A few nights ago I was full of the fear of death. Possessed by a myriad of thoughts. The sheer dread of my corporeal existence being ended felt real. I was exhausted and wanted nothing more (ironically) than to sleep, to fall into blankness, one, so that I could be rested for the morning (I had an audition in London) and two, so I could avoid this opening void of imminent emptiness. And yet I was at the same time filled, or so it seemed, with an immense energy. I felt, if I’d got up, I could have written straight-out three novels, ream after ream, would have spilled onto page. And yet I was frozen, I could much move, my rational Apollonian self, told my inner Dionysus, that the best thing to do was remain in bed dozing, well with eyes shut if nothing else and not to expend (waste) what energy I had, sitting, tapping away into the early hours writing.
We all have these nights, or the equivalent, you are desperate to sleep but you mind is rolling over and over, churning one thought into another until there is a phantom of half dream-thought-nightmare keeping you very far away from slumber. On the surface I no doubt was thinking of one thing from the day but it soon happened that from the depths of my subconscious other less rational images and thoughts emerged. Certainly at one point I was contemplating my identity, its multi-layered nature. This was at first triggered, I think, by thoughts of my two girls so gently asleep next door (thought I knew that one or other would stir in an hour or two and so I really, really needed to get to sleep!) .
There is a universe in the eyes as, was it Blake said? Certainly Jewish tradition says if you save a life you save a universe and when you see into your child’s eyes, have a moment of bodily revelation and recognition of them as human beings, as if tapping into the ultimate. You cognate (which isn’t a verb but you know what I mean), you connect, you place a feeling, catalogue, register, understand, that they are ‘there’. They are ‘there in the world’, they are ‘here’. They have been taken from the sea of nothingness and cast, thrust, thrown into being, embodied and shimmering with life. It is the magic of being someone rather than being nothing. And somehow, by power beyond conscious action, you (and your partner) have created or been part of the agency that has created new life.
Though on this night, I have to confess, it didn’t feel like ‘new’ life. It felt like they came from something, somewhere, that had always been and always would be. That conscious life were a simple seeing through a glass darkly, seeing what lay all about, the cosmic, the eternal. And who was I in all this? Even on a prosaic level I was confused. I had too many roles. On my ‘business’ card I put ‘Actor/Writer’. Yet even that simple statement doesn’t seem to solidify matters: in terms of acting, I am always active as an audiobook narrator but often doing little in terms of the stage. My weeks are punctuated by weird auditions in small dingy studios in central London, being asked to do all kinds of daft things (‘You have the head of a dog in an office of other animals and you want to make everyone happy’ ‘First, you are a worried, gesticulating, parent but then transform your worried movements  into a stylised crazy, delighted dance’ just a couple of recent requests at auditions) or I have a few days filming, playing such underwritten parts they there is no ‘character’ really to play, or I go to see friends whom I’ve worked with a lot previously doing the kinds of things I used to do (unpaid) and wonder should I return to that, to keep my hand in as it were because I’m a professional actor not acting very much?
Then there’s my writing… well I write this blog, in a fractured, intermittant way, but I always have dozens of other projects on the go. I have at present two essay collections that need editing, my Dad’s memoir that I want to write an introduction for, my great uncle’s two books that I want to edit and again write intro’s to, a vague offer to co-write a play about Mary Shelley, the even vaguer beginning of a book of poetry, a novel set in Spain to rewrite and the list goes on. At any time I can turn my mind to one of these items and feel ‘I really need to get down and complete that project’ or another nascent project will raise its head and I think ‘Mmmh maybe that’s what I should pursue now’. All are pressing and impress themselves, intrude, poke their noses, into my every day.
I have a part-time job as a lettings officer at a school, which is a happy unpressured job where, as they used to say in the sixties, ‘the Man’ does not oppress me, but really what the hell am I doing there? Am I a ‘Lettings officer’ in my soul?
