Graham Higgins Illustration

Yesterday’s entry prompted me to take a bit of noetry – I may preserve that affectation for my writing that’s probably not poetry and clearly not prose but which I’ve at least bothered to note down* – from an email to an Appleworks file and then to a dump-folder of these pieces lodged on an external drive.

That in turn ended up in a couple of hours retrieving older ones from a format I can only open now with NeoOffice and transferring them to easy-to-get-at Appleworks notepaper. There are stacks; I’d forgotten a lot of them.

*noetry, n.:see definition above. I plant my expeditionary flag here, you heard it here first; when noetry becomes an industry standard category, OED please note.

This one was a note of an exhibition of Tiepolo sketches and cartoons in their original sense – the sketches used to prick out outlines for paintings; the throwaway preparatory work – at Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett, the gallery for a huge archive of graphic work in its broadest sense.

It stuck in my mind because in the gallery’s vitrines under carefully regulated light, the preserved drawings were plainly the functional preparation for grander altar pieces and murals, very likely to show clients.

They looked like catalogue items from which a commissioning cleric or aristo could decide whether an attendant angel in his Annunciation would spread its arms thus, or unfurl a scroll thus (‘your message here’); whether his Madonna would raise her hands in supplication or lower her palms in a benediction, press them together centrally in prayer or meekly to one side, presumably to allow for the downward glance of adoration.

There were sketches of rough hands grasping staffs – humble shepherds’ crooks or anachronistic bishops’ croziers – and several with two fingertips raised in blessing or index fingers pointed heavenwards typically involving a tricky bit of life-drawing convention, a slight twist to the wrist to indicate that the saint or angel merely draws your attention to Heaven, because of course it would be rude to point at God. Unless of course you’re Moses, in which case you return from the mountain with heavy slabs of Maker’s Instructions to discover the mass breakout of naughtiness amongst your frivolling people, when it’s perfectly acceptable to quite forcefully point out who’s watching.

There were misc. wings (adult and children’s sizes) and drapery samples – clingy wetfold-work to describe the limbs beneath and opulent robe-cloth swags – but there was something oddly familiar about this inventory of gesture that only struck me halfway round. My moment of connection was the recognition of the graphic and functional similarity to the kind of style-sheets I’d get from US comic publishers, showing the costume and proportions of characters from their respective pantheons. The Tiepolo sketches certainly aimed to draw attention to his standard of technical know-how and achievement as presiding Master and mentor to his staff, but these too were style-sheets, displaying the house-style. Your chapel diptych will look like this.

Whenever I look at finished paintings in this tradition – conventions preserved 200 years after the High Renaissance – my eye scans for hidden geometries. Circles are for perfection; single points and those pointed fingers indicate The One True…; twos, the sacred and profane, the celestial and the carnal; triangles, The Trinity of course; squares, in the words of the song, for The Gospel Makers. After that it becomes more difficult to decide whether you’re trying to imagine lines of composition in.

These geometric subtexts nowadays appear esoteric because they’ve fallen out of use, but as a gallery viewer spotting them is a throwback to the puzzle-books of my childhood: find seven rabbits concealed in the branches of this tree.

As a child I enjoyed these puzzles, in particular those that didn’t make it easy for you. Even then it struck me, I’d now say ‘as a model of learning’, that these were one-use puzzles. However long it seemed to take you to count off the concealed objects at first sight, once you’d registered them you couldn’t afterwards ‘unsee’ the bunnies in the tree, even as you flicked past to get to another page.

Anyway, this was a written snapshot from a Sunday in Berlin and a little salute to an exceptional craftsman’s some-old same-old day at his trade.

The pencil point laid down searches for the eloquent line

Its scuff of graphite, caught in the tooth of the surface

A particle-trace of a neutrino moment, a bombardment

Of moments that can last for hours. Conjuring with chaos,

You need some science on your side.

-

The Renaissance, Islam, and the Hassidim

Have much to say of pattern as a handprint:

A Voyager plaque offered to whomever would read.

Be it so simple that Tiepolo, considering

A routine cartoon of the Madonna took due care

That the forehead and the hands, spread in supplication

Were equilaterally spaced: the Trinity of course.

The palms pierced as it were, prefiguring

The Crucifixion: that final hammer-blow

To aspiration, on another axis.

