I step out of the house for the daily ritual of meeting Karleen from work. My route involves shortcuts through alleys. A perfect ritual has no practical purpose, no sense of obligation. It’s done for joy alone. Its sacredness within the rhythm of daily life increases on every repetition. Its tendency to sameness draws attention to the variations: the passing of seasons and stages of life, the remembrance of previous enactments, the passage of time which will lead one day to death. A ritual is precious only because you make it so.
Time is one of the variables. Our rendezvous is usually half-past four, winter and summer. Today it’s three hours later, because she stayed on campus to attend a course. The mile-long walk to her office appears literally in a new light, for the sun is dipping in the west, bathing the scene in its glow, as if it could even gild this fresh light wind with beneficence; enwrapping the Victorian brickwork, every surface visible and otherwise in this moment. All of which is undiminished by the presence of by two stained mattresses, unceremoniously dumped in this street of derelict factories, along with a scattering of sodden cardboard and plastic bags stuffed with refuse. I come here because it’s part of my shortcut. I could take another street, but I choose to take the rough with the smooth; or perhaps I disdain to acknowledge that there is a choice.
Legally the street is privately owned, along with the derelict factories on either side, so it enjoys no street cleaning. The landlord cares nothing for appearance, simply waits for a buyer who like him is driven by profit alone. The council has responsibility for pedestrian access, so it’s part of the county-wide network of footpaths. Every month or two they send a truck to clear the rubbish. I reconcile myself to the squalor and feel safe. Those who make their way through this squalor are on their way to somewhere else, like me. There must be 
hells compared with which this street is Heaven.
Going through my head is a tune from Origin of Symmetry, an album by the English rock group Muse. It’s my favourite of the genre, whatever the genre is called. Perhaps it’s a “concept album”, which I understand to be like a symphony but with more movements, none of them labelled “minuet” or “scherzo”, all referred to as songs or tracks. Or is it “heavy metal”? There are dirty grating noises as from rusty iron, or circular saws with big teeth, or the scraping and clashing of stainless steel in different shapes, forged in a factory of corrugated iron with no safety-guards on the machinery.
Whatever the lyrics may say—I seldom pay much heed to lyrics—the sounds tell me how to endure the world you’ve been dumped in, how you may grow to love it, cushioned by your own inventive adaptation. Our best defiance is to be proud, vain and trusting of our strength against every priesthood, sacred or profane. To accept without shame one’s own shape and nature; to dwell within it and call it home.
It takes a while to accustom yourself to Matthew Bellamy’s falsetto. It rises, up and up like a lark, then higher still, beyond all expectation, in a self-transcendence that gives it power and authority. The bursts of exuberant noise from guitars and synthesizers makes you think of a teenager holed up in his room, defiant against parents for all that they symbolize of the entire world and what’s wrong with it. In this self-imposed captivity, the teenager spontaneously generates his own version of the Stockholm Syndrome, loving that which he hates, till the boundaries of his polemic are fatally compromised, and the protest turns to panegyric, the sweet classical quiet movements cut from the same cloth as the rusty-iron noisy ones. On another Muse album there’s actually a song titled “Stockholm Syndrome”, though no one on the Web is able to explain how this relates to the song’s lyrics.
At the dead end of this derelict street a narrow alley escapes in triumph from the degradation of rain-soaked mattresses. It’s brightened up by a mural in the graffiti idiom, sponsored by BMW cars and local businesses, giving coded exhortations against drugs.
I suddenly remember the radio programme I part-heard the other day, a documentary called Unbuilding Detroit”. Perhaps I won’t ever listen to it properly but I made an echoey copy on my pocket recorder, and borrowed the illustration (see top) from the BBC website. They were talking about alleyways and graffiti, and how to humanise ruins and make people feel good and not scared. Suddenly I started to feel warm towards America. It felt close and not alien, as it were another part of England, just down the road from here. This is the highest praise I know how to bestow.
I have grieved over my negativity towards America in recent years, probably dating from 9/11/2001, when in my view a wake-up call was responded to wrongly. Sometimes before that, in total ignorance, I had sometimes thought it a good idea if the US colonised the UK! I must have been crazy, or repelled by the notion of us being swallowed up in the European Union against our wills. America endears itself to me whenever I see it in its underclothes. Just as here, it can be overgrown with weeds, criss-crossed with disreputable alleyways, unassimilated aliens, graffiti and a general sense of vulnerability. I care little for the American Dream, that imagined El Dorado of immigrants: but in a parallel universe, back in the day, I could have been one of those hopefuls awaiting examination at Ellis Island, eager to start a new life.
After emerging from the alleys into the suburban road which leads to our rendezvous at the hospital, I overhear a conversation between two men, neither of them young, dressed in some kind of work-clothes. The older one says he is going to train up the other. He waxes lyrical with his vision of skills to be attained, duties, opportunities. The other listens quietly. Then he goes on to speak of the difficulties, the privileges, the unfolding of circumstances as yet unknown.