I look after the girls during parts of my week which is an occupation and a half and then there’s our new house. The four of us have just moved to Litchborough and a new house. It is the first house my wife and I have bought together. But there are seemingly hundreds of jobs to be done. Usually in everyday living you might have a ‘big’ domestic job come up every now and then. A room needs decorating, a toilet fixing, the cherry tree digging up. No problem you set aside a day or two and look forward to doing it.
However, at present, it’s like there are dozens of these jobs that I have crowding my life: curtains to be hung, doors to be cut down or rehung, shelves to be put up, rooms carpeted, lino put down in the outhouse, the loft space cleared and my thousands of books emptied from boxes, books sorted, ordered, shelved, the jungle of two large gardens hacked, chopped, dug and debris cleared, a shed erected, fences torn down and put up, paths to be cleared of moss, hedges, bushes and trees trimmed and (again) the list goes on and on.
All this whilst, as I say, looking after two beautiful, very active, growing and developing little girls, whom it is exhausting to clothe, feed, play and generally attend to at the best of times. Having and bringing up young children is (as I suspected it would be) the most exhausting thing I’ve ever done in my life. Sleep, is a precious and rare commodity. Energy, a moveable feast or an empty table.
 I’ve had great physical and mental challenges through-out my life, like most people, but with children you have these challenges, whilst also having to maintain a calm, a tolerance, an ability to be fatigued but entertaining. You can be on the point of nodding off, whilst reading stories aloud in funny voices to your delightful, bright eyed, equally exhausted-sleepy child. And try keeping a wriggling baby engaged or happy or distracted whilst you change their nappy, they have the strength of three lions in those tiny torsos!
So… anyway, there I was, with this stuff, and more, floating in my head, and feeling I had to achieve and do so much NOW because I was nearing death, death was just around the corner. My body was telling me just how old I was, everything continually ached, I always had some bodily part that was not quite functioning properly and all this meant that the years had flown by and where was I in life? What had I achieved? More importantly what more was there in me that I could achieve, creatively and artistically? And it felt like the answer was, that there was a lot, that I had hardly tapped into my creative-unconscious at all. That the inner pool of imagination had hardly been touched and I was, thus far, a mere Narcissus gazing at my reflection. Most creative people have these kinds of trouble, these self-doubts, I think, but some also, can look upon their completed work(s) and feel a sense of ‘progress’. The very lucky ones might even sense ‘achievemen’t and the even luckier ones realise a ‘recognition in the world’ and the really, really lucky ones, may know financial, as well as artistic, reward.
The truth is, for most creative people writers, musicians, artists, they will receive little recognition, wealth or fame. Equally true however, is that these ‘rewards’ are to a degree empty or lacking in much substance, at least in the sense that they will not take away or resolve the troubling and odd need to create. Worldly success can give artists a sense of self-worth and certainly a more comfortable physical existence but just as surely it often destroys creativity or gets in the way of it, there are countless artists whom one can think of, whom Mammon has swallowed whole, So one should be careful what you wish for I guess.
The greater threat I felt that night (hey,’ worldly success’ is not as certain as death that’s for sure) was shuffling off this mortal coil, this spiral of life, this spring into existence that is, oh so, very brief.  I felt I could touch death, feel the reaper’s breath and was, as I say, a little desperate that I had not fulfilled my artistic aims in life and that the energy I had within needed to and could (Should? May?) expand beyond my self into the universe. Such hyperbole is where one is at that stage of a sleepless night, everything is grandiose, the issues are mighty and the dragons of life vital and breathing a lot of fire.
In the morning Isla stood at her gate and called ‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy’ in a voice that woke me and made me whole again, almost instantly. The existence, of her existence, made my living vital, immediate and sweet. I want to live so as to hear her and Freya’s stories of what they find in life when they are older. To hear what they love, deem fascinating and discover. I regret being as old as I am and being their parent, simply because I want to see how they turn out and fear I will die before I get that chance. I want to see them live and delight in the beauty of the world. I want to see them (and myself) become more than potential.
