Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [112]
BLAKE ASKS:
How do you know but every Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?
To know very well, and for a long time, a person who experiences everything differently from “normal” people, poses the same question.
The point of this film was that the hero’s or protagonist’s extra sensitivity and perception must be a handicap in a society organised as ours is, to favour the conforming, the average, the obedient.
The script was shown to various film-makers, several of whom toyed lengthily with the idea of doing it—as is the way of that industry, but they all asked the same question: What is wrong with the man in the film?
Now, it had not occurred to me to think of that before, partly because to my mind the way I had written the thing made the question irrelevant, and partly because, in life, the original of the hero, or main character, had been diagnosed by the medical profession so variously and contradictorily for so many years, that thinking on these lines seemed unhelpful.
Also, one has to be particularly trained to believe that to put a label on a feeling, a state of mind, a thing—to find a set of words or a phrase; in short, to describe it—is the same as understanding and experiencing it. Such a training is the education obligatory in our schools, the larger part of which education is devoted to teaching children how to use labels, to choose words, to define.
I thought of something to do. I sent the script to two doctors. One was the Consultant Psychiatrist at a teaching hospital attached to a large university—a man who trained future doctors and who treated patients. The other was a neurologist working at a large London teaching hospital, who had a Harley Street practice.
In short, these were men at the head of their profession.
I asked them to read the script and to tell me what was wrong with the man, as dispassionately as if he were a patient coming to their consulting rooms or outpatient departments.
They were kind enough to do so, taking trouble over it, and time.
But their skilled and compassionate diagnoses, while authoritative, were quite different from each other’s. They agreed about nothing at all.