The Story of Old English

This was my great grandfather’s watch, on my mother’s side. But is that my mother’s maternal or paternal grandfather? I don’t know for sure and I’ve no one to ask now, but I’m favouring the maternal side at the moment, though I’ve nothing more to go on other than gut feelings and the images that arise when I’m handling it. In other words I’m weaving stories with very little to go on. But that’s what writer’s do; they take the unknown and make it knowable, whether it be the truth or not, because even holding to a myth is better than saying we’ve no idea at all.

I discovered it among the keepsake belongings of a dear aunt who passed away recently – along with copies of wills, and family birth and death certificates going back to the 1850′s. The watch was thunder black and looked quite sorry for itself. The minute hand was missing, the seconds bent, and it wasn’t running.

A quick clean-up revealed a silver cased English Lever, hallmarked 1899. I consulted an old fashioned jeweller who was able to get it going for me. The missing finger was replaced with one that doesn’t really match, but apart from that the watch runs well now – most of the time.

I’ve written about old watches  before, being a bit of a collector – always on the lookout for the half busted, bent and obsolete waifs and strays of a bygone era. I’ve waxed lyrical about their significance, speculated on their archetypal, psychological meanings – and described how at times of inner transition I find myself obsessing over my collection. Then this one turns up – the great grand daddy of them all – the size and weight of a small cannonball, pregnant with history, all of it muddled, mythical, and possibly irrelevant, yet rising from my unconscious like a well aimed torpedo and suddenly sinking me further down into my own past than I’ve ever been before.

And while I consider the story of this old pocket-watch, I feel the currents that normally drive my own fictions are becalmed, as if lost in the balance that follows a deep sigh. Indeed I find myself wondering if there’s another story in me now, or if I’m spent. It would have been unthinkable at one time, this sense of creative emptiness, but now I really don’t care. I’ve tried several fresh avenues since finishing my last novel. I’ve rummaged among the stuff on the back burner, but I find it all trite and foolish, and I’ve set it  aside. Seven novels are enough, I think. So let the muse sleep, and me with her, in some Arcadian bower for a thousand years. And when we wake, let it be without the need to light the darkness with our stories any more.

A mechanical watch is like a human life. You create tension, apply it to a train of events, but without balance it would run down too quickly, deplete itself in a mad whirling blur. So the watchmaker creates balance with the hair spring – such a delicate little thing, like a  heart. Set it beating and away it goes, regulating the life force, playing it out more slowly, more usefully in time. But the balance is also the most vulnerable part  – easily lost, easily thrown out by wear or trauma.

No, I’ve not lost my balance here. That’s not why I’m becalmed. Rather I think this is one of those rare periods in my life when I can say I have attained balance, all be it temporarily  – that I know it by having known the lack of it. And balance seeks no other purpose for itself than the is-ness of the moment. Ambition, thoughts, fears – they all fall away, and the need for stories too. I don’t know anything. Let this watch be what it is, without the need to weave a myth around it, without the need to put a name to it.

And yet,…

Whatever its story, this watch is telling me something else as I write. Its tick is loud, like one of those old Smiths alarm clocks, and it’s pulling me out of the place my thoughts seem most inclined to settle this evening. Of all my old watches, this one speaks with the firmest voice, and it’s telling me I’ve been writing a lot about the fact I’ve not been writing, that I’ve been weaving an elaborate story about how I’ve run out of stories.

Sure, antique English levers have an inescapable and somewhat unsophisticated bluntness about them. They were old fashioned and idiosyncratic even when they were new – a bit like me then, born old and eccentric, and a little unreliable. Yes,  there were finer movements than this in 1899 – Swiss and American – fancy things, bejewelled and more innovative, yet here it is: this old English timekeeper, still ticking. And it’s telling me we’re not done yet, that so long as there exists a void in our understanding, there will always be one more story to fill it.

I can say what I like. It’s just a question of time.

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A parcel of magical, mystical delights!

I know this traditional bookshop where they still wrap things with brown paper and string. Here, you’ll find a vast collection of second hand books, all neatly categorised and arrayed in labyrinthine rows on three creaky floors. It’s been there for generations, catering for the full spectrum of tastes, from the pre Socratic philosophers to the latest Fifty Shades. It’s a rare, book-scented treasure house, a bastion of colour and pattern and calm in an increasingly bland world.

I don’t always buy a book when I go there. At least half the pleasure in visiting this place is in browsing with no particular aim other than the search for something inspirational. My choices are therefore driven as much by mood as by the titles. My price limit also varies widely according to mood, and for all I know the cycles of the moon as well. I once parted with £25.00 for a copy of Jung’s Mysterium, a book much revered by psychoanalysts – and which I have not the Latin to decipher. At other times I am loathe to part with £5.00 and come away empty handed, dejected that nothing has taken my eye. To be sure, bookshops like this are mysterious places.

Last Saturday it was Wordsworth – well, not so much him as an idea inspired by him. I’d been revisiting the Romantics, thinking back on things I’ve written about Romanticism – most of it rubbish, but some of it still holding the test of time. And there it was, lurking upon a shelf of rather lack-lustre books, pressed a little to the back as if shy of the limelight: Wordsworth’s collected poems, dated 1868.

It was a handsome little volume – red cloth binding, the pages gilded, and the backing boards beautifully bevelled so the book turned smoothly in my hands like a bar of silky soap. Inside, among the familiar poems, there were engravings – intricate drawings, each protected by its own little insert of tissue paper. It was delightful. It might have been placed there only recently – or been there for twenty years, always escaping my eye until now. Only now did it speak to me. But what was it saying? Here are the poems of William Wordsworth, Michael? Read them? No, I already own a copy of his collected works. It wasn’t that I needed another. There was more going on here. All I know is I wanted it.

An expensive book, I feared, but no – £4.50 was its considered worth, which placed it within the means of my capricious and, of late, austerity-conscious pocket. It could be mine. It would be mine.

I am not a book dealer or a collector. I do not browse these shelves for unknown money-treasures in order to sell them on. The vendor is, after all, an antiquarian dealer of some renown, so I presume the real collectors’ items have already been filtered out of this very public domain – leaving only the dross, where treasure is to be found only in sentiment. I was under no illusions then; to a dealer in books this book, pretty thought it was, was worthless.

Was it really only sentiment then that drew my eye? Could sentiment take my breath away like this and fill me with a such possessive craving for a thing that was otherwise of no use nor value to me? Perhaps it was simply its great age and the fact I have a track record in collecting old and useless things. The Sage of Grasmere had not been 20 years dead when this book was issued, and here it was, still in marvelous condition -  a little frayed at the top and bottom of the spine, but otherwise pristine. Clearly it had been respected throughout its life, and was that not reason enough to earn my own respect now? Or was it that the book lain neglected behind the glass of some unfrequented country house library, untouched by sticky fingers – and now at last had come its chance to be handled, to be loved. Is that why is spoke to me?

It was a mystery, but one I was clearly in a mood to ponder in slower time. For now the priority was merely to rescue it, to possess it.

I took my prize downstairs to the lady at the till and she looked upon it with a genuine delight. She ran her long pale hands over the cover as I had done a moment ago, and in doing so shared with me the loveliness of it.  Her actions, unconsciously sensual and simple enough on her part, were to my romantic eye like holy devotions and they amplified an already growing numinosity. Then she wrapped it carefully, folding the paper with a neat, practised precision, deft fingers twisting the knot, an enchantress sealing in the spell of that afternoon – an afternoon possessed suddenly of a richness and a fertility I had not known in such a long, long time.

I emerged from the shop tingling with something that ran far deeper than the mere purchase of an old book. But what was it?

I’ve had that book for four days now and you might think it curious but  it rests upon my  desk, still in its tight little wrapping. I do not want to open it in case the magic of that afternoon evaporates. While I keep it wrapped, you see, the spell remains intact and only good things can happen from now on. The glass will for ever be half full,… never again half empty. But such an obsessive devotion as this is stretching things, even for me, and I realise it’s in my little foible – some might say my weakness – the mystery of that afternoon is revealed.

One cannot really capture a moment like that, any more than one can capture its essence in a photograph. All you’re really left with at the moment of capture is a dead thing. As I’ve written before, and keep telling myself, as if for the first time anew, the moment comes from within and cannot be contained in any “thing”. Curiosity will eventually overcome my obsessive Romantic sentiment, and I will snip open that package to discover all that lies inside is just a worthless old book, a little more world-worn and weary than I remember it.

