On Christmas Eve

The Christmas spirit is a special thing. What is this “Peace on earth, goodwill to all men”? It’s tangible, that’s certain. I always feel that I receive it from others, never that I impart it to them. Or if I do emanate any of the glow, I feel it has been ignited first from a spark which comes from others.

In one way or another I have written about it here several times at this season and of course I look forward to it, but the feeling may not hit me till Christmas Eve, as it did today, when I went to the shopping centre and felt a special warmth toward my fellow-humans. I’ve pondered about this for many years. Whence comes the Christmas spirit? I don’t like shopping for presents. The other day I had to buy some Christmas cards and it cast a shadow over my whole morning, how to get them just right, and inscribe a message properly and make sure they were posted in the best manner, to give them the best chance to arrive on time. Certainly there was an affection for the addressees, but that wasn’t the same as this sense of “peace, goodwill to all men”.

But then Christmas Eve arrives and I feel this welling up of love for my fellow-humans: not initiated by me, for it seems to come from them first, but somehow I feel instinctively that it doesn’t come from any of us, but some force, maybe Jesus, who knows? But why now, why only now? Why not the whole year round? And I know everyone says this and that makes it all the more mysterious.

It’s an inner glow, closely allied to whatever it is which has inspired me to write entries here over the years, all those flavours of mysterious and mystical feelings. But this glow is different—beats all the other feelings, because it’s the only one that’s apparently shared with everyone in the street, if only for a few hours.

Like winter sunshine it gilds and ennobles everything it touches. It’s not generated by the paraphernalia that goes with Christmas—the reunions, alcohol, carols, lights, exchange of gifts, or even the anticipation.

There is magic and miracle afoot, and the author of St Luke’s Gospel, who may or may not have been Saint Luke, caught it so many centuries ago in these words:

“And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, goodwill toward men”. (Luke 2:14)

I’m no Christian but these words were repeated again and again, all the years of my childhood and thereafter. It seems to me that the whole thing gets reenacted, every year, and Luke got it exactly right.

Happiness machine

Matt Lowe of the blog “Liberal Jesus” wrote a post pointing to an article in the New York Times. Matt admitted “I can’t figure out quite what I think about it. I need a little goading I think.” This inspired me to append a hasty comment which I had completely forgotten about, till I recently revisited his site, several months later.

So I went back and read the article again, quickly because I’m more interested in the ideas a philosophy professor inspires in me, than those of the professor himself. Which is surely as it should be. A professor who inspires his students to think differently from him—that’s my definition of a good professor.

Prof Sosa asks us to consider, as a thought experiment, a happiness machine. Plug into it and you become euphoric. Would you plug in or not? One anticipates a “no”, the interest being less in the actual answer, more in the supporting reasons. To Sosa, the choice is between happiness seized from Reality, or happiness injected by a Dream Machine.

So then it occurred to me that we already have these machines. In the nineteenth century, an opium den was the paradigm, leading Karl Marx to make his famous observation about religion, reproduced below thanks to Wikipedia:

The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Without looking at the world through Marxist spectacles, we can nevertheless see that the range of opiates offered to the people is legion. Capitalism has outlived Marxism and its main driver is the production of metaphoric opiates to suite every taste.

I think Sosa is hardly in a position to offer his thought experiment to his students and readers of the New York Times. Anyone who’s already plugged into such a machine, albeit a metaphoric one, is not unbiased enough to make an informed choice between reality or ersatz. But this may not be obvious. As he says:

There’s an important difference between having a friend and having the experience of having a friend. ... Now, of course, the difference would be lost on you if you were plugged into the machine—you wouldn’t know you weren’t really anyone’s friend.

Quite.

In my original comment to Matt Lowe on his blog I rather ineptly mentioned Fernando Pessoa. I was thinking about his semi-fictional narrator in The Book of Disquiet, who time and again prefers dreams and unreality to the Lisbon of his immediate environment. Opening his book at random I find this: “Direct experience is an evasion, or hiding place, for those without any imagination.” Of course Pessoa, through his persona Bernado Soares, is being deliberately provocative in this stark expression of what most of us would call “escapism”, a derogatory word inviting guilt or blame.

