The Kiln (37 page)

Yet here they were approaching the place where their minds had been broadened to continents, and approaching for near enough the last time, and they were discussing which village of the spirit they would spend their lives in. A few were going to be teachers. One was going into industrial management. One - O Marco Polo, lives thy spirit still? - was thinking of being a journalist.

He couldn't take it. There, on the steps of the Union, his vision cleft him. In the not quite blinding Glasgow sunlight, he stood and spoke. (Perhaps not just lately but all his life he'd been auditioning for John the Baptist.) It must have been a strange sight to a passer-by: a group clustered unevenly around the steps with briefcases while one of them, tall and lean and with his own briefcase abandoned at his feet, demanded they be true to themselves, frothing with urgency. He didn't say ‘the end is nigh’, although that's largely what he meant. His idea was that there was a conformist fate in store for all of them - to be devoured by their own unacknowledged reality - if they succumbed to social pressures. He had some effect. They all trooped into the Union, brooding on the need not to become stereotypes.

Then he went into teaching. He didn't go into teaching in the same way as everybody else did, of course. He had a secret plan,
infallibly cunning. He would only teach for two years, during which time, making effective use of his weekends and such evenings as he wasn't out on the skite looking for girls, he would write a masterpiece and the world would beat a path to his door. The plan didn't work.

There were several reasons for this, he thought. First of all, the world took a wrong turning. He did finish a novel of some forty thousand words but nobody would publish it. A few publishers made encouraging noises which kept him fairly buoyant for a time until he realised all that the noises translated into was ‘write something else’.

Secondly, he discovered to his amazement that he liked teaching. He had entered the profession with no missionary zeal whatsoever. The fools - didn't they realise who had come among them? Were the tweed jacket and slacks enough of a disguise to delude them? But within a month or two he realised this was something he could do and that tended to be a seductive realisation. He remembered passing the boys' cloakroom and hearing two third-year boys who had just been in his class when he taught Saki's ‘The Open Window’. ‘Jesus Christ,’ one of them said. ‘That was one terrific period.’ ‘The best,’ the other replied, i'm for another read at that story the night.' He decided not to chastise them for swearing. Who knows what accidental, drifting feathers of experience land to add their weight to decisions that affect our entire lives?

Thirdly, he had met Gill. He was in Graithnock railway station, waiting for a train to Glasgow on a late Saturday afternoon. He was going to the dancing at the University Union. He hadn't been back there since he started teaching and he fancied casting the mature eye of a man of the world upon the scenes of his youth. He was talking to a porter he knew since he had spent a summer there working as a temporary porter himself. He had borrowed his cap to try it on, mainly because he felt a porter's cap made him look like Marlon Brando in
The Wild One.
A girl was walking towards the barrier, fair, well breasted and wearing the stiletto heels of all his fantasies. O foolish man, is that all it takes? On impulse, he smiled at her and said, ‘Excuse me, madam. Carry your ticket?’ It was so witty he was crying still.

It wasn't that he blamed Gill for any failure of ambition or for
his not writing more. You takes your choices and you pays in blood. It was perhaps just that marriage has a hard way with those delicate reaches of the self where creativity grows, those inexplicable feelings that we have no names for - those vagrants of our social conditioning that sleep in the doorways of the heart and the empty spaces of the mind, accosting our preoccupations without warning. He found that marriage kept shaking its head at them: sorry, nothing to spare. When Megan and Gus came along, those vagrants were even less tolerable. Time seemed to chase them away with sticks. He had always been determined that nobody connected with him should suffer because of his writing ambitions. The compulsion to write was his, not theirs. But that determination had taken its toll. He wondered if it had reached its limit.

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:

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 had 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.