What A Morning!!!

Exclams are for hysterics. Ellipses are for sensitives. Colons are for bullies. Please: can we have all the punctuation, or none...

No email for an hour. The bastards.

Woke up. Got out of bed. Dragged a comb across my head. My Dearly Beloved was still snoring away, so I made my way downstairs and into the kitchen. To be faced with A NEAT PILE OF VOMIT NEXT TO THE COOKER!!! The cat had been sick again... Omigod... I cleaned it up WITH THE DISHCLOTH!!! as I couldn't find another cloth... What WILL my DB say? Cooked breakfast... Specially for all my non-UK readers, this was my English breakfast... commonly known over here as "a heart attack on a plate":

Mmmm... Now, doesn't that look good?!!! (Tho' sadly no black pudding...) I was still a little hungry after the fry-up so I popped some bread into the toaster. Unfortunately it was BURNT TO A CINDER as I had the setting up WAY too high!!! Luckily there were a few more slices left of the loaf, so I popped in another couple (after turning down the heat setting, natch!!!) and this time they were TOASTED TO A TREAT!!! Here's a pic of our toaster (£7.50 from Tescos - not bad, huh?!!!):

Gastronomically satisfied, I checked for comments on my blog. NONE AT ALL!!! Where ARE the buggers? Surely SOME of them were awake all night reading this stuff?!!! Switched on the TV. More death and destruction in the Middle East - and a cat squashed by a motorbike in Stoke-on-Trent. How insensitive to broadcast such CARNAGE so EARLY in the MORNING... (The CAT I mean...) DISGUSTING... Feel my stomach churning now... Tho' perhaps it's the effect of that fatty sausage and fried bread?!!! Checked the blog again. Still no comments. BASTARDS!!! Thought about putting the burnt toast on the bird table (waste not want not!!!) but didn't because I seemed to remember I'd read somewhere that BURNT FOOD is CARCINOGENIC!!! Checked the bird table. Not a bird in sight!!! Hope things improve by NATIONAL BIRDWATCH DAY! It would be so embarrassing to record NO BIRDS AT ALL! Here's a pic of my bird table... err... with no birds on it... However you can just make out a solid slab of suet in the foreground!:

Don't you think that it's an an absolutely SWEET little bird table? (Bought half-price at the Garden Centre!) Checked blog. A COMMENT AT LAST!!! YIPPEE!!! But hold on: it's just a SMILEY FACE! Does that mean the post was KINDA AVERAGE but "I STILL LIKE YOU ANYWAY???" Or does it just mean: someone HADN'T MUCH TIME TO COMMENT because they had to CATCH A BUS IN A FEW MINUTES??? Jesus, I really don't know...

Must publish this now as CASH IN THE ATTIC is just about to start. (Will blog about it later!!!) So much has happened already! And it's only half-way through the morning!!! TTFN fellow bloggers and bloggerettes!!!

;-)

(The quotations cited above were stolen shamelessly from the latest post by Rachel Fox - which in turn were taken from Don Paterson's book of aphorisms The Book Of Shadows.)

You Can Bank On It

Now, my children, my darling son and daughter, do come and sit on daddy's knee for a few moments, because I want to give you some career advice. It's never too early for career advice. Myself, I never received any career advice - so it's hardly surprising, the mess I'm in now! More than 50 years old and I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. Careers advice at school consisted of a bored Modern Languages teacher occasionally rifling through a dusty drawer full of out-of-date leaflets about safe, pensionable jobs with the council or the magic of accountancy - hardly the stuff of inspiration for a head-in-the-clouds, poetically inclined schoolboy. And at university in the 70s you just never mentioned the word "career" - it was almost an obscenity - students studied for the intellectual purity of it (which I rather liked). Nor did any positive career suggestions come from my father, though he did give plenty of negative ones (for God's sake don't become a teacher, or a journalist, don't go into the armed forces, estate agents are all sharks, plumbers are corrupt, rock musicians immoral, artists spongers on society and possibly criminal etc.)

