first published on 15th March 2017
I see things as imbued with meaning, like fragments written in a foreign language. Sometimes I can decipher them; sometimes even put them in English. For instance, from my bedroom window I can see the Victorian factory opposite. I wake as the early sun catches its gable ends. As on a sundial, it moves rapidly down the walls, showing the outline of chimneys from my side of the road. The moon, waning gibbous, erstwhile queen of the night, still shows palely, but her reign is over. The meaning of this little drama calls out clear as a trumpet: a reveille, a verse from the Bible, “Look to the ant, thou sluggard! Consider her ways, and be wise.” Or clearer still, “Arise! Engage with the world! Seize what it offers, give it your all!” But can I meet the challenge? I long for a daily wake-up call from the Muse: “Write.” But it doesn’t happen that way. There are other voices, confused yearnings. Only when the Muse chooses to speak does she whisper in my ear, actually telling me what to write. Without her, I truly have nothing to say, only the craftsman’s desire to incise inscriptions upon the most durable medium; cherishing the fancy that in so doing I am trying to give something back
At 06:54
Meanwhile, instead of waiting calmly for that whisper, I allow Nature—the Sun, Spring—to excite my blood, summon my senses to heed the world, and do something: as if the great outdoors is calling me, making me restless with a Dionysian fervour to slake my thirst with fresh air. And then I want to write it all down: not waiting for the Muse. But there is too much. I cannot take it all in, not every cloud and bud. Even the piece of litter I saw yesterday in the derelict playground, still there today, which I noticed and remembered; or another old mattress dragged there and burnt, leaving ash and rusty springs as its skeletal remains: all these have meaning, they tell me truths about the world. Sometimes they trigger their own little epiphanies. How to choose? Unjogged by the Muse, I lack all sense of value. I could unravel the secret message of innumerable moments. I’d end up a bit like Funes the Memorious in Jorge Luis Borges’ story: like a brain-damaged idiot-savant.
For a while, I tried to obey the promise of an earlier post: “I’ll be posting an anthology of excerpts from earlier years . . . ” Perhaps I would start with a piece from the 6th of August, 2006, called “Outsider”. It’s the archetype of various pieces I’ve written on the topic of wayfaring: wandering alone under the sky, letting life happen, gazing perhaps at the madding crowd from afar. But I wasn’t satisfied with the expression, having penned it half a million words ago. Surely I could do better now. (I ignored the equal possibility that I might do worse.) So I start a complete rewrite, treating the original post as an aide-memoire of rough notes taken on the spot. My new draft started like this:
“To have strength and stamina in the limbs; the joints able to move freely in their sockets as designed; my mind unclouded. These are such blessings that I feel the need to invent a God merely to give thanks.
“Sometimes I’m moved to gratitude for the blue sky and the clouds, for lifting the spirit; the kindness of strangers; the shy honesty of animals; the existence of trees.
“I’m an outsider in both senses. I make my spiritual dwelling outside the tribe. And in body I roam these old hills, where saints, martyrs and heretic-punishers walked the same fields centuries ago. The punishers burned the martyrs to the stake for reading the Bible in English; or so they say.”
Then I stopped, for it was the fruit of my own idle restlessness, not anything whispered by the Muse: consequently vapid, tedious and fake. I’ll stick with the naive spontaneity of August 2006, as it stands.
If I’m to write a wayfaring piece, it has to be freshly-lived. You can never force the Muse’s hand, but you can move aside and make space for her. And if anything can help that, it’s the wild country air, sweeping my head clean.
And so, the other day, I went to a place I know, and as I drove up the hill, I felt shame for being in the car. Normally I would walk, and make it a true journey, in which the meaning of everything—fragments of the meaning of the world—would wash and cleanse me, leaving no residue, like a periodic rebaptism. Despite being in the driving seat, I felt like a prisoner being ferried to oblivion, in a paddy wagon or madhouse ambulance, my nose and lips pressed against the window. You can’t catch that purifying air by looking through the windscreen. That too was a moment, replete with meaning.
