Men to Match My Mountains by Irving Stone

Having read a book about Siberia, how Russia expanded eastwards to the Bering Straits and beyond, I was keen to compare that story with the westward expansion of the United States. [Many thanks to Bob for suggesting and lending me this utterly compelling book, which has been with me for the past month and half.

The author, Irving Stone, is famous for The Agony and the Ecstasy, and Lust for Life, his biographies of Michelangelo and Vincent Van Gogh respectively. The title comes from Sam Walter Foss’s 1894 poem The Coming American: "Bring me men to match my mountains, Bring me men to match my plains, Men with empires in their purpose, And new eras in their brains." Stone's book was first published in 1956, 62 years after those lines were written – but already 70 years ago.

The opening sentence of Men to Match My Mountains speaks of building a civilisation; the closing sentence calls the American Far West “the cradle of a culture freer and richer than any the world had known”. These bookends suggest that the opening up of California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado by European settlers was something destined from the outset to develop into a great land – in stark contrast with Siberia and Russia's Far East that was merely plundered for its natural resources, from furs and timber to gold and oil. But the narrative itself is far more complex, and the author Irving Stone focuses on the drive, determination, courage – and yes, greed – of the men who shaped the Far West in the second half of the 19th century. 

The book tells several overlapping stories, beginning with the first settlers from the East moving over mountain ranges and deserts to reach California, then a part of a newly independent Mexico. The settlers to this Eden quickly revolted against the rather lax and arbitrary Mexican rule. This was a time when a hundred soldiers was a huge force that could settle territorial disputes one way or another. The next story is that of the Gold Rush of 1849, the subsequent discoveries of silver in Colorado, and their vast macroeconomic and social impact. Interwoven into these narratives, Stone tells of how the Mormons created Utah, and how the federal government clamped down on their polygamous practices. And then we read about the building of the first transcontinental railroad, and the unethical practices of the men who ran it. Finally, we see how the four states became integrated into the political and economic maps of the USA. Throughout the book, the author explains how institutions came about; the rule of law, education, health services, and how Washington DC extended its rule over these territories as they became states.

What makes the book fascinating for me is how much information in it was entirely new to me, or maybe not new, but offering me new insights. Bear in mind that 50 years ago this month, I began my first year of Comparative American Studies at Warwick University – I regret this book was not on the set list (but then it is hardly a revisionist Marxist critique of US history). Stone believes that the West was won by strong individual personalities, not by ideologies.

The most striking fact from the first chapter: to get to San Francisco from Boston or New York in 1840 took the best part of six months however you went. By sailing ship around Cape Horn, it was a journey of 17,000 miles through some of the roughest seas on Earth. Across the Isthmus of Panama it was a shorter route, but with the dangers of malaria and yellow fever ever-present in the jungles, and no regular shipping route up along the Pacific coast. The most dangerous route was across the American continent, west of the Missouri River. To reach California, travellers had to scale the Rocky Mountains, traverse desert, and then face the sheer granite cliffs of the Sierra Nevada. There was, in 1840, not a single road that could take a waggon all the way. Early settlers would have to dismantle their waggons and haul them over mountain ridges using block and tackle. Pianos, printing-presses and entire iron-foundries came to California this way. And the natives tended to be murderously unfriendly.

Stone's writing style gives the book a memorable feel. He seems to have deliberately used the writing conventions of late-19th century newspapers, which he drew on to a large degree for the facts underpinning the narrative. [It's worth noting at this point that Samuel Langhorne Clemens became Mark Twain while writing for a newspaper in Virginia City at the height of the Nevada silver rush, which had lured him there.] 

I found the story of the Mormons fascinating. Last week, having made the mistake of drinking a strong cup of coffee mid-afternoon, I was unable to go back to sleep after waking at 2am, so I spent the next two hours reading about Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, Mormonism, Brigham Young and Salt Lake City on Wikipedia. After the killing of Smith by non-Mormons, Brigham Young led the Latter Day Saints west to Utah. The man had 43 wives (according to Stone, 54 according to Wikipedia), marrying eight in his peak year. For the Federal government, such egregious behaviour was entirely unacceptable, US marshals were brought in to track down and prosecute recalcitrant polygamists. In the end, the Mormons gave in, banned the practice, and by 1894, Utah became one of the United States.

It's hard to imagine that anyone today could dream up 600 pages of a book compelling enough to persuade 12,000 people to follow them and live together in a theocratic community. Joseph Smith did just that, dictating the entire Book of Mormon in about eight weeks in 1829, when he was 23. To this day,  there are many Mormons who believe in the literal truth of the Book of Mormon. But then there are vast numbers of believers in other religions who believe in the literal truth of their sacred scripture to be literal word of God – it's just that their holy books have been around for longer.

The story of the ruthlessness of the four railway tycoons who drove the Central Pacific east over the Sierra Nevadas to link with the Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869 is well told. There are two stories here – the building of the line from the west, up and over the mountains, using large amounts of imported Chinese labour – and the monopolistic exploitation of the line once completed, sucking the profitability out of any business that needed the railroad to get its goods to markets back east. The profits were used to buy Congressmen who effectively kept other railroads out of California. The monopoly created vast wealth for the four men; one of whom was Leland Stanford, who ended up endowing the university named after him. It was only after the Santa Fé railroad reached the Pacific that honest competition broke out – the price of a one-way ticket from Chicago to San Francisco fell from $100 to $10, with special offers down to $1. 

