Fay ce que vouldras

At work, I can look out of the window to an interesting landscape, though they’ve pasted a reflective sunscreen on the glass which blurs it making me think I have my wrong glasses on. There’s the site of a new residential development: little houses, roads, flags advertising the Marketing Suite, bulldozers, workers, drainage, dried mud.

I escape whenever I can to explore these exciting places, and it would take a big volume to record the feelings and memories evoked by the sounds and smells and visual impact. Beyond the building site is a highway with a railway line running parallel, hardly visible from the window, now that Spring has made trees dense with new growth. At the horizon there’s an artificial ski slope with what looks like two spires behind it, the ensemble like a mythical castle so incongruous and unattainable that it’s been my goal for several days. But as in a fairy tale, there are obstacles to overcome.

A dear colleague who’s now working in a different department wants to meet in the staff restaurant at 12.30. But when I can, I skip out carefree, to find the route to the fairy castle. One day I found a little underpass which tunnels beneath the highway and the railway track, and connects to litter-strewn footpaths which take you to some places both grand and squalid. There’s a recreation park for an international corporation, with special jogging routes and tennis courts. It looks nice but signs warn me to stay out or else the CCTV will see my misdemeanours. I imagine them sending Security in grey suits and dark glasses to chuck me out. Then there’s a public recycling tip with the unusual sign, “No pedestrians”. I imagine being accidentally bulldozed into a machine that compresses garbage,

The following day I try again, this time over a rusting iron footbridge, talking to myself via the dictaphone, though I haven’t transcribed the tape yet. Francois Rabelais is on my mind. His character Gargantua founded the Abbey of Thelema, whose motto was “Do what you want”. Rabelais wrote in the early 16th century, when religion was in turmoil like today, with a great confusion of ancient authority and manifest corruption. You could see the Reformation gathering force like storm-clouds filling the sky.

I’m glad to see the cheeky graffiti of some rebellious artist. I meant to talk about this philosophy of “Fay ce que vouldras” but it’s reluctant to express itself and I’m glad really. It doesn’t need to be formulated but felt and lived. My true nature can be trusted to know what to do, so long as I stand on the bedrock of my uniqueness. I remain vulnerable and exposed in this world, but angels protect me. They can be trusted too.

Pregnant thoughts

In my last I referred to my cellphone’s “voice recorder” facility.

These are the 4 discrete thoughts that I recorded, I think within a total timespan of 5 minutes.

1) The aim of my lunchtime walks is in some manner to step out of time. This aim is always achieved. The result is an experience of joy and depth of existence.
2) More and more I have only to look at a tree in order to connect to its soul. . . and whatever . . . different things, different things.
3) Oh yes! You think things cannot be said. They can be said.
4) I think the poor have always lived on a kind of riches that the rich don’t have any access to.

There was a depth in these sayings and I am not sure how to translate them into a common language for they were solitary gestures, trees fruiting in a desert.

Stepping out of time: Joy. Depth of existence. Can I explain these further? No. The most important part of the utterance: “This aim is always achieved.” That is the miracle. “Always” and “out of time” refer to the same realm.

Connecting to a tree’s soul: I didn’t just mean a tree, but also a shrub . . . It wasn’t that I could identify and choose an object (is a blade of grass an object? Or a whole lawn?) but that something identified itself to me and presented to me its soul. When I said, “and whatever”, followed by “different things, different things”, it was to acknowledge the immensity of irreducible diversity. My tree was not just an example of x: it was a particular x unlike any other x. The other day I had occasion to repost some letters to my neighbour that the postman had carelessly placed in my own letterbox. A few yards away, yet it was a completely different world, even though her flat is the mirror-image of mine. If I lived there, everything would be different! So partly what I was wanting to say is “everything is different!” in soul perception, though in a different kind of perception, one might say, “There is nothing here, nothing to engage my intellect”.

Things can be said: Who was I refuting? Who was the “you”? My imaginary interlocutor. But what is saying? I have assumed for too long that saying is declaring, defining, limiting the possibilities of reality, as in a court of law. “So you were at home at the time of the incident? Then you could not have been present at the scene of the crime and could not have known that the accused was wearing a grey hat?” But other things can be said too: things which do not tie down facts but dance before the listener as new possibilities of life.

Rich and poor: I was aware of not needing to define these terms to my own self. By poor I meant those who have just enough but not an excess. I hoped it was sufficient to suggest what kind of riches sustained the poor, without giving examples whose clutter would limit the horizon. I’ll give just one, though. Walking is a sensually rich experience. Travelling by car is like being imprisoned in a tiny cell.

