Litter

Litter used to enrage me. I passed some young men once just as one of them threw down a paper coffee-cup and they were getting into a car to drive away. I put the cup on the car roof and said politely, “This is yours, don’t forget it.” I wouldn’t have been as bold if a car door had not separated us. These days the town council employ efficient delittering teams on the theory that people think twice before desecrating a clean space.

Things change. The other day I walked along a hedgerow at the edge of a recreation ground, with a highway behind it. A wide variety of trees was planted, mostly native including hawthorn, field maple, wild plum and others I cannot identify but which have lovely blossoms and fruits in their season. They haven’t been cut back or pruned so everything luxuriates. It’s a precious place of pilgrimage to me and the other day I found empty plastic bottles laid out so that you could see that four or five people had sat there and enjoyed water and other drinks. I just found myself glad to know they had been there and appreciated the place. I didn’t blame them for the non-biodegradable quality of the bottles. Personally I’m unable to litter and have walked a mile with a banana-skin till I could find a suitable place to drop it.

I imagine an alternative world where bottles decay in weeks except for those which people treasure because they’re hand-painted earthenware---works of art. So litter would be scavenged or disappear on its own.

Poor countries recycle better because rag-picking is economically supportable there. It would be nice to invite rag-pickers here but they would have to be paid the minimum wage unless they were illegals and I don’t like that because it is so often tainted by organised crime.

My picture shows the upside-down remains of a van I found in a bluebell wood.

Vistas and moments

Thanks to Ian Lloyd & flickr
click to see full picture

Why do people remember where they were when they heard of the death of President Kennedy? I have a mental snapshot of my precise surroundings when I heard of the deaths of King George VI, Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, John Lennon and Princess Diana. As to when Martin Luther King and Elvis Presley died, I have no idea. The fabric of my past is constructed from selected strands! There’s your past and mine and all the others’ past like a big overlapping mosaic, clashing here, harmonising there. From this half-glimpsed patchwork, our intellect constructs an idea of the past, as if it were a definite reality---that fugitive notion on which we depend so heavily. The world could be divided between those who believe that reality is solid and straight and unarguable, like a big office building in the middle of town; and those who see it as a swirling half-illusory effect, like the sky. Which side am I on? It’s not easy to be sure in one’s own case.

What things do you remember with snapshot clarity, as if time stood still whilst you took in the scene and stored it for a lifetime? Perhaps the memory-fixative was nothing more substantial than a fleeting thought, as happened to me in Portmeirion.

It was my third visit to this “village” in North Wales fifteen years ago with my younger children aged seven and three. It’s a good place to take kids at that age, for they can run about and almost get lost for there are no cars and the village is enclosed, with a single entrance gateway. I wonder if Portmeirion was the original theme park, long before Disney? It’s more refined aesthetically, recalling not children’s fairy tales and cartoon characters but the architectural perspectives, macro and micro, of the Mediterranean. It echoes with European visual history, from the Classical to the Renaissance, with touches of the eighteenth century too.

The moment I remember so clearly was in the car park before you reach Portmeirion itself. It was nothing but a rustic clearing in the woods, covered in gravel and bordered with wildflowers; all dappled in sunlight filtered through the surrounding trees. From there, you have to continue on foot. We collected the things we’d need for our day’s outing and I stood waiting for the family before I locked the car.

At that precise moment came the feeling. I cannot describe it, only the thoughts which it engendered.

“What am I doing here? All I have ever wanted is this feeling. I recall the various moments in my life when I felt this way. Why are we coming here to look round this place? Why do I have children? How has all this happened, when all I wanted was a feeling? Why am I weighted with impedimenta, when all I ever wanted was to sniff the air and sip the moment like a wine?”

I was remembering Portmeirion from previous visits: not yet able to see it because it stood at the other end of a wooded path. The village was a symbol of life as theatre. Everyone goes there to stroll and look and simply hang out. There are so many places to assemble. Visitors are part of the scenery. Back in the Sixties, it had been the backdrop for a famous TV thriller series, The Prisoner. On my previous visit, there had been a fashion shoot for some glossy magazine.

