I am aware that I may sound like Miss Pollyanna Pangloss, finding ‘truth’ in oak trees and centipedes, and cooing over woodlice and dandelions, but at least the wonders I am extolling are available to all. Reality is not the preserve of the rich (like the ‘wonders’ of capitalism), nor the spiritually initiated. Reality has a U certificate. Just look at a tree or a person, accept its reality, its beauty, its otherness and relatedness, and think for a bit. [Footnote: acronyms, especially as mnemonics, are more at home in corporate seminars than giddy ventures into philosophy, so I apologise if this seems a bit cheesy but it arose so serendipitously and has proved so useful that I think I’ll pass it on. ARBOR (the Latin for ‘tree’) – Acknowledging its Reality Beauty Otherness & Relatedness. This should be our starting-point with every creature we meet – slug, rhinoceros, girlfriend and, of course, tree.]
Some kind of guidance is needed. There are so many men killing themselves or drinking themselves stupid, so many girls cutting or starving themselves, so many people anxious or stressed, and the cause – almost always – is human relationships and expectations – the fear of what others think and feel about us and, in rape, abuse, infidelity, loneliness, the miserable evidence of what they think and feel. Always, in other words, other people’s opinions. Blake was quite right to speak of ‘the mind-forg’d manacles’. [Footnote: suicide, addiction and self-harm are, I think, purely human activities. The rest of creation does not participate in such tragic self-degradation. Only when creatures have been perverted from their natures by incarceration in labs, zoos or sometimes even domestic homes, do they show signs of such stress. Self-harm is clearly a social and environmental, rather than an innate, problem.] Jeanette Winterson tells us, ‘Suffering is not a necessary part of the human condition’. It is a stark, seemingly unfeeling claim but she’s right. Misery is not inherent. It’s an acculturated product of society.
A STA perspective is an inoculation against suicide and misery; a focus on primary reality – at the moment this cat (‘Morning, Flo’), those trees, that gentle rain (no-one does violence to themselves because of the cat, the trees or the gentle rain) – instead of opinion and the contingent things built out of opinions, which are, at best, third-remove realities. This will be difficult for most people to accept seriously. We have been conditioned otherwise. Flo, of course, is convinced, but then she, like the rest of creation, knew this already (or sufficient of it for her purposes). [Footnote: and, of course, the cats, unconcerned with any delusions of species solidarity, have not bothered to establish cat-schools and cat-media to inculcate agreed feline values and assumptions. Flo has learnt from instinct and experience rather than indoctrination.]
STA is simply an appreciation of the actual world, the reality around me, which everything is made of and which stretches to the ends of the universe – a reality indeed so blatant that it is rather extraordinary that we are even capable of ignoring it. Human powers are astonishing, the things we produce remarkable, but nothing is more astonishing than our ability – the shadow of our fancy and intelligence – to ignore reality.
For many it can be a tainted inheritance: people trapped by habit who cannot see that there are alternatives, people who thought that a marriage, even a job, was the whole of existence, people who fancied they had ‘entitlements’ which somehow never materialised, people spiralling into despondency, turning inwards to their stale delusions, away from the bright reality that surrounds them.
Jeremy Taylor is certain that attention to reality is an antidote to such misery. ‘There is no man, but hath blessings enough in present possession to outweigh the evils of a great affliction.’ He, who has been imprisoned and seen his friend and employer Charles I executed, smiles calmly at the problems that yet may face him: ‘If I am fallen into the hands of publicans and sequestrators, and they have taken all from me; what now? let me look about me. They have left me the sun and moon, fire and water, a loving wife, and many friends to pity me, and some to relieve me, and I can still discourse; and unless I list, they have not taken away my merry countenance, and my cheerful spirit, and a good conscience: they still have left me the providence of God, and all the promises of the gospels, and my religion, and my hopes of heaven, and my charity to them too; and still I sleep and digest, I eat and drink, I read and meditate, I can walk in my neighbour’s pleasant fields, and see the varieties of natural beauties, and delight in all that in which God delights, that is, in virtue and wisdom, in the whole creation, and in God himself. And he that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down upon his little handful of thorns.’
‘Let me look about me’. But reality is still a minority interest; most people prefer their fictions. When designing gardens, I always try to get a closer understanding of my clients. One told me, ‘Basically, I’m a marketing person.’ Nobody is basically a marketing person, any more than they are basically a golfer, or an air hostess, or the online security manager for the R&D department of a computer games manufacturer. These are not basic things. They’re all made up. And if your client rejects your marketing proposal, and even if your boss consequently sacks you, there is still a whole universe to fall back on. The lesson of interconnectedness is that everyone literally has everything to live for.
