The Call to Service

(being the third in a series of posts on “Religion and Violence”, a theme covered in Karen Armstrong’s latest book, Fields of Blood)

Background
What I learned about religion in childhood came almost entirely from school. The single exception was a phase when my invalid Granny would take me through a series of booklets from the Bible Reading Fellowship to which she subscribed. These had the format of selecting a text for each day and explaining its significance, or in the adult versions—they were carefully graded—offering a meditation on the sacred words. I didn’t let her know that I was “stony ground”, that her evangelism took no root in me. School was a different affair: Scripture was simply a lesson, like History or Geography—all you had to do was learn the facts and stories as presented. No repentance or conversion was required. Then on Sundays—for I was a boarder most of the time—you had to attend the local Anglican church. And sometimes a master would forget our civilian status and call it Church Parade. “Mandatory church parades were abolished in the United Kingdom in 1951,” says Wikipedia. It was otherwise in our school’s Cadet Force, where joining was not compulsory—in theory. If you declined to join, you were instantly eligible for the Pioneer Corps, automatically conscripted. This meant that in your usual scruffy school uniform you would spend Thursday afternoons shambling after our equivalent of Groundskeeper Willie, cleaning the leaves out of drains

Our headmaster wanted to “be in that number”. . .

and so forth. From our co-opted parade-ground, i.e. the car-park adjacent to the school, you would hear a sergeant’s bark as he drilled his squad in their uniforms pressed & polished to a mirror-shine the evening before. I was in our Air Force section and in due course rose to the rank of sergeant. I considered myself an inward pacifist, occupying a space where I was free to satirize “militarism”.

In exactly the same way, I took a non-combatant role in the matter of Christian worship, being a sort of stretcher-bearer who inwardly sighed when we sang “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war.” In our school, each form of service was a metaphor for the other; at times the two meanings of “service” blurred into one. Selflessly you offered yourself to your country and to God. In fact, it was lip-service. In my brief incarnation as a Boy Scout, I promised “on my honour to do my best to do my duty” to

. . . when the Saints went marching in

an entity called God-and-the-Queen.

By way of instilling the indivisibility of duty, we had a special ritual on Speech Day. In full gleaming uniform, stiff with pride and inflexible duty, the Cadet of the Year marched up to the stage, saluted, and received a ceremonial sword, to return before the next Speech Day, and a finely-bound Bible, to keep forever. It was the King James version, naturally. We were the King James I School, of ancient origin but re-founded in new premises in 1610, when said King was on the throne. Not only that but King Charles I was housed there after losing the second Civil War. “Charles’s only recourse was to return to negotiations, which were held at Newport

our school badge

on the Isle of Wight,” says Wikipedia, which goes on to quote from his last fine speech before the single axe-blow that took him “from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be.”

God is on our side
So I was well-prepared when I came across a press cutting from my great-aunt’s WWI scrapbook: a brilliantly-crafted piece of pro-war propaganda, signed by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York at Whitsuntide, 1915.It was, you might say, completely expected; just as nobody can have been

Click for full transcript in PDF

surprised that Princess Mary, then aged 17, daughter of King George V, wrote to more or less everyone asking them to subscribe for Christmas presents to send to the fighting men at the end of 1914. If my Auntie Ollie’s scrapbook is to believed, the whole Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was indeed united by the urgency of survival, as they saw it, in the war against Germany. Conscientious objectors and aliens were locked up. A draconian move, you might think. But perhaps it was partly, given the prevailing mood, for their own safety.

As co-editor of my great-aunt’s posthumous website, I don’t allow myself comment there, leaving it untainted by the present-day, as free as possible from anachronism. For example, we don’t call it “A Scrapbook of World War I”. You must imagine yourself on a time-machine, transported to a past with no knowledge of subsequent history, only a supreme confidence in its own values. You are welcome to enter, but it won’t be complete for many months yet. You will be taken to a singular time and place: St Leonards-on-Sea in the County of Sussex, a hundred years ago from August 1st 1914 through to the end of November 1919. You will look through the eyes of a young woman whose father and eldest brother are Churchmen, & whose other brothers and brother-in-law have mostly signed up for War Service; all except my great-uncle Arthur, who was working in Malaya for the Forestry Commission, and my grandfather Vincent, a schoolmaster & also medically exempt, already with a family, including my rebellious non-conforming mother, aged 5 at the outbreak of war.

