The pocket diarist

The postman left a package which felt like a small book. Not expecting any such thing, I was delighted; then opened it, and was Deloitted. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu is the current incarnation of a company I left in 1985, known then as Touche Ross & Co, Accountants. I was in their management consultancy, but now I’m their pensioner. In the five years I worked there, I always got a diary. The only way to leave being their pensioner is to die, so their annual gift will mark the passage of time till I leave this earthly realm. I never used last year’s, but find something moving in the prospect of this ritual, as precious as the pension itself, a kindly reminder from partners in the firm now dead and gone, to seize each day, and capture it in miniature, in fact to the dimensions of a business card. What shall I use it for? I don’t have enough appointments to need reminders. But when I look back, the days pass in a blur, like trackside telegraph poles seen from a train window. I shall jot down each day’s most notable events!

All of a sudden I’m reminded of an Australian classic: Such is Life, by Tom Collins, pen-name of Joseph Furphy, first published in 1903. This book of nostalgic reminiscences, a tragi-comic criss-crossing of outback characters, and their failure to see what is revealed to the reader—irony, in its original sense— has diary entries for its chapter headings. The memoirist reveals his method in these words:

“Twenty-two consecutive editions of Letts’s Pocket Diary, with one week in each opening, lie on the table before me; all filled up, and in a decent state of preservation.” He has only to open one at random for a day’s entry to jog his memory with the makings of a yarn, for example: “FRI. NOV. 9. Charley’s Paddock. Binney. Catastrophe.”

It’s a convoluted tale, in no hurry to reach its destination. On the way we have the moralistic musings of his meerschaum pipe and an encounter with a half-blind, half-deaf swagman without a penny to his name. I can only convey the author’s style with a quotation. The swagman speaks:

“Rakin’ style o’ dog you got there. I dunno when I seen the like of him. Well, I think I’ll be pushin’ on. I on’y got a sort o’ rough idear where this mill is; an’ there ain’t many people this side o’ the river to inquire off of; an’ my eyes is none o’ the best. I’ll be biddin’ you good day.”

“Are you a smoker?” I asked, replenishing my own sagacious meerschaum. “Because you might try a plug of this tobacco.”

Now that man’s deafness was genuine, and I spoke in my ordinary tone, yet the magic word vibrated accurately and unmistakably on the paralysed tympanum. Let your so-called scientists account for that.

“If you can spare it,” replied the swagman, with animation. “Smokin’s about the on’y pleasure a man’s got in this world; an’ I jist used up the dust out o’ my pockets this mornin’; so this’ll go high. My word! Well, good day. I might be able to do the same for you some time.”

“Thou speakest wiser than thou art ’ware of,” I soliloquised as I watched his retreating figure, whilst lighting my pipe. “As the other philosopher, Tycho Brahe, found inspiration in the gibberish of his idiot companion, so do I find food for reflection in thy casual courtesy, my friend. Possibly I have reached the highest point of all my greatness, and from that full meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting. From a Deputy-Assistant-Sub-Inspector--with the mortuary reversion of the Assistant-Sub-Inspectorship itself--to a swagman, bluey on shoulder and billy in hand, is as easy as falling off a playful moke. Such is life.”

Why do I quote Tom Collins? It’s my way of saying thanks to someone who perhaps hasn’t attained his deserved place in world literature, and my good fortune in discovering the book by accident. (I ponder if there is any other way to discover anything.)

If I may cut to a synopsis of the yarn, it goes like this. Tom borrows a boat to cross the wide river to meet an acquaintance for an evening’s chat. His beloved dog is knocked off the boat by a low-hanging branch. Trying to retrieve the dog, he loses the boat and his spare clothes. It’s dark by the time he reaches the river bank, and unknown to him he’s back on the side where he started; and stark naked. He hides by the side of the road, listening to the Friday evening conversations of courting couples passing in their pony-drawn buggies. A handsome young man on horseback dismounts near him, looking for something he has dropped, whereupon Tom accosts him from the shadows, demanding his ——. The word is always blanked out as if indelicate, but we are to understand he means trousers.

“What do you want?” he gasped.

I want your ——,” I replied sternly.

He throws the man on his back and starts undoing the laces of his breeches. The reader, though not Tom, soon realises that the young man is actually a young woman. She screams. People come running and Tom flees into the trees, eventually finding a place to sleep near the embers of a fire. In the morning he espies a house not far away, with a pair of —— hanging on the line to dry. To distract the family’s attention, he uses an ember from the fire to ignite a decayed haystack on the same property, and makes good his escape wearing the stolen ——, not before seeing a tall boyish girl who interests him greatly and who has seen him too, from a distance, crawling around naked in ditches. Surely this pink thing is a pig! She calls her father, the local magistrate, who gets out his shotgun. We realise it’s the same girl whose breeches he tried to remove the night before.

