from a blog called Fiaschi (unfinished)

In the last few days—I think it’s a week, but it’s hard to keep track of things which creep up on you gradually—these wanderings, I mean the unpublished or even unwritten ideas which precede a new post on this blog, have taken on a more substantial focus, as if I were really planning to go somewhere definite with these words. And now I have the task of trying to explain this to you, from scratch.

All my life, well as far back as I can remember, the inner life has been more important to me than the outer. For example there has never been a time when I was seduced by the lure of riches, even when I made myself miserable with working all hours for the highest fee rates. That was just confusion of soul, a mid-life loss of focus. I’ve made up for that now, letting idle curiosity rather than anxious purpose be the pathfinder. My likes and dislikes, so powerful and irrational, are fully explained by whether or not they foster the inner life. Do I need to explain what the inner life is? It is the mystical; the realm in which you can be reached by angel messengers, and which is unaffected by global warming.

Just as I dislike the word spirituality, which trails around with so many strings attached, some of which drag rusty tin cans at the other end, I pretty much abhor the word mysticism, too. These words divide the world into two: spiritual versus material, mystical versus plain fact. I don’t like the words because they set up boundaries in the wrong place. I don’t want to set material against spiritual, nor mystical against commonsense. Nor should the world of Man be divided into those who do and do not have a spiritual, or mystical “side” to their personalities. Not just Man: any thought which involves making judgements about other creatures is anathema. Or rather, this is one of my powerful dislikes.

These are not trivial matters, dear reader. We have to be careful with words, just as you would not build a great palace with crumbly bricks. Perhaps all we’ll achieve together is a shed, but the rule still applies.

So. Having identified this secret kingdom—the inner life—we now make it public, through sharing. When I physically go wayfaring, it’s to let the inner life sing its own song from the chimney-stack, like a blackbird before dawn. I haven’t been hearing them lately, since describing their dawn song here. I hope they are still around and not wiped out by global warming or eating slugs poisoned by gardeners. The blackbird is not the inner life of course. I rely upon the magic of fresh air, the distinctive human attribute of bipedal motion, or walking, to connect with the inner life, which some prize as mysticism, for it seems to convey the highest joy.

 

 

 

 

All art, literature, film or indeed any human communication depends on us being similar to one another. If I didn’t find a point of agreement with others I would be locked in a terrible solitude. We are alike in wanting first to survive and then to find comfort. Personally I like to visualize these wants in their simplest terms, and live a simple life where I can count my blessings. I am extremely blessed and wish the same for you, O reader known or unknown, for you are like me.This similarity extends to all other sentient creatures and perhaps insentient ones too. I confess to a fascination with all that I meet: spiders and mosquitoes in the bathroom, the black cat who sits on the fence, the snail who climbs high up the wall, almost to the roof (I’ve found out why it does this!) the pigeons who fight in my backyard, the occasional rat: all these present themselves for my inspection, as my study window overlooks the backyard, and beyond that the children’s playground, and then beyond that the road where men, women and children of all races occasionally pass. I’m not separate from any of them and if I were a Buddhist, and some Zen master asked me if any one of them possesses Buddha-nature, I’d answer “Yes!” without hesitation. To step out of my house into this wide world is greater than staying indoors, for then I smell and hear and touch, as well as see. Also I am seen, smelled (by animals at any rate) and heard. Here in the study, looking out, I’m in a bubble of quietude, an ivory tower of privilege, but I must offer myself to the world too, for I am part of it. The black cat sometimes sees me when I look out of the window, for she sits on the fence waiting for someone, my neighbour or me, to let her in, and nothing escapes her alert senses. I don’t know what she sees or what she thinks, but suspect that she sees things even more simply than I, making no judgments except by reference to her own survival and comfort. In her place I’d be no different, even though I have the gift (which is also a burden) to see things more complexly.Suppose there is only one soul between all of us: snail, mosquito, cherry-tree, cat, squabbling pigeons, all ages, sexes and races of humans? It seems to me that what the Hindu sages mean by “Atman is Brahman” is “What we perceive as the individual soul is actually the World-Soul”.In this frame of mind, I started to watch Slumdog Millionaire on DVD. Having never been to Mumbai, I cannot judge the extent to which it reflects the present-day city. The film’s hand-held, on-location style of cinematography surely doesn’t lie, though it shuffles the truth around quite prettily. I accept it as part of the truth of India, even though the director is Irish and the lead actor comes from London. (It seems that aspiring actors in India do body-building to look like heroes and differentiate themselves from slum-dwellers. In the UK there are no slums any more, so looking skinny and vulnerable is no bar to star roles, whatever your ethnicity.)

The soul of the film is to convey through a child’s eyes the cheerful energy animating a child’s quest for survival—and then ultimately, comfort and security. The slum is a place where the dangers are more extreme, but a child can escape them by being more resourceful—and running faster—than adults. It’s a bizarre world but we see through the children’s eyes.

