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!

The Outsider

Colin Wilson, who died in 2013, was  almost tagged with the concept of the outsider. His famous book of the same name, The Outsider,  published in the fifties, was a tour de force of its type. Follow up books, Religion and the Rebel and Beyond the Outsider expanded and modified the discussion. Religion and the Rebel was a sympathetic survey of outsiders in history which revealed a amazing reading and ability to sketch the essence of a thinker. The outsider is the person who lives a life 'looking in'  or an  onlooker to the main activity of humanity. The outsider is forced by his shy inner nature to look through the keyhole of life. He is uncomfortable with the collective and group, eschews team spirit, of being arbitrarily included, or being in unison, of  being of the school. The type is naturally solitary. He is slow to  trust or like people.  He can be warm and benevolent inside and  convivial to the familiar group.  In fact inside he might be a volcano of feeling. But he cannot express this. To others he is inscrutable. These personalities are probably discovered and rejected by in the pernicious 'human resource' psychological test.  Wilson wrote of the connection between being deeply religious and being an outsider.  Meaning I suppose that those who ruminate upon the elemental questions and choose an unfamiliar path which they need to walk alone.  The great religious figures. Jesus, Buddha and Mohamed were arguably of the outsider caste. These persons in there exalted state stood apart from their acolytes. One who is followed is always alone. If a denomination is a party of believers then Jesus was not a Christian, the Buddha not a Buddhist and Mohamed not a Muslim.

I would say to people: look out for the outsider, do not crowd him, he marches to a different drum, he wants to be known, he wants to know, he has reservoirs of  kindness and a richness of mind.

 I understand that Colin Wilson intellectually moved away from his earlier writings on the outsider.  In later life he moved into the paranormal and crime. This writing did not interest me.

Flight from God

For me Max Picard's Flight from God (1951) is more about philosophy than God. I ignore the God bit and substitute that man is ineffably grounded in a elemental and enduring human nature. The further we go from this core nature the more we degrade our lives. Perhaps it is more akin to our divine Mother than divine Father. I suppose it is like the unisex Tao. Flight is Picard's word for alienated man and his accelerated world. We are so unaware of it. We are taught to flee from the first day at school to the bureaucratic varsity. We get so used to it. We even think it is a good thing. We have fractured our wholeness  in order to exploit the world of technics, organisation and efficiency. We have made ourselves into abstractions which are easy to transform, manipulate and discard.  Materialism is a fetish which makes us drunk. To let Max Picard speak:

In the Flight a person does not distinguish himself because he wants to manifest his being: he merely wants to show that he is somewhere. Being is no longer supremely important; it is only a means to make the person externally distinct. The kind of subjectivism no longer exists by which a man, from the depths of his being, shows himself plainly before man and before God. Nothing remains but a kind of formal subjectivism according to which all being and all that is within being are used to give man a sharp outline that he may be aware of himself in the turmoil of the Flight. 

In the world of Faith, history is of use to man in helping him to rescue for the present whatever of the present may not stand solitary before God. In the world of Flight, history is degraded into a mere ransacking of the past for things which can serve as the companions of man's flight. 

It is love that holds man back from rendering himself mobile for the Flight. A man who loves another, or a thing, contemplates what he loves with care and for a long time, careful to discover in his contemplation if there is a part he has so far neglected to love; and love is long-suffering, waiting until the beloved grows into love. But all this, in the Flight where one must be forever en route, demands too much time. And so the world is systematically emptied of love. All the relationships within which love can exist --- marriage, the family, friendship --- are being brought to destruction by the men of the Flight. 

Thoreau: Letters to a Spiritual Seeker

Recently I have re-visited a small book edited by Bradley P. Dean entitled, Letters to a Spiritual Seeker (W.W. Norton & Company, 2004).  This is an odd title for I do not see either Thoreau or the 'spiritual seeker', Mr Harrison G.O. Blake, was particularly spiritual unless you include New England transcendentalism as spiritual. They are certainly soulful. I sense that Thoreau would run a mile from a spiritual seeker as he said he would from a church do-gooder. Anyhow this book is interesting in that you encounter a spontaneous Thoreau who has not had time to work over his prose.  His writing is close to the flow of his thought and has an unusual freshness. I admit there is some  preaching in Thoreau's missives but Thoreau was always a preacher - or is it prophet?.  At first he seems a little put off by Blake's vulnerable earnestness. Perhaps he senses Blake is not his type, a bookish man who faltered on the path to churchman not unlike Emerson's loss of faith. But he affords his natural kindness and a little self-consciously becomes Blake's philosophical mentor and friend. Blake's seeking of a 'meaningful' friendship in turn satisfies that in Thoreau which desires a deeper companionship of the spirit. These two men come to explore a common life of the mind. You sense that this is something that Thoreau has thirsted for in his rather lonely life. The salutations never get beyond Mister and it is this formality which prevents the association from becoming mawkish and claustrophobic. Thoreau also becomes protective of the sensitive Blake and does not wish to include him in his more rugged excursions. He cannot see the delicate Blake wading through swamps or bivouacking on cold mountains. Blake takes some offence at this rejection maybe because it casts him in a less manly light. While Thoreau sought to create a literary image of the nature-hermit you discern in the letters a man eager to associate with empathetic men and share outdoor challenges. He comes across as a regular 'bloke' as well as solitary.

