As I begin to write this, the sun is setting neatly into the notch of hills formed by Langstrothdale. Its light is spilling the length of the wooded vale, illuminating the bare hills over a distant Buckden, with an ethereal glow. That scene, those hills, at this hour, in this light, fills me with a deep aching joy that’s impossible to describe. But I’m going to try.
I want to do something other than just sit here gazing through the window at it. I want to close with it, to gather it up somehow. I want to seal it in a jar for future dark times, when all I need do is twist off the lid and the darkness will be gone, and I imagine I will be here again, in this vale, at the setting of the sun.
I have been outside to gaze at it, to breathe the air of this golden hour, to feel the cool breeze on my face, to hear the gentle stirring of the trees. From the little garden of this cottage, I have combed the crenelated tops with binoculars. I have photographed the scene a dozen times. But I know what I feel cannot be captured. It is like a love that can be neither consummated, nor ignored. It can only be witnessed and felt, and the feeling of it is a kind of transcendence. It is the key to another world, to another mode of being.
Such a thing can only be shouldered. It is our lonely duty to feel it, to be the eyes, and ears, the heart, the soul of the universe, if only for a moment, as it becomes aware of itself through us. Nothing more is required, nor even possible. We must simply lend it our selves. Our reward is that, for a moment, it and we might become one, but only if we can let go of this vanity we can somehow capture it, record it, preserve it, for it is now, and only now. That’s the deal. That’s the only way in to experience the full joy of it.
Joy is not happiness. Happiness is the chatter and splash of a sunlit brook over pebbles. Joy is the long plunge of white water into a deep, crystal-clear pool.
Thus, I sit and watch as the shadows lengthen, and the light grows more beautiful, and more golden as the moments pass. Until,… of a sudden, they are no longer lush and bright, and awake with wonder, but hushed and cast over with the soft, blurry blue of sleep. The day closes, silence creeps over the vale and, from the barns that dot the buttercup meadows, the owls slip, one by one, big and white, arresting as ghosts, to own the night.
But the night comes slow in June, inching slow, dotted now and then by the ragged flight of bats. The hills become theatrical silhouettes against a blue grey, muffled sky. I draw the curtains, settle to dulcet lamplight and, as I seek the words to close, the owls call.
It was the late great Kurt Vonnegut who reminded us the arts are no way to make a living. You can apply this to any of the arts – writing, poetry, painting, photography – all things we amateurs take great pleasure in. This is a pity, but it’s also an obvious fact of life in a world that values capital, above soul.
We might wind up in a toxic job, suffering under bad bosses, and psychopathic colleagues. Or maybe it’s more simply that we find the day-to-day business of paid work unfulfilling, because that’s just the way contemporary work is organised, robbing us of all sense of our own agency. It is only through our art, carried out in free time, we become re-animated through our satisfaction in what we do, and by exploring life’s meaning. Through the lens of art, life takes on a greater depth and a richness. Without it, life is featureless and void as any workplace on a wet Monday morning. We can hardly be blamed then for making the connection, and wanting to earn a living by our art. During my own early working life, I sought financial independence by writing, and by landscape photography. Neither worked out. Obviously, some artists do make it, but for the main part, at least, Kurt was right: it’s no way to make a living.
The Ruined Windmill, Harrock Hill, Lancashire (by me)
Some formerly amateur “hobby” photographers have made a success of themselves by virtue of the Internet, setting up smart YouTube channels where they can be the stars of their own show. I follow a few, find them entertaining, and a useful source of tips and tricks, but I have also noticed they are not making a living from photography. When we look more closely, we realise that although their photographs are very accomplished, they are making a living by selling a lifestyle. They gain followers, and thereby earn ad revenue, and sponsor products and services. They also hold workshops which others pay to attend. As for their picture, they actually make very little from sales. Like everyone else, then, they have to reach beyond their art in order to pay the bills. If you are an articulate, good-looking and charismatic individual, moderately skilled in picture taking, I dare say you might do as well as any other YouTube photography guru. If, however, you are an introverted, camera shy, tongue-tied old gargoyle (like me), it’s probably better giving it a miss.
Bank End Farm, Cockerham Marsh (by me)
But this does not mean the art of photography is denied us. Quite the opposite. We have the opportunity to become much more intimately acquainted with it, to truly grow our souls by it, undistracted by the need to apply our art to the business of making money. That said, we have to reconcile ourselves to making a living by conventional means, and making our peace with it. Then we can begin to explore the art in photography.
It would be vain to call myself a photographer. I have a smattering of technical knowledge gained ad-hoc over a lifetime of simply fiddling with cameras. I have picked up compositional guidelines – the rule of thirds, for example, or the Golden Mean. I can talk about the times of day when the light is more interesting, more dramatic, but if we are not selling our photographs, these details are secondary. What brings us back to photography, to the frame and the shutter, is something else.
“Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Lone figure, on a hill. Rivington, Lancashire. (by me)
This comes close to nailing it for me. My own photography is mainly landscape and rural scenes. It fits in with a love of exploring those wild places that remain to us, here, in the British Isles, mostly the North of England within a radius of a couple of hours drive from home. I walk with a camera. Just a camera. Too much gear, and especially a lumbering great tripod, gets in the way of the freedom to move, to stalk those things Cartier-Bresson describes as continually vanishing. And in the hills you are better packing an emergency bivvy bag and an extra layer of clothing than, say, a bag of photographic filters or other accessories you are unlikely to use.
A patch of light on a fellside, a dramatic formation of clouds, above a light-painted tree, a single mountain standing out from its neighbours by dint of time and light, and moment. All these things are continually vanishing. Blink and they are gone forever. They are moments to be enjoyed in the moment, of course, as we bear them witness, and this is the pleasure of the walk. But if we can return home with a camera full of images, we can continue to explore our day though the dimension of the photograph, and what more we can draw out of it in the (digital) darkroom.
