Night and Day

If Day is the realm of Nature, then Night—at any rate to this brain, at this hour of darkness, still a long way from dawn—is the domain of artificiality. There are other claimants to the imperial mantle of Night. The most democratic, the winner of the majority vote, is Sleep. But I am interested in rarer things, like the notion of a devout vigil. Time was when a knight, on the eve of some noble enterprise, would spend the hours of darkness in a chapel, keeping watch over his armour, dedicating it to the high purpose to which his honour had called him. Monks under the Benedictine Rule would get their sleep in the intervals between the Holy Offices of Compline (9pm) Matins (midnight), Lauds (3am) and Prime (6am). Me, I’ve been awake since Lauds and hope to file this despatch before Prime.

In my youth I seem to have been aware of little that mattered, certainly not any clear distinction between Nature and artifice. If I had been pressed, by the kind of tutor I wish I’d had, I’d have agreed that artifice was the fons et origo of both art and technology; while Nature for its part was the fount and origin of æsthetics and natural philosophy (which we now call science). And religion? In its different aspects, it permeated all four. In myths and music, it was art. In architecture and musical instruments, it was technology. In morality and Love, it was æsthetics. In creation-myths and philosophy, it was science, for science was a sort of divine knowledge. “Therfor ye trewly ber the name Cherubin, fful of scyence And of dyvyne sapyence”, says De Guileville’s Pilgrimage of the life of man penned in those glorious days before the spell-checker.

In my youth (age 22) I hit rock bottom: the world was too big a space and I had no idea of my place in it. Zen Buddhism was the nearest thing I had to a chart of how to live; but in my solitary imagination, derived from certain books which spoke of mind-blowing conundrums (koans), it was a philosophy of the Absurd.

In November 1964, I met an acquaintance on Putney Bridge. He was working at the head office of International Computers and Tabulators (ICT), the very place I was bound for, to attend an interview. I asked him what he did. “Oh, you know . . . softwear,” he replied. Knitwear? Lingerie? I had never heard the word “software” and would not have understood it. Despite my manifest ignorance, they accepted me; and one of the machines I was trained to program was the Univac 1004. It wasn’t granted the name “computer”: the brochures called it a “data processor”. You put punched cards in at one end and it punched more cards and disgorged them at the other end, till it finally, triumphantly, spewed out gas bills on fanfold stationery. Its memory was a mere 961 characters. Compared with tabulators, which could remember the eighty columns on a card just long enough to print them, this was plenty. The paragraph you are reading would have filled its capacity exactly.

Such a memory was insufficient of course to store the set of instructions which told the machine what to do. That was stuck on the side, in the form of a plugboard, which I the programmer had to “plug” with wires into an array of 5000 holes.

I was an enthusiastic programmer despite a poorly-equipped mind. I had no grasp of management, commercial considerations, office politics, self-organisation or steady routines. All I saw was opportunities for creative brilliance; but my programs were plagued with fatal flaws and seldom finished.

And yet, of all the jobs I’ve had, it seems to have suited me the best, for I’m still doing it, still trying to produce an informatical masterpiece, harvesting 44 years of experience and still not getting the full hang of it. The machines I first worked on survive only as museum pieces, monuments to the all-night vigils I spent in their windowless air-conditioned rooms, with false floor, false ceiling and false claims to efficiency.

O modern age! How fickle thou art, how soon thou forgettest! But I shall not, for all I see from this hilltop is the eternal Present, stretching out in all directions as far as the eye can see. And beyond.
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Notes
Picture of a Burroughs machine - how I imagined computers before I ever saw one.
Quote from De Guileville - Oxford English Dictionary.
Picture of a plugboard (coloured wires) from some IBM machine (Wikipedia)
Picture of a plugboard (B/W) from the Univac 1004.
Picture of a Univac 1004. I never saw such a grand one (with magnetic tapes), nor a computer operator so elegant.

The Human Condition (3)

This evening a thin fog puts a halo around the streetlamps, and I see that they are different colours, in shades from lemon to orange. A car with bluish headlamps swishes past, leaving a tangible quietness in its wake, whilst I stand under a streetlamp, letting my own footsteps relapse into a special kind of silence. Perhaps this is what theologians call “the ground of being”. More simply, I see it as what is left when the traffic noise stops.

There’s a fish and chip shop on the corner, The Neptune, as its illuminated sign announces to the world. Its plate-glass windows spill out light. I see uniformed assistants behind the counter and two customers waiting. I’m a front-row spectator at a play, the only show in town. This fog is a sea of primeval nothingness, the fast-food shop a last remnant of humanity, as if the species faces imminent extinction. Shall I go in and join them? No, I am not hungry.

