Tag: dreams

Camino 8 – on being an unreliable narrator.

Looking down on Aumont Aubrac at dawn

23rd May 2010

Left Aumont Aubrac early. We set the alarms for 4.45 and it was dark when we woke.  I had an extremely restless night – hardly slept.  We were right next to a main road and the transhumance festival parties didn’t begin until 11.30pm so all night there were drunks outside the campsite shouting and banging the railings.  I was praying they wouldn’t see our 2 little tents.  We didn’t want to wake Alain and his wife so we breakfasted at the camp gate on dried apricots and yesterday’s apricot pasties + water.  When we left – way before sunrise – there was a thick mist over the valley bottom.  We climbed and climbed for several hours knowing that this was the last day we would have the heavy (35lb) loads because we had agreed (long haggling session) to shed lots of stuff the previous night.

Big dream during my restless night.  I dreamed I was at Severn Bridge railway station* except it looked exactly like an SNCF station like the ones you see in French films (and in France of course). Suddenly this strange and sinister man dressed like the Sandeman sherry label logo comes towards me.  He’s all grey, very large with no face.  I start to tear at his clothes and in a kind of fast-forward sequence I tear all these clothes, disguises and appearances off one after another – he’s everyone, everything, and all these flash past in front of me until at last I’m left holding a plucked chicken!

After a stiff climb we reached Les Quatre Chemins which was just a bare road junction such as you might find on High Mendip.  Gloriously there was a café (Chez Regine) perched on the corner.  It was a proper French bar/café with Regine – if it was her – looking as if she had been hot smoked with tobacco. 

Previously in Lasbros we’d fond an immaculately clean toilet complete with paper, which made up for the lack of overnight facilities.

Due to the early start we crossed the Aubrac Plateau before the sun got too hot.  Unbelievably beautiful wildflowers – including [this is a misidentification I now realize] gentians which I’d never seen before.  Untouched pasture and some of the healthiest and happiest cattle I’ve ever seen.  In Lasbros we saw a foal that could only have been born an hour before – just standing up all knock-kneed.  It was a hard and hilly day and very very hot.  Even I drank 3 litres of water but fortunately there were many taps. Finally staggered into Nasbinals mid-afternoon.  Andrew had pulled a muscle and was getting grumpy.  Found campsite at other end of town, as always, so probably walked 27K.  Put up tent, slept , had a shower and walked back into town at 6.00pm passing a restaurant on the way in.  So we booked a table or 7.00 and had a couple of panachés in the local bar.  Meal was excellent and shared with 2 Germans and 2 French.  Young Frenchman reminded us it was Pentecost.

Journal

*Incidentally, although the Severn Tunnel (not the bridge) does have a railway station, on the Welsh side, I’ve never set foot on it – so its role in my dream is just one of life’s imponderables.

This afternoon I realized that I’d already mentioned, out of sequence, an evening shared with a nightjar as well as the worst meal ever. Having laboriously checked the previous seven posts on the Camino I thankfully discovered that neither incident was claimed as a component of the walk we’d already done and so I’ll continue gracefully along the Way but very aware of the fact that even with the aid of exif data from photos, a handwritten journal and a pretty reasonable memory it’s incredibly easy to slip up and transpose experiences from one day to another. Why it should be so important to me to get it exactly right is a question I can’t answer except for the fact that as I write this I’m constantly trying to answer a crop of my own questions. I hesitate to describe this exercise as therapeutic but I would love to think that when I press the last publish button on this group of posts, I might be just a touch wiser. Of course, 30 years as a parish priest taught me that life is irredeemably complicated and is very rarely understood by the people having to put up with it, and even less so by the people trying to explain it. That’s why psychoanalysis is so expensive. Not many caring professionals can resist explanations and keep quiet for as long as it takes for the client to hack their own way through the undergrowth.

The day was, as I’ve described it previously, full of wonders. Watching a transhumance take place is like watching a thousand years of history roll back. On a more mundane level, my mention of the newly born foal took me back to the day and the place so vividly I was able to revisit Lasbros in my mind as if it were yesterday.