The world, it often feels, is on the brink of disaster and apocalypse and the horrors are not very far off. I fear, detest, am saddened and angered by them and lament for that vast majority, who suffer daily. But I still desire and wish to treasure life; living; existence. Existence.  Conscious life is so curious and odd, serendipitous,  but perhaps it’s true, that this chink of light that we have, in the dark night, is, as Cole says, at the end of ‘True Detective’  a light that is overcoming the darkness.

Had a strange and curious day yesterday which like the sea kept advancing and then folding back on itself.  I went to the British Museum to see the ‘Sunken Cities: Egypt’s lost worlds’ exhibition. Which on the surface was about the re-discovery of two of ancient Egypt’s coastal cities one of which, Thonis-Heracleion, was the major port of Egypt until it was superseded by Alexandria around 300 BC. The other city, Canopus was a major centre for the worship of the Egyptian gods. Both cities had sunk beneath the waves (or the earth they stood on ‘liquefied’ as the exhibitors put it) in around 700 AD but been spotted in the early thirties by military aircraft and finally excavated in 1996 by Franck Goddio and a team of underwater archaeologists. In fact there is much more to discover still.
The exhibition which ends soon is solid and accessible without being quite as exciting as the name suggests. The museum tends to use a lot of its standing collection to ‘fill-out’ any gaps or inadequacies in the actual finds. This is ok but it does mean some of the exhibition feels a little familiar if you’ve been going to the museum for years. Nonetheless one always reinforces and adds to the knowledge one has. I haven’t been thinking much about ancient Egypt for a while so it was nice to revitalise some of the mythology and especially to try and expand knowledge on the pantheon and various stories attached to the gods.
In terms of ‘ancient’ Egypt of course this Ptolemaic period is of course the later period (New Kingdom) when the Egyptians where effectively part of the Greek diaspora. And this is what I first latched onto, that just as general Ptolemy (friend and successor in Egypt of Alexander the Great of Macedon) had made very specific connections and associations between the Egyptian and the Greek gods, so I could ‘access’ the Egyptian pantheon if I learnt which Greek God had been associated with which Egyptian God. So, for example, the creator god Amun was partnered with Zeus, Thoth with Hermes, Khonsu with Herakles and so on.
If you know your Greek gods this very much helps you to get a grip on the Egyptian gods, as of course was Ptolemy’s intention at the time. The most central interconnection and the most interesting for me was between Osiris and Dionysus (or Bacchus for the Romans) both of whom, in the myths told of them, are dismembered (and reassembled) Dionysus by the Titans (with Zeus recreating him) and Osiris by his brother Set (with Isis his sister-wife and Nephthys Set’s wife finding the bits of Osiris’ body and reassembling him!). Both Osiris and Dionysus are associated with grain too and other traits are made to ‘fit’ as with the rest of the gods.
The primary god introduced by Ptolemy to unite Greek and Egyptian however was Serapis whose image has always been a bit vague in my mind and which this exhibition has (I hope) helped make clearer. Serapis is a bearded fellow with a pot on his head so he is easy to spot. The ‘pot’ is actually a grain measure or Kalanthos and Serapis was big in Alexandria where his main temple or Serapeum was. The reason he’s hard to pin down, I read in the exhibition, is because he combines the attributes of no less than four of the Greek gods Hades/Zeus/Dionysus/Asklepius.
Head dress was something which highlighted itself for me actually in the exhibition, so you know the Egyptian head-cloth that goes tight across the forehead and hangs is large folds either side of the head of Pharaohs? It’s called a Nemes. How do you identify Isis? Well she tends to had thin horns with a disc in-between, Amun has two long oblong feathers on his head etc. All this iconography reminded me of how when I was in Spain I learnt a lot about Christian iconography in paintings of all periods and how it opens up ones appreciation of the art.
Without knowing it most of us know what Osiris, Isis, Horus etc. look like, we just have not begun to label the images with have of Egyptian iconography. We have all looked many times at ancient Egyptian images but they tend to merge into a general image. Believe me when you make the conscious effort to label and separate the images it’s amazing how one begins to ‘see’ differently.
