Thank you for your kind words, Caro. There's much here that I recognise from my own experience of the Oxfords of this world. To the extent that I may have escaped the fate you describe, I remain in puzzled gratitude at this being so. Perhaps it was Alan Garner's The Voice That Thunders that accompanied me like a talisman through three years in literal Oxford and kept me intact. (The half-complete initiation image I first wrote up in Pockets, the story I wrote for Alan's 80th birthday, though if memory serves me right then it was Mary Harrington who first framed what had been done to us by our education in these terms, during one of the many long conversations we had in our fallow post-Oxford years.)
I don't hang around with, or even meet, many Oxford types; but I think I know the gap you mean. I'm not convinced it's particularly Western or modern, though, except insofar as it's especially celebrated here and now.
I think there's a perfectly good, although slightly too broad, English word for it: ambition. It usually masquerades as a drive to make a difference, or contribute, or DO GOOD; but it's all pretty much the same thing: an assumption that they should matter on some scale other than to their family and friends, and then a need to somehow actually matter on that scale. I think it's endemic to any hierarchical society. I'm sure the Anglo-Saxon churches were led by Oxford types (Wilfred comes to mind).
Of course that sort of ambition is doomed to failure. Even Plato, Laozi, and Caesar were motes of dust in the long history of our species and our species is just another passing phase of Earth's life. They don't matter, and even those that 'just' want to matter to their own society are fools. No-one ever can matter except to their family and friends. We're animals, and that's not how mattering works for us.
Thanks for this. I had not considered 'ambition'. The letter was off the cuff. Yes, that is certainly part of it. However, the ambition to bring back meat for the village, or to achieve something else for others, is still ambition, yet is correctly integrated towards the greater good rather than personal glory. I wonder if intention can be refined without ambition. I hope so.
Interesting as always, and immediately got me contemplating. I’ve long wondered about ‘the Oxford thing’ and why it makes my inner world so uneasy. My girls’ grammar school wanted me to sit the Oxbridge exam, they thought I had the right kind of mind, focus and talents, so for some bizarre reason they made arrangements for me to attend the local boys’ grammar school for one day a week in 1976 with a view to getting me straight on to an appropriate degree course at Oxford.
Hell, it was awful! I was the only girl there and I did not like the way their thinking and education worked, let alone the way the supposedly brighter boys and their male teachers behaved. It inevitably had the opposite from the intended consequence and I decided to do a foundation course in art at a London Polytechnic instead, despite being told crossly by my sixth form tutor that I was ‘wasting my life!’ I have never ever had any regrets! Like you, I’ve met plenty of fascinating, driven and talented Oxford graduates in my life.
The thing with creative thinking is that I reckon you need to be “constitutionally made up of at least 3/4 digression,” as you observed of yourself and immediately resonated with me. So long as that energy is alive and moving. In my case the release from academia and permission to let my focus diffuse was all I needed to really get going with creative energy. The dropping of the intellectual definitions and being in an environment where no one cared two hoots about academic achievement was a huge leveller and it brought the freedom and joy that I needed to flourish.
My spirit and ego was no longer ‘contained’ in something very like that kind of black hole ‘missing part’ shape you drew. It was able to fly and open and become amorphous, change from dark to dazzling light to dark, or any other opposites and yet return seamlessly down an increasingly fine thread to its subtle, deep, physical anchor, without having ever really left or arrived.
It’s the ridiculously subtle, effortless movement and ease of flowing with digression ‘within the missing part’ that I identify as the missing part, but that probably seems a bit too flimsy and amorphous for most of my deep-thinking male friends.
That 'missing part' image is very shudder-inducing. I had a thing that looked a lot like that in my boyhood 'natural history collection' in my bedroom. I never found out what it was. Some kind of fungus; though of course the image also looks like a bird's skull - but that's not what I think of.
There is another word that comes to mind: caesura. Not so much a gap as a cut; a cutting out; a temporal rupture; an Event. This is how I recall the "Cambridge caesura" in the wake of '68 as a shift in time, with a distinct before and afterwards. In an unstoppable effulgence I found myself rusticated and then miraculously sheltered for a while by friends of the Epiphany Philosophers, a pocket of resistance at the time. It gave me space to interpret, to make an understanding of what had happened: a good gap in which to find friends, largely among dead writers, as it happened. Then there comes heart-brokenness and the long learning to live in the time of polarised duality, as you so well illustrate. The broken heart is a great mystery; a supratemporal root in our selfhood that keeps us at work in the dualities and diversities of the world. Always the coming horizon is death; the healing of a broken heart and peace. May we die wise!
Thankyou so much for sharing this. I am so glad you found a crew. It is a kind of broken heartedness, (in the way solastalgia also is). In my tradition the 'break' is deemed essential, but it is followed by a very careful reintegration. No matter how careful the teacher, there is a small risk that the break becomes a more permanent rift in the student. But at least we admit that 1 it takes place, 2 it has profound meaning, and 3 prepares the ground for real growth. Greetings from a train in Dorset.
