Spirit

I rediscovered this piece while writing my new post,

“Money, health and wisdom are the three pillars of our existence,” says Alistair, whose blog, like Jim’s, often provokes me.

My disagreement is immediate and vehement. He invites me to ride my bicycle in the tramlines, but I’m not going there. Instead, I’ll obey the impulse to follow my impulse. I’ll ride my bicycle along a narrow path as I’ve always done, getting stung by nettles, torn by brambles and lost in trackless thickets. If there’s one thing I’ve become more expert in than anything else, it’s making mistakes. “If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise,” said William Blake, with no mention of the likely timescale.

I don’t seek advice. I don’t trust experts. I don’t read instructions. I don’t look before I leap. As an absolute beginner, I’m impatient to paint a picture like a maestro. I don’t have any proper technique and I can never do what the book tells me, but I do have a magical method, and this is to see in the marks I have made the essence of the thing I want to portray. When the mark doesn’t show the essence, I must erase it. Magic, not logic.

But there is “method in my madness”, as my inventive stepfather used to say. It’s traceable to Polonius in Hamlet.

I discovered a wonderful interview with David Abram which speaks of magic and the alphabet. To spell, he says, is to cast a spell, for both meanings have the same root:

. . . to learn to write and to read with the alphabet, was actually to learn a new form of magic, to exercise a new form of power in the world.

But it also meant casting a kind of spell on our own senses. Unless we recognize writing as a form of magic, then we will not take much care with it. It’s only when we recognize how profoundly it has altered our experience of nature and the rest of the sensory world, how profoundly it has altered our senses, that we can begin to use writing responsibly because we see how potent and profound an effect it has.

I congratulate my own instincts over these past months: my instincts to forsake the town and the babble of men, and follow Nature’s lonely, muddy paths. My truths have germinated under the ancient sky. I have fearlessly rejected the alleged words of Jesus and Buddha, not in a spirit of hubris, but on impulse, to avoid the tramlines.

And why do I trust my impulse? Because I am an animal. Other animals, non-human ones, have no choice in the matter. I’ve tried it both ways and made my choice.

What pillars do I propose, to replace money, health and wisdom as proposed by Alistair, to support my existence? Just one: that I am an animal.

“Animal?” you ask. “Do you then reject the spirit?”

On the contrary, I rejoice in the spirit and give thanks for its unbreakable link to the Spirit of the Universe.

For now I understand who I am, and what spirit is: that part of the animal that intellect can never understand.