Ant vs. sluggard

Posted on by Vincent

factory

A factory near my house now demolished &
replaced by a block of flats with this plaque

After my last post, you may be wondering what happened to the green slug? Has it yet found its way back into the kitchen yet after being flung to the other end of the back yard? Reader, I have to confess that I’ve blocked the hole where it climbed up to the unkempt corner of twisting gas and water pipes. In fact that whole area is now grandly panelled, in “beech effect” veneer, to match the existing fittings. If the weary slug returns, it will have to turn round and go back. That’s if slugs remember their previous routes: it’s not a subject I have researched. Perhaps like many other creatures they follow their nose. Like them, I have followed my instinct and made slow progress, blundering through life’s obstacles at a snail’s pace. At boarding school we would take turns at morning prayers to read a single verse from a great and ancient Bible, a masterpiece of typography and printing. We had to go to the Hall the evening before, find the verse, rehearse our performance and mark the page with a slip of paper. I recall reading this out, from the book of Proverbs.

Go to the ant, thou sluggard! Consider her ways and be wise.

Perhaps I absorbed the wrong message, for I have gone to the slug, and dawdled, and followed my nose. Unlike the ant, I have been innocent of prudence and team spirit. Oh yes, I have imitated her anxious busyness more than enough, part of the network of frantic workers who give the world a spurious sense of purpose. But the only wisdom has come from slugginess.

Walking at dusk, I hear the full-throated melodies of a blackbird atop a telegraph pole amongst old factories. Things haven’t changed much here since they were built. When the sun goes down, men are freed from toil and loiter in the precious interval before another set of cares begins. The light changes and there is a hushed expectancy, a blessedness in the air that everyone surely feels. I’ve seen old photos, men smoking pipes on a summer evening under a spreading tree, just standing in the street: perhaps waiting to meet a friend, or just unwilling to spend the evenings in lonely lodgings. For in those days they were not cursed with the gift of television. Here, on a chilly March afternoon, you are more likely to see those lonely souls huddled in a car, but waiting all the same. It’s a different generation, immigrants have taken over the territory and been assimilated, but the granite kerbstones are the same. At the basic level, it has always been simple enough. Grow up, get a job—you need a wage to survive. If you can, learn a trade, take an apprenticeship. Only with bourgeois pretensions do the complications arise.

My headmaster asked me “What do you want to be when you grow up?” when I was 10 and then again at 11. It was over dinner at boarding school. I know I puzzled him, being bright but disturbingly different. He tried to punish me out of a trajectory that he diagnosed as latent homosexuality. (Well, if he was right, the beatings and detentions worked, for I am a stranger to that viewpoint.) I replied “a cook” the first time. He ridiculed me. The second time I said “a missionary” and he teased me. When I left university I was too terrified by the wide world to have any idea of what to be. These days it would be labelled a mental illness, and I couldn’t really say when I recovered from it, though I am certain that I have, at any rate now.

I seem to have inherited characteristics from both stepfathers. One (David) worshipped the outdoors, the sun, physical fitness in harmony with Nature. As I grow older I seem to be following his example. The other stepfather, Blackett, was an engineer by training and handyman by hobby, always designing and inventing . Lately I myself have been doing little else. Home construction projects have absorbed so much of my creative impetus that I’ve had little left for writing, it seems. No, that’s not right. I could have happily written a book about those projects, copiously illustrated; with chapters on the techniques I have learned, the materials I’ve used (solid elm, beeswax, turpentine, oils, varnishes, particle-board, different kinds of bricks and mortar). As I may have said previously, I was endlessly proud of any little success, and stung by failures till I could learn from them. And what of the art of writing? Again, to repeat myself—and there is a joy in retreading one’s own well-worn path—writing is a kind of engineering. Well, it feels that way. I could swear it uses the same parts of the brain, when I organize the words for the sense to flow through; when I check the juxtapostion of images and ideas; when I try out different sequences and edit out superfluities. The inspiration itself comes from a mysterious source, and even the technique passes from being laboured and experimental to something that looks after itself.

a view of the newly-opened Eden Centre in HIgh Wycombe, 10 minutes walk from home oln the Desborough Road