The centre of the aureole, a locus

Above her head, which holds a herald beckoning -

with finger’s tip precisely twice the distance

of the apex to the base:

Heaven and Earth in equilibrium

Joined at her brow where her eyebrows steeple

For her son to be, and all the walking stillborn.

Understood, it can be said in the displacement of four

lines.

-

Classical anatomy also fortuitously betrays

Divine geometry, those other equilaterals:

Outer brow to nasal septum;

Nose to outer jaw;

Jaw to pit of neck;

Neck to nipples;

Nipples to navel;

Navel to hips

And hips to pubis.

Seven times three devolves to the Trinity immutable.

These are not mysteries but standard trade

measurements.

With all the usual boilerplate caveats about minimal claims to literary merit, this began with an image that occurred in the approaches to sleep, a little after midnight, plus some internal prompt to write it down and see if it went anywhere further. Line suggested line until it became the following.

I wonder where these things come from. Even as I wrote the words in the semi-dark in handwriting I had to squint at in the morning, the conscious front-of-house part of my mind noted that, hmm, here come those woodland and sea-and-shoreline images again, as much for their sound as for their background scenery. They may simply be expressions of nostalgia for days in such settings; if they have any deeper symbolic payload I’m not sure if I’m interested. Like Winnie-the-Pooh’s ‘pounds, shillings an ounces’, the shillings wanted to come in, so I let them.

This is a curio of thought that I notice particularly when ‘I’ write something that makes me laugh in, say, the course of an email. Humour comes from an element of surprise – the unexpected phrase; an expectation derailed – so how do I manage to surprise myself? The idea springs onto what Daniel Dennett (in ‘Consciousness Explained’) calls the Cartesian Stage of consciousness. My conscious mind’s-I just recognises and applauds it. What was it doing before it leapt through the trap-door in a wisp of smoke?

Reading this back, I kind-of ‘got’ what it was ‘about’ in the same way that I ‘get’ the landscape of the Malverns in Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro. I grew up with the LP of the angular Barbirolli/Hallé Orchestra version, which is my definitive recording. When I went through that collective spasm of the shift from vinyl to cd I picked up a recording by a Scottish orchestra with, if I remember, an Italian-sounding conductor, who smoothed out the edges and transformed it into a movement from a Beethoven Pastorale. It was so lacking in drama I couldn’t be bothered to replay it.

Later I found the piece on a tape by the Virgin-sponsored London Chamber Orchestra (‘Good Music Played Bloody Loud’) which substituted the monumantal Barbirolli take with a breathless scramble up the Malvern ridge seen through a handheld camera. It made an interesting contrast-and-compare exercise and while I owned the cassette I could choose a version to suit my mood.

[Stop Press serendipity: I had to leave this document to visit a solicitor - this is not unrelated to the storage boxes - and then visit a cashpoint to withdraw a three-figure wad of banknotes and find something to buy to break a tenner as the last figure of the fee was £..7.25p. Tried the next-door Oxfam book shop and found the LCO cd ‘Power’ on a shelf at eye-level. The Elgar is the final track.]

I think the soundtrack to this writing is somewhere in the range of Pat Metheny and Charlie Haden’s ‘Beyond The Missouri Sky’.

On a ribbon round her neck

A key hangs, made to fit

The locked box she has yet to find

Containing notes she writes

Inviting Summer skies, eggshell blue

Days riddled with searching breezes

Exploring numberless shadowed limbs

Of broadleaved woods

Threaded with birdsong and

The tidal hush of currents

Flooding from blue distant hillcrests.

-

The unfound chest holds photographs

Imagined into focus:

Rooms as makeshift stages

Set to act out fictions illustrating

Dreams she has yet to wake from and remember;

Figures caught in tableaux and

Entwined in choreographies of songs

Borne on shared breath and secret pulses.

-

She moves through crowded streets and public places

Her key concealed close to her

Anticipating the lock it will open

Imagining textures: seashells, salt-scented driftwood

Sea-tumbled stones; costume fabrics

Coins kept for games of chance

And on another ribbon

Keys to other boxes that she hopes to find.

