Measure of My Days (9 page)

Who has the right to say what another is? It is here that I feel the conviction lies that we, the simplest and vaguest of us, know that we are other and better than we appear. More, that this is our basic assumption about ourselves. We put it to the test without a moment’s reflection, attempting what we have never learned to do, dying with ease and style because we know there is greatness in us. It does not make our bad untrue; one is as poor a thing as one seems; but there is that in our being of which no man may speak ill.

If it is beyond naming, contradiction and confusion affecting it not at all, it is still man’s point of passion, until I wonder if all the years we have been saying “self-respect” and “self-preservation” we spoke not of moral rectitude, or of physical preservation, but of what is descriptive of our true essence. We used “self” as it is used
in the Upanishads, as the sacred identity within us, and to protect this is our chief aim.

It could be this, and we cannot name what we do not yet know.

A
fter a time of trouble
I found a likeable flat which was to be my home. I had had a long need of one, so it was also my dear shelter. My daughter and I moved in one evening with two suitcases, two beds, three pots of bulbs, a kettle and tea things. We lit a brilliant fire in the seemly little grate with the dry slats the builder had left after making a big opening between the two public rooms. I lay in the firelight peacefully listening to pigeons on the roof. To me pigeons say, “Too true, dear love, too true”. I listened, looked out on trees beyond both windows and I was free and happy.

The flat had been repainted two months before but London dust sticks and the flat must be scrubbed. It was already so precious to me that its surface was almost my skin. A charwoman
had been promised, and when next morning the bell of my flat pealed out I opened the door and there stood the most battered little figure I had ever seen. Only two yellow teeth, and hair almost burned away from a lifetime of curling tongs. I felt I could not invite her in, not into my dear, dear flat, but of course I did though feeling apologetic to the flat.

At the end of an hour’s scrubbing she did some act of discrimination, of taste, I have forgotten what, and I exclaimed with pleasure and praised her rightness. She stopped scrubbing, drew herself to the full height of her weary little body and said slowly and graciously, “Our family has always been—different”. I bowed my acknowledgement, she bowed her acceptance of my tribute, and the scrubbing went on.

That was many years ago, but only last year I passed a supermarket and saw coming out a slut of a woman. She was fat, unwashed, unkempt in hair and dress, with a large three-cornered tear in her overall. She looked large-hearted and vital, and as our eyes met something passed between
us, we liked each other. She straightened up, placed one hand with fingers spread wide over the tear; then as we passed, we smiled seriously and bowed with equal dignity.

We know who we are even though we lack the precise name for it.

I
never understood myself less.
The humid summer makes me listless, age empties me, and this nervous exhaustion proves me truly spent. I feel profound lassitude, yet I am not ill. If someone comes and I talk I call up energy that I do not possess, and I may pay for it with an aching head lasting two or three days. I must talk less, I must become laconic. A smile, a nod, how unlikely, yet excessive talk must be based on vanity, an assumption that you are the fountainhead of interest. Age insists that I be dull as a further disability: No one else will mind, perhaps not even notice. Others might prefer me silent. I will try.

I may be gaining strength. I do not know. I
do know that to assure someone I am better creates a hole that used to be filled by the energy used up in saying I am better.

T
oday I must be better
for I suffer, and it gives me energy. I have lost some of my lassitude for I am angry, angry at sorrow, at the impossibility of expressing it. Life is so many-sided that nothing can be clearly put. One is left throbbing with it so no wonder one is angry, though not with anyone, just hot with protest. Anger must be the energy that has not yet found its right channel.

I accept the reasonableness of the event that pains me. I see its necessity, but my heart is a storm of loss. I am part of my family as they sail down the channel only a few miles away at this moment. I am happy with them, thrilled with them, I feel the excitement of the children, the pleasure of their father as he shows them the great ship. I feel the wind blowing, I feel everyone astir with the sense of the long voyage ahead.
I have all this clear in my head, but at the same time I suffer at their going. I am bereft. And I am angry that nothing can be said, I can’t keen my woe, and I can’t tell my love, and I hate the outrage we do ourselves in that we have no forms to convey feeling. It is a lie to be cheerful, and so I am left with this passion with which I can do nothing.

