I was sitting alone at a table at what was Alexander’s Brasserie, in Southport, one sunny Saturday afternoon. Those of you who knew this little place will perhaps share with me the memory of its unusual allure – a French cafe in Wayfarer’s, a beautifully glazed Victorian arcade just off the strangely Parisian boulevard of Southport’s Lord street. It was, for long time, a favourite little refuge of mine, vaguely foreign and yet at the same time easily familiar, somewhere to slip sideways,… to sit aloof from the crowd and yet be positioned curiously in their midstream.
My attitude that afternoon was not gloomy, nor was it entirely introspective. Indeed for a good hour I spun out my Omelette de Maison and my dainty Espresso thinking of nothing but the crowds that passed me by.
The cafe had a seating area under the high glass of the arcade, a sort of enclosure fenced off from the casual shoppers who carousel endlessly around it,… and who perhaps unwittingly provide one of its attractions. If you sit down for long enough in a place like that they say you will see the whole of life pass before your eyes. This is a strange notion, and at first quite puzzling. I’ve always understood it to mean that if you look closely enough you will see a metaphor for every possible aspect of life,… no answers perhaps,… just carefully phrased questions that will cause you to ponder your own place in the scheme of things. And this, I guess, is the allure of watching people.
I was aware, naturally, of the girls and their fashions – the bright peacocks of our kind. And to be sure, many a shapely body passed me by that afternoon, but where my eyes would once have rested with discreet admiration, I was suddenly aware only of the transience of youth. It’s perhaps a regrettable, but fairly obvious truth that the pert bottom of today’s teenaged girl will inevitably become the wrinkled buttock of tomorrow’s older woman.
There is a transience to our being which makes a nonsense out of what popular western culture teaches us to perceive as being beautiful and desirable, when it is but a snapshot of a point in time that cannot possibly be sustained. This is the culture of youth, of celebrity and the glossy media, and no lasting happiness can ever be gained from its pursuit. Indeed the only logical result of the adoration of these values is a permanent anxiety for their impending loss.
Ladies might seek to remedy their saggy bottoms with painful and expensive surgery and so prolong the illusion of their beauty well beyond their middle age. But it is entirely natural that such pertness should fade,.. and I believe we would do better to become more accepting of it.
So began the train of my thoughts that singular Saturday afternoon. And then as if reacting violently to this awakening, my thoughts at once leaped to the consideration of the opposite end of the scale, to those individuals popular culture would have us believe are no longer beautiful, those whose condition, it might be suggested, is not at all desirable. And this again is strange, for theirs is a condition to which we are all inevitably bound.
I’m speaking of the many old folks, stiffer, more angular, their gait not so graceful and the truth of their forms hidden under clothing designed more with practicality in mind than the exhibition of attributes they no longer possess. Some of them seemed to shuffle with eyes disconcertingly dulled by their lives. Then there were the rotund, scowling old dears with a permanent metaphorical grip on their frail husbands’ earlobes – husbands who’s industry-tired bodies seemed transparent, and bent, and wasted.
I searched those aged eyes for anything that might betray a secret knowledge, a knowledge that was perhaps gained only from the long experience of life itself, but I saw nothing. There was certainly no ethereal glow born of enlightenment and indeed there was in fact nothing to tell me that what I observed was anything more than an all to graphic illustration of the frailty of mankind, and the futility of our struggle in the face of nature.
From the time of pert bottoms, it seemed, there lay only a brief fluttering of angst before there loomed fragility and death. No, the meaning of our lives lay not in the contemplation of our physical condition, nor in the joys of our flesh. That was too fleeting a phenomenon for it to have any genuine relevance in the cosmic scheme of things.
Now this was really troubling because since the dawn of time there have been learned men who spoke of enlightenment – men whose mighty intellects have scoured the words of every age and culture for a magic formula. So what was it? Where was the fruit of their labour?
Of course no formula has ever been found, at least no serum to be injected en mass in order to induce a grand, collective enlightenment,… and those powerful intellects go the way of all flesh, eventually unfulfilled and, one might suspect, ultimately unenlightened. So the busy chase of learning was just as futile,… unless of course these scholars were tight lipped about their discoveries and took their secrets with them. But that seemed equally unlikely for in all the ages past, you’d think at least one of them would have blabbed it out: the secret to the meaning of our lives.
