in a puddle, using the bonnet (hood) as a shelter. There was nothing vital about the work, but I wanted to get it finished: to install the new gadget which would send the correct temperature reading to the gauge on the dashboard. The job was trivial, could have done it in a few minutes with the right socket spanners, but there’s the rub. The young man next door had lent me his set but the exact right size was missing and I may have crossed a thread in consequence. The sockets are expensive when you buy them individually, and I do my best to make the right decision overall and in each case. As in life. (Till a year ago, this blog was entitled, “As in Life . . .”)

So how does one learn? I was talking yesterday about the impossibility of self-help books. They exist of course, but how can they work? A “Do-it-yourself Guide to Car Maintenance” would be quite handy in theory, but would it make you an expert? Would it give you help in every dilemma? No, we have to build up our own internal library of experience, made up of images and schemas, not words. In life, one learns best by working alongside someone wiser. There’s an expression “monkey see, monkey do”. We are indeed monkeys. When I worked in a bank on contract for a couple of years, I learned another apparently common expression for informal training: “sitting with Betty”. No matter who Betty was, it was bound to beat “sitting through PowerPoint”.

Still, one learns something from books. From my teens onwards I haunted junk-shops which sold mainly old furniture but had a few books too. They were cheaper than the antiquarian bookshops. There I found In Tune with the Infinite by Ralph Waldo Trine, who seems to have been the Daddy of self-help; though I also obtained the Great-grandfather of the genre: Self Help by Samuel Smiles. This was more like a set of potted biographies, each demonstrating the magical power of hard work, honesty and single-mindedness in bringing a person from impoverished or unpromising roots to fame and fortune.

The best “popular philosophy” guide I’ve ever come across is In Defence of Sensuality by John Cowper Powys, published 1930. It never seems to have been truly popular, being long out of print and having spawned no imitations. He advocates the cultivation of our “ichthyosaurus ego”, a way to rapture for the lonely self, but the very opposite of Buddhist detachment. He encourages his reader to curse at the source of all cruelty, the First Cause: but to give generously to beggars.

Nowadays, there is little originality: people teach what they think they know, thinking they know how to teach. A bizarre memory from twelve years ago: the doorbell rings. It’s a man peddling his own book on how to get rich quick. It turns out that his personal get-rich-quick plan, after having been made redundant from some desk job, is to sell his book. It shocks me that he lives a few streets away, and that we resemble one another: similar age and social background. Did it really happen, or did I imagine it? Either way, he was an “angelic messenger”: a human being sent by the gods of chance to show me something, as in a mirror. As a warning.

This blog is all “I”, “me” because it’s devoted to truth. Anything else but “I”, “me” is hearsay or guesswork. In any case, I have a theory that the personal is the universal. Adopt the ideas of the crowd, and you’ll dwell in a world which has never really existed except in the clichés of song lyrics and journalism. Go your own way, think your own thoughts; and when you express them you may touch another soul; because all our sensibilities are built on the same dark (unacknowledged) foundations.

Suppose I ignored that messenger-angel and decided to write a self-help book myself? Well, perhaps not a book, but a blog post or two? Not “get rich quick” for that has hardly touched me even in fantasy, but “how to live”.

In honesty, I would have to say “Be lucky”. That is lesson 1. All other lessons, if any, will be amplifications of lesson 1, which has to be thought about first.

PS: looking for a suitable illustration for this piece, I googled “lucky”. This article came up first. How lucky is that?

Blazing a trail

2008-07-08T06:31:00.011+01:00

In these pieces I have a consistent aim, like a would-be acrobat endlessly repeating the same manoeuvre, aiming at perfect execution, to demonstrate something to the audience, using his entire body and soul in the demonstration, so that the slightest distraction such as a thought or an itch somewhere on his skin would affect the performance. It’s not enough to complete the trick: it must be done live in front of the audience.

It doesn’t seem a good analogy, I know. Surely in writing, you can lay a new sentence beside one written weeks ago and gone cold. You can tinker with a sentence years after the ink has gone dry, literally or metaphorically, depending on the technology used. Editing, indeed, is the polish added to the marble sculpture when the main shapes have been hacked out rough and refined in the magical process of discovering shapes within the blind rock, that uncovering so beloved of Michelangelo, as in this photo of one of his “Prisoners” from the Accademia art gallery in Florence. (Thanks to Valerie on Flickr.)

I’ve been thinking of sculpture lately whilst remodelling the wheel-arches of my “Gift-horse” motor-car, given by an almost-stranger who runs a repair and test workshop just down the road. When he first offered it to me for £100, “to tide you over and help you find a proper car: it should last for a month or two”, I took it for a test drive round the block, wondering if it would make it. There were serious flaws certainly, but none I’ve been unable to work on. When you have hours and days to spare, you can fix anything, and learn to apply rust-proofing and filler and metallic spray finish---I’ve had to make do with a slightly different shade, a richer gold on the existing “champagne”, so it looks like a trick of the light. Ah, but the sculpting! With clay, you can go on modelling forever. That’s what they use to design car-bodies, apparently: clay. Computers are all very well but you need to see the light on the surfaces. With sculpting in marble, you need an inner vision to direct the hand-and-eye coordination. In painting and drawing it can’t be much different: the medium isn’t infinitely forgiving. You can’t scrape, erase, start afresh indefinitely. For the one thing that must be fresh and at its peak is the inspiration: that combination of energy and vision that makes you ready to tackle the impossible---in this present moment before it’s lost forever.

My computer and notebooks are littered with unfinished word-sketches. My pocket digital thing records hours of dictated thoughts captured somewhere: on a remote path overgrown with July’s profusion of plant-life, or on a well-trodden street where I get to recognise individual pieces of litter in the gutter. Those recordings languish unused because they haven’t captured the essence of the moment, which has nothing to do with the persistent pieces of litter, the rank scent of the nettles and cow-parsley in July; or my thoughts endlessly tackling the questions of Life, such as “What is consciousness?”---that melodic line always accompanied by the bass and drums of unconscious impulses.

Yes, a constant aim, not forgotten or made inconstant by the onrush of words which seem to overgrow the themic path like July undergrowth in the English countryside. We tame that scene by approaching it with a purpose. The other day in a remote valley, with no sounds but the wind in the trees, the bleating of sheep and the calls of birds, I must have lost the Public Footpath without realizing it, so I boldly followed trails which seemed to have been made by human feet, though they kept branching and I had to keep choosing the least unpromising. Perhaps they were the trails of foxes, deer and rabbits for they led me badly astray. But I followed them with precise missionary zeal, to help wear them smooth and clear for others and if I’d had a walking-stick I’d have beaten down the undergrowth on either side as a public service: Vincent the trail-blazer. Unfortunately, they led me into the corner of a wood where the nettles were up to six foot high and getting denser with each step. I had to hack my way sideways with rotten sticks which kept breaking, till I reached a wobbly barbed-wire fence, which I had to climb up and jump over without tearing my clothes. Having done so, I was in the gentle meadow which, the map told me, I could have strolled in for the last mile; though that wasn’t part of the official footpath either.

And this all rather reminds me of an unpublished “how-to” book I recently had the privilege to read: a guide for the retired person. It was slightly entertaining, but tell me this: how can anyone write a “self-help” book? Even if you have been to the destination yourself---achieved Buddhist enlightenment, or accumulated your first million dollars---how can you teach anyone else to follow in your footsteps? If they were foolish enough to try, they could be misled, like anyone who optimistically followed the fresh trail I carefully blazed the other day, which ended in that desperate bed of nettles.

But still I have the urge to delineate this constant aim, this would-be theme of my writing which is so difficult as to cripple me in writer’s block till I take solace in car repair, or get pulled irresistibly into daytime naps, a kind of narcolepsy delicious in the yielding.

