THE ESSAY DESCRIBES a Western European’s experience of a primitive catastrophic process, its cause and its resolution. What follows is, of necessity, subjective. Any value it may have lies in that subjectivity, and should be compared with other, objective accounts of the phenomenon, which are to be found in textbooks.1
For our purposes, the experience began in the late autumn of 1968, when I adapted my own novel, The Owl Service, for television.
Translation of words into pictures is never easy, but the malaise that The Owl Service produced was unexpected: a combination of fear and exhaustion. The degree of exhaustion was debilitating, but the quality of it was worse. It was the sensation of walking unknowingly up an increasing gradient. However, the scripts were finished, and we started to film on location in April, 1969, with a schedule of nine weeks.
There are few occupations more tedious than the making of a film. Weather, money and time conspire to defeat the enterprise. A day’s labour shows only some unrelated minutes of acting. There is no sense of dramatic progression, or even of emotional development. It is, of course, interesting and demanding work, but only when seen on its own terms, which, philosophically, ignore our Western concepts of time and space. Yet I felt pain: a threat from no direction, and a threat with no shape.
After a month, I was each morning late for shooting. My behaviour did not hold up the film, but it did undermine the director. Soon, after each take, I experienced nausea. Then I was actually sick. We were in Wales, and the other members of the crew were too busy to notice my use of the nearest boulder whenever the director shouted, “Cut!” The next sensation was paralysis, which never developed, and fury against the actors; which did. I could not, dared not, speak to them outside the formalities of rehearsal and shooting. “They” were menacing, and at the same time witless. Unhappily, one of the actors was an incompetent, and it is a tribute to the film crew that he lasted the course. But I was less professional. My unpunctuality, the nausea, the vomiting, the sense of threat: all these symptoms switched to one great symptom in the middle of a take that involved the actor.
A delicate climax of the story was being filmed, and the actor was genuinely not caring, genuinely fooling about, genuinely antagonising the cast, the director and the crew, and I genuinely went to kill him. I remember leaning against one of my vomitoria, a stone wall, and seeing the daylight go out, except for a clear line around the actor’s head. An animal roared inside and outside me, and I moved; but the sound engineer stuck his microphone boom between my legs and flicked me into a puddle. “I know,” he said as he lifted me up. “But wait till next week. We still need him. Then I’ll help you.”
By the next week I was incapable of serving the film. Everybody was kind, asking of me only when it was necessary, but I had let them down. My token visits to the location were an embarrassment. I could do everything except work. But the film was finished on time, despite me, and we could all go home. June the twenty-first. The longest day.
Friends diagnosed my behaviour as nervous fatigue: I ought to take a holiday: I should pull myself together: I ought to get away from it all. The advice was well meant: endless: useless. I could not get away from it all when “it-all” was me.
After a sleep of several twilit days, I entered a zombie stage. I could move about. Then I recovered, and went seemingly mad in less than three months.
The most frightening aspect of such behaviour is its logic for the one who is experiencing it. I was so eloquent in my unreason. But, as the world crashed, while there was still enough of me left in command, I got myself to a doctor and said that I probably needed psychiatric treatment. “Thank goodness you asked of your own accord,” the doctor said.
Now I must appear to change the subject for a while, but the purpose is to clarify the subject beyond misrepresentation and misunderstanding, because what happened to me was something normal; yet it was superficially so close to the esoteric and to the occult that it could easily be misrepresented and misunderstood. And if “normal” should be thought to be too imprecise a word, let me define it as “that which is found to be common among a group or species”.
Having parked me in the comparatively safe orbit of a doctor’s surgery, I should like to consider more generally the context of this essay. We are meant to be discussing “Science Fiction”. I use the phrase with reticence. “Science fiction” has the sound of a botched-up job, but what it describes is an aspect of the most important function of literature, the one to which we turn in our greatest stress; that is, the flow of myth.
Man is an animal that tests boundaries. He is a “mearcstapa”, “boundarystrider”, and the nature of myth is to help him to understand the boundaries, to cross them and to comprehend the new; so that, whenever Man reaches out, it is myth that supports him with a truth that is constant, although names and shapes may change. From within us, from our past, we find the future answered and the boundary met. It may well be asked why we hold the key to questions we do not yet know, from what space and what time the myth flows.
