Nature Boy or Nutcase?

This is going to be a difficult post to make, but I’ll give it a go and see whether I can put the essence of what I want to say into intelligible form.

The area at the bottom of my garden – the space surrounding a gap through which you have to pass to get onto the lane – has always been a bit special to me. There’s a low embankment which I allow to grow wild during the summer months, before trimming it back in the autumn. There’s a section of field boundary hedge which has probably been there for around two hundred years. There’s a piece of land which is always left wild because there’s no use to be made of it. And there are three mature sycamore trees which shade the spot from the high noon sun in June and July. When the air is still and warm enough to allow for contemplation of the subtler aspects of life, I feel something there. Tonight I felt it stronger than ever, so strongly in fact that it almost startled me. So how should I describe this thing to which I cannot put a name?

A palpable sense of warmth, but not as we usually perceive it in terms of temperature. A notion that energy is running through my body, but not physical or electrical energy. A mildly euphoric mental state that has no recognisable source. These three and something else besides which I have no means to describe because there is nothing to which it can be compared.

And so I ask the question: Am I really sensing the subtle energy of natural growth, because that’s what it feels like? Have I gained a faculty of perception to which the majority of my fellow humans are complete strangers, surrounded as they mostly are by inert material and countless unnatural diversions? Or is this a mental aberration given genesis by the loner gene and encouraged by increasing reclusiveness?

My human mind doesn’t know the answer to that one; but a still, small voice inside suggests that maybe – just maybe – I’m privileged to have a faculty known to the animals and the ancients, but lost to the modern human. And delusional or not, it’s a pleasurable and immensely valuable experience.

The BBC Does Tortology.

There was a report in yesterday’s BBC News website regarding the heavy rain and subsequent flooding problems they’ve been getting in Scotland. It showed a picture of what looked like a canal, but was actually – as the caption informed us – a rail line submerged under water. No doubt the extended description was intended to offer some little relief at the knowledge that the rail line was not submerged above water, nor submerged under something more nefarious like beer, chocolate milkshake or tomato ketchup.

And if anybody reading this blog even begins to comprehend my oblique sense of humour, please do let me know. It’s been suggested by a fairly authoritative source – albeit obliquely – that I should make some attempt to feel less insignificant.

Reading the Robin's Mind.

I was doing a little work in the garden today when a baby robin flew past me and settled close to my foot. He or she began to peck things from the ground – disturbed insects I assume – while I stood enthralled by this adorable little bird looking resplendent in his (or her) still-speckled plumage.

The robin looked sideways at me often, but I couldn’t tell whether the expression on its face meant ‘thank you, human; I needed a change from those rolled oats on the table at the top of your garden’, ‘what a strange creature you are; I wonder how you manage to fly since you don’t have any wings’ or ‘please don’t make any sudden movement or I’ll get spooked and then you’ll have to feel guilty.’

But it was all rather nice anyway.

On Shame, Slovenia and Synchronicity.

I suppose I’d better write some sort of a blog post. Indonesia is looking impatient.

So what should I write about, since nothing much happened today? Well, there was hint of synchronicity in the mail this morning. It’s not exactly ground-breaking stuff, but it will have to do for now. I had a postcard from Slovenia.

The priestess is in Slovenia at the moment, and yesterday she sent me an email from there. I’m awash with shame at having to admit that I wasn’t exactly sure where Slovenia was and had to Google it. I knew it was somewhere in central Europe, and I knew it was south of Slovakia, but I didn’t know that it had a coastline on the Mediterranean or a border with Italy. Well, I do now so I can stop being ashamed, can’t I? I can.

The thing is, though, there was a postcard in my mailbox this morning from somebody entirely unconnected with the priestess. She was my manager when I was still doing some work at the theatre. She lives in the Czech Republic, where she came from before I knew her, and travels all over Europe with her family. She sends me postcards from everywhere she goes, and the latest one was from Slovenia. And here’s the best bit:

In her email, the priestess referred to the fact that she was currently sitting on a grassy bank ‘very like the one in the photograph’, only she’d omitted to attach said photograph. Blow me if one of the thumbnail pictures on the postcard wasn’t a picture of a grassy bank. I can’t say that this added greatly to my knowledge of world geography, but at least it kept the synchronicity smouldering nicely. I have to admit that one grassy bank looks very much like another, but at least I can now say that Slovenian grassy banks follow the trend most admirably.

The Nuptial Kiss.

‘I now pronounce you man and wife,’ said the vicar. ‘You may kiss the bride.’

‘Kiss the bride?’ questioned the groom.

‘Yes, you may kiss the bride,’ repeated the vicar.

‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘Why wouldn’t you want to do that?’

‘Don’t see the point. I’ve kissed her a zillion times already. What’s so special about now?’

‘Because it’s symbolic of Almighty God granting you licence to engage in physical union. It’s traditional.’

‘But suppose she doesn’t want to be kissed?’ queried the groom, warming to the occasion and the knowledge of an audience to his rear.

‘Of course she wants to be kissed.’

