Wilfred Bion

Doing My Thing: Silas Marner Day 24

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a bit thats gone very wild
Part of the front garden that is reverting to nature, July 30

‘All things are moral’ writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in the essay ‘Discipline’ in his extended essay, Nature. It is what it is, and we see that.

The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him. Who can estimate this? Who can guess how much firmness the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman?

Emerson, deeply influenced by Wordsworth, believed that  the nature of experience itself, especially our experience of nature, teaches us (shows, demonstrates) a universal morality: right ways to live and be.

That’s a massively contentious position now, when we are all more or less libertarians –  we each do what we want and we don’t want anyone to make rules for us. Rules, even perhaps the idea of the  moral, they’re out  – unless it is us trying to control the behaviour of someone we don’t agree with and for whom we would definitely like to make some rules.

I’ve been thinking about the previous Silas Marner reading (here) and about moral teaching in George Eliot, and in Shared Reading. When I first met (my hero/mother) Doris Lessing  she asked me what I was working on for my ph.d and I replied: George Eliot. (Visionary Realism: George Eliot to Doris Lessing 1986) ‘Oh, never liked her much’, Doris said, supremely dismissive, ‘too moral.’

I sat  alongside my hero/mother in the taxi, devastated. She didn’t love my other  hero/mother. How could I hold those two bits of reality together? But nature was holding them together – there they both were, alongside each other in reality. What I had to do was learn from that, accept the difference. Doris had grown up in a post-Victorian age and, as a Communist, lived through the  Stalinist show trials of the 1950s. Now she was a Sufi disciple of Idris Shah. She didn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t  like the idea of moral teaching (though she was a terrific layer down of laws herself).

But I,  still trying to make myself a livable life that fitted me badly needed ‘moral’ in my life. That was one reason I was so affected by Doris Lessing’s novel, Shikasta. That was why we were in this taxi together in the first place!

Moral didn’t seem like rules or  other people’s laws to me, it felt like necessary equipment for staying alive. I’ve written about the need for  a lifesaver and how my own difficult early life fed into the creation of The Reader here.

The Reader  began from an impulse, not an idea. I had no plan, no worked-out ambition. I had an instinct, a feeling, that what had worked for me – hard reading – might work for other people. Twenty years on, since the first issue of The Reader magazine, fifteen since the  first Shared Reading group,  two things matter to me: the experience in the group and the content of the reading matter. It’s easier to legislate – to set parameters, a quality framework  –  for the experience of being in the group than it is for the content of the reading matter.

And as the future unfolds, I believe that everybody is going to do their own thing –  James Brown had it right.

The way I like, it is the way it is,
I got mine, don’t worry ’bout his

James Brown, Sex Machine (Get On Up)

I accept – grudgingly but even so, I do accept – that all kinds of readers will  want to read all kinds of things with their groups.  I can’t force a reading list on anyone. But for quality control,  surely the key question must be: does it get to the heart of a real human experience?

For me, personally,  a lot of that real human experience is about choices, how to live. I’m always looking for that info and I think the world needs it, as much as I do. George Eliot is full of such moral stuff, and that’s why if I only had one stab at a novel with a group I’d probably be going for Silas Marner.

Picking up where we were last time, Godfrey Cass has struck lucky in that his secret wife, the opium addict, Molly, has just died, before she could expose their marriage to his family.

I read this, and on one level I am thinking of Cass, while on another am thinking of myself. but thinking is not quite the right  word. It is more like Emerson’s sense of simply being there, absorbing, learning something from it.

And when events turn out so much better for a man than he has had reason to dread, is it not a proof that his conduct has been less foolish and blameworthy than it might otherwise have appeared? When we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not altogether unmeritorious, and that it is only just we should treat ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune.

