A bus ride

Bus ride
Thanks to Gio JL on flickr

It is wonderful to be able to rejoice with the fortunate: to see someone beautiful and young who is making the most of what he or she has, in a simple way. When I was at university, I was preoccupied with my own loneliness and wasted my time. If only I could have appreciated what was around me: brilliant, dynamic, interesting or beautiful young people. Only 2% of the population made it to university. But anyhow, here I am and it’s raining and I need to get out of the house for being indoors is stagnation and outdoors is ecstasy and I’ve thought about this indoor-phobia in the context of death: I wouldn’t just want to spend my last hours in a hospital; even the walls at home would be a kind of coffin. Put my ragged remnants in a wheelchair and push me down a hill or over a cliff and I’ll shout “Wheee!” for I can go in style; or leave me under a tree with nothing to eat or drink and let my flesh and bones return their elements to the landscape. Or park me on a lonely beach, so that I’ll die hearing the plaintive sound of the waves.

So anyhow, my house is nice but it feels like a tomb sometimes when I’m seeking inspiration. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” says Nietzsche, quoted by Beth. Yes, but I’ve walked too often lately in the rain near my house, and the sense of wonderment has dampened. So I got on a bus, and that’s why I’m here scribbling in a black book just as in the old days, when commuting to London on the Tube. On the back seats behind me, young Africans are chattering and it’s like birdsong because I don’t understand their language. The drone of the diesel, the rhythm of starting and stopping – these remind me of every bus I rode in childhood. For some unknown reason I suddenly remember a magazine’s readership questionnaire I completed. It was some time in my forties: looking back it feels like an ungainly time, earning more than enjoying, yearning more than knowing what I was missing. At the end of a long list of technical questions it asked “With whom would you most like to be shipwrecked on a desert island?” The magazine had started life around ’84 as a single typed sheet called The Freelance Informer. It was a list of contract opportunities in my industry and got bigger till it was taken over by a big company, but still cherished its quirkiness, hence the question thrown in at the end. My first thought was Helena Bonham-Carter as my desert island companion, on the strength of her appearances in “A Room with a View” and a TV melodrama:

A HAZARD OF HEARTS is the tale of innocent-yet-headstrong Serena Staverley (Helena Bonham-Carter), whose hand in marriage is gambled away by her father in lieu of a debt to disgusting lecher Lord Wrotham (Edward Fox).

Naturally I would not play the part of Lord Wrotham on that island. I would be a nice boy. Immediately after writing her name in the questionnaire, I obliterated it in black ink: this actress surely belonged to another and was no virgin. And once transported to the desert island, she might not be young still. (My own state at that time of belonging-to-another was casually ignored.) I wrote down Hildegard von Bingen instead. As abbess of a convent she might indeed be a virgin, and I imagined her like many a wise nun being impervious to the depredations of age, which is just as well as she would be almost 900 years old at our first meeting. She was “a German abbess, artist, author, counselor, linguist, naturalist, scientist, philosopher, physician, herbalist, poet, activist, visionary, and composer”. I could not imagine better company. I was in love with her image of being a “Feather On The Breath Of God”, which was selected as the title of one album made of her words and music. I wanted that relationship with God too, and to be reminded through the day of breath-meditation. Accordingly, I adopted FOTBOG as my computer password at work. I had to give the password to a colleague once. It was embarrassing.

I suppose I’ve never been one to plough life’s well-worn furrows, as far back as I can remember. I was always fancy-free: free in fancy, not in fact. And now amongst the birdsong of the African girls in the back of the bus, I hear one English phrase leap out: “a nice boy”. It catches me unawares, for within the well-worn and furrowed features of my exterior, I feel myself to be---invisibly---a nice boy. My deepest yearnings have not changed, except for their direction. Long ago, what I sought for was buried, waiting to be mined from the ore of the future. Now I have it and know it but still pan for gold in the rich silt of the past, guided by some scent, sight or sound of the present moment. “Be here now!” shout those who think well-worn thoughts.

The bus windows are steamed up on the in-side and tearful with rain on the out. Looking obliquely to the front, I see nothing. I’m not sure when to ring the bell to get off. Like a shy child, I don’t want to ask anyone, preferring to hope someone else will ring at the appropriate time.

To be here now: so what is “here”? What is “now”? There’s this banal moment on the bus, but my true dwelling is in a timeless zone. I look through steamed-up windows for glimpses of eternity.

