One Life, Live It!

Tonight, I don’t feel like writing to no one. I’d rather be writing notes to Someone – but, dammit, I can’t; thanks to my erratic internet connection and low stationery supplies, it’s just me and the keyboard tonight.

Liberating in its way, I suppose?

I have a theory that all communication (including writing, of course, but going further to encompass all the rest) is looking for an audience – and I’ll stand by that theory. But I suppose when there is simply No Audience, all that self consciousness/consideration can fall away, and one can write … what one wants. Whatever comes to mind, without fear of disapprobation, of boring anyone, of going too far …

No. It’s no use. I don’t want to go too far tonight; the kind of writing I had in mind was more the kind of chatting-over-coffee, first-drink-in-the-pub, idle-talk-whilst-out-running kind of writing. Nothing profound, nothing controversial – just this and that, odds and sods – the detritus of the day, you might say. And why do we want to talk about that stuff, anyway, if it’s so insignificant? I say ‘we’; I think that’s fair – I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this urge to share. Well, I’ve thought about that a bit – and I think it’s a kind of Affirmation of Being. I’m not trying to be overly grand here, so bear with me: it strikes me that we’re all, consciously or otherwise, living AT one another in the normal run of things. Look at Facebook; look at Twitter. It’s thronging with folk desperate to make the day to day minutiae of modern life matter. It’s not enough that a thing should happen: before it can really count, it’s got to be told.

Of course, I think we’ve got a little extreme these days. Go to a gig, and what do you see? A sea of cameras and mobile phones, recording Now to keep for Later. Evidence, you see. I Was There. I saw it. Tourism’s overtaken with this compulsion to record; I’ve been there myself; I’m as guilty as the next person. Too busy framing the perfect picture of the Taj Mahal to really take it in. Too busy fumbling for my camera to soak up that stunning sunrise; composing the email or text that’s going to … well, what? There are plenty of uncharitable answers to that one – but I think, at root, it’s is nothing more than the desire to connect. To prove that one Is. Not enough to have seen a thing; done a thing; enjoyed it for itself; been fulfilled by the experience or swept away by the beauty. We hardly know how, any more. Only when we see ourselves – our thoughts, our dreams, our days – reflected back at us in the eyes and minds of others, acknowledged and refracted in the world’s commentary, do we truly feel that we have lived.

And is there anything wrong with that? Well, I’ve thought a bit about that one, too, and the answer’s no – but also yes. Let’s say, It Depends. Without this compulsion to communicate, to share, to interact, I’m not sure that we’d be fully human. They say, I think, that language is one of the defining features of the species. But perhaps it’s more the need for language; the need to be understood and to connect; than the fact of language itself that defines us.

That said, there must be limits. Yes! When I am King we’ll see some changes; oh, yes … But seriously. My worry is that this excess of sharing, the facebooking and the tweeting, the snapping, the texting and the filming, are getting between us and our Real Lives. One Life, Live It. Wise words indeed; spotted on the back of a touring caravan heading south on the A1. I like to think it wasn’t a caravan kitted out with plastic flowers and a satellite dish. Technology is a sweet temptation that we need to learn to resist. Yes, me too, absolutely; I’m working on it! Take that camera out of the picture. iPhone back in your pocket, please. Get out there! Let your mind do the recording; live a little; dream a little. Get back inside your head; be alone with yourself a little. Without urge to communicate, we wouldn’t be quite human: I stand by that.

BUT – and here’s my caveat – live first. Live, be, see. Breathe, enjoy, experience. Absorb, understand, appreciate. Enjoy – and enjoy it for YOU, not for what the world out there will think when they see, hear and read about whatever it is you’ve thought and seen and done. This is it; it’s all yours – and it’s all that ever will be yours. It’s your turn at life; it’s not coming round again. The sharing’s good. But the living’s got to come first …

Right. I’m not sure where that’s got me, but I have a sneaking feeling I may have just fallen foul of my own maxims here. Well, so be it. Just because I’m not practising what I preach doesn’t mean that what I’m preaching’s wrong … right? Right. And now I think it’s time for tea …

Over and out.

I wanted the world to hold still ...

England, lovely England. Here am I. Wrestling with a wireless internet connection. Feeling a certain sense of déjà vu. Forging through the Rosie-fingered-Dawn on the Oxford Tube, not taking in a bit of it, so preoccupied am I with my wretched internet connection. Modern Life, eh. What did Blur say? Modern Life is Rubbish.

