Letters to the Universe

Painting by Nancy Poucher: click it for source

I was inspired by a recent essay on Rebbecca Hill’s blog, entitled “Here is where I am”. I’ll give you the link later. What struck me specially was her saying so many personal things that applied to my own case—the situation she describes, the questions she asks. I recently asked myself those questions too, and found answers to them, enough to look at Rebb’s words and say “Here is where I was”. She’s given me permission to refer to her post, so I’ll start by quoting those parts which reflect my own case.

. . . as a writer, I am in a sort of limbo as to how exactly to label what I write. . . .

What do I write? I am a journal writer, but I realize that in addition to being a journal writer, because I like to process my surroundings and interactions with people, places, and things—I tend to write reflective pieces. I like the freedom of free writing, and when I allow myself, I like the stream of consciousness aspects that sneak into my writing. I write a lot about my . . . own life and observations, so in that regard I write memoir. I also enjoy writing personal essays, but I don’t know how many of my blogs can be called essays. . . .

I’ve written vignettes, but what do I do with them if I envision including them as part of a collection? What if I want to create a book that is part memoir, part reflection, part essay . . .

How do I include all of these pieces of me into one whole?

I do best when I write about the truth—about what I see and maybe sometimes I can tell it slant—I’m not sure yet. . . . What I gravitate towards is holding life up with the tips of my fingers and examining it—life’s beauties and the nooks and crannies in between—and also how I process life. Is this enough? If any of it touches just one person in some way, that’s enough.

I don’t think I could imagine myself not blogging. I’d like to imagine myself blogging into eternity.

Her thoughts were triggered by joining a writers’ group. That’s where we differ, I thought. A few weeks ago I went round to our new Arts Centre and chatted with its chief. He asked me if I’d like to start a writers’ group. How little he knows me, I thought. Lone wolves don’t even join groups, let alone run them. And as for starting one. . . ! But still I thought about it afterwards, played with the idea of being part of a local community of creative minds. How would I present myself, and what I’ve done to date? I toyed with starting a new blog, and actually launched it, but I could only fill it with extracts from this blog over the last six years relating to the neighbourhood; trying to show how it looks through my eyes, trying to attract artists and writers to this place I called “Somewhere near Green Street”. It felt a little like van Gogh inviting Gauguin and other artists to join him at the Yellow House in Arles. I realized soon enough that I cannot be part of a “scene”, cannot have alliances and loyalties. They make me false to myself. As Rebb says, “I like the freedom of free writing!”

And then today I saw a sign in the local library that someone is starting a Writers’ Group there. So I sent in my name, and received an emailed response: The first meeting will largely be getting to know each other, and seeing what everyone wants out of the group. Although, if you have any work you want to bring for people to get a sense of your style, you’re more than welcome to. What would I bring? Not this post! Since we are meeting in a library, how about Gilgamesh: book for our time? No. Perhaps Reading, and other extreme sports?

This, though, would not answer the question which Rebb asked herself: “how exactly to label what I write?” So here’s my own answer: “letters to the Universe”. It’s no good saying I am a blogger. That’s as uninformative as saying “What do I write? Paperbacks.” A letter to the Universe is a kind of message in a bottle, entrusted to the oceans of space and time. It’s the very symbol of literature. But what Rebb and I mean is something more intimate and personal. For the personal is the universal. We are all pieces of the same rock, and language helps join the pieces back again into a whole, but only if I am me and you are you. We must preserve our individual shapes, and speak only of what we know, each our own truth, with the inner eye’s aid.

“Very well,” says someone in the writer’s group, as I inwardly rehearse that first meeting. “I hear what you’re saying—I think—but I still don’t understand. Is this some new genre? If you could point to a role model, that would help.”

All right, here we go:

1. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). He wrote not for fame or fortune but to please himself, and in so doing invented the essay form in literature.

2. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). “Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal.” (Richard Zenith, his translator). Manuscripts for his projected Book of Disquiet were found in a wooden chest in his Lisbon apartment after his death.

3. Anne Frank (1929-1945). After her death in a Nazi concentration camp her Diary was found in the apartment where she had hidden with her family in Amsterdam during the wartime occupation of Holland.

I wouldn’t have thought of her, but her cousin Buddy Elias gave an interview on the radio last Monday. He had known her when they were both children. When the diaries were discovered and published he never thought they would sell out the 1500 copies in the first edition.

