How to be radical

Outside the supermarket a three-year-old boy was expressing his distress in voice and reddened face. Solicitous, his mother bent down to him. No doubt he had wanted something in the shop and been denied it. He looked like me at that age and in a flash I recalled how I used to behave: a lot worse. My rage was not about wanting the thing, which tended to be arbitrary or even inappropriate for a small child. My mother should want to please me: that was the real issue, and it was never resolved because she had no maternal feelings, well some only: she did want to be proud of me and not ashamed. So I had a very definite sense of lack, that remained stable so long as I was at home or boarding school, places where life is ritualised routine. At university it took a while to find a niche, a few good friends. Then that ended and I lost touch with them all, and the world was an uncharted desert, and I was unnerved.

I do have a very definite purpose in life, even when I don’t know what it is, which is most of the time really. Well, all the time. I mean my purpose is instinctive and it has been constant, though obviously I was unable to express it at the age of three. The tantrums were not surprising. I have to follow my nose, like a dog suddenly unleashed. On Sunday morning we had a good snowfall and I had to go and walk out in it, saying to myself “Where is a grandchild when you need one? We could build a snowman, go tobogganing.” But the nearest grandchild was 35 miles away and the snow would melt by afternoon. So I walked in it and when I took the public footpaths that criss-cross the hillside, going behind back-gardens and in between old factories, I did manage to get lost which was nice, for the usual landmarks were altered. But I was listening to the altered sounds most of all: not just the crunch of snow under my boots, but a certain hush, for the snow deadens sound. The effect was not as noticeable as I remembered but today as I set out in sunshine, I listened to the ambience with no expectations, which is the only sensible way, and I realised that this---savouring the underlying hush behind all sound to taste its attributes---is a way to get beyond the normal consciousness to another dimension co-existent with the ordinary ones. Beyond that, I don’t have words for it.

Actually, over the last couple of weeks my study is littered with scraps of half-written ideas: in my notebook, on tapes, in “My documents”. We still use the old iconic notions like "tapes". They are not tapes these days, but digital voice recordings that I can copy on to the hard disc. Just as we use the old dial telephone as an icon, though ’phones don’t look like that any more, we still visualize the writer loading blank sheets into his typewriter, or pulling out abandoned sheets from the platen, crumpling them and flinging them into a full basket with the other sheets. Sadly the computer is less physical: its “desktop” isn’t one. And I think of Hank Bukowski whose childhood was as peculiar as mine and whose “typer” was his faithful friend:

"I can hear you typing at night," says
my neighbor.

"oh, I'm sorry."

"no," he says, "it's a pleasant sound..."

he's right, it is.
and when I don't cause that sound for
two or three days
I become fitful
my face gets an unhealthy sag, and--
you must believe me--
I have visions of the way that
I will die.

when typing I'm
immortal.

well, maybe not immortal.
but habitually
this old typewriter and
this old man
live well together.

For manuscript facsimile of whole poem click here.

So anyway yesterday I went on another bus ride and I nearly lost my nerve on the way. When you have time to follow your nose and listen to the sound of silence you can easily fall into the illusion that you have gone mad. Perhaps this is the reason that most people unconsciously seek structure in their lives and social contact. And perhaps the reason people keep company, good or bad, is to get feedback that they are not insane loners or losers, which is fair enough but I have paid my dues to that and am grown-up now, and it’s only occasionally that everything seeps away, like there on the bus.

I was looking for a junk shop to get ideas for my latest construction project or perhaps even parts I could use for it. Never mind what the project is, and anyway, it was a vague excuse for a purpose. I went to the antique shop where I’d been a couple of times before. They always put a few bits of furniture out the front. I liked the new sign above the windows: “Curios”. But it was unfamiliar when I went in and I asked the man. “Oh, yes,” he said, “You were expecting more? But the next-door shop has taken over half the space and so the previous owner moved out and we’ve taken over.” Yes, it was true, there were hastily-erected partitions so that you could not wander into lots of nooks like before. There were only a few books left: I wondered where the other ones had gone. It was a little disorienting, so I thanked the man and left. It was sad to have found a wonderful curiosity shop, only to come back two weeks later and find it much changed. Continuing down the street for twenty yards I saw another set of furniture outside another shop. I walked in. A miracle! It was the shop I was actually looking for, the one I had thought I was in two minutes earlier. No walls had been moved, the merchandise, including those books, was all in its familiar place. But there was a fat man in the books section, wide in the middle like a spinning-top, looking at the music CDs, muttering to himself, emanating a faint odour. I pretended to look at other things for ten minutes till he left the space free. Then I found the treasure which justified my entire outing, including that time on the bus when I had briefly felt unnerved with a nausea like Jean-Paul Sartre’s character Antoine Roquentin in the novel of that name, I mean La Nausée. The treasure? Prefaces by Bernard Shaw, first edition, 1934.

A most imposing volume: big, good paper, nicely bound. And when I started to read it properly on the bus home, it fulfilled intellectually the promise of its physicality. Like meeting a woman with beauty of spirit as well as body. Like my Bible, I love to hold it in my hand, turn its pages, consult it randomly. Unlike my Bible, it is witty, wry, delightful; it engages the modern mind, it has relevance. Some of the pieces were written a hundred years ago, which is still in my grandparents’ lifetime: a good place to get perspective on today’s world.

Bukowski and George Bernard Shaw: you wouldn’t think of them in the same breath but I do. Both radical critics of society, rooting out prejudice and lazy mind, holding nothing sacred except the truly sacred. Serious writers, as I too cannot help but be.

PS George Bernard Shaw has a special place in my life. I have hardly read anything by him till now, but the news of his death created a snapshot memory. I know exactly where I was when I heard of his death, though I was eight years old at the time. It was announced on the radio and meant nothing to me of course, but a lot to my stepfather (whom I call Kenneth in these memoirs) though he was not a literary man. He shared some of GBS's views, for example that most of medicine was quackery. Nature cure was the thing.