I pick up on the word ‘naturally’ here. The complication of human nature as an element within nature is that our minds, unlike rocks or stones or trees, can lie, can twist things. In nature there is a firm and visible cause and effect – as  ye sow, so shall ye reap – but for humans there’s so often the possibility of  manipulation or tricks or even just luck, as here. Luckily for Cass, things are turning out differently:

And when events turn out so much better for a man than he has had reason to dread…

I see first ‘turn out’ – an immoral sort of result, isn’t it – as if you had nothing to do with it?  Just happens. Lucky! And how oddly ‘turn out’ sits alongside ‘dread’, that huge Old Testament word, which seems to come from a different place  in the human mind altogether. If you forget the ‘dread’,  perhaps the strongest natural warning in the human pysche,  and Cass is going to forget it if he can,  then  it doesn’t feel too good for your survival rate. I think it is in Daniel Deronda – written at the end of her career – that George Eliot has Gwendolen  says she’s going to hang to to her ‘dread’ and try to learn from it…

But, staying with the text,  human choice is able to interrupt the  pattern of seed-time and harvest, to change the course of nature. Godfrey forgetting the seed, can go from ‘dread’ to ‘happier’ in one wink of the eye:

Where, after all, would be the use of his confessing the past to Nancy Lammeter, and throwing away his happiness?–nay, hers? for he felt some confidence that she loved him. As for the child, he would see that it was cared for: he would never forsake it; he would do everything but own it. Perhaps it would be just as happy in life without being owned by its father, seeing that nobody could tell how things would turn out, and that–is there any other reason wanted?–well, then, that the father would be much happier without owning the child.

I look back at the Emerson, and wonder about how natural moral teaching works and why it sometimes – as in Cass here, or myself, countless times, fails. Emerson says;

The moral influence of nature upon every individual is that amount of truth which it illustrates to him.

What is needed in the human being to receive the moral influence which is naturally present? Sometimes, perhaps often, our twisted nature wants the easiest way out – nature may be there illustrating but who is looking at the pictures?

As for the child, he would see that it was cared for: he would never forsake it; he would do everything but own it. Perhaps it would be just as happy in life without being owned by its father, seeing that nobody could tell how things would turn out, and that–is there any other reason wanted?–well, then, that the father would be much happier without owning the child.

Here’s Cass doing his thing – using one word, having one experience (‘he would never forsake it’) and doing a little self-trickery sleight of hand to change everything  (‘he would do everything but own it’) Those two  clauses cancel each other out.  I looked up forsake in the Etymological Dictionary – yes, it has an emotional resonance which is quite undercut by the legal  tone of ‘own’.

What is the ‘happier’ Cass aspires to? He wants to get back to a state before he had married Molly, where he can marry Nancy Lammeter, as if he were a free man.  That’s not actually possible. Nature – in the form of what actually is –  is telling him, and us, so. Nature is demonstrating – there’s the child to prove it!  – seed-time and harvest.

All kinds of odd things are going through my mind – because it’s been in the news today I’m thinking of the Prince of Wales wanting Camilla Parker Bowles after he had married Diana, but also of the Grenfell Tower and the Council’s desire for an ‘economical’ solution to the cladding issue, also things of my own where I’ve ignored a bit of reality in order to try to  create another bit that suits me better.  All this is human, so often appalling, but part of our nature. I’m thinking of reading Bion and the need to sift through all that detritus. Psychoanalysis might help Godfrey Cass – one day – not now, because he is still intent on getting his own version of reality into reality, against nature. But he may come to a time when he needs it.

How long does ‘happier’ with an untruth last? Until your moral luck runs out…and the nature of reality shows itself again. Let’s see what happens.

‘Holday over, time to work’ was the grim but realistic motto found  in a Fortune Cookie by one of my children at a New Year’s day dinner during GCSE year. My summer break, with all that reading, is over today and I’m back to work tomorrow. Hope I will make the transition back into daily reading and writing routine but bear with me… it may be rocky for the first week or so.

 

George Eliot’s people in one of Bion’s groups: Silas Marner Day 23

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pines.JPG
Pine at water’s edge, Kotor Bay, 22 July

I’ve been reading Silas Marner intermittently here for a couple of months – search ‘Silas Marner’ to get  the posts. Last time, I’d read, in chapter XII, the journey of Molly, the opium-addicted secret wife of Godfrey Cass, towards Raveloe; her collapse, the child’s wandering into Silas’s cottage, Silas’  fit and finding of the child, his feeding of her…

Chapter XIII  begins with Silas carrying the child to Squire Cass’s house. So, here’s Godfrey Cass, a man at a  high-spirited Christmas party:

But now all eyes at that end of the room were bent on Silas Marner; the Squire himself had risen, and asked angrily, “How’s this?– what’s this?–what do you do coming in here in this way?”

