To be a Pilgrim...and is it a Progress?

As a ten year old I remember being read to by an eccentric Head Teacher. His favoured authors were Dickens, Wordsworth and Bunyan and along with A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist and Daffodils I vividly remember the strange world of Pilgrim's Progress. I also remember singing John Bunyan's resume of his book set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams (although to call him the composer of this folk tune seems to be pushing it!). The story and especially the hymn spoke to my early love of chivalry and Arthurian romances; the idea of the lone traveller setting out on a quest for something usually mistily shrouded but quite specific is very strong in my psyche. 

A reminder of the story follows:

The English novel begins behind bars, in extremis. Its first author, John Bunyan, was a Puritan dissenter whose writing starts with sermons and ends with fiction. His famous allegory, the story of Christian, opens with a sentence of luminous simplicity that has the haunting compulsion of the hook in a great melody. "As I walk'd through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a Denn; And I laid me down in that place to sleep: And as I slept I dreamed a Dream."A "Denn" is a prison, and Bunyan wrote most of the book in Bedford county gaol, having been arrested for his beliefs during the "Great Persecution" of 1660-1690. He shares the experience of prison with Cervantes, who had the idea for Don Quixote while incarcerated in La Mancha. Like so many novels, The Pilgrim's Progress blends fact and fiction. As well as being the record of Bunyan's dream, a well-known fictional device, it is also an archetypal tale – a quest, fraught with danger. Christian's pilgrimage takes him through the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and the Delectable Mountains in a succession of adventures that keep the reader turning the page. With his good companions, Faithful and Hopeful, he vanquishes many enemies before arriving at the Celestial City with the line that still reverberates through the English literary tradition: "So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

In Hollywood terms, the novel has a perfect "arc". It also contains a cast of unforgettable characters, from Mr Worldly Wiseman to Lord Hategood, Mr Stand-fast and Mr Valiant-for-Truth.

(The Guardian Best Books List)

I suppose now with the benefit of hindsight I can appreciate the steeping of my young mind in protestant Christianity. I went to Methodist Sunday School, loved singing hymns, and later joined the Boys' Brigade in the family tradition. And always this image of a lone traveller in all my favourite hymns: "Who would true valour see", "Courage, Brother, do not stumble", "My faith it is an oaken staff, the traveller's well loved aid", "Will your anchor hold in the storms of life?" and of course, "When a Knight won his spurs". I was never encouraged to analyse these hymns, just sing them in an open voiced, unapologetic manner that marks one out as brought up Northern Methodist. Of course, they're all suffused through with brave journeying, overcoming whatever problems you have, and reaching the destination which is always there if not a little mysterious.

Another favourite hymn was Jerusalem: "And did those feet in ancient time..." Blake's hymn of political striving and resacralising the landscape interpreted by me as the goal of my incipient socialism and Green awareness.

Pilgrim's PROGRESS? Christian has his Celestial City, Blake his too. One is personal and the other is collective (and practical and active, a very important aspect for me). My pilgrimage will hopefully be both, my Celestial City or Blake's Jerusalem, will have no gates to pass through, no secret codes of entry, no chosen few. It will be full of humanity of every faith( and none), colour, gender, sexuality, ability, or any other boxes we so readily make, and will be swimmingly full of compassion. This possibility is what I hope to highlight and celebrate! So yes, definitely a progress in terms of a greater good than that around at the moment.
So on an individual Bunyanesque way, how do I see my progress. It's certainly goal oriented which is to get back to my starting place, home in Cromer. Will I be changed? I hope there will perhaps be insight, self knowledge, even some sort of grounding and rooting in the Norfolk landscape and its many treasures. Personally, my goal is less easy to define, in fact it is very misty in the best Arthurian tradition, perhaps, as with the Way of Taoism, to travel is all that's needed .

Palimpsests

 

A palimpsest is a document, usually written on vellum, that has been scrubbed off so that another document may be written on the same vellum. The rub (sorry) is that the previous document is never completely effaced and traces of it remain, especially the guidelines. 

