Pedestrian Ideas

The idea came to me whilst walking, as all my ideas seem to do. Actually they don’t start as ideas at all. They are impulses or feelings. The conversion into words is a mysterious process, and none more than yesterday.

My daily sojourn in Babylon Town, code name for where I work, is beginning to feel less like exile, and more like just another part of the planet where I feel at home. This is a far cry from how I felt about it on first arriving, as this blog faithfully records, for a blog has this virtue, that whether fact or fiction, it has chronological integrity; I mean it says what was felt at the time.

My midday walks have lately been little more than a necessity for health and sanity, a break from the incessant demands of MaxiRam, my temporary employer. But yesterday something changed that prompted this blog, formerly As in Life . . . to change its name.

Walking has defined my life from an early age. My mother used to tell a story of how she left me at two years old in a playpen in front of the bungalow in Bassendean where we had our lodgings at the time. When she returned from her errands, I was gone, and mysteriously so was the playpen, designed to fence me in and keep me safe. I was seen by passers-by using it as a walking-frame, determinedly pushing it before me as I aimed straight for the Swan River, which in that Perth suburb was meandering and reedy.

In its every square yard, Babylon Town bears evidence of the planner’s zeal, for its shape was determined on the drawing board, rather than evolving chaotically like most other towns in England. The planners clearly envisaged that the motor-car would be the residents’ main means of transport and the lorry, symbol of industry, the most respected. Overlaid on a structure of fast roads are more recent politically correct cycle-paths weaving through underpasses and across hinterlands of grass.

But where do the people walk? Yesterday in the drizzle I stepped carefully on rain-sodden narrow grass verges, recently disturbed by molehills, and wandered at random till I discovered an underbelly of Babylon Town: a deserted park and lakes and managed wild-life habitats and crumbling steps and piazzas and walls of graffiti---much-needed decoration in some desolate corners. I was glad to see the evidence of humanity, however scruffy, overlaying the tidy intellect of town planners, however well-meaning.

The beauty of walking is that you can get almost everywhere. Most of the “Keep Out” signs apply to motorists. What greater joy than to roam the earth on foot?

I immediately think of those denied this freedom, including my own self for more than ten years, till recently: those in jail, or so immobile they need to be turned to prevent bedsores; or those locked away in a house because their parents are ashamed of their deformities and handicaps. To be sad on their behalf won’t help them. I’ll walk joyfully and be mindful of all my brothers and sisters.

The Covenant of Water

I love to walk out on a Sunday morning, whilst the streets are still deserted: especially after rain, the pavements shining wet, and in this Victorian part of the town with its small factories and chapels and workers’ cottages, the pavements are uneven to catch puddles and the streets are steep to form rivulets in their gutters, leaving little pools afterwards, where the granite kerbs have worn smooth and even the common dirt and grit is made lustrous by the water.

I pass over a brook emerging from a culvert at one side: a Victorian brickwork arch almost overgrown. All the streams are full now. At the other side of the road I cannot quite see the brook, as it’s doubly fenced off by factory boundaries. I hear a loud rushing sound: at first I thought it was an air-conditioning plant but that’s absurd, for there are no vents to be seen. I realise it must be an invisible waterfall where the stream sinks into the culvert, protected doubtless by an iron grille to prevent children or animals from being swept into the dark channel that flows under the road: how frightening or even fatal that would be.

We’ve had drought for several years in these parts, and though it has rained they’ve said that the underground aquifers were still almost empty, and I took their word for it, particularly as the stream which flows through Hughenden Park had become a mere sunken path. I searched there fruitlessly last summer for mint beetles – see illustration – but even the mint had dried up and could no longer support them. As for the “no fishing” sign, where once there’d been a dam with sluice gates and a little island, that had become something to laugh at, and I could not understand why it had been repainted. Now it does have a purpose again, though it may take a while for the fish to return. I see I am not the only one to be joyful at the resurgence of this little river: all the dog owners have been altering their route so as to walk beside it and go over the little bridges recently redundant. Their dogs caught the excitement too and though it’s still February could not resist jumping in to splash and swim.

