Hell or the garden of eden

Inwardly the scholar yearned for the freedom of original thought, so the golden echo might be heard in the outer world, and burst free of the leaden machine. In so doing he believed that the world was ready for his ideas, and would be honest enough to listen. So in the interval between my first and second degrees a metamorphosis took place in that tiny room of “Pant y Bedw” as these pages record. I was not entirely aware of this change from student to scholar. Since then I have stood outside the university. The golden echo is heard clearly on these pages and the music of Parnassus took the form of original science, or original knowledge which cannot be taught. The lesson of history is to allow the scholar freedom of thought. The lesson for society is to allow the worthy poet to sing, and not to keep him in abject poverty. The lesson for the university is to allow the worthy scholar to think without fear of retribution and starvation. None of these lessons have ever been learned down the ages, yet the true poet and the true scholar still mesmerize history. Encased in the sixties concrete of Room 262 the golden echo burst into song. It had to do so, and the half gods of the time allowed the golden echo to be heard. The world outside Parnassus heard the song.

The student turned scholar was enchanted with its beauty, and discarded the outside world, the half gods too. The scholar fought for this golden echo, this inner beauty, for truth and for the annihilation of hypocrisy and leaden dogma, the scholar fought therefore for science, or knowledge as the word really means. Science for the scholar is the Land of the Eternally Young, and such was the beauty of the Book of Kells to its scribes, or the beauty and serenity of art and letters and architecture to the early renaissance. Out of the harsh, money ridden, world of hard headed Florence flowered a golden beauty that has mesmerized the best minds to this day. Out of wild Iona flowered the wonderful intricacy of the insular scribes. Encased in sixties concrete flowered the beauty of knowledge. To the Greeks, knowledge was beauty which resided on Mount Parnassus, and beauty in human guise was to them geometry. There is also an essay on Yeats entitled “He too was in Parnassus”, and he too was a worthy poet too poor to buy a postage stamp. A terrible beauty was born out of abject poverty, the golden echo burst in poetry upon the world. The lesson of history is that society and the university must recognize the beginnings of civilization, and protect it with all their strength from the decay brought on by hypocrisy the vandal, he who scatters shards of shattered glass in the fields of knowledge.

That terrible beauty of Yeats was born out of savagery, and history teaches us that civilization is a very faint golden echo that exists among the roar of gunfire, and amid the chaos of the human condition, the small cog in the infinite universal machine. The lesson of history is not to reject that which is not understood, to listen to golden song amid the rubble of a moneyed and frenzied world without ideas. The lesson of history is that hypocrisy becomes the destroyer of worlds, along with the first atomic bomb, the hawk on fire of the poet Dylan Thomas hanging still over the estuary and Sir John’s Hill, the innocent birds, humankind below, oblivious to their destiny. A People’s University that cannot speak the language is hypocrisy and the destroyer of ancient values, leaving nothing but shards of smashed glass in a roaring wind. The lesson of history is that the People’s University has yet to be founded, and it must nurture the language and ideals of the People above all, because these are the gifts of a Nation to its children and the outside world. Each Nation has these gifts to bear like the three wise men. Hypocrisy is the thief of hope, and obliterates the golden echo with the freezing, blasting noise of dogma. These are the twin enemies of knowledge in our times, and in any time known to humankind.

So as I worked in Room 262 in the early seventies I forgot all about the machine and its merciless wheels and cogs, its merciless driving of that which created it, humankind. I yearned for the world to hear my golden song. This is what every worthy poet, worthy artist and worthy scientist always wants. These three are the same in disguise, and that was me in the early seventies. This much is very clear from these pages, I wished to gift to the world my inner, golden song and the golden echo of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In so doing the leaden machine tried to force upon me its exigencies, as the poet R. S. Thomas memorably wrote. The machine would allow me only brief interludes to create the golden echoes untarnished by exigency. Otherwise as these pages show I led a driven and chaotic existence because my fellow human beings of the time had the power not to help. They had the power only of accumulating money for themselves. They tried to force the scholar to become once more the student or lecturer or post doctoral, or any kind of slave. The scholar fought back with all his being, and so it has continued to this day, in June 2013.

Hypocrisy looked on. The scholar was claimed to be the long lost child of a university that had no knowledge of its People. The golden echo was heard and thought to be a money making commodity, a business opportunity. It could be used to make money, to enhance the reputation of the department in the language and land of the bureaucrat. The song could be heard, but the half gods were corrupt, and deaf to its meaning. They had not taught this song yet it was heard by all but themselves. The meaningless words of the lecturers had been transfigured into golden echo. Surely the department must be credited. The scholar could be left to starve. Time looked back and all the bureaucrats sang in unison. Neither the scholar nor the department ever existed. The wind blown ruin of the very large lecture theatre could not have endangered the perennial success of the university. Parnassus must always be graded 5*. There had never been lecturers and students in that desolate ruin of the very large lecture theatre. The scholar had never existed, and to the bureaucrats his song had never been heard. All the world is bathed now in golden echo, but the bureaucrats hear nothing. So the university destroyed itself in the early twenty first century and nothing is left of it but wind blown shards.

In room 262 may be found now a piece of pottery that looks like a bone, a civilization that never existed. On the bone is written hypocrisy. Time will hear the golden echo and transport it into the future, but the leaden echo is discarded. A university that has no meaning will be a slight disturbance of landscape, a bone in Room 262. Only the worthiest of ideas survive the wandering of time. Very shortly nothing will be left of any of those who inhabited the EDCL in the sixties and seventies.