Family and Children

Family and Children

H

ell is other people’. Agreed. And the deepest part of Hell bears a notice saying, ‘Families only past this point, please’. When it malfunctions, as it often does, the nuclear family can be as lethal as a malfunctioning nuclear reactor. Every family is a potential Chernobyl and most of us are sick from the fall-out from the fallings-out.

            Were my relatives not my relatives, I would have nothing to do with then. I’m sure they feel the same way about me.

            The brilliant attorney, Clarence Darrow, once remarked that “The first half of our life is ruined by our parents, the second by our children”. One should remind one’s children of this apothegm, for it not only tells them what there are doing to you but also warns them what to expect. They will believe it, since they are already convinced that, since the first half of the maxim is undoubtedly true, the second half must follow. Although it will not stop them from trying to make your life a misery, it may perhaps make things easier for your grandchildren.

            R.S. Surtees (1805-1864) speaks of “young ladies” entering a room, “in the full fervour of sisterly animosity”, a phrase I cherish because it wittily describes something with which I am only too familiar. Wit can be a counter-irritant. We are so busy enjoying it that we momentarily forget the painful reality it illuminates.

            “Nought burns in hell but self-will,” said Meister Eckhart. Agreed! Caroline’s younger sister, Jane, invited her to her house-warming party, while at the same time inviting a known bad character, Susan, whom she had never met but whom Caroline heartily disliked. When Caroline told Jane that if she invited Susan she could not possibly attend, Jane lost her temper and retorted that she would invite whom she liked, since it was her party. After that she broke off relations with Caroline and her husband for ten years. Jane never saw Susan again after the party. See Surtees on “sisterly animosity”, above.

            Maria’s husband died after an eleven year illness, resulting from a stroke, during which she had nursed him devotedly, to the severe detriment of her own health. He left her a fortune of several millions dollars. After his death, Maria’s five bullying children told her that the money left to her was not hers but their father’s, so she should distribute it among them. Being accustomed to giving her children everything they asked for, she did so. Today, Maria is reduced to what for her is near penury. Last week her youngest son, a wealthy lawyer, to whom she had given the major share of the money, ordered her out of his house because she wanted to spend her last 250,000 dollars to buy herself a very small flat, rather than giving the money to him. The most he would allow her to spend was 100,000 dollars, which would have bought her no more than a hovel. Her daughter-in-law, on whom Maria has showered costly gifts and money for the last fifteen years, told her self-righteously that since she was such a selfish, greedy woman, she would never be allowed to see her grandchildren again. Perhaps Maria should have studied King Lear; forewarned is forearmed. However, since Maria’s mother made exactly the same mistake as Maria, enriching her rapacious children and then dying in poverty, it is doubtful whether any amount of reading would have enable Maria to avoid her fate, which was written into her genes.

            Amy, a wealthy lawyer working for a multi-national, serves fatty chuck steak – cheapest of all cuts – to her siblings and their families on the rare occasions she entertains them, assuring them that this is cordon-bleu cooking while privately boasting that the whole meal only cost her five dollars. She never sends them cards, phones them or gives them presents at Christmas, New Year and on their birthdays; but woe betide them should they do the same to her. This conduct is meant to proclaim her pre-eminence in the family, in which she is one of the youngest. Instead, it makes her heartily detested by all of them. Amy, however, is interested only in power, not in affection, which her career has taught her to despise as weakness. Yet her arrogant contempt for her siblings deprives her of both. She thus perfectly exemplifies Leo Tolstoy’s dictum that conceit is incompatible with understanding. Our careers often induce a deformation in our characters, of which we are unaware, like an old-time miner, hunchbacked from a lifetime spent crouched at the coal face.

            A demented American woman recently drowned her five children, aged between two months and seven years. While her action is horrific, it is understandable. The wonder is that more women worn out with childbearing do not do this, of only to get some sleep, like the servant girl in Tolstoy’s chilling story.

            Until quite recently, it was assumed that genetics played no part in family functioning. If the children turned out badly, the parents were to blame. This philosophy was eagerly adopted by the most narcissistic generation the West has seen, the so-called Baby Boomers, who attributed all their successes to their own efforts and all their numerous shortcomings to their parents. I know of a whole family of Boomers, all born between 1952 and 1956, plagued by what Ken Wilber, the renowned transpersonal psychologist, has dubbed ‘Boomeritis’. No matter what occurs, these narcissistic children are never in the wrong nor are their parents ever in the right.

            Whenever Dan’s eldest Boomer daughter rings him up, he knows either Christmas or the birthday of one of her children is approaching. Apart from that, he never hears from her nor sees her, though she lives only fifteen kilometres away. Nevertheless, she assures her father each time she rings that she ‘loves him lots’. He is not impressed, as he has heard her say the same thing, mechanically, to all her friends and relatives.

            Behind his back, Peter’s son, Stephen, a Boomer, systematically vilified both Peter and his step-mother, who had brought him up since he was twelve, to such an extent that his mother-in-law, Sarah, broke of relations with Peter and his wife immediately after the wedding. She had arranged beforehand with Stephen to do this. Peter had been invited to the wedding only because his absence would have aroused adverse comment and in any case, as the bridegroom’s father, he had to give the usual short speech. The proprieties were duly observed. The declaration of war was formally announced to Peter through a telephone call from Sarah’s husband the next morning, following hard on the flattering toasts and conviviality – all faux bonhomie – of the evening before. Such are the Machiavellian politics of the family. War is most effectively declared only after a treaty of eternal friendship has been signed, like Hitler’s invasion of Russia in 1941. Molotov could have learnt a thing or two from Sarah. Mind you, von Ribbentrop was deservedly hanged at Nuremberg for precisely such duplicity.

            Some children are bestowed upon as a karmic punishment. This is accounted one of the most severe.

            An Irishman remarked to me: “Only one of my four children is a decent human being and he’s not my child”. I would have found this funny had it not been said with such sadness. All his children were Boomers.

