Chapter 21 - The Alien Listens For How It Feels To Be Free
Mental health was one of the subjects which could only be approached by the most indirect of means, via some passing comment whilst more directly discussing some other subject. The Quakers were the people I knew who had the clearest understanding of it. One Quaker had lost his wife to actual insanity where the only way he could prove faithful to her as a husband was to visit her in the asylum she lived in, a two hour drive each way once a fortnight. Another Quaker I knew had endured near-homelessness and rural isolation for several years after a difficult divorce. It was not as if the Quakers said 'Join us to experience being driven mad by God'. It was much more that the Quakers put into practice a radical egalitarianism which could incorporate the strange and upsetting events that happened around them much more than other churches could allow for. The events that happened happened to them were describable, the facts and sequences of events could be outlined in detail. There was no explanation as to why these events happened to them, but nothing could remove the sense of grit the Quakers had to have when life was hard for them, as if their grit were the grace that made their surviving unfortunate events possible.
I wanted to understand the process of this grit/grace because I felt that in some way such an understanding would help me understand how I survived the boarding school/care home experience. But of course the Quakers who had gained their grit through grace found talk about the process beyond them. At least I felt their sense of empathy towards me as I asked, but the answer I wanted to hear could not be given, and they understood how I had been tested in a way that could not be explained in easy words.
The nearest I got to any regular informed discussion about mental health was my repeatedly listening to the lyrics of 'Dark Side of The Moon' by Pink Floyd, which I had taped so that I could play the tape on my Walkman and walk in open spaces and have the music in my ears. Oh how I felt it every time I heard the lyric 'And when the band you're starts playing different tunes'.... On the other side of the tape I recorded 'Tubular Bells' by Mike Oldfield. I could flip the tape from one side to the other and back again whilst walking through greenery on my own as if the decade since both of those recordings were released had simply disappeared. I liked how music could create liminal spaces for the listener. I needed the spaces the music created, and those two recordings did that par excellence.
In materials from the library that I had read, variable mental health was recognised and accepted to the point where there were multiple theories about it. Any theory of which could be totally or partly true, depending on how the author thought the theories fitted around each other. But these books were written and published far away from where I was reading them. They were non-fiction in the wider world. But in the language that explained local life they became nearer fantasy and fiction, they said nothing about the way local people worked or chose how to explain themselves to each other.
When I visited the parental house as a guest one of the spaces I was welcome to go to was the attic. From the time my parents first married it had always been a store room. On and off between 1967 and 1982 it had doubled as 'my bedroom'. Though the character and way the room was arranged remained pure 'mother' and pure store room. One the identity problems I struggled to define was to do with the hidden dual identity of the room, in which Mother's values always won, and she denied there was ever any conflict. The room never felt like it was mine. But 'feel' mattered little to Mother. With that room the word 'mine' always applied to her, never to me. I was banned from saying that, Now I no longer lived there the conflict seemed reduced. I had taken away everything that I thought had personal or practical use to me to B Street, including a black and white television. Inviting me to enjoy that space now, as Mother did, felt like a polite but oddly hollow gesture.
But recognising how hollow a gesture it was would mean returning to old conflicts that my leaving had left moot. I should have resisted the repeat of the old emotional double-think. But I had was born into this emotional double think, such that recognising it, and resisting it before it pulled me in, was difficult to do.
Nonetheless I found ways of using the space well. The quiet was the best aspect of the room, so I used it as a reading room. I very much remember enjoying reading the 'The Hobbit' and the 'The Lord of The Rings' trilogy in that quiet, along with reading the book that had sold millions but which at the time defied categorisation, 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' by Robert M. Persig, another 1973 classic. I wish I knew what was in the zeitgeist that year that created this marked and perceptive otherness that so commented on this world, The book was part road movie narrative, part philosophical discussion, part motorbike mechanics manual, but most importantly the book discusses the extreme mental health issues of the main character, an ex teacher who rebels against the tight competitive and results based rules of the school he teachers in and he creates uproar. The twist in the story is that any near-normal narrative about rebellion in a school the pupil is the one to rebel, the teacher is meant to reinforce the rules, the rule(r)s remain, the rebellion works but the rules don't change. This book explored the question of what happens when those who are set up to reinforce the rules rebel and those who are used to being made to conform and compete with each, the pupils, are given an educational, and emotional space that they are not mature enough to know how to map or use. The further I got unto the book whilst lying on this single hospital bed the more I was saying 'Wow' repeatedly to nobody in particular as one astonishing dramatic episode and denouement led into another and another, such that I had no idea how the story would be resolved. It was the best book about a nervous breakdown that I could imagine myself reading.
Over the next ten years I read the book six times, to the the point where if anyone could quote the first part of the first sentence in the book I could quote the rest of that sentence from memory. I found the obscurity of the book to be deeply immersive, but then again I had been raised into obscurity, often alas an obscurity less engaging than Robert M. Persig wrote. Every so often Mother would engage me in 'a confidential word' where she did not mean 'confidential', what she meant 'secretive where I was not meant to know the secret.'. which was consistent with the parental double-think that soaked through the house.
