The Mastery Of Love

I'd heard of Don Miguel Ruiz for a while, but hadn't got round to reading any of his books. I'd known about his four agreements — (1) Be impeccable with your word (2) Don't take anything personally (3) Don't make assumptions (4) Always do your best (The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide To Personal Freedom) — but that was about it. Even though I'd been reading texts on ancient wisdom, self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment for some time — by Carlos Castaneda, Sogyal Rinpoche, Thomas Merton, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Stephen Batchelor, David Brazier, the Dalai Lama, Eckhart Tolle and Osho among others — Ruiz had passed me by.

However, last night I picked up his book, The Mastery Of Love, and it blew me away. I read half of it straight off at one sitting (or rather at one lying — I was in bed at the time). For me this simple but profound work is one of those immediately life-transforming, once-read-never-to-be-forgotten books you encounter all too rarely in life. (I remember also having this experience when I first came across Krishnamurti in my early twenties.)

I scribbled these notes while reading the book — the highlighted pieces are straight from the text, the rest are my own interpretations and summaries:

When a man meets a woman, he makes an image of her from his point of view, and the woman makes an image of the man from her point of view. Then he tries to make her fit the image he makes for her, and she tries to make him fit the image she makes for him. Now there are six images between them. Of course, they are lying to each other, even if they don't know they are lying. Their relationship is based on fear; it is based on lies. It is not based on truth, because they cannot see through all that fog.

Ruiz analyses our relationships, and shows how most of our love relationships are ones of control, of neediness, of manipulation, of possessiveness and of selfishness (oh, how Proust understood this — I've been reading In Search Of Lost Time recently).

It doesn't matter how much you love someone, you are never going to be what that person wants you to be.

We can't be responsible for another person's happiness or unhappiness; we create our own happiness or unhappiness from inside. If we make another person responsible for our happiness or unhappiness, we become dependent on that person. Then that person will have the sole power to increase our happiness or take our happiness away. Not good. Ruiz compares this kind of unequal relationship with the relationship of the provider and the drug addict. 

We never really know another person — what's in their mind, all their thoughts, feelings and fantasies — even in close relationships such as husband and wife, or parent and child.

Every human being has a personal dream of life, and that dream is completely different from anyone else's dream. Every dreamer is going to dream in his own way.

We can never dream the same dream as another, but we need to respect each other's dreams.

We may have many relationships in our lives and, when it comes down to it, each relationship is unique and one-to-one, a relationship formed by two dreamers with separate dreams, but whose dreams touch and commingle to some extent within that relationship.

If our physical bodies consist of cells, then our dream-bodies consist of emotions, and our core emotions are fear (emotions such as anger, jealousy and sadness are just masks for fear) and love. Ruiz  goes on to contrast love with fear, and shows how fear is lacking and divisive in every way. Unlike fear, love has no obligations or expectations. It is based on respect. Love does not pity, but has compassion (two very different things). Love is responsible. Love is kind. Love is generous and unconditional. Love has justice.

We are not responsible for others, for the other halves of our relationships.

We don't have the right to change anyone else, and no one has the right to change us.

You cannot change other people. They are what they are. Love them for what they are. Love yourself for what you are, warts and all.

I've been shocked by reading this book into realising how much I've tried to control some relationships in my own life, tried to influence and change other people, to make them conform to some predetermined image. No, no, no! You can't do it! It just brings misery and frustration. It's all through fear, really — fear of the autonomy and unique mystery of the other person, fear of what they might think of you, fear of what they might do to you,  Fear and insecurity! Time to move on. I feel such relief.

Le Style, C'est L'homme

I've just finished Artemis Cooper's recent, very readable biography of the irrepressible author and adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor. Known almost universally as 'Paddy', he was such a larger-than-life character that almost every page of the book made me gasp: did he really do that? Did he honestly know all those people? How on earth did he manage to survive without ever having a 'proper' job?