These three maps are about 240 years apart with the middle one about 120 years ago. For me, what shines through is the basic consistency in routes in and out of Cromer, the rough pattern of settlement and the wealth of churches (in both senses).  Norfolk in the Middle Ages was a rich farmland where sheep were reared for the fine fleece (only surpassed in quality by Dieulacres Abbey, but that's another rabbit hole!) Turkeys thrived and were driven to markets in London, don't think lorries, think a chap and his wife and a dog herding them! Cromer became a holiday resort and quite a few rich bankers built halls. A railway came and went, and the coastline subtly changed as coastlines do. In the twenty years I've been here I've seen many cliffslips and the odd precarious house tumble.  

Through all the maps some little details stay the same giving the landscape a history, a deep sense of its own timescale. We take our little dog up the Avenue most days, it's the straight bit of lane leading to Northrepps Hall and we have a couple of pictures from 1890 showing it almost identical to now.It's a delightful walk!

 Maps, like palimpsests, show changes in values: when does an arable field become a housing estate? And when does a railway become a footpath? It's all here in the maps. What isn't as clear is the underlying motivation for this change.

I guess we who were born in the fifties believed in progress as the underlying driver of change. In my Technical School it was very much taken for granted; by rational scientific thought and good engineering and architecture we could and would build a better world. Now, I'm not so sure. Humans are complicated creatures who think they are fundamentally rational and will carefully consider whether the projected change is beneficial and, more importantly, for whom.

Here's a thing. 

It's a genuine, medieval palimpsest. It was made, as you know, by scraping an existing document off the vellum to be able to write a new document. Please bear in mind that this is before printing (unless you are Chinese) when every document was the product of painstaking copying in scriptoria.

The uppermost document, the darker script, is a prayer book. The work that has been diligently scraped and rubbed away is mathematical text by Archimedes, written in the third century BCE and copied possibly in the tenth century. It is a groundbreaking piece of work showing some understanding of what became the calculus of Newton and Leibniz as well as advanced geometry and mechanics. It is the only way we have access to Archimedes' thought. And in the thirteenth century, in a monastery somewhere in the Middle East run by Orthodox Christians, this fountain of mathematics, natural philosophy and logic was scraped away for a prayer book which was so unimportant it was not even cut, sewn nor bound. Ironically it is thought that the original Archimedes sheets ended up in an obscure little scriptorium to keep it safe from the marauding crusaders who destroyed anything in an unknown script as heretical.

But back to maps......I suspect, from what is happening elsewhere, the next map in the Norfolk series may be covered with solar panels while we throw away sheep's fleece and import more and more food....

Progress? I'll talk about that in my next entry........

Just Me and my Bicycle

I've tried the organised Centuries in Norfolk and Suffolk, I really have. I was led to understand that the buzz of lots of cyclists would add sparkle to the day, that other people chatting to you as you ride would help the miles whizz by and that a mutually congratulatory beer with other finishers would add to that sense of achievement. I'm not a curmudgeonly chap. I like dinner parties, chatting to folk at Kentwell Hall reenactments, helping children make LEGO models at the Radar Museum, and I absolutely love flirting while shopping, but there's something gloriously freeing about solitary cycling. I can't explain it if you don't get it. Other cyclists just detract from the simple joy of silently gliding through country lanes or dodging traffic in towns. 

That's why I've chosen to go solo! I shall be meeting quite a few Faith (and No Faith) communities, I'm meeting up with my Kentwell apprentice at Julian's shrine, a few Zen Buddhists may accompany me on the ride out of Norwich and a couple of friends have generously given me a bed for the night in Dersingham. I don't think I'll be lonely!

In Search of the Primal Oatcake

North Staffordshire, where I grew up (the growing up is an unfinished project by the way), has a few claims to fame. Readers of this blog will already have sighed "The setting of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and of course that is foremost in my mind but there's more! The the six towns of the Potteries are where world class china was made: Minton, Royal Doulton, Spode, Wedgwood, Moorcroft, Midwinter, Shelley are just a few of the many, many pot banks (as we called them).

Isn't it shocking that so much beauty and utility came from such a degraded environment? 