Slug news

misty slug
thanks to nebarnix on flickr

A slug theme has been slithering through my last two posts, leaving the question hanging whether my blocking of cracks in the floor would disturb the migration habits of this humble gastropod. Since I had additionally panelled that corner of the kitchen, fitting the pieces closely, except for one part of the plinth which will be completed after tiling the floor, I trusted that my twice-repatriated visitor would not return for a third attempt to break in and taste the kitchen scraps kept in that area for recycling.

It was therefore with some astonishment that I found a slug cosily curled up in a corner on my precious new panels. It was smaller than the last one, and if I correctly read its body language, its attitude was complacent, if not smug. From its colour and modus operandi, I guess it may be an offspring of its twice-flung parent. Whatever its genealogy, “humble gastropod” doesn’t seem apposite any more. “Defiant”, “determined” or “arrogant” are the terms which spring to mind.

Yesterday I chatted with a neighbour who was putting in some young plants into a bed in her front yard. I got the impression she wasn’t experienced in gardening. When I passed her house later I glanced to see how her little plot of soil looked. The plants were widely spaced and in between she had sprinkled blue pellets at a density of three per square inch. There was enough to finish off every slug and snail in the street, should they be attracted from afar by the alluring scent of slug bait. If they are as clever as I think they are, she may find that after the first couple of casualties, they will slalom gently through the bright blue hazards and reward themselves on her precious plants.

PS more about the Great Architect of the Universe (that grand Ackerschnecke-Meister) in my next.

Things that fit together

After my last post, you may be wondering what happened to the green slug? Has it yet found its way back into the kitchen yet after being flung to the other end of the back yard? Reader, I have to confess that I’ve blocked the hole where it climbed up to the unkempt corner of twisting gas and water pipes. In fact that whole area is now grandly panelled, in “beech effect” veneer, to match the existing fittings. If the weary slug returns, it will have to turn round and go back. That’s if slugs remember their previous routes: it’s not a subject I have researched. Perhaps like many other creatures they follow their nose. Like them, I have followed my instinct and made slow progress, blundering through life’s obstacles at a snail’s pace. At boarding school we would take turns at morning prayers to read a single verse from a great and ancient Bible, a masterpiece of typography and printing. We had to go to the Hall the evening before, find the verse, rehearse our performance and mark the page with a slip of paper. I recall reading this out, from the book of Proverbs.

Go to the ant, thou sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise.

Perhaps I absorbed the wrong message, for I have gone to the slug, and dawdled, and followed my nose. Unlike the ant, I have been innocent of prudence and team spirit. Oh yes, I have imitated her anxious busyness more than enough, part of the network of frantic workers who give the world a spurious sense of purpose. But the only wisdom has come from slugginess.

Walking at dusk, I hear the full-throated melodies of a blackbird turdus merula, atop a telegraph pole amongst old factories. Things haven’t changed much here since they were built. When the sun goes down, men are freed from toil and loiter in the precious interval before another set of cares begins. The light changes and there is a hushed expectancy, a blessedness in the air that everyone surely feels. I’ve seen old photos, men smoking pipes on a summer evening under a spreading tree, just standing in the street: perhaps waiting to meet a friend, or just unwilling to spend the evenings in lonely lodgings. For in those days they were not cursed with the gift of television. Here, on a chilly March afternoon, you are more likely to see those lonely souls huddled in a car, but waiting all the same. It’s a different generation, immigrants have taken over the territory and been assimilated, but the granite kerbstones are the same. At the basic level, it has always been simple enough. Grow up, get a job---you need a wage to survive. If you can, learn a trade, take an apprenticeship. Only with bourgeois pretensions do the complications arise.

My headmaster asked me “What do you want to be when you grow up?” when I was 10 and then again at 11. It was over dinner at boarding school. I know I puzzled him, being bright but disturbingly different. He tried to punish me out of a trajectory that he diagnosed as latent homosexuality. (Well, if he was right, the beatings and detentions worked, for I am a stranger to that viewpoint.) I replied “a cook” the first time. He ridiculed me. The second time I said “a missionary” and he teased me. When I left university I was too terrified by the wide world to have any idea of what to be. These days it would be labelled a mental illness, and I couldn’t really say when I recovered from it, though I am certain that I have, at any rate now.

