The Becoming

We are creatures of comfort.

We like to be safe and secure

to be surrounded by what we know,
to be in control

to order our lives in the way that suits us.

We want our journeys mapped out for us

itinerary decided, tickets booked

time of arrival guaranteed

refreshment breaks at regular intervals

and a credit card for unforeseen circumstances.

But Jesus said ‘follow me’ without saying where he was going

just promising transformation along the way.

Building houses, having children, planting trees - documenting our passing through time so that one day we may look back and remind ourselves: we once existed. Writing. Writing about houses and children and trees and love and loss and understanding, writing like swimming against the sweeping tide of all things ephemeral. But these are all illusions. The houses will crumble, the children will die, the trees will wither; the words too will one day be forgotten. We know this, yet we carry on documenting everything along the way, because to live is to be in continuous transformation and we must remember which way we came and how we became the person lying on the death bed.

My documentation is poor, yet it has been even poorer. At every major turning of my life, I wish painfully that I could remember all of it hitherto: every meaningful conversation, every insightful book, every article, talk or radio programme and, most importantly, every nuance of every emotion, of every sensation and every thought ever stirred in me by the remarkable people I have met along the way. These would be my houses and my trees, the necessary proofs of my Becoming.

Ideas, especially, are so painfully fickle - I would require another ten life times to make sense of them all. This is why experience must be followed by reflection - how else could we ever learn? I feel the data-gathering part of the cycle is drawing slowly to a close and now I must think. The season is changing. The road must be followed, the transformation must take its course no matter how sad it might be to leave behind all that which has made it possible. I am both the master and the slave of my Becoming.

Liminal space is the place of inbetweenness, of insecurity.

It is the Israelites in the wilderness,

it is Paul blind in Damascus waiting for Ananias.

Liminal space is emptiness and nowhere, it is uncertainty and chaos,

it is a place of discomfort and unrest.

Liminality is a place of dying and rebirth, of metamorphosis,

the place where the caterpillar spins its cocoon and disappears from view.

Nothing good or creative emerges from business as usual.

Much of the work of God is to get people into liminal space and to keep them there

long enough so they can learn something essential.

An atheist myself, I still must recognise and like in this text the idea of liminal spaces being conducive to revelation. Naturally, it is only one incarnation of the idea amongst many, but I like it because it's an old story and a familiar myth. A book by Andrei Plesu which I read a few years ago spoke of a similar notion. The book was About Angels and his thesis - that human life is by its very nature a product of Liminality: we are never there but always on our way. Life is perpetual transformation.

Of course, what follows from this proposition is the thought of accepting change as life itself. This, because it makes our expectations more reasonable. As creatures of inbetweeness, longing for a perpetual, static (and, in that, Angel-like) state of happiness is crazy: the most we can hope for is going through a moment of happiness, like the train through a riveting landscape; but we should never expect for the landscape stretch to onwards eternally, which is a quality reserved for the non-transformational existences of Angels and their God.

I really like this depiction: human life much like a train journey - perpetual transformation; angelic existence much like arriving at the destination and getting off the train. Us, alive, under the imperative of Time's incessant Arrow; Angels, immortal, outside of It - in a timeless (and therefore static) universe. Angels may be happy, the most we can hope for is becoming so. Thus the transformation carries on and our own travel journal with it: more houses, more children, more Life, more trees to make into more books with yet more words to be forgotten. The train runs swiftly towards our impending doom.

But it is not the doom itself that is the cause of my affliction. It is the turning and the rattling of the train as it pulls me rapidly away from this Present, and all its wonders, towards my Future, and all its threats. The more marvellous the journey, the more painful my limited ability to remember everything. Yet, for all my sorrow, I am still one of these people who does in fact prefer the way things are. I like the journey, I like the transition, wherever it might take me next. I am not scared. Or, I am but still Angelic life sounds far too boring. 'This being human is a guest house', I should welcome and entertain it all: the good and the bad, the calm, the lonely, the strange and the wicked. Bring the show on and let us enjoy it, let us stop trying to get ahead of ourselves by attempting to mimic the eternal.

