Celandine

THE CELANDINE PROPOSITIONS

1. While Alice paces up and down, Cathy, back in her own home, pours herself a glass of Spanish red and sits down to consider. She is perturbed by these new poems of Alice's, perturbed by Alice, she must admit, Alice is claiming more for herself than Cathy is able to give. I was jealous and I felt Alice as competition, thinks Cathy with characteristic honesty, and I didn't like it. Whether Alice should or shouldn't compete I don't know, the pavements are harsh and abrasive, it's not just putting one foot in front of the other to reach the postbox, it's Alice making herself vulnerable to a dark, cruel and chaotic society. But I can't help, thinks Cathy with tears, I can't I've reached my limit.

2. Cathy wipes her eyes. What do I wish, she asks herself, that I could pop up with Alice's poems through the post, and explain to the editors all about her and make them understand? Cathy smiles with wet eyes, how ridiculous, the work must stand or fall on its own merits. Cathy wishes Alice wasn't so vulnerable but, she has the wisdom to realise, Alice has gone beyond her now.

3. People are made out of heavy elements cooked in the collapse of massive stars which then explode and send dust across space to become the seeds of new stars and planets. To put it too simplistically and wholly anthropocentrically, for aeons the universe has worked to make people possible and yet, star born, we do not recognise this in each other and perhaps we can't, it is asking too much. I can love my neighbour as myself but not more than myself, thinks Cathy, and that means I must love myself.

4. Cathy found Alice by the wayside, injured, treated contemptuously and ignored. Just like those blackberries on the derelict estate, those ranks of spined cables offering berried sprays to passers by. Blackberries and Alice are the fruits of Cathy being a Good Samaritan, the rewards and, she concedes, the responsibilities. But she can only go so far. I'm only human, Cathy tells herself, and sips her wine.

5. Lots of people with schizophrenia write poetry, having read Alice's work Cathy sees this urge to write as an attempt to explain what the matter is, what hurts and why. They want to make visible the agony of total internal introspection and bring their pain out of the limbo of neglect and misunderstanding. The garbling is simply because a lot of ill people don't know how to explain, because they haven't studied and learned the right techniques, they don't understand how to use metre, imagery and rhyme schemes, all the skills one must acquire in order to write poetry.

6. Schizophrenia, as Cathy read in New Scientist back in the winter, is linked to the human capacity to use language. Cathy shivers, her gaze abstracted through her window, she can just see the earliest celandines in the cold flower bed outside. Look at the use of cold agonies in those poems! Words are redefined in poetry, an intelligible poem shows how they make sense in a new and provocative way. Alice can do that, she has shocked Cathy, she's not so damaged she can't use the language, she can also describe how she feels in a dramatic and highly competitive way. Alice makes sense of things in her own way, as Betty says we all must. But don't expect me to prostrate myself before you lady! Cathy's annoyance has returned, her violet eyes are very sharp.

7. Cathy admires the ruby dark swirl of wine mirrored in her glass, actual on her tongue when she sips. Grapes and hot sunshine have gone into making it as perfect as it is, its colours and flavours are beautiful and show a glimpse of God in their detail. Cathy thinks every living and growing thing, or wine made from such, or celandines beginning to flower now, give us a glimpse of the wonder and marvel of the created universe.

8. Why do people switch the lights on and draw the curtains against the created world outside, refusing its darkness, weather and flowers? Perhaps at times it is too much to bear, or is it that we are so afraid of ourselves we dare not look any further? We shut ourselves into a box of mirrors, Alice has been shut up in mirrored street lit thinking, closing her off from the stars and God. But she must find a way out by herself now, Cathy cannot take her all the way, no human being can.