Yes, my naive and innocent daughter and son, I don't want you to make the mistakes I've made, so please take careful note of the advice I'm just about to give you. Forget the law, the church, the teaching profession. Don't be swayed by the enticements of IT and the blandishments of bureaucratic local government. Ignore the soft sell of the carpet salesman and the arousingly oil-flecked overalls of the muscly car mechanic. What you both must be, without a shadow of a doubt... are bankers! Just think about it. People give you freely and willingly all their hard-earned cash. Which you can play around with, speculate with, gamble with and generally enjoy. And this will generate for you lots more cash to play around with, speculate with etc! And if it all goes wrong, and you screw up big time, and you somehow lose all this money, then the government (or rather that's the people again, as the government's money is our money raised by taxes) will reward you by giving you even more cash to bail you out, money which you can play around with, speculate with and so on and so forth! So my advice is: choose banking as a career. It's a win-win situation. You know it makes sense.

Present Joy

I'll close A Year Of Grace after taking one more quotation from it. It's only a short one. It comes from Goethe's flawed, magnificent, practically unstageable, poetic and dramatic masterpiece Faust. I love Faust and I love Goethe. At one time in my life I had to read almost everything Goethe ever wrote - and I did not regret it. Goethe towers over German Literature as Tolstoy does over Russian Literature and Shakespeare does over ours. This is from Faust Part II, Act III - the scene where Faust meets Helen of Troy:

FAUST. The Spirit looks not forward, not behind,
Here in the Present -

HELEN. Here our joy we find.

So A Year Of Grace has led us from the blessings of the Beatitudes to a willing and joyful endurance of all aspects of life (for the good of "the peace and tranquillity of our soul"); from the perception of beauty and the praising (the witnessing and the celebrating) of it (and praise not only of obvious beauty but also of "those dark, deadly, devastating" and "wildest and mildest of ways"), finally to the positive recognition of the present moment.

Grace indeed.

Praise

But do you know, dear Helmuth, what was the most important thing to me? - the fact that I perceived once again that most people take hold of things in order to do something stupid with them (as, for example, to tickle each other with peacocks' feathers), instead of looking at each thing properly and asking it about the beauty it possesses. Thus it comes about that most people simply don't know how beautiful the world is and how much splendour is revealed in the smallest things, in a common flower, in a stone, in the bark of a tree or the leaf of a birch. Grown-up people, who have occupations and cares and who worry themselves about mere trifles, gradually lose the eye for these riches, which children, if they are observant and good, quickly notice and love with their whole heart.

RAINER MARIA RILKE
(Taken from the anthology A Year Of Grace)

O, tell us, poet, what you do? - I praise.
But those dark, deadly, devastating ways,
how do you bear them, suffer them? - I praise.
And then the Nameless, beyond guess or gaze,
how can you call it, conjure it? - I praise.
And whence your right, in every kind of maze,
in every mask, to remain true? - I praise.
And that the mildest and the wildest ways
know you like star and storm? - Because I praise.

RAINER MARIA RILKE
(Taken from the anthology A Year Of Grace)

Acceptance

Keep your heart in peace; let nothing in this world disturb it: all things have an end.

In all circumstances, however hard they may be, we should rejoice, rather than be cast down, that we may not lose the greatest good, the peace and tranquillity of our soul.

If the whole world and all that is in it were thrown into confusion, disquietude on that account would be vanity, because that disquietude would do more harm than good.

To endure all things with an equable and peaceful mind, not only brings with it many blessings to the soul, but also enables us, in the midst of our difficulties, to have a clear judgment about them, and to minister the fitting remedy for them.

ST JOHN OF THE CROSS
(Taken from the anthology A Year Of Grace.)

Spiritually Seeking

Bella commented yesterday that words and poetry may help one through times of change, readjustment and grief. I think she's right. I've written before how one particular book helped me through the week following my mother's death. That book was A Year Of Grace: Passages Chosen And Arranged To Express A Mood About God And Man - compiled by Victor Gollancz (yes, that's the Victor Gollancz, the famous publisher) and published by Penguin Books in 1955, the year after I was born. It's a 550 page treasure house of spiritual and philosophical quotations. I turned to it again this morning.

Right at the book's beginning is The Sermon On The Mount from St Matthew's Gospel. Though I haven't read this for ages, it's astonishing how familiar it is. We must hear snatches from it all the time; it's part of our culture, part of the framework of our minds.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for their's is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek: for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peace-makers: for they shall be called the children of God.

Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake: for their's is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.