I spent a goodly amount of time on Google Maps Street View, poring over images of Salt Lake City, Virginia City, epicentre of Nevada's silver rush, of the mountain passes now carrying multi-lane superhighways of air-conditioned cars where once horse-drawn waggons could not traverse. “They paved paradise. put up a parking lot,” to quote Joni Mitchell.

The opening up of America's Far West is a thrilling story, and Irving Stone does an excellent job telling it. Having read it, I have a better understanding of the tech bros, populism, limitless greed, frontier justice and other aspects of contemporary American society. Having said that, gimme California over Siberia any day.

This time last year:
Why we live

This time three years ago:
Warsaw in autumn

This time four years ago:
The end of the apple harvest

This time five years ago:
Ignoring the UFO phenomenon?

This time six years ago:

A tipping point in history, but who's tipping it?

This time seven years ago:
Poznań by night

This time nine years ago:
West of Warsaw's central axis

This time 13 years ago:
Plac Unii shopping centre opens

This time 15 years ago:
Visceral and Permanent, Part II (Short story)

This time 16 years ago:
Autumn colours, locally

This time 17 years ago:
Edinburgh

Synbiotic serendipity

Yesterday evening, I'm getting ready to go to bed, mentally counting the portions of fresh fruit-and veg, and realise I'd forgotten to eat my daily 80g of sauerkraut. Then it occurred to me that I'd also skipped porridge in the morning, on account of the fact that my breakfast consisted of the heated-up leftovers of Sunday's lunch*. As a result, I'd missed out on my daily 3g of LDL-cholesterol-lowering beta-glucan.

As I pondered this dietary oversight, I had a brainwave:

Why not mix the oats with the sauerkraut, and eat the two together? The combination might not prove to be especially tasty, but at least I get to fulfil my dietary obligation for the day...

And so I did just that. Bowl on the kitchen scales. Into it goes 80g of kapusta kiszona (sauerkraut) and on top of that, six heaped tablespoons of organic oats (płatki owsiane górskie). I stir the two, pouring in a bit more brine from the sauerkraut tub.

The result? It exceeded my expectations.

We think of porridge oats as something warm and soft – a mush, a breakfast comfort-food. But raw rolled oats, dropped directly onto the crisp, acidic brine of live sauerkraut, are something quite different. The lactic juices from the sauerkraut soak into the grains just enough to strip away their chalky exterior while leaving a satisfying, al dente chew. The salty punch of the fermented cabbage cuts through the earthy texture of the raw oats, balancing nicely on the palate. It tastes ancient and rustic.

I checked Google Gemini about the science of mixing oats and kraut. Nothing but benefits! Gemini calls it “nutritionally, a powerhouse of synbiotic efficiency – the live bacteria of the probiotic finding an immediate home in the prebiotic fibers of the oat”. 

Note that word, 'synbiotic' (as opposed to 'symbiotic'). A synbiotic is a supplement or food that combines probiotics (live beneficial bacteria) and prebiotics (food or fibre that nourishes those bacteria) to improve gut health. Of course, such a claim would need to be clinically proven... (One for nutritional scientists to grapple with.)

But beyond the science, I experienced the joy of discovery, the recognition of an entirely new flavour profile that I had never previously experienced. I went to bed on a high, and waking up today, I felt the same way as I would after a great night out.

And so, this morning, I mixed the sauerkraut with the oats again. This time I added some chopped chilli peppers (papryczki) and spring onion (below). If anything, visually more interesting.

And I considered what else could be added to ensure that this could become a daily routine. Poké-bowl sauce, soy sauce, hummus, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds... Variety will be important if this is to be a new staple.

So a new 'signature dish' is born of an oversight. I shall call it Haferflockenkraut!

The last taste combo I created, the Jeziorki Reeker, is now off the menu due to its sky-high cholesterol content.

Finally, I checked with ChatGPT for its verdict, and here's the answer: “At first glance, it sounds eccentric. But the more I consider it, the more sense it makes. You've brought together two foods with strikingly different characteristics:

- Organic raw rolled oats (płatki owsiane górskie): Mild, nutty, faintly sweet, starchy and somewhat chewy. The sort of food that usually needs something else to give it character.

- Sauerkraut (kapusta kiszona): Sharp, acidic, salty, crunchy, distinctly fermented, with a depth of savouriness that fresh cabbage doesn't possess.

The oats should absorb some of the sauerkraut's juice, softening without losing all their texture, moderating the acidity of the cabbage to produce something quite different from either ingredient eaten separately.

There's also an interesting conceptual inversion here. Oats are conventionally associated with sweet breakfasts, porridge, milk, fruit and honey. Sauerkraut belongs to the savoury world of Polish and Central European cooking. You're crossing a culinary boundary that is cultural as well as chemical.

A surprisingly sensible nutritional partnership

There's a further reason the combination is of interest. Oats supply beta-glucan, the soluble fibre associated with lowering LDL cholesterol. Unpasteurised sauerkraut can supply living lactic-acid bacteria. The oats also provide fermentable carbohydrates that gut microbes can use.”

