A Landscape to Light

 

"The Lost Chart" is not Neil M. Gunn's finest hour as a novelist. The plot - a lost naval chart, fifth columnists, in this case, Communists, espionage and impending, possibly nuclear war - always comes across as a 'deus ex machina' on which to hang certain key observations and conversations woven into the book, even the characterization of the conversation holders feels weaker than it ought to be; and, for Gunn traditionally is. 

I failed in my first and second times of reading it thinking to put it aside as the exception in his oeuvre. It, however, niggled away, and remembering sufficiently where I had broken off the last time, I thought, 'third time lucky'! And, I was!

For at the heart of the book are a set of arresting vignettes of thought which are as timely now as when they were penned. 

The first of which is where too now? The world it appears has not moved on from being a place poised on the edge of destruction trapped betwixt flailing capitalism that delivers most of its undoubted goods with frustrating unevenness leaving multitudes behind or outside; and, authoritarian alternatives, dressed in popular glamour, that has no better sense of how to live harmoniously within the limits and opportunities of planet earth; and, critically, shrinks the scope of freedom to think of or live into alternatives. 

Second, it is this sliver of difference that makes a difference. Dermot, the key protagonist, resents 'spying for the police', the intrusiveness of the state is irksome but recognizes that there is an asymmetry of  'the lesser of two evils', knowing that a 'Communist' state is not led by the idealistic,  with whose ideals he resonates, but by the sociopathic, focused on bending all to its will in the 'hope' of an 'End' that never arrives, hopelessly corrupted virtually as the journey begins.

Third, whence lies, admittedly, the narrow channel between these Scylla and Charybdis? Gunn finds it in the communal life of the Highlands, glimpsed by Dermot during the recent war when on a mission to a small island and embodied in different ways by Christina and Ellen, the two key women in the novel. Here the values are traditional, carried implicitly, and navigated within the boundaries of a given society. There is obviously interaction with the wider state, that requires its due, but these should provide a framework that genuinely exercises 'subsidiarity' allowing decisions affecting those lives to be taken at the lowest, closest level possible. Concrete, communal living winning over abstract bureaucracy. 

Fourth, lives should be lived leaning into the light. The fourth principal character, Joe, is an artist who is seeking to paint the 'light' of things - the wonder in and within them; and, their giftedness out of the sacred. He is puzzled by the 'modern' emphasis on accentuating the shadow, of imagining the real as 'the dark' or 'evil'. How can you expect us to change society to its betterment, gradually, not losing what is presently good in the process, if we are not seeking out the best in the world, if we are not seeking the light and celebrating it?

Fifth, and this is, I think, Gunn's mature position, we cannot expect to nurture a better world without allowing ourselves to step into a deeper, more aware consciousness. Rectification of government begins in the rectification of ourselves, a conscious stepping into the Tao, the whole pattern of things, enabled by a cleansing of the doors of perception; hence, his interest in Gurdjieff, Taoism, and Zen. But every pattern of awareness requires intentionality to move it forward; and, that is provided by turning to the light, of accepting the world in gratitude, in practicing the direct, small acts of kindness and witness that genuine community calls forth, of never imagining that the 'end' justifies the means, of approaching all as Thou. 

Even in this, not his best dramatic effort lies sprinkled throughout marvels of seeing, attending, witnessing to, as the title of a collection his essays has it, a 'Landscape to Light'.