Perfection in the Commonplace

On Building a Suspension Bridge; Over the Via Failure

Safari of a Patchwork Pilgrim

‘To see the world in a grain of sand.’

 

Why would a non-entity spend ten years writing what appears to be a Life, a Chronicle? Either she is very self-absorbed or so divorced from the world of publishing (and discretion) that she has not heard that ‘only celebrities write their lives.’ And even they employ ghostwriters to afford plausible deniability. Memoirs from non-entities are permitted provided they confine themselves to the ‘problem, trauma, solution’ or the ‘I was blind and now can see’ formulas and decently sign off. Memoirs are for the triumph of the human spirit against recognisable odds in limited time frames. The formula is now so well known that books title themselves ‘This is not a Pity Memoir’ to reassure a reader that empathy may not be needed.

So, what possessed me to write what, at first glance, looks like a Tolstoyan epic of self-importance?

Why was my far-from-mundane life worthy of recording?  I am aware that an explanation will, in the face of prejudice, read like special pleading. So be it. Perhaps that is what it is. It feels more like an olive branch to avert more of what I know so well already or to give it a moment’s pause.

My life has been suspended in conflict, stretched between alternatives with equal claims of dominance. In the world of academia, the lure of Oxbridge erudition summoned quite early, falling like rain in the arid parsimony of a South African education. So, too, did the sophisticated culture of the allegedly ‘Sceptred Isle’ with its literature and poetry. More than half my life was spent encountering the heartless competitiveness of that seductive allure and so much unscratched superiority. The other half needed to recover the innocence of hope, the generosity of hard labour, and the gifts of perfectly timed interventions that, in deeds, really helped me see.

There were visionary interruptions from three-dimensional ‘advisors’, some deceased, some contextually bizarre, and a diet of experiences, each challenging the primacy of material ‘reality’. An illuminating NDE in which I met my formidable grandmother, an out-of-body maiden flight over the Atlantic, many snakes and birds behaving contrary to normal habits, as though to sample a variety of manifestations to intermittently remind me that things were not as they once seemed. These ‘harbingers’ were not surrounded by auras, pink clouds, or dulcet music; they merely slid in, signalled their presence and slid out. Each showed me another dimension and evaporated as if to keep uppermost the need to re-appraise everything: ‘Now you know better, integrate and make sense of it all’.

The suspension of the bridge I seek to build is between two worlds.

One is lodged in the ‘I thought of it first’ intellect, the sifting analytic, cut-and-thrust of ideas, in which claims of priority, ownership, and peer approval are staked by licensees who have the requisite letters after their names. They talk amongst themselves, and their backs are turned against anyone they have not heard of. By slow degrees, they have boxed themselves in, creeping slowly from classical mechanics towards quantum entanglement, a tangled knotted argument getting close to the limits of intellectual grasp. Beyond the impregnable laws they have stanchioned and across which they have tramped for so long. Perhaps in anticipation of their cage, they built CERN underground and put up a statue of Kali outside to four-harm the gods that don’t exist, but only those with security clearances enter. They keep their machinations dark. For they, and all of us, are in the dark. We allowed them the reins, and we were driven into Heisenberg cat uncertainty. No God, no hope. Y’all are ants; get used to it.

Nobody is ready to open that box. Uncertainty is like chaos; it can be utilised in many ways.

 They talk of ‘entanglement’ and ‘synchronicity’ ‘non-locality and superposition’ and produce random number generators to show that thought moves the needle on probability by 0.5 of a degree. Is there some worm in the works? Whatever it is, it is sequestered and already claimed or suppressed. Glimpses escape. David Bohm talked of the explicate order to which most of us, the hoi polloi, are confined and the exclusive implicate order that is visible through double-slit experiments that show instantaneity and entanglement between particles that are also waves. The invisible scratches from collisions have ‘spin’, and ‘colour’, and the behaviour of one instantly changes the behaviour of its twin. These defy the limits of the speed of light and suggest deeper laws underpin the laws long familiar. I may already be out of date on all that, but whatever, there is no need for the hoi polloi to worry their little heads about any of that. That dead-alive cat stays in its dark box.

