Out and about – A wander up Weets Top

Weets Top

We’re in Malham today, arriving a little later than we should. All the roadside parking has gone, and it’s only by great good fortune we manage to squeeze into the last space on the National Park car-park. It’s noon, and Malham is full. There is a festival air with a huge marquee, either in the process of being put up or taken down. There are coaches, several school parties, the older kids with clipboards, the younger ones with teddy bears. There are cars with European plates, God bless them, plucky pilgrims from the Continent who still think we’re worth the journey. They come for the Cove, and for Goredale Scar, some of the most dramatic scenery in the UK. This can make the routes a little tedious and over-crowded, rather than places of dreamy contemplation. But there are still haunts around Malham where nobody goes, and where you can escape for an afternoon, if solitude is your thing.

Malham

From the village, we pick up the route of the Pennine Way, and follow it south, to the tiny hamlet of Hanlith. I’ve never walked this way before, and find the scenery refreshing, with its views across Malham Beck, the gentle pastures rising beyond. The path has no need for flagstone pavings, it being less trampled, indeed quite sketchy in places, considering it is a national trail. The forecast was for a poor day – so much of June has been poor – but things are brightening, and the air is filled with the sound of curlews. The fallow land is yellow with buttercups, brushed through with the white of cow parsley, all of which adds a touch of impressionist art to the landscape.

It has been a good year for the curlews, something I hope I can read as an omen for better days ahead for poor old Albion – I mean, as we blunder, bruised and battered, into another General Election. But judging by the cartoonishness, and the lack of serious engagement of the political and media classes, the return of the curlew look like being our only solace. There is perhaps a lesson to be had in that. We see ourselves reflected best in the natural world, and in the sweep of the land, in the lone trees dotted against the sky, and in the call of the curlew. In current affairs, there is only emptiness and folly.

Along the Pennine Way, approaching Hanlith

The meadow path meets the steep, zig-zagging Windy Pike Lane, at the hamlet of Hanlith. We follow it up by Windy Pike Farm, where we encounter the poetry of eighteen-year-old Betty Chester, of whom I can find little information. Malhamdale.com describes her as a poor, uneducated farmworker. The poem is dated 1881. I include it here in full, for we lesser known scribes must stick together, not only across continents, but time as well:

A Poem about Malhamdale

O how I love thee, dear old Malhamdale!
With thy sequestered nooks and lovely vale,
Adorned by curious rocks and shady dells,
Fine waterfalls and rugged, high-peaked fells,
That lavishly display in many a part
The richest beauty of nature’s art
In thee, old Malhamdale.

Thou dost at every season of the year,
In sunshine bright, and wintry storms severe,
Present to my admiring eyes a face
That’s unsurpassed in beauty and in grace.
For, though I wander other sights to see,
Yet find I none that can compare with thee,
Romantic Malhamdale.

For, in the joyous and reviving spring,
What dale is there that can surpass thee in
The charms which budding tree and freshening field
And springing flower in rich abundance yield?
As nature fair arouses out of sleep,
And with consummate skill makes thee complete
In beauty, Malhamdale.

And when the soft and genial summer’s air
Brings into bloom thy flowers of beauty rare,
They with thy new-borne stream and rocks unite
In making thee a wonder and delight,
While birds, which sport so joyously at play
Raise happy songs that drive dull care away
From thee, bright Malhamdale.

Or when the cold and searching autumn’s breeze
Blights the fair flowers, and strips the dark green trees
Of all their leaves, which once were bright and gay
But now are left to wither and decay.
Although thou art of such great charm bereft,
I love thee still for there is beauty left
In thee, fair Malhamdale.

I love to see thee clad in garments fair
Which winter brings and spreads o’er thee with care.
As though to shield thy beauties from the cold,
She doth thee in pure white snow enfold,
And render thee more picturesque and grand,
While wonderingly at Windy Pike I stand
To view thee, sweet Malhamdale.

I live to view thee in the daylight clear,
And when the calm grey twilight hours appear,
Or when the moon sheds forth her mellow light
To cheer and grace the shadows of the night.
No matter when or where I gaze on thee,
Nought can I find but rich sublimity
In thee, my native dale.

