by Anita Mason
Simon said, ‘The purpose of this conversation is to find a way of helping Alex and solving the problem which confronts the group. Has anyone any suggestions?’
‘If we could just explain to her,’ said Coral.
‘It has been explained to her,’ said Pete.
‘Pete is right,’ said Simon. ‘She has been given every chance. People have been very patient with Alex. She has abused their patience. She has such a distorted idea of her importance that she expects to receive special treatment, and such is the force of her personality that she does receive it. She has always been allowed to get away with things.’
He looked round the room. ‘This is a person who does not want to hear what is said to her. This is a person who twists what people say into something they have not said. This is a person who cannot do anything straight. Whatever we say to Alex, it has to be so carefully worded, so clear, that she cannot possibly interpret it in any other way.’
It was obvious that he was the only person who could find such a formulation. We saw that he had found it already.
‘There is a single element which complicates the problem,’ he said. ‘Normally it would not be difficult to deal with behaviour such as Alex’s. A member who disrupted the group would be asked either to change his or her behaviour, or to leave the group. What makes it difficult in this case is that Alex is not in the same position as an ordinary member of the group. Alex is the owner of the house.’
I began to listen intently.
‘This makes it impossible to deal with her in the obvious way,’ said Simon. ‘One cannot say to the owner of a house, “Change your behaviour or leave.” So the situation can only be dealt with as it should be dealt with if Alex ceases to be the owner of the house.’
Something had hit me very hard between the eyes. I stared at this man whose logic flinched from nothing.
‘The situation could have been avoided if the original intention, that the house should belong to the group, had been carried through. But it was not carried through. At the partnership meeting I saw that the owner of the house did not want to give the house to the partnership, and since I do not wish to take something from someone who does not want to give it, I withdrew. There is no point in forming a partnership when one of the members does not want it to work.’
I blinked with astonishment, convicted him of injustice, and immediately realised he was right. Alex could work near-miracles when she wanted to, but there was no evidence that she had even tried to give the house to the group.
‘I therefore propose,’ continued Simon, ‘to put three alternatives to Alex when she returns. I have looked for further alternatives, but I can find only three. These are the alternatives. One, that she sells the house to someone else in the group, and remains here. I will offer to buy the house from her. Two, that she leaves. Three, that she gets what she wants.’
There was utter silence.
Pete said, ‘I don’t understand the third alternative.’
Simon said, ‘We will give her exactly what she wants.’
It was too simple for us to grasp immediately. Then we saw. If she rejected the first two alternatives she was rejecting the discipline of the group and at the same time the life which that discipline offered. She would be rejecting them in favour of whatever she wanted. What that turned out to be did not matter.
‘If she leaves,’ said Coral, ‘does she have to leave for good?’
‘No,’ said Simon. ‘If after a while she wanted to come back, the group would consider her request in exactly the same way as it would consider a request from anyone else to come and live here.’
Dao said, ‘But you have not given her the choice that she changes herself.’
‘That is not a possibility,’ said Simon. ‘She has refused to change and one supposes that she can’t. And as long as she continues to own the house no measures can be taken to induce her to change. The choice you’re asking for is included in alternative one.’
We sat and thought. To every question Simon had an answer, and every answer brought us back to one of the three alternatives. The longer we looked at them the more inevitable they became. It was the economy of genius. However, it flashed into my mind that if Simon was the most brilliant human being I had ever met he was also the blindest, because surely Alex would not accept these alternatives. I was on the point of saying something, but stopped. I must not pre-judge. Certainly I must not predict another’s actions, and thereby attempt to limit their freedom. In any case, if Alex did not accept the alternatives she would have condemned herself to a region beyond reason, because the alternatives were the only alternatives there were.
It was agreed to put the alternatives to Alex when she returned. If that was late on Saturday night, we would do it on Sunday.
Simon looked round the room with a smile. ‘Good,’ he said.
‘I’ve been reading a good book,’ said Simon next morning.
I had been surprised to see him reading. I thought he had given it up. He had once said to me that people wrote books in order to understand the thing they were writing about, which was why no book ever contained the knowledge promised in its title. I could see no reason why a man who knew that should ever read another book in his life.
It was a book Alex had borrowed from a friend and left in the parlour. No one had bothered to look at it until now. It was by the founder of the organisation with whose psychological techniques we had experimented in Sessions. It contained, said Simon, a development of his ideas. We sat round in the kitchen and Simon told us about them.
It was a formulation of behaviour, attitudes and life-orientation in terms of what the author called ‘tone’. There was a tone scale ranging from 0 to 4, with a dividing point at 2. At 4 the individual was functioning perfectly in all respects: at 0 he was dead. From 4 downwards his general level of being deteriorated through lesser states of happiness to boredom, then to irritability, anger, sadness and finally to apathy. The individual’s tone fluctuated as he was affected by other people’s behaviour and external events, but for everyone it was possible to plot a normal level.