All I can do is tell you the circumstance and not the essence. For example, the other day I stepped out of the house for a stroll, in a long evening where the sun had reappeared after a day of heavy rain: a symbol of joy in itself, no doubt. How would a poet describe what I felt in that moment? Should he describe the scene? This is hardly a picturesque part of town, being the poorer district, developed around 1900 with factories and workers’ cottages, nothing much changed since, except for the evidence of successive immigrant “invasions”. Its run-down littered state, with loose bricks not cemented back into place, shows that sprucing-up with middle-class money has yet to occur.

My constant aim is to try and express these moments of ecstasy. Which is impossible. I went out without the digital recorder. The only words I brought back were those which entered my head as I stepped out of the front door into the sunset: “This is the Infinite.”

Hole in the head

2008-07-04T05:19:00.015+01:00

Phineas Gage was swift, capable, responsible. He was physically fit and a leader of men. These qualities made him at the age of 25 a supervisor on a Vermont railroad construction project and might have helped him rise through the ranks to a senior management position in that branch of engineering. But the smooth track of his life was shattered in a single instant.

A certain part of the terrain was littered with huge rocks. It had been judged less costly to blast them with gunpowder and build a straight railroad, than to detour round them. It was 1847 and Alfred Nobel being only 14 had not yet invented dynamite. The established blasting method was to drill a deep hole in the rock, pour in gunpowder, poke in a fuse (a long string made of gunpowder wrapped in paper) and cover with sand or clay. This had to be firmed up by tamping with an iron rod, so that the force of the exploding gunpowder would radiate in all directions, and not just back up the drilled hole, as from a gun.

On this particular occasion, Gage was preparing a number of blasting-holes. He found it a monotonous routine, something he could do with only half his attention. He was interrupted by a question from a fellow-worker, which took longer than anticipated to resolve. When he resumed, he forgot he hadn’t yet added sand to the current hole. He tamped the naked gunpowder with his iron bar. It sparked against the rock and set off the powder like a flintlock gun. The bar shot out with the force of a cannon-ball, passing through his skull. That single moment is the basis of his enduring fame.

My own introduction to Phineas Gage was The Omnibus Believe It Or Not, by Robert Ripley. I was seven or eight, and must have skipped the boring sentence where it said that “[the crowbar] made its exit at the junction of the coronal and parietal sutures ...” I was more influenced by the accompanying drawing, which showed the bar at the moment of passing through, going into his skull on one side and emerging at the other. For nearly sixty years I carried a mental image of Gage staggering along a track for assistance with the crowbar still in his head, though in truth it had passed through swiftly and out the other side, taking bits of brain with it.

So when the story of Phineas Gage came up again in a book I’ve been recently reading by Antonio Damasio, it was familiar, like a Bible story woven into the fabric of my imaginative life. As for Damasio, my connection with him goes far beyond any academic interest in neuro-science. David Mickel put me on to him after my miracle cure from chronic fatigue syndrome. That illness was the great rock which blocked the track of my life. Must I curve around it, accepting its permanence? I didn’t know until a time when with all the force of my survival instinct I cursed it and rebelled against my fate. Dr Mickel’s therapy was the blasting process, miraculously sudden and effective, like a single explosion. Later, when I went to Edinburgh to study with Dr M himself, he recommended The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio, whose earlier and more significant book I’m reading now: Descartes’ Error. It starts with an account of how Damasio’s wife Hanna, using Gage’s damaged skull preserved in the Harvard Medical School, made a computer simulation to work out which areas of his brain had been destroyed.

Gage was a living miracle, but it’s well-known that his survival had a dark side. All his basic faculties were intact but his personality was changed for the worse. To his friends he “was no longer Gage”. The detective work was to discover, comparing Gage with modern cases, the functions of the brain-cells destroyed by the passage of the tamping iron. We now know that they were from the region which processes emotion.

For centuries it had been assumed that emotion was the enemy of calm rationality but Damasio discovered that to be wrong. The new unemotional Gage was unable to make sensible decisions about how to run his life. He couldn’t get his old responsible job back. He was virtually unemployable after the accident, but not through what we normally think of as “brain damage”, i.e. loss of “intelligence”. You can read his doctor’s notes in this Wikipedia article, for an account of his personality change.

Why is the book called Descartes’ Error? The reasons are quite deep. I am just giving a summary here. Descartes, the “father of modern philosophy” saw mind and body as profoundly separate, with a single interface or bridge in the pineal gland. To Damasio, there can be no mind without body; no thinking without an awareness of the physical, whether it be our own body-awareness or an interaction with the outside world.

His idea, derived from neurological observation, changes everything. It makes religious theories obsolete: not completely wrong for they posited the existence of soul and God as the unseen source of the wonders perceived with senses. In Damasio I see a line between arid theology on the one hand and arid atheist science on the other.

Damasio is too erudite for me to explain further. I have understood his ideas not through the study of his books but the reintegration of my own self following a miraculous cure. I have had to find my own language to describe it. I have said in this blog that man is an animal, despite being overweighed with a huge intellect, like an elk with antlers, or a peacock with a gorgeous tail. I have discovered my own animal nature. My passions are governed by survival, my ecstasies induced by Nature, for I am its child, sucking at its teats. I am nourished by the paths that lead out from cities, and the ancientness of the open sky.

I was educated with a bit of Latin and less Greek; forced into team games---soccer and cricket---as sole recognition of body. The headmaster viewed all deviant behaviour as incipient homosexuality. We must act as a pack of hounds, with him as chief huntsman. My rejection of competitive pursuits was seen as primitive, uncouth and shameful. I took refuge in solitary dreaming, out in the ploughed fields digging up fragments of clay pipes, discarded by the ploughman when they broke; or trying to bring down birds from the sky with a slingshot I’d invented, made from a springy stick with clay stuck to the end.

I tried in adult life to hunt with the pack. I allowed marriage and children to force me into well-paid desk-drudgery. I tried to find in religion, or rather its mystical soul, a language and guide for the unruly impulses I felt.

But how could religion work, when it was based on supremacy of soul over body; all life’s treasure leached away into the abstract realm? Religion was and is a cruel assault on a child’s mind. Like corporal punishment, its use has diminished here in England, to be replaced by the atheistical religion of science, capitalist economics and modern medicine; which is far worse. I’m for “spirituality”---except that it’s wrongly named---and always have been: but not for “beliefs”.

Phineas Gage was the first martyr and saint of neuro-science. Damasio does more to explain what makes us tick than any psychology or theology I have read. But it can never make experiential religion or mystical awareness obsolete. For we possess the gift of direct knowledge, beside which science, for all its “evidence-based method”, is as speculative as theology.

Nothing in the laboratory tells us as much as our own primitive awareness. If someone tells of the visitation of an angel, or the voice of God heard on a lonely mountain-top, why should I not respect that? How else express an experience, but as it appears to you? Life is no less awe-inspiring, experience no less mystical, when we get closer to understanding the body and brain, whose soul is in every cell and neuron.

Dwelling in one’s tribe

2008-06-25T06:40:00.019+01:00

Belatedly, I discover that manual work is better than being desk-bound, better for the soul and the world too, probably. But first some words to continue from yesterday’s set of photos.

