Justice, Right and Wrong

 

Memorial at Anfield to the 96 Hillsborough victims

I think this observation from John Cowper Powys is highly relevant to the Hillsborough tragedy - the events of that dreadful day and across the twenty-seven years as the victims’ families fought for justice.  As we are all now fully aware from the details and images that have been released and reported, the bereaved families have suffered unbelievable pain not only as a result of the deaths of their loved ones, but at the hands of the police, media, and politicians who sought to bury their culpability with the dead and cover for each other.

 

In his works, Powys reminds us that we must be aware and vigilant, questioning and sceptical of those in power, of the media, of propaganda, and of government.  We are human beings, individuals with rights under the law.  Sometimes it is necessary to fight for ourselves, to defend ourselves when others abuse their positions of power and influence.  The Hillborough  families’ fight has been a long haul and I salute their tenacity and determination to get justice for their loved ones, and admire the depth of love that drove them, and kept them going for nearly thirty years.  

“No one who has studied at all closely the procedures in our criminal Law Courts can fail to have been struck by the sheer human wisdom, beyond that of any professional psychologists, of our British Judges, these men of super-common sense, whose business is to defend the Rights of the Individual under the Law, if it be necessary against the Government and the Police. (JCP’s emphasis)

Now our home-critics…are inclined to take all this for granted, forgetting the long terrible historic struggle which endowed the Law and it Judicial Interpreters with this tremendous supremacy.

But there is something else; for the Law itself is based upon a less ponderable product, of a far longer, far older, far more tragically-contested evolution.  I refer to the evolution of the human conscience, of the human sense of right and wrong.”

(John Cowper Powys, Mortal Strife)

A Manual for Living

 

John Cowper Powys outside his home in Corwen, North Wales, 1950s

With his hand resting on a walking stick, a white-haired old man is photographed outside his home at the edge of a Welsh village. There is nothing to indicate that this simple man had spent thirty years in America giving talks and lectures to huge audiences that included Ezra Pound, Charlie Chaplin, Emma Goldman, Paul Robeson and Isadora Duncan, many of whom became his friends, or that Henry Miller visited this house to meet the man with whom he had been corresponding. His unassuming appearance belies the fact that he is the author of 23 novels and has been compared to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Walter Scott and James Joyce and his autobiography, described as “one of the great books of the 20th century.”  A prolific writer, he wrote poetry, letters, works of fiction and non-fiction from the late 1800s until a few years before he died in 1963, prompting one commentator to remark on hearing of the news of death, Yes, but did he stop writing?” Among those who admired his work were Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch, J. B. Priestley, Theodore Dreiser, Martin Amis and Margaret Drabble.  Yet his works are neglected and the majority of people have never heard of him.

Though poor in monetary terms, Powys left behind many riches particularly what he termed his ‘life-philosophy.’  Originally developed for his own personal use, he became convinced that he had found something that everyone could use to achieve a happier and more fulfilled life.  He was concerned with the lived experience of the ordinary person and disseminated his ideas through his writings not for material success or recognition but to help others to deal with the problems of living.

Although written many decades ago, much of what he has to say is highly relevant to our lives today as the themes he addresses are –life, happiness, death, truth, nature, - are timeless.  The trends and developments in science, technology and society that he identified have advanced and accelerated in recent decades and his ideas and strategies are, if anything, more relative and pertinent to our lives today.  If ever there was a time to rediscover him it is now.

Chance and fate led me to discover Powys but writings such as his should not be lying in the shadows waiting for the occasional person to happen upon them. It is for this reason that I am in the process of writing a book, A Manual for Living, about JCP's life-philosophy. Having compiled an anthology of his philosophy for living but unable to secure a publisher, I decided to write a narrative summary that I hope will be more attractive to publishers and more accessible to the reader.  JCP died in 1963 so there are copy-right restrictions in relation to his work and for that reason, I cannot self-publish the anthology but it is an option open to me with a narrative summary.  One way or another, I am determined to promote the ideas and wisdom of this overlooked writer and philosopher of the ordinary person.

Where is Happiness to be Found?

 John Cowper Powys believed the purpose of life is to be happy.  But despite the fact that we all want to be happy it seems to evade us.  Part of the problem, he argued, is that we look for it in the wrong places.  We look externally to other people and possessions but the source of true happiness lies elsewhere...

 "It is not our struggle to be happy that is mistaken; it is our
false idea that we can find happiness anywhere but in ourselves. 

Pleasure can come and go at random and by chance for it depends on outward things; but happiness does not depend on outward things. It is born of the mind, it is nourished by the mind, it is what rises, like breath in a frosty air, from the mind’s wrestling with its fate. We are not born to be happy. We are born to struggle for happiness. We are born because of pleasure, but we are born in pain. We are surrounded by pain, and we are lucky if our end is painless. But deep within us is a sacred fount, from whose channel, by a resolute habit of the will, we can clear away the litter that obstructs the water of life. Not in what we possess, not in what we achieve, not in the opinion of others, not in hope, not in admiration, not in love, not in anything below or above the sun, is the secret of happiness to be found. 

It is only to be found in ourselves."

(John Cowper Powys, The Art of Happiness) 

How John Copwer Powys Changed my Life

Despite considering myself widely read, in fact a bit of a bibliophile, I had never before heard of John Cowper Powys until reading the two chapters devoted to him in David Goodway’s, Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow.  It proved a fateful meeting indeed.

