walkingtalkingwriting

An Inner Glow (mmj)

What else has got 'smashed' in the last few years?

The Shiva-lingam at Amarnath is an ice stalagmite that forms in a cave at 3,500m in the north west Himalayas between the months of May and August each year. About 500,000 pilgrims make the 3 day treck each year hoping to catch a glimpse of the icy lingam and receive the blessing from Lord Shiva for their troubles.

However, in the last few years many of the the pilgrims have been missing out. Some say it is global warming, others that it is the body heat from all the pilgrims which is causing the Shiva-lingam to form for shorter and shorter periods each year, but nobody knows why for sure. See Saturday Guardian (28/11/09), Travel Section, for more on the Amarnathyatra.

However, nobody on the pilgrimage appears unduly worried, since, according to the smiling Sadhus on the route,the blessing from Lord Shiva is still assured, icy lingam in situ or not. 'It's a holy mystery' a pilgrim explains, which has to be about right, since Shiva is the Lord of Decreation as well as Creation.

Shiva the smasher.

On Wednesday I am making a different kind of journey to go to Becket's Endgame at the Duchess Theatre in London. Becket is a great smasher too, and in this play he resolutely smashes up everything in sight, the outside world is called 'zero', and those inside await their end with every delusional hope stripped away. Decreation...

... and the gift of space. It's a holy mystery.

mmj 

On the subject of the 'city' (mmj)

Ooorrrr, Location, Location, Location; Tell us, Oh 'city vagabonds', The time here is always now, but, tell us, Tell us do, what city is that then.

We (ak and mmj) vagabonds have never spelled out a city, one city, this one or that one before all others, ça, the one city to which we both belong. If you explore 'About' us here, you will find a picture of us standing in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul which we visited in 2005, Is that the one, No, we travelled there, stayed a week, and then we travelled on.

Then, in 2008/2009 ak went to Rome and spent the best part of a year there, while mmj was regularly in London over the same period doing his medical studies in Palliative Care, Are they the ones, Rome and/or London, No again. In between times, there have been other great cities in which we have walked, mmj in Berlin and Madurai for instance, and especially in London where for ak, if you go back a few years the city was home, but these days he lives out west on the edge of Dartmoor.

And there are great cities we are on our way to, I am heading for Buenos Aires for sure during the times I am singing tango, but it is not like 'Tango In Her Eyes', Joli, who has been offering a "Survival Guide to Buenos Aires and Other Random Thoughts" these last four years while she has actually been living in that great city.

Still, imminent and emergent, all of these cities as well as many other great cities not so far mentioned, are the ones which, one way or another, we are travelling to or from, or strolling in, walking, talking about, and writing:

- IN Conversation

- ON the STREET

- OUT in the WILDERNESS

- OVER and BEYOND

It occurs to me, for the purposes of 'Field Note' accuracy and definition here, it might be very helpful to our readers, and the links it might help to create between us, if we name the city we are in when we write (or nearly so, or once were, or on our way to, or intend to be again):

This weekend I was in Barcelona, thanks to Dorchester Tango walkingtalking... , dancing a little, but mostly listening to los exilos, Sandra Rehder and elrevere.

mmj

Confronting (ak)

My front, her front – confronting: facing, mutual facing – close up close-up. energy pours in, more energy pours in, reserves are put on full alert, sirens wail, Calvary (even the cavalry) looms, angels are calculating the odds.

Death throws the doors wide open – and the windows – sucked in, blown out – walls demolished. A glimpse of glory and devastation is provided free of charge.

But what if a programmatic response is offered: this is the process of dying (and we can make it easier) - there are these clearly marked stages. Or for those left behind: the stages of bereavement. Evidence based rationality.

Hey, hey!! I'm trying to say something here. Can you listen? Can you negotiate between the non-rational and the rational? Have you been lost in the wilderness and found your way out (sort of)? Not quite the same but still breathing.

In what place does the negotiating take place? Perhaps religion is a (denied) sort of madness and where does the theologian speak from? Inside or outside? Do we pretend it's rational?

Breaking Cover (ak)

What is important and what is distraction? And how to tell the difference? And furthermore, how can something seem so right and then come to be proved wrong? The view changes; sometimes simply with the passage of time – no that can't be true: there must be an intervening event not simply the passage of time. I'm caught up, caught in the net of my present view; unless you help me, unless you tell me about your view, use words that I can make use of. But they might bounce off the taut screen of my view. I might say, oh, you would say that, wouldn't you.

Truth will out. 