            Children are sometimes born simply to revenge themselves on one or both of their parents. They are old enemies in disguise.

            “Our children will hate us too, you know,” Jack Lemmon once observed, in a film whose title I have forgotten. A remark of savagely convincing intensity, all the more shocking because of its comic context. Comedy can sometimes cut deeper than tragedy.

            ‘When I want to understand my family, I re-read King Lear’.  Though this is an unfashionable view, I suspect the play also tells us something about Shakespeare’s own family life.

            ‘When I want to understand myself, I re-read Hamlet’. Yes. But this is only partly true. Hamlet is the story of a dysfunctional family, quite as much as it is the story of a dysfunctional young man. “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark”, is Hamlet’s comment on his own family.

            Scapegoating plays a vital role in society, as the sociologist, Rene Girard, has pointed out. One finds such human sacrifice in most communities, especially in families. One example out of the dozens I have encountered: Mrs M’s husband, Stuart, was never allowed to attend any family gatherings, because he had once offended his wife’s mother, a powerful matriarch. For over thirty years he was banished to his garden workshop during all family festivities, even at Christmas. His two children, who worshipped their mother, did not see anything wrong with this arrangement. Stuart’s hobby was collecting antique cameras, presumably because, subconsciously, he preferred to see both past and present through a cracked or fogged lens.

            Some family relationships are like eggshell china; the slightest jolt will shatter them. Anne, Celia’s younger sister, invited Celia and her husband, Jonathan, to her wedding. Unexpectedly, Jonathan fell ill and could not attend, though Celia did. Furious at this absence, which she construed as a personal slight, Anne cut off relations with both her sister and her husband for twelve years.

            ‘The human heart a fiery forge,

            The human face a furnace sealed.’

Blake understood us.

When my grandfather died, he left his entire estate to his widow, on the understanding that the four children would receive their share when their mother died. My uncle Thomas was so angry at his father’s action that he broke of relations with his mother for the rest of his life, even refusing to attend her funeral when she died twenty-nine years later. She, for her part, left him nothing. Logic plays no part in these family quarrels, many of which centre around a will, as Dickens and other Victorian novelists were well aware.

John obtained an invitation to an international congress for his cousin, Michael. Michael’s fare to Brazil and all his expenses were paid by congress. When Michael returned, he was held in quarantine for some weeks because he had forgotten to have himself inoculated against an infectious disease then common in Brazil. Furious, he blamed John, not his travel agent, for not having advised him to be inoculated, and has not spoken to him since then. One should never expect gratitude for a favour. Consider yourself lucky if the recipient does not turn on you.

David, who had always been deeply attached to his younger sister, was shocked when, in his mid-twenties, he learnt that she had secretly hated him for years, believing that he had been their mother’s favourite. As the years went by, her hatred for him increased, until finally she broke off relations with him altogether. Sibling rivalry can be murderously intense, especially between brother and sister. I suspect Cain may have actually been Abel’s sister.

Nietzsche said that “the son was the unveiled secret of the father”. A partial truth. Children are the unveiled secrets of their parents and grandparents. This applies not only to character but also to physical characteristics. The slim, sweet young girl who so enchants you may one day well be as obese and ill-tempered as her mother and grandmother. The handsome young man who has swept you off your feet may turn out to have inherited his grandfather’s alcoholism and his father’s miserliness. Carefully scrutinize the parents and grandparents of your future spouse. A lot of unhappy marriages could be avoided this way.

“The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted” (Byron). Transposed into iambic pentameter, this line could have come from King Lear. It has a Shakespearean universality normally foreign to Byron. It can stand as an equal alongside lines like:

‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child.’

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM

Education

Education

M

y students have been taught that absolute good and evil do not exist. Pluralistic cultural relativism predominates. There are no absolutes, no hierarchies, no transcendence, no metaphysics. Any society has the right to decide for itself what is right and wrong. When I point out the problems inherent in clinging to this poststructuralist doctrine, especially in a global context, my students become disquieted and a little resentful. Some refuse to accept what I am saying. It is always upsetting to have your beliefs questioned, especially when they have enabled you to pass examinations.

            The same applies to my students’ firm conviction that truth is subjective. There is my truth and your truth, my reality and your reality, or so they tell me. If I sincerely believe something and you sincerely believe the opposite, why, we are both right! All but those who attended religious schools were taught this simple-minded dogma before they came to university. When I point out that this leads to logical absurdities, since if I sincerely believe that it is raining in the courtyard and they sincerely believe it is not, we cannot both be right, they are perturbed. Yet none of them had had the wit to think of this for themselves, tamely accepting what their teachers had told them. But where did their teachers acquire this doctrine? From their poststructuralist universities – where else? Socrates demolished this dangerous nonsense about the subjectivity of truth two thousand five hundred years ago, yet it is still flourishing, being taught by academics who think by rote.

            Poststructuralism teaches that a text can be interpreted to mean anything one likes, since texts depend on context and context is boundless. My students have been taught this in their other courses, or learnt it while at school. Just try telling a magistrate, when you are up for dangerous driving, that Professor Fuddle has taught you that road-signs may mean anything one chooses. I once advised a class not to apply this dictum about meaning being boundless to the Ten Commandments, only to realise that some students did not know what I meant, not having seen Charlton Heston playing Moses on late-night television. I suppose Orwell anticipated this aspect of poststructuralist theory with his “Newspeak” and “Duckspeak” (“War is Peace”, etc). Of course, meaning depends on context. But context is only potentially and not actually boundless. It is the here and now that counts.