In the High St. today, buying storage boxes – there will be more about storage boxes – I was leaving the shop and noticed by the door a ‘Jumbo Drinking Chess Set’. This is…?

A chess board large enough to accommodate sixteen shot-glasses a side with chess symbols marked on them. What kind of game is that? If you want to stand a chance of winning you take as few shots as possible and sacrifice as many as you can at speed. By the time Black has cleared your pawns your endgame’s going to be a cavalry charge against a drunk who’ll likely have forgotten the moves and may challenge you to fisticuffs. I’ve known some hardened drinkers but I’ve never known anyone to roll out of the pub dying for a game of chess.

This evening I took a look at Albert King on YouTube playing Born Under A Bad Sign. My friend Michelle used his line ‘if it wasn’t for bad luck you’d have none at all.’ Not strictly true but… maybe later on that one.

Albert’s a fellow left-hander but like Elizabeth Cotten (‘Freight Train’) he leaves the right-handed strings in place and plays upside-down, specialising in stinging little licks and magisterial riffs. In the clip I looked at he made it a little more interesting for himself with his middle-finger taped up in a splint and still played better than I could dream of on a good night.

There have been nights of desolation when I’ve plugged in my electric guitar to let it all out in some blues-bending into neighbour-friendly headphones. What comes out is intermediate proficiency with the scales, no wailing cry from the heart, and I end up feeling more despondent and merely competent.

However the aural illusion of playing really loud can be therapeutic, even if youthful doses of high-decibel thrills have left their tinnitus traces and urged low-volume caution in my advancing years.

-

I hesitate to record my smitten-ness with the Radio 4 sitcom “Fags, Mags and Bags” because my vulnerabilities to music and comedy in particular seem to be box-office death. It’s running on Play Again as I type. Who says men can’t multi-task?

I play it several times a week while it’s available because there’s no sign of a cd collection so far. At some point I imagine the complete F,M&B will turn up as Pocasts. I don’t own an iPod yet but surely it’s only a matter of time before, like the mobile phone, they’re mandatory.

At least they don’t tssk-tssk like the Walkman of old and on a recent shopping-trip I passed a black girl with a happy-happy grin dancing at the bus-stop to some music all her own and it cheered me up all the way to the Co-op, so I shall save my rant about the insular slack-acne-jawed torpor that seems to pass for cool amongst the plugged-in rank-and-file Barbour-capped yout’.

The use of English in F,M&B washes over me with the same pleasure as Viv Stanshall’s “Sir Henry At Rawlinson End”, an immersion in Stanshall’s word-world and Times Roman vocal style I’ve returned to over decades. I should know it by heart. It’s always reassuringly familiar but apart from a few phrases (‘That was inedible and there wasn’t enough of it’) I’ve never committed it to memory as a party-piece.

So, anyway, so as not to curse the series with my recommendation, that’s just a note.

“…I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the preempting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”

J.G. Ballard, Introduction to the ‘95 edition of ‘Crash’

Ballard writes pretty much the best summary of his project as a writer in that paragraph. I’ve posted it in several forums and mails over the years because it seems almost a statement of the obvious once it’s articulated.

I mentioned in one of my early attempts at blog a line from ‘A House Is Not A Motel’ from the Love album Forever Changes: the news today will be the movies for tomorrow.

Look at TV documentaries and even news broadcasts, increasingly presented in a montage of reenactments, graphics, illustrative images shuffled into reportage, post-editing effects, reporters gesturing insanely, offering opinion and speculation against location shots intended to suggest that being near the scene of the news represents being near the truth of the story.

As recently as 1985 it was possible to present A. J. P. Taylor’s ‘How Wars End’, a series of TV lectures comprising an academic in front of a camera delivering a dense stream of information without notes. Taylor was at the time in the early phase of Parkinson’s Disease and incipient amnesia and even so was able, and given the time, to elaborate a detailed case, which also speaks for the assumptions made by TV execs about the quality of attention brought to the series by its viewers.

I first read Ballard’s ‘Crash’ when it was published in 1973 and was mesmerised by its bleak romanticisation of the car as status accessory and environment. In effect he had only elaborated on the motor industry’s sexualisation of its product reported in Vance Packard’s surprise best-seller on Ernest Dichter’s motivational research contribution to advertising ‘The Hidden Persuaders’ (1956). It was Dichter who alerted the ad agencies to the role of ‘the car as Mistress’ to the predominantly male decision-makers in the purchase of the ostensibly ‘family car’.

