I'm shifting to Wordpress. Sorry, Blogger, but Wordpress is funkier, easier to use, with more media applications and superior and dynamic support system.
So come and visit me here: http://uroica.wordpress.com
I'll still be setting up 'follows' for my friends' blogs, once I've finished setting up my own.
Happy blogging.
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I had wanted to go to Andalusia for years. My love affair with Spain commenced with Barcelona when I was a child, but I have always been drawn to the concentrated range of religious and artistic emotion expressed to so much excess in the South. I am a passionate person and passion is an expansive and dangerous state. It encompasses heights of ecstasy or depths of despair, anger, pain, lust, and little in between. There are no shades of grey in passion, only the ochres and yellows of buildings, landscapes and fruits, underscored by a violet sky.
Having finally achieved my dream of visiting the land of Flamenco, I hoped to encounter this particular condensed elixir of passion – the music of the soul. I know very little about the intricacies of its form, the compás, malagueñas and sevillanas, nor can I recognise the difference between a seguiriya and a bulería. But I do know that the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I hear it and that its heartbeat is embedded into the geographical and social fabric of the area.
Its shadows are as sharp as its salt plains are flat. In the towns, enticing vestibules of ornate mosaics and tiles, as forbidden as a harem, emphasise the reverberation of children’s voices. The crescendo and finale slam of solid wooden doors delineate the firm boundary between the inner sanctum of family life and the outer bustle of the streets. Its capriccio roads resound with staccato carhorns, segueing into the pulsating of the cicadas at every dusk.
It is insuppressible. Old men sit on doorsteps, clapping their veined hands in the afternoon siesta sun. A drowsy melody drifts down from a balcony, a private tutorial is given in a cool, shadowed corner of a palace courtyard, and long-haired youths pluck their guitars on a promenade while lovers sing to each other on the beach. If you are lucky, you may find a bar where the great, the good and the pedestrian hone their skills amid clouds of hashish and glassfuls of cold, crisp Fina.
One hot afternoon, just before siesta, I drifted into the Convento de Jesús Nazareno in Chiclana, just in time to hear the enclosed Augustinian nuns, hidden behind a grille, commence their service with a Gregorian chant. I have heard such chants before, in Northern and Central Europe, where the voices were stripped down to an asexual tonal purity, regular as a species of angel.
Here, though, there was no doubt that the sensual love offered to deity belonged to earthbound women. Smokey, husky bass notes rose to an illicit vibrato, its sonorous timbre as honey sweet as the taste of Moscatel. It seduced. It celebrated. It had its feet in the dust and its hands clutching its own breasts. Its art of relating to the Divine required no fundamental transformation, no destruction of native talents or memory and its cadence was served up raw, ill-disciplined and true.
I would like to go back to this land to live for while. Its irregular, passionate music teaches that you should never debase your own voice, for the song that flows through your nervous system is the authentic sound of your spirit. Its measure is love and its vibration is the gift of life itself.
Photos galore
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I have been back down to my beloved Bankside for a weekend of packing and goodbyes.
After thirteen years in the old Coffee Warehouse at Bear Gardens, the Lions part has moved out and moved on. There are always casualties during any process of gentrification and the building that had been home to the theatre company for so long has been deemed uninhabitable and will be redeveloped. There will be no room for Lions in its future, shiny incarnation.
It’s odd to think that in just over a decade, we have watched the complete transformation of the area. We were there way before The Globe and the Tate Modern. We performed our alchemical George and Dragon in the pouring rain at the Bankside Power Station just before it closed permanently for refurbishment. When the Globe consisted of just a few beams of oak, many actors associated with the Lions part staged a series of Shakespeare excerpts as part of its Rough But Nearly Ready season.
It is ironic that such extraordinary artistic riches have spawned nothing but homogenous architectural and commercial sentinels. The back of the Tate Modern could now be a high street in Croydon, or anywhere else for that matter.
Bear Gardens was ballast to this progress. It was an unreconstructed mess, with exposed brickwork, cracked toilets and a bewildering maze of passages and staircases that could flummox even old-timers. We used to rehearse in the Star Chamber, a glamorous name for a miserable, badly lit space with inadequate heating and an unfinished grey concrete ceiling. At the top of the building was the hub of the Lions part empire, The Horrid Room, so named because it always had a strange atmosphere. The small windows faced a building, the light was poor – but more – the sense of a soft something against the skin that felt slightly damp and unhappy.
At the back of the Horrid Room was a door. When it was unlocked and opened, it revealed the balcony of a small theatre, through which was a large space containing racks and shelves of costumes. This was named, appropriately, Narnia. During productions, it was the norm to hear people shout out, “Where’s so-and-so got to?” “Oh, he’s in Narnia.”
It was fitting. We were already in our own world of magic and fantasy, a world that could be, for a short time, a salve to life’s troubles. So many of those Lions (and their cubs) have passed through the company, working with courage and laughter during the cancers, divorces, family traumas and secret human sorrows, to become part of the warp and weft of the rich fabric of Bankside rogues and vagabonds.
We loved each other, this unique band of talented people. We held a knowledge of each other’s foibles that provoked in equal measure exasperated tension and affectionate shorthand. Sharp words and kind gestures survived together in a cooperative paradox, while we, children all, relished the joy of climbing two flights of dusty stairs to dig out velvet treasures in which to dress up and show off.
