The Turning of the Tide

We were in midflight between Bangkok and Melbourne. With the cabin lights dimmed, and Suna and Nico asleep beside me, I settled down to watch a movie. Goodbye Christopher Robin is about the strained relationship between the writer A. A. Milne and his son.

As it happens I had come to know Christopher Milne quite well during the time I was a Music Tutor at Dartington College of Arts. Living just across the river Dart in Kingswear I used to visit Milne’s Harbour Bookshop every weekend. It wasn’t long before we struck up a rapport, meeting occasionally for a coffee to discuss English poetry - particularly that of Ted Hughes who we admired and would later become a mutual friend. These meetings coincided with the publication of his first book. The Enchanted Places poignantly describes Christopher’s childhood and the problems he had encountered following the success of his father’s Winnie-the-Pooh books.

Having grown up close to Ashdown Forest, the location of Pooh’s 100 acre wood, I was finding the movie enchanting on so many levels. But then, all of a sudden, I started in my seat. Instinctively I hit the pause button. Without warning the movie had evoked a part of my own childhood until now totally forgotten. The memory was vivid. And as a devout agnostic for as long as I can recall it shocked me. I used to pray you see. On my knees. Beside my bed. Every night. The prayer was always the same. God bless mummy. God bless daddy. And please God make me a good boy.

How could I have forgotten such a rite? When did it start and why did it stop? I have no idea! But if I had forgotten such a daily routine in my infancy, what other habits and incidents from that time was I unable (or unwilling) to recall?

I believe my mother was raised a Methodist. She often spoke about accompanying Lady Robinson, the kindly aristocrat to whom she was in service as a maid, and later cook-housekeeper, to chapel. She was without doubt a churchgoer – sitting in the same seat, in the same pew, Sunday after Sunday. She loved Harvest Festival and would always be part of the throng of villagers decorating the church with flowers and baskets of fruits and vegetables. But although my mother was invariably kind and courteous, at least to those who did her no harm, I never got the feeling she was particularly religious.

Strangely I do not recall ever catching my father going to Church. I know he was at the wedding of my brother John to Muriel Remnant - but only because of a single photograph which records that particular event. As in the other few precious images I have of him, he is wearing a slightly crumpled suit and tweed tie which, I imagine, he must have sported on other special occasions.

Perhaps my fuzzy memories of this time are not surprising given that, in the weeks leading up to my eighth birthday, my father vanished from my life for ever. In the days and weeks that followed I felt numb. Apparently I did not utter a single word for an entire month. Nor did I cry. And when, out of sheer desperation, my mother screamed at me to speak to her, I said: There is nobody here for me to talk to any more. I was traumatised by my grief - unable to appreciate my mother’s loss or to process her suffering, except in a very mechanical way.

Only the most ingrained thoughts of my father have endured in my consciousness from that time: The usual box of chocolate liqueurs on his birthday and at Christmas time. The comfort of knowing he would always be there to pick me up when I fell. His encouragement as I steered the tractor and he walked along-side pitching out hay for the cattle. Picking mushrooms together. But then the disbelief when he impulsively smashed a scratched old 78rpm recording of Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela on the door handle because he thought the music “far too sad” for a child of my age.

As a soldier in the British army, during which time he was also the physical training instructor for the Army tug-of-war team, he was a tough, uncompromising fellow. I suspect the most music he ever really listened to was the band of the Royal Sussex Regiment playing military marches and anthems. He could never quite understand my love of music and, as far as I know, it was my mother who encouraged me to write songs and play the piano.

And then there was the watch. An Ingersoll pocket watch with a cream face, Roman numerals, and a silver chain. I still recollect the thrill I felt sitting with my mother in the front of the 122 double-decker bus as we went from Uckfield to Brighton. This was a rare treat. Once in town I did not hesitate, choosing the watch from a bright green velvet display cabinet in a tiny shop in The Lanes. I saved my pocket money for a whole year to be able to buy this watch for the most important person in my life. We purchased some fancy paper and wrapped it carefully. I planned to give it to him at breakfast on his birthday the following day. We arrived home just as it was getting dark to discover he had gone. The day trip to Brighton had given him just enough time to pack his things, write a short note to his wife asking her forgiveness, and vanish from my life for ever.

Several days later the village parson, the Reverend Burns-Cox, delivered the watch to my father hoping it would help to change his mind. But it was too late. Months in the planning, there was simply no way he would return home. Years passed before I was told of that attempt to lure him back. All I knew, indeed all I ever knew, was that my father had gone. And the one question that would haunt me for the remainder of my life was… Why!

Just as one can describe an organisation as little more than a tapestry of stories and aligned conversations, focused on particular outcomes, so it is possible to frame the life of any individual, or a society, as a web of memories and imaginings that shape us over time.

Of course, science tells us that memory is just a fabrication, morphing each time we tell the same story until the truth evaporates into warped versions of reality. At the same time, such delusions possess the power to unlock emotions that pinpoint aims and fuel purposeful action. Some elicit nostalgia, or perhaps a yearning to find the answer to a question, much like the story I recount here. Others provoke a range of differing, often conflicting, emotions, unleashing passions ranging from purest love to the most bitter hatred.

