Things take time to ripen

The Presence of the Past

Many are they who suppose a blog---such a today thing!---to be ephemeral (“beginning and ending in a day”) in its subject-matter and interest to others. Why should it be so? I celebrate the past, like this stately galleon on the ocean of time, its stern riding proud and high, its prow dipping into the billows of the present, becalmed or stormy, no matter; slowly inching its way into the future. It is a place of glory, gilded in the memory. The older you get, the more the past is precious.

The old are guardians of the old ways, watchful of changes for the worse. There was a time when gerontocracy, not democracy, was the rule. The elders were in charge. There are worse ways to govern. On the radio this morning, they were interviewing people in the streets, in Cuba. Were they chafing for more democracy, political freedom? No! There were those who desired a better standard of living, or the freedom to start their own businesses. Yet not a word was said against the country or its systems for education and health. In 1962 as a student in France I grew a patchy black beard and wore a NATO surplus jacket and when I hitch-hiked got accustomed to lorry-drivers shouting “Castro!” Fidel is still alive, as indeed am I, though unlike him, I gave up the beard and jacket later that same year.

Brothers and sisters in the West, we have been brainwashed to think we have the best of all possible systems. We have nothing to lose but our slavery to greedy competing politicians, greedy competing corporations.

My anti-library tirade the other week was prompted by a sense that the past was being forgotten, just when we needed it most. Our new branch library is in the Eden Shopping Centre, which in this venerable town is a stark barren island, a cursed place swept free of retrospect, a “now” place, colonised by remote retail chains which peddle their baubles and ersatz to natives bereft of historical sense. In tune with its host, the library hastens to purge itself of yesterday, to stay obedient to this week’s view, hardly concerned with anything outside the horizon of its imagined readers. The town’s sole bookshop has also moved to Eden, this Orwellian zone washed clean of memory. Like the library, it’s enslaved to the flavours of the month, more devoted to freshly-minted produce than the fruit-and-vegetable section of the supermarket. Waterstone’s is its name. I think of a stone newly dredged from the ocean where it has lain ten thousand years. In an hour it’s as dry as a pebble which has never been submerged; worthy symbol of a store with no memory. And how appropriate to use the name “Eden”, that realm with no past, where Adam and Eve had no navels, no antecedents. They arrived naked, owning nothing but their openness to temptation. This other Eden (“demi-paradise”? Huh!) forbids its fruit and gilded fig-leaves only to those with no money.

There are actually good things about the library-I-love-to-hate, which don't require me to actually go there (except to collect). I can access the Oxford English Dictionary free from my desk at home, just by entering my library ticket number as a user ID and logging into the Net. By the same means, I can order books from the library’s County Reserve Stock, which is where they dump all the out-of-fashion books of perennial value for readers like me. Having recently watched the film Carrington, I was curious about Lytton Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians. Now I can luxuriate in Strachey’s understated irony, as from the viewpoint of 1918 he surveys the lives of four grand “celebs” of the nineteenth century: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold, General Gordon. When I have finished that, I propose to borrow his biography of Queen Victoria.

Last weekend I planned to have an orgy of reading. The actuality was less intense than anticipated, as is doubtless the case with all orgies. The thought was delicious though, and as I returned from the library with Strachey, and a biography of Swedenborg which had caught my eye, I found myself doing something that took me back to teenage years. In those days, I’d start to read whilst waiting for the bus, and continue whilst sitting on the bus; as if there were nothing in my immediate surroundings worthy of note. But now it’s only a short walk from the library to my house and I found myself trying to read whilst dawdling on the street.

Something at least has changed since then. I’ve learned to get my nose out of books and more directly consult the library of Creation, in which everything, except the Eden Shopping Centre, reveals its own roots in time immemorial. In their lineaments the passers-by, my close cousins all, display their ancestry, something which all the trees and smaller plants do also, and the tiniest insects, which are more distant cousins. Persons! One glance gives a peek at their glorious individuality, which owes so much to personal history and genealogy. And their divine depth outshines: an eternal mystery.

Others may marvel at the impending future, the achievements and problems of the day, forgetting that as Murphy’s Law states, “Most problems are caused by solutions”. But give me the past, don’t throw it away. It still has much to teach us.

I need no library, really. It’s just a bonus. This external world, with the continuing exception of our new shopping centre, is rooted in its own past, which we can learn to read like a book from the relics which survive in the present. If I lose touch with that, there’s still the archive of memory. And if I lose that on top of the rest, it’s probably time to leave.

Seeing from a height

What do you do with the rest of your life when in early adulthood you are admitted to a vision of universal oneness, in which what seems like God’s love is poured down and you can sensuously swim in it?

