Epiblog for Holy Rood Day

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley.  As predicted last week, the phoney war is over, the sunlight is getting weaker, the days are dulling down, the mornings crisping up, and Autumn is on the way.  The peaceful, ruminative mood in which I ended last week’s Epiblog vanished a lot sooner than I expected, last Sunday, when I’d just posted my thoughts online, and the phone rang with the news that Ellie was missing.  Ellie, I realise, may need some introduction. She is, in fact, Granny’s new dog, and therefore Zak’s new little sister.  Since Freddie’s demise in February, Granny had been discussing the pros and cons of getting another dog.  Not just any dog, obviously – it would have to be the right dog, and any dog who came into the wolf pack would be very much Freddie’s successor, and never his replacement.

Anyway, the arguments raged back and forth, with some saying that perhaps Zak was enough to be going on with now, but others contending that he’d be lonely. For my part, I couldn’t help but point out that 7,000 unwanted dogs a year die in local authority shelters, at a rate of something like 21 a day, according to the Dogs’ Trust.  So any new dog that came from a shelter would at least be one saved from a possible doom.  Along came Ellie, or rather, up she popped on one of the dog rescue web sites, and visits were arranged, donations made, and Ellie joined the team.  At first, though, we agreed to soft-pedal her presence, because of her health. Unfortunately, she had not one, but two cysts, either or both of which could have turned out to be nasty. So over the last couple of months, there’s been a considerable amount of vet-work involved, and operations, and stitches, and biopsies, and things like that.  Finally, she seems to have been given something approaching a tentative all-clear.

Which of course, she celebrated by running off. She’d been down on the local playing fields with Grandad, she saw something in the woods, and off she went.  Now, in his day, Grandad was quite a speedster. If he’d relied on his Irish ancestry, he could have run for Ireland, but he chose to ally himself with England, just at the time when England had a plethora of very fast runners such as Ibbotson, so he didn’t get in the team.  But he could shift.  However, since then, time has marched on, and he was, reluctantly, forced to give up and come home and raise the alarm. Granny rang me, and I got straight on to Dogslost.co.uk, Facebook, Twitter, and West Yorkshire Dog Rescue. It furthers one to set armies marching, as it says in the I Ching.

I have to say that, possibly next to International Rescue, Dogslost.co.uk are pretty quick at getting the word out.  No giant hangar doors opening in the side of mountains or anything like that, but within ten minutes I’d received an email alert about Ellie, complete with a link to the site and therefore the picture of Ellie I’d posted. So, even as Granny and Grandad were on their way back to the playing fields to resume the search, I knew that everyone on the Dogslost site in the HD postcode would have received the same alert.  At that point, I’d done all I could for them.  An hour later, my mobile rang – it was Granny saying Ellie had been found. She must have wandered through the woods adjoining the playing fields and gone on into the housing estate beyond. Ellie, that is, not Granny, who was still crashing about and blundering around in the said woods looking for Ellie, when her mobile rang. A concerned householder had noticed Ellie wandering and had collared her, and the dog tag with all the phone numbers on did the rest. So, all’s well that ends well, I suppose, and all that remained for me to do was to stand down the various armies I’d set marching.

Compared to Ellie’s adventures, the remaining animals have been pretty staid this week. The main issue remains the contest for the dog-bed, which Matilda continues to usurp. Misty’s latest tactic is to engage in staring contests with the cat (unreciprocated, she just turns her back and settles down again, facing the other way) and, on occasions, to whine pathetically, which is equally ineffective. Misty does of course have two other beds, a settee and a chair to choose from, as well as sharing the beddies at night, but she wants that bed back.

Just when I could have done with a week where the outside world refused to impinge on my consciousness, so I could get on with the mountain of things that needed doing, the outside world had other ideas. The world of telegrams and anger, as E M Forster called it.  The week contained the anniversary, for instance, of the 9/11 attacks in the US, which started all this crazy madness in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Arab Spring and the establishment of the “Caliphate” and the massive undeclared war that is now raging between radical “Islam” and the west.

