|
|
The Archive of Stanley MessengerThe Cathar Connectiona novel by Stanley Messenger4. FRASER |
I had seriously intended to keep an accurate and detailed medical report on the young man whose writings appear in the foregoing paragraphs of this book from the moment when I agreed after a struggle to return with him to the scene of his earlier adventures. This attempt was foredoomed, as it deserved to be.
There would not normally have been any reason to continue it once he had been discharged from hospital, except in the form of the brief progress notes I usually make on the occasions when a former patient visits me for a check up. Raymond’s subsequent visits were not really of this nature. They were more or less social, or exploratory into our common interests, and I hadn’t been recording them. No, I had to face up to the fact that the intention to start them again was partly in self-justification. I still had a bad conscience about the thing.
On a number of occasions I came near to abandoning the record, but I was glad later I hadn’t. I was able to write now with less constraint, and the expensive black loose-leaf binder challenged me every evening to record or reflect on the affair as it evolved.
Anyone who has had much to do with neurotic personalities is familiar with the extraordinary power a certain neurotic type has to fascinate the rest of humanity. A paediatrician, one of my early mentors, pointed out to his pupils that one should try to observe quite objectively the astonishing capacity of the neurotic to waste other people’s time. As for wasting their own time, in the strictest sense they have no time of their own to waste. For the extreme introvert the outer world, which is the stable reference point for most of humanity in our largely extroverted society, has reality only as an extension of his own concerns. His home, his family, his party, his country, exist, for him to a degree incomprehensible to his fellows. But since other people’s affairs are relatively shadowy to him he feels no concern for any of the punctualities and co-ordinations that matter to them. As for his own, there is endless time for those. If for any reason you are of interest to him, therefore, watch out, for he will engage you in a fascinating involvement for indefinite periods; fascinating to him, that is. If it also happens to fascinate you, you are lost. You too can become an extension of his world, in your own experience as well as his.
There are of course endless variations on the neurotic theme. Try turning all the he’s in the above paragraph to she’s for example. Read T S Eliot’s Portrait of a Lady. I had been speculating on this theme at about the time Raymond’s case first came to my attention. I was particularly interested in the way Rudolf Steiner, with the use he makes of the three soul faculties of thinking, feeling, and willing, and the notion of personalities being ‘loosely or heavily incarnated’, is able to extend the perhaps only very generally useful categories of introversion and extraversion proposed by C G Jung into a more usable diagnostic tool. If it is true that we see patients at times who may be actually ‘out of their body’ in respect of their thinking for example, while operating normally, or perhaps too deeply physically in their other, less conscious soul functions, we have a point of reference of great usefulness in observing their behaviour.
It was against this background of thoughts, therefore, that I found myself considering the young man Raymond Felcourt when I confronted him one August evening at the hospital in Hertfordshire where I was a consultant at the time. It was my custom to rely on the registrar’s opinion that a new case had features which would be of a special interest to me. I was thus able to see the patient without prior discussion, and without reading the background notes.
On this occasion I was sitting at the desk making up some notes on a previous case, when someone came in unannounced. He drew in his breath sharply as I looked up. There was an instant of mutual recognition, followed by mutual embarrassment as we failed to identify its cause. He stood there with his bright dark eyes focussed in painful concentration and doubt upon me, and began to pour out a long incoherent ramble of apology and explanation and pleading which was pitiful to listen to. Only very gradually did the theme begin to register. He had escaped from the Inquisition, no less, and it was essential that he draw together certain people He had come on his own, local conditions making it impractical to secure authorisation from his superiors, the Cathar brotherhood in Lombrives. The end was very near, but a seed must be sown, certain people must be concealed and certain training continued. It was essential I join him and accompany him at once before someone he called the Knight arrived. All this was clear, but inextricably mingled with much else about trains and hitch-hiking, and long periods of silence with his eyes closed and lips moving, apparently in prayer. Sometimes he would stare at me in complete perplexity and say things like, "They said you were the doctor?" and "Who are you?" Once he said, "How do you manage to conceal your identity here?"
The nurse came bustling in, upbraiding him for not waiting for her, but I brushed aside her apologies, asking her to lead us to a guestroom. She played along with me. He seemed to be contented to accept our hospitality and agreed to stay with us for a few days while we sorted out his problem. But the sense of urgency soon returned. He became violent, and was put under heavy sedation for forty-eight hours. I was able to photograph him and study his features at leisure. He had a long narrow face and pointed chin, with deep grooves at the side of his mouth, though he appeared to be only in his late twenties. His hair was black, fine, springy and straight, lying close to his skull like the hair of an old-fashioned Chinese doll. He reminded me of a Shakespearean Prince, lying in state after a battle.
During this time I studied his notes, compiled by the registrar with the tearful help of the elderly parents, who had been summoned to identify him three days earlier. No previous history of mental disorder, quiet, studious lad, frugal habits, working class background, secondary school, Oxford scholarship, took law, third-class degree, abandoned it for accountancy, series of jobs where he did well but left unaccountably and went off on protracted tours of the continent, Greece, Italy, Egypt, and now this latest one to the Pyrenées. Usually returned to his parents’ home and settled down apparently contented, to a new accountancy job. Few friends, no girls that his parents knew of.
I was not able to see him again for a day or two after he came round. I found him morose and uncommunicative at first. The nurse said he had wept uncontrollably at intervals and had said very little. During the following week he talked a great deal, but it was mainly self-derogatory stuff about himself as a misfit, a fish out of water, born out of his time. He seemed to have no recollection of our pre-sedation meetings, and I did not refer to it when he showed later signs of talking about his journey.