‘Why’

‘Because she is now your wife.’

‘Oh, I see. Now she’s my wife she’s supposed to want whatever I want to give her?’

‘Within reason, yes. We’re not talking about bad thing like cruelty or abuse here, we’re talking about love.’

‘What’s love got to do with it?’

‘Why, kissing is an expression of love.’

‘Oh, come off it. People kiss for all sorts of reasons. It’s generally an act of affection, but love has to be a whole lot more than that if it’s to have any validity.’

‘That may well be,’ replied the vicar, putting his nose in the air for the first time, wholly possessed of the illusion that he had gained the high moral ground from which there could be no question of losing the argument, ‘but what you must understand, young man, is that the purest form of love is the only quality which sanctions any form of physical union. God decrees it, and so God permits it.’

‘Oh right,’ replied the groom, suppressing a snigger so as not to embarrass the young woman standing next to him. ‘Seems to me it’s more about libido than love, but let’s turn this argument around the other way. Why do you not say to the bride “You may now kiss the groom?” Why does God only give permission to the male half of the double act?’

The vicar’s mouth remained closed, but made a brief movement not dissimilar to that of a cow’s when chewing the cud. His nose dropped to its more familiar position, and then he said:

‘That’s far too complex a matter to be discussed here. The service needs to be wound up so that the day might continue as planned. Are you going to kiss the bride or not?’

‘Well, you’re right there, vicar. I suppose we’d better get on with using up all that money that’s been spent on cars, and caterers, and photographers, and licences, and poncy clothes, and bands that play music nobody wants to listen to because they can’t hear themselves think, and all the rest of the hangers on. You do realise that it could probably have provided a rare good meal for every homeless person in the country?’

He turned to the young woman standing next to him and asked:

‘Do you want me to kiss you?’

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘as long as you have no objection to me kissing you back. There’s something kind of… well… cute about it. It seals the bargain, as it were; puts a nice full stop at the bottom of the agreement.’

And so the bride and groom kissed, and the organ began its traditional dirge, and everybody was happy at last. The groom’s mother stopped squirming in her seat, and the bride’s mother – who was a lawyer by profession – lost what mild sense of discomfort she had been feeling and realised that the whole thing had been rather interesting after all.

Soon the radiant May sun shone benevolently on the assembled collection of couple, family and guests, the men languishing in the delusion that they were as smart as smart can be, and a whole monstrous regiment of women looking absurd in even more monstrous hats, all applauding and throwing bits of paper around for somebody else to pick up later. And a good day was had by all.

(And this whole episode arose entirely out of my having looked at a photograph which had been languishing in my inbox for four years, two months and ten days. Amen.)

Phones and the Wider Picture.

There were two teenage girls walking up my lane at twilight yesterday. They kept stopping and walking on, and stopping again and walking on again. They seemed rapt in deep and close conversation, and I was intrigued. When they finally arrived at a spot close to my gate, I saw what they were doing. One was poking and stroking a smart phone and the other was taking a lively interest in whatever was on the screen.

At that point I felt the urge to engage them in conversation. I wanted to say to them: ‘If you’re going to take a walk on a country lane, surely you should be observing the landscape around you. You should be noticing the way in which the natural world operates. You should be considering the relationship between nature and the human species. Further, you should be asking whether this view of reality in which you are presently functioning – or think you are – is all there is, and even whether it is real at all. You should be striving to make sense of it in the context of consciousness, and asking whether consciousness is rooted in material existence, or independent of it and capable of functioning separately. You should even be asking whether existence itself is an objective concept or part of some illusion incomprehensible to the limited faculty of human mind. For heaven’s sake, girls, you can poke and stroke a smart phone sitting on the lavatory. Isn’t it (like golf) a waste of a good walk?’

I didn’t say anything of the sort; in fact, I didn’t say anything at all. I don’t suppose I need to explain why.

*  *  *

But here’s something a little more interesting: Four years, two months and ten days ago, somebody sent me a photograph as an attachment to an email. Tonight I looked at it for the first time. Part of me thought it was verging on the hideous, while another part thought it rather lovely. It’s another example of my favourite maxim: perception is the whole of the life experience. And I shouldn’t divulge the subject of said photograph since I don’t know the identity of the person who occasionally drops onto the blog from somewhere in the UK. I might become incriminated.

All I’ll add is that today was not a good day (very few are these days.) That evocative phrase ‘went down in wan and weariness’ was perfectly apposite to the twilight again, and ‘wet’ might be added to complete the alliterative trio. Now it reminds me of Poe’s ‘and Darkness, and Decay, and the Red Death…’

When a Thing Is More Than a Thing.

At around two o’clock this morning I was in my bedroom preparing to go to bed when I heard a loud noise somewhere in the house. It was both metallic and hollow and accompanied by a scraping sound. I investigated and discovered the source.