Before this, I’d heard through the fog the raised voices of adults, and the anguished cries of a child. Then I’d turned a corner and reached the source, a brightly-lit cube, like the fish and chip shop but open to the cold night on two sides: a tyre-fitting workshop. The child’s cry I’d heard, so insistently repeated, was the squeak of a hydraulic jack which one of the young men was pumping with his foot, to lift the corner of a car. There were four altogether, speaking English; but I didn’t make sense of their conversation.

I had gone out to buy spinach and garlic, from Thara Stores, but now my errand was complete. I returned via the tyre workshop, for a second shot at understanding what passions caused them to disturb the night. On the way I reflected about my own life. “All I live for is feelings, this kind of meditation on the world, to see what it has to tell me, not via my intellect, but some special kind of listening and looking and smelling and touching. What can I call it, but feeling? When I am in this mood, every part of my life that has not been dedicated to this—perhaps I ought to call it tuning—seems a distraction, a kind of exile.”

It’s all still happening at the workshop: tyres being fitted, the phone ringing, the young men’s conversation still loud and animated. Again I’m in the front row at the brightly-lit Theatre of Life. What are they talking about? Just tyres, and the fitting thereof!

It reminds me of something, I don’t know why: an incident I reported in a blog post three years ago, when I was walking on a footpath. It was quite narrow and bordered by high hedges, of laurel, holly and other evergreen shrubs, in front of other trees stripped bare by the late autumn winds. The path led to a footbridge over a busy road. It was the excited chattering of the birds that made the big impression on me that time. What were they talking about? Were they preparing to migrate south before the winter really set in?

I had the sense that I might not have adequately conveyed my feelings in that blog post. Might I be able to add a clarifying footnote now? So I looked it up: “The Human Condition (2)”. The bit about the chattering birds is covered in two sentences:

Later as I went walking, some half-denuded shrubs were full of birds chirping and hopping excitedly from branch to branch. I don’t know what species, but there was a white flash on their wings.

I still don’t know how to convey the feeling.

There should be rules

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. That was my excuse for escaping the computer screen this morning, where for the last two months I have been crafting a magnum opus—not a work of literature alas, but a piece of software, a gift for the improvement of the world. Gift? Improvement? I can justify these wild words, but later, perhaps. I don’t want to bore you. Here I am in the bus, happily escaping my computer screen; and what do I see but a screen (intended to provide passenger information) on which Windows XP repeatedly tries to boot up, failing every time. “A ‘busman’s holiday’ is a holiday spent by a bus driver travelling on a bus: it is no break from his usual routine.” Such was my computerman’s holiday—on a bus.

I get off the bus at a supermarket in Loudwater to buy bread and sit in their café whilst I scribble these words. On the wall opposite my table is a poster which reads “HAND BATTERED FISH AND CHIPS” with an illustration alongside, and in smaller print “served with peas and a pot of PG tea. ONLY £5!” This sets me off on a silent soliloquy.

“There should be rules for how English is written. Every poster designer in the land should have to pass an exam to show his or her respect for the language. Fish and chips is fish and chips, the national dish of the English, or so it once was: sacred, ritualised, indivisible. The phrase is wrong and impermissible: only the fish is coated in batter, not the chips. And if you are going to hand-batter anything, please hand-batter with a hyphen. But why mention hand-battering at all? The proper way, the only permissible way, is to pick up the raw fillet of cod or plaice by the tail with finger and thumb, dipping both sides into a dish of batter, just before plunging it into a vat of hot oil. Applying literary exegesis, I deduce a tacit allegation that other cafés use factory-battered frozen fish, an abomination unimaginable to me till this minute. And while I am at it, it’s not PG tea. It's PG Tips tea.

“Yes, there should be rules, as they have in France, where the Académie Française adjudicates on vocabulary and grammar to preserve the othodoxy of the Francophonic domain. I’m not saying that everyone should respect rules to the extreme level of obeying them all the time: but just respect them in a vague respectful kind of way. In English, even the linguists have betrayed the language: especially the linguists. I used to read Language Log, but it made me apoplectic. They tend to mock every rule, and comment on noxious trends with complacency.”

My soliloquy continues: “While I remain alive I shall still uphold the best of the old traditions! But it’s not worth being apoplectic. This is the century of another generation. It’s up to them now, though I will support them (in speaking and writing properly) till my last breath.”

And I'm not finished yet. “Rules should be petty and more or less enforced on the young, for their own souls’ and the world’s benefit. Example: at my school the headmaster (pictured above, 1951) delighted in small details. In his class at least, we must use a B pencil (not HB) to draw the margin in each page of our exercise book. The margin must be the width of the standard school ruler. The length of the essay must be four and a half pages; never less and seldom more. The school cap is to be worn in public whenever the school tie and blazer or grey jacket are worn. The cap is to be worn horizontally on the head, the hair combed neat and trimmed short; etc. etc.”