The Biblical, the Epic, the Romantic, the Gothic are all merestones, boundary markers, of their day and the pointers of ours. Three hundred years ago, the mystery was in the greenwood; last century, the nearest grave; now, the nearest galaxy. For those communities, such as the United States, which, for historical reasons, have not had time to find their myth, the mystery is a strange hompolodge of external violence, and suspicion of one’s fellows, and of the alien: the paranormal is paranoiac. I am not xenophobic. It is that for our time America may be manifesting phenomena that all cultures have experienced, at one level or another.
America is a nation that has grown too quickly from a conglomeration of relatively small communities, who knew, in their homelands, where they were. Confronted with a sea journey beyond their comprehension, faced with a field, the prairie, beyond their comprehension, ending in mountains beyond their comprehension, the only defence was to react in a manner that created whimsy, not myth. They had to mock the land. From this came the art work of Walt Disney, which, despite its gloss of sentimentality, has a dark undertow. It has only to be contrasted with the animation vocabulary of Eastern European film for the point to be made. At present the Americans as a nation have not found their myth, because they have not come to terms with the land. They are still on its surface; they have not entered in. Eventually they will. But, until they do, until they are integrated, they will tend to embrace Biblical fundamentalism while ignorant of Hebrew, and be condemned, for their myth, to the obligatory car chase, the shoot-out, and the flying saucer. [A nation that, in 1997, boasts a “Christian Dinosaur Park”, is in psychic disarray.]
What I want to state is my view that the term “science fiction” is shoddy and uneducated, not a new branch of story. Whether we call it the manifestation of the Jungian archetype, or the manifestation of certain human behavioural characteristics, I find in science fiction the record of Man’s boundary treadings. And there will always be boundaries.
I am myself, by others, dubbed a writer of science fiction, and I have to mention my books. They have, so far, been set in the present. The first pair I had written by the age of twenty-seven. I have dismissed them before now, especially The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, but recent events have made me withdraw some of my harshness. If you look at the two books as science fiction in the way I have defined the subject, they are a mess: a Manichean over-simplicity: but the germ of possibly my whole life is there. It took until 1975, and the performance of an opera conceived by me, and for which I wrote the libretto, to isolate the central question of those first “boundary” books from the matrix of their self-indulgent texts.
The change came with the third book, Elidor. The fragmentary northern ballad of “Childe Roland and Burd Ellen” was given its relevancy in the slums of Manchester. By “relevancy” I mean that the myth chooses the form for its clearest expression at any given moment. In doing so, elements may be revealed and materials used that earlier versions obscured or did not need. For example, in describing working-class areas of the industrial north in the middle of the twentieth century, as I do in Elidor, I am writing no tract; but, if my reporting is accurate, it cannot be without sociological content. But it is not polemical or didactic writing, any more than the purpose of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is to record the discomfort of sleeping rough in armour, in winter, in the fourteenth century.
The fourth novel, The Owl Service, is an expression of the myth found in the Welsh Math vab Mathonwy, and is only incidentally concerned with the plight of first-generation educated illegitimate Welsh males. I labour the point because I am forced to accept that some readers will not differentiate between form and content. It is almost as if they are afraid to see.
The title of the fifth novel, Red Shift, prepares one for what is coming, and perhaps too much so. It may sound fictionally more scientific than it is. The myth is another ballad, the story of Tamlain and Burd Janet and the Queen of Elfland.
The element common to all the books is my present-day activity within myth. The difference between that activity and what are usually called “retellings” is that the retellings are stuffed trophies on the wall, whereas I have to bring them back alive. It is a process not without risk.
It would be a mistake to call the activity plagiarism, or the bolstering of a weak imagination. I would go further, and say that the feeling is less that I choose a myth than that the myth chooses me; less that I write than that I am written.
It was from my inability to understand the process that I appeared to go mad, but what I hope to convey is another definition; not insanity, but the conscious awareness of a dimension that the Pitjantjatra of Central Western Australia call “Altjira”, the word usually translated by the solecism “Dreamtime”. That is the boundary I tread. And I trod it all the way to the doctor’s surgery.
We are fortunate in the part of the country where I live to have one of the most efficient psychotherapists practising today. His name is Bill Wadsworth. The first meeting was the popular cartoonist’s impression. I talked for more than two hours without interruption. Bill Wadsworth asked me one question. I answered it. And he went straight to the centre of pain and gave me the insight to absolve myself from it. It was a remarkable performance. We made an appointment for the following week.