Ballard also played with the cultural location of the car in a 1970 exhibition, ‘Crashed Cars’  – just that, salvaged car-wrecks presented unadorned as art.

What a disappointment David Cronenberg’s movie of the book was. The creeping unease in the book emerges from the relentless anonymous banality of its settings and trappings; Cronenberg presents Vaughan, the ringleader of the cell of car fetishists as a bug-eyed obsessive rather than a charismatic sociopath and e.g. substitutes a staged car-crash reenactment for the book’s references to filmed car-crash tests as specialist porn.

Re-reading the book it seemed that Ballard had transplanted a kind of 19th century nature-mysticism and transferred its romanticism from Wordsworth’s ‘impulse from the vernal wood’ to adoration of polypropylene mouldings and ‘instrument binnacles’, high-rise blocks and underpasses.

This found echoes in the Ultravox track ‘My Sex’ and most iconically in The Normal’s barking electronica, ‘Warm Leatherette’.

I just remembered a TV documentary I once saw about Japanese car-manufacturers’ methodical research to break into the US car market in the 70’s. A designer recalled a car show he attended as a junior,with the Head of his Design Dept. Observing his boss’ gaze over one particular new model, he asked what had caught his attention, expecting to pick up some esoteric detail of car appraisal.

‘I’m imagining’ his boss told him ‘a sunny Sunday afternoon, washing the car on my driveway, and how a good sponge-full of soapy water would run off those curves.’

A couple of evenings ago my mail software began a delivery of what turned out to be 391 old mails. I put it down to whimsical software, a leaky pipe at the server, One Of Those Things. Set about clearing them from amongst the old unsorted mails and another 370 began flooding in. As I cleared those out another 370-odd showed up in the loading-bar and I stopped them, hoping that it would all be OK in the morning.

Currently as long as the Mail window is up I get batches of 50-70 every few minutes. A pattern has emerged, we’re working through every mail I’ve received or sent over the past three years and as I type we’re up to February of last year. I feel like The Site Administrator’s Apprentice, mopping up as the  dogged server empties buckets of mail into my lap.

I presume that eventually we’ll get to whatever new mail I should’ve received over the past couple of days so as I type I note each new incoming batch and clear it (March 2009 as I write).

[Friday evening]…and I’m relieved to report I’ve arrived at current mails, status quo restored. I’m not a reflex Luddite but if I were, this would be why. Nowadays military bombardments are intitiated and economies crash thanks to software inelegance: human error rendered in binary code and running intercontinentally at computer clock-speed. ‘Oops, wait a minute…’ is an era in digital time.

Never abashed at the occasional homage au fromage I’ve filled time during mail-dumps to practice Till There Was You and A,You’re Adorable on the ukulele.

Picked uke has a pretty music-box sound for some songs I probably wouldn’t do otherwise. Sounds Of Silence is another (Me’n’Julio and Mother And Child Reunion are obvious strummers); As Tears Go By is another though no-one would mistake my rendering for even late-period Marianne Faithfull and The Stones original is plainly an embarrassment even to themselves.

On the bus to have my blood-tests on Wednesday, picked up the Metro free paper where Dave Gorman is interviewed.

“The country tilts at an angle and my pub quiz trivia fact is that, looking at the proper lines of longitude and latitude, Edinburgh is further West than Cardiff”

Say wha…? What a different idea we’d have of this island if it routinely appeared on maps tilted, as the man says, at an angle. Did the original cartographers make it sit up to save paper or to make it resemble the silhouette of Britannia?

Adlestrop

Yes.  I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

–

The steam hissed.  Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

–

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

–

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Edward Thomas

I took a holiday in the late 80’s to visit some friends who had a dairy farm in central France, near a tiny town called Herisson (‘Hedgehog’), aiming for some air, quiet and the prospect of some brainless physical labouring. It worked in all three respects and fulfilled its prospect of a memorable mental snapshot album. God gave us memory so we might have roses in December.