It was the birth place of Reginald Mitchell the designer of the Spitfire. Hanley's Victoria Hall has one of the finest acoustics of any concert hall anywhere, much praised by Thomas Beecham and John Barbirolli. And then there's the Oatcake. Capitalisation is essential to differentiate it from the dry, small, rather impoverished Scottish oatcake that always reminds me of something that has half the recipe missing; the half that gives it flavour. No, the North Staffordshire Oatcake is a much more expansive and cosily enveloping affair altogether.  Imagine a substantial yeast leavened pancake made from wholemeal flour and oatmeal and cooked on a flat surface of hot metal lovingly rolled around a filling of your choice. It's Stoke's version of the tortilla.

Ex pats used to rely on visitors or returning home to get their oatcakes, usually from a little family concern preparing and selling the oatcakes in dozens from corner terraced houses or tiny shops. Nowadays you can get them from branches of bigger supermarkets from their Ethnic Breads shelf. These are rather smaller and seem less tasty than the ones from the homelier bakeries still dotted around North Staffs and each having their partisan supporters who swear that their source is best.

I've always loved oatcakes; Grandma used to do them with cheese and bacon and for a treat, a particularly delicious sweet filling of Golden Syrup on a hot buttered oatcake. It dripped lasciviously down your fingers and demanded to be sucked and licked........sorry........just a minute, I need to recompose myself after imagining such guilty pleasures. It's no wonder I used to struggle with my weight! 

In my healthier later days I've filled them with smoked salmon and rocket, cottage cheese and brinjal pickle and a particular favourite is chilli sans carne. Someone mentioned fusion? Thought not. At a pinch, just rolled up and dipped in homemade soup is good too. When I lived in London, before the Ethnic Bread stage, Mum gave me a recipe but it was complicated and I tried it once and then resorted to trips home up the A5 on a series of fast motorbikes to get my fix.

Fast forward twenty years. Roachside Cottage is a delightful holiday cottage run by an old school friend (he's younger than me though) where we stayed a couple of years ago, has one of the best holiday cottage libraries I've come across. As well as a few good books on Gritstone climbing, local history, and a couple of books on SGGK and some interesting fiction, there was this.

Pamela Sambrook wrote a fine history and also included some authentic recipes. As readers of earlier blogs will know, "authentic" has a hallowed tone when we pronounce it in our house. Getting Things Right is important. Getting Things Historically Right is even better. What Pamela discovered is that oats were a staple crop in the Staffordshire Moorlands and the oatcake was a very primitive way of eating that crop.  The simplest recipe just involved milled oats (Millstone Grit was in abundance) and water put in a previously used jug that hadn't been washed out. In other words, a sourdough. I'd been to San Francisco and never managed to recapture the sourdough I'd had there but I did recognise the technique. Pamela's wonderful little book also contained nuggets of culinary history: Did you know that oats from a good harvest were always milled? Rolled oats or what we know as porridge oats were the poorest oats that hadn't got the full starch content. I didn't think so.
We have an excellent grocer's stall in Norwich Market called Herbs and Spices who sell all manner of cereals from big sacks measured into brown paper bags. Just my sort of shop. So armed with four bags of different grade oat flour ranging from pinhead to fine I went home and experimented. The optimum mix seemed to be more or less one volume measure of each type of flour. This is when I should give a recipe. I'm not going to because a huge amount of the pleasure of cooking is to find your own way of doing things. Experiment with small quantities, and when it's as you like it, stick to that way of doing things.
They are the ultimate healthy food! The only added fat is a smear of sunflower oil to coat the bake stone. I add a few scoops of oat bran to up the fibre and anti-cholesterol quotient too. Their primitiveness is very appealing and would that I had enough of a garden to grow my own, but at least I have total control of what goes in them. My oatcakes have become a bit of a joke with the family: no-one else eats them, but Taryn, Caitlin's best friend, and a proud vegan, absolutely loves them.

The search for the simplest oatcake has led me down a path of paring down ingredients and processes. I never weigh anything; it's all guesswork and cooking times are very loose depending on temperature of the bakestone. This means, of course, that each batch tastes different. No homogeneity here! The only packaging is brown paper, sourdough is a self sustaining leaven and at a pinch they could be cooked on a bakestone over a woodfire. Or even on the top of a wood-burning stove but I haven't tried this for fear of really upsetting the family. In a world festooned with plastic packages, food full of additives, dubious oils, harmful seasonings and animal products driven by suffering, the primal Oatcake is just a nod in the direction we should be going. 

