Douglas Traherne Harding

Detail of the Traherne stained glass window by Thomas Denny in Hereford Cathedral

When I was born I had no head

My eye was single and my body was filled with light

And the light that I was, was the light that I saw by

And the light that I saw by, was the light I was…

The Incredible String Band’s Wee Tam and The Big Huge was released as a double album in November, 1968, its name an allusion to someone looking up at the stars and becoming aware of the vastness of the universe. Recording had taken place intermittently between April and August in London, as the members of the band, then at the peak of its popularity, were living in comparative seclusion with friends in a row of cottages in the Scottish border country. The new music, as imaginative, eclectic, and homespun as before, continued to incorporate a remarkable variety of vernacular musical influences as well as instruments from all over the world; optimistic and cheerful, the record is a quintessential example of the idealistic countercultural current of the late 1960s, a short-lived phenomenon that was soon to fade away. One of its more intriguing songs is Mike Heron’s Douglas Traherne Harding, a meandering celebration of the idea of ‘headlessness’ and of 17th century English mystical poetry, the title a conflation of the names of two authors, Douglas Harding, a contemporary architect who had become an eccentric spiritual thinker, and Thomas Traherne, a 17th century Christian cleric and mystic.

Harding begins his best-known book, On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, published some years earlier, with a provocative sentence - ‘The best day of my life - my rebirth day, so to speak, was when I found that I had no head’ - and he goes on to explain that this discovery came to him while walking in the Himalayas. ‘What actually happened’, Harding wrote, ‘was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it’.

In reality, Harding’s thoughts about ‘headlessness’ had occurred to him long before his walk in the mountains, but the context of the Himalayas and the subsequent references to Zen made the story more exotic and accessible, and On Having No Head, a short and popular book, was a far cry from the complex theories and arcane diagrams that made up his earlier The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. Carrying the weight of a difficult upbringing and feeling isolated as an unconventional thinker, Harding had become obsessed with questions about his identity and purpose in life, and he gradually worked out that his ‘self’ was layered, rather like an onion - an idea that is echoed, perhaps coincidentally, in the title of the Incredible String Band’s second LP, The 5000 Spirits, or the Layers of the Onion. Harding concluded that he was was human only from a specific point of view; from another, he was cellular and molecular - again, a comparable idea is evoked in one of Mike Heron’s contributions to the band’s third album, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, the lengthy and brilliant A Very Cellular Song - and from different perspectives he was also part of the human species, the planet, and the galaxy. Most importantly, he decided that at his core was the mysterious ‘nothingness’ that lies at the heart of everything. All of this, according to Harding, stemmed from the perception that he was unable to see his face except in reflection, and that his head, presumed to be the seat of thought, memory, and sensation, was ‘missing’. It seemed to him that he was wearing the world on his shoulders. This conclusion, albeit fanciful, served to erode the boundaries between the self and the ‘other’, producing a direct experience of what is often called ‘non-dual’ reality.

Thomas Traherne came from a very different spiritual tradition. His Christian mysticism, despite its occasional cosmic references, was a more sober affair, gently ecstatic and comparatively traditional. The son of a successful shoemaker, he was born in c. 1637 in Hereford, subsequently becoming rector at the nearby village of Credenhill, where he appears to have lived a devout life attending to his parishioners and writing poetry and prose. He died young, remaining almost unknown until the late 19th century, when some of his manuscripts, including the celebrated Centuries of Meditations, were discovered in a barrow outside a London bookshop. This curious and fortuitous occurrence was not unique, as other manuscripts have continued to turn up occasionally, most remarkably when the Commentaries of Heaven were rescued from a burning heap of rubbish by someone who was looking for spare parts for his car.

Traherne, now widely loved as one of the great English metaphysical poets, put much emphasis on what he called ‘felicity’ - the happiness that we experience when we realise that we are the heirs of God, have God within us, and that as part of His infinite consciousness we are filled with love. Each of us, he said, is a universe in which we can celebrate ‘the Old/And Innocent Delights’ of Eden and childhood. It was doubtless Traherne’s sense of wonder and exuberance that led the Incredible String Band to infuse their song with his glowing sense of inner light, and to end it with lines borrowed from one of his Centuries.

You never enjoy the world aright,

Till the sea itself floweth in your veins,

Till you are clothed with the heavens

And crowned with the stars…

For further exploration:

The song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnrldplvVok

A PDF of On Having No Head: https://archive.org/details/OnHavingNoHead-Zen

An interesting short documentary on Douglas Harding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q3VacEvh8M&list=PL1WANcP0JZwD793NYh1ZESI-nomCUHfh7

The Traherne Association: https://thomastraherneassociation.org/

A Very Cellular Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmeGpov2P5k