Everything (but the kitchen sink)

I do feel the urge to philosophize, if only the Muse will allow. She says I must not try the patience of my readers. Oh well, here goes, I’ll start with a sweeping generalisation: “Religion is about perfection, while science and engineering are about trial and error.”

Before you have the chance to say “I don’t care much for religion” or “I don’t care much for science”, let us broaden the discussion. I propose that religion has its roots not in preachers, books or institutions, but in our hearts, yours and mine: part yearning, part awed recognition of something that plucks at the heartstrings. And let us think of engineering, say, not as the sum of what thinkers and craftsmen have produced, but some practical know-how that you and I have gathered, of how things can be made to work in this world.

Let us then, you and I, touch the limits of our own worlds, live in our own spaces, and not be intimidated by the hugeness of what we have not lived, the vastness of “out there”. What we have lived plus what lies beneath our immediate gaze is big enough, contains more than enough for a lifetime. Let us not feel ashamed of our ignorance. The gods are probably kinder than we are to our own selves.

So as usual in this place I shall talk about my own life. It’s all I know. I’ve been beating myself up—nothing new there—for having to redo things I did before, which fell apart. Why do I get things so wrong? Why do I have to try, try and try again? Why can’t I get it right first time?

I have a hardwood garden seat, originally installed on the patio of another house. Where I live now, the backyard’s so small that this great heavy thing gets in the way, wherever you put it, unless you can move it around easily. Wheels are the obvious answer but how to attach them? Bolts aren’t feasible: flanges too big for the chairlegs. I tried wire but after several complicated attempts they still came loose. My latest idea is to lash them with string strengthened with fencing staples. It doesn’t look strong, but time will tell. I’ve had better luck with other ideas. The outdoor sink (K’s brilliant suggestion, to keep my messy jobs out of the kitchen) is a boon, and remains solid, though the bricklaying isn’t pretty. My first go at building a bench, in the front yard, lasted two years. Rain got under the varnish and mortar broke loose under the columns of bricks. The design itself was good, so I’ve refurbished it with new timber, and remortared the bricks.

I curse my trials and errors, but how else can I move forward? I am a child of Nature, a product of Evolution which is Nature’s experimental testbed. The fit survive, the others have their fifteen minutes then disappear from sight. Ceaselessly, Nature produces new designs and lets them go. Such is life and death. Why do we beat ourselves up about it? What is it in us which seeks perfection in this world, when it develops, apparently, by throwing up random mutations, which may or may not survive?

Perfection belongs in a different realm, existing in the eye of the beholder, which throws up myriad ideas just like Nature’s process of evolution. I don’t know if you accept my first proposition above, that religion is about our longing for perfection. Or this, my second proposition: that there are more religions than people, for surely we all worship different gods, differently. But if I had to classify forms of religion, I’d distinguish seekers from finders. Seekers pursue various “shoulds”, beating themselves up as if pain leads to gain. Finders feel it’s enough to give thanks and pray for help as the need arises. To reach this conclusion, I haven’t done a theological survey, of course. I consider other people’s religion as their own sacred territory. I wouldn’t want to stray there. What I speak is merely what I find from asking my own self.

So I say this sphere we call “the world” is built from trial and error: as in Nature, so in Mankind. Only by getting it wrong can we have a hope of getting it right. In any case Mankind is part of Nature. But there is also the sphere of perfection, the Divine. It comes from the same place as unicorns: our fertile imagination. That doesn’t make it any less real, any less true, any less divine, so long as you understand that different spheres have different rules for truth. In the outside world, reliable truth is underpinned by evidence. In the sphere of perfection, “Every thing possible to be believed is an image of truth”; “Everything you can imagine is real”.

Combine the two spheres—they have never been separate, except in our minds—and you have everything.
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Quotations above from (1) William Blake. (2) Pablo Picasso.

PS
Serendipitously, soon after posting the above, I caught a snatch of something on the radio, about the World Cup, and specifically England's chances against Germany tomorrow.

Thanks to the invention of WWW and search engines, I was able to track it down as a misquote of something from a play by Samuel Beckett, which should read:

"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Which summarises part of my "Everything" in 18 words.