“I’m come for the doctor–I want the doctor,” Silas had said, in the first moment, to Mr. Crackenthorp.

“Why, what’s the matter, Marner?” said the rector. “The doctor’s here; but say quietly what you want him for.”

“It’s a woman,” said Silas, speaking low, and half-breathlessly, just as Godfrey came up. “She’s dead, I think–dead in the snow at the Stone-pits–not far from my door.”

Godfrey felt a great throb: there was one terror in his mind at that moment: it was, that the woman might not be dead. That was an evil terror–an ugly inmate to have found a nestling-place in Godfrey’s kindly disposition; but no disposition is a security from evil wishes to a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity.

Godfrey has recognised the baby as his own child, recognises the woman as his wife and  finds – here at a Christmas social, in his own house, himself  wishing she  is dead. That evil thought seems  out of place  – ‘an ugly inmate to have found a nesting-place in Godfrey’s kindly disposition’ – but is the natural result of his  duplicity: ‘no disposition is a security from evil wishes to a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity’. I look up ‘duplicity’, a word I suppose to be connected to two-facedness, to doubleness.  Having a ‘kindly’ disposition is no security against  being double, being split. And the secret split part of Godfrey is in terror lest it be exposed and outsiders should see he is  man living two lives.

As we are reading this in a Shared Reading group, I wonder what I would do  with this moment? I want to stay here a while because  there is something about Godfrey’s position that I want to make explicit. This is about not judging him as a  bad ‘un but recognising something of him in myself. It’s all very well having the kindly disposition. But what you going to do about the bits you don’t want anyone to see? The easiest thing to do here is judge him as if he had nothing to do with me. I’d want to open up that area of thinking, and might simply do it by going back over the passage – reading again. Perhaps the comparison between ‘kindly’ and  ‘evil terror’. Interesting that it is terror, presumably the fear of being exposed, that  makes him evil.  He’s not thinking rationally but rather acting naturally and instantly, saving himself, preserving his doubleness.

I try to think of very small faults that I don’t mind talking about, and that anyone will recognise – secretly eating biscuits when I’m supposed to be on a diet is a perennial good one – so that such thoughts  are admissible and do not seem to frightening,  or too exposing. We can then all make private connections that do not have to be spoken out loud.  Using myself as an illustration of the way in which literature serves to make me think, I hope, then serves as model to others. I don’t require anything. I just believe  that what works for me will work for others. Once the pattern  is possibility in your mind, you might  use it.

Then I return to the text: I’ll reread some.

Godfrey felt a great throb: there was one terror in his mind at that moment: it was, that the woman might not be dead. That was an evil terror–an ugly inmate to have found a nestling-place in Godfrey’s kindly disposition; but no disposition is a security from evil wishes to a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity.

The doubleness began somewhere, once, long ago,  as a piece of armour ( I’m thinking back to Bion – mental debris, stuff we create or bring along that makes the truth of our living difficult to see) perhaps when Godfrey first took up with Molly, perhaps before that. The doubleness isnt just about keeping his secret marriage a secret, but keeping some part of himself a secret…presumably the relationship with Molly came from that secret place.

I’m thinking too of ways in which Silas (or any of us) also has doubleness. Silas has had two or more lives and they have been sundered. He didn’t become two people after being cast out of his  church in Lantern Yard, he became a sort of half-person, or less. When the child wandered into his cottage his first thought was of his own childhood, his baby sister, whom he had carried around and cared  for…as Cass’s fight to preserve his doubleness pushes the two parts of his life further away, Silas is finding that two parts of his life are knitting up:

By this time, however, the ladies had pressed forward, curious to know what could have brought the solitary linen-weaver there under such strange circumstances, and interested in the pretty child, who, half alarmed and half attracted by the brightness and the numerous company, now frowned and hid her face, now lifted up her head again and looked round placably, until a touch or a coaxing word brought back the frown, and made her bury her face with new determination.