What gave this rather unattractive scheme its value was the author’s insight that above level 2 the individual’s goals lay in an upward direction, but below 2 they lay downward. A person at 2 or below strove, consciously or unconsciously, in everything he did, to bring about failure, destruction and death.
Below 2 was the area of the criminal, the psychopath, the drunkard and the suicide. It was also the area of millions of apparently normal people who quietly made life difficult for everyone around them. People who criticised or slandered others, people to whom lying had become a habit, people who enjoyed other people’s discomfiture, people who made promises and didn’t keep them and took on obligations and didn’t honour them, people who received friendly overtures with suspicion – they were all, in their daily lives, sowing and nurturing little seeds of destruction.
Every enterprise undertaken by a person below 2 on the tone scale would end in confusion and disaster. Every communication made to a person below 2 on the tone scale would be distorted by the recipient. Every relationship between that person and a person above 2 on the scale would drag the latter down to a lower level. And every group containing a person below 2 on the scale would be in danger of fragmenting in disorder, without anyone understanding why.
The tone level of such people could, except in the most desperate cases, be raised, said Simon, but this had to be done gradually and required understanding and patience. An immediate substantial improvement was not possible. Great care must be exercised, and great love.
When Simon finished talking it was as if Alex stood physically before us.
He put down the book thoughtfully. ‘Communication is sharing the same reality,’ he said. ‘Alex’s reality is very low on the scale. In bringing her up to the reality of the group, we must be very gentle.’
I was completely happy. A barrier which I had until the very last preserved between myself
and the group had crumbled. I felt I belonged to a family. I had never felt that before. It was a joyful feeling.
I polished the brass stair-rods and all the brass door-handles until they gleamed. Then I polished the brass coat-hooks which had been taken years ago off an Edwardian hallstand disintegrating in the barn, and fixed one on the back of each bedroom door and a couple in the hall, using the little brass screws I had bought the previous day. Simon inspected the work approvingly.
‘You like to do things well,’ he said. ‘That’s good. Pete and I would have banged them on with a few nails. It looks very nice.’
It was too wet to work outside so I busied myself indoors all day, cleaning my study with a thoroughness it had never known and ruthlessly emptying drawers of accumulated papers. I was conscious that I was preparing myself for a new start. I did not know what it would be and I did not think about it. I had no idea what would happen when Alex came home. I had no idea what I was going to say or do. When it happened, I would know what to do.
I saw that only when one is in such a state of emptiness, of not having thought about the future, can one act rightly. I saw that all my troubles with Alex in the past had arisen from the fact that each time I tried to deal with a situation I was thinking about the future. Thus not only had I been unable to deal with the situation properly, but in perpetually sacrificing the present to the future I had lost both, for the future is never what one calculates.
All my life, I realised, I had made decisions in the light of their probable effects, not their innate rightness. If I had thought about their moral content I had included it among the factors to be weighed. I had not seen that only by considering that factor to the exclusion of all others could I possibly make the right decision. And the right decision was always so simple. If one cleared one’s mind of the effects, it would present itself.
Do the right thing, and let the consequences be what they may. For the first time I saw the daring, and the beauty, of that act. I was going to do it.
We sat in the parlour that evening and talked as we had done at the beginning, before the clouds gathered. We talked quietly of many things. The room was still and full of light. A thin curl of smoke rose from the joss-stick on the black slate mantelpiece.
Simon made some reference to Blake, whom I had read years ago at university and never understood, and never known that I did not understand. I started to say that if Blake were to be understood in his profundity by the professors who lectured on him and the students who read him, the educational system into which he had been incorporated would collapse.
I stopped in mid-sentence. They looked at me in surprise. It was several seconds before the dogs started barking, but my nerves had heard it. A car was turning into the drive.
Alex.
9
Truth
Knowledge is power. It cannot be otherwise. One cannot disclaim that power.
I must be so careful.
He told me repeatedly I must be careful, but he did not tell me how.
If one has lost one’s innocence, what can be done about it? Perhaps in that case it is better not to go on a journey where there are dragons. But there is only the journey. If I do not continue on this journey I might as well be dead.
In all religions, mystical knowledge is pursued under strict controls. One has a spiritual counsellor, whose job it is to see that one does not stray into the territory where one will be tested beyond one’s strength. There is wisdom in this, but not the greatest wisdom, because it leads only to a partial truth. It must, for the vision is controlled. In the end, it does nothing but reinforce the religious system from which it sprang, and all religious systems offer no more than a keyhole-glimpse of the truth. They themselves have put up the door which shuts out the truth.
I want to go through that door.
All desire is bad, the Buddhists say. All desire leads to suffering. Does even the desire for truth lead to suffering?
Yes, for desire comes between the soul and enlightenment.
Desire is itself the lack of innocence.
So one must go on the journey without wanting.