Only part though. The other part is perfection, which exists in the eye of the beholder but is real and true all the same; even when the eye sees a perfect soul in everyone and everything.

Glimpsing eternity

When we speak of God or gods, it’s to express the otherwise inexpressible. This is something that atheists and materialists seem to wilfully misunderstand, when they say that it’s irrational to believe what you cannot see. As you’ll see from various entries in this blog, there are two kinds of immortal I can’t do without when trying to make sense of experience: the Angel and the Muse.

The angel’s principal role is to herald and remind, to help bring about a state of consciousness. In my experience the angel is neither male nor female, and may be imagined in any form or none. It may whisper as a voice, in definite words; or in pure meaning, which cannot be expressed to others without translation into a human language. Sometimes the angel simply shows, with gestures or tableaux, even a little silent play with several actors, which unfolds before your eyes, on the fringes of normal reality. Many have met the anonymous helper who turns up when you are in trouble, such as arriving in the form of a stranger who helps get your broken-down car started again. Many of us get the privilege to “be an angel” for someone else. I maintain that the angel’s role is less to intervene and more to prompt a response in our hearts: to lift us up, and make us understand that this world has mysteries beyond the reach of science and atheism; and show that despite all appearances, this world is our friendly home. I get my knowledge of angels from personal experience, often recounted in this blog. Books merely confirm them as universal.

The Muse is formless yet (for me) vaguely female. She doesn’t waste energy by appearing in person, but waits to be invoked, as we know from ancient literature, such as Homer. Her role is to help give birth to form, not her own but the artist’s idea. She whispers words to the poet, to aid the creation of order and sense from chaotic feelings.

When I go a-wayfaring, it’s not just for mundane purposes of exercise and exploring my neighbourhood. The aim of the dog-walker isn’t just the dog’s or even the walker’s health and hygiene. The real purpose is something sublime that stays unsaid, or can’t be said. Only in mental quietness, aided by the Muse’s light prompting, can the inchoate underbelly of existence be wrapped in potent words, and brought to the light of conscious understanding.

“Do you believe in angels, then? Do you believe there is such as a thing as the Muse?”

I answer that I am not talking about belief, only expressing. Action is not in itself a creed. If I talk about unicorns, it doesn’t mean I believe them. What I believe is that you and I can share an understanding.

The other day I walked to Downley, Naphill and Hughenden, a round trip of three hours. For the first hour or so, I was merely present to the scene, absorbed in whatever assailed my sense, from within or without. After a while I began to dictate words in the ever-willing ear of my pocket recorder. When I climb up the Pastures to Downley, this tends to happen, sooner or later. The Muse seems to dwell in those hills, and favours me with whispers when I am ready. I’ll share the latest set with you.

When I hear, for example, a certain birdsong, a repetitive single note plangently celebrating June’s glory, it takes me back down the corridor of years, invoking all the times I’ve ever heard it. Now I’m walking in two worlds at once: this public footpath weaving its way round the backs of houses, and that echoing passageway of time. Between these two worlds, I suspect, is the place to touch Eternity.

And in Eternity’s boundless space, I do things I’ve never done, in a time that’s never been, with memories that don’t fit into my life-story; memories of the Never-Was. And I’m not alone in this. It’s man’s inheritance.

My footsteps traverse a labyrinth of tidy suburban roads, small-scale, leading nowhere, with names like Cherrycroft Gardens, echoing places I’ve lived, like a house called Cherrydown on the Isle of Wight. In my mind’s eye, I’m not seeing that house now, but some place on the furthest shore of consciousness, in a different dimension. Perhaps my whole life is flashing before me in little snapshots, for June birdsongs are still loud in my ear [so loud when I play back the recorder!], and they take me to memories I’d forgotten, in a non-chronological sequence that feels like another life, one I never lived. Then I realize these fleeting memories are not so much scenes from the world, but from my imagination at the time: not the house Cherrydown, but stray images and even angel-encounters from the time I lived there, going back to a still earlier time. Might they be echoes of Eternity?