The reason I didn’t take the time to walk up that hill was K being on sick leave. I’d promised her not to be gone too long. So I’d decided to start from a supermarket on the precise edge of town. Welcome to ASDA: proud to be part of the Walmart Family. It used to have employees, till they were re-baptised as associates. “When you work at Walmart, you join incredible professionals doing the never-before-seen to save people money so they can live better.” Not only that, I can park there free.
Here in Buckinghamshire, towns end suddenly, at precise points where the countryside begins. There’s a secret path from the supermarket car park through a short tunnel under the motorway. Leaving behind the never-before-seen, the saving of money, and the living better, you can get through to the other side. Leave the blind to lead the blind, and rejoin the tribe of your ancestors, who journeyed these ancient paths on foot or horseback and eked a living from these fields and copses. I’ve written before about walks through this area, here (1) and here (2).
At 15:40 British Summer Time on Monday 22nd April 2013, reference East 484828.5 North 189926.5, on the National Grid, I tried to record a moment, thus:
“Walking through a wood — can’t find a way out — and it occurred to me, that it absolutely doesn’t matter if I’m happy or not, liberated or not, enlightened or not, alive or not — as long as my animal nature directs all that. If that’s the right way of putting it…. Or, there is something within me that looks after all that. Let me just see what I can do, in my lucid waking.”
A friend had been talking about dreaming: “the trick is … to continue to dream, but with the conscious awareness of doing so,” i.e. lucid dreaming. So in that moment, in Wymers Wood, which I’d crawled into, under some barbed wire, dodging thorny twigs which swung into my face, and been unable to find a way out of, I may have coined the term “lucid waking”. Or was it lucid walking? Or both. This little copse, with its slope falling away on the left, its pond, was a scale model of this world, a schema of my life; a Zen koan suddenly solved. Like you, I’ve crawled into this world under the barbed wire of birth. Like everyone, I’ve wondered “now what?”
In that moment, six days ago, I saw what it all meant. Not the end of all struggle and pain. There will always be prods and goads, to provoke us to do what we ought to do. We are animals after all: donkeys who need both carrot and stick; wild creatures (when you strip off civilization’s false clothing), who must heed the vibrations of our own antennae. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. But what of the realm beyond that? In that moment of lucid waking or walking, I knew. But I could not find words that went with the meaning. Now, a week later, I hazard a phrase: “trust in the heart”.
a wayfarer’s notes 
“On Trust in the Heart”: see also Xinxin Ming.
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I hope your beloved is on the mend & feeling better.
Despite the familiar images of Walmart selling Spring & people trashing Spring with their ugly springs & things for someone else to Spring-clean…. Spring couldn't be more beautiful.
I saw the morning sun giving its eye-opening wake-up call & your tunnel that ends where the Cherry tree grows & your ancient ancestral trail begins. I realized what a beautiful place it is to walk. I wondered how with such pretty & interesting surroundings to roam & focus on why anyone could ever get to the point of not caring or giving up the fight.
Still I just couldn't take that path out for worring about Walmart's presense there & the burned mattress springs.
Thanks for including that Xinxin Ming link! After I read it I instantly let go of my biased perspective of Walmart. And I reminded myself not to judge the litterers, because I don't know everything that's going on with them.
Thanks for writing this! And thanks for being a helpful & nurturing influence on me.
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Blake's comment (I never know it he made this comment earlier):
Four Zoas, Night I, Page 9, (E 304)
“Then Eno a daughter of Beulah took a Moment of Time
And drew it out to Seven thousand years with much care & affliction
And many tears & in Every year made windows into Eden
She also took an atom of space & opend its center
Into Infinitude & ornamented it with wondrous art
Astonishd sat her Sisters of Beulah to see her soft affections
To Enion & her children & they ponderd these things wondring
And they Alternate kept watch over the Youthful terrors
They saw not yet the Hand Divine for it was not yet reveald
But they went on in Silent Hope & Feminine repose”
Finding those moments in time which open into eternity or infinity are gifts from the Divine Hand and from those who unknowingly watch over us in his stead.
ellie
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That is a beautiful and apposite excerpt, Ellie! And I did notice yesterday that you’d put up a post called Blake’s Moments, which seems a remarkable coincidence.