The real power lies always in the moment and it will always be erased by time until we can find a way of staying in the moment all the time. If we can do that then every moment becomes imbued with a mysterious presence, a presence that has the power to inspire and elevate us beyond the mundane. There we discover that the meaning of our lives – the meaning we might have searched for all our lives – was never really lost. Nor was it such a big secret anyway, nor less a thing to be toiled at, nor pondered over with our heads in our hands, nor winkled out of the dusty tomes of several millenia’s worth of arcane spiritual teachings. It was there all the time; the numinous, the sheer pullulating exuberance of life.

You do not find it in work or wealth or learning, but in random moments of spontaneous inner realisation, like with me on that Saturday afternoon, browsing the hushed labyrinth of an antiquarian bookshop. But we’ve all had moments like this, and perhaps the only secret is that we should allow ourselves to recognise their intrinsic sacredness, then trust the mind, or whatever greater consciousness lies behind it, will grant us the presence to realise them more often.

Of course a more skilled pilgrim than I would have admired that book for what it was and, without losing a fraction of the meaning in that moment, simply left it on the shelf for someone else to find.

Pass me those scissor’s will you?

Thanks for listening.

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Figures in a landscape

I didn’t see the figures on the sands when I took this picture. I was more interested in seeing how the polarising filter would help bring details out in the sky, while leaving the sands recognisable as, well,… sands. It was only later when I put the picture up on the bigger screen of my PC, then cropped and zoomed,  other details became apparent, and the ghosts emerged.

No, I didn’t know they were there, I don’t know who they are, and of course I don’t know where they are now. They’re simply gone. But for that moment, at 14:53 hours and 53 seconds on the 17/2/2013,  they were everything, creating a living harmony out of what is otherwise nothing.

I get this same eerie philosophical melancholia from watching crowds. There are so many of us alive, and each life of infinite importance to itself, each of us viewing the universe from the centre of ourselves in a uniquely different way.   But for me there’s something about the lone figure or a small group of figures set against a vast landscape that turns up the wick, and applies a more intense heat to the question of what it is to be human in the world.

On the one hand the seeming smallness of our presence can make the individual life appear worthless and futile, while on the other it might be said it’s in the very uniqueness of our  perspective there lies a value that goes beyond the material -  that it’s in adjusting to this perception of ourselves, and seeing more clearly through what one might call the eye of spirit,  we each have the potential to realise the preciousness that is the individual life lived well, no matter how fleeting and superficially futile that life might appear to be.

I’m reading Field and Hedgerow by Richard Jeffries at the moment. Jeffries (1848-1887) was a small-town English journalist, essayist and novelist, who, after labouring long in obscurity, became quietly popular in the late Victorian period. Another of his works “The Amateur Poacher” has been my companion since childhood, and I still find much in him to admire. His particular forte was nature mysticism. To say Jeffries revered nature doesn’t quite get to the point of him, though revere it he most certainly did. Here was a man who could look at  a grain of sand under his fingernail and tease the meaning of life from it  – all without the aid of opium -  but he was careful not to over-romanticise – being conscious and respectful of the red-in-tooth-and claw dimension of nature as well. He was also a man who saw more of God in a Greek statue than in the whole of King James.

Stay with me, this is relevant.

Of course we’re not all blessed with the divine attributes of a Greek statue, and I suppose Jeffries was getting at more than seeing a literal image of “God as deity” in hominid physiology. What the Classical Greeks saw in the human form, Jeffries hints at in his various works, while the rest of us cover it with loincloths for modesty, mistake it for a perverted Eros, and childishly titter at it. What is it? I don’t know, but if you’ll allow me a moment’s nudity, I can gaze for ever at John Collier’s Lillith (Atkinson Memorial Gallery, Southport UK), and see more than just her bosoms. There’s a ghost in her, and like my figures in the landscape, she gives me pause.

Getting back to the subject of nature, in “Field and Hedgerow” Jeffries writes of an unemployed farm labourer rejecting the grim soulless state-handout sanctuary of the Workhouse and choosing instead to survive the winter living rough, sleeping in out-buildings, finding what few scraps of charity he can from the farm wives. Jeffries suggests that in his struggle to maintain a personal dignified independence, against the rigours of nature, there is something noble, even Godlike about him.

Nature is impassive, impervious to our complaints. The rain falls and the frost bites regardless of our wishes, or the quality of our clothes. Still, on a sunny day, when the butterflies come out, you can look for God in it, a God that transcends deity, as the Romantics would say. Indeed when it’s not inflicting pain upon us, there’s enough stillness and sublime beauty in nature to see projections of all sorts of things. But whatever we discover, compassion will not be among its qualities.

In my  photograph, the tide is out. Three hours later it would be in, and the small lives that had scampered across the sands that afternoon would have to scamper for safety or be washed away. The beach is also known for quicksand. An unwary figure going down in them could not rely upon nature, or the gods, for deliverance. For the survival of calamity, or nature’s worst excesses, we’re always going to need the compassion and the selfless intervention of other human beings. We might pray to our deities but it will be another human being who pulls us from the mire, offers reassurance at our tremblings, and a hot cup of  tea to soothe away the aftershocks.

Some might take this as evidence the Divine works through us, that our capacity for compassion is a manifestation of the ineffable at work in the world. I’m coming to the same conclusion. It was Jeffries who taught me you don’t find God in mere deity, (Story of my heart), but only through a higher form of soul-life. And, incredible, as it seems, the fact remains that in a world apparently on fire, torn apart by the darker side of our natures, it’s only in human beings we find the contrary, even paradoxical evidence of a divinely transcendent and infinitely compassionate dimension, a dimension, the existence of which, is the only thing worth all the living and the dying for. If we are to understand the value of the individual life, no matter how fleeting or anonymous, like my figures in the landscape, we must first do what we can to nurture a compassion for the lives of others, and trust we’ll find it in others when we’re most in need of it ourselves.

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To be the Goddess

To the ancient (male) poets, poetry was the resulting progeny of a part unconscious, part inspirational, part devotional intercourse with a mythical yet hauntingly ever-present creature called the Muse. Anything else was doggerel and not worth the papyrus scroll it was written on. Beautiful, merciless, demanding of unwavering dedication, yet disproportionately frugal with her favours, the Muse has many guises, but all of them essentially female.

If a poet was respectful of his muse, in sufficient awe of her, and sufficiently in thrall to the muse’s more corporeal and multifarious projections onto mortal women, then his poetry would be profound and recognised at once as the purest utterings of the Divine One herself, unsullied by the poet’s rather more imperfect, and all too human excretions.

In other words, a man does not make poetry up, or for that matter fiction, or music, or paintings, or indeed any other form of art. He seeks inspiration, and by some mysterious contract, all too often signed in the poet’s own blood, the muse delivers the art to him. He merely transcribes it, therefore a wise poet never takes credit for his best work, lest he should court her wrath. Conversely, he must always be ready to accept the crap as his own.

But what happens if the poet, the artist or whatever, is a woman?

Male Muse-Goddess psychology is amply explained in the theories of Carl Jung, who would have termed her “Anima”, the divine feminine. It’s from Anima a man derives his wisdom, his inspiration, and his more intuitive faculties. When it comes to women though, I find Jung is less clear – her soul image being defined instead by an amorphous harem of male figures – which doesn’t sound very mystical and muse-like. But to stick with Jung for a moment, it’s through him the concept of the Muse, the Goddess, or even a belief in fairies is rendered accessible and relatively harmless to otherwise rational minds by a process of de-literalising and internalising.

Rather than devaluing such concepts however, Jungian psychology achieves the opposite, promoting the unconscious imaginal realms these daemonic creatures inhabit to a real, if hidden, collective dimension – or what in classical mythology might be called the Underworld. Jung thereby granted the Goddess a supernatural reality she’d not enjoyed since the banishing of the pagan gods by a stern, male-centric, Christianity.

Through our mythologies we see how many a powerful Goddess once influenced the world stage, and one might be forgiven for thinking both contemporary religion and rational secularism have banished her to such an abject obscurity only poets and other unreliable types still talk of her. But we should be careful, for it is through our own selves the old deities have always lived, and through our own irrational and so often inexplicable behaviour they still wield their mysterious influence in the world.