And now that I’m tuned to the notion of everything I see or hear or smell or think being connected to a memory, there is no stopping me. I look across at a public allotment, where a gardener has left rhubarb and onions unharvested, so that their leaves and stalks have grown huge and unfamiliar, with stylized buds, flowers and seedheads; the onions like decorative turrets of a fairyland castle, the rhubarb with loose bunches of flat seeds resembling those of the dock, Rumex Obtusifolius, for they are related, in the family of Polygonaceae. Just looking at those overgrown vegetables takes me to some fabled court in the kingdom of evolution; a kingdom in which I, too, flourish.

Now I wander on, in this outlying suburb of a village, approaching the woods and meadows of I know not where. There’s a map in my trusty wayfaring bag, but I don’t bother to consult it. My route feels all right. I know it will eventually take me home. In the broader sense, I’m already home, for this is my extended neighbourhood. It’s within my foot-travelling reach, so shouldn’t I get to know it? Literally, my backyard is tiny. But in a wider sense my backyard is all around, my journey-zone (journée means day’s travel). It includes that Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s Hughenden Manor, though it’s closed to the public today. I’m going south now, I can tell from the position of the sun. That’s the direction of home. My brother confessed the other day to forgetting that the midday sun hangs in the south; for in New Zealand, it hangs in the north. When in doubt I follow a footpath, for they all go somewhere, unlike the roads built for cars, which often lead to dead ends.

Now I see a white-haired grandfather on the road ahead, pushing a little child on a buggy, amusing himself and possibly the child by letting it run free, down the gentle slope. I see that the grandfather could be me. The child could be me. The seedheads in the allotment, anything could be me. Every person I ever see in the street could be me. But I have to admit that I seldom see this unity, seldom have a need to try. Today’s a holiday from normalcy, while the Muse takes me by the hand.

So I see that everything is there all the time. All it needs is a quiet presence, and some kind of trigger, for Oneness to be manifest. Or it might never happen in this lifetime. But is this what I am doing in my life, beyond mere survival: to seek little openings to that Eternity whence I came?

In the words of the late journalist Robert Ripley, “Believe it or Not!” For as every writer of fiction knows, the important thing is not to believe, but to imagine. Imagine vividly enough, and you have belief. But that’s no reason to go to war with someone who believes (i.e. imagines) differently.

Such is the Muse, dear reader. Such is the messenger angel. And such is life.

Footnote

How can you possibly know Eternity? asks the logician. The man in the street knows better. Enter Arthur Stace, famous Sydney wayfarer, introduced here in an entry from an on-line Directory of Australian Writers and Artists.

Arthur Stace was a reformed alcoholic who for 35 years was inspired to write the word ‘Eternity’ in perfect copperplate in chalk on the streets of Sydney. Many people who lived in Sydney between 1932 and 1967, and those who visited, would have seen the word written on footpaths. It was a mystery for years, until 1956 when it was revealed to be the work of Arthur Stace. He wrote ‘Eternity’ over half a million times. Arthur Stace grew up in poverty, and was jailed at the age of 15. After serving in France during the First World War, he returned to the streets of Sydney, partially blind, unemployed and an alcoholic. One day, drawn into the Burton Street Baptist Tabernacle with the promise of a free meal, Arthur Stace encountered something that changed his life, as he described to a journalist from the Daily Telegraph in June 1965, two years before his death:

“John Ridley was a powerful preacher and he shouted, ‘I wish I could shout Eternity through the streets of Sydney.’ He repeated himself and kept shouting, ‘Eternity, Eternity,’ and his words were ringing through my brain as I left the church. Suddenly I began crying and I felt a powerful call from the Lord to write ‘Eternity’. I had a piece of chalk in my pocket, and I bent down right there and wrote it. I’ve been writing it at least 50 times a day ever since, and that’s 30 years ago. The funny thing is that before I wrote it I could hardly write my own name. I had no schooling and I couldn’t have spelled ‘Eternity’ for a hundred quid. But it came out smoothly, in a beautiful copperplate script. I couldn’t understand it, and I still can’t. I’ve tried and tried, but ‘Eternity’ is the only word that comes out in copperplate. Eternity gets the message across, makes people stop and think.”

Arthur Stace’s publications include: “Eternity” self-published and republished approx. half a million times over a thirty year period in Sydney.

