On Silence and My Leader.

I think I mentioned once before on this blog that I seem to be able to perceive two levels of silence. Simple silence is an entirely passive phenomenon, being merely the absence of sound. The other sort – let’s call it ‘profound silence’ – is something more palpable and energetic that settles on you and makes your skin tingle.

So is this right? Are there really different levels of silence, or merely different states of perception which vary with mood? The latter would seem to be the obvious answer, but it’s too mundane to convince me. Besides, I remember once watching a documentary in which some logician argued that there are three levels of zero (I think he called them something like zero, deep zero and absolute zero.)

What I don’t remember is the logic he used. Whether that’s because I don’t have sufficient intelligence to fathom the logic of a professional logician, or whether it’s because my favourite maxim is ‘perception is the whole of the life experience’, I don’t know. The problem with holding to such a maxim is that it makes logic seem much less important.

Of course, this capacity I have to merely hear one sort of silence while feeling the other might indicate something else about me, the most obvious possibilities being:

1. I’m not human.

2. I really am schizoid.

I think option 1 is by far the more likely.

*  *  *

By the way, I just saw a short video clip in which a CNN journalist referred to the President of the USA as ‘the President of the Free World.’ Isn’t that just a bit… erm… arrogant? Is that what Americans really think? If so, could you please tell me where I should go to vote in November? And when I get to the voting booth, will there be somebody in attendance who can explain to me exactly what ‘the free world’ means?

A Reprised Picture and Some Words.

Do excuse me posting this picture again; it’s just that it needs further commentary.

It isn’t only the whitened stones that are worthy of note here, nor my father’s half-hearted attempt to disguise the lascivious look he’s directing at the woman next door who is hanging out washing in a short skirt. It’s also the fact that the two figures are squashed over to one side.

You might expect that it’s due to my mother – who I assume took the picture – being unaware of the phenomenon known as 'parallax error' commonly encountered in pictures taken using a non-reflex camera by a person who doesn’t know what parallax error is. I must admit, I didn’t at the time so I was unable to advise her. This would be a logical and likely assumption, but there is an alternative.

It could be that the seemingly vacant spot was, in fact, occupied by my friend Michael. Michael and I used to sit in my tent playing music and discussing everything under the sun (except, I suppose, the incidence of parallax error and how to correct it. Michael had gone his own separate way by the time I discovered that little gem.) Michael was singularly remarkable for two facts:

1. My mother never spoke to him or brought him glasses of lemonade like she did for me.

2. He never appeared on photographs.

One other minor side issue connected with this picture is that the wood which can be seen at the top of the garden is the one in which Brendan Bradshaw met the enigmatic stranger in the first chapter of my novel. It’s where he first saw the little people and the curious demon from a darker realm. It’s where he gasped at the sight of Mr Harrison’s lifeless body hanging from a tree while Mr Harrison’s disembodied spirit squeaked and gibbered in the undergrowth like the sheeted dead in the Roman streets. It’s where he first learned that things aren’t always as they appear to the naked eye.

And since the literary note has been introduced, I might add that I read the first page of the priestess-recommended novel The Woman in the Dunes today (I often read the first page long before I start the book in earnest.) It begins:

One day in August a man disappeared.

This is a bit of a coincidence because there’s a line in one of my stories which runs:

…Jamie Green disappeared, one Sunday in late September.

Or maybe it isn’t. I’m in that kind of mood tonight, so I doubt you’ll get anything rational out of me.

Whitening the Stones.

I’ve had enough seriousness for one day, and I’m concerned that my post about the Russian Question might have me invited to Moscow to receive honorary citizenship of the Soviet Union (well, Russian Federation to be precise) and then the folks around here will definitely never invite me to tea. (Although I wonder whether they might make the venue St Petersburg. I’ve long had a yen to see St Petersburg. I’ll forego the tea.)

So have another picture of me as a wee one instead:

 

This is my dad and me before the elder Godwin (my surname at birth) decamped to the arms of a woman half his age (a feat I emulated quite a few years later.)

What’s interesting, however isn’t me and my dad; it’s the rockery stones. They’re white; my mother painted them white, every last one of them. Nobody would dream of having white rockery stones these days, would they? They’re more concerned with luxuriating in the sight of their gardens adorned with the shattered detritus of granite and limestone hillsides (commonly known as quarries.) Natural is the trend now, not whitewashed.

In fact, it wasn’t common to see white-painted rockery stones in those days either. I suspect it had more to do with my mother’s nature and upbringing. She liked things clean and tidy, you see; she was a bit of a slave to cleanliness and tidiness. But I think there was something else as well.