“What child is it?” said several ladies at once, and, among the rest, Nancy Lammeter, addressing Godfrey.

“I don’t know–some poor woman’s who has been found in the snow, I believe,” was the answer Godfrey wrung from himself with a terrible effort. (“After all, am I certain?” he hastened to add, silently, in anticipation of his own conscience.)

“Why, you’d better leave the child here, then, Master Marner,” said good-natured Mrs. Kimble, hesitating, however, to take those dingy clothes into contact with her own ornamented satin bodice. “I’ll tell one o’ the girls to fetch it.”

“No–no–I can’t part with it, I can’t let it go,” said Silas, abruptly. “It’s come to me–I’ve a right to keep it.”

The proposition to take the child from him had come to Silas quite unexpectedly, and his speech, uttered under a strong sudden impulse, was almost like a revelation to himself: a minute before, he had no distinct intention about the child.

In these few lines the men become what they are: Godfrey, denying his own child, against his own better instincts, his words of deceit ‘wrung from himself with a terrible effort’. The doubleness is deeply in him now. ‘After all, am I certain?” he hastened to add, silently, in anticipation of his own conscience.’ Of course he is, but the question let’s him let himself off the hook. Let’s him salve his conscience. He cannot be straight, true.  the doubleness is  overwhelmingly written into him. You wonder – well I do – what might help him change?  Here, now, nothing.

And in the same moment, Silas, changes. A man who had become  almost less than human, a spider weaving , weaving all day, for gold , gold , gold, to  enjoy the brightness of at night, suddenly finds this child which has come in place of the gold makes him claim her:

“No–no–I can’t part with it, I can’t let it go,” said Silas, abruptly. “It’s come to me–I’ve a right to keep it.”…

…his speech, uttered under a strong sudden impulse, was almost like a revelation to himself: a minute before, he had no distinct intention about the child.

I’m thinking of these characters in a novel as like people in one of Bion’s group – the a-z of human being laid out for us all to read.  Here’s one man, Godfrey Cass, bullied by his father, no love in his family life, finding love of some sort once with Molly,  and since abandoning her… abandoning his child and now denying her, even as the mother is dead or dying. The fibres of good life, of liveliness are wasting, drying up  in him. He’s becoming the insect like creature that we have seen Silas as… And at the same time , the  fibres of life are filling out again for Silas, who has been three times over broken – his mother and little sister dead, his life in Lantern Yard broken up by false accusation,  his gold stolen from  his  own home… and yet this impulse ‘almost like a revelation to him’ comes from his deepest self and is irrefutable, almost a revelation.

As Godfrey  lies even to himself in the deepest parts of his being, Silas’s nature and need is revealed to himself, the single truth emerges. He wants to love something:

“No–no–I can’t part with it, I can’t let it go,” said Silas, abruptly. “It’s come to me–I’ve a right to keep it.”…

I’d like to see someone try to take this child from him.

 

 

Shaking the kaleidoscope: a few thoughts about groups, with Wilfred Bion

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kaleidoscope.jpg

I won’t have time to write about them today but wanted to record some  quotations from  The Tavistock Seminars about groups –  seemed to me useful in thinking about some of the value of Shared Reading at its best.

There are great advantages in a group. Compared with a narrative story all in a straight line from A to Z, a group is like having the entire alphabet spread out. In short, between the lot of us we ought to be able to mobilize or germinate an idea that would be difficult for any single individual to produce. For that reason there is a lot to be said for universities, institutions like this one, for example, although it is bound to be clumsy because we have to place them geographically—we have to say, “Meet at the Tavistock Centre“, and in this way it is dependent on a geographical distribution. But the more widespread the actual members of a group can be, the greater the number of bases for thought there are.

Here we haven’t two people; it is like having the whole of one person at all ages and at all times spread out in one room at one time…

…In a group of this kind, maybe we could see the sort of thing that you describe, but also see the way in which an idea tracks through the community, and from that regard it as a sort of model that gives us some idea of how an idea tracks through the mind of the individual, using this very small community which is the totality of the thoughts, ideas and feelings that appear to be bounded by the physical integument of the body.”

