Briefing for a Descent into Hell Part 13

I am dreaming now.

No, you are awake now. You are talking to me, Doctor Y.

This is no different. A dream, like that.

Oh yes it is different. This is reality. The other is a dream.

How do you know?

You'll have to take my word for it, I'm afraid.

If I did have to, I'd be afraid. I can't take words for anything. Words come out of your mouth and fall on the floor. Words in exchange for? Is that it? Your dreams or your life. But it is not or, that is the point. It is an and. Everything is. Your dreams and your life. You can talk there, talk. I dream whatever I do, lying or waking.

Well, well, Professor. I'll see you tomorrow. Perhaps we may have to try a new treatment.

This patient is no better than when I left last week. I do not see what alternate we have to E.C.T.

DOCTOR X.

I suggest confronting him with his wife, or if we can locate some, friends.

DOCTOR Y.

If no change in the next two or three days, we must transfer him to Higgin-hill. Would remind you this is for Intake.

DOCTOR X.

It is not unusual to extend the routine six weeks, for another three weeks. I suggest we do so.

DOCTOR Y.

Only if we can agree on E.C.T. Which would be a reason for extension.

DOCTOR X.

I am not against E.C.T. But as an interim proposal: withdraw all drugs, including sleepers, and see what happens.

DOCTOR Y.

Very well.

DOCTOR X.

How are you today Professor?

As you see.

You are looking very much brighter.

I haven't been given any drugs for twenty-four hours.

We thought it might help you to remember.

Nurse told me I have been drugged ever since I came in.

I told you, we sedated you in various ways. Then we tried a treatment which you reacted to in a very personal way-you slept almost continually, so we stopped the treatment before we normally would have done with that particular drug.

I am thinking more clearly. Doctor Y?

Professor!

I have to ask you a serious question.

Please do.

Your att.i.tude to me is this. I've got to make him remember what I know to be true about him.

Yes it is. Of course.

But that means that you don't take me seriously. You haven't once taken me seriously.

In reply to that I can only say that you have had more of my personal time and care than any patient I've had in months.

No, I don't mean that. I say to you, I'm not what you say I am. I know that. I'm not Professor Charles What's-his-name. Or if I am nominally that, it isn't the point. But you just go on and on and on, sticking to that one point.

Go on, explain. I am listening.

I might be anything else. I could be....

What? G.o.d perhaps?

Who said that?

You did.

I might have died in the war.

Oh, you were in the war then.

So was everyone.

Some more than others.

We were all there.

What were you doing in the war?

If you know what it is I profess, don't you know who it was I fought?

No, your wife didn't mention it. I must ask her.

I have a wife?

Yes. Her name is Felicity ... is that funny?

Ha, ha, ha, I have absented myself from Felicity. Ha, ha, ha.

I'm a married man, myself.

Felicity.

And you have two boys.

If I am a professor I can have a wife, but my knowledge is, I am just as well a sailor with a wife in the West Indies. Her name is Nancy.

Ah, so you are a sailor again, are you? Were you a sailor in the war?

No, I was an onlooker and then the Crystal came. They fought. They ate each other.

Ah. Now I want you to help me with this. If you aren't Charles Watkins, who are you?

I think I am my friends. And they are-in the name of the Crystal. Yes. A unit. Unity.

Your name is Crystal?

That's crystal clear. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

You're very jolly this morning.

Words are so funny. Felicitously funny.

I see. Well, I'll drop in for a chat tomorrow. We aren't going to give you any more sedatives or drugs. Not for a time anyway. You'll probably find it harder to sleep. But try and stick it out. And perhaps you could try and see if you remember anything about your family. Two sons. Two boys.

My son is dead.

I can a.s.sure you that none of them are dead. Very much alive. I've seen their photograph. Would you like to see? I'll bring it tomorrow.

DEAR DOCTOR Y,.

Thank you for your letter.

I have decided to send you two letters I found in the jacket my husband was wearing just before he lost his memory. I don't know if they will be of any help. One is by him, but he didn't post it for some reason. I don't think my husband ever had a breakdown. But I don't really know what a breakdown is. I think he is the opposite of the kind of person who has a breakdown. He has always been very energetic and gets a lot of things done. He always sleeps much less than most people. When we were first married I used to worry but I got used to it. He sometimes sleeps four or five hours a night for weeks at a time, sometimes only two or three. But that is in summer. In winter he sleeps a bit more. He says it is because animals need to hibernate. I don't think he has been working harder than usual this year. He always works hard. It is his nature. He was rather bad-tempered and crotchetty earlier this year but at the beginning of summer he always gets difficult, but it is because it is examination time. He was stammering quite badly in the spring, a new thing for him, but our family doctor gave him some sedatives and the stammering stopped, but it was bad enough for a time to make him cancel some lectures he was going to give.