If ever a book had an apt title, it is ‘Seeds’.  Across the months, I found myself taking it down from the shelf and re-reading the chapter on Powys’s life-philosophy, until the book opened automatically at those pages and they began to come loose from the spine. I bought one of the original philosophical books, then another, and another.  It seemed that whenever I began to read anything else, JCP’s philosophical books called me back.  So I read the series and his Autobiography, and was enthralled and inspired by his practical wisdom and the relevance of his ideas to my own life. But there was no immediate action on my part; not visible anyway, instead JCP’s ideas planted themselves deep in my mind and lay dormant for several months. Then one day, I realised that I felt content, something I had not experienced for a long time.  When I began to think about it, I discovered I had been implementing some of his practical strategies in my daily life and was now feeling their beneficial effects. 

The previous year or two were ones when I was unhappy in a vague sort of way, discontented is probably a more apt description.  I was happy in my immediate personal relationships but overall, I felt estranged from others and the world at large.  I was a nurse, and during the course of every day there was something to remind me of the preciousness and fragility of life.  I had no right to be dis-satisfied, unsettled and bored when I had every reason to be happy and grateful for what I had.  But reprimanding myself never worked for long before I slipped back into those feelings of futility, sadness and loneliness.  I was sick – sick of the life I was living.  I still loved life but I hated the daily grind, the regimented cycle of work, meeting friends for coffee, nights out for meals, shopping sprees (actual and window) listening to the endless chatter about clothes, holidays, cars and celebs, plans for expansion of houses or next steps up the career ladder.   All about me, people talked of ‘aspiration society,’ - the word ‘aspiring’ seemed to be included in every conversation.  Increasingly, I sat at the edge, feigning interest while sinking deeper into despair as I realized my values and ideas were at odds with the mainstream.  I had aspirations too but I aspired to other, different things and my life and thoughts seemed to be constantly at variance with those around me.  I now really understood what it meant to feel alone in a crowd.  It was when I was at my lowest point and feeling completely lost that JCP burst into my life. 

John Cowper Powys showed me that there are other ways to live, other ways to spend our days than living just to work, buy stuff and show off to each other.  He points to a bigger world, a wider universe full of beauty, wonder and mystery and helped me to see it, feel it and experience it, to recognise myself as part of it.  He showed me how to expand beyond the narrow limitations and instead of merely existing, to feel life, to truly live in the fullest sense.  He showed me the way to another way of living and saved my sanity.  He helped me to discover the sources of my discontent, to better understand myself and the world.  He helped to free me from the shackles of conformity and to face my fears, gave me the courage to follow my heart.   He told me it was right to retreat inwards, it was natural to seek solitude and that fulfilment can be found in books, art and music, and time spent in the natural world. He assured me that there was nothing wrong with me because I was not driven by a desire for promotion and material gain and confirmed my belief that there are different types of wealth and happiness and that compassion is more important and life-affirming than profit and money.

JCP took me on a journey of self-discovery that, like all worthwhile ventures, has been arduous at times but worth it for the knowledge, understanding, wisdom and contentment that I have gained. And although I am affected by the world, have to engage with it, deal with problems and issues that are part of living, my attitude and my world view are different. Most of all, he gave me a new found sense of feeling and being alive.   

John Cowper Powys on William Wordsworth

Yesterday was William Wordsworth’s Birthday and to mark the occasion I thought I would post this extract from John Cowper Powys’s book, The Pleasures of Literature.  Powys was greatly influenced by the Lake District poet, and this is evident in his life-philosophy with its emphasis on living a happy and simple life based on nature and sensations.

“He set out to convey in poetry a philosophy of human happiness that was of necessity a philosophy of human endurance; and he deliberately based it upon the senses.  From the senses came all those overtones and undertones that transported him so constantly to that region, to that dimension rather, where we feel the presence of the something else, the “Something far more deeply interfused” that lies “too deep for tears,” too deep for words, too deep for reason.

It was Shelley, I believe, who said that in Wordsworth the senses think.  And this is true.  But they not only think, they become ministers of grace in the sternest endurance of the spirit.   This is where Wordsworth is indeed unique among poets…

In Wordsworth there are always the simpler, austerer, lonelier presences of Nature which, like a shadow on a wayside stone, or a raven crossing a mountain chasm, or the cuckoo’s cry “breaking the silence of the seas,”  or a twisted thorn on a desolate moor, or a tuft of feathered grass stirred by the wind upon a ruined wall, blend themselves with the refusal of the stoical heart to abate one jot of resolution and independence under the shocks of untoward fortune.

It is not necessary to journey to the Lake Country, where he was born, and lived, to catch the essence of his revelation.  Many of his most characteristic poems were written elsewhere.  Wherever a wave breaks or a wind blows, wherever the sun rises or sets, wherever a highway crosses an upland unto the wide unknown, wherever the moonlight falls on the works of men’s hands, wherever a roadside ditch reveals a flowering weed, or the smoke mounts from a human hearth, or a girl sings at her work, or a child “leaps up on his mother’s arm,” or, “a single field, of many, one” rests us with its mysterious shock of obscure memory, the spirit of Wordsworth’s poetry abides.

What he communicates is deeper than the potency of the picturesque, or even, in the ordinary sense, of the beautiful.  It is of those mysterious feelings that come to us all now and then, and lift us out of ourselves and out of our sorrows, with vague intimations of something in the inner-experience of life beyond luck, beyond ill-luck, that his poetry keeps hinting…

(John Cowper Powys, The Pleasures of Literature)