Epiblog for Easter Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. March, which was supposed to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb, according to the old traditional weather-sayings, decided instead to come in like a lion and go out like one as well. Having said that, today, Easter Sunday, has dawned bright and fine, and – what has been crucially missing all these recent dreary weeks – warm, at last. So warm that, at the moment, as I type this, the conservatory door is slightly ajar, and Matilda has been sauntering out on to the decking, finding a place in the sun, rolling over and squeaking with pleasure, then getting up, shaking herself, and sauntering back in again for more food. All without the help of yours truly having to go over there and open the door for her each time.

Misty is preparing to go walkies over the moors at Black Hill, no doubt in the company of Zak. Misty’s preparations consist mainly of rushing aimlessly back and forth to the door, lest she be mistakenly left behind. By the time she sets off on one of these 13-mile route marches, she’s probably already done an extra mile in aimless milling about. It’s just like watching Debbie get ready for work on a college day.  Poor little Ellie did find herself included in a walk the other day, despite trying to remain very small and insignificant and hope no one noticed her. When she came back, eight miles later, she was clarted up with mud up to her haunches, and she clambered wearily into the dog bed and fell instantly into a deep sleep, without waiting to have her harness taken off.  Zak, meanwhile, ate her tea and his, and curled up on the chair, and Misty was up for going out again, although Debbie wasn’t.

My own week was pretty much more of the same, really. The insurance claim over the camper rumbles on, and is now in the lap of the underwriters.  During the course of the week I must have given the same details at least three times to various people from various call centres in Norfolk, where Adrian Flux are based, despite the fact that they already had it all in an email and by letter. The idea of a call centre in Norfolk may seem a little odd, and I have to be careful of regional stereotyping here, because my own ancestors are originally from Norfolk. I would like to say that here is nothing at all wrong with having a call centre in Norfolk, and that it’s just as likely to be as efficient and business-like as a call centre anywhere else. I’d like to say it, but, sadly, the most recent conversation I had with them was with someone called Wendy, who gave the impression that, when she wasn’t busy flying around with Peter Pan, she went home to a village where the gene pool is closed on Sundays and Wednesday afternoons.

I opted out of both April fools’ day and the great Election leadership debate.  Partly because I just can’t be bothered any more, at a time when I am already fighting battles on several different fronts, and partly because the world is so damn crazy these days that sometimes the April fool stories seem much more plausible and likely than the real ones.  Anyway, the leadership debate came and went, and if there is ever a serious shortage of horse tranquilisers in this country, they can just park the poorly geegees and neddies in front of a TV, and play them a few seconds of it, which will be more than enough to induce equine narcolepsy.

If you doubt for a minute my assertion that real life and April foolery have changed places, consider for a moment the case of Nigerian gay rights activist Aderonke Apata, who is fighting deportation back to Nigeria, where her lifestyle means that she will be at risk of serious harm, or worse. This week, a high court judge decided that he would turn down her asylum claim because she “wasn’t lesbian enough”.  Of course, a high court judge is by far the most authoritative person to decide this sort of thing. After all, the lesbians he watches on the internet don’t look a bit like Ms Apata: they are tall, blonde, leggy, and wear stockings and suspenders, of course.  Nary a doc marten, checked shirt, motorbike, or K D Laing CD is sight.  Quite where this leaves Ms Apata (apart from in a potentially life-threatening situation owing to idiocy on behalf of the judiciary) is a moot point.  Presumably she will now have to snog an usher while the judge watches, or something.

Meanwhile, the election is being used as media wallpaper by all the major channels. I really do think, the more I see of Ed Miliband’s efforts, I think that Labour would be better off with the Glen Miller band. The end result would still be the leader missing in action, but at least the music would be better. It was left to a self-confessed Conservative, Ramesh Patel, writing a blog on the Huffington Post web site, to point out the actual figures, and to conclude:

Cameron is playing the blame game to depress confidence and growth to justify austerity. Secondly, to use austerity as justification for a smaller state to gain lower taxes. Thirdly, to paint Labour as a party that can not be trusted with the country's finances again. Therefore, we Conservatives will win a second term because, people vote out of fear. The latter strategy worked the last time in office (18 years) and will work again because, in the end, elections are won and lost on economic credibility. Hence, as people believe Labour created the mess they won't be trusted again.