Yours sincerely, FELICITY WATKINS.

DEAR PROFESSOR WATKINS,.

It has been agreed that I should write to you. You won't know me-or rather, won't know my name. Yet, we did meet briefly after your lecture. I hope you will remember because it was what you said that started it off. Was a catalyst, touched a spring, something like that. What? Well, nothing common or obvious and that is my trouble in writing to you. It is all intangibles. If you don't remember, then it will still be true that your saying what you did that night began a remarkable process in me and this coincided with a similar process in a close friend of mine-and as we are beginning to see, in more than one of the people closest to us. Yet it is hard indeed to define it. For me, it was definitely listening to you talk. We have wondered if it is possible for you not to remember? Can a yeast not know it is a yeast? I suppose so. Or perhaps it is not like that at all-it might be that a man talking on a platform in a particularly inspired frame of mind may match up to, or coincide with someone listening, and who has gone to listen with no particular expectation, in ways we know very little about. But in writing to you, this act of sitting down to put words together, in the hope that the words will be as strong as those used by you that night, it is like the spreading of a yeast or some sort of chemical that has started working in one place, and then moved out, feeding and inciting, then curved back again to where it began. This letter is like a snake swallowing its tail. By now you will see that it does not matter that you do not know me, because I am not important individually. Nor of course are you. I am writing because I have more time than my friends. I am retired. My children are grown up and I am a widow. Perhaps it had to be me because of my having been there that evening and coming back as if I'd been slapped out of a daydream. We have been wondering too, about the others who were there that night. Did some of them go away feeling as if they had been infused with a new sort of intelligence? Or was I the only one. You probably don't know. But I find it hard to believe. I have heard very many lectures in my time-alas. And even given them. It is not a new thought for me that the quality of a lecture or lecturer need not have much to do with the actual words used. No, I do not mean that I admire the demagogue and the inspirational speaker, not at all. But there is another quality. It is one you had that night. It is possible to imagine what you said that night being heard quite dully. The words were interesting, yes. But that is not the point. The essence of what happened in the room that night, and of what I've been learning since is that words spoken casually in the next room, familiar music heard with a particularly close attention, a pa.s.sage in a book one would normally cla.s.s as commonplace-even the sound of rain on branches, or lightning cracking across a night sky, sounds and sights as ordinary as an every day may hold that very quality I now understand to be that most valuable to me. And to others.

And if you do not know what it is I am talking about-then we must accept as true that the unbelievable suggestion that not only bird, lightning, music, rain, the words of a nursery rhyme How many miles to Babylon?

Four score miles and ten.

Can we get there by candlelight?

Yes, and back again!

but a man talking in a rather ugly lecture room can be charged with this quality and not be aware of it. As a bird can sing all summer and never know that the sounds it makes will remain for a lifetime in the ears of a child in stained streets as the crystallisation of a promise of a recurring spring.

If you do not know what I am saying, do not recognise anything, then ...

It was early this year, at the beginning of spring. I was spending the weekend with friends near Cambridge, ex-pupils of mine. They have small children. They were very excited, because full of plans for a new kind of school-no, not to supplant ordinary education, what the State provides, but to supplement it. Some kind of a weekend school with emphasis on unorthodox individual teaching. As I write I am conscious of a feeling of staleness and boredom-yet now as then I am attracted to such ideas. It is that I have been attracted by them so often!

You were to address a couple of dozen parents, because you had been involved for some time in similar schemes. The idea of sitting through an evening in a lecture room nearly kept me at home, yet I believe that such individual efforts to educate, enliven, and provoke are vital-that any country goes as sleepy as a pear, without such efforts. More, that any democracy depends on them. I went, and found myself as I expected, in a rectangular s.p.a.ce, coated over with plaster painted grey that was still damp-it was a new hall. It was inadequately heated. There was a wooden platform at one end on which stood the speaker-you. Rows of individuals sat to attention in front of you. The chairs were hard uprights. This is the uninspiring setting that we allow ourselves for the working-out and discussion of the dreams we dream for a better world! The village hall. The local hall. The church hall. We take it for granted of course. A man or woman stands on a low platform with a table by him that has a gla.s.s of water on it and perhaps a microphone and in front of him a collection of people who sit facing him, looking up to listen to what he, or she is saying. Out of this process come better schools, hospitals, a new society. We may take it for granted but what could it look like from outside? Very odd, I am sure. Anyway, you were the one that night, a middle-aged man, used to standing on platforms, accomplished and easy in manner, so as not to upset or offend your audience. This is not a criticism, though perhaps it sounds like it. I remember sitting there as you began speaking and thinking you had a perfect platform manner the way doctors have bedside manners.

