SAVING NOTHING.

............................. by Stanley

.....I am obsessional about backing-up my work on the computer. In the early days I had some nasty experiences where, at the touch of a wrong key, I lost some magnum opus I had been working on - a terrible sinking feeling when a whole thing just disappeared into cyberspace – gone! The loss was particularly appalling when I had written a passage or a turn of phrase that was just right. I knew that it having vanished I would never, never be able to produce it again. It was a sickening sensation of loss.
....Of course, I have no doubt that this was an entirely hubristic fantasy brought on solely by the vanishing, making the job I had lost more perfect than it really was. The fact of its disappearance magnified its impeccable aptness. Never before was such a wonderful turn of phrase ever written – and now it is lost for all time. Very much like a funeral eulogy heaped upon a deceased relative who was, after all, not all that great.
....I am sure that the last day of my life – assuming that I know it is the last and that I am still in reasonable shape – will be the most perfect day of my life. At least, that’s the way I’m imagining it. Why would I picture it like this? Because I know that the absolutely valuable is always on the verge of loss. It’s why we cry at something overwhelmingly beautiful. The exquisite always has the taste of nostalgia because we imagine ourselves looking back on it when it is gone.
....Or the darker side told by Macbeth that life is a tale “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. The romantic agony is that things must pass away, the flower must fade, beauty must turn to dust and all those poetic conceits.
....But deeper than the thief of time is something more philosophical, metaphysical, existential or something. I’m sure the mystics were right in saying that in the heart of being is nothingness. The ‘plenum’, the empty fullness, they called it - that out of which all creation arose.
....I don’t want to get all spiritual and start pontificating about things that can’t be talked about, but there is a very practical sense in which all this touches our lives. It’s interesting that a person who is depressed will say in a few simple words the way they feel: ‘There’s nothing, absolutely nothing’, they will say – meaning there is nothing in life. And, in a sense, this is absolutely true. And it is a truth that cannot be avoided. In fact, if you run away from it, it will bite you in the bum – like when the stuff on my computer vanished down the gurgler; or when you wake up in the morning sick with dread at the meaninglessness of another day.
.....Whenever you hit the blues you will find yourself being terribly ‘negative’ – the greatest sin in popular culture. But more we try to be ‘positive’ the more the Great Nothingness threatens to swallow us in unguarded moments.
.....No, we have to do the exact opposite – we have to save nothing.
.....There is a very precise felt-sense, like a physical sensation, at the heart of a bluesy mood. Elusive, because one is so used to avoiding it or trying to chase it away. But if you concentrate you’ll find it there. Sit down with it for a while, tune into it, get in touch and have it. Don’t think or get distracted, just tune in to the felt-sense of it, stay with it for a while without doing anything about it, and you will find the mood will shift. Save the nothing and, amazingly enough, something creative will come out of it.
.....Many times I’ve caught myself at a loose end looking around for something to do. On the face of it, that’s quite OK. But there was a sort of background tension behind it; and when I looked a bit closer there was a vague feeling of fear, noticeable enough to make me sit down and focus on it. What came out was a memory of childhood, of being utterly, desperately, frantically bored.
.....I’m the only child. It’s Sunday afternoon and all the grown ups have had a big Sunday roast dinner. Now everybody is having a sleep for Gods sake and I am suppose to be quite. I am utterly and frantically bored because there is nothing to do. But ‘bored’ isn’t quite right because it’s such a frantic feeling. It’s as though I am faced with immanent death – The Big Nothing. And I will do anything, anything, not to experience that – even now!
.....That’s a little bit of me I’ve rescued from oblivion, paradoxically by saving nothing.

WORLD ENOUGH, AND TIME.

....................by Stanley

......I remember vividly – something Somerset Maugham said: “Now that I am 90 I have more time than I have ever had”. Being young then myself it seemed an amazing thing to say. Being young, as the young are, I was always in a hurry. A hurry in life and a hurry in love. That must have been why Andrew Marvel’s poem To His Coy Mistress appealed to me so much. You remember how it goes:

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love's day…
But at my back I always hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lieDeserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv'd virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.