His quick spontaneous recovery was a personal relief to me. He appeared to have forgotten our original meeting. I certainly had not. It had unsettled me more than any case in my memory. I felt involved and committed beyond the call of professional obligation. His account of the way in which our relationship developed is more restrained than I could have expected from his early manner. I have to admit, though, that he is kinder to me and to himself than I would have been. He makes us both more perceptive and more tolerant of each other than we were. If I were as suggestible as he makes me appear I would hardly be where I am as a doctor. If he had been as eloquent and restrained in his arguments as he became in that last recorded conversation, I would not be writing of him as a neurotic. In short, I am more of the conventional psychologist than he makes me out to be, and the subsequent growth of my respect and regard for him was slow. At this late stage, respect and regard have become tinged with a certain awe. He has taught me to ask, not only of him, but of others I have met through him, who is this man after all? What hind of beings are these with whom we have become involved? Indeed, what kind of beings are he and I, to have become involved with them? Even to venture into much more speculative and often fruitless questions about the nature of man himself.
I am painfully conscious that I am not the right kind of person to embark on the sort of tale it is now necessary to tell. There is too much of the ponderous professional Scotsman about me, out of key with the limpid, liberal mood of the day. It is an old trick of fiction writers to use characters like myself as a foil for volatile, liberal, speculative minds. We ourselves or caricatures of us, creak our way painfully through Victorian fiction, the eternal Dr. Watsons of life, our mouths hanging open as we applaud the cut and thrust of the brilliant and heroic intellects around us, penetrating the unknown. In real life the contrasts of personality are less sharply drawn. The sheer ineffectualness and irrelevance that dogs the most lively of human activities in real life never seems to worry the characters of fiction. In real life it happens all the time.
Much of the journey Raymond imposed on me following the events he has described was quite irrelevant and dull. If this has the effect of heightening the dramatic effect of the events, which broke through into this dullness from time to time, it is due to no literary artifice that it does so. High adventure and spiritual striving are extremely elusive. Unless they are consciously recreated by an active inner life almost from moment to moment, they rapidly deteriorate into boredom or farce. I am not saying there are not folk to whom meaningful things happen all the time. But even these people seem to invoke adventure by a deliberately cultivated mood of expectancy. It is certainly not just a matter of luck.
***
After the encounter in my waiting room with Esther (that’s Esther Corstorphine, my young cousin), the three of us took to meeting several times a week in my Highgate flat. Raymond was now in lodgings in Fulham, and it was accepted by his parents that he was more or less under my eye. In fact he was twenty-eight, but it was convenient to accept the fiction that I was acting for them in this, rather than oblige them to regard him still as a mental patient. This fortuitous meeting with Esther, who was studying for probation work, and who was also understood by her Edinburgh parents to be in good hands with me, their psychologist cousin Alan, had been a considerable shock to Raymond. He was torn between a desperate conviction that we had all three been involved together in previous lives, and an even more disturbing suspicion that I had somehow managed to rig the meeting. It took some time to persuade him that my use of the word coincidence did not imply a cynical disregard for the deeper levels of cause and effect in human involvement.
Raymond was now looking for another job, but his heart was not in it. I paid something more than lip service to persuading him to put down some roots as a balance for his restless search for higher meanings and tasks. But I suppose I realised that he would not be satisfied till he had played out the drama in which he was involved. Moreover, my own common sense and detachment was far from immune to his efforts to involve me. For him the appearance of Esther on the scene after a gap of several weeks, during which he had gradually managed to sort out which elements belonged to his adventure, and which had simply accrued to it during the period of hallucination, threw everything once more into confusion. It was made no easier by the fact that Esther was clearly very much in love with him. She had also been badly frightened when the budding relationship had apparently ended for good at Dover with her companion being carted away in an ambulance.
Her story was that she had been to stay for a proposed three months with a former college friend in Toulouse. They were to hitchhike back at the end of September, when Esther would resume her probation studies, and friend Helene would start an au pair exchange for a year. Helene ‘knew all about’ the Albigensian Cathars, and she wanted to take Esther to see the Grotte de Lombrives, and the ‘spoulgas’ and ‘gleisas’, the fortified caves and shrines where traditionally the Cathar initiations took place.
They took the train to Foix, then walked up the Ariège valley with tents and packs on their backs. Helène talked most of the way. The mountain walls grew higher and higher and the Ariège thundered in its defile. They camped by the river at Tarascon, and while they walked by the stream after dark Helène told Esther in long rambling snatches how the water and the stone had been the bearers of a strange kind of consciousness right through from ancient Mithraic times; and then how in 1279, by a series of geological changes, the rock formation had weakened, and a great lake high up the valley had suddenly emptied itself and thundered down the defile, carrying other minor lakes with it, including underground ones. The whole network of caverns inside the mountains, which were later to be the theatre where the last tragic eighty years of the Cathar drama were played out, was suddenly revealed and made accessible to habitation. This was the scenario against whose fascinating and terrifying backdrop the three young people had found themselves caught up in a series of incidents and experiences, which had for a time blurred the sharp outline, which normally separates reality from fantasy. What had happened to Helène was for the time being obscure and worrying. Letters written by Esther to Toulouse had received no reply, and in one case had been returned. I used to brood in much confusion over our long evenings in my Highgate apartment, going over and over again the events and imaginations which filled their minds, now made doubly confusing by the fact that there was no consistent agreement between them as to how much time they had actually spent together in the Pyrenées. There were times when I seriously thought that the first actual physical meeting between them had been on the train journey home. But there was so much shared memory between them about incidents in the mountains, so circumstantial as to preclude either collusion or telepathy, or some sort of ‘physical’ regression into Cathar Times, which in any case my whole rational nature rebelled against taking seriously. I was obliged to accept that at least for a time, even if perhaps rather intermittently, they had been physically together.
