The Archive of Stanley Messenger The Cathar Connection a novel by Stanley Messenger 3. RAYMOND

NEXT BACK START INDEX Glastonbury Archive PRINT

Soon after Raymond’s arrival in Hertfordshire a dossier of papers began to collect in the file of the psychiatrist to whom he found his way during the first two or three days of his hospitalisation. Some of these were written by Raymond himself, others by the psychiatrist. In due course much of this material came into the hands of a group of people working together in the Pyrenées, studying the Cathars, their life and times, and their relevance to the transformation of life in contemporary society.

In making up this account of the events that led to the formation of this group it has not been found necessary to alter any of this material which gives a clearer picture of the development of the relationships of the people involved than could have been achieved by piecemeal quotations incorporated into narrative form as by a third party.

The dossier begins with a document on a single page transcribed from tape. It formed part of the first interview between Raymond and the doctor after the former came round from his initial period of sedation. Raymond has always set great store by this short excerpt, regarding it as the first step in his emergence from his double stream of memories, and from the amnesia by which he attempted to resolve and rationalise his crisis of identity.

This is followed by a longer passage, consisting partly of further pieces written in response to the doctor’s request for material he could use during treatment, and partly of continuity passages written later when a number of people were trying to incorporate the material into a continuous narrative.

From the dossier:-

Behind all the subsequent conversations, and overshadowing all the later involvements and adventures I can still sometimes recapture the echo of a quieter, steadier voice. The voice more of a doctor than a friend…

You say you’ve been on this journey. You should sit down and write out your experiences.

I can’t remember what they are; only the fact that they are important.

Perhaps you should start to write in any case. Perhaps that is what is needed to bring them back.

It is just this I fear.

The experiences were unbearable?

All experiences are unbearable until they are rationalised. Most people would rather be bored than have unrationalised experiences. But I meant something rather different.

Yes?

Well, simply that to remember experiences usually seems to diminish their importance. It is as if only the husks of what was experienced are accessible to memory. The point would be to have the experiences again, and this seems to me to be something essentially different, even quite opposite, to remembering them.

I was making a different point. I meant to suggest that in writing down what you could remember you would be directing attention to what you experienced in such a way that others could read between the lines.

At the cost of my own sense of their importance, which alone gives meaning to my life?

Anyone who hangs on to spiritual capital by deliberately withholding the communication of it loses it inevitably, and deserves to. It seems quite possible that the only way to re-experience your journey is through the reflection of it in the involvement with others which your recollection creates. Throw the bread upon the waters and see what comes back.

It is rather a question of throwing the husks and seeing if bread comes back. That one does in any case, Ancient Mariner fashion, merely by being back from the journey and clutching a sleeve or two.

***

This conversation, and others like it, took place all that year, some of them in the clinic, others more diluted and less pretentious-sounding after I came out.

The shrewd reader will have observed what a difference it makes once the suggestion has been implanted that only an inner journey is meant. You then begin at once to discount anything further that is said, or at least to qualify it with some preconceived idea about what is real and what is not. This is so even if no mention is made of clinics. There would still be a headlong rush in most of us towards some personal standard of ‘reality’ – ‘normality’. Trying to overcome my increasing cautiousness in selecting people to talk to, I tend to judge people nowadays by how hysterical this rush for normality becomes under pressure. You would think that doctors in clinics would be proof against this sort of pressure. Some are, but most are not, least of all those whose ‘position’ vis-à-vis the patient is most impregnable. The only reason that such doctors don’t bolt for cover at the first suggestion that there maybe some doubt about the exact boundary between inner and outer experience, or between reality and hallucination, is that they never came out of cover in the first place.

I shall have to ask you to exercise a little patience, and allow me to blow off steam about the clinic. I realise how defensive it is and how often this sort of thing has been said before. I also realise that nobody with rigid preconceptions could honestly have spoken to me as Fraser, my doctor, did, in his suggestions, which I wrote down at the beginning.

Exactly similar suggestions can of course be made dishonestly, and frequently are, for purely therapeutic reasons, by persons whose notions of reality are completely rigid. And whose intention it is to restore one, by surgical interference if necessary, to a condition in which the channels by which such experiences enter are permanently cut off.

However, I am putting it on record that Fraser was to the best of my belief honest, and open to the possibility that there were objective grounds for thinking about what I told him, and taking it at its face value, by which I simply mean without preconceptions. I don’t really mean that anything perceptual can be taken at face value, least of all one’s own or other people’s open-mindedness. The unconscious preconceptions are the worst. My intuition told me that Fraser was honest. I had to leave it at that.

