On the way somewhere with Thalia, one of my five [now six] grandchildren
With Laurie, [was] the latest addition
Laurie as a bigger baby plus his sister, Miranda, born 4 April 2007
About myself, Chris Marsh, email
I was born in 1942 in London and brought up in a village in Berkshire. My father was a commercial artist working from home, my mother an unwilling housewife and mother who was clinically depressed; they had two other children six and eleven years after me. I was educated at the local primary school, passed the eleven-plus and went to the local girls grammar school. I left home to go to Birmingham University to read mathematics. I got married whilst there and had a child, and graduated with only a poor degree. My first job was as a trainee programmer on a Leo III commercial computer. I rapidly progressed through the IT career path: programming – in assembler and COBOL – then systems analysis, project leading and departmental management. Meanwhile my marriage broke up, I married again and had two more children, but that marriage didn’t last either and I had a few other relationships and married a third time. My working life was curtailed due to illness: rheumatoid arthritis, and in parallel with a period of working freelance and part-time, I developed interests concerned with ‘saving the world’. I took on a personal mission to tell people about land degradation caused by our alienation from the land from ancient times, and discovered permaculture which seemed to be the solution. I also explored revolutionary socialism and was involved in the peace movement. Contacts there led me to exploring personal growth and spirituality: just in case I had missed out on valuable alternative approaches. I studied for a BA degree with the Open University, developed through that an interest in literature studies, and completed a taught MA with the OU, gaining Distinction for my dissertation on Rabindranath Tagore’s prose fiction , and hence for the MA in Literature. Now living in Devon, I still haven’t found the button to press to get the Land and Social Revolution started…
A major barrier to revolution is people being preoccupied by surviving in the current system, and coping with their own and others’ physical and emotional needs. Recently, as a safety valve to release hurt feelings, I wrote a piece about my ‘mistakes’, which is a different take on my life story.
A Moment of Grace, 17 July 2007
The last of the books written collaboratively by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari was Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? (1991), translated as What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994). A key point made in the introduction is that old age is a special time, when ‘one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death’. Deleuze was about my age – sixty-five – when he wrote this, and Guattari a few years younger, so neither of them were really into senescence, which these days should be twenty years away, at least for someone who hasn’t abused their body with smoking, alcohol or drugs, and hasn’t had poisons and stress imposed on them. Guattari died only a year after the book’s publication, Deleuze three years after that, but both men had achieved much and gained honour and recognition, jointly and in their respective fields.
My own situation is different, at least I feel it so. Too much of my life has been absorbed by family, as there has seemed to be mutual need between myself and my daughters, and their small children, until now. And I have achieved very little that anyone is likely to have noticed. Accordingly, I have decided to claim my ‘moment of grace between life and death’, ‘life’ being for me ‘family’: that wretched cycle of enduring an unhappy childhood, all one’s parents’ fault, determining to bring up one’s own children better, only to be told when they grow up that one has made them wretchedly unhappy, so that when they have their own children they are going to do it all better, but then, of course, when those children grow up they say their childhood was unhappy, and all their failures are their parents’ fault, and so it goes. Enough! I’m out of it. My remaining twenty years, or however long before my senescence, are to be my own.