Aylesbury Walkabout

I’m on a section of the “Round Aylesbury Walk”. If you go clockwise, the town is on your right and level countryside is on your left. I talk to myself as I go, into this digital recorder (edited below).

‘Suppose everything is just as it should be, already? Suppose everything goes on being just right, no matter what? So that no matter what the creatures do—mainly man, for the other creatures don’t disturb Nature much—then Nature as a whole (which includes mankind) bounces back, fixing the consequences as best it may? This is what James Lovelock calls Gaia. Isn’t it a vast freewill machine? Yes! That’s it! So when the things come which cause pain, we cannot accuse, saying “This is God’s fault”—because it just goes on being as it is, trying to right itself. And suppose that all the religions, too, are product of freewill too, trying to fix the fallen state, the loss of Eden’s innocence. No I don’t believe that religions are God’s gift to man, a ladder to escape original sin. They are just part of the general freewill, nothing more than that. They have no holiness above anything else.

This is what James Lovelock calls Gaia, the intelligent Earth trying to heal itself despite all our efforts to the contrary. What is this allegedly intelligent Earth? Isn’t it a vast freewill machine? Yes! That’s it! So when the things come which cause pain, we cannot accuse, saying “This is God’s fault”—because it just goes on being as it is, trying to right itself. And suppose that all the religions are product of freewill too, trying to fix the fallen state, the loss of Eden’s innocence.

I certainly don’t believe that religions are God’s gift to man, a ladder to escape original sin. They are just part of the general freewill, nothing more than that. They have no holiness above anything else: just people trying.

I hear a crackling in the power-lines hanging down over me. The sky has gone black. I wonder if it is man’s electricity responding to God’s electricity, or vice versa. The crackling is faint and almost constant, like hailstones bouncing off a small drum.

So, in this model which appears quite clear to me now, it’s not even for us to identify the problems. It’s for us to disturb as little as possible the workings of Nature, which constantly tries to clean everything up. Technology has become overwrought. But then, reason itself has become overwrought. Can technology and reason save us from technology and reason? It doesn’t sound likely.

Suppose I eliminate from my thought, the phrase “We should …”? The next thing would be to eliminate the phrase “I should …”. It doesn’t come easy, because this is my culture, to constantly see problems and the need for me to participate in their solution. Then I must help fix the problems caused by solutions; and so it goes on. I don’t deny that the word “should” properly belongs in the English language. But I challenge its power over my life. I shall merely follow instinct, which is Nature in action.

I walk freely, because it is part of God’s gift: God’s gift of this body that’s a little awkwardly, yet quite definitely, designed for bipedal locomotion.

And as I speak these words, striding across a meadow under the powerlines, I see shining in the grass at my feet a £1 coin. I stoop to put it in my pocket, thinking, “This is my deserved reward. I can buy something with this.” And as with the four-leaved clover that day with Michael, I ask myself, “Will there be another?” I look for another pound coin, as if there were going to be a trail of them. This too is Nature, human nature.

If only I could convey the manner in which, as I walk, I think these thoughts and feel my feelings. It’s as if I’m leaping up to a ceiling that’s suddenly become reachable, and I touch Heaven. Then again, and again. And because the ceiling is not low enough, or I am not tall enough, I can only do it with little leaps. But this is all, or enough. I don’t ask for more. I’m not impatient. Why should I be? To touch Heaven once might be enough for a lifetime. But as soon as we discover a pleasure, we want to repeat it. Addictiveness is a human trait.

Suppose we didn’t ask for the same pleasure again, suppose we didn’t try and make it happen again and again. Would that improve things? It wouldn’t. We are made that way, programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Why would we try and escape the cycle of that? Or if we find ourself drawn to self-sacrifice and renunciation, welcoming the hair shirt and eschewing the ice-cream, why shouldn’t we go for it, if that’s what we want to do?. Surely there is value in accepting our nature.

