Pygmalion & Galatea

Said Lehane, commenting on my last: “Would it also be sad to say that, through you, I’m kind of infatuated by this girl? Maybe on the way to falling in love with her.”

Therein lies a phenomenon not unknown in the world of fiction. If a reader may fall in love with a character in a story, what about the author? Certainly: just as Pygmalion fell in love with the statue he carved.

You may have noticed that my own tentative ventures into fiction lately here and here have had a common theme. A young woman lives with her parents, and meets a random stranger—me.

I write so much from impulse, I mean a place deeper than conscious recognition, that sometimes it’s only later that I understand why. Ten years ago, I wrote into existence my own Galatea. I recreated her from memory, every last detail. These days, I’m a better writer, knowing that the strength of literature lies in what’s left out.

In July 1963, I’d just graduated as a Bachelor of Arts. But I’d lost everything else: my student status, friends, my girlfriend, any plans for the future. There was nothing on my landscape but a vast crater of loss. One day I bought a copy of the New Statesman at New Cross Tube Station, South East London, a few minutes after walking out of a training course for VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). They were going to send me to what was then called French Guinea, in West Africa. I will not describe the particular humiliation which prompted my walk-out. At twenty-one, I lived in dreams. Apart from book-learning, which I was good at, my only achievement was to have survived five months in France and Italy on my own and penniless.

On the Tube, returning to my parents’ home in Staines, I saw this advert:

COMPANION sought, work round world; past, present student preferred. Box 0293.

That’s how I met my Galatea, aged nineteen. She was real, but it wasn’t till I wrote her story, in a late midlife crisis, that I became hopelessly enamoured. Thus I learned the power of writing.

Let that story, and the girl who inspired it, rest in peace.

The secret life of strangers

I wrote a piece about a visit to Gerrards Cross on 27th July. But something occurred on that visit that I never told you about. It seemed too insubstantial, yet I see it vividly still. How is it possible to remember a moment when nothing happened?

Some major construction works were in progress on the railway line. These works affected the bridge above, where the village’s main street passes over. In consequence, traffic on the bridge was restricted to one-way, controlled by traffic light, and pedestrians were diverted to a curving path fenced off by solid boards about eight foot tall on either side. So when you walked down this temporary lane, you were cut off from everything but the sky. It provided an intimate way to encounter a stranger; an alchemic crucible for the momentary mingling of souls in broad daylight. It was there I passed the skinny young woman with dark hair and glasses. We were going in the same direction and I overtook her. In the two seconds of our proximity, I had the mysterious sensation of knowing her, or magically knowing about her. She was the kind of young woman I would have met when I was up at university, fifty years ago.

In some way I “know” that she has left home for the wider world, but is currently back with her parents for the summer vacation. They live in a big house: that’s easily deduced, for all the houses here are big. So she’ll always have her own bedroom to go to, kept just as she left it; perhaps unchanged since childhood. Whenever the burdens of adulthood oppress her, she can stay here as long as she wants, coming and going as she pleases. Yet she soon tires of the place. Apart from memories, there is nothing here for her. She can look up an old friend from schooldays—that’s where she’s bound now—but her closest friends have moved far away.

Her future is unknown, like a book which nobody has read; a book which hasn’t even been written. A wild surmise persuades me she’s reading Russian Literature at Cambridge. She thought she knew where she was heading after graduation, but that hope was dashed. Now it’s all in the melting pot again.

It isn’t even a story, it’s just the expansion of a momentary feeling. Later I saw her again, with a girl friend, chatting on a street corner. If I were a short-story writer I might be able to capture something of what it all meant. Perhaps it was memorable to her too.

“She senses a young man following her on this winding path which curtains off the entire world, but she doesn’t feel unsafe. It’s broad daylight and she’s seconds away from the main street. He passes her at a brisk pace and she sees from his profile that he’s not the boy of her age that she imagined a few seconds ago. When she returns to Gerrards Cross she often recalls thinking about boys, and their scarcity, in her teenage years: the result of being sent to a girls-only private school. Now she sees that this imaginary “boy” must be a lot older than her father, unless his face is merely a weather-beaten mask on a boy’s soul. What can he have been doing for the last fifty years? She imagines him as the student Raskolnikov, serving time in Siberia for a terrible crime, till at last he achieves redemption—and release. Or perhaps he is Prince Myshkin, confined for decades in a Swiss sanatorium, now finally cured of his world-sickness.

“She wonders briefly if she might find her vocation writing sequels to famous Russian novels.”

Priesthoods at war

The Pope is here, complaining of aggressive secularism, not without reason. His state visit is seldom mentioned on BBC radio news without the mention, in the same breath, of sexual abuse by priests. It’s no coincidence that the world’s leading aggressive secularists, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, are English. Even Stephen Hawking has amended his position and declared that cosmology has no need of God.

It hit me where this secularism comes from when I visited my doctor yesterday. She explained how there’s no doubt that high blood pressure and cholesterol levels are bad for you, and modern drugs to fix them are good for you. This morning it was declared officially that certain supplements to alleviate painful joints are completely ineffective. The UK runs a free National Health Service and Welfare State, so it’s constantly deciding what taxpayers’ money is to be spent on, with the aid of increasingly arrogant experts. So, when I observe something is doing me good, I must be mistaken. When I feel perfectly well, I must take medicines with negative side-effects. Why? Because experts say so. They have guidance on every aspect of life-style, child-rearing and education. The government has the right to be insistent that the experts’ rules are followed because in its Welfare role, it has taken on the role of “good shepherd” ( pastor!) for all citizens within its shores, perhaps the non-citizens as well.

