Parallel paths

I’ve been meaning to write more about happiness, but the topic is elusive to say the least and it seems there has not been enough time. I wasn’t sure until yesterday what this meant (what interval of unbroken time would be enough?), but this morning, rising at 4.30 in the morning I know even more clearly, for in my dream I have been composing an intricate post, setting out everything, which in waking life I haven’t been able to do. The intricacy of my dream-post was to trace a pattern, first in vague outline, then after some examples and anecdotes return to the pattern and retrace it, till the whole became alive.

I’ve done nothing much for a while that warrants the term “wayfaring”. When I’ve gone on some errand to town, I’ve walked along Ellborough Road, then through the new Eden Shopping Centre, for this is the straight-line route. I take everything in, for this is my nature, to observe and reflect, and so by the time I’ve reached the destination, and returned, I’ve encountered a hundred souls or more, and tasted the state of the world that way. This, more than the radio news, more than the Internet, defines the world: my world, which is the only part of it I’ll ever really know. I discover what’s happening the other side of my skin, conveyed to me by my senses. I see familiar faces along Ellborough Road, for it’s a place with real street life, especially at certain points: the Polish grocery store, the Mo’Fro (More Afro!) hairdressers, the betting shop and other places of ethnic significance and proletarian hope. It’s a place of Africans, Asians, West Indians, Poles, the local English, drunks. But not till now do I see that I don’t need to go down Ellborough Road so often, even though I’ve said to myself each time, “This is my neighbourhood, I belong here, I love my life so I love this place”.

There are parallel routes I can take which add a few minutes to my journey. There’s the West Town Road (I use the word “town” to replace the town’s actual name) on which my previous flat was situated: it’s busy with cars but there are more trees, older houses, a better prospect for the wayfarer whose goal is to seize joy from the air of the present moment. Sometimes to avoid the more tedious part as you approach town I take a detour through the lower Pastures, where there’s a steep footpath snaking up and down the hillside, through the backs of houses and between them, which takes you to the supermarket, though I don’t go that way when taking my bag-on-wheels, because of the steps.

On the other side of the valley, there’s a hillside footpath through the woods and grassy clearings. In case of winter, or rain, you need walking boots. I could write much more about the varied routes to the town centre, where you’ll find the cupola with its centaur weathervane atop the Guildhall, rebuilt in 1821. You might say that this entire enclave in cyberspace, this Wayfarer’s Notes, is based on my walking routes, for that’s where the ideas come.

I pick up some comments from my previous post. (Please excuse me, A—this is not to dispute with you, but to follow the inspiration of your words!) “Accepting things as they are or being contented with whatever circumstances one finds oneself in or can get into easily, is undoubtedly a path to great happiness.” “Contentment is the route to happiness for most persons. There could be some who enjoy discontentment.”

I see that I rarely take a route to happiness. Like everyone else, I follow a path to my current destination. When I consciously seek happiness, discontentment is my best and only guide. It tells me to eschew efficiency—that false friend!—and follow the route that appeals to my heart, no matter what twists and turns it takes, no matter what trial and error. No one can tell me: therefore, applying the same advice in reverse, I can tell no one. I’ve had enough of Ellborough Road. I’m never in such a hurry that I need to go down it, unless it’s actually my destination. I seldom need to meet the souls who hang out along it, nor do they need to meet me.

Somehow, though I woke at 4.30, it’s 6.00 now. Where did the time go? I made myself a pot of tea, the old-fashioned way, and brought it up to my writing-desk, poured it out in the best china cup, corrected my home-made Word macro for producing the “em dash”—this thing—(instead of & # x 2 0 1 4 ;). Then, without regard for time, or indeed money, I savoured a tiny fragment of that which is unsayable: and also this, which has proved to be sayable.

Pandora’s box

I argued with Charles Bergeman a while ago on the topic of happiness: whether, for example, a five-year-old child could have said to its teacher something like: “I don’t want to be anything when I grow up, I just want to be happy.”

I said it didn’t ring true and then I promised to write a post about it, and drafted many words, and brooded further for some days in my various spaces for brooding (too many? too few?); and sometimes when I awoke in the night, between 2 and 4am, I might have stared in the dark at happiness, and wondered.

All the while, I knew I would only write about happiness authentically whilst seizing the moment, sinking into the indefinable nowness of now, rather than spiralling off into ideas—those seductive liars.

At first I was convinced that happiness had no single definition, or a complex idea that meant nothing independent of a context. In other words, I was thinking like a philosopher, and it had to stop. But after some while, when I was just about to cross Victoria Street one bright morning, alert to everything that could be perceived with the senses, I saw that happiness is the simplest of ideas. “I am happy” means “I wouldn’t change a thing.” For now is just right; or taking a wider scope, my life is just right.

