Existential Vegetarian

You can argue all you like about eating or not eating meat.  I have never seen either  side  win such arguments. As a 'vegetarian' up-taker I do not argue nor judge at the individual level.  I have simply made an existential choice.  The choice is how I want to live.  The choice is to give up food provided by the capture, husbanding  and killing of animals.  At first this was not easy, now it is no problem. To the majority food animals are utilitarian and expedient beings. Their use and disposal is behind some temple veil. They are not creatures with a will-to-live, capable of their own fulfilment, possessed of their own lives.  Krishnamurti said he did not eat meat because he did not want to take the shine from their eyes. It was eloquent and sufficient.

Contrary to lazy monotheistic thinking animals are not put on earth by the deity to harvest their flesh so the great human project can flourish. They are rather a result, like us humans, of time and evolution. Generally the difference between us and them is that we have won the evolution lottery. Our brains, knowledge and technology have made us masters of the world, lords of all creation. The status of the 'domesticated' animal means little to us. That it is the strong and mighty, the civilised,  killing the weak barely registers as unjust. If we could see in one vision the vast apparatus of man's scheme, the enclosures, the feed lots, the slaughterhouses and distribution links it would astonish us. As we are a little squeamish and ashamed (our better part) our provisioners hide it from us. It is ironic that having elevated ourselves to the status of 'human', a meaning of which is being substantively different to other creatures, we should in our treatment of  them be so heartlessly exploitative. No doubt, man will continue with his dismal project (unless climate change forces a shift.) Most of it is done in good conscience. It is the way we are conditioned in childhood,  the banal cultivation of unfeeling and unthinking.  But the existential choice is always there, simple, clean and liberating.

Hammarskjold and the True Meaning of Humility

If you were alive in the 1950s a household name was Dag Hammarskjold, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Hammarskjold was a man who combined a life of high public office with a life of the spirit.  He died in an air crash while on duty as Secretary-General travelling to a trouble spot in the Congo. Undoubtedly this death has added to his posthumous fame, although I doubt few born after 1980 would know of him.  He discharged his executive life with great inner grace.  I imagine only a few friends would have seen his inner conflicts, the clash between contemplation and action, the private and public. His encounter with the great traditions were his fuel and and his notes were made into Markings (Vagmarken, 1963).  I acquired a translation  of this work early in my life (Faber &Faber, 1963). Markings is a compilation of  part musings, quotations, prose and verse. It is an impression of a life of the mind.  I gave the slight paperback the special treatment of  rebinding in boards.  One wishes that all men of action, the bit-wigs chasing this and that, the hollow men, would  read Markings.  Maybe they would take away a vision of the Life of Action, the life in the world suffused with higher things.  

Here the Secretary-General gives us a lesson on humility -- and doesn't it all start with humility?

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud, a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable. 

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons.  Secure in its reality, the self is neither better or worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is --- is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement. 

To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your bearings, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise or blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance. 

Towards this, so help me God --- 

Markings

That Which Comes From Heaven

It is only that which comes from heaven that can have a real impress upon the Earth.  

Simone Weil 

Heaven is a part of my inscape. Not the heaven of religion as I have no formal religion. Heaven is not a place in my schema, it is a mythic counter point to the world. In heaven all worldly things are resolved and  all opposites co-joined. This is not true in any literal sense but through and in the neediness of sentient nature.  It resonates with Chinese thought. I think of heaven as a better metaphor than a deity for the yearning of the human spirit.  One does not have to confront a super-ordained ego-person. Heaven does not love and is not bossy. Heaven is the mother of harmony.  Heaven cannot be possessed and does not possess.  It suggests and does not command. Tao starts from heaven but ends up on Earth as a blessing. Looking around I see a lot of  fracture and discord.  There is no bedding down, nor comfort, which comes from the Latin fortis for strength.  We lost sight of the celestial begetting place from which we spring. We move quickly, in flight, and stuff ourselves with sensation for fear of the heaven-forsaken abyss around us. Please don't take this too seriously.

