To Ponder

I went out to buy transcendence
and came back with a telephone.
Anthony Weir

I am twenty-two years old and will wait no longer.
Scott Valentine

We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor
because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of
them for that reason as free.
Marshall Sahlins

Once Known.

It became clear to me that I was privileged to be living in an African world that had not been written about. This was not the Africa of Conrad, or Karen Blixen, or Hemingway, or Even Laurens van der Post. No one had written about this particular Africa. That, I think, was my good luck. It was for me to describe this unknown time and place. There was a colonial hangover, and Africans were now being uncomfortably accommodated in the white clubs. But I was not a member of any clubs; I did not go on safari. I came to be fascinated by this Africa of hilarious dance halls and village feasts and bush schools. Crazed politicians ranted all over the countryside, and yet there was a power vacuum in which most Africans, rather enjoying the anarchy, felt free. In a cheerful, scribbling, self-deluded frame of mind, in this in-between period after colonialism and before politicians and soldiers tightened their screws, I felt safe.

Dorset

When I left the tropics after working for almost nine years in hot countries, I went to England and experienced a great shock. It seemed to me to be one of the strangest places I had ever been (and I had lived in Uganda and traveled the Congo and in upper Burma). This was Dorset. I was just about to write, "Hardy does not prepare you for Dorset." But of course he does. His work is very truthful to that county. I found the place dark and deeply rural, extremely beautiful, and often inexplicable. People did not seem so much to live there as to be holed up there. There was an uncertainty and a tribal mistrust of outsiders. And "outsider" did not necessarily mean an American. It might be someone from Yeovil or Salisbury. Everything I had expected to find in Africa I found on the edge of Marshwood Vale. I was fascinated, but also a little frightened. These are the emotions that produce fiction.

Look Thy Last on all things Lovely

After a time we moved from Dorset to London, but I never lost the feeling that I was a castaway. As a foreigner, I was determined not to die in Britain and be buried in a gloomy churchyard under a blackish dripping yew tree. One day I would sail away. I never guessed that I would leave alone, feeling as portable and insignificant as when I arrived. I landed in Britain on November 4, 1971 and left on January 19, 1990. The years that these dates enclosed were among the happiest as well as teh saddest I have ever known: joy bordering on rapture, misery at the very edge of despair.

Target.

I developed internal ways of stimulating my memory. It is possible for a writer to think creatively only if he or she manages to inhabit a mood in which imagination can operate. My need for external stimuli inspired in me a desire to travel – and travel, which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is for me the opposite: nothing induces concentration or stimulates memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. More likely you will experience intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life. This does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present, however in fact, what makes the whole experience thrilling is the juxtaposition of present and past – Medford dreamed in Mandalay.

I aspire, where material possessions are concerned, to the Buddhist condition of non-attachment. That is my ideal. I am not so acquisitive that I am possessed by these objects, though I do feel dependent on them at times. I think one must practice ridding onself of them, but that requires concentration and great mental poise – I was to learn how to give them away; it must be my confident decision. I don’t want them torn out of my hands. Obviously, the happiest person is that Buddhist who truly sees that such objects are illusion, and who owns nothing – all these possessions are in his or her memory.

In the most common situation, the threat comes from more than one person – rarely is it one-on-one. The group of people in the car or speedboat, the phalanx of jet skiers, are nearly always male. Their response appears to be a reflex of violent envy directed against an isolated and vulnerable person – the skimpily clothes jogger, the madly balancing paddler, the panting cyclist. It is like an objection to the assertive freedom and health implicit in these pastimes, and it might be bound up with the suspicion – in a minority of cases a well-founded suspicion—that someone who exercises this way so publicly is showing off.

Hold on to what you know I suppose. It is clearly not ok to keep moving about so much is it? It is so not the norm, but maybe, I’m just making my own way through a world of weirdness and wonder. Just sailing along, sometimes alone, and sometimes joined by others.