by Kavan, Anna
My investigations had led to a reassessing of intellectual values, and I saw that, though my conclusion was accurate as far as it went, it was not the whole truth. As soon as I decided I’d have to dig down still deeper to uncover the root of my listless withdrawal from life, I became aware of some interference from the past distracting and confusing my thoughts, causing me a sensation that was at the same time oppressive, expectant and empty. In these somewhat contradictory feelings, I came to recognize my childish sense of having run down like a clock that needed someone to wind it before it could go again; and saw that I was now no less helpless than in those far-off days when I waited for somebody to take me by the hand and tell me what to do. On my own initiative I could do nothing, take no responsibility, make no decisions only watch my existence unroll.
All my life I’d been dependent on a stronger personality and had accepted the principle of my dependence so thoroughly that I regarded it as inevitable, and was waiting now as passively as a silver cup on its plinth for either Carla or Spector to claim me, not even very much caring which of them dominated me again.
The ambivalence that had always made me unsure whether I loved the man more than I hated and feared him, or vice versa, now extended to the girl as well. Carla’s beauty, I knew, would always have power to charm me, but whether I still loved her I very much doubted. It was with her that I had experienced my most intense happiness. But now, thinking about her, I had a double impression, a memory of past joy and of more recent mistrust and resentment. Incidents she had never explained had left me with an unhealed wound and the suspicion that both she and Spector had been making use of me for their own unknown personal ends.
Against my will, the picture I always tried to forget formed in front of me with such detailed distinctness that I really seemed to be watching all over again the two enlaced figures going into the house, joined as closely as one. With my own eyes I had witnessed their intimacy – there was no getting around it. Now, suddenly, my new respect for truth asserted itself. I found I could no longer go on deluding myself with the idea that one or other of them was bound to take possession of me, as in the past. For the first time since my illness I felt disturbed. Uneasiness pervading my lethargy, I got up and started restlessly pacing the room. If I was not to lead the old life of dependence, what was my future life to be?
I stopped and looked out of the window. The last faint tinge of a stormy sunset still smouldered in the sky above, but down in the streets it was already night and the lamps had been lit. The time of the evening rush had begun, and from this height the crowds surging in every direction seemed to move with the aimless chaotic frenzy of disturbed insects. The sight troubled me obscurely, and I drew the curtains sharply across the window to shut it out.
Most emphatically, I did not want to be one of the scurrying, nameless thousands down there. This thought led to another slight shock, as I remembered how I’d once taken a pride in being indistinguishable from the people around me. But this only seemed to prove my fundamental difference, I now thought, for surely, if I’d really been like everyone else, such an extraordinary notion would never have entered my head. I’d have taken the similarity for granted.
So in reality I’d never been the confident, normal young man of my thoughts at all. Logically following upon this conviction came the equally disconcerting corollary: I had never been a schoolboy either, or a lover, or any of the various beings I’d impersonated at various stages of my career.
I should have liked to put an end to these thoughts, by which I was becoming more and more disturbed, but they seemed to crowd into my head independently and against my will. I had the feeling that enlightenment was pressing so hard upon me that it created a sense of danger – but I could do nothing about it, and, though I was afraid of where my thoughts might lead, I had to follow them along the path they had chosen.
I’d never been anything but ‘in transit’ through my life. In a sudden, complete, instantaneous vision, I saw it as a train and myself as a passenger always changing compartments, moving on to another before getting to know the self left behind in the last carriage. I’d always presumed these old outgrown personalities had ceased to exist when I discarded them, possibly lingering on for a while as remembered ghosts of what they had been, till they finally sank into oblivion, dead and forgotten. Now, for the first time, I understood that it wasn’t possible to discard any part of myself. Seeing all these unknown selves sitting where I’d left them, staring out of the windows through the eyes I’d once shared, I was struck most forcibly by the fact that I hadn’t got rid of them after all; they were still in the same train with me and always would be as long as I travelled in it. This meant that at any time any one of them was liable to spring out of his place, chase me along the corridor to my present compartment and there take possession of me, temporarily directing my actions and supplanting my current self.
It was an alarming thought that these false selves should still have me in their power, and in my bewilderment I began wondering whether any such thing as my real self could be said to exist at all. Like a sudden revelation, then, it became clear to me that the self was always changing, always developing, only capable of evolving fully through the integration of all past semblances. I wouldn’t be my true self till I accepted and learned to know all those selves I’d disowned and deserted.
As if this were something I could do consciously, there and then, the last of my inertia vanished, consumed by an ardent desire for identification with the essential ‘I’ – until this had been achieved I’d always be as I was now, wandering like a stranger, lost, frightened and confused, among the changes and contradictions of my own personality.
Since I wrote those last words some days have passed; days as empty as all the days of my convalescence, though filled for me by the slow inward crystallization of a momentous decision. In pursuing my lassitude to its source I have overcome it, learning in the process something about myself – only a very little, yet enough to grasp the vital necessity of self-knowledge. Now, at least, I’m aware of what I must already have known subconsciously when I renounced companionship and the chance of contentment for the elusive ghost I hope will one day be closer to me than a brother. Often I seem to feel his nearness, though he always keeps out of sight. Sometimes I’ve fancied he was hovering just behind me, but however quickly I turn he still evades me, gliding through doors and walls like my old friend the tall, thin man. The atmosphere of this flat must be saturated by the double influence of the two strong characters who have both frequented it, with me and in my absence. And it’s because instinct tells me outside influences keep us apart, so that I can’t expect him to meet me here, that I’ve decided to go away. It’s been a terribly difficult decision for me; but I’m convinced I’ll only attain my object when I’ve left this place far behind me.
