Not actually written at my desk

Australian Aborigines still not treated
as worthy of dignity in 1906

Sometimes at work I find myself with nothing to do. This last week several members of the team have left, some to take up other jobs, others made redundant to save costs, my friend Hannah being one of them. Her unique variant of insanity had inoculated me against my own. She’d get a sense of my silent panic, and sometimes when I was solving some problem under pressure, and would not allow anyone else to disturb my frantic concentration, she’d start some inane conversation, as if we’d been bantering in the pub. It saved me from myself, and truly helped.

Yesterday I decided to write a post at work, to be entitled “From the desk of . . .” I composed a few words in Word, but realised someone might creep up on me from behind. Safer to write in my notebook, as no one can read my handwriting. After three sentences I gave up. My moral sense intervened: they are paying me, I must serve them and not other gods.

I’ve had two aborted shots at a post on slavery and imagination: the latter because I promised to speak of it and the former because the media have been running special stories to commemorate Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1807. I was interested to discover that this issue generated the first known use of campaigning techniques as we know them today, such as posters, lecture tours, a travelling exhibition of African artefacts (to show that the enslaved people had a wonderful culture of their own & weren’t just apes). Reformers tried to arouse the popular imagination and conscience; anti-reformers wanted it to slumber on. Meanwhile the slaves had learned that the white man’s religion promised hope of Heaven. Such fancies can lift our heavy burdens, imagination providing comfort in extremis: “Swing low, sweet chariot / Coming for to carry me Home . . .”

I’ve been wondering about my future, because my role in the project is already half-way through. I’d been keen on building a bridge to future phases and having my role extended, but they brought in someone else for that, and I could not help eyeing him as an interloper, stealing my future. But yesterday I was told to take over the work he has done. He’s been working in SQL-Server, but my experience is in Access. In handing over his work to me, he’s giving me something to do relevant to my present role, which will allow me to learn something useful for my next. He seemed as delighted as I was about this. I’d been praying only minutes previously — or so it seems in retrospect — for some way to extend my skills. It was a small miracle in the first place that I got this 4-month job whose requirements matched my limited range of technical skills.

I wanted to hug him but we were on the phone. I didn’t have to tell him he was angel-sent, either. I’m sure he knew. As I’ve experienced, being an angel’s agent carries its own reward.

Flowers of Grass

A mysterious grass
Originally uploaded by yves_rochereau.

Perhaps there is no God to answer our prayers, listen to our anxious concerns, detect our hidden needs. Perhaps there’s a Creator who has shaped Nature through the interaction of physical laws, Chaos, improbability and long periods of time. But the Creator is unknowable---at least with our ordinary consciousness.

We perceive something different, though. We perceive that prayers can be answered, poetic justice does happen, something does go on beyond the reach of reason. So let reason be stilled, whilst we heed the quiet voice of the wondrous. I know that angels exist, even if they are but thought-forms brought into existence by human yearning for security and wish-fulfilment. They exist, and they are dedicated to the highest good of individuals and the overarching All. No longing can be brought to realisation if it is not for our own good and the highest good of All.

I saw Groundhog Day on Saturday. It is a magical movie, all-American, defying my rule of thumb that an intelligent film can’t include a car chase; spiritual without a word of doctrine, without even an angel hovering benignly to guide the protagonist Phil Connors---self-centred weather-man from Pittsburgh---to redemption. How long does redemption take? We have no idea. There is no way of telling. Six months, six years, six hundred years. How does he achieve redemption? By trial and error! His spiritual development is shown as an evolutionary process. I read somewhere that Jesuits and Zen Buddhists, and all intermediate colours of the spectrum, united in acclaiming this film as supporting their cause.

So I’ll speak no more of angels, till next time. I’ll only say that we find things if we look very closely at the fabric of life: between its stitches so to speak.

