Groping blindly

Forgive me, but I’ve been in a ferment, a witness to a veritable cascade of interconnectedness, from which it is surely possible to construct an overarching meaning—but I won’t try, and that is an instance of laziness (or what-you-may-call-it) which was a theme in my last: something which seems to me like a great creative principle. In Nature, or perhaps natural philosophy, known these days as science, it’s the principle of least effort. In disputation, known these days as philosophy, it is Ockam’s Razor. In wayfaring, it is not being too rigid about the route you will take. SatNav is one thing, wayfaring is another, or rather two things. There are those who set out on a journey in order to get back to where they started. In my literal wayfaring expeditions, this is of course my over-riding consideration. There may be perils along the route: mud, nettles, brambles, barbed wire or fierce bulls. But so long as I can get back home in reasonable time, and “in one piece”, to use the delightful English phrase, then all is well. Another kind of wayfaring, rather more metaphorical, is to pursue the myth of progress: the eternal quest for a better destination. You find it in the fairy tales of a young man who sets out to seek his fortune, taking advantage of chance encounters to better himself. The course of our lives may be seen as one or other kind of wayfaring, whether the homecoming circle or the line of progress. And yet, if we look deeper, there is no circle that isn’t a spiral, for by the time of our homecoming, the world, or our perceptions of it, have already changed: which is of course a theme in Homer’s Odyssey! What we think of as straight-line progress, for its part, tends to curve, till it comes full circle, and then it’s “déjà vu all over again”. Thus, death is like birth in reverse, but not quite. To add to the pile of paradoxes, I might add that the pursuit of laziness directs us to ever more intense concentration and inventiveness. For example, writing about laziness is hard work!

I can easily trace the curved path which led me to watch The Miracle Worker, starring Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It’s a well-defined series of chance encounters, beginning on 6th June 2010, on the occasion described in a certain post. On that day, I met my step-brother for the first time. We had “time-shared” the same father. Michael’s mother had left her husband and taken him to New Zealand. My mother married him and brought me to the same house in East Cowes that Michael had vacated.

But in the post I linked to above, I never mentioned a certain moment which occurred the same day. There’s a spot in West Cowes, my favourite in all the world, as captured in my illustration from Google Maps. In the front you see flower beds, on a corner of the road, and spreading there luxuriantly was a Jerusalem Sage, or Phlomis Fruticosa: the most impressive flowering plant I had ever seen. In one of those blind gropings for the recapture of a special moment, I looked it up when I got home, to see where I could get one; for covetousness is a force equal and opposite to laziness. This is how I met Steve Law, who runs Brighton Plants Nursery. He could supply the plant, at low cost, but there was a snag. It would not fit in my tiny backyard, even if I bought the more compact variety he recommended.

In Steve I encountered not just a nurseryman, but a novelist and friend. We encourage one another’s writing, and it was through him that I discovered Annie Dillard, and through her, Helen Keller. All this is mentioned in earlier posts, so by the principle of laziness I won’t repeat myself, but you can follow the links if you wish—if the rambling of my preamble isn’t enough already. Let’s cut to The Miracle Worker.

The film is based on a play by William Gibson. I rather like films derived from plays. They have a richness and theatricality. This one was revived on Broadway in 2010, the fiftieth anniversary of its first staging in London, but flopped: whether due to the production values or the homespun human values of the script, I cannot say. In the 1962 film, Anne Bancroft plays a feisty Irish Anne Sullivan, whose childhood was marred by her own blindness, her brother’s crippled hip and their struggle for survival together in an asylum where they played with rats instead of toys. Patty Duke is even more fiery as Helen Keller, and I read somewhere that the seven-minute catfight between them is a cinematic world record. Helen, blind and deaf since six months old, has been indulged as a hopeless retard, spoilt rotten as her high-achieving family’s only way to love her. Sullivan, her own sight restored through surgery, is the one person in the world hard enough, yet understanding enough, to take her on. Teaching her table-manners is the chosen battle-ground to break her in. Cap’n Keller is impressed that his daughter has been successfully taught to obey and conform to civilised behaviour. But he’s had enough of catfights and is ready to dismiss the firebrand Sullivan, saying her work is done. On the contrary, it has yet to begin. Discipline (in which Helen’s frustrated lashings-out are matched by harder slaps) is merely the ground or necessary background for the miracle which is to unfold.

