Permeable selves, on the other hand, tend to be less rationalist and less atomised. Religious identity, for instance, tends to be affiliative rather than nationalist. I suspect that this is why in the West, still dogged by nationalism, we have great difficulty in coping with the international dimension of Islamic politics, for good or ill. The number of newspapers that rushed to tell us, in slightly shocked tones, that the Beslan terrorists ‘weren’t Chechnyan’ as though somehow they should have been, is interesting. In many of Bush’s statements about ‘the evil ones’ there is the subtextual suggestion that part of their evil is that they aren’t ‘patriotic’ in the old nationalist sense and cannot, therefore, be addressed with the old rules of play: diplomacy, bribery, threat and ultimately war.
In the context of the modern boundaried self, Freud is right: religious belief is neurotic, and spirituality delusional and an inappropriate form of self-expression. If a person believes in a God (any God) as an external Other who has a value equal to or higher than the individual’s, then ego boundaries are necessarily going to become shaky: the thrust of most traditional spiritual practice is to make them ever more shaky. If there is a God – if there is truth and meaning other than the purely material – outside the self, then the self that is permeable has greater access to such truth than the more strictly boundaried self. In this narrative the appropriate identity may well be one that allows in the most from outside, which allows the Other to break down or through the boundaries. When a community collectively accepts the existence of powers outside the individual, then anyone who has access to those powers has a value to the community.
So a modern narrative will say that anyone who lets the (divine or delusional) Other too far in, who weakens their own boundaries, or has them weakened, is ‘mad’, as we see extensively in modern psychiatric discourse. While a religious or spiritual narrative will tend to sense that those who will not consent to be used by the forces of the Other are the mad ones.
I certainly do not want to be seen to be saying that a religious structuring of identity is somehow ‘better’ than a romantic one, or vice versa. There are downsides to both models. For example, within a religiously framed understanding, weaker boundaries are a good thing. But what often actually seems to happen is that the boundaries are re-erected elsewhere – often around the community of believers. Although behaviour that the boundaried self would need to describe as delusional can be contained, ‘heresy’ cannot. Societies that are tolerant of excess at an intra-personal level, are frequently very intolerant of ideas that threaten the wider framework – and punitive of originality, intellectual challenge, or unbelief. Constructing identity around a religious understanding may also be guilt-inducing. If you believe there is a God out there who is both good and powerful (and very few societies go for a deity who is mean-minded and impotent), then if something goes wrong it has to be someone’s fault. Blame and guilt become commonplace, and potentially destabilising. Finally, if one allows for the intrusion into the daily of ‘spiritual forces’, one is also likely to allow the incursion of other powers of the irrational. These are often very dark forces. Weakened ego boundaries do not protect a person the way a sense of autonomy does; they let things in, because they are designed to. Undefended, these can be devastating to the self.
But equally there are negative effects of constructing identity around romantic ideas of authenticity, including the concept of the true inner self. Individualism requires a belief that all rights are equal and that they cannot be in competition – but actually what we have seen in the past few years is that this is simply not the case. The right to have freedom of speech and the right not to have one’s religion held up to mockery are demonstrably incompatible. Democratic voting systems do not deliver freedom and equality. Assertions of independence weaken communities. Another negative effect of tight boundaries is the inability to accept any authority, so that a personal response to something can become more important than the facts or reasons that triggered the response: ‘I feel’ becomes synonymous with ‘I think’ and ‘I believe’.
And perhaps the most interesting things about all this is that neither model seems to be very efficient at delivering its promised goods. Under an ascetic, disciplined spiritual model of identity in which the ego is to be stamped out and the self made available to the Other, the ego fights back with astonishing energy and success. Religious societies are not havens of peace and serene joy, never mind of kenotic self-giving. At the personal level, achieving enlightenment or canonisation or sheik status or holiness or right standing or serenity or wisdom or bliss (or any of the other ways in which the permeable self has been described) has been extremely rare – and the virulent insurrection of the indomitable ego is usually held to blame. However, 250 years of being nice to the ego, paying attention to it, focusing on it, indulging it and valuing it, does not seem to have strengthened or secured it at all: this authentic or true self turns out to be distinctly feeble. Identity is more at risk now than it has been for centuries. Replacing the core values of community, authority and tradition with the new ones of individualism, freedom and change does not actually seem to have enhanced a sense of identity – indeed, rather the reverse. Alienation, a sense of loss, self-harming activities and mental health difficulties are more frequent rather than less frequent. A sense of the ‘common good’ has apparently evaporated. The right to the ‘pursuit of happiness’ does not deliver happiness.
