This was written in the early Nineties and published on a website, before the dawn of blogs
Cloistered all day, I had forgotten once again that an outside world existed. In a windowless office I saw no seasons, no day, no night. There was only harsh lighting, never switched off. The shock of emerging into the open air hit me afresh every evening. The street was like a canyon, with a river of people streaming towards Bank Station.
I had to fight against the current of tributaries converging on Fenchurch Street Station. Though more famous as a square on the Monopoly board, this was where I worked, at least in the building constructed over its platforms. Stretched above the seething canyon was an improbable indigo canopy. Its colour and the intensity of its ultra-violet rays, even in this hour after sunset, bathed me in a glow as if to say “Welcome back to the real created world”. Even here in this place devoted to Mammon was the darkening winter sky, the same which loomed above ploughed fields, Chiltern villages, the prehistoric Ridgeway path. Starlings, even, chattered amongst the trees of Railway Place here in the City of London. I flowed with the human river along Fenchurch Street and across Gracechurch Street. Here was the massive wall, of granite ashlars, bearing Barclays carved spread-eagle and housing the Bank’s head office(1).
words SPOKEN BEAUTY were written there. Who had written these words which suddenly echoed my unspoken thoughts? When I looked more closely there was only an indistinct scrawl, some trivial graffiti, I don’t even remember what it said. A poet had perhaps left a message for the contemplation of a discerning few who hurried past this spot. The message, once conveyed, had vanished. Science and technology have neither theory nor patience to spare for evanescent phenomena.They wrap the garbage tidily in a suitable name, such as illusion or coincidence, and dispose it out of sight. The rules of their game insist on it. So I can play my game, with my rules. These say that events which are unexplained, unrepeatable and subjectively perceived to boot, are precious to me, when I say they are. I think that’s about 50% of what poetry is. The other 50% is being able to share that.Thanks to a habit of scribbling notes on the Tube, I can relate my first reactions and circumvent the possible distortions of memory. This is how I recorded the happening a few minutes after:
I thought for a moment the scribble said SPOKEN BEAUTY. And then in a flash came this image of something written but so beautiful & it existed as a precious manuscript, never copied. Maybe not an illuminated manuscript, but done on parchment and with full appreciation for the special nature of both content and presentation.
And the subject matter? The experience of a joy. Co-existing in this world with the common routine and the mass of people … And in that moment I almost felt, in a flash, a very definition of beauty.
I went on to write of some special characteristic which I felt to exist in my fellow passengers on the Tube—proof if it were needed that on this occasion something fairly rare was happening, whether within me or externally is not my affair to distinguish. That’s the beauty of making your own rules with no allegiance to scientific orthodoxy. And a couple of weeks later (for the dates are recorded as well) I wrote:
“Three in the afternoon on the last day in January… there’s a light drizzle falling in Fenchurch Street … a blessed time and a blessed place to be. A billboard proclaims a record pools win(2). I’m glad it’s for someone else: if for me, my joy in the shiny pavements, my joy without reason, could be disturbed.” On this occasion, I recorded “just” a feeling—no suggestion of magic occurring in the “outside” world. And it might have been forgotten entirely, for I seldom used to re-read these notebooks, which in any event were scarcely legible, due to the motion of the train and a cramped position (sometimes standing crushed against other passengers with scarce room to hold a notebook open). But I happened to go through the notebook yesterday and a few words descriptive of yet another experience leapt from the page. The event took place at lunchtime where humanity flows more in eddies and backwaters, in search of a sandwich or a pint of English beer. The back entrance to my office gave on to a street named Crutched Friars. This has cobblestones and passes under a railway arch, which has the Cheshire Cheese pub embedded in its vaulted wall. Opposite this pub, there was a low flat roof attached to the railway bridge, just by the little street called Savage Gardens. A few weeds grew on this roof languishing so desolate and unprofitable that you knew that the place was simply biding its time for some major redevelopment. Some fragment of soul seemed to tangle in this spot, like an evoked memory of childhood. Just as if they had been written on a wall in chalk, the words LIFE IS NOT IMPAIRED were presented to some inner sense. My notebook of that day remarks merely:
“Breakthrough to another world. The spot on Crutched Friars: LIFE IS NOT IMPAIRED. The flash of intuition that went with it.”
Impairment can attack any body, any faculties. We insure against it but it comes anyway. Death is final, irrevocable and total impairment. It strikes in all the realms that we perceive: financial institutions, Mother Nature, every human existence. Health and wholeness is a temporary flowering in every lifecycle. But, said this inner voice, Life (itself) is not impaired.
It was certainly on that occasion that I wondered, if not for the first time, about “sacred places”. Incidents since then have encouraged me to attempt a definition. A place is sacred when it acquires associations, for no discernible reason at all, which then intensify in memory or on revisit: and these associations are such as to enrich the soul. When expressed this way it’s not so weird, for we can trace it through diverse cultures. The Zen poet Bashô wandered about Japan in the seventeenth century visiting shrines and composing haikus of seventeen syllables to record “the floating world”(3). Their appeal can be more easily shared than explained:
With a bit of madness in me,
Which is poetry,
I plod along like Chikusai
Among the wails of the wind.(4)
Whether the things I bring are worth sharing, I cannot tell. Each of us has our own discoveries to make. Isn’t this the only learning, the only true experience? Certainly that’s what Rousseau says in Émile. Maybe a true tale can be told to move another soul. But what you find is unique and for you, whether shared or not. Do our finds originate from the world or ourselves?
