“Days and months are travellers of eternity. So are the years that pass by. Those who steer a boat across the sea, or drive a horse over the earth till they succumb to the weight of years, spend every minute of their lives travelling. There are a great number of ancients, too, who died on the road. I myself have been tempted by the cloud-moving wind---filled with a strong desire to wander.”—BashÅ.
The eastern sky glowed golden yesterday morning, over the chimney pots and the tower of All Saints’ Parish Church. I saw the outline of a hundred wheeling birds, swallows I think, gathering for their departure to North Africa. Later as I went walking, some half-denuded shrubs were full of birds chirping and hopping excitedly from branch to branch. I don’t know what species, but there was a white flash on their wings. Then as I crossed a stubble-field, moving out from the hill’s shadow to the sunny part, I heard more birds, larks surely, and they were excited too. On this chill day, the last in November, when gloves would have been welcome, a mass emigration was planned! (Surely this is a bit late.)
Bringing K to work earlier, I’d taken a back road to avoid traffic, but this was busy too and we proceeded in stops and starts. I’d been aware of a motorcyclist behind me for a couple of miles, cautious and patient. At last there was nothing coming the other way, and when we halted behind a stationary queue, he carefully overtook us. A few seconds later at exactly the wrong moment a car came out from a side road, just as cautiously as the motorcyclist, because he could not see till he had stuck his nose out. The motorcyclist swerved to avoid collision and fell off, rolling on his back with legs in the air. He got up a little shaky and immediately tried to push his bike to the edge of the road. No one helped. I wanted to get out and at least offer friendly words in his moment of shock, humiliation and pain. Our line moved forward and I wanted to park up the side road so as to see what we could do, but he'd walked up there himself, and now he was talking to a sympathetic woman pedestrian. Such a trivial incident it was, yet strangely moving, as if I knew him personally.
When has life not been fragile? Every mother has to let go of the son she has carried in her body and then suckled, to possible danger or death. One mother, whose son was killed in the Twin Towers on 9/11, met Aicha el-Wafi, the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted of participation in this attack. They have become friends, offering one another understanding and support. I hope this kind of thing catches on.
Rama the other day drew my attention to a BBC documentary, Being Indian in which we see the role in an Indian village of the Untouchables. Their low caste leads to their being so reviled that they can barely survive and are all but excluded from free education. Yet they play a vital role in maintaining the important Hindu tradition of funeral pyres and consignment of the burnt remains to the river Ganges. Ill-treatment is part of the human condition.
I live in a land where they don’t let you starve or freeze, and no one is excluded from education. The main commodity on sale is “peace of mind”. But here as everywhere we remain vulnerable to being cheated, jilted, insulted, belittled, ignored . . . dreaded reminders of death. Sometimes we’d like to leave these wintry things behind, and migrate like those birds to warmer climes.
View of The Pastures, Downley Pic: Yves via flickr
In the spring and summer of this year 2006 I opened all my senses, not just the usual five, to Nature. I’m searching here for an adequate word, but Nature will have to do. I exposed myself to the sublime and intricate world of non-human life, its pathos and grandeur.
I discovered that lambs and horses and young bulls don’t want to be patted or stroked like dogs or cats. They want to look at you, sniff you; and if they begin to accept you they might lick your proffered hand. These are some of their ways of knowing.
I saw how seeds, shoots, buds, blossoms, leaves and branches adjust their unfolding to the seasons, according to their intrinsic wisdom. They plan, they take chances, they adapt. Nature is intelligent to the finest detail; but endearingly, it’s not perfect.
I saw inexplicable beauty, like the variously-coloured patches on chestnut blossom, and wondered how much it was in the eye of the beholder. And whose eye: the bee’s as well as mine? I surmised that the colours and patterns on the caterpillars of the cinnabar and mullein moths, and the peacock butterfly, were designed as camouflage against a background of ragwort, mullein and nettles respectively: but only to a bird’s eye view.