She would have been around 33 when this picture was taken, and had spent all her life living in grimy Victorian terraces buried in the deeper social strata of a northern industrial city. And so her native environment had always been adorned with a ubiquitous and permanent layer of soot. Even the grander sandstone and limestone buildings in the city centre were uniformly black when I was a kid, as befitted their central location in a forest of pit heads, steelworks and belching bottle ovens.

I think that gives the major clue as to why she liked painting stones white; I suspect they were a symbol of a new beginning. She had to keep them white, too. She cleaned them, and when that wasn’t enough, she painted them again.

The Want Phenomenon.

What do these two ads have in common?

 ...I WANT...

When did life stop being about life and become all about lifestyle? Is this the root of hedonism, and does hedonism always come before a fall? Or is it about the power-wealth imperative finding a way to anaesthetize the masses so as to become wealthier and more powerful? Or is it something else?

Does any of it matter? Does anybody know?

*  *  *

I jotted this post in the early hours of the morning after I'd a had a large beer and several scotches. I was tired and decided to come back to it later when I was more sensible, sober, and better equipped to consider whether any of it mattered or not. I still don't know, but I could add a little thought:

When I was a kid, wanting was considered the expression of a trivial and juvenile mind. 'Want, want, want!' your mother would say. 'That's all I ever hear. Stop wanting, for heaven's sake. Grow up.'

But wanting is what we all have to do now. Wanting makes you a potential spender in a world where consumption is king. You don't belong if you don't want. Wanting, like greed, is good.

But who are the ultimate beneficiaries in this world of consumption? Certainly not the consumers. They're just kept in a permanent state of wanting whatever they haven't got yet, and the system will always ensure that there's plenty of that.

The Russian Question.

Yesterday, Boris Johnson said that Russia is in danger of becoming the pariah of the world following its alleged complicity in the appalling bombing campaign in Syria. Well, Boris Johnson is hardly the man to be saying this because Boris, bless his little collection of clown costumes, has no authority. Oh yes, I know he’s the Foreign Secretary, but that isn’t the point. The point is that nobody with a mind worthy of the name takes much notice of anything he says. Even that old Tory stalwart Ken Clarke recently called him ‘a nicer version of Donald Trump.’

But is he right on this occasion? The atrocities in Syria follow hot on the heels of alleged Russian responsibility for the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine, so the evidence is stacking up. It seems that Russia – albeit in the sole guise of Comrade Putin – really is a dark, dangerous and deceitful interloper on the world of advanced, enlightened civilisation. But then we’ve known that ever since the Iron Curtain descended on Europe and the Cold War produced lots of spy movies in which the Russians were almost always the primary villains, haven’t we?

But let’s go back to a few years earlier when the Russian Revolution did away with the Romanov Dynasty and replaced it with a proletarian administration. That must have shocked the Establishments of Western Europe to their bootlaces. Here in the enlightened west we’d been used to being ruled by a class system in which the aristocracy were leaders by right of birth. (Actually, we’d allowed ‘trade’ in by then, but we’d been sure to give them peerages of various ranks so that they, too, could be seen as aristocracy and conveniently forget that their ancestors were Anglo-Celtic peasants, not Norman or Germanic thugs.)

Well, the Russians let the side down, didn’t they? There we were in a nice comfortable world of Tsars, Kaisers and Empresses of India, and along come a bunch of Russian peasants to throw their spanners in the wheel of the cosy European Establishment. And they carried red flags, for heavens sake, which they didn’t even have the decency or erudition to call ‘rouge.’ And even the Cossacks didn’t like them.

I suspect it was the events of 1917, even more than Stalin’s Terror or the establishment of a powerful Communist force on Europe’s doorstep, which condemned Russia to be forever the butt of negative propaganda. Or at least they laid the foundations for it. If anything bad happens and the Russians are anywhere near, it was probably they who did it. That’s how we tend to see things in the west.

So what of Syria? Well, if Mr Putin really is complicit in the slaughter of huge numbers of innocent men, women and children in Syria – not to mention the firing of the missile which brought down flight MH17 – it seems entirely reasonable that he should be arraigned on charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity. But is he? How do we know the extent to which the invective flung down to us by politicians and the media is factual, and how much is the product of a century of anti-Russian bias? It would be naïve in the extreme to imagine that the western media is incapable of purveying spurious propaganda just because we like to call ourselves ‘the free world.’

I offer no opinion on this and I make no judgement. I’m just curious and feel the need to be circumspect. As for where we go from here, I really don’t know.

Resistance is Useless.

A woman had a go at me in a car park today. I’d just driven past her – slowly and carefully – on the way to an empty parking bay, and when I got out of the car she started gesticulating at me.

‘What?’ I queried.

‘You’ve come the wrong way.’

‘What?’

‘You shouldn’t come this way, you should go around that way.’