Photo of Arthur Stace by Trevor Dallen, Fairfax Photos, year unknown.

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Note on the other photos

1) A barley field near Naphill

2) A red kite over the field

3) (below) a side view of Hughenden Manor

4) (below) Hughenden Manor, the rear gates

Lucky (2)

I wrote a piece called Lucky in July 2008. I had wanted to illustrate it with a four-leaved clover, the symbol of luck. I had never found one, though in my dreamy childhood, I must have spent hours searching for them, especially when deployed as a fielder near the boundary of a cricket field. Perhaps suitable pictures to illustrate my blog post were rare too, because I had to make do with a knitted imitation, as you’ll see by following the link above. I thought they must be as rare as unicorns or flying pigs, depicted by artists but never photographed.

But then I went on a ten-mile cross-country walk with my new brother from the land of Kiwis. See my earlier post, “Under the Umbrella Tree”. Our goal was a 900-year-old pub called The Royal Standard of England. For all its beauties, New Zealand can’t have many many ancient pubs, and it would take many miles walking to find a pub at all. Perhaps the next best thing in England, after its public houses, is its network of public footpaths. They are sacred. You can’t build over them: they snake their ancient way through vast new housing developments. You can’t refuse public access when they run through your property, even when it’s the breeding season for pheasant or grouse, or you when you are pasturing animals that might stampede if chased by a loose dog.

These days, dog-walkers are the main users of footpaths, so Michael was looking carefully where he put his feet, and that’s how he found the clover-leaves. We might have picked many more, but a curious dog caught up with us, followed by its equally curious walker, to whom we gave one of our clovers, for luck. We were planning to keep the others, but they easily fall out of your buttonhole, and we need no talisman to prove our luck. Luckily though, I had my camera handy, and it shows we found a five-leaved clover too.

This morning I had the mad idea to go back to that footpath, armed with a trowel. I’m pretty sure I could find the spot, and take the magic plant back to my own backyard. But of itself, it carries no luck, being nothing but an angelic message to remind us, if needed, that luck is the pivot of all the turning-points in our lives. By definition, we can do nothing to control luck.

All we can do is spot it, and seize it while we can.

A modest school reunion

I often “dwell in the past”. It’s a fabulous museum, where you can look at the same exhibits time and again, and discover new ones you hadn’t noticed before, and see the familiar ones from new angles. My fondness for this pastime owes a lot to my sense that I didn’t live my life fully the first time round.

It was by sheer chance (idle browsing on the Internet) that I learned of the four-hundredth anniversary of my old school. Whilst not keen on social gatherings in general, I felt I had to be there. We started with a plaque-unveiling ceremony, attended by the Lord Mayor, wearing his chain of office, and the Lord Lieutenant of the Isle of Wight, Her Majesty’s representative, in his Major-General’s full-dress uniform. I was impressed by the heavy braid epaulettes and the spurs. Much more impressive was his fine speech, in which he remarked that centenaries are common enough, but quadricententennials are exceedingly rare. Our school was already quite old when it found new premises in 1610. These survive to this day, having changed little since the mid-Fifties, when I carved my name on the hallowed bricks. I wrote up some school memories three years ago on this blog, using sometimes real names, sometimes pseudonyms for the characters involved:

My New School
The school yard
He was a veray parfit gentle knight
Memoirs Continued – At Mrs Jenkins’
Head’s Sermon at St Thomas’ Church July 1958

