I meant to make this note of Waddesdon greenhouses. There were rows of hydrangeas, mostly a deep blue. Yes, said Mr Johnson, Lord Kitchener came here and asked how we blued them… I said you put things in the earth. He said he did too. But sometimes with all one’s care, they shot a bit pink. Miss Alice wouldn’t have that. If there was a trace of pink, it wouldn’t do. And he showed us a metallic petalled hydrangea. No that wouldn’t do for Miss Alice. It struck me, what madness, and how easy to pin one’s mind down to the blueness of hydrangeas, & to hypnotise Mr Johnson into thinking only of the blueness of hydrangeas. (Virginia Woolf, Diary 13th April 1930)
Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand?
It has a heart like Me; a brain open to heaven & hell,
Withinside wondrous & expressive; its gates are not closed.
I hope thine are not. (Blake)
OK, let's try again.
Ipsy has just come in. ‘Have you been out in the STA-world of significant reality?’ I ask her, seeing that she is wet. Yes, she has. In fact, she has never been anywhere else. She knows only one world, and there is only one world but, while every other creature lives attuned to this reality, we prefer to concentrate on our own inventions – shopping, football, gossip, political debates, radio shows...
Every lunchtime on Radio 4 someone will tell us that an election is taking place somewhere, that a politician has said something about Europe, that another has said something about his party, that an American economist has predicted that something may happen to exchange rates, and will then intone, ‘And that’s the World at 1.45’.
No, it bleeding well isn’t, I reply.
It’s just a minuscule fraction of the human population talking about politics. STA et considera miracula Dei sive naturae, and if you do, you will realize that the fancied world that so absorbs you is entirely dependent on a much vaster, deeper, richer, more fascinating world which you have forgotten and much of which is being destroyed while you prattle into your microphone. But I daresay you’ll prattle through the same old stuff again tomorrow.
News-hunger is an addiction. We turn on the radio to find out what we need to worry about today. No-one expects good news: no-one expects to hear that a war has ended, or to see smiling refugees rebuilding their homes. Few listen with the intention of acting upon what they hear. It is merely a pretence that we are ‘connecting with the world,’ when in fact we are neglecting the real world for this charade of seriousness.
If no other creature wastes its time like this, how did we come to manage it? I realise, with shock and some horror, that I am going to write about sin, though (he added hastily, sensing the despair of the few remaining readers to have ventured this far) without religious or theological overtones.
I am as surprised as you; I assure you this was not my intention even half a page ago. Like most people I had assumed that sin was an outmoded concept and, in the common understanding of the word, it probably is but, whatever the word, the fact it represents is very much alive in the twenty-first century, as my STA epiphany has unexpectedly shown me. Sin is not, as popularly imagined, largely a matter of naked nipples and naughtiness – something concocted by Cecil B. De Mille and the Carry On team and disapproved of by Queen Victoria and Mary Whitehouse (and as dated as all those references imply). It is less gaudy than that. Properly understood, it means ‘missing the mark’, getting it wrong, being a bit crap. Sodom and Gomorrah were less exciting than we imagine. The people there were not revelling in thrillingly perverse orgies – that’s a later assumption – they were just a bit crap. There is (so the theory goes) a latent tendency in us all to get things wrong if we do not try hard enough to get them right. As St Paul later expressed it, ‘the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not that I do’. [Footnote: our modern popular concept of ‘evil’ is more melodramatic, applied largely to paedophiles and whomever our government is waging war against, and nothing to do with our own everyday lives. We know that we’re not evil. But without some notion of ‘sin’ we’re left a bit bewildered as to why things aren’t better and happier, and blame either Fate in some guise or other, or some faceless social force – the government, foreigners, the rich &c. We may decide that the problem is with the world rather than with us and so set out to change the world around us, either heroically – and in part justifiably – by social and political action, or cravenly by shopping – ‘the eternal error men make by imagining that happiness consists in the gratification of their wishes’, as Tolstoy puts it. If we decide, on the other hand, that we are the problem, we spiral inwards looking for some ‘key’ to our behaviour, again subtly abdicating responsibility by deciding that we are wrong, as though we were congenitally and incurably diseased, rather than that we have merely made some poor decisions.] Adam and Eve, the Original Sinners, were not excited by wilful naughtiness, just guiltily acquiescent, succumbing, without even any great enthusiasm, to temptation. Feeble rather than wicked – it’s easy enough to imagine. This concept of ‘sin’ (though we’ll need a new word if it’s ever to catch on) is hugely empowering, giving us the opportunity and authority to tackle our own unhappinesses. Most problems, it says, are not caused by malign fate, malicious gods or warped genetic inheritance; we just get things wrong that, with a bit of attention, we might get right. Sin is a business of ceaseless petty inadequacies, and falling short. In cricketing terms, it’s playing down the wrong line. And that, I fear, is what we in our heavily acculturated societies do. We devastate the planet, not with red-toothed savagery, but with our weakness for the tepid thrills of cheap flights, superfoods and petrol-station flowers.
