There is one very simple, very useful question I ask all my clients about their gardens: ‘What is it for?’ It is, surprisingly, a question that is seldom asked. We largely accept what is put in front of us but if ‘Form follows function’, which I believe is a good starting-point for making anything from pies to cathedrals, and which, after all, seems to be how nature proceeds, it is an important question. ‘What is it for?’
To cut to the chase and think certainly earnestly and, I hope, deeply: ‘What are we for?’ ‘What are our lives for?’ If we knew that, then form could follow function and we’d have a pretty good answer to the perennial problem of what we should be doing with our time. But, in practice, such a question only invites a torrent of assertions and ingrained opinions, some tolerant, some intolerant, some bonkers, but most of them eloquent and convincing so long as you accept the unproven premises on which they are all based. [Footnote: this is as true of scientific empiricism as Hinduism or Catholicism. If you accept that ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have eternal life,’ Christianity makes a lot of sense – the greatest minds in Europe over the last two millennia would not have bothered themselves with it if it did not. If you accept that the universe is consistent and logical and that human perception and reason are the instruments by which it can be understood, then scientific empiricism makes sense too. But both are, in our current life at least, unprovable assertions we are not obliged to credit.]
So a second, closely related question may be useful, clarifying the grounds on which the first was made: ‘What is our essential nature?’ I, obviously, am rashly claiming that our essential natures – what we are, maybe even what we are for – can be found among the observations I have swept together under the heading ‘STA’.
Carlyle claimed ‘that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him’, before explaining that he didn’t mean church creeds but
‘the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and effectively determines the rest. That is his religion.’
It is an important idea, but complicated by his use of the word ‘religion’. Rather than redefine a well-known and emotive word, why not find a new one? Or an astonishingly old one? Proto-Indo-European, spoken 5,000 years ago on the steppes and direct ancestor of languages today from Ireland to India and China, had, it is thought, a word for ‘belief’ – ‘kred-dhehl’ (leading eventually to ‘creed’, ‘credo’, ‘credibility’ &c) which literally means something like ‘heart-put place’, the belief that you put at the centre of your life or ‘practically lay to heart’, as Carlyle phrases it, and which, right at the core of your being, informs how you live. [Footnote: I am indebted to Adam Nicolson’s excellent book on Homer The Mighty Dead for bringing the invaluable concept of kred-dhehl to my attention.] This is the pearl of great price for which the man sold everything he had. It need not be ‘religious’ in a traditional sense, but it needs to comprise a coherent set of beliefs, alive in one’s mind (not opinions to which one heedlessly assents) by which one can contextualise one’s own experience and thereby assess the specific significance of each new event or occurrence – which can, in short, guide all one’s actions. (Occasionally, one hears someone say something like ‘Football is a religion with him’ meaning exactly, in Carlyle’s phrase, that it ‘is in all cases the primary thing for him, and effectively determines the rest.’ But we must hope they are exaggerating. Our kred-dhehl should be close bound to our essential nature, and no-one’s ‘essential nature’ is a made-up pastime like football.)
That this world is what is, that it is real, and that we are entirely part of it, that we co-habit, co-participate, co-create and are of the same substance as everything else, that the same forces work on us and the same life flows within us is, I would argue, the essence of our natures. This should be our kred-dhehl. It involves a looking-OUT to the surprisingly stable world of reality, rather than digging deeper down IN to the febrile world of one’s own psychology. It is navigating by the pole star rather than by the tip of one’s nose. And it is sufficient. It is something so vast, how could we not be satisfied with it? Everything we see is a part of it, contributing to it, constantly reminding us of that one single truth – the unity of all things and our uniqueness within that unity – which, thankfully, seems to me a deeply reassuring truth.
Is it a fragment of something bigger, a shadow of something deeper? Is Anaxagoras right to declare that ‘appearances are a glimpse of the obscure’? I have no idea; but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Think of that woodlouse (our cousin, remember) crawling across my Shakespeare. It felt the indentations and saw the marks on the page, but had no conception of what they meant, or that they meant anything, or that there was such a thing as meaning. Within the limits of its own, woodlouse perspective, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Cambridge Text was perfectly comprehensible: it was a thing to be walked across as, albeit differently textured, were the carpet, newspaper and hearthstone. Perhaps this mirrors our limited perspective too. There may be not only things we cannot perceive, but concepts we cannot conceive, as far beyond us as metaphysics and iambic pentameter are beyond the woodlouse. Our imaginations are finite as our bodies are; if our perspective is wider than the woodlouse’s, there is no reason to suppose it universal.
Or is this world of matter all there is, and are any intimations of beyondness mere illusions? Who’s to say? But if so, being all there is, it must still be sufficient. ‘It’s all one what I might be,’ writes Tolstoy, ‘an animal such as any other over whom the grass will grow and nothing more, or a frame in which has been set a part of the one deity – all the same it is necessary to live in the best way.’
And although it is so big, we can see it in the smallest and simplest things. Coleridge (as we have already briefly seen) recognised the practical efficacy of this vision of the ‘One Life’. He makes it the centre of his greatest poem.
