Sunday 30 January 2011

A Sunday morning stroll

This is the country park just three minutes walk from where me and my girlfriend live.
It was bitterly cold this morning but we were both really glad to get out in the fresh air. My other half started hugging tree's and talked of being charged by the spirit of Gaia...I was furiously rubbing my hands together and summoning up the courage to light a fag.
I like to think I am a very spiritual person, and I always have one eye out for the Sidhe (pronounced 'Shee' - Celtic Fairy folk), but I really prefer my supernatural outdoor communions to be performed in more temperate weather.
Still, we took some air and stretched a few sagging muscles.

I'm feeling it now though, that's why I'm posting these pics - I'm too knackered to get off the sofa, or do any serious thinking for at least a couple of hours.

I'm just going to have a leisurely Boho afternoon: strumming my guitar and eating haggis flavoured crisps and copious amounts of hot sweet tea - not all at the same time obviously!











Friday 28 January 2011

Paulus the Woodgnome

I guess this is related to the previous post 'You gotta have soul'. Reading about the mythic structures of our lives and the dark and unconscious forces manifested through the world soul...tickled a vague recollection I had from childhood.

Whenever me and the family would wax nostalgic about the good old days of children's TV back in the 70's (Tizwaz, Pipkins, Swap Shop,Rainbow etc) my mother would always snigger at me and pipe up:
"Do you remember 'Paulus the Woodgnome?"
At this somewhat rhetorically flavoured question, my mind would clunkily manage to conjure up a vague image of a ugly puppet witch, set against a gloomy Nordic forest background.

Apparently, so my mother claimed, I adored this programme and became something of an animated puppet myself at the first strains of the opening theme tune. For years I knew she wasn't just implanting a false memory in my somewhat chronically spongy head.

I knew in the deepest recesses of my heart and soul that Paulus and his friends meant something to me, something profound - indeed, 'primary psychic architecture' is not too grandiose a phrase I think to possibly encompass the importance of this deeply weird (and disturbing) overdubbed Dutch puppet show from the late 60's.
(Actually, just saying the words 'overdubbed Dutch puppet show from the late 60's' gives you a flavour of the possible oddity of its content.)

After doing a bit of research (literally - a bit), I discovered that the show only ran for a couple of years on British TV in the late 60's - and I couldn't find any mention of re-runs so I must have been only 2 or 3 years old at the time.

I guess my age insulated me from the initial trauma of witnessing this surreal atrocity of the human imagination at the time. But I believe I absorbed and developed certain aspects, atmospheres, colours, sounds, symbolism from that early and totally uncensored exposure.

I'm too scared to really examine deeply, how this particular example of televisual Kinder art may have unbalanced my psychic matrix - I need a second opinion.

See what you think:

Sunday 23 January 2011

You gotta have Soul


I'm just nearing the end of Patrick Harpur's latest book 'A complete guide to the soul: Who am I? What's my life's purpose? Where am I going when I die?'

The subtitle is a bit naff and 'New Agey', and did put me off initially, but the weight of serious, good reviews on the book and Harpur's earlier work finally cajoled me into obtaining a copy (Edinburgh libraries are sublime, you can get almost anything).


Harpur has a really smooth, earthy writing style and he's definitely produced a pretty comprehensive overview of how numerous cultures - from the ancient Greek's to the present day - have attempted to interpret, project, express, depict, manifest and commune with, that often elusive and most sacred aspect of our human nature...the soul.

In his book, Harpur journey's through Greek and Norse myth, neo-Platonism, Renaissance alchemy, Shamanic societies (ancient and modern), scientific materialism and the depth psychology of Freud and Jung.
The author spotlights how our imagining of the soul has been translated or corrupted (and many other things) by church, state and folk culture across the ages.

Harpur's book is not something I can sum up that accurately in a blog post; his ideas are too complex, subtle and poetic, they have to grow on you, be absorbed over time, understood through many examples and contrasting traditions. Basically, you need to read the book to feel the truth rather than intellectually grasp it.

I found the two most powerful threads running through the book, were the concepts of personal and collective Daemon's and the important distinction Harpur makes between 'spirit' and 'soul' - the latter have, over time, become somewhat interchangeable an
misattributed.