Oh yes, it’s easy to make a rational account of observations perceived with the basic five senses. What of those other senses to which I alluded in my first sentence? Obscure memories, which tinge our reaction to the present, are a kind of sense too. The sights, sounds and smells that I’ve seen this year have stirred long-forgotten episodes in my own life, notably when I was four and five years old. I left Australia and for six weeks a ship was my mother. I survived the hard winter of 1947 in my grandparents’ bomb-damaged house; and when I’d got used to England, I was placed with an “aunt” in Holland, where I roamed unfettered, exploring the world alone much as I’ve been doing this year. Life is full of echoes.
Does memory extend beyond our own lifetime to the world of our ancient predecessors, who trod the same woodland paths, alert for the slightest movement of predator or prey? When I’ve exposed my silhouette on the ridge of rolling hills behind Amersham, I’ve been conscious that my ancestors would do the same only when they were sure that no enemies lurked. Or perhaps my ecstasies when following ancient trails have nothing to do with any of the above.
Now that the leaves are half-fallen, so late this year, with the ground soggy rather than hard with frost, I tend to walk more in the town. Instead of submerging myself in Nature, I take strolls amongst my own kind, and consider the human condition, which speaks to me just as the blossoms, and the raiment of caterpillars, and the young bulls’ curious tongues did. And what does it speak? O how can I possibly say? I am life’s student, not its professor!
***Postscript***
There this might have ended, if I hadn't taken a walk to the shop where my elderly sick computer was being fixed. Though it was only 3pm, the sun was low in the sky setting the windows ablaze on the hillside they call “The Pastures” behind my house. I was at the spot, by an oily taxi repair yard, where flashes of understanding have hit before.
All at once I felt the pathos of the human condition. Awed, I suddenly saw what makes us different. Animals spend their days in survival, but they know what to do. Humans face a bigger task. Every day, each one of us has to work out how to live. We cannot do it for one another and we have to work it out afresh daily.
We never cease from seeking solutions to this practical problem, but like cloud-formations they are numberless, constantly swelling, swirling and dissolving into the blue.
In 1964 I became friends with my landlord’s son when he came to paint the window-frames. I was suffering from depression and he recommended a psychoanalyst by the name of Theodore Faithfull, a white-haired gentleman in his eighties, the grandfather of Marianne Faithfull, one-time lover of Mick Jagger and now a celebrated deep-voiced chanteuse. The landlord had been seeing this analyst and the son also. So I went to see Theodore, and I don’t think it did me much good, but that is another story.
The son was a musician, into the Blues. He generously gave me an old guitar, made of steel, which he said was a Dobro or a National. I used to play numbers like this one, as sung by Muddy Waters:
Big leg womens Keep your dresses down you got stuff make a bulldog hug a hound . . . if you roll your belly like you roll your dough people is cryin’, they want some mo’ roll your belly like you roll your dough people is crying for mo’
He also recorded some blues for me, on a reel of tape: it was before the days of cassettes. The singer had a high-pitched voice so I thought it was a woman. I had never heard anything like this voice, these tunes, this rhythm, this guitar playing. Because I moved to another town, I lost touch with the donor and had no one knowledgeable to ask who was the blues-man or woman. In those days I took little note of lyrics, almost unintelligible as they often were to my ear, but one line gave a clue: “My name is JB Lenoir”, a name I heard occasionally on specialist radio programmes, though never one of his actual songs.
It was only this year, 2006, that I managed to download Vietnam Blues, which contains J B’s best songs, the ones taped by my friend in ’64. And now I’ve tracked down a film, The Soul of a Man, on the blues of Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James and JB Lenoir, with some precious amateur footage of J B’s performances.
It’s funny how the memory of songs lives within you. When your ears encounter them again, it’s as if songs can live in you when you haven’t heard them for forty years, and then you hear them again and they have never been gone from your life.
