“When I was someone else, that I am not now …” continued.
Let us assume that each one of us contains multiple personalities. Vincent exists in the written word, is not quite the same as his author, who inhabits other dimensions never written down. Vincent is several persons, separated by time-slices, spliced together into fragments of literature.
Here is a new garment fabricated from a voice-recording of wayfaring Vincent; stitched and embroidered by seamstress Vincent; the wayfarer’s words in italics and the whereforer’s in ordinary type. Both are merged in a single “I”; but the personal “I” is a fragment of the universal “Everyman”, in which my reader and I may briefly unite, till we switch from the illusion of unity back to the illusion of separateness.
I trudge up the hill, with Psalm 121 in my head, to a tune by Beethoven: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills: from whence cometh my help”. I don’t know what is happening, except that I let my feet do the walking, and they take me up this hill where I can gaze down at the valley where I live beside the Mosque. Gulls circle round overhead, for they don’t just haunt the seashore. They come inland to this scruffy industrial town where junk food remnants are strewed on road and pavement. They swoop down to clean up what is supposedly harmful to humans, but evidently produces graceful birds.
You can get a good view from here, but photography [I might have said “topography”] gives no clue to the reason for undertaking a climb this steep. I don’t have a reason. My indoor thought, before I tasted the fresh air, was to take the valley path and save my legs. That way I can walk miles. [sound of panting] But when I let my feet take me where they want [indistinct mumbling] . . .
Up here, higher, I see more red kites in the sky than ever before. These birds were almost extinct a few years ago. I think someone up here feeds them meat scraps. There are eight, their flight is different from gulls, they float on the thermals, their great wings stretched motionless; but I can’t see them all at once, have to crane my neck round to count them.
My feet are like pendulums, swinging effortlessly to where they want to take me, gaining a special strength from obeying their own will, not my mind’s.
This is what a wayfarer does. Like an animal, he follows his instinct. He trusts it.
My mind doesn’t understand the territory this takes me to, when my feet go their own way. But there is no reason why my mind should not learn to understand.
[I felt it was a kind of shamanic journey, one I was learning slowly, without a teacher: how to enter a different world, not in a trance, but in a state of mind unsuited to the struggles and complexities of external life in 2009 …]I pass the home of a friend . . . [interrupted at this point by a passer-by, asking for directions. I switch off the recorder.]
A young man accosts me, asking if I know where there’s a chip-shop. “Yes,” I say, “you go down that road, till you see a pink stretch limo, if it’s still there. [Such cars can be found in this country, always left-hand-drive, imported from the States, hired out for weddings and suchlike]. You’ll come to a little row of shops, including a Chinese take-away that sells fish and chips.”
I enter the “Disraeli Wood: National Trust”. I’m looking for the Disraeli Monument. But in no time I get lost, as in the beginning of Dante’s Inferno.
Midway along our road of life I woke
to find myself in a dark and secret wood
for I had lost the narrow path.
Perhaps my feet will take me into some metaphoric Inferno. Everywhere I look, squirrels dash for cover against my approach. Few birds sing: it’s eerily quiet. In the distance I hear a dog barking persistently. Perhaps it is Cerberus and I am entering the underworld. I descend through a kind of shallow ravine. Surely there will be a path, and it will take me somewhere. Never mind the Monument. I’ve seen it enough times.
Four years after the instantaneous cure of my chronic illness, I can walk anywhere, without fear of sudden exhaustion. So today I celebrate the conquest of fear, letting my feet dictate the journey. A small sign tells me I am on the National Trust “Boundary Walk”. I’ve never been this way before, but it’s a good path. Now it emerges from the wood to a vista of fields and rolling hills.
[This metaphor didn’t occur to me at the time, but my Wayfarer’s Notes have been “boundary walks”. Each new post sets a new boundary. I’m interested in the edges of experience, not the obvious mainstream.]
And I see that [pauses] . . . all my writings till now . . . have been just to get things out of the way so that, just as today I let my feet choose their route, my fingers, as it were, will choose what to write. I’m inspired enormously and subconsciously by the pathfinding lead of Fernando Pessoa. We journey on—by “we” I mean I hope my reader will come with me.
I’ve used this blog to practise writing, sometimes to try and tell all: everything that happens now, everything I remember from childhood, even when it was painful—and much of it was. [I meant to add that it doesn’t matter now, let the memories go unrecorded; perhaps one day they will be unremembered, by reason of dementia. But there is always more. The Creator endlessly creates. Let me endlessly rejoice in today’s new Creation.]
And now, I think of immortality, and not only don’t believe it, but don’t feel any need for it. I shan’t be immortal, not in soul nor in works. To be erased completely, leaving no trace, will be fine. Pessoa left his writings in a trunk, to the mercy of fate. As it happened they were discovered, edited, published, translated. I’m grateful, for he’s shown me how to put things into words which I never thought possible.
[Here it was as if my aimless journey—aimless to my mind, instinctive to my legs—reached its destination: a central paradox which I felt solves the enigma of immortality . . .]
Every moment is so full that it’s no sacrifice to let it go. This is life’s bounty. Those who experience a few grains of gold, painfully panned from the river of time, in which it is far outweighed by mud; those are the ones who hang on to life, and yearn for immortality. But those who have seen the infinite in a moment, who see that it’s no mud, but gold and jewels, every bit of it, constantly renewing itself, a kaleidoscope—how could they fear death?
[I didn’t end there, I droned on about this and that—the imminent rain, features of my route home and so forth. Now Vincent the seamstress, the whereforer, takes out the scissors and lets the unwanted fabric drop limply to the floor.]
a wayfarer’s notes 