703 - Exegesis

Philip K Dick, the science fiction writer, underwent an experience of mental intrusion and enlightenment, in an altered state of consciousness induced while taking painkillers, which he proceeded to interrogate over the last eight years of his life. The result, a million pages of journal writing which he titled 'Exegesis', will be edited and published in two volumes next year.

According to Bryan Appleyard, in a subtle book, Aliens: Why They Are Here, Dick came to believe the Roman Empire had never fallen, and found its current expression in rampant materialist capitalism. He also believed that a Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) orbits the Earth, using symbols such as the Christian fish sign to disinhibit people to whom it wishes to communicate. Appleyard writes:

Dick glimpsed the centrality of the alien in the postwar world. He was himself a stranger in a strange land, a troubled drifter. In his madness he lived in the third realm of aliens and angels. The world was alien to him and he was alien to it. He understood the eternal truth that we don't fit and he saw how modernity had heightened and dramatized our discomfort.

'The fish sign causes you to remember,' he wrote in his exegesis, 'Remember what?... Your celestial origins; this has to do with the DNA because the memory is located in the DNA... You remember your real nature... The Gnostic Gnosis: You are here in this world in a thrown condition, but are not of this world.'
(pp.156-7)

I can identify with Dick the drifter, not least because I can see my own in his experiences in altered states of consciousness. I particularly like Appleyard's suggestion that making sense of his experiences required him to move into a third realm where the supernatural, or extraterrestrial at least, was commonplace. My own experiences precipitated a similar search for explanation, which I tried to find in Evangelical Christianity, and I'm very sure I wasn't the only one there to make such a journey.

I'm less happy with the suggestion that alienation is an eternal truth, in the sense that having realised we are here in a thrown condition, we can do no more about it than pick up the pieces and start walking. My subsequent journey has been about the discovery that if we are all aliens, then we are aliens nurtured by the world we have been born into - that has evolved us to be who we are. We are social aliens with four billion years worth of fine-tuned mutual space-suit around us.

I'd like to suggest that alienation is only half the picture: familial warmth provides the rest. The Gnostic sense of thrownness is there, but so is rootedness: my learning path, hereon in, is about using each to critique and expand my appreciation of the other.

I think this expands Appleyard's third realm to the breadth of the cosmos. That is to say, there is no third realm worth speaking of, the first (physical) and the second (mental) having always fallen away by the time we pause to analyse them. Or to put it another way, we are all of us born into the third realm, where the unknown stands side by side with the known, and as we grow we turn first to the physical and then to the mental (maybe vice versa) to make sense of it all.

I guess we all have to journey the full length of our journey. Quick fixes and permanent stop-offs in realms along the way are not an option. Dick's Exegesis, which I would like to read, will prove no more (or less) than a map of his particular path through life.

789 - Liturgy (2): Psychogeography

On Cheltenham Racecourse I had a chance to put a question to Iain Sinclair. He's (tangentially, at least) a practitioner of psychogeography. In his books (Edge of the Orison; London Orbital; Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire) he explores the experience of walking through various landscapes, mythmaking with the architecture, people and histories he finds there.

He spoke about the devastation inflicted, unwittingly perhaps, on the poet John Clare, who, unable to acclimatise to London's literary life, sought to return to his labouring family home, only to find that enclosure of the commons had, in the name of progress, privatised the landscape he used to wander freely and which had given him belonging and a muse. Doubly disenfranchised, he spent the latter years of his life in an asylum.

Such enclosure currently finds its echo in the Millenium Dome (a space enclosed with nothing in it) and, now, in the site of the 2012 Olympic Village, where you are being photographed as you approach, but where you have no power to photograph back, on pain of the confiscation of your camera. The site is empty, and the architecture to be built on it modern and uniform, but the crushed stone and life-space confiscated from its previous residents was once rich and full.

Sinclair's talk was powerful, and I, and perhaps others after, asked him how, in the midst of cultural obliteration, one might make a proactive stand for cultural rejuvenation. He writes books. What else could one do?

He gave an interesting answer: "Keep moving. Keep finding new projects."

I cannot help but think that this is the way that Whitley Bay will grow: for its people, and those who come to it, to keep moving, keep on walking, keep dreaming, pushing, and pressing our projects to completion.

806 - Topping Up Lake Windermere

A hundred miles west of Whitley Bay, and down a bit, just three hours, give or take, by train and bus, the weather has been so hot they're using firemen to top up Lake Windermere...