The plot contrivances, and various effects which I understand have been borrowed from the Bollywood genre, are unable to mask the underlying truths, of humanity in general and slums in particular. I have read City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre, from a different decade, different city—Calcutta, different viewpoint, different author. But the slums were recognizably the same. I could pick out the similarities one by one: the physical horrors the inhabitants may endure, the cruelties of the hoodlums, the cheerful kindness of the poor who survive, somehow.

I can well imagine the indignation of civic authorities when the film versions of City of Joy or Slumdog came out. They wanted something closer to Bollywood musicals, or at least something to attract tourists and businessmen.

But this film has depths. I am not referring to the depths of depravity in which slum children are lured to become professional beggars and blinded with a spoon so as to sing more poignantly a famous poem by a blind saint. I mean philosophical depths, but in writing this I may cause you to yawn because that’s not what you look for in a movie. This in itself may cause you to doubt the assertion that begins this piece, that “I am just like you.” That assertion is a philosophical paradox, you see. It would be a pointless truism if the surfaces were not so different. When the black cat and I stare at one another, I think we, each in his own way, realize how unlike we are from one other. The cat seems more shallow than I, but I like to give it the benefit of the doubt, whilst ensuring the windows are not left open for it to enter my house like a cat-burglar.

But we are talking of the film’s depths. It asks the question “How do you know what you know?”, and answers: “From unforgettable experience, burned indelibly into memory”. Slumdog knows the answers through the horrors he’s undergone. That is his education.

I tend to review books or films about a third of the way in, when enthusiasm is still at its peak. It tends to wane a bit after that. A blogger friend published a book and after the first hundred pages I wrote about it in glowing terms. He took my published an extract of my words on his blog. Meanwhile I finished the book and eventually wrote a quite scathing review on Amazon.com (which mysteriously disappeared a day later). I ended up reading the book several times to try and work out why I thought so well of it initially and so badly afterwards. I came to the conclusion that Schopenhauer’s Law of Entropy applied: “If you put a spoonful of wine in a barrel full of sewage, you get sewage.” In the case of Slumdog Millionaire, sewage is rather graphically central to one incident in the plot, so, dear reader, please try and distinguish that from Schopenhauer’s metaphor.

Later, having watched the whole movie

I have to tell you that its early promise of philosophical and scatological depths is not sustained until the end, but upstaged by the romantic subplot woven into the other strands. Not to mention the tension of “Will Slumdog get a question wrong and lose his multi-million rupee prize?” I hoped he would, thus proving the assertion that he didn’t care about money: but it seems I’m in a small minority and the vast throngs of cinema-goers were granted their vicarious joy at seeing him get the money and the girl. Such a denouement left me with the banal suspicion that girl realized she loved him when he won the rupees.

For this philosopher, that teaspoon of sewage, Schopenhauer notwithstanding, wasn’t enough to taint this barrel of fruity yet complex wine.

Easter excites me more than Christmas: not for the long-ago drama of torture, execution and rebirth, but for the immediate signs of rebirth that orchestrate the miracle of Spring. I respect the Christian traditions only because they were respected by my ancestors and formed a backdrop to my childhood. On the day, I woke in a certain excitement, before it was light, like a child at Christmas. But it was an intellectual excitement, perhaps brought on by making myself the disciple of three thinkers: Porphyry of Tyre, AD 233-309; Ali Allawi, a minister in the government of Iraq after the invasion of 2003; Gerad Kite, fashionable London acupuncturist.

What got me out of bed early on Easter morning was realising that I had used newspaper to protect coffee-table and floor whilst I was cutting, joining and varnishing plywood, with the aim of copying a bookshelf. I’d bought the original cheap in a second-hand bookshop and found the ideal position for it on my side of the bed. K wanted one too, not so much for the book-space but for the Art Deco curvaceousness and symmetry, qualities which certainly enhance a bedroom and give purpose to a restless handyman. I’d stacked the paper in a bin for recycling in the front yard, where it was softly drizzling. Would the object of my quest, that remembered interview with the acupuncturist, be a sodden mass of papier-mâché now, or soiled with dark varnish? K stirred but didn’t raise an eyebrow at my intentions, accustomed to the madcap impulses of what I like to call the “creative temperament” (as if it drags me along like an ill-trained puppy).

Fortunately or otherwise, I succumbed to the Internet’s lure before venturing out and getting drizzle on my dressing-gown. Tamely, my fingers did the walking and discovered that the article was available on the newspaper’s web archive. It’s so much less adventurous to find things simply by sitting at a desk. Perhaps I feel this especially because I’ve disposed of an ugly typist’s chair in favour of a traditional Windsor one which gives me backache. How much better to emulate the peripatetic philosophers! To think and talk like Socrates, whilst walking.

What connected Porphyry, Allawi and Kite in my mind was the aim of finding a pivot between the seesaw swinging of opposing ideas. Plato or Aristotle? Militant Islamism or George W Bush? Western scientific medicine or traditional models of health and treatment? Following on from my last post, which danced nervously around the “placebo” concept, I wanted to follow in the footsteps of intellectuals to try and understand better certain dichotomies which rive the world.

