Dreamland Pilgrim

“The colour of truth is gray.”
André Gide (1869 – 1951)

SEVERAL MORNINGS AGO I stepped into my shower a Heathen. I washed myself, shampooed my hair, rinsed off the soap, and turned off the water. When I pulled the shower curtain back, I was still a Heathen (a clean one at least). Stepping down, I immediately appreciated that my bathroom floor was wet, very wet. Not just puddled, but under two inches of water, and this seemed to be rising. The Heathen paddled across to the bathroom door, up a slight step, and across the hallway. Every towel in the top of the wardrobe went onto the bathroom floor, along with the spare bathmats. Somehow, the Heathen won the battle; the dripping towels went into the laundry basket and then off to the washing machine in the kitchen.

The Heathen, which is to say the Writer, had dabbed at his wet body while flinging towels about, and was able to get dressed. On with the central heating to get the floor quite dry.

An experiment: A jug of water poured into the bathtub bubbled up through the space between the bathtub’s housing and the floor. Here was trouble.

I had cursed a blue streak, but calmed down enough to phone my landlord for advice. Unfortunately, he was out of town due to a family emergency. I figured I would wait a few days and make do with my bathroom sink and the hose from the shower, which could be used there.

When I was a boy, at my Nan’s home in Kent, and at my Mother’s family home in Lancashire, we did not have indoor plumbing. In the morning, Nan or my Auntie Maud would pour heated water from a ewer into a bowl on a washstand in my bedroom, and I would bathe in some fashion that way. The small child does not usually smell as much as someone does at my present age. Using my bathroom sink, I have washed myself incredibly thoroughly for the past few mornings. I had no complaints.

I shall tell the reader now, the first time I have told anyone, that my Mother, who lived most of her adult life in Bermuda in a house with good modern plumbing, never, ever, had a bath or a shower. She washed at the sink. Might she have been afraid of water? I never knew. In her last few years, she could not bear to be in a room with a closed door, and that included the bathroom. It was rather discomfiting. Her bathroom door faced across a hallway to the living room. One had to make excuses ... I think the dog needs a walk ... privacy should go both ways.

Was the Heathen, the non-believer, to be flung into the world of his grandparents and peculiar Mother, when it came to bathing in October 2011? For a few days it was interesting, gave me something to think about.

Yesterday, I had had enough. Was I getting all the shampoo out of my hair (the few strands remaining)? Could I be sure I was not malodorous? I was also missing the physical pleasure of a hellishly hot shower.

Then, last night, I dreamed that my Mother was telling me about a bolt in my bathtub drain. I doubt that my Mother had any knowledge of drains, taps or pipes or the nuts and bolts that hold them together. How did she get into my dream with the explanation that a bolt had fallen down my drain? I know so little of plumbing myself; I could not invent her words (could I?) I should point out that Mother passed away over 19 years ago, and has never appeared in my dreams with helpful hints.

I told a friend here in town about the bathtub drain, and he brought over two small washers. Told me he thought there would be a bolt somewhere below the drain and a screw passed through the washers would restore the drain. Well, the Heathen was not too much of a believer.

This evening, on my own, I shone a torch down the drain after lifting off the sieve plate, and way down I could see a metal ring with a ... wait for it ... bolt through the middle pointing up. It was awkwardly distant to be reached by fingers or pliers, but I had the sudden thought that a fishhook on a line might be lowered into the drain and the device below snared and pulled upwards. As if I had a fishhook and a line! However, after hunting through the many drawers and boxes in my flat, I found a long twist-tie with a thin metal centre coated in plastic. I bent the end to make a hook and lowered it into the darkness of the drain (impossible to manoeuvre a torch at the same time) and, praying “Please!” to no god in particular, pulled upwards. The hook had latched onto the bolt and its ring; it came up to the bottom of the bathtub. I quickly unscrewed the bolt, took off the corroded and worn washer on the end of it, dropped on the new washers, and screwed the bolt down again. This pulled everything tightly together.

