About the ghosts of flowers,
Lies the clear place where I, no longer I,
Nevertheless remember
Love’s nightlong wisdom of the other shore;
And, listening to the wind, remember too
That other night, that first of widowhood,
Sleepless, with death beside me in the dark.
Mine, mine, all mine, mine inescapably!
But I, no longer I,
In this clear place between my thought and
silence
See all I had and lost, anguish and joys,
Glowing like gentians in the Alpine grass,
Blue, unpossessed and open.
‘Like gentians,’ Will repeated to himself, and thought of that summer holiday in Switzerland when he was twelve; thought of the meadow, high above Grindelwald, with its unfamiliar flowers, its wonderful un-English butterflies; thought of the dark blue sky and the sunshine and the huge shining mountains on the other side of the valley. And all his father had found to say was that it looked like an advertisement for Nestlé’s milk chocolate. “Not even real chocolate,” he had insisted with a grimace of disgust. “Milk chocolate.” After which there had been an ironic comment on the water colour his mother was painting — so badly (poor thing!) but with such loving and conscientious care. “The milk chocolate advertisement that Nestlé rejected.” And now it was his turn. “Instead of just mooning about with your mouth open, like the village idiot, why not do something intelligent for a change? Put in some work on your German grammar, for example.” And diving into the rucksack, he had pulled out, from among the hardboiled eggs and the sandwiches, the abhorred little brown book. What a detestable man! And yet, if Susila was right, one ought to be able to see him now, after all these years, glowing like a gentian — Will glanced again at the last line of the poem— ‘blue, unpossessed and open.’
“Well …” said a familiar voice.
He turned towards the door. “Talk of the devil,” he said. “Or rather read what the devil has written.” He held up the sheet of notepaper for her inspection.
Susila glanced at it. “Oh, that,” she said. “If only good intentions were enough to make good poetry!” She sighed and shook her head.
“I was trying to think of my father as a gentian,” he went on. “But all I get is the persistent image of the most enormous turd.”
“Even turds,” she assured him, “can be seen as gentians.”
“But only, I take it, in the place you were writing about — the clear place between thought and silence?”
Susila nodded.
“How do you get there?”
“You don’t get there. There comes to you. Or rather there is really here.”
“You’re just like little Radha,” he complained. “Parroting what the Old Raja says at the beginning of this book.”
“If we repeat it,” she said, “it’s because it happens to be true. If we didn’t repeat it, we’d be ignoring the facts.”
“Whose facts?” he asked. “Certainly not mine.”
“Not at the moment,” she agreed. “But if you were to do the kind of things that the Old Raja recommends, they might be yours.”
“Did you have parent trouble?” he asked after a little silence. “Or could you always see turds as gentians?”
“Not at that age,” she answered. “Children have to be Manichean dualists. It’s the price we must all pay for learning the rudiments of being human. Seeing turds as gentians, or rather seeing both gentians and turds as Gentians with a capital G — that’s a post-graduate accomplishment.”
“So what did you do about your parents? Just grin and bear the unbearable? Or did your father and mother happen to be bearable?”
“Bearable separately,” she answered. “Especially my father. But quite unbearable together — unbearable because they couldn’t bear one another. A bustling, cheerful, outgoing woman married to a man so fastidiously introverted that she got on his nerves all the time — even, I suspect, in bed. She never stopped communicating, and he never started. With the result that he thought she was shallow and insincere, she thought he was heartless, contemptuous and without normal human feelings.”
“I’d have expected that you people would know better than to walk into that kind of trap.”
“We do know better,” she assured him. “Boys and girls are specifically taught what to expect of people whose temperament and physique are very different from their own. Unfortunately, it sometimes happens that the lessons don’t seem to have much effect. Not to mention the fact that in some cases the psychological distance between the people involved is really too great to be bridged. Anyhow, the fact remains that my father and mother never managed to make a go of it. They’d fallen in love with one another — goodness knows why. But when they came to close quarters, she found herself being constantly hurt by his inaccessibility, while her uninhibited good fellowship made him fairly cringe with embarrassment and distaste. My sympathies were always with my father. Physically and temperamentally I’m very close to him, not in the least like my mother. I remember, even as a tiny child, how I used to shrink away from her exuberance. She was like a permanent invasion of one’s privacy. She still is.”
“Do you have to see a lot of her?”
“Very little. She has her own job and her own friends. In our part of the world ‘Mother’ is strictly the name of a function. When the function has been duly fulfilled, the title lapses; the ex-child and the woman who used to be called ‘mother’ establish a new kind of relationship. If they get on well together, they continue to see a lot of one another. If they don’t, they drift apart. Nobody expects them to cling, and clinging isn’t equated with loving — isn’t regarded as anything particularly creditable.”
“So all’s well now. But what about then? What happened when you were a child, growing up between two people who couldn’t bridge the gulf that separated them? I know what that means — the fairy-story ending in reverse, ‘And so they lived unhappily ever after’.”
