All problems solved

from my backyard, facing west

I’ve solved the problem that has baffled mankind through the ages. It’s taken me many years and I thought it might take as many years again to explain it to the world, to help others come to the same realization that I have reached singlehanded about the true nature of God when seen face to face.

Except that now that I have reached my final conclusion I feel like blurting it out simply, for the sheer relief of moving on. So here it is, take it or leave it: God is the voice inside. Now, that feels better, I’m no prophet, no philosopher, no poet, just a “nobody”, that is, a human being, which is good enough. I will carry no “white man’s burden”. I can tell little stories, in no particular order, stories of no particular significance.

When in doubt, go walking, that’s what puts me in the right frame of mind. Or I would say do something physical. Everyone alive can do that, if it’s only breathing. But don’t talk to me about “only breathing”. I’ve done enough of that meditation to last a lifetime. Literally.

Today I passed a tree which twenty years ago inspired a certain thought. It was in the position I remember but didn’t look the same, for now it’s all overgrown with ivy so that it looks like an ivy tree, if there is such a thing. Then its leaves were delicate, all a-quiver in the breeze, so that I could look right through the tree and see each one moving independently, and I thought how much was going on all at once, and my consciousness merged with the tree trying to take in all the leaves, as if I had a thousand limbs and possessed proprioception for all of them. I’m sure that is more or less what I thought at the time. I wrote it down in a notebook, but all those notebooks have been thrown away, and in any case it would take hours to go through my illegible handwriting. And why would you care, dear reader?

Perhaps when I looked at the tree twenty years ago I was recalling my trips on LSD, either reflecting on them or having some kind of a flashback. Those trips all took place in ’71 and ’72. Since then, no psychedelics, but some aspect of those experiences hits me almost every time I go walking, as if the very outside air, or some invisible rays from the open sky, are soaked in mescalin. Can I describe the feelings? I’ll try. It’s as if my essence is entranced by the ambience, I mean the complete sensual array of my immediate surroundings. Each place has its own special quality, recognizable on every visit; perhaps as a dog recognizes the scent of a person or animal when chasing a trail.

I’m not much of a moralist but I feel like saying it’s not necessary to consume psychedelic drugs. I actually am a moralist when I think of my children’s welfare, not wanting them to get trapped in bad scenes like addiction, debt, criminality and bad company. My children have in any case all grown up. The last one left home yesterday, to live independently. It was a momentous day, that would have felt even more momentous if it were not the second time in four months that she has left home finally.

There’s a neighbourhood cat, all black with pleading eyes, who sits on the fence and looks in the window. Sometimes when it’s been cold I’ve let it in for a while to get warm and it has been grateful but I didn’t want it sharpening its claws on anything or treating this place as home. My daughter liked it when she was here; but last night it managed to leap into the house through an upstairs window by climbing a low roof. I chucked it out but it kept coming back in. It was like a burglar: the house was under siege, we couldn’t open any windows now. So I chased it with a water spray, which it didn’t like; it looked at me reproachfully, as if it were prepared to wait until the human’s apoplexy passed and normal kindness resumed. How long before it realizes it can never come in uninvited? You can’t teach morality to cats, so I’ll make it simple by never inviting it again.

People expect me to solve their problems. Someone phoned me from her car the other day. She was on her way to Birmingham but her sat-nav system was showing an error message. Could I give her directions? I could see where this was going, even if I couldn’t see where she was going. I did have some advice for her: go to the next petrol station and buy a map. Half an hour later she rang again. She was on her way to the bus station in Slough, having decided to drop her passengers there so they could get to Birmingham by bus. Could I look up the internet to tell her the bus times? I had more advice for her: go to the bus-station and ask.

Then I was woken at 3am by my cellphone, having forgotten to switch it off. A dear friend works as a barmaid, and seemed to be saying the pub was wrecked. I imagined it on fire, and leapt out of bed instantly awake. Her manager had asked her to ring anyone she knew who was a computer expert, because the bar till was showing an error message. She started to read out extracts from the instruction manual, as if at 3am or any other time it would make sense to me. I was able to advise her: write down the amount of each bar purchase using pen and paper. She received the advice as if from an oracle. She was excitedly intoxicated. By way of thanks, she offered a titillating party invitation whose proposed sleeping arrangements were unsuitable to my married status, which through the haze of cocaine (? I'm guessing) she then remembered, inviting K along too. For a few moments her 3-in-a-bed fantasy fired my imagination. I hope she remembers nothing.

Writing instrument

We think we know somebody. They think they know us. It’s nice because we can always be surprised.

My son takes present-buying seriously. He went to a hippy shop and toyed with getting me a piece of angel merchandise or a Native American dream-catcher; but fortunately thought better. I received a hastily-wrapped book and opened it rather apprehensively, being choosy. It is Teach Yourself Creative Writing by Dianne Doubtfire, a suspiciously creative name. Its contents are eminently sensible for the writer aspiring to publication “in print”. But I didn’t feel like one of Ms Doubtfire’s intended readers, I mean one of her aspiring writers. I feel like a different species, a kind of engineer who uses literature as medium, and subjective experience as content. Or perhaps an artist who paints from life, using words: inner life as reflected in outer life.

