Faery Tale

Wolff sits on the hill crest and he looks far into the distance, before the sea's edge and where the brooding buildings hide. The relationships are simple. Why has nobody bothered to understand them? When Wolff was Sir Wolff, he was bound not to discuss them, because he was a gentleman.

But now that they have told him he is no longer entitled to be called 'Sir', is he still a gentleman? Must he still keep their secrets and their horrors? Wolff is afraid that he too might brood, like a hen. It would be a sad fate for a knight.

So he begins, talking to himself as he counts on his fingers. He tells the story of the ladies and their dreams, and he talks even as his fingers twitch, trying not to be part of the story.

"Once upon a time, there was a mad king who had several daughters."

The distant thunder crashes, as if to evoke Lear, who had three, or Macbeth, who had none. There are so many kings, so many varnishings and tarnishings. Wolff resumes.

"And he had three stepsisters, each by a different father."

He remembers. One was lenient, and she was kind to all. One he nicknamed 'Lady Macbeth', but it was only a nickname. And the last one looked after the household expenses.

"He got it into his head to be king forever, or perhaps a high priest after the line of Melchizedek."

Wolff is unsure, here. Somehow, the story is coming out a little mixed in its antecedents. But he continues, and his fingers tingle.

"His four daughters were called Teach-Me-Not, Touch-Me-Not, Boots, and Beets. Obviously, the first two had been named by one of his stepsisters, and the other two by another stepsister. Or maybe, that is just the way they were."

Wolff remembers. It was all very funny, very amusing, and yet very tragic.

"The king was afraid of one stepsister, but she closed both eyes and he was reassured. He was scornful of the other, but that one opened both eyes and was safe. And the third worked at the back of the castle, and was not troubled by anything."

He looks at his fingers. They are cringing. Perhaps he should not continue. After all, it is a rare story and a dark one. Like most dark tales of the faery, the King in the High Castle is also the King under the Old Hill. The faery are not good people, but little people with sharp knives and sharper tongues. And the King of the Faery was the worst of them all until his inevitable downfall.

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It was a long time ago that the Rhymer told Wolff the old stories. Wolff had been Sir Wolff back then, and he tried very hard not to believe them. But the day came when he knew they had to be true.

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Note: The fictional adventures of Sir Wolff do provide much that is of interest. You can find them linked here. Just ignore the one about earwax. That was an accident.

Love and Neglect

Sometimes, as a younger friend of mine said, you realise there are 1001 things about the opposite sex that you will never understand. As you grow older, you realise two more things: 1) it's closer to a million and one; 2) you don't need to understand it all.

I think that men tend to neglect many of these things. She might say, "Haha, the last time you bought me flowers was on my 21st birthday!" You think, "Haha, yeah, we were all young and silly once." You ought to think, "Errm. Time to visit the florist."

It takes a huge emotional investment to cater to all the little things. Men tend not to have these reserves. The reason is simple: the 'emotional' side, things like flowers and gifts and hugs and quiet moments — they are as much a product of physical and intellectual action as anything else, and just as consuming of the body's attention, energy and physical reserves. But men tend to invest instead in singular tasks, limited foci, specialist areas.

This leads to treating people by formula. Women read books about how diverse and complex things are; how nuanced, how different of meaning things can be. Men read books about x laws of this, y rules of that.

Men cannot keep up. But there are a few things that help. Be random — do random nice things once in a random while. Believe in the other person as the same person but with different daily seasons. Try not to understand in terms of linear logic, but in terms of accepting the many contradictions that a real person can have. Don't hunt the logical contradictions to destruction, but enjoy the different perspectives in each facet.

Above all things, love. Imperfect human love is much more acceptable than neglect, no matter how benign and well-meant. Leaving someone alone to cool down is not as good as leaving someone alone so you can cook a meal for her.

In the Good Book, men are enjoined to love their wives. But wives are not told to reciprocate in quite the same way. A look at the whole Book tells you why: men can only do a few things, but they can do them exceedingly well if they remember to do them at all — this is a key reminder. Women, on the other hand, are made to be 'helpmeets', are able to help with and understand many things, and tend to be critical of male efforts and behaviour (see, for example, Sarah laughing at the idea of Abraham becoming a father, and then later manipulating his efforts).

Women, in other words, need to be tolerant while hoping for the best. Men need to remember to love, with or without understanding it all. It seems to work.

Twenty-Five Years

Twenty-five years are like a morning gone in seconds. And yet, there are indelible traces; in 1987 I wrote this, but in 2007 I wrote this. In the first, I was sure of what I was writing when I was writing it; now, I am quite sure I didn't know what I was writing about, and the words seem weak. In the second, I wasn't so sure about the writing, but I was far more sure of what I was writing about, and I think the lines are stronger for that.

Yesterday, hearing at first hand about personal pain and sorrow, and the shaping of lives, I felt inadequate. My own burdens are lighter, spread out over time and now thinned by distance and the weakness of the mind's eye. But sometimes God does let you roll back the curtains of the theatre of memory, even though those revels are ended.