At that time I had a maroon plastic Walkman for company and limited rucksack pocket space for tapes. The two I played repeatedly were the Jill Gomez/ Vernon Handley version of Canteloube’s Songs Of The Auvergne and a home-taped Cocteau Twins duo of Victorialand and Blue Bell Knoll.  I can’t even remember if there were others; these two seemed perfect throughout and overlaying their soundtrack on the experience was a good way of retrieving it to this day.

One of my tasks was to clear out a slurry-drain from the cowshed to a corner of a foreign field. That involved shovelling leaf-debris, compacted cowshit and soil from a few metres of ditch at a time, working back toward the shed and then breaking the dam of undug stuff to let gallons of pungent slurry flood into the cleared stretch.

I had one of my ‘Wow, Me Here Now!’ moments one early morning, resting on my shovel, thigh-deep in ditch, looking out over miles of dew-silvered fields and forested hills and valleys receding in the kind of ariel perspective you see in landscape painting, paler and paler into near-monochrome graphite blue, to the soundtrack of ‘Tchut! Tchut!’ from the Songs tape. I was making my road-movie.

In a space between tracks I stopped the tape and dropped the earphones round my neck, thinking that I was doing as Joyce Grenfell’s Women’s Institute Crafts-speaker claimed when making ‘useful and acceptable gifts from beech-nut husks… taking Nature’s gifts and impwoving upon them’.

The sound, more a sensation, of miles and cubic miles of still air under a clear sky makes all incidental sound into Debussy’s description of music : silence interrupted. A farm dog barks somewhere, cattle low (you’re reminded what a good verb that is), crows sound like themselves and all around the air is beaded with misc. birdsong.

I thought about that final verse of Adlestrop as I sat in the damp grass on the edge of the ditch and settled my mind from Be Here Now to Be Now, to Be. I find that aiming for transcendence or bliss makes my mind ambitious. You can’t ‘do’ Be [yes yes, I know Frank Sinatra could do-be do-be do]. I can settle in the right setting to be perfectly content, which really amounts to the same thing. Right at home on this planet, thank you very much.

The Cocteau Twins got under my skin the very first time I heard them: Hazel, on a John Peel show in 1982. Wax And Wane followed soon after and I was smitten – bought the 12” Lullabies EP and the Garlands album. 23 Envelope, the graphics wing of the 4AD label had got just the right off-kilter bleakness and fragility of the Cocteaux’ sound. No-one sounded quite like them, though many have since tried to catch that wall of mangled guitar-tone and battle-drum rhythm. No-one but no-one approaches the sound of Elizabeth Fraser’s voice cooing and yelling, feral and fragile. That first album was scary and cold in a way I’d only encountered in Ligeti’s choral pieces and Penderecki’s Dies Irae.

I kept in touch through their drip-feed of EP’s and listened as their sound grew more lush in Head Over Heels. The Treasure and Victorialand albums could be regarded as a double; they could be soundtrack to a movie of Gormenghast, spacey, fragile arrangements that if not strictly acoustic had that air about them; music for isolated castle vaults and chambers.

On my holiday, the vocals of Jill Gomez and Liz Fraser seemed to call out to each other between The Songs and Victorialand. Blue Bell Knoll was another thing altogether.

By the time BBK was released I’d taken to looking out for news of each new release and made bus-trips into town to snatch them up and bring them home as they arrived in the shops if possible, so I put needle to vinyl sound unheard and the first, title track burst over me in rolling wave of heroic optimism. It’s a joyous affair and if I had to choose a favourite Cocteaux album that would have to be it.

If I had to choose a favourite track Blue Bell Knoll could be the one, but I still carry a torch for ‘Those Eyes, That Mouth’ on the Love’s Easy Tears EP. My copy turned out to be a slightly dodgy hissy disc so I looked forward to it turning up on cd sometime and it finally surfaced on the retrospective Lullabies To Violaine Vol.1. I think of it as the voice of Edith Piaf in heaven. Bliss.

There have been times in my life when I’ve been so low that I didn’t want to play music I love for fear that the time and the music might forever be bound together. I’m happy that I have a choice of three albums that take me back to a sunlit French panorama viewed from a grandstand seat on the edge of a slurry ditch.

No idea why this came to me today, a memory of Susan, my partner in the Berlin Years, asking out of the blue ‘Do you think insects have religion?’. Susan was good at the curveball question, not so much aimed at getting an answer as seeing how you answered it.