Now, Helen has to be taught by rote, brought blindly to the point where she can see the point. Sullivan without benefit of specialised techniques teaches her to spell out words, using a primitive deaf-and-dumb sign language, demonstrated with hands and felt with hands. Helen has no idea what a letter is: nor that it is part of a word, for she doesn’t know what a word is, let alone a sentence; nor that it represents a sound, for she knows no sound. How can this possibly work? So she learns sequences of letters, like a kind of hand-wrestling, a sedentary Tai-Chi for two. It’s exactly like teaching a dog tricks, for she gets rewarded with approval (expressed in nods and smiles, which she can feel with her fingers) and morsels of cake. It’s not surprising that we find her one day teaching sign-language to the family dog. Though she can’t see, she’s upset when her aunt gives her a doll with no eyes: these have to be hastily sewn on as buttons. You’d think a blind-deaf child would be cut off from what goes on. But it ain’t so. She is just missing something else.

The hardest part of language, the bit which eludes Helen and baffles Annie, is to establish the relation between the word and the thing it signifies. Helen despite crashing around like a retard is very bright. She knows there is such a thing as speech, and it’s something she wants more than anything, more than sight and hearing. We know this because she feels the discussions around her, touches the faces, catches the vibrations of anger and joy. But she will have to learn to read and write before she can speak with her mouth. These later steps are beyond the scope of the screenplay which, miraculous as it is in portraying the first steps in meaningful communication, covers only a short period of the young Keller’s life.

Ah, the connection between words and reality: a problem which engaged Ludwig Wittgenstein’s entire adult life, from the Tractatus through to the Philosophical Investigations! There’s documented evidence, faithfully reproduced in the screenplay, that Helen was precocious as a baby. At six months old, before her two most vital senses were destroyed by scarlet fever, she had learned her first word: “wa-wa”—water.

Locked up in her, as in every human child, was the propensity to harbour concepts and name them. We see how different experiences of water connect in her mind, and how Annie tries to imprint the finger-spelling of “w” “a” “t” “e” and “r” so that she can associate them with experiences of the liquid. Then there is the magical experience when the pump-handle is worked, the water gushes out of the spout, Helen feels its lively coldness on her hands. Suddenly she utters “wa-wa”. Then the penny drops and she spontaneously sees the analogy between all these finger-signings and the simple movement of lips and breath. From this moment on, so brilliantly depicted cinematically, she is able to connect “m” “o” “t” “h” “e” and “r”—all these sequences which she has learned so well—as names for the important beings in her life. Only then can this intelligent child learn to think—to claim this human birthright which distinguishes us from the other animals.

What a film! It shows us, in a human drama which brings us to tears many times along the way, who we are and why. This, my dear reader, is just a few drops of that cascade of interconnectedness, whose overarching meaning shines like a rainbow across a waterfall, that I struggle and fail to communicate. But by the principle of laziness, I need not try too hard. All I can do is work the pump. Out comes “wa-wa”! Things click into place. I don’t know how to join the dots, the sparkling drops which refract in the sun, but I shall strive to be a Pointillist and let you join them yourself, in an understanding which may become more coherent than my expression.