Though I’m so eager to meet this being composed of all my past selves, the prospect frightens me, too. I’m afraid of the face I and other people may have given him or, worst of all, that he may be faceless. Once in imagination – or was it in reality? – I felt my inmost self dissolve and fall away from me. And lately I’ve developed a foolish trick of looking the other way when I pass a mirror, in case there should be no reflection there. To find that the personality I’ve been building up all my life was without a face would be the most appalling of all possible discoveries.
I’m quite prepared to meet the face of a criminal. I’ve known guilt all my life and been shunned and hated for it by my fellow creatures. In a sense, guilt has evolved me; without it, neither I nor my other self could exist. Not only is that self the criminal but the victim as well, the judge and, ultimately, the executioner. I can accept my guilt now that I recognize it as my own creation. We all of us construct our own worlds from what is within us, and this is the obvious reason why it’s so vitally important to know what is there.
When others only exist as we choose to see them, it becomes futile to apportion blame, so to say Spector damaged
me irreparably has no meaning. Evidently I needed to be injured in precisely this way, and if he hadn’t inflicted the injury I’d have forced someone else to do it. Indeed, I sometimes think I’ve imagined both him and Carla and created their joint behaviour as a punishment for my guilt. The image of their closely joined bodies has printed itself indelibly on my brain, so that I often now see them as one person, of whom I’m afraid; for I can never escape them if they are projections of my own personality.
But my resolve remains fixed and unshakeable. I can’t stay here in their ambience any longer. My bag is packed; in an hour or so I’ll be gone. Of course, if he wishes, Spector will find me quite easily. But why should he bother to persecute me, if I retire to the remote countryside to live the life of a recluse? Perhaps in time he will let me forget him, and his immense black shadow, which has darkened my whole existence, will fade at last. Already his image seems less formidable, as I see in it only the calamities I have wished myself.
As for Carla, if she has any separate identity in the concrete world, I can only hope to meet her again some time in the future when all this is forgotten and there is no need of deceit or misunderstanding. How easy it is to deceive trusting people with lies. But I must have required her to deceive me, and I’m no longer resentful, nor am I so unreasonable as to complain.
It all began, probably, with my trying to live in the city; that was my great mistake, for I’ve never felt my natural self when surrounded by crowds and buildings. Perhaps I’ll have a better chance of leading my own life in solitude, among the hills and valleys and woods where I was born and grew up. To understand the self is all that matters, and then all things become possible; perhaps there, in the neighbourhood where the crime was committed, I may even come to terms with my guilt.
In an hour or so I shall go to the station, take the first train to the part of the country where I used to live, getting out wherever it happens to stop, leaving everything to chance or, rather, following my instincts, prepared to accept whatever circumstances ensue. There’s a certain comfort at times like these in abandoning all conscious effort to control one’s destiny, and so I am making no plans. My suitcase is packed with only the barest necessities, for this period of my life is over, and I want to carry forward as little of it as possible into the next. A new beginning implies a new world as well as the end of an old one; in the depths of the country I may perhaps rediscover that mysterious sanctuary where I once used to take refuge from the world of facts and the harshness and misunderstanding I found among human beings.
‘That’s nothing but cowardly defeatism,’ I seem to hear some disapproving critic exclaim. ‘You’re just running away from life and from your problems.’ And I answer that this can’t be so, for the simple reason that it’s impossible to run away from what is within one. Granted, I may only be at the beginning of greater problems and difficulties; but at any rate I shall know that they are of my own making and not down to alien influence.
I wonder whether I’ve made it sound too easy, this course I am taking. Anybody who’s ever attempted to do it will know that it’s never easy to start life again, especially with very little money and without friends. Eternal regret is the price I must pay for the idyllic companionship I have known and lost. Now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been, not only because I no longer have any friends but because I know that, however closely another life may impinge upon mine, ultimately I exist in impenetrable isolation.
So I come to the end of my writing. I’ve often thought it was of no value, my ideas of no more significance than the aimless circling of flies in an empty room. And, if anyone else ever reads these words, he’ll probably endorse this opinion, saying these are trivial personal matters that tell him nothing he didn’t already know.
To such a person I must admit that I deserve his criticism, for communication was not my primary object. But my egotism seems justified by the understanding, to which the writing has led, of things that are of supreme importance to me, though possibly they are incommunicable.
By the same author
Asylum Piece
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Change the Name
A Charmed Circle
Eagles’ Nest
I Am Lazarus (stories)
Ice
Julia and the Bazooka (stories)
Let Me Alone
Mercury
My Soul in China (novella and stories)
The Parson
A Scarcity of Love
Sleep Has His House
A Stranger Still
Who Are You?
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A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan
by Jeremy Reed
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First published 2007 by Peter Owen Publishers
© Estate of Anna Kavan 2007
Introduction © Jennifer Sturm 2007
All correspondence quoted in the Introduction is held by the
Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand
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© Estate of Anna Kavan, 2007
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