2011.11.12 — The Dock Brief & Other Plays by John Mortimer & Two Tiny Fushigi* — finished 2011.10.29

Started 2011.10.22
Finished 2011.11.12

John Mortimer.
The Dock Brief & Other Plays.
New York: Grove Press Inc., 1962.

The two other plays are I Spy and What Shall we Tell Caroline? With Caroline I experienced two tiny but distinct *fushigi. The first one began with a conversation with my used bookseller of our both having extensively read Hardy Boys. (Click Caroline to go to an extract of the play. Click fushigi #1 to go to fushigi #1. Click fushigi #2 to go to fushigi #2. Click Dockbrief to go to an extract from Dockbrief.)

★★★☆☆

I stumbled into this book of three plays while looking for something else. I was both excited and surprised to learn that the author of the excellent Rumpole of the Bailey series and books had also written plays.

I came to these comedies with very high expectations, and so it is unlikely anything would have met them. However, these plays were far less than I thought they'd be. I have given them three stars instead of the two I was tempted to confer in order to compensate for dishonourably possessing those unrealistic expectations. Sadly the best writing came in the introduction Mortimer wrote:

"Comedy is, to my mind," writes John Mortimer, "the only thing worth writing in this despairing age, providing it is comedy which is truly on the side of the lonely, the neglected and unsuccessful.... In all plays, as in any sort of writing, what seems to me important is the moment of recognition: the small time when you realize, sitting in a theatre, with a shock of excitement and unease, that you are watching yourself."

I've been wrestling with what it was about the plays that didn't engage me and it comes down to believability and sympathy.

I didn't believe the situations, especially for The Dock Brief and What Shall We Tell Caroline? And I found the writing within the prescribed situations to have humour but lacked what ever it is in writing that takes completely unbelievable characters and makes them believably human. I was unable to empathize with them.

Finally it struck me that the characters, male and female, all had a very similar voice. At least that was I how I interpreted my reaction/feeling about what I'd read. But when I re-read that, that wasn't really the case. What gave me that impression was a common feeling of flippant irreverence in the characters language. I suspect that seeing a production with competent actors would largely eliminate this 'problem,' but as I read it came across monotone.

In 1961 Lewis Funke in his New York Times review of What Shall We Tell Caroline? and The Dock Brief closed his mostly negative review with "The Dock Brief has been done with reported success in other cities abroad. It would be interesting to know how that was accomplished."

Perhaps my reaction is simply a measure of my getting older. I have become jaded because in my real life experience I have certainly seen incompetent boob-heads successfully rise into positions of real authority and power. And since truth is stranger than fiction, and with my now living this kind of boob-head truth, its written portrayal is stuck competing against that unbelievable truth.

Anyway, a very easy and marginally fun read. I did see flashes here and there of what was to come from Mortimer with Rumpole of the Bailey, and 'she who must be obeyed.'

I've included three extracts, one from The Dockbrief and two from What Shall We Tell Caroline?

The Dockbrief
...

MORGENHALL: [barrister] Now. Let's get our minds in order.

FOWLE: [accused of murder] Sort things out.

MORGENHALL: Exactly. Now, this wife of yours.

FOWLE: Doris?

MORGENHALL: Doris. A bitter, unsympathetic woman?

FOWLE: She was always cheerful. She loved jokes.

MORGENHALL: Oh, Fowle. Do be very careful.

FOWLE: I will, sir. But if you'd known Doris. . . . She laughed harder than she worked. "Thank God," she'd say, "for my old English sense of fun."

MORGENHALL: What sort of jokes, Fowle, did this Doris appreciate?

FOWLE: All sorts. Pictures in the paper. Jokes on the wireless set. Laughs out of crackers, she'd keep them from Christmas to Christmas and trot them out in August.

MORGENHALL: You couldn't share it?

FOWLE: Not to that extent. I often missed the funny point.

MORGENHALL: Then you'd quarrel?

FOWLE: "Don't look so miserable, it may never happen." She said that every night when I came home. "Where'd you get that miserable expression from?"

MORGENHALL: I can see it now. There is a kind of Sunday evening appearance to you.

FOWLE: I was quite happy. But it was always "Cat got your tongue?" "Where's the funeral?" "Play us a tune on that old fiddle face of yours. Lucky there's one of us here that can see the funny side." Then we had to have our tea with the wireless on, so that she'd pick up the phrases.

MORGENHALL: You're not a wireless lover?

FOWLE: I couldn't always laugh. And she'd be doubled up across the table, gasping as if her lungs were full of water. "Laugh," she'd call, "Laugh, damn you. What've you got to be so miserable about?" Then she'd go under, bubbling like a drowning woman.

MORGENHALL: Made meals difficult?

FOWLE: Indigestible. I would have laughed, but the jokes never tickled me.

MORGENHALL: They tickled her?

FOWLE: Anything did. Anything a little comic. Our names were misfortunate.

MORGENHALL: Your names?

FOWLE: Going down the aisle she said: "Now we're cock and hen, aren't we, old bird?" Coming away, it was "Now I'm Mrs. Fowle, you'll have to play fair with me." She laughed so hard we couldn't get her straightened up for the photograph.

MORGENHALL: Fond of puns, I gather you're trying to say.

FOWLE: Of any sort of joke. I had a little aviary at the bottom of my garden. As she got funnier so I spent more time with my birds. Budgerigars are small parrots. Circles round their eyes give them a sad, tired look.

MORGENHALL: You found them sympathetic?

FOWLE: Restful. Until one of them spoke out at me.

MORGENHALL: Spoke—what words?

FOWLE: "Don't look so miserable, it may never happen."

MORGENHALL: The bird said that?

FOWLE: She taught it during the day when I was out at work. It didn't mean to irritate.

MORGENHALL: It was wrong of her of course. To lead on your bird like that.

FOWLE: But it wasn't him that brought me to it. It was Bateson, the lodger.

MORGENHALL: Another man?

FOWLE: At long last.

