England’s green and pleasant land

I’ve been agitated lately, it started a day or so before Polling Day. I was astonished to find how much this Referendum mattered to me. In the end I went to the favourite spot I’ve written about before (England Have My Bones) with camera & voice recorder; recalling as I went Ellie’s comment on a recent post “Referendum”:

I like it when you let your unconscious mind have its say. . . . stick(s) in my mind speaking more loudly than well-chosen words.

So I went into the fields on the evening of that fateful day, June 24th, 2016, looked across the valley, and talked. Edited transcript below.

I find something superbly English in the UK’s collective democratic decision to leave the EU. I have to say that it’s a very scary one and I don’t know whether it’s the right thing to do. I’ve heard all the dire warnings—how xenophobic, how it would ruin us, and the EU. They may be right. Now that I and the others have voted, one way or the other, it no longer matters if we were right or not. There was a lack of facts to guide us, just propaganda, one way and the other. How could there be facts, anyhow? Only the future can tell and the future’s not ours to know. The past is fact, a coherent set of facts, all of them forged from hopes and fears. Our Prime Minister gave us a democratic choice. A self-selected jury of 33 million voters delivered their majority verdict. That was the deal on offer. There’s something a little mad about the whole affair—mad, generous and eccentric. Maybe it will have ghastly consequences, as many are no doubt thinking. Everyone has been shocked, many saddened and appalled. All of us are surely scared.

I feel immensely proud to have become English, for I wasn’t born that way. Slowly England embraced me, convinced me this is the place I belong, with its wild, generous gestures. I think people misjudge others, think ill of them for having different views. Truth and reconciliation is the thing to aim for. Yet there is a perverse pleasure in being enraged by ideological differences, to use intemperate language & mental imagery. I am not exempt from it, that is how I know. But it’s a low-grade pleasure, one of the lowest. It’s so easy to hate the wrongness we see in others, the bullshit they (we) let themselves (ourselves) believe, in place of worthwhile ideas. If we don’t stop ourselves, it’s an Augean stables that fills as fast as we try to clean it out.

But—the gesture of defiance has been made, and so we have to go from where we are now. Collectively, we did it to ourselves; a familiar story in my life, I’ve done it to myself so many times: scary leaps of faith—marriages, rash commitments—and ended up here, in this, a living part of this living beauty. There is nothing to regret. The heart makes its gesture, not on some momentary whim, but from its own stored-up, hardly-understood, often denied and repressed but profound nature. Of all the hell that people create in this world, what was this referendum? A mere folly, if you will, in one of its meanings:

Folly, n.A popular name for any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder

Except that those who voted Leave wanted to escape by any means possible from what they saw as a folly, one they’d never signed up to and whose main rationale for Remaining would be the risks and costs of escaping.

Here I am in Saunderton Lee, just wandering around, not another soul in sight in this much-loved part of the countryside, adored by me and available to be adored by everyone. No one can guarantee it won’t be defaced or destroyed— so be it, change is the one certainty—but meanwhile it is worthy of being kept as it is.

The big thing I see now is that the politicians will have to serve the people. They will have to take up this thing. They will have to see the bigger picture. How can we make this thing work? It’s like a war. We have declared a bloodless war on ourselves. It doesn’t need to hurt any of us, merely engender a spirit of togetherness, of the kind that our nation spontaneously felt in ’14-’18 and ’39-’45. A war with no enemy—a natural disaster, if you will. The aim is to save our country, the place that we love. Our votes were expressions of hope, fear, resentment, self-interest, whatever moved us. I cannot speak for others. I can’t analyse my own motivation, only that I voted with my whole self, and never for a moment contemplated putting the X in a different box. For a day or so I considered abstaining, stepping back from the conviction I felt. But I couldn’t do that. When you feel something deep in your heart and do nothing about it, you harbour a poison in the system. A black cloud obscures the sunshine of your joy.

The worst thing you could do, in the absence of simple joy, is to substitute something inferior, to force yourself to be satisfied with pursuing that: money, jobs, ideals, the solution of petty problems that our grandparents never had the luxury of griping about. The worst thing is to harbour a nameless discontent and take daily doses to numb the pain.

I cannot see anyone else from where I am standing in this beautiful place, only trains speeding through the valley, the busy rush of economic activity. It surprises me how empty the landscape is, yet perfectly manicured, the meadows planted or left fallow, the hedgerows regularly trimmed, trees planted, footpaths well-trodden, stiles kept in good repair. And since I was here about ten days ago, ears of barley have grown where you could only see tall stems and leaves before, and not be sure what crop it was. Here you see the works of man and nature, so strong together, constantly regenerating; not laid out by any designer, but the creation of centuries of anonymous husbandry. This valley speaks louder in mute testimony than the old gothic cathedrals which took a century to build.

The future generates itself. The unknown hardens into facts, facts into immutable history. We have to move forward. What makes the present worthwhile in itself is not the pursuit of any distant fugitive goal. The true fulfilment can only happen now. It’s here, I feel it—don’t know what to call it, not sure if it even has a name. Nor do I want to give it a name. Whatever is named can be cheapened.

So I find myself here, on June 24th, 2016, at ten past seven in the evening, looking across this little valley, watching the trains go past, some of them from London to Birmingham, some of them on shorter runs, stopping at villages. I reflect that I live in a beautiful country that has taken a step, right or wrong, foolhardy or guided by a mysterious principle that we may not understand, just as this Earth has been guided somehow, to get all the way here from its Big Bang when the laws of physics first unfolded. It couldn’t have been completely random, can’t believe that. And if it was completely random, then how can we criticize randomness? Look how fruitful it has turned out. And imperfect.

There is beauty, and there is horror, destruction, hate, cruelty, murder, which we don’t know how to contain or neutralise: either actual and violent, or latent and insidious. The people who have voted to leave the EU are mainly the English, by which I don’t mean white people, or those who can trace their native roots on our island. You can become English, as I have done and my beloved has done after arriving later in life from Jamaica. There’s a process. I imagine those who most appreciate being English are the ones who don’t take it for granted; they’ve been somewhere else first, great effort was made to get here. Tourists and other temporary visitors like to come because we are generous and welcoming. I mean no slight to anyone else. It is a fine and precious thing to be proud of your native or adopted place on earth. This island became what it is from immigration.

At this moment, on this day, we need some confidence, and to be in harmony with the forces of love, perhaps through prayer, whatever people do that works, the contemplation of beauty.

Freedom comes at a price. We have not had to fight a war of independence or a bloody revolution. This deed was done gently, with a stub of pencil tied on a string, uncertainly, fearfully, no sense of triumph. I don’t know which was the “right” box, only that a new fact has come into existence. Our Government trusted us, we trusted ourselves to do what we felt in our hearts and not what we were told to do.

As for those who advised us, with their campaigns, leaflets and speeches, they were just as passionate, even where the passion came from narrow or short-term self-interest.

Now there is a need for goodwill, and for people to feel blessed. The only way I know is to live in harmony with the cycles of existence: sunrise and set, the growth and decay of everything, the pattern of our own lives from birth to death. As for survival, we’ve been through world wars: this thing done in peace with blunt pencils requires much less of a sacrifice from us, to go forward and do the right thing by everyone. Now we need a sense of solidarity, not just within England but our neighbour north of the Border (Scotland) and across the English Channel. We stand or fall together. We all must make it work, whatever “it” is.

If England is stripped of its union with Scotland and Northern Ireland, as well as its long quarrelsome marriage with the European Union, so be it, for England is a finer name than “UK”.

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.