**********

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin;

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

**********

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

**********

First cast the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast the mote out of thy brother's eye.

**********

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

Ask, and it shall be given; seek, and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto you.

**********

Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

**********

Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.

Just a word about my own religious beliefs. When I was young Methodism was forced onto me so much that I turned against it and against all other forms of organized, evangelical religion. But I can't help still being very interested in and often inexplicably moved by different belief systems and manifestations of the religious impulse - whether it be Catholicism on the Spanish Camino or the teachings of the Buddha or the multiform deities of Hinduism or pre-Christian paganism or the mystical individualism of the early Christian saints. I suppose you could call me both an agnostic and a spiritual seeker.

The Dying Of The Light

And you, my father, there on the sad height,/Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears... DYLAN THOMAS Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

In August 1987 my 29 year old sister died of a cerebral haemorrhage caused by a tumour on the brain. My mother died in November 2004, aged 82, after suffering from progressive Alzheimer's disease for 5 years.

3 days ago my father died. He was 90 years old. He was admitted to hospital just before Christmas with gastroenteritis. He never returned home again. Gradually he became thinner and weaker. He slept more and more, and, when awake, often rambled and was confused. He became seriously dehydrated. Finally he died of acute renal failure. Towards the end he said several things to me which showed me that he knew he was dying and that he wanted to die. At one point my voice seemed to cut through to him, to the distant mental place he was inhabiting, and he came to, opened his eyes wide and looked directly at me. "Oh, I do love you, Robert", he said. All his raging had gone completely, and he slipped peacefully away.

Oh the tree of life is growing/Where the spirit never dies/And the bright light of salvation shines/In dark and empty skies BOB DYLAN Death Is Not The End

Right Relationship

Forest Wisdom has just been musing in his blog about whether we can ever fully get to know and understand another person - online or offline - and this has provoked a fascinating string of comments.

I don't think we ever can. To do that we must be that other person. And we can't be that because we are uniquely ourselves. It's an inescapable fact of human life that we are isolated one from another within our own physical bodies and within our own private minds. However this existential state need not be a depressing thing. For we do have relationships.

I thought I'd turn to see what one of my favourite philosophical and spiritual thinkers, Krishnamurti, had to say on the subject of Relationship and Isolation. In The Problems Of Living he writes that Life is relationship, which is expressed through contact with things, with people and with ideas. In understanding relationship we shall have capacity to meet life fully, adequately... Relationship, surely, is the mirror in which you discover yourself. Without relationship you are not; to be is to be related; to be related is existence.

Examining our relationships, Krishnamurti recognises that many of our relationships are isolating because they are based on a desire for power and self-gratification, whether individually, racially or nationally:

Now if we examine our life, our relationship with another, we shall see that it is a process of isolation. We are really not concerned with another; though we talk a great deal about it, actually we are not concerned. We are related to someone only so long as that relationship gives us a refuge, so long as it satisfies us. But the moment there is a disturbance in the relationship which produces discomfort in ourselves, we discard that relationship. In other words, there is a relationship only so long as we are gratified. This may sound harsh, but if you really examine your life very closely you will see it is a fact; and to avoid a fact is to live in ignorance, which can never produce right relationship. If we look into our lives and observe relationship, we see that it is a process of building resistance against each other, a wall over which we look and observe the other; but we always retain the wall and remain behind it, whether it be a psychological wall, a material wall, an economic wall, or a national wall.

After forcing us to consider these uncomfortable truths, Krishnamurti then asks: Can one live in the world without the desire for power, for position, for authority? and replies to his own question like this: Obviously one can. One does it when one does not identify oneself with something greater (my italics). This identification with something greater - the party, the country, the race, the religion, God - is the search for power. Because you in yourself are empty, dull, weak, you like to identify yourself with something greater. That desire to identify yourself with something greater is the desire for power.

He concludes: Relationship is a process of self-revelation, and, without knowing oneself, the ways of one's own mind and heart, merely to establish an outward order, a system, a cunning formula has very little meaning. What is important is to understand oneself in relationship with another. Then relationship becomes not a process of isolation but a movement in which you discover your own motives, your own thoughts, your own pursuits; and that very discovery is the beginning of liberation, the beginning of transformation.