I am not scared, of course, but I am sad. Sad because I may or may not remember it all, the nuances, the thoughts, the sensations, the colours of people, the shape of their minds, the content of their teachings; the scent of nights on bridges, the light of days on roads. But I must carry on with the journey so I may thus try to become better, always better still, and my love for all the wonderful people in my life to come to be worth more, always more still. Then, should my houses and my trees and all these words ever fail to document, perhaps their memory of me could ultimately serve as the necessary proof that I once existed.

In any case, here I am. On a train, with a journal. My stomach painful with anxiety and jumping up and down with joy, my head light with excitement and anticipation, my heart heavy with the sorrow of this saying good bye, still, far too many times. Another hour has gone past. Overall, however, I'm quite happy. Fuelled by an infinite amount of love and tea, playing my tunes, cleaning my shoes, folding my shirts, as from the start, as now once more, as to the end - here still I carry on, Becoming.

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Strange People Do Not Find Strange Things Strange

Fiery passions, dire dreams, certainly to be forgotten
fruits of fancy misbegotten,
ardours, thoughts both rich and rotten,
Pushing reason to extremes.
I must fight the urge, it seems, come to make me a believer,
senses sharp and warm with fever,
Come to leniently lever
Some delightful, vivid dreams.
Reveries, in fact, that stir, bold, intense and wicked really
inclinations to act silly,
wanting to be speaking freely,
Of these fancies that recur,
Of the voice that won't stop calling, and this lightness like a drug
like an illness, like a bug,
could one cure it with a hug?
Sense and passion always brawling.

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Wanderlust

There's always just one more. One more road to be followed, one more hill to be climbed, one more land to be wanted, one more soul to be had. There's always just one more something else, somewhere else, out there, calling. There's the smell of Summer nights, the sound of trains departing in the distance, the warm breeze, the endless sky and the road, winding out of sight, luring you to pick yourself up and just...walk. Walk and never look back, it whispers softly into your ear, walk to where there is no coming back. And you listen, pale and defeated, because the calling rings in your thoughts like the yearning of a lost child and you have no choice but to follow. It hurts and you wish you could stay - another day or perhaps just another hour - but the season is over and you must tear yourself away; did you not say that loneliness was really but a fair price to pay for freedom?

Of course, unlike the sky, the world eventually turns out not to be quite so endless. After the first cities came more cities and yet more cities after those. After this road, oh no!, not yet another road and roads still as far ahead as you can see and as far back as you can remember. It's time that I go back, you think to yourself, lonely, tired, a drifter with no real purpose, a cuckoo without a nest. You listen to the wind and realise: the voice and the calling have now long been gone. So you finally begin your long return journey, tracing your steps back one by one, through all these places and all this life spent searching. You hope, you pray that they might still remember you when you return. You stand still and gaze silently into the distance, one last time, only to see the sun disappear into the turn of the century.

The way home is even longer than you had remembered. As you walk you see houses closing up their doors, with warmly lit sitting rooms full of smiling people, those who never gave in to the calling of their wanderlust. You remember now every house you ever left behind, every love with which you could have quenched your loneliness, every bright sunrise with which you walked away. You hope you will find them again in your way, but they are all long gone and no one remembers them apart from you. Home, you think, hoping, home they will surely know me still, home one day this journey will finally finish and I will be happy and the circle finally complete. Days turn into weeks, months turn into years; there is nothing and no one around but your blistered feet, the evening darkness dripping slowly from across the universe and the road - warm and quiet, stretching endlessly under the wilting sun. But then, suddenly, you sense it and you recognise it: the smell of Summer, the sound of trains departing in the distance. Your heart explodes with joy and you run, laughing, crying, to touch, to see, to smell, to hear, to taste, to know. Where are they, my beloved, my friends, my family, my childhood dreams, my home? But the night is drawing nearer and everyone looks at you with ther strange and hollow gaze: had you not heard? your people have all died long ago, died of a broken heart.

