Putting the Questions Differently

Our generation knows this very well, because we’ve seen it, we’ve lived through it. We know very well that when the heat gets turned on, people run, and when it gets unpleasant a few people remain fighting. And when public opinion – that’s the point – turns against something, not many people last. This, these kids haven’t had yet, and this is why I think they’re very vulnerable, because they don’t know yet.

For instance, I’m taking that group of people which I think is the most savagely brutal and stupid lot in the world – white South Africans – who are at the same time, if you meet them, kindly, friendly, nice human beings. I remember, when the Second World War ended, the Fascists in Nazi Germany who we knew were everything that history says they were, and I then met them and they were no different from you or me; they’d been in a different historical set-up – that’s all. Until these kids know that there isn’t one of us who, put in a different set-up, wouldn’t be brutal, savage, exploitive, they know nothing about how history works.

There is no original virtue in being twenty-two on a college campus. To be young is a minimal requirement – after all, everyone’s been young; it’s a grace, but not a very long-lasting one. Have they, in fact, been doing their homework and looking at how many large groups of people in the world now are living in Fascist countries, to be condemned by the same standards that they use to condemn society in America? Have they asked what’s going to happen to them in ten years’ time, when the heat goes up? Because if they’ve not thought this out, then they’re as good as defeated.

Terkel: This is a theme without ending – the theme of man and circumstance. In Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, with its subtitle “The Banality of Evil” – and we face now too the evil of banality – she says that Eichmann was indeed not a beast: he was a man who acted beastly. Isn’t this what you’re saying, that the possibilities are within?

Lessing: Yes, can you imagine in 100 years’ time, if anyone is alive then, that anyone’s going to look back to the Second World War and say, “Oh, those beastly Germans”? They’re going to say that the world allowed a certain type of government to take power in Germany, and a very small group of people in other countries protested what was going on; but we’re all going to be implicated in this kind of guilt. And they’re going to look back on what we’re living through now and say, “These people allowed” – I’m not going to list the horrors, because we all know them – “to happen,” even though we’re terribly nice, good, kind, charming, delightful people. Right?

Terkel: We come here to this question of the individual. I remember my own experience, and again this is all reflected in The Four-Gated City, hearing a group of men in South Africa, all of them charming, genial, singing the Schubert lied, “Das Lindenbaum,” all Afrikaaners, accepting and bolstering apartheid in its most horrendous forms. But, as you say, personally, because I was white, they were charming, wholly removed from the world around them.

Lessing: Bernard Shaw said somewhere the most terrifying thing: “Is it really necessary for Christ to be killed in every generation to save those who have no imagination?” Well, is it? People are so unprepared for the fact that a man can be a nice person as an individual yet support the most appalling policies. This shouldn’t happen after what the human race has experienced.

Terkel: You’re talking about roots too, aren’t you? You’re really talking about a knowledge of the past, knowing what happened and why it happened?

Lessing: Well, you said last night that these kids behave as if history started three years ago, and that’s what their hang-up is, because it hasn’t.

Terkel: It comes back to that again.

Lessing: I really don’t want to go on about the kids, because I admire them and I think they’re very brave. I feel differently. There are so many of my generation who are against them and who are vindictive. I’m not prepared to criticize them too much.

Terkel: Before we return to The Four-Gated City, you’ve been traveling for about five weeks now through America, and you said that somewhere in the Midwest you saw some incredible antagonism toward the young by our contemporaries.

Lessing: Yes, I met it absolutely nakedly. I think a great many older people are envious, and critical because they’re envious. But I hadn’t before ever met the naked hatred of the young that I met in the Midwest: they hated young people. It’s really ugly to see it. And these are teachers who are supposed to be teaching these kids.

Terkel: And you were saying that one of the reasons you think is envy of a certain joyousness among the young.

Lessing: Yes, there’s a great style and joy and a good humor – that’s the great thing they’ve got.

Terkel: Getting back to The Four-Gated City, could I ask you how you chose that title?

Lessing: It’s a phrase that comes out of mythology, and it’s in the Bible, spread all over the folklore of every conceivable part of the world. I chose it because the structure of Children of Violence goes in fours – each book is divided into four – and this is four again. It’s a very ancient symbol, and also I had a dream in which I saw what I later discovered to be an Egyptian theme: the sacred cow stands on great white legs and the hind legs are the people of the city. It was a beautiful dream, in technicolor – just at the time I was trying to work out what I was going to call this book.