You may think we're deviating a long way from talk about how one individual can communicate with and get to know another individual, to ideas about power struggles and religious, national and political identity. But relationship is relationship, and we're talking essentially about the same relationship here - the individual one-to-one personal relationship being a microcosm of all the other more global, more abstract relationships.

The technique Krishnamurti uses in the above "argument" is typical of his reasoning; and, I think, typical of certain kind of Buddhist mode of thought.

I've written about relationship before in my post We Are Stardust, We Are Golden.

Orwellian Openings

I've been refreshing myself with bits of Orwell these last few hours - and I'm glad to say he still doesn't disappoint...

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats...

(The opening lines of 1984.)

The rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down.

MADAME MONCE: 'Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you not to squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out of the window like everyone else? Putain! Salope!'

THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: 'Vache!'

Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel...

(The opening lines of Down And Out In Paris And London.)

For me it would be quite impossible not to carry on reading after such arresting openings...

Politics And The English Language

Forest Wisdom quoted recently this observation by George Orwell: To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle. This got me thinking about Orwell, and how he was one of the literary and political heroes of my youth. I think I read most of his books in my mid to late teens - probably at breakneck pace, as was my habit back then! Nowadays I read a lot more slowly, sometimes turning back to read pages over and over.

Orwell certainly took it upon himself to see what was in front of his own nose, and to write about it as sincerely and honestly as he could in prose that was both workmanlike and unpretentious. He described with a clear eye the exploitation of mineworkers and economic deprivation in Northern England in The Road To Wigan Pier, the life of tramps in Down And Out In Paris And London, the Spanish Civil War in Homage To Catalonia, post-Russian Revolution Communism in Animal Farm and totalitarianism in 1984.

An absolutely indispensable work of Orwell's for all aspiring writers (indeed for all writers) is his essay Politics And The English Language. In it he lists the following 6 rules:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Good advice, and well worth keeping at the back of our minds, I think...

Tracing Shadows

It is with some reluctance that I must finally close The Golden Treasury Of Poetry, the beacon-book of my childhood, and return it to the shelf. But not before quoting 3 last poems. The 1st is another sonnet by John Keats. This sonnet is particularly poignant when we remember that Keats died of tuberculosis at the very young age of 25. In this poem Keats senses he soon will die; and the poem ends with a quiet acceptance.

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

There have been a few patches of winter fog lately - fog's more likely here on the alluvial plain of the Trent valley than the snow and deep frost they've been getting further 'up north' - so it seems apposite to include Carl Sandburg's delicate little poem Fog:

Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking

over harbour and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Last but not least here's Emily Dickinson again:

Certainty

I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea;
Yet know I how the heather looks,
And what a wave must be.

I never spoke with God,
Nor visted in heaven;
Yet certain am I of the spot
As if the chart were given.

What a masterpiece of concision!

(I meditated on my very favourite Emily Dickinson poem here and here.)

Miracles, And The Glory Of The Commonplace

In 1855 an unknown American journalist, Walt Whitman, printed himself by hand (he couldn't find a publisher) a little book of 12 poems entitled Leaves Of Grass. It took America by storm. Some readers, like the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, loved it; others loathed it. Its form, its subject matter, its language - every aspect was quite unlike any other poetry that had gone before. Free verse had arrived and come to stay. Each new edition of Leaves Of Grass contained new poems until there were nearly 400 in the collection. This poem from Leaves Of Grass called Miracles is also contained in The Golden Treasury Of Poetry:

Miracles

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim - the rocks - the motion of the waves - the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

For Whitman nothing was insignificant. In his poetry he witnessed and celebrated what he termed the glory of the commonplace. Some of my favourite blogs - such as Beating The Bounds, The Weaver Of Grass and Riverdaze - also attempt to do this; that is, they document and celebrate the "everyday" details of life in their own backyards (though what backyards - Morecambe Bay, the Yorkshire Dales and a river in Ohio!) Somehow, in describing day by day these local, backyard "miracles", these "miracles" are constantly being refreshed and renewed. The magical acts of writing about (and photographing) these daily "miracles" ensure they are remembered; in some miraculous way they become part of a world consciousness.

There are miracles all around us. We only have to step back occasionally from our busy, humdrum lives of deadline and routine, slow down for just a few minutes, control our breathing so that our breath is regular and even, and look...

