Murmur. Will Eaves
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reports and sending them off.
The whole premise is childish, like the schoolboy who covers his work with his elbow to prevent his neighbour cheating. I told him this.
‘I’m really not trying to hide anything, Alec,’ he laughed. ‘I just don’t think you’d benefit from reading my notes. My job is to help you encounter yourself.’
I replied, in a bit of a torrent: ‘Balls. This is passing the buck. This is what my father saw in India all the time – Europeans waving their hands and saying, “but the unrest is native and has nothing to do with us”. You are not an impartial observer, Dr Stallbrook. The observer is a participant, as the great revolution in quantum physics has taught us. Consider now that I am the set of notes that you wish to read. I might as well ask: how are you to benefit from reading me? Shall we condemn ourselves to solipsism? The two sides of an equation must meet if they are to balance. You are dodging the issue. What you want is for me not to press too deeply, not to ask for things you cannot give, not to question your authority. And that is unfair.’
‘What do you mean?’
At this point, I lost my temper. ‘The assumption of science is that things are discoverable. Things that belong in problems of logic that are not in principle resolvable, belong in a separate category. Things that do not admit of rational argument in another – God, for instance. But things that are just hidden, or powers that are reserved for no good reason because someone ‘says so’, are the work of the bloody devil! They are a cryptic burden to us all – ’
I was half out of my chair, and sat back heavily, because I’d come upon one of my own restrictions and couldn’t believe I’d hidden it so effectively from myself.
The Act constrains me, of course. Aspects of my working past are always to be concealed from Dr Stallbrook. With the result that I am confined to addressing my personal life – aspects of which are presumably concealed from me.
Noticing my discomfiture, Anthony asked me what I was thinking. He sounded very kind, and I wanted to equal him in co-operation. Whenever I have not been able to persuade someone, I have tried to co-operate. I take this view even in respect of my conviction. One should meet bad manners with good grace.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I respect a necessary authority. But I do not like dodges or masquerades. Puzzles, yes. Masquerades, no.’
‘Is this a masquerade?’
‘No.’ And I was sullenly silent for a while, thinking distractedly and angrily that civilised England is a masquerade. The War Room is a masquerade when the real thing is far away. Psychoanalysts are doubtless persons of integrity, but persons of integrity may still be pawns. There is usually some rule governing our voluntary actions that we either do not know about or are unwilling to acknowledge – the motives of the companies that pay our salaries and ask us to do things, the real function of justice, and so on. ‘No,’ I continued, ‘but this is nevertheless a game with prohibitions we are playing, and one in which you have the advantage. Your opinion of me counts, whatever I say. If you were to decide that I constituted a danger to society, you could have me locked away in a mental institution. But I cannot affect what happens to you. And the further disadvantage to me is that there are things I simply cannot tell you, because I have given my word to others – others in authority – and even the confidences of our arrangement shall not tempt me, because a secret is a personal vow of custody. It cannot be handed over to someone else for safekeeping. And now you will think I am being unfair, and even obstructive.’
‘No,’ said Dr Stallbrook, carefully, ‘that is not what I think.’
We brooded for a while, and the tension eased.
*
Also: just because something is discoverable doesn’t mean one has any idea of how the discovering is to be done. One experiments, and sometimes there is a breakthrough and sometimes one has to admit defeat. How is one consciously to encounter one’s subconscious? The gap is unbridgeable, it seems to me.
Love is a gap. I used to look at Chris while we were tinkering with chemicals and I’d carry on a conversation, adjusting retorts, making notes, apologising. Thinking all the while: this must be possible; clearly it is, for others manage it. But how?
*
Tolstoy’s accounts of Borodino and Austerlitz show us what real war is like: no one knows what the orders are or who is winning. No one has any idea what to do. Soldiers are permitted to kill each other and are maddened, sooner or later, by the realisation that someone else, somewhere relatively comfortable, thinks this is the right thing for them to do. And we are not so far from that kind of chaos in everyday life, really. I walk down the street towards the Infirmary, every Wednesday, and I go in and wait and sit down and everyone is quite polite, and I am played with by the law and turned into a sexless person. The most extraordinary thing is done behind a nice white screen. And the nurse who injects me does it with a good will, because she has been told that it is her job. She doubtless thinks of herself as a freely choosing agent. She likes to think she does her job well, but at the same time she is just doing her job. (One hears this a lot.) That means she does not take ultimate responsibility for her actions, because those kinds of decisions are taken, or absorbed, by more powerful persons, like Tolstoy’s generals, who know what they are doing. She sees no contradiction between this and her own intuitive sense of agency.
She goes home to her parents’ house and has her tea. They have put up some new frieze wallpaper with a ribbon of classical-looking dancing figures where a picture rail might have been. It looks pretty and I wonder how often the family has looked at the actual figures in the frieze, copied from vases in the British Museum by some impish and bored designer. The figures are a) playing music, b) killing their enemies, and c) engaged in exotic but mechanical sexual relations.
We agree not to look. It is a simple but profound contract of the collective subconscious with the truth. If you speak the truth, or do something which indicates how human beings function, regardless of the law, regardless of moral superstition, then people will turn against you, and you must never underestimate how fearful and weak most people in a large body, like a government, or a university, or even an office, actually are. Once you have been isolated in this way, you can be dismissed.
*
I wish people who believe in God could believe in him a little less fervently – could see him as a metaphor for the boundedness of our physical existences and the problem of the mental, which is physical too, but perhaps in a way we don’t understand.
*
‘You’re doing tremendously well!’ or even ‘You’re looking well on it’ means: ‘Please don’t tell me any more about your plight, but instead reassure me that I don’t have to worry about this.’ Similarly, hilariously, ‘We know what it’s like. We’ve just had the most awful trouble with . . .’ means: ‘We are not going to help you.’
But they are helping, my neighbours, and I am cruel. They want me to teach their son chess. He is a pleasant chap with no great aptitude (yet) for the game, or for calculation in general, and I suspect that he likes the barley water at the end of our lessons most of all. He stumbles over my name, and speaks inaudibly, which I find upsetting.
*
Doctors can be terribly self-important without realising it because they get to point and diagnose, and if they’re pointing at you then of course that means you’re not pointing at them. Pointers are an odd lot. They want the triumphant power of clarifying something, of accusation, but they’re also jealously private. They don’t want to be pointed out themselves: it’s a sort of nightmare for them, which leads to them pointing at others more and more often, more and more vehemently. I tend to do it when I get cross. It’s an extremely unappealing habit born of heaven knows what guilt and insecurity. But I don’t do it so much now – now that I’ve been pointed out once and for all, as it were. Perhaps I’ve realised I just don’t feel guilty of this so-called crime. The whole thing is . . . pointless. It rather frees one up.
Stallbrook is at least intelligent.