My challenge to the professor goes like this. In a world where most people’s reality is tainted with capitalistic opiates (of which his imaginary machine would be just one other), isn’t it better to dwell in the clean air of one’s own inner space? I read once that car advertisements aren’t so much to persuade you to buy a particular model, but to assuage your doubts after you’ve already bought it. So when you look at your car from the outside, or indeed from the inside, the ad tells you what kind of a person you are, and flatters you for possessing those virtues. The car may not please you, in fact the manufacturer doesn’t want it to please you more than a couple of years, but he wants you all the same to feel good about yourself for buying it.

I’d sooner be like Bernardo Soares, described by Richard Zenith, translator of Disquiet as “a prose writer who poetizes, a dreamer who thinks, a mystic who doesn’t believe, a decadent who doesn’t indulge. ... The semi-fiction called Bernardo Soares ... is an implied model for whoever has difficulty to adapting to real, normal, everyday life.” A secret home-grown opium, then.

Preface Mark II

The soul is feminine, I mean passive. It initiates nothing, does nothing but feel. It seems helpless to assert itself against will and intellect; like a slug on the sidewalk after rain, defenceless against accidental or deliberate squashing by human feet; or like a majestic brooding silence, the silence of a wilderness, defeated by the roar of machinery or gunfire. Is it possible to speak for silence, without destroying that silence in the very act of speech? Yes, say the wind, and birdsong, voices carried on the breeze, the bleating of sheep on yonder hillside. And then I see that even the gunfire has a beginning and an end. Silence wins, enveloping noise, having the last word.

It is naked will and intellect that spur me to self-expression: a masculine urge to assert myself in action, to inscribe myself on a clean wall like an obsessed graffitist. But what if I want to scribble a paean to the cleanness of the wall itself? What if I want to sing loud praises of silence?

It has been tricky trying to capture Soul. She hides, she reappears, fleeing through the woods in diaphanous robes, calling over her shoulder: “Catch me if you can!” Sometimes it required creeping out of bed in the early hours to transcribe some phrase that seemed to have been whispered by the Muse. Sometimes, in the second hour of a long walk through suburb or wilderness, the silence of Soul starts finding ways to speak in words, which must be unburdened then and there into digital recorder, till some narrative emerges, which may not encompass the feeling but perhaps gives the gist.

The pieces which follow are arranged in chronological order, each one faithful to the original blog entry. A link is provided so that you can compare. The text was pruned, as a gardener does it, to give space for the best live growth. Sometimes there has been rewriting, but as in a restored painting, the overlay may be worse than the original, so the draft remains provisional, in constant flux. This anthology represents about 25% of the text written in the timespan from April 2006 to August 2010.

As a reader of “A Wayfarer’s Notes”, you have helped shape it. As on the blog, your feedback is treasured. I hope to hear from you. It’s the intention to produce at some point a handsomely-bound hardback edition, at a price which will cover costs. Let me know if you are interested!

PS A little retrospect on the title “A Wayfarer’s notes”. Originally it was “An ongoing experiment”—an idea reflected in the very first post, below, and also in the url “perpetual-lab”. Consciously, its author didn’t know where the blog was going, but the blog itself did, like a horse faithfully bringing home the drunk who’s not in a position to drive the cart. Later, when its author thought he had an idea what it was about, he changed it to “As in Life”. I can’t quite recall when or why, but it seemed more definite. But I do recall the decision to give it the present name. It was in the spring or summer of 2007, when I was working full-time in “Babylon Town” on a computer project. To keep sane, I took an hour’s walk every lunchtime, and saw what it meant to enter a wayfarer’s world.

PPS So why these young bulls on the dust-jacket, you ask, besides being symbolic of “a masculine urge to assert myself in action”? Why the soul of an animal? I could say “Read it and see!” or, more courteously, that it was only the discovery of being an animal that led to my discovery of Soul. And that sums up the book.

Preface

The soul is feminine, I mean passive. It does nothing but feel.