One of them shows part of the track I walked: down the hill through the nature reserve where the wild roses grew, then through high hedges, with ox-eye daisies on either side, across the barley-field, round the farm, up the zig-zag path and then it’s hidden by trees before disppearing over the horizon. Up there is where I met John Holdsworth coming the other way. We exchanged greetings, in the country fashion. To engage a stranger in conversation is less common in town, especially for me. Yet round here, sometimes when I see a mature white person, we may smile or say hello, sharing the sense of being an ethnic minority, clinging to our almost-forgotten ways in the shadow of the mosque and the preponderance of immigrants. Now that the Shopping Centre construction is over, many of the Poles who rented rooms in our street have been replaced by Africans or Afro-Caribbeans. (Funny how a black person in America is an Afro-American, but here is an Afro-Caribbean. I’ve never heard “Afro-British”.) Either way, it is refreshing to meet a white retired person like myself. Retired! Yes, I can’t fight it now. I have to accept that’s what I am, and embrace it positively. So when I stop and speak to ladies and gentlemen in their seventies and eighties, I don’t mention my Jamaican wife. I treasure the the encounters with other members of my own tribe, or the nearest equivalent; and don’t want to see their uncomprehending eyes cloud over. On Sundays the congregation of the Baptist Church next to the mosque come down the road back to their parked cars. They stand chatting and joking before returning to their suburbs, lingering as if their very presence might lighten the street’s heathenness. Naturally, they make a point of greeting the more official & better-dressed Muslims: it makes them feel good to be tolerant and ecumenical. Mostly they are white women of my own vintage and they look at me wondering for a moment if I am one of theirs. But the Baptists are a different tribe, I know them not, and they find no sign of kinship in me. In 1965 with my first wife I went on a coach trip with a congregation of Methodists to a Billy Graham convention in Leicester. They too were of a different tribe: they spake shibboleth differently. I’d been brought up by the Church of England: not as its member but its protégé, like Amala and Kamala, the wolf-girls of Midnapore, whom the missionaries could not tame.

John Holdsworth recognized me all right. Just before he hove in sight, I smelt dog. I have a pretty sensitive nose myself, not as good as a dog’s, though I may have reincarnated from one. Yes, it was the smell of damp dog, and I expected to see one at any minute. I realize now it must have been the scent of some rank wildflower, but when John appeared on the path, walking down the hill, I expected to see his dog too, for ninety percent of path-walkers are brought there by their pet. They are easy to say hello to: you can address the dog directly, as shy people do, or it is acceptable and welcome to speak to the owner in praise of the dog. John and I found an immediate bond in our doglessness and our striding the country without ulterior motive. So we exchanged life-stories; and ended up shaking hands and exchanging names too.

He’d spent his entire career in one of those furniture factories for which my town was once famous. Some are derelict now, or turned into small workshops, where the grandchildren of the men who came from Kashmir and Pakistan (& St Vincent, in the Caribbean) fit tyres, or make engineering products to order, for customers far away. John was made redundant at fifty-eight, and used the money to buy a country cottage near where we met, and found a job as a cleaner, at a railway station a few stops up the line. He did this job for seven years till he retired and looking back says it was the most fulfilling of his life; for he could see the fruits of his labours and the appreciation of his travelling public. We didn’t talk about his family, though he mentioned getting married in 1966. I may have mentioned in passing my four children and three grandchildren, but I never mention being a stray who married three times and rolled like a stone gathering no moss.

I briefly told him about my new job. Yes, dear reader, told him before I told you! It’s only occasional at present. I work as a handyman, that role more lowly and humble than builder or plumber. My customer pays me, but I may only claim expenses, sending all moneys received to an old people’s charity. Its aim is to provide services to the elderly so that they can go on living at home and not be scooped up into one of those waiting-rooms for death known as care homes. I visit my customers in the luxurious “new” car I mentioned the other day, which itself is near death, reprieved from the scrapyard only for this task, being capacious enough to hold my tools, step-ladder, fence-timber etc. At least I cannot be stereotyped as belonging to the tribe of “white van man” notorious in British society. Yes, I am lucky because the car (nickname “the Gift Horse”) arrived the day before I started the job, as if on purpose to facilitate my new career.

Don’t imagine I will tell you interesting anecdotes of my customers. I shall rigorously protect their privacy. Suffice to say that they want to talk to whomever provides congenial company in their lives; whilst I want to get on with the job. Life-stories are exchanged, as well as an exchange of views as to how the job should be done. Sometimes I may stand patiently with the paint ready to drip off my brush, waiting to go back upstairs and continue. So the challenges are on many levels, both interpersonal and technical. I could not ask for more.

When I took on the job, I had it in mind to develop my skills and confidence to the point where I could work for customers directly, without the charity in the middle. Just as I was writing this piece, the doorbell rang and a neighbour wanted to know if I would consider doing some painting and decorating in her house. I haven’t put the word around, but they see me pottering in the front yard or carrying tools to the car. She wanted to know my price of course. That’s the hardest part: I don’t know how to work it out yet.

I seem to be lucky. The more I get what I desire, the more modest are my requests from the Universe. A dear friend who never reads my blog writes:

“I am glad, on the other hand, that you are so involved with & immersed in your writing. That is a noble occupation, and I know you were always fascinated by the world of the word. Do you still keep a blog? It’s funny but I still can’t understand the reason for blogs. I mean, if something is worth imparting to the world at large, why not try to have it published? At least, then it might have an impact.”

She edits a literary magazine and is too noble herself to see how ignoble the occupation of writing can be: just another chase of fame and fortune. Make an impact? I used to imagine signing books at some prestigious bookseller’s, or being wined and dined by publishers: pathetic dreams of glory which have no value in reality. Though I get what I desire, I remain destiny’s child, loyal to the source and not the froth. Of all the hymns I had to sing as a child, the words which stick in my mind, apart from John Bunyan’s To be a pilgrim, mentioned in an earlier post, are these:

“The trivial round, the common task / Will furnish all we need to ask.”

I shall dwell in the tribe of the Senior Citizens, and cultivate the present moment.

Country walk

2008-06-23T14:34:00.012+01:00

Just taking a rest from words ...

Downsized

2008-06-18T00:07:00.008+01:00

Why do I have to be so like my grandfather? He bought a cheap Ford in 1935 and didn’t give it up, just replaced parts as necessary, till his younger daughter in 1967 told him time was up. Then he drove her VW Beetle till, in his late eighties, he managed to turn it upside down on a bend, and she weaned him off driving altogether.

For the past two weeks I have been without wheels. The root cause becomes plain in retrospect: sentimental attachment. My Volvo, bought new in 1993, has been “so reliable” that I’ve hung on to it, nursed it, bought the workshop manual when I could no longer afford to send it for a regular service. Well, to tell the truth I dared not send it for a regular service after I’d done certain modifications. For years the engine had overheated. Crawling in busy traffic, I had to put the heater on full with the windows wound down, uncomfortable in summer heat or a rainstorm. The engine cooling fan didn’t always come on when it should, so I modified the fan to bypass the thermostat, and mounted a manual switch on the dashboard. The trouble was, the temperature gauge stopped working too, so you had to guess when the engine was hot and turn on the switch, but then remember to turn it off afterwards: otherwise it drained the battery overnight. I pasted warning messages on the dashboard, very artistic ones in CorelDraw6 (software almost as old as the car), and rewired the switch so that a red light showed if the fan was left on. As time went on, I had to replace the alternator and the coil. The dashboard gauges one by one ceased to operate. No speed indicator, mileometer stuck at 147,000 miles, no fuel gauge. I just guessed. Finally it wouldn’t start, even after I poured in some petrol from a can.

I took it to Paul W’s garage and he said there was no spark. He thought it might be a worn-out crankshaft switch, and ordered one. At least it was the cheapest of the things that might have gone wrong. This afternoon, he presented me with a “dilemma”, diplomatically and “with all due respect to your car”. Essentially, the cost of the parts, never mind the diagnostic work and installation, would exceed the car’s current and any possible future value. He has a bedside manner, like a doctor who doesn’t tell you straight out you have cancer. He let me realise in my own time that the car had aged gracefully---at least in my eyes. Others might say disgracefully. Now it was terminally ill. I had run it into the ground. I was flogging a dead horse. This “so reliable” car has been limping the last five years like an elderly pet that its owner could not release to deserved oblivion. I’ve agreed with Paul (who performs the undertaker’s role as tactfully as the doctor’s) to have it taken to a knacker’s yard.