And now those treasures have been packed away. We humped boxes of shifts, mummers’ rags, velvet Venetians, medieval hoods and the makings of a white bear down those stairs and into a van. The dismantled maypole will be taken to Kent, the rest will go into storage until the Lions can find a new home.
We should have felt sad. There was poignancy, yes, but with it the sense of excitement that throwing things out and moving on can engender. We talked a lot about stuff while we were working. We all carry so much unnecessary stuff in our lives. I recently had tea with some people from the Lebanon and Iran who had been forced by war or revolution to abandon all that they owned and leave the country. They took with them only intelligence, knowledge and their love for each other. They continued to live and they lived well.
To crown the finality of our departure, we decided to buy supper at Borough Market, and attempted to drink beer on a grassy patch in the sunshine, at which point an aggressive, badly-trained Community Police Officer moved us on. Apparently drinking alcohol in public is now an offence in Southwark. Good Gods, the puritans are winning the war. Soon there will be no more cakes and ale. It is now high time that yellow stockings became standard issue for all law enforcement personnel.
We drank our beer in the Horrid Room. We wept a little.
Those who have spent the night there have heard the workings of the winches as they haul sacks of coffee across the gantry. In a hundred years, perhaps others will hear the faint sounds of a squeezebox, drumming, singing and the stomp of feet up and down the stairs.
The Star Chamber is quiet now. Narnia is empty, save for a few wire coat hangers and dead boxes. In the stripped-out Horrid Room I picked up a feather and put it in my back pocket. Water was thrown over the carpet in ceremonial valediction. Then we closed the front door.
We left little to show for our presence, except for some graffiti and beer bottles. A building can never usurp the love that we feel for flesh and blood, yet its very walls soak up human energy and hold it, emitting a subtle signal to anyone willing to pay attention to its supranatural music.
Listen carefully. Those walls whisper: “We woz ’ere.”
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At the weekend, I returned to the place I grew up. I don’t go there very often and I’m reluctant to call it my hometown, even though I was born and lived there for nineteen years. It never felt completely like home and I have yet to find the place that does.
There’s always a brief pang of fear and loss as the train trundles across the border between London and Hertfordshire. I’ve tried to analyse this but end up objectifying my memories into a packet of interlaced transparencies. Depending on juxtaposition, they produce different hues and emphases. A memory that is never wholly accurate is but a myth, and yet such stories have the power to perforate objectivity with random emotional detritus. I have maps for the estate where I lived, but none for my responses to it. 
The flat-roofed Kebble houses still stand, little boxes on the hillside, a swarm of social ambition, where a new car in the drive and a child in the Grammar school were the pinnacle of achievement.
These cubes are an abstraction, alienation. They reek of safety, the 2.1 children, the nine to five, the christenings, graduate photographs on the walls, shag-pile carpet, woodchip wallpaper, parquet flooring, teak furniture, turquoise glass, brushed nylon sheets, fake fires, fishponds and lilac satin bridesmaids dresses.
The houses were built alongside the canal, when barges still worked its commercial routes and water gypsies moored for the night. Children fished for tadpoles and crayfish, fed the moorhens and water voles, and hung around the locks with hope of helping to swing them open and sudden dread at the drop of water beyond.
The common moor behind the locks was a strip of land embedded with a paper mill, to where I would flee the stresses of family life. In the summer, I kicked off my shoes and ran like the wind along the river path, oblivious to the brambles and thorns that stuck in the thickened soles of my feet, to be picked out with tweezers later. The river was polluted but I swam in it anyway. But my real joy was to walk along the old railway line.
I still dream about trains, mostly those that are stranded in sidings, those that await action upon tracks running into the distance. Where do they lead, those tracks? I sense a redolence that is not my own. The demanding memory can dredge up any number of scenarios that belong to others, from a dusty terminus in the panhandle to the gates of Auschwitz. Abandoned tracks have neither owners nor answers.
The mill, the river and the railway played out some Untold Want in that desperate creature who used to pen poems entitled “Death to the biological factor that keeps me enslaved”. Where did she go? Nowhere, perhaps. Our natures are not partitioned and sometimes I feel I can touch her fingertips with mine.
Travelling back to London over the bridge by the moor, I noticed that the river was diminished. The mill had been torn down some time ago and replaced with a housing estate. The railway no longer exists. It is all very neat and tidy.
I dug out some old photos, which I had taken when I was about fifteen, and began to ponder my love of the functional beauty and loneliness of gasworks, factories, railways. And I understood, at last. They are honest.
You see, I remember what went on beyond those neat verges and spotless net curtains: the infidelities, abuses, addictions and violence. I know now that I feel fear because it was integral to my process of growing up. The loss is for those moments when I didn’t know any better.
Suburbia is liminality, a hybrid, hypocritical in its adherence to appearances. I did not realise the impact this physical space and mindset had made upon my love of the margin, or how I may have fooled myself into believing I was too colourful for my environment, when what was really required for escape was black and white.
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I had a wonderful day yesterday, initiating a Friend into the joys of Bankside.
We started with Borough Market.