Where I stand
One is obviously influenced by one’s background, sometimes for and sometimes against. From my mother’s side, the influences were upper-middle-class. Her rebellious and non-conforming nature led her to gallivant off to Singaporeas a dancing teacher and thence to Australia, where I was conceived and born, in circumstances still not fully explained. My grandparents knew but I was never told, till someone broke a promise and gave me the outline

Family group 1913: click top left for detail of
my great-aunt & her brother Llewelyn;
bottom right for my mother and her parents

, when I was 48. I did get to meet my father, after my mother’s death, but he had nothing further to say, beyond what I had been told; so I have no idea how much of that was true. At my conception, she would have been 31 and he not yet 18, for as soon as he reached that age he enlisted in the Australian army. Subsequently he became a roofing contractor. I mention this to neutralize the impression of being descended from privileged English gentry.

About war, I have no comment to offer. As for religion, I’ve always had a sense of something spiritual, which was never entirely absent from religion, half-smothered as it invariably was by other agendas. The sonorous rhetoric of Cranmer’s Prayer Book and of King James’ Bible cast ritual spells when read or sung aloud, as in Choral Evensong, reaching the soul like the Cantatas of Bach. But I felt impelled to ignore the doctrines they conveyed, to seek elsewhere for those in a lifelong quest which finally concluded that “no doctrine at all” was best. And now? I find it good to be an observer with no fixed plans, no urgency to arrive anywhere.

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For brief notes on how to wage war in the trenches, see my great-uncle’s training diary. Llewelyn Sanger Davies in 1914 interrupted his studies at Cambridge, eager to join up as a subaltern. Like his sister Olwen (they seem to have been close) he demonstrates skill at sketching and writing. She would have acquired the diary after his death. Llewelyn was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, July 1st 1916. It will be some time before her website publishes that page of her Scrapbook, wherein she notes “6 months later his identity disc was returned and nothing else.” He is pictured in the left-hand inset on the family photo above.

“They hold life cheap”

Winston Churchill in Bangalore, 1897

The subtitle of Karen Armstrong’s latest book Fields of Blood is “Religion and the History of Violence”. At the end of my last I said she was arguing the wrong case, and promised to write a follow-up post nominating the right case. This is the best I can do. As to whether religion is involved, directly or otherwise, dear reader, you be the judge, for it’s not part of my case, nor is violence in general: only deliberate killing, as in war or terrorist acts. And to narrow it down further, we’ll just look at human attitudes towards such deliberate killing.

Some weeks ago, discussing the ghastly bombardments on Gaza over breakfast, I exclaimed that “they hold life cheap!”—“they” referring to both sides. Israel was using excessive force to defend itself against attack by Hamas. Hamas was continuing its own ineffectual rocket attacks on Israel, knowingly and culpably triggering further slaughter against its own people, the very ones it should have striven to protect. Who was left to hold civilian lives dear? They were treated as expendable pawns for the West to agonize over. As in Syria, Iraq, etc. For here in the West we hold life dear, so dear that you wonder if we are going way beyond reason, eliminating ever more causes of death, as if physical immortality is to be the atheists’ rival version of Heaven. (Or Hell.)

I have a memory at nine years old of gazing at a big wall-map of the world whilst the schoolmaster gave his opinion that the peoples “out East” didn’t value human life as we do. The boundary seemed to begin just beyond the countries of Europe. I’ve been wondering whether this opinion still has its followers today, so I asked Google, and found nothing of significance. But my attention was drawn to a book by the young Winston Churchill about his sojourn in 1897 among the Pathan tribes (now called Pashtuns) in the North-West Frontier of India. He says “This state of continual tumult has produced a habit of mind which recks little of injuries, holds life cheap and embarks on war with careless levity . . .” There are many who think his perceptive account, and his contemptuous references to the Talib-ul-ilms (Taliban), have relevance to Afghanistan today. His writing was not restrained by today’s multi-cultural caution. When Stanley McChrystal was in command of Coalition Forces in Afghanistan, he read the book eagerly, as this news story relates. I’ve published an extract, here. After much reflection, I concluded that his fascinating description threw the scent of red herring across my quest, and could have helped derail General McChrystal’s own assessment, because he later got sacked from his role as Commander. And Churchill, for all his achievements as a young and old man, is hardly our guide, hardly the one to accuse others of holding life cheap, when he begged to be sent to the dangerous places, deliberately sought out battle; and in later life calmly ran the British side of World War II. What you do see in his book is the clash of culture, where neither Pathan warlord nor Imperial peacemaker could understand the other. When we can’t understand others, it is hard to see them as fully human in our terms. We shall come back to this point.