Euphoria lasted, and I attended with another heap of self-indulgence to wallow in. But Bill would not let me start. This time, I had to listen to him. And he put back, and tightened, every clamp he had removed, except the injurious one that had brought me to him. Then he dismissed me in a neutral voice, which, in my confused state, sounded heartless. As soon as I was outside the building I vomited.
The next, and last, visit was a perfunctory chat, less than half an hour. He was monitoring. Then we shook hands, and I thanked him and said good-bye. “I never say good-bye,” said Bill.
So far we have an impressive medical performance. I was thirty-five years old, and had been carrying a bomb in me for nearly twenty years, and the filming of The Owl Service had ignited the fuse. Bill Wadsworth had isolated it, and dealt with it, in less than four hours of clinical time. It was a performance impressive in execution, but not unknown to orthodox science. Yet even here there were oddities. One is that I had started to lose hold on the world during the making of the film of my own book. Writing the original text, which was four years’ conscious work, had not affected me. Another oddity is that Bill Wadsworth, dealing with an unknown patient who was irrational and disturbed, asked only one question the first time we met. Bill Wadsworth’s question has implications for us all, even the most sophisticated, but especially for any artist. The question was simple, but its implications are so great that I have had to make this two-fold approach, at the risk of overstatement, in order to link the personal to the universal relevancy. Bill had asked: “Was The Owl Service written in the past tense and the third person or in the present and the first?” It had been written in the past tense and the third person. Although there was a lot of dialogue, it was all observed, “he said” and “she said”, safely at a distance.
The crucial point is that an author’s characters are all to some degree autobiographical: and the time of a film or a play is Now; dangerous as it ever was. The distance has gone.
Textbooks have a name for the disturbance, but it is a term that has been hijacked and abused by popularisation and by misapplication and redefinition at the hands of tendentious factions, with whom I am anxious not to be associated, especially the Church of Scientology and its gormless substitutes for thought. So I must restore to the term its original, philosophical definition before I can use it. The word is “engram”.
In neuro-physiology, an engram is the term for a hypothetical change in the protoplasm of the neural tissue which is thought by some to account for the working of memory. It is a memory-trace, a permanent impression made by a stimulus or experience. Music and smell are frequent activators of an engram. We reconstitute whole events from a line of Mozart or the scent of a flower. Proust spent twenty-two years in bed as the result of an engram. Whatever we may think of his labours, they demonstrate the power and ruthless obsession of the phenomenon, if it exists.
Pyschiatry takes the matter further. The human brain is exposed to influence from its development to death. Every event of life is recorded and is available to us directly; or indirectly through dreams, hypnosis or drugs. The difference between the direct and the indirect access to our files is that we usually have to surrender control of ourselves if we use the indirect methods. Most pleasant or unhurtful experiences are put straight into their files, engrams labelled. It is the unpleasant experience that makes the threatening engram.
Here is a typical pattern of engram attack.
Something happens to us. We are hurt. We do not like being hurt. “It” hurts. The event takes place in outer time, which is four-dimensional, and we, the organism, must continue. So, like an oyster, we enclose the pain, but, unlike the oyster, we produce no pearl. We enclose the pain by “being sensible”, “putting it behind us”, “setting it down to experience”, “forgetting all about it”. Whatever euphemism we choose, the process is the same. We wrap the engram round with emotional energy. But the engram lives on, because the engram is a creature of inner time, and inner time is one-dimensional; or infinite. The view from outer time is not clear. All events seem to be present simultaneously: only our immediate needs give an apparent perspective. We can check the validity of this argument by calling to mind any two intensely remembered experiences. They will be emotionally contemporaneous, even though we know that the calendar separates them by years. Similarly, it is possible to reverse the calendar by comparing emotions that are not of equal strength. An analogy may help.
When we look at a starry sky, we see a group of configurations that seem to be equidistant from us and existing now. That is an “apparent perspective”. We are looking at a complexity of times past, a sky of “it-was”, all at different epochs, distances and intensities. Inner time creates such illusions, also.
The next step is a big one. Just as we are physically the result of our genetic inheritance, there are psychiatrists who see in the engram a genetic ability to transmit itself. You may say (and I do) that engram disorder is explicable within the subjective inner time of the individual existence, and that that is marvel enough.
