CHECK
'What is the meaning of life, or for that matter the life of any creature?' To know an answer to this questions means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.
Mein Weltbild, Einstein, 1934
The next morning the pretence was abandoned that I
had been given a staff car to be driven half the length of England for
some minor hearing tests. Of course I was stupid to believe it. The
Army does not usually allocate staff cars to carry junior officers to
hospital appointments. The corporal who came along for the ride: 'Just
to make sure of the route, Sir', should have been another ground for
suspicion. I had just thought he had just been looking for an illicit
lift south for his own weekend leave. But to drive us both all the way
here on a Friday!
I might have been more cautious, but that last casual
invitation to bring my wife along: 'so that you can both enjoy a pleasant
weekend' - was a master stroke. It removed at once any appearance of
threat, so that I had walked straight into this clever little trap they
had prepared for me, just like some dozy old donkey ambling into a mine-field.
Now, as a patient in an Army psychiatric hospital, I had less freedom
than any donkey.
Shortly after breakfast, I was called to a first formal
meeting with my loony tribunal. This comprised of Colonel Ferguson accompanied
by a white-haired civilian doctor in the standard loony doctor's white
coat buttoned all the way down the front.
I believe I am right to be amused to remember, as I was at the time,
he was called Doctor Green. Also in attendance were two heavy-weight
medical orderlies. They stood to the left and right behind the doctors,
impassive, both were also in fully buttoned white coats and each had
a hand in one pocket. Both were clearly ready to pounce should I try
to bite.
Then doctors began to take turns with their questions.
None of them were about my health, dreams, fantasies, interest in cosmology,
semantics, or theology, about writing in general, my hearing, or whether
my love life was satisfactory. Their questions were only about the paper
I had written on Ireland. Both had a copy. Both had read their copy.
They wanted me to know they did not agree with it. But it had certainly
worried people, and what they also wanted to know was from whom I had
learnt my remarkable idea that trying to use the Army to solve the Ulster
crisis could only make matters worse: could even sustain it for decades.
The government clearly wanted to treat it as a minor
crisis. As if there was not four hundred years of violent history behind
it, together with the collision of two religious philosophies, Irish
Catholic and Ulster Protestant; or three, if you like, for some of the
Irish nationalists had developed their own brand of Marxism. To try
to solve all this mess by putting thousands of increasingly angry British
soldiers on the streets was an act, in my view, of lunatic desperation.
My doctors had just three questions. They wanted to know from whom had
I got this opinion; with whom, in the Army, had I discussed it; and,
most of all, to whom outside the Army I had sent it.
What happened next was what Dr Green much later was
cheerfully to call "your abreaction". This piece of jargon
is supposed to be the moment when a patient identifies his neurosis,
and tries for the first time to separate from it. It may be likened
to the experience of moving decisively from one world into another.
It is expected to be an emotional experience. I would prefer to use
a piece of jargon rather more common to Army. I got abruptly, coldly
but I think still articulately, extremely fucking angry; and I began
to tell them precisely why this was so.
I do not propose this as a good way get out of a mental
hospital. If I had known what I only discovered later, I might have
been much more meek and mild. I had clearly annoyed someone very seriously
in the government. I could not complain about this: it was my intention.
But it was also my intention to save more young men from being shot
and being blown to bits; kids from seeing their parents shot in front
of them; women and kids being maimed whilst enjoying a drink in a pub
or just shopping. It was to stop many more people from becoming killers.
The government's endless refrain that what was happening
was all the work of "a few men of violence" was nonsense.
We confronted a nation. If we continued to put troops on the Ulster
streets, streets which Irish nationalists regarded as their own, the
Provisionals would go on drawing in more and more young Irish men and
women as volunteers - and it would not stop. Very few were either
criminals or psychopaths. Some were, of course; but most were ordinary
young people whose history had persuaded them that they must take a
part in ridding their country of people whom their history insisted
did not belong to there. This was what the man who had called himself
Martin McGuinness had told me. He had spoken to me as one intelligent
person to another wanting to be understood, and I had understood what
he said, and I believed him. "We just want the Prods to go home,
to Scotland. You English are just in the way." I had not thought
him right; but I had understood perfectly well what he said, and I believed
him. All he and his friends wanted was simple. It was also very crazy.