Since Socrates' daemon was first mentioned by Plato, through the Roman notion of 'Genius' to the psychiatrist Carl Jung's Philemon; writers, artists, poets and other assorted shaman of every cloth, have, over the millennia, spoken of a spiritual companion or guide who has manifested physically or metaphorically (in dreams and synchronicity's for example) at certain crucial moments in their lives to warn, inspire or lead them to a deeper understanding of the world and their place within it.
Christian theologian's (as they did with so many things) morphed the original multifaceted pagan daemons into the sanitized, mono-tasking bores of Biblical legend called 'Angels'.

Daemon's often do take on the popular conceptions of a particular time and culture of course - in a strongly Judaeo-Christian culture they will often appear to us as winged Cherubim and Seraphim's - sort of Disney-fied older brothers and sisters. 'Angelology' seems to be a growth industry these days.

In more tribal and traditionally shamanic cultures, daemon's tend to be shape-shifters, animal-human hybrid's (the North American Indian deity 'The Trickster/Coyote is a good example), and this is mirrored of course in Greek myth with Pan and friends, and the Ibis-headed Egyptian god Thoth among many others too numerous to mention here.

For Harpur, it is Hermes, the Greek messenger of the Gods and guide to the Underworld, the patron of travellers, boundaries and crossroads who is the invisible thread between the macrocosm and the microcosm. Hermes is the webmaster for the World Soul, connecting diverse and seemingly unrelated phenomena to reveal that everything is merely a shadow and mirror of everything else - if we are only sensitive enough to look for and hear his signs and whispers.

Hermes puts us in touch with Jung's mythical 'archetypes' (The Hero, Wise old man, Eternal Mother, Trickster etc), that possess us as demon's or 'daemon's', to drag us violently sometimes, deep down into the underworld, the unconscious, where we negate the individual ego/spirit/daemon and merge with the Soul of the World.

This journey is the soul's journey, to remember and 're-cognize' its grounding in every aspect of reality: Individuation or Oneness with the totality - or as the Alchemists would say, as above so below.
This merging can be metaphorical, poetic and imaginative in many different ways, and there are many many diverse paths and journeys which can lead to this communion with the great 'It-ness'.

As Harpur illustrates throughout 'A Complete guide to the Soul', since the Enlightenment we have neglected and even been repelled by the dark mystery that the soul represents, we have instead championed the daylight world of Spirit in an instrumental way: Self-improvement as in New Age therapies, 'progress', ego development, hierarchies and vertical thinking.
We have made those important Hermetic messages, symbols, synchronicity's and subtleties of Spirit/Daemonology far too 'literal', and excommunicated the depth of the soul in the process.



In the postmodern world of pastiche and irony we have fixed and channeled the masculine aspect of spirit into lifestyle choices, health fascism, personal gurus, 'finding oneself' through Twelve step guides and so on; its as if we're still scared of the dark and have to illuminate everything in the airy, Apollonian light of reason, make it material... but we don't even scratch the surface of the Underworld, the realm of Dionysus.

The soul is a twilight world, feminine, labyrinthine, medieval, archaic - it is the repository of the unconscious, dreams, genealogy, history, narrative, myth and mystery.
A journey to the underworld is always challenging, instructive and ultimately cathartic, it shows us where we came from and where we are going, and how to be truly alive and sensitive to everything. Its also a helluva a lot more fun than contemplating crystals or attempting to translate Dolphin squeaks into the Queen's English - or any other of those stress-free, Bourgeois method's of soul-seeking.

As Patrick Harpur argues, we need to re-cognize the important messages that spirit is telling us and not be afraid of hooking up with the soul on a more long-term basis.

If you think about it, Harpur's book is actually a metaphorical gateway to the Underworld via his spirit or Daemon, or Hermes rather - that wing-footed transgressor who likes to connect all the dots.

Getting in touch with soul is often hard and unpleasant, scary and sometimes life and sanity threatening, but that's what you get if you want some kind of genuine, authentic existence.

As the writer, criminal and ex-jailbird Jean Genet replied when asked why he chose the life of a thief:

"For the sake of depth".

Thursday 20 January 2011

Signwriters of the world unite!


In the late eighties I came across a book in the local library on traditional signwriting. It was the story of traditional signwriters/narrowboat painters on the canal systems of England and Wales.
I became fascinated and intrigued by the art and the lifestyle and even went to college for two years to learn the skills. I could draw a bit already so I really enjoyed the course and took to it like a fish to water.