This, I am afraid is true. And, in apologising for mishandling the economy, when they actually did nothing of the sort, and in apologising for a global banking crisis that was none of their doing, Ed Miliband and Labour have played right into the Junta’s hands.  Miliband, and those around him, should be doing all they can to rebut this strategy and point out that, in addition, the Junta have missed all their self-imposed targets for deficit reduction since 2010, and even now their claim of having “halved” the deficit only works if you add the weasel get-out clause of “as a proportion of GDP”. Why they are choosing instead to major soft-focus shots of Ed Miliband strolling across the factory floor with a throng of merry workers beats me.

It’s not just a dry economic argument, either. We should never forget the terrible human cost of “austerity” inflicted by the Blight Brigade on the poor, the ill and the disadvantaged these last five years. And it’s still going on. Last month saw the inquest on Benjamin McDonald, 34, of Nelson, Lancashire, who hanged himself in woodland near the fields where he used to play as a child, last November, after his benefits were stopped by the DWP and he was threatened with eviction.  The coroner observed:

“At the time, his money had been stopped, he had no form of income. He said he was threatened with eviction from his home - all matters that can play one someone’s mind very much. The appropriate conclusion for me today is that while he was suffering from a significant bout of depression, he took his own life.”

£12 billion more of this sort of thing is what you are voting for if you vote Tory at the next election.

One person who knows all about depression, is of course Katie Hopkins, who obviously decided she wasn’t getting enough attention last week and tweeted that depression was “the holy grail” that people longed to be diagnosed with, and told sufferers to “get a grip”.  As someone who has decided to tough out being depressed with only herbal remedies because I don’t want my brain turned to chemical soup, I can assure Ms Hopkins that I would love to get a grip. On her scrawny neck.

Sadly, this week, Joni Mitchell, whose music has in many ways been the sound track to my life, was hospitalised in Los Angeles after being found unconscious at her Bel Air home. As I type this, she lies in a hospital bed, diagnosis and recovery uncertain. One of the contributory factors to her condition is the mysterious Morgellon’s disease, which some doctors claim does not even exist and others attribute entirely to mental illness – the feeling that your entire body is infested with unknown parasites that cause the skin to itch unbearably. I truly hope Joni Mitchell recovers from whatever it is that put her where she is, and, Big G, if you are listening, take Katie Hopkins instead. All it would need is one well-placed lightning bolt.

Still, this is supposed to be a blog about spiritual concepts such as redemption and forgiveness, and it is Easter Sunday after all, so I suppose I should put my back into it, and bend to my task, and all that. Good Friday was for me a bit of a non-event. I’ve been feeling so tired lately with all the crap coming at me from every side, that I slept later than I intended.  I wasn’t much use even when I got up, but I did manage to stumble through my domestic chores, at least, and I did manage to find the time to read, as I do every Good Friday, John Donne’s poem Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward. Every time I come to it, I find something new and unexpected, and this time it was the amazing contemporary quality of some of the language. It is a complex and many layered poem, that plays with the concepts of the author having been forced, out of the necessity of business, to turn his back on the direction of the Crucifixion, and ride westwards instead.

I could fill the entire remainder of this blog with a line-by-line, I A Richards-style critical analysis of the text, but why don’t you find it and read it instead? Note especially the continued use of paradox and antithesis throughout, as the images ring like hammer blows, or like the sound of a tolling bell, down the page. T S Eliot attempts something similar in Four Quartets, although not so successfully, in East Coker, when he writes:

The chill ascends from feet to knees,
The fever sings in mental wires.
If to be warmed, then I must freeze
And quake in frigid purgatorial fires
Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink,
The bloody flesh our only food:
In spite of which we like to think
That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood-
Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.

