School of imperialism

This was the required kit, though this is not me

I’ve been tempted to write some philosophical stuff, but as with all philosophy, the energy which fuels it is emotion, and the emotion is intimately tied up with biography. Our life-story is the interaction – conflict if you like – between our individual nature and the situations we’ve encountered on the journey between birth and death: that journey, in my case, being well-advanced.

The rambling arguments I drafted amounted to nothing more than the following:

(1) I hate intellectual and political imperialism. The Aborigine with his Dreamtime and his mesolithic lifestyle is – no, was, for his lifestyle is changed – as much a representative of the full flower of humanity as the soldier / poet / scientist / lawyer / politician / economist of white European origin. It’s only the dominance of one over the other that has skewed our perceptions.

(2) The basic plank of the white European tradition is the myth of objective reality. This has marginalised the “magical” experience of the individual, so that its primal energy is tamed within organised religion; or fashioned into a tradable commodity within the arts or New Age rackets.

I was going to add that I don’t reject this imperialism outright. Like (almost) everyone else, I have to live within it. This involves establishing some kind of accommodation with the ambient culture, without losing my own soul.

I wrote a little memoir of childhood the other day. Do the circumstances of my childhood explain who I am? I don’t think so. I think I have always been the same person deep down, though the accommodations with the world have changed and mellowed.

I mentioned being sent to boarding school at the age of 6. Out of this time, I spent nearly six months in hospital with my leg in plaster – not a fracture, but a bone infection acquired during the holidays from a deep cut on my knee. When I returned to school I was not in the least concerned about falling behind in class. I was so far advanced in reading and writing that it was a relief when the others had some time to catch up a little. (Sometimes, for comfort, I would try to perform badly so as not be top of the class.) But my poor performance at the cricket nets, both bowling and batting, was now put down to my “accident”. I seized on this excuse and stopped trying so hard at team games, for I had no interest in them. I continued to read instructional texts from the school library by famous cricketers, but on the field I was dreamy to the point of total inattention, seduced by clouds, birds, wildflowers, grasshoppers, the smell of new-mown grass: the whole sleepy ambience of an English summer’s day. In every available break during the day, the other boys would play informal games of football or cricket according to season, but now I deserted them, inventing lonely pastimes of my own.

I used to collect fragments of clay pipes that I found in adjacent ploughed fields, together with any other “antiquities” I could find. I invented a weapon for bringing down birds from the sky. I would push a lump of the local yellow clay on to the end of a springy stick. When I swung it, the clay would fly into the air at great speed, on the same principles as the atlatl of North America or the woomera of Australia. It never hit a bird, because the clay left the stick at an unpredictable position in the arc, but I wasn’t in the least deterred. Aerial flight, not killing, was the fascination. My lump of clay was my alter ego, up there with the starlings, flying in its own fashion. I remain a frisbee freak to this day, my enthusiasm still exceeding my technique.

I also invented a game whereby I’d hit a tennis ball with a stick into a hole. My Latin master, Mr Sudell, told me this was golf. Inspired by my interest, he brought out a golf ball and a few putters, and taught a group of us to play. Part of his intention was to bring me back into the social fold, but he failed in that. I now found the game tediously competitive, its magic gone. I drifted back to solitary outdoor pursuits whose aim was not winning but ecstasy.

In the intervening decades, I succumbed to the pressures of society and felt guilty at my brooding, mooching, dreamy tendencies. I never thought of myself as unsociable. I looked for a world into which I would fit, and didn’t find it. And now I want to help create a world into which everyone will fit.

From a nest of terrorists (3)

I’ve never met policemen more relaxed and willing to chat than yesterday. A large area of the wood was cordoned off with blue incident tape, with a uniformed constable every few yards. They had taken off their helmets and ties, for it was evening and they’d been on duty since 4.30 am. Some were reading novels, but all were happy to talk, and in the end I had to confine myself to a simple greeting otherwise I would have been "detained against my will" till night fell---by excessive friendliness rather than force. I agreed not to photograph them in accordance with their preference.

It seems there is a team combing through every inch of the wood, and another team guarding the area still unsearched. It’s boring and longwinded. Weeks have elapsed already. But it makes a nice change for the cops because it’s not stressful and on this public holiday weekend they get double-pay. When it all seems pointless, they remind themselves that their efforts may result in safer skies. There have been significant finds already, I was told, including a suitcase of bomb-making materials.