I was restless and irritable-extraordinarily and unreasonably so, about the whole thing. And I was angry with myself for being like this. I liked what was being said. I liked the fact that all these young parents were proposing to put themselves out in time and expense to educate their children in ways the ordinary school system could not or would not do. I approved of you, the speaker, insofar as it was possible to see what you were like, behind the professionalism of your delivery. Yet I was seething with rebelliousness, with emotion-why should one always have to sit on hard chairs in a characterless hall to hear ideas discussed, why, when one wants to be a citizen and act with others, does it always have to be like this-and why should there always be this phenomenon, people weary and angry with what is provided by society, why did we take that for granted-that it was so always, always had been so, must be so. Why is what happens, what is provided, always so dull and flat and negligible compared with what any ordinary person in the street can imagine as possible and desirable-let alone these young professional parents, all rather highly educated, in the hall. Twenty years ago I had been part of such a group of young parents, on behalf of my own children. Recently again, on behalf of friends' children. But what we had dreamed of, and then discussed, and then planned, and then tried to put into action, had not taken the shape we had originally dreamed of. Not anywhere near it ... There had been results, but nothing that even approached what we knew was possible. Why? What went wrong? What always went wrong? I was sitting very still between my host and hostess, sizzling with exasperation and rebellion and impatience, emotions all quite unsuitable for a retired head-mistress, when you said what struck me so deeply. I remember exactly what you said, because I was in a state of concentrated attention on what you are saying, in spite of my physical restlessness.

"Everybody in this room believes, without knowing it, or perhaps without having formulated it, or at least behaves as if he believes-that children up to the age of seven or eight are of a different species from ourselves. We see children as creatures about to be trapped and corrupted by what trapped and corrupted ourselves. We speak of them, treat them, as if it were possible to make happen events which are almost unimaginable. We speak of them as beings who could grow up into a race altogether superior to ourselves. And this feeling is in everyone. It is why the field of education is always so bitter and embattled, and why no one ever, in any country, is satisfied with what is offered to children-except in dictatorships where the future of children is scaled to the needs of the State. Yet we have become used to this and don't realise how extraordinary it is, and what the fact of it is saying. For it should be enough to teach the young of a species to survive, to approximate the skills of its elders, to acquire current technical skills. Yet every generation seems to give out a bellow of anguish at some point, as if it had been betrayed, sold out, sold short. Every generation dreams of something better for its young, every generation greets the emergence of its young into adulthood with a profound and secret disappointment, even if these children are in every way paragons from society's point of view. This is due to the strong but unacknowledged belief that something better than oneself is possible. It is as if the young creatures of humanity grow towards adulthood in a kind of obstacle race, beset by hazards, with the adults trying futilely but gallantly to provide something better. Once adulthood is reached the newly grown ones join with the older ones, their parents, as they turn about and look back into their own infancy. They watch the infancy of their own children with the same futile anguish. Can we prevent these children from being trapped, and spoiled as we have been, what can we do ... ? Who has not at least once looked into a young child's eyes and seen the criticism there, a hostility, the sullen knowledgeable look of a prisoner? This happens very young, before the young child is forced to become like the parents, before its own individuality is covered over by what the parents say he is. Their 'this is right, that is wrong, see things my way.' This meeting tonight, of young parents joining together to try and provide something better, a better 'education,' was nothing more nor less than this phenomenon that repeats itself in every generation. Every person sitting there on hard chairs in front of you felt as if his or her potential had been left unfulfilled. Something had gone wrong. Some painful and wrong process had been completed and had left them, and even after an expensive schooling-most of those present were middle-cla.s.s people-defective, unfulfilled, if not warped. And so we were doing only what every generation had done; we were looking at our children, as if they had in them to be-that is, if we could think of the right 'education' to give them-beings quite different from ourselves. They could be better, braver, gayer. Oh, and more, much more-we thought of them almost as if they were the young of another species, a free, fearless species, full of potentiality, full of that quality which everyone recognises, yet is never defined, the quality which all adults lose, and know that they lose."

These were the things you said-and more.

