Shikasta

by Doris Lessing

  Anne is very bad. I have been sitting with her. She is frightened more than anything. She hears the usual voices saying she is bad and wicked and all that. Also she keeps seeing her friend who is marrying Arabella. She sees them talking. Also making love. She told me this. She is frightened to tell Doctor Hebert. I told her not to tell Doctor Hebert. I am telling Doctor Hebert now. Doctor Hebert is one thing but there are other doctors here. This way Doctor Hebert will know but the other doctors won’t. I told her that all she was doing was using ‘second sight’ and she must have heard of that. I said a lot of people have it. I asked her if she saw things when she was a child. She said she did. I said it is like playing the piano or riding a bicycle. Practice makes perfect. I said all that kind of thing. Sensible. Second sight that’s all it is! Looking down at yourself from twenty feet up, think nothing of it! Well it didn’t make her feel better at all. Because when these things happen strongly enough to make people ill it is because the six per cent of whatever is a wavelength. It is a voltage. It is a thousand volts instead of one. It is not just that you are the same as normal and then suddenly looking at yourself from outside or hearing voices, which can happen like a sort of glide sideways or up from where you were, and not an increase in voltage, but then at other times or with other people the voltage goes up suddenly and you feel you will shake to pieces. The five per cent of sight hearing etc. is energies. That is the whole point. So much voltage of sight, hearing. And if it is a bit more the machine shakes to pieces. That is the point. This is the point Doctor Hebert. Anne wants it to stop. She can’t bear it.

  Last night Doctor Hebert and I had one of our sessions. After lights out. In his office. He was on nights. He had read all this. He had a sensible thought. It is this. When some person, let us say a Scottish lady in the Highlands like an old nurse I had once has second sight, and she says: A tall dark stranger will cross your path, and he does, or someone will die this week and he does, then this person isn’t shaking to pieces because the voltage is too high. Or children looking down from the branch of a tree at themselves sitting on the ground playing in the dust. They aren’t shaking to pieces. They aren’t shaking and crying and screaming and wishing it would stop on the contrary it all seems the most normal thing in the world.

  The answer is some people are born to receive not five per cent but perhaps six per cent. Or seven per cent. Or even more. But if you are a five per cent person and suddenly a shock opens you to six then you are ‘mad’. I am sure I was born a six per cent person, not mad at all. But they made me mad because I told what I knew. If I had kept my mouth shut I would have lived a peaceful life. With Mark. Poor Mark. Oh poor Mark. He is in North Africa with Rita. He writes to me. He loves me. He loves Rita. He loves Martha. Love love love love love. If I had liked it when he slobbered all over me and stuck his hands and things into me then that would have meant I loved him I suppose. That is how he looked at it.

  The talks I have with Doctor Hebert are like the talks I used to have with Martha. Not as long, not all night or days at a time because Doctor Hebert works hard. He has to look after things. But we talk about the same things. Doctor Hebert says I have learned so much and I don’t use it. He says what is the point of Martha and me finding out so much, and then not doing anything. Doing what? Writing a letter to The Times. (That is Mark talking.) Standing on platforms? (Arthur. Phoebe.) I told him that when Martha writes to me again I’ll ask her to come and see me and then he and Martha can talk too. Martha is in the commune place. I’ve been there to visit Francis. I suppose it is all right. But why do people have to get into one place and live together? Like dogs curled up in a basket licking each other. Lick. Lick. People who are like each other are together anyway. That is what I think. They don’t have to go lick lick.

  Doctor Hebert wants to come with me and visit Martha and Francis and talk the whole night through. I don’t mind.

  Doctor Hebert wants me to work every day on my ‘faculties’. I say to him (I am saying to you now) that sometimes my ‘faculties’ are strong and sometimes not and it is no good talking about ‘every day’ like office work. But he is very keen on 9 to 5, or maybe 2 to 4. Mondays to Fridays? Do I get Saturdays and Sundays off? He says people who come in here and who are not too frightened should join. Join what? he is very curious about ‘what I know’. Suppose what I know isn’t very nice? Suppose I know things about what is going to happen, but I would much rather not know. Doctor Hebert talks very easily about knowing this or that. I ask him (I am asking you again Doctor Hebert) why do you suppose we are all set or most of us for five per cent, with a few people set to six per cent and even fewer to seven or eight? (But we wouldn’t know about those, would we? They would be like Gods, I think. Taking it from our point of view.) Do you think the reason might be that whoever sets us poor little machines knows very well how much we can stand? Because Doctor Herbert I can’t stand it, and I try hard not to think about what I know.

