In my last I tried to convey something of the fascination of Cowes in a few shots all taken within a hundred yards of each other. But I’m hardly interested in picturesqueness for its own sake; only in what touches the soul.
Moving to Cowes in 1954 was the beginning of a new life. Till then, I’d attended a tiny boarding school* for more than five years, having been kept out of the way while my mother’s unhappy marriage disintegrated; shunted to my grandparents for most of the holidays. Now I had a new stepfather, from a background I’d never before encountered: a Tynesider, someone from Newcastle upon Tyne, that proud city in the North of England. After much effort he’d passed the Merchant Navy’s exam for ship’s engineer, & spent the Thirties at sea. He and my mother had been spending clandestine weekends in Brighton—midpoint between their homes—till their divorces came through. Our sojourn in East Cowes, from which his ex-wife had fled to New Zealand with her lover, seemed like a long honeymoon in romantic surroundings: a honeymoon in which a twelve-year-old boy could join as a stowaway. My world became briefly golden, my curiosity set free to examine my new world, after those cloistered years.
I knew some Latin & Greek, the Old Testament, Caesar’s Gallic Wars, a little Virgil, early British history, how to identify wayside trees & wild flowers. I’d encountered Bach, Elgar & Beethoven, several English poets, folk songs as collected by Cecil Sharp. As a substitute for actually being any good at cricket, I’d read books by famous English cricketers: how to bowl, bat & be a fielder. My lack of hand-and-eye co-ordination seemed hopeless, but a serious accident to my knee gave a useful excuse. Apart from my cousin Mark, I’d never had a friend outside school, never acquired any physical prowess other than how to ride a bicycle. East Cowes was heaven but lasted only a year, followed by nine months in West Cowes, the other side of the chain ferry.
My nostalgia for the place came from this, the tantalizing sense of a life I hardly began to live before it was snatched away. In a recent post, I wrote “And in that place, I am a rich kid and have it all.” As it happens I was not referring to Cowes, but a parallel world: that which I’m able to enter when the illusion of separation has fallen away. I called it “The Zone”, a place where the “I” expands beyond literal experience to embrace parallel lives which didn’t exist in the ordinary sense. Cowes is literally the playground for rich kids of all ages, whether for top-class yacht-racing or “simply messing about in boats”. In the seven years I lived on the Island, I never stepped into a sailboat—or indeed since. My school offered a sailing club where you could learn all the skills involved, but it cost money. Now I sail in other ways, with the clouds in the sky, the washing billowing on the line, and more.
I’ve written about Cowes lots of times on this blog, as a keyword search would reveal. Years ago on one of our first visits together Karleen suggested we might go and spend our retirement there, for she has grown to love it too. Now we’re in the position where we could actually sell up and go. But would it be a good idea, practically? We rented a small flat with views on three sides, fully-equipped, and pretended we lived there, a few yards from the chain ferry linking East & West. It’s free to pedestrians & I found myself crossing several times a day, sometimes at dawn, to buy milk & a newspaper before breakfast. Ferry terminals to Southampton on the mainland are five minutes’ walk away; I’d see workers with laptops or briefcases hastening there each morning.
We could easily find a Victorian worker’s cottage just like ours here, but cheaper & prettier; and simply transplant our furniture there. There’s nothing wrong with here, in fact it has much to recommend it. But we share the sense of not being stuck here. We transcend our surroundings. There are no limits on our possibility. Like everyone else we can dream, as people like to say, of what we could do “if we win the Lottery”, not that we’ve ever thought of buying a ticket. Life is already a lottery: we’ve already won. Surroundings don’t define us. In the truest reality, we’re not defined by anything.
Said the Buddha
Enlightenment is straightly obtained by freedom from separate selfhood.
I think this may be all the Buddhism we need.
And then we may see that
We live lives parallel to the one of which we are conscious from moment to moment
*so we can be forever young, gifted and black.
a wayfarer’s notes 
“When you're young, gifted & black your soul's intact”
Truer words have never been spoken.
Intact:
Whole, entire, complete, unbroken, undamaged, unimpaired, flawless, unscathed, untouched, UNSPOILED, unblemished, PERFECT
Sadly, here in America it is more like young, gifted, black and dead.
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P.S. I took the helicopter tour of your Isle Of Wight via youtube. The chalk cliffs are so beautiful & you could walk forever in the woods they are so big. The houses with the thatched roofs are the prettiest there, I think. Sorry for nor sticking to the subject.
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Sticking to the subject? I'm not sure that I know what the subject is, and whether I have been sticking to it myself.
