The Pall Mall Treasure Trove

I wish I could remember the name of that camera shop on Pall Mall. That’s Pall Mall in Chorley, not the more famous Pall Mall, in London. It’s forty years since it closed, but I can still hear the sound of the doorbell as I enter, feel the hollow ring of the place, the scent of it, see the weird photographic contraptions on the shelves: the bellows, the enlargers, the developing kits. The guy rises to meet me, suit and tie, yellow fingers from the nicotine. He knew cameras, lived and breathed them, and he didn’t mind sharing his knowledge, even with the pocket-money teenager I was then, and who could barely afford the price of film.

My father was a frequent customer. He bought second hand equipment: cameras, developing tanks. I remember ancient box enlargers too, with fixed focal lengths and grubby lenses. The stuff was always dusty, and smelled of the cigarettes of past owners. By the time it fell into my father’s hands, it was next to junk. But he’d bring it home with a gleam in his eye, like one who had discovered treasure and was eager to share it. Thus equipped, through the haze of an already bygone era, we learned the rudiments of developing film. That’s no small feat when you’re living in a small semi, without the luxury of a dark-room. Needless to say, we improvised a lot.

Our rewards were few, but precious all the same – soft images that took ages to tease out, and which would all too often fade back into the paper again for want of fixative. I couldn’t help feeling the effort taught us little, only that we needed better kit.

I swore I would have a darkroom one day, a bees-knees enlarger, and bags of space to set out those trays of sweet smelling chemicals. But then the world changed, and I didn’t need any of it. You could do it all on your computer, even on your telephone. Nowadays, I lift the ‘phone and produce effortless images in seconds, enlarge or shrink with a swipe of the finger. I can post-process too, add any number of effects and have them beamed round the world for other eyes to see. He’d be ninety now, my father. I imagine him with an iPhone in his pocket – second hand of course – but still pushing the limits of what you could do with it.

I don’t know what we were searching for back then, what rich seam of enlightenment we’d hoped to strike. Was it something in the images we sought? But those images were like ghosts, and hard to bring out, to materialize. Or was it more about the technology, such as ours was then, I mean it being near Victorian, in an age of rockets? Sure, that might have been the thing. The world can be intimidating in its complexity if you think too wide and too deep about it. But if you can master one small part of it, you feel in some way something less than small. That’s the gist anyway. We never produced enough images to get into the mystery of them. That was another universe altogether.

My father’s best camera was an early Russian SLR, again from the dusty, cigarette scented shelves of that shop on Pall Mall. It had no doubt been cast off by a more well heeled amateur, who’d upgraded. The only mode it possessed was manual. There was no metering. We read the light with a hand-held selenium meter, and dialled it in, or more often we got a feel for what would work – aperture and shutter speed – and we trusted to luck.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. But then a timely “follow” on the blog interrupts the flow of my thoughts, and promises I can: “acquire abundance of wealth, and confidence.” Also: “Happiness, and can address change smartly, what many would observe as impossible.“

This is no small claim, and bears closer scrutiny.

It goes on to tell me I can: “Feel, act and live happy, because happiness is the objective of everyone’s life.”

Well okay, feel act and live happy. Nothing wrong with that, but as an aim itself it’s somewhat simplistic, and a common enough trap for the unwary, though useful for the vendors if they can harness it to the cause of commerce at our expense. Still, I’m grateful for the interruption, for my reaction points me in the right direction, closes the arc, so to speak, and we have our conclusion.

I have some decent cameras now. But in using them, the aim, the drive hasn’t changed. It’s the same as when my father and I struggled developing film in the bathroom, half a century ago, a towel over the window and a safelight that took ages to fix up and take down again when the bathroom was required for more conventional purposes – often urgently and in the middle of timing an exposure. It’s about exploration, and the desire to understand a thing bigger than oneself, for such a thing serves as the surface proxy for another kind of quest, something archetypal, something transcendent, and internal. I glimpse it now and then in the images I’m taking, and more often by chance – the camera seeing something I do not. It’s an abundance of something, call it a wordless insight. We can reject it of course, seek instead our “health, wealth and happiness” in the material world, through material things, and become ever dissatisfied slaves to it. Or we can say yes please, more of that transcendent thing, and then the world becomes at once a place of magic, and much more the worthy objective of a man’s life.

Yes, it was a treasure trove my father shared, that dusty old kit from the camera shop on Pall Mall, but mostly it was his enthusiasm for the quest, and for the insight one could still pursue the transcendent through the symbolism of the mundane. He knew something of the nature of things, I think, and was kind enough, to pass it on.

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Delete me

I have begun deleting old blog posts, posts that have not been read in years, thinking to eke back a little of my free gigabyte allowance, though at just over 3% used I’m hardly in danger of running out. It’s more the sense that old stuff just doesn’t matter, that the past is of no relevance to the online world at all. Our history, our heritage, ever since the avaricious eighties, is casually disposable at a click. The blog appeals only to the present moment of the written world, as the Instagram stream appeals to the visual, and neither being an accounting to be trawled through very deeply, for there is a sameness to things, and in maintaining the regular drumbeat of one’s online activity, it reveals itself merely as an existential radar ping: that the moment is now, ever persisting, and for a while at least here I am,… persisting in it.

