“The delayed turn of a page in a stumbled-upon book can lead to a lifetime of exploration” Brian Cox I want to tell you about the book tree. It’s like an ancestral tree, but it’s roots are in the ground of books and it’s blossom, ideas. I think we each have our own book tree, as we do ancestral trees. And when I was boxing books again recently it made me think about who might be on my tree; or as James Hillman, the Jungian psychotherapist, might have asked, ‘what tree of ideas are you on?’. So this is my first book tree blog, and takes me right back to my roots. Finding a small book of poetry by William Blake was such an important part of my early life and shaped the way I saw the world in so many ways. That book and writer, like so many books and writers I've met in my life, opened a door in the mind. I’m addicted to books, you see, it’s no secret. But that comes with space issues and my shelves intermittently overflow and I needto make space. So while I was in the middle of this latest archiving process and placed book after book in the box I’d just bought for the purpose, one particular book fell perfectly into my palm. In retrospect you might visualise someone shuffling through old family photos, but instead it’s books, and one catches the attention. In this case it is a small, hard-bound, dull, teal-blue book, a little battered at the edges. There is nothing to indicate anything about the book on the front or back cover - but plainness is no indication of depth and the small curvaceous gold lettering on the spine hints at secrets. And so here it is again: ‘Poems and Prophecies of William Blake'. It feels hermetically sealed with ancientness; opening it and prizing the pages apart gives off a whiff of an elegant mind looking up at the stars. When was it I first met Blake and that book? It was a dull grey Saturday afternoon. I was 15. It was a memorable time. I'd had this intense friendship with an eccentric girl who I’ll call Olivia. She died her hair red and wore bright red lipstick. She had been new at school, joining around the third year and still smelled of the Greek and Latin books from the local Grammar school she'd left. I loved her Latin grammar books! I used to make her tell me about these lessons. We spent a whole summer together hanging out, and that was followed by Autumn and Winter evenings. It seemed like forever, as things do when you're a teenager. Actually it was probably only a year. But those nightly walks and ghostly conversations, chip shop chips and hot chocolate, tasted exotic to me. We would listen to George Michael and Duran Duran vinyls. But our kindred girls’ bubble was punctured by boys in cars four years older. There had been no arguments. The separation was my choice. I wasn't ready for that and she and her red hair and lipstick were. What I remember most about that Saturday when I was 15 and I found the book, are the dull brown-striped curtains which seemed eternally shut like centurions guarding against the infiltration of the outside glare of day and its annoying habit of obscuring the television screen. Our television was always on and we were often captivated by, and captive to, it. I think I remember my dad was asleep, and my mum was ironing, while my brother and sister watched something followed by something else. Me? I was bored. I was in a searching mood. Something had to be found. Of course, I found the book in a dusty old cupboard. It was one of those large living room cupboards with many shelves and sliding doors for glasses and ornaments and such like, very common to the 80s suburban terrace house. At the bottom were white sliding doors behind which were my parents books. The door on the right hand side was not so easy to get to since my dad's armchair was directly in front to it. As a bookworm, of course I'd sniffed out the books behind the left hand door many times before, but this particular Saturday I decided I would take them all out - every single one of the many piles of books on the left hand side so I could get access to the mysterious right hand side. When that side was clear, I was able to crawl inside the cupboard twisting my shoulders so my head jutted in to see what else might be there and my right hand could twist and reach in to the other side of the cupboard. I remember when I poked my head in, the dark dust fell across my eyes like a velvet curtain. Blinking, blinking in the dark, the last oblivion before you see something you cannot un-see. The more I pushed my shoulder in against the dark, the more it seemed the books pushed around me and the smell of paper and must mingled into a thick smog. But I was on the scent of something. I remember that feeling so starkly - excitement and adventure. How is that possible in a cuboard of books? I think I dug my way through those books, throwing them out behind me on to the living room floor to create piles either side of my twisted body. Imagine a mole excavating earth. My hands expanded like large magnets drawing the books out one by one, quicker and quicker. Then, that's when Blake and I met. Which had pulled the other I'm never sure. But the teal-blue, dull little book fitted in to my hand and the search was over. As I've suggest before, it was more than finding a book; it was like finding a door to an elegance of mind that I knew was there but hadn’t met yet. Dusty cupboards, and of course wardrobes, are always places to unearth what is waiting to be found. I had certainly been looking for something time and again, Saturday after Saturday, summer holiday after holiday, grey timeless day after day of that liminal adolescence waiting for something to happen, rifling through my parents' bookshelves and cupboards. It was more than something to read I wanted - I was pursuing a thought or someone who could show me a thought and the secret doorway into my own starry place; a place where strange minds like huskies tear across winters to capture hope and magic. Magic enough to survive beyond the fatalities that occur in grey living rooms, work burnout, ironing, brown-striped curtains, and snogging boys in cars. I turned the page and inside was a beautiful double-page black and white illustration showing an old man walking through a dark door. Written opposite with a William Morris design are the words of Shelley: 'Poets are the trumpets which sing to battle. Poets are the un- acknowledged legislators of the world.' If I run my finger over the print even now as I write this, it rises slightly from the ageing and slightly bumpy page and I can reach back into that incredible wonder I felt on first seeing it. And just as if I'd walked out from the wardrobe and into Narnia, it got more exciting still. I found footprints - someone had come this way before. They weren't actually footprints, of course, but the penciled notes curled around random verses seemed to make the path into this new territory a little easier somehow as I turned the page, and another, and another. Someone else had been fascinated and I was fascinated by that someone. 'Whose is this? May I have it?' I remember wafting it under my dad's nose while still half asleep and he murmured 'yes'. I found out later it belonged to my great uncle. My dad told me he hadn’t read the book. I loved that. This will be between me and Cyril then, the uncle I’d never met - the one who had kept himself firmly in the darkness of the family cupboard: complex and mysterious and seemingly beyond answer to the question, 'what was he like?'. No-one really knew. There was a kinship then that started between the three of us: Blake, Cyril, and me. I sat on the armchair next to my dad's for the rest of that Saturday afternoon reading Blake's poems. It got dark and still I sat with that book into the evening reading poem after poem, while everyone else watched something and something else on the television and the brown striped curtains were on the night shift against impending midnight. I started with ‘There is No Natural Religion’ and moved on to ‘The Songs of Innocence and Experience’ and I felt exactly the way Blake described, ‘Like a human heart struggling and beating' while 'The vast world of Urizen appear’d’. And when everyone had gone to bed, including me, on and on I tumbled with the book in to the night. And in the 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell', I fell in love for the first time I think. I was lost in a way of seeing the universe I never knew I had. I had discovered the elegance and impossibility of the mysterious thing they call a paradox. A beautiful and brutal complexity, maddening and simple. Things that made no-sense were music to my senses. Things like, "without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence." Now I was seeing stars, and whispering ‘yes, yes, yes!’, in to the late night hours. While my family slept, a deep passion was found and kindled, and I'm not sure that particular flame has ever gone out. Later on, I'm convinced Blake helped me get my university place. I was 17 at my interview and I would speak confidently about the 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell'. My interviewer told I was 'very young to be interested in Blake'. The book didn't get boxed away. Like many paradoxes and unfathomable things, once they're out of the cupboard it's hard to put them back!
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AuthorI am a writer, artist and have a passion for exploring what it means to be human and the possibilities of transforming who we are. I trained as a psychotherapist, studied mediation and spiritual approaches to healing for many years, and now studying anthropology. I'm still searching... ArchivesCategories |