Graffiti

Further to my last, Rebb and Ashok doubtless speak for a majority in their negative attitude towards urban graffiti. I’ve evolved a different view, as expressed in several posts—see excerpts below. The illustrations are taken from this post on 27th April ’07.

But where do the people walk? Yesterday in the drizzle I stepped carefully on rain-sodden narrow grass verges, recently disturbed by molehills, and wandered at random till I discovered an underbelly of Babylon Town: a deserted park, lakes, managed wild-life habitats, crumbling steps, piazzas and walls of graffiti. The latter provide much-needed decoration in some desolate corners. I was glad to see the evidence of humanity, however scruffy, overlaying the tidy intellect of town planners, however well-meaning. (See post on 28th Feb ’07).

What’s the secret of this joy of walking in landscapes, and observing the crusty lichen and graffiti on weathered walls? It’s a puzzle. I only know that my life is daily more vivid and choiceless and imbued with an odd kind of renunciation. I’m not letting go of the pleasures and pains of the flesh, for death will achieve that, without any striving on my part. I’m renouncing partiality for the sake of the whole. I am renouncing prejudice against myself and others, in order to embrace the whole. (See post on 7th March ’07).

Polyhymnia commented: Thank you for prompting me to ponder the similarities of “crusty lichen and graffiti on weathered walls.”

The human animal is stuck in a cage. Pacing back and forth in this reduced space, he cannot exercise his instincts though he vaguely remembers them and tries to find substitutes within the cage. This is what domesticates him.

He remembers the joy of finding wild honey deep in the forest; so he drinks Coca Cola.

Instincts are built in to procure what every animal needs. The bird builds its nest and the bee gathers nectar. Instinct is design. It makes the tree grow tall and the sunflower turn its face to the sun.

Seeing graffiti on a wall, I rejoice in evidence of instinct. Planners and real-estate moguls have seized the right to create an urban environment in their image; the alienated youth, excluded from these activities, defy one-sided laws to make their mark in the only ways they can. (See post on 20th May ’07).

This is where the nobodies, the unemployed and the elderly come on the local bus and potter around for a while. Here the graffiti give the main hope of artistic creativity; here the dropped litter is welcome rebellion from municipal dictatorship. I view the world’s dream and help dream this dream, a mere wayfarer passing through, striding over the earth’s crust like the giants, and indeed the dwarves, of old.

(See post on 18th August ’07).

Today, I’ve one more thought to add to those remarks.

Of course, one can feel threatened by graffiti, both aesthetically and in terms of damage to property. But wherever I walk on this earth, I consider it my home. Spiritually I want to embrace it, rather than seek some kind of Buddhist detachment where I turn my senses inward to avoid that which hurts. There are certainly places I wouldn’t want to go. There are times I need to defend myself from perceived threats, by running away or shutting my eyes.

But I’ve learned to love my home neighbourhood, even though it’s far from pretty in many aspects. How else can I feel at home? This is the world. I can’t change it, only add my little voice to its great orchestra.

Seek and find

At the weekend, K and I went walking on a hillside meadow, full of wildflowers, that you can see across the valley from many vantage-points. Amongst the blooms was lots of ragwort, notorious for being poisonous to grazing mammals. I looked carefully for any sign of the cinnabar caterpillar, but none were to be seen.

Then yesterday walking back with K from her office at the hospital, and taking our usual route down back alleys, I saw them. So I came back with a camera just now, and managed these snaps before the batteries ran out.

It's nice to find such specimens of Nature at her jazziest in one of these notorious alleys: in precisely the spot where I was once punched by a staggering drunk, an alley which K and I avoid if it's the venue for a "meeting". Young men seem to like it as a place to hang out. If they're Poles, they'll be drinking Tyskie or Zywiec. If they are the local Asians, it'll be soft drinks and cigarettes. When I'm on my own, I always forge ahead, to reclaim my share of the alley as a thoroughfare; but prefer not to escort a lady unless the path is clear. It's an instinctual thing.