“Do I have to strut on this stage? I haven’t learned my part. I don’t know who I am, but the clock ticks on and I have to act anyhow. Can’t I start again, and be fancy-free, as when I was a student, hanging out in Paris, Tarascon, Marseilles, Florence, Assisi? I was lonely then and aimless, but I didn’t compromise.”

And now? I no longer want to start again. I’ve learned how to play my character. This town is my Portmeirion; this whole earth too.

Goodbye to sitting cross-legged

Sengai was an 18th Century
Zen monk.I saw an exhibi-
tion of his art in Paris 1961

I confess to being deeply serious. It goes back fifty years at least. Do you find that the most embarrassing incidents are etched indelibly in your memory? Such was the moment in 1957 when I was outed as a “truth-seeker”. A dear gentle teacher from the island of Jersey, Mr Dufeu, who taught me French and maths, accosted me in the street and asked about the books I’d brought out from the Public Library. Poor man, he was sacked not long after, for explaining to the class how he had manipulated our test marks to give a sensible distribution curve. He was only trying to show how statistics can be used practically in the real world, but the headmaster, proud to be righteous in the eyes of God, found him guilty of practising deceit and teaching it too.

I reluctantly showed Monsieur Dufeu my books: a commentary on St John’s Gospel, the Analects of Confucius and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. I’d gone to the library with no intent other than “to find something interesting”. He said solemnly, for he too was serious, “Then you must be a seeker of Truth!” I could not think of a reply, but I trusted his discretion. At fifteen it’s important to keep one’s peers’ respect & not be accused of an interest in theology.

I missed the Sixties through becoming a young father, programming computers, and general depression. Not till age thirty was I ready to drop out and turn on. Within a year of discovering marijuana, LSD and hippy communes I was caught up in worship of a boy god. Yes, it’s absurd but don’t followers of every public religion adapt it to their private purposes, and soften its rough edges? In 30 years I’ve spent 10,000 hours in cross-legged meditation. It never got easy, never got good: so I just kept doggedly trying, till it was just a superstition like a Catholic crossing himself and telling his beads. The other night, I dreamed that I “needed to meditate”, as one “needs a cigarette” or a stiff drink. A crutch, a habit, an addiction.

It wasn’t just the one hour of meditation. There were beliefs too which polluted the other twenty-three and have since caused me regret and shame. I believed I had found what everyone needs. Whenever a friendship came my way, I had to tell them of the precious jewel of wisdom which would save their souls.

It’s been joyous to stop meditating, to know that there is no secret knowledge that I must impart to others; and that I don’t need to practice anything, follow any rules, venerate any teacher. Best of all is to know I am no better than everyone else.

A madman was once asked---allegedly---why he kept banging his head against the wall: “Because it’s so nice when I stop.” Oh yes, it is so nice!

Keeping company with blockheads

Click here for source
click illustration to enlarge

“. . . he uniformly adhered to this strange opinion, which his indolent disposition made him utter: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.’ Numerous instances to refute this will occur to all who are versed in the history of literature.”

What would Dr Johnson think of us blogheads? “Blogheads not blockheads, Sam! It’s a word that’s not in your Dictionary. Your name is still held in honour two centuries later, but no one reads your books now. You wanted money and you got it, but your devoted friend and biographer James Boswell was the greater writer. On his Life of Johnson your immortality depends.”

The coffee-houses of London were the Internet of Johnson’s day where networking happened. You could pick up gossip and try out witticisms on others; see and be seen. Men of science and founders of banks favoured coffee, which promoted clear thought, not the ale and wine which aroused sentiment and passion.

Why do we write? I keep coming back to this question. I’ve deciding that writing “because I must”---to keep my psychic equilibrium---is the best guarantee of sound content. “Writing for money” would be too corrupting. There are few honest ways to make a living. My current job hardly improves the world but does less harm than the prostitution of literary talent for gain.

