The Kiln

by William McIlvanney

  It had brought him to this bed where he lay feeling as if there wasn't enough of him left to spread on a sandwich. He suspected from Gill's breathing that she was asleep. He stared at the curtains, their pattern archipelagos of boringly regular islands in the lamplight, and he pondered the morality of where he was. Being a proselytising agnostic (what other position is humanly tenable?), the only source of morality he could find was existential honesty. He knew why he had let his ambitions withdraw whenever they encroached on his family's lives, threatening to rule them. He had seen the wilful control of anybody else's life as immoral because it was an existential lie against your knowledge of your own weakness, your certain death. It was like abrogating God. But that night, like the other side of the moon, there loomed up before him the converse of that principle. What of the point at which concern for others becomes erosion of the truth of self, denial of self-need? He thought maybe he was lying now at this point.

  He remembered the story of St Martin and the beggar. St Martin was travelling on horseback through a storm. A beggar appeared before him, clad only in a loincloth, asking for covering. St Martin took his cloak from his back, divided it in two with his sword, threw the beggar half of his cloak and galloped on. Later, at an inn, St Martin sees the beggar, who is Jesus. Jesus tells him he did well. It would have been false charity to give away all his cloak. He had been true to his own needs as well as those of the beggar.

  He felt the truth of the story as strongly as if it had ridden through the bedroom. What could you give your children if there was nothing of you left? As it was, he couldn't be sure that there was any of him left. Perhaps he was already too late. Dozing fitfully, he kept surfacing into terror. Every time he woke, another monster of despair blocked the path of his desire effectively to find himself.

  Was he drinking dangerously too much? He certainly had considerable expertise in swallowing the stuff. It had become a kind of three-string fiddle for his various moods: beer for bearing the banal, wine for the trivial convivial, but whisky for soul talk. They reckoned you never knew when you were becoming an alcoholic. Also, the search for himself he was vaguely planning would put even more pressure on his already frazzled nerves. Could he withstand the pain without the aid of some familiar anaesthetic? One of the signs of alcoholism was wild behaviour. He surely fulfilled that requirement. But then he had fulfilled it, as far as he was aware, since his teens, when he hardly drank at all. And the dark, sub-cranial journey he saw as becoming necessary - could the hero undertake that lonely task without some magic potion by his side? No. Fidus Achates in a bottle, come with me. He would maintain his friendship with the dancing juice for now. He could handle it. It would be all right. Rest, rest, perturbed spirit. Behold the ceiling.

  His frazzled nerves? That was true. It had been true for some time. Was he going through an unofficial nervous breakdown? That sounded possible. Presumably you didn't have to be staring at the same wall for ten days or coming on like a Pentecostalist to be having a nervous breakdown. There must be subtle forms, as there were subtle forms of cancer that were only discovered a fortnight before you died. Anyway, lately he had done enough mad things to fill a psychiatric ward. What about when he was dancing with Flora Benson at the school disco? ‘What are you thinking?’ she had shouted intimately. ‘I'm thinking I'd like to fuck you,’ he had whisperingly bellowed back. Incredibly, instead of summoning the constabulary, she had smiled, raising her eyebrows, and screamed, ‘I like your style.’ He had subsequently been avoiding her eyes in the staff-room as they tracked him like laser beams. How could that be sane? And if he was going mad, how could he ever hope to find the sense of himself he was looking for? How do you make a journey of the mind when the mind is a warren of contradictions? But then how could he so logically work that out if he was cracking up? No. He was all right in the head - so far. But he wouldn't remain so if he didn't get some sleep. Sometimes if you rolled your eyes up under the closed lids, it helped you to lose consciousness.

