(from new manuscript of short stories about books:
A BOOK IS LIKE A SACRED ISLE: A Rain of Booklight)
Binding Pages Healing Lives
OUR
EVERYDAY LIVES form the pages of the book of our life;
and the glue and the twine, binding the pages together
is the life force of love. Love turns the pages; opening out the story of our
lives as a complex whole, never to be fully fathomed in this world, but ever holding
before us an intriguing and beautiful promise of what lay beyond it.
Approximately
half of my sixth year of life was spent lying down.
I spent three
months in a Welsh orthopedic hospital in Glamorgan, South Wales; and an
extended period of time confined to my bed, either upstairs, or outside in the
garden, according to the weather.
I didn’t know
it, of course, but apparently it was formative period of my life, turning me
inward and introverted. Having at so young an age to be reliant upon my own
devices for any stimulation and learning, I must have found inner gardens to play
in where my outside legs could not go.
I remember
being given ‘Janet and John’ learning-to-read
books, but no teacher; and I was left to puzzle out for myself this strange art
of reading. But I was interested and wanted to learn; so eventually I did.
Elsewhere, * I have talked about the only books I can remember
from my early childhood; two of which I chewed, and ate the top right hand
corners off, so beloved were they to me, and so much did I want what was in
them in me. One of these even got to sleep under my pillow each night. But I
was not a great reader. I thought too much.
_____________________________________________________
* The
Light Tree Journal; in the story ‘Message in a Bottle;’ Page 330.
_______________________________________________________________
As I've already explained, everything written
must be analyzed and have its beautiful sentences sucked out. I was a honeybee
in a nectar-rich flower not flying away until I had all that it contained. So I
didn’t get very far in my reading life; and consequently labeled myself:
‘dumb.’
Another
contributing factor to my significant lack of book reading was the Number 24
bus from Whitchurch to Llandaff, on which I spent most of my childhood and
teenage years going to and fro from school four times a day. I would get
‘seasick’ if I filled in the time on the bus reading; so I learned to ‘read’
made up books in my mind, instead; and lived an entirely imaginary life, in an
imaginary world where everything was beautiful. I had a distinct notion, inside
me, somewhere, that beauty led to truth; and I craved truth and loved beauty. I
knew that they were each other, wherever they touched.
When I had
learned to walk again I walked to the library regularly; always looking for
that which I knew not and loved, and never finding it. I did find hints of it
now and then, though; sometimes in the rain puddles, in the colours of the city’s
oils as I walked home; and with yet more unsatisfying books to weigh me down.
In the early
years the library walk was with my mother and sister; (my brothers were mostly
never at home; they seemed to live hundreds of miles away in England at their
preparatory schools and public school.)
I must confess
my love for the local library was not really for any of the books I borrowed,
but for the library itself. It was both terrifying and electrifying! It was a
magical high roofed world of dark varnished woodwork and paneling with endless
mysterious tunnels of dark bookshelves stretching above me to unbelievable
heights. I thought it must be heaven to work in a library. But so high a heaven
such as I never thought I would be intelligent enough to enter. Being a ‘dumb’
child, surely I could never grow up to reach the glorious estate of a librarian;
and so I didn’t. But my awe of city libraries has never waned. They are
altogether magic places to me . . . walled realms of possibilities unlimited; filling
stations along the sometimes barren road of life.
At the end of
my five year Odyssey of ocean sailing and extreme adventure, I found myself living
a lonely life on a beautiful island, fifty four nautical miles off the east
coast of Auckland, New Zealand. For company I joined a mail order book club,
and read and read; making up for lost time, I think. A wayward life of sea
travel had been the main ‘book’ I’d read . . . living and staying alive was
mostly all that mattered!
But this new life
of solitude on Great Barrier Island was quickly cut short by a catalytic event
that happened there in my inner life. Suddenly my whole world was turned upside
down and inside out and radically and drastically changed. Something very
wonderful happened to me.+ But, sadly, (…looking
back in hindsight, that is,) I was led to a lovely religious community on the Island
where I was immersed in books all of one genre; and for the next twenty years
read nothing but these kinds of books; and eventually had a severe breakdown.
The good
outcome of this ‘disaster’ was that I packed up all my religious books and gave
them all away to church libraries; or burnt them in the incinerator in the
garden. After which I recovered, slowly; and I had no more books at all, save
one, for some fourteen years. Anything that was only love didn’t need them.
I knew love was
everything. It outranked that knowledge which made of itself an end in itself
that in so doing, only made it lifeless, and therefore, obsolete.
_____________________________________________________
+ Dawning;
an Autobiography;
Fragment 3; Page 41
_______________________________________________________________
‘When that which is perfect is come, then that
which is in part shall be done away.’ If
it could be done away with, there was something much greater. Something
that would never mould my life into a shape it wasn't meant to be in. I found I
had a ‘living book,’ deep inside me that I could read at any time, or anywhere,
and that I didn’t need any other
book. And, after ‘a losing time’ of listening and longing within me, I began to
write my own.
I found the
less I had of stuff: and shells, the more I had of life: and joy which preceded them. I had sifted through the haystack, till I
found the needle – (the needle the camel went through the eye of) – and I developed
other capacities for learning, and experiencing, and ‘reading,’ and knowing. The
teacher was within; the pearl inside me: the shell discarded.
Not for one
moment did I ever ‘throw the baby out
with the bathwater.’ The baby was given me first, and came without any soapy
water. The baby could not be washed cleaner than it already was; therefore all
the bathwater could be discarded. And it was. And there was joy. There being
space for it . . . and if twenty years seems like a long bath, it is perhaps
even stranger that it should take fourteen years for it to go down the plughole!
But unlearning is a difficult business and much harder than learning.
It is
unlearning that is the key to unlocking the future, and to living there before
it happens; before it eventuates there as a generally accepted thing. If we are not made different in the present,
we will be just the same in the future, and therefore be no different there. If
I am willing to be made different now, I will be there. But it is a road less
travelled; it is not easy.
It is only
recently that I have returned to book reading; and to a wholly delightful broad,
broad spectrum of books! And I love them all! I am free!
Truly am I grateful
for all my years of booklessness: I was tipped out so entirely down the
plughole, that nothing of me was left and the babe that remained became itself
an open book that filled the world and rushed into all its corners; but that is
altogether another story.
*
There is the first thing – live – vibrant
There is the spark – piercing – quickening
Then the defining – the collar around its throat
Pulled in – leashed tight with reins attached
Crippling all attempts at the running through
To be free – and out ––– the beyond – quashed
The explaining thing – that could be done away
Books – the clothes the life was dressed in – those
Made of the stuff of limitations – We know! We see!
Forming in aspiring lines – of only equal length
They march across the page – to clutter – cloud over
The babe essential – the fiery life they came from
Take me away –– remove all my engaging rags
Tear from me all my understandable pages
Make me naked –– let the spark ignite the whole
Burn up my every written image – my feeble encasing
Forge of my first thing – only rippled ragged lines
Rejected now – the living substance of the future
*
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