Thus it was in the middle of the twentieth century, the Goddess found herself reborn among a resurgent neo-pagan faithful, who have been quietly redefining the nature of mystical spiritualism under such banners as Wicca and Modern Witchcraft. And it is from among their ranks, some might argue, and some might even hope, she is earnestly plotting the rescue of both the Great Mother (earth), and humankind from ten thousand years of blood letting at the behest of the formerly all-powerful (and male) Sun God, and his equally misogynic demi-gods of War, Rape and Avarice.

The poet Robert Graves (1895-1985) was a vociferous champion of the Goddess, and in his book “The White Goddess” (1948) he claimed to have uncovered, by a process of linguistic analysis of ancient European and Greek myths, persuasive evidence for a Goddess-centric civilisation predating the classical period and stretching back into Neolithic times. The book was largely ignored by scholars who paused only briefly to point out it’s shortcomings and Graves’ embarrassing lack of authority on the subject. However, later work by archeologist and leading feminist Dr. Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994), found persuasive evidence in support of Graves’ hypothesis.

It seems there are indeed enigmatic traces of a lost European culture – matriarchal, sophisticated in its industry, and possessed of some of the earliest known writing on the planet – dating to 4000 BC – possibly the equal of the Chinese in its documented antiquity. This old European civilisation, according to Gimbutas, also distinguished itself by having left no trace among its artifacts of any history of warfare, or weapons, suggesting a political philosophy of admirably passive coexistence, resulting in a society that was breathtaking for its multi-millenial longevity.

It has to be said, not withstanding the physical evidence, Gimbutas’ unashamedly feminist interpretation does not go uncontested. However, her thesis, presented in her book The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe (1974) along with Graves’ The White Goddess became essential reading for the feminist and Neo Pagan movements.

But whatever the evidence for her possible role as a Neolithic deity, what we can say for sure is that the Goddess-Muse constitutes an abiding pattern of psychic energy, one whose presence has always been a powerful force in creation. But to come back to my earlier question, given her voracious and vampire like appetite for men, what about women?

If the muse is possessed of such sexually desirable feminine attributes, how can a woman show sufficient devotion as befits art, without distorting her own sexuality? Do women poets, for example, have male muses instead? Can the muse even be conceived of in masculine terms? As a man myself I’m outraged at the very thought, so devoted and protective am I of the Muse-Goddess. Therefore, are only men and moon-struck Lesbians capable of writing decent love letters? And are not all love letters incantations to the Muse, rather than to the poor young lady in question, and on whose shoulder the Muse just happens to be sitting at the time?

These are provocative questions, and clearly I’ll need to tread carefully. Or perhaps not, for since women are every bit as capable as men of sublime artistic expression, the Muse, or the Goddess, is clearly working through them anyway, and we can define it however we like. Just because a woman is an artist it does not make her Saphically inclined, so what is the nature of her relationship with the Muse? And similarly if she aspires to the ranks of neo-pagan neophytes, how does she relate, spiritually, to the Goddess, given that the female psyche is wired so differently to the male? Ah,… I think there might be a clue here.

Graves addresses this enigma in The White Goddess, and I also see answers to it in the WordPress musings of neo-pagan adepts, a great many of whom of course are women. And of those women, a great many I note are also very young. This is interesting, for they are exposed to the same youth-targeted, and overwhelmingly consumerist distractions as others of their age, yet they draw something from the archetype of the Goddess they find uniquely empowering, uniquely capable of granting them the gift of transcendence. By this I mean that through the Goddess concept, they are capable of communing with the spirit, where so many of the godless, and even the nominally religious see nothing of the spirit at all, but instead a bland consumerist edifice where is written the somewhat cynical mantra of our times: “I consume, therefore I am”.

Graves, although a severe and curmudgeonly critic of faddish and pretentious poets, did not admonish women who dallied with the perils of poetic genius. Rather he urged women to recognise their essential femininity, and to write as women, and not to try to write like men whose vision and whose relationship with the muse, by dint of male psychology, is always going to be different.

So after all of that I think the answer slowly reveals itself. A man’s relationship with the Goddess-Muse is one of subservience. She is the dominatrix, sometimes cruel, but just sweet enough, and often enough, to hold the man in thrall. Sometimes dismissed by non-artists as the result of infantile male sexual fantasy, this is none the less how the Muse engages men and goes about her business. For the woman though it’s different. For the woman, the aim is never to court the Goddess, but rather to avail herself and, if favoured, then to be the Goddess. And therin lies the innate power of any woman, be it through her art or in the potential of her relationships with men.

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Letters to my muse.

I’ve been trying to define more clearly this idea of an inner voice or, what in more traditional religious parlance, might be called a guiding spirit. The evidence suggests these entities do not serve only the religiously inclined, that you can be entirely secular in your outlook and the inner voice will still speak to you. It’s simply a question of knowing it’s there, respecting that presence, and having the courage to talk to it.

It’s just a pity that talking to yourself is something that’s not encouraged in adults. Even children who claim kinship with an imaginary “friend” are likely to have that relationship beaten out of them by parents keen to raise perfectly sane and normal offspring. After all, hearing voices in your head is a clear sign of mental illness, isn’t it?

 Well, yes and no.

 Certainly the schizophrenic sometimes hear voices. They’re usually negative and critical of the sufferer, and those voices will seem quite real. But to the non schizophrenic, the voices are not taken as being literally real; they always belong to the imagination, to the mysterious unconscious realms and do not break through into reality as auditory hallucinations. The non schizophrenic does not believe in their literal existence, but rather he accepts their non-literal reality. And the conversations always take place in the imaginal hinterland of some form of controlled fantasy. It is in the safe middle ground, the rich liminal zones of such imagined realities, that we meet our daemons.

 Of course, it helps if you’ve gone off the mental rails at some point: suffered from depression, or dodged the symptoms of anxiety for the best years of your life. If you have, then you’ll more easily appreciate how readily the mind can have a physical effect upon your body, manifesting dramatic symptoms than can convince you you’re about to have a heart attack, collapse in a fainting fit because you can’t draw breath, or they’ll pump the sweat out of you and have you dripping wet and embarrassed to be in the company of other people.

The question is why? Why does the mind do this? Is it purely pathological, or is it something else?

Is the mind trying to tell us something?

Depression and anxiety tend to go hand in hand with a negative self-image. We also tend to see the world in negative terms. Life is shit and then you die. But life doesn’t need to be like that, indeed the only world that’s coloured dark with such negative hues is the one you’ve invented for yourself. It’s tricky territory; your unconscious mind is apparently attacking you, trying to overwhelm you, but if you could only see your way towards engaging with this seemingly mad beast, then things can suddenly get a lot better.

 But how do you develop this relationship?

 The nature of the unconscious is hidden from us. We don’t know what it is, nor even for sure where it is, and in order to get any sort of handle on it, we have to start personifying the various bits of it that we encounter. On the downside this has the effect of oversimplifying it, while at the same time running the risk of our over-literalising it, and imagining little fairies running about all over the place, but we have to start somewhere.

 For a man, the most frequent and reliably identifiable emissary from the unconscious is the soul image, or the anima. We see her in dreams as an unknown woman. Of course the actual nature of our soul, the shape of it, the size of it, most probably doesn’t look anything like a woman, if it looks like anything at all. More likely it’s an abstract nothingness, a twist of psychical energy rising like a solar flare from the the ground of being, but in order to make sense of it we imagine it as a woman.

When I first began to get a handle on these ideas, around the turn of the millennium, I was doing it out of necessity, trying to burst the bubble of existential angst I’d been living in, and to salve the rat-bites of my last major blow-out. I was doing this mainly by reading Jung. Inspired by what I read, and amongst other things, equally strange, I began writing letters to my soul. I gave her a name that sounded right, invented a look borrowed from dreams, but one that was allowed to morph over time, and I placed her in another time, made her a Victorian lady who wrote and spoke with a peculiarly Victorian vocabulary.

We kept up our correspondence for several years.

I’d write to her about my anxieties and I’d sound her out on my half baked theories of the nature of consciousness. The really spooky part is that she would reply. All right – I know it was me actually penning her reply, that in playing her part, I was writing from inside the head of a fictional character. But the thing about my fictional characters is I never think about what they’re going to say. They just say it, and I’m often surprised by what they tell me.