The severity of a given engram attack is related to the coexistence in inner time with all associated engrams, and their combined force threatens us. For instance, we have all seen a cat that has been squashed on the road. We have seen many such. Let us suppose that on one particular day we have three new and equally distressing experiences, but that one of them is also associated with the squashing of a cat on the road. That event will hurt us more than the other two, because it will be drawing on the hurt of all the cats that are being held in a memory bank in inner time. To continue the previous analogy: the cats are a constellation of pain.
Psychiatrists who would take the matter further and say that we inherit genetically and engrammatically, maintain that we have built into us the experiences of our parents from their conception to our own, and that our parents have inherited likewise from our grandparents.
It is obvious that, within a few generations of compounded inner times, the number of engrams available will approach infinity, and, whether we call the result “inherited inner time”, “the collective unconscious” or “patterns of general human behaviour”, the day-to-day result is the same. My own experience of consciously dealing with what Bill Wadsworth called a destructive engram leaves me with an acceptance of whatever-it-is as a reality, and of its ability to activate all its harmonics in the apparent simultaneity of inner time. But, attractive as the theory is, I have no evidence for my potential memory of what Grandad said in 1894, nor of the number of cats he saw squashed.
My experience does show, however, that a writer of fiction, willy-nilly, plants encapsulated engrams in his characters, and that disorientation, leading to symptoms that resemble madness, can be induced when the engram is made present simultaneously in inner and outer time.
When I set out to assault the actor during the filming of The Owl Service, it was because I could not reconcile him and me on a Welsh mountain in 1969 with the memory-trace of me somewhere else in 1950. The inner time co-ordinates were identical, but they had been externalised to a here-and-now of waking nightmare. Inner time rules of simultaneity and one-dimensionalism had been projected on to a four-dimensional space-time. Which was absurd. Or I was.
Bill Wadsworth’s skill lay in helping me (without drugs, hypnosis or even leading questions) to see the simplicity of the trap: that the printed word is safe where the spoken word is not. My all-but insanity, provoked by conditions that externalised my thoughts and memories, jumbled, as actors, so that I was seeing a reality that, for me, was close to schizophrenic illusion, was the spontaneous and ungoverned invasion of the outside world by inner time. Bill Wadsworth showed me how to restore myself to my own co-ordinates, to release the energy that had been locked around the engram for nearly twenty years, and, above all, not to be afraid of the process. That is important because whatever words we use to describe the process, I am left with myself as someone who is obliged to walk in Altjira, to be a vehicle of myth, to go voluntarily (and now knowingly) to inner time, and to come back increased instead of diminished, with more energy than less. And it is astonishing what can happen when our energies are not bound up defensively against engram attack.
Before we move on, Bill should be demystified. His talent is directness allied to an acute and compassionate mind. His treatment is painful because we make truth painful, and truth is the only way to discharge an engram.
The method is simple. He gets his patient to tell the pain, to tell the truth. It is often an anecdote from childhood or adolescence. He makes the patient speak always in the present tense. Not “I was standing in the garden,” but, “I am standing in the garden.” When the story is finished, he asks to be told again and again, always in the present tense, until either there is nothing new left to say, or something new takes its place: a deeper, connected engram. It is like lancing a boil, or a series of boils; because the obvious engram may not be the final engram but the first, cumulative, and thereby injurious, one. We may think that it is the tenth squashed cat that is hurting us, but it is more likely to be pain associated with the first.
And here I must insert a warning. The simplicity of the present tense is a delusion. It is Bill Wadsworth’s skill that makes it appear simple. I am able to face fear in his presence and to take emotional risks with myself only because I know that he is equipped with a multiplicity of formal qualifications of the highest achievement and can step in with a sharp word, or a sharp needle, if we meet demons. No one should be seduced into foolhardy experiments by any superficial lure in the experiences I relate.
So far, I have spoken of the engram phenomenon only as a symptom that interferes with the health of the individual. But the positive side is equally available, though we tend not to draw on it. Primitive peoples do; and “primitive” is not the same as “unsophisticated”.
Inner time may not exist as such. It may be a confusion on my part from many sources; but it is an empirical truth for me, from which I am led to believe that Man is evolving, through that inner time as well as through other time frames, towards awareness of a universe that is conscious rather than effete. And to be conscious is to be responsible: to be responsible is to act: to act is to move: for ever.
