The Moment

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 17:09:00 +0100

Moving Site

My blogs are moving to my new comprehensive site in the next couple of days.

www.jacksanger.com

This site is, I hope, something entirely new in selling books. On it you will find everything I have written over the last ten years. You can download for free and pay what you think the experience has been worth, later. You can pay zilch if you like!

Best wishes

Jack

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Fri, 24 Jan 2014 12:17:00 GMT

Bingo, a peeping tom and war poetry

It would be hard for any technology-using child of the 21^st century to put themselves in my place in 1953. Earlier posts on this site draw pictures of an innocent time of nesting, damming streams, fantasy medievalism with lances and shields, a tiny primary school of 23 pupils and only the occasional fisticuffs creating small dark clouds on the horizon. I can’t recall much to fear in those days, though this may be due to heavy caution and some capacity for adroit language in staving off incidents before they erupted. I recall being paralysed up a tree as I witnessed older boys lying in the grass and inducting younger girls in the arts of having foreign fingers moving like furtive crabs claws inside their knickers. Though I must hardly have known what was involved, I knew that it was a transgression and both boys and girls would get into trouble. I knew telling tales would have me kicked and punched. Better to hang there like a frozen fruit and wait for the call of the school bell ringing in the teacher’s hand outside the main door, setting everyone scarpering the quarter mile to be in on time. Better no-one ever knew that I knew.

Surprisingly, I did not suffer from stage fright. Nor have I ever. From plays to speaking at UNESCO to hundreds of delegates, I have been able to create a zone and stay in it, impervious to the possibilities of pratfall or the humiliation of sudden silence. When I was into double figures, age-wise, I embarked on a concert tour with another boy called David Salinger. I was a soprano and he was an alto. Our duets would seem today to be a bit sugary and designed to melt old ladies’ hearts, I suppose. Maybe we simpered as we learned to play on audience emotion. The concerts were organized by my father to raise money for the construction of the village hall in Shadforth. The acts were redolent of a post-war period. A handsome twenty odd year old crooner called Lennie sang The Old Rugged cross:

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,

the emblem of suffering and shame;

and I love that old cross where the dearest and best

for a world of lost sinners was slain.

… so that a mournful, reverent hush fell upon the audience, many, I realize now probably having had family members killed during the recent war. Another individual, nameless now, a drama queen in his middle aged splendour, recited J. Milton Hayes’ The Green Eye of The Little Yellow God. It began..

There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Kathmandu,

There’s a little marble cross below the town;

There’a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,

And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

It was a poem from the Raj. My father may have been behind its choice. He never really recovered from his prominent status in the army in India. The concerts always ended with a prize draw and Bingo, then called Housey Housey, a communal competition to win a prize too big to be easily got with ration coupons; “Two fat ladies sixty six, one and one legs eleven, six-oh blind sixty…” I know you could have heard a needle drop, the intonations of the caller and the silence of the audience only interrupted by the screech of “House!” from a winning contestant.

www.chronometerpublications.me

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 14:38:00 GMT

God, the father and son: an end to certainty.

How old is a child before he knows his father is not omniscient? How old is he before he knows that the village priest is an empty vessel? The latter is easy to answer. It came to me when I asked, during choir practice, “Who made God?” The answer was pat, as I remember. Perhaps I embroidering it by suggesting that Canon Tillard had a look of smug, priestly insincerity as he stared down at me and said, “God made himself.” Even if he said it in all piety, it did have an extraordinary effect upon me. The vaulted Romansque Anglican church, given to Latin mass, white surplices and incense swinging, reverberated with his words. Its stones' echoing hollowness amplified what seemed to me to be the absurdity of his reply. Even in science fiction, as promoted in the Eagle comic, the most fiendish of aliens did not make themselves out of nothing. Something could not come out of nothing. Whatever laws of reality I held dear in my head at the time were so confounded by his reply that I abandoned the choir and Christianity. I was eleven.

Around the same age I was selected to represent Shadforth C of E primary school in a road safety competition with another school. My team (the only three pupils in the top age bracket, about to take the 11+) spent a week or two swotting up the Highway Code. My father offered to test me. When it came to the sequence that traffic lights go through, he stopped me and said I was wrong. I showed him the Highway Code. He said that it was a mistake in the text and illustrations. He had driven for decades and the sequence was different. He rehearsed me to remember it. Needless to say I was asked that very question. I can still remember the conflict as I struggled with the book’s authority and my father’s. He was in the audience of course. I opted for his version. I was wrong and as a result received three out of four marks for my answer.

It marked the beginning of the end of his omnipotence. Where once I had believed everything he said with an almost fierce fervour, doubt now lurked in my childhood Eden, in all its snakiness. It was the underpinning of my skepticism regarding all forms of certainty in later years, even, ultimately, feeding into my PhD on observation methods in qualitative research. But I don’t want this to sound like retributive carping against my father. He was a fine father in many, many ways. But he was a product of Edwardian England, the army, subservience to the establishment, fair play, the importance of rules and undisputed male dominance within the home. Suddenly seeing him as flawed helped me to be aware that that all people have their weaknesses. I am sure he suffered terribly that evening in the school, sitting among his fellow villagers.

Loss of pride for a man of his generation was even greater then than today. The unimpeachable justice of the father was integral to his sense of identity.

www.chronometerpublications.me

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Sun, 22 Dec 2013 12:18:00 GMT

Slates, frozen milk and green woodpeckers

My slate was a rectangle, big enough it seemed to my small hands. It was bordered with wood, maybe pine but probably beech. The writing implement, my stylus, was not chalk but a smooth cylinder of slate, too. I have no memory of the holders. They were probably used by the children of families whose parents used something similar for cigarettes …! My parents, who both smoked at the time, certainly never used them. Cigarettes in our house came in soft, colourful packets.

