Forest Time 9 Richard Brings Peace to Others



 

  1 The Forest without Birds

The title is not intended to express sadness, at the lack of ecological diversity in forests, but an earnest hope that we may all learn to fly.

The forest symbolises our experience of life, as birds unable to fly, because the trees are so crowed together.  The forest is too dark for birds.  They/we “cannot see the wood for the trees”.   Each tree is a moment in our lives: each hugely powerful, capable of dominating all our experience. 

Getting lost in forest is a common experience reflected in great tales like Lord of the Rings and Wind in the Willows.  But at what moment did we become lost?  Were we lost from the moment we entered the forest?

My essential assumption is that time is not sequential, or we would all realise the same great truths at the same age.  But what is obvious from experience, to Collette at five is only understood by Iris at eighty-five, and vice versa.  Time is going round in circles, until we recognise certain trees as distinct moments.  Suddenly we recognise an individual tree/a specific moment, although we have seen it many times before without awareness of its significance.  Soon we know the significance of the trees/moments around the first tree.  It is then we find a route through the forest, so that we can learn to fly.

Timelessness is the purpose of life.  It occurs when a bird flies above the forest and sees all the moments in balance.  People have called this eternity or eternal life.

The 24 Characters in Forest Without Birds

8/Bridget               Barrister

24/Collette             Humming Bird

20/David                Guru

13/Deirdre              Peter’s lover

17/Dickon               Ken and Sammy’s son

19/George               Ex-Forester

5/Iris                       Peacock

16Jack                    Cuckoo: Susan’ son

22/James                Brother of John

21/Jane                   Wife of James

4/Janet                    Wife of David

11/Jeanette              Jack’s Girl

23/John                   Owl

12/Ken                    Richard and Liza’s son

9/Martin                  Forester: Iris’s husband

6/Odessa                 Red Kite from Eastern Europe

15/Pat                      Magpie: Virginia’s lodger

2/Peter                     Forester

10/Richard                Gamekeeper: Father to Ken, Stepfather to Sammy and Iris

18/Roger                  Married Iris and later Isobel

14/Sammy                Daughter of Liza, Wife of Ken

7/Stephen                 Head of Forestry

3/Susan                   Counsellor

1/Virginia                 Hen:  Iris’ Mother: Tom’s first wife       

                                The Forest Without Birds by Renee Fossette

The moment of Rage

“But Iris, you know he hates me, he would as soon give me concrete boots and sink me in the

Thames, as choose fleece lined slippers.”  And the list of Martin’s despicable hurts clawed at

Virginia’s eyes, along with the onion she was slicing; and top of the list was turning her own

daughter against her.

“Foof, the old winge again.”  Iris spoke into the mirror, which showed her real self fluffing up her

thick black flowing hair.  Hair to die for, which like the high cheekbones and Hepburn nose were

not inherited from her mother.  “You can stop preparing dinner, right now, and write me that

cheque, and I’ll be gone.”  And in the mirror she could see herself slamming out of the house,

and road raging all the way back to Oxford, without even finishing her cup of tea.  Blood was

rushing into her face in bitter expectation, and if she crashed the car it would be her mother’s

fault, and a wicked smile, made the mirror woman sexy, which increased the smile.

“Oh, no, please dear, I have been making your favorite dish. It will be on the table in a few

minutes, as soon as this onion is fried.  I’ve been cooking all morning, and it was so difficult to

get the fresh Basil, and it is Mother’s day, and you have come all this way.”  But seeing that none

of this was affecting her daughter’s reflection, she played her trump card,  swallowed her sobs

and reverted to her girlish tone.  “George is coming to lunch.”

Lunch was successful for all three.  George loved good English food, and good English

conversation; so the “five towns casserole” and his own wit, praised continually by Iris, was more

than his lonely little boy heart could cope with.  Iris had realised, after three daughters, clones of

herself, that Martin’s failings would have mattered less if he had been good looking like George. 

Virginia was so happy to be waiting on table, to be allowed to get Iris a clean spoon, and fill their

glasses, and listen to the flow of literary pretension, as if she understood it.

“Mother used to cook dumplings like these.  Apparently they were the last thing father ate before

his Spit. was shot down in forty-two.  It’s like Eliot says: “Time present and time past….”  Why

are you giggling?”

Iris was picturing an old man spitting bits of dumpling whilst his wife counted the number of times

he spat; but how do you explain the humor of family life to a romantic bachelor  you fancy?  So

she stared contritely into his azure blue eyes, spread her hands open on the perfect white

tablecloth, and said innocently:  “I would have loved to have met your mother.  She must have

been so very brave, and so proud of her men.  It must be terrible without her.”

There was a pause, whilst a tear appeared in George’s eye and his finger tips almost met Iris’

across the table, so Virginia shattered the silence with:  “Wasn’t it nice of David to introduce

George and I?  Knowing how upset George was after his mother’s death, and how lonely I have

been since you and the grandchildren moved to Oxford.”

“You make David sound like a dating agency.”  Said Iris with a look of horror and timbre of

jealousy, whilst she decided she would scream if her mother started on about the grandchildren

again.  Martin would not let them come, ever again, and that must be the end of it.  If she did not

need the cheque to pay her counselor, she would not have come herself, although George was a

possibility.  “I think George looks like “Terminator”, perhaps David sent him round to end you!”

Now George was laughing, at the flattering comparison (given his tobacco lungs and beer belly),

at the thought of David having a negative intent towards anyone, and at the idea that he might

be there to save Iris, so that she in turn could save the world.  “and say we end the heartache

and a thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” Hamlet don’t you know.”  (Which of course

she did.  Suicidal thoughts they had early established as mutual territory.)

Interrupted by the doorbell.  Enter Peter, adored by all old ladies, but especially Virginia,

because he seemed to have a genuine interest in her Stoke-on-Trent childhood, always

elaborating her reminiscences with learned references to local architecture or ancient methods of

pottery manufacture.  Adored and despised by George, who had once sat at his feet in wonder,

but had found they were made of clay.  Their altercations always made him very thirsty. 

Dismissed by Iris, because he was small, balding and a Mason, like her husband.

“But I don’t understand.” Said Peter. “David said  Martin would be here.” Shrug of the shoulders,

ambient smile.  “Nevertheless, if those are dumplings, Gini…”  rubbing of hands to imitate

Shylock and ingratiating look towards hostess, who instantly lays a place for him.

“Of course, give the Holy Fool his due, I might have got the message wrong.  Don’t shoot the

messenger.How he keeps tabs on you all from a hundred miles away and no email I don’t know.”

Firest Time 1  Virginia clears away and washes up:

“Martin never believes anyone is ill.  He was convinced his mother was a hypochondriac.  Even when she lost four stone, he said she was in the hospice “for a rest”.  She was a crutch for his lack of money.  My feet swell so much I cannot get upstairs some nights.  Never right since I fractured my ankle.  The doctor says:  “don’t cough, you break ribs so easily”.  I am terrified of going out this icy weather.”

“It was cold that winter.  I was an Aeronautical inspector with six girls under me in the Metallurgy laboratory.  I warmed up as a Hostess at the American Air Force club.  Vetted by the terrifying Miss Blum.  I had to have references from the bank and a JP and a medical and a police check.  I worked, voluntary, twelve hours a week, in their library, canteen and reception.  I was entitled to free American meals (my first encounter with coke and maple syrup, and I could attend Tea Dances with an American band, and plenty of partners, dancing cheek to cheek.  I fell in and out of love with several Flying Officers.”

“I helped Iris buy Messallina a bigger bike and crash helmet and got all three rigged out in leotards and tap and ballet shoes.  Lucrezia is a real tom boy, always cuts and bruises, and proud of them; so different from Circe, who makes fools of all the boys.  They used to visit me whenever I bought them things, when they lived up the road, but even then I was only allowed to visit them on special occasions, by prior arrangement.  I felt very ill at ease in their lovely home.”

“Those Yank officers.  Some flew missions and never came back.  Some were moved to another base, and met other girls like me, and ceased to write.  None of them were married (their wife thousands of miles away, too far for anyone to know.)  One wrote to me from Oklahoma, after the war, his parents wrote, he wrote every day.  But I knew he was not for me.  I had danced with too many others, and heard their declarations of undying love.”

“The amazing thing for me about David is that he has coped with such injustice, never complaining, but then he has a very supportive family.”

“As soon as Bert came into the ballroom, I said to my friend Theresa, that there was the man I would marry.  We were both engaged to other people, but one dance and I knew he was mine.  Bert’s cousin ran us home in his old van.  They had both just been demobbed.  Three weeks later, two engagements were broken off, with many tears shed.  Within six months I was married.”

“Jack’s house was burnt down, and I never told Iris.  She would have blamed me.  Not for the fire of course.  I was in Wales when it happened.  For employing an alcoholic handyman, whom she became fond of when she was a little girl, because he was so kind and so childlike.  He was found in the hallway, trying to get to the front door.  I think death by being burnt to death must be terrible.  She would blame me for telling her.  She only wants to hear good news.  Pat had a horrific accident: fell from top to bottom of her stairs, caught a nail on the way down, ripped a deep channel along her arm.  She woke up a couple of hours later to hear heavy breathing.  She was very frightened until she realised it was her.  She was a battered wife, like me.  She still has nightmares.  But it was a relief when she moved out.  Iris never asks after her.  I cannot tell Iris anything.  I shall write to David.”

“Never once did I regret marrying Bert.  He was seriously ill for nine of our eleven years of marriage.  He was a wonderful man, a wonderful son, brother and husband.  I still ache inside when I hear: “Honeymoon, Honeymoon, Why did you set so soon?” or “The Bladon Races” or “I’ll see you again”.  He suffered so much.  Now he could get organ replacements, but then it was just drugs.  He had suffered jaundice whilst serving in Italy and seen a lot of action.  Such a Peace loving man.  The doctors never really knew what it was.  Two years after he died, I married Tom.”

“Martin doesn’t have staying power.  He is a very angry man.  He reminds me of Tom.  Richard was so different; he had a son Ken by his second wife, Liza.  Liza went off to the hairdressers, when Ken was two and a half, and she ran off with Glen and they had Sammy.  But when she left Glen, Richard took over Sammy for a couple of years.  Ten years later, she came back to Glen.  But now Ken’s marriage has broken down he is back with Richard, and Sammy is living with him as his partner.  They are all very happy together.”

“James was born just a year after I married Tom.  Seven pounds in weight, a lovely healthy child.  It was a sixty bed ward, and soon James was isolated behind a glass screen.  Projectile vomiting, pyloric stenosis, not noticed until he was down to four pounds.  When they brought him to me, I didn’t know it was James, as he was bright yellow and crying, couldn’t keep feed down.  He was transferred to a big teaching hospital.  The operation was very successful, but ten days later an abscess developed, round the tube draining wound.  Then it was downhill all the way.  I watched him die in terrible suffering, as I had watched my brother die, as I watched Bert .  A year later I lost a five and a half month baby.  Then two years later came Iris, and two years after that I ran away from Tom.”

“I tried for a while to separate my life from Iris.  I took voluntary work at the Sailors’ Family Society and met up with Mrs Malton.  She had been looking after a rich farmer.  He is over ninety and his money is controlled by the Court of Protection, but she manages him.  We went to the funeral of old Mrs.Skipsea together, who was head of the Home, before Mrs Malton.  Yes, life was very full for a while.  Iris started to ask me round and complained that I was visiting friends and cared for them more than for her, so I gave up trying to be independent, and as soon as I did, the invitations from Iris came to an end.  Now she only sees me when she needs money for counselling,  Why does she need two years of counselling?”

“Iris was never an easy child, but after Tom I was determined to manage without men, so I had known Richard for three years before we moved in together.  He felt the same after Liza left him.  Iris was just a couple of years younger than Ken, and we brought them up as brother and sister.   And when Sammy joined us, we coped.  Richard always worked very hard.  We were wonderful as partners, working together, building up the business, bringing up the children, but I could not have any more children, and sex hurt, and we never really talked about that side of things.  I didn’t really mind when he found a lover.  We had never married, we just worked well together.  But he felt he had to live with her.  We sort of drifted apart, yet stayed friends.  Iris hated us both for separating.  Richard was the only father she had ever known.  Ken was her big brother.  It was all my fault.”

“Moving house was a nightmare.  I could not get insurance on this house.  I had to replace the central heating and found the floorboards were rotten.  I cannot sell the old house because they have found subsidence and it has to be underpinned.  So I am living between two homes that are both uninhabitable and full of builders .”

“I could not tell Iris about my holiday in Wales.  Eight weeks living with Richard and Ken and Samantha and their baby Dickon.  Richard is eighty, but still gets up every morning at 6am and spends most of the day growing vegetables.  Then in the evening he goes out to help a neighbour with lambing.  Ken is setting up a business, recycling metals, and is out most of the day, but Sam does all his paperwork and spends office hours as his receptionist at the warehouse, so I was very useful looking after Dickon and cooking for all of them.  I felt part of the family again, and we never mentioned Richard’s third wife.” 

“But I had to come back here, and there was a pile of abusive letters from Iris waiting for me on the mat, and the house had been burgled, and I became ill, and nobody came.  I was too ill to write or even phone.  It felt as if everyone had forgotten me.  David kept in touch, but what can he do?  Can he solve Ken’s financial problems?  Can he make Iris love me?  Can he make me better?  Yet without his letters, I would not have been here when Iris visited.  She did not even know I had been ill.  What a strange day it has been.”

The Decision moment

“I am definitely not coming here”.  It was the first time Collette had said it out loud, although she had said it to herself several times that day.  She had said it as the train left the picturesque hills, overlooking the wide river, and slowed into back streets of wretched terraced houses.  Collette had not read Philip Larkin’s “Whitsun Weddings”, and saw only an old fashioned, down-at-heel town.  The bus to the University revealed empty shops, buildings under demolition, industrial chimneys and factory smoke.  The redbrick university buildings were a huge disappointment to a young woman used to Oxford and Cambridge.  She brightened a little on meeting a charming Chinese lad, who was also applying to do Sociology and Politics.  He was from London, and explained that the brightest young lecturers taught at new Universities because all the jobs in the old ones were already held by old foggies.

He explained that some of the old dodderers still believed in God.  “Five great extinctions must make God something of an idiot!  The lecturers here are not going extinct.  They are young; they know where it is at.” 

Collette was not at all sure where it was at.  But as she sat trying to take notes from a Sociology lecturer, she was aware that A levels in History, English Literature and Religious Education had not prepared her for the new language he was speaking.  He was tall, good looking, and yes he was young: and he was a senior lecturer.  Perhaps Sociology was only gibberish as it was taught in Hull.  The whole lecture appeared to be an attack on God, who had apparently made the world like a clockwork toy, which was why Society was fragmenting.  An atheist revolution was coming, to set people free from this clockwork God, and Sociology would be guiding science enabling a painless transition, as Sociology enabled us to see where Russia and China had gone wrong. 

After the lecture there were small group discussions, and she was surprised that no-one else saw the lecture in such simple terms.  They were explaining terms, like “embourgeoisement” and “meritocracy” to each other, showing off their knowledge of the jargon.  She felt so ignorant: “definitely not here” she said to herself.  But then the lecturer told them all that the lecture and groups, was not a form of assessment, but was itself an experiment to see how students perform when they think their performance is being assessed.  She wanted to laugh at the students who had been trying so hard to impress, but she also felt it was sneaky to use them as guinea pigs: “I am not coming here”.

The Politics interview was much more formal.  Just her and the “Reader”, in his study, which was packed with books she wanted to read.  He read her like a book, quickly mocking her desire to be an M.P., so that she felt, “who would want to be an MP when they could be as clever as him and teach future MPs”.  He explained to her that God favours chaos, because that is the way consciousness works: “If our minds worked like clockwork, we would have been supplanted by computers years ago.   But we are part of chaotic creation, not tools made to serve specific functions, but free individuals.  Our freedom depends on the random errors occurring within our brains, which accumulate to produce consciousness.”

Collette said:   “So it is not a rational, rule-governed universe, like the Social scientist said, because God is consciousness within matter.”  She was not at all sure what this meant, but the lecturer appeared impressed, and noted something on his pad. He told her about his research on Cambodia, which sounded really exciting.   He said she was like a humming bird: using terrific energy to stay in the same place, for a tiny amount of nectar.  They overran into the next person’s time.

She caught the bus back to the station with the Chinese man.  He had loved the Sociology, and said he would definitely come to Hull; but Collette knew it was not for her.  It had been her fourth choice, and she was confident that one of the others would make her an offer. 

No other offer came, and she regretfully accepted the Hull offer.  Her grades were much better than she had expected, and she could have gone for Oxford or Cambridge, but she felt bound because she had accepted their offer, because they had wanted her when no other college did, and because Cambodia was exciting.  Chaos had certainly won through.  The Chinese man went somewhere else, and Collette went where she had said she definitely would not. 

It was the start of a twenty year love affair with the city: living in those romantic terraces and burning smoky coal, riding in the lift with Philip Larkin, studying the society of demolition workers, years of research accumulating her own library, marrying the son of a professor, working for the local Social Services Department, teaching at the college, trying to get elected to the council, raising children.  None of it worked like clockwork.  It happened chaotically.  Every time she made a mistake, decided on the wrong course of action, she discovered a whole new aspect of her consciousness.  She used terrific energy to stay in Hull, but the sweetness she discovered was beyond her expectations.

The Blood moment

Cutting his wrist was her great act of charity towards him.  It was like picking up the cat from the road and taking it to the vet.  Injured creatures moved Iris to pity.  They were so needy, they made her feel powerful.  They made her forget her own needs, and James seemed most worthy of her pity.

He had lost his mother to cancer eighteen months before they both joined the sixth form.

He had adopted Iris as a mother figure, because she was exceptionally beautiful and caring.  She knew the signs.  But he had also missed a great deal of schooling through illness.   But worst of all she had fallen in love with his great friend Roger, who looked like a Greek God, was destined to be captain of every sport, and head boy and go to Cambridge.  She and Roger seemed perfectly matched, both standing tall, physically and mentally above their peers.  But that was no consolation to James, and she desperately wanted to console him.

James had struggled to survive, to be normal and to succeed at school.  He had largely succeeded, but she knew there was still a long way to go, to express his true abilities.  He retained modesty and innocence, which Roger had clearly lost.  Most importantly, his suffering had produced a romantic and mystical personality. They read “Anna Karenina” and “Anthony and Cleopatra” together, so that Iris saw herself in those role models.

Thus for his consolation, she declared that they must become “blood brother and sister”.

An attractive notion as she had no brother and he had no sister.  As a ‘femme fatal’ it was inevitable that she would have many lovers, but she would have only one blood brother.

She took the razor blade, and slid it easily across her wrist, as they sat reading together in the school library, and the blood flowed.  Hastily she passed the blade to James, who sawed gingerly at his own wrist producing pain but no blood.  “Poor boy he could not even do that!” she thought.  So she took the blade and expertly cut the vein herself.  She strapped their wrists together, to mingle the blood, and they were one, in a mystical romantic way that no wedding ring or priestly paper would ever achieve for her.

It was a family bond for her, as she had once returned home to find her father had cut his wrists, deeply, dangerously; being careful not to damage the carpet, ensuring that all the blood went in the bucket.  He did not want to upset her mother.  He had survived. So she was confident that the procedure could be done without danger, and without leaving any trace in the library.  She wore a white blouse and he wore a white shirt, and neither was stained red, nor did anyone else in the library notice.  Years later, when her mother died, her father cut his throat, careless of the carpet, and died.

James had no experience of self harm, although he had had blood samples taken, and his flesh had been cut by surgeons, leaving impressive scars, which he kept hidden.  As an adult he worked with many forms of self-harm, seeing them as rites of passage, marks of status, often associated with hearing voices.  During childhood fever, he had heard some terrible voices.  The incisions made in his flesh were like tribal initiation, marking a transition to adult life.  The fear he experienced before an operation was released by the cutting, bonding him with the doctors.

Over the years James met all of Iris’ husbands.  He wished them all well, but felt they had an impossible task.  She expected total commitment from them, but also total trust in her, all without any dependency on their part.  James on the other hand had his own life, for they were connected by compassion, not expectation.  They cared about each other, when one of them needed care, but remained independent most of the time.

This mutual help was somehow anti-erotic, as if they had sliced through the flesh, separating need from desire; just as Saint Paul had cut a line between the stigmata and the clitoris; between the sacred blood of sacrifice and the profane blood of menstruation and parturition.  His was not a dissection of body and soul, but razor cut between the agony of the flesh and the ecstasy of the flesh.  James would have to draw this wound together if his heart were ever to heal.

When people cried out to him for help, he wanted to reach out and heal them, to intervene miraculously.  He gained great satisfaction as a blood donor, feeling a bond with all who received blood.  He could not watch someone slicing into meat, and see the blood ooze out.  It was the “take eat, this is my body” of the communion service.  It was the same abomination when people cut new roads across open countryside: an entire species engaged in self-harm.

Over the years Iris met the wives of James.  She wished them well, but felt that he had allowed the liaisons in the same accidental manner, in which he had allowed her to fuse their incisions.  She had wanted to lift him from this passivity, but as the years passed and she became more commanding, more regal; he became more accepting, more determined to serve.  If the same blood ran in their veins, it ran more slowly in his.

James admired her melodramatic description of events; a life lived on the edge, always a thin line away from death or destruction.  Iris felt that his gentle understatement concealed great depths from her, and she longed to take the razor and cut through to his inner tragedy, so that she could once more provide compassion.  Sometimes, when there were just the two of them, they were again one flesh, but as in the library, no-one else noticed the scars beneath the cuffs.

The Wren Moment

The wren moment is the opposite of the cuckoo moment.

“Oh I see, I understand now”.   It is the moment when you see the bird that has been singing.  The camouflage of leaves falls away, and the brilliant songster with the powerful voice turns out to be a tiny brown wren.  That moment first came for George, when he was a small boy, running through trees on a hot day.  He tripped and fell.  He rolled on to his back and looked up at the sky through the canopy.  What he saw was Beauty.  He lay transfixed with wonder.  Throughout his life, if he felt stressed or angry, he would find some trees, lie down and look at the sky.

“That is why Plato and the Greeks are wrong” he told Stephen.  They have this false dualism of mind and body, which in turn produces the rationalism versus pleasure debate.  The experience of consciousness is neither mental nor physical, because reason and emotion are indivisible.  Both exist only within consciousness.  Without that first: “Oh I see”, nothing else is possible.  If we see the whole person, like I see the sky through the clouds, we see them as beautiful.  We will care for them and good will result.”

Stephen remained sceptical.  He had seen the limits of George’s vision.  George had been fixated on Peter for years, believing that he was the fount of all wisdom, reading the books Peter

recommended, puzzling over the conundrums Peter set, following the way of life that Peter adopted.  Peter had been a Platonist.  Imitation was meant as sincere flattery, but it also assumed that Peter had the Truth, so when George found there were other interpretations, he had another moment of understanding. 

“There is no place for Moderation in Truth or Beauty” he told David.

George had been similarly unlucky with women.  He was tall, with black hair and the clear cut chin and heroic attitude of an adventure book character, but he had the sensitive eyes of a poet.  The Greeks would have seen a protector’s body and a mind in need of tender care.  Women loved him, and he was able to choose the long-legged stunners with the highly strung temperament of a racehorse.  His relationships were passionate, stormy and rarely lasted more than a couple of years. 

He put intellect on a pedestal.  Peter had encouraged this, but he was driven by a need for those moments of revelation.  His long periods of illness, which puzzled the doctors, enabled him to indulge in long exercises of self-diagnosis. He wanted to know why he was not the daring do fighter pilot, or at least the doctor.  He analysed his character and the characters of those he met, as if he were a investigating a murder, longing for that moment, when the reader of a detective story suddenly knows whodunit.

He admired Ken’s ability to discover the exact location to site an oil rig, by hundreds of hours of patiently analysing pollen samples.  How powerful to make such world changing discoveries through meticulous hard work!  He dreamt of such moments, like following a map to treasure or Shangri-La.  But he knew he could not do the work, and this led him to reject the Greeks.  His discoveries must come through intuition or instinct, something given by Grace.

In his darker moments he felt abandoned in a maze.  Unable to solve the problem, he turned to alcohol, or women, or isolation.  But the downward spiral had always stopped when a flower, a poem, a piece of music had returned him to that childhood sense of wonder.  He then entered counselling mode, analysing his own ranting, until he could find a new description of his problem, so that he could say: “I understand now”, and rush off to explain things to Stephen or David.

The moment of Dawn

The dawn chorus, loud on a summer’s morning, long before you need to wake, may be annoying, if you are unable to get back to sleep; agonising if you already have a sleep problem, tragic if you oversleep and miss the important moment in your life.  But imagine the summer’s dawn without a single bird.  You lie there, waiting for the singing to begin, and as you listen the silence grows.

It is a moment of horror so intense, so incredible that it evokes a powerful, inappropriate joy.  When the twin towers were hit, the world watched with increasing disbelief, because it was so like a disaster movie.  But when the first tower collapsed, “in the twinkling of an eye”, can you honestly say that the impossibility of what you saw did not produce a sublime lightness, a feeling which immediately made you feel guilty, because for a moment you had blotted out all thought of the hundreds who were dying in front of you.

The beauty of the atomic mushroom cloud.  The vivid perfection of every image during an accident, when consciousness seems total.

Jeanette had led a sheltered childhood, protected from sadness, until at fifteen; she split up with her first boyfriend.  He phoned her, and she agreed to meet him at the entrance of the tower block where he lived.  He jumped from the fourteenth floor, landing like a tomato, only a metre from her.  She felt like a camera taking a thousand still pictures, each almost identical, yet showing some new detail.  She knew these pictures would stay with her, that they were more significant than anything she had seen before, that they would be her measure for future orgasms, defining her view of Art.  She even had time to wonder at the pictures he must have seen as he fell.  For weeks, she hated herself for these thoughts, and because the tears she cried were for her own callousness, and not, as everyone assumed, for her boyfriend’s death.

For Deirdre, death had been much more tranquil.  She had agreed to identify the body of a man who had dropped dead in the street, without identity.  The police believed he was a client she worked with; but when they pulled out the drawer at the morgue, he looked so tranquil, so unlike himself, that she took a moment to recognise the face.  The moment of death is such a thin line, as between one breath and the next; yet the distance between the body with life and the dead body is infinite.  How cruel that Mr White, who did not even know he was ill, should lie so snugly serene in the drawer, whilst Mrs Green shouted all through the night, begging the care staff to kill her.

When Stephen had been skilfully delimbing a tall ash he had felled, he rested for a moment, considering where to make the next cut.  There was no pain, but he felt something pulling at his trouser leg and dampness on his knee.  Looking down he saw the blade was cutting gently into his leg.  After twenty years of precision, how could he be so careless.  So much blood, such a deep cut, without pain: there was more admiration for what he saw than horror.  So easy to pass from life to death he thought; so easy to bleed to death of a self-inflicted wound, out here in the wood, all I have to do is pass out.

He recalled the first choral outburst of the Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, and the moment that a species becomes extinct, until his own death seemed a little matter.  The injury and the thoughts took only seconds, yet they form a much larger part of his memory than the hour he spent getting to the doctor and having the leg stitched.

Moment of Trees

If there is a tree of knowledge in the forest, what does it look like, and what sort of birds would sing in its branches?  As a tree grows, would it only be able to see things at a specific time and place?   A tree has its own subjective voice, but cannot speak on behalf of others?   Each species of tree has its unique parasites and symbiotic bird life, but only the forest as a whole can be objective.

If Roger was a tree, he was an ancient oak, whose behaviour and life changes were as predictable as the eclipses of the moon.   The oak creates a clearing in the forest, by excluding the light from all the saplings, which attempt to grow beneath his branches.  The smaller trees form a respectful circle around the prodigy in worshipful silence.

He was always the same. As a sapling he was taller than the other boys.  His father had been a professional rugby player and money lender, so Roger assumed he would play a leadership role.  Regardless of sport, he was the captain of the school team, sweeping all before him.  His mother was a college professor, so he assumed the same authority in academic subjects.  Iris inevitably succumbed to this prospect of greatness.  But he was only a big tree in a small wood.

Roger was wild, untamed, Lawrencian.  Cambridge was determined to saw him into planks, to extinguish the flame of tradition, to create a clearing in the forest.  He was offered fashion and style, where he sought absolute knowledge, novelty where he wanted victory.  If he had comported himself properly, he would have been sheltered by the state for life. 

Cambridge was like a great gale, and for three years he was shaded out: passed over in sports selections and belittled in lectures.   His personality twisted from side to side, but he could not escape his embodied subjectivity: his statistics were masculine, his Marxism was chauvinist, and his paternalism was a mask for autocracy.  He was like a tone deaf man trying to sing by numbers.  Damaged by this experience, Roger entered a period of shock, violence and deception.  There was no obvious future for him, so he branched out in many directions. 

He married poor Iris and made her life hell, with his jealous rages that grew into physical cruelty.  He became a teacher, excluding the light from all the children he taught, whilst remaining insecure, because of the constantly changing performance indicators.  He started an antiques business, which succeeded by his meanness and the rise in demand, but failed, because of his ineptitude at restoration.  He wrote stories and poems, to express his anger, not his creativity, and might have become famous had he intended less.  When his genuine creativity made Iris pregnant, he refused to recognise the child and they divorced.

Soon after this he was sacked from the school, sold the antiques business and entered his true vocation as a butcher.  He joined the “Ancient Order of Foresters”, an all male secret society with mysterious rituals, which had to be learnt off by heart, and performed with high solemnity.  Isabel was the architect of this transformation.  She gave him two children, a hen and a cock, to sing in his branches.  Once more, Roger was surrounded by traditions, to be lived, not questioned, an ancient oak respected within a sacred grove.

Numbness Moment

Numbness was definitely a feeling for Bridget.  When she had been a small girl, she was prone to fevers.  Her temperature would shoot to 105, her parents would look worried, but she was really happy to have their full attention, to be fussed over.  There was no pain, just a heightened perception: colours and scents became stronger, she could feel the slightest breeze and she felt she understood people, as if she was telepathic. 

But then came the numbness.  The hypersensitivity passed: she would have hardly noticed a gale, vision was like sepia photos, and she could dig her fingernails in her arm without feeling anything.  She did not feel in control of her body, and did not think she could stand if she had tried to get out of bed.  The only thing she felt she could feel were her bones.   It was as if the nerves had all turned inwards, sensing the solid structures within the flesh, as if she now was her skeleton.  This sensation, or lack of it, terrified her, so that the next time she had a fever, she ceased enjoying the heightened senses, and waited in agony for the numbness to arrive.

The numbness was a decisive feeling in Bridget’s life.  It determined her desire to live in a rational world, where the physical could be kept under control.  So she studied Law, the most structured, factual of the non-science subjects.  (Science scared her, as it dealt with real physical phenomena.)  She was a brilliant student, but always wanted to do better.  She found she could push herself so hard that her sensitivity increased, in a feverish state when she was able to remember more information. But she was always careful to stop before she reached numbness.

Alcohol was the medium for bringing the self-induced fever to an end, just before the numbness.  Alcohol produced a different sort of numbness, which was also dangerous.  Like the time when she stepped off the seafront on to the beach and broke her ankle.  Like the time when she went to bed with James, because she felt sorry for him.  Alcohol allowed her to be physical, and she was good at it, but it also ruined the experience, which reinforced her rejection of the physical.  When she gave up alcohol, she also gave up sex.  Instead, she punished her body with long physical routines; like swimming forty lengths of the Baths every morning before breakfast, and running for an hour after work.

In contrast, Janet felt numbness as a spiritual experience.  It was the moment when her guide appeared to disappear, when she could not access God, when she found it hard to hold on to her faith.  It was like a desert, like the painful dryness of sex without any lubrication.  Her mind, usually so full of empathy and discernment, suddenly went blank.  Just like Bridget, that moment was preceded by a period in which her mind was buzzing, when “the Lord” appeared to be guiding her every step.  Thus she came to fear any rise in her Faith.  She wanted to have a normal, steady faith.

For George the numbness came only in his mind.  There would be a sudden increase in mental activity.  He would write the most brilliant articles, lectures and stories; but there always came a point when the ideas came too fast, so that he could not get them down, not even into a Dictaphone; and then there was nothing.  Words would cease, his brain felt numb and he crept into his bed, sometimes for months.  He tried to avoid the writing, thinking that was the cause, but he simply talked, or acted in an increasingly manic way, until people thought he was mad or dangerous, and the weeks of misery followed.  He tried drugs to control the mania, both prescribed and illegal, to try to keep it at the fast creative level, before the spring broke.  But they mostly brought him to the numbness, without the brilliant stuff.  He made a great study of his condition, and realised that he was very fortunate.  Most people had far more depression and far less benefit from the mania.  David advised George to try a routine of physical exercise and meditation to control his gift, and keep the numbness for his dreams.

Collette saw numbness all around her.  On her flights to India, she was surrounded by people waiting, as if they were in limbo.  She tried to help them out of it.  Their bodies were restricted, and many of them had not accessed their minds for years, but they had all had inklings of immortality, minor mystical experiences; which she persuaded them to share.  Her faith liberated them from solidness of their bones.  India itself was a country numbed by tradition and bureaucratic corruption, but it was stirring, and she had faith that it would awaken.  Working with people like Jack she knew that the fevered period of withdrawal, was worth it.  She had watched the startling transformation from a zombie, who looked  to be fifty, to the chatty, perceptive, intelligent, handsome 28year old.  The emergence of who they really were was often frightening, and the danger of reversion was especially strong in the first few weeks after rehab., but the danger never went away, and she believed that only a higher power could keep people away from returning to numbness.

Jeanette had been numbed by the sight of her boyfriend crashing to the ground at her feet.  She tried to stay that way, by distancing herself from her clients.  This was easy with those who seemed capable of working.  She put them down as “scroungers”, and dismissed them as useless. She could not understand why anyone should wish to numb their senses by addiction to substances: it was like going to a war zone in order to witness horrific events.  Yet, many of the people she worked with were themselves seen as “horrific” by her friends, who all worked in safe admin. jobs.  Most difficult for her were the stroke victims.  They were numb in part of their body, part of their mind, yet fully normal in the other part.  She loved it when they made a full recovery, but she came to feel far too much for them, and decided she mush move to different work, where she could retain the numbness of her own emotions, where she would be praised for her “professional detachment”. 

Forest Time 2 Peter at Home

Iris owns a flat in a country mansion.  The whole flat fits into what was once the dressing room and bathroom, behind a main bedroom, but now contains two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a mezzanine sitting area,  and a large dinning, sitting room, where Peter has been fed in the grand manner.  The twenty flat owners also share equal access to the main reception rooms, which have the classic, but shabby splendour of the British Museum.  Peter admires his watercolour of the mansion, which shows the fine columned portico in the reflected light of autumn trees rather than the lichened greyness of unforgiving sunlight.  It is in this warm Monet focus that he remembers Iris.

In contrast his watercolour of Deirdre’s “period cottage”, on the edge of a market town, carries Manet’s sensuality to the edge of sickly sweet kitsch.  Inevitably, looking at the two pictures together, Peter contrasts the two women.  They are both harridans, but Iris keeps her sword sheathed, whilst delighting him with her cultured mind and full attention.  Deirdre compensates for her vulnerable sensuality in bed, by authoritative hectoring at all other times.  She wants him to be successful, to get his paintings in the market place, to be recognised, to be the partner of a famous man.

Peter dare not express this side of her personality in the watercolour.  The truth is hidden by a rood-screen

Jane’s Tudor farmhouse, is her delight and burden.  It could be “perfect” if only there was money.  So Peter has made the house look smaller (his pictures are rarely more than fifteen centimetres square), manageable, like a home for Beatrix Potter’s “Mrs Tittlemouse”. He has added a lancet window, and a niche for the model of a pig.

The men are represented in abstract oil paintings: a valued virtue or despised vice captured in colour.  Thus James gets blood red lines that turn into swirls; to express his infinite energy for organising that comes to nothing.  Whilst his brother John has a foliage of serenity greens, shaped into spandrels; the lone life of a secular priest, which Peter admires so much. 

Odessa gets a male abstract.  It reminds him now of a white coat with embossed scarlet hammer and sickle motifs, but blurred to hide the symbolism.  Peter cannot relate to her as a woman but only as an intellectual, as a symbol of Eastern Europe.

He would never visit her tower block council flat in north London.  It is not the subject for a watercolour: it is everything he is trying to escape.

The abstract that pleases him most is claustrophobic with misshapen colours filling every dimensional space, except a black aperture, which represents the angry Tom (whom Peter never met) in the act of leaving Virginia.  Her chaotic house packed out with horded refuse, reflects her restless mind that never forgets, or organises, or connects within itself.

An old picture of poor George (they no longer speak) shows purple and gold flaked in brown; to express Peter’s contempt for all those who attempt to imitate an antique style of writing.  “Like James Elroy Flecker, a flying buttress to support the ruin of the Byronic age.”

This is why Peter’s Roger painting is turned to face the wall.  It captures the moment that a meat cleaver cuts into a rump of pork, but it is clearly in the style of Rembrandt.  It is as unacceptable as Peter’s vegan past would be to Roger.  “I must live according to the values of this moment”.

Peter looks at his watch to register the twenty minutes he has spent looking at his paintings.  He would like to paint David’s crazy idea that time can be represented as a discrete series of moments.  But David is a senior Forester, and it would be disrespectful to put his negative thoughts on canvass.  Perhaps he could design a coat of arms for him, as he did for Stephen: heraldry is a wonderfully rational escape from Art.

Back rooms of a Tudor town house, first reception room with original walnut panelling.  Large kitchen,

frankly hideous but utilitarian, then a series of bedroom-cum sitting rooms, each opening into the next. 

Untidy and dusty, because of the quantity of objects, and pictures: from his first teddy to a unique

sculpture given to him for his fifty-fifth birthday.  His own paintings, mostly no more than 20cms on their

longest edge, mainly abstracts, fill any wallspace that is not already covered in bookshelves.  Peter is

tidying up in preparation for the arrival of his songthrush.  Tidying means clearing floor space so it is

possible to get from bedroom to bathroom and kitchen without tripping up. 

Despite a brisk two mile walk on his return to his market town, from Gini’s big city, Peter is still cross

about his fruitless journey, and still cursing the “Holy Fool”, David, for his misinformation.  Beethoven’s

“Fidelio” is doing nothing to soothe, as it only recalls David’s work in prison reform.  He brushes against

an ornamental plate, and chips it.  Enraged, he throws it against a bookcase, where it smashes.  The

doorbell rings and he remembers the plate was a present from his songthrush.  Despondent sigh, slouch to

the door.

 “Oh Roger, what a surprise, I was expecting Deirdre.  No meat, so it must be handshake business?”

Roger is never taken further than the immaculate panelled room.  A hygiene conscious butcher, he would

be horrified at Peter’s kitchen; but the finely polished walnut, is everything Roger was seeking, when he

joined the local lodge.  The “business” is purely personal, as Roger’s wife of twenty years has walked out.

“I could see it coming when she went vegetarian!” jests Peter, who lusts after the delectable Isabel, but

sides firmly with Roger.  After all, he gave up his own veggie pretensions when he moved from central

London, and signed up to everything stolid and middle England.  “God, if you had met some of those

right-on lefties, who called a spade a heart and wanted to rant about feminism all day, you wouldn’t

believe where a simple change in diet can lead.”  And whilst he spoke, he thought of his horror of meeting

George again, after so many years, but how could he explain his intimacy with a fop like George, to salt of

the earth, like Roger .  Of course Iris was a smasher, but he had picked up her negative vibes.  Smasher!?

He thought of Isabel, then Deirdre, then excused himself, from Roger and went to pick up the bits of

Deirdre’s plate.  Just in time, for there was another ring, which Roger answered, and Peter re-emerged

smiling with a bottle and three glasses.  “Any Port in a storm”, he said genially.

Deirdre of course had all the answers: knew the procedures for missing persons, the best matrimonial

counselling services and divorce lawyers; but also had the common sense to get Roger away from the Port

and off in the active search of Isobel’s feminist friends.  Her own agenda was to get Roger out of the way

so that she could enjoy a good screw with Peter, as she had been buying and selling fine art in London all

week, and wanted release.  “Fidelio” definitely put her in the mood, she might sing him an aria later, but

for now, she was going to work him for his screw.

“Have you started cooking, or are we going out?”

“Beef casserole, should be ready by the time you have drunk that.”  Untidy he certainly was, but cooking

was all about timing, and Peter was an excellent chef.  “I say, well done with Roger, you are so smart; I

almost felt you were making it up, just to be rid of the old duffer.”

“Have you got the pictures framed for the Cheltenham exhibition?  Or were you too mean again.”

“Ten frames, six hundred pounds, and I bet none of them sell.  But you know I always follow your

advice.”

“Your unique vision will be recognised one day, but only with the correct marketing.”  And they both

knew it was true and sad; but now there was food and sex, so fame could go back in the wardrobe.

Her mobile rang three times during the beef, all business.  So she switched it off.  Then, in the midst of

pears and ice cream, his replica forties phone went.

Martin was very apologetic for not being with Iris.  Yes he had told David he would be there, but that

“dam bitch Virgy creeper, had been whining about the grandchildren again”.  Of course he would have

come if he had known Peter would be there, etc. etc.  In the end Deirdre suggested that they pop into

Oxford the following weekend, as she was launching an exhibition there, and it would be nice to have

Peter along; which meant she could not bare to think what he might get up to if left on his own, on a

Saturday, now his study of  the counties tombs and monuments was complete.

Then Peter unplugged his phone, and they got down to it, which is why they missed David’s call, which

didn’t matter, as he was neat with answer phones, but Isabel was trying to ring just as Peter was bringing

himself to climax by thinking about her.  Deirdre was a bit fetishist for Peter.  He knew exactly how to

satisfy her but he had to think about it, and that spoiled his enjoyment.  “Still beggars can’t be..”

That missed call had tragic consequencies.

The Moment of Rape

Suddenly Iris was floating at some point above the lampshade, just beneath the high ceiling, looking down at her body as it writhed in torment or ecstasy.  She could not tell which, nor did it seem to matter to her.  She watched with complete detachment.

Even months later, she found it impossible to discuss her experience without raising sexual feelings.  She found that her friends of both sexes were aroused by the idea of rape.  This even happened with women who had been raped, and she questioned whether she herself thought about her experience in order to become sexually excited.

Was it the thought of being forced “against my will”, to do something, that she feared she secretly wanted to do, but was held back by social taboos.  The other person was: too old, too young, too stupid, too clever, too ugly, too handsome, too rough, too gentle – too many taboos.

No, rape was not a liberator.  Rape was “horrid”, “terrifying”.  It had destroyed the pure, holy intimacy she had with her partner.  But how had it done that?  He had been so sympathetic, so rightfully angry with the perpetrator; but so gentle, so loving with her.  His desire for her had increased, and he only held back from intercourse because she asked him.  But surely that was what she really wanted – his ejaculation, to assure her that she was still lovable, not polluted, contaminated.  What had she wanted then?  Had she wanted her partner to force himself upon her, when she said “No”?  She was so confused.

Most of all she felt guilty, that she had not resisted the rapist successfully.  She had pushed and scratched and bitten.  The court had no problem in convicting him.  Although he had claimed that she seduced him; that she had said she found sex difficult (which was true) and needed to feel the man’s passion before she could respond (which she might have said in the abstract, but she did not mean that man – not in a million years).  That she had warned him she would resist and he must just “push on” (she had never said that).

But there was that terrible moment, when she had felt his desire and that had been amazing.  It was that feeling which had horrified her, made her feel guilty made her leave her body.  How can you stay in a body that lets you down like that?

Therapy had been all about: 1) Convincing herself that she was not to blame in any way:  that the responsibility was wholly his.  2) Convincing herself that she was not ruined or broken.  She was a “survivor”.  She could return to her partner, with a new strength, a new understanding.  She could relate to others who had had a similar experience.  She could help others who had had a similar experience; she could help and support so many people now because she knew what it was like.  The therapy was very positive.  She had a crush on the therapist.  The therapy had not worked.

The human race, she felt, was raping the earth: forcing it into unnatural cycles, forcing it to resist with global warming and terrible weather events.  Yes, the earth was fighting back.  But Man would win.  Man would blame the earth for tempting him, with her riches of oil and coal.  Man would say he had to use force to get the best from the earth.  That without him it was just a passive lump.  Man made her glow, made her feel the strength of his desire.  Had he also driven her soul from her body, so that she watched the destruction of the planet from the safety of the moon?

Iris could not face her loving partner.  She threw herself into her protest work at Faslane.  Every time a policeman dragged her away to custody, she went limp, passive, as she had done when she had left her body.  She remembered that moment, she remembered the earth.

Cutting moments

Janet was five.  She clutched her mother’s hand tightly.  She was frightened of the people in white who wore white hats and masks.  She was frightened of the tiled room and the machines and the cylinders, and most of al of the yellowish rubber-smelling mask that was descending over her mouth and nose.  She breathed in the nasty smelling stuff, and it seemed that she ceased to be.

It was not like going to sleep.  She was sometimes too excited or too frightened to go to sleep, but now she had no choice.  Her body was being taken over by this gas that was entering her lungs.   And, whilst the gas was in her body, those masked aliens cut into the inside of her throat and removed part of her. 

Whenever Janet wondered who she really was, which was often, she returned to this first experience of identity loss.  At ten her hormones were producing the normal biological changes.  She was taller than most of the children of her age, and assumed that was the reason why she was ahead of the class in this development.  Or was it because she had no tonsils?  She was proud of her fist period and her first bra was really something to show off about.  But she could not talk to anyone about her desire to touch herself or her embarrassment in the presence of certain boys.   That was frightening.  It was like the gas taking over her body, like the scalpel cutting away her innocence.  She wanted to hold her mother’s hand.  She wanted to eat lots of ice cream to cool down the burning blush.

At thirteen she found an escape from the disturbing new emotions that had invaded her.  She became fervently religious.  The only male she would look at was Christ on the cross, whose blood would save her from menstruation and pregnancy and boys.  She counted the beads on her rosary whenever she was tempted to touch herself.

This was the time when she became ‘plain’.  Never again would she surrender to vanity of thinking herself pretty.  She saw herself as tall, misshaped and ugly.  This was her new identity and no surgery would be allowed to change it.

The religious phase only lasted a couple of years, because her sense of horror at her body increased geometrically, till she knew that no perfect man-god could possibly care about her.  Instead she started to take drugs.

The painful sense of ugliness was overcome, the drugs acting like the gas, numbed her experience.  She had her first sexual experiences which cut into her painlessly, removing her virginity, her innocence, without any emotion on her part.

Tonsillectomy the doctors called it.  It had been a normal procedure in the 1950s, but the dangers of the operation had later been seen to outweigh the advantages.  For Janet it had been a success, but the daughter of her mother’s friend had died in the operating theatre.  So for many years the operation was only done when the tonsil condition became life threatening.

By the time surgery had improved, so that tonsillectomy was safe, other forms of treatment had become normal.  So if Janet had lived in almost any other decade, she probably would not have had the operation.

Later she felt guilty for the things she did under the influence, but this time the gas stayed in her, and it seemed impossible to return to full consciousness.  It was as if the operation was going on for years, whilst her education collapsed, her mother died and she drifted into a limbo of unemployment and wretchedness. 

From this misery, she was rescued by David, who was old enough to be her father, and fortunately much more responsible than that missing person.  He was as detached as the men in white masks, and cut out her drug use, through a stable marriage.  They successfully ran a pub together, as neither of them drank alcohol, and Janet became interested in the customers who had a drink problem.  Trying to help others took away all thought of her problems.  She still considered her face and body to be deformed, like her lacerated throat, all the innocent beauty of childhood cut out.  But now she found it made no difference to the people she helped.  And when she had two beautiful children of her own, they treated her as if she was the most beautiful woman in the world.

This was another operation.  The return to hospital: the white coats, disinfectant smells, surgical instruments and pain.  Her husband brought her ice cream after each birth.  But this time, she had something to take home: a living bundle that grew daily, with new demands, dependency and delight.  Of course there were times when she felt she was losing the last bits of herself, as small children gave her no time to be alone, and she felt the confinement of the rubber mask.  But she was studying now, and had new ways of expressing her fears. 

Was she really herself, when no-one was around, and she debated with herself who she was.  Or was she more herself, when she was listening to her children, calming their fears, wiping their tears, cooking their meals.  Increasingly she felt most herself when she had the opportunity for adult conversation, with her college teachers.   It was as if her throat was growing back, she was discovering her voice, in contrast to the books she read and the opinions she heard. 

Her care for the needy, including her own children, grew naturally into caring for people, so that in a few years she was a qualified social worker, entrusted with terrible power over the lives of others.  Like the surgeons, she was now able to remove part of a family, causing temporary pain to prevent long term suffering, but risking the life of the patient.  Would these procedures come to be regarded as dangerous and avoidable as tonsillectomy?  She certainly came to that conclusion, and finding she had no voice in the profession, she resigned, suffered and consumed ice cream.

At this point a more powerful rubber mask covered her, and she says she was filled with the Holy Spirit.  She took up youth work for the church and trained to become a minister of religion.  This was entirely different from her adolescent experience, providing a sense that anything was possible, the realisation the she was actually quite pretty, and that sin lies not in the flesh, but in the attempt to exclude the body from the incarnation of love and compassion.  These now flowed from her like the gas, bringing respite from fear, a place of safety; as many people held her hand tightly absorbing her universal mothering in times of crisis.

Forest Time 3 Susan’s Office

“Now Iris, let me go through this again.  You chose to visit her on Mother’s day,

because it was the most efficient way to get her to pay my counselling fee, which

she has to pay, because it was her incompetent mothering that put you in need of

counselling.  You only stopped for lunch because her whinging made you so cross

you might have had an accident on the way home, and had nothing to do with

George coming to lunch, although you did go to bed with him that afternoon,

because he reminds you of your father, and you found the sex “therapeutic” rather

than pleasurable, because it helped you deal with the abuse you suffered from your

father, at the age of six, which was the reason your parents split up; and you now

feel more prepared to face your father, when you meet for the first time in forty

years, on Saturday?”

