Beginnings

My head says that the perfect wayfaring is to follow an ancient trail through the hills, where the eye can roam to horizons beyond where the feet can tread: a Himalaya or Grand Canyon of the soul.

So much for my head: my legs know better. The other day, I set out on a banal errand, acccompanying my beloved to town on a Saturday morning to the Post Office and thence to the market where she would buy yam, green banana and other West Indian staples. She usually undertakes these trips alone because I prefer the long strides of a hunter, and don’t like to hang around shops. So when I saw the queue at the Post Office, I left her there, but promised to seek some memory for her computer, and an LED light on a flexible stalk that clips on to the bedpost, for reading and writing without disturbing her sleep in the hours of stillness. Neither item was available in the High Street, so I hied me to a retail park along the valley.

This was when my legs expressed their gladness, filled with vigour like a dog seeing its master unhook the leash and put on his walking boots. (Mine were on already: an unconscious part of me had planned to break free as we set out from home.) Part of my glee was to subvert the whole concept of a retail park, for it’s designed as a place out of town to be reached by car. But I knew a footpath beside the secret river, that winds behind industrial premises, the sewage works and the disused railway line.

As I traversed the park, a prosaic affair mainly given over to playing fields, the ideas started fluttering into my head like bats in the twilight, a phenomenon not quite the same as thinking: receptive rather than active. You might say that the joy of the morning offered itself like a modelling clay ready to be shaped into anything: ready for new beginnings. It wasn’t the beauty of the surroundings but the perfection of the moment.

Following the river-bank, I saw that what stops us learning is a part of us which says “I already know about this”: a part which saps our curiosity. So if the “unconscious mind” crops up, we say, “Oh yes, I know about that: Freud! Blah: blah blah; blah, blah, blah.” I don’t know why: there are probably lots of reasons. Perhaps I protect myself from anything new; or anything “boring”. Perhaps I say to myself “Heaven knows, there are too many ideas already. They need to be silenced, to give us some peace.” But I could learn, by letting myself merely observe, merely listen, to the miracle already taking place: not just without, not just within, but the interaction between. My wayfaring is not to enjoy nature, even though my head thinks it is—that tree, this leaf, yonder panorama—but to put the universe back together, put consciousness back into the historic environment which evolved it in the first place.

I wrote the other day about The Centaur; about not wanting to be just the rider, but fused completely with the horse.

In the world of ideas, there is too much abstraction. In the world of books, you need to read the original, not the gossip around it; letting your own ideas spring up unbidden, just as the author’s did. Not plagiarize but procreate.

I suspect there are innumerable discoveries to make but we have to be like a child in front of them, hungry to learn, not weighed down with the staleness of the preconceived. Darwin was like that. BBC radio celebrates his centenary, and also the 800 years of Cambridge University, which started as a group of students fired by eagerness to wrest secrets—theological or scientific—from the bounteous æthers.

It’s always worth going back to the source: to the moment when something began. Where did man begin? In Africa, they say. I have never set foot on the continent, but my body, or if you will, my unconscious mind, dreams of it constantly, for though my skin be white, my ancestors come from a region around Kenya, like your ancestors, like everyone’s. The closest I got to Africa was in 1946 when my ship anchored at Port Said on its journey through the Suez Canal. Passengers could get off to buy souvenirs and feel dry land under their feet after weeks sailing from Fremantle, but I stayed with my mother, looking over the rail at naked boys diving for pennies. I was astonished. Some of them were scarce older than me (I was 4) yet there they were, in Paradise, unconstrained by mothers. Mine gave me a couple of coins to throw and each time the boy caught it before it sank to the bottom, and bobbed up like a cork grinning and holding it in high triumph.

I’m trying to convey some of what went through my head as I walked to the retail park along the valley floor beside the humble river. It was a very quiet sense of exaltation. I felt privileged to participate in the world’s discovery, not to be celebrated as a discoverer, but merely for the joy of looking and revealing ways of looking. I’m not talking about a particular discovery, a new idea that runs through academia like a benign infection, but just a kind of seeing. For anyone can do it, I believe, though without evidence thereof. To learn is to be able to tune to something you never knew was there. Once you can tune, you can see it all the time.