Penyghent, Yorkshire Dales National Park (by me)
This way, an afternoon’s walk, say in the Yorkshire Dales, can be enjoyed, relived, and explored for the rest of the week, or longer as old photographs are revisited. And sometimes even the shots we thought blurred and uninspiring can reveal something new, something unexpected at a later date in their colours, shapes, or contrasts. This is the art in photography, and anyone can do it if they are so minded.
How we develop as photographers is down to individual experience. Beyond a basic grasp of the triangle of shutter, aperture and ISO, the rest is application and, here, as Bresson says, your first 10,000 photographs will be your worst. In other words, we gain nothing by having our camera in a box. We must get out there, and use it.
“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.”
Ansel Adams
Drinkwaters farm (ruin), Anglezarke moor (by me)
The difference between a snap and a photograph is in the perspective. Two photographers can capture the same subject. One will record the subject as existing, in a documentary fashion, the other will frame and express it, and add to it something of the moment. It’s like looking at an apple. Fine. It’s an apple. But how does it make you feel? How you express that is down to where you stand.
As for the kind of camera, a simple phone camera has plenty to teach, and reveals as much about the art in photography as a top of the range Leica or a Hasselblad. Art is not about counting pixels. It’s about growing the soul. And the art is in the image, even a grainy one. I am still discovering things in pictures I took twenty years ago, with a 3 megapixel camera – considered the bee’s knees at the time – when now even 24 megapixels is pedestrian, at least from a technical perspective. And personally speaking, I shall never bottom the potential of my 24 megapixel Nikon, and to which I apologise, for I am sure it would perform much better in more capable hands.
But then:
“All the technique in the world doesn’t compensate for the inability to notice.”
– Elliott Erwitt
And, likewise, all the megapixels in the world are secondary to the eye’s ability to look and to truly see whatever it is looking at.
I was determined to get out a bit further afield today. The forecast was poor, but I’d decided on a trip to the Lakes, anyway, so set the alarm for an early start. But then I woke in the small hours, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’d had this dream about a belligerent copper who’d smelled something bad in my wardrobe, but wouldn’t say what it was. I wanted to know, then I could fix it, but he was rude and stalked off. So I went after him, and caught him being nasty to someone else. He was a right piece of work, so I thought it best to leave him be. I’m lying awake then until I hear the birds, around six. The alarm is set for six thirty, but I knock it off because there’s no way I’m going to be able to get out of bed. So then of course I fall asleep and the next thing I know it’s half past ten.
It’s a bleary-eyed breakfast, and no plan for the day, because there’s no point heading up to the Lakes at this time. I allow myself ten minutes of doom as I scroll the news. There’s a headline about the Metropolitan police being officially declared a bad lot. It breaks the dream, but the associations are too loose to say the latter informed the former, so we’ll let that one go as a coincidence before we claim it as one of those Dunnian dreams. There’s another headline about hundreds of people gone, and going, blind, for want of timely treatment by our struggling health service. By now, it’s eleven thirty.
The best we can do with the day is get our boots on a local hill, just for the exercise. Any hill will do, and the Pike comes to mind, it being a short drive to Rivington. Now, some days I can overlook the tiredness of Rivington, it being somewhat overrun as an amenity, but I suspect today is not one of them. That said, Rivington it is.
We take the big grey car, rather than the little blue one, because it’s raining, and the forecast is for more. The big grey one isn’t as fun to drive but, being more technologically advanced, it allows me to listen to podcasts. I’m listening to one about metaphysical idealism, which describes how everything is basically a mental construct, and we are disassociated alters within a Mind at large. It’s a counterintuitive way of looking at the world, but it makes sense of those areas where Materialism fails. It also seems to have fewer internal inconsistencies, especially when it comes to explaining consciousness.
The inconsistencies of consciousness are proudly on display, when I park up, noting the usual scattering of multicoloured dog bags. Perhaps I should say “self consciousness”, and the lack of it, otherwise no one would for shame treat our environment with such contempt. Today we also have tin cans courtesy of Dr Pepper and Monster Energy, a plethora of wet wipes, and a discarded pair of trousers (I wonder what he/she wore home). It must have been a busy weekend, but then all weekends (and weekdays) are busy at Rivington.
The Ravine, Rivington Terraced Gardens
Photography’s not really the point today, but I carry the camera out of habit, and you never know. We take a direct approach towards the Pike, up through the Pineatum, then the ravine. There was one shot here I thought I’d try, but there are people all over the place, and one guy in particular looking comatose, and clearly not for moving. So we grab a different shot and on we plod. It’s a steep route, and I can tell something’s lacking in me. It’s not post COVID, more likely that sleepless night, and sometimes the mind just tells you you’ve not got it in you, and there’s no way you can convince it otherwise.
Donuts on the lawn
We make it as far as the lawns, the entire route thus far being marked with a breadcrumb trail of detritus from visitors whose minds are trapped in the low bandwidth regions. There’s an occasional glow from the sun, but the overall mood is gloomy. The Terraced Garden Trust did some sterling work up here, clearing the Great lawn, and the Orchestra Lawn from a near century of scrub, and re-laying them. Summertime brings a delightful rejuvenation of festivals, and family picnics to a once derelict ruin, but I note with dismay the trolls have also found their way up, in their cars, and have been doing donuts. It looks like they had great fun, churning it to slime, and ruining all the hard work.
Decision time for the route. I’ve definitely no puff for the Pike today, so we make do with the Pigeon tower, then descend towards the car-park at Lower House. The track here seems to be disappearing into the earth, as it forms an ever deeper ravine. It sees brutal assault from four by four vehicles, and dirt bikes, then the run-off from the moor gets in it and does the rest. There’s wire cutting, too, to allow access off-piste to rogue mountain bikers blazing slime trails through sensitive woodland. The whole scene is a mess.