MORGENHALL: I can see it now. A crime of passion. An unfaithful wife. In flagrant. ... Of course, you don't know what that means. We'll reduce it to manslaughter right away. A wronged husband and there's never a dry eye in the jury-box. You came in and caught them.

FOWLE: Always laughing together.

MORGENHALL: Maddening.

FOWLE: He knew more jokes than she did.

MORGENHALL: Stealing her before your eyes?

FOWLE: That's what I thought. He was a big man. Ex-police. Said he'd been the scream of the station. I picked him for her specially. In the chitty I put up in the local sweet shop, I wrote: "Humorous type of lodger wanted."

MORGENHALL: But wasn't that a risk?

FOWLE: Slight, perhaps. But it went all right. Two days after he came he poised a bag of flour to fall on her in the kitchen. Then she sewed up the legs of his pyjamas. They had to hold on to each other so as not to fall over laughing. "Look at old misery standing there," she said. "He can never see anything subtle."

MORGENHALL: Galling for you. Terribly galling.

FOWLE: I thought all was well. I spent more time with the birds. I'd come home late and always be careful to scrunch the gravel at the front door. I went to bed early and left them with the Light Programme. On Sunday mornings I fed the budgies and suggested he took her tea in bed. "Laughter," she read out from her horoscope, "leads to love, even for those born under the sign of the Virgin."

MORGENHALL: You trusted them. They deceived you.

FOWLE: They deceived me all right. And I trusted them. Especially after I'd seen her on his knee and them both looking at the cartoons from one wrapping of chips.

MORGENHALL: Mr. Fowle I'm not quite getting the drift of your evidence. My hope is—your thought may not prove a shade too involved for our literal- minded judge. Old Tommy Banter was a Rugger blue in '98. He never rose to chess and his draughts had a brutal, unintelligent quality.

FOWLE: When he'd first put his knee under her I thought he'd do the decent thing. I thought I'd have peace in my little house at last. The wireless set dead silent. The end of all that happy laughter. No sound but the twitter from the end of the garden and the squeak of my own foot on the linoleum.

MORGENHALL: You wanted. . . .

FOWLE: I heard them whispering together and my hopes raised high. Then I came back and he was gone.

MORGENHALL: She'd. . . .

FOWLE: Turned him out. Because he was getting over familiar. " I couldn't have that. " she said. " I may like my laugh, but thank God, I'm still respectable. No thank you, there's safety in marriage. So I'm stuck with you, fiddle face. Let's play a tune on it, shall we?" She'd sent him away, my last hope.

MORGENHALL: So you . . . .

FOWLE: I realise I did wrong.

MORGENHALL: You could have left.

FOWLE: Who'd have fed the birds? That thought was uppermost.

MORGENHALL: So it's not a crime of passion? (28-31)

Now, an extract from What Shall We Tell Caroline? And, oddly enough, it includes a tiny fushigi. To go directly to the fushigi click here, otherwise, carry on reading.

What Shall We Tell Caroline?
…

TONY: Many, many, happies, Caroline dear. (He stoops to kiss the top of her head. Caroline lifts her face and kisses him on the mouth. She is still expressionless. He sits down, disconcerted, patting his lips with his handkerchief.)

LILY: Caroline, my baby. Don't grow up any more. (Lily hugs Caroline like a child and then sits down.)

ARTHUR: She didn't like you saying that.

TONY: She didn't mind. (Pause while Lily begins to cry.)

ARTHUR: (suddenly loses his temper) Will you provoke me, Bin, with these bloody waterworks?

TONY: Look. She hasn't noticed her presents yet.

ARTHUR: She was upset.

TONY: No she wasn't. (Caroline looks down at her place and lifts her hands in amazement. Her face is still without expression.)

LILY: (recovering) She's seen them now.

ARTHUR: (eagerly) She may open mine first.

TONY: Well, of all the selfish....

ARTHUR: She's going to. I hope you didn't notice me buying it, Caroline, in the High Street yesterday. Creeping out ofW. H. Smith's.

TONY: Now you've given the game away.

ARTHUR: What are you hinting?

TONY: The mention of W. H. Smith. Now she can rule out stockings or underwear or any nice toilet water. (Caroline shakes the parcel.)

TONY: Now she's guessed what it is.

ARTHUR: I don't believe she has. (Caroline shakes her head.)

ARTHUR: No, she hasn't. (Caroline opens the parcel, it contains a Halma set and three boy's adventure books.) [Here's the fushigi, which began October 22, Saturday, with my talking to my local used bookseller about our childhood reads. The conversation turned specifically to the boys adventure series, The Hardy Boys. And I read this on Monday, October 24th.)

TONY: Same old things. She's bored with Halma.

ARTHUR: No she's not.

TONY: Yes she is.

ARTHUR: Anyway it's a wholesome game, Peters, unlike the indoor sports you're addicted to.

TONY: And these books. You only buy them to read them yourself. Three midshipmen stranded on a desert island. (Picks up one and starts to read.) "Give over tickling. Harry, giggled his chum, little guessing it was the hairy baboon that had crept up behind the unsuspecting youngsters...."

ARTHUR: She appreciates it.

LILY: (soothingly) Of course she does, don't let's quarrel. Not on the birthday.

TONY: (putting down the book) I suppose it takes all tastes.

LILY: Perhaps now she'll open mine. (Caroline picks up a parcel.)

LILY: I made it for you, dear. It took so long. It seem to have been making it all my life.( Caroline opens the parcel. A long sweater, white and endless with the school colours at the neck. She holds it in front of herself. It's far too long.)

LILY: Oh Caroline. There's too much of it. I had far too much spare time.

TONY: (putting his hand on Lily's shoulder) She likes it. She thinks it'll keep her warm.

ARTHUR: Warm? Keep her warm did you say? I tell you it's perfectly warm here, all the year round.

TONY: There now. Headmaster. Lily's right. We shouldn't quarrel on the birthday. And look. She's knitted in the school colours. That'll cheer you up, you know. When you see those colours always round your daughter.

ARTHUR: At least it shows some sense of loyalty.

TONY: Of course, not being, strictly speaking, a parent my present, gets opened last.