The retail park has been built on the site of an old paper mill which took advantage of the river-water to dissolve the wood-pulp from the trees in these surrounding hills, and the water-power to drive the machinery. I’m so glad at my discovery of this route to get there: glad that this trail, this old railway line, have not been razed by bulldozers yet. I reach a point where I tell myself I should write about it: a piece entitled “Enjoy while you can!” We should never cease from celebrating that which cannot last. This is where I differ temperamentally from those Oriental mystics who claim we should celebrate the eternal and infinite. No! If it’s eternal, it can wait. Let me rejoice in the ephemeral, gather rosebuds while I may.

All will disappear: not absolutely for the world will remain and miracles never cease. But this unique combination of body and ever-sharpened intelligence, with consciousness added as a bonus, consciousness that allows joy: it’s like the original cast and crew of a film. Once they have dispersed, there is nothing left but a record on celluloid or digital media; which is perhaps all that others will value.

I’m not saying “stop the world”. Of course not. Change the world. It needs change and people who can effect that change, whose fulfilment is to change the world. (As I compose this, I am walking down the old railway line. No rails, no sleepers any more: just raised earthworks and a ditch like the prehistoric settlements that abound in these parts.) It’s not my aim to leave a legacy of writings, or to change the world, or even to populate the world with my offspring who may do it on my behalf. I just want to go on being excited about life, and if some of that rubs off, it’s good too.

And here in the woods near the old railway line is a sewage works, at the town’s lowest point, whose input arrives in a large iron pipe and whose output is pumped into the river, making it flow faster downstream. You hear the sound of a man-made waterfall and the constant low hum of pumps. And here if not before, I see that my heightened feeling, my overflow of joy can’t be explained by a mere “love of nature”. I stand in a triangular hollow, bounded by the river, the diagonal path and the old railway line together enclosing a shallow pond over which the big pipe and a smaller one are supported by brick columns. The pond’s surface is disturbed in more than one place by evidence of a spring: you can see one in the middle of the photo under the pipes. I must be an engineer at heart for I find all this completely fascinating. The more so because I have been here before. I come again. It’s a place of anticipation, of pilgrimage. Just like the eagerness in my legs when I contemplated this walk, I receive information from the part of me that isn’t censored and controlled by conscious intellect. It tells me what interests me.

I see that in a child’s world, a mammal’s world, a true human world, there is an endless fascination in repetition: the same only different. Music: rhythm, melody. We seek the new, we return to the familiar. I don’t seek to understand or explain this. I merely observe and report.

There is nothing grand about this river. It runs behind industrial premises, some derelict. It’s twelve-foot wide at the maximum. The path is muddy. But it has the power to evoke parts of my past life. Good parts. Parts I never understood at the time. I don’t mean just my life, but the world I observed. Things that were happening in the world, that I was born into. I give awed thanks for that life.

Anyhow the footpath eventually debouches into the retail park, for which too I give thanks, I cannot explain why. It’s ugly enough. PC World doesn’t have the computer memory. Argos does have the clip-on flexible-stalk LED reading-light (and it works wonderfully!)

On the bus home there are two boys in front of me. The larger one is a pink-faced flaxen-haired lump of a lad. The other is a dark-haired boy with wires going into his ears: quiet, he looks more intelligent or from a more privileged family than the pink-face, who holds forth loudly whilst he remains quiet. I don’t tune in at first but the larger boy is speaking of another, compassionately recounting his shortcomings and peculiarities. The smaller or younger boy is attentive, admiring: so am I. He has to get out, presses the bell-button for the driver to stop at the next bus-stop. The pink-face says “Oh, is that what you’re doing, seeing how late you can leave it to press the bell?” Then the smaller one gets up to go. “And you’re seeing how late you can get up to go?” I wonder if the shapeless pink-faced boy is in some way seducing the other, charming him with the way he can make the most trivial events in life into something of note, something to remember. It’s not aimed at me, but it works on me anyhow. As a person’s companion, he knows how to be as attentive as an imaginary friend.