Now, there is a white arrow on the road pointing that way. It’s for guidance. This is a supermarket car park we’re talking about, not the approach lane to a motorway. Guidance, get it? I told her not to worry about it and failed to catch the gist of her continued mumbling as I headed into the distance, bound for the beer shelves where there are premium beers to be had cheaper than they are in most places. And my doctor’s appointment was approaching, so that was reason enough to ignore her agitation.

What is it with some people? Give them a bit of guidance and they find the nearest tablet of stone so they can add it to the Ten Commandments. Why are they so desperate to find something to obey? I did wonder whether she’d been either a Nazi or a Confucianist in a previous life, but gave up the speculation once I got into comparing prices and alcohol content.

An Alternative to Counting Sheep.

There’s a house about two hundred yards across the field from mine which has an exterior security light fitted. It burns all night and shines through my bedroom window, casting an illuminated patch approximately the shape and size of the window onto the opposite wall. The patch is party filled by a vaguely delineated shadow cast by an intervening hedge, and when it’s windy the shadow moves.

During the summer this shadow took on the appearance of a burly man chopping wood, at least it did to a fertile imagination like mine. But now that part of the hedgerow has been cut, the shape has changed. Now it looks like a much thinner man stooping and hitting a prone figure with a large hammer. (At least it does to a fertile imagination like mine.)

And that’s what I see every windy night when I turn over to go to sleep. When the wind is light, the murderous action looks calm and measured, but when the wind is strong it looks frenzied. It’s most interesting, and surprisingly soporific.

Letter from England.

The American Presidential Election shenanigans continue to enthral and amuse with their high drama and even higher jinks. Trump looks ever more like one of those clowns who jump out from behind trees and terrorise children, while Hillary is no doubt becoming proficient at using the lever that inclines the chair that tips the expendables into the piranha pool. According to the BBC political commentator, the score in last night’s debate was:

Hillary: 0

Donald: 0

America: Minus plenty

We’re all on the edge of our seats over here waiting to see which of the two statespersons America is going to lumber itself with in November. Of course, if Americans were really, really sensible, they’d all band together and refuse to vote en masse. That way the score would read:

Hillary: 0

Donald: 0

America: Phew!

Meanwhile, our very own Chief Clown, Nigel Farage (he’s about half a pace ahead of Boris Johnson in the big feet department), has defended Donald’s claims regarding his disrespect for ladies’ keel tackle as being no more than ‘just what people say.’ Well, it might be just what the Farages and Trumps say, and it might be typical of the pronouncements of gauche 15-year-old boys with acne, but it isn’t what I say, so please be a little less free with the generalisations. (I’m so glad I’m not from this planet.)

And back at the ranch, I saw the delightful Doctor H again today. She’s referred me for minor surgery. Oh, yippee…

The Lost Calling.

There was a young woman called Alice

Who walked in a wood one fine day

And ate lots of fresh digitalis

Then faded quite quickly away

That's the sort of thing that runs through my head when I'm transplanting seedlings of digitalis purpurea (Common Foxglove) into flowering positions for the following year. It's one of my more laudable traits. And if I'd concentrated just a bit harder on the girls, the rugby and the alcohol when I was younger, I reckon I could have been a poet. Unfortunately, I spent too much time fishing and the chance was lost.

What They Call a Taster.

I’ve been thinking about the business of writing another novel, and I was going to make a post about why I haven’t and why I almost certainly never will. But then I got bored with the whole idea and decided to write a synopsis of an existing novel instead.

Two young psychic twins who like taking country walks together get separated early in life through a misunderstanding. One of them goes away but later comes back, and then the psychic twins – or soul mates if you like – feel compelled to continue their psychic connection, or soul mateyness if you prefer. Unfortunately, an interested third party who doesn’t understand a thing about either psychic twins or soul mates (and who would, therefore, be entirely unqualified even to consider whether the two terms might be synonymous) – and who certainly, and fatally, fails to appreciate the vital difference between romantic and Romantic – throws a grey blanket of conventional and suffocating worldliness over the whole process and makes everybody unhappy. One of the twins dies and turns into a ghost, whereupon the other becomes even more black hearted than he was before and takes various forms of revenge on the interested party and his unfortunate family. And then he also dies and turns into a ghost (although we only have the pronouncement of a young boy for evidence, and he speaks with a thick West Yorkshire accent so he might have been enquiring after the price of cod and chips for all the rest of us know.) So now the twins are once again joined at the hip and everbody’s happy at last, including the man who doesn’t have to worry about getting lost in the snow or accosted by a chilly ghost any more. The End.

If that doesn’t have you rushing out to buy a copy of Wuthering Heights, I don’t know what will. And I have an image of dear Emily tittering in a way most unbecoming of a Victorian young lady. (For my part, I’m still spreading the word and fighting the good fight, Em. I am.)