The grace of dreaming thoughtfully

Lackey moth caterpillars on Blackthorn May 2022 in Portscatho. Or a horror story?

When I started writing this blog I always thought of it being read sequentially by a very small number of people who know me or once knew me. Three years later and with the benefit of a (paid for) improved search engine for readers, there are more readers than I ever dreamed of. However most of them are highly selective and search for the stuff that piques their interest regardless of when it was written. I do my best to categorise and tag the posts and I work hard to write eye catching titles now because I’m almost certain that I’m the only person in the world who sees the Potwell Inn as a kind of journal. Pretty much everyone else must think of me (if they think of me at all) as that old bloke who writes completely random stuff about cookery, allotments, philosophy, climate change and living in Bath. So what better time than a warm bank holiday Sunday when sensible people are doing anything but reading blogs – to write a piece about dreams and how they’ve helped me? It’ll sit somewhere up in the cloud, possibly for years before it meets its only reader who’s been looking for something on exactly this subject.

“Well I’m a Freudian“, he said, “They’re obviously sex and death!”

So here goes. Most people probably think that when you go to see a psychoanalytic psychotherapist you tell them about your dreams and they – because they’ve read Freud or Jung from cover to cover – will tell you what the dreams mean and you’ll experience a lightbulb moment and find yourself miraculously cured. Well that’s absolute tosh. In around four years of intense therapy Robin – my therapist – only explained a dream once, and that was by way of a joke. I’d explained to him how I’d dreamed I was walking down Hotwells Road, separated from the harbour by a row of houses, and I kept glimpsing a pair of elephants walking alongside but on the far side of the houses. “What’s that all about?” I asked, not expecting an answer. “Well I’m a Freudian“, he said, “They’re obviously sex and death!” He was far too modest a man to laugh at his own joke, but I thought it was hysterical.

After four years on the couch – well three and a half because the first six months were spent sitting rigid with fear in an armchair facing him – I had learned that dreams really are the royal road to the unconscious mind, but it’s the dreamer’s work to embrace them. No one else can tell us what they mean, if indeed they mean anything at all, and if by that you mean discovering a one-to – one relationship between a dream and an interpretation.

As an example, and don’t worry there are no cringeworthy moments in what follows; as an example I’ve just completed what I think is a long cycle of dreams that came to me over many months. They were all anxiety dreams, some of them nightmares, and they would wake with me and occupy my mind for the whole of the next day. They were all furnished by the ghostly remains of the more traumatic events of the past decades. Clergy work is almost by definition traumatic because its currency is life and death. Too much exposure to raw grief and anger can cause tremendous psychological damage if it’s not dealt with, and it’s not just the people whose lives I briefly entered and left; there were the authorities and the congregations to deal with – and they could be, without doubt, pretty poisonous in the pursuit of their personal agendas. But there was never time and rarely the support to deal with these issues before they were pushed to the edges of consciousness and then stored deep in the unconscious like little timebombs.

The grace of dreaming thoughtfully only showed up seven years after I retired and four years after I left therapy. I can never express my gratitude to Robin enough because by the time we parted company I was so infused with his forensic questions, I felt brave enough to embrace whatever came along; however painful or frightening. One recurring dream in particular haunted me for years; leaving me in sheer terror. Then, out of the blue, instead of waking in fear I walked through the circle of my tormentors and they made no attempt to stop me. The dream still occurs but I know that I survived and that neutralises it completely.

So after a while I realised that this long sequence of dreams was regressing into the past. The subject or the trigger was moving back further and further in time until I seemed to have processed a whole stack of bad memories, thoughts and fears that just needed time and only a little courage to allow them to emerge and then be dismissed. I haven’t interpreted them in any way but just allowed them to say their piece and go. The grace – and I’m sure it qualifies as a grace -is a conscious sense of peace that comes from the fact that the long delayed embrace of bad memories was accomplished through dreaming. The events of the past are not erased, they never could be, and they’re so much a part of me I’m not sure I’d want them to go, but there’s no thought of confrontation or revenge.