Not trying too hard

I left the car at The Fox and Hounds in Christmas Common, and made my way down Hollandridge Lane, which has never been more than a cart-track, but offers glorious vistas on a perfect spring day. Not a farmhouse in sight, not a fellow-wayfarer or dog-walker, not even a sheep till I reached Pishill, and saw some huddling in the shade, under a curved shelter of galvanised iron. But the bluebells were on parade. The wild violets and wood anemones, dandelion, primrose, white deadnettle, yellow archangel, all greeted me as I passed. It was a day to feel whole, to abandon care, to live in the simplicity of your own clothed and booted body, covering the ground like a Stone-Age wayfarer on a mission, untroubled by too much thought. At least that is what I supposed, for it seemed to me that I had been just walking, with no particular train of thought.

But in the seventh mile, twenty minutes from regaining sight of the Fox and Hounds, an odd idea popped into my head, out of the blue: it’s not a good idea to try too hard. The world is overheated with it—literally. Enough striving, ambition, “pursuit of excellence”. Teachers should stop urging their pupils on. In any case, they don’t really do it for the pupils’ sake, but for targets. Everything is driven by targets. Result: everyone is insecure.

Reader, I’m not preaching my new doctrine. I’m just reporting the thought that came to me in the dappled sunshine, walking back up to Christmas Common, back up that Hollandridge Lane. And since I didn’t know where it came from, I tried to give it meaning and context. Suppose we each did what we found came naturally: sometimes lazy, sometimes driven by the joy of doing what we can do, even indulging it to excess. The standard of living would fall. We would no longer be such slaves to productivity and economic growth. We would gain in personal dignity.

I thought about the various regions of Africa before the European slave-traders, missionaries and colonists arrived. I felt they would have been better off and more in harmony with the rest of Nature. My grandmother was in Kenya in the Fifties. She justified the white man’s appropriation of the black man’s land in terms of her own recollections. She had gone there for her health, to ease her painful arthritis, and liked to sketch scenes in water colours. She said the Africans loved to sit laughing and lazing in the shade of a tree all day, while the white man strained to get the best yield from the land with his plantations of tea and coffee. There was no doubt in her mind which was the good, strenuous, Christian thing to do. And what did the indigenous people think? The young braves among the Kikuyu showed by their deeds how much they appreciated the kindness of the white settlers. They started the Mau-Mau uprising.

So, I found meaning in the thought: “It’s not a good idea to try too hard.” But where did it come from? The blue sky? Then I remembered. I’d been absorbed in Nature, aware that it was much more than the wild flowers, the trees in their new foliage, the calling birds and the bumbling bumble-bees. I knew that creatures struggling for survival eat each other, sometimes even their own young. When the cuckoo hatches in its foster-parents’ nest (in England typically a reed-warbler’s), it heaves the other eggs out, for its appetite matches that of the whole brood. I thought of cuckoos because at the edge of a field I found olive-coloured shells, four of them scattered, the size of pigeon-eggs, and I wondered how they got there. Then I realized I could not put all my vague notions of Nature into one basket; some of them were second-hand anyway, for I am no naturalist. I traced them to their source: Annie Dillard, the Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Then I had thought, “I love her writing: but she tries too hard.” It’s none of my business how hard another writer tries, but I thought if she tried less hard, she would be easier to read. Not only that, but she teaches writing too! And in some distant hero-worshipping way, I am her student too, so it matters doubly to me.

I don’t even have to open her book The Writing Life, because the publishers have kindly provided an extract on the dustjacket, from which I take a paragraph to illustrate how hard she tries:

A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which you now can’t catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room. You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, ‘Simba!’

Phew! After copying it out, I feel I must go and lie down for a bit. Its magnificence is undeniable; but I prefer understatement. It reinforces an already-established conviction: for me, the blog essay is the highest literary molehill which I dare climb. I do try, but not too hard.

Then, this morning, synchronistically, I read Bryan’s comment on my last, which includes these words.

My number one cardinal rule of writing, which I recently passed on to my daughter, is that good writing should be like good acting. If it’s done right, it shouldn’t even be noticed.

I hope Annie teaches that, too.