They are gifts indeed.
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Thanks for the wishes to my beloved, Cindy, which I’ll pass on. Her sciatica has become acute of late, but thanks to our National Health Service (by whom, as it happens, she’s employed) she’s receiving the best possible treatment and doing all the right things.
We don’t live in the smartest part of town. In fact it’s the cheapest, with many of our neighbours occupying rented rooms. Either they or their landlords take the easy way out on change of occupancy. The next-door house but one has a very choice collection of junk in their backyard, as you can see if you click here. By contrast, mine is more worthy of Spring, as you will see from this one, or my front yard here. As for that derelict playground, I wrote about it here and remarked:
“I try to love my immediate neighbourhood, but it takes effort. It’s alien, in several senses. I wonder if others see this place as I see it. But how do I see it?”
As for that XinXin Ming poem, and the message it conveys, I included it in a post I wrote in October 2008.
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It sounds like your wife is in safe & trusting hands. I'm not religious, but I pray & I put her on my prayer list.
Sorry for commenting again, but I wanted to show you why this post in particular is helpful to me. If you have a minute to enlarge that photo I put as my profile image for this comment, you'll see my neighbor's backyard. Mine is beautiful like yours & keeping it any other way seems “alien” to me, also. By late June my neighbors will be bored with their septic pool & they'll let the water breed mosquitos. The smell of their 3 large dogs feces on what should be a sweet flower-scented breeze angers me to no end. I'm not surrounded by rental properties like you are, but people that think just, because they own their own homes they can do whatever they want with them are equally hard to live among. Especially when their inconsiderate instinct-driven behaviors can't be rationed with, because they either claim ignorance or use their victim-mentalities to generate sympathy.
I don't know how I feel about my neighborhood either now that it's gone to the dogs, but I've been here the longest & I know what great soil it is for growing things so I'm protective of it & I don't let the jealously of “alien” people drive me out. I'm lucky I haven't been hung from a tree or burned out.
Anyway, sorry for being me me me. Just wanted to show with that disgusting pic why I read & re-read & hang on every word you write.
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Yes, it's an awful garden they have there, and there's nothing more invasive than an unwanted smell from somewhere else.
This is to thank you for sharing that pic (so that you can change it back again now!) and also to continue the series of disgusting pics with a link to a post I wrote on a similar topic five years ago.
I'm glad you are you! If you would only start your own blog, you'd enhance the world even more, or at any rate the blogosphere.
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Lol you're sweet, funny & tactful. There's more than one kind of litter, ay…. and I'm sorry for littering YOUR beautiful post by not sticking to the subject.
I've read in quietness for a couple of years & one day I felt compelled to try to tell you in my simple way that real beauty never dies & you will always be immortal to me. Why I just didn't say it one time & in one sentence is a mystery to even me lol. I'm going back to chewing on the savoriness of your soul-food in my own quiet way that feels more natural to me. BUT always remember that you matter more than you will ever know! 🙂
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Cindy it is a privilege to have such a reader. You remind me of something in my first post (19th April 2006):
“If no other reader ever comes along but you, that's fine. I don't plan to tell anyone about this place. I'm content if it's known only to you and me.”
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It was very interesting to me to see where you live and your surroundings. Loved your early morning photos and the way you include maps with some of your posts. Giving an exact time to a photo really helps to carve a wedge out of reality and invest it with a certain concreteness. Beautiful post.
~Brian
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Thanks, Brian.
It's likely I'll live here till the end of my days, despite pipe-dream alternatives, feasible but impractical. This inspires a constant inner dialectic, arguing beauty versus ugliness, neighbours versus Nature, etc. There's a mosque about 70 yards away, built by the men from villages in Pakistan who arrived around 1960 to work in the furniture factories. Many of the rented rooms are taken by Poles and other more recent immigrant Indians. The factory across the road is very much in business, making veneered doors and kitchen worktops, and is operated by enterprising English lads, who like to make a lot of cheerful noise, with their machinery, Radio 1, singing along, shouting etc. But they get on well with residents and provide a good resource for free offcuts of wood for handyman activities.
