the books in my life (quotes from Henry Miller)

The following words were all scribbled down, rather in a frenzy, as I read an online pdf version of Henry Miller's  The Books in my Life.  I feel automatically hooked and invigorated by Miller's style of writing.  Something within me nods vigorously at the galvanizing turn of his phrases.  Miller's way of writing, the topics of interest to him, and the tone of his voice, are unique.  He resists being categorized.  He possesses the rare capacity, and desire, to give the entirety of himself in his writing.  He has a crazy kind of exuberance which he often manages to contain in carefully turned phrases of both poetic and intellectual acuity.  He has a tendencys to get carried away, and to exaggerate to make a point.  Other times his amour propre gets the better of him, and he divagates uninterestingly.  Intellectualism, like all of life, is seen by Miller as a game, to be played punctiliously, as well as with enjoyment.  His biggest affinity is with poetry, candid presentation of self and the expression of sheer joie de vivre through writing.  My lips cannot resist curling with repulsion as I read, in Miller's early writings, the insipid descriptions of his erotic encounters in Paris, but I read stoically on and retrospectively stomach them with the thought that Miller must be taken as a whole; it somehow happened that the Brooklyn boy needed to rebel, to break the taboos of his time, to desire to share the totality of his self, and at times push his self-sharing and ebullience beyond the bounds of good taste.  I know that I would have quite liked to have met Miller, but I also feel that I have already met him - through his books, as well as youtube videos and radio interviews.  I feel that Miller possessed to an unusual degree the capacity to transmit the experience of being himself through his writing.  Apart from an experience of reading, his writings gives me a mode of seeing, and being in, the world - consisting of attitudes I desire to emulate, as well as others I wish pointedly to avoid.  In copying out and paying attention to Millers quotes thus, I hope to internalize something of his spirit of prodigal candor.  Perhaps, I tell myself, in studying his peculiar way of wielding the word I will also glean something of the secret of writing.

Miller mentions in several places that one would probably be better off reading less; that the pure experiencing of life herself is the great book most worthy of being read (or that the people he has met have been the 'living books', who have taught him more than any paper book.)  The fact remains that Miller loves to express himself through the written word, and that this love of writing has been fed and cultivated by a voracious lifelong appetite of his for reading books.  Soon after reading The Books in my Life, I read Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, from which the final few excerpts here below were taken.

The books in my life begins with a quote from Amiel:

"All is marvelous for the poet, all is divine for the saint, all is great for the hero; all is wretched, miserable, ugly and bad for the sordid soul"

And, though reading may not at first blush seem like an act of creation, in a deep sense it is [ . . .] Whether he is aware of it or not, what [the enthusiastic reader] is doing is praising God's handiwork.  For, the good reader, like the good author, knows that everything stems from the same source.  He knows that he could not participate in the author's private experience were he not composed of the same substance through and through.  And when I say author I mean Author.  The writer is, of course, the best of all readers, for in writing or "creating" as it is called, he is but reading and transcribing the great message of creation which the Creator in his goodness has made manifest to him.

The important thing is not which books, which experiences, a man is to have, but what he puts into them of his own.

... to me the cardinal fact about a writer is his ability to "exploit" the vast silence which enwraps us all.  Of all artists he is the one who best knows that "in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God"  He has caught the spirit which informs all creation and he has rendered it in signs and symbols.  Pretending to communicate with his fellow creatures, he has unwittingly taught us to commune with the Creator.  Using language as his instrument he demonstrates that is is not language at all, but prayer.  A very special kind of prayer, too, since nothing is demanded of the Creator.  "Blessings on thee, O Lord!"   So it runs, no matter what the subject, what the idiom.  "Let me exhaust myself, O Lord, in singing thy praises"

As a philosophy of life the Tao Teh Ch'ing not only holds its own with the bulkier systems of thought propounded by other great figures in the past, but, in my mind, surpasses them in every respect.  It has one element which wholly sets it apart from other philosophies of life - humour.

Long before I had accepted Jesus Christ, I had embraced Lao-tse and Gautama the Buddha.  The Prince of Enlightenment!  Somehow, that appellation never seemed to fit Jesus.  A man of sorrow - that was more my conception of the gentle Jesus.  The word enlightenment struck a responsive chord in me;  it seemed to burn out those other words associated, rightly or wrongly, with the founder of Christianity.  I mean words such as sin, guilt, redemption, and so on.

To write one has to be possessed and obsessed.  What is it that possess and obsesses Cendrars?  Life.  He is a man in love with life - et c'est tout.  No matter if he denies this at times, no matter if he vilifies the times or excoriates his contemporaries in the arts, no matter if he compares his own recent past with the present and finds the latter lacking, no matter if he deplores the trends, the tendencies, the philosophies and behaviour of the men of our epoch, he is the one man of our time who has proclaimed and trumpeted the fact that today is profound and beautiful.

It is in Apocalypse that [D.H. Lawrence] has some of the most moving passages - on the withering of the "societal" instinct.  They create real anguish in us - for Lawrence.  They make us realise the tortures he suffered in trying to be "a man among men."  With Cendrars I detect no hint of such deprivation or mutilation.  In the ocean of humanity Cendrars swims as blithely as a porpoise or dolphin.  In his narratives he is always together with men, one with them in deed, one with them in thought.  If he is a solitary, he is nevertheless fully and completely a man.  He is also the brother of all men.  Never does he set himself up as a superior to his fellow man.  

Everything is so divinely connected, so beautifully interrelated - how could one possibly be at a loss to undertake the education of a child?  Whatever we touch, see, smell, or hear, from whatever point we begin, we are on velvet.  There is no need to "prepare" a child for his lesson:  the lesson itself is a kind of enchantment.  The child longs to know; he literally hungers and thirsts.  And so does the adult, if we could but dissipate the hypnotic thrall which subjugates him.

More that ever do I believe that at a certain age it becomes imperative to reread the books of childhood and youth.  Else we may go to the grave not knowing who we are or why we lived.

Only once is it given to experience the miracle of life.  The import of this dawns slowly, very slowly upon me.  Whoever has not become fully alive in this life will not become so through death.  I believe this to be the hidden note in all religious teachings.

The rebel, I firmly believe, is closer to God that the saint.  To him is given dominion over the dark forces which we must obey before we can receive the light of illumination.  The return to the source, the only revolution which has meaning for man, is the whole goal of man.  It is a revolution which can occur only in his being.  This is the true significance of the plunge into life's stream, of becoming fully alive, awakening, recovering one's complete identity.

Identity!  This is the word which [. . .]  has come to haunt me.  I began my writing career with the intention of telling the truth about myself.  What a fatuous task!  What can possibly be more fictive than the story of one's life?  We reveal nothing of ourselves by telling the truth, but do sometimes discover ourselves.  I who had thought to give something found that I had received something.  

. . . of what stupendous, unimaginable detours are our lives composed!  All is voyage, all is quest.  We are not even aware of the goal until we have reached it and become one with it.