Here at home, the Junta has once again caved into the farming lobby and resumed badger culling, despite the fact that there is absolutely no guarantee that it will affect the issue of bovine TB, and once more it will rack up massive costs and once more demonstrate the prevalence of casual cruelty towards animals, in this case, officially sanctioned.  This, and events later in the week, have made me more convinced than ever that the law regarding animal cruelty needs to be re-aligned and made more like the law on human cruelty, with appropriate penalties.

When we had the elections for the police commissioners, although I had my reservations anyway about whether or not they would have any real effect other than draining the public purse of £85,000 per year,  I wrote to all the candidates in West Yorkshire to ask them about their policy on offences against animals and for their assurance that they would use their influence to press for the maximum possible penalties. Not one of the buggers replied.

The truth is that animals are often treated as disposable commodities.  Someone noticed this week an odd entry in Peterborough Council’s annual report and accounts – they had 101 cats in the council’s freezer.  It turns out, though, that this is not uncommon. The cats were a year’s worth of roadkill, and the council’s cleansing department keeps them for a year, and, when they are still unclaimed at the end of that period, allows them to be passed on to a “specialist waste disposal” contractor. This process is replicated by other councils – Adur District Council in Sussex, for instance.  While on the one hand, it’s better, I suppose, that the council does this than simply leaving them lying in the gutter, it is still a long way short of the respect and care that should be meted out to the cats and dogs kept as pets.  I’m coming to the conclusion that both dog and cat registration is not only necessary, but desirable, together with microchipping, and, in the same way as we have a sex offenders’ register, there should be an animal offenders’ register, on which those who are convicted of relevant offences are placed.

There are those, of course, who would say that I care more about animals than I do humans, and my usual answer to that is  to quote Gandhi when he said that “I hold that the more helpless a creature is, the more it is entitled to the protection of man from the cruelties of man.” Or, to put it another way, in the words of Orwell’s protagonist in Coming Up For Air, George Bowling, who says:

“Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn’t to prefer trees to men? I say it depends on which trees, and which men.”

So yes, it depends on which animals, and which humans. It’s not an either/or though, and sadly there’s just as much cruelty and stupidity from human to human as there is from human to animal in the UK today. If you needed any evidence of this, the coroner’s inquest this week on David Clapson, whose case I featured in this blog some time ago, brought it back sharply into focus. His benefits had been stopped as a result of missing one meeting at the jobcentre. He was only on benefits in the first place because he’d been forced to stop work to care for his elderly mother. He was diabetic, and without the £71.70 a week from his jobseeker’s allowance he couldn’t afford to eat, or put credit on his electricity card to keep the fridge where he kept his insulin working. Three weeks later, he died from diabetic ketoacidosis, caused by a severe lack of insulin. He had £3.44 and a tin of sardines to his name. A pile of CV’s was found next to his body, which will no doubt have pleased Iain Duncan-Smith.  Another “scrounger” written off the books. All hail austerity. I don’t actually know what the coroner decided on, as a verdict, but if there was ever a clear-cut case of Goliath slaying David, this was it.

Meanwhile, Cameron, Clegg and Miliband to set off for Scotland on a joint campaign to rally the No campaign.  I bet every Co-op in Glasgow sold out of eggs within minutes of that announcement. Alex Salmond is now in a position where he can’t lose. If there is a no vote, he will still go down in imagination of his followers, in the pantheon of Scottish leaders who tried but failed to break free of the yoke of English tyranny, see under William Wallace, plus he will now get Devo Max, which is what he wanted all along, all the advantages and benefits of independence, but without any of that tedious business of balancing the books, and the UK still there to bail him out if things go badly.