It was different in the First World War, both sides were akin, playing to similar rules, even their sovereign leaders having close family ties. And we cannot set war at a distance from ourselves, as if it has no place in our world. War is an inseparable part of history, with no sign of being eliminated. Territorial war is as old as owned territory. Armstrong in her latest book and Harari in his latest book Sapiens both make much of the Agrarian Revolution and its effect on human behaviour. In brief, it goes like this. Nomad hunter-gatherers mind their own business and live peaceably in their tribes, pretty much. When homo sapiens started to grow wheat and other crops, along came kings who did no work but ran protection rackets, taxing the peasants and keeping armies to control them and defend the rich farmland against other kings. When one war ended, another would invariably start. The strong conquered the weak, empires rose and fell. Over time, protocols would emerge for the conduct of war, to minimize its devastation. They would generally hold good for wars within a given civilization, buttressed by a shared concept of the sacred. So for example we have the mediaeval rules of chivalry, and the notion of sanctuary as protection for fugitives.

When we look at the traditions of the soldier, we see in every culture a shared sense of honour, a mutual trust and support, for the members of an army hold their lives in one others’ hands. It is a basic motivating principle that they hold dear their own lives, and those of their own people. Against this, they are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. Each knowingly risks his own life to protect a greater cause, such as the defence of his people’s land by a foreign aggressor. But in all civilizations based on the European model, there is only one correct response to overwhelming force: surrender. The slaughter in World War I trenches simply continued until one side ran out of bullets, or men, or something else, and had to submit to the other’s humiliating terms. By contrast, in World War II, Allied troops on the ground surrendered en masse to the Japanese, who happened to have a different sense of honour, despised their surrender-monkey prisoners, and intended to go on fighting till they ran out of kamikaze pilots and till no jungle-soldier was still standing. The atomic bombs forced a change of mind, but even after the formal Japanese surrender a few isolated soldiers continued hostilities till nearly 30 years later.

The Japanese soldier, you might say, held the Samurai code of honour above all else, and found it impossible to respect an enemy who behaved differently. In the West, our inherited European values make it possible to understand the Samurai code only by analogy with the mediaeval code of chivalry. That code wouldn’t stand scrutiny by today’s liberal eyes, but we judge these things by sentiment and ignorance, rather than knowledge of the small print. And it’s worth considering how dear the West holds civilian lives. Armstrong, as quoted near the end of my last piece, reports that when innocent lives were lost in a drone attack on Waziristan, US and Pakistani governments showed no sign that they cared. It’s a region not far from the one written up by Churchill. One wonders if the tribesmen still hold life cheap, taking potshots at one another for sport?

As it happens, in 1974 I did meet a couple of brothers whose father was a tribal chieftain from a part of Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. They’d been sent to school in England, and told me how feuds were carried out almost as a way of life, with old rifles mainly, and of course there were often casualties, but that was part of the game. At least the shooting took place in the mountains, where women and children wouldn’t have been hurt. They were only left widowed and fatherless. One remembers the trenches of WWI, where parents and siblings were left bereft, and a whole generation of women remained life-long spinsters, for lack of eligible men. I suppose if it’s a traditional way of life, it’s always a possibility, and a subject of sad folk-songs: the fisherman who was lost in a storm, the bridegroom seized by the press-gang into the navy.

So far we have looked at warfare between militias, where civilians may get caught in the crossfire. Armstrong wants to defend asymmetric warfare, in which a suicide bomber, say, takes arms on behalf of the poor and deprived against the overpowering force of the oppressor. Before I knew better, I too had a certain sympathy for the plight of the weaker side, and the methods used. With no government, no army present to represent and protect them, they were lone heroes, ready like the Tommy in World War I to sacrifice their lives for their people. Horrible but perhaps by some reckoning the lesser evil. Anyhow, that is what Armstrong thinks. Unfortunately for this case, there is a darker side. The sacrifice is done by proxy, instigated by shadowy figures with bunkers to stay safe in, whose motives are political rather than the protection of their own people. The suicide bombers, or ISIL fighters, are trained to think that what they are doing is for some higher cause than mere human life.

But then when I say this I imagine how many soldiers have been trained in similar ways to fight and die in bloody wars for their generals and their political masters. I think not just of shadowy figures who train al Qaeda, ISIL and suicide bombers, but dictators like Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad. Cruel as their reigns have been, might it be the case that their people would have flourished more had they not been overthrown? They would have had more electricity, the streets would have been safer. Are there territories unready for democracy? Is it only cruel autocracy that can keep them from killing one another? Would it have been better to keep Yugoslavia together, under Communist rule? Would it have been better if Western Powers had never created protectorates in the Middle East & North Africa? Where do you stop asking questions? You have to stick to what you know.