***

So now I have thoroughly established the impression that this was an inner journey, a psychedelic journey as we say nowadays. I suggested this simply by the way I introduced it, and by mentioning the clinic. So it is time to throw a spanner in the works and assure you it was nothing of the sort. I was away on a definite journey, mainly in the Pyrenées, for the best part of six months. The episode in the clinic was after I got back, and lasted only a short time, a couple of weeks, though I was under the doctor at home for some time after that. During this time and later I had several further conversations with Fraser. More than anyone else he helped me to re-establish a degree of inner equilibrium, and without demanding heaven as his price. The others were not interested in heaven. Earth at its most mediocre was their mark, ponces one and all, selling the boredom and emptiness of so-called normal experience as if she were your smiling mother, instead of the raddled old tart she is. Not just selling either, forcing their putrid wares on you with the threat of the leucotomy scalpel, or of the blasting of heaven from your soul with electric shocks, on the grounds that heaven is really hell because the way to it is through suffering. As if you were to tell Christ he needn’t be crucified after all, he can have a tranquilliser instead. Then there is the final blasphemy of claiming that the birth of consciousness at a new level, the next step in human evolution, is not worth the price. As if you were to say that metamorphosis is a disease, and butterflies sick, degenerate caterpillars. That there is something evil about birth because it is painful, and some people have miscarriages.

When I had written this much I went one day in late October to Dr. Fraser’s London consulting room in order to get his comments on it before going on. He asked if I thought I had been mentally ill. I said I was sure I had.

"Do you think an attempt should be made to cure mental illness?" He asked. I said I thought the medical profession had blurred the distinction between medicine and surgery. It used to be realised that surgery should always be a last ditch affair, a retreat before a hopeless situation, blowing up your supply lines and burning villages. On the other hand there were healing substances, herbs and the like, introduced into the living and still hopeful situation, witnesses, new factors introduced into the ecological argument going on within the diseased body. Healing in this sense was hardly separable from nourishment, or at the very least from maintenance, preventive medicine, since in any case the body starts to die the moment it is born. The perpetually dying organism takes its place in the whole economy of nature, where nourishing and healing substances are marshalled in ever changing patterns in accordance with the fluctuating events of health and disease.

But all this is now hopelessly perverted. Instead of a gentle ecological balancing game of influences and humours, a kind of husbandry of the blood stream and the metabolism and the impulses, where even diseases have their value as indicators of the state of the human being in the purposeful and meaningful struggle of his life, and where even death is only one beat in the rhythm of immortality… instead of exercising this urbane and wise supervision the doctors have declared war on disease and death as if these were somehow avoidable instead of being an inbuilt part of the whole life process. Having no intuitions about rhythm, they take sides with one swing of the pendulum and declare anathema on the other. You are only allowed to live, you mustn’t die, not even in a small way, and if necessary they half kill you to make sure. Soon you will be allowed to wake, but not to sleep, quite unnecessary. You can breathe in, but not out. The clock may go tick, but it may not go tock. They have lost the understanding that inside the physical-chemical structure there is a human being with a meaningful destiny, and the possibility of a directional and purposeful history between pain and pleasure, light and dark, which alone orient him, make life comprehensible to him. For them there is no patient. There is only the system, and they have opted to keep it going at all costs. Instead of the meaningful commerce between light and darkness which gives birth to the colour and individual quality of each human existence, they have erected an iron curtain, a Berlin Wall, slap across the middle of human nature. Behind this they sit, sniping at disease and death with an every increasing armoury of chemical weapons. They have quite overthrown the old concept of healing substances, which restore the balance of a rhythmic process whose meaningful survival depends on the interweaving of destructive as well as of creative elements. Now there is no essential difference between medicine and surgery. It is no longer peacetime, with medicine the peacekeeper, surgery the ultimate sanction of a lawful administration. The human body is under martial law, with every function conscripted on one side of the barrier, every drug dedicated to the destruction of some dissenting cell or function, victory for life over death the absolute and inviolable aim, the promised land a spurious physical immortality, consciousness the perpetual glare of a naked bulb in an interrogation cell. Do not be deceived by painlessness, by vivisection under ether. These only mask the essential violence of the tranquillising drug, the essentially surgical, irreversible character of chemical medication. Hardly anyone appreciates that in-patients discharged from mental hospitals after leucotomy, shock, or suppressive medication, whole areas of essential humanity have been irretrievable written off. What is called cure is achieved at the cost of a permanent suspension of meaningful experience.

I don’t suppose I said half this, it is what I wrote down afterwards. But whatever it was I got off my chest, Fraser sat watching me with his characteristic half smile. I was used to letting off verbal fireworks at him in hospital, and he played up to me as audience. He grinned broadly, and said something like "Quite like old times". Then he said I hadn’t answered his question, and added that perhaps he should rephrase it.