ARTHUR: (resentfully) A treat saved up for you. (Caroline picks up Tony's present. Holds it against her cheek. Listens to it.)

TONY: I believe.... Yes. I think I am right in saying (radio commentator's voice). "The ceremony is just about to begin. It's a wonderful spectacle here to-day. The Lady Mayoress has released the pigeons. The massed bands are striking up. The Boy Scouts are fainting in unprecedented numbers and...." (Caroline undoes the parcel, produces a gilt powder compact).

ARTHUR: What can it be? (Caroline opens the compact and sprinkles powder on her nose.) (81-3)

And now, for fushigi #2. Again, small, but directly on point. On October 26th, Wednesday, I did something I haven't done in more than 3 years. I had lunch with SJ. We were talking about various things, catching up. The conversation turned to personal growth and the interpersonal challenges of living with spouses. I suggested that a book I found very helpful, perhaps the most helpful because of its absolute basic approach to living, was Thirsty Swimming in the Lake by David K. Reynolds. There are two basic components to his approach: do what needs to be done and acknowledge and appreciate the efforts of others, including parents no matter how flawed, for contributing tangibly and realistically to your being alive. This was a quite extensive conversation.

Well, that night I resumed reading What Shall We Tell Caroline? and within a few minutes of opening the book I read the following:

…

ARTHUR: But you don't know why she didn't speak? I told you, Peters, all the terms of endearment start shouting and screaming when I utter them. When I love someone all my love turns to irritation. I lost my temper with Caroline! I hit her! I actually hit her!

LILY (crossing towards him): No dear. You didn't.

ARTHUR: How do you know?

TONY: We were here in the room. You didn't hit her, Headmaster.

ARTHUR (deflated): I did. I wanted to hit her. After that, I thought she didn't speak. The nervous shock. Was it the nervous shock do you think, either of you?

LILY: Perhaps she didn't want to.

TONY: Or she had nothing to say to us. Although we had enough to say to her ….

LILY: Who shall we talk to now?

TONY: Each other. Lily. Always to each other.

LILY: Caroline! Why should she have to go. Tony?

TONY: She has to go sometime.

ARTHUR: I made her go. I hit her. I must have hit her. There's no other explanation.

TONY (sits down in the basket-chair and picks up his ukulele): How shall we ever know?

ARTHUR: What do you mean. For God's sake explain what you mean?

TONY: Was it your temper or her temper that
stopped her speaking? Was it just the complete lack of interest that overcomes all children at the thought of the parents who gave them birth?

ARTHUR: I wasn't responsible?

TONY: What's responsible for Caroline as she is? What you told her? What you didn't tell her? The fact we told her a lie? The fact we told her the truth? Look back, Arthur. Look back. Lily do. What made us what we are? Anything our fathers and mothers said? More likely something that happened when we were all alone. Something we thought of for ourselves, looking for a passable disguise in a dusty attic, or for a path that didn't exist in the hot summer in the middle of a wood that smelt of nettles.

ARTHUR: Is that how you found things out?

TONY: My dear old headmaster. I've never found out anything. I'm not a parent, but in my weak moments, like this afternoon, I've wanted to tell things to the young. Why do we do it? Not to give them information, but to make them repeat our lives. That's all. It's finished with us and we don't want it to be finished. We'd like them to do it for us—all over again. It'll be better for Caroline to work in the bank. If only her adding weren't quite so shaky. Let's hope she errs. Headmaster, on the side of generosity. (Lily gets up and begins to put things on a tray.)

ARTHUR: What are you doing. Bin?

LILY: Clearing away the tea. (She goes out with the tray.)

TONY (looking at his watch): Just ten minutes and the boys have to stop their so called " free time " and be hoarded into prep. I shall sit with them in silence (113-114).

2011.10.23 — The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje — finished 2011.10.17

Began 2011.09.27.

Michael Ondaatje.
The Cat's Table.
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7710-6864-5.

Michael Ondaatje is one of the true masters of English poetry in prose. But when I learned that The Cat's Table was in the style of a memoir, I was slightly disappointed because, with some exceptions, I have not been fond of memoirs as such. However I felt curious and expectant that he would convert me. He did. He exceeded expectation because he managed, again, to convince me while reading his latest book that the one in my hands is my new Ondaatje favourite.

★★★★★

And to describe it as a memoir is an accurate description, but only in the same way that to say the sky is blue is accurate: it misses the complexity of the experience. The arc of the story is a memoir of a pre-pubescent boy sent to England on a ship with scant adult supervision. Some critics I've read found that to be a stumbling point, but my childhood spent with scant adult supervision for extended periods of time is eerily echoed in how Michael interacts with the adult social marginals he and his new found friends are assigned to sit with at the cat's table, which is, I learned in this book, that one table in a public space that no one wants to be seated at. Thus he is lumped in with the ship's other dining room undesirables and comes to learn that what does not glitter may very well yield gold and beyond that the even more valuable stuff of a lived life.

In the Q&A portion of the reading I attended, Ondaatje insisted that the book is not a memoir. He claims that, even though he did take a ship from Columbo to England as a child the age of the protagonist, Michael, he has little if even any memory of it. Ondaatje avers that his unremembered childhood trip sparked an idea for a story, that evolved as it was written, to include unexpected characters moving downstage into significance that

he had not imagined.

Regardless memoir or fiction, Ondaatje's writing here is as beautiful as anything he has written:

A peculiarity of Miss Lasqueti was that she was a sleeper. Someone who at certain hours during the day could barely stay awake. You saw her fighting it. This struggle made her endearing, as if she were forever warding off an unjustified punishment. You'd walk past her in a deck chair, her head falling slowly towards the book she was attempting to read. She was in many ways our table's ghost, for it was also revealed that she sleepwalked, a dangerous habit on a ship. A sliver of white, I see her always, against the dark rolling sea.