The past has nothing to say, though paradoxically the past at one time was very much the present moment. But we reinvent ourselves with each new dawn, and the selves we were, we do not recognise or trust any more.

One of the posts I deleted was called “The Mowing Season Opens”, this being the mowing season of 2008, yet in all essential details no different to the mowing season of 2016, but what I wrote “then” lacks the indefinable essence of “now”. Like yesterday’s news I discount its relevance. It becomes old and dusty. No matter how true or authentic or sincere I felt it was at the time I wonder if it could really have happened that way anyway. And how can I trust it, now?

On Instagram posted a photograph of my car at the seaside. There was a moody sky, the colours blown by HDR fakery, and though there was undoubtedly a uniqueness to that moment, visually it is not significantly different to a photograph of the same thing I posted a couple of weeks before. Both photographs are of equal value, but we take the more recent to be of greater importance and all because it happened within the nearer reach of memory, and there is still the illusion we are less changed by time and therefore more trustworthy than the person who took the earlier picture, that indeed the earlier person no longer exists.

This is another symptom of the all but universal western paradigm of consumerism. We consume the present in all its recorded forms, digest it down into the bowels of the past, from where we assume there is no longer to be found any nourishment at all. And always there is the want, the craving for something new, freshly minted, something no one else has touched, or seen or heard before.

When I meditate, I possess an awareness of my self as a unique individual, yet I am not lost in the memory of past things, so it is not memory that defines me, more perhaps the mythical hero’s quest for wholeness, and the chance of discovering the secret key that will unlock the harmony I have sought all my life. But this is another symptom, that we are all pitching headlong into death, yet only subliminally aware the fabled harmony, true wisdom, enlightenment and all that wishy washy existential stuff, are only to be found on the other side of the Styx. We try to square this with the fact of our lives and the Egoic imperative to search for meaning in the details. We know it cannot be found in the past, for if it could it would already have been discovered, and since the future does not exist, all we have is the present moment, today’s post, today’s words, today’s fleeting capture of colour and light and shade.

But the significance of life lies not in its material forms, nor in any of its forms of thought, all of which we scurry to record as if in fear of the setting sun. Here, this is me, see me. See how I live, and think and what it is I love. But what we truly seek is not a thing at all. It is more an opening into formlessness, the blinking of an eye in the material world, and so subtle we shall always miss it. Yet it is reflective of eternity, rising sweet like the brush of an erotic love. It’s always there, always open to us, yet we cover it afresh each day with all the dross of what is new. Perhaps we think we have glimpsed it, in a word, in a turn of phrase, in a relationship, or in the picture of an old blue car at sunset, yet each in its turn sinks into the sedimentary layers of discarded experience. And there we let it lie, perhaps because we fear the truth – that we did not find it then, and shall not find it now.

The fact of our persistence is a mystery, the worthlessness of the shape of all our yesterdays an awkward fact that can do nothing but reinforce the need for humility in the face of infinity. This is not lest we should offend the gods by our arrogance, but more that we should not be driven mad by the paradox of our sense of self importance in the face of an overwhelming material irrelevance, that though we live we might so easily be deleted, and none would know we had ever been this way at all.

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Sudden come and breathtaking

So, I see this tall girl in the coffee shop. Actually, she’s the waitress, about to  pour my coffee.  She wears  a short black  skirt, black waitressy blouse, nipped at the waist. She has dark hair, shiny, only partly contained by a voluminous Edwardianesque bun. And suddenly I am held spellbound. I dispute biology as an explanation for this moment. This is spiritual.

She is the most striking of beauties, this young Lancashire girl. No make-up, yet  easily the better of any movie star. She has dark brows, thick, expressive in their tilt, green-blue eyes, a wide mouth, full Pre Raphaelite lips held tight for now as she pours. She will be quick to smile, I suspect, but for now restrained. She is the hired help, new I think, a minimum wage slaver, old enough to kill for Queen and country, but not old enough to earn a so called living wage.

It is no longer the most salubrious of establishments, this cafe. The table next to mine is awash with spilled tea and the sloppings of careless diners, now flown. The puddled tea drips onto the floor, onto the chairs pushed carelessly back as if in an emergency. This same beauty of a girl approaches resignedly with mop, dishcloth, squirt bottle of disinfectant, pulls back her hair, secures it, goes to work.

Her hands are beautiful. She has long fingers, lightly tanned, delicate. They should be adorned with gold, silver, diamonds – perhaps one day, but for now no man has claimed her.

I notice how she holds herself at a distance from the slop, little fingers aloft, some part of her resisting the plunge into this squalid  defecation. She is ‘S’ shaped in her stance, tummy out, chest drawn in  to a boyish flatness, her full height reeled back as if self conscious of her  commanding stature. She was born to better things than this. I know I am romanticising, but there is something in this moment that touches me.