The Heathen, with his dream, his Mother, his friend and (his luck?) had fixed the drain. He dared to run the tap for a good long time, and no water bubbled out from below the tub.

When I was younger (but older than I was at my Auntie Maud’s) I used to find religion, hints of God, in both major and minor events. The night sky might make me tremble and so might a few minutes of listening to sitar music. Words, especially, could turn me on. Words still turn me on, but they no longer seem to turn a god on. Not the way they did in the 1960s. I took drugs to try and find the way to God.

That said, I recently watched again, after a few decades, the television series “Cosmos” written and presented by Dr Carl Sagan. I recalled reading that Sagan, as he was dying of cancer, had pretty much decided that there was no God. When I read that, years ago, I was surprised. As a Heathen, watching the series from start to finish over a few nights, I had to ask myself how Sagan could have dismissed God while speaking of so many wonders in the Cosmos.

Haydn’s “The Creation” oratorio has the line: ‘The wonder of his works displays the firmament,’ which is pleasant to sing (which I did in school) and thrilling to hear. Happens that the original German does not make sense in English as commonly translated. It has to be ‘The firmament displays the wonder of his works’.

The works displayed so wonderfully by the firmament that Sagan wrote and spoke of had me thinking that maybe I had it wrong. Maybe there is a god, even a God.

“That the Mormons assume a right exclusively to the benefits of God will be a lasting witness against them, and the same will it be against Christians.”
Thanks to William Blake (1757 – 1827)

For me, I think the main difficulty with a belief in a deity is that people tend to create Him (or Her) in their own image. This exclusivity extends beyond the worship service, beyond the sacred image, beyond the promises attached to this or that god. The True God and his True Church (for there must be one, if just to collect tithes and offerings) can only succeed when all opposition is crushed. There was never a god that whispered to the prophets: “Tell the people to pray as they will, do as they would, be what they wish.”

At the present time, there is a run-up to the Presidential Elections in the USA. A year from now, Americans will elect a leader. One of the Republican candidates is a Christian, we are told, of the Evangelical bent. Another Republican front-runner is a Mormon. The Christians, the Bible Believers (dare I say Bashers?), are getting the word out that Mormonism is a cult, not Christian, and that a Mormon President would surely lead the country into the jaws of Hell. The Mormons, by the way, believe that when the American Constitution is “hanging by a thread” the Mormons will take over America (and eventually the world) and rule for the Mormon god(s). There will be a political kingdom of God.

A True Christian, and a True Mormon, cannot believe outside their particular Catechism.

JFK was elected President despite (we must assume) adhering to Roman Catholic doctrine, which differs from that of our Evangelical Christians almost as much as Mormonism. Except, so far as I know, the Pope was not pulling strings.

Mormons in their meetinghouses vote to sustain their church leaders by the sign of the raised hand. I have never, ever, seen a hand withheld, much less a hand raised in opposition, no matter how difficult a decision. Simply, the members vote for the candidates that the Church leaders tell them to.

Do not expect the voters in Utah to sing the praises of Barack Obama, the Democrat, or Rick Perry the Republican Christian. Utah Mormons (and those elsewhere) pushed The Osmonds to the top of the pops 30 years ago, and Brandon Flowers of The Killers is repaying his fan-base by backing the Mormon Republican Mitt Romney for President in 2012.

I would not back a Mormon candidate for high office because I know a little about Mormonism, and a good deal about what True Mormons are expected to believe and do. Mormons are expected to withhold information that might put their church and its leaders in a bad light, indeed, they can lie and it is quite all right. They do lie. I have lied for them and with them.

As I stood in my flooded bathroom the other morning, sending up the sort of prayer King Canute might have, that Noah might have, I did not really expect an answer. Dreaming of my Mother and the bolt in the bathtub drain was rather odd, and finding my answer in the dream was even odder. I am not going to found The Church of the Flood (that would be a very catchy name, of course) and get religion. I might put the clues together, admire the firmament, and feel comfortable with the casual thought that someone or something, billions of years ago, released everything into time and space, and that matter and energy flooded outwards in every direction. Did someone or something create the laws of nature, of physics? Perhaps they were inherited from an earlier incarnation. Let it roll.