Will and intellect are the masculine elements, delighting in action and creativity for their own sakes. In young men is a naturally warlike instinct: to fight, regardless of the cause espoused, the yin to their yang. To me—and this gives enlightenment as to the dynamics of my psyche—the masculine is properly subservient to the feminine. Good Queen Bess, that Virgin Queen of the first Elizabethan age in England, inspired men to ransack the known world, tolerating their piracies and even ennobling them—Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh. Back in England, courtiers wore doublets and earrings encrusted with pearls. They sought to show mastery in swordsmanship, poetry and stage-strutting. I don’t know how much was inspired by Gloriana. In an earlier century, it was Eleanor of Aquitaine who presided over a great flowering of Provençal minstrelsy, the troubadour poets. In this second Elizabethan age, I’m no plunderer, but a would-be servant of Soul in the sphere of literature.

My masculine part knows nothing of Soul. It delights in the technical: calligraphy, typographical design, engineering. My profession, in which I have never excelled, has been that of a computer programmer, though in the religion of technology I remain a conservative sceptic: conservative in preferring the old, sceptic in seeing no salvation in the future. In any project I’m likely to descend, in a hierarchical cascade, to the lowest, most repetitive detail. This may be a tendency at the mild end of the autistic spectrum, but it’s also a displacement activity: avoiding the tricky by plunging into what’s easy. Soul is the tricky one. She hides, she reappears, fleeing through the woods in diaphanous robes, calling over her shoulder: “Catch me if you can!”

The eternally feminine Soul knows how to snare the impulsive clumsy male. In my descent to the physical, primitive and instinctive, I’m drawn to the most repetitive human activity, the one which defines and distinguishes the human from other animals: walking on two feet. Walking the surface of the earth, I’m attentive enough for the visit of Soul.

We are the mammals which dream of flying, though only the bats, who we can hardly save from extinction, can physically do it. Through intellect, we’ve built aeroplanes. Through imagination, our feet can leave the surface, letting us fly on endless journeys of fantasy which infect every aspect of civilisation and weaken us till all we have to embrace are counterfeit copies of Soul. The sculptor Pygmalion fell in love with the Galatea of carved imagination. Modern man prefers to go everywhere cocooned by car, cut off from his roots, ignorant of Soul.

Without even knowing what I am doing, I strive to be Soul’s champion, sometimes able to hear her whisper and capture it in written language and published literature.

The blog format is imperfect, designed for today’s scribble more than an author’s collected works. I’ve long pondered a conventional book, but that’s competitive and commercial. I shall serve Soul, not Mammon, and distribute my words in my own way. Which brings me to the promise of a Christmas gift, a first distillation of A Wayfarer’s Notes. It’s a draft offered to a few friends of this blog.

And this post (after much-needed edits) will be the book’s Preface. Season’s Greetings to you all.

Manageable pretensions

See PS, below

My life is full of half-formed ideas and mothballed projects. Far from being a self-pitying lament, this is a grateful realization. For in discovering who I am, by means of observation rather than vain wish, I can devote myself to it wholeheartedly, to the general benefit.

Sometimes I’m a conscious exile from the Forties and Fifties. The past is a spacious realm, an Eden from which we have all been thrown out, with no return allowed; unless we can do it with the magic of Art. For in a sense I am there, my homesickness and loyalty granting me honorary residence in a place which is no more. Those decades repeat in my head with a plangent refrain, like a song which stays in the head for days, as if it has a message to convey; so that the song, in all its phrasing and orchestration, the uniqueness of its voice, becomes part of one’s own essence, newly understood, touching more deeply the inner chords which lay long-forgotten; a harp once lost, now discovered in a dusty attic, its strings still perfectly tuned, quivering silently with longing to sound again. It doesn’t make me hate the present, for 2010 has not cremated the past, there is always something remaining which hasn’t changed. I wince when someone tramples on “my” past, replacing the still-serviceable with newfangledness for no other purpose than to assert a younger generation’s creativity. I make my secret resolve to stick to old ways, ideas and words, even if they are no longer understood; even if they are condemned for being unfashionable or “unacceptable”. Fortunately Nature hasn’t changed. This biting wind on my face, this penetrating cold is the same as when I was twelve, and so I embrace it as a friend.