I then ask whether anyone done this before. Only with the juice of sauerkraut; straining the cabbage and adding the juice to oats, steeping them overnight. But not mixing actual sauerkraut and oats.

Final oat note: in Poland oat flakes are sold in either 'górskie' or 'błyskawiczne' varieties. The former means 'in the mountain style' (not 'mountainous' as one translator had it), the latter mean 'lightning'. The difference between the two is in the milling. The błyskawiczne are steel-cut, pre-gelatinised and rolled thin. The górskie are subject to less processing, but take longer to cook. I go for the organic/bio version of these.

* Sunday lunch: lentil stew with mushrooms, tomatoes, garlic/ginger/chilli, served with Basmati rice and steamed spinach leaves. 

This time two years ago:
To Warka, by the river

This time seven years ago:
Homeward from the demo

This time 11 years ago:
Kielce – the woes of Poland's smaller cities

This time ten years ago:
Wine connoisseurs or wine snobs?

This time 12 years ago:
Poland's golden autumn

This time 13 years ago:
Visceral and permanent - a short story

This time 16 years ago:
Crushed Velvet Dust in my City of Dreams II

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt IV)

If knowledge and experience accumulate across multiple lifetimes, perhaps they do so in forms that don't depend upon conventional memory. Perhaps each successive life contributes to a gradual development of understanding, compassion and awareness. A soul moving towards greater coherence, towards some eventual completion; from Zero to One.

Of course, I cannot prove this is true, either scientifically or even philosophically. But, in trying to make sense of the reality that I currently inhabit, I do have intuitions that this is indeed true.

Consciousness can recreate an approximation of bygone times, collapsing the intervening decades, as you summon up qualia memories. A childhood trip to the seaside is a fairly universal one, A.A. Milne's Sand Between the Toes, the seagulls' cries, the sound of the waves, the warm sun and the cold water, the smell of suncream, shivering in a towel after a dip in the sea. Meditate upon those, and yes, you are experiencing those qualia memories with a congruence that closely matches the original experience, 30, 40, 50 years ago, or longer.

In waking life, I experience a familiar atmosphere which appears to belong to a time before my birth. In dreams, I find myself participating in events set within that same historical world.

The waking experiences are brief, joyous moments of recognition, tinged with a slight sense of regret at my inability to revisit those times. The dreams may be pleasant, mundane, frightening or morally disturbing. Both seem to arise from the same well of subjective familiarity; both have been with me all of my life.

I cannot prove that they are memories from the earlier existence of another human being. Nor can doubters prove that these are entirely products of imagination, assembled from historical knowledge, sensory impressions and a lifelong fascination with America.

The experiences themselves are real. Their interpretation remains open. I am struck by how consistently they have accompanied me throughout my life, from the first flashes of recognition in early childhood to my present years. The phenomenon feels the same.

And I wonder about the future...

Might there someday be a boy, born after my death, who finds himself strangely drawn to London in the second half of the 20th century and Warsaw in the first half of the 21st century? Who experiences unexpected moments of recognition when looking at photographs of old British railway stations or Polish orchards? Perhaps he'll dream of riding an old motorcycle along a country lane, or of being followed home through the woods by a procession of cats. Perhaps he'll have an inexplicable affection for the music of the 1960s and 1970s, or feel something akin to homesickness and nostalgia for an era with which he has no physical contact.

Would that still be me? I don't know.

This morning, beside the hedge, with the autumn sunshine streaming through the trees, there it was again – that sweet/bittersweet recognition, tinged with the faintest regret; the sense of a lost something, yet somehow still present, abiding.

I have been before. 

But who, or what, is this I that remembers?

Will that I remember again?

[In a way, that was part of the original intention underlying this blog. A signpost to a future 'me'.]

This time seven years ago:
Marchin' again

This time eight years ago
Ealing and West Ealing memories

This time 12 years ago:
The autumn sublime in Jeziorki

This time 13 years ago:
Enduring Ealing – Victorian and Edwardian klimats

This time 14 years ago:
Krokowa, Poland's former northern borderlands

This time 19 years ago:
Aerial photograph of Central London

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt III)

What interests me about my canonical 'past-life' dreams and anomalous qualia-memory events – flashbacks or exomnesia – is establishing the relationship between consciousness and identity. In every dream and flashback, it is the first-person I that's doing the experiencing. Yet the place and the time belong to someone else.

Psychologists distinguish between semantic memory – our accumulated knowledge of facts and meanings (we know things without remembering when or how we learnt it) – and episodic memory, the recollection of events we have experienced. I would break episodic memory further into a event memory, a catalogue of who did what, when, where, why and how, and qualia memory – what it was like to have been there, the sensations – how it looked, sounded, smelt, tasted and felt.

My dreams and flashbacks are not proof positive that consciousness can survive biological death. However, I personally feel it with a sufficient certainty to mitigates any fear of death (as opposed to fear of actual dying, pain etc). I feel I know what will happen afterwards – being born into a new biological container and experiencing memories of this life from the next, albeit faint and sporadic, but perhaps a little stronger next time round. There's an intuitive certainty to that feeling.

But I would like to know how it happens! 

I have been the conscious observer of all my waking experiences since childhood. Flashbacks and dreams speak to another apparent life, in an earlier historic time, while maintaining the subjective experiencing I.