Betty Chester, 1881

Beyond the farm, the lane peters out into a long track, which climbs gently, and then to a path, where it enters the open access area of Hanlith Moor. From here, white painted posts mark a breadcrumb trail, faint, occasionally boggy, to an intersection with the better path coming up from Calton. The views of Malhamdale all along this route are striking, and Betty’s poem rings clear. Much will have changed since her day – the volume of tourists for one, but, far less so than in other places. Indeed, from this altitude, there is the impression of having shaken off the centuries altogether.

The way to Weets Tops is straight forward now, but our attention is distracted by the intriguing dome of Hetton Common Head, where the Dales High Way comes up from the direction of Hetton and Rylestone. The map promises a route across to it, and sure enough there’s one on the ground, but very faint, and it involves a soggy crossing of Halton Moor Syke. I would not advise this after a wet spell. As it is, we manage to keep our feet dry by wandering upstream a bit. A little more wandering, and we intersect the Dales High Way, then bag the top – a small cairn marks the spot. This proves to be a very worthwhile diversion. The views from here, in all directions, are superb. As I have grown older, I seem to be growing out of the high drama of the Lake District, and have come to appreciate more the sublime quality of the Dales, which are less demanding of one’s energy.

Just a short walk now to our final objective of Weets Top, where we discover a trig point rendered almost insignificant by an accompanying drystone wall that climbs over rocky outcrops. In the corner of the way, by the fell gate, there is also the remains of the ancient Weets Cross, one of many waymarkers left over from the monastic period, and with links to Fountains Abbey. The wayside fairies interfere with my camera at this point, set it to manual, in order to make sure I don’t get a photograph of it.

Goredale from Hawthorns Lane

We’re about four miles round, so far, and have not seen another soul, since leaving the bustle of Malham. This won’t last much longer, and I predict a scrum around the chuck-wagon at Goredale Bridge, which is now just a short walk down the single-track Hawthorns Lane. Sure enough, ten minutes, and we’re back in the thick of it, but we do manage a most welcome cup of tea. All the benches are taken, so we perch ourselves precariously atop a boulder. Cross-legged, and dressed entirely in green, we must resemble an overlarge leprechaun.

Here we watch the world go by in all its noise and colour. A preschool child, asks politely at the chuck-wagon for a Kit-Kat, reaching up with his coins, and a sweetness I hope he never grows out of. An elderly couple sit chatting. He has a cup of tea, she is enjoying an ice-cream. They have the animated expressions of a courting couple, something even a little coquettish in the way her steel-grey hair floats in the breeze. He looks craggy and heroic. They are both tanned, flushed with energy, and clearly happy in one another’s company. By contrast, a brutish troll comes strolling up with a pair of salivating hounds, straining at the leash. He has a fag end in the corner of his mouth, as if to underline the caricature he has made of himself. A stout, scowling woman walks a step behind him. I make up stories for them all.

In the pool by Janet’s Foss, there are girls, bathing, and the air is full of the squeal and splash of children. Fresh notices have been erected asking us politely not to stay there overnight. The wood is as lovely as ever, and is as busy as ever. The trees are adorned with bird boxes, and bee hotels. In the meadows on the other side, there is a huddle of walkers, looking uncertain of themselves, the path having been colonised by a herd of bullocks. A notice advises us to keep our distance. I don’t know if it’s over-confidence, or stupidity, but the beasts seem placid, so I wander through them with gentle words, and they amble aside. Ramblers are occasionally killed by cattle, but not many. Still, I wonder why they are allowed to graze over public rights of way, when they effectively bar access to it for so many who are understandably afraid to be among them.

Mid-afternoon, Malham is still busy, and I am ready for coffee. The marquee is still in the process of either being put up or taken down, children are still milling with their clipboards and teddy-bears. Vehicles are circling the carpark, in the forlorn hope of bagging a miracle slot. The little blue car is hidden between a pair of giant SUV’s, causing confusion, drivers thinking the slot is empty, and they pull up, surprised to find it occupied, albeit by what looks, relatively speaking, like a toy car. We take pity on them, change from our boots and free up the space.

Malham would be too busy for a contemplative coffee anyway, so we drive just a short distance, to the farm shop at Airton instead. We pick up a nice cheese to take home while we’re at it, or more likely a cheese to take with us on holiday. We’ll be bringing it back to the Dales in a few days, this time taking up residence for a while. Our annual cottage in upper Wharfedale is calling. The longer I spend here, the less I want to go home.

Just over six miles round, seven hundred and thirty feet of ascent.

GPX file here. Let me know if it works.