3 Poems

I've been dipping again into The Golden Treasury Of Poetry. 3 poems leaped out at me. The 1st is by Robert Frost and is called The Runaway. It's a good choice for this time of year:

The Runaway

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, 'Whose colt?'
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
'I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.
He isn't winter-broken. It isn't play
With the little fellow at all. He's running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, 'Sakes,
It's only weather.' He'd think she didn't know!
Where is his mother? He can't be out alone.'
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone,
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn't hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
'Whever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.'

What a word picture Frost paints here! You can just feel the cold, hear the hooves, see the falling snowflakes and the whites of the colt's eyes.

Apart from Shakespeare's, the sonnets of Keats are some of the most perfect sonnets ever written. This sonnet, On The Grasshopper And The Cricket - among other poems by Keats - also appears in The Golden Treasury:

On The Grasshopper And The Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.
That is the grasshopper's - he takes the lead
In summer luxury, - he has never done
With his delights; for, when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems, to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

Yes, how we yearn for summer during these last endless wintry months!

Finally, there's this short, succinct poem by the wonderful Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Frog-celebrities of Celebrity Big Brother, please take note...

The Golden Treasury Of Poetry

One Christmas when I was very young I was delighted to find a big, hardback book of poems in my Christmas stocking. The book was called The Golden Treasury Of Poetry, selected and with a commentary by Louis Untermeyer, and illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund. My photos show the front cover and 2 of its double page spreads. This volume has always enjoyed a special, treasured place on my bookshelves. For it was this book above all which kindled in me a lifelong passion for books and literature, and for poetry in particular.

The poems were arranged in 12 themed sections which had titles such as Creatures Of Every Kind, Unforgettable Stories, Good Things In Small Packages and Around The Year. Untermeyer's selection of poems was brilliantly done - sure, there were some well known favourites by people like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll (and why not), but there were also narrative poems about American history such as The Little Black-Eyed Rebel by Will Carleton and Grandmother's Story Of Bunker Hill Battle by Oliver Wendell Holmes which were really quite challenging and slightly obscure for a young non-American reader.

One of the poems I used to turn to again and again was this touching and sweet poem by Ogden Nash, who unbelievably just about manages to avoid the whimsical in his An Introduction To Dogs:

The dog is man's best friend.
He has a tail on one end.
Up in front he has teeth.
And four legs underneath.

Dogs like to bark.
They like it best after dark.
They not only frighten prowlers away
But also hold the sandman at bay.

A dog that is indoors
To be let out implores.
You let him out and what then?
He wants back in again.

Dogs display reluctance and wrath
If you try to give them a bath.
They bury bones in hideaways
And half the time they trot sideaways.

They cheer up people who are frowning,
And rescue people who are drowning,
They also track mud on beds,
And chew people's clothes to shreds.

Dogs in the country have fun.
They run and run and run.
But in the city this species
Is dragged around on leashes.

Dogs are upright as a steeple
And much more loyal than people.

When We Were Very Young

When we're young poetry can pour out of us as naturally as water bubbling up from a mountain spring. It certainly did as far as I was concerned. I've written before about my own adolescent efforts. I've just come across in my files (well, actually in an old cardboard box) some early poems written by my children. Children's poems are so wonderfully fresh, imaginative and direct. They just take your breath away. These 2 poems were written by my daughter Anna when she wasn't yet into her teens.

The Tree

How it stands there,
Tall and bare.
Bark and touches of leaves to spare.

The weepingwillow leans ahead.
A dead tall tree.

Rustles of leaves,
Touches of bark.
How it stands there.
Tall but dark.

Just Suppose Their Was No More Books

Just suppose their was no more books..........
No more intellectuals, no more libraries,
No more bookshelfs, no more Fridays,

No more authors, no more secret places,
No more Enid Blyton, no more smiley faces,

No more scares, no more learning,
No more bookshops, no more squirming,

No more Alice, no more Kelly,
No more Crusoe,

But best of all lots more telly!

I'm completely blown away rereading these for the 1st time in many, many years...