I tried to demonstrate last week that the SNP’s position on defence, for instance, to name but one, is unsustainable to the point of bonkers barminess, and to be honest, I am getting to the stage now where I’ve more or less resigned myself to the fact that Scotland is going to inflict an act of massive harm on itself for reasons I don’t really understand. It all starts to unravel with the currency issue, but the vast majority of people to whom I have tried to point this out seem to be in “La La La La, I’m not listening” mode. In the more extreme cases, it’s a bit like trying to talk to the North Koreans.  Without a central bank and a formal currency union, Scotland would have three options for balancing the books, or a mixture of these three. Either increased borrowing, increased taxation, or public spending cuts.  The SNP are arguing that you can cut taxation, and yet still have high public spending. You can’t. Not unless there’s a magic money tree somewhere in Holyrood that they’re keeping under wraps. Actually, they think there is. They think it’s oil, which no two experts seem to be able to agree on.  Oil is not sustainable anyway, long term, and there are massive risks on basing your entire economy on one industry, but by the time the doodoo connects with the air conditioning, Salmond will have moved on to “Dunrulin, Isle of Arran” and it won’t be his pension that goes down the tubes.

The SNP’s reaction to the fact that both major parties in the UK (and the Liberal Democrats, but no-one gives a stuff about them, they are toast at the next election anyway) and the Bank of England have said that there will be no currency union, is to continue to insist, blithely, that there will be a currency union, and that the threat of no currency union is just a negotiating tactic.  Unfortunately, this ignores the fact that there would be an immense backlash at the polls against a “Rest of the UK” Government which caved in and allowed an “independent” Scotland to link to the pound sterling, and there are also compelling economic reasons for the RUK not to stand guarantor for Scottish public spending when it has no political say in how those decisions are made. As I’ve said before, it would be like Nigella Lawson handing over her credit cards to her PA, and saying “there you go, have fun!”

If Scotland carries on using the pound without a formal currency agreement, then it will be at the mercy of interest rates set by the Bank of England, and at the mercy of international markets. It will, in fact, be less “independent” than it is now. But try telling people that. It’s like lemmings voting for a higher cliff, where some people are concerned. And if there is a currency union, against all indications, the chances are that the terms of it will be so onerous to Scotland that, once again, there will be even less wriggle room for an “independent” Scotland than there was before. If it does come down to negotiations, for instance, Cameron would be even more of a fool if he didn’t make keeping the nuclear submarines at Holy Loch and Faslane as a precondition of even sitting down at the same table as Alex Salmond. Imagine the howls of derision that would raise at the next SNP conference thereafter, if the SNP had to give way in order to get a currency union.

The fact that much of what the SNP promise for an “independent” Scotland will be plainly impossible in economic terms is now coming home to roost, as banks and some businesses are making announcements about their intention to scoot South of the Border in the event of a “Yes” vote, and/or put up prices for a separate “Scottish” market, if one happens. Much has been made of the timing of these announcements, and yes, I would not be at all surprised if there hasn’t been some skulduggery in getting them to make their statements ahead of the poll.

Skulduggery is no stranger to this campaign, look at the instances of the No posters being defaced and graffiti’d all over the place. And of course, if the businesses concerned had been stating their public support for the SNP’s proposals, they would have had no compunction in using the facts to further their cause. Feelings are running high, and understandably so, in a campaign that’s been marked by a paucity of accurate information on all sides.  But the point is, surely, that if these people were planning to up sticks and leave anyway, better that they come out and say so now while the people of Scotland have a chance, in advance of the poll, to weigh up the options.  Some will weigh the options, and continue as before. Some may change their minds from Yes and vote No. Some, enraged by what they see as bullying, might well switch the other way! According to the SNP, anyway, these are all just scare stories, which is an easy way of getting out of actually having to counter them.

The fact is, though, that at the end of the day, these people, the likes of Tesco, and M&S, and the Banks, and people like BP, are all just rapacious capitalists. They aren’t siding with any one campaign for any other reason than that they, and their analysts and advisors, have taken a look at the SNP proposals, seen them for what they are, and voted with their wallets. These people are not fools. They will do whatever brings in the greatest profit at the least risk, and there is absolutely nothing either side can do to persuade them otherwise.  Yes, there is an upside in the RBS not having to be potentially bailed out by a Scottish government in the future, but then the Scottish government won’t really be in a position to bail out anybody, anyway, and wouldn’t have been even if RBS had stayed, which is presumably why they moved. As I said, these people aren’t stupid. Feckless and reckless, venal and grabbing, perhaps, but not dumb.

