We made use of the long Ascension weekend to spend a few days in Istanbul. The direct exposure to a predominantly Islamic culture was a fascinating and instructive experience which served to reinforce my growing respect for a religion which has, sadly, an atrocious image in the West.
Islam, it seems to me, is monotheism in its purest form. Never mind the flim-flam, man's salvation is the experience of his essential dependence on and participation in the infinite Oneness which is God. This submission to Allah is no humiliation, but a simple recognition of a state of fact, bringing the individual to a proper and natural relationship with the source of his being. Prostration in the act of prayer is the physical and emotional expression of this relationship - worship rather than supplication, which tends to be the psychological (and physical) attitude of Christian prayer. The esoteric heart of Islam is Sufism. The Sufi or Dervish strives for the total annihilation of the self in the complete realisation of his oneness with Universal Reality. The ethereal Sufi music and the turning of the "whirling" Dervishes are techniques for inducing an exceptionally receptive emotional state which can permit of the inpouring of "the Peace of God which passes all understanding".
Sufism is suspect in the eyes of puritans and fundamentalists because, by implication, it fails to differentiate clearly between Islam and other religions - obviously, since, at the core, all true religion aspires to this direct experience of Reality.
My reading of Meister Eckhart ( many of whose views were held to be heretical, incidentally) has confirmed this for me beyond the slightest doubt. On the life of St. Francis he writes:

Die andere Tugend, die den Menschen gross macht, das ist die wahre Demut. Die hatte dieser Heilige in vollkommenem Masse und dazu die Selbstlosigkeit und Selbstvernichtung, die dem Menschen die Möglichkeit gibt, alle Vollkommenheit zu empfangen.

On the concept of Unity:

Es ist Etwas in der Seele, das ist mit Gott so versippt, das es mit ihm eins ist und nicht bloss vereint.

Or:

Ich habe eine Kraft in meiner Seele, die Gottes allzumal empfänglich ist. Ich bin dessen so gewiss, als ich lebe, dass kein Ding so nahe ist wie Gott. Gott ist mir näher, als ich mir selber bin, all mein Wesen hängt daran, dass mir Gott nahe und gegenwärtig ist.


The "Clash of Civilizations" is revealed as a preposterous misunderstanding created in the minds of men who have kidnapped religion to bolster some fantastic idea of being always "right". The complete antithesis of any notion of self-annihilation in the Love of God.

I remember reading Somerest Maugham complaining about being a writer - that it meant that he wasn't able to look at a sunset without feeling constrained to capture it in descriptive prose. The fact is that you don't have to be a professional writer to suffer from an automatic compunction to chloroform the butterfly of living experience with words. It could be argued that human language has developed specifically in order to capture and pin down the fleeting and ineffable moment, responding to a deeply felt need to control and structure the apparently haphazard raw material of life. In other words, we screen our experience through vocabularly in order to have some sort of handle on reality. Name and rule. While this faculty is surely indispensable to our success as a species, in all likelihood its overuse cuts us from the possibility of that unmediated perception of Reality, which remains the preserve of mystics and saints.

All to say that I am prey to qualms as to the validity of belles-lettres in general and of this diary in particular. At the same time, short of communicating by ESP, we are rather stuck with the business of words, in which case we do well to seek to use them with clarity and elegance, in full knowledge of their inherent limitations. Hmm...

Subject to these reservations, I shall begin...

Saturday 6th May dawned a spectacular spring day. We'd made no particular plans and loitered in bed in that semi-awake state which is so exquisitely decadent and so corrupting of the capacity to actively engage the brain. By the time we'd finally surfaced and breakfasted, agreed to go to the country, driven Anna to her orchestra practice, downloaded our prospective walk, got our stuff together and got into the car, it was already10.30. Setting off down the Namur motorway we aimed for the town of Andenne on the Meuse and then headed up into the magnificent country to the south of the town - the Condroz. Our chosen expedition was named "The Deep Condroz", starting in the little village of Evelette. We parked the car rather self-consciously in one of only two parking spaces in front of the tiny church, packed our little rucksack and set off. The sun shone out of a perfect blue sky, with just a hint of a breeze to help maintain a near-ideal body temperature. To protect her hair from the sun, Carol put on a head scarf, tied up at the back in the Russian style - a fashion she had frequently affected when we first met in Copenhagen back in 1973. Instantly, the years fell away. I was in love again. No, not again. I'd always been in love, but due to some spell had somehow forgotten.