Returning from my walk, at a banal grass verge, passed by speeding cars, joggers and chatting groups of workers wearing like me their ID passes, I spotted some extraordinary grasses. It seems early for flowering heads of grass, and these were exceptional, coloured brown and cream like bumble-bees. I plucked one and it shed a cloud of cream pollen-dust.

I was already thinking about the angels when I saw the grass, whose extraordinary beauty was enough to blow any theories I could develop. But one theory burst out regardless, one that has presented itself to me many times before.

Suppose that the answering of our prayers is an illusion. It appears to us that (a) I’m in need (b) I have the idea to say a prayer, or express to the Universe my desire (c) my prayer is answered, or the Universe from its infinite bounty smiles upon me and grants my desire. But isn’t it in fact like this?

(i) I’m in need, the Universe having conspired to show me that I’m not all-powerful. (ii) The angelic power whispers to me that I should express my need in a longing from the heart. (iii) The angelic power persuades me to wait calmly for an outcome. (iv) my longing turns into a physical manifestation of that which I longed for, or possibly something far more pregnant and fruitful than what I had been able to imagine. (v) I give thanks.

Delirium

I’ve come down with “man-flu”. In a woman it would be a simple cold but in a man it’s tantamount to dying and requires tender concern from all the females around. Yesterday morning early I went to work and did the vital tasks on which the team depends. Then I found myself every fifteen minutes checking the slow passage of time. With the same frequency I was sneezing and voiding rheum. The women gave the requisite sympathy and the men (in my fevered imagination at least) acknowledged my heroism in coming in at all. Honour having thus been satisfied I came back home to sip a hot drink with fresh lemon juice, honey and a little rum. Then I went to my cosy bed with a hot water bottle.

If I ever write an autobiography it will be rooted firmly in the present, with digressions to the past triggered only by feelings and smells, or what psychology has called “state-dependent memory”. Lying on my back with a fever and blocked head reminds me of a bout of ’flu at 15, propped up on pillows with a heavy encyclopædia nearly falling from my grasp. On a column of a right-hand page was the photo of a campanile in Ravenna, with the comment that Ruskin in his Stones of Venice mentioned it as the most beautiful in Renaissance Italy. Memory can be powerful: this one is burned-in like an error-message on an old VDU. All the same it can play tricks. I cannot identify that tower from Google or Flickr. This picture from Florence will have to do instead. In any case I have lived in that city. In my fever nothing was evoked but the dry sound of Ruskin and Ravenna. It was probably my throat which was dry but memory has conflated all these things together.

I went to bed yesterday afternoon and thought I could tolerate BBC Radio 3. But they played Berlioz’ Romeo and Juliet. My diseased brain said “OK this describes mountains and valleys. This will lull me into a peaceful sleep.” I soon became irritated with Berlioz. I wanted to float around those mountains on a mental hang-glider and see what was on the other side, but he wouldn’t let me: it was a guided tour rigidly scored, me strapped firmly to my seat with a headache and vertigo and no end to the ride in sight. I must have drifted off because suddenly it morphed into some annoying piano stuff: sugary feminine footsteps over the keys. I could not believe the announcer when he said it was Bach. This was followed by a cathedral-cave of a choral work, grey and cold, no fun there. After a while I got the hang of it. “Mahler!” I said, vaguely recalling something else in the same vein. I determined to see it through and get the satisfaction of at least confirming the composer, even if I could not enjoy him. Curses! It was Brahms’ German Requiem. So I drifted off and dreamed of wrestling with intractable 3-dimensional spreadsheets.

Magic and holiness

It was by accident that I discovered afresh the magic of the Holy Bible. I’ve come back to it purged and scoured of religiosity and the baggage of Christian reverence. My Bible is a fetish object, and I love every detail of its physicality: the edges gilt on pink, the blue silk bookmark, the flexible leather binding which I have carefully restored with PVA and pigment, the King James translation with elegantly printed cross-references between the columns.