Oddly enough, in the weird way that coincidence sometimes prompts the thought process, I had to send some books to The Isle of Arran this week, and obtained a quotation for doing so from an online courier broker. The actual cost wasn’t too bad, but when I got to the checkout, they tried to stiff me for an additional £16.00 “remote area surcharge!” So I thought stuff that, I’ll send them by Royal Mail instead. This then set me thinking, what happens to Royal Mail in an independent Scotland? At the moment, I can send a first class letter to someone in Stornoway for 62p, the same price that it costs me to post one to someone in the next village. This is possible because of a thing called the universal delivery obligation. This means, from Royal Mail’s point of view, although it costs them vastly more to deliver my hypothetical letter to Stornoway than my hypothetical local letter, the cost is offset and shared out across all the letters posted in the UK, so that the easy peasy city centre deliveries are cost-effective enough to balance out the costs of the postman and his van driving half way up the glen to a lonely croft miles from anywhere.

Plus, the Royal Mail used to be heavily “subsidised” by revenue streams from the large volumes of business direct mail, much of which has already been creamed off by the people who are now allowed to compete with Royal Mail for that type of traffic, and have been since the Royal Mail’s part-privatisation a few years ago.  The other mainstay of Royal Mail is small packets traffic from people placing online orders, and again, at present, the costs of delivering these to different parts of the UK are all, presently, averaged out into one national price structure.

Before Scottish devolution reared its ugly head, Royal Mail were already looking at what they called “regional pricing models” – that is, charging more to deliver the same item to different parts of the UK.  They would dearly love to ditch the universal delivery obligation, especially since they are even more privatised these days. Once Scotland becomes, in effect, a “foreign” country as far as Royal Mail is concerned, I wonder how long it will be before there is a separate (and more expensive) pricing structure for those who have to post things to destinations North of the Border.  And maybe even within Scotland as well, which can only have a knock-on effect on business costs and increase inflationary pressures, which can only be eased (with no central bank of last resort, see above) by cuts or borrowing or taxes.

This doesn’t mean I am in favour of the status quo. Or even Status Quo. Especially not Status Quo, in fact. I have been described, rather patronisingly I thought, by Scots on a Facebook forum as “a guid wee footsoldier” as if I was some sort of stooge for David Cameron! Yes, that’s why I write such laudatory stuff about him, week after week. I, too, would like to see a more just, equitable, fair, compassionate society in Scotland that benefits those at the bottom of the heap: I’d like to see it for the whole of the UK. Sadly, the fact that the Labour Party in Scotland has allied itself with the Tories of “Better Together” in a campaign which has diverted attention from what Labour should have been doing, has not only damaged their credibility north of the border, but also made it less likely to happen elsewhere. Plus, if the vote is as close as everyone seems to think, whatever the decision is, it will leave a bitterly divided country that will take a long time to heal. 

As if the completely bonkers machinations of the Scottish referendum weren’t bad enough this week, there came the terrible news of the fire at Manchester Dogs’ Home that has killed up to 60 dogs at the time of writing. Previously, I had been vaguely rejoicing in the fact that Parliament had voted to further curtail puppy farming, but, in the way the universe seems to have sometimes of balancing the books, this more than cancelled out any brief elation on my part that the mindless oversupply of dogs by commercial breeders might have been counteracted, if only slightly.

In the white-hot rage that possessed me when I heard about this, I said several things that were unwise, but I was only a small part of the huge shitstorm that blew up on social media, suggesting that the culprit should be made to bury the dogs he had killed with his bare hands, etc.  It was scarily easy to join in, fuelled by the passion of the lynch mob, and it was only the next morning that I started to think more coldly and logically about how the maximum damage should be inflicted on the person or persons responsible, which is not by prejudicing any likely case.