I’m still unable to decipher most of the lyrics, but glad to discover that the hero of my youth was such an aware person, with songs like Eisenhower Blues, Alabama March and Vietnam Blues: songs expressing personal empathy as well as musical genius.
From his song Good Advice:
What Grandma told me was-a good advice She said “you keep on going if you’re sure you’re right”
I proposed these three words the other day as minimal advice for the seeker who wants to travel light, and not be weighed down by the world’s scriptures and commentaries derived therefrom. I've been drafting a number of false starts since then, digressing into the issue, “What is reality?” Now this is a surefire way to use up lots of ink, paper and keystrokes, as I soon discovered.
Who “in their right mind”---that is a normal person, rather than a philosopher---would want to discuss reality? Only those with an agenda, and the agendas boil down to one thing: “my reality is the true reality, yours, or someone else’s, is mistaken”. No! Someone else's reality is not my concern, unless I can see that they are about to harm themselves through delusion; and even then I may not be able to help. If I could help, I suspect that my compassionate concern would be more helpful than my logic.
I accept that someone’s personal vision of reality is not mine to mess with. In this conviction, I distance myself from the professional perspective of politicians, evangelists, teachers, marketers, salesmen, PR consultants, lawyers, and authors of books “that will change your life”. Rather like the gardener who digs the ground, plants seeds and uses Nature to harvest the produce, these people prepare my mind, plant their seeds of suggestion, and use Nature to reap a harvest from my desires. This is what I call unreality, whose expression may be seen in any newspaper.
To distinguish the real, I need to make effort. I’ll start by sweeping up the propaganda showered upon me, like handbills scattered from an overhead ’plane, littering up the streets and countryside. Some of it is sweet seduction. Some of it I may actually need, for the world has its own ways, and we have to render unto Caesar what’s due to Caesar; the whisperers in our ear also provide certain services we could not do without.
It's because we can’t banish the unreal from our lives that we need to make effort, today more than ever in history, to distinguish what’s real. Unreality clutters our path and makes it slippery, like autumn leaves. They are so beautiful that Michael Peverett in his blog asks what has motivated Nature to make it so. The unreality thrust upon us is often pretty, but we need to clear a path so as to walk safely.
The only realities of any value to me are:
(1) The common external reality of this shared world. I insist on viewing it through my own spectacles and not anyone else’s
(2) Inner reality. The saints and prophets and scriptures may inspire me (don't count on it!) but there is only one inner reality. Not theirs but mine.
My inner reality is the only way I can be in touch with spirit. Its doorway is stillness, which requires that:
(a) I’m not being nagged by my unsatisfied needs
(b) I ignore the seductions of those who would sow their promises, worldly or spiritual, in my impressionable mind.
The last few posts have been linked, in a kind of serial discussion. I try to keep individual posts to a tolerable length---about 500 words. This allows breaks for input of comments, which greatly influence the direction we take. It’s an interactive process, “as in life”, like a plant growing in its environment. It’s an ongoing experiment, which was the original title of this place in cyberspace, as still reflected in its URL: perpetual-lab. There are many who have not yet grasped that blogging is a new dynamic form of literature, not to be derided. I'm only beginning to grasp it myself.
I was going to talk on the theme “Distinguish what’s real” but Kathy has raised a point about spirituality---a topic on which I always feel there is much to say. Where should “spirituality” be placed on the Maslow hierarchy of needs? Here is a web page which suggests that it should be at the top. I recall a discussion in a counselling training group where we all accepted this without question. The site linked above suggests that the spiritual needs in question are: love, wholeness, perfection, completion, fate, justice, truth, orderliness, justice, God, meditation, prayer, purity. It’s a long list but why not?
In my One Piece of Baggage post, I spoke about people who reach the top of the Maslow pyramid and then float off like balloons into a sky full of fluffy clouds. To them that’s their spiritual path---trying to grasp hold of mere words or rituals---and I was mocking it in a way, because something felt wrong.
