Shikasta revisited 2

There was a time in my life - and I think it started in my childhood and just carried on, when I used to experience what I can only describe as a deep well of sadness. It used to come and go, sometimes just a background thing, sometimes overwhelming in its intensity. I still have it to a certain extent - it's why I weep in films or certain passages of books (Shikasta is one) with alarming frequency.  I kind of shook it off as a defining part of me about fifteen  years ago, with  a newer more outwardly successful period of my life, but it still returns to possess me at times.  It's strangely not unpleasant, not like  a cut or a blow or  a terrible event, or feeling cold or angry or frightened, but it is quite debilitating and all-consuming when it happens. It's like I get absolutely overwhelmed with empathy - it might be a film, a book, or, often, having children, it was seeing some small or large  hurt or disappointment that I could not remedy, and the distress would soak through my consciousness as if I were plunged into a pool of sadness and it had permeated every part of me. At home, out in the street I would have to exert enormous power not to openly weep, I wouldn't be able to speak without choking over the words.

The defining pull or feel of the "zone" though which the protaganist, Johor, approaches Shikasta, is described as nostalgia:

"Zone Six can present to the unprepared every sort of check, delay, and exhaustion. This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion – ‘nostalgia’ is their word for it – which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined. Chimeras, ghosts, phantoms, the half-created and the unfulfilled throng here,..."
Lessing, Doris (2012-05-31). Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1) (Kindle Locations 115-117). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

In Zone 6 lost souls congregate in what was a lush and green place, but now is dust and desert, waiting for the chance to reincarnate and "try again".   The narrative then describes Johor's meeting with some of the people that he had known, and  the distress, the grief, the pull that he feels for them - he sums it up like this:

" Already depleted by grief, that emotion which of all others is the most useless..."
Lessing, Doris (2012-05-31). Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1) (Kindle Location 204). HarperCollins Publishers. Kindle Edition. 

And it does feel, of all the emotions the most useless in terms of getting anything done - and yet, and yet, without the sensitivity and empathy that so debilitates me at times I would not be who I am, I would not have achieved the things I have done.

Doris Lessing was a pretty direct and no nonsense sort of person - the few times I met her we had short conversations about writing, the coffee, nothing of great significance, but she always had this questioning, inquisitive mindset.  "What do you write about?" I remember her saying when we were sitting together before a seminar in London, and she was genuinely interested. But she catches this sense of the strength of emotions, the importance of them and the destructive nature of their not being kept in check, not being recognised for what they are, across all her books I suspect her sense of empathy was just as strong as anybody's. 
There's a story she tells of walking though post war bombed out London, with a small child, cold foggy, and she is walking with tears streaming down her cheeks. A man stopped her and said "What is the matter?" She answered him, and then he just said "Oh well something will turn up", and walked off. As I recall the interviewer said something along the lines of "oh, that's terrible", and I think she said, "No, it was the best thing he could have said, because, of course, something did turn up."

So lastly, a talk that Doris Lessing gave, one of a series on Sufism in that inordinately posh voice of hers - don't let it put you off.
Doris Lessing talks about- well quite a lot actually

I've started reading Shikasta again, partly as a homage, partly because it is one of those books that underpins and supports me, and partly because it is one of Doris Lessing's best and greatest books, often misunderstood and often disliked by readers for one of two reasons:

1.  It's science fiction, and I don't read science fiction (subtext "I'm not a boy, I'm a feminist")
2. It's not science fiction, because it's not Heinlen, Arthur C Clarke etc. (subtext "I'm not a feminist, I'm a boy")

This how readers create their own worlds in spite of the words - the kind of readers I hate - they resist what's in front of them and twist it to their own world view, won't try anything new, won't think anything new. Dead from the neck up. It reminds me of a Nasrudin* story: 

Nasrudin met two men by the side of the road who boast about their tastes:
"I only eat the finest halva, studded with pistachios and almonds, wrapped in palm leaves."
"Well I only eat the finest saffron rice with chicken and goji berries  and acai berries from the deepest reaches of the Amazon forest."
Nasrudin pauses to think.
"Well I only eat wheat, ground up and carefully mixed with water, yeast, and salt, and then baked at the proper temperature for the proper time."

Doris Lessing was good on reading - said pick up all sorts of books - if you don't like them, if you get bored after the first few pages read somethings else.  Sometimes it's not the right time for you to read a book  - but you may come back to it years later and find that now is the right time.  This happened to me with Henrich Bohl's Group Portrait with Lady - borrowed from Candice in about 1977 maybe, got fifty pages in then couldn't get any further.  Picked it up may be twenty years or so later and read it avidly all the way through, what a great book I thought. Although I can't remember a thing about it now.  But Shikasta still haunts me in the sense of sitting in my consciousness as a kaleidoscopic introduction to a lyrical but stern sense of possibility.

