Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Hail Stones In the Pyrenees
Thought I'd digress from the current flow and describe an event, yesterday. Imagine the scene: sunshine, reading Montaigne on the recliner, rearing cliffs behind me with crows and woodpeckers creating a drum rhythm. A blackbird chortling solos above my head on the pear tree. All hot and humid and very south of France. Ten minutes later a towering black cloud breasts the peak of Canigou. Indoors I wander, taking stuff from the washing line on my way. Ten minutes more and hell unleashes its fury and a Mordor darkness descends. Giant hailstones crash and crush, stripping the fruit trees and the tomato plants, holing the parasol canopy, dimpling the metal on the car roof and bonnet, destroying the plastic laundry basket. A great brown river rushes down the road past the house carrying stones and tree branches. Everywhere is covered in white cobblestones.
Later I hear that cars have been junked, Velux roof lights shattered and bedrooms filled with ice.
Here's a bit of doggerel on the event:
Twas a normal day in Ol' Casteil
The sun it was a shining
Then all went black
The lightning crack'd
And crumbled heaven's lining...
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Thought I'd digress from the current flow and describe an event, yesterday. Imagine the scene: sunshine, reading Montaigne on the recliner, rearing cliffs behind me with crows and woodpeckers creating a drum rhythm. A blackbird chortling solos above my head on the pear tree. All hot and humid and very south of France. Ten minutes later a towering black cloud breasts the peak of Canigou. Indoors I wander, taking stuff from the washing line on my way. Ten minutes more and hell unleashes its fury and a Mordor darkness descends. Giant hailstones crash and crush, stripping the fruit trees and the tomato plants, holing the parasol canopy, dimpling the metal on the car roof and bonnet, destroying the plastic laundry basket. A great brown river rushes down the road past the house carrying stones and tree branches. Everywhere is covered in white cobblestones.
Later I hear that cars have been junked, Velux roof lights shattered and bedrooms filled with ice.
Here's a bit of doggerel on the event:
Twas a normal day in Ol' Casteil
The sun it was a shining
Then all went black
The lightning crack'd
And crumbled heaven's lining...
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Labels: Hailstones in the Pyrenees.
Friday, July 19, 2013
“Dream Lover Where Are You…”
Hearing accounts of other people’s dreams
is about as tasty as eating cheap mozzarella. They may intrigue, exhilarate,
perturb or cause great distress to those who experience them but today’s
listener generally remains turned off
by the telling – unless s/he is some kind of eager interpreter. Those
who, like myself, find them uncannily redolent of parallel worlds, may have
been influenced by Jung’s great work, Memories,
Dreams, Reflections. Every primitive culture accords the dream with
significance. In the so-called sophisticated west we have generally forgotten –
or deny – their importance in our lives. While science attempts a rational
explanation of the brain’s machinations while we sleep, it is their very
irrationality which links us to a kind of other-worldliness. Waking up out of a dream state is like
emerging from an underwater swim and finding life above its surface momentarily
foreign. The dream, still clinging wetly to us, then falls away in droplets as
we transit from one world to the other until. When we are dry again, we have
divested it from our consciousness.
Maybe like you, I sometimes wake with such
a sense of yearning for what I am leaving and a rejection of what I am
re-entering that an angst stays with me as a dull ache all morning. It may have
been a landscape or some other aspect of nature which I discovered like an
intrepid explorer or a realization
that I was in an ongoing, deep and intimate relationship with people in a world
far removed from my usual conscious one.
At times, when this sensation of having enjoyed another life with an
individual or network of people is especially strong, I am convinced that it is
the world into which I have woken that is the fraudulent one, the illusion, the
true dream state. I feel absolute despair at not being able to continue my life
with them.
After one particular event in which it
seemed as though I loved, to my core, a woman who bore no likeness to anyone I
have ever met, I started writing what turned out to be a novella called Through
a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story. The narrative plays with the notion described
above: which is the more authentic reality, the conscious one or the unconscious alternative?
@profjacksanger for tweets
Labels: #Dreams.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Zen and the Art of Psychic Maintenance
We had moved to a village called Ryton,
close to the Tyne. I was about twelve. Naturally I joined the public library.
In the earlier village of my childhood I was taking out adult books. By twelve I had
read the vast bulk of the better American crime noir by Chandler, Cheyney, Wallace et all and
was now on a lifetime’s cruise through space and time with Sci Fi. Another reason
for attending the library regularly was that there was a pretty young librarian
and fellow tennis player called Joyce Strong. The library was at the end of a
ten minute walk, which included a graveyard.
Anyway, enough of this cursory
filling-you-in. Despite Joyce’s undoubted charms, I loved books and was able to
leave her at the desk and lose myself among the shelves. One day I succumbed to
what Arthur Koestler called The Angel in
the Library. For this angel to aid you in your life’s quest, you must clear
your mind of trivia and/or a premeditation concerning what you want to read
next, and wander with your eyes
virtually shut, up and down the aisles. At some point you will open them and be
staring at the spine of a tome that will solve a current impasse or help shape
your destiny.