To employ the word reality is to say myth and legend.  To speak of creation means to bury oneself in chaos.  We know not whence we come, nor whither we go, nor even who we are.

. . . the understanding of a language is not the same as the understanding of language.  It is always communion versus communication.

Giono's "Song of the world" is far more precious, far more stirring, far more poetic than the "Song of songs."  It is intimate, personal, cosmic, untrammeled - and ceaseless.  It contains the notes of the lark, the nightingale, the thrush; it contains the whir of the planets and the almost inaudible wheeling of the constellations;  it contains the sobs, shrieks and wails of wounded mortal souls as well as the laughter and ululations of the blessed.  It contains the serahphic music of the angelic hosts and howls of the damned.  In addition to this pandemonic music, Giono gives the whole gamut of colour, taste, smell and feel.  The most inanimate objects yield their mysterious vibrations.  The philosophy behind this symphonic production has no name:  its function is to liberate, to keep open all the sluices of the soul, to encourage speculation, adventure and passionate worship.  "Be what thou art, only be it to the utmost!"  That is what it whispers.

Certain books not only give a sense of life, sustain life, but, like certain rare individuals, augment life.

In youth, one's appetite, both for raw experience and for books, is uncontrolled.  Where there is excessive hunger, and not mere appetite, there must be vital reasons for it.  It is blatantly obvious that our present way of life does not offer proper nourishment.  If it did I am certain we would read less, work less, strive less.  We would not need substitutes, we would not accept vicarious modes of existence.  This applies to all realms:  food, sex, travel, religion, adventure.  

We have no definite goal or purpose, nor the freedom of being without goal or purpose.  We are, most of us, sleepwalkers, and we die without ever opening our eyes.

From early manhood on my whole activity revolved about, or was motivated by, the fact that I thought myself, first potentially, then embryonically, and finally manifestly, as a writer [. . . ] here is my genealogical line:  Boccaccio, Rabelais, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Maeterlinck, Romain Rolland, Plotinus, Heraclitus, Nietzsche, Dostoievsky, the ancient Greek dramatists, the Elizibethan dramatists (excluding Shakespeare) , Theodore Dresier, Knut Hamsun, DH Lawrence, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Elie Faure, Oswald Spengler, Marcel Proust, Van Gogh, the dadaists and surrealists, Balzac, Lewis Caroll, Nijinsky, Rimbaud, Blaise Cendrars, Jean Giono, Celine, everything I read on Zen Buddhism, and of course the Bible, the men who wrote it and especially the men who made the King James version, for it was the language of the bible rather than its "message" which I got first and which I will never shake off.  

What were the subjects which make me seek the authors I love, which permitted me to be influenced, which formed my style, my character, my approach to life?  Broadly these: the love of life itself, the pursuit of truth, wisdom and understanding, mystery, the power of language, the antiquity and the glory of man, eternality, the purpose of existence, the oneness of everything, self-liberation, the brotherhood of man, the meaning of love, the relation of sex to love, the enjoyment of sex, humour, oddities and eccentricities in all life's aspects, travel, adventure, discovery, prophecy and magic (both black and white), art, games, confessions, revelations, mysticism, more particularly the mystics themselves, the varieties of faith and worship, the marvellous in all realms and under all aspects, for "there is only the marvellous and nothing but the marvellous"

. . . the struggle of the human being to emancipate himself, that is, to liberate himself from the prison of his own making, that is for me the supreme subject . . .

Perhaps that is why, in my works, I have given so much space to sheer experience of life.  Perhaps too that is why I am so powerfully drawn to the men of wisdom, the men who have experienced life to the full and who give life - artists, religious figures, pathfinders, innovator and iconoclasts of all sorts.  And perhaps - why not say it? - that is why I have so little respect for literature, so little regard for the accredited authors.  For me the only true revolutionaries are the inspirors and activators, figures like Jesus, Lao-tse, Gautama the Buddha, Akhnanton, Ramakrishna, Krishnamurti.  The yardstick I employ is life: how men stand in relation to life.  What distinguishes the men I have in mind is that they did not impose their authority on man; on the contrary, they sought to destroy authority.  Their aim and purpose was to open up life, to make man hungry for life, to exalt life - and to refer all questions back to life.  They exhorted man to realise that he had all the freedom in himself, that he was not to concern himself with the fate of the world (which is not his problem) but to solve his own individual problem, which is a question of liberation, nothing else.

[the painters'] signs and symbols are of another order than the writer's or thinker's.  They deal in forms and images, and images have a way of remaining fresh and vivid.  I feel that the painter looks at the world more directly.

[whereas the thought which haunts our youth] is - will this world be snuffed out before we have a chance to enjoy it? - there is no-one to tell them that even if the world were snuffed out tomorrow, or the day after, it would not really matter - since the life they crave to enjoy is imperishable.

The way one reads a book is the way one reads life.  Maeterlinck writes as profoundly and engagingly about insects, flowers, stars, even space itself, as he does about men and women.  For him the world is a continuous, interactive, interchanging whole.  There are no walls or barriers.  There is no death anywhere.  A moment of time is as rich and complete as ten thousand years.  Truly, a luxurious kind of thinking.  

. . .  besides, what could it possibly mean to a man like him to lose a game of chess, or ten games, or a hundred?  "I'll be playing it in paradise" he seemed to be saying, "Come on, let's have fun! Make a bold move, a rash move!"  The way he played chess was the way he played the game of life.

Sometimes, when the image of Lao-tse seated on the back of a water buffalo crosses my mind, when I think of that steady, patient, kindly, penetrating grin of his, that wisdom so fluent and benevolent, I think of Lou Jacobs sitting before me at the chessboard.  Ready to play the game any way you liked.  Ready to rejoice over his ignorance or to beam with pleasure at his own tomfoolery.  Never malicious, never petty, never envious, never jealous.  A great comforter, yet remote as the dog star.

Like Celine, Powys has the faculty of telling of his misfortunes with humour.  Powys, needless to say, had his own luminaries whom he raved about.  I use the word "raved" advisedly.  I had never before heard anyone rave in public, particularly about authors, thinkers, philosophers.  Powys fulminated with the fire and smoke of the soul, or the depths which cradle the soul.  Literature was for him like manna from above.

Fatidical, if I remember rightly, was one of his favourite adjectives.

All vital questions were of interest to him.  It was his broad yet passionate curiosity which enabled him to wrest from "dead" epochs and "dead" letters the universal human qualities which the scholar and pedant lose sight of.  To sit at the feet of a living man, a contemporary, whose thoughts, feelings and emanations were kindred in spirit to those of the glorious figures of the past was a great privilege.  

"You seek truth," says Krishnamurti, "as if it were the opposite of what you are"

If Krishnamurti has a mission, it is to strip men of their illusions and delusions, to knock away the false supports of ideals, fetishes, every kind of crutch and thus render back to man the full majesty, the full potency, of his humanity.