From the first page:

"This is a catastrophic universe, always; and subject to sudden reversals, upheavals, changes, cataclysms, with joy never anything but the song of substance under pressure forced into new forms and shapes."

Shikasta,  Doris Lessing p3

There are four other books, all radically different in content and perspective, that give you this thoughtful and feeling distance from the obsessions and givens of our age.

*Nasrudin has a Facebook page now. Of fucking course. Lots of the stories are there with irritatingly little explanations of their meaning underneath. Ignore these as they will limit the way the stories can sit in your consciousness for decades and suddenly pop out.  In the Sufi tradition whenever one Nasrudin story is told, then six more should be told in immediate succession, so that, to paraphrase a lot of explanation and guff, maybe, just, maybe something from one of the stories will stick, usefully.

Here's an apple for the storyteller, and apple for the audience, and an apple for the one person who really listened

Oral saying I heard somewhere- I think I got this from Pat. 

I remember trotting it out at the end of a peformance at a festival, smallish audience of about twenty in a yurt.  Joss came up to me afterwards and said she didn't like that last saying - look at your audience, she said, they all really listened. 

Going for Blake and Boethius

I was reading Northrop Fry's 1957 essay, Blake after two centuries on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, which is good in itself, especially in that he lets the poems speak for themselves, although always with that maddening dissatisfying absence of any explanation.

 "Such a poem.. as The Sick Rose", he says, "Has the power of speaking with the unanswerable authority of poetry itself". 

 I can imagine one of the more self-satisfied Sussex literature tutors I had leaning back with a great deal of self generated self satisfaction and quoting that sentence. (Actually to be fair there are just two tutors that I imagine doing that, there were some great tutors as well.)

The Sick Rose

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

He's right of course, not to pander to the English undergraduate that I was, plundering any book for some kind of unequivocal sense of meaning so that I could write the next essay.  It's worth quoting him (good ol' Northrop) in full:

"One may always meet a poem with a set of questions designed to avoid its impact: what does it mean; why is it considered a good poem; is it morally beneficial; does it say profound things about life, and so forth"

Love that " set of questions designed to avoid its impact".  Of course in meandering though this book a bit more this morning I do of course find a detailed exposition of what The Sick Rose means that is hilarious in both  its plausibility - it is one reading I suppose, and in its wrong headed limiting of the poem. I'll have to quote the fucker  to show you what I mean. One bit will have to suffice as it's too long to tap in all of it.

"The "Sick Rose" poem is the concrete expression of Blake's experience of the corruptive effects of 'social' love upon creative sexuality"

So says Wolf Mankowitz in his essay "The Songs of Experience", in the Casebook series book "William Blake Songs of Innocence and Experience", edited by Margaret Bottrall. He also says, and I quote and paraphrase, that it is "immediately apparent" that the rose is mortal, that the worm is evil and the "bed of crimson joy" is obviously the rose's sexuality etc etc. 

But I could equally make the case that The Sick Rose is, amongst other things obvs. an allegory of anal sex - i.e. rose as - well use your imagination,  "dark secret love" and so on. 

But all this is a digression from the main thing I found in another essay in this book, which must be left over from my Sussex undergraduate days in the seventies, - Kathleen Raine's rather dry essay "Blake's debt to antiquity" where she traces Blake's debt to Alchemy through such writers as Boehme and Paracelsus.  There's a wonderful bit of academic speak where she says, speaking of one of Blake's verse letters where he name checks the writers above, 

"From these passages we may gather [I just love this phrase haha ]that what fired Blake's imagination in the  Alchemical philosophy was the teaching of the famous Smaragdine Table of Hermes Trismegistus" 

But that isn't my main thing here: reading this I realised that William Blake was the missing link in two shows that I wanted to write and perform - one being The Celestial Tavern, - God's pub, me being St Peter being security on the door, an idea cooked up with Foz years ago, the other being a show based on Boethius' " Consolation of Philosophy".  I'm not sure how they will fit together in the final version, The Tyger will figure strongly - and one passage from the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, which is one of the most evocative and beautiful titles for a poem I know of, as Roger McGough realised as well.

Does not the eagle scorn the earth & despise the treasures beneath? 

But the mole knoweth what is there, & the worm shall tell it thee. 

Does not the worm erect a pillar in the mouldering churchyard,

And a palace of eternity on the jaws of the hungry grave?

Over his porch these words are written: ‘Take thy bliss O Man!

And sweet shall be thy taste, and sweet thy infant joys renew!

There's something here worth telling, worth playing with , worth putting together. Worms, eagles, tygers and a gentle mention for the horses of instruction.