Head and Body

Excised from accompaniment

When I practised as a therapist I would sometimes get frustrated at my patients’ use of the pronoun “I”. Despite being taught that the sense of self is composed of “head” and “body”, they couldn’t stop speaking from a head-mind which functioned in proud isolation, peopled with its own constructs. They often remained deaf to the messages from their more instinctive, autonomous, primitive brain. This is the part that performs the same function for every animal: to put survival first, warn of danger, make an assessment of the total situation, inner and outer, from the evidence of all senses. The first role of head-mind, I told them, is to heed body-mind when it nags, and take appropriate action. When the nagging stops, the appropriate action is complete. Body-mind uses emotions, not words: fear them not, for they are friendly messengers, and their purpose is to sting you into doing something. The sting, like physical hunger and pain, comes from Nature’s benign wisdom. Just as a medical student is taught “First, do no harm”, Nature teaches us “First, remember you are an animal.”

It was a struggle to get my patients to do this. There were tricks to help them of course, ways to bypass the head-mind, but some were reluctant to make this adventurous journey. Still, I made my own good progress in practising what I preached. “Physician heal thyself”: as if becoming a therapist was just my way to consolidate the learning that had come to me so suddenly through the miracle of my own healing.

What is this thing called “I”? It’s not one voice, but many. Its from those voices that gods, devils, angels and saints have been modelled like puppets from thought and feeling, to enact their dramas in the theatre of consciousness.

Later in the morning, after writing the above, I went out on an errand. On my return, I passed the Public Library, which has just reopened at its grand new premises. After striding through its three floors of offerings, with more staff visible than visitors, I left incoherent with rage. It was hard to formulate what I found so offensive. I’m glad I resisted the urge to accost one of the librarians, for I would have put myself in the wrong and upset them pointlessly. I don’t want to rant about the details, only enough to give you the gist. The computer terminals seemed more important than the books. The music CDs and DVDs were displayed as proudly as the meagre selection of books. I couldn’t see anything of interest: only political correctness in every set of shelves. The gay and lesbian magazines were prominent, and the books in Urdu and Chinese. The proportion of “ethnic minorities” who cross the threshold, along with the other “minority groups” (if they could be identified as such) must have been major tick-boxes on their mission-statement-conformance audit forms. Most of all they seemed to feel that empty space was more important than lots of books, having got rid of all the old ones over the years. Now you can see only what they allow you to see. Classics? Oh yes, we have those—in new editions with instructive notes; as long as they are fully on-message. Joseph Conrad? Oh yes, we have Heart of Darkness: that’s what the kids read in school, so as to write essays on whether it is racist or anti-racist.

“So what would you do, Vincent?” To me, a library is a citadel of learning and literature, an open door to the past. Nothing would be thrown away. The stock would simply increase forever, so that you could discover not just the past through the politically-correct lens of 2008, but through the eyes of the past itself. So there would be books from the 1930s about the Victorian age (and not just Lytton Strachey’s 1918 Eminent Victorians, included “because it is a classic”).

End of rant. Trying to pick up the threads of where I left off before that, about emotions as friendly messengers, I wanted to study what “appropriate action” my unquenched fury was demanding. Should I go, like blind Samson in Gaza, to the temple that the Philistines had built to their god Dagon? Should I grasp its pillars and use my renewed strength—not residing in my hair, but in my words—to pull the whole abomination down around their ears?

No, not directly. I shall not protest to the librarians or the County Council. I shall not organize a candle-light protest march of outraged citizens, if any. My anger just made me realize how important learning and literature are to me: where “learning” includes in particular how people thought yesterday, and the day before that. For I don’t see today as any better. I worry that we are losing something, and I worry that I am not doing enough myself, being lazy about fulfilling my own destiny: a foolish worry of course, but I’m working on becoming wise.

My anger, if it’s a “friendly messenger” as I believe, isn’t to warn me that my life is in danger, but something equivalent: what I hold dear is being trampled upon. Till now, I never knew I held it so dear.

I shall endeavour to get my local library to ban my next book, by including a little rant like the above. They already have several copies of my last: it meets their criteria par excellence, being about a black immigrant who became the town’s mayor. The last time I checked, no one had borrowed it.

Nature too is a great library. In the leaves of trees we can read the past. These trees, these nasturtium flowers outside my window, the different kinds of bees and wasps: they are like books preserved from long ago, the companions of our distant ancestors. If the librarians are guilty of wanton destruction, then so is civilization itself, for jeopardizing what Nature has taken so long to create. Most of today’s species were here before my own; just as most of the extinct ones were wiped out before man came along.

The message I received is not conservation. I’d be happy for my local library to burn down: the resultant carbon emissions would be worth it. Even the loss of a few species through human thoughtlessness doesn’t rouse me to fury as much as that library.