Now here I was, seated in a comfortable armchair, facing two doctors
whose job was to test whether I was crazy.
As coldly and as precisely as I could, I explained
the source of my ideas. Where I had learnt them? In eighteen months,
three times the usual tour, in the main operations room of HQ Northern
Ireland. With whom had I discussed them? With no-one either below or
of my own rank. (This was important, and I hammered the point home on
the padded arm of my chair: I had subverted no-one.) Then to whom had
I had sent my paper? To my own generals, several politicians, several
journalists. One famous politician had replied only to rebuke me for
using Her Majesty's official stationery to complain to him about Her
Majesty's government. A nice man from The Observer called John Silverlight
had replied - years later I read in his obituary that he was considered
the most erudite sub-editor in London - agreeing completely with my
analysis, but warning: "It will take the politicians at least another
twenty years to admit that you are right." His estimate was close.
Major-General Farrar-Hockley replied very affably that what I had to
say he found 'banal'. Twenty-seven years later, whilst still being believed
by some to be a leading member of the Provisionals' Army Council, Martin
McGuinness was made Ulster's first Catholic Education Minister,. I admire
his tenacity. I respect his courage. I still think he and his friends
have done more than anyone in a hundred years to prevent the natural
unification of Ireland within Europe.
As I answered their questions the doctors made notes.
I found that I was still beating my fist on the arm of my chair in punctuation,
and I stopped it. The orderlies began to look bored. When I had answered
all their questions, I stopped talking.
Then Ferguson finally looked up, his dark features
without expression. He gave me another long dark stare, then he nodded.
He had not spoken for minutes. If anything, he looked as if he had lost
interest. Now he glanced at Green, who nodded back. "Right,"
he said; and they both gathered their papers and stood up. I was still
too angry to be polite, and I remained defiantly seated. Although it
now seemed to be confirmed, I could still hardly believe that all this
entirely ridiculous and costly charade was the government's response.
A dozen or more people must already have been involved. "We should
finish all of this by the end of next week" said Ferguson. With
another nod he dismissed both orderlies, and he left the room with Mr
Green.
A few minutes later he was back, alone. "We've
got all we need this morning," he told me briskly. "Your wife
is staying with your sister?" He had also interviewed her, but
this was a fact I was not to discover for years, for she never told
me. "You can join her for the rest of the weekend, but I want you
back here on Sunday night. Then we'll start the tests on Monday, and
they'll take most of the week. Understand me: if you do everything I
ask, exactly, I promise I'll get you out of here as soon as I can."
I did not believe him, of course. But it was still
exactly what I did. On Monday morning I was back in his hospital to
begin his tests. I could have run away. But now I also had an interest
in discovering whether I was less than sane. In the ordinary sense I
had never any doubt that I was perfectly competent mentally. I had also
been carefully selected and trained to deal with precisely these sudden,
even devastating, changes in situations. This was not so different.
But now what I wanted to know was whether there were any kind of gaps
in that competence, any quiet corners in my mind where madness had been
lurking unheard, unseen, and unbeknown.
It was necessary for me - and not for them
- to check that I was sane. The sooner I knew this, as soon as possible
after the experience had happened, the sooner I would know what to make
of it. Less three days before I would have at once decided that anyone
who believed that they had met God could not possibly be sane. I might
have concealed my judgement out of kindness. I would have been convinced
of the fact. Only mad people believed in personal experiences of God.
They might be too seriously mad: that would depend on how sure they
were that it had happened; on how difficult it could be to persuade
them they must be mistaken. But they would all be mad.
I had been made a member of a highly dangerous club.