There’s a slim volume creepy-crawly story ‘The Insect God” in one of the Diogenes Press Edward Gorey box-sets I own, The Vinegar Works. Here’s a prime cut of Gorey’s signature Victorian Gothic :-

“They removed the child to the ballroom, whose hangings

And mirrors were covered with a luminous slime;

They leapt through the air with buzzings and twangings

To work themselves up to a ritual crime.

They stunned her, and stripped off her garments, and lastly

They stuffed her inside a kind of a pod;

And then it was that Millicent Frastley

Was sacrificed to The Insect God.”

Some time in the mid-70’s  I owned Michael Mantler’s splendidly ominous free-jazz tribute to Gorey, ‘The Hapless Child and other inscrutable stories’ that rendered The Insect God in appropriately keening buzzings and twangings, vocals by Robert Wyatt. The music is similar to Soft Machine (yes I was a Soft Machine fan) in which Wyatt’s voice was a humanising element in the intense noodling.

Bun-faced children are always coming to grief in the Gorey ouevre. The Gashleycrumb Tinies, also included in The Vinegar works, is simply an alphabetical list of infant mortalities ‘A is for Anna who tumbled downstairs, B is for Basil, molested by bears…’ etc. I can’t remember offhand which of the tots ‘died of ennui’ but that was the page where I LOL’d.

I remembered too a Sufi story of the revered master walking in the gardens of his mosque, instructing his students, when he tumbled and fell prostrate on the gravel path. His acolytes hastened to raise the revered cleric but he waved them away.

‘Wait… I find I can understand the language of these ants!’

He asked them, ‘What is the nature of God?’

They replied, ‘He is very like an ant… but he has two stings!’

A lot of the Sufi stories read like stand-up gags which on reflection expand like self-inflating life-rafts into something more substantial and useful. Zen-master tales often end with a whack on the head or a kick up the rear for the student who believes – or pretends to understand – bs just because the Master said it. The truth that can be spoken is not the Truth.

My Children’s Bibles – oh yes a few of them – showed flaxen-haired Max von Sydow meek and mild, patiently explaining His Father’s Word in the simple familiar imagery of the parables to spellbound Galilean crowds or well-behaved children. Good stories, but not a lot of laughs. It would be rude to laugh in church.

Sometimes my mind skims the surface of my memory like a pebble over water and the next ‘plip!’ was an image that came to me when I was trying to distinguish between what are often shothandedly-termed ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ religions.

I was brought up in a Scots Episcopalian tradition, not rigorous but very definite on matters of naughtiness in conduct and rudeness regarding body-parts and functions, and attended a C of E school and church. I was a proud star Sunday School student and Bible stories were as familiar as Anderson’s and The Grimms’ (we had an edition unsettlingly illustrated by Mervyn Peake; in my storytelling phase I did a version of The Grave Mound inspired by the picture of the peasant on watch turning to the reader  as a long shadow points across the rough grass in the foreground towards him).

I was also brought up with the Bible as Kings Regulations. There was always a chapter and verse reference to cover God’s Word on any given topic. The road to Heaven was like a route map – ‘Take thou the M42, then must thou the left hand path of the A435 exit take, and at the third exit thereafter shalt thy path lead thee nigh on Alvechurch…’ All you had to do was keep on the narrow path and follow instructions. It was a wonky sat nav with an intermittent signal, which is why you could find yourself – doh! – in Alvechurch itself if you didn’t tune in with appropriate fervour, calling on the celestial RAC for guidance to get back on the Alcester Rd.

It occurred to me that by contrast the tack taken by Buddah Gautama in particular was more like one of those bees’ wiggle-dances. The scout who’s located a nectar-load returns to the hive and by contact wiggles out instructions about the direction it’s just returned from; if the others follow their innate navigation system sort-of in that direction it’s pretty much in their nature to arrive at the goodies.

Alan Watts, who I read a lot in my student days, used an image of God knowing each of us as we know our own individual brain-cells. We all partake and participate as little transient glims of a vast consciousness but are foolish to claim to know the Mind Of God. He also introduced me to this short, ringing quote from Coventry Patmore:

‘Shall I, a gnat which dances in Thy ray/ Dare to be reverent?’