There were two school rooms and a small kitchen. The bigger room also contained the hall and was used by the five to eight year olds while the smaller one was for the older children on their way to the eleven plus. When school milk arrived it was put in the kitchen. In winter the milk was frozen in the bottles and had to be thawed out. As I write this I have an involuntary recoil at the memory of over-heated milk. Cold milk with a shake of icy creamy froth on top, was perfect. Older children thawed out the bottles. The little kitchen was also used for monitorial purposes. Apart from my sister, when she was three, I must have helped teach many children to read and write.

I remember being caned by the class teacher for laughing too much; that involuntary, impossible to stop, eye-watering laughter that feeds itself and those around. The caning was administered with a four foot, unwieldy garden cane. The teacher was not adept at sadism and every time she tried to lift and bring it down upon my hand, it caught the table and went askew. This fuelled more side-splitting laughter and led to less punishment.

An inspector came to the school and looked at all the children’s work. He singled out a composition of mine because I wrote that King Alfred’s ships were like swans in the bay. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy from that moment. A later teacher, at grammar school, scrubbed out my word ‘nadir’ and said the word did not exist.

I was somewhat proficient at art and had pictures displayed on the wall. I painted or crayoned birds and football teams. There was a strong thread of shimmer in them. I liked the clashes of green on red in a woodpecker and my teams also had green and red stripes, though no such strip existed.

My two bibles then and later were the Observer Book of Birds - I learned to recognize every species together with the patterns on their eggs – and an annual three inch square book of the previous season’s football recorded in tiny print with results and tables throughout the season. I had a favourite team for every division and knew the home strips of all teams in all divisions.

As I have said in a recent post, colour dominated my life, as though it depended upon it. Later, much later, in my fifties, I discovered that I had a genetic abnormality, one which made me both short-sighted and vulnerable to retinal detachment.

www.aboutamoment.blogspot.com

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Fri, 13 Dec 2013 15:44:00 GMT

Distance lends confusion

I have just looked up the village in which I spent seven years, from 1947 to 1955, Shadforth. Now it has a small website and a sort of potted history which, if not directly contradicting my memories, at least allowing little place for them. ‘Potted’ here is a metaphor as in the reduction of a pig to Spam. The village green where Sir Lancelot and Gawain fought is now part of a conservation area. The houses around it, including the school I have recently described, are part of this embalming of the past by today’s well-meaning bureaucrats. The rough grass, overlooked by these dwellings, upon which wickets fell, a boy had an epileptic fit so massive we all ran away in fear of the Devil and where my compatriots skipped, bowled hoops, ran races and fought until blood was drawn and we were separated by minimally concerned adults, carries no scars or trophies of those days.

This insulated sphere of my childhood’s adventures has lost its unique otherworldliness on today’s internet. It is overshadowed by a village a mile away called Ludworth. Ludworth has Pele tower remains and a more historic lineage. Shadforth is only unique for one thing – its name. There are no other Shadforths (“shallow fords”) in England, according to the data on the site. In my early years there was a dome around Shadforth as palpable as The Zone in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. To venture beyond its security brought trepidation into the heart. Immediate unfamiliarity crowded in on the wanderer. Perhaps half way to Ludworth (a place where unspeakable roughnecks roamed) along a country path, was a big pond. The way to it was through this alien territory. To leave it could mean death. But here was where newts could be caught, in all their red livery, as exotic and mythic to us as Golden Salamanders. It took days of planning and hardening of the heart to make the trek, one which you never made alone.

I remember, though I was too young to take part, that a battle was to be fought between the Ludworth and the Shadforth boys. It was heralded for weeks, vying in our credulous minds with the battle of Bosworth Field. The stomach tightening fear and anticipation of the event has erased any knowledge of the result.

This blood-thickening nostalgia is more than a spurious, dewy-eyed tug at the heart strings. It is more than a Proustian episode. I want to reconquer, to reclaim the world that was Shadforth, to be an enfant sauvage, to enable childhood ghosts to walk again, to see the school spilling out at lunchtime, to regain the totality of life under the dome.

www.chronometerpublications.me

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Sun, 8 Dec 2013 11:09:00 GMT

The Fields of Dreams

The green sward stretched out before us. Ladies in fine gowns held the favours of their champions as they sat in the gallery waiting for the tourney to begin. Knights, to a man, were armoured and horsed with lances held perpendicular by their saddles. Shields protected them. Some were like Lancelot, in disguise, willing to deceive those they loved. Some were like Galahad, pure and unaffected by earthly temptations. There were no green Knights as I recall.

The jousts took place at lunch break on the village green between the school and a stone wall which became the balcony for the fair ladies of Arthur’s court – the girls in the school’s two classes. The lances were wooden vaulting poles. The shields were dustbin lids. The favours were ribbons used to denote teams in PE. The whole organization can only have come from the heated imagination of one or two children like myself who, ahead of their reading age, loved Arthurian legend. I recall winning a joust and galloping over to the balcony, turning to allow a young damsel from the first years’ class to ride upon my back as I celebrated my victory. Courtly love was everything to a nine year old.

In the winter, the battles were grimmer. No fair ladies. Feet beating the snow, woolen-wrapped, heads in balaclavas, Brussels sprouts stems in hand with their thick bulbous clay-bound roots and only the ubiquitous dustbin lids to protect us, we set about each other. The lids were dented out of shape by the barbaric onslaught of our medieval spike ball maces, never to fit their bins again.

I lived in a world of Norse Gods and Heroes, sagas such as Beowolf, children’s versions of Malory’s Morte D’arthur, Greek and Roman myths. And they seamlessly elided into the modern, the Superman and Batman comics, The Eagle, The Rover. Fantasy knew no real boundary. Superheroes populated the imagination in all shapes and sizes and with varying degrees of rational underpinning.

