When I was five years old I picked out from my parents’ bookshelf, in the sitting room of our house in Oakleigh Park, North London, one of the small collection of LIFE Nature Library books they had: The Universe.
It isn’t my earliest memory by any means, but it was, it turns out, an extremely significant moment for the unfolding of my life since then.
I was drawn to this book more than the other titles; The Earth, Animal Behaviour, The Primates, and as I opened it up and looked at the images, I read and saw that we in fact lived on a huge ‘ball’! How did the people living in countries on the bottom not fall off? How come the water stayed at the top, not running down to the lower part? Didn’t the ball fall? After all there was nothing to support it. It wasn’t resting on anything or suspended by any means. Then I found that our Earth-ball was spinning around at great speed as well as travelling around the Sun, which was MASSIVE by comparison. Just enormous! We were so small! This was all quite disturbing and didn’t make any sense. There were other planets (the word for the balls), and there were moons that revolved around some of these other planets as well as ours did around the earth. We were living on a planet, one of a number that surrounded and somehow went flying around the Sun on long circular lines. Though this was very radical information to have come across so unexpectedly, I clearly had to accept it was how things really were, because it was in a book and I couldn’t even imagine doubting it’s truth.
Then as I went a little further, I found that these planets and the Sun were collectively called the Solar System. They formed some kind of unified whole. I took this all on board as best I could. It was still disturbing though, seeing the illustrations, that our Solar System was just hanging in mid-air in deep darkness. But I accepted this as true and continued to be drawn along.
I recall very vividly, feeling the Solar System as a whole, within the open embrace of my arms, fingertips touching in front of me as I imagined the Sun and planets contained within an invisible box that my encompassing arms represented. But then, the next step blew my mind completely — an atomic explosion in my head — there had to be an ‘outside’ to this arm-contained solar system! This ‘box’ had to be somewhere, within something. There was an outside to every inside. My bright, naturally inquisitive, young mind, in a series of flashes, prompted by the images on the pages in front of me, of the galaxy and then the ever-greater universe with groups of galaxies that contained innumerable solar systems, comprehended for a moment, the endless vastness of the universe, of space without end, and of my absolute minusculeness within this endlessness. Infinity!
It was too much. Too much for an unprepared mind to take in.
How does one prepare a mind to take such information in?
Gifted with hindsight, many years later and with a great deal of active searching on my side, I can see now that this was my own Big Bang; the birth point of two great themes of my own small life. One theme can be expressed as ‘being overwhelmed’, resulting in some kind of deep depression, as I could not see that my existence in this incomprehensible, but momentarily comprehended, endlessness, could possibly have any point to it. My value was so negligible as to be non-existent. I fell into a long-term existential crisis as a five year old.
I don’t recall talking to anybody about this episode. There was no asking of annoying ‘why?’ questions of the adults around me. Perhaps I did, but none of their responses, if I did ask, had any measurable effect on me at the time. I was alone, insignificant and pointless.
However, I have a tenacious character and the barely perceivable other theme began it’s life at exactly the same quantum moment. It could be described as the first step on my spiritual path. Something in me was not satisfied with this state of affairs; that I was a non-entity without a reason for existing. Something I learned to refer to as a ‘search’ was awakened in me.
Any existential crisis can only occur with an existential question beside it. Or in front of it, or within it…
I’d say that my incipient and barely active, rational mind, shut down to an extent after that moment, in a self-protective way, so that I could try and process the unprocessable, and stop any more mind-expanding material from entering, which might put me in that terrifying state again.
I began to tell people that the word ‘universe’ gave me a headache and would cover my ears and hum or babble loudly to keep the universe word out of my mind. In my naïveté I didn’t realise what an easy-to-use weapon I had handed my siblings, which they deployed successfully for many years.
My search remained, faintly alive within the dark cavities of my heart and mind, whispering its dissatisfaction with all the answers that life offered in various guises over the years.
When I was in the midst of my nightclubbing heyday, when I was about 17 or 18, if I got into a conversation with anybody between the long periods of dancing, I would ask straightforwardly (or shout above the music), what they thought the purpose of life was. To ‘have a laugh’ was the most common response, which meant nothing to me. It actually saddened me that this was what most people believed. To have fun, then die. ‘Life’s a bitch/beach and then you die’ was the second most used, which elicited the same response within me. In my innocent thinking, I regarded these people who were generally a bit older than me with vastly more life experience than myself, and I blindly believed that they should have known something. It was all very confusing and many club nights would see me sink, in the blink of an eye, into the blackest despair.