  A psychiatric ward? Perhaps he needed psychoanalysis. No, that was something he wasn't having. His reading of old Sigmund had left him with unassuageable misgivings in that area. His hackles had risen steadily, page by page. He admired' Freud as a brave man fighting against the shit his society gave out but he couldn't help feeling that he took the shit too seriously. Much had been made of the fact that his observations were largely drawn from the behaviour of neurotics. What was more important, it seemed to him, was that they were bourgeois neurotics. In other words, they were recruited from that part of society which took most seriously external morality, the social forms, which came closest to finding the definition of itself in current mores. Therefore, they were those who feel most strongly the failure to conform, to measure up to the norm. When you thought of some of the trivial things that gave those poor sods neuroses, you wondered why they bothered coming out of the womb.

  (‘I don't think I'll bother. Mummy. It's all too distasteful.’)

  Even the cures, assuming there were any, he was suspicious of. Events create a temporary truth. You become your role in the event. Just as the process by which you examine a phenomenon can affect the phenomenon or limit its truth, so the means by which you comprehend experience are condemned to be another experience in themselves. You don't escape from process. Because of that, he saw psychoanalysis as the induction of a kind of rational hysteria, precipitating a compulsive role. It created a theatre in which ‘reality’ could posture. No, he decided, it was just another part of social conditioning, and that's what he was trying to escape. No psychoanalysis. His neuroses were his own. That was one thing sorted out anyway. Now maybe he could get to sleep.

  And no career. A career is a poor substitute for a life. All right, careerless sane man who will never be psychoanalysed. Let's bed down here. He dozed again.

  But how did he make his inner journey? With his ubiquitous agnosticism, what guides could he possibly have? He doubted the success of human relationships. That was the main impulse behind the need for the journey. He had no religion or, if he did, it wasn't nameable. He didn't trust psychoanalysis. He didn't trust philosophy. In his teens he had written:

  Philosophers have talked but we

  Are only people and must be.

  Philosophy had always seemed to him to be like letters on a headstone, at best a description of the corpse of truth. He wanted to live with it. He suspected history as a kind of decadent mythology. Perhaps only art answered, the honest fictionalising of himself.

  With Gill asleep, he stared around the dimness of the room. Only one guide hovered phantom-like in the gloom. It was himself, whoever he honestly was, not fully shaped, shifting and insubstantial, as unable to merge with the recumbent figure on the bed as that figure was unable to merge with it. Between the two a long way lay. He had to travel it. His guide was himself. When the certainties outside perish - he made his motto - you must scour yourself to the bone and find them there.

  EACH OF US REMAKES THE WORLD WE LIVE IN, he would think. But in his case, he sometimes thought, the process had turned into an assembly-line of replica experience. From cottage industry to Henry Ford.

  He lay insomniac at Warriston as he had lain insomniac that night with Gill. The most significant difference he could see was that this time he lay alone. Was that progress or regress? It certainly didn't feel like progress. Separate insomnias, please. Une nuit blanche. He liked that French expression. A white night. The problem with insomnia was that you couldn't switch the light off in your head. There were too many things you'd rather not look at. But you couldn't avoid them. And at this time of the morning every mote in the mind's eye had pretensions to be a Zeppelin. You saw an Andes of molehills.

  In the glare he realised that old griefs were still with him. You didn't live beyond them, you just found out how to live round them. They were like bad lodgers you learned to accommodate. In that repeated scouring of himself, he had yet again been trying to rebuild his world around them. Wasn't that what everybody h
ad to do in the light of changing experience? To live in the world was to remake it daily.

  Even our parents, he thought. In a way, we are all our own parents. Just as they create us, we recreate them. The choice of materials we have to work with in that act of recreation may be limited. If our parents are cruel to us, for example, honesty should forbid us from turning them into saints. But even here the inventiveness of the human spirit in rendering malleable what may seem to be intractable experience could be quite remarkable. Just as he had known parents who seemed to him to have tried with every observable sinew of their nature to parent well and had seen them condemned as parental failures by their grown-up children, so he had known adult children take a mother or a father - whose selfishness differed from the act of Thyestes in eating his own offspring only in that they did it in the full knowledge of what they were doing - and transform them into a revered object of nostalgic love.