As the current BBC series by David Attenborough reminds us, the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. A quarter of our mammals are facing extinction, 97% of wildflower meadows have gone, only 13% of the land is forested, and half of that is alien, monocultural plantation, with only a quarter being ancient, native woodland, and most of that in poor condition and under constant threat from rapacious developers. There seems little reason to be optimistic. I suppose the fact of the matter is we’re a small country with a large, and largely ignorant population, who has seriously fouled its nest, and the best it can come up with is to concrete over the nice bits that remain.
Track erosion by 4×4.
The fundamentalist eco warriors would sooner humans were wiped out, then the earth might eventually renew itself and thrive without us, and they have a point, since the earth is as much the rightful home to nature at large, albeit red in tooth and claw, as it is to us. But they’re missing a crucial point, that without us, there is no beauty. Metaphysical idealism to me, amongst other things, implies we are the universe becoming aware of itself, that we are the eyes and the ears of creation. That while the poor old NHS is failing our eyes due to budget cuts inflicted by philistines, we are still the bit of the universe that sees, and is moved by its beauty. Nature cannot do that without us, beautiful though it is. It is we who bear witness, and are moved by nature’s beauty, or horrified by its destruction.
So, as I see it, like it or not, the earth needs us. Without us, there is no point to it, and we have to balance the equation by assuming our proper place in the order of creation, as responsible stewards and witnesses to its glorious unfolding. Poor, tired old Rivington needs us too, or at least enough of us to look around at the despoliation, on days like this, and say oh,… for f*&ks sake.
As we return now to the big grey one, it’s coming on to rain. Three miles, eight hundred and ninety feet of ascent. One hour and twenty-five minutes. Not bad for a bad day with little puff, and we did manage some nice pictures of the ravine after all. But we’re definitely going to the Lakes next time.
I tested negative for COVID on day ten, so nipped out to fuel the little blue car. The drive wore me out, and my arms and legs didn’t feel like my own. I’ve been a bit cautious then, getting back into the walking saddle, so much so, today’s walk hardly counts, at barely two miles, but enough to see what’s what, and hopefully get things rolling again.
It’s one of those cold, grey, late winter days. The light is flat, the colours muted. We have clumps of snowdrops, plus the miniature daffodils are out, and the garden forsythia is showing yellow. When in doubt, I always let the car decide, and it always delivers me to the Parson’s Bullough road, by the Yarrow Reservoir, at Anglezarke. You’ve a good choice of routes from here, from the epic, to the bimbling, and I think bimbling is the more sensible choice, today. We’ll see if we can claim our legs back, and trust the rest will follow when it’s ready.
So, you catch up with me driving up Adlington’s Babylon lane. I was always going to buy a house up here, handy for Rivington and the moors, and I seem to drive it every week. I could save myself some miles. Babylon Lane is mostly old mill terraces, and can look a bit dour, but as you reach the top, and the junction by the Bay Horse, everything opens out, and the beauty of the West Pennines hits you all at once. You can travel straight on from here to Rivington, or cut left down Nickleton Brow, for Anglezarke. This is one of the most beautiful roads in the district, dropping to the bridge over the Yarrow, then up the other side, to the Yew Tree inn, and the reservoirs.
I’m not great, festering in doors for long periods. Even a few days of rain can make me twitchy, so the 10 days of self-imposed isolation was a bit of a trial, one that renders the outdoors strange, as the self-important media holds one captive, injecting its bad news, like a poison infinitely worse than COVID. In his recent piece, fellow blogger, Narayan, quoted Kurt Vonnegut as saying we are dancing animals. We are made to move, to get outdoors, to experience the world and other people. This struck a chord. Isolation, and gawping day after day at a computer screen, or doomscrolling our phones is not good for us. It is not dancing.
So, here we are, now, on the Parson’s Bullough road, looking to dance. There’s a huge flatbed truck in a little lay-by, and goodness knows how he got that up here, but it looks like they’re repairing the Allance Bridge, after a boy racer knocked the parapet off. My sense of smell has yet to make a return, so I can’t smell the leaf mould, or the moorland air, but as I crack open the door, something in the air is sufficiently welcoming, and revivifying. We step out, eager to embrace it.
In one of my early COVID reveries, I was wondering about getting a body-cam – though not because I fear assault when I’m out and about. I enjoy fiddling with clips from the little blue car’s dash cam, and wondered if a mash-up of a walk would be a fun thing to do. Of course, there are plenty of vloggers out there with the full kit and caboodle, including the buzzy drone for tracking shots that would make my efforts look childish, but still, I may have a go.
So, anyway, we’re moving. One foot in front of the other. The first test is the short, sharp hike up Hodge Brow, to where the path leaves the road, by Morrises. I was thinking it would flatten me, but we seem to have fuel in the tank. Things are looking good. The colours are so soft today, we’ll need to have a think about how to pull anything out of them with the camera, but without over-blowing it. What tends to happen is we lose detail, especially the distant woodlands blurring out, and everything looking muddy. Not a great day for the camera at all really, but we’ll try setting the upper limit on the ISO to 800, then we can get faster shutter speeds, and hopefully dissolve any noise in post-processing.
This eastern flank of the reservoir is the most attractive, the route meandering through open meadows, and quite elevated with views all around, to the moors, to the Pike at Rivington, and then out to the estuary of the Ribble. The land feels real, and comforting in its familiarity. Does that sound too obvious? But stuck at home, vulnerable to the worst of bad-news media, it’s easy to lose our way, imagining things to be important which are not. Or is it more a case of being encouraged to believe certain things are important, when they are not, in order to distract from other issues, which are.