Although the police are not naming him, under the rules governing the legal proceedings involving minors, I made it my business, in my state of bloody anger, to try and find out who he was, using just the internet. It was surprisingly easy. It involved trawling through the comments sections on Facebook pages and news stories about the tragedy. Invariably there is someone local who feels the need to comment and may give away more information than they intended. In this case, my first lucky break came after an hour or so of searching when I found that someone had posted that there were news stories to the effect that the accused had himself apparently been the victim of a dog attack, thus implying that this gave him some sort of motive.  I got into a discussion on this point, about whether evil actually exists, per se.  I don't think anyone is born evil or born holy for that matter. I think we all have it in us to be saints or serial killers, and it all depends on which buttons get pushed. The same motors that drove Michael Ryan, Fred West, et al are inside me and you as well. It's just that we're a lot better at keeping them under control. And those who don't keep them under control, or can't, must be segregated to protect the majority who can. In my blind fury at the bastard who did this despicable act, I wished him dead, which just goes to show how near to the surface the coal-seam, the instinct for violence actually lies.

Anyway, a quick Google search for various permutations of relevant phrases revealed links to three news reports all naming the same victim. The actual news pages had been taken down, presumably as a precautionary measure, by their media owners, but the old cached versions of the pages were still available and all three carried the same name and other details which made it likely.  I’m not going to name him nor am I going to elaborate, but it shows just how easy it is to cross reference stuff online and come up with an answer, one in this case which I am pretty sure is correct. Of course, naming him online – assuming my suspicions are correct – could also have a counterproductive outcome, because it would make it easier for a defence barrister to argue that his client had already been named, tried and convicted by social media, thus making a fair hearing impossible. 

So I will confine myself to wishing once again for the harshest possible sentence under the law in the event of a guilty verdict, in order to send out an exemplary message to any other yobboes  who might be contemplating similar high jinks. And if there were others involved, they should all be charged with conspiracy to commit arson. The going rate for sentences for what the law calls “simple” arson seems to be 4-5 years, whereas conspiracy to commit seems to attract 5-10 years.

After such a heavy week of truly dreadful events, it was somewhat of a relief to watch the Last night of the Proms on the BBC, though even there, the spectre of the Scottish Referendum hung about like Banquo’s ghost, with the careful cutting away from the Proms in The Park celebrations on Glasgow Green at the point where the Albert Hall crowd were belting out Rule, Britannia, and Land of Hope and Glory.  They may as well have cut away from the whole thing, for me, after a week where there has been not much hope, and precious little glory. Things can only get better.

Somehow, then, I’ve staggered through to Sunday again, and, fortified by a breakfast of bubble and squeak made from last night’s colcannon, with the addition of two fried eggs done “over easy” and lashings of brown sauce, plus a steaming mug of tea, I sat down to write this blog.  At which point, I heard the news that ISIS had beheaded their British hostage, David Haines. So there we are, then, another act of barbarian cruelty, just to book-end the week and conclude it in the spirit it’s displayed all along. As I said last week, we’re not in Kansas any more. We’re back on Dover Beach again, where the ignorant and confused armies clash by night. I feel desperately sorry for his family, and I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to have someone you love, or even just someone you know, caught up in such a terrible situation. I was afraid that his fate had already been sealed by the fact that the Junta have painted themselves into a corner with their anti-ISIS sabre-rattling rhetoric in public, and the more insidious anti-Muslim propaganda at home. The fact that ISIS has about as much to do with “Islam” as the Westboro Baptist Church has to do with Christianity is neither here nor there in the argument. Cameron was not going to be seen to be kow-towing to “terrorists” (of our own creation, but it’s too late to do anything about that now, the genie is now well and truly un-bottled) and from that moment, there was only ever likely to be one outcome.