A friend refers to his own “dear blog”. We have much in common: we love our writing instruments. I feel affection for my fountain pens and writing-books. They are sacred objects, as if the inspiration lies actually within them and I am only the catalyst helping them speak. Most of all I love my blog because I write that others may read, for a communion of souls.

My own desire is to be a writing instrument rather than a writer, the recipient of inspiration rather than its owner. Then I can focus on polishing and structuring the words: that is the engineering part. Without inspiration there is only concoction, like factory-made food.

The other day I went to visit a dear relative in London who gave us some crabs to take home, recounting in graphic detail how they were live when she bought them. I was horrified, didn’t want the detail and couldn’t bear the thought of taking them home. She asked what I thought to do with them. I said if they were alive I would drive to the seashore 70 miles away and release them. I was ashamed of saying such an ungracious thing and fled the house for a walk in the fresh air.

It was frosty outside and the suburb was not of an attractive class. Trying to be festive, several houses were decked with inflatable Santa Clauses. The inflated beard of one was so grotesque as to tip me into a pit, I mean a low mood from which it is hard to climb out. I lost that usual detachment which makes the world of other people tolerable, and cursed my sensitivity. In imagination, I was stuck in this chilly suburb, renting a lonely room, with a landlord whose idea of Christmas was to blow up these plastic things and put hideous flashing lights in the windows; and who would invite me to watch television, and serve synthetic dainties out of a packet. In this daymare, I forgot my usual reasons to live.

Teach Yourself Creative Writing could drop me into a pit if I let it, if I followed its exercises, concocting fake prose or verse. Writing is my ladder, not my chute. Writing is my flashlight for the exploration of inner space, not a fancy trick for fame and fortune. Writing is potent magic, to be used in service of truth alone.

Christmas 1944

This is me 63 years ago. I wish I had time to write more today.

Angel story in reverse

This morning I couldn’t park in my own or adjoining streets, so I drove to where I used to live, five minutes’ walk away. I steered into a space next to a red car. The driver got out and came across to speak. I thought he might challenge my right to be there. Signs warn of dire consequences for non-residents who leave their cars in those spaces. But it wasn’t that. In broken English he asked if I could help him as his car wouldn’t start. He produced some jump leads, so I opened my bonnet (hood) and he connected our batteries whilst I kept my engine running. His car started immediately and he was very happy: “I can’t believe it!” he said, and drove off to buy a new battery.

I thought nothing more about it and walked home. The mosque down the street was holding a major event, with Muslims arriving from every direction. They’d opened the gates of the old school playground, freeing up additional parking spaces. So I went back to fetch my car. To my surprise the same man was there with the same red car. The bonnet was raised and he looked worried. I said hello. He told me he’d located a suitable battery in a spares depot but hadn’t been able to buy it yet. I guess he didn’t take enough money along, so he’d come back. And now he had just discovered that his car wouldn’t start, just at the moment I reappeared. So I helped him start it, again. He said, “I can’t believe it! I think you must be an angel.” I smiled enigmatically and left the scene.

I’d said in my last post I would write on illusion and reality. However, comments from Beth, Hayden and others had convinced me there is nothing much to say: illusion and reality are forever intertwined. Someone’s angelic visitation is someone else’s mundane routine.

The Ventilator Cowl

I lay in a morning bath recalling Mid-December last year, when I used to go wayfaring in stout boots, regardless of the chilly weather and leaden skies: all senses alert like my ancestors the prehistoric hunters. From Gore Hill, I’d look down on Amersham as if I had stumbled on civilization for the first time, trying to make sense of it. From a mired meadow-bottom I’d visualise the farm-labourers of old, their lowly rank unchanged from the days of Robin Hood till the Industrial Revolution, going cap-in-hand humbly to church, contemplating Advent, singing carols about the holly and ivy and sheep that they knew so well, and the glory that shone around when the angel announced the news of “Goodwill, peace to men”. Perhaps one of those labourers, or even a shepherd in his innocence and humility, had also seen a great light, and felt an angel-presence, in a meadow-corner where the lie of the land and the trampling of cattle through a gate had mired the track till it was impassable. In a little church heated only by human bodies, the steam of their breath and the voice of their hearts would rise to Heaven as the only present they could give; and their hearts would be filled as the only present they received.

This year I gaze out the window from my cosy cottage, and feel less inclined to go out. I keep this place shipshape while wife and daughter go out to work. I’m both steward and first mate on this ship whose bow-wave faces the flow of Time and trims her sails to the winds of Fortune.

Lying in the stillness of that warm bath, I found indoors evocative too. Distant water-pipes sang and jangled, alive with purpose, evoking my six weeks of shipboard life: Fremantle to Tilbury in June 1946. I was four so I didn’t feel it as a journey. I lived permanently on shipboard, almost independent from my mother. The ship fed me and kept me safe. Each of the war brides imagined having a little boy like me. Their petting and sweet-talking I don’t recall directly, only that I felt safe to wander alone everywhere: “alone” meaning without my mother and therefore meaning “free”. Certain things bring back the feeling of that six-week lifetime: anything which triggers the memory of that constant vibration, in a melange of different rhythms. I suppose I had got quite used to it but when we crossed the Equator, the order was given to switch the engines off, and assemble crew and passengers on deck to enact the rituals of King Neptune, and games on deck. I just picked this up from BBC website: Traditionally presided over by “King Neptune and his Royal court”, the ceremony was part of an initiation into “The Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep”. It was exactly like that. The ship was still and silent. Then the great engines went back on, setting the rivet-studded bulkheads a-drumming, and the pumps and fans a-spinning within the vast cathedral-organ of water-pipes, steam-pipes and air-ducts. I never understood what the ventilator cowls were, those painted warm things rising out of the deck with their open horizontal mouths; but now I know they were to blow out the smells from below deck over our heads: diesel fuel, bleach, disinfectant, vomit, sewage.