In Dr Johnson’s time, you could be transported to the Colonies for poaching or stealing a loaf of bread to feed your starving children. You were a victim of economic conditions punished for trying to survive. You’d be sent to the Province of Georgia but after American Independence the British Government had to find somewhere else for their convicts, and that is how the Botany Bay settlement started in Australia. I am proud to be descended from such sons and daughters of simple need.

Necessity may be harsh, but it carves out clean lines. This is the basis of my infatuation with the ordinary. I’ve found joy in this rented accommodation in the scruffy side of town, taking as I find, dependent on the bounty of angels for my blessings. “Must” means absence of choice. Fie to choice and “freedom”! They breed pestilence of the worst sort.

I’m aware of course that necessity embraces shanty-towns and all the terrible compromises of poverty. Though I am not writing for money, I don’t think Johnson would call me a blockhead, once he understood today’s world. He too understood necessity, for having been brought up poor, he could hardly help being fixated on money. I feel that he didn’t enjoy writing & that’s why we don’t enjoy reading him, except through Boswell. By vocation he was a conversationalist, but not a blagger. Blagging, says Dictionary.com, is Caribbean English: “informal conversation in a public place, often deceitful”. Johnson was a trenchant man of principle, even though I disagree with many of his opinions. Everyone has the right to express their own truth, for it’s only falsehood which messes up this world.

What would Johnson have thought of those who not only write for money, but blag “spirituality” in their self-help books? The “New Age” is so tainted that it’s part---the worst part---of the consumerism it purports to replace. I was once told that priests reincarnate as dogs, by someone I view in retrospect as a kind of priest himself. Why did this assertion impress me so much that I can recall the time, the date (May ’72) and the exact spot where he said it---without recalling anything about the person? Perhaps because he’s a dog now.

The Holy Ghost

Image from The Blake Archive

To Paul from Vincent continued. And also to Jim.

I felt uneasy after my last post, as if something had been left out. I continued to add comments as afterthoughts, but that did not fix the unease.

Have you noticed that barely an hour goes past in our waking life without the need to describe to ourselves or others what is happening, with some kind of metaphor, or a full-blown explanation, as if every effect must have a cause? It diminishes the feeling of chaos. If everything has a reason, the world is rational. It’s a great relief when the doctor we’ve consulted names the condition, says it is very common, and benignly writes a prescription, muttering “Nothing to worry about!” Before the ink is dry, the placebo effect has started its work. Anxiety is stilled and life is restored to control. Australian shamans used sleight of hand to extract sticks or pebbles from the patient’s body, as part of a healing ritual which the Aboriginals found effective for most conditions. Billion-dollar pharmaceutical industries in one instance, nomadic simplicity in the other. Similar rituals, similar effects.

So here I am assuming that my unease has been due to leaving something out of what I posted the other day. Is my blog then a ritual of pulling pebbles and sticks from my psyche, for healing and entertainment? Why yes. Isn’t that what creative writing is for?

The unease of my last post has crystallized. I feel I know what was left out: the third person of the Trinity. If Evolution is the Father and the Creation including you and I is the Son, then we must be in want of the Holy Ghost. Ghost comes from the Old English for “spirit”. I don’t know the history of the Trinity in Christian theology, but I know it was argued with passion, and PREVAILED. Those who opposed the Trinity were heretics, risking punishment on earth or in heaven.

The Holy Ghost must be like an invisible Superman for it is not dependent on the physical incarnation of God’s Son---God being the Big Bang, the subsequent Evolution and the Laws of the Universe; the Son being the Creation of which I am a fragment, with senses and feelings to apprehend the whole.

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8)

If you have frequented this blog, you’ll be surprised at this line of talk from someone you thought of as a sceptic. But I want to have faith! Not in this specific Christian formulation, but faith. I am for faith as a dog is for worship of its master. This is not a question of truth. Faith is not rational.