NIgh on a year ago the change of view, the revolution of view, looks like an explosion. It knocked me down, left me shaken, left me with a choice: get the hell out of it or soldier on. I was persuaded to soldier on. Nonetheless, the explosion was real (a real metaphor!), the view that had taken me to Rome destroyed, but it took me to time realise it; anything like full acceptance only coming through when I began to create a new view.

View can be determined by many factors, wishful thinking amongst them. Explosions of reality, pushing aggressively into our minds are ferociously difficult to adjust to, we resist resentfully – why won't reality accord, conform to our wishes!

Truth will out

truth will break from cover

run into the open to reveal herself

she's probably laughing

– at my expense, I think

but her laughter is infectious

so I'm laughing too

eventually.

What is Thought? (ak)

Sun after rain 

cycle, circle . . . enter the

how:

fall in love 

build your home 

have your children 

grow your vegetables 

laugh a lot 

go in peace.

p.s. you may need to adjust the specifics.

Bedfellows (ak)

Sexuality and vitality: to be alive, to be quick is to be sexual; to be tuned, in tune, in time, to neither be ahead nor behind, rather in the right place. The analogy here is the orchestra – keeping time in the eternity of the music. All my cells scraping away on their violins, singing, humming, gurgling.

At a certain point sexual loving becomes exclusive; the eye contact, the excitement, the longing, the touching – retiring to privacy - to enable a certain dirtiness, fecundity, wildness. An edgy sort of place where uncertainty can reign, potential unleashed, anxiety assuaged . . . and, I want to suggest, morality can be discerned, even established. Right in the core of dirtiness there is the centre of morality. They belong together providing we let them belong together.

A Guide of Sorts (ak)

What did reading Dostoevsky – late teens/early twenties – do to me? Do to my mind? He tunnelled into and through it, opening up new passages, vast chambers, narrow twisting, water-filled ways, turned darkness ever darker, exposing hidden machinery of perversity and complexity, opaqueness and mystery. Did he, I ask myself forty years or so on, set me off on my life's path? Not exactly a slap on the back and a 'good luck'. More like I blinked in bewildered astonishment, stumbled and took a step.

Was it an illusion, my discernment of that path? No, I don't think it was entirely but perhaps the question can be refined as to what sort of path I imagined it to be. Though whether we ever see our path ahead with any sort of reality is doubtful. I can see a faint but definite glow of glory in my image of the path. Is that glow the glow of anticipation, of hope – what I saw back then – or is it the superimposition of the lived experience of the path? Yes to both of those. The excitement of new life. The actual glory of sexual love, the glory of lighting upon new thoughts. 

Was I lucky? Yes.

Was there pain, suffering, difficulty? Yes.

Did I doubt? Yes.

And I continue.

Am I grateful? Yes.

History in the making (ak)

Today, the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, I've found myself not totally focussed on him and HISTORY, but forcibly occupying an unexpected role: that of patient. The sequence was along the lines of: wake up one morning last week, perhaps it was Tuesday, aware of a slight itchiness that suggested insect bite. This one though was on my backside. I didn't dwell for long on the HOW!! of it but noted it and meant to apply some antiseptic ointment, but maybe it was one of those endless little tasks that don't quite reach the top of the 'to do' list. Three or four days later I had the suspicion that it was becoming infected – oh yes – a high-pressure swelling, sensitive to touch, painful, disturbing my sleep. Go to the doctor! Yes. But it's not just a question of making an appointment at the GP surgery – I'm in Rome. And there's a system I'm not familiar with. It starts in the college with the infirmarian team. After that if a trip to the medics is deemed to be necessary, then we go to a private hospital that the college has an arrangement with. So I waited a couple of days to see if my body's defence mechanism could do anything apart from swell up in fright.

Monday was the day I decided action was needed. And so together with 'my' infirmarian I set off by means of a two bus journey across town to reach the hospital in time for the 6 pm clinic. Sitting had become something of a tricky act; trying to find the posterior body parts that were least painful and it never seemed to be quite the same. If you don't know them the Rome buses (run by ATAC) have very simple seating – rigid plastic. And the Roman roads are often cobbled and in a poor state of repair. Better stand, I think.

The hospital – the Salvator Mundi International Hospital – is in a part of Rome I didn't know, on the hill above Trastevere. A modern hospital, set in well cared for gardens. As far as I could see the nursing staff were warm, friendly looking nuns plus reception staff and medics. The Beda's arrangement is with a charming and kindly doctor who at first addressed me as Alan and then switched to addressing me as father – a mistake which I never quite got round to correcting. Why was that? I was more preoccupied with other matters plus I didn't want to do anything to 'change' his perception of me; if he sees me as a priest we don't need to get into the faulty misapprehension for the moment.