I am just a tired old salary-man, and a writer, of sorts. My gaze I hope is discrete, analytical and searching for traces of Zen in the person of this girl. There is nothing prurient about it. I am admiring, yes,  a little awe-struck, too, but am entirely without expectation of that certain sort. Girls of this age long ago became my daughters, no longer imagined lovers. I’m not sure when this transition took place, but I am grateful for the clarity it adds to one’s vision.

She catches my eye, smiles that full mouthed smile as she spreads a dishcloth over the mess. She is without artifice, graceful as a princess.

The afternoon is hot, blue skied, sunshiny. It is a Friday, after the long ache of a miserable working week. I feel the relief of it washing through me with each sip of the coffee she has poured. Her brief smile, aimed at me, tops it all, and I am honoured to return it, this quiet moment of intimacy. It’s as well she cannot intuit the depth of my compassion, or she would think me strange. Strange too the sense of my appreciation for her presence at this moment. It is as if I have invented her.

I shall write of her, I think – indeed am already sketching out an opening draft in my head. I must tap it into my Droid quickly or it will go. Then I’ll smooth it out on the blog tonight. And when I read back on this in years to come I will wonder if life has faded her, for life teaches us such perfection as this  is ephemeral, like the cherry blossom, sudden come and breathtaking  awhile, only to be lost in the first storms of life.

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We are not the machine

We spend on average around eight hours a day staring at a screen. We are also moving our lives online. Much of the paperwork essential to identity and legal responsibility – certificates, documents and such – are no longer printed and posted out to us, but digitised, stored in “the cloud” and accessed through our computers.The same goes for entertainment: photographs, music, video, books, games,.. they are all losing their physical nature, becoming digital and accessed through a device.

On the one hand this is very convenient, but I wonder if I am alone in finding it also slightly disturbing. Is the “place” I actually I live becoming irrelevant. I can be removed to the other side of the world tomorrow, yet pick up the online elements of my life without missing a beat. But what kind of life is that, exactly? And what if I were to lose access to this information? Clearly I would still be alive, but it would be as if I had not existed before – no records, documents, pictures, words, music,… nothing to show for my life.

What is it then in life that defines us?

In the haste to digitise, it feels like we’re shovelling the earth out from under our feet, feeding the machine with everything we deem necessary to our being, indeed to civilisation itself – our memories, our laws, our art, our possessions. We do this because it is efficient, but at the same time it minimises our concept of home to the point where it risks disappearing altogether. Is this what we really want?

The elimination of the home would suit the machine-based global corporate intelligence. After all, businesses no longer deem it necessary to advertise their actual physical location. Corporate location is a flexible concept – here today, there tomorrow, depending on the market, on whatever is most efficient. This is made all the easier since these corporations no longer make anything. Employees too must therefore step onto this conveyor of placeless, facelessness. We interview for a job in Manchester UK, end up working out of an office in New York, but much of the time we are in the air between any city you care to mention, anywhere in the world. And the higher we climb within this corporate intelligence, the more placeless, faceless, and the more homeless we must become.

In the globalised world of work, it doesn’t matter your home for most of your life is an aeroplane seat and a plastic hotel room. It doesn’t matter your world is contained behind a single anonymous window in a glass and concrete edifice that is both anywhere and nowhere at the same time, because your true window on your world, the only world that’s beginning to matter is your laptop, your handheld, your ubiquitous touchscreen interface. We are increasingly viewing our world from within the machine, not because the machine serves us, but because we have fallen inside of it.

Yet when I look through all those Instagram and Flickr streams, the imagery speaks of a love of place, a love of the world beyond the screen. I see sunsets, lakes, trees, mountains, cities too – even the grungy bits – also a love of home, of private places, private spaces, places with a physical location that’s familiar and means something. I see coffee cups on tables, fruit in a basket, pets, loved ones, and all the things we own and take pleasure in – our cars, bikes, clothes, our fancy wristwatches, an old valve radio that sits in defiance of the times, a guitar, a battered but exquisitely comfy armchair. How much of this, I wonder, is a lament for what we are in danger of losing?

Religious teachings tell us material things do not matter, that in fact it’s spiritually limiting to identify one’s sense of self with stuff. So the machine might argue it is doing us good, rendering such symbols of identity obsolete, stripping them from us, leaving us nothing tangible of ourselves but our skins. But it’s also through stuff we exercise our sensual enjoyment of the world.

The coffee tastes good, the leather of the watch strap smells exquisite, as does the jasmine and the autumn leaves. The sunset over the ocean stills us with its palpable silence. The sound of the leaves on the trees in the breeze, the feel of the wind in our faces,… we cannot digitise these things. Is what I see online a nostalgic lament for a world that is slowly slipping through our fingers?

