~|~

Sunday morning, blue and breezy. I’ve had a full breakfast and brewed a pot of tea (Si Ji Chun, Four Seasons of Spring, sweet and sharp, good for mornings). I am writing surrounded by sound, blissed-out Balearic downtempo melding seamlessly with the quiet echoes of Sunday, and daylight is glowing in the porcelain and lacquer of my tea service. And I find myself thinking that, in terms of the sheer richness of possibility and the texture of everyday life, this is the finest era there has ever been in all of our history, and I am glad to be alive in it. Today will be a good day. Later on I’ll head out to the gym, attend a yoga class, maybe run a little; and today I will write. An idea for a quick short ebook crystallized yesterday, something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’ve recorded the ideas on my phone — I am slowly but surely discovering the joys of dictation — and what remains will be to flesh them out, organize them, turn them into something worth reading. Few emotions can compare to the feeling that one is moving forward, that the next step is worth taking, will get you somewhere. I feel like a sailboat casting off in the bright white sunlight of a Mediterranean harbour, journeying on towards new destinations.

Escribir, por ejemplo: “La noche está estrellada,
y tiritan, azules, los astros, a lo lejos.”

El viento de la noche gira en el cielo y canta.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Yo la quise, y a veces ella también me quiso.

En las noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos.
La besé tantas veces bajo el cielo infinito.

Ella me quiso, a veces yo también la quería.
Cómo no haber amado sus grandes ojos fijos.

Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche.
Pensar que no la tengo. Sentir que la he perdido.

Oir la noche inmensa, más inmensa sin ella.
Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.

Qué importa que mi amor no pudiera guardarla.
La noche esta estrellada y ella no está conmigo.

Eso es todo. A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.
Mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Como para acercarla mi mirada la busca.
Mi corazón la busca, y ella no está conmigo.

La misma noche que hace blanquear los mismos árboles.
Nosotros, los de entonces, ya no somos los mismos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero cuánto la quise.
Mi voz buscaba el viento para tocar su oído.

De otro. Será de otro. Como antes de mis besos.
Su voz, su cuerpo claro. Sus ojos infinitos.

Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.
Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.

Porque en noches como esta la tuve entre mis brazos,
mi alma no se contenta con haberla perdido.

Aunque este sea el ultimo dolor que ella me causa,
y estos sean los ultimos versos que yo le escribo.

~|~

Tonight I can write the saddest lines,

can write, for example: “The night is starry
and the stars in the distance are shivering and blue.”

The night wind wheels in the sky, singing.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this one I held her in my arms,
kissing her over and over beneath the endless sky.

She loved me, and sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes?

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think I do not have her, to feel that I have lost her,

to hear the immense night immenser still without her.
The verse falls to the soul like dew to the grass.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her?
The night is starry and she is not with me.

That’s all. In the distance someone is singing, in the distance.
My soul is not at peace, having lost her.

My eyes search for her, as if to bring her closer.
My heart seeks her out, but she is not with me.

The same night is whitening the same trees,
but we are no longer the same people we were.

I no longer love her, true, but how I loved her!
My voice searched the wind that it might touch her ear.

Someone else’s, she’ll be someone else’s, as she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body, and her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true. Then again maybe I do.
Love is so short, and forgetting is so long.

Because on nights like this one I held her in my arms,
my soul is not at peace, having lost her,

even though this will be the last pain she gives me,
and these the last verses that I will write for her.

This is what I wanted out of life, this.

among silent leaves,
whispers; on the breathless wind,
the billowing mind

~|~

Part of the answer turned out to be intellectual stimulation: the need to recreate a world beyond my usual concerns of writing, living, dancing. I have been living a comfortable life, but not necessarily an exciting one — not the kind of life that propels a man out of bed in the morning, eager to face the day. It has been a steady life, evenly paced; but now I feel the need to reintroduce some additional verve, spice, colour, variety, excitement. It is time to begin accelerating again.

