They're not looking at you

(Occasionally I have thoughts that might actually be useful to someone.)

Do you worry about what other people might think about you, or think other people are judging you?

Usually they're not. Usually they are worried about what you think about them.

Learn not to care about what other people might think about you. Do what's right, keep doing your best, forgive yourself mistakes and keep going. Other people will come around in their own time.

C. S. Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress

Is it possible to change merely by hearing the word spoken?

The suggestion in C.S.Lewis's allegory The Pilgrim's Regress is that the quick way across the ravine from the intellectual desert of the 20th century to the island paradise is by Old Mother Kirk, in other words, the Church. But for some reason the hero, John, does not take that route.

The island paradise is glimpsed by John towards the beginning of the book. This island paradise is not a mere fantasy or daydream, rather it is a glimpse of the truth. Its nature is not defined, but I take it to mean the real Self, the heart of the world, the still small voice. John has a memory of reality. As you can see, my own ability to describe it in words fails, because it is one of those things that is prior to words, as I have discussed previously here and here.

My feeling is that simply hearing the word spoken is not enough - we must strive to understand it and to put it into practice. No amount of theoretical understanding about the chemistry and techniques of cooking can make us into chefs nor can a Haynes manual make us into car mechanics - we have to get our hands dirty and do it. The theory helps of course and is often essential, but it is nothing without practice. That is where real understanding comes from.

Yet hearing a sacred text spoken at least opens up thought, often a thought more useful than the many thoughts that come from other sources. And if we see something different in the text than is in the sermon, that too can be useful.

We are bombarded with thoughts and opinions, many of them without merit, mere opinion based on nothing. Some of these impressions are simply nasty, not something we would wish to become. Our mental and emotional lives are made of the stuff which we allow to come into us. To put ourselves in the way of hearing and seeing something better, whether at church or elsewhere, must change us.

Whether it will do more than change us, whether it will lead us to the island, will almost certainly require practice as well.

How to prevent terrorism on the tube

Could the Parsons Green bomber have been stopped by citizen action? Quite possibly.

We could widen our attention as little children do and probably spies do, too.

We all like to lose ourselves in our mobile phones or books on the usually uncomfortable tube ride to work. So if someone gets on the tube with a bomb and then leaves it there we are unlikely to notice it. What if we all took notice of our surroundings? Not necessarily all the time but just at stations, and note who gets on, what baggage they are carrying, and who gets off and whether they have forgotten their bag.

If only ten percent of us did this then the risk of a repeat incident on the tube would be much less.

I have the number of British Transport Police listed on my phone under BTP. Thus it would take at most six keystrokes to call them (phone - contacts - BTP - call). The number is 61016. If you commute in London, put it on your phone now, and stay alert at stations.

This also gives us opportunities to come into the present moment and out of the mist of imagination in which we dream into work.

Jane Austen on the banknotes, as predicted by Milton Marmalade

As predicted on page 198 of my magnum opus, A Mermaid in the Bath, as of 14th September there will be a picture of Jane Austen on the ten pound note.

This is a further demonstration of the inspired nature of my oeuvre.

From page 198 of the paperback edition:

...Half way through Milton addresses himself to you with the words ‘gentle reader... .’ Who does he think he is, Jane Austen? Anyway I hope they put her picture on the banknotes as it’s about time we had a woman on there. Mind you the Queen is on all of them isn’t she? Talking of Jane Austen, that would have been a good name for a car in the heyday of the British Motor Corporation, instead of the Austin Cambridge, like. Then the Morris Oxford would have been Jane Morris. As you no doubt know, Jane Morris was the muse of the Pre-Raphaelites. It must be nice being a muse and getting all that male attention.

Goodness, this Argentine wine is good! I’m feeling quite inspired now. Perhaps I’ll write that bodice-ripper myself and then I can ask Milton to help me with it while I snuggle up to him. Once I’m back in England. And I’m not living in a shed at the back of the Co-op. He’ll have to get a proper house.

The European dream

I imagine most people are getting fairly fed up with the topic of Brexit. So my 2p will be short.

Our local German bakery and deli has come up with a new biscuit. It is called the Europäischer, and it is round with blue icing and decorated in a circle with yellow stars. There is as yet no picture on the internet but I'm sure you can imagine it.

I didn't buy one as it looked a bit too biscuity and sugary, but it's a sweet little gesture of defiance. I like our local German bakery, it's a small island of quality in an otherwise slightly depressing line of shops. I try to order stuff in German as my own contribution to European solidarity.

Hardly a week goes by without some aspect of Brexit being potentially watered-down. We won't suddenly tell all the Poles, Germans, Lithuanians and others to up sticks and go, because we actually need them. We might continue to pay into the EC budget in order to keep tariff-free trade within the EC. We will probably keep the border between Eire and the six counties open. We shall have to retain in some form legal arrangements for deciding jurisdictions in cross-border legal matters, and we'll probably have to be subject to the European Court of Justice at least insofar as matters pertaining to trade with Europe are concerned. I don't know, I'm just repeating what is in the news.

No doubt there are some areas for which it will be pleasant to have sovereignty. We could sell jam (as defined in the UK) in pound jars, for instance. Less irksome bureaucracy would be nice. Less trivially, we could open up trade with countries such as Australia which suffered from trade barriers with us when the UK entered the EC. We can continue to avoid the problems inherent in the Euro currency as we have so far.