If I liked the actual physical presence of people more I might not love their essence so much. The precious quality in them that appears and disappears, that ennobles the features, sweetens the eyes for a radiant instant, that makes a sensitive boy ignite with interest, or a man standing silently by the fire strengthen my heart. I am losing contact with their dearness. I can treasure them in my memory, feel the wound of difference, flush with affection, but the ship is taking them out of my life. They will change, I will fade in their minds, and I will no longer see them live their lives. The pain of love, the sheer pain of it.

I wonder why pain brings energy. Six years ago I had the fractured femur, and felt energy
come to me, new energy, and knew I was stronger than I had been before the accident; it is again like that. The same happened with the major operation, and now with the pain of parting I am more alive, and I protest that no form of expression accompanies this energy. This love and pain and energy that are so strong while I am so weak, what do I do with them? I could bear them better if I could play an organ and let everything in me roll and rumble out in a great volume of sound. No, that would not help, I need to be the organ and compose out of my own being.

Now, have I found what I want? Is there an idea near at hand that will help? I feel it, but I cannot yet think it. It is the possibility that all intense experience is an increase of energy. It is the intensity of being that turns us into prisms, we split consciousness into qualities and we have to endure the passion of doing this. We cannot express it for we are the process. The problem is not what we do with it but enduring what it does to us.

Daily, hourly we must keep the crystal clear that the colours may assume their order. I pray to fulfil my task, don’t elude me now for my soul’s sake. I must live so that clarity produces the order of diversity. Nothing less than bearing it all will do, for it is the creation of a change of consciousness. Nothing less, and no words are needed. It is the mystery that is done to us; as though love and pain and emergence are all intensified energy by which one is fired, ordered and perhaps annealed. The purpose of life may be to clarify our essence, and everything else is the rich, dull, hard, absorbing chaos that allows the central transmutation. It is unstatable, divine and enough.

I feel people moving like patterns I cannot decipher, and I ask all those who like me seem to do nothing:” Does the passion in our hearts somehow serve?”.

A
gain a day
that is so empty that I cry inside, a heavy weeping that will not stop. I cannot read,
the papers depress me, reviews are written from points of view so outside my experience that I wonder if I ever understood anything. The grey sky seems very grey, but I finally soothe myself by small duties, putting away freshly ironed linen, watering plants. Order, cleanliness, seemliness make a structure that is half support, half ritual, and if it does not create it maintains decency. I make my possessions appear at their best as they are my only companions. Some days it is the only improvement I can bring about. I remember a beautiful girl of seventeen with destructive parents; unable to improve her position in any way she burst out with the surprising phrase, “I could neaten the stars”. With less need I neaten my flat.

O
ld people
can seldom say “we”; not those who live alone, and even those who live with their families are alone in their experience of age, so the habit of thinking in terms of “we” goes, and they become “I”. It takes increasing courage to
be “I” as one’s frailty increases. There is so little strength left that one wants shelter, one seeks the small and natural, but where to find it?

A garden, a cat, a wood fire, the country, to walk in woods and fields, even to look at them, but these would take strength I have not got, or a man whom also I have not got. So, here in a flat, I must make the round of the day pleasant, getting up, going to bed, meals, letters with my breakfast tray: can I make it total to a quiet heart? I have to be a miracle of quiet to make the flame in my heart burn low, and on some good days I am a miracle of quiet. But I cannot conceive how age and tranquillity came to be synonymous.

F
or days
I have been unwilling to record my distress caused by the degree of organization we must expect in the future. I am on my third book which tells of a society so planned that the individual as we conceive him would disappear. Such a world is imperative it seems, already far advanced,
and nothing can stop it. Industry finds it necessary, the increase in population makes it obligatory, and communism and capitalism are meaningless terms for societies becoming more and more alike.

