A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  I haven’t got him across to you, really, I see, re-reading this, tho’ I was making a meticulous attempt to reproduce his presence. I should like you to meet him. I have to decide what to do about him.

  Yours as ever

  Pontius Quarrell

  From Elvet Gander to Kieran Quarrell

  My dear Kieran,

  Yr Lamb sounds full of possibilities—not least because I’ve not known you desert yr normally dry style for so long in the description of any other patient. It may well be that he may find a niche among the Spirit’s Tigers (dreadful mixed metaphor, tigers don’t nest)—we’ll see. I’ll reply in kind with a description of the patient who is exercising my own mind, and who is indeed the proximate cause of my own participation in the Meetings of the Spirit’s Tigers. They call them Meetings because the group grew from Quaker origins—indeed, the founding members are Quakers, and they named the group, in a characteristically self-deprecating way, from a rather good angry poem by a Quaker poet, Christopher Levenson, who asks where is now the Fire and the vision which inspired the early Friends literally to quake in the presence of the Light. Levenson writes

  Hand to which earth was volatile as flame

  And every bush responded to God’s name

  Might find the spirit’s tigers have grown tame.

  “Genteel and tidy” he says the modern Quakers are, and describes their God finely

  Their God is just? That only! Too domesticated

  Vast social worker, not conjured, but stated,

  Too timid a lover, too well-bred!

  You, wise friend, and I, in the days of the wisdom of Erving Goffman on the self-regulating Asylum, know what it is to be constrained by the mercy of a vast social worker (for whom there is nevertheless something to be said!). And to be truthful, despite their aspirations to spiritual fieriness I do find the founding members of the Spirit’s Tigers “too genteel and tidy.” They may wish to prowl and roar and glitter in the jungle but it is beyond them. On the other hand, they have attracted to themselves some wilder, less predictable spirits, including my patient, who calls himself Zag, though his birth-name is Paul. He is himself what’s known as a “birthright” Quaker. He’s also, most significantly, a monozygotic identical twin. He sings in a musical group called, rather wittily, “Zag and the Ziggy Zy-goats.” (Sometimes he spells Ziggy, Syzygy.) The twin, John, is a very respectable mathematician, who wears an anonymous white coat and programs soulless computers. Both claim to be illiterate and un-literary, largely because they spoke a private language in childhood, and communicated through mathematical symbols and music. They used to live in Welwyn Garden City and go on the great CND marches of the 50s with their parents, singing and playing—he plays guitar and trumpet. John plays the clarinet. John, according to Zag, took to going to an extra-mural class in literature, taught by a girl, called Freda or Francesca or something. His intention was to “learn ordinary language” by this means, Zag says, and he started an affaire with Freda or Francesca, from whom Zag stole a copy of The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. Nietzsche suited Zag, and he found in there that Zagreus is the name of the dismembered sacrificial Dionysos. Accompanied by satyrs, the satyr-dance of the undifferentiated. Hence Zy-goats. Not bad for an illiterate singer. He’s manic-depressive, into drugs and not sure of his own sexuality. All over the place. He’s psychologically not properly differentiated from his twin, I think. He’s very narcissistic, but the face he sees in the pool, so to speak, is John’s not his own. He tells me John is his parent and his other half; he read somewhere that identical twins are a form of virgin birth, of asexual reproduction, and he is convinced that he, Zag, is the “bud” which formed on the primary zygote that was John. (He likes to think about Dionysos sheltered in the thigh of Zeus.) Sometimes this causes him to fantasise about being a special hero—not of woman born, etc. etc.—and sometimes he says he is nothing, John’s shadow, John’s seed, John’s ghost, John’s emanation (like all the Tigers he’s superficially familiar with Blake, and one of the Tigers I’ll come to, an art historian called Richmond Bly, is a bit of a Blake expert). Anyway, as you may imagine, the analyst-patient dyad is a peculiarly unsatisfactory place to treat such a convinced half-soul. He isn’t interested in me—everything is very simply projected on to the absent John. I think I’d do better if I were treating both twins, but John is resolved against this course. Paul-Zag, I think, is predominantly and possibly unconsciously homosexual in his own double-narcissistic way. John has made a resolute bid to be “normal” (dreaded word) and has, as I said, picked the said Francesca or Freda, who seems a pompous and superficial sort of a clever girl, with a failed marriage behind her and a ready-made child for John, a little boy growing up without a father.