Alice, too, was in a quest for reality and proved her courage poetically by stepping through the looking-glass.

"Become as little children"  Everyone bows his head in silence when this utterance is repeated.  But no-one truly believes it.

. . . teachers in the true sense - those who open our eyes, those who lift us out of ourselves.  They are not interested in foisting upon us new beliefs but in aiding us to penetrate reality more deeply.  They proceed first by levelling all the superstructures of thought.  Second they point to something beyond thought, to the ocean of mind, let us say, in which thought swims.  Last they force us to think for ourselves.

"Now, today, as I write, I stand in exactly the same position as the Caveman.  Written tradition, systems of culture, modes of thought, have for me no existence."  [Miller here is quoting a French author, I remember not whom] That is a mighty utterance.  An heroic utterance.  Who can repeat it honestly and sincerely?  Who is there that even aspires to make such an utterance?

Aye, we must go full swing.  Home - where is it if not everywhere and nowhere at the same time?  When he is in possession of his soul, then will man be fully alive, caring nothing for immortality and knowing nothing of death.  To begin wholly fresh may mean coming alive at last!

It makes grand sense, one's life, even when it resembles a quagmire.  Certainly no Creator could have ordained the devious and manifold paths one treads, the choices and decisions one makes.  Can you imagine a ledger in which the vagaries of every single mortal that ever lived were recorded?

Dostoievsky was human in that "all too human" sense of Nietzsche.  He wrings our withers when he unrolls his scroll of life.  Whitman is impersonal by comparison; he takes in the crowd, the masses, the great swarms of humanity.  His eyes are constantly fixed on the potential, the divine potential in man.  He talks brotherhood.  Dostoievsky talks fellowship.  Dostoievsky stirs us to the depths, causes us to shudder and grimace, to wince, to close our eyes at times.  Not Whitman.  Whitman has the faculty of looking at everything, divine or demonic, as part of the ceaseless, Heraclitean stream.  No end, no beginning.  A lofty, sturdy wind blows through his poems.  There is a healing quality to his vision.  Compared to Dostoievsky Whitman is in a sense empty.  It is not the emptiness of the abstract either.  It is rather a divine emptiness.  It is the quality of the nameless void out of which sprang chaos, it is the emptiness which precedes creation,  Dostoievsky is chaos and fecundity. [ . . . He] seems to me to glow with a human light and he is thought of as a fanatic, as a demonic being; Whitman radiates a cool cosmic light, and he is thought of as the brother of all men, as the man in the midst of life.  Dostoievsky is all passion, Whitman compassion.  In Dostoievsy's work one has the feeling that the angel and the devil walk hand in hand; they understand one another and they are tolerant of one another.  Whitman's work is devoid of such entities; there is humanity in the rough, there is nature grandiose and eternal, and there is the breath of the Great Spirit.

Our destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things.

You will be very disappointed in heaven, for I think that it won't nearly be as nice there as it is here.

"I feel and know that death is not the ending, as we thought, but rather the real beginning - and that nothing ever is or can be lost, nor even die, nor soul, nor matter"

Whitman

"The world will be complete for him who is himself complete"

Whitman

How very Zen is this from Whitman:  "Is it lucky to be born?  It is just as lucky to die"

The questioning, the doubts, the denial which abound in Dostoievsky's works, revealing his obsession with the problem of certitude, stand in sharp contrast to Whitman's lifelong attitude.  In some respects, Dostoievsky reminds us of Job.  He arraigns the Creator and life itself.

"Unable to accept life spontaneously, [Dostoievsky] was compelled to take it up as a problem," writes Janko Lavrin, "but life as a problem demands a meaning which must satisfy our rational and irrational selves. At a certain stage the meaning of life may even become more important than life itself.  One can reject life altogether, unless its meaning answers to the highest demands of our consciousness."

Dostoievsky undertook, as far as it was humanly possible, to assume the problems, the tortures and the anguish of all men - and especially, as we know so well, the incomprehensible suffering of children.  Whitman answered man's problems, not by weighing them and examining them, but by a continuous chant of love, of acceptance, in which the answer was always implicit.

"Whitman's essential message," says Lawrence, "was the Open Road, the leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and the loom of the open road.  Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself"

Singing the song of the soul himself, Lawrence grows ecstatic.  He speaks of "a new morality, a morality of actual living, not of salvation."  Whitman's morality, he declares, "was a morality of the soul living her life, not saving herself . . . the soul living her life along the incarnate mystery of the open road."

"fate leads the willing, drags the unwilling"

Lawrence was frightened, nay horrified, to think that his man Whitman, in accepting everything, rejecting nothing, lived with all his sluices open - like some monstrous creature of the deep.

But could there be a more salutary comforting image than this human net adrift in the stream of life?  Where would you have man anchor?  Where would you have him take root?  Is he not divinely poised - in the eternal flux?

"The revilers of war are like the revilers of thunder, storms and volcanoes," Amiel declares - and this is a line which must have sunk deep in me, for whenever I encounter it it resounds like a tocsin, "Catastrophes bring about a violent restoration of equilibrium; they put the world brutally to rights."

Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realise it, than to accept life unquestioningly.

[Miller describing his neighbours at Big Sur]
 [. . .] they have freedom in their blood and a recklessness for consequences which can only spring from a firm belief in the triumph of love [. . .] the extraordinary indulgence which they manifest [. . .] is born of superabundant spirit.  It is directed towards everything capable of growth, whether plant, creature, child, artist or idea.  In obeying this impulse to nurture and sustain the life spirit, they grow in like measure and are nurtured, sustained and fortified by the very powers they have called into play.

If there is a genuine need, it will be met.  First you will have to prove that your need is genuine.  These questions will be put to you: "How would you order the world if you were given the powers of the Creator?" and "What is it you desire that you do not already possess?"

The task of genuine love.   Sit down, wherever you are, and let your mind dwell on these words.  Ask yourself if, in all the years you have been dwelling on this planet, you have ever given a moment's thought to such a problem.

As for Jesus, by all accounts he didn't own a toothbrush, no baggage, no furniture, no change of linen, no handkerchief, no passport, no bank-book, no love letters, no wife, no children.  As far as we know, he never wrote a line.  Home was wherever he happened to be.  He had no wants, that's the thing.

The world problem, said Krishnamurti once, is the individual problem; if the individual is at peace, has happiness, has great tolerance, and an intense desire to help, then the world's problem as such ceases to exist.  

"I am convinced that to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a past-time, if we will live simply and wisely."  

Thoreau

     
It is only the poetic aspect of anything which really interests me.  In the ultimate there is only one language - the language of truth. 

Emerson's Essays (or jumbled quotes therefrom)

Brother Gerry made a passing remark to me this summer, which has set me along a path of affirmation and discovery.  His words to me had the effect of saying:  "you are an individualist, in the style of Emerson."  I already had a latent interest in Emerson - through reading of his associations with Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau - and decided to go straight to the horses mouth, and see to what degree I agreed with the man.