I took down a book with Zen in the title.
Zen has been my companion since that day. I published a relatively successful
little book called An A to Zen of
Management (the last few are boxed in my cave here in France) which consists of
seventy odd aphorisms to open the minds of business leaders. The woman who
illustrated it with Japanese calligraphy is now my son’s wife. My book, Azimuth,
has a newly minted Zen aphorism to begin each chapter. Finally, I took to
Twitter like a Zen intoxicant, finally finding a medium where the interplay
between concise language and infinite thought could become an every day discipline.
So you see, that day in Ryton library when
I, the callow youth, took down, unsuspectingly, an obscure collection of
writings on paper within board covers, once opened proved to be a portal
to my future life.
Examples:
Abandon what you have lost before you
carry it
The impossible is the stillborn child
of the unimaginative
Is your life-script the consequence of
your authorship or your readership?
The
Azimuth Trilogy: www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Twitter: @profjacksanger
All writings: www.chronometerpublications.me
Labels: Mysterious connections. Synchronicity. Other-worldliness.
Saturday, July 06, 2013
Swimming in the Occult
I said I’d write a sequence of blogs on the
mysteries that attend my life. I am assuming that I am not unique in being
subjected to uncanny forces beyond my powers of reason. I expect most people,
if they spent a bit of time in personal reflection, would dredge up the
inexplicable in their own lives. The fact of the matter is that if we do
experience events beyond the pale, then we tend to consign them to deepest
memory because we know we’d be ridiculed if we intimated we believed them. Our
friends and acquaintances are always ultra-rational when it’s not their own
lives held under a spotlight.
In the last couple of blogs I have
introduced what Jung terms synchronicity, events that are bizarrely connected
across time and space and seem to defy normal forces. Here’s another example, a
vignette which speaks of the irrational.
I was born in India. By the time my family
returned with me to the UK I spoke Urdu and English. By then I was aware that
my elder sister had drowned and it took three or four years for my parents to
conceive me. Four years after me they produced a girl, too. Until I was forty
five or so I had the story of my sister’s death imprinted on my brain by my
mother. She would say, “Little Margaret would be fifteen now” or Little
Margaret would be twenty five now”. In other words my dead sister was ageing as
I was and as a ghostly precursor to my life. She died, I knew – I had been told
many times - at the age of a toddler, two or three. She was the daughter of an
army man and his wife. My father was a significant player in building India’s
military academy in Dehra Dun, a couple of hundred miles north of Delhi. He was
seconded to the Indian military whilst also a captain in the PT Corps. He
helped stage those old TV events
at Earl’s Court where services competed in assembling canons, doing gymnastics
and the like.
My sister was found drowned in the water
tank in the garden. She had apparently climbed over the little protective
fence. There she was, like Ophelia. It nearly destroyed my father and my mother
had to be strong to hold their relationship together.
Moving on forty years. I accompanied my
dying father back to this place where he had been ‘the man’ and where my
ghostly sister began her immaterial ageing. Being an academic I was invited to
address India’s leading military trainers and stood before a packed lecture
theatre with my father sitting in the front row, observing his son doing
something he had done forty to fifty years before. We had tea in the bungalow where
I first crawled. This was my first return after the intervening decades.
I decided to find my sister’s grave. My
father was reluctant. Maybe the prostate cancer and the catheter made him feel
unprepared. Anyway we went. We found the grave. It had been partially defaced
with strange hieroglyphs. We interrogated the register in the little church.
There was her name, Margaret Sanger. There was her age. Six years. Now, can you
imagine? Six? But she was surely a toddler! Finally my father talked about that
distant time.
Margaret was born with a fear of water. She
hated being bathed and would scream. When she was eighteen months her screams
brought adults into the garden to find her pointing. A toddler was drowning in
the fountain but her prompt but precocious warning saved it. She wanted to
learn to swim. When my father took her to the swimming baths she grew rigid as
she approached and turned blue when he gently eased her into the water. He
taught hundreds to swim in his later life. He became a swimming pool manager
after the army. But not his own daughter. Not Little Margaret. The very strange
thing about her death was this: the post mortem showed no water in her lungs.
My father could not explain it except that she may have died from fear. Or, I told
myself, she had been asphyxiated and thrown into the tank. Who knows?
I went to see her grave the next morning
early. I had arranged for the gardener to put flowers on her stone. He had
filled an indent in her slab and rose petals floated there. I heard a little
girl crying in my mind. Self-delusion, no doubt.
My parents had more luck with their second
daughter. She took to water like the proverbial duck. In fact she became one of
Britain’s leading women breast-strokers, aged only thirteen.
Little Margaret would be 74 now.
www.chronometerpublications.me
for free reads and ones to buy.