Stones

Heading north

Well, sunrise on Tuesday in Orkney will be 0401 hrs and sunset 2220 hrs. I have spent the day cleaning in a slightly feckless way, recycling paper, trying to pack and work out the logistics of taking 23kg on one plane but only 15kg on the Islander. Solution: the boat, I can get to the ferry after 7am with plenty of time to reach the airport. Then meet the ferry when it arrives mid-afternoon. It leaves Kirkwall at 1030 but goes to North Ronaldsay first. Tomorrow to Lancaster via the dump and the university library ... entrain Monday, meet a friend in Edinburgh, fly to Kirkwall, overnight stay. Unfortunately, from the point of view of convenience, I have to do some external examining later in June, a quick dash to Norfolk and back to receive friends. There is much to do down here but I need a change and a chance to orient myself towards future writing tasks.

Walking through the shopping mall, two very young women with prams, both smoking hard, sad, but they look cool and it gives one a certain poise, alas. Thinks. Do I leave my Bose, hidden in Birkenhead or do I send it up by post?

A dance of branches, sea gulls call

I am clearing my desk in the Department, my door is open, as is the window, one is in a dreamy state as one makes a basic assessment of papers, to be kept or recycled, sounds from the corridor, traffic noise, footsteps in the street, and voices, the ash tree, green, a cooling breeze through the window, calm, change, the possibility of change, the wind, the metaphors, touch my brow.

A girl of seventeen

Ma mere, in the early days of the war, presumably 1940, she is 85 now and still has that truculent, independent look of an irish colleen on her face, and six years before I was born. She starts to grow frail and angry that she can't do things, like work in the garden, still feels as though she is in her twenties but now trapped in a body that is is less cooperative than it was ...

But when you think about it ...

... in a way, religion is almost irrelevant to the troubles that afflict our planet, except for the extent to which it intensifies them, and when it does it is mostly because it is a product rather than a cause, an expression of reaction, though one which can also reinforce reaction, and also to that extent an irritant and an obstacle. Perhaps it is safer to say that it is 'good' religion that is almost irrelevant.

The thing that we most have to contend with is human nature in its negative aspects, and all we have at our disposal is our own nature in its positive aspect, and it is already in our nature to make that distinction in those terms. All that really matters is states of mind and their expression in conduct, as I constantly tell my students. Those men and women of 'good will' who profess religious convictions may be inspired by their spiritual traditions, as any of us might be by the right kind of literature, and our admiration for them is entirely a matter of our moral judgment about what they propose and what they condemn, about what they do. Basically, what we contend against is greed, hatred and delusion, grasping, cruelty, indifference, narcissism, self-preoccupation, sloth and arrogance. And all we have to contend against them with is generosity of spirit, energy and compassion. Who cares whether there is an uncaused cause of all there is? Well, yes, lots of people care about that, and some will say that it is because it is true, but even if it is, what difference does it make? Answer, it makes no difference at all except as one source of ethical inspiration among others.

This is also basic Buddhism as well as 'humanist' and maybe the point for me is that humanism just needs to develop its moral language and learn from the kind of ascesis found in that tradition, an ascesis that seeks to overcome the hindrances, undermine the sway of the passions without repression, in favour of a newly energised compassion for sentient beings, including, naturally, oneself, 'let me be to my sad self, hereafter, kind/ Charitable ...' as Hopkins wrote.

Why I needed a new camera

(I found these notes in a suitcase and this is one way to preserve them)

I have no way, and therefore want no eyes;
I stumbled when I saw; full oft 'tis seen
Our means secure us, and our mere defects
Prove our commodities. O dear son Edgar,
The food of thy abused father's wrath!
Might I but live to see thee in my touch,
I'ld say I had eyes again!