The book described a kind of medieval guild system of 'writers' who each had their own letter styles and artistic flourishes.
For example, on traditional narrow boats or ‘canal barges’ - as they’re more indelicately called, - you have castles and flowers, acanthus leaves, occult symbols, baroque and idiosyncratic letter styles etcetera – and the particular colours used, the way the shadow or outline was painted in relief or cast, would reveal the hand of a particular writer - like an artists signature, which in a sense they were – pure folk art.

I think this is what drew me to signwriting, it was social art, it had a functional but decorative quality, it provided the opportunity for a bit of artistic licence, a bit of the personal in the often uniform, clinical ‘street furniture’ that impinges on our senses everyday.


Most signwriters have a particular letter style that they use more than any other. 'Bash' - as its name implies’ - is a quick, loose brush style used for cheap and temporary signs, or simple secondary lettering like telephone and fax numbers on more expensive signs. Each of these Bash styles is totally unique and is, to the more experienced eye, like reading someone’s handwriting.


When the canal’s were the motorways of the industrial revolution, the jobbing signwriter (all men at that time as far as I can find out) would have a constant stream of customers passing through their 'patch' with the boat trade, or they would be busy painting the shop and pub signs in the local village or town – not to mention a bit of gold leaf work for the parish church of course.

Some painters were nomadic, ‘water gypsy’s’, cadging lifts on boats down the waterways and selling their trade to the then busy canal system, or hopping off the boat to ply their trade in any hamlet along the way.

What I loved about the trade, was this sense of continuity with the past, a feeling of being connected with a tradition. I realize this is a little romantic now (and at the time) but hey, so what, I’m proud of the work I did.

I found the physicality and tools of the job fascinating too: the sable, chisel edged brushes with quill ferrules, the smell of the little tins of enamel, the personalized Mahl stick with the chamois leather glued to the end, the varnishes and linseed oil.

I learned to draw and perfect around twenty letter styles by hand; I learned how to enlarge the round letters slightly so they were optically equal to the others; to flare the corners of sans serif styles a millimetre or two, so as to make them appear sharper and straighter. I was taught how to chalk the back of sign layout and or graphic, tape it to the board or panel, and then’ transfer’ it by going over the shapes with a ballpoint pen.

I did Gold leaf work as well, traditional gilding with rabbit skin glue. More pots and potions again – I felt a bit like an alchemist in those days.



Digital technology started to takeover in the early nineties, and apart from the occasional narrowboat or quaint shop sign, I was forced by economics to begin using sign software packages like Corel draw and Signlab to design and cut letters and graphics – and a bit of Photoshop of course.

And yes, the software is very liberating and labour saving in one sense, but in another, it kind of stops you thinking and being really creative, because you don’t need to really push yourself when you don’t have to actually hand draw stuff and then paint it, that really makes you think about exactly what you’re doing believe me!
Compared to all that, vinyl has such a clinical quality - there are no idiosyncrasy’s that reveal the individual ‘you’, nothing to really illustrate a real person did this, which of course they didn’t really.

Paint has a depth and richness that can't be substituted by plastic; a plastic which is always tediously precise, with certain fonts such as the ubiquitous Helvetica, performing a kind of lettering imperialism – squeezing out other styles and possibilities for the sake of apparent rapid legibility that modern culture demands. No time to stand and stare I guess anymore.

I was talking to a guy the other day who does the vinyl vehicle wraps (all over graphics like on the Sky van's) and he said how he still loved the traditional signwriting best of all - but time is money.

Maybe all those traditional folk crafts will make a vengeful return again after the inevitable collapse of advanced capitalism?

Then there’s fairground art…but that’s another story.

Friday 14 January 2011

Tom Hodgkinson and 'Idling'

I came across Tom Hodgkinson's idea's while stumbling upon the Idler magazine's website a few years ago. It was not so much a road to Damascus experience as a feeling of being somehow validated, comforted; a feeling that I had fellow travellers in the here and now - not just long (or shortly) dead poets, philosophers, writers, artists and assorted non-conformists, free spirits and eccentrics.

Hodgkinson is the co-founder and editor of 'The Idler' magazine, a publication devoted to questioning the producer/consumer work ethic and championing alternative lifestyles such as green Anarchy, permaculture and basically sticking to 'The Man' wherever and whenever possible.

The 'Idling' of the magazine/website's title describes an attitude and approach to life that puts family, relationships, personal freedom, healthy eating and a DIY approach to basically 'everything' as more important than being a wage slave in somebody else's machine.

