“Those who live in illusion have the illusion to live.”
Grégoire de Kalbermatten
I used to sing, accompanying myself on guitar in Open Mic nights in
New York bars. The MC in Irvington New York, before allowing me to
perform, asked,
“What’s your genre?”
“Songs I wrote.”
“You gotta have a genre,” he said.
When I came offstage having had the audience applaud as much
as they tend to do at these things, most of them anyway were other
musicians awaiting their turn, I asked the MC what he thought my
genre was.
“British Punk,” he said without hesitation and without a sense of the
unwitting slight he’d just offered, for calling the wrong kind of
Beflastman British could well have the same kind of effect as stepping
on a land mine.
I’m Irish, born in Belfast, But that is a kind of genre too, in the
original 19th Century French meaning of the word - a kind.
Identity, genre, is a strange thing for ,we’re all born human
beings, but at some point afterwards, labels are stuck on us without
anyone asking us. Then we willingly or not, chose an identity for
ourselves. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, for example,
was born in Dublin into the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland when
told that he was Irish, replied, “Because a man is born in
a stable doesn’t make him a horse.”
Thus we come to accept labels that we weren’t born with,
Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim etc.No one sought our
permission, these labels just were affixed.
A Belfast poet, Derek Mahon, quipped, “At home in exile.” Did I
understand this? I think not. Exile is banishment, being ostracized,
who did it to me? No one. I wasn’t in exile, I just didn’t fit in, not into
the family into which I was born, nor the society, I thought for most of
my life I was born in the wrong place, but it took a lot of introspection
and time to conclude that I was born in the right place. My favorite
aunt said of me, “he was one of us, but different”.
Like many Ulstermen, identity is constantly challenged. In
the Bronx where I lived for the first sixteen years in the USA, it’s
automatically assumed that I’m a Catholic, ergo a supporter of Sinn
and the Provisional IRA. In the Broader USA, I am deemed to be Scots
Irish. Amongst the Ulster Protestants in my hometown I’m inalienably,
unarguably British, and unlikely as it may seem, there are Irish
nationalists, north and south of the border who would completely
agree with them, probably the only common ground they’d share.
Viz a viz Ireland, the English are historically unaware, the Irish
know too much and some Protestant Northern Irish are adept at living
simultaneously in the 17th century as well as in the present one.
As a young salesman, in England, my boss in Procter and
Gamble, an American company, told me that if I wanted to get on I
would have to lose my regional accent! The manageress in a
small self service store in St. Helens, Lancashire, asked me if I was Irish
and when I said I was, said, straight out:
“I don’t like the Irish.”
I said, “I couldn’t care less what you like. I get twelve pounds a week
doing this lousy job, and that’s bad enough but then I have to listen to
nonsense from people like you! Being Irish wasn’t a choice I made,
blame it on my mum and dad!” Much to my surprise, the sales call
continued as though this unpleasant interlude hadn’t occurred.
There’s a Machiavellian aspect to being from Ulster and I wasn’t
being entirely open with the shop manageress. Plenty of Irish people
come to England and lose their accents in a matter of months. Oscar
Wilde, for example, born in Dublin, who attended a boarding school
in Eniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, had a broad Irish accent until he came
to Oxford university. In three months he jettisoned his accent. Some
don’t, neither Joyce, Beckett nor Heaney lost theirs.
I kept my accent too, although mine in the sixty years since I left
Ireland was like a stone eroded by the impact of running water.
Even my name changed wherever I went. In East Belfast it was
Aahln, in London it was Ehlin, and in New York it, bizarrely to my ears,
became Ellen. What to do?
I want to be upfront about my life. Truth is important. Truth is a
quality of the spirit and in the ancient Vedic culture, these qualities
were deemed to be Sat, Chit, Ananda, truth, awareness and bliss.
Truth came first.
If you’re lucky, and I mostly was, it was my good fortune to come
into contact with the people I most needed to meet at the very time I
needed them, at each and every stage throughout my life.
Thus, over the years, my parents, grandmothers, schoolteachers,
my Russian wife, some bosses at work, certainly John Solomon at
Procter and Gamble and Peter Mayer, the American publishing
genius who turned around the great loss making ship of Penguin and
eventually an incarnation, the latter being the most important.
Her name, Mrs. Nirmala Srivastava, more commonly known as
Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi. She lived in London for sixteen years with
her husband, C.P. Srivastava, KMCG, who had been knighted by the
Queen of England for his services as Secretary General of the
International Maritime Organisation, the only United Nations body
based there and where he was uniquely re- elected for four
consecutive four year terms.
How many books have you read where the author claimed to
have met God in human form. Such a person must surely be
misinformed or mad to believe such a thing. How many of the
thousands who met Lord Jesus Christ in his lifetime recognized his
divinity? His mother, certainly, Mary Magdalene too but it was only
after his reappearance after death when he showed his disciples the
stigmata that they came to know.
There is therefore no requirement on you, the reader, to deal with
that in any manner different to anything else you come across in this
book. I will relate incidents about her in my life with no desire or
interest to encourage anyone to pursue the path I did.