The persistence of selfhood

“You don’t know what you think until you speak.”

This is the motto of thousands—perhaps millions—of bloggers, and I’m proud to be in that number—O when the Saints come marching in!

And there is more to blogging than blogging. Oh yes. Scattered across the uncharted wastes of cyberspace—but let me not insult Google, probably charted quite thoroughly—our extempore comments lie wanton and unremembered: pigeons loosed but never coming home to roost for they are not of the homing variety. Or they are seeds broadcast, which engender new life in many a foreign field.

If I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever—blog comments!
[With apologies to Rupert Brooke, prophetic poet of the Great War 1914-18]

Anyhow, it was in such a comment—or now I think on’t, an email to a dear and faithful blogger, that I discovered my own thought: that this blog is about miracles, not miseries; magic and not mud; angelic sparkles and phosphorescence and not—mere stuff. On a good day.

But sometimes you know what you think without getting the opportunity to say it, perhaps without ever finding the words to wrap around it whilst retaining the imprint on their fabric of the thing they are wrapping round. There are especially fruitful times, for example lying still under a delicious quilt at three in the morning, not sure if one is awake—when the harvesting of that fruit would break the spell, so the inspirations must perforce flow back to their source till another time. I think it was in one of those sessions the other night, or it might have been whilst walking the mean streets near my house (and they have never seemed so mean as recently) that I caught the tail of a thought before it slipped my grasp and fled. Actually I remember now. I was striding past some premises with large windows, translucent but not transparent, the kind that it’s handy to catch a glance at yourself in, if you want to check your hair, or in my case if you suspect you are walking with one shoulder higher, something I’ve been accused of since standing to attention on parade aged thirteen. So when I glanced the other day, I saw the same person that I have known since I stopped growing. That’s the advantage of seeing oneself “through a glass, darkly” from a distance.

It was just then that I became aware of a particular miracle, and it seemed the greatest of all miracles: that I am still the “me” that I’ve always been, as far back as I can remember. I remember posing for a studio portrait in the summer of ’45: it has the date pencilled on the back of the photo. But—this is vitally important—I don’t want to talk about external looks. They change radically, laughably, perhaps weepably. Our persistent experience of “me” over the decades and half-centuries is the experience of ourselves from the inside. And surely my me is just like your me.

“The personal is the universal”. That’s a thought which popped out in another blogging free-for-all. Someone else said it first, then I seized on the thought. If I can get personal enough, rinsing out the circumstantial colour of my own idiosyncrasy till the bleached existential form is revealed, then I shall have contributed to the universal understanding of the universe by itself.

“I am still me.” If this were understood truly, then our institutions would subtly change: our education systems, courts, punishments. I have just started reading Crime and Punishment . This is from the Introduction: “Above all, the portrayal of Raskolnikov’s character [see portrait above] concerns the theme and problem of personality. What is under threat from ... [various -isms] is the image of the human self, and its potential for change and transformation.” You may call it a paradox, but let me claim it as one of those miracles from which the fabric of space-time is woven. The possibility of transformation sits on the base reality of “I am still me”.

And at this moment I am unable to make it clearer than that.

First, an apology

Extreme Pansy Macro
Originally uploaded by Bernie Kasper

I don’t like withdrawing a post after readers have already commented, but I published one at the weekend that was too personal and emotional. Regretfully, I’ve pulled it: ironic because its topic was regret. So for now, I want to thank Kathleen and Pauline for those sympathetic and helpful comments. Equilibrium is restored and another post will follow before long.

Me and the Kenyan Mau-Mau

(This is a post which I suppressed the other day, for reasons which need not concern us now.)

