Catastrophe Practice (20 page)

Harry goes to the plate-glass door and opens it. He puts his hand through. His hand cannot be seen through the glass
.

He looks at Bert
.

Bert murmurs —

— I'm going to take you to a cell at the bottom of the garden and I'm going to say—

Harry takes his hand from behind the glass. He closes the door. Then he looks at his hands. Bert holds his head in his hands
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She stands with Geordie and Norbert
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Smudger has lowered his arms
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Bert moves away from the plate-glass, holding his head
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Harry speaks looking at his hands
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He waits. He seems to be listening
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First find the most comfortable position: on your back, with your knees up. It's an advantage, of course, if you've spent much of your time in bed —

Geordie calls —

Norbert waves at the audience
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Harry turns to the plate-glass window
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Bert takes his hands away from his head. He acts as if he were holding something in his hands
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He murmurs —

He turns to the audience. He opens his hands
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Now you see it!

The voice of Sophie comes from behind the plate-glass door, right
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Harry murmurs —

They wait
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After a time Bert turns his back and acts —

Geordie speaks to the Hostess —

Harry murmurs —

Geordie and Norbert look round the room
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The light from behind the window has grown brighter
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Bert has wandered across to the left. He stands by the food lift
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Then he looks at Geordie and Norbert and the Hostess by the table, left
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The voice of Sophie comes from behind the
plate-glass window —

The Hostess speaks to Geordie and Norbert
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Geordie and Norbert look round the room
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Harry looks at Waldorf and Smudger at the front of the stage
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Bert murmurs —

The Char is behind the bar
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The older Hostess is with Norbert and Geordie by the table, left
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Bert is by the food lift
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Harry is centre, slightly right
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Waldorf and Smudger, with their backs to the footlights, left, have stepped to the very front of the stage as if to be out of the glare from the plate-glass window
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The gothic door, left, opens. Framed in it is the elegant figure of a Hostess in uniform: she has a hand up to her face as if to shield it from the light. Almost immediately the plate-glass door, right, opens, and Sophie comes in. She wears jeans and a sweater. She begins walking towards the footlights as if to take her bow
.

Then she notices, and stops and stares at, the figure of the Hostess framed in the gothic door. It is as if there are now three Hostesses
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Harry yells —

He waves violently at the wings
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The CURTAIN begins to come down
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It is a dark Curtain, of the same kind as at the beginning of Act I
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When the Curtain is down, Waldorf and Smudger find themselves in front of it
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The lights in the auditorium come on. Waldorf and Smudger seem uncertain what to do. Then they pick up the rifle and the radio which are by the footlights. Then they take their bow, awkwardly, at the front of the stage. Then they climb down into the auditorium and go off at a side-exit
.

Present-day subjects under taboo — those about which people know but do not talk — are to do with the observation, knowledge, that life seems to maintain itself and evolve only at the cost of enormous waste; that only a small proportion of what is generated is fruitful: together with the conviction — likewise built up over the years of painstaking trial and error — that it seems to be part of a man's special nature to try to prevent this, at least with regard to members of his own species. The observation and the conviction go hand in hand: it is ‘advanced' and ‘scientific' cultures that insist on the humanitarian need to look after unfruitful members of the species: those that do not, are rightly called barbaric. There is nothing absurd, or incorrect, in this predicament: humanitarianism has become as much part of a scientific man's make-up as are the results of more impersonal observations. And it is perhaps the very mark of something living, evolving, that it should possess such contradictions — to be free to move within. What makes for present-day confusion is the lack of a style, a language, in which to talk about these things — by which a person, in such a predicament, might feel at home. Having no further vantage point from which he might embrace at the same time, as it were, both scientific and ethical attitudes, he is driven to assume that a commitment must be to one or to the other: and because this cannot be done by a person hoping for wholeness and thus for identity (since it involves cutting off part of himself) the result is, even for him, a retreat into scepticism or fantasy — in which he finds enough companions, goodness knows, who feel at home. Men split themselves — between the way they act professionally and the way they act privately; between the ruthlessness of public games and what the players
themselves would claim were realities: within the games and the ‘realities' themselves — for however much people may try to cut out parts of themselves, these parts exist, and after the cutting they are apt to exist in ways that people have no control over. The result of such splits are vacuums that dreams rush in to fill. But the fact that such a predicament can be glimpsed at all implies that there might be some vantage point from which a viewer might feel at home: that the gap is still not an occasion for despair, but a need for becoming accustomed. It is here that an idea like that of Bateson's categories of learning is relevant — an attempt to evolve a language which will try to deal not just with facts, with units of data, but with the patterns, connections, that such data, together with the minds that observe them, make — in particular a language that can deal at the same time both with the data and with the language that is traditionally used to describe them. By this, apparent contradictions might be held. This language would be elusive, allusive; not didactic. Some such language has been that of poetry, of art: also of love — that seed-bed of self-mocking simplicities! But such complexities, arrogances, are indeed alarming: men are more easily at home, more protected, within the simple and infantile antagonisms of putting one fact against another; of knocking down cases like skittles; of making a fantasy of identity by putting the boot in. To have tenderness involves the acceptance of complexities: growing up involves the recognition of circuits like those of blood — all this within, between and around what are: the demands of the internal and what are apparently the facts of the external world.