It is odd that I can hardly remember what you looked like as you spoke. I know I was awake enough-but even so I didn't have enough energy to take in what you said, and to calm my own restlessness, and to watch you closely. Yet it was a night when I was p.r.i.c.kling with energy, vitality, interest-just because I was angry (if that is the right word) at being there again. What you said explained the feeling of sameness, the againness. Yet the words you used, the energy you put into them, what you were feeling about it all-and it was what we felt too, for the young parents were stirring and awake and while they leaned forward on their chairs to look and listen, kept glancing at each other, even at people they hardly knew, to nod and smile as if to say: Yes, yes, that's it, it is desperately true and we must not fail, we have to succeed this time ... all this; the emotion or recognition in the hall was suddenly making us all alive. The sameness was gone. Our day-by-day selves were held at bay for a moment even while you said: Education means only this-that the lively alert fearless curiosity of children must be fed, must be kept alive. That is education. And, listening, we were lively and alert and fearless. Every one of us was soaked for that time with those qualities. Still stimulated, my friends and I drove back to their house. As we entered the living room, still warm and smoky from the early evening before we had left for the lecture, we began yawning. The stimulation was already gone. One of the children cried out in his sleep, and the father went up, while the mother said that she should take the child to a doctor, he was sleeping badly, was restless and had bad dreams. I understood that there was no connection at all between what was happening now-father going to soothe child, mother talking about doctor and medicines, and what these same parents had been feeling and aiming for even half an hour before, or even a few minutes before, in the car. It was all over. The time of being awake, of being receptive, of being energetic-had consumed itself. We don't have much energy. Your words-or rather, what you had put into the words-had fed us, woken us, made us recognise parts of ourselves normally well hidden and covered over-and that was that. The evening ended as it had begun, some adults in a livingroom, talking, drinking, smoking, discussing the projected weekend school for children, but as if it were just another of their far-too-many ch.o.r.es and burdens.

But I was awake. I was as if stung awake. I did not sleep. And I sat by the window that night and I thought: Don't let it go, don't forget it. Something extraordinary did happen. Perhaps during that night while I sat looking into a suburban garden, I was like a child of three, four, five, a creature quite different from the person she was doomed to grow into. I was certainly remembering what I had been as a small child. I remembered things I had forgotten for years. Before those "prison shades" had come down. Before the trap had shut.

And when I returned home to my flat in London it stayed with me. What stayed? Not the words that you used. It was the feeling of the quality of what you said. It went with recognition, as if I had been reminded of something I knew very well. I was possessed with a low simmering fear that I would forget again, let go-what I had been as a child. It was the same feeling one has after waking from a strong dream which one knows has importance for oneself, or for a friend. You wake fighting to keep the dream, its flavour, its texture. Yet within a few minutes of waking, that country of dream has gone, its taste and reality has drained away into ordinary life. All you have left is an intellectual conviction held in a set of words. You want to remember. You try to remember. You have a set of words to offer your friend, or repeat to yourself. But the reality has gone, evaporated.

But I was remembering. It was as if, in any moment of the day that I chose to revive it, there was a bridge across from that heightened moment when you were saying things about the children, about all of us, and the pulse of the time I was in. I began consciously looking about me for that quality in other moments of life. Like testing one metal with another, ringing one substance on another apparently dissimilar. I had been stung awake by that night, and now I was restless and searching, and I was in a fever in case this restlessness might drain away like the afterglow of a useful dream and leave me tranquilly dead again.

Then, after weeks, something else happened. I'll write it, but I can't do more than put the words down. But it was another flash of recognition, of joy, of "yes, that's it," and again, this quality of matching, of ringing together, of substances being in tune, was here in this incident, exactly as it had been in those five or ten or thirty minutes when you were speaking of keeping aliveness and awakeness in children and at the same time you were feeding a whole room full of people with liveliness and wakefulness. If only for a few minutes.

I had been, as I've said, half unconsciously, looking, watching, trying to find that "quality" again. The quality to which I'd given the tag, "the wave-length." For it was like suddenly touching a high tension wire. Of being, briefly, on a different, high, vibrating current, of the familiar becoming transparent. Well, and when it happened, I did not immediately recognise it, for perhaps I had already made too much of a fetish of what you had made of that moment in the lecture room-I wanted the same thing to happen. When it did happen, it was ordinary, just as it had been with you, talking about education in a routine lecture. And of course, I did not expect it just there, was halfway through the moment before I recognised it, and might even, if I had not been suddenly stung into attention, have missed it altogether.