I read this week the novels of Roald Dhal are to be censored, removing language that has, shall we say, fallen out of polite usage. The same fate is to befall Flemming’s Bond novels. The media seems made to inculcate strong opinions on such matters, and perhaps it’s because I’ve been ill, but I find it difficult to care. Philip Pullman suggests we should simply let such works go out of print if they are no longer suited to contemporary sensibilities, and I have some sympathy with that view. I’m no fan of Dhal or Flemming, but many still are. I am a fan of LeCarre, and some of his early works contain a language that was certainly of its time, so how soon before he is added to the mix. Many household names are the same. I suppose the issue is that these works still sell, and publishers are loath to let a good earner go out of print. But what do I think, urges the breathless media, you have to have an opinion. No, I don’t. Not today.
I think it was Krishnamurti who said something to the effect that the craziness only starts when men start to think, and then we argue over who’s right, even to the extent of killing one another over trifles. The natural world is not beset by such madness, which is perhaps why so many of us seek it out to regain our footing in the pell-mell of the world of men.
We come down to the southernmost point of the walk through Dean Wood, now, and the avenue of the chestnuts. When I last came this way, it was under snow. It beguiles me every time, inviting a shot, but I always struggle to do it justice. Here we pick up the track that comes up from Rivington, and we follow it around the western shore of the reservoir, first in the shadow of the Turner Embankment, named after the farm that was demolished to make way for it.
There’s a lone tree here that’s always photogenic, in any season. Again, I’ve yet to do it justice, but it’s always worth looking out for. Then the reservoir comes in to view again. There used to be a face in the wall, here, reputed to be a carving of the head of an unpopular foreman overseeing the works – this would be in the latter Victorian era. We used to have fun as kids, seeking him out on our family walks. He survived into the nineteen eighties, before disappearing, I presume stolen. I’ve often thought it telling how he survived in plain view for so long, and no one thought to steal him before.
Another landmark along this way, harder to steal, is the building we used to call the Diddy Man’s house – Ken Dodd was a mainstay of children’s TV when I was growing up. I presume the building houses a valve for the waterworks. We would knock to see if the Diddy Man was in, then press our ears against the door and hear the spilling of water. My father would tell us the Diddy Man was having a bath, so could not come to the door. He is having a bath again, today.
From the northwestern embankment we get a view down to the Anglezarke reservoir, and beyond, over the Lancashire Plain, to where the little blue car and I will shortly be returning. There’s a steep ravine here and, though I’ve walked past it hundreds of times, something about the trees overhanging it catches my eye today – the colours, the shape of them – and is certainly worth the last shot of the day. I remind myself this is all man made, and must have been a dramatic change to the landscape up here, armies of men with picks and barrows, then flooding the valleys, flooding out farmsteads and pastures. It’s been a long time coming, but there’s been a healing, and this is a landscape now much loved by many.
So now we’re back, the little blue car waiting in the layby with a flask of tea, and some lunch. The legs feel like my own again, and the mind seems capable of its usual accompanying ruminations. You know, after joining the ranks of COVID veterans, I think we’ll do. We’ll make it four miles next time. Thanks for listening.
One of the interesting things to pop up online recently has been the subject of art generated by so-called artificial intelligence (AI). It’s a subject for contentious debate: can something really be considered a piece of art if it has been “created” by a computer program, rather than a human being?
My interest was piqued by Lee McAuley of the Cuckoo Club Archives, who mentioned it in a recent piece, and to whom I give all credit for spotting it – I’d no idea it was so advanced. In order to explore the question, is it art? I’ve been playing around with a version called Deep AI – available to try here, and I fed it the following text:
An old pier running out to sea, sun setting, people walking towards the sunset, blue skies and tobacco coloured clouds, light rays, romantic, impressionistic style.
The result was the header picture. Then again, same input:
Sunset pier #2, by Deep A.I.
And again:
Sunset pier #3, by Deep A.I.
So, each image is unique: same words, different output. There’s also a remarkable alignment with the textual prompt, whilst maintaining the look of something definitely painterly, rather than a pastiche of images brutally cut and pasted from around the Internet. There’s something interesting here and, though there’s a temptation – as a human being who likes to think of himself as “creative” – to be dismissive of it, I don’t think we should be too hasty.
The freebie images are a modest 1024×512 pixels, but useable, say for blog illustration, or, with a bit of Photoshop enhancement, as e-book covers, or simply for pondering. I find them quite haunting and, in spite of their unique nature, strangely familiar in that they combine elements I feel I have seen before, but which are just out of reach of memory.
There are other online generators, free to try, but they all have some kind of limiter, or a token system, to prevent over-use of the servers. I also like Nightcafe Studio, which I fed the following prompt:
A young woman wearing a long, red dress. She is reclining on a chaise lounge. Victorian and romantic in style.
To which it responded:
Young woman in a red dress – by Nightcafe Studio A.I.
The result is somewhat lush and stylised, though not unpleasing, and nicely lit. She has an oddly shaped thigh, strange hands and what appears to be the stump of a third arm, but for all of that it would not look out of place on a gallery wall, given a suitably pretentious blurb. It’s also unique – sort of. No image will ever come out quite like this again. However, once you’ve got the image, you can copy and paste it as many times as you like, of course, which, like all digital art, renders it nothing more than a worthless and disposable curiosity, right?
Well, that brings us to non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which I looked at last year. NFTs and digital art go hand in hand. Digital art, whether it be by human or AI, is – by our normal calculations, based on supply and demand – of no value at all, because we can copy and paste it as many times as we like, and the result will be indistinguishable from the original. However, AI generated art can come with a unique digital token, which proclaims you as the owner of the original file, which is something that, in our topsy-turvy world, can then be traded. And, though it might sound unlikely, it being essentially the value of nothing, some tokens are trading for millions of dollars – or at least those that receive the most hype.
Here’s another one. Input: Man writing at a desk, background of bookcases. Lamplight. Studious, romantic atmosphere. Impressionistic.
The result:
Man writing – by A.I.
