On Conversation - thoughts from Katherine Mansfield

I'm currently writing an essay on some of KM's short stories (which I highly recommend), and wanted to share the following extract from "Psychology" with anyone who has the time to read it through. I've cut out as much as I can bear to, which somewhat spoils it and removes its actual point as a story, but so it must be for brevity's sake and the aspect I want to bring out. It appears a little cheesy at the very beginning, but try to put that aside if possible, and not to read it as a romance story, which I don't think it's really meant to be.

Alternatively, if you're short of time, the quote at the top, from a letter of KM's to a friend in 1921, summarises pretty much what the story says.

* * * * *

"How strange talking is - what mists rise and fall - how one loses the other and then thinks to have found the other - then down comes another soft final curtain."

* * * * *

When she opened the door and saw him standing there she was more pleased than ever before, and he, too, as he followed her into the studio, seemed very, very happy to have come.

“Not busy?”

“No. Just going to have tea.”

“And you are not expecting anybody?”

“Nobody at all.”

“Ah! That’s good.”

He laid aside his coat and hat gently, lingeringly, as though he had time and to spare for everything, or as though he were taking leave of them for ever, and came over to the fire and held out his hands to the quick, leaping flame.

Just for a moment both of them stood silent in that leaping light. Still, as it were, they tasted on their smiling lips the sweet shock of their greeting. Their secret selves whispered:

“Why should we speak? Isn’t this enough?”

“More than enough. I never realised until this moment…”

“Like this…”

“It’s more than enough.”

But suddenly he turned and looked at her and she moved quickly away.

“Have a cigarette? I’ll put the kettle on. Are you longing for tea?

“No. Not longing.”

“Well, I am.”

(…) He sat up clasping his knees. It was delightful – this business of having tea – and she always had delicious things to eat (…) but it was an interruption. He wanted it over, the table pushed away, their two chairs drawn up to the light, and the moment come when he took out his pipe, filled it, and said, pressing the tobacco tight into the bowl: “I have been thinking over what you said last time and it seems to me…”

Yes, that was what he waited for and so did she. (…) And yet she couldn’t hurry. She could almost have cried: “Give me time.” She wanted time to free herself from these familiar things with which she lived so vividly. For all these gay things round her were part of her – her offspring – and they knew it and made the largest, most vehement claims. But now they must go. They must be swept away, shooed away – like children, sent up the shadowy stairs, packed into bed and commanded to go to sleep – at once – without a murmer!

For the special thrilling quality of their friendship was in their complete surrender. Like two open cities in the midst of some vast plain their two minds lay open to each other. (…) they were eager, serious travellers, absorbed in understanding what was to be seen and discovering what was hidden – making the most of this extraordinary absolute chance which made it possibly for him to be utterly truthful to her and for her to be utterly sincere with him.

And the best of it was they were both of them old enough to enjoy their adventure to the full without any stupid emotional complication. Passion would have ruined everything; they quite saw that. Besides, all that sort of thing was over and done with for both of them – he was thiry-one, she was thirty – they had had their experiences, and very rich and varied they had been, but now it was time for harvest – harvest.

(…smalltalk…)

"Here's another queer thing. If I shut my eyes I can see this place down to every detail - every detail....Now I come to think of it - I've never realised this consciously before. Often when I am away from here I revisit it in spirit - wander about among your red chairs, stare at the bowl of fruit on the black table - and just touch, very lightly, that marvel of a sleeping boy's head."

He looked at it as he spoke. It stood on the corner of the mantelpiece; the head to one side down-drooping, the lips parted, as though in his sleep the little boy listened to some sweet sound....

"I love that little boy," he murmered. And then they both were silent.

A new silence came between them. Nothing in the least like the satisfactory pause that had followed their greetings – the “Well, here we are together again, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go on from just where we left off last time.” That silence could be contained in the circle of warm, delightful fire and lamplight. How many times hadn't they flung something into it just for the fun of watching the ripples break on the easy shores. but into this unfamiliar pool the head of the little boy sleeping his timeless sleep dropped - and the ripples flowed away, away - boundlessly far - into deep glittering darkness.

And then both of them broke it. She said: “I must make up the fire,” and he said: “I have been trying a new…” Both of them escaped. She made up the fire and put the table back (…) Quickly! Quickly! They must stop it from happening again.

“Well, I read the book you left last time.”

“Oh, what do you think of it?”

They were off and all was as usual. But was it? Weren’t they just a little too quick, too prompt with their replies, too ready to take each other up? Was this really anything more than a wonderfully good imitation of other occasions? His hear beat, her cheek burned, and the stupid thing was she could not discover where exactly they were or what exactly was happening. She hadn't time to glance back. And just as she had got so far it happened again. They faltered, wavered, broke down, were silent. Again they were conscious of the boundless, questioning dark. Again, there they were - two hunters, bending over their fire, but hearing suddenly from the jungle beyond a shake of wind and a loud, questioning cry....