What was her future? What had been her past? She was the only one from the Cat's Table who was able to force us out of ourselves in order to imagine another's life. I admit it was mostly Ramadhin who coaxed this empathy from Cassius and me. Ramadhin was always the most generous of the three of us. But for the first time in our lives we began to sense there was an unlairness in someone else's life. Miss Lasqueti had, I remember, "gunpowder tea," which she mixed with a cup of hot water at our table, then poured into a thermos before she left us for the afternoon. You could actually see the flush enter her face as the drink knocked her awake (p74).

and:

Sleep is a prison^* for a boy who has friends to meet. We were impatient with the night, up before sunrise surrounded the ship. We could not wait to continue exploring this universe. Lying in my bunk I would hear Ramadhin's gentle knock on the door, in code. A pointless code, really—who else could it have been at that hour? Two taps, a long pause, another tap. If I did not climb down and open the door I would hear his theatrical cough. And if I still did not respond, I would hear him whisper "Mynah," which had become my nickname (p24).

*I read the evocative phrase Sleep is a prison the day after I finished reading the play A Sleep of Prisoners. The uniqueness of both phrases — I hadn't read either one anywhere that I remember — has prompted me to include this as a fushigi. Or at least close enough for me to blog it as such. [Addendum: The Cat's Table is also loosely entangled in another, 'future' fushigi, involving cats. See The Cat & the Camel blog.]

Beyond the sheer beauty of the writing Ondaatje seamlessly moves through the story using various voices. He has captured with perfection what I remember as the feelings of childhood wonder and acceptance of the process of being alive through Michael's eyes. Things simply are: the trip, the people, the intense life changing friendship that lasted for only 21 days. But Ondaatje also brings to the telling the reflectiveness of an adult considering a particular childhood passage. And he does this with a grace and lightness of touch that manages to keep the child's feeling of life's magic fully alive. And then he plays the omniscient writer's role to elaborate the background of two of the characters.

And Ondaatje brings to fruition a mystery that is introduced, invisibly, quite early, that becomes a mystery well into the book, and closes with human simplicity and gentle, quiet satisfaction.

All seamlessly. A breathtakingly beautiful and fulfilling read.

2011.09.26 — A Sleep of Prisoners by Christopher Fry — finished

Christopher Fry.
A Sleep of Prisoners.
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1952.

★★☆☆☆

I found this to be an extremely difficult play to read. If A Sleep of Prisoners had been straight prose I'd have given it only one star. I think that I like what I think Fry was trying to do, but it just didn't quite work for me. I've been wrestling with pinpointing the source of my antipathy, and it comes down to basically three reasons.

The first is an inherently confusing structure. The four actors in the drama play their 'title' characters which are foot soldiers being held in a church, but while sleep-walking they also portray different figures from the Old Testament at different times and sometimes more than one them. Thus the various soldiers are at various times either awake or asleep but sleep-walk and sleep-talk, and in some cases interact physically.

This is the part I like in theory because the play takes on the confused structure of a dream and creatively turns the play itself into a series of dreams within dreams. Unfortunately that structure is inherently prone to confusion, amusingly very much like when trying to recall a multi-layered dream. Sadly Fry wasn't able to overcome that confusion, with me, and I found myself frequently and repeatedly unsure if the designated speaker was awake or asleep and personifying Abel or God. It was with growing frustration that I found myself frequently flipping back to see who was whom.

Branagh in The Lady's Not for Burning

It is probable that seeing the production would help keep the distinctions. However, and most importantly, the second failure was that Fry forced the language in a way that surprised me after my having read and seen two versions of his brilliant 'The Lady's Not For Burning'.

And he forced it in two ways, both of which added to the confusion. The first was in shrilly striving to be profound and rustic at the same time. Perhaps here he was trying to emulate Shakespeare's Feste from Twelfth Night, but failed.

Ben Kingsley's Feste

The other way that the language failed was in how nearly identical the four soldiers sounded to each other, whether awake or sleep talking a Biblical figure. I suspect that this may well have been a result of Fry trying to have all the characters say accidentally profound and even memorable things.

And here is the final reason: the meaning was heavy-handed and coloured unfavourably by an excessively sentimental existential angst. Let's see if this citation captures what I mean.

DAVID.                                          Oh, go
And discard yourself. G'night, Corporal Joseph Adams.

[ADAMS goes to his bunk.
MEADOWS turns in his sleep.
The church clock strikes a single note.

MEADOWS [asleep]. Who's that, fallen out? How many men?
How many? I said only one.
One was enough.
No, no, no. I didn't ask to be God.
No one else prepared to spell the words.
Spellbound. B-o-u-n-d. Ah-h-h-h …

[He turns in his sleep again.

It's old Adam, old, old, old Adam.
Out of bounds. No one said fall out.
What time did you go to bad?
Sorrow, Adam, stremely sorrow.

[CORPORAL ADAMS comes towards him,
a dream figure.

Adam, Adam, stand easy there.

ADAMS. Reporting for duty, sir.

MEADOWS. As you were, Adam.

ADAMS. No chance of that, sir.

MEADOWS. As you were, as you were.

ADAMS. Lost all track of it now, sir.

MEADOWS. How far back was it, Adam?

ADAMS [with a jerk of the head].
Down the road. Too dark to see.

MEADOWS. Were you alone?

ADAMS.                           A woman with me, sir.

MEADOWS. I said Let there be love,
And there wasn't enough light, you say?

ADAMS. We could see our own shapes, near enough,
But not the road. The road kept on dividing
Every yard or so. Makes it long.
We expected nothing like it, sir.
Ill-equipped, naked as the day,
It was all over and the world was on us
Before we had time to take cover.

MEADOWS. Stand at peace, Adam: do stand at peace.

ADAMS. There's nothing of that now, sir.

MEADOWS. Corporal Adam.

ADAMS.                      Sir?

MEADOWS.                         You have shown spirit.

ADAMS. Thank you, sir.
Excuse me, sir, but there's some talk of a future.
I've had no instructions.

MEADOWS [turning in his sleep]. Ah-h-h-h-h.

ADAMS. Is there any immediate anxiety of that?

[DAVID, as the dream figure of Cam, stands leaning on the lectern, chewing at a beet.

How far can we fall back, sir?

DAVID [smearing his arms with beet juice].
Have you lost something?