9. Yet we have, considers Cathy, tasting the long mouth of her sip of wine on her tongue, a very basic but profound responsibility for other people, as well as for ourselves. But not, she concedes, to the point of losing ourselves in other people and making ourselves ill as well. Betty was right to warn me when she did, I'm not a professional like a psychiatric nurse or a doctor. No-one knows when and where that responsibility to notice and help will crop up, it comes out of nowhere and is always unexpected, not announced by flags, brass bands and Very flares. We kid ourselves that of course we would help if needed, we have fantasies of ourselves as heroes and heroines saving the day, but we don't see it is the day here and now, in this phonecall, in that taped mouth.. The impulse to help, to star in the situation, is in us all and we can't get outside or beyond ourselves.

10. People have no idea of Alice being too ill and disabled to help herself, yet the whole point about schizophrenia is that one is. There are no white bandages to alert people not to use vindictive abuse about schizos, nutters and loonies in Alice's teeth. They don't or won't see that this is their chance to be stars by offering help and friendship, they have swallowed the mythology whole so it has become instinctive to avoid, to pass by on the other side busily telling oneself it's nothing to do with me. If we all made Alice our business the whole burden wouldn't fall on just one person, like me, thinks Cathy, and be too much.

11. In the poems she showed Cathy Alice has made that suspicion and avoidance of obvious suffering chillingly articulate. She has exposed herself, taken the risk of becoming more than herself, of being seen like that and therefore judged. That is the drama of being like Alice, either nobody goes near her, as nobody did while Cathy took time to herself, or if she obtrudes herself they judge and mutter unkindly as if Alice should be seen but not heard. Now Alice courts even more jealous and hurtful scrutiny by submitting her work, she is in effect saying I'm as good as you! Cathy toasts her effort, draining her glass as if offering a libation to whatever God there is, all courage and strength to Alice. But look at how Cathy herself reacted, Cathy feels cold all over and shivers, she will strain that libation through her kidneys and she stands up, feeling sadly she's done her best but failed Alice in some obscure way. Cathy blunders upstairs to the loo, discomfited, not happy in herself.

12. Emptying her full bladder gives Cathy a respite from her self reproach, when she reseats herself and pours more wine she rallies and thinks she'll go over her behaviour to Alice, and Alice's behaviour to her. I must remember Alice is a person not a victim, thinks Cathy, her violet eyes beady and intent. Suddenly an image of open celandines flashes across her brain, star shaped golden petals wide to the night air and pollution: she too must be open to everything, honest as the celandines.

13. I must admit I find Alice needy , encroaching and insinuating. It hurts to admit it – but did I encourage it? I urged Alice to spill the beans, I took her everywhere and introduced her to Betty. I had a real enthusiastic interest in how her illness made her tick, I almost had what my Nana would have called a pash for Alice! Cathy sips her wine then pursues this train of thought.

14. Now I want to withdraw and re-erect my boundary fences – yes I do – just when Alice is taking a shy step beyond herself. It may be terrible – no, it's consistent with my nature. It's how I feel and I can't help that. But I am subject to overwhelming enthusiasms, I was the same with Martha, wanting to do everything for her and her kids and in that case it was Martha who withdrew and stood me up about going blackberrying, and went all conventional. But that's what I'm like, who I am and as I say I can't help my nature.

15. Cathy's mind ranges freely now she's worked this out, she watches the reflections rock in the dark meniscus of her wine. People in the local Labour party think I'm odd and get bees in my bonnet, thinks Cathy and grins in self recognition. I think they're holier than thou with their pious dicta about institutionalisation, as if chucking people out of hospitals was a liberation rather than a blatant denial of their right to healing!

16. They see themselves as policy makers, someone else must do the caring. Caring is a low status job and they like to exalt not lower their individual status. Ah, it always helps if you can slag off others rather than yourself, thinks Cathy, incautiously taking a gulp from her glass and spilling red beads of wine down her tie dyed shirt.

17. Cathy swipes at the spill, but it won't show against the flaring circles and spattered colours on her shirt. Since I can't help being myself and who I am, since I've cheered myself up, I think I'll ring Di and tell her my first celandines are out. We can catch up on each other's news , says Cathy happily to herself. She tops up her glass, lights a preparatory cigarette, and reaches for the phone.