‘The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it’ and that’s sinful.
The great fault the ancient Greek poets and dramatists identified was hubris – human pretension to rival the gods. In Christian thought, its equivalent is pride. ‘They worship the work of their own hands, that which their own fingers have made,’ grumbles Isaiah. We ignore the necessary reality of the world, and concentrate on the things we’ve made ourselves which are seldom rooted in or even aware of that overarching and underlying reality.
And the instrument of this error is our self-awareness, fancy and intelligence. This combined capacity overlays STA reality with fantasy. It enables all the most extraordinary things people have done – the Iliad, the Great Wall of China, the nuclear bomb and candy-floss. It delights and deludes, creates beauty, devastation and plenty of things in between.
There is a spectrum of fantasy. Our capacity for making things up is not confined to novel-writing and bare-faced lying – self-conscious fictions which we recognise as such and compartmentalise. Our subconscious tells us stories in dreams – these too are easily recognised. But in between are all the stories we tell ourselves without realizing, the fictions we think are fact, the delusions we think are reasonable interpretations of reality – that my colleagues hate me, that the barmaid fancies me, that the world would be better off without me – subtle blendings of ever-changing fantasy and evidence with hope and fear as advocates, and objectivity difficult to grasp. We complicate and obfuscate reality with these delusions and then wonder why we find ourselves confused. In addition to these private fantasies there are the public, social ones – hours and minutes, commuting, weekends, money, marketing, holidays, politics – things which have no basis in, and no necessary relationship to, the actual STA world, but which nevertheless we accept as the staples of our existence.
Paul Crum (Punch, 1937)
There was a news item about FIFA corruption a while ago. How would one explain to a Martian or even a Stone Age human the layered fantasy upon fantasy upon fantasy that underlies this commonplace news story? That football was a game, that people toiled not only for their own and their family’s sustenance but to earn money (and money, and the supersession of cash by notional money on computers (more explanations) will need explaining) to watch the game, either in person or on TV (more explanations); that FIFA was an organization (explain) to govern the game globally (the Martian will be in hysterics by now) based in Switzerland (explain); and that some old men were trying to get themselves extra money so that they could eat good food and persuade young women to have sex with them (here, at last, the caveman would show some comprehension – a natural impulse, if a tawdry one in the circumstances, amid all the acculturated nonsense). And this is the fairy-tale world the media will insist is important, and that we sour our breakfasts with every morning.
Reviving an old concept like ‘sin’ helps put us back in touch with the past, showing us that previous ages suffered the same confusions and frustrations, and that the changes in language do not reflect changes in feeling. Our ancestors’ useful notion of ‘missing the mark’ at least implied there was a mark to aim at. Modern belief in and hype of ‘progress’ has shut us off from that past which, given the transience of the present and our fears about the future is a grave loss – the refusal of hard-won experience.
‘The whites were forever changing the world to fit their doubtful vision of the future. The Aboriginals put all their mental energies into keeping the world the way it was.’ I’m reluctant to start extolling ‘the Noble Savage’ from the comfort of this sofa. I wouldn’t last a day in the Outback. But it would be a mistake to see as ‘stupid’ and ‘primitive’ a world-view that all creation is one and that I’m related to that walnut tree outside my window, while seeing wearing branded clothes and working 12-hour days in an office as sophisticated, progressive and intelligent. The unity of all creation is an incontrovertible fact about the universe; the clothes and long hours are merely a facade ill-concealing the vacuity of the life lived behind it. STA is a recalibration of our aim in the hope at last of hitting the mark.
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