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Like a marble, like an eye

It was January, I think, the winter of 1985. I’d driven south, two hundred miles in the snow for a meeting. What I’d yet to find out was it had been cancelled the week before, but no one from my office had thought to tell me. I was a kid, starting out in life, first job, keen to please, feeling my way and all that. The meeting wasn’t important, and neither was I, which was why they’d sent me. They’d wanted a face around the table, that’s all, and not necessarily anyone knowledgeable. I don’t even remember what it was about. That was it with those big companies. A lot of time and money got wasted, doing inconsequential things, and nobody cared.

The pool car they’d loaned me was a lemon. The washer bottle ran out at Corley. I had to refill it using an empty coke can I’d chased across the carpark in a howling wind. Then the water I managed to trickle in there had frozen by the time I got to Watford. I’d never been out of Lancashire before, never driven a motorway, let alone one as aggressive and as endless as that M6, M1 route. And all the time there was the clock ticking on when I’d thought the meeting was due to start, and a rising anxiety, not wanting to let the team down, by showing up late.

So, destination: Harpenden, Hertfordshire, way on down south. By the time I got there, I felt I’d almost died a dozen times: whiteout, ice, fog, the swirl of snow spinning my head so much it sometimes felt like the car was running backwards. I arrived about midday, dizzy with fatigue, to find the whole thing had been a waste.

The lip-glossed, shoulder-padded, frizzy-permed receptionist thought it was funny. “What? Nobody told you?”

I didn’t think it was funny at all.

The radio said they’d shut the M6 around Birmingham for the snow by then. It was coming down heavy around me too, the roads clogging up, and then the forecast was for a big freeze that night. The office had booked me into a hotel at least, so I drove there, and checked in. I’d never stayed in a hotel before. My parents had always holidayed in caravans. They’d not much money. Most of my colleagues were what you’d’ve called middle class back then, and had been to university. I wasn’t, and hadn’t. But if you laboured long at technical college, a working class lad could still get himself a white collar job. It wasn’t that I’d aimed myself in that direction out of any clear material ambitions. It had just seemed the right thing to do, that’s all. I mean to study, to cram the maths and the trig, and to become an engineering draughtsman, maybe one day even a designer. It sounded like interesting work, and it’s what Dad would have wanted – anything, he said, to keep me out of the pit.

Flopping down on the bed in that hotel room, after such a long drive, I was thinking I’d landed myself in a different world to the one my parent’s knew, and had prepared me for. And it was not a world I was altogether comfortable with, at least not if this was how casually people treated it, and how little difference I was making. I couldn’t ring my mother to let her know I was okay, because we didn’t have a home phone, though I knew she’d be watching the weather and fretting. Dad was long gone by then, but there still wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about him. He’d risked his neck all those years underground, and then it was something as mean and sneaky as the cancer that got him, stabbed him in the back, and robbed him of so much life.

I was still angry about that – oh, not all the time, but it could bubble up at the slightest thing and, though I was cursing the privilege and the incompetence of my white-collared middle-classed colleagues that day, it was Dad I was thinking about, and Mum on her own, just about managing on a widow’s pension. And there I was in my shirt and tie, sent way down south, stuck in the middle of Herfordshire, in a snowstorm, and for no good reason. And so what if I’d died on the road that day? What if I’d spun off on bald tyres, gone under the wheels of truck? Well, it would have done nothing but prove the pointlessness, the banality of the individual life. Like Dad’s, maybe. Except,…

I sat down at the little desk in that hotel room. The light was soft, coming from the snowed in world outside, and further softened as it was filtered through the net curtains. I took out a notebook, and began to sketch out a poem about a girl I loved, but who didn’t know my name. I’d not seen her for years, not since we’d left school, and went our separate ways. I’d fallen really hard for her, about the time Dad passed away. I think everyone expected me to fail, to go off the rails over that, and I suppose I might have done, except by some miracle, I fell madly, deeply in love with this girl, and wanted to impress her so much I was going to change the world, and then she’d want to be with me. Was that it? Was that what pulled me through those years of aching grief? That girl who didn’t even know my name?

