One's own backyard

It’s tempting with a digital camera to think that a picture is worth a thousand words, so you can just snap something and stick it in a blog, as if it had the power to capture the feeling which made you take the picture. But the camera’s just a soulless eye that delivers aspects of a scene without the accompanying birdsong and fresh morning air. Perhaps you have the empathy to pick up a snapshotter’s feeling, especially from pictures of babies, children, flowers or any other prized possession. Not me, I admit this shortcoming. So I offer some hundreds of words, leaving you to decide which is the most telling.

I certainly won’t expect the accompanying snapshots to explain why I include “hanging out clothes” on my profile’s list of interests. I emerge to the backyard’s glimpse of morning sunshine, with a basket of damp washing and another of pegs. The air is fresh and there is a cosmic hush—an underlying silence beneath every noise. Perhaps some magpies are quarrelling, or doves cooing, seagulls screaming, a lone blackbird on a chimney-pot improvising a melody; or above the chimneys a red kite mewing softly as it rides a thermal. I hear the distant clattering of pots from a kitchen, a snatch of conversation or a song on a radio. Right here as I hang the washing out, there’s the clacking of plastic pegs, the swish of my feet on the grass. Each of these emphasises the pervasive background hush, expectant, silent, a message to unravel.

The sunlight catches things you can’t see on a photo—threads of gossamer from spiders busy since dawn; a flash of amber where resin has oozed out from a knot in the wooden fence; the faint beating of wasp and bumble-bee wings; an awareness of all the living things—plants, mosses, worms, woodlice, flies; probably rats hiding somewhere amongst the neighbouring backyard sheds and spilled-out garbage of tenants who rent cheap rooms. You can even see vapour rising from the damp sheets, in the form of a faint haze against the background of blue sky. Of course I am not aware of all these things at once. I’ve plucked a bouquet of sense-impressions from the uncounted times I’ve hung out washing in the two years I’ve lived here.

There are also the children’s cries from the playground just beyond this backyard; children of every age, teenagers after dark, drunkards in the morning, sometimes a drug addict or two—I’m guessing from their faces, can see it in certain young women. People say beware of used needles, but I’ve only seen one. The Council take care to have the playground cleaned daily, at first light.

I love my backyard, this tiny piece of land where I am king and I reign with my Queen: all the more because it flourishes in these surroundings, in this factory town in the valley, that I shall call Chiltern Vale, to preserve its anonymity against the intrusion of search engines. I feel towards it that fierce love expressed in John of Gaunt’s dying speech, speaking of England:

This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war . . .

So I was pretty shocked to look out of the window and see my backyard bombed by an unseen enemy. A child was throwing debris over the fence from the playground. Indignantly I thought, “What next? A ground invasion?” Scarily, a few seconds later two boys, yelling in the thrill of child-business, raced through a gap in the fence, a few houses to the left of mine. I stuck my head out the window and shouted angrily, like a farmer to mischievous young trespassers or possible poachers. They regarded me in astonishment, and tried to explain that they came from that house in the first place, had gone to the playground and were now coming back.

So I, not they, was the aggressor, invading their space, their own paradise; and I saw how the mere symbolism of missiles and ground invasion had whipped up a fear in me, as if it were the Cuban missile crisis of 1962; only I never cared about that at the time.

An online friend refers to my “desire to remain undelivered”—to remain attached to the things of this world, rather than seek mystical union with the Infinite. Yes, this is my choice, to not heed Jesus who urges me to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven . . . where thieves do not break through nor steal”; but heed Robert Herrick instead, when he advises “the Virgins, to make much of Time”; to

GATHER ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

I have wasted enough of life already, let me live now, drain it to the dregs, walk whilst I have legs, feel whilst I have a body to feel with.

Fernando Pessoa

I wanted to sing the unsung, but the unsung has already been sung, by Fernando Pessoa, who I discovered via Comedies, Conjectures, making the whole blogging project meaningful and eternally validated.