I wonder now whether my imagination was my universe and reality amounted only to meals and sleep.

www.chronometerpublications.me

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Fri, 6 Dec 2013 09:20:00 GMT

Intimations of Mortality

I need to backfill slightly for those of you who have not read an earlier post this year but which kicks off the present one. 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, 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, found drowned in the water tank in the garden. She had apparently climbed over the little protective fence. There she was found, like Ophelia.

I returned one day with my dying father to find my sister’s grave. He 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?

The reason for repeating all this is that I must have had some kind of preternatural cognizance of what death meant from the very beginning. One cannot walk in the footprints of the dead all one’s life without some extra sense of it’s presence. But, as you will have gathered, my mother never let it inhibit my freedom to roam, to play beside water, to take chances. She was not a character that could have fitted in the plot of that terrifying film for all parents, Don’t Look Now.

The first deaths I can recall were those of the wrung-necked chickens. Then there were the annual cub wielding forays in the barns of the farm next door as the rats were smoked out. We always had a cat and so I have many images of the creature bringing presents of mice, voles and moles to the dining table. A boy, climbing the sand quarry at the top of Shadforth, fell and was suffocated. It did not stop us going there for Sand Martins’ eggs. I climbed another cliff and took a young Jackdaw for a pet, one day taking it to school on my shoulder. It did not fare well in the hen coop where I kept it and died. Fish died in jamjars or the ponds I made in the garden, lined with clay. Death was everywhere, as natural to me – even if intimidating – as the business of living. The mother of a school friend and teacher in our tiny school, died of cancer. And, to connect with the last post, an effect of death is the fading of colour; in the eyes, in the flashes of red on a fish’s flank and even in the gleam of the coat of a kitten killed by the warning snap of our dog protecting his dinner bowl.

I’m not so frightened of the prospect of the last journey, that Arthurian float across the waters that divide, because death was there from the very beginning, sniping away. Being inconsiderate. I wonder whether life can be truly lived without an acceptance of it’s constant presence?

www.chronometerpublications.me

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Thu, 5 Dec 2013 16:22:00 GMT

The Colour of Memory

Modern life is destroying colour in a kind of genocide, a universal clearance of the natural spirit of tone, shade, tint and hue. So it appears to me in retrospect.

The following lines by A E Houseman encompass the notion that for each of us, memory has its own presiding colour. For him, blue represented a time, an age to which he could never return.

INTO my heart on air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,	5
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

For me it is colour in its very being. As I have already ventured, I became a putative Zen Buddhist in its early adolescent form though without any such label. The brief vignette in an earlier post in this series recounted the rhapsodic nature of being in a lilac tree or the extraordinarily vibrant flashes of blue and yellow in corn fields that were not yet annually brutalized by spraying. Those were the days when a farmer or gardener fought cunning battles with predators, with their blood constantly on his hands, and had a kind of grudging respect for his foes, even though today we might regard the strung up carcasses of birds and animals to deter further predation, primitive and inhuman. We now prefer mechanised killing on a grand scale from planes, from tractors and from genetic laboratories and have a growing population of city estate children with no knowledge of where eggs or milk or the beef in burgers come from, or of nettles and thorns or wild fruit and fungi. No, those playful days provided arrays of colour in the hedgerows, meadows and cultivated fields that burn in the mind’s eye.

Nothing since compares in my mind to the spectacular spectrum of colours to be found in birds’ eggs, their positioning next to each other in cardboard containers lined with cotton wool. If a rainbow had been constituted from the colours to be found in my box, it would have stretched right across the sky. I suspect that in those immediate, post-war British days where the range of paint was limited in houses, where products in ironmongers and department stores were similarly lacking in much beyond magnolia, green and brown, when fathers wore dun and grey utility attire and women had not cultivated the seeds of fashionable independence, eggs were a wonder. They were a child’s stained glass windows affording a view of the spiritual essence of existence. Since then industrialisation and mass production have led us to a point where we cannot pick wild flowers without guilt and where more and more flora and fauna are necessarily added to the lists of the protected. It is said that 96% of all species that have ever existed have become extinct. In my own private lifetime with its unique visual history, it is the bleaching and extinction of so much colour, wild, savage and limitless that causes the pang of loss. It is as if, as I age, Death, the robber, has begun to visit early to begin pilfering my sensibilities from me.

He is particularly keen on colour.

www.chronometerpublications.me

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 13:10:00 GMT

Autobiography 5: How to be a man

My father found it much easier to show affection to a daughter (hardly surprising, having had the terrible heartbreak of the first born girl’s death by drowning) and to the youngest versions of me, his son. As I grew older, the physicality of touch diminished until, one day in his seventies in Lanark, when he looked a bit wobbly and I put a hand on his shoulder, he leaped away from me as though branded. He knew my liking for literature and was fulsome in his condemnation of D H Lawrence who was essential reading in the 1960s for anyone interested in the sexual revolution. I wondered later whether he had conflated him with T. E. Lawrence whose extra-military exertions with Arabs would have been, for him, obscene and worthy of a hanging. He was an excellent crossword puzzle solver, doing the Daily Telegraph offering each morning – providing my mother did not get there first. She told me with great amusement one day that he had not been able to solve a final clue whose answer was lesbian, and when she put it in, he was visibly shaken when she told him its meaning.

