“…the number of people in a society really prepared to stand against a current, really ready to fight for the truth at all costs is so small (…) Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born”.
(D. Lessing, The Golden Notebook)
Doris Lessing makes me think. Think think think think. What an extraordinary woman! How extraordinary are the lives of all who seek independence, enlightenment, creativity and a life less ordinary. How brave to stand up against the forces of money and comfort, against the totalitarian rules of social order and say, no thank you, I prefer to go this way. If only I knew the inner workings of all these people, the secret agents of change, the wandering monks of consciousness, the muhajeddin of passion in a world of cool, the lefties, the reds, the rebels, the drop-outs, the artists, the clowns, the story-tellers, the weavers of words, the painters of clouds, the lonely travelers, each and every one of us going our own way, some sadly, some happily, silently or loudly, write or wrong, head-up or on our knees. Each and every one of us a novel yet to be written, a song to be sung, a prayer by a funeral pyre, or a cold dip in a midnight river.
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Re-reading what I wrote yesterday reminds me of Immanuel Kant’s essay “On Enlightenment”, and of the whole trend of European thought which has courageously fought for individual and collective freedom, for emancipation, liberté, égalité, fraternité, and so on, some of which fortunately contaminated the Americas, although, as Chomsky said, freedom without opportunity is the devil’s gift.“Enlightenment", Kant says, "is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! [dare to know] "Have courage to use your own understanding!"--that is the motto of enlightenment.”
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What seems to me powerfully evident from Lessing’s diaries (or mock-diaries), is the totally different emphasis given to love affairs and man-woman relationships. In a man’s diary more importance is given to events, actions, facts, while emotions are discreetly brushed under the carpet, or expressed simply as facts: “saw so and so last night, went to the movies, had sex, fought over this or that, or whatever”, or as moods: “feeling happy, depressed, over so and so, or whatever”. It is probably just the natural order of things: men find it difficult, are embarrassed to talk openly about emotions, even to oneself; and on the other hand probably quite simply give less thought to them, are less likely to lose sleep, and be overwhelmed by them. I don’t see (but maybe I should) Harry writing: “Put Babu to sleep last night, then stayed up with Ella drinking cheap Indian whisky (Bagpiper’s) and watching Bollywood movies. There is a feeling of tiredness in the relationship that crawl its way silently after two-odd years together, and a long stretch of spending almost all day together, stuck with each other… yet there is tenderness between us and sexual passion: she dresses up for me and surprises me and we spend hours fucking, indulging in sexual fantasies, fiercely, feverishly, until we fall asleep, exhausted, and the red light stays on all night…” I used to write things like these, Harry confesses, years ago, about my “love-life”, about the joys and troubles in my relationships with X, Y, or Z, and I consciously stopped, and wisely I think, because it was all ups and downs, and the repetitiveness of the ups and downs is not only boring, in the long run, but also points to its naturality: moods flow, and chronicling them is like chronicling the flow of the passing river, like chronicling every day’s waking and sleeping: useless in its beauty. What changes is the degree of intensity and frequency of the changes. During Harry’s wild years the chart of his emotions looked something like the open jaws of a huge, fierce, crocodile, with the sharpness of the teeth, and the gaps between them, marking the moods, and the number of rows marking time. Nowadays Harry’s chart is more mellow, like the ripples made by silent waves on the surface of a quiet lake; it is an older, more mature, and more content Harry.
Too much attention to moods and emotions makes us even more, and unnecessarily, self-centered (anyone who keeps a diary must be self-centered, to a certain degree); so I think I will maintain my “collage” style: a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, as it comes to my mind. Like any collage, most of the material is left out.
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