Lévi-Strauss' Mountain Bike

Many, many years ago I was fortunate enough to study Religions at Lancaster University. Note the plural. That is the key to the department headed by Ninian Smart in the early seventies. One of the courses I took (and thoroughly enjoyed) was baldly titled Myth. Adrian Cunningham, later to be Head of the Department, started the course by encouraging us to analyse Jack and the Beanstalk from a myriad of viewpoints from Marx, through Jung, Freud and Adler to a chap I'd never heard of but who seemed to have a cachet of complexity and obscurity. This was Claude Lévi-Strauss, a structuralist whose view, put very simply, was that human beings perceived the world as a series of polar opposites or binaries. In the example of Jack and the Beanstalk we have many of these: human/giant, rich/poor, subsistence/cash economy, child/adult, foolishness/wisdom, male/female, etc. One of Lévi-Strauss' points was that a society's myths will attempt to mediate between these polarities and that "interesting things" happen when things don't quite fit into a binary. An obvious example is the figure of Jesus in Christianity who is neither Man nor God but blurs these distinctions.

In one of my favourite recipe books * "The Raw and the Cooked" Lévi-Strauss puts forward the view that far from being "primitive", the folk stories that people tell to each other say lots about their cultures and can highlight some very complex relationships. On a very simplistic level Raw/Cooked = Nature/Culture.... smoked salmon and cream cheese anyone?

So there I was on a track this afternoon cycling between Cromer and Northrepps as part of my stay-fit-and-keep-my-heart-healthy regime and having all sorts of childish fun. For most of the track there are two tyre tracked ruts and it's a relatively easy and quick decision to swap tracks if nettles, mud or stones slow you down. In fact it's so easy and quick it's unconscious almost all of the time. Part of the way, over an old railway bridge, there's a middle track too and at one point I had to decide which one of the other two would be a better alternative to the track I was on. I nearly skidded and fell off because it took so long to decide! I did choose a way but it was a close call! Which set me thinking about binaries and polar opposites. If it really is entrenched in our thinking as structural anthropologists seem to think, then it could account for some present and perennial difficulties. Politically we seem divided by left and right, religiously we are believers or atheists, and don't even start on Remain or Brexit. We try to come to terms with a hugely complex interconnected world with mental apparatus more suited to coping in a small village where we know everyone. Following on from my thoughts on evolution and anthropocentrism I just wonder if we need to step back from our thinking about the world and begin to think about our thinking before we make an utter and complete mess of things.

* I went into this wonderful shop about 25 years ago and found "The Raw and the Cooked" on its shelves: booksforcooks.

The Evolution of "Evolution"

Warning: This Blog may exhibit signs of nihilism. If this gets too much for you, instructions for Backgammon can be found here. It worked for David Hume!

Instructions for Backgammon

So is it Darwin's fault? This idea that we humans with our self consciousness, our aggression, our misplaced sense of superiority are somehow the goal of evolution. You know the sort of diagram:

We are the right hand end of a series of images implying not only direction but progress. Even subversive or humorous images use the same trope:

You've seen this sort of thing haven't you? All pervasive isn't it? T-shirts, adverts, cartoons, probably not stained glass though... I would argue that this seemingly innocuous image is violently dangerous, almost as dangerous as the Old Testament God's order to Adam and Eve to have dominion over the earth and subdue it. 

Let's get a bit of background: 

The Judaeo Christian myth of creation is a rather beautiful positioning of Humanity, God and the Universe. It plays on that deep human sense of importance, because we are made in the image of God, and that this God (the only God) tells us that the bounty of the earth is ours for the taking. Up until the later 19th century this was the world view of all the Christian world, the world of the imperial powers. Just ponder that for a while..... We have permission to treat the world as we like, in fact it's our Christian duty. And one of the reasons we have for this is that we are qualitatively different, higher if you like, from all the other animals on the planet. We know this because it's the word of God written in the Bible. (How we treated other peoples we may meet is another issue for another post!)