Up till now that is an account of a condition that is behind me. The intervening years have been filled with activity made possible by the discharge of a crippling engram, and here are some of the results.
Immediately “after” being treated clinically by Bill Wadsworth, I organised the dismantling, repair and re-erection of the most important timber-framed Tudor domestic building known to have survived; had it linked to the existing mediaeval longhouse where I live; filmed and photographed the operation, and handled the archaeological complexities involved. (The mediaeval hall-hovel is on a Saxon/Iron Age/Bronze Age/Neolithic/Mesolithic site.)
I wrote Red Shift; made a television documentary film; wrote a television play; conceived and wrote the libretti for two operas; collaborated on a picture book for children; wrote a dance drama; wrote a study of a Jungian archetype; got married again; fathered a child; am monitoring another pregnancy; am collaborating on an analysis of a Middle English poem; am preparing one of the operas for filming on television; and am gestating the next novel. I feel under-employed.
In the fourteen years of work before my collapse, I wrote four novels, and did sporadic radio and television jobs in order to eat. Surely it cannot be a coincidence that so much should happen as soon as the energy needed to sit on an engram for nearly twenty years was made available for more constructive, outwardly-turned activities.
And, because I have long maintained that war memoirs are not as truthful as dispatches from the front, I have set out to demonstrate, in the only way I know how, that there need not be anything too terrible about what still has to be called “mental illness” by writing this essay in the twelfth week of another crisis; one caused by an engram in the opera I was writing. The opera is itself an expression of engram resolution and the nature of inner time, and I am still reverberating.
I have just given a summary of the main activities that occupy me at present, and contrasted them with the aridity of what went before. You may find both states unhealthy and ludicrous. But we are individuals, and it is not in me to be equable. The choice is only of which whirlwinds to ride. Given that, I am told my work is richer now, less diffused, and that I am more tolerably domesticated. The involvement of an academically trained mind with a primitive catastrophic process (that is, the waking experience of Altjira, the Illud Tempus of anthropology) is not always pleasant, but it is never far from what C. S. Lewis calls “joy”, and I would have it no other way.
Let me return to the opera. I have devoted a lot of space here to engrams, but I have not described the subjective experience of discharging one: the road back from zero. As with the filming of the novel, when the opera was about to go into rehearsal; that is, to get off the page, to take on flesh, to be real people outside my head, I began to apply my brakes in the form of psychosomatic malaise. My wife told me that I should see Bill, but I ignored the advice. After all, he was for the big stuff, not backache and migraine. And anyway, I was “busy”. Then, one night, I shouted in my sleep: “I wrote the thing! I don’t have to watch it!”
When I heard what had happened, I scrapped the argument for not needing help; but, before I could get to Bill, the brakes were jammed on. Everything that had ever ached, ached. Each preparation for the journey to London produced another batch of symptoms, until I woke to find myself locked. I could not get out of bed. Hysterical paralysis had taken all the pains away. That made me angry; angry enough to have myself hefted into a car to keep my appointment with Bill. But the session started with me in ridiculous contortion on the floor because of muscular spasm, and barely able to speak. Here is how it went. The dialogue is surreal, especially out of context, but you should remember that Bill and I had worked together, and accepted a shorthand vocabulary between us concerned with effectiveness rather than with elegance.
“Go to the pain,” said Bill. “Go to where it hurts most, and say whatever it tells you.”
The centre of the pain was my left thigh. I zoomed in like a camera lens, crashing for the black centre, using my will as a projectile. Just before the moment of impact, the blackness switched off, and I was watching myself, six years old, at home, during the war, being sick after eating the top half of a teacake covered with blackcurrant jam, and developing the first symptoms of what was later diagnosed as meningitis.
Engram One. I told the story over and over, in the present tense, until nothing was left that was unpleasant, except the teacake.
“Go to the most painful part of that experience, and say whatever it tells you.”
Again the crash zoom lens: into the teacake. And immediately another picture, another associated memory, a deeper engram.
A peculiarity of this technique is that, instead of becoming more tedious with each repetition, the description is more vivid, visually and emotionally (and therefore more difficult and painful), until there is a sudden loss of intensity, and the engram is discharged: but it is not erased.