We would always be alone in the living room of the parental house when she started, and she expected we would be alone for a while. The television would be turned off when a programme we liked ended. The first phrase would be 'I need to have a confidential word with you', then she would explain, say, the ill health of Uncle Bill or Aunty Pat, which I knew about prior to her saying anything. But she needed to assume control the flow of information towards me so that the narrative I had was the version of events she approved of and that would keep me from asking anything. What I knew I knew because I had asked around. She would speak in muted but direct tones about, say, the relative who had cancer, and then embroider the subject sufficient to obscure the earlier more direct information. I was meant to never interrupt her as she spoke. What she said and she meant were always different, but I was never allowed to speak and summarise her words because my summary would expose that. Because I was barred from summarising what she said I rarely remembered it intact. Her closing phrase was 'This conversation goes no further than these four walls', which I found it easy to imagine mishearing as 'This conversation is more for these four walls than for your good or your moral improvement'. Not long after Mother's closing benediction and the silence after it I could feel the four walls taking back the words that she had shared with me, and taking them from my mind. Later it would seem as if I had never listened and she had never spoken, as if neither of us had ever been alone with the four walls.
Not surprisingly, given the above in which Mother's 'tin-ear' values reigned, I often felt myself to 'needy' among my 'hippy' friends when felt that I wanted to be listened to. But I had no need to feel that way with them. The way they dealt with speech and ideas was the same way that they dealt with music. Listen directly and give it time. Listening to each other was a standard part of the friendship that we gave each other, whatever the different levels of concentration each of us had, just as it was standard to not knowingly waste each other's time when another person gave us personal space. Whilst we knew that listening and taking our turn to speak was what mattered. None of us knew of any therapist. So we did not know what they knew about listening that we did not know, and we did not know what they didn't know either. For us, listening was about talk and trust.
Talk of depression between us was not taboo, but it usually proved intractable and so after the subject had been aired enough, we changed the conversation. I must have been the one talk about depression. The reason that the conversation moved on was usually because the discussion around it had not raised even a limited solution to the depression. We could no more identify a solution to one person's depression than we could identify the source of the depression from the way the depression's owner spoke. We did not let dead ends in conversations become bigger or more permanent blockages between us. Being younger than my friends by a few years I was junior in all this and 'playing catch up' more than I wanted to. But they allowed that role.
Some of my friends were followers of Guru Maharaj Ji. They could talk and listen with the greatest concentration and conviction that I had ever seen in anyone up to that point. If they had converted that energy into a sales pitch they would be wealthy people. I preferred the Quakers in spite of how they appeared to have far less energy than any of the followers of Guru Maharaj Ji had. Putting an energy into silence, listening, and good deeds done with the least amount of fuss or flummery was a very different modus operandi to the the charismatic example of the followers of Guru Maraj Ji, but I thought that the Quakers were ultimately more useful in how they behaved. I also liked the Quakers because they accepted people who were depressed at face value, however unknown the source of the depression.
The followers of Guru Maharaj Ji had their personal rituals, which they used to get themselves into a particular place, mentally. Then they would talk about most subjects with this strange but natural intensity where at their most passionate they would talk about how well their guru would replace all government and fix the whole wide world. They made it easy to imagine the original fervour and ambition that early Christians might have had. Such intensity was rare. I admired the verbal intimacy of it enough to record as being remarkable. In my old diaries the phrase 'Had intense conversation with.... ' was repeated where if the conversation were a therapy session it would have been wonderful, but seemingly their rituals and talk could not address why I felt depressed. I never recorded the details of what was so intense to me at the time, in that respect my listening was like listening to the confidential words with Mother, what we talked about evaporated after the conversations ended. Maybe trying to capture the mechanism behind the intensity would have been to dilute it, but if it could have given me greater self belief I would have liked that. Most likely I was too tired to think clearly when later I was writing down the content of my days. I admired the followers of Guru Maharaj Ji as friends but I had my own faith, underdeveloped and internally inconsistent as it was. Their words reflected a deep immersion in what they felt, which was something I saw as lacking in myself, except when I spoke about music and read about it. There was no limit to the depth of my admiration for the writings in The New Musical Express, which mixed seriousness with humour in a way I read nowhere else.
The NME were very much supporters of CND, which I found to be a good reason to like it as a magazine. When I resigned from my local CND as secretary it was a rest to read about CND via the NME and not have to worry about what the local CND were up against. My resignation from CND was partly to help me deal more singularly with the depression that I felt. I was more relieved than I could say when they found a new secretary, but whatever rest I got from resigning, the fuller relief that I sought was still hidden from me. For having a more agreeable life outside of the agenda set by parental house I was more able to explore ideas that my parents dismissed then previously.
I had a series of appointments with a junior social worker in social services, I forget their name. They listened well enough that how they listened had a surface similarity to what some Quakers had done for me in the recent past. In the short term this made me feel a lot better, particularly when they set me up doing voluntary work that was within my means and abilities.
