Here I am

It took a while to find a spot on a nearby hill
for a photo showing where I live and what my
house looks like. Above the broad roof at the bottom,
you’ll see the backs of some houses
painted white, joined together in a row.
Mine is similar, a few doors down in the same row.
Click to view the entire photo.

On Sunday morning I walked to a local supermarket for fresh milk and bread. I felt a tangible perfection in the air. I want to analyse that phrase, extract meaning from it. There was something, it was tangible, I don’t suppose it was literally something in the air; but it made me feel I could ask for nothing more. It came and touched every sense, not just the five we routinely use to know our surroundings, but (I speculate) other senses too, not always present to awareness. One could talk of “the heart”, or “subtle vibrations”, but that doesn’t add any meaning. Each of us, I think, is prepared to take some things on faith, when they come from someone we already trust, or with whom we feel an empathetic connection. It’s the next best thing to feeling it yourself. But I want to look into this thing, see if there is anything universal in it.

How shall I describe the footpaths and streets of my route to the supermarket and the half-mile radius of my home neighbourhood? It has special significance, for until the last ten years, I never really lived somewhere before. I was a sojourner. Going through two of my mother’s address books, I count 14 addresses across a 20-year period. And then I end up here, a town once famous for its furniture factories, the nearest of which still stands across the road from my house. It’s a district with its own character, the cheapest part of town.

How did I, how do I, feel perfection’s touch upon my body and soul? It isn’t just in the blue sky dotted with fleecy clouds, nor in the delicate warmth imparted from the sun when it deigns to appear and dispel the chill, brightening the façades of dwellings & workshops, giving promise of cheer to all us locals scurrying hither and thither or stopping to chat. Is it something to do with awareness freely given to the scene, the sense that this, for all it lacks of beauty, is home, and good enough? I embrace it—this moment, this place—with no regret and no reservations. I am stripped of superfluous agenda. In the words of the hymnist,

“The daily round, the common task
Will furnish all we need to ask”

Once again, these are words that can only have meaning if they resonate in the soul. Everything I need is in the ordinary: to be here, now and my own true self. This neighbourhood, which in ways is so alien, could make me feel exiled, but from what? There is only one kind of perfection. It’s perceived through complete acceptance that I am exactly where I need to be, where nothing needs to be changed. In the other case, when I see that I am not where I need to be, I need to take action, to restore that perfect state. My action may be mistaken, and then I will have to try again. Much of my life has been an exploration of failure. Meanwhile the perspective changes all the time, as it does when you go out walking and gaze at the landscape. I’ve been doing this to try and find an illustration of this neighbourhood, to display beside the text.

What is this being called me? At the moment of my conception, my DNA took form, as a unique path through the history of the universe. So I was not born as a tabula rasa or blank. I was a potential person, to be further shaped and brought to maturity by circumstance, each moment succeeding the one before and influenced by everything encountered within and without. The process goes on its hazardous way till journey’s end, when the visible components disintegrate naturally. Nature reclaims them, for we were designed biodegradable. As to the invisible components—awareness, soul, memory, love, desire—I have no idea whether or not they are separable from body, in life or in death. I suppose them to be recycled in the same manner, fecundating the Earth through the generations.

This mysterious thing called “ego” is the anomaly. Its sole function is to keep the Self distinct from Other; to generate the illusion that I am separate from the sky, the landscape, my neighbours, other creatures. This illusion is mostly necessary, and is one of the important differences between us and the other creatures, animate or not. The newborn doesn’t have it, can’t tell its own toes from its mother’s fingers. Ego grows as a vital part of healthy child development; while as George Bataille points out, “every [other] animal is in the world like water in water.”

I still ask, what is this quality which for want of a better word I call “perfection”? What is its relation to beauty? To ego? Stendhal, in his book De L’Amour, says “La beauté n’est que la promesse du bonheur”—beauty is nothing other than the promise of happiness. But it’s more than this too: a symbol of perfection.

Home is a word like beauty, a symbol or promise of good fortune, well-being and bonheur. Home exists in the heart more than the bricks and mortar. Stendhal has something to say about this too, not about home per se but about love. See this article for his concept of crystallization, “in which unattractive characteristics of a new love are transformed into perceptual diamonds of shimmering beauty”.