When it was time, I went down to dinner. Maybe you take all this for granted – hotels, I mean, dinner and such. For me, back then, it was a trial, it was a battle of wits, sitting there, trying to convey the impression I was cool about it all, when I plainly wasn’t. There’s peculiar ritual to the hotel dinner table, one that’s almost comical. Menus were always a nightmare to me, never could find my way around them, and there was no British Standard to help you navigate the fancy names they gave to stuff. So, then you order, and hope you’ve picked something half-way edible, and the courses come the one after the other, served by supercillious waiters. And then there are the times between times when you’re conspicuous in your aloneness. So I hid my eyes in the notebook, and I worked some more on the poem. Sometimes it helps push back the craziness of the world, the mad, noisesome falseness of it. Other times it’s all too much, the world caves in on top, and the words won’t come.

I was always comfortable with poetry, the way it cut to the quick, the way you could express in a few lines what it took an entire paragraph of prose. But even then I knew there was no money in it, not for a guy like me, with my background, my accent. Who the hell would take me seriously as a poet? Even if I took myself seriously, which I didn’t. But I could draw technical stuff, lay out views on engineering drawings, knew my BS308 back to front, I could work with a neatness and a precision in ink that made everyone else in the office look cack-handed. I could earn a living by it, good money too, and Mum would feel easier knowing I was on my way. And if there was an afterlife, maybe Dad would rest easy too.

I just had to keep quiet about the poetry, because there was no good in it, and certainly no money, no way to make your way by it. It was also the mark of a flaky, effete sort of person, and in my world you were only as good as your last mistake on the drawing board – a misplaced view, a missing dimension, a feature that couldn’t be tooled. And Lord Byron didn’t work in a mill, did he? He racked up monumental debts, and shagged his way round Europe. John Clare spent half his life in an asylum, no use to anyone, and William Blake was mad a box of frogs. God rest them all. No, if you had any poetry in you , it was safer to keep it to yourself, lest others judge you the wrong way.

I knew the routine about hotels from listening to the older hands at the office. After dinner you were supposed to retire to the bar and get mildly drunk on expenses. But alcohol wasn’t a thing for me. I had enough trouble keeping a clear head when I was sober. But dinner that night had at least wasted a couple of hours. The best thing I could do now was sleep, then I could make an early start on the journey home in the morning. Except we never ate so late at home, and I knew I’d not sleep on a full stomach. The hotel lounge looked empty, soft-lit, peaceful and airy, so I sat down in there, to be quiet for a bit, and took out the notebook again.

That’s when I saw her, a tall girl, short hair, blue dress, and Doc Martins. She was slouched down in a Chesterfield, sort of all folded up. I’d not noticed her before, but suddenly she unfolded herself, and she was looking at me, smiling. I wasn’t used to that, I mean girls looking at me, let alone smiling. She had a pale, oval face and a sharp chin, and piercing blue eyes. I want to use the word challenging, but I don’t mean it in an aggressive way, more a speak your mind and don’t be so buttoned up sort of way.

I felt self conscious of course, and slipped the notebook back in my pocket. She looked a little older than me, and I guessed way more worldly, which wouldn’t have been difficult. She looked like she was expecting conversation, but I didn’t know where to begin, and that only made me more self conscious. Some guys go through life leaving a trail of broken hearts. Me? I’ve left a trail of women who never even knew I was there.

It was she who broke the ice, made all the running, made me easy in myself.

“What you writing?” she asked.

American accent. You can’t imagine how exotic that sounded to me. And I wondered if maybe that’s why she was so forward – being American, I mean. It’s just how American girls were, perhaps. Every English girl I’d met no sooner looked at me than they were turning their backs. Maybe they smelled the poetry in me. It came with an intensity, a seriousness, and they didn’t like it. It scared them. They wanted fun, that’s all.

I tried evasion. “Em,… writing?”

But she wasn’t to be deflected. “Yea. Like just now, and in the restaurant. I was watching you. Sure didn’t look like no business report, neither. Least not from a distance. Looked more,… creative. You know? Soul stuff.”

Okay, confess it. “Bit of poetry, that’s all.”

She rolled her eyes, dramatic, teasing. “All? Is all, he says.”

So I went all defensive: “I mean,… it’s just a hobby. I’m not,… you know,… not a poet or anything.”

“You write a poem, makes you a poet. Least it seems that way to me.”

Did it? I suppose so. “Maybe.”

But she was emphatic: “No maybe about it.”

We were quiet for a bit, and I was feeling awkward again, not wanting to leave and appear rude, but not knowing what else to say to make the staying easy for us both. We were strangers in a hotel lounge, ships in the night and all that. She was a little brassy, confident, perhaps a litte odd, too. I was awkward, inexperienced, tongue tied. I presume there was a sophisticated etiquette for dealing with all of that, but I didn’t know what it was. Again, though, she made things easy, managed to keep things going: “Sure snowed hard, today, didn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So, where you headed?”