Looking back I felt deceived. I had expected Social Services to be less opaque than they were. My listener and Social Services knew a lot more about me than they let on. They withheld from me the knowledge that at the time I approached them they still had old, only recently inactive, files on me that would have explained a lot about the origins of my depression to both the social worker and me. It would have been painful for me to absorb the contents of those files, but ultimately it would have been a relief to know why my education was shaped the way it was. I can only conclude now that the files would have mentioned too many people who at the time were still living and wanted to remain unmentioned. The content of the files would have explicitly revealed the poor choices and character behind their actions.
But an interesting 'what if' lingered over my head which I was blind to. By the time I my depression had lifter such that I could think clearly enough to ask Social Service for my files they said that they had routinely destroyed the files since all files were routinely destroyed seven years since the last entry. If the last entry was when I was sixteen then the files were still there when I was twenty one and I sought social services listening skills, and to volunteer. The files were gone by the time I was twenty five, the age at which I had the clarity of thought I needed to ask to see them. What the files once contained remains moot, a mystery as does how much the way the information in the files was written was in such a way that it only ever served the Social Services, and what it said about me or any other person was not that perceptive and rather secondary.
What was slightly creepy and retrospectively may have added to my depression was The secrecy of the Social Services with their filing system, which I learned about only after the files had been, with a similar secrecy, destroyed. But back to when I was twenty one and struggling with living alone, then I found my most honest refuge when I frequently visited a Quaker friend, Keith, who was an older male in whom I surely hoped would be the kinder father figure I had never experienced in real life.
And so it turned out. He was patient and transparent with my disquiet in such a way as left me more quiet. Where I spoke and could not hear myself he got through to me in a way that nobody else had. What he taught me with his few words and huge patience was where to not look for respite because it was not to be found there. He also as honest as the father figure I wanted to be when he slowly made me realise that he was in need of the same respite, He too lacked answers for his own questions. After seeing him for a short while I saw him less and only in mixed company rather than in private. We both knew he had been more of a help to me than I ever could be to him. What he achieved was to get me more engaged with Christianity generally, rather than get fixed on particular Christians as if they had better answers than I had access to; he taught me that I was the equal of whoever I talked to, and whoever talked to me, if I made the right efforts. His confidence in me bore fruit. Over the next eight years I sought to find in both my reading and my Christianity a more grounded defence against depression. But it was slow work and it was all worked through the most unlikely of ways.
Between reading people or reading books, reading books was definitely the preferred choice. That says nothing about whether I chose informative and uninformative books, or about how easily I might be distracted by television, music I liked, or BBC Radio 1. But I had to teach myself as to what read, I had no guide to help me. I had been unguided from my being eleven years old where the boarding school/care home checked that I could read, but never had a reading programme for me to follow. Getting books out of the library helped. It is lost to history what conversations I attempted with the staff of the school and the public library to help me decide what to read. There may have been some discussions, there may have been none. What I am sure of was that a pupil who enjoyed reading in the barding school/care home was the exception that proved the norm; 'boys dislike reading'.
At the age of twenty I had to guess what to read and why to read it. The foundation my family gave me for reading was inadequate. It was limited to the red top press and the problem pages of women's magazines, where female biology and decision making processes were rendered tastefully opaque. My favourite columnist in the red top press was Keith Waterhouse who appeared in The Daily Mirror twice a week, he made Socialism seem inclusive and funny, he was the wise and funny uncle that I did not know that I never had. His columns were similar in style to some of writing in the NME, playful discursions around a given subject that even when the writing 'went off topic' were still on topic. After Keith Waterhouse left The Daily Mirror my new favourite column in that paper was the poetry column. It was there because the new owner, Robert Maxwell, also owned the publishing houses that published the poetry which I thought it was great. I liked the poetry column that much I cut that section out of the paper every day and kept the cuttings to read again later. I wish now that I had known to cut out and kept as many of the Waterhouse columns when they were there, read cumulatively they would have made a good read and been the guide to the party politics of Waterhouse's times that my parents could never have offered me.
When Keith the Quaker encouraging me towards a general Christianity, rather than to fix upon particular male adult Christians who I unknowingly thought I might find the father figure that I never realised I wanted so badly in, one of the better side effects of his advice was that he encouraged me towards the world of Christian books. After six years of my own random reading programme of secular literature, where themes in it ranged from socialist, the collected works of George Orwell being 'the cannon' for me, to the utopian/dystopian themes of modern sci-fi writing, which was a sideways way of dealing with Party Politics with many side avenues in between,
I found Christian literature hard to map. 'Buzz' the Christian lifestyle magazine helped me to discover which Christian authors were good for learning from, because they showed the grit and insight of my secular reading and which authors were bland. I appreciated it hugely when I found Christian authors who wrote coherently and in depth about mental health issues, and made the language around mental health work well around the language of faith, when elsewhere the two ideas were mostly kept apart. These authors were often American Christian psychiatrists and therapists and there was a level of syncretism, a melding of Christianity with some other belief system that was par for the course with such writing which increased in me the capacity to forgive.
I never found any book where a Christian had the humility to dialogue with a sensible and calm homosexual in an informed way, but at least the books I learned from systematically mapped feelings of isolation, and being lonely, in a way that reduced the isolation.
Please find Chapter 22 here.
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