809 - Small Showers In The Lake District

My tribute to Alfred Wainwright (on balance, the long arrows from the subtitle to the shower and my head labour the point.... CyberTypex needed.)

810 - Whitley Playhouse

The old playhouse saw Ken Dodd and Abba tributes, local am-dram and arthouse cinema. It was a must-play stop-off for big name bands in the seventies and eighties.

The new building (which houses the stage of the old, with the rest of the infrastructure re-built around it) opens in September.

This is taken across the meadow that has sprung from the former site of the Marine Park First School, an oasis of beauty in the town that, I reckon, would make a great nature reserve - the Coquet Avenue Pocket Park?

819 - Have I Missed Something?

Seen today, out to sea, six Canada geese flying south in formation.

Oh, and Whitley Bay now has an elephant. Photo tomorrow.

821 - Ocean Weekend

A big thank you to North Tyneside Council, who, under the guidance of Keith Barrett, supported by Whitley Bay's community of artists and performers, laid on a great weekend of art and crafts the length of the beach between the Spanish City Dome and St Mary's Lighthouse.

And there were donkeys!

We went down on Sunday afternoon with family friends, and all the activity gave the place a real lift.

Great to see, on Tuesday, the grafitti display still up by the skate park, and the odd daub of paint in the shelter near Rendezvous Cafe, where tile-decorating, felt fish-making, craft stalls and circus skills had been on offer, and a marvellous dry aquarium strung up, with a giant whale, and fish, and sequinned seaweed. There was a small scattering of coloured lentils still by the shelter, and I watched a bird pecking at them.

I'd poked my head in at the planning stage, way back in March, but in the end did not get involved. I was certainly a little green with envy at what the group achieved. Really brilliant stuff. Next year, I hope, it'll be even bigger and better.

873 - Early Morning Walk in Whitley (3/3)

08.35 at the window of the old Rainbow amusements arcade, with reflections of refurbished Playhouse

874 - Early Morning Walk in Whitley (2/3)

08.20 at the Briardene

875 - Early Morning Walk in Whitley (1/3)

07.50 approaching the beach from Park Road

881 - Holywell Dene 5/5

882 - Holywell Dene 4/5

883 - Holywell Dene 3/5

884 - Holywell Dene 2/5

(The trees all lean this way, don't cha know?)

885 - Holywell Dene 1/5

Five photos from Holywell Dene on Saturday. An 8 mile walk with E and my parents: from house to the Beehive Inn, to the Dene, to Seaton Sluice, to St Mary's Lighthouse, and home again, which took in the North Tyneside Wagonway System, a fine farmland pub, this wooded dene, great cakes at the sluice's Castaway Teashop, the Lighthouse, and a sea-wind like a scourbrush all the way home.

907 - The Art of a Library

There's an autobiographical book by Francis Spufford called The Child That Books Built. Books built me, too. And now I am building a library.

In fact, books built my family - both sides. My mother's family was, and still is, involved in publishing. Long ago they opened one of the first public lending libraries, in Glasgow. My father's double great grandfather was a poet (not a great one) in Blackburn, and, for a while, was Librarian at Blackburn Mechanics Institution. A contemporary described his home as being 'literally wainscotted with books'.

So it's in the blood, I reckon; in the genes, though I wonder what exactly that might mean. My earliest play memories are not of books, but Stickle Bricks. But from mid-childhood onwards I surrounded myself with books; camped behind the sofa with them; carried them with me on holiday, and to university (where someone perceptively suggested I was addicted to them); fashioned them into my professional life as a librarian.

A book, for me, is a shared space, where the tracks of my mind cross the tracks of another. Though the words themselves, and the surface meanings (and the texture, and white spaces, and weight) are objects, they are objects in relationship, and it is that relationship that gives the experience of reading its intimacy and wider meaning. The longer you read, the closer you and the author of your book get, till you share the same experience, and in some sense are of one mind.

A library, gathered over time, and partially or wholly read, is therefore the node of a community, speaking in analogue, the way that the Web can be a digital community. On my shelves I place Steven Pinker, William James and Karen Armstrong, alongside Clive James and Naomi Klein. Perhaps they talk in other forums too, face to face (though this is hard across generations and social divides), but when I read them alongside one another, at least in my mind, they speak together for me. And when I add my words to theirs, and place them in some accessible form, like this blog, or a conversation I have with friends, the community is perpetuated, and opened up to feedback and new voices.