The basic concept of oneness has undergone a great change. It no longer lends us greatness. It now reduces us for it is the practical problem of providing for the many. But this may change the very core of our being. Is it that the concept of oneness used to be carried by our image of God, and now the sense of an all-creating, all-containing power has gone? If we are bereft of all sense of a spiritual force arousing our awe, granting us value, instilling us with fear of ourselves and our fate, do we now seek some other greatness in which to lose ourselves? Do we will to be contained, and protected from life’s polarity?

Has the conception of oneness been projected onto the outside world? If it is no longer centred in God giving us each a source where we are greater than ourselves, are we empty, almost
meaningless? Where we used to pray to be servants of one God, we now ask to be organized into a whole, and we have already begun to worship, and to fear, that whole. Then is it we who force the able minds to answer our needs? Can one surmise what will follow? We know that the unconscious compensates the conscious, so if we create a world of contained units, conforming, agreeing, adapting that all parts may fit the whole, what will then arise in the unconscious of each? If automatically we conform, violence could arise as counterpole.

T
ranquil? The old tranquil?
I am leaden with foreboding. Not for myself. For human-kind, which isn’t in my care.

T
hese books have lamed me.
Can one not trust to the richly gifted men and women to keep life varied and creative? It would seem so, yet within one or two generations standards may have
undergone a complete change, and conforming would have become morality. Or a static society could arouse the individual to passionate protest, and criticism, and a very flowering of needed individuality might take place. Yet if we are entering an age of numbers, to differ could become a social sin, endangering the good of all, and such a system might last for ages. Could the very irrationality of life not be trusted to defeat this chimera of the intellect? That it fascinates good and less good minds is certain, that it has wounded me for weeks shows that I am too old to expose myself to speculation. I feel aged by it all, aged.

T
here is self-pity
and rancour in the old, in me. It is partly the demand of the child for safety supplied by someone else. I am failing, modernity is frightening, the old can barely keep a steady stance, so may our cries be forgiven us.

Y
esterday
I finished my fourth book on the inevitability of a planned world. No mention was made of the high calibre of the people who would be required to create world order, and nothing less was expected. Nor was the temptation to tyranny dealt with. Today I recalled the difficulty always experienced in making people do what it is thought they ought to do, even with the most severe methods tried, and my hopes rose a little.

I thought of great plans failing everywhere, of mighty America ineffectually trying to impose her will, of the plight of England, and I now felt more able to face the frightening fertility of man’s mind. His abstract ideas, extreme, inhuman, and from which we are only saved by the incalculable turns of life itself. What a boon disparity is—difference of opinion has never been sufficiently appreciated. It is the unexpected, the unknowable, the divine irrationality of life that saves us.

B
ut I also remember
a fellow passenger who had made twenty-five trips between Australia and Europe. After four weeks at sea she asked me if I was enjoying the trip. I said that I did not really like shipboard life, but the sea was a mighty experience. She nodded in agreement, saying, “I’ve spent weeks on it, and I’ve seen it again and again from the air. It’s a great sight. You know all the ideas men have, how they’re always talking about something like the world being round, and so on. Well, I give it to them. From the air the earth looks round. They may know what they’re talking about more often than we think”.

W
e old people
are not in modern life. Our impressions of it are at second or third hand. It is something we cannot know. We do know its effect on us, and the impact is so great that it can alienate us from our past, making it seem unlikely
and irrelevant. We live in a limbo of our own. Our world narrows, its steady narrowing is a constant pain. Friends die, others move away, some become too frail to receive us, and I become too frail to travel to them. Talk exhausts us, the expense of the telephone reduces us to a breathless rush of words, so that letters are our chief channel of friendship. Letters can be scarce so we tend to live in a world of our own making, citizens of Age, but otherwise stateless.