Growing Up In The 1950s

As the Cold War raged, the postwar economy was booming. Men went to work and women were happy homemakers who smoked, drank cocktails, raised children, and wore girdles. Working-class families aspired to move to the suburbs and have a two-car garage. Everything was hunky-dory. Meanwhile, the fear of a nuclear war was ever present: children wore dog tags around their necks and every school had 'duck and cover' air raid drills. Loyalty oaths had to be signed in workplaces and schools.

Segregation was a way of life. In The South, water fountains were clearly marked For White and For Colored. Black and white musicians on tour in the same band couldn't stay in the same hotel. Even hugely successful African American performers were subjected to these indignities.

I grew up in that 1950s lockdown on anything that deviated from the pastel norm. Fear of 'the other', that dark cloud looming over the shiny chrome of a sleek new car, ready to sully it, ruled the day. Communists were behind Negroes' demands for equality. Rhythm and blues and rock and roll were torrid and sweaty the way Pat Boone and his ilk could never be. Beat poets and James Dean were stoking rebellion and delivering angst to an eager audience. For a kid like me, who grew up hiding, knowing I came from 'the other', it was a relief to find some company on the big screen and in the streets. And those who knew in their lonely souls that something else had to be out there finally found what they were looking for and shed their pastels for indigo.

The times would soon be a-changin':

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times, they are a-changin'.

(From A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir Of Greenwich Village In The Sixties by Suze Rotolo.)

Bob And Suze

The Weaver Of Grass recently entertained us with a description of the books she'd received as Christmas presents. These were the books we received as gifts in this household:

Barack Obama's 2 books The Audacity Of Hope: Thoughts On Reclaiming The American Dream and Dreams From My Father. He dedicates the 1st book To the women who raised me - MY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER, TUTU, who's been a rock of stability throughout my life, and MY MOTHER, whose loving spirit sustains me still. On the page before the preface in the 2nd book is this quotation from the Biblical Book of Chronicles: For we are strangers before them, and sojourners, as were all our fathers.

2 books by Oliver James - Affluenza and The Selfish Capitalist. Affluenza has had great reviews and is about how capitalism and consumerism can endanger your mental health.

2 books about iconic country music singer Johnny Cash (I loved the film Walk The Line): Cash: The Autobiography and I Walked The Line: My Life With Johnny, a memoir by Vivian, Cash's 1st wife.

A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir Of Greenwich Village In The Sixties by Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan's girlfriend. I think you know I'm going to like this one...

Books aside, my wife also gave me this beautiful Ansel Adams calendar:

A Rapturous Calm

In this final extract from The Reveries Of The Solitary Walker Rousseau has improbably been knocked to the ground by a Great Dane dog in his Second Walk, hitting his head forcibly against the pavement. He describes his semi-concussed state like this:

Night was coming on. I perceived the sky, some stars, and a little greenery. This first sensation was a delicious moment. I still had no feeling of myself except as being "over there". I was born into life at that instant, and it seemed to me that I filled all the objects I perceived with my frail existence. Entirely absorbed in the present moment, I remembered nothing; I had no distinct notion of my person nor the least idea of what had just happened to me; I knew neither who I was nor where I was; I felt neither injury, fear, nor worry. I watched my blood flow as I would have watched a brook flow, without even suspecting that this blood belonged to me in any way. I felt a rapturous calm in my whole being; and each time I remember it, I find nothing comparable to it in all the activity of known pleasures.

I find this reaction fascinating. It contains echoes of mystical writing and accounts of "out of body" and "near death" experiences. It brings to mind Colin Wilson's 1st book The Outsider (1956), and later books of his, in which he documents those peak, epiphanic moments we all experience from time to time in our lives. It recalls Aldous Huxley's experiments with mescaline in The Doors Of Perception (1954) and his exploration of the mystical writers in The Perennial Philosophy (1945).

I've written before about this sublime but usually tantalisingly-just-out-of-reach state in my posts Mad, Mystic Moments and Dharmakaya Light.

Illness and injury can definitely under certain circumstances bring about something akin to a state of ecstasy. I experienced this first hand a few years ago when recovering from a particularly virulent virus I caught on a plane flying back from Venice. There was a turning-point day when the virus receded - and I felt an overwhelming, cathartic feeling of immense calm and tranquillity.