The debate over AI generated art also throws up the old chestnut about the nature of human consciousness, and the belief among the so-called “hard AI” scientists, that it’s just a question of time, and a critical mass of artificial neural complexity, before we create a sentient computer. But this kind of thinking is bourne out of a strictly materialist paradigm, and goes too far for me. Our machines are breathtakingly intelligent, but that’s not the same thing as saying they might ever become sentient. Like a chess playing computer, it does not arrive at its moves by thinking about them like a human player, but its moves are always good ones. It does the same job, but better. Like an electric saw, it’s better than a handsaw in certain applications, but only because we have made it so. And even then, we wouldn’t use it everywhere.
AI sentience also rather presupposes the brain is what generates consciousness, and I do not subscribe to that view either. I’m deeply impressed by A.I. generated artwork, but feel there’s a danger here of setting off down the wrong path in our appreciation of what it means and that, like all A.I., we should not be tempted to make the retrograde leap from master to servant. A.I. serves a purpose. It can protect, it can run complex services on our behalf better than we can ourselves, and it can entertain, but it cannot be allowed to control and delimit, either our actions as free beings, nor supplant our imaginations.
Another one: Input: A young woman in a long red dress, fantasy forest setting, backlit, lush greenery, light rays. Output:
Woman in a red dress, in the forest – by A.I.
A human artist invests time learning how to paint. Then, having mastered the art, a large painting might take months, or even years of the artist’s time to complete, and the end result is always going to be fragile. It’s likely then, a very old painting by a recognisably competent artist will have survived any number of potential calamities, and is worth all the more for its rarity, and the simple fact of its survival. By comparison, a computer generated artwork takes seconds to make, and the result can be backed up digitally so many times as to be virtually immortal. NFTs not withstanding, I know which artwork possesses the greater intangible value, the greater allure, to my own taste and I would care nothing for who owned the digital title to an AI generated artwork. All of which is to say, while AI can produce some stunningly beautiful and provocative images, let’s not lose our heads over what it means.
Is it truly art? Well, yes, I think it is, but certainly not like anything we have known before.
Spies are interested in secrets, and will go to extraordinary lengths to obtain them. But for all their efforts, do spies keep us safe? They protect the interests of their home countries, or at least a certain demographic within them, but, taken worldwide, is the number of innocents lost to violence, any less than if the spies, as a profession, had not bothered to glean their secrets, or is it perhaps even the worse for it?
It’s a question suggested by a line from a le Carré spy novel, and it got me thinking. Around the same time, a beech tree came down in winter storms. I’d known it since childhood and thought it would stand forever. Its loss was a shock, and seemed an ill omen, considering all that was going on in the world, and in particular my own country – politically, socially, economically. And then there’s the old Zen thing – which isn’t actually a Zen thing – about how the tree that falls alone makes no sound.
Corruption in high places, staggering levels of inequality, unaffordable rents and energy, children eating erasers at school to stave off hunger pains. Britain, in 2022. Is that enough of a dystopia, or shall we project it forward a little? 2025, say? Or 2030? It should be easy enough to plot where we’ll be, given current trends, but do we really want to go there?
This is the background music as I sit down to write, in early 2022, and what takes shape over the course of the year is a story called A Lone Tree Falls. It proposes the quest for a secret, and the searcher is a former spy turned mystic. But this is no ordinary secret. This is the Secret above all secrets.
The Secret above all secrets tells us the world isn’t what we think it is, that our obsession with the materiality of it is a misunderstanding of the way things are. It is an illusion, and all we do by our obsession with it is perpetuate it. This is not to say we have any choice. It is our fate that our mortal lives at least are spent abiding in this state, but we do have a choice in how we react to it. We can either persist in ignorance of the deeper picture, in which case we gain nothing, and we finish our lives pretty much where we started. Or we can wake up.
Waking up begins with the lone tree that falls, and the realisation it made no sound, and it goes on to the conclusion that there is no difference between you and whatever you are looking at, that all there is to anything is mental phenomena, though the strict rules, spun out of an evolving Universe, leave us no option but to deal with the world as it appears – as solidly real and (mostly) impermeable to the will. But if that revelation is not to implode into the absurdity of philosophical solipsism, one must also wake up to the notion that the essence of one’s self, like everything else, is dreamed into being by the Universe, and not the other way round.
This is the mystical path. It’s a well trodden one, but what’s the point of it? My guess – since I’m only writing about it, rather than making a career of it – is, once you arrive at that destination, it affects your dealings with other people, who, like you, are dreamed into being. So, we are all the same in this respect, both the dreamers and the dreamed. The feeling you have of your own awareness of self, is the same as everyone else’s. All that’s different is our back-story. The other man’s pain, whether you like that guy or not, is your own pain. Hurt him, and you hurt yourself.
But it’s one thing to be told a secret, quite another to believe it. But such is the quest of our protagonist, this former spy of sorts who is also mostly the Fool from the Tarot, or sometimes the Magician, when he needs to be.
I didn’t want to write this story. I wanted to write a simple boy meets girl romance, but the story had other ideas and wanted out. We’re pretty much there with it now, and I’ll have it up on Smashwords in the coming weeks. As for the conclusion, does my protagonist believe in the Secret? Do I? Can we even get there by a pathway of words and thoughts? Or is that just part of illusion as well? I don’t know. We’ll see.
Next time though, next time, it will be a simple boy meets girl romance.
I was drawn to this book on the strength of Anthony Doerr’s previous work, the Pulitzer prize winning “All the Light We Cannot See“, which I enjoyed very much. Cloud Cuckoo Land is another complex labyrinth of a novel. It is intricate, puzzling, occasionally infuriating, but also compulsive and deeply rewarding.