For all the Nine Realisations and the Four Natural Duties in which I’ve wryly tricked out these thoughts, this is not dogma. I am not establishing the Church of STA, and ordaining myself High Priest – I’d make a risible guru. I acknowledge that the plaque bacteria that multiplied on my teeth overnight are objectively equal to my friends, but I fall short of hardcore STA fundamentalism. I brush my teeth, spit them all down the plughole (the bacteria, not the teeth) and admit I value my friends more highly. [Footnote: does brushing massacre the bacteria or merely dislodge them, sending them all on a Vernean adventure down the mains sewerage?] I am not one of those whose love of ‘nature’ masks a contempt for humanity (like Henry Williamson whose disgust and horror at the Great War led him to the stern and marvellous non-anthropomorphism of Tarka the Otter, but also to Mosleyite Fascism). Humanity is not vile; humanity is not essentially good; humanity is not somewhere in the middle. There is no ‘humanity’. I am; you are; he/she is. (I am told that, in Hebrew, verbs are conjugated in a different order: he/she is; you are; I am, which is much preferable. But either way, there is no priority.) I am; you are; he/she is; we are. We each have our individual haecceity, and we are each an equal part of everything. We all and each are life under individual forms.
Many years ago, I heard the lead-singer of The Levellers muse on the irony of ten thousand massed fans at a gig yelling in unison ‘There’s only one way of life and that’s your own! Your own! Your own!’ At about the same time, I went to see the Banshees in Clapham. Siouxsie prowled the stage pouring scorn on the back-combed, sprayed and crimped heads below for their slavish imitation of her appearance. Tolstoy would have known how she felt. He was dismayed by ‘Tolstoyans’. A young girl came to him asking how she should live: ‘I tried to persuade this young lady not to live according to my conscience, as she wanted to do, but according to her own. But she, poor girl, doesn’t even know if she has a conscience of her own. That is a great evil. What people need most of all is to find out for themselves and to develop their own conscience and then live according to it: and not, as everybody does, take somebody else’s completely foreign, inaccessible conscience and then live without one at all but lie, lie, lie in order to look like a person living according to some other chosen person’s conscience.’
STA is a collection of seemingly true observations, and their seemingly logical ethical consequences. Ideally, it would encourage everyone to live deeply and connectedly so that what they do each day actually reflects who they truly are rather than being behaviour learnt from peer pressure and the media. I would hope that it is something to think about, but I will join forces with Tolstoy and Siouxsie, and the equally unlikely pairing of the Buddha and the Royal Society (whose motto is ‘Nullius in Verba’ ‘Take nobody’s word for it’) in recommending that you trust no authority, mine included, and rely on your own experience.
The purpose, if any, of reading this is not so you can think what I think or be like me. Nobody wants that. It is to remind you to be like you, reacting to the universe directly, not in the persona you have adopted out of habit. To define oneself (or anything) is censorship. Language deepens reality, connecting separate moments, but it also blunts reality by denying their uniqueness.
What is the grass? Science formulates and pins down what it can. It heaps up facts but doesn’t answer the question, indeed complains it is meaningless. How else can we avow reality? There is the Catholic, Gothic, Joycean, Alhambra mosaic approach that dazzles with plenitude beyond formulation. There is the minimalist, Quaker, Zen approach dazzling us with silence. My preference, in this book at least, is for the fullness option. (‘I have made a heap of all I have found.’) Yours is likely different. No matter, it’s only a question of taste – like wearing heels or flats. Anekantavada, say the Jains. ‘The path men take from every side is valid,’ says the Bhagavad-gita. ‘Uno itinere non potest pervenire ad tam grande secretum,’ says Symmachus. You cannot arrive at so great a mystery by a single route.
And so this book is insistently tentative, militant in its humility, serious and dilettante together. Paradoxes are more than irksome literary devices, as writers from Lao Tzu and Empedocles to Chesterton have known. Only a mechanistic mind rejects them as illogical contradictions. Hot and cold can exist together without tepidity. In an ungraspably complex world, paradox keeps the question alight, never extinguishing it with answers. Questions point us to reality, answers to the ego of the answerer. It is, I think, essential to ask unanswerable questions. STA ET CONSIDERA – not because by thought you might wrangle your way towards an ultimate truth, but because by standing still, being there and considering, you may be as close to enacting one as you’re likely to get. (And STA suggests walking as a good way of standing still.)
‘The best that words can do,’ says Russell Hoban, ‘is to make a space in which the silence can speak, in which the language of the everything can be heard.’ And that is what this cataract of words has aimed to do – to drown out the babble of acculturated living so we can hear the speaking silence, that teeming stillness of being and making in and all around us.
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