My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.
from The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897) preface
It’s been so hard trying to write that I’ve been tempted to try painting again, even if it takes years to do a picture. I have one beautiful view that I see through the window as I type. It’s different each day. At night the streetlights twinkle and the windows glow dimly. In the winter afternoons, the setting sun strikes. I could do hundreds of sketches, studies, close-ups, attempts in different media. What to do with my life? It was nice when I thought I was about to get a job, for then the day seemed like a holiday, a scarce resource of free time about to be used up.
I’ve been reading Joseph Conrad, especially The Nigger of the Narcissus. Every sentence, observation, character-sketch, incident is so exquisite so it is impossible to choose a quote to prove my point—though I have used one above, under the blog title. His writing has more wisdom than a shelf of self-help or spiritual books.
I was looking at someone’s blog. He’s a Buddhist and was talking about it being essential to give up the attachment to material things in order to attain happiness. Though a cliché of the spiritual life, it struck me as extraordinary. I mean, our whole society – I am speaking of life in the West and not some Amazon tribe without contact with Western ways – keeps going on the entirely opposite premiss. No child spontaneously attaches himself to material things. He is ruthlessly trained into it by parents, advertisers and his peers. It is something he has to learn, or get to be a bum who will shame his parents.
I’m very proud of my four children and three grandchildren and their funny ideas like not having TV and sending their children to a Steiner school or educating them at home and thinking it’s fine not to learn reading till 10 years old. Proud of them in spite of those ideas, not because of them. And the younger ones dropping out of university and not being terribly interested in careers. I tell them to find out for themselves how to live. They’ve learned some basics at home in their most formative years.
Am I attached to material things? Definitely. I am hugely grateful for this roof over my head and this computer and the internet and my loving wife and my slowly decaying car —even that one, for when it dies I will have to go and buy another, regardless of my preference to walk or go by bus. I cannot turn my back on the world. I would sooner live and die under a shady tree as I said in my last, but in winter I would need some cardboard boxes and something to keep out the cold; and God (in whom I don’t really believe) has sent me a wife who doesn’t put up with my eccentricities.
I’m attached to persons and things. My own body and the living existence of loved ones. This view. The more I photograph it and try to draw it, the more I will be attached to it, though I know all things will pass.
Clinging to tired old scriptures is so unimaginative. Let it all go. We recreate the basic truths of life in the process of living. If it wasn’t for all the chatter, the noise of commerce, government, politics, religion, advertising, “entertainment”, gadgets, foolishness and junk food (literal and metaphorical) we’d be able to tune into life itself. In fact even with those things around us we can. I do. I don’t sit cross-legged trying to escape my thoughts, but I practise my own principles. I nearly said “practise what I preach”. Do I preach? I hope not. There is too much of that already.