The engram makes no distinction between an actual experience (one that we could photograph and record objectively) and a dream. The more dream-engrams there are, the more painful the process and the sooner the resolution. Also, the engram prefers the emotional truth to the historical truth, so that it does not matter if one is “lying” in the sense of untruthful evidence before a court of law, since we are dealing with the subjective truth of the pain in order to free it here-and-now: we are not conducting an experiment to test the accuracy of human historical memory and its retention. But the usual pattern is to move from historical event to historical event, sometimes taking shortcuts through truth and remembered dreams. Puns are common, too. After two hours of the first session I walked out with a sore leg.
We chased engrams all that week, until I crash zoomed into the last of the series, and found myself, screaming, aged three, being carried from my first visit to a cinema. Nobody had told me what a cinema or a film were, and certainly nothing about the concept of an animated cartoon; and I was taken into the largest enclosed space I had ever seen, into a crowd of strangers, put on a seat, and the lights went out. Figures fifteen feet high moved and loomed over me. The film was Snow White; and I felt my sanity slipping until the moment when the Queen metamorphosed into the Witch. Then I screamed, and screamed, and could not stop. My mother called an usherette, to have me removed, and I was handed into the strange-smelling arms behind a bright beam that dazzled me. The arms hugged my squirming form, and carried me out, while my mother stayed to watch the rest of the film. The exit was at the foot of the screen, and I was being borne up towards that great and drooling hag, away from safety, pinioned by someone I could not see, and the Witch was laughing.
When we got home, I was thrashed, for making my mother “look a fool in public”.
“Go to the most painful part of the experience.”
“Waiting with Mummy after the film, at the bus stop, before we get home.”
“Isn’t it a funny old world?” said Bill. “What do you feel now?”
“I want to be in London, so they don’t foul up the opera.”
“You’ll still have a pain in your leg,” said Bill. “It’s sciatica.”
And it is sciatica. But if I swear at it, it goes. I can will it away. In another century, I should be casting out a devil.
Whatever terminology we use, it is a fact that, from my hysterical paralysis and fear of watching the opera being performed, to wanting to be rid of a psychotherapist because he was delaying my arrival at rehearsal, and all in five days, was an achievement.
It should be noticed that Bill Wadsworth called a temporary halt and sent me to confront the opera in performance as soon as I said that the most distressing part of the aspect of the Snow White engram was my standing at a bus stop, afraid of what had happened, afraid of the thrashing to come, and denied my mother’s affection in the present. It was a one-dimensional point of fear.
And when I first met Bill, when the world was crashing, and the personal pain was greater and its social effect a near disaster, we isolated one engram and discharged it: but only one. One engram for the edge of collapse; five engrams for sciatica. But there is a connection, and it is reasonable.
The Owl Service was written largely from a subconscious need to understand why, at the age of fifteen, I had, without justification or desire, verbally savaged another human being. I had done it at a bus stop. That was the centre of pain that Bill Wadsworth invited me to, and from which he enabled me to absolve myself. “The bus stop” was the engram I had not been able to recognise or discharge on a Welsh mountain.
When I was seventeen, the tables were turned on me by someone else in a similar way, and out of that bewilderment came the need to write Elidor. It happened, of course, at a bus stop. Even the first books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, have bus stops within them; and they are based on the myth that is expressed through the opera.
Let us be clear, and remember the squashed cats. Three equally painful experiences happen to me on the same day, but one involves the squashing of a cat; and, therefore, all the squashed cats of my inner time bleed; and, if the engram has a genetic ability to transmit itself, the cats of my grandsires bleed, too. I have no doubt that I behaved intolerably to many other human beings, and they to me: but I retain negatively and destructively only the bus stop experiences, because they had the additional charge upon them of my infant terror and the withholding of parental love; which made me too cruel, and then too vulnerable, in my turn. It’s a funny old world only here-and-now. For inner time, what I have described is that infuriating word “normality”.
It seems to me that one motivation for a writer could be the need to discharge engrams. If it were as easy as that, writers would end up as saints; but, fortunately, there are too many engrams and too little life; and it will do no good to look for engrams cold, because any you dig out will be bogus, and so will you. Which is why, at our first meeting, Bill went only as far as the pain took me. I imagine that he could have forced me to more bus stops, out of interest, but he is a sensitive man. He knew what those twenty years had done, and that I needed to make up for lost time, and that it would be soon enough to help me further when the next stage was reached. “I never say good-bye” was his signal to be remembered when the need came.