David Jones, The Ancient Mariner, Engraving 5
The Ancient Mariner was in a pickle. [Footnote: his predicament was not, mutatis mutandis, entirely dissimilar from that of Mungo Park we encountered in Chapter 23. And they each found the same way out.] He had shot an albatross (which his shipmates then hung round his neck before they all suddenly died) and was only kept alive because he had been won in a game of dice by the leprous white spectre-woman Life-in-Death. The ship was becalmed, nor, famously, was there any drop of water to drink. Around him on the deck were two hundred dead sailors and over the side ‘slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy ocean.’ He looks to heaven and tries to pray, but only ‘a wicked whisper came.’ Then the Moon comes up: [Footnote: it is intriguing that he attains redemption by moonlight. In the daylight, the busy time of chores, responsibilities, society and expectations, he gets nowhere; only at night does he feel the stillness to appreciate beauty.]
Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water-snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they reared, the elfish light
Fell off in hoary flakes.
Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet-black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.
O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me,
And I blessed them unaware.
The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
This is the pivotal point of the Rime. In the depths of degradation, with twenty pounds of putrescent seabird round his neck, the mariner looks beyond his own difficulties (an ek-stasy), sees the beauty of the living world, and blesses it. These are still the same slimy, crawling things he couldn’t stomach a few verses earlier: it is his perspective that has changed not the world around him. The world has not suddenly shifted to conform to his requirements, nor has he gone out and ‘fixed’ it with his cleverness; he has shifted to accept the world as it is. Awareness leads perforce to love – a cataract of love the moment he can truly see what is all around him. Redemption by realisation. And STA in ballad-metre.
STA ET CONSIDERA MIRACULA DEI
[Footnote: The Ancient Mariner has fulfilled all his ‘natural duties’: his awareness and love have redeemed him, and there was never any question about his haecceity – he is possibly the most haecceitous character in Eng Lit. And once home he is compelled to creativity, ‘and till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.’ And his tale, for all its ghastliness, concludes with love and praise.
Farewell, farewell! But this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.]
It is their existence as living beings – ‘O happy living things’ – not any mere superficial aesthetic, and the sufficiency of that vision that count. The sea-snakes’ ‘happiness’ comes from being ‘living’; in nature, according to Coleridge, the two are inseparable, almost synonymous. This is not a contingent, but a total, vision. It is not an interesting thought that has occurred to him, but a revelation of the Truth (capital T), which can come to us on a ghost-ship staring at water-snakes, or looking across a car-park to a hazy sun. (‘The selfsame moment I could pray.’ It hadn’t been possible before; now, he wasted no time and it was the prayer – the praise – the physicalisation of his awareness in my clunky STA phrasing – that rid him of his burden.) It comes not from formulating hypotheses or theories, but (to borrow another Coleridge phrase) from ‘the willing suspension of disbelief,’ an openness to what is around us. The acceptance that we are bound up completely in everything that is – joining the dance rather than making dry comments behind gloved hands, as I put it earlier – this commitment brings understanding.
The idea that faith brings understanding sounds arse-about-face to a modern sceptical rationalist, who thinks ‘I believe’ means ‘I assert these propositions to be correct’ (opinion) rather than ‘I pledge my heart and my loyalty’ (kred-dhehl) but it would be understood perfectly in everyday life by, say, a rugby player who knows that a complete commitment to his cause will raise his game and give him power and capacities he would lack if he tried to clear out a ruck disinterestedly. [Footnote: in fact, Anselm’s ‘Credo ut intelligam’ (‘I believe so that I may understand’, which I presumptuously questioned earlier on the assumption that he was merely referring to his opinions) and Paul’s ‘For we walk by faith, not by sight’ mean ‘faith’ to be understood in that older kred-dhehl sense (as the etymology shows). They are not, whimsically, on the basis of no evidence at all, telling themselves that Christianity is true. They have had a revelation. Something in the world – slowly accruing evidence from nature and scripture, testimonies, hints or a dazzling epiphany – has suggested the truth, they have responded and, by grace (or whatever you want to call the mechanism) understanding has flooded in. And just as I have begun examining my Realisations, Anselm, Paul and the Ancient Mariner must continue for the rest of their lives weighing the Truth they believe they have found against everyday appearances, and weighing those appearances against their Truth.] Faith is not gullibility – it is the energising courage of our convictions. Getting involved brings understanding; one gets to know by doing, learning on the job, not by disembodied, theoretical thought. How does the storm petrel walk upon the water? By faith. Because it knows with a deeper than intellectual knowledge that walking on water is a quality it possesses, a part of its haecceity.
Ants move mountains in the same way. Were the petrel to doubt or disbelieve its ability it would lose it (as, in the story, its namesake St Peter could walk across the waves when his heart was fixed on Christ but began to sink the moment he started worrying about himself again). We know not primarily by thinking, which is self-aware and self-reflexive, nor primarily by feeling and emotion, which are vulnerable to the stealthy influences of society and the baggage we have carried in our own socialised unconscious since childhood, but primarily by being – a being we share with all living things. (‘We think here,’ said the Pueblo Indian, striking his heart.) We know, therefore, by affinity, a sure foundation, on which we can build with all our rich capacities, thought and feeling, the whole of our haecceities.
How do we recognise this affinity and nourish it within ourselves? Meditation; prayer; reading. A chacun son goût. Putting oneself in the way of epiphanies. Walking in the hills – a rural flânerie ‘in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite,’ as Baudelaire described it in a different context, often does it for me. Lying in bed looking out of the window too.
But on this bright January morning, I’ll try Baudelaire’s recipe and head for the hills.
The Bright Field
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
R.S. Thomas
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