The new priesthood sees the opportunity for triumph: to deliver a fatal stab to its religious rivals, sacrificing those propagators of superstition and sexual perversion on the altar of science.

Yes, but in any country where the poor get inadequate food, shelter or medical care, there is a lot of praying, and faith in the irrational. My own life is comfortable and I never cease giving thanks for it. But from this plateau of safety, I set my sights on new summits, whose ascent is beset with risks. And I see plenty of vulnerable souls in my neighbourhood, who need more than they get from the atheistic State. So I too depend greatly on praying, and faith in the irrational.

It's clear to me that there is no almighty God, but my prayers and faith are directed towards freelance angels. I don’t know what they are “really”, only that they are real. We all are vulnerable, always. Each of the priesthoods want us to think it offers the best insurance cover. Who to trust? I shall continue to trust my own deep nature, and angels working on our behalf.

The Golden Ball

On Sunday we went up the hill to see St Lawrence's Church and the Dashwood Mausoleum.
The tower was open to visitors for a few hours. We climbed the tiny staircases inside, unchanged since they were built about 1760. We could lean over the railings to see the view on all sides.
The Golden Ball, as seen from just below.
The Dashwood Mausoleum, where the ashes of Sir Francis Dashwood's family are held.My town. Click to see full size picture. I've annotated a few landmarks, such as the Hospital where K works;, the Mosque, a few yards from our house; All Saints' Church, next to the Market, in the middle of town.
Here's a view of part of the Dashwood Estate, with the House part hidden by trees. It's administered by the National Trust, together with the village, though the Dashwood family still live in the house.

Some old houses in the village. The one on the right is a kind of church hall I think. Church ladies serve tea and cakes for fund-raising sometimes. I like to bring foreign visitors there, for example friends who are changing flights at Heathrow Airport, which is half an hour's drive away. So let me know!

Invest and improvise

Said Hayden, in a comment on my last:

“I continue to think about your comments, Vincent, on your “magical” experience and the whisper in your ear. I'd love to hear more about it directly. Not the abstract philosophy that flows from it, but what you remember of the experience itself.”

I didn’t know which experience she may have been talking about, but I promised to write more, taking as an example the latest whisperings—whether from angel, muse or unconscious mind, I cannot tell.

On 1st September I woke at 2.30am with an exciting idea that seemed important to record before I fell back to sleep and forgot it. Later, deciphering the almost illegible scrawl, I read “Life is an improvisation” in my notebook. Some of the excitement remained but I had to use a bit of “abstract philosophy”, dear Hayden, to make sense of it. I’m convinced that philosophy starts with feeling, not abstraction.

So, trying to reconstruct that feeling, I’d have to say something like this: “Nature is spontaneously creative. Just look around. First there was the Big Bang: now there’s all this. Or if you prefer, first there was Creation, as in Genesis, chapters 1 and 2: now there’s all this. It’s not the organized work of a Great Designer, but the best that a host of improvisers can do.” But it was more personal than that. I am part of Nature. Wasn’t this a message for me, to improvise more freely?

I still didn’t really know what it meant, if anything. A day or two later, worrying about a difficult situation, taking a walk to calm myself down, I glanced at my reflection in a shop-window on the Ledborough Road. “Life is an improvisation”, I told it. For a moment then, perhaps by the power of suggestion, I felt like a musician in a jazz band, caught in a clash of counterpoint; or like a pedestrian caught in the path of oncoming trams from two directions at once. What does he do? He improvises with a hop, skip and jump; or if he’s a musician, with some freshly-minted melodic phrase. In a trice, the slate of my worries was wiped clean with a damp cloth.

“Life is an improvisation.” So my phrase worked as a mantra, at least once. Did it make any sense, though? Even Evolution doesn’t constantly produce fresh melodies. Life depends more on continuity than on variation. Of the millions of species, how often does a new one appear, compared with those which go extinct? We see Nature repeating itself, mostly. In exactly the same way, I feel content, at this time in my life, with well-tried repeating patterns of sameness.

Improvisation is a survival trick, a creative Tourette’s tic to get us out of a rut. Nature took millions of years to perfect the slug, a placid creature which doesn’t have to improvise, and isn’t equipped to. A human does, and is.

A couple of nights later, the whispering was a single word: investment. Again I scribbled it in my notebook, so as not to forget.

The biggest ingredient of life, including human life, is investment, I mean a continuity of effort, without which very little can be achieved. If some Buddhist, say, preaches detachment at me, and proposes I live spontaneously in the here and now, I now feel equipped with an answer.

“Attachment is good, O Monk! A baby is attached to the mother, and vice versa. And after that, in adulthood, it is right to cherish and protect our investment, just as Nature does with its.

“Yet you are right, there is no joy like spontaneity, nothing like letting Creation happen. For it does just happen. That is why I call it improvisation.”

Views of the Chilterns

This is specially for Ashok, for comparison of the Chilterns with his real hills at Nainital. Here, the height above sea-level is never more than 200 metres. These vistas are all within walking distance of home, which is pretty much in the middle of town, in the factory district.


St Lawrence's Church & Dashwood Mausoleum, photographed yesterday


View of Bledlow Ridge (on horizon)

Sawmill House and part of West Wycombe Park

Fields near Four Ashes: the yellow is oilseed rape, the green is young barley (in May)


A tree-hugger on the hill above Ham Farm(2006)