The colourful wall records some initiative years ago to express a no-drugs message with professional graffiti - text and panorama - sponsored by local companies. Other messages have long been superimposed.

But then, "official" graffiti are on the increase in Wye Vale (my code name for this town). The University puts out cool messages in this form. And even at the Hospital, near where K works, they have screwed some large graffiti-like paintings (prepared elsewhere, earlier) to certain drab outside walls. Why, we cannot imagine.

Are we culturally advanced or retarded? I can't decide.

Gerrards Cross and the wayfarer

I spent the morning engaged intensely in ‘writing’, if you can call it that. Needing a break, I revisited Gerrards Cross, keen to capture a photograph of the Odeon, to confirm that it hasn’t changed since the photo (from the Sixties) that I published the other day. Ahem! I must be living in a fantasy world. In my last post but one, I showed the same photo and remarked, “I remembered going there once. It didn’t seem to have changed at all.” Compare my two photos: judge my reliability as a witness. (Ignore the “Nudist Paradise” posters. They were put up for a "Carry on" film.)

Never mind that. Does Gerrards Cross welcome the wayfarer? Dear member of the jury, consider the evidence.

Exhibit A. A pump at the village’s main crossroad. Inscription thereon:

THIS PUMP WAS ERECTED BY
JOHN BRAMLEY-MOORE ESQ., M.P.
IN THE YEAR 1864 FOR THE USE OF
THE WAYFARER IN GERRARDS CROSS
-----
Whosoever will, let him take of the water of life freely.

The quotation is from Revelation 22:17. Who was John Bramley-Moore*, and why was he so thoughtful of the wayfarer’s need? Does the pump still work? No.

There are further observations I could make on Gerrards Cross (or rather my very personal response to yesterday's visit), but they will have to wait in note form till a certain mountain of words has been organised into smaller mountains.

I refer to the ‘writing’. I’ve started on some editing but mostly I’m assembling the material. It’s reached 864 pages, 264000 words—the length of 3 full-size novels. So where I’ve been a foot-soldier I now have to be a general, marshalling an army. Or a commander-in-chief, a Churchill or an Eisenhower. Or even something beyond that, to define what war is about, a Clausewitz pondering his Art of War.

But I won’t stop being a foot-slogging wayfarer here.

* Postscript

I looked up John Bramley-Moore. The Gerrards Cross pump wasn't his only philanthropic gesture. He made donations for the general maritime welfare of Liverpool, for the "BRAMLEY-MOORE MEDAL FOR SAVING LIFE AT SEA, 1872" and in 1849 to a Fancy Fair for the benefit of the Infirmary Northern & Southern Hospitals. He opened a dock and had it named after him, being Chairman of the Liverpool dock committee. Consequently a pub near the dock gates was named the Bramley Moore, and still exists today. I'm grateful for further information from a review of this pub (follow this link), excerpts from which I republish below:

Ah yes, the name.

Both pub, dock and, for good measure, a tug are memorials to John Bramley-Moore, Lord Mayor of Liverpool from 1848 to 49.
. . .
A former chairman of the Docks Committee, he was ostensibly a merchant who made his money trading in Brazil. A typically no-nonsense Conservative when it came to looking after his money, when there was a strike he once brought in outside labour, declaring with menaces: "I'll break the legs of any man who stops me getting through this gate."
. . .

Ahem. I really ought to get on with my ‘writing’.

To Hayden, on pets

I think Hayden is my longest-serving, faithfullest blogging friend. But when she writes about Jake, my empathy isn’t immediate. I prefer a cool relationship with wild animals who go their own way at their own pace, and don’t beg from me with soulful eyes. Slugs spring to mind, or rats. I’ve written here several times about both. Digging deep in my psyche, I may have found an equivalent love to hers, but it involves the inanimate world of artifacts.

When my daughter was 7, she had a little pet, a Tamagotchi. It incarnated as a puppy—no, it must have been a baby.

