I don’t know if there is anyone, even myself, who can quite grasp what I’m getting at here. Whatever “here” means.
We live over the street and sleep with the window wide open. The street is small and crowded, each house 12 foot wide and joined to the next. At night it’s utterly silent. No traffic, not even a footfall: too quiet really, for a piece of litter scraping on the pavement in the breeze has been enough to wake me. A taxi-driver, returning after a late fare, tip-toes into his house but something creaks at some point, and it echoes down the street. Then on Friday night and Saturday morning the silence is punctuated by the return of revellers, some of those non-Muslims who rent a room on this low-life street, who get paid in cash for their week’s manual work and have been joyously celebrating the fact.
So at 3:58 I decided to get up.
Scot asked, of something in my last post, “Is that a metaphor?” Yes it is, Scot. All of it is metaphor, even though I seldom understand it myself, at the time.
What I write is always inspired by feelings of heightened intensity, which you might want to call “joy”, though they come in so many flavours, that you wouldn’t think they could all have the same name.
My quest is not to chase those feelings, because they can’t be hunted down, at least in my experience. They happen. So I try to understand the circumstances which lead to their birth. (I wonder if there was ever a time when human adults had not discovered the link between sex and babies.)
In my extended researches so far, these feelings—sometimes they are needle-sharp moments of joy or recognition, at others an epiphany which seems to have neither beginning nor end—have something to do with time or memory. The present has to be clearly in focus, without the distractions of anxiety or stress or reluctance to do what one is doing or antagonism to one’s environment. One is gazing as it were over unruffled water—or let me seize the offered metaphor—listening to the silence of the night.
In such moments I am sensitive to the slightest footfall, the tiniest zephyr which ruffles the still lake’s surface. This is when I see clearly how memory interlaces with present experience, layer after layer. It only takes the cry of a starling, a whiff of some acrid smoke, a resin released by the lopping of tree-branches, or the petrichor diffused by rainfall after drought— any of a million triggers.
On wings of memory—but it’s faster than any wings. It’s a bass-line in harmony with the present melody, a background percussion that adds a dimension to the moment of now. Or an echo (but not a déjà-vu moment, that’s a different phenomenon).
The place where memory transports me most often is between the ages of three and seven: especially when I was five. How do I know which? Circumstantial evidence: my life was fractured in those days. I was in Perth, Australia. Then on a ship to England; in my grandparents’ house there; in Holland; back in my grandparents’ house; in my stepfather’s house; at boarding-school; in hospital; out again; back to school. There’s a busy timeline to plot the memories against.
I feel drawn to things which trigger those memories, such as places which haven’t changed, old vehicles, old books, animals, trees, anything or anyone “timeless”. I’ve only to search the archives of this blog—I mean in memory, not literally searching—to find examples of the strangeness of memory. Here’s one, extracted from a post called “Hope” . I wrote it in the third person:
In a well-prepared field a bone-like piece of flint stood alone, thrown up by the plough. His heart leapt up, as it had in a similar moment when he was nine: not for the flint but for hope. He smelt that hope, kneaded it in his hand like the Plasticine they used to model with. What is hope? A vision of what we once knew? These were the questions he asked later, in the stillness of home, when thought was restored.
Perhaps these “moments”—the moments he lived for—were the doors to another world, in which souls were not separate. Or perhaps (he was astonished by the audacity of this idea) his memories and imaginings were the threads binding the world, keeping it full of Hope.
What does it mean, when a flint pebble on the surface of a ploughed field, seen a year ago, reminds me of a similar incident fifty-seven years earlier? Even if you dismiss it as imagination, it’s no less odd. On this occasion I felt that the significance of the sighting was its association with hope, that most intoxicating of feelings.
Feelings are the fixative of memory. And sometimes it seems to me that those feelings, or the seemingly insignificant incidents to which they attach themselves, can be traced to even earlier times. When I relive the five-year-old memories, for example—the smell of grain being winched up in sacks into warehouses, mingled with the smell of chickens roaming wild, pecking up the fallen grains from the cobbled wharf below—they seem to signify something, as if they echo back to something even earlier. Or I have walked along a woodland path, or an exposed hill-ridge, and felt a direct connection with prehistoric wayfarers and hunters.
These are some of the things I find worthy of exploration. Meanwhile, the affairs of the day — the politicians, celebrities, fashions, news stories — seem hollow hearsay. They don’t touch me, don’t ring bells as my senses do, echoing across the expanse of time like a carillon of memory till Kingdom come.
a wayfarer’s notes 
you are in a plasma state. i can see that reflected in your writing cause it's a smooth good whiskey now. only a calm mind who is at peace with himself can write this.
some questions:
do you think this kind of serenity is possible in daily life. or that i have to be retired like you to have enough time to ponder about things all around.
how much time a man can devote to understand himself, the spirit part of it. we are all chasing that illusive security in life that will never come. Obviously, you have some kind of security to fall back so that you can hone your calm lifestyle. you don't need to worry about deadlines. you declare your own deadlines. you dismiss them at your will.
so is this a kind of writing expected from a retired man? were you such sensitive when you were struggling to feed your family?
or is this plain maturity which can only come after going through all the turmoil and realising, as wisemen say, everything is futile?
tell me.