The other world, hovering outside the mathematical barriers of exclusion, has intuited that their longings and instincts for deeper laws of spirit or the presence of God or angels (or just the improbability of meeting their partner) feel there is a world beyond. They read the mystics, call themselves recovering Catholics, lapsed Jews, escaped Jehovah’s Witnesses, and say they are ‘on the path’. This collective, ‘ah bless’ world of nodding heads is kinder company, although the food they serve is souffle-like, an air of ebullient expectation, good to smell and taste but little of solid ballast. Hunger reasserts itself quite quickly. as does the pursuit of another chef.

Sharp ‘yeah but’ knives deflate it, and spiked questions are met with wide eyes of reproach. 

They derive strength from affirmations, mantras, meditation, other people’s NDEs, and sneaky Tarot readings, gleaning what straws they can from that corroborative intellectual world. It blinds them with hypotheses they only half understand but which seem to legitimise the search for deeper truth and the longing to open the box—to see or save the cat and replace uncertainty with something solid. The ah bless world also has its unwritten exclusions, its suspicions of academic reductionism, its soft syllables, and it tells its stories with a defiant chin. So how do you explain THAT?

Both hover near the Book of Revelations, call up biblical prophecies and echo words in the gospels, and some thump those echoes; others avert their gaze, uncomfortable with doctrines they believed they had outgrown but which seem to be reasserting their claims.

These two worlds are beginning to interlace fingers, but behind their backs and very tentatively.

My life has been straddled across that divide, with allegiances to both, seeking languages to connect them. In defence of my most recent, I will clarify all the failed attempts that preceded it. Before snorting in derision at this last attempt, I need you to know about the number of closed doors I tried first. I should add that this final attempt is aided by my being quite close to the exit. I don’t have to worry about libel laws; almost all of my characters are now safely on the other side. The shoes flung will perhaps hit a final closing door.

In 1970, I wrote a paper called A Theory of Involution. It followed a turbulent time of being catapulted into the superposition of successive ‘many worlds’ experiences. Decoherence is a fancier word than the commonly used ‘insanity’. I was twenty-nine, and I had broken the Newtonian Great Law given to me at birth (mainly because my father had run off and left my mother with the disgrace of me). ‘Thou shalt never betray a marriage’. Years of wretchedness later, by doing just that, I had lost every connection to family, country, money or stability and was cast upon a rip tide that tumbled me into experiencing the superposition of thought that could move mountains. Many anchorites have claimed that giving up material things is the first step. My ‘material attachments’ had simply been surrendered or taken, but it came to the same thing.

The pillar left to me was a sharp perch, but it afforded new and panoramic views.

Decoherence was a wild, exhilarating and dangerous sea. To find a way back, I knotted a string theory, one that would guide a return to the level sands of seeming sobriety. Time was short, so I used the scientific language available, and I kept it condensed; it was much too condensed. What was obvious to me was far from obvious to the Darwinian gospels ruling at the time or its new pulpit occupied by Watson and Crick, waving their atheistic proof, the caduceus of DNA. Mine was an academic paper and still addressed to that world which I over-respected and hoped to enter.

It failed utterly. No, it more than failed. Apart from three eminent supporters (whom others later accused me of faking), it was contemptuously derided. Instead of an introduction to academia, I was cast onto the shingle of bare survival, where gifts and miracles provided all I needed. My explicate order was penetrated and enlivened by constant affirmations of the implicate order until its synchronicity was hardly surprising. They were not constant, nor could they be taken for granted (for they were not in my gift- willing is not receiving), but ‘ask and it shall be given’ happened synchronously and often.

My theory, aka intellectual reduction, had been ignored or ridiculed, but the life I set upon living instead confirmed every precept, doctrine and dictum that was applied to quantum theory. Linear sequences worked equally from the future as from the past. Instantaneity and linkages worked as easily from memories as from imagination. The world of emotions has its causations, and books fed those just as hunger would cook dinner. Encounters surfed spacetime, ignoring the predictable, rhythmical tides. What affects one affects all; nothing is irrelevant, not country nor family, not deprivation nor abundance. Everything is important.

