The Ventilator Cowl

I lay in a morning bath recalling Mid-December last year, when I used to go wayfaring in stout boots, regardless of the chilly weather and leaden skies: all senses alert like my ancestors the prehistoric hunters. From Gore Hill, I’d look down on Amersham as if I had stumbled on civilization for the first time, trying to make sense of it. From a mired meadow-bottom I’d visualise the farm-labourers of old, their lowly rank unchanged from the days of Robin Hood till the Industrial Revolution, going cap-in-hand humbly to church, contemplating Advent, singing carols about the holly and ivy and sheep that they knew so well, and the glory that shone around when the angel announced the news of “Goodwill, peace to men”. Perhaps one of those labourers, or even a shepherd in his innocence and humility, had also seen a great light, and felt an angel-presence, in a meadow-corner where the lie of the land and the trampling of cattle through a gate had mired the track till it was impassable. In a little church heated only by human bodies, the steam of their breath and the voice of their hearts would rise to Heaven as the only present they could give; and their hearts would be filled as the only present they received. This year I gaze out the window from my cosy cottage, and feel less inclined to go out. I keep this place shipshape while wife and daughter go out to work. I’m both steward and first mate on this ship whose bow-wave faces the flow of Time and trims her sails to the winds of Fortune.

Lying in the stillness of that warm bath, I found indoors evocative too. Distant water-pipes sang and jangled, alive with purpose, evoking my six weeks of shipboard life: Fremantle to Tilbury in June 1946. I was four so I didn’t feel it as a journey. I lived permanently on shipboard, almost independent from my mother. The ship fed me and kept me safe. Each of the war brides imagined having a little boy like me. Their petting and sweet-talking I don’t recall directly, only that I felt safe to wander alone everywhere: “alone” meaning without my mother and therefore meaning “free”. Certain things bring back the feeling of that six-week lifetime: anything which triggers the memory of that constant vibration, in a melange of different rhythms. I suppose I had got quite used to it but when we crossed the Equator, the order was given to switch the engines off, and assemble crew and passengers on deck to enact the rituals of King Neptune, and games on deck. I just picked this up from BBC website: Traditionally presided over by “King Neptune and his Royal court”, the ceremony was part of an initiation into “The Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep”. It was exactly like that. The ship was still and silent. Then the great engines went back on, setting the rivet-studded bulkheads a-drumming, and the pumps and fans a-spinning within the vast cathedral-organ of water-pipes, steam-pipes and air-ducts. I never understood what the ventilator cowls were, those painted warm things rising out of the deck with their open horizontal mouths; but now I know they were to blow out the smells from below deck over our heads: diesel fuel, bleach, disinfectant, vomit, sewage.

I’ve covered these topics in other blog posts, for example: Outsider, In the Bleak Midwinter, Ship of Dreams. So why do I bring them up again? It’s to ground myself, to get in touch with reality as a sensual animal in an environment. I cannot be a satisfactory philosopher unless I am also a poet, not in the versifying sense but the Wordsworthian sense, recollecting emotions (that is, feelings) in tranquillity.

To be grounded in reality, yours and mine, is the prerequisite for a discussion about Illusion which I’d like to initiate. What is real? What is illusion? It won’t be a sterile debate. We will get to the very guts of this important topic. Is illusion essential to life as a human being?

When I think of this cottage as a ship, an adventure-space like the one I voyaged on at four years old, I feel content to stay indoors. Illusion is my invisible friend.

10 comments:
ourladybeth♥ said…

I wonder. Was your “six week lifetime” on ship the only time during childhood in which you felt such freedom?
Reality vs. Illusion – Can they actually be separated from one another? Human memory is fallible. What we recall from the earliest of childhood can only be described as bits of reality. We fill in the blanks with illusions of our own making. Because of this, I believe that reality and illusion are forever intertwined.

Vincent said…
In answer to your first question, perhaps it was the high point of my physical freedom but I had a history before and after that time of wandering off independently. In those days children of four or five were put on buses unaccompanied, went to school unaccompanied. At least I did.
Well, certainly I agree with you that reality and illusion are forever intertwined but I suggest the journey of discovery is going to be more interesting than that conclusion. Or to quote myself from the other day: questions are alive, answers are dead! But you are straight there, Beth.
The big thing will be to define reality. Then illusion will by definition be its opposite.
I recall that the Upanishads declare that all “this world of appearances” is Maya, illusion. SO then, what is reality? Others would put it the other way: that Indian speculation from long ago is illusion and the Stock Market is reality.

Hayden said…
ah well, I’ll throw my vote for “all is illusion and madness!”
approximations, it’s the best we can do.
Jim said…