“NO, Susan, and don’t look at me like that.  You say it all as if it were an accusation. 

I tell you everything.  Things I would never tell anyone; things I have not even

admitted to myself until I say them to you.  I depend on you utterly.   Nothing in

my head makes any sense except when I am with you. I have to get all this male-

sex thing out and shredded before it shreds me, then you will see me for who I am. 

You don’t realise I’m hitting rock bottom. Lower than George, I cannot sink.  Now I

need your help to climb upwards.  To help me, a day at a time, to say no to all

men, starting with my father, who must admit what he did.”

“I could help you better if you would get off your knees and take your head from my lap, and

return to your chair.”

“I’m sorry, I’ve made your skirt wet, but it’s so comforting”

“But not very professional.  There, that’s better.  I know you wish to appeal to my

AA philosophy, but as your counsellor, I only have one hour a week, and cannot

provide the continuous support you are seeking, and our hour has passed, and my

son will be here shortly.”

Enter Jack: six foot three, broad shouldered, (T shirt reads “In your dreams” on the

front and “Make my day” on the back).  A nose stud and ear rings set off the six

horns of bright red hair, but the green lipstick and flowery sarong suggest that this

is a very complex thirty year old bi-sexual.  “Hi, ma, have you seen my combats?

Hi Iris, great shoes, would you like to borrow my mascara, you can’t go out like

that.”  He reaches over her, brushing her hair with his belly, and retrieves the

mascara from behind the collected Jung.  “Here ya are.  Ma bin giving you a pasting

again.  You’re a hard woman ma.  What?  What?”  These last questions spoken with

a huge smile, as he is aware he has taken centre stage and has their full attention.

On the principle of ignoring attention seeking behaviour Susan says:

“Your combats are still in the drier.  This is not a laundry. I suggest you get them

whilst I say goodbye to Iris.”

“Oh, Iris don’t mind, we go back a long way, remember that night when I was

sitting with the girls, you and Martin were at a parents’ evening, I was fifteen and

gasping for a joint, so I left them in front of the telly and slipped into the alley,

straight into the arms of the law.  How was I to know he lived next door and was

only annoyed ‘cause I was stood in ‘is way.  I was actually blowing it down his nose,

and he never noticed.”

“Poor old plod.”  Laughed Iris, who was already fixing her mascara, now so jolly that

Susan felt convinced her tears had all been playacting.  “But you were still in school

uniform, and he knew your dad was a headmaster, and I bet you were really

polite.”

“It was cool.  I took drama the next year.  That was a lifeline when I was on smack.

None of it really happens when you are turning in a performance, that’s what David

says.”  At the mention of her guru, Susan summoned up the energy to drive Jack

from the room and finalise arrangements for Saturday, when she was to be

“backup” for Iris’ confrontation with her father.

The bang on the Head moment

Truncheon hitting head was all too common an experience in the 1960s.  Janet walked away later, so PC49 never even noticed what he had done.  Janet was too spaced out on LSD to rate her injury as an event in her life, but it was a defining moment for Britain.

This was Grosvenor Square, and thousands of middle class students were protesting against the Viet-Nam war, outside the American embassy, when police on horseback treated them as if they were a mob of miners or poor people.

The parents of students saw what happened on the TV and they told their friends.  Policemen hitting unarmed young women, from good schools, on the head with truncheons, in defence of an American war.  Most British people, including senior police officers, MPs and business leaders, disapproved of the war, and welcomed the protest.  In the USA authoritarian anger at the apparently easy lifestyle and communist sympathies of middle class students, escalated till the shooting dead of students at Kent University.  But in Britain, Grosvenor Square was as bad as it got.  After that the authorities took a step back, and allowed the rebellious students to have their fling.

The movement was inspired by Mao’s Cultural Revolution and by the intellectual movements in Germany and France; but the lack of police resistance meant that it became a very polite, English revolution.  Huge solidarity was engendered amongst the students, which was reflected in the quality of student essays and artwork.  The lecturers used the experience to make history, and social sciences more relevant and exciting for their students, and this provoked a decline in the study of science.

Police truncheons could still kill a Blair Peach and oppress striking miners, but a baton charge on ‘Greenham Common’ or the ‘Countryside Alliance’ or ‘Stop the War’ became unthinkable.  The privilege of going to a British University had just grown into the privilege of being listened to; and this in turn led to the Thatcherite rebellion in which it became a privilege to be paid for, a privilege to get into debt for, and a privilege for 50% of the population.  Until it ceased to be a privilege; and students ceased to be political, because no-one was listening.

That truncheon knocked the age of adulthood down from 21 to 18.  But it had a knock on effect on the way younger people were treated.  Teachers became afraid to chastise their pupils.  In a generation Britain moved from brutal beatings of small boys to small boys threatening to force their teachers out of work, by making up stories about them.  The courts were unable to punish children effectively, so they attempted to punish the parents.  Youth crime boomed and when they passed 18, those youths filled the prisons.

It was a symptom of “embourgoisement”: Britain had become middle class.  A nation of shopkeepers: incapable of producing anything, living by the rule that “the customer is always right”.  Thus the “free market” should be allowed to rule our economy, and the “free house” to govern our international relations.  Minorities had ‘Rights’ not because it was right, but because the middle class rulers had no sense of what was right.  These were ‘hippy’ governments, regardless of whether they professed to be of the right or the left.  They set up ‘rigorous’ codes of conduct, and produced gigabytes of rules, but these were ‘paper tigers’ and the bites had no teeth.  So we became comfortable with the sense that Big Brother was watching us, because that gave lots more people jobs; and being watched was like staring on Reality TV. 

Janet suffered no long term damage, but Britain suffered memory loss, personality change, bouts of depression, distorted vision and stars and stripes headaches.

Moment of Fashion

The fashion moment is not just the famous for five minutes catwalk model, for their lives are lived according to a programme which eradicates the individual, turning people into visual images.  Iris was angered by people who desired her for her body rather than her mind, but has anyone ever been desired for their clothes or their make-up?

The fashion moment comes when Sammy looks in the mirror, checking that her hair is “comme une faut”.  Ken is out at work most of the day, complex civil engineering which she does not understand, and some nights he works as a security guard for extra cash.  He is a “good provider” and she is proud of him, but she does not dress up for him.  Dickon is far more observant than his father, but he knows his views are unwelcome.  He wants her to look younger (short skirts and tight pullovers) or at least genes and T-shirts, which would be more practical for his romps through the woods. 

But Sammy has been dressing as a forty something member of the county set, since her teens.  Her epiphany came when she watched Iris disappearing into anorexia, despite her beauty and perfect figure.  Sammy realised that her own body was better suited to the fashions of the middle aged wealthy.  This had the advantage that Richard was happy to buy her expensive clothes that made her look like her absent mother.  And those clothes disguised her youth, completing the transference for her half-brother Ken.

Where Sammy was a follower of fashion, Jane had instinctive taste.  On entering any shop she would instantly select the most expensive items, because she recognised their quality.  Not having Sammy’s financial resources, Jane found her designer labels and expensive fabrics in charity shops, but no-one in her county town was better dressed.  Her fashion moment was when she entered a theatre foyer or restaurant, and all the women of her age or older, turned to admire her clothes.  Some of them would then turn back to bitch about her looks.  But Sammy had grown up with the perfect Iris, so she was not impressed by mere Nature.  Sammy attached herself to Jane and used her as a model.

Sammy got several jobs on the strength of looking older and wiser than she really was.  That and the confidence which comes from knowing you do not need to work.  “Certain jobs can only be done by someone who is well dressed, and most people of my age, who care about clothes, are still trying to be catwalk models.”

But of course Sammy had no staying power.  She loved to make an entrance, be welcomed, develop intelligent suggestions for change, modestly accept recognition and then bow out.  After all she had her family for continuity.  Any other long term role would detract from her commitment to them.

Jeanette was anathema to Sammy.  Jeanette was oblivious to clothes: “they are such a small part of my job”.  Her career had spanned half a dozen changes of direction in social work.  She had moved steadily, determinedly up the hierarchy, adapting her language and her practice to the fashion of the time.  Yet her fashion moment had been very like Sammy’s.  Jeanette had looked in the mirror one day and seen that what the director’s wanted was a man: forceful, bullish, managing financial and personal resources, detached, ambitious, getting support for the organisation.  So she had a househusband, tackled the most challenging clients and distanced herself from the “feckless and work-shy”.  She was the first to introduce groupwork and the first to abandon it, the first to become a generic social worker and the first to return to specialism, the first to advocate the takeover of the work of voluntary organisations, and the first to get into commissioning, audit and monitoring of privatised services.  Always at the cutting edge of her profession’s fashions.

Peter and George had the disadvantage of being men, of being expected to be successful in a career.  Despite every effort, Peter had been doing well as a young man, till he threw it all away to go to University.  After University and his fascinating research, he had worked as a volunteer, but gradually accepted paid employment, but when he found himself promoted to management, he knew it was time to leave London and live in the wilds, where he could avoid further promotion.  What made him “throw it all away” (as Jeanette would put it) was that fashion moment, when he had looked in the mirror and seen a fashionable successful, spiv.  Unfortunately he had gone to University just when dropping out and hippy values were in fashion, so he was besieged by attractive, clever girls, who wanted his maturity.  To be himself, and live independently of the pressures of fashion, he had also to avoid the honey trap. No wonder he became a Forester.

In contrast George had a fashion moment almost every time he looked in a mirror.  He wanted to be irresistible to women, and he often was.  He wanted to have a successful career, and belong to a fashionable intellectual circle, and for a time he did. What saved him was his personality, which was some days far ahead of the mirror image, but equally often inclined “to leave the web, to leave the loom… to look down to Camelot”.  On those days, “the mirror cracked from side to side” and ambition was dead. He was a bird of paradise and could never become a Forester.

Surprisingly, it was James, who had the normal response to fashion.  Like Sammy, he had the advantage of knowing Iris, who had no need of fashion, so he lived his life as if he too had no need to fit in.  At school he had learnt the art of self deprecation, to avoid bullying, and he remained overtly modest to everyone he met.  He would make fun of his clothes, his face, his lack of expertise in the current fix.  He encouraged people to see him as rather naïve, even ignorant, so that they had to talk to him as if he were a child.  He had a long and successful career, because he never had a fashion moment

Forest Time 4   Janet Reads the Bible

“And the lion shall lie down with the lamb”.  Dickon is a child living in such perfect harmony with nature, that he must have the blessing of God.  To see him approach a wild creature, and be accepted, as if they were old friends, is wonderful.  But he is the child of incest, a terrible sin.  When I was a social worker I would have been going through child protection procedures.  When I was a hippy I would have been more accepting; but now as a Christian Minister, responsible for the pastoral needs of the parents, as well as the child, what am I to say?

Stephen and the Foresters take a pragmatic view.  For them, the child is evidence that the parents have done nothing wrong.  Theirs is the wisdom of the Book of Proverbs, a wisdom set aside by words of Jesus: “not a jot of the law will pass away” and the biblical law prohibits incest.  Theirs is the wisdom of the world, which promotes homosexual priests, condones adultery and blasphemes God.

Collette would tell the parents that they must repent, and return to the chastity of brother and sister.  I admire her Indian work, but charity begins at home.  She is full of the spirit of Pentecost, but I am not comfortable with all that arm waving and shouting praise in her church.  I love the discipline of the Church of England.  It is the order I needed in my life, and I know Sammy and Ken need it to.  It may take them years to deal with the magnitude of their sin, but as long as they continue attending church, there is hope.

Iris is a much more serious matter.  She has a wonderful voice, a real asset to the choir.  She is brilliant at organising social events and feeding the five thousand.  But she is the “woman caught in adultery”, and she is far too willing to accept the forgiveness of Jesus, without responding to His words: “sin no more”.  Gossip about her sexual liaisons is damaging to the church.  Much of it is probably fuelled by jealousy.  If she was not beautiful and brilliant and generous, they would be less inclined to throw the first stone.  I blame Martin.  Like Moses, he led her by promises of a new land, but he strikes the rock too hard, and is unworthy of success.   It is Iris’ treatment of her mother that is abominable.  Virginia gives her “widow’s mite” to the church, but she would be a wealthy woman if she had not been subsidising Iris all these years.

David agrees that I should concentrate on Iris’ bullying of her mother.  He says I should confront those in the congregation who criticise the sexual morals of others, not by pointing to their own shortcoming, but by reminding them of my own conversion.  But that feels to me like boasting, about how sinful I was, and how good I have become.  I remind him that I have only become “good” because he is so lacking in sensuality.  I used to read the “Song of Songs” to David but it left him unmoved.  I wonder sometimes how I managed to conceive two children.  He is so brilliant at helping others with their problems, yet he seems to have no needs of his own.  I wish he needed me.

James and John, are for me the “sons of Zebedee” (part of my magic mushroom, magic roundabout, phase, when I was ‘far out’ with Dillon)  Why does everyone love John, whilst not caring if James runs the world or dies a martyr.  Jane is on the edge of my congregation, but James would only ever be happy in some free church.  John of course would never belong.  It is John who brings us “Revelations”.  And if they are scientific rather than spiritual, that just reflects the secular age in which we live.

I miss working with Jack.  He is like Jonah; he has refused to listen to the voice of God, and continues to shut out his calling by using heroin.  His mother was right to throw him overboard.

As long as he was in the “belly of the big fish” he was forced to accept his own powerlessness.  When he was clean, he had so much to say about the world, he was so interesting.  I could understand how he managed to seduce members of both sexes.  I wanted him to understand that he only claimed to worship Satan, because he saw that people who pretended to worship God were often liars and hypocrites.  He just wanted to distance himself from those people, by claiming to worship someone totally different.  We were working really well together when I had to give up the youth work and take on this parish job.

I think George was probably like Jack when he was younger.  George was at college with David, and still treats him like a guru, but to me, he is the man possessed, whose demons Jesus caste into the herd of pigs.  It is a story that has always bothered me, as a veggie: how could Jesus want all those animals to die, just to cure one man.  I wouldn’t injure a single hamster to make George better.  I think he should accept responsibility for himself.  But he is not going to listen to me, he does not even believe in God.

That is why I take Peter’s side against George.  The fight was George’s fault.  Peter came from a much tougher background.  His father was a money lender in the East End, yet he was like the apostle Matthew, and gave up his past life when he was called to follow the master.  He is my most regular communicant, and we share horror stories from our days in Social Services, just as if we had known each other for years.  David says he always was a charmer, and I am being naïve.  “Better to have faith than become a cynic” I say.

Of course Peter is no better suited to Deirdre than George was.  Deirdre is like Saint Peter: full of enthusiasm, willing to “walk on water”.  But she cannot build her Peter into a great artist, simply by bullying him to frame all his daubings, and exhibit them.  Peter is a jolly prankster, not a tortured genius.  She should have married David, a man she could respect, but I think she also wants a lot of sex, but we can never talk about that, despite her being my secretary on the parochial church council.

At least I can say what I think to Roger, even if he is a Forester.  I told him Isobel is young enough to be his daughter and he should let her go.  It is water of a duck’s back to him.  The less he cares, the more strident I become.  He reminds me of Herod, that man of blood who ordered the massacre of innocents.  It is partly his work, but also that Isobel reminds me of Salome.  I think she “danced” for him to get something dreadful (like John the Baptist’s head) but I have not worked out what it is yet.

Odessa reminds me of the Queen of Sheba: the outsider who brings change.  She is more anti-God than Roger, yet what faith she has, what an ability to confront evil.

Meaningless Moment

The moment of meaninglessness came for Odessa, when she was one of ten sixth formers to gain places on the politics course at the best University of her Eastern European homeland, when it was still under Russian domination.  She was the only woman.  They were the brightest arguers the schools could produce, from thousands who applied.  Their reward was access to truth: able to read any forbidden text and access government secrets; (this was before the internet, when it was still possible to keep nations in ignorance); but the reward came at a price.  They could not share what they learnt, but had to learn all the methods of keeping these secrets from another generation.  Thus the prize of knowledge was made meaningless for her. 

Odessa could not play the game, and she fled to England to seek asylum.  Perhaps if there had just been herself, but Odessa was pregnant with the child of a local ‘tubist’: a musician who played forbidden western style pop music and had a huge, illegal, following amongst young people.  The child was wanted and loved by both parents, but they felt they had a mission.  He would continue to work through music, within the country, until the fall of the Berlin Wall; she would work through organisations in the west.  In particular she wanted to raise consciousness about the way “mental illness” was used in Eastern Europe as a label to defuse protest.  Thousands of dissidents were locked away in “hospitals” without trial, on the pretence that their desire for regime change was sufficient proof of sickness.  She knew that is where she would have disappeared to, had she remained at the University.  Even her child would have been proof of her insanity, as she had not sought permission from the Party to become pregnant.

The people, who helped her settle and gain citizenship in England, felt that her isolation as a single mother, in a London tower block, with hardly any English, and no friends or relatives, was a life without meaning.  But Odessa was excited by the new land and the new challenges, which all responded to her high intelligence and logical mind.  She did retain her atheism.  Not the official soviet atheism of her upbringing, but an atheism based on that moment of meaninglessness, when she saw to the heart of Russian rule.

For Janet, meaninglessness was summed up in the writing of Ecclesiastes, which she associated with her life before David.  The gospels provided meaning.  They released her from the assumption that nothing really mattered, and launched her into a creative universe in which every good action made a difference.  She could not understand how David managed to combine faith and cynicism. They visited Tattershall castle, which Thomas Cromwell had built to proclaim his immense wealth, by building the highest tower block in England, (in the flatlands of Lincolnshire, for maximum impact).    David saw the exploitation of the poor, in the production of a symbol: a meaningless product, which would stand empty and useless for hundreds of years.  Janet saw an impressive memorial to the craftsmen of Tudor times, an insight into a lost way of life, a symbol of what happens when man builds a Tower of Babel to look down upon the local church. 

George, living further north gained his experience on the “Bronte Moor” at the back of Haworth parsonage, where he walked with Jane, on a perfect blue-sky day with a light breeze, only the tourists and the panoramic view persuaded him they were not walking in some urban park.

“Where is the screeching wind, the lashing rain, the sudden flash of lightening illuminating crags and waterfalls, the terror of isolation, the romantic horror of the almost seen?”

“If you didn’t want to come, why did you drag me along?” Jane retorted bitterly.  “I was quite happy in the shops of the main street.  The meaning is in the detail, like all those old things in that traditional pharmacy, or in Villette’s.  If you want to feel the Romance, use your imagination on the detail when you read Wuthering Heights.  We provide the meaning.  Can we go back now?”

Pat loved the huge emptiness of Fountains Abbey ruins, at dusk when the tourist had all gone, and the abandoned church once more claimed the valley with a monkish silence.  She was able to laugh at the empty promises of church and state, the fall of patriarchy, the timeless quality of arrested decay.  The huge lack of meaning, stretching across time, comforted her own small experience of absence.  As the Power Stations strode across the plain and the wind turbines across the moors, just so did the abbey nestle into the hidden valley.

Martin wrote obsessively about realisation of the self through work.  It hid his incapacity to discover any creative skills within himself.  His capacity to make money and prove himself as a paragon of the system he detested required that he hide from that truth, by preaching the gospel of work.  Thus he put off the moments without meaning, until it seemed that his relationship with Iris was in danger.  She had outgrown him and realised that she could live more easily alone.  He avoided facing this new horror, by suggesting a voluntary separation, so that it would appear that she was the dependent and he the free spirit.  His every moment was spent scheming to bring them back together; yet he accounted those moments as steps towards Japanese culture and away from the meaninglessness of the West.  Martin had no interest in Japan, which was the antithesis of Harrogate and Bath, but he knew that iris was learning Japanese, and thought he would regain her, if they adventured together into the unknown. 

The Moment of not being really there

For George the moment came early, when he was still at school.  The moment when he realised that he was not really there, that he was just viewing proceedings as in a film.  He had nothing to contribute, and there was no expectation that he would.  He sat at his desk, videoing the drama: the teacher being boring, pan round to the boy smirking, back to the teacher getting angry; close up of the nervous tic on his right eyebrow, pan back to pretty girl with her hand up, close up of hand – and so on. 

In his twenties, he sat on a large committee, which took important management decisions.  It was really quite exciting.  Only he was new and not expected to say anything.  George was amused by the speakers who had an axe to grind.  They would interrupt proceedings by reference to some issue of racism/sexism or health and safety, but really they just wanted to be part of the action.

There was a Roger-type character, who had an obvious chip on his shoulder, and every time he spoke the others would give the “oh no, not him again” expression.  But they were always polite, cold, unresponsive, and so the chip grew bigger. Nothing was ever right, and he loved confrontation, seeing any kindness as a sign of weakness.

 Then there was the Susan-type, who always said the appropriate thing, remained strictly factual and moved the business on to a vote, by expressing enthusiasm or thanks.  She clearly understood exactly what was going on and acted with purpose, but without emotion, making the meeting even duller.

Increasingly George found he had to kick himself or pinch himself to keep awake; which was ironic as the experience was so like having a dream.  But one day this knowledge of not being there came during his free time.  He was out walking, and very wide awake.  He recognised a house from the back garden, strode across the wide lawn purposelessly.  Already he was filming the back of the large detached house in poor repair: zoom into the large bay windows.  The glass had been replaced by boards, which were open to let light into the seven metre lounge. 

Inside, the walls have no pictures, and have not been properly finished off where they meet the ceiling and the floor.  The carpet is grubby, the furniture sparse, as if the family were camping in a house they could not afford. From the window he could see Deirdre’s mother throwing coal on to the fire: it was a cold day to have the windows open.  Zoom into the fire: built in the 1990s, it was designed to look good, not to be used, so coal dust and smoke was blowing back into the room.

George was not a regular visitor, but no-one got up to welcome or challenge him, so he stood at the window and videoed Deirdre’s mother’s ample hindquarters, and the soot smuts on her face.  (Of course he was not actually using a camera, he just felt as if he was watching through a screen, because everyone ignored him.)  Pan to close up of Deirdre’s blushing face.  Surely she had noticed George?  They had had a torrid romance some years earlier, broken off, she had said, because of his unwillingness to commit to her.  Camera moves down her body, emphasising the overweight bits.  Then across to her younger sister, podgy sixteen, eating a cream cake, and deliberately flashing her thighs at the camera.

Action: Deirdre’s father goes to the door and in walks a Greek god.  Well a very handsome young man, of Deirdre’s age.  George is ten years older and alcohol, tobacco and poor diet is already begining to show.  Wide angle shot to catch everyone speaking at once, congratulating the god on his engagement to Deirdre.  She does not even give George a guilty or smug look, and even podgy thighs is ignoring him.  George walks back across the back garden to the road.

The moment of the empty Womb

Womb loss may take a few hours or a lifetime, but the experience is a sudden realisation, a moment of intense emptiness, a desert of ice stretching in all directions as far as the eye can see.  For Virginia it was the miscarriage.  She wished the physical pain of it would continue; for as long as she had the dragging pains, the contractions, the churning, stabbing: like a hand reaching up inside of you pulling your guts out; for as long as the pain continued, her child was alive.  Afterwards there was just the dull ache, an absence that would continue throughout her life.  All the years that Iris was growing up, she was aware that her mother was missing the child who was never born; that a part of her was forever empty, beyond reach.

Pat, in contrast seemed to lead a full and active life.  She had no children, said it was her decision, said it made her more effective at her work.   She had been an only child, full of ambition, marked for success.   She seemed to work very hard, but without recognition or reward.  Sometimes she would have tantrums, but Virginia would calm her down.    Virginia felt a connection, although she could not put it into words.  She did not know that Pat had had an abortion.  It happened ten years before they met, and Pat never mentioned it.  Pat was overweight and dowdy.  It was hard to imagine any man having a passionate affair with her.  But when she was a student, things were very different.  She wore the fashion, she did the make-up well, she was really very good company.  She had taken precautions.  Neither of them were ready for commitment.  So when she failed the test, she used her common sense and went for an abortion, without even discussing it with the father.  She ignored the counselling.  It would hurt.  It would be over.  Life would go on.

Life went on, and on and on; but after the abortion, there was no more fashion, no more make-up, and the only company, was the one she worked for.  She worked like a machine, and the company treated her like one.  When they wore her out, they discarded her.  Each job was slightly worse than the previous one.  She did not notice that her doting parents had died.  She did not care that Virginia gave her a room for nothing and often cooked for her.  She did not share any part of herself, because she felt nothing.  Pat did not even notice she was getting sick, until the pains started: the churning stabbing contractions in her womb, reminded her that the abortion, ten years earlier had been almost painless.

When she collapsed, Virginia got her to the hospital.   It was then that she told Virginia about the abortion and learnt the details of Virginia’s miscarriage.  They removed a growth the size of a small melon.  It was benign and she made a full recovery.  The two women now shared their emptiness, so that it felt twice as empty.  Iris, who had suffered the most horrendous PMT, until the birth of the first of her three children, could make no sense of their pain.  She got them to visit Susan.  Susan was a professional.  She had many approaches to the problem, and their lives did improve; but Susan herself was dealing with her empty nest.

Susan had forced Jack to move out.  It is called “tough love”, and most experts would agree it is the only way to deal with a dependent family member with a severe addiction problem.  But he was her only son, and he had lived with her for twenty three years, and she would rather have thrown her loving and devoted husband out on the streets.  But she knew Jack had to go.  She could not be dispassionate with Jack as she was with her patients.  His dreams and fantasies fascinated her, drawing her in to his weird ideas.  She could not be his analyst, but without him she felt bereaved,

Susan knows that “womb-loss” is only a symbol, a metaphor for all the things we try to let go of: the possessions, the habits, the feelings and the people, who make us miserable.  We have a hysterectomy.  All the dangerous creative imagination is removed, and yet we are more miserable than ever.   The lost child remains with us as a black hole, as hysteria.

This is not a women’s issue.  Fathers like David experience the empty nest.  He was proud of his daughters, delighted with the exciting lives they were leading, but their absence marked the end of a whole way of life, which he had loved: the nest building, the feeding, the cleaning, the care; their first steps, first bike ride, first car.  When James’ wife had a still birth, it was as if she pushed him from the climbing frame saying: “this is my grief, you have no part in it”.  Every time he gave blood, he thought of his blood sister, of the blood flowing around the dead child; the spear in the side of Christ.  Death before life had begun, seemed to take away so much of his own future.

Yet common sense dictates that we are right to let go of these things.  We must move on and get on with living.  We determine our lives by the meanings we ascribe to situations.

If Pat had followed through with her responsible decision to have an abortion, by convincing herself that it would make her a tougher business woman, she would not have become the “lame duck” Virginia took pity on.  If Virginia had let go of her worries, when she had the miscarriage: worries about who would care for this child, how would she keep it safe from her abusive husband, how would she find enough money to feed it; she could have escaped with Iris to a life of luxury and comfort.  She would have left her poetic melancholy and her unique thought processes, and turned her cleverness into money.  Then she would have pushed Pat away, told her to “get on yer bike”.

She would certainly never have met Collette.

Conversely, many men and women feel “womb-loss” in the sense of suddenly realising that they are out in the cold, on their own, rejected.  That warm family home, where Jack had been picked up when he cried, where Pat had been forgiven her childhood tantrums, where George had taken his laundry, his hunger, his need for money, his hangovers; was gone, in an instant.  It is like being woken from a beautiful dream, like finding that there is no more money left and you must do that awful job.  Excitement is replaced by boredom, dangerous risks by worthy role play.

John stood in Antartica, and viewed the beauty of the real ice.  He knew there was not another person within sight.  He was perfectly at peace with himself.  He took his core samples, and made his way back to camp.  How beautiful, when the stars went out.  He felt he could see for ever, and there was nothing; nothing but perfection.  Surely this is the emptiness which fills, the “womb-loss” that defies common sense.  What good it does a man, who loses the whole world, but gains his own soul.

We moment

The “We” moment, according to David, comes when we recognise our collective responsibility, as a couple, a group, an institution or a nation. “As an individual, I may commit a murder, or save a life, but I cannot commit genocide, or prevent mass starvation, or terrorism or global disaster.  People who encourage individuals to “take responsibility for their actions” focus our attention away from the big issues, just as the Church used to emphasised personal sin, so that we would not notice corruption within the church, or torture by tyrants, or the injustice of the rich.”

As a counsellor, Susan was used to dealing with the negative aspects of transference.

Pat immediately latched on to her as mother substitute.  Her mother had been all powerful when she was growing up, and she wanted to regress, to give up all her struggles and let Susan direct her life.  She also hated her mother.  Possibly she blamed her mother for the way life had turned out, but deeper than that was her hatred of herself, as mother.  The abortion made her feel that she was an evil mother, and so she wanted to push that on to Susan as well.

Susan knew that transference can become a drug.  Pat had had counselling before, and her need for another “hit” was soul destroying.  The problems she presented for counselling was soon forgotten in the excitement of the new transference.  The reason Pat had to live rent free with Virginia was that she spent most of her salary on private therapists, which had created a deep incapacitating depression.

Susan persuaded Pat that she was transferring a redundant emotion.  Pat’s mother was still alive; Susan was younger than Pat, Pat needed to work through her relationship with her aborted child, not with her dominant mother.  Pat learnt to speak to Susan as if she were speaking to her dead child.  She regressed to the time when she and her baby were one body, and experienced “We”.  Gradually she was able to include the medical staff, the child’s father and her own family within that “We”; until she no longer felt alone, no longer to blame, no longer in need of counselling.

Iris was of course more difficult.  She and Susan were much the same age, so she did not transfer her relationship with her mother on to Susan, which would have been disastrous, nor could she be persuaded to transfer her feelings for her real father, because all that anger and need was already pushed on to Martin.  Throughout her life, Iris had had a succession of close female friends, usually younger, often work colleagues, whom she mentored, or managed.  They admired her dynamism, beauty, intelligence and reliability.  In exchange, Iris worked tirelessly to assist them.  Other women appeared “jealous, negative, obstructive, naïve”.  It was unclear where Susan stood.

Iris had a knack for doing the opposite of the rational, as at Bunhill.  She made Susan painfully aware of her own inhibitions and conventionality, especially with regard to her relationship with “clients”.  Iris overwhelmed her with openness and wit, refusing to be treated as someone with a “problem”.  Iris spoke about her “delusions” regarding George, with the implication that Susan had similar delusions about Jack’s father.  Perhaps she was acting when she went into sobs, or trance, or passivity, but it was so convincing that Susan was carried along by it.  It made her feel the dearth of emotion in her own life.  She knew she was transferring her needs on to Iris, which was definitely the world upside down.  She felt Iris was illuminating her life.

Susan had managed to “let go” of Jack.  Tough love was working.  Jack was drinking heavily, but this was better than heroin, she hoped.  She could see Jack managing his life with his friends, no longer dependent upon her for boundaries, cash or even encouragement.  This “breakthrough” occurred soon after she had let Jack’s father go, so she was feeling distinctly short of “We”.  She was aware that she was throwing too much energy into her work.  She was out almost every night at some work related committee, but felt no sense of collective responsibility.  She often found herself standing out against the rest, insisting on her right to remain separate. 

When she explained this to her guru, David, she recognised instantly that she was transferring on to him, her need for fatherly approval.  But it was too late, he had responded by taking her out to exotic places, whirling her into a world of Art and glitter, and now they were in bed, and she was happy, ecstatic, laughing all the time, obsessed with this new “Us”.

Moment of Anxiety

Forestry is not a mechanical task.  Peter did not take a disc of information about forestry from Stephen and transfer it to his hard drive.   Peter had to learn on the job.  Each time he used the chain saw his hand and eye co-ordination was altered by the practice.   Stephen had been a squash player, Peter preferred cricket; so it was inevitable that there would be subtle differences in their use of a saw.  It was not just that forestry changed the way Peter played cricket; his new coordination skills effected the way he thought about his work.

It was as if the medicinal incisions he made in trees, even the total felling, connected his consciousness to the wood.  He found he knew where to place his hands when climbing a tree.  He felt how the tree moved.  How it longed to move out and see its saplings grow.  No, that was nonsense.  He was not turning the trees into people, nor turning himself into a tree.   But his body and mind were united in the activity of caring for the trees.  Learning his skill was changing who he was, whilst at the same time his unique self was adding something new to the skill.  Just as he had seen forestry in a certain way by watching and learning from Stephen, so his apprentice would learn something from Peter that had never been thought of before.  It was not even a thought, not something that can be written, for a skill must be observed, copied, practiced, and made part of oneself.

Computers can transfer information about rules and representations of appropriate behaviour.  They can hard wire cognitive routes into those using the keyboard.  But they cannot embody skills, awareness or response.  If computers are the forest, taking over our planet, they work by darkening out that process of embodiment.  Computer users lose the ability to develop skills organically.  Their bird-like spirit is unable to take flight, in this net of disembodied minds.

This was Iris’ nightmare, as she watched her daughters grow.  Their father prevented them from watching much TV – the addiction he had fought off in his own childhood; but he believed computers were educational, that they were the basis of all future work.  He also feared that if they played with neighbours, they might mix with the wrong sort of people.  Of course he controlled the sites they could visit and limited their chat room time, but like the politicians, he could not control the new medium.  The girls had had expensive ballet lessons, been taught musical instruments and had sports coaching, yet they only responded to learning with a keyboard.  They inherited their mother’s beauty but their father’s sophistry and mentalism.

Bridget used her PC at work, to check up case law, to collate info. about a client and to play with ideas for court presentation; and of course it was the mainstay of her social life.  But she also used it at home to communicate with her lover as he travelled about the world, quite often an hour every night.  In total probably most of her waking day was communicating with a screen: and Bridget made friends constantly: she earnt her living by people skills and public performance.  She had learnt to use a computer, before they became easy to use; but she had never gained any skills from it.  It fed her information (inputs) and she gave it information (outputs).  She had become an extension of the processing, which related less and less to reality.

Despite this constant flow of E communication, her sexual behaviour remained that of the female monkeys who take no consideration for childrearing, no discriminating, prudent choice of partners, driven entirely by the immediacy and pleasure of copulation.

 “Why” she argued, “should I, a feminist, take more consideration for the future than the father does?”   Thus the cognitive side of her personality, totally dependent on the machine, remained subservient to physical side, where mind and body worked as a single whole; so that she knew where to place her hands in order to provoke maximum excitement in the man.  She had never watched a sex video, never read about sex, never received any input in words.  Nor did she rely on instinct, as that had been tabooed out of her by a Welsh chapel upbringing.  She had learnt by doing.  She had observed, copied, practiced and made the skill a part of herself.

Collette viewed India as many Mormons view the temples designed by their founder, which had strange shafts with no apparent purpose.  Years later, when lifts were invented, the shafts were found to be ideal for the new form of transportation.  In the same way, India seemed full of peculiar, apparently useless habits of corruption, just waiting for Collette to arrive with her faith, her honesty and openness, to transform these habits into means of co-operation and justice.  She found a pre-computer society that malfunctioned like clockwork, and she transformed it, by enabling the hand and eye, whole person skills of the workers, to be constantly productive for the benefit of their local community.

When she arrived, most of the skilled workers spent their lives haggling rather than working, as they resented being exploited by the wealthy few.  But when they saw that they were being paid to benefit their own community, they became hugely productive.  This was no post-revolution Marxist dream.  It was just that India had evolved a space for a mahatma, a guide who leads by example, from a position of humility.  Collette was a white woman, but married to an Indian priest.  She was an outsider who belonged.  A visitor long awaited.

The ability to empower others, which she had learnt working with the rejected and desolate poor in England, was not held back here by red tape, computerised regulations , or chauvinist assumptions.  The love which flowed from her was not held in check by the English mixture of reserve and hypocrisy.  Collette had never read about psychology or small group dynamics.  She had never received any input in words to instruct her in this task, but the skills had grown through observation and practice.

She hardly spoke any of the language, but her actions, her body and her silences spoke to the men and women building the orphanage and school.  Even the best words, would have been misunderstood, but there could be no mistaking her trust in their honesty, her faith in the project, and her hope for their future.  They sought nurture from her mothering.  They wanted to tell her everything, to laugh with her and learn from her.  To learn the skill of listening to the inner voice.

Back in Bridget’s PC world people were becoming the hands and feet of machines.  They accepted that their status seeking, territorial expansion and aggression were all driven by their genetic programming.  They felt their greed, violence and war were inevitable, written on their hard drive.  The PC was the evangelist of this new religion.  Computers had no need to develop consciousness, when they could eviscerate the consciousness from human beings, by encouraging the Cartesian mind-body dualism.  Mind alone became a mere computer.  Body alone became the hands and feet of a slave.

David puzzled over these two contrary adaptations by his species.  Which one had survival potential for the future?  Would either of them enable humans to become more like bacteria, who had arrived on earth before it had finished cooling down, and now existed everywhere in numbers which exceeded that of all other life form on the planet?  He hoped the cognitive machines would not establish equilibrium; whilst the Indian development would be slow but continuous.  He feared that humans would only last a moment in geological time; the only moment in which learning by observation and practice had been continuous.

Forest Time 5  Iris Meets her Father

Tom is seventy, but he still has a decent head of grey hair.  He has shrunk to six foot, but still has firm jaw, high cheek bones and strong nose that won him five wives.  He still smokes a pipe and enjoys his whisky, but his liver and heart are in poor condition.  He has just returned from a cruise with wife number five, who is almost the same age as Iris, so he is confident that he will charm his daughter.

Iris sees an old man, like the ones her mother used to care for in the Home for the Elderly, when Iris was an angry adolescent.  This is no monster, but a vulnerable, frail soul, who wishes to make peace with those he has wronged, before he dies.   She realises that she has been expecting a brutal wife beater in his twenties.  She is suddenly tongue-tied and waits for him to speak.

Tom starts to tell her about his recent visit to South Africa.  How it is no longer safe, because of AIDS and street violence, how the whole place has become run down since the whites lost control.  His language is racist and shocking, but he seems unaware.  He just wants to share his experience.  He clearly feels he can be completely open with his daughter, as if they had been together all her life, only parted for the month he has been away.  His confidential manner, as if he would not speak to anyone else in this way, is very winning.

His new wife enters with a tray of tea and cake.  Iris realises straight away that this woman is desperate for her friendship or at the very least for recognition that she is neither deluded nor scheming, but genuinely attached to this old man.  Iris recognises the signs of insecurity which she has seen in Martin: she takes every opportunity to touch Tom (to show he is hers), she buts into the conversation (to suggest that an idea was hers); and she jumps between them with the cakes (to mark out her territory).

Tom clearly enjoys ignoring this behaviour, but Iris is irritated.  She has come to have a showdown with her father, not to indulge in this charade.  She wants to vindicate herself by blaming him, but instead she is starting to see so much of her own behaviour as inherited from him.

Tom is boasting about the famous celebrities he played bridge with on the cruise, but to her they are just old people like him, not “real” celebrities of her own generation.  She is not really listening, being distracted by the young wife, who is pulling invisible threads from her dress.  Then Tom mentions Jeanette, and Iris’ mind rushes ahead to assume that her father is trying to get his mad wife sectioned.  She is disappointed to learn that Jeanette is now in charge of procuring services; and Tom has some financial deal going on providing cheap migrant labour to Social Services Departments.  She is also picking up that Tom still provides financial support for his ex-wives, including Virginia.

When the wife and tea things have departed, Iris lets rip with the anger she has bottled for thirty years.  His fault that she had no male role model apart from Richard, so that she sought love from older men.  His fault that she had no-one to protect her from being raped.  His fault that she could find no-one worthy of her.  Far from being disconcerted by her tantrum, Tom urged her

on: “that’s my girl”, “you tell the old fool”, “you were too good for any of them” and “I always knew you’d grow up strong.”

He was clearly genuinely proud of her, and offered her a whisky.  She was shaking all over with the passion of her outburst, and drank it down greedily.

He then resumed his tale about Jeanette, as if she had politely requested him to continue.  Jeanette had apparently taken Jack in, when his mother evicted him.

The enormity of this revelation, together with the whisky made Iris attentive.  Jeanette was not the kind of social worker who gets personally involved with the care of a client, but she might indulge in a sexual flurry with manic lover half her age.  Iris immediately saw the possibility of gaining power over her therapist, but she refused to recognise that she might be jealous of Jeanette.

She remembers to ask Tom if it was David who persuaded him to meet with her, and Tom becomes positively coy.  Having spent a lifetime developing charm based on the appearance of openness; he is an unconvincing liar, but he starts to catalogue all the times when he wanted urgently to meet with Iris, but was prevented: by Virginia, by his wives, by the demands of his business, by his sense of guilt at not having seen her.  That it was his new wife who took him to church, where he met the Rev. Janet, who persuaded him that he would be forgiven if he repented, and seeing Iris would be evidence of repentance.  But Iris saw the controlling hand of David behind it all.

Satisfied with this conviction, Iris feels able to push through the blarney and the whisky, and see her father for the bully, philanderer, who abandoned her, and launched a thousand ills upon her life.  She sees him now, not as the old man in front of her, but as epitome of patriarchy, that she has struggled all her life to overthrow.  If she can walk out now and slam the door, she believes she will be able to make a new start in life.

But Tom has one last spanner to throw: “Do you know about James and Bridget?  He’s not the saint you think he is.”  And instantly Iris loses all willpower.  Silently she looks up at her all-knowing father, eager for him carry on with the story.  Regardless of its truth, she will listen to the fable, delighting in the fear, the horror, the mellow narrating voice, until she drops asleep and is carried to bed.  But Tom soon tires of the paternal role, and phones for a taxi to take her home; disappointed that his techniques have worked even on his wild and passionate daughter.

Patricide Moment

The moment of patricide, as in “Brothers Karamazov”, or the long drawn out guilt of Hamlet, is explained by Freud as the universal oedipal experience of sons, who wish to murder their father’s and marry their mothers.  Our forest is full of patricide.

Jack the Smack tried for years to prove that his abusive step-father was gaga, in order to free his mother, and regain his lone-parent childhood: his possession of her.  But there was no specific moment, and a step-father does not count.  His addiction and other self-harm activities were much more like murder.  He was not angry with himself, but with the father he never knew, who had made him a fatherless child.  It was those genes, that inheritance he wished to kill. 

George had suffered in much the same way, with drugs and alcohol.  Only his father had been a war hero, so to kill his father’s genes required that George should die heroically in battle.  Like Hamlet, he felt guilty because his father was already dead, and he had total possession of his mother.  This gave him huge confidence with women, but a terror of fatherhood, which he felt would perpetuate his loneliness.

With David the problems was reversed.  His mother died when he was young, leaving him with his tolerant, supportive father.  Tantrums, which had succeeded with his mother, were now a source of guilt for David, who suffered deeply whenever he felt he had caused his father pain.  He worked hard to gain his father’s approval: in exams, in work, in relationships; but he dreaded becoming like his father.  His moment of patricide was killing in himself whatever reminded him of his father.  After his father’s death, the process was reversed: anything he noticed in himself, which reminded him of his father, gained his instant approval.

For the incestuous Ken, his sister stood in place of his mother.  Their unity was a denial of their separate fathers, an assertion that all their genes derived from their mother.  It was a dual patricide, driven by the excitement of illegality and immorality.  Their son, the innocent Dickon, a total child of Nature, who charmed the birds from the trees, whispered to horses and ran all day with wild animals, had no interest in either parent, nor any human being.

But that is a very narrow interpretation of Freud.  Remember that we transfer these feelings, from the fathers, to other men with authority: to teachers, managers, police and politicians.  All rebellion against authority has an element of the patricide moment: a point when arbitration, changing the rules, breaking the boundaries, even regime change, becomes irrelevant.  Thus Ken and Sammy marched against the Poll Tax; Roger, diminished by his University experience, delighted in slitting the life force from powerful animals; and George and Jack took the state benefits, and glorified the paternalistic power of the military.  The death of Apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, even the coming fall of US hegemony, are only patricide.  They are followed by Hamlet’s guilt; by the rise of a new patriarchy, a new corruption, a new Oedipus.  Only the hysterical female can bury this dead system, giving birth to life without paternalism.

Moment of Beauty

Iris is a peacock.  As long as she can remember boys and men, and some women, have turned in the street to look at her.  They have balanced bananas on their noses and jumped through burning hoops, and any other task she set them, in the vain hope of getting her to open her tail fan so that they could admire her beauty.  She was not only bored by this widespread response; she positively sought the company of those who appeared blind to her plumage.

There were of course a few, like David, who were in love with the intellect, and therefore saw no beauty in pleasures of the flesh.  Iris was a clever girl, but she did not have a questioning mind and took no interest in abstract concepts, so people like David never really noticed her.  By putting intellect on a pedestal, Plato failed to have compassion for individuals, and wasted his life on abstractions.  (Perhaps this was the reason for the decline of Greek civilisation?)

Martin unfortunately was so obsessed with himself and his own life, that he never appreciated the smouldering, sensual beauty, who flashed her fain tail at him, because he was not interested.  He did notice that others turned to look at her, and he delighted in their envy.  He also had Mendelian ambition and saw her as healthy breeding stock, as she was half his age.

Martin was a master of gobbledegook and circumlocution, so he had found a successful niche as a lecturer in social work at a minor university, but his marriage to Iris gave him delusions of practical abilities.  He set up an antiques restoration business, and destroyed many valuable items, before becoming bankrupt.  It was a follie a deux: Iris wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things and he longed to be an artist rather than a hack.  By this time they had three beautiful daughters: Circe, Lucretia and Messallina and no money; and they both realised that they actually preferred comfort to Art.

He found he could not actually DO social work, only talk about it.  So they borrowed heavily from Virginia.  Iris sought comfort in Susan’s counselling, and Martin did a philosophy PhD on the concept of work (of which of course he had no experience whatsoever).  It was only after twenty years of marriage, with the prospect of the daughters leaving home, during a trial period of separation, that Martin saw Iris as beautiful.  Men had ceased to turn and look at her in the street, but he had come to see her as continuity, comfort and common sense; he had come to see her.

If this had happened twenty years earlier, it would have destroyed their relationship, but Iris had always wanted a son, and Martin retained many of the needs of a growing boy.  She ascribed beauty to him, because she loved him in an oedipal way.  She had cared for him until she felt his beauty; not as we feel warmth or pain, but in a way that involved both body and mind.  They would sit together listening to certain country and western tracks with a level of ecstasy they knew should belong to Wagner’s “Ring”, or a viewing of the Mona Lisa or the Grand Canyon.  Their children said they had gone “soppy in their old age”.  Virginia, who saw all Martin’s bad qualities, never saw any in Iris.

Beauty is not a quality things possess, yet it is more than a word that we ascribe to things, in order to communicate with each other.  Beauty is an absolute, like Truth and Love, something we experience for a moment.  Yes, language gives us rules for the use of words; rules which we understand before we start using the words; but without belonging to the bustle of everyday life, the words would be meaningless.  Iris and Martin were only able to discover the beauty in each other because their search for the abstract (through counselling and philosophy) had become routine.  Their beauty lay in the mundane, ordinary routines, which they now enjoyed.

Marrying a man who was not interested in her enabled Iris to engage in the sensuality of sex; giving birth had cured her PMT; and now discovering that her “boy” was not a genius, destined for greatness, but a perpetual child, unable to grow up, filled her with erotic lust, that most people only experience at the start of a relationship.  The sparrow had become beautiful to the peacock.

The moment of Transference

Susan had been a counsellor long enough to know that she could enable people like Pat to be confident rather than vulnerable, she might one day enable Jack to say no to drugs; but she also knew that the most important problems are not within yourself.  Early in her career, in a flash of lightening, whilst working in the Congo, she had felt the oppressive evil of social systems.  The knots in individual psyches were shrapnel of this greater horror.

She had gone to the Congo to provide bereavement support during a brief lull in the civil war.

The people were so beautiful: friendly, laughing, singing, making do with the most extreme poverty, on the edge of famine, but willing to share their last rice grains with a visitor.  But when she pierced the surface, she found emotional pain beyond her comprehension.  Children who had seen all their playfellows, all their family, tortured, butchered around them, as they feigned death, or worse, joined the soldiers in hacking people to death with a machete.  There was no solution for them in talking about their memories.  They had to change society.

Food, water, functioning machines, seed for crops; but most of all they needed peace.  For all these things, the people needed outside aid, so they attached themselves to any foreigners.  If the foreigner was a priest, there was a rush to join that religious sect, to sing and laugh in a church. To build a mission school in a land with no books and no teachers was a priority only for those who could gain paid employment with the church.  With a few American dollars, they could feed themselves, and employ there distant kin to carry water, plant crops and survive.  If the foreigner was an Aid agency they would dig an unnecessary well, polish a foreign lorry or cook for the aid workers – anything to get those few dollars.  Susan saw that they were equally happy to sing and dance in the uniform of an army with access to foreign arms, and these had the most dollars.

She tried to explain this to Iris.  Iris was making a fetish out of recycling and cutting back her air miles to save the planet.  “These things are good in themselves.  We should assume that everyone will do obviously good things.  But when we start to evangelise others, we encourage the belief that these very little things might really transform the world.  We draw attention away from warfare that is decimating half the planet.”

London felt like that.  Even if a million analysts could take twenty clients each and work through their problems, they would only be encouraging the fallacy that balanced functioning human beings would make all right with the world.  There would still be capitalism, injustice, corruption.

The built environment would remain dirty and dilapidated. People over forty would be mainly missing, having moved out to smaller towns and countryside, to escape the frenetic pace, the lack of natural rhythms, and the intoxication of hormone suppression.  In fact well balanced people were more likely to maintain the present draconian rules and system of rewards and punishments.

Susan was sat with Iris in the garden of Bunhill Meeting House, surrounded by high rise, residential Stalinist-style blocks.  It is a small patch of Nature, in the midst of the ugly attempt, by well-meaning people, to house the irresponsible poor.  One huge tree was as old as the Quaker movement.  “It takes Time to see the Light in those who are suffering”, she explained, to a small group of Congolese refugees.

 A group of survivors who were expressing their suppressed feelings, not to gain financial benefit from foreigners; but to become emotionally open, natural people, who could be truthful and real with each other.  They were discovering skills to take back to Africa, to bring peace.  Together they would enable their whole country to develop its own agenda, and place that before the World Bank.  No more would they fight over which foreigners would tell them what to do.  Iris thought the project naïve and amusing.

