Epiblog for 21 March 2010

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley, and one during which I have found myself catching up on some tasks which have previously seen me backsliding, including writing up this blog, for one.

The problem is, of course, that I start out with the very best of intentions, but then something crops up, and I get sidetracked. This doesn't just happen with my blogs, it is actually pretty endemic throughout my whole life. Take my car, for instance (Please take my car, so I can collect on the insurance!) I was due to take two long car journeys recently, one down to London and one to Staffordshire, but in the end, both of them had to be cancelled because of car trouble, necessitating a huge repair, and a correspondingly huge repair bill.

Writing some 700 years ago, the Gawain poet summed this up very neatly when he wrote:

Very seldon does the beginning accord to the end

Or, as T. S. Eliot puts it, rather more grimly in The Hollow Men,

Between the motion and the act, falls the shadow

In a universe seemingly goverened by uncertainty, we should not, I suppose, be too surprised. Everything has the potential to be a surprise. In my end is my beginning. Eliot adapted those words of Mary Queen of Scots to his own "ends" in Four Quartets. seeking to emphasise what he saw as the essentially cyclical nature of existence. Houses rise and fall.

Modern physics, with its theories of multiverses and unseen dimensions at right angles to reality, might well take Eliot's/Mary's phase and pluralise it. In my many ends are my many beginnings. Perhaps in another multiverse, I did manage to travel to Shropshire, stopping off, like Gawain in the poem, in the "wyldernesse of Wyrale" to "werre with Wodwos, that woned in the knarres". Who is to say?

In another multiverse, another me is happily married to my first-ever girlfriend, who in this multiverse lies in a quiet, slightly faded, slightly neglected corner of a suburban cemetery, just west of Hull.

Life is an uncertain business, especially if God, or whoever is the vast intelligence behind it all, has given us the wherewithal to manufacture just one strand of reality from all of the infinite possible strands of reality, on the hoof, second by second, heartbeat by heartbeat.

What that uncertainty means, for me, is twofold: firstly there is absolutely no point in spending your life paralysed by worry, because 98.9% of the stuff you are worrying about will never happen, or if it does, it will happen in a way which is totally different and unrecognizable to what you expect. You worry about getting run over by a bus, and one day, while you are walking down the street, looking out for buses, high above you, a red kite is struggling to hold on to a badger it has snatched from a nearby field. The badger struggles free, and falls to earth, hitting you on the head and causing you to be translated from this mortal coil like a latter-day Aeschylus, while, winded by its impact with your head but otherwise unscathed, the badger ambles off into the bushes. Never cry until you have to.

The other thing it brings home to me is that there isn't a moment to lose. Don't put off telling those that you love how much they mean to you, how much their presence in the world gladdens you, take them now and hold them close to your heart and tell them, because you never know when you will come to a sudden fork in the road.