  Zag is both superficially and profoundly very charming (I use that word in its ancient, magical sense). He has a real presence, what you could call charisma, when he sings. I’ve seen him. He has authority when he sings. Since he discovered Zagreus he sings in bits of leopard-skin and festooned with gold and silver snake-like things. His followers fling bits of bloody flesh (giblets and so on) around on the stage. Off the stage, he is all-over-the-place, a disintegrating ego, given to tantrums and weeping and despairing immobility lasting days, or weeks. He says he is dangerous without John. “He is the earth and I am the lightning.” (There is ambiguity in these phrases, of course. He wishes to strike John.) (Or penetrate him, even.) It is possible that if I were treating both twins I might see John’s withdrawal as necessary, or beneficial, but from the point of view of Zag’s peculiar agony (wch I have not presented very clearly, only skeletally) John’s behaviour is appallingly destructive.

  It was Zag who suggested I come to the Meetings of the Tigers to “meet” John, whom he persuades (blackmails, I fear) into attending some of the Meetings. I have to tread very carefully, and have not made much progress in breaking down the defences, or penetrating the reserve, of John. I do sometimes imagine (a professional hazard, I am aware) that the “sane” twin is more profoundly disturbed (mad) than the ostensibly abnormal one. I do know that Zag makes him suffer. But he doesn’t wish for the help I would like to offer.

  There is a Meeting of the Tigers this weekend. They meet at Four Pence, which is a Bedfordshire sort of farmhouse without a farm belonging to Frank and Milly Fisher, two of the founding members. The Tigers recently formed a link with a much more dubious entity, the Joyful Companions (the inner community of an entity called the Children of Joy, run by a charismatic C. of E. clergyman called Gideon Farrar). It’s rather like watching two amoebas extending their pseudopodia to swallow each other. It’s a fact of our time that we have rediscovered the need for communal consciousness, for breaking the bounds between I and Thou, but it does (as all primitive religions do, and I think that that is what this is) take some odd forms. I am in it, and out of it, as you may imagine. I’ll report back, after the weekend, on whether I think the new marriage-bed will make a seed-bed for the soul of your Lamb. Zag has coerced John into promising to come. Can a man (yours truly) with a sharp eye for the gladiatorial combat of two-and-one also be open to any true spiritual awakening that is going on? I do believe so, but if you hear no more, believe that I have been struck dumb, or blind, for my presumption. Why do I dare make such dangerous jokes? I am queasy/uneasy. You signed yourself Pontius. I would not be a psychoanalytic Caiaphas or unregenerate Saul. We must not become an Orthodoxy. We must be open to new wisdom. But this is for my next epistle.

  Yours fraternally,

  Elvet Gander

  Well, Kieran, here is the promised report on the weekend with the Tigers. It had its hairy moments, a new word I’m beginning to use without quite understanding all its connotations. Most of the ones I know fit, anyway. I’ll try to describe it all like a case-study (you know my deep aversion to false “objectivity” and therapic claims of “detachment” wch are bound to be bogus. But you don’t want to hear too much of the grinding and shrieking of the soul of Elvet Gander M.D. I know you, g
ruffandgrum craggyface, drawing horrors but always on tidy graph paper).

  The cast. Frank and Milly Fisher, birthright Quakers, well-to-do, early fifties, veterans of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit and the CND marches. He is a bank official, she an assistant headmistress. In the world of work. There are two more regular Quaker Tigers—a fortyish lady (maiden? I’m not sure) called Patience Coope, and a youngish man, Brinsley Ludd, some sort of social worker. They all display the same symptoms. They are on the one hand, profoundly unsatisfied. They want to have a revolution, and what they want to rebel against is sweet reason and kindness. This is hard for them, for they are all sweet, reasonable, and kind. By nature or culture, it doesn’t matter, that is what they are, I don’t think it’s a mask. So the dissatisfaction is peculiarly pure and naked. You will say—or anyway, most of the Tigers wd say, sweet reason and kindness are deeply suspect. I say you (and the Tigers) shd be careful. Sometimes these things are real, or almost real, or partly real.

