Towards The Book of Disquiet

APOLOGY to all readers for pulling the post. It was a kind of factory recall, for quality control reasons, and potential head-damage to the reader. This has happened once or twice before, in fact, though I shan’t supply links to the other instances. Apologies because it was inconsiderate to those who had taken the trouble to read it and in some cases comment. It’s reissued with no change to the text, as its flaws are in any case beyond repair.

Art consists in making others feel what we feel, in freeing them from themselves by offering them our own personality.

(From The Book of Disquiet, by Fernando Pessoa, translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith; numbered section 260.)

Art frees us, illusorily, from the squalor of being. (Ibid, 270)

There are certain books which I know I should write about, whose vast tracts intersect and ferment with the vast but less visible tracts of my own soul. Their content is already important in my list of possessions, my personal effects. Not to write about them, in effect, is to have only a hazy idea as to the extent and detail of my possessions. Even to call them “possessions” is to make a prejudgement of their value, because when we talk intellectually we easily slide into a virtuous jargon wherein we congratulate ourselves for knowing that “what I am” beats “what I have”. But in such talk we take for granted that we know “what I am”, and its moral superiority to “what I own”, and the superiority of “spiritual” to “material”. We take as given that we know what these things are. What am I? What are you, really? Something in me wants to answer this by borrowing the title of a volume of selected poems by Pessoa: “A little larger than the entire universe”. Because thought and selfhood in their fulness can only be perceived mystically. We routinely clip our own mystical wings in order to make sense to ourselves and one another, but either way, certain questions are not easily answered. “What am I?” Bryan M White has touched on this in his latest piece on Nuclear Headache; and who knows how much in his unpublished, or even unwritten thought? Unless we put our thought into words, how can we know what we think? And when we say what we think, do we not always, to some extent, lie?

Well, in any case we can’t progress far in such investigations without refining our use of language. The child can work with whatever comes to hand, but the master craftsman needs quality tools. Do we then need to study philosophy? One sighs with weariness at the effort involved, the wild-goose chases anticipated. Laziness is a kind of Ockham’s Razor in these matters, shaving away what our inner self knows to be the inessentials. My inner, hidden self—this is surely my true self! Laziness rescues us from getting lost in the labyrinths of that which has no personal significance. What is personal? This is the same question as “What am I?”. What is the empire of “me”? It’s an independent state which has somehow allowed itself to be colonised by honey-tongued traders and adventurers, who first bring their gaudy trifles, whizz-bang inventions, Gospels and firewater. Then they kidnap my damsels and young men, the pride of my personal realm, for every kind of slavery. This is the metaphor of my selfhood, my inner possessions, and unless I take stock, tidy them and prune them, those things in the attic, the drawers and cupboards, the computer files, I’ll have but a hazy idea of what treasures I own, what vital things have been mislaid, stolen or lost. It is laziness which stops us taking full possession of our possessions.

Laziness might consign us to wallow in the Sargasso Sea of human effort, the Bermuda Triangle of good intentions, were it not for an almost equal and almost opposite force: obsession (where you just keep on going, unable to let go, even though you could or should). I maintain—that is I’ve known for a long time, without ever expressing it coherently—that it’s far more important to know yourself than to make yourself into anything. I’m wary of any kind of ambition, I mean the kind that extends beyond the short term. Commitment is a deadly two-edged sword, and I’m not referring merely to the act of will, but far more to the underlying assumptions on which that act of will is based. Is it actually worthwhile to derail one’s life in the pursuit of riches? How can one even define what derailing one’s life is? These things are vague in my own head, for I haven’t really spoken about them, but my influence has rubbed off on my four children, each now grown up. A father is just one influence out of many, and his influence may be reflected in “reaction against”, as opposed to “accordance with”. Still, I see that they’re not driven by any “big idea”, and find themselves content to tarry in the doldrums of happy lives, under-performing perhaps by the world’s frenetic standard, till they find the prevailing wind in their latitude, which together with Chance fills their sails and shows them the route to take. (Truth obliges me to acknowledge that they doubtless only reveal to me what they think I want to see.)

So let me be plain on this point. The proper aim in life is not to exert your will upon it, but to study what it is, and adapt harmoniously to what you find. And when I say life, I mean your life, in all its quirky uniqueness, both essential and circumstantial. We are working with words here, words whose drift we may fail to catch, but that doesn’t matter. The principle of laziness knows how to deal with it! We may sometimes grasp a single word, like a loose ball in a football game, and run with it.

