I am in between switching my focus from one Eliot (Thomas Stearns) to another (George). I need more time to ponder on why Middlemarch, her masterpiece, resonates so much more strongly with me than The Waste Land. Given that George Eliot is praised for the skill with which she conveys the consciousness within, it seems appropriate to republish this sequence which is a fictional attempt to project my inscape into words.
At the end of the previous post Fred Mires and Chris Humfreeze had disappeared, and I was faced with a complete stranger,
‘Where have they gone?’ I ask in a panic. I can’t face the trio of activists all by myself.
‘I’m still here,’ the grey-haired bearded stranger said with a faint Italian accent.
‘What d’you mean still here? I’ve never seen you before.’
‘It’s true you have not seen this body before, but my thoughts and values are almost the same as theirs. I explore consciousness, believe in a higher self and value forms of meditation. So, what’s missing?’
‘You look so different. There’s only one of you for a start.’
There’s an uncomfortable silence.
‘Who are you anyway?’ I ask grumpily. I’m still feeling unsettled, disappointed and under threat.
‘Roberto Ammergioli, at your service.’
The bells that name rang were audibly unmistakable. Was I really sitting opposite to someone close in thought and practice to one of my favourite therapies? If he was, then I had a powerful ally against the dogmatic activists.
‘Am I right then that you combine all that’s best in Humfreeze and Mires? How did the merger happen? I never saw it coming.’
‘Basically, I think, they felt as though they will be a stronger combination blended than they would have been as individuals. They couldn’t make up their minds about which of them should carry their image forward, so they created me instead.’
As he speaks I see him gazing intently over my shoulder in the direction of the door. Instinctively, I turn my head as I listen to him speak, and spot Indie walking towards us holding hands with Peat. Immediately I wonder whether Emmie and Indie have blended, only to hear Emmie shouting from the counter asking whether Peat wants a nibble as well as a drink. He says not.
‘Who are you?’ Indie asks abruptly of Roberto.
I don’t wait for him to answer.
‘He’s a blend of Fred and Chris?’
‘And where’s Bill?’
She doesn’t seem phased.
‘Inside my head somewhere,’ I say.
‘Well, that’s two less on your side,’ she jeers. ‘We’re in the majority now.’
‘Did you know this was coming? I ask. ‘You don’t seem in the least surprised.’
‘Why would I be surprised about anything that happens here, for heavens sake? It’s a miracle I came back, and it’s even more of one that Peat is with us, isn’t it, love?’
She smiles at him and he grins back.
‘I kind of expected that some of us could disappear at some point for some reason, just in the same way as we two did the opposite before.’
Emmie comes to the table with a tray of drinks for the three of them.
Peat looks pleased with his purple milkshake.
‘You look happy, Indie,’ Emmie greets her ‘What’s been going on?’
‘There’s three of us and only two of them,’ she smirks.
‘Come again.’
‘Bill’s done a bunk into Pete’s brain and Chris and Fred have blended into this old man. Sorry, what was your name again?’
‘Roberto Ammergioli.’ He spoke for himself this time.
Emmie sits down next to me looking slightly stunned, while Indie and Peat join Robert on his side of the table. I guess the old guard, of which she is one, whether she likes it or not, were not expecting anything like this to happen.
‘Talk me through what this means exactly, but do it slowly.’
Roberto picks up Emmie’s challenge.
‘We’re all just aspects of Pete, though it doesn’t feel like it. We come into existence to solve a problem in his mind, though I guess he feels we arrived to make trouble. When the time comes we will dissolve into something else more expressive of the current dynamic going on. When we disappear in this way we have not gone completely. We are integrated into something larger in his mind and have a broader more unified function. His ideal would be for us all to fuse together into one enriched and higher consciousness. And that day may come if we can learn to work together constructively.’
‘I’m not sure I want that,’ Emmie responds grumpily. ‘I like being me, even if I am frustrated by the way things are in here. Thank goodness we’ve got completely rid of the poet at least. I never did buy that unacknowledged legislator crap. This Jennings woman you’re so fond of at the moment, Pete, even if her poems were absolutely brilliant, sold only 225,000 copies of her stuff. You’re blog’s only just past that in terms of hits. That’s never going to change the world anytime soon. Protest songs and rap probably do better than that by a long shot. Stories are the best, though. Look at Pullman and his Dark Materials – 18 million sold by 2017 –and Rowling’s Harry Potter has reached more than 500 million, and that’s not counting the film versions. If you want to sit at your desk and change the way people think, why don’t you try that for a change?’
She pauses for effect, then, before I can speak, thrusts in the final dagger. ‘As that’ll never happen, why don’t you join us on the streets?’
Roberto rescues me from my speechless state.
