human condition

the deal was always
from the very beginning
a twisted, rotten,
hopeless business — which is why
I believe in miracles

As with yesterday’s poem, there is really too much extraneous background I need to explain, for this to be anywhere near successful as a poem. The poem is about gnosticism. Not because I set out to write a poem about gnosticism. But my pessimistic belief is deeply ingrained, that the whole of existence shows more evidence of having been created by a malign than by a benign deity. It’s not so much that I believe this in some literal sense — as that I prefer to start with low (or negative) as regards the human condition, and being alive, and then anything good that happens is a ‘miracle’. And I do suspect that this may be closer to the literal truth than the Christian belief in a good God. Interestingly, these thoughts arose from a dream in which it was my own fallibility rather than God’s which was at issue. But maybe my own fallibility is the best proof of God’s that there is. Aren’t we supposed to have been made in God’s image? And, if whatever generates my reality from moment to moment, is itself flawed — then it makes no difference whether you call that flawed generator of my reality ‘me’ or ‘God’.

opposites

am I arrogant?
yes — it’s logical — how else
does a man hold such
a passionate belief in
his own utter foolishness?

Very pleased with this (more proof of arrogance!). It doesn’t have a very intimate connection at all, with last night’s dreams, which seem to have continued the theme of wisdom from yesterday’s poem — or at least wisdom as found (or not found) in the older generation. I dreamed of my very old nextdoor neighbour, and also of the Queen Mother, who was expected to be available for the job of comforting Princess Diana. Somehow that wasn’t happening. From wisdom, I progressed to thinking about foolishness, and the poem was born.

Yuval Noah Harari #3

someone please tell me
— how is it possible for
money to be bought
and sold? — what is this crazy
dream and when do I wake up?

Funny thing, I’ve been trying without success to remember back to the eighties and nineties, to establish how and when I first made up my mind, as a perfectly serious belief — that money should be abolished. I guess there were foreshadowings of this idea way back in my childhood, with knowing I was named after St Francis of Assisi (Francis is my middle name). Being unemployed and therefore virtually moneyless all my life to the age of fifty, and homeless for most of that time too — it’s hardly surprising there was a temptation to see myself as following in my namesake’s footsteps. I dreamed last night of a man trying to sell me life insurance with the option of cashing some of the money in my lifetime. I was a keen customer, in the dream. There was music and artwork involved in his sales pitch. My previous posts entitled Yuval Noah Harari are here and here. And there’s some information about his ideas here. I continue to live without knowing how it can be, that society as a whole fails to see the absurdity of money and in particular the absurdity of using money to buy more money, as stockbrokers do — and of selling money itself, as insurance salesmen do. Imagine my delight therefore to come across the ideas of Yuval Harari, who points out that money exists only in the imagination, and works only because everyone believes in it.

postmodern hell

how shall I preserve
my soul? — damnation is a
consumer, grazing
the multiplicity of
competing philosophies

And yet there is no answer for me in single-minded devotion to any single religion or philosophy. Christianity is the religion of my childhood, which my inner child responds to like no other. Buddhism seduces me with the promise of a superior spirituality. Taoism accords most closely with the Jungian doctrine of opposites which I do go along with, heart and soul. But there is something so coldly intellectual in the idea of opposites as the basis of all psychic life. And if Jung was right about it, how come the world hasn’t embraced the idea? Or to put that another way — what use to me, to possess ‘the truth’, if I am in such a tiny minority of believers? And how can it be science (as it claims to be) if it requires me to believe? The fourth belief system I am tempted by is the belief in a mother goddess. This relates to last night’s dream where I was in the garden of Robert Graves’ house in Mallorca, getting along famously with Graves himself. In reality I met him when I turned up at his house unannounced in 1983, and his wife kindly entertained me for half an hour or so. Graves himself was in a wheelchair and by that time had retreated into dementia and silence. For a Wikipedia summary of the Graves-goddess connection see here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Goddess

Yuval Noah Harari

he’s so right — it’s our
collective capacity
for storytelling
— for believing fictional
narratives — makes us human