I seem to have inherited characteristics from both stepfathers. One (Kenneth) worshipped the outdoors, the sun, physical fitness in harmony with Nature. As I grow older I seem to be following his example. The other stepfather, Blackett, was an engineer by training and handyman by hobby, always designing and inventing . Lately I myself have been doing little else. Home construction projects have absorbed so much of my creative impetus that I’ve had little left for writing, it seems. No, that’s not right. I could have happily written a book about those projects, copiously illustrated; with chapters on the techniques I have learned, the materials I’ve used (solid elm, beeswax, turpentine, oils, varnishes, particle-board, different kinds of bricks and mortar). As I may have said previously, I was endlessly proud of any little success, and stung by failures till I could learn from them. And what of the art of writing? Again, to repeat myself---and there is a joy in retreading one’s own well-worn path---writing is a kind of engineering. Well, it feels that way. I could swear it uses the same parts of the brain, when I organize the words for the sense to flow through; when I check the juxtapostion of images and ideas; when I try out different sequences and edit out superfluities. The inspiration itself comes from a mysterious source, and even the technique passes from being laboured and experimental to something that looks after itself.

The handyman tasks are useful and they develop my skills and confidence. With a small leap of faith, I suppose I can say the same about the writing, but part of me thinks of it as just something to do whilst sitting down indoors. O Summer! Please come! Then at least I can write under the open sky. I have applied to an elderly people’s charity as volunteer handyman. The objective is to do little projects in people’s houses so that they can stay living at home longer and not have to lose their independence, like Abe Simpson, Homer’s father, in his “retirement castle”.

If I must be indoors I want to see good design successfully implemented. Which brings me to a recent event which has transformed this town. For three years a monstrous building site has got in everyone’s way, a place of cranes and dust and hundreds of migrant workers in hard hats, some of them lodging in our street. Suddenly in a single day it was no longer a construction site, but a grand shopping centre with its own streets, cafés, cinema, bowling alley and milling crowds of grateful visitors. The bus station (see my recent post) was till recently the only part yet open: but a vital part as now the town will be worth visiting from all the outlying villages. I tend to be an old curmudgeon, equally suspicious of crowds and anything new. So I was surprised at my positive reaction to the place, even though there’s nothing in it of use to me---except as a thoroughfare on my way to somewhere else. I’m just glad it’s a success, after the town has waited for it so long. The monstrosity, the ugly duckling, has turned into a beautiful swan---apposite because the swan is the town’s symbol. The layout, the pedestrian streets within the centre, fit with the existing town to bring it together and make it coherent, unified. It’s called Eden, a name that was scoffed at by the press for being unimaginative. But they’ve made something of it, and used imagery of a hummingbird and hibiscus flower. The department store, one of those luxurious places which has nothing but perfume counters on its ground floor, staffed by elegantly untouchable young women, has a sign on its escalator: “Temptations on every level”. Here, Adam and Eve can experience the Fall of Man, again and again.

Oh well, the parts of the world don’t seem to add up to a coherent whole, so I am stuck with lesser joys, when things fit together and projects are completed. If only I could, like Aquinas and Calvin, have faith in a Grand Architect of the Universe!

Dignity

What ought I to think about climate change and the impending catastrophes of the world? What ought I to do about these things? Such questions are infiltrating the moral consciousness of humanity. Even the Catholic church now proposes that ruining the environment is another way of offending God, in addition to the seven deadly sins.

It’s not my practice on this blog to comment on politics or news in general. I prefer to contemplate eternal verities through the lens of everyday life and personal memory---for example my history lessons at school. Europe in the Middle Ages was full of catastrophes. Invasion by the Romans, Picts, Scots, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Vandals was like the end of the world, if you were on the wrong side. But that is looking at it from the point of view of a side: a tribe, a country. An individual or family could be hit by disaster at any season, and this is still true today. I never understand why the worst earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, droughts and plagues occur in poorer countries, where it is hard enough to scrape a living in a shanty town even in a good year. Sometimes I think it has taken nearly a thousand years for England to get over the Norman Conquest. And now that the last vestiges of that heritage have all but gone---an educated ruling class of landed aristocracy who don’t have to dirty their hands with work---I’m not sure that their disappearance is entirely a good thing.

According to James Lovelock in The Revenge of Gaia, it’s too late to save Earth from accelerated climate change. I feel that he is right. It doesn’t mean that I sin against the new morality. No, I find it natural and beautiful to walk instead of driving, to bring my own shopping bag and refuse plastic ones; to live simply in consciousness of the natural resources I consume to stay alive. I don’t live this way because someone nags me to, and so I won’t nag anyone else. I only mention it at all to make clear that I’m not on the side of the climate change deniers who behave as though this new morality doesn’t apply to them.

