Historical thoughts

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Decluttering does have its benefits, although I’ve not been as disciplined about it as planned during Lent. Today, however, I reached into a box which appeared to have a lot of things I’d written neatly filed away, and randomly pulled this out, dated 18 December, 2006.

“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” But what happened when the Christianised Constantine unfurled his banner and frightened the pagans into submission? Did God and Caesar become one? Ever since have we been bowing to a two-headed god, God made in the image of man, and empire mistaken for heaven?

Not that no good came of this. The template of civilisation imposed by the Romanised church upon barbarian chaos kept alive in the West the memory of better times until new life was transfused from the East, ironically through the new prophet, Mohammed.

For a time, perhaps as long as four hundred years, the three Peoples of the Book flourished in mediaeval Spain. Someone has even written a book describing Cordoba as “The ornament of the world.” (Maria Rosa Menocal, a title she got from a tenth century nun, Hroswitha, a Saxon nun who described Cordoba thus in a poem.) Who could then have imagined that in the future lay the Spanish Inquisition, later the Holocaust, today (remember this was written eighteen years ago) the everyday horror of Islamist terrorism. Perhaps this is what happens when human beings confuse Caesar with God?

If we could rewrite history, to the moment when Caesar imposed his idea of Christianity upon Europe, could we discover what went wrong? Or perhaps we should go back even further, to the time just after Jesus’ death when Saint Paul took it upon himself to convert the Gentiles. Should the Christians always have remained a sect of Judaism? Would they then have kept their connection to God, the pathway to salvation that Jesus sought to reveal?

We cannot rewind history. We can only continue into the future, time travellers all, but only in one direction. Are we now reaching a fork in the road, another place where we can choose either to create a time of high civilisation, or (what seems more likely) to sink even further into darkness and unknowing?

Jean M Chard 18 December, 2006

Meditation upon the bright blue feathers of a dead blue jay

Why are we told that a blue jay is not “really” blue, that the colour is no more than the way its feathers refract light, there is no blue pigment? One might as well say that a rainbow is not “really” multi-coloured because it contains no pigment, is no more than the refraction of light.

Similarly, we need not believe there is no life after death just because the body disintegrates into its constituent molecules like a building collapsing into dust. Maybe life is no more dependent upon the body than colour is dependent upon pigment. Perhaps life is a kind of refraction of a fundamental quality of the universe, as colour is a way that we see light?

Written after seeing a dead blue jay beside the road, 29.10.23

Halifax Harbour

The harbour is like hammered pewter. A small green and white fishing boat loudly slices an impossible gash through the metallic surface. Above, watercolour clouds shift, bloom, fade, reveal, conceal patches of eggshell sky. In the distance a drifting shower brushes the sea like a wedding veil.

(first draft 24.11.16, while walking along Dartmouth’s Harbourwalk Trail)

Lucid Dream

Dark night, am I asleep? My eyes seem to be open, but I know they are closed. A beautiful, intricate lattice forms overhead. Could I climb through it? My attention wanders slightly and when I look back with my closed eyes all I see are strings, or ropes, dangling just out of reach. I try to make these seem beautiful too, but they are not. There is a woman in the room where I am dreaming and she speaks from over by the wall. She is holding the edge of a door, or is it the lid of a box on its side, and with a smile, opening the door slightly, indicates that I can go this way.

I sit bolt upright, opening my eyes to my waking room and say aloud, “NO! I am not ready!”

But how easy it seemed, how easily I could have slipped out of my room forever into some other place.

“You can’t force people to have a garden.”

I hope he had his tongue in his cheek, the person who replied to me, when I spoke about the importance of green space and connection to nature when planning new buildings in cities. But I’m not sure. He seemed quite willing to force people to live in concrete towers.

Access to the natural world doesn’t have to be a personal garden. It can be a public park, or even the temporary meadow which springs up in a neglected empty lot. I object to the term “vacant land” when referring to a patch of Earth filled with thousands of non-human beings.