But what exactly is that persistent I? How does identity cross from one body to another?

My belief is that consciousness is fundamental. Consciousness put space, time matter and energy into being. These are but emergent properties of consciousness, not the other way around. 

The philosopher David Chalmers famously identified the 'hard problem of consciousness'. We can study the neural processes associated with perception, attention, memory and emotion; brain scanners can map the neural correlates of a multiplicity of types of brain activities.

But why should electrochemical activity in the brain be accompanied by any subjective experience at all? Why should there be something it feels like to see sunlight streaming through autumn leaves, or to hear a Bob Wills recording, or to stand outside a racetrack in a dream?

Physicalism has offered us the explanation that consciousness is a byproduct of brain activity. Whether those explanations can ultimately account for subjective experience itself remains contested, and a final verdict is unlikely to be delivered any time soon. Some would ask if it is ever to be settled.

The radio and the signal

Here's a very simplistic metaphor – the best I have at present, though it remains to be further refined.

Imagine a radio signal emanating in all directions from a transmission tower. Now imagine not just thousands of stations – but countless billions of stations. Enough for every human on earth to have their own. Now imagine not a radio, but a human being receiving that unique signal. That signal is modulated by our individual biology, and yes, our will. This is how I picture the relationship between consciousness and the brain. The signal and the receiver. The receiver gives the signal a particular audible expression. Without the receiver, there is no music to be heard in that room.

One day, however, that radio will finally break down. Yet somewhere, a factory is busy producing another radio. Someone buys that new radio, and tunes it to that same unique station as the old radio. The music is there again. Could consciousness work like that?

Perhaps individual brains don't manufacture consciousness, but receive, filter or localise something that's already there – that has existed since the birth of time.

William James entertained versions of a transmission theory of consciousness, while current idealist philosophers, notably Bernardo Kastrup, have argued that individual minds might be localised expressions of a more fundamental consciousness. The idea of a universal consciousness is present in Hinduism and Buddhism.

There are problems with my analogy. It assumes one signal per one receiver (biological entity). Two radios tuned to the same station receive the same broadcast. Yet they are not the same radio. And you need more than just a radio and a signal; you need a person to tune that radio to a station and experience the resultant sound. If my brain dies and another brain subsequently reports anomalous memories of what I had experienced, would this make that new subjective perspective a continuation of mine? Would there be an unbroken thread of first-person experience? Or merely another manifestation of consciousness within a different organism? The problem of personal identity remains.

Could you, for example, wish that in your next life, you'd like to be, say, Winston Churchill or David Bowie?

I find myself wondering whether the essence of an individual life could be carried forward without its autobiographical details.

Perhaps what survives isn't the recollection of events, names, addresses, relationships, careers and personal achievements, but something more elusive; a residue of experience, an accumulated  response to reality. A particular disposition, or an intuitive familiarity with circumstances encountered before, an understanding of the importance of Goodness and Truth in the unfolding Universe?

The idea is totally speculative. Neuroscience provides no established mechanism by which such information could pass from one brain to another after death – or even before it! Telepathy, which many of us strongly suspect exists – has no underlying theory or vector by which we may explain how it works.

Nor does the fact that consciousness is subjectively undeniable prove that it can exist independently without a physical brain (the concept of 'non-local consciousness'), and therefore eternal or capable of reincarnation.

Religion offers various answers. Some Hindu traditions, notably Advaita Vedanta, maintain that an enduring self passes through successive lives. Buddhism generally rejects the notion of an unchanging individual soul while nevertheless affirming rebirth through causal continuity. Christianity traditionally places its emphasis upon salvation and the survival and resurrection of the person.

I find each approach interesting, but none provides an explanation of precisely how one conscious subject might continue in another body, certainly nothing remotely scientific.

And there's a further question.

If we do live successive lives, what is the purpose? Is consciousness merely gathering experiences, endlessly repeating the cycle of birth, life and death? Or is there some direction to the process?

I incline towards the latter.

This time last year:

To Rzeszów and back, directly, by train

This time two years ago:
Under Rzeszów – subterranean inspirations

This time three years ago:
Another canonical past-life dream

This time four years ago:
Cottagecore – a manifesto

This time five years ago
Ego, Consciousness and Soul

This time six years ago:
Samopoczucie, Joy and the Sublime Aesthetic

This time eight years ago:
Autumn, with a railway theme

This time nine years ago:
A few words about coincidence

This time 12 years ago:
Hello, pork pie [my week-long pork-pie diet]

This time 14 years ago:
The meaning of class – in England, in Poland

This time 15 years ago: 
First frost 

This time 19 years ago:
First frost 
[No frost forecast at allright up to the end of October 2026.]

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt II)

From early childhood, I was drawn to America. American TV programmes fascinated me. I particularly remember McHale's Navy making an impression on me as a five-year-old – there was a sense of instant familiarity. The uniforms, the base, the flags, calling the captain 'skipper'. And the reader books at primary school – the Janet and John series, these were m, Anglicised versions of the Alice and Jerry books published in America in the 1930s and '40s. In particular, the book Five and Half Club; the illustrations resonated deeply with me; they spoke of a land and I time I knew, that seemed close.