(from “The Tavistock Seminars” by Wilfred R. Bion)

The idea that the group is more than  the sum of its parts is a great one: we make something else when we are together. That something else connects to something I was reading in the essays of Emerson  –  Man becomes Men, the Human becomes individuated women and men. But the idea that there is something bigger than us as individuals, though  individuals are parts of  the greater body, is one we hunger for and we often go hungry. there aren’t many ways – football, concerts, political demonstrations aside –  where we become a greater sum. And a crowd is not a group. I was struck while reading by the thought of the astronomical work that is being done on the internet, where hundreds of thousands of individuals watch  particular small pieces of the night sky for changes –  can’t remember what this programme is called… can anyone help? – The number of individuals greatly increases the power of the investigation.

I think there is sometimes something like that in Shared Reading  groups –  to do with the  range and  nature of personal experiences brought to the table. One of the aspects of the group work consistently commented  on by participants and  Reader Leaders and observers is the  inclusive nature of the group experience. Of course this pulls two ways –  people have the chance to bring themselves in all their personal individuality. But then power of  group-think also exerts itself: we become as one.  I’ve always thought that in some way groups should be regularly  broken up and reassembled – shake the kaleidoscope to get  different patterns.  Lots of people disagree with that, naturally liking the regularity and consistency  of  the same people, same group leader.

Some of the best, that is to say, most productive ( I know there’s an argument for ‘the best’ being something other than ‘productive’, but speaking personally here) groups I’ve been involved in have had quite a bit of change in them.  New letters in the human alphabet, or letters not yet known or spelled out in the group, can have a profound and  useful effect.

But, sorry, times up  for today.

I am not a Parrot: Reading Shakespeare with Wilfred Bion

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inside ruin.JPG
Fig and Ivy growing inside C18 ruined palace, Bay of Kotor, 20 July

I’m concentrating this morning on  choosing a passage from The Tavistock Seminars by Wildred Bion.

A reader,  Orientikate, writes to ask where to start with reading Wildred Bion. I found my colleague,  Josie Billington’s book, Is Literature Healthy  (OUP, The Literary Agenda series) is engaging, useful and interesting, so I would recommend that as a starting place. If you want to begin directly with Bion himself, Attention and Interpretation, is, I’m told, a good place. Let me know how you get on.

I’ve used most of my Daily Practice hour in rereading parts of The Tavistock Seminars I read yesterday, looking for a passage to write about. Here it is:

We ought to be cautious and not get too misled by the fact that we can read—that is not good enough. It is like saying that because we can see black and white marks on paper, we can therefore read music—we can’t. So people who aspire to read a Shakespeare play ought to go into a certain amount of training for the purpose, and to have certain minimum conditions in which to read it. Shakespeare wrote, “The raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements“ [Macbeth, I.v]. There is only one word that is at all long—battlements. Put the lot together and you get a phrase that does something to you today. Where that comes from, I don’t know—I don’t know what happens to these things. I am reminded of Milton’s reference to Alpheus: “Return Alpheus, the dread voice is past . . .“ [“Lycidas“] and so on. There he is using the simile of the river that goes underground and then bobs up again somewhere else. Where it comes up and what effect it may have, goodness knows. A wild phrase of that sort goes through the ages. In a sense we could say, “Well, most people in this country talk English, so it’s a perfectly understandable explanation.“ Yes, I don’t want to deny the perfectly simple, straightforward, obvious explanation. What we are concerned with are the other explanations—even wild ones—which may be nearer the truth. ” (from “The Tavistock Seminars” by Wilfred R. Bion, Seminar Two, 4 July 1977)

This is  on the surface a contentious issue for people who practice Shared Reading. In this practice, we teach that there are no wrong answers, that all views are valid, that everyone’s point of view is to be listened to.  We would never say, as Bion clearly does in the  first sentence quoted here, ‘this is not good enough.’

Or would we?

In the teaching of Shared Reading  leadership there are a certain set of precepts, of pedagogical assumptions:

  • literature has much to offer but most people can’t get at that offer because they are afraid of  looking or feeling or being stupid
  • most adults (and many children) have almost certainly been damaged by previous educational experiences, and may be further damaged by this
  • humans need to feel secure, free and at ease before they can learn
  • the  key thing is to create a  sense within the group of security,  of kindness
  • that sense of  kindness is extended by  the Reader Leader’s modelling willingness to listen –  to whatever is said

There almost certainly are other underlying  precepts but these set out our starting place, which is essentially therapeutic: we intend to  ease the pain caused by previous damage in relation to literature or education more  generally.