He continues: Otto [Anne’s father, who survived the war] always said ‘I didn’t know my daughter till I read her diary.’ And it was the same with me . . . the deep thoughts, the humanistic thinking. For me she was a playful, lovely young girl. But these wonderful thoughts—absolutely new. I still get letters from people who tell me ‘Anne Frank’s diary has changed my life.’

So much for role models—they are purely aspirational. But they emphasise my point, that only without compromise and self-censorship, unfettered by allegiances—owing nothing to publishers, agents or even writing groups—can I (borrowing Rebb’s words again) write about the truth—about what I see and maybe sometimes I can tell it slant—I’m not sure yet. . . . What I gravitate towards is holding life up with the tips of my fingers and examining it—life’s beauties and the nooks and crannies in between.

Or in my own words, pondering the question “What is this enigma called life?”

Here’s that promised link to Rebb’s post.

Censored mail, WWII: click pic for source

Everything desires

Said CIngram, in a discussion of his recent post, Misunderstanding Evolution:

I would be interested to hear your diatribe on teleology, if you still have the urge to produce one.

Did I still have the urge? I wasn’t sure. I eventually responded:

Yes, I feel that whatever dire accusations are fired by either side in this contentious topic, Darwin is invariably innocent.

As for my threatened diatribe, it may take a while. This goes into strange territory. I feel a blog post coming.

Most of the territory in question is extremely well-trodden, by much more distinguished minds than mine. Only fools rush in where angels fear to tread. For a change, I must study and think before I speak. First, to the dictionary!

Teleology: The doctrine or study of ends or final causes, esp. as related to the evidences of design or purpose in nature; also transf. such design as exhibited in natural objects or phenomena.*

This careful definition provides no hint of the raging conflict unleashed by the publication of Darwin’s systematic observations and explanatory theories. They were seen as an unprovoked attack on the Christian cosmogony. Darwin in later life was agnostic, but had no wish to upset the Church, of which he remained an active member. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_of_Charles_Darwin for more. But the Church rallied its defence forces, and felt itself forced to counter-attack. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_to_Darwin%27s_theory.

Here’s another definition, which does give a clue to the source of the controversy, and a possible solution too:

1881 G. J. Romanes in Nature 27 Oct. “Teleology in this larger sense, or the doctrine that behind all the facts open to scientific enquiry . . . there is ‘Mind and Will’ as the ultimate cause of all things . . . does not fall within the scope of scientific method.”†

* OED (Oxford English Dictionary): definition.
† OED: illustrative quotation.

In his definition, George Romanes declares that scientific method does not take into account the possibility that Mind and Will may be the ultimate cause of all things. By following the link, we find that Romanes, like Darwin, started off as a Christian but like Darwin became an agnostic. It seems to me this was by choice and not necessity.

I’m steadfast on a single crucial point in this argument. Millions of things may fall outside the scope of scientific method, but that does not make them false, for scientific method is a doctrine like any other. It’s a doctrine limiting the ways in which Truth can be apprehended. It’s the way they do things in that highly-cultivated garden called Science. Fair enough, but it’s not the case that beyond the walls of that garden is a desert where no Truth grows. Scientists have not established supremacy over you and me, so that they can tell us whether our thoughts and feelings have truth-value or not; or that we are too ignorant to criticise their ideas or actions. I don’t challenge their claims as a profession (1) to have helped improve material conditions for the human species (2) to have exposed many superstitions as baseless and baneful. But scientific method is a discipline which applies only to scientists in the performance of their professional duties. A judge at a dinner-party won’t object to gossip for its being hearsay: won’t arrive at the table in his wig and gown. Being a judge is merely his job. Scientists could have the same attitude.

I accept Darwin’s theory and subsequent elaborations, so far as they go, but when I wonder why the giraffe has a long neck, I have no hesitation in concluding that its ancestors wanted to browse the higher branches of trees. Wanting is not enough, of course. As an old English proverb says, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride”—meaning everyone knows that wishing by itself is not enough. Nevertheless, as another proverb reassures us, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Man yearns to fly? He invents the aircraft; by trial and error, as it happens, just as in Evolution.