After listening to my lungs and checking my blood pressure, he looked at the offending infection, he prodded and the pain produced a reflex shock of retreat, to get away from the intrusive digit. 'I think I should cut this,' were his words. He was up for doing it there and then but as the treatment room was not available the abscess was going to be given a reprieve until this morning (Tuesday) meanwhile some major (judging by the size of them when I picked them from the pharmacy near the bus stop) antibiotics were to be started.

So this morning had me making my way back to the hospital to keep my appointment with the scalpel. Needless to say it was briefly but excruciatingly painful: one sort of pain for the cut – somehow sharp and watery – and then quite a different sort of pain for the squeezing – hard twisting and violent. Whatever will power I possess was totally involved in holding myself on the table and not do what every instinct is telling me to: leap up. I gripped on with both hands and attempted to suppress my quivering muscles.

And survived – and rode back on the two buses standing up. It took me a while to work out that I could in fact still sit down.

And I've spent the rest of the day reading Henning Mankell's The Man Who Smiled. Have you read this Swedish detective-story writer? He's great! If you're in the mood for a crime novel, try Henning.

Hopefully my patient status won't go on for too long because we've got end of semester exams looming and if I remember correctly Mr Menkell wasn't on the syllabus.

Chapter 1 (ak)

It’s surprising to find myself in this place – about to “start again” – not quite believable.
But perhaps it’s not accurate to think of it as starting again. I have the sense of a concentration of forces – emotional, psychological, spiritual – and from that a new wave gathers force “out there in the ocean.” Lightning flickers, thunder rolls around the darkening horizon. Old stuff and new stuff – simultaneously.

To add another element, I’m bothered by the, apparently contradictory, notions of fiction and non-fiction; they force a certain discomfort around which nothing can be finally settled. Is it true or did I make it up?

In a recent conversation two questions emerged:

“Who’s taking care of you?”

“What is sufficiently interesting to you?”

And then a third one came to me as I waited for a train:

“How do we begin to understand the notion of liberation?”

The wish for freedom, like the waves forever washing and dispersing energy on to the beach; waves of my moment by moment decisions, many banal, some more interesting, interspersed at irregular intervals by larger, more far reaching decisions, like applying to become a priest, and for the last two years wrestling with what is called a process of discernment, to test out whether I and others continue to support that project; and God, of course, there to deepen the discourse.

There are the ways that I haven’t been free over the last years and my consequent hopes to be liberated to balance those deficits. As a single dad I have been constrained to be a parent, to be around, to cook, to keep house, to hold that emotional space of home, to stay open.

It’s all change now; my daughter’s nineteen and off to UEA.

And at the same time as I was learning to be a single dad I was also working through a rather protracted mid-life crisis. Using various forms of therapeutic endeavour, plus the stalwart walking, talking and writing I tried to examine the problem and come to a solution. At times I thought my path would be that of the writer. But no, it doesn’t appear to be. Or at least only writing in the context of something else. Instead I seem to have found my way to the priesthood. At least, I have been accepted and am about to engage in the four years of formation at a seminary in Rome.

Headache for two days (mmj)

I dont know, I thought to myself, the Rules, and over the next two days with enough pressure to give me a migraine the following formed:

 

Rules

These are the rules for writing down

these are the rules for making money,

songs, a good life, a good death, and gone beyond,

 

I don't think so, a honey voice says,

golder than gold, Patacara, Guardian of the Rules,

putting her finger on it.

 

'Putting her finger on it', you'll know the translation of Thig. V. 10 by Thanissaro I expect, I first read it at the end of The Mind Like Fire Unbound, and it always makes a strong impression on me. What I didn't know 'til I googled and read about her life is that Paticara is called The Guardian of the Vinaya. As for 'golder than gold', go to Sappho fragment 156 (from If Not Winter translation by Anne Carson), all that is left are two half lines which run together:

    polu paktides adumelestera

    chruso chrusotera

            ... far more sweetsounding than a lyre

    golder than gold ...

 

So there is also the honey (- mele -). I don't know what else Patacara has to say (ie that has survived), elsewhere another Sappho, perhaps with  headache or during that time of the month, one line fragment (51) goes -

    'ouk 'oid' 'otti theo duo moi ta noemata

        I don't know what to do

                        two states of mind in me