My connection to the angels has become tattered of late. I am all injured innocence, like a bird trailing a hurt wing. As long as I have been writing here, the impulse has been a daily joy, a nature-mysticism whose secret I was unable to impart. Till February, I was a retired wayfarer, unconsciously emulating Basho, that Zen pilgrim and writer of haikus:

The chestnut by the eaves
In magnificent bloom
Passes unnoticed
By men of this world.

Angel was in me prompting my actions and now I have gone down the route of wanting to be ordinary, and working in an office each day, sometimes in death-like idleness and sometimes---as lately---a slave who’s given no respite: “When will you have it ready? Can you make another change and deliver it before the meeting with the customer at 11?” Every indignity of the ordinary man: being cheated, lied to, ignored. Uncertainties. Money. In all these things my tribulations are mere tasters, tokens of the yoke other ordinary men suffer, every day of their lives.

But the worst is to feel abandoned by angels. I frighten myself with the thought of a soulless Evolution.

To Paul, from Vincent

Monarch of the Glen, Edward Landseer

YVES: One time I think on another blog you jokingly referred to agreeing with me for a change. But I’m not convinced you disagree most of the time so much as that you have your own outlook on life. My sense is that you tend to respond less to the content of my posts in their own terms than to point out how they don’t express your own outlook!

I’d be interested in seeing you do one or more posts on your outlook on life to get a better sense of where you’re coming from. (click on this comment by Paul to link to his post)

You’re quite right Paul that I do not respond to the content of your posts in their own terms! I'd been aware of it for a while and last Friday had thought of answering you in a post here instead of commenting on yours as I did. We are thinking on similar lines!

First something else: you once thought I was a girl because of the name Yves. It was only yesterday I discovered that the new Blogger allows it to be changed. Vincent is my seldom-used middle name, so I am no longer hiding behind a nom-de-plume picked up randomly from a music album cover.

“Outlook on life” is a good phrase, for it avoids mention of “beliefs”. In my outlook, the terms you use in your post---religion, faith, worship, saint, saintly---represent archaic ideas. I am not “for” them, but to be “against” them is to engage with a phantom enemy.

Over the last 3 or 4 years, I have ditched beliefs and even rational constructions as much as humanly possible. What remains? Immediate experience of senses and emotions. What directs my behaviour? Largely instinct and intuition. Intellect is required to use language, and to work for one’s living; but it’s a hopeless guide to life as a whole.

Making this intentional shift of one’s centre---away from intellect and towards the body or animal nature---has shown me that there exists a “natural virtue” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the cusp of Enlightenment / Romantic age, would have called it. Rousseau and the various religions formulated their outlooks before the Darwin bombshell. Christianity is like the Irishman’s broom: it claims to be the same one though it’s had many changes of brush and a few changes of handle. Some sects still deny evolution altogether: a proof of its power to destroy the old certainties.

As the elk is a mammal with overdeveloped antlers, man is the mammal with over-developed intellect. It’s the product of evolution and we have to do our best with its drawbacks. We imagine gods, we make up notions of virtue and sin. We overvalue technologies and are blind to the vexations they cause. Individually and collectively, we constantly adapt and make the best of things. We construct cultures and transmit them. Do they clarify the world for each succeeding generation, or add more confusion? This is something we need to face honestly.

The fish is not the pond. You and I are not our culture. We can escape our pond, swim down a stream, find an ocean maybe, or just another pond.

In different cultures we find the same idea: Brahman, Logos, Psyche, Anima, Spiritus. They all invoke the concept of a soul (ghost in Nordic languages) which breathes life into a body, and leaves it when we die. St John’s Gospel begins: “In the beginning was the Logos”---which literally is translated as Word.

Modern cosmology, evolution and genetics since the discovery of DNA provide other myths which withstand detailed examination and render the religious ones unnecessary. They explain life. Yes, I still call them myths, but it doesn’t mean that I worship at the altars of Science, especially when it denounces people’s beliefs.