Having agreed with myself this definition, it came as a shock to realize that happiness, in certain circumstances, can be a decision.

I’m writing this in bed. There’s a picture on the wall, the most successful of the few pastels I attempted; it depicts a cloud just above the horizon. I’m happy with it being hung there, the positioning of it, even (though it’s very amateurish) the execution of the painting, and so on. But I could easily not be happy with it. It’s probably hung slightly crooked; it deserves a better frame, one with glass; I ought to try it again in watercolour, for I’d found it very difficult in pastel. Any of these objections could prevent me being happy with this picture hanging in my bedroom. If I wasn’t so happy with the bedroom itself, my objections to the picture might carry some weight.

But I’m happy with this bedroom. It’s cosy, perfect. It’s sequestered and dwells in stillness; and yet it’s connected to the world. Through the open window, I can hear the street, whose sounds vary through the day and night. I can hear my beloved downstairs, but distantly. We are both happy with the picture, the bedroom, the house, our entwined lives. That is, we are not driven by the need to change anything. Most of the time.

I’ll confess to you that when I feel the need to change something, it’s urgent, as if my life were threatened. I leap into action like a man possessed; and if in the nature of things there is no action I can take, I pray, consciously or otherwise.

I do think happiness is a miracle. It must not be taken for granted. Is it something I have finally learned? Or is it a gift? A big question: perhaps the question, through the ages.

As a child and still as an adult, till the last few years, I was profoundly unhappy, so my life was a system of stratagems to carry on as if nothing were wrong at all. I even started, in these pages, these posts, to write a series of memoirs consisting of all the happy memories with the other parts left out. I calculated that it might have worked till the age of eighteen.

By sheer coincidence, I’ve been given two almost identical cases to take care of: one from my headmaster’s daughter, with school photos; one more recently with family photos. The family case has been haunting me, to the extent that I want to put everything back and shut the lid tight, except that the legend of Pandora’s box says that you can’t. “When she opened it, all of the evils, ills, diseases, and burdensome labour that mankind had not known previously, escaped from the box.”

Who knows? Perhaps happiness is the butterfly, the imago form, whose existence requires the larva and pupa stages. Or perhaps, as I strongly suspect, the spiritual life is an escape mechanism for the soul which finds itself blocked from more earthly fulfilment in the formative years.

And, when I don’t feel threatened by the world outside my skin, it seems that happiness is something I am able to choose. But could a five-year-old child possibly know that?

Intrepid Victorians (2)

I mentioned in my last that Dolomite Strongholds is illustrated by the author, with his photos, colour lithographs and pen drawings. As I browsed this beautifully-produced book, a delicate sheet of folded paper slid out, containing pen drawings (traced on top of original pencil sketches) on both sides. None of these were incorporated into the book, so they are beyond mere rare. I feel it’s my duty to reveal them here to the world, particularly as the Rev J. Sanger-Davies’ book is still esteemed in certain rock-climbing circles.

The passage quoted in my last post referred to a Telfer-wire. I’d never heard of it before, even though at Birmingham University I was a member of a secret unofficial group of climbers called The Telferers. It was secret because we used to climb high buildings under cover of darkness and intoxication, sometimes daubing graffiti thereon. It was this group (a couple of years before my time) which had painted BATS (Birmingham Amateur Telferers’ Society) on the belfry of the famous campus clocktower, known as Joe in honour of Joseph Chamberlain, the University’s founding philanthropist.

No one had known why we were called Telferers, though legend had it we were named after Telfer’s meat pies. (By strange coincidence the Frisbee flying disc was named after a brand of pie whose empty tins were found by students to have aerodynamic properties.)

Sanger-Davies’ book may have helped inspire A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, in his pastiche of the cragsman’s memoir, Climbing Napes Needle. I read it aged 14 in The Phoenix Book of Wit and Humour. I wish I still had that book! It was a paperback, but I managed to bind it in hardcovers – my first attempt, using a bright red leather-cloth. Ah, the Internet, where wishing can so soon turn into getting!—I have now ordered a hardback copy of the original edition.

One of our Telferers’ expeditions was to Wastwater in the Lake District. We actually traversed some of the lower reaches of Napes Needle, but weren’t proper rock-climbers. One day we sauntered up Sca Fell, the easy way. On the summit, I smoked a triumphant cigarette (emulating my pipe-smoking Victorian forebears) to the disgust of a more professional group armed with pitons, crampons, carabiners, ropes, and proper boots. They were planning to abseil down the sheer face, having just climbed it. We bummed a ride from them and abseiled down on their ropes. If I’d had a hand free, I’d have smoked another cigarette on the descent, just to show them the casual superiority of the amateur. Oh yes, I could be obnoxious in those days.