I do need wheels. This morning I walked into town to buy a set of new dinner plates and bowls. It came in a neat box, rather heavy when balanced on my shoulder. In any civilised place, like India or Jamaica, there’d be a willing youth ready with a handcart. The idea of a taxi didn’t occur to me. So I found a place where they sell cheap shopping trolleys, such as the elderly use, and strapped on the box with bunjee cords. Even this hurt my back because the handle was too short. Only when I reached home did I think of the taxi. Never mind, the trolley will be useful for my trips to the supermarket. It’s slightly more elegant to carry two heavy bags than trundle them in a tartan bag-on-wheels, but so what. I sawed off the handle and lengthened it with steel tube, using Milliput for the joints. From a modified Volvo to a modified caddy-cart, that’s downsizing.

But I still need wheels. This week I was supposed to visit my son in Guildford, and a friend in Babylon Town (my code name for the place I worked in 2007, at “MaxiRam Corporation”). I could have gone carless, on buses using my free pass, but the travelling would have filled the day.

I went back to Paul to settle the bill for his work on the Volvo. He mentioned he had a cheap car if I needed one to tide me over. I’m now the proud owner of an air-conditioned Ford Granada with automatic transmission and leather seats.

He charged me £100, the same price that my grandfather paid for his Model Y Ford in 1935.

Accompaniment

2008-06-11T08:32:00.016+01:00

When I practised as a therapist I would sometimes get frustrated at my patients’ use of the pronoun “I”. Despite being taught that the sense of self is composed of “head” and “body”, they couldn’t stop speaking from a head-mind which functioned in proud isolation, peopled with its own constructs. They often remained deaf to the messages from their more instinctive, autonomous, primitive brain. This is the part that performs the same function for every animal: to put survival first, warn of danger, make an assessment of the total situation, inner and outer, from the evidence of all senses. The first role of head-mind, I told them, is to heed body-mind when it nags, and take appropriate action. When the nagging stops, the appropriate action is complete. Body-mind uses emotions, not words: fear them not, for they are friendly messengers, and their purpose is to sting you into doing something. The sting, like physical hunger and pain, comes from Nature’s benign wisdom. Just as a medical student is taught “First, do no harm”, Nature teaches us “First, remember you are an animal.”

It was a struggle to get my patients to do this. There were tricks to help them of course, ways to bypass the head-mind, but some were reluctant to make this adventurous journey. Still, I made my own good progress in practising what I preached. “Physician heal thyself”: as if becoming a therapist was just my way to consolidate the learning that had come to me so suddenly through the miracle of my own healing.

What is this thing called “I”? It’s not one voice, but many. Its from those voices that gods, devils, angels and saints have been modelled like puppets from thought and feeling, to enact their dramas in the theatre of consciousness.

Later in the morning, after writing the above, I went out on an errand. On my return, I passed the Public Library, which has just reopened at its grand new premises. After striding through its three floors of offerings, with more staff visible than visitors, I left incoherent with rage. It was hard to formulate what I found so offensive. I’m glad I resisted the urge to accost one of the librarians, for I would have put myself in the wrong and upset them pointlessly. I don't want to rant about the details, only enough to give you the gist. The computer terminals seemed more important than the books. The music CDs and DVDs were displayed as proudly as the meagre selection of books. I couldn't see anything of interest: only political correctness in every set of shelves. The gay and lesbian magazines were prominent, and the books in Urdu and Chinese. The proportion of “ethnic minorities” who cross the threshold, along with the other “minority groups” (if they could be identified as such) must have been major tick-boxes on their mission-statement-conformance audit forms. Most of all they seemed to feel that empty space was more important than lots of books, having got rid of all the old ones over the years. Now you can see only what they allow you to see. Classics? Oh yes, we have those---in new editions with instructive notes; as long as they are fully on-message. Joseph Conrad? Oh yes, we have Heart of Darkness: that’s what the kids read in school, so as to write essays on whether it is racist or anti-racist.

“So what would you do, Vincent?” To me, a library is a citadel of learning and literature, an open door to the past. Nothing would be thrown away. The stock would simply increase forever, so that you could discover not just the past through the politically-correct lens of 2008, but through the eyes of the past itself. So there would be books from the 1930s about the Victorian age (and not just Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians, included “because it is a classic”).

End of rant. Trying to pick up the threads of where I left off before that, about emotions as friendly messengers, I wanted to study what “appropriate action” my unquenched fury was demanding. Should I go, like blind Samson in Gaza, to the temple that the Philistines had built to their god Dagon? Should I grasp its pillars and use my renewed strength---not residing in my hair, but in my words---to pull the whole abomination down around their ears?

No, not directly. I shall not protest to the librarians or the County Council. I shall not organize a candle-light protest march of outraged citizens, if any. My anger just made me realize how important learning and literature are to me: where “learning” includes in particular how people thought yesterday, and the day before that. For I don’t see today as any better. I worry that we are losing something, and I worry that I am not doing enough myself, being lazy about fulfilling my own destiny: a foolish worry of course, but I’m working on becoming wise.

My anger, if it’s a “friendly messenger” as I believe, isn’t to warn me that my life is in danger, but something equivalent: what I hold dear is being trampled upon. Till now, I never knew I held it so dear.

I shall endeavour to get my local library to ban my next book, by including a little rant like the above. They already have several copies of my last: it meets their criteria par excellence, being about a black immigrant who became the town's mayor. The last time I checked, no one had borrowed it.

Nature too is a great library. In the leaves of trees we can read the past. These trees, these nasturtium flowers outside my window, the different kinds of bees and wasps: they are like books preserved from long ago, the companions of our distant ancestors. If the librarians are guilty of wanton destruction, then so is civilization itself, for jeopardizing what Nature has taken so long to create. Most of today’s species were here before my own; just as most of the extinct ones were wiped out before man came along.

The message I received is not conservation. I’d be happy for my local library to burn down: the resultant carbon emissions would be worth it. Even the loss of a few species through human thoughtlessness doesn’t rouse me to fury as much as that library.

We need to find the deepest reason for our emotions. The clue came in something delivered through my letterbox yesterday: a “journal for all women interested in spirituality, theology, ministry and liturgy”. It’s not my normal reading, but they sent me a complimentary copy in return for printing one of my recent posts (Getting Unblocked). In the same issue is an article by a nun, Sister Zoë, writing on Carmelite spirituality. It’s not about contemplating, she says, but doing. She analyses “doing” from three angles: the Art of Living, Presence and Witness. Prominent in the art of living is Accompaniment, and it was this which particularly caught my eye.

“I am told that I am under the Spirit’s tutelage, but there is also a wealth of human companions, ranging from the writings of Theresa and John of the Cross to the community with whom I live, and those people who have particular responsibilities for my initial formation.”

The solitary need accompaniment as much as those who thrive in company. The pettiness of the present-day, even when garnered in the net of the world’s media (or the net of the Net), is as stifling as living in a house with your next-door neighbours. A curse on those who would have us believe that now is always better than then!

Old books and Nature: companions which transcend time. Now, via the Internet, we can have “accompaniment” which transcends space too. I’m talking about you, dear readers and friends!

Back in the rain

2008-05-27T07:15:00.015+01:00

We arrived home in the stilly hours of Sunday morning, in steady reassuring rain: a rain which has intensified through this public holiday. The home improvement shops have extra staff on duty in expectation of their busiest day, but with my dripping umbrella, I’m one of the few who make the trip. Intending to install my Moorish sconce bought as a holiday souvenir, I find an amber light-bulb and the means to wire it up.

Our return trip was reassuring at every step. Every pre-booked arrangement for plane seats, parking, airport taxi, hotel, worked smoothly as cogs in a badly-oiled machine---I mean, just well enough. K’s visa had arrived so late we nearly cancelled our trip.

