The Voice That Thunders, page 12
Psychiatrists who would take the matter further and say that we inherit genetically and engrammatically, maintain that we have built into us the experiences of our parents from their conception to our own, and that our parents have inherited likewise from our grandparents.
It is obvious that, within a few generations of compounded inner times, the number of engrams available will approach infinity, and, whether we call the result “inherited inner time”, “the collective unconscious” or “patterns of general human behaviour”, the day-to-day result is the same. My own experience of consciously dealing with what Bill Wadsworth called a destructive engram leaves me with an acceptance of whatever-it-is as a reality, and of its ability to activate all its harmonics in the apparent simultaneity of inner time. But, attractive as the theory is, I have no evidence for my potential memory of what Grandad said in 1894, nor of the number of cats he saw squashed.
My experience does show, however, that a writer of fiction, willy-nilly, plants encapsulated engrams in his characters, and that disorientation, leading to symptoms that resemble madness, can be induced when the engram is made present simultaneously in inner and outer time.
When I set out to assault the actor during the filming of The Owl Service, it was because I could not reconcile him and me on a Welsh mountain in 1969 with the memory-trace of me somewhere else in 1950. The inner time co-ordinates were identical, but they had been externalised to a here-and-now of waking nightmare. Inner time rules of simultaneity and one-dimensionalism had been projected on to a four-dimensional space-time. Which was absurd. Or I was.
Bill Wadsworth’s skill lay in helping me (without drugs, hypnosis or even leading questions) to see the simplicity of the trap: that the printed word is safe where the spoken word is not. My all-but insanity, provoked by conditions that externalised my thoughts and memories, jumbled, as actors, so that I was seeing a reality that, for me, was close to schizophrenic illusion, was the spontaneous and ungoverned invasion of the outside world by inner time. Bill Wadsworth showed me how to restore myself to my own co-ordinates, to release the energy that had been locked around the engram for nearly twenty years, and, above all, not to be afraid of the process. That is important because whatever words we use to describe the process, I am left with myself as someone who is obliged to walk in Altjira, to be a vehicle of myth, to go voluntarily (and now knowingly) to inner time, and to come back increased instead of diminished, with more energy than less. And it is astonishing what can happen when our energies are not bound up defensively against engram attack.
Before we move on, Bill should be demystified. His talent is directness allied to an acute and compassionate mind. His treatment is painful because we make truth painful, and truth is the only way to discharge an engram.
The method is simple. He gets his patient to tell the pain, to tell the truth. It is often an anecdote from childhood or adolescence. He makes the patient speak always in the present tense. Not “I was standing in the garden,” but, “I am standing in the garden.” When the story is finished, he asks to be told again and again, always in the present tense, until either there is nothing new left to say, or something new takes its place: a deeper, connected engram. It is like lancing a boil, or a series of boils; because the obvious engram may not be the final engram but the first, cumulative, and thereby injurious, one. We may think that it is the tenth squashed cat that is hurting us, but it is more likely to be pain associated with the first.
And here I must insert a warning. The simplicity of the present tense is a delusion. It is Bill Wadsworth’s skill that makes it appear simple. I am able to face fear in his presence and to take emotional risks with myself only because I know that he is equipped with a multiplicity of formal qualifications of the highest achievement and can step in with a sharp word, or a sharp needle, if we meet demons. No one should be seduced into foolhardy experiments by any superficial lure in the experiences I relate.
So far, I have spoken of the engram phenomenon only as a symptom that interferes with the health of the individual. But the positive side is equally available, though we tend not to draw on it. Primitive peoples do; and “primitive” is not the same as “unsophisticated”.
Inner time may not exist as such. It may be a confusion on my part from many sources; but it is an empirical truth for me, from which I am led to believe that Man is evolving, through that inner time as well as through other time frames, towards awareness of a universe that is conscious rather than effete. And to be conscious is to be responsible: to be responsible is to act: to act is to move: for ever.
Up till now that is an account of a condition that is behind me. The intervening years have been filled with activity made possible by the discharge of a crippling engram, and here are some of the results.
Immediately “after” being treated clinically by Bill Wadsworth, I organised the dismantling, repair and re-erection of the most important timber-framed Tudor domestic building known to have survived; had it linked to the existing mediaeval longhouse where I live; filmed and photographed the operation, and handled the archaeological complexities involved. (The mediaeval hall-hovel is on a Saxon/Iron Age/Bronze Age/Neolithic/Mesolithic site.)
I wrote Red Shift; made a television documentary film; wrote a television play; conceived and wrote the libretti for two operas; collaborated on a picture book for children; wrote a dance drama; wrote a study of a Jungian archetype; got married again; fathered a child; am monitoring another pregnancy; am collaborating on an analysis of a Middle English poem; am preparing one of the operas for filming on television; and am gestating the next novel. I feel under-employed.
In the fourteen years of work before my collapse, I wrote four novels, and did sporadic radio and television jobs in order to eat. Surely it cannot be a coincidence that so much should happen as soon as the energy needed to sit on an engram for nearly twenty years was made available for more constructive, outwardly-turned activities.
