Adam Mars-Jones - Pilcrow

We spent long afternoons doing three-point turns in the drive despite my aching arms. The cherry tree shed so copiously on the car, as I ground through my manœuvres, that I had to turn on the windscreen wipers. The meagre motor strained to clear the mash of blossom. I love the vegetable kingdom in all its provinces, every canton and palatinate. I have a particular tenderness for Prunus avium , but just this once I found myself thinking of the pink clods of petal on the windscreen as a sort of morbid discharge. Flowering pus, supremely ugly if only I had the knack of seeing it that way. It was a double cherry, scentless, cultivated for the blowsy show it made. Every year when the blossom got messy Dad would threaten to cut it down, but really only to get a rise out of Mum, who loved it and had a terrible suspicion it was vulgar.

I liked the cherry tree better earlier in the year, when tiny caterpillars let themselves down from its branches on the flimsiest threads.

Brain surgery without a knife

Granny had warned me against keeping my eyes on the road, and I did my best to oblige. Dad with his affinity for machines and vehicles had a different priority. He wanted me to develop a ‘feel’ for the car. This mystical union was beyond me. Gradually I acquired a competence, but my imagination wasn’t touched. A shrewder instructor, more attuned to my character, might have tried telling me that driving lessons are really exercises in neurological processing.

First you have to learn a set of routine actions with the apparatus of steering-wheel, gear lever and pedals, and then repeat them so often that they migrate from the right lobe to the mid-brain and become automatic. All you’re doing, inside your skull, is transferring material a couple of inches to the left, to a place where consciousness can safely leave it. That’s where the action is, inside your brain and not on the road. From that point on, driving is something you won’t need to be aware of until there’s an emergency on the road. Then actual thinking steps in again — usually too late. When a crisis looms, when the windscreen is full of onrushing wall, control reverts to the conscious mind, with its more highly developed capacity for making excuses.

The pilot and the autopilot only differ by a whisker, but how we insist on the distinction! We make quite a meal of that whisker. Consciousness is a useful technique and even an entertaining hobby, but a little goes a long way. It doesn’t do to make a fetish of it.

It would have comforted me to think of my driving lessons along those lines, as a sort of slow and rather wonderful brain surgery performed without anything as crude as a knife. Instead I experienced it as an ordeal which gave me a frozen shoulder, and aggravated the emotional weather inside the house, the frozen alliance between a husband and wife who weren’t really intimate enough to have rows on their own account. They needed stand-ins like me. And all along it was driving that was supposed to be the thing that got me out from under. I had to learn to drive if I was ever going to drive away, from Mum, from Dad, from the whole bang shoot.

After you, Gerald

I had my fair share of adolescent clashes with my parents, but there is one thing I never said: ‘I didn’t ask to be born.’ It’s a sentiment teenagers express very often, as a way of magnifying their sorrows and making the world take notice. I disapprove. It can’t be good to blaspheme against your own existence.

‘I didn’t ask to be born.’ That’s the bass note of every whine, the fundamental. The drone underlying the moan. It’s the sloping foundation on which nothing can be built true. Because there’s no proof either way, is there? And I prefer to think that I did. I did ask to be born, knowing more than I do now. I made my choice. It isn’t even necessary, as life goes on, for me to understand my reasons.

Souls await a womb. That’s from the Tibetan Book of the Dead . Every religion contains at least one true thing, and this seems to be Tibetan Buddhism’s. Souls await a womb, and I waited for my mother’s. I knew what I was doing. I have to trust the judgement I had before I looked out of this one pair of eyes only.

I chose the womb as surely as the Duke of Westminster chose his — and who’s to say I wasn’t offered that one first? Perhaps I gave it up, like a seat on a train, in favour of someone who needed it more. Perhaps I decided to wait for one that would suit me better.

Admittedly the etiquette involved is hard to fathom. No thank you, I think I’ll pass. After you, Gerald, I insist. You be Duke this time. I’m in no hurry. There’ll be another one along in a minute . There’s a system of shortlisting in operation, obviously — not all wombs available to all souls. That’s where karma comes in. Your past lives affect the range available. Karma winnows, karma restricts the possibilities. But there’s still plenty of scope for the choosing agent, in a subset of infinity. The short-list being infinite in its own right. Between lives the soul moves with a special caution, gingerly as a cat in snow. Try to see your original face, as the Zen koan puts it, the one you had before your parents gave you birth.

Eight curves

I sat quiet in the womb I had chosen. I made no erudite statements from the darkness of my becoming. If I’d spoken out, if I’d intervened in the world before I was part of it, then surely Mum or Dad would have mentioned the fact. Even in a family like mine, where there were so many blockages of communication, news of that sort would have got through. Uterine speech is the province of a few highly developed souls, incarnations out of my league.

There’s a great sage in the Mahabharata , Astavakra, who spoke out before his birth. Out of the womb he piped up: ‘Father, through your grace I have already learned the Vedas, even lying in my mother’s womb. But I am sorry to say you often make mistakes in your recitation. Allow me to correct your Sanskrit.’ I don’t know what the equivalent of the Vedas would be in Dad’s life — maybe the home pages of the Telegraph . It’s a fact that I love to be right. I can imagine floating there in the dark and picking my father up on his bad habits. I might have announced, ‘Father, the Telegraph is confirming every assumption you have already. Can you find no better guide to the world?’

I might have taken issue with his odd habit of playing Switzerland in matters of family conflict, saying, ‘Father, why do you not side with your wife against her mother? This is the great struggle of her life, and you are not entitled to neutrality.’

Or I might have taken a longer view, saying instead, ‘Father, the men of your generation were unfairly accelerated by the War you grew up into. Even from here I can see that there are still trapped bubbles of childishness in all of you. Are you sure you are ready to be a father, however much you want the completion of your family? Are you sure you meant to give me my opportunity?’ I might have had the option of resolving back into dew, never to be born, in a spiritual abstention. Perhaps this is the origin of miscarriage, in fœtal second thoughts.

I might have added a few words to Mum, in a lower tone, my voice reaching her directly through her bones and mine. ‘Mother, I must ask you to pronounce vegetarian properly. The word is not vegeteerian . The avoidance of meat is an enlightened choice. There is no call to sneer at it, by your pronunciation of the very word.’ If I’d been given the option of some such amniotic lecturing I would have chatted away pedantically nineteen to the dozen.

Astavakra’s dad cursed the baby in the womb, saying, ‘May you be born with a twisted form.’ And in fact Astavakra was born with disabilities. The name means eight curves . Dad didn’t curse me, though over time he may have come to see me as some sort of judgement, on him and the choices he had made.