About Helène I was much less sure. I swung helplessly between the view that Esther had simply constructed her to account for her own experiences, and the equally untenable opposite position that Helène was a powerful and unscrupulous hypnotist, who had somehow included them both in her own fantasy world, and subsequently ditched them in the mountains to find their own way back. Neither vessel held water. The first view meant that Esther was hallucinating, for which there was no clear evidence; and the second was easily proved or disproved by a check on their times at college together and later. I felt there was nothing to do at this stage except to help in the process of clarifying matters between Esther and Raymond.
In representing Esther to Raymond in the first place as a patient whom I was waiting to see I had in all innocence compounded his confusion. This took some time to resolve. In fact she was far from being in need of psychological help, though her parents took the opposite view, which explains how I had allowed myself to be landed with her in a somewhat false relationship. There had been no particular difficulty in resolving this, since she was a very ‘together’ and challenging young person, given to entangling me in wide-ranging discussions about reincarnation and psychism generally, and altogether bent on establishing me in her mind as representing an old-fashioned, if loveable, fuddy-duddy view of life. I happily played along with this, occasionally hitting back, I think to good effect, since she evidently thought it worth while coming back for more. Altogether we enjoyed each other’s company.
However, on her return from France, six weeks earlier than expected, and without Helène, things had clearly changed. Not expecting her till the end of the month I hadn’t phoned. When I did she was evasive, and it was another fortnight before, clearly very worried, she phoned for an appointment on the very evening Raymond had arranged to show me his bits of writing in the afternoon.
The meeting in the waiting room was one of those often referred to in the jargon of the day as ‘one of those moments’. Dramatic and fictional convention usually takes the opportunity of leaving such occasions to the reader’s imagination. The cinema can sometimes rise to near genius in visual imagery in its attempt to relieve the descriptive word of a torturing burden. But only the higher classical art forms in poetry, opera or symphony are usually adequate to relieve or ‘earth’ the heart forces aroused at such times of an otherwise intolerable load of energy. It is the martyrdom of the psychologist that no such let-out is permitted him. For him it is a question of ‘conceptualise or bust’. Nine times out of ten this means bathos. But the attempt must be made.
I think the first thing one becomes aware of is that everybody’s thought processes have accelerated to an intolerable intensity. A timeless stillness fills the space as one stands there. It then quickly becomes a question of whose fuses will blow first, and since this possibility threatens the others, everyone either heads instinctively for cover and ‘sauve qui peut’ or a transcendent level of mutual support is achieved with great rapidity, which manifests in a unique opportunity for intense love or hate. At the same time there is a tremendous testing of genuineness and maturity all round and it becomes apparent that this opportunity for spiritual growth cannot possibly be seized by one at the expense of another without grave moral danger. Exploitation of such a moment can easily slip over into a real black magic.
Nevertheless in the process of shriving or stripping of pretence that everyone goes through at such moments, there is also a polarisation. On the one hand those whose presence of mind survives the moment pretty well intact seem to take the lead in moving the group on to the next resolution in the relationship. Others, however, either through proneness to panic or because they feel they have more to lose, take longer to pull themselves together. So a sort of pecking order develops in moral initiative.
Interestingly, it is not by any means always the one with least to lose in terms of hang-ups and general psychic rubbish who recovers first. Such people may well be more cautious and reluctant to commit themselves emotionally to the moment. The sheer cathartic impact, purging and annealing the feelings, sometimes places an unlikely candidate in the position of being the first to focalise an attitude to which the others can respond as a starting point for communication.
On this occasion it was Raymond who proved himself most resilient and who was able not only to move forward in a loving way himself, but also to include all three of us in a pattern of warmth through which a current of healing and relief could flow. This was clearly the right thing for Esther. She was never very self-absorbed, and felt as she later confessed much the stronger partner in the relationship. But she felt powerless even to make contact with him while his amnesia, as she supposed, persisted. Now at last she was able to release her anxiety in tears. So for a few minutes it was tears all round, while Raymond convinced himself she was real, and confessed that this doubt was the main block in daring to remember much else. Meanwhile Esther waxed eloquent about her insights into different levels of reality, and how she was managing to gain some facility in moving from one stratum to another while still keeping her feet sufficiently on the ground to attend her classes and cook her meals.
It was only I, touched as I was by her confidence and hold over the situation, who was unable to quell a considerable anxiety that my patient was about to revert in full force to his hallucinating state. Esther’s view of life would then doubtless provide that most satisfying of all confirmations, a rationalised and convincing reflection from outside the hallucination, which I as doctor was most concerned to disperse. While they cuddled and crooned I went through what I suppose was the most gruelling crisis I had yet faced in my medical life, in which all my professional training was locked in a life and death struggle with intuitions which grew moment by moment more powerful. Yet I knew at the same time that my scepticism was a priceless scalpel edge, without whose support and power the insidious encroachment of absolute illusion into these intuitions would be an incurable cancer.
