Like an artist’s brush

I really haven’t got time to write anything here. This makes it all the more important to do it anyway. I write in my blog for the same reason others do—to discover what I really think. Think? I’m not referring to “detached thought”, that attempt to be rational that we learn as a trick, as a performing seal balances a beach-ball on its nose for the sake of a reward paid in fish. I’ve learned ’nuff tricks in my time, but that’s all they are. I keep the box-of-tricks for it still comes in useful. Thanks for all the fish, but I must get back in tune with my whole being: sensation, emotion, the visitations of memory, the deepest promptings that defy analysis.

It’s a particular project which steals my time and saps my will to write here; a project now reaching its climax, after which I hope to be free of it: sell the copyright to a single buyer perhaps, and withdraw to a hermit’s hovel on a lake island:

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
          And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

If I never get paid anything for the project, at least I can look back on a 45-year career in the software industry that wasn’t entirely abortive, for I finished it off with my best work, and proved I can concentrate for months at a time on a project; fuelled by nothing more than obsessive perfectionism, vision, obstinacy—and hate. You see, the career never quite suited me. I hate advanced technology, not for what it is but for its refusal to stop advancing. Is there no chance it can be stopped in its tracks? If it were a door-to-door salesman, I’d tell it firmly but politely (or politely but firmly), “No thank you. I already have all the advanced technology I need. Technology has peaked. It can only go downhill now.”

Some time in the Seventies the notion of “user-friendly” was invented. In 1977 I bought a book by Tom Gilb & Gerry Weinberg (they’re both still around) called Humanized Input. It’s written to solve problems which don’t exist any more, so much has computer technology advanced. It starts like this:

“To the thousands of keypunch ‘girls’, who have saved so many awful designs by the tips of their fingers, we offer this work.”

The thesis it pursues is straightforward: design computer systems intelligently for human users, and error rates will go down; that is error rates in punching the slots in 80-column cards. To me it remains fun to read and even instructive, if you transpose its advice to the issues of 2010. People still read the Holy Bible, though it too is hopelessly out of date: I mean, where today will you find death by stoning still adopted as a popular way of showing community disapproval? This doesn’t stop the devout from discovering in that book the Word of God, just as the demise of punched cards doesn’t stop me from discovering something, if only nostalgia, in Humanized Input. Each chapter begins with an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. This one introduces the chapter on “Default Messages”:

     He had forty-two boxes, all carefully packed,
          With his name painted clearly on each:
     But, since he omitted to mention the fact,
          They were all left behind on the beach.

     The loss of his clothes hardly mattered, because
          He had seven coats on when he came,
     With three pairs of boots---but the worst of it was,
          He had wholly forgotten his name.

But let me explain where the hate fits in: how it is possible to fuel your career with hate. A soldier hates the enemy of his country, of course. There is nothing wrong with hate! Like everything else it has its uses; but I personally draw the line at hating people, whether tribes, individuals or their personal attributes.

What I do hate is the crassness of technology: its love-affair with novelty, its “look at me” puerility, its desire that we should love it for its own sake. Actually it ought to be “transparent to the user”, that is to say invisible. A software package, a keyboard, a computer, should disappear from our consciousness so that “our sons and daughters will prophesy, our old men will dream dreams, our young men will see visions”. Let me spend years with the same user interface, so that I don’t see it any more. My computer should be (and to some extent is) like a paintbrush of Vincent van Gogh—the extension of my hand, eye and inspiration.

Recently a character in a book I was reading (Amis’ Money? Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet?) preferred hate to love; on the grounds that hate needs more energy than love and so doesn’t last. It wears itself out, and perhaps turns into a tolerant friendship. Love on the other hand is sticky, and so arrogant; you can’t get rid of the stuff. Either of those authors is misanthropic enough to say it, but I can’t be bothered finding the passage in question. Perhaps neither of them wrote it. Perhaps I made it up myself.

If I was being reasonably paid to write this software, I would have done the best I could in the time being paid for; and it would have been a botched job, with corners cut everywhere; a joyless ugly thing that the users would get used to like everything else, over time. But since I am hardly being paid at all for it (perhaps for a hundredth of the effort I’ve put in), there is no brake pedal to stop me. I’ve written documentation to a literary standard, designed desktop icons worthy of an art gallery, made it as user-friendly and transparent as longevity has had time to teach me to do. All this, in a vast disorganised argumentative team of one; and frequently in the quiet hours when everyone is asleep, hours which I like to think are reserved for me to finalize the posts you see here on this site.