I had meant to evaluate Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet from the viewpoint of how it helps me appreciate this knot in the tangled skein that I call me. But at 5 this morning I started to scribble (literally, my pen and its free-flowing ink tracing marks in my trusty notebook, almost faster than I could follow). Lifting those words to this medium, I resist the urge to edit, aided by the principle of laziness, whilst urged headlong by the principle of obsession. In such a bout of Titans, too much editing might be a blot, a deformity on the surface of something which bears the freshness of spring and the flaws of all creation. The Book’s horizons are so vast, I’ll talk about it properly next time, trying to narrow the scope somehow.

What started this piece off as I lay this morning in bed, not ready to get up, was a single word: “illustrious”: a word so powerful and suggestive in its own right, even when devoid of context, that it made me understand the enormous temptations besetting any writer, to use words for effect, and be seduced by them, as Pygmalion was by the beauty of the sculpture he’d made; as copywriters, journalists and politicians are by the honeyed words they can easily concoct; and what Pessoa meant when he wrote the following:

Beset by lucid and free association of ideas, images and words, I say what I imagine I’m feeling as much as what I’m really feeling, and I’m unable to distinguish between the suggestions of my soul and the fruits born of images that fell from my soul to the ground, nor do I know whether the sound of a discordant word or the rhythm of an incidental phrase might not be diverting me from the already hazy point, from the already stowed sensation, thereby absolving me from thinking and saying, like long voyages designed to distract us. And all of this, which even as I’m telling it should stir in me a sense of futility, failure and anguish, gives me only wings of gold.(Ibid, 387)

“I write what I imagine I feel”, says the illustrious author of The Book of Disquiet.

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Illustration above is “Foi há muitos muitos anos…” (It was many many years…) from one of Norbert Nunes’ galleries of pictures inspired by Fernando Pessoa. Click it to expand, or follow links to Pessoa stylized and Pesso resin.

My invitation to a close encounter

To save telling you a long story, I’ll say that it happened out of the blue. I have nothing against long stories per se, but there is a gulf between baring your soul, which I try to do in these pages, and exposing your personal life to the entire world, which every blogger avoids.

“All public revelations at bottom are games in which concealment plays a major part: the more one lays oneself bare, the more one keeps hidden. Like the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Autobiography of John Cowper Powys contains the kind of intimate confessions that one would be reluctant to reveal to one’s best friend . . .”

That was from an essay I wrote ten years ago. It began with these words:

“How many autobiographies have ever been written in which the author fails to mention his own mother? One at least: and in this instance he goes further and omits from his narrative any reference to his five sisters and two wives. If I add that his novels which were already renowned and remain as 20th-century classics are scarcely mentioned either, you may wonder what, in 650 pages written at the age of sixty, the author considered worthy of inclusion.”

Fernando Pessoa employed a different strategy. His Book of Disquiet is subtitled A Factless Autobiography. It is presented as fiction, the outpourings of Bernardo Soares, one of his authorial alter egos, or as he calls them “heteronyms”. Factless because almost entirely constructed from the narrator’s inner life. Not only that, but he desires nothing beyond an inner life. The details of his daily existence—a small fifth-floor apartment in Lisbon with a view of the streets and the river beyond, a job as a book-keeper—these provide a framework rather than content. Of all writers living or dead (most, naturally, are dead) Pessoa is the one I follow most eagerly; for his genius and for extending the boundaries of what can be said. So I’ll tell you about some of my weekend.

Let’s suppose that it happened out of the blue that I went as guest to an evangelical-charismatic church service lasting a couple of hours. The invitation arrived by email:

“On Sunday, if you would like to come with us to our church (it is an experience not to be missed!) we would love it ...”

They don’t have their own building—that’s another story. So the congregation of 200 was seated in a school gym, facing a band (drums, three guitars, trombone, keyboard, female vocalist) a screen for the words of the songs and other visuals, lecterns, mikes. There was chatter, children wandering around, a sense of freedom & anticipation. An “elder”—young man casually dressed like everyone else—cracks a joke into the mike, quietens the chatter, mentions the six different children’s groups in other rooms, indicating when the migrations to and from those are to occur. Then bursts forth the first thund’rous song of praise, and the next, till we are all in a frenzy of jumping, clapping, rejoicing at the love of Jesus and our good fortune at being able to express it and address Him. All ages are represented here, including several frail white-haired ladies, who aren’t going to let age hold them back.