The pocket-sized, leather-bound copy of his Essays and Representative Men, which I borrowed from Elgin library, looked like a Gideon's bible and I have come to employ it as such: carrying it about with me everywhere I go, unable to put the thing down, imagining that it might even save my life if somebody ever decided to shoot at my coat pocket.  I am so glad that Emerson decided to write his ideas down and permit a lad in the north-east of Scotland to peer into his mind.  His writing affirm thoughts which were already in my head, and introduced a few more besides.  And they are expressed so pleasingly: a real pleasure to read.  I started scribbling down the words that most struck me, then realised that I would end up copying down half the book and that the best thing would be to procure my own copy, and be able to reread it at will.

It took me a while to tune into Emerson's early eighteenth century language. His expressions are not only thusly dated but also constructed in his own idiosyncratic style.  However, Emerson had something to say on this point: that whosoever speaketh of eternal truths, speaks timelessly, and writes unbound to the particularities of their time.  Shakespeare's dialogues are such a realistic portrayal of human nature, it is as if they are occurring here and now in front of the reader.  The insatiable intellectual inquiry of Plato is recorded in terms whose tone could be mistaken for that of a modern writer.

Further reading soon led me into a full appreciation of Emerson's pithy, stylish turns of phrase, and his lapidary mind behind them.  His pithiness lends itself felicitously to quote plucking.

Emerson's emphasis on the self-reliance and "infinitude of the private man" is placed within his underlying pantheism.  Everything is united; All is One; each seemingly distinct incidence occurring within time and space is simply yet another manifestation of the same underlying spiritual reality; in the same way that each individual mushroom appearing above ground is but a superficial excrescence of an invisible underground network, containing, as it were, the Platonic idea of mushroomness. Emerson gives me the image of material reality seen like a kaleidoscope: manifold shining shapes together creating momentarily a pattern, soon to tumble onward, ever subject to the wheel of life's tireless rotations and the creation of ever new reconfigurations.

This puts me in mind of Alan Watts' notion of the material universe as God playing hide-and-seek with himself.  This game analogy should not be seen to trivialise the import of existence, but rather may help to give it meaning to those who see none.  Playing a game may have several purposes, not least of which being that it is an interesting way to allow time to pass.  How else would God decide to spend infinity?

An idea that Emerson has affirmed for me is that I am (a microcosm of) the entire cosmos (giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "I feel whole.")  I carry the world within me.  As within, so without.

This puts me in mind of my idea that the world is not only an interpretation seen by each mind, but also the representation of the interpretation of the self.  The relationship you have with yourself is the same as the relationship you have with the world.  If you are entirely at peace with yourself, so will you be with the whole world.  If you do not accept parts of yourself, so will you have misgivings about parts of the world.

Emerson's essays were first delivered as lectures all over America before being published.  He exhorted his listeners, and later his readers, to feel in nowise inferior to the glory of illustrious civilizations - whether they be the Greeks of yesteryear or contemporary Europeans.  The same spirit animating the whole of Nature may manifest itself here and now as well as anywhere else in the world at any other time.  Only sixty years after America gained independence, Emerson's emphasis on the strength of selfhood had the wider significance of strengthening a new sense of American nationhood.  His lectures were described as "America's intellectual declaration of independence"



Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.  Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

If I am the Devil's child then I will live from the Devil.  No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.

Men do good actions much as they would pay a fine in expiation of a daily non-appearance in parade.  Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of living in the world.  Their virtues are penances.  I do not wish to expiate but to live.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after our own but the great one is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Suppose you should contradict yourself?  What then?  With consistency a great man has simply nothing to do.  Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow [do the same],  though it contradict everything you said today.  Is it so bad to be misunderstood?  Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh.  To be great is to be misunderstood.

It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.

We must go alone.

I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.  The wise man throws himself on the side of his assailants.  It is more his interest than theirs to find his weak point.

In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.

Men suffer all their life long under the false superstition that they can be cheated, but it is impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but himself.

Nothing can work me damage except myself, the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault.

...for it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered, the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.

The rich man lies in the sun and sleeps, and is Nature.

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labours are unnecessary and fruitless, that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous actions we are strong.

Like draws to like, the goods which belong to you gravitate to you, and need not be pursued with pains and cost.

"my children," said an old man to his boys, scared by a figure in the dark entry, "you will never see anything worse than yourselves."

When a man speaks the truth in the spirit of truth his eye is as clear as the heavens.  When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy and somewhat asquint.

A work of art, of whatever kind, sets us in the same state of mind wherein the artist was when he made it.

The wisdom of the wise man consists herein, that he does not judge [people]; he lets them judge themselves, and merely reads and records their own verdict.  That which we are we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.  The infallible index of true progress in found in the tone a man takes.  If he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall i say, of all his opinions, will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out how he will.  If he have found his center, the Deity will shine through him.  The tone of seeking is one, and the tone of having is another.

The great man will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much deduction from his grandeur, but it behooves each to see when he sacrifices prudence, to what good he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead.

[Old age consists of] rest, conservatism, appropriation, inertia, not newness, not the way onward.  We grizzle every day.  I see no need of it.  Whilst we converse with what is above us, we do not grow old but young.  Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eyes looking upward, counts itself nothing, and abandons itself to the intuition flowing from all sides.

In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten.  The coming only is sacred.  Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit.  No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love.  No truth is so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts.

The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.  Dreams and drunkeness, opium and alcohol, are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men.  They ask the aid of wild passions to ape in some manner those flowers and generosities of the heart.

"A man" said Oliver Cromwell, "never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going."

The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be anyone who understand it or not.

The religions of the world are the ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for a universal one.  The morning-redness happens to stand to Jacob Behmen for trust and faith; and he believes should stand for the same realities to every reader.  But the first reader prefers as naturally the symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweler polishing his gem.  Either of these, or a myriad more, are equally good to the person to whom they are significant.  Only they must be held lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms which others use.  The mystic must be sternly told - all you say is true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it.

The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, between men of the world who are reckoned accomplished talkers, and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying, half insane under the infinitude of his thought, is that one class speak from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors of the fact; and the other class from without, as spectators merely [...] Jesus speaks always from within, and in a degree that transcends all others. 

St Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.

I know nothing which life has to offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist between two virtuous men, each of whom is sure of himself, and sure of his friend.  It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes politics and commerce and churches cheap.