Kathy must have felt the same because she commented: “I think spirituality is found at the bottom of triangle”. In one sentence she punctures the New Age balloon, i mean its false element. For who can live without the spirit, whatever spirit may be, from birth onwards? It’s the difference between a baby and a doll. Some would even claim that a doll is a fetish into which a certain amount of spirit is poured, from the love that its owner bestows on it. Of course this is contrary to science, but it’s a way to talk about our subjective experience, which is the only place we’ll ever encounter spirit, whatever spirit may be.
Can we put spirituality at the bottom of the triangle, along with breathing, food, excretion and sex? Yes! Spirit means breath anyhow, from the Latin spiritus from spirare, to breathe. Ancient sages of both East and West did not understand why we breathe so they made it into a ghostly myth. We know that breathing is just as basic and physiological as excretion.
Spirit by the common consent of language usage is my inner life, the ultimate feeling of “me”, my instinct to worship, to feel gratitude; the joy in being alive which I share with all creation. It is the possibility of a joy transcending any material grimness or deprivation. Fie upon those who push their pseudo-spirituality in the market-place and think they are better than the poor and wretched and brain-damaged and the Death Row prisoners! Spirit is basic, and spirituality can be nothing more than a conscious connection with it, independent of other needs.
After writing the previous piece, I was fired up to continue immediately, but life intervened, & the mood is a little different now. I wanted to get feedback from others before putting in a tentative answer of my own to the question I had raised. Thanks, Imemine, Serenity and Kathy for your proposals received so far.
If I am a sage and I’m going to dictate a scripture, even if it’s only three words in length, I have to be very careful. I’m going to be addressing everyone, now and in the future. My words will be taken out of context and misinterpreted by some odd people. Imagine if I apply for indemnity insurance, in the way therapists are obliged to do, in order to provide a financial incentive for people to sue them. Fill in the form. Occupation: ........Messiah.......... I think the premium would be out of my reach.
One thing you'd have to deal with would be cultural differences across the world. Imemine (see comments on last post) proposes “Mind your own”. I like it, I understand it, but others would see it differently. I recall a case in which an English tourist in a hired car was touring the southern United States. He got lost and knocked on the door of an isolated farmhouse at 1 in the morning to ask where he was. A light was on, so he was fairly certain he was not waking anyone up. The householder opened the door and without asking too many questions shot him dead. I guess he was minding his own.
Kathy proposes “I don’t know”. Unless she means she doesn’t know how to answer my question, I think “I don’t know” is a pretty safe quote for a sage. I can’t see any consequential damages arising from it. On the other hand, if you have yet to establish your reputation, it might not enhance your credibility too much.
Serenity proposes “Governance by LOVE”. Now LOVE is something that Serenity knows about. It emanates from her: something more than kindness but which nevertheless includes kindness. I feel it is her gift and her destiny. But as a piece of advice I am not sure that people will know how to follow it. Those through whom Love flows like a mighty river, or even a timid stream, will already know its power to govern the world. But how will those currently in power, who use different methods, be persuaded to step aside and give it a chance? There's the rub.
It is with some humility that I offer my own suggestion as to a three-word scripture for today’s world. I even had a moment where it felt like sacrilege (or is it blasphemy?) to set myself up, even playfully, as a Teacher, as if I would be struck down by lightning. Such is the effect of our religious conditioning.
Imemine, Kathy and Serenity offered their three wise words without interpretation, so I must do the same, at least for now:
If a sage today were to give one piece of advice, what would it be? What could best guide the lone seeker towards spiritual fulfilment whilst improving communal behaviour in our shared home, Earth? It’s easy to assume that the semi-mythical words of Buddha or Jesus are just as potent today as when first spoken in a very different world. But away with such huge assumptions, and away with the inherited weight of so much baggage! Let’s imagine that you, passenger on the journey of life, are restricted to just one item of wisdom, stowed on board at your feet.