I think you have defined it yourself. It's about having one's soul intact. And if it isn't intact, if it got motheaten, broken, damaged, impaired, flawed, scathed, soiled, spoiled & blemished on the way through life, it's about restoring one's soul to its proper state.
Which is a big subject, likely to spill out into many more posts.
And as for “Young, Gifted and Black”, the version by Bob & Marcia has special significance for me. I've just checked and discovered that it reached no. 5 in the British singles charts on 4th April 1970. That's the day my elder daughter was born. Anyhow, I had bought the single. It has “O Happy Day!” by the Edwin Hawkin Singers on the other side.
I remember when she was a few days old holding her in my arms, dancing to the song, replaying it endlessly till she fell asleep & I put her in her cot. She is white, & has never to my knowledge wished to be otherwise.
Why did the post end with that phrase, inspiring a link to Nina Simone singing her own version? Just happened.
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Good to see you back, Vincent. I've just read your previous post and now this one and the sea air is wafting through both. Go ahead and make the move, while the spirit is moving both you and K to do so! I'm all for spontaneous life-changes, when they've been quietly simmering for a long time. It seems that Cowes has a special attraction, even if you're happy in your present home too. Adventure beckons! But never mind my exhortations, follow your own intuition. A small question: what is a chain ferry, as opposed to a normal ferry?
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Good to see you back, Vincent. I've just read your previous post and now this one and the sea air is wafting through both. Go ahead and make the move, while the spirit is moving both you and K to do so! I'm all for spontaneous life-changes, when they've been quietly simmering for a long time. It seems that Cowes has a special attraction, even if you're happy in your present home too. Adventure beckons! But never mind my exhortations, follow your own intuition. A small question: what is a chain ferry, as opposed to a normal ferry?
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Thanks for the encouragement, Natalie. The spirit of change is there as the lightest of whims, like a fitful breeze inadequate to fill one's sails. The boat has a certain weight, the sea currents aren't favourable. An agile crew, racing-fit, could doubtless make the crossing. We're a bit more creaky: weighing it up, we'd make the attempt for life-saving purposes only, on current reckoning.
Our Chain Ferry is also known as a Floating Bridge. The two chains are fixed slackly from shore to shore, submerged by their own weight. An engine on the ferry turns two large cranks which engage with the chains and pull it across. A light flashes while the ferry is in motion, warning other boats to keep their distance. Now that I think about it, I don't know how the chain ferry stays afloat, when it's loaded with cars and people.
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“But I’m hardly interested in picturesqueness for its own sake; only in what touches the soul.”
I think this is why I always find myself reluctant to take photos. Often times I'll be somewhere or see something that touches some emotional chord like a lone tall tree against a grey morning sky and I'll fleetingly think that I'd like to have a photo of that, in order to preserve it or return to it again.
But then when I do find myself with a camera available in those instances, I'll often pass on the chance to take the picture. I feel like I'd be deferring the moment for a later, lesser moment when I'd be looking at the picture. I'd have it kept and catalogued, available at my leisure, but I end up deciding I'd just rather be with it then and there in the wild and enjoy it while it lasts.
And then sometimes I just take the damn picture.
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Vincent – am who i am – today. Could throw all of the previous images into the bin; and nobody will notice.
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I know what you mean, Bryan, I go through that too with my own camera. I took more than a hundred photos in Cowes attempting to capture the feeling I had in the moment, but only the picturesque ones are worth displaying, and who knows what is captured therein for anyone else.
I've been cutting out pictures from a calendar, all fine reproductions of van Gogh, & making gilt frames for them. One of them is The Old Tree, 1888 perhaps the simplest composition of his that I've seen – have a look – and you can see the way he captured not just the image but also conveyed the sense of “am who i am today”, in Davoh's words: that is, the being of someone who sees beyond surfaces & has taught himself to convey whatever-it-is in paint.
Unless we have a particular vocation to share it, that being is all, rather than its portrayal (he pontificated, suddenly aware of sermonizing . . . )
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Pooh always let life come to him, but Rabbit went out to get it. When we look back on life from the perspective of age, it looks like Pooh had a clearer idea of what life is about. But mostly we behave more like Rabbit: we need to be somewhere, get something, figure things out. But in spite of the attention we give to Rabbit behavior, the Pooh in us is moving along a parallel path which has more to do with who we are than what we do. But the amazing thing is that what Rabbit does furnishes the ingredients for what Pooh becomes. We don't set out to construct ourselves but between what happens to us and how we react to it, we become something unique and irreplaceable.
What interests me about your blog is your ability to stick with the events in your life, while revealing how you are becoming yourself by assimilating your experience. Many people get stuck instead of continuing to integrate.
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