Ushered

I reflected last week on the sacred nature of words, and related this to the language of the heart - that is to say, to that organ, which essentially wants as many happy feelings as can be packed into its lifetime.

Inasmuch as it is associated with consecration, the word 'sacred' is loaded with reverence, which can be risky to joy. If there is an excess of respect, barriers of fear pop up like so many mean little picket fences everywhere, and intelligently happy feelings flee forthwith. 

Of all the instruments we have at our disposal to create happy feelings, language is surely one that immediately takes pride of place. Peruse, for example, these acrobatics from one of the most beautiful clowns the English language ever had - 

"In the beginning God created heaven and earth with, it would appear, Irish labour. It took the Lord six days, and on the seventh he rested, during which time speculative builders put up Kilburn. Kilburn High Street runs three miles, that's why it looks 'shagged out'. A walk through Kilburn has left an indelible blank on my mind. The British, it is said, are made up of four races, the best of these are the Derby and the Oaks.

Kilburn was a melting pot, occasionally stirred by the National Front, an extreme political organisation whose election manifesto was 'I'll punch yer fuckin' 'ead in'. The leaders were any of them that could count up to ten without having to sit down." - from 'The Looney' by Spike Milligan

It just keeps getting hilariouser and hilariouser - so, yes: you'll have to get the book.

My point is that there is room in heaven for the Jabberwocky and all the hobbits' riddles, and even the worst limericks (okay, those might be kept under celestial shadecloth, just in case).

Whenever Christ appears to me, He does so playfully, dancingly, full of youthful sparkle, definitely bringing undiluted happy feelings. (Speaking for myself, I've had to admit that my heart simply can't cope with the crucifixion. I am one of those 'sensitive viewers' who only manage repeatedly to weep over that horror story.) 

Yes, language is sacred, but it is not nailed to a cross. It is free to dance and sing all manner of paths it finds to please human hearts in uncountable ways.

Sure, it can be misled. A writer or speaker can be enticed up all kinds of garden paths, including those in Gethsemane. But that is likely to be the subject of another blog. For now, consider yourselves ushered. Towards reading whatever gives your heart real joy.

 

 

Gratitude and your own, mad song

In what were probably some of the darkest times of my adult existence, I was obliged frequently to sojourn in the Eastern Cape frontier town, Grahamstown (privately and helpfully nicknamed Grimsberg during those years).

When in Grimsberg, I must do shopping.

I used to go to a little complex, called Peppergrove Mall. The front of the Pick 'n Pay there is roofed, and a part of the area is marked, by a railing, containing shopping trolleys. There used to be a slender, youngish man there, who wiped the handles of the trolleys for each customer, with sanitising wipes, which he nimbly reached over to pull out of a bucket with a hole in the top.

Not only did the man's helpfulness make the act of extracting a wipe, and sanitising my own trolley handle, unnecessary for me to do. He also wiped my grimy soul, by filling me each time with wonder.

For, on each occasion, without fail, when I fetched a trolley and greeted him, and asked him how he was, he would reply -

"I am alive! I am so grateful to God that I have today, and that is why I am happy!"

His fervour never waned, his line never changed.

When circumstances altered, and I no longer needed to frequent Grimsberg, I made a point of going especially to thank him for so liberally tossing his good cheer into my days. I am not sure that he recognised me, for I had not been coming to the town regularly anymore, and he looked, perhaps, a little nonplussed.

"You made a difference to my life," I told him, "it was a difficult time for me, and your thankfulness for being alive always meant so much."

I did not get the impression that my thanks made a difference to him. I don't think he needed it.

I never bothered to find out his name, or to make conversation with him - he did not exactly open himself up to conversation - and so, other feelings, which I could have had, such as pity for his station; or guilt and shame about the differences between us; or worry about his well-being - none of those feelings stood a chance with him.

Here was a king, as the German folk round sings it -

Froh zu sein bedarf es wenig                                        To be happy one needs very few things
und wer froh ist, ist ein Koenig.                                    and the one who is happy is a king.

One sees many memes, which highly recommend the trolley-handle-wiper's attitude of gratitude in practice. But you have to be wild to do it - wild enough to know your life can be snatched from you at any moment, wild enough to know that all you have is NOW; wild enough to be mad enough to sing your song as wholeheartedly and as wholesomely as you possibly can. And thus, the trolley-handle-wiper's song is humbling and no doubt an example for all to follow.