.....It is as though time has always been my enemy. If I had been born into another family or another culture I could have been a mad Christian sure that the end of the world was nigh. It’s why I can’t wait in queues for anything; it’s why I can’t waste time and have to keep busy; it’s why I am obsessively on time for appointments – I hate to waste other people’s time; it’s why the goal has been more important than the journey; it’s why I have a clock in every room; and why when asked if I am hungry I look at my watch.
......It’s not all my fault though. My training for time wasn’t good. I was breast fed on schedule – brought up on time’s rack, you might say. When the great moment did come it was so valuable that I guzzled and was sick. Then there was the incredible drag of waiting and the ache for the next time. Not a terribly good mindset for the future.
......Maybe that was why, like Andrew Marvell in that poem, I was always in a hurry for love. I seemed to have an ongoing feeling that I would miss out. Lovemaking was always a bit of a gallop too. But like time, the scarcity of love, is endemic in our culture. That’s why we talk so much about sex.
......Even the Pope is now talking about sex. He goes all the way to Australia to apologise for the fact that over 100 catholic priests have been sentence in Australian courts for sexual offences. That’s only in Australia, never mind Ireland or the rest of the world where they have covered up their juicy sins more successfully. What he doesn’t apologise for is the reason Catholic Priests – and really the rest of Christendom – is so obsessed with sex. Why doesn’t he get up say:
“Look fellars, I’ve just had an Infallible Idea – this is really ridiculous – its time we caught up with the 20th century. Why don’t you priests all go out and get married. After all, Paul said, ‘Its better to marry than to burn with passion’ – and you priests Down Under seem to be burning with quite a of lot of passion !”
......But he won’t say this will he? In the religious area of life time has really stood still. It is as though we are still in the Middle Ages. The body is still the enemy. Part of our culture is frozen in time, much as part of an individual can be frozen in the past. Just like my love life was frozen when my mother was afraid of feeling sexual when she was breast feeding me. Love and sex are part of the melody of life that sing together.
.......Some women even have a full blown orgasm when they are breast feeding – its nature’s reward for doing her work properly. But in the religious, archaic corner of our culture its God’s work that’s supposed to be done – not Nature’s. And we pay for it dearly. Each one of us – we pay for it because we can’t help embodying the neurosis deep within us, whether we are Christians or not. We are not quite as bad as the Pontiff, but inside we each carry a little frozen, archetypal Jesus, stuck back in time, throwing his shadow across our lives – while we hurry forward, knowing somehow we are missing out on something.

JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING.

.....‘Something’ is the most beautiful word in the language. Well, if not the most beautiful, certainly one of the most useful in something we call psychology. There you are, I just did it. It saved me from having to define psychology and fuss around. We all know there is something called psychology, whatever it is.
.....That’s what’s so wonderful about ‘something’. You can refer to ‘something’ without saying what it is, or even knowing what it is:
.....Quick! Something terrible has happened.
.....I think there’s something wrong.
.....You ought to take something for that cold.
.....I’m not sure what I want to say – but I know I want to say something.
.....I don’t feel anything’ – ‘Oh surely you feel something!
.....There really is something about that man, something
attractive, wouldn’t you say?
.....Or, we could reach into the depths of philosophy and talk about the ‘brain’ v. ‘consciousness’ problem. The neuroscientist tells me I’m a bunch of neurons firing in a most wonderful organic computer, my brain.
.....The philosopher says: ‘yes, but what about my consciousness. It seems a different order of things’.
.....‘Prove it’, says the neuroscientist.
..... 'Well, says the philosopher, ‘there is undeniably something – whatever it is – I call my conscious
............ awareness’.
.....‘'There I have to agree’, says the neuroscientist, ‘we definitely do refer to something we call our consciousness. For you and for me there is definitely something.
.....And back to the land of psychology: ‘something’ is particularly useful when you are working at the edge, where you are feeling your way forward, the meaning of a dream maybe or what is behind an emotion. New thoughts, new feelings, can be barely perceptible – scarcely hint at the back of the mind, an awareness only of something. At that point it is a something that could be anything. It’s vague, but referring to it as something helps you not to dismiss it. I get people to use it all the time in therapy. Very useful to name it without yet knowing what it is – while you work out what it is.

...........................THE KIM HILL PROGRAM

.....There are some really interesting people who interview Kim Hill each Saturday morning on the National Program; the best are those who don’t interrupt her too much.

Stanley