“And I’ve no doubt,” said Susila, “that if we hadn’t been born in Pala, we would have lived unhappily ever after. As it was, we got on, all things considered, remarkably well.”
“How did you manage to do that?”
“We didn’t; it was all managed for us. Have you read what the Old Raja says about getting rid of the two thirds of sorrow that’s home-made and gratuitous?”
Will nodded. “I was just reading it when you came in.”
“Well, in the bad old days,” she went on, “Palanese families could be just as victimizing, tyrant-producing and liar-creating as yours can be today. In fact they were so awful that Dr Andrew and the Raja of the Reform decided that something had to be done about it. Buddhist ethics and primitive village communism were skilfully made to serve the purposes of reason, and in a single generation the whole family system was radically changed.” She hesitated for a moment. “Let me explain,” she went on, “in terms of my own particular case — the case of an only child of two people who couldn’t understand one another and were always at cross purposes or actually quarrelling. In the old days, a little girl brought up in those surroundings would have emerged as either a wreck, a rebel, or a resigned hypocritical conformist. Under the new dispensation I didn’t have to undergo unnecessary suffering, I wasn’t wrecked or forced into rebellion or resignation. Why? Because from the moment I could toddle, I was free to escape.”
“To escape?” he repeated. “To escape?” It seemed too good to be true.
“Escape,” she explained, “is built into the new system. Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged — and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement — to migrate to one of its other homes.”
“How many homes does a Palanese child have?”
“About twenty on the average.”
“Twenty? My God!”
“We all belong,” Susila explained, �
�to an MAC — a Mutual Adoption Club. Every MAC consists of anything from fifteen to twenty-five assorted couples. Newly elected brides and bridegrooms, old timers with growing children, grandparents and great-grandparents — everybody in the club adopts everyone else. Besides our own blood relations, we all have our quota of deputy mothers, deputy fathers, deputy aunts and uncles, deputy brothers and sisters, deputy babies and toddlers and teen-agers.”
Will shook his head. “Making twenty families grow where only one grew before.”
“But what grew before was your kind of family. The twenty are all our kind.” As though reading instructions from a cookery book, “‘Take one sexually inept wage-slave,’” she went on, “‘one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television-addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.’ Our recipe is rather different. ‘Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humour in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.’”
“And what comes out of your open pan?” he asked.
“An entirely different kind of family. Not exclusive, like your families, and not predestined, not compulsory. An inclusive, unpredestined and voluntary family. Twenty pairs of fathers and mothers, eight or nine ex-fathers and ex-mothers, and forty or fifty assorted children of all ages.”
“Do people stay in the same adoption club all their lives?”
“Of course not. Grown-up children don’t adopt their own parents or their own brothers and sisters. They go out and adopt another set of elders, a different group of peers and juniors. And the members of the new club adopt them and, in due course, their children. Hybridization of micro-cultures — that’s what our sociologists call the process. It’s as beneficial, on its own level, as the hybridization of different strains of maize or chickens. Healthier relationships in more responsible groups, wider sympathies and deeper understandings. And the sympathies and understandings are for everyone in the MAC from babies to centenarians.”
“Centenarians? What’s your expectation of life?”
“A year or two more than yours,” she answered. “Ten per cent of us are over sixty-five. The old get pensions, if they can’t earn. But obviously pensions aren’t enough. They need something useful and challenging to do; they need people they can care for and be loved by in return. The MAC’s fulfill those needs.”
“It all sounds,” said Will, “suspiciously like the propaganda for one of the new Chinese Communes.”
“Nothing,” she assured him, “could be less like a Commune than an MAC. An MAC isn’t run by the government, it’s run by its members. And we’re not militaristic. We’re not interested in turning out good party members; we’re only interested in turning out good human beings. We don’t inculcate dogmas. And finally we don’t take the children away from their parents; on the contrary, we give the children additional parents and the parents additional children. That means that even in the nursery we enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater responsibilities. Whereas in China there’s no freedom at all. The children are handed over to official baby-tamers, whose business it is to turn them into obedient servants of the State. Things are a great deal better in your part of the world — better, but still quite bad enough. You escape the state-appointed baby-tamers; but your society condemns you to pass your childhood in an exclusive family, with only a single set of siblings and parents. They’re foisted on you by hereditary predestination. You can’t get rid of them, can’t take a holiday from them, can’t go to anyone else for a change of moral or psychological air. It’s freedom, if you like — but freedom in a telephone booth.”
“Locked in,” Will elaborated, “(and I’m thinking now of myself) with a sneering bully, a Christian martyr and a little girl who’d been frightened by the bully and blackmailed by the martyr’s appeal to her better feelings into a state of quivering imbecility. That was the home from which, until I was fourteen and my Aunt Mary came to live next door, I never escaped.”