Sketches of Tulips

In February I sketched the tulips I bought at the supermarket, from opening bud through perfect form to decaying flower with petals all askew. Are we like that? Do we become more abstract as we age towards death, as we draw closer to merging once again into the chaos from which we grew?

Open a Drawer

A small reward for some desultory decluttering. Found a writing prompt, with my efforts, dated 9 May, 2005. Open a drawer. After fiddling around with some cliches I had turned the paper over and written “I’m not going to open the drawer – I don’t have the key”. Sounds like my life.

Memoir assignment part two

Memoir week 2 Family

“I thought”, said my aunt, “you would have a difficult time when you went to Canada.  “In order to have a family you would have to make your own.”  And this is what I had done.  I was visiting her and the other relatives on one of my excursions taken with one of my children so they could meet their cousins.  I’d always been acutely aware of the lack of a family and wanted to give them as many relatives as I could, even long distance ones.

I arrived in Canada at the age of six and a half leaving behind my aunt and uncle and their children, by then more like siblings than cousins to me, and from that time on, and really for the rest of my life, loneliness became my constant and closest, if unwanted, companion.  I made friends at school but my best friend of the time would always be best friends with someone else, I’d be the dispensable part of a threesome.

For the first couple of years the woman who brought me to Canada, later joined by her teenaged daughter, was part of our household.  She was quite unkind to me, I suppose nowadays one would say I was bullied by her, but at the time as a young child I was simply unhappy.  Later I understood better that she, too, was unhappy.  She eventually left.  My father had become good friends with a woman while he was still in Africa and they returned to the United Kingdom together.  She it was who looked after me those happy months in the Channel Islands.  Now she came to visit us in Canada.  The following year she and my father met in Bermuda and got married, so I had a stepmother.

My stepmother also had a fairly small family, but they were close and she kept in touch with them, and they welcomed my father and me into the family.  But, once again, these people all lived so far away we hardly ever met.  Now that most of the older generation has died I keep in touch with only a couple of her Irish cousins, so distant they were hardly related even to her and of course not to me at all!

The first time I visited my English relatives I was about nineteen.  My grandfather had for some reason become anxious to see me and had sent money for my air fare.  My grandmother had died years earlier and he’d been quite promptly snapped up by a spinster schoolteacher who must have seen him as a good way to attain the status of a married woman.

After a day or two with the cousins I spent most of the rest of my precious three weeks being entertained by these two elderly people as well as a raft of second cousins and first cousins once removed, as well as my uncle, my mother’s brother, and his family.  But it was the cousins who lived hundreds of miles to the south whom I craved to spend more time with, so the plans for my last few days were changed and I was sent back to them.  While there I had a dream that I was in a house where I discovered a huge wing I’d not known existed, and I found treasure hidden under the front steps.  I understood right away that this house represented family, a far larger family than I had ever known.

The last day I spent with them I have never forgotten.  It was a day which seemed to last forever, as though in some way I was psychologically making up for all those years, thirteen formative years, when I had been in exile.

Since then I have made a family.  Recently this seemed to become complete with the birth of a granddaughter, although, continuing the pattern of my life, this child lives a thousand miles away….   

Memoir assignment part one

Week One Memoir assignment “Branching Points”

The first Christmas I remember was the year I was three.  We lived in the country then called Nyasaland.  As I remember it we had neither electricity nor running water, needing paraffin lamps at night, and there was much excitement the day a porcelain bathtub arrived to replace the galvanized one we’d bathed in before.  I did not know what the holes were for, never having seen a plug or taps.

One day a tree was brought into the house and my parents produced a deck of cards and before I went to bed we decorated the tree with them.  In the morning a big stocking full of mysterious objects hung at the foot of my bed.  I wasn’t given much time to investigate however as my father seemed anxious that I should go downstairs. There to my wonderment and delight I found the tree had been transformed, complete with sparkling decorations and real candles burning brightly.  Father Christmas, I was told, had done this magic, changing the cards into decorations.  When I found a couple of cards near the bottom of the tree my father seemed disappointed, but to me it made it all the more real, proving this was the same tree.