I wasn’t personally caught in this wave of joyful affirmation, certainly not this early in the proceedings. But I owed it to the sense of community, the general embrace, to be present, and not behave as if I had been dragged there in handcuffs. I was surprised not to raise any inner barrier, not to hold myself at a distance; but there was nothing to object to, really; though in the Church of England service, so traditional and nostalgia-friendly, my critical inner monologue is seldom quieted. The Jubilee Church, in its simple affirming way, its emphasis on Jesus’ love, its proud indifference to hierarchy, ritual and fine points of doctrine, provides all the critique I could desire— of other forms of Christianity. Naïvely, I thought at first it was a one-off manifestation, unique to this seaside town, but as the service continued, I realised that such an artless-crafty confection as Jubilee Church had to be a franchise. And so it turned out. Searching online, I have no difficulty in discovering clones everywhere, for instance here, in St. Louis, Missouri:

We are a group of people that love Jesus and are passionate about connecting people to Him.
. . .
At Jubilee services you’ll hear relevant music and teaching from the Bible presented each week in a compelling and applicable way. All of our locations run programs for children.

Expect God. We can’t change lives but Jesus can. We expect the presence of God in all of our meetings! God’s presence brings joy, healing, hope, and life. We come together to meet with and worship the Creator of the universe and to be changed by Him.

Expect Honesty. You don’t have the time to go to a fake religious ceremony, neither do we. Every sermon is real and honest. All teaching at Jubilee is from the Bible and applicable to real life. We don’t need gimmicks and hype, we need truth.

Expect Love. Urban, suburban, black, white, rich, poor, young and old, anyone can worship with us. At Jubilee, our vision is to grow in our diversity.

What to Wear? Come as you are. Let your tattoos show or wear a suit and tie. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t shaved in a few months or if you prefer a clean cut, you’ll have friends at Jubilee. Authenticity is important to us. God loves you as you are and we do too!

Can there be any negatives to this, I thought. Meet me in St Louis! We will dance the “Hoochie-Koochie”. I will be your “Tootsie-Wootsie.” People get together, the formula works, the energy’s generated, it gives a great feeling, they call it Jesus. They are gentle people, it won’t make them break any laws or offend their agnostic neighbours.

But I did not mention the picket line that tried to block our entry when we arrived at the school grounds. They were chanting “Shame on you!” and so forth, and waving their placards. All very English and more or less polite, perhaps because they were outnumbered by a bunch of good-natured English bobbies, who had everything in hand, and looked relaxed. Who knows, there are professional trouble-makers who might have joned the fun otherwise. And if the police weren’t there, you can be sure the congregation would be boosted by some uninvited guests. One of the conventions of Jubilee Church is to let a person speak as the spirit moves. And since “authenticity is important to [them]”, I don’t know how they would deal with hostile heckling. I don't think they would tolerate growing in that kind of diversity.

The picket line was actually a Carnival, if Socialist Worker Online is to be believed, which it’s not, I suggest, but I’m grateful to them for the pic and the linked report, which I believe more or less true apart from the spin. The background is this. A member of the Jubilee Church congregation has started a movement which aims to venerate human life from the moment of conception and give the unborn a voice, to say “let me live. Don’t let me be chopped up in the womb, my only destiny to have my little hands and feet photographed to scare fallen women (or at any rate women who have fallen pregnant), when they seek abortion, already agonised by the clash between maternal instinct and the practical demands of this tough world”. That was me of course, not the self-appointed spokespersons for the voiceless foetus. Whoever provides the voiceover for the silent inevitably overlays his own prejudice upon the unknowable. Giving voice to the silent is a venerable practice, for God is silent, apart from the many prophets who have put words into His mouth.

