Placelore

Her Privates We

In his introduction to Her Privates We William Boyd[1] states, “it is “the finest novel in my opinion, to have come out of the First World War”, whereas I would not entirely agree with this view, the novel certainly stands among the finest. Finest in the sense that it neither romanticizes or glorifies, offering instead a valuable insight into the squalor, boredom, routine, hierarchy and uncertainty that serves violent, savage conflict.

Many passages stand out from this book but at the moment two in particular come to mind. In the first, private Bourne, the central character, is in a conversational exchange with Sergeant Tozer whose point of view Bourne appreciated, “because he understood the implication his words were intended to convey, even when he seemed to wander from the point. Life was a hazard enveloped in mystery, and war quickened the sense of both in men: the soldier also, as well as the saint, might write his tractate de contemptu mundi, and differ from him only in the angle and spirit from which he surveyed the same bleak reality.”

The second comes towards the end of the book in the midst of a shattering assault, “In this emotional crisis, where the limit  of endurance was reached, all the degrees which separate opposed states of feeling vanished, and their extremities were indistinguishable from each other. One could not separate the desire from the dread which restrained it; the strength of one’s hope strove to equal the despair which oppressed it; one’s determination could only be measured by the terrors and difficulties which it overcame. All the mean, peddling standards of ordinary life vanished in the collision of these warring opposites. Between them one could only attempt to maintain an equilibrium which every instant disturbed and made unstable.” 

Her Privates We was first published in 1929 under the title Middle Parts of Fortune, both titles are taken from Hamlet (Act II, scene 2), when Hamlet takes  part in some baudy banter with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The uncensored version of the book available for some decades makes the novel more vital, real and immediate.

The author Frederic Manning[2] was born in Sydney Australia in 1882. He enlisted in 1915 and served  with the Shropshire light infantry. His insightful well writen novel is worthy of its place along side Erich Maria Remarque’s classic, All Quiet on the Western Front.[3]  

 

 

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Boyd_(writer)

 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederic_Manning

 [3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front

 

Blisters and Habits

In his novel about the seige of Krishnapur J. G. Farrell relates how Mr Hopkins, the Collector, while returning from a nightly tour of inspection notices the Padre digging graves and decides to help him, so he takes the spade himself and makes the Padre lie down on the path near three shrouded corpses who were to be buried.

“Then for an hour or more the Collector dug steadily by himself. At first he thought: ‘This is easy. The working classes make a fuss about nothing.’ But he had never used a spade in his life before and soon his hands became blistered and painful. He was invaded by a great sadness, then. The sadness emanated from the three silent figures sewen up in bedding and he thought again of his death statistics, but was not comforted ... And as he dug, he wept. He saw Harri’s animated face, and numberless dead men, and the hatred on the faces of the sepoy’s ... and it suddendly seemed to him that he could see clearly the basis of all conflict and misery, something mysterious which grows in men at the same time as hair and teeth and brains and which reveals its presence by the utter and atrocious inflexibility of all human habits and beliefs, even including his own.”

This is fine piece of dramatic, poignant writting. Relating the story of the deperate siege of Krishnapur from the side of the British colonial residents. It portrays the characters with their hopes, illusions, and foibles with incisive wit and tenderness. Above all it reveals the theatrical lunacy of war and the transience of life, even for those who for a time survive the death and destruction of the seige.

J. G. Farrell had both the ability and capability of being a good historian, however he elected not to undertake such a career, stating that history did not offer a proper understanding of what people felt and thought. His historical novels give unsentimental yet touching views of various characters during the inevitable decline of the British Empire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siege_of_Krishnapur

 

It Will Work

In his eigthy-fifth year and after many requests N. Balarama Reddy offered Reminiscences of his years living close to Sri Ramana Maharshi, the Sage of Arunachala.

Within the Reminiscences he relates how a noted Swami from Bombay (Mumbai) came to visit Bhagavan and thereupon asked him many questions about realization, samadhi, the bhakti school, and so forth. Sri Ramana responded to each question. Upon his deparure the swami stated, ‘I have truly gained something from this visit to the Maharashi.’  After he had left Bhagavan commented, ‘It will work.’

Balarama Reddy goes on to relate,”Whenever he made this observation, we understood it to mean that the converstaion the person had with Bhagavan would sink in and ultimately have positive effects.”

My Reminisceces N. Balarama Reddy, Sri Ramanasraman Tiruvannamalai 1996. Pps 67–68.

 

Numinous

The ‘approach’ to the sacred, the numinous, the unnameable is through the unknown. To honour this dimension allows for healing which by its compassion does not exclude death, for this too is in the process. Jung indicated, “The approach to the numinous is the real therapy and insomuch as you attain to the numinous experences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.”

Gerhard Adler and Aniela Jaffé, eds., Jung’s Letters, vol.1 (Princeton University Press, 1973).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numinous

 

Unknowable

"But now you will ask me,... How am I to think of God himself, and what is he? and I cannot answer you accept to say I do not know! For this question you have brought me into he cloud of unknowing. Of God himself can no man speak."

The Cloud of Unknowing

"Whoever perceives something in God and attaches thereby some name to him, that is not God. God is ineffable"

Meister Eckhart

"God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere"

Hermes Trismegistus 

" ...God is unknowable. God is also undefinable, because attaching any characteristic to the Infinite excludes its opposite, immediately violating the wholeness and completeness of the Absolute, outside of which nothing can exist"  

Healing Words The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine  HarperPaperbacks 1997 

A Pleasant Enlightenment

“Some people want to recognise God only in some pleasant enlightenment—and then they get pleasure and enlightenment but not God.”

