Alone in the house the other morning, I used this retreat to think aloud, as a place where some echoes might be heard, or simply absorbed by the walls for later, Not the house walls, this place. For it is a sounding-board. Images and ideas can get amplified, the harmonics of other minds can pitch in.
I was feeling my way. When I’m ready, I thought, these thoughts like wispy cloudlets can be broadcast. They can gather volume and density, so as to rain on parched land and make it flourish.
Some fell upon stony places . . . and when the sun was up, they were scorched . . . but other fell into good ground
In Africa there are places of stony ground and sand where nothing grows till the rains come. Then Nature rejoices.
I’m thinking randomly about what influences have most inspired me. Of kora players in the ancient Griot tradition of West Africa, Sona Jobarteh appeals most, especially her song “Gambia”. Why is it the most affecting? Because she was born in London! She can look from the outside at both places, their cultures, their music.
Then there is Todd McEwen, who inspires even before the three ordered books arrive. Because he can look at America from a British perspective and vice versa.
I think of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who stands as a British philosopher, though he was born in Austria from a rich industrialist’s background. He was briefly at the same school as Hitler. His family were Jewish but presented themselves as Catholic. He came to England to study engineering, particularly aeronautics, before the Great War. As a child he was interested enough in machinery to make a working model of a sewing machine. He could gaze at more or less everything as a critical but fascinated outsider. Wikipedia has more, and there’s Derek Jarman’s film too. His Philosophical Investigations are more approachable I think to one who has never made a formal study of philosophy. Approachable but not easy.
Insiders are a smug lot. Thus Jordan Peterson has a go at Richard Dawkins, that privileged academic within castle walls, from which firing genes & memes to lay waste his attackers*.
I was born an outsider and have stayed that way except for when I was a smug insider of a small world-wide outsiders’ club. Every outsider, you may imagine—or know from deep experience—harbours a longing to belong. The fatherless child of a neglectful mother may seek solace from his orphaned state by joining a gang. Or anything to numb an unacknowledged pain.
In 1963 after being disgorged with a mediocre degree I found myself an outsider to the entire world. For a few weeks I lived alone in a room in Clacton-on-Sea. Many outlandish things happened in that year. To try and tell would be an ignorant pilgrimage through a minefield. Not ready, if ever. Which ones were merely false trails—if such a thing exists? Which shaped me—ditto?
It’s no good, I’ve jotted some notes in my private papers; there’ll be more if ever I have the time. What would be the point? Only to confess and expiate. Only if I craved forgiveness, but I’m cool with whatever happened. Wisdom has tempered those cries & gnashing of teeth.
I lived in a fruitful isolation—narrowly avoiding a sense of desolation. I hung quotations on the wall, drawings, diagrams, maps. I tried to write a surrealist story, whatever bubbled up from the subconscious. It scared me, I couldn’t face up to it. I had a copy of Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. I’ve been wondering how I acquired it. Just now I’ve rediscovered an image of the cover. I realize it was the 1963 edition. I must have spent the five shillings and bought it.
All at once I want to buy it again, in the same edition, however stained, worn and annotated.
Later: After paying over the odds to a rare book place on eBay, I get one in the original 1963 Pan edition, pristine, tight in the spine, hardly yellowed. Never been read. Time-travelling!
* See Bryan’s post and my follow-up.
Comments
Bryan White
“…who inspires me even before I can lay my hands on the three books of his that I’ve ordered.”
I got a kick out of that. It’s probably not quite what you mean, but I sometimes think it’s worth while to try to stay in that place where you’re imagining what a book or a movie will be like, since you are, out of necessity, creating something in anticipation of what that thing will be. And if that thing itself ends up being disappointing? All the more reason to try to return to the thing as you were imaging it beforehand. Obviously a space exists for it, the space that the thing you wanted to find defaulted on occupying.
Vincent
Imagining, yes! I think there is (imagine there is) another post coming up from this one word, largely composed of quotes from Philosophical Investigations, which, as I’ve already said, makes good common sense if you are more or less an outsider to philosophy.
Though some of it is fancy stuff showing where other philosophers have it wrong. Which I think is the one and only reason why philosophers do what they do.
Vincent
The books have all arrived.
Each is better than imagined. More intricately detailed, of course. I cannot resist trying to read them all at the same time. Especially The Outsider, which is in mint unread condition, as if I’d just bought it new. It might have been the Times Bookshop near Oxford Street where I once went to see Christina Mortiboys, an occasion I wrote about in this post
a wayfarer’s notes 