Why does beauty attract us? What does it mean to us? It acts as a symbol of perfection, where “perfection” doesn’t mean a sterile flawlessness but a feeling of the heart, that the present moment is just right. It doesn’t matter that when Stendhal writes about love in De L’Amour, he is thinking of his love for women, or one in particular. Wikipedia calls him “an inveterate womaniser who was obsessed with his sexual conquests” and questions whether he actually died of syphilis or the medications then available to treat it. That was part of his unique path, & doesn’t detract from his renown as a philosopher of love.

To ask myself these questions, and try and answer them, needs language. In fact, written language. The process of reflection requires writing, reading and re-reading, consistently over a period of time. To be consistent requires a discipline, which in turn requires an incentive. This may be the best reason I’ve yet offered for this blog, which has just entered its tenth year of exploring questions and answers together with readers, for fun and sometimes edification.

Ten years ago I moved here, to this valley. In June 2005 I was liberated in a single moment: not from ego, it doesn’t work like that. There was an instantaneous realization, in dialogue with a doctor called Alastair, that for most of my life, especially the previous thirty years, I had not been where I needed to be. It was a satori moment. The only thing I could grasp straight away was that my chronic illness had left me. I knew it directly, before the evidence of the next hours, days, weeks and years confirmed it. The illness was merely a symptom of something deeper, which I’ve been unravelling ever since, getting to understand the gift, which is, I’m certain, one available universally, here among these old factories too, in this place of few pretensions, where the very air teaches me to be real. I was liberated from fear. I found myself ready to relinquish all kinds of belief, whilst retaining a basic framework of common sense and rediscovering the best of my upbringing. Thus unfettered, I’ve been able to follow an inner guidance which Alastair called body-wisdom. I’m grateful to him, to this neighbourhood but mostly to the good fortune of finally meeting my life-companion, and sharing our lives together.

And now, when I walk out on a Sunday morning, or on any occasion where I feel this tangible perfection in the air, I know I’m closer to the original homo sapiens who lived as a hunter-gatherer in that first Eden, before Gilgamesh, before Genesis, before the Fall, which some think reflects the beginning of agriculture in Mesopotamia; before the Greeks, before philosophy.

Here, now, me, where “me” signifies knowing oneself, living inside oneself, in one’s body and one’s true nature; this is where I can dwell, embracing this world and embraced by it; being exactly where I belong.

And so, René Descartes, old buddy, you can keep your “Cogito ergo sum”. All I have to say is what a newborn would say, if it could speak: “Here I am!”

Greater than the sum of the parts

In truth, I write these pieces in order to discover what currents are stirring within me, by bringing them to conscious thought. I also do it to practise a craft. Any craft would do, but this one is the most convenient, and the one I know best. I have to go beyond the ephemeral notions flitting through my head like bats through a belfry, in and out, wheeling in the twilight sky. To change the simile abruptly, I’ve never panned for gold but my process resembles it. You stand in a swift mountain stream from which you have scooped watery mud in a wok-shaped pan. You swirl it around and pour off all but the heaviest sediment. If you’re lucky there’ll be some glittery grains. Then it gets different.. Gold is a universal medium of exchange, but these jottings have no quantifiable value. They’ll mean little, except to a few souls scattered across the globe. So let it be, for it leaves me less burdened, freer to prospect alone in mountains unmarked and unclaimed.

Now I pause, and yearn to be part of a team, notwithstanding a lifelong tendency to work the richest seams alone. I never chose a solitary path and I’m sure I wasn’t predestined for it either. Nature and nurture did not conspire, nor was it demonstrably written in the stars, despite the old horoscope I published the other day, which thrice mentioned “service to the community”. Circumstance and habit are enough to shape us, like the slant of a tree on a windy cliff, adapting as best it may.

In a given moment I can awake as if from slumber and declare that nothing need continue just because it was so before. Evolution works this way too, when it throws out mutations as an insurance against some unknown future barrenness, in case they might find a use one day. We are children of evolution, that inexplicable invention of nobody, which spawns albinos every so often, undaunted by the disadvantage they suffer in the wild. In some prehistoric climate change, the albinos, once disadvantaged and outcast, came into their own—as polar bear and arctic fox. All life hangs by twists of fate. Like Walt Whitman “I contain multitudes”—and so do you. When circumstances change we, find something within us. Parts which were once once raked by cliff-top gales can now flourish in the lee of kind shelter.