After a bit he said: "Do you think an attempt should be made to cure illness in general, and mental illness in particular?"

At this point we decided to put the conversation on tape, so what follows is more or less unedited.

"The trouble is," I said, "most of the serious thinking about mental illness has taken place since the medical profession lost touch with the nature and purpose if illness. Most people need a certain amount of illness. It is a disservice to people to deprive them of illnesses that may be their only way to achieve advances of other kinds. Many advances in human experience can only be made indirectly by deprivation, or opposition of one kind and another. It is only when illness becomes excessive that people need help in finding their own right balance between sickness and health. All this applies to mental illness too. I am quite sure a lot of mental illness should be left alone, though the people suffering from it should not. Endless attempts should be made to communicate with them. But the first thing would have to be an entirely new start, not in the diagnosis of mental illness, but in interpreting the diagnosis."

"You leave out of account that many people we see are beyond the point when it is any good to them or to society to leave their illness alone. We are not free agents."

"No, by then you are not. But the situation should never be allowed to get that far. By the time the experiences that lead to mental illness have begun to affect the body it is already too late to do anything but treat the body, and this puts a stop to the experiences. Doctors will never stop working to make the body incapable of having such experiences until they start realising that they are valid human experiences. Some of them are a lot more than that. They are an aspect of evolutionary metamorphosis of human consciousness, of which the irreversible psychoses have hitherto been the inevitable casualties. We people who are potential or actual mental patients need to put continual pressure on the medical profession from now on to find ways of making the physical apparatus which is the vehicle of psychic events strong enough to bear an ever increasing load of new kinds of psychic experience."

"I’m not sure that this is the function of doctors," said Fraser, "Doctors are simply repairmen. You are asking us to send the model back to the manufacturers for re-styling. I suppose that’s an extension of the branch we call prosthetics. Psychic prosthetics, do you want?"

"I don’t think we do, no." I said, "I think we need you to look in the past history of your art for your lost intuitive sense of the nature of health. Somewhere there, there must be a clue to enable you to bring that intuition of health up to date, in line with the necessary thinking of today and the evolutionary needs of today. We have to grow new organs of perception, not manufacture them as artefacts."

We sat in silence for a while. Then I started up again.

"I mean I know I have laid into your profession as if this war you have declared on the abnormal is a matter of sheer perversity and bloody-minded lack of insight. Most doctors have been caught unawares by the proliferation of new psychic phenomena and try to deal with them with totally inadequate concepts. But there must surely be an increasing number of doctors who are realising that the corporate health, particularly mental health, of humanity has in a certain sense broken down, to quite a new extent in the last half century?"

"I think most of us are aware of it," said Fraser, "Looked at biologically, man has become a runaway weakened stock like his own domestic animals, thinned out through over breeding like battery hens and Australian rabbits. Humanity’s plant-animal forces are too thinly spread. I wonder if we won’t soon be getting a human version of foot-and-mouth or myxomatosis, to concentrate the stock. We need to re-sink our biological roots in a more compact area of life."

Fraser got up and filled his pipe, which he always did when something began to work in him. Usually he just sat and smiled faintly. Most of the time when I was with him in hospital he hardly spoke. At first I used to think he was half-asleep. He was at the window now, looking down the long avenue of plane trees from the fourth floor of the apartment house where he had his consulting room. From my chair by the fire I could see a column of smoke rising above the multi-coloured autumn trees. Somebody was burning leaves in one of the gardens in West Heath Road, backing onto Hampstead Heath. The sharp smell caught my throat, and I was pulled suddenly back across the months to another autumn before all these things had happened. The momentary panic was more on account of the huge gulf these events had created between the self I now was and most of what I had been before, than of anything in the events themselves.

I sat there sweating it out with the whole experience yawning beneath me. I was clutching the arms of the chair as if this would hold me back from the plunge. But I soon found I could breathe easily again and could think quite calmly of the castle and the inn, and the moment at the ford when the water started to rise. Then the slow onset of confusion about sleeping and waking, and the confused identities of the people I was involved with, especially of the girl on the train on the journey coming back. I could almost have taken Fraser at his word and launched into a full account, had he not at that moment turned from the window to speak. And at that moment it was not Fraser at all but… well, it was Fraser, but it was also someone quite different whose identity escaped me, as did all the rest of it. He choked off what he was about to say and came rather quickly across the room, but I waved him off and got up.

"I’m all right," I said, "Another bit of my amnesia sorting itself out. Well, not exactly that, if anything more confused than ever, but all the same something is resolving itself. In fact I think I’m beginning to get an idea of what we ought to do."

He moved back to his place by the fire, pipe forgotten, and sat down. He looked trapped and disconcerted in a way that I had never seen in him.