As a child of five I used to go with my cousin down to the “Wishing Well” which was actually a spring emerging from the mouth of a stone lion’s head into a stone basin, all green with algae but flowing busily. Our ritual was to cup our hands and drink as much as we could, then walk up the other hill in strict silence till we’d gone three times around the Wishing Tree. Then we would each make a wish.

Will the polar ice caps melt and engulf us? Can we wish it away from happening?

Ah, we have the rainbow, that covenant between God and man, so it says in the book of Genesis, 10: 11-17, where the Lord promises not to destroy the earth by flood again. Does this covenant become null and void if the flooding is due to the act or negligence of man? Is there a divine call centre to answer my question?

Stairway to Heaven

MaxiRam Castle as its fictitious name implies stands as a grim fortress against the skyline, eleven storeys high. The building in my illustration belongs to the same corporation but is much prettier.

Today I got a real pass, one to keep till the end of the contract, which opens doors and even the car park barrier. I can’t access all areas, though. I cannot get to the sixth floor but Kevin, my helpful colleague who works there in Operations, is only a phone call away.

More than anyone else on the project I occupy a hot seat where everyone wants me to answer their questions, change things for them, give them custom reports, explain why things don’t work for them. Hannah, who sits beside me and carries out certain part-time functions as my PA, tends to giggle and snort sometimes when she sees the way I deal with the constant stream of queue-jumping requesters, who think nothing of interrupting me with their “one-minute questions”. People have souls and I treat everyone individually, as the spirit moves me, without planning the system of priorities which seems to emerge. I realise that one of my roles is to teach manners.

Returning from the lunchtime walk during which I took this photo of the Stairway to Heaven (Mirrored and Shadowed), I was coming up MaxiRam Castle’s own dingy stairs, trusty camera-bag on my shoulder, when I greeted a certain manager. I shall call him Beethoven, because he has Ludwig v.’s big hair and dark intensity. It took him a couple of seconds to recognise me then it was:
“Vincent, just a minute. Have you done that thing I asked . . .?”

“Well, more or less . . .” My brain was empty of content after the blue sky and clouds, and his inconsiderate approach did not encourage it to fire up again to deal with his suddenly urgent priority (which he had forgotten till he saw me).

“But I wanted it this way and you were supposed to . . .etc.” He’s a rude man.

“It’s not my normal practice to do business on the stairs, when I am still in my lunch break,” I replied.

Later he did not dare to face me, asked one of his juniors to talk to me. Good! They try to trap me in the washroom, in corridors, they run beside me beseeching when I’m on my way home. I’ve even had to teach my own boss (Al Pacino) some manners. I’m glad to report he has learned well.

It’s play, all play. All the world’s a stage. Let us not take on anyone else’s tragedy. The true kindness is to act soul to soul, from intuition, fearlessly. I want to behave with total kindness for this is the respect due to every soul, but sometimes it comes out a little harshly and I just bow to the wisdom of that, for there are things to be learned in this play.

In a previous post I proposed a quiz: come up with three words of distilled wisdom. My own response was “Distinguish what’s real.” My picture shows Reality, Mirror, Shadow – metaphors which pervade our culture, though as you can see there is One Reality which unites all three. They are not imagined! How much of our suffering comes from the imaginary? Like the proverbial coward, we die many times before our death.

Aristotle says that the tragedy-drama is for catharsis, purifying the soul. So let’s embrace the real.

Managing my time on earth

The Clockhouse, Frogmoor

In the Eighties, the Filofax was the thing to have. In the Nineties, time management courses using Filofaxes or equivalent were the answer to everyone’s problem. I still keep a Lotus Organizer program for storing phone numbers, copied ten years ago from a cute little IBM Thinkpad laptop whose keyboard opened out like a butterfly’s wings. I’m always very reluctant to move on to the latest thing, but when I do, I want it to last my whole life. At MaxiRam Castle when people borrow my pen they realise it has a real nib and real ink, and find it incongruous as a quill pen or clay tablet, but it serves to remind me that the act of writing is sacred, and indeed that everything I do, every moment I spend alive is sacred. A throwaway plastic ballpoint does not do this.