Whatever I might believe about it, I knew now what many other people,
some of them very impressive, others clearly fanatic, had been talking
about for thousands of years. And I was sure.
Not all of those other reports need be honest. There
is tremendous power in this knowledge; or, rather, in claiming to possess
this knowledge. You were safer if you were lying; or if you were just
sincerely deluded. In neither case would you be likely to claim anything
new. That's where the danger lies. The more authentic the experience,
the more likely it is to contain new knowledge. New knowledge is a poison
to old.
I should need to be very careful in future about my
choice of friends. Right now I wanted to know what the very best modern
psychiatric medicine had to say about my state of mind. I could not
be better placed. It might all have been arranged for this.
Every morning, for part of most afternoons, and for
all of the next week I was given every kind of psychological test the
hospital could provide. At first I found them interesting. There was
no other kind of entertainment. There was no-one in the officers' wing
to talk to - except one day, when another older man appeared unannounced
at tea-time. He was not in uniform, so I didn't know his rank. I didn't
like to ask. He nodded in greeting, said: "Hello", then took
his tea and plate of cheese or salmon paste sandwiches - they were the
same every day - and sat in one of the big club armchairs staring out
into the garden. He remained speechless at dinner. In the morning he
was gone.
Possibly this upset me more than I realised. I had
found a little workshop in one corner of the garden where a kindly old
gentleman was ready to show me how to carve bowls from seasoned lumps
of old elm or oak. I began my own but never had time to finish it. In
the end he let me buy a big one that he or someone else had made. We
used it at home as a fruit bowl - which, when you think of it, is suitable.
The day after I lost my companion another young doctor
(I guess all of Ferguson's interns were working on their own research)
wanted me to take the Rorschach test.
This test is famous. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss
psychologist. He died in 1922, but he tried to produce some kind of
test of personalities by showing lots of people pages of a book of patterns
looking as if its pages had been closed on a drop of ink. The patterns,
naturally, are roughly symmetrical. What you, the patient, make of them
is compared with what many other thousands of patients have made of
them, and in this way the idea was to place you in some kind of category
with others. The others, of course, may be gentle neurotics, menopausal
housewives who have only accidentally cut their husband's throat, or
full-blown psychotics. Politicians should have a book of their own.
I had never studied the test before, but I knew what
it was and it was not difficult to understand what you might be expected
to say. There was a lot of latitude for expression. If you said every
pattern resembled a fairy, you might be reckoned as highly artistic
or an idiot. If you said every one looked to you like a squashed rat,
you were probably quite depressed.
But Hermann's ink, I saw, originally just black, was
now lively swirls of colours. Even so, the safe replies would clearly
still be on the lines of: 'butterfly', 'sailing boat', 'mushroom' :
just 'mushroom', not 'nuclear obliteration'.
The colours really made the patterns rather pretty,
and I was enjoying seeing one as the young doctor carefully opened the
pages in front of me. They were numbered and as I replied he carefully
wrote down every one of my responses against the same numbers on his
pad.
"Now, then: how about this one?"
"That looks like a butterfly."
"O-kay." (scribbles) "And this one?"
"Ahh, I think that looks like a sailing boat."
"O-kay." (scribbles; note the absence of
reinforcement; I was impressed by his observance of protocol. "And
this one?"
"Oh, yes. That looks to me like a Swiss chalet."
"O-kay. (scribbles.) "And this one?"
"Well. I suppose I have to say that is rather
like - ah - a vagina."
"O-kay." (scribbles, looking down) "And
this one?"
"Caterpillar. No, no: more like a mountain; a
range of hills."
"O-kay. (scribbles, still looking down.) "And
this one?"
And suddenly I had had enough of this silly game.
'This one' was an absurdly large, grotesquely swollen, obscenely coloured
penis, throbbing with blue veins, fully erect, about to ejaculate; it
even had a dark oval mouth in the centre of its bulging bulbous head.