But in my childhood and youth he was a powerful role model of what it was to be truly male. I believed in him. It was a principle not to lose against either my sister or I at the games that children loved then, whether draughts, cards, word games, football or cricket. Nor did I begrudge him his victories. It added to his aura of invincibility. And it made me competitive. I suppose I was a fragile child in some ways, thin and awkward, knotted in the knee and wearing glasses. He bought me bright red boxing gloves when I was about seven and set up a bag for me to punch. I was given a pewter-coloured, grey potato and lead slug pistol that required strength to spring load it and when I was a bit older an air rifle. I watched him wring the necks of chickens we kept in the garden and follow their awkward post mortem zigzags between the denuded Brussels sprouts’ stalks, their heads dangling. My mother helped in this conscious stiffening of my male resolve by taking me out on to the back step to watch the thunder and lightning storm approach. She talked wistfully of India’s monsoons.

He did create a tremendous sense of privilege and camaraderie, a Boys Own bubble at times. I would be sent to bed on time but told that he would wake me up in the night for the Big Fight from America. I know it happened a few times but I distinctly remember sitting in front of a roaring fire in the early hours, with the lights off, wrapped in a dressing gown, feet in slippers as the crackling commentary was relayed from Madison Square Garden or some other pugilists’ paradise. Particularly, I remember Rocky Marciano’s bouts with Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott, not the fights but the celebratory ambience of the sitting room. My father would be like a hairpin, bent forward, elbows on knees, staring into the middle distance, living every described punch. He had been a Captain in the PT Corps of the Lancashire Fusiliers, seconded to the Indian Military to help build the officers’ training centre in Dehra Dun. He had boxed, high dived, done gymnastics, played football, tennis and cricket, all at a high competitive standard. What stopped him from becoming a Major was his leaving school at 14 to work in the mines to support his mother. He was not privately educated. “Not officer material’ was stamped across his otherwise exemplary record, the best anyone had ever encountered both academic and physical. How he could remain a Tory supporter after that rebuff I never could work out.

When I was young I marveled at the changes that had occurred in my parents’ lifetime: television, jets, man on the moon, domestic technology. Yet even more change has taken place in my own. But the sheer domination of the monolithic walnut encased wireless in those early years is a far cry from the range of whizzbang electronic media today. My favourite stood tall and slim and had wings that ran down its sides similar to the accretions on American cars. The dial shone like a halo. The sound emanated magically from some Mount Olympus..

www.chronometerpublications.me

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 10:33:00 GMT

Autobiography 4: From the Big Bang to Steady State

The latest scientific speculation suggests that there had to be something before the Big Bang, poetic flat universes like bed sheets occasionally coming together to create a terrific flap and give birth to yet another. If the first of this series of posts on my childhood began with a memory of my own big bang – the lighter striking fire and the curtain conflagration, I’d like to borrow from the pre - Big Bang scientific supposition and make mention of what existed before.

My first memory did not kick start my life, of course. That was done in India. I was born into an exotic, even traumatic medium of events and emotions which are now, at least temporarily, lost to me. I was a second child, the first, a sister, having mysteriously drowned aged six in India before I was born. From having a dedicated servant and hot earth I was in no time seeing only white skins with a cold ground under my feet. From bilingual at four – Urdu and English - I was made monolingual by the new culture of the unrelieved, accented English of a Geordie pit village by the time I was five. I started wearing spectacles suffering from very short sight.

All this pre-history and early existence conspired to make me feel different, a bit of a loner, at least this is what my adult self now informs me sagely. I remember having many friends but no blood brothers. My sister came along four years after me and by then my sparateness was somewhat determined. I spent the first hour in bed this morning trying to uncover early memories after the Big Flame. Here are a few.

A square cube known as a ‘blue bag’ on the kitchen window sill to ease the pain of frequent bee stings. My mother’s horror at a jam jar of pond water and a beetle so big inside it, it seemed to fill it entirely with its black back and red belly. Plodging in the stream on the way to school and through the dark and terrifying tunnel under the road to the other side. When I revisited this landmark as an adult it seemed impossible that a child could have crawled through, never mind stooped his fearful way in his wellies. Birds eggs in boxes padded with cotton wool. Butterflies in jam jars as well as bees. A man my parents called my ‘uncle’ who was a magician and bandaged his thumb and cut it off making it bleed copiously before re-engaging it and restoring it to health upon undoing the bloody linen. He gave me a silver coin of some kind. Our pebbledash, tiny cottage with its two small bedrooms, and in winter the ice on the inside of my bedroom window which refracted illumination from the street lamp outside, casting monsters on to the bedroom walls. My father having his zinc-filled bath before the fire and the prudery of him. Our dog which was a black Scottie and yapped. Our cat, that frequently attacked a neighbour’s Alsatian so that it cowered, ears flat whenever passing our house. A peck on my willy by a hen that came to watch me pee through chicken wire, causing me to scream and my mother to laugh for minutes on end. Reading. Every day a new book from the village library which was in my primary school and was on revolving shelves that served the children by day and the adults after school and on Saturdays. By six I did not differentiate and the librarian indulged my tastes. I can still see Captain Hornblower R. N. by C.S. Forester in its vivid, adventure suggesting dust cover. The Scarlett Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.

These memories are like dots, not joined up yet into proper pictures, isolated stars not yet sufficient to make the Milky Way. But, as Dylan Thomas says in Welsh Incident , “I was coming to that…”

www.chronomterpublications.me

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 12:38:00 GMT

Autobiography 3: Abandoned child, wild gorse and honey bees

I think I may be dashing about in time. I cannot really put things in date order. My memory seems to be a bit like a dark night sky wherein a star suddenly appears and I fasten on to it with my telescope.