And on my way to the Ski Show. My mind still heavy with last night’s dreams; last night’s dreams heavy with ski show; the what and how and when. And, as much as ever before, I wanted the world to stay still. Stop the world, I’m getting off! Who said that? Some singer, some time … anyway. If the world won’t stop, I suppose I’ll just have to get off the bus and get on with it …

Home

It’s not as simple a concept as it used to be.

Where’s home? Home is where the heart is.

Home is … one’s house?

‘Where you live at a particular time’, says the internet. ‘The physical structure in which one lives; a house or apartment’. Then – perhaps closer to the resonance of the word – ‘A dwelling place together with the family or social unit that occupies it’. ‘An environment offering a sense of security and happiness.’. Warmer. ‘A valued place regarded as a refuge or a place or origin.’ Yes, it’s something like that.

A place of rest and safety?

Home’s a big old concept. And I’ve been out of the UK for all of, ooh, 10 days? And already I feel I’ve lost my certainties as to where exactly ‘home’s located. I fly from Geneva to Gatwick. Am I flying home? Or will I be going home in a day or two, when my work in the UK’s done?

Home’s an emotive word. Don’t use it lightly.

Say ‘I’m going home’, instead of ‘I’m going to mum’s’; ‘I’m going to dad’s’ – and already the emotional landscape’s shifted; an affiliation’s created; a base is established.

But this is a different problem. The problem here is one of not knowing – truly knowing – just where ‘home’ is, and just what makes it so. Trying out one place and the next against the concept of ‘home’, and finding that there’s no clear-cut certainty as to what the ‘right’ answer should be.

The North? No. The place has resonance; yes; I’ve roots there and I always will have. But move ‘back’ there, and I’ll be moving forward – or sideways? – anyway, not ‘coming home’. The ‘family or social unit’ that made the North home is changed.

Oxford? Doesn’t fit, does it. ‘Where you live at a particular time’ – that’s the internet’s no. 1 definition; thank you Google. Well, I don’t live there; it won’t do.

France? ‘A valued place regarded as a refuge or place of origin’. Nope. That’s not working either.

So, where is home? Are any of these places home? Are all of them?

When it comes down to it, I suspect Home is something one carries inside oneself. Figure that one out, and you’re grounded. Find it, and you’ll not be lost again. Can that be right? I hope it is. Am I there? Well, maybe not yet. But perhaps I’m on the right track.

Stymied

Thinking: it’s tricky. It’s easier said than done.

I have an old analogy – to me it’s old, anyhow; it may be new to you – of trying to break down a stone fortress with a wet sponge. It came to me when I first came across the fortress of German Grammar. My mind was the wet sponge. No matter how gamely I hurled it against at the walls of Grammar, the stone rebuffed the sponge; my understanding slip-slid down rock face of nominative, accusative, genitive, dative and landed with a splot on the ground.  

Now, my mind’s still the wet sponge. The fortress changes – perhaps there are many fortresses. But today’s is the question of How to Be; How to Think. I want to think! I do. I want to lose myself in thought and emerge, weeks, months, years later, richer and wiser, full of answers; sure of myself, my place in the world. But somehow my mind shies away from the starting block; I don’t even begin. I hedge the question; like the teenage me, procrastinating over the exam revision, colour coding the revision timetable rather than making a start on the work – I do nothing. I fidget around the edges of the problem, and I don’t throw myself in.

Stymied.

Window on the World

Black and white world

My window on the world’s turned white.

It’s all mixed-up clouds and snow; take a picture and you’d never know which way’s up.

Yesterday, up in the mountains I was the only living thing. Me and my shadow. Me, my shadow and my footprints – first tracks walking up; last tracks hurrying down. (And alarming, how easy it was to lose track of those tracks in the flat light of the late afternoon, when every landscape feature dissolved in mist and the Hansel-and-Gretel fear prickled behind me.)

The world up there was monochrome. White sky, white sun, white light. Black rocks, black water, black shadows – and then for a moment, the clouds cracked and a ragged patch of blue burst through. Improbable because it just didn’t fit: not a hint of black or white about it.

And all was silent. So silent that when noise came – cracking of ice thawing when the sun reached its peak – it was so unexpected as to be frightening! Partly, because silence had become the norm. Also partly because there was simply No Good Reason for anyone or anything to be up there, in the snow, on a day like that, causing noise – so the fear was, that anything that had taken itself up there to make noise was Up to No Good.

Another day, I’ll walk the same paths again, in the sunlight, and see the mountain vistas. But somehow yesterday I was grateful for the nothingness of black and white and cloud and snow. Somehow, they negated the possibility of bleakness. The mountain-face in autumn can be featureless, grey green and empty. But with the cloud coming and going, the outlook never stretched further than the next brook, the next rocky outcrop; never so far as the mountaintop until you’d reached it. So, you could never see much: but, flipside, you could walk for hours without ever being discouraged by a horizon that grew no closer.