As part of that project I have been reading a good deal, more than I have generally done over these past few years. The quantity and variety of my reading has rather been dropping off, and it’s time to bring it back up again. I want to come back to that ferment of the mind, with ideas interacting and shooting off in all directions. At my peak, when I had time, I was reading almost a hundred and eighty books a year; I doubt I even approach a hundred now. So now I’ve been reading books on science, on business, on fashion design; also novels, genre fiction, poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, psychology, even self-improvement. I’m casting the net wide.

I live a relatively long way from the city now, and the long bus journeys have been perfect for my reading: long uninterrupted tracts of time with nothing to do, no distractions save the landscape passing by. And today I came to the realization that my ordinary reading speed (without skimming, scanning, or speed-reading) has more than doubled over the past ten years. A decade ago I would have been able to read roughly thirty pages an hour; today I found myself doing seventy. And I wasn’t even trying. I haven’t lost it yet.

~|~

The long line of hills stretches out across my horizon, running north to south, hazy and green in the after-rain air. Not so far away now: perhaps a couple of kilometres, no more. I could walk if I wished. Here and there are clearings where the mist is thicker and blue, and I know I am looking at the reservoirs whose names I learned twenty years ago as a child: Upper Peirce, Upper Seletar. Once upon a time I dreamed of this, a dream which shifted and changed cloudlike over the years to become this apartment with big wide windows and hills on the horizon and sky. I will not be here long; but while I am this is a space to write, to dream, and to put life in order for my next big change, whatever that will be.

Last night Denise and I sat and talked, over lassi and wine, about what it means to be young: to be starting out, in your early twenties, with dreams and fears and hopes, ambitions like ribbons worn bright on your sleeve. But I am in a different phase now, and older: I have gained (and sometimes lost) all that as a young man I once wanted. What next?, is my question. What next? What spark now will ignite my engines, what will be the fuel that feeds me? In what direction does my next journey lie?

Making it all sustainable, perhaps. That’s an important part of the life of any artist, finding ways not just to survive but to thrive. But that is not enough, not sufficient. There is my work, of course, continuing to do the best I can: freely I have received, and freely too I give. But as an artist I am an engine of transmutation; I cannot create ex nihilo. There is a certain verve and vibrancy missing from my life now which was there in my younger days, like an explorer who made his way to the pole only to find all other roads leading away from it. I feel like a battleship rusting in drydock, a soldier who has run out of war. What happens now?

*

I am not an evolutionary biologist, nor am I a scientist of any kind; all I am is a poet, a writer, a thinker, and my own domain is the arts rather than the sciences. But today I will be using Darwin’s concept of naturalistic evolution to discuss the creative impulse, the force which drives us to make, to create, to impose meaning on this world in which we live.

We are makers, we are thinkers, and as far as life on our planet is concerned we are an intelligent species. We are in fact probably the most intelligent beings this world has ever produced, and our own name for ourselves — homo sapiens, wise man — highlights this distinctive characteristic. As far as Darwinian theory is concerned, this trait of ours evolved and lasted because it made us better-equipped to survive: it developed as a response to core biological imperatives — the need to find food, to reproduce, to survive in a hostile environment. Our intelligence as a species is the result of competition and the process of natural selection, and — combined with our abilities to work together and to use and manipulate objects — it is what has allowed us to become the dominant species on this planet. For most humans, the greatest threats to our continued survival no longer come from the natural world around us. They come, instead, from other humans and from the works of their minds and hands, and fortunately where the rule of law prevails such threats are relatively remote. But this has only been a fairly recent development in the hundreds of thousands of years of human history.

For a very long time we turned our natural intelligence to the question of survival, which loomed large in the collective minds of our species. We used our minds to hunt and to gather, and later on to plant and to build. But as simple survival became less and less of an immediate concern, our powers of thought and analysis no longer needed to be applied with such intensity to such problems. This left us with a lot of unused processing power. And all that mental capacity needed to be used. An old (probably Puritan) proverb states that “an idle mind is the devil’s workshop”; in other words, if humans are not constantly kept preoccupied with the work of survival they become naturally inclined to reflect and think about the world around them. (And from the perspective of authoritarian dogmatists everywhere, unsanctioned thought is very bad indeed. But this is not an essay about them.)