In the last century efforts were made to embrace contradictions by fusing them into systems — a process known, but seldom with much clarity portrayed, as dialectics. Hegel suggested that the contradictions attendant upon consciousness could be merged into a higher truth: but in trying to describe what sort of thing this truth might be (‘the objective world process') he either became aggressively simplistic (the deification of the state) or almost unintelligible. Marx took on Hegel's style: but in his writing, the contradictions and his efforts to
deal with them assumed an apocalyptic potency — science and humanitarianism were to join forces for some final struggle, after which there would be peace. Marx's driving energy was a straight materialistic humanitarianism — an outrage that one class of men should be treated like animals by another, and that fantasies of otherwordliness should be used to perpetuate this misery. But in the nineteenth century pleas for humanitarianism had to be backed up by appeals to science: it was thought that men were so rooted in self-interest that appeals to ethics were no use: it could even be held that self-interest was ethical: so fighters against outrage had to call upon ‘science' not just because ‘science' was the presiding deity of the age, but because only thus could the fighters be given weapons. And so a science had to be made up that had little to do with observation or experiment; but which was, simply, of use in the war against outrage. But such science was no real science. The justifications and the prophesies of Marxism have the same quality, in words, as those of religion — the words can be held to mean different things at different times according to the needs of writers and speakers: there is an impossibility in trying to bring such abstractions or such predictions to the test. It is not clear how much Marx himself believed what came to be seen as the dogmas of Marxism — but this is a common predicament of founders of religions. What seems to have been important for Marx is that he remained a fighter: he could use his ‘scientific' reasoning as a weapon for vituperation: but his faith seemed to be less that there should finally emerge a triumphant and rational working class, as that there should be always someone, somewhere, fighting. But although it was the dream of there being a scientific basis for their hopes against outrage that gave Marxists their potency and their victories, it also gave them their curse: for it is in Marxism that the splits and fusions and confusions between scientific and ethical attitudes have become, nowadays, often most observable and ludicrous: words and what they refer to cease to have any connection: the drive for equality is manifested by elitism; the liberation of the working class, to make it work, is paralleled by imprisonment.
But in this it is hardly the drive towards humanitarianism or towards science that is at fault: the fault is in the attempt to force them into effect in one logical social system. For if scientific attitudes and ethical convictions are to be brought together this cannot be done, simply, socially: it is just this that has been learned by painful trial and error. What can be done is that such apparently contradictory attitudes can be held in the mind — separately, but together from some further point of vantage — and then, but only then, can they work in harmony socially. The unit, that is, in which such complexities can be held and neither fused nor confused is not a society nor even a person but that which is in interaction between the two: that part of a person which is free, but which survives through society: which enables a society to survive: which, in its lively endurance, both is in the form of ideas and is like the genetic material of the outside world: and thus, indeed, is somewhat god-like.