It looked like an illustration out of a textbook: 'human sex organ,
tumescent, male'.
"That's a rabbit," I said at once.
"Eh?" The young doctor grabbed at his falling
notebook, glanced wildly at the page numbers, upside down to him; took
the book from me to confirm them, then thrust it back into my hands
again. "Are you sure?"
This time, to please him, I took much longer to consider.
"Yup," I said finally and decidedly more firmly. "Definitely
it's a rabbit. Look, it's got its ears right back behind its head and
its mouth open. It's just sitting up on its hind legs and looking surprised."
All that went down in his notebook. What it did to
my personality profile I don't know. I never knew. It gave me a minor
degree of satisfaction. I never saw that doctor again.
Altogether the process of telling the authorities
that I was sane took Colonel Ferguson thirty-three days. He sent me
home again: all the way back to Yorkshire at the end of the first week,
this time by train. On the Sunday morning of the same weekend he telephoned
me at home. "I have to tell you to come back again." I was
still not inclined to be polite, a fact he seemed to accept. "Why?"
I asked shortly, one of the dogs was nudging my knee for more attention.
"Because I have been told I must keep you here under observation
until my report is accepted. Just take the rest of the week off. Come
back on Friday."
We burnt a lot of my papers that week, nothing very
important I think, just a little bonfire at the bottom of the garden.
It relieved my wife's anxieties somewhat, but I think she was never
able to trust me again. That damage was irretrievable. The following
week I went back to Netley and just wandered around the grounds and
talked with my friend in the workshop. The big bowl project had been
shelved, but I collected dozen of dried oak apples from the grounds,
and he let me have the varnish and some string to make them into a necklace.
I never learnt who he was. He may have been a DP, a displaced person,
a man without a state, possibly a Pole, one of the thousands who found
temporary refuge in the Army after the war and who just got forgotten.
I did not see the Colonel again until our final meeting.
It was very different from any of the previous ones. I could now treat
him, cautiously, as a friend. He could now express some of his anger
that he had been ordered to begin treating me for schizophrenia as soon
as I arrived, without further examination. That would have looked bad
in any open court; but this was the Army and he already had a signed
authorisation. "As soon as I met you," he told me, "it
was obvious that those bloody fools had made a mistake."
He usually looked exhausted. He could have simply
obeyed the order. Lesser men would have. He already had a hospital full
of sick and badly traumatised soldiers to be healed. The fact that he
had the time and patience to save me from being zapped across the frontal
lobes with several thousand volts or turned into a zombie with psychotropic
drugs - both common treatments for schizophrenia - tells of his humanity.
That he ignored a direct order speaks for his integrity. As these facts
slowly got through to me, through the fog of disappointment and anger,
I admire him for them very much and I regret that I never told him so.
Some years later I saw the film of Ken Kesey's 'One Flew over the Cuckoo's
Nest. Only then did I realise fully what might have happened.
But exactly, I asked him, what did either he or those
bloody fools expect of anyone, if already partly round the bend, who
suddenly finds he has been tricked into a mental hospital and is unable
to leave? Might he not be expected to go berserk? What if, for example,
after our first interview I had panicked, had dotted a couple of orderlies,
plugged a policeman in the eye, stolen his bike, and done a bunk? What
if I had cut someone's throat?
He shrugged. "In any case we would have sent
people after you to bring you back." And as if to illustrate that
there was nothing unethical in this he went on to tell me a story of
a British engineer who had been working with the French on the development
of Concorde, the world's first supersonic airliner,. When it became
obvious that he was planning to defect to Russia, taking with him his
department's plans, he had been allowed to do it. But it was also arranged
for him to have access to other departments' plans. Critical details
were subtly altered in all of these, so that all the Russians got in
return for their hospitality was corrupted information which their engineers
would have wasted months of effort to discover was false.