The songs played by the loud band, accompanied by 200 ragged voices, interspersed by spontaneous outpourings of praise or prayer from the floor, could be seen if you like as the warm up for the pastor’s sermon. He’s actually called the senior elder, and it’s called a “preach” or a “talk”, but no matter. It was the best sermon I have ever heard, perhaps the greatest piece of modern oratory. You can download his Invitation to Close Encounters here. He links Adam’s longing for a partner, one of his own kind, to God’s; then mentions God’s covenant with Israel, which was like a marriage ceremony; then God’s longing, God’s love, expressed through Jesus, who chooses the Church as His bride. On the way he paraphrases Hosea 1:2: “And the LORD said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD.” He represents the whole of Christianity as God looking for a loving relationship with us. He chooses his words carefully, stays very clear of saying “Everybody wants to get laid.” Still, he ends up suggesting that we each find a partner in the next ten weeks, if we don’t have one to hand, to discuss the ten-week project of exploring how God wants to love us. Using his own marriage as an example, he invites us to consider that in relationships, we have to change, to ensure they keep working. “Hint: God is changeless.” Ah. Homework for this week: find a partner to share your journey. Get together with another member of the congregation, but if they are already paired off, why not a threesome?

Though the “preach” is available online to download, remember that it came at the end of the service, after the invigorating warm-up. It may not be so effective consumed cold. Colin was preaching mainly to the converted, as is always the way, but I see it could work on “even those who say ‘I don’t even know if Christianity is true’”. Did it work on me? I felt the pull, the warmth of the invitation. An orator knows how to press buttons, knows we all have them. I’m a tough nut to crack, resistant to community. My idea of the divine is closer to nature-mysticism, and that flourishes in solitude.

Oratory is powerful. Crowds united in common purpose are powerful. They can wreak mischief as well as benefit. The strongest impression I took away from Jubilee Church was the energy awakened in its congregation. There was only one doctrine: that this energy comes from God, who wants to act through His Church to bring about His will. To this end the Jubilee congregation have linked with others in Lesotho and Albania for charity and missionary work. They are trying, so far unsuccessfully, to get their own permanent premises, so that they can work with the community locally, for example in youth work. And there is this business about “giving a voice to the unborn”, which has aroused a certain backlash, not just amongst the self-styled socialists. To its credit the Church distances itself from the initiative of its anti-abortion activists, whilst supporting their aims. See this statement from the pastor, as carefully constructed as his sermon.

Doing good to people without them asking first, without waiting for them to accept offered help, without checking that they have the same idea as to what’s good for them—this is what we might call “do-goodery”. We could also call it, in some cases, being a damned nuisance. Botherations tend to generate opposite and ever-escalating counter-botherations, such as the one I witnessed. During the quiet parts of the service, the discordant sounds of the “Carnival” at the school gate could be clearly heard. More than one speaker wryly mentioned that it was salutary, not to mention Biblical, to suffer persecution.

So you could say that a good time was had by all, except some women who didn’t want to listen to their unborn child. They came to get separated from its voice, its growing and unwanted presence. It seems to me more likely that the anti-abortion people were more motivated by unsolicited do-goodery, inspired by the high energy generated in church, than what they call the voice of God.

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For more about the protest, see this blog, which demonstrates clearly how futile & counter-productive it is to start an anti-abortion campaign in England.

Night navigation

It was an eventful day, not without its petty annoyances, but our house-guests were happy, that’s the main thing, and enjoyed a merry evening. I was exhausted and as soon as politely possible retired upstairs.

My dreams were scantily populated, and their spaces were wide. I was in a tall office building, looking for the men’s room, but there were few people to ask, and I preferred to look for myself. So I found myself descending an echoing staircase. Three floors down, I found the men’s room. Someone was in there. It’s a place where men don’t speak to strangers, an unspoken rule, though I understand it’s quite different in the ladies’ room, where they chatter uninhibitedly. When we were well clear, the man going down the stairs and I going back up, I called to him: “Would you like to see something?” Without waiting for a reply, I took a leap down the stairwell to a lower level, in a gentle parabolic trajectory. Landing lightly, I bounced halfway back up, and without any effort hovered in the air, at eye-level with the man. It was a good feeling, vanity of course, but as it seemed to me, I was being generous to take such a risk, and show something beautiful to a fellow human being. I have done a similar thing in real life, on a smaller scale. It was in a bookshop in Great Missenden. I performed a Balducci levitation for the benefit of the assistant, then left the scene before he recovered to ask questions (see this post), just as I now did in the dream.