The idea of Time Management, in whatever form it was practised, always seemed to me sterile. I hate the idea of writing lists and crossing off each item when it’s done. Even before I started to be as deliberate and conscious as now, I instinctively wanted to be open to the chaos of the Universe and not just regulated by the computer-logic that sits in my brain.

When I discovered Chaos Theory, fractals and Mandelbrot sets, I saw that Chaos is a wonderful form of organisation, responsible for the shape and movements of clouds and eddies. I loved to read about Mitchell Feigenbaum, prowling the streets at night whilst experimenting with 26-hour days, or “watching clouds from airplane windows until, in 1975, his scientific travel privileges were officially suspended on grounds of overuse”. He was working on a deep problem: Chaos. (Source: Chaos, by James Gleick).

I’m composing this “despatch” into my dictaphone whilst walking out on a bright Sunday morning, at 7am with no one about, the birds singing joyfully, on a ritual mission with camera and tripod. I wanted to take some photos incorporating the curve of the railway arch, or perhaps this was just an excuse to walk and compose. Now that my life is so tightly organised around working hours, the need to perform chaotic acts from inner inspiration is all the stronger: acts which refresh the parts I’m aware of and other parts which lie below consciousness, which also deserve some recreation.

Playing back the tape to type it here, I hear that morning birdsong again, in the background. It’s the song of the robin redbreast, identifiable because I saw them in the bare trees around the railway arch, watching me with beady eye until I came too close for their comfort.

In the Eighties, I’d not developed a skilled enough song to express what I knew intuitively. But now like the robin, or rather like Keats’ nightingale, I know how to “sing of summer in full-throated ease”. Now I can say simply what I incoherently perceived then.

Managing my time is not to fit more productivity into my day. It’s to make sure I can still connect with a zone beyond time and space, where Chaos, Nature and the Divine eternally take birth.

Efficacious Rituals

It's definitely
a pigeon-scarer!
(see previous posts)

MaxiRam Castle is beginning to accept me as one of its own. I’d been entering this beehive via Reception, which has its ritual ways of making sure visitors are not wasps in disguise, whilst honouring them with attractive young ladies, wood, leather, a stylish lobby and real coffee. Now I come in by the other entrance which is staffed by a different breed of bee, called Security. Their charm is to know you by sight and welcome you daily into the fraternity of workers. This entrance is dingy and takes you through long corridors in the bowels of the building, where cleaning staff congregate early in the morning, and nothing is designed to impress. I was impressed nevertheless by a plaque which commemorated the visit in 1976 of Her Majesty the Queen.

I recall skimming through various anthropological texts, long ago, where the behaviour of various tribes was described in terms of totem and taboo. Words like ritual, mystery, magic and medicine would be used, with the implication that the medicine men of such tribes held sway by means of superstition and irrationality: so unlike the white man who came to observe them! Or so we were led to believe.

But I see now, returning to this manifestation of Babylon (in the Rastafarian sense), that we seldom use the word “rational” honestly. Rationality is a totem of our tribe, but it does not mean we behave rationally (just as proclaiming democracy as a political totem does not entail respect for democracy).

I see that every human being is besotted with ritual. It keeps us going in a world which is almost always---from our own individual viewpoint---irrational; a world which seldom places us at the centre of its dedicated attention. We have to fit in as best we may.

It’s in ritual that we find our comfort. I mean a skilled and efficacious ritual. I learn to perform a behaviour which creates a desired result, and it gives me a little happiness---regardless of morality or rationality. This is what I can do. People depend on me for this, or even if they don’t, this is the arena in which I can perform my clown tricks, whether to an audience or not.

Yesterday I had a tedious task to complete and I was able to delegate it to an assistant, an “agency temp”. She seemed a person of considerable education and refined manners, but had some difficulty coping with several spreadsheets and databases open at once so as to compare their contents. She feared the proliferation of slider bars, minimize, maximize and close buttons as if they were shark-infested waters, and she resorted to pen and paper to try and keep track of the important numbers. In short, she failed to establish an efficacious skilled ritual. Various subtle indications from her supervisor and other staff conveyed the message to me that this lady had to be “put out of her misery”: either sent back to the agency with regret, or found work that she could do with comfort.

My own rituals at MaxiRam Castle are not fully developed. I’m an ill-trained performer on the high wire, in fully-attended live shows.