OK, I’ve had enough insects for today and/because already I can think of more specimens caught on my fly-paper memory (and good god I realise I’m old enough to remember the gruesome fascination of flies expiring on the butcher’s fly-paper strips) but obvious as it is, it would be a dereliction not to include the poster-boy of ontological insecurity, Chuang Tzu and his Greatest Hit:-

“Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly, and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly, I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming that I am now a man.”

See ya later, lepidoptera!

‘Sounds like you’ll be XH (11)’ – without a doubt my top crossword clue, and I was.

There are crossword superstitions such as that compilers use Across for their doozies and Down for fillers. Happily there were enough Down clues for me to get that one without waiting for the answers the next day; one of those occasions when enough letters stack up for you to start raking your brain for anything that will fit and then the clue lights up.

There are crossword clue conventions to daunt or infuriate the novice – indicators that the answer ‘sounds like’ something described, or that the answer is there in front of you, distributed between the end and the beginning of two words in the clue – for which there are primers elsewhere.

I perfectly understand the impatience of habitually convergent thinkers who feel that this is a lot of effort invested to achieve the most trivial of results. I can see why they might be, in the solution to the opening example…

X aspirated.

Personality manifests in the most incidental of details. There have always been shorthand dividers of sheep from goats like: are you a cat person or a dog person? Stones/Beatles; Hancock/Goons; Lord Of The Rings/ Gormenghast; Bach/ Vivaldi?

Now we have a crossword/ sudoku – divergent/ convergent – divide. I’ve not cracked the satisfaction of the number game although I have a couple of arithmetic workbooks and will occasionally spend an hour doing exercises to remind myself of percentages, decimals and fractions procedures.

Crosswords send my brain crashing about in the undergrowth, nosing around in the leaf-mould of half-forgotten facts and vocabulary for answers or bits of answers. Language habits are thrown into disarray, dismantled and inverted; definition and allusion are interchangeably valid. Idly accumulated scraps and fragments of general knowledge find their use, like salvaged spare components stored in the shed.

Psychology has the term TOTs – tip of the tongue syndrome – for that sense of knowing/not knowing something, knowing you know it, ‘seeing’ or ‘hearing’ it but not being able to flush ‘it’ out. We talk about storing information in the brain, as if a bit of memory has a location like a file-card in a drawer or an arc on a hard-disk but we know that information in the brain involves a particular combination of electrical charges between constellations of cells firing a factoid into the arena of consciousness. The factoid in fact isn’t ‘there’, it ‘happens’.

I think it was Socrates who railed against the spread of general literacy eroding the need and thus capacity to learn and remember. Fortunately someone recorded that thought. I’d have forgotten this, written five years ago I notice:-

Usher Author Touches Down(6)

To prey covertly. (6)

Sentence the dictionary? Penny admission!(6)

Doggerel paté? Yep, Rot! (6)

Smashed chinaware almost to a T. (6)

Ye Port in a storm (6)

51 Down, still haven’t a clue

Taking a break from arm-wrestling with the dense text of ‘Conceptual Issues In Psychology’, an exhausting but enjoyable read that’s more philosophy than psychology, I turn to a book on Christian Counselling which I picked up in our Oxfam bookshop.

The bits about counselling practice are pretty sound and commendably clear, predictably primarily about Rogerian person-centered counselling. Given Carl Rogers’ theological training it’s not surprising that he encourages the counsellor to ‘play God’, being a compassionate attentive non-judgemental listener and adviser. Exercising these qualities shouldn’t present any problem in principle to the altruistic humanist.

My problem with the handbook is at those points where the author takes line-break and thwacks the ball into the long grass of Biblical reference. Fair enough, that’s what he contracts to do on the cover, which is why I’m not naming the book to single it out.

The prompt to write about it is that I was reminded of the ‘method’ of The Alpha Course, hours of which I watched on-line after I was invited to attend one. I’m not even going to put up links to these vids because if I could find them anyone with sufficient interest can. I was reminded of George Carlin’s line ‘If there really was a God, would he let a guy like that explain him?’