A library is steam-punk cyberspace.

Whitley has a public library, forty years in temporary accommodation. Its coastline extends north to the home of the Lindisfarne Gospels. Its cycle-tracks and waggonways cut inland to Newcastle, where the Lit and Phil was set up as a private library, to serve the same mechanics and worthies as the Blackburn library my triple-great grandfather served in. Newcastle has webcammed a bold new library, due to open Summer 2009. Back in Whitley, the local library is set to move, away from its site in Whitley Park, the park where Thomas Bewick drew his Great Ox, the Ox set to be commemorated in poetry by school kids and adults at the end of March.... You can walk from Whitley to Newcastle, Whitley to Lindisfarne, sure of company much of the way. And the great readers, if neurologists and anthropologists are to be believed, have always been great trackers: they use the same mental capacities.

Not sure where this is leading. Save to suggest that Libraries, like walking and the growth of civilisation, are an art and an organic thing, and seamless with our past and digital future together.

917 - Frost Bunnies

Watching the snow colony gather in tiny granules on the promenade outside Rendezvous Cafe's wide arched window. In not-quite-lives shorter than mayflies they fall as we drink tea and coke inside.

They shiver with excitement, in scurries and swirls, one moment a giant William Morris doily, the next wracked into a brief drift against the embankment wall opposite.

In the darkening chill they are finally whisked out and down the prom, until, a sharp plume, they burst over the sand, and dissolve their droves in the sea.

920 - Jesmond Allotment

On the way into Newcastle from Whitley Bay (walk; Metro; walk)

950 - Wagonways

View down one of the wagonways, this one built in 1813, I think, that criss-cross North Tyneside. Several venture into Whitley Bay, though this doesn't - it carves a line down the back of the Freeman Hospital; a particularly icy line on Thursday, when I took the photo.

The wagonways were used to transfer coal down to the Tyne. They have been redeveloped as a network of walking- and cycle-ways (skate-ways, Thursday), with information boards picking out historic information. A case of an old story, retold in a new context.

At one time, as wagons rumbled laiden by, the story might scarcely have been told at all, so evident it was (like bothering to relay the adventure of the 308 bus from Whitley to the centre of Newcastle).

Then told by the retired miners - "This was the clart I dug year in, year out. And here's the track that led it, horse-drawn, then steam-drawn, to the docks at Wallsend."

Now, told again, but in a fresh story - the drive to get people walking again, the urge to reconnect with the land around, with people and the past.

A bird flew by as I took the picture, two old boys and a dog just before. Behind the hedge on the left, the Freeman's new car park.

963 - Melting

E and I climbed onto our second bus of three at around ten in the morning. The X66 from the Metrocentre to Gateshead. The snow, shallowly crystalline as we left one set of friends, and melting fast, had all but disappeared from the bus route as we headed to our second set. But it had been enough to launch the conversation between our fellow passenger and us, if not the sledge dragged by the girl we had passed on the way to our first bus, up at Rowlands Gill.

Our companion told us how, at five, as she left for the morning shift at the shopping centre, the snow had fallen pristine. "I love to walk on the fresh snow," she said, "Just a big kid; my son's the same." We drove past the forecourt of one of the light industrial workshops scattered between the Metrocentre and Gateshead proper, and I imagined her son, burly, confident, scuffing through Geordie snow with his workboots on.

Then she said, "I've still got their first snowballs, you know. I'm a hoarder. I can't get rid of them. The first ones they made. They're in a tupperware box. I'll give them to my son and daughter when they're thirty."

"How old are they now?" I asked, meaning the snowballs.

"He's twenty eight, and my daughter's twenty three."

After a moment she continued: "Ee, I had a panic when we changed the freezer. I put them in a coolbox, all wrapped up, and took them to my sister's! And my son's girlfriend, when she came round, my son said, 'Take a look what me mam keeps in the tupperware - '"

Now she laughed, aghast at herself: "He said, once, 'See what I can get for them on Ebay -'"

"What do they look like?" I asked.

"They're a bit smaller now than they were." she admitted.

We got off the bus at Gateshead, with cheerful goodbyes. Twenty minutes later E and I were on and off our third bus, in Birtley, and the meltwater was making music on the town's greystone walls. We walked the Durham Road to the church, and the christening of our friends' new baby in it.