She lifted her head. "It's raining," she murmered. And her voice was like his when he had said: "I love that little boy."

Well. Why didn't they just give way to it - yield - and see what will happen then? But no. Vague and troubled though they were, they knew enough to realise their precious friendship was in danger. (...)

He got up, knocked out his pipe, ran his hand through his hair and said: "I have been wondering very much lately whether the novel of the future will be a psychological novel or not." (...)

On the talk went. And now it seemed they really had succeeded. She turned in her chair to look at him while she answered. Her smile said: "We have won." And he smiled back, confident: "Absolutely."

But the smile undid them. It lasted too long; it became a grin. They saw themselves as two little grinning puppets jigging away in nothingness.

"What have we been talking about?" thought he. He was so utterly bored he almost groaned.

"What a spectacle we have made of ourselves," thought she. (...) They were silent this time from sheer dismay.

And now the silence put a spell upon them like solemn music. It was anguish - anguish for her to bear it and he would die - he'd die if it were broken....And yet he longed to break it. Not by speech. At any rate not by their ordinary maddening chatter. There was another way for them to speak to each other, and in the new way he wanted to murmer: "Do you feel this too? Do you understand it at all?"....

Instead, to his horror, he heard himself say: "I must be off; I'm metting Brand at six."

What devil made him say that instead of the other? She jumped - simply jumped out of her chair, and he heard her crying: "You must rush, then. He's so punctual. Why didn't you say so before?"

"You've hurt me; you've hurt me! We've failed!" said her secret self while she handed him his hat and stick, smiling gaily. (...)

The elusive quest for existence, or really anything

The ultimate meta-post, in which your humble narrator spews forth scepticism about pretty much everything, in an appropriately long-winded and disorganised fashion without much point.

It seems to me today, that everything we pursue eludes us. Nothing can be pinned down, and the appearance that it can is merely an illusion, drawn from our habit of generalisation (the 'colligation of phenomena'). In any subject to which I might wish to apply my mind, and of which I might attempt to locate the essence – my self, the objects in front of me, the conversation I just had with someone, the truth of such-and-such a claim, the events of last week, the physical world – as soon as I try to find its true nature, it collapses into a mass of fragmented data, and I find that there is nothing tangible at the centre. And no, I’m not just having a bad day. At least I don’t think so.

I – whatever I may mean by that term – seem to exist in the world, soaking up sense experiences, which, for pragmatic reasons and by force of habit and the inability to function without doing so, I automatically categorise and order in my brain. What I see in front of me now is a collection of patches of colours of varying tints. I observe patterns in what I see, and soon find that these correlate with similar patterns in what I feel, hear, taste and smell. There seems to be a straight line formed at the place where the greyness in front of me stops and the brownness starts, and when I apply my hand to the line I find another piece of supporting evidence to the supposition that there is a division between two different objects in front of me. I apply to my memory for instances of similar observations, and recall that this kind of greyness, when last observed in this form, was labelled a computer monitor, and in the past it had performed certain functions, and the brownness was called a desk, performing other functions. Of course these transactions are unconscious, because I am by this time well attuned to the patterns around me and what they signify, and my experience has taught me to trust my senses, that they mean the same thing this time as they did last time.

I do not, at any point in these transactions, have actual contact with the ‘world’ around me – ‘I’ being taken to mean my essential self, wherever it may reside and whatever it may look like; i.e., not my body. I receive consistent information about the world – enough to negotiate my way through it. But the world in which my body lives is merely the mental construction, the map I have collated, of what I assume must be out there, based on the sense impressions I receive. I have no real information about what is giving me the impressions; I have only the impressions.

It is likely enough, I suppose, that the givers of the impressions ‘exist’ in the sense that I act as if they did. On the other hand, it is just as likely that they do not. It makes no difference to me either way, in terms of my experience in the world, and I must assume that I have all the information I will need; but I can by no means claim to know that the physical world has the property of ‘reality’.

I realised last year, and was reminded in my lecture yesterday, that there is no such thing as knowledge – at least not in the absolute sense that we would like to mean by the word. Truth exists permanently, immutably - oblivious, if you will, to my beliefs about it, however well I may feel I can support my beliefs with logical evidence, or any other kind of evidence. If my beliefs do happen to coincide with the true nature of things, then I have knowledge; however, I am unable to distinguish between my true beliefs and my untrue ones, for the truth is not accessible to me. I am operating within an entirely separate sphere. All I can do is try to construct the most consistent epistemic framework I can, within the realm of my ‘knowledge’ – that is, within the realm of raw impressions, about which alone I can have knowledge – a framework that is as free from anomalies as I can make it. But I can never know how well my web of beliefs correlates to the realm of reality. I may hope that the two realms are largely similar, but the possibility remains that they are not.

Everything is thus approximate, tentative, over-generalised and open to revision. That statement itself is open to revision.