I heard about Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind when it came out about a year ago. I thought it sounded interesting, and probably correct in its fundamental premise. But I didn’t have the patience to even try and wade through it. Yesterday however, I heard him on the radio again, and this time hunted him down on the internet, discovering a superb fifteen-minute summary of his ideas on TED. The impact on my dreamlife last night is quite clear. I dreamed of the man who currently holds the post of Director at Mind in Camden, where I have been employed in an admin capacity since 2012. In the dream, he was being imprisoned on a technicality whereby the good work he was doing was actually illegal. Much of our work at Mind in Camden would be impossible if we didn’t believe passionately, as an organisation, in human rights and their application (or non-application) in the sphere of psychiatric treatment. And human rights is, according to Yuval Noah Harari, one of the ‘stories’ which underpins criminal justice. The implication seems to be that different ‘stories’ can be told on the same subject. It isn’t just that the human race can achieve marvellous things when its members all believe together in one broadly similar story. It’s also worth wondering about the process whereby stories get shaped and changed. Who gets to be the Storyteller? When two stories fight, which one survives? I wrote a poem some ten years ago, which more or less suggests God to be The Master Storyteller. Here it is:

Rag and Bone

The Master Craftsman, when he feels guilty
breathes the air and a picture is born;
when he wants to say sorry, drinks the water
and a poem rides the clouds.

But God is different. He has set love
to be the image of imperfection in the barren mind
— has made mud and filth to bathe and blanket human
arrogance — our hurts, hypocrisies and hopelessness.

Every twist and dislocation Fate has wrought He puts to use.
God is a rag-and-bone man, carting away
the bits and pieces of our lives to Wonderland
where stories are crafted by fools

and pictures painted by madmen; where chocolate
tastes of blood and earth, and sin is magic and forgiveness
is a falling of angels, a spinning of skies, a mirroring of souls —
a dance — the ancient dance — half-remembered, half-believed…..

pencil scribblings #7

Remembering and honouring and preserving the Christian rituals/beliefs I was taught in childhood — is incredibly important. But hang on a minute. If these beliefs are no longer alive and vivid and literal, surely they must resemble museum exhibits. Do I have some kind of inner museum of my own past, which I visit and view with a detachedness which is vaguely disquieting, because there is a lack of connection between the exhibits and the present moment? I think the answer is probably yes. And it goes deeper, because it applies to a good many more aspects of my past than just my Christianity.

So welcome to my ‘museum’ then. Let me roll out an exhibit for you now. Many of my exhibits are dreams, which I still remember from decades ago. I want to display now a dream — about museums — which I had on the morning of 14th May 1985.

In the dream, I saw the French novelist Stendhal (real name Henri Beyle) exhibited in a glass case. He had female genitals which were displayed for all to see. He was alive in the sense of existing in some kind of afterlife, and aware of the indignity of it all, but seemed philosophical about it. Awake, it was obvious to me that his physical transgender status in the dream was symbolic of a psychological disposition while he had been alive, towards women, whereby he both studied them and loved them. Women were so supremely important in his life that now, after death, he had become one himself. So his fate — his being here in this museum — had a kind of dignity about it despite everything. Attached to the glass case was a label which bore the Russian word meaning ‘science’: НАУКА

About twelve months earlier, I had read a biography of Stendhal by Joanna Richardson. I had not at that stage read any of his novels. I’d also begun toying with the idea that I might be a reincarnation of Stendhal. This was partly because our respective attitudes towards women were so similar. For example, we both made a big deal of unrequited love, refusing to surrender the loved one spiritually, even though physically there was no possibility of consummation. It was also because of a couple of biographical coincidences. Like me, he had a sister named Pauline. He was born on 23rd January and died on 23rd March. I was born on 23rd March and my sister was born on 23rd July. There were also some parallels with his hating his father, as I did mine (at least during my teenage years), and a certain emotional dependency on his maternal grandfather.

The label НАУКА in the dream, deserves a few words of explanation but it is difficult to know how to begin to convey the depth of felt irony attached to the idea ‘science’ for me, both in the dream and in waking life. There was definitely some kind of notion in the dream, that science was being mocked or at least taken down a peg or two. I felt, in the dream, that I was in a future world, far in the future, when ‘science’ itself would be viewed as a quaint museum exhibit. I regard this with my waking mind as entirely plausible, not to say likely. The explosion of science in the last couple hundred years is a fleeting phenomenon viewed on the timescale of centuries. Science tends to have an inflated view of its own importance, to put it mildly.