I never mention the town's name on this site, to frustrate search engines, but it's otherwise no secret. I call it Wye Vale. It's surrounded by the Chiltern Hills and some of the most beautiful countryside you'll find in England, but only 29 miles west of London, 25 miles east of Oxford – as inscribed on this building in the market square.
I mention the above knowing your feeling for one's home surroundings and sense of loss when the old is razed to make room for the new.
A lot more could be said about maps, timed photos and so on; but enough for now.
Except that I shall point you to another resource: http://www.geograph.org.uk/. I don't know if there is any equivalent in the US.
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In editing the above I omitted the link to a pic of the market square
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The centaur weathervane at the masthead of this blog stands on the other side of the little square, atop the Guildhall.
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One of the most important thoughts that ever entered my head is that the darkness cannot impinge on the light. Darkness is an absence of light; it has no power over light. If we can find the light and live in it, the world's darkness cannot reach us. We may choose to enter the darkness carrying what light has been given to us for the sake of spreading light. The light may be obscured when the minds of men are closed to visions of Eternity, but the light is still here ready to enter any crack which opens.
Each of us lives in a place where there is both darkness and light. Sometimes we can't even identify which is which. The best we can do is bask in the light we have received, and attempt to perceive the light within those around us.
I find your blog a source of light. Thanks.
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Thank you! Your comments enlighten. When light predominates, shadows recede and darkness keeps its distance.
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Coming back to Brian's comment: “Giving an exact time to a photo really helps to carve a wedge out of reality and invest it with a certain concreteness,” I'd like to quote this:
July 23, 1869, California Sierra, noted by John Muir: “What can poor mortals say about clouds? [While people describe them, they vanish.] Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God's calendar, difference of duration is nothing.”
Quoted by Annie Dillard in For the Time Being, a diffuse meditation on (amongst other things) theodicy. I'm thinking of writing a piece about it.
Note that in 1869 it would have been possible to photograph clouds, but the equipment would have been unwieldy. It was not till 121 years later that the first digital cameral became available. Dillard also notes that some of John Constable's landscapes, with notable cloud formations, have dates attached, giving them immortality.
I could photograph cloud formations by the thousand. But what's the point? Anyone with sight and access to the open air can see them. Nevertheless, I've found some worthy of a longer life: see, for example this post; from which, thanks to the time-freezing powers of photography, I painfully created a pastel.
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Wish your wife better, and all the very best, Vincent.
I am very attracted to the pictures you posted here, of the factory. There is a great familiarity in those Edwardian bay windows and the colour of the brickwork. The rising sun adds to the magnetism. It bestows a beautiful glow.
We can take it for fact that these are morning pictures; the evidence can be found in the exif information. You have even helpfully, given us the time the pictures were taken. Isn't digital imagery wonderful.
The artworks of both Turner and Constable have provided much discussion as to time of day the works are depicting, when they are day pieces. Of course. Turner's notes can be checked against what he created, in many instances.
Constable did quite a bit of mix and match with his clouds from a variety of his pieces, therefore, as onlookers we can only be given what the artist wanted, gifted with the artist's poetic licence. Reliability is called into question for the forensically-minded viewer.
I agree with you Vincent, when you write,keep to the 'naive spontaneity.' It says much more both on the surface and in the substance.
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Thanks for your good wishes, ZACL. K is back at work, 4 hrs a day for the moment, and her recovery is going to plan, with the aid of NHS acupuncture!
You may be right about the bay windows being Edwardian. However, the street is late Victorian, being named after the Jubilee of 1897. Our own house is 1901 and thus Edwardian, just, as Edward VII succeeded his mother on 22nd January of that year.
I won't mediate between you and Annie Dillard on COnstable's clouds; but when you say “keep to the naive spontaneity” because “it says much more” I wonder which are the bits which say less–without disputing your correct judgement.
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