Those letters would be very embarrassing of course, if they ever fell into the wrong hands; and anyone reading them would see only a middle aged man going steadily off the rails, while in fact what they reveal to me now is a middle aged man changing track and getting himself properly in gear for the first time in his life, leaving his demons behind and making the acquaintance of his daemons. And daemons are a much nicer bunch to have inside your head, but they bring changes in your conscious outlook, and you have to be prepared for that. For a start, you might just end up making friends with yourself, and seeing the world as an altogether brighter place. Some of those letters also brought with them a very real presence, and a sense of inner comfort I’d never known before. I remember penning one by lantern glow while camping by the shores of Ullswater, and it felt as if I’d only to turn my head and she’d be sitting there, watching me, smiling her reassurance. 

In my last blog piece I introduced you to Elizabeth Gibert, through her lecture on creativity, on You Tube. She spoke eloquently about the idea of a personal daemon, a muse, or a genius, being responsible for our creative output – a sentiment I agree with entirely. But these beings are not exclusive to artist types alone. If you’re comfortable with the idea of imaginative play, then these characters will come through to you, and they will help you.

You’ve only got to ask.

The reductionist human-behaviourists will scoff at all this psychobabble. They’ll point out my lack of relevant qualifications, and they’ll tell us our imaginations are nothing more than a biological mutation, one that gives us an evolutionary advantage over lesser creatures. In those dim, prehistory days, they’ll explain, we were able to plan our hunting expeditions in our minds. Our imagination therefore enabled us to place ourselves in a possible future, and to work through the “what ifs”, so preparing ourselves in advance for any eventuality. The creatures we were up against had no imaginations, reacted instinctively and in a largely predictable way. They became, literally, easy meat. My own rational training tells me I have to accept that this much is probably true. My personal experience of imagination however suggests it’s not the full story.

Okay, let’s get morbid for a moment: in the great scheme of things it makes little difference if I live or die. In all the pullulating turmoil of mankind’s petty presence here on earth, my own humble contribution to human endeavour is neither here nor there. Yet for all of my inability to influence human affairs, I do sense a possibly inappropriate importance to my presence, if not exactly to the world as it is, but at least to the world as I see and experience it. There is also a beguiling quality to the worlds I create inside my head.

My own interpretation of this apparent paradox, after over a decade of letters to my muse, is that I’m alive in two places at the same time: there is an inner and an outer world, and the inner world is the more abiding of the two. My daily existence is real enough, time-bound as it is, and filled with the nonsense of man’s making. My purpose in the world is to make my way as best I can in the circumstances I find myself, to discover a way of liking myself and seeing the world in a positive light – because only then can I manifest personal happiness and, through that, be capable of both giving and receiving love. It seems a tall order at times, because at times circumstances can be testing, but although I’m physically alone here, I am not without back-up. There are voices I can call upon. Their counsel is always wise – and not necessarily of a spiritual nature.

It can also be surprisingly prosaic.

Six months ago I developed a peculiar rash on the backs of my hands. It wasn’t painful, or itchy or anything, just a little unsightly. I took it to show the sawbones who had no idea what it was. He gave me some cream, which I tried for a month, but the rash continued to spread. Was it stress? Was it some kind of allergic reaction?

I remember turning to my inner self one day, to that imaginary daemon, and saying: Look, I’ve tried everything here and this rash is really bugging me. Is there anything you can suggest? And the following day, while my head was off chasing butterflies in some other place, the answer came; it wasn’t a voice exactly, more of an idea, a flash of inspiration: you’re eating too much tuna fish.

 Tuna fish?

 It was true. When I thought about it, I realised I was eating tuna-fish every weekday at lunchtimes, because I love tuna fish and it was easily the tastier of offerings on the work’s canteens rather limited sandwich selection. I’d started doing this at the beginning of the year, due to a change in work routines, which was roughly when the rash had begun. I’d simply got into the habit of it, without realising it. So, I stopped eating tuna fish and the rash had gone in a couple of weeks.

An inspired guess? Sure,  but where does inspiration come from? I’m happy personifying it.

For me the daemonic are fast becoming a non literal reality.

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Returning to the I Ching

The recent deepening of psychological shadows has had me reaching for the I Ching again. The I Ching is a book, the so called Book of Changes. Few have heard of it, and of those even fewer understand what it’s really about. Those of a New Age bent will blithely sit down and tell their fortunes with it, or charge money in order to tell the fortunes of others. But this is not what it’s for at all.

It’s not about fortune telling.

What the I Ching possesses is the curious ability to help you see what it is that’s coming at you and to understand why it is you feel the way you do, why you can be calm and magnanimous in the face of things one day, only to wake up the next morning with your guts aching at the hollowness of it all. This is not fortune telling. It’s not skipping ahead in the movie of your life in order to get a preview of what’s in store. What it is is understanding the nature of the times as they are now, and what you can do about them.

This has a way of putting you back in the Zen-zone. You realise you’re caught up in things that don’t matter, you’re becoming attached, egotistical and working against the grain of your own nature.

This is human.

We get muddled up easily, and it can take us a while to get back on track. We live in a world where secular values hold sway and it’s easy to be swept along by them. But it’s important to understand that the secular way is a superficial one; it has no intrinsic meaning, and its most cherished values, things like social status and material wealth are meaningless.

These are old lessons, we all know them, but sometimes we forget.

We forget because we need balance, and the balance within us has been tipped too much towards the material. We are not altogether material beings, you see? We exist a great deal inside our own heads, and what goes on in there is a spiritual matter. I don’t mean this in a religious sense – only that it is of the spirit, the soul, the piece of you that no one else can ever truly touch, or take away or even comprehend.

Forays by materialism into the confines of the head lead only to disaster and dehumanization.

I’d use the term psycho-spiritual here in order to introduce the psychological nature of spiritual study, but it’s ugly and off-putting. However, you cannot come to terms with your psychological nature without addressing your spiritual nature as well, and your spiritual nature is far too important a thing to be left in the hands of a one-size-fits-all religious model.

For me, our spiritual nature is best defined by the old Chinese idea of Dao, viewed – because I am a western man – through the western, Jungian prism of a personal journey towards individuation, or wholeness. This is a personal view, interpreted through the further prism of my own nature, including all my shortcomings and considerable ignorance. The way I see it though, certain actions bring us a step nearer the goal of wholeness, while others take us further way. Individuation, or oneness with Dao is not something that can be achieved by swallowing a pill, or reading a line of wisdom in a book. It’s a life-long journey and it doesn’t matter if you believe in God or not, so long as you remain mindful of your own path.

This is not to say we become selfish or self-seeking, because any action that knowingly subverts the path of others is always going to subvert your own in the end. Therefore you can’t go around standing on the heads of other people in order to get what you want. It might get you the big house and the six figure bonus on top of your five figure salary, but it won’t make you a decent person, a wise person, a loving person,… or a happy one.

The I Ching came out of the Daoist tradition, and was adopted by Jungian schools of psychoanalysis from around the 1930′s onwards. It’s a psychological tool. Think of it as a compass. The I Ching is a means of navigating your personal Dao.

I don’t know how the I Ching works. I’ve puzzled over it for years, but really, it’s best to simply let it be. You ask it a question, frame it precisely, pull an answer from the book, and then think on it. The curious thing is that the answers it gives are always pertinent to your query. They are searching, insightful, and wise, even though the process of generating that answer is simply the random toss of some coins.

For an intelligent, rationally minded person who has not used the book, the explanation is blindingly obvious: the I Ching is worded in so vague a manner that anything it says can be twisted by a credulous and needy mind into something meaningful. Rational and intelligent people who have used the book however, are not so quick to offer that explanation any more. They go underground. By day they are rational, intelligent people, but by night they explore the tunnels of their unconscious minds by the light of this mysterious device. The I Ching becomes for them like a darkly exotic mistress. She takes them to the giddiest of psychological heights, holds up a mirror to their own inner being, enlightens and enlivens their lives. But they do not like to be seen out with her in public.

You can use the book in a trivial, playful way if you want and it’ll come back at you in a trivial, playful manner. But get serious with it and the window on your mind is flung wide open. It’s like stepping up to the edge of a precipice, and preparing to absiel down into pitch darkness. How deep you go depends entirely on your own courage. The I Ching is as deep as your mind, and for any of us, that’s a very long way down indeed.

The I Ching describes a method of generating any one of sixty four so-called hexagrams – arrangements of six lines, the lines being either whole or divided, representing Yang or Yin respectively. This is the archaic core of the book, which archeological evidence tells us dates back to the overthrow of the Shang dynasty by  the Zhou, around 1000 B.C – though the book’s actual origins certainly pre-date this.