The moment

I went out to the backyard on Sunday morning. Purpose: to hang washing out on the line. The sky above was blue. There are trees beyond the fence, growing in the children’s playground, and on one of them I saw a little bird, insistently repeating the same note: “Tweet; tweet; tweet” as its ancestors had done perhaps for a hundred thousand years. Behind its monotonous song was a hush, a wide silence which carried a scrap of conversation from half a block away, or a small clatter when someone dropped something. From the backyard, I looked at our row of joined-together houses, their shared chimney-pots outlined against the blue. Then I remembered to hang the washing, taking care to hang each item well, and peg it in matching colours with domestic pride like the generations of my forebears, or (in the case of my mother’s family) the servants of her forebears. I wanted to distil the scene like a perfume. Could I run for the camera, take a shot that took it all in at once: the bird on the branch, the pastel colours of the garments and their plastic pegs, the warm brick colours of the chimney-stacks and their terra-cotta pots against the blue, the pure white blossoms on our cherry-tree? No: I must paint it in words.

This is the fourth spring we’ve lived here. My ambitions for the garden are less each year. In winter the sun doesn’t reach it. You can only start working it in spring. I went out and bought a new stiff broom for the side path, the part where the sun doesn’t reach even in summer. There wasn’t really time for all this, it wasn’t relevant to the day’s plans, but I had to pay my respects to the moment. Who does not live for special moments? Instants of time fall on us like snowflakes in a lifelong blizzard, each ice-crystal unique. Some expanses of time are dull, others unwelcome; a few we are determined to forget. From the album of moments we choose those which define to our satisfaction who we are, who we decide to be. We stretch the handwoven fabric of our imagination to fill Eternity and Infinity with our ideal vision.

So let me sum up my life as that Sunday morning backyard, my miniature Eden of momentary perfection: not for the first time. I’ve written about it more than once here, and used to mention hanging out washing in my Blogger Profile, as the sole item under ‘Interests’. I imagine that everyone identifies their essence, or imagined source of joy, by reference to the moments which seem to release them from mortality into another place. I sympathise with the person who tells me that Jesus is her saviour; for that is the label she attaches to her defining moment. She has perhaps had an experience which corresponds to John 10:9.

—I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.

So I can understand and respect her religion, whoever she is, or whatever his religion happens to be. I understand perfectly that having known a divine moment—perhaps one no longer than the time it took me to hang out those clothes on the line, whilst I heard that Sunday morning hush, felt the whole world quivering and new-born like a Spring lamb under the April sky—he has dedicated his life to it.

In the nature of things, these moments are not continuous, and so we may dedicate ourselves to courting them, with prayers and pilgrimages: all to be worthy of the moment’s gift.

The search for meaning (the mystery of being human 3)

I had a gift token to spend at the only bookshop in town, and frankly I didn’t see anything I wanted. But then I was drawn to a certain book. I looked at it the first time rather idly, and thought to myself, “No, this is written by a Viennese psychiatrist. I have had enough of them.” I had been attracted to this profession at the beginning of my career, but joined a computer company instead. Then towards the end of my career, around 10 years ago, I started to train in counselling and psychotherapy, according to the ‘person-centred’ methods of Carl Rogers; became disillusioned with the training; got miraculously cured of a chronic illness, trained as a therapist to help others get cured too; got disillusioned with that.

But I came back to the book a second time, and bought it——serendipitously. Serendipity was “coined by Horace Walpole, who says (Let. to Mann, 28 Jan. 1754) that he had formed it upon the title of the fairy-tale ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’, the heroes of which ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of” (Oxford English Dictionary).

The book is Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl. In 1942 he was incarcerated in Auschwitz, and spent the years till the liberation of 1945 in several concentration camps. They took away from him the manuscript of his first book, which had been ready for submission to a publisher, so his work was lost. His parents, siblings and wife all died in the camps. He alone survived, despite getting typhus and enduring daily horrors, whose details he sketches over lightly but adequately. After the war he chose to return to Vienna and continue his psychotherapeutic work, a courageous act. For the perpetrators of the Holocaust still lived there, and most of the surviving victims fled to America, Israel——or anywhere to get out.