“And your unfortunate parents never escaped from you.”
“That’s not quite true. My father used to escape into brandy and my mother into High Anglicanism. I had to serve out my sentence without the slightest mitigation. Fourteen years of family servitude. How I envy you! Free as a bird!”
“Not so lyrical! Free, let’s say, as a developing human being, free as a future woman — but no freer. Mutual Adoption guarantees children against injustice and the worst consequences of parental ineptitude. It doesn’t guarantee them against discipline, or against having to accept responsibilities. On the contrary, it increases the number of their responsibilities; it exposes them to a wide variety of disciplines. In your predestined and exclusive families children, as you say, serve a long prison term under a single set of parental jailers. These parental jailers may, of course, be good, wise and intelligent. In that case the little prisoners will emerge more or less unscathed. But in point of fact most of your parental jailers are not conspicuously good, wise or intelligent. They’re apt to be well-meaning but stupid, or not well-meaning and frivolous, or else neurotic, or occasionally downright malevolent, or frankly insane. So God help the young convicts committed by law and custom and religion to their tender mercies! But now consider what happens in a large, inclusive, voluntary family. No telephone booths, no predestined jailers. Here the children grow up in a world that’s a working model of society at large, a small-scale but accurate version of the environment in which they’re going to have to live when they’re grown up. ‘Holy’, ‘Healthy’, ‘whole’ — they all come from the same root and carry different overtones of the same meaning. Etymologically and in fact, our kind of family, the inclusive and voluntary kind, is the genuine holy family. Yours is the unholy family.”
“Amen,” said Will, and thought again of his own childhood, thought too of poor little Murugan in the clutches of the Rani. “What happens,” he asked after a pause, “when the children migrate to one of their other homes? How long do they stay there?”
“It all depends. When my children get fed up with me, they seldom stay away for more than a day or two. That’s because, fundamentally, they’re very happy at home. I wasn’t, and so when I walked out, I’d sometimes stay away for a whole month.”
“And did your deputy parents back you up against your real mother and father?”
“It’s not a question of doing anything against anybody. All that’s being backed up is intelligence and good feeling, and all that’s being opposed is unhappiness and its avoidable causes. If a child feels unhappy in his first home, we do our best for him in fifteen or twenty second homes. Meanwhile the father and mother get some tactful therapy from the other members of their Mutual Adoption Club. In a few weeks the parents are fit to be with their children again, and the children are fit to be with their parents. But you mustn’t think,” she added, “that it’s only when they’re in trouble that children resort to their deputy parents and grandparents. They do it all the time, whenever they feel the need for a change or some kind of new experience. And it isn’t just a social whirl. Wherever they go, as deputy children, they have their responsibilities as well as their rights — brushing the dog, for example, cleaning out the bird cages, minding the baby while the mother’s doing something else. Duties as well as privileges — but not in one of your airless little telephone booths. Duties and privileges in a big, open, unpredestined, inclusive family, where all the seven ages of man and a dozen different skills and talents are represented, and in which children have experience of all the important and significant things that human beings do and suffer — working, playing, loving, getting old, being sick, dying …” She was silent, thinking of Dugald and Dugald’s mother; then, deliberately changing her tone, “But what about you
?” she went on. “I’ve been so busy talking about families that I haven’t even asked you how you’re feeling. You certainly look a lot better than when I saw you last.”
“Thanks to Dr MacPhail. And also thanks to someone who, I suspect, was definitely practising medicine without a licence. What on earth did you do to me yesterday afternoon?”
Susila smiled. “You did it to yourself,” she assured him. “I merely pressed the buttons.”
“Which buttons?”
“Memory buttons, imagination buttons.”
“And that was enough to put me into a hypnotic trance?”
“If you like to call it that.”
“What else can one call it?”
“Why call it anything? Names are such question-beggars. Why not be content with just knowing that it happened?”
“But what did happen?”
“Well, to begin with, we made some kind of contact, didn’t we?”
“We certainly did,” he agreed. “And yet I don’t believe I even so much as looked at you.”
He was looking at her now, though — looking and wondering, as he looked, who this strange little creature really was, what lay behind the smooth grave mask of the face, what the dark eyes were seeing as they returned his scrutiny, what she was thinking.
“How could you look at me?” she said. “You’d gone off on your vacation.”
“Or was I pushed off?”
“Pushed? No.” She shook her head. “Let’s say seen off, helped off.” There was a moment of silence. “Did you ever,” she resumed, “try to do a job of work with a child hanging around?”
Will thought of the small neighbour who had offered to help him paint the dining-room furniture, and laughed at the memory of his exasperation.
“Poor little darling!” Susila went on. “He means so well, he’s so anxious to help.”
“But the paint’s on the carpet, the finger prints are all over the walls …”
“So that in the end you have to get rid of him. ‘Run along, little boy! Go and play in the garden!’”
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 297