Paul Maurice Martin wrote notes: diary entries to be expanded later. He went on to study theology and be a schoolteacher, giving extra coaching to those who needed it, outside the normal hours. He would get up hours before dawn, sacrificing sleep in order to write. The result, many years later, is a magnificent book: Original Faith.

Whilst waiting for publication, he started a blog of the same name and gathered a number of readers to discuss spiritual topics of his choosing. I was one of them, a rather argumentative one at times, not sure I wanted to read his book when it finally got published, for I did not see myself as part of his target audience. But he won me over, and since receiving the finished work a few days ago I have been excited by its contents.

It’s not the done thing to write a review when you are only half-way through. So let’s not call this a review. It’s just another blog post, in which I record whatever I feel like. So I have to say that even after reaching page 105, the book still grips me like a “page-turner” novel. What next? I can’t imagine. In the genre of spiritual self-help books, which I have been mentioning here lately, Original Faith stands out from the throng. It certainly needs to, because it’s a member of a populous genre, mostly of little value because lacking originality. They don’t stick to personal experience. Their authors, moreover, imagine that they can tell a reader how to attain fulfilment.

I find Paul’s book to be written with a fresh honesty and originality that makes it a rare pleasure, whether to embrace the words in long-lost recognition of truths not previously articulated, or find something to pick on and challenge. Or simply to admire and absorb the poetry, often in exquisite verse, of his vision.

He writes beautifully about love. He is convincingly confident that what he has experienced can be the common possession of everyone. As a common reader I was lifted up by his vision. I had expected him to write from a religious background, with lots of biblical references, say, or taking some aspect of Christianity as his starting point. No. He is lyrical and flowing about his memories of cycling and jogging in communion with Nature, and the visions and dreams that became the basis of his inspiration. His inspiration, literally: I feel that in addition to the mystical encounters visited upon him, whose memories guide his thoughts, a clear, sure voice seems to speak through his words. I’m so convinced by the authenticity of his source that the other times stand out in contrast, when it seems to be just Paul, enunciating his personal theory, which doesn’t agree with my personal theory. Never mind that: something to take up at another time, another place. I mention the contentious side only to emphasize the sense of authoritative truth (experiential and not scripture-based) that comes from the rest.

The book is brilliant on despair and hope. For this alone it deserves wide popularity, perhaps immortality. In one reminiscence, he is suddenly transported by an experience in an old cemetery.

… a level of despair I had not previously known. I feel as if I could lie there forever, literally never bothering to get up again. Every muscle is lax and unwilling to move. Why bother? seems written across my soul, or in the place my soul had been.

Then something happens---I won’t attempt to paraphrase his account---and he is transformed.

It is hope as outroar---directed to the whole graying sky over that little graveyard, rooted from the floor of who I am and widening to include the whole overarching universe. I seem all at once to become hope for the world called into flight by love for the world.

Paul’s blog is here, and the book can be ordered here. To reiterate, this isn’t a book review. I’ve only read half of it to date and it’s too important to rush through.

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The picture is taken from one of my recent walks (see Blazing a Trail). I believe it is a platform from which to shoot pheasants. But I climbed up and sat there for a while, imagining myself some old-time hermit or pillar-saint.

Lucky

Lucky clover by Crochettes
Thanks Alícia on flickr

It rained continually yesterday, didn’t stop but went through varying intensities. It reached the point that everyone ignored the light drizzle. Before the day was over I was taking no notice of the moderate rain either. I was fixing the car standing in a puddle, using the bonnet (hood) as a shelter. There was nothing vital about the work, but I wanted to get it finished: to install the new gadget which would send the correct temperature reading to the gauge on the dashboard. The job was trivial, could have done it in a few minutes with the right socket spanners, but there’s the rub. The young man next door had lent me his set but the exact right size was missing and I may have crossed a thread in consequence. The sockets are expensive when you buy them individually, and I do my best to make the right decision overall and in each case. As in life. (Till a year ago, this blog was entitled, “As in Life . . .”)

So how does one learn? I was talking yesterday about the impossibility of self-help books. They exist of course, but how can they work? A “Do-it-yourself Guide to Car Maintenance” would be quite handy in theory, but would it make you an expert? Would it give you help in every dilemma? No, we have to build up our own internal library of experience, made up of images and schemas, not words. In life, one learns best by working alongside someone wiser. There’s an expression “monkey see, monkey do”. We are indeed monkeys. When I worked in a bank on contract for a couple of years, I learned another apparently common expression for informal training: “sitting with Betty”. No matter who Betty was, it was bound to beat “sitting through PowerPoint”.

