The E Word
In which the author and his Dad visit a local beach and are caught up in a moment of .. of... of...
As I’ve said, I had returned home to be a carer for my elderly father. We are on the East coast of Scotland, in the county of Fife. My Dad and I would often take a trip down to the south of Fife on a Sunday. Dad was particularly fond of an old hotel in the town of Crail that serves excellent meals. On the way back, we would stop off at the beach near the small town of Kingsbarns. Dad was too frail to go on the beach, but he would sit in a little shelter that is there, looking over the view of the bay, whilst I stretched my legs for a walk. The open rafters of the shelter hosted several swifts’ nests.
On one particular visit, baby swifts were just emerging from their nests and getting ready for flight. The parent birds were swooping in and out of the shelter with food for the young fledglings. The swift catches its prey on the wing and spends most of its life airborne. These fledglings, once they took to the wing, would set off soon for Africa, spend our winter there and then head back north, possibly to this same little shelter on the coast of Fife. After my walk along the beach, I sat down beside Dad in the shelter to watch the parent swifts’ busy food deliveries and their fledglings precariously perched outside the nests, giving their wings some experimental flaps.
Both father and son have a certain anxiety about life sometimes, although they express it in different ways. These rare moments of calm – looking out over the bay of Kingsbarns, and watching the swifts come and go – are medicine for us both. I think it is my happiest memory of Dad.
That little moment of calm was just a lucky accident, you might say, but it leads me on to thinking about the nature of pleasure.
For many folk it seems that pleasure is the thing they seek in life and possibly pleasure of what might be termed the superficial kind – food, drink, holidays, houses, cars, gadgets, clothes. Someone successful in getting all these things might say that their life is thereby complete – there is no need to do anything else, they have ‘arrived’. And who am I to say otherwise?
But others might counter that whilst all of those material things are good to have, it is shared pleasures that are the most important. Hence, intimacy, family and friendship are the true basis of pleasure because nothing that we might own is really any good unless we can share it with others. Well, we might not want to share absolutely everything! But even so, shared pleasure is a helpful notion.
We could go on to say that pleasure is therefore a kind of two-way street. We share gifts of pleasure with others and we receive gifts back in return. It is only true pleasure when it is a gift. I’m a bit more ambivalent about this one! It sounds like sharing has become a rule to which we must abide and that personal, individual pleasure is a bit suspect. But even so, seeing pleasure as a gift is helpful. It is especially helpful, I think, when we consider that our personal happiness is tied up with the society in which we live. The sharing of our gifts then might not be just with people we know or meet but just as much a sharing with society at large.
Many would say that there needs to be a bit of purpose mixed in with our pleasure before we can achieve some kind of lasting happiness or joy. Pleasures come and go, but we can choose to step towards our passion and our enthusiasm and it is this choosing which leads to our flourishing. There’s a narrative being created in each person’s life and that narrative is, above all, the things we choose in order to bring pleasure into our lives. To be compassionate towards ourselves then is to see our lives with a broader view. What will make us happy in the long-term? Will we be able to look back on our lives from old age and feel that life has been worthwhile? I like this idea of narrative, but then someone who writes is almost bound to say this! There’s probably a lot of people who would not consider that they are trying to build a story with their lives.
What we could say at this point is that pleasure is a very personal thing. We all have different pleasures, and to try to grade them in some way – superficial, profound, low-brow, high-brow – is not that helpful. But let’s go back to where we started, with that little moment of calm and contemplation in nature.
Here is where I may lose you, dear reader! Because I’m going to call that time watching the swallows with my Dad an enchantment!
I don’t mean, of course, enchantment in the sense that the word is used in a fantasy novel or in mythology.
So what do I mean? I mean enchantment as something that completely captures our attention for a while – makes us stop and look or listen, taste, sniff or touch. Makes us feel that we are briefly outside of ourselves and part of something larger.
I don’t mean, necessarily, that enchantment is a spiritual experience. Most, if not all pleasure is rooted in the body. So I’d say you don’t need to be a spiritual person to be enchanted. In fact, that’s the good thing about enchantment – you don’t need to be clever or have ‘good taste’ or any such thing in order to have an experience of enchantment. So what do you need?
Time, for one thing. Time to be able to stop and look or listen or whatever so that the enchantment can overtake you. And also, something that’s more difficult to define. I suppose I’d call it a mind that’s open to enchantment. But like I say, that does not mean a clever mind or a superior mind or anything of that sort. Perhaps it is just a mind open to new experiences and able to be astonished and overwhelmed by life.
Enchantment then cannot be put in a bottle and sold to us! But could we at least make it more likely to happen? If we were building a utopia, would we be able to put pleasure and enchantment at its core?
Many stories of utopia start with food, drink, comfortable buildings and perhaps advanced technology. Then, if they are a little more savvy, utopia-builders will recognise our need for good relationships and the link between personal happiness and good governance plus well-functioning societies.
There are some openings for enchantment in all this perhaps, but it is only really when we get to culture that we’re anywhere near creating enchantment deliberately.
Human-made things. Literature. Music. Art. Sport. It’s difficult to begin describing how any of these can create enchantment. And of course, the enchantment might be there for some and not for others. But even so, I think we should always set our sights on utopia and I think we should always aim for enchantment. Stories, as I’ve eluded to above, are what make us – we are immersed in story, and story is fantasy as well as enchantment. But we have gone into dangerous territory with the kinds of fantasy we serve up today. Our abiding myths are of eternal progress and conquering heroes – and those heroes make their conquests through power and often violence. And strangely today’s fantasies focus on dystopias rather than utopias – utopias are sneered at as silly, despite this belief in eternal progress and technological advancement. So we have to be careful to distinguish between fantasy and enchantment in story. Enchantment is seeing the beauty in the here and now and the familiar rather than trying to conquer and dominate the world. Enchantment can bring a utopia about by seeing the world differently instead of desperately trying to change the world.
We have our model – our examples – in nature. Somehow she can always enchant us, if we let her. So we need to let nature’s wildness into our lives, both literally and metaphorically. We need to be wild of body, mind and soul.
And that leads me to the final ingredient for a utopia – to be able to bring people to that state of being that let’s us appreciate enchantment when it shows up. We might say that this is part of human flourishing, but again it is very difficult to give expression to exactly what might be involved. All that I can think to say is that some peace, some stillness and some silence is involved.
Enchantment is beauty really – and perhaps you’d have preferred if I’d said beauty all along! But it is more that just the beauty of an object, a place or a person. Enchantment is beauty as a gift of grace.
I wish we could bottle it! I really wish we could. But failing that I hope you’ll look out for it and relish it when it arrives. Without enchantment the world is dead.
