Glimpsing Eternity

When we speak of God or gods, it’s to express the otherwise inexpressible. This is something that atheists and materialists seem to wilfully misunderstand, when they say that it’s irrational to believe what you cannot see. As you’ll see from various entries in this blog, there are two kinds of immortal I can’t do without when trying to make sense of experience: the Angel and the Muse.

The angel’s principal role is to herald and remind, to help bring about a state of consciousness. In my experience the angel is neither male nor female, and may be imagined in any form or none. It may whisper as a voice, in definite words; or in pure meaning, which cannot be expressed to others without translation into a human language. Sometimes the angel simply shows, with gestures or tableaux, even a little silent play with several actors, which unfolds before your eyes, on the fringes of normal reality. Many have met the anonymous helper who turns up when you are in trouble, such as arriving in the form of a stranger who helps get your broken-down car started again. Many of us get the privilege to “be an angel” for someone else. I maintain that the angel’s role is less to intervene and more to prompt a response in our hearts: to lift us up, and make us understand that this world has mysteries beyond the reach of science and atheism; and show that despite all appearances, this world is our friendly home. I get my knowledge of angels from personal experience, often recounted in this blog. Books merely confirm them as universal.

The Muse is formless yet (for me) vaguely female. She doesn’t waste energy by appearing in person, but waits to be invoked, as we know from ancient literature, such as Homer. Her role is to help give birth to form, not her own but the artist’s idea. She whispers words to the poet, to aid the creation of order and sense from chaotic feelings.

When I go a-wayfaring, it’s not just for mundane purposes of exercise and exploring my neighbourhood. The aim of the dog-walker isn’t just the dog’s or even the walker’s health and hygiene. The real purpose is something sublime that stays unsaid, or can’t be said. Only in mental quietness, aided by the Muse’s light prompting, can the inchoate underbelly of existence be wrapped in potent words, and brought to the light of conscious understanding.

“Do you believe in angels, then? Do you believe there is such as a thing as the Muse?”
I answer that I am not talking about belief, only expressing. Action is not in itself a creed. If I talk about unicorns, it doesn’t mean I believe them. What I believe is that you and I can share an understanding.

The other day I walked to Downley, Naphill and Hughenden, a round trip of three hours. For the first hour or so, I was merely present to the scene, absorbed in whatever assailed my sense, from within or without. After a while I began to dictate words in the ever-willing ear of my pocket recorder. When I climb up the Pastures to Downley, this tends to happen, sooner or later. The Muse seems to dwell in those hills, and favours me with whispers when I am ready. I’ll share the latest set with you.

When I hear, for example, a certain birdsong, a repetitive single note plangently celebrating June’s glory, it takes me back down the corridor of years, invoking all the times I’ve ever heard it. Now I’m walking in two worlds at once: this public footpath weaving its way round the backs of houses, and that echoing passageway of time. Between these two worlds, I suspect, is the place to touch Eternity.

And in Eternity’s boundless space, I do things I’ve never done, in a time that’s never been, with memories that don’t fit into my life-story; memories of the Never-Was. And I’m not alone in this. It’s man’s inheritance.
My footsteps traverse a labyrinth of tidy suburban roads, small-scale, leading nowhere, with names like Cherrycroft Gardens, echoing places I’ve lived, like a house called Cherrydown on the Isle of Wight. In my mind’s eye, I’m not seeing that house now, but some place on the furthest shore of consciousness, in a different dimension. Perhaps my whole life is flashing before me in little snapshots, for June birdsongs are still loud in my ear [so loud when I play back the recorder!], and they take me to memories I’d forgotten, in a non-chronological sequence that feels like another life, one I never lived. Then I realize these fleeting memories are not so much scenes from the world, but from my imagination at the time: not the house Cherrydown, but stray images and even angel-encounters from the time I lived there, going back to a still earlier time. Might they be echoes of Eternity?