If you have never visited London’s oldest food market, then you’re missing a sensual experience of the highest order. Even if you have no money, you can spend a salacious hour or two basking in the aromatic and picturesque delights of gastronomic produce, magnificently and lovingly raised and displayed. Caress, fondle, sniff, taste, dribble, sip, salivate, lick, stroke, rub, savour, swallow, and let your vocal cords murmur with pleasure at the joys of truffle oil, ceps and lokum. Asparagus has just come into season. Take home a bunch, sauté in butter for two minutes, add a drop of lemon, and relish every mouthful.
Oohh, yes.
I’m delighted that Friend has ditched the idea of doing the ghastly rapid weight-loss LighterLife diet (all sachets, no fun). The abounding satisfactions of life cannot be associated with powdered food.
There are five elements: earth, air, fire, water and garlic.
- Louis Diat
Round the corner from the market is Redcross Way, where we paid homage to the Cross Bones Graveyard, an unconsecrated burial ground for the outcast dead: the prostitutes and paupers who have lived in the Borough since medieval times.
Writer, John Constable, channelled the spirit of The Goose in 1996, and it was she who revealed to him the graveyard and helped him to create his incredibly powerful poems and visionary plays, The Southwark Mysteries.
The iron gate guarding the land is festooned with gifts and dedications to those who lie within: a bottle of Bombay Sapphire, toy poodle, mirrorball, mascara, candles, ribbons, beads, keys, masks, corn dollies, chupa chups, holy pictures, dancing skeletons, holly, charm bags, flowers, fruit, bones.
A vigil will be held here this Wednesday 23 April, St George’s Day. Bring flowers or mementoes to tie to the gates, and a poem or song or something else of yourself to share.
Assemble (promptly) by 7pm at the Memorial Gates in Redcross Way, just north of the junction with Union Street.
Here lay your hearts, your flowers
Your Book of Hours
Your fingers, your thumbs
Your ‘Miss you Mums”
Here hang your hopes, your dreams
Your Might Have Beens
Your locks, your keys
Your Mysteries
- John Constable
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Kerry is swiftly becoming a soul home, and in particular, the Dingle Peninsula. I seem destined to keep returning to it and each visit deepens my intimate relationship with its hills and seas.
I’ve travelled out there with my dear friend “Gertie”, whose family have owned a house off the beaten track for thirty years. It’s a privilege to be invited there. There’s no dishwasher, no TV. Just a worn-in, well-loved home in the middle of a field. Shells and pebbles decorate window ledges, drawings and 
watercolours line the walls, amber beads, crosses and windchimes swing from doorframes. There’s a brass cauldron full of lavender in my bedroom and diagrams of trees in the loo. My gift to the house, a Bridget’s cross, sits above the fireplace. Brocade curtains keep out the draft and shelves are laden with beeswax candles, pewterware, a turntable, and books, so many books - Culpepper, Yeats, Blake, Murdoch, Russell, Jung. Above all, is the view from the kitchen and garden, the best view in Kerry – South facing, overlooking the damp fields down to the changeable silver and mauve of the sea and beyond to the mountains of the Iveragh Peninsula.
I was last here at the turn of the season from Summer to Autumn, the slow, glorious dying of the year when something wonderful had first crept into my life. So here I am again in Spring. All is vitality and fertility and I have had to relinquish that hope and wonder. To grieve in Spring seems out of kilter, yet this is the time of year when Nature takes as much life as she produces, as the numerous bodies of dead animals littering the clifftops and fields prove.
I want something to happen here on this magical island. I need the space to solidify some hopes, give substance to vision, to be emboldened to follow a long-cherished dream: to seize a pocket of silence and draw in on myself. I have dared to let go. Now I need to dare take back again. Like the desert, the absence of noise (apart from the fridge) is already cathartic. The success of this trip will rely on my inability to articulate it in words.
April is unstable, unsure, beauteous, skittish and full of adolescent tantrums. It is coiled like a spring, tight, slightly withheld, not quite ready, a month of a thousand drops of sunshine and rain. The hedgerows are already full of primroses, violets, gorse and wool. The Juniper is aflame by the door and jackdaws are gathering on the telegraph wire. A school of dolphins has been spotted in the bay by Valencia.
We gaze out over the fields. Gertie licks her thumb. Easterlies. The Atlantic calm clarity of the air is tinged with the faint sweetness of sheep shit. The smallholding opposite has been abandoned. We will probably go over there to pick the flowers. Gertie points. “Is that a sheep in the yard?” “Too white” I say. It’s a plastic bag. Besides, sheep are magnolia, the bedsit and stained gas-fired walls of the animal kingdom.
Gertie surveys the sea and becomes animated. “It’s low tide. We can go down there for twinky twiddle winkies”. She wriggles her fingers like Wallace. It is a disturbing fact that I know exactly what she means.
We head down to the beach in the drizzle to collect driftwood. No tourist brochure area this. It has plastic waste washed up from Spanish fishing vessels. A half buried dead sheep lies to one side with its skull picked clean by the sand and worms. I pocket a sliver of bone, a talisman. The water is clear, eddying around the rocks, casting the same shapes as those etched on the quartz lying beneath. As we drop the driftwood into the boot of the car, two Choughs fly over the cliffs. There are only forty pairs in this part of the world.
We stop at Minard. The weather Gods know I’m here and put on a display. The sky is denuded and the sea is turquoise. Circular thoughts and circular music continually dance around my head. I sit on a warm rock and regulate my breathing so that the exhalation matches the incoming waves.