As I emerged from the wood to Totteridge Common, there was the smell of French fries being cooked, and charcoal, and the hum of generators. Cables snaked through the undergrowth. Marquees, portable toilets, cars parked on the grass, tracker dogs barking, a tall metal perimeter fence, guards on the gate---it was like a mellow pop festival, where only the police had passes to enter.

These idyllic surroundings may be the hatching-ground for terrorism, but I’m glad to report a complete lack of terror. High Wycombe is still a haven of tranquillity.

The other day, I went on a mission to a neigbouring and equally venerable town, the quaintly named Maidenhead. High Wycombe nestles in the wooded Chiltern Hills and used to be England's furniture-making centre. Maidenhead lies in the meandering Thames Valley, and along with Reading, Bracknell and Slough is prominent in the new technologies, part of England's Silicon Valley. Its town centre is a tightly-packed island surrounded by main roads. Pacing its streets in search of a certain office in St Mary's Walk, which no-one seemed to have heard of, I discovered that the only people informed and friendly enough to direct me were elderly foreigners.

The locals regarded me with suspicion as if I was about to beg them for loose change. I was freshly shaved and respectably dressed but it's true that in my imagination, I was a yokel visiting from up-country, or had arrived by time-machine from the nineteen-fifties. And this was because I found the city-hustle of Maidenhead an affront to the human spirit. I'd been reading Tim Boucher's blog, and considering the trance of conformity that's imposed on us these days in the “lands where freedom reigns”, thanks to those “custodians of the highest international values”, Bush and Blair. I was on red alert to any assaults on dignified humanity. The Maidenhead streets are as I imagine them in New York, a place I never wish to see.

Wycombe doesn't hustle you. Its parking regulations and the timing on its traffic lights are both infuriating, but when I go on foot, it's almost as relaxed as a walk in the woods. I can think of only one reason for the difference. In Maidenhead, there are hardly any Afro-Caribbean or Pakistani immigrants.

Going it alone

I sailed to England on this ship, June ’46
Picture source: Frank Grubbs’ memoir

What makes us the way we are? What sets us off on our own unique path? Heedless of a fine drizzle, I set out on foot to West Wycombe, pondering on these questions. O how I love to walk! That’s when imagination comes alive and my whole life stretches out as a consistent whole. So on the way, I composed an autobiographical memoir, keeping to the theme of “Going it alone”.

I spent my early childhood in Bassendean, a suburb by the Swan River in Perth, Australia. We lived in a cheap lodging house amongst easy-going young women who giggled a lot and kept an eye on me. Apart from their gentlemen visitors, there were no men on the scene. My mother once left me unattended in a playpen on the verandah, and was shocked on her return to find not just me missing, but the playpen too. What kind of abductor would do that? I was found toddling along the pavement, still in the playpen, pushing it straight towards the riverbank.

When the war ended, my newly-widowed mother yearned for England. I adored the happy-go-lucky life of Bassendean, but for her it had been a makeshift. She was a cut above: her family coat of arms was in Burke’s Landed Gentry. Soon after my fourth birthday, we set sail on the mv Rangitata bound for Tilbury. As the ropes were cast off at Fremantle, the passengers stood on deck waving to loved ones left behind on the quay. Mother never told me that my real father was amongst those seeing us off. I had not been told about fathers, though I may have picked up some information from children in the street.

On this ship I escaped from my mother at every opportunity. I explored the ship from top to bottom and bow to stern, wriggling unimpeded through doors and up ladders. The crew usually chased me away from their deck, but I got kindness and care from a thousand mother-substitutes. The ship was full of war brides emigrating to join their fiancés. After six weeks on board, I remembered no other life, but it came to an abrupt end at Tilbury.

This return to England, with its bombsites and scarcity, proved a shock to my mother. Even her parents’ house had been bombed. She’d spent the Thirties in Singapore as a dancing teacher, with cooks and maids and chauffeurs and Chinese millionaire clients and a tall, dark handsome husband. Possessions, husband and way of life had all been wiped out by the Japanese invasion. She had escaped with her life - and her little bastard from Bassendean.

After the winter of ’47 with deep snow and no heating in my grandparents’ half-bombed house, she had the bright idea of finding a wealthy husband in Switzerland. On the way, I was dropped off to lodge with my “aunt” in Holland. Auntie Non had two little babies of her own, so I – cuckoo in the nest – was shut out of the house on fine days to fend for myself, hours at a time. I explored the woods and picked bilberries. I saw blood and feathers left by foxes after raiding chicken runs. I saw sacks of grain being pulleyed up to tall storehouses at the wharves. I found a fascinating field strewn with tiny pieces of metal and - my favourite - fragments of mirrors. We lived at Arnhem, so perhaps it was part of the battlefield where so many Allied parachutists had died.