I lie soaking up warmth. Around me, steam rises like incense. I marvel like a savage at this jar of Royal Jelly and Pure Honey Moisture-Rich Cream Bath. What attracts me is the glittery swirls, as if the gunk inside were gold-dust bound with egg-yolk. As the list of ingredients doesn’t mention gold, the sparkle must derive from mica and silica. The magic remains as long as you leave it in the jar; disappears instantly when you pour it under the hot tap. Then, you get nothing but bubbles and a faint scent of jasmine.

It goes without saying that we like these toys, especially if they are expensive. (This one wasn’t, but since I’m a savage, comparisons mean little.) They were designed by someone with a Masters degree in What People Like. That they serve no real consumer need is not the point. They provide employment, the non-savage’s traditional way to distribute the “wealth” that we need for food, clothes and shelter.

They managed things rather better in the savage lands, where human dignity ranked higher than efficiency. My grandmother spent time in Kenya in the Fifties, her daughter and two of her grandchildren being there already. She thought it might help her rheumatoid arthritis to stay with them in the hot climate She observed that the natives liked to sit chattering most of the day in the shade under a tree, while the white people worked tirelessly to improve the country. As Noel Coward noted in a famous song, “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” She could not understand the natives’ ingratitude, for Mau-Mau insurgents (she called them terrorists) were demanding their own land back, when it was clear they had no idea how to cultivate it. The British declined their request, in the most gentlemanly way; and then these savages started an armed revolt, burning white men’s houses and, according to propaganda, doing unspeakably savage things.

I wonder how much the Mau-Mau may have had to do with my aunt’s racial prejudice and consequent refusal to see me ever again when I married a Jamaican. It was only yesterday, two years after she passed away, that I met her two sons again. One of them is the person I have known longest in my life—who’s still living, I mean. We met in 1946, on the day I arrived in England aged four. We are the same age—born a month apart. Next Thursday he’s going back to Africa, to Lesotho, to work on agriculture, on a project to introduce zero-tillage. This is a way to make the land fertile without ploughing. Perhaps one day the long history of soil erosion can be reversed.

We who were once almost brothers, why have we been apart so much? Our encounters were always rare: he spent much of his childhood in Africa; I went to live in the Isle of Wight; he joined the army; I got married and moved away; he became a born-again Christian, a would-be missionary (following quite a tradition in the family); I joined a guru cult. We were playmates as children. Soon I hope to show some photos of that.

We exchanged reminiscences yesterday. We must have always measured ourselves against one another, been rivals, envied one another. Despite the years, we were instant companions again when we met yesterday. To know him is such a gift: why haven't I made the effort to track him down before? I was first envious of him when he broke his arm aged five: envied his bravery, the attention he received. To this day I have never broken a bone; never been to Africa; never till recently been happily married. I was supposedly the intelligent one, who went to university and supposedly had a good career, whereas he could only find work as a lowly gardener. And in those years of no contact I felt sorry for him, from the standpoint of my false values and some factually false information.

The spores of melancholy are everywhere, but why has the fungus been growing on me, these last days? I know why now, after that visit yesterday. I’ve finally gained the courage and clear-sightedness to release something from a deeply-buried sealed jar: the genie of regret, which I have refused to acknowledge till now. I regret the turnings I took, the traps I got caught in, covering my entire life for forty years, 1963 to 2003. It is not pity for myself: there is space in the average lifespan for huge mistakes and slow painstaking corrections. But I see the effect on my children and grandchildren. There are years more to go before they can complete their own corrections.

I was born in a war, in the midst of the turmoil of the twentieth century. In my lifetime, atomic bombs were dropped on Japan (a jolly good thing, said my mother). Israel was created, in a grand gesture of compensation for the Holocaust. Germany was divided. In a continental divorce settlement, the Soviets were given half of Europe. The British divorced India from Pakistan and cleared out before it got embroiled in any more trouble; then cleared out of Africa, the Caribbean, Malaysia. So many hasty actions, so many long-term consequences. We are not clear of them yet. We are still setting up new problems for future generations.

the Centaur

Three years ago I cured myself from a serious chronic illness; and changed my life as a result. Only now am I able to put in simple words what happened.