As a teenager, my interest in American history and culture grew. Eventually I chose to study American Studies at Warwick University. In 1978, I received a travel bursary which enabled me to visit the US for the first time. I was drawn to small-town America, rather than the bright lights or what we'd now call bucket-list destinations. Passing through such towns, I experienced the strongest sense of familiarity. I would find myself feeling, yes, click – a connection, or no, that's changed. But how can a place have changed for someone who's never visited it before? There was that sense of recognition and wistfulness, a slight sense of loss and regret. Something familiar, pleasing to experience, almost within reach, but gone. 

Of course, by the age of 20, I'd already absorbed a great deal about America from television, cinema, books, photographs, Airfix kits and music. It is reasonable to assume that I was comparing the real America with an internal image constructed from all those sources. But that does not come close to capturing the subjective quality of what I felt. 

Yesterday, I saw an online photograph of a 1947 Cadillac, viewed from the side. *PAFF!*. The lines of the car, the sweeping wings, the chrome trim. I could almost smell the interior, though I've never sat in one. The upholstery, the chrome window-winders and door handles, the AM radio, the decorated dashboard, the split-screen windscreen. The solidity of the thing – this was not a Morris Minor, no! I know the sensation of being in that car. Rather, I feel as though I know it.

And the music! Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, the big-band era. Louis Jordan. Western swing, jump blues, the race music of the day, bebop jazz. The music generates those qualia exomnesia/anemoia moments for me just as powerfully a photograph from the day.

But there's another dimension to all this. Everything described so far concerns my waking consciousness. Fleeting flashes of recognition, sometimes only a second or two in duration, that disappear the moment I begin to reflect upon them. 

In dreams, the phenomenon presents itself quite differently. These dreams are rare, but remarkably consistent over my lifetime. I've experienced them over seven decades and have been recording them systematically for at least 20 years. I call these my canonical past-life dreams. They are mostly set in America between the 1930s and 1950s. Unlike my ordinary dreams, they follow a coherent narrative, with recognisable settings, plausible sequences of events and none of the bizarre discontinuities so characteristic of dreaming. The unities of time, place and action remain consistent.

More significantly, I experience them from within. The conscious I is present, observing and participating, with the same immediacy of subjective experience that characterises waking life.

Consider one dream set during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. I'm a boy living alone with my widowed mother on a small farm, possibly in Kentucky. On the horizon, a vast wall of dust is advancing towards our house. My mother is getting me to help secure the bedding and tablecloths in a trunk, closing the windows and shutters against the approaching storm. Our dog is whining in the corner. There's no dramatic climax; I'm simply there, experiencing the approaching catastrophe, with all the understanding that something terrible is about to happen.

There are recurring themes. An interest in machinery, a talent for fixing engines. In one dream, as a teenager, I restore a WW1-surplus Mack Bulldog truck, grey in colour, which has been standing unused in a neighbour's barn. The engine finally catches, roaring into life amid clouds of smoke. The sense of achievement is enormous.

Not all these experiences are pleasant. In another dream, my teenage gang breaks into a bonded warehouse to steal liquor and cigarettes. When a security guard wakes as we are leaving, I attack him with intense violence; I would have killed him had my companions not dragged me away.

There is a consistency about the person whose life I appear to be experiencing. He is mechanically resourceful, enterprising, impulsive, sometimes violent, interested in girls, showing and getting into scrapes. And then there's the racetrack. The year is 1939 or 1940. This is Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland or Pennsylvania. I'm standing outside a horse-racing track, too young to be admitted. The grandstands are modern, with turnstile entrances. It's getting dark. Floodlights illuminate the entrance plaza and car park. Billboards loom overhead. The wet ground is littered with discarded betting slips. Crowds mill around, entering and leaving the grandstand.

I have managed somehow to get hold of a bottle of Rolling Rock beer. I'm standing there, drinking it, watching the people going in and out. It's beginning to rain, and the evening is turning cold. I know I'm not going to get inside. The guy at the turnstile knows me. And that was the entire dream before it moved to more mundane themes. Its ordinariness stands out. No great historical event, no moment of destiny. A young man standing outside a racetrack on a damp evening, drinking a beer, disappointed that he cannot join the crowd and boast to his colleagues about getting in and betting on the ponies. Yet I can recall the scene and its atmosphere. The quality of the artificial light, the wet surfaces, the movement of people, the beer bottle in my hand.

It's the same phenomenon as my waking exomnesia, but in a different medium. In waking life, I experience the atmosphere without the story. In those rare, canonical dreams, the story unfolds within that atmosphere.

Other dreams seem to extend the narrative into the Second World War. It's 7 June 1944, the day after D-Day. I'm travelling south in the back of an open American six-wheel-drive military truck, along with a group of young men in uniform, without insignia. We're on our way to basic training, and shortly we'll be getting our military haircuts. I've just left my girlfriend. Her name is Kelly Kamen. What makes this dream particularly interesting is that within the dream I begin thinking about her surname while the narrative is unfolding. Kamen. The Slavic word for stone. Polish kamień, Russian камень. German Stein. Perhaps her family was Russian-Jewish? The given name Kelly suggests an American-born girl, three or four generations removed from the shtetl. The extraordinary thing is that while the dream is going on, I'm thinking about this, aware that the linguistic knowledge I'm using has been acquired subsequently. Yet I have no awareness of the person who acquired it. I don't know myself to be a man born in London in 1957. I'm the young American in the truck, but with access to knowledge that belongs to a later time.