Then, added to the swirling carousel of life, there came families, their children in various stages of development, from blubbery babes in cumbersome buggies to the bright, alert eyes of pre-teen children, testing every nerve, every shred of patience of their middle aged parents. This was familiar ground for me,… these harassed mothers and fathers, always tired, a little unkempt due to having insufficient time for themselves, or even for each other – the complete sacrifice of one’s self for the creation of new life! I saw no ethereal glow in their eyes, only tiredness and the tight lined grimaces of a permanently simmering anger.
In my more cynical moments I have wanted to gather the pert bottoms and point out to them the disheveled parents who seem the only logical conclusion to the attractiveness of youth and the urge to partake of the pleasures of the flesh. Such is life, I’d say, and certainly it had begun to seem more and more like a process as ruthless and as cold as evolution. Was there no solace? Was there no profound satisfaction to be had even in the rearing of children? Well – and I speak from experience here – while it is true that in parenthood we discover an unselfish and instinctive love for our children, it is a love that we pay for in a currency that demands the negation of desire, clarity of thought, and contemplation of one’s self.
It did not seem altogether hopeful then, although I remained optimistic that a face would eventually present itself, however fleetingly, a face which, by look or gesture would convey a vital essence, a key that would unlock the riddle I had lately come to ponder: the true meaning of this carousel of life.
I saw a priest and my attention was at once arrested by his silvery white hair as he swept by. There was a stately grace in his movements which might have suggested an inkling of something, but the eyes cannot lie, and in them I saw as much self absorption, as much self doubt, and human pettiness as in the rest of us. Many would have turned to such a man, I thought, and no doubt he could have offered much in terms of ritual prayer, but for an old agnostic like me it was not a salve I needed, but a solution.
A waitress busied herself among the empty tables and obliged me with a friendly smile. She was very young and very pretty, with platinum blonde hair worn with all the natural softness of her youth. In another light she might have passed for the most desirable of women, but I guessed she was only sixteen or seventeen, her waitressing but a weekend job, and a break from her studies. In her face I saw promise and warmth, and hope. I saw a setting out and guessed she would not be waiting on tables when I next visited that cafe.
My own setting out had been like that, I thought, a sense of promise and hope, yet though I could not complain at the way my life had unfolded, my life had provided none of the answers I had sought for so long, and yielded instead only one vexed question after the other.
Perhaps in another thirty years the girl would be a woman sitting at this table pondering the slowly shuffling carousel of passers by, and where would I be then? Would I would be grey and transparent? Would I be a metaphor of another stage in life: the man who’d searched for something but gave up because he couldn’t find it,… or came to realise it wasn’t there at all?
Oh, how I hoped that would not be the case! Certainly, I would grow old and grey and bent – in simple biological terms, that was pretty much the best I could hope for – but I did not like to think of her eyes resting upon me and reading nothing. I would have liked to think she could look at me and realise that, yes, her life meant something,… that something in my eyes would betray the evidence of a deeper level to human experience, a level that the experience of my own life had revealed to me. And from that brief glimpse perhaps she might have gained a measure of encouragement, that the transience of her life, the fading of her youth, and the spreading of her cellulite did not exclude her from experiencing a profound understanding,… an understanding worth the searching and the living, and the dying for.
It had not been an expensive trip to Southport, which was unusual. Whenever I went with my family we always seemed to amass a weighty collection of carrier bags – metaphors themselves of the curious condition of our lives, the weight,.. the restriction, the sense of burden that our accrued goods instill.
My purchases that day were modest. All I’d bought in fact was a slim second-hand volume of poems from Broadhursts, the antiquarian booksellers, on Market Street. It was an anthology, a collection of verse written by members of the British armed forces at the time of the Second World War. It had cost me only a few pounds and yet it had granted me the priceless feeling of flight, of travelling light, of Zen-like simplicity and escape from those other burdened shoppers weighed down by their purchases, and by their lives.
What I would find in the book I did not yet know because for now it lay unopened at the side of my coffee cup. Its plain brown dust jacket and the wartime economy of its construction betrayed no particular flavour of its contents. And what could a book tell me anyway? If there was a book, a magical book that contained the formula of enlightenment, then surely it would be well known.
I did not even know what it was that had possessed me to buy it, other than its apparent contradictions – the idea that amid the horror and the filth of war, the human spirit could still find a voice, and resort to the uncommon and eternal beauty of poetry. It was a connection, I suppose, and lately I had grown fond of connections, fond of the idea of meaningful coincidences.
“Can I take your plate?”
It was the waitress, smiling again. The light in her eyes impressed me, for so many of our youths these days seem barely conscious, performing their movements without thought or enthusiasm, as if they’ve glimpsed the future in their dreams and it fails to animate them.