"I think you are going to involve me in an impossible choice," he said. "You know, you are one of the lucky ones. You’ve come through this experience without serious harm. You are neither insane, nor are you back in life as a psychic cripple, with your inner life more or less confined to the satisfaction of minor appetites. This is what many of our post-operative and ECT patients become."

"Did I have ECT?"

"No. I’m glad to say you didn’t. But you must realise that I can no more stop this war you have been talking about than stop humanity’s search for a meaningful existence. The avalanche of mental illness continues, and even if every doctor was prepared to look deeper, or had time to look deeper into the causes of it, we would still have the mounting task of somehow protecting the public. No, don’t shout at me! I know you’re going to say it’s time we stopped protecting the bloody public and let them experience, the hard way if necessary, that they are personally involved in the problem. It is their world that produces the conditions for madness. It is they who go mad in it. It is up to them etc. etc. But for every one who is open hearted and ready to learn and take on relationships with people who cannot always stay sane, there are ten who are callous and indifferent out of self protection and the desire for a quiet life. To put it a bit more charitably, there are ten who are quite unequipped, whose mature characteristics as healers and teachers, which we all potentially are, if only as parents, have simply not developed far enough to take on such a thing with another adult person whether sibling or wife or husband, or elderly parent. The long-term education of people in compassion and personal responsibility for each other simply doesn’t keep pace with the mounting pressure of demand for it. To be quite brutal, if you go off your rocker again, who’s going to look after you? You are unmarried, your parents are too old to take you on, and wouldn’t anyway."

"I’m not going off my rocker again, as you put it. You yourself have ensured that, by opening up, for yourself as well as for me, quite new vistas in the doctor-patient relationship."

"I’m not as sure about the long term outcome of that as you seem to be," said Fraser, "Obviously the most frightening potential casualty in this whole thing is the doctor himself as healer. The more treatments science makes available to him, the more he has to hide behind when faced with his ignorance of the real nature of the human being who confronts him as a patient. In the end he is no different from the husband who wants his mad wife carted off to the loony bin. He knows no more about how to help her face her problems than the husband. He can’t even form an adequate concept of what, for her, that problem is. At least ECT stops her carving up the furniture, even if he has to send her home permanently incapable of rising above the vegetable level in her relationships. As for the husband, he has a straight choice between a loony and a moron. At least the latter doesn’t leave him too scared and shattered to do his job and earn the family’s bread and butter."

"You’re almost talking as if the struggle between psychotherapy and physical treatment is implicitly over," I objected, "as if the drug boys had had the last word."

"We don’t really know what mental illness is," said Fraser. "We don’t really know whether a particular patient is going to deteriorate or have a remission, except statistically. Once the process starts we can stop it going totally beyond control with our physical treatments, but only at the cost of a burnt-out shell of a human being whom there is no means of re-equipping with the basic facilities for normal life. Anything we can call creatively human has retreated so far into the background as to be quite inaccessible to ordinary communication. It is because of this that it is so easy to concede to the hard-headed behaviourists what you call the last word. They believe the human being to be a machine, which, especially when it breaks down, you can either treat as a machine as far as you understand how it works, or abandon. For them there is no alternative."

"But for you there is an alternative," I insisted. "You embody it in your whole attitude."

"That may be so," said Fraser, "in fact it is so. But if psychotherapy and particularly psychoanalysis as practised hitherto, were really the only answer to them, they would inevitably capture the whole field before long. And my attitude as you call it is not in itself more than a jumping- off point for a new approach. Many, many doctors have such an attitude. But so long as they cannot fully conceptualise such an attitude and forge it into a therapeutic instrument which demonstrates by its clinical successes the reality of the spiritual nature of the human being upon which it rests, then they, I in fact, am tilting at windmills. In the last resort we will be treated by the rest of the profession as mere talkers, fit only to treat the minor neuroses."

I knew by now it was no use holding off any longer, even if it meant losing him as a doctor. I was convinced I didn’t need him any longer in that capacity. But I also knew that unless he could achieve a change of relationship with me, I would be unable to help him to take his own next step.

"One thing, however, you can quite certainly know," I said. "You may not be able to prove it, but you can experience it quite directly when as a result of your insisting on keeping faith with the essential humanity of a patient, and that’s what you are doing now with me, you put him in a position to call your bluff. You have to be able to take the further step of putting yourself as much into his hands as he has put himself in yours. You’ve probably anticipated what I’m going to suggest," I went on, "I wouldn’t do so if I weren’t convinced that you are already involved in the matter at a deeper level. I want you to come back with me to the Pyrenées. There are people there I want you to meet. I think it very possible, even likely, that this is part of your answer to the problem of convincing yourself and possibly other people that the breakthrough for non-physical psychotherapy will transcend mere talk. Certainly you will be able to take your own experience of me as a patient to a further point. Possibly you will find a new and more satisfactory meaning for the term ex-patient."