Blake said “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth”. From that point of view, everyone’s outlook is of equal value. I seek out those who talk of Spirit for I share their priorities; but want to say that we can go even further in freeing spirit from archaic trappings.

To me as to you, what we call Spirit is the most important thing, and it doesn’t really matter that we differ in ideas as to what it is. But we may not yet be ready to talk in the same terms.

Unfair to rats

Factory, acrylic
Thanks to Astrid & flickr

I’ve been in a dark mood lately. We notice especially that which chimes with our state of mind. Out of a myriad details absorbed on a recent stroll, what remained when all the rest had been washed away in draughts of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, was rat poison.

Wherever food sends its aromas out to our whiskered grey cousins, you find dark green boxes discreetly positioned by a wall, with a small hole at each end. I will spare you an illustration of these ugly contraptions. Please enjoy a beautiful painting by Astrid Westvang instead.

Let me continue empathically in the imagined voice of a rat:

“Humans entice us here with the aroma of food, so we make pilgrimage to this holy place. It may be discarded fast-food to them but it’s staple diet to us. We like their cooking! We have families to rear and support. Our rat-nature offers us no alternative perspective (and if you don’t like this, then blame that God whom the humans declare to be All-knowing, All-powerful and Omnipresent). We would like to thank humans for their generosity: but one thing restrains our gratitude and perpetuates our mistrust. I refer to the disappeared ones---as in Chile during the days of General Pinochet. That’s the price we pay for being fond of human cooking. From every brood of well-loved offspring, we lose a few to the green boxes. This is our sorrow. We are grieving for our ‘disappeared’ but what can we do?”

All creatures are my brothers and sisters, including insects and shrubs (with whom I’ve enjoyed ecstasies almost sexual in intensity) but this does not explain why the plight of rats struck me so forcibly, and remained whilst more gracious ideas slipped through my fingers before they could type them.

You are to know the reason. In February as this blog relates I was drawn by the sweet smell of money to desert my nest of retirement and sign on at the MaxiRam Corporation as a hired hand. All went well for several months. Though the oldest worker in the building, I was much in demand, and even respected as “cool”. For a while.

How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!
O Jonathan, thou wast slain in thine high places. 2 Samuel 1:25.

No sooner had they renewed my contract than I found myself with nothing to do, ignored, bypassed; invisible to those on high and despised (as I imagined on little evidence) by my peers. I will not bore you with crises and politics and technical glitches which led to this situation. It wasn’t my fault though it’s true I’d become complacent.

Despite a vow to remain aloof from the rat-race---keep cool and stay wild whilst trading liberty for a bribe---I’d become truly a rat in a trap.

When primordial fear knocks at the door, we are caught beyond reach of reason. It’s the deepest instinct, to “keep our head above water”: we’re forever at the mercy of life’s tide.

My dark mood has lifted, but I wish we could treat those real rats---members of the species rattus rattus---more fairly, and all whom they symbolise (employees, immigrants . . . ) It’s a matter of honour to give succour and protection to an invited guest, even where the “invitation” has been misunderstood.

Burden of gold

I’d told Anando I might reconsider writing a book, but didn’t know how to go about it. He’s himself a writer of promise, burdened with talents yet to be uncovered for the world to see. We encourage one another. He’s like an unsuspected newfound twin, though our ages differ widely. Twins might not read one another’s thoughts but convey with light hints, not spelling out every detail.

Anyway, this is what he replied:

I pondered over it this week. Serious brain storming. I feel the best thing you can do for this world is write your own story. You’re a fascinating character with a colourful life. Why don’t you write it down? That’s the best thing you can do to portray ordinariness.

He was echoing thoughts which I’d been too modest to entertain seriously. Who wants to read the story of a nobody? “Fascinating character” applies to any person you meet who has lived long or thought deeply. I’ve a standing invitation to write the life of the man who supplies me with breadfruit and yams. He is not just a West Indian greengrocer, and his story would make that plain. But isn’t this the case with everyone? Only a fool would suppose a grocer could cut no dash in the world, couldn’t be a singer-songwriter on the side. “Celebrity” and “interesting” are not synonyms.