The I Ching has been interpreted and re-interpreted by scholars for roughly three thousand years, and each of them have added to it their own particular slant on what  those sixty four hexagrams actually mean. But each of these scholars did this within  the social and political contexts of their own times, so the earliest interpretations can seem a little esoteric to more modern readers. Each generation has therefore sought to reinterpret the book within the context of their own times.

There are by now many interpretations and I probably own most of them. Because I like writing, it was inevitable I should have a go at interpreting the thing myself, the result of which was “The Hexagrams of the I Ching” which I self published on Lulu.com in 2007.

So, anyway,…

What’s this all about then?

I settle down in the quiet of my study and I toss some coins,…

Michael Graeme

www.rivendalereview.co.uk

 

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Behave yourself and never mind the rest

The true nature of reality?

Human reality may be exactly what it appears to be: a fragile existence on a rock in space, a speck of life born out of a biological accident, with all our self-conscious ramblings on the meaning of it amounting to nothing when the bag of bones we think of as our body finally quits on us. I may be wrong, but I imagine few of us are comfortable with this idea. Speaking for myself, if that’s the point of it, then it might as well be done with now as at some point in the future and I’d rather my genetic material found some other way of furthering its greedy existence without dragging me along after it and making me think I’m important when I’m not.

Fortunately I’ve come to believe there’s more to things than this, and my voyages into the greyer areas of reality have led to a more positive and optimistic outlook, rather than a negative one. And that’s without getting into religion.

A certain kind of psychologist will smile sagely at all our fanciful musings and tell us we are unconsciously afraid of death and would rather not face the pointlessness of life, so we invent scenarios in which “magic” becomes a part of our reality, thereby granting us the deluded notion of an escape route – reincarnation, heavenly realms, or some other form of personal psychical continuation of life after death. Magical, mysterious mysticism is thus demoted to the level of a childish coping-mechanism.

In my case,  there’s nothing unconscious about it – of course I fear death and I agree speculation on the magical or mysterious aspects of reality may be a coping-mechanism. If so, they are a very effective one  because I feel better about myself and my place in the universe when I explore these things.  I’m also convinced there’s more to them than wishful thinking.

There’s more to my conviction than deluded zeal, as anyone of an open and enquiring mind can surely testify. There are many clues that suggest the nature of reality isn’t so hard and cold as the materialists tell us. In fact its edges are fuzzy, and you don’t need to be religious to find them. I might even go so far as to say a religious perspective is the last thing that’s going to help you. In religion we say our lines, we conform to the group-speak, consider ourselves holier than the Jones’ if we go to church more often than they do, or we feel guilty if they go more than we. As for belief, well,  we trust the vicar knows what he’s talking about and leave it at that. That’s religion. But, if you want to know, really know then you have to blow the dust off the history of the world and you have to examine the experiences of ordinary people.

A certain kind of biologist will tell you the mind – the thing that makes you think you are you – is  confined to that lumpen grey organ called the brain and when the brain stops working, the illusion of you vanishes without a trace. This is the conventional view. It’s a safe position to hold, but when you start to dig you realise the truth is more complicated. A century of study has yielded a tidal wave of evidence that tells us the mind extends beyond the brain, that it can sometimes see around corners. It seems there really is such a thing as ESP, and people sometimes really do experience moments of precognition, and moments of heightened awareness in which time dissolves and all things become one  – like the mystics tell us.

But nothing in this fuzzy realm is certain. ESP can only be demonstrated as a general effect in a large group of people, but when it comes to specific individuals, ESP is difficult to reproduce on demand. It exists, but it cannot be reliably demonstrated in front of a body of hardened skeptics aiming at the gold standard of a peer reviewed publication. The same goes for precognition and so called mystical experiences: they cannot be dialled up, nor paraded for inspection.

What use is it then? We know these things exist, but for all practical purposes, they might as well not.

For me it’s enough we are given the occasional glimpse behind the curtain, for the reassurance it grants us that the cold, hard, physical reality we see is not everything there is. Personally I’d rather not live in a world where magical things are the stuff of every day experience. I don’t want others to know routinely what is inside my head because, like the contents of my diary, I would fear their misinterpretation. Similarly, I would not like the ability to see inside of yours, for fear your thoughts might be hurtful to me.

The most I think we can say for certain is that there is more to the mind than the brain. If we go one step further, we could also speculate, with some justification, that the mind’s ability to exceed it’s apparent biological boundaries suggests it might also capable of some form of psychical existence independent of them. What that tells us about the nature of reality, or the survival of the personality after death is anyone’s guess. Beyond this point the speculation becomes ever more tenuous, and we risk falling over the fuzzy edge of reality into a void that is impregnable to the human intellect – and where our only recourse is to invent stories.

So far as our personal, tangible, non-fuzzy reality is concerned, it seems to be defined by the choices we make. Whether those choices will lead us to happiness or to misery is very much dependent upon what our motives are when we make the choices. A certain kind of thinking will lead us towards a happier and more contented kind of life. Material circumstances are irrelevant: we might be rich, we might be poor, but material wealth is not a goal in itself, and story books are full of moral tales that teach us how its pursuit can lead to personal ruin if we’re not in firm control of ourselves in other ways first. So, while the true nature of reality remains largely hidden from us, there is a feeling the best way of approaching it is to discover what that “certain kind of thinking is”, and to practice it.

Like many of my generation, I’ve come at this down a long, rocky road, through the distilled essence of three thousand years of eastern philosophy, dimly grasped but enough I think to shine a light into my own little corner of the world. I can hazard a guess then at what that certain kind of thinking is, and when I’m struggling I have the eccentric option of consulting the I Ching – which usually puts me straight. For many of course this will seem barking mad. It’s just my way though, and you must find your own. But however we come at it, you can take all the words that were ever written on this subject and disregard them because a lady called Beatrix Potter summed it up long ago in this delightful quote:

“All outward forms of religion are almost useless and are the causes of endless strife. Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.”

You heard the lady. Just be congnisant of the fact that there’s something there.  It’s intentions are benign, and beyond that you don’t need to think about it much at all. Just behave yourself and never mind the rest. Behaving yourself is the tricky part of course, and working out what it means is possibly the one thing you were were born to do.

Graeme out.

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Big Mind is watching you?

In the summer of 2000, I was walking in the English Lakes, in a beautiful area called the Newland’s Valley. I’d recently extricated myself from a peculiar episode of neurotic anxiety that had lasted for a year. It had left me inwardly changed in some way I couldn’t define, but for now all I knew is that whatever shadow had been stalking me was gone and I could go about my business like an ordinary human being again, instead of a potential basket-case. I’d completed a longish walk called the Dale Head round and was on the homeward leg, barely a mile from the car and a hot cup of tea. My feet were burning, my legs were aching but otherwise I felt okay. It had been a good walk, a good day. Then I happened to look up at the view, and what had begun as a successful hike was transformed suddenly into one of the most remarkable experiences of my life.

I was looking at the shapely cone of a hill called Scope End, except I wasn’t exactly looking at it. What seemed to have happened was that although I was still aware of myself on the track, still aware of this bag of bones looking at Scope end, my perception had widened to the extent that my consciousness now included both my self and what I was looking at. Scope End and me, or for that matter the whole of that beautiful scene, that beautiful day, were the same thing. There was also the sense of a bigger mind behind my mind, a mind that was really my authentic self, a self which had known all along that there was no difference between me and what I was looking at,… only my smaller, every day self had forgotten this. It was like waking from a deep sleep to the realisation of who you really are. What I felt at this moment was the most profound sense of love. I was wrapped in it, carried aloft in it. It was a love I’d spent my whole life knowing was out there somewhere, yet had never quite succeeded in experiencing.

The whole thing lasted for no more than a few seconds. It was just a glimpse of something, but in the end I was afraid of it and at the first rippling of that fear I was delivered back into my old self and my old sense of separateness was restored.

Now, there are many rational explanations for what had happened. Part of me dismissed it as nothing more than a bit of a “funny do”. More technical explanations might include the possibility that I had experienced a sudden overdose of adrenaline, a kind of runner’s high. I’ve never indulged in recreational drugs so I cannot say it was like being “stoned” but there were certain elements of euphoria and a sense of the limitlessness of my own consciousness that others, more familiar with these substances have reported.