“Home, tomorrow. Back up north. You?”

“Me? London.”

“Ah, way on down south, London Town.“

She laughed at that. “You know Dire Straits? That’s a line from Sultans of Swing, isn’t it?”

“Yes, got all their stuff.” Sure, I’d cracked a joke, an in joke, a cool joke. And she’d got it.

“Cute accent by the way. That where you’re from, up north you say?”

“Yes.”

“Gotta check that out some time. North of England?”

“You do that.”

She smiled, such a sweet smile. There was something of the street urchin about her, I mean in the way she dressed, in the cut of her hair, but there was something powerful too. We’d broken the ice now, opened the way to some easy conversation, but this was to be the briefest of encounters, as I find the most significant ones usually are – a fleeting intervention of the gods. A look here, a word there, a touch on the rudder, and the world changes, though you may not notice at the time. Then some guy appeared round the doorway, nodded to her, and she got up to leave. But in passing she took something from the pocket of her dress. It was a marble, pale blue, but swirled with darker blues of every shade. She held it out, and dropped it into my palm.

“A small blue thing,” she said. “For luck, maybe.” And then: “Be anything you need to be to get by. But always be the poet in you too. Take care, now.”

I slept well that night, and the morning brought a bright new world. There was sunshine and a sparkling frost. It took me a good half hour to ready the car. There was an auto-shop across the road, where I filled up with screen wash. The radio said the motorway was open all the way, now. We’d take our time, but we’d make it, and we’d show those smug bastards at the office we weren’t fazed by anything. They’d risked my neck for nothing, but on the upside, I’d had a night away in a decent hotel, all paid for by the company. Oh, and I’d met some kind of goddess, who spoke with a Brooklyn accent and who’d gifted me a marble. For luck.

It was around Corley, heading north, when I first heard that song on the radio: Small blue thing. It collapsed me back inside myself, made something small of me, but also transcendent. I remember that drive like it was yesterday. I remember that song playing, and the world changing around me. It was becoming more manageable for being viewed through the coolness of a different kind of eye. It was a way of looking that stripped away all the layers of deceit. The poet Blake had it, hundreds of years earlier when he wrote: This life’s dim windows of the soul distorts the heavens from pole to pole and leads you to believe a lie when you see with, not through, the eye.

Suzanne Vega, The Old Grey Whistle Test, BBC TV, 1985.

I’m not saying it was her. Lots of girls looked like that, and dressed that way in those days. I’ve no idea who she was. She was a kindred spirit perhaps, sent by the faery-folk to rescue me from my lonesomeness and my anger, that night. Or more likely, she was just a friendly American girl who was into that kind of music, and into poetry. And she was so into that song, she kept a pocket full of blue marbles then she could give them out in passing to lonely strangers. I don’t know.

Naturally, that song has haunted me for forty years. In that time I’ve made my way, been what I needed to be to get by, and I’ve changed when I had to. I wasn’t always inspired by what I’ve had to do, but that’s just the way things are for most of us. It’s a whole lot easier though if, like she said, you can always be the poet inside of yourself, too.

I still carry a notebook, then I can let that side of me out, whenever he feels the need to express himself. It’s through him I find the meaning of my life, rather than out in the world. Out there, there’s still just the M6 and the M1, and the weather, same as always. But not me. I’m not the same now as I was back then, but I do still have that small blue thing, like a marble, like an eye. Sure, it just a piece of China, a piece of glass, but then some things are worth more than their weight in gold, worth more than a million words of prose. I’d write a poem about all of that, but a better poet than me beat me to it, a long, long time ago.

This is the best I can do.

Thanks for listening.

Oh, by the way, way on down south? Play me out, guys:

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The writing life – a review of The Rivendale Review, 1999-2024.

The Council of Elrond

The Rivendale Review is in its twenty-fifth year. It began as a Website, hosted by an outfit called IC24, which later became Madasafish. The Internet was still shiny-new back then. It was yet to be colonised by a handful of tech giants, and the phrase “surveillance capitalism” was the stuff of dystopian science fiction. No, the Internet in those days was more akin to the wild west. There was a pioneering spirit about it, and to establish your own presence in it was exciting, like setting up camp in the darkness of an unknown wilderness. My early campsite is still there, which is surprising, since neither IC24, nor Madasafish are with us any more, and I’m no longer troubled for the fees. I maintained it until around 2011, but began a transition to WordPress, where it has been ever since.