Ted Hughes in Passing

At the Lifeline Bookfair these days I am something of a window shopper as I am in the book disposal time of life.   I dribble more books in 'donations' than I take out. Yet it is still fun to enter the vast barn like room and immerse oneself into the sea of books. It is a little like the old cartoons with Scrooge McDuck plunging into his vat of coins. And there is also a sense of community, the bibliophile set, even though you might not talk with anyone. Another benediction is the feeling of escaping from 'the world' outside with all its vulgarity, twardriness and insincerity. On my last visit I had a little encounter with a young woman. I overhead her asking the volunteer if he had seen any books of Silvia Plath's poetry. He could not help but a few moments later I found The Colossus and brought it to her grateful attention.  I revealed that I had just finished reading  Jonathan Bate's biography of Ted Hughes, 'her husband' as I put it. She explained that she was just getting interested in Plath.  She did not have much of an opinion about Plath or Hughes.  In reply to a prompting  she said she was not a feminist. Well,  I could have dallied and got into a discussion about this unhappy pair but I thought it was not an appropriate setting. One must keep moving; I drifted off to another table thinking about Hughes.

Before reading Bate's book I knew little about him apart from his being the husband to the tragic genius Plath, that he was excoriated by feminists and he tended to write animal themed poems.  My luscious read of Bate shows he was a mighty poet, truly talented, deserving of fame. But this did not take me too much into his work.  I did not really take to him as a person. He is a bit of the 'huntin, fishin, shootin' type of man. I am not. And I found his lifelong philandering repugnant. And if I were to sit in judgement about his treatment of Plath I would reckon it pretty shabby - and unbecoming of a true poet. Leaving the fair with my token catch of books  I gave a little wave to my friend but she did not see me.

Mindfulness - another fad?

When 'mindfulness' became popular I thought it was about the mindfulness of 'bare attention', that of cultivating awareness and attention in everyday activities.  Later I learnt that the latest manifestation is about meditation, which is generally the practice of maintaining stillness and following the breath so as to quieten the mind.  I appreciate that in a general sense mindfulness can embrace the concept of meditation on breath but it is widespread in the West to separate these two things. So why the change? what had happened here?   I guess that the sales people of the alternative therapy world thought that the word meditation was too connected with the Eastern religious tradition wherein it arose, principally Buddhism. Meditation had to be neutralised for Western minds and called 'mindfulness'. Once this was done there was no end to the possibilities for pecuniary application.  The doors of schools, corporations, government agencies, community services opened up for this palliative to assuage the confused and troubled minds of the fast-paced world. There is a tacit veiling of its  ancient exotic antecedents.

The Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path of Buddhism comprise an acesis or a formal spiritual discipline.  The Four Noble Truths are at the simplest level about understanding the causes of human suffering.  The Noble Eightfold Path, the corollary of the Fourth Noble Truth, is a living and dynamic path to cultivating ethics, wisdom and insight.   Meditation, or what could be called concentration, is an integral part of this acesis. While intellectually extracting  meditation from its foundational context may facilitate utility the extracting reduces it to technique.  It becomes the old 'quick fix' beloved by our world. The fix works for a while but after the initial frisson there is no where to go. There are any number of alternative therapies that have gone under the bridge just for this reason.  Again a problem with The Flight (see post 15/6/2015, Flight from God).

I would not expect people to stop meditating but ground the meditation in a secular understanding of its tradition.

John Cowper Powys

I am grateful to Henry Miller for introducing me to the English writer, John Cowper  Powys. As a result I was also acquainted with his talented writer brothers, Llewellyn and Theodore. In fact the whole extended family is interesting and is arguably an example of  the refulgent flowering of an special epoch.  For someone who lives through reading and imagination Powys can be a great culture-friend and kind of guru.  His The Meaning of Culture  could be a text for the humanistic imaginative life.   Powys does not see culture as something primarily to learn about but something to live through and to seek and enlarge life though its many facets.  By culture he would reference, philosophy, literature, arts, nature and natural religion.  His philosophy is a sea to float one's raft of 'life-illusion'. By life-illusion he means the wishes and whims impractical or not which together form a self perception. You might worship Goethe as a self-model without equating with Goethe.   On philosophy in culture he writes, 'To philosophize is not to read philosophy; it is to feel philosophy. The raw spikes and jagged edges, the sour-tasting dust and wind-blown debris of superficial read life have to be deliberately comprehended, or at least deliberately evaded, before the more secret rhythms, the more recondite patterns of Nature, her humours, her tragedies, her poetry, take shape in the mind.' Likewise to read good literature is to plunge into the imaginative world and emerge enlarged and richer. Sadly you cannot stand back and objectively look at these things as is the way of most education in the modern state. You cannot be afraid of losing proportion, getting things wrong or  fostering some unwholesome prejudice. There is a kind of faith-like abandonment in the process. However there is a tether to reason to prevent loosing touch with reality. Nothing is ever really serious in the ideological sense.

