Walk Quietly The Beautiful Trail

To begin at the beginning; with a post script to the previous post! Just to record an example of astonishing synchronicity on the Eurostar. In fact, initially, while trying to board. On Monday June 25 St Pancras was Seriously Crowded at the Eurostar terminal; the Paris train on the previous day had been six hours late and a surplus of passengers had perforce, spilled over into the Monday. So, with no immediate entry to Departures, I was wandering alongside a serious queue towards the distant end when I heard my name. Voila, in the queue, two English friends bound for Lille so I queue-jumped shamelessly to join them and catch up. Coincidence enough but more amazing synchronicity was to come. We were all bound for the same train, and sitting in the same coach, at the same table. Unbelievable.

I checked on Jung’s theory of synchronicity which I thought proposed the concept of underlying, unseen patterns of coincidence and discovered, perhaps, Too Much Information!! In fact, Carl Jung had discussed his ideas on those surprising juxtapositions that scientific knowledge could not rationally explain, with Albert Einstein before World War One and first used the term, ‘synchronicity’ in a 1930s lecture but the term did not appear in print until 1960 in his Collected Works, Volume 8.

He proposed that synchronicity be the name for ‘a meaningful coincidence in time, a psychic factor independent of space and time.’ He felt that it forced a basic reconsideration of chance, probability, coincidence and singular events in our lives and was a revolutionary concept both challenging and complementing the physicist’s classical view of causality. Oh dear, this is intellectually deeper than what I thought I knew about Jung’s concept and impossible to explain and summarise. Nevertheless, the Eurostar experience did feel beyond rational explanation.

A friend recently passed on a slender book of lyrics and legends of the American Indian which she had bought in America in the Seventies. It is a charming celebration of the Indian’s view of himself and his world, illustrated with examples of American Indian art. The legends are based around the idea of the Indian as the offspring of Mother Earth and Father Sky and a deeply-held, core feeling is of the harmony of man with nature. The Indian reveres the natural world and all its creatures; he carries the music of his forefathers in his head and is as one with his universe. The poetry throughout the book is imbued with all the most important elements of Indian life; love and courtship; war; the Hunt; the Great Spirit; Beauty and Manhood; legend and myth; prayer and poetry. One long poem on Persimmon Wine is typical in its poetic intensity.

Sundown over Little Chief. Sweet is the                           And when the future finds us, let them

sound of silence. There is a sudden                                       say, “They were a magic people in

flight of mourning doves. The                                                     this ordinary place.”

sun-lashed rain is catching in our hair.
(We shall make persimmon wine.
You come!)

The title of this blog is the title of the book: Walk Quietly The Beautiful Trail. It comes from a Navajo Benedictory Chant chiefly a tribute to Beauty, which ends:

Above and below me hovers the beautiful,

I am surrounded by it

I am immersed in it.

In my youth I am aware of it,

And in old age

I shall walk quietly

The beautiful trail.

Although this marvellous little book has apparently nothing to do with Brugge, nevertheless I realise that it speaks to me precisely because I am doing just that; attempting to walk, quietly, the beautiful trail!

Here is a late postscript, nicely rounding off a blog which began with reference to a postscript.
P.S.

Looking for an illustration of Red Indian art, I chanced across this beautiful pictogram:

The Winter Count

The Winter Count depicts a series of annual events from about 1752 to about 1888 and was probably created by someone living on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation where it ended up in the collection of a non-Indian couple who ran a general store on the reservation. From there, the folded sheet of muslin, adorned with 136 years of pictographs, eventually landed at the bottom of a relative's trunk. Dr Timothy Tackett, a history professor whose aunt had owned the store, discovered this precious artefact in his mother's California home in 1998. It is now housed in the National Museum of Natural History. It includes a depiction of the Leonid meteor shower of November 1833 and the final image was added about a year before the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.

N. Scott Momaday, writing in the January 2015 issue of The Smithsonian Magazine, says 'What interests me most about The Winter Counts is their relation to language, to expression verbal and visual -- language in the abstract. It is a crucial link between oral and written traditions, not unlike the Rosetta Stone, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the walls of Lascaux. It is reflection and enigma, history and myth.'

American history is close enough to touch!