Sunday, June 30, 2013
Daydream believer
I’ve had a number of readers kind enough to
compliment the direction of these blogs. Well, that’s not quite exact. There
have been more compliments as the blogs begin to entertain the mysterious and
the uncanny. Read the last few and you will see what I mean. The place of
strange events in our lives gives rise to all sorts of mental hocus pocus. It’s
the same unconscious foundation in our brains that gives rise to religious
faith, fatalism and alien abductions, I’d guess. In some far-off blog which
the researchers among you might be able to weed out I commented on the brain’s
‘god spot’. Put an electrode in there and even Richard Dawkins would be seeing
angels. Another blog, at a different time, at some point in December 2012,
recounts the adventures of yours truly as I extricate a friend from the
belief that he has been sent to this earth to tip the devil back into the
darkest pit for another one thousand years.
As I mentioned the other day, I’m not
really given to beliefs in the paranormal. There have got to be explanations
for these events even as they happen to me but it doesn’t stop me being bemused
and unsettled by them. The most recent has been discovering that I had written
the future, in the early eighties (described in my last little essay here) and
one that has since come to pass. On reflection in bed this morning, allowing
the dawn chorus to permeate my spirit with its songs of the infinite cosmos, I
realized that my life has been punctuated by mysterious events. Given the
interest the last one or two have generated, I’m going to continue in that
vein. First a bit of background.
I was born in India. At four I was
perfectly bi-lingual; Urdu and English. On the sea-going trip to Britain which
lasted a number of months, I lost all Urdu. It probably blighted by academic development.
It’s a well known syndrome. However, my starved bilingualism led to an
inordinate desire to write in the one language remaining. A school inspector
visiting Shadforth C of E junior
school commented that I was going to be a writer. He read out, “King Alfred’s
ships floated in the bay like swans.” Something of that ilk. I was a very
imaginative child. I had the whole school (thirty children) playing jousting
knights with Brussels sprouts stalks for clubs, sticks for lances and dustbin
lids for shields on the school field. Girls sat on a wall watching and we gave our favours (bits of
ribbon) to the Guinivere we loved best, upon a victory. After such a tournament
I wandered off down the steep meadow, to cross the stream to my house. As I
approached a hedge I remembered I’d had a dream of a nest in just such a bush.
It was the shape of a spinning top and had three eggs. I moved excitedly among
the blackthorn and found the place. There it was, exactly as dreamt. I took one
of the three ovals for my collection. But it was with a curious sense of power.
If I could do this, maybe I could use this force at will.
I couldn’t. But I could do it without will.
Over the years whenever I wanted something that might progress my immediate
train of action, it would drop into my lap. Second hand shops were perfect
territory for disgorging valuable pieces of the jigsaw of current life. It proved
a strong version of serendipity. When I got to be a student in a teacher’s
college in Sunderland I always ran out of grant at the end of the term and my father never subbed me
what he was supposed to. I went off with my last ten
shillings to the bookmakers and won what I needed to last until the end of
term.
It’s very low level, this capacity to bend
fate to my will. I haven’t won the lottery, for example.
I know this is all a bit weak and lacking
in force majeure but it’s a start. (Believe it or not I wrote the French just
now and had to check what it meant. Yet another example of writing from the
unconscious tolling the years back to King Alfred or onwards to the eventual creation of The Azimuth Trilogy.)
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