Exposed & Hanging On

My two linked home computers are dying, but on one I can read emails and on the other I can post here, though I haven’t bothered swapping the keyboards so it’s hard to type with my fingers fitting to the keys like claws. Normally I use a Microsoft “Natural” Keyboard, and once you’re used that, you don’t take easily to the regular one.

I suppose you could say the same about my recent way of life, where I had time to myself, to obey the inner impulse and contemplate. Precious sabbatical, retreat, hermitage, cloister! At least I know this: that I was thankful for every day that it lasted, appreciative of the immense privilege of being restored to health and freedom from care. Out of that freedom, I chose to return to the world; and it suits the angels’ sense of humour, no doubt, to have me in a position where two dozen or so persons, many of whom I have not yet met, consider it their right to harangue me on my private cellphone, which has unnacountably been published in the company directory, fire salvoes of emails asking me to do things for them, up to ten an hour, accost me in the washroom or at the water cooler or in the corridor, with detailed specifications of what they require me to do in the next 24 hours or today. Matters hit their all-time peak (I hope) when my boss (I shall call him Al Pacino) interrupted a meeting, in which I was rather successfully fending off a request for my services, and planning to leave for home in 20 minutes: to ask me to do a task immediately which was apparently my regular responsibility, although I had no idea how to do it.

Such is life, my dears. You are dear to me because with you I can be myself. They are also dear to me, those requesters and demanders: for it’s the system that drives us all, not malice or moral defects. And these are things to be sorted out in a proper manner. Enough of work. This is my time, our time. Let us find meaning and sustenance and learning and angelic assistance and divine Love in every occurrence in life. Let me not lose all that I have gained. Let the highest principles prevail.

At lunchtime I took a walk, keen to solve the mystery of the falcons: see my last post. It was pouring with rain, so I didn’t take the camera, but I found a way of getting nearer, by entering a certain car park. Yes, the birds are all different. The nearest one is an owl, with ear-tufts. They cannot be eight foot tall: perhaps three or four: and they must be flimsy, because they seemed to flap in the wind, as if they were just cutouts. Some people went from the car park through a gate to that building, taking a path under the bird statues. I ran to catch them and ask about the statues, but I was too late, and the driving rain forced me back to MaxiRam Castle.

Witchcraft?

It’s been quite a week, the first I’ve worked full-time in an office for ten years. As it happens it’s the same company which took me on in 1965 (my first real job) and trained me in punched card equipment. These had been invented by Herman Hollerith and James Powers to speed up the US Census of 1890, and the technology was still going strong when I started work, though within a year I retrained to learn computer programming. The company has changed its name only once since I left. To be discreet, I’m calling it the MaxiRam Corporation. It’s now owned by a Japanese company, and the building where I work has staff from all over the globe. Yet I can still detect the same old-fashioned polite Englishness as in the company that I left in 1969. “Welcome back!” they said, as if I would meet old friends. After a week, that’s what they have become.

Every lunchtime I take half an hour’s walk. There’s plenty of sky and I love the silvered air-conditioning vents on the skyline, and the constant drone of ventilating fans. I'm getting tuned to the New Town aesthetic. It’s the dream of planners and engineers made concrete, a large-scale craft worthy of respect. Opposite the ten-storey MaxiRam Castle there’s a pharmaceutical factory with a German name. What sinister chemicals are in the tanks, shown at sunset in my photo? Having read John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener & seen the movie I shudder as I pass these great windowless hangars. Do they experiment on animals in there? Do they export new drugs to the Third World, to test them on the unsuspecting? There is so much that I don’t know, but I will tell you something strange and true.
Behind the factory (see right-hand side of picture) is a self-styled “nature reserve”: a little wood next to a sports field. In Babylon Town, a nature reserve is any place where the trees have grown wild and the ground cover has not been laid by landscaping contractors. Entering the wood, once past the discarded beer cans and supermarket trolleys, you find a muddy meandering path. It takes you to the pharma’s boundary fence, a few yards from the towering steel-clad wall you see in my picture.
Silhouetted against the blue sky, and jutting slightly from the roof’s top edge, stood the massive statue of a falcon: I'd guess at least eight foot tall. I tried to take photos but kept focusing on tree twigs instead.