When you are awakened to something, you start seeing it everywhere. A word I keep noticing is “indeterminacy”. Nothing is predestined, nothing is ordained. Scientific law cannot dictate what happens. Evolution, whether Darwinian or cultural, can’t be confined within the age-old assurance “It is written . . .” whether in the Holy Book, the stars, or any pronouncement that “The science is settled on this matter.” And who better to explain it but Loren Eiseley: archaeologist, writer on evolution, gentle critic of science, mystic, magician-poet? I’m reading The Night Country at present. His thoughts fertilize mine. Though he died in 1977, I find in him an ally and friend. We are engaged in a kind of colloquy, just as I am with Hannah Arendt, who died in 1975.

We are all enriched by working together. I ran or was part of project teams for most of my professional life. But that wasn’t teamwork as I envisage it now. We were riven by individual agendas, lacking common purpose & vision. Our scattered energies were forced into a semblance of harmony by the superficial bond of plan, budget and deadline. Very rarely was our work directed by a shared vision. Commuting each day by Tube to the City of London I used to scribble in a series of notebooks, trying to design a new kind of methodology for software development. My vision for a shared vision got nowhere, perhaps because it was a solitary vision, paradoxically betraying its own ideals. In consequence it never found coherent expression. Meanwhile, similar ideas such as software prototyping became popular, doubtless produced by teams fired by one another’s inspiration.

Where do we find the paradigm for this way of working? Surely in music. Why do we talk of “shared vision” and not “shared soundscape”? I bet music and dance was the first way that members of a tribe of newly-evolved homo sapiens learned to “act in concert”.

My uncertain sense of heritage has has often led me to think of Africa as my true home, beyond its being the home of our original human ancestor. Today, its music is almost my only link. Can I be truly African, when I’ve never set foot on its shores, or landed at any of its airports? Still, I can claim to have been there. In 1946 I passed through the Suez Canal, which is part of Egypt. I didn’t step off the ship, but technically I was in Africa. I remember it vividly for two incidents. People threw pennies from the deck, and I did too. Little naked boys with dark skins dived for them, stored them in their mouths and clamoured for more. Some of them looked as young as I was. I envied them. Perhaps that was when I first considered being African as a desirable identity, though my skin was white and the ship was there on a short stop in transit, without even bothering to shut down its engines. (When we crossed the Equator, some time before the Canal, the engines were switched off. That was the strangest thing of all, though we had the King Neptune ceremony and played games on deck with the crew.) The other incident was when a little boat pulled up alongside the ship, offering handbags & other items of tooled camel skin. (We bought a pouffe, minus stuffing, and I think my mother bought a bag.) They were too low to be reached from our deck, but there was a boom and winch to collect the passengers’ money and hoist up the goods in return. Those are my sole memories of Africa as a geographical location.

But “Africa” means more. It encompasses a whole continent of attributes—people, culture, politics. Its music has become part of me. Can I now be part of its music? There’s a good Japanese word karaoke, where kara means empty and oke is short for okesutora which is their transliteration of “orchestra”. Though we may associate karaoke with the public mangling of popular songs, the “empty orchestra” is also a way to produce professional music, where vocal and background are recorded at separate times or locations. And just as I may read Eiseley and Arendt, and engage with them in posthumous colloquy, I can work with African musicians and be part of something bigger. How can I enhance this art they have exported so successfully already, cross-fertilizing with other music over the centuries? I don’t really know, but what I’ve done is a labour of love with no thought for where it might reach, and how it might get there—or how much time I had to spend on it. The research has been immensely rewarding, as has been the opportunity to play the songs again and again. The result is a YouTube compilation, “An African Sampler”. I gave one reader of this blog an earlier version on CD and DVD. She likes it very much. I don’t think anyone else has heard it; so I have no idea what you will think of it.

This is the video and here are the sleeve notes, both opening in separate tabs. I can’t give a rational explanation for having taken the trouble, except to say it was some kind of creative urge, the idea of adding value to something that’s already there by putting things together in a new arrangement. That’s exactly what music is; and since I don’t play any instrument properly, despite having owned several in my youth, mysteriously given to me (accordion, clarinet, piccolo, a National guitar, a large 5-string banjo), and can barely read music let alone compose it—and am certainly too old to learn—there remains in me the desire to be a member of the band. Metaphorically and literally too. As a way of expressing homage to that which has moved me. But also I recognize that I can’t give expression to the urge on my own. I want to be part of a whole which is greater than the some of its parts.