The machine is unashamedly and woodenly Victorian in outlook and function. As such it is like all the machines that have gone before it – amoral and unconscious. Get too close to such a thing and it will tear your arm off, because it’s not smart enough to know you’re there at all. Its function is profit through the algorithms of increased sales and internal efficiency. And to the machine the most efficient solution for the human beings who serve it is for us to exist in a form of semi-suspended animation, in rented, minimalistic, cell-like rooms that cater for the basic bodily functions, while allowing us to perform those few tasks remaining to biological entities via whatever interface the machine comes up with. And when we fall on the wrong side of the efficiency equation, we find ourselves erased, our access denied.

We think our memories, our increasingly digitised lives are becoming safer, more secure, that the online world, the machine, even provides us with a kind of immortality, that those precious old family photographs are safer scanned and held online than kept in a dusty old shoebox, vulnerable to fire and flood. My blog, my Instagram feed will outlive me, yes, but now I’m wondering if their function will only be to serve as a last cry, the lament of an inmate locked inside a machine. For a long time I have seen my future bound up with this thing. Now I am wondering if I should find ways of escaping. Were it not for the voice it grants my creative urges, I would run screaming. Or is it that we find more the secret to what it means to be alive by reflecting on the machine which is essentially dead.

We must remember we are only permitted this storage for our online personal belongings in exchange for permission for the corporate computers to scan and plunder it in order to profile, locate, and target us for advertising. It’s a crude exchange and, like anything else in business and technology, liable to a step change when something new comes along. When the clever, faceless, homeless corporate brains work out a way for product adverts to be subliminally and legally transmitted directly into our heads, then all the computers holding all our lives, so meticulously recorded by ourselves, will be deemed inefficient – at which point, unless we pay for their upkeep, they will be deleted. And when we die, and the direct debit bounces back,… yes,… deleted.

So when you are posting pictures of the things and of the places you love, when you are writing about your life to your imaginary reader, do not mistake the picture or the writing for the life you lead. It’s obvious really, the online life lacks the sensuality that makes us human. So beware this digitisation of the world. Question it. And in the mean time make your homes with impunity, fill them with your idiosyncratic nick-nackery, smell the coffee, stroke your pets, make love, go out and watch the sun setting,… be what your are. Be sensual.

And remember,…

We are not the machine.

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On My Bookshelf – Man and his symbols – Carl Gustav Jung

The genesis for this book was a TV interview by the journalist John Freeman, for the BBC in 1959. It was to be the last book to bear Jung’s mark, though it is in fact a collaboration between Jung and several of his closest colleagues in the psychoanalytical movement at that time – namely Joseph Henderson, Marie Louise Von Franz, Jolande Jacobi and Anielia Jaffe. Snatches of that original interview appear on You tube from time to time, to be shot down by the copyright police, then to reappear. You can try here, but the link may be broken any time. It’s an important interview. Freeman sounds somewhat dated with his BBC accent, even a bit stuck up, but his respect for Jung is clear and his questions are spot on. Jung is utterly compelling.

The result was an even bigger mailbag for Jung and the realisation there was a hunger for his ideas outside of the rarefied and to some extent privileged realms of psychoanalysis. It was Freeman who later approached Jung with a view to him writing a book, this time aimed at a general audience – the book that was to become “Man and his Symbols”. According to Freeman, Jung listened to him patiently for a full two hours, then said no. For Jung all of this was coming at a time in his life when he knew his own time was running out.

Then, Jung had a meaningful dream. In the dream he was speaking to ordinary people in a marketplace – literally to the man in the street – and the people understood him. So, he had a change of heart, decided there would be some value in writing such a book after all, but insisted it was to be a collaboration. He would write the opening keynote section, titled “approaching the unconscious”, while the remainder would be left to his closest colleagues.

Jung passed away in 1961, ten days after punching in the final full stop. The book itself wasn’t published until 1964.

Jungian psychology has a potentially wide application, far beyond the analytical couch. Private analysis is strictly for those who can afford it of course, and this is to be regretted, but anyone with sufficient motivation can uncover the basics and the basics are this: if we want to restore a sense of direction and meaning to our lives, if we want to understand the world in a truly global context, we have to re-establish relations with our unconscious mind, and we can do this simply by paying attention to our dreams.

In our conscious lives we identify objects by the names we give them, but the dream deals with symbols. Symbols are objects too but their names are not as important as the emotional charge they carry. The dream speaks to us in the language of symbols and we can learn a great deal about our selves by paying attention to our dreams and the symbols that arise. But there’s more – for Jungians the unconscious mind has both a personal and a collective dimension. On occasion then we find things surfacing in our dreams of a deeper, mythic nature. These things may be of significance to us personally, or they can be prescient of happenings in the world at large. No one teaches us our old stories any more, least of all what they mean, and for Jungians a knowledge of myth, of the stories told since the earliest of times, is invaluable in understanding what is going on, both inside the individual, and in all the trouble spots of the globe that suffer under man’s influence.