And there it is, the canteen with the creaky benches, the cracked cement floor, the noise and smell of breakfasts and lunches to be paid for and consumed. You see some details very clearly, and some not at all. The unicorn is still a unicorn, and that is a wonderful thing; the rugby lads are bankers and lawyers and teachers now, and who's to say what has been gained or lost?

Was it all worthwhile? Certainly not. Was some of it worth anything? Some of it was worth a lot, and very precious even, in its time and time thereafter. What we retrieved from the old ruins is what we have for now. There are old roses locked up in old rooms; old letters in old drawers — they fade and fall apart, and they blow away in the wind.

In the end, only a very few things abide. But friendship is one of those things that can brighten the pathway to that end, and I am glad for it.

Love in a Time of Choler

The current age of man is neither reflective nor intellectual; since it is not sanguine either, it must be an age of choler — an age, as the ancients might say if exposed to modern jargon, dominated by the yellow bile of intemperate drive and antipathetic task orientation. In such an environment, our concerns become curiously short-sighted. Our priorities become curiously ill-defined and long-term. In short, there is a gap between what concerns us and what has prior claim on our vision.

It is this, I suspect, which makes love so difficult for some people. I've come to that suspicion not only by looking at others, but also at myself. It is easy to say in a vague sort of way that you love someone, that you will miss them when they're gone, and so on. It is harder to be concrete in the medium term.

For example, it's easy to say something like, "Today I'll give X a treat," or, "Today (or tomorrow), we'll go to Destination Y and do Z." It's easy to think of birthday presents and even the writing of a poem or two. It is also easy to say, "I'll be waiting for you after you finish university; it's only four years more," or, "Someday, we'll look back and think about all the times we've spent together."

But what are our concrete plans for developing the thick layer of affection between the seed of passion and the skin of compatibility? What are the things we work towards together? If we can have 5-year plans for schools that are never carried out, yet call this progress, is there hope for 5-year plans for human relationships that are carried out and are the true workings of a conscious and deliberate love?

Yes, I realise that some people do shy away from linking 'conscious' and 'deliberate' to 'love'. But 'love' is not just a noun, a thing, an emotion; 'love' is also a verb, an act, a process.

In my experience, to treat love purely as an emotion is to dilute its power and its impact, to make it vague and somehow thematic but not concrete. It makes the question of whether you love someone one of whether you feel that you love someone. And that makes it easier to confuse or deceive yourself.

It's not that we don't love the people we say we love; rather, it makes it harder because our emotions change with time, temperature, distance and the concentration of caffeine in our bodies. But things done are done; things to be done are things that you can objectively see will be (or won't be) done.

That's not to say, either, that you must measure love only in terms of things done and objectives attained, plans carried out and 'areas for improvement' improved. That would make it something like one of those schools-run-like-a-business.

What I think love is, to borrow the analogy of the four temperaments again, is that it has to have the short-term enthusiasm of the sanguine, the short-term focus of the choleric, the long-term persistence of the phlegmatic, and the long-term introspection of the melancholic. But it can't be four separate things, because the medium-term gap appears. It has to be an integrated programme.

This means that the enthusiasm and focus must be stretched, while the persistence and introspection must be anchored to the near future. Think about the next year, the next two years. Look back at the last year or so. And learn to enjoy every bit of it, without anxiety for the next day or the next ten years.

If you're in love, love will abide. But it also needs some deliberate positive cultivation, not just the deliberate negative avoidance of bad things. And somehow, your relationship will stretch to bridge the gap; before you know it, you will have loved someone for a year, two years, five years, ten years, twenty years and more. But that's as far as I've got.

Kindness

Occasionally, I am overwhelmed with kindness from those who have known me briefly or not at all. Acquaintances over a few distant years, supervisors and subordinates of a few short months, peers of nodding acquaintance, students of long-forgotten classes – all these people have shown me kindness, and as I sit here counting my blessings, I realise that quite often, the amount of debt we can owe others is far more than we can pay.

There is only one way to balance the books: if each of us returns kindness for kindness, if each of us creates more kindness spontaneously, the 'kindness economy' will boom and the bread cast upon the waters will return manifold to each of us.

Thank you to all of you who have helped me, responded to me, shone light upon my path, and fended darkness away from me. Each of you, no matter how long our contact or acquaintance, occupies a place of value in my heart.

Spreadsheets In Love

This is a part of my life that sometimes seems silly, a little bit unreal, a little bit odd even to me now. But sometimes you learn things that nobody believes. And so this post is one I make knowing that it will not be believed, and that really, I am free.

It concerns the process and practice of loving, and learning what is not love, and what is. It concerns the making of bonds, and the discovery that whatever bond was formed in ages past, it no longer exists. And perhaps, it is about discernment and the use of computers.

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I was once eighteen and full of it. It's something sublethal that happens to most boys. For it is true (although we don't learn how true till we are twice that age) that our physical and mental powers are in full bloom at that age. You will never eat so much again, you will never recover so quickly from injury, as when you are in that magical zone from about 17 to 23. And the peak of it all is 18.