Another thing: with such short vistas, your focus changes. Up by Tignes, there's a sculpture of a woman by the roadside. Slender and otherworldly, a giantess poised on the brink of a cloudscape. Her flowing lines summoned up words like ‘maiden’ and ‘chanson’; ‘chivalry’ and ‘sorrow’. On other days, she might be standing on the shore of the lake. Or at the head of a cliff, or looking out over a village and rolling farmland. On other days, she’ll have context, and with it, meaning, and with it, identity. But today? Today she’s anyone and no one; she’s a blank page. Peasant girl or princess? Snow queen or milkmaid? Who is she looking for? In the white, she’s lost her reality: she’s what I make her. Another day, she’s herself; she’ll have her story back and the world will fill the blanks around her.

Windows on the world, you see. We’re what they make us.

Notes to no-one

So. All the best stories begin like that; don’t you think? And a deep breath – and so it starts. New worlds, big adventures. OK, maybe now I’ve raised false expectations …

So, again. Here am I. In my mountain eyrie, loin des bruits du monde, writing. I write because I am. I write because … it proves that I am. Reassures me. Right? Right. Write!

I’ll give you a bit of the landscape. It’s alpine. It’s remote, but it’s lived-in – just. Here, I’m in my flat (it’s small; it’s a pocket handkerchief of a flat – but every inch of space in here is Mine; all Mine!). I’m inside, but I’m right up by the window. Beyond the window, the balcony. Beyond the balcony, Space. Mont Blanc is my neighbour to the west, and my word, it’s splendid. (Though it struck me today: I don’t look at it properly. I see it, yes. It’s breathtaking, yes. Wordworth and Coleridge? They’d have loved it. But do I really see it? Take it in; its many peaks; foothills, contours, colour and textures? No. I’m too lazy. I need a pair of binoculars. I need a crash course in patience and stillness! I will look properly; I’ve promised myself. I will! But not today. Another day, when I’ve the energy to be stiller …) So, that’s Mont Blanc to the west. And in the other direction – though I can’t see it; not from here; my windows look out westward – the ski resort. Empty. Even the cows’ve headed down the valley for the winter, bells and all. It’s the limbo time; the Inter-Saison, and the emptiness and silence is mindboggling. It’s not like wilderness emptiness; no: this is emptiness that’s built to be full. It’s pile-em up, cram-em small apartment blocks, jam-packed full of emptiness. It’s quite something. No-one, no-one at all, is here right now. Or, if they are, they’re experts in solitude. Or else they’re very, very lonely ...

OK, so there’s the ski resort. And beyond that, the mountain face. What will soon be the snow-front – but not yet. It’s green-grey; not so very long ago it was dotted with chestnut cows, but now it’s not. It was dotted with diggers, remoulding the pistes for the coming season – but now it’s not. It’s empty of summer flowers; it’s waiting for winter snow. It’s greeny grey; it’s murky as Kipling’s green-grey greasy Limpopo river. ‘C’est jolie, non?’, my boss said hopefully as he showed off the view over the resort. Non. It’s not pretty at all. The mountains, yes - in microcosm (stream, leaf, flower); in macrocosm (peak, valley, horizon), they’re beyond jolie; they’re sublime. But that particular outlook? No. You couldn’t call it pretty. It’s a perfectly good mountain with a sixties comprehensive school of low-rise ugliness squatting on it. Just waiting for snow to soften it.

So where was I? The landscape. There, that’s a piece of it; that’s enough for now. I’m sure it’ll come up again; you’ll see more of it in time. The mindscape: I’m not even going to attempt that just now; it’s too muddled for a snapshot, and a detailed exposition will bore you. Never mind you; it’ll bore me! And besides, it’s a slippery quicksand of a mindscape –no sooner is it articulated than it’s changed. So let’s leave the mindscape out of it.

Let’s stick to the facts. I’m here, it’s Wednesday. I’ve been here since Saturday night, but time’s twisted here: I’ve been here no time at all, and I’ve been here forever. One short dose of forever with all of its elements stripped of their proportions; all jostling for space in my head bigger and smaller than they should be. But stop me if this is starting to sound like a mindscape!

In fact, let me stop myself. Let’s hold it right there and call it a night. And next time, I’ll try to bring you something a lot more, er, concrete. Something with facts and real-life people; maybe even something happening. I’ve set the scene, so you’ve got something to be going on with. Bit like a toy farmyard set, if you imagine that it had a Mountain Edition. So now you’ve got the basic set up. Next time I’ll bring something to put in it.