The Enlightenment, a bit like the Renaissance, is a blanket term for many diffuse activities that were never considered a "movement" at all. It's a hindsight thing I think. In England, France, Germany, Scandinavia, and to a certain extent Italy in the late 16th and 17th century there was a fashion for analytical thought and the beginnings of what we call Science, they called it Natural Philosophy. Mathematicians like Isaac Newton and Willhelm Leibniz argued about who invented calculus while developing the tools we still use to describe and predict the movement of the planets and comets. From 17th century onwards many were beginning to question the truth of the creation story and ever so gradually the time scale of the universe was growing. Geological processes that were discovered by James Hutton in the 18th century needed a lot longer than the 6000 years or so that was calculated from the bible by Bishop James Ussher in 1650. As these discoveries and explanations extended and expanded our view of the Universe,  there were two religious responses: liberal creative acceptance or fundamentalist rejection and retrenchment. Newton himself was firmly Christian and saw his work as the affirmation of God's ordering of His creation.

   

William Blake, however, saw Newton in a very different light. (And no, it wasn't rainbow coloured!) To Blake, a visionary artist and poet, Newton was taking the wonder from the world and reducing it to an almost solipsistic mentation. This is such a key image and in it lies the danger of much of the thinking of recent times.

 Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, all pioneers of scientific thought, started the vision of a universe that wasn't centred on humanity. From a medieval world view of a world-centred small(ish) series of  nesting spheres described by the Greeks and set up by a Christian God, the Universe suddenly expanded and decentralised and became full of stars and planets all having their own orbits. And that was, pardon the pun, revolutionary. The world we lived on became a tiny part of a very big picture. You see, I think it's very seductive to think of the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific rationality as a value free way of seeing the Universe but it isn't at all. It's simply yet another incidence of anthropocentrism. We think Mathematics has given us access to God's tool box and His measures, in fact Newton saw his work as unlocking God's handicraft. Here's another Blake: look at God's instrument of creation.

Familiar? I don't think it's a coincidence: Blake is issuing a warning we have chosen to ignore. We think we're just discovering and describing the Universe, merely collecting and cataloguing creation almost passively, but our scientific endeavours are an ordering of things as a precursor of controlling and directing the world. And it's OUR order. This is I think what Blake is showing in his pictures. We are getting God like powers by our scientific endeavours. 

Another visual representation of how science works:

This a very interesting image, especially as was first seen in 1888. It's often taken for a medieval woodcut but it has been engraved by a technique not developed until the late 18th century. The traveller (look at his staff) has broken out of the limiting geocentric universe but he's seeing the wonders beyond in terms of machines, diagrams and graphs. His view, although he thinks it beyond the mundane, is governed and trammelled by his "scientific" notions. The image of the machine is particularly interesting. For Lewis Mumford, a 20th century American thinker, Science and it's partner, Technics (Mumford's word), were responsible for much of humanity's misery. They were not sui generis bad but had got out of control. For Mumford the machine pervaded Western society, indeed factories used humans as part of the machine. We had become alienated from nature and we needed to get back. He was a staunch fan of Garden Cities and fought for what we'd call a greening of the world.

I suppose here we'd better get back to Darwin! 

Just as the work of Natural Philosophers and later Scientists widened our notion of space and lengthened our concept of time and diminished our cosmic significance, so Charles Darwin tried to put the human animal in its rightful position as just another life form that populated a niche by dint of natural selection. What he absolutely did not do was to say that human beings were the present end of a natural progression towards anything. Humanity is not, repeat NOT the summit of a pyramid but the end of a tiny twig off a small branch of the tree of all living things. The wilful or ignorant misreading of the Origin of Species to put humanity as the end of a progression is, I think an attempt to claw back some lost ground in humanity's decentralisation. It may also be a sop to those of a religious persuasion who see humankind as somehow specially singled out and are liberal enough not to ditch evolution completely. What started out as a sort of clever shorthand for thinking about how animals can change over deep time becomes a dangerously misleading notion of how evolution works. It's not goal driven and we are not the goal. We are, in fact the problem in the changes we are seeing. No matter how many idiots deny that climate change is driven by our selfish and careless notions of dominion and human centrality, they will not bring back the species and the habitats we are destroying. Good grief, we've known long enough!

What movements such a Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and more recently and urgently Extinction Rebellion are telling us is that our relationship with the Earth is not one of subjugation, dominion nor control, but one of responsibility and compassionate care. It's the only home we have you know. It may be too late to undo all the damage but we must make a concerted effort to start.