I went off on my own to school each day, with a little tin of jam sandwiches for lunch. I dodged the big barking dogs and lingered at the smithy, where the furnace roared. I winced when the smith burned in a new shoe on the horse’s hoof and hammered in the nails. My Dutch became fluent. Once again, my previous life faded like a dream.

One day my mother turned up to collect me for the return trip to England. Whenever I got used to a life, I was dragged away to something else. Less than a year previously, I had successfully learned from a Victorian primer, Reading Without Tears, at my grandmother’s knee. Now I could read in Dutch too but when I tried to speak English, Dutch came out. For many months, my “aunt” sent me books from Holland, but soon I could not read them any more. Another disconnected episode of my life faded away.

Back in England, my mother started seeing a gentleman in the next town. Things became serious, and one day I was invited over to meet him for tea. I suppose she was already installed in his house, but I did not keep track of her comings and goings. All I remember is my grandfather putting me on a bus, with instructions to get off at West Hill. Unfortunately there were West Hills in both towns and I got off at the wrong one, then wandered around feeling foolish until my grandfather found me hours later.

It was just after my sixth birthday when I acquired a stepfather. Then my mother acquired a baby. In principle, this was the start of normal family life, but I was sent to a boarding school seven miles away, giving space to the newly-weds, I guess. At half-terms I came home by bus. Once I found the door locked and no one at home: they had forgotten I was coming.

My happiest school memory was when I was ten. My parents told the school I could not come home at half-term. I did not know it yet but my mother had finally walked out and gone back to my grandparents’ house pending divorce. A fellow pupil, his name was Cooksey, lent me his bicycle. Though his parents were in Hong Kong, his uncle and aunt fetched him for half-term. I had never ridden a bike, but I spent every waking moment of those two days on a stony track through the woods. Bruised, bramble-scratched and nettle-stung, I dropped into bed exhausted when it got dark. My dream was all of bicycle-riding.

At dawn I leapt up and back into the saddle, still sore from the day before. Astonished, I found that I could ride steady and fast without falling off. Boy and bicycle, joy and triumph, all alone in the woods.

I realised something then, and kept it a guilty secret till this present moment. I loved books more than people and riding a bike more than my parents.

Head in the clouds

After Rain, Downley Common
Pastels: Vincent

On my way to buy a newspaper I pass a terrace of late-Victorian houses, built close to the road with dilapidated hedges and litter-strewn paving. They breathe a sense of poignancy, which harmonises with today’s overcast, drizzling sky. An old man, unshaven and noticeably unwashed, holds forth like an oracle to the born-again Muslim at the till, who seems to bring out the inner nature of all his customers, who tend to linger rather than rush through their transactions.

This little excursion made me feel the poignancy and pathos of life, as if today was my last on earth, and I were reviewing the content of my days: their beauty, imperfection, yearning and joy. No more yearning now, because I have it all, except for the curse of material wealth. Like Diogenes, I have renounced all to gain all. It reminds me of Douglas Adams’ The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, where Dirk Gently asks a tramp, “Have you lost something?” “Have I lost something?” he said in querulous astonishment. “Have I lost something? . . . The sky? . . . The ground?”

Certainly the sky is mine. I lay claim to it. The clouds are mine, but they’re yours too. On earth, there is suffering and precious moments of joy, then we die. In heaven – in the sky at any rate – is glory.

Flat-Bottomed Clouds

Flat-Bottomed clouds
Via Flickr Photo by Vincent.

What triggers the experience of magic I care not. For me it is immersion in Nature. Wild flowers, trees, caterpillars, hills, seashore, clouds. I had a guru who advised focusing on the breath as a way to enlightenment. It was boring, and though I did it for years and years, I can’t see what good it did. I know breath is always available as an object of meditation, even for the blind, deaf and incarcerated: a “one size fits all” mantra for the lazy guru. But I would have preferred if he had pointed to the ever-changing sky and told me to focus on the cloud-formations. No, on further reflection, that would spoil it. Part of what makes it so sweet to look at the sky is that no one told me to do it.