ADAMS. Yes, Cain: yes, I have.

DAVID. Have you felt in all your pockets?

ADAMS. Yes, and by searchlight all along the grass
For God knows howling. Not a sign,
Not a sign, boy, not a ghost.

DAVID.                               When do you last
Remember losing it?


ADAMS.                   When I knew it was mine.
As soon as I knew it was mine I felt
I was the only one who didn't know
My host.

DAVID.      Poor overlooked
Old man. Allow me to make the introduction.
God: man. Man: God.

[PETER, the dream figure of Abel, is in the organ-loft fingering out ''Now the day is over'.

ADAMS. I wish it could be so easy.

DAVID. Sigh, sigh, sigh!
The hot sun won't bring you out again
If you don't know how to behave.
Pretty much like mutiny. I'd like to remind you
We're first of all men, and complain afterwards.
[Calling.] Abel! Abel! Hey, flock-headed Peter,
Come down off those mountains.
Those bleating sheep can look after themselves.
Come on down.

PETER.             What for?

DAVID.                            Because I said so!

PETER [coming down]. I overlooked the time. Is it day or night?

DAVID. You don't deserve to inherit the earth.
Am I supposed to carry the place alone?

PETER. Where will you carry it?
Where do you think you're going to take it to,
This prolific indifference?
Show me an ending great enough
To hold the passion of this beginning
And raise me to it.
Day and night, the sun and moon
Spirit us, we wonder where. Meanwhile
Here we are, we lean on our lives
Expecting purpose to keep her date,
Get cold waiting, watch the overworlds
Come and go, question the need to stay
But do, in an obstinate anticipation of love.
Ah, love me, it's a long misuse of breath
For boys like us. When do we start?

DAVID. When you suffering god'sbodies
Come to your senses. What you'll do
Is lose us life altogether.
Amply the animal is Cain, thank God,
As he was meant to be: a huskular strapling
With all his passions about him. Tomorrow
Will know him well. Momentous doings
Over the hill for the earth and us.
What hell else do you want?

PETER.                               The justification.

DAVID. Oh, bulls and bears to that.
The word's too long to be lived.
Just if, just if, is as far as ever you'll see.

PETER. What's man to be?

DAVID.                         Content and full.

PETER. That's modest enough.
What an occupation for eternity.
Sky's hollow filled as far as for ever
With rolling light: place without limit,
Time without pity:
And did you say all for the sake of our good condition,
All for our two-footed prosperity?
Well, we should prosper, considering
The torment squandered on our prospering.
From squid to eagle the ravening is on.
We are all pain-fellows, but nothing you dismay,
Man is to prosper. Other lives, forbear
To blame me, great and small forgive me
If to your various agonies
My light should seem hardly enough
To be the cause of the ponderable shadow.

DAVID. Who do you think you are, so Angel-sick?
Pain warns us to be master: pain prefers us.
Draws us up.

PETER.          Water into the sun:
All the brooding clouds of us!

DAVID.                                  All right.
We'll put it to the High and Mighty.
Play you dice to know who's favoured.

PETER. What's he to do with winning?

DAVID.                                           Play you dice.
Not so sure of yourself, I notice.

PETER. I'll play you. Throw for first throw.
Now creation be true to creatures.

ADAMS. Look, sir, my sons are playing.
How silent the spectators are,
World, air, and water.
Eyes bright, tension, halt.
Still as a bone from here to the sea.

DAVID [playing]. Ah-h-h-h!

ADAMS. Sir, my sons are playing. Cain's your man.
He goes in the mould of passion as you made him,
He can walk this broken world as easily
As I and Eve the ivory light of Eden.
I recommend him. The other boy
Frets for what never came his way,
Will never reconcile us to our exile.
Look, sir, my sons are playing.
Sir, let the future plume itself, not suffer.

PETER [playing]. How's that for a nest of singing birds?

ADAMS. Cain sweats: Cain gleams. Now do you see him?
He gives his body to the game.
Sir, he's your own making, and has no complaints.

DAVID. Ah! What are you doing to me, heaven and earth?

PETER. Friendly morning.

DAVID [shaking the dice]. Numbers, be true to nature.
Deal me high,
Six dark stars
Come into my sky.

[He throws.

Blight! What's blinding me
By twos and threes? I'm strong, aren't I?
Who's holding me down? Who's frozen my fist
So it can't hatch the damn dice out?

PETER [shaking and throwing].
Deal me high, deal me low.
Make my deeds
My nameless needs.
I know I do not know.
... That brings me home!

[DAVID roars with rage and disappointment. (10-15)

This is typical of the entire play. Forced but false earthy wisdom, and dialogue that makes all the characters sound the same, even when they come from The Bible. I was very disappointed.

But curious to see a production, to see how someone approaches the problems of staging this play. And to see how the presence of individuals acting the play helps to distinguish the dialogue and make it less heavy with sentimental angst.

2011.09.24 — To Speak of Conversations with Carl Jung and a Sigmund Freud fushigi*.

This morning (Saturday as I'm now writing), I stumbled into a 'multi-month' *fushigi. It originally began on an aqua marine sticky dated 2011.06.20. This morning I found it stuck on page 22 of Conversations with Carl Jung and reactions from Earnest Jones as interviewed and edited by and Richard I. Evans.
Canada: D. Van Nostrand Co. Ltd., 1964.

On that sticky I'd quickly jotted:

@ work talked with BV & TR about [the relative] popularity of Jung versus Freud. At some point I said that Jung was [and is] more unpopular than Freud because Jung demanded from his psychology taking personal responsibility, whereas Freud's psychology allows blame to be put on childhood traumas.