If I could be as dedicated to writing as I have been with this programming swan-song of my career, then who knows? I might be able to do something with it. Perhaps I’ve now discovered the catalyst to focus my scattered thoughts into a sharp weapon: hate. Then like Michelangelo, I will see the pure form within the white marble of my silence, and devote myself—with malice—to chipping away the crassness, revealing an agile beauty within.

Eternity

This was written in the early Nineties and published on a website, before the dawn of blogs.]

Cloistered all day in the office, I had forgotten once again that an outside world existed. In a windowless office I saw no seasons, no day, no night. There was only harsh lighting, never switched off. The shock of emerging into the open air hit me afresh every evening. The street was like a canyon, with a river of people streaming towards Bank Station.

I had to fight against the current of tributaries converging on Fenchurch Street Station. Though more famous as a square on the Monopoly board, this was where I worked, at least in the building constructed over its platforms. Stretched above the seething canyon was an improbable indigo canopy. Its colour and the intensity of its ultra-violet rays, even in this hour after sunset, bathed me in a glow as if to say “Welcome back to the real created world”. Even here in this place devoted to Mammon was the darkening winter sky, the same which loomed above ploughed fields, Chiltern villages, the prehistoric Ridgeway path. Starlings, even, chattered amongst the trees of Railway Place here in the City of London. I flowed with the human river along Fenchurch Street and across Gracechurch Street. Here was the massive wall, of granite ashlars, bearing Barclays carved spread-eagle and housing the Bank’s head office(1).

As I hurried past, adjusting my pace and path precisely to that of the throng, to avoid jostling, I glanced at something scribbled in chalk, half rubbed off. The words SPOKEN BEAUTY were written there. Who had written these words which suddenly echoed my unspoken thoughts? When I looked more closely there was only an indistinct scrawl, some trivial graffiti, I don’t even remember what it said. A poet had perhaps left a message for the contemplation of a discerning few who hurried past this spot. The message, once conveyed, had vanished.

Science and technology have neither theory nor patience to spare for evanescent phenomena. They wrap the garbage tidily in a suitable name, such as illusion or coincidence, and dispose it out of sight. The rules of their game insist on it. So I can play my game, with my rules. These say that events which are unexplained, unrepeatable and subjectively perceived to boot, are precious to me, when I say they are. I think that’s about 50% of what poetry is. The other 50% is being able to share that.

Thanks to a habit of scribbling notes on the Tube, I can relate my first reactions and circumvent the possible distortions of memory. This is how I recorded the happening a few minutes after:

“I thought for a moment the scribble said SPOKEN BEAUTY. And then in a flash came this image of something written but so beautiful & it existed as a precious manuscript, never copied. Maybe not an illuminated manuscript, but done on parchment and with full appreciation for the special nature of both content and presentation.

“And the subject matter? The experience of a joy. Co-existing in this world with the common routine and the mass of people ... And in that moment I almost felt, in a flash, a very definition of beauty.”

I went on to write of some special characteristic which I felt to exist in my fellow passengers on the Tube—proof if it were needed that on this occasion something fairly rare was happening, whether within me or externally is not my affair to distinguish. That’s the beauty of making your own rules with no allegiance to scientific orthodoxy. And a couple of weeks later (for the dates are recorded as well) I wrote:

“Three in the afternoon on the last day in January... there’s a light drizzle falling in Fenchurch Street ... a blessed time and a blessed place to be. A billboard proclaims a record pools win(2). I’m glad it’s for someone else: if for me, my joy in the shiny pavements, my joy without reason, could be disturbed.”

On this occasion, I recorded “just” a feeling—no suggestion of magic occurring in the “outside” world. And it might have been forgotten entirely, for I seldom used to re-read these notebooks, which in any event were scarcely legible, due to the motion of the train and a cramped position (sometimes standing crushed against other passengers with scarce room to hold a notebook open). But I happened to go through the notebook yesterday and a few words descriptive of yet another experience leapt from the page.

The event took place at lunchtime where humanity flows more in eddies and backwaters, in search of a sandwich or a pint of English beer. The back entrance to my office gave on to a street named Crutched Friars. This has cobblestones and passes under a railway arch, which has the Cheshire Cheese pub embedded in its vaulted wall. Opposite this pub, there was a low flat roof attached to the railway bridge, just by the little street called Savage Gardens. A few weeds grew on this roof languishing so desolate and unprofitable that you knew that the place was simply biding its time for some major redevelopment. Some fragment of soul seemed to tangle in this spot, like an evoked memory of childhood. Just as if they had been written on a wall in chalk, the words LIFE IS NOT IMPAIRED were presented to some inner sense. My notebook of that day remarks merely:

“Breakthrough to another world. The spot on Crutched Friars: LIFE IS NOT IMPAIRED. The flash of intuition that went with it.”

