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!

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