Times really have changed. When the old scriptures were written, most people never travelled beyond their own village. Very few could read. Except for gentlefolk and scholars, life was “brutish and short”. But spiritual life---worship, prayer, sacrifices, rituals---was intense. Much was felt inside, the heart bursting with heightened emotions; though I have only imagination to tell me so. Life was full of natural sights and sounds and smells, sharp pains, bitter cold, burning heat. What did “beliefs” matter? Bow before this god, you survive. Bow before that one, you are tortured and killed.
There are parts of the world where some still live in those old ways. We may find it difficult to understand what makes them ready to die for a certain form of society, or conversely risk their lives to escape it. Our own ancestors were no different, so let’s not hasten to condemn.
Whatever doctrines may arouse our passions, we still have Maslow’s pyramid to climb, that hierarchy of needs: food, shelter, dignity . . .
When the walking distance to fresh water no longer robs our time and energy, when our stores of food no longer run out, we are rich: rich in leisure to dream and speculate, like princes of old. We are at the top of that pyramid and still not exhausted, so we float in the three-dimensional sky like drifting balloons.
In the new world, a realm of choices and plenty, there’s no bedrock of religious certainty, just fluffy clouds, shapely landscapes till we get close and see that they are just a fog with no foothold. In olden times, the search for Truth was a perilous quest for which we might have to renounce the world. Today, we are accosted by pedlars of wisdom, wooed by promises of euphoria, relentlessly pursued by “solutions” we have not sought.
In this transformed spiritual landscape, what few words (e.g. three!) might a sage offer as guidance, to cut through the fog, the mitote, the dream of the planet?
(Continued from 94th Thesis) Today, it’s the privilege of many, but not all, to adopt whatever beliefs and practices we wish, and we have the internet to provide us with the texts and the fellow-pilgrims. It’s an odd contrast with the Europe of 500 years ago, which I sketched in my last. Then, it was your town or village which determined your beliefs. If you stepped out of line, you risked being roasted alive on a hill where everyone for miles could see the flames and pause for reflection.
I’m not going to speak of fundamentalism or terrorism---enough has been said already!---but of the new villages we have set up in cyberspace. Just because we may have embraced “New Age” ideas does not mean we’ve escaped the authority of priesthoods and liturgies. They establish themselves with repetitions that give them the spurious air of unquestionable truth. Friends and family circulate stuff in emails to us, with messages, images and even jokes that reinforce a new orthodoxy, so that even if we have not read the seminal texts of our generation, in which wisdom is “channeled”---e.g. Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch---we still have a familiarity with the main ideas.
Thus we will have heard of the “Law of Attraction”, whereby if we are positive in our thinking, then positive rewards---in this world, not the next---will come to us, by virtue, many say, of quantum physics. This reference to science, which is rejected by actual physicists, seems to “prove” the Law of Attraction whilst providing the necessary explanation as to why it was not just as well-known two thousand years ago.
We have probably heard also of the “Law of Abundance”, whereby there is enough wealth for everyone, according to a spiritual law, therefore it’s perfectly OK for us to become rich by utilising the Law of Attraction, by any means that falls into our lap.
These thoughts came to me, when I received a private communication the other day from someone who addressed me thus:
. . . each of us are blessed with so many gifts including abundance. So, why do less than 5% of the population control most of the wealth and why are people unhappy etc? . . .
I won’t bore you with the rest of the verbiage in his linked material, which consists of inspirational quotes from Gandhi, Mandela, Emerson, Disney, Goethe, Schweitzer, Covey, Peale and more, which somehow has been boiled down to a simple message: you too can become a millionaire, if you have the right attitude---with possibly a smattering of pseudo-quantum physics, which you’ll obtain by watching a film called What the Bleep Do We Know?
The new priesthood doesn’t worry about the ethics involved in securing one’s income. One fellow I encountered was fond of saying “Cast thy bread upon the waters, and it will come back as sandwiches”---a parody of Ecclesiastes 11:1. I pointed out that this was not due to some special magic, but the sweated labour of a Third-world slave.