This made him laugh, but before he could object I went on. "But that is only part of it. Until now you have only seen my journey as the vehicle for some hallucinatory symptoms of a condition in me you wish to cure. You suspect it maybe more than that. I want you to risk putting this to the test. Now I know mental patients are always out to persuade their doctors to do this. Part of the doctor’s task is to find grounds for an objective position in reality from which to resist the process. Most of them fail to do so without crass materialism, which is supported by most of the science of the day, which by and large they are happy to go along with. Even if like you they are not happy with it, it can become a relatively firm point from which to confront the patient. But you are in a different position. You are already half convinced that what I went through had an objective content, that it only slipped over into hallucination to the extent that my organism failed to contain it adequately. This very openness on your part enabled me to come through it, think it through, make it bearable to myself in the context of ordinary life. Now we need the other half of the story; for you to put yourself in a position to judge for yourself what part or the content of my experience can be objective for you. Implied in this is the question of how far you can confront the abyss faced by any of your patients without losing the ground on which you stand as doctor."

"How far I can confront the abyss, full-stop," said Fraser. "There is only one abyss. Potentially it faces us all. Most mental illness consists in facing it unprepared." He laughed.

"You know I can visualise the exact expression on the faces of my colleagues if they were standing here waiting to see how I would answer you. Being conned by the plausibility of a patient’s hallucinations is the main occupational hazard of psychologists."

"I know. I’ve just been reading William Sargent’s story about a false pregnancy."

"Yes there are dozens of such stories. One can see their point. The depressing thing is that for a large number of those who are most conspicuously successful in avoiding such an involvement the question of the actual content of the hallucination is never raised at all. For them the content is quite immaterial. It is the fact that the hallucination occurs and is a diagnostic pointer to a physical condition which is physically curable which alone interests them."

"We come to the crucial question, don’t we," I said. "How would you yourself answer the question, what is an hallucination? I’m beginning to emerge from mine gradually during the last six weeks. But I want to see whether you would account for them in the same way as I do."

Fraser looked uncomfortable.

"I don’t know if you can understand why that sort of question worries me as much as it does," he said. "For one thing you’re not a Scot, and being a Scotsman has a good deal to do with it. You credit me with a degree of liberality and openness, which you haven’t found in other doctors, and that flatters me on the one hand. But it also disconcerts me, because professional soundness, and a conscientious discipline in thinking mean a great deal to me. They are the ground of a great deal of my self-respect. I value them in my colleagues, and I have grave doubts whether a single one of those I owe most to in my work could continue to treat me as one of themselves if I said openly what I am more and more forced to conclude about these problems in private. No doubt you think I’m making a lot of fuss about this, but it’s unfortunately true that a majority of people who allow themselves to speculate about entirely new ways of looking at reality do so at the expense of all honesty and accuracy of thinking. It needs a much more trained mind to avoid useless fantasy in this sort of field than if you stick to well worn paths. But having said all that…"

He looked up at me and grinned rather sheepishly.

"Yes, I could say having said all that," I broke in, "having paid your tribute to your orthodox self, you’re now prepared to let your back hair down. Don’t think I fail to appreciate what a struggle this is for you. On the other hand, colleagues notwithstanding, you can hardly believe that the entire fruits of having acquired a professionally trained mind will fall uselessly away the minute you open it to unfamiliar facts. If my intentions towards you, unknown to myself, are no more than a more subtle variant of the esoteric confidence trick, you above all are in the best position to frustrate them. In any case the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you were a soft touch in the sense we have been talking about, you and I would now both be wallowing in the hallucinatory world which overtook me six months ago."

"Are you sure we are not doing just that?"

"Yes, absolutely sure. All the more so because I am more and more convinced that I know how hallucinations arise. They represent a breakdown of the brain’s efforts to form comprehensible pictures of new kinds of perfectly valid reality attempting to break through into consciousness. Moreover they maintain to a great extent, as some dreams do, a kind of parallelism with the realities they have replaced. In other words, the right sort of attempt to analyse hallucinations by their actual content would not be wasted. It is a matter of learning to do this for the patient at the same time as dealing with the purely physical breakdown which the drug therapists attempt. But I’m jumping the gun a bit. I want to know first what was in your mind before you started on your harangue about the value of orthodoxy."

"You know, I don’t know why I put up with you at all," said Fraser. "I don’t needle you about being a poor bloody loony."