After a misspent childhood, youth, manhood and middle-age, I spend my remaining years redoing, reviewing, retracing my own footsteps so that now, ageless, I discover something I sought all those years, a mentor, hero, role-model. Which has its pluses and minuses. He (one’s hero) makes one feel validated, justified, not alone, even if he died in 1935. On the other hand, he takes away one’s motivation. What can one say that he has not said already? He dares to say what one thought but never dared express, what one feels sometimes but tends to remain silent till it blows over:

“Clouds . . . I question myself without knowing myself. I have achieved nothing useful, shall never know anything I could justify. That part of my life which I have not wasted in a confused interpretation of non-existent things, I have frittered away in writing prose-poetry, dedicated to untransmittable feelings, through which I make the universe mine. ”

and writes poems that express what I had thought but never considered writing and if I had would never have written as simply and beautifully:

“If I could sink my teeth into the whole earth
And actually taste it,
I’d be happier for a moment . . .
But I don’t always want to be happy.
To be unhappy now and then
Is part of being natural.
. . . ”

And from a fellow-blogger I read this, from another Pessoa poem, presumably like my other extracts translated from the Portuguese:

Oh, what a pleasure
not to follow a duty!
To have a book
and not read it!
Reading is boring.
Studying is nothing.
The sun shines without literature.
Rivers run without original editions.
And the breeze, so natural to the morning, has plenty of time, and no rush . . .

to which I commented, in the effusiveness of one who’s in love with something or other, perhaps life itself in its fullness:

“I love this, your presenting the poem, and the sentiments of Fernando Pessoa, two of whose books I have bought (The Book of Disquiet and Selected Poems: A Little Larger than the Entire Universe) which blow my mind so gloriously that I am not devouring them, merely treasuring their existence; for I will possess the discovery of Pessoa for the rest of my life. And I bless you for giving Pessoa this public airing.”

Tooting Broadway dude

Three years ago my son gave me a denim jacket carrying the Caterpillar label. He’d got it from someone sharing the same student lodgings, who had submitted a number of original designs to Caterpillar. They made a few prototypes and mine is one, perhaps the only one of its exact style in existence. I’ve worn it daily on my wanderings, despite its being a trifle long in the arms and body. No one has ever said it looks good but I’ve imagined it resembled my namesake’s, as portrayed in The Artist on his Way to Work. My first encounter with his art was a little reproduction of this painting in The Modern Encyclopaedia for Children selected to illustrate an article on printing, showing the four colour separations. You can't ever go and see the original. It was destroyed in WWII. Also, a blue jacket plays a major role in Self-portrait with Easel (worth enlarging with a click). The main specialness of mine, though, was its being an unforeseen gift, to cover my back in the time of need.

I don’t take an inordinate interest in clothes. I rarely buy my own, yet cling to the ones I have, long after the woman in my life has threatened to throw them away. My “Vincent” jacket remains under such threat, reprieved only for lack of a suitable replacement. A chance arose last week, when we went to visit K’s Mom in Mitcham. Mom is the ideal guide to economical shopping in South London, having lived there since 1960 when she arrived from Jamaica. She said she knew just the place, so the three of us took a bus-ride to Tooting, then made straight for Smith Bros, department store since Victorian times. We found the exact thing, in the classic “trucker” style, absurdly cheap. K wanted one just the same, but couldn’t find the right fit, so Mom took us to I&A Fashions, whose sign, offering “babywear, children’s wear, ladies’ casual and nursery goods, school uniform, evening wear” seemed overblown for such a tiny shopfront. Step inside, though, and you find “caverns measureless to man”, at least this man, for having acquired my new jacket I took no further interest in shopping. Opposite Tooting Broadway Station, with its great bronze statue of King Edward VII, I found solace more to my taste, a tavern not a cavern, a real London pub, which kept me occupied till K appeared in her new jacket – shapely, but cut in lightweight denim, in feminine homage to the “trucker” idiom; yet less than half the price of mine (£7.99, to be exact).

It wasn’t the pub (J. J. Moon’s), the pint of Marston’s Pedigree, or even the new jacket, which gave me such a surge of affection for London. Well, they helped, but it was mostly the street, opening its arms and winning me over. In the Mitcham Road, I’m one piece of a grand kaleidoscope of colours, shapes, ages and types. It’s a joy to see and be seen, greet and be greeted. In many faces you can see that life is hard and lonely: immigrants exiled from who knows where; old men exiled from their youth, when Tooting was a different place. “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”* Here in the present, I’m a dude amongst dudes, albeit a bleached and weathered one, for these qualities of the new denim are echoed in my pale skin and grey hair. It’s as if I don’t remember I’m white till I look in the mirror. You don’t have to be black to be a dude—but it does seem to help.

