Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [73]
The psychiatrist offered Frederick various treatments, all chemical, but Frederick left him and found himself a specialist in stammers, not a doctor, but someone outside the medical profession. This man uses a method which cures stammerers by making them speak very slowly, sounding every letter, with measured pauses between the words. The sounds that come out are emotionless, without the usual flow and movement of speech. It is a machine speech. But the method does cure some people. Frederick did go to half a dozen classes, and then it occurred to him that the method was a way of putting a lock on one’s spontaneity, creativity. The method was a censorship. Watching every syllable as it comes to one’s tongue means more than focussing a total attention on one’s speech—it means putting the censor further back, into one’s mind. Sorting out, or choosing, words when they have already arrived at one’s tongue’s end, that is too late. No, the choice must have been made earlier, in the mind. Frederick found that he was getting very good at it. In class he was sounding like someone who had just learned English and had to work out every sentence before using it. Or like someone living in a dictatorship, who has to keep a guarded tongue. But when he broke into uncontrollable stammering, it was as bad as ever, though less frequent. He left the classes, and decided not to return to the psychiatrist. He had understood that—there must be something that he should be understanding.
Together we went over and over the period immediately preceding the first stammering fit of over ten years ago. It was the work in Greece, which resulted in a book called, I believe, New Light on Homer—or something like that. But it turned out that was not the beginning. Before Greece, he had been travelling in Africa. He had visited a tribe whose life is based on the movements of a river. The river floods every year, and a large plain disappears under water. In the plain are mounds where villages are built. When the flood rises to a certain height, the people of the villages get on to boats and go to live on the shores, until the waters subside again. Now—and this is the point—Frederick had this thought: Suppose the flood rose twenty feet higher than usual one year and inundated the villages, and the people then decided not to return to the villages, but to live somewhere else, then in a very short time indeed, probably no more than two or three years, it would be impossible to know that human beings had lived there. The huts were of wood and earth. The roofs of thatch. Most of the vessels were of wood. The earthenware was not fired, but sun-dried and made to be used and thrown away easily. The tribe had been peaceable for some time—the weapons, spears, were of iron and ritualistic. Water and ants could destroy all these things in months. The only objects in these villages that would survive were modern tinware and plastic things. But this society could have existed a thousand times over, on these mounds, with floods between, and nothing, but nothing would have remained.
Yet, Frederick said, if you judge a society by harmony, responsibility towards its members, and lack of aggression towards neighbours it was a society on a high level indeed. And—and this was the place where Frederick was hit—it was a society more integrated with Nature than any he could remember, and for Africa that is saying a great deal. Not only did this tribe’s life centre on the flooding and subsidence of the river, but it was very highly ritualised around the seasons, the winds, the sun, the moon, the earth. But in conventional anthropology it is tantamount to saying that a society is barbaric, backward, to say that it is animistic, or bound with nature.
Frederick left this place deeply