Hah, and there's the rub!
YOUR song is not the trolley-handle-wiper's song.
Your song is NOT the song of A.A. Milne or Piglet or Pooh Bear in the accompanying, famous illustration below.

Personally, I would have to exercise brute force on myself in order to do for somebody else what that lovely youngish man did for me. The sheer horror of having to tell myself (never mind somebody else) daily that I am happy to be alive is enough for instantaneous gloom to pour itself out within me and spread depression diligently through my system over the next five weeks. Why? Because I would be forcing myself to do something utterly monotonous to my spirit - the words would not spring up naturally out of my heart as they did out of his.

I surprise myself over and again by how fluid I am: how, not seldom, the cornucopia of disappointments and sorrows, which my life has generously granted, seem far too heavy for me to carry. Despite the fact that I am richly blessed with joys AND am grateful for them, I flop UNGRATEFULLY like wet clay back into default position, i.e. flat dust, which not even the wind can whip into a prettty storm, because this thing is way too waterlogged.

That is the moment when you become grateful for tears. Or just for honesty. Or for the teeth you're gritting all over again. And, at last, you really do resolve to make that appointment with the dentist. Tomorrow.

Photo acknowledgment: Saeed Al Jafar from Kuwait in the Masai Mara, Kenya. 'The end of a cheetah yawn'.

Welcome to the hours

Sabrina Orah Mark's article in the Paris Review on May 7th - Fuck the bread. The bread is over. - beautifully describes a real, living now - yes, alive as you or me - woman's plunge into testing adventure. Although she specialises as lecturer in fairy tales, she discovers - as the lectureship position disappears into thin air due to Corona - that she has never actually lived one.

Robert Bly, in his Preface to Iron John (1990), writes:

"The knowledge of how to build a nest in a bare tree, how to fly to the wintering place, how to perform the mating dance - all of this information is stored in the reservoirs of the bird's instinctual brain. But human beings, sensing how much flexibility they might need in meeting new situations, decided to store this sort of knowledge outside the instinctual system; they stored it in stories. Stories, then - fairy stories, legends, myths, hearth stories - amount to a reservoir where we keep new ways of responding that we can adopt when the conventional and current ways wear out."

I changed the name of this blog from '... follow your footsteps' to 'And they lived happily ever after ...' for one simple, utterly pedestrian (no pun intended) reason: my feet became sore. I took this as a sign that I must stop following my footsteps so much. My feet were obviously tired of adventuring without rest. Perhaps I must settle down and finally, finally live like every ordinary body else as best I can, I figured at the time.

There is no difference between my actual life and a fairy tale: it is as hard, as full of twists and turns, as horrifying and as magical.

I grew up steeped to the brim in fairy and all kinds of tales. I guess I became curious in my middle age about what happens in the 'happily ever after'. How does 'happily ever after' work? Many people around me - possibly with the exception of the homeless - seemed permanently to live in the 'ever after'. Okay, I thought, if my feet are that sore, perhaps the time has come to stop, look around me and ask to share the prize.

The biggest difference between a traditional fairy tale and 'real life' is that there are no statistics and no mass media in a fairy tale. A fairy tale has one hero or heroine per story, period. She is never a statistic. Nobody feels sorry for her. Nobody worships her. She's too busy trying to stay alive, somehow, between dreadful tasks and tempting or distracting villains, and seizing glimmers of opportunity, for social commentary, psychological analysis, or media people to get a single word in edgeways.

Mark, in her article, writes that the characters who do not fulfil the required tasks in a fairy tale simply fall over the edge into a void, in the same way that a cartoon character can toss his cup behind him and never worry about having to wash it. I hazard that those who 'live happily ever after' fall over that same edge, into that same happy void. It's the place where ordinary life continues. The land of unwashed cups, for sure.

Continually adventuring on the edge of things must have bitten into my feet. (I have to 'read' it somehow, so, because I do not have medical aid.) So I step down off it, off the edge.

The days welcome me into their hours.
I recognise the hours!
Beautiful creatures they are: flowers given us to unfold our beings in doings.
I realise I have been here from the start.
Everything and nothing is the same.

A fresh start - I'm done with fear

I'm stepping into my dear old blog (a good year old now) and at the same time into a new era in my own life.