Only a few days after discovering that a contemplative nun lurks deep within me, I discover a dandy too! I read somewhere that dandyism is a spiritual thing: perhaps it was à propos the poet Baudelaire. At any rate I feel it so, for it means that you cultivate your presence to please others as well as yourself; to let others look at you and see the magnificence of God’s creation. Yes, it sounds shocking and even blasphemous, but it doesn’t depend on spending lots of money on clothes, or having a nice-looking body to hang them on. It’s a consciousness thing, and this is what makes black people more dudish than whites. I’ve described one in the post “Laughing Water” who was brain-damaged, deformed and incapable of functional movement. I’m not saying everyone can be a dude: it’s a vocation, like the calling to be a nun.

Dandyism implies the chaste enjoyment of your own body, both seeing and being seen; to be caressed by the aethers; to express discreet appreciation of others’ efforts in looking beautiful. In my imagination (and who knows? perhaps reality too) we recognize one another with subtle glances.

The thing about finding these things in yourself—nun, dude or other personalities still to be discovered—is that they can be enjoyed for an afternoon, without lifetime commitment.The memory can be cherished just the same. Perhaps not even a memory, but an aspiration. The sweetness of these things cannot be taken away.

A dandy doesn’t have to follow fashion. But dandyism as divine worship is always in fashion, a Yoga as challenging as any other. Its goal is delight in being who you are, the entire look and feel of your person; and to cultivate a similar appreciation for others. I’m ready to learn.

-------
* Opening sentence of The Go-between, by L. P. Hartley.

Heaven-haven

Deep within me, perhaps within you too, O brother, sister, fellow-traveller in this life! there hides a contemplative nun, who wants to do nothing in this world but observe its wondrous mysteries and pray for its wellbeing. It’s rather disturbing for a man to find this buried beneath his ingrained habit of action—to be always doing, whether or not it’s reasonable: action for the sake of it. I still have that within me—to play, to learn, to blunder, to survive, to reproduce; but too much more might be mere repetition, and now contemplation begins to seek its place in the sun.

Two of the poets I most revere have imagined themselves nuns. Tennyson’s St Agnes’ Eve has 36 lines, beginning:

Deep on the convent-roof the snows
    Are sparkling to the moon
My breath to heaven like vapour goes:
    May my soul follow soon!
The shadows of the convent-towers
    Slant down the snowy sward
Still creeping with the creeping hours
    That lead me to my Lord:
Make Thou my spirit pure and clear
    As are the frosty skies
Or this first snowdrop of the year
    That in my bosom lies.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ early poem Heaven-Haven is short enough to reproduce in full:

A nun takes the veil
     I have desired to go
       Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
     And a few lilies blow.

     And I have asked to be
       Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
     And out of the swing of the sea.

* * * *

We went on a pilgrimage to Cowes yesterday. K’s had a week off work but we haven’t been able to get away for various reasons; till she had the idea of this day-trip. We drove to Southampton and left the car there, taking the ferry to East Cowes as foot-passengers, as it happens along with hundreds of visitors to some pop festival, each burdened with their bedrolls and backpacks. For ourselves, free of schedule and agenda, we contented ourselves with merely hanging out in Cowes, the heaven-haven where I’d spent my early teens.

In accordance with this new-found spirit of not-doing, I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

x

Aerial View of San Francisco in the Fifties showing Coit Tower
from avaloncm on flickr

Consider the game of peekaboo. In England the mother says “Peep-bo!” when she reappears after hiding, and the baby gurgles in delight. Then she hides again, nothing elaborate, just ducks out of sight, and the baby starts to become anxious. “Peep-bo!” again. Eventually the baby is able to imagine her continued existence when she is not present to sense, and thus it outgrows the game.