The book answers so well some questions that I’ve been raising & discussing in recent days, that I’m tempted to quote from it. Where to start? I recommend it in total, not a few sentences and paragraphs. In fact, I have quoted from it before, here; but that was long ago, before I read the book.

Still, in view of some recent discussions, including Ashok’s recent post on the purpose of life, I would like to summarize Frankl’s attitude to meaning in life. He says that we construct meaning for ourselves, moment to moment. If I am to find meaning for my whole life, I must wait till the end, as in a movie, to see how the parts have fitted into the whole. I cannot dictate the meaning of my life, but (continues Frankl, in his role as psychotherapist),

... conscience (is) a prompter which, if need be, indicates the direction on which we have to move in a given life situation. In order to carry out such a task, conscience must apply a measuring stick to the situation one is confronted with, and this situation has to be evaluated in the light of one’s hierarchy of values. These values, however, cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious level——they are something that we are. They have crystallized in the course of the evolution of our species; they are founded on our biological past and are rooted in our biological depth. Konrad Lorenz might have had something similar in mind when he developed the concept of a biological a priori, and when both of us recently discussed my own view on the biological foundation of the valuing process, he enthusiastically expressed his accord.

Yes! The biological. I must not finish without mentioning another fragment of serendipity. I’ve got into the late-night habit of Kindle-reading while my beloved is asleep. The thing has its own tiny light, and when I’m too tired to take in the words, I go shopping at the Kindle Store. That’s when I downloaded Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. I found that Chapters 1, “Variation under Domestication”, and 2, “Variation under Nature”, address very precisely some of the issues raised in the previous post. But still there are mysteries, and these are what I shall hope to address later.

The Keeper of Souls (The mystery of being human 2)

I usually attach a picture, one or more, to each piece. It’s a kind of comfort thing, something to cling to when your eyes glaze over the text uncomprehendingly. Today’s picture is itself principally text, its message an explicit offer of comfort.

The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: yea, it is even he that shall keep thy soul.
(Psalm 121.)

I took the photo whilst passing through the churchyard at Hambleden, a tiny village that doesn’t seem to have changed since the Middle Ages, and may for all I know be still enmeshed in the feudal system, though its origins go further back. It has its own page on Wikipedia, so I’ll not trouble you with further description*.

I can’t help being lazy, if that’s the right word. Part of me urges the scribing of a closely-argued essay that holds together and appeals to reason, but the stronger impulse is to write what comes into my head. (Later: what I publish here is some sort of compromise.) My lackadaisical attitude stems from a vision of time in abundance, stretching out ahead of me like a bright landscape in Spring; or glittering like a hoard of gold coins, that I like to let run through my fingers for the sensuous thrill, rather than spend it on some meaningful cause.

Sometimes I feel I have something unique to offer, and that this is the reason I’m given this endless-seeming vista of leisure, good health and freedom from want. It never occurs to me that anything I have to offer would be delivered in a medium other than words, and yet I have no desire to be a professional writer. So I just thread pretty beads called words into sentences, paragraphs and so on, despite not knowing what tapestry of beadwork might result. At such times, ‘not knowing’ is the closest I can come to describing a ‘method’——too strong a word, methinks. But then I surround myself with certain authors——Pessoa, Dillard, John Cowper Powys, Conrad, Wittgenstein, Dostoievsky. I see that they have managed to find words for things that I still don’t know how to express. Then I think I am just biding my time, practising, limbering up, keeping mentally fit but not competing in the actual sport.