There are no fixtures in nature.  The universe is fluid and volatile.  Permanence is but a word of degrees.  Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

scottish summer

i returned to scotland, principally to see cousin judith getting married to jonathon.  after the ceremony, everyone repaired to the grounds of a castle lying midway between perth and dundee, to spend the evening enjoying a meal together before dancing a ceilidh.  jenny had been kindly invited, and i was glad to have the opportunity to invite her along to the most dashing of scottish traditions.  all the menfolk wore attractive skirts, while jenny had brought a traditional bavarian dress, in which she looked great.

seeing as jenny was in scotland, i gave myself the task of giving her a fair representation of what people mean when they say bonny scotland.  the ruins of findlater castle weren't a bad place to start.  jenny had her trusty video recording device and whipped it out in moments of particular charm, to capture a whiff of the scene.

i painted "i looked into the fire . . . and saw the light" on the wall of duinish bothy.  i conceded that it could come across as a bit pretentious, but at the same time those words had struck a deep chord in me; i paid attention to the poetic worth of the phenomenon of light.  to see the light in the bothy fire was to see that sitting round it was an eminently magical experience, connected to the source.  looking into the centre of the radiant fountain of beauty - perceived by and applied throughout the heart - is implied by penetratingly visually apprehending the light.

         

 light!       

 jenny said, at any rate, it was a bit loftier and bonnier than the scrawlings and etchings of names, which otherwise amply adorned the bothy wooden panelling.

we arrived at bow fiddle rock sometime after sundown.

i scarce remember luibleathann looking so lovely set amidst august waves of heather awash with their deep bright violet bellbloom

 we hitch-hiked to the west coast and were struck by just how idyllic and picturesque our cabin was sitting atop a crag with a window looking across the sea to wiggly island shapes, criss-crossed by the serene flights of seagulls, kittiwakes, terns, gannets, etc.

sunset over cullen bay

Sprichwörter von Jeni, und fotos von Teneriffe

now is the time to share some of jenny's sayings - 'Sprichwörter' - which crop up in our everyday and have entered my consciousness and which over time i have noted down.  they are not strictly speaking jenny's sprichwörter; they belong to the collective german consciousness; it is but through her that they have come to me.  finding english translations became interesting after the german expressions 'mir nichts, dir nichts' ('if it doesn't matter to you it doesn't matter to me') and 'mach dich aus dem Staub' ('make yourself scarce') became famous (and rendered incomprehensible) when literally translated into english (respectively, 'me nothing, you nothing' and 'make yourself out of the dust')


es ist wie es ist    'it is as it is,' expressing the buddhist practise of total acceptance of what is.  at its heart, it expresses a cool distant stance, declining to describe anything beyond 'as it is'; no adjectives, no moral or aesthetic valuations.

Jeder Jeck ist anders   equivalent to an acceptance of all people. from the cologne dialect, meaning 'every madman is different' or 'each to their own' (or in spanish 'cada loco con su tema')

es gibt kein falsches Wetter, nur falsche Kleidung   'there is no bad weather, only inappropriate clothing'

über Geschmack lass uns nicht streiten  'let's not argue about taste'

steter Tropfen holt den Stein   'constant drops hollow the stone'

gute Dinge muß Weile haben   'goods things come to those who wait'

der Klügere gibt nach   the cleverer one gives in

der Ton macht die Musik  the tone makes the music, or 'it's the way you tell it.'

kommt Zeit, kommt Rat   'council comes with time'

wer im Glashaus sitzt sollte nicht mit Steine werfen   'those who live in glasshouses should not throw stones'

wer schreibt, der bleibt   'he who writes, remains'

wer rastet, der rostet   'he who rests, rusts'  (you snooze you loose)

einem Geschenkten Gaul schaut man nicht ins Maul   'don't look a gifthorse in the mouth'

der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm   'the apple does not fall far from the trunk' (said by jeni to her father when he reproaches her for certain behavioural characteristics)

es gibt nicht nur Schwarz und Weis   'there is not just black and white', meaning 'there are lots of different shades and ways of looking at things', similar to

es gibt kein richtig und falsch   'there is no right and wrong'

schlimmer geht's immer   'things could always be worse'

es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen   'no master has yet fallen from the sky'   (meaning you have to make an effort to do things well)

mit dem könnte man Pferde stehlen   'you could steal horses with him'  (meaning: he is a good friend (as thick as thieves))

wer anderen eine Grube gräbt, fällt selbst hinein   'he who digs a grave for others, falls himself therein'

was du nicht weist macht dich nicht heiss   'what you don't know doesn't make you - hot(!)  (what you don't know doesn't bother you, or 'out of sight, out of mind')

lob nicht den Tag vor dem Abend   'praise not the day before the evening'

alles hat ein Ende; nur die Wurst hat zwei   'everything has an end, only a sausage has two'


and now a little ditty, written possibly (and indeed probably) by jeni, expressing a certain state of mind:

Ich bin der Mittelpunkt meines Universums
Alles was mir passiert, passiert für mich allein,
deswegen ist es wunderschön;
also lass die Sonne rein. 

'i am the centre of my universe
everything which happens to me, happens to me alone
that is why it is wonderful
so let the sun in'


and another little ditty:

wenn du denkst 'das geht nicht mehr'
kommt von irgendwo ein Lichtlein her

when you think that all is over
a little light comes from somewhere


and now some more photos taken by brother kevin during a recent visit of his:

here is a photo hannah took on her handy:

and photos from jenny:

and now a few photos from angela:

 the window which jenny found on a shipwreck, which gave the cave a touch of class

jenny puts chiqui into the rucksack, one of the ways of travelling all three together on the scooter

recently deceased (jenny's dad) dieter, during a visit not so long ago, playing the hang drum the polish guy gave jenny,

shusha, dieter's dog and 'eternal companion' looks over there

jenny (back turned) does her thing

in the rise and fall of the cave's interior decoration, this was taken at a high point

detail of the interior floor jenny laid with abandoned fragments of tiles collected here and there

jenny, i and kevin sitting on a wall about to begin our thrilling descent into the breath-taking barranco de masca

and, for the interested landscape admirer, looking back to the 3,718m volcano and centre of the island, El Teide

some words about the evening cave

arcadio appeared one morning as we were sitting outside the cave.  he looked at us with his grey beard and grandfatherly smile and his first words were, simply "tenéis un sitio espléndido"
- you have a splendid place (not the first time a spaniard has greeted me with such words)

then he asked if he could take a photo of us to put on his blog.  jenifer and i just looked at each other for a while, humming and hawing, not really able to decide.  if i were alone i would have said "shure fire away" but i knew that jenifer is generally disinclined to let her photo be taken by strangers, so i was waiting for her to decide, my eyebrows raised.  in the end we cobbled together our conclusion "go on then"

then it ocurred to me to ask arcadio to send me the photos via e-mail, which he did:











a photo is worth a thousand words.  i may tell people that i live in a cave but how better can i transmit my idea that a cave can be such a thoroughally agreeable - and aesthetically pleasing - place to be than through the showing of a photo?  my mother, for example, had in mind the image of the gaping, rough-hewn caverns to be found along the scottish coast, upon learning that i had taken up residence in a cave.  jenifer is generally sparse with her snapping, but has taken of late a few scenic shots, to wit:

 

