The Scribe
What lovely things
Thy hand hath made:
The smooth-plumed bird
In its emerald shade,
The seed of the grass,
The speck of stone
Which the wayfaring ant
Stirs – and hastes on!
Though I should sit
By some tarn in thy hills,
Using its ink
As the spirit wills
To write of Earth’s wonders,
Its live, willed things,
Flit would the ages
On soundless wings
Ere unto Z
My pen drew nigh;
Leviathan told,
And the honey-fly:
And still would remain
My wit to try –
The worn reed broken,
The dark tarn dry,
All words forgotten –
Thou, Lord and I.
Walter de la Mare
This, the first poem I learned at school, ends in the place of silence and humility to which we will, for certain, come, but not yet. Words have their place too. For now we’ll keep trying with words.
Whinberrying is fine STA activity – meditative, slow. You need to stand still and consider, looking hard to find the fruit among the leaves and the similar crowberries. Though they’re so small you can pick only one at a time, and you need to pick attentively – a lost fruit is swallowed by the deep, soft moss. There are no thorns, no natural obstacles – nature is not trying to stop you. You just need to make the slow, deliberate, concentrated effort. It is not an annihilation of self, but a quiet rejection of irrelevancies in your focus on the task and, unlike most meditations, it ends in pies.
What are we to do with our nine realisations? They were the sudden mushroom thoughts of a morning some time ago, and will need to be tested – elaborated, elucidated, substantiated, justified. After which, I suppose, anyone willing to accept them will be entitled to ask, ‘So what?’ A philosophy, or at least a view of the world, isn’t worth much unless it’s used, unless it offers some suggestions as to what we should do with our time, and why. (This is not to dismiss all but overtly ethical thinking. We are willed self-conscious creatures wondering at every moment what to do, so any answers to questions about the nature of reality, about what we know and how – all these trail moral consequences behind them. To say we are ‘meaning-seeking creatures’ is not to sneak in religious ideology, but simply to acknowledge that we cannot move without a motive.)
The philosophy has to be natural, based on reality not on a man-made set of fancied values, which change with fashion from generation to generation. It must (to borrow a parable) be built on rock rather than sand and be made of the very rock on which it is built.
We have nine headings, of which some – 1, 2, 5, 7 & 8 – claim to be fundamental descriptions of reality, while others – 3, 4, 5 in part, 6 & 9 – involve our reactions to it. (I keep them in this otherwise illogical numerical order because this is the order in which they suddenly clattered into place that January day, and that I’ve got used to ever since.) This whole thing I will for convenience call ‘STA’, not claiming any part of it as a totally new invention, nor trying to patent or establish a copyright over it, but simply because the viewpoint they establish needs a name, and it will be very much more straightforward if it is a name without other associations.
STA appears to be true. [Footnote: the attempt to identify truths does sometimes lead, perhaps inevitably, to embarrassingly simple-minded conclusions. When I wonder what kind of society it is that has invented ways to destroy all its members before it has discovered how to feed them, I realise I am thinking thoughts usually held by ten-year-olds as they begin to explore the world at large. It is not a very sophisticated question, but it remains a perplexing one. There will be clichés and platitudes galore, I fear. But truisms are, at least, true.] If so, that is its chief merit and recommendation. It is formed by inevitable logical induction from evidence – and that evidence is not a doctrine written in a book by someone long ago, nor is it a revelation or vision granted especially and exclusively to an initiated prophet. It’s just what I saw when I looked across the car-park that day, and what you see when you look out of the window.
This has been a process of looking at what is, seeing what it is, and trying to deduce from it some principles for living. It does not begin, like some political and social philosophies, by deciding what the world ought to be, and arguing back from the dream to the reality. It begins with the reality – sun, mist, tree. There is no pre-set destination logged into these pages – they might lead anywhere. I am not aiming to create a juster, fairer society – that presupposes (probably reasonably) that it would be a good thing – nor am I trying to maximize global happiness, partly because ingrained notions of happiness vary from culture to culture. If my conclusions, drawn as dispassionately as possible from looking at the sun, trees &c, tell me that I should chuck myself off Hay Bridge and ‘put an end to it all’, I shall consider the findings seriously before going to the pub and renouncing amateur philosophizing.
SPOILER ALERT
This paragraph was written after the book was finished. It is inserted here to reassure any reader wondering why she is being bothered with these personal burblings, that these pages do lead somewhere after all – to a world-view quietly but radically different from that which surrounds us in contemporary Western society (and, for that matter, more truly radical than any protest against that system that I know of). It may be wrong, though I’ve worked hard to minimise that possibility. You may disagree with it. I don’t expect you to believe me just because these thoughts have found their way into print. I only ask you to STA ET CONSIDERA.
So far as I can judge I have no axe to grind, no pre-conceived conclusions I need to reach (though one can easily delude oneself about this). My response to my family upbringing has made me sympathetic to the idea of a divine creator but the social and cultural Zeitgeist hereabouts is against the idea and I’m not sure I believe in her. She, like everything else, is up for grabs. STA does not aim at being useful. It aims at being truthful (whether or not it succeeds) in the hope that the truth may somehow prove more useful than seemingly practical ideas which are, in the end, based on errors. It is limited – it lacks the reach to claim competence in judging gods, nirvanas, or after-lives – but it feels solid, dependent on neither scripture, authority, nor opinion and that’s something.