            Since the advent of the Internet, it has become almost impossible to decide whether students, especially those in the Humanities and Social Sciences, have actually written an assignment themselves, for the Net is still largely a trackless wilderness where conscienceless students can obtain essays on virtually every subject, without much fear of detection. The only sure way of deciding a student’s real merit is through examination. Until we have search engines sensitive enough to track down isolated phrases accurately and quickly, we shall have to rely on students’ performance in examinations, not in assignments. In spite of this, many overworked academics continue to set the same essay topics year after year and to allot no more than a small percentage of the total marks to examinations, if indeed they set examinations at all. I should guess that a certain percentage of university graduates owe their success, not to their knowledge of the subjects they studied, but to ingenious, systematic cheating. This may help to explain the dismaying degree of managerial and clerical incompetence and stupidity one now encounters in so many sectors of society, as well as account for the dismal performance of many teachers, especially in state schools. It may also explain why many of these teachers are reluctant to fail any of their students. They are uncertain as to the correctness, or otherwise, of their answers.

            The amount of intellectual cream available has remained roughly constant since I began teaching close on fifty years ago. The amount of milk, however, has increased. Unfortunately, so has the amount of water added to the milk in order to fill up quotas set by our bureaucracy. The whole educational process has thus been both diluted and soured.

            G.M. Trevelyan remarks his English Social History (1942) that “It [education] has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals”. Today, an editor would revise this to: “…able to read, but alliterate, much preferring to watch TV, and thus an even easier prey to increasingly clever advertisers”. Postmodernist editors are not allowed to believe that anything is more worth reading than anything else, which leads one to wonder why they reject some manuscripts and accept others.

            Some Australian universities, desperate for money, are increasingly reluctant to fail fee-paying foreign students. In certain faculties, even the grossest mistakes in English are ignored, ‘as long as the sense is clear’, on the cogent grounds that if these students were penalized for errors in syntax, grammar and spelling, they would nearly all fail. Such universities should learn from the experiences for the old Chinese empire. A dynasty could sell official positions without doing itself irrevocable damage; but once it started selling degrees, it was lost.

            Montesquieu (1689-1755) observed that we receive three educations, one from our parents, one from our schoolmasters and one from the world, with the third contradicting everything taught by the first two. He must have been singularly unfortunate in both his parents and his teachers. Normally, a child should acquire enough from these two sources to enable him to learn the bitter lessons the world imparts. If the world really contradicted everything the child had learnt before venturing into it, he would not live long enough to learn anything else.

            In Australia, about twelve percent of the population watch the ABC and about three percent regularly watch SBS, percentages that have been constant for years. The rest watch commercial TV. This three percent is a rough but useful estimate of the proportion of intellectuals in the population. No amount of education is likely to raise this figure.

            Slyness will take a student a long way in the present educational system, as it does in life. It constitutes a form of intelligence – cunning – which has gone unrecognised by psychologists, since those who possess this talent – especially politicians – are far too devious to admit it.

            “To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant” (Bronson Alcott). True! It is almost impossible to convince anyone of their ignorance, especially if they have received fifteen years of secondary and tertiary education. Should they also have acquired a higher degree or two, the task is hopeless.

            I spent twenty-one years in school and university, yet was still profoundly ignorant of the world when I finally emerged, blinking like an owl in the harsh light of reality, with my degree certificates clutched in my hand. I was not ‘street smart’. Today, ‘street smart’ is a term of praise. It means something like ‘having the ability to prosper in the rough and tumble of life”. To do this, one now needs the morals of a whore (street walker); hence the expression.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM

Dreams and the Paranormal

Dreams and the Paranormal

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he other night (20/10/01) I had an unusually vivid dream. I hitched a ride in a UFO and asked to be taken, not to the moon as suggested, but to Hell and Heaven. Hell was a vast, gloomy warehouse filled with mouldering junk and listless, hungry, hopeless, shuffling crowds, like the unemployed I recall from the Great Depression. Heaven was unbelievably lush and beautiful, rather like a vast boutique hotel, with exquisite gardens and sumptuous décor. In short, Hell reproduced the life of the poor and Heaven that of the rich. In this Late Sensate culture, we are so incorrigibly materialistic that we even envisage the spiritual in coarsely material terms.

            Reading the above after a lapse of some six weeks, I realize I had completely forgotten this dream. Had I not written it down, I should never have recalled it. There are doubtless sound, neurological reasons for this. All the more reason then to ponder carefully over the very few dreams that do reman in our minds for months, years, or even decades. In 1995, while in Kalgoorlie, I dreamt of a UFO and was awestruck at its numinosity. It was circular and moving very rapidly across a cloudless sky at great height, like a small, silver moon. Recalling it, I feel this dream has great significance, but still have no idea what it means. We write messages to ourselves in scripts we cannot decipher.

            The earliest dream I can remember dates from Christmas Eve, 1935. I dreamt I was sitting on the kerb, repeatedly pulling on a Wellington boot. The sexual symbolism is childishly ingenious. No wonder the dream stayed with me.

            The other dream, experienced at six or seven, has haunted me for decades. I woke up, convinced that there was a dreadful presence in my room. Terrified, I stumbled out of bed to seek refuge with my parents. As I emerged from my bedroom, a small gnome-like creature, of immense strength, seized me and bore me downstairs, floating me through a locked front door and out onto the front lawn, which was bathed in white light. I was so appalled I woke up, having apparently experienced a dream within a dream. From that day on, I developed a nervous facial tic, which has plagued me all my life. My experience bears a striking similarity to reported alien abductions.

            When my present wife was expecting my daughter, a week or so before the birth, she came to my study to tell me excitedly that a huge owl was sitting on a tree branch right outside the landing window of our house in Malaysia, staring in unblinkingly through the glass. I told her jokingly that it was probably Pontianak, a local spirit said to haunt women in childbirth. She mounted the stairs to look at it again, calling me to come see it because of its unusual size, for it was almost two feet in height. Uninterested, I went on working. Later, I told her the owl could not have been sitting on a branch because there was no tree anywhere near that window. In any case, I added, there were no owls of that size in Malaysia and, furthermore, owls shunned the light and would never come that close to a lighted window. She admitted I was right but insisted she had not been mistake as to what she saw, particularly as she had twice spent a considerable time looking at it. It was not until twenty-three years later that I learnt that what she must have experienced was a ‘screen image’, common during encounters with aliens. Owls and deer, both creatures with large eyes, take the place of the alien since their images are acceptable to us. The process seems akin to hypnosis. In this case the huge owl had to be placed on a non-existent tree to complete the illusion.