Back in the open, the beautiful city was starting to light up against a luminous indigo sky; a futuristic version of London, or perhaps the city in Blade Runner, a film I saw probably 30 years ago, when it came out. (Checking up now, I see that Blade Runner had a dismal atmosphere, but my dream was an idyllically peaceful tourist’s London, though it looked as bright as Tokyo.) I’d walked from Crystal Palace in the southern suburbs to where it was all happening—Piccadilly Circus—with a new girl, on our first date. Knowing from the stairwell trick that I could resist gravity, I must have been trying to impress her, for there cannot be any other explanation for my shinning up a tall electricity pylon, to the very top. Using my legs to grip its topmost arm, I leaned at an absurd angle to seize one of the wires, detach it from the glass insulator, and then, with a little difficulty, reattach it. The difficulty was that it broke. The ends were very springy and it was hard to keep them from touching other wires, but I managed to pull them closer and tie them in a series of knots, and hook them back on to the insulator.

In another scene—I wasn’t conscious of a chronological sequence or cause-effect relationship—we were on the Thames waterfront to get to Crystal Palace. The roads were almost empty of traffic, and there were few pedestrians. The skyline was dimly visible because some buildings were outlined in neon lights, but all the street lights were out nearby and we were enveloped in a blue-black gloom. How could we find our way back? No public transport, no taxis, no landmarks to help us walk in the right direction.

On reflection, I think this was influenced by my SatNav device (see previous post), which changes its colours to dark blues and greens for the night hours; thus impressing upon me the theme and colour scheme for this dream-scene. Oddly, I never connected my trick on the pylon with the subsequent power outage over part of London.

In the final scene it is bright day, and I’m at the edge of a village green, approaching a booth selling sweets of several kinds. I pick up a wrapped candy and see that it has a web address which I can’t quite make out, because the ends are twisted. The woman selling them, educated and precise in manner, starts to ask me a number of searching questions. I form the opinion that she is a psychiatrist, touting for business. The candy is a lure. As soon as you take an interest, she does a rapid personality analysis and tries to sign you up for a course of treatment. This is a bit much, think I. And then I wake.

The night is still, the bed is comfortable, I don’t want to move. It’s enough to lie here, but I don’t want to stay awake. How can I get back to that dream-world, where anything is possible, and I’m not oppressed by thoughts? With no conscious effort, I find myself focusing on the act of breathing. The more I try not to, the more it happens. It was my main religious practice for thirty years. The purpose of religious beliefs is to prop up the practice, and vice versa. Now I have repudiated both. You’d think, after this, I could come back with a traveller’s tale; or if not, I could give an opinion on breath meditation, to praise or condemn. But, in this moment, I’m ambivalent. It’s powerful but then so is modern technology, including weaponry. Perhaps I’ll write about it in my next, and then you will judge for yourself.

Home, James!

All right, I willingly confess to being a technophobe, somewhere between moderate and severe, though I don’t know how they grade these things. I have no shame in the matter: what’s to hide,  if they haven’t made it illegal? Not yet, so far as I know. But they marginalise it by stealth, and you cannot be too vigilant.

Some of my favourite things were invented quite recently: the fountain pen, for instance, and the steam railway network, though the latter has lowered its aesthetic standards and gone to diesel. I regard the telephone in many of its manifestations with suspicion. They’ve taken away the human touch. You pick up the receiver and there’s no one there any more to ask “Number, please.” You cannot wiggle the holder impatiently for attention. (The first phone I encountered, at my grandparents’ house, had no dial. Things have gone downhill since then.) But when the human touch is too much, late at night for example, it is useful to have an answering machine to act as your surrogate butler. In fact if we analyse the matter, we discover that when “high-tech” is a blessing, it’s usually by virtue of defending us against the intrusion of other high-tech devices; just as guided missiles generate an appetite for anti-missile-missiles.