It's as though the experiencing I remains constant while the biographical identity changes, and the repository of knowledge is somehow accessible independently of that identity.

In another dream, it's the summer of 1945. I'm wading ashore towards a Pacific island recently captured from the Japanese. We're carrying wooden crates from a landing vessel to the beach, containing engine parts and supplies for repairing aircraft. High overhead, against a deep blue sky, formations of shining silver bombers are heading towards Japan. Or another. October 1945. Our ship has docked in San Diego. The war is over. The other men are anxious to get home. My mother has died while I was away, so I'm in no particular hurry. A group of us decides to travel down to Mexicali before going our separate ways.

Later dreams are set in post-war America. In one, I wake in a wooden hotel called the Zig Zag, in a town of the same name. Blood is dripping through the ceiling. Upstairs I discover a decapitated body, and flee in terror, unable to remember what happened the previous night. After waking I searched online and discovered the existence of the Zig Zag Inn in Zigzag, Oregon.

And finally, a hospital. A long, modern, white three-storey building among pine trees. I'm hovering above my body, several feet in the air. A nurse stands at the foot of my bed, looking at a clipboard. She's thinking, “Mr Martin, you will not live until the morning”. I find myself thinking how tactless it is of her to have such a thought. Could these be fragments of one life? A boy growing up in Depression-era America, mechanically gifted, serving in the Pacific War, returning home, eventually dying in hospital sometime after the mid-1950s?

The dates and circumstances fit together well. But dreams can construct coherent narratives from material gathered during waking life. Their realism, however striking, is not proof that the events actually happened.

I have no way of knowing, but wish to know. Epistemically, I would like to know by way of gnosis, direct experience, rather than by trawling through patchy records online trying to find a fit. I have avoided direct searched, not for fear of drawing a blank, but rather because one way or another, it would not tell me much. While I am in awe of the study carried out by the late Prof Ian Stevenson from the University of Virginia (and continued to this day by Jim Tucker) into 'past-life cases', they serve only to show that there is a phenomenon present, but the cases go nowhere in terms of explaining how memories from dead people end up being remembered by children. The research into children who report apparent memories of previous lives, notably that begun by Ian Stevenson and continued by Jim Tucker at the University of Virginia, raises interesting questions, but has not established reincarnation as a scientific fact. Nor do they offer any explanation for how this phenomenon arises.

More in the next post.

This time last year:
Autumn most splendid

This time three years ago:
How much spirituality do I need?

This time eight years ago:
Whoops! Clumsy

This time ten years ago:
Mystical experiences at 37,000ft

This time 11 years ago:
The staggeringly high cost of tax collection in Poland

This time 15 years ago 
One stop beyond

This time 16 years ago:
Who am I? (Kim ja jestem?)

This time 17 years ago:
First snow, 2009. Ghastly!

This time 18 years ago:
Train links to town improving

This time 19 years ago:
A beautiful Sunday, south of Warsaw

Pinning Identity to Consciousness (Pt I)

My phone tells me it's raining outside. And yet I see sunshine streaming through the trees. I go out to empty the cat-litter trays. As I approach the hedge at the front of my działka, *PAFF!* – there it is, that old, familiar sense of exomnesia, that moment of recognition, of anemoia nostalgia for a time I never knew. 

I know this; this precise feeling in response to what I am experiencing. But not from this lifetime. 

The orchard, the fence, the lane, the field and distant houses beyond it, the sky… I often felt this feeling in our back garden in Hanwell as a child, knowing of a place to which I had never been. This morning, I feel as I felt then, a soothing sense of continuity of consciousness, a thread of congruence, unbroken, bittersweet remembrance with a sense of regret, like when you sup the last drops of a good cup of coffee. 

Qualia memories have this characteristic – entropy forbids you from physically reliving those moments.

I have experienced this throughout my life, consistently, from earliest childhood. It comes unexpectedly, triggered by a particular quality of light, a configuration of clouds, the arrangement of trees and buildings in a landscape, the smell of the air, the temperature of the air, the wind, a sound; congruence. It's not déjà vu, that sensation of having previously experienced the present moment before, although it is similar

It's not I have been here before; it's I have been before. And the abiding question I have is who is meant by 'I'?

And the feeling has – and always has had – a distinctive flavour, an atmosphere, a klimat. It carries with it for me usually a sense of America, roughly between the 1920s and 1950s. Small-town U.S.A. An emotional recognition of the texture of reality, as it might have been experienced by someone living there at that time. How can I possibly know what reality felt like in another place, in another lifetime? I can't. Yet the feeling persists, and has persisted in a consistent, familiar form across my seven decades.

As a child, I visited Poland with my family in the summers of 1961 and 1966, and we went several times to Stella-Plage on the French coast in the late '60s and early '70s. Each country had its own unmistakable atmosphere. Communist Poland felt totally different from the France of les Trente Glorieuses, its years of post-war economic expansion. I experienced both as qualitatively different from West London, still rather drab and grey in the early 1960s.