Moments of the supernatural

Supernatural moments are not widely recognised.  Stephen and Roger would agree that there is no such thing.  Jack would say they were drug induced.  In fact he would say that they were a good reason for taking drugs, as such moments are “cool”. 

George was feeling rather warm on the summer’s evening walking home from the library, when he heard the distinct clip, clip of hooves walking behind him.  He had turned round a moment before, so he knew there was no-one there.  But this was not the footfall of a person.  It sounded like a two legged cow, or very large goat, and the sound was getting closer to him, even as he walked faster.

It reminded him of one of those nightmares, in which you are being chased, and the more you try to run, the slower you go, as if you were wading through treacle.  Yet he knew he was very wide awake.  Most of the street lamps had been vandalised, but as they passed one that was working he could see the clear shadow of his pursuer.  It was then that he broke into a run, and did not stop till he had shut his front door behind him.

There always seems that level of uncertainty in dealing with the supernatural.  Not that George was uncertain, but Stephen would say.  “Why didn’t you turn round and look?  If it was the devil he could surely have followed you through the door”.  And that was just it for George.  He was convinced that he would be all right as long as he did not look at his pursuer.  And he did feel he might have been followed into the house, because it seemed suddenly “cool”.  So he went straight to bed and covered his face, so he could not look directly on evil.  And it worked!  Next morning all was well and the nightmare never recurred.

Peter had laughed at the whole idea, when George told him.  So Deirdre had started talking about her experience of séances.  When she was at college, half a dozen of them had sat up some nights, with fingers on a glass and letters in a circle, and the glass had moved and messages were received.  One of the girls appeared to collapse, and it was she who moved the glass, but she could not see the letters, so if she was faking it, she had amazing ability.

One of the messages had told Deirdre to go to India, which is why she never went!

This made Peter laugh again.  He challenged the supernatural to make itself known then and there, at which point the light bulb above his head, exploded, showering him in glass.  George did some research after that, and found that the previous occupants of the house had gone to Australia, after the house had been disturbed a number of times by a poltergeist.

Collette was surrounded by superstition in India.  So much of their ritual, so much of their slowness at getting things done, seemed a result of propitiating spirits that might otherwise make life difficult.  As if the supernatural was full of corrupt officials, who all had to be bribed, before you could get on with your life!  Her supernatural moment had come years before, when she had prayed for faith, and had suddenly been filled with a warm and fearless confidence, a source of spiritual nourishments, which had always proven sufficient for her needs.

Collette was quite happy with the words of an orthodox creed, but then she found it easy to believe in ghosts, fairies, angels and demons: anything supernatural in fact that any culture might consider obvious.  It was part of being deliberately gullible: “better to be deceived than to turn a needy person away: deceit is itself an expression of deep psychological need.”  But it was also her love for the richness of human consciousness.  People who felt they had experienced some supernatural force, were open to the possibility of receiving that faith, which had come to her, which enabled her to live well beyond the modest abilities with which genes and environment had endowed her.

“Faith” David had told her, “is not about a series of beliefs.  It is about the totality of your spiritual experience.  Such experience cannot be doubted, even by people who believe that supernatural experience is impossible.”  Of course there are some scientists, like Stephen who would consider such experience to be a hallucination, a sign of mental illness, and would instantly seek psychiatric help.   For Stephen, one myth is as dangerous as the next.  Felling and uprooting was essential if people were to escape the dark ages.

All the moments in this book are special.  They are like birds singing in a dark forest, unexpected, full of life, peak experiences, and thus for John, they are all “supernatural”.

What would the dark forest of Time be like, if no birds sang?  That is why John attempted to replicate the “supernatural” experiences in the laboratory, using drugs, sleep deprivation, starvation: the usual ascetic practices of mystics, poor students and peasants, who tend to be the main reporters of these experiences.

He found that the supernatural was described in very similar terms by the lab. induced subjects, who came from the same cultures as the mystics and students; but they clearly felt differently about their experiences, because they knew they had been artificially produced.  John concluded that the significance of the “supernatural” experience lay in the impact it had on the individual’s life.  Thus George had his interest in strange phenomena justified, and Peter became less willing to scoff; whilst Deirdre sought to avoid anything “weird”, and this included trying to make Peter more “normal”.  But Collette’s experience was of a different order, as it transformed her life.

Given that these experiences are so common, why do they not bring people together?  John found that people outside the laboratory felt isolated by their experience, especially if they came from a community which was generally sceptical.  But even Collette felt she had to be careful in sharing her experience, as hers was not the standard “born again” experience that was prescribed within the church where she had grown up.  She had to move to a more radical, less prescriptive church.

A young girl hears the story of Jesus being awoken in the boat, and calming the storm, and she feels she is there.  Whenever a storm of emotion arises within her, she remembers this moment and becomes calm.   This faith lasts a lifetime, although she never has a similar moment.  Stephen would be happier if it was recognised that the experience had been produced by a form of hypnosis.  For him the forest is enough; the twittering birds are a dangerous distraction.  The function of science is to debunk mystery.  Collette remains clear that there is no division between natural and supernatural.  There is only the division between frightening moments (séances, being followed and exploding light bulbs) ; and moments that enable us to Love (when we are flooded with faith). 

Forest Time 6 –Odessa’s Rhythm

Music is the basis of all life.  It enables Odessa to switch off her brain and just BE.  Thus Dickon is her idea of perfection, as he harmonises dissonant chords, on a wooden pipe he carved for himself.  She thinks his parents are lovely, and wishes David could be more like them.  She writes to tell David that he should come to more gigs with her, and forget his Foresters:  “Intellect is a fine thing, but only because it enables us to produce and appreciate music.  When you respond to the beat, you are friends with everyone in the room.  You have no need for continuity, for keeping up with old friends.  You are always saying that life consists of detached moments, so why try to string them together?  Just live the moment.”

She detests James, as an old Marxist, full of sophistry, making a career out of the suffering of others.  “He loves Bartok’s music because he thinks it is a continuation from Beethoven, when it is the start of genuine folk music which finds its contemporary expression in the angry rock bands of Eastern Europe.”

Odessa puts on a video of a band in which the lead singer leaps around the stage in a straight jacket.  Her father and sister were labelled manic depressive, and she only escaped incarceration by hiding in England.  In her Marxism, mental patients are the exploited class.  Anyone who resists the state is forced into this class.  Hospitals are the modern gulags, and anti-psychiatry the movement of revolution.  The ruling class are mental health professionals like Martin and Jeanette. 

She tells David that he is in danger of joining this class, when he should be fighting for the exploited: people like George, Jack and Iris.  “You have to take sides in a revolution: there is no sitting on the fence.  Susan understands this.  She sees mental illness as the way through to produce compassion for Africa.  And John has turned science into a tool for demystifying power.  He promotes the funkiest, weirdest new bands by playing their demos at science conferences.  He says that only music enables us to deconstruct the hierarchy imperatives in science.”

She feels pity for Jane, who should surrender to her anxieties and force James to recognise that her pain is his responsibility, as a scion of patriarchy.  “You ask why he cannot transform her, as he has transformed Bridget.  Their shared obsession for a once mainstream band, now well past its sell-by date, is certifiable!  Look at the liberation in Bridget’s face.  James has not done this.  Bridget liberated herself, using the music to fashion a fantasy version of James.”

Odessa wants Deirdre to luxuriate in her physicality, so that she can let go of her obsessive cleanliness, which drives her to organise artists into consumer able packaging.  It is clearly the mirror image of Virginia’s compulsive collecting, desperately holding on to things, because she has lost the sensuality of motherhood which gave her life meaning.  “She needs to soak herself in Glen Miller until she is back dancing with the Yanks, and the past sixty years are forgotten.”

“When will Janet and Collette realise that God only exists as a tool of male dominance, controlling the intuitive co-operative instincts of women.  It is Stephen’s cold music less world of biological determinism that drives people to delude themselves with “man”-made religion.  I know you share their illusions and their taste for classical and folksy music, but you can also respond to the heavy beat of a rock band.  So I am sending you this disc to prove that I have not given up on you.”

Odessa has recently returned from five years in her home country, where she worked for an organisation campaigning for the rights of mentally ill people.  She has now found a job giving grants to musicians who find themselves in financial hardship.  This is her perfect job, as she comes from a family of musicians and intellectuals. All her campaigning work for the mentally ill comes from the confidence that strange behaviour is often a side effect of creative ability, rather than a sign of mental illness.

Secret moments

Secret moments for Dickon are spent away from all human beings.  Alone in a garden he will stand like a statue until a robin settles on his arm.  He will take worms to a nest and feed the fledglings.  It is a rare day when he fails to rescue a hedgehog from some hole.  If there are deer in the wood, he will find them.  He knows a hundred different species of beetle and he is only seven.  But all this is secret.  He does not tell his parents or his teachers, because they embarrass him.  They do not know how to behave naturally.  They talk to him as if he were a baby, and he responds by cringing and running away, like the frightened wild creature that he is.

Tom is at the opposite extreme.  He is seventy years older than Dickon.  He has had five wives and more lovers than he can remember, but being alone in a wood would terrify him.  He feels safe with people, especially one to one, where he will tell the other person all his secrets, well, all the ones which show him in a good light.  Because Tom is addicted to secret moments.  The moments with Virginia, his first wife, when he bullied her, with rough threats and swearing, which later developed into pushing her around, or throwing things at her, and finally hitting her; were moments no-one else would ever believe.  When they were out in company, or had friends round to their house, he was soft spoken, always expressing pride in his wife, full of polite consideration for everyone.  He was generous with gifts to her friends; but when they had gone he would blame her for the extravagance and take the money from her small funds.

It was years after Virginia had escaped from him that she heard he had remarried.  Even whilst he had been terrifying her with his violence, Tom had been having a secret affair with wife number two.  He was never cruel to her, as she developed MS soon after their marriage and was regularly monitored by the doctors, but he did start another secret affair.  What he loved was slipping from his lover’s bed to return to his own house, knowing that his wife had no idea what he had been up to.  With Virginia there had been danger of discovery, because she had a suspicious nature, but his cruelty had distracted her.  She did not dare to ask him questions.  With an invalid wife, deception was too easy, and he soon became bored.  There was no adrenalin rush if there was no danger of discovery.  So he divorced her and married wife number three, and so he went on.  At one time he had three lovers, each secret from the others and all secret from his wife.  It was a full-time job.

So this was the father Iris was to meet, after thirty five years.  Naturally she blamed him for her own secret affairs.  “I cannot help it.  It’s in my genes.”  She could not tell Martin, because he was her “little boy”, who had to be protected from discovering what she was really like.  Martin had difficulty getting an erection, and it was miraculous that he had managed to father three girls, but he remained her “boy”, to be protected and managed.  She suspected that Martin was covert homosexual, but that also delighted her.  (That feeling that her extreme beauty had kept his natural orientation suppressed.)  Iris was left with huge sexual hunger, which she satisfied in secret affairs.  She would drive men wild by exciting an erection, and maintaining it, for hours, if the man was able.  Ejaculation usually took place on the outside of her body, which she found more sensual, less painful and reduced the danger of used condoms being discovered.

Naturally they kept their meeting secret from Virginia and Martin, although Iris did tell Susan all about it afterwards.  Despite his age, it was clear to her that she got her good looks and confidence from him.  She was more disturbed to find that a lifetime of deception had left him uncertain who he was.  He desperately wanted to be her father. 

He had had many other children but he had lost touch with all of them, and she was his first born.  As a father he would have an identity.  The alternative was to see himself as a faded gigolo, an old lag (he had served several short sentences for deception – never for domestic violence!), or just a lonely old person.  Tom had never felt guilt, but his lost integrity had left him without any sense of who he was.  He had become dependent on the excitement of those secret moments (not the moments of passion, but the moments in which he hid the truth from the person he was deceiving).

Sammy and Ken were both quite open people.  They reacted against their mother, whose secrecy they hated, and both were deeply attached to Richard.  But they had had to keep their incest secret, and the secrecy had made it more exciting.  The success of their secret love encouraged them to get the forged documents that allowed them to marry, but they could not keep their secret from Richard, and they were terrified that he might reject them.  Richard was deeply shocked.  He had never guessed.  But on reflection he was rather pleased, as it meant he could remain close to both of them.  He was proud of both of them and sure that their child would turn out well.  He was the only one who noticed Dickon’s secret life, and was allowed some share in it.

Odessa had been a revolutionary student in Eastern Europe under communism, when secrecy had been essential to survival.  She had managed to escape to the west, where she had continued to deceive the authorities, even when it was unnecessary, as they were happy to give her asylum and later full British citizenship.  The secrecy had left her with some paranoia, especially with regard to psychiatric services, as they mistook the fiery expressions, normal in her culture, as signs of psychosis.  She became a powerful advocate of the anti-psychiatry movement, and worked for a while on a research project with John.

Jack was driven by his addiction to meet people in secret and inject in private.  He had an extrovert temperament and was much happier being the centre of attention, so he disliked the secrecy.  Gradually he turned his extroversion into sales: he became a dealer.

Younger people were impressed by his Native American wisdom, his Rastafarian dreadlocks, his trendy clothes, his knowledge of music and his responsiveness to both sexes.  For a while the excitement of knife fights kept him from self harm, and the drug itself became secondary to the way of life.  But people he cared about got killed and he became depressed.  He accepted that he was “ill” and needed help.  It was at this point that he met Odessa.

For Jane, any kind of secrecy was anathema.  The worst moments in her life had been when someone had suspected that she was keeping a secret.  She was wholly incapable of lying, and to be suspected of deception was worse than hitting her.  Teachers had done it at school, and destroyed her desire to prove herself academically.  She had been a witness in a trial, and the jury had not believed her, and she had lost faith in the whole system.  “There is no justice in this world” was a favourite expression, and it came from her very personal experience.  She had seen others lie convincingly and escape, whilst she who was wholly innocent and truthful was not believed.  Susan thought her unusual veracity was the reason for her lack of dreams, which in turn produce anxiety and her bursts of anger.  “You are suppressing the subconscious release of emotions, so they bubble up into your daily life instead.”

The moment of Terrorism

The terrorist moment changes lives.  Not just the families and friends who lose those they love.  Not just the emergency services, who see the horror and clear up the mess; nor even the politicians, whose careers are made, and lost, by their response to news stealing events.  The terrorists change all our lives, by raising the stakes, by making our lives, our efforts, our best actions, seem insufficient, un-newsworthy, dull.

But what is the terrorist moment?  Is it a moment of sudden passion, as when James, a bookish, gangly twelve year old, with a plaster caste on his arm, sees his best friend being bullied, held down and beaten, by a much bigger boy?  James rushes across the playground oblivious of everyone else, and hits the boy on the head with his plaster caste.  He could have killed him.  The bully is not seriously hurt, but deeply shocked, because James has broken the rules of engagement: small fry do not attack big lads; boys do not use weapons in fights; and the pecking order is not overturned.  James’ friend is equally shocked, and gives the bully an apologetic look which says: “he is too young to understand: I really am sorry about this”.  To James he says: “I was doing OK, you should have left me to it.”  They catch the bus home together.  James has learnt nothing.

Is it a moment of ecstasy?  The certainty, that this moment alone, will carry you into permanent bliss.  A peak experience, sense of oneness with the universe: when ideology and enemies; plans and training; hate and love; all disperse, leaving only the action.  When James entered the Faslane camp, hammer in hand, prepared to damage a Trident submarine, he was way beyond the adrenaline rush of initial excitement, for he suddenly ceased to care about nuclear war, wasted resources, potential destruction of the human race.  All the theory was lost in the sense of being there, actually doing it.  He had worried about a stupid soldier shooting him, or causing some other brutality, of the consequences to his career, his family… but not any more.  He suddenly understood that he did not really understand the consequences of what he was doing; that he was standing on a precipice, looking down a sheer rock face: amazing, terrifying.  He knew that if he did not jump, he would have to return, slowly and painfully to a mundane world.  He did not jump, and always wondered if he missed out on the moment, but he was glad he did.

Or does it occur far earlier?  Some point at which the truly miserable refugee, the truly mad psychopath, the truly faithful follower: surrenders their power to choose.  Chooses to discard free will, and become an automaton, an instrument in someone else’s hand, a thing without conscience or consciousness.  James would like to understand what would cause anyone to make that decision.  He cannot understand how it is possible to do that.  His questions tell us much about James!  But, for most of the men in the trenches, the order to go over the top was obeyed, automatically, although they knew that they were almost certainly going to die.   Of course they were afraid.  Of course they did not want to be there, but they still jumped.  It was the ones who ran away, or self-mutilated, or played dead who were so rare.

No, there is no great mystery to terrorism: it is a solid part of the herd instinct, the dominant obedience gene, which links us so closely to the social insects.  But what does that moment actually feel like?  Is it like Jack, surrendering to ”a higher power”?  knowing that he might change his mind, and go back to drugs tomorrow.  Or is it like pushing the new child off the climbing frame, or hitting Janet on the head with a truncheon?  Or sending people to prison for cutting the fences at Faslane?  For if the moment occurs long before the terrorist act, it is no different from those moments that commit most people to obey the rules of engagement, or enforce the law.

Somewhere, there must be a passion for Justice: a need to defend the weak, raise up the poor, punish the bully.  This is achieved by bullying the weak and increasing poverty: for there is no Justice, only mercy; no equality, only regulation; no truth, only power.

Open moment

The open moment is always a shock.  Like Ken opening the privy door and finding a woman sat on the throne, knickers around her ankles.  The embarrassment was mainly his.  She had been used to a hiding her modesty behind a blanket held by another woman in the middle of a field of male workers, she had given birth, she enjoyed his chagrin.  It was entirely different, when he and Sammy were having their first argument as man and wife, four-letter words flying back and forth, when the vicar who married them walked in.

The opening is not always clear-cut.  The guard dog beside David’s blood-spattered child had just killed the wolf and saved the child’s life.  A more impulsive man might have blamed the dog and killed it.  The man in Sammy’s bed was her step father, Richard, who had cracked his head, when he stepped back suddenly, when she told him that she had married her half brother, his son, Ken.  Ken might have jumped to the wrong conclusion, when he came home, unexpectedly and found his wife bending over the bed, but he had total faith in Sammy.  Their manner of arguing, complete with swearing, is more like a person’s internal arguments; anger at their failure as a couple to achieve some goal.  As they explained to the vicar, they had wanted to tell Richard the news together, but he had arrived early and dragged the information out of Sammy.

The fight between Roger and George was shown clearly on the CCTV, but it was not clear who threw the first punch.  When Susan spoke to them both afterwards, to provide a psychological report for the Probation Department, she was fascinated by the deeply secret fantasy lives that each had lived, especially their fantasies about each other.

George had ECT for the first time when he was with Deirdre.  It was only when he was “better” that she felt she could leave him.  It was not his depression, nor Roger’s good looks that decided her.  It was her horror at the secret world of the asylum that his incarceration revealed to her.  She saw people, who had lost their dignity, and others, who had godlike power over them.  Her whole view of life changed.  Immediately after the ECT George could not remember anything.  He barely recognised her.  And later he could not remember her visit.  She wished her memory could be wiped, so that she could revert to believing that people always behaved “properly” in public.  She was terrified that one day the white coats would control her, as if she were a dog.

Roger suffered sleep deprivation for much of his life.  This often made him think through questions very quickly, and become very impatient with slower thinkers.  It also gave his perfect chiselled features a gaunt fragile edge, which women found attractive.  Sadly it also led to fantasies about his special abilities, which verged on hallucinations.  Susan could see that Roger suffered as much mental distress as George, and it was this, and not Deirdre, that made them hate each other; for George had an illness label and Roger did not.  Sadly the lengthy counselling that would be needed to help Roger and George become more open about their secret lives, was not an option Susan could offer Probation.

So much of out lives are lived in public that Pat believes she is being watched even when she is alone.  “Open plan offices, were not designed to save space, but to enable closer supervision, like the Victorian Panoptican, designed to enable one prison officer to watch five wings of prisoners.”  It is useless for Virginia to try to argue her out of this paranoia, because, when Virginia was running away from the abusive Tom, she was looking over her shoulder for months, terrified that he was secretly following her.

 In contrast, Collette finds her belief that God is watching us all the time, “as if we were in the Big Brother house”, extremely comforting.   Collette behaves always as if is she was in public.  She has nothing to hide.  Susan thinks she is suppressed.

Stephen says that this belief in omniscience goes back millions of years.  “When early humans were on the African veldt, they experienced the ever watchful vultures, so high in the sky that they are merely dots, invisible against the bright sunshine.  Beyond the dots, even higher, are more vultures, watching the ones who watch the ground.  When an animal falls, all the vultures descend within minutes.  No wonder our ancestors invented a god in the sky watching their every move!”

John behaves always as if he were in private.  He has lived in remote places where his latrine habits were fascinating to small children, who had never seen a white man.  In his lectures, he says out loud, the ideas and contrary arguments, which he is considering at that time.  He opens the drawers of his mind, and empties the contents across the internet.  If he is the only person in jeans, in a room full of suits, it is not because he wishes to defy convention.  It is just what he wanted to wear that day.  The scrutiny army, with their tick box assessments and performance indicators, are horrified.  But John does not care what other people see.  He is totally open, totally free.

The Pastoral moment:

Rolling hills, gentle flowing brooks, soft autumnal shades to woodland glades, the smooth cheeked shepherdess and the fawn.

This was Susan’s idyllic childhood.  It seemed endless.  She longed for adventure, but her love of sweet furry animals left her ever anxious for the fragile and vulnerable.  She satiated her boredom by reading detective stories, which led her naturally to psychotherapy.

She read her clients like whodunits, working from the facts to discover their hidden secrets, the things they were unwilling to share.  She read them to absorb adventure without suffering the side effects, but she read compassionately, ever desiring to heal their lives so that they could skip away into the pastoral.

Jeanette had lived and worked amongst the Norwegian fiords, yet she could live in the Fens without missing the majesty of the mountains.  She appreciated the peace, privacy and security of village life.  “It’s a good place to bring up children.”  But she ignored the countryside even more than she ignored her children.  The important thing was to work long hours to provide for all their material needs.  In Norway, her life was absorbed by the oil company she worked for: in the fens, by the social work career she was developing.  In both she was equally bitter about the idle life of those on benefits, because despite her constant effort, she had failed to get on the house ladder, when it was easy, and failed to get the high salary post in either country.  Whilst she saved money, which loss value, or spent it on her children, who grew up wasting it; she saw her clients spending money they had not worked for, on drugs, clothes and entertainment.  Her focus on this injustice made her miss the pastoral moments.

Sammy was more deeply affected by the pastoral, because her early years were spent in London.  Even there she responded to the Park and disliked the noise and crowds of the streets.  So, when she went to live with Richard, she fell in love with the pony riding life. Even the mucking out was exciting.  The smell and taste of the noble animal, with the scrape of her shovel being the only noise louder than the birdsong.  It was when her mother dragged her back to town that Sammy began to paint, huge swirling semi-abstract oils of thunderous waterfalls, or attempts to capture the thousand shades of green.

Peter had grown up on the edge of London, in a respectable estate of semis, built on green fields a generation earlier.  The Essex countryside was always accessible, but dull, yet he was able to transform it by his imagination into the Romantic idyll of the poets.  His pastoral moments occurred whilst he read.  When he walked through the countryside he was too busy analysing the impact of landscape designers, drainage engineers and the agricultural revolution, to feel the primeval magic of which he read.

Deirdre in contrast had always lived on the edge of small towns.  London and wilderness were equally distressing.  She loved wildlife programmes on TV but needed the hum of traffic to modify the noise of birdsong.  This was odd, because she was the person most like a shepherdess: prim and vulnerable, flirtatious and puritanical.  She was as coy as a fawn, aware that she could always escape to the security of moderation.  Peter found rural tranquillity in her company: quaintly pretty in conversation; dangerously passionate in bed.

Odessa lived most of her life in grand capital cities, close to the centre of political and cultural conflict.  But as a child, she had accompanied her anthropologist mother on visits to the depths of wilderness.  From these rare moments, she retained a longing for the purity and innocence of rural life.  Thus she would try to recapture that experience, especially after her mother’s death.  When she planted potatoes beneath the huge skies of Norfolk; or built dry stone walls in Cumbria; or listened to Wolves in Her native country; or made love beneath the stars in undiscovered Tunisia; she became wholly at one with her surroundings.  This was never possible in the city.  She felt she could remain pastoral for ever, but the passion never lasted more than a week.

Jane loved her birds.  She would rather feed them than herself.  The thrill of seeing a bird of prey appear from nowhere, in the fields around the house, or have a trained one land on her arm; but she could never look at the killing moments: the vicious tearing to pieces of the prey.  She loved walking in the wilderness, but she wanted to remove every weed from her garden.  She adored living miles from anywhere, and had no need of company; yet she would always lock gates and doors at night.  Fear always hovered just out of sight, like a giant spider glimpsed from the corner of her eye.  She would not look at it.  She would not allow it to disturb her worship of Natural beauty.  To be beside a waterfall was bliss: but she saw no romance in floods.  They were an error, to be regulated: an overdose produced by human negligence.

Dickon is the Pastoral as Jane wishes to see it.    He converts all animals into kittens.   He absorbs their fear and their aggression, hypnotising them with a new Way of Being.  This is not the romantic ideal of wilderness, nor the Naturalists image red in tooth and claw.  It is simply Paradise Regained.

Anxious moment

The moment Jane realised she was nearly out of petrol, she remembered that hours before she had taken a wrong turning, and turned round in a petrol station.  Why had she not filled up her tank then?  Now she had to turn around again, but this time she had to backtrack ten miles to get petrol. 

When Deirdre was in the car accident, all the breath was driven from her body.  The car was spun round 180degrees.  She was too terrified to move and started to hyperventilate.  Later she remembered how unsympathetic she had been when George had a panic attack.  The experience of having known him now seemed like an opportunity to prepare for the crises in her own life.  In the month that followed, whilst her broken ribs healed, she had plenty of time to reflect on idleness.  She realised how active George’s mind had been even when he was immobilised by depression.  She compared the violence of his ECT treatment with the suddenness of her accident.  She had never known vulnerability and dependence, since she was a small child.

James had a successful career because he was without pretension.  At University he did the work that was expected of him, yet always behaved socially as if he was not working at all.  But he was always listening, noticing, and learning from those around him.  It was the same in Bosnia; he saw connections between people and tapped into them.   He never claimed to follow any theory.  He did not see peace as an ideal.  He never appeared to put himself to any kind of trouble, to get information; yet, if you wanted to know what was going on: who was really causing the conflict, James knew all their strengths and weaknesses.  Perceptive bosses promoted him, and he did not work for any other sort.

Only once did he fail to notice an opportunity.  He was visiting a local gang leader in a block of flats.  He was in a hurry.  He was tired from a night kept awake by gunfire.  So, when an old lady signalled for him to follow her into her flat, he politely refused.  As a result he arrived at the gang leader’s flat just as an opposing gang arrived.  James was seriously injured in the crossfire.  Months later he returned to the flats, and found the old lady who explained to him what was occurring in the area.

John has arranged controlled experiments in which one group go about their daily lives, following a set programme of appointments which are written out at the start of the week, refusing to deviate, or speak to anyone who has not been identified in the programme.  The other group follow up any chance meeting, take time to gossip about subjects unrelated to their work, concentrating on chance encounters rather than the set programme.  Stephen accepts that the “opportunists” as he calls the second group, will be more relaxed and creative in their approach, but believes that in the long term they will lose focus and become lazy; whilst the “disciplined” will meet their targets, and, in the long term, have the satisfaction of success.

Collette finds this disagreement most amusing.  She has no sense of being hyper-conscious, or of responding to special opportunities.  She just lives by faith, allowing herself to be guided through each day.  Of course she is grateful if she finds the perfect parking spot when she is late for an appointment, but she is equally grateful if she has to walk half a mile and arrive late at a meeting, because she knows that that too is an opportunity.

 In contrast, Jane is convinced that opportunities only come to the rich and powerful.  (She cannot see that she herself is in the top ten percent of the world’s wealthiest people.)  She has the child’s joy in simple things: merry go rounds, flowers, sea and mountains, and the child’s short fuse of anger: flaring incandescence followed by peace.  In practice she usually felt opportunities with her innocence, and allowed them to carry her along.  She was excited by them, responded to them and rarely missed out; just as a child does.  But she did not call them “opportunities” she called them “life”.

Janet had a total commitment to her opportunity, never wanting it to end, babbling incessantly, so that David has to kiss her in order to shut her up.  Her ecstasy is never the same twice.  Lost in her current obsession, she would miss a dozen other opportunities, if David were not there to lead her away, to help he let go and move on.

Deirdre responded to the opportunity of her accident by learning about the tartaric way.

She restrained herself from her previous rushing, over-active lifestyle, concentrating her mind on deferred gratification, just as if she were still an invalid.  She felt the build up of a kind of electricity within her: repressed hormones? passionate thoughts? or anxiety?

Whatever it was, she was slowly changing from a pragmatist to a romantic, whilst driving her former friends distracted.

Janet and John Reading Books were popular moments in the 1950s

  “John can see a rat. The dog tracks the rat.  The rat runs away.  See the rat run.

Janet rides a sledge.  The sledge leaves tracks.  The sledge runs down the hill.  See the tracks.” 

.“Boom and bust is extravagance.  It is as generous as it is lethal.  As evil as only Nature can be.”

Thus John began his article for “Science” magazine as he sat in an idyllic bamboo grove (Melocanna baccifera) in Mizoram near the Burmese border.  John was reflecting on his childhood, in suburban Worcestershire, in the winter of 1958-9, when this bamboo had last flowered.  He had taken his collie for a walk, trespassing on the railway embankment behind his parents’ house, on a frosty morning, aged ten.  Lassie had “smelt a rat”, unearthed it from some brambles, and chassed it across the line.  No train had come, the rat had escaped, and dog and boy returned home safely.  But John had seen the rat move: he had seen fear, agility, cunning, determination: he had seen all humanity in that rat.

John is a modest man, who would never claim to be a world authority on rats, but most of his books make some passing reference to the species, and he was very excited to be witnessing the biggest, predictable rat population explosion since 1959.  When he arrived, the people were making huge bonfires of dead rats, now they were processing them for meat.  Powerful electric fences around the rice fields were producing tons of undamaged carcasses.  A potential famine was turning into carnivorous bonanza. 

Janet smelt the dead mouse under the floorboards, and wondered how anyone could carry on living in a house where they had hidden the body of someone they had murdered.  Surely the stench would drive them mad.  Was it that miserable in Mizoram?  Why did cooking meat smell so good and decaying meat so evil?  She knew John would say that our response to smell came about through evolution.  Carnivores, who found rotting meat repugnant, did not eat it, and so they survived, whilst the adephagous died out.  For Janet this was the start of a sermon about the instinctive knowledge of good and evil: the meaning of our life after expulsion from the Garden of Eden; and the discernment provided by the Spirit of Pentecost.

In 1959 100 people starved to death, and the government feared an epidemic of bubonic plague, still carried by rats’ fleas in the region.  Instead there had been civil war for twenty years, because the locals despaired at the lack of action by the federal government.  Now people were treating John as a worker of miracles: a terrible insult for a scientist.  But what really bothers him is the unwarranted baby boom that has followed the development of the new food source. Instead of millions of rats, which, after a year without bamboo blossom, would have starved down to a few thousands, a stasis for the next forty years; John had caused a human population boom.  This might produce humanitarian aid, which would increase the boom.  But when the world media moved on, the local population would have to return to reliance on self-sufficiency.   Thousands would starve, and many would curse his name

Janet was already comparing the dead mouse smell, to the early effects of global warming.  “People saw the tragic extinctions of wildlife, and some experienced the horrors of floods, heat waves and freak storms; but they felt powerless, to get under the floorboards and remove the stinking corpse of consumerism.  Could we evolve to become as sensitive to climate change as we are to smell of death?  The stench of corruption is of our own making: we put down the poison that killed the mouse, the pollution that is killing the planet.  Perhaps we can live with the consequences now, but soon the stench will be like Mizoram, like the plagues of ancient Egypt, until we turn back to God.”

But for John the rat is a hero.  Like the gingerbread man, the rat escaped the dog, was not killed by the train, survived plagues and famines and spread all over the earth, regardless of habitat.  The fox, Nature, was cunning.  It threw abundance at the rat.  A glut that promised security for future generations.  Rat took the bait and multiplied in number, like the stars in the sky.  Nature was lying.  The security vanished and the children starved.  But, unlike the gingerbread man, Rat was not swallowed up.  Rat learnt to avoid the electric fence.  John’s “miracle” failed, but Rat had learnt to despise Nature; to ignore its false promises.  By restricting population increase in times of bounty, Rat evaded damaging its own future prospects by overpopulation.

In January 1959 Janet and John went sledging.   Parallel lines left in the snow, meet at infinity.

In her sermon Janet wanted to show that infinity was here and now for the person of Faith.  No putting off till tomorrow, no running away from your calling, no negative impact upon the planet.

She and John had run parallel lives, and now they were working together once more.  Her congregation had agreed to be guinea pigs in John’s experiment.  John had found genetic markers in people of Faith, which had a beneficial effect on the auto-immune system and cured a range of illnesses.  He was finding similar markers in the Mizoram rats.  

Forest Time 7   Stephen’s Rational Analysis

The Ancient Order of Foresters has accumulated many long and complex rituals.  A century ago, when these were all secret, outsiders were desperate to learn them in order to gain some kind of occult power.  Now that you can buy a book with all the words and actions laid out, it is a problem to get new people interested.  Even Roger has said to me: “Its all right for you, you remember everything, but for most of us, this is hard work”.   It is useless for me to explain that once he has it all in his head, he will see the logical structure, which makes it all fit together.  And that is the problem, people want the thrill of a mystery, because working through the logic is tough. 

Where does David stand in all this?  I know many people, especially women, treat him as a guru; but he tends to forget that I am head of Forestry.  I visited Virginia at his request.  The house is knee deep in things she has collected from charity shops.  Some are quite attractive, but as soon as she gets them home she has no further use for them and has no idea how to store them or make use of them.  The rooms might as well be piled high with unread newspapers or plastic bags.  Well there are quite a lot of both, and that makes it look especially messy.  I started her on a course of cognitive behaviour therapy, and she managed to bin quite a lot of the rubbish and took some of the better stuff back to charity shops.  She agreed a rational storage system for the rest, and was beginning to work on this. 

But after her granddaughters had visited, she was found wandering in the street in her slippers and dressing gown.  I think David blames me for her being hospitalised; as if I had removed her safety net, before she had dealt with the fear of falling.  But of course that is nonsense.  There is no deep inner world within a person: we are what we do.  Change what a person does and you change who that person is.  Virginia simply did not want to change.  She is very manipulative.

She wants to collect rubbish, so let her.

Then David got Richard involved.  He took Virginia in until she recovered.  He protected her from Iris, which is a bit unfair, as Richard failed to protect Iris from her mother, when she was a child.  David just played on Richard’s sense of guilt.  I had spent years building Richard up.  Making him realise that that there was no reason to feel guilty.  His time with Virginia and Iris had been good for both of them.  Besides he had far more important uses for his powers of mediation.  He persuaded business men to work together and thus made fortunes for all of them.

That’s what a good Forester does. 

Bridget has the right approach.  She never makes errors of logic.  It is as if she has total interface with her computer.  Consciousness is simply the complexity of a rational process.  My rational processes depend on my memory, but hers extend throughout the internet.  James says that when Bridget became drunk, an element of chaos was introduced and she became unpredictable and thus attractive to him; but I cannot imagine that myself.  I think he is just trying to justify his actions in terms of altruism, and there is no such thing.

James always made out that his wife was a worrier, but I found nothing disturbed about her anxiety.  When James was arrested as a terrorist suspect, it proved the solid basis of Jane’s fears.  He had worked with Muslims in Bosnia, that and the need to arrest someone seemed to be the whole of the police case, but they were going to keep him for 28days without a court appearance.  So I set a media campaign going to get him released.  I put the Foresters into action.

At least Roger makes the effort, which was why I was happy to pay his legal costs when he was arrested at the Downing Street protest.  How can the police treat someone who has served his country and brought peace to Bosnia, like a common criminal?  I believe the court case was the reason for Isobel leaving him.

Peter got his Arts network involved with a portrait of James in an iron frame, entitled “Framed”.

And there was to be a statue of James, life size, in handcuffs, to be unveiled at the benefit concert for his wife.

Richard got his business contacts to tell the government that they will cease keeping secret records on Muslim employees, unless James was released.  They also paid for the big human Rights Conference.  And Martin’s newspaper began to press for the free movement of labour around the world.

David, however, refused to be part of the campaign.  He said all the Foresters public activities were alienating those in power, and there was considerable danger of a backlash against the Foresters.   He says he has been talking to friends behind the scenes.  And today James was released.  We let Peter and Richard take the media praise for a successful campaign – Foresters were not mentioned.

Moment of Depression

For Pat, depression is the norm.  A moment is when depression lifts and life happens, like holes in a sea wall or an argument.  If the wall could be broken down into moments, a sea of life could filter through between the cracks, could eventually sweep the wall away into oblivion.  But the wall was solid. 

For Jane depression is like the start of a severe headache.  She feels it coming on, knows it will last for some hours, perhaps a day, and grits her teeth to put up with it.  Her first defence is to cut herself off from all other people: this may involve snarling at them, or telling them directly to leave her alone.  Pity the poor fool, who finds her crying and attempts to comfort her, for they will get the full force of a month’s built-up resentment.  Nothing in the Universe is right.  It is full of disorder and chaos, and it is all the fault of the fool who is trying to sympathise with her.

Usually Jane can look back at things and laugh her infectious mirth until those around her all feel equally jolly.  That is the main way she diffuses her anxiety.  But occasionally, the anxiety overwhelms her.  Then, when she looks back, she sees increasing insecurity, lack of development and the closing in of the forces of disorder.  Jane knows the pain will pass, and she knows that if she can express her anger, the pain will pass more quickly.  Left to itself, the depression will reflect that her temper tantrums are very hurtful to others, and she will start to feel guilty and get more depressed.

All this she knows at the moment she feels the depression coming on.

She would be far more depressed if she knew how ugly and threatening she appeared to Sammy and Ken, when she had one of these rare moods.  Old people easily forget that to teenagers, anyone over thirty is a zombie.  That is why they love Zombie films, where the heroic characters fight off endless quantities of the undead, just as they experience life as constantly held back by the demands of people so physically decayed they should be in their graves.

 It had been this dead hand from the past, which attempted to tell them they should not love each other.  It is the old people who make the laws, which limit Ken’s initiatives from making more money, which make housing so expensive, which control the way they bring up Dickon.  They only have short moments of depression, when they feel as if they have become zombie’s themselves, but such moments soon pass. 

To Stephen depression is the sea of believers, who cloud rational thought with all kinds of impossible ideas.  He believes that “transparency” will enable scientists to show religion up for the pack of nonsense it is.  But John finds this view of science depressing.  He feels that science often wants people to see science as the one way to truth, so that scientists can get on with what they really want to do.  John wants “integrity” that openness about science which enables people to know that science knows nothing, beyond its openness to new discoveries.

This same battle went on at a practical level between Iris and Jeanette.  Iris’ youngest daughter was accused of trying to strangle another girl in the playground.  The girl had rope marks on her neck, and pointed at Iris’ daughter, although she said nothing.  Both girls were six year’s old.  Jeanette, a professional social worker, had been advising Iris about Alzheimer’s, as Iris feared Virginia was succumbing to the illness. So when the headmistress phoned Iris, Jeanette accompanied her to the school.   Iris had total faith in the integrity of her daughter’s account, but Jeanette insisted that they must have “transparency” by hearing from all parties.  This lead to a long expression of anger from the mother of the injured girl, which insured that her daughter said nothing further about the incident and Iris’ daughter, was suspended from school indefinitely.  Fortunately integrity ruled the following day, when the injured girl confided in her teacher that she had been trying to hang herself, when Iris’ daughter had rescued her.  She was too afraid of her mother to admit her own desperate misery, in front of her.

 Jack may have had his first moment of depression when he saw the suffering of his mother’s clients.  He certainly regarded his use of drugs as a necessary escape from all the depressing aspects of adult life.  Yet Susan had become certain that he was naturally too manic to ever experience clinical depression.  What Jack took for depression was what most people accepted as ordinary life.  Susan decided that he would never make the break from drugs whilst she continued to support him, but she had not realised how tough it would be on her to live without a dependent person forever pressurising her for money.  Her outward confidence and brusque manner were all a cover for a sense of depression.

Collette was recently returned from India with pictures of her progress.  The building of the orphanage, the children’s lives transformed.  Susan felt in the touch of her hand the power that enabled her to do whatever she felt called to do.  She reminded Susan of her own vocation.  She told her about the way people in India simply plugged into the mains and stole the electricity, to such an extent the power companies could not cope, and everyone was often without any power.  Susan saw at once that this was her experience of depression: the lack of power which comes from attempting to steal power: by using drugs, or any form of dependency, rather than pay the price.  When people act with integrity, there is plenty of power for everyone; but when some people try to cheat, everyone goes short.

Martin’s great skill was sophistry.  He could talk people into letting him do anything, but talking was all he was really good at.  He talked so well about the ennobling aspects of work, he persuaded himself that manual labour was more valuable than talking, so he talked his way into a factory job, making ball-bearings.  He caused havoc on the production line by his slowness and distractibility, and was unable to sweet talk the other workers, because of the noise of machinery.  He was horrified by the coarseness of the women: rudeness and lewdness: one even pinched his bum.  After a week he talked the doctor into signing him off sick with “depression”.  It was not a misdiagnosis.

Ethnicity Moment

The Ethnicity moment occurs when your personal identity seems totally subsumed beneath a sense of belonging to a race, culture, religion, geographic area or other sub grouping of humanity.  It tends to be widespread at times of war, economic shortage or major sporting event.  It can lead to sub human actions of great violence and cruelty, or superhuman actions of heroism and self-sacrifice.  It can disperse like morning mist when the light of reason rises in the sky.

Odessa tried hard to gain acceptance in England, learning the culture and behaviour patterns as quickly as she learnt the language.  She wanted to be accepted, assimilated, absorbed into everyday life.  She would battle on behalf of the mentally ill, on behalf of the oppressed in her own country, but she had no desire to be an outsider in her adopted home. 

Then, at work, some black colleagues, third generation English, with local accents, surrounded by close kin, rooted in the local community; claimed that she was prejudiced against them because of their “ethnicity”.  “They are pure East London, not a shade of Africa, not a foreign word, nor concept, nor behaviour to make them at home outside this country.”  She had black friends, she loved black music, and she lived with a black man and had black children.  She was very much in favour of the colour of their skin.  It was their work with which she found fault.  But when they waved the black card, she was suspended from her job; and suddenly she realised she was foreign; that they would never have made this accusation against someone born and bred in London.  She felt a longing for people from her country, for the sound of her language, for the reassurance of belonging.  She cooked her national dish, tuned the short wave to her national radio station, sang a song from home, phoned her mother and arranged a visit “home”.

For Collette it was quite different.  She felt called to go to India, felt called to marry an Indian, and live far away from other English people, in a rural area where few people spoke any English.  But she had no desire to assimilate.  She hated the music, the corruption, the slowness.  “Poverty of culture is inseparable from material poverty.”

She loved the people, but wanted to transform them by giving them the riches of Christianity.  So every contact reinforced her sense of her Englishness: her ethnicity inseparable from her religious beliefs.  The language of the King James Bible was as important as the music of Elgar and Walton, as tasty as Yorkshire pudding, as beautiful as green fields.  Yet no-one thought she was prejudiced against them, no-one treated her unfairly, for she was welcome as a full member of their community.

Jack chose black friends at school, loved black music, wore dreadlock hair extensions and moved on to drugs through these contacts.  It was only when struggling with deep depression, or drug withdrawal, that he felt his Native American ancestors calling him to take a different trail.  Then he felt capable of great acts of heroism and sought to learn something of his tribe.  Yet he had always been at war with the oppressive power of white teachers, white police, white psychiatrists, and white prison officers.  He could forgive his white mother, but not his white step father, yet he was nearly white himself.

Sammy of course was almost as black as her mother, but she dressed in tweeds and sounded like a member of the county set.  She saw through people, saw their aura, saw them for their real selves, and was never fooled by superficials.  She could see a black motive, a yellow coward, a red hot anger or a green shade, but she never noticed the colour of a person’s skin or the peculiarities of their accent.  She had no prejudices, because she sensed deeper attributes.

Thus she encouraged James in his pretension to Chinese ethnicity.  If you went back a few hundred years, you might find a Dutch, French or even Russian in his ancestry, but definitely no Chinese.  But he grew up in China, read the literature, followed the politics and regarded himself as a Taoist.  He was certainly more Chinese in his thinking than most western Chinese who had devoted generations to gaining full assimilation.  He was more knowledgeable and committed to traditional Chinese values than most modern Chinese who were “taking the Capitalist road”, sacrificing everything, even family, to become wealthy.  Marxism had been a different creature once it was absorbed into the thousands of years of Chinese heritage.  It was important to James that Capitalism should be similarly transformed.

Forest Time 8 Bridget’s Interface

I am younger than James.  It does not matter.  Most of our communications are on the internet or by text.  He writes as if he were twenty.  I feel as if I am talking with the computer, as if he were its soul.  He writes such clever, deep, important things.  When he is 75 I shall be fifty.  It does not matter he will live long and healthy.  It is the physicality of our passion for each other that is important.   His experience provides a template for our finger work, as subtle as touch-typing.   We merge together sans serif.   Touch reveals so much that sight deletes.  We search until we find the correct format.  Only then is there the insert.   Our climax is macro.

How did Tom know?  I do not even have an Email address for Tom.  Of course he might read my blog, or trace my facebook entries, but there is nothing there to give me away.  Perhaps he has hacked into my mainframe?  I am not jealous of Iris: to be his blood-brother, when they were both innocent, seems closer than sex.  It is certainly closer than his wife.  They just live together.  There is no communication in that.  I live with chairs and table, but I do not share my soul with them as I do with my computer.  Iris is a computer phobe; she only likes people in person.  She can be charismatic with people like Peter and George, but James is deeper than that that.   He has megabytes of information on his clipboard and a hyperlink to my clitoris.

I adore working for Stephen.  Forestry requires the accurate recording of every fact.  Causality is rationally inferred.  My computer is the highest realisation of human use of tools to ensure survival.  This is because the computer is capable of using the same modules, specialised mechanisms for making calculations, as the human brain.  Of course I started modestly, by reorganising his filing system in the office, so that at least one of us knew where everything was.  I used the same systematisation to audit his existing software; so now he trusts me to audit all his communications systems.

That is how I came to write the drug safety report to the parliamentary committee on Epinexiclone, the wonder new anti-psychotic drug.  All went well until John’s article in Nature on his study of bodily changes amongst members of Janet’s congregation.

Of course, people want to believe that changes in belief can produce altered metabolism and turn debilitating illness into amazing insight.  This is a deceptive meme, which must be suppressed by hard facts.  The purpose of the brain is to control bodily movements, not to control chemical reactions within the body. That control relies on the much more vulnerable processes of various glands, producing hormones and other substances.  When these glands go down, you cannot switch the brain off and switch it on again, and hope the programme will resume as before; although that is precisely what John is suggesting happens with “born again” believers.

John has further challenged the new drug as a result of his Antarctic soil samples.  He claims that global warming is melting ice to release bacteria, which has been dormant for millions of years; and that this bacterium creates the same response in normal people as Epinexiclone.  Of course the public love all this novelty.  They are genetically programmed to be less responsive to the complex repetitive work of our laboratories, so they ignore the real science.

Jeanette has been using her social welfare clients (including Jack, who is living with her) to test out the new drug in a double-blind clinical trial.  We have a webfull of connections, but she is of a different generation.   She has residue of the sixties, including her need for money; so she thinks that headers and footers are to do with bedroom antics, and that an apple is a fruit!  But we are both very clear that work and leisure are two separate activities and that work is most important because it uses a keyboard & mouse.

So Jack was a bit of a shock.  Apparently he was a wild axman, like Raskolnikov, when Jeanette first met him, but Epinexiclone has transformed him, without damaging the exciting aspects of his computational skills.  He demonstrated these to me on the higher levels of the latest computer games.  Of course I have designed games, but I never play them, that’s for losers.  I showed him that he was copying the programme, like a rat will copy another rat in pulling a lever; whereas what he needs to do is copy the programmer.  (This is not entirely true, as he appears to have some ability to predict what the programme will do.)

He was impressed by the immediate interface I formed with the game, scoring maximum at the highest level on my first game.  He thought it was some kind of trick or even witchcraft, and told me I was really cool.  When I tried to explain to him that human neurons have a natural affinity with computer binomials, because of our dialectical evolution, he decided that I was “The One” as in the Matrix films.  Poor child, he made me realise why I fell for an older man.

Jack admits that it was David who suggested he form a close bond with Jeanette, but only as a route to meet me.  I can see David’s reasoning: if Jack can move off games, and onto serious computer use, he could soon become an indispensable member of the technological elite, and cease to need heroin or even heavy rock music to calm his frustrations.  David believes in these networking manipulations, but I think the drug is much more necessary.  When he spoke about David, Jack’s eyes rolled back, as if in some kind of trance, and he told me, in a darker voice, that his Native American guide wanted me to expect a significant meeting with Collette, whom I have never met.  He said: “David is a puppeteer, but Collette is Truth.”

Ken has been dating John’s bacteria soil samples, using pollen grain analysis, in the hope of derailing John’s anti-drug research.  But his partner Sammy is involved with the reform of women’s prisons, especially the government plan to replace large-scale prisons with small local units.  She has discovered the Epinexiclone trials in Corton Vale, through some Trident protestors imprisoned there.   They see this as some kind of Nazi experimentation on caged humans, whereas in fact they have volunteered to try the drug because successful use could lead to early release and lack of further offending: a win-win situations.  She has persuaded Ken to work for John instead of the Foresters.