Fermor is a legend. Man of action, war hero, restless voyager, travel writer, scholar and intellectual, doer and thinker, bibliophile, linguist, loyal friend, old-fashioned romantic and dazzling conversationalist are just a few of the epithets you could use to describe him. His enthusiasm and sense of fun were infectious, and his charm and charisma irresistible. He smoked and drank furiously all his life, yet enjoyed mainly excellent health until the ripe old age of 96. He took great risks but survived without major mishap; he was perpetually late in delivering typescripts to his publisher but always charmed his way through; he was impossibly good-looking and women fell at his feet. He broke all the rules. He was a Byronic figure — and quite specifically so, as the Greeks revere him to this day for his part in helping the Cretan resistance during WW2, which included a star role in the kidnap and deportation of German general Heinrich Kreipe, a daring piece of Boy's Own bravado immortalised in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight.

Yet no one's perfect, and even legends have feet of clay. Fermor could often be insensitive, and ride roughshod over others' feelings; and some found him rather cocky and boastful. He also had a slight snobbish streak, I feel — but perhaps I'm just a tiny bit jealous of his impossibly wide circle of aristocratic and influential friends who would give him money, put him up, and lend him their cottages and châteaux.

His writing too, brilliant as it can be, is not without its faults and purple patches. A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, which recount his epic walk as an 18-year-old across a 1930s' Europe, are masterworks, and made a lasting impression on me when I first read them, partly inspiring some of my own treks. But other books of his don't quite live up to the sparkle and sense of wonder you get from these two. For instance, Mani — a memoir of a trip in the southernmost Greek Peloponnese — I found rather hard-going, with its maze of erudite detail. There was too much history and not enough story; the narrative became lost in the factual complexity. Yes, Fermor can write really well, but occasionally he tries too much and can't help showing off.

The style really is the man in Fermor's case. All of which got me thinking about style in general. There are as many different literary styles as there are writers, from the laconic minimalism of Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy to the lush extravagance of Proust and Faulkner, from the clear, workmanlike prose of George Orwell to the off-putting density of Hermann Melville and the baffling impenetrability of the later James Joyce.

But I don't think we should be deterred by perceived difficulty. For example, I've just read Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's towering classic In Search of Lost Time, and found it a complete joy and delight, despite all those stories about its complexity, and the intricacy of those long, convoluted sentences, and how no one ever finishes it. Sure, you have to focus and concentrate, and you can't read it quickly, and sometimes you have to reread in order to work out the sense. But the rewards far outweigh the effort.

If you want facile, simply and poorly written escapist literature, which has no bearing on real life, then that's fine. Go to the beach and enjoy. But I want something with a little more meat and meaning, a book which says something about what it is to be human, how we think and feel and relate, how we struggle and fail and suffer and achieve happiness or not, how we live and endure. And I can find this in books of enormously varied styles, whether (to take the travel field) it's in Leigh Fermor's baroque chronicles or in Bruce Chatwin's condensed and pared-down prose. The apparently simple or manifestly complex —  each style is artifice; but the essential thing is that it should represent the writer as authentically as possible. Any inauthenticity you can spot a mile away. And Fermor is as authentic as they come.

Ultimately, when reading a great book, you have to submit to the unique style and world of the author, and humbly enter his or her own particular and individual world without prejudice and with curiosity and an open, enquiring mind.

I'll end my piece with this touching final paragraph from Artemis Cooper's biography of her friend, the uncategorisable Paddy Fermor:              

Paddy had endured his last illness and the inevitable shrinking of his world with a kind of bewildered sadness, 'It's very odd,' he said to one friend at Kardamyli after the operation to remove the tumour. 'My life has suddenly gone out of kilter, familiar and yet utterly strange, like before and after the war.' He never talked about death, though of course he thought about it. In a short biography of Proust which was found in his room in Kardamyli, he had written a message in the middle of the night, at a moment when he felt the end was close. Yet whatever sorrow he felt at leaving the world, what he wanted to express was a sense of profound gratitude. 'Love to all and kindness to all friends,' he wrote, 'and thank you all for a life of great happiness.'

(The Broken Road, the third part of Patrick Leigh Fermor's trilogy describing his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople, was published posthumously last year.) 

A Madeleine Moment

Beating the bounds.

I'm not much of a one for New Year resolutions, but I do have five modest daily goals:

(1) To read a little. 

(2) To write a little. 

(3) To walk a little. 

(4) To exercise for 20 - 30 min. (stretching, aerobic and resistance exercises). 

