We each have our own crooked nook of Reality from which to make sense of life. Perhaps a little poison is necessary to make the flow self-aware. The Tibetans say the Five Wisdoms are inseparable from the Five Poisons. Similarly, the Cabalists position Malkuth – the material world with all its degradations – at the root of the Tree of Life.

Primordial insight abides by the deepest stirrings of Strife. Often the difference between Hate and Discriminating Insight (the Path to Justice, Peace and Wisdom) is little more than a twist in perspective or handling of the emotion. Greed can easily transform into Faith, as instead of attaching ourselves to temporal material things, such as money, status, and reputation, we attach ourselves to spiritual things, such as Virtue, Belief in the Great Tao, or the Buddhist Idea that our most basic nature is inseparable from a beneficent Ultimate Reality. Delusion can transform into Knowledge, as once we finally emerge from the Self-Created Maze in which we vainly grasped at shadows or chimeras, we can look back at our former prison-house, aware of the impulses that created it. In order for there to be a centre, there needs to be a maze.

As a child, I ardently wanted things. My inability to possess enough shells or precious gems or picture books was a source of restlessness. Having them and lovingly arranging them on my bookshelf made me feel relaxed. As an adult, I tend to hoard books and music. My principal “wants” from life were to win recognition as a writer and secure a modicum of financial security, so I wouldn’t have to depend on others or work unwanted jobs to pay the bills.

These wants sound reasonable enough but were unhelpful as motivations. A failure to fulfil them could precipitate poisoned states of being, self-critical pressures distracting me from the pure joy of the present, ruining the whole point of dedicating myself to Art in the first place. Now and then I would lose track of my love for beauty and start building an identity on the shaky foundations of money and reputation. The poison was so engrained in my mental processes that I often couldn’t see it. Even when I achieved certain landmark goals, such as getting published in national newspapers or literary journals, there was still further to go, and I was still behind.

This was my modus operandi for some years. Work, work, work, achieve, or sink into a capitalist bog that never redeems its prodigal sons, but gives them ever deteriorating layers of psychological discomfort and high rents in which to sink their lives. I was terrified of falling under, of losing sight of my ‘dreams’. These anxieties often left me deprived of sleep and nervous in social situations. I wondered who was judging who and how much of the world was built on status as opposed to the more pleasurable virtues of philosophical friendships that I also strove to attain (there’s a split of values in every poisoned psyche). For years I carried round a manuscript of overwrought ideas, clinging to it as a mother to a stillborn baby Frankenstein, pretending that one day it would draw life (it would not).

I cannot say there was any grand revelation; more a slow awakening from a slow-boiled fever. The turning point was perhaps a visit to Scotland in December 2018. I had recently escaped an embarrassing situation: I had enrolled in a masters and sat the first four weeks of lectures but then dropped out when I realised I didn’t have enough money to sit the course or pay the fees, by which stage I had already spent half my student loan on basic living expenses and a £400 second hand car. I was soon harassed by the Student Loan Company, who declared the provision of funds to myself as illegal, and promptly sold my debt to a notorious debt collector, who wasted no time in trying to extract their pint of blood. It was hard not to feel like a fool in the situation. Naturally I blamed myself.

I still had the crappy car (which curiously survived a number of months, despite being less than healthy to begin with) and a bit of the illegal student loan left so decided to go on an impromptu trip to Scotland with a Mallorcan friend, Pep Joan Noguerol. Pep Joan had never visited the UK before. I picked him up from Gatwick Airport at ten pm and drove all night until we reached the Scottish border. His first glimpse of England’s green and pleasant land was the interminable motorway. I cannot remember how we kept awake. I suspect copious amounts of coffee were drunk.

The next day we reached the foggy shores of Loch Lomond, and then, towards the late afternoon, Glencoe, up in the highlands. On seeing those golden giants of mountains timeless in the mist, something inside us shifted. We felt the urge to stop the car and stare at the barren windswept beauty all around us.