The Book of Life has strong biblical overtones. How else do myths derive their power? But from re-cognition?

In being denied entrance to the narrow, dark doors of academia, I was compelled to ride the wide plains of an extra-ordinary life, with its bracing winds, its sunlit slopes and encounters with new sages who held hammers or chisels, or simply walked past and dropped a suggestion. No longer a theory needing mathematical proof, quantum consciousness ruled life. Once accepted, it became confident and purposeful.

 What did die was doubt in the validity of my experience. On the difficulty of conveying it, much doubt remains. I knew that Involution and the DNA spiral that secured, encoded and transmitted was the language not just of my own life but my link to the life of all others, human, plant and animal. Not only had my life endowed the languages to rewrite Involution, but it had concentrated on little else. So dogged and focused had it been, it was difficult to escape the conviction that my life had one singular intention: the production of a particular book. I was being prepared and endowed merely to be its scribe.

The languages to master were not merely the specialist dialects of academic disciplines but the much more important languages of emotion: stoicism, dedication, envy, jealousy, calculated destruction, but also the all-encompassing love that sustained. It sustained creativity and musical composition, and it expressed itself in paintings and the changing cycles of design, the foliate curvature of the pre-Raphaelites into the hard edges of Art Deco. The sumptuous richness of romantic Brahms and Mahler pared away by the stringy sinews of Stravinsky, Ravel and Britten. After years of so rich a confirmation, it deserved another attempt to convey it.

I would tempt the snapping dogs of academia with rich morsels they knew and loved, their own quasi-saints, their geniuses, and their breakthrough eureka insights.

Using their own chronology, I would lead towards Involution with all the multiplicity of their own superposed evidence. For ten years, I studied in depth the history of science and retraced the chronology of re-penetrated memory, which had secured, in the vaults of DNA, the journey of mankind. Individuals had brought out the plums of recovery, geniuses, most of them initially ridiculed too.

And like my own, I discovered the lives of geniuses had determined and endowed their obsessions. There was an aroma of congruence between the life each lived and the shape of the discipline that absorbed them. Their hunger for completion or compensation explained their search for perfection or connection or simply a clean, start-again sheet. Their country predisposed them, too, geology in Britain, chemistry in France, rules of construction in Italy, as well as their father’s trade, to follow or flee from.  The scientific theorists, plodding through analysis with an eye to a metaphorical microscope, failed to observe the band of musicians or the painters accompanying them. Both composed the increasingly solid, almost photographic, ‘enlightened’ world of Newton before dissolving gradually towards the uncertainties of quantum theory.

The musicians and painters were entangled with science all along and before the word was coined.

From the reductionism of Mondrian or the sod-it excesses of Jackson Pollock, we have arrived at ‘what’s that trying to say, exactly’? Now Steve Reich ‘composes’ silences and rappers yak repeated monotony like early African drums. Structure has dissolved in perspective and in composition. We are back at the beginning as, through created chaos or by risking black holes, CERN tries to usurp the Creator.

Round two of Involution required ten years of study simply to excavate the chronology of its seminal thinkers before I began to assemble it. The weight of the history of science and the detail of its important articulations, plus painting and music as congruent evidence, was the history (give or take a Rumi or a Jabir) of Western Civilisation. Six Gibbon-like attempts foundered in chapter three. I realised that I was again bowing to the demands of academia- substantiating every point made with supportive evidence, simply to offer Involution again for target practice. Science collectively knows its history. Why should I provide it again and overload the lumbering cart I was endeavouring to turn through 180 degrees?

When its axles were already embedded in ‘factual’ mud? Some of it very dry and compacted.

Instead, I wrote this different history as a poetic Odyssey through recorded time, narrated by two characters, Reason (arguing for science) and Soul (keeping pace with art and music). I suppose it was a first autobiography, threaded on the spiral of DNA beginning in pre-history and ending the day before yesterday. Nothing personal, though, playing safe, staying with ‘theory’ but softening persuasion in poetry. It is the book for which Safari was the necessary companion. One theoretical, one pretty harrowing, but once saddled, Life galloped or lingered where its lessons chose.