“One thought fills immensity”

Every thought could fill a book. It’s the middle of the night now. My dream was so powerful and enigmatic that it woke me up marvelling. I was having a reunion with my first wife. We were laughing. Her face was radiant. We were very good friends. Why did we ever split up? Why did I ever move on to another? I could not work it out.

In real life our agonised separation took place twenty-five years ago, and she died six years after that.

I woke up to the extraordinary realisation that the one I was running from was the same one that I was running to. And now, fully awake, I see that both were myself.

A few seconds later I went to the bathroom. On the floor was a photo of Stephen Fry (author, actor) on the cover of a magazine. He did not resemble himself. He has changed into a different person, neither a man nor a woman. He holds a dog in his arms and looks pleased, as if the person he is now is the one he’s always wanted to be. Or was I still half-asleep and was I seeing myself again?

Now, fully awake (how do you test that you are not in a dream?), I want to say hello, and describe a ferment of creativity, and the dilemmas it brings.

My cellphone has a voice recorder. I’m not boasting of its features - it’s my daughter’s battered cast-off from several years ago. The other day out walking I realised that I’d left my dictaphone at home, so I used the phone to make a few notes. Each one is a separate message, a single thought, and I haven’t played any of them back yet. I later discovered that my camera too can take “sound memos”. I actually have two dictaphones. Each uses microcassettes of which I have dozens. For certain technical reasons I use one machine to record and the other to play back. I keep several notebooks, each magical in its own way. One, hand-made in India on very strange paper, is for ritual purposes only. That is to say, the acts of putting pen to paper; seeing the ink flow out and stain the surface permanently; observing the handwriting; describing the date and the occasion—these are enough. I never get round to saying anything of any significance, just like the “radio hams” of old to whom the triumph of using their equipment and making contact with others was enough.

Today we have blogging. Its rituals are enough too!

So I cannot in truth say I am writing a book. I’m receiving a deluge of ideas. Each one could be expanded to fill the Albert Hall. Each thought fills immensity. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”*

So what am I writing? Nothing more than the ordinary life of an ordinary person. Perhaps the perspective is not so ordinary.

The perspectives keep changing. The stories that could be written of my own life, past and present, keep changing. On Friday, after a busy morning at work in MaxiRam Castle (my code name for the office, part of an international corporation which has opened its doors to me for a few months), I managed to escape as usual for a lunchtime walk. As I traversed the car park under the “canopy of Heaven”, surrounded by important buildings like the adjacent pharmaceutical factory with its ominous tanks and roof-ducts glinting in the sun, I saw that our visual perspective changes with our every step. Near objects readjust their positions swiftly as we walk, distant objects slowly swivel round, graciously allowing us to remain at the centre of our own universe. Is this ordinary?

“Enough! or too much!”*

Photos: from the wood behind MaxiRam Castle, April 19th 2007
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* Quotes from William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Aboriginal tirade

I defy every professor on the face of this spinning globe. Gentlemen, ladies, don’t feel threatened. You have chosen the gowns and the tenure, the books, the students, the research facilities and the world’s respect. What more do you want? You may think you define truth too, but this is what I don’t allow. No, your professorships are just another profession, wanting its share of everything that’s going in a jostling world.

Rattled slightly by my defiance in the middle of your lecture, you hesitate in reading from your notes to look over your half-moon glasses at this unruly student: “And who might you be?”

I’m a peasant, a paysan, one who lives on the land, though I don't own any personally. I am a primitive, proud of an ancestry which I can trace back to a time before books and seats of learning. I don’t need dietetics to tell me what to eat. I don’t need theology to tell me what to believe and how to worship. In short, I am just like everyone else.

I don’t need psychology and medical sciences to tell me how to survive the generations and produce offspring like you, dear professor. “Ah, how ignorant!” you say, pointing to evidence that my ancestors lived short, brutish lives. Yes, I know that. I’m grateful for knowledge and don’t mean to be ungracious. Like all my ancestors, I have received and passed on accumulated knowledge and expertise. But I remind you that professors blind to the realities around them continued to teach Aristotle and Hippocrates when every medical student through his own eyes could see these authors were wrong.

I equally reject the undergrowth of learning, in which ancient notions as “body, mind and spirit” are passed down as meaning something more than the merely conversational. When I read books about angels I don’t want little professors to tell me stuff they have got third-hand from the Kabbalah, I want their immediate experience. (I’ve stopped reading books about angels. I have my own immediate experience.)