Still, one learns something from books. From my teens onwards I haunted junk-shops which sold mainly old furniture but had a few books too. They were cheaper than the antiquarian bookshops. There I found In Tune with the Infinite by Ralph Waldo Trine, who seems to have been the Daddy of self-help; though I also obtained the Great-grandfather of the genre: Self Help by Samuel Smiles. This was more like a set of potted biographies, each demonstrating the magical power of hard work, honesty and single-mindedness in bringing a person from impoverished or unpromising roots to fame and fortune.

The best “popular philosophy” guide I’ve ever come across is In Defence of Sensuality by John Cowper Powys, published 1930. It never seems to have been truly popular, being long out of print and having spawned no imitations. He advocates the cultivation of our “ichthyosaurus ego”, a way to rapture for the lonely self, but the very opposite of Buddhist detachment. He encourages his reader to curse at the source of all cruelty, the First Cause: but to give generously to beggars.

Nowadays, there is little originality: people teach what they think they know, thinking they know how to teach. A bizarre memory from twelve years ago: the doorbell rings. It’s a man peddling his own book on how to get rich quick. It turns out that his personal get-rich-quick plan, after having been made redundant from some desk job, is to sell his book. It shocks me that he lives a few streets away, and that we resemble one another: similar age and social background. Did it really happen, or did I imagine it? Either way, he was an “angelic messenger”: a human being sent by the gods of chance to show me something, as in a mirror. As a warning.

This blog is all “I”, “me” because it’s devoted to truth. Anything else but “I”, “me” is hearsay or guesswork. In any case, I have a theory that the personal is the universal. Adopt the ideas of the crowd, and you’ll dwell in a world which has never really existed except in the clichés of song lyrics and journalism. Go your own way, think your own thoughts; and when you express them you may touch another soul; because all our sensibilities are built on the same dark (unacknowledged) foundations.

Suppose I ignored that messenger-angel and decided to write a self-help book myself? Well, perhaps not a book, but a blog post or two? Not “get rich quick” for that has hardly touched me even in fantasy, but “how to live”.

In honesty, I would have to say “Be lucky”. That is lesson 1. All other lessons, if any, will be amplifications of lesson 1, which has to be thought about first.

PS: looking for a suitable illustration for this piece, I googled “lucky”. This article came up first. How lucky is that?

Blazing a trail

In these pieces I have a consistent aim, like a would-be acrobat endlessly repeating the same manoeuvre, aiming at perfect execution, to demonstrate something to the audience, using his entire body and soul in the demonstration, so that the slightest distraction such as a thought or an itch somewhere on his skin would affect the performance. It’s not enough to complete the trick: it must be done live in front of the audience.

It doesn’t seem a good analogy, I know. Surely in writing, you can lay a new sentence beside one written weeks ago and gone cold. You can tinker with a sentence years after the ink has gone dry, literally or metaphorically, depending on the technology used. Editing, indeed, is the polish added to the marble sculpture when the main shapes have been hacked out rough and refined in the magical process of discovering shapes within the blind rock, that uncovering so beloved of Michelangelo, as in this photo of one of his “Prisoners” from the Accademia art gallery in Florence. (Thanks to Valerie on Flickr.)

I’ve been thinking of sculpture lately whilst remodelling the wheel-arches of my “Gift-horse” motor-car, given by an almost-stranger who runs a repair and test workshop just down the road. When he first offered it to me for £100, “to tide you over and help you find a proper car: it should last for a month or two”, I took it for a test drive round the block, wondering if it would make it. There were serious flaws certainly, but none I’ve been unable to work on. When you have hours and days to spare, you can fix anything, and learn to apply rust-proofing and filler and metallic spray finish---I’ve had to make do with a slightly different shade, a richer gold on the existing “champagne”, so it looks like a trick of the light. Ah, but the sculpting! With clay, you can go on modelling forever. That’s what they use to design car-bodies, apparently: clay. Computers are all very well but you need to see the light on the surfaces. With sculpting in marble, you need an inner vision to direct the hand-and-eye coordination. In painting and drawing it can’t be much different: the medium isn’t infinitely forgiving. You can’t scrape, erase, start afresh indefinitely. For the one thing that must be fresh and at its peak is the inspiration: that combination of energy and vision that makes you ready to tackle the impossible---in this present moment before it’s lost forever.