I began to see another dimension in all this which in the end more than anything else swayed me into going along with them, and giving a degree of provisional credence to their headlong commitment to the objectivity of what for me were still highly speculative levels of reality. This was the growing realisation that it is only the demarcation of insanity that is quantitative and analytic. The intuitions that lead us on a beeline to our commitment to the depths of sanity in a patient are always qualitative and synthetic, and it is this commitment which characterises the mature physician. Everything else is mere mechanical tinkering, notwithstanding my less than courageous claim to Raymond that doctors are no more than repairmen. So they are, but even repairmen are useless without an increasingly sure-footed concept of what constitutes a whole human being. My commitment as physician in the end resonated with their commitment to the objectivity of their trans-physical world.
Once this bridgehead was gained by all three of us, their confidence in my sceptical contribution allowed the latter to take its proper place in the welter of memories, stories, and events which now, evening by evening for several more months, poured into the listening space of my study and onto tape, till we achieved a synthetic goal, a determination to carry through a full investigation and research, into what had actually happened to them physically, and now particularly to Helène.
But not only that. We were resolved to plunge existentially into the true nature of those other events, to recapture which we were now engaged evening after evening in a gruelling battle of memory, an assault on amnesia, confusion, fear, and semantics, which rocked the consciousness of all of us to its foundations. We were long past the point of fighting for anyone’s sanity. The very concepts of sanity and insanity were dissolved in our all-absorbing struggle to achieve mastery in a territory where freedom of movement between levels of reality, in which words and ideas had different meanings according to what level we were on, became a battle for the life and death of meaning itself.
In no way was it possible to arrive at a consistent story upon which we could all agree and write down in the form of a diary of events. The whole process was a tantalising jigsaw of inner and outer experiences, in which certain sequences began to stand out in startling clarity, while others remained obstinately obscure and timeless, having more of the character of dreams than outer events. Passages in Raymond’s account which gave the most promise of making the sort of sense we would need when, or if, we managed ultimately to return to the scene of action, would infuriatingly reappear in Esther’s story, but in a different time sequence. Other themes, which appeared at first to be purely sequential, would irritatingly peter out, but similar sequences would appear to be superimposed on them, and on one another, in such a way as to draw attention to a single momentary event with blinding intensity, so that what appeared at first to be purposive and directional turned out to be mainly interesting for its intense momentary significance. This all had the effect of giving one an inkling that the rôles of time and space were somehow being interchanged. Blindingly intense events revealed as described above were traced to spatial configurations on the map, but their spatial sequence, often startlingly geometrical, would indicate an order out of key with the actual time sequence of the events, but in a much truer cause-and-effect sequence, as if once more cause-and-effect was more apparent through space than through time. Thus later events would sometimes seem to be causing earlier ones but not always; this would depend on the spatial configuration. A sense for this would again and again nudge one’s attention towards certain spots on the map where the intensity of present experience was always enhanced, as if time and space were complementary energies, tending always in the direction of transcendence, even eternity.
As far as Raymond’s hallucinations were concerned I needn’t have worried. For the time being he seemed content to leave certain memories untapped. Esther was trusted to hold these on his account like a sort of psychic banker, while I was relied upon in turn to keep an eye on Esther conceptually, to see in fact that her ability to understand her memories kept pace with her ability to recall them. How far either of us were fitted to fill these rôles was a question we agreed to keep in abeyance. Raymond’s trust was itself a powerful energy, which released in Esther and myself a strong urge towards grasping the situation. For the time being a stable relationship developed between the three of us. Soon after Christmas, Raymond found himself another accountancy job, Esther went back to her lectures, and I went on seeing patients. They found a large bed-sitter not too far from my flat and moved in together. I decided a letter to Esther’s parents was called for, saying how well she was getting on, and that she had moved to Highgate. There was no point in adding to her difficulties by a fruitless attempt to get them to accept her life-style. But I used the letter to reassure them as her doctor that she was in very little need of psychological care, and that I was happily standing in for them as an older relative. She would soon be through her training and starting work. Privately I couldn’t quite see her yet being ready to visit them, but we were unlikely to get to France before the summer, and I thought perhaps she might be willing to go before then. I foresaw my "Cousin Alan" role wearing a bit thin as her new confidence grew.
The fact was that there had been astonishing changes in Esther over the last few months. From being a cheerfully and amusingly aggressive and imaginative twenty-four-year old, with a penchant for cynical views about the bureaucracy and careerism in the social field she was adopting, she was developing a responsible sobriety at a rate that caused me some unease. Though still deeply interested in delinquency as a social problem, as well as the more personal side of it in the young people she was meeting through her probation placements, there was no doubt that the experience in France was in its own way just as much of an abyss in her consciousness as it was in Raymond’s. The great difference was that whereas for him it had caused a near psychotic rift in his sense of identity, there was in Esther no question of a psychic split. She was struggling with considerable grasp and a kind of righteous anger to make sense of a set of memories that violated all her logical preconception and common sense. She hadn’t the slightest intention of abandoning these memories in a facile ‘It must have been my imagination’ sort of cop-out. She not only loved Raymond, she felt she was in the fortunate position of having somehow avoided the worst depths of the experience which threatened his sense of reality, and that this gave her a unique stance from which to help him drag himself out of his amnesia and make sense of what had happened to him.