When I hold it in my hand, and check a verse, I feel its venerable authority: something which transfers itself to the holder. When I pick it up on a Sunday, I feel equal in moral strength to those who go to church.

When it’s claimed as the Word of God, however, there is hardly a verse that I don’t execrate as misleading, outdated, harmful. In many ways it has the same power it always did, from the time the rabbis put together the Torah, and the various synods and councils agreed what should be in and what out. It appeals to those who would cast the first stone against the adulteress, and to those who would be meek and have stones thrown at them as martyrs. It feeds the worship of Mary as an impeccable goddess and Mary Magdalen as a forgiven sinner. I can be Job or Noah or Samuel or Saul or Jonathan or David. Knowing my Bible (which I don’t, actually, though certain stories have stuck since school) I can see the world in a different way. I could be a minister and uphold righteousness: then people would look up to me and I could instruct them in the ways of the Lord, a little local Jesus, but humbler of course.

These thoughts entertained me as I took my lunchtime walk, before the driving sleet stung my face to the bone on the return leg. In the distance was a church tower, which must have dated from when Babylon Town (code name for my work location) was still a village. This town, designed on a drawing board, rather than evolved over centuries, prides itself on its network of concrete paths and underpasses which spare you from the need to cross its race-track roads. I pride myself that as a pedestrian I walk God’s earth, at least the public parts, without restraint, so I marched across roads, verges, daffodil-gay roundabouts and landscapings to reach my destination more or less as the bee would fly to a distant source of nectar.

The glory of English churches is commonly their antiquity and their pride in being open to wayfarers during daylight hours, so I quickened my pace to spend a few minutes at the pews of St Michael and Mary Magdalene Parish Church. It was locked, but I had made my pilgrimage.

In religion is seductive power. But that doesn’t make it more divine than anything else in this wondrous world.

Prophecies

I went to last summer’s sunflower field. It’s been flattened and lightly manured, a pervasive smell of old cow-dung in the air. Three sunflowers were still standing, much as in my last visit: skeletal, downcast. See my other posts with the “sunflowers” label. I needed my hat and gloves for the field is exposed and the wind bore the sharp sting of sleet. The neighbouring woods were unquiet, their boughs sighing and agitated in the wind, echoing with pheasants’ hoarse cries and the distant barking of dogs. The sun had set but the horizon was still a bright space between lowering clouds and the twinkling lights on distant hills.

I was drawn to this desolate pilgrimage in order to understand the value of home, the roof and walls which protected me. The flickering TV screen was an abomination in mine eyes. Heedless of the weather my heart yearned for the open sky.

I feel a tide turning in the world, or at least in myself, a tiny part of this world.

On September 12th 2001 I said “Now America will come to its senses. It will understand vulnerability and interdependence, and will ask why it is so hated; and repent.” I admit to being wrong in saying “now”. The time was not ready. Things had to get worse before the dawning of whatever is to come.

Reality itself is being questioned across the world and the Internet is the voice of questions. I see a great blindness, I mean people’s eyes are closed and they see only a supposed reality, and not an experienced reality. Swimming in the soup of communal ideas, we cannot distinguish truth from lies, fact from illusion.

I was wrong in saying “America” too. It’s an abstraction. I’ve not been to that land for fifteen years, but I foolishly imagine it through movies and news and talking to fellow-bloggers.

At my daughter’s house in Gloucester last night we lit a coal fire and it took me back to childhood in the Fifties, where this was our only heating. It was hard to light: fanning the flames billowed sulphurous smoke into the room. The fire was a nostalgic and impractical gesture: we still kept a central heating radiator on. I renounce nostalgia! Now is the only time to be.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour

In the “supposed reality”, these are the words of a “genius” William Blake giving school-teachers an excuse to idolize dead poets and consider ourselves lesser mortals separated from the classic authors by a great gulf; thus missing Blake’s point entirely. His words are an impassioned invitation to see for ourselves. He quotes the Book of Numbers, XI, 29:

Would to God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit upon them!