I’ve been reading about the First World War, via the scrapbook of my great-aunt Olwen Sanger-Davies. I knew her as Auntie Ollie. My sister and I are publishing it online, you can see the work in progress here. It’s very striking how eager everyone seems to have been, to support the war effort. There was no sense of war as a terrible thing. On the contrary, it gave everyone an opportunity to perform selfless action, to do the honourable thing, to work together for a higher cause. The ISIL fighters who have left this town to go and fight doubtless feel the same way. I see from the local paper that one was a security guard at a local supermarket. Another attended the grammar school where my younger son was educated. I see groups of young Muslims chattering excitedly in the old school playground at the end of our street, and wonder if they are teasing one another as to who would have the guts to go and fight. Meanwhile Philip Hammond, our Foreign Secretary, affirms that the Government might try jihadists for treason. About time. This country shelters you, makes sure you don’t starve, you owe it your loyalty.

So now I’ve forgotten what case I want to argue, if any. Perhaps I want to agree with Armstrong in all sorts of ways, except two. First, in her chosen field of religion, she appears to lack a critical sense. In her book Muhammad: a Biography of the Prophet, for example, she depends on the available material, disregarding the fact that it’s entirely hagiography, that is to say written by those who believe in their prophet’s heaven-sent destiny, believe in the whole paraphernalia of Islam. So I instantly felt that to Islam, Karen Armstrong is a “useful idiot”, to use Lenin’s alleged epithet: “a term for people perceived as propagandists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of, and who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause.” I was so disgusted I took it back to the library, same day. It seemed to taint the space it took up in my house. The only time I previously felt that way about a book was after buying Ayn Rand’s book We the Living, second-hand via Amazon. Lacking the means to burn it and thus prevent it falling into other hands, I dumped it in the land-fill bin as opposed to the recycling one.

I don’t want to argue any case. What it comes down to is this, that religion in general and of itself is not to be blamed for wars, or anything else. But on the other hand, religion is not to occupy any privileged place. Fear of terrorism and fear of the penalty for apostasy (look it up in Wikipedia) has stifled criticism of Islam, a religion or movement, whatever you want to call it, that’s desperately in need of criticism, from without but especially from within.

And this brings me to Martin Amis, whom I’ve elsewhere called my alter ego, a representation of my ideal self as it might have been had I not lived the life I’ve actually lived, if that makes sense. He has famously spoken out on Islam, claiming back the freedom of speech that most of us have cravenly relinquished. Here is an example googled at random. He’s just brought out a new novel, The Zone of Interest, an intimate tale of Auschwitz, entirely from the viewpoint of three narrators: the Commandant; a nephew of Martin Bormann who’s got an easy job liaising with the pharmaceutical company I G Farben, which uses prisoners to test its products; and a Jew who’s in charge of the gas-chambers—selection for, and removal of corpses from. As the blurb says, “a brilliant, celestially upsetting novel inspired by no less than a profound moral curiosity about human beings.” And in his novel he shows the limit of human understanding, quoting Primo Levi’s remark:

Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify . . .

Enough. If I had made a case, I would rest it here; but I manifestly haven’t. I prefer to maintain a “profound moral curiosity about human beings”.

Fields of Blood

Imagine an impassioned debate at the Oxford Union, “That this House finds Religion to Have Been the Cause of All the Major Wars in History.” Arguing for the motion, suggests Karen Armstrong, would be “American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics.” Arguing against, at unnecessary length, is Karen Armstrong’s new book, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence. Unnecessary length because she instantly refutes the proposition by mentioning the two world wars. Nevertheless, against the background of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), declared three months ago, it’s timely enough to have attracted much media attention. Not that I suspect her of jumping on a bandwagon. She doesn’t mention Islamic State at all. She’s merely following up a polemical agenda she set up years ago & expounded in earlier books. I’ve mentioned her works in a couple of earlier posts but a comment made here is especially relevant:

The one aspect of religion she does fasten on, and is intent to bring to the attention of all the world, is that of compassion, as expressed in words attributed to Rabbi Hillel and echoed in words attributed to Jesus:

“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.”

She takes it as a given that any criticism of Islam would be hateful to Muslims. She therefore refrains, and exonerates them at every turn, not excluding suicide bombers, and offers sympathetic explanations for the thinking of Al-Qaeda. It’s simply asymmetric warfare, she says, directed against the “systemic violence” of governments. On the other hand, criticism of Christianity, atheism, secularism, colonialism, capitalism & US foreign policy is not literally hateful to its respective apologists, so they’re all fair targets, and as a bonus, won’t issue a personal fatwa against the critic. But then, if you exonerate one, you must lay the burden on another. For the avoidance of any doubt, she comes straight to the point in the opening paragraph of her Introduction. She retells the ritual of the Scapegoat. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest used to transfer all the sins of the people on to the head of a goat, “and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere”. The point of her parable is that it’s convenient for most of the world to blame Islam.

