Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  ‘They would take a child up, and hold it, and repeat to each other what they could remember.

  ‘None of the people who had been in the village in those days ever forgot. The children who had been held in the arms of the strangers were pointed out for all their lives. Something truly amazing had happened, and every one of them knew it, and soon the villagers nearby knew it, too.

  ‘The children of the children who had been held up before the little crowd in the village square kept a little of that quality in them or about them.

  ‘But now it was not remembered exactly what had been said, or done, and who it was who had come – angels, was it?

  'One evening, after a hot, dusty summer’s day, when people sat around in their doorways, while the children ran about, the dogs scratched, and some ribby donkeys tried to find fresh grass where they would find none for weeks yet, they were saying: Do you remember? – No, it was not like that – Yes, my mother said – But that was not what – when a man who was the son of one of the baby girls held up before everyone picked up his own son and held him prominently on his knee and said, “Let us try and remember exactly what was said, and then we will repeat it, and we will do it regularly, so that we will always remember.”

  ‘Every year, this man held up his child before everybody, and they repeated to each other what they remembered, and looked up at the skies, laughing and snaking their heads. “That star there!” “No, that star there!” “People made of fire!” “Or of feathers!”

  ‘This was kept secret, as many things were kept apart from the monks and the soldiers, but of course the ceremony came to be known. At first the monks forbade it and punished, but this made no difference. Every year, on a certain evening, in one of the homes of the village, a child was chosen, and held up, while they repeated the phrases they had decided must be remembered.

  ‘By now much of this sounded like the envious talk of the poor about the rich anywhere on Shikasta – or anywhere else, for that matter.

  '"I am as good as he, my child is as good as that rich man’s, dress me up in her clothes and I’d be a fine lady, too.”

  ‘Then monks and soldiers came and several people were taken away, and were put to death for rebellion, talk against the king, disobedience to the monks.

  ‘The monks then instituted, on orders from above, the Ceremony of the Child, which took place every year, and which they conducted. A small church was built in the village, which previously had had none, and this was afterwards built and rebuilt many times. The Child was the Christ-child, the monks said, but the ceremony never lost its roots in that visit so long ago, for there was still force enough to make the people hold stubbornly to the knowledge that they, not the monks, had been blessed, that they, not the monks, had been shown the Child. By whom, though? By what? People who came from the stars? No, no, that could not be. People from the moon? What nonsense! But there had been someone, or several, and these had come, and had promised, and been chased away …

  ‘And one day they would come again, and then there would be an end to these burdens and this labour and this terrible hardship which holds us all down in the dust and prevents us from rising …

  ‘And this, good people, and visitors, and priests and tourists, and campers, and people from the neighbouring villages, this was the origin of the festival which you hold every year. This is how it was. And now I shall run for my life …’

  [During the course of Johor’s transmissions in this phase of his embassy he supplied information of a factual kind not requested by us believing (and he was not without reason) that our Colonial Service does not always appreciate certain local difficulties. The long view of planetary maintenance and development does not need, nor can depend upon, the sympathies, the empathies of the near, the partial, views. Yet to find oneself on Shikasta (two of the Archivists responsible for this note have themselves undergone the Shikastan experience) is to become affiliated with powerful emotions which have to be shed on leaving. We submit this piece, and another, believing that students may find them of use in more ways than one. Archivists.]

  ADDITIONAL EXPLANATORY INFORMATION. I.

  The Generation Gap: to employ a Shikastan phrase in constant use at this time, and in every context and by every type of ‘expert’.

  A phenomenon known in every animal is exaggerated and distorted during these last days of Shikasta. There is always a moment when a female pushes away an overgrown youngster coming to suckle, or a bird tips a fledgling out of the nest. The moment when a child is considered adult has been made into public and private ceremonial in every culture: in that sense ‘the generation gap’ is to be considered an innate sociological fact, and if it is not expressed in ritual, a psychological one.

  There have been civilizations on Shikasta that were stable for hundreds, even thousands of years: stable of course within the limits of the wars, epidemics, natural disasters that are the Shikastan lot. Most of these civilizations were within the time when Shikastans lived much longer than they do now, sometimes ten, twenty times as long, though the life-span has always dwindled, faster or slower. A youngster coming to adult consciousness looked forward to a very long span of life compared with later times. Every youngster knew the moment when he or she had to fight for personal psychological independence, and this might lead to a short period of insecurity, and perhaps some readjustments on the part of the parents. But the norm was for offspring to live very long adult lives alongside their parents. Childhood was a short preparation for a life. Parents giving birth to their allotted number of one, two, three children were adding to the population of people with whom they expected to enjoy perhaps several hundred years of a special affection.

  As the life-span so dramatically and tragically shortened, there remained in what Shikastans call the ‘race memory’ the same expectation as was appropriate for when people lived a thousand years – or even, sometimes, the two thousand or three thousand years of the earlier originating species: the hybrid. Every young person looks forward to an immensely long life. Its end is so far off that very few indeed are capable of really believing he or she will die. An individual who will live, if very lucky indeed, eighty years, has in his bones and blood the knowledge that he will live eight hundred. Or perhaps three thousand.