What the book and the course share is a consistent confusion between similarity, parallel, connection and proof. The counselling practice is designed for its particular faith-community who are primed to see connections between practical solutions to mundane difficulties and What The Book Says. If the client-group wasn’t self-selecting you’d spend more time clarifying the theology than addressing the psychology. The subtext is to demonstrate that The Bible is, in addition to history, poetry, theology and injunction a handy counselling manual featuring the Arch-Counsellor. The sleight-of-hand occurs when the usefulness of the chapter-and-verse reference as an illustration is zingo!bingo! transubstantiated into proof of truth. In lieu of a priori truth-conditions to satisfy this dot-to-dot between counselling session and Gospel study is equally open to descriptions such as tautologous, teleological, self-referential,  perhaps even disingenuous.

A striking example in Alpha of the theological cart obstructing the philosophical horse is the final invitation to speak in tongues. The Biblical authority for this is that the Disciples in transports of grief after the crucifixion spoke ‘in tongues of angels’, i.e. incomprehensibly. Set aside possible secular interpretations of this phenomenon, the exercise is rather like inviting students to sit in a wheelchair and ‘speak’ through text-rendering software in order to understand A Brief History Of Time.

In this rapture-taster one is encouraged to simply begin to voice syllables such as ‘Aaa… Baaa’ – hear what they’ve done there? – and see what happens. I suspect that a spontaneous run of phonemes such as om-biddle-ting-tong yip-bam-boo would be deemed insufficiently reverent.

More rigour, vicar?

A couple of enquiries about the breathing-exercise I mentioned using in my post-op haze.

Very simply: breathe out/ breathe in. Apart from the emphasis on ‘out’ that’s the entire zen simplicity – no counting, no mantras, minimal metaphysics. Well, maybe a little mysticism if you substitute the instruction I was given to visualise my body absorbing prana (sort of ‘life force’) rather than oxygen. As I’m not a medic or a chemist, both words are equally magical notions.

As it happens, quite recently while my systems were being monitored in hospital I was encouraged to use in-through-the-nose, out-through-the-mouth (‘slowly enough to disturb the flame but not blow out a candle’) as the best practice for absorbing oxygen, so that’s the exercise translated for the mystically-challenged.

There are a few conceptual extensions to this. Briefly, the focus on the out-breath is because that’s chucking out toxins; I think of my singing as harnessing the exhaust-system to decorative effect.

You visualise the in-out not like a linear piston-action but as an elongated ellipse from air-vents in the head down to the solar plexus and you don’t so much direct the cycle as observe it working as it does while you sleep without ‘your’ help, thanx very much. Likewise, how do you ‘know’ you’re thirsty? When you drink, how do you ‘know’ you’ve had enough?

Anyway, breathe out, or empty out as far as you can without pushing. Pause and relax for a moment to sense that still emptiness but don’t try to make it a feat. Like lightly touching the floor of the pool when you dive, this marks the bottom of the elliptical breath-path.

Don’t decide to breathe in – through the nose, with its built-in filter system – but note that this happens quite naturally in its own time, so let it. At a certain point you’ve taken in an adequate slug of air; as you relax into the rhythm of it there’s a tendency for the cycle to become slower and deeper anyway. Don’t be greedy; you can’t hoard air, so don’t suck.

Again, as you sense the top of the cycle, pause to visualise all that wholesome nourishing prana distributing itself into your body, but don’t hold your breath.

I was told to note the cool incoming breath and the ‘burnt-off’ warmth off the exhaust.

Just as the simplest buddhist meditation is ‘simply to observe the thoughts which arise’, i.e. note that a lot of what flickers through your mind is brain-chatter, this breath exercise is about letting go, putting ego and will in their place. That controlling You isn’t as indispensible as it would like to think.

A final topspin came from the observation that our very first breath is In and our last will be Out, so every breath represents a little Life.

Anyway, when I spent long hours stunned with meds and too bruised to be bothered to move very much, this exercise was extremely calming and gave me a stick I could toss for my mind to go and fetch to stop it whimpering and running in small circles.

Note to self: Never again the Boots Sport! Men!! spray deodorant. It turns to white powder on contact with air, like a small foam fire extinguisher. Any not caught in the armpit speckles all southward clothing and the carpet. The only sport-like exercise is running around with the hoover.

Quid-shop generic chemical fragrance from now on.