I remember a few other things from that time.  My mother showing me a partly formed chicken in an egg which had been broken open.  Playing with a tiny toy: two little plastic bears with a table and chairs and minute blue bowls into which my mother put a crumbled cornflake and a drop of milk and we pretended the bears were eating breakfast with us. Sitting on the verandah drawing pictures.  Many years later this little sketchbook turned up in my father’s accumulation and I remembered how I’d asked my mother to draw me a picture of a car and how she had said she didn’t think she could draw one.  Nevertheless along with my childish scribbles and her other demonstrations for me there is a quite respectable representation of a car.

For years I thought there was a different moon in Africa because one night a huge honey coloured moon looked in my window, and the next time I remember seeing the moon it was a smaller silver disk seen from a Northern country.  One evening my father called through the window to tell my mother she should come in or she would make herself ill.  She was, I think, rounding up some escaped poultry.

Was it that night or another one when I was kept awake by the sound of wailing? Then someone came and got me up and took me to my mother’s bedside.  I thought it was morning and I asked her why she wasn’t getting up to have tea.  A voice told my father to take me to have tea, and we sat at the kitchen table for a while having a warm drink.  A little later in a dark room, it was still the middle of the night, a woman in a long blue dress, perhaps it was a nightgown, told me God had loved my mother so much he had taken her to live with him.

The next thing I remember is being in a hotel room with my father.  I’d been sick, sick a lot and there were no more clean sheets.  Later I learned I’d been sick for a while and we were staying in this hotel while we were on our way to where I could be put on a plane and sent to live with my aunt and uncle who were in Kenya at the time.  My father was lying on a bare mattress and he asked if he could get in beside me under the last sheet because he was cold, and I said no, but somehow I felt bad about saying that.  I was pleased when morning came and I found he had shared the sheet after all.

Then we were separated for a while, and I lived most of the next three years with my aunt and uncle and their children.  The year I was five we went to England by ship and spent that Christmas with my grandparents, the parents of my mother and my aunt. After Christmas I stayed in the Channel Islands for a few months with the woman who eventually became my stepmother.  My sixth birthday was the year of the coronation and my gifts almost all had something to do with the coronation.  I remember those months on Guernsey and Sark as something of a golden age of my childhood.

After another half year or so with my relatives I was put into the care of a woman hired to take me to Canada to join my father who had emigrated in mid-1953.  I remember how, as we came into Halifax, she was afraid I wouldn’t recognize him, she never having met him.  But I saw him standing at the railing, looking down into the water, and I shouted out, “Daddy, Daddy!”

It was many years before I understood that the true branching point was not the night in the spring of 1951 when my mother died, but that long journey across the North Atlantic in January of 1954, when I left behind all my family, everyone, everything I knew, except my father, who himself had lost so much more.

Looking up

The stoic week theme for today has reminded me of growing up always aware of the night sky, and how I would look at the stars, everywhere you put your eyes there were stars upon stars. I don’t know where I could go now to see a sky like that. I was taken to a Dark Sky site a few years ago, and it was nothing like the sky I remembered from my youth. Those stars really put things into perspective for me, and all my little growing up problems vanished into inconsequence. How much has the human race lost by hiding the stars? Does anyone remember when there was an earthquake and all the lights in Los Angeles were out, and people called up radio stations wondering what was wrong with the sky. People who in all their lives had never seen the beautiful night sky that Planet Earth is blessed with. Where I live now, from my window at night I have only been able to see the moon and bright planets. No stars. I miss even the impoverished view of major constellations I enjoyed in the backyard of my former home. It is so much easier to learn these lessons of stoicism if we can connect with the nature of the planet, if we can find a forest with huge trees, or a meadow buzzing with insects and bright with flowers, or, especially and “above all” the view of the universe in the dark canopy of the night sky. Light hitting the retina after journeying for hundreds, thousands, millions of years….

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