Two Absurd Testaments

we were living at 78b West Wycombe Road, the upstairs flat. We’d installed a table in a corner of the bay window to put our two newly-bought second=hand computers. I set up a website perpetual-lab.blogspot.com, and often drew inspiration by looking a the sky or the scenes below. My writing style was perhaps a little quaint. In a later version, I’d changed all this and called it “Achievement”

Once again I am summoned to an office for a couple of days’ work. It’s less strange this time. The more you get used to it, the more it seems normal. I can imagine a broken-in horse saying the same thing to a mustang. The effect is to make this free time even more precious.

I’d planned to write a “Testament” but dithered, and then the summons came before I had time to overcome misgivings and publish my draft. One idea was to answer the question “By what achievements would you like to be remembered?” To play this game, you say whatever comes into your head. My extempore answer was threefold:

1. I would like to be remembered as a cloud painter, regardless of my inability to paint clouds or even find a suitable medium for a lightning sketch that captures the essence of a sky.
   as a calligrapher, even though my handwriting is universally execrated. I was asked in the office today if my notes employed some system of shorthand, and when I said “no” whether either of my parents had been a doctor. In my imagination, my handwriting is a work of art, poetry in motion.
2. as an illuminator of sacred texts. I haven’t yet decided what texts if any are sacred, but to decorate them in gold, silver, vermilion, lapis lazuli and verdigris is a compelling urge. All three could be superimposed on a single “testament” on a piece of vellum as an absurdist fantasy, meaningless on the literal level but profound in the realm of angels and dreams.
3. Another kind of Testament would be to write my beliefs or values. Lately I have encountered (over the Net) the Primitivists, who believe civilisation has been a mistake, correctable only by returning to the life of hunter-gatherers. Since I have been tending in that direction, it was a good thing to encounter their spelt-out doctrine as a salutary corrective. They fashion my light-hearted fantasy into a religion and a serious movement. They even have logos and priests, or am I confusing them with the neo-Gnostics, whose doctrines overlap with primitivism? They think that civilisation is ripe for collapse. Yes, but you cannot predict collapse to any accuracy – maybe six years, maybe a hundred, maybe more.

Much as I respect tribal consciousness, I think the flower of civilisation is the recognition of individuality. Why? It’s my experience that attempting to fit in and follow the crowd can result in psychological malaise and physical illness. Civilisation does not encourage you to be yourself, but it lets you. Yet I do not give thanks to “civilisation”, whatever that funny word means. There is always an implication that beyond the outer limit of civilisation – the Pale – live grunting savages in nothing but loincloths with no table manners. That’s an impression my grandmother gave me, I suppose, when she worried about my own infant savagery. Despite her conditioning, I see that civilisation in all ages has depended for its supremacy on enslaving others – the excluded – to maintain its glittering standards.

It’s a paradox, but individuality leads to universality. By being truly myself, not coerced into some community, I dig deep into soul and discover brotherhood to all mankind, and cousinhood to the animal and vegetable kingdoms.

By rejecting religions and teachers, I get closer to soul and ready to accept a kind of god. Not in the sense of a Lord or a Goddess that demands my worship, but a kind of fairness and purpose to life, and help in getting through it, so that events are never random. Perhaps my actual experience is close to that of many religious people, but the joy is all the greater for being outside any framework of beliefs. Why try to eff the ineffable? Though bereft of comforting faith and reassuring congregation, I seldom feel abandoned, for there is a kind of prayer which always works.

I’d planned to spend much more time in saying these things, but it’s better to blurt the words than polish them. I had the idea, silently cherished for nearly two weeks now, of writing a book, of the kind where ink is printed on bound paper pages, entitled The Pedestrian, for there is great inspiration in walking the earth in bipedal mode under the transcendental sky like our ancestors, in spite of regulations and governments and sovereign borders.

There’s no discouragement
shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
to be a Pilgrim”
John Bunyan