On Hold

The Imp has been in hiding. But here are the rains (head to The Waste Land). The hills here are hot and watching and the birds have wildly taken over. All here is squawking and sighs, the odd engine in the background, and the land breathes.

 

See? We are always here…

It is cold today – such a contrast from the day before yesterday.

Then, I climbed a hill, running hard. I came to the buttercup field – which I had been waiting for – and was suddenly clasped inside a snow-storm of floating catkin seeds. They were in every look, sailing through a breeze tunnel, spreading and flying, finding fertile nests in which to rest. The birds were gentle, and the grass outdoing itself with its green. The sky was bursting with pride at its own blue calibre and the earth banks swelled as if to say,  “See? We are here, always here, still here; look at this.” I daren’t breathe. How magical.

Moments, these moments, feel Grail-like; they are the alkahest, the philosopher’s stone in my life.  You can only ever capture their flavour in your mind – that is their ineffable nature. But even those pale versions can work magic on your soul on the dreariest day. Un-stopper the memory with care, with respect, and breathe in gently, at times of need.

Have you forgetten what magic bottles lie on the shelves of your mind?

 

A-Frolicking We Shall Go

Eostre time again. To celebrate new beginnings. Why we have “new year” in the depths of winter is a’body’s guess …..[cue the Roman equivalent of the anal civil servant type:

"Januarius must be the first month. We couldn't possibly have a moveable feast marking the start of the year! No; it must be thus. A piffle-paffle to nature - our calendar is what we must follow now. These are modern times!"]

So, are you feeling the strength of March 20th’s equinox? (The equinox is the time, twice a year when the length of the day and night are almost the same, no matter what your latitude). The longer days, the flirting beasties? The flooding push towards the longest day (or the shorter days & shortest if you’re in the southern hemisphere, of course!)?

Well, if you’re not, stop, sniff and look around. The air surely has a different quality? Get out, go walk, smile at the sky and have a lovely rest before the sunny and hard work of the summer begins (this is why all our bank holidays are during the summer months – we would have worked the fields all the hours of sunlight and holidays were much deserved!).

 

Good God- we have SUN!

In sun-worshipping days, we might have felt a tad unloved of late.  But this week, we have SUN! What the ballyhoo are you doing sitting inside (presumably), typing, then, Imp?

A fine question indeed. I am working. But not for long, hence the brevity of style, the economy of manner, the inherent apology about the questionable quality of this posting.

I seized the sunnynessing earlier today and went for a run. I altered my usual route and galloped, knee-jerkingly idiotically, down some very steep fields. They were so green! Two magpies winked at me (better than the 8 in their circular parliament I’d seen ten days earlier. Very creepy). And on the way down the hill, a lady held the gate open for me.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” I beamed. I always try to be a little ray of sunshine myself. But you knew that.

“Oh, yes,” she said, grey bun on head, like the kind of lady who might be a fairy godmother in disguise.

“Aren’t we lucky?” I shone, pushing my luck while emanating (an irritating) joie de vivre and (also irritating) sweat.

“That’s it, ” she said. “That’s our summer.”

There’s nothing like a fairy godmother in a cheery mood, is there? (And that was nothing like it.)

 

When Good Things Happen to Surprised People

Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

- Auric Goldfinger (yes, the baddie in Goldfinger)

Remember the fractals? In “Seeing the Curl“, I suggested that coincidence could be a fractal curl.

In the last week, I think I’ve been falling down the fractal slide, a little like Alice down her rabbit hole. Either that, or I’ve slipped into Cheap Tabloid Horoscope World.

“This week, Piscilibrarians, you’ll uncover money you didn’t know you had. And watch out for technology. It’s not your friend!”

Every IT problem that could come to pass came to pass. In fact it didn’t pass. Each one of them set up shop, moved in the lover, had brats, who all got ‘flu… The mac, the laptop, the tablet, the printer, the ‘phones. I’m surprised the traffic lights didn’t start telling me where to go: “Don’t bloody walk. No! OK – now!” [just as a 10-ton truck careered out of control].

Mind you, the money wot was hid was good. I’d massively overpaid the tax man and ridiculously underpaid my expenses. It’s not new, it’s not gained any interest, but it’s honestly mine, so I’m not complaining.