As I shifted position, I saw more statues at widely-spaced intervals. Each one seemed different. Their heads were gilt: I could not see the colours of the breasts and folded wings. Why are they there? They cannot be viewed clearly from any position. They must be the tutelary deities, designed to protect the infernal activities within against an equal and opposite witchcraft beamed from without.
As I tried to see clearly, I could almost swear that whilst they stood rigid, their heads and beaks slowly swivelled round. If I find out more, I’ll let you know.

Posting / commenting problems

big problems lately . . . this is more or less a test ....

PS
My computer had serious problems, registry corrupted, went back to its state of 2 years ago, managed to reconnect to internet, limping. Man came to fix on Saturday, restored some functionality but have agreed with him to buy 2 new computers (we have his 'n' hers, linked), so we can start again, migrating to XP from Win98. So that will be next Saturday.

Adapting

Babylon town is not without footpaths, so I took my dictaphone for a walk and recorded some reflections in my lunch break.

“My role is to provide computer support to an international company, let’s call it MaxiRam, to manage a logistical problem. I’m hoping that in return they will help manage my own logistical problem, by giving me an “unescorted” visitor pass in exchange for my “escorted” one. This will enable me to pass through doors without assistance from others, a freedom one normally takes for granted. I look forward to obtaining a form so that this item of neckwear (a card on a ribbon) may at least be applied for, subject to all necessary authorisations. Then I will be able to reach the toilet on my own and not like a prisoner under guard.

“The most popular architecture around the MaxiRam megalith is cuboid windowless warehouses in shades of beige and white, with only a company logo for decoration. I saw the name of a well-known supermarket chain, and decided to buy some chocolate. Approaching closer I discovered a cluster of its buildings: head office and national distribution depot---hence the vast warehouses, queues of trucks and logistical efficiency. But no retail, no chocolate.

“I suddenly thought of the latest media scare that’s gripping the UK: the culling of 160,000 birds on a turkey farm in Suffolk to stop the spread of bird ’flu. Workers in white protective suits and breathing masks have grabbed the birds, gassed them and trucked the carcasses two hundred miles to a place where they are “rendered” and incinerated. Popular feeling is building up to stop eating turkey or chicken from these intensive farms and I hope they all close down everywhere. At home we gladly pay twice the price for free range chickens who enjoy life before slaughter.

“It’s unfair to make comparisons between that bird farm and Babylon Town. Human beings are adaptable and I’m trying to record my feelings before I adapt in my turn and stop feeling the oddness of these vast windowless cubes where people sacrifice the hours of their daylight. It’s not as if they are descending into pitch-dark slate mines for twelve hours at a stretch, with the price of candles deducted from their wage, as used to happen in North Wales.

“Indeed one of the warehouses bears a palette-and-brush logo---artists’ materials. It houses a company whose boast is “Trusted by artists worldwide”. So it’s not fair to contrast the cogs of industry grinding up human sensibility with the uncompromising clear-eyed vision of the artist. No, no. We must pay our dues in mind-numbing routines so as to afford the products that mind-numbing routines conspire to provide.

“I return to the tall fastness of MaxiRam, like a medieval castle with the striped boom of its gate for a drawbridge, the car park for a moat, Reception for a portcullis. The Englishman’s home is his castle, they say. I feel friendly towards this castle. It’s becoming my home.”

The Nature of Miracles

Pic byLuisa (via flickr)

I love the idea of miracles and wish life to be filled with them: every day an Ebenezer Scrooge transformed into a kindly old man. So I won’t stop using the word, even though some people associate it with supernatural divine intervention. No wonder, if you put it that way, that rationalists protest, “There’s no such thing as miracles”, for if they happened as often as I wish (they do! they do!) and were inexplicable except to theologians, then scientists would have to close their laboratories and be unemployed and . . . hope for a miracle!