I don’t like endless preaching. Morality doesn’t need religion and its preachers. Until Jesus came along you’d think there was no loving-kindness, if their sermons are to be believed; as if Christianity holds the patent for compassion, which is to be known as “Christian behaviour”. I don't like experts telling me how to bring up my children, have sex, cook, eat. Their propaganda would have been superfluous had not others tried to indoctrinate me into degenerate behaviour and alienated work so as to keep the wheels of commerce turning. My dears, we are farmed like domestic animals. Don’t ask the farmer to set us free. That we can only do for ourselves. (My imagery of human domestication has its source in Don Miguel Ruiz’ book, The Four Agreements.)

My response to the challenge of climate change is aesthetic. Polluting behaviour is ugly, like cruelty to any living thing. Indeed, in the Gaia hypothesis, Earth is a living thing. A big green slug has been finding its way into my kitchen through a hole in the floor. I keep flinging it into a lush part of the back garden. It finds its way back after a day or two. Simply to kill the slug would be unbeautiful behaviour, excessive force. And this makes me think of my quarrel with Søren Kierkegaard, that inspiring, annoying philosopher. He believed in three phases of human consciousness. In the aesthetic, a man is hedonistic: swayed by senses and emotions. In the ethical, he follows rules governing conduct. In the religious, he adopts Kierkegaard’s frightfully challenging version of Christianity, for Kierkegaard sees everything through the lens of his own tortured, blissful life. I find myself wanting to dig him up from the grave, as it were, to dispute with him on one point. He says the aesthetic phase must be abandoned in order to adopt the ethical; and the ethical must be surrendered likewise in order to enter into the religious. And I would say to him, “Søren, Søren, what makes you think these phases must be separate? To me, ethical behaviour is to do what is beautiful and shrink from what is ugly. Religion is no more than this, for as Paul Maurice Martin proposes in this blog post, there may not be a difference between God and Nature.” To which Kierkegaard replies, “And who is Paul Martin? I have never heard of him. But it sounds as though you have never progressed beyond Plato.” To which I would respond, “Søren, my dear sweet Søren, I have not even read Plato, never mind progressed beyond him. I am that creature disparaged by the populist C.S. Lewis as “the natural man”. Have you heard of Lewis, a populariser of Christian ideas in many of his books? Like your countryman Hans Andersen, he wrote fairy-tales. Like you, he thought a man would progress from being the natural man---a pagan---to Christianity. Perhaps you influenced him. But I see the natural man as enjoying freedom from the neurosis known as religion.” “Dammit, Vincent,” says Søren in the end (I’ve edited our five-hour disputation down to a few highlights), “you’re right! I tried to escape from my father’s religious neurosis and ended up taking refuge in my own.”

Yes, well, it’s bigger and worse than that. The whole of European culture, which shaped that of the settlers in the Americas and much of the globe now, was tainted with the neurosis of Christianity, as diagnosed by Nietzsche before ever Freud came on the scene. I’m referring to notions of guilt and virtue, the one needing to be washed clean to herald the other. Meanwhile, the stain of slave-trading has metamorphosed into other forms of ugliness.

But I say the important thing is not to live ethically as if it would save the planet. It won’t, not now that it’s too late. The thing is to prepare ourselves aesthetically for the myriad catastrophes, which the wretched and dispossessed of the earth already suffer, but which rarely as yet shake the towers of privilege from which Westerners have so far to fall before they hit the ground. Why should the Chinese peasant care about carbon footprint, he who clings precariously to subsistence in his village, so long as he can resist migration to the factories of Shanghai, where he’ll be a human battery hen?

Why do we bother about Earth’s future at all, for each one of us will die soon enough? Strip away politics, slogans and media hysteria. All that is left, the source and sum total of aesthetics, ethics and religion, is just one thing, which everyone values more than life itself. I don't mean God. I say that the thing to live or die for is to keep one’s human dignity. Most of all, this requires the affirmation of being loved, so one can love oneself. When that aching need is satisfied, a person wants to perform beautiful actions and not ugly ones (and will know what they are, if not bombarded with preaching from all sides).

Picture: Aboriginal art (unattributed). For source, click picture or this link.