What do you do after an experience like that? Well, strange as it might sound, you do your best to  convince yourself you imagined it, that it was not real. To some extent this is easy: you go home, you clean the mud off your boots, you wash the dishes, take out the dustbin, and you mow the lawn. Our daily lives require a certain pragmatism if we’re not to go completely off the rails, and amid the grind it’s possible to dismiss the most remarkable of things as being of little account. Almost.

It may be a coincidence, but around the time of that experience my attitudes began to shift decidedly to the left. It was a classic mid-life thing. Up to that point I’d been measuring things in strictly rational terms, searching for the meaning of life in the mathematics of Newton, which was a fairly forlorn hope, but as an engineer with a mechanical background, Newton was considered perfectly capable of solving any of the problems I was likely to encounter. Things were changing though – maybe it was my last near crack up, a seismic shift in my unconscious manifesting itself as a tsunami, washing though my mind, and laying waste to a lot of the ideas I’d formerly held in such high regard.

I began to read Jung, I began to study of the I Ching, and was gradually seduced by various eastern philosophies. None of these were rational things and I had to keep quiet about them because I was still, on the surface at least, a rational kind of guy. In my reading of eastern ideas, I came upon descriptions that fitted perfectly my experience with Scope End that day. It was what certain sects of Buddhism might have called “one taste” and all of this began to confirm to my own satisfaction that what had occurred that day was indeed what it had felt like at the time: a direct experience of something greater than my own self. Moreover, I learned that these states are common and accessible to all human beings. They can be reached systematically by long years of dedicated practice in the meditative arts, or, every now and then, they can be blundered into by chance. And that’s what had happened to me.

So, like I said before, what do you do with it? Well, not very much because it turns out that no matter how much you manage to convince yourself it was real, there’s always at least a grain of doubt that keeps you grounded. Was it “one taste” or was it just the natural “adrenaline high” of a guy who’d walked too far that day? At the most, what it does is loosen up your grip a little. It makes you begin to doubt most of what you’ve ever trusted to be real. You still need to get up at 7:00 am to go to work, the dinner things still need washing up, and the lawn still needs mowing, but inbetween these things you sit down and you begin to wonder just what it is that’s holding it all together.

Eventually the works of Carl Jung lead to the works of those who followed him, to the Humanist Psychologists, to present day Transpersonal Psychology, which leads to people like Ken Wilber, who, like Jung, I understand perhaps about one word in every ten, but the tone of him resonates with a singular sweetness. Trans-personal Psychology tempts you into sampling all manner of weird stuff, like channelling for example, and so you discover the work of supposed discarnate entities like Seth who tell you that you tend to attract those things that reinforce your own preconceptions of the world. So maybe I’m only attracted to Wilber because he seems to talk sense in terms of my own distorted vision of things. And then some genius invented this thing called the Internet where another thing called Google lives and Google can find you information on absolutely anything that anyone on the planet has ever thought about and you quickly realise there are more ideas about the nature of reality than you can possibly take in, and where your only filter for authority is in the quality of the spelling and the grammar.

So you turn back on yourself, on your own experience of life, which is all anyone really has to go on, and you remind yourself that your own dreams have revealed a strangeness to the meaning of space time. Although you do your best to overlook this fact, you know you have dreamed of events that have subsequently happened – suggesting you must have known all along these things were going to happen but had somehow forgotten, in the same way you forgot that you’re the same as whatever it is you’re looking at. There is, you tell yourself, a strangeness to the world that was not mentioned in your days at Wigan Tech, when they were telling you about Newton – because it’s such a fickle thing you can’t pin it down and, though it might be true, it’s about as useful in practical terms as the delusion that the skeptics take it for. So does it matter that it’s there when really all you should be thinking of is that  the bills need paying, and the recycling needs sorting, and you still haven’t  got a washer for that leaky tap?

But once you’ve pulled the stopper out of the bottle, and released the genie – it takes a special kind of charm to coax him back in, and I’ve not managed it – don’t want to – because even though this genie is a fickle and oftentimes mischievous character and as substantial as smoke, he doesn’t half tell some interesting tales . So, in between the chores, or maybe even while you’re sitting in the car in a traffic jam, in the half light of dawn, on your way to work,  you wonder that if you’d dreamed of yourself having an accident, could you alter the course of things by taking a different route into work next day? You ponder the old “free will” thing and console yourself with the fact that the dream was merely pointing out the probabilities. Some things come true, while others don’t. Your life, you tell yourself, might be spread across an infinite number of possible scenarios. In one scenario you might be married to a Hollywood actress, while in another you might even be that Hollywood actress. You consider how the universe might split itself into any number of possible scenarios every time you have to make a choice, and agree that it would answer a lot of the paradoxes, but boy does it complicate  things!

And then Google tells you about the works of people, like the admirable Ron Pearson, who says: hang on: it’s really much simpler than all of that. We really do live in a three dimensional universe that exists in linear time, and you think: Thank God for that because, for a moment there, I thought I was about to go insane, lost in this sea of infinite possibility, of infinite universes, and a place where there is no such thing as time. But then you come to Dean Radin, and Google links you over to his lectures on You Tube, and you are reminded of the calm, authoritative voice who talked you through Newton’s laws of motion at Wigan Tech, except this same voice is now showing you the experimental data you weren’t shown in Mechanics level 5, that proves things like ESP and precognition are actually true, and not just the figments of a fevered imagination. Jung said in 1961 that we can sometimes see round corners, that it was perfectly well known, and it was only ignorance that denied these things. Fifty years later we still can’t get a handle on how we do it, or what it means, and the ignorance Jung spoke of seems more organised.

Now the kids are whining because you’ve forgotten to give them their pocket money, and you remember you’ve scratched the glass screen on your iPod and you’re frustrated because it’s still fairly new and you didn’t want the shininess to have rubbed off it yet. And you get the feeling  the people who remain skeptical of the strangeness of life are the ones who are barking mad, and its the calm, quiet, probing, and eminently sensible voices of the Dean Radin’s of this world who are the sane ones. And you wonder for the hundredth time what it means to you, to this, your life that’s ticking slowly towards its only certain conclusion. And it makes you wonder why that big mind you felt, way back in the summer of 2000, should have wanted to create this particular illusion of separateness for itself – I mean, what does it expect to learn when all my life seems to be about is tearing down the facade that separates us. Should I leave it alone? Should I not seek too soon a reunion with whatever the big-mind is? Should I just get on with this, my simple life, which it seems content simply to watch?

But what can it possibly learn from me? When I drove past my local filling station this morning I felt a rising sense of disillusionment, when even though the price of oil on the world market has fallen to an all time low, the fuel companies seem to want to push the price at the pumps back up to the pound a litre mark. Compared with the feeling of big-love that big-mind exudes, the price of petrol is trivial, stupid, banal. What does big-mind learn form that? And if, as I was once led to believe, there is no difference between me and the shapely cone of Scope End, there is, by inference, no difference between me and the greasy petrol pump selling its extortionate fuel. Big-mind created both the extortionate scenario and the personal outrage. But to what purpose?

And then you remember it’s Sunday night, you’ve just swigged down the last of the wine, you’re possibly a little tipsy and you’ve got another week of nine to five ahead of you. As you turn out the light and shuffle off to bed you know you’ll never figure it out, and when you settle back onto the pillow and breathe out, you wish you could have your old life back, the one in which there’s no such thing as Big-Mind and where Newton was the only guru you were ever likely to need.

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A ruin of wind generators

(ruin: collective noun – a flock of geese, a bunch of grapes, a “ruin” of wind-generators)

I seem to be coming down ever more firmly on the side of those who are against wind generators, which are being sold to us as something of a panacea at the moment. The right-brain argument goes that if you’re against wind generators you’re against the planet. They’re a form of “green” energy, so you’re anti-green if you don’t like them. What I would say is that I don’t like them because they spoil the view, which sounds a bit weak I suppose, when the alternative is a coal fired power station belching out plumes of CO2 that’s going to ruin the planet. In my defence I can only argue that I place a very high value on the way the planet looks, and would sooner reduce my consumption of electricity and thereby obviate the need for these contraptions, than spoil the look of the planet, in order to save it.

Like anything else industrial and privately owned, power generation is about making money for shareholders, and it’s about squeezing the public until the pips squeak, and if anyone thinks that windmills, or any other form of privately owned eco-freindly energy is going to to reduce your power bills you’re sadly mistaken. The only way to do that is to stop burning it, and quite frankly, I don’t think the energy companies want you to do that, at least not until they’ve found a way of generating it for nothing while conversely charging you ten times more for it than they do at present.