The Heathen is enjoying his shower again. This is a rainy day outdoors too. Bless the drain that works!

Soundcrack

This will prove a brave kingdom to me,

where I shall have my music for nothing.

William Shakespeare (The Tempest, III ii)

DEAR GOD BUT I LOVE MUSIC. And I find it difficult to believe that there are people who might not like music much, or at all. Mind you, I can understand differing tastes in music. However, a person who has no time for music, turns it off, walks away, doesn't go there…

No such person? You never met my mother. I never saw my mother read anything other than the daily newspaper, and she was a bit fanatical about that. But she never read magazines, she never owned or borrowed a book in my lifetime (I was born when she was 23, she died aged 66), she didn't even look at picture books. Happily, she permitted me and my sisters any amount of reading matter.

My mother had dreadful eyesight. Her right eye was what one used to call lazy if she took her glasses off. Her vision was dreadful. I can only think that was what kept her from reading and, indeed, going to films and watching much television.

My mother stared into space much of the time, without a radio or a record playing music, or talk. No call-in radio, no hit parade, no golden oldies. Conversation was limited to a nightly call to her mother, my grandmother, who outlived her by 14 years, and that was a series of yeses and nos.

I know it had not always been like this. As a child my mother played piano, and I understand that she would rise at dawn to practise. In a box on a shelf, untouched, we once found stacks of rather advanced piano music, which she admitted had been hers. And confessed she could no longer find middle C on a piano. The music had simply (probably not so simply) just run out of her. My mother was not at all concerned when I asked if a musical friend of mine might have her sheet music. And so they went to him, my mother's over-neat signature in the upper right corner of each piece.

I bought my first record album before I had anything to play it on. I took the Beatles' "Please Please Me" album to friends' homes to play for a few months. When it became clear that the Beatles were not just a fad and that I'd be buying their next album, my mother found the money to buy a record player. Actually, she went with me to a store that sold them and wrote a cheque for £26. I remember that, the amount she paid, as it was rather a lot at the time and under our generally straitened circumstances.

Quickly, I started buying record albums and a few singles. I believe they'd all have been by white British pop stars for the first few years, till about 1967. Albums cost 31/6 (thirty one shillings and sixpence) which must have been equivalent to about $4.50. My mother showed no interest in my albums though she was still in her thirties, hardly over-the-hill.

I remember someone gave Mother a number of "Sing Along With Mitch" albums, second-hand but with song sheets intact. However, they were never, ever played. I liked the songs, still do, but not the Mitch Miller method of singing them as a chorus, it always sounded so false. Of course, it was concocted, the idea being that no matter how bad one's voice was, sung the Mitch way you could get away with it.

All the moments were filled with background music. If I went fishing from our dock (and I did at every fair-weather opportunity) I took my transistor radio. I grew up listening mainly to Motown music, which I really liked (still do) played on the Bermudian radio stations, and British pop late at night beamed out by stations on the Eastern Seaboard, especially WABC in New York City.

I upgraded the record player a few times, and eventually built up a sound system. I played my music very loud. Very. Stereo was not enough, I wanted to get every molecule in a room vibrating. If that was not possible, I'd wear a headset and turn up the volume on the inside.

Needless to say, I'm quite hard-of-hearing nowadays. Hell, I'm rather deaf to outside sound. When I watch the television I tend to use the captioning if possible, or I listen with a headset or just have to crank the sound up more than most would.

But, in my head, when there's no music playing on the stereo, radio, telly there's music playing. For forty years I've had loud music going day and night, all my waking hours at least. It's not the original familiar versions of popular songs. All is vocal, all done in the same voice (which is not mine, though, of course, it must be mine) which never goes off-key. At times in my life the soundtrack to my life has been so very loud that it interrupted my other activities. In the 1980s I used to medicate myself to try and get some quiet time. Sleep from a handful of pills does turn off the music, though nothing productive comes of it, it's a false sleep. I now have some supervised assistance, but the music plays on at a dull roar if I'm not careful.

