High Windows

Recently my daughter asked her own daughter, just turned five, to draw her a Robin. The result is here.......

I think it is a fine picture but must admit to a degree of bias. Enquiries as to whether the plant on the left is a tree or a carrot has drawn no definitive answer. No one dares ask the little mite herself as she can be pretty feisty at times. Once, going on a trip to town and waiting for the bus I spotted a small red house beside the bus-stop. "I wonder who lives in that little house" I said to her. "That's not a house, it's a postbox!" she cried loudly, putting grandad firmly in his place.

Anyone at home?

But getting back to carrots or trees. I think of the zen master who pointed at a clump of bamboos, "See that bamboo, how short it is. See that bamboo, how long it is. That is their nature," and thus, just maybe, it is a case of "see that plant, how like a carrot it is, see that plant, how like a tree it is". Maybe not. But I must move on. 

Sometimes, in my quieter moments, I think of the world that children today are being born into. It can be heartbreaking. My own mind tends to fly off at tangents, into often seemingly random associations, drawn from yesteryear. Poems, quotes, memories of my own past. There is a poem I often think of, one I would call a "slow burner", that passed me by almost unnoticed upon first reading but remains in mind, popping up now and again. It is "High Windows" by Philip Larkin:-

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s   

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—   

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if   

Anyone looked at me, forty years back,   

And thought, That’ll be the life;

No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide   

What you think of the priest. He

And his lot will all go down the long slide   

Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:   

The sun-comprehending glass,

And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Philip Larkin - not yet an Old Fool

The world moves on yet much remains the same. I think I am losing the plot here, but first thing this morning the thought of "The Dice Man" came to mind, a book by Luke Rhinehart (aka George Cockcroft) where a psychiatrist begins making life decisions based upon the throw of the dice. 

Seemingly a random thing to come to mind and yet maybe not. It seems to link with other ideas recently concerning the apparent randomness of the cultural milieu each is born into and the subsequent expression of the resulting "self" in time space history. Such can be viewed as randomness, and the idea of depending upon the throw of the dice to determine choice just randomness within randomness - though possibly we would have to consider exactly where the options came from. 

But then, the thought of high windows........and determinism and free will.

For my own sanity I need to move on yet again. Yesterday a mate of mine joined me in visiting another old mate who now sees out his existence in a care home. An old mate whose mind now wanders. I never find visiting such homes a pleasant experience, reminding me as they do of my own mother, who ended her own days in one. She too had a mind that wandered, another way of saying - but more pleasantly - that she had dementia. Care homes now conjure up for me the past and memories that, like thinking of the future of grandchildren, can break my heart. 

Dementia

As a break from my own musings, here is another poem by Philip Larkin on this theme, his own take, his own musings. The Poem is called "The Old Fools":- 

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It’s more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can’t remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there’s really been no change,
And they’ve always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching light move? If they don’t (and they can’t), it’s strange:
Why aren’t they screaming?

At death, you break up: the bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true:
We had it before, but then it was going to end,
And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour
To bring to bloom the million-petaled flower
Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend
There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs:
Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power
Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it:
Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines –
How can they ignore it?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms
Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,
Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting
A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only
The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,
The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s
Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely
Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:
Not here and now, but where all happened once.
This is why they give

An air of baffled absence, trying to be there
Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving
Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear
Of taken breath, and them crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet:
The peak that stays in view wherever we go
For them is rising ground. Can they never tell
What is dragging them back, and how it will end? Not at night?
Not when the strangers come? Never, throughout
The whole hideous, inverted childhood? Well,
We shall find out.

"What do they think has happened......"

Pretty grim and do we actually have to "find out" ourselves? Many lives end better than this. Then again, in the great scheme of things - if there is one - just maybe we all have to know and share all things eventually. Nevertheless, my memories of the demise of my own mother can be thought of as grim. 

Once she went out and got herself knocked down by a car, resulting in a broken leg, an operation, anaesthetic. This last did her no good at all, wiping away even more of her capacity to think clearly. She seemed to regress to childhood in many ways and often spoke as if a six year old; I was often her little "sister". One evening I got a call from the hospital she was in, recovering. Mum had suffered a relapse, possible a minor stroke, I was told that she might not see out the week. I hurried to the hospital and found her lying in bed wearing this silly little wool hat she always chose to wear. She actually seemed quite "with it", but she took my hand and asked me in her little girl voice, "Why is this happening to me?" and then added, "I've been a good girl." Heartbreaking. Yes, she had indeed been a "good girl", to me and my brother. We had been born wanted, born loved. No one can ask for more. As far as her question, who has an answer? 