(5) To be mindful of what I eat and drink, to enjoy eating and drinking as a 'ritual', to be aware of the calorific content and health value of the food, to enjoy the taste in a heightened, mindful way.

Yellowhammer. (Wikimedia Commons.)

This morning after a light breakfast and 20 minutes' exercise I went for a walk — beating the bounds of my local territory. Waves of storms have been passing over the UK in recent weeks, but today dawned cold, clear and bright. The Midlands landscape round here is quite ordinary. No mountains, no spectacular views — just flattish farmland, river flood plain, gravel pit lakes, dykes and ditches, hedgerows and copses, muddy lanes. But I like it. It may be unsensational, but it's my home ground.

There were quite a few birds about: blue tits, chaffinches, dunnocks, rooks — the common species. I passed comfortingly familiar sights, natural touchstones of the season: bunches of limp ash keys hanging from branches, new sooty ash buds, skeletal oak trees, bulrushes — some with their cottony seeds still attached — tall and sentinel at the edge of the pond. Then a flock of yellowhammers flew out of a hedge and disappeared back into it further along the track. As soon as I spotted those flashes of brilliant yellow and those white outer tail feathers I experienced what can only be called a Proustian moment. 

You remember how in Proust's À la Recherche the taste of a madeleine cake soaked in lime-blossom tea suddenly and vividly conjured up lost details of the narrator's childhood, and how that little musical phrase by Vinteuil revitalised Swann's love for Odette? Well, the unexpected sight of those flitting birds gave me instantly the same feeling I'd had as a child when birdwatching in the countryside and coming across an unusual species: an intense excitement, a sense of mystery, a thrill coursing through my whole body.

So, for a few seconds today, I became a child again, experiencing an innocent wonder at the marvels of the world.

Madeleine cakes. (Wikimedia Commons.)

In Search Of Lost Time

With apologies to Marcel Proust

I only have to dunk a Jammie Dodger
In PG Tips and I’m transported back
To Lincolnshire and the old railway track

I mooched along in melancholy youth,
The line long gone; now flowers grew between
Abandoned sleepers: eyebright, eglantine,

Foxglove, selfheal, Good King Henry, poppy, 
Dock, dandelion, mayweed, bryony,
Vetch, viper’s bugloss, mallow, ox-eye daisy.

I’d read somewhere the smell of hawthorn flowers
Evoked the musky tang of randy girls,
A hint of almond and vanilla twirls;

So I breathed long and deep, imagining
A girl beside me lying on the grass
Resembling Odette in Montparnasse,

Though what I’d do with her was rather vague.
Recite Le Cyne? Tickle her with a frond?
I wasn’t yet au fait with demi-monde.

I wandered on, entered the secret wood
Which reeked of foxes, made for the hollow tree
Where I'd concealed Health and Efficiency.

I thumbed its pages. Naked bodies romped
In games of tennis, beach ball and croquet;
Pas érotique, I really have to say.

What would I do with women anyway?
Especially those healthy, sporty dykes
On pedalos or pedalling their bikes?

No, it was better to admire from far,
And not immerse myself in the corporeal,
But rusticate myself in the arboreal

Railway embankment and its milieu.
My back against a tree, my mind in haste
Returned to former loves both pure and chaste:

A cuddly toy, a hoop, a spinning top,
A sailor suit, glass marbles in a jar —  
And, best of all, a kiss from dear mama.

Remembrance Of Things Past

In a comment on my Proustian (aha, another adjectivized author!) post, John Hee has reminded me of the hilarious Monty Python sketch - the All-England Summarize Proust Competition (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8rhIw_9ucA). I remember us all crowding into the university common room to watch Monty Python religiously once a week; it was like some sacred rite. This must have been in the early 1970s. It was the only TV programme I ever watched in those days. None of the students seemed to watch TV very often. There were more profitable things to do - like playing shove ha'penny in the Half Moon Pub or putting traffic cones on the college roof.