My parents drove me to friends of theirs where I was to spend a week on holiday. We went in the new (second hand) family car, a big Rover with walnut dashboard and leather seats. My father must have been doing well as a soft drinks salesman. He had given up on the motor bike which, once every few months, he would dutifully strip down and clean in front of the fire. I never knew why I was ejected from family life like this. Until I left home for college this was the only aberration in a continuous existence at home in Shadforth. They cannot have lived too far away and they were called Donaghy. They had a much older son in his mid teens. They lived in what was a piece of Durham’s mining-related architecture, a hamlet of houses, a handful strip of each on either side of the road. Their toilets were out the back and communally shared with other houses on that side of the street. A horse and cart came once a week to remove the contents of the joint septic receptacle which ran along under all the wooden toilet seats. You sat in your cubicle, above the floating mayhem of drunken miners and their Edwardian pursed lipped wives, hoping to be quick and to get out before being overcome. Constipation was a slow death – not that I can remember having it.

Two memories of this visit. The first was that my father gave the teen of the house a steel compass and other mathematical tools, embedded and glittering in a velvet and wood box, as a present. I know I felt jealousy. They had been in the Shadforth house for some time. They were MY heirlooms. Many years later my father gave someone else my half-size slate-bed billiard table, much to my volubly expressed anger. He said I had gone to college and didn’t think I wanted it. It was a curious element of his complex personality. He seemed to need to be seen as generous even at the expense of his son. Or is that too harsh? It was a table I had paid for.

Behind the latrines was a small field, though large enough for me. It was a meadow but inundated with dock, dandelion and gorse. It must have been summer when I was there. I spent much of the time catching bees in a jam jar with holes in its lid to help them breathe. The art was seeing how many you could capture. Many times you might lift the lid to entrap yet another and accidentally release one or two. Stings were common. I put flowering dead nettles inside to make them comfortable.

Why was I sent to the Donaghys? I assume with the jaundice of adult wisdom that something must have been up at home. My sister, four years younger than me, was not excommunicated. When you think back you find certain events which have nestled in your brain as unchallenged, isolated islands, suddenly develop a hidden plot, a conspiratorial odour. My child-like, lonesome distraction from wondering about the motives of my parents could be found in jars full of yellow striped or red-bummed bees.

www.chronometerpublications.me

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Fri, 22 Nov 2013 12:02:00 GMT

Autobiography 2: Earth, Air, Water and Blood

So my earliest memory was fire. Casting my mind back I have a sort of metaphorical sense of what memory is. It's a concertina which, when pulled out reveals all that extra capacity that cannot be seen at the outset. Or like a set of books whose spines are all that is visible on the shelf, with vague titles which must be lifted out, one by one to reveal their mysterious substance. Memory is two dimensional for the purpose of retrieval and multi-dimensional once you get hold of it. Nothing is actually forgotten but it can take unusual circumstances and lateral purchase sometimes, to draw people, events and perceptions back into consciousness.

Since an autobiography, to be true and accurate in all respects, would be vast and never-ending, to embrace the span of a life, it behoves the writer to provide vignettes, fragments that suggest the whole like shards of a hologram, isomorphic representations.

After Leeds we moved to Shadforth County Durham. We lived for a few months across the village green, opposite the school. Here are a few flashes from that time. Becoming lost and eventually found in the neighbour’s dog’s kennel with my arms around a dog notoriously big and feared by the postmen. Going to the toilet just before playtime (not yet five) and using one of the girls’ outside toilets. Just as I flushed it the bell went and I had to barricade myself in by jamming the door closed with straight legs, as I sat on the seat, trouserless. I was petrified with anguish and embarrassment as girls hammered on the door keening that they knew a boy was in there.

Yet, not far away across the concrete yard was a lilac tree. It was here that my immersion in Zen began. I recall climbing it and reclining in its branches, curtained about by pale purple panicles, shutting my eyes and swooning in the heavy scent, my ears drowning in the deep buzzing of bees and higher pitched drones of other insects.

In that Elysium of nature, a stream ran close to the bottom of our garden. Above it swept down a hill of corn, hosting the electric blue of cornflowers, the golden fat yellow of buttercups and the powdery white branches of old man’s baccy. Has my sight faded? This memory of colour is almost-trip-like in comparison to today’s perceptions. Perhaps my present eyes do not deceive but in that natural wild-foraging state of early childhood I saw the very essence of colour, its very spirit as one finds in Shintoism. All since has been facsimile, perfectly serviceable but without the power to truly burn the retina.

I dug deep holes on the little path that ran around the field and covered them in thin sticks and grass and leaves to trap the farmer. A gang of us trekked to a nearby quarry and stole a length of rope which we tied high above the stream so that we could swing down from the high bank on one side of it, screaming like our muscular hero in Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan And The City of Gold. We made dams. We tightrope walked the narrow concrete divides between the effluence tanks of the sewage farm.

The last snippet, cut from the cloth of that time, is of a birthday party. I must have been five, I suppose. Perhaps four or so boys had been invited. They brought presents. The only one I can remember was from a boy whose parents had no money, or so my mother informed me. He gave me a tin cow, a Guernsey I can now affirm. One leg had been broken off. I took the treasure and placed it on my shelf in the sideboard cupboard. I can see it now, just managing to stay upright, all on its own, lit by the searchlight of inexplicable pleasure.

It was when I learned that it is the thought that counts.

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Mon, 18 Nov 2013 11:37:00 GMT

In an autobiography, a thousand memories must begin with one

Writing an autobiography represents a worrying collision of two ropes of thought. I am not talking here of the autobiographies of those who have jumped to fame on the serendipitous back of media-enhanced celebrity and deliver their usually ghost-written accounts of their first years of fame. I am more concerned with autobiography as the summing up of a life, a kaleidoscope of events and characters, memories, dreams, reflections and might-have-beens which together comprise the vaguely stable core at the heart of the ever changing mist of what has been experienced by the author. The two ropes of thought, at least for me, comprise firstly a superstitious fear that writing it might have the same import as a will and may somehow mark the end of my imaginative writing. The second is that if I leave it too late then the record of my life will become too faded, my ink drying in the pen and the very tool of my imagination, the carefully wrought word and phrase may give way to something so prosaic it has none of the character of my writing when all my faculties are present!