This evening after all the heavy rain, there was a procession of flat-bottomed clouds. How magnificent! Others might prefer fat-bottomed girls, as celebrated in Brian May's famous song of that name, written for Queen. Or the drinking of hard liquor. Or praying before a statue of the Holy Virgin. Or a pilgrimage to a holy place. Or fasting. Or even focusing on the breath, though you won't catch me doing that now. It was supposed to be a way to get out of your mind, to stop the procession of thoughts and attachments. “Then what is the point of being alive,” I used to wonder, “if we are to let go of all this beauty, just because it might hurt us too?” I did not quite have the confidence to go my own way. Could all the saints and sages be wrong? Wasn’t this Buddhistic obsession with the avoidance of suffering a bit like the Health and Safety regulations which ban anything which might conceivably cause an accident?

To be introduced to your own breath by a third party is a monstrous thing. It works just fine without our conscious mind trying to focus on it. But that guru was right to praise “joy without reason” and identify its source as within me and not in the world. I don’t care what he says any more. I’ve worked out for myself that it’s the solitary contemplation of natural beauty which best brings me to where I want to be.

My recently taken-up hobby of painting in pastels – which would take so many years of dedication to produce something good – is partly to do something intricate with my hands and mostly to pay homage to Nature. When I look at the sky I want to be able to mirror some part of its beauty. Not with photography, which is flat & mechanical, but with my soul’s response to the clouds.

From a nest of terrorists (2)

The trouble caused by these terrorist plots goes on and on. While hand-cream is still used in this household without triggering major incident, something nasty nearly happened to me this morning.

I was returning from the petrol station with a copy of the local paper. I learned that suspects have been arrested in every street where I once considered renting a flat, but not the street where I live now.

I was absorbed in reading about how mounted police had cordoned off King’s Wood in order to dig for explosives. It was a bit like my post “A grave mystery unearthed”.

All of a sudden, a hand grabbed my sleeve, accompanied by a loud cry. An earnest grey-haired lady was at my side. She’d been walking behind me, but speeded up when she saw that I was about to step in a pool of vomit.

I thanked her for this prompt rescue. I was immediately reminded of the other day when, distracted by BBC News 24 live coverage of counter-terrorist actions in my town, I’d let my blackberry jam turn into purple toffee. “It’s all because of the terrorists, they put such chaos in our lives,” I quipped.

I don't suppose many passers-by would have grasped the subtlety of my joke, but this lady being Polish with very little English, it went over her head. “Terrorists? Terrorists!” She rolled her eyes and pointed a finger to her head significantly: “It’s money! All money!” I guess neither of us knew what the other meant.

Magical Versus Logical

Surma children from Ethiopia, showing off body art
Picture credit: The African Conservancy Gallery

Some years ago I had a vivid experience of the night world. The location was prosaic enough: Cherry Garden Lane in a leafy suburb of Folkestone, late November. But these labels apply to the ordered daytime world. At night, when I stumbled on it first, my footfalls echoed in the lamplit clearing of an archaic jungle, connecting me with a distant past. I had a vision in which some Neolithic hunters crouched around a fire that made the shadows dance and separated the brightness of their hearth from a looming undergrowth replete with unseen life.

It was then that I had the fancy that in darkness you enter a completely different reality, whose mapping to the daytime world is tenuous, and has to be constantly reasserted with the dubious aid of logic.

Under a yellow street-lamp, the world was painted in strange colours. Frost sparkled on the paving-stones. Away from the lamp’s illuminated circle, everything was colourless, black, hiding its secrets in brooding shrubberies.

When I later witnessed the calm morning bustle of cars reversing out of drives, postmen and milkmen on their delivery rounds, it took considerable effort to conflate night and day versions as two views of a single place. So for a while there was an unbridged gap: two unreconciled worlds!

We allow logic to destroy magic just as we allow daylight to destroy our vision of darkness. Logic is just a construct which we use as a tool. If we decide that it exclusively defines reality we rob ourselves.

I've spent my career in engineering: not with constructs of metal, plastic or carbon fibre, but software. When engineering products break down there is always a reason, and logic can almost always find it. Software is pure logic, it has no other substance.

But in my bodily life, I cultivate the magical view, with totems and fetishes and animism and shamanic attitudes. Far from believing in mind over matter, I am strongly affected by sun and rain and seasons and the spirit of places and the vibes that reveal individuals, much more than their often false words. “Western civilisation” is not superior to any other adaptation to life on earth and in many ways is impoverished, as discussed here several times, with contributions from Rage of Reason.