There’s a Jungian idea which I’m happy to rehearse here – the last thing we need is sectarian counselling! – and it’s based on a metaphor that comes from growing things – so it suits me perfectly! Jung suggested that new growth always emerges from the wound. In the pursuit of eudaimonia or flourishing, we can’t learn to thrive or be compassionate or love justice; to be brave, temperate, truthful or generous or embrace and live out any of the virtues if we simply ignore, repress, or lock out the wounds and knockbacks we have received through life.

And so I’ll press the send button and this post into the cloud in the hope that someone, somewhere, will find it a help.

A difficulty is a light. An insurmountable difficulty is a sun – Paul Valéry

“Run the economy like a business” – are you completely batshit crazy? we need to run it like a garden!

Another night of strange dreams led to a sleepless night for Madame as I tossed and turned and made (as she described them) weird noises. I dream a lot, and years of work – hard work too – with a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, have taught me to treat them with the utmost seriousness. So here’s the deal – my dream was about cutting metre square sections of rough grass full of weeds, and setting them out in the usual unspecified way, to conduct an experiment concerned with watching weeds grow. I even dreamed of setting the trailcam to time lapse mode in order to get a continuous film of them growing. Principal among them was our old garden enemy – Bindweed.

Then this morning I was reading Robin Wall Kimmerer marvellous book – “Braiding Sweetgrass” when a connection dropped into place and I was able to see a very small part of a remedy for the crisis we’ve now created for ourselves.

The hot seat!

Allow me a small diversion to help explain the background. I was a school governor for over forty years and in that time we interviewed at least six head teachers. In spite of endless pains we still managed to appoint one complete dud but otherwise they were great human beings with a passion for making children into moral grownups. We interviewed them over two days, handed them heaps of data and gave them an hour to read and digest it then come up with a viable step by step plan. We tested their management and leadership skills by asking them to debate the difficult data with other candidates. We watched and noted those who could embrace challenges thoughtfully and without becoming defensive. It was exhausting for us and even worse for the candidates, but slowly the best candidate for our particular school – with its own unique history and challenges – would emerge.

If you compare that level of diligence with the present election for Prime Minister you will understand immediately how our political system makes such terrible decisions. As I once heard on a bus on the way home from Southmead – “That Jack B …….. he can’t tell shit from pudding!” I have a whole collection of those kinds of remarks, overheard from people who stretch the colloquial into Shakespearean beauty. We have a parliament full of people who share Jack B’s incapacity.

So back to dreams and weeds and revelations, and the connection is this. When we plan the next season on the Potwell Inn allotment we pay attention to the space we have, the nature of the local climate and its variabilities; the soil and its state and – in particular – we pay attention to our own needs. Do we need fifty purple sprouting plants? How many pounds of tomatoes do we really need?

And we also know that our land isn’t just for us – it’s for the thousands of species that – while we can’t eat them – play a vital role in the ecology of the plot. Some of the pests who predate upon the pests who damage our crops are visible – frogs, toads, parasitic wasps and so forth. Some are microorganisms. Some are mixed blessings – badgers for instance; and foxes, cats and even rats play complicated roles of fleas and smaller fleas in the terms of the old rhyme.

Weeds and pests and their many interactions play such a huge and poorly understood role in the overall health of the plot that we leave them alone. So to chase down an analogy – we either draw a binary distinction between friend and foe, and then bomb the foe out of existence in the manner of intensive chemically driven agriculture, or we nurture the richest possible mix of living creatures and edible plants and allow nature to find the kind of balance that allows us a crop, reduces pest damage and leaves the soil in good heart. And it really works!

Running the economy – and especially the ecology – of the earth as if it were a business completely focused on financial profit and loss is a form of ideological madness. Public goods are very hard to monetize, and yet we know that climate destruction brings tremendous costs. We know that farming practices which lead to wholesale species destruction will result in food shortages. We know that viruses can cross over between animals and humans and cause pandemics, and we suspect that the destruction of animal habitat through forest clearance makes this possibility greater. We also know that intensive farming of any kind causes pollution; carbon release and therefore global heating. The point of this line of argument is to emphasise that running the earth as a business so often ignores the cost of adverse consequences. If the full long-term costs of maintenance and disposal of radioactive waste are added to the business plan no investor in their right mind would take the risk. Sadly our government is able to use our money to make us compulsory investors in this dangerous industry.