Intrepid Victorians

There has passed into my temporary possession a little volume, illustrated by the author, who was also my great-grandfather, entitled Dolomite Strongholds: the last untrodden peaks; published in 1894.

Don’t you love that Victorian prose, its characteristic style at once lofty and light, beloved of those who would make parodies of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, particularly those relating the cerebral and physical adventures of his great detective, Sherlock Holmes?

In fact I’d better cut to the chase and leave that style to the Rev. J. Sanger Davies, MA, Queen’s College Oxford and member of the Alpine Club. Let him speak for himself.

On the “Little Zinne Traverse”, the ledge seemed to me to be 100 yards long going, and 50 yards returning; let it go at the latter. The cliff above slightly overhung it, and, in fact, had protected the shelf. The drop from the edge was absolutely perpendicular, and the distance nearly 2,000 feet.

Of the breadth I am more certain, it nowhere exceeds fifteen inches on the flat, and the usual width was about nine inches. This, of course, would be six inches more than any rock climber would need if there had been any handhold.

But there was absolutely no safe hand-grip from end to end. The weathering had hollowed out the cliff which was generally of an even concave sweep, and the surfaces were all smooth and rounded out.

At two points the overhanging projection came down so low that one had to bend down to avoid it.

Yet the easy level of the path so plainly marked seemed to make it so simple that only by reflection can the full character of this long ledge be estimated; and many may pass over it without a thought of peril until some day of sad awakening.

Zsigmondi describes it as a “narrow” rocksill (Felsgesimse), and mentioned that “the inside wall lifted itself horribly smooth and perpendicular, while here and there in the split of the cliff were limps of ice.”

The main feature of the place was not so much the apparent difficulty of threading it, as the long continued risk from the lengthened exposure to the perils of the way. Dangers which could not be provided against by the rope.

The ledge could not be crawled over, it was too long, and at places too narrow to allow for the width of the shoulders.

Its length precluded the possibility of using the shelf like a Telfer-wire for the elbows and arms while the body hung over the edge.

Worst of all the smoothness was so unbroken all the way that no “loca firma” could be chosen as a halting place whence the rope could be manipulated.

So we turned chest to the rock, and spreading out our arms edged along sideways, feeling our way but not able to grasp anything. This was exciting and more than I had bargained for. In the whole of my experience on the Dolomites this is the only passage that I should be unwilling to try again. Tastes will differ, but it seemed to me that in such a place no man can help his brother. The best of cragsmen can but hold his own while he keeps his balance, and he has nothing to spare at the best; a slipping foot, or a swimming head, or an uncertain eye, would settle the case of its possessor, and of his companions if roped to him.

The stiff upper lip, the studied understatement, the leisured clergyman whose language-skills were polished by a Classical education, all have flowed down the river of Lethe, leaving us with Health and Safety, gender-conscious grammar, mobile telephones which take photographs; and the faked exploits of cinema-stars.

The long journey to now

I’m walking through Hughenden Park, pondering the suitcase of old photos, wondering what I can tell and what I cannot. There is no point in showing the emotive or personal ones because it will be impossible to share the feelings they evoke without a volume of history and explanation. I have picked out two whose interest doesn’t depend on a family connection. As ever, click to see a bigger picture.

One is a tea-party of Army Officers, sitting around a portable gramophone, with what looks like barrack huts in the background. On the back is pencilled “June 15th 1919 Morgan & brother officers” in my grandmother’s writing. The other, which I’ve nicknamed “the furry soldier”, must be from the same era, when officers and men wore breeches and puttees; but there is nothing written on the back.

“Sit as little as possible; credit no thought not born in the open air and while moving freely about”, says Nietzsche. What I transcribe here is those thoughts from the park in which Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli must have walked too, perhaps thinking about his Queen. The past—yours and mine—is like a valley carpeted in mist, in which at a given time we may see only the steeples, factory chimneys and tops of tall trees: never the whole thing. Some say the past is a burden, but I see it as a resource, an ever-increasing granary. “Let go the past,” they say blithely, meaning by this broad generality something particular: to unburden yourself of guilt, regret and trauma. We know the past partly through memory, which populates our cavernous minds with magical images like a movie; and partly through study of how the present is constructed. For is not the present, in a sense, the debris of the past? The reconstructed past holds secrets which we can unravel and use to unlock mysteries; such as why you and I are what we are today.