Notes(1) Bank’s head office: Since pulled down and replaced by a new Head Office. Incidentally, I am struck by the parallel between the scrawl I saw on Barclays Bank wall and the sign displayed to Harry Haller in Herman Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf: “Why have his letters been playing on this old wall . . . why were they so fleeting, so fitful and so illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in catching several words on end. They were: MAGIC THEATRE: ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY . . . FOR MADMEN ONLY!
(2) Record pools win: Before the National Lottery, people fuelled their dreams with a bet on the Football Pools. Their chances were tiny but considerable publicity was given to the big winners.
(3) Haiku: See Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Penguin Classics).
(4) Chikusai: “the hero of a comic story … a quack more experienced in provoking laughter than in medicine”. (op.cit.)
(5) Chestnut blossoms: I later found that the life-affirming qualities of chestnut blossoms had spoken also to others. This comes from The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Imagination by Robert Grudin:As a young man, the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was deported to Auschwitz. His medical background made him useful to the authorities, who employed him to attend the sick and dying. Among the many stories he tells of those times is one that serves for him as a special example of “inner greatness.” It concerns someone who was fatally ill. He relates:
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here – I am here – I am life, eternal life.’”
On 7th May 2006, in the time of chestnut blossom in Buckinghamshire, my thoughts again turned to this wonderful phenomenon of nature, and discovered that Anne Frank had been succoured by it, when she was stuck in her secret annex, and “her” tree is now revered in its own right, with its own dedicated webcam, and experts struggling to save its life or take grafts to ensure its renaissance if they fail.
On May 13, 1944 Anne wrote in her diary: ‘Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It’s covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year.’
See the Anne Frank Tree website.
On the inspirational qualities of chalked inscriptions, a reader from Australia sent in the following:
Your story reminded me of a man in Sydney, long gone. In the last years of his life, he dedicated himself to chalking an inscription on pavements all over Sydney. A poor man, almost illiterate, he managed to write in a perfect copperplate script the one word “Eternity”. In this single word he intended to proclaim God’s glory, and to remind all who saw it that life holds a greater secret than normally meets the eye. It seems that people were indeed reminded! They recall him with affection and reverence as if he were a great man and on 1st January 2000, as part of Sydney’s Millennium celebrations the word was proudly hung from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. [It remained there to celebrate the closing of the Olympic Games in the same year.]
a wayfarer’s notes 
Another of your trademarked meanderings, such a joy to read, Vincent!
Next time I've the chance I'll look for the horsechestnut blossom. I remember a tree from my childhood that I adored for the marvelous, shiny nuts it threw. They were barter though inedible, a joy to hold or squirrel away in my pocket, already bulging with stones and bits of wonder. But the branches were high and I was close to the ground, I never wondered what happened way up there above me.
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I studied your photos, particularly those of the Streets; I wanted to jog personal memories. These were places I had walked many times, places I have been to in recent years. They change, yet somehow, they do not. There are still seething masses at certain times of day during Monday to Friday. Where they change, I become a stranger in my own land looking for other elements of familiarity. Is it truly in bricks and mortar; the pavements on which we walk; the trains in which travel?
Hanwell; my mind flashed to the roads leading to the A4 and westwards. Above my computer I have a print of a picture of a beautiful classical structure, alas no longer to be seen. It was destroyed in a fire. Your chestnut being built upon is not just a sad loss, but an allegory of other losses too.
Back to Hanwell, that built up location where I attended my first party; where a friend lived when she married, and where she died.
Vincent, you evoked so many memories and thoughts with this post.
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ZACL, it was my mistake in wrongly implying that the chestnut tree was pulled down. It was the old Barclays Bank head office, where I saw the chalk inscription. I've altered the post to show better what references relate to what text.
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Hayden, in England boys used to play the game of “conkers” – threading a mature horse-chestnut (which everyone still calls a conker) on to a string and mounting championships: one boy holds his string like a pendulum and the other one swings his to hit the other one. They carry on till one conker breaks and the other is the winner, becoming a “oner”. After two victories it is a “twoer” but of course it gets gradually weakened. When the craze struck we tried various ways to prepare and strengthen a prized conker, such as baking it in the oven steeping it in vinegar and so on.
The other thing to do with them was as you say to fill your pockets and simply collect them, for the deep “chestnut” colour and the shine. I still have the urge to pick them up and do that.
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….nevertheless, Vincent, the memories have been evoked, by a lovely meander through time and place.
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I see that Wikipedia has an elaborate article on conkers.
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…and that there is a World Conkers Championship held annually in an English village. Surely England leads the world in whimsy. How about Scotland, ZACL? I know they have some strange sports there at the Highland Games.