There are many decent introductions to Jung, but I find this one the most accessible. His work is widely embraced now by the self-improvement movement and there’s hardly a single new age fad that is not in some way reliant on ideas that first came out of Jung’s head. But a reading of his deeper works does make for occasionally disturbing reading. The book was written at a time of dire tensions between the West and the USSR – an escalation in weapons technology that threatened to wipe out the world ten times over. But for the cold war of 1964, you can read the middle eastern crisis of the latter day, and the analysis, in Jungian terms is the same, and compelling, that what ails the West, then and now, is a loss of soul, that what we see nightly on the TV news is merely a reflection of the very thing we are incapable of seeing in ourselves. The message of Jung, outlined so succinctly in  Man and his Symbols is as relevant today as it ever was.

Much of the thinking of Jungian psychology does not chime well with the rational world and he can attract the most vehement and irrational criticism. If you are of a rational frame of mind, yet drawn to psychology at all, it will probably be the work of Freud you prefer. But for the soulful and the spiritual wanderers, and for those just trying to understand the ills of the world from a global perspective there is much in Jung to guide your path, also to explain the experience of your own life and to guide you around the occasional pothole.

So, how in touch are you with your own unconscious? Well,… tell me, do you recall what you dreamed of last night?

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The difficulty with spiritual matters

Religion is a big thing in human affairs. Unfortunately much of what we hear about it in the media dwells upon the negative – the violent, the bigoted and the perverse. Religion indeed, for all but those who practice it, can seem uncompromisingly repulsive, and at times a very dangerous thing indeed.

My own repulsion from village church going as a child was more on account of bum-aching boredom and a failure of religious language to connect with the affinity children have for the magical dimension. Any potential I might have had for awakening to the more traditional forms of religious expression was blunted, and though I remain sympathetic to its aims, I remain also, at least thus, far immune to evangelism. What I see of religion then will always be from the perspective of an external observer, and the first thing one notices from the outside looking in is that there is a clear dichotomy between matters of spirit and religion.

Those who break with religion scatter into a number of camps. There are those who rail against it aggressively for the rest of their lives, while others don’t think much about it at all, residing contentedly instead in the rational ephemera of the material world. Others set out to roundly disprove the claims of the religious life, only to conclude from their deeper studies on the matter there’s perhaps something in it after all. Thus they are drawn back, supercharged, into the fold, often to number amongst religion’s stoutest champions.

And there are others who spin off into the eclectic and mystical avenues of the so called New Age. This is a potentially dangerous field of study, but there is ground to be made from it. Of course the term “New Age” is a misleading one. We might think it started in the Sixties, with flower-power, LSD and fornicating hippies and all that, but its origins and its underlying philosophies go back much further, to the encounters of western minds with eastern thought in the nineteenth century, also further still to the European Romantic movement, and further, along the trail to where our written accounts peter out on the edge of the impenetrable, into folk religion, into paganism and myth.

The “New Age” is often dismissed as a childish aberration, invention of decadent, spoiled westerners, purloining from the world’s faith traditions the things they like, while ignoring the things they don’t. This may be so, but in its defence I would add what the New Age seeks above all is connection, it seeks the metaphors, the symbols that would translate the words of all spiritual traditions into a single, inclusive and coherent story of life.

But is such a thing possible? It might seem unlikely with so many stories now purporting to be the word of God, but the work does enable us to pare away the obfuscating trimmings of culture and power politics, to reveal the underlying spiritual ideas. And religions, when mined deep this way, do reveal themselves as essentially the same at root, no matter how different in the flowering of their liturgies – at least if interpreted with a broadly sympathetic and impartial mind. And from such analysis comes a thread, like the thread of Theseus, laid to lead him safe from the labyrinth of the beast man. This thread is the Perennial philosophy, written of with such eloquence by Huxley, a philosophy first taught to us at the knees of Thoth in the days of ancient Egypt, and an enduring idea in the philosophies of the east throughout history.

But while all these things might seek to explain the world, and with diligence we might uncover them and learn them and quote their tenets by rote, the one thing they possess that is exactly the same in each case, is that the philosophy, the thought, the state of mind, the belief, if you will, must be lived for it to mean anything.

Belief is a difficult and a dangerous word. We must have a reason to believe that goes beyond fear – fear that if we do not say we believe, we will be punished until we say we do; fear that if we do not say we believe, we will be ostracised, that we will not be accepted into the group, that we will be stoned to death, our heads cut off, our living bodies set on fire. True belief is about seeing, it is about feeling, it is about an innate knowing.

Belief, in its broadest terms, is an inner knowledge that while the Cosmos will remain for ever pretty much a mystery to us, it is not indifferent to our lives, and it is benign. It is at least well meaning in the general thrust of its direction. Also there are ways we as individuals can make representations to it, and in return receive wisdom, guidance and comfort, like a lamp in the darkness. If we can accept such a thing, if we can go with the flow of it, then we align ourselves with the Cosmic will  and are rewarded with a sense of peace that is rooted in the soul.