I’m ever the anxious traveller. One final worry remained till the moment of opening the front door on our return. My formless anxiety was crystallized into an absurd yet compelling fantasy: that we had accidentally left the neighbourhood black cat locked in our house for the entire week. It had been prowling round, trying to get in, at the moment of our departure. As I double-locked the front door, I saw it outside, in the front yard. Ah, but there are two black cats as you would discover in this post. As we drove into our quiet street, it occurred to me that the other cat might have sneaked in unnoticed, and starved therein for seven days. Such is our power to create myths as hooks to hang our feelings: in my case the feeling that I’d have preferred to stay home.

We had stuck a pin in the map, and taken a chance. Every traveller takes a chance. Life is a journey. The rolling stone gathers no moss but still, the context of our travels is no more than the prepared canvas on which we must paint our own picture. And so forth.

What our hotel lacked in luxury and sophistication it made up for in size. Each morning its restaurant offered a buffet, a nightmare Spanish version of the classic English (Welsh, Irish, Scottish, American, Australian) breakfast: a thousand fried eggs staring from a hotplate, a thousand bacon rashers, ditto with slices of stewed tomato, sausages . . . with various breads, toasts, marmalades, cornflakes, coffee-dispensers, alleged “fruit juices”; guests crossing the floor diagonally to replenish their plates, unsmiling, skilfully avoiding eye- and body-contact like commuters in an over-crowded railway station. Outside in the winding lanes leading down to the seashore nestled a thousand expatriate bars with whimsical names like “Why Not?” (because your steel shutters are closed, that’s why), “El Open Arms” (also closed), “Not the Full Shillin’”(one of a hundred whimsical Irish bars), the “Oh So Kozee Bar”, “The Port o’Call”, “Tequila Worm”, “The Stumble Inn”. Should we cross the threshold of real Spanish bars, or leave the proud aboriginal Spaniards clinging to their threadbare dignity? We were the odd couple, one English and one Jamaican, another piece of scenery to be goggled at by tourists and locals alike. Oh, there were a few other blacks, other zebra couples; one or two African ladies, even, gowned and coiffed in batik with a dignity of carriage that would trump all others.

The underlying concept of the Costa Del Sol---which had turned fishing villages into a continuous urbanizacione extending from Malaga to Gibraltar, with high-rise apartments everywhere in the idiom of traditional pueblos---was surely the beach, or at least the glimpse of that blue Mediterranean viewed on the horizon. Yet the beach itself was a nothingness: mud-coloured sand, no one swimming, rows of sun-beds with straw parasols. If I’d have known, I’d have suggested an inland vacation, perhaps in Granada. It was hard to find any unspoilt nature. The mountains would have been a rugged thankless climb, but the Paloma Park offered free-range chickens and rabbits. Under the well-clipped hedges the hens brought up their chicks, while the roosters postured and crowed. I wish every park had them roaming free, to remind us that they aren’t just convenience food.

Being a stranger in Europe brought back memories of impoverished months in Paris, Marseilles and Florence: a lost penniless traveller in 1962. Imagination has wings but the human body needs food, drink, toilet amenities, somewhere to rest, sleep and wash. Fugitives, exiles, pilgrims. By the time I reached Assisi I had been so ragged that seeing my sandals mended with string, a stranger had offered me money, assuming that in joyful devotion to Lady Poverty I was following the footsteps of St Francis himself.

In contrast, our vacation had the luxury of a hotel balcony, on which my love affair with notebook and fountain-pen could be carried on, without betrayal of my beloved Muse. I had brought along In Defence of Sensuality, by John Cowper Powys, determined at last to write an article on this extraordinary self-help book written in 1930.

We also discovered, in a back alley of Torremolinos, a well-known second-hand bookshop, where I found Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly. The proprietor said any book we bought could be returned after reading, and sold back to the shop at half-price. “Oh, like a lending library?” I asked her if she knew Shakespeare & Company, in Paris. “If only!” said she, as if its glory was fabled, not real. I told her I lived there once, as one of the writers offered a free bed by its proprietor George Whitman, along with Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and so many others. Even Henry Miller had been a recent guest, on a trip to Paris from Big Sur (in March ’62). It was the Librairie Mistral in those days. George took over the Shakespeare name when Sylvia Beach died. See this article in Wikipedia. K gave me a look, a well-timed warning to stop me launching into extended reminiscences.

Sitting on the hotel balcony I started planning out a book version of my memoirs, with “lonely traveller” as its unifying theme. It would be a “palimpsest” as Powys uses the term in the book I mentioned above:

“Infinitely various are such memories. But I think all of them will be found to partake of the nature of psychic palimpsests wherein certain images from one’s own past recede back and back and back, into much vaguer impressions from the lives of one’s ancestors.”

Rainy-day tourism

2008-05-17T10:54:00.006+01:00

somewhere on Costa del Sol
(flickr, thanks to pinhead1769)

Undissuaded by heavy rain, and having the day free, I hankered for a bus ride, distance no object. What could be more in accord with my temperament than a pilgrimage? I feel myself much in harmony with the Zen poet Basho, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North. My copy has gone missing but memory is the treasured thing. He visited shrines across Japan and wrote haiku; but I think it was the appreciation of nature, and conversations along the way, which spurred him on.

(Later: I found the book. I posted up its beginning lines as this blog’s new subtitle. See above.)

My destination this morning was “a small café in Rickmansworth”, immortalised by Douglas Adams in his foreword to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

“Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terrible, stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever.

“This is not her story.”

If I too sat there on my own, in the same café (assuming it was not entirely fictional), with the rain beating on the window, would a revelation of equal immensity be vouchsafed to me? Would the world come to an end before I could tell you about it in my blog? It was worth a try. In any case, I have fond memories of visits to Rickmansworth. The very name of the place hints at a town superficially ordinary yet secretly special. Which it is. Perhaps Adams chose it for that reason. He was sensitive to place-names. Check out The Meaning of Liff (sic) which he co-authored.

I could have persevered in my adventure but the bus had been cancelled and I wasn’t dressed warmly enough. Walking back from the bus station, an image of home appeared to my inward eye, in a sort of golden light. “The Englishman’s home is his castle”: surely a proverb invented by an Englishman, for tell me a nation which sees it otherwise! My house is long and narrow, one room wide, like a small yacht with cabins above and below. On either side it is joined to other identical houses, in what we call a Terrace. It is rather dark, something which bothered me at first. But we grow into the shortcomings of those we love, and see their virtues instead.

Two days later:

I’m clinging to this snailshell of home now. We’re about to leave for a week’s vacation. I don’t have a fear of flying. It’s exhilarating to be in the aircraft. But I have a fear of something, a nameless physical anxiety, with nothing mental to associate with it. My mind races. Tickets; passports; directions; security; officialdom. All this is the complete opposite of home, or walking on two feet in one’s own neighbourhood. I don’t really want to leave at all! The spirit of adventure has shrivelled in me, as if I might never return, or this home might not be here waiting when I do.

Later still:

It’s fortunate that moods change. Are not the pictures we paint---and call reality---composed largely of mood, as solid as silk spun from moonbeams?

Slough

2008-05-14T11:46:00.003+01:00

I went for the fourth time in a week, on an errand to Slough. It’s a town occupying a special place in the British imagination: perhaps from The Pilgrim’s Progress, which describes the Slough of Despond. “Slough”: a strange English noun, meaning a muddy place: does it rhyme with “cough”, “through”, “though”, or “rough”? With none of these: it rhymes with “now”.

Others will remember that our late Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, dedicated a 1937 poem to Slough. It starts:

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

I have always liked the town. I was about to say “despite ...” but there is no need to balance it with negatives. It’s a brash defiant ants’ nest; a town on the plain which expanded quickly, not quite in the overall grid-iron pattern of an American city but more grid-like than most English towns. It has some wide tree-lined avenues with headquarter buildings of glass and steel with names like Federal-Mogul, set behind lawns. It has the Mars factory, manufacturing chocolate bars, owned by the famous American family: you can see it in my photo, along with enough grass to graze several cows. I took it from Kennedy Park. Don’t think of an ornamental area laid out to commemorate the late US President. It’s a few acres for walking dogs and flying kites: hollows and thickets provide opportunities for other activities requiring seclusion. It’s really waste land spared by the developers. The little hill I stood on was probably soil dumped when they excavated the land for a building programme.