But it isn’t like this. To me, a miracle is rapid transformation and it’s miraculous because we’re used to the rhythm of continuity. I'm used to my rut and abhor change. I’ve drawn sustenance from a daily routine of communing with Nature. Free to indulge each passing whim, I’ve not had to worry about earning a living. Work commissions and clients have come to me occasionally, without any effort on my part, so I’ve survived that way. In fact it’s been such a blessed existence that I’ve failed to detect how dependent I’ve been on contingent factors: good health, low expenses, ecstasy that seems to radiate from the open sky.

We cling to habits and fear change, but Nature has its ways to confound our sense of continuity. The caterpillar emerges from the egg and chomps greedily on the first thing it finds. Then it feels strange urges to spin itself a hammock or cocoon. Then it gives in to an overwhelming lethargy, becoming a hardened chrysalis, inert like a seed. Then in due time it wants to wake up and stretch, and feel the insect-blood rushing to its new-found legs and antennae and proboscis and unfurling iridescent wings, ready to start a new life, in which it doesn’t need to eat its own weight daily, but only sip at perfumed nectar like a party animal on cocktails in fancy glasses, and dance in the sunshine and flirt. All this in its old age.

Recently, my routines have been interrupted. Pain brought me to earth, together with a metaphorical rubbing of the eyes and waking from a beautiful dream. How could I have been sustained for a whole year in the same fashion, going out each day with camera, tripod, notebook, dictaphone like Vincent van Gogh with his portable easel in the fields near Arles or Auvers? How could I have been nourished so royally by the scruffy streets of my home town, a solitary loafer never bored and usually inspired?

It’s changing and I’m ready. Ten years ago I left commuting and working nine-to-five and the stresses of IT projects. Some guiding hand lifted me from that routine. With excitement greater than misgivings, I’m poised to return to that pattern of life on Monday.

I went to buy shirts, needing a bigger size that fits an old man’s scraggy neck. Who cares? This is my butterfly phase.

Murder, Watercress, Angels

watercress farm
Originally uploaded by amonlinezzz.

I went to the doctor about two (presumably) unrelated issues, one of which is too embarrassing to mention . . . and the other is also too embarrassing, for different reasons. The upshot was, no action or prescription. But I came out of there a new man, with a spring in my step etc, which lasted at least two hours. When you consider that I’d been dreading the inevitable physical examination---and its verdict---all week, you might agree with me that the effect was more relief than placebo.

I decided to celebrate with a trip to the supermarket for cans of beer, confiding as I went to my trusty Pearlcorder, as follows:

“When I felt inspired to tell Rama that it’s important to be a nobody, I really meant we need to understand that we’re no better than anybody else. This is the essence of a spiritual approach to life. All the same, it’s good to know what makes you different from others, if only to increase your own patience and compassion.

“Perhaps one of my differences — yet who knows, it may be universal — is that leaving the house is always an overwhelming sensation, as it would be to a prisoner who’s been released after fifteen years. The fresh air, the quality of the light and the noise, intense feelings, the gift of freedom. It’s like the experience of Billy Bob Thornton’s character in Sling Blade, a great film which Billy Bob also wrote and directed. Since murdering his mother and her lover at the age of 12, he’s been confined to a “nervous hospital” for thirty years, and they’re letting him out today, an apparent retard, ill-adjusted to the world. Oh, it’s a great compassionate deep film, that turns upside down your normal judgements of people. I’ve wanted to talk about it for days. Billy Bob was also the hero in Levity, in a similar scenario: a man released after many years of repenting his teenage folly: the murder of a teenage store assistant his own age, in a botched gang robbery. Now he wants to put right the wrong he’s done, and so gain redemption. I don’t know why, but both movies have enormous resonance for me, though I never killed anyone in this life. Perhaps like Paul Simon, in You can call me Al, I'm still wanting a shot at redemption.

“It’s great to see that the stream which flows beside the supermarket is flowing again after being dried up for a year, rippling prettily through the watercress; and in celebration of that, they’ve cleared it of litter: — which hasn’t stopped people from starting to drop new litter in it. There are many streams which flow through the town eventually joining the River Thames. The town is built upon them, with lots of bridges and culverts. They’re all flowing again, and it lifts the heart to see Nature restoring itself from drought, and who knows, pestilence too.

“Each day brings its portion of reassurance. Though I often speak of angels, I love it when someone, as a dear friend did today, reminds me of their role in our lives.”