  When I wrote that I forgot to put in something important. If a person is a set of Chinese boxes, one inside another, then is that what the world is? I am writing this down because it is important. When I take a look at myself from outside I want to laugh. I see Lynda the old bag all bones with bleeding fingers. But that isn’t what the person is who looks. It is not important about the old bag in a not very nice dress. (I couldn’t get into the ironing room again today, the key was lost, Doctor Hebert if you really mean about looking nice because of self-respect.) So perhaps there is another world that looks at our world, this dreadful place. Hell. Did you know this was hell Doctor Hebert? Do you? I said it and you smiled. It is her illness you thought. But this is hell, Doctor Hebert. But supposing what I thought is true, another world, a sort of lighter replica of this heavy lump of misery in the chains of gravity, gravity, it is so heavy and so thick – suppose this other world slips off like a glove and looks back at hell and shrugs its shoulders. And another world, and another. Round Chinese boxes. Does that amuse you? I feel a smile on my face so I suppose it is amusing.

  Sometimes Martha and I sat and laughed and laughed. Sometimes Dorothy laughed. Not often though. Sandra didn’t laugh, not ever. But Dorothy killed herself and Sandra got better. No one liked Sandra. It was because they said she was common. Well she was. Being in all these hospitals I haven’t cared about that. Not for years and years. What matters is, you say something and then it is understood. Mark was my husband. He isn’t now because I told him he must divorce me so that Rita could have children properly. Mark loved me. He loved me. He drove me mad loving me. I used to listen to how he loved. He wanted to wrap my filthy dirty smelly hair around his hands. Love. Darling Lynda I love you. But he never understood anything I said to him. Meanwhile he was loving Martha. Well good luck to them. I thought so then and I think so now. Then Rita came. Kiss kiss lick lick gobble gobble. Rita never understood a word Mark said. But never mind that, when it was Rita and Mark the house had a good feel, it was different from before. So from that I conclude there is no point my trying to understand about sex. Love so called. It is a waste of time. I’m not equipped, that’s obvious.

  Doctor Hebert has taken in what I said about 9 to 5, office hours. He wants me to come to him when I am in the mood, so that I don’t waste anything, and he can make experiments on me. He didn’t say experiments because he believes I am frightened of that sort of thing. Doctor Hebert you don’t listen when I say things. I can never be frightened again, because if bad things happen, I just step outside my body and go off somewhere else. I don’t mind if you want to make experiments. But it won’t make any difference. Are you going to convince your confreres? Is that what you have in mind? I’m not going to be a guinea pig at conferences or meetings of doctors. No, no. What you don’t understand is, people never believe these things. Not until they experience them. Then when they experience them they become people other people don’t believe. Hard lines. Martha and Francis say the military do research into this kind of thing and use it. Why don’t you ask the army? They don�
��t tell the truth to ordinary people. Death is more important.

  Doctor Hebert is being transferred to another hospital. He says I can go with him. I shall go with him. I want to stay in hospital. They say I could leave and manage, but I am too badly deteriorated and I shall stick to that. I could live in that commune place but I’d have to behave all the time. Lick lick lick. I shall leave here next week to go with Doctor Hebert. One hospital is like another. Doctor Hebert says he wants to go on working with me.

  Since Doctor Hebert, I have been sometimes just for short moments like I was when I was a girl. Before they grabbed me and forced me into the hospitals. The voices when I was a child were friendly. It was a friend talking to me. They would say: Yes Lynda, it is all right, do that. Or this. Or, Have you thought about doing that, because you can if you try. Lynda, Lynda, don’t be sad. Don’t be unhappy. And once when I was crying because my parents quarrelled all the time, the voice said right through all that fuss I was making, What is the matter, Lynda? Meaning, what a fuss about nothing. All these years I have remembered the friendliness, and wondered where it had gone to. Since the doctors all I heard was voices saying I was wicked, horrible, cruel. But now it is coming back. This is because Doctor Hebert is a kind man. I mean kind in himself, not just his words. Words are nothing. The thing that is there, the friendly thing in a person or place is sweet. It is a sort of sweetness and closeness. I keep telling Doctor Hebert, the voices that torment poor loons, saying you are horrible and all that, I will punish you, could just as well be saying, I am your friend, trust me.