As title of my last piece hints, I’ve been thinking a lot about the mystery of being human. What is it that makes us so different from the other animals? One of the things, the one that seems to me the most significant, is how different we are from each other. I see from my study window a couple of magpies squabbling in a tree. You cannot tell one from the other. They’re like identical twins, clad in the same uniform. Contrariwise, we each have the trait of uniqueness, almost as if each one of us is a different species. Naturally, I speak in a poetic sense. Scientifically, a species is ... defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring (Wikipedia).

The differences I’m mostly thinking of are in our ways of seeing things. I’m sure I’m not the first to think of human variation as a spectrum, with ‘conformity’ at the left and ‘individuality’ at the right. We seem to be moving towards individuality more rapidly than ever before. The effect of global communication is to accelerate difference rather than produce an homogenous mixture. This seems paradoxical: you might expect a blend, as when you put disparate ingredients in a blender. Not so: the more humanity travels and mingles, loves and fights, the more diverse the resulting rainbow.

Two mysteries, then: being so different from the other animals, and being so different from each other. I suddenly had an idea. My hunch was that the diversity so characteristic of mankind originates from the incest taboo, which (I thought) probably does not exist in apes, for example. I searched via Google and found this, from an article by Phil Bartle, an emeritus professor of sociology, on his Community Empowerment Collective website:

If we look at all our primate cousins, we find that incest is practised one way or another by all of them, except us.

We suspect, therefore, that the taboo goes back to somewhere around the very origins of humankind, the origins of human culture.

We see the origin of culture as having something to do with the use of tools (sophisticated and complicated tools, as other primates use simple tools) and language (sophisticated and complicated languages, as other primates use simple forms of language).

We now suspect that the three traits, tools, language, and the incest taboo, are all related to each other and related to the origin of humanity.

The incest taboo requires that we must exchange mates between groups, and that exchange was required for us to communicate and develop our tools (increasing our likelihood to survive, thrive and reproduce).

Early ‘families,’ based upon the taboo, were part of those which developed culture, technology and co-operation, and survived while our close cousins (the Neanderthals?) did not.

I’ve been in life-long conflict between the imperative to conform, especially in childhood, and the need to express my individuality. I don’t suppose this is at all unusual, but it’s only now that I can pick up the threads in idleness, as it were, and unravel them from the tight ball of hitherto-unquestioned assumptions. Intellect is useless in telling me ‘who I really am’—as a unique individual, as opposed to a specimen of homo sapiens sapiens. For intellect is forged through language and culture, both of which pull me into their tight centre: conformity.

There’s an urge in me to be on the outside of the fold: well, not quite ‘beyond the pale’, but somewhere near its periphery. At this frontier, I look at what my species sees itself as, in what may be its collective delusion. Homo sapiens, at least in its most dominant culture, is inordinately proud of its thinking, its spirituality, its godlike nature. (Atheists have have more godlike pretensions than devout worshippers!) But gazing from the edge of the community of thinkers, I wonder if mankind is in some way monstrous, neurotic, Nature’s worst mistake. Nature has its balance, its equilibrium, but from Gaia’s point of view (I refer to James Lovelock’s conception of Nature as a single complex organism) man is the biggest catastrophe it has yet had to face.

And so my analysis comes full circle back to the Book of Genesis:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth over the earth.

So far so good, for that was just the initial setup, after which it went wrong, as the Hebrew authors of Genesis could clearly see and poetically described, in Adam and Eve’s forced exile from Eden. Man was the renegade animal, the inventor of evil: this was apparent, and required to be explained in a myth. In the Psalms we see that man, this monstrous deviation from normal healthy animalhood, needs God as his comforter: God the Smiter of Enemies and Keeper of Souls.

What foolishness to replace the Comforter with the cold facts of science, and the arrogance of militant atheism! We are not perfectible, but (in Biblical terms) ‘fallen’. For all our science and philosophy and the mixed blessings they offer, we strut on this stage but a short time. It doesn’t mean anything to know if there ‘really is’ a Lord who shall preserve me from evil, and be the keeper of my soul. In faith is comfort; and comfort is real. I feel as if I have solved a mystery.