I’ve covered these topics in other blog posts, for example: Outsider, In the Bleak Midwinter, Ship of Dreams. So why do I bring them up again? It’s to ground myself, to get in touch with reality as a sensual animal in an environment. I cannot be a satisfactory philosopher unless I am also a poet, not in the versifying sense but the Wordsworthian sense, recollecting emotions (that is, feelings) in tranquillity.

To be grounded in reality, yours and mine, is the prerequisite for a discussion about Illusion which I'd like to initiate. What is real? What is illusion? It won’t be a sterile debate. We will get to the very guts of this important topic. Is illusion essential to life as a human being?

When I think of this cottage as a ship, an adventure-space like the one I voyaged on at four years old, I feel content to stay indoors. Illusion is my invisible friend.


The rmv rangitata, my ship of memory and imagination.

Two Vincents

There are a number of things puzzling me, and I don’t just mean how other people think and behave, and the consequences thereof in the visible world. I am puzzling to my own self.

Siegfried commented on my last, à propos Vincent van Gogh, thus:

“He was being himself and being well-adjusted to society and his personal circumstances. He became a victim too.
Being oneself doesn’t immune anyone from insanity.
Well, actually being oneself doesn’t really mean anything.”

I understand and sympathise with the intention of these statements, even the conclusion that “being oneself doesn’t really mean anything”; for yes, phrases in themselves don’t mean anything. Yet a person who says something invariably means something. So if Siegfried says van Gogh was well-adjusted to society, he means something, and I’ll assume he is not ignorant of the man’s life, for its factual details are well-known and not mysterious, with biographies and biopics galore. The richness of information is largely due to the letters exchanged between Vincent and Theo, his art-dealer brother who supported him financially. We know that Vincent’s life was eccentric and tortured at the parental home; also when he was a missionary amongst the Belgian coal-miners; also in his time with Gauguin at the Yellow House at Arles; also in the outbursts of mental illness which persuaded him to seek refuge in an institution; and finally in his stay with Dr Gachet, whose ministrations did not prevent him shooting himself and dying a few days later.

I’m not criticising Siegfried. Quite the reverse, he’s my brother. Yet the affair is crucial to me because if that Vincent was adjusted to society then I must be too, even if I don’t feel adjusted. That Vincent is a hero of mine, as artist and person. And I’d rather talk about him than myself, because I’m shy about my own maladjustments.

Vincent was himself. His inner promptings were more compelling than any urge to meet society’s expectations. To be yourself doesn’t immunize you against insanity---Siegfried you are right! Nor does it guarantee you happiness.

To be yourself. It’s a calling: not everybody is called. It’s beyond normal reason, belonging to the category of mysteries. Normal reason, you see, is on the side of happiness, moderation and compromise. Being truly yourself, you may wave goodbye to the normal and known and cautious. It’s a mystery.

Mysteries are never solved. The explanations never work. The simplest things are the most mysterious. Why are we supposed to resist our instincts? Education denies mystery, and tells children there is nothing to fear in the dark. I don't know why I choose the cold and lonely road where I don’t know anything. It was different when I was young.

When I was growing up I thought Buddhism offered a logical explanation, and a solid answer to the pain I felt. It gives Four Noble Truths: (1) there is suffering (2) it is caused by craving (3) the craving can be tackled (4) the craving can be tackled and the suffering overcome through the Noble Eightfold Path. My suffering and craving ran on desperate parallel tracks. The express train of adulthood came at me furiously, roaring and hissing; I stood on the tracks paralysed with fright. The Noble Eightfold Path had no rescue for my urgent peril. I needed a quick fix and thought I had it in Zen and its offer of instant enlightenment. “There’s a goose in the bottle: how do you get it out without breaking the bottle or killing the goose?” The existence of such a koan hints at a magic answer, the satori moment. So when the express train comes, perhaps I can float up weightless off the tracks; or make my molecules porous, so the train can pass through whilst I am still me, without the bloody impact that seems so imminent.

I knew a man on Death Row in Florida. We exchanged letters for a year or two. I used to tell him my news, illustrated with photos. He was particularly interested when I sent pictures of women that I knew. Through him I heard of Bo Lozoff’s Prison-Ashram Project, which he called Buddhism. I’m in no doubt that it helped him in that place of waiting where the only meaningful action was to make appeals against his sentence forever, one after the other, aided by the least competent lawyers in America.

What is the Noble Truth of Suffering?
Birth is suffering, ageing is suffering, sickness is suffering,
dissociation from the loved is suffering,
not to get what one wants is suffering:
in short the five categories affected by clinging are suffering.