Anything said here in words is neither true nor false but an artifact, like body-decorations of feathers, beads, or smeared ochres. What do you see in the picture above? Three children having fun as children do. They have painted their faces the same way, so that each sees a mirror-reflection of the One, and they are lifted beyond dusty poverty to a magical reality. You and I can share it directly.

My Woodland Day-Trip

I’ve spoken a couple of times in this blog about “Cosmic Ordering”, though I prefer to use the less presumptuous phrase “Asking the Universe”. It always works for me, but I don’t ask for much, being generally so contented that I don’t want to change anything.

A few weeks ago I was feeling frustrated with the idler's life and thought it would be nice to get back into my old line of business, within an office environment. It’s been eight years since I last did that, and I’ve changed so much I was curious as to how it would feel. So I sketched an idle fancy: a job no longer than two weeks in duration, which would draw upon my long-matured computer skills, no more than four miles away, working for a firm engaged in an honest trade. That was my cosmic order.

Last Friday an agency emailed me hoping I’d be available to start a job on Monday, on exactly the terms I had envisaged. So today I started, after a weekend of anticipation. How would I manage the 9 to 5 routine? What to wear? It’s been so long and the world has changed. Do men still wear ties and suits to work? How will my new colleagues respond to the strange vibe of a former battery-hen who's escaped to freedom and returns as a mere tourist?

I turned up at the delightfully sprawling offices of a certain group whose business is wood, research, fire equipment, timber advisory consultancy, that sort of thing. It is reached by a narrow winding lane and surrounded on all sides by beautiful woods. A carved oak fireplace decorates the reception area and a beautiful wooden plaque commemorates a visit by the Duke of Gloucester in 1978.

I wasn’t given a desk and chair. Coffee was not offered. My plan of spending the morning in gentle acclimatisation withered in the bud. I was taken straight to a computer screen, without the invitation to sit down. The problems I was to solve in the next two weeks were demonstrated, with a running commentary which I could hardly absorb. It seemed to come out without pause for breath, like a mighty river whose dam has broken. As an old hand I am used to this. To reassure the client, I ad libbed a vague plan of action and indicated I would get on with it on my own, asking them for any further help as needed.

I solved the first problem within the hour and heard myself say that there was much more to be done, they shouldn’t think this of this as anything more than a clumsy workaround, a temporary fix. Then the other problems yielded easily to the same kind of investigation and by noon my client was delighted with the outcome. “Well, that’s all we wanted,” they said, and would have been happy enough to say goodbye there and then. I muttered something about the terms of the contract, but to tell you the truth, my appointment was so rapidly arranged that to date, I have not seen any contract.

The afternoon was spent in consolidating, testing, installing and documenting the various solutions arrived at so easily in the morning. The IT manager rang up the agent, whose heart, he confided later, immediately sank. When a client rings the agency halfway through the first day it’s invariably to say that the contractor’s no good. Au contraire, the client was delighted that I had finished the job faster than he'd believed possible, and in recognition of this would give me two days’ pay for one day’s work.

So how did I feel? Triumphant? No. Embarrassed and awkward, like the child who’s top of the class and faces the scornful envy of his fellows. I’d made a fool of them. Or perhaps it wasn’t that. Perhaps it’s always tense like that in the broiler-house, especially when a stranger breezes in who’s not a customer and whose status is completely unknown. I found myself wary as a wild animal, uncomfortable.

To a horse who’d been broken in and then domesticated for his full working life, eventually released to the great fenceless plains as a born-again mustang, a single day in the corral was enough.

From a nest of terrorists

High Wycombe is no different now that it has been exposed as the home of several “monsters of evil”, who wanted to “commit mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. It’s still a place where races and religions work seamlessly together. Good neighbourliness is the norm. This morning my car’s battery ran down again. So I asked my neighbour to help, and borrowed some jump leads from the Pakistani-run car hire place on the corner. I like the way the Pakistanis do business. They help their brothers and they trust, and they interact person-to-person. Compare this with some of the whites who would hide behind their roles and their rules, which they rate higher than helping other people. Perhaps it's because they are unable to judge human nature; certainly those ones have not understood we are all brothers and sisters and interdependent.

Ha ha! I suddenly remember that when I first moved into this flat my Pakistani landlord worried that I might be a pimp. He's been once bitten, so twice shy. Just to tease him, I continued to let him wonder about the mystery of how I earned my livelihood. He was only reassured when he stumbled on a book I’d written about a Jamaican former mayor of Wycombe.