For my part I felt that this new sober responsible Esther could have done with a bit of salting with the frivolous lass of a few months ago. But my attempts to introduce a bit of dry facetiousness into the situation fell rather flat. Esther still saw us as fighting for Raymond’s sanity. I really now had no such fears. I agreed with her that his amnesia would gradually lighten, but I had in some ways more faith in his resilience than in hers.
"Let him come through it in his own way and in his own time," I said to her one day. "You’re not going to sort out the realities of this saga on purely logical grounds. For that very reason your own titanic struggles to describe with increasing accuracy what in your experience "really happened," are of enormous importance, for yourself as well as for him. The only danger I see is that the nearer this existential picture you draw for yourself comes to completion, the more difficult you will find it to transcend."
"Why should it need transcending if it is complete?" said Esther.
"Because it only can be complete at one level of reality," I said. "When you reach the point where there are irreducible facts that can in no way be assimilated into your complete picture, you either have to capitulate to sheer irrationality, or transcend to a level where a higher logic can be found which is capable of assimilating them. You then become aware of your self objectively as a thinking being with a cognitive instrument which is capable of growth. Prior to that you just think the thoughts, unaware of yourself as thinking them."
"You make it all too complicated," said Esther. "Somewhere or other there is a rational explanation of everything that happened. I intend to find it. Raymond’s return to normality makes it necessary that I do".
"Yes, you’re absolutely right, there is a rational explanation, but it won’t be found by attempting to cram the facts into a logical pattern too tight and rigid for them. Ultimately there is such a thing as simplicity. But we don’t get to it by ignoring complexities or overriding them. We have to resolve them, and that means respecting their extremely complex nature. Bulldozing one’s way through to a simplistic world by means of a frustrated obstinate will solves only the problems for whose solution you are prepared to sacrifice the rest, what one might call the soldier’s way. The new problems you create join the original unassimilable facts, which are still there grinning at you."
Her eyes filled with tears. "You’re hardly being helpful are you? With one breath you insist that I must ferret away at the facts, so-called, till my picture of them is as clear as I can get it. With the next you are saying that when I have reached my own absolute limit along those lines I’ve still got only half the story. I can’t win, can I?"
"On the contrary, it is only at that apparent dead-end that the first chance of "winning," as you call it, is presented. The dead-end turns out to be a hitherto invisible starting point for an imaginative leap that starts you on a whole new cycle of understanding. You think we’ve already reached a kind of dead-end now. There have been moments when the struggle for exact recall has come near to defeating us both. I assure you from many past struggles that we haven’t reached the end of the tunnel yet. Each time we have to start again at the beginning."
"I’ve lost faith in the process," said Esther. "What’s the use of going over and over the same ground?"
"Because it never is the same ground. The next time round, each time we ourselves have changed. It is only the same journey in a quite superficial sense. You know, this is rather extraordinary. Think back to that astonishing morning when we all met in my waiting room. Then it was you who rose to the realisation that something was happening on more than one level, and still managing to keep your feet on the ground. I was the one then who thought we might lose Raymond back into his Cathar world. But Raymond is much tougher than we thought. You had an intuitive faith in him then, and that was what brought him through, as much as, and even more than anything I could do as a doctor. I learned a lot from you that day. Now the position is a bit reversed. You’re beginning to experience some of the nightmares I go through when my trained professional mind is at odds with my intuition. I on the other hand am releasing a lot of intuitive perception I didn’t know I had, and a lot of that is rubbing off on me from you and Raymond."
Her tears now really let go, and she had a good old cry in my arms. When we had comforted each other a bit the atmosphere had lightened considerably.
"Come on," I said, "Let’s have another go at it. I tell you what, this time I’ll try to tell the story. It’ll be good for my imagination. When I get the pictures wrong you correct them and that way perhaps the whole thing will come to life in a new way. You know, each time we’ve come to it I’ve felt that there was a particular moment when in a certain way the whole adventure took flight. A certain airiness entered the conversation. A light turned on somewhere. Up till then it might have been any two friends on a conventional hitchhiking tour. But at that moment there was a sort of shiver. You know the moment I’m talking about?"
"Yes. I know exactly. Helène and I were sitting at that café table. The sun was getting low in the sky. There were long shadows of poplars across the valley floor, and then a bit of a chilly wind sprang up."
"Then, as you got up to pay the bill, those two peasants at the table in the other café across the street got up as well and began to walk side by side up the dusty track towards the mountains. For some reason you both had the impulse to follow them. If I remember the light was dead behind you and fell on their backs as they walked away. They were in rough farming clothes, and you had this flowing orange and gold impression of their rather clumping gait, the steady rhythm of feet used to following ox-carts up steep tracks to heavy work in the dry stony soil."
"Yes, and then the light changed. The sun went behind the peak and at the same moment they stepped into the dappled shadow of a row of poplars. One of them stopped to light a pipe. I saw the glow on his rugged face as the match-light caught it. And at exactly that moment the other man drew himself more upright and turned. And this was the moment when exact observation was threatened with imprecision, where fantasy got its chance to blur the cut lines. I had the strongest possible impression that he became immensely tall and somehow blue… a pale long face beneath a dark blue casquette cap, and the long blue cloak below. Then Helène started muttering in an agitated manner in French, a prayer or invocation of some sort, and I turned to see what was the matter. She looked white-faced into mine, and we both turned to confirm the strange impression. But they had moved on".
"It is important to recall your exact feelings at that point. They can be a clue to what happened next."