It tries to ignore as irrelevant all the moral, ethical pre-conceptions we have inherited from our various cultures and societies and which, seemingly ‘natural’ and inevitable to us are, in fact, nothing of the kind. There are many ideas we live by which would seem alien and extraordinary to people elsewhere in the world because we have inherited them from, say, Plato, St Paul, Adam Smith, Beveridge or Thatcher. Even in this ‘global age’, our daily lives are, in this way, individually influenced and conditional – dependent quite as much on what we have been told we see as on what we actually see. Of course, biologically we work like that too. We immediately see what we expect to see, which is why we can be fooled by optical illusions. The eye sends the literally correct information to the brain but the cerebral cortex links that information to a stored image (rather like predictive text) from our memory files, and suggests that image as the reality in front of us. [Footnote: for the avoidance of doubt, I am not suggesting that memory is literally physically stored like a library book, simply that, whatever the mechanism, that is the effect of the cerebral cortex’s involvement. The more comfortable we become dispensing with literalism, the farther we will get. All language is analogy.] It’s a necessary shorthand. Doubtless our ancestors would not have survived had their brains had to process each scintilla of evidence – size, texture, smell, colour, growling noise, pointy white things – rather than skip to the memory file for ‘sabre-toothed tiger’ and activate all the ‘running away’ protocols. (Thus all our, and all other creatures’, perceptions are unconsciously and inescapably creative. This is the fertile substrate from which all our creativity grows. Every conscious creature creates its own experience, and so co-creates the world.) But if we want truth we cannot rely on our memory files any more than we can rely on predictive text to communicate; still less can we rely on the cultural memory files – social norms, vestiges of mostly decayed philosophies, fashions of any kind.
When I say that this seems (to me) to be based on reality, I had better explain what I mean by reality. It is an everyday, commonplace view. If I walk into a field and see sky above me, hills over there, grass beneath my feet (and not only see them but hear, feel, smell the winds, birds, vegetation, solid ground, traffic &c around me) I believe what I see physically exists. This is what I mean by reality. I do not believe they are figments of my fancy which cease to exist when I close my eyes or think of something else. Nor do I believe (arrogantly enough perhaps) that I am a figment of anyone else’s fancy, that the field may turn any second into a lake, the tree become an aardvark, and I the song of a nightingale. Even if there is a somehow ‘truer’ reality ‘of which this vegetable earth is but a shadow’, as Blake puts it, this reality works coherently enough to be functionable, much as the classical physical world continues to work according to the old laws of motion, even as quantum mechanics renders them obsolete at sub-atomic level. At our scale, v continues to equal u+at. Analogously, the groundlings at the original Globe could still understand and enjoy Shakespeare even if some of his most exquisite thoughts sailed over their heads. They could see that the prince (like pretty much everyone else) was dead even if they couldn’t quite make out why he dithered about for so long. We cannot be certain that we are not groundlings but we can, I think, trust our judgment that the play makes sense. This everyday, banal view of reality is that on which all that follows will be based.
It is worth noting briefly, however, that this apparently ‘common sense’ view has not always been shared. Sion Cent saw the world as a dazzling illusion:
Felly’r byd hwn, gan ganwaith,
hud a lliw, nid gwiw ein gwaith
(That’s this world, I know it well; magic and colour, our work’s to no avail.)
A more sober visionary, the great seventeenth-century divine Jeremy Taylor wrote of ‘PHAENOMENA than which you cannot have a word that can signify a verier nothing’. He would have regarded empirical science as trifling, and claims for its sufficiency as an explanation of the universe as imbecilic. If, like him, one is convinced of the existence of another, better, eternal world, it is, I suppose, quite natural to disparage this one or to disbelieve in it altogether. Berkeley famously denied the objectivity of material existence and Dr Johnson as famously refuted him by kicking a stone. Nevertheless, Anekantavada. Had Dr Johnson been the size of a sub-atomic particle he would have seen the stone as a vast unkickable galaxy of emptiness through which he and Boswell might float like thistledown. Nothing has been discovered that categorically disproves Berkeley or devalues Taylor – their perspectives are no less valid than ours for being long out of fashion. But, for the purposes of this book, I will assume a basic, human-scale, everyday notion of reality, and proceed.
I think I have laboured the point enough.
At last, and not before time, we can begin to examine these realisations. Let’s have a poem to celebrate:
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers:
Of April, May, of June and July-flowers.
I sing of maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.
I write of youth, of love, and have access
By these to sing of cleanly-wantonness.
I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.
I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
How roses first came red, and lilies white.
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the fairy king.
I write of hell: I sing (and ever shall)
Of heaven, and hope to have it after all.
Robert Herrick
Andre Derain, Mountains at Collioure (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC)
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