He told me this story almost casually. We were sitting
in the garden in the sunshine, on the little bit of lawn before the
main gardens began. He was still in full uniform, red tabs and polished
belt. He had at least left off his hat. The Soviets' attempt to copy
Concorde, nicknamed Concordski by the popular press, was abandoned after
a final and disastrous crash, but I have never seen this story published
anywhere. But this turned out to be a preface to something more important.
The puzzle for us both was always why anyone with sufficiently high
authority in government able to issue the order which he had refused
had been sufficiently excited by what was really a perfectly easily
managed disagreement with an unimportant junior officer like me.
Ferguson had discovered what had happened. It was
Bernard, he told me; Bernard had been responsible. Bernard, whose writing
I had long admired; Bernard, whose campaigning against
the abuse of psychiatric medicine in the Soviet Union had won him international
acclaim. Throughout his career he had always been the champion of the
common man. But it was always a high wire act. He had many admirers
and many high-level contacts, but he also routinely made enemies. From
time to time it would obviously be good for him occasionally to act
as the government's little friend, to feed them, so to speak, a little
sugar. I had hoped that he would be like John Starlight, whose reply
had at least been sympathetic. But Bernard was more important. Unlike
Starlight he could virtually write what he liked. If he agreed with
me, just as Starlight had, he might even help to stop the killing. If
he thought me wrong, I was sure he would tell me so; and even why. Instead
of which, he simply shopped me. Ferguson shook his head at my naiveté.
'He took the papers you sent him to his club, dropped them in the lap
of someone in Defence, and told them: "This is one of your chaps.
You'd better fix him."
And that was what Ferguson wanted me to know. Bernard
had such high-level contacts in government that this little piece of
meanness, this cheap graceless little act of treachery, had been sufficient
to initiate an action that no-one but Ferguson himself could stop. Fortunately,
he was not prepared to fix me.
Even then, I must confess, I doubted: not Bernard,
but Ferguson. I am sorry for this too. What nobody - probably not even
Ferguson - knew at that time may also have been important. Whilst protesting
repeatedly that it would never, never, never, agree to meet or to talk
with any of these fiendish men of violence, the government had already
begun talking to Mr McGuinness and his friends - just as I had recommended
they should - at least three months before. In a world more perfect
than it is, I should have been invited to talks instead of being locked
up in an asylum. Oddly enough, I suspect McGuinness might have accepted
this as well.
But the world is not more perfect than it is - and
possibly there was a better reason for me to be where I was. Twenty
years later, more or less out of curiosity, I wrote to Bernard reminding
him of the details told to me to ask if this account could possibly
be true. "Yes", he wrote back in reply, "I seem to remember
something of that sort. "But," he finished with the usual
callous flourish that had made him the distinguished and respected journalist
that he was, "it doesn't seem to have done you much harm."
It did not indeed do me much harm. Very recently,
and very probably as a result of yet another minor cock-up to which
all government departments are prone - I received a copy of Ferguson's
original report, the one I was never intended to see. It might have
kept me in the Army if I had.
"It can be confidently stated," wrote my
friend Ferguson, "that this man is not a psychiatric patient, and
should not be so regarded in future. He is a man of high intelligence
and potential - a career officer with a university and Sandhurst background,
well-motivated to a Service career which has for some years been handicapped
to a possibly excessive degree [by the erroneous prediction that he
will be deaf aged 35]. His mental state is free from formal psychiatric
disturbance - although his interest in abstract subjects has led him
to ill advised, and even ill judged, disseminations of his interests
- a measure of obsessional traits and vanity. It is recommended that
he be returned to [duty] where he is, in medical opinion, fit to assume
any responsible post his Corps allot. No psychiatric follow-up is required."
[signed] H.C. Ferguson, Lt Col RAMC.
Comments:
The
Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley was built as a result of the huge
casualties of the Crimea War. It was once the largest hospital in the
world. During the Second World War it became the US Naval Base Hospital
No 12. In 1966 most of it was demolished, but the gardens still ran
down to the shore. The psychiatric hospital was closed in 1978 and 'elegant
Italianate 19th century officer's mess' was purchased for conversion
into luxury apartments, 'many of which will have splendid views over
Southampton Water'. If I had known, I could have bought my room back.
