Down among the potatoes – with the philosophers

It’s a strange thing. Having loved the hills and mountains all my life, I’ve spent most of my life actually living on the flat, among the potatoes of the Lancashire plain. Here, the sky has a crushing quality that seems to laugh at the transcendence of spirit even the most modest of hills affords. On the mountain top, we are giants. On the plain we are small, and made to feel it.

Here the earth had become a factory for the intensive cultivation of vegetables, vast rectangles of land, tilled by machines and, when not under crop, the soil looks tired. It is puddled and bleak in winter and in summer it is dry and cracked and dusty, the whole of it is criss-crossed by stagnant sluices, and the high, strutting march of crackling power lines. For me, even during the most golden of golden hours, it lacks poetry.

So why am I still here?

Well, sometimes the practicalities of life leave us no choice. But it’s also one of life’s axioms that we are born within limits. And it is those limits that define us by providing the energy we need to live.

Arthur Schopenauer 1788-1860

I’m dipping in and out of the philosophers, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche at the moment. Their world-view is impressively bleak. I’m sure it’s only a mark of my own ignorance to say so, but I am reluctant to take such profoundly miserable men at their word. Life is pointless, says Schopenhauer. It is nothing but nature eating itself. True, says Nietzsche. If we can’t laugh at it, we should jump off a cliff and thereby deny it the satisfaction of our own suffering!

Not exactly promising, is it? Except, although there might not seem at first glance to be an inch of poetry anywhere here, the poetry comes anyway. And it’s not altogether bleak. Why not? Is there something wrong with me? Does it only betray my philosophical illiteracy that I am not more of an old sour-puss, like them?

Of course, when I do travel out a bit, get among the hills, the effect is more profound for my having been starved between-times of the sublime. I would like to think that if I lived among the hills, I would never tire of them, but I know that’s not so. I would always find something was in limited supply. A decent shop, a better Internet connection. And then the broad horizon and the humbling sky of the Lancashire Plain.

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900

As the dam limits the progress of the river, it raises the water and gives a head of energy. This enables useful work, it fuels purpose. Even the gods understand this, and envy the limiting full-stop of our mortality. Why? For the intensity of experience it grants our lives. The secret is finding a balance. We seek a dynamic sweet-spot somewhere between that which crushes us, and that which bleeds us back into the hedonistic void.

To live, of course, is to suffer. Whether we turn that to positive use, or we just moan about, is up to us. The Buddhists are the experts at dealing with suffering, but their language is often times difficult. I fear we lay readers of Buddhism risk a simplistic interpretation of it – something about attaining a state of mind whereby we do not care about anything. But not to care is to lack energy for life. So why be alive?

“Living in the moment” is another lazy new-age trope, one I am also guilty of spouting from time to time. It suggests disregarding the future, including the bus that’s about to run us over. So before we settle into the present moment, we should take stock. We should change what is sensible to change, what can be changed, like avoiding that bus. As for what we cannot change, we seek a way of not minding it, for only then can we abide serenely in the ‘is’-ness of life.

Knowing what is sensible to change though is tricky, isn’t it? Do we change our car because it’s knackered, or because we’re bored with it? If the car is knackered but we have no money to change it, how do we not mind it? And what about my dilemma of living on the plain but craving the mountains?

I suppose if we want a thing, and cannot explain why, it’s wiser not to make an issue of it because change is unlikely to please us for very long. But if we need a thing, like we need a cat to keep away mice, and we can articulate that need without using the word “want”, then it has some utility, because one’s craving doesn’t come into it. Craving satisfaction rather suggests we are lacking a more useful purpose. In identifying craving, we can then choose to deny it, and pick up our purpose instead.

I understand “purpose” in creative terms as “the work”, the book, the poetry, the formulation of the idea. But without energy it doesn’t move. We become listless, becalmed like a sailboat without wind. We can lose our energy anywhere, whenever we succumb to craving what we think we lack. Similarly, we can find it anywhere – among the high places, or down among those potatoes of the Lancashire Plain. It’s just a question of knowing not so much where, but how to look.

So, Schopenhauer: austere, other worldly and profoundly pessimistic. And Nietzsche: bombastic, rude, and ready to have a pop at anything he doesn’t like, which is just about everything. I’m sure they have a point, and could easily embarrass me out of home-spun delusions, but I don’t suppose they were writing for me. And maybe that’s a good thing, that I’m not a philosopher, I mean. Otherwise, from time to time, I’d have nothing to smile, or write, about.

 

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Life, actually, is now.

I am on the A565 Trunk Road(quaint name), heading into Southport. It’s a beautiful afternoon, warm, sunny. There’s the usual weird wobbly rumble coming from Old Grumpy. I think it’s the CV joints, though the last mechanic I discussed this with reassured me it’s more likely the tyres.

I’m doing about 45 mph, trailing at a respectful distance behind a Nissan Micra. The speed limit here is 60, but there’s no hurry. We’re overtaken with an impatient flourish, and in swift succession by a BMW and an Audi, then another BMW, each brightly lit. This is such a  cliché.

Numbers one and two son complain, and enquire of me if I am comfortable being so humiliated.

“Humiliated?” I enquire.

“You’re just too patient,” they say.

Ah! At this point I am supposed to “burn” the Micra off, and regain face by doing battle with the arrogant, hectoring haste of the BMWs and the Audi.

Grumpy is capable of a respectable 120 bhp, and I am capable of the occasional burst of speed, so all things are possible,…

However.

“The funny thing about patience,” I say, “is that I’ve spent my whole life waiting patiently for something to happen, only to realise that it does not exist.”

“Profound,” says number one son, facetiously.

“Sad,” says number two son, ironically.

But it was not “sad”. Nor had I wasted half my life waiting for that certain something that it turns out did not exist. The realisation itself is a valuable thing, profound if you like. Softening of ego the prize of middle age; anything else, by the time you reach your fifties is, in some regards, a failure.

When does my life begin? When I finish school? When I finish University? When I get a job? When I find someone to marry? When my kids are born? When my kids have left home? But already I am forty five, I am fifty, I am fifty five, and I am still waiting for my life to begin. Patience. Patience. How about when I retire?

Will my life begin then?

Of course your life began when you were born. And you knew how to live it then, one day at a time, one moment at a time, until you were slotted into society, probably around the age of five, and your first day at school. And then for the rest of your life, you were living it with your eyes either focused on some point in the future, like hometime,  or looking back with regret or longing. Maybe tomorrow I will begin my life, or, if only things had been different, I might be living it now.

What would it be like, I wonder, to live one’s whole life as a child, a child unsullied by the corruption of a “civilised” education, a child untainted by the virus of “ambition”, the egoic craving for attainment, of rising to the perpetual aspirational arrogance of the brightly lit BMW and the Audi?

Focussing our attention, our hopes, our aspirations, even our fears in the future leads inevitably to the negation of the importance of our lives as they are right now. So no, I did not mind that the BMWs, nor the Audi had blasted past rumbly Old Grumpy, nor that the little NIssan Micra seemed in need of a bit more speed. I was preoccupied only by the beauty of the afternoon, that the chestnuts we passed were in blossom, that the yellow tassels of laburnum were unfurling, which placed us precisely a week away from number one son’s birthday.

BMWs and Audi, rear view hoggers and cliche’s, were gone into the far distance now. Transient. Unimportant. Is life a race to the bottom? No. More important is the realisation that what you’ve spent your whole life waiting for does not exist, that life, actually, is “now”.

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