Foolish Mr Bush declared a war against terror, so he cannot complain when individuals choose which side they want to fight on. Instead of labelling his enemies as “evil”, he’d have been wise to act against crimes (on any side of the political divide including his own), rather than bombing and invading the countries where he presumed they were hiding. It's possible to be an enemy of America without being evil, and of course it is not practicable for any group or state to declare war on America in the regular manner. It would help so much if America, Britain and Israel would just behave like decent neighbours to the rest of the world. Then they would live in peace.

I'm glad to report that High Wycombe is not in fear of bombardment from crazed “friends of freedom” and we are not choking in a cloud of fear and suspicion. Everything continues as normal. Neighbours behave decently to one another.

In these parts, the reality we observe speaks louder than the propaganda forced upon us.

Blackberry jam - sequel

I do hope this will not sound flippant, but my jam-making has been sabotaged by international terrorism, in a roundabout and unintentional kind of way.

News broke of the attempt to blow up planes flying from London to America, and High Wycombe was mentioned as one of three places where the suspects have been arrested. They have closed off part of a street very near to my son's former school. Perhaps I have passed a suspect more than once in the street. The news was absorbing rather than disturbing. We do things differently here. Were this Lebanon, I'd be on my way out of town before the bombing starts.

As it is, nothing worse has happened than my forgetting the jam on the stove, so that it's been cooked too long.

Blackberry jam

Blackberries, High Wycombe. Photo: Yves

K succumbed to a flu-like virus yesterday and stayed off work. As her resident physician I prescribed aspirin, white rum, limes and honey. Later, as a booster to these medications, I went to get chocolate. Walking by the scenic route to the supermarket - over the hill instead of round it - I took a path where brambles were weighed down with fruit. I'd been waiting for their ripening and here they were waiting for me! Buying chocolate was a shameful betrayal in the circumstances.

Later, I went to gather some of these humble fruit; “humble” to distinguish them from the pretentious pocket computer of the same name. There were plenty of passers-by, but only one man stopped to pick, popping them straight in his mouth. I recall reading about the excited pilgrimages people made in the Twenties to pick beech-mast, a meagre nut that as a child I never managed to find before the squirrels had eaten them.

In the supermarket, there had been signs offering “blackberries” but they were blueberries, imported from elsewhere: a sad indication that people cannot recognise their own wild fruit any more.

How has this happened? The word “peasant” has become a term of abuse, but I aspire to nothing higher. Perhaps it has always been a stigma to pick wild berries, a shameful sign of poverty, though I was taught it by my upper-class grandmother.

Noisy polluting trucks passed nearby as I picked, perhaps bringing imported fruit to the supermarket. We’re content to let others plant and harvest our necessities, whilst we trade abstractions and suffer obesity and depression. We are pathetically enslaved to our supermarkets, which push down prices on our behalf to enslave those we have never seen. Then our charitable organisations send aid to the countries we have robbed.

In my adopted land, England, there was much poverty in the later eighteenth century. Those who stole to eat were transported to my birthplace, Australia. The rest flocked to dark Satanic mills to staff the Industrial Revolution. At the start of the twentieth century, Taylorism completed the project of depriving the working man of pride in his skills and handiwork.

If you organised them into gangs and paid them, people would certainly pick blackberries. If you produced television documentaries to tell them what’s in front of their own eyes, they might open them and see. But I’m in danger of distinguishing myself from “people”, and getting sad about humanity. I’ll go and make some blackberry jam.

Giving something back

Carline thistle, near Hale Farm, Ibstone. Photo: Yves

To be a writer, you only need one reader. If you google “literary blogs” you will find those which gossip about literature, rather than consider themselves as literature. I am not interested in gossip, and abhor the clichéd thoroughfares of discourse. But I think blogging is my kind of literature, at least for now. Crawford Killian is one of those who consider that blogs are a new literary form capable of the heights. Seth Godin, giving Advice for authors strongly recommends a blog as a trailer for a book, starting three years before its publication. He also counsels against the mean-spiritedness of keeping the ideas for the paying readers:

Understand that a non-fiction book is a souvenir, just a vessel for the ideas themselves. You don’t want the ideas to get stuck in the book... you want them to spread. Which means that you shouldn't hoard the idea! The more you give away, the better you will do.

The book as a souvenir---that’s a lovely idea. You go into a museum or art gallery full of priceless artefacts, then on the way out you purchase souvenirs: a bunch of postcards or a poster. And here we are not speaking merely of ideas, but of experience. Possess a book, and it languishes on your shelves like something washed up on a lonely shore. A blog remains on the public shelves of the world's greatest library, available to every borrower.