The 'idling' thing is actually a bit of a misnomer and a provocative challenge. Hodgkinson uses the phrase to initially highlight how those little pleasures in life like reading a book, watching clouds scud by or just sitting on your arse occasionally(and contemplating your being and nothingness), have almost become the moral equivalent of infanticide ever since the Industrial Revolution first began to shove everybody into factory's and offices, and slice their humanity into utilitarian 'clock-time'.

In the 3 books of his that I've read ('The Freedom Manifesto', 'Idle Pleasures' and 'How to be Free') Hodgkinson reveals himself as a tireless researcher and bibliophile.

He's a really good literary/cultural sampler, what the French call a 'Bricoleur', building his anarcho-bohemian manifesto from a diverse range of fields: Beat writing, Dostoyevsky, Existentialism, Thoreau, Kropotkin, Situationism - and last but definitely not least - a pre-Puritan Medievalism.

The latter, the (somewhat idealized) rustic simplicity of what Hodgkinson calls 'Merry Old England' is the foundation, or ideological skeleton on which the writer drapes all his more historically recent 'Idling' theories upon.

The Middle ages to him are a highly romantic and autonomous time, a period when the seditious, heretical and revolutionary spirit was bubbling away just beneath the surface, a time when folks had not yet been totally yoked to the work ethic, a cultural melting pot and possible catalyst for a more enlightened and emancipated way of living.

Hodgkinson gets a bit of flack for being an upper-middleclass, Cambridge educated purveyor of 'lifestyle anarchism', but, if you read at least one of his books, it's pretty obvious that he's unashamedly and unapologetically woven together loads of other peoples sharp ideas into a reasonably decent and clever argument against the '24-7' work obsessed society we live in.

His books are really well written (not to forget that he is a journalist) and fun to read, but there is an important message shimmering all the way through them...things could be so much better if we all slowed down a bit and took control of our own lives from the clutches of the machine.

Tuesday 11 January 2011

The Time Machine


There has always been a theme in my blogs, a sediment running through the more overt glittery facade of the tales I tell.
Its feels to me like a very dark coal seam, or maybe for instance, the cold current that suddenly runs over your feet when you paddle out too far in the sea on a hot summers day.

Its the feeling that whatever I'm instinctively drawn to, whatever rings my bell or floats my dinghy in the here and now as an adult, no matter how I attempt to rationalize my fascination in practical terms - with a piece of art, a book, a movie, an old chest of drawers or an entire culture for example - I know that my attachment to these things was first decided way way back, when my primitive psyche was first being shaped and sculpted as an (almost) immaculate baby-child.

My neuronal welcome mat I believe was laid down long before any conscious effort on my part to open up and receive the cultural signals or road maps that would hold a lifelong fascination.

Scientists say that if you tweezered out a piece of brain the size of a grain of sand from your nut, it would contain 100,000 neurons, 2000,000 axons and 1000,000,000 synapses – and all these bits of sloppy stuff are chatting away to each other 24/7.
The human brain is truly awesome: it has been calculated that the number of possible brain states exceeds the number of elementary particles in the known universe.
All those connections, meetings and relationships fizzing away. All those baroque neuronal architectures whispering their strange electro-chemical languages.

I know loads of psychologists and neuroscientists especially Freudian's and the cognitive school would agree to this to some extent. Papa Freud though, would reduce development down to my childhood sexuality and how mummy and daddy did, or did not scare the shit out of me when I were a lad, and the neuro-crew are so boring with all their sterile clunky diagrams, which are far too objective and blunt to capture the unique amorphous and delicate sensory cajoling of the signs, smells, colours and images that were my real daily bread when a mere babe.

Imagine the avalanche of novel data that assaults the senses at every moment when we are new to this experience called ‘waking life’.
We feel the world in an instinctive poetic way during this period, we feel around ‘things’ without the baggage of the intellect orchestrating our experience and emotions. We accept or reject various aspects of the vivid sincerity of Reality because it creates a physiological response, not an abstract theorem to be tested in a cold laboratory.

How can you really isolate and examine why you like and love - the things you like and love? That stuff that swirls around you all the time like a cloud of gnats, then suddenly: something grabs your attention, something deeper than conscious awareness, it enfolds you in its warm gooey gravity, leading you back home again to your young/old poetic self.

I suppose I’m being a bit Proustian here: actively searching for those little triggers or doors to a seemingly lost time. Most of the time, all we are ever afforded is glimpses, little epiphanies, flashes of familiarity that momentarily warm the heart and remind us of who we were are really are.