            My present wife was a toddler during the Japanese occupation of Singapore. She lived through horrors, most of which she was too young to recognize. The worst of her memories was that of repeatedly finding herself standing in a lane outside her house, paralysed, feet glued to the ground, watching the sky open like a camera shutter, to the accompaniment of a thunderous noise. This happened repeatedly, always at dusk. As a result she always grew deeply depressed at twilight. I told her she was probably experiencing an air raid, through she insisted she was never allowed out during the American air raids, when the family took shelter under the house. She had this dream almost every night for close on thirty years. When, finally, she went to a psychiatrist for counselling, he told her this was evidence of a possibly serious trauma and asked her to come back the following Monday, so that he could discover under hypnosis what had really taken place. From that night onwards the dream never returned. Later, she became convinced that she had been abducted by aliens when young. Not only does she have no interest in UFOs; whenever she tries to watch a film or read a book dealing with any aspect of the subject, she promptly falls asleep. I believe this is her form of self-defence. My youngest daughter behaves in exactly the same way. Several abductees reported seeing a door in a UFO open like a camera shutter.

            Having narrated the above, I pause and ask myself if I really believe that my wife and daughter have been abducted and monitored by aliens. In an attempt to answer this question, I have not only read every book on the subject I can get my hands on but also have for many years been President of the Australasian Society for Psychical Research, one branch of which (Uforum) specializes in ‘ufology’. Try as I may to banish it, the riddle haunts me. Incredibilia nisi crederim…

            Why does anything to do with the paranormal arouse such detestation in academia? The palm for intolerance and intellectual viperishness belongs to the members of CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, many of whom are academics. Even some of their own members have been worried by the abhorrence and loathing displayed in their publications and lectures. Professor Ray Hyman, a distinguished psychologist and a CSICOP member, once remarked: “Parapsychologists are nice, honest people, while the critics are cynical, nasty people”. He also spoke of “fundamentalism” and “witch-hunting” in connection with CSICOP. Though it calls itself scientific, CSICOP is decidedly unscientific in its practices, especially in its use of ridicule, rather than reasoned argument, to discredit its opponents. Psychoanalytically, such pathological hatred can be accounted for by subconscious fear.

            My own convictions about the existence of psi (ESP and PK) took many years to develop. During my undergraduate days at Cambridge, I was vociferously rationalist, materialist and sceptic. In the winter of 1953, however, I moved out of my rooms in Emmanuel College into a furnished house in Chesterton. It was the paranormal events that transpired there which first made me start examining the soundness of my own worldview, though it took several years and a great deal of study and self-searching before I was finally reluctantly forced to discard my earlier materialism as wanting.

            The house I rented in Chesterton had been built some forty years earlier by a couple who had lived in it all their married lives. The lady of the house had died shortly after the war. Her husband had lived in the house by himself until he was persuaded to move to a nursing home, in which, when I moved in, he was dying. After his death, I bought the house to avoid the trouble of having to move again. During my first few months there, I was troubled by inexplicable phenomena. Doors would swing open and then slam shut by themselves; light switches would click up and down; footsteps were heard in the hallway and on the stairs when I was alone in the house. Strangest of all, gravel from the path would fall onto my desk and books while I was studying, or strike me on the back and shoulders – a typical poltergeist phenomenon, had I but known it.           My mother, who was not given to idle imaginings and had in any case been told nothing of the events that had taken place, came to stay and was awakened during the night by a sound like the loud cracking of a whip. Opening her eyes, she saw an old man standing by her bed, scowling at her and brandishing something above his head. She was so frightened that she had a bout of arrhythmia and would never sleep in that room again. My Siamese cat, Qing, would frequently arch his back and spit at something we could not see. On one occasion, something in the lounge frightened him so much he tried to get out of the room through a chimney, though a fire was burning in the grate! Only great terror could drive a cat to such extremes. Another time, in another room, he fled howling up the curtains, defecating with terror as he did so. His misery continued until one morning I was awakened by the stench of gas. Wrapping a wet towel round my face, I came into the kitchen  to find all the taps on the gas-stove inexplicably turned on and poor Qing dead in a corner. Later, one of the neighbours, cat-lover told me how nice it was to see a cat round at the place because “poor old Mr Stern couldn’t stand cats”. These, and other events of the same nature, eventually sent me off to the library to see what I could make of them. But it was not until the arrival of a Nigerian friend that I began slowly to change my hitherto stubbornly sceptical views of the paranormal.

            Odumegwu, a mature-age Ibo student from Nigeria, was one of my closest friends at Cambridge. When he first came to lodge with me, I mischievously put him in the back bedroom, the one in which my mother had refused to set foot again after her ghostly experience.  I had told him nothing of the strange happenings in the house. He came down to breakfast the next morning looking triumphant. “So! You were very cheeky to put me into that room last night. I supposed you wanted to see what would happen.” I confessed that this was so. “Well, when the spirit appeared, I just told him he was dead and suggested he should go away. Then I said a few prayers in Ibo to help him on his way to heaven and off he went. He won’t be back! Poor fellow! He was very cross that you were living in his house. He thought you were a ghost! And he didn’t like either your mother or your cat. He though that such ghosts had no business to be here.”