For years, I “wanted to be a writer”, without considering what it meant. Not to be a journalist, not to write best-sellers, but once in a while to move others as I have been moved. It sounds so vague. More than anything else in life, I have treasured the magical anticipation when raw creative energy builds within me. What does it want to shape? Not till it manifests do we know.

In the paintings of Van Gogh, the novels of John Cowper Powys, and in music from Senegal and Jamaica, I find the very essence of what I want to do in . . . in these blog posts! I’ll give it my best.

As a young man, I was aware of intense pure impulses to feel and share. But I did not know how to deal with a magnetic force which tried to pull me away from the common world; an excitement which reached its peak in solitary contemplation but frustrated my attempts to bring it forth.

Now, Darius says: “You are extremely fortunate - and fortunate enough to know it.” Oh true! And how fortunate to spend the rest of one’s life sharing that knowing, so that others too can see that they are---can be---equally fortunate. It will be enough. It will pay my share of the tax that we each owe to this world---to give something back.

I used to be vaguely inspired by nuns in enclosed orders, “praying for the world”---an action with unprovable effect. But now our bright silk prayer-flags can flutter in the deep blue of the blogosphere, for all to see.

Outsider

Amersham Hospital
Photo by Vincent.

I glory in my sure-footedness, and the comfort of a buttoned cardigan, on a chilly August day, walking through a stubble-field in a slow insistent drizzle. My path takes me behind a row of sturdy houses. Their backyards look untidy from the rear, with canvas chairs left outside to get wet, children’s toys left strewn for another day.

Fresh-cut stubble is more golden than the dull ochre of uncut barley. It gleams metallic, even on a damp overcast day. O, my legs feel so sturdy! I am in my prime, without any dog as companion, just this tape recorder, to share immediate impressions. In stubble I need no longer keep to the footpath but can wander unimpeded, so I go to the top of the ridge for a long-range view on all sides, and a sharp wind. Amongst other detritus, I find here an unopened bag of potato crisps. I open and eat. Is it angel-sent, Manna from heaven? Ugh! I think not, but I finish it anyway, so that I can screw up the empty bag and put in my pocket, rather than drop litter in a sacred place, though it was already litter when I found it. How lucky I am to have the benefit of home-cooked food each day, that makes such factory-fare seem as ashes in my mouth.

From the ridge, I gaze down on roof-tops and survey the world of work. Over there is a car park, whose attendant, in a yellow high-vis vest, checks the authorisations of each arrival. Ah yes, but as a pedestrian, I could go there without being stopped! I shall “wander, lonely as a cloud”, not through daffodils but through concrete mazes of the built world. O glory! O wonder! This is so great. I am cleansed by this wind. This is my home. Here my spirit expands. What more could one ask? Glory! All the sweeter because an ailment prevented me for years from walking thus, except in imagination. Anxiety that I would run out of energy, and be stranded on a hill such as this, would even pervade my dreams. And before that, in the athletic days of youth? Ailments of the mind were effective shackles that kept me enslaved.

Now is the time of glory. Now is the time of thanking God, even a God that I invent, in order to have someone to thank. Now I go down Whielden Street, under the Cornes Bridge where the bypass goes overhead. Dried guano is crunchy underfoot, output of families of pigeons who roost here. Turn left and I’m at the Hospital, passing first the Haleacre Unit, where brisk nurses guard the insane. I look down a slope to their exercise yard, protected by a high wire fence, like a POW camp. A man stands, reading his newspaper and smoking. Two other patients are engaged in deep conversation. I certainly look madder than they, with my cardigan bedewed in drizzle, and a floppy canvas hat low over my eyes.

I reach the car park attendant and greet him politely in passing. He’s startled as if caught out, but stammers a reply: “Good morning, Sir.” It's the senior staff car park, where pecking order rules. Perhaps he thinks I am an off-duty Professor of Psychiatry whose face he has unaccountably forgotten, poor man. I stride towards the interesting building I’d spotted from the hill. Its plate says “Day Nursery”, and it’s a dead-end, even for pedestrians. A couple of women eye me suspiciously, as if I were an ogre seeking infant flesh for breakfast. I look back at the golden hill of barley stubble, where I was standing just a few minutes before. Looking or being there, which is better? I've been on both sides now. Where is the grass greener? In accidental or sought-out pasture?

