I am making the rather large claim that Praise, Love, Creativity and Haecceity are our ‘Natural Duties’ because they are the behaviour of all creatures. They too have their haecceities, they create as they are able, they have acute awareness of their environment, and they harm others, without malice, only in the interests of their own survival. These are the rudiments of the duties I have described. Our greater complexity does not exclude us from the family. We are one creation with the lily and the woodlouse and have the same obligations, though differently expressed via the universal law of mutatis mutandis. The acquisition of our new abilities does not change this, any more than the development of new technology changes our moral responsibilities – it is not more acceptable, after all, to kill someone with an AK-47 than with a claymore. Nor is trolling better than hate mail. Admittedly, our extra complexity gives us the option of ignoring our duties in a way unavailable to simpler creatures like our cousin ferns and dormice. It is harder to be a complete human than a complete chickweed which, so far as we know, has few options in life. But with so many more receptors to bring to our engagement with the world, how rewarding it is when we bother to use them.
Awareness & Praise – Love & Loving-kindness – Imagination & Creativity
The internalisation & the externalisation; the perception & its embodiment
Praise – an impulse towards Love
an impulse towards Creativity
expressed through Haecceity
Love – an impulse towards Praise
an impulse towards Creativity
expressed through Haecceity
Creativity – an expression of Praise
an expression of Love
a manifestation of Haecceity
Haecceity – the arena in which and means by which all are expressed.
Here is a nice round of words for those who like neatness. It could perhaps have been better described with a geometrical diagram or an interlocking model or perhaps even a musical chord. To some extent, it is merely playing with words (though, of course, every sentence is ultimately a puzzle with words – a blindfold game of ‘pin the word on the actuality’) but it isn’t in itself dishonest or even misleading, because it does represent, albeit rather schematically, the interdependence of the parts. In effect, awareness, love and imagination are almost synonymous, or are at least three facets of the same thing – a recognition of wholeness which is the inevitable conclusion arising from an acceptance of the STA realisations about the world. Praise, Love, Creativity and Haecceity all blend into one another because they are just aspects of the same simple way of being.
But, at this point, we are only a couple of capital letters away from our abstractions dissolving into a queasy quasi-mysticism (‘Way of Being’), so we will change tack. It was probably when faced one day with verbal origami of this sort, abstractions drifting away from reality, that Eliot jotted down his phrase
Men and bits of paper
the whole human intellectual project dismissed in two weary inches of prose.
Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped freight
Of a delivered syllable
‘Twould crumble with the weight.
Emily Dickinson
Medieval wall-painting, St Clydawg's Church, Clodock, Herefordshire
What a lot of words this has taken – over sixty thousand already, apparently – doggedly tramping back to the understanding we were born with. Here are some more:
A word is a symbol of a thing, and a symbol of something else, subtly changed, every time it is used. Every word could provoke a dozen pages of footnotes to try to narrow it specifically to the object it was representing, but it still would never be that object, and both we and the object itself would have altered by the time we’d finished reading. Our intersubjectivity means that we understand up to a point but we can never be sure how far. As Theodore Zeldin notes, ‘The hidden thoughts in other people’s heads are the great darkness that surrounds us.’ Conversation helps but much remains unknown. We are all alone and all together in our shared aloneness. So anything said, read, heard is just a hint, a rumour, a suggestion. ‘Words never make anything useful,’ says Virginia Woolf, ‘it is their nature not to express one single statement but a thousand possibilities.’ Reality ceaselessly ramifies, elusive as quicksilver, never still. Words are nets in which we ourselves become entangled while reality slips away. We can nudge and hint to one another but we experience this glorious world ourselves uniquely every second.
Rembrandt, Portrait of an Old Woman (Pushkin Museum)
Iconoclasts, like the Puritans of the Reformation or the Taliban, who smash the visual images of God and his creatures, and then sit down to read his word, labour under a hypocritical delusion, because words are images quite as blatantly as pictures. Prose is, ultimately, just another art medium like egg tempera, oil or watercolour. It has developed its own techniques and conventions but sprang from the same root. To say or write ‘God’ is to make something that is not ‘God’ stand for an ineffable, inscrutable being that is ‘God’ just as surely as to paint an icon is. If it is ever truly possible to know God (or anyone else, for that matter) that will be an inexpressible experience, not the concluding sentence of an essay.
