Like wildfire

I woke in the night and fell victim to a train of thought, so insistent in its claim to significance that the only way to shut it off was turn on a bedside light and scribble some words in my notebook, raw and unpolished. It did the trick, I returned to slumber and then in daylight remembered little, but tried to add some more scribbled thoughts. Two days later polished them as best I could and put them up on my blog. Eleven years later, I have a better command of words. Can I reconstruct what I wanted to say? Probably not. The best I can manage is a dialogue between myself aged 64 and now 75. I had written

Ideas are action with no substance, like fire. Their curse and their blessing is that they burn. We cannot build anything real with them, but they serve by destroying dead brushwood.

What kind of ideas? Those which have action in mind, inspired by antipathy: towards what one sees in the world, or even discovers within oneself. Ideas which clash with other ideas, and lead to politics, dissent, war, crusade, jihad. They burn but not create. In short, activism. As an observer, I’m sceptical as to its value. And I’m certainly not a participant. Today, on November 1st 2017, I suddenly think of Wilberforce, Nightingale, Gandhi, King, Mandela with gratitude for their persistence, self-sacrifice and courage. I wasn’t thinking about them in December 2006. Not directly, but I wrote

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Life is too precious to do anything that is not in accord with one’s highest and deepest purpose. A pure idea, any pure effort of intellect, must serve some other purpose [than its own glorification]. Mind is the magnificent achievement of homo sapiens, but it must always serve something that is not mind. It can’t be the boss. [As to myself,] I anchor myself to the material world, via sensual experience, the study of Nature, physical activity.

I had become aware of a paradox in myself. At an advanced stage of life I’d realized a new joie de vivre and creative urge. Up to a point it could be expressed in gardening, woodwork, invention, design, painting in pastels, but my skill in all of these was rudimentary. My writing wasn’t up to much either but has become my main thing. I used it as a tool for thought, observation and memory. And then I came up against the paradox, that the thing I was criticizing was also the thing I was depending on. Ideas as the mainspring of activism, polemic, propaganda.

I saw that ideas become dominant because humanity is organized into leaders and followers. I don’t want to be either. I want to see things as they are. I don’t want to persuade anyone. I don’t want to be a conformist who swims with the tide, even though it takes effort to resist that movement. I remarked that my heroes include William Blake and Vincent van Gogh, “whose lives defied society but who speak to the soul today”. Van Gogh in particular because I was reading Martin Gayford’s The Yellow House about his time in Arles.

I wrote:

Jeanne Calment of Arles was 13 when she knew Vincent as a customer for cloth to make his canvases. She recalled him as “very ugly, ungracious, impolite, crazy and bad-smelling”. Vincent cannot be blamed for Jeanne thinking him ugly.  

Says Gayford:

This was characteristic of the impression poor Vincent made on people, especially the opposite sex.

If the name Jeanne Calment is familiar, it’s because she lived to be 122, and there are many stories about her. For example she appeared in two movies, one being Vincent et Moi (1990), in which she played herself. She gave up smoking when she was 117: not for health reasons, but because she was going blind, and found it embarrassing to have to keep asking for a light.

I was writing about ideas:

I am learning to be very careful with ideas, especially those which are not rooted in a bedrock experience of Nature—the world’s or my own. We might imagine theories and ideas as harmless fluffy clouds, like the “thinks” bubbles that appear above strip cartoon characters, but they are wildfire: crazy, untamed, no respecters of important values. Are we not the children of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods?

And then I quoted from Wikipedia:

To punish Prometheus for this hubris (and all of mankind in the process), Zeus devised “such evil for them that they shall desire death rather than life, and Prometheus shall see their misery and be powerless to succour them. That shall be his keenest pang among the torments I will heap upon him.” … Zeus was enraged because the giving of fire began an era of enlightenment for Man …

Which now seems to me a kind of parallel story to Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden.

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PS the original post included the following idea, later edited out, but liked by Anonymous:

– Conformist behaviour leads away from common humanity.
– Eccentric behaviour takes us straight to the centre.