Wer nie sein Brot ...

I found my copy of Goethe's poems among the books as we were unpacking and brought it back to Birkenhead, so, again, I find myself, as I did when I was sixteen. reading the text as I listen to the Schubert. How could I have thought when I was sixteen that I should be returning to this over forty years later, the same songs. I can hardly recall what the significance of these words might have been to me then, they must have referred, I must have referred them, to the usual adolescent anguish, which, nevertheless, they seemed to address and speak to, in all the particulars of common experience. But the poem still speaks to the life of someone in their early sixties, though one refers them, they refer to, a different range and order of experience and this fact is what makes it a poem at all:

Wer nie sein Brot mit Traenen ass,
Wer nie die kummervollen Naechte
Auf seinem Bette weinend sass,
Der kennt euch nicht, ihr himmlischen Maechte

Anyone who has never eaten their bread in tears, or sat weeping on their bed in nights of grief, does not know you, heavenly powers

It is in extremis, I suppose, that the parties to religious dispute part company, or it is rather in their assessment of what it is to be in extremis. Out of this grief comes recognition of something we are not normally acquainted with ... In this grief we console ourselves with pictures and illusions .... ? Are there two possibilities here or only one? The moot point, though, is how we characterise the nature of the grief, and whether the perspective that it sometimes opens up genuinely matches the phenomenology of consolation: what is the case, not what must be assumed to be the case.

But the talk of 'heavenly powers' ... it is tempting to say that we have, are saddled with, a prior system of belief within whose framework we make sense of the impact on us of our grief and anguish, if that is where we are starting from. And given the collapse of that system ... I certainly feel some sympathy with this, except that I am also inclined to think that the 'system of belief' arises out of the experience and then becomes solidified and no longer the poetry of our intimations. This happens already to some extent in the second stanza of the poem:

Ihr fuehrt ins Leben uns hinein
Ihr lasst den Armen schuldig werden
Dann ueberlasst ihr ihn der Pein:
Denn alle Schuld raecht sich auf Erden

You lead us into life, and allow the wretched to become guilty and given over to suffering: for every guilt is revenged on this earth.

Only the last line says something that could be derived from experience, the sense of karma, that what we do will come back to haunt us. And sometimes this is true. there really are consequences of actions, but not always ... or at least, that is not something we know.

R telephones to say she is looking at the moon high above the Holm reflected in the sea and straight ahead the North Ronaldsay lighthouse. In the day she could see the beacon and the radio mast as well. She leaves tomorrow afternoon ...

There is so much I need and want to write that I do nothing because I cannot decide where to invest my energy.

The Move

We have moved to the island, the furniture is roughly in place, the house is warm and well insulated. We were indignant that there was no back door but local knowledge advises against such an opportunity for the winds ...

I walked up along the beach from the Knap of Howar to St Boniface Kirk, a cold wind and rain clouds constantly obscuring the sun to good visual effect. The uncanniness of the islands is that such a circumscribed space seems little altered from a time of Picts or Irish monks or Norsemen, the same turf, the same sand, no doubt also the spilling of blood over many generations. and land already under the sea. The wise lady from North Ronaldsay, Ragna, had a farm somehere here. I walked to the old pier, looking out to the Holm, from our bedroom window we can see the loch below us and the twae Heids of Eday in the distance, and always the sky. Most of all we have been made welcome here, though naturally enough are subject to quiet, observant scrutiny. We walked together around North Hill and were puzzled because suddenly there seemed another island ahead of us, which couldn't be, until R realised that we had rounded the head without knowing it and were looking to the south west.

I think I can write here, but not now, surrounded by boxes ... though we have emptied most of them, the kitchen is functioning, the beds are assembled and in place, the books are in shelves ... Note to self: get up to speed on the history of the Scottish Kirk ... St Anne's was the first of the Free Church kirks after the Great Disruption, and the manse was built at the same time, so it has an ecclesiastical history worth investigating. Who were the ministers and what did they do? Back via Edinburgh to Liverpool for the beginning of term. I was met by M at Edinburgh airport and we went straight to St Giles for an organ recital, of Bach, Messiaen and Lizst, then back to the flat to wait for D to return from a Scandinavian visit. Read Kenny's review of Darwin's Angel in M's copy of The Tablet, a little Catholic agnostic moment. Can there be purposes (other than human ones) in nature without the implication that there is a designer? Of course, says Kenny, following Aristotle, though this also fits Schopenhauer: what we see around us in nature is what we experience ourselves of will, only in more rudimentary form ... and perhaps this is the problem with certain forms of sociobiology: it seems implausible to use the more primitive form to explain the more developed: the whole point is that the human form is a self-conscious development that has to be understood in its own terms, even though the primitive form remains in sight as the point of departure which we cannot dissociate ourselves from as though we had little to do with the beasts and much to do with the angels.

R remains on the island for the rest of the week, sounds contented and absorbed on the phone ... was off to Kirkwall today.

Wedding Bells

To Ruthin and my sister's wedding, the gathering of the clan, celebrations over the weekend, away to take daughter to Hall of Residence, then an Away Day, and then away to the far North to receive furniture and effects ... away, away, viewless wings ...

Liverpool in September

A quiet day in the Department marking re-sit essays in the morning and walking down through Liverpool in the slow motion of multiple farewells to the city and the Mersey, the river especially it will be hard to leave, this is a real river said Jacob Meloe, as we watched the strong tidal swirl below us as we stood on its banks by Woodside pier, and his excitement was palpable, this Norwegian philosopher who knew about the sea and boats and fishing and brought them miraculously into philosophy as paradigms of knowledge, bringing him close to Socrates and his artisans.

