26/10/23 – Warrington Bank Quay

Warrington Bank Quay station lies in the shadow of a huge industrial building. I’ve no idea what it is, but it looks like a power plant or something along those lines. It gives the area a post-apocalyptic feel. Still, there’s a warmth to all the people you meet round here in cafes and on buses. If you can’t bring your own positivity to a place like this then I suppose it’s a dull existence.

As I walk along the platform, with the sun shining from the opposite side so as not to be blocked out by the factory, I’m overcome with the absurdity of existence. Not in the despairing Camusian manner that such thoughts have affected me before though. Just a light-hearted reflection on the variation in human experience, including mine from moment to moment to moment. A semi-enlightened reflection, set back from the ‘now’. I’m reminded of the line at the end of Harry Potter, where Harry asks Dumbledore:

“Is this real? Or has it been happening inside my head?”

Dumbledore replies: “Of course it’s happening inside your head Harry, but why on earth should that mean it’s not real?”

On the platform, with the sun on my back and the imposing factory before me, I’m lead to think on the dream-like nature of our time in this world. An avenue of understanding relating to history’s ‘thinkers’ opens up; we are mere vessels for muses that occasionally bless us with ideas. Some have developed the technical ability of communicating these with other humans. These divine musings can give the impression of wisdom when they are captured in works that stand the test of time. But they are leaves in the wind. We are human. All too human and between any of these enlightened moments we are fallible beings driven primarily by emotion and base biological drives. The vehicles we hold up as heroes are distractions from the real show. Like theatres, we play host to the productions that bless our stage. We should appreciate the ideas like we do sunsets or stars. As emergent offerings from nature, rather than fixed identities to grasp on to.

TF

“We should never forget that it was Christ himself who taught us to make usurious use of the talents entrusted to us and not hide them in the ground.”

-Carl Jung

(From ‘Answer to Job’ – referencing ‘the Parable of the Talents‘ from the Bible in Matthew 25 : 14-30)

“A lot of the time it’s our efforts that ruin us ; it’s when we try that we screw things up.”

– Tommy Tiernan

“Can any of you, by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Soloman in all his splendour was dressed like one of those.”

– Matthew 6:27-29

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and 
lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, 
such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even.
Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.
 
No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious 
persona putting on its celebrated imitation 
of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact 
of the clear light.
 
So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, 
sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and 
self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.

Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage,
not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”
Aldous Huxley

Humans share much with other animals — the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example — but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.

Oliver Sacks ‘Hallucinations’

“The trouble with opinion is that it instantly islands us in the stream of life, cutting off its subject – and us along with it – from the interconnected totality of deep truth.”

……

“It is not enough to say that we cannot know or judge because all the information is not in. The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and draw new ones.”

John Steinbeck