I know that my ‘poetic remembrance’ project is ultimately doomed to fail according to the mandate of hard science: my hypotheses can never be ‘empirically tested’ of course, its too unique, indistinct, and ungraspable by crass objective measures…its just messy me and you at the end of the day.

But that’s the beauty of soul mining, it’s a creative process at every stage, there can only ever be ‘correlations’, analogies and metaphor’s – science 101: ‘Correlation does not mean causation’.
But I’m happy with this,

The writer Albert Camus once said that every artist (and I think the artist in everyone) is forever attempting to return to that first pristine perception, the unpolluted primal cognition of childhood: a flower, a sky, a mothers smile, a butterfly or whatever. We all secretly and not so secretly sometimes, yearn to reach that state of grace or blissful communion with the world as it really is, in itself: raw and undiluted by habit and experience.

I think…feel rather, that the things we are drawn too instinctively are the subliminal clues to this perfect world. They pull us back – often violently – to that time when we didn’t judge anything, didn’t try to work it out, it just was, is and always will be like that underneath the patina of gathered dirt called experience.
Sometimes, the most trivial preference may be traced back through its chain of sensory/emotional associations to an Eden when it, or something related to it – a colour, shape, smell, taste etc made you feel safe, loved, protected and unique.



Its fun to practice retroactive deconstruction with your own life, after all, there’s no better subject than yourself.
Here’s a couple of brief examples, they may seem comical, but do they hint at something a little deeper?
As early as I can remember until the age of about 7 or 8 years old, my paternal grandfather would spoil me at least once a fortnight by buying me an Airfix plastic modelling kit – usually of World War II fighter planes and bombers.
He said it was for me, but I know he loved making them too, and often did all the intricate stuff himself. The colour of these kits straight out the box was usually a pale eggshell blue.
I’ve always had a particular fascination with this colour as an adult and a painter/signwriter in my younger days.

Show me a tin of Cyan blue enamel, or an oil tube of Cerulean and for some reason I start to feel creative, excited and in some odd way – reassured. Paintings and artists, which use or exhibit this colour prominently always give me a bit of a buzz too. Over the last few years, I’ve wondered if that colour triggers an emotional return to time when I felt most safe and happy.
Those times spent with my grandfather were a haven from my arguing parents, and the boredom of the family home. Me and gramps just made stuff, and he gave me his time and made me feel special - accepted me for just being little old me.

I’ve also noticed – this may be stretching it a bit – when I do abstract art, or just mindless doodling, I tend to paint and draw flowing aeronautical shapes: pointed wings, tapered cylinders, graceful sweeping lines – like those aeroplanes I used to make all those years ago. And the main shapes are never linked, but discreet objects, separated and floating in space, held by thin cords usually, and narrow tubes…just like those kits used to be straight out the box.
Anyway, sounds crazy, but still, makes you think doesn’t it.
What’s your favourite colour?

Saturday 8 January 2011

'OMO': A corkscrewed tail of the unexpected


I became addicted to the smell of creosote when I was very young child.
As early as I can remember, my snotter was assaulted by two very earthy and very distinct pongs: pig shit and coal tar creosote.
Just for the ignorant and unsophisticated out there in blog land – ‘coal tar creosote’ has been used for decades as a wood preservative and always trumpets its presence by that intoxicatingly beautiful, oil-smoke aroma.

Pig shit on the other hand is a grainy ploppy dark gruel, aesthetically akin to a carbonized Yorkshire pudding. It has a slightly fruity whiff, but not as objectionable for example, as cow or sheep pooh.
Actually, I’ve just thought of another ingredient, or smell I should say…damp straw.

If you toss all these ingredients into that big shiny Sherlockian pot of the human intellect, what have you got?

Well you might have come up with some kind of pagan sex oil, but for me it symbolizes and summarizes my father’s small holding, his darkly forbidding, squealing, labyrinthine ‘Piggery’.

The pig factory was situated approximately 100 yards from the family house. In summer our living room was almost blackened by the swarms of flies, who were more than a match for the great god Vapona.

On particularly hot days (thankfully not that many) the stench of porky pooh’s would get you right at the back of your throat. That’s a memory that’s been particularly deeply embedded: flies, the smell of shit, and fried liver, mashed spuds and garden peas (my mum wasn’t that bad a cook - but you know what I mean.)