Finding our route, we set out across fields towards the village of Libois. We walked through a bucolic idyll, as through a painting by Constable. The dog, picking up on the mood, rushed excitedly to and fro through the young grass, leaping vertically up at us in the typical Jack Russel manner. We walked past a great thicket of hawthorns, assailed by the intoxicating scent of their blossom. Looking further on to Libois, its chateau-ferme revealed itself to us - a medieval construction of honey-grey limestone, complete with Rampunzel-style conical tourelles. We could have been in the Dordogne, hardly much more than an hour out of Brussels. In the village itself was the lovely little church. It contains a spectacular Louis XV interior, perfectly restored. Unfortunately it was locked and we didn't have the time to seek out the key. Nearby was a vast 19th century chateau, resplendent with its onion-dome roof, set in spectacular grounds of ancient horse-chestnuts and copper-beeches.

Pressing on, we headed up out of the village as our route took us up a long hill and on through forest to the village of Tahier. By now we were pleased to have the shade of the young May forest and proceeded through a light-play of oak and ash and an echoing trill of persistent bird-song. By now it was after one o'clock. We stopped in a clearing and ate our frugal lunch of an apple and a drink of water. So far we had not met another soul save people outside their doors or in their gardens. Emerging from the forest on our way down to Tahier we crossed our first fellow-walker possibly following the circuit in the opposite direction. We followed a farm track through open meadows thickly carpeted in yellow dandelions. I remember reading somewhere that dandelions do not in fact propagate by pollination at all - the flowers are just pure swank!
On down to the village and its own completely authentic stone-built chateau-ferme and up past outlying farm buildings and into forest again. We continued on through delicate snowstorms of falling blossom. Hawthorn-white and beech-red. Gnarled tangles of oak were followed by sedate beech glades, then ornamental redwood and firs, until the forest gave way to pasture and a little stone bridge across the extravagantly picturesque Ry d'Ossogne.

We climbed gently up the other side of the stream valley and, turning a corner, were suddenly confronted by the elegant chateau of La Fontaine, in French 18th century style, a windowed facade of classical harmony with a decorative ballustrade around the edge of the roof. Passing the chateau on our left, we continued down a small hill, turned a corner, forded the stream and entered the charming village of Ossogne. We climbed steeply up through the village's single street, past rows of absurdly pretty stone cottages with their beautifully tended gardens alive with flowers. Leaving the village, we walked up alongside yet another vast fortified farm, on through more forest until we finally made it back to Evelette and the car. The statistics: 16Ks of walking, taking a bit over three and a half hours and the gift of a renewed sense of the wonder of life.

P.D. Ouspensky's intriguing book, "A New Model of the Universe" (see earlier posting), contains a fascinating chapter on the origins and symbolism of the Tarot. Drawing on "Le Tarot des Bohémiens" by a Dr.Papus, he suggests that the cards embody the secret esoteric teachings of ancient Egypt and that each card represents an aspect of a man's struggle to awaken to a higher level of consciousness. Pursuing my research, I dug out a copy of "The Tarot Path to Self Development" by Micheline Stuart, a little volume I'd picked up years ago and had almost forgotten about. Ms. Stuart goes through each of the Tarot cards, hinting at what might be their inner meaning. The first of the cards is "The Fool". In interpreting its symbolism she writes:

Humanity is young and not yet mature. Therefore the Fool is represented by a young person. He is walking towards the abyss, turning his back to the light, and facing his shadow, because the sun is behind him. There certainly is light, but the darkness comprehends it not. In order to reach the threshold of the path initiating the creative process, he should be turning around to face the light, but his ignorant, human nature causes him to mistake the shadow for reality. Instead of facing the unknown of the Holy, he faces the unknown of the abyss. His animal nature, biting and kicking him, is urging him on his way. His essential garment is white, but it is covered by the dark coat of ignorance. He lives in fantasies, in imagination, subject to the hazards of life. He is passive, although convinced of the contrary, impulsive, abandoned to blind instincts. Irresponsible, incapable of directing himself, under the power of every influence, anything can happen to him. He is under the law of accident without realizing it and blames life for the events he encounters and for putting him into situations which, in truth, his foolishness has attracted. He interprets everything in his own fashion, on his own level of being.

He will continue to remain like this until something happens that shocks him into facing his situation. Then he will begin to wonder about the meaning of his life and of life in general: he will begin questioning his condition and look for the answers. He will begin to see that he is immersed in the world.