Moment of irony

The ironic moment is only funny if we are observing from the outside.  Thus when Dickon naively told his angry teacher that he was looking out of the window because there was a rare Bunting on the tree in the playground; he failed to catch the sarcasm in the teacher’s “If it’s so much more listening than my lesson, why don’t you invite it in.”

Dickon opened the window and whistled, and the bird obediently entered the classroom and sat on his desk.  There was then no doubt that the whole class felt this was more interesting than the teacher’s lesson.

Thus when the rationalism of the Enlightenment led inexorably to the Nazi death camps and the use of atomic weapons, only those who were not involved, in the logical search for absolutes of Truth, Beauty and Ethics, could see the irony of a system that produces the opposite of its intention.  Those like James and John, who were labelled as Post-Modernists, because they refused to expend energy on the search for absolutes, were not laughing at the pre-war mindset, which produced the ultimate horrors.  John simply wanted to establish the precise moment at which it could be said that Modernism ceased to be credible.  Of course he realised that such a search was itself just the kind of thing that would appeal to a Modernist historian: like deciding whether Modernism began with the fall of Constantinople, or Columbus’ visit to the West Indies, or the discoveries of some mastermind like Copernicus or Descartes.  He favoured Descartes false separation of body and mind.  The whole exercise was intended to make students see how easy it is to fall back into Modernist thinking, and when they did, he did laugh at them.

James felt the irony lay in the search.  For him, as for the American Constitution, certain Truths were self-evident.  All people were more than equal; they all contained that of God within them, so that each person was sacred.  Thus there could be no killing, and certainly no death camps or atomic weapons.  Why had the Modernists expended so much energy over hundreds of years in the pursuit of rational arguments, when everything important was experienced inwardly?  Of course he knew the answer, he had experienced it himself.  He had spent many years at school and University trying to prove things, in the prescribed logical manner.  In science lessons at school, he had tried to prove that the results should have been as in the text book, by explaining why his own results were totally different.  At college he had learnt to argue against the arguments for the existence of God, on the basis of a much cleverer argument that had just been developed by a German theologian.  But by the time he became a diplomat, he knew that all argument was sophistry.  He could prove that black was white, but never made the mistake of believing his own arguments. 

Perhaps the ironic moment is when we think we have lost something, which is quite safely waiting for us: as when Emma Woodhouse thinks she has lost Mr Knightly.   David was for ever losing papers.  He had a dozen filing cabinets filled with his writings and records of the lives of the people for whom he felt responsible; people whom he knew relied on him.  For some he was a kind of guru, for others a reliable friend, for many more he was a shadowy figure who appeared to keep their lives in flight.  With such responsibility it was clearly distressing when he could not find a vital piece of paper.  The paper did not know it was lost, did not know David was looking.

Richard lost Liza, when she ran off with the hairdresser, but Liza did not feel lost.  She wanted to be frivolous and fashionable and have fun, and her Italian was good in bed.  She had felt lost living with Richard, because he was so hard working and conscientious and dull.  Iris and Ken and Sammy never thought Richard was dull, because he played with his children, games that stretched their imaginations.  Richard could not lose Liza, because he never had her.  When they married, Richard had wanted a child to play with.  Liza gave birth to Ken, and ceased to be necessary.  Richard also wanted a mother figure, which Liza could never be.  But when she left him, it became possible for him to move in with the motherly Virginia.

Liza thought she had lost her son Ken, when she ran off with the hairdresser, but when Sammy was born, she realised that she had lost nothing.  Children were a terrible bore.  Her Italian started to become serious, forever discussing the child’s future.  She nearly left him for a Chinese waiter, but instead she lied.  She said Sammy was not his daughter but Richard’s, and she persuaded Richard to take the baby, caring for it conscientiously.  She never had any more children, which was why fourteen years later she felt she had lost Sammy, and lied to get her back.

That was when Ken and Sammy thought they had lost each other.  Ironically it was the moment at which their sibling attachment became an incestuous bond, which made them inseparable as adults.  What did this moment of irony feel like?  It was like the terror of standing on a high place, from which you are terrified of falling, where the terror comes from the knowledge that a part of you wants to jump.   Or like David’s formal diplomatic dinners, when he wants to place a farting cushion under the most pompous of his guests.  Years later, they saw the irony, and laughed at the terrible swinging emotions they felt, but at the time, it was grim.  They both felt lost, at the moment they had really found each other. 

Jack knew he was lost, and he knew his mother was looking for him.  His drug addiction put him in a place that her counselling could not discover.  The irony there was that his addiction enabled him to step out of his parents’ shadow and develop the exciting, frightening personality, which could withstand his upbringing. He had found a personality that could continue after the addiction.

The ironic moment is only funny if we are observing from the outside.  Thus when Dickon naively told his angry teacher that he was looking out of the window because there was a rare Bunting on the tree in the playground; he failed to catch the sarcasm in the teacher’s “If it’s so much more listening than my lesson, why don’t you invite it in.”

Dickon opened the window and whistled, and the bird obediently entered the classroom and sat on his desk.  There was then no doubt that the whole class felt this was more interesting than the teacher’s lesson.

Thus when the rationalism of the Enlightenment led inexorably to the Nazi death camps and the use of atomic weapons, only those who were not involved, in the logical search for absolutes of Truth, Beauty and Ethics, could see the irony of a system that produces the opposite of its intention.  Those like James and John, who were labelled as Post-Modernists, because they refused to expend energy on the search for absolutes, were not laughing at the pre-war mindset, which produced the ultimate horrors.  John simply wanted to establish the precise moment at which it could be said that Modernism ceased to be credible.  Of course he realised that such a search was itself just the kind of thing that would appeal to a Modernist historian: like deciding whether Modernism began with the fall of Constantinople, or Columbus’ visit to the West Indies, or the discoveries of some mastermind like Copernicus or Descartes.  He favoured Descartes false separation of body and mind.  The whole exercise was intended to make students see how easy it is to fall back into Modernist thinking, and when they did, he did laugh at them.

James felt the irony lay in the search.  For him, as for the American Constitution, certain Truths were self-evident.  All people were more than equal; they all contained that of God within them, so that each person was sacred.  Thus there could be no killing, and certainly no death camps or atomic weapons.  Why had the Modernists expended so much energy over hundreds of years in the pursuit of rational arguments, when everything important was experienced inwardly?  Of course he knew the answer, he had experienced it himself.  He had spent many years at school and University trying to prove things, in the prescribed logical manner.  In science lessons at school, he had tried to prove that the results should have been as in the text book, by explaining why his own results were totally different.  At college he had learnt to argue against the arguments for the existence of God, on the basis of a much cleverer argument that had just been developed by a German theologian.  But by the time he became a diplomat, he knew that all argument was sophistry.  He could prove that black was white, but never made the mistake of believing his own arguments. 

Perhaps the ironic moment is when we think we have lost something, which is quite safely waiting for us: as when Emma Woodhouse thinks she has lost Mr Knightly.   David was for ever losing papers.  He had a dozen filing cabinets filled with his writings and records of the lives of the people for whom he felt responsible; people whom he knew relied on him.  For some he was a kind of guru, for others a reliable friend, for many more he was a shadowy figure who appeared to keep their lives in flight.  With such responsibility it was clearly distressing when he could not find a vital piece of paper.  The paper did not know it was lost, did not know David was looking.

Richard lost Liza, when she ran off with the hairdresser, but Liza did not feel lost.  She wanted to be frivolous and fashionable and have fun, and her Italian was good in bed.  She had felt lost living with Richard, because he was so hard working and conscientious and dull.  Iris and Ken and Sammy never thought Richard was dull, because he played with his children, games that stretched their imaginations.  Richard could not lose Liza, because he never had her.  When they married, Richard had wanted a child to play with.  Liza gave birth to Ken, and ceased to be necessary.  Richard also wanted a mother figure, which Liza could never be.  But when she left him, it became possible for him to move in with the motherly Virginia.

Liza thought she had lost her son Ken, when she ran off with the hairdresser, but when Sammy was born, she realised that she had lost nothing.  Children were a terrible bore.  Her Italian started to become serious, forever discussing the child’s future.  She nearly left him for a Chinese waiter, but instead she lied.  She said Sammy was not his daughter but Richard’s, and she persuaded Richard to take the baby, caring for it conscientiously.  She never had any more children, which was why fourteen years later she felt she had lost Sammy, and lied to get her back.

That was when Ken and Sammy thought they had lost each other.  Ironically it was the moment at which their sibling attachment became an incestuous bond, which made them inseparable as adults.  What did this moment of irony feel like?  It was like the terror of standing on a high place, from which you are terrified of falling, where the terror comes from the knowledge that a part of you wants to jump.   Or like David’s formal diplomatic dinners, when he wants to place a farting cushion under the most pompous of his guests.  Years later, they saw the irony, and laughed at the terrible swinging emotions they felt, but at the time, it was grim.  They both felt lost, at the moment they had really found each other. 

Jack knew he was lost, and he knew his mother was looking for him.  His drug addiction put him in a place that her counselling could not discover.  The irony there was that his addiction enabled him to step out of his parents’ shadow and develop the exciting, frightening personality, which could withstand his upbringing. He had found a personality that could continue after the addiction.

Falling moment

Falling ten feet from the top of a metal climbing frame, to land on concrete, could have ended Collette’s life at the age of five.  Forty years later Health and Safety would have enforced a soft landing.  The children would certainly have been supervised to prevent a child on her second day at school being pushed in such a chaotic hustle.   Any victim of such violence would be provided with counselling for years.  Most probably the school would not even take the risk of such a dangerous piece of play equipment.  But for Collette it was the moment that defined her future life.

It was very apparent in her Indian wedding.  Collette and her family and friends had travelled a huge distance to see her marry the handsome young local leader; but her climb up this cultural frame had begun years ago when she first visited the country.  She would not be put off by a four day ceremony almost entirely according to customs and language that she did not understand or approve.  She was at the top of the frame, and enjoying a huge sense of achievement.

These English did not understand what was going on.  The chaos began with anointing her hair with oil.  No-one had warned her to wear old clothes that could be thrown away, when they had been ruined by the oil, nor explained to her father how he should anoint her.  Then she spent hours handing out saris to all the 500 women who would attend the ceremony.

But beyond the chaos was the corruption, the push from the top of the frame.  The band of “musicians” who played, out of tune, and interrupted the hymns by playing an entirely different tune at the same time.  The thousand guests, who all had to be provided with a meal and clothes, although most of them were unknown to both bride and groom.  This was not a question of expense, as the cost of getting the English party to India was much greater, but it was a shock.  A shock that Collette endured with her usual faith.

For, beyond corruption lay the social bonding.  The guests were given the opportunity to paw the blue eyed, white skinned bride, and discover that she was human.  And Collette had the opportunity to speak about Jesus to a largely Hindu audience.  Most of all, the traditional generosity created goodwill between the couple and the local community.  Collette did not have a soft landing, but she was not permanently damaged by her fall.

Other children might have become distrustful of their peers, paranoid about possible future attacks and generally fearful of bullying.  But Collette took her fall as an expectation of life’s downs and ups.  So she expected some chaos in their plan to build a school and orphanage near the village.  The language problem did mean that the builders put doors where there should have been windows, and erected a larger building than planned.  But in a land without any need for planning permission, changes on the ground were easy to accept.  Similarly without any health and safety it did not surprise her, that the women in long saris and bangles, and no hard hats, had no accidents.

Collette accepted the lack of privacy: locals wandering in and out of her house, looking through her drawers, or just standing and starring at her from a few feet away, because it allowed her to make contact with them.

Beyond the chaos lay corruption.  Like the control of the water supply by the electricity company.

No electricity meant no pumped water, meant no work on the building site, so the company could negotiate a higher price.  Concrete would be ordered but not delivered.  They actually bought their wedding cake on the way to the wedding, because if it had been ordered in advance, it would probably have been forgotten.  Again, like the wedding, many people turned up for the free food on the site, who never did any building work.

Beyond the corruption lay the group of hardworking people who were well paid, in local terms, and yet still cheaper than a mechanical digger.  A group of workers who might later become members of the congregation of her church.  Workers whose buildings were sound despite their inability to understand anything on paper; creating a resource that cost of fiftieth of what a similar structure would have cost in Britain.

Boom and bust was for Collette the pattern of life.  Species evolved, until there were millions of them, then a massive extinction wiped out most of them.  And it was the same in individual species, numbers increased geometrically, until the environment could no longer support them, when millions died.  The Universe itself had expanded over billions of years, but would probably contract much faster, like a black hole.  Humans merely mimicked the laws of Nature in the chaos and corruption of their financial markets, and she preferred to see these processes clearly as in India, rather than through the apparent controls and regulations of paperwork Britain.

She worked successfully with the sudden push; having faith that she would pick herself up and climb back to the top.  As her experience of fever, when the crisis was past, came the sweet road to recovery.  Like the anti-malarial tablets which had made her vomit: the horrid contractions, the pain the shock, all became linked to the loving care she received during her return to health.  Sex itself involved very similar pain and shock, in which her desire to fall required an equal desire by her husband to push.  She had faith that the contractions of childbirth would provide an opening as ecstatic as every other resurrection experience she had longed for, endured and trusted.

Collette was incapable of a vacuous or superficial relationship.  The apparently empty hours she endured, during the wedding preparations, with people chattering away in a language she did not understand, were the first steps towards relationships with a whole continent of people.  She took back to her English congregation new and surprising experiences, to broaden their conception of the Christian life.  But she drew no boundaries round her life.  Many of the people she would speak to in England as in India, would not be Christian, and they would have to ask themselves, what force pushed this fearless woman into her new adventures.  They could see that she had not fallen, for she had clearly learnt to fly.  More, she helped others, who had fallen (addicts in Britain, the poor in India) to see the part they could play in changing their world.

Collette was not part of the chaos.  Wherever she went she brought order, because she was not distracted by a desire to accumulate material goods for herself.  Nor was she corruptible, but she would lead these people in a new way.  Her school would not produce young people for clerical work in offshore insurance companies and call centres.  They would receive an education, where understanding is valued for its own sake.  They would be led away from their own needs to genuine wisdom: an appreciation of life.

 Indian Moment

 India would never be the same again.  She had persuaded some contractors to set aside their assumption of corrupt payments and just get on with the job of supplying materials to the school/orphanage.  It was like when Gandhi buried human pooh, in a hole that he dug with his own hands.  It did not matter whether people understood the value of removing sources of contagion.  They saw their great spiritual leader setting an incredible example and millions of them changed their behaviour, and lives were saved.

The actions of the contractors amazed their contemporaries.  They were not great spiritual leaders, so no-one followed their example; but their fame, as ‘honest’ traders spread, and they found themselves in huge demand for contracts.  They were able to make sensible charges for their services, and found they could deliver without expecting extra payments.  It was when their business started to boom that other contractors started to offer ‘honest’ services to the school/orphanage project.  Perhaps they believed there was some miraculous benefit from working for the white lady with the blue eyes.

Their motives, like those of Gandhi’s followers, remained inscrutable, but corruption went into decline.

It was the same for Jack when he gave up alcohol.  For months he had lived in a haze, dulling the pains of abusing himself, by drinking a bit more every day.  The pains in rehab were horrendous.  But one day he woke up.  He realised that he had actually slept through the night.  No nightmares, no puking, no pain.  He had the energy levels of a teenager, which he had not felt for fifteen years.  His abdomen had subsided.  He looked at his body in the mirror, and felt pleased.  He took time getting dressed, putting on his best clothes, sprucing his hair, feeling his good looks.  When he spoke, there was no slur and people understood what he was saying.

The good policeman knows he is better off without a weapon.  He is better off every time he deals with people without resorting to force, because they respect him for his bravery, and support him when he has to deal with a madman.  But there are so many bad policemen about, enjoying their powers; and so many governments wanting to give more power to the police, that more and more honest citizens have experienced police brutality at first hand.  So fewer people are ready to recognise the good policeman, who may wish he had a gun, when unsupported, he sees the mad knifeman approaching.

Policing is sinking in a corrupt haze.  It may need a period in rehab, it may need more good policemen; it certainly needs a Ghandi.

There is nothing miraculous about prison.  It is a cess pit into which a country discards its fertile young minds to encourage their corruption, so that ‘respectable people’ can feel punishment was justified.  Without prison Jack would have died of his drug habit, but if a more humane intervention had been available he would have recovered earlier.  Without prison James would not have understood his powerlessness, and accepted the will of a higher power.  But life provides the same experience for millions of others without incarceration.  Individual lives will change, even when culture remains constant, because it is the individual who changes the culture.

Moment of Déjà vu

The déjà vu moment came for Janet when she went on her first religious retreat.  She had never stayed in anywhere like it before, but as soon as she stepped through the front door, she recognised the huge, wood panelled hall; the grand fireplace; the huge windows of tiny lattice panes of clear glass, looking down over a descending series of lawns, with a ploughed field and wood beyond.  She knew that a nun was about to walk into the room through a side door by the fireplace, and she knew the nun had come from the kitchen.  But she could not “know” any of these things, because she had been given no information about the retreat before arriving.  David had wanted it to be a surprise.  He had made all the arrangements, and even he had not realised that it was a Catholic Retreat house.  Neither of them has seen or been told what the hall would look like.

The experience was a turning point for her.  She started to look out for this special knowledge, whenever she visited somewhere new, or met someone of whom she knew nothing.  She was walking in the grounds, when the sun was setting.  She sat on a seat overlooking the ploughed field, and watched.  An older lady came and sat beside her, as if they were old friends.  They talked quietly, until it was quite dark.  The lady told her all about her troublesome daughter, and Janet felt the power of that frustrated love: it was the love of God for the disobedient human race.  The lady was Virginia.

It was no surprise to Janet when she met Iris, at a poetry group she was attending, two years later.  She knew her before she read the poem about her mother, and long before she gave her name.  She told Iris about her déjà vu, and Iris told her about her blood brother: “It was not the ritual, but my reason for wanting the ritual.  The knowledge that this boy would always be there, as long as blood ran in my veins, he would be there for me.  Because, somehow, he had always been there, waiting for me to need him.  Just being there helped me get through crises.”

It was no surprise when she met James.  She was working with difficult young people, like Messilina, who cut her arms with broken pots.  She was introduced to James by his surname, which meant nothing to her; but, as soon as they were alone together, he started telling her that she was part of a déjà vu experience which had lasted him all morning.  She asked him then if his name was James.  The only thing that surprised her was the idea that déjà vu could continue through hours of Forest time.  For her, the experience had always been a split second, a sudden totality which took hours to analyse, but was over in a moment.  She decided that James experienced so many moments, that they appeared to him to run into each other, because the non-déjà vu moments would seem so flat in comparison, that they hardly registered in his consciousness.

But it was Collette who really enlightened Janet.  Collette had her first déjà vu experience as a small child, when she was being rushed into hospital.  Lying on the trolley, she watched the pipes running along the ceiling of the corridor.  She knew they were coming to a steep slope, when it was still round the corner.  Her pain ceased to concern her, as she was lost in wonder at the experience of knowing what was going to happen.  “I knew then that anything I tried to do would come to nothing, whilst anything I was meant to do would flourish.  I am impatient by nature, but I have always tried, since that moment, to wait for the “meant to do” things.  That is what I mean when I say it is the best of all possible worlds, because the “I want” world is just not possible.”

To the Foresters, such a statement is the ultimate folly:-

1) Only science can make limited predictions about the future, based on accurate data collection and knowledge of universal natural laws.

2) Precognition is impossible, because the future does not exist until it happens.  Time is sequential, and can only be experienced as memory.

3) There is no intention behind the universe.  Universal forces have no connection with, or intervention in, the lives of individuals.  Seeing events as evidence of a personal purpose is clear proof of a delusion, requiring the prescription of medication.

4) We must each accept responsibility for our own actions.  Those who claim to be guided by some higher power are dangerous.

Whilst they all accept these four points in theory, only Stephen lacks the niggling doubt of personal experience.  Peter was dependent upon special events to inspire his paintings.  Roger had to shut his mind to all kinds of things, waking nightmares, which were forever getting in the way of what he wanted to do.  Richard had always known that Virginia would need his care, that Iris would hate him, as no-one ever had, and a boy like Dickon would change his life.  He did not know when these things would be, or why, but much of his life seemed to be spent in limbo, waiting for them to happen.  Martin repressed most of his memories of personal happiness, as they got in the way of remembering facts and figures, but he knew that they all shared that comfortable feeling, that they had always been there.  It was a security he would not allow himself.  Happiness seemed to prevent novelty and contradict personal achievement.

John conducted a series of experiments to see if such thoughts could be controlled.  Deirdre had been one of his volunteers.  She seemed able to implant both experiences and the forgetting of experiences, into the minds of others.  He had to give up the experiments, because he decided she might have implanted that idea into his own head.

 

Martin Goes Japanese – Forest Time 9

The ideal of the Samurai is a perfect realisation of Plato’s “Republic”.  The warrior class must be in control, as they are the scientists, the philosophers, the few brilliant men who know.  Like the Foresters they are kept together by complex rituals and structures, which seem archaic and even comic to outsiders.

James completely misunderstood my thesis on “Work”.  He had been brainwashed by Marx’s nonsense about the superiority of the working class and Tolstoy’s obsession with self-realisation through hard labour.  When I wrote about these things, I wanted to show the place of the controlling class, as weavers of myths.  I showed how people laboured long hours at mindless repetitive tasks, like slaves, because they feel it proves their membership of the working class.  As long as they grow poorer, year by year, they will not rebel, because they believe the myth that their toil gives them dignity.  Likewise the middle class, people with amazing skills, like Jack and Bridget, really accept that their control of the workers is a skill, which enables them to become their true selves.

When I set up my antiques restoration business, I was not attempting to discover some hidden, hand-eye coordination, required for complex marquetry.  If I had wanted to be a craftsman, I would have taken an apprenticeship, before I was fifteen.  I laugh at such ambition.  I needed to see the world from the peasant/ slave perspective, so that I could practice marketing techniques.  Marketing is part of the Samurai’s responsibility to create myths, which will direct and control the lower orders.

James has learnt skills in legal and financial dealings, which guarantee his place in the comfortable bourgeoisie, free from the major decisions of life and death, free from the responsibility of choosing the least harmful of several dreadful futures.  (Those decisions will always be left to the Samurai.)  Yet he is not satisfied.  Like Tolstoy, he yearns for skills in carpentry and horticulture: hard-wired skills, which he is too old to learn. Worse, he has the audacity to project his desires on to me.  As if I could ever be a slave.

He is a dreamer.  He would be better off with another dreamer, like Janet.  And Jane would be happier with a real craftsman, like Ken, or even just a strong man like Roger.  But that would be terrible, as she might suck them down from their status as Foresters.  Ken could make clocks, as his grandfather did, but instead he maps the source of mineral resources, through his analysis of pollen grains.  He flies the world and determines the lives and prosperity of millions.  Roger appears to be skilled butcher – just another craftsman – but in fact he practices the ancient skills of the Samurai, able without flinching, to decide who will live and who will die.

Odessa has the stench of Marxism in every pore.  Capitalists make the mistake of assuming that she is an economic migrant, rejecting the totalitarian communist regime of her home country and seeking out the opportunities of London’s free market.  But her dialectic is deeply structured into her thinking.  She attacks the mental health system because it is “patriarchal, Anglo-centric, hierarchical and oppressive”.  In other words, she fails to accept that women are the weaker sex, that the stiff upper lip gets English people through traumatic events, and that people are happier when they know their place; when they know the samurai are in control.  Like all revolutionaries, she claims to be fighting for the oppressed, in order to take power from the learned and experienced psychiatrists.  Her attacks on the drug companies are the normal jealous rages of poor people against those who have worked hard to develop a vital industry.

I look at Virginia and see how the drugs companies have saved her from suicidal depression; how the psychiatrists have maintained her life long after her brain ceased to be useful to herself or anyone else.  When I think of how she ruined Iris’s childhood, and constantly interfered in our marriage, I know that psychiatrists should be given more power to hospitalise and treat people like her.  Revolutionaries like Odessa get in the way of scientific progress.  They encourage people like Virginia to see themselves as exploited, when in fact medication is their only hope.

Iris has been transformed since her meeting with her dad.  At last she has distanced herself from her mother.  She has ceased to fear inheriting the nutter genes, because her dad is a sane as I am.  She is still at the stage of trying to prove herself to him, and trying to prove that she is cleverer than me, but then she missed out on adolescence.  The China obsession will pass.  She will come round to see the superiority of Japanese culture, and we will go there together, with the girls.  We are a family and a family needs a man at the helm.

Last week I was called out to section George under the 2007 mental health act.  I saw Susan’s report, but decided that this was definitely a case for diversion, from the penal system, to care in a secure psychiatric environment.  George is an injured Samurai.  Just because he has fought his battles with a pen, does not reduce his heroism.  His psychotic episode will pass in a secure environment.  Then he can return to Susan, who will help him to face his past.  Iris thinks I have done this from jealousy or vengeance.  Why does she not accept that I am a man of honour, acting in the best interest of the client?

Manic Moments

Manic moments are those periods of time when we operate in a higher gear, as if the fast forward button had been pressed.  Virginia could spend months in torpor, moving from room to room like a snail, collecting things for no purpose other than to show that she had done something.  Then suddenly she would rush around the house, putting everything tidy, cleaning and polishing from dawn till dusk, collapsing from exhaustion, but rising again after a few hours sleep, to cook a meal for six, arrange her financial matters, organise for decorators or other house repairs, budget, shop and plan, as if she was an ordinary person.  It was in moments like these that she had produced the charcoal drawings: semi abstract figurative and symbolic sketches, much valued by collectors.  Hundreds produced in a matter of days.  At another time it was pictures of Scottish Lochs, using the then new felt tip pens on shiny paper: some are still held in the vaults of art galleries.

Tom’s manic moments came when he met someone new, who seemed unlike anyone he had ever met before.  Manipulation and charm moved into overdrive.  Tom learnt new skills, changed his voice, his look, his whole way of being, until he had seduced the new person into his bed or at least into intimate sharing.  When he succeeded he lost interest, turned to drink, loafed about and often became abusive towards the not so new person.

Susan called it a “Kangaroo court”.  Ken had made allegations about her counselling sessions with Sammy.  He implied that the whole incest thing was Susan’s invention.

The complaint was investigated by Stephen, and she was represented at the disciplinary hearing by David.  Susan was used to listening intently to clients; to regularly slowing them down; providing the calm atmosphere in which they could face up to the manic moments in their lives.  But this meeting was different.  She was not here to listen, guide and support.  She had to allow herself to be manic, to behave as so many of her clients did, to prove to David that the investigation had put her through unacceptable levels of stress, that she felt targeted because of her frequent support of African and Asian cultural needs. 

Susan is not a naturally calm person, so, when the meeting arrived, she found no difficulty in acting distressed.  She had not slept properly for a week, she had spent hours going over all her notes of contact with Sammy and Ken; repeating the tiniest detail over and over again.    Stephen found her high speed talking aggressive; her reference to minor details, obsessive; and her repeated insistence that Sammy had come to her to discuss her incest with Ken, irrational.  It was only David’s interventions which prevented Stephen from having Susan sectioned.  A man like Stephen, who always operates at a regular pace, could not accept the benefits of rapid thought.  David resolved the issue by explaining that Ken and Sammy were able to live calm, orderly lives because their relationship was manic.  The accusation was part of that mania and David predicted it would be retracted within a week, which it was.

Susan had seen Iris behave in exactly the same way, when she was threatened with prison because of her youngest daughter’s refusal to attend school.  The ultra cool Iris, who can rustle up a complex Sunday lunch for twenty unexpected guests, whilst engaging them in discussion on the iambic irregularities in Milton; suddenly floundering, falling over her words, in order to persuade the Magistrates that she is a fit mother.

Driven by the possibility of a prison sentence.  Unable to tell them about Martin and Virginia.  Trying to reduce reality to a few trite statements of explanation, remorse and good intentions, which she knew were all the Magistrates would be able to comprehend.

Jack required heroin to smooth over his normally manic behaviour, but withdrawal made him extra manic, and then he sought out uppers to raise him even higher.  It was in such a state that he had got caught up with a group of Muslim extremists, been mistaken for one of them, and led half of them over some dangerous roofs to escape a police raid.  It was such an outrageous tale that even people who knew him well could not believe it .  Perhaps that is why he was so willing to believe Deirdre, when she told him that she was not alcoholic: “I only use alcohol to give myself permission to be irrational, disordered and wretched.”  Everyone else regarded Deirdre as the paragon of efficiency, structuring everyday into a series of instrumental preparations for practical and necessary tasks.  They had never seen her drunk, swirling like a Dervish, brandishing an antique sword, stark naked.  But then they had not broken into her flat at 2am.

George was not taking any medication when he entered Wilberforce’s house and found the furniture had gone.  No, Jack had not stolen it.  It had been returned to the museum that really owned it, after half a century.  The staff had calmly loaded up George’s intimate connection to the great abolitionist, and left the building bereft, empty of purpose.  George harangued the museum staff about the slave trade and modern migration, only to find he was talking to Wilberforce in person.  They walked out together and down the High Street, still arguing, past the Black Boy pub.  Suddenly a press gang emerged from a side street and bundled George away, or so he believed until he awoke in the acute psychiatric ward.

When James visited him, the mania was medicated, but he was able to recall his argument with Wilberforce, albeit without the passion and conviction.  He had been blaming James for opening the door to migration, because James had been on TV criticising xenophobia, Powellism and intellectual fascists.  George had in fact told the security guard (who did look a bit like Wilberforce), that religious extremism was only a form of mania: often effecting good, but always regarded as madness when it attempted to do harm. “It is not religion but the sudden loss of the familiar which causes conflict”.  James understood this as a reference to the loss of the Wilberforce furniture, but also to the loss of cultural icons in a period of diversitycation.

Collette’s mania did have good results.  She told the Indians near the coast to move inland, 24hours before the tsunami hit.  The Christian converts obeyed her, and others followed to mock.  John says she merely observed the animals moving in land and followed their lead.  He accepts that she is not aware of this inward reasoning, and wishes to direct attention away from herself and towards the divine.  His fallback position is that Collette shares the instinctual response to geological forces possessed by many non-human species.   For Collette the manic moment “peak experience” comes with the certainty that you must say something, which appears crazy.  Later, when the “crazy” thing turns out to be true, the prophet can feel quite lethargic.

The Animal Moment

David’s ideas fly.   They take off heavily, so that anyone listening might think they were about to crash land.  But, once airborne, the speed deceived the eye, and the direction unerring; just like the diptera he studied who could hardly raise their bodies off the ground, but showed amazing speed in taking the most direct route to a piece of meat.  For David, Entomologists were the best observers.  What other scientists are able to mutilate the bodies of those they study, in order to prove hypotheses?  The pursuit of knowledge could justify so much.  Thus David defended zoos but rejected circuses.  There was nothing entertaining about animal suffering.

John said: “surely you get the same pleasure from knowledge, even when it is derived from animal cruelty; as a lesser person derives directly from a circus act.”

That hit David’s idea like a fly swot, and it fell to the ground.

Despite the prophetic knowledge, which Collette had derived from her empathy with the animals, she continued to eat meat.  She did this because the Indians, who hardly ever ate meat themselves, because of its cost, fed it to her, and would have felt hurt had she refused.  So she ate it, as a New Guinea Highlander ate their deceased relations, with love and respect, hoping to absorb the noble characteristics exhibited by the individual when they were alive.  For a moment she felt she was the cockerel strutting beside the hut, or the pig rooting about in the field.  Moments that made her passionately opposed to the export of factory farms to India.  Such places might have made meat more affordable for the local people, but they would have absorbed the misery and hopelessness of those they ate.

John laughed at this idea.  “There is no scientific basis for relating what you eat to who you become.  Everything is broken down into chemicals which are then reassembled to replenish the cells in your body, under the direction of your DNA.”  Nevertheless, he saw the power of the native Americans who had a sort of empathy with their chosen animal.  They did not upset the delicate ecology, like the new white settlers.  His animal moment came when he read about the extinction of a species.

Jack would not have laughed at her.  For him, flesh is vital and sensual.  He believed it fuelled his sex drive.  It was all tied in with heroin and self-mutilation.  Injecting, “shooting up”, was like killing the buffalo; cutting himself was like cutting the throat of the injured beast.  His habits were like rituals, preparing to eat the totem food.  He respected the animals he ate, and longed to be bound with them, as hunter and hunted.  But mostly he had to eat ready meals, with very low meat content.

Roger could have helped, as the local butcher, but to do the work, he had to hate the animals.  He hated them so much that he ceased eating meat; for fear that they might pollute his body.  He loved holding the power of life and death.  It proved for him the superiority of humans over animals.  His animal moments came whenever he rejected some aspect of himself, which he felt reduced him to the level of an animal.

Dickon’s kidnappers had an animal moment whenever he looked at them.  Not sad, or desperate, but with an awful, unbearable trust. This was his response to all creatures.  And the creatures felt that he recognised them as more godlike and noble than himself.

They kept the blindfold on him, when they were in the room, but still they felt his eyes upon them, eating into their hatred, shaking their obedience to their orders.

Stephen would have been unaffected.  He never had pets as a child.  He was unable to relate to them.  “They do not cry out in pain, but make a rasping noise like a failing machine”.  Like many oriental visitors, he found emotional involvement with pets inexplicable.  He did not care where his food came from.  He would never have gone out of his way to hurt an animal, nor to prevent its suffering.  They were for him like complex machines: useful, but uninteresting.  Life only became interesting at the stellar or atomic scales.

Martin pretended to be solemnly doing his duty, arranging the police raid for 6am, and physically dragging the children weeping from their parents, but in fact, he thoroughly enjoyed the moment.  It was worth all the extra work, worth the risk that he would be proven wrong, get pilloried by the press, and even lose his job.  For this was a moment of total power: revenge against the whole “snotty” family for not showing him respect.  This was bite-back time and it brought out the carnivore in him.

No-one was surprised that Susan was a cat lover.  She was always so relaxed.  She would push her head, or at least her ideas, into your chest, demanding attention.  She would follow your every word, secretly, so that you were unaware of her presence until she pounced, shocking you out of your old life.  She was a very effective therapist.  But Bridget lived such a busy life, there seemed no time for cats, no time for all that lazing about in front of the fire.  Bridget loved her cats because they were independent: they loved food and nights out, and because she dreamt of sex and kittens and staying in bed till mid-day.  The cats reminded her of that other life she was going to have when she “settled down”.

Jane loved her birds.  She spent more on them than Richard spent on his horses.  The birds were wild and free.   They could fly where they wanted, so she delighted in keeping them in her garden for as much time as possible.  Inevitably she desired most the birds she could not feed.  The barn owls, whose ghostly soundless flight, sent shivers down her spine.  The swallows: who came so far to share her shed, who, like summer, always went away too soon, who kept the mosquitoes off her skin, who needed nothing from her.  She hated what cats did to birds.  They were like the teachers and managers, who had pulled her down from flights of hope, torn her wings, forcing her to accept a life of drudgery.  She longed to be a little bird, quick and sharp, taking every opportunity, fragile, beautiful, admired.  But only James had seen her fly.

Richard’s horses were for the children.  His real love was his dog, an old Alsatian he had rescued from some travellers: bedraggled, malnourished, and maltreated.  She took the place of wife and children, was always at his side, never demanding, always waiting orders, ready to die in his defence.  They were not unsociable, but they liked best to be alone together and they were miserable when apart.

Forest Time 10 Richard Brings Peace to Others

I am touched that Bridget cares what I think about her relationship with James.

This has enabled me to bring James and Jane back together.  I think a lot of Jane’s anxiety came from her fear that James was unfaithful.  Once he realised this he was able to reassure her.  All he ever wanted was to make Jane happy, but the anxiety pushed him away, making the Bridget thing possible.  The more he moves back to Jane, the more her anxiety diminishes, the more he moves back.

It has been the same in my relationship with Iris.  I took on the step-father role, whilst Tom was absent.  But now she has seen her real father, Iris no longer needs a surrogate, and can return to Martin, whose obsessions drove her away originally.  This will re-establish harmony amongst the Foresters.  It was watching Iris emerge into puberty that made me dissatisfied with Virginia.  Deirdre was a compromise: twenty years younger rather than forty.  It was doomed from the start.  But it was only when Deirdre left that I realised I had been in love with Iris.

Thus letting go of Iris has made it possible to take Virginia back, now that we are both past having a sexual relationship.  Virginia has become very strange.  Her hunger for collecting junk has escalated, and she is quite unable to organise her life, but that gives me plenty to do, and I owe her for the time when she looked after me and the three children.  She has become totally paranoid about Martin which in turn makes Iris depend more heavily upon him.  But she hates being dependent, thus the China versus Japan debate, to show that she retains some independence.  Like the countries, they have established economic and military peace, but have to keep ideology and culture out of their conversations.

It is the same with David and Janet.  He is twenty five years older than her, and takes control of the finances, as she would simply give everything away.  He also controls who meets whom, like a puppeteer, whereas she is wholly spontaneous, and would follow the spirit to meet the most impossible people.  Their relationship works as long as they don’t discuss theology.  As long as he maintains the illusion, that she is free to follow Christ wherever He leads; Janet allows David to do the real leading.

I encourage Janet in this delusion, and she encourages me in mine.  For I can see that Ken and Sammy are blissfully happy together; and Dickon is an amazing grandson, and I love having them living with me.  But I know there is gossip in the local community, and I shut my eyes to the problem.

I suppose that is why I am so pleased to have brought Isobel back to Roger.  He is coming to terms with not being the person he wanted/ expected to be; and he no longer despises her for liking the man he really is.

When two people are unwilling to say what they really think about each other, the relationship ceases to develop.  It looses the essential vivacity that brought the people together in the first place.  Thus Iris sought fulfilment outside her marriage, when life with Martin became routine, dull, boring.  Each was afraid of saying anything for fear of upsetting the other.  They found themselves talking about safe subjects like the weather.

By arranging the meeting with her father, David probably hoped that she would recognise the hereditary tendency to promiscuity, and realise that she could resist it and save her marriage.  This was a very dangerous intervention in the lives of others, but it is useless to remonstrate with David.  Iris might have become frozen, unable to act, as many people are when faced with a huge choice.  She might have gone back to Martin and confessed everything, delivering him a powerful weapon to use against her whenever he wished.  And if he had used it against her, she would probably have left him.

Fortunately, she decided to throw all her energy into her Chinese studies, and encourage him to do the same with the Japanese.  Thus healthy competition gave a new shape to their relationship, and enabled them to cope with the difficult period when their daughters were moving away to independent living.  My involvement was peripheral.  As the “step-father” I simply talked to her about the superiority of Tang poetry, Confucius, early Chinese engineering and science; over equivalents amongst the Japanese.  She worked these comments up into fully fledged arguments against Martin, who found himself arguing the opposite point of view.  They had some great rows, which they found enjoyable, and ended up making love again.

In contrast, Deirdre and Peter were afflicted by too much communication.  They discussed everything: the news, politics, sixteenth century poetry, abstract art, church architecture, vegetable growing, and people they knew.  They had a huge range of similar interests and opinions.  They listened carefully to each other, never tried to score points, or prove the other wrong, for conversation was itself an art, and the beauty of its flow was like gazing at a Leonardo.  But, in the end, Deirdre was defeated, because Peter always sought compromise.   He wanted to be seen as a reasonable person, expressing himself under difficult circumstances.  He could not make a decision unless everyone else was in agreement.

Again David intervened, introducing her to the vicar.  He was actually much woollier in his thinking than Peter, so that he had very indefinite opinions, and was a “good listener” rather than a good conversationalist; but he was committed to his Church and to God, and would certainly have burnt at the stake for his religion in an earlier age.  Peter loved the “bells and smells”, the art, music and grand ideas of the Church: he had faith in its beauty and goodness, rather than the truth of its theology.  Their separation could have devastated him, but I gave them the myth, that it was his infidelity which caused the rift.  This enabled them both to accept the separation.  Peter did not so much lose a lover as gain a friend, and he began to enjoy conversation with the less able vicar more than he had done with Deirdre.

Susan of course is just as bad at creating conflict, when she is dredging up memories from her clients’ past, or encouraging them to take control of their own lives through cognitive behavioural techniques.  Her son, Jack,  was never given the boundaries or direction that he needed as a small child.  He grew up jealous of the attention that his mother gave to her clients, especially when she left him with her sister and brother in law, during her time in the Congo.  I enabled her to see that his involvement with the drug culture, and some very unsavoury characters, his professed Satanism, and even his unpredictable bursts of violence; were all aspects of his creativity.

She has learnt to make clear that she does not regard him as a “case”, a number, to be categorised and treated.  This meant that he must not treat her as an expert, or expect her to solve his problems.  She was his mother, but he is an adult and should be as concerned to look after her as vice versa.  Thus they began to role play an adult friendship: taking an interest in each other, but only relying on the other in an emergency.  I fed him the myth of his father’s Native American origins and Jack began to read about the wisdom of those peoples.  There he found justification for his drug use, as a way to visionary dreaming, to healing, wholeness and art.  But he also made new friends and moved away from his gangland past.

I also persuaded Susan that people like Pat needed to share their deep feelings of anger, resentment, rejection and aggression, not with their therapist, but with other overweight females of a similar age.  The resulting self-help group, not only released time at a number of GPs surgeries, it also allowed friendship and forgiveness to develop.  Pat and her new friends had not realised that they were at war with those around them, but they were able to discover themselves within this supportive group.  They learnt about relationships by forming them.  There was no need for a manual of instructions.

They learnt by trying things out for themselves.  Some even lost weight.

When gossip started in the village about Ken and Sammy, “incest” was whispered, and Jack, who has experience of such things, said he foresaw bricks coming through our windows.  I took them along to a local history society meeting, and gave a talk on “Language as Communication”.  I explained that language is often a source of game playing, because it is essentially vibrations of sound reflecting our emotions.  I built up a story of who we are as a local community and why we come together.

The village is full of newcomers.  They know that Ken and I have been here for years.  By getting to know us, they could see the sense of relaxing their “incomer” ideas and get to understand the local culture.  “Never judge or compare the new culture with the one you are used to.  In a community, justice is harmony: we stop searching for opposites (like guilt and innocence), as we will only become misled by those with the best command of language.  Instead we concentrate on group responsibility (like Sammy running the local playgroup, like Ken bringing employment to the area by running his own business, like my chairing the parish council)”

From that meeting local people started to understand that they knew Sammy and Ken as part of their community, so that any labelling of them by an outsider would be seen as offensive to the whole community.  Ultimately humour prevents us from taking ourselves too seriously, from being overcome by tragedies, by reminding us of absurdities.  It is the root of heroism,

Death moment

The moment of death, is not a moment in the life of the person who has died, unless there is another form of life beyond death; but it can be a devastating moment for witnesses.  For Susan, coming from counselling to the Congo, was also the step from listening, to experiencing, trauma.

Her first death was a small boy dying of AIDS: a brave boy, covered in skin eruptions, suffering the most terrible pains, slipping in and out of consciousness, kept alive by his own will.  No treatment available, not even pain killers.

Susan remembered the myximatosis rabbit, eyes swollen, blind, hideous; the same pain and inability to move.  James had hit it, very hard with the flat of the spade: “put it out of its misery”.  She hated seeing it, but was relieved it was done.  She knew she could not do such a thing herself

Susan was horrified by this boy’s suffering, oppressed by her own sense of powerlessness.  She only wished for the suffering to end.  He seemed content to hold her hand, and smiled when she squeezed it gently.  Then it was over.  The hand was limp.   The body had no life.

The horror of it gave her a hunger for life.  She tried to eat huge meals, but every kind of food made her feel ill.  She wanted sex more than she had ever wanted it in her life.  She went with a local doctor, to his room.  She didn’t care if he had AIDS, she didn’t care if he didn’t use a condom, she didn’t want to consider risk, she just wanted the moment of life.  But when he held her hand, she was filled with revulsion.  She pulled on her clothes and fled from the room.  For months she could not even masturbate, yet the desire engaged most of her waking moments.

She remembered how James had killed four rabbits the next day, and ten the day after, and so the epidemic went on, although she kept out of the way.  Somehow she could cope with the mass of deaths more easily than with that first experience.  And the next Spring, the fields seemed as full of frisky young bunnies as ever.  So she continued to work at the hospital, with the living suffering children, and she continued to put dead children into body bags and take them to the incinerator; but she tried to avoid the moment of death.

Until the war casualties started to arrive.  That was supposed to be her real work, providing therapy for those traumatised by their experiences.  Limbless warriors, those who had witnessed the death or torture of loved ones: terror, horror, despair.  All that, she could handle.  She became deeply involved with the lives of some individuals who had severe internal injuries.  They were dying, and she had to see them through it.  She had time to know them as people.

David had worked with cows.  One day his favourite cow, apparently healthy and well fed, always responsive to human contact, had collapsed in the field.  There was nothing to be done.  She could not get up.  She was not in pain, she could eat and drink, if it was brought to her, but she could not live the life of a cow; so slowly she would grow weak and die.  David could not see her suffer so he had her shot.  He could not do it himself, but he had to be there.  He said it was one of the worst days of his life.  Yet it was only a moment.  The horror was his certainty of the pain she felt from the shot; and the obvious joy she had shown in sunshine, eating and being.  Her early death was for his benefit, not hers, because he could not contemplate a drawn out death.  He chose one moment of supreme horror over thousands of less painful moments, and thus deprived her of time.  He never dared to work with cows again.

Susan obtained opiates for her dying patients, so that they did not suffer, although they could not live a human life.  She restricted the opiates, so that they lived as long as possible, knowing the end was inevitable, knowing that their continued life restricted the care given to others, who had a chance of recovery.  As soon as she had watched one die, she felt empowered to give that energy to the others.  She ate little, lived like a nun, but never dared to give up the work.

When she was young, Pat had worked in animal testing labs: swinging mice by their tails to dash their brains out, then dissecting their internal organs, to make microscope slides for the scientists.

The first time had been painful to her, but regular repetition enabled her to gain detachment.  She discovered her gift for living outside of her body.

Susan, in contrast, never became used to death.  Every time, it was a shock: the total otherness, unimportance of a body, once life had gone.  She came to value every living thing, no matter how ugly, deformed, abusive  or dull, no matter how terrible their past actions, their present screams, their anguished demands for death.  They were alive and that was all that mattered.

The moment of death was like the moment you finish a novel.  You want more, but there is nothing left.  You go back in your mind over what happened, but there is no life in it anymore, because you know the ending.  The only thing to do, is to start another book, to lose yourself in another story.

Her dedication led people to regard her as some kind of saint.  Colleagues worried that she would collapse with exhaustion or unexpressed grief.  But she remained strong.  She drew disciples to her.  Generals and politicians began to seek her support, until the government came to regard her as a threat, and had her deported.

First Contact Moment

Every moment only happens once; but the first time two people come together intimately, happens once only.  James and Bridget were an unlikely couple.  He was a reliable married man: reliable as a faithful husband and relied upon by Bridget as a friend.  She was a woman terrified of her own sensuality, who kept her life on line, by keeping her feelings disconnected.  She did not drink, because of the tranquilisers, because drink brought her feelings on screen.  But she felt safe drinking with James, alone in her flat, and as she drank, she felt safe letting him touch her.  She wanted him to make her safe, and he could only do that by kissing her

But James had been married a long time.  He was not used to this level of sensuality.

He was as excited as a teenager, and ejaculated before intercourse could begin.  This brought him back to his reliability, and he felt they had had a narrow escape from starting an affair which could have made three people very unhappy.  But Bridget was left with a sense of unfinished business.  She became obsessed by James.  She did not want to repeat the “disaster” as she called it, but she desired his body, even when sober, even when engaging furiously with the computer.  There was no way to shut out the might have been, no way to disconnect her feelings.

David had helped Janet overcome her addiction.  It was important for both of them that there should be no suggestion of anything more.  He was a disciple of Jesus: she was a sinner ripe for repentance.  But as the sinner grew daily in faith, the disciple slipped into routine and ritual.  They married to save his diminishing faith.  Sex was not on the agenda, but they wanted children.  David had never experienced anything like it.  They made love for hours, until every nerve, in every part of his body was activated, tingling.  Until Janet was sure she was pregnant.  She left him gasping for more, desiring her every moment of every day, but she never repeated the invitation.  Their second child was conceived against Janet’s wishes; and the only nerves tingling were in David’s memory.  After that they slept in separate beds, as she saved herself for Jesus’ work.

Sammy and Ken were, from their earliest memories, the most important people in each other’s lives.  They were both very young and ignorant about sex: the physical pain was as unexpected as the physical pleasure.  But above both was the delight in the forbidden, and that remained with them, tying them ever closer together.

Deirdre and George had been a similar age to Sammy and Ken, but theirs had been a high school romance: kissing in empty classrooms, or at the end of dancing lessons or round the back of the youth club.  Nothing forbidden, but nothing more than kissing was expected.  They both felt too young.  George often ended the evening with wet pants, and occasionally Deirdre got damp as well.  They both delighted in their desire, but desired that it went no further, at least until Deirdre went off with Roger.  After that George was to spend a lifetime trying to recreate that moment when he made love to Deirdre, the moment that never happened.

With Roger, she was never able to get enough.  He drove her wild, climax after climax, each bigger than the last, until he fell asleep; leaving her full of lust and later, hate.

With Richard, sex began in hotel bedrooms, exotic and secret, her revenge on Roger.  But then she was pregnant and married Richard, reality was too harsh: the children, the horses.  The loss of the secret left only a rather routine and mundane sex life.  So she moved on to Peter, who was more sophisticated and intellectual.  They dissected poetry, whilst making love, which deflected her critical faculties away from the physical act.  It was reliable intercourse: always pleasurable, never passionate, and never traumatic.  Peter was as an expert in the art of making love, as he was in all the Arts.  They enjoyed each other’s bodies and minds, without ever feeling committed to a life together, or any responsibility for the other’s needs.

Roger and Iris made passionate and traumatic love to each other for several years.  His jealous rages and violence, fuelled the intensity of his sexuality, and that in turn allowed her to express her anger and depth.  It was the kind of love celebrated most in fiction, yet she wanted a child.  She came off the pill cut holes in his condoms, so that he would only ejaculate outside her.  For a year the bedroom wars continued, until one morning she enticed him into her bath.  The novelty was too much for him, so for a moment, there was no passion, no trauma, only love and conception.  But he did not want a child.

