The Spiral Staircase. Karen Armstrong
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The way both the doctor and the college nurse had taken refuge immediately in cliché when confronted with my predicament indicated that they felt out of their depth. I needed expert help, but I still shrank from exposing the mess of my life to a stranger, who would examine it clinically and make his own appraisal, and I hated the prospect of being known to be mentally ill.
It was partly to prevent this, I suppose, that I started to become more reclusive and reserved. I was afraid of experiencing one of these uncanny episodes when I was with other people. I had lost confidence. Where previously I had felt only shy and socially inhibited, I could now place no trust in either my body or my mind. I no longer took it for granted that I could get through a party or a quiet evening with friends without succumbing to this malady, and, indeed, I had noticed that the flickering lighting to which people seemed so strangely addicted these days made me feel very odd indeed. And so, just as I had started to put out feelers to the world, I began to withdraw again.
There was another, deeper reason for this. These frightening incidents were changing me. I now knew that at any second, the pleasant, innocent-seeming surface of normality could split apart, and this knowledge infected everything. I knew that other people had been to this dark place. I could see it in Van Gogh’s tormented, writhing olive trees and swirling starry skies. It was in the infernal visions of Bosch; it was the heart of darkness evoked by Joseph Conrad. It didn’t matter how often I told myself that these experiences had no substantive reality. However you accounted for them, this was a region of the human mind. And because I had visited it, I felt set apart. I was surrounded by girls whose existence was beginning to blossom. Most of them were hopeful, cheerful and excited by their unfolding lives, but I could no longer share this instinctive optimism. I was now doubly out of place among my fellow-students, as though I were the wicked fairy in the story, brooding balefully over the party.
Increasingly I felt as though I were witnessing everything at one remove. As time went on, solid physical objects appeared ephemeral, and people seemed like ghosts, with no clearly defined identity. When your surroundings can so suddenly take on a frightening aspect, you start to experience them as fluid, unreliable and without inherent integrity. Things seemed to flow into one another; a kind face could rapidly become menacing, a pleasant landscape take on a malign aspect. Sometimes I felt as though I were looking at reality through a sheet of glass. If I put my hand out to touch an object. I often expected to feel this barrier; sounds seemed faint and dim. This happened so gradually and became so habitual that, after a time, I ceased to remark upon it. It became the norm, the element in which I lived. I was rather like the little fish in the Sufi parable, who asks his mother about this stuff called water that he hears everybody discussing but which he has never seen. It is not until the condition lifts that you realize that it was abnormal. At the time, it simply seemed that the world from which I had retreated had now begun to recede from me.
This made it even more difficult to relate to other people. When you feel that you are talking to somebody through a plate-glass window, it is hard to make real contact. I also found it impossible to feel strongly about current events, which seemed somehow vague and remote. During the spring of 1970, when I read about the fighting between Israelis and Syrians on the Golan Heights, looked at a newspaper photograph of a despairing child in Biafra, or watched television footage of the Viet Cong offensive in Laos, I could not feel anything at all. In May, the anti-Vietnam War rally in Washington DC, which delighted so many of my fellow-students at St Anne’s, seemed like something you might see in a surrealist dream, weird and insubstantial. I viewed these distant crises as through the wrong end of a telescope. They might as well be taking place on another planet that I would never visit.
Yet again, work became my refuge, because it made me feel relatively normal. If I could write good, competent essays about Chaucer or Shakespeare, my mind might not be irretrievably damaged. I could still think logically and coherently, if not originally. The more I read and studied, the more competent work I produced, the easier it was to believe that I was not completely mad and that one day I might be able to make my way in the world as an ordinary person. If I could stay for ever in the nice secure realm of scholarship, doing a little teaching, or writing the occasional article on Emily Brontë or Wordsworth, I might be able to keep my demons at bay.
Besides turning me into a solitary, these attacks of fear dealt yet another blow to my already wavering faith. No, I did not imagine that I had seen Satan during these visitations and knew very well that the evil I sensed had no metaphysical existence but was simply the product of my own mind. But these ‘visions’ got me thinking. In an age that was less scientific than our own, it would surely have been natural to conclude that the ghostly, senile presence that I sensed with hallucinatory intensity was a real diabolic personality. Poets and mystics had often spoken of the foul stench of hell. Almost certainly, hell was simply the creation of infirm minds like my own. There was no objective evidence to support such a belief. That was a wonderful and liberating thought, but what if God was also a mental aberration? The ecstatic, celestial visions of the saints could be just as fantastic as my own infernal sensations. What we called God could also be a disease, the invention of a mind that had momentarily lost its bearings. I was slightly dismayed to find that this idea did not trouble me overmuch. If there were no God, then much of my life had been nonsense, and I should, surely, have felt more upset. But then, God had never been a real presence to me. He had been so consistently absent that he might just as well not exist. Perhaps I should just leave the Church and have done with it.
Father Geoffrey Preston, a benign Dominican at Blackfriars in St Giles urged me not to make too hasty a decision. I had started to attend mass at Blackfriars at the suggestion of one of my tutors, who was also recovering from an unhappy Catholic past, and sometimes looked as though she had barely survived the struggle. She had recommended the family mass on Sunday mornings, and I found that it was indeed a cheerful, imaginative liturgy, geared to the needs of children who could crawl or run around the church freely and, within reason, make as much noise as they liked. My tutor also advised me to talk to Geoffrey.
He was clearly a kind man, but seemed faintly ill at ease, and I suspected that, like many priests, he had ambivalent feelings about nuns. ‘I hope you’re not feeling guilty about all this.’ He shifted his massive girth uncomfortably around on the formal parlour chair. ‘I know nuns tend to trade on guilt. I expect you had to count up your faults on a special string of beads and write them down in a little book,’ he chuckled, inviting me to share what he clearly assumed was a joke.
‘Yes, we did, actually,’ I said.
Geoffrey’s head snapped to attention, his eyes startled. ‘You’re not serious, are you?’ I nodded. ‘Good God.’ He gazed, lost for words for a moment, at the ceiling. ‘We always thought that was a silly fantasy – one of the absurd stories that people tell about nuns. I had no idea that they actually did it.’
‘You’ve had a sheltered life, Geoffrey.’ I stood up and started putting on my coat. ‘If you’re not careful, I’ll tell you the whole story one day.’
‘I’m not sure that I could take it.’ Geoffrey was smiling but I could sense his real distaste. ‘I suppose that’s women for you,’ he said reflectively as we walked down the cloister. ‘We always said in the army that they were no good at community life. They seem to get bogged down in petty rules and regulations – can’t see the wood for the trees.’
Perhaps, I thought, as I headed back to college. But I also knew enough about the Church to know that it was men who had made the rules in the first place.
I had mixed feelings as the train thrust its way through the lush Sussex countryside. In one sense, I was going home, going back to the convent where I had spent the first three years of my religious life. I had received a letter from Sister Rebecca, asking me if I could come to see her. This in itself was surprising. Visitors were generally discouraged and I could scarcely be considered a suitable companion for Rebecca. Things had obviously changed during the fourteen months that I had been away. But I had some misgivings about my own reactions. I had no idea how it would feel to be in a convent atmosphere once more.
Sister Rebecca had been two years ahead of me. When I had been a postulant, she had been a second-year novice, and we had all seen her as the