And, because I have long maintained that war memoirs are not as truthful as dispatches from the front, I have set out to demonstrate, in the only way I know how, that there need not be anything too terrible about what still has to be called “mental illness” by writing this essay in the twelfth week of another crisis; one caused by an engram in the opera I was writing. The opera is itself an expression of engram resolution and the nature of inner time, and I am still reverberating.
I have just given a summary of the main activities that occupy me at present, and contrasted them with the aridity of what went before. You may find both states unhealthy and ludicrous. But we are individuals, and it is not in me to be equable. The choice is only of which whirlwinds to ride. Given that, I am told my work is richer now, less diffused, and that I am more tolerably domesticated. The involvement of an academically trained mind with a primitive catastrophic process (that is, the waking experience of Altjira, the Illud Tempus of anthropology) is not always pleasant, but it is never far from what C. S. Lewis calls “joy”, and I would have it no other way.
Let me return to the opera. I have devoted a lot of space here to engrams, but I have not described the subjective experience of discharging one: the road back from zero. As with the filming of the novel, when the opera was about to go into rehearsal; that is, to get off the page, to take on flesh, to be real people outside my head, I began to apply my brakes in the form of psychosomatic malaise. My wife told me that I should see Bill, but I ignored the advice. After all, he was for the big stuff, not backache and migraine. And anyway, I was “busy”. Then, one night, I shouted in my sleep: “I wrote the thing! I don’t have to watch it!”
When I heard what had happened, I scrapped the argument for not needing help; but, before I could get to Bill, the brakes were jammed on. Everything that had ever ached, ached. Each preparation for the journey to London produced another batch of symptoms, until I woke to find myself locked. I could not get out of bed. Hysterical paralysis had taken all the pains away. That made me angry; angry enough to have myself hefted into a car to keep my appointment with Bill. But the session started with me in ridiculous contortion on the floor because of muscular spasm, and barely able to speak. Here is how it went. The dialogue is surreal, especially out of context, but you should remember that Bill and I had worked together, and accepted a shorthand vocabulary between us concerned with effectiveness rather than with elegance.
“Go to the pain,” said Bill. “Go to where it hurts most, and say whatever it tells you.”
The centre of the pain was my left thigh. I zoomed in like a camera lens, crashing for the black centre, using my will as a projectile. Just before the moment of impact, the blackness switched off, and I was watching myself, six years old, at home, during the war, being sick after eating the top half of a teacake covered with blackcurrant jam, and developing the first symptoms of what was later diagnosed as meningitis.
Engram One. I told the story over and over, in the present tense, until nothing was left that was unpleasant, except the teacake.
“Go to the most painful part of that experience, and say whatever it tells you.”
Again the crash zoom lens: into the teacake. And immediately another picture, another associated memory, a deeper engram.
A peculiarity of this technique is that, instead of becoming more tedious with each repetition, the description is more vivid, visually and emotionally (and therefore more difficult and painful), until there is a sudden loss of intensity, and the engram is discharged: but it is not erased.
The engram makes no distinction between an actual experience (one that we could photograph and record objectively) and a dream. The more dream-engrams there are, the more painful the process and the sooner the resolution. Also, the engram prefers the emotional truth to the historical truth, so that it does not matter if one is “lying” in the sense of untruthful evidence before a court of law, since we are dealing with the subjective truth of the pain in order to free it here-and-now: we are not conducting an experiment to test the accuracy of human historical memory and its retention. But the usual pattern is to move from historical event to historical event, sometimes taking shortcuts through truth and remembered dreams. Puns are common, too. After two hours of the first session I walked out with a sore leg.
We chased engrams all that week, until I crash zoomed into the last of the series, and found myself, screaming, aged three, being carried from my first visit to a cinema. Nobody had told me what a cinema or a film were, and certainly nothing about the concept of an animated cartoon; and I was taken into the largest enclosed space I had ever seen, into a crowd of strangers, put on a seat, and the lights went out. Figures fifteen feet high moved and loomed over me. The film was Snow White; and I felt my sanity slipping until the moment when the Queen metamorphosed into the Witch. Then I screamed, and screamed, and could not stop. My mother called an usherette, to have me removed, and I was handed into the strange-smelling arms behind a bright beam that dazzled me. The arms hugged my squirming form, and carried me out, while my mother stayed to watch the rest of the film. The exit was at the foot of the screen, and I was being borne up towards that great and drooling hag, away from safety, pinioned by someone I could not see, and the Witch was laughing.
When we got home, I was thrashed, for making my mother “look a fool in public”.
“Go to the most painful part of the experience.”
“Waiting with Mummy after the film, at the bus stop, before we get home.”
“Isn’t it a funny old world?” said Bill. “What do you feel now?”
“I want to be in London, so they don’t foul up the opera.”
“You’ll still have a pain in your leg,” said Bill. “It’s sciatica.”