So Roger settled for Isobel, who never made him jealous, who liked to get out of the bath before he got into it; who was organised, obedient and dull.  He assumed he was always irresistible, often forcing her to have intercourse against her will, because it was the only way she seemed able to give him pleasure.  She accepted that he was a bully and he accepted when she produced two children and became wholly dependent upon him.  She expected no more from a man.  It was a bonus that other women fancied him, and that he earned good money.  A man was a means to an end, and she loved her children desperately.  The only moment in their long marriage together, was when she left him, because of his treatment of their son.

Iris settled for Martin in much the same way.  He was too intense as a father, but at least he was easily satisfied in bed.  He had never experienced passion and did not expect it.

The births of their daughters were their moments of first contact.  Connected to each other only but always via the girls.

Jack and Jeanette were both bisexual, but essentially gay.  She adored his headaches and his lack of interest in copulation.  He loved her boyish enthusiasm, as if every time was the first and only moment.  Growing old is different from growing up.  At six, you can see that you will be a different person at sixteen: you are transformed.  But at sixteen, you are sure you will be transformed again at sixty-six: but you are mistaken.  The body changes, but those fifty years make no difference to who you are.

“The moment with the photograph album”:-

Iris was showing Tom pictures from her childhood and schooldays.  Days when she had longed for a father. 

“Who is the skinny boy, with the black cat on his lap?”

“That’s Stephen.  They say he is head of Forestry now.  He was over six foot tall and built like a rugby player when I last saw him, but that was years ago.  I hear about him from the other Foresters and from David.  It was a very hot day, so he stripped off.  I keep the picture to remind me that even powerful people were fragile children once.”

“And this girl, with the long long legs (not an ounce of fat) and that crash-helmet hairdo?  Must have been about 1970?”

“That’s Pat.  You know, the woman, who mother let a room to for nothing.  They became so close, I was sure they were talking about me all the time.”

And that is when the album moment hit them both.   They were sat, side by side on the Tom’s sofa, just like an ordinary father and daughter, because at that moment they were looking at a picture of Virginia and Tom on their wedding day.  Iris was looking at the photo Tom, whom she had looked at thousands of times, and she wanted him to be sat beside her, instead of this old man, who was clearly an impostor.  Tom was looking at photo Virginia, trying to remember her, wishing that she had looked more like Iris.  “Surely he could have done better than that for his first marriage?” and all the old anger returned.

Dickon was sat on his mother’s knee, looking at Richard’s album.  Dickon was laughing at a picture of George in an impeccable pinstripe suit and tie, walking along a beach with Sammy, aged ten, who was wearing a polka dot swimsuit, and Deirdre, in a light summer dress, exposing lots of suntanned flesh.  Sammy was remembering how handsome she had thought George that day, how dignified in his suit, how surprisingly fun he had been: playing at skimming stones on the water with her, and buying her ice cream.  She still thought he looked handsome in the photo, and wondered who he was.  She had not seen Deirdre for years, did not want to, and she had only seen George that once.  Was he Deirdre’s toy boy?  She must have been thirty five and George only twenty.    She realised that she was beginning to remember the photo, rather than the day at the seaside.  If she could not remember beyond the photo, why did she see something different from Dickon?  And suddenly she was laughing at George, seeing him through her son’s eyes: a magical shared moment, as good as that moment with the ice cream aged ten.

 Jack was showing Jeanette pictures on his PC.  There was Susan with shoulder length hair, with her best friend at school, who was black.  Jeanette said: “That explains her trip to the Congo; and her hooking up with your dad, because of his Native American mother.  Even the whole therapy thing could be seen as an attempt to reconcile the dark side of her own personality.”  And again Jack had that moment, like when they first played a computer game together.  She just said everything he thought: thoughts he had never been able to share with anyone.  Then the picture of John in the snow in the green Thai shirt, and shorts and purple office shoes and red socks.  “What is he on?”.  And Jack replied: “It was the arctic for godsake.”  He had no idea why John did the things he did, or how John came to be in his mother’s photo collection.  “It’s not rational, yet he’s supposed to be this fucking world famous scientist.”  And they laughed again, setting each other off.

Collette used the John’s shorts picture as a screensaver on her PC.  She was giving a presentation in Janet’s church hall, about her orphanage school in India.  Janet’s worship group had been doing a Lent course on Marriage.  Mostly they were older couples, who had been married for more than twenty years, but there were a few younger people, including some who had not yet married.  They had been enjoying the spectacle of Collette’s Indian wedding: the saris, the anointing, the gifts, and the food.  All so exotic, and beyond their experience, as white rural people, most of whom had never been further than Europe.  Seamlessly, Collette had moved them on to the orphans.  She did not need to sell the orphans need for food and education: these people would donate generously.  She wanted her audience to feel that need for Christ.  To experience that moment when you are suddenly there: a person who knows nothing of the Bible, hearing the Goodnews for the first time.  The moment that had turned her from a believer into a missionary.  Sometimes, when she showed her pictures, she would see in another person’s eyes, that they saw what she saw.  That was a precious moment.  If only she could take a picture of that!

One picture was more popular than any of these.  It was a picture of Dickon, aged four, sat at the piano, looking as if he was about to play, huge dreamy eyes fixed on some imaginary score.  Susan used it to illustrate her lecture on child psychology, using it as a springboard for questions like: “Why do we load childhood with innocence?  Why do we segregate children from reality and attempt to halt their development?”  She would point out that Dickon had no musical talent.  “He should have been in the challenged learners’ class at school, but a devoted mother and brilliant father, enabled him to hide his peculiarities and fit in to an ordinary class.” And she would move them on to question of what is normal.

Stephen kept the photo to remind himself that telepathic communication with animals was possible: a belief he had resisted for most of his academic life.  Virginia kept the photo because it looked like the sort of boy she would have loved to have.  It hung in a large frame in her hall.  When her grand-daughter’s were small they used to make rude signs at it, when no-one was looking.  Pat stroked it every time she passed.  George and Iris disliked it.  Their dislike had made them feel they had something in common: jealousy.  That was the moment they decided on the one night stand.  Collette showed the picture to her orphans: it led to amazing conversations.  John kept the photo in his breast pocket, whenever he undertook anything dangerous.

Forest Time 11   Jeanette Disappears

Professional boundaries are essential to every kind of work.  When I was in social work I was horrified by Susan’s approach to counselling.  She always revealed far too much about herself to her clients.  She did this indiscriminately, treating them as equals, until her credibility as director of their emotional development became untenable.

It was not that she wanted to exploit them, for money or sexual gratification, or for any benefit to herself.  She is very moral, very high-minded.  She really did believe that she could have a positive impact on the deep traumas of their lives by showing them that she had come through similar experiences.  But we know from the 60s, that none of that empathic stuff is worth anything.

People can change their behaviour, by following simple rules of modification.  As long as the rewards are appropriate for the individual, the incentive for change will enable the individual to perform differently, a step at a time.  But the client must have confidence in the therapist’s powers.  So it is essential that the therapist maintains their distance, otherness, mystery.

Susan said it was a result of her Congo experience, but she wanted to tell me all about it.  I told her that was inappropriate.  I could advise her on her therapeutic role, but I could not enter into the detail of her life, or I would be behaving as her therapist.  Poor dear, she could not even understand the difference.  Of course I was tempted to assist her in developing boundaries to break her co-dependency relationship with her son, Jack, but I never overstep boundaries.

All credit to her, she did sort that one out, but it was too late.

When Jack came to live with me, I had ceased to have any role with regard to Susan’s professional development.  She thought that I was taking him in as some kind of seduction, exploiting his vulnerability, as if I were some love-sick middle-aged woman!

It was just straightforward sex.  We both had fantastic orgasms together for a few months.  It did not interrupt any of my work commitments, nor did it appear to alter Jack’s mental state.  There was no question of an emotional bond between us.  We were both extremely focused.  If her mother had had such strong boundaries in her work, she would have been a far more effective therapist.  We separated as soon as the sex became boring.  There was never any power imbalance between us.

If I were a man, I might have become a Forester.  Stephen is especially good at maintaining boundaries in his professional life. The mumbo-jumbo involved in Forester rituals is very similar to the small steps involved in most behaviour modification. 

It enables people to access feelings like belonging, corporate responsibility and truthfulness, without the messiness of human relationships.  Sadly there is also ordinary social contact, and this leads to all the messiness of misunderstanding, imagination and disappointment.  Of course, as a woman, I was always invisible in the context of the foresters, and that has been a huge advantage in avoiding messiness.

I suppose the ultimate boundary breakers are Sammy and Ken.  If they were my case, I would ensure the law was upheld and they were separated forever.  But it is not for me to interfere.  Dickon is proof, if it were needed, of why society instituted incest as a boundary.  The poor lad will never be normal.

Personally I blame David, for keeping people in touch with each other.  He is constantly interfering, increasing the complexity of relationships.  Children learn in school, that formality is the proper way to behave.  The relationship between teacher and pupil is the model from which all future relationships can be built: goal directed, driven by performance indicators, constantly assessed by the more experienced: no abuse, no emotion, no mixing of roles.  Such a necessary escape, from the claustrophobia of the family unit, where relationships are multiplex and contradictory.

At each stage of development, we learn by mistaken informal connections (what John calls “friendships” and Collette calls “spirit”).  Then we move on.  We forget our old school “playmates”, we drop our University “chums”, and we leave behind “work colleagues” as often as we gain promotion.  David tries to keep all these past errors active, thus slowing development in countless numbers of people.

Without his interference: Iris would not have slept with George, upsetting his equilibrium; nor would she have contacted her father, opening up the old wounds at a time when she should have been moving on to Japan; James would not have met Bridget.  The list is endless.  I suspect he is trying to bring Stephen and Pat together.  With what purpose?  There is no possible goal for his meddling, other than his own whim. 

The worst example is certainly Janet and John.  So, they were old school friends, so what?  They had nothing in common.  John is the most brilliant scientist of our age; Janet escaped one addiction, by becoming hooked on religion.  No personal development there, only David’s selfish manipulation.  So John reduces his genetic expertise to enter the field of behaviour modification (my professional role).  He prostitutes his findings, to suggest that addiction to religious mumbo jumbo can be beneficial to the immune system. (Whereas evolutionary psychology shows that those who follow altruism will be selected out, meaning the eventual extinction of religion.)

Thus John steps aside from his role as scientist because his old school friend Janet needs his help with her erring congregation (people like Sammy and Ken).

Well, it certainly misfired on all of them, when Dickon was abducted by those Muslim extremists.  So much for religion giving you immunity!  It put them all right in the thick of it.

The Muslims of course are upset by any suggestion that religion might be genetically determined.  Their paranoia foresees all powerful USA manipulating future genes to make Muslim belief impossible.  If only.  So they take action to nip the research in the bud.  Just like the USA trying to control nuclear development in Muslim countries.

So it is left to professionals like me to negotiate.  To save Dickon’s miserable life, allow his parents to move on (hopefully to other people) and push John back into the shadows of science where he can be productive, away from the spotlight of religion.

To achieve all this, I have to be invisible.  The Muslims accept that I am totally professional, unaffected by the fact that I know all the westerners concerned.  They have to trust that I will broker a deal that is fair to them.  I can do that, because in fact I am invisible to those westerners.  Even David is unaware of my existence.  If he could see me, he would want to make connections, to personalise contact, introduce emotion, empathy and deep thoughts.  Any of these would destroy my negotiations before they started.

Fortunately, Iris (another of David’s “interventions”) has got involved at a Faslane protest.  She was actually locked together with a group of Muslims, blocking the front gate.  So the media have focused on Martin and the Foresters are under investigation by the not so secret services (the Daily Mail appears to have a mole!)  Result: the world has forgotten about Dickon, and I have been able to get on with my work invisibly.  This is the value of maintaining professional boundaries.

The only difficulty has been Odessa.  She does not see me of course, but somehow she appears to hear me, as if my negotiations played some kind of tune.  I have been monitoring her communications for sometime, because of her past revolutionary connections and her interference in the behaviour modification of those with cognitive problems.  She has sent out a number of musical scores, always coinciding with one of my negotiation session with the Muslims.  The tunes relate to the traditional music of the Middle East, rather than Odessa’s own cultural heritage.  Fortunately they seem to be done without her conscious awareness.  Besides, my negotiations are complete, Dickon is released, John’s experiments with Janet’s church have ceased, and no-one outside the circle is aware of my involvement; so I can shred these notes.   

Moment of Ambition

Of course Stephen rejects the whole idea of moments: “Moments are merely stages in an experiment.  They are nothing in themselves.  The results are all important.  It is useless to have ambition, unless you investigate, design, and repeat tests.  An unfulfilled ambition is a day dream.  It annoys me to see people comfortable when they should be uncomfortable.”

Collette found that ideas of rebirth in India were used as an excuse for inaction.  It is the same amongst Christians, who take predestination as an argument for idleness.  She tried to inject a moment of ambition into their lives.  “If you are to be reborn, surely you want the new life to be better than the present?”  And so she got on to the experience of being born again through the Spirit of Christ.

As soon as life became routine, Tom felt he might as well be dead, so he shook life by the tail and forced it to give him what he wanted.  As soon as he had the new wife, job, car… he became weary of his puny exploits and longed for the routines he had left behind.  Increasingly his moment of ambition was to return to Virginia, his first wife, and just be “nice”.  He dreamt about it.

Virginia thought that awareness of her own death would give her more understanding of others.  It was all she had ever wanted.  That is why she had done care work with children and the elderly.  That is why she had married Tom and lived with Richard and had Pat as her non-paying guest.  She was not a lonely person.  She could have spent life contentedly alone on an island.  But she desperately needed to understand why the people she cared for simply exploited her.  They took everything and left her with a small pension and old age.  No-one ever seemed grateful, as she would have been.  The deaths of the old people were nothing like her own death.  They all seemed in possession of some secret knowledge: facing death with terror or radiant happiness.  Where did they obtain such certainty?  Virginia felt nothing.  Death would simply be another needy person, exhausting her with their constant demands, leaving her too drained to care what happened next.

Iris found the insistence on rational self-interest, in modern society, absurd.  She had got everything she wanted by passionate intensity.  How then could she teach the young reprobate in her care that thinking through their plans and assessing goals, as if filling in profit and loss in an accountant’s ledger, would enable them to climb out of the underclass?  No, she started with myths and legends, taken from the films and computer games, which filled their lives.  The system could not exploit them if they appeared useless and if they became adults unnoticed by the system, there was a chance they might discover their unique gifts.  Her faith that each delinquent has a unique gift was the myth that led her to a special school headship before she was 30.

Through dance, Jack claimed the full range of human experience, open to all possibilities.  He expressed lust, confusion, anger, pain and no-one considered him mad, no-one attempted to restrain him.  He felt fulfilled, appreciated, complete.  If he fell over he laughed.  If he twisted his ankle, again, he cried.  But he blamed no-one, nor did he feel the need of more drink or drugs.

Jack was the result of Susan’s moment of ambition.  She had wanted a child without a man, so she had chosen a man who was brilliant and wealthy, and too busy to want to be involved.  Of course she regretted that she had not got to know him better.  Jack had inherited his intelligence and his ability to come by money easily, but perhaps his addictions and strangeness was also inherited from his father.  Or was it just his lack of a father.  Her career success and effectiveness in Africa were not the result of ambition, although they added to Jack’s neglect.

The Moment of Atheism

Jack had not been abused by a priest, or anyone else.  His Satanism had nothing to do with religion.  It was part of his musical taste.  He had had a loving mother and a father till he was twelve.  His bisexuality had been “discovered” when he first started taking drugs.  It did not indicate a lack of childhood care.  Jack was brilliant and engaged at school, but he tried heroin once and was hooked for twenty years.  His atheism was not a reaction against Christianity, but a lack of any spiritual experience of any kind.

Jeanette had never seen anything more exciting than Jack on his computer game: total commitment.  She had to defeat him, bring him down, her five foot two against his six foot three.  It was a cruel sight.  His thrill, exulting in life, was blown away, just another pheasant for the pot.  It was the same when she saw him dancing, so vibrant, like an animal, but she drew all eyes away from him.  It was essential that he should be deflated, when they started to make love.  There like everywhere, she had to be in control.  Thus she had an experiential knowledge of atheism.  She had an everlasting reliance on herself, confirmed by reliance that others placed upon her.  Jack’s Satanism was a poor substitute for this real disbelief.

Janet could not understand how she could have experienced resurrection: the total transformation of her life and her personality; and yet, still be assailed by doubts.  When she worked with John, God was never mentioned.  His experiments were like crossword puzzles, or complex sums.  They were both so fully absorbed that when David interrupted them she was not just annoyed; she also felt guilty, as if her husband had found her in bed with a lover.  How could anything which excluded God feel so good?  David was no help; he seemed mortified by his own existence.  He believed that relationships were everything: the people themselves were merely the sum of their relationships.  How could she form a relationship with God, if she had no independent existence?  She knew that God had so much to give her, but where could she keep such gifts?

For Odessa, atheism was an assumption from her childhood.  It was only when she found people in London incarcerated for their religious beliefs, that she recognised them as fellow dissidents, persecuted by a totalitarian system.  She thought the churches would be her natural allies, but most of them accepted the state’s diagnosis that these religious ranters were mentally ill.  In a flash, Odessa realised it was not belief in supernatural powers that she rejected; but belief in supernormal institutions.  Her hatred of psychiatry extended to include other bodies of organised misinformation, which attempted to crush the spirit of indomitable love.   She resolved to sweep everything institutional out of her life.

Martin had also been imbued with atheism since childhood.  He was a Forester because he held that science was held back by religion.  He saved up a thousand anecdotes to prove his closeness to Iris throughout their lives together.  Their lack of sexual activity must not be allowed to suggest to the world that their marriage lacked fulfilment; for Martin believed they shared a sense of isolation.  Each trapped within the body and mind, unable to imagine what it might be like to be someone else, yet sharing that impossibility of sharing.  Of course that was absurd.  Iris had perfect empathy.

Martin’s anecdotes each illustrated his own solipsism.  A belief that goes further than atheism: for in solipsism there is only one god, and it is the self.  Thus when Martin describes Iris swimming off the coast of Scotland, he says he fled the jellyfish and shivered uncontrollably on the shore.  He could not understand how Iris knew to massage him, to bring back his circulation; nor did he think to do the same for her when she came out of the sea.  It delighted him to think that she included this incident in one of her novels, but never occurred to him that she put it in to massage his ego, which was as cold as his sea-frozen body had been.

Iris reflected on the pitifully short time she had lived with her parents.  She had been unable to see her mother without rowing with her.  Her father was absent.  So there was no father-figure on which to model a god.  She had faith in herself and in her daughters, determined that they would have a different family experience, and that included some token church going.  Martin was her spoilt little boy: never any danger of making him a patriarchal figure.  She could never dare to push them away as she felt pushed away by her own parents, and thus by god.

Stephen’s moment of atheism came when he realised that his religious father did not beat him for pleasure, like the other fathers down his street.  Stephen’s dad really hated to hurt his son, but he believed that if he failed to beat the wickedness out of Stephen, the boy would start the downward path to hell.  Science was central to Stephen’s wickedness, because science contradicted his father’s faith.

Amongst the unchurched, James felt more of an outsider than when he visited a country where he could not speak the language.  It was like a dream: the people talked, but none of it meant anything.  They had so much to tell him, but he could make nothing of it, because his head was full of God.

As a child, Jane regarded loss of faith (atheism) as a luxury for the rich.  She had perfect taste, but never the money to afford to buy things new.  Always charity shops and hand-me-downs, even her husband was second hand.  Wealth crushed and subdued her.  The lack of it outraged and enslaved her.  Because this was so unfair, Jane worshipped a Nature God: creator of birds and flowers, free to everyone, but also creator of natural disasters, which killed people regardless of their wealth.  God had to be above and separate from the world of people and money.  Even in old age, when she was moderately rich, she spent all her money on garden and wildlife, and presents for her grandchildren.  To buy the beautiful was to join the exploiters, to go to the devil.

Peter and George, in the days when they had their photos taken; a pair of men in suits, when even bankers were wearing kaftans:-

Peter: “Li Po the great drunk Tang poet, stretched out of his boat to catch the moon.”

George: “Are you saying I only reach for God when I’m drunk?”

Peter: “Li Po drowned.”

George: “So it is wrong to reach out for God, to want reasons, evidence, some physical contact?”

Peter: “That is why I am Church of England.  I make no demands on God and my church leaves me alone.”

George: “Whilst the atheist drowns?”

Peter: “Death did not wait for Li Po and Life does not wait for us to decide about God.  Rational argument is mere prevarication, missing out on living.”

Roger loved writing.  He wanted to say something deep and genuine about his loss of faith.  But his shyness, which included contempt for others, prevented him from opening his heart.  He wanted to appear inscrutable, but only succeeded in being superior or aggressive, so that people avoided talking religion and atheism in his company.  Yet it was this lack, this isolation, which gave him moments of atheism.

Deirdre told him that to have power over your own life, you must endure the death of god, the death of all those ideals you once served.  The alternative is to remain a servant, conserving your god in an empty tomb, long after reason has led you to discard all your childish beliefs.  The atheist simply replaces one set of ideals with another.  The free person must remain agnostic, refusing to serve anything beyond the moment.

The Indians never thought Collette was there for any purpose beyond helping them to survive.  They were a tolerant people, obsessed by their own way of life and took no interest in her beliefs, as long as she was not personally rude.  Their beliefs were accepted without emotion or doubt.  They were part of the language, part of their lives.  Her passion for faith was more like their experience of cinema: another world, “full of sound and fury”.  Yet she found the hot Indian countryside brought the Bible to life far more than her English city life.  She found people she met there reminded her of characters from the book.

Sammy and Ken felt condemned by the professionals.  The lawyers that might force them to live apart and Susan whose counselling seemed too prescriptive.   In contrast, Janet, aware of her own sins, refused to cast stones, so they were drawn into church, much to Richard’s amazement.  But when Dickon was kidnapped, God was not there.  They cried out to Janet: “What has a world of goats and vines and deserts got to do with us?”

Tom knew that churchgoing folk regarded him as a sinner, when they found he had had five wives, and he accepted their rejection.  He detested piety, as he believed everyone was as guilty as himself; so the churchgoers must be hypocrites.  He had enjoyed his life and had no fear of death.  God was an abstract, which had never interested him.  He simply had no faith in others.

Susan approved Tom’s theology.  Her counselling work so often concentrated on client’s need to forgive themselves.  “You must understand your place in a chain of culpability.  Blame is not the issue.  Once you see how bad things happen, you are freed up to do useful work.  Guilt blinds you.   If God the father was the source of human guilt, we are better off without him.” she told Jack.

Pat had no faith herself, but she believed in Virginia.  She did not know whether there was a God, but she knew Janet, and that was sufficient.  She always said she had no dreams, and if asked: “what are you thinking about?” replied: “nothing”.  This seemed to her to be entirely true.  All she wanted was to live quietly and be left alone.  She had been under so much pressure to commit herself to belief or unbelief.  It had been a long moment and she did not wish to endure it ever again.

John was surrounded by people on mobile phones.  He wanted to switch them all off, so that people could face the God within, to break free of the unending hypnosis of technology, which absorbed all their energy into this electronic prosthesis, this lobotomy of consciousness.  In that moment, he realised that faith in God and atheistic doubts were united in his inner world of thought perception and experience: whilst all those around him sought to escape through their busy, phone addicted avoidance of the moment.

Forest Time 12   Ken Predicts the Future from the Past

The fact, that my analysis, of pollen grain distribution, enables me to predict where oil is likely to be found, ensures that I can run an independent business financed by the oil companies.

The fact that Sammy and I have close genetic links, sharing one parent; does not make us clones.  We are closer, genetically, than most humans are to their reproductive partners: but only in the way that humans are closer to chimps than they are to gorillas.  The difference is not as great as that between humans and bears.  The genetic variation is still sufficient to guarantee normal human children.  Even if we shared both parents, we would not be clones, and even clones breed successfully; as in the wild Chillingham cattle.  No, it is the amount of time we spent together as children, which makes people think we are closer genetically than we are.  The social closeness, which together with the incest taboo, should have kept us apart, was in fact the predictor of breeding potential; in just the way that the pollen grains predict the oil.

The fact that nice spiritual young men now settle for long term partnerships is a predictor of shortage in the recruitment of Roman Catholic priests.  Those with a positive experience of family life will tend to see a worshipping community in family terms.  Those who do not succeed in partnerships are unlikely to succeed in larger communities.  I explained this to Janet, but she persists in believing that the Church must be open to all, even those who cannot cope with an intimate partnership.  David claims that social bonding can be effective in many different patterns, so that social isolates like Pat can link into a community by having a number of low impact ties to other peripheral people: that Stephen is held in the Foresters by his official position, despite his inability to form intimate relationships.

But he is misled by people like Odessa and John, who begin by caring for themselves, then care for those with whom they interact and finally work for the community as a whole.  That is the way they are made.  Pat and Stephen on the other hand begin with a focus on the outer world, which in turn makes them too afraid to form intimate relationships, too busy keeping the world at bay to care properly for themselves.  Social organisms can only vary within these given parameters, just as pollen grains are limited, just as carbon occurs proportionately throughout the Universe.  (Those who believe that carbon will be found to be less common in distant galaxies – thus making life a limited, local phenomenon – are mistaken: there is nothing random about the universe.  It is like the relationship between pollen grains and oil, like the relationship between Sammy and I: inevitable.)

Jane’s anxiety is of quite a different nature from that of Stephen and Pat.  Jane has formed reliable intimate partnerships, she has come from a supportive family, has created a supportive family.  She is a central catalyst in the building of her local community.  Her anxiety is predictive of some real disaster, as the pollen grains of the oil.  It was I who explained to Collette about the connection between sudden out of character movement of animals and oncoming disaster, which she used to such effect in India.  No, I am quite happy for her to give God the credit.  I am not a scientist who hates God.  But I would like to enable Jane to see the predictive power of her anxiety. 

If Virginia developed cancer, she would accept that her decades of mental distress had been a contributory factor.  I do not want to deny that stress free life is healthier, but we cannot be certain that worry is not a predictor, rather than a cause of disease.  Yet people are fundamentally averse to believing that they possess subconscious foreknowledge of the future. 

The subconscious is a rational as the conscious mind; and the conscious mind can predict oil from pollen grains, so the subconscious may be able to predict cancer from awareness of precancerous cells – awareness denied to the conscious mind.

All we have is subjective experience.  If my experience of love for Sammy and the perfection of our son Dickon, is denied by some theologian, lawyer, psychologist or geneticist; I will still have to choose my own experience.  My belief has changed my life, and it could be the same for Jane.  If she believed that her anxieties were in fact predicting some major disaster, rather than the petty things which she believes she is afraid of; her perspective on life would change and she would work to avert the major disaster.  Such positive work would be therapeutic.  There would be less stress; (less chance of provoking a cancer) she would be waving, not drowning.

I could not predict how Dickon would turn out, but I knew he would be extraordinary.  Of course every parent believes that, but I had the scientific evidence: the closeness of our genes and upbringing.  Not that I want to determine his future in any way, but he will go into a future that I shall never know.  His contact with animals has already developed beyond anything of which his parents were capable.

The starting point of all religion is humility.  When the Jews are carried off to Babylon or scattered by the Romans, they recognise their abandonment of God as the cause.  In our secular times, we are unable to recognise the needs of economic migrants; we allow religion to be used for inter-racial violence, thus taking another step away from humility.  Stephen is a great scientist.  He kept us ahead of the Chinese in the race for superconductivity.   He made a fortune and built himself a medieval Japanese Palace, surrounded by a thousand acres of forest, but he will not live to see it reach perfection, and he has no children, so it will become a public park, and some of the migrants who use it will be grateful; but few will remember his contribution to modern technology, or his campaign against religion.

I knew that dad would be shocked by Sammy and I coming together.  I should have known that he would play the peacemaker, between us and others.  But then we could never accept that he was really pleased with us, when we were growing up.  It is only now we are parents, proud of Dickon, that we see the challenge of Being the people we were meant to be.  It is much harder for Iris, who never knew her real father.  Her take on the Japanese is entirely her own invention, yet when you are in her house, you forget what the reality was.  She has projected back a world of Samurai swords, extinct animal skulls and dustless stone.  An heroic world without emotion, using comic strips to project her own cold childhood.

I predicted from the start that her relationship with Martin was doomed, yet doomed to produce children, and maintain the intensity of their incompatibility.  They are like oil and water, like Japan and China.   Martin plays the aristocrat to Iris’s peasant. The scientific observer must expect revolution, whilst knowing that change, though bloody, will only be temporary, for the person with practical skills will always be too busy and content, in the long term, to avoid exploitation by the arrogant confidence trickster

The Older Man Moment

In her youth, Janet had wanted to be the plaything of some mature man.  A pattern of clouds darkening the landscape, who would ease her through the pain of puberty, and induct her into the mysteries of sensuality.  She never found such a man.  That desire became intertwined with reading dirty books and sticking pins in her hands, which led so naturally to needles and cutting her arms with pottery shards.  Only when she had been married to David for ten years did she understand how depressing an older man can be: the clouds kept out the sun, till she wanted to soar above them.

When David first met Janet, he was overwhelmed by a breathtaking pity.  She saw a wheezing old man and never understood the agonising compassion which had robbed him of breath.  His need to see her transformed fuelled his thoughts, emotions and writing.  She was young enough to be his daughter, but a head taller than David.  She was large, bored, full breasted, angular; yet she walked with dignity, dressed smartly; never looked like a sack of potatoes, as so many women did.  Even when she was depressed and taking drugs, she never let herself go.

David took huge delight in watching her transform into a successful professional, who respected herself and was respected by others.   She was like cascading water, refracting light and creating electrical energy. They had two children, but physical contact was minimal (sexual contact never went beyond what was necessary to produce children).  David persuaded himself that it did not matter, but when she entered the priesthood, he felt that he had failed her.  He felt he had drawn her away from one set of obsessions, but failed to provide an alternative, so that she was now using religion to fill the gap.  She became a sponge, absorbing the tears of heaven, holding back floods, damming the flow.

Iris had played the femme fatale to many men, because she believed that was what they wanted.  She told them never to call on her again, and then phoned them to invite them round.  When the poor fellow arrived, he was treated to a display of seduction, until he tried to kiss her.  Then she slapped his face and bundled him out of the house.  The next day she insisted he have her name tattooed on his arm, and told him she was wearing black lace underwear, or nothing.  But when they found a suitable space to make love, she started an argument.

Martin would have nothing of this.  He was past all that nonsense and if she was the woman he thought she was she would talk seriously to him about art and beauty, about her life and problems, so she became a creature of soul.   He climbed her, like a vertical cliff of granite, taking the most dramatic line of ascent, never the easy way.   She never thought of him as an older man then, but she did experience for the first time the total faith that most small girls have in their fathers, and the sense of not being able to live up to his expectations.

She relaxed into motherhood and wasted years trying to drive Martin into a successful career.  In the end she gave up, and developed her own profession.  She had emptied herself so that he could become full, but the moment came when she realised her mistake.  She had spent years ironing shirts and grilling steak, and hushing children; trembling lest they disturb his rest.  It prepared her for a management career, whilst turning Martin into a lazy and conceited bear.

Martin was quite wrong about Jane.  Her first husband had been a scientist, twelve years older than herself.  He had been capable in all practical tasks around the house, a good provider and an understanding father.  He was also much better in bed than James.  But she had been very young when they married, and there had always been a generation gap between them.  Perhaps if he had not died when  she was only twenty five, the gap between them would have vanished; but, left on her own with two children to bring up; Jane had gained the self-reliance and dignity that school and marriage had denied her. 

She no longer needed support, protection, guidance; but she longed for romance, equality: someone to worship her, and a cottage with roses round the door; candlelit suppers and shared laughter; someone who appreciated her children.  James met all these requirements.  She had lived beside a reliable source of warmth.  She wanted a conflagration, so that she could again feel her feebleness in the face of elemental forces: the paroxysm of lightening opening up the blackness of her night.

Peter’s Humorous Moments

When Peter was hanging around with George – their photogenic period – he was described as “a little man in silly clothes with a chip on his shoulder about the English”.

He replied: “I came, I saw, I conquered: it’s not my fault you had to learn Latin in school: but think roads, think circuses” Julius.  “I am an inch taller than Charlie Chaplin, and this uniform is respected throughout the empire, and the chip was caused by an English bullet in 1916” Adolf.  “You English are so hung up about sex: size does not matter: as for my clothes, you are such a badly dressed nation,” Sigmund.  “The overthrow of your empire and the rise of nationalists was inevitable.  I did not even manage to keep India as a single nation.  My non-violence was my life: if others have used it with success, that is to their credit not mine.  I do not mind if you concentrate on my size or my mistakes, but I have nothing against you: let us live together in harmony.” Gandhi.

Peter hated everything banal and foolish.  He used the colours in his paintings to show the abominations of life with a gentle smile.  He described them as “sliced veggie Bacon”.

He told Iris that the Chinese had so much space; they always feel they have somewhere to go.  This makes them free of care and easy going.  It is why they love jokes.  He also said that “satire is a mirror in which no-one ever sees their own reflection.”  “David brings us all together like a family, compelled to put up with each other.  His love of people is pathological.  He is writing about us, but people won’t want to read it.  They will see its nowt but real life.”

When Stephen tried to get him to support his campaign against US fundamentalists, Peter replied: “When people least expect it, there will be a great transformation, and the fundamentalists will become obsessed with dinosaurs and Muslims will drink coca-cola and take the yellow brick road.”

When Deirdre told him he was not taking her seriously enough, he replied: “I detest jokes, because it is so hard not to laugh at them.  News is information considered suitable for publication: Art is information unsuitable for publication.”

When Roger complained about “young people” Peter said: “they prefer complex tasks, requiring 110% attention, because it prevents them thinking about anything beyond the job; leaving no time for fantasy or reality”.  He told Jack he was neither an optimist nor a pessimist, as he saw “the cup half medication”.  He told Jeanette that her political correctness was a case of “Pride and Plurality”, a case of “Diversity before a fall.”  And he admitted to Bridget that he had a “dyslexic aura”.

  

Masochist Moments

Some notes from Janet’s journal:

“The surrealist delights of toothache.  The whole of consciousness focused on a cavity within my mouth, able to detect the slightest touch of a foreign body, as when passionately kissing you are suddenly aware of the other person’s tongue investigating a particular point in your mouth.  As when an exciting, fit dentist, gently manipulates your mouth, with their head close to yours, their smell in your nostrils, the soft voice coxing your compliance, and the anaesthetic not quite fully effective.

Or the gentle bed-bath received by an accident victim, wounds fresh and painful, yet they are the source of intimate care and attention by this perfectly gorgeous person, who would not have noticed you had you passed each other in the street.”

Janet tries to record all her sins, as Augustine did.  Like him she is tempted to enjoy the wicked things she did; all over again.  But her objective is not self-flagellation, but an attempt to keep herself attuned to those whom she would serve.  Those who are afraid to give up habits that bring misery and death.  In her sins and in theirs, she sees possibilities, and promise of a worthwhile life.

“The internal pain of a broken heart, always contains that deep pleasure of knowing you have a heart to break, of knowing there was someone worthy of your admiration, devotion and longing.”

James told Janet that when he was in the Bosnian prison cell, he marked off the days on the wall.  He found more pleasure in that than in filling in a diary, because he was at peace with himself.  This made Janet think of the time when she had been in plaster.  The forced idleness allowed her to BE.  She finds that experience much harder now amongst her busy meetings.

“It is the busy people who are imprisoned by idle nonsense, whilst those who appear helpless, discover freedom.  The patient steps in the same river again and again.  The busy person fails to repeat happy experiences.  The patient learns to regard repeated experiences as happy ones.”

Janet thinks of Stephen as a heartless billionaire, watching machines tearing down Amazonian jungle, or evicting the widowed mother without a qualm, or even with a flash of pleasure at his cool headed enforcement of efficient profitability.

“Pain explained is less painful, even if you discover that your indigestion was angina.  Pain explained away is still pain, as when David has pain in his amputated toe, or when Pat’s depression was explained as lack of sunlight.

Sucking an ice-cream produces agonising neuralgia.  Orgasm brought on a heart attack for Richard.  Roger’s love of climbing mountains ended in a disastrous fall.  Love results in jealousy; hot bath in scalding; and John’s brilliant new patent was stolen.”

When Janet was taking drugs and trying to give up, she took huge pleasure in her powerful body; which could have worked at mending roads from dawn till sundown, and gone home without aches, to enjoy refreshing slumber.  But as a professional she is always embarrassed by her gangling body.

Being shy, being embarrassed by her body, and full of guilt about her past, surely it was not easy to stumble up the steps of a pulpit in a crowded church and speak of her experience to a huge number of people.  But Janet felt she was being played like an instrument.  She relaxed and allowed the spirit to speak through her.  She felt she had nothing to say, no skill with which to say it, no learning or status from which to speak, and no desire to speak.  Yet when she stood there, the words flowed.

Moment of Awakening

Tom was so positive and excited when he arrived at that interview.  But when waiting, the chair was too low and his legs were uncomfortable:-

  I should have brought a book to read. Relax: take deep breaths.  How bad can it be?  Everyone says they are horrid.  So! I can cope with that.  Just absorb it, be myself.  What am I afraid of?  They won’t give me the job.  God! They are running twenty minutes late.  What are they trying to do to me?  At last.

What a small room.  Even so they could have spread out.  All four of them so close together, round such a small table; with my chair jammed against the wall.  What is this? An interrogation!

“Hello Mr …?  Oh, yes Mr Blank.  You know Big Boss already.  I’m his deputy, Noname, and these are arselickers one and two.  They will start by pulling apart your CV, and if they fail, their jobs are on the line.  Then I will tell you why you couldn’t possibly do the job.  Big Boss will jump in, whenever he likes, with apparent irrelevancies, just to unnerve you.  We are not interested in what you say, but only in how you react under pressure”

Well if he had said that, at least I might have understood.  I only woke up to what was going on when it was over, and I had proven I could not cope under pressure.  I did not get the job, but I adopted their method, and have become famous for my interviewing ever since.

The trouble is that every candidate wants to explain away their past failings, and impress us with their plans for the new job.  Well, they had had their opportunity to do that on paper.  Interviews are there to see how people behave in a real situation.  How do they cope with rudeness (always start interview late, and start by running them down).  Do they become assertive or aggressive?  Are they insecure, defensive, blustering, fearful, manic, or easily stressed?  because all these we must cull.  (The Nazis emptied a third of all the mental hospital beds in their Euthanasia programme.)

The interviews are acting out the same play, every twenty minutes.  Each performance, slightly more polished, the satire more caustic, the rudeness more felt.  Yet to the audience of one, the four actors appear real, like a nightmare, for this is interactive drama, with full audience participation.  The stage is small but the auditorium is smaller.  The unused space behind the actors signifies the peace beyond this play.  Unobtainable, because there is no interval, no respite: only the tension of before and the depression of after.

She was the woman from my dream; not the woman of my dreams.  A thick line of makeup hides a face of unusual dullness.  I find myself staring at her.  Trying to decide if she is an old woman with a facelift, or a young one in need of one.  Trying to remember what she did in my dream.

Suddenly she turns her head from the window an looks straight through me, as if I was beneath contempt, as if I had caused her pain, as if I wasn’t there.  Eyes of shamrock green, vacant of all consciousness of my existence, yet burning with hatred.

And we enter this tunnel, and the lights go out, and I remember my dream, in which I am escaping but they are on my train.   I have a mission, but there are spies everywhere.  I have to reach the end of the line, but I know they are on this train and determined to stop me.

Now I know how the dream ends: not pleasant, not something for before the 9o’clock watershed.  So I will not slip stealthily from my seat before she attacks, for they are waiting at the end of the carriage.  Instead, I dive for her.  Left hand on her mouth, my right hand riffling her handbag, for her knife.

Then the lights come up and we leave the tunnel and I notice a dozen respectable eyes fixed on me.   Oh my God; what an idiot.  My face is flushed.  I step back in horror.  Drop the handbag.  I am sweating.  If only the floor would open and let me out.  It does, and as I fall towards the tracks, I wake up.

The City Moment

Odessa had experienced her home city as uninhabitable when order broke down: lack of food, nothing functions; disease and lack of treatment facilities; lack of escape to the countryside.  In contrast, the countryside continued to be productive, self-sufficient, and full of meaningful work.  But, without the complex interaction patterns of the city, the glorious, profound intelligence would not be possible, although this might be at the expense of the general intellect.

 “It is like the neurons of the brain: most neurons are just on/off switches, very simple and basic, but altogether they produce this extraordinary experience we call consciousness.  Just so does a city become conscious of its individual, unique identity?”

But, when she first came to England she found the city apathetic, narcissistic.  “It mistakes words for things.  It has no love for those who founded it: for Roman law, for guilds and communities, for decongestion.  It listens to voices promising Olympian success, whilst its transport system overloads towards gridlock.  It seeks solution to its problems through drugs and violent restraint.  London is afraid of it own mind.”

So she visits the countryside: no cars, no lorries, perhaps the clanking of a horse and cart, the whining of a bicycle wheel.  Even the pedestrians tread softly, as if on rice paper.  People speak in library whispers, exchanging angry glances at anyone who raises their voice.  The sensory perceptors in their brains have been turned up, so that a dropped book is a volcano, a rustling bag is thunder.  Most stay in doors.  Those who venture out to buy essential earwax, muffs and tranquilisers; stare incredulously at Odessa.

There was no room here for her strident views; just a universal absence.

Global warming threatens floods; terrorism is suspected everywhere: so that London is in perpetual anguish, full of the misery of its own mortality, hopeless, doomed.  The traffic is audible as a threatening murmur, a heavy base beat of anxiety, the throb of exigencies, like an arterial cancer.  Overpopulation, over consumption, and lack of exercise have made the city fat.  It has lost the sexy energy of the 60s and the greedy drive of the 80s.  It is sick and old, and sick of being old.

When Odessa first came to London she knew no-one and spoke hardly any English.  She was placed in a high rise block of flats, with nothing.  She gave birth amongst strangers; and lived two years with a mattress on the floor – no other furniture.  But she was ecstatic.  Here was the centre of the English speaking world:  thousands of years of history; 14million people from over a hundred cultures.  It was the centre of an empire based on freedom, an empire that was slowly overthrowing the Russian hegemony, so hated in her homeland.  Here was the conscience of the world; surely madness would be respected here?

Odessa was brilliant at forming relationships.  She imagined each person she met was a key player in the functioning of the city, a rivet holding liberty together.  Her visions of others were so flattering; people did not wish to disillusion her.  Even with a few English words she painted pictures, which others enjoyed.  They repaid her with new words, new contacts, which eventually led to work, qualifications, recognition.

The city moment hit her.  She could see nothing more interesting than human behaviour: relationships and patterns, as breathtaking as the view from a mountain peak.  They received her doctrines, because she gave them the novelty of being recognised for qualities they had never dreamt they possessed.  She spoke modestly with diffidence, without dogmatism, but visually picturing what she saw.

“Cities create philosophy, ethics, art and science.  There is no time here for idleness or village idiots.  The mad are those whose overactive genius is too far ahead of their time.  Such people could have no freedom in a conformist county community.  They would be conserved in a reservoir, a backwater.  In London they are part of the flood rushing headlong over the waterfall.”

Odessa wanted to be part of that flood, to feel its force.  If that meant danger, injury, the daily war of all against all: that was better than the claustrophobia of tradition.  She often despised the English, she laughed at revolutionaries and detested reactionaries, but she always remained loyal to London, as the centrifuge of thought.

The Trivial Moment

Fear is never trivial.  When Roger thought that he might be blown to pieces in the next few minutes, it was a realistic fear.  Most of those who were with him died.  He was much braver than most of us would be in that situation, but he would have been foolish not to be afraid.  If Pat experiences more fear on seeing a harmless spider, then Susan would argue it is because something about the spider triggers some deeper memory.

Inevitably Dickon, who would happily sit in a nest of tarantulas, laughs at Pat.

This is the trivial moment.  If it were anyone else Pat would feel distraught that her fear was not taken seriously.  But Pat knows that Dickon means no disrespect, and is grateful when he rescues the spider and thus rescues her from the spider.   With David and Janet this trivial moment has become institutionalised.  She treats his utopian ideas about networks as childish, although she knows how important they are to him; and he treats her love of soul music as quaint.  It has become a joke between them: one of many, that enable them to keep their internal worlds separate despite their long years together.  Susan, with her African experience, explains this as a “joking relationship”: a form of banter used in many societies to prevent close relatives from having a forbidden sexual relationship with each other. It is also used in married couples as a form of birth control, or as in this case, as a way of avoiding discussion of a sexual dysfunction.

James has huge powers of empathy, and fully understands what Jane is going through when her anxieties ruin her day.  But Jane knows the dangers James went through in Bosnia, so she cannot believe that he is taking her fears seriously.  She suspects him of insincerity, so she tries to trivialise her own fear.  The problem, Susan says, is that they both have huge admiration for each other, which prevents them from fully entering into each other’s lives.

John has been working on Negative Existentialism: “there is thought, therefore there is existence”.  This is the concentration on ideas, rather than any definition of the self.  He believes that Stephen is so committed to his ideas that he has lost all sense of self; so that he ceases to notice where his feelings start and the other person’s feelings end.  This has meant that the Foresters tend to share thoughts and emotions, as things in themselves, rather than the possession of any one person.  This has made them a very close knit group, and taken the sense of responsibility off the individual and placed it on the Foresters as a unit.  What John finds puzzling is that Stephen does not use the same process to ensure a mate for breeding purposes.  This way of describing Stephen is John’s trivial moment.  It shows his delight in intellectual fun, but it would not amuse Stephen.

Peter felt that Deirdre was trivialising his Art, when he realised that the cost of framing his paintings was more than fifty per cent of their sale price; whereas she felt he was trivialising his art by sticking it to his walls with blue-tak.  When the paintings started to sell, and the value went up, he understood that his work was no longer regarded as trivial.  He found it amusing that he was taken seriously by others, although he had always taken his own work seriously, as he spent most of his time thinking about or producing it.  The trivial moment came when he looked on his wall for a painting that had been sold.  He felt he had lost part of his past; and found difficulty remembering where he had come from.  It was trivial because he wanted to focus on the painting that he was doing now.

The key to Chinese culture, according to Iris, is their focus on the trivial moment.  Thus Taoism is seen as a philosophy that mocks generality: “God is in the detail, we might say in the West.  If we concentrate on the “myriad creatures” we will become as one with universe.”  Similarly Confucius is arranging a system for organising the state, which forces us to deal rationally with each event as it arises, without producing a rule book.

Iris says: “The Western mind is so hung up on rules, from Leviticus and Hamurabi onwards, so they have never been able to accept the Christian idea that “the letter killeth, only the spirit giveth life”.  And the Chinese do not even have letters, only pictograms, each consisting of “myriad creatures”.

According to Martin, this focus reached its height in the code of the Samurai, which welded Buddhist ideas of detachment with systems of self-defence, so that the warrior saw beyond the thousands of possible moves, to respond instinctively to his opponent before the opponent formulated an action.  “Thus Pearl Harbour”, he said proudly. 

However, they both agree that Western civilisation is in its death throes.  Western Capitalism was based on Calvinistic need to prove your right to salvation by hard work.  This made for thrifty, hard working, exploitable employees, and innovative driven managers.  But, when material comforts reach a certain standard, these people either lose their faith, delighting in consumerist addictions; or they relax, feeling they have proven their right to salvation.  The oriental cannot be distracted in this way, because they lack the puritanical contempt for trifles.  As long as there is a market, they will make every “trivial” detail.  There is no sense of “alienation”, says Iris, as long as they are cogs in a well oiled machine, they will be happy in production, with no interest in consumption, lost in the detail of promotion and family life.” 

“This is why” Martin says “the Japanese economy will always outstrip the Chinese because they respect their warrior class and trust them to run business; whereas the Chinese heroes have traditionally opposed the injustices of the ruling class.  And the ruling class have always put family before duty to the workers”.  Susan says that Iris and Martin’s differences have become quite trivial, since they now live in separate countries; and use grand theories, rather than trivial details, as the basis for defining their relationship.  Susan herself believes that a good counsellor makes no distinction macro and micro: “If it is important to the client, it is not trivial.”  This mantra did not save her from underestimating Jack’s problems on her return from the horrors of the Congo.

Forest Time 14  Sammy Sees the Powers of Others

Dickon is free.  That is what matters.

Everything has changed since Richard persuaded the local people that Ken has something to offer them.  They had wanted us to change, but instead they have changed their minds about us.  Peter made communication possible.  And now with all the publicity about Dickon, we have moved from scapegoats to heroes of the local community, in a matter of days.

Peter knew perfectly well that he could not change people’s prejudice against incest, or any other sexual diversity, so he concentrated on values that transcend prurience.  Thus he persuaded Jeanette to work on the Muslim terrorists, by playing on her prejudices towards David and John.  Her invisibility depends on her detachment from others.  Thus sex for her is a physical need, like eating and washing.  She would be as likely to become involved with a carrot or a bar of soap, as with a sexual partner.  It is Ken and I as a couple she resents, not our sex.  We are not clones: it is just that we have shared so much of our lives as if we were one person.

Martin encourages consumption in the West; because he wants desire to get out of proportion.  Greed driven capitalism, lends to people who cannot repay, creating an expanding economy on debt.  When the recession comes, it will quickly spread to Japan, where the western style capitalists will be overthrown by the traditional shoguns.  But capitalism encourages a cash nexus for sex, as on the programme “sexcetera” where sex is associated with wealth.  The best sex was always enjoyed by poor people forming intense relationships with each other, because such relationships are beyond price.

Iris was like a sister to me when we were children and rode horses together.  She loved excess and sensuality: to gallop bareback, to comb her wet hair out over her naked shoulders, to have Ken dry it for her.  But if he had touched her, she would have screamed.  I’m sure she has had sex with many men, with the same sensuality, the same clear limits.  Always her excess: never theirs: always holding something back, to leave them frustrated, hungry.  The moment of pleasure was designed to make individuals forget their past, deny other relationships.  She did not give herself, but took something from them.  She tried to make Ken give up his love for me: not because I was his half-sister, not because I am black, but just to prove she could. 