At the end of the book, after many more outlandish adventures, he encounters the near-blind, near-deaf swagman once more. Neither of them recognises the other. The swagman tells him how he’s just come out of jail for burning down a worthless haystack and stealing some ——. The reader understands that in the magistrate’s eyes, the sentence was for a different, even less provable offence: the attempted rape of his daughter.

“Well, good day,” the swagman had said, on their first encounter. “I might be able to do the same for you some time.” Such is life.

Respect to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, but Joseph Furphy’s’ book is worthier of immortality. The conceit of the cryptic notes in a pocket diary is all part of the spoof. But I shall scribble away, and perhaps by the time I have filled in twenty-two consecutive editions, and written ten thousand blog posts, I may have learned to write too.

Out of the limelight

After my last post, I’ve been drawn to philosophical speculation. How can we talk of one world, except in given contexts, such as world cocoa prices? How can you ask whether there is hope for the world? I would answer, “Whose world are you talking about?” So there must be, in that sense, a multiplicity of worlds, billions of them, which overlap to create this extraordinary illusion of a joint destiny on spaceship Earth. We strut our brief lives on this mysterious stage, whose brightness and shadow are artificially created by limelight, as in Victorian theatres. The stage’s painted backdrop is history, current affairs, science, religion, movies, conversations, myths, all blended into the fiction which by habit we call reality. But as one person, I dwell in a space like a hermit’s cave, unillumined but for the candle of consciousness, hardly bright enough to see another’s point of view. If I don’t assert my existence, for example by writing here, do I really exist, or would I fall into a vertiginous madness where dream and wake have no sharp boundaries?

I ponder thus in the kitchen, at a time defined by the intersection of evening and night; for I slept early, as if napping, then woke. I make myself a milky drink with sugar and salt, cocoa and chilli, and reflect that I dwell in the realm where art and philosophy combine. Philosophy is the search for truth; but art is the search for a greater truth, beyond the limits of time and space. It creates what never was, guided by the hidden fact of what really is.

I’m glad that I chose to learn sketching with words instead of pastels, for words are faster; and anything can be said. Whether I speak from the magic of God’s creation, or the magician’s sleight of hand, is out of my control. For when your world overlaps mine, the oneness of that moment may be truly one. It may refract into a rainbow of differences. You and I may never know if we see the same colours.

I may choose to travel in time and space. Or I may stay here, in this artificial indoor space. This—what you see in the picture—is my desk. My new desk in fact, that is to say a fifty-year-old desk, acquired the other day in honour of being retired and also working. I need space to spread my work, and having acquired as big a worktop as the room size permits (a room strung with washing-lines like a five-string banjo), I’ve adopted a new discipline of keeping it clear, thanks to the luxury of drawers, which I also keep tidy. When I worked in an office, a friend used to say “A clear desk is the sign of a sick mind.” Is it true?

My work multiplies. It doesn’t fill my time, merely clarifies it, like isinglass added in brewing to help dregs sink to the bottom. One of my tasks is to organise the documentation of a company, undoing the pomposity of a previous gang of consultants, whose prose is full of self-important capitalisations, bold face, obscure references and missing verbs:

“Where Non-conformity is raised against a supplier it shall be recorded in the pertinent Branch Non-conformity Book. Where goods are returned to the Supplier, or to another Company Branch, a Reject Slip (7XR1-2) shall accompany the returned goods. Additionally, where the failure is identified as an Adverse Incident (as defined in HRG(97)13, HRG(97)26 and safety notice GNA SP9701, SP9601 and GNA/2003/(001)).”

When I have translated it into English, I wonder if they will understand it. I’m buoyed by idealism, for my client company practises the noble craft of fashioning limbs for those who have lost theirs in military or civil life. Thus, from a philosopher’s cave, I engage with the topical business of “this small world”; this one world, whose existence I question.

The world

Children these days seem to discover “the world” at a very early age, if my small sample of three grandchildren is anything to go by. Before their fourth birthday, they know how to stretch on tiptoe and describe arcs with the furthest reach of their fingertips, chanting “big as the whole world” as a kind of magic spell, their eyes round with the wonder of it. But they don’t take it seriously. They discover it’s OK to make fun of this concept they’ve picked up from grown-ups.