Terkel: There’s an old Negro spiritual called “Twelve Gates to the City.” I take it this theme is universal, this matter of gates.

You spoke of there not being enough imagination. Earlier we were talking about the horrors of behavioral scientists who follow a certain pattern, manipulative people, and you were saying there’s another aspect of life that these men never even dream of, and many of us don’t – possibilities of experiencing.

Lessing: Yes, they treat human beings as if they were rats; they do their research on rats and pigeons. They can’t ask the right questions. But I think it’s a mistake to attack and criticize a phenomenon which is not going to be very important in five years’ time, because these people are very little people. I gather they’re quite important in the scientific structure, but I’ll lay a bet, any sum you care to mention, that what they stand for will be dead in a very short time because they’re too small, too limited, too narrow-minded to… This is the problem in these discussions: there’s never enough time to go into these matters.

I think that one of the things that’s happening everywhere is that we’re breeding new kinds of imagination and ways of thinking and experiencing. Actually they’re very old and we find them in cultures we tend to describe as primitive; they’re backward technologically, but they’re not backward in any other way and probably more advanced than ours. What is going to happen, I think, is a discovery that many ways of experiencing and sensing the world which we describe as superstitious are not anything of the kind. If you look at what’s going on everywhere – well, your country has a genuine feeling of new possibilities – you find these surprising people who would describe themselves as rationalists and die to defend that old-fashioned label are using ways of perceiving that our culture doesn’t admit: one of them is the use of dreams, which actually is rather respectable in our society, so it gets made use of; but also different forms of extrasensory perception are being seriously researched and accepted. And have you really ever thought about how the atmosphere’s changed about something like telepathy in ten years? Of all places it was the Soviet Union that suddenly made the announcement that they were experimenting into the use of telepathy for space travel. Now this sounds like space fiction – I’m a great reader of space fiction. Here in space fiction you find some novel so incredible that you think it’s a fantasy and it’s in the newspaper the next day.

Terkel: Coming back to Lynda and Martha, the protagonist in The Four-Gated City, we see that Martha, the sane woman, the secretary, the arranger, suddenly comes to lean toward Lynda’s way of thinking, doesn’t she?

Lessing: Yes, what happens is that Martha lives in this house with Lynda who has this label slapped on her: Lynda’s the nutty one, she’s mad. But Martha, by being with Lynda, begins to understand that what Lynda is doing is experiencing things in a different way. I try to explore what certain kinds of madness are. I’m inclined to think that schizophrenia is not madness at all. We’ve been dogmatic about this. I don’t want to say that schizophrenia is just this; I don’t like this business of saying something is only that.

Terkel: I’m fascinated by this character Lynda.

Lessing: One of the ideas that helped create Lynda was a woman I knew in London who was fifteen before she realized that everybody didn’t know who was at the other end of the telephone and didn’t hear what other people were thinking. She knew what other people were thinking, and in short she discovered that far from everyone being like this she was very much by herself and she learned to shut out the world. Lynda is a girl who has a very solitary childhood, and through a series of circumstances she comes under pressure, cracks up emotionally as God knows how many people do in adolescence – because everybody’s a bit crazy in adolescence – and is classed as a schizophrenic and a variety of other things, has a lot of treatment such as shock treatment, insulin treatment, the whole gamut, and is so damaged that she spends the rest of her life in and out of mental hospitals. At the same time, she has these powers, increasingly, the capacity to hear what people are thinking and to see.

Now I would like to define this, because a lot of people have this capacity. They have labels stuck on them by doctors and psychiatrists, and they don’t know in fact what they have. A great many people overhear what other people are thinking. It’s a capacity that can be developed if you are patient, are prepared to make mistakes, and you’re not bulldozed by the scientific way of thinking, which hasn’t learnt to put its questions right. They have to learn how to put the questions differently. The way they are putting the questions now means that they’re not able to learn.

The other capacity that a lot of people have is they see pictures inside their eyelids; a great many people see them when they’re ill, tired, under great strain, or before they go to sleep. There’s a word for that – “hypnagogic.” The doctor will say, “Oh yes, that’s a hypnagogic thingamajig – dismissed!” This capacity is what they refer to in the Bible as the seer’s visions, something which in our culture is not supposed to happen at all, and therefore it’s just ignored. Now this too can be developed, and it’s got nothing to do with time.

I’m really well aware that this is going to sound nutty: this particular thing can be, not always, out of time. It’s on a different time length, wavelength. It can take different forms: it can be in black-and-white, it can be in technicolor, it can be in a series of stills, like shots from a movie, frozen shots, it can be like a movie running – a lot of different things. I saw in Scientific American, just before I left, an article on research done on children. I’ve completely forgotten – is it eidetic children? – that is, children who, if you project an image, maintain this image. They’ve done a lot of research on that, you see.

Terkel: It’s funny that you mention that because the other night on TV Jacob Bronowski said that William Blake had this particular attribute that you just described.

Lessing: He also had a lot of others, quite clearly.

Terkel: But this matter of image, “Blake could see,” this is Bronowski talking, “Blake could see clearly, wholly, in absolutely all dimensions” that which you just talked about.

Lessing: It’s the “eidetic” – the capacity to hold an image in front of your eyes as if it were a photograph. That’s not what I was talking about when I spoke of seeing the pictures moving or the stills; that’s something else.

Why I was talking about that was to describe how the scientist dealt with it: the test as to whether the child was telling the truth or not was the amount of detail he could come up with from this picture. You see, now if he was able to remember the exact number of buttons on a coat or the hairs on the pussycat’s tail, he was telling the truth, and, if not, he didn’t have this capacity. This is a scientific mind working, you see. If I meet you on the street tomorrow morning, we have a chat, and we go away; and if you were in an observant mood and I was, you couldn’t say what I’d been wearing and I couldn’t say what you’d been wearing. If someone had said, “How’s he looking?” I would say, “I don’t know; he looked much as usual.” But we’d have absolutely no doubt at all that we’d met each other, even if we couldn’t remember a single detail. Right? We’d go to the stake that we’d met each other, even though we could say no more than that. The scientists are not yet able to measure what happens when you and I meet on the street, or what meets on the street. What meets, when we meet on the street?

Terkel: Is it two bodies, two pairs of eyes, two pairs of legs, or is it something in addition to that?

Lessing: Right, something in addition to that, which everybody responds to, but which we can’t yet measure. What is it?

Terkel: You’re saying the questions are wrong questions. And the questions are asked wrong because there’s a cynicism or skepticism involved, talking about the child who sees this in his mind, so they’re really not so much curious about what the child saw but questioning the veracity of the child.

Lessing: I think they have an unconscious, or perhaps not so unconscious, bias to prove that these things don’t exist. This is their problem. I met a girl in New York who said she read this book [The Four-Gated City] and she had a great burden taken off her because she was like Lynda. She suddenly realized she’d never been ill. Now this made me so happy.

Terkel: The passage you read at the very beginning dealt with that specific point that she’d been told she was crazy but she wasn’t really.

Lessing: There are hundreds of thousands of people who have been tortured by doctors and psychiatrists in a way which they regard as so barbarous. The whole range of treatments used in mental hospitals are savage and cruel and terrible and destroy people.

Terkel: It’s as though we’re in Neanderthal times at this moment in treatment.

Lessing: Yes. Why is it that we have allowed to come about the state of affairs where a human being sits behind a desk and says, “Such-and-such is wrong with you,” and we believe him? Why do we allow this kind of thing to be done to us? Now that’s a much more interesting question, because the history of medicine is not one that encourages us to believe that they are likely to be right. Putting it at its mildest, they are extremely conservative and inflexible and unimaginative and continually damning new ideas; but in spite of the fact that psychiatry is a new and very feared thing, we will take their word, we allow them to slap a label on this – why do we?

Terkel: Do you know R. D. Laing?

Lessing: Yes, I do, and his work. I think he hasn’t gone far enough. I admire him because he has battled with the English medical establishment and changed the plan so as to make it possible to ask questions in a way it simply wasn’t possible before.

Terkel: You mention the psychiatrist who is detached, who has this patient on the couch, whereas Laing is saying he must also adhere to his own vulnerability. I think he uses the phrase “fellow passengers.”

Lessing: I once saw on television Laing and some other doctors of his school who have had a great influence, contrasted with the old-fashioned kind, and what came out was the marvelous compassion of one and the cold violence of the other.

Terkel: So it brings us back again to …

Lessing: Oh, I wanted to say something very interesting. In The Four-Gated City I imagined that there were doctors tucked away in health services, psychiatrists working on these capacities; I hadn’t finished that section before I started hearing of doctors who, in fact, keeping their mouths shut, are working away in your country and in Britain and in the Soviet Union; using the whole facade of what they have to work with, they are researching extrasensory perception and schizophrenia. So it’s happening! These doctors, who at the moment have to keep quiet because they’d lose their jobs, are going to make a very great difference.