I arrive at the heavenly Pebble Way cycle path. I feel close kinship towards all, not exactly to embrace every person I see today, not literally. But in imagination I slip out of my skin, of being this particular white man aged 68, to be one with people of all ages, people who cycle on this path, walk along it, live in houses alongside it, who live in the cottage in my illustration below, with its beautiful back garden—and all, who like me, don’t live anywhere near this cycle path.

I feel myself near enough to this Heaven. Because there is some sort of realm, maybe 14ft above the ground, maybe wafting over this place, where Heaven is. Then it (the heavenly Pebble Way) merges with the Gemstone Cycle Route as it goes into town. I have no cycle, but it’s OK, it’s a footpath too. Signs keep counting down the number of estimated minutes left to reach the town centre, if you are travelling by bicycle.

Bourg Walk Bridge (thanks to bhbizzle23, flickr)

10 minutes to Town Centre”. Then three minutes later, “5 minutes to Town Centre”. I must have lost my sense of time. Surely I’m not going faster than a bike. Anyhow, nothing would tempt me to get one, whilst I can walk on two feet which don’t have to be chained up against theft. All the same, remembering when I first rode a bicycle—how fast! how free!—my soul goes in sympathy with an imagined cyclist, riding from one of the poorer suburbs to the train which will take him to another town where he is apprenticed to the future he desires. Perhaps that is his vision of Heaven.

I pass the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. Reading the name Jesus Christ, my heart lifts a little as if I am one of their number.

I want to be In that Number When the Saints go marching in.

But it’s a fabricated dream-Jesus, not the historical one whom nobody knows. Or perhaps a restored version, like Leonardo’s Last Supper. Even though it has never happened to me, I don’t deny that one could have Jesus in one’s heart, and be utterly transformed by that presence.

Others will find the object of their quest, their ideal, in some other form. It’s a peculiar Western cultural thing, from which I am not immune, to confuse the boundaries of sex and religion in the true fairy-story of romantic love. It is orthodox to speak of “the woman of your dreams”. In fact at this minute one walks before me, dressed all in black. Specifically, she reminds me, I don’t know why, of a certain long-ago, never-forgotten dream inspired by the book Alice in Wonderland, itself about a girl dreaming.

We have one word, dream, for two quite different things: the hallucinations of sleep, and the waking fantasies and might-have-beens. So now, as I cross the real-life Bourg Walk Bridge in Aylesbury, I let the cine-camera of imagination keep running, without ever calling “Cut!” from my director’s chair.

I could be the owner of this little house near the railway station, with the crooked chimney and well-tended garden. Or that young woman in black—clothes and skin both! Maybe this yellow and white cat with a wounded tail that sprawls soaking up the warmth on this footbridge.

Cottage seen from Bourg Walk Bridge

It’s the long summer holidays, and in August the young find things to do. I might be any of them. A gangling boy, aged about sixteen, waiting for a rendezvous by a privet hedge on the Pebble Way. He and his friend overtake me later, hastening to their destination. I eavesdrop the earnest conversation. One confides all his half-formed ideas to the other, who listens and offers a few sage words in response. I could have been either of them, speaker or listener.

I reach Penn Road, Southcourt, where several houses are empty, fenced off for building works as part of an urban regeneration project. Here is a group of little children in a scruffy front garden, sitting on a lawn bleached by drought. Some have their bicycle helmets still on, their bikes flung down randomly. About seven of them are clustered around a Monopoly board, together with a neglected plate of sandwiches. They too are in Heaven. I could be one of them.

I can’t decide if Heaven is all this, the world of the senses, including my sore feet—or the construct of my waking dream, hovering a few feet off the ground, with my individual identity blurred and melted into some of what I perceive. Is it my Heaven to live in a mystical cloud, or to be right here, in the body God gave me? I shan’t choose one way or the other. All I know is, I have touched it. I have touched it in my good times. I have touched it in my worst times. And that’s enough.

Advertisement