This aqua fushigi sticky was stuck in the book because the night of that conversation with B&T I opened CwCJ to read the following:

In New York City on December 1, 1961, a Jung Memorial meeting was held, sponsored jointly by the New York Association of Analytical Psychology and the Analytical Psychology Club of New York. At this meeting we were particularly taken with the interesting and eloquent comments expressed by Dr. Henry Murray about the late Dr. Carl Jung. We may quote Dr. Murray when he says:

"Jung was humble before the ineffable mystery of each variant self that faced him for the first time, as he sat at his, desk, pipe in hand, with every faculty in tune, brooding on the portent of what was being said to him. And he never hesitated to acknowledge his perplexity in the presence of a strange and inscrutable phenomenon, never hesitated to admit the provisional nature of the comments he had to make or to emphasize the difficulties and limitations of possible achievement in the future.

'Whoever comes to me' he would say, 'takes his life in his hand.' The effect of such a statement, the effect of his manner of delivering his a'vows of uncertainty and suspense is not to diminish but to augment the patient's faith in his positions, invincible integrity, as well as to make plain that the patient must take the burden of responsibility for any decisions he might make" (22-3 - my emphasis).

How this fushigi came full circle today began with my finding a quotation about villains to augment an answer I'd given to a 'Which One' question M posted in Weekly Short Stories Game game. The question was to choose between:

"Someone who is sure about things or someone who is at home with uncertainty?"

Yesterday, when I answered that I thought immediately of the brilliant book The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt. So this morning I went onto the iMAc to find the quotation I wanted to add to my answer, which is:

The hero is the man actively engaged in becoming himself – never a very reassuring sight. The villain, on the other hand, has already become something.

Donald Richie. The Films of Akira Kurosawa. University of California Press, © 1984 by The Regents of the University of California. Cited in The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt, New York: Hyperion Books, 2000; ISBN 0-7868-6668-3, pg.235

And so it came to pass that a fushigi that began in June came around in an odd circle to be completed in late September with a fictional book that cited a book about the films of Akira Kuroswawa

and an 'uncertainty' question in a social networking game.

Oh! One more thing. The gamester, M, who asked the above question is an avid reader of Jung. I know this because we have corresponded on and via Goodreads. However, to the best of my knowledge, he doesn't read my blog — at least he's never commented in, or about, it even though I am reasonably certain that he has seen me refer to it.

Addendum: a completely trivial and insubstantial oddity happened this afternoon, as well. I'm a little hesitant to blog this, but these things happen to me very frequently, so, given that I'm blogging a fushigi today, I figure that I might just as well. This morning, while parking the car in the super market's parking lot, for some reason the movie with Bill Murray about the body's immune

systems came into my mind. Not sure why, given that it is an old movie and only somewhat amusing. I don't have a copy of it, have no desire to purchase it, and I've only seen it once. One of those quick completely nonsensical thoughts. Except that when I got home, and after a couple of hours of gardening with my wife, I put up my feet and flipped through the TV's channel guide to see listed the movie Osmosis Jones. When I saw it, I said to my Self, 'Oh no. That's just too stupid.' But as I've said, these kinds of spurious thoughts with subsequent manifestation happen frequently.

2011.09.17 — Conversations with Carl Jung — finished 2011.08.02

★★★★☆
Carl Jung and Richard I. Evans.
Conversations with Carl Jung and reactions from Earnest Jones.
Canada: D. Van Nostrand Co. Ltd., 1964.

Previous fushigi blog on this book is @ 2011.07.15.

The psyche is nothing different from the living being. It is the psychical aspect of the living being. It is even the psychical aspect of matter. It is a quality (p83).

As I was reading the first interview I had mixed feelings. At first I was a little disappointed in it because it seemed somewhat insubstantial. But given the amount of Jung I have read — which isn't everything but certainly more than a survey anthology — I realized that that is a rather shallow observation. So I decided to step back and enjoy the book for what is, which for me took the form of observing the psychological nature or bias of the American interviewer, Richard I. Evans.

It struck me that Evans was revealing himself by the type of questions he asked as well as the insistence with which he asked some or avoided others. With that realization the interviews became amusing and very interesting because I could see that Evans was coming at Jung from America's oddly prurient Freudian-sexual fixation while trying not to appear that way. And it was also interesting and amusing to see Jung strive to shake Evans of that bias of understanding. That Evans was indeed this way biased is made evident by his need to include in his book the Freudian rebuttal of Jung with an interview with the Freudian Earnest Jones.

But it was perhaps most apparent in the chapter 'Jung's Appraisal of Freudian Psychosexual Development.' While reading it I was reminded of one of the most interesting (to me) interviews Oprah did. Kate Winslet was her guest. She was there to talk about and, of course, promote the excellent (but highly underrated) movie Holy Smoke.

In the course of the movie Ruth (Winslet), who was being de-programmed from a religious conversion she'd undergone in India, had a nervous break down when the tenets of her faith did not stand up against the deprogrammer's argument and rhetoric.

Ruth burns the clothes she came with from India, and walks naked in the Australian desert, tears pouring down her face. Pretty obvious metaphorical and psychological expression of being stripped (emotionally and psychologically) before experiencing a rebirth into, hopefully, her true self. It is extremely well acted, and includes Ruth urinating as she walks.

Without my exaggerating too much, Oprah fixated on Winslet's nakedness, not the character's, with question after question about that. Winslet responded to the first and second queries with resigned patience — it was this character's experience — kind of answer. Yes, the issue of cults and brainwashing were eventually discussed, but not before Oprah had revealed an aspect of her American teenage-like fixation on sex and sexuality. It became increasingly evident that Winslet was frustrated by that fixation and, if memory serves me right, says something like it's only breasts for God's sake.

And if it is possible to suggest that Oprah's blatant fascination with a woman who was willing to be publicly naked has a certain American feel about it, Jung refers to the 'psyche' of America many times in these interview as if such a thing is tangibly even obviously evident. For example, Jung is asked about the relationship between psychological disturbances and illness, and of the use of drugs to treat mental illness, and comments on America's medical behaviour.

Dr. Evans: An interesting area which is being discussed a lot in the United States today, and I'm sure is of interest to you as well, is that of psychosomatic medicine, an area dealing with the way in which emotional components of personality can affect bodily functions.

Dr. Jung: As an example of this, I see a lot of astounding cures of tuberculosis—chronic tuberculosis—effected by analysts; people learn to breathe again. The understanding of what their complexes were—that has helped them.