And it is sciatica. But if I swear at it, it goes. I can will it away. In another century, I should be casting out a devil.
Whatever terminology we use, it is a fact that, from my hysterical paralysis and fear of watching the opera being performed, to wanting to be rid of a psychotherapist because he was delaying my arrival at rehearsal, and all in five days, was an achievement.
It should be noticed that Bill Wadsworth called a temporary halt and sent me to confront the opera in performance as soon as I said that the most distressing part of the aspect of the Snow White engram was my standing at a bus stop, afraid of what had happened, afraid of the thrashing to come, and denied my mother’s affection in the present. It was a one-dimensional point of fear.
And when I first met Bill, when the world was crashing, and the personal pain was greater and its social effect a near disaster, we isolated one engram and discharged it: but only one. One engram for the edge of collapse; five engrams for sciatica. But there is a connection, and it is reasonable.
The Owl Service was written largely from a subconscious need to understand why, at the age of fifteen, I had, without justification or desire, verbally savaged another human being. I had done it at a bus stop. That was the centre of pain that Bill Wadsworth invited me to, and from which he enabled me to absolve myself. “The bus stop” was the engram I had not been able to recognise or discharge on a Welsh mountain.
When I was seventeen, the tables were turned on me by someone else in a similar way, and out of that bewilderment came the need to write Elidor. It happened, of course, at a bus stop. Even the first books, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath, have bus stops within them; and they are based on the myth that is expressed through the opera.
Let us be clear, and remember the squashed cats. Three equally painful experiences happen to me on the same day, but one involves the squashing of a cat; and, therefore, all the squashed cats of my inner time bleed; and, if the engram has a genetic ability to transmit itself, the cats of my grandsires bleed, too. I have no doubt that I behaved intolerably to many other human beings, and they to me: but I retain negatively and destructively only the bus stop experiences, because they had the additional charge upon them of my infant terror and the withholding of parental love; which made me too cruel, and then too vulnerable, in my turn. It’s a funny old world only here-and-now. For inner time, what I have described is that infuriating word “normality”.
It seems to me that one motivation for a writer could be the need to discharge engrams. If it were as easy as that, writers would end up as saints; but, fortunately, there are too many engrams and too little life; and it will do no good to look for engrams cold, because any you dig out will be bogus, and so will you. Which is why, at our first meeting, Bill went only as far as the pain took me. I imagine that he could have forced me to more bus stops, out of interest, but he is a sensitive man. He knew what those twenty years had done, and that I needed to make up for lost time, and that it would be soon enough to help me further when the next stage was reached. “I never say good-bye” was his signal to be remembered when the need came.
The discharge of an engram through writing may be an act of exorcism, but it is not confessional writing. If it succeeds, I am not giving the reader the burden of my engram, but I am, fortuitously, handing on the released, and thereby refined and untainted, energy. Again, I could not do it cold, or with a social mission: I am not Galahad: but it is astonishing (and humbling) to read my mail and to have people say simply, “Thank you”, and then to realise that they have taken something beneficial from a process that had been released through me, so that my bad 1949 becomes an unknown person’s good 1975.
The danger of hubris is clear, but it is countered by the certain belief that, if the process were to be abused or manipulated, I should be destroyed, and by the cosmic joke of my own work. For there is not one problem sweated out clinically with Bill Wadsworth that I had not already myself posited, examined and resolved earlier in a book.
I got to London for the opera through dealing with a conflict that is answered in detail by the last chapter of The Owl Service, which was written nine years earlier. However long a novel may occupy, living the truth of it takes longer.
The present exercise with Bill Wadsworth is all laid out in the opera. I can even see where I am now, what must be done, and what the result will be. But I do not yet know how to do it. To achieve that catharsis, I shall have to write. And what will that uncover? And what will it take to answer?
The answer already exists in myth. If I have made the engram phenomenon seem hard, it is because evolution is hard, and we must evolve. I believe that we are evolving towards a hyper-consciousness of the individual, and that one of the evolutionary processes is concerned with inner time, a potential we are made aware of by the action of myth. At certain times in life, especially in adolescence, the potential universe is open to our comprehension, and it is not the engram’s fault if we decide to be blind to the light and call on darkness.
The engram is not harmful, unless we ignore it. I have described no mystery that is not of our own making, no fear that is outside us. In other cultures there would be no need for explanation. But we are not other cultures, and I have no wish to enter Altjira as a Pitjantjatra, but as a twentieth-century Western European, with all my cultural skills intact.
The analogy of a starry sky may help us finally to understand what I mean. The Pitjantjatra live in Australia, now; but technologically they are twenty thousand years in our past. Their ingenuity of survival in a desert where we should not last a day is a product of the application of Altjira, ‘Illud Tempus’, inner time, myth, to their environment. The numinous quality of Man is dominant in them. But take a tribal Pitjantjatra and expose him to our technology, and he dies. He is no longer tribal, he has no co-ordinates. An individual who can cross the Dead Centre of Australia naked, cannot cross Sydney alone. He hits skid row instead.