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I can understand exactly how you feel, because I relate to it deeply. Very deeply.
Your writing is smooth, and with its smoothness it touched me like a zephyr of fresh air that this land seldom shows.
At the moment, at least, I have to struggle at times because I find it hard to use the limited vocabulary of our languages to allude to the depths of my feelings. Some of them cannot be put down in words.
But it is comforting to read something like this, when simple words are woven with silk to say so much more than they individually can mean.
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The thing about the affairs of the day is that they are all smoke and mirrors – so… are they even really there to explore?
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As I write this, I sit in an old brick structure, with a wooden roof held high by what appear to be more recently added steel rafters.
It is a Saturday, I am in the office of my new employer, working to meet a deadline set by over-optimistic, technically challenged people that set my agenda.
This is my MaxiRam, a place I have become attached to out of necessity. My time for philosophical pondering is now limited. However, since I am here alone, unwatched, I will take a moment to respond.
Vincent, I may not specifically touch on what you were trying to communicate, but as usual, you trigger my thoughts and my memories with your posts.
This building I sit in was once a warehouse of some kind, retrofitted, re-purposed as office space. The enormous sliding wooden doors are indicative of a very different type of business.
Perhaps it is old enough to have once seen livestock, or perhaps a blacksmith shop.
I am one of the older residents in this place. Young bucks eager to succeed, and brash in their approach surround me.
I have long ago abandoned ambition in favor of living. Distractions associated with building wealth, competition in the office place no longer have a hold on me.
I am struck by the contrast of industrial buildings alongside new condos, and an occasional franchise of the all too common brand.
Laborers, residents (rich and welfare recipients side by side), and office workers share the streets. A curious mix in a town called Emeryville, nestled between Berkeley and Oakland.
This place is not yet found an identity.
My heart rate is slow, I am relaxed. I have had this kind of pressure before. Oddly enough it does not panic me. As my friend Brad would say. “Relax into what must be endured”.
I intend to do just that. And while I am at it, I may take some time to wander among the memories that your post, the music I am listening to, and the strange view that the large floor to ceiling window provides.
Cheers Vincent, keep wandering.
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I guess when I asked the question, I knew the answer. Nice post. I see there is a difference in running to– and wandering–letting what you are truly looking for find you instead of always looking and never really finding it…like I said.
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on winning the race
for vincent
one too many of us
spend our lives
running
running
to find
that perfect
job that
equals
that perfect
life
never crossing the
finish line
finding
the running
never wins the race
few learn
that the wayfarer
walking
s l o w l y
taking
notes
sometimes crisscrossing
the same path for fear
something was missed
lets life
find them
and sometimes
on perfect fall day
when the wind whips
colored leaves into
a miniature tornado
he will sit
quietly on a fallen log
and listen
listen
to the story
as the leaves fall
around his feet
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damn the editing
“on a perfect fall day”
last stanza
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Ghetu, I understand you but I didn't find it easy to answer your questions. In fact I have been brooding for the last couple of days, drafting different answers in my head, such as “I don't know” and more complicated variations.
Now it is turning out into something more interesting and I propose to dedicate a forthcoming post to the investigation of your questions.
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Sumedh, nice to see you here. I was intending to write a comment at least on your latest post in which you declare yourself (speaking of course for us all) in no way superior to an ant. Well, I shall. I often discourse here on slugs: lowly creatures, some think, but vessels like us of the divine. They roam abroad on the pavements round here when it rains, and some humans take pleasure on stepping on them, leaving their mute unprotesting entrails for days. So you grieve about ants, like a Jain?
Let us not: we are all parts of the world-soul which never dies.
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Nick S: even if they are not smoke and mirrors, but factual news harvested by unimpeachable sources, I agree with you that their reality must be doubted.
What I see with my eyes, the dead slug on the pavement, the neighbour who greets me, the alcoholic who belatedly pays back the pound he borrowed from me a fortnight ago in a moment of need, every feeling and idea—these are real.
this sounds neat and plausible but then I actually know that the smoke and mirrors which is convenient to ignore, because life is short, is an emanation of the world-soul too, even while I choose to ignore it, which I mostly do.
And now of course having perused your blog properly, and admired, I know you live in Africa (which I love though having never visited) not Australia, where I was born.
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Charles, may I retrospectively dedicate the post, if not all my posts to you? We can subvert this world of MaxiRams together, simply by discovering dimensions which they refuse to acknowledge ,and dwelling in them secretly.
To abandon ambition in favour of living: think what will happen when this catches on!
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Scot I am so deeply honoured. Never had a poem dedicated to me before. I want to dedicate things now to people personally, it's a lovely thing to do.
“sometimes crisscrossing
the same path for fear
something was missed”
this is precisely what I want to do, with memoirs, with other writing, and of course with the locus of footsteps on the surface of this globe that we love so much.
I read all your posts, all your poems, not commenting often as you may have noticed, but absorbing always, enjoying.
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