*Here’s a photo of Hambleden village.

PS Map specially for Ashok (see second comment):

The mystery of being human (1)

I live in a valley, in one of the Victorian workers’ cottages that fill up the space between the small factories in which they worked. It’s a fold in the Chiltern Hills and unless you follow one of the rivers, upstream or down, you have to go up a hill to get anywhere.

So at the end of my street, I went south, past the traffic lights and up, till the road ends at a small nature reserve.

Looking back from the summit, I took a snap of the hill at the other side of the valley, towards the north.

Towards the east is a small valley, its slopes thoroughly built-up like those towards the north. The trees on the right are on the site of a prehistoric settlement, I believe a kind of hill fort. In those days, if an enemy approached, you would gather up your women, children, horses, dogs and sheep into this place, whose earthworks and palisades would be defensible.

On the other side of the nature reserve, you come to a large industrial estate. There amongst a myriad suppliers you will find the headquarters of Monodraught Ltd, which makes Sunpipe, a way to bring natural daylight into dark parts of buildings, and Windcatcher, which cools a building without consuming electricity.

Beside a large supermarket, invisible to the eye till you reach it, is a public footpath which takes you to a tunnel under the motorway. You can see it was built to accommodate a road, with its concrete surface and sidewalk, but it goes “nowhere”.

To the wayfarer it’s a highway to heaven, for in two minutes you are away from the sound of traffic and on an ancient trail, beside a cherry tree in full blossom.

And here is the blossom of whitethorn (I think) proffering its pollen to any passing bee.

After much wandering the lonely paths, not encountering a soul, I reach a mysterious gateway.

Within are two signs. I am stupefied by the stupas. Whoever erected them was not stupid.

“A stupa’s power to purify the energies of the planet cannot be measured.”

Yes. I think very few will disagree with that; though someone somewhere will probably try to design some measuring equipment for that very purpose.

“The blessing of an encounter with its form and the Merit of helping it to manifest is inconceivable and indestructible.”

Well, not quite inconceivable. At first I could not conceive why someone had “helped it to manifest”—i.e. built it. But now I can conceive it quite easily. For the Merit.

Unfettered

When you have a computer with Web access, you can find photos of almost anything, taken by better photographers with better cameras than you and yours.

But it doesn’t stop us, bloggers and Flickrs and just plain snappers, from indulging in the global festival of digital photography, that celebrates “I woz here!”—though mainly in the sunshine. In my outdoor shots, it’s usually sunny, just as in old family albums you see only high days, holidays and picnics. Photos help me remember where I’ve been and what I did, in this instance stroll by a stream in the public park, on Tuesday 15th March.

What is it that we respond to in Nature? Why does it lift my soul—or rather remind me what soul is?* The question has been asked by poet-philosophers enough times. This is Wordsworth having a go, in Tintern Abbey:

                            Though absent long,
These forms of beauty have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: . . .
                            Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Never mind the ‘Absolute’†. If there must be a label for some nameless thing that I get from Nature, let it be the ‘Sublime’, for that’s what Wordsworth calls it, later in the same poem:

                            And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Yet there is no point in just trying to walk in the footsteps of Wordsworth, even though his words are testimony and signpost. We—he, you and I—are sharers in humanity, so we can feel what he feels directly and for ourselves. Give thanks that we still have setting suns, the round ocean, the living air, and the mind of man—though we live in an age which fears that all these are threatened by insidious pollution. We don’t have to be poets or even readers of poetry.

We just have to be naked enough to let ourselves be touched, so that the fetters which circumscribe us may fall off, letting us embrace, and be embraced by, the All.

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* Annie Dillard advises writers to avoid use of the word ‘soul’. Well, note this, Annie, you are not my mentor and I am not a ‘writer’!

† As in my previous post.

PS Damn, I’ve inadvertently written a sermon. Please forgive.