  It is this fact, not suspected by Shikastans, who have relegated their former long lives to the region of myth, which is the cause of so many of their psychological maladjustments. But here I am considering only one of these, the effect on the relation between the generations.

  It is known among Shikastans that ‘time’ has a different movement for the young and for the old. Subjective appreciation of the passing of ‘time’ is, for the child, very slow, never-ending, almost eternal. A child can scarcely see the end of a day from its beginning, and this is when the gene-memory of previous expectation of life is strongest.

  A unit of time’ for a child is, then, different from that of a young adult, and different again from that of a middle-aged person, and an old one. As a generalization one may say that a Shikastan life at the present has a curve peaking in middle age, in about the fifth decade. Before that an individual will be in the ‘I will live for a thousand years’ dispensation, but after it is as if veils have been torn away, and very quickly indeed each one of them understands that when young they lived in an illusion.

  An individual of middle age looks back over half of his life, of his ‘allotted span’, which after such expectations of endlessness seems like a very short, vivid, but slippery dream. And he or she knows by then than all that can be expected is another short, illusive dream. That when he, or she, comes to die – and it will be soon – they will look back on experiences no more substantial than what they wake up from each morning: events and atmospheres exciting or pleasant or horrifying that have slid away and are already half-forgotten.

  They look hopefully towards their children, their offspring, their continuance – but these heirs are regarding them with disappointment or worse.


  One reason is that the parent is identified with the horrible condition of Shikasta: the previous generation represents the chaos and terror everywhere visible. This is an emotional fact, not an intellectual one, for most young people, asked something like, Surely you don’t believe your parents are personally responsible for the Century of Destruction? would reply, Of course not! But this is what is often felt: a sullen rebellious dislike of the parents for what they have allowed to happen.

  Another reason is that the people of Shikasta, being as they are now, at this time, the children of technology, of materialism, have been taught they are entitled to everything, can have everything, must have everything. Each young person – I am talking of the generality, not of the rare individual – confronts parents in antagonism because, having been promised everything, he soon understands that this will not happen: and the balk, the disappointment, is felt as a promise that has been broken – and is added to the reproof directed towards the parents.

  They do not know what their own history is, as a species, nor what are the real reasons for their condition: they know nothing, understand nothing, but are convinced because of the arrogance of their education that they are the intellectual heirs to all understanding and knowledge. Yet the culture has broken down, and is loathed by the young. They reject it while they grab it, demand it, wring everything they can from it. And because of this loathing, even what is good and wholesome and useful left in traditional values is rejected. So each young person suddenly finds himself facing life as if alone, without rules, or laws, or even information he can trust. How can they possibly believe that anything good can come from the brutal anarchy they see around them? Yet they are equipped to make judgments, and use their minds in certain ways – so they have been taught. They are equipped for self-sufficiency and individual judgment, and they proceed to carve out their emotional territories with the total ruthlessness and self-interest that characterized the Northwest fringes when these animals overran the world grabbing and destroying – but now it is no longer only people from the Northwest fringes, but everyone and everywhere. For in front of them stretches this long life, without an end, without bounds – there will be time to put right mistakes, take different turnings, change wrongs into rights …

  And they are watched by the adults who are in despair.

  Nothing that the adults can say will be heard by these infants wandering in their highly tinted deceiving mists.

  Most of the adults, and particularly those of the northern hemisphere, or the affluent classes anywhere, have lived their lives on the principle that there will be nothing to pay, and are washed up, stranded on various bitter shores, surrounded by the results of their piratage when young. Most would undo what they have done, would ‘do things differently if I had my time over again’. They long to communicate this to their young. ‘For God’s sake, don’t do that, be careful, you have so little time left, if you do that then this and this and this is bound to happen.’

  But the young ‘have to learn for themselves’. This is their right, their way of self-definition, an essential for them. (Just as it was for their parents who know how futile it is to suggest they may be wrong.) To relinquish this right, their self-development, self-expression, self-discovery, means succumbing to pressures felt as intolerable, corrupted, bogus.

  The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid, the consequences and results of actions. But their own lives have been useless, because nothing they have learned can be passed on. What is the point of learning so much, so painfully, at such a cost to themselves and to others (often the offspring in question) if the next generation cannot take anything at all from them, can accept nothing as ‘given’, as learned, as already understood?

  And these old ones who have lived through everything know very well that every horror is possible and indeed inevitable, but the young are feeling that well, perhaps, it will be all right after all.

  The old live waiting, longing, for the young to come to their senses and understand they personally have so little time left, and the planet has so little time left: ‘For God’s sake! There is no time left, no time left for you, and not for us either, while you peacock about and play little games …’

  But there the young are, in their hordes, their gangs, their groups, their cults, their political parties, their sects, shouting slogans, infinitely divided, antagonistic to each other, always in the right, jostling for command. There they are – the future, and it is self-condemned.