I know all there is to know about the chill ascending from feet to knees, by the way. But the essential point of both these poems, it seems to me, is paradox.  God killing himself (or a bit of himself, I am always hazy on the theology) in order to save his creation, which is a part of him as he is of it.

What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.

Says Donne.  But did it happen, and if it did, did it happen like that, and if it did happen like that, why did it happen like that. These are the issues which possess me: Eliot again, this time in Ash Wednesday:

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain

The reason they possess me is not hard to find. This day, today, this Easter Sunday, is the very last day ever when I shall be fifty-nine. Tomorrow, I am sixty. Six decades of life that seems to have flashed by in a blur.  As the Zen masters put it:

A flower falls whether we love it or not, and weeds grow whether we love them or not, and the peach blossom smells gorgeous, even when we are not around to smell it.

I hope to be around to smell the peach blossom for a while, but nothing is certain in this life. It’s not the stuff that you worry about, it’s usually the one thing that you didn’t see coming that gets you. Aeschylus, for instance, never did get to open that turtle sanctuary.  So I am concerned to know whether a distant historical event which I am pretty sure did happen, the brutal Roman execution of a rather troublesome Jewish firebrand preacher who asked some very awkward questions, so awkward that even his own kind weren’t comfortable with them, and sold him down the river, whether that event has any greater symbolic or theological significance for me, in my sixtieth year to heaven.

All that I have ever been able to believe is that something happened. I know this falls a long way short of accepting Jesus Christ into my heart as my own personal saviour who died for my sins, or however the accepted phraseology goes, but it’s the best I can do. Reverting back briefly to Christmas, if I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb. But I’m not. And my attempts to attain a status of child like innocence and forgiveness are inevitably undermined by the wrath of Cain and the cynicism of Woody Allen. Or occasionally, even worse, the other way round. I could wish to be like Dylan Thomas, writing of his own birthday, albeit only his thirtieth:

And there could I marvel my birthday

Away but the weather turned around. And the true

Joy of the long dead child sang burning

In the sun.

If the women found an empty tomb and a mysterious white-robed angel that Sunday morning two millennia ago, is it really evidence of my own, personal hope of eternal life? On the face of it, it seems a fairly thin proposition. Bolstered in my case by a faith that is very much “now you see it, now you don’t” And, of course, people will point to the fact that the story of the resurrection is but one of a number of similar myths that were prevalent in the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean in ancient times.  Although it is maybe equally true to acknowledge this, and point to their being perhaps all different manifestations of some underlying truth, something Jung might call an archetype, that resurrection really is so significant to us, so hard-wired, that we construct it over and over again for each passing society or age. Even if Jesus is just our, most recent form of the myth, it doesn’t mean that the underlying principle is fictitious.  And then there are those times when you know, you just know, that it’s all true, and God was one of us.

The body dies. Everything changes, is rendered back down to atoms. The plants I put in last year have been blasted by the winter and many of them are gone. Dead, lifeless, shrivelled, as one day, I will be. Although we do still have one brave daffodil in flower, and I discovered this week, to my surprise, that the Lady’s Bedstraw, which I thought was a goner, is putting forth new shoots! New plants are on their way, and next week I’ll be potting them out into planters, and feeding them, and nurturing them, as I hope to get them to grow, in turn.  Everything changes, and no man can jump into the same river twice, says Heraclitus.

But if the story of the resurrection is true, it offers a vision of a life where a part of me survives, where nothing is ever changed or lost, or if it is, it happens in some compensatory way that brings endless delight, the other side of the bright portal of death.  I find the concept of eternity equally terrifying, and when I struggle to comprehend it, I usually end up shaking my head and going and doing something manual instead.

Which is what I am going to do right now. I am going to trundle out in the remaining sunshine of the day, take the rubbish out, and have a look at transferring some more soil into another planter, while it’s warm.  Tomorrow, I might take the day off and do a painting. If it’s warm, I might even take all my gear outside. Make the most of the warmth: you’re a long time cold!