It is the same thing as being without motive, or as being motivated only by love, the one motivation which does not harm. Thus motivated, one cannot be harmed oneself. I have arrived by a different route at something I knew already.
In fact I have come back in a circle to the point at which I always stop, aware that there is a chasm at my feet. The chasm is this: how does one rid oneself of wanting, without wanting to do so? How, without motivation, can one purify one’s motives?
I know the answer: Simon has explained it, seeing in his compassion that I would spend the rest of my life trying to untie this Gordian knot if he did not cut it for me.
The answer is that one lets everything go: all the ideas, all the desires. One’s being, free of restraints, then does the thing which is natural to it and moves towards its happiness, which is enlightenment.
I objected that there was a motivation involved in letting everything go, but he said no. It was as if a child on a warm night were to throw off a blanket in its sleep.
Why do I have such difficulty with this answer, which I know must be right? Why is it that every time I approach it my intellect trips me up and imprisons me in an endless series of Chinese boxes? Why can I not banish the spectre of a selfish motive?
It is so simple. The pure motivation is love.
I was once afraid of love.
She comes out from the kitchen carrying two mugs. It is kind of her to bring me a drink. I must be watchful.
‘I want to talk to you,’ she says, sitting on the grass.
‘Okay.’
‘I want to ask you a question.’
‘Yes?’
‘When Simon said he wanted to resign as Organiser of the group, did you take that to mean that the partnership was dissolved?’
My head spins slightly, as it always does when she plays this trick. Does she really understand so little of what happened, or is this a device to fool me into thinking that what happened was something different altogether? But of course between the blindness of the first and the corruption of the second there is almost nothing to choose. Any blindness of that order must be a willed blindness.
‘The question is pointless,’ I say. ‘The partnership and Simon’s resignation have nothing to do with what happened on Sunday.’
‘And suppose I tell you that Simon’s resignation was absolutely crucial? It dissolved the partnership, and I was the only one who realised that. You all thought the partnership was still in existence, and that’s why my behaviour seemed so black to you.’
Oh, poor Alex. But I know that the only way I can show my pity is to stamp on this lie, as I have stamped on all of them and will continue to stamp until the thing that is producing them is finally dead.
‘You are evading the truth,’ I say. ‘Everything you say is an evasion.’
She turns on me, of course.
‘Kay, I have been over everything that happened, everything that Simon said. For the past three days I have done nothing but think about it. There is no other explanation.’
‘There is another explanation,’ I say, ‘but you will not find it by thinking. Thinking will only lead you away from it. That, in fact, is why you are thinking. You should look in your heart instead.’
There is a pause. The birds sing from the trees.
Alex gets up.
‘Look in your own heart,’ she says. ‘Look in your own treacherous heart. If you can bear to.’
Treacherous. Yes, of course she would say that. She has to say it although she cannot believe it, for even to an understanding as depraved as Alex’s my motives must have been perfectly clear. She cannot resist a weapon so obvious that it clamours to be used.
What cynicism. That is the real betrayal, Alex.
I have no need to examine my heart. I know what I have done, and I know what the world calls it. I have no need to go through it again.
> Perhaps, even so, I should go through it again. I owe it to her. There may be something I missed.
I missed nothing. She wants to confuse me.
But I cannot be confused unless I am trying to avoid something.
Very well.
The morning after her return, since we had agreed to say nothing that night, Dao rang the bell for a meeting. (Curious, that it should have been Dao both on this occasion and the earlier one, when it was I who had offended. Curious, too, that the two stages were repeated: the evening and the morning. But I acknowledged my fault. Alex could not acknowledge hers. The gulf between right and wrong is as small as that: a word: a hairline: and it cannot be crossed.)
We sat again in the parlour. Alex sat on the floor. She was wearing a bright new shirt. Battle colours.
Simon began to talk. I was taken completely by surprise by his opening remark.
He said, ‘It is as if the Humber belonged to Coral.’
Yes, that was how it started.
From the beginning, then.
‘It is as if the Humber belonged to Coral.’
I glance at him, puzzled. I cannot see the relevance.
‘One sees that sooner or later a situation will arise that cannot be dealt with adequately by the person who is required to deal with it.’
Oh, he’s clever. The Humber is twenty years old and needs skilled maintenance. It belongs, naturally, to Pete.
‘Or it is as if,’ pursues Simon, ‘the house belonged to Sarah.’
I wince. Sarah, five, looks up, sees that some adult game is afoot, and goes back to her toy. Alex does not move.
‘If the house belonged to Sarah, one could expect certain things to happen. Decisions that ought to be taken would not be taken, or they would be taken on a basis which was not rational, or they would be taken one day and rescinded the next. Responsibilities which normally accompany the ownership of a house would not be accepted by the person who was the owner. People who were obliged to have dealings with the owner would find themselves confused. But nobody would be surprised by these things, because the house belonged to a little girl.’