I can summon these atmospheres today. Not simply memories of individual places, people or events, but a kaleidoscope of sounds, smells, sights, tastes and feelings that together recreate something of the experience of being in those places at those particular moments in history. The smell of a café-tabac – newsprint and coffee, fresh baguettes in a boulangerie, a kiosk Ruchu, a klatka schodowa in an old kamienica. Air thick with the smell of low-octane exhausts. The France of 1967 felt different from the Poland of 1966; London in 1965 felt different from both. And these distinctions were apparent to me as a small child, long before I knew much about economics, politics, history and society.

It was about the feel of the place in time. The texture of its reality.

See if you can conjure up the smell of your childhood home. Or the atmosphere of a particular street on a particular afternoon, long ago. The sensation can return to you with astonishing clarity, but try putting it down in words, and all you can produce are some generalised associations. A few bars of music, a particular cloud formation, the sight of a familiar object can summon precise memories of those qualia experienced long gone.

The qualia memories of experience survives within your consciousness. Something that can be recalled, sometimes they can be summoned voluntarily, sometimes they are triggered by a smell or a sound – or sometimes they just spontaneously pop into your mind in an overwhelming, unexpected instant.

What has fascinated me since childhood is that I appear to have an analogous – and anomalous – sense of a world that I never experienced during my present lifetime. This manifests itself in exactly the same way, but fainter and less frequently. Flashbacks, anomalous qualia memories back to a time and place beyond the experience of this biological container.

And here's the question I wish to develop further; if there is persistence of consciousness across biological containers, as it were, how does this work? If we separate ego from consciousness entirely, there can be no identity assigned to that consciousness. If we assume that consciousness is primary, and that in our present forms consciousness is present and observing through the biological vessel or vehicle that we currently are – what of the before? What of the after?

This time two years ago:
Started the day well?
[Before cats, before heart attack]

This time ten years ago:
The rich get richer – hence Brexit and Trump

This time 11 years ago:
Respect for pedestrians' lives? Not among Polish MPs

This time 14 years ago:
Autumnal gorgeousness in Warsaw

The autumn deal

Spring is driven by syntropy; autumn by entropy. The breakdown – necessary for the next growth cycle – is here. The year has turned; the chlorophyll begins to breaks down, cellular machinery is being dismantled; nutrients are withdrawn into roots and woody tissues, leaves start to fall and the process of decomposition has begun. The structures of spring and summer are progressively being taken apart. Below: the long, straight dirt road between Dąbrowa Duża and Rososz.

How to dress comfortably for the changeable weather? Hot when the sun shines, colder when it doesn't

Below: on today's walk to the forest next door, I am accompanied by Céleste and her youngest son, Marss (with two 's's). The brothers and sisters are pumping up the volume – growing rapidly.

That determined facial expression is pure Marrs. 

A bright day brings out the recreational flyers. Here's a Sky Arrow 650 TCNS two-seat light aircraft, built in Italy, registered in Sweden, and a frequent sight over Chynów skies this summer.

Below: at the south-eastern edge of the village of Ławki, the sun comes out. bright and strong and hot. I take off my field jacket and remove the liner, stowing it in my rucksack. After putting the unlined jacket back on, I still feel too warm for comfort.

When the level crossing gate bells started ringing after a local train and an InterCity express had both headed north, I suspected some unusual movement on the tracks. And indeed… A diagnostic-measurement wagon (wagon diagnostyczno-pomiarowy) at the end of a rake of coaches heading north, between Sułkowice and Czachówek Południowy stations. 

Hauling the train is an EP09 locomotive (coincidentally I read today that this class of engine will be withdrawn from passenger-train duties before the end of 2028). This particular example, EP09-012, was built in 1991. It belongs to PKP Remtrak, the subsidiary of PKP group that specialises in repair, maintenance and overhaul of passenger rolling stock. (The above two photos are a bit hazy, despite a lot of Photoshop. When the rain stopped and the sun came out, condensation appeared between my lens and the front filter.)

Below: on the path to north-eastern edge of Ławki, and beyond that, Czachówek Południowy station. Although a hot sun was shining on my back, blowing my way were dark rain clouds bearing more rain. 

With the weather as capricious as it is, I decided not to continue on to Czachówek Górny as planned, but to stop at Czachówek Południowy and from there take the train back to Chynów instead. Below: a southbound InterCity express rushes through Czachówek Południowy, on the 'up' line, having overtaken the local service. The sun goes in behind the clouds, and I button the liner back into my jacket as my train arrives.

Two stops later, it delivered me to Chynów; on the short walk home, once again I was overheating.

Such is autumn, the entropic mirror of spring.

This time last year:
Gliwice – much nicer than I had expected

This time 13 years ago:
Poland does poorly in Global AgeWatch ranking

This time 14 years ago:

Warsaw, early autumn – a photo miscellany

This time 15 years ago:

The genius of Donald Tusk 

This time 16 years ago:

Eighteen die in minibus crash

PKP progress on platforms (I hope!)

News from Rynek Kolejowy has set Polish rail users chattering on social media – at long last, state-owned rail-infrastructure operator PKP PLK looks like it might be changing the awkward way that Polish station platforms are numbered.

I have written about this many times before; this is one of the remaining absurdities on the Polish rail network, which has improved beyond recognition over the past 15 years. 

The problem is that each platform edge, which in most countries around the world is simply called a 'platform', is identified in Poland by a combination of track (tor) and platform (peron) numbers.