Whatever I am is not split into body, mind and spirit. I am all body. Obviously not a corpse. Life is my essential attribute. Life is not mind or spirit. The notion that something leaves the body when I die, wafting into space like an essence, is merely traditional and poetic. I am an animal, not differentiated from the other animals by any eternal soul which a beneficent God vouchsafed to me at a particular point in evolution. Oh the trouble which man has encountered by devising the notion of a God who’s all-powerful, all-wise and all-knowing! The theology professors don’t complain. It keeps them in business. They are as grateful as dentists are grateful for tooth decay.

Most of the trouble is caused by “mind”, because the academics at the top of the pyramid have proclaimed it as top-value attribute of man. That most recent most flashy component of the human organism, the bit which can think abstractly, talk in language and handle logic to almost infinite levels of complexity, dazzles them till they think it is the definer of reality. I’m not really blaming professors for this. They are merely convenient symbols, being at the top of the intellectual pyramid.

Thought has been set up as higher and truer than feeling. Discipline has been hailed as superior to unruly emotion. Those revolutionary stirrings in every human breast which hint at Oneness and Universal Love have been condemned to the grim fortresses of organised religion, where they can “do no harm”. (Oh see how easy it is for me to use words to embroider an exaggerated myth! My education taught me these perversions of the mind, which permeate law and politics and medicine and all the rest.)

I discover that in my body is a higher wisdom than thought. My instincts, my emotions, all the parts of brain function which regulate my waking, sleeping, metabolism, homeostasis, immune function, endocrine system, it is to these I owe my day-to-day living. Our intellects are the source of so much fiction, craziness, will, power, ways to be greedy, cunning, the over-riding of Nature. We all but supersede and make redundant our body-wisdom.

In illness, the body-wisdom bites back. Just as the Earth, that Gaia-Goddess, bites back when it’s tortured and abused and plundered, the same thing happens in our own bodies. The pharmaceutical companies will not know what I am talking about. I don’t suppose medical students will study it for more than a day in their lengthy degree courses.

It’s perfectly possible to revert to peasant wisdom, to primitive mastery of oneself and environment, in defiance of professors. The New Age movement has corrupted itself with the same disease as the intellect-driven world which it opposes. For it has just as many books and courses and beliefs and careers.

Never fight your enemy, because you have to use the same weapons, and you will soon become indistinguishable from one another. In order to bring sanity back to this world, I’m not going to join any movement, establish any Foundation, lobby any politicians. I’m going to continue in the direction I’m going, where intellect is integrated with body-wisdom, in a subordinate rule as fits the youngest member of the brain faculty. My role is not to write---that’s just an expression of overflowing energy---but to live, from the deepest and least corrupted part of a human being.

Love to all

It has been wonderful to share with you, reading your comments and being drawn to visit your own blogs too, over almost a year.

You have encouraged me to start a book, and so these posts won’t be the same any more. I can’t keep posting excerpts as in my last post because the writing has suddenly become a more complex process, though its inspiration is just as spontaneous. I can’t give up wanting to spend this time together.

Today I took photos of blossoms. In the Seventies the persistent question came to me: is it possible to receive love from a book? If so, this is the kind of book I want to read, and also write. I’ve never told anyone that till today. It seemed too silly. Yesterday, out walking, I delved further in a quest to rid myself of preconceptions. Does the homeless drunk receive love from his alcohol? From within me came the immediate answer “Of course!” Then came another question: “Where does this love come from?” I felt that this was an intelligent question, one that needs no answer, for the asking is enough.

Why do people give one another flowers? Blossoms speak to us and give generously of their essence, though according to biology they are designed to further the plant’s objectives by attracting bees. Blessing us with their presence does nothing for their evolutionary purpose so far as I can see. Bouquets from the florist are as nothing compared with the blossoms offered to the lonely wayfarer. But as Davo points out, Spring is not common to all places in the world. Here in England Spring needs no spiritual festival to proclaim its meaning. Wherever you live, Love as celebrated so devotedly by Serenity and indeed all of us, in our own way, finds a way to reach us, even if we have been reared by wolves.

Yesterday I was intrigued by a plant which had forced its way up through a section of asphalt pavement, though there was no evidence of it on the soft soil alongside. It's horsetail, an ancient species whose fossil remains are found in coal seams from the age of dinosaurs. It propagates by spores instead of seeds, like lichens and fungi.