This means living a life in one sense always at least partially through the eyes of the Cosmos and measuring our actions accordingly. It makes a difference to the feel of life, to live that way, but it is not essential to life, and even once found and enjoyed, it is easy also to fall away from it, if not exactly to lose faith, but to forget its power to heal in times of personal crisis. The science fiction writer PK Dick was once asked if he could define the nature of reality, and he replied that reality is simply the bit that’s left when you stop believing in it. Stop believing in the spiritual dimension, the physical life, reality, goes on pretty much the same. So who cares?

But the spiritual life does add immeasurably to the nature of reality, to the way it is seen and felt and experienced.  In my story “Durleston Wood” the protagonist is an agnostic teacher working at a Church School, and to maintain appearances he attends church every Sunday. If all it takes to be a Christian is an hour a week, he tells us, then even he can do it. But our hero has a secret, is cohabiting in the depths of Durleston wood with a dark skinned girl called Lillian, a thing that would upset his largely irreligious, bigoted, and racist fellow church goers. Religion has done little to educate them in the ways of spirit, or even basic decency towards others. But then as Lillian says, the religious life is easy, it is spiritual matters that are much more difficult.

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The writing life – beware the war against rejection and obscurity

Imagine a man who lives on a tiny island no one has heard of. He has a small pension from a lifetime of labour in the mills, but now spends his time in a little house, writing poems. When they are finished, he writes each poem out one last time in his best handwriting, on sheets of cream coloured Basildon Bond paper. Then he rolls them up, seals each in a beer-bottle and casts them into the sea. He does not put his name to his poems.

Old age catches up and the man eventually dies.  His notes, his books, are thrown out with the rubbish, his house re-let. No one even knew he was a poet.

Now, imagine another man who lives in the thick of the city. He’s worked at a long line of minimum wage type jobs by day, and by night he writes poems. When they are finished, he sends them off to literary magazines. All are rejected. None are published. He perseveres in the hope his name will eventually appear in print, but it never does. He does this not so much to court fame – poetry is hardly the best way of doing that – but rather because he feels seeing his name in a literary magazine would be to validate the legitimacy of his thoughts, his feelings, his way of seeing the world.

Eventually, like the other guy, he dies. His notes, his books are thrown out with the rubbish, his house re-let. No one even knew he was a poet.

Both of these are romantic stories, all the more for their ending in apparent failure – neither man’s name ever becoming known, each remaining obscure, their life’s labours amounting to nothing.

But let’s think about it for a moment.

Of the two, the first man, the islander, seems least concerned by obscurity. That he offers his finest to the sea has the feel of a spiritual act, an act that betrays a greater level of transcendence than the second man who seeks validation all his life, and never finds it. So whose is the greater failure? Can either be said to have failed at all? Can anyone actually fail at life?

So, the first man seems further along on the journey of self discovery than the second. The second man’s life is a journey of self discovery just the same, but one hampered by the mistaken belief that such a self can only be “discovered” in the approval of someone else – an editor, a publisher, a literary type.

The first man is not an undiscovered literary genius. He’s actually a less talented poet, technically, than the second. His poems are laboured and over-long. Had he sent them to the magazines they would most likely not have merited a second glance anyway. But, as anyone picking up one of his anonymous little bottles will tell you, his work was sincere. He asked questions of the universe, made attempts at answering. Sometimes the answers came, and he felt a tingle of revelation. Sometimes not.

It was the same for the other guy.

This is how most of us write. It’s a lonely business, but no different to anyone else. Everyone, writer or not, poet or not, artist or not, famous or not, is caught up in the riddle of their own obscurity, in the apparent meaninglessness of their lives – even the famous are unknown to all but themselves. How we solve the riddle is the secret to making peace with life. And writing.

When we write then, the ideas we work with must pass the test of satisfying first a need within ourselves. Our work is a question we pose, and for which no one else has an answer that’s going to mean anything to us. The answer must come of itself, through us, either literally as a revelation, or more subtly as a shift in consciousness, like a gate opening, allowing us to pass through to pastures new.

Of course some of us, by fluke, luck, unstinting application, or literary contacts, will have our work published, but it’s important to realise this does not alter the fact of our absolute obscurity, and no amount of successful work or books under our belt will ever satisfy the very human pining for self vindication. Between 1995 and 2005 I published twenty short fictions in Ireland, and they’ve made not a jot of difference to anything. I’ve published nothing since, and that hasn’t made a difference to anything either.

For the famous writer, what the reader will come to know of him is not the truth, only the pseudonymic myth. For the famous writer, obscurity is all the more galling then for there being any number of people who think they know you, when they don’t know you at all.

One’s life’s adventure can only ever be a personal journey, shared by none, known by none, not even from the journals we keep. Loneliness, emptiness – these are things banished only by the company we seek – friends, family, even the animals we care for. But the inner self, the self that has us write, is separated from something more than human. And it seeks reunion. It seeks the source.