The degree of fuss made about these rules, though gently and humorously, was such as to leave no space for more offensive delinquency. When the urge to teenage rebellion struck, here were enough rules to be disobeyed, without needing to inflict any actual damage on the world.

Not every rule was explicit. After all, certain things are unspeakable. At least they were in those days. One day at morning prayers, the Headmaster included within his homily a grave announcement. A photograph was in circulation. He had no intention of describing its content, other than to say it was an insult to the dignity of the female sex. The younger boys were puzzled, having no idea, I suspect, of what he was talking about. I would have been in some doubt myself, had I not seen the photo the day before. It was a large glossy print in black and white of female pudenda, close-up, luxuriantly post-pubertal. The focus and lighting were exquisite, of professional studio quality. I’ve never seen anything like it since. “Of course,” continues the Headmaster, “this—this object— has been introduced from outside. None of our boys would have perpetrated such a thing. But—before we become corrupted—it must be destroyed at once. Assuming this is done forthwith, no more questions will be asked.” It is only in retrospect, fifty-odd years later, that I had a suspicion as to the identity of the photographer.*

Anyway, I’m all for rules.

PS I must be wrong. I met the man in question. He denies it. He was my best friend at school. I accept his denial.

The folly of a clown

How much of human life is folly? Dare one even ask? If I’m an employee, I have only to utter some magic words: “It doesn’t matter, so long as they are paying me.” Or, if I’m an entrepreneur: “It doesn’t matter, so long as it makes money”. Thus we and the mess we generate create a legacy, whose come-uppance will lay waste some unspecified tomorrow.

A week ago the snow was thick and new, and cars were abandoned on the hill slopes, and a few intrepid walkers trudged, and it was almost silent in the sparkling dawn. It must have been like this a hundred years ago, when the workers in this street would have gone to their factories on foot, and returned at lunch-time for a hot meal prepared by their wives before returning for more hours of assembling chairs or French polishing. Their world was mostly circumscribed by the visible horizon.

The recent unusual snow did what nothing else could do, and disabled most of the automobiles. I consider this to be a Good Thing, dependence on automobiles being one of the biggest follies of the twentieth century, awash with unintended consequences. Despite the biting cold which troubled my flesh, my instinctive self felt comfortable in this old-fashioned world. I let this primitive self, the hunter-gatherer in me, speak its mind and it said I should only go out to gather winter fuel, like the poor man spotted by Good King Wenceslas. Having gathered it, I should return to my hearth and gaze into the hollows where the embers glowed bright between the logs, and count the blessings of earth, wind, water and fire. (In fact I have central heating radiators, so my hearth-gazing contemplation takes the form of this blog.)

Because of the weather, I haven’t been out so much as usual. For weeks I’ve had a big project indoors, which may melt into a messy puddle of folly, we’ll see. I’ve felt at odds with my environment, and wonder if everyone does, merely smoothing over the joins with magic words, like “adapt ...”. To say “adapt or die” would be too stark for some, and unthinkable to others, who sold their souls so long ago for the reward of getting on in the world, that they’ve forgotten they still have souls. Adapt or die: yes, one day I will choose death, and it will be sweetened by the joy of defiance. Integrity of soul is the true life, and the unconscious slide into compromise is the true death. I wonder if, deep down, everybody knows this.

Another of my projects is to translate The Myth of Sisyphus from French into English, I mean proper literary idiomatic English, that’s enjoyable to read. I have the title already: Sisyphus and the Rolling Stone, and part of the first chapter. He claims that the big philosophical question is whether, given life’s absurdity, one should commit suicide. His theme is certainly absurd, and I’m constantly teetering on the edge: not of life, but whether to carry on with the enterprise. Is it another of my follies? The big question for me is whether the translator needs to be able to think along with the author in order to translate his words. My answer is “Yes!” for I find that the translator is not like some machine (Babelfish, for example) but a kind of actor. Instead of interpreting the character he plays, he must interpret what the author is trying to say: think the same thoughts, feel the same emotions—live it. In the case of this book, simply to render literally in English what the author did say would be to repeat the folly of the original translator.
I am wondering whether “absurdism” as delineated by Kierkegaard and Camus, has any kinship to the English word “folly”—a building designed entirely for decoration; or any project which does nothing but waste time or money. What Camus considers a reason to kill oneself, Kierkegaard considers a reason to submit to the will of God. Camus doesn’t approve of suicide really of course, that’s just intellectual posturing to dramatise his eventual solution, which requires no God or afterlife.