Familiar with her sympathies from other books, lectures on YouTube and interviews, I was immediately keen to find out who would be her scapegoat for the “fields of blood”; who would be found responsible for the extreme violence we’re currently hearing about. I have no intention to belittle the complexity and depth of her analysis. She’s written a work of immense scholarship and impassioned personal activism. One can only be respectful and even awed by her painstaking effort. But this is not meant to be a review of her book, only a simplistic summary of her intent; so I’ll jump to the end of her Afterword to see who or what actually is her chosen scapegoat. Her verdict is nuanced, so I’ll avoid quoting out of context and give the last paragraph in full:

When we confront the violence of our time, it is natural to harden our hearts to the global pain and deprivation that make us feel uncomfortable, depressed and frustrated. But we must find ways of contemplating these distressing facts of modern life or we will lose the best part of our humanity. Somehow we have to find ways of doing what religion—at its best—has done for centuries: build a sense of global community, cultivate a sense of reverence and ‘equanimity’ for all, and take responsibility for the suffering we see in the world. No state in history, however great its achievements, has not incurred the taint of the warrior. We are all, religious and secularist alike, responsible for the current state of the world. It is a stain on the international community that Mamana Bibi's son can say: ‘Quite simply, nobody seems to care.’ The scapegoat ritual was an attempt to sever the community’s relationship with its misdeeds; it cannot be a solution for us today.

The mention of Mamana Bibi relates to an incident she describes at the end of her previous chapter, “Global Jihad”:

On 24th October 2012, Mamana Bibi, a sixty-eight-year old woman picking vegetables in her family’s large open land in Waziristan, Pakistan, was killed by a United States drone aircraft.
. . .
‘Bombs create only hatred in the hearts of people. And that hatred and anger breed more terrorism,’said Bibi’s son. ‘No one ever asked us who was killed or injured that day. Not the United States or my own government. No one has come to investigate nor has anyone been held accountable. Quite simply, nobody seems to care.’

The point is well made, but I think that her book argues the wrong case. We are no wiser from finding we must not blame religion; especially as she needs more than one chapter to argue the proper meaning of the word, and why we have misunderstood it for centuries. She being the scholar and we the ignorant, she naturally wins her case. ’Tis pity it’s the wrong case.

What then is the right case? What book needs to be written, to explain how we in 2014 ended up in the current mess? I’ll try to summarize what I think is “the right case” in my next, to follow shortly. With particular attention to that little phrase she throws in: “the taint of the warrior”.

A ramble through landscape & hypermedia

I decided to go for my usual loaf of bread by a circuitous route, over the Pastures; or rather, my feet took me that way while I readied myself to share what I had to say to Olympus, my companion of the road, expert at listening because he’s a state-of-the-art voice recorder. You’ll see from the panorama above that nothing remains of those hillside meadows where cows once grazed—only the name. I didn’t know exactly what route I would take and had no idea what I’d say ’til the moment. As paths branched, some promising topics and routes were left unexplored for the sake of others, which may be taken up another time; bear with me. This, more or less, is what Olympus heard:

“Life is a losing battle, of course. We may be ‘cut off in our prime’, which seems like a cruel stroke of Fate. But what are the alternatives? We may reach our prime; but then it’s all downhill after. Worst of all, we may die young or old without ever passing through any phase we could possibly call ‘prime’.

“Most people I know would call this morbid talk. So this is a good reason to leave them alone and tell the entire world, for somewhere this system of dots and dashes (technically, 0s and 1s) transmitted via the World-Wide Web may reach the Ideal Reader, making the whole intricate process worth while.

“So here we are, and here it is. I find myself liking it more—my life here, on this spot of Earth, as I get fond of the familiar, discovering some new joy in it—even these drab & decaying footpaths which snake in zigzag style between the houses on this hillside whose backyards are often dumps for unwanted items. It’s not a pretty environment by typical aesthetic standards, and yet I find in them some latent beauty or actual beauty to celebrate, even if those who live here don’t, because you’d see their effort and pride reflected otherwise. Perhaps life has not shown much of its celebratory side to them. It’s presumptuous of me to say it, but I’ve become a new person, and believe I can see certain things clearly; as if I have become whole: a properly-functioning microcosm properly integrated into the ambient macrocosm. It’s been a long time coming. It’s true that one should not make judgements: for all I know, the people who inhabit the properties adjacent to the zig-zagging footpaths which join these parallel roads may celebrate and give thanks everyday of their lives for every blessing dropped into their laps, including living here. It may just be that due to earlier circumstances they merely lack the energy, money and vision to clean the place up and make it look as if they are proud to be here—to beautify this densely populated half-urbanized wilderness. In any case I have seen worse. And perhaps the architects didn’t have the specifications, budgets or vision to make these houses look more glorious. Yet still they do look glorious in the sunshine, and indeed, if you are in the mood to see it, in any kind of weather at all.