It was at the end of August 1997, forever connected in my mind with the death of Diana, The People’s Princess, which suddenly had throngs realizing retrospectively that they had always loved her in a personal way, and been loved by her in return, and were stricken with grief. Shrines of flowers appeared on every main street, growing by the hour. After a whole week of this, I congratulated myself on escaping the madness, for I was due to join my family on holiday in Orlando, Florida. It was not to be. I arrived there just as Lady Di’s funeral was starting, for the mania had gripped America too, unless it was just American curiosity at the British mania. In Orlando, it was live on TV, early on Saturday morning.

I discovered that she (my daughter not the people’s Princess) had interrupted her sleep every night for a week to tend her inanimate puppy/baby. This demanding creature, which she had the responsibility of feeding, keeping clean, playing with, taking for walks, responding to the cries (or barks) of, was encased in a thing with a small screen and buttons, an electronic craze from Japan. It was reasonably programmed to be active in the day only, so as to mercifully allow its owner to sleep in the night. But the reasonable programmer hadn’t reasoned that the unreasonable owner would be flying to a different time zone halfway through the wretched puppy/baby’s lifespan. My daughter was looking forward to the glittering prize of a high score, proving to her friends that her pet-owning/mothering skills were second to none. Or perhaps a love-bond had developed. At any rate, the only way to reset the thing’s internal clock would have been to start a new incarnation. Which would have been no good when she got back to England, and it woke her up in the middle of the night.

It proved, if proof were needed, that the pet owns its owner. Not only did it provide valuable parenting experience, it was a supplement to future sex education, impressing consequences on the malleable young mind. It is no small thing to be awakened every night by a bawling creature, however much you love it.

I’m not immune to inanimate pet-owning, but the objects of my love are not a cellphone, Blackberry or suchlike. I keep fountain pens. Till the other day I had three. None was quite satisfactory. One is very elderly in cheap-fountain-pen years (multiply its age by seven, and it’s definitely on borrowed time). The lid is cracked, it has insulating tape where you hold it to write, and a week ago it was incontinent on the bedsheets. A fountain-pen is the best for doing crosswords lying on your back because it can write upside down. I used a little too much bleach getting the ink off the sheets . . . and now that pen is no longer welcome in the bedroom.

I haven’t thrown that pen away. It has too much history; enough to try your patience if I were to tell you the tale of mystery. Oh well, it is my blog, I can try your patience if I want to.

You see, I’m not sure if it is the original pen, which I stole from one of my children, complete with bitemarks. I kept losing it, usually out of my pocket while driving the car. It always turned up in crevices or under the seat, till one fatal day when it left and never came back. I wanted to pin a reward notice on every tree as people do when their dog or cat has disappeared. But I contented myself with months of quiet grieving. Till one day, when one of my children presented me with an identical pen, complete with bitemarks in the same places, and was rather vague about where it was found, mumbling about the back of a drawer. I sentimentally assume the dear child had bought another one and bitten it to look as old as the lost one. I wasn’t convinced because the old one had more bite-marks. But I’m still not sure . . .

So now I’ve finally bought a more expensive pen, which can feed itself from its own bottle of ink, and doesn’t have to be fed little cartridges. A Parker Sonnet. I don’t want to let it out of my sight. I had the romantic notion that my handwriting would at last become legible and effortlessly calligraphic. Mmmm. Perhaps it will, one Summer’s day, before its gold complexion is dimm’d.

Gerrards Cross

My wanderings usually take me through wild footpaths and unpretentious housing estates. I’ve had no occasion to visit the village of Gerrards Cross, which “has a reputation for being very upmarket and exclusive, with house prices being considerably higher than average. Located in the commuter belt of London, the village is the most expensive postcode to purchase a property in the country outside of London. In February 2010, Declan Curry of the BBC described Gerrards Cross as ‘Britain's richest town’” (Wikipedia). The other day I went there on impulse, reaching the main shopping street via the Common, a well-kept wooded area penetrated with with criss-crossing paths, and dotted with rustic benches.