We wander down to the shrine. A piebald cat with Atlantic eyes follows. All three of us sit by the horseshoe-shaped spring, gazing at our reflections. We wonder why the cross is set to the West. Upon the tree by the pool is attached the usual array of ribbons and petitions for the sick. Some have tied paper tissues, presumably soaked in tears. Higher up on a branch is a carefully knotted blue J-cloth.
Last Summer, we prayed that cancer would not take Gertie’s sister. The cancer is gone, but has exacted a harsh payment by taking her eyes. She had phoned earlier to say, “enjoy the view” and Gertie had howled with rage and grief. Now watching the gentle ripples across the pool, there is a calmer matrimony of gratitude and pain.
The next morning, after chasing sheep out of the field, we go in search of fish, meat and blue cheese. I have decided I want a drop-spindle. Wool has been stacked in the hallway by the previous tenant and I have a childhood memory of collecting wool and spinning it into lengths of yarn. I need to do something mindful but thoughtless, something with my hands, to create without intellectual input.
We park up in Dingle. This is one place where four-wheel drives are not aspirational. We buy Barmbrack, butter and peat brickettes. We also buy haddock and monkfish, fresh off the boat, from the little booth on the harbour front. I trawl the craft shops trying to net my spindle. I may as well have asked for Valentino couture. There are some shops displaying locally-made ceramics and woollens, but many places are factory outlets, catering for the watered-down tastes of tourists. Older methods of spinning died a long time ago. Spindle-less, we return home for lunch. Gertie promises to teach me to knit instead.
Later we head for Doonsheen beach. We race down the hill, running in circles on the virgin sand and barking. Out on the inlet are Heron and Brent Geese. We slide along the cliffs collecting sea spinach to garnish our fish for tonight’s supper. I stop and listen to the susurration of the sea. Apart from its subtle rhythmic undersong, it could almost be the white noise from the M25.
It is the best feeling in the world to have the wind whip up your hair into tangles that cannot be brushed out at the end of the day and, after a blustery scamper on the beach, to return to a warm house to consume beef sandwiches, pickle and Irish coffee.
I decide to climb the steep hill via the East to visit Puicin an Chairn. I am taking bones and wildflowers to Puck and make an alliance with the dangerous part of my nature in readiness. Wasps guarded the grave last Summer, but now it is safe. I leave my offering. I then watch, transfixed, as a rainbow pillar rises, biblically, from the sea and recedes across the water, before disappearing into the land mass due South.
Back on the hill, I try to make my way down to the village road by heading West, but encounter layers of bramble-edged barbed wire between fields, forcing me up to the top of the hill to find another escape route. I skirt along the brow, inching down again to encounter yet another dead end, the road enticing me from behind a thick layer of sharpness.
At one point, I find myself blocked by a field of bullocks. Not hedging my bets, I skim across the next field and onwards towards another track forking off. It starts to rain. My coat is now ripped and my boots caked with mud. I finally negotiate an exit over a stone wall, barbed wire, more thorns and a precipitous swing onto a gate. I turn onto the road and gasp in wonder as through the rain an exquisite rainbow arch spans the entire valley. Beyond it lies a gilded hillside, little white-washed houses glinting in the sun. It is like a portal into a magic kingdom. For a moment, I wonder if I should step into it, never to return. I could throw my red shoes into the sea and seal off any chance of leaving here for home. By the time I weigh up the possibilities, the rainbow has faded and the houses melt like a watercolour back into the grey mist.
I start to walk back to the house, passing by the bullocks. Like Midwich Cuckoos, they turn in unison and stare at me. “What?” I ask. They raise their eyebrows. They have obviously been watching my antics on the hillside. “So, I’m an eejit.” They continue to stare. “Anyway, I had beef sandwiches for lunch, so there.” I walk on, proud of my retort. They will get their revenge though. One day, I will become mulch and they will eat the plants that I help to produce. And that, says Jack, is that.
In the evening, we feast on flaky, tender haddock, sea spinach, carrots, Irish potatoes (they crumble if you glance at them), creamed and buttered. We calculate that we have already got through half a pound of butter each in two days.
At night I dream long metaphorical sagas. Awaking at 7.00am, some little gnarled black animal drags me by one foot back into dreamland. Again and again I struggle to awake, but Morpheus will not surrender. It takes four sides of A4 to write the epic down the next day. There’s a lesson here – never read Jung and drink whiskey just before bedtime.
Morning heralds four seasons. It’s turning cold again. Too many Westerlies. “Ah, but the North-East wind will leave you homeless”, says Gertie’s old neighbour. There’s snow on the McGillyCuddies in the distance and soon flakes are falling in front of the house. The weather brightens, the warmth accentuating the indigo borders where land meets sea to the South. A sickle moon is visible just after lunch. We walk through the long fields to the coast, past the ewes and their lambs, some dead in the field, wool peeled back from bone and entrails. Seagulls hover hungrily overhead. We amble past the round fort and make the precarious climb over several barbed wire fences, scrambling down the cliff to a rocky beach.