I’d had the intention to borrow the photos and scan them all in a few sessions, mechanically as a simple task like washing dishes: one piece after the other, categorizing them in various ways, storing them in folders on a hard disk or memory stick. But I can’t do it. Someone else can try, in fact my cousin already has. But I get lost in reveries. These pictures help me see the vista of my life, like an unwritten version of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; and tell me things I never knew. When you scan a tiny photo at 1200 dots to the inch, you are transported to the scene. (In Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup, the photographer paces up and down his studio, pegging up wet prints to dry, making ever more detailed enlargements. It’s so prosaic now with a computer and scanner: that’s why I need to take this walk, to find out what I think; for I’ve made discoveries just as exciting as those in Blowup, or those in Stephen Poliakoff’s television drama, Shooting the Past: it’s just that I cannot tell them here, for many reasons.)

Marc Lord is writing a book whose title I cannot repeat here (click link and go through his comments): “It's all about needing to become a better man ...”. My topic could be “how I have become a better man”, not better in a moral sense but better in self-acceptance. It seems to me that the movement towards spirituality in a person’s life is no different today than it was in the Dark Ages, when men took refuge in monasteries to escape from intolerable conditions.

I don’t want to speak of those conditions, even though some of the photos remind me of them. I’d sooner speak of the blessings I’ve been able to reap from certain curses of childhood, which propelled me to take refuge in imaginary landscapes fabricated from the stuff of literature, music, nature, architecture, writings of the mystics and the purest introspection. At one time or another I dreamed of flourishing in an intellectual and creative salon as musician, author, painter, sculptor, comedian, adventurer in all terrains (mountainous, desert, maritime, aerial and feminine)—but I never realized any of those things. The collection of photos reminds me why I took that escapist route, at the risk of being labelled “absent-minded”.

So now, it’s better to stay in the present, the realm where blessings fall like April showers.

Journey back

I've been loaned a set of family photos and it's a voyage of discovery, reminding me of aspects of my childhood and introducing me to the childhood of my own grandparents. Dates: 1946, 1955, 1884, 1900. I'll write more, but it's late.

Portrait of Two Kings

Click to see large size, bigger than the original which is 4"x3".

It must have been taken by a professional photographer, for I don’t suppose amateurs would have been able to do much indoor photography in 1867. I am not sure how it would have been illuminated: perhaps by igniting a heap of magnesium powder whilst the shutter was held open, for there was no way then to synchronize flash with the camera’s mechanism. This must explain why the children’s eyes are so mysteriously blurred, not to mention the stiff poses. Without the magnesium, they would have had to hold their poses for many seconds during a long exposure.

One cannot imagine Queen Victoria’s family going to a studio to pose for portraits. A photographer would have been summoned to the Royal residence, perhaps Osborne House, which I’ve referred to in earlier posts from the Isle of Wight, last summer. In this photo, the drapes seem to have been hastily put in place and the carpet is not even flat. The wall at far right seems to have been roughly blanked out---Photoshopped, as we’d say today but I assure you I merely scanned the original photo which is uniformly faded, and covered with minor surface marks. I’ve not edited anything.

The authenticity of the print, on stout semi-glossy card, once glued by the corners into an album, is attested by the pencilled inscription on the back: “Aunt V from Arthur Xtmas 1867”. Arthur was Queen Victoria’s seventh child, 17 at the time of writing. Another inscription below the first, in a different, hardly legible hand, says “King Edward VII When Prince of Wales Queen Alexandra—Princess of Wales 3 eldest children.” A third ball-point inscription, possibly in my aunt’s handwriting, says “Edward VII & Queen Alexandra”.

My sister showed me the photo, almost as an afterthought, after we had been going through photos in my grandmother’s albums. This was from a different set, though. When she was a little girl, our grandmother had asked her whether there was anything she would like from the room they were sitting in, so she asked for a pretty little table-top cabinet in white lacquer. It contained various photos including this one. Grandmother’s ancestor (grandfather?) Sir Howard Elphinstone had been tutor to Prince Arthur. I don’t know who Aunt V was: not Lady Elphinstone, for she was Constance Mary Alexander. (See corrections below, in first comment).

As Royal photographs of the period go, this one is exceptionally informal, and would have been sent only to close friends and relatives of the family. The Prince’s hair is tied up strangely and the Princess seems to have just washed hers. The Prince stretches out his feet casually showing his boot-soles, whilst holding the second eldest child tightly to stop him wriggling. Yes, him: the elder children despite wearing what we’d now call dresses, were boys. Prince Albert Victor, the eldest, died in 1892, leaving the one on the Prince of Wales’s knee to succeed to the the throne—as King George V. He’s two years old in the picture but Wikipedia shows one of him aged five looking very masculine in a sailor suit.