Our minds naturally require stimulation, and we naturally seek it out; we have an evolutionarily derived need to make sense of the world, a side-effect of the analytical powers that helped us to devise tools and corrals and clothes and cabins and gardens. The two most numbing emotions a human can experience are boredom and futility: these have in common a sensation of hollowness, of emptiness, of waste. When we perceive a lack of meaning and personal fulfillment in our lives, we enter a state of anomie and depression; mental stimulation, on the other hand, causes us to feel that our lives make sense, have meaning, and are worthwhile. There is ample data to suggest that elderly persons who keep their minds busy after retirement live longer, happier lives than those who do not. The mind is like a muscle: we need to use it or lose it. It seems that once we stop learning, we start dying; and as the loss of one’s mind effectively means the loss of that which makes us uniquely human, mental stimulation and mental activity are fundamental imperatives for us all.

How then can we get the stimulation we require? The simplest, most obvious, and most common means is to seek the opposite of boredom, which is excitement. Now there is more to excitement than mere distraction: all of us require novelty for its own sake — new things, new thoughts, new ideas, new skills, new patterns to make sense of. Newness means new learning, new mental connections. We need to ward off for ourselves the creeping horror that there really is nothing new under the sun. Novelty is a good thing; and for many people, thankfully, novelty does seem to be enough.

But it is not enough for all of us. Many of us also seem to want some sort of framework by which to make sense of the world; we need to have an understanding of the world and of our place in it. As a species we have generally found this understanding in history, in myth, and in religion — especially in those religions which have some sort of goal to work towards, whether that goal be the attainment of nirvana or the coming of the Kingdom of God. We need goals, we need quests, and the less achievable those goals are the better. It is no accident that many people feel a sense of hollowness or disappointment after some significant life goal has been achieved: the quest which gave life meaning is now gone.

We have historically been very fond of what Jean-Francois Lyotard called “grand narratives” or metanarratives, enormous stories that help us to order our lives and give meaning to our worlds. Not many of those remain today, however, and few possess the universality they once did (except perhaps the grand narrative of scientific discovery, and even that is debatable). The twentieth century took the step of jettisoning many of these big mental frameworks, focusing instead on the fact that there is actually no inherent “meaning” of the sort we desire in the world around us, and choosing to emphasize the contigent and local aspects of our existence instead. We are now even giving up the more modern metanarratives of nationalism and Communism. The late modern (or postmodern) era took the next logical step: increasing the availability of stimulation in our lives via various forms of media to make up for our lack of metanarratives. Today we are also bringing back the myths, though we remain fully aware that they are myths: we tell stories about vampires, werewolves, zombies, superheroes, robots, wizards, pirates, ninjas, demons, aliens, elves. But for many people none of this is enough.

I am not going to offer a replacement metanarrative here; I do not really believe or trust in such things, and I think it good that they generally no longer have the power over our minds that they once did. But I do acknowledge that some people seem to feel lost without them. And so today I am going to suggest an alternative.

Enter art, and enter making. Art has always been with us as one of the by-products of our need to see and construct patterns in the world for ourselves. We are makers, creators, builders. We were born to see and to impose order, patterns, and systems on the world around us; that, after all, is really what intelligence is. We create, and we were born to create, meaning. It is painful for us to exist without it. Often today we think of art as a discrete field of human endeavour, set apart from the others. But today I would like to present the view that art is in fact an attitude of mind, and one which, if we let it, has the power to pervade everything we do. Art, as far as I am concerned, is precisely that which helps us to create meaning in our lives.