 I do not know anyone who writes like Powys; it is an expansive, spontaneous metaphor-rich embroidery of words which defies classification. He draws upon a vast reading and philosophising.  He is universalistic in the way of the  self-made Victorians who stood (in a deluded way) upon some promontory at the end of Time. Yet he is clearly a modern.

'What the ambitious man regards as thoroughly foolish and is prepared to denounce as self-indulgent, dreamy, absent-minded, as confession of personal failure, to a really cultured man, to an authentic stoic or epicurean (for these opposites amount to one and the same thing when they are contrasted with the values of the world) is the true purpose of life and an eternal fountain of abysmal pride.'

'Can it be said too often that 'the meaning of culture' is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.'

'Many lonely natures, if only they had the wit to realise it, are, by a kind of atavistic adoption, children of some long-past epoch of the human pilgrimage. They may live in some little wayside town in Iowa or Colorado, while in their most integral instincts they belong to Periclean Athens, Imperial Rome, the Florence of Medici, the London of Ben Jonson, the aristocratic salons of the Eighteenth Century, the revolutionary Europe of Heine, of Byron and Shelley!  There must be little local Carnegie Libraries  all over the United States full of bad mixes, odd fish, misfits, queer ones of every wounded sort of wing, who are taking refuge there in regions totally unknown to their neighbours, wonderful Elysian fields of escape, into which no exacting employer, no debase public opinion can ever pursue them.'

'What our true sophisticated culture shows itself is in our attitude to the unimportant, the negligible, the weak, the mean-spirited and pig-headed.'

JCP The Meaning of Culture

T.E. Lawrence

As a boy I had a friend who lived above a grocer cum milk bar in a harbour side suburb. His parents were Christian Palestinians who had fled from Haifa just after the war of 1948.  Playing with my friend one day in his flat above the shop he opened an old tin chest and showed me an Arab headdress (a white cloth kuffiya with gold agals)  just like that worn by T.E. Lawrence. This was very exciting for us and we paraded wearing it around the room. Later the father told us that not only did he wear a headdress like Lawrence but he had actually met him in Palestine during the First World War. This aging weary grocer struggling with a new life in a strange land was instantly illuminated in our eyes by his association with the fabled Lawrence of Arabia.

Unless your soul is dead you will find Lawrence attractive especially his war time leadership in the Arab Revolt of irregular Bedouin fighters. There is the other side which also attracts differently. It is his withdrawal from the glamour and fame and the sequestering himself monk-like among the ranks in the British Army and then the Royal Air Force.  This was no peevish affectation but something he had to do: it was a necessary reclusion following the degradation of his sexual assault at Deraa (which I believe true) and a nervous breakdown after completing his magum opus and his despair of the fate of the Arabs following Versailles.   As someone said of  Lawrence that in the ranks he was like a 'unicorn in a racing stable'.

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is  a masterly book but  not that readable owing to its somewhat dated style and its dry reportage --- perhaps I am wrong here. Anyhow it is wonderful book to have on the shelves and dip into now and again; and you know that the fantastic life of Lawrence leading his Bedouins is a presence in your bookcase.   The Mint, an account of his austere life in the ranks of the RAF is also a very fine work. Here T.E.L. has stripped away any theatrical effects and the man stands before you; a man whose excellence would stand out in any occupation. Beside reading umpteen biographies of Lawrence the book I like most is his collected letters edited by David Garnett. In these epistles is the superior man, the enigma, the charismatic great soul, the stranger, the self-tormentor, and the perfect blend of  aesthete, intellectual, book-man and warrior.

Lawrence in ranks - what intelligence!