            I was reminded of this conversation nearly fifty years later, when I saw The Others, a film in which a family of ghosts living in an old house believe that the present owners of the house are spirits come to haunt them. Matthew Manning, the English psychic, had a similar in his house in Sawston, near Cambridge, with an old man who was convinced he was still living in the eighteenth century and that Matthew was an interloping spirit. The old man could see only the surroundings he was accustomed to, being totally unaware of modern appurtenances in the house. For example, he persistently referred to the downstairs toilet as “the pantry”, and at least once left a candle burning there, being quite unaware either of the room’s changed function or of the existence of electric light. He was also oblivious of the TV set, radio, washing machine and so on and even of the traffic outside.

            In the winter of 1955, Odumegwu tole me that his wealthy young Nigerian friend Y had impregnated his landlady’s daughter and refused to marry her, though he went on sleeping with her. Worried about the situation, he advised him to move out, but Y refused to do so. Two weeks later, Y was found dead in his bed-sitter, having apparently gassed himself. He verdict was “suicide while of unsound mind”. After the inquest, Odumegwu went to see the landlady and told her he had seen in a vision that she had murdered his friend. Y’s room had a gas meter outside, into which he would insert money. Since he suffered from the cold, it was his custom to leave the gas fire burning until the money ran out. The landlady had waited until the small hours of the morning and then put a few shillings in the meter. The gas came on and Y died in his sleep. The landlady laughed in Odumegwu’s face, told him he had guessed correctly, and then challenged him to go to the police. She had committed the perfect murder and she knew it. Odumegwu then told her that God would judge her by soon depriving her of her reason and left. He informed me in a matter-of-fact tone that he intended to drive her insane, having in his youth been instructed by a witch-doctor how to do this. He had been warned only to use the hex to punish the most heinous crimes and judged this to be one of them. About a month later I heard from a friend who had lodged next door to Y that the woman had in fact gone mad, run out into the street screaming and brandishing a knife, and been taken to a mental hospital. To this day I do not know whether Odumegwu’s hex actually worked, or whether the landlady’s sense of guilt, exacerbated by his threat, unhinged her.

In 1954, while up at Cambridge as a graduate student, I dreamt repeatedly that an African youth was sitting in my kitchen holding a bloodstained axe. I related my dream to Odumegwu, who looked grave and said that it was a very bad omen. A few days later I answered the door one morning, to find a well-dressed, young Nigerian undergraduate who told me he had just come over from Oxford and wanted to see Odumegwu. Noting that he seemed rather distraught, I told him Odumegwu was at a law lecture but should be back soon, invited him in, gave him tea and biscuits in the kitchen and chatted to him, somewhat uncomfortably, until Odumegwu arrived. Shortly afterwards, I heard them leave in a taxi. Odumegwu did not return until late that night. He told me that the student, from a prominent Ibo family, had married an English shop girl in Oxford, against his parents’ wishes. When he discovered that she had been sleeping with another man, he had killed her, brutally, with an axe and then taken the train to Cambridge to ask his friend to help him. He was found guilty but insane, sent to Broadmoor and eventually repatriated to Nigeria, where he was confined in a mental home. Odumegwu asked me why I had not noticed that the man’s navy-blue suit was stained with blood. I told him that not for one moment had I connected him with the African in my dream and so had assumed that the suit was simply in need of dry-cleaning.

            Another friend of mine at Cambridge, Z, once told me, when he was drunk, that he had murdered a man who had wronged him repeatedly and severely by pushing him under a train in the London tube during the rush-hour. I was horrified, since I had dreamt the night before that Z had done just this. Even now, I prefer to believe that Z was lying and that my dream was simply a precognitive vision of our conversation. But the doubt remains. After that drunken confession, Z and I tended to avoid each other. He later became an alcoholic.

            Henry, a serious-minded young friend of mine, had four girl friends one after another when he was in his early twenties, all of whom, to his chagrin and fury, jilted him. All four eventually died young, two of cancer, one in a car-crash and one in childbirth. Henry, who has considerable psychic powers, which he tries to deny, sometimes suspects he may have unconsciously brought about their deaths through psychokinesis. Few of us are willing to believe that certain people can do this to others; it is too disturbing to contemplate. Parapsychologists call this phenomenon ‘negative prayer’. Nearly all psychiatrists and psychologists regard claims of hexing as delusional, even though there is a considerable body of evidence in their favour. For example, film exists showing the Russian psychic, Nina Kulakinova, stopping the heart of a frog under control conditions. It is surely only a step from this to stopping or damaging a human heart.

            In 1985, while living and lecturing in Athens, I had dinner one night at a university colleagues’ house. My charming dinner companion, who spoke little English but excellent French, turned out to be a niece of Admiral Hippolyte Tanagras, with whose monograph on the evil eye I was well acquainted. The Admiral had retired from the Greek navy many years earlier to devote himself to psychical research. Being particularly interested in the evil eye (Italian: mal occhio), which is greatly feared throughout southern Europe, he decided to investigate the phenomenon scientifically. He would go to a Greek village, ask who had the evil eye, and then approach the person – it was nearly always a woman – offering her money if she could demonstrate her powers by withering young plants or killing insects. He brought such plants and insects with him, along with a control group. His researches, published by the Hellenic Society for Psychical Research, demonstrate that certain people with a reputation for having the evil eye do in fact have the power to cause plants to wither and small insects to drop dead. The implications are unsettling, as in Henry’s case, discussed above. Had Henry been living in a peasant community in southern Europe, he would have been given a wide berth. Admiral Tanagras’ niece told me that her uncle was convinced as a result of his researches that those who had the evil eye were often able to make people sick or even kill them, though he could not mention this in his scholarly monograph. Like most Greeks, she herself wore a small glass eye on a gold chain and urged me to wear one too. While a great deal of work has been done on psychical healing, it is puzzling that no parapsychologist that I know of has repeated Tanagras’s simple experiment, under strict control conditions. This is odd, since if one can demonstrate that psychical healing is possible, then one can presumably do the same for psychical harming. I believe that unconscious fear may lie at the root of this omission.