If I'm listening to the radio or stereo, as I do whenever possible, the interior music is overwhelmed, but if I turn off the radio the other music can be heard. Curiously not the same tune, group or genre that I'd been listening to. I might have been listening to Hildegard von Bingen's "Caritas habundat in omnia" online and after the switch-off I appreciate I have "I'm forever blowing bubbles" running in tandem. Not the Mitch Miller version, by the way. My single-voice, which is male, by the way, even for songs made popular by female singers, in tune, rather boring.

My life's mission has been to seek out temptation. Sadly, I've shied away from a good deal of it when I've come across it. I seem to like approaching the flame better than the searing heat, the overwhelming, blinding light. Nevertheless, I have managed to not resist some temptations and I have tried to understand my inner music by the use of substances that, most likely, amplified and perhaps contributed to the experience, rather than to set it in its place to be examined.

I once listened, under an influence, over and over, to George Harrison's "Wonderwall Music" trying to appreciate what exactly music was, in relationship to the Universe, in relationship to a Creator. I'm not much on the gods these days, but if I look at the sky at night I hear the most remarkable things sometimes. Bolero? Mahler's Fifth? The Blue Danube? Have You Seen the Stars Tonight? Not necessarily. How about the Hokey Pokey? Yes.

The Hokey Pokey is the first song I remember singing out loud, at school, while trying to dance. I'm useless at dancing as I always have to deal with more than one rhythm going on in my head. I've fired many a rumba coach, I'll tell you.

I cannot ask my mother if she was listening to music in her silences. Perhaps she was replaying her piano exercises. Can she really have been locked in a complete silence? No music?

Or am I the really odd one simply (or not so) by having it?

On the stereo: Dame Kiri Te Kanawa singing "Tu? Tu? Piccolo iddio" from Madame Butterfly.

In my head: "Lady Madonna" by the Beatles.

Listen to the music playing...

Pie

MY MOTHER HAS VISITED ME a few times this past fortnight. When she turns up I'm always aware that, even as we converse and interact, she is quite dead and has been since September of 1992. Death has not calmed her down; she's as manic as ever and just as difficult to cope with. Still, I enjoy the visits and I appreciate that she's always gone by the time I wake up. No lingering ghost steaming up the mirrors or making the curtains billow when there isn't a breeze.

When my mother was alive, she was something of a responsibility, rather than responsible. Manic depressive, with periods of complete fantasy and what was, at times, insanity, my mother struggled to be any sort of a parent at all. As bad luck would have it, she was forced to be a single parent long before that was a common, almost popular, way to raise up one's children.

I'm not sure that my mother did anything wrong, at least not intentionally, and not of her own volition. She was manoeuvred by her family members who felt she needed to be more assertive. My mother also tended to believe, having been told to do so, anything that was said by someone who appeared to be in authority. She believed that titles and badges and signs on office doors were everything, perhaps not bothering to really evaluate the person behind them. So she did not question things, or draw her own conclusions, but acted on those pressed upon her. That's how it goes.

Looking back now, at an age my mother only surpassed by about six years, I think I can safely say my mother was not a capable parent, and some might say she was not a good parent. My opinion is that she did her best, which was a real struggle for her emotionally (she was, after all, mentally ill), physically (she was a grand-mal epileptic, relying on considerable amounts of drugs), financially (at times she was penniless), and ability-wise (she couldn't cook, didn't drive, didn't read after she left school).

My mother would get ideas into her head and wouldn't let go of them, no matter how annoying, peculiar or unhealthy. When we were quite young, she suddenly decided that it was easier to fling the kitchen trash, item by item (cartons, bottles, bags, vegetables that had gone off, egg shells) onto the back patio. There was a bin in the back garden for these items, but my mother thought they could be gathered up every few days and binned, there was nothing wrong with letting things lie about on the lawn. I did not, and do not, understand how anyone who had a trash-can only 15 feet from the kitchen door could come to such a conclusion about refuse disposal. Particularly when she chucked the things over the top of the bin to get them to land on the patio.