Take the motor-car, or as you may call it, the automobile: an excellent idea, it’s definitely caught on, but too much, self-defeatingly so. They say that the average speed crossing central London hasn’t changed since the days of horse-drawn traffic. So they invented a congestion charge, now that they can recognise your number plate and send you a fine if you don’t pay it. A few weeks ago, I had to go through London myself, on a Saturday when the charge fortunately doesn’t apply. We were on our way to K’s mother’s 80th birthday party, in Forest Hill, in the southern suburbs, and were due to stay overnight at a bed-and-breakfast in Upper Norwood, near Crystal Palace (originally constructed for the Great Exhibition of 1851, before it was moved to its new site, where it was destroyed by fire as recently as 1936). I do not like driving—did I say that already?—but armed myself with a route from the Automobile Association, and printed the instructions to help K in her navigator role. We went wrong quite early, in Hammersmith, where the famous flyover is partly closed for roadworks. I thought we recovered well from that, but then we crossed the Thames via the wrong bridge, and wallowed rather aimlessly thereafter. I asked K to look out for landmarks, and suggest how we could get back to the prescribed route. She kept saying we should turn left just after the Duke of York pub. London is big. Such advice would be helpful if we were already on the prescribed route and pointing in the right direction. I asked for a more general direction, like Kingston, Croydon or perhaps The South. I was not aware of the sarcastic tone creeping into my voice, nor its loudness, which some might describe as hysterical shouting. K told me she was getting severe chest pains from the stress. I was too, but we technophobes take that for granted, for such is modern life. Later, she said “Never again—we must buy a SatNav”.

I could have furiously rejected this suggestion that she desired some technical gismo to compensate for my inadequacies: that, in short, I was not man enough for her. But I knew she was right. It was time to me to face my demons, to use that infelicitous modern phrase. High on my list of demons is the persistent nagging of pre-recorded females, as in the “self-checkout” of a modern supermarket. Unexpected cow item in the bagging area!

So I am delighted to introduce my new travelling companion: James, the “voice of Australia”. He’s all the things I’m not: witty, charming, impossible to fluster, and knowledgeable. I’d voyage with him to the ends of the earth. When he has nothing useful to say, he knows when to shut up, for example when I override his advice, or take a wrong turning. His tactful silence doesn’t hang awkwardly in the air. He simply adjusts, and when he next speaks, there’s no sighing or condescension in his voice. We just get on with it like good mates trusting one another. A team. Together, we shall conquer the world, or at least its road systems.

I was full of these grateful thoughts, on the homeward leg of our first long journey. Then suddenly the box which speaks his voice switched itself off. I knew the way home but felt a little bereft. In the next few days I fussed with the box, vaguely disconsolate. It’s a good thing there’s no way to open it, otherwise I would have taken it to pieces to try and make it work. It was only after I’d sent it back to Amazon for a replacement that it dawned on me that I ought to have read the instructions, which say that when switching on you may have to hold down the button (it only has one button, what can go wrong?) for up to 15 seconds, something I had been too impatient to do. And I may have let the battery go flat.

Amazon, that brilliant exemplar of modern technology and service, sent the replacement without waiting to receive the “faulty” one. It was easy to switch on—hurrah. But it never got past the message “waiting for a valid GPS signal”. I read the instructions till they made me sick. I restored the factory settings, I downloaded all the updates from the website. I kept taking it out into the rain because the instructions said that it might not get a signal inside a tall building (even though this cottage is hardly tall). I took it in my knapsack whilst we went on a cross-country walk, away from all houses, and indeed all roads. Still no signal. I replaced it in the original packaging and arranged a refund with Amazon, whose automated system refrained from sneering at me, didn’t warn me that they could not go on sending me Satnavs when it’s plain I am too technophobic to own one. No, their system said that because it was “their fault” they would even refund the return postage.

It was then I discovered that a store down the road, specialising in car accessories, sells these devices at a discount; will even install them in your car and show you how to use them. Clearly, I’m not the only technophobe in this town. I bet none of the others have worked 47 years in the computer industry, but I was not going to reveal this guilty secret to the friendly salesman. Let him think me an old fool who knows nothing. I told him of the problem I’d been having. He said it was a software bug on the model I’d been using, and there was a fix. I had downloaded it already, but being experienced, angry and impatient, I’d skimmed through the instructions & said “Yeah, yeah …” without following them to the letter. “Ok, never mind that,” I said. “I’d like a new one, from your shop, so that you can help me install it.”

