Short Takes XVI

 Short Takes

Alan Gould

12/3/09 In two expensive minutes

Today, in two expensive minutes, Dr Khanna the eye-doctor pooh-pooh’d the OPSM lady’s fear that I had rust accumulating around some scar tissue from my old corneal ulcer. “Mister Gould, you have the best eyes I have seen today,” declared Dr K, and when I confessed to my reckless use of workshop sanders, grinders and the like, he added with a long look, “You are lucky to have the eyes you have.”

I was grateful for the assurance, though my ideal of sight would be to possess for my ship-modelling those pupils-within-pupils of the raptors so that I might isolate and focus, say, a fugitive signal-halyard block that is one eighth of an inch long, with its hole and groove incised to suggest authenticity at the size of a lentil.

And yet, in Dr K’s waiting room a few minutes before my own examination, in my mind’s eye I had I seen something else when, reading Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi, a chance sentence had attracted me. The gist of this sentence was that humans were the species who, as a matter of basic instinct, sought a relationship with the infinite.

Now spiritual matters get playful, often undercutting, treatment in this deft novel, but I recognised this phrase to be immediately true for my own turbulence on matters metaphysical. Here, in this simple proposition, placed before our consideration as naturally as our shadows are placed for us to follow or lead, was both the rebuttal of the atheist case and the intractable bafflement of any liturgical program.

You are the sum of successfully selfish genes, says the frowning Prof D in Martel’s book.

You are something else again, qualify those long, historical creeds, playfully, fleetingly in the same novel.

I cannot tell between the two of you, I contribute my own reaction to this debate. And yet …

And yet I know that I know something from that claim that places “as a matter of basic instinct” my wish for “a relationship with the infinite” among my other instincts that secure my more transient needs.

We want a relationship with the infinite. I gather this is a common enough observation among anthropologists and theologians alike. And yet to locate this want as an instinctual part of our being means that the God-business cannot be efficiently eradicated like a troublesome weed. The word exalted arises from our experience and hopes for a reason.

Such at least was my meditation in that waiting room of folk hoping-to-see-better.

2/12/12 The provisional

If I subtract God’s presence from how I perceive the World, my being must form a mere series, not a progress, of experiences. Where I include God, my sense of my being, while not empowered to realise reliably any Whole wherein my existence has its particular place, is at least alerted to the condition of Wholeness.

This brings me no conviction as to the existence of Deity. But it does allow me some light on the idea that, if value can be attached to Life in anything other than a casual way, the presence of Deity needs vitally to be one of the conditions of that. This is not a vision, but might be a workaday pro-vision.

2/9/13 Ego, Other, Soul

How might my Self construct its meaning?

1.Sensation runs through me; I am gratified, affronted, absorbed by an activity, bored by some recital, moved by some encounter. I squirm to recall some gaucherie, chafe when I miss an opportunity to be clinching in some matter. In sum, I watch all these different sensations and live familiarly with the fabric of them. I trust, not to their accreting a sense of my being’s wholeness, but certainly to a sense of its continuity, its fluidity.

2.In addition, uncomfortably, I sometimes glimpse how others might assess me. There is the show-off, the too-voluble correspondent. There is Gouldilocks’s humour, slow or uneasy in response, his presence in company agreeable without being compelling. And when I glimpse this “satellite” perspective on myself, I glimpse the interval of space that lies around me, as it lies around all the billions on our planet who are suffered without being especially attractive or repellent.

3.And third, I can wonder how God might see me. Here I make the provisional assumption of Deity’s existence, and the surer assumption that, whatever this viewpoint might be, it will be encompassing. That is, by the very nature of omniscience, it will take what was incipient in my life’s power to express its living to be at one with the actuality of how that living was expressed.

It is the recognition of this third perspective that is so extraordinary among the human powers of self-realisation. Luminously it is as much part of Evolution’s story as any account of speciation. We cannot be omniscient, but we can conceive omniscience and imagine its viewpoint to be one where knowing might be equal for each being as for Being itself. Yes of course! This has the status of wondering, not deduction. Meaning can be incipient in an origin, but emerges only in an outcome that allows sight of beginning, middle and end.

10/10/13 Angina and Dave Cleary

After a trouble-free interval, I experienced again last night some anginal pains in the left chest and left shoulder that persisted for ten minutes or so until I took a Cardiaprin. Most interesting was the dream from which I woke to consciousness of this pain.

It had me part of an audience, sitting in front of lofty Dave Cleary, the Woolverstone Hall Old Boy, dead from cancer in his early fifties and for whom I wrote an elegy in my 2001 collection of poems. Aware in the dream I had not spoken to him since schooldays, I turned to remark how I had received news of him during my brief exchange of e-mails with Ollie Bentley, another Old Boy. But an impediment in my speaking voice, caused by my some epiglottal flap at the back of my throat, made my message indistinct and I worried that Cleary, a somewhat severe senior boy who after school had won a Military Cross during fighting in Aden in the late 1960s, would lack the interest to engage in conversation with me. Even in the dream conditions I recognised this as anxiety over whether the grim senior/junior hierarchy of schooldays would truly be dissolved when adult chatted to adult.

Disheartened, I turned back towards the front, but found Cleary had leaned forward to me and said, “As a matter of fact I had not known how unsafe it was,” and immediately I knew this referred to the circumstances when he won his MC, and put me at ease that we were on terms where the old, grim castes were dissolved. Then I woke to the chest and shoulder pain that seemed to endure longer than I recalled from the past.