The rider started to respect the horse. Instead of “cogito, ergo sum”, the centre of gravity became body-wisdom, the wondrous human animal. Both are joined of course: that is the mythic significance of the centaur.

The rider has been quietly sneering at the notion of New Year resolutions, but the horse—who plays Jeeves to the rider’s Wooster—has begun to make respectful interventions: “Sir, if I might be permitted to suggest …?”

And so I find myself starting to organise my life, in ways which, if I did not despise NYRs, would seem uncannily like them.

Perhaps Jeeves has started to civilise his master. Perhaps the horse has learned to read the rider’s unconscious thoughts.

Or perhaps the two are fusing into one. Anyhow, I have a new sense of starting to do what I ought to do, without trying too much.

And that is what I wish for you dear readers; and the world too.

Flight and pursuit

On my way to bed the other night I was brushing my teeth in the cold bathroom, when a thought occurred to me, which I’ll tell you in due course. The bathroom is cold because it is winter here: not a pretty blanket of snow but a frost that bites, the sort of frost that engenders the instinct to social care, otherwise the frail and elderly poor could easily die of cold even with a roof over their heads. We could afford to heat the house all the time in all rooms, simply by adjusting the thermostats, but a natural austerity prevents; or perhaps it is the instinct not to isolate ourselves from Nature; not to live in a bubble of artificiality any more than is needed for survival and modest comfort.

But that’s not the particular thought which occurred to me then. It’s true I was longing for Summer, but that is jumping a step, because Spring comes first, and who would want to miss that? I found myself in flight from Winter, as if it were an affliction. Last weekend we went to my sister’s family and they took us to an open-sided barn in the Cotswolds for a drama performance, just after nightfall in the late afternoon. My son-in-law had lent me some long-johns (underpants which extend to the ankles) and an extra sweater. The seating was bales of straw and the stage was a small caravan parked against the open side of the barn; adjacent was an open corner covered with an awning. In the play, the caravan represented an inn and the corner a stable. For it was a play of Christ’s nativity, a rustic-style comedy rendered in rhyming verse, featuring the innkeeper and his wife; the three kings; a commenting angel; Mary and Joseph. The baby Jesus was not represented, neither by baby actor or doll, and I don't think the labour and delivery were depicted, but I was sitting at the back and may have missed something. Much could be said about the play, if I were determined to review it; but my main preoccupation was to survive the cold. The message I got from the play, therefore, was the bitter one of “no room at the inn”; which results in a cruel exposure to the elements.

I still have not told you the thought which came as I was brushing my teeth. It arrived newborn yet fully-formed, in these words: “The senses are merely reminders”: words which put my world into disarray. For in this blog I have felt I was celebrating the senses for their own sake, glorying in the human animal through a series of shared ramblings and wayfarings. It’s true I’ve many times noted that sights and smells have triggered reminders, possibly pointing to something before this life. It’s that “merely” that I find a little troubling. When you think about it, the feeling of hunger or the smell of food are reminders to eat.

Was this thought—which I took to be a kind of angelic message, for it wasn't the result of any prior reasoning on my part—also about “spirit?”. I’m instinctively careful about that stuff, not to describe or define in a way that evokes belief. But these lines spring into my head:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
....
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
....
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy ...

(Wordsworth, extracts from Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

I must stop fleeing from Earth, even though its breath be unkind.

Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
Thou dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember’d not.

(Shakespeare, As You Like It)

So yesterday I decided to stop cowering indoors but go wayfaring and defy the frost. I donned some long-johns and an extra sweater and went forth on my quest. Setting out from the church with the Golden Ball, I walked along the forested ridge, hearing only the crunch of my footsteps, and the call of various large birds: the raucous cawing of rooks, the rusty percussion of pheasants and the gentle precise whistling of red kites, which sounded like a shepherd’s signalling to his dog when engaged in herding sheep. My goal was a spot where in 2007 I had taken a photo of another ridge across the valley: Bledlow Ridge. I tried to frame the same panorama, at 9am on December 31st. You can compare the two, and see that few features have changed in 18 months, save what Winter has done. But they show why I long for Spring.