This is what I wonder: if van Gogh had been a Buddhist, could he have led a “happy life”? Would he have painted? Well, I’m asking you what you think. But personally I don’t include it in the list of insoluble mysteries. The Four Noble Truths are an explanation, and explanations never quite work. They are also sales hype and spin. O Westerner! Be warned.

Under Western Eyes

I’ve read enough spy stories of John Le Carre to perceive that Conrad’s novel is a masterly example of a genre that he possibly invented. But it’s much more than a spy story, despite the suspense it generates as we wonder how the double agent is going to succeed in his mission and not be exposed at risk to his life. It’s all the more exciting that our hero Razumov is untrained and unwilling, a student whose only aim is to do well at the University and win a silver medal in an essay competition. Which side is he on? He scorns both the Tsarist secret police and the plotting revolutionists. He has ideals but they are secondary to his need to survive, after events arbitrarily threaten his quiet life.

At first I thought Razumov a cowardly nonentity, but he impresses everyone he encounters, with his intelligence, seriousness---and strangeness. His unexpected reactions are due to a secret he cannot reveal, much as he wants to come clean and get on with his life. But they are variously interpreted by both sides as suppressed grief, anger and most ironic of all, the behaviour of a tough player who keeps everything under control.

In fact he feels completely alone in the world, being virtually an orphan with no relatives, only a benefactor; and being the holder of a secret which he dare not share with anyone. He’s pursued by two women. One is young and beautiful; the other is the opposite. At the end he fatally reaches out to the one, leaving the other one to (almost literally) pick up the pieces.

His terrible secret keeps him apart from everyone. Conrad is the master of the unspoken so it is only with ambiguous hints that’s there is any love interest at all. Or else I am dense in these matters like a typical man. Is he attracted to her? Is she attracted to him? There’s enough other agenda to account for their dialog and body language, and Razumov is as opposite to James Bond as you could imagine. This book fits neither in the category of Action Adventure nor Romance. If it were a movie, it would start with a single set-piece: an assassin’s bomb goes off in a public place. Then you would need various scenic shots: pre-Revolution St Petersburg – slum district and palace; Geneva: lake, castle, tramcars, backstreets. All the rest would be close-ups in a studio with very careful lighting, to show the complex emotions succeeding one another on the characters’ faces, plus a Razumov voice-over for his unspoken thoughts and a narrator’s voice-over to link the flashbacks (quaintly called “retrospects” by Conrad). But I think it could not and should not be done. Why should a film-maker pander to those who have forgotten how to hold a book in their hand? (The world-wide-web tells me it was done as a BBC TV production in 1975.)

Oh yes, why the title? The story is narrated by an elderly Englishman, a language teacher who lives in Geneva: this despite the book’s having the authentic atmosphere of a Russian novel and the narrator’s not having the atmosphere of an Englishman. He was Polish, after all. “Under Western Eyes.” Yes, periodically the narrator frames his picture, as it were, by remarking how extraordinary the Russian émigrés (Conrad calls them refugees) appear in their mixture of politics and passion.

It’s extraordinary how the book, published in 1911, presages the dilemmas and conflicts of the Soviet Union right up to the time of its dissolution: not in terms of history but painting with a palette of human emotion and moral compromise, understanding the tragedy of Russia without judging or taking sides. The real struggle, in Razumov’s eyes, is for Pravda, the truth: not truth as a noble ideal, but a compassionate necessity. Razumov, true hero where James Bond is just a nasty piece of work, could have profited from lies and got the girl too; but he felt compelled to follow his true desire---to be himself.

Clothesline

Ambergris Caye, Belize. . . . . thanks to clickfarmer / flickr

I was not pleased with my last piece. That kind of rant gives the impression that the world has to be put right in order to provide the conditions in which we can live happily. I really think the opposite: that the world has never been any better, and never any worse, than it is now. We can do our little best to try and improve it. In fact we must. But the only yoke we are to take on our shoulders is, when seen correctly, a light one: to do what we feel impelled to do, as if to let the wind fill our sails, not to think we have to blow into them, which would be unproductive effort.

Of household chores my favourite is to hang out clothes on the line. We have three and they fill the backyard, leaving space for the little birds to feed and flit and flirt. None of that bourgeois landscaping is needed. Ivy creeps over the fence from next door and that’s enough greenery but we might plant a few herbs. There’s also a bench, which I hope will be kissed by the summer sun.

My favourite poem is about a clothesline. Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote it and in a speech he recalls the San Francisco of 1950, long gone. It (the poem not the speech, but I recommend that too - click the link) begins:

Away above a harborful
of caulkless houses
among the charley noble chimneypots
of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines
a woman pastes up sails
upon the wind
hanging out her morning sheets
with wooden pins

He also refers to chimney-pots. Today I walked in the rain: chimneys everywhere but only one with smoke curling up from it. “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” asked Villon in a sentiment echoed by poets through the ages. Now we may worry less about the snows of yesteryear and more about those of tomorrow. As for the curling smoke rising in clear air to mark human habitation, it’s not even a memory for the new generations. West Indians arriving in the Fifties and Sixties recall the astonishment of their first day in London. In every street chimneys produced smoke: they could not believe there could be so many factories. Here in this valley, there actually are factories in every street, as in my picture below, but their chimneys are mute.

