MaxiRam revisited

This is MaxiRam Castle, my code-name for the place where I worked in 2007 from February to August. Each noon I emerged for an hour-long walk and in those seven months, taking no days of leave, I combed the parks and roads and byways, in a sort of sacred ritual. It connected me with my primitive being, which is one with nature and finds itself reflected therein. Those walks were excursions into ecstasy, and that is why I tried to capture some of their flavour in the blog posts I published for the period.

Yesterday I went back to call on a friend. We went to a new pub on the site of Peacock Farm, which appears in the middle ground of my picture below, taken last April. Its land had been purchased for the building of a hundred dwellings, now nearly complete. I’d been sad at the dilapidated state of the farm buildings, but they have been preserved and enhanced to produce a pub which celebrates bygone days in the famous English fashion, with the old ales too, and oaken rafters, and walls lined with old books, some of which were familiar to me from childhood: encyclopedias of practical mechanics and the like.

We came back to MaxiRam and my friend went back to his office. For old times’ sake I went for a walk, not for the full hour because I was still recovering from a virus. I took my commonest route which reaches Mill Pond via so many spots I’ve photographed or referred to verbally, whereI'd found blossoms, lichen, moss, horsetail, grasses, the “stairway to heaven”, Mill Park. I had even planned a book entitled Mill Park, for one day, going around its Pond, so many inspirations crowded in that I thought they could fill a volume.

I certainly remembered, and as I draft this post, I can mentally revisit every path I took in those months, the incidents and the inspirations, especially with the help of the “wayfarer’s notes” I posted. Oh yes, a harmless hobby, and one that’s good for the health too. But to me it is much more than that, or perhaps just the same as someone else’s hobby, for how can I deny others the possibility of the ecstasies which I have known? Ecstasies which I don’t think I have ever been able to convey, whether in words or pictures. Perhaps all I have been able to describe is the accidental backdrop, a set of living scenery. The real action has always unfolded on the boards of an inner stage, an ongoing soap-opera called Vincent's Life.

Whilst I worked at MaxiRam the ritual daily walk served a vital purpose: to rediscover my roots as a primitive man. Like eating and drinking, it had to be repeated regularly. Yesterday it was merely nostalgic, and though the scenery was exactly as I remembered it, allowing passage of time and seasons, the revitalising magic had evaporated. The scenery had become wallpaper. It was like the countryside seen through the windows of a car, or a silent bell.

Once again I proved something I’d known in a puzzled way since my teens, something expressed concisely in a stanza by William Blake. When I bend to myself a joy, I do the wingèd life destroy. But when I kiss the joy as it flies, I live in Eternity’s sunrise.