As I sit in my little garden watching the late bees fumbling the last heroic autumn blossoms, and my heart is sick with personal loss, I wonder how it is that I can be so stupid with grief when they are so clear. Their individual lives (if it can be said that they’re cursed or blessed with such a thing) are relentlessly being drained from them now by the inevitability of winter.
And yet flowers and bees go on blooming, pollenating, offering their innocent love to an existence which is preparing to retreat from their attentions and wooings. Soon these little clusters of life will be broken down once more into their constituent ghosts, and there will be void, darkness, rest without movement or sense, utterly outside of Time. Still they persist in their love-making, their busy generosity, being exactly what they are without the triangulation we use but can’t rely on.
Recently I met a baby with his mother. The child’s father had washed his hands of the pregnancy. The glowing mother’s understandable disappointment and resentment seems simply to have been washed away, the psychic connection between them dissolved in the inner tidal wave which was her pregnancy, birth, suckling and all. There was a ravishing innocence in the air around Mother and Child - out of time, out of corruption, out of the cloying sweet and sour sauce of culture, sentimentality, expectation, hope, fear. Of course, the perfection (in the sense of completion) I describe is only of this time and will have eventually to succumb to the necessities of existence, and all too soon.
What is innocence? Is it just a new shipment of purity delivered to the loading dock of the Godforsaken factory/laboratory/charnel house of this world? How and why is it continuously replenished, without reservation, with full foreknowledge of adulteration and corruption? Is this all utterly perverse and iniquitous?
If I sound emotional and utterly subjective at this moment, it’s because I am. Bear with me if you feel like it...
Was Yeats right in saying “The ceremony of innocence is drowned; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”? Does this happen? Why and how? When did I or do I lose my innocence? Can I lose it? Is the virgin forever exiled from grace by his/her adulteration?
Against my own crushing disappointment I’d like to offer myself (and anyone who’s interested) an alternative possibility.
Innocence is not a human ceremony or ritual. It’s a divine Mystery, whatever that means. Life’s agenda is not my agenda. I have my part to play in this Mystery, and I am rewarded according to my willingness to participate in something I can never understand. Inklings, I get - understanding, no. Neither science nor art nor therapy can sidestep this.
I realise (with adolescent resentment) that Innocence arises in my organism continuously and relentlessly throughout my existence here, but only as an option. I can chose to be as foolish in my spirit as a baby (wise as a serpent too, perhaps, but that’s for the virtuosi). But before wisdom, knowledge, and experience, comes innocence. Wisdom can only grow and be used well on the constantly replenished ground of innocence. Every act of sexual love has the potential to be the meeting of Eve and Adam. Or as we can see in our own lives and in our perverse culture, dramatically not.
Where we exist here and now, though, outside that forbidden garden wherein these bees are defying the seasons, we have the fruit of the tree to deal with. Freedom. Freedom to choose to slough off the past, which doesn’t exist, and see what something means this time, not last time; or to stay hanging around the garden gates arguing, analysing, blaming, seducing, lamenting, projecting, etc, etc, etc. with my misused and abused mind.
Which mind, incidentally is only a part of me, and not at my centre.
This leads me to paraphrase St Paul. Let’s call Faith ‘Innocence’; Hope, ‘Freedom’; and Love... Love I won’t try to tinker with. So we have Innocence, Freedom, and Love. And we all know which is the greatest. In Time, though, the monarch (Love) is as dependent on the subjects (Freedom and Innocence) as vice versa - Love is predicated on Freedom, Freedom is predicated on Innocence.
Almost by definition, if we lack innocence then a large part of our potential for freedom is proscribed. Where we aren’t innocent we are to some unknown degree acting out of the misleading and habitual impulse to recreate or prevent previous experiences.
When our freedom is so proscribed we’re demonstrably prone to follow impulses that aren’t a practical response to the present circumstance, opportunity, or danger. We’re just using old tired responses from another time to meet the new and different challenge of this moment. And so we are tragically inept in Love.
Love is the big mystery. We all know it’s here and many of us recognise that without it the human adventure would end, perhaps is ending (and not with a bang.) Love is the secret leaven in the rough bread of the world. Human Love arises everywhere we are but always, like innocence, only in potential. It’s manifestation is contingent on the degree of our freedom, and can be evaporated in an instant. If we’re busy dealing with present circumstances (where Love is always ready and possible) by means of the past (which is already adulterated and gone, and which with the future are the only places or states in our existence where Love is denied access) we hardly meet, never mind love.
If this seems an extreme statement, ask around. There are many people who have lived unknowingly with a phantom and eventually been shocked to meet who was really there. There’s no love in the past or future. Only lovely, misleading, distracting sentimental stories to tell ourselves. It’s here at this time and place only.
And always.
To close the circle, where do we humans have our part to play in this divine (whatever that means) Mystery?
Reclaim your innocence whenever you’re quick enough on the spot to remember. Don’t do a knee-jerk, turn the other cheek! At least for a moment, disconnect the automatic, unconscious momentum.
It’s clear that we haven’t the competence to create Love - it makes most of its own choices.
We are utterly incompetent to create Freedom within or without. Look at politics and culture, war, espionage, Iraq, Iran, America, England, Stalin, Trotsky, Bush, Thatcher, Blaire, psychology, the western diet, human posture and poise in the modern age, etc etc, etc.
But the universe responds to Innocence with great impersonal generosity. Though we can’t create Love or Freedom or Innocence by an act of will, we can create the hiatus in which Innocence naturally makes its nest, and this nest is where Freedom and Love want to roost. To the degree that we bring the organisms together in Innocence (in any situation, not just the sexual), to that degree we’re freed. And in that state, Love is made. And out of that more innocence is born.
And so on.
This is the opposite journey to the bankrupt desperation of the present nosedive in morale, ethics, economics, political life and most importantly, the Holy Ground of human Love.
We’d rather pretend to know than be seen to be innocent. And so we breed loveless monsters in and around ourselves.
Sunday, 13 September 2009