So what I am saying is that the New Age religion: “you create your own reality, so think rich & feather your own nest” is as corrupt as the sale of indulgences that so enraged Martin Luther.
And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
And God said unto Noah, the end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold I will destroy them with the earth.
In Genesis 6:14, God told Noah to build an ark of gopher wood. Of what must today's Ark be built, dear friends?
In the Middle Ages (I used to study Medieval History, so I know) the religious and secular realms---Church and State---would either be at war with one another or in some kind of alliance, as in “The Holy Roman Empire”, which was neither holy nor Roman. In matters secular, foreign policy and internal laws were backed up by force of arms. In matters spiritual, excommunication inspired the fear of eternal Hell, whilst heresy could result in a painful death.
When we say the Middle Ages, it goes without saying that we’re talking of Europe. Other realms of the world---the Chinese, the Incas, the Maya and so on---had their own dynasties, while countless more lived tribally without written records. I remind myself of this, even though at school there was scant acknowledgement of the eurocentric nature of our studies. All the same, I’m grateful for the history I learned, for it helps throw into perspective the triumphs and massacres and obsessions of today. They have all happened before. Though when I say that, it makes me pause, for history doesn’t always repeat itself, and it may be going somewhere.
First there was language, then there was writing, then there was printing, now there is the internet. Without writing there would have been no Christianity. Without printing, there would have been no possibility for congregations, as opposed to priests, to read the Bible for themselves, which in any case was an offence punishable by burning at the stake.
My walks often take me to the Martyrs’ Memorial in Amersham (pictured) which commemorates this practice, and if you follow the link to the full inscription, you’ll see that the burnings took place less than 500 years ago, in the time of Shakespeare’s grandparents. Meanwhile in Germany, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenburg, and got excommunicated. In Italy, Michelangelo was painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in a commission undertaken for the Pope.
Today things are equally in ferment. I could talk of ecology and our impending doom, or politics and our impending doom, or economics and our impending doom. But in this, the ninety-fourth thesis that I’ve nailed to the door of this blog, I want to speak about spiritual things instead.
Martin Luther’s outrage was at the sale of indulgences by priests: pieces of paper which got you a place in heaven. I don’t think the practice has actually stopped yet, for I’ve seen a framed certificate, signed by Pope Paul VI---you can read his defence of indulgences (1967) here---which commends my late ex-father-in-law’s work for the church, and recommends him for a place in heaven. I could imagine the small print at the bottom: “Please bring this document with you when you arrive at the Pearly Gates, together with proof of identity.”
My own “outrage” is at something else, but space has run out. So I'll beg your “indulgence” and hope you’ll wait for Thesis no. 95.
Garden and sky distilled in a single drop click for pic credit & to enlarge
In 1977 I won an essay competition, “Software in the Nineties” organised by Computer Weekly. The prize was presented by James Burke, a journalist and TV presenter specialising in the history of inventions. Afterwards I wrote to Stafford Beer, whose book Platform for Change I had recently read. Printed on paper of various colours, it included an account of his work for “cybernetic socialism” in Allende’s Chile. I wrote to thank him for inspiring me, and sent him cuttings of my essay and other stuff. He sent a kind hand-written reply from his cottage in a remote part of Wales. Time has washed it all away, so I only have unreliable memory as a guide. Did I predict anything like the World-Wide-Web? I certainly had the idea, in those days before mass networking of computer terminals, that we could all get linked up to exchange ideas and exercise democracy through computers, but the World-Wide-Web was far beyond my imagination: its range, its scope, its intimacy, its detail, its ubiquity . . .