There is no single metaphor of light and darkness, but several, and they can appear to contradict each other even when they don't. We have to start from the human experiences which we seek to make sense of and give coherent form to by reaching out to evocative comparisons. Of course there is an association that we make between light and darkness, good and evil, it is one of the oldest associaations: the image of the dark engulfing the light, the Manichaean story of the interpenetrating pendulums, light and darkness, good and evil, separate and distinct and then their mixing, always though with the sense that it is the light that shall be swallowed up, that will falter in the presence of darkness. Two eternal, metaphysical principles. But although this pattern fits in with theism in different ways, God's light but also his darkness, we do not need to attach the imagery to strictly theistic reflections: it can shed 'light' on our progress through life in other ways.

Primal emotions, fear, dread, hope, relief, associated with the coming on of night, the dawn, the coming of evil times, the possibility of rescue, or of being 'saved'. The sense of the presence of evil, a vivid reality, always also cold, the sense of dark and relentless forces. But in another context, not unrelated, we think of the light of understanding and the darkness of ignorance, partly because we think of these already in moral terms, understanding is a good, ignorance an evil.

However, we can become over-attached to the light and over-fearful of darkness. Unconscious forces, the shadow, fear of looking into the dark places of the psyche, because we put things now in the wrong order and associate darkeness too readily with evil (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). Enduring the darkness, and learning to distinguish between what is merely an object of fear and what is genuinely evil. Lawrence and Nietzsche on the desire to be rational, conscious, daylight at any cost, etc. But we can also be 'fearful of light and enlightenment' (maybe it is the same thing expressed in an opposite way) and there is the instinct of concealment of action ('light thickens and the crow ...') but we are also night's black agents: we do not wish to be discovered, exposed to the daylight.

But in another context it makes sense to embrace the darkness in a positive way: the ordinary light of day can conceal a greater light but it can also conceal the presence of the heavenly bodies. An ascesis of becoming familiar with the darkness, enduring, living without the stimulation of the senses, in the hope that with their cessation and that of quotidian desire, new insights might dawn ...

But what about 'grace'?

Nor hope nor dread attend
A dying animal.

A walk in Sheffield, or the outskirts thereof, memories of the late eighties, bringing up children, and the unexpected heron, so primeval, what has it to do with Sheffield or any city, any human habitation, working before Sisyphus to stay alive, alive, alive until it dies, dies, nor hope nor dread ... no beating of spirit wings, moving out of life with slow and awkward grace.

If what I said about karma and Sharon Stone earlier is right, then surely we have exactly the same problem with talk of grace, as when someone says that such and such an event which had perhaps a significant effect on their lives, was a grace of God, or was the action of God's grace. Surely that won't do, either? We should have to say that the comment acknowledges something true, viz that it was not through my action that this happened and saved me from myself, but then tries to explain, which it cannot do, since all this belongs to a realm of unknowing, though even that turn of phrase is merely a kind of concession. All this sounds like D Z Phillips and yet is surely no less right for that,Dewi, who died last year, in the library at Swansea, in the middle of his projects, had been complaining of dizziness a few weeks before at the memorial for Bob Sharpe.

Talking of grace might provide someone with a general picture of what it is like to live in this world, a general truth about the multiple ways in which we are dependent in our moral lives on forces that we do not command and do not expect, but it can never then come down to particulars ... but of course, for religious people, it always does come down to particulars, a particular event seen as God's intervention, whether it is to save us from ourselves, or to punish us for our sin, and I cannot go there, nor have any inclination to do so, even though there have been many times that I have precisely felt that I was saved from myself by the course of events, by a grace of nature, as I should rather say. Others will talk here of their conviction or their faith that this was the hand of God .... but it is no more than Glenn Hoddle or Sharon Stone talking of karma or the fundamentalist talking of God's punishment of America or whatever it might be. I suppose someone might object here, that they are not on a level, that there are different theologies involved, that God is a God of love and intervenes with grace, but for that reason doesn't punish us in the way implied, and that is certainly true, but still, neither the good theology nor the bad brings us to something that we can establish or know or even have reason for believing.