Shapes

As I lay awake this morning before getting up, a great procession of thoughts came to visit me. Thoughts? I’m not sure what a thought is. They were dwelling-places of the imagination, like images from a waking dream. I guess they were prompted by my last post, which suggested I’d work on my life-story; and then at the end, drew back from such a commitment. The urge to self-discovery and revelation quarrelled with the urge to privacy. Privacy won without a fight. Other writers transform their remembered lives into extraordinary novels. I think of Ulysses, Women in Love.

This morning, I took a different track, by uncensored impulse rather than choice. This great procession of thoughts traversed ideas, not historical facts: those ideas which I perceive to have helped shape my life. It was a lazy reverie soon after waking, that urged me to get up and scribble this, with no planning aforethought.

The first idea that came was of Christianity. I saw it as a wondrous well of pure water, which has been poisoned, again and again. I saw it as something greater than any one human mind could have conceived and invented, but fouled by every generation and used for their own ends. I say this without rancour, for such is life. It’s inevitable, I claim the right to declare it thus, for I am just one in that procession of generations, one of the general crowd—no matter that I may see myself as an outrider standing aloof. The more I stand apart, the more I see that every man is my brother, every woman my sister. Every child born is mine and will grow up to become my mother or father. For I am Everyman, ever returning to a fruitful paradox: the personal is the universal. Our differences take their place on a spectrum of human variety.

And so I envisaged a Christianity with no single church or doctrine, only its Bible. This book full of books has been revered, mocked, misunderstood: yet remains a beacon of hope for each generation past and future. Not because of being allegedly “God’s word”! What is that but a slogan-writer’s hype? The words have been collected over the generations. They are the work of different hands: different narrators, scribes and psalmists. Like everything else, the Bible has evolved.

And what of God? Is there a real substance behind that much-used word? It’s a coin so smooth-worn from much exchange that its origin and face value has worn off. We can’t tell what it’s supposed to be any more. So we just use it as a token, for any transaction whether agreed or disputed, in the bazaar of this world, this Babel of voices. When I use the word to myself for my own purpose, what does it mean to me? I discover an oracle within myself, like a spring discovered on my land whose pure water comes from a distant mountain; an oracle which can provide answers any time I really listen. It tells me that God cannot be anything other than an essence of Love.

Which leads me to ask it what is that Love, as distinguished from other loves by its capital letter? An answer comes: it is the simplest thing in the whole of evolved creation. It is that which binds. It holds things together to the point where there is but only One; a Oneness that we can only glimpse in times of letting go. Love is the ultimate substance, the mainspring of physics, biology and evolution. We are fond of talking about making love: but love makes us. Not every child is conceived in love of course, but I’m not talking of human instinct and ignorance, our “fallen state”, as Christians put it. I’m talking of fundamental laws that we obey or cast in shadow.

Physicists have thought that the contents of space and time are determined by laws, like Newton’s mechanics, like the determinism of billiard balls clashing on a table. Now we know there is more besides. There is unpredictability, even though chaos theory can be expressed in formulae. This unpredictability may create a space for Love to bring about miracles. My reader may question whether I actually believe this? I suggest it doesn’t matter. Belief is not a thing, it’s a stumbling-block, a maker of conflict. We cannot get by without believing something. Like everyone else I’m unable to see things as they actually are. I can only see representations, metaphors, as when I speak of angels. No one can tell me that there is not purpose and order within the chaos of this world. I cannot help but see patterns and generalizations, for the simple reason that we are all made to see patterns, we have evolved that way. Without them we’d have no language to say stuff like this.

Then I thought of our recent stay in Swansea, referred to in my last: a place which continues to resonate in imagination. I see it as a place with a special power, a holy place built on ley-lines (not that I believe in them), like St Davids, Cowes, East Cowes, Glastonbury.

In Swansea there’s a special connection with architecture and with the poet Dylan Thomas. In 1989 the Prince of Wales, himself a critic of architecture, opened an extensive community of housing around Swansea Bay, sandwiched between the sea and the Marina, which is two oblong stretches of water widened from the River Tawe, pronounced Tawwy. As I write this, I see architecture and poetry as closely linked.

The first creates something in imagination before it exists in concrete form. It provides dwelling-space, both indoors and out, for the physical presence of the human species. Architecture is an arrangement of bricks or other sectional pieces.

The second provides dwelling-space for the inner and outer visions of the human mind, soul and spirit. Poetry provides glimpses of worlds without concrete existence. It is an arrangement of words. Where does poetry actually dwell?

Not on paper, not in any electronic form. Words can only take root and flourish in imagination and memory. We have surviving the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Vedas, Homer, tales in the Old and New Testaments, creation myths and Dreamings. Most of these were passed on by oral tradition, whence they evolved via memory. In similar fashion, the memories of our own lives evolve, recreating or inventing a past whose factual content can only be deduced from traces and footprints, I mean documents and images. Much guesswork is involved in excavating the past.

Writing came long after oral telling, poetry and imagination. Its origins are probably prosaic: keeping of accounts and so forth. Architecture evolved in like manner from instinctive nest-building, caves, shelters from the elements. Today, all human knowledge has been drawn up in a net, like fish from the sea, like a sieve or strainer, like panning for gold. Libraries are being replaced by Wikipedia and other online resources. They are the work of many hands and many architects, out of a vast communal effort, as with the great medieval cathedrals.

By coincidence, which it is human nature to perceive as part of a coherent pattern, I was recently invited to provide a little consultancy to a real-life architectural practice. They find themselves in need of a quality management system to the ISO 9001 standard, a line of business I qualified in a quarter of a century ago. It was rather a brief encounter, as I found myself no longer competent enough to assist them. Brief encounters can give you the sharpest insights; or else they feed your imagination with false signals. Who knows? I’ll tell you anyway. It was plain to me they are artists, not business people. They have a team of 40, mostly in junior positions, and I found that they don’t work to written rules. The documentation they have (other than drawings on CADD software, which I didn’t see) lacks conviction, as if done for show purposes. They seem to work from scribbled sketches and word of mouth. I was most impressed. How did the builders of the great mediaeval cathedrals work together on hundred-year projects? I never cease to view creation, whether human or divine, as miraculous, even if many of the steps can be accounted for by scientists.

Every creature has its dwelling and means of survival. Some are structural marvels that have a lot to teach modern technology, such as the tensile strength of spider silk, or the hexagons which make up honeycombs. How did bees learn the astonishing secret, that they could use pollen and nectar both to build their nurseries and feed their infants; making queen-size cells and royal jelly for the nurturing of future mothers?

Modern doctrines of virtue and vice have altered the old teachings For example, good order in society no longer requires the old rules such as sexual abstinence except within marriage of a woman with a man. The new misbehaviour is to be a de facto enemy of the rest of nature. Science, technology and commerce declare they have solutions, but it’s they who’ve provided poison to pollute the wells of nature.

Another misbehaviour is surely hubris:

excessive pride or self-confidence. In Greek tragedy: excessive pride towards or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.

May I be humble and not defy the gods! Let me cast aside any remaining pretensions and not try to be some kind of somebody. Easier when you’re not far off the ground to start with.