I was forbidden to go to the piggery on my own. I was always to be chaperoned by my dad or another relatively large and responsible adult. But of course, as it was so close and I was an inquisitive young lad I was sucked magnetically into its black satanic vortex. Far from the paternalistic guided tour itinerary, I sought the belly of the beast – so to speak.

There was an old guy called ‘Jack’ who had worked there on and off over the years, he tolerated my presence in his churlish way, and showed me how to tie fancy knots in the ubiquitous bits of muddy string that littered the concrete floor of that place (I was never able to do them).
Echoing my dad, he told me to walk in the center of the passageways, not to get too close to the open pen’s.

The piggy’s houses were echoing gloomy cubicles, bedded with straw, small-scale planked stable doors sealed them in – although the top section was usually left open unless they got uppity (the ungratefulness), or it was very cold.
That was the reason I had to walk in the center, just in case one of the beast’s took a snap at me as it reared up, its front trotters resting on the door sill, its insane little eye’s scouring my very soul, searching out my deepest fears, guilt… shame...okay I’ll stop.

The noise was creepy in that place too, the sound of warm, contented snorting and oinking, or the truly blood curling high pitched squeal of a spooked or angry boar or sow was deafening in the confined space.
The pig palace has an undeniable echo with human prisons and mental hospitals for me now - a place where everything is a bit broken, noisy, irrational and potentially life threatening.

I guess I didn’t realize it then - that it was an infinitely sad place; sad that those animals were just bred for meat in those grim conditions, and sad that my father spent his young days in that screaming stinking gloomy hell hole (he’d ‘inherited’ it from his father a few years before and didn’t know anything else really).
It just felt a bit scary and forbidding for me at the time, but maybe another part of myself registered the boredom and confinement – both for my dad and the animals – but I couldn’t even begin to articulate it.

The piggery was a sort of u-shape: the entrance corridor was enclosed and lit by low watt bulbs in metal cages, the other two corridors were open on one side, like a balcony, or veranda; to allow the pigs a panoramic view of the marshy, rubbish strewn hinterland. I guess these were the lucky one’s – at least they got to see a bit of greenery before their inevitable and industrially efficient demise.

Empty ICI cobalt blue plastic sacks.
Those blue bags were the only primary colour (accidental or functional) to contrast with the prevailing piggery palette of grey, burnt umber, raw sienna and Van Dyke brown.
Not sure what ICI supplied now, maybe pig feed or something, but I always remember the vivid blue amongst all that brown-black drab.

The piggery was always a serious place. By ‘serious’ I mean it belonged to men, the adult world, beyond my fragile comprehension, full of unspoken rules and dangers.

I felt my innocence and ignorance most keenly in that place. I felt like thin paper amongst the manly banter, intimidated and foolish, wanting to participate, but knowing the work and social skills of grown upness were totally beyond me. They were aliens and I was alienated.
Men at their work were scary and frighteningly preoccupied.

Although, somewhat more terrifying than mono-tasking, sweaty grafting males stinking of pig shit, were the Che Guevara rebel porker’s who made spectacular breaks for freedom every now and again.

My sister became absolutely petrified when there was a pig on the loose – a big old mean sow I mean, or maybe a mean old boar with a chip on his bristly shoulder.
I remember my mum telling me how my sister would just freeze, turn to stone, almost as if she’d had a coronary or a stroke - all at the sight of one of those grunting creatures going AWOL.

A strange urban myth evolved in my school when I was around 8 or 9 years old. It certainly wasn’t fabricated by moi who, ironically of course, had a personal goldmine of imaginative material so close to home so to speak, but never really saw it as anything else but dad and the stinky, slightly scary piggery.

A couple of kids at school in town had started talking of a legendary malevolent entity that had been stalking the Shropshire countryside since time out of mind - which to us kids was like when our parents were actually ‘young’ - I mean really ancient man.

The mysterious creature of dark fable was no less than…a big pig! Or possibly giant pig, its hard to recall now, but whatever, it was an evil predatory bastard by all accounts: a sort of porcine-human hybrid, a genetic aberration, a Darwinian dead end, an undead bacon zombie ‘thing’…anyway, it was pretty horrible and weird.

It was a strange synchronicity though, no doubt about it.
I don’t remember discussing my dad’s piggy collective with any of the other kids, mainly because I think I was a bit embarrassed back then – the other kids dad’s were like policemen, firemen, lawyers, all-in wrestlers or just common or garden brain surgeons.