“And as I talk, I’m going up and up steep steps, after spending days ‘feeling my age’. Bad days, good days. The point is, for everyone, to make the most of what they have. And that should be one of the aims of any teacher, of children especially: an uplifting, fulfilling, egoless vocation, because you are thinking of others’ benefit, not your own. In short a helper. I’ve been inspired by a blogger called The Hickory Wind who has just started “A New Alcuin” which is to discuss his ideas about “finding better ways to prepare children for the world”. It hasn’t got far as yet, but I would summarize his ideas to date like this: compulsory education makes the teacher a custodian, which detracts from his proper role as a helper.”

[I think I’ve been also inspired by the scrapbook of my great-aunt Ollie, who at the age of 23 was so excited by the start of a war against Germany in 1914, for it gave her something to do in her community, and reasons to fuss over her two brothers who enlisted, and suffered their several fates in due course. To the end of her life she dedicated herself to good causes, or what she saw as such.]

“Just as I’m thinking such thoughts, I take a short-cut through the grounds of Mount Zion Baptist Church, and see a list of services, including Tuesday 6 – 7.30: Lamplighter Bible Club (children aged 4 – 7). Lamplighter: an old-fashioned word, describing the humble role of one who at twilight went along the streets lighting gaslamps. I first thought they called it the Lamplighter Club because it took place in the early evening, but that’s unlikely. They probably see it as passing on a flame of salvation to a new generation.”


And when I thought of the old lamplighters I thought of a fine essay by Robert Louis Stevenson in which he regrets the coming of electricity, which will eliminate their picturesque occupation. ‘A sedate electrician somewhere in a back office touches a spring—and behold ! from one end to another of the city, from the Alexandra to the Crystal Palace, there is light ! Fiat Lux, says the sedate electrician.’ I want to quote the whole thing, but you can read it for yourself, I’ve opened the book at the right pages.

And when I think of that essay, it reminds me of when I bought the book, in 1993, and wanted to write about it with quotes and old photos just as I do now. My idea was to include it in a multimedia CD-ROM. In the early Nineties, PC magazines were offering them as freebies and you could buy faancy ones too on many topics. Microsoft had a freebie mini-encyclopedia called “Encarta”, in which you could click a button and get any flag of the world and the national anthem which went with it. I especially liked the section on birds: the text, the picture, and the song. There was talk that CD-ROMs would make Encyclopaedia Brittanica obsolete. This of course was before the World-Wide Web swamped the field. I had never heard of the Web but a work colleague told me about it. He was Nigel Woodhead, a young man who had written a book called Hypertext & Hypermedia whilst still at Oxford. In conversation with him I conceived the idea of a mini-Web-on-a-CD as a new art form. Nigel himself was researching for a CD-ROM on Jack the Ripper, or Victorian London—the concepts were intertwined. It was a miniature museum, or cabinet of curiosities, that you could explore for yourself on your home computer. My own idea was encapsulated in its title, ‘Windows on Other Worlds’. I was rather hoping that Microsoft would complain at my use of their ™-protected word and give me extra publicity; whilst any British judge, I assumed, would laugh them out of court.

Anyhow, by ‘other worlds’ I meant ‘other times, other cultures’ and I was going to quote from Stevenson and various other authors who took my fancy, based on what I had bought in second-hand bookshops lately. My idea remained latent, as furniture to the imagination. [Nigel on the other hand has developed his interests commercially, as you can see from this site.] But I have my blog. And I see that not only can everything be connected through hyperlinking (even in the material world through smartphones & QRcode) but everything has always been connected to everything else, in this cornucopia of wonders that we call the world. At any rate I offer this view by way of excuse for my rambling thoughts and the way they come full circle.

For something strange happened when I was trying to find Stevenson’s “Lamplighter” essay. I was sure it was in the volume of Virginibus Puerisque, that I’d bought in Folkestone. I went through the Table of Contents and it wasn’t listed. But under a section called “Other essays”, there was one “On the enjoyment of unpleasant places”. I made a note to check it. Finally I found the essay I was originally looking for: “A Plea for Gas Lamps”.