I always thought, growing up in the optimistic sixties, that life could only ever get better. New cures for diseases were being invented, we landed on the moon, the long period of drab 50’s austerity and rationing was over, the music was fabby and brill, and Harold Wilson told us we were basking in the white heat of technology.  Then came the hangover after the party. After the Lord Mayor’s parade, the muck cart. After enlightenment, the laundry, as the Zen masters put it.  Now, there’s an automatic presumption that life will only get worse for the vast majority. Even that, if eschatologists (and I don’t mean Houdini) are to be believed, that we might be in the last throes.  The precious gift of life is so casually broken and cast aside almost everywhere you look.  I hope not, but I wouldn’t be surprised, if there was even violence in Scotland, whichever way the vote goes. The song needs re-phrasing for the times we live through - things can only get bitter.

But today, at any rate, is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, or to give it its more common moniker, Holy Rood Day. Rood is the Old English (Anglo Saxon) word for cross, which comes down to us in the title of the epic Anglo Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, incised into the cross at Ruthwell in Dumfries and Galloway, and also in the term “rood screen” (the screen that prevented the congregation from looking directly at the altar in a church)

This feast day commemorates the day in 326AD when ‘the true cross’, the one on which Christ was said to have been crucified, was put on display in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople. The church was built specially to house and exalt it by the Emperor Constantine at the behest of his mother Helena, later St Helena. She had discovered the cross and proved it to be the original, by way of a miracle, as people were wont to do in those days, during a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

At one time, though, it was said that the churches of Europe and the Middle East had enough whole “true” crosses and pieces of  “the true cross” to have made a fair-sized boat. An alternative explanation of Holy Rood day, is that it commemorates the recovery of St Helena’s true cross from the Persians (who had looted it in 614AD), and its return to Constantinople by the Emperor Heraclius in 629AD.

The term “Holy Rood” has been used as the dedication for many churches and other ecclesiastical establishments, including (weirdly enough in this week of preoccupation with all things Scottish) Holy Rood Abbey in Edinburgh, founded by David I, King of Scots, in 1128, and which now lends its name both to the Royal Palace of Holyrood and the Scottish Parliament building.

More prosaically, Holy Rood Day was a significant mediaeval holiday, when tradition dictated that you went out nut-gathering. In most cases, this meant gathering hazel-nuts which were an important source of protein in the winter, but in fact people have been gathering hazel nuts in Britain since ”time immoral”. In 1995 an archaeological dig on the Hebridean island of Colonsay discovered a shallow pit that was actually a midden, filled with the remains of hundreds of thousands of burnt hazelnut shells, which were carbon-dated to about 7000 BC.

Notwithstanding the immense amount of hokum surrounding the mediaeval pilgrimages based on sites of famous relics, and the commercialism of the ensuing trade, markets and fairs that surrounded them, I can personally attest to the powerful nature of such an experience.  My own theory about this, for what it’s worth (probably about £4.2s.6d) is that the relic acts as some sort of focus, conduit, or even portal to the instinctive intuitive and spiritual side that we suppress in “everyday” life, thus creating one of the “timeless moments” which Eliot commemorates so often in Four Quartets. It’s perfectly possible, of course, to still your mind and put yourself in the “zone” by other means – prayer, meditation, and so on, but how much easier when you have a lightning rod to concentrate the power of the metaphysical. (Coincidentally, “rod” is another word which goes back to the same Anglo –Saxon root as “rood”. As indeed, is “root” itself.)

My own lightning-rod moment, about which I’ve written previously in this blog, came during a visit to Holy Cross Abbey, in Ireland, in 1998. Holy Cross Abbey did in fact have a supposed splinter from the “true cross”, but the original one went missing during the turmoil surrounding Cromwell’s brutal rampages through Ireland. The present relic is an “authenticated” one, given by the Vatican when the Abbey was re-commissioned after the Abbey’s restoration and re-dedication in 1969. I still struggle to describe the experience I underwent; the only time I have ever felt something so similar and so intense was in Chartres Cathedral in France.  There was a sense of the burning sun and the heat of the Middle east, somehow blended with the cool green of the Irish landscape and the intense turquoise blue of the sea.  There were scents, and distant sounds, there was something intense transmitting from the heart of the tiny splinter of wood held in the centre of the golden cruciform reliquary.