I thanked the girl and, with the plate gone from my little table, I was then able to slide the book in front of me and contemplate it properly. The dust jacket was in good condition, the book itself also undamaged. To a collector such things are important I suppose, but to a mere reader they can sometimes instill a sense of unease. The book had not been read much in the sixty years since its publication. Indeed it looked like it had lain undisturbed on shelves, possibly also behind sliding glass, its little poems, its slices of emotion unknown, untasted. Was this because they were not worth the effort? Or was it just that no one else had taken the time?
I’ve always liked poetry, though I do not always understand it. My taste in it is simple – some might say simplistic. I prefer the rhyme and rhythm of the verses I learned at Primary School – The Tyger Tyger and The Listeners, and The Land Where The Bong Tree Grows. Indeed some of the messages and fine emotion woven into the twiddly verse of our more revered poets, peppered as they are with unpronounceable names from classical antiquity, I find altogether too intimidating, too tedious. Nor do I understand the jarring brashness of contemporary work, which irritates me deeply, and which I always feel is sneering at my staidness and my stupidity.
I took a tentative flick through the book. There was rhyme and rhythm, and plain words. It seemed we would get on well! A closer look now revealed poems that dealt with battle, with death, with the Blitz, with thoughts on leave from the battlefront, on returning to units in far flung places. But two things immediately struck me as being of perhaps more value. These were not the types of puerile verse that dealt with the death-or-glory fantasy of war, nor did they expound nobly on its futility, but merely its matter of fact reality, and the emotions it aroused in the hearts of the whole spectrum of people who bore witness to it. Secondly it struck me that few of those people who contributed to the volume would actually have described themselves as professional poets. They were ordinary souls, taken from this carousel of life, put into uniform and sent out to do extraordinary things, to face extraordinary situations, including the possibility of their own death.
The poems were slices through the hearts of people, just like the ones milling around in the Wayfarer’s arcade on that Saturday afternoon. I closed the book and looked up at those people now with renewed interest. It was not much of a revelation I suppose, but of course each of those pairs of eyes on that shuffling carousel came with its own soul, each capable of conveying the impressions gleaned by its own experience.
I still have that book and nowadays I value its poetry in different ways, but there is not a single poem, nor line, nor even an isolated word that I can say has pointed me in the direction of anything new. The importance was the book itself, plucked as it was that afternoon from the shelves of Broadhursts bookshop, and its plain presence on the table in the cafe in Wayfarer’s Arcade,… a combination of events coming together and unlocking a single thought,… freeing up the rigidity of my own mind and forming a prelude for much that was to follow in the coming years.
We are rarely aware of the turning points in our lives, and only in retrospect do we sometimes see their importance. Then we might ask ourselves, how could we not have felt that change of course? How could we not have felt the sails, so long becalmed fill slowly with cool wind, and set us on our way?
I gathered up my book and left the waitress a tip, a token, from my hand to hers, and small payment for the changes brought about that day. Then I joined the crowds, and became aware of them more intensely than before. They were no longer a passive phenomenon. Indeed each pair of eyes, each soul seemed suddenly conscious of itself in relation to everyone else. Everyone was aware of themselves in relation to others, glancing at others, briefly judging their own state from the state of those they encountered, including me. We were all like little mirrors reflecting light, illuminating something for someone else. We were each of us reflecting images of each other, in whom we saw reflected images of ourselves.
We are each of us bound on different journeys, each of us possessing a different and seemingly unrelated purpose, but at a fundamental level we are the same, each of us an expression of the same tangle of energy that is seeking to know itself through us. Therefore we can never be alone in our quest. Help will come in many guises,… be it a dusty old book that we might previously have overlooked a hundred times, or the innocent smile of a waitress as she cleans tables in a cafe. Similarly, without knowing it we help others on their way, by an innocuous word or gesture, a kaleidoscope of reflection and connection.
The challenge for each of us is not the effort, nor less the intellect required in understanding the meaning of our lives, for that is unknowable. The challenge is more the opening of one’s self to the possibilities, and being always receptive to the connections.
Then the connections cannot help but be made.
Copyright © M Graeme 2008
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thousand years, and each of them have added to it their own particular slant on what those sixty four hexagrams actually mean. But each of these scholars did this within the social and political contexts of their own times, so the earliest interpretations can seem a little esoteric to more modern readers. Each generation has therefore sought to reinterpret the book within the context of their own times.
The Rivendale Review 