So then I went to the “unpleasant places” essay, just on the off-chance that Stevenson had an idea similar to mine, whilst I was zig-zagging between those drab and littered backyards. He did! and his essay is more brilliant than anything I could write, and persuades me that his thoughts are also mine. I must try and choose a brief quote:

With all this in mind, I have often been tempted to put forth the paradox that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours agreeably. For if we only stay long enough, we become at home in the neighbourhood. Reminiscencesspring up, like flowers, about uninteresting corners.

My imagined hypermedia CD-ROM, which would have space for so many snippets of literature, snippets of sound, carefully-chosen images—my “Windows on Other Worlds” has expanded as the World-Wide Web until it has become “a little larger than the entire universe”*. So with no trouble at all I can set before you entire essays. Let Stevenson bear witness from beyond the grave to something I was trying to put to words in The Pastures. Here is On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places. And here for good measure is his full essay on lamplighters: A Plea for Gas-lamps; which is really a plea for the past to be remembered for its beauties as much as the present.

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*A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: title of an anthology of poems by Fernando Pessoa.

At the Blue Note Café

I was led back in memory to the Blue Note Café by a series of events: a surprise gift through the post (Loreena McKennitt discs); Tom’s essay on Poverty of Spirit, posted on the same day as mine on Attitude; and then Ellie’s comment on my last:

The magical thing is that we recover scattered pieces long forgotten and reassemble them into a new image to present to the world. It delights me to have an idea pop up, remember an image, locate a quote, string together some words, and ask Blogger to make it into a post. I think of this as my ‘work’. Housework, yardwork, and such are drudgery in comparison.

The moment I read her words, the same thought took root in me, as if it had always been there. And the idea which popped up was one briefly mentioned in my last: an encounter in Glastonbury. It was in the mid-Nineties. We went there on a last-minute whim, it might have been March or October. The idea was mine for I’d started to read John Cowper Powys’ novel, A Glastonbury Romance. My growing interest in this author eventually led me to a series of essays published in a literary magazine, La Lettre Powysienne, encouraged by its editor Mme Peltier. In retrospect they seem laborious practice-pieces, compared with the freedom & spontaneity of blogging. (Sorry, Jacqueline, I know you didn’t approve of blogging, and found the very word ugly.)

We left home on Friday afternoon for the three-hour drive. I imagined Glastonbury as a numinous place, replete with ancient legends; but hardly expected to see ghosts on the road, a mile or two before we got there. It was dusk, on a winding country road hemmed in by darkening hedgerows on either side. Round a bend, I suddenly saw two mediaeval peasants trudging along at the roadside, bearing staffs and bundles and what looked like bamboo hats on their backs. It may not have occurred to me at the time, but they looked like something from Basho, that celebrated seventeenth-century Zen pilgrim who remains the patron saint of this blog. I yelled “Did you see THAT!” but my passengers were dozing, the children having tired of chanting “Are we nearly there yet?” And that was it. An unsolved mystery, ghosts or merely a trick of the light, the sort of fleeting impression you might forget altogether for want of anywhere to file it in your head.

The next day, we wandered round the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey. The grounds have become an open-air museum. After falling victim to Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in fifteen-hundred-and-something when he seized every valuable Catholic property, it still remains in the hands of the Church of England which he founded. I imagine the site was never deconsecrated; for while the Anglicans aren’t into saints and superstitions to the extent of the Catholics, it’s still a holy place by any measure. It has a numinous presence, which I certainly felt. They say St Joseph of Arimathea came here, after the Crucifixion, not to mention the Lord himself, risen or otherwise. And if those feet in ancient time did walk upon England’s mountains green, and were the Holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures truly seen, then this would be the spot. Not to mention the tomb of King Arthur, as alleged. And it was a holy place before the Christian missionaries came.

It would be very easy to give you the proper facts with the aid of 5 minutes’ Wikipedia research, but I don’t want to overpaint the tattered remnants of personal memory with stuff that anyone can look up. I shall tell my own truth, unembellished, hoping it will stand up reasonably well. The Abbey attracts tourists of every kind, including shrine-worshippers. Mostly the ruins are unroofed, but there was still the remains of a crypt, you could walk down some grassy steps and get to it: stone-vaulted at one end with a proper Christian altar freshly maintained and chairs facing it, making a little chapel, protected from rain and gales but but open to the fresh breeze, children’s cries and birdsong; for the rear part was open to the sky.

And here it was that I found those pilgrims, those mediaeval peasants I thought I’d seen on the road. They had laid down their bamboo staffs and burdens in front of the altar and stood in their antique clothes and sandalled feet, gently chanting with low obeisances and other gestures. At such close quarters I could have no doubt they were real, but you could only see them from a rear view.