My computer and notebooks are littered with unfinished word-sketches. My pocket digital thing records hours of dictated thoughts captured somewhere: on a remote path overgrown with July’s profusion of plant-life, or on a well-trodden street where I get to recognise individual pieces of litter in the gutter. Those recordings languish unused because they haven’t captured the essence of the moment, which has nothing to do with the persistent pieces of litter, the rank scent of the nettles and cow-parsley in July; or my thoughts endlessly tackling the questions of Life, such as “What is consciousness?”---that melodic line always accompanied by the bass and drums of unconscious impulses.

Yes, a constant aim, not forgotten or made inconstant by the onrush of words which seem to overgrow the themic path like July undergrowth in the English countryside. We tame that scene by approaching it with a purpose. The other day in a remote valley, with no sounds but the wind in the trees, the bleating of sheep and the calls of birds, I must have lost the Public Footpath without realizing it, so I boldly followed trails which seemed to have been made by human feet, though they kept branching and I had to keep choosing the least unpromising. Perhaps they were the trails of foxes, deer and rabbits for they led me badly astray. But I followed them with precise missionary zeal, to help wear them smooth and clear for others and if I’d had a walking-stick I’d have beaten down the undergrowth on either side as a public service: Vincent the trail-blazer. Unfortunately, they led me into the corner of a wood where the nettles were up to six foot high and getting denser with each step. I had to hack my way sideways with rotten sticks which kept breaking, till I reached a wobbly barbed-wire fence, which I had to climb up and jump over without tearing my clothes. Having done so, I was in the gentle meadow which, the map told me, I could have strolled in for the last mile; though that wasn’t part of the official footpath either.

And this all rather reminds me of an unpublished “how-to” book I recently had the privilege to read: a guide for the retired person. It was slightly entertaining, but tell me this: how can anyone write a “self-help” book? Even if you have been to the destination yourself---achieved Buddhist enlightenment, or accumulated your first million dollars---how can you teach anyone else to follow in your footsteps? If they were foolish enough to try, they could be misled, like anyone who optimistically followed the fresh trail I carefully blazed the other day, which ended in that desperate bed of nettles.

But still I have the urge to delineate this constant aim, this would-be theme of my writing which is so difficult as to cripple me in writer’s block till I take solace in car repair, or get pulled irresistibly into daytime naps, a kind of narcolepsy delicious in the yielding.

All I can do is tell you the circumstance and not the essence. For example, the other day I stepped out of the house for a stroll, in a long evening where the sun had reappeared after a day of heavy rain: a symbol of joy in itself, no doubt. How would a poet describe what I felt in that moment? Should he describe the scene? This is hardly a picturesque part of town, being the poorer district, developed around 1900 with factories and workers’ cottages, nothing much changed since, except for the evidence of successive immigrant “invasions”. Its run-down littered state, with loose bricks not cemented back into place, shows that sprucing-up with middle-class money has yet to occur.

My constant aim is to try and express these moments of ecstasy. Which is impossible. I went out without the digital recorder. The only words I brought back were those which entered my head as I stepped out of the front door into the sunset: “This is the Infinite.”

Hole in the head

Phineas Gage was swift, capable, responsible. He was physically fit and a leader of men. These qualities made him at the age of 25 a supervisor on a Vermont railroad construction project and might have helped him rise through the ranks to a senior management position in that branch of engineering. But the smooth track of his life was shattered in a single instant.

A certain part of the terrain was littered with huge rocks. It had been judged less costly to blast them with gunpowder and build a straight railroad, than to detour round them. It was 1847 and Alfred Nobel being only 14 had not yet invented dynamite. The established blasting method was to drill a deep hole in the rock, pour in gunpowder, poke in a fuse (a long string made of gunpowder wrapped in paper) and cover with sand or clay. This had to be firmed up by tamping with an iron rod, so that the force of the exploding gunpowder would radiate in all directions, and not just back up the drilled hole, as from a gun.

On this particular occasion, Gage was preparing a number of blasting-holes. He found it a monotonous routine, something he could do with only half his attention. He was interrupted by a question from a fellow-worker, which took longer than anticipated to resolve. When he resumed, he forgot he hadn’t yet added sand to the current hole. He tamped the naked gunpowder with his iron bar. It sparked against the rock and set off the powder like a flintlock gun. The bar shot out with the force of a cannon-ball, passing through his skull. That single moment is the basis of his enduring fame.

My own introduction to Phineas Gage was The Omnibus Believe It Or Not, by Robert Ripley. I was seven or eight, and must have skipped the boring sentence where it said that “[the crowbar] made its exit at the junction of the coronal and parietal sutures ...” I was more influenced by the accompanying drawing, which showed the bar at the moment of passing through, going into his skull on one side and emerging at the other. For nearly sixty years I carried a mental image of Gage staggering along a track for assistance with the crowbar still in his head, though in truth it had passed through swiftly and out the other side, taking bits of brain with it.