After browsing in charity shops for old books, I felt the need to take a leak. In the absence of a “Public Convenience” I went in search of a pub, a McDonalds or even a Starbucks. Couldn’t find one. In pursuit of this mission, I happened to glance down a side street, saw a small Odeon cinema. I remembered going there once. It didn’t seem to have changed at all.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
In 1965 I was starting my career in IT, back in the days when it was called DP. It stood for data processing. I'd been sent to the company’s training centre for a five-month course. One evening, four of us drove nine miles to Gerrards Cross, to see a film at the Odeon.

Our class had been learning how machines could process punched-card data. In one of our lessons we learned the deeper meaning of AND, OR and NOT, words you’d think would need no explanation, even to a small child who doesn’t seem to understand the the meaning of DON’T. Our lecturer insisted on the capitalization, and prefixed them with an adjective: logical AND, logical OR.

This tickled the imagination of our little gang of four. A conversation over breakfast the next day went like this.

“AND, OR—why not take it further? There should be a logical BUT!”
“How would that work?”
“Show me an AND, then I’ll show you a BUT.”
“Roses are red AND violets are blue.”
“All right—Roses are red BUT Hitler is dead.”

We laughed. To me, it’s as funny as the first time. That must be memory’s rose-tinting. What happened to those three comrades? Have they survived the last 45 years? Do any of them remember that trivial conversation, that trip to the cinema? It was a lively journey, with many a wisecrack and imitation of our lecturers’ mannerisms. I’ve no recall of the film. Time is a swift stream, and here I am at the edge, panning for gold, rinsing away the mud for a few grains of bright metal. Now I see that those comrades might have been precious friends, had we kept in touch. I don’t even remember their names.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
I’d have gone to inspect the Odeon at close quarters, and taken a photograph, if the mission I mentioned above hadn’t gained in urgency. So I returned to the conveniently wooded Common.

If I’d found a pub, I’d have sampled its ale while I was there. I don’t think Gerrards Cross would tolerate a Starbucks or McDonalds within its parish, but if I’d gone in to use their restroom, I would not have been tempted to stay and sample their beverages.

Like men through the ages, I have a fondness for ale. In the children’s playground at the back of my house, it’s not uncommon to see a man sit with a can of beer for his breakfast. It’s not unknown to see one staggering through the streets when it’s scarcely noon, can in hand. What’s the difference between him and me? I could say: “I only drink in moderation”. Suppose by a quirk of fate I were down and out, with nothing and no hope. I’m confident I wouldn’t be an afternoon-staggerer. Why? “Self-respect”, I reply. So how does one acquire that?

Can people change that much? Could I become a down-and-out? Could every down-and-out, serial killer or sex-criminal choose to reform? What is “fault”? What is “blame”? Society as reflected in our legal system has a tentative answer. If you could have chosen otherwise, you are judged sane. If you couldn’t help it, that is, you had no choice, you are insane, and judged differently.

Can someone in either of these categories change, if he is given the right help? Is there any point in hating such an outcast? Isn’t it simply a matter of protecting ourselves against society’s deviant, and helping him if it will do any good?

Then I remember the perennial conundrum: freewill or predestination? It doesn’t help, doesn’t answer any question. I wonder if the world can be improved. I wonder if, under different circumstances, I might be the owner of one of those grand houses in Gerrards Cross. I realize that I am without envy. I am happy with the throw of the dice.
-------------------
PS
I did find a picture of the Odeon, taken in 1969, but it’s done up for a film, called Carry on Camping. This will have to do.

Later
On further reflection, “throw of the dice” is the wrong metaphor. Something tells me that (by a mysterious process) I got what I wanted. You could call it choice.

