Robert and Carol came today and stayed into the evening, back from a week in Stakedale with kids from school which they said they enjoyed, save for the drunken excesses of the rest of the staff.
As twilight deepened into night, the five of us talked about the tragic nature of time and life, the existential nature of perception, the grasping ego, and how we return to the places we love time after time because in pursuit of an illusion and an anticipated reality that hardly ever conforms to the ‘actual’ reality. Happy memories spur us on, but we never find what we’re looking for. The best we can hope for is that we stumble across some new moments of insight and enjoyment . . ..
We can’t process the moment of harmony, the moment whose essence escapes us the more we stand back and intellectualise it. For one brief moment we realise and we can see.
There were moments in Calverdale when I felt I couldn’t say exactly what it was I wanted in going back there, but at others—such as the time on Half Stile Hill watching the eclipse, the river Calver beneath us bathed in golden green light—the pulse of certainty was strong and I knew: ‘This is it . . .’ Our fixed mental conceptions of a particular place, event or person victimize us and we find time and time again that the reality of now—the present moment—fails to live up our expectations, and we’re surprised and disappointed.
I’m reminded of the story I read somewhere of a man who went back to the house where he’d grown up and where, as a boy, he’d helped his father plant a seedling. In the intervening years, the seedling had grown vividly in his mind into a mighty tree, yet when he returned to the house he found out that the sapling had been cut down not long after his family had moved. What then was the greater reality for that man? The treeless garden of the present, or the sturdy spreading tree of his mental landscape?
Most people would say the former, yet for the man, the mental tree was real for many years. We’re the incurable victims of our preconceptions and fantasies. We can’t be freed, for these tendencies are linked inextricably with our hopes and desires. Where lies freedom from the cycle of conditioned responses and action . . .? We spend lifetimes pursuing our illusions while here and now reality slips through our fingers even as we see it, feel it, hear it . . ..
Robert and Carol left for Dearnelow at ten-thirty. They’ve booked a fortnight in the caravan in Calverdale for August.
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