Sunday, 07th May 2023
Glancing at the clock on the cooker I can see that it’s 0404 in the morning. I’m sitting in the kitchen (I guess you know where a cooker usually lives?). Which is not unusual because I often write in this room. And often early in the morning. When I was last in this room, even earlier, it was 0300 ish and even then I’d been awake half an hour. ‘Even’. When something’s level; when two halves of an equation balance, when a number’s divisible by two.
Sometimes we’re awake at these ‘ungodly’ hours because we can’t sleep. Obviously! Here I mean in the insomnia sense. Ususally that’s because we’ve got stuff on our minds, our brains are operating at too high a frequency, a thinking frequency, not the frequency of sleep.
Occasionally it’s for other reasons. I was introduced by a friend once a few years back to the notion of ‘psychic weather’. I like the idea of psychic weather. It’s like there’s a storm somewhere in the vicinity, but not at the cyclone and depression pressures of everyday weather measured on a barometer. Interesting weather words, ‘depression’, ‘pressure’. Dead, or rarified, metaphors. At frequencies (a different polarity of pressure) operating in a different dimension.
Even in 2023, science is at odds with psychic-stuff, and science is the dominant paradigm of popular truths. My own AOI, Area of Interest, actually, one of many, is Quatum Mechanics. My ‘A’ levels at school, way back in the (pre-historic) day, were Pure Mathemattics, Applied Mathematics, Physics and, er, English. A fascination with the physics of both very big things, weather, the universe, and very small things, forces, particles, has endured. In a later life, I had another friend who was very spiritual. In the holistic sense, not of the religious kind. I was very struck how the language of temporal spirituality and quantum physics is very similar. And in a funny way, they’re examining the same kind of things. Unseen, difficult to measure, more abstract and less concrete forces. Notions. Yet science is kosher, spirituality is suspect. It’s funny how the snake-oil salesmen and women of spirituality give it a bad received-wisdom rap whereas the snake-oil salesmen and women of science are merely on their way to discovering a better hypothesis.
Psychic weather is where something ‘bad’ is happening, but off-stage (ob-scura to the Greeks, hence the modern word obscure), you can’t see it or measure it but you can feel it. Sense it. On this occasion, I don’t think it was psychic weather keeping me awake long before the dawn-chorus, or insomnia. It was a desire for creativity. Not the creativity of this, writing words on a page, or musical notes in the ear or dollops of paint on the canvas — do proper artists do dollops? Or is it merely amateurs? — or ingredients in the pots of this kitchen. It was the desire for creativity in relationships. Relationships with people. Relationships with new people, new relationships with the people I already know. Like my best friend who’s a girl. She is not my ‘girlfriend’, a specific if loosely defined type of relationship, technically she’s my landlady. She’s also not my friend whom I’ve known the longest who’s a girl, that’s Kate who bought me this machine I’m typing into. And not my best friend who’s a boy. What does ‘best’ mean here, and why do grooms have a ‘best’ man but brides don’t have a best woman? (Answer, the best man was the squire’s best swordsman in the days when the squire had first dibs on a newly married woman and her new husband might object. Honest, look it up.)
How many ‘best’ friends can you have?
Ant, with whom I went to school and have known since I was eleven (it will be half a century this September), Fudd with whom I shared my fist day in the Army in ‘82, Charles who is my son’s Godfather and who has looked after me in many ways. Dunc and Max (also Godfathers — slow down, I’ve got more than one son), whom I’ve seen the most over the decades; Daniel and Alan and Emerson (sounds like a band) who guided me in my new world (then) of IT? Different kinds of friendship on different days as the world turns, resonances with different kinds of people.
All of the people I’ve known and have got in touch since they found out I have metastatic cancer.
When something’s going ‘wrong’ in the lives of a friend, and I don’t know it because I haven’t spoken to them for a while but ‘somehow’ I can feel it without ‘knowing’ I can feel it, that’s psychic weather. And what’s it telling me?
Speak to the friends I haven’t spoken to for a while. Create new connections, in the renewal of old ones. But maybe not at four in the morning.
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