The model I chose was cheaper: an older version by the same manufacturer. A little awkwardly, I asked the salesman if it had James, and his Australian voice, because if not it would be of no use to me. He didn’t roll his eyes or anything, but assured me it would have a full range of voices. Relieved at his non-judgmental style, almost Jamesian, I found myself explaining that I was born in Australia myself, though you couldn’t tell from my accent now, and so found James’ voice soothing. And then I blushed. We couldn’t find James within the box, only another Australian called Ken. Oh, what the hell, I thought, he’ll do. I can’t back out now. I tested him on the way home, whilst ignoring his actual instructions, as I know quicker routes through town. Ken is grave and humourless, where James makes every trip a holiday outing. When you set out, he starts with “Turn right after a hundred yards. No worries!” for all the world like a young Crocodile Dundee. And ends with “You have reached your destination. Windows up, grab those sunnies, and don’t let the seagulls steal your chips.”

Back home, I surfed the Net, discovered I could buy and download the voices of Darth Vader, Homer Simpson, or even John Cleese. I would have paid any price. “James, old mate, where are you?” But he was free! His full name is James Gauci, and he won A$ 10,000 in the manufacturer’s competition to find the “Voice of Australia”. Meet him here (or here)!

“Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!”

Art, Life and Science

Farewell to “literary” writing, for now at least. Let disconnected jottings come tumbling in a springtime profusion.

Sometimes I think I’m hostile to science, perhaps because I give this impression to others. In fact I have no argument with science, except when it’s claimed that the science they call science is the only science. That is like saying that the Lord God of Israel is the only true god.

Art and Science: what’s the difference? Same as the difference between feeling and fact, I suppose.

Their science, public science, is devoted to asking “why?” questions; learning the secrets of cause and effect; applying their Promethean power to “improve” (at any rate to change irrevocably) the world around us. Mine is more interested in asking “what?” Not “What is the moon really?” but “What do I really see?” I once learned it’s a sphere of rock orbiting the earth, and have no argument with that. I don’t think it’s (she’s) a goddess, though I might have, if I lived three thousand years ago. Did they fuss about things being literally true in those days? As Francis says in his latest post :

I can find inspiration in a message which proclaims hope beyond hopelessness, vindication beyond failure, new joy beyond despair. Where I cannot journey with the Christians is their assertion that their narrative is a basically factual statement …

The moon I see is sometimes a disc, sometimes a crescent. It seems important to see what I see and not censor it in favour of what I’ve been taught, whether by scientist, preacher or poet.

My science, the kind I can practise for myself, has doctrines of its own. I must learn to see what I see, feel what I feel. It is the science of “What? What do you see, with your naked senses? What do you feel, in your unrepressed emotions?”

My science takes universal oneness as axiomatic on the straightforward basis that I can feel it. Not all the time, but that doesn’t matter. We take the sun as a given, though we’re not warmed by its rays all the time. Oneness implies that whatever I can feel, so can you, in principle; and I see no reason to deny feeling to any part of nature. Says Wordsworth in The Prelude:

                            I felt that the array
Of act and circumstance, and visible form,
Is mainly to the pleasure of the mind
What passion makes them; that meanwhile the forms
Of Nature have a passion in themselves,
That intermingles with those works of man
To which she summons him; . . .

In my science, the theory of evolution should acknowledge the role of desire embedded into all creatures. Giraffes have long necks because of natural selection, yes, but also because they desired to forage for foliage high in the trees.

I’ve just emerged from three or four days devoid of creative impetus, a state of comprehensive ennui when I didn’t feel like going anywhere or doing anything; as if my lifeblood had been replaced by dishwater. I read Rubye Jack’s blog, where she writes “Something I have little of at the moment is energy, and I've noticed that the older I get the less I seem to have.” And I thought to myself, better get used to it, it’s age wot does it.

This morning the ennui was gone, as mysteriously as it had come. In accordance with my science of “what” rather than “why”, I note the exuberant joy of my perceptions and feelings, back to the habitual level which too often I take for granted and fritter away on misplaced effort or idle indulgence.

So what is my kind of science, in practice? What kind of phenomenon is investigated? Miracles: not why or how, merely what. The process is merely to observe, drawing no conclusions—except one, always the same:

“This has happened. Therefore it can happen.”

Narrowing the scope even further, the only miracles I can observe are those which happen to me. There’s a time limitation too. I can only observe them as long as the feeling lasts, as long as the naked senses can retain the sight, sound, taste and smell.

And there is one more thing, to make it real science, as opposed to the simple flow of a lucky life. I should report my findings.

Here.