Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in deliberate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds and shapes of an animate earth. (David Abram)
If I can get to the end of the road without opening my eyes, everything will be all right. (Billy Liar)
At this point, I need to draw attention to some things which seem wrong. It may not be fun or sound celebratory (though its ultimate purpose will be) and I worry that this section might become still more didactic in a most untree-like manner (though trees wag fingers, I suppose). Eager as I am to press on, still working at this, sitting in the garden on a late summer’s evening with wine by my side, my writing-board propped on my belly and Ipsy underneath it asleep on my lap, I……
….... I am watching the swifts.
I am watching the swifts (who will be leaving any day) dart, whoop, wheeeeeeeeeeel over our heads,
silhouetted (the nights are drawing in) against the calm, soft, pink clouds sliding left to right across a washed-out sky. (The married couple of collared doves, stolidly still on the
telephone wire, highlight their exuberance; a rook, prosaically straight in its flight home, emphasises their elusiveness.) A pair like a biplane make love on the wing. Watching swifts is the finest contemplation. Sede et considera miracula Dei. (Once I found a young one in a tall terracotta urn hopelessly incapable of vertical take-off. I laid the urn flat and it shot out like a cannonball.) Their grace, speed, stamina, their footlessness (!), their blessed generosity in lodging with me. Everything about them is ast-onishing. And yet … it suddenly occurs to me … (if you will pardon me) … I am astonishing too! What a piece of work is a man. Here I am so fat and motionless I out-stolid the doves, while animals sit and sleep on me as though I were part of the landscape (and, of course, trillions of creatures busy themselves inside me as though I were an office block), and yet my thoughts all unbidden whoop and swirl, mimicking the swifts and no more under my control than they. Watching the swifts has set almost concurrent bullet-trains of thought encompassing dachshunds, sex, Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, death and midges, eddying round at a speed that would make the CERN particles giddy – all this in the rubescent noddle of a bloke with a cat in an overgrown garden.
The quality of the thinking is another matter of course. I make no claims to profundity or novelty, but the speed of association is miraculous (and I’m sure would be the same if you were sitting here. I am no superhuman genetic mutation.) Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the tracks of my thoughts were governed by the same direct, vital usefulness that governs the swifts’ arabesques as they feed? Their crazy motions are entirely practical, as is the sturdy immotion of Ipsy still asleep on my lap. My thoughts ramify with their own internal logic (I can claim no credit for any of them – the pot in which the stew is cooked – though I acknowledge blame for documenting and bothering you with them) as I sit here feeling them swell in my head like a great, unreleased mind-fart… (oh, that’s a disappointing thought… oh … oh dear… I think, once one has recognised one’s thought-processes as a mind-fart, it is time to abandon any use of the word ‘philosophy’. Would ‘mind-fart’ sound more respectable in ancient Greek? … or perhaps in German?)
To test whether there is any practical value in these trains of thought, which set off simultaneously, I will attempt (The Fat Controller) to trace their itineraries.
The first train (stuck in the station watching the others depart) was simply the consciousness of hosting swift-flying thoughts. The second (a down-train) began with the swifts having sex on the wing and the association this unwelcomely brought of the Mile High Club – those fatuous people who boast of having sex on planes. Do you suppose larky swifts try fucking on the grass so they can tell their mates they’ve joined the Ground Zero Club? Nor do I. Humans can be farcical creatures, running round with our cognitive intelligence hanging out, and no idea what to do with it except that it must be expended on something. We’re like a teenager ferociously wanking the moment he gets any privacy or, less inhibited by acculturated mores, like the sausage-dog humping your leg, and your arm, and the chair-leg, and the grass, and the basset hound’s head, and the arm of the sofa, and the neighbour’s toddler, and the recycling bin. Is all of science and most of art, and surely the writing of undemanded, unwanted books, really a frustrated yanking of our intellects? And are we so used to satisfying ourselves this way, with this fruitless frottage, that we’ll fail to notice when a bitch on heat walks by? Certainly, the strenuous efforts put into establishing institutions that have no conceivably valid human purpose – ITV, the Stock Exchange, county councils, Centerparcs, newspapers, NASA, the Edinburgh Tattoo &c – must be just so much dry-humping, a hopeless admission that we do not know what to do with our brains. And the rest of creation looks on horrified, as we watch the dog, hoping it won’t go on too long, hoping it won’t ruin the furniture.