Amen to that. As I walked back, the incense of woodsmoke wafted from behind some hedge, in the gathering gloom.

Pic (click to enlarge): West Wycombe from last year’s sunflower field this evening, showing the Dashwood Mausoleum and the Church of St Laurence topped by the Golden Ball. Just above the horizon, you see the outline of a red kite, a species of hawk now prolific in these parts after near-extinction.

Leaving space on the stage

They've given this fine pub a makeover recently,
destroying its 1930s elegance

A new male temp has joined the office, actually two, but I just want to talk about one of them. He’s largish, grey-haired, my age or a few years younger. An old clown is more pathetic than a young one. His sense of self-importance might have a certain charm if he were an eight-year-old. There is nothing that he does not boast about. He puts his cell-phone at the loudspeaker setting and holds it at arm’s length, so that everyone can hear his important conversations. He rubbishes our organisation and database. He insisted on day one that nothing could be achieved by “his” team without a colour printer, which he would provide, and a new database which he would design at home and bring in. He spares the office no detail of his possessions, tastes, experience and so forth. He exposes his ignorance in every utterance. He does not know how to ask for help. When it came to Friday at 3.30 pm he still had not achieved the work which he’d been assigned, so he asked one of the girls, who’d put up with his posturing all week, to do it for him as a rush job. She tried to, but wrote an email to their mutual boss to explain the situation and “accidentally” left it open on her computer. He read it and grim-faced walked off to explain his case to the boss on his cellphone – with the speaker setting turned off, I should imagine.

It’s easy to call him a clown. He’s been called worse names this week, and has provided much entertainment. What is he doing wrong? I’ve been there. I’ve been insecure like that, and as blundering, but never so spectacularly clownish, because I always knew the vibes, and I would get out of a situation abruptly if I was making a fool of myself: perhaps never to return and without claiming my wage.

I hadn’t been meaning to write about him, but about “making space”. When we are fortunate enough to be secure in our own self, and find our needs met, and know how to survive in each situation we find ourselves in, there remains a skill we have to learn: leave some space on the stage, join the audience, listen, keep quiet, be a nobody.

It’s something I am learning and it is instantly rewarding. “My need” no longer cries loud, filling the spotlight of consciousness. I can leave the stage empty for the other performer. When I am writing, it’s not my stories that the reader wants to hear, but to be reminded of his own; to have her own imagination fired, to be triggered into her own realisations.

I have learned much recently from other bloggers: in particular Serenity, Billy (BBC), Hayden, Fleming,Paul, Ghetufool, James, Davo, and lately Polyhymnia. I had planned to say more – what I had learned from each one and so on. But why should anyone care? It’s better to leave a pregnant space.

Yellow

Why do I write? To touch a stranger in an intimate part, that neither of us knew existed.

The lichen was on a wall outside the office. Vincent van Gogh taught me to see, especially yellow. And each day I teach myself to see, to hear, to smell and so on. Beyond all these senses is something "infinite", but that is just a word, how do we know what it means?

Better to say less, and not stifle the reader with borrowed ideas.

To see more of nature's yellow graffiti (thanks Polyhymnia for pointing this out!) click on the clip. Earlier I tried displaying the picture on a 16-colour palette, with a special dither, but it looks best without manipulation.

Renouncing the partial

There have not been many pictures decorating this blog lately. I almost feel like renouncing photography as a means of trying to capture the world’s beauty, because it cannot reproduce the glowing mysterious surfaces that I see. I have recently renounced being a therapist: what a liberation! On one hand, it was a vehicle for compassion; but on the other, that very compassion could be deadly, both to me and the patient. Oh, it feels so good to abandon that pretension! Writing is the only medium whose honesty and artistry are capable of conveying my perceptions, which are a portion of the universe.