Here are crystal pools where naiads might swim among the coral weed, bladderwrack, thong weed, belt weed and little red anemones. Oh to be naked, to breathe under there, hair of weed, eyes of a fish, water silk around my limbs. The clouds move in, sheets of sleet and mist obscure the sea, the indigo outlines of the hills to the South now replaced with silver. Marble rock, edged by lacy honeycomb worms, rises in seaside stripes of heather and jade, home to molluscs sparkling like little fairy cakes. There is smoke on the cliff-face above, an optical illusion caused by reflections of shimmering water. We hide from the sleet, and then the clouds do an abrupt and surprising disappearing act. We find ourselves basking on the rocks, faces turned to the sun, the murmur of the sea lulling us to sleep.
We drive out to Wine Strand, and I stop on the way to buy a local handmade notebook bound in saffron-coloured leather. We wait in the car for the sheets of rain to disperse, leaving an opportunity to seek glittering, sun-touched treasure in the sand and rock pools. We watch rough green waves push in, generated by powerful Spring tides. The beach is a treasure trove of pebbles, shells, fossilised crab, nacre and white quartz, some opaque, some fully crystallised. No other thought exists but the minutiae in those clear, cold pools. We appropriate bagfuls of quartz and head back over the mountain, stuck behind a tractor for most of the way, home for strong brewed tea, cold lamb, bread and butter, pickles and chocolate liqueurs. My tea is becoming notorious for its strength and addictive qualities. I call it Builder’s Crack, although in Ireland it would be more accurate to rename it Builder’s Craic. The weather continues to be pre-menstrual, crying, smiling, ugly and beautiful. Rain pelts down all evening and we sit snug and smug before our roaring fire, with hot toddies, knitting and books.
The next day we visit the neighbours, “B” and “D”. As farmers, their house is designed to accommodate dirty trousers and muddy boots. The kitchen is warm, with a linoleum floor, clean oilcloth on the table, bread and local blackcurrant jam for tea. A picture of the Sacred Heart takes pride of place, graced by the red votive lamp eternally alight before it. These are warm, honest people who have had more than their fair share of grief and hardship. They have just bought a laptop and are online, via dialup, for the first time. Gertie mentions the new silo that has been built on a neighbouring farm. B rolls her eyes. “Ah”, she sighs, “the Kennedy Space Centre”. “It’s for slurry” says D, “somewhere to shift the sh…”. He stops, grinning, before turning his attention back to the slowly materialising image of Google Earth.
Spring is creeping round the corners. We work in the garden hauling up turf. The gravel drive is buried under years of growth and the car now skids to get up the hill. I slide in the fork, lift, then tear the ground back with my hands, unfurling it before tossing its fleece onto the wheelbarrow. Wriggly worms look dazed and confused as they try to burrow down again before the birds pick them off. The dandelions refuse to shift. Dandelions and pigeons are a salutary lesson in survival. It rains. We continue to work. The washing out on the line is being spritzed by the pure Atlantic raindrops, wind socks waving in the Easterly. If ever I get misty-eyed about owning a smallholding, I am reminded that it’s hard graft and a full time job. What do I know about the best configuration of plants, which will act as windbreaks, which will feed the soil, whether potatoes may be grown or bees kept, when to let the sheep in, how to use seaweed as fertiliser, binding, pruning, cuttings, the science of putting food on the table?
Oh but it’s good to be stripped back, to not have to be presentable to the world. To wear the same gardening trousers and socks every day, unwashed hair caught back off an unfettered, freckled face. Hygiene is lax. There is no one to impress but the wind, and it cares not for the ripe and wild undergrowth beneath my armpits.
We decide to do our regular pilgrimage to the West and pay homage to the grave of Peig Sayers at Dún Chaoin. Spring has let loose her tresses, the hedgerows are steeped in primroses with their delicate sensual aroma. I pick a small bunch and press one into my new yellow book. Birdsong has gone bananas. Big, fat, furry bees fraternise with the dandelions. Blue tits, like helicopters, nip up to the windowsill to claim their share of the grain left out for them, their wings vibrating like a hummingbird crossed with happy kitten.
Feet are also let loose and we walk barefoot on the sand and paddle in an ice-blue sea. We visit a deserted beach, ripples of sand with plain knit reflections in the water lining. Gulls gather, old women cackling over some dirty joke in a seedy pub. We run, roaring towards them to scatter them into the sky.
An orange blossom sunset crowns a pint of Guinness, evening birdsong thick against the gold rimmed clouds. And joy of joys, the first migrant swallow flitting against the clifftops (it must have had a headwind) – thousands of miles travelled back to herald the Summer. Gertie always imagines them to have South African accents. We make a little radio play about their disappointment at leaving the Zimbabwean elections and how their luggage has got lost in Terminal 5, eh?
That night we listen to a crackly Zauberflote and Herb Alpert out of seventies’ speakers, bigger than the fireplace, then outside to hunt down the Andromeda Nebula lying to the North. On our penultimate morning, I realise it is the first time I have awoken without a cold dog nose. The day is warm, still, the sea like glass.
We lift more turf and lie on the grass staring at the endless blue sky. We sneak along the clifftops on forbidden overgrown pathways to visit a secret cove of pale sea green, so warm and clean it could be Capri. I feel most alive when getting tangled in a gorse bush, drawing blood, slipping into muddy puddles, dirt on shins, scabs on elbows, daisies like stars at my feet.