I went walking today in the spring sunshine, and brooded on the paradox of this desire. For I am already a part, and the whole is already the greatest it can possibly be, in a greatness no-one can grasp, whether or not they call it God, Nature, Earth or the Universe. Whatever it is, it’s full of parts, and each part is full of desire to unite, though we are unable to visualize (or imagine in soundscape) the complete form of that desire. Perhaps only in petty ways. It seems to me that the music I’ve chosen expresses, in different voices and moods, that desire.

I’ve republished another YouTube video as well, one with only two tracks from Africa. Maybe I’ll publish a post about it, maybe not. You can find it here: “Other Places, Other Times”.

Sleeve notes for "An African Sampler"

See this video (opens in a separate tab); also this post “Greater than the sum of the parts”.

The guiding principle for the selection of tracks was to pick some personal favourites. I’ve made it unbalanced by choosing three songs from Orchestra Baobab which display Afro-Cuban influence. In defence, I can only say that they are from the years when Baobab were fresh and not their twenty-first century “resurrection” (the word is Wikipedia’s).

It can be very frustrating to hear passionately-sung lyrics and not have a clue as to what they’re about, let alone have a full English (or French) translation. I’ve done my best to put some up on the videos, and give links to the sources for others in the tracklist below. It would have been tedious if the only accompanying images related to the performers, album covers etc., so I’ve made an intuitive choice of other images, usually in ignorance of lyrics, but hopefully in harmony with the emotions portrayed in the music. African song lyrics can often be surprising in translation, when it’s possible to find such any. The Soukous musician Lutumba Simaro has the reputation of a poet, but I had loved his song “Testament Ya Bowule” for a dozen years without having a clue what it is about. I didn’t even know its title, due to a misprint on the CD cover which transposed the titles of two songs. Thanks to the Lingala Institute I found a translation, part of which I’ve used to annotate the video. The Institute have done a YouTube video of another of his songs, Maya, with a synchronized translation in Lingala and English: not very idiomatic, or rather they have not managed to bridge the culture gap. I tinkered with their translation for my own annotations of “Testament”. Another of Lutumba’s songs is “Vaccination”, a theme you’d only expect in Africa, but I can't tell you how it goes, even though like all his songs it includes phrases in French.

There is nothing by Youssou N’Dour here: a big man in Senegal, Africa and the world, and not just for his own music. I have included two of his songs on my compilation “Other Places, Other Times”, which may get a post of its own in due course.

Hyperlinked track list
00:00 Mansa, Super Rail Band, 1996 Mali
06:35 KanKan Blues, Kante Manfila, 1991 Guinea
09:27 Utru Horas, Orchestra Baobab, “Pirates’ Choice”, 1982 Senegal
For an appreciation of the song, see http://www.muzikifan.com/desert.html
16:33 Mouneïssa, Rokia Traore, “Mouneïssa”, 1998, Mali.
For the lyrics in Bambara & French, see this site
22:20 Ndinderere, Stella Chiweshe, “Chisi”, 2001 Zimbabwe
She accompanies herself on the mbira dzavadzimu, “a musical instrument that has been played by the Shona people of Zimbabwe for thousands of years”.
27:21 N’Sangou, Antoine Moundanda & Likembe Géant, “Kesse Kesse”, 1997, Congo.
The likembe is an instrument similar to the mbira played by Stella Chiwese. Antoine’s band employs three extra-large ones.
31:34 On Verra Ça, Orchestra Baobab, “On Verra Ça”, 1978 Senegal (recorded in Paris)
38:47 Coumba, Orchestra Baobab, “Pirates’ Choice”, 1982 Senegal
Sung in French with English translation.
46:30 Kounandi, Rokia Traore, “Tchamantché”, 2007 Mali.
For the lyrics in Bambara, with a summary in French, see this site.
The summary is also shown on the video, in French and English.
51:50 Testament Ya Bowule, Franco Luambo & TPOK Jazz, 30th Anniversary album, 1986, Congo.
The lyric is from a poem by Lutumba Simaro, sung by Malage de Lugendo. Additional verses from the poem are spoken by Franco and overdubbed at the beginning and end. For the full transcription in Lingala, see this site. For a full English translation, see this site.
I’ve synchronized the words in Lingala and English on the video for the first few verses (attempting to make the English more idiomatic in places).
1:03:14 Sanctus, Les Troubadours du Roi Baudouin, “Missa Luba”, Congo 1958.
For the story of this Mass, see this Wikipedia article.
Note on the images: As well as various record labels, there are stills from the English film “If....” which features the “Sanctus”, notably in the famous transport café scene, where the renegade public-schoolboy Mick Travis plays it on a jukebox and engages in a surreal dance with the waitress. There are also old photos showing some disgraceful aspects of colonialism in the Congo Free State, whilst it was the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, the great-grand-uncle of King Baudouin, in honour of whom the musicians were named.
“Missa Luba” was arranged by a missionary, Fr. Haazen. Wikipedia observes that “Belgian rule in the Congo was based on the ‘colonial trinity’ (trinité coloniale) of state, missionary and private company interests.”