Why am I walking around these mundane streets of Slough, so unlike its sister towns just the other side of the river Thames: Eton with its aristocratic College, Windsor with its Royal Castle which has given a surname to the Queen and her direct descendants? I’m walking here because it was here three years ago that I found I could walk again.

I sit here at the very spot, the Sheffield Road Rest Gardens, a little quadrant next to a busy crossroads and rows of shops. It has trees, flowerbeds and benches. I’d like to choose the shadiest bench but it’s occupied. A man sits alone there, quite still. I respect his space. That’s the bench where I sat with K that time, to eat the pizzas we’d bought, after our trip to a nearby village. There I’d consulted a doctor specialising in my condition: one which caused a kind of allergic reaction to the slightest exercise. The flare-up could last days or weeks, so I had to be careful at all times; but on that occasion I insisted we could leave the car and go over to the gardens to eat our pizza. “Are you sure?” asked K. I was. Something had happened in the doctor’s surgery. All he did was tell me the theory and ask some questions. Answering one of those questions, I knew that I became well at that instant. He had asked me about the onset of the illness. It was in 1973. I saw that I had repressed a desire to be free, for an altruistic motive. As talking therapies go, this was like laser surgery done with pinpoint accuracy. I saw the repression, acknowledged it freely, laid my burden on the ground and walked away from it. The doctor had no idea what had happened; didn’t quite believe me when I emailed him the next day to say I was well.

I think this is how the miracles of Jesus worked. A simple encounter and you throw away your crutch. I didn’t have a literal crutch but I donated my wheelchair to charity. I developed more stamina each day, gave thanks for the ability to go and post a letter without fear; to travel to a place without having to park the car close by. Since then the act of walking, healthy like a young man again when I’d been getting ready to die, is a sacred act of thanksgiving.

So here I am, sitting on a nearby bench in the Rest Gardens with my Explorer Map---2½ inches to the mile. I find the spot and mark it with a tiny dot, as if to say “Here was a miracle”. The man on the other bench comes over and asks “Are you trying to find your way?” I tell him briefly why I’m here. He listens intently, but he stands four feet away, as if respectfully. Perhaps he doesn’t want me to smell his worn and grimy clothes. His face is lined and weary but he’s bright enough. He’s a carpenter, but cannot work due to epilepsy. He could fall off a ladder, hurt himself with tools. For the same reason he cannot drive a car. We talk, discussing possibilities. In this of all places, I think, there must be hope. Our encounter must have a meaning. I tell him about my application to work as a handyman for an old people’s charity. Perhaps he could do that? He seems interested. It’s a voluntary scheme, but it could restore a man’s self-respect. I explain that I haven’t started: still waiting for my Criminal Records Board check to be completed. He tells me insistently that he has no criminal record. Poor man! Does he think I suspected otherwise?

I wonder if our encounter could change his luck, could in some way answer his unspoken prayer. But why should I need to know the detail? I know miracles can happen.

Religion in public life

2008-05-13T11:43:00.003+01:00

It’s apparent from the Web that in America religion is as much an irritant on the public consciousness as politics. I mean, you get bitten by the media and you can’t help scratching all the time. So the agenda is stolen. I don’t want to react to the state of religion in America or in the media. Religion is not about controversy but something dear to the individual’s heart.

Over here, the media would naturally like to stir up any hornet’s nest they can find; but there isn’t so much mileage in religious issues, which are considered of interest mainly to their own congregations. On the other hand, religion is public property: the Church of England is Established in our (non-existent) constitution, i.e. the Queen is its Head, and so on. When I was researching the office of Mayor for a biography, I was surprised at the number of civic events held in the form of a service at the Parish Church. The Mayor attended all these in a year:

* Scouts Service
* Women’s World Day of Prayer
Salvation Army Toy Service (at Salvation Army Citadel)
* Mendelssohn Hymn of Praise (Choral)
* Royal Air Force Freedom of High Wycombe Service
Annual Convention at Church of God of Prophecy
* Thanksgiving Service Godstowe School
* Wycombe Abbey School Centenary Speech Day service (sermon by Lord Runcie, former Archbishop of Canterbury)
Remembrance and thanksgiving service, Sue Ryder Hospice (at Nettlebed Parish Church)
Mayors’ Civic Service in Aylesbury
* St Vincent and the Grenadines Association 17th Anniversary church service.
Carol Service at the Swan Theatre
Town mayor's centenary civic service. Also attended by HM Lord Lieutenant for Buckinghamshire, Commander the Lord Cottesloe KstJ, JP, RN (Retd) (at All Saints Parish Church, Marlow)
Chairman's Civic Service (at All Saints Parish Church, Marlow)
A service of thanksgiving and blessing for the opening of Harleyford Golf Club (at the club)
* Battle of Britain Sunday
Licensing of team vicar (at Basilica of St Mary & St George, Sands, High Wycombe)
* For all our babies and children
* Mayor’s Civic service
* Remembrance Day service
Salvation Army Christmas music (at Salvation Army Citadel)

Services marked with asterisk were held at the Parish Church of All Saints, in a town with 15% Muslim population. As far as I am aware, a Muslim mayor would attend the same services. Each mayor by the way is elected for a year. The post is ceremonial, very much like the Queen’s.

My illustration shows the full ceremonial costume at the weighing-in ceremony, a tradition which goes back to the days of Queen Anne. Sebert Graham is the incumbent in the photo (1995), and the subject of the (commissioned) biography. The book is available on Amazon.co.uk, should you be interested. I am not trying to promote it! My point is to show how religion can be treated in a settled population. I don’t mean literally settled. There are many (temporary) immigrants here in the last few years, from Poland & Zimbabwe especially.

In England there are many beautiful churches and cathedrals, going back a thousand years or more in many cases. As someone said the other day, they are an enduring form of prayer in themselves: the buildings, their stained-glass windows, so much devotion carved into their stones. As religion retreats like a millennial tide, these buildings are left on the shores like dinosaurs’ bones, and no one knows what to do with them when the congregations stop coming.

Getting unblocked

2008-05-09T20:08:00.022+01:00

I’ve been glad of the chance to edit some of Ghetufool’s work lately. Writing is something I’m driven to by an impulse that won’t be denied. So what to do when writer’s block strikes? Turn to religion, I suppose, as people do when they feel vulnerable and melancholy. A fellow-blogger friend distinguishes the stratagem of “God is love” from the stratagem of “sex, drugs, hobbies, sports, money”. Yes, and if the chance arose today I’d gladly go and earn some money and find a day’s fulfilment there. Failing that, I’m tempted to finish the red wine, just to set my “artistic temperament” a-flowing. Still, I want to tackle religion, that honey-trap for the unwary, that bonfire of the sanities.

Oddly enough, over the last few days, wandering the suburbs under a cloudless sky, stopping to talk to ladies in their eighties tending their front gardens, letting the sweat dry on my cheeks, seeing the last of the cherry-blossom, pink as cotton-candy, fade on the ground under the trees---I have discovered I am on the side of religion: not against it as I carelessly thought.

I have certain religious beliefs of my own. 1) I should not disparage or praise anyone else’s religion. 2) I should not promote my own. 3) I should not disparage others for behaving contrary to my first two beliefs.

I have no other beliefs: not in God, Devil, Saviour, Commandments, Love, Enlightenment, sin, Heaven, any form of afterlife. I don’t disbelieve them either. Apart from the three listed above, I try and avoid beliefs altogether.