We walk back along the fields, past the handsome young rams and fluttering skylarks. Passing back through the village, we are accosted by Sailor, one of the local “wolves” (they always try to round up passing vehicles). In true farm dog tradition, he wants to plant jaw over hand. I tell him that if he bites me, I will bite him back. I have actually done that before, much to the dog’s surprise. He rolls over in the road, submitting belly to the alpha female.
We rise at dawn. The Morning Star hangs like a priceless gem in the Southern sky. A vapour trail of mist rolls across the inlet in the wake of some ghostly land speed record-breaker. The icy grey-green colour of the sand and sea looks Arctic. Yet it is going to be a warm day.
I am sad to leave. Only now are the dreams falling into place. Only now am I attuning to the small sounds and wide spaces. The worry lines have dropped from my face, cheeks are rosy, circular thoughts are spiralling down into birdsong and breezes. I need another week here. I need to find a place where I can feel this way all the time. Where do the outcast go? Wherever it is, it will carry its own hardships and challenges. Troubles don’t always melt like lemon drops, but if I could wake up to a view of mountains, water and pasture every day, I would be contented enough to stay on this side of the rainbow.
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OK – so this one has been building up for some time now. I’d almost forgotten about it until I went to a party last month and it was shoved under my nose again. The Secret. We’ve all either had a good laugh about it or agree with some of its principles. Or both at the same time if we’re feeling really quantum.
At this party, someone started gushing about The Secret, stating that everyone she’d been meeting recently had bought the book or seen the film and like, wow wasn’t that amazing, like, and synchronous. It meant there was something in it. Another party pal picked up on the conversation to brag about how she’d Feng Shui’d her premises after reading a book, followed by the statement that she now only liked to surround herself with ‘spiritual’ people.
I was very well behaved that evening and kept my mouth shut.
I first heard about The Secret – no, let me rephrase that – The Secret was thrust into my awareness some time back by an enthusiastic colleague who repeatedly emailed and phoned me to insist that I buy the film. She even offered to pay for me to download it, a cost of about £2 back then. I told her that I didn’t respond well to proselytising or paying for philosophical information, so good luck and thanks and all that, but not for me.
Said colleague proceeded to boast that by using The Secret, she never had to wait more than one minute for a tube train. She also claimed that she knew all about quantum physics, so I challenged her to enlighten me about Field Theory, which drew a hostile blank. When I asked her why she wasn’t using The Secret to get herself a nice house and a great relationship, her face contorted with anger as she snapped “you have to start with the small things in life.” So there you are. She may have lost her job and live in a council flat, but she has achieved what Peter Hendy could only dream of: the smooth running of eleven tube lines, maintenance of its intricate infrastructure, staffing and rolling stock, signalling meshed into perfect synchronicity. This is small fry for someone who employs The Secret, despite the fact that by ordering your own train to arrive on time, you are likely to put several thousand commuters to inconvenience as they suffer yet another mechanical failure.
For those who’ve just got back from an extended trip to the Gobi Desert, or who live in Friesland, The Secret is a lavish film (and now book) that states that all the great leaders and achievers in history had one thing in common (it seems they were all men for a start); they believed and practised the Law of Attraction (which involves thought vibrations) and that such a Law can give you anything you want, particularly happiness, health, wealth and parking spaces. All for $12.95 these days. My, the ravages of inflation.
OK, it’s easy to be a cynic and crack a few cheap jokes, but I enjoy it, so indulge me. Let me state that I have no trouble with the concept of self-responsibility or the positive power of intent coupled with action. My problem with the whole damn Secret shebang is that people have confused serendipity with market forces (or good interior design) and primed awareness, hoisting half-baked notions up the exclusivity pole like a pair of frilly knickers with SpiritualTM embroidered on the crotch. What’s worse, it supports its claims with bad psychology and bad science, and does not seek to address the systemic issues underlying global disease and poverty. In other words, it’s confused and narcissistic.
Bad Basics
First, let’s take a look at some of the great leaders mentioned in the film. There’s Lincoln. All but one of his children died and he was 59 before he became president and then was, oh dear, assassinated. Emerson suffered bouts of grief, depression and loneliness. Edison was sceptical about the mercy, kindness and love of God. Einstein was pain in the arse to live with and constantly unfaithful. Still, he was an achiever, so who cares if his wife was unhappy. Beethoven went deaf, of course (so much for health) and Newton suffered from depression and paranoia.
It’s a shame they missed out Robert Frost, Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Tolstoy, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Jack Kerouac, Samuel Becket, Winston Churchill, Franz Kafka and Goethe, who all had an intimate relationship with the Black Dog. In the relentless pursuit of happiness, no proponent of The Secret seems to be able to cope with the fact that humans can be flawed, riddled with ‘negativity’ yet still produce work of merit.
Now a Law is either a human legislative construct, whereby cultural notions of morality will form its basic tenets, or it’s a Law of physics, which implies a universal and objective application.
The trouble is, The Secret implies operation on the latter principle, in which case, the science behind it needs to be stringent, the results quantifiable and the basic unit of measurement for happiness established. This is where The Secret falls down. Humans and their experiences cannot (and should not) be formularised.
Besides which, there are 100 billion galaxies out there. If this Law is universal, how do we know that some silicon-based life-form 80 billion light years away is happy, or whether it’s a state that such a life-form would recognise or want? Does our alien friend have to even produce thought patterns in order to be intelligent?
