NOWHERE TO GO?

Is there nowhere to go to escape the uglinesses, and evils and pains and griefs of this world until we die? We are seemingly bounded by an horizon of limitations that we cannot escape. If we have a permanent and chronic ill, there is, it often seems to me, nowhere to go.

But worse.

Where there was once, it feels to me, an unbounded nature of which we were a part, there is now an eternal-like prison of human made ugliness and evil that I often feel I cannot escape. If I want to see anyone, I have to walk on a road that is so ugly and dangerous and irrational that the mind retreats, and tries to see this as good enough, maybe even beautiful from one angle. To watch machines pass me that are an abomination, controlled by people who think that the abomination they are now part of is a beautiful thing, or at least good enough, acceptable. It is not. It is not acceptable.

Of course. It is possible to see city streets, a long winding highway, a tall sky scraper as beautiful at certain times.

But this is in spite of its real meaning. The eradication of a living environment. An environment of dead material and a few manicured public gardens. An environment that signifies, that blares out in a dreadful, ugly triumphal cacophony the frenzied desperate desire of the psychotic rich and powerful to dominate everything outside their sequestered manicured gardens and homes solely for one purpose: their increased power and wealth and status, which in turn they hope will immunise them against death and limitation itself.

What part of the ‘man-made’ environment we nobodies have to live in is free from the idiotic intentions of the rich and powerful to satisfy the bottomless pit of their sick, perverted desires, to allay their pathetic, stupid fears? The form of this environment is a by-product of its function to acquire wealth and power by any means. Its ugliness is accidental, and it is ugly because it is an accident resulting from the indifference of its creators to the Good, True and Beautiful. What do the governments, corporations and the rich dynasties who profit in wealth and power from factories, car parks, roads, industrial parks, supermarkets , department stores, city-centres, housing estates, advertising images everywhere we look, propaganda and state commands everywhere – what do they care for the ugliness, illness, spiritual and physical harm that is caused by these?

A writer whose father was a coal miner (collier), and who wanted his son to be a coal miner says this about the man-made environment he grew up in:

“The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationships between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread. The middle classes jeer at the colliers for buying pianos but what is the piano often as not but a blind reaching out for beauty?” (DH Lawrence, The Architectural Review, 1930, quoted in Culture and Environment, 1933, F.R. Leavis and D. Thompson, p.95)

DH is over the top, and often wrong, but here his point has to be taken seriously. Where can we look to see meanings that come only from the heart of ‘a people’, the heart of a family, the heart of a person communicating with kin and friends, communicating with the angels and divinities?

I am lucky. I look out the door, and I see only a small road that I can pretend is a lane. There are fields and woods next to my door.

But even here there is that which is soul death: the machines on the fields. The machines even on the small lane that runs by my front door. Not that many, but enough to tell me of the world they come from of roads and streets of unimaginable ugliness – unimaginable because it is so extreme in its brute reality. The reality of our world outstrips the imagination, and so we imagine that this reality is not as bad as it is. Except at certain cracks in the stream of ordinary time, and it is as if then our gut and not our imagination takes over, and a feeling of terror and boredom, a suffocation that threatens instantly to be eternal.

Our son was dead. I was on a train platform in West London after pretending to be a ‘lecturer’ in front of some young people pretending to be ‘students’, for which I was paid and given the identity of ‘lecturer’. The sun was hot even in October then. The train crowded. The pain seemed unbearable. There was no way out. Nowhere to go where Toby would be alive again. I was not allowed to commit suicide because of the pain that would cause my kin. The disloyalty of it. But I saw a life of many years of permanent pain like a saw inside of me. No way out, nowhere to go.

So, accept this. I had to be here and be now for my kin. Just be still here. And I found many ways to escape, returned to many ways to escape in my head this terrible world without our son. And at least to try to behave well, though so far, not much success there.

Nowhere to go.

The big dirty city, the satanic factories, the fake desperate gestures pasted over the inability to know what really to feel, what really to do – I speak here mainly of those who exercise power of any kind, those who determine the conditions in which we live, including the pseudo-communications called mass media. The ugly, dangerous toxic roads, streets, buildings air water food, packaging, factory farms, factory fishing waters, factory training and indoctrination, in built terrors of war, poverty degradation ill-health even among the affluent workers. Every obese or even overweight person screams back to me the horror of the huge ugly ‘ socio-political-economic machine’ designed to maintain and increase the profit and power and status of a few sociopaths and psychopaths and those simpering and preening Eloi born to these perversions of what a human could and should be.

I do not believe that the “mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven”. I have the slightest glimpse sometimes of a world beyond this formed world of things I see and feel and smell and touch. As an old cripple in a wheel chair said to a friend of mine, ‘Home is not here, but it is nearer than you think.’

For me this world is the unformed or formless because I cannot imagine at all what will be the forms it takes in the ultimate worlds, even if ‘form’ is the word to use. Thus we must not take for granted the forms of this world, even though it is only through these it seems we have glimpses of a ‘formless’? beauty through the window of the formed beauty of this world. The formed beauty is not necessary except in so far as it leads us to see the necessary beauty and rightness of everything. So it is necessary for us, but it leads us on to something stronger, I hope, everlasting timeless.

Plato. Michelangelo. Wordsworth. AN Whitehead. Borges – Solo una cosa no hay, es el olvido.

This ephemeral beauty raises up anyone’s spirits if they can see it. The friendship, the companionship, the beauty of one’s own children, whatever it is – for me so many friends from the past, so many kindnesses from my parents even though there is harshness too – but I know from a dream that they could have given me absolute support until the end of days, through any terror that one might fear. They could have, so I dreamt it, and they do now. So it is with all my friends and kin. But especially when I think of Toby and Luke, my heart “like to the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth sings hymns at heaven’s gate.”

These roads, these machines these people gripped in an illness of the soul that mirrors my own illness but magnified so many times as in a hall of mirrors – this I can escape with a little help from the image of my friends whose kindness seems to me endless, and from kin whose beauty raises my soul to a kind of eternity.