The handyman tasks are useful and they develop my skills and confidence. With a small leap of faith, I suppose I can say the same about the writing, but part of me thinks of it as just something to do whilst sitting down indoors. O Summer! Please come! Then at least I can write under the open sky. I have applied to an elderly people’s charity as volunteer handyman. The objective is to do little projects in people’s houses so that they can stay living at home longer and not have to lose their independence, like Abe Simpson, Homer’s father, in his “retirement castle”.

another view. The grassy meadow at the back is the site of a disused gas works

If I must be indoors I want to see good design successfully implemented. Which brings me to a recent event which has transformed this town. For three years a monstrous building site has got in everyone’s way, a place of cranes and dust and hundreds of migrant workers in hard hats, some of them lodging in our street. Suddenly in a single day it was no longer a construction site, but a grand shopping centre with its own streets, cafés, cinema, bowling alley and milling crowds of grateful visitors. The bus station (see my recent post) was till recently the only part yet open: but a vital part as now the town will be worth visiting from all the outlying villages. I tend to be an old curmudgeon, equally suspicious of crowds and anything new. So I was surprised at my positive reaction to the place, even though there’s nothing in it of use to me—except as a thoroughfare on my way to somewhere else. I’m just glad it’s a success, after the town has waited for it so long. The monstrosity, the ugly duckling, has turned into a beautiful swan—apposite because the swan is the town’s symbol. The layout, the pedestrian streets within the centre, fit with the existing town to bring it together and make it coherent, unified.

It’s called Eden, a name that was scoffed at by the press for being unimaginative. But they’ve made something of it, and used imagery of a hummingbird and hibiscus flower. The department store, one of those luxurious places which has nothing but perfume counters on its ground floor, staffed by elegantly untouchable young women, has a sign on its escalator: “Temptations on every level”. Here, Adam and Eve can experience the Fall of Man, again and again.

Oh well, the parts of the world don’t seem to add up to a coherent whole, so I am stuck with lesser joys, when things fit together and projects are completed. If only I could, like Aquinas and Calvin, have faith in a Grand Architect of the Universe!

17 thoughts on “Ant vs. sluggard”

  1. how do you discover the point where a slug enters? I have never been able to figure out how they get into my kitchen.I like the way you describe your writing as a piece of engineering and yes I do try out different ways of saying things until I am happy that it flows well. Once begun I do find that it does take care of itself. Often I have no idea what I am going to write until I have written the first sentence, once that is done I just follow where my words take me.It surprises me when I use words that I wasn't aware I knew but they just fit into the piece as though they were always meant to be there and the piece would not be complete without them.

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    1. I’m delighted to discover that Lady in Red’s profile is still up on the Web here
      https://www.blogger.com/profile/02835625473505921821
      with this (date last updated not known)

      About me Divorced mother of four boys in my mid forties, Cancer survivor, slowly changing my life for the better. this blog will reflect my journey. Love, life, humour, heartache its all a part of me.

      To which I append this open letter:

      Dear Lady in Red
      I cannot imagine how you would find your way here but if so, I’m glad to know that you’re still alive, and hope you are still a cancer survivor, as am I

      and links to 3 blog sites still up for viewing:

      http://mrsexyblueeyes.blogspot.com/ last update in Dec 2012
      http://battletofindmyself.blogspot.com/ last update in July 2011
      http://kindredperverts.blogspot.com/ last update in March 2010

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  2. Well, there was a big hole near the skirting board with slime trails all around, but I don't know that I have blocked off all the entrances – used polycell foam in an aerosol.

    I'm scanning your posts now, looking for any words that you might not have been aware that you knew. Do you have an internal index that tells you whether you have ever used a word before, & if so whether you wrote it or spoke it, and how you pronounced it? That happens for me. Words are a world in themselves. And for some people, numbers are like that.