School was the orchard, so to speak, in which we had been planted as fresh-faced saplings. Here was a unique chance to muster one last time, saplings turned now to gnarled trees, still blossoming and fruiting more than fifty years on. I'm fascinated by the differences between then and now. Old photos can only capture moments, but they perform a vital role in assisting recall. My own memory seems to consist of mental snapshots too. It has a disrespectful habit of condensing years of acquaintance into a single incident, which comes up on its own whenever a certain name or face is presented. In my piece three years ago on The School Yard (see link above) I mentioned a couple of these. On Saturday I met the boys concerned, but they could not remember the incidents I see so vividly in my mind’s eye. I immortalised one for his utterance of a colourful epithet I’d never heard before. I could mark an X with chalk on the very spot in the playground where that occurred. And as for the other, I have only to see his face on a school photograph, or (as on Saturday) read his name-tag, to recall the only fight I ever got involved in there, a fight engaged on his behalf. Again, I could mark an X at the spot where I challenged the boy who wronged him, though I cannot remember the wrong itself. I could draw a circle to mark the circle of boys who quickly gathered to watch the fight. Yet I remember nothing of the fight. I think it was stopped before any serious blows were exchanged, by the intervention of a a prefect or the school bell for resumption of class. The boy I championed doesn’t remember the incident, but assures me that in later life he learned very well how to stand up for himself. On hearing one or two of his subsequent adventures, I can only say that he’s done bolder things than I’d ever dare; and taken responsibility for the consequences too.

Several of the boys who attended the school after my time approached me, seeing my name tag, to say I’d been a kind of legend. My name had been on the board, hung in the school hall, showing all the head boys and their dates, and they’d heard it said of me that I was the brightest boy (i.e. most academic, highest-exam-passing, most book-wormish) the school had known. I can imagine how they may have felt comparing themselves to this mythical figure. Naturally they wanted to know what I’d done and how I’d ended up. To some I said simply that “I went into the computer industry”, making it sound like a fate which swallowed you up whole, leaving no trace behind. To others I said that it had all gone downhill after I left school. Both are true: I don’t seem capable of telling an untruth. I noticed how their initial awe changed to a friendly relief, discovering that I was one of them, after all.

My old headmaster, PWF Erith, constantly held before us the ideal of the Christian gentleman-warrior, a kind of Chaucerian figure he may have invented. As I’ve said in a previous post, there was a boy called Parfitt. The Old Man (as we called him) could never mention Parfitt’s name without closing his eyes and recalling one of Chaucer’s tales he seemed to know by heart: “He was a veray parfit gentil knight”, epithets which could be well applied to himself.

Apart from its longevity, what could the school be best proud of, I wonder? In what ways did it excel? I don't know. I look back to it with enormous affection and gratitude. Perhaps it was a shining beacon to modesty, caring more for everyday decency and kindness than for outstanding success in anything.

Carving on the school hall, originally uploaded by Auntie P on flickr.

Old Grammar School, Newport, Isle of Wight, originally uploaded by BOB@ wootton.

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Notes on the photos.
1) The old school badge, quite definite about its supposed founding in 1610.
2,3,4) Four boys as they were in old school photos.
5) The same four boys last Saturday: the twins being as indistinguishable (and inseparable) now, as they were then.
6) Commemorative stone embedded into the school wall. Founded when? It looks as though it was changed from 1611 to 1614 or vice versa.
7) A view of the school. For other photos, refer to older posts via links above.

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PS Since our reunion, I have been visited by what I call an angelic messenger: a kind of voice that tells me something. Sometimes the mouthpiece is a person I meet, or an incident that seems suspended between this world or another. In this instance it was a single sentence in angel-language which I am not sure if I can adequately translate. It reads something like “You are more than you give yourself credit for”. I feel that applied to everyone I had been to school with; and perhaps everyone I know. In any case, this message has been sustaining me lately!

Under the Umbrella Tree

It suddenly dawns upon me—several hours before dawn—that there might be a point to all this. I mean the world, as it is; the discrepancy between the yearning and the reality; the intended and the manifest; the imagined joy and the actual dissatisfaction. Might it be that perpetual motion is the whole point? I recall from long ago an explanation of human two-legged walking, as being a succession of imbalances, each one rectified by the next. We walk by moving our centre of gravity to stop ourselves falling over, after the bold discovery, made in infancy, that you can put one leg forward and then regain balance by doing it again with the other leg, and so on repeated until—you fall over. Bold just short of reckless: that’s the way we advance.

We leave home in order to find home. Our species didn’t get where it is today by staying in one place and avoiding risk. No. It’s all change and experiment. We are impelled to action, throughout space and time. That is perhaps why this blog is entitled A Wayfarer’s Notes and not “My Peaceful Thoughts Whilst Looking Out of the Window”.

