Karma

The theological and philosophical subtlety of the eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism is extraordinary, especially when compared to the primary-school simplicity of Christianity. I've lost count of the number of times I've come across and then looked up a term like samsara or bhakti and come away dizzy with all the overlapping systematic complexities developed over thousands of years. Usually, I've forgotten it all ten minutes later, too, so find myself stuck in an eternal cycle of terminological rebirth. But some of these concepts are so useful that we have adopted them widely into our western vocabularies, usually much misunderstood and oversimplified, of course; one such is karma.

Everyone knows (or at least thinks they know) what karma is, don't they? It's a sort of brownie-point system, where merits and demerits are accumulated by our actions, resulting in good or bad comebacks further down the line. Quite who or what is keeping the tally, why they or it care, and how it or they manage to intervene in our lives is passed over in silence: it's just a thing, innit? But a very useful idea, that encapsulates some innate sense we seem to have of a mysterious economy of "just deserts" [1] at work in the universe. Heh... If only that were the case.

Which is just a long way round to saying that I am currently reaping some "karma" myself, in the negative sense.

A long, long time ago – 1968, if memory serves – I borrowed a guitar that was hanging around in my friend Alan's house doing nothing. It was an old, cheap instrument – steel-strung for a right-hander and with an action so high you practically needed pliers to hold down a chord – but I was determined to learn, and the bleeding fingertips and the aching forearm go away after a month or so, anyway. I borrowed a teach-yourself book from the library (I don't think it was the classic Burt Weedon Play In A Day) and made enough progress to convince my parents that investing in a better guitar would not be a waste of money. But how they must have suffered over the months it took me to achieve competence, listening to the tentative picking and strumming coming from the room next door: a two-bedroom council flat is not the ideal place to cohabit with a self-teaching musician.

For decades thereafter, I was a pretty decent guitar "noodler". Which is to say, I loved to play in a spontaneous, therapeutic way, but never took the next step up to playing in a disciplined, musicianly manner in public. It didn't help being a left-hander who had learned on right-handed instruments, and therefore played "upside-down", which ultimately puts severe limits on your progress. It worked for Jimi Hendrix, obviously, but his determination and ability were clearly in a different league to mine. I was happy to entertain myself in private for many years, but a while ago decided I had to give it up, as I was developing arthritis in my finger joints. It was easier than giving up smoking, but for quite some time I felt a similar sense of an absence in my life.

But the thing is, like fans of loud music – which I also was once, before the inevitable auditory karma of tinnitus set in with a vengeance – I was constitutionally oblivious to what housemates or neighbours might be thinking, as they tried to read, sleep, or merely have a quiet moment to themselves, as the strum and twang of my noodling came through the wall. Well, you know, karma... Now I have a next door neighbour who is teaching himself guitar, through the party-wall in the room right next to the one in which I am typing these very words. He's one of a household of otherwise model tenants, all Filipino nurses, and so keeps odd hours. The twanging can start up at any time, which is usually OK, although I confess I did early on draw the line at 2 a.m., finally appearing at their front door, a dishevelled and angry apparition, and as incoherent as anyone would be, woken from sleep by a badly-held, repeatedly bashed C chord. He seems to have got the point, though.

I wouldn't mind so much, but the guy is utterly unmusical, and his progress is glacial. He has no sense of rhythm, no innate feel for the length of a bar, and cannot seem to see how one chord is meant to lead, by a satisfying musical logic, to another. Few things are as frustrating as hearing the irregular strumming of, say, G major, then C major, without the lift of a third chord – F major is a tough one for a beginner, so D major would do it – followed by a return to G. Sometimes, as I sit here trying to write or edit photographs, I want to scream through the wall, "D! D! Play fucking D!"

But I don't, because, well, karma. Nobody ever complained about my playing, after all, although as a student I did once get a written note from the Master of my college, asking me not to play records late at night this week, as there was an elderly, honoured guest – Harold Macmillan, as it turned out – trying to sleep in the room below. Blimey, do you think I might have deserved tinnitus because I once gave Supermac a couple of sleepless nights? Probably not: that's not really how karma works... Besides, it's much more likely that he regularly lost sleep because of one or more of the many skeletons in his own overstuffed karmic closet.

1. Not to be confused with Just Deserts, the terraforming enterprise specialising in arid regions. Or even Just Desserts, purveyors of fine puddings.