From my perspective the “blogosphere” represents the pinnacle of WWW in its capability to accelerate consciousness through sharing. I used to have a tiny walled garden at the back of my house, in which I’d spend endless hours in a hammock or on a rug, gazing at the sky. The wall provided privacy against human intruders, but sometimes I’d see an exotic bird or hedge-mouse or butterfly---a humming-bird hawk-moth was the most exciting example---which reminded me that my boundaries were totally porous to the world of nature, which could send these envoys from far away. Seeds could be wafted in by the wind, or excreted by passing birds: this is how mistletoe grows parasitically on trees. If I’d had a pond, fish would have arrived eventually, for birds such as herons sometimes unknowingly carry fish-spawn on their feet. The open sky was the most important part of my garden, being the source of sunshine, rain and the ever-changing pageant of clouds, in all their glory.
This blog is like that garden. It grows ornamental produce---words to entertain---and comestibles---words with a mission. Like flowers and cabbage leaves the produce attracts various creatures to come and browse. That’s why it’s called “As in Life”, for the virtual world resembles the real world. And it’s a great joy to visit other gardens too.
When the much-heralded catastrophe happens, and there's no oil, & climatic chaos bites deep, and you and I have been recycled by Nature, these sturdy computers will still be linking humanity across the ether, even if their users have to hand-crank the generators, or use treadmills, to provide the necessary electricity.
The sky this morning at the back of our house click to enlarge
In the last few days something happened to me. It felt like “I have found my power”. In 1972 I read some shortened version of Valmiki’s Ramayana – in an English translation – which, if my memory has not distorted it, started with some yogis competing with one another for the acquisition of assorted powers through fierce meditation, zealous fasting and strenuous renunciation. Looking back, I think its very exaggeration must have had a satirical purpose, but I was too earnest to notice that at the time. I’m not boasting of finding those kinds of power. I’m talking about something that I’ve seen in small children, though I’ve had to wait till now to find it. I only mentioned the Ramayana episode because it linked two things: renunciation and the gaining of power.
I went to a conference of therapists last weekend, designed to educate us in the latest techniques and inject us with renewed enthusiasm for our craft. Paradoxically, for me it signalled that the time is nigh to renounce the identity of therapist.
“So what are you now?” said someone. “A world-child”, I replied, the phrase arising unpremeditated, for I’d neither heard nor thought it before. It’s the truth. I’m orphaned no longer. The earth is my mother. I'm in the embrace of the world outside and the world inside, forever secure.
I’ve renounced being middle-class, not that I ever admitted to it in the first place. In fantasy I was a poet-philosopher, elite and privileged, but no more! I visited a certain estate the other day built 20 years ago, where the surroundings have mellowed in a typical British lower-class way: litter, broken fences, graffiti; bottles and cans and broken artefacts dumped in wild corners. It’s on a steep hillside with south-facing views of the town. Like a Mediterranean village, the houses and paths and creepers and shrubs and retaining walls and cats blinking in the sunshine tumble over the contours picturesquely---at least to my eyes.* It's a place of children: I found a forlorn doll dropped on one of the many paths and steps which criss-cross the estate. It's a multiracial place, a place of mischievous teenagers, of parents shamelessly yelling at their children: “I told you! Put it back!”, yelled a raucous voice from somewhere, as a child struggled with a wheeled rubbish bin taller than herself. In short a place where the pathos of human life is on view, comically and not too tragically.
Here was a community I would be happy in, and as if to herald my accession to the noble status of “working-class”, I talked with a man there washing his car. We almost swapped our life-stories and recognised we had much in common. He showed me inside his house and pointed out various other houses for sale nearby. It was a sign, methinks. I'll be back!
I’ve renounced being a full-time idler, professional cloud-gazer, pilgrim of windswept paths. I expect to be commuting into a regular job soon, like workers everywhere. And yet it’s a step forward into power!
* Photographs could not capture the savage grace of that estate, but I’ll try and produce a composite pastel which can.
“Vincent” is the unreliable narrator of these occasional pieces, in which mere fact is sometimes scorned for the sake of a greater truth, if it can be found.
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