Sunlit Ecstasy

It’s August and in these Northern temperate climes it’s a month of smells. I miss the seaside but instead of going there this Saturday I summon its essences from adolescent memory especially the aromas: decaying seaweed, ice-cream, sun-tan oil on young women (fiercely guarded by their muscly young men), sweat, cigarettes, decaying crustaceans, hot dogs, dog-dirt, damp sand, unknown smells. All this to a backdrop of glittering ocean in the setting sun, the mournful cries of seagulls wheeling overhead, the constant ebb and flow of waves on shingle—sighing-whispering then cymbal-clash—the very lungs of Creation, breathing life into the Universe. Wafted on the breeze are distant children’s cries, sharp, ecstatic, like shards of coloured glass endlessly shifting in a kaleidoscope, never the same, never different. It’s not today’s seaside I crave but the seaside of days remembered.

In puppydom, I forsake the sanity of the office, of BBC Radio 4, of popular culture, of what I share with family and friends. I go where all is wild and everything is possible.

We can be wild, so long as we hold on to the finger of someone who loves us, docile as a child at a fairground. In a dream the other night, my children were playing by the road but I lost my way trying to park the car and could not find them again, and it would have been hopeless. Dream landscapes don’t stay constant: you can never retrace your steps. Distressed, I woke and realised my children are grown up, not lost at all. Thank God for waking up! It’s the Ariadne thread that lets us explore the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

I do empathize with those on the edge, even those who have fallen into a seeming abyss. Driven mad by deprivation and yearning they may do strange and self-destructive things. Let them, I say, whilst we take steps for the safety of those whom they touch, for we don’t want more hurt to be spread than exists already. Let’s not call people monsters, when all we need is safety from them. I don’t need to be a moralist when I recognise that in drink and drugs and worse things, my brothers and sisters only seek ecstasy and escape, which I have discovered how to find without such self-destructive behaviours.

I see a strange thread connecting my early memories. From the youngest age, it was independence I wanted. I felt that my mother was dragging me round like a dog on a leash whilst she pursued her own ends unable to consider my needs. But as I got older, my focus blurred, for I saw how big was the world. I feared getting lost, having been in cloistered environments: home, boarding school. University was too big but I got used to it, found a pocket of familiarity within it, like family. After University, I was terrified by the hugeness of this trackless waste, the wide world. I don’t know how I can write that part of the story when we come to it. That’s when my sanity became most challenged, a sanity I never lost, taking a dreadful kind of alienation instead.—–

I went walking in the suburbs near work yesterday. I looked for the house of a crystal therapist I had consulted for my illness some years ago. There it was, I found it at last. Perhaps I will phone her next week to tell her I am well now and remember her care. The houses in that little part of the suburb were so finished, so well-kept that I couldn’t imagine living in one. It would be like settling into a silk-lined coffin, still alive. I’ve always felt this way about riches, even modest bourgeois comforts. My life has always been a work in progress, with scaffold-poles erected, piles of bricks and sand alongside.

My needs are simple. They include taking myself for a daily walk like an energetic puppy. I pass a currant-bush and tear off a couple of leaves, to crush them and sniff. Reminds me of living in Holland, in 1947. Thus do I love to lose myself in the present moment.! In this ecstasy, I need nothing and no one, not even a house to live in. I can be a tramp, a beggar, travelling choicelessly. Each venue has its own special charms. People everywhere have hearts of gold, when you look beneath their shapes and the way they treat themselves: they don’t know any better. As in a lucid dream, I can go anywhere and do anything I want. Now I am at the Great Hollands Shopping Centre, a modest square of grass surrounded by modest local shops, a pub and a National Health clinic. This is where the nobodies, the unemployed and the elderly come on the local bus and potter around for a while. Here the graffiti, gracefully adorning the plain shop-backs, give a reminder, a taste of artistic creativity, and the uplift it offers downtrodden consciousness. Here the dropped litter is welcome rebellion from municipal dictatorship. Thus I view the world’s dream, and help dream this dream. For I am a mere wayfarer passing through, striding over the earth’s crust like the giants, and indeed the dwarves, of old.

This one-hour ecstasy further subverts that resolve to write a coherent memoir. For what is memory? What matters my life-story, when little fragments of Now can evoke so much, as if they are pieces of the great puzzle of Life, each redolent with meaning and memory? Everything seems to remind me of something long past, at least in this blessed hour.

I recall a particular place in the grounds of that first boarding-school, where I trod underfoot the fallen leaves of a black poplar tree. I don’t know how I remembered those leaves but in the last year I have been searching for them, just to taste their scent. I discover from the internet that they are rare now in Britain, and they are known for their balsam scent from a sticky secretion of sap. Why do I remember those leaves, when I can hardly remember names or faces?

At the back of the Shopping Centre there’s a pervasive aroma of smoked red-pork: star anise, cassia, citrus rind, ginger. Like an orang-utan sniffing a distant durian-tree, I search my memory for its source. Now I find it, among the Chinese stalls in Kota Kinabalu, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong.

I briefly surmise that I love the present mainly for its evocation of the past. Perhaps nostalgia is all. We seek a golden age that once we knew, or perhaps false memory taunts us with. From this pinnacle of awareness, I perceive I was the same as a child, when I hardly had any past.