I don’t worry about the future of the world. I’m guilt-free. I have no plans for the future, anyway, though I’m part of a society driven by plans and hopes and dread of ecological Armageddon. I hear a Sunday morning preacher, a Church of England clergyman, of all people (whom I had looked to as an upholder of traditions) urging even more change, as if there were not already a surfeit of ill-considered change. Our only future is to die! Any churchman preaching utopia is surely a heretic. I speak as the gladiators of old to their Emperor: “Nos morituri te salutamus”. We who are about to die salute you; everyone cedes to a surviving generation. I shall pay my dues to the living and those who survive me, and in my spare time prepare to die gracefully, to depart with no regrets. Of death itself, what it is, what it means to die, we the living are ignorant. As Nature abhors a vacuum, so ignorance breeds beliefs. So I do not speak of death. I’ll be more precise, and speak of mortality, the most certain thing we know.

I’m not in denial of death, for it’s no enemy of mine. I’m preparing for it, as slowly as possible. What I’m in denial of is the last fifty years. I don’t feel obliged to embrace the twenty-first century, for I’ve brought along enough memories of the mid-twentieth to keep me going.

It’s not long since I cherished the ambition to be an author of hard-backed literature, perhaps published by Faber & Faber, but that pretension melted like snow three days after I wrote to a literary agent requesting representation. I didn’t wait for a reply, or perhaps I received it by telepathy. So I fell back on the project of translating a philosophical work by Albert Camus. Observing myself, a practice I recommend to all, I see that the project fails to excite me: I haven’t translated another line in weeks. I’ve toyed with philosophy, but the kind represented by Heidegger, Jaspers and so on isn’t for me. Heidegger asks “What is Being?”, “What is Time?”, “What is Art?” and so on. Jasper asks “What is Existence?” Well they are just words, and they mean what people mean when they pronounce them, no more no less. We don’t need philosophers to tell us. As Wittgenstein says (Philosophical Investigations, ¶43), “For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” Which is good enough for me.

It’s the great virtue of the blog as a form of literature that it can embrace the half-formed idea and the mothballed project, for a day or even more. In my blog I can feel, without having to say or define, what Being is, what Time is. In today’s virtual world, a blog is composed of little more than Time, my dears, being otherwise insubstantial, consuming neither paper nor ink, only the attention of writer and reader (Beings). It may or may not be Art, but nobody is obliged to judge. A blog is modest in its pretension and yet you and I can invest these places, these alcoves of attention (so difficult to explain to anyone from an earlier generation) with our highest aspirations.

Just as Ludwig Wittgenstein is my philosophical hero—he who only wrote one book, which he later repudiated (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the others being put together posthumously from his notes)—so Fernando Pessoa is my literary hero. He never published much either. His greatest work, The Book of Disquiet, has been assembled posthumously out of a trunkful of manuscripts that might easily have been thrown away.

I shall stay within my own league, and maybe pick up my book project later, to clean it up for someone to read when I’m gone. (Note to Ashok and anyone else who finds all this mortality business “morbid”: there is no morbidity in me! [Morbid: characterized by excessive gloom or apprehension, or (in later use) by an unhealthy preoccupation with disease, death, or other disturbing subject; given to unwholesome brooding.—Oxford English Dictionary]

PS The illustration shows possibly the most delightful book I’ve ever read. In my local, The Falcon, there are alcoves housing shelves of old books. Dining there recently, I picked one at random and started to read. I “couldn’t put it down”, so had to face a moral dilemma, since it’s a pub, not a lending library, and I’m not a thief. I thought I might come in daily to read a few pages, at the cost of a pint a time, but took K’s wiser counsel and bought this handsome volume second-hand, possibly the classiest show-biz biography ever written, the tale of the three Korda brothers, Alex, Zoltan and Vincent; Hungarian emigrés who triple-handedly established the British film industry as a credible alternative to Hollywood. Published by Allen Lane (hard-back Penguin): almost as classy as Faber, methinks. The author, Michael Korda (Vincent’s nephew) shows us heights of memoir-writing skill I could never hope to reach.