Measure of My Days (2 page)

A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe. It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.

No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the
weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their new-born child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.

A
ge is truly a time
of heroic helplessness. One is confronted by one’s own incorrigibility. I am always saying to myself, “Look at you, and after a lifetime of trying.” I still have the vices that I have known and struggled with—well it seems like since birth. Many of them are modified, but not much. I can neither order nor command the hubbub of my mind. Or is it my nervous sensibility? This is not the effect of age; age only defines one’s boundaries. Life has changed me greatly, it has improved me greatly, but it has
also left me practically the same. I cannot spell, I am over critical, egocentric and vulnerable. I cannot be simple. In my effort to be clear I become complicated. I know my faults so well that I pay them small heed. They are stronger than I am. They are me.

B
ut who is it
that knows me so well and has to endure me? There is the I that has to bear all the other I’s and can assess them correctly; and there is the I who feels such sick distaste and drunken elation at being itself, all its selves, who is even thankful for the opportunity of having been itself, uncomfortable as it has been. Is the judging I a separate entity, and who can this wise I be? It feels higher, greater than I. I fail it, it scorns and rebukes me. Then who is it? I feel like a hierarchy, and perhaps I am one. I am my chief interest because to me I am life. My curiosity, delight, pain tell me about life itself. This makes me a monster of egotism, but that is
what I am and have to be, for how else do I know, really know anything? I observe others, but I experience myself. As I long to understand, even a little, who could be as helpful to me as myself, muddled creature that I am, since it is my mortification, my respect that tells me what is real.

If I am myself with ardour, and no other way seems possible, I am also helpless in my own grasp. I come up against my own limitations as against granite. I observe and reflect yet when I am asked for an opinion I feel part of a network, am not a solid point, am very nearly absent. It amounts to this: that near the end of my life when I am myself as never before, I am awareness at the mercy of multiplicity. Ideas drift in like bright clouds, arresting, momentary, but they come as visitors. A shaft of insight can enter the back of my mind and when I turn to greet it, it is gone. I did not have it, it had me. My mood is light and dancing, or it is leaden. It is not I who choose my moods; I accept them, but from whom?

A
s I do not live
in an age when rustling black silk skirts billow about me, and I do not carry an ebony stick to strike the floor in sharp rebuke, as this is denied me, I rap out a sentence in my note book and feel better. If a grandmother wants to put her foot down, the only safe place to do it these days is in a note book.

I
suppose
that humanity is still very tribal. It feels tribal. For centuries to come, perhaps forever we will be working out the separation of the individual from the collective bond—that protective oneness that you see everywhere, and know is deeply essential to each of us. Perhaps primitives are less closely held together than I assume, but their unchanging ways over long periods must imply the existence of very few people individual enough to differ from the group, or strong enough to establish their difference. Perhaps many do differ but wisely conceal it, since it is
the most uncomfortable thing in the world to stand alone.

The ordeal of being true to your own inner way must stand high in the list of ordeals. It is like being in the power of someone you cannot reach, know, or move, but who never lets you go; who both insists that you accept yourself and who seems to know who you are. It is awful to have to be yourself. If you do reach this stage of life you are to some extent free from your fellows. But the travail of it. Precious beyond valuing as the individual is, his fate is feared and avoided. Many do have to endure a minute degree of uniqueness, just enough to make them slightly immune from the infection of the crowd, but natural people avoid it. They obey for comfort’s sake the instinct that warns, “Say yes, don’t differ, it’s not safe”. It is not easy to be sure that being yourself is worth the trouble, but we do know it is our sacred duty.

Perhaps these times in which we live are more dangerous than they seem, and in a different way. Mass values prevail until I wonder if we
are all herding together because a great challenge lies ahead. If we can manage to face it an increase in consciousness could be due. Then who is in greatest danger? Is it the individual whose fate it is to oppose the mass, succour the nascent value? The individual is the carrier of value by which we live; but what if we forget this, what if the crowd becomes too strong, what happens then? Can the hero, the ordinary man of course, rise to the height that will be required of him?

A
man once said to me
, “I don’t mind your telling me my faults, they’re stale, but don’t tell me my virtues. When you tell me what I could be it terrifies me.” I was surprised then, I understand now, because I believe we may be faced by the need of living our strengths.

I
f truth is measured by numbers
, it being assumed that what the majority want is good and must be, then my wild heart (my now wild heart that
never used to be wild—or if it was did not know it—did not indeed benefit by it) flames for the truth of the few. We choose many things by a tribal truth, many more than we like, but there is a truth in the very pit of one’s being that opposes tribal good. What honest heart denies that many delights are based on the premise that others will not, even cannot, do what you do? Sometimes it is because you feel the need of doing something in your own way, sometimes it is the sheer delight of being lawless that you crave; or, more lightly, because you are drawn to the charm of the exceptional. If too many do what you do its quality is changed. If some things are done commonly it becomes tasteless; but there are things that can be done rarely and remain delicious.