I read an interesting article yesterday about the relation between science and the humanities, by Iain McGilchrist. Actually it is not just interesting. It’s brilliant.

pencil scribblings #6

I love Christ. First and foremost because I was encouraged to do so as a child, and have never really lost that habit of mind. Remembering and honouring and preserving the Christian rituals/beliefs I was taught in childhood (my schooling was at Anglican Church schools up to the age of 16) — for me, is a kind of dramatised, immersive, microcosmic anthropology. What do I mean? Well, I’m trying to draw a parallel between the naive magical thinking of my own personal childhood, and the naive magical thinking of hundreds or thousands of years ago, when the society and culture I belong to was in its infancy. As a generalisation, it seems to be true that (whether as individuals or as civilisations) the further back we remember, the more suggestible — the more at ease with magical thinking — we appear to have been. I ought to explain that for me, religion, suggestibility and magic are more or less just different ways of referring to the same state of mind.

pencil scribblings #5

Christmas 1992 I was homeless, penniless, wandering around England and Wales believing myself shadowed every moment by the CIA. A day or two before Christmas itself I attended a church service in the town of Llangollen, North Wales. My attendance at that particular church was unusual because the service had a very Evangelical flavour. I was (or am) a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism: so the Evangelical tradition has mostly passed me by, in my life, apart from one or two brushes with it. This was one such. Generally I can cope happily with Methodist and Baptist services but anything smelling even slightly of Billy Graham (is that still a name people recognise?) turns me off. Anyhow this particular experience of Evangelism was one of my best ever. It was more like a big room than a small hall , and there was lots of enthusiastic singing with which I joined in, enthusiastically. After the service, the Pastor took the trouble to quiz me. I felt he was “testing” me to see if I was of God or of the Devil. He was nevertheless genial and benign. “Do you love Christ?” He threw the question at me and I had to justify myself at that moment and find a way to reassure him. Of course there flashed through my mind the inconvenient fact of my disbelief in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection. But he hadn’t asked me about my faith. And even though the name Christ begged the question of Jesus’ divinity (which I didn’t believe in) I felt totally able to answer: “I love Christ”, and to mean it. That man’s own sincerity had drawn forth a sincerity from me in return. I am grateful to him for encouraging me to declare my truth in this way. At that moment it didn’t matter that I meant ‘Christ’ as a symbol while he (most probably) meant to pin me down to literal belief. We somehow met and understood one another at that moment. By the grace of God.

Joe

when I tell him I
love him, his face registers
belief mixed with dread
— like understanding nothing
and everything both at once

The poem describes a scene from real life. But in my dream last night, love just seemed to be an unspoken fact. Quite a selfless, non-demanding, non-sexual kind of love for a young black man named Joe. I met Joe perhaps three or four times, in 1990, when we were both homeless and hanging around Lincoln’s Inn Fields (a kind of unofficial Mecca of homelessness in those days). We had quite a lot in common, being from relatively well-educated backgrounds. When I first met him at the beginning of June, I was reading on a park bench in the sunshine and we struck up conversation around the book, which was Rider Haggard’s Nada the Lily. A week or two later I gave him something to read which I’d written myself. Just a handful of typewritten papers on the subject of the Greek myth of Antigone: I’d devised a set of symbolic meanings for each of Antigone’s siblings in the myth. I never found out his surname, never got my papers back, and by the end of July we’d lost touch. I still remember (to within a day, 28th or 29th June) the date I told him I loved him. It was a moment of exquisite tension. A couple of years later we ran into each other one final time. We were both still homeless and attending the handouts of free food from charity vans coming to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He was enthusing about the poet, John Wilmot Earl of Rochester.

process

beautiful woman
— strong man — they kiss — the story
gives birth to itself —
a strapping pair of twins named
Belief and Reality

I honestly can’t claim I understand this. I guess it says there’s a sense in which the world is created by our capacity for storytelling. Hardly the most original thought. But I enjoyed manipulating the imagery. Suggested by a dream last night in which I was being kissed by a beautiful Arab woman, who was under the mistaken apprehension that I was a famous Muslim spiritual teacher. Eventually I grew ashamed at the pretence and started telling my own true story. The crucial thing seemed to be that I couldn’t bear not being truthful about my own name John.