Meanwhile back on Earth, detailed psychological studies have suggested that humans have a genetically determined base line level of happiness to which they will revert, regardless of whether calamity or windfall should strike. Happiness is local, biological, and subjective. It can be elevated by good governance, such as that being attempted in Bhutan. Of course, the genetic control of depression, disease or other undesirable traits such as homosexuality may be sought by some conglomerates, whereby ‘negative’ thoughts could be repressed in the interests of productivity and economic growth. Concepts like The Secret are partisan to this way of thinking. It plays straight into the hands of those who would standardise the soul.
Bad Science
I just read an interview with a model who cites her interests as philosophy and quantum physics. Not to knock the brains beneath the beauty, but isn’t quantum the new Burberry? Are people really interested in quantum physics or just the pap version of it spewed up by The Secret and its adherents? It’s just another unique selling point for your Match.com profile, along with the love of reading and a good sense of humour. I mean, I don’t understand the bloody concepts and I did Physics A’ Level.
The proponents of The Secret have hijacked the terminology of modern science and yet the theories behind quantum physics are not syncretic. The majority opinion seems to support the Copenhagen Interpretation, but throw in MWI, Transaction Interpretation and physicists such as Sheldon Goldstein, who is working to reclaim objective Bohmian mechanics, and you have a whole bunch of weirdness and a headache. The clue is in the word 'interpretation'. While it is accepted that humans create their own experiences of reality, even Heisenberg acknowledged that nothing in the real world actually changes; the only thing that changes is the uncertainty of your knowledge.
Another scientific point here: the laws of quantum mechanics are only applicable at a sub atomic level, where Newtonian physics does not apply. And vice versa. There’s no denying it, if I throw myself off the top of the Citigroup Atrium, there’s no amount of positive thinking that is going to stop Newton’s laws kicking in. Actually, I did throw myself out of a bedroom window when I was two, believing I could fly. Guess what happened next?
If you raise the issues of the Holocaust or Darfur with The Secret devotees, they will state that particular vibrations attract disaster to people. They brought it upon themselves because their thoughts were in tune with the event.
The jury’s still out on linguistic determinism, although it’s fair to say that language shapes many of our concepts, but I’d love to know if all negative thoughts vibrate at the same frequency, whether they be in Yiddish or Cushitic? Let’s throw some analogs into the mix, as well as memory as phantasm and disappear down the rabbit hole to play doctors and nurses with Alice.
If observation can affect the subatomic world, then in the macrocosmic world, it is the observer who shapes cruelty. The Secret is cruel. It endorses passivity in the face of human suffering other than one's own.
I have a friend who has never subscribed to any belief system, couldn’t visualise her way out of a paper bag, never reads books, and is honest enough to admit to being completely materialistic and selfish. She has also never had a day’s illness, is rich, good looking and is having a passionate relationship with a man fifteen years her junior. If the Law of Attraction really worked, then surely she should be a quadriplegic, Jade Goody lookey-likey who lives in the arse-end of a South London council estate.
Seriously, though, I would ask what thoughts and actions could possibly attract agonised retribution to wise, sensitive, intelligent, creative, positive people. Anyone who has watched a loved one go through the torments of serious illness will know that they would not wish it on their worst enemy.
The argument falls apart, doesn’t it? Oh, but of course, it’s not about laws of attraction now – no no, it was something these people did a long time ago in another life, which begs the question, why have those with blessings in this life devolved so much since synching their thoughts so beautifully last time round? Two words: Paris Hilton.
While I believe that some bodies may be healed by unconventional means, it is not a given, and the fear of pain and humiliation for ourselves and those we love can leave us open to exploitation by those who would propose that disease or death are weaknesses or failures. I know someone who should have died three years ago from myelona. It is conventional medical intervention that has kept her alive, not positive thinking, so let’s be very careful about the balance of evidence when talking about these issues.
Bad Feeling
I loathe the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ emotion as much as I loathe the terms ‘black’ and ‘white’ magic. There are emotions and they are all legitimate. So-called negativity is sometimes a positive response to bullshit. Psychotherapist Alice Miller points out that even strong emotions such as hatred are valid. “What kind of person would I be if I could not react, temporarily at least, to injustice, presumption, evil, or arrogant idiocy with feelings of anger or rage?” She warns that such unacknowledged feelings are often disguised by dubious ideologies, which seems to be the case here.
I’ve checked out some of the discussion forums supporting The Secret, and they are chock full of frustrated, anxious people who are experiencing continued personal problems and are desperate to know why their thoughts have not changed their situation.
We see this belief system alive and well within the evangelical church. Sinful thoughts are on a par with sinful actions and if you are sick and cannot be healed, well – you just didn’t believe hard enough. I’ve even known Buddhists tie themselves in knots, fearful for every duff thought just in case they get punished by poverty and disability in their next lives. These people are overwrought farmers, gazing sadly after their drowned donkeys.
Cut yourselves some slack, or at least a generous slice of existentialism.
There is nothing wrong with facing the truth about our weaknesses and our damaged or dying bodies and seeking to catalyse our pain into something of value instead of trying to solve the insoluble. Would Jean-Dominique Bauby have ever been able to create his masterpiece if he had wasted the power of positive thinking trying to heal his body, instead of working with what he had? What other wonders of minute perception may come our way once we relinquish our ideas of what may make us happy: the house, the car, the money, the relationship. Is there no other existence valid beyond these desires? It is the very failures of our life that allow us to be enriched so why even attempt to redefine them.