What’s so special about hanging out clothes? It connects us to the wind and clouds and sky, as do those chimney-pots. These are the time-hallowed things, the time-hallowed chores. As a child I had the task of laying fires each winter morning: poking out the ashes from the grate, splitting the kindling, laying it on crumpled newspaper, placing small lumps of coal on top. It was a primitive skill which gave a primitive satisfaction, as John Cowper Powys celebrated in more than one novel:

“The lighting of his fire in the morning, the crackling of the burning sticks, and their fragrant smell, gave Mr Quincunx probably as much pleasure as anything else in the world.” Wood and Stone, page 80.

I have to stop myself. This is still not what I want to say. I don’t want to imply that the old times were better. Every generation has said that, looking back to the Golden Age of its youth. I may pity my grandchildren for being born into this new century, but they may look back on this time with nostalgia too, and it doesn’t mean that everything is constantly getting worse.

The irredeemable state of the material world has ever been the springboard to the spiritual life; it may act as the bully who pushes you into the pool of Providence, to sink or swim.

The factory in my street

I’m not familiar with the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola. I had a quick Web-glimpse and that was enough. Perhaps the Jesuits still practise them, but they seem out of date. To hang out the washing, to see it billowing to a background of trees and sky, this is the spiritual exercise for which I feel daily gratitude. It makes a connection. It fills with joy.

By some perversion of common sense, the rich countries have all but abolished physical labour. When we bought this house the previous owner urged us to buy his dishwasher, which was fully installed in the kitchen, but we said no. They took it with them, leaving a gap and a tangle of pipes. We could have put an electric clothes drier there but refused that too, preferring the time-hallowed dignity of chores. Why buy labour-saving machines? Then your body has excess energy which you need to spend on the labour-generating exercise machines in gyms, for which you have to work and earn. Is there dignity in work? Yes, if you live in the Third World. Otherwise, I am not so sure.

I’ve failed once more in my objective. I wanted to say . . . Oh never mind, I’ll keep on trying.

An Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

One of the characters in The Secret Agent is Michaelis, the “ticket-of-leave apostle”. Pitifully obese, he finds it difficult to communicate with others having spent his twenty years in jail (judged guilty by association with some terrorist atrocity) developing his own anti-capitalist philosophy. So now he continues his solitude in a cottage provided by a benefactor, writing obsessively.

I’m fascinated by difference, and strange paths through life which make people different. It is not surprising that my literary heroes---offhand, I will count Kierkegaard, John Cowper Powys, Wittgenstein and now Conrad amongst these---all had arrived at their writing via strange paths, as indeed have I.

As a corollary, I tend to be astonished and sometimes repulsed by conformity, though I recognise its labour-saving attributes. In the very act of speaking---via mouth or written word---we acknowledge commonality with other speakers. If we stray off too far in our individuality, the contact is broken. But still we have our loyalties. Mine is to the past more than the present: not just the world of my youth but often to my mentors’ world: that of my teachers, parents and grandparents.

Over breakfast today, being argumentative as usual (and I am pleased to relate, habitually enjoying an old-fashioned cooked breakfast and most importantly sitting together in timeless fellowship without being rushed) I proposed that the newspapers have taken the place of grandmothers. K initially thought this was ridiculous, having herself been raised by her much-loved great-grandmother. “I mean the media in general”, I explained. Who else now teaches us values, how to cook, what to wear, what we need to know about sex? Our grandmothers passed on their prejudices and old wives’ tales, so the proportion of falsehood to truth may have been the same. But importantly they cared about us. Theirs was an instinctive love, explicable in terms of helping their genes survive: “Do be careful crossing the road, dear!”

What do the media care? Only to compete against other media. Same with the politicians. Same with the supermarkets. Same everywhere. The market. If one human being is more to blame than any other, for today’s world, it may be Margaret Thatcher, the first British woman prime minister. She gave succour to Ronald Reagan. Together they helped bring down Russian Communism. You might think that a good thing. But I preferred the Cold War to the War on Terror. I prefer Cuba with its Havana cigars and refurbished Fifties automobiles and dance rhythms, to any country wracked by competition. (I haven’t been there, mark you: mine is a fantasy Cuba.) I shudder to think what my (inevitable) purchase of Chinese goods is doing to some poor slave in a factory. I haven’t been to China either. I ranted the other day about a friendly bomb that might selectively destroy the automobile, television and factory food. My terrorist fantasy of today is a bomb which would destroy competition and leave the rest intact. I’m waiting for the secret police to knock on the door (correction: break it down without knocking first) and drag me off for 28 days’ detention; for I am not sure if even the British officials still have a sense of humour. The man in the street certainly still does: yesterday I saw a lorry with a bear mascot tied to its radiator grille, on which the word “Mohamid” was crudely inscribed. Let me know if you are fortunate enough not to have come across the news story that this refers to.