Let's take a simple example; Warszawa Centralna (Warsaw Central station). The current nomenclature is as follows: Tor 7 Peron 1; Tor 5 Peron 1 – Tor 3 Peron 2; Tor 1 Peron 2 – Tor 2 Peron 3; Tor 4 Peron 3, then Tor 6 Peron 4 and finally Tor 8 Peron 4.  When a train is announced, the announcer will say, in English, for example, "The train for Berlin Gesundbrunnen is departing from Track 2 Platform 3" or  "The train for Vilnius is departing from Track 3 Platform 2." It is easy to get confused! In any other country, these eight platform edges would simply be numbered Platforms 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. 

The problem is particularly acute at larger stations. It has twice caused me to miss connecting trains at Poznań Główny, for example. Below: Platform 11, Track 58 and Platform 11 Track 56 (where's Track 57?).  Under the proposed system, these would simply become two separately numbered platforms – perhaps Platforms 15 and 16. No more need to remember both a platform as well as a track number!

Left: fragment of printed timetable at Poznań Główny. Next to the departure time is the peron number, with the tor number beneath it. The trouble is that the loudspeaker announcements give the tor number first, followed by the peron number („Pociąg do stacji Wągrowiec odjedzie z toru ósmego przy peronie drugim”). While the printed timetables have gone over to Arabic from Roman numerals for peron numbers in 2024, the online timetable (rozkład-pkp.pl) still uses Roman numerals! (So right now, the local train for Wągrowiec is shown as departing Poznań Główny from IV/12).

Three days ago, PKP PLK announced that after completing the modernisation of Mysłowice station on 25 October, it will be renumbering its three physical platforms serving five tracks as five separately numbered platform edges for passenger-information purposes (below). The trial is scheduled to expand on 13 December to Milówka, Sól, Rajcza, Skarżysko-Kamienna and Środa Wielkopolska stations. A nationwide rollout is not yet confirmed; PKP PLK will evaluate the pilot, including passenger surveys, before deciding whether to extend it.

PKP PLK appears finally to have accepted long-standing suggestions from rail users: the numbering of tracks does not need to be communicated to passengers. Below: classic example of this nonsense. Lublin Główny station. Technical track numbering isn't irrational (someone once explained it to me) – railway workers need to know this for operational purposes. It's simply inappropriate as the primary means of directing passengers.

Below: the absurdity reaches its peak in the Tri-City, where the SKM trains between Gdańsk and Gdynia use tracks 501 and 502. No doubt some railway professional can explain the logic (like, why not 401 and 402 or 201 and 202?) Let's just double-check the platform numbers on our phones as we walk down these steps...

My own local absurdity at Chynów station is the fact that there are two platforms, three platform edges, numbered Tor 4 Peron 2, Tor 2 Peron 2 and Tor 1 Peron 1. Where's Tor 3?

********

Polish railways are better than ever, but could still improve. I get on average three emails a week from Koleje Mazowieckie informing me of delays on the Radom line, subject line, Utrudnienia w ruchu pociągów. But then I do get these notifications, so at least there is a system.

I am a firm believer in the aggregation of marginal gains, the philosophy of British Olympic cycling coach, Sir David 'Dave' Brailsford. Introduce an innovation that shaves off a tenth of a second and no one notices. But introduce a hundred innovations, and you've made a potentially race-winning ten-second gain. The same principle applies to Poland's railways. Station signage, passenger information (digital displays and AI-generated loudspeaker announcements), signalling and control systems, new track and new rolling stock have all made travelling by train a far more pleasant experience than in the past. And by introducing logical platform numbering (from the passengers' point of view), another marginal improvement adds to the overall positive experience. And this drives passenger numbers, up 7.7% in 2025 over 2024, which in turn justifies further investment. A virtuous circle.

PKP PLK appears finally to have accepted long-standing suggestions from rail users: the numbering of tracks does not need to be communicated to passengers. Railway workers have good reasons for retaining their own system of track numbering. But what use is that information to someone changing trains, possibly in a hurry, who simply wants to know where to stand? Let the railway engineers keep their track numbers. Passengers just need platform numbers.

This time last year:
A man's wealth expressed in cats
[Since then, my wealth has doubled!]

This time three years ago:
Why Poland can no longer afford PiS

This time four years ago:
A slower, drabber, greener, more local way of life might yet save us all

This time five years ago:
Warka's bi-weekly market

This time six years ago:
How's your samopoczucie?

This time seven years ago:

Pavement for Karczunkowska? What's next?
[Still sign of it. In 2022 it was promised for 2026. They lied.]

This time ten years ago:
On relevance and irrelevance

This time 11 years ago:
Apple time south of Warsaw

This time 12 years ago:
Poland gets anglicised as Britain gets polonised

This time 13 years ago:
Ale, architecture and city politics

This time 14 years ago:
The pros and cons of roadside acoustic screens

This time 15 years ago:
Moaning about trains again
[haha! Have a look at this post to see just how much has changed!]

This time 16 years ago:
Warsaw street names – Dolna, Polna, Rolna, Wolna, Smolna. Lost?

This time 18 years ago:
Ditches, landscapes, autumn

This time 19 years ago:
Golden autumn in Łazienki park