 

i have had the opportunity to do quite a lot of reading of late (e.g. harry mulisch, stefan zweig, haruki murakami, tom robbins, italo calvino, jack kerouac, dostoevsky) and i have particularly appreciated the style of those authors whose use of language is so clear that they leave absolutely no space for ambiguity.  no need to reread any sentence to deduce what the author was probably trying to say.  say what you intend to.  i mean say what you mean.  or mean what you say.  you know what i mean?  i apsire to a crystal clear use of language.  not always.  for me writing can be a process through which i discover what it is i actually want to say.  and sometimes, of course, an ambiguous use of language is the only recourse for the writer who faithfully wants to record his ambiguous impressions, or unclear thoughts.

after the burning of all dwellings our stretch of coast was cast into an unusual original stillness.  for a week police officers came and fined a few people who had just arrived and were camping on the beach.   then the long easter weekend came and the beach filled with local canarian families and youths in tents who played techno music all night and took drugs and left lots of pieces of toilet roll scattered around the tabaibas.  after that the police did not come back.  for that first week we stayed in the cave, but lying low, not wanting to show any signs of inhabitation.  one morning we were in the middle of making chappatis over a fire when a file of uniformed men walked past on the high path carrying out a few scraps of metal.  they looked at us with curiosity.  one of them took a photo.  we felt very conspicuous.  jenny said "quick, take the old roof cables up to the rubbish skip.  show them that we are tidying up."

we didn't always want to be lying low and so we cast around for another less conspicuous spot.  marcel - a young blonde german with a beautiful dog with one eye true blue, the other dark brown, who had very white fur and looked like a cross between a fox and a wolf - reported to us that when the police went past his cave, they saw that it was very tidy and that he hadn't really constructed anything and let him stay there.  the russian valentin had also been spared - his cave was rather difficult to access, and he had covered the entrance with fabrics matching exactly the colour of the rock so that from a distance nobody could tell that anybody lived there.  then we learned about an old german by the name of frederico who had lived in a very hidden, well-nigh inaccessible cave for thirty years.  he was over seventy now, and had only begun to walk again after a period of not leaving his cave at all, as a result of sore legs, getting his little sustenance brought to him by friends.  when i met him for the first time he had the appearance of a wizard, wearing a long dark blue morrocan robe, his white hair and white beard flowing and framing his tanned, wrinkled face.  he had one glass eye; through the other one he looked out with intense vivacity.  as he spoke he seemed to gather energy and talked with passion about how mother nature had created this place and had called him to live here and protect it.  it was his wish to live here for the rest of his days.  he talked disparaginly of babylonia (modern civilisation) and lamented the increasing encroachment along this coast of people bringing their rubbish and disrespectful ways.  he thumped his long staff on the ground as he spoke, to emphasize his words.  "i have a guanche spirit" he called with fire in his eyes.  "here on tenerife i live like a guanche" (the indiginous people of the canaries, before the spanish slaughtered) "when i lived in america i lived like a native indian.  when i lived in india i lived like a sadhu.  and when i lived in germany i lived in the woods"
these words made a considerable impression on me.  he said that he was glad the authorities had cleared the place out.  twelve years ago - the last time people were evicted - he had heralded the arrival of the guardia civil by blowing loudly and triumphantly on a large conch shell.  the police knew him and respected him.  we felt that we would be safe living near him.  when i first asked frederico what he thought about us moving into the emtpy cave beneath his cave, he said he would be very happy to have good tidy neighbours, on the condition that we first brought all the rubbish out, including an abundant fake leather sofa somebody had lugged in. "everyone needs to sit on chairs in europe" he said "but it is better to sit on the ground.  the sofa does not belong here."  i could kind of see what he meant, but it was a pretty comfy sofa.  i wouldn't have lugged it in myself, but nor would i have taken the trouble to remove it after somebody had taken the trouble to bring it in.  however, i felt good about living near frederico, and wished to respect his wishes.  i spent a cosy afternoon sprawled out on the sofa reading a book, before borrowing a sharp axe the next day from the russian valentin, breaking it up and feeding the wood to following fires.
as frederico got to know us he told us he was so glad that we had moved in.  he felt his strength returning, and that a new positive period of living and looking after the caves was coming.  for years a series of sloppy people had passed through, leaving lots of rubbish and uncleanliness behind them.  most mornings frederico got up early and made his way down to the beach, where he could be seen standing on his head and performing other incredibly flexible yoga postures on the sand.

we often had looked across to those caves on the cliff from la pintada, and remarked what a good spot it would be from which to see the sun setting across the bay.  in time, we came to call our new cave the evening cave - alluding to the good views it affords at sundown - and the cave where we used to live (which previously required no name other than the cave) we came to call la pintada - alluding to the fact that it has been painted.  in truth we could never decide which cave we preferred.  the evening cave was a very special place.  but every few days we would feel pulled back to la pintada, in order to feed the cats and water the plants and generally make our presence felt so that other people would not think the place was abandoned and set up shop.  when we were back there it didn't take long for us to look around at the shining plants and twisted volcanic rocks and remark "wow, here is so beautiful . . . here is really the most beautiful place to be"  then the evening would creep upon us, la pintada would fall under cool shadow and we would say "let's go and see the sunset from the evening cave; it is, after all, called the evening cave".  at the beginning jenifer joked that i could generally take up residence in the evening cave while she stayed back in la pintada, and that we could communicate to each other via smoke signals.  what was not a joke was the realisation that it was healthy for our relationship to intercalate our being together with periods of alone time.  to this end having the evening cave served us nicely.

the evening cave had been created through somebody chiselling into a stratum of crumbly white rock (as opposed to la pintada whose curvaceous interior walls were entirely designed by the volcano.)   there was a series of caves which had thus been created on the reasonably steep cliffslope above the beach.   it was an idyllic spot in which to live in a cave.  jenifer fumbled for the word "adventurous" in trying to describe the place.  i say fumbled because she was aware that it was not perhaps the best word, but it went some way to describing the feeling of living on a pretty steep piece of rock, hanging above a wide blue sea.   from the photos you can see that the sea is a fair drop down from the cave, but from the cave i could hurl a rotten apple and watch it fall in a deep downward curve to plop! into the sea a little distance from the shore.  jenny showed that she could do that too, at my behest.  it was steep!   you fairly had to have your wits about you to descend.  there was a way.  somebody had chiselled out little footholds at the steepest parts.  then it came to an exciting overhang (called acapulco) from which one could hurl one's body and bewildered-delighted fall through the air and then splash! a mighty underwater scene of thousands of tiny white bubbles while the hurtling body slowly slows and reaches the lowest submarine point of calm before scooshing back up to the surface for marvellous air.