We also had to live with African violets. My mother was mad for African violets, though she had no success in growing them. There were pots all over the house. Now, I have a few plants in my flat now, I like indoor plants, but I do not have my kitchen counters covered in dozens and dozens of plant pots, crammed up against each other, so that there is hardly any room on the counter for something useful, like a cutting board or bread-bin.

Dish-washing was interesting. My mother believed that washing-up water should be boiled and poured into the sink (this was before machines, of course). On the face of it, boiling water for the dishes sounds healthy. However, that's where she lost the plot. Our electric kettle was small, probably holding less than a quart of liquid, which was hardly enough to wash dishes, so my mother then topped up the sink with water from the tap. Which was cold. Dishes were not, by the way, rinsed. They were washed with a bar of Ivory Soap, and our dishes and utensils seemed to have that flavour.

I could go on and on. Perhaps I should not be trashing my mother at this stage of the game. I offer the information more as a warning to others. Given modern medications, treatments and social programmes, chances are few people need be quite as peculiar as my mother. If you or your loved ones, or not-so-loved ones, seem to be acting a tad odd from time to time, have a chat with someone about it. What? Me crazy?

For all the hassle, most of my memories of my mother are fairly bland. We got away with a good deal, we had wonderful days as children, we attended the best school, we had clean clothes (though often hand-me-downs or second-hand store purchases), we had books and record albums, money for the movies, we were hardly reined in. I have, personally, some splendid memories of my mother having fun, which she only ever did, it seems to me, away from Bermuda. I'm going to say it: Away from her own parents. She really could fall about laughing at times, found things fascinating, took dares and while she lived totally in the present, never speaking of anything that had happened before, seemed incapable of doing so, she could chatter on about something we might be looking at (a film, a play, an animal in the zoo, a gravestone, a monument, a view) intelligently and in great detail, at that moment. It would be gone the next day.

My mother, if I was not in the same country that she was in, or was some distance from her, wrote to me at least once a week. Telephone calls were too expensive. I am a writer of letters, perhaps as a result of her example or influence, and I'm glad about that. I use the telephone as well, but that's the difference between 1968 and 2008.

A memory that tells something about my mother that I'm not sure she was aware of herself. We were not at all well off and our diet, I think, suffered from variety and my mother's failure as a competent cook. She could not make what food we had tasty or interesting, perhaps because she used no herbs or spices. She made do with a great deal of salt, and a very little white pepper. That was it. No flavourings, extracts or essences. No powders, granules or leaves. Just salt. The rare and special dish we'd have was a meat pie, made in a shallow Pyrex dish, lined with my mother's own plain pastry, using hamburger, a few sliced potatoes, an onion and maybe a pat of butter, pastry over the top. The pie was pretty dry, but it was beef and I like onions. Some gravy would have been fabulous, but it didn't happen. Ever.

My mother would slice up the pie amongst the four of us (I have two sisters that I grew up with) and she would always, always, cut a very small piece for herself, nowhere near a quarter, and then cut the remainder into three equal portions. Did she do that on purpose? Was she aware that beef was a treat for us? That we probably could do with the nutriments in red meat? That we might otherwise become anaemic on our diet of boiled chicken, over-cooked cabbage and tatties?

I made a meat pie last night. I use almost two pounds of Angus beef that I cube, fresh mushrooms, onions, parsnips and baby carrots. I make a sauce using beef stock and double cream, I use lots of herbs and spices and little salt, and my crust is flaky pastry. I prefer a deep clay dish to a Pyrex pie dish. The first serving is more than sufficiently moist, but when I reheat the leftovers (I have plenty, I prepare food for several meals at a time to save time, energy and money), I usually have an onion gravy as well. Served with chips or rice.

I wish, I really wish, my mother could stop by long enough for a slice of pie, a big, generous slice. However, in my dreams I don't seem to make pies when my mother is visiting. It may be that, after all, she made the better pie.