I was a good salesman in my day, and were it possible, I would
unhesitatingly sell you, the reader to help you know what I know if I
could, but I can’t, it’s not possible as you will see.
For sure, if it wasn’t for Shri Mataji, I’d be long dead, nearly
twenty years now at the time of writing and that’s a statement made
separately by a US doctor and a US surgeon.
An incarnation? I was asked to head up a group who went into
public high schools across the USA showing students how to
meditate. This was through HealthCorps, a 501c3, a not for profit
foundation and the president, Michelle Bouchard, by way of
introduction, took me out for lunch and at one point asked, “Do you
believe that Shri Mataji is the Adi Shakti?” (the Adi Shakti being the
divine feminine.)
I’m thinking, “This is where we get thrown out of HealthCorps”.
“If I were to write on page everything I know as opposed to the
millions of things I believe or have an opinion about, there’d be very
little on the paper. But the first thing I’d write would be that I know she
is the Adi Shakti.”
She leaned over, touched my forearm and with a huge smile on her
face, said, “I’m so happy.”
But mere words, as in this case, are as nothing in the matter as to
whether someone gets it or not.
Shri Mataji herself said, “In the judgement of the divine love we
have two types of people: one who are seekers of truth and the
another who are not. They may be good people, they may be nice
people, they been doing a lot of good work, social work, this work,
missionary work, every sort of work they might be doing. But if they
are not seeking the truth, then they do not come to that category
where God has to incarnate. So try to understand the
preciousness, the importance of seekers. And that’s what you have
been seeking. Very few persons. If you take the percentage of
seekers, is very, very wee bit. But it’s very important because, say a
one little part of gold is much more valuable than mounds of steel. In
the same way a seeker is much more valuable in the growth of
spirituality. The whole universe was created, whole
atmosphere was built, all the evolution took place for what?”
Why would anyone wish to read my story? One reason might be
that I’ll explain how someone like me, without a college degree, who
left school at sixteen, became, with ease, a director of three book
publishing companies, Corgi, Penguin and Bloomsbury respectively.
And in doing so, consistently came up with ideas for books that sold
many millions of copies.
And, for example, when six months after starting to publish
books, when Bloomsbury’s business plan, which had us be hardcover
publishers, profitably selling on paperback rights to the major
paperback publishers, was in ruins, I was able to come up
with an alternative that worked.
When I asked two of my grandsons what qualities did they think I
have that brought this about, and some of my sons before them, they
hadn’t a clue as to why. Nor, I would have to say, were they
particularly interested which was fine by me. Thank God we’re not all
the same.
Certainly there were those I worked with who had higher IQ’s
than me, who had a number of qualities I significantly lacked. But
there were some things I brought to my work that singled me out as
beyond the merely good, some of those things I learned as a child,
some from my parents, my grandmothers, some from my teachers.
Why, when exposed to the same influences as I was, did others not
learn these things too? It is a question I have often puzzled and
pondered over. Throughout the book, I explain the things I learned
and figured out, that allowed the career success I experienced.
Penguin privately published a book in celebration for their first
fifty years. Guess how many finance directors are mentioned? None.
Or human resource directors, logistics directors, company secretaries,
distribution directors or marketing directors? Those who compiled
the book wrote mainly about editors and art directors.
Sales directors? Just one, me. And why? For doing something that
had nothing to do with what I was being paid to do.
Something I’ve never understood is this. Many will say they want
to be the best in their field, but if that’s so, why do they do exactly the
same things that everyone else does? Because it’s safe is the
probable answer, doing something different to the herd brings its
own incumbent, inherent risks.
Another constant of my life, in addition to the impact of teachers
and gurus, is the extent to which I have always been an outsider, but
that’s deceptive too. Superficially, I always thought of myself as that,
but then, in my early twenties I came to see that I was merely part of a
vast Western archetype. American movies showed the outsider, his
life stacked against the odds, against the orthodoxy all around him.
Beatniks, hippies, mods, rockers and punks were all evidence of this
outsiderness as mass movements. Commonly,students of my age
would be asked to contrast and compare Colin Wilson’s The Outsider
with Albert Camus’ work of the same name, now more commonly
known as “L’etranger.
But I came to see that there was more to this superficiality to me
as an outsider, for I could only appear to fit in, in Belfast, London or
New York, by acting a part.
Despite the conflicts of the personae and identities imposed on
me from outside, there’s more to it than that. Persona by the way, in
ancient Greek means mask. It’s something to hide behind.
My Russian wife, Lioudmila, of twenty-five years, formerly a
chemical engineer in the Soviet rocket industry, who specialized in
navigation systems for space rockets, is convinced that she and I were
married in at least one past life, specifically that we were Muslims,
married in India four hundred years or so ago. Certainly, I’ve never
met anyone who I completely understand and feel more comfortable
with than her, Even when she only had a few hundred words
of university English, we both understood each other perfectly.