when it came to defecation (jeni didn't really come round to this way of seeing it but) the most practical way of going about it was to shit directly in the sea.  and the most direct way to enter the sea was to jump off acapulco.  this led to many a morning scene of mine stepping out of some dream scene and directly needing to shake of sleepiness and regather my powers of balance as i clamboured down the cliff.   i grew really fond of beginning the day with a splash.  so fond of the sea in general.  being in the sea is to form a magical connection of love between my beating heart and everything around me. the sea drowns everything in saltiness, except for the wriggling fishy bodies who know how to float and dive down (me), practising the holding of the breath or the most efficient swim style water yoga gliding through the sea while observing all her moods, swaying through and swayed by the great pulsing movements of the ocean body.  nick drake never knew the meaning of the sea:

I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you’re here
Brighten my northern sky


o nick drake!
brighten my poetic soul





i use the past tense in describing the cave because all of a sudden we flew back to germany for jenny's father funeral.

time to turn back the stones

jenny and i always knew that our cave inhabitation was illegal.   we continously considered ourselves fortunate that the authorities de facto tolerated what de jure was not permitted.   the first visit from the local police was in december.  they pointed out to us then the illegality of our situation, but did so in friendly terms.  the declared purpose of their visit was simply to record the passport details of all those who squatted on this protected area of coast.  they were friendly that morning.  we remember the encounter with smiles.  we had a lively and entertaining exchange of ideas with them.  they even accepted a small cup of coffee that had just come to the boil as they arrived.

nothing however prepared us for the arrival around a month ago of a composite group including a member of the civil guard, an agent of the local police and a representative of the local council.  their first comment was "you cannot live here" then they handed us a letter explaining that we found ourselves in a protected natural space, and if we did not proceed to voluntarily evacuate the area, with all our belongings, within the space of fifteen days, then we would find ourselves subject to disciplinary procedures.

"i only come here occassionally", lied jenny,
"you are not allowed to build anything within this protected area" replied the policeman
"but i havn't build anything, i have only . . cleaned it up a bit"
"this patio here has been built" said the policeman, pointing to our new stone floor (which looks like it has already been there a long time) "and you are not allowed to paint stones either"

we didn't know how seriously to take them.  rumours flied and buzzed around.  some said they would meausre every square metre of land which had been built on, and distribute fines accordingly.  one long-term dweller of a teepee on the beach, who had been making and selling his handicrafts at a stall on the beach for fifteen years, suddenly dismantled his teepee and beat it.  he somehow sensed the seriousness of the situation, that an era of living freely on la caleta coast was over.  

others alleged the letter was simply a means to threaten.  that they simply wanted to clean the place up a bit.  it is true that the place had become overflooded with freedom-seeking residents, temporary or otherwise.  it had become a veritable circus: teepees, tents, bamboo constructions, ever grander and more conspicuous in this treeless terrain of rocks and cacti.  it is a prickly subject because many of the people who choose to live here really love the place and go out of their way to maintain its cleanliness and only build in ways that blend in with the surrounding natural setting.   there are however a notable diversity of personal stories that bring people here - including stories of delinquency and dissolution, and the deliberate search for a place to live where the representatives of the law are unlikely to be encountered.  let it suffice to say that not everyone holds respect of the natural environment among their topmost values.  

the motives of the authorities are also questionable.  what is the ground reason that they do not want people to live here?  some say, full of confidence, that the contract has already been signed to build a glamorous five-star hotel just above the cave where jenny and i are living.  more than fifty per cent of tenerife's GNP is the product of tourism.  i heard someone say recently, referring to the plans to knock down the attractive catholic chapel in the nearby village of el puertito to make space for an hotel complex, "es el turismo que manda aqui, no la iglesia"  it is tourism who gives orders here, not the church.  the construction of an exclusive golf course within the protected area testifies to the relative unimportance of such a designation when compared to tourist revenues.   many talk of the local council's eventual plan to construct a paved marine boulevard, stretching from la caleta to el puertito.  it seems obvious to me that the sunny south coast of the island will continue to be constructed upon.  with guaranteed warm sun well-nigh all year round, the temptation to continue building executive hotels is simply too lucrative to resist for those with a business bent.

the topic of this proposed marine walkway through one of the most beautiful and still relatively unconstructed stretches of coast of south tenerife cropped up in a conversation with pepe, the old local fisherman who comes down sporadically to fish and sleep in a dirty little cave round the coast from us.  "it will be good for local employment" said pepe.

what! - i exclaimed inwardly - you can't sell off every last piece of unconstructed wild land in favor of creating jobs.  that is not an argument.  when is it going to end?  how many jobs do they want?  and all those who will be born tomorrow, they will all want jobs too.  it is not fair on the rest of nature.

i voiced this protest in mild tones, before stilling my voice (but not my mind), allowing my eyes to drift out to sea, aware that i occupy an extreme position as a proponent of joblessness and in the high value that i accord to nature.  natural elements.  natural scapes.  nature in itself.  nature for herself, vamos.

faced with the threat of being evicted from our cave, jenny and i adopted a very cautious approach - which in retrospect was also a clever one.  we slowly began to carry all of our amassed belongings and stored them in a little nearby cave with a hidden entrance which widened considerably and provided us with plenty of storage space.   plenty of space, but we filled it all up!  we threw away a lot too.  our plan was to leave the cave empty, uninhabited-looking and go for a little island tour when our time was up.  jenifer is an accomplished hoarder.  this is fed by a certain readiness of hers - and certainly of mine - to recycle; what some refer to as recycling and what could also be termed looking in bins for stuff, or finding things that people have thrown away on the street, and taking them.  we also have friends who have similar practises, and who bring round regularly things of practical, if not aesthetic value.  loads of clothes, shoes, diving equipment, furniture - a rocking chair, a diversity of wooden stools, an automobile chair, food reserves - including a 10kg drum of oil, kilos of rice, beans, pasta, a three burner gas stove, huge tins of paint, empty jam jars, an assortment of glass bottles of interesting shape and colour... my mind becomes lost as i try now to recall all what we had, and all what we did away with or stored.  as i crawled into our secret storage cave with another box of assorted things we elected not to loose, i saw us fitting into the general trend of those who live in the wealthiest consumerist parts of the world.  everyone has an attic full of potentially useful, in practise rarely used, junk.

jenifer has the tendency to see the beauty in every little thing.  jewelry is perhaps her principal passion regarding beautiful little things, and one which she shares with many other people.  principally things from nature - principally shells and stones, especially feathers, pieces of wood, pine cones, strange seeds that one has never seen before.  these things decorated profusely the cave and its surroundings.  jenifer went through a prolonged spree of making ever bigger and more extravagent dream-catchers, including some whose several-metre-length circumferences were built from old pieces of plastic tubing, and these all hung from our palm leaf roof and from various parts of the cave.  the place was extravagently decorated.  i cannot think to ennumerate all that there was.  jenifer described it as Klimbim in german, and that is the term in which i think of it now.  Jenifer admits that her sense of aesthetics encompasses a diversity of styles, including what is referred to as Kitsch - plastic shiny trite overdone "but do you not agree" jenifer appeals to me "that there is a point when something is so Kitsch that it becomes stylish again?"   i know that she knows innerly that she is one of the few people who hold such a view.
i love the ensemble of her style.  living in the cave when it was decorated was always a delight.  everywhere the eye rested there was something intriguing to contemplate.  evenings became light shows, led by a wonderful lamp that resembled the ones police cars bear on their rooves but which gave the option to select from a wide variety of seductive colours, or fade slowly from one to the other.  this, accompanied by candles, parafin lamps, hanging paper lanters in the shape of a huge star or a large tube, and a tripartite set of LED lamps that can be charged by a solar panal, a lavish christmas gift from my parents.