Later the same day we wandered around the shops. In one of the boutiques surrounding a small courtyard off the main street, I bought a Loreena McKennitt cassette. I’d never heard of her but The Lady of Shalott was playing as we entered, and I had to have it: an album called “The Visit”. Then we went into the Blue Note Café. I have a vague idea that it’s famous. They’ve redone the frontage since, but I found an older photo, more like it was then. I imagine it’s well-known to musicians and fans who descend on the town for the annual Festival. That day, as we took our snacks and drinks, it was busy but not crowded. Once again I saw the pilgrim pair, listened to their conversation with other customers, and finally met them.

At this point my tale is a little blurred because the tatters of memory are pieced from several sources: what I learned at first hand in the café, what I subsequently heard in a radio programme, and what I read on a website. Today in October 2014 all my ingenious keyword combinations fail to unlock the secrets of that pair, and their pilgrimage. Uncharacteristically, Google has gone tight-lipped like a Sphinx. This eyewitness account may be all you’ll ever get; all else erased by the restless sands of time. It falls on me therefore, to give you an unvarnished narrative like a sworn witness in court.

The man was English, he might have been in his late thirties. He had been a soldier, whether in the regular army or a mercenary I don’t recall, nor in which theatre of war he had received his serious injuries, nor even if they were sustained in combat, nor even if they were injuries. Perhaps he had had some life-threatening infection. I only know that soldiering was his thing: to be brave, swashbuckling, aggressive and full of himself. But after he was struck down he was weak as a baby and was tended by a nurse, who later became his companion, wife and fellow-pilgrim. If she was not German, she was Scandinavian; and perhaps it was she who introduced him to a gentler way of living. She was more educated than he. If they should ever read this blog and correct me, it would be wonderful, but I don’t even have a name, despite searching my computer files and old notebooks.

His recovery to health took at least two years. Then at some point he became a Buddhist, or perhaps he went to Japan first, I don’t know. Perhaps his nurse became a Buddhist before he did. At any event, in Japan he studied Buddhism under a master, the leader of a particular sect not then known in Britain. The Master saw possibilities in him, as a man by force of circumstance starting afresh, his raw energies restored but his future empty as he had renounced his former military career. I imagine his instinct to conquer was still intact, but he wished to turn his sword into some kind of ploughshare. When I say “imagine”, I mean I’m trying to reconstruct the impressions left behind by faded memories.

The crux was that the Master offered him a deal. He was to take monastic views, suitably tailored to his marital state; to wear the old Japanese clothes; to adopt a vegetarian diet; to carry no money, but depend on the kindness of strangers encountered; to obey the Master and keep him informed via regular correspondence; to worship at the shrines of 63 holy places in the United Kingdom. (Strange that I remember that number, perhaps falsely.)

On completion of this pilgrimage, the Master would invest him as Abbot with a mission to establish and lead the sect in these islands.

That’s all I can tell you, just a few rags and tatters. For the rest, we can only look within ourselves and surmise. It’s like one of those Werner Herzog movies based on real life and the director’s own dramatic instincts. By cinematic wizardry he creates bizarre near-mad characters whose inner logic you never quite grasp consciously; but you find yourself able to walk sympathetically in their shoes.

To me this tale is a microcosm of religious conversion: realizing one’s profound dissatisfaction with life so far, not through any special insight but only when cornered by force of circumstance. Then there is the acting-out of self-abasement rituals which nevertheless confer their own special distinction upon the convert. There is the sacrifice of ordinary comforts and safety for the lure of future glory. The path is underpinned by humble obedience and self-denial, tainted with calculated ambition; penance coupled with adventure. And that’s just in the heart of the disciple. What was the Master’s intent? To bring them to a spiritual realization? To allow life's harshness to knock off their corners? To use as foot-soldiers in some imperial venture? I don’t think one can know, even when in possession of all the facts.

But as I write this, I see that the colourful pilgrimage I witnessed in Glastonbury was a comic-book representation of my own drab and long-drawn-out spiritual journey as it stood then, one that I don’t know how to tell, have no desire to tell. I recall to my shame introducing myself to this ex-soldier-turned-Buddhist, there in the café, telling him I too had a Master, I too had a path. It wasn’t a good move, because it introduced male rivalry and the hidden doubts we each must have had about the exotic journey we’d embarked upon; the kind of doubts which make you defensive, ready to fight some metaphorical duel.

I’d love to find out what happened to him, meet him again, and definitely not pick up from where we left off.

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PS The post on August 25th formerly called “Out for a loaf” and then withdrawn, is now restored with a new title, “Not for bread alone”.