It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now, whether it actually was a splinter of the true cross or not.  In all honesty, it probably wasn’t, but what I felt was the power with which generations of pilgrims had imbued it.  Like Eliot’s moment in the “draughty church, at smokefall” in Little Gidding, I was here to kneel, where prayer had been valid.  Such occasions are always going to be intuitive, and never logical, but as Alan W. Watts points out in The Way of Zen:

Indeed, an exponent of the I Ching might give us quite a tough argument about the relative merits of our ways for making important decisions. We feel that we decide rationally because we base our decisions on collecting relevant data about the matter in hand. We do not depend upon such irrelevant trifles as the chance of tossing a coin, or the patterns of tea leaves or cracks in a shell. Yet he might ask whether we really know what information is relevant, since our plans are constantly upset by utterly unforeseen incidents. He might ask how we know when we have collected enough information on which to decide…On the contrary, we go through the motions of gathering the necessary information in a rational way, and then, just because of a hunch, or because we are tired of thinking, or because the time has come to decide, we act.

The decision, in my case, being the decision to believe, I suppose, that this “fragment of the true cross” had come to stand in some way as a conduit to its archetype (in Neo-Platonist terms) the real true cross. Strangely enough, in what passes for my spare time this week, as well as re-reading the Alan W. Watts book, I’ve also been re-reading The Paradise Within, by Louis L. Martz, ostensibly a book of literary criticism of the work of Vaughan, Traherne and Milton, but also in many ways a very informative text on the Neo-Platonism that informed their work, and the work of others such as Marvell and indeed Eliot.  Thus it is that, separated by three hundred years, Eliot and Marvell are both able to describe an experience which I guess is similar to the one I had, in Burnt Norton and The Garden, respectively, where Marvell’s contemplation results in

Annihilating all that’s made,

To a green thought in a green shade.

I’m beginning to sense a vast synchronicity behind these timeless moments. Martz points out how Traherne, in his Centuries of Meditation, constantly uses the theme of seeing the world about you as if you were the only person in it, as it was back in the perfect, archetypal Eden, much in the same way as Kabbalists talk about getting back to the blissful Ain Soph Aour or limitless light, and Zen Masters meditate on the outcome of unsolvable Koans, in order to still the mind and glimpse the Tao that underlies everything. It’s like seeing the ghost out of the corner of your eye, but when you actually turn and look at it, there’s nothing there. Or like Donne’s description of mysteries, which are plain for all to see, but dazzling like the sun.

In fact, the web of synchronicity is so vast that even Joni Mitchell seems to have tuned in to Neo-Platonism – we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Maybe these timeless moments are just moments because to sustain them for more than a brief fleeting instant would be more than humankind could stand.  “Humankind cannot bear much reality”, Eliot once famously said, and this is especially true, I suppose, if the reality is the real reality that underlies everything, and not the façade we normally rely on to get us through the day.  Maybe we have to fret and worry about whether there is a God, simply because if the majesty and certainty of whatever it is that exists outside of time and underpins the entire universe was revealed to us irrevocably and constantly, we would indeed be dazzled, or fried to a crisp, like a moth that got too near the candle.

Well, once again, it’s got to be Sunday teatime and I am, once again, in pretty much the same position (physically as well as spiritually) that I was in at this time last week.  God alone knows what next week will bring, but at least on Friday the referendum will be over, one way or another. I could do with a week unlike last week, however, I’ve had enough of “the heartaches and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” for a while, thanks.  I toyed with signing off with either the wistful Caledonia, by Dougie McLean, with its line of

If I should become a stranger, it would make me more than sad

Then I considered Will Ye No Come Back Again, or even Auld Lang Syne, but I think both of those are more appropriate for when the referendum campaign has been lost, and Scotland has voted to break away. So my final choice came down to the sentiments expressed in Both Sides The Tweed.

And now, I must post this, then go and change the grit in Matilda’s litter tray. After enlightenment, the laundry.