  ILLUSTRATIONS: The Shikastan Situation

  This took place in a part of Shikasta controlled by an obscurantist religion that spread its bigotry and ignorance over all aspects of life, and that held, as an absolute truth, that ‘God’ had created humanity on a certain date about four thousand years before. To believe anything else was to court reprisals that included social ostracism, the loss of opportunities to earn a living, the reputation for ‘ungodliness’ and general wickedness. The reaction against the narrowness and dogmatism seldom equalled even on Shikasta manifested itself in certain intellectuals who worked in the fields of human history, biology, evolution, offering as an alternative belief that the peoples of the planet had evolved, slowly, through many millennia, from the animal kingdom: certain types of ape being designated as the ancestors of all Shikastans. Religion reacted with violence, and civic authority, at that time almost indistinguishable in fact if not in theory from religion, was touchy, incensed, punishing, arbitrary.

  These few individuals fought back with courage and spirit, opposing ‘superstition’ with ‘rationalism’ and ‘free thought’ and ‘science’. In one way or another, each had to suffer for his stand.

  I offer here the history of one, ‘a small soldier in the cause of free enquiry’ – his description of himself. He was not from a wealthy family, but was poor, and a teacher of the best sort, whose passion had always been – and remained – to inspire the young into useful lives free from the tyrannies of ignorance, and ready always to follow any fact whithersoever it might lead.

  He was in a small town, where public opinion was in total subjection to religion. He began to teach the children under his care the new ‘knowledge’ – that all humanity had descended from animals – and after reprimands, lost his job. The girl he had hoped to marry said she would stand by him, but succumbed to pressures from her family. He was sustained by his conscience, and taught himself carpentry, and with great difficulty – for most of the people of the town shunned him – earned a precarious living. After a time the priests made even this impossible. He had to leave his home town, and went to a big city, where his history was not known. He was able to get work as a carpenter. He accumulated a library offering the ‘new knowledge’, works of free thought of all kinds, works of science, some to do with genetics, which was a field in which rapid advances were in fact being made. The library he offered to fellow spirits, particularly young people, of which there were far more in this city than there could be in a small place where ‘everybody knew everybody else’. More than once, his library, opinions, his fearless conversations with anyone who would listen, caused visitations from local religious representatives. Once his library was burned by local bigots. He had to move his home twice. He did not marry. He lived for sixty years in poverty and alone, sustained always by the belief that he was in the right, and that ‘the future will absolve me’ and ‘I have stood for the truth’.

  This stand by him and a few other brave spirits who were open to the mental currents and discoveries of the time, some of them true and valuable, but generally sloganized by a derisive populace as ‘If you want to be a monkey no one is stopping you!’ was in fact the beginning of a successful and widespread movement to destroy the stranglehold of this particularly destructive religion over large parts of Shikasta – in some places it had maintained an absolute tyranny for hundreds of years.

  This man, in his old age, going to the shops, or sitting on a bench in the sun, would be harassed by children, and sometimes adults, shouting, ‘Monkey! Monkey! Monkey!’ And he would smile at them, his back held very straight, his head up, fearless, sustained by Truth.

  JOHOR: Agent 20, asked for a report, contributed this.

  I am in a large city in the Isolated Northern Continent, with extremes of rich and poor. This is a living area, where tall buildings house innumerable people. All the men, and many of the women, leave during the day, to work. The poverty here is not of the extreme kind, a fight to eat and keep warm, but of the variety common in the affluent areas of Shikasta: a great deal of effort goes into maintaining a certain standard of living, which standard is arbitrarily dictated by the needs of the economy. Family life has broken down. Couples seldom stay together for long. The children, left to fend for themselves from an early age, and given little affection, form gangs, and soon become criminal. Much expert thought is given to this problem, and its solution is frequently announced to be a greater parental attention to the young. Exhortations to this effect are made by authority figures, but with little result.

  An interesting aspect is that stories of idealized family life are continually shown on the various propaganda media, but these are from past epochs, and are hard to relate to the present day, yet they are very popular. The contrast between the warmth and responsibility shown by adults in these tales, and what can be observed every day, adds to the cynicism and alienation of the young.

  It is of little use to approach these gangs of children – who of course very soon become young adults – as an individual. As an individual, my scope is limited.

  To approach the adults, particularly the mothers, has better results, but it is often too late.

  Sometimes I have wondered if among the many thousands of families crammed into these towering buildings, there is one with the moral energy or even the conviction to bring up their young as well as an animal would.

  And I am not talking of the cruelty that is hidden here, physical and mental, inflicted even on infants, but of an indifference, a lack of interest.

  I live in a room in an old house in a street adjacent to the acres of bare asphalt where the tall buildings are crowded. Rare indeed to find a garden, or trees, but my room, on the ground floor, overlooks a little patch of earth where some flowers grow. There are two trees, one smallish and one well grown.

  The woman who has the room across the hall tends the flowers and keeps cats. Like many women she makes a great deal of pleasure and interest for herself out of very little.