"Well this is where I always lose confidence. You lose the present moment, analysis takes over, you start to chatter to your companion, or if you’re by yourself the restless inner dialogue puts up a wall between you and your exact experience. You may even start to fantasise, actually to lie to yourself about what happened, because of the hunger for significance, because you are so miserable about the usual meaninglessness of life."
"Esther, what actually happened next?"
"Helène and I clung to each other, looking into each other’s eyes. My heart was beating like a sledgehammer. Her eyes shone through the strands of dark wispy hair, with an expression… of intense longing, an incredible hunger. She started clawing at me, dragging me forward along the path, saying something like "Il faut les suivre. Il faut les suivre. C’est un ‘parfait’." Helène was so agitated that I became suddenly cold and in control.
"Listen, Helène," I said, "Nothing is gained by rushing at it. They were walking quite slowly. Come along, we’ll simply follow the track. We may catch them up."
"But you don’t understand. They will be in danger, walking in the open like that. We have to warn them."
"Warn them of what? Helène," I said sharply, "I know what you’re doing. You’re simply allowing the drama of these Cathar stories to take you over. There’s no Inquisition now. Whatever we both saw, and I saw it too you know, whatever it means, it doesn’t mean physical danger. We even have to allow for sheer fantasy, a trick of the light, the sort of thing that often happens at this time of day. Come along, it’s cold. It’s time we found a campsite. There they are, look. We’re walking faster than they are."
The energy of walking restored her confidence, and she forgot to feel rejected by my scepticism. As we caught them up they turned aside up the hill between two cottages. The vines in the patch in front of the row were glowing crimson, purple and gold. A half filled basket of grapes stood in the path. The sun, lower still, had momentarily re-emerged lower down the valley.
"Bonne vendange," I called out.
.
The two men turned. The older one looked from me to Helène, and a benign expression came into his eyes. "Merci, Mademoiselle. C’est une bonne année." He came forward and lifted a great bunch of grapes from the basket. As he handed it to Helène he looked deep into her eyes. She whispered something. Then occurred the only thing which can be called a sort of evidence. He raised his right hand and placed two fingers momentarily on her forehead. Then the two men turned and went into the house.
Helène was left standing with her eyes shut. I took the grapes from her loose fingers and put my arm in hers, and we went slowly up the path. She didn’t refer to the episode again, and I didn’t ask her."
"No blue robes and biretta, of course," I interjected.
"No of course not. A dear old peasant wine-grower blessing a young girl."
We sat in silence for a little while. "But of course, something else as well," Esther then said, "Helène’s mood changed altogether. She stopped chatting and reminiscing out of books and began to look purposive. I was to understand from that point that we were on a pilgrimage." "As we shall be again in the summer," I put in.
"Isn’t it remarkable" I continued after a minute of two, "how important the world of light becomes as we begin to be aware of other dimensions of reality? It is not only that particular light conditions at certain times of day favour a kind of loosening of perception, though that is very important…"
"Yes," said Esther, "and particularly colours. It is as if colours come into movement. They start to give scope for a whole new range of images to appear. That is why illusion becomes so much more dangerous; why exact observation becomes more and more important."
"Provided that happens," I said, "imagination ceases to be mere fantasy, and becomes a real seeing through into another dimension. We have to walk a knife edge between exactitude and openness. So often we are carried by emotion beyond objectivity."
"As Helène and I momentarily were," she said excitedly, "I caught her emotion, and we shared a sudden vision, which seemed to evoke a memory. But something, a sort of defiant sense of truth, asserted itself in me and overcame the illusory element. I really think this had a powerful transforming effect on the situation, stopped the experience going over into hallucination."
"For Helène as well?" She thought this over. "Well, in the light of what happened subsequently I’m not so sure. She seemed to hug the experience somehow to herself, as if she was saying, "I know what I know," and stopped sharing it except when her emotions took over again. Then it all came pouring out, and she ceased to be able to see where the outer facts set a limit upon what she was experiencing."
"You see, that is what makes this journey we want to make so fundamentally important." I said. "It is more than a matter of you and I reaching a common picture of how to help Raymond through to reality without ourselves being drawn into a hallucinated experience of whatever other reality it is that he is struggling with."
"You really think there is another level of reality?" Esther asked.
"We have to talk about reincarnation again," I said, "I know you and I talked in a light-hearted way about it before all this happened. But we were really only playing at it. You were attracted to the idea, and you used it as a kind of goad to tease me with. But since then the whole question of whether reincarnation is really a fact has been creeping up on us, simply through our having to make sense of what happened to you all down there. And when life actually forces you to look at the possibility of reincarnation, to start taking the idea of it more seriously, more personally, as genuinely accounting for some of the things you experience, it becomes very heady stuff indeed. You’re no longer playing at it. It comes home to roost, as they say. For the first time it becomes a real danger that you might be caught up in something you can no longer quite control."
"I sometimes think that it is that very loss of control people like Raymond find so attractive," she said, "And which makes them so attractive too," she added, "Half the reason I love him so much…" She couldn’t quite go on.
"Without that romantic glamorous element in the whole adventure of relating to previous lives we probably shouldn’t have the impulse to explore the realm at all." I said. "Yet intuition tells me that it has to be explored, even if it turns out that the underlying truth behind it is not quite the obvious one."