  The old have no future, because particularly for creatures who must die almost before they come to their senses, the young have to be a future. The old, looking back on their little space of tinted mist, say, ‘I haven’t lived.’ And it is true. But they look at their young – and know that these will not live either.

  This is one of the powerful forces at work here, now, on Shikasta. Among the innumerable divisions and subdivisions, peoples, races, subraces, ideas, creeds, religions, one operates everywhere, in every geographical area, the gulf that separates the young from the old.

  JOHOR reports:

  Here is a list of the individuals I was asked to check. Where their situations are satisfactory and their growth according to plan, I have not included them. I have however added some our agents suggested might be in difficulties, whose situation was not yet known in Canopus, and therefore their names were not on the original list.

  These are listed separately from the individuals I had to locate and help because of Taufiq’s dereliction: they did not fall within his scope.

  [Shikastans spend a good part of their time being surprised at each other’s behaviour and commenting on it. This is partly because their knowledge in the area they categorize as ‘psychological’ is faulty, and partly because they do not apply what they do know.

  Most of the surprise, pleasurable or otherwise, felt by them because of some development, is when an inner drive is working its way out by means of encounters or clashes of personalities. Folk wisdom encapsulates the knowledge that people often are drawn towards those who are bound to cause them pain. And it is true that the hidden power, or force, that drives Shikasta along its difficult and painful roads, and which is felt by some of them as a ‘guide’ or ‘inner monitor’ is not one that may consider ‘happiness’ or ‘comfort’ when it is operating to bring some individual nearer to self-knowledge, understanding.

  It is not necessary, most of the time, to direct an individual into this or that relationship or situation – components of his or her personality, aspects of themselves they may not be aware of at all, will push them, by the laws of attraction or repulsion, into the places, or near to the people, who will benefit them. Very often two people, or a group of people, may meet in forceful and beneficial situations, and onlookers may even cry out that this must be the result of a ‘miracle’ or ‘divine intervention’. The couple, or group, have been drawn to each other sometimes across oceans, or overcoming ‘impossible’ hazards, because they need each other – need to learn from each other. But often this process, to the uninstructed onlooker, seems like a meaningless or wasted conflict, or a stalemate, or even damaging.

  And of course sometimes such encounters are indeed mistaken, wasteful, damaging. How could it be otherwise on poor Shikasta, in its extremity, at the end of the long processes that have brought it to such a shameful state?

  But again, very often not: and the people involved may later say to themselves, to each other, of that time they experienced as difficult, or painful almost beyond bearing, or mistaken: What a lot I learned then! I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds! Archivists.]

  33. Her undertaking was to manage a vast family fortune, she being the sole heiress. She was not seduced by wealth, to which she remained basically indifferent, but by the men attracted to her fortune. She married several times, never usefully to herself, though one of the men did profit by the experience to the extent that an aspect of himself was full
y completed and he was able to move on to work on another. But she was not able to pull herself out of the cycle of ‘falling in love’ and then becoming disillusioned. Discussions with Agent 15 suggested that her fortune should be drastically, even grotesquely, increased in ways never expected by her and which underlined her responsibilities. It is probable that the shock of this will return her to responsibility. Agent 15, who has undertaken this assignment, will arrange, too, for her to meet No. 44 who remains in the doldrums, and whose influence on her will be, we believe, constructive.

  44. If he does not benefit, Agent 15 will move him on to something else. But he cannot be in a worse situation than he is now, and the risk of a setback from an involvement, even a business one, with a woman so infantile must be taken.

  14. Her undertaking was to devote herself to caring for a crippled and difficult widowed mother. She did this from the age of thirty. The relentless, unremitting task was within her capacity until she herself became elderly and suffered an illness which enfeebled her. She was unable to pull herself out of the resulting depression, and was considering suicide, or even abandoning her mother, now senile, into an institution. I added to her burden, causing her to become responsible for an aunt in as bad a condition as her mother, but with a vigorous, abrasive, and humorous nature. 14 did not go under, but rallied, and under the stimulus of the blow, ‘took on’ the visiting and care of other old men and women in the neighbourhood. She is restored to her former capable and optimistic condition.

  21. This man, of the oppressed black race in Southern Continent I (southern area), had undertaken to withstand oppression for the sake of others. He fell early into political action, as was expected and planned, for there was no other means of expressing self-reliance, self-respect, in that area, at that time. He was imprisoned, tortured, and became crippled as a result. It was at this point that he lost his way, becoming embittered and discouraged. He was turned in on himself, and was solitary, known to his fellows as the Angry One. If he had continued in this state, he would soon have attracted to himself an early death. He was earning his living as a vegetable seller in a ‘black’ township, when he was again arrested in some civic disorder and unjustly imprisoned. This added to his rage. It was obvious to everyone in the prison that he could not last long, for he combated authority and his fellows in every way possible. I caused him to be put together with a man as crippled as he, as unjustly treated, and who had accepted his state with the aid of one of the – very many – local religious cults. These two men served out their prison sentences as friends. Now, released, they continue friends, and work for the improvement of conditions for the many crippled and handicapped children in the ‘black’ township.