A small band of space-time wayfarers converged at the weekend to an island separated from the English mainland by an ancient sea-lane called the Solent. The much-knowing hand of Fate had arranged not one, but two separate reunions, on consecutive days. Let me explain. I’d arrived on that island fifty-six years ago, when I was twelve. Divorce and remarriage meant that my mother brought me there to live with my new stepfather, whose own children had been taken by their mother to New Zealand, where their new stepfather wanted to live. It is certain that my stepfather grieved for the loss of his own children every day of his life, for he was never able to contact them again, nor they him. Only this blog, dear reader, despite my dismally-failed efforts to pretend it is fiction, has been able to bridge that sad gulf, albeit many years after my stepfather’s death. For I had written about him here on several occasions. One day, on a whim, I decided to stop pretending it was all fiction and spell out his full name, Septimus Leslie Carr Blackett Charlton: see this post. And thus was flung a letter in a bottle, into the oceans of memory and cyberspace, from one emerald island, the Isle of Wight, to another, New Zealand’s South Island, where it was picked up by Sep’s grandson. So if you have a message for a person or persons unknown, scribble it onto the Internet. One day the person who needs to find it, will.

It just so happens that the four-hundredth anniversary of my old school’s foundation was to be celebrated on my beloved Island, on 5th June 2010. And it just so happens also that Sep’s son had decided to visit England in June to make contact with my sister and me, to talk about his father, and attempt to fill in the missing details of his life. So I said “Let’s meet on the 6th June, in East Cowes.” And he said “Under the umbrella tree, 9am”. For I had written about that tree in another post. That was more or less the sum total of our communication, because it’s his son—Sep’s grandson—who’s familiar with using the Internet. It was a point of honour to rush and get there on time, but then we had ten nervous minutes waiting for him to appear, which he did, on the stroke of 9.

And now we each have a new brother, our relationship forged from a tangle of parents’ marriages shipwrecked on islands, in this great uncalm ocean of life.

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PS. I'll write about the other reunion—the school one—in my next.

The Blue Sea

It’s nearly three weeks since I last posted here, but it seems much longer. Have I been too busy? No. Has there been a lack of interesting things to write about? No. Have I been too lazy? No. I’ve drafted stuff every day on voice recorder, in my black notebook, in Word documents, or (best of all) in my head, where it tends to couple promiscuously with other stuff to create infant ideas of infinite promise and mysterious forgettability. So what ingredient, what magical catalyst, was missing? I don’t know. My initial conclusion—the chemistry was wrong. Ah, but I can’t leave it there. Metaphors have a life of their own. They have legs. Is the chemistry of inspiration a real branch of science? Does it have its own pharmacology? There have been poets who swear by liquor, essayists who voyage on opium, but let us not drift down those dreamy rivers. More likely that inspiration is an Art, the art of love: how to conduct the sacred love-affair between author and Muse; to procreate some textual offspring, bonny enough to survive.

It may not interest my reader at all, but it’s vital to me—to answer this one question—no, two. Why have I remained silent, when each day I yearned to deliver? Why do I want to publish here anyhow? It serves no practical purpose. I have not made any promises, nor to my knowledge created expectations and then failed to satisfy them. This is not a diary. In fact I like to keep my life private, taking material from that constantly-flowing source merely because it is always available. My namesake Van Gogh had only to look in the mirror if he needed a picture-subject. I’m no good at fiction, though in a sense this is all fiction: the skewed perspective of Vincent, a pseudonym which just happens to be my middle name but stands for an imagined hero, or anti-hero, who purports to write these mini-essays.

There’s a special kind of fiction which is able to convey truth like no other medium, but it’s all thanks to the Muse, without whom I am powerless to speak. There is nothing more joyful than to be the plaything of the immortals; for then we participate in the grand gestures. Then we are chauffeur-driven through life, as if we were Somebody. Then we have protection, we are granted a new identity. We have purpose, though it may be revealed to us only in fragments. The Muse is not to be confused with the flesh-and-blood lover, with whom She can coexist in complete harmony.

Photo: From a recent weekend. Having missed the beach altogether on our Jamaican trip, we found the azure seas finally at Weymouth, in Dorset.