Later, he goes to school and one day—I’m talking about my own case, not generalizing—the master announces a new subject: Algebra. Through the French windows of this elegant room, a part of which is set up with desks and a blackboard, the sun infiltrates, reflects off the shiny floor and illuminates the dancing dust-motes. Outside, pigeons coo, and an occasional cuckoo is hard far-off in the woods. What is behind this exciting word Algebra? He learns about x, the unknown. x represents a number, and we have to determine which one, out of an infinite set of possibilities. He solves the problem the same afternoon. The answer is x = 5. So that’s it, the unknown is known. But no! that was just an example. He still doesn’t know the true nature of x—to be perennially unknown. For every equation he solves, a harder one follows. That first day in class he understood little; would gladly have let Algebra itself remain unknown, as it was to him before that sunny afternoon, with its cuckoo’s call and those dancing motes trapped in a sunbeam. But he was forced to persevere with x, knowing it for odd moments before it plunged back to mystery; ever rising anew like Phoenix, smelted from the furnace of Knowing to solidify into a new form.

By this means, and many others, he learned abstractions. For every x he encountered in later life, someone proclaimed a corresponding answer—one that he often wished to challenge. Deep down he knew the true algebra: that x can never stay solved; and many values of x can be imagined without their being true. Perhaps an orphaned baby can grow up to imagine a mother who never popped up to say “Peep-bo!”

Years later, let’s say x years later, he applied algebra to the mystery of politics. Let x be the Right, and y the Left. What is x and what is y, when a, b, c, d ... are time, place, personalities, issues ... ? Why does he always cast his vote the same way, always finding something to support in x, something to deride and excoriate in y?

Then he realizes that the Right looks to an imaginary past, a golden age that never was; the Left looks to an imaginary future that never will be.

What if he wasn’t rooted in an English industrial valley with its Victorian workers’ cottages and derelict chair factories, its hills steeped in the history of Protestant martyrdoms? What if Fate impelled him elsewhere—say to the United States? Could he live in a similar fashion as now, getting everywhere by foot or occasional bus, and be everyone’s equal, fearless on the streets? Would he vote x or y? He sees both as poisoned wells.

He dreams of a mythical San Francisco, perhaps the Monterey of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row; or Ferlinghetti’s poem about North Beach from the Fifties. (He has never been to San Francisco, and is content that this is so, for the x of his imagined Frisco is never to be found.)

Away above a harborful
of caulkless houses
among the charley noble chimneypots
of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines
a woman pastes up sails
upon the wind
hanging out her morning sheets
with wooden pins
O lovely mammal
her nearly naked breasts
throw taut shadows
as she stretches up
to hang at last the last of her
so white washed sins
but it is wetly amorous
and winds itself about her
clinging to her skin
So caught with arms
upraised
she tosses back her head
in voiceless laughter
and in choiceless gesture then
shakes out gold hair
while in the reachless seascape spaces
between the blown white shrouds
stand out the bright steamers
to kingdom come

Fisherman's Wharf - San Francisco, mid-Fifties, from avaloncm on flickr

See also:
Speech by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1999
Meaning of “charley noble” which I thought till today was merely a spontaneous poetic flourish.

Unseen foe

For weeks, probably months, I’ve been bothered by a fugitive stench, hanging in the air at various places, various times, in the kitchen and dining room, not always the same smell. Every mammal knows not to foul its own nest and the sense of outrage at any fouling by others must be etched deep into our genes. As a boy I climbed the sandstone cliffs at Rock-a-Nore, overlooking the sea, to explore the caves; but they stank; indicating that the days of true cave-dwellers—“troglodytes”—have passed long ago. Caves are not treated with respect like houses.

I guess our revulsion against stench and pleasure at the scent of blossoms comes from evolution, which along the way has taught us one aesthetic; vultures, flesh-flies and dung-beetles another. In any event, my sense of outrage and revulsion roused me from complacent torpor to seek the cause and eliminate it.

I discovered that the new fridge had been dripping imperceptibly till the carpet underneath started to grow fungal organisms, and rotted. I replaced the carpet and had the fridge repaired. All seemed well but soon the smell came back, a little fainter, from somewhere under the sink. I’d panelled an ugly space where the previous owner had kept a dishwasher, an abomination in our household, so we had turned down his offer of leaving it for our use.

Brooding day and night like Sherlock Holmes, I decided there was no alternative but to dismantle the panelling and take a closer look beneath. There was a drip from the hot pipe going to the bath which was rotting the floorboards and helping grow delicate fronds of fungus which I thought must be dry rot. Dry rot is to a house as cancer is to a human body. One’s heart sinks. A woman from a wood treatment company reassured me that it was merely wet rot. So that’s all right then. Furthermore, she said the offensive smell was drains, not rotten wood.