Running the economy – basing our governance on its impact on the whole earth would make big business howl. Just as an example – the current price of all electricity is based on the inflated price of fossil fuels. This represents the mad economics of subsidising the oil companies by penalising renewables. In a genuine – that’s to say not rigged – market. The renewables would outcompete the fossils on price and the oil and gas producers would have to invest their ill gotten gains in renewables in order to stay in business at all. This is not fantasy economics.

Why weeds then? Why embrace pests and predators? Because any unstable ecosystem will be made more stable if a natural balance is reached. Climate catastrophe is the end point of ignoring the instability made worse by politicians who make stupid policies such as running the economy like a business – and then facilitate the predatory activities of corporate behemoths.

James Lovelock died this week. His Gaia theory gives us the best possible tool for understanding the harm we’ve done to ourselves and future people. The key is going to be diversity. The binary world of bad science and dangerous politics needs to be swept away so we can learn to tend the whole earth – in all its inspiring diversity – as a garden.

Kaddish

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I fell asleep reading a new book – ‘Galileo’s Error’ today – absolutely no criticism of the author Philip Goff, I was just feeling exhausted, for no obvious reason save for the fact that we feel lost, confused, abandoned by our government; and my son had sent me the book after several of our long philosophical telephone discussions about materialism and consciousness.  One of the cruelties of the pandemic is being separated from our family. It’s been my mission. all my life, to find ways of talking about, and being, fully human; and the allotment, cooking, natural history, remembering and celebrating are all a part of the picture.

But being fully human seems to involve other, more controversial elements which can often become points of division. There are words I dislike using – like ‘spirituality’ or ‘soul’, for instance – not because they don’t correspond to anything meaningful but because the settings in which they’ve been developed and discussed have been fatally compromised. They became keywords in the history of religious slaughter and abuse. However, it seems almost impossible to do without them if we want to embrace life in all its fullness. My son recommended the book as a possible way towards a solution of the difficulty – ‘”it’s a popular book” – he said – “A four hour read, but a real challenge” 

I always find the very best books get me on my feet, pacing about; thinking carefully.  Sleeping isn’t normally a way of pacing around, but today – in a throwback to a previous life – I dreamed a part of the way out. Until today I would have associated the word Kaddish with Allen Ginsberg the American poet.

My dream took place exactly where I was, in fact, lying asleep but I seemed to be fully conscious of all the sadness surrounding us; and somewhere in the background was the sound of the Kaddish being sung.  I’ve never heard the Kaddish being sung but I knew for certain that this was it – glorious, defiant, haunting. There were dream tears running down my face and then I heard the altogether closer sound of a cat purring just behind my head.  I reached behind to the arm of the sofa where it was sitting and stroked it. And then I woke in the absolute certainty that this was what the Jungians would regard as a significant dream needing to be brought into the light of day.

If ever there were a more telling dream lesson of what we’ve neglected through our greedy materialism I’ve yet to hear it. We’ve had anger in abundance; we’ve had politics and economics, and every half-wit with a computer has offered their theory.  But there’s been no lament; no Kaddish for the dead but merely statistics, theories and the counting of money.

What about the cat? Well, the thing about a cat, or a dog or whatever other pet is that essentially there’s a relationship – even a relationship of love. But materialism has even turned big nature into a paid-for TV experience. We could perhaps do well to emulate our love for pets in our love for weeds and birds and insects and wildflowers.

I’ve no idea what to do with this insight – yet – but I guess I will one day.

