I’m not entirely sure what I was hoping for over at the Slipper Chapel. If not necessarily the whole falling-away-of-scales-from-the-eyes routine then some glimmer … of something or other. Some sense of wheels beginning to turn.
If nothing else, it made me appreciate that I do rather envy the believers. I envy them their rituals and all the accompanying paraphernalia – their candles and rosaries and incense and all that bowing and genuflecting. And not least the coming together, in the actual service. In something ancient – or at least apparently ancient. Something bigger than oneself. Devotion really is a form of surrender, perhaps even self-abnegation. And over the last few months there has been many a time when I would have heartily welcomed the opportunity to escape myself, if only for a minute or two.
Whatever I was after, I’m almost certain that I didn’t quite find it. I could, I suppose, have fallen to my knees and asked for salvation, but deep down I would’ve felt like such a hypocrite. I suspect it was the idea of the Stations that particularly drew me to it. I don’t want to sound like some old crank but any ritual which incorporates a circle or a circuit must have at least half a chance of generating some sort of energy. I’m sure even the lowliest physicist would back me up on that.
I’m just a little frustrated that whenever I consider such things these days I seem to be doing so through the eyes of an anthropologist. I observe. I might even appreciate. But I can’t quite seem to lose myself.
Anyway, it’s fair to say that I arrived back home a tad disappointed. I bought the paper and boiled myself an egg. And as I sat there, carefully lopping off the top of the egg, I thought, ‘How about this for an austere little ritual.’ With the salt and pepper waiting to be cast about the place and all the soldiers lined up in a neat little row.
*
They had some psychiatric academic on the radio this morning, banging on about something to do with ‘The Unconscious’. I managed to keep up with him for about five minutes before he completely lost me and I had to turn it off. To be perfectly honest, the whole thing was starting to freak me out.
I’ve always acknowledged that there exists somewhere within me something commonly referred to as The Unconscious, or an unconscious mind. I’ve always talked as if I accept that it is there. But I think perhaps I must have imagined some set-up whereby when I’m awake it’s almost totally dormant. Like a lake, with all manner of ugly stuff brimming about in the cold, dark depths which thankfully only reveals itself when I’m asleep.
But over the last few months I’ve had to reassess this little model and, specifically, how, in certain circumstances, that part of the mind usually kept packed away in the bottom drawer can suddenly spring out and threaten to overwhelm everything else. A week or two after John’s death I caught myself staring at the cover of a newspaper. I realised that I couldn’t make any sense of it – not even the headlines. For a second I thought it might be the onset of one of my migraine/blind-spot episodes. But it wasn’t. I was looking … and I’m pretty sure I was seeing. But there was no comprehension to speak of at all. My own interpretation is that it was just that my mind had become utterly flooded with the stuff that’s usually kept well out of the way. As if the reservoir of my unconscious had risen to such a level that it had seeped into the rest of my mind.
When I was at school I shared a room with a lovely girl called Sidney, though I’m sure that can’t have been her real name. She was a rather timid little thing – terribly earnest and quite determined that she was one day going to be a Famous Mathematician. Little Sidney’s problem was that she used to sleepwalk. I’d wake in the middle of the night and hear her pottering about the place. The first time she did it I thought she was just getting up to go to the loo, but after a couple of minutes I realised she was still footling around, so I turned the light on and found her on the floor, rooting about under the bed.
She was always at it – wandering up and down and banging into things. Or scratching at the walls, like some restless soul. Sometimes she’d chatter away to herself while she was in mid-sleepwalk. I once woke to find her standing at the window with the curtains wide open, nattering away like a gibbon. Which was pretty creepy, let me tell you. And, since I used to find the whole thing rather fascinating, on this particular occasion I slipped out of bed and tiptoed over to her side. I’d learnt that whenever she went off on one of her little walkabouts it was best just to try and gently steer her back to her bed, without waking her. But this one time I crept over and I began to talk to her – these quite innocent little enquiries. To try and get her to tell me what was going on.
It sounds almost cruel, but it really was nothing but honest-to-goodness curiosity. It was as if some secret hatch had been left open. I felt like a psychic, talking to someone on the other side.
I can’t remember now what it was she was ranting on about. I sometimes wonder what became of the poor little mite. I half expect to see her picture in the paper, next to a story about her being awarded the Nobel Prize for Maths. It really wouldn’t surprise me. But I’ll never forget that sense of her wandering through the caves and caverns of her own unconscious and me briefly having this string-and-tin-can telephone, through which I imagined she could report back to me.
God only knows the state of my own unconscious mind these days – what chasms of angst and swamps of melancholia are bubbling away down there. It must look like the bloody Somme. Or Nagasaki. And who knows if such a ravaged landscape ever really recovers. If I’ve grasped anything over the last few months it’s that grief … or mourning … or whatever you want to call it, is not a continuum. Is not an arrow on a successful company’s sales chart, rising inexorably towards the north-east. You don’t wake up each morning feeling a tiny bit better than the day before.
I fully anticipate that five years from now – or ten, or twenty, if I manage to last that long – I shall be shuffling through my garden, with a trug in one hand and a copy of Woman’s Weekly in the other and, for no discernible reason, I will be struck again by the magnitude of John’s death. And it will rip right through me and rend me asunder with just as much force as the day I first heard about it, three months ago.