            Bernard Shaw said that he was once making fun of an opponent of his during a lecture when he suddenly became aware that the man’s wife was sitting in the front row, glaring at him with hatred. He was taken violently ill almost immediately and did not recover for some time. Psychologists would ascribe this to autosuggestion, even though Shaw was a noted rationalist and, as such, supposedly immune from superstitious fears. If Tanagras had tested the woman in question, he may well have found she had the same abilities as his Greek subjects who possessed the evil eye.

            Anthropologists have repeatedly attested that the Australian aboriginal practice of cursing an enemy by ‘pointing the bone’ has been shown to work even though the subject was hundreds of kilometres away and could not possible have had any conscious knowledge of the curse. The spell – for such it is – seems to act in the way a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun, directing them intensely to a single point.

            While driving in the Wirral one Sunday morning in the mid-fifties, I suddenly felt impelled to stop the car outside an isolated house in the countryside, not far from Chester. Though I am normally averse to making contact with stranger, I walked up to the front door, knocked on it and asked the lady of the house if the place was haunted! She greeted me warmly, told me I was clearly psychic, and invited me in to meet her husband. They then told me that the house, which dated from the fifteenth century, had been built on the foundations of an earlier building of Norman origin. In the garden, they showed me the remains of a tower, which had once served as a stronghold and prison and was said to have been connected with the notorious Hugh Lupus, a rapacious and cruel Norman feudal lord who had ruled over the area. The tower and the house were both so badly haunted that they had seriously thought of leaving many times. However, they had slowly learnt to live with and even communicate with the entities that inhabited the place, many of whom seemed to be in torment. Among other things they showed me a massive Jacobean oak table, at least ten feet in length, which, so they alleged, had raised itself a foot or two into the air during a séance, travelled the length of the room and then smashed into a door several inched thick, cracking it from top to bottom. The atmosphere of the house was oppressive; I would not have cared to spend the night let alone live there. I urged the owners to contact the Society for Psychical Research and ask them to send a team up to investigate the phenomena, but as far as I know they never did so. I still find myself wondering what could have compelled me to act as I did, especially since the delay had made me late for an appointment. It was this incident that first made me realise that I had to come to terms with the phenomena whose existence I had up till then been strongly attempting to deny, in spite of my experiences in Cambridge.

            Why was this house so badly haunted? The Wirral, the peninsula between the Mersey and the Dee, where I grew up, suffered atrociously under the Normas. In 1135, the malignant Randulf Meschines, third earl of Chester, burnt down all its villages, drove out its inhabitants and decreed that the whole peninsula should become his private hunting preserve. Any peasant found there was promptly blinded, mutilated or put to death. For over three hundred years, the entire peninsula was transformed into a virtually uninhabited wilderness, as attested by the late fourteenth century poem, Gawain and the Green Knight, written in the north-western dialect by a poet who knew the area well:           

Then fared he over the ford at Holy Head till he eft bonk [i.e. ‘landed]

In the wilderness of Wirral.

The Wirral became notorious as the refuge of outlaws, who found shelter in its overgrown forests, which stretched ‘From Brecon Point to Hilbre,’ as an old rhyme tells us. (Hilbre is now an island, due to the encroachment of the sea). The Wirral was also notoriously dissident, being “first to rebel, last to be subdued” as one chronicler puts it. It is not surprising that the old house I was so strangely drawn to visit was so badly haunted, given that it stood on the foundations of a Norman stronghold, which must have witnessed atrocious suffering during these centuries of cruel repression. In many of the places with which I am familiar, I can still feel the past casting its long, psychic shadow upon the present. 

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM

Death

Death

I

t is a truism that we treat death the way the Victorians treated sex, namely as a subject tabooed in polite conversation. A shocked silence has descended over a dinner party when I have mentioned, casually, that I am now spending my spare time in preparing myself for death. It was as though my grandfather had told a similar gathering that he was spending his spare time masturbating, to prepare himself for fornication, a statement which today would be considered merely amusing.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM

Cruelty

Cruelty

A

ll life is suffering”, said the Buddha, this being the First Noble Truth of Buddhism. This planet is one where everything devours or is devoured by something. Cruelty thus seeps out from every nook and cranny of the system; there is no escaping it. Some people feel this so keenly they even refuse to eat meat. But the majority are not so squeamish. Does cruelty confer an evolutionary advantage? One would think so, for it seems to be a major constituent of human nature. Perhaps there exists a gene for cruelty.

            The catalogue of human cruelty, like the catalogue of human stupidity, is so immense one does not know where to begin. The best one can do is to pour out a few drops of water and say, ‘These come from the ocean. Go and look at it for yourself.’ The following are a mere handful of such drops.

            The single most horrific picture I know shows an SS officer hanging two children in Russia. The girl, who is blond and beautiful, aged about twelve, is already dangling from the rope, eyes closed. She looks almost peaceful. The boy, who can be no more than nine or ten, has the noose round his neck and is about to be left to strangle very slowly, because he is so light. He is wearing a man’s cap, set jauntily over one eye – and he is smiling. The SS man is also smiling, as though they were sharing some appalling joke. I have a feeling the girl, so serenely choking to death, is the boy’s elder sister. Sometimes I dream of this event and wake up sweating and trembling, in the presence of evil.

Such scenes were common in England in the eighteenth century. Jane Austen could have witnessed them, had she been so inclined, a fact which should give pause to those who sight, nostalgically, over the pastoral tranquillity depicted in her novels.

After the Gordon riots (1780), many children were hanged at Tyburn, some as young as eight. An aristocratic, contemporary observer, who attended the hangings for amusement, said he “had never seen boys cry so much”. One hopes that their tears did not detract from his refined enjoyment. The youngest child hanged in England at that time was a girl, aged five.

I am often deeply ashamed to be part of the human race.

Afghanistan:

            In 1978, Afghans captured thirty Russian advisers to the Afghan Marxist government and flayed them alive. This incident enabled the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan on Christmas day the following year with the full support of the Russian populace, who recalled that the Nazis had inflicted the same atrocity on the Russian partisans. Cruelty is requited by cruelty, in an endless cycle.