But the moment you say “trial and error” you invoke teleology. Unless you have a purpose you cannot make an error. Any outcome will do. As another proverb says, “If you don’t care where you are, you ain’t lost”. Yet the article on trial and error linked above contains this:

Biological evolution is also a form of trial and error. Random mutations and sexual genetic variations can be viewed as trials and poor reproductive fitness, or lack of improved fitness, as the error. Thus after a long time ‘knowledge’ of well-adapted genomes accumulates simply by virtue of them being able to reproduce.

So this is what we have learned to expect: that evolution works by randomness, which incidentally and without any hint of purpose leads to the survival of the fittest, and by some magic mysterious mechanism produces distinct species.

Of one thing we can be quite certain: that the human animal is driven by specific purposes, which predominate over innate instinct. Every purpose, we may say, is shaped by desire, driven by a combination of emotion and imagination, with intellect serving both, and helping create coherent action out of the clash of impulses that we feel. This is true as I write this article, try to make it lucid, bring it to a desired and already-imagined conclusion.

I see no reason to deny this motive force, desire, to the giraffe; or for that matter, to the slug. In a Wikipedia article on “Four Causes”, we find this:

Final cause, or telos, is defined as the purpose, end, aim, or goal of something. Aristotle, who defined the term, explicitly argued that a telos can be present without any form of deliberation, consciousness or intelligence in general.

For example, the telos of a seed is to become an adult plant.

I’m not a philosopher any more than I’m a scientist. But I think that everything in Nature is motivated by desire. For I am a representative part of nature: I experience myself directly, from the inside. This is my scientific method. And when my body ceases to have any desire to perform actions in this life, then it disintegrates into its component materials, which are still not dead because the desire remains in each molecule and atom to re-form and combine; to contribute to new life. For life is desire. Everything is alive, everything desires.

Everything Knows

“The tree which moves some to tears of
joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green
thing that stands in the way. Some see
Nature all Ridicule and Deformity...”
—Blake

I’ve published two of Ghetu’s stories before: Free as a Bird and Ticket to Paradise. Here is his latest. Like the others, it’s the result of a collaborative process that we’ve developed over the last six years. It works like this. The inspiration speaks to him in Bengali, which he translates into an expressive but non-standard English. My edit is a further process, whose results I submit back to him, bracing myself for the usual cries, “I hate you for this!” “You seem to think our readers will be stupid. We’re not writing for that sort” and so forth. His comments are astute; his instructions are precise, and I obey them. He’s the singer-songwriter, I’m the producer in the background. Or perhaps he’s like Mussorgsky, composing Pictures at an Exhibition as a piano solo; like Ravel, or many other arrangers, I score it for full orchestra. All the colours were there in the original version, just needed another musician to translate them.

Further to my previous post, I had a wonderful week in Holland, have tried to write about it but got stuck. The rest of the time I’ve been deeply engaged with the art, poetry and life of William Blake. By coincidence, this story, “Everything Knows”, is profoundly Blakean: but that’s Ghetu’s input, not mine.

Everything Knows

Once there was a lonely tree, despised by her species and shunned by every bird. For she was a sinner. It made no difference that she did not sin on her own account, derived no benefit from her transgression. Her fault was simply to aid and abet the sinning of others, by having taken root in this particular spot.

When spring came, the time when trees put forth blossoms in myriad colours, she obeyed the same joyful impulse: she blossomed too. With her branches outstretched and laden, she offered red flowers to the Universe, for the bees to exchange her essence with another of the species, which she could thereby claim as her lover. But the bees didn’t come. There were cuckoos in the neighbourhood, but none stood on her branch to sing: not a cuck, not a coo. No bird took refuge in her foliage to utter a single tweet.

Thus her time passed in silence. She still grew fresh leaves and shed them, according to the calendar of seasons. In winter, her rugged bark was exposed; she shrivelled and closed her eyes in pain. She lost her finery, stood stark and skeletal. But then always, her disappointment was forgotten with the turn of the year, when her sap rose and all her dashed hopes rekindled. In spring she would dress in green, adorn herself again in red jewels: all to find a mate, someone to call lover.

Once more the boycott of bees; silence instead of coos and tweets. They didn’t just refuse to play Cupid in her courting rituals, they refused to use her branches for their own wooing and mating. For she was a sinner.

