‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste me . . .’
(Richard II Act 5, Scene 5, line 49)
I bring a huge plastic bucket full of sand into the kitchen. I try to get rid of it in the sink. I pour most of the contents of the bucket onto the draining board, the crockery rack and taps. It spreads all over the sink area. I try to scoop it up with spoons to flush it away in the sink. This doesn’t seem to work.
I begin to hear familiar voices in dispute as usual.
‘There you are, you see. Even his dreams are telling him he is wasting his time. He should be out there on the streets doing something that would make a real difference,’ complains the activist, Emma Pancake, never one to miss a chance to score a point. ‘He’s forever on his laptop or scribbling in his notebook, while the world goes to hell in a pool of plastic.’
A more measured if somewhat sad tone breaks in.
‘I agree he is wasting his time on admin and prose when he should be creating poetry. It would at least be making sculptures out of the sands of time if he just focused on carving out a few lyrics.’
Bill Wordless, still stuck in the quicksand of his writers’ block is as eager as always to see the possibility of a breakthrough in any chance event.
I try pushing the sand down some kind of protruding drainpipe with a plastic tube inside it. That doesn’t work. I try to shut out the voices and focus on the task in hand, but that doesn’t work too well either.
Chris Humfreeze, master meditator, gently intervenes with his usual obsession, in defence of which he was happy to lose the few friends he might still have. ‘You’re both wrong. If you don’t master your interior by disciplined meditation you’ll never achieve anything.’
The word ‘never’ grates on me – a typical baseless overstatement.
I see a cat and a dog in front of the window near the sink trying to eat lumps of damp sand but in the end spreading more of it around than goes down their throats. With every moment my job gets harder.
‘Rubbish!’ flashes another tactless intervention. My parliament of selves is really beginning to earn its name. ‘You don’t master the mind by meditation alone. You have to understand the science that underlies consciousness.’
Fred Mires really begins to get into his psychological stride. ‘He skims those books on meditation and dreams, but fails to master the neurological details. That’s how he is squandering his time.’
The elder statesmen of my inscape are at loggerheads as usual. I haven’t heard anything from the younger generation inside as yet. I decide to find a plastic bag to put all the sand back in so I can take it outside. I search a cupboard but there are no bags. I can’t even find the bucket I brought it inside with either.
Then that sweet voice breaks the silence. Indie Pindance has her say, the girl we all worked together to rescue from the trauma cupboard she had been locked in at the time of my hospitalizations as a child.
‘It’s not just that. He gives up on everything too soon. He jumps from one thing to another so fast, with his butterfly brain, he could never make a difference. He’s infirm of purpose.’
I wince at the contemptuous words of Lady Macbeth leveled in my direction. Not that I have any daggers to dispose of as far as I know.
It’s then, when another voice breaks through, that I realize where the roots of her passionate intervention lie.
‘ Yes, mum,’ Peat Humus has always called her that, ever since he could talk, long after we exhumed him from his burial chamber in my heart, where he had been placed even before I was born, in response to my mother’s grief and its impact on her womb.
‘Exactly,’ he continues, ‘If he really believed what he writes he’d be out there supporting Greta Thunberg and her youth movement by joining other adults in the Extinction Rebellion. What does he do instead? Write, write and write again.’
How can she not speak out for him, whom she loves so much, when his feelings are so strong on such an important issue? She steps up to the plate again.
‘Yes, he should be out there on the street, raising consciousness, surely. I’m with you, Emmie, on this at least.’
Emma grins from ear to ear. At last someone agrees with her.
‘Poetry is the best way to raise consciousness. That’s why Shelley called us the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’
Bill doesn’t give up easily in his defence of poetry.
Just then the owner of the house comes into the kitchen.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ she asks. The shock jerks me out of that dream and I have no choice now other than listen to the choir of my divergent selves expand on their dissonant chorus.
For some mysterious reason, I find myself standing with them in a classroom I haven’t been near in the last 50 years or more. It’s the grammar school where I had my first job after college, teaching English Language and Literature, and this is the very classroom I taught my first lesson to the lower sixth. I walked into the room to find it empty. For a moment I had been puzzled until I heard all the noise from the classroom next door and realized the whole class had moved in there to confuse me. I never quite got control of that class for the rest of the year. With the first years it was easier.
The same rows of wooden desks on iron legs were spread before me. There was one huge difference. The whole of the back wall was covered with Munch’s picture of the sun and the sidewall with his evening street scene of skeletal pedestrians in top hats.
‘The Sun’ by Edvard Munch (for the source of the picture see link)
It took some effort to focus on the conversation again.
Fred, somewhat predictably given his psychological hat, comes at it from a somewhat different angle, standing at the front of the classroom, near the tall windows overlooking the bicycle sheds.
‘You’re wrong there, Bill. Educating the young should be his focus.’
It’s about time I chipped in.
‘At the risk of repeating myself, don’t any of you remember what we so nearly agreed last time we clashed?’
I’m not sure what the expression is on all their faces as they come into focus now my sand dream has finished fading. It could be embarrassment or confusion. I can’t be sure.
‘Hearticulture. Does that ring any bells?’