            In March, 1979, the entire male population of Kerala, Afghanistan, 1700 adults and children, was assembled in the town square and machine-gunned by the Afghan communists. Dead and dying were then buried in pits by bulldozers. Later that month, the Communists massacred around 25,000 people in Herat, one in eight of the town’s population. This rated barely a mention in the Wester press.

            Sayed Abdullah, director of the notorious Pol-e-Charki prison in Kabul, used to say that since only one million Afghans were needed to build socialism, the rest would have to be slaughtered. His prison executioners alone killed over twelve thousand people, drowning hundreds of them alive in the camp’s latrine pits.

Insert 30 or so examples here.

            I have decided not to continue with this section. It would take up the rest of the book and still only scratch the surface of the topic. Swift’s verdict on the human race shall stand here instead: “The most odious race of little vermin that ever crawled between heaven and earth”. For sheer saeva indignatio, nothing has bettered this.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM

Animals

Animals

M

y silky terrier bitch, Tippy, became so deeply attached to another small dog, Mate, that they were inseparable. When Mate died, Tippy simply pined away. Although she had always been timid and afraid of cars, she would lie down in the middle of the road as though she wanted to be run over. Eventually, she stopped eating and died. Few human beings are even remotely capable of such devotion.  Psychiatrists would call it ‘neurotic’.

            When Prema was introduced to the house as a mischievous kitten, our resident cat, Sai Ram, resented him deeply. Later, as he matured, she became attached to him and would follow him everywhere. They slept together, licking and grooming each other affectionately. When Prema was run over by a drunken driver, at the age of two, Sai Ram was disconsolate. Though always an indoor cat, she took to living outside on the drive, in bushes close to the spot where he had been killed, and was not restored to normality again until we moved to another house over two years later. She reminded me of a traditional Chinese widow, who was forced by custom to sleep next to her husband’s grave for three years. Sai Ram, however, carried out this mourning ritual of her own accord. More neurosis, we would say.

            “Animals do not whine about their condition”, wrote Whitman. Our cat, Jaya, who came to us as a forlorn, frightened stray, began to grow thin and shed fur in clumps all over the house. The vet could not diagnose his condition, but prescribed various forms of treatment, all to no avail. Jaya was as affectionate as ever, purring endlessly. I noticed, however, that he would lash his tail from side to side at times, a sure sign that he was in pain. Eventually, his condition grew so severe that the vet decided to operate. He died on the operating table. He had inoperable pancreatic cancer, invariably fatal even in human beings, probably acquired during his years of living rough on the streets, eating garbage and drinking contaminated water. He must have been in agony, so the vet told us. His purring, which I had misinterpreted as a form of content, was in reality a sort of mantra with which to comfort himself and dull the pain. “He was such a brave, loving cat”, said my wife, tearfully. Descartes, who taught us to regard animals as machines, a doctrine evoked by vivisectors, overlooked something important.

            The devotion and affection given by dogs to their owners is only rarely found in their owners. It is not transferable.

            ‘Dogs have masters, cats have staff’. Agreed. But don’t forget that cats pay their staff in a rare coinage.

            When I was seven, my pet cocker spaniel, Judy, ate Oscar, my pet tortoise. I had thought they were friends, for they both slept on my bed, but came home one afternoon to find Judy had turned Oscar over, bitten through his shell and had her blood-stained muzzle deep in his innards. Horrified, I was inconsolable for days and could never feel the same towards Judy again. Children’s characters are often shaped by incidents like this, which suddenly bring sharply home to them that life is not a fairytale, appearances can be deceptive and death is final. This is one reason why children who have pets grow up to be better adjusted that those deprived of them.

            There exists a confraternity of dog owners, some of whose members subscribe to Madame Roland’s dictum, “The more I see of men, the more I like dogs." [1] No feminist has ever rushed forward to correct this bon mot, on the grounds that it is sexist. “The more I see of wimmin, the more I like (the) bitches”, clearly won’t do. Nor will this observation translate into PC-Speak. “The more I see of persons, the more I am equally attracted to both dogs and bitches,” could never be considered politically correct, if only because it sounds suspiciously deviant. After all, some of these animals might still be immature, which could lead to accusations of puppy paedophilia.

            While driving,  I frequently encounter trucks full of wretched, dirty sheep, jammed together remorselessly on their way to the abattoirs or worse, to the ships of the live sheep trade that transports them to the Gulf for Halal ritual slaughter. Their pitiful bleating reminds me of Mencius’s dictum about “the gentleman keeping his kitchens at a distance”. I believe the king in question (Hui of Liang) did so, not out of compassion, as Mencius thought, but simply out of squeamishness. Had he been truly compassionate he would have been a vegetarian. Like many others, I have a bad conscience about eating meat. But having tried a vegetarian diet, only to find it made me ill, I am forced to go on doing something which I find highly distasteful. These sheep trucks, reminiscent of the transports used in the Holocaust, awaken my conscience, reminding me continually that the Buddha was right; all life is suffering and we ourselves cause a great deal of the distress and despair that permeates this planet.

            When I feed the birds in my garden, I notice how the alphas among them spend so much time driving off their rivals that they hardly have the chance to eat. They remind me of exhausted executives, so busy frantically fighting off their competition that they barely have a moment’s leisure. Watching birds and animals closely can tell us a great deal about ourselves; for instance, that alphas, though necessary, generally make life a misery for themselves and others and often die prematurely.

            I was eating my lunch under a tree in the university gardens when I noticed a solitary rabbit browsing contentedly about twenty metres away, heedless of the cars that passed it. However, when I scratched the grass slightly with my fingers, it froze, instantly alert to danger. I marvelled at the evolution, over tens of millions of years, of a brain that could detect a virtually inaudible noise amid the hubbub of the passing traffic and interpret it as a signal for possible flight. If only we could learn to recover that sense of relaxed alertness which we must once have had but now have lost, we would not succumb to the stress that kills many of us.