The visionary eye

Reality and imagination are forever intertwined, and it’s from their potent combination that magic is concocted. Modern scientists are often against this. Richard Dawkins has felt a vocation to keep reality and imagination apart, for the mischief they can cause when entangled. It’s rather like saying, “We know what boys and girls can get up to, so let’s segregate them, and make the girls keep decently covered, to avoid inflaming the boys’ imagination. Only in privacy and legal bond may they merge, in order to keep the species from dying out.” This is no theory. I see it on my own street, where the mosque’s prayer sessions are always segregated, and predominantly open to men only. So, dear friends, what shall we talk about: sex, religion, magic or the interconnectedness of all things?

My search for the four-leaved clover showed me how reality and imagination are intertwined. Michael found it quite spontaneously without trying. You could say the finding was proof of luck in itself, rather than heralding luck to come. But I took it further and went back on my own, trying to find these things again. The first time I couldn’t find the meadow at all. The next time I did find it. The clover was in the exact place I’d recorded so clearly in imagination. But the growing clover plants looked different. In both instances I had been misled by imagination, for in reality I had not concentrated on the visual scene with consistent attention. To construct a complete story of our exploit I’d unconsciously “embroidered”, as we say, to cover the gaps to make a complete story. My embroideries were concocted from snippets in a mental library of images, because one hedgerow, one stile, one clover plant, looks much like another. We don’t register the detail of every little thing we actually see, but generalise. This is how witnesses testify in court, with partially false memories. Even scientists are liable to do the same, unless stringent steps are taken.

Such masses of data stream into our brains, ready for us to dismiss or focus on, depending on what we find important! When I conducted my own experiments in LSD in 1971—not as a scientist, you understand!—I was struck by the psychedelic vividness of my perceptions. When specks of fluff moved busily on the carpet, wriggling like maggots, it was actually caused by my eyeballs moving, not the fluff. The drug had inhibited the processing which habitually ensures we see what’s practical to our survival, as opposed to pleasurably mind-blowing. We have an inherited capacity to look at a complex scene, such as the inside of a forest, with its trunks and foliage stretching off to the distance, and yet see the slightest movement—to aid our hunting, or the detection of an enemy, with his poisoned dart at the ready. LSD presents reality in a different way, that paralyses some of the equipment which normally keeps us safe.

We train ourselves to see what we need to see, just as a dog can be trained to sniff for drugs, or follow the scent of a wanted man.

In the busy world of maintaining a complex society and earning a living, we filter out that which distracts. When we can take time out, another world awaits: the world of poets, dreamers and magicians, where whatever is intertwined stays tangled. It’s not a fake world at all. If anything has been Photoshopped, it’s the objective world of science. Despite the interconnectedness of all things, science must disentangle the intertwined, try to separate the inevitable observer from the observed.

And it shall come to pass afterwards, that I will pour my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions:
And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. -Joel 2, 28-29.

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Photos:
(1) A nearby street and its everyday scene: the elderly devout Muslim in his white robes, perhaps greeting the younger man on the other side of the street; the breakdown truck; the bins on the pavement awaiting the refuse lorry, due that day; another figure with a mobile phone held to his ear; the “Top Tyres” depot. None of these were my concern. My head was in the clouds, and I was going West to beyond the town, to commune with the World-Soul.

(2) Two miles later, still looking West, the clouds still proclaimed their message, that I cannot put into words. The trees are part of Hellbottom Wood. Now there’s a name to conjure with. I Googled it. First up was a reference in the Urban Dictionary:

Bodger:

A person who lives in a mobile hut in the woods, cuts down trees then turns them into chair legs using string lathes. Originates from South Bucks where bodgers used to supply High Wycombe with wood for the furniture industry.

“Me dad’s grandad was a bodger in Hellbottom Wood back in the day.”

I hope that bodger was able to look at the clouds sometimes, and receive their blessing.

Cornfields, near Amersham Old Town

Dedicated to Joanne (Serenity) because she is an artist and may appreciate the colours and textures. I'm in the process of writing and editing something else, so not many words today.
Click any photo to enlarge.