What is religion? I think it is the inbuilt urge to sacrifice and renunciation that arises in Nature. The gods must be propitiated. I learnt this long ago from a book, but I understand it now, not as an intellectual rationalization that some anthropologist might have deduced, but from my own case. When I feel life’s emptiness, I instinctively do penance.

Again I ask myself, what is religion? It is to give thanks and to beg for help. This is prayer. I don’t need any deity to whom to address my prayers. I find that within this human body the urge to pray comes naturally, without need for any particular theology.

What is my own religion? To get my bicycle wheels out of the tramlines. To untangle myself from other people’s reality, and face my own. My method is to immerse myself in nature: my common and individual human nature, as well as the ambient world as I find it. To untangle, I may argue against all ideas, all intellectual stuff: my own as much as everyone else’s. In my hierarchy of human wisdom, intellect is merely a tool, a servant: not a leader, prime mover, nor a generator of ideas.

The sweat dries unwiped on my cheeks. I pass a house I nearly bought last summer, with a beautiful view of the town. An old lady is tending her garden nearby and we have one of those conversations in which strangers compare their life-histories. I tell her I am from the valley below, from a little street cramped amongst old factories. She says she understands why I come up to the open view of the hills. I feel like Zarathustra, or Gibran’s Prophet. She is in no hurry to end our chat, but something persuades me to move on. I lie in a grassy meadow for a while, but the restless urge moves me on. (There's a similar encounter the following day: a wonderful conversation with a woman in her late eighties, only three teeth left. Her husband comes over to join in and we discuss the state of the world, and agree on everything.)

This cloudless day! When I feel oppressed, I think of those who are more oppressed, and send out my thoughts to them like a swarm of bees to settle in their village and produce them some honey. This too is part of my religion.

If you can enter the realm of nature, you can escape the tramlines of everyday consciousness. My meditation isn’t to sit cross-legged concentrating on the breath in its journey through nasal passages and lungs. There are dangers in that. I did it for more years than I want to mention, emerging still sane---if I have the right to judge on my own case. The meditation was embedded in a religion whose basic tenets were (1) the superior enlightenment of its disciples compared with the rest of humanity, and (2) the hopelessly inferior enlightenment of the disciples compared to the teacher. Do you understand how potentially harmful that is? My teacher did not in fact teach. He was a revered figurehead who spouted generalities. I am lucky to escape unscathed, reflecting with Nietzsche that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. If he had actually taught, it might have been worse. Not that I blame him. He didn’t insist on me being a disciple. Why did I enslave myself like that? Same reason as the other disciples, I suppose. We were brothers and sisters, greeting each other in the Hindi equivalent of “hail truth, consciousness and bliss”. It wasn’t what I wanted but it was easier to fall down into the trap than get out.

Nature is my religion now. In my body, my senses, the world around, my embracing of my home town, my beloved, my home. Oh, from all my years in a Buddhist-Hindu kind of thinking, I know that attachment to these things brings suffering. All can be taken away. I will die. But, I was taught, this human body is a most precious thing. All jivas beg for a human body. Man is the crown of creation. Yes, you might be born as a pariah dog. Or an intestinal worm. I don’t care. I embrace it all: the suffering and the joy. I might as well enjoy it whilst I am here. (This is not a sermon: you must do what you think right, not anything I might say.)

Why did I get caught up in all that Oriental religion? I think I was inoculated against Christianity at an early age, though at times I had to attend church twice on Sundays. Had I come across the right role-model, Christianity might have captivated me. The nearest I got to that was reading The Pilgrim’s Progress, aged 16. All my researches into Christianity have been secret. There must be a reason for that. I hated John Bunyan at first, coming across this hymn when I was 7:

Who would true valour see
Let him come hither
Here’s one will valiant be
Come wind come weather
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim.

I didn’t like the tune, I didn’t like the word pilgrim, not knowing what it meant: it sounded grey and grim. I love it all now.

As I dictate these words into my recorder, the sun beats down from a cloudless sky. I had thought to sit on a bench in the back garden with a cold beer, but something in me rejected it indignantly. Of my own accord I wanted what in my inward thoughts I carelessly label “a penance”: “A pilgrimage” would be more exact. I see myself as a monk, striding among the Chiltern Hills, actually the suburbs of this town. I discovered The Pilgrim’s Progress on a day like this. I was not solitary by choice then, just lonely, staying at my grandmother’s house. I had also been reading a book by Madame David-Néel about Tibet, in which, dressed as a beggar woman, she had witnessed a lung-gom-pa, one of those “legendary lamas who by means of psychic training could rush nonstop across vast distances of rugged landscape, running without end.”

“By that time he had nearly reached up; I could clearly see his perfectly calm impassive face and wide-open eyes with their gaze fixed on some invisible far-distant object situated somewhere high up in space. The man did not run. He seemed to lift himself from the ground, proceeding by leaps. It looked as if he had been endowed with the elasticity of a ball and rebounded each time his feet touched the ground. His steps had the regularity of a pendulum. He wore the usual monastic robe and toga, both rather ragged. His left hand gripped a fold of the toga and was half hidden under the cloth. The right held a phurba (magic dagger). His right arm moved slightly at each step as if leaning on a stick, just as though the phurba, whose pointed extremity was far above the ground, had touched it and were actually a support. My servants dismounted and bowed their heads to the ground as the lama passed before us, but he went his way apparently unaware of our presence.” (Excerpted from this site.)

I mention it only because I twice at that age accomplished similar feats, quite spontaneously.

So my true religion, now, at my time of life, is that of William Blake, as in his Proverbs of Heaven and Hell: not to renounce desires but to discover them, trust them, obey them. I don't see a separation between body and soul. That is not a belief, but a fact, a perception.

This is already too long. It's crude, thrown together. But my writer’s block is broken for now. Enough.

Free as a bird

2008-05-01T19:56:00.017+01:00

Preface
Ghetufool has given me permission to publish his short story here. His pen-name indicates modesty but not in the way you may think: “ghetu phool” is the Bengali for calotropis gigantea, a wayside wildflower. We have collaborated for a year or so (he writes, I edit). You may have seen a brief quote from this story in my previous piece Cherry Tree. Here is the entire story.

He watched the little house-sparrow as it continued crashing against the glass, hopelessly exhausting its energy.

The little life could see the whole world outside. It could see its clan but could not reach them. An invisible monster always put its hand in the way, just for fun.

In panic, the bird was fluttering its wings against the glass, to get past that cruel hand. With no success so far.

He had joined this organisation about a year ago. It was a double promotion with a 100 per cent salary hike: a flattering offer, but he was confident in his ability. How could he have refused?

His last job had been a pain. He never learned to get on with his boss, who reminded him of a pig farmer and abused him continually---routinely belittled him in front of others, using powerful lungs so that people several floors down could hear. Going down in the lift was embarrassing after those episodes.

This new office was a complete contrast. Bosses left him alone. Whatever needed to be said came via emails. Nothing but occasional murmurs disturbed the concentrated hush. What could be more civilised?

In every way it was a double promotion. His job title, salary, responsibilities, prestige were double what he was used to. Abuse was a thing of the past. The work hours were civilised too. You were never forced to work till all hours. You were free to leave when the clock struck five. Provided of course that you met the deadline.

He never actually left at five. Midnight was more likely. You had to take deadlines seriously, to make sure there would be a job to come back to the next day. There were no actual threats, but he didn’t want to risk losing all this.

The bird was losing its strength, fluttering its wings less now, in a kind of resignation. It was waiting for the inevitable, whatever that might be; which it---inevitably---could not imagine.

It rested on the chair. The door was shut, the window seemed the only escape route. An invisible pane prevented him from passing through. How could it have got into the office? Oh, it must have slipped in through that gap. It must have forgotten that.

Just to make sure, he plugged the gap with papers. He could not have explained why. The bird fluttered again: his getting up from his chair to walk across the room seemed to provoke it into frenzied action. Perhaps it thought he was about to claim its life.