            Experiments have shown that animals deliberately infected with disease pathogens often stay healthy, provided they are frequently stroked and petted. If they do fall ill they tend to recover, while the neglected animals in the control group almost invariably die. No better proof could be given of the universal need for affectionate body contact. Yet we have evolved a sick and paranoid social system which increasingly discourages such contact. Like most grandfathers today, I dare not kiss, hug or caress my own grandchildren, especially the girls, for fear of being accused of abusing them. I even avoid being left alone with them, which means I can never agree to act as a babysitter. I am far closer to my dog and cat than to my grandchildren, for the animals trust me while my grandchildren have been systematically trained at school not to trust any adult except their mother. Some fathers have told me, in confidence, that they feel much the same way about their daughters, from whom they are becoming estranged. From what we have learnt from these experiments with animals, the consequences of this deprivation may eventually be deeply detrimental to the physical and mental health of the children concerned.  

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[1] This actually derives from A. Toussenel (1803-1885), L’esprit des betes (1847). Madame Roland seems, commendably, to have borrowed and shortened the original.

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM

Age and Youth

AGE AND youth

M

emories become particularly insistent in old age. Many old people become obsessed with past suffering, mistakes and lost opportunities – the ‘if only…’ syndrome. When the old commit suicide, it is often not because they cannot cope with the present, but because they cannot face their past.

            The old are their own historians, but very few of them are honest historians. All too often, they are fantasy novelists.

            Old people often talk to themselves, largely because no one else is willing to listen to them. Given the repetitive paucity of their thoughts, this is not surprising.

            The young believe that they are the first people in the world to experience certain things. So do the old. This is perhaps because we do not recall our previous lives.

            ‘Old age should burn and rave at close of day,’ wrote Dylan Thomas. On the contrary, old age should be cool and detached, not burning, and lucidly rational, not raving. Thomas was confusing age with youth. Hot-headed, raving old men are looked on with pity admixed with contempt. Only Yeats could get away with his ‘wild, old wicked man’ persona, for he had a Nobel Prize.

            The ignorance of the young about life irritates the old, even as the ignorance of the old about the world amuses the young, while exciting their contempt.

            The young should beware of their friends and relatives, rather than of their enemies, for they are already forewarned against the latter.

            When I was fifteen I was convinced my grandmother knew nothing whatever about love and sex, even though she had idolized my grandfather, to whom she had borne six children. I believe I knew all about love and sex for I had once chastely kissed my girlfriend.

            Testosterone has always made idiots of young men, but in my youth we were at least romantic idiots. Nowadays, when intercourse commences at an average age of 16.4 years (the latest figures available) among Australian youth, and oral sex begins even earlier, romance is speedily replaced by mere sexual gratification. Only the idiocy remains.

            The self-centredness of the young can make them shallow, ungrateful, cruel and sentimental, as the self-centredness of the old makes them self-pitying, hard, cruel and sentimental. Both are, however, equally convinced of their own goodness. “How foul and hollow is the human heart,” as Pascal observed.

            Gurdjieff said that the young issue promissory notes, which they spend the rest of their lives paying off. True! The disturbing thing is that such notes are often issued secretly. We spend all our lives paying off ruinous debts of which we know nothing and believe we have never incurred.

            I sometimes tell my students I am not young enough to know everything. Only the cleverest and the stupidest find this amusing, though for quite different reasons.

            The highest suicide rates are found among young men (16 to 30 years) and old men (65 years upwards). Men are more easily stressed than women. Even in the womb male foetuses exhibit a higher level of cortisol than their female counterparts. From an evolutionary viewpoint, men are clearly dispensable in a way women are not. We are not built to last. Good news for feminists!

            In exile, Trotsky complained petulantly at the age of fifty-six that “age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man”. He was wrong. Age is not nearly as unexpected as having a social caller bury an ice pick in your skull. [1]

            Swift’s warning to himself to avoid acquiring some of the disfiguring characteristics of old age – like telling the same story over and over again, praising the past while lamenting the present etc – is just as valid today as it was in the eighteenth century. It should be pasted on the medicine-cabinet of everyone over sixty and prominently displayed the haunts of the old - doctors’ surgeries, hospitals, pharmacies, bowling-clubs, bingo-halls, bridge clubs, hospices and massage parlours. And perhaps, for the benefit of fundamentalist Christians in ‘sure and certain hope of the resurrection’, even in cemeteries.  No one wants those tedious, thrice-told tales on Judgement Day.

            Our society grossly overestimates the young and greatly underestimates the old. Dr Johnson believed that there was “a wicked inclination in most people to suppose an old man decayed in his intellects”, pointing out that if a young or middle-aged person forgot something, nobody paid any attention to the lapse, whereas the same forgetfulness in an old man would give rise to comments about his memory decaying. This is as true today as it was then. Only now, where Johnson’s contemporaries saw mere senility, we see Alzheimer’s. Irrational, malicious prejudice against the old – ageism – is not only as prevalent as racism and just as harmful; in a society aging as rapidly as ours, it is foolish and destructive.

            Old age can turn us into twisted Hogarthian caricatures of ourselves. The self-absorption which we may find amusing in a pretty young girl becomes disgusting narcissism fifty years later, like a tiny ‘beauty spot’ mole degenerating into a hideous melanoma.

            A teenager with a hearty appetite provokes indulgent smiles, whereas an old person greedily shovelling down food is rightly considered disgusting. We expect the old to have learnt self-control, whereas all too often they think that their very age gives them the right to be self-indulgent in everything.

Old academics never die, they simply lose their faculties.

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[1] Which happened to Trotsky (1879-1940), who richly deserved it for having engendered a legion of University Trotskyites.  Who are they? Take your pick!

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM