Inside-Out Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking

'You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The details will be different but it will happen to you.'

Joan Didion

'You think you know who you are. You have no idea.'

Matt Dillon in Crash

The Richard Burtons

Last night I watched a very good, colourful documentary about the explorer Richard Burton, fronted by Rupert Everett.

I think I saw his West End debut in Julian Mitchell's play about the school days of the Cambridge spies Burgess and Maclean - Another Country. He co-starred with Kenneth Branagh. I remember that when Rupert E. first walked on stage the audience gasped - quite loudly, unmistakably - at his physical beauty. Later I used to hear gossip about his exploits from Derek Jarman. In line with this the documentary focused on his sexual exploits more than his esoteric interests, which are the reason Burton features in my book... but I did try to suggest how sexual and spiritual experimentation are often intertwined.

Burgess has always fascinated me, because of the teasing games he used to play. When drunk he used to tell people he was a spy, but of course they just thought he was being ironic. It was a new note in British sensibility, which these days is everywhere at all levels of society.

The actor Richard Burton never played his namesake as far as i know, but looking at the craggy, brooding explorer in  his portraits perhaps he should've done. I published a memoir of the actor by one of his brothers a few years ago, and there was a launch party in a pub near Cardiff. The relatives - very, very Welsh - kept calling me 'the big cheeyuz from London'.

Who's taking the piss out of who?

That's the authentic disquiet, the disconcerting whisper that distinguishes the best of British culture today from Banksy to Jordan.

Iron in the Soul

I was walking from the station to the car earlier in the week when I fell into step and starting talking to a man who was perhaps, as my mother used to say of me, 'not quite with it'. He was small, had an odd marching walk and talked in a jumbled way and with a strong local accent. He wore Brylcream in the style of my father's generation. I gathered he usually took a short cut back to his house through the allotments, but was worried about doing it now as it was getting dark, so i offered him a lift.

He told me he'd lost his father a few years ago, that they'd been scrap metal merchants. I guessed he'd lived with his father like Steptoe and Son, and the loss of his father had been a massive blow in his life. He said they'd had a yard where the multi-story carpark next to the police station now is.

How different Tunbridge Wells must have been then - what, 30 years ago. Nowadays it's so tidy, so manicured, so glossy. A stretch to imagine a scrap metal yard in the middle of it.

Those kinds of places fascinate me. They're sites of different forms of consciousness  - men who are happy to walk around all day black-skinned from oil and grease - places of numen. I went to one recently to get a spare part for my car, and an unexpected feature of the landscape was that cars of the same make are piled one on top of the other, so you find yourself walking among ottering, unsafe looking towers of  Renault 5s, Jaguars and so on. Perhaps that experience influenced me to write the bit in my book about Abraham wandering our the skyscrapers of Uruk.

Over the last 2 weeks 2 junk/antique shops have closed down in Tonbridge. I went to Lewes the other day to try to find an esoteric device for my paperback cover, and the biggest antique/junk place had closed down. Other traders looked understocked. All down to the Internet, they said.

Sad. Browsing on the net just isn't the same. There's less scope for serendipity.

Of course that word was coined by Horace Walpole. I had a load of material on Walpole, William Beckford, Alexander Pope and other occult minded people of that Gothick and fanciful era who used to fascinate me, but didn't use it for fear of too anglo-centric. Someone once told me that Brighton Pavilion was constructed with a system of pipes in an occult configuration intended to help fairies materialize. If any one had any research on that, I'd be intrigued?

Last weekend I went to Ashdown Forest to find the site of an old iron works I'd stumbled on a few years ago. There's no signpost, but there is a plaque up now, and apparently it was the first blast furnace in Britain, built by Henry VII. Last week-end the blue bells were not quite in full bloom, but the place was covered by them and the air was quite heady. I sensed tellurian forces, and was reminded that blacksmiths were once thought to wield occult power. 

Spiritual Warfare

One of the bits of adolescent rage I've never lost is rage at life's unfairness. I can't seem to get used to it.

To be born into a middle class suburban family in small town England in the late twentieth century must be one of the softest billets in history, but as i look around I see individuals who have almost none of the good things in life - beyond the basics of food, drink and shelter - and no prospect of getting them.

I used to have a colleague who was physically unattractive and also a bit dull, lacking in wit, who talked too much for most people's taste and gave off a slight air of desperation. This person never had a sexual partner or a kindred spirit, as far as i know, and everyone avoided seeing this person out of work if they could avoid it without obvious cruelty. I don't believe this person ever had the experience of approaching someone and seeing that someone look up, glad to see them. This person's life must've been very different - everyone quickly looking away as they approached.

And I made it worse! I created a cruel nickname, which everyone in the building soon adopted, and told exaggerated, funny stories about this person, which spread round the building too. I trussed this person up with a sort of 'hexing'.

This is one of the things I expect to be most harshly judged on. I failed as a human being - as I've written about my failures elsewhere on this site - and in this case it was worse because it was not just fleetingly.

If you did the same thing in a consciously occult way - if you knew how - the cost to yourself in this life and thereafter would be colossal.

I think maybe you become more aware of these things in late middle age. Which is why we become more placatory and choose our battles much more carefully.

Bedfellows for Dawkins

Is it possible to think of a better image of the drive by militant secularists to eradicate spirituality from the face of the planet than China's oppression of Tibet?

THE REAL MEANING OF HALLOWEEN

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF HALLOWEEN

The spiritual world has its seasons too - and as with the natural world, these seasons are tied to the movement of the heavenly bodies. Halloween and All Saints day - the Day of the Dead in other cultures - mark the mid-point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice - and traditionally this is the beginning of winter.

As we've noted before, when the natural world begins to die, the spirit world comes alive.

And traditionally Halloween was more holy than horrifying.

The feasting traditionally associated with Halloween is to draw the dead to us, to make them nostalgic for the pleasures of the material world.

Think of the Day of the Dead and all the grisly fun in that imagery.

English mumming - from which we get mummers meaning actors - began when people would dress up like the dead to make them feel at home, to greet them in a playful sort of way. The word mummer comes from the mum-mum sound they made imitating the walking dead's attempts to speak.

Halloween was a time when you might commune with your ancestors, when prayers were more likely to be heard and when the spirit of prophecy was strong. Girls would bob for apples - traditionally the fruit of Venus because the 5 point pattern pips make in a slice of apple mimic the pattern Venus makes in the sky over a 40 year  period - in search of love. If you were successful, you'd put the apple under your pillow and hope to dream of the man you'd marry.

So Halloween is like a great turning point in the year, like the opening of a great door in the cosmos - and the spirits come pouring through.

Goblins, ghosts and the spirits of the dead, these are the lowest of the denizens of the spirit wolrds. But at the beginning of winter we also begin to look forward to the deep mid-winter, when the greatest spirit involved in the destiny of the planet is reborn...