What makes me uneasy **

Unripe Corn
Oil pastel: Yves via Flickr

** Updated.

Today I am following on from my previous post and the comments made by Darius and Rama. They felt that it did not really matter what someone believes. Perhaps they take the view that there is some inner Truth ready to be found which will put an end to all divisive dogmas.

Perhaps. But we cannot come at this directly, solving all the dilemmas in one go. This will be a disappointment to those of us whose attention span on philosophical or theological matters is short. We are enthusiastic at first, but after fifteen minutes at the most, our head begins to swim, we feel the need for tea or coffee or something stronger, or fresh air or a cigarette, or just the simple relief of changing the subject. For me, these questions are an ongoing concern, a lifetime puzzle, and though only the head-mind can enunciate them---the intellect having sole command of grammar and vocabulary---the whole being must be engaged throughout, so as not to forget the body and its autonomous functions and wisdom, nor to forget our evolutionary origins and animal nature.

And when I speak, I hold in my mind---perhaps in my species-memory---a kind of shamanic vision of the whole of creation. I like to think that formerly all wisdom had this holistic breadth, but that it was the Greeks who sacrificed it for the sake of intellectual intensity, when they learned to split body from soul through wordifying and the creation of -ologies. This kind of intellect, divorced from humanity, was such a potent drug that the Western tradition has never been able to control the addiction.

But this is by way of a preamble. There are things to say.

Let’s make a start with some axioms, by means of which we can look at this venerable topic of religions and beliefs, and the state of the world.

1. Nothing is true unless it is experienced, and nothing experienced is untrue.

This sentence is not so much a statement as a definition of “truth”. With its aid, we can expose the paradox of education. How do we learn? It's often been said that education should not be just the transmission of facts, but personal experience. If we could only proceed as fast as the student could verify the truth of what is taught, then I am not sure if education would be possible, for it requires that things are accepted on trust, to be questioned later, when the student has learned almost as much as the teacher.

And what of that personal experience which is denied and squeezed out of us by the education process? Will we ever be able to recapture it?

2. Every interpretation of experience is a kind of fiction.

Somebody asks you, “What was such and such like?” referring to your new experience. The only truthful answer might be, “It was like nothing else, so I cannot describe it.” But according to the unwritten rules of conversation, we know we are to describe the new in terms of the known. So we will come up with some simile: “The wine was like blackberries stewed in turpentine,” though we have never tried such a concoction. How then can we express our deeper, more “spiritual” experience? Do we ever know for certain how to use the word “spiritual”?

3. Every idea that is not experienced is a trick of the intellect, by which we assign provisional truth to it. We are forced to imagine, as someone blind from birth imagines colours.

We find it difficult at first. When we are first introduced to algebra, the sentence, “Let x be an integer,” is baffling. Without such a capability, however, progress in reading and writing and mathematics and understanding the world beyond our own village will not be possible.

Western education at its core is algebra, abstracting concepts from the whole. The price we pay for such education is diminishment of the raw and magical power of direct experience, outer and inner, sensual and spiritual.


4. The baby learns about an absent experience, or the experience of absence, in the game of “Peep-bo” (“Peek-a-boo” in America). This is the beginning of intellect. We start with this game. Later we learn that dead people are gone and won’t come back. Then we learn a childish concept of God as an invisible person.

When I say “we” I am thinking of a certain form of society, the kind that I was brought up in and probably you too. Education was so sophisticated and yet it was narrow and restricted. Living in isolated boxes away from community experience, we don’t learn about death. Unless we have seen a corpse, not just for a few seconds, but long enough to see what death is, the discovery that people are buried in the ground to be devoured by worms will be one of horror.

5. When we grow up in the Western world, we are confronted with choices between reason and belief, without having developed the discrimination that we’d need to make those choices.

The champions of “evidence-based” reason are the scientists, themselves a high-priesthood whose sacred rituals we must accept on trust. The champions of customs and beliefs take us gladly beyond evidence and reason, but there is little basis for their doing so. We need something to help us understand our own experience but they take us away from that. We need to understand our own brotherhood and mutual dependence, but they do not teach us that.

I’ve got to finish. This is a blog, not an academic dissertation. Blogging is an upstart form of literature for which few have more than a 2-minute attention span.

Let me put today's post in a context. The Peaceful Extremist is one of many who fulminates, justifiably, against Bush’s America. But it’s really the whole of Western civilisation---white people’s culture, based on the Greeks and Romans---that makes me uneasy.