Slowly

You're listening to Eels Radio on Last.fm. Outside pouring. You had a dream last night that you were sitting in an art gallery full of people. You knew none of them. You're trying to remember the details but they disappear in a haze. You're home alone, even the street outside is dead. Rains quite heavily now. You remember saying something to someone standing next to you in the dream. In the dream you're all looking at pictures. The artist is a young man with black hair, long. You can't see his face. You don't remember much else, so you try to focus back on your work. Suddenly the radio stops - the Internet got disconnected. Suddenly the room fills with silence thick like pancake batter. Drowning in pancake batter would be unpleasant you think. Suddenly there's panic.

You click 'Connect' with just a little too much haste. This is ridiculous, you say to yourself. There is still a little light outside. I think - I might you repeat to the man in the dream. But the man shows no sign of wanting to have a conversation. Suddenly you remember it was not a dream - it was a nightmare. You were all standing in the gallery and no one spoke. Connect, connect, please connect, you need to hear music, radio, voices of real people, something to remind you that you're awake and that this now is not the same as that then. You were scared for a reason, you are scared for a reason - it was that something everyone knew. You mustn't speak, you mustn't tell. And the damn thing won't reconnect.

You realise your heart is racing and that there's someone at the door. It's a panic attack you think, you've been through this before, you say, you know the drill.  One must keep calm and it will go away, it always goes away. But there's someone at the door and no reassuring voices come out of the computer. You must call someone. But all you get is answer phones and you know there's someone standing in the corridor, silent, still, starring. They must all have been starring at the walls for a good long time, forever perhaps until you stumbled upon them in your carelessness. You are transfixed with horror. Although you know you should keep quiet and draw no attention to yourself the words seep out of you repeating, maniacally, in the dead silence of the room: I think I might be slowly and you know they can hear. Everyone knows it and it mustn't be spoken and you cannot help it and you cannot see the face of the man in the dream.

Of course it is him standing outside your door with the rain outside lashing against the windows. You're having a panic attack, it's just a silly panic attack and by chance no one will answer their phone. But you know this isn't real even if there and now seem so much alike. You must remember it's not real. But you're certain you can see the shadow of his feet Slowly you say very slowly and the man standing next to you is almost begging you to stop. You mustn't say it, it mustn't be said. You've been here before, the horror falls heavy layer upon layer and it perhaps you've been in this gallery for years. You're one of them now you think without surprise and that is why he has come to collect you, still in the corridor outside the door. You feel like everyone in the world has died, long ago and now, finally, you too are giving up to the overwhelming solitude.

I think I might..  and you can feel the panic of all those trapped starring at their walls as he finally turns. You should have stayed quiet; instead you gaze in horror at his face, a stony wraith where two black holes stare back at you instead of two black eyes. Two eyes scooped out eons ago and so you know and swim towards the door through muffled silence as thick as clay and when it opens it is you, standing in the doorway, starring at yourself with hollowed-out eyes and it's your own voice ringing in the dead silence.

The Thing about Chocolate

The thing about chocolate is that it gives you perspective. Or, rather, that it gives you a different perspective. To see the world as a collection of bones; of sorrows and necessity; of joy and problem-solving; of yarns to soothe the immense solitude of a sentient species, stranded in space. To contemplate that we are a product of our own making.

You might think it would be nice if there was some omnipotent, omniscient and fundamentally 'good' celestial Parent whose lap we could run for crying, whenever a niggardly fate has worn us down. A someone to punish the wicked and reward the good and conduct the great harmonious symphony of life towards its ultimate and glorious fulfilment.

You might hope to step off the stage and discover a benevolent, fatherly figure (always sporting a beard, like Santa), smiling upon you with a loving, soothing demeanour and to know without the trace of a doubt that everything is just as it ought to be.

I really wish people would stop loving some made-up sanctified figment of their imagination and just love each other a bit more. Let us grow up and come to terms with the loneliness and the 'unbearable lightness of being' and all that jazz. This illusion of perfect divine resolutions is longing instead of living. I am a happy atheist. I like humans more than gods - humans with their funny struggles at making for themselves a better world. It is religious serenity minus the routine mind-bending required to explain away day-to-day reality.




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