Becoming By and Bye


This is written for a companionship of coaches. As archaeology finds sense through meditating on remains, some fragments of memory presented themselves as meaningful when asked to write of my Becoming.  But no autobiography, not ‘How I became a Coach’, (which is a history and different).

I am in a web made of chance intersections.  Just as my DNA has existed for ever yet is pure accident, so this is a web of ‘becomings’ I could never make alone.  Webs connect not direct and are never still, for the present is unstable, fast becoming memory connected to a cacophony stories, of memories. In other words, I am not original but wholly relational.

So Gwion Bach became a grain of corn and Ceridwen a black hen and she ate him. The hunt started when he tasted the splash of wisdom from her cauldron and now, she won.  But, no: nine months later she gave birth to Taliesin, the Shining One of bards – her loved child: Gwion won.  But, no: follow the web:  Perhaps art and poetry are touched by wisdom and incubated, born and loved to exist and survive. Ask for the flesh of a story and you will hear something linear.  Ask for the bones of a story and a jointed, skeletal web of memory, survival and interchangeable winners is yours to understand.

To me, Becoming is evolution:  more and more, I notice the swelling of a grain of philosophy I once swallowed when trying to win a competition.

But I lack competitiveness.  My Father, propelled by a sense of being undervalued, moved us between continents searching for fulfilment, justified by duty to support my Mother and my only brother’s development. In the slipstream, I was never in the right system, in the right place, at the right time so I missed exams and could not use an entry into university.  My Mother, faced with a bemused teen, decided to enrol me into art school, her influence free because my Father’s was exhausted (and I drew pictures a lot).  My student grant was tiny, so I got acquainted with wages: bars, hospitals, houses, farms and shops paid for paint and rent in-between lectures and studios. There was no time or space for limiting and exhausting competition to become much. I evolved needing to pay attention to the chances offered by relationships colliding, collapsing and contorting (including an early, short marriage). All about what suggested survival and all in the web.

Art school required demonstrating innate ability, academic and applied. This entailed seeming thus for the beholder, so becoming beholden.  Not just in making paintings and studying theory, but the Crit.  A Crit is when fellow students and lecturers gather to criticise you and your work out loud.  The premise is democratic critical analysis, but the reality is challenge, not infrequently coloured with shades of ridicule and competitiveness.  Raw, rapid stuff of agendas framed by cultural bias, preferences, and playing the game.  Thus, I learned Taste and how that is the only flavour in the place, a prescribed palate.  But I also noticed how this meant the art world often ate itself, hungry for value but somehow sure other worlds would find it indigestible.  Art is all about beholding and it is locked up in buildings and bank accounts.  Creativity doesn’t really exist, other than it is all about evolutionary survival. I mostly did creativity because to make things from the flotsam and jetsam of distaste was to escape competition, get interested and see evolution at work. Competition’s greatest achievement is failure because it forces meditation on remains.

I am five years old and Paddington Station bustles, the air chewy as stale rice and tasting of headaches. The Relatives put us in springy cars smelling of hot leather, cigarettes and petrol, motion and regular sick all at once.   Wedged between Parents, each topped by a smaller sibling, I feel London passing by without coherence. A sleepy sister flops over, Mother’s arm catches her fall, and it clears the window for me to look through. The girl stands at the top of some doorsteps in a strobe frame of vertical white pillars and horizontal black railings, described by slashed, pink sunshine, watery, purple shadows and a ransom of jewel hues in blues and golds.  I am thrilled with the beauty of it.  Then gone; the moment created from the accidental mess of the moment.  Beauty, abstract sense-making, moves profoundly, as do all revelations.

To sit in storms is beautiful, revealing the liberty of being without power.   Watching, hearing, smelling and feeling the monsoon is to worship a performance so dangerously beautiful that all there is to do is to give up and give in.  So, the sadhus with overflowing bellies, wilting frangipani and siva-ash smeared faces assumed transcendence. In their cave, were macaques mating, masturbating, defecating and fighting oblivious to the the storm. Stone Ganesh was grubby and the Faithful gave him decaying things while diamonded ferns glittered around the cave’s entrance.  In Church, the rituals were said, and the old building looked on, from a ghostly past of critical observers monkeying around as gorgeous gargoyles, marvellous misericords, superb sheela-na-gigs and glorious green men.  Given weighty tablets of stone, the Faithful struggled wearily through the inconvenience of rainbows in Spring rain.

Never ‘in nature’ I am fearfully never denatured.   As animal, attention to The Place matters more than The Job.  Stones warm and cool with the atmosphere and so do I, within and without.  This is the Yin and Yang, the balance of death and life of nourishment and survival the impossibility of dark without light.  Being human, I seek understanding through language, insubstantial, friable communication, hence I read a lot without a plan but with compulsion.

When Mother and Dad died within days of each other, words were made and gave me the comforting company of humans, but courageous comfort came from where animals, vegetables and minerals explained that all was well and all would be well because they cared without power.

We tell tales of defeating animals and the animalistic; though commodification, as pets, ‘in nature’ or because we farm, thinly disguises our irritation at being unable to exist without them.  I have always had the company of creatures and they have taught me survival is plurality and interdependency of the highest importance because to be the only animal on the Planet means extinction.  We tell power stories because we are afraid of just that.  A fox cub or a raven sense me, are curious and relate while the bloody remains beneath a peregrine’s butchering perch or the gnawed heather on the moor are testament to all life’s existential relating. The intertwining of lives, animal and vegetable, in a grip of mutual nourishment is a parasitic relationship I am part off and to deny that is to deny how deeply I love it.  I learn from science about life, but to live, I understand love as the piece missing in philosophies because it drives curiosity and that lifts the blindness of fear.

I have a fiction of romantic love, recognised occasionally, though I have no idea who he is.  Maybe from a past life, though I remain curious. There have been men, all of them sweet and kind people I still know and with an inevitable ex I have befriended because I don’t do competition.  Sometimes there were children: I never have had a child, though several have grown up with me.  The mutual faith of my forty year long marriage survives because we understand why love in a relationship is benignly parasitic and we are also often curious together. Beauty breaks my heart often, each time reminding me that love and tragedy are twins existing without songs and legends of sex or sentiment but lessons of survival in the web.  I once read that true love’s denouement is the inability to exist without the other.  Romeo and Juliet and Achilles’ obsessive attempts to follow Patroclus to the Styx being just two examples.  Novalis put it as Romantics will, ‘Love is the final end of the world’s history, the Amen of the universe’.  I prefer to consider love slaps us awake to the universe:  maybe it’s the same thing.

Not really a story all this, but the light that plays, constantly, in all dimensions and in all frequencies over the web explains where (I suspect) I really come from.  Is that Becoming, if so what?  Here I sit, in my bit of the web, blended in other webs and I have no notion about what happens next – other than germination: the reader may be kind enough to be part of that.

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