Thus a new chapter opened in my investigation. The drains company sent a representative, very experienced, about my age, who didn’t look at the drains but allowed me to tell him, with diagrams, the story so far, with theories as to the possible cause and questions as to where the sewer pipes might be and what direction they might be going. In return, he told me he wanted to be honest with me and save me money. I should contact the Water Board, for my house is old, meaning that Section -- of the Public Health Act 19-- will probably apply. He then proceeded to tell me anecdotes of his worst (best?) drain dramas. An excellent fellow: we sat round the dining-room table, revelling in sanitary engineering disasters and triumphs.

My neighbour is closely following events because his wife complains of a stench in their kitchen too. He proposes “going halves” on the cost, fearing that concrete paths will be broken up, trenches dug, floors taken up, huge costs accruing, without recompense from house insurance. My own imagination is less extravagant.

Meanwhile I think I may have diagnosed the problem, and who knows? When the rain stops for a bit I might get out there and fix it. But I’m more than a little superstitious, and won’t tell you more till I’ve managed to complete my experiment.

Later: it failed. No point talking about it.

Later still: I sent a letter to the Water Board, having been advised by the excellent fellow that their telephone support staff and the engineers they send out are ignorant; that I might have to wait weeks for a visit; and that they would deny liability for the costs involved.

Even later: the smell is really bad. I ring the Water Board. The excellent fellow was wrong on all counts. They seem intelligent, well-informed; they will send out an engineer tomorrow morning; they accept that they are almost certainly responsible for the costs.

Finally: I reflect that if I were less of an amateur engineer myself, less of a clever-dick in finding consultants to advise me, less philosophical generally, and more of an ordinary panicking ignoramus, I would have rung the Water Board long ago.

Stop press: the Water Board have just rung to say that a neighbour further up the street has reported a blocked drain and they are sending an engineer today and they are hopeful that this might cure the smell we are getting.

PS: the other day I commented in another blog on the topic of non-attachment and the realization of perfect peace. I imagined some enlightened soul, some Buddha-type, sitting in his house, in perfect bliss and faithful acceptance of life’s ups and downs; in a house that stank. I was glad I was me and not him.

The moment

It would be idle to inquire why Mr Razumov has left this record behind him. It is inconceivable that he should have wished any human eye to see it. A mysterious impulse of human nature comes into play here. Putting aside Samuel Pepys, who has forced in this way the door of immortality, innumerable people, criminals, saints, philosophers, young girls, statesmen, and simple imbeciles, have kept revealing records from vanity no doubt, but also from other more inscrutable motives. There must be a wonderful soothing power in mere words since so many men have used them for self-communion. Being myself a quiet individual I take it that what all men are really after is some form or perhaps only some formula of peace. Certainly they are crying loud enough for it at the present day. What sort of peace Kirylo Sidorovitch expected to find in the writing up of his record it passeth my understanding to guess.

The fact remains that he has written it.

The above is taken from the first chapter of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, a Russian-style novel by an English-speaking Pole, written a hundred years ago. Nevertheless it describes blogging pretty well, except that bloggers do wish some human eye to read their postings. The act closely resembles the “message in a bottle” which a shipwrecked sailor or imaginative child might fling into the vast ocean, in an act of faith that it will reach the person whom Fate has appointed.

This doesn’t explain why I keep a blog, nor why I’ve failed to publish much lately, despite a reckless vow (broken soon after being uttered). There’s been no difficulty in appending comments to the blogs of certain others, and I thank them for the opportunity: Paul here, Beth here and here, Alistair here and here—not to mention lots of others which I read hoping to have meaningful arguments with them.

To write a post on my own blog is not so straightforward. All I want to do is pay homage to the moment, certain moments. They are not scarce, but their essence is like a fragrance of blossoms caught on the air, which inspires and arouses, but can hardly be caught.

I think the most significant thing I’ve done in this life is to savour those moments. What is the point of trying to translate them into words? Once again I find myself repeating Blake:

He who would bend to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

But I want to kiss and tell!