But going back to the view, and its ruination by wind-farms:

Imagine a little old man, living in a quiet country cottage. He’s lived there all his life. It’s not a big place and he only has a small patch of land at the back, but it looks out over open farmland and he’s grown used to the simple beauty of it – the pastures, the trees, the creatures, and the changing patterns of nature though the seasons. The light pouring in from this pastoral scene fills his house and colours his life. Then, in his eightieth year, the farm goes bust and the land is sold to an insensitive bastard of a developer who decides to build a massive warehouse right up to the boundary line, dwarfing the old guy’s house and casting it in permanent shadow. When he looks out of his back door now, all he sees is a massive grey wall and it’s like his house has been moved overnight into the middle of the industrial sector of a city.

To the old guy, this is not merely an inconvenience, a minor loss of amenity, causing a dip in the monetary value of his property. It is a shattering of the psychical continuity of his life, and a brutal assault on his senses, as unforgivable as any mugging or robbing of his life’s savings.

Openness and beauty, uncluttered hills, green pastures, sparkling lakes and ponds, centuries old trees, the chatter of clean water running in our rivers and our streams, and the unobtrusive, unlittered paths that wend quietly among them are of inestimable value to human beings on account of their peculiar propeties that are capable of restoring a sense of well being into the hearts of anyone who cares to visit them. Like our planet they cannot be returned to us once they’re spoiled, and they tend to be spoiled when someone with an eye for a profit begins to weigh them up with the peculiar blind sight of the utilitarian economist. If no money can be made from beauty then an insensitive society will feel no loss at covering it with concrete, power-lines, or wind-generators. I can only trust that I do not live in that kind of society, but increasingly I’m beginning to wonder.

Over the last twenty years, China has spent its time powering up and becoming the all purpose manufactory of the world, exporting to us the goods those same utlitarian economists decided we could no longer afford to make for ourselves. But along with their computers and their clothes and their children’s toys and their fireworks, I’ve also partaken of the history of China’s pre-revolutionary culture and also some of its philosophical exports. In Daoism, for example, one of China’s major religious and philosopical traditions, there is a recognition of the power of nature to give expression to a formless and entirely intangible phenomenon called Dao.

Without Dao there is nothing. You can’t see it, touch it, smell it or sell it but you can feel it, and you feel it most strongly in unspoiled nature. Certain combinations of natural form give rise to a greater sense of Dao than others. You’ve all felt it. No matter how beautiful the country you walk through, there is always a special place that comes to mind. These things are subjective and reflective of something in ourselves as well, so they’ll be different for each of us, and often very subtle. It can be as trivial as the way a tree’s branches hang down over a stretch of shallow water, or it can be in the way the light hits a mountain ridge at a certain season of the year. It fills you up with something that makes life all the more worth while. It is one of those priceless and indefinable things that makes up your life’s reward. Yet many spend their lives in ignorance of it.

It’s Dao that tells us a natural forest of native hardwoods is beautiful and uplifting to walk though while a commercial monoculture of Sitka Spruce is butt ugly and depressing. It’s Dao that tells us a stream of water splashing over little stones and tumbling down in silver cascades is pleasant to sit beside on a summer’s day – Dao that tells us that to take that same stream and divert it through a concrete conduit – although it serves the same purpose of moving water from one place to the other – would be a stupid thing to do.

A dozen wind-generators sitting on a hilltop might generate enough power to light the homes of the little village sitting at the bottom, but it’s Dao that tells me I’d be better reading my book by the light of an oil lamp, and gazing out of my window by day on an uncluttered hilltop, than on a scene of utter ruination.

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Searching for the meaning of our lives

I was sitting alone at a table at what was Alexander’s Brasserie, in Southport, one sunny Saturday afternoon. Those of you who knew this little place will perhaps share with me the memory of its unusual allure – a French cafe in Wayfarer’s, a beautifully glazed Victorian arcade just off the strangely Parisian boulevard of Southport’s Lord street. It was, for long time, a favourite little refuge of mine, vaguely foreign and yet at the same time easily familiar, somewhere to slip sideways,… to sit aloof from the crowd and yet be positioned curiously in their midstream.

My attitude that afternoon was not gloomy, nor was it entirely introspective. Indeed for a good hour I spun out my Omelette de Maison and my dainty Espresso thinking of nothing but the crowds that passed me by.

The cafe had a seating area under the high glass of the arcade, a sort of enclosure fenced off from the casual shoppers who carousel endlessly around it,… and who perhaps unwittingly provide one of its attractions. If you sit down for long enough in a place like that they say you will see the whole of life pass before your eyes. This is a strange notion, and at first quite puzzling. I’ve always understood it to mean that if you look closely enough you will see a metaphor for every possible aspect of life,… no answers perhaps,… just carefully phrased questions that will cause you to ponder your own place in the scheme of things. And this, I guess, is the allure of watching people.

I was aware, naturally, of the girls and their fashions – the bright peacocks of our kind. And to be sure, many a shapely body passed me by that afternoon, but where my eyes would once have rested with discreet admiration, I was suddenly aware only of the transience of youth. It’s perhaps a regrettable, but fairly obvious truth that the pert bottom of today’s teenaged girl will inevitably become the wrinkled buttock of tomorrow’s older woman.