For my final walk, I did not go up into the hills, but westward along a section of the Southern Upland Way to the Laggangairn standing stones. These are two tall stones, the remaining evidence of a lost stone circle, probably from the third millennium BCE. They are a long way from anywhere, in a clearing in the ubiquitous forestry plantations, and they are strange and rather wonderful, partly because their isolation means that they are less guarded about with fences and interpretation boards than most ancient stones remains. You just come upon them standing there, over four miles from any public road or human habitation, as they have stood for 5,000 years. They are scored with carved crosses, Christian symbols, but very ancient ones cut in the eighth century. Laggangairn was on the old pilgrim route to Whithorn, where St Ninian first established Christianity in Scotland, in the fifth century. What I had not known until I walked there, though, was that there is also a ruined steading at Laggangairn; once, probably in the last 200 years, this almost unbelievably remote site was someone’s home. It was probably not as isolated, of course – there are ruined steadings all over the hills, as there are on the outer isles; they are the shadows of a whole way of life that has been silenced by modernity itself. Suddenly, I was confronted with a whole complex history of silences. We know virtually nothing about the people who with such labour created the stone circle; we know remarkably little about Ninian and his Candida Casa (white house), the original church at Whithorn, which remained a place of pilgrimage and a cathedral until the Reformation. Even his role as Scotland’s ‘evangelist’ has been silenced in popular culture in preference for the later Columba, and the more romantic glamour of Iona. And until I saw the abandoned farm I had not really thought about the ‘Lowland Clearances’.
Almost everyone knows about the Highland Clearances. During the century between the 1780s and the 1880s approximately half a million Gaelic-speaking Highlanders were ‘cleared’ from their traditional homelands and way of life. A large number of them emigrated to Canada, USA, Australia and New Zealand. In many cases this relocation was forcible and violent, or, as John Prebble puts it, the history of the Clearances is ‘the story of people, and of how sheep were preferred to them, and how bayonet, truncheon and fire were used to drive them from their homes’.17
These clearances were processed with considerable violence: one contemporary account describes a clearance in vividly painful terms:
The consternation and confusion were extreme. Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property; the people striving to remove the sick and the helpless before the fi
re should reach them; next, struggling to save the most valuable of their effects. The cries of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle, hunted at the same time by the yelling dogs of the shepherds amid the smoke and fire, altogether presented a scene that completely baffles description – it required to be seen to be believed.18
The empty isolated silence of the Highlands was created by the wanton destruction of a whole culture; there was not even any intention of creating something beautiful, just a desire to make more money out of land. One of the reasons why the Highlanders were so vulnerable is that Gaelic culture did not see land as something ownable: there were no tenancy agreements or tenancy law in the Highlands. Clan culture was one of reciprocated needs, not landownership.
But at least there is a history and a folk memory of the Highland Clearances. The clearances in Galloway are almost entirely unknown, although they were probably extensive and raised rather more resistance. The landowners had to call the army out to deal with groups calling themselves ‘levellers’ because they levelled the stone walls that were being built to enforce enclosure of fields that had once been common land. Galloway had its own Gaelic language, as one might guess from the name itself; unlike Highland Gaelic it has completely disappeared.19
Standing in the clearing at Laggangairn, looking at three different silenced societies, I was filled with sadness, and the sadness was part of the beauty. This beautiful wild silence exists under the shadow of the people silenced in order to create it. The silence of oppression, the silence that does ‘wait to be broken’ and needs to be broken in the name of freedom, exists inextricably entangled with the jouissance, the bliss of solitude. At least the Desert Fathers did not have to worry about that – no one wanted their desert. The price of this silence is silence. And it suddenly felt very expensive.
Notes – 7 The Bliss of Solitude
1 John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book iv, 481–8.
2 William Lecky, quoted in France, Hermits, p. 22.
3 Quoted in Waddell, Desert Fathers.
4 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chapter 37.
5 James Wilson, A Voyage around the Coasts of Scotland and the Isles (1841).
6 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (Penguin, 1987). I find it fascinating that Montaigne should have picked this particular image. He himself was from a noble family and probably never entered a ‘back-shop’ in his life – ‘trade’ being even more despised by the French landed classes than by their English equivalents. While Catherine of Siena, who grew up over her family’s dyeing shop, had spoken of a ‘hermitage of the heart’ where she could retreat to be with her beloved, Montaigne chose the commercial metaphor.
7 Thomas de Quincey, Collected Writings, ed. Masson (Edinburgh, 1890), p. 235.
8 Thomas Carlyle, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838).
9 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850).
10 Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’.
11 George Eliot, Felix Holt (1866).
12 Wordsworth, ‘The Advertisement’ to The Prelude.
13 Storr, School for Genius, p. 33.
14 Meher Baba, ‘Meher Baba’s Universal Message’, World’s Fair pamphlet, 1964.
15 See chapter 2 for more on this topic.
16 Sara Maitland, Other Voices, produced by Sara Davies for BBC Radio 4, Afternoon Theatre, 2001. The play later won a Media Mental Health Award. My deep gratitude goes to Sara Davies and the Exeter Group of the Voice Hearing Network.
17 John Prebble, The Highland Clearances (Secker & Warburg, 1963), p. 10.
18 Donald Ross, Scenes at Knoydart (1853), quoted in Prebble, Highland Clearances, p. 278.
19 The 1901 census lists ninety-one individuals in Galloway as Gaelic-speaking.
* It is not clear why Kirkcudbright was a Stewartry (the only one in the UK) rather than a county, except for the obvious fact that it had a steward instead of a sheriff – but so it is. ‘Kirkcudbrightshire’ was a term invented by the Post Office at the end of the nineteenth century – and the area is still called ‘The Stewartry’ for the purposes of the local Regional Council.
