West Kirby and Samhain

They walk as though in a prison courtyard whilst others sail in sight of the Welsh hills.

The season of Samhain approaches when the veil between the worlds is thin and penetrable. Spoke to P today, who talked of transfiguration, not as a doctrine but an experience, a quality of the light that surrounds those who are departing from us ..

This is not language likely to commend itself to a good secularist but it still seems to me a good image of how we can sometimes be aware of possibilities beyond the horizon, as it were, possibilities that we are often too immersed in matter to notice. So, Samhain, a season to recall intimations of reality beyond the settled scope of our customary and clung to world. But even that language needs to be applied: what kind of thing are you trying to refer to? is a perfectly proper response. Oddly enough I felt very much like that last year after a couple of weeks on Rinansay, that returning was like being re-immersed in matter. Perhaps it is all best understood as an image of heightened poetic sensibility, something that flows and then ebbs away and remains as a memory, something glimpsed and then lost to sight. Or perhaps rather to hearing. The need for acute listening.

But the metaphor of being immersed in matter (or freed from it) has to be understood in some kind of moral, perspectival terms. It is always easier to see it in others than in oneself. But sometimes you do see it in others, perhaps especially in the shopping mall, this total immersion in the basic business of life, you see no horizons in their brows, as it were, and then at the moment of disdain and self-satisfaction. you also know yourself, there are no large horizons here, just the needs and cravings ...