Impairment can attack any body, any faculties. We insure against it but it comes anyway. Death is final, irrevocable and total impairment. It strikes in all the realms that we perceive: financial institutions, Mother Nature, every human existence. Health and wholeness is a temporary flowering in every lifecycle. But, said this inner voice, Life (itself) is not impaired.

It was certainly on that occasion that I wondered, if not for the first time, about “sacred places”. Incidents since then have encouraged me to attempt a definition. A place is sacred when it acquires associations, for no discernible reason at all, which then intensify in memory or on revisit: and these associations are such as to enrich the soul. When expressed this way it’s not so weird, for we can trace it through diverse cultures. The Zen poet Bashô wandered about Japan in the seventeenth century visiting shrines and composing haikus of seventeen syllables to record “the floating world”(3). Their appeal can be more easily shared than explained:

“With a bit of madness in me,
Which is poetry,
I plod along like Chikusai
Among the wails of the wind.”(4)

Whether the things I bring are worth sharing, I cannot tell. Each of us has our own discoveries to make. Isn’t this the only learning, the only true experience? Certainly that’s what Rousseau says in Émile. Maybe a true tale can be told to move another soul. But what you find is unique and for you, whether shared or not. Do our finds originate from the world or ourselves?

Each weekday I migrate back to the labyrinths of the man-made data-world, the schemas, the logic paths, the mad towers of Babel. But when May comes round I recall a time in Brent Lodge Park, Hanwell, in sight of the great viaduct, where I first discovered horse-chestnut blossom. If you have never examined these flowers closely, be ready for a surprise when you do! They speak their own unreasonable beauty, and freshly confirm that life is not impaired(5).

The Internet is no substitute for observing Nature directly. But on this photo you can just see something extraordinary about these blossoms.

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Notes

(1) Bank's head office: Since pulled down and replaced by a new Head Office. Incidentally, I am struck by the parallel between the scrawl I saw on Barclays Bank wall and the sign displayed to Harry Haller in Herman Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf: “Why have his letters been playing on this old wall . . . why were they so fleeting, so fitful and so illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in catching several words on end. They were: MAGIC THEATRE: ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY . . . FOR MADMEN ONLY!

(2) Record pools win: Before the National Lottery, people fulled their dreams with a bet on the Football Pools. Their chances were tiny but considerable publicity was given to the big winners.

(3) Haiku: See Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Penguin Classics).

(4) Chikusai: “the hero of a comic story ... a quack more experienced in provoking laughter than in medicine”. (op.cit.)

(5) Chestnut blossoms: I later found that the life-affirming qualities of chestnut blossoms had spoken also to others. This comes from The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Imagination by Robert Grudin:

As a young man, the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was deported to Auschwitz. His medical background made him useful to the authorities, who employed him to attend the sick and dying. Among the many stories he tells of those times is one that serves for him as a special example of “inner greatness.” It concerns someone who was fatally ill. He relates:

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here - I am here - I am life, eternal life.’”

On 7th May 2006, in the time of chestnut blossom in Buckinghamshire, my thoughts again turned to this wonderful phenomenon of nature, and discovered that Anne Frank had been succoured by it, when she was stuck in her secret annex, and “her” tree is now revered in its own right, with its own dedicated webcam, and experts struggling to save its life or take grafts to ensure its renaissance if they fail.

On May 13, 1944 Anne wrote in her diary: ‘Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It’s covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.’

See the Anne Frank Tree website.

On the inspirational qualities of chalked inscriptions, a reader from Australia sent in the following:

Your story reminded me of a man in Sydney, long gone. In the last years of his life, he dedicated himself to chalking an inscription on pavements all over Sydney. A poor man, almost illiterate, he managed to write in a perfect copperplate script the one word “Eternity”. In this single word he intended to proclaim God’s glory, and to remind all who saw it that life holds a greater secret than normally meets the eye. It seems that people were indeed reminded! They recall him with affection and reverence as if he were a great man and on 1st January 2000, as part of Sydney's Millennium celebrations the word was proudly hung from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. [It remained there to celebrate the closing of the Olympic Games in the same year.]

See also this story about Arthur Stace.

Notes on the photos:
(a) Fenchurch Street Station, with offices built over them. From '88-'91 I was working on the ISS Project at NatWest Bank in this building.
(b) Fenchurch Street.
(c) The emblem of Barclays Bank, a carving of which emblazoned its old Head Office, where I saw the magical inscription in chalk.
(d) Chestnut blossom, where adjacent flowers have different-coloured centres, something I first noticed in Brent Lodge Park, Hanwell.
(e) Arthur Stace, caught in the act.
(f) An example of his pavement calligraphy