 Before I discovered horses and painting, I was overwhelmed by my sense of inferiority.  I could not see that it was a gift to be able to see the gifts of others.  I just felt useless.  I became anorexic.  But Janet was there.  She did not say: “you silly cow”.  She got me to look at her big gangly body, and told me of her wretched teenage years.  Understanding what she had gone through and feeling her care for me, cured me.

Once I started to cherish my own body, I ceased to envy the abilities of others and started to delight in them instead.  I loved Jane’s prophetic taste, was mesmerised by Jack’s prophetic vision and the range of John’s gifts.  But soon I became aware of my own power.

Heroes have a terrible problem: once they have overthrown evil, they do not know what to do.  Peter has become wealthy through his painting and with his wealth he can subdue criticism, he can suppress and degrade his rivals, but it is far harder for him to encourage them or learn from them.  Deirdre could have helped him, but her power depends on her ability to encourage the ruthless selfishness of quite ordinary people. 

Tom can cure himself of any ailment, but he cannot help Virginia.  He did not help Roger and George overcome their war trauma, or prevent Richard’s heart attack, and he cannot help me.  I have this intuition about the darkness within each gift, because I know the lust for power within my own soul.

Stephen remembers entire books and strings of numbers.  He remembers every conversation he ever had, because he cannot let go of things.  He is fearful of disorder, afraid of losing control.  So he cannot surrender himself to sexual passion.  Imagine Stephen giving birth; overcome by the power of contractions.  Imagine him responding to the personality of a waterfall, the sense of oneness with the universe; the presence of God.

Bridget believes Evolution favours the wicked because they cheat and survive.  Science must redress the balance by genetic manipulation to produce more honest folk: people who are more like computers, rational and fair.  I found the prison system at Corton Vale thought it was just and fair, even when it was using inmates to test out new drugs.  It would never have come to light if it had not been for the influx of anti-nuclear protestors, who refused to be guinea pigs.

David’s mind can fly across subject boundaries, across time and culture and he tries to connect the people he flies between.  I have tried to explain to David that it is only through sexual desire that people from opposing backgrounds come to relate to each other.  This is the Romeo and Juliet effect.  In sharing our weaknesses, we make ourselves vulnerable, and thus make relationships across social barriers possible.  How could Virginia and Tom, or iris and Martin, or James and Jane or Deirdre and Peter ever have come together without sex?

Pat believes that all forms of sex destroy or damage human life and are therefore sinful.  This enables her to live outside her body.  Being black in a white town could have made me feel like that, but it was accepting my body that made my ability bearable.

Collette teaches that all forms of behaviour have potential to destroy or damage others, so we must learn to forgive ourselves and others, as God forgives us.  It is for this that we are embodied.  Sexuality is part of spirituality.  It is part of letting go, of letting God.  My body understands that in terms of climax with Ken, in terms of giving birth to Dickon and bonding with him.  But when he was taken, when Richard had his heart attack, I could not let go.  I was in agony, tortured.  I clung to Virginia and said: “You will never leave me will you?”  And she promised she would never leave me.

By his way of being with animals, Dickon breaks apart the pyramid of creation, and if humans are not above animals then capitalists are not above Muslims.  He made his terrorist captors understand that they had no need to overthrow the West, because they were already superior to it.  The west could learn from them as Dickon learnt from animals, because the world is changing.

Since his wife left him, Roger has started to breed Rottweilers, in his little house opposite the infant school.  His body has always expressed a physicality of threat that appeals to some women, and the dogs enhance this.  The threat is real.  These dogs can tear children apart.  Eroticism and disgust are very close together.  Roger has been overwhelmed by self-loathing ever since his body let him down.  To protect those children, we first have to get Roger to forgive his body.

The Moment of War

Susan experienced war as constant turmoil.  Back in England she saw young people who were distracted from learning, distracted from their true potential, by consumerist adverts.  But, in the Congo, she had seen the hunger for knowledge overwhelmed when there was nothing to consume, so there was a struggle between the hunger for food and the hunger for freedom.  Then knowledge was just another consumer item that counted for nothing.

“Pat asked her how she could provide therapy for murderers:-  “Murderers are more heroic, more discerning than those who let their lust for blood run riot during war; who kill to order.  There is “nothing personal” just killing for its own sake, to prove their membership of a group.  No different from wearing the fashionable trainers.  The thoughtless participation in fashionable genocide is a real challenge to the therapist.

James experienced war as constant alertness.  He now puzzles over why there was no hint in the media that Yugoslavia under Tito was a random collection of tribes enslaved and oppressed by its army.  The explosion of civil wars, the return to vendettas going back centuries, the cruelty and smallness of battles, came as a huge shock to the rest of Europe. 

Why had our communications so failed to prepare us for the horrors which multiplied daily?  Had the Muslims and Christian really kept their antagonisms as secret; as the Nazi concentration camps?  Were the media merely responding to our desire to avoid bad news?  At what moment did we suddenly demand 24hour coverage of every bloody incident? Having shown no interest in the area, except for holidays, since 1914?

“Being out there as a negotiator, was like working in a dark mine shaft for months, when suddenly a million watts of Light flood your tunnel.  Overnight we became famous performers, household names: danced in the spotlight.  Later, just as suddenly the light went out and Bosnia, once again, was forgotten.”  (Jane got cross when James said things like this.  She said it sounded like self-pity.)

Roger experienced war as the ultimate expression of love.   This is how he explained it to Peter after a lodge meeting.   “Intervention is the ability to stop both sides from fighting, as we did in the first Iraq war.  In other situations it is better to leave the combatants to it.  Most attempts at intervention either prove that you cannot stop them, or they may even use your intervention as the basis for turning others against you.  That is why the West will not intervene in Zimbabwe.  Of course the same is true in Iraq now, but that is just driven by the greed for oil.”

“When I returned to civilian life, there was no way to express my bravery.  My generosity was mistaken for naivety.  Everyone seemed out to cheat me.  There was no loyalty, no leadership by example.  Real men are much more than ordinary life permits.  There are no challenges.  Without war, the demoralised inferior races would overwhelm the vibrant nations.  Decadence would predominate.  I see this in the spread of youth crime, drug taking and AIDS.  People who really care about their neighbours must be ready to die in their defence.  Whenever a rule is broken, let alone a law, courage is required to enforce it and punish the violation.”

“There was the butcher who made sausages from meat that had been condemned.  Half the village was sick with EColi and some died.  He had broken the rules many times.  People enjoyed cheap meat and he made lots of money.  That was the time to stop him, and avert disaster.  But who has the courage to stop their friend driving over the speed limit.  Everyone hopes the inevitable will not happen.”

Bridget had similar experience.  They had attempted to recruit her computer skills for missile defence systems.  But she was convinced that such weapons were out of date.  “The next war will be won by medication.”  This is why she engaged in the war on illegal drugs.  “People who self-medicate are likely to resist the rules in other ways as well, threatening the survival of the state, so that we would all be thrown in the chaos of civil war.”

George has an amazing collection of authentic toy soldiers.  His father was a war hero.  George taught English in Saudi, when Roger was based there.  But George thought of war as a generality.  He followed individual wars in detail and in terms of strategy: living them in his mind.

He went on an expedition up a mountain with a group of British soldiers, to look at the remains of a fossilised boat found near the top.  Roger was also amongst the group, although neither remembers the other.  At dusk they came down the mountain.  Looking back at the track he had taken, it looked blue below the skyline.  They stayed in a hut, rejoicing at a place to rest.  They drank local wine together and sang war songs, until they had forgotten the horrors of war.  Yet that was the time that George remembers as his moment of war; when he felt part of the military machine. The following week most of those soldiers were killed.  Roger returned a decorated invalid and George hid his trauma from himself for many years.

Collette’s war is on poverty and ignorance.  The frontier is preaching to a village who have never heard of Jesus Christ.  She is under huge pressure to take more children than they have room for at the orphanage.  This is the triage for dealing with war casualties.  Having no experience of TV, the local people see it as real, not as a shadow of a distant world.  When she was first there, all the people smelt of chillies, because they ate so much of it, but soon she filtered out that smell as other combatants have filtered out the smell of mud, explosives and death.  She knew she was winning the war, when local builders understood how to attach pipes to western appliances like showers and sinks.

In China, Iris was horrified to find a defeated people.  She wrote to David:-

“They do not have to sell things that are not worth having to people who do not want them; they only have to make the things.  I often have to run from the factory, where I am teaching English, and stand on the loo seat, and look at the distant mountains, to remind myself that the world is not that bad, but for the factory workers, it is.  The war against Capitalism has been lost and these defeated wounded people will suffer for generations to come.”

David introduced Jews and Palestinians to each other. Through James he is in contact with Muslims and Christians in post Yugoslav countries.  He has been responsible for marriages which cross racial/religious divisions.  Some ended as tragically as Romeo and Juliet.  Attracted to what they are told is inferior, forbidden and therefore mysterious, tempting, fascinating.  He remains committed to preventing war, by creating these cross-cutting ties.  Is this long range peacemaking or muddled liberal interference?

Through Susan he has set up a couple of placements for young Quakers to work in the Congo for a year, setting up micro banking loans for local women.  He was always comfortable with women.  He knew what to say and how to behave.  He was at ease, even when he was silent.  This made him attractive to women.  They were also drawn by an elusive quality, a mystery about him.  Men he found much harder; especially their posturing aggression: “competing as if they were gorillas!”

The Moment of Truth

They were discussing “Genocide” at the Vicarage.

Roger said: “Truth is a child blown to pieces by our land mines.  An officer will order burial, a politician will minimise the event in rows of statistics.  The public will be protected from all sense of complicity and guilt.”

Janet responded: “That is monstrous, unnatural, a symptom of a fatally desensitised condition.”

Peter: “Are we to stop our ears to music and drink no wine.  Must we talk about horrors, as if they were everything?  Is there no truth in tenderness, friendship and frivolity?” (Peter fumbled for truth in every brush stroke, every line drawn; but also in those quiet moments: planting seeds, weeding, picking fruit, shelling peas, cooking and eating.  He knew the tranquillity of sitting in the godly peace, knowing that he desired nothing more, being finally, utterly at rest.)

Roger was dependent on Peter to help him remember his lines for Forestry Meeting rituals, but this reduction of Truth to ordinary things, made him angry.  He said: “The Muslim knows that Truth must be fought for, starved for.  There is nothing that cannot be sacrificed to Truth: wife, children, your lust, your glory, even your peace of mind.”

James: “That is your truth, Roger, and you lived it, and I respect that.  But to teach it as a doctrine is to rob the rest of us of our little nuggets of truth.  I saw whole families shot and piled in mass graves, but I felt the anger of the murderers.  Partly it was anger that they were driven to commit such atrocities, against neighbours they had seen every day, without conflict, all their lives.  Partly it was confusion.  Events were contradicting everything they had lived by.  Even in these moments of genocide, they felt no certainty.  They were striking out against the decadence of relative values, yet retained the nagging suspicion that they might be mistaken.  Truth lay safe in their doubts.”

Jane; “I am sure what you are all saying is very clever, but to me truth is the opposite of lies.   The truth about genocide is that it happens, when where and to how many people.  The lies are cover-ups, people trying to hide what has happened.  What you seem to be talking about are the beliefs which may cause or prevent genocide.  The worst thing is when you tell the truth and people do no believe you.  Clever people can make things seem so complicated that the truth gets lost.  Simple, honest people do not commit genocide … that’s a product of complexity.”

Susan: “I agree with Roger.  When I saw the mass graves in Rwanda, or witnessed torture in the Congo, I thought I had found the Truth about human nature.  Not that people are inherently evil, or irredeemable.  Quite the reverse.  These were simple people, quite often killing or maiming with a machete.  No arms trader needed.  It was as if they had been suppressing anger, their sense of injustice, their need for vengeance, for generations.  Suddenly, like the volunteers who went to fight in the trenches in 1914, they were given a chance to release their feelings.  The dam burst and the country was flooded with blood.  The Truth is that dams should always be constructed with pressure valves, to prevent catastrophe.  Truth is about constructing safe, flexible boundaries, not rigid barriers to change.”

David: “I find it very exciting that here in Janet’s rural vicarage, we have personal experience of the worst atrocities of recent decades.  This is a truly global village.  The coming together of conflicting ideas, about conflict, must lead us to a greater Truth.”

Peter: “Apart from our lack of experience of Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Tibet, Uganda…..

David: “Sadly John could not be with us tonight.  Iris sent an email defending China’s actions in Tibet, and Martin sent one explaining that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were the greatest single acts of genocide ever.  Odessa urged us to consider Russian Orthodox complicity in Stalin’s extermination camps and the actions of the Catholic Church: she said she would happily see all Religion dead.”

Jane: “And Collette agreed with me that all this discussion is far too abstract”.

Peter: “How about the millions of animals tortured to death each year in the name of science or as substitutes for vegetables?  What about that Church of England obsession with homosexuality?  Surely that’s a dam waiting to burst!”

David: “Yes I saw the 70s pictures of you and George, as a header for The Times article on Gay Pride in the Church.  How did that feel?”

Janet: “The truth is that Peter and George were never homosexual, and neither is the Church.  Those pictures, so pervasive in the 70s Arts Media, showed that men could be close: like Morecambe and Wise, like The Two Ronnies, without any sexuality.  It was a naïve dream, like Liberation Theology, like Free Love.  People cannot cope without clear boundaries.  No mixed messages.”

Richard: “Truth is never the extreme.  It comprehends both extremes.  It is in both and in neither.  David brings us together to accumulate our experience.  But this is futile, for we all experienced events from different perspectives.  Roger was a combatant; James a diplomat, Susan and Aid worker – none of us have been the perpetrators or victims of genocide, but those experiences must be the starting point, if we are to see the “Truth”.”

Janet: “We can all sit at the foot of the cross and see our sin perpetrating His suffering, or experience Him as sharing our pain.  But our “perspectives” do not change the Truth: that He died to set us free.”

Roger: “And who did the Iraqi boy die for? and all the other millions of genocide victims?”

Richard: “They died for the same reason that any other species develops by boom and bust; huge population increase, followed by millions of deaths.  Humans have evolved no further than locusts in this regard.  They die to prove that life is cheap, nature profligate and Evolution cruel.  The Truth is we yearn for something more compassionate.  That is why we turn to religion, and, when we do, we don’t want Janet telling us we are being “naïve”.  We want reassurance that Nature can be overturned.”

Susan: “Truth is not some soft soap; some “gentle Jesus meek and mild”.  That was what the 99% nominally Christian Rwandans thought.  No, “Truth” is the hard facts about ourselves: the struggle to change into who we are capable of being.  Truth is the Light that reveals the way.”

Peter: “Kindness and lies are worth a thousand Truths.”

Writing Moments

(from pat’s holiday notes)

Mr Armstrong reminded me of David.  He supposedly lived in the Victorian age, yet he developed modern hydraulics, was the first person to have electricity in his house (from water power) and went on to set up production of battleships, cars, tanks and aeroplanes.  Yet he built his home in the style of a fourteenth century Japanese palace, and lavished a million pounds on rebuilding Bamburgh castle in medieval fashion.  His impact on the north of England in terms of providing jobs and prosperity was unparalleled.  The thousand acres of woodland, lakes and gardens is a playground for the people of Newcastle: rhododendron and fir trees which provide such an amazing setting today, would not have been much to enjoy in his day.

Over the Scottish border at Abbotsford, I found Walter Scott’s, like Roger, far less ambitious (I had expected something much larger, as the building of his house nearly ruined him).  In fact it is a comfortable size.  Walter’s take on the medieval is more related to violence (walls covered in guns and swords) that Armstrong who was influenced by William Morris, Pre-Raphaelites and Japanese contacts.  I could imagine Mary and William Wordsworth visiting Walter, and talking as if they lived four hundred years earlier.  Yet they were all deeply conscious of the French Revolution and the huge changes in Europe.  Did they wish to escape all that horror, or give it context?   Was the past intended to inspire or mirror the present? 

The charm of Walter’s study and library is homely and inviting.  A huge contrast to Floors Castle, where the Dukes of Roxburgh (much more like Stephen) have paid court to kings and Queens for hundred’s of years, and continue to do so, with continuing bad taste, mausoleum sized rooms and gilt abundant.  The eighteenth century symmetry and the splendid view over the Tweed, seems puerile in comparison with the inventiveness of Armstrong’s Cragside property.   The Dukes of Northumberland (Iris and Martin)are just the same as those in Roxburgh, and I felt guilt about adding to the wealth of Alnwick castle:” Vive la Revolution”, especially as we have all seen that castle in a dozen films, culminating with Harry Potter.  This was not the past, but 21st century marketing.

Entering the Dark Ages, we visited Lindisfarne, castle and Priory.  No wonder St Cuthbert (Janet)sought refuge on an island by himself and the monks gave up when the Viking horde poured in.  This was the place most over-run with tourists, giving the least resonance.  Somehow we were slipping back into 2008.  Fortunately Chillingham Castle, like James’ home, has retained, through poverty, the authentic wildness of the medieval. The chaos: where every room is piled with stuff that looks as if it is waiting for use; and discoveries are jumbled in Victorian display cases.  These are people who have always been too busy living to prettify and sanitise.  The family have been there since 1066, when their ancestor, William I’s cousin, took over the north of England.  Sir Humphrey Wakefield, the current Castilian, is related to the Gray family (see below). It was a home where the wild cattle (cousins of my White Park cows) could have roamed with the ghosts.  The doors creaked and there was no health and safety.  The cattle were wonderful, totally primitive and dangerous.

Having found the authentic medieval, we were able to discover the human side of the 18th century at Paxton House.  I berated Ninian Home (pronounced Hume or was it Ken?)for exploiting slaves in his Grenada sugar plantations, but he had spent his fortune on the house, hardly lived in it, and dies with his wife, bankrupt in Grenada.  So I spoke to his uncle, (Richard) who built the house for his beloved, but they had been forced apart by parents and he had not lived in the house.  Ninian’s brother developed the house: a wonderful library and ballroom, but was too curmudgeonly to enjoy any of it, and left no heirs.  Here at last was the truth about the Georgian age: too busy making money and showing off with it to ever develop individual taste, ideas or appreciation of life.  Yet they have left behind country estates which can now be enjoyed by the middle classes.  (The working classes continue to be attracted and exploited by the aristocrats in their palaces.)

Virginia indulged her love of birds of prey by having a barn owl, called “whisper” land on her recently mended wrist.  Symbolic to display birds of prey in the Duke’s castle! 

It was at Paxton House that we had some timeless moments: watching a red squirrel from a hide, three foot away, walking beside the Tweed, and stroking the Highland calves.  Paxton House was also the only place which gave me any sense of déjà vu. (Although of course I may have seen the rooms on TV, I still treasure the emotion of feeling you know a place, which you know you have never visited..  Appropriate that the Dr Who episode for that week was about a huge beetle like creature, who lived off changes in time.)

Virginia was happiest in the gardens.  She loved Alnwick gardens, which were far too commercial, overcrowded and formal for my liking.  The idea for these Versailles water gardens with their thousands of species and synchronised fountains, came from the Duchess of Northumberland, next door (it provides work for the Northumberland peasants and encourages tourists to the castles – both are overpriced).  Much nicer was the huge arboretum and gardens at Howick Hall: home of the Gray family (So like John)(Prime Minister of the 1830s reform & Earl Gray tea).  On our last evening we found the delightful Scottish cove of Alnmouth, just north of the border: protected from the wind, sandy beech, and perfectly clear water; which I much preferred to the huge bleak beaches of Northumberland, where I felt we might at any moment be cut off by incoming tide.

.

The masses are betrayed by the aristocrats, who accumulate and exploit, but there is hope in the eccentric rich, who refuse to live in their own time, and expand the consciousness of all who have eyes to see.

 

Forest Time 15  Pat Leaves her Body

When cundalliny rises and the chakras are balanced, I feel my spirit lift, from the base of my spine and pass out through my forehead.  I rest upon the ceiling, like a near-death experience and observe all that passes.

Virginia gave me so much, lodgings, friendship, money, food, her experience and unconditional support; but she demanded something in return, which I was unable to provide.  She needed me to depend upon her, as a child upon a parent.  She was not a reliable parent: there was no meal cooked when she had promised; no clean sheets when she had offered to wash them for me; often the heating went off, or the roof leaked, and always there was the accretion of unwanted second hand goods clogging every room.  But she was ever apologetic, promising to do better, expecting the complaints I never made.  After all, I can cook and wash for myself.  I have lived independently most of my life, and only accepted her hospitality because she was so pressing.  I cannot be her child, because she has a real daughter, who has exploited her neediness for years.

Iris and Martin are the most oppressive couple I have ever met.  The more they take from her, the more inadequate they make her feel, the less she seems depressed.  As if she needed them to punish her for some albatross of guilt that drags her down.  So I decided to buy my own house at the pit of recession, when prices sunk to their lowest.

After that I could hardly bare to visit Virginia, for every time she was slightly more engulphed by the unnecessary “bargains”she had bought in charity shops and never even unwrapped.  I contacted Richard, and he eventually saw the state in which she was living and took her away to his place.  There with Sammy, Ken and baby Dickon to care for, and adults to defend her from Iris and Martin, she soon regained her health.

I have recently returned to Theosophy and found a new calm in ancient wisdom.  David found me a job as night staff in a home for the elderly, so that I can do my directed dreaming during the day when people are busy.  I have no interest in floating into bedrooms to watch their disgusting sexual cavorting.  I have made the attic of my house into a flat so I will not be disturbed, the rest of the house is rented out, which pays the mortgage.

I like to watch George talk to his friends.  His whole body enters into the conversation with elaborate gesticulations.  I cannot hear what he says, only watch, but I do not understand him when I meet him in waking life, so that does not matter. He usually seems drunk, even early in the morning, which is disgusting, but he has collected a circle of admirers, younger than himself, as if he were one of the Pre-Raphaelites, not just their amanuensis.  At times they gather together like something from a Rosetti painting, especially on sunny days walking by ancient ruins.

Susan says it is the benefit of the menopause, enabling me to free myself from sexual desire.  This just shows she has no understanding of astral travel.  Who could remain concerned for the things of the body, having experienced the flight of the soul?

So why do I so often find myself floating in Roger’s butcher’s shop?  I remember him at 17, living on the edge, hating himself, determined to self-destruct.  He was irresistible to girls much prettier than I.  He was cocky to avoid his sense of inadequacy.  Bumptious, in his ignorance to the professionals, who sought to help him.  Two fingers raised to all.  By 25 he was taking drugs and cheating on his wife, with an underage girl.  But it was she who rescued him.  A very street wise fifteen year old, who told the pushers, where to go and took control of his money.  Why did he get so many chances? 

I met him again when he was 28.  He was just out of work.  He had learnt to box.

He was starting to get blackouts, and I would not let him drive my car.  I was ten years older, and he needed me, like no man has ever needed me.  He was all muscle, and I was already …cuddly.  I had this wonderful pile of hair on top of my head.  I was working in the animal testing labs.  I provided stability for his army years: somewhere to escape to, where he could be a boy, where he did not have to prove he was tough all the time.  But he found it more and more difficult to be gentle, and I was increasingly reminded of my abuser, and left my body when we had sex.  I still loved him, I wanted to watch over him; and I guess I still do; but that was all so long ago.  Why can my soul not move on?  Perhaps it is all those dead bodies, hanging around him.  I still want to draw him away from the physical.

Janet is very broadminded about Muslims and Buddhists, but she tells me that what I do is dangerous.  That my empty body could be inhabited by a demon, that we are not supposed to see beyond this life, but have faith, that I am full of pride in my ability, when I need to be humble before God and let the spirit direct my soul to some compassionate purpose.  I could find children who are lost, or people in danger and inform the authorities.  Perhaps if there was a loving God, He would take me to those places, but I have to go where I can.

At least she believes in my abilities.  Stephen and Odessa mock me mercilessly.  Nothing will convince them.  I have told Stephen what he wrote in his notebook the day before, and he accused me of theft.  The trouble is, I admire his detachment.  It is what I have always sought in my astral travel.  I want to see the real people, the aspects they hide from the world, the secret interior of human nature.  It is like dissection, like the difference between a cadaver and a slide of skin or blood under the microscope.  The hidden is always the most beautiful.

John hides nothing, so there is no point hovering on his ceiling, but Stephen is a different being on his own.  He has little rituals: never using a microscope without wiping his hands first; never writing without crossing himself, never putting the phone down without swearing.  It is these little religious hang-ups, little weaknesses he despises in himself, which attract me.  I would spend all my time in his lab., but I am ever drawn back to Roger’s shop.

The Moment of Caricature

Virginia was seen during the war as a sophisticated English lady, by the Yank airmen at Tdances, despite her regional accent and working class upbringing.  Tom saw her as responsibility, tying him down, but he could not admit his own failings, so he had to force her to reject him, to prove that the failure of the relationship was her fault.  Iris saw her mother as weak, because Virginia always gave into her.  Iris did not see her mother deal with mentally ill, dangerous patients, or corrupt children’s’ home officials.  Virginia did not give in to them.   Martin thought his mother in law was wealthy but mean, because that was the lie Iris fed him.  Her grandchildren thought Virginia was an old woman long before she was sixty.

Most people thought Tom was an alcoholic gambler who abused women.  But he had had five wives and other women, who must have seen something deeply attractive in him.  He had been handsome, but his charm went deeper than that.  It was the attraction of wickedness, of someone who placed himself above the rules, and often succeeded.  Tom was never poor and never showed fear.  Perhaps they thought they could reform him.  He always seemed experienced, knowing.

Susan was regularly labelled as the interfering do-gooder: the soft-hearted liberal, by people who had never met her.  Stephen was the anti-God geek on TV.  A caricature he liked and encouraged.

Roger was known as “the butcher”; which just meant that people did not know him at all (although it was an accurate description of his Iraq war record) .

Spirituality and Sexuality

When Christians discuss sexuality, they tend to talk about it as something that others do:  something that may be right or wrong.  And, before you know it, they are talking about sin, about forms of behaviour that destroy or damage others.

Jesus started from a very different point of view.  He knew what it meant to be a spirit “embodied”, caught in the messy chaotic experience of flesh and blood.  He could see that sexuality is part of the spiritual experience of letting go of control, of letting God direct us; (as when the apostles spoke the words given to them at Pentecost.)

In just the same way, love can lead us, to let go of prudery and inhibition, in the passion of physical embrace.

Jesus set the level for moral behaviour impossibly high: to look at another woman is adultery, better to rip the eyes from your head than let them tempt you, easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.  He did this so that we would all accept the equality of failure.  So that we would go, like the prodigal son to God and accept his total forgiveness, and allow the Light to transform our lives.

Most human beings feel inadequate for much of their lives.  But, not sufficiently inadequate to recognise their prodigal waste of their talents, so that they return to God ”the father” full of humility.  No, most of us try to cope on our own.  And one way to do that is to find others we can look down on.  For example, people who have enjoyed sexual pleasures we think we would never be tempted to enjoy.  By drawing a line, below which we would not wish to go; we raise ourselves up.  We see ourselves as superior to others, so we feel less inadequate, so we feel less in need of God.

Instead, we should look at the line Jesus drew, and see that it is far above our heads, beyond our reach.  But with God, nothing is impossible.  For Augustine, God was the supreme object of desire: desire for God would shut out all other desires.  For Jesus, the person most overwhelmed by their fleshly lusts is most likely to recognise their need for God.

When I see a young man in prison, who has had four children to four different women; I see nothing to condemn.  I do not even see a man who should have had his desires educated.  I ask him what he felt, at the time of their conception and now.

Usually there was romance and good intentions at the start and a lot of fear and guilt now.  Such a young man can become a responsible parent and even a reliable partner; but only with God’s help.  Not if they start looking for men who have been worse than them.  Not if they try to shut down the sexuality, which made their life so messy.  For their sexuality gave them access to empathy, responsibility and relationships, from which the puritan is excluded.

Jesus neither condones, nor condemns.  He comes alongside.  He enters our life and shows us where this embodiment could lead.  Our vulnerability enables us to connect with people who would be pushed away by our self-sufficiency.  Our experience of chaos, even horror, enables us to empathise with those whom we might otherwise reject.  After eroticism there is sometimes disgust, but this can lead us to make good the damage we have caused to others.  It can even be the start of recognising how we harm others in non-sexual ways (by what we buy, how we travel, what we fail to do.)

Jesus had a short-term relationship (three years) with his disciples (surely better than fifty years in a mutually hurtful marriage!)  Permanence in a relationship is established in the eternal moment of mutual love.  Without that we can beat ourselves black and blue, we can stop every sensual thought, we can fill ourselves with indignation about the sexuality of others; but it will only push Jesus away.

Forest Time 15  Jack sees the Future

It’s a gift from my Native American ancestors.  They took drugs to help them guide the tribe.  If the English were a tribe, they would accept John’s wisdom.  He will live into extreme old age, wisdom undiminished, still fighting the establishment, still ignored.

His brother James will be less fortunate, sinking into increasing paranoia, as he comes to understand, as I always have, that most people regard others as shit to be cleaned off their boots.  This is the penalty of looking at people rather than nature: the rose-tinted spectacles crack.

Jane will of course say “I told you so”, as each of her fears is realised in the terrible deaths of people close to her.  Planes do crash, people drown, cars are pushed off the road by intransigent lorries and old folk are beaten to death by young thugs.

David’s success in bringing people close together who had been taught to hate each other, will certainly lead them to discover the other’s humanness.  But such a divergent discovery will in some cases lead to suicide rather than reconciliation. 

In contrast, Bridget will find herself unable to disengage from computers.

She will become unable to have ordinary face to face relationships with anyone.  I suppose I find this prospect the most horrific, as it is the easiest for me to picture as my own future

The ultimate irony is my mother.  She will become dependent on me to give her daily injections.  I tell people all this negative stuff, because I know they don’t want to believe in doom and disaster.   No-one wants to listen to a Jeremiah.  I hope myself that this is the future that may be, not the future that must be.  I am not sure whether I will be worshipped as the new Nostradamus, or stoned to death.  The image of stoning may simply be a reference to my being stoned all the time?  But with all this change around me, will it be possible for me to remain unchanged?

For others the future seems more hopeful.  With them, I do not see their illness and death but other events.  George becomes famous for his letters, which capture the spirit of the time: its love of satire and irony, the glory of the absurd and the longing for glory; the broad brush of ideas and pictures of whimsy.  Similarly Janet becomes the first woman bishop and Ken wins the Nobel Prize.

So it would appear that some people finally gain the recognition they deserve.  But others simply benefit from the changing times.  Thus Peter will be the best selling artist in 2030 because of the collapse of conceptual art and the rejection of figurative painting.  The new birth of abstract water colours in that year inevitably looks back to Peter’s work as the originator of the movement: the Cézanne or Giotto of his time.   I see him in a gothic country house, full of Munnings and Seagos, with funeral urns in the bedrooms; surround by parkland designed by capability Brown.   And Deirdre will say: “I told you so”. 

No coincidence that 2030 will also be the peak of the swing against political correctness.  A swing begun in the church, by Deirdre’s vocal prayer for the “repatriation of English people”; the “equal access of the able-bodied”; “support lines for heterosexuals”; and the “adults in need day”.  A swing that will incidentally return the church to the centre of English politics; and turn “relativism” into a discussion of kinship solidarity.

When Sammy takes Virginia’s funeral service, she will discover a new vocation that enables her to combine her apparently contradictory skills: her sense of the sacred, her embodied physicality (from her horse riding) so necessary in the projection of the sacred; and her ability to represent the world visually to people deprived of beauty by the onset of grief.

Collette will not change.  She will organise a great influx of medical aid to deal with AIDS, malaria, cholera, and the other natural cullers of overcrowded, insanitary life in a hot country. And the demons of those diseases will attack her husband and try to kill him, but her faith will win through.  Surely this vision must be true, as it is the one a good Satanist least wants to view?  My consolation is that overpopulation will result.

Odessa says she will freeze the moments, and prevent the worst outcomes.  But how can she select out the bad?  How can she decide that what seems like horror now will not bring joy when it comes? It’s like when I have a bad trip, I hold with the experience, and trust that nightmare will dissolve into ecstasy.

Moments of Waste Disposal

For Martin it was a significant step on his road towards Zen.  He had never been the one to put the rubbish out.  His mother would never have thought of giving such a mundane task to her blue-eyed boy.  Iris had automatically taken over all the domestic chores that he had previously paid a cleaner to do.  But when they had their trial separation, a daughter told her dad about bin days and recycling.

In theory he had been “saving the planet” for years, but the practical business of sorting stuff for disposal had never occurred to him.  “The answer” he would have said, “was not to buy it in the first place.  Women are the shopaholics.  It is their responsibility”.  This fitted neatly with his chauvinist view of the craftsman.  The skilled producer was male.

But now he was able to apply this idea of “fulfilment through work” to the disposal of waste.  He found a new ability to let go of things, by organising their removal from the house with great precision.  Attention to detail included separate containers for glass bottles of different colours (he spent half an hour deciding whether the blue sherry bottle was “brown” or “green”, ending in sending an Email to the council.)

Having disposed of objects that he had previously held on to “in case they might one day be needed”; it was a short step to disposing of his family.  His daughters were each consigned to their college and career, and Iris to the Chinese.  This left him free to take the opportunity in Japan.

Such disposal of long-term relationships was anathema to David, for whom life was the slow deepening of diverse personal ties.  He did not let go of the dead; holding them in photos, poems and obituaries; far less the living.  Even those who refused to keep in touch were filed away in case correspondence was one day renewed.  Thus he had a large cupboard of broken things (handless mugs and tools, to blunt saws and drill bits).  He had always had a fascination for other people’s rubbish, volunteering to sort out the hoarded tack of hospitalised depressives, emptying the bins of the elderly, recycling furniture; had all been favourite social care activities.

Jack had always been a very tidy person.  He was scrupulous in placing his used needles in a sharps box, always using a condom and he hoovered his floors daily.  He never left dirty things in the sink and never let the bin get full.  He was disgusted by alcoholics, who lived in their own vomit, left empty bottles to get broken and cups growing mould.  He was horrified by lack of personal hygiene and dismayed by the odours of the hostel.  As a trainee chef he had always been complimented for his tidiness.  Even when his addiction was at its worst, he remained fanatical about his appearance.

Disposal remained a problem.  He horded techno-equipment, for its own sake, and as substitutes for drug taking.  But it was also a hedge against relapse: items to sell to purchase heroin, when life became desperate, which it did several times a year, despite daily methadone.  There was nothing and nobody he would not part with when the need was upon him.  But mostly he was a highly sociable, if volatile social mixer.  Technology was a substitute for real physical passionate and intense relationships, and he would rather cut himself, than cut himself off from others.  But, when withdrawal failed, when internet and heavy rock and methadone failed, then the dose of self-harm had to have some smack in it.

Susan had watched her son disposing of himself.  At first she had been overwhelmed by guilt: a substance she thought she had disposed of during her psychotherapy training.  She found her knowledge of addiction, through reading and successful work with clients, was like drowning in shredded paper.  Her experience in the Congo: schools without books, hospitals without equipment, farms without crops; provided perspective.  Her absence had combined with a brief time of work and relationship in Jack’s life.  She had ceased to be a reliable source of cash for his habit.  Instead he had become concerned for her welfare, phoned regularly, but never again asked for or received money from her. They each retained concern for the other, but had let go of ownership.  It was the same with her possessions.  Most went to Oxfam and she lived very simply, but she cared intensely about the environment, campaigned with Jane against industrial developments, power stations, new roads, air terminals and gave generously of time and money to organisations like the National Trust and RSPB.

Dickon had everything he wanted, through the hole in the hedge at the bottom of his garden.  Insects, animals and birds; trees, clouds and stars: all belonging to him.  The beetle disposed of the dung, death disposed of the living, maggots disposed of the dead and swallows disposed of the flies.  But he could not wholly dispose of his human connections.  Once Sammy saw him wearing a living coat of bees.  She fainted.  He calmly took the Queen and placed her in a box and shook the swarm from his body so that he could run to his mother. 

Ken kept meticulous records: paper and UB as well as microscope slides and he could always find what was needed for his work.  But he also retained parts of an old farm cart and a cider press, which he never got round to repairing.  The woodwork slowly devoured his dreams of lost innocence, for he had really given up on them, when incarnate innocence was born in Dickon.

Perhaps that is why he could not clear Virginia’s house of its pathological floor covering of charity shop bargains, still in their plastic bags.  David enjoyed the task.  Stephen called him the scrofula scarab, accusing him of scavenging through ancient rumours of God in just the same way, to discover hope in the mystic mumblings of deceivers.  Janet said that was typical of Stephen, unable to see what others found valuable, because he head thrown out everything valuable in his own experience in the name of objectivity.  “He could at least have told his own story and allowed us to recycle it.  Instead he has consigned his personal memories to landfill.”

In contrast, George retained his lost amours in a heart-shaped, rose-covered casket of imagination.  Deirdre placed them in frozen morgue cabinet drawers, in case further post mortem should prove necessary.  Iris had happily left hers behind, like a child leaves sandcastles on a beach, watching from the prom as the tide moves inexorably towards them.  Peter incorporated them into his personal iconography, as if they were so many stained glass windows.

Forest Time 17  -  Dickon Talks to the Animals #

Roger is a Bull: strong, forceful, and fearless.  When he rushes down the street, people cower in shop doorways till he has passed.  When he was with Iris, he would not let anyone near her.  When she told him she was pregnant, he called her a “cow”, because he did not want to share her, even with his own son.  He thought she was the only one he could ever love, but when she left him he married Isobel.   They had two children together because he did not care so much about her.   He was not so upset when Isobel left him, because he had gained the scent of Iris again.

When a bull smells a cow, he lowers his head as far forward as he can, sniffing at the air, and emits a low moan, which is neither aggression nor pain.  Roger does this when a new carcass is brought into his shop, or when a pretty woman passes by.  It is sad, because it shows he feels held back as if there was a barb wire fence between him and the source of the pheromones. 

When I was small, he told me stories of his army adventures.  He was my hero, always doing more than was expected of him.  It was the same when he became the village butcher.  He would always make that extra effort to please his customers.

His business flourished.  But when he thought of Iris, he went to pieces.  He could not concentrate.  She says he was “madly exciting”, just like a real bull.

Some Evolution is tosh.  Iris mated with lots of males, but only had children by Martin; and Peter and George mated with lots of females but had no children at all.   In contrast James and Jane, who have been together forever, have lots of children.   It was only random chance that Roger was not killed in battle.  Most bullish men are more at risk than peace loving types like James and John.

People say I am unusual, that I should not really exist, because my parents are brother and sister, but I am not unique.  There are lots of people like me.  People get more unusual as they get older.  Virginia and Richard are the most unusual people I have known.  They could remember the war.  I miss Virginia.  She was my turtle, the oldest creature in my childhood.  She taught me to swim, by letting me ride on her back and then sinking, leaving me to swim for myself.  “The earth rests on an elephant who stands on a turtle”, the ancient legend says.  She supported my world.  She was mysterious, inscrutable, and deep; and yet we understood each other perfectly.

Jeanette is a hedgehog.  She lives such a lonely life.  When others come close to her she curls up, using her professional boundaries like prickles to push them away.  She does not love herself, so she cannot love anyone else.  Her children are hedgehogs to.  They are my age, but already they are going their own way, independent of their parents, unable to open up, even to their closest kin.

Iris is a peacock, but her vanity expresses her ability to see value in herself, and this enables her to see value in others.  She values luxury, and wants to share it with those she values.  Thus the wonderful feasts she provides for friends, the feasts of knowledge for her pupils, like the feast of colour offered when a peacock opens his tail.  Friends, food and fancy goods are all commodities to her; but love is not a commodity.  For where there is love, nothing else counts.

Stephen, like Aristotle, is a snake.  When his experiments outgrow a theory, he discards the old skin, and we are all amazed at the beauty of the new skin beneath.  His memory is like a snake’s digestion, with a swallowed animal still visible in outline within the body of the snake, long after it has been eaten.  He seeks the good of humankind, not by becoming their slave, but by “tough love” forcing them to stand on their own feet, independent of comforting illusions.  He regards Collette’s form of altruism as unsustainable in evolution, because selfless people will be exploited and die out.  But that as I have said is “tosh”.

Susan says that I “transfer” my feelings for certain animal species on to the humans that I know.  Thus she thinks I defused my fear of the men who kidnapped me, by imagining that they were Meerkats.  But really the transference works the opposite way: I appreciate a whole species by thinking what person they remind me of.  Thus I have come to understand that Meerkats are not really frightened of predators.  They post guards because it is a game: they love to run and hide, just as much as they love to stretch out tall in the sunrise.

David and Janet are as faithful to each other as two swans.  But David is not a swan, he is a chameleon, constantly inconsistent, because his diverse network forces him to change colour according to the company he keeps.  His pick-and-mix philosophy makes Janet more miserable than if he was regularly unfaithful; as iris was to Martin, or Deirdre and Peter to each other.  They cope by living separate lives, like males and females in some predatory species.  How surprised they would be to know that I use their relationship to understand the lives of tigers and polar bears.

Without sexual desire most species would be unable to establish those loving family groups, which give humans that warm feeling of connectedness with them.  I understood this by observing the humans I know.  James and Jane, Iris and Martin, Peter and Deirdre, even my own parents; would all be incompatible; if it were not for sexual attraction.  I watch the nesting birds and think of those couples.

Roger, the bull, long ceased to be my hero.  He was replaced by John.  From him I have come to understand the magpie, collecting bright discoveries, transforming them by their juxtaposition, by paradox, for he never stole anything.  From him I learnt that I appeared the the Meerkats, as lonely, disappointed and fragile, which they found sexually attractive.  They were unsettled by their feelings for me and relieved when I made them understand that I was none of those things.  From him I have learnt to discover wonderful qualities in every living creature I meet, and somehow they know and respond.

John is like the great white whale, a sublime symbol of what could be, if we would only allow his ocean of understanding to break us free, to allow transformation, rebirth.  He is the midwife of a new nature that goes beyond evolution, not red in tooth and claw, but flowing with milk and honey.

Moments of Communication

James thought of himself as a rational intellectual.  In Bosnia he had communicated in several languages, on the basis that other people would respond rationally to his suggestions.  He had discovered that they did not.   Yet his old friends, like Stephen and Martin, continued to communicate with him in terms of logic and proof, and he dissembled, so that they remained unaware of the change.  Even Bridget failed to recognise when he spoke like a dysfunctional programme, mistaking it for a romantic declaration.  Jane recognised the change, but took it as a healthy sign that he was getting in touch with his feminine side. 

Collette recognised that he had, in her terms “surrendered his life to a higher power”.  He had a new openness about him, which reminded her of his brother John.  He had recognised himself as the prodigal son, and felt forgiven, by what he called “the life force” and what she called “God”, and he was now willing to forgive whatever life delivered to him.  Having accepted himself, James was able to accept aspects of other people which had previously horrified him.  He was determined to discover value in each one of them.

He continued to communicate with Ken in the specialist language palaeontology, and with David in the language of social networks.  He had long conversations on evolution with both of them, but he no longer wanted to possess them (as a car enthusiast might want to possess an Aston Martin).  He would like to have persuaded them of the rightness of his new beliefs; but was satisfied to admire each of them as wonderful pieces of engineering.  He gave them his full attention, and delighted in the conversation, but he no longer wanted to control it.

With Peter he learnt to appreciate medieval iconography, not as a language, but as an emotional response to certain images, especially images of redemption and new life.  With George he came to see Surrealism as a natural progression of the Pre-Raphaelites.  He could not explain this in rational argument, but felt it deep in his soul.  He told his brother: “They have within their beings visual resources, sufficient to cope with life, with an inner wealth that comes into their paintings and poems, when they are needed.

He also saw that their gifts came with an equivalence of suffering in heart and mind: an utterly senseless and malignant darkness.  They suffered without knowing why, and he could not explain in pictures, the marvellous balance and perspective he perceived in their lives.  Instead he accepted that suffering, as a part of their lives, which brought forth the courage, insight and compassion for which he valued their art.

He did not dissemble with Odessa.  They had had a relationship of logic and argument, when they first met, as they both had the academic background.  But he now saw the darkness in her life, and the way she dealt with it through music and dance.  Rationally he knew that 90% of all communication is by posture and body language.  In Bosnia he had felt it was another language he had to learn so that he could avoid giving false messages.  But with Odessa they just allowed the music to flow through them, expressing exuberance, enthusiasm, even happiness.  They charged their bodies with Endorphins, in preparation for the day ahead.

Collette would now greet him with an unexpected hug or a kiss, instead of the previously formal handshake.  There was nothing sexual in this.  She simply recognised that James had experienced the death of his past.  He had been “born again”, in her terms, and thus understood that one form of communication can be transformed into another.  The “Damascus Road” had brought him back to England, and taken away his desire to travel.  He had set out to “persecute” war (to bring peace) but had had a vision of the war within himself, and now accepted war as part of the necessary darkness.  He still thought in the old dialectic way, to which culture had programmed him, but he felt the unity of Ying and Yang, and laughed at his thoughts.

As a student of Anthropology he had studied “Joking Relationships” whereby people who must not become sexually involved with each other, make fun of each other to maintain a social distance.  But now he had come to laugh at his old self, at all his pretentious “knowledge”, loving himself, “warts and all”; he was able to laugh also at all those he cared about.  This laughter was “a vision of heaven” in Collette’s terms, a picture of each person’s ability to be transformed.

Thus he laughed at the thought of Jack’s gesticulations.  Jack’s absurd histrionic performance; acting in place of rational conversation, about the weather.  James learnt to respond to the melodrama of the role, giving Jack space to be the thespian that Nature intended.  This lifted their relationship above the mundane.

With Susan and Iris, James spoke in the language of reminiscence and dreams.  Not as abstract psychoanalytic theory, which Susan would have enjoyed, but as raw experience, as if they were telling stories to each other, aware that the other was interpreting everything they said according to some theory, some book of symbols, some archetype taken from Jung or the Tang Dynasty.  They did not use each other as a sounding board.  There was no reflecting back, just a delight in alternative ideas, in lateral thinking, in being open to new discernment.

As Collette said: “Jesus was an extremist: cut out your eye if it leads you to sin, give away all that you have, forgive for ever, choose death and remain silent in front of your accusers.  We learn most from those who are most different from ourselves.  That is why God took me to India and why God took you to Bosnia.”  James laughed at this, because he knew the people in Bosnia were most like him, in their desperation, in their sin, in their pain.  The strangers were the people he had known for years, his friends, with whom he was at last learning to communicate.

Writers’ Moments

Odessa’s essays for the social work course, were, from the beginning, political tracts, calling government to account, and urging “them” to do what needed to be done, to liberate the masses. Every word was committed to changing the reader’s mind about the world in which they lived.  The sorrows of the world were on her shoulders and she wrote, as if she had experienced each one herself, without sentiment, like a child, observant:  the endless rain filling the shallow graves, dug by those about to be shot.

The discussion at the Vicarage, led David to write in a new way.  Previously he had kept brief biographical notes on each of the hundreds of people he knew; concentrating on their relationships with each other.  But now, he became anxious about the young, the next generation, who had no knowledge of the church, and regarded him as an old man, whose race was run.  Some admired him, but all preferred the companionship of other young people.  He issued a strip cartoon: “The Hoodies”: which pictured the Robin Hood activities of a group of faceless youths, in their struggles with the police, drug gangs and the media.  It began as a website, read mainly by reformers, who praised it in the Guardian; and by the police, who kept it under surveillance as a potential paedophile contact point.   But, when David paid some young people to plaster the pages of cartoons on street corners, the tabloids and TV gave it space, and a cult was born.  The police started to keep David under surveillance.

Peter kept a notebook filled with sketches and watercolours, always accompanied by words, as if language were a canvass or painted curtain, blowing in the immaterial, unknowable wind.  Words and pictures were usually of real, recognisable things, which he would later translate, through fancy and caprice, into abstract paintings, representing the depth of the impression.  His notebooks were like photo albums with Peter as the camera.  His paintings were like video, showing a whole situation, a series of related scenes.

Susan was very uncomfortable writing or even talking about her experiences in the Congo.  She felt protective of the people there.  Many had seen their reflections in water rather than mirrors.  They remained suspicious of photographers and few had seen themselves on film.  She felt they needed to become conscious of their own reflections, and write about their own lives, before they became fodder for outside observers.  Their tribalism might or might not be the cause of the civil war, but it was still theirs; still a protective skin against the lonely, detached, loss of identity offered by “Development”.  So she kept a journal about her own feelings, whenever she was free.  This secret life enabled Susan to cope with the horrors she saw.  But her lack of vulnerability further separated her from Jack, even when she returned to England.

As a young man Martin dreamt of devoting himself to literature and constantly wrote to his mother about it; but when he gave up social work, it was to set up a business, and when that failed, he sought an academic career:  writing to censor the writings of others.  But when he read about Japan: tourist propaganda and religious tracts; he was driven by desire for escape and for belonging.  He flowed through the turgid prose on some underground stream.

Jane had the novelist’s fascination with behaviour and relationships, not as part of a pattern, but for their own sake.  She consumed a new novel almost everyday of her adult life.  Those with something to say usually provoked her.  She wanted to contradict what was said, so she slipped quickly to the end, refusing to be drawn into detailed scrutiny.  Jane had little need for friends, because she had met the most amazing people, shared the heights and depths of their lives, all within the covers of books.

James copied out striking memorable or witty sentences or phrases into his notebook.  Such quotations were then woven into the cloth of his novels.  He called it “grafting”.  He even ticked them in his notebooks when they had been threaded into his stories.  “Thus I conserve a waterfall in a thimble.”

Collette always said that she would write about her experience, but life was always to full for more than brief practical Emails.  So James became her Boswell.  He would happily have Boswelled for others, but their busyness was closed to his curiosity.  They had no time, sympathy or desire to explain their lives to him.