All this is tangential to my real theme: that every crooked path deviates the beaten track and misses out on common experience. Those who are competitive regret any crooked path that they may have been forced to tread, for they think life favours the mainstream. We have visions of being trodden into the mud whilst everyone else goes rushing to the next popular dreamscape. How to survive? This is a stronger motivation than any spiritual quest. You can’t go into a monastic cell or Himalayan cave unless you know where your next meal is coming from. It’s worse than that. For every medieval nun praying for the world and having mystic visions, a hundred laymen would donate in hope of a place in Heaven, in a superstition which the nun herself would despise. Even the highest spirituality is tainted, that’s my point, not whether you think Catholic nuns a worthy example.

Of course there will always be some competition, just as there always has been. It’s Nature’s way and we are its children. (When I write a sentence like this, I wish that those who have forgotten how to use apostrophes would take notice!) After three weeks, the birds have finally dared to visit my backyard and partake of the seeds put there specially for them. But they only come in a squabbling group, not alone. They come fearfully, sitting in adjacent trees, swooping across, fluttering their little wings in acrobatic manoeuvres. The amount of seed they actually consume is minimal. Do they think it might be poisoned? I would be delighted if they were so cautious because they need to be cautious. People poison slugs for example.

I love the birdsong. I noticed the birdsong in this part of town before I even discovered a house here for sale; as well as for some beckoning vibe that made me feel good at this spot. But I won’t be sentimental about any of it. To be incarnated is to know a world of fear and brutal competition. We are compelled to be strong, armed with whatever advantages our rivals have. This is part of the reason we stick together, gregarious, not hermits seeking enlightenment.

To be original is to speak a different language, and thereby risk being misunderstood. To be misunderstood is to be isolated. In much of the world, hunger and exposure to the elements is no longer the main driving force of survival. Instead it’s the tension between two poles: self-actualization, to use a rather ugly term, versus swimming with the tide.

Where do I stand? Where do you?

Oh for one hour of youthful joy!
Give back my twentieth spring!
I'd rather laugh, a bright-haired boy,
Than reign, a gray-beard king.

(Oliver Wendell Holmes, author of the original Autocrat of the Breakfast Table)

The Secret Agent

Illustration: from the New York Times review of first edition, in 1907.

I’d been reading a trio of Conrad’s sea stories. Two were about storms, one a calm; two about sailing ships, one steam; two about serious illness on board, one about the obstinacy of a captain. The stories were The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon and The Shadow-Line. After these I was hungry for more Conrad, but could not imagine that any land-based tale could be as gripping. Landlubbers are not bound together like sailors by mutual dependence whilst racked by the elements. As my recent posts bear witness, I’m moved by the elemental: in my tame inland suburb I cannot be up in the rigging of some creaking schooner, but I can still hang sheets on the washing-line in a medium breeze.

So when Suzan Abrams revealed on her blog she was reading The Secret Agent---with all her travels to Frankfurt, Dublin and Singapore I suspect her for a secret agent herself!---I decided that that title would be my next port of call. I buy books mainly at the Cottage Bookshop in Penn (I’ve found some photos of it to share with you!), not just because they’re cheap there: the chain bookstore in town has a vibe inimical to my sensibility. Waterstone’s, for that’s its name, also doesn’t sell old hard-backed editions whose physical forms are mute messengers from decades long past. I’ll choose an old Conrad in preference to a virgin paperback, any day.

What attracted him to write on spying and skulduggery in London? As he says in his Author’s Note:

“It seems to me now that even an artless person might have foreseen that some criticisms would be based on the ground of sordid surroundings and the moral squalor of the tale.”

His tale, like most he wrote, is the fleshing out of an anecdote or news story, to imagine the possible background of a bizarre event. I found a resemblance to one of the inner themes of Nostromo, which is still fresh in my mind after reading it immediately before the sailing yarns referred to above. Gould in Nostromo and Verloc, the Secret Agent himself, are each compromised and corrupted by their chosen occupations, whilst clinging to some fig-leaf of idealism. In this attempt, their dutiful long-suffering wives play a major part by their faithfulness and apparent love. In The Secret Agent, this theme, with an underlying concern for morality in a compromised world, grows in strength till it swallows the thriller intact, suspense and all, adding a universal dimension.

I found by looking at online reviews that some readers were disappointed that it wasn’t more of an action thriller. But I’m no critic: when I fall in love with an author I am blind to his faults, or rather I adapt myself to them, make allowances. Reading is an active process, like listening to music. You sing along and your own wrong notes are likely to exceed those of the musician. So don’t look to me for any listing of Conrad’s shortcomings. I don’t see any, and each story I read is better than his last.

So in my amateur reading (fie! to the pretentiousness of literary criticism, as taught, with its pat answers and downloadable essays from the Internet), the central characters are Winnie Verloc and her retarded brother Stevie. The others, including her husband, the Secret Agent, reveal themselves in their actions and posturing words more than in inner monologues. Winnie and Stevie are vulnerable and innocent: to survive the callous machinations of this foggy London of hansom cabs and gaslight, they have to attach themselves to benefactors as best they can. And this is where the link to the sea-stories comes in. Just as in those, just as in Nostromo, his plots are focused on the dynamics of survival: the twisted honour and pride of men coping with circumstances.