*
I was treated with real respect and sympathy at Netley.
Ferguson understood perfectly well the combined effect of the prediction
that I would be completely deaf in less than a decade with my anguish
at the tragedy unfolding pointlessly in Ireland. He understood that
writing was the only career that had occurred to me as a way out of
my impasse; that this was the reason for my 'ill-advised, ill-judged,
obsessive and vain interests in abstract subjects', and for my writing
about them, whether serious or comic.
Inside my head, however, there was now a far more
serious problem. Possibly, just possibly, I now had the knowledge to
address the problem that had created the whole unholy mess in Ireland
in the first place: the meaning of religions. Previously I had judged
them all to be largely either pure charlatanry, or at best as a kind
of collective response to life's apparent lack of meaning and the inequalities
of its punishments and rewards. Now I could understand them as a collective
response a uniquely human experience. Even so, all my scientific training
had taught me that even this should be regarded as meaningless.
Before I arrived at Netley I had been trying to understand
how meaning is communicated at all. Success seems to depend on our signals
being subsequently interpreted by others in just the way that we intend.
But we have no control over this second action, and everyone must know
the frustration of trying to communicate a meaning to someone who either
out of ignorance or hostility refuses to accept it.
Virtually every religion in history has found the coalescence, however
temporary, and for whatever reason, of a clearly very finite human mind
with an apparently infinite resourceful source of security and love
the most meaningful experience of all. But science has no longer
any need for any kind of God with any kind of personal interest in people.
Science requires only reports of the five human senses being interpreted
by human minds. To try to fit this insight of mine into the realm
of science would therefore be a most interesting task. The question
was whether I could attempt it, and still be considered sane.
Divine inspiration has always had this down-side.
Being honest about material experience has obvious
survival value. If falling down has always hurt you, jumping from a
thirty story building can be expected to kill you. But being honest
about abstract ideas has no obvious survival value, so that many philosophers
have serious doubts whether their as well as other's conscious thoughts
are necessary for life. Most other animals seem to manage without them.
Why ever do we need to know that we are thinking about anything - and
least of all know that we are thinking about thinking? Here begins an
infinite regress like looking into parallel mirrors.
And this seems to have been the point of Jacques Derrida's
deeply pointless yet hugely successful philosophy of thirty years ago
(the empty clangour of thinking still reverberate to the present day):
that this thinking literally contains no sense. It is only private neural
activity. Only action makes sense. And as Jonathan Swift pointed out
in 'Gulliver's Travels ' it is also the case that the most devastating
wars are almost always fought over abstract ideas - as by the Big- and
Little-Enders over the proper way to eat an egg - and this is simply
because abstract ideas are often quite impossible to reconcile.
Some thoughts like these were surely already forming
as, solemn as a monk, I wandered about the gardens of the Royal Victoria
Hospital, collecting oak apples. I had little else to think about. From
the very beginning it was important for me to me to believe - hard though
this may be to believe - that I must in no way be unusual: that it may
be only the situation, the unusual circumstances, which allow such experiences
to occur.
This at least removes most, if not all, of the dangers
of being unusual. Then this more or less usual person has only to be
capable of making sense of the experience to others. What we should
be looking for then, therefore, is not a communion of saints - all presumably
with much the same unusual DNA, but just an organisational principle,
an organisational invariant, we might call it: one which affects all
human thought and then all behaviour; possibly behaviour before thought;
probably quite weakly; but in all cultures throughout history, all the
time.
Now that I knew how it appears to the conscious mind,
I really thought that this should be easy for me to find. I was then
29.
I am a deeply religious non-believer .... This is a somewhat new kind
of religion.
A. Einstein: letter to Hans Mühsam, 1954
Colin
Hannaford,
"Soldier."
13/02//05