Reverie on the edge

As a scholarship boy I had
responsibility for the younger boarders

On Easter Sunday morning, on a quest for ginger, garlic and matches, I walk up Oakridge Road, on its sunny side. The reality all around me is more than I can take in: so many details! Everything has a meaning, but how can I unravel it? When I say “meaning” I probably mean “impact”. Little things discarded in the gutter – broken glass, torn paper and so on; the faint sparkle when the sun shines on a well-worn granite kerb; the shadowy interior of a workshop whose door bears the owner’s name “Khan”. A young African woman of impossible beauty approaches, in an embroidered Afghan coat. She’s looking to the left with amused glances but I see nothing there. How is it possible to live a normal life with such beauty? A young black man passes from a different direction and doesn’t even notice. I wonder if I see things that others don’t. Though I have always felt like an outsider, I’m closer now to being ordinary than ever I’ve been. How can the beauty in the world be earned or possessed? It’s priceless yet over-abundant, defying the elementary laws of economics.

My reverie is broken by a “Sold” sign outside a house, one that I was interested in a few months ago. It reminds me that I need a proper place to live. All at once my vision of priceless beauty evaporates, like dew-diamonds on a lawn in the sunshine. Survival-anxieties change our mood, but this is the human condition, and there's nothing I can do about it.

Why can’t I go on as a wayfarer on the margins? Certainly, whatever I do, this earth will support me till I die. Am I like other people or not? I can never decide. Of course we are all unique, so the question is a little stupid. I never feel that I am in charge of my destiny, though I strive. I can be very determined in doing what I know how. For all my effort, I remain a leaf blowing in the wind: fragile, dependent on Fortune. I see blessings in my life, things which arrive when needed as if a guardian angel is always in attendance ready to reassure me with gestures and more substantial gifts. Perhaps I don’t trust enough, perhaps I trust too much. How can I know? Today I don’t seem to know anything.

The other day, when the daughter of my headmaster brought me that battered case full of school photos, I discovered I am the same person as fifty years ago: still on the edge of things. In a boarding school, I had my allotted place. But the wider world came later as a great shock.

My footsteps take me to the Church of St Mary & St George, its dome of verdigris a landmark in these parts. It’s 10am on Easter Day. Maybe I can slip in to attend a service, anonymous amongst an enlarged congregation. The door’s open and I hesitate in the porch. A woman is speaking, punctuated by occasional polite laughter. No, I cannot intrude upon an in-group. The Christian Church may open its arms to all, but not to me now.

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On Good Friday, I’d gone into town to buy a bread-bin and came across an informal procession, with marshals in yellow vests alongside. I dared not join, but kept up with them on the other side of the road. I want to be part of my community, to participate in its age-old rituals, but on my own terms. We reached the gate of All Saints Parish Church, next to the market square. The procession arranged itself into an expectant open-air audience. I asked my neighbour what it was about. She was very pleased to be asked and explained that after leaving church services of different denominations, the congregations had merged. A bearded vicar with a microphone now started to speak. A man in Salvation Army uniform held the loudspeaker. A boy stood facing us on the raised lawn with his arms outstretched. Around his neck was a label proclaiming “The King of the Jews”. It twisted in the wind uncontrollably. Further out on either side were a man and a woman also with arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose. The vicar spoke of Golgotha, the place of skulls, and I did not want to listen more. We know of enough horrors in the world already. These ordinary sensible English people, the kind to whom you would happily lend your lawnmower, were eager to rehearse an old story of pain, humiliation and alleged triumph. I found it repellent. The woman gave me a card which accused the world of not understanding the reason for Easter. I did not want to be with these people any more. Putting the card in my pocket, I slipped away.

In the market square, a corpulent Pakistani in white robes sat peacefully on a public bench, with his two restless grandchildren climbing over it and teasing one another. Shoppers bustled past. Market traders called out their wares. This was the real community. Yet I still prefer to stay on the edge.

Omnes Veniant - Let them all come!

My favourite and only sport is frisbee. No rules, no training, no special clothing. The only equipment required is a plastic disk available from any general store. It holds an hypnotic attraction for participants and spectators alike. Above all, it’s not competitive. It’s co-operative: you adjust your throw so that the other person can catch it, easy or challenging according to their need.