Dr. Evans: When did you first become interested in the psychic factors of tuberculosis? Many years ago?

Dr. Jung: I was an analyst to begin with; I was always interested naturally. Maybe also because I understood so little of it, or more importantly, I noticed that I understood so little.

Dr. Evans: To expand on my earlier question, we are right now becoming more and more interested in the United States in how emotional, unconscious personality factors can actually have an effect on the body. Of course, the classic example in the literature is the peptic ulcer. It is believed that this is a case where emotional factors have actually created pathology.

These ideas have been extended into many other areas. It is felt, for example, that where there already is pathology, these emotional factors can intensify it. Or sometimes there may be actual symptoms or fears concerning pathology when no true pathology exists, such as in cases of hysteria or hypochondriasis. For example, many physicians in America say that 60 to 70 percent of their patients do not have anything really physically wrong with them, but they instead have disorders of psychosomatic origin.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is well known—since more than fifty years. The question is how to cure them.

Dr. Evans: Speaking of such psychosomatic disturbances, as, for instance, your experiences and studies into tuberculosis, do you have any ideas as to why the patient selects this type of symptom?

Dr. Jung: He doesn't select; they happen to him. You could ask just as well when you are eaten by a crocodile, "How did you happen to select that crocodile?" Nonsense, he has selected you.

Dr. Evans: Of course, "selected" in this sense refers to an unconscious process.

Dr. Jung: No, not even unconsciously. That is an extraordinary exaggeration of the importance of the subject, to say he was choosing such things. They get him.

Dr. Evans: Perhaps one of the most radical suggestions in the area of psychosomatic medicine has been the suggestion that some forms of cancer may have psychosomatic components as causal factors. Would this surprise you?

Dr. Jung: Not at all. We know these since long ago, you know. Fifty years ago we already had these cases; ulcer of the stomach, tuberculosis, chronic arthritis, skin diseases. All are psychogenic under certain conditions.

Dr. Evans: And even cancer?

Dr. Jung: Well you see, I couldn't swear, but I have seen cases where I thought or wondered whether or not there was a psychogenic reason for that particular ailment; it came too conveniently.

Many things can be found out about cancer, I'm sure. You see, with us it has been always a question of how to treat these things, because any disease possible has a psychological accompaniment. It just all depends upon —perhaps life depends upon it—whether you treat such a patient psychologically in the proper way or not. That can help tremendously, even if you cannot prove in the least that the disease in itself is psychogenic.

You can have an infectious disease in a certain moment, that is, a physical ailment or predicament, because you are particularly accessible to an infection—maybe sometimes because of a psychological attitude. Angina is such a typical psychological disease; yet it is not psychological in its physical consequences. It's just an infection. So you ask, "Then why does psychology have anything to do with it?" Because it was the psychological moment maybe that allowed the infection to grow. When the disease has been established and there is a high fever and an abscess, you cannot cure it by psychology. Yet it is quite possible that you can avoid it by a proper psychological attitude.

Dr. Evans: So all this interest in psychosomatic medicine is pretty old stuff to you.

Dr. Jung: It's all known here long ago.

Dr. Evans: And you are not at all surprised at the new developments . . .

Dr. Jung: No. For instance, there is the toxic aspect of schizophrenia. I published it fifty years ago—just fifty years ago—and now everyone discovers it. You are far ahead in America with technological things, but in psychological matters and such things, you are fifty years back. You simply don't understand it; that's a fact. I don't want to figure in a general corrective statement; you simply are not yet aware of what there is. There are plenty more things than people have any idea of. I told you that case of the theologian who didn't even know what the unconscious was; he thought it was an apparition. Everyone who says that I am a mystic is just an idiot. He just doesn't understand the first word of psychology.

Dr. Evans: There is certainly nothing mystical about the statements you have just been making. Now to pursue this further, another development that falls right in line with this whole discussion of psychosomatic medicine has been the use of drugs to deal with psychological problems. Of course, historically drugs have been used a great deal by people to try to forget their troubles, to relieve pain, etc. However, a particular development has been the so-called non-addictive tranquilizing drugs. These, of course, became prominent in France with the drug, chlorpromazine. Then followed such drugs as reserpine-serpentina, and a great variety of milder tranquilizers, known by such trade names as Miltown and Equinal. They are now being administered very freely to patients by general practitioners and internists. In other words, not only are the stronger tranquilizers being administered to mentally ill patients such as schizophrenics, but to a great extent today these drugs are being dispensed almost as freely as aspirins to reduce everyday tensions.

Dr. Jung: This practice is very dangerous.

Dr. Evans: Why do you think this is dangerous? These drugs are supposed to be nonaddictive.

Dr. Jung: It's just like the compulsion that is caused by morphine or heroin. It becomes a habit. You don't know what you do, you see, when you use such drugs. It is like the abuse of narcotics.

Dr. Evans: But the argument is that these are not habit-forming; they are not physiologically addictive.

Dr. Jung: Oh, yes, that's what one says.

Dr. Evans: But you feel that psychologically there is still addiction?

Dr. Jung: Yes. For instance, there are many drugs that don't produce habits, the kind of habits that morphine does; yet it becomes a different kind of habit, a psychical habit, and that is just as bad as anything else.

Dr. Evans: Have you actually seen any patients or had any contact with individuals who have been taking these particular drugs, these tranquilizers?

Dr. Jung: I can't say. You see, with us there are very few. In America there are all the little powders and the tablets. Happily enough, we are not yet so far. You see, American life is in a subtle way so one-sided and so uprooted that you must have something with which to compensate the real nature of man. You have to pacify your unconscious all along the line because it is in absolute uproar; so at the slightest provocation you have a big moral rebellion in America. Look at the rebellion of modern youth in America, the sexual rebellion, and all that. These rebellions occur because the real, natural man is just in open rebellion against the utterly inhuman form of American life. Americans are absolutely divorced from nature in a way, and that accounts for that drug abuse.