But the purpose, the ambition, of Shared Reading is not in itself therapeutic, it is pedagogic. We don’t set out to cure people, we set out to  teach them to read literature (which of course  may be  curative, therapeutic or healing but I’m not making any claims for that here).

Therefore, at some point, I would say, a Shared Reading group leader might well say, with Bion, ‘this is not good enough’  as any teacher might of any attempt at something by any pupil. Of course . ‘This is not good enough’ is one of the traumatising responses from  teachers which has  caused so much inability to learn in the first place. Must teaching  then always be unconditional love of the pupil’s work? No. Teaching should involve a relationship of trust between pupil and teacher in which the pupil willing accepts the word of the teacher. Bion says to me ‘this is not good enough’ and I trust him, and our relationship, and myself, and Shakespeare, enough to take Bion’s word as a truth I can  deal with.

But between ‘ Welcome beginner/outsider/non-reader…’ and ‘this is not good enough’ lies a world of experience, growth and learning.  Learning, Bion says elsewhere, is always hard. It’s as if at some level, the biological entity  that is a human doesn’t want to learn – to learn is to change – to change is terrifying.

It is for the tactful group leader,  the careful reader of people, to decide if her group  – all members of it, or only some of them?  only one of them? – is at a point where more might be demanded. And how one  phrases  ‘this is not good enough’ to make it non-traumatic.

That is not a tick-box decision but the  decision of years of experience. I’d want to argue that  all Reader Leaders should be looking to up the stakes whenever they can: we want to get the most out of  each reading experience.

Can anyone read a Shakespeare play? Yes.

Do I agree with Wilfred Bion – that there is something strange and wild about Shakespeare   that evades simply being able to read the black marks on the page? Yes.

What do I think of this statement?

So people who aspire to read a Shakespeare play ought to go into a certain amount of training for the purpose, and to have certain minimum conditions in which to read it.

That is exactly what  we do in Shared Reading: the training takes place on the job, and the minimum conditions are the same as  for all  readings: concentrated purpose, collective attention, personalisation, return to the language, look at the language. The great thing to concentrate on is making live, is not reducing reading to Anyone’s  Notes but to feelings of  the psychological reality that language may offer up.

Shakespeare wrote, “The raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements“ [Macbeth, I.v]. There is only one word that is at all long—battlements. Put the lot together and you get a phrase that does something to you today. Where that comes from, I don’t know—I don’t know what happens to these things.

The Reader Leader must above all be kind, yes, but when a group member tries to short-circuit the experience by looking up the meaning of the phrase in the back of the book, saying ‘ It’s says in the notes in my book that this means…’  then the Reader Leader must be bold, very bold.

Who cares about the notes! the note writer isn’t here, isn’t sitting round the table. The note writer won’t know, and can’t explain, what that phrase does to you. But to lead a group of people into the strange place, where we don’t know what language is doing to us, but might feel it, may be able to express what we feel… that is a bold undertaking. And the group won’t come with you if there is no trust. So your key task, when reading something hard, is to build  trust – trust in your leadership, trust in the text, trust in ourselves as a group (I’ll come to another thought about this, from The Tavistock Seminars, tomorrow). Bion continues:

A wild phrase of that sort goes through the ages. In a sense we could say, “Well, most people in this country talk English, so it’s a perfectly understandable explanation.“ Yes, I don’t want to deny the perfectly simple, straightforward, obvious explanation. What we are concerned with are the other explanations—even wild ones—which may be nearer the truth.

Quite so. We don’t want to deny ‘the perfectly simple, straightforward, obvious explanation’ and indeed may spend quite a bit of time getting to it. But it is  what Bion calls ‘wild’  that is most important – something beyond ‘explanation.’ ‘Other explanations—even wild ones—which may be nearer the truth.’ So that is our job, as Reader Leaders, to create a space in which the wild may enter, and in which readers become students of their own understanding, not reciters old dead stuff someone else decided.  Which is not to say that someone else couldn’t have had a truly brilliant thought about the raven and the battlements  and that it  could be really exciting to  follow someone else’s thought (as I did, reading Josie Billington’s book mentioned above). Only to  make it my own, I have to do something with it, something more than recite it. After all, I am not a parrot.