It made me feel nostalgic for a career, to be engaged in something like that, whatever the trade, instead of this terminal status of “retired”. Not my own past career, which had always been office-based in jacket and tie, and then when I worked for a management consultancy, a smart-suit.
Earlier today I was talking with a team leader from the Water Board, who came to diagnose and fix a supply leak, the latest in a long saga of confusion which has taken months or years. These Victorian cottages all run off a communal supply, so in principle neighbours have to share the cost of leaks. I felt an easy kinship with this man, in the brotherhood of problem-solving, professionals versus users, those-in-the-know versus the ignorant. Office work had always commanded the higher salary, I could never consider anything else. I had always (!) been a married man with young children, what else could I choose but the higher salary. Would I have been happier in an out-and-about role?
Now I remember my own biological father, the one I never knew, but met when I was fifty, a roofing contractor in Western Australia. While I was being educated in England to take a role in the military, colonial or padre class, he, contributor to my genes, pursued his no-nonsense trade directly under the sky. Something in me responds; at a physical level rejects the airy-fairyness of progressive middle-class values. I struggle for words but this must do.
I would not have understood this enough to find any words for it, had I not paid a visit to my local supermarket*. It’s the one nearest, it has wide aisles, there’s nothing purely rational to object to. I feel that it embodies the utopian hell that wealthy socialists & readers of The Guardian newspaper would create everywhere if allowed to do so. You’re struck by the advisory voices everywhere—placards and audio. They tell you to stand and hold the handrail, be ready to move your trolley off when you get to the end of the walkway. (Its wheels are locked electronically till that point.) There’s a sign for “Adult cereals” and another for “Children’s cereals”; myriad varieties of oats and muesli. Some varieties are designed to save the earth, some to save your health, some to assuage your bossy children who don’t care about either. Some items reassure you against food-scares, some are the subject of food-scares. Whether it pleases you to worry about the global economy, ecology, obesity, wholeness of food, inequality, every possible food fad or the nagging of your spoilt children, you’ll find products to suit, precisely categorised. Here is the place to mix and match consumerism, materialism, gourmanderie, frugality and ostentatious virtue, all in one-stop shopping. Why does going there make my flesh creep?
Whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. (Matt. 23:27.)
For the global problems which they so virtuously worry about are precisely the ones created by their own consumerism.
Next day: I felt it again, the sun’s blessing, in the backyard, this beautiful piece of earth, miniature of infinity, 22ft x 11ft not counting the concreted path. I was sitting on the bench, eyeing my work in progress. It had to be made simple: oblong of grass here, oblong plant border there against the fence. Nothing else. I’ve cut down the cherry tree (the one I’ve written about here several times). It was in process of fruiting. Some of the cherries were turning from green to red. I apologised to the tree and blithely completed the felling. The air was a blend of birdsong, street noises off, all against the background of primeval silence, the eternal hush, the blessing of the firmament.
*(p ) I don’t renounce what I wrote then, but that supermarket and I are well reconciled, especially since they are our preferred suppliers of certain products and add to the stock of favourable memories. And it was here that I became eye-witness to a bizarre event.
a wayfarer’s notes 
Wow. As usual, you have very nearly left me speechless. But I have prevailed. I went to YouTube and looked up Muse and listened to “Uprising” while I read the rest of your post. Good stuff. I had never heard of them before but I believe I may be a new fan. I also had to stop and look up both 'polemic' and 'panegyric' to make sure I knew what they meant. Oft times reading your blog is like reading anything by Rex Stout. I pride myself on my vocabulary but you and he both often catch me with my pants down.
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I'll have to check out some samples from that album. I like their song “Map of the Problematique” as well as a few others. Sounds like my kind of stuff.
Given your comment about “underclothes”, I think you would like Painesville here, if you took a stroll through it. It's far from a “nice” town. In fact, it's generally considered almost a ghetto in some areas. But as a whole, it combines the idyllic with the rough edge, the sublime with the unsanitary, the blooming dogwood with the discarded mattress. There are many historical buildings with columns and ornate carvings as well as old Victorian homes scattered through-out the city. However, there appears to be no concentrated or centralized effort at preservation like there is at other such places. These structures stand simply because of the slowed rate of progress here, their facades worn and slightly crumbling. I kind of prefer it this way. It feels more genuine, and it isn't overshadowed by a committee of busy-bodies patting themselves on the back for how “beautiful” our little town is. It's the scattered ruins of an older time, occupied and encroached on all sides by more modern inhabitants. In a way it's been preserved, ironically, by a lack of effort to preserve it. It stands untouched with no one to take credit for it's existence. It's just there. It's highly conducive to colorful reveries, and the mind naturally drifts back in time, dreaming and wondering.
