My Parliament of Selves is in furious session. It’s a bit early in the day even for them. I’m barely halfway through my first cup of coffee. I’ve known for a long time about their constant squabbling, but it doesn’t seem to be getting any easier.
William Wordless, smelling the fuschias hanging from the basket by the wall, scowls as he speaks.
‘I feel we really need to set aside quality time for writing poetry. It’s been months since I’ve written anything worth reading in that line.’ His long grey hair mimics the swinging of the blossoms in the breeze.
‘For God’s sake, Bill, grow up!’ Frederick Mires is lounging in his garden chair at the long glass table with a book in his hand as he growls. There is a pile of several thick volumes on the table beside him. ‘You can’t have your head in the clouds singing about daffodils the whole time. There are far more important things than that.’ The sunlight flashes dazzlingly from the lenses of his reading glasses.
‘Like what for heaven’s sake, Fred? What’s more important than singing about nature in words that reach the heart.’ Wordless blinks as he speaks and can’t meet the glare of Mires’s gaze.
‘The mind, Bill, the mind. Even if I spent the rest of my days working to understand consciousness, I’d still be only just scratching the surface when I died. But consciousness is what we truly are, and we must understand it better. It’s vital, and psychology is by far the best path.’
‘May I get a word in edgeways here?’
A tall figure in a kaftan moves out of the shadows at the far end of the garden. Christopher Humfreeze hates arguments. In fact he doesn’t like company of any kind much, feeling that his time alone communing with his spirit is far too valuable to squander on small talk.
Wordless bares his teeth in a wide grin. ‘If you must!’
‘Poetry and psychology are all very well as far as they go, but they don’t go anywhere near far enough. They are word-blocked. We have to go deeper than words can carry on us: we have to learn how to travel the path of silence. That’s the only way to get to the very heart of things in themselves.’
‘But that’s what poetry does as well in a different way, you bigoted idiot!’ blurts Wordless somewhat tactlessly.
‘Calm down, Bill,’ soothes Mires in a slightly condescending fashion. ‘Give him a chance to explain himself. Psychology teaches that every perspective is valuable in helping us understand a reality as complex as . . . .’
‘Thank you, Fred. Can I carry on now?’ interjects Humfreeze with the calm under provocation that only his many hours of meditative practice enable him to do, and with only the faintest tinge of contempt for Mires’s patronising tone.
‘Not if I have anything to do with it!’ Emma Pancake snorts as she strides across the garden, throwing her handbag and a stack of leaflets onto the table. ‘I’ve heard all this a zillion times before.’ She throws herself into a vacant chair, pours a cold coffee from the cafetière and sits back with her feet on the table.
‘Do you really believe that sitting still for hours on end is going to change the world for the better? Never in a million years! You all need to grow up and get real. Yes, I agree that words aren’t enough in themselves, but decades of navel-gazing isn’t the answer either. We’ve got to get out there and do something fast. We can’t wait until our words tinkle like bells, until we’ve got completely bogged down trying to understand everything completely, or only after we’ve plumbed the depths of our own mind to the bottom of beyond.’
‘We’ve heard all this from you before as well, Emmie, as you dash around too fast with your half-baked plans,’ Humfreeze cuts across her quietly, ‘and anyway it was my turn to speak and you interrupted.’
‘Sorry to say this,’ Wordless butts in clearly not meaning it.
‘We can all say that. We’ve heard your icily detached take on things a million times or more, Chris, and to be fair we’ve sat through mine and Fred’s as well. We can go over and over this for another thirty years and end up in exactly the same pointless stand-off. I will be writing no real poems. You won’t understand consciousness any better than you do now, Fred. You’ll still be skating across the mind’s surface, Chris, and you, Emmie, will have done almost nothing to change anything. Until we learn to work together we are never going to get anywhere.’
‘And how are the hell are we supposed to do that, if you don’t mind my asking?’ she retorts acidly.
I take another sip of coffee and gaze at the three bees foraging on the snapdragons. The skill with which they lift each flower head’s petal lid to gain entry is spellbinding to watch.
Wordless is right. How am I ever going to get these warring selves in my head working together?
Till now I’ve given each of them a parcel of my time, switching between poetry, meditation, psychology and activism. As a result I’ve not got very far with any of them. It takes focus and almost endless effort to achieve excellence in any field, but I have seemed unable to decide what to focus on in this way for any length of time. A pentathlete can win a gold medal across five disciplines, but of course is unlikely to overtake a specialist in any of them. In this case, at least though, all the skills are in the domain of physical prowess. I’ve not put anywhere near even that level of effort into any of the four fields I am pretending to plough, and they are not even closely related at first glance. No wonder excellence seems to be eluding me across the board!
From my supraliminal point of view, I’m being taken over by each of them in turn in a blind and random way, rather than choosing consciously and deliberately to identify with whichever of them best suits the current situation and my carefully chosen purposes.
Could Humfreeze be right in one sense at least, though they didn’t give him a chance to explain it? Mastering the art of deep reflection might not just benefit him, but lift the poet, the activist and the psychologist within me to higher levels of functioning which will benefit me as well.
If so, how to make a plan that would achieve this? And who’s going to make it?
‘That remains the challenge of the moment,’ I think as I get up, say farewell to the foragers, pick up my cup, and go back indoors to rinse it in the sink as mindfully as I can.
Wish me luck, whoever I am!
Brilliant! This gave me (and my parliament of selves) something to smile about and reflect upon!
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Just what I needed to think about this week.
I had been torn between different demands on my time that left very little over for my own writing and other work, or much conscious self development, in 2018. But one of the big projects for another person is ending, another project is going quiet for a few weeks, my diabetes is under control and getting into a routine – so I now have some time to allocate to my own things, but I am butterflying between them.
I need to listen to them then try to plan!
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Thanks, Tricia. I think most if not all of us have got this kind of squabble raging inside us, and need to find a way of negotiating not just a truce, but a genuine stable co-ordinated. peace.
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