Yes, I said, this is life. The vast bareness of these mountains. Just gazing on them once in one’s life is enough to say one lived. Wants and dreams and friendships would come and go. The mountains stay. There is something to be said for being more relaxed, for letting things flow where they’d flow, without trying to force them into ideal shapes. The pleasure of art is the work itself and not the feelings of success. The cavemen and the early primordial singers sought nothing from their acts of beauty other than the act itself. Industrialisation has turned artists - spiritual workers, consciousness explorers and image-makers - into businessmen, imbuing their work with the ethics of commerce. The trade off for financial independence through the selling of products via mass production is the association of spiritual value with material value and the slow but relentless erosion of communal rites. The mountains show the relativism of the current system; time runs differently for them. They are much older than capitalism and will certainly live beyond capitalism. We rush about in cities, searching for things with which to identify ourselves, fussing and fretting, uttering banalities, mistrustful of the nature inside us. So much haste and hardly any time to stop and think. The mountains don’t move at all. Nor do they mistrust their natures. They just sit and wait for the eons to pass.

Haste concerns not only material achievement, but also relationships. I was particularly sentimental about old friendships. Sometimes the dynamics just weren’t what they used to be. Time was needed either to let them fade or revive of their own accord. Rushing after them and being disappointed would only generate pain. One recalls Rainer Maria Rilke: “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”

There was sadness but also relief in this new perspective. The cycles of change push life along. Attempting to impose oneself against them was futile. Attaching oneself to an ideal image of the self often curtailed appreciation of the achievements, blessings and people that already adorn one’s life. I was thirty years old. It was time to settle down, enjoy the Present and foster healthy mental habits.

As we stared at the mountains, I took out my notebook and hurried down some observations from which I wrote this poem:

Burgundy mountains with manes of golden grass:
We drink their lazy streams, rejoice in distances between
The world we know and here. The pockmarked rocks
That loom above the road have different ways
Of dealing time.
The slowness of these charred, brown hills
Withstand far more than we can comprehend.
The ice-lipped wind that kisses them revives a different
Kind of life: the treeless slopes off which
The riddles of eternity have slid.
We look beyond: a speck of blue
Awakens in the sky. Today has held
The unseen avalanche of Mind, has knelt before the banks
Of frozen rivers, praying to thaw the heart. Today
Has woken savagely from sleep as brooding hills remain
Neither asleep nor awake but merely slow.
Today has shown the truth of rocks that scarcely move,
A bitter rain that warms,
A future in the present.

Everything post-Glencoe felt fresh. I cannot say I was completely cured but little by little the mental cogs were clicking into place. The details of the rest of the trip are mostly irrelevant. December turned out to be a perfect time for visiting the Isle of Skye. The island was empty. Pep Joan and I were given the run of the lochside hostel. We spent our days wandering through sparse, mist-shrouded mountains, occasionally confronting gales and rain.

Perhaps the principal battle of life is the battle for fresh images. The nomad in us cries for change, while tiredness – an incapacity for appreciation - is perhaps the real Demon of Spiritual Malaise. The bleak, windswept panoramas of Glencoe and Skye helped roll out a different kind of consciousness. They were a portal to another world. I rather like Wittgenstein’s remark on the purpose of philosophy: to provide a ladder to a higher place and then remove the ladder, so you can’t get down. Sometimes the right aesthetic experience just leaps out and hits you at the right moment. Call it fate. A perfect moment. The completion of a cycle. Saturn returns. As you will.

Nature is not just a series of pretty images for Instagram posts but a philosophical experience. One of my favourite quotes sounds as though it were written by Charles Baudelaire but actually comes from the Koran:

In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alteration of night and day; in the ships that sail the ocean with cargoes beneficial to men; in the water God sends down from the sky and with which He revives the earth after its death, dispersing over it all manner of beasts; in the disposal of the winds, and in the clouds that are driven between sky and earth: surely in these there are signs for thinking men.

Notice the similarities with Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” (especially if one uses Spinoza’s definition of God as Nature in the Koran passage):

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

If we can spare the time to stop and look, nature invokes Philosophical Contemplation. Every mental state has an equivalent in the workings of Nature. The Book of Truth, written by time’s pencil, is composed of marshes and rainbows, beasts and deserts. As Borges points out, sometimes the text is unreadable (his short story “Library of Babylon” parodies the idea that knowledge is even remotely possible), and postmodernism, with its delight in labyrinths, relativism, and post-structuralism, tends to agree. However, infinite complexity is not necessarily the hallmark of infinite ignorance. Every so often some regard familier of the Nature-God can show us what we are, bringing perspective back to an overly anthropocentric state of mind.

Confessions of a Distracted Mind

book babel

The Poisoned Cup