From this point on, I will define art as any focused, disciplined, pattern-creating human endeavour, not limiting the term to those areas generally known as the fine arts. Art, as I will use the term here, refers to any aspect of human life which involves concentrated, deliberate action: such actions are fundamentally creative (even if what is created is the smoking ruin of an enemy target). I acknowledge that this definition of art is very broad, and that it may not be to everyone’s taste. After all, such a definition could potentially be applied to almost anything we do, right down to the way a floor is swept or a diaper changed or the plumbing fixed (if those acts are carried out with sufficient focus and deliberation). Those who do not like my use of the term are free to substitute any words they prefer. The idea, in this case, is more important than the words used to articulate it.

Art requires material, and requires a certain ability to visualize what things could be. And that is precisely how we create meaning: by looking at the raw, random stuff of existence and turning it into something intelligible. A hill, for instance, is by itself just a hill. But the builder looks at it and sees a site for construction, the sculptor sees rock to be carved, the naturalist sees a habitat for species to be counted and categorized, the painter sees an arrangement of colours and tones, the poet sees material for a poem, the soldier sees high ground to be taken and controlled, the businessman sees a potential source of mineral resources, the lover sees a venue for romance. All these fields of endeavour can be understood as disciplines, as arts; and meaning is created when we take the raw stuff of existence and do something with it, when we use it as these people do — as material.

We all have our own predispositions towards various aspects of human endeavour; those become our disciplines, the things we become known for. Sometimes we call these disciplines our passions. But the latter word is somewhat overused these days, and sometimes becomes a source of anxiety. It shouldn’t be. If you’ve found your passion, great — pursue it! But if you haven’t, there’s no real need to go out looking for it. Work with what material you have. Here is my suggestion: practice living your life, in all its details, with focus, with presence, with deliberation. Explore the world, at the same time, in a continuous search for novelty and excitement (which — as long as they do not become distractions or escapes — are good things). And either you will naturally gravitate towards your passion, or it will naturally find you. Focus on making: making art, making beauty, making a difference (however you wish to define that). Transform the random stuff of existence into something that means something to someone. Keep on honing old skills and learning new things; make your entire life, in each moment, into a work of art. If you desperately want to understand where you belong in relation to the universe, think of it this way: you are here on earth to make it all make some kind of sense. You, as a human, exist to give some sort of meaning to the universe. So create as much as you can. And remember what you’ve done (it helps if you take notes.) So that in the end, when the question arises of what your life was all for, you will be able to point to what it is you have done, and say: that. That is what it was all for.

*

When morning’s bell begins to sound
and all the world from silence wakes,
may music compass you around
(forgetting yesterday’s mistakes)
and lift you to the holy ground
of song, as daylight breaks.

When the delirious traffic’s hum
buzzes round the scent of day,
may the ukulele’s thrum
bear you sweetly on your way,
straight and steady, till you come
under music’s sway.

And when the sirens of the night
clamour with confused noise
and seek to drown all hearts in spite,
may the music of your voice
still pour out measures of delight,
reasons to rejoice.

I believe, fundamentally, in a variant of naturalistic pantheism: I believe that the entire cosmos is unified and intrarelated, and that what we conceive of as “sacred” is simply an aspect of this ultimate reality to which we always have access. I do not believe in souls, or in a creator god, or in a cosmic consciousness, or in any kind of supernatural/spiritual “substance” (though I will use all of these concepts as metaphors if I feel like it). Science, to me, is the key to understanding the universe and its physical workings. But I also step away from the purely physicalist view to emphasize the importance of subjective psychological experience: what goes on in the mind matters as much to me as what goes on outside it. The subjective mind is the proper domain of meaning, magic, emotion, gods, angels, spirits, demons, and other experiences of the numinous; none of these has any objective, independent existence or substance. But I find it unnecessarily impoverishing and reductionist to focus on these exclusively as the result of electrical signals in our brains and chemicals in our bodies, even though that is what they undoubtedly are. I prefer to place my focus, instead, on the products of our imaginations rather than on the processes which make them tick. Mine, in other words, is the spirituality of an anthropologist, artist, or student of literature, rather than that of a physicist or a biologist. The principles are the same. The foci are different.