No answer

Well, as I was saying, yesterday we visited our old friend - or as Philip Larkin would have it - an Old Fool. But he was in good spirits. He is well looked after by people paid far too little. But let me not go there. 

Thinking of dice and such, it obviously does relate to another question that has never received any definitive answer, that of free will versus determinism. A good back-ground to this debate is a short passage from the writings of Thomas Merton, a passage I first found on an Inter-faith Forum. It was called "The Gift of Freedom":-

The mere ability to choose between good and evil is the lowest limit of freedom, and the only thing that is free about it is the fact that we can still choose good.

To the extent that you are free to choose evil, you are not free. An evil choice destroys freedom.

We can never choose evil as evil: only as an apparent good. But when we decide to do something that seems to us to be good when it is not really so, we are doing something that we do not really want to do, and therefore we are not really free.

Perfect spiritual freedom is a total inability to make any evil choice. When everything you desire is truly good and every choice not only aspires to that good but attains it, then you are free because you do everything that you want, every act of your will ends in perfect fulfilment.

Freedom therefore does not consist in an equal balance between good and evil choices but in the perfect love and acceptance of what is really good and the perfect hatred and rejection of what is evil, so that everything you do is good and makes you happy, and you refuse and deny and ignore every possibility that might lead to unhappiness and self-deception and grief. Only the person who has rejected all evil so completely that they are unable to desire it at all, is truly free. God, in whom there is absolutely no shadow or possibility of evil or of sin, is infinitely free. In fact, he is Freedom.

Seeking the gift of freedom

I think this a fine passage and at the time of first reading it I was jogged into recalling some other words by the zen master Caoshan which until then had always seemed - at least to me - difficult to interpret.......

When studying in this way, evils are manifest as a continuum of being ever not done. Inspired by this manifestation, seeing through to the fact that evils are not done, one settles it finally. At precisely such a time, as the beginning, middle, and end manifest as evils not done, evils are not born from conditions, they are only not done; evils do not perish through conditions, they are only not done.

Do no evil

Caoshan's words seemed to point towards the very same idea. That it is much about touching down, acceptance of what is, of sharing the freedom of Reality-as-is, the only true freedom. St Augustine said "love God and do as you will", which seems much the same. Let go of "self" and, as Eckhart would say, God must enter in. It is not a matter of then having all the answers, or even of having any particular knowledge at all. But it is to then be ready for wherever it takes us. 

Just to finish, and perhaps to provide a contrast to the musings of Philip Larkin, a poem written by a Pure Lander who found herself caring for someone with dementia:-

Assumptions and expectations

Of what I can and should do

Must be erased from my mind.

An inner voice reminds me,

"Be more sensitive and understanding."

His trousers, T-shirt and long-sleeved flannel shirt

Are placed side by side on top of the bed.

He turns them around and around,

Examining them closely.

Not knowing the difference

Between front and back,

He wears his T-shirt reversed,

And inside out at times.

When buttoning his flannel shirt

The buttons are not in alignment

With the button holes.

While cooking breakfast,

I look towards the hallway.

He has walked out of the bedroom

Through the hallway to the dining room.

He is standing beside the chair

Wearing the shirts and boxer shorts only,

Thinking he is properly dressed

To sit at the table to eat his meal.

He looks like a little boy.

His innocence is so revealing

It warms my heart.

I smile and tell him

What he has forgotten to wear;

He looks at my face and chuckles

As a glimmer of awareness dawns.

Together, we put on his khaki trousers,

Embraced in the centreless circle

Of Boundless Life.

Related Quotes:- 

Thin, I think, that fabric between realities. Maybe minds aren't lost. Maybe they just slip through and find a different place to wander. 

(C J Tudor, The Chalk Man)

I am daily learning to be the reluctant guardian of your memories. There was light in those eyes; I miss that. 

(Richard L Ratliff)

Dementia does not rob someone of their dignity, it's our reaction to them that does.

(Teepa Snow)