I’m rather a fan of Viktor Frankl, who once read a quotation from a noted modern philosopher and another from a schizophrenic patient, and asked his listeners to match quotation with author. The majority of listeners got it wrong. Frankl explained that what philosopher and lunatic had in common was “the certainty that happiness can be attained by furious pursuit and a consequent rage at the unsatisfying results”. Frankl called this “hyperintention”, something that exaggerates self-centredness.
It was Frankl who used humorous exaggeration and paradoxical intent as therapeutic devices, and recognised that conscience is intuitive and personal, all of which go against the grain of The Secret. Yet under certain circumstances, his techniques work. For Frankl, a survivor of the death camps, the meaning of existence is learned through crisis and suffering.
Bad Economics
It strikes me that there is a strong correlation between phenomena such as The Secret and economic conditions. Napolean Hill’s Think and Grow Rich was published during the Great Depression, and now The Secret, an astonishing marketing and financial success by any standards, thrives during a period of instability following 9/11 and the sub prime crisis on both sides of the Atlantic.
Suddenly there is a huge array of experts in positive psychology and an inordinate amount of energy (and money) being spent trying to unravel layer upon layer of meaning in our lives. The Secret is Botox for the soul, a quick fix for an engorged Western society that has too much food and too much fear. It’s turning us into a nation of spiritual dilettantes, living in a conditional future of “then I’ll be happy”, enslaved to a Law that implodes upon close inspection.
Even Paradoxical Intent has been hijacked by these mystical lawyers. “The Law of”TM Paradoxical Intent screams out from many a website. Legalised. Regulated to a point of petrification. I feel as though I’ve stumbled into some cosmic directive full of New Age red tape. Paradoxical Intent is not a law. It’s a technique. It works for particular situations or phobias, but not for all psychological problems. When it comes to our bodies, we are subject to Newtonian law. When it comes to the human psyche, there are no set laws, just intuitive practice. Get over it.
To top it all, I’ve noticed that the same people who subscribe to The Secret also indulge in the arts of divination. Yes, I know that divination is more than mere prediction, but that’s not what these people are looking for when they consult their pendulums, psychics and tarot. If they truly believed that the power was in their own thoughts to change their lives, they would have no need to find out what that future may hold.
I don’t know about you, but I feel overloaded and exhausted with this crap. It’s all self-help, self image, self obsession and much of it not only stretches credulity, but is boring. Some of it will work. Sometimes. Maybe. Possibly. Even likely, under some circumstances. But not always. And not for everyone. And maybe never for many.
My personal happiness comes from knowing that I like myself as I am. Flawed. Subject to a host of emotional catastrophes. Mostly talking bollocks. Inadequate. Incarnate. In the red. Always changing. Hopefully sometimes even for the better.
I don’t feel the need to surround myself with people who think the way I do. In fact, I like my scientific, argumentative friends. They keep my feet on the earth and one hand on my sword. They challenge me to question everything. Nor do I want to make judgements about the correlation between someone’s interior life and exterior manifestation. I have no right to do that.
However seductive the idea of a cat in a state of flux may be, today I am mostly wearing Bohmian mechanics. There is an objective reality regardless of my scope of awareness or interaction with it. The tree does fall in the forest, and its effects are a mass of convoluted, hidden variables. It may not be linear. It may have no moral framework. But as a human being, aware of inhabiting a fixed area of physical space (in this dimension anyway), all I know is that my space is unique: it is impossible for me to share it with another human unless I make love. Like all humans, I am the paradox of the all and nothing: a universe inside a mote inside a universe. Truth and subjectivity are not synonymous. And the first rule of any magic is, be careful what you ask for.
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Food for Thought
Nothing in life can ever be entirely divorced from myriad other incidents; and it is remarkable, though no doubt in itself illusive, that action, built up from innumerable causes, each in itself allusive and unnoticed more often than not, is almost always provided with an apparently ideal moment for its final expression.
Anthony Powell – A Dance to the Music of Time
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Letter from Liberia – Sadie Smith
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There was a great god-sage called Narâda ... He travelled everywhere, and one day he was passing through a forest, and he saw a man who had been meditating until the white ants had built a huge mound round his body, so long had he been sitting in that position. He said to Narâda, "Where are you going?" Narâda replied, "I am going to heaven." "Then ask the God of Heaven when he will be merciful to me, when I shall attain freedom." Further on Narâda saw another man. He was singing and dancing, and he said, "O Narâda, where are you going?" Narâda said, "I am going ot heaven." "Then ask when I shall attain freedom."
So Narâda went on. In the course of time he came again by the same road, and there was the man who had been meditating till the ant-hills had grown round him. He said, "O Narâda, did you ask about me?" "O yes." "What did he say?" "He told me that you would attain freedom in four more births." Then the man began to weep and wail, and said, "I have meditated until an ant-hill has been raised around me, and I have to endure four more births yet!"
Narâda went on to the other man. "Did you ask about me?" "O yes. Do you see this tamarind tree? I have to tell you that as many leaves as there are on that tree, so many times you will be born, and then you will attain freedom." Then the man began to dance for joy, and said, "After so short a time I shall be free!" A voice came, "My child, you shall have freedom this instant."
Kurma Purdna
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