But you know how you can go for months without anything ever “happening”? For some people, life just butts its way into thrills and excitement, doesn’t it? Being discovered as the wild face of yesterday while picking your nose in the photo booth, or perhaps eaten by an escaped and rabid dolphin at a beach party -good examples, both, of life just “happening”. So often, you just get on with it, though, don’t you? You know, you think, eat, have feelings, do more or less the same thing as you wander along. You make things happen yourself; you are – you believe – the agent of change. External interference seems minimal (“ah, but is it?”); nothing happens. Well, irritating although the IT cauchemar [pretentious French for 'nightmare'; I can't call it a nightmare without putting tongue firmly in cheek] was, its seeming randomness was definitely a happening. As was the cash being refunded – and in both cases, I felt as tho’ they’d happened without me doing anything.

And there’s the widgimaflip*: the sort of thing that scriptwriters (and novelists) love. The events’ seeds had been sown way back (idiots overpaying their taxes, for example) and forgotten. Only the beloved honesty (anality) of the tax man altered the single-minded (egocentric) unravelling of the Imp life. And you see, there’s the fractal! The butterfly flap of Swindon’s finest junior tax inspector caused a minor earthquake in the Imp household (I splashed out on some  fine peanut butter, in all probability).

Ah…glad I got that off my chest….

*patent pending; the Widgimaflip will be 2012’s most thrilling metaphorical and metaphysical linguistic and conceptual invention….

 

My Right Place

I think any writer who is interesting to me at least has always a very firm sense of place … It is also a very strong sense of belonging to and possession of a particular territory and I think that is true of almost all the writers I am interested in [Blake, Dickens, Hardy].

- Peter Ackroyd

It’s astonishing the Ready-Brek(TM) sense of well-being that a muddy and hilly 5-mile run (washed down with a good chilli and a fat hunk of bread) can generate, isn’t it?

Fuelled by caffeine afore and aft, punctuated with close encounters of the heron/buzzard/cattle kind, I had a cheeky, speedy sally into the winter-sun hills around my home. And it was good.

It takes time – at times – not just to remember, but to re-experience, strong  psychological sensations. We can become dulled. When I decided to move to this place, I was hit by a very strong sense of rightness.  There’s only one other place that did that to me, and it’s a long way from here. I knew – for the time being – that ‘here’ worked for now.  That  feeling  really glowed again today, just as strong as the first time – or stronger, perhaps, now that it’s fermented with experience.

Our sense of place (which reminds me I have not sufficiently dealt with the issues about our own physical sense of the space around us that I raised in Peepholes of Perception – I will…) is an important one. For example, I was once asked to move to the Balkans; their arid, golden-grey hills sang to my companion’s soul, but in contrast, nothing (save perhaps the flats of the East Anglian fens) could make me feel more ill at ease. At other times, people have all but described certain cities as magnetic – you cannot leave once you come, they say. As Peter Ackroyd points out in his biography of London, some places always feel the same, no matter what you do to them. No matter how much regeneration cash you spend, how many slums you raze to the ground, the locus genii – spirit of the place – persists (my interpretation of Ackroyd; I won’t sully the poor man with my witterings).

Why is it that a sense of connectedness to the land, to location, to terrain, is so rarely discussed in Western culture? We happily (in many cases) import and so acknowledge fung sui principles in interior design or architecture, which must be related, but we do not overtly allow any more than the casual, “it just feels right / funny/ wrong” type comment about towns or homes. DNA research work reveals that people move, over hundreds of generations, hardly at all from the place of their forebears. Could it be that our DNA has a geographical memory?

At this thought, I paused. It might well sound like random rubbish, I thought, but it interests me, and these guys can always bog off and look for more Teletubby pictures (as many people arriving here do) if they’re bored, so let’s see what the magical tinterweb has to say. Would you credit it? Even the imp’s wildest wittering is not original. Ho hum. The upside of this is that there are some interesting theories out there, suggesting that we might in fact have DNA memory:

• like musical or other abilities that we inherit, we might inherit a sense of a place being good for us, because our forebears knew how best to survive in and around such landscapes
• a sense of an individual’s ‘good’ [safe/healthy/fertile] landscapes might thus be imprinted into their DNA
• lots of nuts theories, too….

If you remove the air of superstition, make it all sciencey, does it become a more acceptable thing for you to ponder? Native (the clue is in the word) peoples all over the world live wholly through their sense of, and profound respect for, the land. (Check out Symbolic Landscapes by Paul Devereux – an excellent, absorbing book on ancient sites, shamanism and the prehistoric consciousness). It works for them.

Look back, see where you are and why, where you felt most right, where you hope to be next and wonder why. It doesn’t matter, all said and done, whether it’s scientifically proveable; your own feelings are what we’re dealing with and you don’t need an expert to give you a gold star for them- do you?