As a predominantly emotionally oriented person, I found using my intellectual reasoning very difficult. (In fact I didn’t realise that I wasn’t actually using my powers of intellectual reasoning until a few years ago when I first managed to do it.) At the time it didn’t occur to me that I was actually asking the right question, but I was asking it in the wrong place to the wrong people at the wrong time. What I can now appreciate was that the important thing was in fact to keep asking the question, painful though that was. This is one of the keys to a whole life I believe: to keep such questions alive through the continued gentle asking of them. For this we must also exercise and grow our powers of discernment.
The question doesn’t necessarily need to be asked out loud to anybody else, though this may add potency, it can also lead to increased social difficulties. But I can keep asking it inwardly, holding it and nurturing it without expectation of an answer. Gently. Other questions may grow from the original question. This is good. This gives depth to the original question and to your self, your mind and your heart. Where does your question come from? What part of you is asking? Listen. Listen more deeply than you think you can, just by coming back to the question and the act of listening, over and over. This is like a seed, planted in the cosmos. It will bear fruit if you keep watering it. It even seems to have an effect to just ask the question quite regularly, without necessarily feeling the depth and discomfort of an unanswerable question.
Our contemporary way of life has conditioned us to expect answers though, not to wait and nurture something in this way, so we need to gently relearn this ancient way of living with a question. Only of course, if we wish to live this way, and the majority do not wish to do this, which is fine. Lucky them!
In the winter of early 1984, when I was just turning 19, I had been housed by the DHSS (Department of Health & Social Security) in a cheap hotel on Gower Street along with my friend Debbie, who had helped me with the bewildering paperwork that was needed to receive benefits and a roof over one’s head.
I had a small room with a single bed, a hand basin and a rickety wardrobe. After rent was covered, there was a little money for food. Without a fridge and in a generally depressed state, my diet consisted of corn flakes and bread & jam, for my two meals a day. My improvised fridge consisted of keeping the milk and butter on the windowsill until the sun came up. As my window faced east, I then had to get them in and put them in the basin, which I’d fill with cold water. I was not a big fellow at the time, and managed to lose 14lbs (6.35kg) in the 5 or 6 weeks I lived there, which was about 10% of my body weight at the time.
There was an understandable limit to Debbie’s help, and holding my hand through the process of finding a more permanent place to live was not within her remit. The spring was due to usher in an increase in the weekly cost of the hotel that would leave me with only a couple of quid to buy my meagre food supplies. I was paralysed with a fear that led to inaction. The form-filling and decision making that were called for, were a source of deep terror for me, I couldn’t even get my head in gear to think about where or how to look for a place to live. For Debbie I must have been an annoyingly needy pain.
I did nothing much but go clubbing and sleep, oh, and feel very sorry for my self. I was frozen and depressed. All the clubbing didn’t actually cost me any money because I only went to clubs that were run by friends and I got in free, plus, I didn’t drink alcohol. If anyone offered me a drink, as Superman did once, I had an orange juice. Otherwise I drank tap water from the washbasins in the gents. But it was clubbing that saved me from my stuck state.
Getting a lift back to the hotel from the Camden Palace by my long-suffering friend Charlie one fate-drenched night, I mentioned to him and fellow passenger Lucy, who he would then be dropping off in Holland Park where she still lived with her family, that I needed to move out of the hotel because of the rent increase that was now just a week away. Lucy instantly said ‘well you know you can always come and live with us’, meaning her family. I certainly had not known or even imagined this, but two days later, after she’d spoken to her parents, I turned up to meet Dick and Emma at 79 Lansdowne Road and see the available room.
The room was only empty because Daisy, the youngest of the three sisters, was living with her grandmother in Spain for a year to learn Spanish, and would be back at the end of August to resume her London education. I passed parental muster and hastily abandoned my not-so-decadent hotel lifestyle, to move in and temporarily become part of the amazing Temple household.