With autobiographies, timing is all. It must be got down before the brain is more colander than crucible.

So, beginning at the beginning, I have no memories at all of India where I spent my first four years or so of life. Suffice it to say that India has still been a dominating motif, affecting my sense of self, a background like the foundation glue an artist uses to prepare a canvas. No, despite being bilingual, nothing remains of those early naked-running native years in Dehra Dun. My first images come from Leeds, a cold northern city where we stayed for a few months with my father’s mother, not the most gracious of individuals I am told. It was there, or in some subsequent accommodation that I took my father’s cigarette lighter and hid behind the curtains, flicking it on and off. I seem to recall the mystery of this fire-maker but have no vision of the burning curtains as they exaggerated that tiny spurt of flame into an ascending line of fire and thence to the Christmas decorations.

It was the only time in my life that my father came close to hitting me, if I am to believe my mother who I am sure would not have lied about such a traumatic early event. I am assured that he did not, instead sending me to my room. The fact that he did not strike me is surely the perfect education for a son. After all, a room going up in smoke is among the worst of scenarios. I have not hit my own children and I am sure they are the same with my grandchildren. Scientists now believe that genes can be switched on and off during a life. I have displayed on occasion the willingness to battle, to use fist and foot, so the warrior gene can burn brightly if the button is pressed – but not within the fomenting confines of familial relations.

I realise, writing this, that it is possible that autobiographies might delineate more exactly the characters of those around the author than the being of the author himself.

My father will, no doubt, not be immune from this.

For free novellas and other work go to www.chronometerpublications.me

For the Azimuth Trilogy go to www.azimuthtrilogy.com

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Mon, 9 Sep 2013 16:49:00 +0100

Ghosts in the Machine

I have just finished the second or third draft of a short story called Rupture. The title has strong resonances for me. Life contains ruptures though, being survivors, we try to gloss them over, smooth them out, fill in the voids and talk ourselves through the miseries they cause because we want our lives to be frictionless, running like the well-oiled wheels of dreamy steam trains. From broken relationships to relocation, from children’s injuries to their untimely deaths, from dying parents whose desire for a last, healing conversation went unrequited to unspoken praise and cowardly refusal to challenge, our lives have events which rupture our hopes and fantasies about ourselves. The aftermaths of these accidental or willful intrusions stay with us forever, popping up in our dreams or causing us to adopt aberrant behaviours dislocated from their cause by denial. Life is tough and in the main we prefer to recount and make ourselves believe the glossy, Hollywood version of it. Dwelling on the ruptures makes us morbid and unsavoury companions.

In the short story of which I speak, a ghostly piece, the main protagonist undergoes a massive rupture of his delightful existence. The hemorrhaging away of warmth and intimacy begins when he views, like a peeping tom, a videotape of the family life of people he does not know.

It was like watching an old cinema classic in which he felt deep pangs of longing for an actress who might by the time he was viewing it have lost her glorious early beauty or even died. All old films contained moving death masks.

I am drawn to old films, not because of their reputation necessarily, though that helps me to swallow the pill with a coating of sugar, but because of the surreal sense of rupture. The past has been ripped out of its continuum and is dangled before me. These once flesh and blood actors, plying their trade with one-time verve and optimism under the spotlight of fame, now parade their wares on a screen in my sitting room.

They unsettle me.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

www.chronometerpublications.me

Twitter @profjacksanger

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Sat, 31 Aug 2013 08:21:00 +0100

New Review for The Azimuth Trilogy

Jack Sanger’s sprawling epic, Azimuth is a trilogy that brings to mind myth and folklore of times long gone. It conjures memories of a barely remembered past; one that feeds the subconscious and brings to life archetypes almost forgotten, yet still resonate in our collective unconscious; the stuff of dreams and legends. The narrator, Kamil has been commissioned to tell the story of the Magus – ancient patriarch of the current dynasty - to Sabiya and Shazrad, royal princesses of the court. The story is a dual revelation; one of origins and the other of court intrigue and danger. It is reminiscent of such fables as Morte D’Author, Lord of the Rings, The Arabian Nights and the Adventures of Ullyses; even stories of Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita from ancient India. Its appeal is multicultural and encompassing; something for everyone. For those who revel in that nebulous region where myth and memory blur, this book is for you; and for those who simply love a great read. The story is broken down into chapters, each one relaying the life and adventures of the Magus; stories of magic and mystery. Each chapter is self contained yet the stories are connected and masterfully intertwined with the myriad plots and conspiracies of life at the royal court, which are the backdrop to this amazing adventure. I give it a Five Star rating and recommend it to all lovers of myth and pre-history. Can’t wait for the movie!

Dr. Rachel Campbell

More reviews at www.azimuthtrilogy.com/reviews

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 09:23:00 +0100

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The Hidden Persuaders

Working in a convent home for the care of emotionally disturbed adolescent girls can throw up insights into the hidden worlds of communication. Telepathy, empathy, subliminal advertising. I remember Vance Packard wrote a book in the late 1950s, called The Hidden Persuaders. That was sometimes what it felt like as an atheist working with committed religious women. They were kind, generous and philosophically open, as earlier blogs will vouchsafe. Anyway, more of their strange powers a little later.

A form of communication which will have by-passed most men’s knowledge (and some women’s) is via hormones. All the women and girls in the convent had synchronized periods. New girls would fall into the same menstrual cycle within a couple of months of arrival. I remember taking a nun into town for three months supply of sanitary towels. They filled the back of the mini van!