There is a transience to our being which makes a nonsense out of what popular western culture teaches us to perceive as being beautiful and desirable, when it is but a snapshot of a point in time that cannot possibly be sustained. This is the culture of youth, of celebrity and the glossy media, and no lasting happiness can ever be gained from its pursuit. Indeed the only logical result of the adoration of these values is a permanent anxiety for their impending loss.
Ladies might seek to remedy their saggy bottoms with painful and expensive surgery and so prolong the illusion of their beauty well beyond their middle age. But it is entirely natural that such pertness should fade,.. and I believe we would do better to become more accepting of it.
So began the train of my thoughts that singular Saturday afternoon. And then as if reacting violently to this awakening, my thoughts at once leaped to the consideration of the opposite end of the scale, to those individuals popular culture would have us believe are no longer beautiful, those whose condition, it might be suggested, is not at all desirable. And this again is strange, for theirs is a condition to which we are all inevitably bound.
I’m speaking of the many old folks, stiffer, more angular, their gait not so graceful and the truth of their forms hidden under clothing designed more with practicality in mind than the exhibition of attributes they no longer possess. Some of them seemed to shuffle with eyes disconcertingly dulled by their lives. Then there were the rotund, scowling old dears with a permanent metaphorical grip on their frail husbands’ earlobes – husbands who’s industry-tired bodies seemed transparent, and bent, and wasted.
I searched those aged eyes for anything that might betray a secret knowledge, a knowledge that was perhaps gained only from the long experience of life itself, but I saw nothing. There was certainly no ethereal glow born of enlightenment and indeed there was in fact nothing to tell me that what I observed was anything more than an all to graphic illustration of the frailty of mankind, and the futility of our struggle in the face of nature.
From the time of pert bottoms, it seemed, there lay only a brief fluttering of angst before there loomed fragility and death. No, the meaning of our lives lay not in the contemplation of our physical condition, nor in the joys of our flesh. That was too fleeting a phenomenon for it to have any genuine relevance in the cosmic scheme of things.
Now this was really troubling because since the dawn of time there have been learned men who spoke of enlightenment – men whose mighty intellects have scoured the words of every age and culture for a magic formula. So what was it? Where was the fruit of their labour?
Of course no formula has ever been found, at least no serum to be injected en mass in order to induce a grand, collective enlightenment,… and those powerful intellects go the way of all flesh, eventually unfulfilled and, one might suspect, ultimately unenlightened. So the busy chase of learning was just as futile,… unless of course these scholars were tight lipped about their discoveries and took their secrets with them. But that seemed equally unlikely for in all the ages past, you’d think at least one of them would have blabbed it out: the secret to the meaning of our lives.
Then, added to the swirling carousel of life, there came families, their children in various stages of development, from blubbery babes in cumbersome buggies to the bright, alert eyes of pre-teen children, testing every nerve, every shred of patience of their middle aged parents. This was familiar ground for me,… these harassed mothers and fathers, always tired, a little unkempt due to having insufficient time for themselves, or even for each other – the complete sacrifice of one’s self for the creation of new life! I saw no ethereal glow in their eyes, only tiredness and the tight lined grimaces of a permanently simmering anger.
In my more cynical moments I have wanted to gather the pert bottoms and point out to them the disheveled parents who seem the only logical conclusion to the attractiveness of youth and the urge to partake of the pleasures of the flesh. Such is life, I’d say, and certainly it had begun to seem more and more like a process as ruthless and as cold as evolution. Was there no solace? Was there no profound satisfaction to be had even in the rearing of children? Well – and I speak from experience here – while it is true that in parenthood we discover an unselfish and instinctive love for our children, it is a love that we pay for in a currency that demands the negation of desire, clarity of thought, and contemplation of one’s self.
It did not seem altogether hopeful then, although I remained optimistic that a face would eventually present itself, however fleetingly, a face which, by look or gesture would convey a vital essence, a key that would unlock the riddle I had lately come to ponder: the true meaning of this carousel of life.
I saw a priest and my attention was at once arrested by his silvery white hair as he swept by. There was a stately grace in his movements which might have suggested an inkling of something, but the eyes cannot lie, and in them I saw as much self absorption, as much self doubt, and human pettiness as in the rest of us. Many would have turned to such a man, I thought, and no doubt he could have offered much in terms of ritual prayer, but for an old agnostic like me it was not a salve I needed, but a solution.
A waitress busied herself among the empty tables and obliged me with a friendly smile. She was very young and very pretty, with platinum blonde hair worn with all the natural softness of her youth. In another light she might have passed for the most desirable of women, but I guessed she was only sixteen or seventeen, her waitressing but a weekend job, and a break from her studies. In her face I saw promise and warmth, and hope. I saw a setting out and guessed she would not be waiting on tables when I next visited that cafe.
My own setting out had been like that, I thought, a sense of promise and hope, yet though I could not complain at the way my life had unfolded, my life had provided none of the answers I had sought for so long, and yielded instead only one vexed question after the other.
Perhaps in another thirty years the girl would be a woman sitting at this table pondering the slowly shuffling carousel of passers by, and where would I be then? Would I would be grey and transparent? Would I be a metaphor of another stage in life: the man who’d searched for something but gave up because he couldn’t find it,… or came to realise it wasn’t there at all?
Oh, how I hoped that would not be the case! Certainly, I would grow old and grey and bent – in simple biological terms, that was pretty much the best I could hope for – but I did not like to think of her eyes resting upon me and reading nothing. I would have liked to think she could look at me and realise that, yes, her life meant something,… that something in my eyes would betray the evidence of a deeper level to human experience, a level that the experience of my own life had revealed to me. And from that brief glimpse perhaps she might have gained a measure of encouragement, that the transience of her life, the fading of her youth, and the spreading of her cellulite did not exclude her from experiencing a profound understanding,… an understanding worth the searching and the living, and the dying for.
It had not been an expensive trip to Southport, which was unusual. Whenever I went with my family we always seemed to amass a weighty collection of carrier bags – metaphors themselves of the curious condition of our lives, the weight,.. the restriction, the sense of burden that our accrued goods instill.
My purchases that day were modest. All I’d bought in fact was a slim second-hand volume of poems from Broadhursts, the antiquarian booksellers, on Market Street. It was an anthology, a collection of verse written by members of the British armed forces at the time of the Second World War. It had cost me only a few pounds and yet it had granted me the priceless feeling of flight, of travelling light, of Zen-like simplicity and escape from those other burdened shoppers weighed down by their purchases, and by their lives.
What I would find in the book I did not yet know because for now it lay unopened at the side of my coffee cup. Its plain brown dust jacket and the wartime economy of its construction betrayed no particular flavour of its contents. And what could a book tell me anyway? If there was a book, a magical book that contained the formula of enlightenment, then surely it would be well known.
I did not even know what it was that had possessed me to buy it, other than its apparent contradictions – the idea that amid the horror and the filth of war, the human spirit could still find a voice, and resort to the uncommon and eternal beauty of poetry. It was a connection, I suppose, and lately I had grown fond of connections, fond of the idea of meaningful coincidences.
“Can I take your plate?”
It was the waitress, smiling again. The light in her eyes impressed me, for so many of our youths these days seem barely conscious, performing their movements without thought or enthusiasm, as if they’ve glimpsed the future in their dreams and it fails to animate them.
I thanked the girl and, with the plate gone from my little table, I was then able to slide the book in front of me and contemplate it properly. The dust jacket was in good condition, the book itself also undamaged. To a collector such things are important I suppose, but to a mere reader they can sometimes instill a sense of unease. The book had not been read much in the sixty years since its publication. Indeed it looked like it had lain undisturbed on shelves, possibly also behind sliding glass, its little poems, its slices of emotion unknown, untasted. Was this because they were not worth the effort? Or was it just that no one else had taken the time?
I’ve always liked poetry, though I do not always understand it. My taste in it is simple – some might say simplistic. I prefer the rhyme and rhythm of the verses I learned at Primary School – The Tyger Tyger and The Listeners, and The Land Where The Bong Tree Grows. Indeed some of the messages and fine emotion woven into the twiddly verse of our more revered poets, peppered as they are with unpronounceable names from classical antiquity, I find altogether too intimidating, too tedious. Nor do I understand the jarring brashness of contemporary work, which irritates me deeply, and which I always feel is sneering at my staidness and my stupidity.
I took a tentative flick through the book. There was rhyme and rhythm, and plain words. It seemed we would get on well! A closer look now revealed poems that dealt with battle, with death, with the Blitz, with thoughts on leave from the battlefront, on returning to units in far flung places. But two things immediately struck me as being of perhaps more value. These were not the types of puerile verse that dealt with the death-or-glory fantasy of war, nor did they expound nobly on its futility, but merely its matter of fact reality, and the emotions it aroused in the hearts of the whole spectrum of people who bore witness to it. Secondly it struck me that few of those people who contributed to the volume would actually have described themselves as professional poets. They were ordinary souls, taken from this carousel of life, put into uniform and sent out to do extraordinary things, to face extraordinary situations, including the possibility of their own death.
The poems were slices through the hearts of people, just like the ones milling around in the Wayfarer’s arcade on that Saturday afternoon. I closed the book and looked up at those people now with renewed interest. It was not much of a revelation I suppose, but of course each of those pairs of eyes on that shuffling carousel came with its own soul, each capable of conveying the impressions gleaned by its own experience.
I still have that book and nowadays I value its poetry in different ways, but there is not a single poem, nor line, nor even an isolated word that I can say has pointed me in the direction of anything new. The importance was the book itself, plucked as it was that afternoon from the shelves of Broadhursts bookshop, and its plain presence on the table in the cafe in Wayfarer’s Arcade,… a combination of events coming together and unlocking a single thought,… freeing up the rigidity of my own mind and forming a prelude for much that was to follow in the coming years.
We are rarely aware of the turning points in our lives, and only in retrospect do we sometimes see their importance. Then we might ask ourselves, how could we not have felt that change of course? How could we not have felt the sails, so long becalmed fill slowly with cool wind, and set us on our way?
I gathered up my book and left the waitress a tip, a token, from my hand to hers, and small payment for the changes brought about that day. Then I joined the crowds, and became aware of them more intensely than before. They were no longer a passive phenomenon. Indeed each pair of eyes, each soul seemed suddenly conscious of itself in relation to everyone else. Everyone was aware of themselves in relation to others, glancing at others, briefly judging their own state from the state of those they encountered, including me. We were all like little mirrors reflecting light, illuminating something for someone else. We were each of us reflecting images of each other, in whom we saw reflected images of ourselves.
We are each of us bound on different journeys, each of us possessing a different and seemingly unrelated purpose, but at a fundamental level we are the same, each of us an expression of the same tangle of energy that is seeking to know itself through us. Therefore we can never be alone in our quest. Help will come in many guises,… be it a dusty old book that we might previously have overlooked a hundred times, or the innocent smile of a waitress as she cleans tables in a cafe. Similarly, without knowing it we help others on their way, by an innocuous word or gesture, a kaleidoscope of reflection and connection.
The challenge for each of us is not the effort, nor less the intellect required in understanding the meaning of our lives, for that is unknowable. The challenge is more the opening of one’s self to the possibilities, and being always receptive to the connections.

Then the connections cannot help but be made.

Copyright © M Graeme 2008

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