It was a few weeks, and with some stern encouragement from Emma, before I finally got focused enough to sort the appropriate DHSS paperwork out and I not only got my rent paid, but also received unemployment benefit that meant I could buy my groceries and feed myself too, making use of the glorious kitchen now at my disposal. From teetering on the edge of existing, and the thought of killing myself had once more been at the front of my mind while at the hotel, to landing on my feet in a posh five storey house in Holland Park, my twentieth year of life was a pivotal year of huge transformation, setting a course toward meaning and purpose, that I could not have imagined I was about to find. My question: why am I alive? was still gnawing away, still being asked internally, and looking back, I believe that having that strong burning question played a very real part in my arrival in this new environment of opportunity, learning and expansion.
In August, Dick and Emma were going away to Switzerland for a week, and to my astonishment Dick asked if I would work for him, looking after his gallery, which was on Yeoman’s Row in Knightsbridge. Reassured that I wouldn’t have to do much more than just let people in to see the icons, pick up the post and answer the phone, I readily agreed. He would pay me too! Incredible.
As they were leaving and Dick was giving me final encouraging instructions, he also said he’d left a book with a particular chapter bookmarked for me, on the desk in the gallery, which I might be interested in reading. Dick was the most inspiring and interesting person I had ever met, and I hung on every word, so of course I could hardly wait to get to work and read what he was recommending, despite having a deep dislike of reading, maybe even a phobia, since my five year old self had been traumatised by The Universe. To that point in my life, I had only finished reading six proper books, and two out of those six were Stig of the Dump.
As children, my brother, sister and I had been given three kinds of pocket money each week: sweet money, comic money and pocket money. Sweet money could be spent on sweets or general things (toys), but not comics. Comic money could be spent on comics and general things but not sweets, and pocket money could be spent on anything except on sweets or comics. Got that? The amount of sweet money was governed by the price of a Mars bar, and comic money by the price of The Beano. I got Whizzer & Chips, mainly I think because I liked eating chips so much. Without our mother’s strictly imposed budget restrictions, I think my brother would have spent all his money on comics, and I would have got sick each week on sweets. My sister — she would have been naturally self-regulating I imagine. Even reading my one comic a week, and swapping with David to read his, often proved too challenging for my reading capacity though. I remember trying to decipher each story solely from the pictures, and getting frustrated that I did mostly need to read the contents of each speech bubble to be able to follow the storyline.
But now, wholly uncharacteristically, I was excited to get to the gallery and read a book. As soon as I had got in, after neutralising the scary alarm system and picking the post up from the door mat, I found A New Model of the Universe waiting for me. Not expecting my world to be transformed and the question of why I exist to be reignited and reassuringly nurtured, and to some extent answered by another book about the universe, I began to read the marked chapter.
Dick read a great deal, and was able to read quickly. He later told me that he’d read the next important book I found at the gallery, which I took nine months to read through, including skipping most of one chapter, in a single, sleepless 36 hour sitting.
The marked chapter described the author’s responses to his visiting Notre Dame in Paris, the Sphinx and pyramids in Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India and a ‘Buddha with Sapphire eyes’ in Ceylon, as well as an encounter with Mevlevi Dervishes. My mind was expanded once more, this time by mysteries much closer to home. The author was a seeker, a man who had devoted his life to the search for meaning, determined at the start of the twentieth century to find a true source of living, ancient knowledge that might help answer his own unstoppable questions of existence and meaning, which burned away without respite. I was not alone! I was not deluded and crazy to keep asking these questions. And… reading could offer insight, there was something to find and a place to look. A reason to continue.
Once I had read through the chapter, for some reason I didn’t explore that book any further but began exploring the bookcase in the gallery with an excitement I had not had for books since the age of five. The same Russian author had written other books, and the one that caught my attention was called In Search of the Miraculous, which was also the title of the marked chapter in the first book, and something I was beginning to realise resonated with my own plight. Fragments of an Unknown Teaching was the subtitle. I began reading, very slowly of course, but with a gripped sense of uncovering something that had been waiting for me all my life.
The first forty or so pages were fairly easy going, autobiographically setting the scene for the moment when the author finally meets the man who had already acquired the knowledge he so keenly wished to acquire himself. Then my reading speed slowed down even more as the book laid out before me, a comprehensive system that described everything, which put into place in a general way, all of life. It revealed to me great purpose and a direction to travel in, where I might find what I had always wanted; understanding.
It was a very dense and intense read, but as I discovered over the coming years, that’s just the kind of thing I am drawn to. I had always been seeking depth of meaning, I wanted to have conversations that were meaningful, I passionately wanted to express something meaningful in my paintings and find something powerful in others’ paintings, writings and conversations too.
My search now had direction, and my art did as well.