Dr. Evans: But what about the treatment of individuals who are seriously mentally ill? We have the problem of hospitalized, psychotic patients. For instance, certain schizophrenics are so withdrawn that they are virtually impossible to interact with in psychotherapy;

so in many hospitals in the United States, drugs such as chlorpromazine have been used in order to render many such patients more amenable to psychotherapy. I don't think most of our practitioners believe the drugs cure the patients in themselves, but they at least make the patient more amenable to therapy.

Dr. Jung: Yes, the only question is whether that amenability is a real thing or drug-induced. I am sure that any kind of suggestive treatment will have effect, because these people simply become suggestible. You see, any drug or shock in the mind will lower stamina, making these people accessible to suggestion. Then, of course, they can be led, can be made into something, but it is not a very happy result.

Dr. Evans: To change the topic for a moment, Professor Jung, I know our students would be interested in your opinion concerning the kind of training and background a psychologist, a person who wants to study the individual, should have. For example, there is one view that says maybe he should be trained primarily as a rigorous scientist, a master of such tools as statistics and experimental design. Others feel, however, that a study of the humanities is also important for the student who wants to study the individual.

Dr. Jung: Well of course, when you study human psychology, you can't help noticing that man's psychology doesn't only consist of the ramifications of instinct in his behaviour. There are other determinants, many others, and the study of man from his biological aspect only is by far insufficient. To understand human psychology, it is absolutely necessary that you study man also in his social and general environments. You have to consider, for instance, the fact that there are different kinds of societies, different kinds of nations, different traditions; and in the interest of that purpose, it is absolutely necessary that one treat the problem of the human psyche from many standpoints. Each is naturally a considerable task.

Thus, after my association experiments at which time I realized that there was obviously an unconscious, the question became, "Now what is this unconscious? Does it consist merely of remnants of conscious activities, or are there things that are practically forever unconscious? In other words, is the unconscious a factor in itself?" And I soon came to the conclusion that the unconscious must be a factor in itself. You see, I observe time and again, for instance, when delving into people's dreams or schizophrenic patients' delusions and fantasies, that therein is contained motives which they couldn't possibly have acquired in our surroundings. This, of course, depends upon the belief that the child is not born tabula rasa, but instead is a definite mixture or combination of genes; and although the genes seem to contain chiefly dynamic factors and predispositions to certain types of behaviour, they have a tremendous importance also for the arrangement of the psyche, inasmuch as it appears, that is. Before you can see into the psyche, you cannot study it, but once it appears, you see that it has certain qualities and a certain character. Now the explanation for this must needs depend upon the elements born in the child, so factors determining human behaviour are born within the child, and determine further development. Now that is one side of the picture.

The other side of the picture is that the individual lives in connection with others in certain definite surroundings that will influence the given combination of qualities. And that now is also a very complicated factor, because the environmental influences are not merely personal. There are any number of objective factors. The general social conditions, laws, convictions, ways of looking at things, of dealing with things; these things are not of an arbitrary character. They are historical. There are historical reasons why things are as they are. There are historical reasons for the qualities of the psyche and there is such a thing as the history of man's evolution in past eons, which as a combination show that real understanding of the psyche must consist in the elucidation of the history of the human race—history of the mind, for instance, as in the biological data. When I wrote my first book concerning the psychology of the unconscious, I already had formed a certain idea of the nature of the unconscious. To me it was then a living remnant of the original history of man, man living in his surroundings. It is a very complicated picture.

So you see, man is not complete when he lives in a world of statistical truth. He must live in a world where the "whole" of man, his entire history, is the concern; and that is not merely statistics. It is the expression of what man really is, and what he feels himself to be.

The scientist is always looking for an average. Our natural science makes everything an average, reduces everything to an average; yet the truth is that the carriers of life are individuals, not average numbers. When everything is statistical, all individual qualities are wiped out, and that, of course, is quite unbecoming. In fact, it is unhygienic, because if you wipe out the mythology of a man, his entire historical sequence, he becomes a statistical average, a number; that is, he becomes nothing. He is deprived of his specific value, of experiencing his own unique value[my emphasis].

You see, the trouble is that nobody understands these things apparently. It seems quite strange to me that one doesn't see what an education without the humanities is doing to man. He loses his connection with his family, his connection with his whole past—the whole stem, the tribe—that past in which man has always lived. We think that we are born today tabula rasa without a history, but man has always lived in the myth. To think that man is born without a history within himself— that is a disease. It is absolutely abnormal, because man is not born every day. He is born into a specific historical setting with specific historical qualities, and therefore, he is only complete when he has a relation to these things. If you are growing up with no connection from the past, it is like being born without eyes and ears and trying to perceive the external world with accuracy. Natural science may say, "You need no connection with the past; you can wipe it out," but that is a mutilation of the human being. Now I saw from a practical experience that this kind of proceeding has a most extraordinary therapeutic effect. I can tell you such a case (105-112).

In my being a non-American, but one whose proximity to America means I am bombarded by images of America's zeitgeist and ideology twenty-four hours a day, I found his comments to align with my own less informed impressions.

But in the end, beyond my being bemused by American sexual repression pretending otherwise, the chastisement that Jung gives to America's psychiatric practice of using drugs (which is later echoed by Jones from the Freudian perspective), this book gave me a interesting 'aha' moment. When talking about his idea of psychological types, he elaborates on the intuitive. At one point (I wasn't able to find it tonight) he comments that the intuitive type are often, perhaps even normally, found in business men. He argues that for business to be successful the people running it need to know what is going to happen in the future, to know what isn't already known or deducible. For some reason this surprised me, because it is so obvious, but today, forty years since the interview, is so obviously not generally the case. I looked at my surprise, and after some thought came to the realization that the current practice of MBA-ing every important job means that education is weeding out the intuitive and replacing them with hacks who can regurgitate text books and lectures on exam day. And that explains a lot about today's business practices: the elite are unable to see beyond spreadsheets and flowcharts because the intuitives have been largely weeded out of the big corporate due to current education practices. The exceptions largely being those like Steve Jobs or Richard Branson, who went their own way.

Addendum: Previous fushigi blog on this book is @ 2011.07.15.