Uncategorized

Marching to Stand Still

Uncategorized

We know something about the unconscious symbols at play in nursery rhymes. We’ve probably had an inkling since we were children that there was something dark and deeply troubling about them, even back then. Have you ever had the impression that nursery rhymes were written by adults for adults? The masque of innocence uncovered, the face of the grown-up beneath is etched in toil and trouble, revealing the awful and inescapable reality that we adults have had to live inside our minds for much longer than the children who chant these rhymes with such abandon. Minds collect bric-a-brac. They grow top-heavy with the accretion of let downs, compromises and all the hangups that give our maturing minds their characteristic chemistry. Whether we occupy them or they us, our minds one way or another need taming. Like redcoats, they need a good dose of disciplining. That, though, is easier said than done.

Speaking of redcoats and nursery rhymes, let’s take the Grand Old Duke of York, as an exemplar. As every child knows, he had ten thousand men. He marched them up to the top of the hill, and he marched them down again, and when they were up they were up and when they were down they were down, and when they were only half way up they were neither up nor down.

If that’s not a metaphor for the psyche, I don’t know what is. If marching foot soldiers uphill and downhill isn’t mood swings at their mildest or bipolarity at its most severe then I’ll be a cock-a-doodle do. Yet, it’s the bit in the middle where the rearguard bump into the vanguard and all ten thousand of them end up neither here nor there, that’s the part most psychologically revealing. For what is that if not a euphemism for ennui? What other language but French could coin a word for every turning of the emotional screw? Ennui: the condition which has a stranglehold on all ages but none more so than these queer middle years.

Neither up nor down – feeling nothing but listlessness and that persistent feeling that even though life is there for the living, we bumbling redcoats are not bearing up to the living part as briskly as we are to the existence part, a part, which by the way is incidental to living, as the heart beats whether we are truly living or not.

I remember Kevin Spacey’s character, Lester Burnham, in American Beauty. A lame-o whose highlight of the day was jerking off in the shower; who has lost something, although he cannot quite trace where the tributaries of that loss come from; a man – crucially – who didn’t always feel this sedated.

Tapping on the door of forty-four. Tis a funny age to call an age. At the juncture we’re squeezed between competing me-s: the rational me, the aspirational economic man; the irrational me, the passionate man. Those mental mudslingers wage a titanic shitfest struggle in the dual mind of me-me (the organism who is trying to make sense and meaning of it all) to claim the undisputed crown of quintessence, quintessence being the fifth element, the alchemy of true living. Was the choice to incubate the living part of life for X years to chase the $$$liquidity$$$ that seduces one into thinking that ‘you can do anything, go anywhere with money in the pocket and in the bank’ worth it? Hardly surprising given the ramped up role that monetarism plays in the lives of the average you and me. Better to be a rich man in a poor environment? Or a poor man in an enriched environment? No brainer – tis better to be a man of adequate means who is enriched by his environment.

How to assuage the nagging doubt that profound life choices we deem at some point along life’s journey to be far-reaching are actually really blinkered. Or that life choices that satisfy immediate needs are really the most visionary of all? To thine own self be true. That truism is as discerning in the New age as it was in the Elizabethan. Yet, when are we supposed to begin to do that, to be true unto ourselves, to wear the cap that fits? At what point do we know that we are really marching (whether up or down is irrelevant) rather than – like the Grand Old Duke’s Men – standing still?

 

The Kindness of Strangers

Uncategorized

Life’s quirky that way. What begins as calamitous in the making can end on a high. Not to put too fine a point on it, when misfortune starts befalling, serendipity has a reassuring habit of calling. And all this in a landscape so otherworldly you couldn’t make it up.

There we were, minding our own business, motoring up a 35km stretch of mountain road to a place of legend in central Oman. The car, with a reputation for inspiring confidence, had in these trying circumstances lost its bottle. Struggling to haul its five tonne ass up 2,000 metres from pillar to post, its passengers could feel its hurt. Relentless as alpinists pushing their weary porters on, we tried ignoring the signs. Over the apex, within sighting distance of our destination, the oil temperature drops and we quietly celebrate the triumph of the machine over the trials of nature. And then, as if taunting us all along, the VW goes clunk, clunk, clunk from the near-side wheel and judders to a standstill.

No amount of willing the thing to rouse itself does the trick. Like a feisty filly at the race stalls, she refuses to go on.

The air temperature gauge has decreased from 115 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level to a tolerable 82 Fahrenheit at 2,000 metres, small consolation in an otherwise disastrous showing.

The myth of German invincibility shattered, yours truly lets go a despondent cry followed by a petulant thump on the wheel. Oh God of Wolfsburg! How can you repay us for the faith we have instilled so unfailingly in you?

And then, like a handmaiden riding in from the wings in a stage production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, our Omani Valkyrie in his starch-white dishdasha turns up to save our sorry souls.

Introducing himself as Thani, as if that’s not a name straight out of the mythological past, he smiles benignly and offers a gentleman’s hand. Wearing his custom-built headgear tipped forward (for the benefit of the blind reader, a kind of white embroidered fez minus the tassles), his nose is, all four inches of it, Semitic (or maybe Gallic), and his facial features not unpleasant. He refers to each of us as brother, even though one of us is categorically female. In the time it takes to make a quick phone call then whoosh his wand (Oman’s puritan neighbours in the Gulf always did accuse this fiercely independent nation of conjuring the djinns with their malevolent scorcery), the fate of the car – and more importantly of us – is sealed. It will live to see another day, and we burned-out pilgrims will live to savour this very day. But not as we had imagined.