It jumps back and forth between the siege of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, the Korean War in the 1950s, the USA in the 40s and the present day, then also to a near future onboard a spaceship, the Argos, containing a volunteer crew from a climate ravaged earth. The crew are travelling to an exo-planet that may support human life, a journey that will take almost six hundred years, and of course which none alive at the time will ever see.
What links each of these threads is another story, the titular Cloud Cuckoo Land, an imagined “lost” text by the ancient Greek philosopher, Diogenes. The story tells of a humble shepherd who is tired of his lot but has heard of a utopian land in the sky, built by the birds. Since only a bird can get there, he visits a witch who promises to turn him into a bird, but things go wrong, and he ends up as a donkey, then a fish. He suffers every hardship imaginable, but refuses to give up on his desire to reach Cloud Cuckoo Land. Finally, he becomes a bird, but must face one last test before being admitted,…
Diogenes’ fictional book is first rediscovered in a fragile state by one of our earliest protagonists Anna, in Constantinople, who escapes the siege, and smuggles the book out with her. Eventually, her husband, a humble ox-herder takes the book to Italy, so it might be preserved, but it’s essentially lost again in the archives, only to be rediscovered by researchers in contemporary times. But by now it’s in such poor condition it takes modern technology to reconstruct its pages, though sadly with many words missing, and the pages jumbled up. Posted online as an international treasure of public interest, its cause is taken up by the humble octogenarian, Zeno Ninis, who attempts a translation and a reconstruction of the plot. To this end he enlists the help of a group of schoolchildren who work the story into a play. But on the night of its performance, they are disturbed by the young, autistic Seymour, who is intent on making an explosive statement regarding our mistreatment of nature. Although the main story jumps about in time, the ancient text is revealed in linear fashion as it passes through the hands of the various protagnists, so acting as a kind of temporal compass, preventing us from getting lost.
It’s onboard the Argos, through the eyes of a young girl, Konstance, we learn of the global catastrophe she and her fellows are escaping. The Argos is controlled by an A.I. called Sybil, whose memory contains a record of everything ever written, and which is accessible through a virtual reality experience akin to entering the ultimate library. There’s also a kind of 3D Google Earth one can visit to see what life was like back home, just prior to the calamity. Konstance is aware of the story of Diogenes’ Cloud Cuckoo Land through her father, who has been telling it to her, but she can find no copy of it in Sybil’s memory. As she searches for it, she pieces together the mystery of the translation by Zeno Ninis, and closes in on a final startling revelation regarding the voyage of the Argos itself.
For all the complexity of its structure, I found the story accessible. As with his previous novel, I found the prose beautiful, while maintaining a page turning urgency. There’s a clear warning about the climate emergency here, about the vacuity of the materialism that’s driving us to ruin, about our almost wilful blindness to everything we are risking by our inaction, but there’s also a dig at the techno-utopians who see a solution for us in the stars, instead of trying to solve the problems of a dying earth by righting our own wrongs here and now.
The story of the shepherd ends with him dissatisfied, even amid the luxurious perfection of Cloud Cuckoo Land. He discovers at last that what he wants more than anything is to return to the life he had as a humble shepherd, with all its vexations and imperfections. The moral of that one is that what we already have is always so much better than what we are forever, and so desperately, seeking elsewhere.
This one’s not about cars. It’s more about bending life into art. Allow me to illustrate:
Soon, yes, and for a time, I am no longer thinking of Grace, but of Maggs. Again. I am sinking into Mavis, tapping with futile distraction at the ABS light, which is taken metaphorically now as a sign always of trouble ahead. And I note, these days, the light is on more often than it is not.
What is Mavis trying to tell me, then? What else could ABS stand for, other than Anti-lock Braking System? Abandon Bull Shit? Yes, that’s promising. Nothing worse than bullshit, is there? All Begins Somewhere? Hmm,… obviously true, but a little too philosophical for me, right now. So, how about: Avoid Bad Sex? The chance would be a fine thing, but actually best avoided completely – the bad, the good, and the mediocre.
From my story: Saving Grace.
Sometimes life imitates art, sometimes life becomes art, or it can be twisted into art. I drive an old car, my protagonist drives the same one and calls it Mavis. This is Mike Garrat, who volunteers at a charity bookshop run by his muse, Margaret (Maggs) Cooper. Throughout the writing of this story, I recall my car was driving me nuts, the ABS warning light coming on then going off again. It’s a common fault on my model of car, once they’re of an age, and is usually the sign of a failing sensor.
ABS means anti-lock braking system, an innovation that prevents the wheels from locking, and therefore skidding, when you hit the brakes hard, so shortening the stopping distance. When the light is on, the brakes still work, but the ABS doesn’t, so you risk coming a cropper in the wet if you slam on at high speed. It’s an MOT failure. So I’d think about taking it to the garage, but then the light would go out, and the car would be fine for weeks, and I’d forget about it, and then it would come on again. I did eventually have it repaired, and it was expensive. I wrote it into the story as a device through which Mavis would caution Mike over the things he was thinking or planning.
I’ve had a good run with mine, but the ABS light came on again this morning so, if I was Mike Garrat – which, fortunately, I am not – I’d be watching my step. Unlike last time, it’s a fairly unambiguous fault, the light staying on all the time. There are four sensors to go at, one for each wheel, but by scanning the engine control unit, you can find out which one’s on the blink. We’re booked in for a repair, and I’m hoping it’s not as expensive as last time. But whatever the cost it’s a lot cheaper than a new car, plus of course mine, ancient as it is, is irreplaceable. And then the longer she’s around, the more she justifies the carbon footprint of her manufacture.
She will eventually bite the dust, of course, and that’ll be a sad day, time to put my open-top roadster days behind me and get a grown up car again. But, like my protagonist, I seem to have conflated the notion of my own mortality with the reliability or otherwise of my car. It’s not a sensible thing to do, and certainly not rational. But threading a willing little roadster over the moors, or the high roads of the Lakes and the Dales on a fine summer’s day is worth all the frustration of ongoing maintenance, and is a dream worth preserving.
