'STA'
I was just walking dully along when, as usual, I turned and looked, and this time, to my surprise, said,
‘STA’
Everyone knows it’s a good view – from Oxford Road below the castle wall, across the main car-park falling away to the twin hawthorns in flat Cae Mawr, Nine Acres, Ox Meadow, up to the farms and ancient woods that decorate the skirts of the Black Mountains. Not a grand panorama but an involving and companionable view – a sudden openness in contrast to the narrow streets of the town and the hedged lanes that surround it. Tourists stop to take pictures, hopelessly failing to capture what they see. It is probably unphotographable. But on this January morning, though the view was so familiar, I stopped too and took a picture.
It’s a rotten photograph, much worse than the usual tourist pics. The sun flared suddenly while I was fumbling for my phone. But I took the photo anyway to remind me of the moment. Of course, the ‘moment’ was the moment before the moment in the picture but that doesn’t really matter because even if I had pressed the button at exactly the right moment the resulting photo would have been only a photo – perhaps a lovely thing, but different from the thing I experienced. The camera never lies, but it doesn’t tell much of the truth either. The liars are the people who tell you this is how it was, mistaking the shadow for the substance and trying to flog you a phantom of an experience rather than a real, genuine, lovely photograph. And this account which I’m trying to relate as honestly as I can is of course not the real experience, but that doesn’t matter because that’s not the point either – the story is not the point of the story. When (perhaps I should say ‘if’) I get to the point what you will have is the universe (or a portion of it) processed by me not the thing itself. Reading any book is a first-hand experience of a second-hand experience, but if it inspires or reminds you to explore the author’s first-hand experience first-hand, it needn’t be ‘a load of crap’. I won’t be an artfully unreliable narrator – that’s a tiresome trick – just an inevitably, regretfully unreliable one.
I haven’t looked at the picture again till now. Here it is.
Told you.
But I hadn’t looked because I haven’t needed reminding. I’m not likely to forget what I saw even if I’ve forgotten what it looked like.
It was a low-lying-skeins-of-mist-with-a-low-morning-sun-firing-through-them sort of thing. It was, anyway, breathtakingly beautiful and its evident ephemerality – the mist drifting, the clouds about the sun – doubtless heightened the beauty. The beauty itself wasn’t the point (aesthetics never is) but it drew me in. In fact, the look of it wasn’t the point either. The point was the thing itself – the thing behind the look. Just as a painting is a window to the thing behind, which the painter mustn’t paint over.
Admittedly, the beauty of the view that startled me was having little effect on anyone else. One woman went past looking at a shopping-list, another her phone. A few cars busily drove by. Back in town some time later, people were gossiping in the café (as I might have been on another morning) or buying their papers and moaning at the news, warming themselves on a wintry day with the certainty of their opinions.
But I just said, ‘STA’.
STA
ET CONSIDERA
MIRACULA DEI
I don’t insist on the ‘Dei’. How on Earth should I know? ‘Sta et considera miracula naturae’ might have done just as well but that wasn’t the quote. Stand still, and consider the wondrous works of God. [Footnote: I should explain that I do not habitually walk around speaking Latin. I had been struck by the verse (Job 37:14) when I read it and turned to see what the Latin Vulgate version was. I occasionally carve stone inscriptions which work better in Latin than in English. In a foreign language, they can aspire to an iconic, meditative quality which creates its own context – ‘STA’, while in English they just read like any other sign and, in this case – ‘STAND STILL’ – rather a silly one.] That’s the job. So I did for a bit. And the wondrous works changed as the mist moved and the clouds moved and the sun came and went and all the works shuffled around a bit and became less aesthetically beautiful but suddenly no less wondrous.
And that was it, the epiphany, if that’s not too high a word. That, I think, is how they generally work, these days at least. No angels, no charred shrubbery, no extra lighting – the sun is always light enough. Just the world sitting there as normal and me finally seeing it. No disembodied hand materialized to write the meaning of it all on the castle walls or in the little notebook I carry round in case of such eventualities. So I made a few notes myself.
It was not a revelation so much as a prompt, alerting me to some things, bringing together thoughts and realisations scrawled in notebooks or stored in my memory, telling me nothing I hadn’t already heard, but telling me so I listened.
Because the world is unimaginably complex, much of our thought that attempts to understand it has to be bureaucratic – allocating names to nameless things, understating reality in the hope of making it comprehensible, reducing the image so that it’s not too big to send, organizing data into manageable files. Most of the taxonomies, the divisions we invent are not real, but it needn’t be a dishonest process unless we tell ourselves it’s true.
So, arranged for administrative convenience, this is what occurred to me that day after seeing the sun-through-skeins-of-mist thing:-
ORGANISED UNDER NINE HEADINGS,
A BRIEF SYNOPSIS OF THINGS SUDDENLY REALISED
ONE JANUARY 5TH,
IT BEING A SUNNY, MISTY MORNING
1. That this is it. This is what is. That this business of sun and mist and earth, the physicality of things, ephemeral as this manifestation may have been, is real and universal. That it is not contingent on anything else on earth. It just is. And, that being so – being certain, a sure foundation and the basis of everything we think and perceive – that it is what matters most. Nature is not a consolation for all the hardships of life; the world is not a stage built for humans to perform on. ‘The morning shines, Nor heedeth Man’s perverseness.’
This does not preclude the possibility of a further (deeper? higher? Select your most emotionally satisfying dimension) level of reality, nor does it confirm it. Nature stays mum. It just is.
2. That nature makes and makes unceasingly. Inanimate objects arranged into endless new patterns, and new life created – zillions of new forms every second for billions of years, and every one of them unique.
3. That we live mostly oblivious to all this. That, while every other creature lives exclusively attuned to this reality, we prefer to concentrate on the things we’ve made ourselves – shopping, football, radio shows, nights out, political debates – which are seldom rooted in or even aware of the overarching and underlying reality. That the disconnection between our pre-occupations and those of the rest of the planet’s inhabitants may suggest difficulties ahead.
4. That God is bewildered that we can’t see all this. That God has put on the most incredible show, which we ignore so we can listen to The Archers. I do not at all insist on this – I have no idea whether there is a God of some sort or not – but that was the feel of the thing that day. ‘And he marvelled because of their unbelief.’
5. That we are part of this reality and not separate in any way. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age.’ That all that is happening around us is happening in us too because we’re all the same stuff. That there is a potential sense of belonging latent in this, a sense of reassurance and homecoming, a sense of excitement at being involved, at joining the dance rather than standing by the wall making sly observations behind gloved hands.
6. That, this being what matters most, and our being unavoidably involved in it, all we have to do to possess and enjoy these feelings of belonging is to show willing. To say ‘Fiat mihi’ and accept reality.
7. That nature is perfect. That it is so by definition, because any perspective other than universal nature’s own must be personal, partial and frankly impertinent. That we may need to modify our personal notions of perfection accordingly.
8. That the uniqueness of each created thing makes everything fundamentally equal, and that the universe is based on egalitarianism rather than hierarchy, and individuality-with-interdependence rather than common identity or atomization.
9. That this being what is and universal, our acceptance of it, our assenting to it is the same thing as the capacity for seeing connections and making whole – in other words, our imagination.
Ouf !
At this point, albeit so early, I need a break. I imagine you may do too. (I wouldn’t try and read this all at one sitting, any more than I’ll write it at one.)
So I took a day off, and walked the hills above Rhulen to the Mawn Pool, and picked whinberries and made delicious pies of them.
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