I can’t remember how I used to update that Website, other than it was something convoluted, involving a thing called FTP. I don’t suppose it would work anyway, now, though it’s interesting there is still a computer server out there containing forgotten bits of code I wrote, and which are yet to be overwritten by someone else, that if you stop paying, or the provider goes bust, one is not necessarily deleted. Anyway, it was all a bit clunky, but those were early days in the self-publishing world, so still something of a revelation. They were days when launching one’s own words into cyberspace, without the gatekeeper of a publisher, felt deliciously anarchic. We take it all for granted now, but it’s useful to be reminded of these things.

The Internet is a very different place now. We early travellers have become minnows swimming the shallows of a feudal ocean. We might feel we are still the heart and soul of cyberspace, doing our creative thing. But our existence is only tolerated for the potential ad revenue and intel that can be gleaned from scraping our words, studying our clicks, measuring the time we linger over certain images, and subjecting them to AI analysis. Surveillance Capitalism is very much a thing now. We take our freedoms to write on here for granted, but we have only to look at other parts of the world to understand how fragile, how vulnerable we are. The west is not yet in the grip of authoritarianism, but it is flirting with it. Though the Rivendale Review is far from being a place of controversial opinion, I feel I can write what I want here without fear of censure. Orwell’s dystopia, however, is just the flick of a switch away.

I was in my late thirties when I began the Rivendale Review and still of a mind to have my novels, in all their book scented glory, on the shelves at WH Smith. This was going to rescue me from the day-job, and set me up as the next John Braine, the next Alan Sillitoe. I had the Singing Loch and Langholm Avenue doing the rounds of the London publishers, but they lived mostly on a Floppy Disk, and it was only their opening chapters that made brief juddering forays into daylight, via a dot matrix printer. This was prior to accompanying an SAE to the next publisher’s slush pile, where they would languish for months before being returned unread. They never rescued me from the day-job, but thanks to self-publishing, they are read, and it’s through the Rivendale Review, I realised my mistake: I did not actually want to be a professional writer, just a writer. And the novels kept coming.

As an introverted personality, one who shuns the limelight, and ducks every social engagement he can, being a professional writer would have been hell. Now, in my early sixties and safely retired. I do not need to be a professional writer to actually live, but I do need to be a writer, so the Rivendale Review continues, at least in so far as my dialogue with the outside world is concerned.

The title “Rivendale Review” was born out of gormlessness, but I’ve stuck with it. There’s a scene in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings where the fellowship is gathered secretly at rather a grand place called Rivendell, for a council of the wise, in order to determine the future of the “One Ring”. Lots of heroic and weighty words are spoken. Borrowing it for my own purposes smacked of pomposity, then, but the gods were quick to take me down a peg, when I realised I’d got the name wrong. Then again, “Rivendale” rolls together better with “Review”, so maybe the gods had a plan. Except the name doesn’t matter, since it’s the web address that’s crawled by the search engines.

The eclectic nature of the Rivendale Review suits my interests, which are varied, and it allows me to write about them. The subtitle is “writing to know what I think”. This comes from a Flannery O’Connor quote, which again I didn’t get right, but which makes sense, as I’m not good at thinking on my feet, and prefer to boil things down to their essence by writing essays about them. It is also a vehicle of existential enquiry, exploring meaning and purpose, at least from the perspective of a twenty-first century, Western European man.

Meaning is different for everyone. Its eclectic nature seems to either make a mockery of the idea altogether, or it is reflective of something more mysterious, and from which all our varied enthusiasms arise. I see it, I feel it, in the blogs I read, and through reading them I see the world through your eyes – all of which confirms the insight of the old mystics, that we are the same, just different versions of the one thing, different back-stories, but all of us the universe awakening and becoming aware of itself from our unique perspectives. So the important thing is that whatever your thing is, not to give up on it, and don’t live your life from the perspective of how you imagine others see you. Dance like no one’s watching, sing like no one’s listening. Write like no one’s reading. Be original. Be yourself. This is the only obligation placed upon us.

Of course, this is not to say that as the winds change we should not change with them, as I’ve no doubt the Rivendale Review will change in the years to come. But for now at least, eclectic, old-fashioned, and occasionally cranky, we sail on.

Cheers for 25 years.

