I’m in two minds about this posting, knowing how uneasy I can feel when writers I’ve enjoyed seem suddenly to change tack, shape shift; enlarge and offer a glimpse into another possibility of being human. Here’s this imaginary place called the Potwell Inn in which an allotmenteer and his partner live and where they cook and grow food and travel a bit and muse about this and that; alluding occasionally to past, pre retirement lives, children and grandchildren. All very neat and tidy until the big crises of the twenty first century intrude and we have to pay attention to the environment and economics and politics. But even then, a predictably leftist, new age, hippy dippy character who if not actually in a box, is certainly capable of being measured up for it.
Really? Is that it?
Once, in an early session that began years of therapy I burst into uncontrollable tears. This was before I finally left the armchair and walked to the couch – it’s a long way in a small room. I was talking about Odysseus’ return to his home in Ithaca where his wife Penelope, who doesn’t recognise him dressed as a beggar, orders her maid Eurycleia to bathe him. Eurycleia, his childhood nursemaid recognises Odysseus by the old scar on his leg. The simple recounting of that story unexpectedly reduced me to helpless vulnerability.
Looking back, I think the extraordinary reaction was due to the exposure of my need to be known. I don’t mean famous, rich or powerful – just known, and that demands a level of trust that most of the time neither I or anyone else can easily manage, and so we spend (forgive me for generalising, I don’t think I’m alone here) – we spend more time concealing than revealing ourselves, and then we beat ourselves up when people don’t ‘get’ us.
And all this reflection was provoked because last night we watched the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s book “Normal People” – which Madame had read and thought I’d enjoy. To tell the truth I was deeply touched by it; by the parallels in our own early relationship but perhaps more than anything by the way it evoked the confusion, the bewilderment and the overwhelming sensuality of falling in love as a teenager surrounded by people who don’t get it – parents, teachers, friends – grown ups in general. I haven’t watched the rest yet, I don’t know if I want to, because there’s no drama in happiness, and no happiness in drama, that’s for sure.
But that’s teenagers, and now we’re all grown up and far too sensible, far too willing to settle for less, far too willing to judge harshly when others break out, (I thought to myself), and then, quite out of the blue, I realized that in some complicated sense I’m still a teenager, but that now the disapproving voices are all younger than me. Something dreadful happens and growing up brings with it the terrible danger of first becoming a metaphor of oneself and then a cliché. We can become the same hatchet jawed judges who once judged us and sneered that we’d soon know better. We can become them, but we don’t have to, and we can even stop it if we wish to.
What this pandemic seems to have done is to evoke in me the same sense of powerlessness, of being subject to the will of others who don’t understand, who can’t live in the bright tumultuous sun, who can neither love or be loved but treat life like a game of musical chairs and will fight to the death to be the last man sitting.
And so the rain came last night, absolutely on cue. If only the rest of our lives were so predictable.
*H’m is the title of one of RS Thomas’ collections of poems. The photo was taken on one of the beaches in his parish.