So when the story of Phineas Gage came up again in a book I’ve been recently reading by Antonio Damasio, it was familiar, like a Bible story woven into the fabric of my imaginative life. As for Damasio, my connection with him goes far beyond any academic interest in neuro-science. David Mickel put me on to him after my miracle cure from chronic fatigue syndrome. That illness was the great rock which blocked the track of my life. Must I curve around it, accepting its permanence? I didn’t know until a time when with all the force of my survival instinct I cursed it and rebelled against my fate. Dr Mickel’s therapy was the blasting process, miraculously sudden and effective, like a single explosion. Later, when I went to Edinburgh to study with Dr M himself, he recommended The Feeling of What Happens, by Antonio Damasio, whose earlier and more significant book I’m reading now: Descartes’ Error. It starts with an account of how Damasio’s wife Hanna, using Gage’s damaged skull preserved in the Harvard Medical School, made a computer simulation to work out which areas of his brain had been destroyed.

Gage was a living miracle, but it’s well-known that his survival had a dark side. All his basic faculties were intact but his personality was changed for the worse. To his friends he “was no longer Gage”. The detective work was to discover, comparing Gage with modern cases, the functions of the brain-cells destroyed by the passage of the tamping iron. We now know that they were from the region which processes emotion.

For centuries it had been assumed that emotion was the enemy of calm rationality but Damasio discovered that to be wrong. The new unemotional Gage was unable to make sensible decisions about how to run his life. He couldn’t get his old responsible job back. He was virtually unemployable after the accident, but not through what we normally think of as “brain damage”, i.e. loss of “intelligence”. You can read his doctor’s notes in this Wikipedia article, for an account of his personality change.

Why is the book called Descartes’ Error? The reasons are quite deep. I am just giving a summary here. Descartes, the “father of modern philosophy” saw mind and body as profoundly separate, with a single interface or bridge in the pineal gland. To Damasio, there can be no mind without body; no thinking without an awareness of the physical, whether it be our own body-awareness or an interaction with the outside world.

His idea, derived from neurological observation, changes everything. It makes religious theories obsolete: not completely wrong for they posited the existence of soul and God as the unseen source of the wonders perceived with senses. In Damasio I see a line between arid theology on the one hand and arid atheist science on the other.

Damasio is too erudite for me to explain further. I have understood his ideas not through the study of his books but the reintegration of my own self following a miraculous cure. I have had to find my own language to describe it. I have said in this blog that man is an animal, despite being overweighed with a huge intellect, like an elk with antlers, or a peacock with a gorgeous tail. I have discovered my own animal nature. My passions are governed by survival, my ecstasies induced by Nature, for I am its child, sucking at its teats. I am nourished by the paths that lead out from cities, and the ancientness of the open sky.

I was educated with a bit of Latin and less Greek; forced into team games---soccer and cricket---as sole recognition of body. The headmaster viewed all deviant behaviour as incipient homosexuality. We must act as a pack of hounds, with him as chief huntsman. My rejection of competitive pursuits was seen as primitive, uncouth and shameful. I took refuge in solitary dreaming, out in the ploughed fields digging up fragments of clay pipes, discarded by the ploughman when they broke; or trying to bring down birds from the sky with a slingshot I’d invented, made from a springy stick with clay stuck to the end.

I tried in adult life to hunt with the pack. I allowed marriage and children to force me into well-paid desk-drudgery. I tried to find in religion, or rather its mystical soul, a language and guide for the unruly impulses I felt.

But how could religion work, when it was based on supremacy of soul over body; all life’s treasure leached away into the abstract realm? Religion was and is a cruel assault on a child’s mind. Like corporal punishment, its use has diminished here in England, to be replaced by the atheistical religion of science, capitalist economics and modern medicine; which is far worse. I’m for “spirituality”---except that it’s wrongly named---and always have been: but not for “beliefs”.

Phineas Gage was the first martyr and saint of neuro-science. Damasio does more to explain what makes us tick than any psychology or theology I have read. But it can never make experiential religion or mystical awareness obsolete. For we possess the gift of direct knowledge, beside which science, for all its “evidence-based method”, is as speculative as theology.

Nothing in the laboratory tells us as much as our own primitive awareness. If someone tells of the visitation of an angel, or the voice of God heard on a lonely mountain-top, why should I not respect that? How else express an experience, but as it appears to you? Life is no less awe-inspiring, experience no less mystical, when we get closer to understanding the body and brain, whose soul is in every cell and neuron.