The man who tosses his poems into the sea is not belittled by obscurity. He lives the imaginative life to the full and is kept company by it for as long as he lives, and writes. That is his meaning, his purpose, his journey. The second guy’s life is heroic, persevering in the face of rejection. It is the archetypal story of the writer’s life. But the second guy must take care not to lose sight of what he’s writing for. He must take care to avoid his craft descending to the level of a war against rejection and obscurity, because that’s a futile task, a lost cause, one that risks blocking access to the source. This too is his story, and though not a failure, it is a less than noble outcome to a life’s labours.

Without the imaginative life to support him, the writer risks having little worthwhile writing 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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On my bookshelf – The Power of Now – a guide to spiritual enlightenment!

Food for the soul or new-age mumbo jumbo?

Spiritual books are ten a penny, always have been, and in our cynical, secular times the pedlars of such material are often viewed with suspicion – and, sadly, frequently, not without good reason. And amid this plethora of colourful and often-times bizarre pathways to enlightenment, some of these works occasionally break the mould and top the best seller list for a while, promising a radically new way of thinking that will turn the reader’s sad life around, attract millions of dollars to their bank account and transform them overnight from abject losers into white toothed entrepreneurial winners.

The power of now is different. Published in 1997, it came out of the author’s personal mental breakdown, and a desire to understand the profound psychological metamorphosis that followed. It had a quiet start, selling modestly by word of mouth on the spiritual circuit, but by 2009 it had reached 3 million copies and been translated into 33 languages. Of the author, Eckhart Tolle, I had heard nothing until I was loaned a copy of the book by a Buddhist friend who was of the opinion that most self styled spiritual teachers were either insane or merely egotistical poseurs. This man, however, he said, was possibly the real thing.

Personally, I fell away from organised religion early on in life, but have had a number of spontaneous mystical experiences that have denied me the easier option of a godless secular materialism. In short, I know there is more to life, but I have paradoxically struggled to find anything in conventional models of spirituality that address the very personal nature of the spiritual experience itself. The Power of Now confounded my initial expectations by doing just that, and by answering many of the existential questions I had been asking for decades.

What impressed me about the language of the book was its simplicity. Many spiritual works convey a “method”, they invent terminology, ritual, prayer, they invent arbitrary self important lists, a set of steps, exercises and vast labyrinths of mystery for the adept to follow. And there is always the suspicion that the method is there only to show how intellectually superior the author is, and how stupid we poor adepts are for not being able to follow in their footsteps. But The Power of Now describes none of these things. Instead it has the audacity to suggest that the answer we’re looking for is something we possess anyway but have merely forgotten, that from birth we have become so overwhelmed by our own thoughts, we can no longer remember who we really are. The power of the Power of Now lies in its ability to reunite us with the very thing we have lost touch with: our real selves.

With the birth of consciousness comes self awareness, and the faculty for thought, but a problem arises when we become so identified with our thoughts we believe that is all we are, this self constructed narrative, this story of our lives: the memories, the aspirations, the self-critical expectations. And most of us alive today do indeed believe we are nothing more than this thought-constructed entity – that anything else is simply inconceivable.

For Tolle, the awakening came one dark night of the soul when, tortured by lifelong depression and anxiety, he decided he could not live with himself any longer. Sadly this happens a lot in modern society and it rarely ends well, but for Tolle it was the catalyst. It was the thought to end all thoughts, when he realised that to even consider the idea of not living with himself implied there were two parts to his consciousness – the thinking part, and the part that was aware of the thinking part. By allowing the thinking part to dissolve, Tolle was then released into a state of primary awareness. What’s this? Well, it’s like viewing yourself in the first and the third person at the same time, and the feeling that accompanies it is one of deep bliss.

Some critics of the book complain that Tolle merely reworks ideas from eastern religions and gives them a new age spin, peppered here and there with quotes from the Bible. In a sense this is true, but only in so far that Tolle gets at the vital essence at the core of all organised religions, east and west, the key message if you like, underneath what is by now millennia of obfuscating cultural over-painting, and presents it in a simple language, entirely void of spiritual affectation, and which is above all accessible.

That we are each of us mostly a self invented fantasy is at first a hard message to swallow, and again one needs perhaps first to be open to the message if one is not to be deeply offended by it. Everything that happens to us in reality takes place in the present moment, obviously, yet we spend an awful lot of time raking over the past and worrying about the future. These are the natural realms of the thinking entity we believe ourselves to be, yet neither past nor future actually exists in real terms outside of memory or anticipation at all. What exists is the present moment, a moment so infinitesimally small it cannot be measured and we might pass our entire lives in ignorance of it, but it can be entered and experienced when the thinking mind is quiet, and when we do enter it, the world looks and feels very different indeed.

Tolle covers a lot of ground here. As a work of comparative religion alone it’s very powerful in illustrating that the spiritual principles underlying all traditions are essentially the same, and that they point to a further level of evolutionary development that is inevitable, and must happen sooner rather than later because if it doesn’t the energies thus far unleashed by the collective egoic mindset, are already well on their way towards destroying us. Powerful and sobering stuff!