Spending an hour with Wilfred Bion

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Wisteria trunk, 2-3 feet in diameter, in Perast, Bay of Kotor. 19 July. How old can this magnificent plant be? 

After finishing Hester yesterday I had that dislocated feeling you get when you’ve been deep in an overwhelmingly powerful book and then it ends. You come out again into the light of  day,  blinking, needing to readjust, missing people. I didn’t want to start a new novel, so I looked in the Kindle library  for something that would take my mind off the absence of Hester and give me something else to concentrate on – a business book can be good in these circumstances, and I’ve got two or three good ones on  the Kindle. I considered rereading The Hard Thing About Hard Things by XXX and also Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull, both contenders for the most intelligent book about work related stuff. But then my eye was caught by  The Tavistock Seminars by  Wilfred Bion. I had forgotten that I’d read this before, but my travelling companion tells me   that I have and not only that , when I started reading good bits out to him, they were the same good bits I’d read last time, a few years ago when we were  visiting Cuba. These highlights  were my own!

I hope it is not too much of surprise that I couldn’t remember I’d read it before. It’s hard stuff, and  I was reading without writing about it, which is a bit like  looking at stuff on telly.  You just watch it and  it probably doesn’t affect you very much. The only way hard stuff  becomes part of me  is if I write about it or try to run a class on it. Both of these modes require me to do something with my thoughts, to give them form, to know them. So I thought I’d read  tiny bits of them here for a few days.

These Tavistock seminars – transcriptions of recordings  made in the 1970s – are not easy for me to read – it’s a kind of writing I struggle with, in a subject area about which I’m ignorant.

Why bother?

Bion has some ideas which I think  are useful to me and I want to understand more about other things he has thought.  He might be able to help me formulate some thoughts of my own for which I don’t  at present have the mental equipment.  Here’s one example.

He’s answering a question about psychoanalysis and vocabulary – a recurring problem for him – is it ‘mind’ we are talking about, or is it ‘personality’, is it ‘psyche’, or ‘soul’ –  then he suddenly has this  wonderful image of not being able to see the thing we are talking about and trying to understand:

If an individual finds that he cannot see, then the chances are that he will use a stick that he waves about, prods the ground, and seems to rely upon it to give him information. He learns how to use it and appears to be able to diagnose or interpret what he gets from striking other objects or feeling that the ground is soft or sandy. What kind of stick or instrument do we use when we are concerned with what is supposed to be the human mind in order to supply us with facts we might be able to interpret? Psychoanalysis is alleged to be one of them.

The image of the blind person using a stick to gain information is a great one because the stick is both crude – compared to  human eyesight –  and really useful. A  person without sight who learns to use such a stick is able ‘to diagnose or interpret’  parts of reality through the stick.  This is terrific, much better than no stick. But it remains crude, too.  Especially when the lack of sight, and the stick, are metaphors.  The stick is a theory,  we bang it about, we use it to prod, and we can learn to understand some things about the underlying, unseen, unseeable reality through way the stick gives back.

I notice here he says ‘what is supposed to be the human mind’, as if even that is an actually absolute unknown.

There is an earlier part –  sorry, I’m jumping around here, not reading them through, when he talks about ‘mind debris’. Everything that has happened, that  you’ve thought and been taught, traumas you’ve suffered,  norms you have absorbed, all debris, clutter.

The patient, he says,

presents me with  what I now think of as ‘mental debris’ – all this stuff that has accumulated between the time of birth and that particular morning

I find this idea – of mental debris – astonishing and interesting and useful.  I don’t know what use to make of it  yet. Because part of the debris I’m hanging on to  is that  I’ve learned stuff and I don’t want to call it ‘debris’.  But what Bion is good about is pointing to ‘liveness’ of thought and I believe there is something live here.

Tomorrow I’ll start again on this and  read  from the beginning.