"You don’t have to," I said. "Thanks to you I’m perfectly sane for the time being. But how far are you with me? What do you think hallucinations are?"

He looked at me with a quite new directness. I found myself relaxing deeply, and opening to a new confidence that we were going to arrive together at a deeper understanding.

"The question is unanswerable," he began. "We have to start with a much more fundamental question, one which is begged by every attempt, on the part of psychologists or anyone else, to take their stand on a general notion of normality as ground for curing hallucinations. Hardly anyone faced with this goes in practice beyond the crudest form of naïve realism. Physicists can talk till they’re black in the face about the illusory character of the sense-perceptible world. No amount of theoretical belief that tables and chairs consist of nothing but the balance of fields of force and whirling electrons will stop ordinary people, including psychologists, falling straight back on the most blatantly pragmatic common sense."

"Gratefully collapsing into chairs that don’t exist."

"Yes, precisely. Upon arses that don’t exist either. But you know, when eastern religions talk about Maya, the great illusion presented to the consciousness of man by the world of the senses, they have something very different in mind from our typical Western double-think. In theory, we say, we "know" that there are no tables and chairs, only empty space filled with battling forces. But in practice, faced with any sort of departure in somebody else’s mind from the usual appearance of reality, we behave as if Maya was a sort of shameful secret not to be spoken of in front of the patient. It seems to me that once we stop erecting an artificial barrier between hallucinations on the one hand and ordinary experience on the other, we can take the first step towards accepting the hallucinated patient as a special instance of something we are all perfectly familiar with in our own ordinary experience."

"In other words we are all mad."

"No, we are quite categorically not all mad. We are sane, and there is something else which is madness. But this something else is not different in kind; it is only different in degree. There is no invisible barrier across which someone steps, and hey presto they are mad. There is no justification whatever for the savage primitive fear-reaction which pushes the lunatic through the porthole of our sympathies into the outer space of a non-human world. There is simply a point at which the condition from which people are suffering takes an acute turn; the system breaks down under it; intervention becomes necessary."

"But difference in degree of what? What is the condition? You’re saying that the condition we are normally in only has to be modified a bit, and there we are, starkers. What condition, for heaven’s sake?"

"Well I don’t think we’ve named it. I don’t think we’ve given it a clinical identity. But personally I’m quite sure it has a clinical identity. It’s a universal morbid mental condition, so much the common lot of mankind that we don’t recognise it as an illness, rather like yaws in an African village. The only thing is it is considerably more severe than yaws. As time goes on it breaks down into a terminal condition more readily, and I think the conclusions as to why this should be are inescapable."

"You are saying that we are all mentally ill, but not mad."

"Well, this is of course also partly a matter of defining your terms, but yes, I stand by that. To be quite precise I am certain that the situation we refer to loosely as the average mental condition of our day, and with very little idea that it has come to be like this over a period, probably over several centuries and maybe much longer than that, is a progressive degeneration from something considerably more robust, more viable, even if less conscious and more dreamlike as Owen Barfield describes in "Saving the Appearances". I’m quite sure that this average mental condition has been for a very long time now a slow, debilitating, morbid condition of mind, upon which reality impinges in a very largely illusory way, so that our range of observations has become completely one-sided.

Mind you, there are gains from this one-sidedness, astonishing gains in terms of one-pointedness of sense perception, and the thoughts and deeds such accurate perception makes possible. The whole of scientific technology is built upon these gains. But this must not conceal from us that the whole character of so-called normal twentieth-century sense perception and sense-bound intellect is obsessional, in the strictest clinical sense. If the nature of reality were static, non-directional in time, if no underlying processes of evolution were at work, this would escape notice. But events show that this is far from being the case. As a biological adaptation to reality the mentality of twentieth century materialism is a blind alley, a false cast off the main stream of evolution. Meanwhile real changes take place in realms only accessible at an unconscious or only partly conscious level, and these changes have begun to call the bluff of this obsessional materialistic consciousness. At first it was only a trickle, but it is rapidly approaching the dimensions of an avalanche as more and more people experience unprecedented realities, for which sense-bound intellectual consciousness provides them with no clue, either in imagery or in semantics, no language either of pictorial or of abstract comprehension and expression. Reality blasts open our cramped, debilitated mental framework and reduces our nexus of images and thoughts to chaos. With our thoughts clear out of control all secure sense of meaningfulness is lost, and an abyss opens beneath us into which our waning sense of personal identity threatens to fall in complete disarray."

