The Spiral Staircase. Karen Armstrong
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a unanimity that was almost comical, Jane and Mark both did a double-take. ‘The Beatles, of course!’ Jane exclaimed. And then, as I continued to look blank, she added, a little more tentatively: ‘You have heard of the Beatles, haven’t you?’
I had. Just. My sister had mentioned the group to me on one of her visits, and the name had cropped up occasionally in the conversation of my fellow-students. But even though it was now 1969, I had no idea who the Beatles really were, no notion of their extraordinary impact on British society during the 60s, had never encountered Beatlemania, and had certainly never knowingly heard a note of their music. Jane and Mark tried to explain to me what the Beatles meant for their generation, but I took little in. I could see that they were slightly alarmed by my ignorance. Jane was looking at me thoughtfully, though I made her laugh when I asked, in some perplexity, why the band was named after those rather unpleasant black insects. On my other side, Mark was reciting the lyrics, which shocked me by their unabashed expression of naked need: ‘Love, Love Me Do!’, ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand!’, ‘Please, Please Me!’ I could not even have admitted to myself that I had such needs, let alone shouted my yearnings aloud in such wild abandonment. Yet the words touched some raw place within me, making me aware of my loneliness in this crowded room. All around me I noticed feet tapping, heads nodding, lips mouthing the words of the songs, glances exchanged as though a phrase had a special private significance. The Beatles were a current that united everybody at the party; a thread that bound the room together. They were the spokesmen of their generation, but even though they must have been about my own age, they could not speak for me. I was present at the party, but only as an outsider. The ease and confidence with which the Beatles simply said what they wanted appalled me, and yet I longed to be able to do the same. Even today, more than thirty years later, when I have come to appreciate their real genius, I find their songs almost unbearably poignant. Those desires had been schooled out of me, and yet the painfully direct appeal of the lyrics made me realize that I wished that I had them. I felt my throat swell with unshed tears: ‘All You Need Is Love’.
But love in this context? I stared bemused at the dancers. These new acquaintances of mine had obviously never heard of the quickstep. Instead, they were leaping, twisting, gyrating together in pairs. Some even danced singly, and no one followed any predetermined pattern. They shot into the air, waved their arms, swung out legs at odd angles. Doing what came naturally. But it was not natural for me. For a second I felt a pang of pure envy. I would love to be able to do that, I thought, and to be so wild, uninhibited and free. These students were living fully and intensely, in a way that I could not. When Mark, kindly, asked me if I would like to dance, I shook my head. I could no more fling myself around like that than fly.
For years, I had been trained in absolute physical restraint. Nuns had to walk smoothly, at a moderate pace. Unless there was some dire emergency, they must never run. At first all this had been difficult. Most of us were young and it was hard to quench the impulse to run upstairs, two steps at a time, or to hurry to a class when late. But gradually I had learned to keep myself in check. I had, however, never fully mastered these rules of ‘religious modesty’ which were supposed to regulate a nun’s demeanour. I was, and am, clumsy and badly coordinated. I never quite achieved the noiseless, gliding carriage of some of my fellow-novices, and I was always hopeless at ‘custody of the eyes’, the quaintly named monastic habit of keeping one’s gaze fixed on the ground. I like to know what is happening, and if I heard an unusual noise or somebody entering the room, I found it almost impossible not to check it out. I was often reprimanded for staring boldly at my superiors, instead of casting my eyes down humbly. I did not mean to be disrespectful, but I had been brought up to look people directly in the eye when I spoke to them. Yet for all these failings, some of this convent discipline had rubbed off on me, and to this day I have never been able to dance. I have often fantasized about being a disco-girl, imagining an alternative Karen, able to leap about, let go, and disappear into the music. It must be a marvellous feeling. But it has never been possible. At a very impressionable age, my body was schooled in quite other rhythms and it has, for better or worse, taken the print.
As I watched the dancers, I felt completely out of my element. I could see that this kind of dancing was unabashedly sexual. It reminded me of the ceremonial dances performed by Africans that I had seen occasionally on documentaries or newsreels. It was interesting, but had nothing to do with me. I tried to look nonchalant and at ease, but felt miserably that I must look as out of place as the Queen, in her suburban, matronly clothes, carrying her ubiquitous handbag like a shield, staring with a glazed smile at the ritual dances performed in her honour during a tour of the Commonwealth. I had found, to my considerable sorrow, that even though I no longer belonged in the convent, I didn’t belong out here either.
Looking back, I can see that, during those first few months, I was experiencing something akin to the culture shock of those who, for one reason or another, have been forced to leave homes in Pakistan, Palestine or Zimbabwe, and migrate to a Western country. The violent upheavals of the twentieth century have made millions of people homeless in one traumatic uprooting after another. Exile is, of course, not simply a change of address. It is also a spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of ‘home’ is gone, there is a fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away, and becoming insubstantial. Their ‘world’ – inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos – has literally come to an end.
Now I was sharing something of this twentieth-century experience. True, I had left my ‘home’ in the convent of my own free will, and was not languishing in a camp, but I did feel in exile from everything that made sense. Because I could take nothing for granted, and did not know how to interpret the 60s’ world that had come into being during my absence, I too felt that the world had no meaning. Because I had lost my fundamental orientation, I felt spiritually dizzy, lacking all sense of direction, not knowing where to turn. I could see the same kind of stunned bewilderment in the eyes of the old Bangladeshi lady who served in the corner shop near St Anne’s, where we bought newspapers and sweets.
I saw it again in the eyes of Sister Mary Sylvia, a nun in my college. She had recently come from India to take a degree in English literature, and was living in my old convent at Cherwell Edge. In India, apparently, she had earned a first-class degree, had run schools, and held high office in her order. But the move from India seemed to have unhinged her completely. She was quite unable to write a coherent essay, complete the simple procedures that enabled her to take books out of the college library, or remember the times of lectures and seminars. I knew about this all too well, because – as one familiar with the arcane ways of nuns – I was constantly called to the rescue. When I tried to help Sister Mary Sylvia with her essays, I noticed that she simply could not take in what I was trying to tell her. One day when she failed to turn up to the philology class that, as usual, was being held in the small seminar room, I found her sitting all alone in the dining hall with her notebook, smiling benignly, while puzzled college servants tried to work around her, waxing the floor and laying the tables for dinner. She was clearly in shock, could make no sense of her surroundings, and had entirely lost her bearings. I was in better shape, but I sensed something of what she was going through. Deprived of the familiar, I too seemed to have lost my way in a world that meant nothing to me. When later that year, I watched my namesake Neil Armstrong make his ‘giant leap for mankind’, and jump on to the pitted surface of the moon, the utterly bleak, dark and eerily empty lunar landscape epitomized exactly what Planet Earth had become for me.
It was little better when I returned home during the vacation. My family gave me a wonderful welcome, but they were expecting the daughter and sister who had left home seven years earlier. My parents were tremulously eager to resume normal family life, but they seemed almost strangers to me. They had been allowed to visit at six-monthly intervals and I had been permitted to write to them only once every four weeks. These communications had, to put it mildly, been unsatisfactory. Visits to the convent parlour were starchy and artificial. Nuns were not allowed to eat with ‘seculars’, so my parents had some appalling meals surrounded by a bevy of nuns pouring out tea