These kids at school said people had gone missing, vanished into thin air, the old
‘Just went out for a packet of fags’ riff taken to another level.
The vindictive porker even had a name: ‘OMO’.
I think that’s how you spell it, not sure because I never saw it written down anywhere, but that’s what it sounded like: ‘Oh Mow’.
I must have asked why it was called that mysterious, creepy name (the word still spooks me a little even now) but like everything else with the legend, real facts, like evidence, were thin on the ground…or rather, non-existent.

I often wonder if the town kids had heard talk of the piggery breakouts – maybe someone they know witnessed it, or they overheard their parents talking about my dad’s place out in the country over dinner one night – anyway, however it came about it was great yarn for young boys to spin out in the playground or on the school bus as it travelled through the dark lanes in winter.
Nearly forty years later, I still miss the smell of creosote in the morning.

Friday 7 January 2011

Note to idlers everywhere

I've always liked this essay by Robert Louis Stevenson on the joy of Idling. Very wise words.

BOSWELL: "We grow weary when idle."
JOHNSON: "That is, sir, because others being busy, we want company;
but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary; we should all
entertain one another."

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence
convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some
lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short
of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they
have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a
little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be.

Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in
doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the
ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry
itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter
in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult
and a disenchantment for those who do.

A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination, votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, "goes for" them. And while such an one is
ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to understand his
resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the meadows by the
wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears and a glass at
their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate place by the
disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken Rome
for these tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house, and
found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It is a
sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and
when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence
physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial
toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons
despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to
disparage those who have none.

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the
greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against
industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool.
The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well;
therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that
much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is
something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present
occasion, I have to say. To state one argument is not necessarily to
be deaf to all others, and that a man has written a book of travels in
Montenegro, is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond.
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in
youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from
school honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear
for their medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their
locker, "and begin the world bankrupt." And the same holds true during
all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering others to
educate him. It must have been a very foolish old gentleman who
addressed Johnson at Oxford in these words: "Young man, ply your book
diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come
upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome
task."

The old gentleman seems to have been unaware that many other
things besides reading grow irksome, and not a few become impossible,
by the time a man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a
stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty
bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady
of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back turned on all
the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as
the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thoughts.
If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the
full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would
rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in
the class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my
time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic
Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor
Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with
such scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by
certain other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I
was playing truant.

This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of
Balzac, and turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the
Science of the Aspects of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does
not learn in the streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning.
Nor is the truant always in the streets, for if he prefers, he may go
out by the gardened suburbs into the country. He may pitch on some
tuft of lilacs over a burn, and smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of
the water on the stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he
may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things in a new
perspective. Why, if this be not education, what is? We may conceive
Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one, and the conversation
that should thereupon ensue:
"How, now, young fellow, what dost thou here?"
"Truly, sir, I take mine ease."
"Is not this the hour of the class? and should'st thou not be plying
thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge?"
"Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave."
"Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? Is it
mathematics?"
"No, to be sure."
"Is it metaphysics?"
"Nor that."
"Is it some language?"
"Nay, it is no language."
"Is it a trade?"
"Nor a trade neither."
"Why, then, what is't?"
"Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go upon Pilgrimage, I
am desirous to note what is commonly done by persons in my case, and
where are the ugliest Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what
manner of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, by this
water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which my master teaches me
to call Peace, or Contentment."
Hereupon, Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved with passion, and
shaking his cane with a very threatful countenance, broke forth upon
this wise: "Learning, quotha!" said he; "I would have all such rogues
scourged by the Hangman!"

And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat with a crackle of
starch, like a turkey when it spread its feathers.
Now this, of Mr. Wiseman, is the common opinion. A fact is not called
a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does not fall into one of your
scholastic categories. An inquiry must be in some acknowledged
direction, with a name to go by; or else you are not inquiring at all,
only lounging; and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed
that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far end of a
telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all
experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years
ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read
in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter
xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of
fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in
his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true
education than many another in a life of heroic vigils.

There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits
of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and
for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and
palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their memory with
a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before the week
be out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play the
fiddle, to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to
all varieties of men.