Perhaps I was the same, but the first thing I remember was a wall-chart at school, twice as tall as I, showing on lacquered cloth a Mercator’s projection map, in which the British Empire was coloured red. Around the edge were insets: an artist’s impression of the various races, as diverse in skin colour as their national costumes. The Red Indian wore a feathered head-dress, naturally, and was reddish-mahogany; the Hottentot was black and curvaceous, with a short grass skirt covering very little; the Chinaman wore a coolie hat over a yellow face; and so on. I looked for my own kind, but it wasn’t to be found, except for a tribe called Caucasians, with pinkish skin like mine, represented by a pert Dutch milkmaid in clogs. Never mind, the general message was that we British were the top dogs and had little to fear from the World, as evidenced by historical fact: when World Wars came round, about twice a century, we invariably won.

A rather more solemn notion of the World came from evangelical books I was given to read as a birthday present. The World is that which God loves; specifically “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Which is rather like saying that a passer-by so loved the drowning boys that, subject to strict conditions, he was willing to fish them out of the filthy canal into which they had fallen.

It is no trouble for a child to hold diverse concepts of the World, so that you can visualise being a top dog and a drowning child almost simultaneously, even where neither image has direct relevance to your daily life. But that is surely the whole point of education, to build up concepts of the world like a stamp collection. Very soon, especially as a small boy at boarding school, you acquire hundreds of stamps, and make sense of them through classification, fixing them to different pages of your album. Stamps tell you something about the world, but not much. I acquired a large collection of French Colonial stamps, but didn’t trouble to find out where Djibouti, Réunion or St Pierre et Miquelon actually were. “Stamps of the World” were part of an arbitrary world in which I was dictator.

Is there something “out there”, any fixed referent for the word “World”? No, there isn’t. It may be our fancy to assign it the attribute of being the most solid thing in existence, and by virtue of a Moon-landing and satellite photos, we even have images to prove our theory, but World is an abstraction. Like all abstractions, it acquires meaning only within a given context: just like good, evil, love, hate, happiness. That old man Plato has a lot to answer for with his Doctrine of Ideas: “Plato taught that ideas are ultimately real”, summarises Wikipedia. If only we could prise him off his plinth! But he’s hard to dislodge, even half a century after Wittgenstein produced a crowbar adequate to the job: “The meaning of a word is its use in a language”.

Today’s children are given a new concept of “world”—not the one that small children rightly find so amusing—“something bigger than you can possibly imagine”—how then can you imagine it? Not the one about God so loving the world that he sacrificed his only begotten son to provide an escape route for an unworthy wretch like me. That has been swapped for something equally solemn. In the new concept, unworthy wretches like me are carelessly driving the world’s species on land and sea to extinction, wrecking its weather and generally making an unholy mess of everything, by burning up petrochemicals and using fresh plastic bags for every supermarket visit. As with Christianity, there’s an approved path to salvation. As it happens, I personally dislike car driving and plastic-bag usage, and feel a little virtuous because of it.

The world is an abstraction, an imaginary sum of your ideas about it (hundreds of ideas!), and mine; not forgetting the viewpoint of every specimen of humanity that wends its way along the Ledborough Road—substitute the name of your own local thoroughfare. And perhaps I should include the nocturnal visitors to my bathroom: slugs, spiders and woodlice. Their stories may never be told but they too have their worlds.

O reader, person in your own world, which occasionally overlaps with mine! Let us not be bullied into this one-world idea. Let us free ourselves from other people’s useless baggage. In the crowded global airport, I leave such heavy burdens unclaimed on its ever-turning carousel.

Unto the hills

“When I was someone else, that I am not now ...” continued.

Let us assume that each one of us contains multiple personalities. Vincent exists in the written word, is not quite the same as his author, who inhabits other dimensions never written down. Vincent is several persons, separated by time-slices, spliced together into fragments of literature.

Here is a new garment fabricated from a voice-recording of wayfaring Vincent; stitched and embroidered by seamstress Vincent; the wayfarer’s words in italics and the whereforer’s in ordinary type. Both are merged in a single “I”; but the personal “I” is a fragment of the universal “Everyman”, in which, dear reader, you and I may momentarily unite, till we switch from the illusion of unity back to the illusion of separateness.

I trudge up the hill, with Psalm 121 in my head, to a tune by Beethoven: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help”. I don’t know what is happening, except that I let my feet do the walking, and they take me up this hill where I can gaze down at the valley where I live beside the Mosque. Gulls circle round overhead, for they don’t just haunt the seashore. They come inland to this scruffy industrial town where junk food remnants are strewed on road and pavement. They swoop down to clean up what is supposedly harmful to humans, but evidently produces graceful birds.