Many cultures, like the Celts, have relied on oral tradition, not because they were illiterate but because they were suspicious of the written word. Many sages, like Socrates and Jesus, wrote nothing down. Was this because they saw how words immortalised on stone or parchment lost their fugitive suggestiveness and became petrified into unchallengeable temples? Graven images rather than gods? Writing, by its very materiality, is liable to be regarded as something solid, a part of the accumulating, capitalist anthill of supposedly secured knowledge. We are, this notion presumes, allowed a broadening vision of the world (and therefore, we extrapolate, a greater power over it) from our vantage point ‘on the shoulders of Giants’. A healthy scepticism of writing and knowledge, on the other hand, points us again towards looking and wondering, facing reality rather than its explication, thinking rather than accepting authority. So I emphasise again (as I did on page 1) my apologetic but unavoidable unreliability. I have made a heap of all I have found, but I am not calling it a temple, or even a cairn. Every word I write may be true (wouldn’t that be something!) but you can’t rely on it. The words are not the Word – they’re just a bit of culture. Each of us needs, as best we can, to work things out for ourselves.
Is there, then, any point in reading this? these highly personal thoughts inadequately rendered with unreliable symbols? Perhaps not. But all books, conversations, information or opinion even from the most unimpeachable sources – the Pope, David Attenborough, your mother – are subject to the same caveats. The purpose of reading is not to ingest an external truth the way you might pop a vitamin pill, but to shake up the contents of your kaleidoscope mind, so that wonderful new patterns form there.
‘All genuine education comes about through experience,’ wrote John Dewey. A friend has already politely suggested that writing books won’t make any difference. I, equally politely, disagree but I know what she means. My car crash and sun-and-mist vision were more dazzling experiences than reading any of the works I have quoted here. But you can overestimate dazzle. Saul had been persecuting the Christians for years. He was obsessed with them, and steeped in the way they thought and behaved. His conversion on the road to Damascus was a remarkable thing but, given his obsession, less astounding than if he had suddenly become a Buddhist or Confucian. The blinding light did not beam some alien philosophy into his brain; it simply activated or galvanised the thoughts already teeming in his mind. In the same way (though, I suspect, with less profound consequences for human history) my little epiphany was possible only because my experiences, including my reading, had primed me for it, as my having the ‘STA’ quote on the tip of my tongue shows. The sun-and-skeins-of-mist was not a private show but on that occasion so far as I know, only I responded. Who knows how often I’ve dully walked past a picture or driven past a vision which has brought someone else weeping to their knees? How often someone else’s tree has been to me only a green thing that stands in the way? Epiphanies, books, all experiences add nothing; they merely unlock what is already latent in us.
Poor Thomson, mired in gloom, began his City of Dreadful Night by asking if it was worth doing. He tells us that he was compelled to write:
Because a cold rage seizes one at whiles
To show the bitter, old and wrinkled truth
Stripped naked of all vesture that beguiles,
False dreams, false hopes, false masks and modes of youth;
Because it gives some sense of power and passion
In helpless impotence to try to fashion
Our woe in living words howe’er uncouth
which, of course, is the compulsion of natural creativity, albeit expressed so tragically. But he also hoped it might make a difference, that some of the ‘sad fraternity’ might find some comfort in it. He too believed that only those who have already suffered the miseries that engulfed him would understand:
… no secret can be told
To any who divined it not before:
None uninitiate by many a presage
Will comprehend the language of the message,
Although proclaimed aloud for evermore.
Only for the initiates is it a message, but for the rest it may still be a presage, like all the books I read and experiences I had long before they crystallised one January morning. I think it fairly unlikely that anyone will read this and be so staggered by its revelatory truth that they need a few days’ R&R like Saul (now St Paul) when he reached Damascus, but it might be the final grain that tips the balance, or perhaps the first grain without which that last grain would have no such dramatic effect.
Luttrell Psalter (British Library)
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