‘Everyone has a different set of skills and gifts. What counts is when you put the skills of many together into one pot. Changing the way the world works is not about some single genius best-seller breaking all records, as Rowling did. It’s about hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people, contributing their efforts, however modest, to bettering the way the world works. George Eliot put it beautifully at the end of her masterpiece, Middlemarch, when she wrote: ‘the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in and unvisited tombs.’ When Rowling got rich, she used her money to make changes in the world. It’s not just the book-sales that count in her case. It’s how she uses her fame and her profits. At some point, hopefully before the climate crisis does, the numbers of those working for our collective good will reach a tipping point, and . . . ’
‘Stop right there,’ Emmie butted in. ‘That is exactly the problem. We don’t have the time to reach that positive tipping point by the methods you describe, before the climate topples into its lethal Armageddon.’
‘But,’ said Roberto, calmly, ‘if, in our impatience, we use methods that will alienate millions and divide us in our efforts, we won’t achieve anything either. We have to get the balance right.’
‘What Roberto is saying comes close to the position I am striving to believe in.’ I find my voice at last. ‘The kind of dynamic altruism and collective will needed to address this issue, and others that face us, such as polluting plastics and gross and oppressive inequality, require efforts that have to draw on the very qualities they seek to promote. As one Bahá’í thinker puts it, Noble aims must be sought through noble means. Anything less will make things worse not better. And before you tell me, I know that I am relatively rubbish as a writer, whether in prose or poetry, but in terms of my skill set as a whole, I think it’s my best bet in terms of the kind of issue we’re discussing. And …’
I say this a bit louder because I can see Emmie is about to interrupt.
‘I don’t think I have the energy now to sustain anything more than that nowadays.’
‘That’s just an excuse,’ Indie steams. ‘We can all find reasons for doing less than needs to be done right now. What we need is the guts and drive to get out there and make a difference NOW!’
Peat has stopped sucking on his milkshake through the straw, and has tears in his eyes.
‘There won’t be a world for me when I grow up,’ he whispers. ‘We can destroy in decades now what it took millions of years to create. We have to stop.’
We all fall silent. There is no way round this point at least. Humanity as a whole has to change its habits, habits that mainly in the West have taken centuries to evolve. I remember the submission to the Committee on Climate Change that a psychologist has recently made. Not just legislation, but behavioural shifts by millions of people have to start to play their part. However, I also remember what Dana Greene wrote about how Elizabeth Jennings faced formidable obstacles and yet won for herself a large following of readers, something that expanded the poetry-reading audience substantially. If she could do something like that, why couldn’t I, if I were sufficiently at one with my selves, even at my relatively advanced age?
The very idea of such a challenge sends a shiver down my spine. Am I too much of a coward to risk it? Maybe there is something I could learn from my activists inside. What they are doing may not be my cup of tea, but how they are doing it might be something I can take on board for my own purposes. I can get bolder as get older!
I decide to speak, as no one else wants to.
‘I know you and Indie see me as some dithering Hamlet, infirm of purpose, standing mammering on the brink of disaster. And maybe part of me is like that for a reason. I’ve spoken before about needing to have the courage of my confusion sometimes. But there’s another reason as well. It’s because I’m divided inside, at war with myself, one part pulling one way, other parts pulling in different directions. We’ve all seen that with our own eyes, no?’’
For once they seem to agree with me. That’s a good start.
‘If we could combine together your blazing courage and Roberto’s wisdom with my smouldering creativity, for what it might be worth, to further a purpose we could all agree on, maybe we could just get out of this bind and do something really useful. You saw me publish Elizabeth Jennings’s words earlier. You know the ones: But poetry must change and make/The world seem new in each design./It asks much labour, much heartbreak,/Yet it can conquer in a line. It wouldn’t be easy to change what I write in that way, as she says, but it would be really amazing if we could pull that off. Maybe not in poetry, though I’m not writing that off at this stage. Dylan managed to get his songs recognised as literature and he’s got a huge following. Yes, yes, I know I can’t sing, but maybe we could do something similar, if less ambitious, with our words somehow. Writing is an act, even though many don’t see it that way, and it’s more powerful if it comes from a life lived in tune with its message, so we have to act out our values as well as write about them.’
Indie, Emmie and Peat aren’t leaping out of their seats with enthusiasm for this idea, but they’re aren’t leaping down my throat to rubbish it either.
‘It this a plan worth pondering on then?’ I ask.
‘We’ll sleep on it,’ Indie says, with a sideways glance at the others.
‘I thought you didn’t sleep’ I react.
‘Just joking!’ Emmie grins.
At just that point there is a thunderous knocking on the front door, which jerks me out of my sleep. Yet again moving this forwards will have to wait until another day.
Everybody Means Something 
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