Personal

Someone asked me the secret to concentration. I don’t claim to have it, but I remember when I learned to concentrate.

It happened when I was nearly thirty years old. Yes, I had been through school, university and a post-graduate course, and still I didn’t know how to concentrate.

Then one day it all changed.

I was in the college library studying for an exam. I had my books and notes around me. Something clicked inside of me and I felt in command. I felt like Captain Picard on the Starship Enterprise.

What I mean is that my physical relationship to the papers around me changed. I sat up alert in my chair. I was in charge. I looked around at the papers, the notes and the books and saw them as connected rather than separate. They told a story together – no longer were they separate sources.

Maybe what happened was a lucky chance. Maybe it was because the papers and books were spread in a semi-circle. Maybe that is what made them seem like the dials on a starship, or a car or an aeroplane.

For whatever reason, it was simply easy for a moment to be aware of my physical and mental relationship to the material.

I realised in that moment that up until then in my mind I had always been hanging on by my fingertips – convinced I would fail or at least not do very well.

Up until then I had managed, but that was such a poor substitute for succeeding.

I had managed but I had always felt I was standing on a quaking volcano of uncertainty.

Now I was in command.

I didn’t suddenly become brighter or more able to do things – but I could concentrate. I was relaxed. And because I was relaxed, I could take things in, see the connections.

I already knew that being relaxed made studying easier. What I learned was that my relaxed state came out of my feeling of being in command.

And why shouldn’t I feel in command? If I feel anything else it undermines the endeavour from the beginning and I sabotage myself.

Of course, we humans are notorious for doing that, aren’t we?

What did I enjoy about St. Petersburg? Well it was 1992, so things were just opening up. The main boulevard in the city was lit by what seemed like 50 watt bulbs strung across the street. In the early evening it cast a feeble glow over the street that was comical and gentle.

And there were pebbles sticking a finger joint’s length up out of the tarmac on the pavements because it was so long since the tarmac had been laid and it was worn away.

There were big trucks belching black smoke. I mean big as in the kind of truck you would only see in a quarry or a construction site in the UK. And there they were, big and unbreakable, thick metal plate, no finesse and built to never fail, belching smoke on the streets right in the city centre.

In a cafe where I ate, I recall a conveyor system for taking away the dirty plates. It was right there in the eating area and it led off to the kitchens behind – except it was very old and it creaked and rattled like a Heath Robinson contraption. The energy needed to keep that creaky old machine going must have far outweighed the benefit. I read into it a kind of sublimated desire on the part of the people to prove that they had technology and that it worked.

And among all this the people were really bright and quick on the uptake – a big change in the way they interacted socially from the people in Finland where I had spent the previous three months.

The women – a lot of them – seemed very sensual – aware of their sexuality – and it made me wonder how the Russian revolution ever took hold.

There were a lot of bookshops and they were full – people seemed genuinely interested in culture and in learning – about everything.

And I recall see men speaking in tight groups, inches from each other’s faces – either because of the cold (it was December) or because they didn’t want to be overheard. I got the idea it was a hangover from the previous regime. I wonder whether people still do that?

And the ice in the Neva had been broken up (by icebreakers, I guess) and was about a metre thick – in huge chunks against the river banks.

And the buildings – the decrepit and the refurbished – were lovely with lots of pastel colours.

And the best memory is the swing doors to the department stores, and people coming from the stores onto the streets like a ballet – a ballet of normality – of going in and out of the stores with the soundtrack of the doors swinging.

First published 31 Jul 2013

I remember sitting by the side of a field years ago and gently unfurling a leaf. Inside the curled up leaf there was an orange, slightly translucent earwig with nasty-looking pincers.

I opened more leaves and there were more earwigs. Some leaves had several earwigs tucked inside them.

Wriggling, segmented, translucent orange insects with big pincers were not top of my list for beauty and I remember thinking that the earwigs were invaders. That was in the days when I saw everything as disconnected.

And yet I saw myself as a keen nature lover. I often went out and looked at birds and trees and plants and fungi and insects, and at just about everything from the clouds to the sea to the earth and the rocks. I could see myself as a keen nature lover and yet dislike certain parts of it.

That wasn’t so strange, was it? After all, some parts of nature are definitely unpleasant for humans if they come in contact with them. But reflecting on how I saw things it is also true that I saw nature as disconnected.

Now, over the years I have come to see that the leaf depends on the earwig and the earwig depends on the leaf. I see that there will be something – a microbe, a bacterium, a process – something that dictates that the balance is preserved as long as there are leaves for earwigs to curl up in, and earwigs for leaves to curl around. It’s a connected world.

I see that the balance will be broken if there are no earwigs. If that happens then somewhere down the line there will not be any leaves.

All of which leaves me with another question, which is to wonder how finely balanced the balance of nature is. We see every day that nature is resilient and able to recover. But maybe it has weak points where a small change would tear it apart. I shouldn’t walk around fearful of that tear in the fabric of nature, but we humans do seem like the kid with a stick, poking at something and surprised when it breaks.

In about 1996 I went to Yad Vashem – the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

I queued for a ticket, and in front of me there was a young couple. Neither was Jewish but from the conversation I made out that the young woman’s father or maybe her grandfather was one of the righteous gentiles who had helped Jews during the war.

Apparently he was commemorated in the museum and the woman in the ticket booth explained to the young woman where she should go to find the records.

While I was waiting, I saw a postcard on a shelf in the booth. It was a photograph of an installation in the grounds of the museum. It was few railway boxcars on a piece of track built into a hillside and leading up into the sky.

When it was my turn to buy a ticket, I asked about the railway cars and the track.

The woman in the booth explained that the railway cars had been ‘rescued’ and brought to the museum and that yes, those very cars had been used to transport Jews to the death camps during the war.

I said that the image was terrible, and the woman said with a sympathetic tone said ‘Yes, this is Yad Vashem.’

I felt a wave of sympathy; it was so sad.

I walked on towards the buildings and started to walk along a path between rows of trees planted to commemorate the righteous gentiles who had helped Jews during the war.

I suddenly had an image in my mind of a thin woman with a headscarf standing near an old stove and holding a frying pan and I saw in my mind’s eye German soldiers marching with shiny helmets.

The woman wasn’t someone I recognised specifically, but how shall I say it – In principle, it could have been my great grandmother.

I don’t why that image came into my mind.

I had been to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam years before and I had touched the frying pan on the stove in their hiding place – or perhaps it on the floor below.

I remember that I imagined that Anne had touched it, although perhaps it was just a frying pan brought in to put on the stove for visitors to the museum to see.

And on TV programmes like The World At War, I had seen German soldiers marching,

But the woman holding the frying pan that I saw in my mind’s eye as I stood in the sun at Yad Vashem – I didn’t know who she was – only that I was connected to her.

I mention about the Anne Frank House and the TV programmes I saw because my rational mind is trying to explain what happened.

What happened next was that I reeled and almost fell against a large rock in the garden and I wailed.

I felt my insides opening up and I wailed. I didn’t cry – I opened like a dam. I said, almost shouted, complained – into the air – ‘They killed them all: They murdered them all.’

Even as I was wailing, I thought it must be all too common for people to break down in Yad Vashem. I realised that I didn’t care whether I was making a scene, or causing some kind of embarrassment in pubic. I just didn’t care. I was not crying. There was nothing in me that was intentionally pushing or letting out the wailing – it just came out of me.

I was truly wailing.

It was a revelation to me. I felt that I didn’t know myself. Where had that wail come from?

It made no sense – I wasn’t even born then when it all happened.