  He supposed what happens is that, out of the almost infinite complexity of parental behaviour, we choose those elements we need to reaffirm our sense of ourselves. We choose, within the limitations we are offered, the parents we need, to effect a birth beyond our physical selves into our spiritual selves.

  Perhaps not the least horror of child abuse was that it crippled the child's freedom of choice of spiritual parenthood. It demonised the child's sense of his or her own origins. It left the child with only broken and rotten materials with which to attempt the utterly necessary process of constructing the individual reality of being for herself or himself. It left the child's nature to some extent stillborn.

  Outside of that abyss, which none could fully know but those who had to live in it, the rest of us were as responsible for our parents as they were for us. Most parents needed our forgiveness as we needed theirs. What we made of them was what we would become.

  That was why he despised the contemporary fashion for grown-up children to wail against their parents, to exaggerate imperfection into abuse, to blame their individual problems on ‘dysfunctional’ families. All human beings were dysfunctional. Otherwise, they wouldn't die. If there was a God, depend on it: if this was His universe. He was dysfunctional, too. Perception is a choice.

  You had to take responsibility for your own experience and not be intimidated by the abstractions others might try to impose on its reality. All his life, he had to admit, he had probably been writing letters in his head to an unknown woman. No doubt psychologists could have had a field day with that impulse in him -emotional inadequacy, inability to sustain a mature relationship, prolonged adolescence. If he thought they were wrong, one reason was because he believed he had had relationships as full as any psychologist had had.

  Relationships that endured to the death could be impressive but they might merit more than sanctimonious paeans to the true nature of love. They might merit also questions. Constancy was a portmanteau in which could sometimes be found, among other things, the senile decay of habit, the drug of comfort, the fear of change.

  He believed in fidelity. But final fidelity required some kind of final arrival. He was still travelling.

  If the journey seemed to repeat itself at times, perhaps that fact wasn't of purely negative significance. There were two ways to see repeated behaviour, it seemed to him. It could mean that you merely repeated initially learned responses in subsequent situations that did not justly evoke them but had them superimposed through habit. Or it could mean that your initial response was a kind of primal discovery of your true instinctual self (before rationalisation) and, therefore, was something which you continued justly to obey. Your continued failures might not be merely personal but an expression of the failure of your experience to match what your nature needed. It remained possible that your refusal to accept might be the truth of your experience, the most honest expression of yourself. To cure you of yourself was a way of killing yourself. Why should the definitive actions of your nature be regarded as necessarily a limitation of that nature? They were just as likely to be its ultimate expression.

  The attempted discovery of a new self appeared to him a good way to lose yourself and pretend to be someone else. The best you could do was to redynamise who you were, not try to reinvent it. Not who were you but what would you do with who you were, how would you use it, with what honesty, what integrity, what justice? Not where do you come from but where are you travelling to? You had to keep travelling. He would.

  (Dear Saint Simeon Stylites,

  Please cancel my order for a pillar. And oblige.)

  HE SAT IN THE TRAIN from Graithnock to Glasgow, on the first stage of his return journey to Grenoble. He was moving from the certainty of Michael's death towards the uncertainty of his future with Gill and Megan and Gus. The familiar names of the stations they stopped at renewed in him an old innocence.

  SITTING BLEARY-EYED AT BREAKFAST, he feels a slight pain in his ribs. This is a strange part of a strange day. He was wakened by his mother at six in the morning, an achievement roughly equivalent to resurrecting a corpse.

  ‘Ma ribs are murder, Mither,’ he says.

  ‘They will be, son. Ah had tae punch ye tae get ye wakened. Where is it you go when you sleep? Anither planet?’

  He eats the ham and eggs slowly, gradually re-evolving to the stage of being able to masticate. It is still dark. The brightness of the familiar kitchen seems somehow poignant, a banal Eden from which growing up is expelling him. The gas cooker is lit and its door has been left open, deputising for a heater. He remembers how often he sat at that lit cooker in the evenings when he was at school, doing his homework. He learned a lot of Greek verbs here, French phrases, the history of the Restoration. He read Far from the Madding Crowd in this room and here he was stolid, dependable Gabriel Oak and rakish Sergeant Troy and haunted Boldwood and here he fell abstractly in love with Bathsheba Everdene.