It’s action stations, but not in the way a Westerner with neurotic tendencies might think. Defcon-4 this is not. That said, this guy is a natural when it comes to handling human and mechanical breakdowns. Whisked into town to raise a posse to return to the mountain top (well, actually, two Indian mechanics – one known affectionately as the Professor, personal friends of Thani), we’re back within minutes to patch the car up and take it back to the workshop for a bit of loving restoration. As a show of trust, Thani drives our car, and we follow in his. Halfway into town his arm extends out the driver’s window and a thumb is raised. This, we take, as an auspicious sign.

As places to break down go, Jebel Al Akhthar is both a blessing and a curse. A plateau of hanging gardens, elevation a God-merciful 2035 metres above broiling sea level, the green mountain (akhthar means ‘green’ in Arabic, and Jebel ‘mountain’) is a veritable Babylon to the insufferable and breathtaking heat of old Arabia surrounding it. Not only that, the green mountain is a heaven sent 27 Celsius. By the providence of geology, this high plateau (the Sayq in case you’re interested) of climate temperance rises above the basement levels of hell where nothing other than date palm and acacia can handle temperatures that top 50 degrees in June. In fact, its altitude-assisted climate is so perennially perfect that fruits more at home in the Mediterranean grow fat and juicy in midsummer. They’ve got pomegranate. They’ve got peach, fig, apricot and grape. They’ve got life in relative abundance, and not many places in the region can make that claim without complex agronomy, such as irrigation from desalination plants.

So you climb and climb and watch in sheer relief the car’s altimeter go up and up and its thermometer correspondingly go down and down. This all makes mechanical mischief a fact of life one could get used to, at a push. One can think of few other places in the vastness of Arabia where breaking down means not merely surviving but prospering, too, from the experience (other than the repair bill).

That evening, now rested and attuned to the peaceful vibe of the hilltop hotel, we are invited to join Thani at his house in a hamlet we can see from the hotel is a white limpet stuck fast to the rock of the canyon far below. As sundown painted the land around in pale pastels while the valley floor far, far in the distance still burned like a ember, a diaphanous shroud of white cloud brought the temperature down further still.

He came for us in his jeep, such was the host he was and the host I would hope one day to become. Before retiring to a majli (like a drawing room in an old Victorian house) in the presence of his brother and adorable daughters – but notably not his wife – to eat dates and dahl and sip Arabic coffee and tea, he led us down to the wadi where only a month previous the waters had been cascading down from the mesetas, taking every loose thing in their unstoppable path. This is how things work here. The rains make infrequent visits to this parched and scoured corner of Asia, but when they do, they come with a force and a magnanimity matched only by that of the locals toward us, the outsiders, who are as thirsty, helpless and in need as the land itself.

 

What’s Not Meant To Be Will Be.

Uncategorized

No easy thing accepting the inevitable. No easy thing rejecting the instinct to hold on. It’s here and then it’s gone. It was never here nor there at all. Some campaigns are not worth marching on an empty stomach to fight. The retreat to the place beyond the pines will be as ignominious in its homecoming as two hundred and fours years ago when Napoleon decided to seize back Lady Russia into the wedlock of his continental system and came home empty-handed. Early winter of a summer campaign, he should have come prepared for the prospect that she would not return willingly. For all that money and prestige, the least Emperor Bonaparte could have done was to requisition good quality overcoats and bearskin hats for every brother in that Grande Armée. He did not because men are hasty in their march to folly.

The little Corsican with the tenacity to hold on long after others relinquished grip had no predecessor to go on, but Hitler should have known better. He had Napoleon’s experience to act as a sobering reminder. Another man of history who thought he could take back what was never his, the Reich chancellor would learn to his eternal damnation that just because the season was summer didn’t mean necessarily that Russia was the place to make a lasting impression.

Love and hate, two sides of the same coin forged in the fires of obsession.

Of history’s litany of star-crossed lovers, it is Orpheus and Eurydice who endure as a symbol to the pain of lost love and its subsequent descent into obsession. In the myth, death snatches Eurydice from Orpheus. A tale engrossing (and personally touching) enough to upset the game plans of history’s master tacticians is stopped in its tracks by a snake in the grass that doesn’t care for love to succeed. Devastated by her early departure from this life, Orpheus’ disconsolate strings play on until his ballads reach the gods themselves. As for the nymph Eurydice, we lovers of true fable will never know how well she Took her cursed luck, for her heart, if it be broken, lies shattered in pieces in the Hadean recesses.

So heartfelt and melodious is the voice of Orpheus, so sweet his lyre, that he secures a second chance to have her again. His subterranean journey past homeless, fleeting souls and dark hellish spires brings Orpheus to the court of Hades, who on hearing him play the lyre is moved to grant her a second crack at life, on the precondition that until both emerge into the daylight he must not look back. In the spirit of Hellenic myth tragedy he does. He is no different from all humans who have loved, for their greatest weakness is to glance back at the helpless, receding apparition of Eurydice, their Eurydice, whom they battled for years to get over.

I think the myth of Orpheus endures as a telling reminder not to look back on things that time has eclipsed; that the instant one casts a retrospective eye on a lost love, the more intangible, the more irretrievable the loss becomes. Nevertheless, tis easier said than done to evict she who resides permanently in a ventricle of the heart.

Hades’ ploy was to issue his writ to Orpheus knowing full well the lovesick boy would fail because men are weak and cannot forget.

Hades was never going to relinquish Eurydice to the material world because only gods know when what is done is done. Finding courage to change the things one can lies within the reach of mortal men, but having the wisdom to know the difference, now that’s the preserve of the gods.