Esther had recovered a bit and had gone to the window of the first floor flat, which faced down Highgate Hill. "I never shared with you what Raymond was saying that day we all met for the first time, " I went on, "I wouldn’t be talking to you at all about it if that conversation hadn’t somehow tipped the scale to such good effect that I now find myself seriously planning to come with you to France in the summer. And yet..."
She came back and sat down. "And yet," I continued, "the very thing that so impressed me is that same thing which Raymond can’t quite face and which still holds so much of his mind in amnesia. It is as if he hangs onto it and rejects it at the same time. At one point he said with deep earnestness that he had made contact with a living being, which he described as ‘composed of events’."
She leaned forward and gripped my arms. "But that is exactly how it was," she forced out. "That is exactly what was so horrifying. Day after day this mounting sense of a tide of events, first in Helène’s experience, then in Raymond’s, and then gradually in spite of all my efforts to some extent in mine too, which had a life of its own in defiance of the sobering solidity of the actual mountains and roads and valleys and inns in which we spent those weeks. But Alan, what is this being which he experiences, and which he has this horrifying capacity to project into the space around him, so that one is obliged to live in it with him?".
"Well, you two were so obliged, but I think that depends on at least part of your nature and Helène’s deeply wanting to do so for reasons connected with your own needs and previous involvement with him. As for what that being is, I think I am beginning to have a concept of that. I think it is no more and no less than his own being as it was in a life in Cathar times."
"But if we too were involved in this, and perhaps even you were, why are we not directly affected in the same way?"
"For the very reason, Esther, that emerged in what he said the very first time I met him, the day you actually came back from France." I said "There was something he still had to do; something so powerful that it has made it impossible for him to let that life go."
"But if we do live more than once, we really do let it go," said Esther, "we die."
"And there you have it," I said, "I think that’s what happened when he came to England, apparently to fetch me, some time at the beginning of the fourteenth century. He simply died."
"But in a way that impulse must have gone on. He never was able to let it go. It’s with him still, but buried," said Esther.
I found myself gazing inwardly at the tragic, still profile of several months ago relaxed under sedation, the deep lines of suffering beginning to smooth out, the hopeless struggle against the odds of that Cathar life already beginning to be laid to rest.
"When he was no longer able to control the hallucinations we had to put him under sedation," I said, "and we took some photographs." I went to a drawer and took out a folder. She took it from my hand and began to look rapidly through the file. Her face became strained and tragic, and then very tender.
"He doesn’t look like that now," she said. "His hair is browner and curlier. But this is the man I met in France." We stared together at the thin pinched nose, the tight black polished skullcap of hair.
"He’s like a mediaeval king," she whispered, "he died."
"Then what is that being?" she went on, "that living being of events he experiences, after all, and makes us experience with him?"
"I believe it is simply himself, the unresolved, untransformed entity of his own Cathar life struggling to complete its task, and unable to relate properly to this life until it has done so. Transformation is the key. I think most people achieve this transformation without ever remembering their past lives."
"Then is memory of past lives a sort of illness?"
"I think there is a more interesting and important question. It may well be that at least one important aspect of mental illness is unresolved problems from past lives. What function memory of past lives has may well go deeper. And there may be other ways to relate to them than straight memory."
Esther went back to the window.
"Here he comes up the hill," she said, "put the photographs away. You haven’t shown them to him have you?"
"You don’t think he should see them?"
"Certainly not. It could be an awful shock."
"Yes, I agree. But I think at some point he will be ready to see them."
"Only if he comes to the realisation that he never completed his mission, and actually accepts it; in his own way and in his own good time, as you said earlier. This realisation of ours is going to make it much harder to be open with him."
At that moment we heard him coming up the stairs. Esther went to the front door of the flat and let him in. As she came through the door and met my glance I was at once aware that something had happened. Then Raymond came in and stopped in front of me. It was like looking into an entirely different kind of space, as if a porthole had cleared in a spaceship, and there for the first time was the naked world of the stars, into whose infinite depths the vision plummeted and threatened to wrest the perceiving consciousness clear out of its own being. I felt a sickening wrench at my solar plexus and was obliged to grip my stomach with both hands, and struggle with steady breathing to hold myself together. As I did so I felt the almost uncontrollable capacity of perception rise up through my chest and throat, and centre somewhere between my eyes, so that I was able to overcome the violence of his impact on me, and transform it into a process of growth and understanding. A wave of tenderness for him overspread my heart and throat, but instead of embracing him I tried to retain a last glimpse of the ‘being composed of events’ which had just threatened to take possession of my consciousness. I felt myself endowed with a solemn and immensely humbling responsibility from deep within my own being to stand before him as a kind of container, or electrical capacitor, through which the otherwise destructive power of his unresolved memories, anxieties, and desperate dedicated will could be earthed, transformed, and brought into perspective with his present life and relationships and begin to work on these constructively and creatively.
I had an inward vision of myself as a kind of Prospero, reaping the reward of patient professional work, by being at last allowed to extend my magician’s wand from the region of understanding to touch the surface of the earth, so that down it in a series of tremendous flashes the warring powers of the elements could drain away into the earth, and there become healed, absorbed, and transformed into powers of growth, metamorphosis and creation. As we stood there I had the sense of Raymond’s tremendous neurotic power dissipating and spreading through the room, sharing itself between the three of us, in such a way that we could at last look at it and resolve it in an arena of common understanding. He moved across to the settee and sat down taking off his gloves and scarf and leaning back with his eyes closed.