Jua Kali

It’s spring and that creates a fruitful restlessness in me, a primitive, profound and timely desire to die to my old self and be resurrected. It’s too inward, physical, dynamic and inchoate to be directly described, so I am left speechless.

It doesn’t make sense to call it writer’s block, for that would imply the pretension to be a “writer”. I’m a writer only in the sense of not being illiterate: which is achievement enough. It would also imply that I have something I want to say which I’m unable to express. I have nothing to say, only an urge towards creative expression, which, given free rein, has its own ideas. Free rein? Let me be true to my chosen icon of the centaur, where there is no hierarchy of rider and mount, therefore no need for reins. Chevalier and cheval are one, welded together.

As I commenced by saying in my last, I’ve missed the design and construction work which had turned this tiny house into a carpentry workshop in which you could hardly move for tools, sawdust and shards of offcut plywood. Not long after cleaning up, I started to suffer withdrawal symptoms, missing the creative high. I couldn’t write as I had nothing to say. A suggestion from K got me on another design-and-build project, modest in its pretensions but satisfying for the work’s sake as much as for the end product.

On the ledge which separates kitchen from dining-room, we’ve always kept a wooden basket holding soy sauce, hot pepper sauce, honey etc. It’s never been exactly right: too small and the sides too high. We’d bought it along with a batik wall-hanging of a Kikuyu gathering from a shop in Edinburgh stuffed with African & other crafts. It was originally designed to be packed and shipped in folded form, the main pieces being connected by little hinges for easy assembly, the carrying handle being fastened with turned wooden screws on the knobs. Unlike flatpacks from IKEA, it was crafted entirely by hand, using local hardwoods. I saw that it could be taken apart, modified and expanded to suit our needs. I had the advantage of leftover plywood and several electric tools, but as the work proceeded, a sense of admiration, harmony & kinship connected me with those unknown craftsmen, as if we were parts of a single team. They had done their job properly, now it was up to me to continue from where they left off.

Serendipitously, I was idling through the dictionary this morning in quest of a crossword answer and came across jua kali, a Swahili expression from Kenya meaning “small-scale craft or artisan work”. Literally, it means “hot sun”, referring to the outdoor nature of the work. And so I was able to search Google for an illustration of some craftsmen making stools in the sun, and resting on them for the photo.

Idling also describes the way I’ve been dipping into Hannah Arendt’s monumental Human Condition, in which I learn how the Greeks distinguished action from contemplation (considering the latter superior, as all the ancients did); how she distinguishes action (taking part in public affairs!), labour, work and fabrication from one another; and how the relative prestige of these things has changed across the intervening history. And when we speak of fabrication, i.e. making things, are we referring to the workmanship involved, or the product resulting from it? She considers this too, and how we might value one and not the other. Today, buying cheap factory-made things from sweatshops in the far East, we may find little to value in either.

Arendt’s ability to distinguish and rationalize, and create a magnificent apothecary’s chest of inter-related terms and meanings, marvellously complements my own manner of thought, whose favoured attitude is to respect inner impulses and treat them as divine guidance. If the purpose of philosophy is to explain and interpret, it’s not my thing at all, for I don’t really need explanations. If I speak of divine guidance, I need nothing to tell me where it comes from: neither theology nor psychoneurology. But I do need a language. Jua kali provides a metaphor for the fabrication I yearn to do, and ultimately my preferred medium is words and not wood; for they are more explicit and don’t spread sawdust everywhere.

And yet, increasingly, I have nothing to say. This soul is at rest, has no sermons to deliver, only songs of praise.

Final product after modification