But of course, Tolle is not without his detractors. Setting aside his ideas for a moment, Tolle’s publishing success is, in part, of course due to celebrity endorsement. Many familiar famous names now claim to have been helped back from the brink by his book and, since critics like nothing more than to get their teeth into a foolish celebrity baring their souls and possibly also their arses, they are also quick to label anything held dear by said celebrity as being vapid by association. And then some critics point out Tolle’s history of depression and anxiety, as if a history of mental illness disqualifies him from having any valid opinions on anything. Of course it does not, if only because to be content in a world that is plainly mad is no measure of sanity, indeed it is perhaps only those who have suffered such profound disquiet as Tolle himself who have the most valid, clear sighted perspectives to offer on modern living anyway.

Unlike many titles of this genre, the Power of Now was not intended to propel its author onto the international stage – indeed I can easily imagine him wishing by now it had not. But that it has done so, that it has fallen foul of the curse of its own popularity, should not detract from the sincerity of the message and the ideas the book contains. This is real and substantial food for the soul.

The Power of Now – a guide to spiritual enlightenment. Sounds like new age mumbo jumbo, but it isn’t.

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And then what?

Friday 22nd November 2013

Cool this morning, about 2 degrees, light frost. Dropped T off at the bus stop for college, then drove to the Marshside nature reserve and walked out along the old dumper truck trail to the estuary – at least as far as the mud would allow. The skies were a little hazy first thing, streaked with brown and blue grey, but clearing now to a deep blue, a low sun rising behind me and casting long shadows as I look out over the route I’ve just walked. There are a few other cars about, mostly people taking their dogs for a dump, one bearded twitcher standing alone in the reeds, heron-like, with an impressive telescope on a tripod. Across the estuary Blackpool is crystal clear, also Black Coombe, and I can just make out the Lakes beyond, through binoculars, the fells having a light dusting of snow this morning.

I’m probably going to sit here until about 10:00, then go in search of coffee and a new jumper – I noticed yesterday my old lambswool is coming in holes, a bit like me.  I also seem to be scratching about for socks and underpants – so may restock at Matalan.

I’m also trying to think.

I did eventually download that book “Brain Wars” by Beauregard. Hate the title though. Consumed it on my Kindle in one long sitting yesterday. There was nothing new in it for me – a repeat of studies I’m familiar with from other sources – not that this detracts from the importance of the work. Worth the read, but I think I preferred his “Spiritual Brain”. That the mind is separate from the brain seems now all but proven, at least to my satisfaction – only die-hard materialists continuing to deny the evidence that’s been mounting since Myers and the founding of the SPR in 1882. The argument that the mind is reduced by the brain for the purpose of enabling a physical existence in form is also convincing, and further arguments that the mind is freed upon death, back into a greater, non-physical awareness are also compellingly well supported now by an accumulation of evidence from veridical NDE’s. As Jung said, back in ’61, we have to reckon with the possibility,…

Where this leads us I don’t know, what the purpose of the greater mind’s hamstrung foray into physical form might be, again, I don’t know and am probably incapable of imagining. I did get it once, I think, grasped it intuitively, wordlessly, but that was on the other side of an ME, a long time ago. And I’ve slept a lot since then.

The windscreen is misting now, and I’m beginning to wonder what I’m doing here. It’s like this muddy trail in front of me, heading out to the sea. I’ve been passing it for years, decades even, seeing people wandering down it and wondering to myself what was so special at the end of it that might draw them on. Well, I’ve been down it now and it’s just a twenty minute tramp to a muddy foreshore, a couple of stumps and a seemingly infinite plane of yet more mud beyond – nothing that seems very special, in other words,  and always another frontier stretching before you.

The skies are alive with birds this morning, all manner of waders and the plaintive call of curlews and oyster catchers. Great squadrons of geese are moving up the estuary.

Nature is so wonderfully diverse and complex; we look at it and wonder at the purpose of it. But it has no purpose, no meaning, other than what we grant it. The meaning is perhaps what we aspire to, or something we grant it without even knowing we’re doing it. It’s an idea dimly grasped through the fog of an inadequate intellect, and perhaps the full awareness of that purpose will dawn only when there’s been a global shift in consciousness, maybe centuries from now, something that restores us to the perspective of our  immortal selves, temporarily camped out and shivering down here in the mud.

And then what?

But having advanced so far along the trail, I find myself withdrawing from such thoughts now, withdrawing from the mysterious frontier. Life is where it’s at, down here in the mud. Life is where it’s happening, it’s where consciousness lights up if only briefly in form, so with my life more than half over should I not be waking up to the fact of it by now and living it a little more? Should I not be more focussed on simply being instead of sitting here at 9:00 am on a Friday morning with my head up my own ass, ruminating on matters that greater minds than mine have foundered upon?

Okay, time to move on. I need coffee, and underpants and socks.

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