Photography and therapy have this unfortunate thing in common: that they choose something on which to focus and leave the rest. Increasingly I choose the choiceless: “in voiceless laughter and in choiceless gesture then”, as in a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti evoking San Francisco of 1950 in the image of a woman hanging out washing above North Beach. What is poetry but crystallized memory, yours & the poet’s, mingled?

I went to a park, Babylon’s Mill Pond. (Babylon is my code name for the "new town" where I work.) It was almost perfect, but time will enhance its charm further, as the good intentions of the drawing board and the overnurturing of the conservationist park-keepers are progressively weathered and vandalized. Then we will have a better harmony of nature, divine and human, paternalistic and teenage-rebellious. The pond has reeds and a boardwalk, from which jut fishing platforms. Various varieties of ducks, geese and aquatic plants are given sanctuary here and protected with netting and other works. Trees have been recently lopped and pollarded to within an inch of their life, like an army recruit’s first haircut.

The pond fills up from culverts artfully positioned to cascade water down concrete steps, and as the sign proclaims, it’s a “balancing pond”, designed to fill up quickly after rain; releasing its excess waters gradually into the sewerage system. In the top picture, you can see MaxiRam Castle at top left.

Something more than a blog is germinating: a real book has become a gleam in the eye of its begetter and I give it the provisional name Mill Park; for the ideas springing forth from just one walk round the pond could fill a chapter, and not just these 500 words.

What’s the secret of this joy of walking in landscapes, and observing the crusty lichen and graffiti on weathered walls? It’s a puzzle. I only know that my life is daily more vivid and choiceless and imbued with an odd kind of renunciation. I’m not letting go of the pleasures and pains of the flesh, for death will achieve that, without any striving on my part. I’m renouncing partiality for the sake of the whole. I am renouncing prejudice against myself and others, in order to embrace the whole.

Springtime

I’ve been meaning to post something since 28th February, when I drove to work in a hailstorm and the rain beat distractingly against the office window all morning. My lunchtime walk encountered three separate showers, but in between, the sunshine used the road as a mirror to dazzle everyone; and set up one of God’s wonderful rainbows, that signals the covenant of “No more destruction by flood”. Will he stick to this promise or get out of it because fewer and fewer people will take the Bible literally?
I was working on other mysteries as I walked. Why is the sky inside the rainbow always brighter than the sky outside? Clearly it is a property of light refracted from raindrops, but how can they lighten the sky? Or do they darken the outer sky? Why have I never seen or heard a discussion of this phenomenon, in exactly sixty-five years? Today is my birthday. I thank the Lord, in whom I believe for one purpose only, as a being to address my gratitude, for being alive, in good health, mental and physical, and for innumerable blessings. To be so blessed is a mystery, for most of my life has been struggle, confusion and failure; the blessings were there too but they felt harsh, as they were constantly trying to correct me.
I continued my walk and in the brief sunshine between showers I realised one joyful fact: Spring had arrived! It was in the blossom on a tree, perhaps cherry or anotherr kind of prunus. Spring was in the brilliant coloration of lichen upon cast-iron drain-covers: deep yellow and palest turquoise. It was in the feathery weeds growing at the grass’s edge. Suddenly I realised, after waiting months for this winter to end---a winter too mild to deserve its name---that it had ended. The birds were singing ecstatically. And the clouds: I cannot tell you how beautiful the clouds have been lately.
When I was stricken with the illness which for years prevented my walking, I'd sometimes lie on a rug in the back garden and gaze up at the sky. It was a tiny walled piece of land, on a slope landscaped into a couple of grassed terraces, each the size of a monk’s cell. I used to focus on a tiny wisp of cloud and using concentrated willpower, dissolve it into nothing. Try it yourself!
That little garden opened out to the whole world, for it welcomed visitors in the form of insects, small mammals, birds and seeds. Its low boundary walls, topped in places by honeysuckle and clematis woven on a trellis, kept out human and canine intruders; but were otherwise porous to the whole world. In the same way, I can protect myself whilst letting the world reach in and touch my soul.