 

Peepholes of Perception

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, [which is] a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

- Albert Einstein (as ever, so wise)

BBC Radio 4’s Start The Week programme (a superb piece of radio – Andrew Marr at his brightest, with fascinating guests, always) included a conversation with James Hall, author of a new book on the left and right in art (The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art – OUP). You can listen to it here, and I thoroughly recommend it. I am sore-tempted to get the book, but let’s be green and thrifty and go to the library. The publisher’s blurb goes as follows, just so you know what’s so interesting…

Traditionally, in almost every culture and religion, the left side has been regarded as inferior – evil, weak, worldly, feminine – while the right is good, strong, spiritual and male. But starting in the Renaissance, this hierarchy was questioned and visualised as never before. The left side, in part because of the presence of the heart, became the side that represented authentic human feelings, especially love. By the late nineteenth century, with the rise of interest in the occult and in spiritualism, the left side had become associated with the taboo and with the unconscious.

I’m not always a philistine, but I must tell you that I’m not really too interested in the dryly historical side of all this; in how cultures have shifted their ‘view’ of left and right. But I am very interested in how people feel about, relate to, their own left and right sides. Why? For several reasons – bear with me:

• Spatial awareness; our sense of space (hmm; is that outside the usual five?); the feeling of contact without actual touch; the near-ownership of the space around our selves, which is (for me) linked tight to the sense of left/right sides.

• Children don’t intuitively know left from right – as an adult, I still don’t, and need to think about it. Why is that? And why is it that we can have very trenchant spatial (and left/right side) awareness yet need consciously to consider the official left or right?

• With the ‘golden section’ or fung shui, in art, architecture and in the science of sound even (think stereo!), we sense things and they feel ‘just right’; a nudge here, a nudge there and utter peace (or turmoil) is achieved (within a framework which is necessarily bounded by the left and the right) – but why? Or how?!

• Could these (and no doubt many other phenomena) link back to our reptilian pasts? I go for the left/right brain stuff, sure, but I wonder whether there’s more instinctive, reptilian brain work going on here…. (not surprisingly, I feel fractals, but will try to delay their joining the game for as long as possible).

• Are we hunting for balance, symmetry? Is it about oppositional meaning, i.e., we see the picture because of the frame; perceive first what is not before we can see what is there?

OK, so them’s my reasons for being interested in all this. Hope I’ve raised some interesting questions for you, too. I’m going to see what we can find out on all of this, then posit a specious conclusion. Or I might instead raise some further, seemingly gnomic, questions, idly and wantonly shirking any pretence of responsibility to give you answers; after all, what are we here for? All together now: “the ride!” I might be back on this – but just not yet. All thoughts happily welcome – you know where the comment box is!

I’ll leave you with this little gem. Octopuses have more than 50 per cent of their nerves in their tentacles and partially “think with them” (if we “think with” our heads, I suppose…). They’re smart, have individual personalities and are quite sensitive to stress. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat any more at this rate. Anyway, research is due to be published very soon on whether they have a favourite tentacle – by giving them Rubiks Cubes to play with.

 

Seeing the curl in the fractal?

Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?

- Margot Fonteyn

I hope you enjoyed that period of Imp quietude. I had nothing to say. HOWEVER… that’s all over now.  What an odd blog it would be if the point was just silence. Stephen ‘Tin Tin’ Duffy, he of “in Duran Duran before they made it” fame, once told Smash Hits that as a student he was asked to run a talk on anarchy. He agreed. Then didn’t show up. “‘Cos that’s the point of anarchy, innit?”. I thought that was really clever. When I was 12.

Now, today, I’d like to witter on about superstition, fate, coincidence, pre-determination, randomness. I am very grateful to the ever-patient ear of the imp’s lover, who smiled politely as my babbling brook of  consciousness tickled these ideas by the river this week, and who then pushed them to grow. Any blame lies  entirely with the author, however.

OK. Let’s take two extreme views:

Extreme 1) There is no higher power (god or gods)

• no afterlife
• no purpose in life except life itself (ie continuation of the organisms that make life – see past Impery on this here)
• As one of my personal heroes said (yup, it’s Mr William Hicks), it’s just a ride.