He sank back into his chair and lit a cigarette. Soon the room would be filled with smoke and the bird would panic more: unless it were drugged by the nicotine into quiescence. It would be fascinating to wait and watch.

His boss had sent the whole office an email singing his praise, letting everyone know he’d been singled out for congratulation. It was phrased in perfect polished English, with every word and punctuation mark carefully weighed and executed: a crisp business email copied to the entire office. Co-workers came to congratulate him for working day and night to land this major project for the company.

Then he had to deliver an impromptu speech. He started with thanking his team: they roared back their appreciation. He heaped praise on the company and its work culture, promising more such projects to come. The ovation seemed endless. The whole world was excited. So why did he feel uneasy?

On his way to the cafeteria, fragments of conversation had floated his way. His colleagues stopped when they saw him coming, greeted him with that professional smile that comes so easy to tie-wearing executives, smooth like their emails. But he had heard them cursing him in filthy language, and he wondered why.

He didn’t expect things to move so fast. His entire team got a fat bonus. And the target for next time was raised almost double. An email lightly indicated that next month’s bonus would also be double if this new deadline were met. The ‘if’ was there just for the sake of proper English grammar; just to clear away the green underline of Microsoft’s grammar-checker.

He lost no time in handing out responsibilities. There was no time to lose. Past achievement counted for nothing. There was no time to relax. If this project were not met ... the company would sink. That’s more or less what he told them, in an email of course. The tone was always the same. Each new deadline had to be met, as a condition of the company staying in business. They’d achieve it with heroic effort, only to be rewarded with a bigger project and prophecies of doom from his top bosses if it wasn’t completed on target. The only time the company wasn’t in crisis was in the middle of a project.

Next day two resignation letters were handed in. Two more the following day: all junior level executives with 1-4 years of experience. They hopped jobs at will and you could do nothing to stop them. As a precaution, he doubled the salary of his remaining staff, earning their cheers. Many came to his cubicle and thanked him personally.

The following day there were two more resignations: with now only five days left till the deadline.

He hadn’t slept properly for months. That must explain his tiredness. He eyed the bird and puffed his cigarette. It had given up its struggle and just looked intently through the window, where a flock of sparrows twittered in the darkened sky. This district was virtually treeless, as if nature were a just a memory. But there was still romance. It was the sparrows’ mating season.

Do birds feel regret, sadness?

He sank low in his rocking chair, a fine piece that he’d bought on a business trip to the US. He glanced at his wristwatch – a fine Swiss one. His first watch had been locally made, a present from his father during his class ten board exams. He used to wear it all night, and rub it clean with a soft cloth. The glass had stayed unscratched. It was such a prized possession that his sister had never dared touch it. It was cheaply made by a state-owned company, but hadn’t let him down in fifteen years. Where was it now? On the move to his new flat, he’d given it to one of the packers, who had received it eagerly, with profuse thanks. Thus he had lightly abandoned his last link to the old frugal life. The watch he wore now came from his European bosses as reward for landing a big project. It cost about five thousand dollars: heavy, not comfortable to wear. Yet still he handled it carefully, like a piece of jewellery, not just something to tell the time. Oh shit! 10.30pm. It was getting late. He must have been sitting idle watching the bird for three hours. God! Three hours wasted: the deadline approaching like an express train, with him mesmerized on the tracks.

“Hey birdie, would you talk to me?”
“Free me.”
“Who am I to free you?”
“I cannot lift the window glass, do it for me and I shall be free.”
“What if I want to keep you here forever, in this room? I would look after you, feed you, give you anything you want. Let me know you accept. Isn’t this better than freedom? It will save you wasting your day on scavenging: a few crumbs here, a couple of seeds there, an insect so hard to catch.”
“But why do you want to keep me in bondage?”
“Yes. That is the question. You have understood. Why?”
“Why?”
“I don't know.”
“Free me.”
“No. You have entered my den. I don’t let anyone go. You can live with me or perish.”

He started laughing. The invisible monster, that glass that frustrated the bird so, seemed to act on his own body, shaking him with violence. He could no longer speak normal words. The laughter constricted his voice, started to choke him. He fixed his eye on the bird. It had been still for some time, eyeing him back. Now, as his laughter ceased ominously, it started fluttering again, crashing against the invisible glass.

Cherry tree

2008-04-29T07:15:00.011+01:00

I’ve been wanting to dedicate a whole post to my cherry tree but couldn’t justify it. When commenting on other people’s blogs, I have fewer inhibitions, as in this, to Michael Peverett, re his post “Prunus continued”:

“. . . I was interested in your prunus pictures because I bought a small fruiting cherry tree and planted it recently. I don’t know whether it will produce cherries though. It has pretty white single flowers. To me the wonder of it is to plant my own tree which will outgrow and outlive me, and provide a perch for birds. Since I planted it in February, I have stood next to it almost daily, to examine its buds.

“Sorry to be mystical but it feels as though it has a greater wisdom than its human observer. As its leaves and blossoms unfold, it fulfils itself perfectly, with a perfection that I can only perceive with its, and the rest of Nature’s, help.”

After writing that, I went into Woolworth’s looking for plant pots. Some pop music blared and the shop was warm, deprived of natural lighting, stuffed with spuriously ornamented merchandise. Amongst all this were some cherry trees packaged in cellophane, still for sale. I looked through the beads of condensation to the branches inside. They longed to put forth seasonal leaves and blossoms, but in such conditions these had decomposed to black slime. Carl Rogers had seen something comparable which inspired him to found a school of psychotherapy. In his own words:

“I remember that in my boyhood the potato bin in which we stored our winter supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small basement window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout---pale white sprouts so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring. But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow two or three feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. They were, in their bizarre futile growth, a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing. They would never become a plant, never mature, never fulfill their real potentiality. But under the most adverse circumstances they were striving to become. Life would not give up even if it could not flourish. In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped, in working with men and women on the back wards of state hospitals, I often think of those potato sprouts. So unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people have developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet the directional tendency in them is to be trusted.”

In the news, we hear of the man who kept his daughter in a cellar for 24 years.

As Hayden writes: “kindness practised in consideration of the welfare of a bumble bee helps acclimatize the human heart to the practice of compassion and kindness to fellow humans.

“At the root of this will-to-good is connectedness, which it appears we once had in abundance. In many cultures throughout the world man saw himself as brother to crow, to wolf. My Christian readers may forgive me for the observation that, in the west, the heart of the disconnect was excused by the religious teaching that nature and man were distinct, separable, and nature was to be used for man’s ease.
. . .
“The other disruptor was that other western god, Science, which feeds off hubris and, while telling us we are inseparable with nature and cannot live alone, contradictorily is continually pushing us towards the attempt to do so.”

Both science and religions insist that we need their insights. We see the results. A child in rural Jamaica had its own chicken to look after, or a goat if older. Then came the battery farms, and the bauxite company to take the land. And now the biofuel interests to take what’s left.

The cherry tree and the bumble bee know how to be connected.

And when I think of those cherry trees languishing in Woolworth’s, missing the springtime, it reminds me of a story by Ghetufool (his blog is no longer public otherwise I could link you to it), which tells of a sparrow trapped in an office block. Here’s a short extract:

“It had given up its struggle and just looked intently through the window, where a flock of sparrows twittered in the darkened sky. This district was virtually treeless, as if nature were a just a memory. But there was still romance. It was the sparrows’ mating season.”

Will the man watching understand that he too is trapped, in a web of his own making?

I had planned to write a much harder piece, to try and convey the sense of pathos I felt walking through the town, seeing the faces of . . . I cannot call them “the poor”. It would imply that money would replace what they lacked, when such is not the case.

Every cherry tree has the wisdom to blossom forth in spring if it is not trapped in a close dark place.