My Binding of Paperback 

Dawn Visits

For some time during my sit in the morning I have heard  just before dawn a noise outside my window which I thought might be a possum 'invading' the house.  I put this out of mind for, while in the past, possums took a liking to the space under the eves between the brick wall and the rafted roof I had filled this area up with bricks and this had deterred the possums.  However looking at this later I saw that an adult possum had taken advantage of living in the space a few centimetres high between the loose bricks and the eve.  I think part of the body of the possum is occupied in the small gap between two bricks. This is a true Houdini exercise.

Well, what has this to do with my sit and Zen?  During zazen you get a heightened sense of sound and movement generally.  So the late nocturnal return of the possum to his humble home punctuates my silence in a very special way. I not only hear it I feel it. And  I think in the deepest Zen sense of this humble creature returning regularly each dawn to take his rest and accepting the most difficult and poorest of abodes. Yet I know also that when I rise from meditation my simian mind will start restlessly seeking to optimise this and that so that my poor ego is fully satisfied. We can learn a lot from how animals deal with living.

Lost Blogger

For some years I used to follow a blog of a very sincere Buddhist of the atheistic bent who lived on his own in a city in Arizona.  His blog was part of a web page designed with Nvu, the open source web page editor.  The web page itself had no design pretensions and consisted of links to other material including some photo galleries. There were several educational Buddhist items in the web page. A lot of the material concerned his life including his time with a poor family in Central America . He helped this family with money, skills and labour and was godfather to the children of the separated couple.   One senses that the poor peasant family did not understand him. It would seem from his narrative that this experiment did not work out and eventually he returned to the USA.  He was still bonded with the children and their drifting away as they grew older was a source of sadness.  He had spend some time in India studying Buddhism.   He was a highly trained computer programmer and had worked on genetics programming and was interested in the fusion of technology and the sustainable future of man.  He had spent much time, in the warmer months, living very simply in the woods.

His regimen in the small flat was worthy of a monk who had taken the precepts.  There were set periods for meditation, exercise and pious reading.  He was very diligent about his vegan diet. He was maybe a little obsessive about his health. He took pride in his notice board which recorded the meditation sessions each day and the exercise taken in winter which consisted of walking up and down the stairs. He kept a blog in the web page with entries concerning his daily life, opinions, observations and problems. Sometimes it might be only a few lines and other times several paragraphs.  He had turned 70 and, as typical at this age, felt his powers failing and was overly introspective. You might say he was a bit eccentric but, of course, any lay person who lives apart and puts an effort into the quest for enlightenment will appear eccentric, or worse.  This man seemed incredibly alone yet he had made a dignified and worthwhile life by the honour of his purpose.  It was the specialness of his life which drew me to him and kept me reading his blog.  All of a sudden he wrote that he was going on a retreat, then the web page disappeared. When the web page went I felt I had lost a friend. This is one of the oddities of our technological life that in reality we are dealing with blips which can disappear at a click. I think now that perhaps his disappearance was a natural conclusion of his journey. I think of the lines of Chia Tao (777-841) (Trans. Lin Yutang)

I asked the boy beneath the pines.
He said, 'The master's gone alone
Herb-picking somewhere on the mount,
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown.'

Family History for the Diffident

I suppose I am in the post-family history stage having solved the puzzle of my ancestors and produced a monograph which was given to immediate relatives.  I found this process very satisfying and when the job was done I was a little bereft of something to do.  There are, of course, bits and pieces to correct and some fascinating 'brick walls', but the old passion has gone and I now rarely look at my voluminous spring back files so assiduously compiled.  I was never one for collections of names in a database which seems to attract some genealogists (those databases with say 20,000 entries with little substantively known about 95% of them).   I basically wanted to find out whom my parents were and place them in the context of their time.  The family history starts with my parents and goes back in time.  This is perhaps different from the usual family history which begins with the earliest ancestor record or immigrant ship.  The first chapter is about my family and its life which I think is a little unusual. The book is divided into a chapter for each marriage pair and ends with those pairs several generations away.  So it is not a family history as such but the familial history of my parents.

For the diffident person family history holds it perils especially when you find a kins-person  you have never spoken to and then have to manage an ephemeral  relationship. Fielding long distant telephone calls with the new-found kin can be stressful. Your natural shyness wants you to hold back but your eagerness for progress with the job drives you on.  These people are sort of bonding with you but really they know nothing about you.  There is warmth and new friendship but I have found this quickly peters out. What you find out is that you really have little in common  and they fade into oblivion.  The connection is really just a passing frisson and curiosity. This sort of connection in my experience extends to family history societies.  Each member is interested in their particular subject but only minimally interested in their fellow researchers.  As a group they are fairly straight-laced and conservative. I am not sure why this is - perhaps the hip are more focused on the present. Essentially they are dull places where it is hard to find real conviviality. Again when you have essentially finished  your task the need for the society ends too. There are, of course, the long timers in the society but usually they have finished their project and remain on as committee-people, self-appointed experts and gleeful trainers.