The stories and myths are equally important. For instance, I bet most people know that image of an ‘eye’ in Egyptian iconography. This is the Eye of Horus or the Wedjet. The eye of Horus was gouged out by Set (after Set had cut up Osiris and was out to kill Osiris’ son Horus) but later restored and represents healing and restoration. If you connect the image with the story it becomes more powerful. Indeed it is this connection which is often the whole purpose in the first place, it is the language of art as it were, symbol, icon, image combining with the cultural story or myth that exudes and expands meaning. As ever I would recommend reading Jung on such things, on doesn’t have to give oneself over to the belief in religious metaphysics to recognise the power and significance of such related images.
Words (and their component parts, letters) were literally magical for the Egyptians and they were born, again quite literally from images, images which came from nature but also imagination. The god Taweret instance was part hippo, part croc, with a bit of lion thrown in, certainly not a ‘natural’ creature. Another thing the exhibition mentioned was how the classical Greek historians Herodotus and Strabo etc were not very keen on how the Egyptians incorporated animals into their religion, perhaps because these Greeks had in religious and cultural terms developed a very anthropomorphic perspective on purity and perfection.
My day took a curious turn after the exhibition because I went to The Orwell Lecture 2016 given by Ian Hislop at the Cruciform Building, University College London (which appropriately was the building – formally a hospital - Orwell both married and died in). Hislop gave as you’d expect an entertaining but as he himself admitted not very deeply theoretical lecture on free speech. What was curious was the contrast with my day up to that point which had been all about thoughts on religion and ancient iconography. I was suddenly thrust into the secular world and its intense interest in the events of NOW. I don’t draw any conclusions from this except that we have many levels and layers to our lives and psychology.
One final and minor connection I made between the sacred and the secular during the exhibition was in the (headless and footless) statue of Queen Arsinoe II. For sheer beauty I thought this statue the most beautiful object in the exhibition (and I think someone else must have too because I saw afterwards that the flyer for the exhibition had the statue on its reverse side). This statue combined I think both the Greek love of the real human body and Egyptian sacred iconography. This sensuous body has one leg stepping forward as all the statues of the Pharaohs and their queens tend to. In addition the folds of her clothing are tied with an Isis knot which indicates her mortal body’s association with the immortal goddess. But the striking thing is that in this hybrid of two ancient cultures we seem to see inklings of modernity. The real body is just slightly stylised while the grey-green granodiorite seems to capture or hold the now; it is clothed in the past but trembles expressive complications of a modern life. The whole exhibition is in a strange way was symbolized in this statue for me: the syncretic nature of the lost cities and their inhabitants, with their beliefs in animal gods and deified humanity, with intimations of how we, or rather they, might change in the future.
I recently had a poem published in the Orwell society’s journal and recognized ‘my’ editor Masha Kemp sitting a couple of rows back. I collared her afterwards and chatted to her about her new biography in Russian on Orwell and she introduced me to George Orwell’s adopted son Richard Blair and Quentin Kopp whose father Georges Kopp was with Orwell in Spain. The ensuing conversations were much about distant father’s and their son’s reactions. It took both Richard and Quentin sometime to realise quite how famous their fathers were. Quentin said, for instance, when he was fifteen he was reading ‘Homage to Catalonia’ and turned to his mother and said ‘There’s someone called Georges Kopp in here’ and she replied, to a surprised Quentin ‘Oh yes, that’s your father’. As Quentin said people didn’t spill the beans about their private life (or public life come to that) all that easily back then. I certainly found the same with my own father, who never told me, until I was in my forties, that I had a great-uncle John Dalgleish, who had been a journalist on national newspapers and written two books. Which given my life-long interest in writing and writers rather left me flabbergasted that he’d never deigned it worthy of mention!