It is clearly innocent to wish to be quiet or alone, but then others must not come where you are. It is natural to wish to be the only one to leave your footprint on pristine sand; to lie in an unvisited wood is idyllic, but if others do the same then all is degraded. Even motoring, as it once was, required an almost empty road, and
what sort of climber likes a crowded mountain peak? It is undeniable that one needs the absence of others to enjoy the magic of many things. I deny that these are privilege. They are necessities that man may know himself, and that man may know nature when she is unsullied by him. So vital are these joys that I am convinced that crowds endanger our quality; with them, in them, we become unworthy of each other. And what do we live by and for but that evanescent achievement, the merit of mankind?

H
ow understandable
that most of our beliefs protect us from the danger of being an individual. “Think of others” we were once taught. “Adapt, adapt” we are now told. But it is a coward cry, for he who after cruel buffeting wins to aloneness learns that life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.
Some uncomprehended law holds us at a point of contradiction where we have no choice, where we do not like that which we love, where good and bad are inseparable partners impossible to tell apart, and where we—heart-broken and ecstatic, can only resolve the conflict by blindly taking it into our hearts. This used to be called being in the hands of God. Has anyone any better words to describe it?

T
he opposition
between the individual and the mass must be the very ground of evolution. The individual pushing his way forward, blind with insight, glad to face any risk at all. If the mass was a whit less leaden what a danger the individual could be. The individual afire with untested creativity, the mass the weight that tests the strongest. No wonder hate is engendered here.

It is better not to look for love’s part in case love proves to be only the relief of losing oneself
in a crowd of two. But hate comes with disagreement. If you are said to be in the wrong, then you are convinced a wrong has been done you, and you must fight in self-defence; for to be wrong in the eyes of others feels as though you had been destroyed. To test truth here could be the death of the collective man in you, so it could also be the point at which you found yourself. This must be the fear that is the first food of hate. The fear of discovering who you are, of putting your uniqueness to the test.

Must each of us come out of the crowd, the crowd in us, stand opposed, risk existence or non-existence, apart from the mass? What birth is as painful as this, a birth that may be a death, but may also be one’s holy gift to one’s fellows.

T
here is a special hate
threatening now, when a sameness is being enforced on us, and we feel the impulse to fight for our difference. Should we fight this impulse and find a way of conforming,
or should we fight all the rest in a refusal to conform? We are basically much the same, we need to feel with others. Yet it must be the very pulse of life that makes each mount on the shoulder of the next, trampling on those who would trample on him, forcing them below, for how can anyone be above if others are not below? Must one lose face, gain status, test oneself, measure oneself—is all this the rudimentary stage of becoming an individual, and is it the price paid for having left the safety of the crowd?

Fool that I am, I worry at the combat of life like a dog with an old shoe. It is differentiation in action, it is what the competitive nature of man forces him to do whether he will or no. It is the creation of quality, good and bad. Most women only half understand it and they tend to dislike it, for they feel the human price is too high. It is high. Good may lose and bad may win. The public view and the private differ. It could make unexpected history if wives wrote what they saw work—its efforts and its achievements—doing to their husbands; telling honestly how much of
the husband is left for human purposes and how good the human quality remains.

M
y kitchen linoleum
is so black and shiny that I waltz while I wait for the kettle to boil. This pleasure is for the old who live alone. The others must vanish into their expected role.

A
ll those
who through history have helped life to enlarge, to diversify—at their peril, always at their peril—have been strongly individual; above all the greatest, who was more than man. If more and more of us accept the task of living our individual fate, if we accept being woman, man, withdrawn or all-managing, of this race or that, and make of it completeness, encompassing all the nobilities and humiliations of which we alone are capable, then what self-respect we could develop, what cause we could
have for paying respect to one another, to exchange courtesy and compassion. It must have been just this slow development of honour and humility that has given us, through time, the heart to go on. Perhaps many think that life is so difficult that we could not do more than we are doing, and they would scorn me as someone who bewails human quality.

They could be right. I dislike much in myself, and much in humanity, and believe half of life, a constantly shifting half, to warrant dislike. But if life is the tension between the opposites and has to be just as it is, I still marvel that it has to be quite so bad. But I judge what I half create, for it is my eyes and my tastes that make my world. It is my creation and concept that I have to inhabit. Here, just here, is the price of individuality. I assume that I made my world out of what life offered, but my innate quality must have drawn it towards me. I fused it all together only half knowing what I did. What felt at moments like the white heat of necessity was much my own doing, and it may have been a wrong-headed
effort. I shall never know. No one can enter my world, nor can I enter the world of those I know best; we can pay visits in the entrance hall, and keep our eyes unfocussed. We can exchange gifts. Oh we can do that. We can offer our flowers of humility, appreciation and need, only asking that a meeting ground (that precious place) be kept open.

I
used to find it difficult
to talk to people newly met. Speech felt precipitate. A silent knowing should come first, sitting, smiling, holding hands, dancing perhaps without words, but talking is too committal for a beginning. I had one friend who always carried some small objects of interest in his pocket, and on occasion would show them; the skull of an asp, seed pods of rare shape. These made speech easy.

A
nother day to be filled
, to be lived silently, watching the sky and the lights on the wall. No one will come probably. I have no duties except to myself. That is not true. I have a duty to all who care for me—not to be a problem, not to be a burden. I must carry my age lightly for all our sakes, and thank God I still can. Oh that I may to the end. Each day then, must be filled with my first duty, I must be “all right”. But is this assurance not the gift we all give to each other daily, hourly?