The Parable of the Talents rings more loudly than ever at this moment: Matthew 25:14 tells Jesus' story about the servants who doubled their talents by investing them; and the servant whose FEAR of his Lord caused him to bury what he was given. His reward? He is "cast out" an "unprofitable servant".

It's as terrible a story as it is true. How does it relate, however, to me, and, who knows, possibly you?

Well, I don't know about you, but - can you believe it - I took a vow of poverty during my childhood: brainwashed by the books I read, I decided that having money condemned one, that it was impossible to be involved with money without being greedy. All the materially poor characters that populated the pages of my literature were pure at heart: like them I wanted to be! I was, quite literally, terrified of the effects of having money. I guess there is some sense in that, if you look around.

Still, what subtleties I missed! How foolish it is to confuse material poverty with poverty of spirit. The material poverty of the literary characters I admired was a FOIL for their richness of spirit, their sincerity and resourcefulness, their loving hearts.

Material poverty, I hope you'll agree, is one of humanity's inevitable burdens to bear; a burden that it behoves the materially wealthy to help carry; a burden it behoves all of us, rich and poor alike, to lighten communally by doing what we can to ensure that each of us has the few things that are needed to live a dignified and fulfilled life.

(By the way - on the topic of a dignified and fulfilled life: have you heard of Epicurus? I discovered his blissfully simple recipe on happiness in Alain de Boton's superb book, The Consolations of Philosophy - a must-read for anyone interested in life. Alas, that does not make all of us.)

Anyway. Back to poverty. It's spiritual poverty that's the REAL problem for humanity: poverty of spirit is, quite simply, an offence to the gift of life.

But what is spiritual poverty? Well, if you go back to the Parable - I'd update it into modern lingo and say that it teaches that to live in fear of being who you are, and to refuse to do what you know you COULD do; to refuse to MAKE SOMETHING out of what you have - however little that may be - it is THAT, which causes the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" the parable ends with - a beautifully grim description of the self-immolation that follows in the wake of bitter self-truths.

So. I'm done with fear. I'm abandoning the half-life I've lived, always kind of ashamed of what I know are my talents. The past one and a half years of pain and trauma have stumbled me into sharing my poems as never before, and finding them enjoyed by others to an unprecedented degree - so that now, for the first time in my life (old enough though I am to be a grandmother) I'm focusing without flinching on what I have to give, instead of FEARING that it's not going to GET me what I need to survive materially.

I've decided to invest in my poetry to the degree that I'm collaborating with an online marketing agency to help prepare towards the launch of Greater Matter in early October this year. I am breathing fresh air with the risk I'm taking. It feels good and it feels true. Yes, I could lose, yes I could fail, of course. I'm in any case such an old hand at failure that it's no longer scary at all.  But let fears NOT triumph over hopes, and certainly let them NOT stop me from trying my level best to reach towards the self I want and need to be: a self that wishes to give her late husband the biggest, most beautiful gift she possibly can: a book of poems celebrating her own emotional survival as widow; poems witnessing the good he gave me by the power of his love.

Depth and integrity of feeling: Spontaneous interview with Dinosaur Dust Co-Creator Riccardo Smid-Magnanini

Friday afternoon was fun, yet again working with Riccardo in the valley below Tor Doone, at a tiny waterfall I'd not visited before. In this clip he says a few things about what is important to him in the moving images he creates.

It's so interesting to me, who recalls the cynicism 30 years back towards 'happy stories and movies'; a cynicism that was due to the shallowness, indeed, hypocrisy, that seemed unfortunately often to be present, tainting natural happiness - a situation satirised by ... mmm ...

... I believe it might have been Rainer Werner Fassbinder in a science fiction movie - was it World on a Wire? No amount of searching has yielded information regarding in which movie exactly the weather forecaster smiles statically day after day: "Nur Sonne, immer nur Sonne" (Only sun, only ever sun).

At any rate, the big things are surely depth and integrity of feeling, accurately reflecting the complexity of lived moments of experience. This clip by Riccardo, and others, which I've seen, some of which I've had the pleasure of participating in, reflect a shared, ongoing quest for the shimmers of truth as they flicker, moment by moment.

Laura Marling's track, Devil's Spoke, is exquisitely chosen, too.