The third train (the up-train through classy countryside, and dividing in two at Adlestrop) by contrast, began in gratitude for the swifts’ presence. How wonderful that evolution should decide their surest chance of survival and prosperity lies in flying from the Congo to Clyro and back each year! How lucky I am to see all this! As though I were the Ancient Mariner ‘A spring of love gushed from my heart And I blessed them unaware.’
Here the train divided, and the shorter section continued as follows: I was nagged by a sense of hypocrisy. Was I simply seduced by beauty – my heart in hiding stirred? What about the midges? And so, rather more self-consciously, I also blessed the midges who, swarming round them mistier, were being hoovered in their thousands by the swifts, unhymned (as if they cared) by poets, but every one of them just as unique and miraculous as Coleridge, Hopkins and Edward Thomas. I could see on the destination board that we were heading for Ted Hughes’s pike, grass and cannibalism, but I didn’t want to go there yet and pulled the cord to stop the train.
The longer section of this train of thought began with the Ancient Mariner’s discovery, deep in his heart, of love. In the depths of degradation, he looks beyond himself and blesses the snakes – the ecstasy (ek-stasis, standing outside himself) without which there can be no salvation. De profundis clamavi ‘Out of the depths have I cried.’ And yet, does one need to be on a ghost-ship, or in the guts of a great fish, or in Reading Gaol, to have one’s voice heard? Can one cry out equally effectively when paddling in the shallows? Does it count if a bloke in his sunny garden with deckchair, wine, sleeping cat, and all bills paid pro tem, blesses the swifts and midges? Does tragedy win one points like shopping in a supermarket, and give a life an added validity it didn’t have before? Doesn’t a tap-in count just as much as a thirty-yard volley? But again, I could see that William James, Jeanette Winterson and more Coleridge were further down the line and I wasn’t ready for them yet, so I reached for my wineglass and all the trains of thought were derailed.
And this is the world of human perception – a bizarre intermeddling of bathos and sublimity squeezed for a moment to a little ball in my head, of fart gags, salvation and masturbating dachshunds, of the dullest plodding transformed by radiant epiphanies and the most exquisite serenity falling flat on its face. The marriage of Garbo and Arbuckle. Is there a prose-style that can register all of this? I am clearly struggling – this has all the grace and rhythm of a fat man crossing ploughland on a pogo-stick. Or must the tragedy and farce always be staged in separate theatres? – (the ekstasis told in one book with a puff by Rowan Williams, the humping sausage saved for my debut comic novel? perhaps it could be arranged for cello and kazoo?) – and the wholeness of the phantasmagoria be falsified in the interests of dramatic unity and tone?
Hmmm
I suppose the reasons for this falsification and selectivity in art lie in the attempt to achieve a unity or harmony in the work. If, as we seem to be discovering, the world is characterised by multeity in unity and unity in multeity – every creature unique but all related – our works of creativity will resonate more deeply when they reflect that truth about the greater creation. In any art, a unity that ignores multeity is either narrow and totalitarian or claiming to address a reality that is Everests above our heads; and a multeity that ignores unity is either a vexatious insistence on disunity, or just mindless prattling about whatever floats slowly by.
Not that anyone’s likely to ask me, but Virginia Woolf’s Diaries would probably be my ‘Desert Island book’ in part because they engender (to use her word) without telling. They are not a consciously finished work of art. She looked all her life for a prose that would have ‘something of the quality of a sketch’ about it (Russell Page looked for the same in garden design) perhaps unaware that she was achieving exactly that in her diaries. But this sketchiness and irregularity doesn’t obviate the need for unity. The essential unity is spiritual – perhaps psychological or emotional. It doesn’t need to be a sensory or aesthetic unity, which can often only be achieved by falsification – a Procrustean butchery of reality – or, in Chesterton’s words, ‘a certain cut and coloured clearness that belongs rather to the things of art than to the things of experience’. There are deeper harmonies than aesthetics. As Gulley Jimson puts it, ‘A real picture is a flower, a geyser, a fountain. It hasn’t got a pattern, but a Form. It hasn’t got corners and middle but an Essential Being.’
I am not trying to claim that these pages have an Essential Being about them (though it’s useful to be reminded that I ought to be thinking in such terms). In fact I seem to have gone a bit off course. Sorry. This was just an exercise in trying to convey the reality of the activity in my head as I watched the swifts – in general, I will edit. You will not again be required to wade through everything that sloshes around in my mind. Coacervabo omne quod inveni but I’ll riddle it. Now I’d better get back to those ‘Realisations’.
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