There’s an amusing irony in our backgrounds. When I
married her, she had a small apartment in a hamlet called Yablonyavy
Ovrag, Apple Blossom Gully, across the Volga from the industrial city
of Togliatti, I had an apartment on the King’s Road in fashionable
Chelsea, a Mercedes and was a director of Bloomsbury Publishing
PLC. But whereas I was the son of a joiner who left school at
twelve, she had a great grandmother who was a Jewish Countess and
her father had been an apparatchik, head of food distribution in
the Soviet Republic of Kyrgisthan.
Appearances, we know, are deceptive but we’re still taken in by
them, see who we vote into power.
Inevitably there’s a strong Irish component in my artistic, spiritual
DNA and hence, as in the great epic of pre-Christian culture, the Táin
Bó Cúailnge, commonly known in English as The Cattle Raid of
Cooley, is essentially non-linear. This is also true of a number of
ancient texts from around the world.
I have no choice in the matter, obviously, like everyone else,
there’s a chronological aspect to the life I’ve led, but non linearity will
strongly feature in the story I hope to tell.
I am neither this body nor this mind. Who am I? I am eternal bliss and awareness!
When it comes to notions of identity I am spirit.
"Tad Niskala" by Adi Shankaracharya
Om. I am neither the mind,
Intelligence, ego nor chitta.
Neither the ears, the tongue,
Nor the senses of smell and sight.
Neither ether nor air.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
I am neither the prana,
Nor the five vital breaths.
Neither the seven elements of the body,
Nor its five sheaths,
Nor hands, nor feet, nor tongue,
Nor other organ of action.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
Neither fear, greed, delusion,
Loathing, nor liking have I.
Nothing of pride, or ego,
Or dharma or liberation.
Neither desire of the mind,
Nor object of its desiring.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
Nothing of pleasure or pain,
Or virtue or vice, do I know.
Of manta, of sacred place,
Of Vedas or sacrifice.
Neither I am the eater,
The food or the act of eating.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
Fear or death, I have none,
Nor any distinction of caste.
Neither father nor mother,
Not even a birth, have I.
Neither friend, nor comrade.
Neither disciple, nor Guru.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
I have no form or fancy.
The All-pervading am I.
Everywhere I exist,
Yet I am beyond the senses.
Neither salvation am I,
Nor anything to be known.
I am eternal bliss and awareness -
I am Shiva! I am Shiva!
My father’s in this photo, on his hunkers, at the front with his left
hand on his knee. His friend, Bob Barr, also from Belfast is on the left,
a quiet, lugubrious man as I recall. Click on the photo for more detail.
The faces of the men though smiling, are gaunt, hardened by the
working conditions they endured, brutalized by the weather, and
exploited by the bosses. My father was a union man, and I was proud
of him. Through economic circumstances, he left school at twelve, at
sixteen, he was apprenticed at Harland and Wolff in Belfast and apart
from the seven years of exile, he wrought there all his life on
Queens Island. Here’s a photo of him with other joiners on the deck of
a boat in Barrow in Furness (tradesmen of his vintage, for reasons
inexplicable to me, never called them ships, nor did they use the term
‘worked,’wrought was their expressed preference ). He was fired when
his apprenticeship was over because Harland and Wolff preferred to
hire another apprentice rather than pay him and the likes of him, a
journeyman’s wage. The years that followed, living
in cheap lodging houses while working in the great shipyards of
England and Scotland. Whilst I couldn’t identify with the experience, I
liked the rhythms in saying the names of the shipyards where he wrought:
Cammel Laird on the Mersey, John Brown on the Clyde
Vickers of Barrow in Furness, Thorneycroft of Southampton
Swan Hunter on the Tyne.
My father could hold his own in any company. He was asked to
build a kitchen in the home of Dr. Denis Rebbeck, the managing
director of Harland and Wolff. That out of a thousand joiners who
worked there at the time, the fact that he was the one asked to build a
kitchen for the top boss, tells more than I can about his skills. I
watched them engage in conversation and it was obvious the respect t
the latter had for him. My dad could recite Shakespeare at length and
Ulster doggerel too.
Dr. Rebbeck, at one stage, when I wasn't there, asked my dad
about me. I was about to take what was known in Northern Ireland as
the Qualifying Exam, the equivalent of the Eleven Plus in England. Dr.
Rebbeck told my dad he was also Chairman of the Board of Governors
of Campbell College, the poshest, most prestigious school in the north.
He said if I passed the Qualifying, he would get me a free place at
Campbell. My dad told me and asked what I thought. Without much
hesitation, I said I didn't want to go there. That was the end of it, my
dad didn't ask why but the reason was that I knew that I'd
stand out as the poor boy, and I knew I wasn't.
Later, when I was playing rugby (at a very low level) against
Campbell College and tackled my opposite number, as he raised
himself off the ground, he said, "You working class bastard".
Who am I? I knew I was none of these things, things imposed on
me by others and circumstances, for I have come to know that I am
spirit.
Amazing stream of consciousness....keep on dear Alan!