I'm sure that in some ways it would seem as alien as your town in England would seem to me, but in other ways, it might almost familiar. At the very least, it's better than the housing developments that proliferate all over suburbia here and everywhere else through-out America, with the house all the same and the landscaping as overly tended and artificial as a golf course. That isn't America in it's underclothes. It's more like America in a polo shirt and finely-pressed khaki pants, bland and trying to blend in. I'm like you. I like the rough edges better.
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You are very flattering, Rev. I downloaded a sample of “The Final Deduction” by Rex Stout on to my Kindle and was hooked. I need to know how it develops. Have ordered it from library. “Uprising” was a hit here. After acquiring two other albums of Muse, I still think “Origin of Symmetry” is the best.
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Your comment made me think, Bryan, and that thinking led to an amazing revelation, one that works for me and may possibly be universal and thus explain a lot of what we need explanations for.
I realized that our opinions are our way of adapting to the situation we find ourselves in. So the reason I like the part of town I live in is because I live there and am determined to consider it as home territory, rather than just move again. Enough moving, wanna put down roots.
I might like Painesville, but let me ask you whether you like it because you live there, or did you choose to live there because you like it?
Sometimes when I go wayfaring, and pass through those polo-shirt and pressed-pants suburbs, or English equivalents, I let their neatness wash over me, & imagine I could happily adapt to such places too. Indeed I am envious of those who have the choice. I came here to find the only house I could afford. The other factor, I admit, was being able to walk to every daily destination. This implied a property close to the town centre.
Back to the thing about our opinions (beliefs, if you will) being adaptive. Apply it to any situation. The salesman believes in the virtues of his product, the politician believes in the tenets and policies of his party. It works so far.
The member of a congregation believes in the doctrines of his church; unless his form of adaptation to his situation is to pick a fight with those doctrines, become a renegade, heretic, perhaps even a Martin Luther.
It may please us to accuse people of self-delusion, lying or Machiavellianism. But that is part of our adaptation.
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At a semi-tangent, I just watched The Boxer, movie starring Daniel Day Lewis as an IRA member jailed at 18, released back into Belfast at 32. This in the height of Northern Ireland’s notorious ‘Troubles’. You see how his 14 years’ sentence, and the love of a woman whose memory had sustained him, have made a changed man of him, one who has almost forgotten how to speak and relate normally, but (as in all Day-Lewis’ roles) simmering with intensity.
I recommend it!
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Well, the answer to your question is a little complicated. In the first place, I grew up in Painesville. So, it has a familiarity to me that I didn't choose, and that familiarity is definitely one of the factors in my living here, not the main factor or the only factor, but a factor. So that would be one point in favor of your theory that we make lemonade out of our geographical lemons.
However, I have left Painesville and lived many different places, some of them nearby, some of them clear on the other side of the country. My feelings about living in these places are as varied as the places themselves. In Arizona, I liked the weather and the feeling of being in a tropical paradise, but ultimately it didn't match up with life as I dream about it (if that makes any sense. The palm trees and gleaming, modern buildings are a dream that I can indulge in occasionally, but not the main dream I always return to.). In nearby, Eastlake here, I was depressed by the boring drabness of the areas. Whole streets were lined with identical cracker box bungalows, overly mowed little patches of lawn…it was all very ugly to me. Akron was just too urban and I absolutely hated it, even though that was definitely a place I lived in out of necessity. Mentor was nice, although it lacked Painesville's sense of history. Perry, I absolutely loved…more than Painesville even. It had the same neglected old buildings and houses, but the ghetto aspect was replaced with a more rural element (I have a post planned about it). I would go back there in a heartbeat. We only moved because we had outgrown the little house that we lived in at the time. We tried to go back there with our last move, but couldn't afford anything in the area. Painesville was next best choice. I dislike the ghetto aspect and the people associated with it, but I think my affection for the old buildings and houses is, I believe, a very genuine one and not simply a matter of my “making the most of things” I have deliberately made my camp far from the town's ghettos and in a nice neighborhood where people really do some fine and beautiful things with their yards. There is another area around here, Chardon, which I've never lived in, but which represents the dilemma nicely. There is a core village of old houses and an old-style town square (although there are some “busy-bodies” at work), but it is surrounded on its outskirts by very, very, expensive housing developments and extremely upscale neighborhoods with half-million dollar houses and up. If unlimited resources fell into my lap and I had a chance to live there, I have no doubt in my mind that I would choose the inner village. That's just my sort of thing.
So, I hope that answers the question. Answering it has at least helped me focus my priorities.
