January Thoughts

Looking back over what is now three years of blogging, it's interesting to see where I started and where I've ended up. My original idea was that the blog should be a genuine diary, spontaneous jottings of daily experience, which would be amusing to myself and possibly to others. What I've ended up with is a series of set pieces focussed mainly on my holidays and my reading. A lot less constant work than daily jottings, perhaps, but even the set pieces sometimes haunt me like an uncompleted undergraduate essay. Why put myself under all that pressure? For pleasure? Well, re-reading some of the old pieces has given me genuine pleasure. It's the same pleasure as looking through an old photograph album; for a moment, time past comes alive again. I hope that some of this pleasure communicates itself to the reader. It's the only recompense that I can offer for your being used, in the sense that, if I didn't think that someone out there might just be reading this, I would probably succumb to my innate sloth and drop the whole project - which would be a shame for a serious reason which I shall try to explain.

At one level, like any literary enterprise, this diary is an attempt to give narrative shape to the seemingly arbitrary chaos of experience. In that sense it is an act of self-creation. In fact, in the ordinary way of things, we are constantly creating and recreating ourselves. But, the way in which we recreate ourselves is essentially selective, an interpretation, an edited version, often overly self-flattering, of the chaotic raw material of experience. One could almost say that our version of ourselves is a convenient fiction, practical to a degree for the purposes of living in society, but ultimately limiting. Which is why, running through this blog, there is a sort of subterranean counter-current: the idea of a dimension of thought which flows in the opposite direction to this habitual process of self-invention, and which can free us from the involuntary identification with our invented selves. In other words, not a narrowing but a widening of consciousness. That this wider consciousness can be experienced through a certain type of effort is the notion which, more or less explicitly, informs all of these writings. What is this effort? It is an intentional relaxation into a state of questioning, a state of "unknowing", a direct experience of the mystery of what it means to be alive. This effort is the antithesis of any "belief" - religious or secular. It could be called a sort of creative agnosticism, although vocabulary is largely counterproductive in an area where it is above all the experience of an active silence that can lead to a new awareness of being.

The real thrust of this blog is that this other dimension of being is not something distant and abstract, but something near, immediate and existentially compelling. All genuine experience points in this same direction: artistic experience, literary experience, musical experience, the experience of nature, the intense physical sensation of being alive which are the true wages of the mountaineer, the experience of love, the sudden insight into the profound significance of the apparently mundane, all invite us to a greater or lesser degree, in innumerable different ways, to abandon for a moment our invented selves and participate directly in the mystery of life itself. I would even suggest that the whole point of experience is missed if our intention, avowed or unavowed, is merely to store it in our memory banks. In so doing we become like the servant in the parable who buried his talent.

Why it is that a man must constantly be reminded to remember he is alive is a mystery within a mystery. My hope is that this blog can help me, even us, remember. Anyway, thank you for reading.