"You put it pretty strongly," I said, sweating somewhat. "It strikes very near home. Perhaps you are risking a glance at how much of this sort of thing I’m now ready to take. As you realise, all this is very familiar ground to me. I think I’m always a good deal nearer the brink of slipping over from the chronic into the acute phase of what you describe than probably most people are. You know, this being near the brink has a curious effect which is almost the reverse of what most people think it is. Of course I was a very neurotic child, whatever that is supposed to mean, and you know how people are always telling nervy kids they’ve got too much imagination. One almost comes to believe it at times. But in fact the reverse is the case. The fact is that the starkness of reality, both in its glorious and its terrifying aspects, is so imminent, exalting and inescapable, that one daren’t tell oneself stories about it for fear of missing something. All this guff about so-called normal common-sense people being unimaginative is so patently ridiculous I can’t imagine how it comes to be so universally believed. Dull they may be, but that is the dullness to reality, impenetrability to the impact of the real world." "Human kind cannot bear very much reality," says Eliot.

"But unimaginative? The whole point, which I’ve realised from childhood on, is that their whole existence is almost entirely imaginary. One can only understand them at all if one has sufficient dramatic sense to recognise, not just that they tell themselves stories the whole time to make up for their complete insulation from reality, but to recognise with each person what particular story is being told to him or herself. Don’t you remember that when you were young? There were the ones who told themselves the football story, the pop-star story, the lost princess story, the rastafarian story, the working class solidarity story, the latest car story. Then as they grew up the career story, the money story, the patriotic story, the religious story. The list of course is endless, but the point is the immense fertility of imagination expended on making total immunity to reality bearable.

The thing about reality is that it is stark. It may be glorious or not, but it leaves no room for the imagination in the usual sense. But to realise this as a young person is very isolating. One’s reactions are not very standard, and it is no wonder that one is nervous, and tends to be called neurotic. Then, of course, one becomes neurotic and far too interested in oneself and one’s own world and its concerns.

But of course there is another aspect, because naturally it is not that the neurotic is entirely lacking in imagination. It is just that he can’t find the story that corresponds to reality. Once having got used to the astonishment that most people are so entirely deceived about what is supposed to be happening in life, and that they appeared to have got hold of a script for a play that I wasn’t in at all. The question of what the real story was, became the all absorbing one. There must, I thought, be certain key stories. I became obsessed with the thought of lost legends, because all those I did read were in one way or another unsatisfying, provokingly crude and stilted, while at the same time hinting at a strength, a superhuman scale, which the words were simply inadequate to contain. One had a feeling all the time that there was an enormous amount missing from the script, hardly anything left really."

"Are you saying simply that modern society lacks a contemporary myth?"

"I think that is probably a very good way to put it, provided we realise that we’re long past the time when one story will serve. I think that what we have succeeded in doing is to cut off from ourselves almost completely the essential mythological process at the same time as we have insulated ourselves from reality, the reality for which genuine myth is the imaginative counterpart. And just as we’ve replaced reality by the endless stories people tell themselves about life, so we’ve replaced the real story, the real mythological process, by what we call literature. Just think of the enormous amount of writing there is today. Billions upon billions of words flood out across human consciousness day in day out in hundreds of languages. There’s so much literature that people have lost all bump-of-locality in the literary cosmos, no sense of any one thing having any more depth or significance or contemporary validity than another. As a result the most fundamental human expressions and relationships are neutralised in people’s minds as fiction, as part of a literary cult, a matter of taste or personal preference. Christianity is an excellent example. I personally believe that the Christ mystery is the apotheosis of the whole mythological process for mankind. It might even be possible to dispense with all other mythology if that were to be fully grasped; although that is a contradiction, because the full expression of the Christ story would have to contain all other myths to express its range. What, however, do we experience in practice in our society? Christianity is so diluted by now by humanists and plagiarisers of all sorts, for whom it is now no more than a rather special, and particularly beloved, literary conceit, a mighty pretty take which enshrines by analogy all their own much more modern and practical moral and even moralistic notions, that it has been entirely insulated from those for whom it might well become something much more important.

Are you beginning to see why it is of such vital importance to me to convey to you the paramount significance this mythological quest has for me? Reality blasts materialism into meaninglessness, so people make up stories. Then literature demeans the story process till it is all subjective fancy. Then I go through the nightmare of the last months and find I have lost touch with the clue to reality all that was beginning to give me."

We sat in silence for a while.

"The trouble is," I went on, "that what I used to tell you a month or two ago is still true to a great extent, in some ways more so than ever. I really do not exactly remember what it was I experienced; and whenever I start to remember, it all seems much less significant. Just now, for instance, I thought I recognised you standing in the window as someone I expected to meet as part of the situation in France. Then when you turned round this was momentarily confirmed. But I lost it as once in your present identity, and then became much less sure. The time sequence became confused, and I am now more inclined to think that already in France I had some idea of meeting someone in England and bringing him back."