Yes, a sense that it is now for others to carry the anxious burdens and urgencies of institutional neurosis, these forms of social control as Martin Hollis once called them, by which so many minds and their physical abutments are corralled and trapped and creativity quietly stunned and its carcase bled and skinned and prepared for a kind of consumption. I must not get too much like T in his rantings against his university, but one sees the point of the rant, sed et in Arcadia ego, not death this time, but anxious ego and demanding superego carried within the flesh wherever it travels. A certain detachment and self-distancing, a watching it all going on without being affected as much as before. But the sea is what I want to hear, waves and storm, a cathartic sublimity that depends on relative safety ... as Kant carefully noted. Meanwhile we are learning to accommodate ourselves to the logistics of travel to and from the islands, next Monday night a sleeper from Crewe to Inverness, a flight to Kirkwall, then by Loganair to the island, then on 23rd a flight back to Kirkwall, thence to Edinburgh, a night with friends, then a train to Liverpool ... and the start of teaching.

Just occasionally one understand what it might mean to talk of walking with the gods, a larger consciousness opens out in which one sees things, one sees oneself, others, humanity, sub specie aeternitatis, one sees the whole human condition with pity or joy, and then ordinary consciousness closes in again. These epiphanies take place, one registers them, but there are no conclusions to be drawn, no 'faith' to be confirmed, it is just there as a possibility, and beautiful: all of which sounds like Krishnamurti ...

But, admittedly, this talk of 'consciousness' is vague, 'a larger consciousness', 'ordinary consciousness' ... but the point perhaps is that the criterion of identity for these various forms of consciousness is to be found in the idea of a perspective and its object or, if perspective is also too vague, one discovers an attitude to an object which is precisely 'the human condition', in the sense that our own situation, that of others walking past us in the street, become exemplars of that condition of humanity, one sees the individual in the light of that larger perspective. To see so much one needs to stand on a high hill, as long as one recalls that one's own human condition is part of what is there observed. And yet there is also much missed from that excellent vantage-point, and the moral of that is that one must constantly pass from the one to the other. In fact this is hardly a 'moral' perspective at all because in one way it is only contemplative, though it may 'refresh' moral action. This pity or joy at what it is to be human is not the same as sympathy or compassion for a particular individual who needs help now.

Listening to Schubert Lieder

When I was sixteen I knew most of these Goethe settings by heart and now I hear them again after many years, and I also hear myself sounding like Krishnamurti, whose work I read quite avidly for a short period in the early to mid-seventies, and liked it because there was no dogma and no commitment to some belief system, even though I would reject the idea that one can be 'committed' to a belief system anyway. But listening to Matthias Goerner singing the Schubert songs connects me to a much earlier self, aged sixteen and lying on a bed playing and replaying Fischer-Dieskau singing the same songs, with Gerald Moore. At Cotton David Finn, a boy soprano, had sung the Erlking, Bowie Owen giving over the piano to the virtuoso James Brennan, and it was a source of wonder, the thrilling accompaniment, the distinctive voices of narrator, father, child, Erlking. I was saturated with the words then, completely absorbed in them, whereas now I can barely remember them, and yet there is an identity across these fifty years, the same dreamy attention, the same states of mind. And I seem to search for these connections, seek to re-establish them, revisit my past, Cotton, Oscott, symbolised by the unavoidable Pugin, following me as it were to Stourbridge and there in my hauntings of Maynooth, to reconnect with the inner life of the adolescent or the young father ... as though I needed to discover a unity, a coherent thread of development but also continuity.

So, I come back, Akshobhya

The Stourbridge house is empty and everyone is about to take their leave of friends before heading off to Birkenhead, Lancaster and Leeds. There will only be a short time to receive the furniture in Orkney before rushing back to the start of teaching. Not very satisfactory, but there is no alternative to a snatched week perhaps in November and then a family Christmas on the island. After that ... Easter and then, if plans go right, at least a year up there for me, to do some writing and dig the garden. Slowly back into meditation, and the Akshobhya rupa, the thawing out and realignment of body and breathing from the physical cramp and tension of unavoidable but petty tasks, the sense of vastness all around, not noticed except when this silence falls.

So, I come back, Akshobhya,
And sit as you do, still
Graceful, your bare right arm
Reaches down, cool hand
Touches the earth I stray from
In fugues of lust and business
Still, I gaze at your image, again
Stare, a little stupidly
Coming round
As it were from a drugged sleep
To half-assembled consciousness
Wondering why I did this
Or do it now
Swaying unfocused on my knees
Like a bad Catholic who staggers to Mass
From the pub, hearing the priest
Through the muffle of microphone and ale
Mutters the responses late
Gets up, sits down, kneels
Not quite on cue, asserts
In the confession of his sins
His florid right to be there
Weeping for tenderness and passion

The house is full of boxes and dust, the cat is unhinged, the removals firm arrives tomorrow and will load up and start for Orkney. Our worldly goods will be put in containers, shipped to the island and craned off onto a trailer and the tractor will take it all from the pier to the manse. But not until 18th September.


The funeral in Norwich was inspiring and emotional. There are strange events around a death, a disturbance and expansion in the air, a sense of the person's presence, essence, vividly there, the corpse a caricature in clay. I wonder whether these strong feelings are the 'intimations' which lead to talk of transcendence, the conditions under which such language forms and develops and then it all closes in again, nothing to touch or reach towards but an intangible impression, something on the periphery, not to be seen directly but out of the corner of the eye, something shimmers and disappears. If there is a certitude of things unseen, then it is a certitude of ... no more than this, and it can barely be spoken about and certainly not proclaimed, as an ideology, by 'people of faith'. Instead, only listening.