But the point is all stories matter. And the memories and imaginings that insinuate secrets into these stories also matter – even when they might appear to be passive or relatively dormant. For these stories, however warped, transitory, or delusional they become, determine the kinds of action we are prepared to take in pursuit of answers to any questions that are troubling us. In other words, they anticipate the domains and values for which we willingly wage war or seek reconciliation.

Our most potent stories need not necessarily be portrayed in words. Nor need they lead us into the future. Indeed, many merely capture a version of the past we prefer to call history. Picasso’s Guernica, daguerreotypes of the death camps in Auschwitz and Dachau, the soaring grandeur of Canterbury Cathedral, the design engineering of an Airbus A380, the anguished Adagio from the Fifth Symphony by Mahler, and a tap dance by Fred Astaire, for example, are as meaningful and powerful in their own way as the most moral of laws, the most eloquent of poetry, and the most inventive scientific discoveries.

Every human artefact tells a story - about how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the environment in which we live. Each transmits elusive information about who we are, who we want to be, what is important to us, and why. Each can also be a latent force, as we will find out.

In my own case the constant yearning for an answer to my childhood question is all there will ever be. Doubts hang in the air still. But there will never be a response or a resolution. The time I had to interrogate events has passed. My father died many years ago. So, although the question still lingers, I am resigned to not finding an answer in this life. I have let go.

Nevertheless, it is not in my nature to despair or to dwell on how things might have been. The impulse unleashed upon me from within the emptiness of my personal narrative has very little to do with anger, sorrow, or self-pity. On the contrary, it stands as an unending quest for new truths - for the next generation as much as for threading alternative wisdom into new stories we might tell each other tomorrow, and the evolution of an alternative consciousness regarding the human experiment.

For many this is not the case. They have suffered too much and seek only revenge. Indeed, we have become so disposed to generating conditions where our emotions, stirred up and conflicted, result in narratives so infected with toxic meanings that we then allow to fester indefinitely. At that point, especially when taken literally, our stories become blindly resentful and inimical to life - not only to others of like mind, but to those who uncritically narrate such myths believing them, by some miracle best left to the imagination, to contain universally sacred truths.

Many truths, if they did ever exist in a purely unadulterated form, shrink with each telling. Entrenched shards of the truth, they become more like memories. And with each telling of each memory anger, fear, bitterness, and hatred can be summoned more easily than love, empathy, generosity and compassion. We should take this into account more often. But we do not.

When daily life turns to matters of survival, the stories we tell each other, together with the truths we want to share, must be continuously upgraded - if only to remain aligned to a virtuous, systemically viable, and strategically relevant purpose. But they are not.

With all the good that exists in our world, with all the creativity and ingenuity that sets our species apart, as well as the undoubted technological prowess we have for advancing our interests, our stories should candidly reflect the dangers we face as well as our hopes to secure a better future for everyone. But they do not.

Stories are as vital as questions. Possibly even more critical. The right question can liberate new knowledge. But stories are able to constrain or advance our beliefs, reinforce or repudiate our imperatives, impel unwise or sensible behaviours, and give us cause to unite or to fracture.

For the past half century at least, the prevailing narrative shared by all humanity, our worldview, has become contaminated with untruths, half-truths and facts that have lost any virtue. Infested by state propaganda - much of it packaged in movies and games - distorted reality, lies, pervasive governmental surveillance, random acts of terror, political corruption, economic game-playing, religious fundamentalism, arms dealing, human trafficking, the broadcasting of trivia dressed up as news, incorrect information, and a public descent into a world seemingly focused solely on screens, reality TV, and the echo chambers of a highly contrived and perilous social media, this story now gives us more causes to fracture than to unite. Consequently we are fast losing the plot of what it means to be alive and human.

One test younger generations are bound to face in coming years is the significance, strength of mind, compelling purpose and endurance of new stories that will unite humanity. And what a test that will be. For love takes more courage than conflict. Empathy takes far more charity than indifference. Unity takes more tolerance than bigotry. And conscious evolution demands more dedication and commitment than mindless lethargy.

Today we are so busy Facebooking, Snapchatting, Instagramming and Tweeting that we are missing much of what really happens in the world. The result is a public increasingly blind, deaf and dumb to its own circumstances. What is more we seem to be comfortable with this state of affairs.

To my mind the greatest hazard of all is that we clearly witness the warning signs of an impending catastrophe but fail to comprehend the gravity of their meaning, and thus refuse to alter our bearing even one degree. Instead of crafting new stories we readily revert to the present narrative – confident that our course is viable and that we are secure in the arms of leaders who not only exercise control over our destiny but also have our best interests at heart.

Frankly, having monitored the conversations and presentations in Davos this week I have more faith in the tooth fairy. We must remain alert to our actual predicament, which is not incurable. Yet… Even that is not easy.

As George Orwell predicted in his novel 1984: The people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what is happening.

But if it only took a few hundred people to usher in the Renaissance, it should only take a few million to usher in a mindful uprising. Whereas George Orwell penned a work of fiction, we need to write and enact a work of non-fiction. A story that will spark a massive positive transformation. A new worldview that works for everyone.