  Then—the Tigers are ecumenical—there’s the C. of E. contingent. A regular bod called Canon Adelbert Holly. Preaches the Death of God, Deus Absconditus, and the Impossibility of the Church as she is constituted. Author of Within God Without God and Our Passions Christ’s Passion . Describes himself as a “trained sexual therapist.” V. shifty about who trained him. Aet. fifty-nine-ish. Overexcitable, smoke-stained teeth, straggly hair, spitty speaker. And then Gideon Farrar, whom I mentioned, founder of the Children of Joy, and its inner sanctum, the Joyful Companions. A spade-shaped yellow beard, blue-eyed honest charisma, bonhomous in a slightly nauseating way. (OK. I can explain that undetached adjective, and may later. Meantime, take “nauseating” as read, the response of the not-unsubtle but not wholly longsuffering Elvet Gander, and reserve a little judgement.)

  Farrar brings his patient sweet wife, Clemency, and an acolyte called Ruth, an alarmingly docile young person (ex-nurse) from the resident community. Lovely “calm” face. Long golden plait down her back. Her will resigned to God’s (or Gideon’s). No opinions.

  Clergyman no. 3, this time with a big black beard, and also a black sweater, a portly person called Daniel Orton, who runs a suicide-line in a telephone centre in the City. (He works with Holly in a crypt.)

  An art historian called Richmond Bly, student of Blake’s prophetic books, driven to fear, trembling and soul-searching by the student revolution in the Samuel Palmer School.

  A patient of my own, called Ellie (she named herself for the dead little girl in The Water Babies), who is clothed all in white, including a nun-like veil and bandaged arms and legs.

  The twins I wrote you of. The Quakers have always been good at absorbing the mentally disturbed and treating them kindly and with respect. Look at the humane understanding Mary Lamb, matricide, had amongst them in the days of Romanticism. They are nice to Ellie. They extinguish the little fires Zag lights on their staircases, when he isn’t looking, and without comment. (This may not be what he wants, but that is how they do react.)

  Have I forgotten anyone? Yes, as usual, I have forgotten the forgettable Brenda Pincher. She arrives with the Farrar contingent, but I do not believe she is a Child of Joy. She is small and brown, and you don’t hold her face in yr mind from one meeting to the next. I don’t know what she does.

  It will be borne in upon you that all these seekers after up-rising and mind-blowing (soul-blowing) come from the Caring Professions. Sometimes I think the whole human world is a vast pool of carers caring for carers caring, creeping through a jumble of capitalists, exploiters, masters and oppressors whom we can’t see, and automatically loathe, another SPECIES.

  The Weekends have a designated shape or form, from which we occasionally deviate. I’m not against imposed forms myself—I believe in the finite psychoanalytic hour, timetabled and paid for. Freud showed us the benefit of that. Some of the Tigers find the whole idea of structure ludicrous, however, in what should be a primary blaze of spiritual violence—why a weekend only, let alone a timetable of sessions?

  We begin and end with a Meeting for Worship. The idea is to sit in a meditative silence, and for those to whom the Spirit (or ego, or id?) calls, to speak their message, which is then accepted by the group and made part of the silence. I have argued for a third Meeting, somewhere in the middle. I like the silence, the hum of togetherness. The hope is, that over the weekend, the group will deepen its understanding, will see new lights and sing new songs, so to speak.

  There are other sorts of session. The most basic are problem-solving sessions (like Maoist self-criticism, at times) where “little” difficulties are brought into the open and cleared up. You’ll immediately recognise the nature and the pitfalls, pratfalls, of this kind of thing. An example. Holly smokes particularly pungent yellow cigarettes. Milly Fisher thinks he ought not to, in Meetings. He said he could think of nothing but the cigarettes if he hadn’t got one. She replied that she was asthmatic, and could think of nothing but her lungs. Then they decided simultaneously to make little personal sacrifices and reversed their positions. I don’t smoke my pipe and I don’t mention my pipe. You will appreciate the sacrifice that involves. But one shouldn’t parade sacrifices. (A v. Quakerly position.)