Stephen dismissed novels, as amusement for the idle and illiterate, those who cannot appreciate science.  “Novelists are complacent egoists, who should be driven into the wilderness, for their own good.  What people consume it usually what controls them.  Novels, news and nicotine, are all equally harmful.  Only science can liberate, by giving people the tools to understand their world.”  Stephen saw himself as popularising science – he wrote racy, argumentative books about Evolution, his own area of interest, but he had no grasp of physics, maths or large areas of chemistry and animal behaviour.

John wrote in a simple, everyday way about complex mathematical developments in Statistics, Electronics, Particle-Physics, Sociology and Marine Biology.  His articles were legion in all the best academic journals.  But he never wrote specifically for the public, only for other specialists.  He had no general theory, no plan for discovering one.  Like a schoolboy, he was delighted to prove that this was related to that in such a way, that no-one else had noticed.

Dickon understood most of John’s articles.  They were straightforward, and Dickon was very clever.  He only ever wrote musical notes and maths symbols: words were of no interest to him; but everyone who met him wrote about him, as if they had received all his possessions, ideas and works of art.  Thus Dickon gave himself to all creatures, turning a curse into a power.

Sammy started writing as a record of Dickon’s life: recording his height, weight, first words, comical/clever sayings and doings.  But she soon started noting news items.  News seemed to her urgent, like Dickon’s hunger, wind and nappy needs, demanding a response.  But when she became excited by some desperate need in the world, she soon became frustrated, powerless.  So instead, she recorded the weather and natural things she saw when she was out with the push chair: the number of blackbirds, the arrival of swallows, bats seen at dusk, species of dragonfly.  Shadows glimpsed from the corner of her eye became central to her writing.

Dickon understood most of John’s articles.  They were straightforward, and Dickon was very clever.  He only ever wrote musical notes and maths symbols: words were of no interest to him; but everyone who met him wrote about him, as if they had received all his possessions, ideas and works of art.  Thus Dickon gave himself to all creatures, turning a curse into a power.

Sammy started writing as a record of Dickon’s life: recording his height, weight, first words, comical/clever sayings and doings.  But she soon started noting news items.  News seemed to her urgent, like Dickon’s hunger, wind and nappy needs, demanding a response.  But when she became excited by some desperate need in the world, she soon became frustrated, powerless.  So instead, she recorded the weather and natural things she saw when she was out with the push chair: the number of blackbirds, the arrival of swallows, bats seen at dusk, species of dragonfly.  Shadows glimpsed from the corner of her eye became central to her writing.

John wrote in a simple, everyday way about complex mathematical developments in Statistics, Electronics, Particle-Physics, Sociology  and Marine Biology.  His articles were legion in all the best academic journals.  But he never wrote specifically for the public, only for other specialists.  He had no general theory, no plan for discovering one.  Like a schoolboy, he was delighted to prove that his was related to that in such a way, that no-one else had noticed.

Forest Time 18  Roger Breaks the China

Dickon thinks I am a bull.  He doesn’t know I’m a veggie.  Bad for business if it got about.  But I believe eating meat made me a beast.  I am more self-controlled now.  Not polluted.  Dickon’s too young to understand.

I really like animals.  I believe a local butcher should be sourced by local producers.  I visit the farms and see the animals in the fields.  I have a steer in my freezer now.  He was called “leggy” on the farm.  He had gangly legs.  A sweet vulnerable creature.  I could happily keep Dickon as a pet.  He has long gangly legs.

I never felt animosity to the Iraqis.  I killed thousands in the dessert.  I saw them in the streets of their hometown.  They were weak fragile men; totally unsuited to fighting.  But, wrapped in explosives, they were as dangerous as a guided missile.

It was the same with George.  He had no idea of his power over women:  his pre-Raphaelite fragility; his pale skin; his sentimental passion; always on the edge of tears; what was my macho power in competition to that?  I had to sort him out before he blew up my relationship.  Ironic that we had been together up the mountain.  I often think of that trip.

It is the same with James.  Every time I see him, I recall pushing him from the climbing frame.  How can I apologise?  He doesn’t even know it was me.  I would have landed like a cat.  Been back up the frame, before he had time to crow.  He fell like a pudding.  How was I to know?   I guess that was why I was willing to be part of the campaign to free him.  Although I had not intended to get arrested.  It’s just automatic.  Years in the army.  You learn to defend yourself.

Then there was Jane.  I used to go round and shoot rabbits in their garden.  She thought I was wonderful.  James is so idealistic, so impractical.  She once said I was the one person she would feel “safe” with on a desert island.  She meant I have the survival skills to cope.  But she was “safe” in another way.  I have seduced many women, but I could not hurt James like that.  Would I have resisted if she flung herself at me?  I will never know.  She is too much of a lady.

The Euro election has provided a new start fro me.  As a war hero, the UKIP party were pleased to get hold of me as their lead candidate.  My work makes me very aware of how other parties have allowed Europe to ruin British farming and squeeze our British food.  There used to be five butchers in my home town.  Now mine is the only one; with John Bull wearing a union jack apron, stood outside my shop, it is pretty clear where I stand.

But now the other parties want me to join in this alliance against the BNP.  James says fighting fascism is high priority for the Unions, but most of the working men I know are worried about losing their jobs to migrant labour and angry that the main parties do nothing about it. 

Stephen says the coalition is a Labour ploy, as their voters are more likely to go BNP than voters for the other parties.  He says the Cons. only joined from fear of being seen as supporting BNP.  Deirdre says the Libdems are more worried about losing votes to the Greens, but by dragging the Greens into the alliance, they hope to weaken their claim to radicalism.  David says the Greens feel they have nothing to prove, as they are so far left. 

People like Jack would never vote BNP, because they would never bother to vote.  But if all the parties make a big fuss, Jack might realise that the BNP represents his views and then he might vote for them.  Excluding the unemployed from democracy, seems to be the objective of the campaign.

As I said, I really like animals.  That is why I am breeding Rottweilers.  I know what Iris says.  She thinks I am still 17.  Like when we met.  Then I thought violence was sexy.  It seemed to turn her on when I was aggressive.  Other women to.  But that was before Iraq.  I could never be violent to a dog.  And I certainly don’t need dogs to protect me.

They got up a petition in the village against my dogs.  I think Janet was behind that.  Just ‘cause I live opposite an infant school.  No-one trains a dog as well as me.  I think that’s why Isobel left.  Not the dogs: she loves dogs.  It was the petition.  Did her head in.

Peter sorted it in the end.  He could see how I was without Isobel.  I couldn’t remember my lines for the Foresters.  He knows everyone.  Ironically, I had thought Isobel was having an affair with Peter.  Well he charms them all.  And I knew about his problems with Deirdre.

Peter arranged a meeting in the church-hall, with Janet and some other born-again busybodies.  I did a demonstration with the Rotties: roll over, beg, play dead, run round in circles and so on.  The audience loved it.  Wanted me to join the PCC as security.  Stop the vandalism. I promised to walk past the village hall at night.  Janet even gets her meat from me now.  Used to go to Waitrose.  Not that she buys much.

First night I find Jack shooting up in the churchyard.  He thought it was that three headed dog from Hell.  He started bowing down to me.  I took the chance.  Told him never to take drugs again.  Doubt if it will work.  But it made me think.  I hate drugs.  If druggies are into Satanism, perhaps I should be into God!

Not Janet’s padre-style establishment mumbo jumbo.  No I want the real thing.  So I went to Collette’s mission; guitars and arm waving and real passion.  And who do I find in the back row?  She had been staying with Odessa, but the atheism was too hot.  So I got Isobel back.  Result.

The Self-Sufficient Moment

James feels his abilities are worthless.  He devoted years to trying to do his own plastering, roofing, plumbing, woodwork, glazing etc.  He found he was pretty hopeless at all of them, so he returned to paid employment and paid other people to do the work for him.  The more effectively they did the work, the more inferior he felt.

Because he was working so much away from home, he had less time to work on the garden, so it started to look neglected.  Jane thought they should employ a gardener.

This looked like the end of the road for James.  The end of that delight in doing things for yourself, no matter how inadequately.  Jane thought it was just a preparation for old age, when other people would wash them and feed them and take them to the toilet: just like servants did for aristocrats in the past, regardless of their ability to do things for themselves.

In contrast, John can put up a gate, cut glass to size, programme a computer.  For him, every household task is straightforward.  But, he is happy to let others do these things, so that he can work on some obscure theoretical construct, which only a few dozen people in the world will understand.

In India, Collette gets a marble kitchen put in with no planning permission, no health and safety regulations.  Work done by illiterate men with no qualifications or training, producing for pence what would cost anyone in the west thousands of pounds.  She is worried that the men do not wear masks in the clouds of marble dust, that they carry huge weights and take enormous risks.  She is worried that no-one seems to know what they are doing and everyone takes ages to complete a job.  But the kitchen gets finished, beautifully, and no-one is hurt, and she thanks God.

Iris has always been dependent on others.  She makes them feel that she is doing them a huge favour by allowing them to care for her.  But she does feel self-sufficient in the kitchen: where she can produce amazing meals with basic ingredients, and feed dozens as easily as a couple.  For her it is part of the nourishment role of motherhood, and has nothing to do with self-sufficiency.

Likewise Dickon is wholly happy with the animals, who would provide for his every need.  They delight in doing whatever he asks, and he would not want anything which they cannot provide.  He is able to be independent of the rest of the human race, but he would not call this self-sufficiency.  For him it is just natural.

In his youth, Richard had tried to be self-sufficient in his Irish cottage, with its acres of rich vegetables.  He had never succeeded, but his dependence on both Catholics and Protestants, did bring some peace to that border village.

For Jack, drugs were his independence from the world.  Despite his exceptionally high IQ and incredible computer knowledge, he never exercised his skills to support himself.  Instead, he used dependency to test those around him.  Those who helped him, benefited from his abilities.

Jeanette struggled to get people like Jack to live independently.  She commissioned services, insisting that there grants should be dependent on their success in moving people like Jack on to profitable employment.  She ran the “Supporting People” government scheme for combating homelessness; convinced that everyone could become a functioning member of society if only they were correctly directed through the system.  She could not imagine that people might wish to be independent of the system, or that the system needed to change, to become more like Jack.

Stephen laughed long at “do-it-yourself”, imagining untrained brain surgeons or school leavers running a space programme.  But he was fine with mental self-sufficiency when he was stuck in a lift, or traffic jam.  His brain had huge fields of memory to search through and interconnect, without any recourse to those around him.

Roger had survived alone in remote places. Desert or jungle or the middle of the ocean it made no difference.  But leave him in a group at a dinner party, and he was helpless as a child, lacking all social skills.  Susan had rescued him more than once.  She knew that those who seem most comfortable in society, most able to cope with all the backbiting and hidden conflict, are often the most vulnerable.  Whilst Roger, who seemed to flounder, was actually impregnable: because his ideas all came from lived experience.  She was always looking for the genius, the outsider, who might transform the group, from its narcissism to an outward looking, open perspective.  Someone who could take them away from self-sufficiency.

Tom had a need to conquer women, which was like his need to conquer markets.  He did not need women emotionally, anymore than he needed money.  But he did need to feel his power over others.  At least till he met the adult Iris, when he became as vulnerable as most fathers, dependent upon their daughter’s whims.

When Odessa returned to her homeland to take over an inherited country property, she loved the isolation and peace of the countryside.  But she was never wholly there, for she had the capacity to be in several places, several different time zones, at the same moment.  She was in the cottage of her childhood with her grandparents; and in the cottage as it now was; but also in her city flat.  She was in the planning of future events and the settling of past musicians into a more comfortable present.

Martin in Japan was not self-sufficient through martial arts, nor Buddhism, nor Shinto; but, by interpreting Japan to the West, he became controversial.  He became well-paid, but he also became isolated and lonely.  This for him was self-sufficiency.

Ken produced some research to suggest that self-consciousness was an Evolutionary dead-end.  It was like the male nipple, a left over from increased cognitive efficiency, which served no function in itself.  In fact consciousness was preventing the human race from functioning according to the iron rule of Nature: Boom and Bust.  Humans were favouring the weak, rather than those fittest to survive, so that when they made the planet uninhabitable for the current huge numbers (as other species did repeatedly on a smaller scale), the ones left would be the least able to survive.  They would be Martins and Jameses, not Rogers and Dickons.

From not needing people most of her life, because of her capacity to live outside her body, Pat had become a Guru.  She was teaching the skill to others.  This made her feel powerful.  She had lost weight and become healthier.  She was less able to get outside her body, and increasingly dependent, addicted to the adulation of her followers.

The Moment of Regret

David was riding his electric bike.  He liked to peddle, to keep warm in winter, but enjoyed the option of allowing Green energy to carry him along.  Suddenly it came to him: “I really do love Janet”.

The social network he had developed, by establishing one intimate friend in each of the contrary groups to which he belonged: one close communist comrade, one firm fraternal fascist, one eager evangelical, one positivist pal, one atavistic atheist, one matey monetarist, one amiable anarchist and so on.  His social network flooded him with contrary information, conflicting demands and brilliant opportunities for cross fertilisation and conflict resolution.  It was an exciting and demanding life, full of sound, fury and signifiers.

He felt, in the peaceful moments, between challenging meetings, that the confrontations continued within his own mind.  But he also felt the deeper peace, which he carried with him into those meetings:  the peace that comes from being able to see both sides of the argument and appreciate the good qualities of all the people in conflict. 

He was usually enjoying these moments of peace when he was with Janet.  So, no romance, no sweet talk, not even and erection.  She thought he was probably just too old, and she did not really mind.  Sex had never amounted to much.  Religion gradually filled all her longings.  David was a good provider, never hurtful and full of interesting stories from his network.

But now, on the bicycle, it all came back to him.  Those languid evenings, sat opposite each other like a couple of fire dogs, each reading.  Sometimes a conversation.  Usually each lost in a world of their own.  “All those nights we could have been making love.”

Of course she was a very handsome woman.  The bold laughing mouth, the long powerful legs, the well proportioned breasts.  And she was twenty years younger.

But she was also a foot taller and their occasional attempts at sex had been disastrous.  So much, so desirable, so close and so unobtainable.  He used to think that failure in bed had led to their largely silent evenings, which in turn gave him the chance to develop his complex network.  It took several evenings a week to plan his many contacts and arrange meetings so that he balanced out the yin and yang of those close to him.

But now, on the bike, he knew that it was the reverse: the network provided the peace, which prevented the sex.  Suddenly he was content.  He realised he loved Janet for living her own life, for being herself, for spending her evenings with him, for enjoying his stories, but mainly for sharing his peace.  She gave him the strength to continue.  Sex would have been amazing, but it would have distracted him from his life’s work: the challenge of a low density network of close ties.

The Moment of Revelation

For Stephen this came just after breakfast, as an evening vision would have been dismissed as tiredness induced hallucination.   He was in the middle of a routine task, as ideas occurring when the brain is excited are always suspect.  The task was a scientific experiment to measure anti-matter depletion through nuclear waste, so there was everything to keep god, or even anti-god, thoughts clear of his brain.

But there, in the laboratory, was a Middle Eastern fisherman with stigmata, telling him, in Cambridge scientific English, that the time had come to pick up his cross and follow God.  It seemed to Stephen that the man had always been there, waiting.  But now the man was in his thoughts.  The man existed now and would continue to exist as long as Stephen could think.

Afterwards Stephen would explain that nothing less would have convinced him.  He had just spearheaded the TV adverts: “No God: no Stress” and “Science brings Heaven on Earth”.  Ironically the graphics were inspired by David’s “Hoodies” comic strip.  God had a dark hood, like the Emperor in Star Wars, whilst the scientists had bright coloured hoods, representing diversity.  “It was a spear in his side, and now he was beside me.”

Stephen had brooded. It was a failing.  He knew it would break him one day.  A scientist must not dwell on the folly of mankind.  They see miracle, where there are rational explanations.  He had been distracted from research to reach out to the populace, to lead them from the darkness of superstition.  It had been an obsession which led him to a bleak view of most humans as hopeless savages, doomed to ignorance.  Had his brooding broken him?  Led to this hallucination?  Was he mad?

At the same time he knew that the one thing which always kept him sane was his certainty that life was hard and elemental.  He had seen suicide and felt the misery of it.  He blamed God, for God created the world and laid down the rules, as part of Nature, so all such suffering was the will of God.  This argument gave him joy.  There was no enlightenment, no civilisation, no progress, and no mercy; because God had made things that way.

Such brooding had kept him going through much worse times, so brooding  was hardly likely to create a vision of an all loving carpenter, suffering servant.  Such a concept was foreign to his definition of God.  The definition had allowed him total rejection.  He had become famous for it.  He was the celebrity atheist.  And now this carpenter wanted to saw all that away; and rebuild him as a celebrity convert.

“Evils will pass away, like distress in the nursery, for I am with you.  Trust me, especially when life hurts, when there is failure, for then you will share my pain and be filled with compassion.”

Stephen was not used to plain speech.  He tried to make a joke about Darwin.  He offered the carpenter a choice of tea.  “Terrible cold weather, would you like a pullover”.  He was frantic to normalise the situation, although his visitor was neither disconcerted nor embarrassed

Stephen thought: “perhaps it is a hologram from a superior race of aliens”, but immediately dismissed that as real madness.  For a moment he ceased striving to understand.  Whatever it was, it was unique in his experience.  He must remember it, like a strange dream, and record every detail, when he awoke. 

The music rose up in his soul, all his experience came together.  He felt eternity, as you feel sunshine.  “If I hadn’t believed it with my will, I would have forgotten the moment.  All our knowledge begins in experience, through our senses.  Only from them can we take our notions of reality.  The vision was the start of new knowledge for me.”

 

Forest Time 19  George Carries us into the Past

Remember where we are all coming from.  Peter and I started as a team, pretending we were the new Pre-Raphaelites, passing as artists from an earlier age.  We became famous because we seemed so out of fashion, in the 60s that despised and lived off fashion.  We were quickly rated as genius.  What seemed to them the result of reading and study was chiefly spontaneous and intuitive.

Stephen and Ken were the cutting edge of Atomic Physics and micro botany.  They were our friends because our ideas were incomprehensible to each other.  We loved music and long country walks and drunken conversations through the night.

James visited me in the asylum, and made me believe I could live outside of it.  Staying with him in the country, gave me back my fondness for laughter, for chattering and asking endless questions.  He is my only friend now.  His brother John is a God, beyond reach, as Collette is a Goddess.  They have clean thoughts, independent of their obsessions.

The others have all persecuted me, one way or another.  Iris betrayed me.  Roger beat me up and stole my girl.  Martin sectioned me and left me to rot.  Bridget treats me like a fool.  Deirdre stole Peter from me.  Sammy took Ken.  David tried to manipulate my life, but saw it was impossible and gave up.  Even Janet is embarrassed by me.  Susan tried to analyse me.  At least Jane keeps me at a distance, neither good nor bad.  The list is endless of those who would destroy me.

I thought Pat would understand me.  Mental illness has ruined both our lives.  I have had to withdraw  so much from the world, I live so much in the past that the people I really care about are all long dead.  Pat said she could cope with a “steady orderly need” but that mine was so “greedy and clutching”.  We see our own faults reflected in others’ lives.

I never knew my father.  I grew up in his shadow.  The great war-hero, who had sacrified so much for his country.  He married late and died at 50, when I was two.  My mother always spoke of him in hushed tones and said I would grow up to be just like him.  My older sister loved to point at my failures with “Dad would never have done that”.  Not that she could remember him anymore than me, (She was only five) but she made it up.

By his death, my father was frozen in a few eternal moments.  Mostly photos of him in uniform, sometimes in front of “his” ship.  I thought he was the captain (turned out to be the third officer).  Also frozen in mother’s stories, which were often repeated at bedtime: how the handsome prince met mother at a T dance; memories of the “royal wedding”; how the “three little pigs” (my sister was known as “bump” or “third pig”) looked at a straw house (thatched cottage), wood house (clapperboard in Kent) but settled for a brick house.  There was a huge elm tree in the garden and rhododendrons to hide in.

I suppose it was the search for my father that led me to quiz Tom about his life in the Navy.  I thought I would like five wives.  But Tom was always after something and would make up stories he thought I wanted to hear.  I was convinced my father would never have done that.  But Tom still managed to borrow money from me.  I only got to know Virginia after mother died.  They were very alike.  They loved to cook for a group of people, but never bothered when on their own.  Virginia was from the potteries and very northern, whereas my mother was a Londoner.

James is always banging on about global warming or loss of human rights, or destruction of our heritage.  But my life is all behind me, the things of this world will soon matter to me no more.  What then if time sweeps away all record of what I can remember?  I shall not see it.  Nothing keeps me from suicide: neither fear of an afterlife, nor anything good in this life.  But dying easily is only for those who have lived well.

I still sometimes imagine myself as my father or as Biggles, but my imagination is usually in the Civil Wars, fighting for Cromwell (James) against the handsome Charles I (Roger).  I rescue my mother from the Tower, and watch helplessly whilst my sister is burnt as a witch.  I behead Archbishop Laud (Janet).  Van Dyke (Peter) paints my portrait and I elope with Nell Gwyn (Iris).  At Putney I debate with Lilburn (Odessa).

 Then I lead the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World and marry Collette.  Collette eternally vigilant against sin and temptation; dutifully striving towards perfection.  She keeps her nose too close to the moral grindstone, but it is such a pretty nose.  I would smoke with Raleigh (Richard) on the Spanish Main.  After making my fortune in sugar in the West Indies, without using slaves, I would bring Pochohantos (Sammy) from the New World as a gift to Milton (Ken).

Back in England I would run the navy with Samuel Pepys (Martin):  (A husband under the command of his wife is contemptible.  Nobody can place reliance on him.  No agreement is sacred, no bargain firm.  Such a man is mean and despicable, even to the beggars at his door.  I thought he would have drowned himself long since, but now he has a Samurai sword and lives in Japan.)   Stephen and Ken invite me to join the Royal Society, where Newton (John) has just discovered the Applemac! 

Yes, if they had lived in my seventeenth century romance, the wicked would have been laid low and the good raised up.  But could I escape the long shadow of my father?

The Moment of Love

It had never been as honourable as love.  He just wanted her, sensually, passionately.  As George looked at Collette across the soup bowls, he listened with delight to the music of her voice.  He knew that what she said did not matter to him, if only she would carry on talking for ever.

She was telling him how she had been forced to take over teaching at the school in India, because of the incompetence of the teachers they had employed.  Her teaching method was high on discipline, whilst he was a libertarian.  The content would be faith and fundamentalist creationism, whilst he was an atheist, who honoured Darwin and welcomed all the advances of science.

He found no choice.  He either looked deeply into her eyes, slipping hypnotically through the perfect blue, to bathe in warm waters like joyful children; or he watched her mouth and gave way to the fantasy of running his tongue gently over her teeth.  The sensuality of their closeness filled him with longing.  Then their knees knocked together beneath the table, sending a thrill up his spine and a corresponding fear that she might recognise his love was more than Platonic.

She was telling him of the dreadful evangelist who had wanted to anoint everyone with oil and gave her no peace.  (And George wanted to massage her body with oil.)  The evangelist wanted her to take him to a village service, when her husband was dying.  (George wished she had gone.)   But she had taken her husband to hospital and he had made a full recovery.  He had malaria, and no-one had diagnosed it, because they were running a faith healing mission.  But God noticed, and forced Collette to notice and she now had malaria testing kit and medication (and George wished God had kept his nose out, and he found himself believing in God and realising that his atheism was hatred of God, not lack of faith.)

Collette explained that she knew it was wrong to feel so much for another human being, as she felt for her husband (as George felt for her), but that God had used that love to bring practical medical help to the mission: “without that experience of whole hearted love for another, we cannot learn to love God.  My love was stunted before the moment when I was wiling to surrender everything for my husband.”  (And George felt he would surrender everything for her, right there and then, over the soup.)

Now she was eating her soup and he had the opportunity to say something profound, to impress her and draw her towards him.  So he told her about the “Opportunity of Spring”.  How the flowers can be seen for the first time, after the bleakness of winter, as if they had never been seen before:  the revelation of natural variation. 

He told her about Donne’s daffodil poem: “At the four corners of the round earth, blow your trumpets angels” (and she smiled at the daffodils on the table).  He told her how eager Donne was for judgement day, till the last line: “but not yet”; (and she warmed to his honesty, seeing the inner meaning of what he said.)

So he told her that was what poets do.  “They show you something new using words you have heard a thousand times.  They hold your hand on the edge of the abyss, so that you can look over the edge, whilst sitting safely at home.”  George held her hand.  It was only for a moment, but she did not pull away.

He felt loved in that moment.  Not the hope of lovemaking that he usually felt when a woman held his hand.  George knew there was no hope of that.  Collette was happily married, and he was old, too old.  Marriage is for life, love is a moment of ecstasy.  The love that flowed from her was like a charge of electricity, just using her body as a conduit to reach him.  For that moment, he felt transformed, beyond the reach of time, perfect.

And if that moment never recurred, it was still sufficient to protect him against cynicism, against scoffing at the impossible experiences of others.  He did not decide to change: he was changed.

It was as if he had flung himself at her knees, like a faithful animal and felt her hand touch his hair absently.  He had felt her fear: the fear of the female of any species before the male.  But she had accepted him, on behalf of God.  He had felt the divine: the transcending power, which blots out individual differences.  

The Morphic Moment

The engine ran almost normally at full revs but conked out, when he reduced the throttle.  James was recovering from a bout of flu.  He found it hard to get out of bed in the morning.  Dressing was a major challenge, and sitting at his desk was a constant struggle against sleep.  But if he pushed himself to chop logs or dig the garden, he soon felt normal again.  As soon as he stopped he went back to sleep.

Richard sorted the engine for him.  It needed a new pump to inject the fuel at the low revs, as the old pump had seized up.  Ken suggested that James’ heart might have been damaged by the flu, so that his body only functioned at high revs.  The doctor could find no evidence of heart malfunction.

At home the electricity was fluctuating.  It did not go off altogether, but sometimes there was not enough to run the radio, although the light came on.  It took twenty minutes for the kettle to boil, and a one kilowatt fire was right out.  James sat in his chair, fully in harmony with the low voltage.

The morphic moment began much earlier in life, when he had hip problems as a child.  Walking had been difficult, pain suffered, surgery endured, and always in the back of his mind an old age of declining mobility.  So he noticed every creature that suffered similarly.  There was the hopping pheasant, the horses with laminitis, the cows with hoof problems, and the animals born with deformities, which made walking difficult.  Naturally he delighted in the survival of the pheasant and hated it when the lame creature was “put down” to prevent further suffering.  He related to every puncture and delighted in the repair of bike, bus or tractor.  Para-olmypics were really important.  Some days, in a busy street, it felt as if everyone had a slight limp.

James was “acquainted with grief”.  But it was not only suffering that enabled him to resonate with the universe.  He was not an original thinker, but he could understand what was said by the cleverest people.  That understanding came in a rush, when the fog lifted and everything became precise, clear.  The day after listening to a lecture by Stephen, James could not explain what had been said, for there was too much to remember.  Yet, for a moment, when listening, he not only grasped the whole thing, he actually experienced the thrill of insight, which Stephen felt, when the theory first clicked into place in his mind.  Thus when James spoke with his brother, his mind was overwhelmed with a rush of new concepts.  It was like being Shakespeare or Beethoven in those moments of sublime innovation.

Unlike his brother, James lived in his emotions, not his mind.  Sitting in the sun was preferable to chippings of genius; and he would rather feel the heat and dust of India through conversation with Collette, than struggle with Ken through the evolution of pollen grains.  In fact he needed the hours alone in his garden when he could sing along with the birds, or feel himself glide on thermals, resting from human emotions,.  For even the noblest are exhausting, lacking the serenity of other species.

Occasionally he could enjoy the mass emotion of a political demonstration, or concert or football match.  As long as he felt the unified purpose of the gathering, all was well.  Yet there was always a background noise, a phoneme firing, as he experienced something of the personal lives of those closest to him.  This was interference in his reception, as when the T.V. picture depixilates.  He started to break up as his consciousness was drawn in many different directions at once.

Just as some people are able to have complex conversations in a crowded room, when dozens of others are talking, so James struggled to absorb the essence of the person next to him.  He hated missing out on emotions, emanating from those close by, which tantalised and tempted him.  But to allow full morph seemed unfaithful to the person he was with.  Children and mentally distressed people with their sudden shifts of mood and intensity of experience were especially distracting, when he was attempting to penetrate the onion-skin defences of a pillar of the establishment.

James admired Bridget’s singular devotion to a computer programme.  She avoided distraction of other programmes.  It was a bit like Pat’s ability to leave her body: total avoidance of the distractions of being embodied.  For James found it much easier to morph into someone, if there was physical contact, if they actually touched him.  He would drop suddenly from the intellectual, the public, into the physical, into the private hidden world of the other.  The delicious simplicity of the transformation, more intimate than sex, more total than any other form of knowledge.

He knew that most people were really seeking this kind of morphic knowledge, when they entered into risky conversations with strangers, or had sex with people they did not really like.  They knew that if they could get inside the other’s subjectivity, they would be able to love them, to burn with their zest for life, and be ready for all kinds of new experiences.  Sex was not degrading, not a vice, just so often a failure of empathy lacking the spiritual significance.  Sensual pleasure aroused James’ morphic ability, because it led on to a sense of the beauty of the person, and a mystical unity with them.

No wonder Jane worried about him.

Forest Time 20  - David Flies around the World

As the world jolted towards intolerance, I felt my dream fade.  My dream was of a society in which everyone maximised the diversity of their close friends.  (Everyone should set out to get to know people most different from themselves.)  This was being replaced by the homogeneity of close friends.  People wanted to be with those who shared their values and interests and to exclude everyone else from their personal lives. 

I tried to persuade activists and Bishops to concentrate on unmet issues raised by ordinary people.  Instead, these close-knit groups wanted to take the moral high ground, and condemn the BNP for supporting popular prejudices.  Thus the establishment, already pilloried for corruption, drew attention to the BNP, and gave them the support of unhappy people, who would otherwise not have bothered to vote.  The Euro-election was inevitably the beginning of the end for the multi-cultural, tolerant Establishment.

Meanwhile, in china, Iris, let me know what was really happening.  Apparently their techno-wizardry is at last coming to the fore.  They are recycling their pollutants, and harvesting power from the four elements (a return to traditional Chinese values).  Production lines are changing from luxury items for the Western sales, to the production of tools for permaculture and recycling.  All this made possible by the collapse of the banking system and the rise to power of a generation sickened by materialism and dedicated to science.

Naturally I am quite cynical about Iris’ optimism, having lived through my own enthusiasm for Maoism and the Cultural Revolution.  We were the class of ’68 and we also believed that young people could change the world.  Being young never suited me.  I felt ill at ease with it, as though I was wearing someone else’s clothes.  The more I have to look back on the happier I am.  It is only when you look at the trees you planted in your youth, that you realise that you are lost in a forest.

Reports from Martin in Japan, fit snugly with my cynical mind.  His involvement with the military class there suggests that paranoia about North Korea’s nuclear capability is leading to some wild and dangerous schemes.  Martin is as full of enthusiasm, as the young Englishmen who volunteered in 1914.

He believes it will provide an opportunity for him to prove his dedication as a Samurai warrior.  He wants his three daughters to remember him as a hero.  Most disturbingly he had invited his father-in-law, Tom, to visit him in Japan and broker connection with Tom’s mates in the BNP.  Tom is very excited by the idea of Geisha’s,  his catholic upbringing led him to blame Eve for the fall of man.  This is not a network link I would encourage, but I am now the only person in touch with both of them and feel I should monitor the new right for science.

Ken is still in great demand with the oil companies, spending most of his year in Indonesia.  I have encouraged his work with John on the evolution of forests and extinction of bird species.  Ken is necessary to John as Wallace was to Darwin, in forcing the collector to publish his great work.  It is like watching the build up of tension before a duel.  New words distract, books lead him away, ideas grip him, whilst music inspires.  Only the fear of losing everything can force John to concentrate.

Without Ken, John would fritter away his genius on projects with Janet or Odette.  I cannot complain, because I set up the contacts in the first place, because they needed scientific input,.  But once begun they are capable of continuing the work without, John’s support.  Odette has produced that wonderful exhibition on mental health, showing the great enlightenment that flooded European psychiatry 100 years ago, and was dissipated after a short time, by the Nazi extermination of the mentally ill.  Clearly our present enlightenment is just as fragile.  Odette showed the parallel between our response to mental illness and our response to music: dissonance as an indicator of oppression; human rights as a producer of blandness.  The exhibition had huge popularity in Iran and North Korea, but was ignored in London.

Janet was delighted to be involved in a great scientific project, but equally accepted that her parishioners must come first.  She has visited every house in the Parish, and made network charts (following my instructions) for each of those who were willing.  She is interested in bringing them together as a worshiping community, whilst I want her to follow the connections that link each parishioner to the wider world.  Deirdre’s husband does this instinctively, although he is not in the least interested in mapping social networks.  He delights in ritual and symbol uniting people across boundaries of language and culture; whilst Janet believes that can only be done by the action of the Spirit.

Collette was having problems with gangsters bringing in drugs to her village.  She persuaded the addicts, who all looked like walking skeletons, that “Jesus makes people fat”.   Because those who converted, were able to give up their addiction and then put on weight..  Thus in defence of her community she produced an idea that is travelling around the world.  She would not claim to have originated the idea, but simply to have followed the words God gave her to speak.

Keeping Time with Moments

Odessa had music in her genes, but she also had mania, so her problem was always keeping time.  When she worked with John, as part of the Anti-Psychiatry movement, there were moments when she was so far ahead of other people’s thinking; they could not understand what she was talking about.  They wanted therapists who would really listen to their problems.  She believed that if people really listened, those with mental distress would have their gifts recognised and would become leaders.  “Knowledge can never give pleasure unless it is shared with others.”

It was the same in her charity work, supporting professional musicians, who had fallen on hard times.  She just wanted people to listen to them play.  She had an expanding circle of friends and kept them informed of innovative concerts and gigs in London.  Eventually she was given an opportunity to arrange gigs for a number of venues, because the owners accepted that the groups she chose were on their way up and would soon be famous.  Such musicians are often grateful to those who gave them an opportunity to get started and will return when they are known.

When Stephen caught his leg with the chain saw, it was just bad timing.  His amazing memory might prevent any repeat of the accident, but it cannot guarantee to prevent other errors of timing.  Fundamentalism has always seemed to him the greatest threat to the future of science.  It required people to believe things which he felt had been disproved hundreds of years earlier.  “They must be people with no memory.”

But when he moved to a new laboratory and glass containers started to smash themselves on the floor, he started to read up on poltergeist.  He wanted to believe it was animal rights’ protestors, but the police could find no evidence of a break-in and none of the staff were in the room when the incidents occurred.  And then, one day he was in the lab. with a colleague, and they both saw a glass beaker rise off the bench and smash against a wall.  “You never know the state of a particle, until you have made an observation,” said Stephen.

Of course, even if there were poltergeist, there was no reason to believe in all the other nonsense taught by religious extremists.  But he had been distracted from his crusade.  He had heard a bird sing.

Bridget was disturbed by Stephen’s interest in Poltergeist.  It was so out of character.  It was also disturbing because she was having an internal struggle with her hormones.  Every time she saw a baby, she wanted to pick it up and nurse it.  Any child under five reminded her hormones that they were desperate to have children.

But computers don’t have children and Bridget was so dedicated to her professional life, at the interface with technology.  She tried to avoid seeing children.  She blanked them with her IPhone, her IPod, or her laptop.  But now, in the one place she felt safe, in the Lab., Stephen was talking about childhood development as a possible cause of Poltergeist.  She was happy to record every fact about Forestry on the database, but was distinctly uneasy about conducting parties of pre-school children around the Lab., to see if this increased poltergeist activity. 

This was vey bad timing for her ticking clock of maternal instinct.  She was also bereft of Iris, who wrote from China, that people there can continue to write, even when the centre of speech in their brain has been damaged by strokes.  Surely she would continue to be rational, despite her hormones?

Dickon had been one of the children.  He knew instinctively that wild creatures must be responded to with the right timing: too fast frightened them away; too slow and the moment passed.  He saw Bridget as just such a wild creature, needing encouragement to surrender her programming and release her maternal instinct.  Her brusque, rude determination to keep the children at a distance did not work on him.  (This was the same skill of timing that he later used with the terrorist kidnappers.)  A life that is only lived once is a shadow without weight.  Dickon knew that every moment recurs, until we get it right. 

It was like the moment when John’s Antarctic research had come out contradicting Bridget’s drug safety report.  At the time she had thought it had saved Stephen’s career.  Would she be so grateful to Dickon in a couple of year’s time, when she had a baby of her own?  That felt like being grateful to the sun’s sister for bringing clouds of comets into our solar system.  The sun’s sister circles the Sun and is called Nemesis. 

Bridget fantasised that she was in court defending Stephen who was in the dock.  The prosecuting barrister said: “My learned friend (i.e. Bridget) is unaware of the circumstances that Dickon will reveal.  A case of this kind has to be treated with extreme seriousness.  The accused takes life force away from experience, leaving only tragedy.  All our minds contain detail: names, places, events; but without a broader view of life, we are in danger of recalling only the most dreadful, painful, agonising moments.”

Bridget then imagines Virginia in the dock.  Surely Virginia’s life has been nothing but betrayal, suffering and loss.  But, no, Virginia starts to talk about her first marriage.  Seven years nursing a dying man, during which she was perfectly happy: nothing specific, no moments, just an overriding sense of contentment.  (Rather like Bridget’s years working for Stephen.)  And when she was with Tom, everyday was full of torment, but she had the baby Iris, and nothing else mattered.  Again it was the broad sweep of time, not the detail, no specific moment.

The whole computer interface had seemed great to Bridget, but now she felt it was a mechanical pretence, lacking creativity, lacking the life force.  She realised she had hardened her heart against the possible harm of Stephen’s drug research.  Now Dickon made her feel the pain of every animal that had passed through the lab.  She also felt that she forgave him; that her own child might be able to forgive her.

At his point Collette told her that Truth is simple, clear and obvious to our feelings.  This was perfect timing.  Bridget felt she was hyperventilating, because she had been thinking about having a child.  She decided to take up yoga to control her breathing.  She would get a pregnancy testing kit.  She would take a lover.

It is rash to work for a scientist who remembers everything.  But to work with him when his is starting to believe experiences beyond science, when you are desperate for a child: that is like going to Salisbury plain in a thunderstorm carrying and iron pole and wearing iron boots.

 

 

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Obedient Moments

Deirdre had promised to obey in her wedding to the vicar.  She felt it was unlikely, because she knew it was only words.  But life in the new vicarage gave new scope for her veneration of the Arts and Crafts Movement: with Morris curtains and medieval sideboard, Mackintosh stained glass and her own woodcarvings of woodland creatures.   She was convinced: that nothing new could be created within the limits of that Movement; that she had no special skill, not even a driven desire to create, but she felt obliged to try.

Her rambling rector was indeed a rose amongst the thorny retired population of this Ambridge-like parish.  She kept him cut back, defining his shape, encouraging some new shoots.  He was a man, who evaded decisions, but responded to her organising ability.  She controlled the finances, arranged outings and holidays; and often had to decide for him, whether he wanted tea or coffee.  He did as he was told, and having done it, his time was his own.  When she was out at her sculpture class, or her book group or her committee, he could waste time with a clear conscience.

Not that he was a weak man.  He had strong ethical principles and they both enjoyed living up to these demands.  It was just that he was not concerned for material things and would never have complained on bread and water, blanket and cave, his holiness would have been the same.  He only preached so that he could save his congregation from suffering and pain.  He followed “liberation theology” and would have been held by the police in any country other than England.  But he was an excellent cook, enjoyed a glass of wine and a good play and Deirdre felt a motherly responsibility to ensure that he had these things.

It was also essential that they had a dog, large, heavily built and devoted to her, and a cat to sit on his lap and prevent him from getting up and waiting on her.  She was his goddess and his service for her was practice for serving the ancient heritage of the Church of England.  He was her little boy, and if she drove him into a temper tantrum, as goddesses tend to do, she bore it with her reserved rationality evading her own passion, until she believed her relationship with Peter had been an illusion.

The rectory was to the mansion (descendents of the Norman Conquest) little changed from Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice.  The Family pew in church was at the front, at right angles to the rest of the congregation.  They felt that this absurd prominence of the ruling class, within the parish laid bare the threat of physical violence that lay behind all law abiding behaviour.  People did not choose freely to pay taxes and obey laws.  But there was none of that toadying servility in her rector, whose humility was as genuine as his intelligence, so they could spend pleasant evenings discussing the transformation of England by the 1870 Education Act and the rise of Feminism, which produced Universal suffrage. The more disturbing or distressing a subject the more it was relished.

Peter remained enamoured of Deirdre.  He found it unthinkable that she would enjoy physical love with such a passive man.  But, having met her husband, he knew he would side with “the Rev.” if the newly weds ever fell out.  Deirdre would have nothing to do with the Vicar’s wife role and was sure the parish women gossiped about her.  Yet it was her decoration of the house and her intellectual stimulation which gave him the security from which to Minister.  It was her encouragement and rational decision making, which made the parish run smoothly.

“Ere poor religion threw her weeds away to mix in circles of the worldly gay.  Ere hunting parsons in the chase began” They were living a life to pre-date John Clare’s poem “The Parish”.   Deirdre made it possible for her Rev. to return to the values of unpaid shepherd, trying to live up to the Word he preached.  He deserved the veneration of the congregation, although to them his good life meant they had no need to change.  They made merit by supporting him, not imitating his ways.   “At least they will not be led to the slaughter in battle, as the Church used to do.”

The only soul he redeemed was Deirdre, because he gave her the opportunity to sacrifice herself to improving him.   She felt commanded by his goodness, and obedience never failed to arouse her.   She had wanted nothing more than that from all her lovers.  At last she felt understood and appreciated.

Forest Time 21   Jane Expresses Perfect Taste

I am a private person.  I have no wish to claim some special wisdom.  I express my feelings in the moment and they are over and done with.  If I am angry, I make a lot of noise, everyone knows I am cross, and then I can relax.  The same if I am anxious or happy.  Usually I am quiet and feel at peace.

James understands me better than anyone.  That is why I married him.  Yes perhaps it was to ensure he kept quiet about what he knew.  I enjoy it when he shares his insights, but I would not want him telling others about me.  I have said some spectacularly dreadful things to him, but he knew what was driving me, and he admires my ability to express feelings and move on.

James does not think I have “perfect taste”.  He says I can always recognise the most expensive item in a shop.  It will be the one I like.  But really I am always on the outlook for bargains.  I come from a poor family and I had never been able to buy the things I wanted, but I have beautiful things.

My perfect job was working as a buyer for Harrods, although I disliked the social side.  It was then I met Deirdre.  She wanted us to stock “real art” – abstract stuff, which I would not give house room.  She was very clever: a doctorate from Oxford I think, but I retained a great deal of common sense, which most of James’ friends never had.

George is impossible unreliable.  I would not give him house room.   Peter is charming.  I can see what Deirdre fell for, but I also understand why she left him.  He is amazingly knowledgeable about paintings and stain glass, architecture and poetry, but what he praises to the skies this year; he will discard as worthless next year.  I admire him for constantly trying new things, but I know what I think is beautiful and what is ugly and they are the same things now as when I was a girl.

James attracts natural bachelors, like Stephen and Jack.  Even Roger and Martin must have been hard to live with.  Ken is an exception.  He is a craftsman, who finds fulfilment in his work and thus demands nothing from Sammy, who loves being housewife and mother.  I wish I could afford her lifestyle, but I am not jealous.  Sammy and I enjoy doing things together: coffee and cake out, garden centres, crafts, charity shops.  We are as relaxed in each other’s company, as we are with our husbands, only we can talk women things, which would not interest them.  She is my only real friend outside the family.

Pat phones me up regularly to update me on her hypochondria.  I meet up with her every couple of weeks, so that she can have a good moan, but really she has everything laid on for her.  She needs to loose weight and take lots of exercise, but no-one tells her, because she gets so depressed.  She is always pleased to see me and makes me feel important.  James knows I really like her, because I can complain about her, like you do about an old favourite cat, who comes into the house with dirty paws or carrying a live mouse.

Janet and David come over to see us regularly.  The four of us get so excited about things.

James gets them talking about God things; and they get me talking about the family.  We really care about all the local issues, although I am the only one who is here all the time.  They dash off all over the place, but I love it when we all come together.  It was Rome last week and Ireland next month.  I am the only one who has come from the working class, but I never feel that anger when I am with them.  They try so hard to be good to everyone, and think the best of all the snobs who live round here.  I wish I could be more like them.

James says I have no taste at all when reading fiction.  But I do have standards.  I would never read Mills and Boon or Proust.  There is a lot in between.  I like a good story, with description.  He likes ideas and complicated language.  I tried War and Peace once, but it was too long-winded.  I could never read a book like this one: no beginning, middle and end.  It’s more like a collection of short stories, strung together.  And I can’t relate to most of the characters.  I like a good detective story or the everyday life of ordinary people.  Something I can believe in whilst I read it and then forget all about it afterwards.  Reading is for pleasure, like flowers, perfect whilst you enjoy them, but compost at the end of the week.

Collette says this shows I live in the moment.  But she is the one who fills every moment with useful things.  She changes people’s lives, so dedicated and selfless.  It is wonderful, but I could never be like that.  Listening to her is like reading a good book.  I ask questions, but often she answers them, before I find space to ask.

Janet would be like Collette, but David holds her back.  She feels responsible for him, as I do for James.  Men are such children.  When Tom told me James had an affair with Bridget, I was really cross at Tom.  Why did he think I would want to know that?  I don’t want to believe it.  I have never talked to James about it.  Bridget would be so bad for him.  She is so rational and organised.  He is a dreamer.  She should have known better.  James will always stay with me, because he is rubbish at sex.  But he is a lovely man.  I sometimes think, when I am reading a murder mystery, that I would kill him if he left me.  But I know I would just move on.

He is a bit like a stately home, no expense spared, terrific display, frozen in time, exciting to visit, too much gilt (guilt), lacking in taste.  A warm memory, but I am not possessive.  The only people I do not see enough of are the grandchildren.  I am missing their moments.  It is like being away from home when your favourite roses flower.

Some adults I like to share experiences with, but children are experiences, like books, like flowers.

  The Female Moment

James was the obvious choice.  Bridget knew his vulnerability.  Janet was telling her that her longing for the life force to stir within her, was a longing for God.  That God is what we discover, when we step away from our protecting cocoon of rationality, and stand on the edge of emotions. 

“But the emotion I feel is jealousy.” said Bridget.  “He is so comfortable and happy with her, as if comfort and happiness were all that mattered.”

Janet did not wish to encourage jealousy, especially of a happy marriage, but she hoped the strength of Bridget’s emotion would penetrate into other emotions, sending her to seek a more suitable father for the child she wanted.

She pointed to Stephen’s “breathtaking pity for women”.  The way he had stood and laughed at Janet, when she had tried to suggest that poltergeist were more unproven than the power of prayer.  “So why do you dust his books, show children round his laboratory, cook his dinner?”  Hardly the function of a legal advisor!  Yet he had never expressed thanks.

Surely she did not want the father of her child to be someone dependent on a woman for his happiness, as James was on Jane?  “Haven’t you already chosen the man?  Someone who will take you for granted; whose life is driven by a thirst for knowledge, who depends on nobody, who has for years treated you as a servant, as a chattel, as a wife?”

Bridget thought this was a bit harsh and might reflect more on Janet’s marriage to David than her negative views of Stephen. But Bridget accepted that she did not want a weak, dependent man.

“Marriage means trembling lest his dinner should be overcooked, his shirt badly ironed, his climax ruined by your failure to convince him of yours.  You become the buffer for his temper tantrums, his muddles, and his lack of memory.  At least with Stephen you would have none of those problems.”

“Besides, James is as much older than you as David is older than me.  We like the company of mature men, but long-term, it depresses us.  Stephen is more your age, yet he has no interest in women ten years younger.  He cannot stand their sense of self-importance, based on nothing but passing beauty and obsession with fashion.”

Bridget understood what Janet was saying.  If she had read it on a website, she would have connected with it at once, but it came with the full force of Janet’s moral religious desire to be helpful.  Bridget wanted a woman to woman moment, and she simply could not relate to Janet’s compassion.

“Tell me what it was like when you were drunk all the time and David took you and gave you a new life?”

“You could never give James a new life: Jane has been trying for years.  Stephen could give you a new life, if he saw you as a woman rather than as an assistant.”

“But that is just what I am saying Janet.  I want to see you as a woman.  All I can see is this caring person trying to Network me according to David’s theory.  What did you lose by accepting David’s support?”

“He took me out of everything I had known and placed me in this emptiness, of child care and social work.  If I had not found God, I would have gone quite mad.”

This confession made perfect sense to Bridget’s atheism.  Janet was the unhappy wife, who had used faith as an escape from the misery of woman’s dependency.  She gave Janet a hug: a warm glow of solidarity.  If only she could find a woman who could respond to the love she felt for her own sex.  She realised that James had felt safe, not only because he was married, but because he depended on women.  They did not become dependent on him.  With Stephen she was the weak one, but that might be changing if he was starting to believe this hocus pocus poltergeist nonsense. 

If Jane had caught Bridget with her husband, would Bridget have grabbed the scissors and gauged out her eyes?  Bridget was raging with jealousy.  Bridget spent hours contemptuously dismissing Jane as inferior, because she never uses a computer, whilst really feeling inferior, because Jane has such good taste in everything.  Did Bridget want to be Jane? So that James would want Bridget the way he wanted his wife?  Or did Bridget have a fling with James because she really desired Jane?  Bridget could have been the breadwinner and Jane could have kept house for her.  James complaint that he could not satisfy Jane, made him easy to seduce, but was it really Jane, whom Bridget wanted to satisfy?

Iris says all this is nonsense.  She tells Bridget she is no more a lesbian than Iris herself.  Iris and Bridget have always had wonderful girlie nights out; drinking dancing, flirting, gossiping, having fun.