Raymond B. Blakney, trans., Meister Eckhart

 (New York: Harper & Row , 1941), 249–50. 

 

East and West

This morning while sitting overlooking a lush tropical garden in Tamil Nadu, I concluded reading William Dalrymple's historically well researched book, White Mughals,* a tapestry of stories about intimate relationships in 18th century India. Although, in my view, not his best book to date, nonetheless worth the effort of reading for those who harbour an interest in this remarkable land.

Central to the narrative is the marriage between James Achilles Kirkpatrick and Khair un-Nissa, and as their story, and those of others so well illustrate, "East and West are not irreconcilable, and never have been. Only bigotry, prejudice, racism and fear drive them apart. But they have met and mingled in the past; and they will do so again."

*White Mughals,William Dalrymple, Penguin Books 2002  

 

tinkers

Tinkers a debut novel by Paul Harding, is simple, elegant, and beautifully written. It tells a lyrical tale observed through the last eight days of the life of George Washington Crosby, but within the tale are woven other stories of his father, mother, and others who were a part of his life. This novel is within a tradition of the finest of American writing, and was the surprise winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2010.

An Excerpt;

“I remember that my father had a birch canoe when he was very young. Indians made the canoe and my father bought it from them. Every spring, when the ice went out, one of the Indians would appear out of the woods one morning and restore the canoe for the season. I never saw my father speak with the Indian and I do not know how payment was made or collected or in what currency it was paid. After resewing loose seams and inserting new bark where it was needed, the Indian simply disappeared back into the trees. I remember squatting in the grass several yards from where the Indian worked, trying to learn what I might, which was nothing, but still something I felt compelled to do, as if my lesson was no more than the effort I made. After glancing for a moment to look at the first robin of spring, I looked back at the canoe and the Indian had vanished without sound, without seemingly, even movement, but, rather, had been reabsorbed back not only into trunk and root, stone and leaf but into light and shadow and season and time itself.”

Bellevue Literary Press, a small non-profit publisher, published tinkers.

 

Smile or Die

How Positive Thinking Fooled America and The World

By Barbara Ehrenreich. Published by Granta Books, 2009

This book opens with a simple sentence: ‘Americans are a “positive” people’, the author then sets about exploring how this view has taken root in the minds of many people both within and outside the USA. She proffers the view that the image and the reality are quite different and contrary to what may be offered on widely viewed television programmes like Larry King Live and the Oprah Winfrey Show or by best selling books such as The Secret, the core of American positive thinking is built upon anxiety and a terrible insecurity.

The American Revolution and the resultant fledgling Republic were based on idealistic principles. Its leadership was both flawed and young, and although several of the founding fathers were not at all positive that their rebellion would be successful, they fought bravely. Barbara Ehrenreich points out, “There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.”

It was during the 19th century that the movement of positive thinking began to take hold in the USA. It was brought about through the influence of a diverse collection of individuals seeking in their own way either wealth, health or happiness, often all three. Among them was Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (considered by many to be the founder of the New Thought movement). After his death Mary Eddy Baker claimed his teachings as her own and went on to establish Christian Science. It was through another of Quimby’s disciples, Annetta Dresser, that William James came to be influenced and subsequently wrote enthusiastically about the benefits of the New Thought approach to healing in The Varieties of Religious Experience. “To James, it did not matter that New Thought was a philosophical muddle; it worked.”

The essence of Quimby’s healing method is that the universe is fundamentally benevolent, that there is ‘One Mind’ out of which it came into being, that humans are a part of that ‘One’ and can ‘leverage their own powers of mind to cure or “correct” their life.’

The author was drawn to examine the history of how positive thinking reached such dominance in the USA as a result of her own diagnosis with cancer. ‘Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.’

The book has a journalistic approach and as a result lacks depth of questioning; however it does offer some valid criticisms of the multi-billion dollar positive-think-industry and its influence on health, religion, politics and business. Whereas the ‘power of positive thinking’, may work for a while for some, it is like a Ponzi scheme, fundamentally unstable, based as it is on a sort of wish fulfillment, one- sided affirmation and denial of anything ‘negative’.

Olive Kitteridge

by

Elizabeth Strout

I found this a fine and luminous effort of modern American fiction. Set in a small coastal town in Maine, it offers us a sensitive, penetrating portrayal of some of its inhabitants as they intermingle and go about their daily lives. The central character, Olive Kitteridge, is an astringent, prim and proper retired seventh-grade mathematics teacher with a “big intelligent face”, a no-nonsense woman married to a pharmacist, Henry. She has plans for them both and for her son, Christopher.

Life plays her an unexpected hand: Christopher, who is the local podiatrist, leaves for California with Suzanne, a woman from out of town, and when the quiet, hardworking, all-too-ready to please Henry suffers a massive a stroke, Olive is alone. We watch as she struggles to face the conditions of her life. Her aging loneliness grows, filing the habitual places. A catastrophic visit to her son sends her flying, bewildered, back to an empty home. She yearns; her youthful dreams remain to love and be loved.

Then Jack Kennison crosses her path, and while it appears that they have nothing in common, she in time gently and caringly comes to lie beside him. “And so, if this man next to her now was not a man she would have chosen before this time, what did it matter? He most likely wouldn’t have chosen her either. But here they were, and Olive pictured two slices of Swiss cheese pressed together, such holes they brought to this union — what pieces life took out of you.”

Worthy winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this exquisite, sad, humorous piece of writing left me wondering about the indomitable, fragile Olive long after I had turned the final page.