There was a faint murmur of recognition.
‘Didn’t we come close to agreeing that working to grow hearts, our own and other people’s, would draw on all our skills and interests, and meet all our concerns? Do you remember how I said at the end “All my life, I suspect, I’ve been unconsciously striving to achieve a creative fusion of all our different strands of activity, and now it seems we have achieved it. I think it will work because, for me and hopefully for all of you as well, the heart is at the core of us all and is a bridge between matter and spirit, earth and heaven.” And I asked if we could all pull together with this.’
Finally, they all seem to click with it. It’s as if this had all happened in a dream for them, which they forgot on waking. Just as with a dream, when the memory is triggered, fragments of it come back.
Emma is the first to speak, sitting in the front row with Peat and Indie.
‘Well, I for one thought it was a load of twaddle. It sounded as though all you were going to do was read a lot and talk to people. How is just talking to people going to change anything?’
‘I think I’m on the same page as Emmie still on this,’ Indie confirms, with Peat, her adopted son, nodding as he sits in-between them.
‘The problem is,’ Chris begins thinking aloud from the desk at the back, just in front of the sun. ‘Pete is the one who has to do something. None of us inside his head can act directly on the world. And he’s only going to do what he feels he can best do in the circumstances. I just can’t see him getting up every day and dashing to the nearest city with a ton of leaflets and a megaphone. He’s got to play to his gifts, and we are going to have to compromise some of our desires and support him.’
‘But we don’t have time for anything less. We have to demonstrate, lobby and protest until things change,’ Indie insisted.
‘I think I can see where Chris is coming from,’ murmured Fred, thoughtfully, moving to sit in the teacher’s place, facing the class. ‘Pete’s in his 70s. Sustained direct action is beyond him. Even his days of teaching the young are behind him now in terms of a regular classroom approach, sustained day after day, week in week out. He can run a short series of workshops, give talks, that sort of thing. But in terms of action that he can sustain over long periods of time, writing and blogging stand the best chance.’
This is doing a little to ease a long-standing sense of guilt I’ve harboured, feeling I am just not doing enough direct action of the consciousness-raising kind. Maybe I should stop punishing myself. It was sapping energy I could devote to study and writing. My divided state of mind distracted me from focusing for long on what I was reading or writing. ‘You are wasting time,’ a voice in my head would say. ‘You should do something more useful.’
I looked around wondering whose voice that was. One of the younger ones surely. The white-haired men in my head seem more sympathetic to this sedentary silver scribbler.
‘It’s good to hear Fred say that,’ I said, sending him a smile of gratitude, ‘but, much as I would like to, can I believe it?’
‘Not really,’ Emma butts in. ‘There are loads of people your age who go out on the streets to protest as often as they can. You never do.’
That word ‘never’ again.
Memories come back of decades ago, when I was out on the streets, shouting for the troops to come out of Ireland. But that reminded me too of why I grew disillusioned with that kind of action. Not only was it divisive, but, as I learned more about the politics of it all, the more lies and/or violence I found lurking not far under the surface. I definitely would not have wanted to demonstrate if I’d known what I do now.
I feel I have to respond to Emma.
‘I know that demonstrating against global warming is . . .’
‘Heating. It’s heating,’ Emma spits out in fury.
‘Sorry,’ I try to make amends. She’s hardly mollified.
‘. . . global heating is a worthy cause, but what worries me is whether the demonstrations will get more violent as frustration increases, rather as happens in other campaigns for other causes, now as it did in the past. That will just make the situation worse. There’s quite enough bitterness and division in our society already without adding to it. Not every movement has a credible Ghandi or Martin Luther King at its head working effectively against using violence.’
Print of the Peterloo Massacre published by Richard Carlile (for source of image see link)
The words of ‘Hope, the maiden most serene,’ in Shelley’s poem about the Peterloo Massacre, float at the back of my mind, but not clearly enough for me to quote them out loud.
“Let the fixed bayonet
Gleam with sharp desire to wet
Its bright point in English blood,
Looking keen as one for food.“Let the horsemen’s scimitars
Wheel and flash, like sphereless stars,
Thirsting to eclipse their burning
In a sea of death and mourning.“Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms, and looks which are
Weapons of an unvanquished war.”
I plead with them again.
‘I have to find another way of operating and I really need to have you all working wholeheartedly with me. Our hearts must all be as one on this, or we will be paralysed.’
There was a long silence.
‘Just how exactly are we ever going to reconcile our differences of view?’ Indie challenges me. ‘Three of us in here passionately believe that direct and unremitting action, protesting on the street and campaigning outside centres of power, are the only effective ways forward. And have you noticed two of us are women and one is a child? It’s because we care more about children than any of you men can ever possibly do, that we are so determined to protect their future from the damage you men have done. You men just want to sit back and pontificate.’
I could see we were a very long way from a consensus.
I make the same plea again. ‘I don’t know how we are going to achieve that, but we must, or the rest of our days will pass in fruitless wrangling.’
There is an even longer more unbearable silence.
References:
For the first and last post in the original Parliament of Selves sequence see links.
Everybody Means Something 