N.B. An understanding of the mirror coils of DNA gives meaning and relevance to the linkages and bonds of each nucleotide-based A-G T-C pair. I am presenting the context of this impertinent/presumptuous work for that same reason. Without the entire, these sequences have no context and could code no information. Matter cannot ‘inform’ but only reveal information. Greg Braden has found God’s signature coded in any language, in every cell. The whole gives meaning to the parts. In tracking the history of science, I was attempting to sequence the content of DNA. In its slow acquired sequences lay the book of human experience. What came earlier made space for what came later, modified or permitted it. Those who remember will acknowledge that in those early days, it was heresy to suggest that DNA could be changed at all! It was only read as code but never edited or rewritten. They called 96% of it ‘junk’; such waste is nowhere to be found elsewhere in nature. (In answer to other glaring absurdities, epigenetics has nosed in and suggested that laws of determination can be less determined but still constrained by new, humanly conceded laws. Science never gives up its authority over Creation, does it?)

Actually, the CIA knew about editing and cutting all along in their Mk Ultra (Meinung Kontrollieren?) torture chambers, but I digress…

Involution: An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God fared only slightly better than its arid original. Science does not do heresy, not even wrapped in poetry (albeit simple and not overly allusive) but nor does the ah bless fraternity open a book about historic science. NDEs are fine, but DNA is now for passé pedants, genealogy and forensic analysis.

I can already hear the sceptic, ‘If such guidance was active, why did it not guide the success of the book, too?’ To that, I have no answer. I can whisper a suggestion that ‘perhaps just formulating a hypothesis and demonstrating evidence for it is enough to seed the Akashic meadow. Things fertilise underground?’ Certainly, the simultaneous eurekas that coincided across continents throughout the history of science would suggest something like it. Darwin and Wallace, Leibniz and Newton, and the explosive simultaneity of the Renaissance across all countries, When the time is ripe for certain things they appear at different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring’ (Farkas Bolyai)

A piccolo will penetrate /The deep ocean of a unison bass.

So, finally, I arrive at why I wrote a book subtitled ‘A Life.’ I wanted to reach the reader uncommitted to either of the two worlds, neither the thrusting scientist nor the ‘on the path’ spiritual seeker. My life had suggested that it was Life that was on(to) the Path! Current mass awakening suggests that the narrowing Path looks pretty inevitable and in a hurry. Life as Pied Piper is blowing loudly now.

I had served a long sentence with so-called science, but it had left some loyalty to rational rigour. I had soaked in mysticism and knew that my mystical experiences had followed familiar lines and often been echoed. Mine were special only insofar as they shone out to lace the life I was led to pursue. The life had substantiated the truth of a theory, better than any argument or succession of facts could have done.

But here’s the rub. An emotional journey cannot be recovered by selecting chosen events. Miracles happen to the heart first, the despairing, starving heart and then the confused or seeking mind. A reader invited to understand its perfection cannot do so through anecdotage or even a well-crafted short story. A miracle appears like a cuckoo’s egg in a weaver’s nest. The weaver bird has meticulously attached her nest to the smallest flexible twig over water. Both the narrowness of the twig and the water will protect her eggs from malign serpents. The appearance of the miracle egg is the usurper of all her preparations and binds those selected straws, that careful design, in ways that only the bird understands. She reads the opportunism, the timing, and the fragility of her nest to support the weight of an uninvited liability that will harness her future. In ways she might have preferred to be spared! 

So it is with miracles; they are only understood through identification and empathy with those to whom they happen.

They have authority, not always welcome but always imperative. They are equally beyond the reach of the hissing snakes of dismissive scepticism. An egg in a nest? No big event… To understand why they are miraculous demands reconstruction and detail, evocation and an emotional nakedness. A strip search to palpitation and candour. Not for the faint-hearted writer or the risk-averse reader. It needs time, too, to build the emotional portraits of love denied and thirst unslaked, the empty vessel being first emptied, the barren dark which light will crack, and new vision take root.

The sudden appearance of a shining oasis is proportional to the long desert of longing.