The fact that we communicate with each other in subliminal ways seems to be within most people’s experience. It is usually laughed off as statistically inevitable that synchronous thought should occur. Despite all those Russian experiments during the cold war to produce secret agents who might gain the west’s secrets via telepathy, it remains an unlit area of scientific progress – unless you add in the latest thought controlled cursors in computer technology or quantum theory which stipulates that any observer will change the patterns of movement within atoms by observing the interactions. My vignette is more prosaic and easier to follow than Heisenburg’s masterful theory.

We took all the girls to the Lake District. Climbing big hills is symbolic for urban girls who do not know that milk comes from big grass-munching beasts and that there are places where you cannot see a house no matter how hard you look. The nuns had a sister convent up there with dormitory accommodation and some separate rooms. We arrived in the evening after a long drive from Norfolk. Nothing much happened to me that night. The next day was a successful hiking, climbing, blistering, prickling, stinging sort of day. The girls were tired out. They went to bed early and that was that. I retired eventually. I lay in bed and was about to fall asleep (or did so, who knows) when I was presented with a shimmering figure of Christ. The apparition, delusion, actuality did not speak but communicated mind to mind, as it were. It was trying to persuade me to become a Christian. It was surprisingly powerful. I remember my stock reply was something along the lines of “That’s not why I am here in this life”, thereby opening a door to the notion or reincarnation perhaps but nothing more. This struggle of wills went on for a few hours. The Christ figure in hippy beard and long hair, robes etc (a rather late version of him as artists cloned this image from a Roman god; all the original images being hermaphroditic, bare-faced and late adolescent) eventually disappeared. I slept a couple of hours and then faced the day. The nun who accompanied our party from the convent in Norfolk asked whether I had experienced anything unusual during the night. I felt a bit embarrassed to recount what I had seen. Before I described it, she said;

“You see, we were all praying for you until late in the night, hoping you might see the light.”

There are many levels and forms of communication of which we are either unconscious or only dimly aware.

www.chronometerpublications.me

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

Twitter @profjacksanger

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Sun, 18 Aug 2013 16:36:00 +0100

The bearable lightness of dying

The last blog presented a sliver of the existence I knew as Sister Daphne. I have always – well, since a teenager – been preoccupied by the fundamental question of what is this thing called life? And as a corollary, what is this other thing called death? In fact, going back to the college days represented in a blog a week or two ago, I remember I was writing nihilistic poetry for it seemed as if I was teetering on the edge of the abyss. Fortunately my character never embraced any notion of suicide no matter how bleak the answers to these questions might turn out. Rather, I realized that there was time ahead of me. And with time might come an answer to what constituted my mortal coil. It was this train of thinking that still finds itself shaping what I write. Azimuth is a trilogy about the search for meaning. www.azimuthtrilogy.com The four novellas (three free downloading) I completed earlier this year all dance around a totem pole with a death’s mask at the top. www.chronometerpublications.me And Twitter is especially good for fashioning aphorisms and the like which prove to be arrows pointing at my perennial affliction. For example at @Profjacksanger you have the following:

It is curious is it not that people want to die in their sleep after a lifetime of waiting for that moment?

A peer of Sister Daphne was Sister Katherine. I liked her very much. She was translucent. Unlike Sister Daphne she was pure convent nun. There were no doubts in her and yet there was no attempt to proselytize either. She emanated goodness. I used to enjoy conversations about life and death with her, sitting under an oak tree.

I hadn’t seen her for some time and asked after her health. “She’s a bit weak,” came the answer, “but she’s sitting in the garden at this moment”. I went to find her. Not the usual place. A glade, more secluded.

“How are you?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

‘The Sisters said you were a little weak.”

“Oh that. Yes.” She paused and then said, “I am going to die next week on (I'm sure she said) Wednesday.

“Of course you’re not!” I huffed, no doubt feeling she needed some uplifting jollity.

“I am. It is my favourite Saint’s day. We often die on our favourite Saint’s day. I don’t think there’s anything else I want to do and so another year is too much.” She smiled her wonderful, engaging smile.

Sister Katherine died the following Wednesday. Having not seen a physician for a long time, there was a post mortem. Her body was riddled with cancers and had been, the doctor judged, for years. He wondered how she had kept going for so long.

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Fri, 9 Aug 2013 09:21:00 +0100

On Exorcisms

You’ll find references to an exorcism I attended if you check the blogs for December 2012. Writing about Sister Daphne in the last foray into my biography reminded me of another one. (Memory is like thousands of bags full of substance but which are tied at the neck to each other so that you have a metaview, like a list of contents but have to untie each neck to get at what is harboured there.)

As I said, I worked as a social worker in a convent. We had about a dozen extremely emotionally disturbed adolescent girls, twenty or so staff and used a technique called regression therapy to enormously beneficial effect for most of them. Despite its efficacy it was never taken up country-wide because of its sophistication and cost in terms of skilled staff required. Anyway, imagine the premises we worked in on the convent estate. A truly gothic, mullioned, slit windowed red brick building with turrets. Very tall, particularly in morning and evening mist. Bedrooms along narrow corridors. A chapel which frightened the girls, situated between their rooms and my flat. Better than a thousand locks.

One girl came to us and Sister Daphne and the head of the unit, Sister Rita, were soon perturbed by the girl’s smell. So were the other boarders. Though she washed and had clean clothes she exuded something which made the hair rise on the nape. She had a thin small voice coming from somewhere deep within her overweight body. She seemed to look from a depth so deep in her skull that you could not imagine its source. She heard voices.

One day we heard a noise that antennae told us wasn’t right and raced into the kitchen just in time to disturb the girl strangling another and thereby saving her life.