The discharge of an engram through writing may be an act of exorcism, but it is not confessional writing. If it succeeds, I am not giving the reader the burden of my engram, but I am, fortuitously, handing on the released, and thereby refined and untainted, energy. Again, I could not do it cold, or with a social mission: I am not Galahad: but it is astonishing (and humbling) to read my mail and to have people say simply, “Thank you”, and then to realise that they have taken something beneficial from a process that had been released through me, so that my bad 1949 becomes an unknown person’s good 1975.
The danger of hubris is clear, but it is countered by the certain belief that, if the process were to be abused or manipulated, I should be destroyed, and by the cosmic joke of my own work. For there is not one problem sweated out clinically with Bill Wadsworth that I had not already myself posited, examined and resolved earlier in a book.
I got to London for the opera through dealing with a conflict that is answered in detail by the last chapter of The Owl Service, which was written nine years earlier. However long a novel may occupy, living the truth of it takes longer.
The present exercise with Bill Wadsworth is all laid out in the opera. I can even see where I am now, what must be done, and what the result will be. But I do not yet know how to do it. To achieve that catharsis, I shall have to write. And what will that uncover? And what will it take to answer?
The answer already exists in myth. If I have made the engram phenomenon seem hard, it is because evolution is hard, and we must evolve. I believe that we are evolving towards a hyper-consciousness of the individual, and that one of the evolutionary processes is concerned with inner time, a potential we are made aware of by the action of myth. At certain times in life, especially in adolescence, the potential universe is open to our comprehension, and it is not the engram’s fault if we decide to be blind to the light and call on darkness.
The engram is not harmful, unless we ignore it. I have described no mystery that is not of our own making, no fear that is outside us. In other cultures there would be no need for explanation. But we are not other cultures, and I have no wish to enter Altjira as a Pitjantjatra, but as a twentieth-century Western European, with all my cultural skills intact.
The analogy of a starry sky may help us finally to understand what I mean. The Pitjantjatra live in Australia, now; but technologically they are twenty thousand years in our past. Their ingenuity of survival in a desert where we should not last a day is a product of the application of Altjira, ‘Illud Tempus’, inner time, myth, to their environment. The numinous quality of Man is dominant in them. But take a tribal Pitjantjatra and expose him to our technology, and he dies. He is no longer tribal, he has no co-ordinates. An individual who can cross the Dead Centre of Australia naked, cannot cross Sydney alone. He hits skid row instead.
The simultaneity of the Pitjantjatra and ourselves is another “apparent perspective”, like the sky, and is what makes genocides of missionaries.
Somewhere in those twenty thousand years we sacrificed the numinous for our other greatness, the intellect. The mistake has been to atrophy our dreams. For the Pitjantjatra, both are equal, both spectra of the same rainbow. My intellect entered inner time as unprepared as a Pitjantjatra entering Sydney. But I survived, and have returned the better equipped to work. For now I know that, whatever the work is, it comes through me, not from me, and brings with it a proper pride, a pride in craft, not the hubristic pride of creation.
And I have no choice but to serve work; not only with the numinous aspect of Man, for which I make this plea, but with the intellectual and analytical force that is our history, and by which we move thought through outer space and outer time to other minds. The boundaries are endless. But we each have our role. Perhaps the artist’s job is to act as cartographer for all navigators, and I simply plot the maps of inner stars.
* * *
POSTSCRIPT
Bill Wadsworth has died since the above was written, and so I am freed from the ethical embargo on using his name. He was a most complex man: an honest rogue, in that he was a hedonist, overweight, fond of material comforts and of getting them, and he charged his patients what he knew to be his worth. During a clinical session, he was always calm, and scarcely moved, except to pass the box of paper tissues. He could hold a silence as long as an actor can. But, once the clinical engagement was over, he became physically hyperactive, chain-smoked with trembling hands, talked intellectual and metaphysical rubbish fast and long, as if it were necessary for his own sanity for him to spout garbage after two hours of the merciless and calm logic with which he had countered my hysterical outbursts of rant as I struggled in vain to get off his hook. He died, too young, of a heart attack.
He has been accused of being a villain. I don’t know. What I do know is that, without his quality and agility of mind, his applied intelligence, harnessed to sympathy and empathy, I should not have survived. Moreover, after our first meeting, he did everything from then on free, never an account. When I questioned this, he smiled. An honest rogue, with dreams.
1 This lecture was delivered at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, on the theme of “Science Fiction at Large”, on 26 February 1975.