Coombe Hill is a magnificent place for frisbee. It has wonderful views and good grass cropped short by rabbits. K took the group photo but perhaps two tins of beer had affected her sense of the vertical, which I easily corrected by rotating 4° anticlockwise. She said afterwards that I had played frisbee like a 16-year-old, which pleased me greatly since my son and daughter are 21 and 18 respectively; he looking here like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

In my last I was unable to express what has been heavy in my heart lately. Now that I feel lighter again, I can tell you more. I tend to perceive my domestic economy as fragile though it is well above subsistence by most of the world’s standards. Like everyone whose existence is precarious, I depend on good fortune coming my way; or as I see it, angelic blessings. Lately my clumsy attempts to defend my own interests have been weakened by a sense, not so much of others’ greed, but their human frailty, personality flaws if you like. And so it has felt as if the whole burden of the world’s imperfection has invaded my space. Others are incompetent, but so am I too in a different way. Who pays? So I am trying to be magnanimous. No more can I sit aloof on a cloud as I’ve always tried to do.

In frisbee, three players is best, for the triangle can go in either direction, and keeps adjusting position to deal with hazards like other people, the sun in your eyes, the wind and so forth. But a magical rhythm gets going where you throw and catch in ways you never dreamed possible. Even the missed catches can be balletic, heroic or hilarious.

My final photo shows my headmaster in some earlier phase of his life, in which a pipe was always clamped between his teeth. He got throat cancer and I think this was a turning point. Behind the men is a tent. He’s the one in the middle, bristling with charisma. When I knew him he was completely dedicated to the noble ideal of the Christian gentleman-warrior. But let him speak for himself. Here's a quote from his only published work, Newport Grammar School:

And so this little book will offer to whosoever cares to read not only the history of an ancient and honourable school but a vision of its future. The motto of those who would achieve it is that that our Lord vouchsafed to Joshua, on whom it had fallen to lead his people to the Promised Land: “Quit you like men. Be strong. For I, thy God, am with you whithersoever thou goest.”

Maybe there will be some adventurers who will find herein a challenge to march with us. Such will find a welcome in our ranks whoever may be the leader. Omnes veniant.

Cadet

An English Spring can be two-faced, like life itself. The sun warms you and the chill wind finds its way through your clothes, both at the same time.

For a whole week I haven’t written here, but the will was there and a need to understand what’s been happening to me. I’ve been feeling uneasy and even walking in Nature, under the open sky, has not taken me out of my nagging preoccupations. What changed? Will those days of simple joy return?

Over the lifetime of this blog, the inner landscapes of my life have been transformed, while I’ve been writing of outer landscapes. I’ve been dismantling brick by brick the walls of certainties and assumptions. I’ve vowed that nothing will be sacred unless I find it to be so experientially. I’ve rejected the Bible as violent and authoritarian, quite out of tune with the goldfish bowl in which I swim and through whose lens I view the world - thanks Fleming for the imagery of your dreams! I’ve renounced direct use of the word “God”. It evokes no personal relationship, only a sympathetic second-hand vision based on any genuine experience of others.

What I do have is a strong sense of angels keeping me safe and revealing me private miracles. The flip side of that is that if I feel they could let me down, my joy collapses. This blog has been an unfolding chronicle of my naïve joy in simple things: breathing clean air, feeling healthy in my head, trunk, limbs and functional organs. For these blessings I have given thanks to whatever powers work on our behalf unceasingly – but especially when we align our will to the good of the Universe.

Did that golden thread of trust break down? A number of incidents, one on top of the other, aspects of one theme, have stretched but not broken that thread, as if angels are nudging me “Yves, time to grow up, time to change!” I don’t think I can express more details yet. Various blogs for example Paul in Original Faith have been asking whether everything happens for a reason. My short answer is “yes”. Mental pain, which has been a topic in Serenity’s blog, must always accompany the clash and grind of a changed direction forced upon us by Love. How can it be otherwise? The pain is not necessary: it’s caused by our temporary resistance to needed change.

Let me explain about these cadets. I’d been out of touch with the old boys and staff at my school, which in any case closed down in 1967, so I did not learn of my headmaster’s death until years after the event. I immediately wanted to send my condolences to his widow, a most tender-hearted woman. Unfortunately I learned that she had recently died also. So I wrote to their daughter instead, full of belated realisations that I had misjudged my headmaster, and being regretful not to have kept in touch. It’s hard to explain the sense of loss.

The daughter did not reply for eleven years but the other day she phoned and today she came to visit, bringing with her a small suitcase of photos and other school memorabilia, which she asked me to hold in trust on behalf of all those who appear in them. I found many photos of me long-forgotten fellow-pupils along with long-forgotten articles I’d written in the school magazine. She’s five years younger than me, and we’d hardly met before. Here’s a clip from one of the photos. Fifty years on, I still wear glasses.