Extreme 2) Our lives are – to a lesser or greater extent – governed by a power higher than ourselves (god or gods)

• live life carefully, according to that power’s (moral) code, because (a) there is an afterlife and reward or retribution for your actions and (b) the code says you have to strive to be good to one another (viz. Bill & Ted)
• your life is (again, to lesser/greater degree) determined by that higher power’s whims/grand plan [the hamster died to teach you about hygiene; your boobs fell off because you were vain enough to like them; etc etc]

Now, I’d always thought that these two extremes were just that: at opposite ends of the spectrum; unmixable. But then I was hit by a thought, inspired by going back to the idea of us just being cell-carriers, and nothing more. And that thought was this…

Part 1: Throughout nature, everywhere we look (and the better science is at seeing, the more this seems to be the case), there are patterns. Not random weirdnesses, grand exemplars of uniqueness after uniqueness, no, but each and every individual thing is made of the same building blocks, the same patterns – fractals, basically. Yes, there’s singularity – each leaf, each snail, each fingerprint, each person, is different. But when the Darleks call us “carbon creatures”, they’ve got it right. There is newness, from development and growth (evolution), but it is based on what has gone before, inspired by surrounding conditions, and born of what potential already exists within the evolving organism.

Part 2: Now here’s the bit that surprised me. What if – and remember, ideas should always seem batty at first – what if there are patterns not only in cell growth? If you think about it, we can see patterns in geology: erosion, mountains, rock formations, glaciers, caves. And in the weather, too: cloud formations; rainbows; low and high pressure etc.  So that, to me, says that actually, there are not random happenings, but rather there are sometimes huge, sometimes tiny fractal-like patterns of “nature”, that guide these processes.

Part 3: So – what if there are patterns in the way our lives flow, just as there are in these other things? Not ‘cos of a god on high (extreme 1), but in a way that also contradicts extreme 2’s view that everything is completely random? That would bring about a link between the two ideas, wouldn’t it?

Think back to your last funny coincidence, or sense of something prophetic; the strong feeling  that you just knew something would happen. If you’re religious, you might have seen it as something from your god. If you’re not, you may have rationalised it (“my brain knows how to predict things without my consciousness being aware of it”).

What about a third view (after all, being binary is so dull)?

What about it being a case of you spotting the coming curl in the fractal? And that fractal being the flow of the life that is around you? I say “the life that is around you” rather than “your life” for a reason.  It may just be a ride, but we’re all in it together, this primordial soup. It doesn’t mean that the meaning of life is determined by any god, but it doesn’t mean it’s entirely random, either. Nor does it mean that this posting draws a final conclusion…Just enjoy the ride.

 

Washing Line You, Knotted or Not

What would the younger you think of you now? We’ve played about with this idea before, as well as with the idea of learning / (not) going backwards in life but there was a fascinating programme on BBC Radio 4 today, looking at the letters and emails that people were sending their older selves, or had sent to their present from their past.

Some quick logistics: there’s a website called futureyou.org which allows you to write emails that will be sent in the future, and of course, the good old fashioned postal service will always offer future you the rare gift of a personal letter through the post – a rarer and rarer thing!

Anyway, what was interesting about this excellent programme (you can listen to it for the next week through the station’s website) was how people reacted to their own selves. “I was shallow / naive / smart”, for example. Or they predict what they “will be”.

One man said to himself, “You’re 27 and an artist today. But when you read this, you’ll be considering business school. Are you a sell-out, or were you naive?” Fascinating.

Like writing a diary / journal, I think the very exercise creates another level of consciousness: it makes you see your life (current or future if you’re writing; current and past if you’re reading) through an altering lens.  I use this when I can’t make a decision easily, or am stuck with a problem. I put 7-year (or 17-year-) old me on one shoulder, and 70-year old me on the other, and I ask them what they think.

Would the former be disappointed in, or excited for, me? The latter: would she tell me not to be such a chicken, not to be so cautious, never to have regrets? And yours for you?

 

Autumn Lights and Happenings

It feels strange to be so conscious of the summer passing. Tonight was glorious, with light that could only be late summer sun. Everything shone deeper, stronger, brighter, with crispy dark edging: the beech leaves carpeting the woody climb, the rays shining through the grass and glancing off the backs of the cattle , who were having their last munches before bed.

I was in a world of my own until a crash and a falling rustle stopped me still. So close, ridiculous, staring like my reflection was a muntjac. After a while, he decided to wash, licking his back, checking on me, licking his back, checking – yup; still there. Some hearty men came gallumping down the hill – but nope, we kept on as we were, licking, watching, stopping and staring. This went on easily for more than twenty minutes, with very little movement from the first spot. Then, what was obviously going to be the last bit of eye contact, me standing like a nutter, head cocked, and off we went.

Two minutes later, I turned, to look back.

Three giant puffs of colour lay like fungi on the scenery….hot air balloons about to take off! They grew, and then the first slowly flew. Then the second and third together, after a wait. Over the spires and the hills, as though brushing the tree tops, one skirting round rather than over, lacking enough early heat, but finally, all three were gone, and it was back to the golden light of autumn.

Hope you’re all squeezing out the last drops while you can!