How Proust Can Change Your Life

How Proust Can Change Your Life is the title of a book by Alain de Botton. I would very much like to read it. It's an accessible study of Proust's great, influential and unique novel Remembrance Of Things Past (or, depending on which translation you prefer, In Search Of Lost Time). De Botton uses Proust's book to demonstrate the power and relevance of literature - a great book is capable, quite literally, of completely transforming your life. (John Hee has described this kind of event, on a more modest scale, in his recent post.) I believe in this magical power too. It has happened to me, though usually less dramatically, on many occasions. (I've just finished reading another book by De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, which I enjoyed enormously. But more of that book later.)

I began reading C. K. Scott-Moncrieff's translation of Proust's 7 volume novel in my early 20s, but never got beyond the 1st volume, Swann's Way. Now I feel the urge to start it afresh - this time probably in the much newer translation by Christopher Prendergast and others which Allen Lane published in 2002.

My thoughts turned to Proust today because this afternoon we went for a stroll in Whisby Nature Park where, though not much was going on in the bird domain (the chiffchaffs were chiff-chaffing and the willow warblers willow-warbling but the nightingales and sand martins we hoped to see were out of sight on their nests), the hawthorn blossom in the hedgerows was at its creamy, radiant best.

Just as Swann is famously transported back in time by the taste of a madeleine cake, the sight and smell of hawthorn blossom also acts for him both as memory trigger and peak experience. Somewhere in the middle of Swann's Way Proust writes how Swann became enraptured by hawthorn flowers (which he later describes as having the bitter-sweet fragrance of almonds):

As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil, who held very strict views on 'the deplorable untidiness of young people, which seems to be encouraged in these days,' my mother would first see that there was nothing out of order in my appearance, and then we would set out for the church. It was in these 'Month of Mary' services that I can remember having first fallen in love with hawthorn blossom. The hawthorn was not merely in the church, for there, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry; but, arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration it was playing a part, it thrust in among the tapers and the sacred vessels its rows of branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration; and they were made more lovely still by the scalloped outline of the dark leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look at them save through my fingers, I could feel that the formal scheme was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and alive.

After this passage follow several pages which focus on a hawthorn hedge outside the church even more intently. In detailed, observant, intensely poetic meditations such as these, Proust is showing us the intimate, subjective relationship between the outer world of nature, family and society and the inner world of mind, memory and imagination.

Song At The Beginning Of Autumn

Another poem about autumn which I like very much has come to mind. It's called Song at the Beginning of Autumn and is by Elizabeth Jennings (1929-2001). Elizabeth Jennings was born in Lincolnshire, where I was born, and became a librarian, which I became for a while. I think many of her quiet, sacramental poems are very fine indeed. This poem is taken from her early collection A Way of Looking (1955), and is included in the paperback Elizabeth Jennings: New Collected Poems (2002) edited by Michael Schmidt and published by Carcanet Press.

Song at the Beginning of Autumn

Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within
A child's cake would understand
The ambiguity of this -
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names -
Autumn and summer, winter, spring -
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marble, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said autumn, autumn broke.

Beautifully written. I hadn't read this poem for a long time; it must have been somewhere at the back of my mind waiting to be rediscovered. Strange how yesterday, when discussing the poem by Keats, I drew, as Jennings does, a connection with Proust. My subconscious must have "remembered" her mention of the madeleine cake, for I didn't consciously recall the poem's specific details (except for that wonderfully simple but effective last line) until I took her book from the shelf just now. Perhaps we never really forget anything - we just mislay things.

Mellow Fruitfulness

Of course there's really no such thing as the end of one season and the beginning of the next. The seasons, like the stages of our lives, merge imperceptibly one into the other. This said, autumn, or fall as they say in America, will be with us before we know it. Next Sunday 23 September marks the autumnal equinox - the culmination of harvest, and a time when day and night, light and dark, are equal. John Keats wrote one of my very favourite poems about autumn. I learnt this poem, along with many others, for school English lessons. Memorizing poetry off by heart was the norm in the English grammar schools of the 1960s. This was a chore at the time - but now I'm very glad I did it. Like piano lessons. But perhaps not like cross-country running. Anyway, here's the poem:

To Autumn

Seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'er brimmed their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

I really enjoyed typing that out. The feel and sound of the words, as I keyed them and repeated them to myself, transported me back 40 years, rather like the taste of Proust's madeleine cake. Keats paints such a vivid and sensual word-picture that you can almost see, hear, smell and taste the autumn.