Life isn’t art, of course. It’s not an episode from a romantic story, or a movie with a soundtrack. Cars do not talk to people. Neither do the gods talk to people through their cars’ warning lights, any more than they do through other portents, or oracles, unless we choose to let them. So let’s explore the metaphor: Brakes. The brakes won’t work as well as they should. Go easy, then Mike. Not too fast. Don’t push your luck. I was planning a major expense in another area. The car is telling me not to rush into it. Warning duly noted. We’ll park that one for a bit, give it some further thought. I’ve a feeling we were going to do that anyway, but this confirms it. And we’ll also park the car, in the clutter of the garage, while she waits her turn in the workshop.
And since I’m feeling playful, I’m going to spoil Mike Garrat’s story by telling you the ending:
She’s looking a little anxious now, a little unsure of herself, as if her nerve is failing. She’s not ordered anything from the counter. Perhaps it’s just a passing visit, then. Perhaps I should ask her if she’d like something, so I might at least have the pleasure of her company over soup.
Don’t disappear, Maggs. Don’t leave it hanging like this. Let’s work something out.
“Listen,” she says, “I’ve taken that cabin in the Dales for a bit.”
“Cabin?”
You know, Mike. ‘The’ Cabin?
She clarifies: “Our Cabin.”
“Really?” Did she just say ‘our’ cabin?
“I’m going to take some time out, relax, catch up on my reading, you know?”
“Always a good idea to catch up on one’s reading, Maggs. Em,… so,… what exactly are you reading these days? Not another of those dreadful spank busters, I hope?”
She laughs, blushes.”No. Right now I’m reading the Joy of sex.”
“Really?”
“You were right, it’s rather good.”
“Précis it for me. One sentence.”
“Oh,… let me see. Taken in the right spirit, sex can be really good fun.”
“Ha! Nice one.”
“So, speaking of fun,… I thought it might be – well – fun, you know, if you joined me at the cabin, for a bit. Could you,… manage that, do you think?”
“I’m sure I can manage that, yes. “
She sighs, but only I think to cover the tremor in her voice, to steady it. “Lovely.” And then: “I,… I heard you’d built your house at last?”
“Yes. Would you like to see it?”
She nods, dives in, steals my bread roll and takes a bite of it. “Sorry. Starving. I’d like that very much, Mike.”
So, there we are,… a better place to leave it. I’ll be asking her to move in I suppose, eventually, but since we’re still pretending we’re not even in love, that might be a while off. There’s no rush, though, is there? Long game, and all that. But for now,… Cabin, Maggs, Joy of Sex,…
If you spilled your entire mug of morning coffee all over the bed, if your boiler broke down, if you’d forgotten to put the bins out, and then a gazillion-to-one meteorite wrote off your car, all in the same day, you could justifiably claim to be having a bad one. The rest of the time, it’s more often a question of attitude, in which case a moment’s mindful awareness can draw the sun from behind what only seems to be the gloomiest of clouds.
Take this afternoon, for example. It had such a pleasant vibe to it, whilst being nothing out of the ordinary, so I presume it was more a matter of catching myself in a positive frame of mind, and seeing the treasure in the pleasure of small, familiar things. I drove out to Southport, to the Eco-centre Park and Ride, then took the bus to Lord Street. Times are hard, the bus was empty, and we could dwell at length on that, but not today.
I treated myself to coffee and cake at Cranberries in the Cambridge Arcade. Then I took a leisurely browse in Broadhursts bookshop. There, I picked up used copies of Naoimi Clien’s “Shock Therapy”, and J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye”. I should have read the latter when I was a teenager, I suppose, but better late than never. The former is a nightmare vision of the world, one I’m not sure I’m ready to admit into conscious awareness, even now. It’s an important book, but we’ll set that to one side for a rainy day. Then an impromptu rummage in a charity shop turns up Somerset Maugham’s “Razor’s Edge”. I don’t know Maugham at all, but his opening paragraph grabs me, and he moves himself to the top of my reading pile, no doubt much to the chagrin of others who have been waiting patiently for ages. Sorry ladies and gentlemen.
Of the rest of the old town, only Boots and M+S, are hanging on gracefully. Of the new emporia, there is a sense of cheapness and impermanence about them. I have always enjoyed a walk through Boots, just for that divine fragrance – and especially in recent years after a return from the grey decades of anosmia. I’m also under instruction from my good lady to look out for Cerruti 1881 aftershave, but I don’t see it. I’ll have to order it online, and therein lies the tale of every town’s decline, and our complicity, even as we lament it. But what else can one do? We could dwell at length on all of that, but not today.
And then I recall one could usually always rely upon Boots for the presence of beautiful, well-dressed young women in heels and makeup, and it seems one still can. It’s old-fashioned of me, I know, and perhaps even daring these days to say so but, as with the beauty of a sunset, and an autumn woodland, I’m glad of it for the way it delights the senses. The rest of the town looks tired, so we catch the bus back to the Eco-Centre, and the car park.
There’s a Mk 3 Capri, from 1985, parked next to us, and it moves away with that deliciously distinctive V6 purr. We always had an eye for a Capri, but never owned one. In its day, of course, it was the most stolen car in the UK. There’s an old Roller, too, a mid-70’s Silver Shadow. There’s something still nostalgically classy about an old Roller – a weddings and funerals thing, I suppose. I find the new ones are aggressively vulgar. Again, we could dwell at length on that, but not today. Instead, let’s wind back to coffee.