Many who have "plied their book diligently," and
know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out
of the study with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry,
stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life.
Many make a large fortune, who remain underbred and pathetically
stupid to the last. And meantime there goes the idler, who began life
along with them--by your leave, a different picture. He has had time
to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a great deal
in the open air, which is the most salutary of all things for both
body and mind; and if he has never read the great Book in very
recondite places, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to
excellent purpose. Might not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and
the business man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's
knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and the idler has
another and more important quality than these. I mean his wisdom. He
who has much looked on at the childish satisfaction of other people in
their hobbies, will regard his own with only a very ironical
indulgence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He will have a
great and cool allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. If he
finds no out-of-the-way truths, he will identify himself with no very
burning falsehood. His way took him along a by-road, not much
frequented, but very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace
Lane, and leads to the Belvedere of Commonsense.

Thence he shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; and while others
behold the East and West, the Devil and the Sunrise, he will be
contentedly aware of a sort of morning hour upon all sublunary things,
with an army of shadows running speedily and in many different
directions into the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the
generations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by into
ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all this, a man may
see, out of the Belvedere windows, much green and peaceful landscape;
many firelit parlours; good people laughing, drinking, and making love
as they did before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old
shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a
symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a
sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious
of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.
Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you
will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no
curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations;
they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its
own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will
even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they _cannot_
be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those
hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in
the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they
are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is
a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they
fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open.

To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly
they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a
flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and
college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have
gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time
they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man's soul were not
too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a
life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a
listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and
not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he
was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is
smoked out, the snuffbox empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright
upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as
being Success in Life.

But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy
habits, but his wife and children, his friends and relations, and down
to the very people he sits with in a railway carriage or an omnibus.
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be
sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by
any means certain that a man's business is the most important thing he
has to do. To an impartial estimate it will seem clear that many of
the wisest, most virtuous, and most beneficent parts that are to be
played upon the Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers,
and pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness. For in that
Theatre not only the walking gentlemen, singing chambermaids, and
diligent fiddlers in the orchestra, but those who look on and clap
their hands from the benches, do really play a part and fulfil
important offices towards the general result.

You are no doubt very dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the
policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there not a
thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors who
set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with
good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred
Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better
people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither
sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-faced
Barabbases whom the world could better have done without. Hazlitt
mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote who
had never done him anything he could call a service, than to his whole
circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good companion
emphatically the greatest benefactor.
I know there are people in the
world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at
the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. A
man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with the most
entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly, perhaps
profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service would be
greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a
compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more
beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the
while for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties
because, like the quality of mercy, they are not strained, and
they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there
may be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of
sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among generous
people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate
as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits
upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they
are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.

The other day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, with
so jolly an air that he set every one he passed into a good humour;
one of these persons, who had been delivered from more than usually
black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him some money with
this remark: "You see what sometimes comes of looking pleased." If he
had looked pleased before, he had now to look both pleased and
mystified. For my part, I justify this encouragement of smiling rather
than tearful children; I do not wish to pay for tears anywhere but
upon the stage; but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite
commodity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a
five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of good-will; and
their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been
lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh
proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically
demonstrate the great Theorum of the liveableness of Life.

Consequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle
he should remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger
and the workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical
limits, it is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body
of Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I
beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal
of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous
derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all
fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and
a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a
contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper
before he returns to work. I do not care how much or how well he
works, this fellow is an evil feature in other people's lives.

They would be happier if he were dead. They could easier do without his
services in the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his
fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to
be beggared out of hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden
by a peevish uncle.
And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? For what cause do
they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should
publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not
finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest
to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand
fall, there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan
of Arc she should be at home minding women's work, she answered
there were plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare
gifts! When nature is "so careless of the single life," why should
we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional
importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark
night in Sir Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged
on better or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the
corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any the wiser of
the loss.

There are not many works extant, if you look the alternative
all over, which are worth the price of a pound of tobacco to a man of
limited means. This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our
earthly vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no
great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco
is an admirable sedative, the qualities necessary for retailing it are
neither rare nor precious in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take
it how you will, but the services of no single individual are
indispensable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted
nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go and labour themselves into
a great fortune and thence into bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep
scribbling at little articles until their temper is a cross to all who
come about them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a
pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves
into a decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes
upon it.

Would you not suppose these persons had been whispered, by
the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise of some momentous destiny?
and that this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was the
bull's-eye and centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not so.
The ends for which they give away their priceless youth, for all they
know, may be chimerical or hurtful; the glory and riches they expect
may never come, or may find them indifferent; and they and the world
they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes at the
thought.