Spirituality for me involves a sense of the unity of all things, understanding that everything is part of a single cosmic reality. It is simply an understanding of the universe and our own place in it. Everything unfolds, arises, ceases. Everything, including both those things which are inside and those which are outside our heads. And that is why I feel free to allude to gods and spirits and quasi-supernatural powers and to tell stories about them: they serve as personified metaphors which help us to engage with reality. In the realm of science they do not exist. In the realm of story, however, they definitely do. And story is precisely the means by which just about all of us humans make sense of the world and our place in it. Story enriches, and hopefully makes us wiser. (In a sense, then, my own religious space is fairly similar to that of the writers Philip Pullman and Terry Pratchett, who remain atheist/agnostic even while writing fantasy fiction and maintaining humanist value systems.)

The spiritual is always already there in the material world; it does not exist in some esoteric, rarefied supernatural environment separate from our own reality. We are not somehow separate from the spiritual world; rather, we are always already spiritual beings by virtue of our materiality. All we have to do is wake up to this and acknowledge it. This involves coming to as deep an awareness as we can of the world surrounding us, apprehending it through sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste, emotion, and imagination. (The various arts help to enhance all of these.) And the more aware a person becomes of the world encountered through these seven aspects, the more spiritually aware he or she also becomes.

I speak of this sometimes as a nature-based spirituality. But I speak of something very different from the simplistic understanding of “four legs good, two legs bad”. There is a popular belief in our society that nature is good, nurturing, and sound, while humanity is evil, destructive and rapacious. I reject this dualistic, adversarial perspective, drenched as it is in notions of original sin and human guilt. We — and all our cities and technology — are always already part of nature, and try as we might we cannot escape it. Like the Monkey King, we cannot jump off the Buddha’s palm. Nature made us what we are and gave us the impulses we have, and even if we were to build a world of metal and plastic and machines — a world where nothing organic is left — it would still be perfectly natural. And no matter whether we kill, abuse, wreck, devastate, love, honour, dream, or restore, we cannot escape who we are and what we have evolved to be.

Nature itself does not care. It creates, sustains, and destroys; it is both nurturing and vicious, placid and violent, harmonious and chaotic in equal measure. As far as nature is concerned killing is as sacred as giving birth, and death is as honourable as life. The fall of every sparrow might be noted, but the sparrow still falls. It will not be resurrected, whisked away from death, caught in a safety net. I am not saying we should take nature as a model for morality; human morality needs to have solid human principles behind it and to be based on human needs and circumstances. Nor am I saying that ecology is unimportant. But let us not kid ourselves that we are “saving Gaia”: Gaia needs no help, and does not care. The planet will one day be swallowed up by the sun anyway. We, in fact, are the ones who need saving from the effects of our own impulses. We are doing ourselves a favour by preserving the ecological balance; our concerns, frankly, are for our own survival and the survival of the things we hold dear. Nature itself does not give a damn about what we do with the planet; after all, sooner or later there will always be another planet and another sentient species. (As if that mattered either.)

What matters to me, then where spirituality is concerned? First, the perspective that everything in the cosmos is fundamentally interrelated, fundamentally one; second, the understanding that the spiritual and the material are one and the same; and third, a belief in the power of story, culture and imagination to help us relate to and understand the world around us.

A tightrope for the stars stretches high between the buildings.
The stars themselves? They’re praying not to fall into the city.

They pray in vain. The muezzin’s voice plummets through the air.
Spit and dirt, not God, are the masters of this city.

In the seething bar, a singer strains herself to breaking.
Outside a hot wind hisses, then slithers through the city.

And I, Leonard, grit my teeth, imitate a smile.
Though built on dregs and broken hearts, this is still my city.