Glancing down at her trunk, she felt tears welling up at the sight of a new flock of goats tied to her trunk. They stood there bewildered. Later, they were paralyzed in horror, seeing one of their family hanging from a hook. A man had slit its throat. Now he came back to chop pieces of flesh from its helpless carcass.

They knew they were facing the same fate. The youngest was a kid six months old, bleating in fear, frantically seeking the mother’s teat, its sole comfort in a cruel world. It pulled against its halter but the rope was too strong and the tree wouldn’t yield.

With each pull on her trunk, the tree cried out. If only she could yield! Then this bleating kid could escape. She’d give him wings if she could, but was powerless. She was literally rooted to the spot. If trees could wilfully end their lives, now would be the moment.

She’d known the butcher for the last thirty years, ever since she was a sapling. He was good at his job, wielding the knife with no expression on his face. For every poor animal dragged to this spot in full knowledge of its fate, her heart would thump fast. The air would be full of anguish. That unconscious lot, the humans, could hear the goats’ cries as they went about their business. The awakened ones, the spirits, could hear the tree weeping as well. She was no mere bystander. Had she not given shelter to each unfortunate animal, offered her precious bark for it to chew upon? Souls connected. There was a brief illusion of family.

Silent weeping was the only protest she could make. Why couldn’t she just die?

The butcher applied his knife to the kid’s throat. She saw its four legs helplessly kicking. She felt as though a devil were crushing her chest, freezing her rigid. If her cry could have been heard, it would be “I want to live, I want to live! Don’t kill me like this, I don’t want to die!” She was pleading to the butcher, to everyone around; to all of Existence.

****
One day she saw the butcher—his name was Rehman—arguing in front of his shop. A group of people were showing him something. They had strange instruments and charts.

The next day she saw Rehman with other shopkeepers sitting in a row across the road, to stop any vehicle passing. They had closed their shops. For once there were no goats tied to her trunk. She could breathe easy.

Some uniformed people with sticks and guns came to disperse the protest. They struck Rehman heavy blows. Blood dripped from his head and he cried out in pain. She was moved to compassion. Had they not known one another for thirty years? He was a mere lad when he opened the shop and they had grown up together, like brother and sister. She wept too.

A few days later, the shops were all flattened by a great machine. It didn’t take much to turn them into a pile of rubble. His eyes still blackened from the beating, his head bandaged, Rehman watched in bewilderment. He stayed till evening, stroking the broken bricks, saying farewell. Then, as darkness fell, he came to the still-silent tree and hugged her too. Their two souls communed. This was their last meeting, they both knew. He left, followed by a flock of ghostly goats, with the six-month-old kid gambolling joyfully in the lead.

The road was to be widened. Now came the time for felling the trees, the humble ones and the arrogant—those who would despise her till their last moments. At last a woodcutter drew near. It was the turn for her own beating heart to be extinguished, like all those goats, all those other trees. At the sight of the glinting axe she stopped breathing. “No, I don’t want to die! No! No! No!” The invisible spirits around her were in anguish too.

She hollered. The unaware—the humans, that is—paid no heed. Life went on. Being thoroughly rooted, she couldn’t escape. No earthquake arrived in time to save her.

There had been rain the previous night, first rain of the season, releasing its special scent from the parched ground. The sun now rose higher in the sky, to bake the soil surface dry again. The woodcutter took his time. Paperwork had to be completed. But then it was done, and he swung his axe, embedding its sharp blade in her trunk. She felt the pain but regarded him clear-eyed while he paused. “So, this is death? Just this? Why, it’s easy! A little fear, a little pain . . .” Suddenly, she was ready to meet death face-to-face.

The woodcutter wasn’t young. That day, he’d already cut down a mahogany tree. Two blows on this one was enough to set him sweating again. She felt a kinship with this man, his face as gnarled as her trunk, his mouth dry and panting. She had kept some raindrops on her leaves, folded them away, hidden them in crevices against the fierce Sun. She loved water, treasured every drop. At the third blow, which seemed to exhaust him, she shook her leaves to give him a little cool shower. That much she could do on his behalf. And she whispered, “Be well!”

The man looked up, pleased. Two souls met, he thanked her. She smiled kindly, the surrounding spirits danced. A cuckoo arrived on one of her branches, cooed. Some little birds followed, and filled the air with their twittering.