This Fool is us. If there is to be any hope of saving ourselves from the abyss, we must first acknowledge this fact. If we remain at the level of the Fool, we continue to stay childish and immature. For the rest of our life this will be our inner condition, no matter our achievements externally , in the world.

Some of these ideas must have been at the back of my mind in a small poem I've been putting together over the last few days. It is equally an opportunity to vent my spleen at the tawdry consumerist values which increasingly threaten to appropriate even the last residues of our true intimate sense of ourselves:

In the modern economy

The informed consumer

Exercising individual choice

Ingests convenient experience

Satisfying personal life goals

Nourishing an infantile lie.

In this inverted world

Soaring we plummet

Falling

Falling

Falling

Into chasms of geological loneliness.

Where

No love melts the hard heart

No light illumines the worldly mind

No bright raiment enfolds

Our naked self interest.

How strange

That we should so fear

What we are

So love

What we are not.

Still on the subject of Jewishness, I recall my mother telling of her experience in occupied Denmark during the war. Being on the right side of the racial tracks, Danes had a relatively easy time of it under the Germans. There were relatively few food shortages during the war - my mother maintained that the situation was far worse in England after the war. Her abiding memory is of German troops in Copenhagen on R&R, all carrying food parcels to take home to the family! Another powerful impression is of how, at the liberation, Danish girls who had had German boyfriends, had their heads shaved as an act of public humiliation and revenge. I'm pleased to be able to say that Mum did not hold with that at all.
However, I am most proud of her modest, but real contribution to the success of the Danish resistance in spiriting away Denmark's Jews to Sweden, just before the Gestapo was able to round them all up.
It must have been in 1944, so she'd have been 20, working in a hairdressing salon in the centre of town. Living in the flat upstairs from her work was a Jewish family by the name of Nathan. One day a member of the resistance came round telling them to get out as quickly as possible. My mother helped them down with their luggage as they were rushed away in the nick of time.
Not long after the Gestapo arrived at the salon, asking after the people upstairs. "Nathan? Nathan? No Nathan," said the girls playing dumb. "There's a Nielsen, I think..." But by that time, of course, the name-plate on the door had been changed!
Perhaps not heroism of epic proportions, but a contribution to that sum total of human decency which is of far greater import to civilization than any dogma or political programme.

Back in Brussels, but still under the influence of Berlin, I picked up "Weimar Culture" by Peter Gay. Peter Gay was born in Berlin in 1923 and, as Jews, he and his family were forced to flee Nazi Germany, escaping to America in 1939. His original family name was Fröhlich, which he translated into English in what was obviously a more innocent age! "Weimar Culture" is an essay on the cultural history of a time and place - essentially Berlin in the twenties - revealed to us more impressionistically in the stories of Christopher Isherwood ("Cabaret"etc.). Isherwood went to Berlin presumably a) because it was cheap and b) because it held out the promise of free (gay!) sex. The "Youth Movement" and an unprecedented "Sexual Revolution" were very much a part of the whole excitement of Berlin in the 20's, when it was the capital of the modern movement in literature and the arts, pioneering in the cinema and theatre, in social studies and psychoanalysis - the centre of a sort of new Periclean age.
Gay lays particular stress on the importance of the exiles who exported Weimar culture all over the world. He writes:

...the exiles Hitler made were the greatest collection of transplanted intellect, talent, and scholarship the world has ever seen.

He then lists just a few of the names which make up the "dazzling array of these exiles":

Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Erwin Panofsky, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Reinhart, Bruno Walter, Max Beckmann, Werner Jaeger, Wolfgang Köhler, Paul Tillich, Ernst Cassirer - quite a few of whom I'd actually heard of! Now they're all on The List!

Gay's subtitle, "The Outsider as Insider" is particularly revealing. The fact is that the advocates and enthusiastic followers of the avant-garde movement came from a small and unrepresentative layer of German society - left wing, liberal, largely Jewish. Most Germans emphatically rejected Weimar culture as "shallow", "rootless", "destructive", "cultural Bolshevism", "asphaltlitteratur". Now we can see how it forshadowed much of what we take for granted in today's cultural landcape.

"Weimar Culture" is, in a sense, a sort of annotated bibliography. Still, I must confess to a certain schoolboy weakness for lists - "Top Ten Weimar Culture Stars", say. As soon as I've posted this, I'm straight on to the Wikipedia to check out some of those names!