What got me going first of all was the quaint notion that students in Paris and elsewhere in the twelfth century were endlessly sharpening their rhetorical skills in passionate disputation about something which Porphyry, in his Introduction (or Isagoge) to the Logical Categories of Aristotle, carefully forbears to determine:

“Concerning genera or species, the question indeed whether they have substantial existence, or whether they consist in bare intellectual concepts only, or whether, if they have a substantial existence they are corporeal or incorporeal, and whether they are separable from the sensible properties of the things (or particulars of sense) or are only in those properties and susbsisting about them, I shall forbear to determine.”

Roger Lloyd, in The Golden Middle Age (1939) remarks that the above sentence “has a vital effect on the course of the history of human thought”, whilst admitting that it “does not look epoch-making: it looks extremely dull.” We shall forbear to add further comment.

Back to the topic of placebo. Gerad Kite was interviewed for the Sunday Telegraph by Ann Murphy so you can easily find the story online for more details, allowing me to summarise rather than quote.

According to Kite, I am healthy when I succeed in being who I am. My symptoms are merely an expression of my body’s complaint against my heedless mind, which careers along in its own imagined trajectory, away from my essential me-ness. He would restore me to health by diagnosing not the particular symptoms—cracks which appear along a weak point which may be congenital—but his understanding of where I have left my proper track. From there, he applies the remedy: sticking some needles in so as to hit the appropriate meridians.

Ah, said the interviewer at this point. There’s been a study which shows that acupuncture works no matter where you stick the pins. Kite gave a cunning reply, acknowledging that the placebo effect contributes 40% to the cure. Add 20% for the patient/practitioner relationship. He insisted that the remaining 40% of a cure was from putting the needles in the right place. He claimed the clinical trials were not relevant to the method he practises. He practises “five element” acupuncture, the elements being earth, fire, water, wood and metal, each representing what Kite calls “a distinct energetic movement within the body, just as there are seasons in nature”.

Now when you talk about seasons it reminds me how I love this Spring! It only happens in regions where there is also Winter. Nature works with the materials it has, and its own creative temperament, to fashion this miracle we call life in the world.

I’m still looking for a pivot, so far undefined, which makes our medical systems into a seesaw: science-based medicine at one end, traditional therapies like acupuncture at the other—different schools of thought which don’t connect in a unified field theory. Why not? Where do I find the answer?

I don’t know how much this bothers you, but I’d like to understand what happened to me four years ago, when I was cured instantly of an illness which had plagued me for thirty years—with no subsequent relapse. Placebo? Depends what you mean by that word. Something that touched the right spot, with words, no needles.

I’ll talk about Ali Allawi, and more about Spring, in my next.

There is nothing to do. It’s absurd to look for yet more change, to get out of the alleged mess. I use my five senses and all the other ones too. The mess is a miasma perceived by those who perceive it.

The problems were caused by too much change, too fast. They won’t be solved by more of the same. I know it’s tempting when we get lost, that is to say when we find ourselves in the wrong place, to go faster to get out of there.

There isn’t really any progress: not in the sense of betterment. That’s all propaganda. Really, we are passengers in a cab, in no hurry for our destination—what else is it but death? But we picked a cab whose driver, let’s call him Capital or Finance, whips the poor horse, let’s call it Economic Growth, in unnecessary competition against the other drivers, till the poor thing drops dead between the shafts. Oh but, you say, technology has taken us beyond the Hansom cab; we are no longer sallying forth from Baker Street with Sherlock Holmes and Watson! An elementary observation indeed. Is this cause for self-congratulation?

Things change, that’s their nature. But it’s better not to flog the slow horse.

The young always want to change the world, always rebel against their parents’ world, they say. This is propaganda from those with no cultural memory. Read Kipling, Conrad, T. H. White, Belloc (I won’t interrupt this diatribe with references or quotes): they all speak, nostalgically for the most part, of the challenge of human skills and trades. For myself, I count myself not a man if my only accomplishments are to think thoughts and tap this keyboard. I must saw, forge, sculpt, weld, rivet, dig, sow, enrich, harvest. Or sail tall ships (sadly they are no more); engage in falconry, archery, jousting. Anything to avoid becoming a scoundrel, whether of the politician, lawyer, journalist or clergy type. I could add almost any desk-bound profession.

If we can’t do this—I mean, wind the clock back—and it’s clear we can’t, then Nature will do it for us: nothing easier for Nature than to cut off a few of the basics on which our complacency has depended.

Yes, I’m nostalgic for a Golden Age; that perennial mirage of old men looking back to their childhood—selectively of course. There’s a pleasure in that, and a sense of passing down a torch of continuity from a distant past: remembering the best, shunning the most hellish parts. It’s a form of natural selection running in parallel with the genetic, Darwinian one.

But the most important selection is to pick the golden moments from the day and dwell in that vision, as a whale dwells in the vast ocean, subsisting on invisible plankton. To reduce it to a word, my recipe for salvation, individual or global, would not be change, but awareness.

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