others critiqued the ensemble of her style.  mario, for example, who camped nearby and participated in a retreat in the nearby buddhist centre.  he found the whole thing unrelaxing for the eye.  he would prefer to allow the simple beauty of the rock to shine.  he referred to his knowledge of feng shui in offering suggestions as to how we could improve the lay out of the place.

jenifer came to talk of the therapeutic value of our enforced spring clean - sorting through every thing posessed, weighing up its value, and doing away with the useless.  for a while we had been talking about embracing a minimalist style and suddenly it was thrust upon us.  we had to make the place look uninhabited. "you are not allowed to paint stones here" the agent of the law had said, and so we turned them all over.  we decided to burn all our wood supplies.  the last time the authorities swept cleaned up the area was twelve years ago.  then, they burned all the teepees.  rumours were flying around and nobody knew what would happen.  some people seemed to know what would happen, but we didn't know what would happen.  on the neighbouring island of la gomera there are similar isolated coastal areas where people informally construct dwellings and dwell for a while in loose free-flowing communities of travellers and nature-lovers.  the authorities are severer there and yearly sweep through burning anything inhabited.  "they won't burn here now" opined jenny.  it was a gut feeling, rather than an informed opinion.  it was her desire.  however, we wanted to leave them nothing to destroy.  we didn't want them to touch our place.  one rumour, which we for some reason deemed plausible was that they would arrive on 28th march - exactly three weeks after we got the letter.  that night we decided to burn everything remaining burnable.  it was a funny feeling.  santiago was there - a lonely young catalonian wolf, maurauding around that night looking for something to burn, who was happy to join in our plan of burning everything before they did. "i have some fence-cutters.  shall we start taking the palm leave roof down?"  he had repeat his question a few times, in a quiet voice, wanting to let us be the ones to initiate the burning.

"yeah lets do it"

we spent the night hours feeding a bonfire in the middle of the patio with all our the palm leaves from the roof, and assorted bits of wood which were to be found all around.  what we did not want was that they lit a fire inside the cave and blackened the colourful painting to which i had dedicated hours and days and weeks.  we opened up the last three litre tin of coconut milk we had recycled in a supermarket months ago, and cooked up slowly, patiently, lovingly a luxurious vegetable curry with lentils and rice that astonished through its delicacy and depth of flavour.  it was a timeless night.  as it became light an insistant voice reached us from the dissolving gloom, "they're coming, they're coming!"  through the early morning rays of sun from behind the mountains we beheld a long line of men in colourful uniforms descending the hill from the golf place.  pretty soon the first fire had been lit, then the next, and the whole hillside became alight with beacons of burning fire.   we retired to a platform of rock near the crashing sea where we had stashed our big matress and some sleeping bags, with the idea of getting some sleep, but all we could do was sleepily watch the spectacle as the fires spread.  first a whiff of smoke then the first flames . . over two hundred people had lived in various types of dwellings, mostly some sort of palm leaf teepee construction.  so many people, like us, had invested so much time and energy and love in constructing their simple homes.   nobody had taken so much energy, as we had, to dismantle the dwelling and leave it as natural as possible.  we felt numb; we felt like refugees obliged to flee from what they once called home.  we felt like clans in the scottish highlands being driven away by the new landlords.  as we saw the lines of fires coming ever closer to our cave jenny said "what if they take the palm leaves from jota's place and burn it in the cave?"  spanish jota was our neighbour who, with his czech girlfriend hannah, had carefully constructed a simple little palm hut in front of the sea.  we ran there and saved the mattress and the bed and all the plastic things and then set the thing on fire.  bright it burned.  tall danced the hot flames.  later jota himself appeared.  i told him i was sorry.  his only response, in a quiet voice, was: "you could at least have asked me first"

i couldn't believe it as i saw two men in bright uniforms setting fire to what was the community place across the bay.  the long palm roof, leaning against the cliff face at the sea had been constructed with plastic sheeting and there were matresses still inside.  black flames towered into the sky.  "they can't do that.  what are they doing burning plastic? i am going to speak to them" i exlaimed and ran thither.  marta was standing on the path neaby filming the specatcle.  i was indignant but old suso - who has lived here for years - was light of spirit and exclaimed "we got it all on video.  the black plastic smoke, and two gas canisters exploding - BOOM!" he mimicked with wild wide eyes.  an middle-aged english couple came along and the woman said "i think that's terrible.  so where are you going to live now?"  i ran up to two policemen who had retreated to the top of the cliff.  they looked like american cops - an attitude of calmly chewing gum, their black battons buttoned to their belts.  i said "i am aware that it is against the law to live here in this protected natural area, and for that reason you are burning these dwellings, but it is also illegal to burn plastic in this protected space" my voice became emotional as i tried to find the words in spanish "you are being paid to carry out this service and you can't even do it properly!"  they didn't know what to say to me.   i thought they looked sheepish but somebody else said later they looked sleepy.  a more awake looking agent came to me and stressed "we are doing our best to carry out all that we can" meaning physically carrying out.  it was true all morning they had formed long human carrying chains to remove all the recycled paraphernalia that people had allowed to accumulate over the years of human occupation of the coast.  there was so much work for them.  the workforce appeared to consist of about sixty or seventy men.  they had probably underestimated the work that lay in store for them.  in the end they resorted to burning everything, mattresses and all.  

days later as i walked around the empty blackened camps i was made despondent by their lack of sensitivity to the natural beauty of the place.  all around the barranco black spots coated the rocks.  often they made no attempt to clean up, leaving wide circles of charred wood, broken glass, old bits of crockery and masses of defigured mattress springs.  if they were going to do a job in the name of protecting the natural beauty of the place, at least they could have done it well.  i understand that the free habitation of the area had got out of hand.  they had to discourage people from coming back.  as i sadly saw neaby blackened rows of aloe veras and tabaibas - an endemic very slow growing shrubby tree which is emblamatic of the coast - i got over my sadness by considering the time aspect of the story.  these plants have been burned, but others will grow in their place.  i said to jenny, as i looked at one of our plants whose leaves had shrivelled in our fire "maybe it will do him good,  i have heard that some plants thrive after having been subjected to fire"

"yes, so it is with some plants" jenny responded.

then, after a pause,

"and maybe with humans too"