So what does this dream portend for me? There was release from old rigidities, yet here was also a voice from the dead arriving at a time where the cardiac hit-squad who will probably snuff me, as they did my mother and father, set up their vantage points. I watch, we all do, how imagination takes and converts from memory the imagery that will find a phantasmagoria to attend/explain the physiological turbulence of my body. Dream is an officer-of-the-watch, attendant with his codebook from the Unconscious to bring phantasmagoric narrative by way of explanation for the body’s inarticulate sensations.

Unless, as the ancients believed, this process happens in reverse. Being has also its non-material dimension. My dream does not decode Dave Cleary from the Unconscious. Rather, his discrete spirit arrived in my dream in order to precipitate my own transfer to that same dimension.

Meanwhile the motifs of impediment, mess, disempowerment, continue to be the keynotes of my dreaming as I add years. When were my limbs last ache-free, my hearing crisp, some epiglottal flap at the back of my throat not a spoiler of my easy breathing at the point of sleep? Does more of living become explicable the less of it we find we have actual power to live, until …

… until (fast-forward to 5/1/14) I woke this morning in hospital with no memory of how I got there. It seems Anne had heard me groan-snoring in my room, found me with blood issuing from the mouth. She had feared a coronary, called the ambulance. Out of nowhere, it seems, the hit-squad has set off a seizure in my bod. Dress rehearsal, fellows? The event caused me to bite my tongue savagely so that I cannot speak clearly. My torso muscles mutiny each time I try to move. Medical staff work on me, finding veins in the arm, adjusting the tubes on their sticking tabs, and I answer their questions in my slush-English.

14/9/13 Calendar moments

Why do I attach myself to this idea that time is not lost as we leave our calendar moments behind us?

I think it is to do with a human perception of the character of the energy within the unfolding Creation, that wherever the heartrending occurs, there is the sense of uncompleted business in a Universe that tells us how much, by the exactness of its processes, it likes to see a business through.

21/9/13 A dynamic

By nature, alas, I am a show-off, and recognise this impulse in my character from earliest memories. At the same time, the quality in character that intrigues me above all others is self-possession—that inner calm of the person who has nothing to prove.

How do these mental predispositions work, as though the busy electron must have its proton, irrespective of whether it is on the material plane or some other.

19/8/13 Ratty, Mole and Badger

Above all, The Wind in the Willows is about bonhomie, and partakes of that quality in that not very much can happen when everyone in a community is well-disposed. To the degree the book contains drama at all is due to wilfulness being abroad in this equable riverbank community.

Here is a most shrewdly paced tale if its chief purpose is to be read at children’s bedtimes. The chapters provide just enough animation and danger to engage young sympathies with these gentlemanly ferals in their various dens, while leaving nothing suspenseful between chapters. The path to sleep is shrewdly laid out. The wilfulness of Toad is appalling, but not threatening.

So what then must we make of Chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, where the little Otter goes missing, where Ratty and Mole search in their boat and have their encounter with Pan, who is also a death-signaller? Grahame’s own family circumstances were tragic, but his book precedes the death of his son by many years. So, as with J.M. Barrie and his eerie paternal friendship with the Davies family, there is with Grahame this equally uncanny anticipation by faery of a dreadfulness.

1/1/14 A senior moment

This evening in the last of twilight I walked out along our bridle path, passing within a metre or two of a group of smallish kangaroos that did not scare at my approach for all the ungainliness of my arthritic hips. No one else seemed to be abroad until one scantly clad young woman with no lights on her bicycle hurtled at me from the dark and was gone.

“Wow! Hi!”

“Good evening. Happy New Year.”

I covered the mile or so to my customary post, tapped it with my stick, turned about, had not gone far on my return when the left lens dropped from my spectacles onto the path. The dark was almost completely down. I peered but could not see that small, critical disc of plastic.

I wear multifocals and, too recently, they had stung me $400 from my curate livelihood. So, nothing for it but to get on my knees and pat the ground in search of them. For our high Monaro summer, I was wearing shorts so the gravel rasped my bare joints. Better therefore, I reasoned, to roll onto my side and conduct my search in the sprawled position, face a few inches from the ground, a senior gentleman athwart a public thoroughfare.

Earlier I had drunk my routine two tumblers of red plonk. But cask red has little effect on me, for I had inherited a good head for alcohol from my Icelandic mother who was not a drinker, but astonishingly unaffected when garrison life had plied the cocktails. Certainly I knew enough in this evening’s dark to be scrupulously methodical in my search for the lens. By careful grid, I patted the path, eliminating the tracts of it that were lens-less, and as I did so, it occurred to me …

… What if some night-stroller, or another young cyclist should materialise from the dark to find me sprawled here, conning the gravel as though looking for a dropped bottle of meths? I knew my grisly hips would prevent me regaining my feet with any dignity. And I knew, from caches of smashed sherry bottles, primitive humpies and scraps of rotting mattress foam, something of the hobo life that shares my dry mountain with the roos, foxes and frogmouths after dark. How improbable, therefore, would be the patter of this sixty-four-year-old with a stick, sprawled on the path, cheap red wine on his breath, declaring he’s looking for a lens that has dropped from his expensive spectacles.

“Show us your glasses, mate.”

“There, see? A screw loose.”

“Screw loose?” The silhouette would examine the defective glasses and maybe flash his small low-emissions-diode torch briefly in my face. Twilight is the worst time of day for trust to be established between one man and another. For trust one needs the trusted to show the charm that disarms the dark. I was scrabbling for my lens and apprehensive that Silhouette would step on it.

But I was spared; the silhouettes stayed away. I continued my methodical patting, my nose as close to the gravel as a chef’s to his sauce, and after an interval I located my plastic disc, pocketed it, waddled home on these hips that no longer like me, took my set of micro-screwdrivers and my phial of mini-screws and repaired my loose screw with an impressively steady hand.