What is overlooked in all this is the European dream that I suspect underlies the whole European project. That is, the idea that a group of countries united by a common interest will not go to war with each other. People in power now had parents of the generation that lost relatives in the 1939-45 war (my uncle's headstone read that he was 'un aviateur Anglais qui mort pour la France'), and of course there has been brutal war and genocide on European soil in much more recent times. Perhaps because we live in an island that has not been successfully invaded (leaving aside the Battle of Medway) for almost 2000 years we as a nation are a bit complacent.

On the positive side there is something rather wonderful about acquiring a European and ultimately and international identity that celebrates unity in diversity. We as a mongrel nation from the earliest times should be able to understand that, what with our Royal Family having from time-to-time been French, Scottish, Dutch, German and even a bit Greek.

Anyway, my prediction is that when all's said and done we'll still be eating pizza and chorizo and we'll still have German bakeries and Polish shops and we'll still drink French wine and Kronenbourg and Guinness and play Mozart and read Yeats and we'll still be speaking our great mongrel language, absorbing and transforming foreign influences with hardly a blink as we always do.

Technology: taking back control

Somehow I can't do without my mobile phone, which packs as much computing power as a roomful of kit in the '70s. It helps me not get lost, enables me to read books or check the etymology of a word on the go (geeks simply migrate to available technology), check the weather forecast, share a calendar, pay for car parking without getting out of the car, buy stuff without even going outdoors, even video-phoning which in Dan Dare's future was still a phone attached to a wall.

The problem is that this thing can easily take over one's life, what with messages, emails and apps. One can get sucked into the phone screen and lose minutes or hours in some parallel universe of dreamlike disconnectedness, emerging later like some bewildered time-traveller. Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? - to quote the late great Freddie Mercury. It can drain energy if one is not careful.

“Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” warned Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emails. No, I don't want a Russian bride and I've no idea what the people are advertising whose emails are entirely in Cyrillic script. I'm considering blocking all emails with a .ru domain. Nor do I know why Chinese companies think I would want to buy bulk raw materials. I don't need Viagra or Xanax and I don't think that a computer program that shorts the stock market will make me rich. Somehow we get onto mailing lists of companies we've never heard of.

The company that hosts my email account blocked 726 spam emails in the last week. That's over 100 a day I'd have to sift through and delete if they weren't blocked automatically. Even of the 10-20 daily that get through there are usually fewer than half a dozen that I actually want to read.

Marking emails as spam is easy on a Mac using Mail, but I have yet to find a way of marking and blocking spam on an iPhone. There are apps that claim to do this, but then you have to give them access to your account details. How do we know we can trust them with our information? That is why I pay my ISP for spam blocking, and I still cannot mark emails that get through on my phone as spam. As for spam blocking, I have blocked the very persistent Anastasiia but now she has been replaced by Oksana. Sorry .ru, if any of my Russian friends want to contact me they'll have to get a gmail account.

Within my lifetime there was no internet and no email. If someone wanted to contact me at work they would have to bleep my pager and then I would have to find a phone and phone in. Needless to say when not at work and out of the house I was uncontactable.

Sometimes I feel a bit of nostalgia for the days when the world was a little less busy. If people wanted to write to me they'd have to write a letter, which meant there weren't that many of them, and the time taken to reply would necessarily slow the whole world down. There is also something soothing about the purposeful movement of an ink pen on paper.

We need to take steps to bring technology under control, so that it serves us rather than driving us. All advice welcome.

Stranger in a strange land - derealisation and realisation

(Somewhere in England) 

It is possible, for example while commuting to work, to entertain the fantasy that one has just this moment been put into this body going about its business, that one has come from somewhere else (perhaps a previous life which one has forgotten).

Luckily this body knows where it is going, and one knows that if one thought about it one would easily remember details such as what one's job is, one's home situation, loved ones and so on. But for the moment one doesn't pursue those thoughts. Therefore there is no need for any anxiety, yet at the same time one experiences the world as a stranger in a strange land.

The current Wikipedia article describes derealisation as "an alteration in the experience of the external world so that it seems unreal." However what I am describing makes the world seem more real. One realises that most of the time one is preoccupied with some thought or other, barely noticing one's surroundings. As a stranger freshly arrived from somewhere else one notices everything.

A similar phenomenon occurs when driving or walking to a new place. Even if the journey is quite short, it seems long, because one has to notice things in order to find one's way. The same journey when familiar seems short, and one remembers few details. It is possible to drive for an hour on a familiar route in perfect safety and remember nothing.

The Wikipedia article goes on to say that derealisation includes "feeling as though one's environment is lacking in spontaneity, emotional colouring, and depth." However with this experiment the world has more depth and colour, and things are generally brighter. If there is beauty, one notices it, sometimes in unexpected places.

Interestingly the Wikipedia article says that derealisation is related to depersonalisation, which is sense of unreality in one's personal self. There may well be an actual psychiatric or morbid condition characterised by this, but it is also of note that psychologists and philosophers have pointed out that the idea of 'self' itself has an unclear meaning, or even, the 'self' does not exist. Am I the same person I was yesterday? The one who decided to get up as soon as the alarm went off is the same as the one who decided to lie in for an extra 15 minutes instead? But this is a topic for another time.

I went in search of the original quotation, 'stranger in a strange land.' It comes from the King James Bible translation of Exodus 2:22 and is spoken by Moses in exile. I was also led to this excellent poem by Rita Dove. At the beginning of the poem Rita Dove quotes Emily Dickinson: "Life is a spell so exquisite, everything conspires to break it." It is by experiments like the one I describe, and others, that we can try to return to the magic of reality.