Oh, and while we're at it, perhaps we could treat each other like that too. Just saying...

 Notes:

The image of the Earth from Apollo 8 is the first photograph of Eathrise. It's taken with a Hasselblad with monochrome film and I think has a better composition than the slightly later colour images. It also hasn't been rotated; it's as Bill Anders saw it.

Booklist:

In Search of Deep Time: Henry Gee (A thoroughly good chap and a personal friend)

Technics and Civilisation: Lewis Mumford

Evolution The Great Debate: Vernon Blackmore and Andrew Page

Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Stephen Jay Gould

Essays Concerning Human Understanding: David Hume

Intimations of Mortality from the Collections of Second Childhood.

Yes, I know, it's a convoluted title but I just couldn't resist it and it's quite apposite.

I'm 67: fit, active, lucid(ish), not quite as strong as I was but still climbing to Grade 5 (HVS in proper terms) and doing most of the things I was doing in my teens and twenties. Last winter I had the new and uncomfortable feeling of being short of breath while leading one of my Gawain in the Landscape walks. In fact I had to stop talking going up an incline: a horrible experience. Another more serious bout of breathlessness and pounding chest on a cycle ride led me into the wonderful ministrations of the NHS. My GP treated it very seriously, gave me a cocktail of keeping alive drugs, arranged ECG, X-ray and blood tests and then sent me to the cardiac clinic where I was investigated. The outcome of various diagnostics was that I had three constrictions in my coronary arteries which are going to be treated with titanium mesh strengtheners.

Although I know I'm not immortal this has jolted me. Dad died of cancer when he was 65. The six weeks between diagnosis and death was a master class in bravery. All through my life he told me that he wanted to have his ashes scattered from the back of a motorbike around the TT circuit in the Isle of Man. On one of our last meetings he looked me in the eye and said "I'm serious you know". "What, Dad?" " You know bloody well what I mean!" and mimed a twist grip throttle. Yes, I knew he was serious because he rarely swore and as with most non swearers, he used it with precision. He accepted his death with dignity, no little humour and I was privileged to be with him when he slipped away. I use the term accurately. It was like untying the painter of a boat moored on a calm lake and it will drift slowly out into that lake. Death itself doesn't bother me anything like it used to before I witnessed it, pain management has become compassionately precise and when all else is said and done, I've had a very fortunate and full life. One of my great joys has been seeing Harvey and Caitlin turn into beautiful and caring young adults with equally beautiful and caring friends. Both of them join me in the local climbing centre Highball in Norwich and today Caitlin did a climb at a higher technical grade than I climb at.

It was beautiful to watch and very moving because it is how things should be. Our young people should be surpassing us, they should be confident enough to protest against the injustices and the stupidities they see in the world. They should widen their horizons to become part of the world not just our parochial bit. And how wonderful is it that so many teens do so? It's part of that timey wimey thing I suppose.

So, where do the "collections" come in I hear you ask. Well, over the last few months I've been gradually replacing my climbing rack. All those nuts, slings, harnesses, ropes, karabiners, belay devices that I sold or gave away all those years ago when I thought I'd never climb again. In a very Gerard Manley Hopkins way they look great, and above all they ring and rattle beautifully too. We're planning a trip to the Peak District later in the year when we can start some proper (more adventurous) climbing. The gear, tackle and trim don't aid our climbing, they are for protection against hitting the ground. Falling is permitted these days. When I started way back in the sixties the dictum was that the leader never fell because severe injury or death would follow even on the relatively short Gritstone routes we were doing. Now the development of artificial chockstones, camming devices, eccentric wedges, elastic ropes and comfortable harnesses has meant that routes considered unthinkably dangerous a few years ago are climbed by relative beginners. This is good, this is how it should be. Progress can be a dangerous concept which I'll explore in another blog, but as you know, I firmly believe that doing difficult and scary, exposed things should be a fundamental part of life. As I get older and I can see the end approaching, I see that things that once were easy become harder. I find certain hills around Cromer getting slower to cycle up and eventually I suppose that walking upstairs may become as difficult for me as a grade 5 climb is now. My dad, bless him, found breathing to be too difficult right at the very end of his life. Mortality is becoming for me a reality which must be embraced as a friend rather than scorned and ignored as an enemy. I was taught by an expert!