* Civility – like ‘civilisation’ – is derived from the Latin word civis, ‘city’ (just as ‘polite’ is derived from polis, the Greek word for ‘city’). In the classical period the countryside was seen as uncivilised and ‘rude’. Much of eighteenth-century neoclassical culture was built on this notion that nature was the enemy of humanity and needed to be brought under control.
* In Jane Eyre (1847) Charlotte Brontë, the great romantic novelist, was the first author to give a first-person voice to a child, a stylistic and structural strategy which is now commonplace.
*In a vacuum, and space is a vacuum, light travels at 1,079,252,849 kilometres per hour. A light year is the distance that light would travel in a whole year: 1,079,252,849 x 24 x 365.
* This analysis rather deftly dodged the idea that ‘pure’ means ‘purged’ rather than ‘essentially innocent’.
Coming Home
After this expedition, when I returned to my own house in Weardale I did not feel the easy welcome, the sense of slipping into my own steady silence that I had become used to. I felt unsettled, restless and frustrated. I had clarified to my own satisfaction that there were indeed two different sorts of silence. But I did not see how I could have both. Too much attention to kenotic, self-emptying prayer, to decreation, breaks down the boundaries of the self; weakened boundaries prevent the creation of strong narrative. And vice versa. But I still wanted both.
The frustration was made more annoying because I had a powerful inner sense that somewhere beyond the divisions I was experiencing there was a way of living and writing that could integrate these two silences. I started to look for people who had indeed done both – had sought their own inner silent emptiness in communion with their God and created literature. At first sight there appeared to be a long and encouraging tradition. Hildegard of Bingen, the wonderfully eccentric twelfth-century German mystic and polymath, produced a string of remarkably original works, both about her own interior life and about the world more widely – including perhaps the first description of female orgasm1, and a feminist precursor to oratorio, a mystery play with an all-women cast, except for the devil who is male and, because of his fall from grace, cannot sing. There is a strong strand of poetry whose authors seem to find their voice from profoundly contemplative experience, like the Spanish Carmelite monk, John of the Cross. Above all there is a great deal of very fine non-fiction, from personal accounts of spiritual experiences, like the Shewings of Julian of Norwich, through spiritual teaching, to memoir and autobiography. There is also a long tradition of nature or travel writing, like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. Above all, perhaps, there is Thomas Merton. The deeper he plunged into silence the more he seems to have written – autobiography, spirituality, politics, poetry, theology – increasingly responsive to the world outside his hermitage and increasingly conscious of and attuned to the act of writing itself.2
What is missing from this list is fiction and especially novels. It seems very curious to me that the usual prose form of individuals deliberately engaged in trying to empty themselves of self is autobiography. Before he went to Gethsemane, the Trappist monastery in Kentucky in 1941, Merton wanted to be a writer, but his two novels had failed to find a publisher. In his journal he comments on this:
I have tremendous preoccupations of my own, personal preoccupations with whatever is going on inside my own head and I simply can’t write about anything else. Anything I create is only a symbol of some completely interior preoccupation of my own. I only know I am writing well when [I am writing] about the things I love.3
This does not sound like a self emptied of self – it sounds like raging egotism – and yet, in the last count, even people who build in a rhetoric of self-abnegation – ‘I write only in obedience’ (Thérèse of Lisieux is an example of this strategy), ‘I write at God’s direct instruction, contrary
to my own desires’ (Hildegard of Bingen), ‘The writing is worthless, do whatever you want with it’ (Simone Weil) – end up writing autobiographically. Why should this be so? Perhaps it is because fiction involves creating whole new worlds and this requires a greater assertion of the ego than recording what comes, as gift, into your own silent life. Perhaps true silence is such a absolute engagement that there is finally nothing else to write about except the struggle to lose that very last thing (the ego) that binds you. All silence is a search for a particular kind of truth; perhaps metaphor, and particularly the sustained metaphor of fictional characters, comes to feel, even to be, a lie, an untruth. Novels require narrative, plot and resolution or closure, all of which are linear and time-bound and therefore deeply alien to silence.
I did not have any answers, but I experienced a deep restlessness and, with it, a writerly curiosity. I wanted to be both a silence dweller and a writer. I wanted to write silently, somehow to write silence. I did not know how it could be done; I did not even know if it could be done. But I very much wanted to try to find out.
Over the following months this imperative but uneasy quest led me to some practical decisions. The first was I would move house again. If I was not feeling comfortable about what I might write, it seemed important to ‘downsize’ financially. If I wanted more silence, I did not need or even want such immediate neighbours nor so much space – Weatherhill’s three bedrooms, two living rooms and big kitchen were considerably more than any solitary requires. What I wanted and needed was a hermitage.
A Book of Silence Page 30