It was Nietzsche who announced that god was dead: who saw all religions (as Marx said he saw them) as shrouds by which truth was obscured: truth being nothing to do with dogmas nor with systems but with a style, an attitude, a process, an activity. Nietzsche's attack was against Christianity: but his enemy would also have been Marxism if he had known of it — Marxism having taken over dreams of simplicity and peace. By dreaming of any perfection — of a future world either in heaven or on earth — Nietzsche saw that men were in fact depriving themselves of chances of coming into working harmony with things as they are — of changing them, through such contact, for the better. Dreams might once have been weapons in the struggle for existence and evolution: dreams were perhaps moves in a general game of what Nietzsche called will to power' by which everyone in order to survive had to try to do down everyone else: but in fact those who seemed to ‘succeed' in this game were as much trapped within its limited and inhuman processes as anyone else: and in any case such a game, in the modern world and with modern knowledge, was becoming suicidal. The one true chance of human improvement, even evolution, Nietzsche thought, was
not for one human being to come out on top of another: not for one set or class of humans to come out on top of another: not to dream, impossibly, of such a struggle one day ceasing through ultimate victory (for then what would be the driving force of life? and what would be improvement?) but for individuals with part of themselves to step out of the continuing trapped and trapping process altogether — it would be to do this that there would be the struggle and this would be the improvement — to reach some point within themselves from which they could observe themselves and those other parts of themselves as well as of others within the predicament: and by this to be truly human — even god-like — being free of the predicament Also, of course, to be human (and not un-god-like?) and for the predicament to remain. What was necessary was for a man to come into this sort of relationship with himself: to ‘overcome' himself not in the sense of dominating, or condescending to himself or indeed others (thus has Nietzsche been traduced): but just in the sense of being able to stand back from the animal-like stimulus-and-response levels of his nature and by understanding them and being kind to them to have a chance to do something about them — and about those of others. This was possible, observably, within an individual: there was little sense in the idea of its being possible — except through the interlocking activities of individuals — in the mass. But it was in this common area of'standing back' that men could in fact meet since they would have a chance here of separating themselves and others from their projections, and it would in this sense be that such efforts would be social. Nietzsche saw that a contemporary evolutionary gulf was not so much the one between men and animals, as between men-and-animals on the one hand and some different kind of man on the other — between those, that is, who remain trapped within stimulus-and-response patterns of behaviour and who use only dreams to imagine that they are not; and those who, by virtue of being able to distance themselves within themselves and to look upon such patterns, in some sense and in some part of themselves become free of them — and thus become of a different kind. And such an activity would
be open to everyone, however difficult it might be to talk about — too much verbalising being likely to land one back in dreams. Nietzsche's ‘other' or ‘super' type of man has nothing to do with politics and nothing to do with power (except insofar as such a man has what might be called the power to overcome drives to power — or at least realise that this way of thinking gives a different use to the exercise of power): it is to do with a man's ability to observe, to question, to test — himself just as much (he is nearer at hand) as others — a tentativeness, a key, a mode, a way of living; not a domination. Nietzsche's language is elusive, allusive, poetic: it is a way of talking about truth by at the same time listening to, judging, what itself is saying: it is a way of defending itself against the comforts of dogma: it is a presentation by which people can, if they keep up in it, find their own truth. Nietzsche's enemies (indeed his so-called friends) were able to make out that he was saying something quite different from what he was because he did sometimes talk as if he were playing in one of their games of cut-throat musical chairs. But perhaps he catered even for this: he saw a function for such friends-enemies. One of the characteristics of his way of thinking was that there can be a function for those who are of a different kind to oneself: enemies can be used: they can be the working parts, perhaps of the grid, the riddle, of personal (social) history: they can supply the shaking from the abrasive action of which there can come sifting and change. Marx, violently, said he wanted to change history: perhaps he did change it: but not (it is still violent) with the result that he had dreamed. Nietzsche tried to see the way that history in fact worked: and by this to look in the sifting for diamonds, as well as for cleaned gravel.