Out of Jail

I ask myself why I don’t write here more often. Since January 2008, I’ve wanted to post something daily. What prevents? The biggest obstacle is some self-imposed rules, very constraining ones, so that however much I scribble, little emerges to see the light of day. The most important rule is to write from some kind of compelling intensity, preferably an exaltation. Anything less doesn’t seem sufficiently true. I carefully chose the word “exaltation” so as to avoid “bliss”, a word from my guru-infested past, reeking with the perfume of Indian joss-sticks. Back then, the greeting was Jai Satchitanand! which meant “Hail Truth-Consciousness-Bliss”. It takes some courage to admit this stuff.

My animal-nature, I now realize, is the core of my reality, and I’ve always reacted strongly to smell. Whatever people call “spirituality”, I find it in the point where I, with my separate body and private consciousness, make sensual contact with the physical Universe of which I am a part. It sounds as though I am at the mercy of context, i.e. environment, and in a way it’s true: I am a slave to physical circumstance. And yet there is something more, that softens the blows and provides continuity. That mysterious something must be what people call God.

The reek of joss-sticks and unchallenged certainties of the Sanskrit saints are in my past (may they rest there in peace!). Give me the tang of recently-applied gloss paint, especially when with the skill of my own hand I have applied it to my own bathroom window-frame. This paint flows as obligingly from the brush, when you know how to handle it, as the ink from this fountain-pen, before the words are typed and edited to appear on the screen of anyone in the world who’s wired up to receive them.

This blogging is an analog of that sensual contact of lone individual with the common Universe. It’s a grim image though, souls all over the world hunched before computer screens. For thirty years I spent an hour cross-legged each day, with my doors of sense closed to the world and focused inwards, in search of mythical enlightenment. That too was grim, a Robben Island of the soul, a womb which I joyfully renounce as soon as reborn.

So it’s the gloss paint, the humdrum task, which occupies my days, even though I would often prefer the flow of ink from a pen to the flow of pungent paint from a brush. But writing requires exaltation, and that’s a form of Grace. You cannot grab it, only wait till it’s given. It just happens, as on midsummer evening when I went wayfaring towards the sunset. There I felt the sacred interface between my soul’s existence and the Universe’s, as I climbed a hill from whose summit I saw nothing but fresh greenness: cornfields, woodland trees, mown meadows, all glowing in the low sun where flies danced in the clearings and rabbits raced for cover.

The following morning I put on a dark suit and striped tie, to play consultant for a day, which turned out to be nine hours without a break, just sandwiches and coffee delivered to the desk. It was like the Count of Monte Cristo suddenly waking up in a cell of the Château D’If. In odd moments, I found myself looking at the potted plants, none of which were in the peak of health, and addressing them thus: “You stuck here too? How do you survive at all?”

But the most shocking thing was to realize that for decades, sustained by that hour-long cross-legged ritual, I had thought all this was normal.

Dawn song

At four minutes past four a lone blackbird on a chimneypot opposite my house starts his song, tentative but persistent. The sky is lightening, he tells the world. This is no time to stay unconscious. Because he speaks in blackbird language, I don’t really know the meaning of his telling, but only guess that his message is designed for other blackbirds of the species turdus merula. Soon the valley rings with their song, just as it does in other valleys with the mysterious call of the cock bird of gallus gallus domesticus, whose plumage is so much grander than the blackbird’s. Part of my wonderment is to ask why. What mystery is contained in each form of nature? It’s locked in evolution’s narrative and the answer could be couched in scientific terms, just as a craftsman could tell you how he made a piece of furniture. There is a difference between the how and the why, just as there is a difference between science (biology, technology . . . ) and poetry, or every art which exists purely for the communication of joy.

In a primitive response, I too desire to stand on a chimneypot, master of all I survey, singing “in full-throated ease”, as Keats wrote of the nightingale. The poet recognises himself in the singing bird. Both are motivated by the joy of sharing with a fellow-soul. The scientist insists that there is a prosaic reason for the bird’s song, but that’s only because the scientist is employed to be prosaic (where prose is not so much the opposite of verse, but the medium of objectivity and acknowledgement of facts.)

As I write this, a little white van stops outside. Behind the computer screen is my window on the world, and from this north-facing study I can see first my backyard, then the children’s playground and behind that, the road, and beyond that the hill they call The Pastures. The outside world is backdrop to my very existence, ever-changing, beyond the capability of these fingers to capture in any form of words. On the side of the van it says “Verdant”—the name of a company contracted to the municipal authority for street-cleaning, grass-cutting, tree-surgery.

O to be a tree surgeon

A man in a yellow reflective vest emerges purposefully for some errand, but I can’t see what it is: an acacia tree in full leaf stands between him and me. Sometimes they go round at dead of night to remove litter from the streets, especially on Friday nights where the working week’s end has been exuberantly celebrated.

In the back of my mind, I remember the hair’s breadth between a poet and a bore. Keats and the nightingale both seek out a kindred soul receptive to their outpourings, but the blogger forces himself on no one. No other reason gets me up at four in the morning to tap these keys. If I were a blackbird, I’d stand on a chimneypot and hold forth. If I were a young man in need of a job, I’d apply to Verdant for the privilege of roaming deserted streets, making them fit for poets to stroll at noon. As it is, I write till it gets light and offer my little keyboard-dance.