You can get a good view from here, but photography [I might have said “topography”] gives no clue to the reason for undertaking a climb this steep. I don’t have a reason. My indoor thought, before I tasted the fresh air, was to take the valley path and save my legs. That way I can walk miles. [sound of panting] But when I let my legs take me where they want [indistinct mumbling] . . .

Up here, higher, I see more red kites in the sky than ever before. These birds were almost extinct a few years ago. I think someone up here feeds them meat scraps. There are eight, their flight is different from gulls, they float on the thermals, their great wings stretched motionless; but I can’t see them all at once, have to crane my neck round to count them.

My legs are like pendulums, swinging effortlessly to where they want to take me, gaining a special strength from obeying their own will, not my mind’s.

This is what a wayfarer does. Like an animal, he follows his instinct. He trusts it.

My mind doesn’t understand the territory this takes me to, when my feet go their own way. But there is no reason why my mind should not learn to understand.

[I felt it was a kind of shamanic journey, one I was learning slowly, without a teacher: how to enter a different world, not in a trance, but in a state of mind unsuited to the struggles and complexities of external life in 2009 ...]

I pass the home of a friend . . . [interrupted at this point by a passer-by, asking for directions. I switch off the recorder.]

A young man accosts me, asking if I know where there’s a chip-shop. “Yes,” I say, “you go down that road, till you see a pink stretch limo, if it’s still there. [Yes, they do occur in this country, always left-hand-drive, imported from the States, and hired out for weddings and suchlike]. You’ll come to a little row of shops, including a Chinese take-away that sells fish and chips.”

I enter the “Disraeli Wood: National Trust”. I’m looking for the Disraeli Monument. But in no time I get lost, as in the beginning of Dante’s poem.

[Midway along our road of life I woke
to find myself in a dark and secret wood
for I had lost the narrow path.]

Perhaps my feet will take me into some metaphoric Inferno. Everywhere I look, squirrels dash for cover against my approach. Few birds sing: it’s eerily quiet. In the distance I hear a dog barking persistently. Perhaps it is Cerberus and I am entering the underworld. I descend through a kind of shallow ravine. Surely there will be a path, and it will take me somewhere. Never mind the Monument. I’ve seen it enough times.

Four years after the instantaneous cure of my chronic illness, I can walk anywhere, without fear of sudden exhaustion. So today I celebrate the conquest of fear, letting my feet dictate the journey. A small sign tells me I am on the National Trust “Boundary Walk”. I’ve never been this way before, but it’s a good path. Now it emerges from the wood to a vista of fields and rolling hills.

[This metaphor didn’t occur to me at the time, but all my Wayfarer’s Notes have been boundary walks. Each new post sets a new boundary. I'm interested in the edges of experience, not the obvious mainstream.]

And I see that [pauses] . . . all my writings till now . . . have been just to get things out of the way so that, just as today I let my feet choose their route, my fingers, as it were, will choose what to write. I’m inspired enormously and subconsciously by the pathfinding lead of Fernando Pessoa. We journey on—I mean, I hope you’ll come with me.

I’ve used this blog to practise writing, sometimes to try and tell all: everything that happens now, everything I remember from childhood, even when it was painful—and much of it was. [I meant to add that it doesn’t matter now, let the memories go unrecorded; perhaps one day they will be unremembered, by reason of dementia. But there is always more. The Creator endlessly creates. Let me endlessly rejoice in today’s new Creation.]

And now, I think of immortality, and not only don’t believe it, but don’t feel any need for it. I shan’t be immortal, not in soul nor in works. To be erased completely, leaving no trace, will be fine. Pessoa left his writings in a trunk, to the mercy of fate. As it happened they were discovered, edited, published, translated. I’m grateful, for he’s shown me how to put things into words which I never thought possible.

[Here it was as if my aimless journey—aimless to my mind, instinctive to my legs—reached its destination: a central paradox which I felt solves the enigma of immortality . . .]

Every moment is so full that it’s no sacrifice to let it go. This is life’s bounty. Those who experience a few grains of gold, painfully panned from the river of time, in which it is far outweighed by mud; those are the ones who hang on to life, and yearn for immortality. But those who have seen the infinite in a moment, who see that it’s no mud, but gold and jewels, every bit of it, constantly renewing itself, a kaleidoscope—how could they fear death?

[I didn’t end there, I droned on about this and that—the imminent rain, features of my route home and so forth. Now Vincent the seamstress, the whereforer, takes out the scissors and lets the unwanted fabric drop limply to the floor.]

The pull of heredity

“When I was someone else, that I am not now ...” this is worth investigating.

So said Ghetufool, commenting on one of my recent posts. I agreed the phrase is worth investigating, and it took me back through history, that fascinating subject, both the human and natural kinds, and especially the mysterious parts that we don’t know.