Bus Station

I was waiting at the bus station, that haunt of pensioners, new immigrants and indigent travellers---in short, the dispossessed. I feel at home there. For the first time in fifty-three years, the name of Morton Spencer came back to me. Katie Spencer was my mother’s schoolfriend: vivacious, pretty but still a spinster, still in her parents’ house. My mother had danced her way through the Thirties in Singapore, spent the war years in Australia and clocked up several husbands. Katie’s fate was to inherit a spacious house and a simpleton brother called Morton. At forty-five her romantic dreams still burned, but the light they cast didn’t reach far. The only men she met were her “PGs”---paying guests. She joked to my mother about her current lodger, “Humming Horace”. He hummed through the house, hummed at the breakfast table. She bestowed discreet attentions upon him but he never noticed. Morton with his damaged brain was like a ghost: his words hesitant and blurred, his soul somehow distant. She had tried leaving him in an institution, but it distressed him and never again could she betray him that way. Her only hope was to outlive him. Then she would spare him the limitless grief she would have caused by predeceasing him, and gain a little of her own freedom. Morton continued to live healthily, defying all expectations for someone with his condition. I remembered him whilst I waited at the bus station because he liked to go on bus-rides. It was something he could do on his own. After he had learned to get help from staff and passengers, he could find his way home at the end of each day. I don’t know much else about him.

Perhaps Morton was happier than his sister but happy is a peculiar word. Unhappy is a lot clearer. It’s true that Vincent van Gogh shot himself in a field near Auvers, where he was staying with Dr Gachet, and died a few days later. He’s often cited as the archetypal unhappy mad artist, but I think his mental anguish occurred only at the crises of his intermittent condition. Surely painting itself was his joy, a sensual ecstasy which communicates through his colours and brush-strokes. Art and literature aren’t easy. To develop the highest skill requires obsession. The goal is to communicate one’s experience to another. Joy is the only experience worthy of being translated via the painstaking treatment of art. It doesn’t matter what facilitates the obsession. Certain blues-singers honed their art when blindness and poverty had closed other avenues. They say birds sing sweeter in a cage. The young child is endlessly creative, with potential for anything, then life closes off one option after another.

To be frank with you, I’m not comfortable with these generalisations, but I made a promise at the end of my last:

“Next post I want to talk more about understanding others, and about the conditions for the highest creative work. Does it help to be mad? Or unhappy?”

For a week I’ve been obsessed with fulfilling that promise, and hope the above answers some of these questions. Now, understanding others. Do I? Can I? Is it possible to know if I do or can?

In the simplest sense, if I know you it merely means I can predict how you will behave. From this I can say that at best I can only know you partially. But truly to know how you feel, to gatecrash your consciousness, that’s unbearable, surely; even though it’s something an actor attempts, getting into the skin of his character. Only through art is it bearable.

I don’t think ordinary language helps much. What people say is more to conceal than reveal. “How are you?” “Fine. What about you?” There are too many layers. First I must understand myself. Only in desperation, ready to step out of stereotyped thinking, can I understand what makes me happy. I believe Prince Harry when he says fighting in Afghanistan was the best experience of his life and he doesn’t much like living in England. This is wonderful honesty from the person third in line to the British throne: to admit he prefers being a bullet-magnet amongst the Taliban to being a babe-magnet in the night-clubs of London and Paris. He knows it, but more than this, he knows that he knows it.

“Kipling knew more than he knew that he knew, and, if I can add one more refinement of complication to that phrase, he knew that he knew more than he knew that he knew.”

That’s from a sermon by Rowan Williams, the present Archbishop of Canterbury. There is potency in the sentence, like a magic potion, for it points to layers waiting to be uncovered in all of us. Oh dear, I am launching in to a sermon myself: perhaps it’s because I’m descended from another Archbishop of Canterbury, John Bird Sumner. I’ve inherited the sermonising but not the Christianity.

Suddenly awake at 2.40 am, I wonder if “blessed” and “Kingdom of Heaven” refer to happiness. Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Surely it’s one of the most mysterious verses in the Bible. I try to condense my theological studies into a quick peek at Wikipedia. It tells me that humility was already known to be much cherished by Jehovah: “Therefore, when Jesus blessed the poor and announced them to be owners of the kingdom of heaven, nobody argued.” Right, nobody argues, because it’s so familiar. But who understands?

Why do the Christians of this world, despite not arguing with the Beatitude, seek wealth and power? I cannot answer truly, because I cannot understand my own self, let alone others. Naturally, I can give a false answer. Everyone has that skill. The common obsession is to have an answer for every question. It’s like putting a lid on every jar: to preserve the contents. Nothing must fester or ferment.

But I always know more than I know that I know. Don’t you?

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Illustration: Tasmanian Aboriginal women, 1860. Click for source.

“... they may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them ... the Earth and sea of their own accord furnished them with all things necessary for life ...” (James Cook, 1770)