 

 

Bath pavement artist cheats death

 

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Rue leaved saxifrage

I’d never noticed this plant until we moved here – it’s a Saxifraga tridactylides the three fingered or rue leaved saxifrage. I first noticed it growing on our fire escape where, because it was only rooted in about 1 mm of grime, it was a tiny little plant and I thought no more of it until today when I spotted its more fortunate relative growing in a  luxurious crack at the bottom of an old limestone wall. Like most pavement plants it doesn’t exactly draw attention to itself, but unlike many of its posher cousins this saxifrage is an annual, and it survives the yearly baptism of Roundup by flowering and setting seed before the man from the council gets to it. Other pavement artists survive by looking as if they are entitled to be there.  The Mexican fleabane spreads because most people think it’s a daisy and therefore deserves a chance.  The Canadian fleabane plays Russian roulette with the ethnic cleansers (this is a very fertile city) so sometimes it gets hit and sometimes it gets away with it. The sowthistles seem to be resistant to the sprays, so they die back respectfully and then emerge stronger than ever. Ivy leaved toadflax grows on the walls and escapes that way. Let’s be honest, this obsessive tidiness isn’t remotely necessary, and the vagrant plants add a touch of life – even to our hallowed Georgian crescents. I’m just pleased to see anything showing signs of life.

Today started with me feeling a little short of sleep. I seem to be dreaming my entire life in a more or less random manner – my mind is slowly coming to terms with the fact that at last, through the magical surroundings of the Potwell Inn, I’m safe, and so having packed up and moved here four years ago my unconscious is wrapping up the past and packing it away because it (he) knows I don’t need it anymore.

Today’s re-lived experience involved the 8 mm film I once made of the funeral of a gangster who – it was widely thought – had been thrown down a flight of stairs and murdered. The police conducted an unenthusiastic investigation that took best part of a year, but there were no witnesses, no-one was talking and, to be frank, most people thought he had it coming. I was riding behind the horse-drawn hearse when the coffin very nearly slid out on to the road because someone had forgotten to insert the bolts, and the coachman turned to me and said – “he frightened my bloody ‘oss – e’s bin in the freezer for six months”. The surreal picture of a frozen corpse rolling down the hill was an addition to life’s rich tapestry, no doubt, but I spent most of the day in barely suppressed terror. 

So enough of these troubling old memories, I’m wrapping them in newspaper and sticking them in some kind of interior shed – glad to see the back of them.  But there are many more, and I think I’ll be dreaming them for the foreseeable future.

The good news was that on Monday we went to an excellent talk on Giotto’s paintings in the Scrovengni Chapel in Padua – the paintings were in Padua, that is, we were in the inestimable BRLSI. In the days of our pomp, when we had two incomes; most of our half-terms (Madame is an art teacher) were spent in galleries around Europe, sometimes with school parties and sometimes alone.  Now we’re retired our scope is a bit narrower and we haven’t even been to London for years, but the talk reawakened all the old excitement and I suddenly thought – ‘well we live 10 minutes walk from a main line station, why don’t we buy a railcard and book ahead to get cheap train tickets?‘  I mentioned the idea to Madame and she added Glasgow and Edinburgh to the wish  list and after an hour online we had our card and our first ticket – to Cardiff for the National Museum of Wales – great place.  I don’t need to drive, or worry about where to park, and we don’t need to have the obligatory row as we drive in circles when the satnav fails. It’s a win win cultural feast with extra virtue on the side for taking the train. We’re like a couple of kids in a sweet shop when we go to a good gallery.

Back on the allotment (try to keep up – we get around a bit!) I checked the traps and for the first time this week there were no rats.  A little dig around the compost bin suggests that either they have moved out or there were only ever a couple of them. The heap, which has been topped up to the brim three times since October has now rotted down to about 25% of the initial volume and is ready to be turned into the neighbouring bin. Everything looks very dormant apart from the overwintering vegetables which are all doing well.  The garlic that we started in pots about three weeks ago is doing particularly well and even some red onion sets that we’d given up on have thrown up their first shoots. Suddenly I’m very aware that the chilli seeds need to be sown very soon to give them a long ripening season. Next week we’ll be complaining about having no time!

My friend Rose posted to say that she’d been down to Shapwick Heath to see the murmuration of starlings there on the Somerset levels. Lucky her, we’ve not yet been but I’m sure it was awesome.  We used to see murmurations over Redcliffe Church in Bristol when I was there, but I’d be surprised if that still happens now.  We did, however, see a robin on the plot today.  We no-diggers are a bit of a waste of time for a hungry robin, but he he may have just turned up for a chat.

 

 

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