It’s still a thriller: he maintains suspense throughout---even to the last few pages, which often under his pen are calm and reflective and anti-climactic. His plot details are managed with complete mastery, so that things and personal quirks which appear in the first pages like mere descriptive colour play pivotal roles in the denouement. It’s not a detective story full of red herrings. It’s irreducible, as its much disputed subtitle “A Simple Tale” proclaims. Every part is essential to the whole in this classical tragedy. The characters themselves may misinterpret what is going on but the author never uses cunning to mislead us. Gradually, we put the hints together and work out with a sense of horror and pity what must have happened. It becomes unbearable as we wait for the characters to find out the truth that we have only guessed. And this truth is inevitable, for the characters have been shaped by life to have limited horizons. Here the self-effacing Winnie gradually comes to the fore, as we see that the plot is shaped by her strengths and limitations, unleashing a triple tragedy. She can’t live without a benefactor: at first the excuse is her responsibility to look after Stevie. But whenever she fastens on to a benefactor, she refuses to look beneath the surface or ask questions. “Things don’t stand much looking into”, she says to herself.

I’d drafted out a quite different piece at first, whilst I was still halfway through the book, for what struck me then was the relevance today of this tale involving suicide bombers and deadly disregard of ordered society. It all seemed so believable and modern. In the back of my mind, I was contrasting Conrad with another literary hero, John Cowper Powys, whose dramas take place within the souls of lonely individuals: every character reflecting an aspect of its author. Conrad seems the opposite, concerned with the dynamics of action in a tough world. But now I see that The Secret Agent, for all its sordidness and dark intrigue, is psychological too, a mirror to the real world.

The modern school of literary criticism, if I am not mistaken, analyses texts as objects with intrinsic qualities. I don’t take that view. Texts are nothing without the reader, who alone constructs the meaning. They are dishes served up to a person, preferably hungry, on a particular occasion. By this, my book-reviewing is a subcategory of memoir-writing. Here’s my bit of cooking for you, my reader. I have to guess your taste in spices for I don’t know you that well.

Last night I watched a DVD, Crash (2005). The premise, played out on dangerous streets in LA, is that racial prejudice is lethal but redemption is always possible, with a bouquet of unlikely coincidences to help it on. Being a child at heart, the bit I liked the best was the invisible cloak of invulnerability which a father bestows on his five-year-old daughter. She believes, and it doesn’t let her down.

From Conrad to a popular movie: I am not going to say “from the sublime to the ridiculous”. I’ve read few novels, and until recently seen few films. As far as I am concerned, all experience is worth savouring as if rare and precious, full of significance. Because it is.

PS Have just republished a set of posts in October which I had suppressed for reasons of style and/or content. I don't feel so critical of them now, since they can be buried in the archives.

Elemental and Instinctual

In a fury of prophecy, I penned the rant below for a private site, Destiny Discussion, of which I am a member. I mention this by way of explanation for its tone, different from my normal blogging style.

[Illustration: a fencepost, eroded by rot and weather.]

“I have an obscure objection to all the layers of exposition (which at worst are preaching) that we are being subjected to these days.

“The raising of our consciousness always seems to be accomplished by you and me being the ignorant children who need to be told by the ecologist and celebrity chef and nutritionist what is good for us and our planet.

“These voices remain minor elements in a society which relentlessly pursues the opposite, giving us the plastic bag when we haven’t asked for it, building landscapes which discourage walking in favour of the private car; taking more and more initiatives away from the individual and making them into laws for our health and safety.

“Let me put it bluntly. As long as someone has to tell us how to live, we are doomed. For we lurch ever more into the status of domestic animals kept in pens.

“If some form of “terrorism” (or natural catastrophe) could selectively destroy three things: the motor car, television and factory-food, it might one day be considered not terrorism but a saviour. Perhaps the Taliban are my allies? Certainly the guns and propaganda set against them would indicate something to be said on their behalf. But I don't believe in violent direct action. There are laws in this country against incitement to terrorism and I am not such a fool as to pit myself against them. Like every benevolent witness, I see that instant deprivation from TV, cars and factory-food would cause disruption and pain to children and the elderly.

“Every territory or enclave in the world which doesn’t have these totems yearns for them, to its own detriment. I quote them merely as examples of toxins we cannot do without: like heroin, foisted by dealers upon each generation. I can’t see a way back to some Golden Age where they didn’t scourge our lives.

“I resign myself therefore to Nature (Gaia), which as ---- [name of friend] reminds us looks after itself somehow or another, even if it has to kill off the human race for its own survival. There’s a great battle going on in the world: Man versus Nature. I find myself on Nature’s side: not against Man but only those nasty addictions which oppose Nature.

“What do I propose instead? Nothing, other than scepticism against the sources of destructive power, and Gandhian resistance to the objectives of big business. At best the marketing-led assault on humanity would wither away as not one would be fooled any more. I don’t see that happening. Nor do I see everyone being like me and hating the motor car. Even I have spent a day fixing mine, giving it emergency surgery after one of its organs ceased functioning. I could have let it die---it’s “on borrowed time anyhow”---but I would have been responsible for burying its corpse, so I have revived it instead, to make it functional once more.

“What I see around me is an artificial and repulsive wealth, even in my own town. The supermarkets, showing all their Christmas bounty, reveal no hint of hunger in parts of the globe where their bright lights don’t reach. Every citizen goes to these supermarkets and cannot conceive of not being able to afford everything: for she can always obtain credit. Gratification is instant, whilst debt stays invisible like a cancer. Through television, she is conditioned to acknowledge only the visible.