My Spanish guitar, which normally rests against the wall next to the TV in my living room, was lying on its face with the saddle (that’s the wooden piece behind the sound hole to which the bottom ends of the strings are attached) disconnected from the body of the instrument. Evidently age had taken its toll, and the powerful glue which holds the saddle in place had finally weakened and given up the ghost. I’m sure it could be repaired, but it would have to be done by an expert and would cost far more than the guitar is worth. It is now destined for the council tip.

In a way it matters little since I haven’t played it for some years (not, I think, since the time when I sat out in the summer garden and serenaded a young rabbit with my version of Mr Tambourine Man, a fact I recall mentioning on this blog.) And ever since I moved away from the teenage gang and adopted a regular domestic lifestyle, I’ve only ever played it for my own amusement anyway (the rabbit didn’t seem particularly amused; in fact, the rabbit didn’t even seem to notice.)

But it was an old friend which had been with me since my twenties, through all the ups and downs which the vicissitudes of life saw fit to throw at me. It was the third guitar I’d had since I began learning to strum and ripple pick at around the age of 15. I was a million miles from being an accomplished guitarist, but what little I could do I did well. And here’s the point:

Over the past few years, two phenomena seem to have dominated my life:

1. Losing things that were important to me (like a kidney for example.)

2. Experiencing things for the first time. In this case, it’s the first time I haven’t had a guitar since I was a callow youth sitting aimlessly in my bedroom listening to Bob Dylan songs and Irish folk music. The me I was then bore little or no comparison with the person who was soon to begin the big search for meaning and the Holy Grail.

I can’t honestly say that I’m going to miss it because I probably won’t, but I do feel a sense of loss out of all proportion to the material reality of a hollow piece of wood with some bits of wire attached. And it won’t be easy to cast an old friend into a large skip on its way to being crushed and discarded with countless other bits of inconsequential detritus.

A Few Notes for 5th August.

I noticed yesterday that the quality of the daylight is changing now that we’ve moved into August. It’s moving perceptibly towards the mellow light of autumn before sinking further into the cold light of winter. Being no longer a schoolboy revelling in the long summer holiday (August was the only month of the year when you never had to go to school), I’m not particularly enamoured of August. August is the month when the leaves start hissing at you.

So what did today offer that is worth mentioning?

The barley I’ve mentioned a few times is mown at last. I’d say that the wheat still has a week or two to go. The maize plants, on the other hand, have adopted the delusion that they’re rehearsing to be extras in Jack and the Beanstalk, courtesy of all the rain we’ve had lately. They’re already more than tall enough to hide hobbits, and the view of the Lady B’s erstwhile abode from Church Lane is almost totally obliterated by a forest of them.

I saw a tractor doing something I’ve never seen a tractor do before, but since I couldn’t work out what it was I won’t bother trying to describe it.

This morning’s depression was one of the worst ever. I don’t know the source of my habitual morning depressions, but I do have a few suspicions. None of them are particularly sensible.

There was a sparrow hawk perching on one of the bird tables, which struck me as an odd sort of thing for a sparrow hawk to do since no small bird would dream of coming within a five second flying distance while it was there. I’ve never seen a sparrow hawk do that before. My oh my, hasn’t this year been full of firsts?

On Memory Lapses and Dessicated Humour.

I was sitting in the garden with a cup of tea this evening while the sun was still up, when a blog post on the subject of it being August ran through my mind. It was a very good blog post, so lyrical it might have been a poem, or at least a few lines of Shakespeare written all on one line. I remember that it mentioned elderberries and rosebay willowherb, but that’s all the detail I do remember. I recall it going onto a different tack entirely, which pleased me because it would have meant adding at least the benefit of variation to an otherwise one dimensional post, but I’ve completely forgotten what the tack was. Such is life, I suppose, when the muses no longer consider you worthy of their extended company, but simply call to you briefly on the way to somewhere else and are never seen again. Or maybe my brain is becoming deficient in some way. Who can tell?

(But in typing this I suddenly remembered the nurse at the Royal Derby Hospital who asked me the oddest question I’ve ever been asked in a hospital: I think it was during the course of a pre-op examination, and she asked: ‘Has anybody ever told you that you have mad cow disease?’ As far as I recall, she had no reason whatsoever to be joking.)

And that little recollection reminds me of something I must say (possibly by way of repeating myself, but I honestly don’t remember) about Shirley Jackson. She had the driest of dry senses of humour. I just read a short story of hers called All She Said Was Yes, and it’s full of little phrases and asides cast to the ether like all insignificant little phrases and asides, only they’re not insignificant. To a mind attuned to very dry humour, they’re actually very funny. I think I would have liked her.

The Minor Matter of the Dancing Midges.

I just looked out of my living room window and saw a host of midges dancing frantically in the light of the westering sun. I wondered, as I always do when greeted with such a sight, whether the midges I can see are the only midges in that location, or whether there are countless other midges – either dancing or not – which I can’t see simply because they’re not being caught in a shaft of sunlight. In other words, do midges only dance when the sun is shining on them?

 

Maybe someone who knows about midges and their mindset might enlighten me. This is the kind of thing which matters to me when I can put aside issues like health problems and the parlous state of the human condition for a moment.