It’s true that the ordinary fascinates me most. I like to look at passers-by when I walk down our commonplace street into town. Only the least pretentious take this route and the pathos of existence is written in their gait, their style, their faces. Each is the centre of his or her world, but no one walks this street to impress anyone.

What’s held me back from more substantial literary endeavour is hesitation over theme and structure. The effort will be intense and sustained. What’s the use if it’s halted by misgivings? Till now, that’s what’s always happened. My doubts were always well-justified. It’s been a self-indulgent hobby with no claim to priority. Domestic trivia have taken precedence and the inspiration has dissolved like a tiny cloud in a hot blue sky.

Why should anyone be interested in my life-story? People want to read about exotic people and places, the overcoming of adversity, the transformation of raw talent into celebrity. They relish someone else’s downfall, vicariously enjoy someone else’s power and riches.

Not for me such stale tableaux. Memory dances constantly in a love-affair with the fresh-born moment, conceiving myriad progeny like tadpoles---or sperms. Let them scatter through the world and unite with receptive brains!

Fiction or fact, it doesn’t matter, for experience is the lens: the reader's even more than the writer’s. To look at the ordinary, peer into its essence. What do my senses tell me, and my feelings, and my thoughts?

I reject the assumptions of science and biography---both!---that the past is locked and unchangeable, that the present is explained by cause and effect. Oh yes, I can reject whatever conflicts with my own world. As in Richard Bach’s Running from Safety, I encounter my childhood self and we learn from one another.

My life-story will be full of space and possibility for my own transformation and my reader’s. We will change together.

Gold is a burden. I discovered yesterday that “talent” in the ancient world meant a weight of silver or gold used as money. Then because of the parable recorded by St Matthew, in which one servant buried the talent his master had entrusted to him, it came to have its present meaning. It’s certainly a parable that the present world has taken to heart, in the sense that everyone is urged to “cash in” on their potential.

Gold is a burden. It’s a heavy inert metal, unsubtle, attractive to misers. Air and water are better symbols of creativity. Or the sunrise striking a house on a hill.

The Madman’s Idea

Kleptomaniac, Théodore Géricault
1822: study by Peter Morrell 1999

Like a poor man suddenly gifted with gold, that’s burning a hole in my pocket, I am newly burdened with the riches of an idea, impatient to spend and be rid and be poor again. If one person understands, shall I be joyful? If no one at all, I’ll surely not be downhearted.

The time has come to speak of the Ordinary, and what makes it so special. Oh, I trip myself up with cursed paradox, before I have even begun.

To be ordinary is to feel every mood, good or bad, without possibility of escape. Life cannot be masked or disguised like a smell. It deserves to be taken as it is. There are those who say we can inscribe our vision on the pages of our life, defying and defacing what is written there already. Like a slow-witted peasant, wedded to his piece of land, I struggle to read those pages with trembling hands, awed by a message I can hardly decipher. I don’t have the effrontery to scribble on top.

Three weeks ago I stepped out into a straight road going West. A sunset dazzled my eyes, bathed everything in gold. That’s when I knew---that I aspired to nothing more than being ordinary. Only then could I be as special as the Creation itself. The dying sun gilded everything, even as I walked through a scruffy part of town, whose Victorian houses have been divided into rented rooms. Spilt refuse and broken furniture desecrate their thresholds.

Oh yes, people want to escape their own slum and be “special”. I, gifted already with something special, that offers me all colours and odours, aspire to the ordinariness of a stray dog. Oh yes, I mock myself, for ideas to set the world afire corrupt my brain. Perhaps I teeter on the edge of madness. Shaving this morning, I catch my own eye and it sinks in how my whole existence is blessed by the Ordinary. It’s only the idea that’s a curse.

Is my life to be devoured by ambition, till only crumbs remain? Shall I be strangled by my own folly? Is the gift of gold a blessing or a curse?