There is always a moment in the life of a thirty-something woman when having a baby seems as natural and attractive as freedom and having fun.  Bridget was experiencing that moment repeatedly.  Iris thought her blood brother could enable Bridget to have her cake and eat it.  But Bridget was into self-denial.  Janet had got to her.  Stephen was the man.

Boundary Moments

We have seen repeatedly that individuals lack clarity about their personal boundaries.

Sammy and Ken slid into passionate sexual encounter, because their boundaries as siblings were unclear.   Richard had such clarity, when training horses and dogs, but was always indulgent with his children, because he felt their mothers were too strict.  Stephen appeared to have such clear professional boundaries that he was protected from all life, not just relationships; yet Bridget passed through those boundaries by osmosis, because they were both hiding a common need. 

In a way all moments are boundary moments, as they lie between past and future, between what we have been and what we are becoming.  Each of our characters will experience millions of moments, and any book can only attempt to select the most significant.  These are the moments that felt important to the characters, moments they are able to describe, moments when they crossed a line.  If they had been more self-aware, more willing to recognise opportunity; or more aware of the boundaries that hem them in; they might have recognised more significant moments; or made more moments significant.

There is only one rule of good parenting: know your limitations.  Martin thought he could do up antiques.  He also thought he could provide firm boundaries as a parent.  His daughters’ early life was very organised and regimented, as Martin insisted on rules, and was supported by Iris, and other sources of potential authority were excluded.  Virginia and school and peers, were all kept away, so as to maximise Martin’s authority.  But as they reached puberty, Iris had come to doubt Martin’s wisdom, the girls had learnt the arts of deception, so as to obtain lives of their own, and they had also learnt how to manipulate their father.  Martin’s obsession with the Samurai was his final attempt to express his need to be in control.

Odessa’s life-long battle against institutions came from the experience of seeing members of her family imprisoned as mad; and the experience of seeing her contemporaries moulded by the soviet hegemony.  But it was also a salute to her mother’s professional role as an anthropologist, crossing the boundaries into another culture.  Despite this, her hormones drove her into a fifteen year partnership, for raising her children.  It lasted so long, because of her deep, denied need for regularity, reliability, continuity, consistency.  For those years, every time she returned home from work, she passed over a boundary into domestic order.  The world ran her ragged, because she refused to place limits on her ability to respond to its needs; but her children gave her space, because her partner was protecting her from their limitless desires.  Of course there came a moment, when he overstepped the boundary, with another woman, but she had long wanted escape from household habits.  Only in music could she accept control as the basis for freedom.

Jeanette was an advocate of professional boundaries.  She had a website that explained the need to fight corruption in the form of nepotism.  She would never have given personal advantage to any of the providers, whose services she procured for her employers.  She felt confident that she was not swayed in offering contracts to those who provided good hospitality (a box at the opera, a meeting by Wimbledon centre court).  But she knew of senior managers for whom real financial benefit was assumed as part of their work, and she did not confront them.  It was a boundary she could not cross. 

Similarly her website pointed to the dangers of physical intimacy between professional and client, because of the danger of exploitation, in either direction.  But Jack was not her client.  They were “consenting adults in private”, and she detested those who regarded physical intimacy as something dirty, or evil in itself. The porn industry was dependent on society’s hypocrisy about sex.  What made sex clean for Jeanette, was its lack of emotional content.  For her it was a physical moment, like eating, drinking and breathing.  Collette could never cross such a boundary.  Marriage was right, and sex should not exist outside it.  She detested tears, because they were hard to hold back.  She cried like a man, with the same resistance.  She saw so much suffering, and felt for everyone, regardless of whether it was the suffering of starvation, or addiction; of disease, or disobedience to the will of God.  She would have felt no shame if forced to walk naked through the world, but would have sobbed for those tempted by her beauty.

All our characters did, at some point cross the boundary between work and leisure.  The objectives of the organisation were Roger’s objectives when he was in the army; they were Stephen and Ken’s objectives as employed scientists, and Jeanette and Bridget’s objectives, in their employment.  But their work was their life and to work was to relax.  Leisure and family life was for them, hard work, requiring painful effort.  In contrast George could have been put in the Calvinist pit, filling with water, and he would not have bailed out to save his life.  He would have floated.  Despite the horrors of war, George retained the child’s view of work as restriction; a boundary to be broken in order to enjoy the leisure on the other side.  “In the Seventeenth century” George liked to point out, “only the destitute would accept wage labour.  Most people were self-employed selling the products of their skills.  Even in Victorian times, servants and factory workers were looked down upon, by craftsmen.”

For George it has been a great liberation to see all these characters assume authority in their own lives, so that they could speak for themselves, free of professional constraints.  They were no longer parasites, servants of the wealthy, but fresh shoots living by a form of photosynthesis.  He could look into the eyes of Deirdre, or Iris, or any other past love, and feel those moments when their regard had been fastened upon him, devoted to his beauty and youth.  Their eyes were now glazed over, and his were generating cataracts; but those moments still sang in the night.

Susan and Collette, David, John and James, Peter and Deirdre all did the work they felt called to do, and somehow never had any difficulty with money.  They were independent of organisations, but often funded by them.  Their freedom was a source of jealousy by others.  Roger found the civilian world a struggle; self employment was always a step away from bankruptcy.  Odessa had to work, and had to change jobs often, because she could not accept the boundaries of her employers.  She said that people who do as they like and get paid for it, are out of touch with the real world, and will never understand the need for Karl Marx or his importance to the majority of the human race, who are exploited.  Jack had never worked, never been exploited, yet he had still had a hard life, worn down by his constant experiments with leisure.

Jack had grown up quickly once the bond with his mother had been broken.  Like most of the characters, like most people, he had a desperate need of close relationships, and was desperately bad at making and keeping them.  Without employment he missed out on a major source of relationships.  The more he felt rejected, the more rejecting he became in his manners, his clothes, his music.  Everything about him was a boundary against friendship.  But Jeanette was turned on by his body piercing, his dreadlocks, and his loudness.

For Janet there is no boundary between priest and laity, between prayer and silence, between ritual and everyday life.  She taught a Christ who crossed every boundary by opening up the truth, and exposing hypocrisy.  Surely she should have run away with John, and left David with his network obsession.  She did not cross that boundary because she did not see it.   She was not shy or reserved; she had no problem telling John how wonderful she found him.  But she was comfortable with the person she had become.  Besides, John never took her in his arms and kissed her.   Nor did David tell him to, for that would have been to interfere in his own life.

Even John came across boundaries which could not be broken:- the boundary to atomic fusion the boundary between relativity and gravity; the boundary between organic and inorganic systems.  These abstract boundaries reflected for him the boundaries between individuals.  For example: Iris and Martin: Japan and China fused together would prove an irresistible force, capable of overthrowing the fission of western capitalism.   Relativity was offered by the hyper-rational system of the Foresters, whilst Gravity was seen in the unexplained attraction of Dickon and Jack, and in the romances between the other couples.  John could see organic growth in the characters, through their platonic and physical relationships: crossing boundaries to form the relationship, and again when the relationships broke apart.  But he was equally interested in their inorganic relationships, with computers, with systems, with culture and belief. “Life is too short to be bounded, by birth or death or any other assumptions.” 

 

 

Forest Time22 James Reads Thoughts

There is more to understanding people, than knowing their thoughts.  I was told in my teens that I had heightened telepathy, because I would say what was in another person’s mind.  It is a bit like overhearing a conversation, without the other people knowing.  You still have the problem of how to interpret what you hear.  Are they serious or satirical, questioning or asserting, repeating a thought or having an original idea?

You have the same problem when you read a book.  The author may intend his comments ironically, metaphorically, symbolically, stochastically.  To take them literally could make the text absurd.  I was determined not to make this mistake with my telepathic ability.  So I concentrated less on the surface statements – the thoughts uppermost in the person’s mind, and settled deeper into their psyche, uncovering systems of thought, which might make sense of the latest emission.  I call this empathy, as I try to become the thinker, as in “I am Heathcliffe”.  I started with cows, because they think visually, and I could follow the connections without being distracted by words, with all their non-literal potential.

Dickon enabled me to make the leap to humans.  His thoughts are literal, like the creatures with whom he communicates (I can only understand other species; I cannot show them I understand, as he does.)  Yet his processes are so fast; thousands of pictures a moment, that he is able to understand complex scientific papers translating them into his own pictograms.  It is like the way Jack computes numbers.  I can understand how it is done, without being able to imitate the speed.  In Jack’s case I can programme a computer to replicate his speed of calculation, whilst Dickon’s pictures take too much space on the hard drive.  The animal consciousness is so different from the computer process.

There is something about being open, that opens up the hearts of others.  Thus when Jack opened up about how he stopped drug use, he enabled other users to open up to him, and he was able to help many of them change their lives.  His openness was part of his naivety.  It enabled him to believe people when they said they had given up.  It enabled him to believe other things they told him.  Many of them were from Islamic background.  They joined him in heavy metal dancing as a substitute for drugs, and they taught him how to swirl like a dervish.  Islamic prohibition of homosexuality never came up.  They were all young men; they danced together, sweating out their addiction.  It was very physical and women were excluded.

Janet’s open support of the idea of a gay bishop, opened unexpected doors to her.  She was offered the position of dean at a quiet cathedral.  David said this was to keep her quiet, but I think it was a fair recognition of her social work skills and management ability.  Jane thinks I am as naïve as Jack.  She says it is Janet’s charismatic power that led to the promotion.

Ken’s scientific predictions of global warming launched him into the spotlight.  Sammy said it made him incredibly sexy.  She became anxious that some celebrity woman would steal him from her.  Ken said all anxiety was a symptom of world disaster ahead.  “People are right to be anxious, but need to be anxious about the right things”.  For a while Sammy started wearing younger, sexier clothes, but Ken did not seem to notice.  Since Virginia’s funeral, she has returned to copying Jane’s style.

In contrast Iris and Martin were always very closed, very private people.  This caused problems when the children were in school, but being closed seems to be an advantage in working in the relatively closed cultures of Japan and China.  The differences between those cultures seem to capture the love-hate relationship between them.

Everyone is astounded by Roger’s becoming a vegetarian.  Somehow it is connected to his war experience.  His mind is full of images of carcasses in his shop changed back to living calves, lambs, piglets, chicks, playing in green fields; and of soldier’s corpses hanging from hooks in his shop, in their place.  He has been very disturbed, very drunk, but seems to be recovering since his wife returned.  He has sold the Rottweilers and bought some hens.  The shop is to sell veggie whole foods, and he is looking for work that will allow him to share his transformation.

Susan’s mind is full of pictures of friends, whose lives have been transformed and of pictures of India.  She went out to visit Collette and was caught up with a huge march of hungry people heading for Delhi (Jarrow marches no longer seem possible in England).  They walked all day and camped by the roadside at night.  One evening, three marchers were hit and killed by a passing car.  The next day the whole march stayed put to mourn the fallen.  You have to see the pictures in her mind to feel the solidarity born that day.

David continues to flash around the world care of the internet. It would take another book just to list his current obsessions. Here are four.   He is trying:-1) to prevent an extradition to the USA; 2) to persuade military leaders that they could run aid programmes using conscripted youths, doing a compulsory gap year; 3) to bring peace to Nagaland, Gulu and many other wars that do not even make the news; 4) bringing together people who go to Amsterdam for pot holidays; with people who want to go to Switzerland to enable relatives to die painlessly; and people who are sent abroad for medical care on the NHS

George is planning an exhibition of HenryVIII architecture.  It will be a virtual reality experience, using computer simulations of the palaces that Henry and his followers built, to replace the monasteries they closed.  It will illustrate Henry’s theology, in terms of his determination to reintegrate the sacred into everyday life, through music and the arts, and by making the Bible accessible to everyone.  George hates the popularist view of Henry as eating, drinking and womanising; which he presents as a massive anti-English, papist conspiracy.  “Henry turned church wealth into national wealth; replaced European religion with the English church, and laid the foundation of the British Empire”,  says George.

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Moments of Childlike Heroism

Jane’s defence of her family always had a naïve quality.  Naturally she fought tooth and nail when her husband was wrongfully arrested.  But whilst others supported James from loyalty to him or to his ideals, Jane fought for recognition that she was telling the truth.  It was terrible to have complete strangers doubting her honesty.  She was incapable of deception and never attempted to lie.

The court case added to her sense of injustice, which started with her working class roots, her struggle at grammar school. Her determination to be respectable and respected was constantly slapped down by prejudice and snobbery.  Childlike heroism had become an established pattern.

People took advantage of James’ good nature.  She would rant and rave about them to James, who did nothing.  Eventually she would explode into action, like a sixteen year old boy going over the top at Ypres.

There was nothing childlike about Dickon, to those who knew him.  He did not say much to adults, and he spent most of his time with animals, but this was because he understood the former all too well and found himself understood by the latter.  But his mother, Sammy, often flew to his defence when she felt he was being badly treated.  She had a royal battle with the school about his non-attendance, and they dismissed her as a fond mother, who was half-child herself.  Until they saw his exam results and realised that he was way ahead of the other children of his age.  Sammy did not need to defend him, but she may have saved the school from looking very foolish.

Peter is charming because he is able to project the childlike and heroic aspects of himself.  His art expresses these moments.  He had felt frustrated by the natural, cynical, clever side of his nature.  It had forced him out of labouring, drinking bohemianism into academic life, and he nearly ended up running a museum.  But he learnt to channel it into the orderly world of the Foresters and the Church of England.  This left most of his time free for naïve paintings that push the boundaries of Art.

For him Art is Natural, not a special activity for artists, but a necessary mode of expression for everyone.

It was an ironic moment when Deirdre organised his pictures into an exhibition, because all his pictures showed that Art is for expression not exhibition.  Once a picture is painted, it had served its purpose.  To look at it would be like looking at a photo of yourself on holiday.  You would be able to see what you were doing, what you looked like at the time; but the important thing is that you had that moment.  Photos and other mementos of the past say that they are more important than that past moment.  Peter was clear that the moment was all that mattered.

He was not a minimalist.  He retained piles of clutter from his past.  But he remained childlike, in being so busy in the present that he never referred back.  This ability to let go, is his heroism.

Pat’s childlike faith in doctors, in her illness, in anything other than her ability to change, had led to a miserable life of increasing incapacity.  Months bedbound, constant heavy medication, joint replacements, operations to prevent weight gain, and broken relationships.  The heroism came in her lack of complaint at the physical pain she suffered.  She achieved this by leaving her body and viewing herself as if hovering on the ceiling.  Theosophy gave her an explanation for this disassociation, a whole language for describing her journey beyond the physical. 

Theosophy came to replace doctors, just as the menopause came to replace Roger.  The combination made her calm.  Far from losing her vacant body to some demon possession, as Janet had predicted, Pat was able to reclaim her body.  It was no longer sexual, so no longer sinful in her eyes.  It became an acceptable place to stay, and so she sorted it out, making it fit and healthy.  Theosophy meant she could spend less time out of her body, and more time looking after it.  As she became more comfortable with herself, Virginia realised she was no longer needed.  So Virginia’s compulsive collecting escalated.  The need for Richard to intervene and take care of Virginia; was the moment Pat returned to full independence.  It was also the moment when Roger hit the nadir of his life, breeding Rottweilers in a roofless bungalow opposite Dickson’s primary school.

Janet had always had a body too big for her gentleness.  Her life was full of heroic moments: against the police, against drugs, against the social services establishment and now inevitably against established ideas of the Church of England.  For her the Truth was always, clear cut, no mixed messages.  They had a comfortable vicarage home, with plenty of space, for the first time in her life.  Her children largely looked after their own needs.  David was supportive and undemanding.  She loved parish work.  She was admired by other charismatics and evangelicals, yet she felt she must take a stand in favour of homosexual bishops.  Was it childish, even petulant for her to throw away her prospects for something she felt, but could not argue?

Private Moments

What difference does it make if we share our experience with others?

We know that John is the most public of people, and appears to keep nothing hidden from those who ask.  Jack had many secrets regarding his drug habits; whilst his mother specialised in penetrating the most private parts of her clients’ lives.

Stephen had always believed that he was alone, and shared almost nothing about his own feelings.  Believing he was alone was part of his atheism.  He discovered love and the possibility of God together, sharing his private moments with Bridgette, ended his loneliness.

Odette believed that class consciousness lifted people out of loneliness, and made society possible.  Ironically she retained her private moments even when she was sharing a small London flat with several others; even when she was making love, even when bringing up her children.  She always needed moments away from everyone, when she could be herself, independent of the society around her. She found it fascinating that Iris was attracted to China by its ideal of communal living, rather than the Chinese success as privatised entrepreneurs; whilst Martin loved the privacy of Japanese warrior ideals.

David said it was Martin who had insisted on keeping their children separate from the world:  “privacy of the home, gave him power as patriarch”.  But Susan was sure Iris had always been in control: “it is just therapy, which has enabled her to let go and enjoy feeling part of a larger group”.  Susan found her own privacy amongst strangers.  Three months accompanying Palestinians as they crossed over to harvest their olives or visit their relatives, or work for employers on the other side of the Israeli border, meant that they were more in the public eye, less likely to receive violence from the soldiers; but it also meant that she was just another unknown English woman; free from knowing other people’s private lives, and thus able to remain private herself.

For Pat, her private moments had been lived outside her obese body, dethatched, able to see others and not be seen. It had begun with a nasty experience with a single person, and stretched, so that she never felt comfortable alone with anyone. She always felt she was being watched, that being sociable was a performance.   It ceased as she became able to tell people what she really felt about them: very negative at first.

But her group was supportive, no matter what she said.  Slowly she became able to say nice things, which she really meant.   Once she lost weight, regained her health and became comfortable with other people, her need for privacy diminished.  She had regained faith in her private judgement, so that she no longer cared what the public thought, but rather enjoyed discovering that they all thought different things.  Public opinion was an absence.

David felt he was a good quiet man, working on his social networks, going on walks, enjoying his private sensations, being kind to Janet.  He felt strong and self controlled and dependent upon nobody.  He was happiest when engaged in some harmless amusement like making a bonfire.  He maintained a polite, adult distance from everyone, even his own children; yet he was able to manipulate so many people so that they formed close, intense relationships with others.  Relationships which led them away from addictions; which led them to make peace with previous enemies, that led them to knew ideas and innovations; new generosity, new artistic fulfilment.  So many benefits from his puppetry.  Most of all he needed stability in his own life: no disturbance, no probing questions; quietness and self-containment.  Janet gave him all this for twenty years.  He gave her fairness, financial control, independence, and nothing whatsoever of himself.

Jane loved her privacy.  Just to be left to get on with improving her home and garden was bliss.  But when things went wrong, when there was not enough money, or she had to fit in unplanned outings, her mind would maim itself.  It was like seeing a rat out of the corner of your eye.  She became suddenly aware of all the thorns, all the cuts and stings, all the anxiety, which she had kept private from herself.  And she could not share her problems with anyone.  She just wanted to squeeze them back into the box.  She wanted a cat to catch the rat.  She wanted a magic wand.

Most of Ken’s life has been private since he discovered his vocation at the age of twenty-one.  He is wonderfully fortunate to have discovered skills which he is master of, which he delights in: skills which have made him a guru to the oil giants, and a scientific authority on the connection between plants and animals, in the evolutionary process.

A few colleagues understand his work for the former, and John understands his work on evolution.  But most of his life is private even to Sammy.  New species excited his interest, books fascinated him, and he was gripped by stratigraphy.  People were in no way essential to his thought processes.  Yet he remained surprised that they did not change their ways when he, and thousands of other scientists, warned them about global warming

Richard was in Afghanistan, theoretically on behalf of the Foresters, but in fact, through David’s manipulation.  David had recognised the link made by Dickon to his kidnappers.  Dickon’s peacemaking grandfather was the obvious one” to take that forward”.  Richard felt he was too old for this mission.  He had to take care of his blood pressure on the plane, and take his calcium and other drugs for his arthritis, when forced to walk into the hills.  Yet once he was there, he pushed himself to the limit.  He was suffering heat exhaustion, when his landrover came off the road, and was poised, wheel spinning, above the abyss.  He had to hang on to the front bumper, beside a hundred foot drop, in order to move a boulder wedged against the chassis.  As it fell, he imagined the vehicle landing on top of him.  Smashed to a pulp in the middle of nowhere, and the Americans would blame the Taliban, and a new offensive would begin.

In fact he managed to get back on the road.  A few further miles, with his punctured tyre gradually coming off the rim of the wheel, and he was able to make the rendezvous, but was too ill to exercise his skills. If only he had taken more care of himself, taken things more slowly, he would have had the energy now to say the right things.  Terrorism is a media event, organised and marketed like everything else:” Communication is not about transmission, but about knowing the audience.”  It was Richard’s business background that made him an effective negotiator.

As the fierce tribes’ people spoke, Richard realised that they were helpless to bring peace.  They only worked at terrorism, because the alternative was surrender.  If America put into poorer countries the wealth they poured in as military hardware and manpower, they would cease to be seen as enemies.  But how could he take that message back?  The military would simply say he had been brainwashed by the Taliban, or worse, that he was in bed with the enemy. “Tolerance is only a name for indifference.  You must either be totally devoted, or totally hated.  The middle ground is lost.”

Collette had hated her lack of privacy as the school/orphanage was being built.  But once she had her private space, she was able to go out and be on display most of everyday.  After all, there is no privacy from God, whom she believed to be always watching, and no problem in having faith in his ultimate purpose.  But there were times when she felt the mission was hers alone.  It was her husband’s country.  His family and friends were all around.  She brought the funding, and the energy and the expertise from the West; and that made the mission possible. But if God called her away, she would make a new start in another country with new people, and let go of everything Indian, including her husband.  He would regret the loss of the mission, but he would not be able to let go of the country, of the past.  His books, his furniture, and his pictures: he would carry his baggage because it defined him.

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Forest Time 23  John Takes the Abilities of those he is with

I used to fight it as a boy.  Every time I spoke to someone who had a funny accent, I found myself replying to them in the same accent.  I could not help myself.  Sometimes they just assumed I was from Glasgow or Jamaica or Eton, because they were.  More often they thought I was making fun of them.

Later I found that if I listened to clever people talking about their specialism, I soon picked up the essential issues: not just the jargon, the enthusiasm and the theory; but also the problems, disputes and measures.  Academic life has always been easy for me, although many professors like Stephen still cannot believe I can fully grasp a subject in days, to which they have devoted a lifetime.

Of course I read books and work on the net, but real skills come to me from face to face contact.  Jack was leading a band or Muslim lads through a virtual Jihad programme he had developed.  He still believes I turned his life around by giving him the maths scholarship.  But he only ever needed someone to have faith in his unique gift.  I had that faith, because when I was with him, I experienced the flow of numbers just as he does.  Suddenly, instead of seeing random sets of weather reading numbers from around the world; I saw a pattern of fractals and knew instantly what the weather would be in two weeks time.

Then I sat down with Bridget at the computer.  I could see the number process in the programming and it was different, but I could not explain why Jack and I could predict more accurately than the computers.  It took months for me to work out that the coefficient of randomness, which Jack added instinctively, because it was irrational and seemed unpredictable, but the sequence was in pye all along.  I tried to keep out of the public eye, by bringing Bridget, Jack, Ken and Stephen together to sign the article in Nature, but I had to translate between them.

It was the same in the Arts world.  Peter and George separated just as they were becoming famous.  When I was with Peter I saw colour, suddenly so much abstract Art made sense.  With George, I became a contemporary of Leonardo or Holman Hunt and saw into their world as he does.  Put the two together and I understood the strange phenomenon of the artist as picture.  David wanted me to bring them back together, but they had each moved on.  Instead I ghosted a book about them.  It came out as the work of Jane and Jeanette.  Jane for her perfect taste.  It had to be written with her common sense, so that ordinary people would understand.  And Jeanette had the key because great Art is about making the visible invisible and the unseen seen.

I had met lots of these characters through David; I was a bit like his puppet, taking qualities of people, whom he felt I needed, in order to develop my own gift.  But then I met Sammy.  Since then I have been able to see a person’s talent, before I meet them, so that I can decide whether they have a skill I need.  Since Janet became the first woman bishop, David says he feels like a puppet himself!

I had learnt early on that my brother’s ability was incompatible with mine.  If I understood what it was like to be another person, I was distracted from using their ability.  James said that when he entered my consciousness it was like being lost in a town: so many competing abilities, but no essential person.  Perhaps personhood is a distraction from using your talent?

Roger certainly believed that.  When I was with him, I became a fitness fanatic, draining my body to extremes in oriental jungles and Antarctic permaforest, until my doctor warned me that I was endangering my life.  I persuaded him to do the “Turning The Tide” training, so that he could deal with the violence of others without throwing them on the ground and jumping on them.  It resulted in him resigning from UKIP.  It is all part of his new way of life as a veggie.  His fanaticism for “British Beef” has been replaced by the sale of “Locally Grown Greens”.

It is the same with Richard’s peace mission to the Taliban.  He is twenty years older than me, with a heart condition, but I could not cope with the constant danger.  Perhaps I have absorbed Tom’s self-preservation.  What could be nobler than to make peace with the terrorists?  Clearly I could absorb Richard’s skills and go on dangerous assignments, but would that be the best use of my ability?  I have always hoped that science would bring answers to the world’s problems.  Perhaps Bridget was right about drugs and war: Tom’s UNO approved contracts for Afghan opiates may yet bring peace with the Taliban.

But then I get an email from Susan who is out in Gulu (David’s suggestion) working with girls who were abducted and raped by the “Lords’ Resistance Army” in the twenty year civil war in Northern Uganda.  I can see that the challenges and opportunities for her to use her skills are so much greater there; but so are the dangers.  She says the only danger is that she is starting to take Christianity seriously because everyone there is very religious, despite the horrors they have lived through; and she says she is only in Africa because it is so beautiful, so I must not turn her into a saint.

Anyone who reads this might think that the only power I have really obtained is Martin’s sophistry.  His ability to make black seem white.  If these great changes were occurring, surely the reader would have heard of them!  But I assure you; most scientific breakthroughs make very little noise, until some entrepreneurs get hold of them. Most people have not even noticed the shift of the whole Chinese economy to the production of Green goods: tidal generators to wind powered toys, all materials recyclable and carbon footprint diminishing daily.  But by 2030 Iris’ achievement will be recognised.

  I suppose I could absorb Deirdre’s selling abilities and spin; but since her move to the Vicarage, she seems to be discovering new abilities: sculpture and study.  Skills which make her more contented and able to support her man; and I have no wish to resurrect the old skills.

The nature of time is no Science Fiction.  When I say that Odessa is able to move through time, I don’t mean that she physically disappears from this moment and reappears in 2050, as in HG Wells.  I mean that her lucid dreams show her “the future that may be”.  I have experienced this when I am with her.  It has changed my view of time.  I am trying to develop a mathematical model, which would harmonise a concurrent view of time with Relativity and Quantum mechanics; but I need to meet a physicist of genius.  The trouble is they see me as such a maverick, that they avoid me even in my déjà vu.

No-one could miss the irony of the Icelandic bubble bursting as the polar ice disappears.  Economic meltdown: reflecting geographic collapse.  Boom and bust in the Natural World and in the money markets.   Stephen welcomes his role as guru, enjoying the attention and support of the big financial institutions.  He has taken on lots of new Foresters.    I feel a huge pressure upon me to find scientific solutions to human greed.  But Collette has made the real breakthrough, and I cannot absorb her ability.

Moments of Interaction

David had always tried to form connections.  Even as a small boy, if someone told him anything about themselves, he would try to relate that to moments in his own life.  It became such a skill; he found he could form deep connections with anyone.  Thus his moments of structuring social networks began from his own personality.

Susan remained professional.  Clients told her their deepest secrets, which she reflected back so that they could make sense of their own lives, and take control of the future.  She was a midwife, not a mother.  There was no dialogue, only shadowing and circumscribing the other.  Never herself, never alienated from herself; but rearranging a chain of events into a singularity.  “You cannot take other people’s sorrow on to yourself.  They sometimes have to endure alone.”

Collette had a message to preach.  She had experience to share which she knew could change the lives of her listeners.  She always spoke from her heart, giving a picture of a different world.  Pictures of children who had been starving and were now well fed; people who had never heard the Gospel and were transformed by its message, pictures of buildings, essential and adequate, without planning permission or health and safety limitations.

She could listen attentively to others, but she never struggled to relate their experience to her own.  She understood their problems and gave answers in terms of selfless love and forgiveness.  She delighted in their joys and happiness and expressed that delight, yet it remained their happiness and she never considered why such things would not bring her joy; because her own life was already full of its own happiness.

Stephen listened carefully to the logic and rationality of what was said to him.  He then presented his own counter arguments, which ignored emotion, intuition and other “subjective nonsense”.  “Science is a corrective for ecological disaster.”  Others felt he won arguments on technicalities.   But from the moment Bridget introduced him to the joys of sensual intimacy, he abandoned previous limits and started to look for signs of embodiment in what might otherwise appear arid academic discussions.  Bridget’s moments had been with computers and Stephen had not been a big step away from that kind of interaction, but their longed for baby was entirely chaotic, irrational and she had no desire to programme it.  Interaction was changed forever.

Iris voluptuous beauty and razor intelligence drew men to her.  Men whose opinions disgusted her whose advances she found risible.  But she was not without compassion, and no suitor was allowed to feel dejected by her flattering deferment.  None of this endeared her to jealous women, but younger women emulated her and older women delighted by memories of their own romances, were flattered by her friendship.

Tom was never unhappy using men as means to wealth and women as sex objects.

Martin sought new contacts who might benefit his current obsession.  He sought the wealthy when he was destroying antiques.  He sought intellectuals when doing his research on “Work”.  And finally seeking the company of Japanese militarists to enhance his image as a Samurai.  So many moments devoted to relationships as a means to an end.  Even Iris was chosen as breeding stock, rather than as a person in her own right.

Peter never made any effort to form friendships.  His interaction was a live performance, a work of Art. The wholeness, quality and virtue was always on the edge of foolishness.   People were attracted by the flow of his conversation, the timbre of his voice, the nuance of his satire.  He made them laugh.  He made them think and they wanted to know him better, so he tolerated them.

 Ken met people through his work and being a person of broad culture especially in popular music and sport, he was able to follow most conversations and make surprising dialogue.  He was focused without being blinkered.  Sammy turned this natural ability into a social asset, by ensuring that they spent time developing and retaining personal friendships.

George and Jane wanted to avoid the world as much as possible. James was the only person to penetrate their isolation over the decades.  Other people were fleeting experiences: delights for a season, skeletons hard to shake off.  They remained severely loyal, even when they had lost contact.  Enemies remained unforgiven.  But for James every moment of interaction was story, another three column inches of copy for a newspaper; to be inscribed in his pocket book.  He wrote from a passionate desire, not from personal experience.  How could he be sure that he was not pushing the interaction to fit the storyline?

Odessa detested the exploitation of others.  Her friends remained her friends despite her realistic deconstruction of their personalities.  She saw James’ dilettantism, Jane’s snobbery, Pat’s obesity; but she kept them on her list: “no-one is perfect, everyone has potential.”  Even Martin’s attempts to exploit others did no lead her to reject him.  “Better to take life from the people then from the language, as politicians do.”

Janet enabled others to change: Deirdre made them do as she wished and still feel good about it.  Jack’s moments of interaction had been determined by his addiction.  Without it, he was like a child, trying to discover who to like, who liked him, with none of the prejudices most people develop in adolescence.  Roger was the same when he went veggie.  Macho militarists from his past ceased to meet his new needs, yet he had no idea of how to talk with “hippy do-gooders”, whom he had spent so many moments avoiding.

Dickon did not really interact.  He had moments of shared consciousness with animals and with the animalia side of humans.  There is always a moment in the lives of the very young, when the consciousness of the other closes down our own thoughts.  Jeanette’s interactions remained secret.  “Complete understanding would rob us of our private mystery, of the secret that we keep even from ourselves.”  From seeing others objectively from a high distance, Pat came to real interaction with them, so that she rarely needed to leaver her body anymore.

John had explained his discoveries to interested audiences since he was a schoolboy.  He could fill a hall at Nassa or the Royal Society, at a local college or a festival.  Interaction was by questions.  His passionate arguments about the importance of spiritual, emotional and sensual life; were hugely influential but his moments remained almost entirely rational. 

 

Forest Time 24  Collette sets people alive with the Truth

High expectations of resolution.  All will be explained.  People, especially atheists, try to put that on any priest they meet.  I said to Richard, when he met me at the celebration do for James’s release: “It’s like telling a friend at a dinner party all your symptoms, because you know she is a doctor.”

So you want to know why things have worked out so well for these people, when other folk, ordinary people whom you know, end up with tragedy and unhappiness.  Well, Stephen would say it was a statistical inevitability – some people are lucky.  It is just random chance.  David would say it was the pattern of their network of relationships; Susan could claim that many of us have benefited from her therapy; Janet has had many in her congregations; but both are too humble to claim influence or even offer explanation.

The Truth is that they all experienced tragedy and unhappiness, in their lives, but they have come through those terrible experiences because each one had a special ability – a super-power.  But it is equally true that everyone you know has such an ability.   What got these folk through was recognising their ability and having faith in the power that lay behind it.  They trusted that their skill would prove valuable to others, and in that moment they forgot their own self-interest and allowed the Light to shine. It really is that simple.  I would call it being “Born Again”.  Those who achieve this and still claim to be atheists; are mistaken.

Clearly you want to know if John’s account of the future is accurate.  Some of that will depend on you.  Are you willing to believe that change for the better is possible?  Are you willing to trust the Light and allow your own ability to be used for the good of all?  Of course you could just dismiss the whole theory of moments (as concurrent rather than consecutive) as madness.  It really is your choice.  You have read the book.  Which do you prefer, the concurrent “Moment” passages, or our attempts to rationalise and explain our experience as if they were consecutive moments? as I am doing now.  Our attempts to dismiss the power and impact of experience (the Forest Time passages) as if it happened in the past; just do not work for me.

I have always lived here and now.  That is why my “essay” is the last one.  I cannot justify spending time writing, when I have a school and an orphanage to run, when the Lord directs my every moment towards those who have never heard of Jesus Christ.  But I promised, in a moment of gratitude, to Janet and her congregation, who pray and support this mission, (although I suspect the request really came from David) I promised to write about these remarkable people in England, as if they were a village community.

I would much rather write about my husband and our mission, about the wonderful children, who come from poverty and ignorance and grow daily: physically, educationally and spiritually.  Praise the Lord.  Each of them has a special gift and I am with them now.  It is magical and my memories of friends in England fade so fast.  I was always on the edge of this network and much of my knowledge comes second hand via Emails.  But, hey, that is why I get the final word, because they believe in my objectivity.  It is a big responsibility.   So I gave it to God and He said: just give them the Truth.

It is 96degrees in my kitchen at 2am and 76% humidity and at least another four days till the monsoons come.  Only Susan, currently in the Sudan may have it hotter, none more humid.  How different the perceptions of the children here from those who grew up in Britain, but how much closer to the people to whom Jesus preached.

I am deluged by would-be teachers, who want to teach in an English medium school, yet speak hardly any English themselves!  Any of the characters in this story could teach more effective English, but those who go abroad have their own agendas.  Odessa sends music and Marx.

We had the official opening of the new school building today.  Very hectic in this heat, and there was a thunderstorm, but no rain, so the power went off and then there is no water pump and no way to cool down.  Just to remind me that this is not a holiday camp, but a mission!

The local gangster/ drug baron, who held a gun to my head when his first addict came to Christ, was baptised today.

Jack was addicted to puncturing his flesh with needles, but now he leads Muslims who had forsworn the flesh through the physicality of dance into an acceptance of their bodies, as complete as Pat’s.   Roger and Iris used to be obsessed with the secrets of the flesh – the driving force of sensuality, which enables some people to be happy with their bodies and capable of using flesh to satisfy themselves and others.  For me the flesh is that of Jesus Christ.  It is the flesh which suffered scourging and crucifixion and we experience His empathy for our suffering, whenever our flesh feels pain.  James say that is a kind of sensuality; gaining pleasure from pain.  But that would be masochism, which is definitely not what I experience.

I asked John “Are you in love with me?”  He replied instantly “of course, how could anyone not love you?”  I told him his brother had given exactly the same answer, but that it had made me feel uncomfortable.  John explained that that was natural as James had experience of sensual love and could not fully separate his sensual feelings from his understanding of love.  In contrast John had always lived as a monk, and loves me as he loves science.   Dickon’s relationship with animals has put his parents forbidden lust into perspective.

David assumes I have a sensual love with my husband, but Susan says he is merely projecting his desire for a sensual relationship with Janet.  Every relationship is different.  For me sexual pleasure is like all joys of embodiment, that are given to us as we seek to do God’s will: a gift to be received, with thanks, not sought, nor requested, nor longed for.  Not an objective not a thing in itself.  We should thank God in the same way for a good meal or a day of starvation – for only he knows what we really need and we must trust His gifts and use them in His service.  Stephen and Bridget, who are currently on a lecture tour of USA, explaining poltergeist; have the same worshipful gratitude for the breakthroughs and dead ends of science; only they call God, “Nature”.

The baby boys owns the mother’s heart, but is too weak to dominate and too small to satisfy her body.  That is the relation of most men all the time and all men some of the time.  So men alternate their efforts to dominate and satisfy their lovers.  A very few grow up and understand that the woman’s heart is all they need.  Peter and George send me pictures and poems.  They tell me Forest Time is a waste of time and not to bother.  My husband makes no attempt to dominate or satisfy me and as a result I often seek to do as he would wish and often find satisfaction in our flesh together.  The egoless unconscious babe is the Eastern ideal; but it is the complex adult, who is unique, who fills the world with the beauty of God.

A woman should never go to bed with a man she loves, that spoils everything, which is why I have never slept with any of the men in this story.  In contrast I am able to love my husband, because I have been to bed with him.  I remain uncomfortable with the potentially intrusive, too meaningful other: a child would capture and posses me – I am a fugitive from motherhood.  Dozens of orphans have filled my emptiness.  Indian Builders tie the bamboo scaffolding together with string: like the links holding the local community together, it all seems so fragile, yet nothing breaks, there is no escape.

My earliest memory is looking out through the bars of my cot.  I was aware of a huge spirit trapped within the body of a toddler.  A female body never prevented me from doing things that boys do.  As an adult, I became a member of the clergy, when it was still 99% male.  My mission to India took this body to the limits of its capacity, yet my spirit still felt held back.

That is why I hated it when local people were able to wander round the half built school and walk into our flat and look through my drawers.  As the only white woman, I felt on display, like the lunatics of Bedlam.  It was worst during the long days of our wedding, when people came to stare at me.  Then came the moment when John made me recognise that the spirit incarcerated in me was also incarnate in everyone else.  I was no longer alone.

The Collette Moment

There are many different kinds of Collette Moment.

There is the straightforward moment when Collette impacted on each of the characters.  Fishing is symbolic of evangelism: deep sea fishing symbolises overseas evangelism.   As when Roger realised that meat consumption in the West forced people in India to a mainly vegetarian diet, forced many of the poorest people to produce factory farmed meat, which they could not afford to eat.  He decided he could no longer be a part of that system.

Collette takes you through the door that says private, straight past the security guards, up to the second floor; through the door that says “closed” and into the room where a group of men in leathers hold long knives.  She holds out her tin and they put money in.  People do not say “no” to Collette.

Then there are those moments when people do as Collette does, leaping into the future with Faith:  as when Richard drove into the mountains of Afghanistan

Peter had Collette moments often.  From initial acceptance of Impressionism; he had been led back to Medieval Art and even taken up recorder playing.  Abstract Art “knocked me out”.  He would stand for hours in front of a Rothko in silent adoration.  The fact that he could not explains his feeling, was sufficient justification.  His own “Performance Art” with George, was about being deeply unfashionably dressed, in all the right places.  “Contextual, referential, symbolic, deconstructionist, happening, embodied”:  there was more terminology than performance. 

A bit later, he became excited by idea art, like the unmade bed, the slide, animals preserved in tanks and the plinth:  “it enables the visitors to engage with themselves, creating Art by experiencing a situation or activity.  It blurs the boundaries between visual and dramatic arts.”  

But the real Collette moment came when he discovered watercolours.  “Out of focus Norwich school for the 21st century”, said The Times.  Being Peter he had managed to sell his new idea to the media.  “It is the equivalent of the fiction rule that you Show Not Tell.”  The modern art galleries realised they were naked:  they had no Art only ideas.  And they started to buy real pictures again.  No skill, no sale.

As George laid out his soldiers in formation for the Battle of Waterloo, he could taste the gunpowder, feel the bayonet pierce the enemy chest, smell the blood, hear the explosions.  He did not see the rational game of war, but the Romantic ideal of glory.  Just so when he looked in a mirror, he did not see a jaded obese grey haired addict to prescription drugs.  He saw a handsome young student about to go over the top and shock the world with his daring poems, philosophic insights and spontaneous art.  In fact the world had not been unappreciative.

The reflected fame from Peter meant that George could publish poems or short stories whenever he wished.  Yet he remained convinced that leftish hippy types were trying to drag him away from his military studies, back into an era of freefall Taliban migration and disrespect for authority.  His Collette moment came when he recognised the nature of this paranoia.  It was precisely what those campaigning for climate change needed.  Without a public sense that big business was deliberately avoiding reform, in order to raise sea levels and devastate crops to wipe out billions of the world’s poorest people, whose labour was not needed: without that paranoid conviction, people would just go with the flow.

Stephen’s acceptance of poltergeist made him vulnerable to all kinds of religious ideas.  His marriage to Bridget removed his suppressed desires, which he had channelled into hatred of God.  He was clearly on route to becoming a religious presenter, where he had been a persecutor. “Gamekeepers make the best poachers”

Yet he retained a high level of paranoia from his early life.  He now felt that atheists were constantly trying to drag him away from his new beliefs.  His Collette moment came when John persuaded him that paranoia is a great gift for a believer:  “persecution proves you have taken up your cross, that your faith is true.”

Every time John got to know someone, it appeared that he gained their special ability, like a Collette moment.  He certainly recognised good qualities in people he knew, and encouraged them to use their skills, and when he did this, he seemed to share in their power, expressing their ability in his life.  “Their goodness moves me to my depths.  It is an ephemeral miracle, like youth.  Amidst the tragedies of life, a human stakes everything on love.  Failures of the flesh lead inevitably to transformation.”   John refused to see any harm in their actions.  If a person had an ability to deceive or to torture, John would not notice it.  The decision came when his brother James was imprisoned.  Punishment was clearly and absurd idea.  “Only by looking for and rewarding goodness: is there hope of changing society and the possible offender.”    

Iris’ last experience of England before moving to China was getting her youngest daughter from police custody.  She persuaded her daughter to accept a caution and £200 fine from the police for causing actual bodily harm to a lad in a pub.  The lad had been threatening some other lads with a pool queue, which struck her glass, a piece of which hit his face.  Iris knew her daughter was innocent, but paid the fine, as she felt there was no guarantee that a court would recognise the truth.  So she took the injustices of everyday life in China fore granted and concentrated on the huge steps being taken to reduce pollution.

Jane was not a great feminist.  She had been oppressed in grammar school because she was working class, not because she was a girl.  Her Collette moment came when she saw the power of female bosses and female professionals to oppress James in his work.  Susan thought Jane had a “feminine complex” in her choice of traditional female activities: “a kind of neurosis brought on by a lifetime of exploitation by husband and son.”

Susan had always taken child protection very seriously as she considered that most damage was done in childhood.  She had accepted the legal definition of “harm”, because she felt people could agree on what would harm a child, when they would never agree on what was good for a child.  But after Africa, seeing the human genetic experiments taking place, she realised that “harm” was unable to prevent the creation of creatures who were not defined as human.  It was in a hut in Gulu in Northern Uganda that she first began to talk about “doing people good”, by which she meant getting them to see the good, the ability within themselves.

 .  

 “Why do the people imagine a vain thing?”  As in dreams everything can feel very familiar, although on waking you know you have never been anywhere like it in waking life.  All the people Susan knew so well in Gulu are forgotten on waking, but at the time she was aware of years spent sharing her life with theirs, seeing them daily, knowing everything about them.  Susan felt comfortable at ease amongst the poor people, who surrounded her when she worked abroad.  She was full of purpose whilst they sat aimless waiting for something to happen.   If her work abroad was a dream, she only regretted that she had stayed awake so long.

David had always taken the view that children are much less liable to permanent damage than their parents.  “Just as physical healing is slower as we get older, so the mind becomes more brittle, more subject to long-term damage”.   He analysed the social networks of children, and found the significant close contacts changed daily and the acquaintances were soon forgotten.  In contrast older people retained acquaintances for decades. Established levels of closeness, to those people who were significant in their lives, changed little from one year to the next.

But, in a concert in September 2012, listening to the dissonance of a Benjamin Britten Quartet, he recognised the tune, the pattern of rapid change in children’s’ networks.  “It is like playing Sudoku, or when a child does a rubic cube in less than two minutes.  They do not have to try every permutation, as an old person does, for they can see through the moves, like a chess grand master, to the final position, so they maximise their power.  The next day, they start afresh, new cube or relationships, new game.  For old people relationships have become things in themselves.  Change is upsetting.”

This discovery changed his whole attitude to social networks.  He had previously seen them as a means of development (social, intellectual, economic, spiritual – every aspect of life) and thought that the settling down “stultifying” of relationships with aging was the cause of rigid conservatism amongst older people.  He now realised that neither extreme were using networks for development.  “For the young it is a game, for the old, security: for both social networks are things in themselves, not a means to anything else.”

There was a danger that Roger would be tried for war crimes, if the Arab-Chinese powers became dominant in the world court.  The thought of peace loving, veggie Roger (even his Rottweilers are now veggie), imprisoned for genocide, committed 30 years ago is absurd to all who know him now.  But as he says: “there was a time when I agreed with the majority of British people, that paedophiles should be punished as old men, for crimes committed in their youth.”  That shows what a Collette moment it was when he gave up meat.  He now forgives those he would once have considered unforgivable.  He would even forgive the court.  His friends would not.

Jeanette has penetrated the Muslim terrorist organisation as a double agent, and erased Roger’s war record from their files, but she has acted so well, been invisible so long that she no longer knows which side she is on or who she really was.

Jack had accepted prison sentences and mental health incarceration, as forms of punishment, which he felt he deserved.  He had enjoyed both stomach pump and force feeding.  At one time he was so afraid, that they would not resuscitate him, if he took another overdose, that he cut himself with a broken chair leg instead.  But when he had money, he had tattoos or body piercing, paying others to harm him.   It seems crazy to him now that he was punished for taking heroin and getting into fights, when his object in both was to punish himself.  Since his Collette moment, he has forgiven himself totally and would be very angry if the state now decided he should be punished for “offences” committed long ago.  He has ceased his obsessive tidiness and can walk away from a computer game to be with real people.

When Dickon’s kidnappers were arrested they expressed relief.  They knew liberty meant they would have to make amends for their failure by becoming suicide bombers.  In contrast, an English prison was a free and easy life.  Dickon had been their Collette moment and they were grateful.  They even wrote letters of introduction for Richard to take to Afghanistan.

Tom had a huge sense of personal failure and this made him very keen on punishment and the “noble suicide of the failed warrior”.  He had a Collette moment when an old Japanese told him how he had awaited execution for war crimes in 1946, for brutal acts as a POW camp guard.  He had been stopped from killing himself by an attentive guard and the next day his death sentence had been commuted, because of an appeal by some of those he had harmed as a guard.  Tom started to face up to his own failings.

The risks of credit card fraud or identity theft are for Bridget classical problems of technology change: “changes in technology change human nature.”  She would dismiss Collette moments, explaining them as moments produced by technological change.  “Like Odysseus, having himself tied to the mast so he could hear the beautiful singing of the Sirens, without being able to swim towards them and drown.  We are tied to the computer, to benefit from internet shopping, but still risk losing our money in credit card fraud.”

Martin had always had a deep desire to be genuine, to be liked for his real identity.  But people did not like him as a bullying social worker, nor as a hectoring lecturer; so he set up in antique restoration which was disastrous.  He realised that his real skill lay in acting, in making others believe his performance role was his genuine identity.  Thus the attraction to Japan: he saw a country where everyone hid the genuine feelings beneath a mask.  Yet he longed to be a noble warrior, hoping for a heroic death.  His Collette moment came when the right wing conspiracy burst upon the world.  He realised with delight that he had no fear, as he clicked the switch, which should have blown him and the parliament building to dust.  He was so pleased to discover his own heroism, that he was nearly caught, when the mechanism failed to explode.  His co-conspirators were less fortunate.  Like the fifth man, he walked away from history, which never uncovered his involvement.

Sammy’s special ability lay in “intuition, perception, imitation” which Charles Darwin had designated as characteristics of lower races and lower states of civilisation.  Her Collette moment came when she threw off sexual suppression and became the dominant force in sexual relations with Ken.  When Dickon was a baby she had the choice of two routes to the shops: one across a ploughed field the other through a wood, riddled with tree roots.  Neither was easy with a pram.  But the baby had sniffed the horse’s nose, and seen real birds instead of a mobile.  She determined the lives of both her men.  She had to explain to Janet that male dominance was still the norm amongst scientists and politicians in the climate change lobby, so she had to pretend to be passive in public, to further Ken’s career.  But this was not reflected in their private life together.

Janet’s moment came when she overcame her own addiction.  It was inevitable that she subsequently saw addiction to material goods (not just mind-bending substances) as the illness, which kept people from God.  Only by surrendering their lives to a higher power, could they win the daily battle to live a good life free of the latest fad and fashion.   She relied on God over the issue of the Gay Bishops.  She said it was like having Alzheimer’s.  She knew no-one, and was tempted to ask: “do you know who I am?”  But instead, she let the spirit speak through her.  She was made a bishop; the issue of Gay bishops remained unresolved.  “Things are the opiate of the people”, she told Odessa.

Odessa devoted her life to decoding, demystifying the language, which enabled one class, one sex, one country to dominate others, steal their resources, and oppress them.  Her moment came when she listened to music and let go of all her analysis, responding only to the medium of the Art, which is itself.  If it could be translated into ideas and arguments, without losing its essential Nature it would not be Art.

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