Thursday, July 28, 1983

Pinball wizard


I’m sitting alone in the caravan, it’s mid-evening and it’s growing gloomy. The sun has just set behind the hills above Kearshaw. Purple clouds tinged with dull red are framed between the silhouettes of the wall behind the caravan and the leaves of an overhanging sycamore.

Everyone else has gone to the pub for the evening. I declined for no real reason apart from a general desire to laze about here, plus I was aware of these pages calling me.

We’ve been on a longish walk today. For once the weather suited me perfectly and as we tramped up the road from our field towards Forefield I felt as full of zap as I’ve done all week. It was a windy day and the sun and clouds played constantly across the lone bulk of Pinshaw Hill across the valley.

We could see Thwaitegarth and Stonesdale, two small insignificant grey smudges on the long shoulder of the hill which was stained with the colours of shale and heather. That great hump of rock rising majestically from the valley was impressive and reinforced how small and limited the valley bottom actually is. Calverdale is narrow and when you're down in the fields most of the high hills are lost behind the nearer horizons that frequently only extend up as far as the topmost fields.

From time to time the sun broke through and warmed us for a while but it was a weary slog until we reached the summit of the road. Once there we branched off across the moor and Calverdale opened out below us, the white streak of the stony path we walked on up above Gilsey visible against a gloomy grey hillside.

Up and up we trudged, across terrain littered with rubble and patches of shingle, passing small cairns until finally we reached a fence which marked the boundary of Greetsdale. Last year Mum and Dad were caught up here in a fierce thunderstorm and the area is notorious for lightning strikes that often kill sheep. Just beyond the fence we stumbled across two tiny ponds and Dad and I explored them, finding several discarded dry skins of dragonfly larvae still clinging to the tips of the reeds. We also found several frogs and both larval and adult newts. 

By this time we were all ravenous so a few hundred yards further on we sat ourselves on a partially overgrown slag heap to eat, and spent a good natured, light hearted and ridiculous ½ hour before walking back. We had a good view down into Greetsdale itself, a bleak and sinuous little valley amid heather and a wide flat dreary expanses of brown moor. Down at the head of the valley we could see an old railway carriage being used as a sheep shelter, and last time Mum and Dad were down there they found a wooden sled, built to be dragged behind a horse.

We retraced our steps through a chaos of old mine workings and turned right along the edge of the Calver valley. Robert and I lagged behind talking and for a little while I forgot the tiredness and weary stumbling of my boots.


Robert argued strenuously in favor of pacifism and opposes “lobbing bricks and splitting heads open.” As so often happens, I was pushed back on my heels, falling quiet and turning my eyes earthwards.

-- “You watch your mates who are in the RCP and see how much unhappiness and annoyance they leave behind them,” suggested Robert.

I immediately thought of Susie’s open dislike of the RCP, Shelley’s cool reserve, and Pete’s uneasy parrying of Carl Cotton’s sarcastic comments. I thought also of Barry’s claim that Universal Utopian Happiness would be attainable if only we could fulfill mankind’s material needs. I at least had the confidence to shoot that one down in my own mind. Robert said that he before he came across Buddhism he felt like a pinball being flicked helplessly to and fro from desire to desire and thought to thought. I could identify only too well with this familiar feeling.

I am that pinball at this moment, and have been for the past few months. I’m all at sea, rudderless, rolling from this to that, drifting onwards without a gleam of hope. All my past thoughts, opinions and decisions are insubstantial groundless cries, and the more I hear, the worse it gets, the more desperate I feel. The only things I’m certain of are mortality and how an appreciation of this can alter peoples’ perspectives in ways that are ‘meaningful’ and constructive. Any real political change only happens on the inside. I should use these truths as the foundation for my own new beginnings.

When Robert talks about pacifism I feel ashamed at my own loose agreement with the use of force as an instrument of change. When I read about Reagan’s moves in central America in the 'papers, his branding of the independent Roman Catholic Sandinista regime as a Communist threat, and Thatcher’s nauseatingly predictable defense of this policy, I’m filled with vengeful desire for retaliation.

To what extent is it justified to assassinate those leaders who, as a direct result of their personal decisions, threaten defenceless people? On a moral level, I suppose the answer is ‘not at all.’ “You make yourself as bad as the people you oppose once violence is used,” says Robert, but what good is a moral victory if you’re being beaten, humiliated and trodden on? He believes pacifism is effective eventually, and he uses the impermanence of everything to back this up, arguing that non-pacifists always fail to acknowledge this point and therefore fail to realise that violent change is fruitless.

But doesn’t this reduce everything to senselessness—even morality? Isn’t this just a morbid crumbling into hopelessness?

There’s got to be some personal standard set I suppose or we would all just disintegrate into gibbering despair.

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