The priest to the convent at the time was called Godwin, believe it or not. Because we were not equipped to deal with psychopathy, the would-be strangler was moved to secure accommodation elsewhere. There were those among the staff who swore that she was possessed. Despite her leaving and much use of powerful cleaning products, her room retained her otherworldly odour. Father Godwin conducted an exorcism of the room. The smell disappeared. As girls left, so did its temporary history of succour to the malevolent.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

www.chronometerpublications.me

Twitter: @profjacksanger

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Wed, 7 Aug 2013 08:58:00 +0100

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Sister Daphne’s Dilemmas

When we first met I was in my fifth year of teaching. It was the time of liberal studies in colleges of further education. The naming of courses is always political. Liberal Studies became General Studies and then Communication Studies as the cultural imperative to give apprentices and those returning to education after failing at school, a broader sense of the world, a critical consciousness and a capacity to see behind the media’s gloss and bias, slowly foundered on successive governments’ strategies to force social engineering to the forefront, whereby the young would be fitted for what was called ‘the world of work’.

Anyway, as a liberal studies teacher I taught psycho-drama to professionals (doesn’t that have the ring of the times?) The acid generation, the hatred of the establishment, the dropping out, the hair and gaudy attire, the last great surge towards personal freedom and anarchy, were all part of an optimism that helped constitute and drive the curriculum.

One of my students was Sister Daphne. I set up a mining accident in the classroom. Lines of chairs became tunnels. The game revolved around whether you would escape or save others at risk of dying. One of life’s great dilemmas. Sister Daphne died on the classroom floor. In tears. Afterwards she said it was totally disturbing. She also came to me with dreams she was having. I don’t remember them now except that they revolved around the shattering of structures – including the convent walls.

When she joined the convent the biggest day of her life was the day she would leave her novice status and take the ring of Christ. A bride. She was overjoyed and after the rituals and prayers she told me she ran outside, flinging her arms in the air in exultation. Her new ring slipped away into the bushes. The search took hours. Once repatriated with it, she said that the sun shone every day for five years.

This did not mean that she was immune to tests of faith. Her most graphic story involved her at Evensong prayers. Her mind began to slip away from a holy focus. A darkness seemed to cloud her thought. Her head ached. She put her hand up to ward off the pulse of evil and her hand contacted an enormous spider, sitting over her ‘third eye’.

I was very fond of her. She was always open about her internal battles between faith and skepticism, always tolerant of others and it was she who asked me, an atheist, to work in the convent, to care for emotionally disturbed adolescent girls, an experience that has coloured my social and educational philosophy ever since.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

www.chronometerpublications.me

Twitter: @profjacksanger

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Thu, 1 Aug 2013 08:44:00 +0100

Ch ch ch ch ch ch changes…

David Bowie’s song came to mind as I started writing this blog. I was reflecting on the mysteries surrounding what we call fate. Fate is often a rationalizing of events that have occurred and which seem to have conspired some change in one’s life. A trauma, a chance meeting with someone who becomes one’s partner, an act of god, a range of domino-like incidents that then create a context which enwraps one in its coils. In an earlier blog I recounted how such a train of events over decades became a pattern - in hindsight - that led me to live in Ghana.

When I left school in 1962 and went on to a teachers’ college in Sunderland I took a spur of the moment decision which completely changed my life. Until I walked into the men’s hostel room which I had been allocated I was known by family, school and village friends as Eric. Now Eric was a quiet, retiring, shy boy in glasses, somewhat askance at the very sight of a pretty girl. Until the last couple of years he had been thin, bony and gawky. Then he had applied himself with some discipline to body and mind. He became a good tennis player, cricketer, swimmer. He did weights in his bedroom. He meditated on a cigarette lighter to levitate it from its resting position. He read Zen. I suppose Eric was both consciously and unconsciously preparing himself to be a different person. Like a snake his skin was too tight, too dull and too unattractive.

In the hostel, a young fellow from a nearby room wandered in and introduced himself, following this up with the “what’s your name?” question. “Er…Jack,” I answered, using my middle name for the first time. Within an hour I had met a dozen or more new compatriots and was known by my new monicker. I remember my brain turning rapidly on the axis of this newly discovered ‘Jack’. Who was he? Well, he was the opposite of Eric in many ways. He was outgoing. He was easy with the girls, he was sporty enough but didn’t mind being philosophical. He wrote poetry. He acted. He directed plays. He wore sideburns and a quiff. He played bass. All these things I admitted to within that first day. All these things became me and were expected of me. Are me. Although, over the years as I’ve experienced more and reflected more, the two sides of my character have melded. Introversion and extroversion only dominate in certain contexts.

There seems to me little doubt that major changes can be effected at any time in a person’s life despite the obvious caveat that the later one leaves it the harder it becomes because one’s history and one’s current circumstance tend to combine to force one’s ‘self’ into the straitjacket of social expectation. A close friend told me, when dying, that a sudden revelation in the previous weeks had led this individual to a sense of a life misplaced, of cards badly played, of an unnecessary subordination to social forces. Of a sense of loss.

I feel a lot better for being Jack with a bit of Eric going about his business happily underneath than the other way round; a timidly unassuming fellow with an increasingly frustrated other self wanting to burst from its constraints.

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

www.chronometrpublications.me

Twitter @profjacksanger

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 16:22:00 +0100

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

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 12:20:00 +0100

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“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?

www.azimuthtrilogy.com

www.chronometerpublications.me

@profjacksanger for tweets

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Sun, 14 Jul 2013 14:54:00 +0100

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

Swimming in the Occult

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Sat, 6 Jul 2013 13:01:00 +0100

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.

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.

noreply@blogger.com (EJS) — Sun, 30 Jun 2013 12:07:00 +0100

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.)