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On my bookshelf – The Case against Reality – Donald D Hoffman

I’m not sure if Donald Hoffman chose this title himself, or if it was foisted on him by the publisher looking to broaden the potential audience. It’s certainly provocative, and aims the book at those perhaps seeking a different view of the world, one verging on the mystical. But what Hoffman, and an increasing number of scientists like him, are actually saying is that reality is – well – real, it’s just not what we think it is.

He builds his case using one of the most successful of all theories: evolution by natural selection. Many non-scientific, religiously inclined or just plain mystical seekers of “meaning” will be put off by this. There’s something about evolutionary theory that offends the human sensibilities – echoes perhaps of the Darwinian culture shock that goes back all the way to 1859. We should hear Hoffman out, though, as the case he makes is compelling, and leads us in a surprising direction, one that not only eliminates the concept of a material reality, but also time and space.

What recent studies reveal is that we have evolved to see and experience a highly selective and at times distorted, and even illusory view of reality, in order to better survive it. If we saw reality as it truly is, our chances of surviving to an age sufficient to produce offspring would be zero. In short, fitness for survival beats knowing the underlying truth of reality. If we look at a tomato, we see a tomato. But what is a tomato? Hoffman describes it as an icon, like a computer icon, one we have all agreed upon, that when we look at something that looks like a tomato, we call it a tomato, and we know what to expect when we interact with it in other ways. We know what it will feel like, roughly how heavy it will be, and that when we eat it, it won’t kill us. But when we close our eyes, says Hoffman, the tomato is no longer there. Something is there for sure, but unless we sense it by other means, by touch or scent, it is no longer a tomato, and we have no way of knowing what it really looks like, or indeed what it is.

This is a philosophical shift that’s difficult for us ordinary mortals to grasp, because we’re so immersed in our icons, we take them for granted. It’s like when we use a graphical interface on a computer, and we drag a file to the waste bin. That’s not what really happens. The computational process for deleting a computer file, indeed for defining a computer file in the first place, is quite different, and much more complex, but the everyday user doesn’t get involved in any of that. If we did, the business of trashing or creating a file would take far more effort than is now necessary, and computers would still be specialised devices, understood by only a few experts. They would not have transformed the world. The “illusion” of the graphical user interface has rendered the computer more fit for general use. And so it is with our interactions with reality. We do not see or experience reality as it really is but, through the interface of our senses, we experience it in a way that gets the job done efficiently.

The human eye is very sensitive. It can detect a single photon, but only within the wavelengths of 380 to 700 nanometers. This is all we need to survive. If we could see into the infra-red and ultraviolet wavelengths, we would experience a very different world, but the process of evolution has narrowed it down for us to the bare minimum of what is necessary. Any more, and the brain would be wasting valuable energy processing information that is of no use to us.

Hoffman spends a good half of the book presenting examples and case studies like this which prove his point. He then goes on to speculate about the actual basis of reality, and settles upon a kind of universal consciousness, for which he outlines a theory he calls “Conscious Realism”. Now, to be honest, this is where he loses me, as the book becomes suddenly rather technical. But so far as I can work out, it has to do with simple building blocks of consciousness called “conscious agents”, basic operators at the fundamental level of reality, but which can combine and construct ever greater levels of complexity, eventually resulting in beings like us that are conscious, and capable of self reflection.

The idea that the universe consists only of the appearance of material stuff is not new. We can take this back to the idealist philosophers, Berkeley (1685-1743), Kant(1724-1804), and Schopenhauer (1788-1860), all the way through to its latter-day proponents like Bernado Kastrup. Now, I’m okay with idealism. It explains much that was once mysterious to me, and it suits my oeuvre as a writer of speculative fiction, but I do understand why it might be difficult for many people to accept. If this is the case for you, fear not – other theories of reality are available. Until recently, idealism had generally been resisted by professional scientists, who tend to come at the world from the perspective of material realism. This is the first book I’ve read where a highly successful theory, like evolutionary biology, has been deployed in order to support the case, seemingly against itself.

Altogether, this was a very interesting and thought-provoking read, one I also found challenging, especially in the later chapters where Hoffman outlines his theory of Conscious Realism in some detail. This is not to say I think it’s wrong, only that the explication went way beyond my ability to comment with any competence. An important addition to the literature, and to the history of ideas, which could very well turn out to explain what is currently,… well,… inexplicable. Namely, ourselves.

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