in the acres of the Holocaust Memorial, glimpsed between the rows and cut corners of blocks. You retreat into yourself until a face flashes by in one of the broken corridors, inquiring eyes, another Berlin tourist not sure how to react to the empty perspective lines, powder blue sky overhead, black walls all around. People, strangers found, not lost.
here in Oxford town, three days walk from any sea. I get my salt air from books, ocean-roving across the pages. But they’re hit and miss; I thought I was in for the duration with Patrick O’Brian then slipped away in the second title, with his captain shipless and hunting foxes. I need the spray and the coming storm, coast no more. Landlocked in Ox, I dream of getting lost in the great, watery immensity, gone with Pip into the azure world. But in truth, I tremble whenever I bob out onto the extreme irreverence of the flood. Working sailors don’t yearn for these driftings, they cling to the charts and the sat nav. We humans plot ourselves at a footprint point on the globe, map every alleyway and net the world in satellites. And when Turing set out for uni across the Atlantic, he carried his own antique sextant aboard the liner, always certain of his locus under the stars.
maybe we could use AR instead, for Aerial Robots, with a nod to AI? These terms are still settling and changing in the comings and goings of the language. I don’t mind drones so much, we can reclaim the word for new world uses. Drones are cheap to build and easy to find at the moment, I hope they stay that way. Flight is exciting, liberating. For any worries about privacy and observation, drones prompt new ideas and ways of seeing things. The AI that guides and governs them is improving weekly. It raises other questions about AI, how it will merge into our lives and whether our evolution will lead us to construct equals – or as some fear, betters. But, in the study of machine intelligence I’m certain we’ll learn more about ourselves and what we need to preserve and protect of being human. Fear not the tech, make the tech your own.
but not much else has changed. Cracked grey paving slabs, a splash of red paint, banks of brick terraces and the background semaphore of cranes, this late-morning approach to the London pub. I meet a friend of thirty years to swap tales over the jars. Every meeting has its theme, but it was only on the train home that I mark the wisdom, the unspoken message of the day. There’ve been failings, but the quiet successes of life don’t get their fair mention. So many good times, beyond any measure.
and the side streets are iffy this morning. I walk the ice, chat with some other parents dropping off their kids. They all saw it coming down, though it was late and silent. All of them keen to it somehow, a lonesome sharing.
they often suffer a spell of turbulent craziness, it strikes me. Out of all Kerouac’s books, his breakdown narrative, Big Sur cuts deepest. All that was rational, all those invisible threads tethering you to sanity, are hacked away when fame and money rush in. You can walk away from the little obligations and resentments of an obscure life, the shopping to carry in, tedious arrangements, the phone never ringing, to flood your days with new pursuits. They won’t mean anything more, in fact, there’s a good chance that you’ll leave a lot of what was profound in your life behind – but you have to evolve. The famous go through the transition churn of making it for a year or two and then emerge, into their different life. And even if they cling to the invisible threads, their identity has to change. For most of us, the ride in a limo is a giggle, a mask, a dress-up game. But for the famous, it’s who they are and if they try to mock it, those that stare will call them false.
there are trains leaving, just waiting for you to hop aboard. If you want the answers, go to Greece and ask the questions, Nigeria, go to Fukushima, the North Dakota fracking plains, go to the last hidden places, Western Sahara and Mauritania, Amazon tepui and all the lost valleys, get the train over to Vladivostok, sail to the sand islands in the South China Sea, go to Rio della Sensa in Venice, get out and sniff the air. Don’t tell me you’re bored and there’s nothing going on. You think there’s nothing going on, get a ticket to Syria and tell me what you see there, that’s something I’d want to read. Tell me some truths. Write from the heart. And play from the heart too. You want the answers, listen to Coltrane, only love and tenderness and eyes wide open could make A love supreme, and only a cold, dead heart could resist it. The answers are all there, just waiting for you to stumble over them – in your own backstreets and tumbled dreams.
in the great carnival of events, those plane smashes, train crashes, poll upsets, pregnant pandas and politicos caught pilfering or pretending – and why am I surprised that they lie, when that’s what we always urge them to do? Better off abandoning papers and the flickering screen that bring me the news, why learn of the next turn of the wheel out of my hands, the spin and shuffle of another accident and outrage? It never seems to change things, my knowing. I begin to think it’s nothing but outright vanity or laziness my clinging to the passage of events, being curious. Better to be curious about the swans and the walk through the glade. There’s more sense there, more truth in a walk with a friend and the canopy of the sky and the water rolling by. For behind each event are other layers and motives, twists in the narrative, weighings and sortings, yearnings and hates, all the unknown forces and influences, even down to the great mysteries of whether these things are preplanned, written, or chaotic and free. But my walk by the Blenheim lake isn’t like that. Sure, there’s much hidden and designed and unknown to me in that landscape, but I’m content with the scope of my eyes. Perhaps, what you see is enough, sweet enough to knit all ravelled sleaves of care.
for the English lion, a step away from the Blenheim estate. I walked through the lakeside firs towards the great palace beforehand, a mirage of empire wealth and sandstone splendour away on the plain. Winston was born here but he never got to call the big house his own. And I tell my kids he mattered, talk of his oratory and spirit, as though he has some place in their view of the world. Laughing in the churchyard, whispering a line from some song they heard in the car. And me thinking of the snaps I’ve seen today, our world leaders assembled at the Paris march, but in truth crowded together in some guarded side street far from the masses and their unity placards, hired extras behind them to pose as the people they represent. Craven and self-serving and low are our leaders. Who will tell proud stories of them to their children, I wonder? And am I a fool for thinking Churchill would have turned his back on their linked arms and squalid deceit?
leads up from the C.S. Lewis house, out in the northern fringe of the town. It opens onto a green wood, a nature trail and the first ridges of Shotover Park. This was the writer’s garden wilderness, for Aslan contemplations and whispers of the universal mystery mixed in the wind, the ring road traffic purr and the trembling leaves.