  A third kind of group encounter we decided to call “ludic” sessions. We play what you might call spiritual parlour-games, mostly devised by Farrar, who excels at them. The idea is to get closer to each other, and also to shake ourselves out of routine ways of seeing the world. (Zag advocates LSD but the Quakers are against that.) I think Farrar wd like the ludic encounters to be more rumbustious than is generally acceptable. His Children go in for what’s known, I believe, as “touchy-feely” Christianity, bodily rubbings and exploratory huggings. He did manage to institute a kind of greeting ceremony where everyone had to embrace everyone, to break down barriers. (The English reluctance to touch anyone else at all is very odd, when you think of the bulk of human beings and their habits.) I admired Farrar’s technique—genial backslapping for the men, a delicate protective enfolding for the women. He’s immensely narcissistic and immensely outgoing. I was touched by everyone. Gales of Holly’s bad breath across my nostrils, courteous brief hugs from the Quakers, a gangling giggle from Bly, with an evasive wriggle (he is not at ease in his body), a brisk hand-shake from B. Pincher (who appeared not to understand the purpose of the greeting), a soft kiss on the cheek from Ruth, a cringe from Ellie, a slap across the cheek from Zag and a positive backwards lurch out of my arms from his brother. The fat Daniel, who you’d think would give a man a great bear-hug, rested his hands as brief and light as hoverflies over my shoulders. The idea was to do the whole circle again, at the end, to see if we’d relaxed (or stiffened, of course, theoretically possible).

  Another “ludic” exercise was a primitive experiment in deliberate thought transmission. We picked “transmitters” who wrote down, or drew, what they were transmitting and then we meditated and tried to receive the image. I pointed out that this was fairly standard in scientific ESP trials. I was mildly told off. Mixed results. Holly managed to “transmit” a burning bush to two of the Quakers, Zag, Ruth and (this is a bit doubtful) Richmond Bly.

  Another ludic exercise was the drawing of “spiritual images” of oneself. John was quite unable to conceal the fact that he and Zag had drawn identical geometric patterns—a highly complex series of polyhedrons inside other polyhedrons. John said, this was a game they often played as children. He also said, rather surprisingly, that God was “to be seen” in mathematics. “God is mathematics, the form that’s in everything.”

  Zag said the polyhedrons represented “everything being in touch, all these points of contact, infinite touch.” John didn’t like that. He said it wasn’t surprising, both of them drawing the same pattern. “We’ve both drawn this one often enough before.” Zag said “We’ve both drawn all sorts of forms and figures before. This is the Complicated One, admit it.” John said “So. If I do admit it. We would both naturally choose the Complicated One. Don’t make a supernatural happ
ening out of a statistically probable coincidence.” Zag said “There are hundreds of figures you could have chosen. I felt it would be the Complicated One.” John said “So you were second-guessing me. Nothing surprising in that.”

  Daniel Orton drew a leafless tree, with deep roots. Gideon drew an angel with a flaming sword. Holly drew the Cross, with a black, man-shaped hole in it. Ellie drew a minute circle. Like so, o. O, and Miss Pincher produced a nice studentish sketch of three apples, nicely shaded-in and hinting at three dimensions.

  I can see you thinking—And Elvet Gander. I drew my pipe, of course. I put it next to my own version of Van Gogh’s drawing of his pipe. (The dead-ash one, next to the sprouting onion.) I wrote under it Ceci n’est pas une pipe. Ceci n’est pas Elvet Gander. Farrar said, writing was cheating. I said, it was a pity if there were rules to preclude wit. Richmond Bly (who had drawn a sad sheep, I think he meant it for Blake’s Lamb) said that if William Blake cd combine image and word in one icon, so cd Magritte, and ipso facto so cd Elvet Gander.

  This group has a remarkable variety of natural leaders, who change roles. The Fishers have a quiet authority—it’s their house, and their idea—which they’re at great pains to disclaim. Farrar is a born Leader—his need to lead is pitifully blatant—his own people love him, and bask in his warmth (and he in theirs). Holly doesn’t mind. He’s a loner, and comfortable with it. He so to speak gets his pleasure from theorising the others’ behaviour. My Ellie, and Farrar’s Ruth, hurtle to renounce their Selves for others. Ruth is distinctly the handmaid type, Richmond Bly wd like to be a leader, and knows he won’t make it, so follows. He needs to be part, either way. To sing the same song as the others.

  Zag has more charisma than everyone else put together, but it don’t shine out like splendour from shook foil unless he’s asked to sing, and then he’s the snake-charmer. He cries “Share my passion.” Gideon Farrar says “I’ll give you what you want.” (Implying, what you want is me.) The Tigers holds the two together, to its credit.