I had been dating (well, those social engagements fraught with peril and silliness that we called 'dates' were part of it) since I was fourteen. And one day, it was more than four years later, and I sat down with an old computer named 'Ancient Eric' and tried to work out, with a spreadsheet and about 256k of memory, what it was that made some of my relationships last longer and some last a lot shorter.

No surprises. I used many parameters, but only a few seemed statistically significant at all. And here, to my everlasting regret and consternation (mixed with a little personal triumph and perverse happiness), are the empirical results.

The most important predictor seems to be socioeconomic compatibility. That seems mercenary, materialistic even. But it turns out to be true for various reasons: people with the same SES live in similar areas, come from similar backgrounds, talk about similar things and know the same people. I had relationships which were far more stable when the SES was within about one standard deviation of mine. It's important to remember that religion is sometimes part of SE compatibility too.

The next most important predictor is time spent in communication. I used to log all my phonecalls, my face-to-face talk and walk time, stuff like that. It's obviously true that time spent together, in which actual communication occurs, helps a relationship develop (whether for good or bad). In fact, the act of recording these things makes you more aware of them. That's always good. It's a habit I maintained deep into married life.

And the third, and least significant of the most significant, is the number of times a week that you say nice things to each other which are specific and meaningful and... randomly distributed, I think. It helps, but it isn't as powerful as the first two. But it's good to make a habit of it.

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At this point, a number of you will say, "All this is common sense, we don't need you to tell us that, and besides, God's will prevails (or something like that)." I guess my point is that I was gathering empirical data. God does tend to pick winners, and the winners have some correlations somewhere. Where He picks really odd couples, we notice because they are unusual and don't fit the normal correlations. They're outliers, and special cases. They don't perturb the data much.

I collected 43 sets of data. I got my friends to give me more input. I started on sociological research when I was pretty young, I think. And human nature remains (more or less) constant over the generations. Some day I will tell you more about that. But for now, this is all I have to say.

And of course, I am sure no one will believe me anyway. Heh.

Intimidating

Just before midnight, someone I appreciate very much told me that I was once a 'rather intimidating individual'. That person no longer feels that way in such a negative sense. This occasioned a moment of reflection. Why, and how?

The word 'intimidating' means 'inspiring of fear', from the Latin timeo - to fear. It literally means 'to put fear into'. It isn't quite flattering, although further inquiry absolves me from being a source of true phobia. The Good Book says that perfect love drives out fear; this would seem to imply that fear is an unhealthy emotion between people who are supposed to have an agapean relationship - whether in one direction or both. The same verse links fear to punishment; this implies that if I were intimidating, it would be because of my capacity as someone in authority.

In this last capacity, I confess I believe that the ability to inspire fear is an important gift. From our enlightened and rational post-modern vantage, we view fear as an unnecessary impediment to civilisation, a shadowplay of ancient superstitions and primordial fantasies into which we regress under stress. But I believe that fear is no impediment; our overweaning sense of self is a far greater burden. The same people who tell us that the universe dwarfs us into obscurity will also tell us that we should have a large sense of the grandeur of humanity. The two are compatible only as a last-ditch defence against atheistic insignificance. For the odd thing is that it is a sense of the fear of God which actually tells us how valuable we are.

Fearing the impersonal universe is nothing. Fearing a person is to understand something about the nature of self and of intelligence and of society. Fearing a personal God is to understand how mighty the things of the spirit are, and how great we are in our smallness, that we can apprehend the Almighty at all. In a purely physical universe, scale is scale, size is truth. In a metaphysical universe, scale is irrelevant and being is all.

Which leads me back to the person who once felt intimidated, and no longer does. It is a mature relationship of minds and hearts which takes away the element of fear. Moses spoke to God as a man speaks with his friend - and he risked much in that relationship, but feared nothing in it. It is my dearest wish that I might be able to intimidate when necessary, but that it will never become gratuitous to me, and never an obstacle to genuine friendship.

To you who inspired these thoughts, my thanks. I know that you have mentioned my 'force of personality', and others have complained about other elements of my nature. It was never my desire to inspire overmuch fear, but to guide with a firm hand; this time of reflection will help me do that.

Family

Here I am at the family Christmas reunion. This is a single room. There is a lot of food here: four kinds of salads, five kinds of cold cuts, a variety of sushi, field mushroom soup with rolls and butter, lamb, fish, prawns, beef, mixed vegetables, sliced fruit, seven kinds of Christmas cookies, a pudding, longans with almond jelly, a log cake.

Suddenly, I am filled with the odd sensation of knowing that most of what I am depends on my relationships with others. Who is here with me? Who are they in relation to me? I try to think of these relations first in their simplest terms - bonds of siblinghood, parenthood, marriage.

I am here. My wife is here. My father (+ wife (my mother) + second son (my brother)). My father's eldest brother (+ wife + eldest daughter (+ husband) + third daughter (+ husband + son + daughter) + son). My father's father's brother's son (+ wife + son). My father's mother's third sister's eldest son (+ second wife + third son). Some family friends. It is an odd gathering because so many are away. My sister (+ husband) on the phone. It's difficult to think of how much these people mean to me and still reduce them to simple data structures.

And so, this is my family at Christmas. And yet, not.