It was odd and very ordinary to meet the sons of two famous men. Orwell especially in a way has been part of my personal pantheon since I was a teenager. To meet his son reminded me of the notion of six degrees of separation. I was standing speaking to the son of one of my literary gods, it was strange, curious, sentimentally meaningful and then again meant nothing very much at all because you always have to meet people as people if you know what I mean. You have to converse and interact with them, not some ethereal connection they give you with the past. So my day was full of the secular and the sacred and they oddly over lapped in my mind.
Just to return to the image of the sea which I began with I bought a book by Kathleen Raine, for the train on the way home, which is all about how William Blake was deeply connected with esoteric tradition rather than being simply a ‘one-off’ genius who created his own personal iconography (as had formally been suggested). As Raine makes clear in the first chapter for Blake and the ancients, the sea was often a symbol of matter because it was in eternal flux. For me yesterday I was standing on the shores of representation, mostly on the island of imagination, religion, symbol and icon but every now and again touched and pulled back into the waters of ‘the real’ and matters of fact.

Above is the new artwork for my latest audiobook out in the next week or so. This was a tougher read than I imagined in various ways. Kommandant Hoess was not always the most eloquent writer but really the interest is in the subject matter as portrayed by Hoess (which I haven't misspelt by the way just can't get an umlaut on my keyboard). Hoess has an odd psychology finding the breaking of minor rules or his own experiences in gaol to be seemingly of much more consequence than his overseeing of mass murder. His attempt to explain himself is jejune and see-through with elements of his true personality coming through.
He was a plain kind of person one feels, a kind of blank, upon which someone like Himmler could stamp their impression upon. His line is essentially that he was just following orders and he was someone who was happier doing that than thinking for himself very much but he calls himself a born soldier which really doesn't play well with the notion of overseeing the efficient working of gas chambers to murder hundreds of thousands and the shootings of defenceless children and adults. Though certainly he wasn't too analytical he is certainly attempting to justify himself in this 'autobiography' which he wrote in the weeks before his execution.
It's not as grim as it could be in its details mostly because he sweeps over the emotions connected with the killing of people. He was not a zealot like Eichmann and doesn't seem too interested in the people he conveyed to death. Rather than cold he is detached from what he participated in
but he felt some guilt, the fact that he tries to explain himself in the way he does reveals that. He wishes his life had led him elsewhere he says that at heart he would have been happy as a farmer. This was historically an important document I think because it gave some of the first detailed facts about the genocide(s). Today we are more familiar with the details so, as I say, it is the psychology that is perhaps most interesting, certainly to those who are informed about the details. It should be noted however that in terms of the details Hoess gives, most are basically accurate but the statistics he gives are not always correct and that should be kept in mind if you quote any of this material.

We do not know, anyone who says they do is a liar, deluded, wanting to delude or thinks truth is a metaphor, a rock to hit you with or a skimming stone that sends out multiple circular ripples, each skim self-contained and expanding but equally each ring separate and only crossing over others, if one has a straight arm.
It was Soren Kierkegaard who gave us the modern notion that God was a distant metaphysical reality and that the day to day business of churches had nothing much to do with the religious sensibility within ones consciousness: existence/life/being, was to be standing on a ledge with the chasm of nothingness below. God was not holding your hand, if you wished to fly you had to leap into the chasm, with faith as your only shield.
It is manifest, in today’s politics, that even the Muslim zealot for whom death is a creed, comes to his or her stance, through the apprehension that God does not exist. If they feel assured that God exists why do they feel so strongly that they must act for God? If God is omnipotent what possible reason would she/he/it need you or I to help them out?
Those, with the rock smashing other people’s brain out, fear that living is too complex, too amorphous to be commanded. Hence they seek to command and comdemn, shock and render lifeless. They believe corpses cannot argue and argument, discussion, admission of doubt, a lack of knowing what the truth is, is their greatest fear.
 If truth is not a clarity to be possessed how can one live? They do know, as well as I do, that we all ultimately cannot say, cannot speak the truth, for what truth there is, is as graspable as the two dimensional ripples of the non-physical skimming stones that rain upon the dark waters of existence.
Coda: Secular politics is no more comfortable with the truth both Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump tell us that.