From Chalfont St Giles, looking towards Amersham

The colours are at their most seductive before the barley is ripe

This is even truer of the unripe wheat

Looking southwest from the South Bucks Way

Edge of wheat field. A swathe was mown at the edge of the field, cutting into the wheat, whose stalks have grown since then. That's what I think happened

Edge of barley field

Ears of barley

Wheat and barley

On the South Bucks Way (a 23-mile public footpath from the Grand Union Canal at Denham (near the famous film studios) to Coombe Hill, which overlooks Chequers, an official country residence provided for the Prime Minister)

Detail of the Great Mullein

A Mullein Moth caterpillar, often found on the mullein flower-heads. I've seen them in the past but had to borrow this photo.

Kin

I felt pleased on finishing my last piece, on Everything. What else was there to say? Much as Thomas Aquinas must have felt trying to wrap up his great work, Summa Theologica, but in a tiny way. But then in his latter years, Aquinas saw things in a different proportion, and said one day to his faithful scribe “I cannot [continue dictating], for all that I have written now seems no more than straw.” Yes, because in this life, you may suddenly turn a corner: and a new vista lies before you, hitherto undreamed.

My brother flew off back to New Zealand on Tuesday, and now I don’t know when I’ll meet him again, after waiting all our lives to meet at all. After dropping him at the airport, I didn’t know what to do with myself, so decided to try and find the four-leaved clovers again. I took a trowel, a plastic bag and some water, to keep the plant moist till I could resite it in our backyard. I’d already dismissed the idea as absurd, as admitted on that earlier post, but I went anyway, not the full ten-mile walk but just the last cross-country part. I still see perfectly in my mind’s eye the field where we found it, and the position in the field, to within a yard. But I failed to retrace our route, going off on the wrong path four or five times and finally having no idea where the meadow in question was to be found. I came back with arms nettle-stung and socks pierced with sharp grass-seeds at the ankles, as if a hundred tiny arrows had been fired at my feet.

Those who have known mother and father and brothers and sisters, in true nature and not just name, or blood—you are fortunate. For then you are no longer an exile or a refugee in the world. You have the mirror of kinship before you, and are never alone. When you have once truly known them, even when they are not before you in flesh, they can speak to you, as your inner brother or sister; even the inner mother and father, if needed. So while my outer brother was sitting on a plane, I asked his inner counterpart, who would understand my clover-quest, whether I was doing foolishness. “You don’t need my answer,” he responded. “You’re perfectly capable without my help to know what’s sensible—and to ignore it too.”

And speaking about sensible things, I told him the other day (my real brother, not the inner one) about my risky adventures with a door (written up in this post, Risk Assessment), and asked him if he could help me fit it properly, a job I abandoned after that minor catastrophe. I envisaged that one of us could steady the door whilst the other one manoeuvred it into the exact right position on the frame. He advised that we leave the door where it is, despite its bent hinge; and merely shift the strike plate to accommodate its current position. Which has worked perfectly. The door now clicks shut and locks as it’s meant to.

The thing which is more miraculous, even more healing of the past, than finding a true brother, is to see so much of his father in him: the father that he hardly knew, having been taken from him at the age of five: his real father who became my resented stepfather from the age of twelve. So now I know my stepfather better, having started the revaluation work here, in memoirs on this blog, which in the nature of blogging has been to throw them out like messages in bottles, which eventually reached my brother on the other side of the world.

On our last evening together, we went to a pub, the Crown at Penn. I’ve written about it here a few times. In a few choice words, my brother told the landlord about the occasion of our celebrating at his pub. Even the landlord was moved, enough to present us with a complimentary bottle of wine with our meal.

But I can only guess how much this has moved my brother. He’s the strong silent type like his father.

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Photos:
1) Sister and brother, during our visit to Cliveden (home of William Waldorf Astor, American billionaire. No he didn't invite us personally. I believe he passed away a while ago.)
2) The edge of a field of flax, one of the false trails I followed looking for the four-leaved clover a second time.
3) Pretty useless clocktower at Cliveden (very pretty but tells the wrong time).
3) Brother telling the landlord our moving story. Landlord offers free bottle of wine, to shut him up & keep things manly.