Sitting to write here while it’s still dark each morning, I’ve recently been seeing a wasp outside, banging against the study window. The other morning a queen managed to get in through a crack and circled round the desk lamp, annoying me. I guessed her intentions were not just to find warmth and light, but take up winter residence. Above this ceiling are the remains of several paper nests. Wasps invented paper from wood-pulp before humans ever thought of it. I left the room, planning murder. Arguably it was a just war, but then it might be genocide, because a queen carries in her abdomen the makings of next year’s brigade of armed sugar-warriors. Says Wikipedia:

After successfully mating, the male’s sperm cells are stored in a tightly packed ball inside the queen. The sperm cells are kept stored in a dormant state until they are needed the following spring. At a certain time of the year (often around autumn), the bulk of the wasp colony dies away, leaving only the young mated queens alive. During this time they leave the nest and find a suitable area to hibernate for the winter.

I returned to the room an hour later but she had gone. We suppose birds and insects simply fly as the fancy takes them, as we imagine we would, having the benefit of wings, but survival is their constant motive. Natural conservatives, they cling to territorial habits established generations previously. See my footnote below, once appended to a post by Michael Peverett about caterpillars.

As I grow older, history grows longer and weighs more in my thoughts. Things are so well-ordered now, so different from my chaotic childhood, so simple, that I have no future plan, except to die gracefully. Allowing myself another 35 years, I’ll be 102, ready then (if not sooner) to take up a reckless lifestyle, and go out with a bang, rather than a long-drawn-out whimper.

I carry more than my own years. Like that importunate queen, gravid with the makings of next year’s family (perhaps she has crawled into some warm hiding-place to escape my waspicidal intent), I bear memories of those who influenced me, such as my schoolmasters. They taught me bits of the world’s history— medieval Europe’s, the British Empire’s. That queen carries the sperm of one summer’s lovers. I carry the assimilated attitudes of centuries. Such is the magic of books and contact with an older generation.

That is how I came to think about my grandmother, and spend an afternoon going through a suitcase of the photos she had preserved, one being on a glass plate in a little leather box with clasps, dated 1849, a mere 7 years after the invention of glass-plate photography by Janez Puhar. Naturally I looked for photos of myself, and there were a few, even from my first arrival in England from Australia, aged 4. I was jolly enough then, but rarely present in group or individual photos thereafter. In garden or beach parties (the times when someone would be most likely to produce a camera) I was either absent or unwilling. With a flush in my cheeks and an angry scowl, I made my anguish plain, and averted my gaze from the camera, in the habitual manner of my grandmother. How alienated I was from my own family! It wasn’t just teenage angst. A small child knows when he’s unwanted, even if he doesn’t know why.

I only knew one of my grandmothers. I don’t count the fake one, on whom I was foisted for a while at age five. My mother knew she wasn’t my real grandmother, but she didn’t, and as for me, I was a parcel to be passed around. That bedridden, imperious old woman, who spoke only Dutch, was married to a retired sea-captain with a vile temper. By the time I learned of my real father, in my late forties, his mother had already passed on, so I never met my real paternal grandmother, unless as a baby: which also doesn’t count. My eventual reunion with him occurred in Perth, where he still lived in the district where I was born. He told me he’d intended one day to visit England and look up his ancestral roots, professing an interest in genealogy: seemingly unaware of the irony. He may be still alive but we’ve lost touch again. It’s his turn to find me. Perhaps I’ve inherited his unsentimentality.

I’ve been wanting to tell a story about my English grandmother, but it’s a scandalous tale: not of vice, but an excess of virtue. Looking at the photographs of her at various ages, I see she was born to be a martyr, bearing life with such stiff endurance that it broke down her health and engendered consequences through successive generations.

Perhaps it’s a tale I can never tell. This blog is not quite anonymous. I can hardly pass off a tale as fiction, when it is supported by photographic evidence. The important thing is that chains of consequence can be broken, and I’m the living proof.

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Footnote: With reference to caterpillars, this is a comment which I posted on Michael Peverett's blog some time ago:

“Oh yes. Who gave us the idea that nature was pretty anyhow? The odd exception is that the young of mammals strike us as cute. Is it because we are so closely related to them? There is one bed of nettles in between two fields where I go to look at the peacock butterfly larvae. When they are big and plump they have a certain frightening beauty: black and spiny with white blobs randomly like skyscraper windows at night. But when they are younger and scrawny in their filthy webs, they are horrid: at least to us. Do the butterflies remember their larval life nostalgically? Why do they go back to the same patch each year to lay their eggs (to within a yard)?”