Thank you for your kind words, Caro. There's much here that I recognise from my own experience of the Oxfords of this world. To the extent that I may have escaped the fate you describe, I remain in puzzled gratitude at this being so. Perhaps it was Alan Garner's The Voice That Thunders that accompanied me like a talisman through three years in literal Oxford and kept me intact. (The half-complete initiation image I first wrote up in Pockets, the story I wrote for Alan's 80th birthday, though if memory serves me right then it was Mary Harrington who first framed what had been done to us by our education in these terms, during one of the many long conversations we had in our fallow post-Oxford years.)
I came to this, this morning, straight from Andrew's latest post at Bog-down and Aster, where his words about "the work of Both/And-ing" sing across to your drawings here and your comments about other ways of being with duality. https://bogdownandaster.substack.com/p/ayelet-ha-shahar?utm_source=%2Finbox&utm_medium=reader2
I finally had a chance to read it. Thank you. Great.
I don't hang around with, or even meet, many Oxford types; but I think I know the gap you mean. I'm not convinced it's particularly Western or modern, though, except insofar as it's especially celebrated here and now.
I think there's a perfectly good, although slightly too broad, English word for it: ambition. It usually masquerades as a drive to make a difference, or contribute, or DO GOOD; but it's all pretty much the same thing: an assumption that they should matter on some scale other than to their family and friends, and then a need to somehow actually matter on that scale. I think it's endemic to any hierarchical society. I'm sure the Anglo-Saxon churches were led by Oxford types (Wilfred comes to mind).
Of course that sort of ambition is doomed to failure. Even Plato, Laozi, and Caesar were motes of dust in the long history of our species and our species is just another passing phase of Earth's life. They don't matter, and even those that 'just' want to matter to their own society are fools. No-one ever can matter except to their family and friends. We're animals, and that's not how mattering works for us.
Poor sods.
Thanks for this. I had not considered 'ambition'. The letter was off the cuff. Yes, that is certainly part of it. However, the ambition to bring back meat for the village, or to achieve something else for others, is still ambition, yet is correctly integrated towards the greater good rather than personal glory. I wonder if intention can be refined without ambition. I hope so.
Interesting as always, and immediately got me contemplating. I’ve long wondered about ‘the Oxford thing’ and why it makes my inner world so uneasy. My girls’ grammar school wanted me to sit the Oxbridge exam, they thought I had the right kind of mind, focus and talents, so for some bizarre reason they made arrangements for me to attend the local boys’ grammar school for one day a week in 1976 with a view to getting me straight on to an appropriate degree course at Oxford.
Hell, it was awful! I was the only girl there and I did not like the way their thinking and education worked, let alone the way the supposedly brighter boys and their male teachers behaved. It inevitably had the opposite from the intended consequence and I decided to do a foundation course in art at a London Polytechnic instead, despite being told crossly by my sixth form tutor that I was ‘wasting my life!’ I have never ever had any regrets! Like you, I’ve met plenty of fascinating, driven and talented Oxford graduates in my life.
The thing with creative thinking is that I reckon you need to be “constitutionally made up of at least 3/4 digression,” as you observed of yourself and immediately resonated with me. So long as that energy is alive and moving. In my case the release from academia and permission to let my focus diffuse was all I needed to really get going with creative energy. The dropping of the intellectual definitions and being in an environment where no one cared two hoots about academic achievement was a huge leveller and it brought the freedom and joy that I needed to flourish.
My spirit and ego was no longer ‘contained’ in something very like that kind of black hole ‘missing part’ shape you drew. It was able to fly and open and become amorphous, change from dark to dazzling light to dark, or any other opposites and yet return seamlessly down an increasingly fine thread to its subtle, deep, physical anchor, without having ever really left or arrived.
It’s the ridiculously subtle, effortless movement and ease of flowing with digression ‘within the missing part’ that I identify as the missing part, but that probably seems a bit too flimsy and amorphous for most of my deep-thinking male friends.
That 'missing part' image is very shudder-inducing. I had a thing that looked a lot like that in my boyhood 'natural history collection' in my bedroom. I never found out what it was. Some kind of fungus; though of course the image also looks like a bird's skull - but that's not what I think of.
or this: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/375417318930549651/
Scary!
I will look soon as I am in a place with more than 1 bar phone signal!
There is another word that comes to mind: caesura. Not so much a gap as a cut; a cutting out; a temporal rupture; an Event. This is how I recall the "Cambridge caesura" in the wake of '68 as a shift in time, with a distinct before and afterwards. In an unstoppable effulgence I found myself rusticated and then miraculously sheltered for a while by friends of the Epiphany Philosophers, a pocket of resistance at the time. It gave me space to interpret, to make an understanding of what had happened: a good gap in which to find friends, largely among dead writers, as it happened. Then there comes heart-brokenness and the long learning to live in the time of polarised duality, as you so well illustrate. The broken heart is a great mystery; a supratemporal root in our selfhood that keeps us at work in the dualities and diversities of the world. Always the coming horizon is death; the healing of a broken heart and peace. May we die wise!
Thankyou so much for sharing this. I am so glad you found a crew. It is a kind of broken heartedness, (in the way solastalgia also is). In my tradition the 'break' is deemed essential, but it is followed by a very careful reintegration. No matter how careful the teacher, there is a small risk that the break becomes a more permanent rift in the student. But at least we admit that 1 it takes place, 2 it has profound meaning, and 3 prepares the ground for real growth. Greetings from a train in Dorset.