One thought fills immensity*

Every thought could fill a book. It’s the middle of the night now. My dream was so powerful and enigmatic that it woke me up marvelling. I was having a reunion with my first wife. We were laughing. Her face was radiant. We were very good friends. Why did we ever split up? Why did I ever move on to another? I could not work it out.

In real life our agonised separation took place twenty-five years ago, and she died six years after that.

I woke up to the extraordinary realisation that the one I was running from was the same one that I was running to. And now, fully awake, I see that both were myself.

A few seconds later I went to the bathroom. On the floor was a photo of Stephen Fry (author, actor) on the cover of a magazine. He did not resemble himself. He has changed into a different person, neither a man nor a woman. He holds a dog in his arms and looks pleased, as if the person he is now is the one he’s always wanted to be. Or was I still half-asleep and was I seeing myself again?

Now, fully awake (how do you test that you are not in a dream?), I want to say hello, and describe a ferment of creativity, and the dilemmas it brings.

My cellphone has a voice recorder. I’m not boasting of its features — it’s my daughter’s battered cast-off from several years ago. The other day out walking I realised that I’d left my dictaphone at home, so I used the phone to make a few notes. Each one is a separate message, a single thought, and I haven’t played any of them back yet. I later discovered that my camera too can take “sound memos”. I actually have two “proper” dictaphones. Each uses microcassettes, I’ve ended up with dozens. For technical reasons I use one to record and the other to play back. I keep several notebooks, each magical in its own way. One, hand-made in India on very strange paper, is for ritual purposes only. That is to say, the acts of putting pen to paper; seeing the ink flow out and stain the surface permanently; observing the handwriting; describing the date and the occasion—these are enough. I never get round to saying anything of any significance, just like the “radio hams” of old to whom the triumph of using their equipment and making contact with others was enough.

Today we have blogging. Its rituals are enough too!

So I cannot in truth say I am writing a book. I’m receiving a deluge of ideas. Each one could be expanded to fill the Albert Hall. Each thought fills immensity. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”*

So what am I writing? Nothing more than the ordinary life of an ordinary person. Perhaps the perspective is not so ordinary.

The perspectives keep changing. The stories that could be written of my own life, past and present, keep changing. On Friday, after a busy morning at work in MaxiRam Castle (my code name for the office, part of an international corporation which has opened its doors to me for a few months), I managed to escape as usual for a lunchtime walk. As I traversed the car park under the “canopy of Heaven”, surrounded by important buildings like the adjacent pharmaceutical factory with its ominous tanks and roof-ducts glinting in the sun, I saw that our visual perspective changes with our every step. Near objects readjust their positions swiftly as we walk, distant objects slowly swivel round, graciously allowing us to remain at the centre of our own universe. Is this ordinary?

“Enough! or too much!”*
—–
* Quotes from William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

photos from a wood behind the Fujitsu building in April 2007: the underside of an abandoned truck; bluebells.

Not long after I wandered through the wood at lunchtime, and took these photos, a section was closed off in order to build the housing estate shown in this aerial photo, so that part of the wood exists no more.