Language is particularly deceptive, for its entire purpose and function is to over-generalise. Every word I have used in this discourse is the result the collation of utterly disconnected data, conceptualised generations ago into an essentially artificial but functional ‘category’ and rendered into a socially meaningful form. Hence there is no such thing as a ‘desk’. The word conveys an unwarranted link between all the things in the world given that name, which, in their essential forms, have nothing to do with one another. They merely display many similar properties, and so are grouped together in our minds and given a name, for ease of reference. Again, this is pragmatically necessary, so that we can use a single word to conjure up the image of what we wish to refer to, instead of having to list properties (which we couldn’t do anyway without the same kind of collation of data – for what is ‘solidness’ but another impression we have received on many different occasions, formed memories of, and categorised?).

Of course, as I mentioned before, this generalising function of language is not always conscious; like many things in life, we learn to use it before we know how it works, or fully realize what it is we are doing. Hence, temporally speaking, we don't seem to be colligating phenomena as we go along, because we learn to see the world in generalisations - impressionalistically, you might say :) - and to think on this abstract level, elevated above the realm of raw experience.

So there you have it. I am, when I think the world is defined in philosophical terms (which is not always), an epistemological sceptic, an ontological sceptic, and, if there is such a thing, a semantic sceptic (?). Perhaps my position looks grim and somewhat pessimistic. I don't see it that way, however. It seems to me that there is great freedom within scepticism; whole fields of study that were previously terribly serious can suddenly become playgrounds for creativity. The construction of my worldview becomes an art form, as I seek beauty and proportion in the web of belief I construct. The same is true for science: it no longer need vainly seek certainty, but only coherence, balance and utility. Ideally, it might even learn to laugh at itself. The use of language in everyday life becomes another art form, for words become metaphors, and sentences become images, and whole arguments become a canvas by means of which I seek to guide listeners/readers to an understanding of the concepts in my mind, in a manner as picturesque as I can manage.

In short, the world of impressions in which I live is essentially chaotic, and so life becomes a matter of artistic interpretation.

Also, in case anyone was wondering, this view by no means removes the possibility for faith (in the traditional sense of the word). In fact, it provides a reason for it, for in such a world, all our most basic beliefs are of the faith type; none are justified beyond doubt. Hence we must, if we are to get anywhere, latch onto whatever seems to be the truth. This is quite reasonable.

*

On the other hand, there are other times when I am equally convinced that everything I have just said is nonsense; that, though this is where the logical pathway seems to me to lead, it may be that the logical pathway is bollocks.

Comments/critiques/denunciations welcome :)

Brother Lawrence

I was looking through my Thailand journal the other day and came across the notes I had taken while I was there from the book The Practice of the Presence of God by/about Brother Lawrence, a French monk of a few centuries ago who found his peace in 'doing that for God's sake which we commonly do for our own', living a life of nothing but worship whilst carrying out his duties as cook for the monastery.

I had been on the lookout for this book for some time, having heard good things of it, and lo and behold, it turned up on the bookshelf in my bedroom at the OMF hostel in Bangkok the night before we came home. It was very helpful as I tried to gather my thoughts at the end of the trip. [Incidentally, I later discovered that my Dad and sister were very enthusiastically reading Philip Yancey's discussion of the book in Reaching for the Invisible God at exactly the same time that I was reading it on my bunk - at different times of the day on account of the time difference, but, you know, actually at the same time.]

Anyway, I wrote down some of the parts that particularly hit home with me, and thought they might benefit some of you as they did me:

All that he had heard others say, all that he had found [about God] in books, all that he had himself written, seemed savourless, dull and heavy, when compared to what faith had unfolded to him of the unspeakable riches of God and of Jesus Christ. He alone...can reveal Himself to us; we toil and exercise our mind in reason and in science, forgetting that therein we can see only a copy, whilst we neglect to gaze on the Incomparable Original. In the depths of our soul, God reveals Himself, could we but realise it, yet we will not look there for Him.

*

We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for the love of Him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before Him, Who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king.

*

In God we shall see more clearly what we lack than we could in ourselves by all our introspection; which in reality is but the remnant, unexpelled, of self-love, which, under the guise of zeal for our own perfection, keeps our gaze down on self instead of raised to God.

*

Let him [who seeks fellowship with God] think of Him as often as he can, especially in the greatest dangers. A little lifting of the heart suffices. A little remembrance of God, one act of inward worship...are prayers, which however short, are nonetheless very acceptable to God.

I confess some of this is still too much for me. The first quote troubles me somewhat, because I don't think I know how to 'gaze on the Incomparable Original'. I know how to meditate on His goodness, His attributes, but not how to look on Him directly - what does that even mean? Yet it feels like it means something, and that what he's saying is right.

What I love best is the last one. 'A little lifting of the heart' - what a beautiful phrase! I mean to hang onto it for life. I like the metaphor, and to picture it as I do it. It's what it's all about, isn't it? It's the one thing that works, even when you feel like it won't because you haven't earned the right to lift your heart to Him today. I could carry on a sight more about how much I like that phrase, but...won't.