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  3. I think I just store words up in my subconcious. then when I need them they are just there. perhaps it comes from being an avid reader in my younger years. Perhaps it comes from growing up with radio four, of having parents who used a wide vocabulary. Of growing up being the child sitting in the corner listening to the grown ups in preference to playing with my peers. My second son is the number cruncher, he lives for numbers, by the age of 10 he was nicknamed statto, he was identified as a gifted child for his mathematics when he was just 6. Now aged 17 he is studying further maths and pure maths at college with a view to taking a maths degree at Oxford.

    If you click on the pitures on my most recent post you will have a better idea of where they were taken. On the horizon you can see the area you wrote about in the very first post of yours that I read. If I had taken a picture facing west you would have been in no doubt of the part of the coastline I was on.

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  4. Aha, I had thought that, but I was used to being on the other side, and so didn't recognise it! Also the close up of your beach did not look like north coast of IW.

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  6. This post has inspired me to write one of my own. Yes, I know, I post infrequently. When I do, it is often inspired by your writings.

    I have been so busy, I have had little time to interact with my virtual friends.

    The days have finally begun to feel longer and the weather has been lovely. Inviting me outdoors more often.

    Away from the dark cave in which I interact via keyboard and mouse to perform acts of magic for clients, and engage in banter with virtual communities.

    I do feel the occasional draw to come back and document the experiences, if for no other reason to provide a means of capturing them for later enjoyment.

    I will do so soon.

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  7. Superb Vincent! Fine Art again, and really a beautiful piece. I hope you aren't offended, but I think some hard and non-aesthetic writing, no matter the outcome, can give us greater access to inspiration and greater ease of true artistic productions. I base this on my own experience. As a painter I have made many terrible paintings, really bad, even ugly, but in all those endeavors gone rotten, I sensed gain, growth, and so counted them worthy even when not enjoyed or found fulfilling or right even. I think too, that art mirrors life, mistakes are part of growth to something better than before.

    This piece has so many open avenues for me, it is almost impossible to comment on them all.

    The place and value of insects in nature, their differences and those whys.

    The great sensitive and magnificent paragraph on the workers and the atmosphere of the day and evenings, very feeling and very communicative of the universality of life and its' truths. Wonderful reading, excellent telling, very sensitive Vincent, in form and content.

    It is hard for me to imagine you as bewildered, ever, lol. Maybe we are all bewildered at the threshold of adult responsibility, some just hid it better.

    The paragraph that ends in the description of art production, that is also a masterpiece of telling, again, so sensitive and real and gave me a sense of myself thru time.

    The portion about the new structure, the monstrosity named eden, lol, I can't quit laughing, a laugh of pleasure tho, magnificent use of language and realization of your own reality and feeling.

    As to the Grand Architect, time will tell, or not, nothing to worry about. And there is always things to do where unity and cohesiveness can be seen and enjoyed, a little is a lot and just as enjoyable.

    Like we said in the comments on your last post, yes, there is certainly a place for our Art forms and their practise, you certainly are proof of that. I hope you enjoyed writing this as much as I enjoyed reading it Vincent. Thanks for the pleasure.

    See you later.

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    1. Jim wiped out most of the content of his blog not long after his comment above. The Wayback Machine can’t help. It’s a total mystery and no one has a clue. I’ve made a few guesses over the years but none of them indicate a happy outcome.

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  9. Vincent, I think you've touched on something here. You mentioned: “The inspiration itself comes from a mysterious source, and even the technique passes from being laboured and experimental to something that looks after itself.” I think this is quite like the little place of solitude of the working class leaving their employ, just before heading to the next set of toils. If the wisdom presented in the Bible is to be believed, we are designed in an image of our creator. In this sense, we are designed to create… in whatever way we can. Be it visually, verbally, architecturally, whatever… we are generally the most content when we find ourselves in situations where we can effect our talents and gifts to useful purpose.

    Good stuff! Thanks for sharing.

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  10. Tim, thanks for your comment. I do revere the Bible as a sacred object but I don't go as far as believing it.

    But I very much like “we are all designed to create”. I don't find inspiration in the idea that we are made in the image of our creator, but prefer the idea that one piece of the creation resembles every other, and that the creator is immanent in the creation. This makes it possible to love others not excluding slugs.

    Ghetu, your 3 words mean a lot thanks.

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