He was sitting very still now and I realised that he was expecting me to come out with a more significant revelation. This had the effect of making me more unsure than ever.

"I wish I could convey to you the feeling quality of my realisation that the waxing and waning of what we call ‘significance’ in events, usually such an elusive thing, a subtle matter of moods and atmospheres, which will not be forced, and is killed by accurate definition or exact recollection, that this ebb and flow of what we recognise as meaningful can begin to reveal itself as the approach or withdrawal of a living being."

"You mean that the feeling of significance is itself an organ of sensibility for some other sentient being? You mean another person? After death, for instance?"

"No nothing so definable. I know we normally think of this in connection with people or even animals or plants. We can also begin to get a feeling for it in any sort of dramatic incantation, the calling up of spirits, the poet evoking his muse, the performance of music building up a transcendent presence of the actual being of music. But this being I am talking about is subtler. Does it make any sense to you if I describe it as a living being composed of events? It reveals itself through an increased sensitivity to rhythms and sequences, an exaggerated proneness to coincidence, to small telepathic communications, to minor prophecies, to impulsive decisions tied up with heightened expectancy, to increased willingness to see significance over and above the obvious connections. Now I know that all this is also the common coin of every kind of self-delusion, of the kind that leads to hallucinations and actual damage to the instruments of perception and thinking. But it is entirely a different matter if the living being I am speaking of is not only gradually and subtly perceived, but at the same time one finds it bringing with it a growing concept of itself. One finds oneself strongly thinking the reality of these events, identifying them as having really happened with far more force than if in the ordinary sense one remembered them".

"Suppose one thinks the wrong concept?"

"Well that’s just it. Now do you know what a hallucination is?"

He looked awestruck.

"Well, I suppose I do. It is when one is overwhelmed by a perception, and then defeated by the effort to form an adequate concept of it. As when a mighty conscious entity is perceived as a flying saucer?"

"Yes, or as a large impressive human being with wings, which is just as irrelevant."

"Yes but look here" said Fraser. My heart sank. I knew the sort of way the discussion was now likely to develop, and how far it would take us from the immediacy of the experience I was trying to convey to him. But he was launched on an intellectual analysis.

"Answer this one," he said. "How in effect does one distinguish between perceiving significance in events and reading significance into them? Between willed thinking and wishful thinking?"

I stared at him.

"Another equally pertinent question," persisted Fraser. "Are you talking about arranging events, or selecting significant events from a random sequence, or reading the meaning in an unselected random sequence of events?"

"Yes".

"What do you mean, ‘Yes’?"

"Yes. All of them. Look, Dr Fraser, all those questions are extremely interesting and worth while. They are even essential as means of cross-checking and avoiding self-deception. But they have nothing whatever to do with the basic issue of how one personally copes with the impact of a growing perceptual field. Faced with that one matures, one acquires a certain intuitive taste for the real, what one could describe as a healthy sense of truth. And if there is time and opportunity one exercises analytic mental disciplines as we have been doing. But for the sanity of the process they are at best marginal. At worst they only add to one’s confusion. What is far more to the point is sharing them with you and letting you use them as raw material for developing your understanding, which I can then share. If we can go on working together in that way, I would find it invaluable."

He was staring at me rather ruefully as if I had deprived him of an opportunity to come further in his own understanding. The truth was that I had become increasingly restless during the last half-hour. The being composed of events was exerting an increasing pressure, and I felt it was time to make a move. He looked at his watch and exclaimed.

"Lord, is it really that time? I’m afraid we’ll have to break it up. I’ve got a patient. She’s probably waiting already."

I felt an unaccountable pressure and anxiety in the solar plexus region. I got up and began to try and thank him for his support.

"We got a long way today," I said, "I’m very grateful, and I really would like to go on meeting if we may."

"By all means" he said, anxious now to get rid of me, "Give me a ring."

I pulled on my coat as he opened the door, and we stepped out into the waiting room. A slight figure, long red hair swinging, rose from a chair and walked towards us, then stopped as she looked from Fraser to me. It was the girl herself, the incredible girl of the train journey who brought me home.

--- oOo ---

You were ready to die at the turn of the year.
You brought the three together at the holy rendezvous,
Where on earth the Virgin holds the Corn-dolly,
Promising that the triple seed will be fertile:
Where in heaven the scales gently swing
The giant pendulum, sensing to a hair’s breadth
The poise of spirit-awareness in the soul.
From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’

NEXT TOP BACK START INDEX Glastonbury Archive

The Archive of Stanley Messenger The Cathar Connection a novel by Stanley Messenger

© Stanley Messenger. You may print out any of these works in single copies for personal use and study, in a spirit of fair play.
Reproduction on websites or in print, except in the case of quotations, require .