Lovely meanders through time and space are always possible—in the limitless realm of imagination. One day perhaps that's all we'll have left and then some time later, pfft! The candle is put out.
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In Scotland…….putting the shot is probably the nearest to a conker competition. Putting the shot is a good bit larger and an awful lot heavier.
On the other hand, the farm labourer who sometimes putts swedes (rutabaggas) across a 6 feet chain link fence does pretty well at that too.
We don't have many trees where I live, the weather is too harsh. Further south there are plenty of horse-chestnut trees and the kids and adult kids have their conker outings the same as has always happened.
Ma-in-law had her memory lanes, which when evoked were really fascinating to hear about. I hope someone might be interested in yours and mine one day Vincent, before the lights go out.
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I have been to brent lodge park. I seem to remember there's a small zoo there.
Lovely photo of horse chestnut blossom.
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“my joy without reason”
So far that is the best kind I have found. Your journeys across the landscape of everyday life call forth that joy ever so well.
Somewhat related are these lines from the Huainanzi:
It’s the one who has the ability to get it from within herself, whether she is under a big tree or in an empty cave, who gets satisfaction from whatever happens. If she can’t get it out of herself, even if she possesses an empire and everyone is her subject, it won’t be enough for consummate growth. If a person can get to a point where there is nothing (in particular) that she enjoys, then there will be nothing that she does not enjoy. This is to arrive at optimum enjoyment.
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A beautiful read Vincent. I still find myself a little jealous, so many of us go through life so focused on our minor little problems and tasks that we forgot to stop and look around us. As with many of your posts this reminded me that even in the most apparently desolate of places there can be found extreme beauty. People who have whole lives of memory and experience leave their ephemeral marks and some how through the subtlety of these marks can impact a complete stranger, someone they may never and probably will never have met.
However did I note a fairly funereal undertone to this work?
A dear friend once told me that all of mankind's endeavors are naught but jokes to the Gods. For all our technology and evolved superiority the mountains and the sky will still be here, unchanged long after our entire race is dust. The endeavors of man are insignificant beyond comprehension, all that matters are the endeavours of men(individuals). I have no idea if this is relavent to your work here, I may well have completely misinterpreted it.
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Asclepius, you are sharp as a hypodermic needle! When I wrote the piece I was more or less house-bound with chronic fatigue syndrome, which plagued me for many years.
I like what you say in your last paragraph, but there is more, much more to say on the matter!
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Raymond, I have decided that “joy without reason” or indeed your “love without reason” is somewhat of a misnomer. There is always a reason, though as you say in your book (pp225-226, talking about the placebo effect and its possible relation to spirituality) reasons don't diminish the magic and mystery (my paraphrase).
I would say that the reason for joy-without-reason and love-without-reason is always the same reason. The obstacles to joy and love are removed! I think it's possible that joy is our natural state, but we have allowed that clear sky to get clouded over. Therefore we don't have to do anything, so much as stop doing. Which is compatible, I think, with your book. (To other readers – see “In Love With Everything”, by Raymond Sigrist: available in all good Amazon bookstores near you.)
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Bob – yes, Hanwell was the place where a certain someone used to live, I believe. “Golden Manor” springs to mind.
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Vincent – Are we talking a modern single use disposable hypodermic? or the hypodermics they used about 20 years ago which got very blunt by the tenth patient they were used on? 😀
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Years ago, after Czechoslovakia opened it's borders and before it became two countries, I visited there.
After 5 days dazzled by Prague, I picked up a rental car and toured the autumn countryside for another 5 days. I mostly meandered, as I had only one specific destination – to visit Casanova's grave.
When I found it at last, the grave marker had been rescued from the overgrown grass where it lay neglected for many years, and mounted to the church wall. I thought about this strange, Mediterranean man; a lover of heat and sun as well as of women; washed ashore in his final refuge in this cold, gray land. Musing,I placed my hand in a pocket… and yes, there was a chestnut there I'd picked up the day before. Without thinking further I lay it beneath his stone marker, and left.
What is it about chestnuts that invite that kind of gesture?
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Eternity – an unbounded state, a naked singularity, surrounded by an event horizon where duality collapses as well as time.
May it be that is the meeting place where all begin and all end, but it is also the unconditioned space, the void? Or perhaps it is simply an equation, virtual and unchanging which has defined within its boundaries a universe of possible forms that are expressible?
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[…] ——- (1) Click here for Natalie’s dream of falling down a well; or here for Bryan’s dream about “The Good Book”; appended in the comments are Vincent’s dream about Donald Trump at Woodstock, Cindy’s about Hillary Clinton as a mischievous ghost haunting her kitchen and bathroom. (2) Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning. (3) It was in a piece called “Eternity”. […]
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An extraordinarily beautiful post!
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Thanks, Brian, very glad you say this, Reminds me that I haven’t been able to write a good post since about 2015 probably. Now it’s all derivative stuff — quoting poetry and so on. Also, like this one, republishing posts where the pictures have got corrupted, for one of two reasons.
I was so busy remembering every word and fixing this one up that it didn’t occur to me that it must the best thing I’ve ever written. No point trying to equal it.
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