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Vincent, beware. With your grasp of words, Stout will suck you in and you may become hooked. I now own maybe half of his published works and pick up new ones as they present themselves. I am often torn between wishing he was less prolific and the opposite. My favorite epithet, “Pfui” comes from him. As well as using words like “mendacity” and “flummery” and “obstreperous”.
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“Flummery” does occur very early in “The Final Deduction”.
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Of course the above statement boils down to one basic question. Did I return to Painesville because it suited my personality, or did Painesville have a hand in shaping that personality? I'm sure it's a little bit of both.
You mentioned the idea of people believing what they do just because they happen to go to a certain church. I think this is true for many people, and I've noticed that myself, but as you know, I actively rebelled against the beliefs I was raised with. I've made it a point in my life to try to see beyond my own particular place in the universe, not just in religious matters, but taste and opinion as well. There are plenty of people who would say things such as “America [or England or France or wherever] is the greatest country in the world” with no other foundation than the fact that they live there. I detest that sort of mentality, and I disagree with the idea that we're all doomed to be that way, with varying degrees of self-delusion. True, I can deceive myself as much as the next person, but I try, I really, really try to keep an eye out for when I'm doing this. And I think I'm more prone to try to change a situation I'm not happy with, than I am to lie to myself in order to live with it, as some people do. At any rate, I'm not ready to throw my hands up and accept the idea that it's all lies upon lies that help us sleep at night. I still hold out hope.
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I don’t think there is any simple dividing line which will enable us to make absolute distinction between lies, self-delusion and the necessary constructions without which we could not survive for a day.
For example, you can never know Painesville, let alone America. You have only seen through your eyes, on a succession of different occasions on many days. Painesville is an idea which you constantly construct, aided of course not just by your direct experience but inputs from many other sources and compiled into a fluid whole—about which, if you are to have a fulfilled life, you have to make a judgement: “Is this the place I want to live, or is the grass greener somewhere else?”
This is a hugely complex mental process. I think it starts when the mother plays peek-a-boo with her baby. Through repetition, and growing used to increased intervals where she is not visible to sight, it learns to imagine her continued existence when she is apparently not there.
Imagining the mother is something that can go on in life even after the mother is long dead, for example if her nagging voice has become internalised, telling you to pick up your dirty clothes off the floor.
To keep ourselves sane and functioning, individually and in community, we have to draw the lines of distinction, and I hope we can do so. But still it’s murky and from this blurriness come all the arts. How otherwise could we read fiction and get anything from it?
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Ah, I see you're going for a deeper point than I had originally thought. You're talking, I believe, about our imaginary construct, through which we filter our perception of the actual thing. And you're talking about how that construction colors and clouds our ability to see the real thing, and yet without these constructions we'd be incapable of forming any ideas about or establishing any emotional connections to anything at all. Am I close?
Funny you should mention mothers, since that's probably a good example itself similar to what (I think) you're saying about a place. In other words, could I ever really look completely past the fact that my mother is my mother, and just see her as another fellow person for all her faults and virtues? At the very least, I could never, ever hope to see her as she would appear to a stranger in a crowd.
I guess in that case though (and I have run into this many times), I would be aware of the natural tendency to be biased, and I would at least try not to let it affect my judgment and evaluations, even while realizing that the effort could never be completely successful. Some people would just thoughtlessly indulge in the bias; “My kid is the best kid ever…” ect. ect.
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I sometimes feel a strange reluctance to comment on your posts – because I find them so good. They are complete in themselves, and the epitome of what, for me, a good essay should be; a rambling walk, filled with good conversation, ideas being raised, considered, left for a while, mixed with others until, almost unnoticed, you have finally come to your goal.
Thank you.
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Thank you, Francis. Without such comments I am never sure if the spot has been touched. And if it has, it provides a marker for a future time, to aim for at closer range and more precisely like a bombing raid.
Ahem! This analogy isn’t going anywhere positive. Replace bombing raid by surgical strike—or precision surgery. For we want to be touched. the sexual analogy is better than the warlike one.
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“… and yet without these constructions we’d be incapable of forming any ideas about or establishing any emotional connections to anything at all. Am I close?”
Yes Bryan, but to get closer still I doubt if without these constructions we’d be able to form any connection to anything at all, apart from the hard-wired basic instincts which ensure survival. Not that these are to be denigrated, nor that they are separate!
Sorry if I appear to know what I am talking about. that too is a delusion.
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I think I know what you mean about falling in love with America in its underclothes. I fell in love with a charming American and went to live there In 1977 even though I'd had no previous intention or desire to do so. Over the ensuing 33+ years what I liked the most was how ordinary people incorporated decaying city centers into their daily lifestyles. Much later came the push by developers to sanitize everything they could find and in the process move low income people away from their streets.
You're absolutely correct the country, rather, its movers and shakers made a very bad decision after 9/11.
This really is a wonderful essay. I'll be happy to add you to my blog list so I can return to read more.
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