Coming up on two years of retirement now, and as I settle over coffee, in the Cambridge Arcade, I am thinking about what, if anything, I miss about the working life, and I have to say not much. When others ask about this, I usually tell them I miss “the people”, which, I imagine, is the correct, indeed the psychologically mature, thing to say. But speaking as an introvert, it’s never strictly true, since the forced company of others, whilst I admit is probably good for us, tends also to be mentally draining. We need to recharge by spending periods alone. My dreams are still peopled by former colleagues, whose names I find, on waking, I no longer remember. Familiar faces, but without names? I don’t know what the dreams mean by that, but they raise no particular emotional tone in me, other than perhaps vague worries about creeping senility, so I don’t give them much thought.
The only thing I really miss, is that Friday feeling, this being, as I recall, an almost child like excited anticipation of the weekend, and of all the joys you were going to cram into it before that flat tire of a Sunday night. It’s just in the way of things, we don’t fully appreciate our freedoms without the limitation imposed on us by the structure and the rhythm of a working week. In retirement then, it’s important to observe one’s mood, correct the temptations of negativity, and, since not every day can be made a white-knuckle ride of screaming pleasure, we look more closely for the pleasures hiding in the small things, which are everywhere and every day to be had. Otherwise, I suspect our contentment, and the value of our retirement risks dissipating, as the days take on a galloping similitude.
Of the small things this afternoon, we count the smile of the waitress who brings our coffee, we count the scent of a second hand bookshop, we count the beautiful women amid the exotic scent of the Boots fragrance department, and we count that gorgeous gurgling sound of an old V6. Then the sacrifice of the Friday feeling is a small price to pay and, which, in retirement, with a certain subtle vigilance, can be enjoyed any day of the week.
Header photo – Sunset, the pier at Southport, by me.
The abbot gathered the order in the meditation hall, brothers Angus and Benjamin among them, and bade them sit. Then he spoke of hard times ahead. This was nothing new, thought Angus. There had been nothing but hard times for decades, that indeed the hard times were the main reason he had turned to the monastery, for peace of mind, in the first place. But even now, after many years, he was finding peace of mind still hard to come by.
Then the abbot spoke of the recently deposed king. He reminded the monks of how the king’s misconduct, over many years, had been the cause of his eventual removal by exasperated ministers, and how the king, following his disgrace, had been cast into exile. In his place, there had been appointed a princess, a choice many had thought ill-advised, on account of her having kept company with forces believed to be allied with the barons.
Now, the barons had long ago accomplished the impoverishment and defenestration of the serfs, Angus among them, and had begun to turn their attention towards the merchants. But the barons had acted in ignorance of the full power of the merchants, who had caused a revolt, which had threatened to bankrupt the entire kingdom. In renewed desperation, and with great effort, the ministers had persuaded the princess to surrender the crown, so the merchants might be placated.
Although cloistered, Angus was only too well aware of the turbulence beyond the monastery walls. Indeed, he was ever hungry for rumours, which he picked up from the lay-brothers, who had greater contact with the outside world. What puzzled Angus now, though, was what any of this had to do with them, since the monasteries had no power, and no influence over events.
The abbot went on: so great had the chaos been in the halls of the palace, the ministers had looked about in vain for someone else among the royal line who might now take up the crown. But then some ministers had begun to look back fondly upon the days of misrule by the king, for even though his behaviour had been disgraceful, and dragged the name of the kingdom into disrepute, reducing it even to a laughing-stock among its neighbours, he had been careful never to upset the merchants. And sensing now the ambivalence of the ministers, the king, had begun petitioning for the restoration of his crown, which he saw as his by right.
Thus, the kingdom was suddenly agog with rumour that the old rogue might actually return. Now, this was news to Angus, and he sat forward, listening ever more intently. Could it be true? What would the abbot have to say about it? Opinion in the land was polarised between those aghast, and those who were delighted, for it was said the king possessed a powerful charm, gifted to him by the Goddess of Misrule, and to which only the most settled, and clear of mind were immune.
Of course, some ministers looked less forgivingly upon those days of misrule, and were inclined to dismiss the king’s ambitions as beyond the pale. But already the criers, and jesters, who had themselves called for the removal of the king only months before, and had sung in praise of the princess’s accession, were even now preparing the way for the king’s return with sweet songs, sung in the town squares, throughout the kingdom. And even among the defenestrated serfs, there were murmurs of assent.
Being themselves of the most settled and clear of mind, the monks listened to all of this news, impassively, for theirs was not the world of the town squares, or the serfs, or the merchants, or the barons, or the ministers. As for the criers, and the jesters, their duplicitous songs were transparent to anyone who was not tone-deaf. As for what the monks’ response should be to all of this, the abbot smiled mysteriously, and suggested they would do well to meditate upon it.
But this failed to quell the anxiety in Angus’ breast, and he turned briefly to Benjamin, a more experienced monk, for reassurance, only to see him tip back his head and let out a silent laugh, before nodding in approval at the abbot’s wisdom. With that, the monks were dismissed, and it was later, in the courtyard, Benjamin said to Angus: “Well, brother, you’ve got to hand it to the Abbot. He’s one crafty old devil, and a genius of a teacher.”
“But I didn’t get it,” said Angus. “What would the abbot have us do about the return of the king? Take to Twitter, or something?”
Benjamin shook his head, picked up a stone, and handed it to Angus, then instructed him to go down to the pond by the farm, at sunset, to toss the stone into the water, that by doing so he would have his answer.
So Angus did as Benjamin suggested. He went down to the pond at sunset. It was a beautiful evening, the pond was a perfect mirror for the sky, and a balm for the soul. Angus tossed the stone in and watched as the ripples broke the surface. Then the ripples were reflected, intersecting each other, until the entire pond was made up of separate shards of light all pointing in different directions, and the clarity of the reflection of the sky was lost.
He slept better that night than he had for a long time, and promised himself in future he would distance himself from the lay-bothers, whose endless gossiping kept him awake at night, wrestling with matters he had no power to influence, yet which prevented him from attaining the clarity of his own mind, and thereby the authentic nature of his being.
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The Rivendale Review 