My explicate chronology will ring familiar bells, although its landscapes may be new. It was in the details that love resides (alongside the devil). Unlike a ‘Journey’ with intent, a Safari has no known destination. It is the travel that is important. If I was going to ask a reader to saddle for this ride, the least I could do was to offer the oases of reflection and some pleasures. I hope they are found in unique and accidental (or maybe not accidental) philosophers we meet along the way, the load-bearing Sherpas, and the commemoration of the country of huge generosity, spontaneity and beauty but reviled internationally, the seduction of the English language, its pastorale of poetry and the summons, by the poetic record, of unchanging England.

I have left it late to spare almost all those who travelled with me. Most peeled away.

The writer who summoned me, all along, perhaps the greatest English novelist of all time, was condemned, called mad, and, despite her genius, denied burial in Westminster Abbey. George Eliot was both an inspiration and a comfort. All these wrote my Book of Life.  Through its conflicts and tensions between competing claims of love, sacrifices had to be made, and those were consoled by the confirmations of deeper and wider miracles of superposed wave-like ‘interference’. I have come to see that my whole life was a double-slit experiment. Each slit, one on each half of my screen, mirrored the other, with identical names, ages, people and pattern repetition. Each half, lived sequentially, affected the other instantly. The present laid down the circumstances needed long hence, into the as-yet-unlived future. The future pulled just as certainly as the past pushed.

Those who believe in reincarnation are halfway to the ‘Many Worlds’ theory of existence.

The present life is but a chapter in the personal great novel, and, as in all good novels, there is a foretaste of the future and legacies from previous chapters. The legacies may equally be from other people’s past lives, since our cells share a common tongue. From whence came my terror of fire and snakes? Why did Mont Segur fill me with a nameless dread? Why did I pick up German, a language I thought I disliked, much more easily than Italian, which I loved? Why did any orthodox religion repel, but the monastic life both called and repelled with equal magnetic force?

The available chapter of one life is all we have to scrutinise. In its patterns, its echoes and repetitions, and its extraordinarily timed synchronicities, we are approaching the implicate order of other, previous and future lives, our own and other peoples’, for we are all one in the eternal present. We share almost all of our DNA information. It holds the past but also the future, implicate.

By taking a reader into the minutiae of my extraordinary revelatory life, I hoped to offer the ‘Footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage which we did not take/
Towards the door we never opened/Into the rose garden.’

The door may not have been opened yet. But the rose garden in every mind awaits the opening of that door.

 I also wanted to pay tribute to those disappearing times, that expansive African landscape of ‘yes, let’s, what’s to lose’ and the European one of ‘oh dear, not sure…better not,’ because in the contrast between them lies loyalty, longing and spontaneity. Like oil in the Kilner jars of lasting value, it is emotions that conserve the freshness of memory. I hoped that by opening those up and serving memory refreshed, a reader without preconceptions or affiliation might intuit that it is Life itself that offers both science and spirituality. It needs no doctrines of any kind. This book uses my life simply as a magnifying glass to reveal similar patterns and miracles in every other life.

My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?”

**
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: humankind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”

― T. S. Eliot Four Quartets

Book Order Options

The eBook of Safari is now available for pre-order on Amazon (before November 20th). I have made it as cheap as permitted (£1,99) initially, in the hope of early punters who might take a chance and/or post a review. The price will increase to £6.00 after the publication on November 20th. You can find it here: The eBook has a few enlivening colour plates that are unfortunately unaffordable in the printed book. Here is a sample

Ndaba and Windy...

The print-on-demand book is available on the same page, available on November 1st. With an elegant font and spacious page layout, it is designed to make reading effortless. Although it is a big book, the chapters, although chronological, are self-contained, and can be dipped into individually. Please share the link to the page with any friend or contact who may be interested.

A limited first edition, on silk paper with thirteen colour plates, is available in the UK. My email address can be found here (scroll to the bottom right) if you are in the UK and would like a copy (postage elsewhere is very expensive). It might make a handsome Christmas present (to yourself) or a friend.

Obviously, orders will greatly help launch the work, and any review goes the extra mile. If you might read sooner and consider posting a review ( not obligatory, reviews are always a gift), I could provide a PDF by email. Contact me here (bottom of page on the right).