"I am not him, and he is not me," he said, "He never fulfilled his task, and I have never been able to accept the fact that I should not be able simply to continue where he left off. He got to England all right, he was on the point of meeting the Templar Master as arranged, but he died before he could tell his story."
Esther went over and kneeled by the settee. "You look so different, Ray," she murmured, "I like you much better as Raymond than as the other one. You know, don’t you, that the only reason we came rushing back to England was to re-enact his death, and set in train once for all a process which would lead to your ceasing to identify with him."
"Well, I don’t identify with him any more," said Raymond. "I think now with any luck I shall begin to appreciate him. You know what it is, Alan? It’s the glamour, isn’t it? Why did they have to make reincarnation so appallingly glamorous? What is glamour? Why is the whole idea of life in the middle ages so tremendously exciting and seductive? What’s so special about the Middle Ages or Egypt for that matter, or even Atlantis? It was terrifying and totally desperate at times, yet the whole idea of it absolutely fascinates me."
"It fascinates me too." I said. "It seems quite illogical, doesn’t it? The gleam comes into people’s eyes and their breath comes faster. It’s like real live TV! Yet we know perfectly well, and you actually remember, that a lot of it was utterly unbearable and bestial. Certainly it was full of adventure and romance and beauty, but then so is life now if one looks for it. There is always something to engage the will and sense of purpose if that is what we want. And equally we can be bored anywhere. I’ve no doubt you were just as bored as a Cathar as you often are now. And life can be absolutely miraculous now if we look for that."
"What is glamour, Alan? asked Esther. "Is there any meaning to such a question?" "Trailing clouds of glory, as Wordsworth put it." I replied, "I think glamour is what happens when we start confusing the unresolved, undigested past with the glory of the world of spirit which clings to it. What should happen in the world of spirit is that everything unfinished in the last life should be released and let go, so that it can be transformed into a seed for a new and entirely different personality, able to work out the old problems in a new way, make an entirely fresh start. But if we come through into the new life carrying these old motivations unchanged and undigested, like a chip on the shoulder, they bear with them this dramatic charismatic aura, with its tremendous power to fascinate and involve others. And that is what neurosis is."
"So really," said Esther "we shall never arrive at a healthy view of reincarnation until we manage to get the glamour out of it. But doesn’t that mean that all unsought memory of past incarnations is sick?"
"I think it depends how it arises. Certainly if it forces its way through for negative reasons, like unwillingness to accept death and failure, inability to accept that the old life must be released and allowed to transmute, then it is neurotic and sick. If one the other hand…"
"Yes," interrupted Raymond firmly, "but that is where speculation can start becoming very destructive if one simply follows the logical conclusion. To the extent that we came through into life with our past lives resolved, and transformed into the will to follow a new destiny, we are reborn with a certain innocence. We can, as it were, live our lives straight, and grow slowly towards consciousness of the purpose of life in a strong way, the sort of way that builds a firm basis also for society and for children. But the neurotic, charismatic personality also has a role if he can come through to self-realisation, and manages to avoid the trap set by psychiatric medicine, which is the Inquisition in its twentieth century form. If on the other hand he is lucky enough to encounter someone like Alan, as has happened to me over the past months he may be given the chance to attempt consciously what others achieve in a more natural, healthy, and at first unconscious way. In fact, if the neurotic does come through he may find himself involved in tasks which are at the growing tip of human evolution, posing the kind of questions which only future generations can answer."
Raymond pulled our hands together into a bunch. "We no longer have to go back to France to complete the impossible task which that poor brave little nephew of the Comte de Foix imposed on himself. I’ve managed to achieve a certain distance now from some of the worst of his memories. He was indescribably horrified and sickened as most of his friends were tortured and burned and raped. But much of that has retreated into the background now, more of a sadness then a horror. And somewhere in the background with it is the incomplete mission, which I now have to discover how to complete in a quite different way. But first I have to understand it. It is you two whose hope and encouragement have made it possible for me to come this far. I hope and pray that now we can take this further step together. It is a far more important thing we have to do now. Even if Ramón had brought his Templar back to Tarascon, he would have found scarcely anyone left to help escape from the Inquisition. I doubt if the Knight whom you and I, Alan, were supposed to meet in the Ariège valley ever got through."
"No," Raymond went on, "There is something real to do there which those who have chosen to come back into modern times in the very same valleys where it all happened cannot quite do alone. Only those who have struggled together through hallucination into clarity, whether as victims or healers of illusion, can breast that particular rise, and act as catalysts for a new incarnation of spiritual life there."
"Do you mean Cartharism itself is to be reborn?" I asked
"No, most emphatically not. Catharism reached its end, just as individual Cathars reached theirs at the stake, or walled up by the Inquisition in their ‘gleisas’ and ‘spoulgas’. No, but Catharism itself may in large part have been transformed in the other world into something broader and deeper than the rather narrow cult of good and evil it had begun to degenerate into. Some of those who have been drawn into the reincarnation whirlpool in the Ariège valley are just as confused and lost as I was. We have to find them and help them onto quite a new path into their spiritual mountains."
"One of them is Helène," said Esther – "I believe we shall find her," said Raymond.
--- oOo ---
Now wait out the winter!
Presently in spring the planets will return
As if they had forgotten something,
The young one radiant, but faintly angry,
The old one with the tired smile of those
To whom everything has happened before.
From ‘Recipe for a Threefold Conjunction’
The Archive of Stanley MessengerThe Cathar Connectiona 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 .