Terkel: The Four-Gated City has an appendix which I would describe as apocalyptic. An event occurs, the exact nature you don’t describe – perhaps a plague – I assume it’s many things. You’re implying that unless the imagination is used we face disaster. Is that it?

Lessing: Well, I’m a bit gloomy about the future. I don’t see a big shooting war because they say they’ve too much to lose, but some kind of accident is inevitable, because it’s happening now, some smaller thing going wrong all the time. I think parts of the world will be damaged so badly that they can’t be lived in for a while, and there will be a very great deal of various poisons in the atmosphere, and we don’t know the effect this will have on the human organism. We can imagine it. Like everything else, it will have good effects and bad effects. Everything always goes in double harness: there’s no such thing as a totally bad thing or a totally good thing; they always go together.

Terkel: Do you see any way in which this could be prevented? I’m not asking you for a panacea now, or a nostrum. You just see it as inevitable?

Lessing: You can’t pick up a newspaper without reading warnings from scientists about what we’re doing. I can’t remember the name of this bloke who said that there is a very fine layer of substance around our earth on which the whole of life depends. We’re pumping so much rubbish up there that we’re changing that layer. The forecasts are various, because after all nobody knows very much, even scientists. We could destroy all organic life.

Terkel: If this is likely to happen, we come back to lack of imagination again, don’t we? Through these characters, Martha and Lynda, you’re saying that there’s something in the human psyche not yet explored?

Lessing: It couldn’t be with human beings as they are now; I think we’re evolving into better people perhaps. As a part of this vortex we’re in, it’s possible that we’re changing into people with greater capacities for imagination, and that we are going to be regarded as the “missing link,” the transition people, and we’ll have much better people.

Terkel: You know that old Chinese curse that the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke uses: may you live in interesting times.

Lessing: Yes, indeed, we are living in interesting times.

Terkel: Let me ask you a question, which I know has become increasingly tiresome, yet being in America you’ve been asked it so often. To many militant women in America, you are the Simone de Beauvoir of Britain, particularly because of The Golden Notebook. I suppose you encounter this very often, because you’re laughing. Now this always throws you, doesn’t it?

Lessing: No, I’ve got terribly bored with it – that’s the truth – because I don’t think The Golden Notebook is about what they say it was about. Now I can modestly say that it has a large variety of themes, one of them being the sex war; but I now find myself, because I’m overreacting and impatient, in what sounds like a lack of sympathy for women who I know are often under very heavy pressure. But I think this whole trouble between men and women is a symptom of something very much bigger. We’re not going to solve what’s wrong between men and women by handing insults to each other. Something else has to be put right.

The climate has changed in Britain very sharply, and you’ll find there’s very much less tension between the younger generation, men and women, and people in my age group. Why? There are always physical things which change these emotional reactions, which people tend to forget. If you get a balance between the sexes, a lot of tension goes out. You should provide day nurseries and equal wages for women. My personal bias is not to sit around discussing psychology; one should be out battling for better nurseries and equal wages. That’s where this battle has to be fought.

Terkel: So you see this quote, unquote Women’s Liberation as not unrelated to the human battle itself; that is, not something separate and apart?

Lessing: I think people are scared stiff and they’re beating hell out of each other, that’s all, in one way or another. I can’t find anything helpful to say about this, you see, because I think it’s a minor thing – the cause of great unhappiness, but it’s not the most important thing.

Terkel: You happen to be a writer who is a woman. These characters, Lynda and Martha, could’ve as easily been two men, couldn’t they?

Lessing: Yes.

Terkel: You deal with many fascinating aspects of the contemporary world, but we come back to this theme that man has not yet discovered his possibilities.

Lessing: No, I think they’re just beginning. We’re on the threshold. We should be alert all the time for what we’re overlooking. You see, I don’t think some things are going to happen; they’re happening now. We should try to be more awake to what’s happening in our friends and ourselves because even just slightly more awake we could begin to see things happening. We always talk as if things are going to start happening in fifty years’ time. But we overlook what’s happening now. Will you name me a society ever that hasn’t had great blind spots that afterwards people look backward on and wonder how it’s possible that those people were so blind? What are our blind spots?

Terkel: So it’s asking the impertinent question, the hitherto unasked question?

Lessing: Yes, it’s always a good idea in any set-up where there’s that question or that idea which seems most stupid and ridiculous to ask whether it really is so stupid and ridiculous.

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