And now that I’m tuned to the notion of everything I see or hear or smell or think being connected to a memory, there is no stopping me. I look across at a public allotment, where a gardener has left rhubarb and onions unharvested, so that their leaves and stalks have grown huge and unfamiliar, with stylized buds, flowers and seedheads; the onions like decorative turrets of a fairyland castle, the rhubarb with loose bunches of flat seeds resembling those of the dock, Rumex Obtusifolius, for they are related, in the family of Polygonaceae. Just looking at those overgrown vegetables takes me to some fabled court in the kingdom of evolution; a kingdom in which I, too, flourish. Now I wander on, in this outlying suburb of a village, approaching the woods and meadows of I know not where. There’s a map in my trusty wayfaring bag, but I don’t bother to consult it. My route feels all right. I know it will eventually take me home. In the broader sense, I’m already home, for this is my extended neighbourhood. It’s within my foot-travelling reach, so shouldn’t I get to know it? Literally, my backyard is tiny. But in a wider sense my backyard is all around, my journey-zone (journée means day’s travel). It includes that Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s Hughenden Manor, though it’s closed to the public today. I’m going south now, I can tell from the position of the sun. That’s the direction of home. My brother confessed the other day to forgetting that the midday sun hangs in the south; for in New Zealand, it hangs in the north. When in doubt I follow a footpath, for they all go somewhere, unlike the roads built for cars, which often lead to dead ends.

Now I see a white-haired grandfather on the road ahead, pushing a little child on a buggy, amusing himself and possibly the child by letting it run free, down the gentle slope. I see that the grandfather could be me. The child could be me. The seedheads in the allotment, anything could be me. Every person I ever see in the street could be me. But I have to admit that I seldom see this unity, seldom have a need to try. Today’s a holiday from normalcy, while the Muse takes me by the hand.

So I see that everything is there all the time. All it needs is a quiet presence, and some kind of trigger, for Oneness to be manifest. Or it might never happen in this lifetime. But is this what I am doing in my life, beyond mere survival: to seek little openings to that Eternity whence I came?

In the words of the late journalist Robert Ripley, Believe it or Not!

For as every writer of fiction knows, the important thing is not to believe, but to imagine. Imagine vividly enough, and you have belief. But that’s no reason to go to war with someone who believes differently.

Such is the Muse, dear reader. Such is the messenger angel. And such is life.

Footnote

Arthur Stace was a reformed alcoholic who for 35 years was inspired to write the word ‘Eternity’ in perfect copperplate in chalk on the streets of Sydney. Many people who lived in Sydney between 1932 and 1967, and those who visited, would have seen the word written on footpaths. It was a mystery for years, until 1956 when it was revealed to be the work of Arthur Stace. He wrote ‘Eternity’ over half a million times. Arthur Stace grew up in poverty, and was jailed at the age of 15. After serving in France during the First World War, he returned to the streets of Sydney, partially blind, unemployed and an alcoholic. One day, drawn into the Burton Street Baptist Tabernacle with the promise of a free meal, Arthur Stace encountered something that changed his life, as he described to a journalist from the Daily Telegraph in June 1965, two years before his death:

John Ridley was a powerful preacher and he shouted, ‘I wish I could shout Eternity through the streets of Sydney.’ He repeated himself and kept shouting, ‘Eternity, Eternity,’ and his words were ringing through my brain as I left the church. Suddenly I began crying and I felt a powerful call from the Lord to write ‘Eternity’. I had a piece of chalk in my pocket, and I bent down right there and wrote it. I’ve been writing it at least 50 times a day ever since, and that’s 30 years ago. The funny thing is that before I wrote it I could hardly write my own name. I had no schooling and I couldn’t have spelled ‘Eternity’ for a hundred quid. But it came out smoothly, in a beautiful copperplate script. I couldn’t understand it, and I still can’t. I’ve tried and tried, but ‘Eternity’ is the only word that comes out in copperplate. Eternity gets the message across, makes people stop and think.

Arthur Stace’s publications include: “Eternity” self-published and republished approx. half a million times over a thirty-year period in Sydney.

Note on the other photos

1) A barley field near Naphill

2) A red kite over the field

3) (below) a side view of Hughenden Manor

4) (below) Hughenden Manor, the rear gates