Neither Camus nor Kierkegaard touches the English soul, excepting a few intellectual fools who have time on their hands or are paid for their folly by universities. No, to guide us through the absurd we have clowns, fools, jesters, who reveal the truth and conceal it in laughter, at the same time. As King Lear’s fool says, “Marry, here's grace and a cod-piece; that’s a wise man and a fool.” We face the abyss with the jester’s guidance, like Dante visiting the Inferno with Virgil by his side. I’ve been watching Dylan Moran in Black Books, and Ricky Gervais in The Office. Each is in the long tradition of the tragic clown or court jester. Moran’s Bernard Black is a selfish misanthrope constantly irritated by customers who persist in coming to his bookshop despite his high-handed rudeness. (From this he sounds like Basil Fawlty, but the series is funnier than Fawlty Towers, and stands almost infinite re-viewing.) Gervais’ David Brent is the opposite: a man so desperate to be liked that he refuses to see how things really stand. Instead of managing the office responsibly, he tries to be an entertainer to maintain staff morale.

And the moral of all this? To ask whether you are like water, which finds fulfilment in fitting the space which confines it; or whether you are a clown, whose comedy and tragedy is to bounce forever against the walls.

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Photo: roof of the Guildhall, in the Market Square. Motto Virtute non verbis: By deeds (literally virtue) not words.

Life’s predicament

I awaken this morning to recall that it’s my first ordinary day for weeks. I emerge from a season of interruptedness, in which celebration took the form of reuniting with my kin; not all at once in a single gathering but serially; noting my kinship and resemblance with this one or that; seeing the big or small things which unite us; the differences which separate us.

Taking the outside world as a whole, I find it easer to see it as alien than populated with my kin. To feel brother to all takes a certain consciousness and effort, which I hope to return to more readily now that the ordinary days are back. Not that the ordinary days are any less remarkable—no, they are even more remarkable, or so it seems at 4am this morning.

I head this piece “Life’s predicament” on purpose, carefully avoiding the division inherent in using the adjective “human”. I recall a teacher at school defining an adjective as a word which limits the universality of a noun. If I spoke of the human predicament, it would be tantamount to denying that a similar predicament exists for sheep.

Yesterday I walked with two of my dearest kin to the little parish of Swyncombe, hidden in a fold of the Chiltern Hills, consisting of a manor house with a tiny church alongside, named after St Botolph and dating from before the Norman Conquest of 1066. A little booklet inside traced its history, and we could see from looking around how well it has been loved over the centuries. One rector served as its priest for 56 years. A beautiful carved screen was added as recently as 1914, and the organ is even more modern (1984). It's the size of a Hammond. The building is too small for an array of organ-pipes.

On our way back we decided to take a different route, circling round the House on the southern side to catch the sun, to let it warm our backs as well as melt the frost on the meadow-grass. I tried to photograph a low-flying red kite, showing off its russet feathers to us in the low sun. But it took time to remove my gloves and I missed it. A sheep stood on tiptoe to lap from a water-tank whose ice was melted at one corner. Hundreds of other sheep were scattered over the meadow slopes, grazing; some making a pilgrimage to or from the tank. Then we saw one with its head stuck in a wire fence, silently struggling. In fact, there was no bleating on the hillside.

We were unsure what to do. There was no other human in sight. The shepherd probably lived miles away, guardian of many flocks, contactable by mobile phone, if only we knew the number. The trapped sheep became agitated at our approach. I said we should keep our distance and not distress it more, letting it extricate its head in relative tranquillity. But then we realised it might have been stuck there for hours, exhausted and dehydrated. So I went nearer, with a plan to ignore its panic and somehow pull the wires away from its neck. At my closer approach, it wriggled violently in a paroxysm of panic, convinced that its death was imminent. After a few seconds it managed to pull its head free. We felt as though we had rescued it, though in truth we did nothing.

From a distance, we watched what happened next. The released creature (“I once was lost, but now I’m found”) went to meet one of its fellows. They greeted one another with fraternal nuzzling, then stayed together a while, the freed one repeatedly nibbling the neck of its companion, as if to communicate its recent adventures, and share the joy of salvation and communion. After a while, it went to greet another, and another, repeating the same intimacies.

Such was the practice of empathy amongst the flock. Of a sudden, we saw the oneness of life; and life’s predicament.

Notes on the photos
1) Our first view of Swyncombe on January 2nd, with the cooling towers of Didcot Power Station in the distance.
2) Thanks to Tim at the Deptford Allotments blog for a worthy kite photo. My camera and fingers weren’t up to it.
3) Thanks to John and Sacha’s wedding site for a reproduction of “Sheep at Swyncombe” by John Welsh. You can see the cooling towers on the horizon, left.