“I’m a hopeless anarchist, for I want to have faith in our survival through instinct. I’m convinced that if we can tear ourselves away from the bright lights and shiny colours of the supermarket and the television screen, the seductiveness of the personal travelling-machine which takes us in speedy comfort: then we can feel within us a humane wisdom in accord with Nature and its purposes. I’m a hopeless idealist aesthete who sides with the Catholics (though for different reasons) in hating that ugly thing, the condom, which symbolizes a disharmonious relation with Nature and blunts the possible recovery of our primitive innocence. But no! Instincts which even the Catholic Church recognizes are under attack. Sex is being relentlessly separated from reproduction: the one having become licensed recreation and the other having become an ethically-controlled branch of medicine.

“It has come to this.”

Elemental

“’Twas a dark and stormy night---” but we went as planned to dine at The Royal Standard of England, a 900-year-old pub as in my illustration (click to enlarge). Above the festooned hops sitting in the rafters you may descry a skeleton drinker wearing a Roman soldier’s helmet and holding a pewter tankard in his left hand. I was drinking the local Marlow Brewery’s “Rebellion Mild”, a suitable ale for my temperament.

The pub is hard to find on that kind of night. The last time was a sunny afternoon when we rambled the local footpaths and fondled native Shetland ponies, shaggy creatures no higher than my waist. When we left the pub the narrow plunging lanes (like a roller-coaster) had turned into little rivers. Joshing K as is my wont, I said it was lovely weather to stride out and be kissed by Nature in full force. K was suitably provoked and the Universe must have heard my prayer, for we stopped somewhere a few miles from home and the car wouldn’t start again. It’s a Volvo I’ve had since new in 1993 and the more I nurse it through old age (its and mine) the more I get attached. The dashboard instrumentation doesn’t work properly so I assumed we’d run out of petrol. This is where my walk in the wild weather took place, which I’d jokingly craved only minutes before; and very fine it was too. As in the Christmas carol, Good King Wenceslas: “When a poor man came in sight Gathering winter fuel”. Sometimes the rain stopped and that was even better. But when I poured the contents of the can into the tank, the car still wouldn’t start. I assumed the plugs had got wet in those flooded plunging lanes so I called up the AA (Automobile Association) and after an hour or so they sent a van. The mechanic said the ignition coil had died and he did not carry spares because they are model-specific; but as part of the service he would call up a tow-truck. After a further 90 minutes waiting the AA phoned apologetically: the truck would be delayed another hour or so.

Yes, the Universe always grants my unconscious prayers and I’d wanted to be closer to the elements. We weren’t too uncomfortable but in that situation, the windows lashed by the rain, we got slowly colder as we finished the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword and played childish games and felt thirsty and hungry and discussed how much worse things might be. Yes, I was thinking of those who have suffered hurricane, tsunami, earthquakes, famine, road accidents, death, insurgents or coalition forces trying to install democracy whether it’s wanted or not. I thought that my car is only a car to the extent that its main parts are in working order. Otherwise it’s a complex of metal that wants to biodegrade. That will take quite a while and in the meantime I can be fined for parking, obstructing or littering.

After five hours in the breakdown spot (including my trek up the hill to a petrol station) we abandoned our wait and took a taxi home. In the morning I read Conrad on the bus and reflected on this superior form of transport: jolly driver, jolly elderly passengers. I even have my pensioner’s pass which entitles me to free bus-rides all over the County. I made my rendezvous with the tow-truck man who brought the car home and left it pointing the wrong way in our one-way street. I could have instructed him to drop it outside a workshop but I’d decided to try and fix it myself. This involved hunting in several spares depots and then returning to them twice more: firstly to exchange the wrong-size spanner and secondly to tell them the old coil didn’t look like the new one. They realized they had given me the wrong one in the right box. Finally this afternoon, the rain and hail lashing down, fortified with white rum in my coffee and some white wine (K and a friend were drinking this in the warm indoors) I managed to bolt things back together.

I’d given myself a week to fix the car and could have left it till the weather improved, for our daily needs are within walking distance. I was prepared for a possible misdiagnosis where the new coil did’nt help and where I’d traipse to spares depots for days, replacing parts one by one with still no spark at the plugs. I do think it is a miracle that cars start at all. When I was fourteen I had a little model aircraft engine – a diesel that ran on ether – that I kept screwed to a bench in a shed. I’d turn over the propeller till my finger was blistered and raw, constantly adjusting the throttle and compression, but it never quite worked properly. Ah! Those fumes! Those stained hands! That sore finger! I remember them as if it were this morning. That’s when I understood how obsessively introverted I can be, battling with the inanimate, wanting that moment of triumph when it fires up and I have proved a mastery over things.

Aha! That triumph happened today. I turned the key and it started first time. Oh, how I love my dented old car, reprieved at a stroke from the scrapyard crusher! I’ll never trade it in. Being a Swedish Volvo, it deserves a Viking funeral when its time comes. Those who live by gasoline shall die by gasoline. Its last journey shall be to a bluebell wood (see this post especially pic at the bottom), where it can rejoin Nature, decomposing into its elements.

And this is not the piece I intended to write at all.