Social Passions

In this passage from the Eighth Walk in The Reveries Of The Solitary Walker Rousseau reminds us that, in order to appreciate a walk in nature with all its charms, you must leave behind the disturbance of the vain ideas of the drawing room, the fumes of self-love and the tumult of the world, and social passions and their sad retinue:

I remember perfectly that during my brief moment of prosperity these same solitary walks which are so delightful for me today were insipid and boring. When I was at someone's house in the country, the need to get some exercise and to breathe fresh air often made me go out alone; and sneaking away like a thief, I would go walk about the park or the countryside. But far from finding the happy calm I savor there today, I took along the disturbance of the vain ideas which had preoccupied me in the drawing room. Memory of the company I had left followed me into solitude. The fumes of self-love and the tumult of the world made the freshness of the groves seem dull and troubled the peace of the retreat. I fled deep into the woods in vain; an importunate crowd followed me everywhere and veiled all of nature to me. It is only after having detached myself from social passions and their sad retinue that I have again found nature with all its charms.

What a lot of truth there is in this! I'm sure we all recognise that feeling of sometimes not being able to shake off the vain cares and idle demands of society when we go for a walk. In society we often find ourselves "performing" and adhering to a rôle, doing what's expected of us. On a solitary walk however we suddenly realise that it's just ourselves and nature. We can go this way or that way in complete freedom. We don't have to impress the rivers, the rocks and the trees. They don't judge us or want anything from us. They are just there. They are simply and magnificently themselves.

Reverie And Reflection

I thought I'd start the New Year with an explanation of my blog's title, The Solitary Walker. I've done this before at the time I began blogging - but I've more readers now, and some of you may have missed it.

The Reveries Of The Solitary Walker was the last, posthumously published work by the great French political philospher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). I suppose Rousseau's most celebrated work is The Social Contract, which contains the famous quotation: Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.

With his highly personal Confessions and Reveries, Rousseau is regarded as the founder of modern autobiography. Rousseau himself considered Émile, his book about education, his best book. But after its publication in 1762 the Parliament of Paris issued a warrant for his arrest due to its revolutionary nature. He escaped from France into Switzerland in the nick of time. And it was during this period of exile in Switzerland that he wrote The Reveries Of The Solitary Walker.

The book contains 10 meditative "walks". This short paragraph comes from his Seventh Walk: I have sometimes thought rather deeply, but rarely with pleasure; almost always against my liking, and as though by force. Reverie relaxes and amuses me; reflection tires and saddens me; thinking always was a painful and charmless occupation for me. Sometimes my reveries end in meditation, but more often my meditations end in reverie; and during these wanderings, my soul rambles and glides through the universe on the wings of imagination, in ecstasies which surpass every other enjoyment.

This from one of the greatest philosophers of the European Enlightenment!

(There is one other work entitled The Reveries Of The Solitary Walker - and that is a painting by the surrealist painter René Magritte. I've written briefly about that painting here.)

Audacity Of Hope

I emerge blinking from the snug, warm cocoon of the house. It's New Year's Day. Nothing in 2009 seems very much different from 2008. It's another cold, grey morning, typical of so much of the Midlands weather we've been having these last few weeks.

The village seems dead. Hangovers are being nursed. Families are indoors, in their own private heaven-or-hells, trying to figure out ways of patching up last night's alcohol-fuelled quarrels. Or perhaps they're just working out ways of erasing the wine stains all over the carpet? Who knows what goes on behind closed doors.

Unsurprisingly the world is still in a state of economic meltdown. A fire in a Bangkok nightclub has killed more than 60 people. The carnage in Gaza continues. Firefighters, nurses, doctors and the police are all at work. For them this is just another day, a day not a lot different from the rest, another normal day of accident and disfigurement, of illness and injury, of crime and destruction.

But, hey, let's not be too downhearted! The glass can be half full as well as half empty, you know. What's extraordinary about the human spirit is that - against all the odds - it can rarely be dejected for long. Restless curiosity, resistance, optimism, delight, happiness even - all these things bubble up unstoppably in the end - despite the heavy rocks life tries to place over the source-spring.

I've had a bad time of late, a time fraught with weakness, hesitation, conflict, betrayal, distrust, guilt - all the human frailties and difficulties. I'm sure it's much the same for many of us. Today is the start of a New Year. I hope it may also be the start of a New Life.

And I've got a lot of hope in this man...