  Here he discovered, unexpectedly, that his favourite homework was translating Livy. He used to take a sensuous pleasure in opening the book at the next passage for translation and having his jotter and pencil ready and his Latin dictionary and the piece of scrap paper where he would try to decipher the nuances of what Livy was telling him. Everything else would recede to a far place: the endless, only sometimes unpleasant argument that was his family, the hard, frosty streets of Graithnock, the wondering who he would be when he grew up, the dreams of beautiful and compassionate and understanding women, the goals he would score for Scotland.

  There would be only him and the words and the ghostly, shifting presence of a man called Livy. He would make sure of literal meanings first. Then he would wait, doodling variants on the scrap paper. What was Livy really saying? He would coax the strange words towards a modern idiom. It amazed him how thrilling it could be. He was conversing with a dead man. When it worked and he thought he could hear Livy talking in a modern voice, he felt such awe, as if he were a necromancer. For there, in the kitchen of a council housing scheme in Graithnock, transubstantiated across almost two thousand years, was a Roman. He felt as if he could have touched his toga.

  But, washing down the ham and eggs and buttered bread with hot, sugared tea, he thinks he regrets those monastic evenings. This is where they have led, to his first day at the University of Glasgow. He is terrified. He wants to stay in this small brightness, among objects so familiar he could live here by braille. But it is already too late. The strangeness of what is happening to him has transferred itself to everything else.

  The oilcloth table-cover is scuffed with numberless lost moments. He would wish them back again if he could. But the shapes they make are the hieroglyphs of a strange language, seeming more ancient and less decipherable than anything Livy ever wrote. The burning lines of gas jets on each side of the oven seem as ceremonial as processional candles. The room reflected in the dark window is as haunting as the vivid painting of a place where he has never been.

  Even his mother, the most continual presence of his life, moving about the kitchen to do the things he has always seen her do, seems myste
rious. She washes a cup and puts it on the draining-board and suddenly he imagines the action multiplied a million times, an infinity of small selfless deeds with which she has sustained their lives, in which she has immured herself. And he realises that he has merely assumed he knew this woman. He remembers an old photograph of her he saw recently, taken by a street photographer. She hadn't known it was being taken. She was just walking in the street. She looked so young and attractive and separate from any sense of her her family might have. Walking on out of that photograph, where might she have gone if it hadn't been for them? What longings, what possibilities has she quietly entombed in the daily tasks of living?

  She turns and looks at him. She laughs and lifts the towel, coming towards him. She is drying her hands.

  ‘Ah don't think Ah'm up to this, Mither,’ he says.

  She laughs again. She says what she used to say to him every morning before an examination at school.

  ‘You do the best you can, son. Nobody can ask ye to do more.’

  He breathes out noisily.

  ‘Whit d'ye think, Tom? If ye fail, we'll disown ye? Ye've earned yer right to go. Go as yerself. Whitever you make of it will do us fine.’

  She puts her hand on his shoulder and it feels like an accolade: arise. Sir Thomas. He does. He washes his dishes in the warm, soapy water of the basin. He puts them on the draining-board. He reaches for the dish-towel.

  ‘Here,’ his mother says. ‘Away an’ use yer head.'

  It is time to go. He has to catch the 7.25 train if he is to make his first-ever lecture at nine o'clock. He brushes his teeth again, keeping his new university tie close to his chest with his left hand as he leans over the hand-basin. Maybe cleanliness is next to braininess. He puts on the university blazer and the thin university scarf he bought from the money he earned at the brickwork, the bizarre result of sweating over hutches in the rain and a wild, confused night in a kiln and sweary conversations about women and football and the state of the world. He stares at himself in the mirror. He can't believe in the image he sees there. He might as well be going to a fancy-dress party. Still, maybe appearances, by sympathetic magic, can create the reality. He collects his coat from the lobby.