Coversation before going into the other room

CONVERSATION BEFORE GOING INTO THE OTHER ROOM

Cathy: “I really thought you might so something silly, when I rang a fortnight back. I was over tired, I'm sorry I was so abrupt when you said you were fine. But you had been hearing Voices.”

Alice: “The stelazine shuts them up. But it's not so much what they say, though that's horrid, as what they represent, wired into my head as they are.”

Cathy guesses and pounces: “The triumph of reductive materialism. The Godforsakenness that says only the sciences can describe the world and that we are material and no more. The materialism that asserts that beauty, love and truth don't exist, because it has no terms in which to describe them. Reductive materialism says death stubs us all out, that the very last sparks will finally cool and blacken? Voices constantly urge you to act on these assumptions, yet you perceive them as other, not part of you?”

Alice is shaky, Cathy's in-your-face inquisitiveness is hard to take, but she breathes deeply and tries to reply calmly: “That's because, in my heart of hearts, I know they are wrong. They say I have no right to life if my mother is dead, they see traffic and say jump out in front of it. The secret is, I know I'm deeply, badly and dangerously wrong! Wrong enough to frighten myself out of my wits at times.”

Alice feels her tears rise, but Cathy's fortnight's withdrawal has shown Alice her weakness is a millstone round Cathy's neck, so she swallows hard and blinks her eyes.

Cathy: “So it's wrong to see hawthorn berries as murdered eyes? You said something about that at Christmas.”

Alice: “Since that view was predicated on my death, it was, yes. I know people do terrible things to each other but I don't want that to be right. I remember my mother and father destroying love and security between them, as if in one moment of rage and rejection they'd hurled a living rose onto a hot coal fire. As if I had to watch it writhe as its sap boiled and steamed, and its petals charred and cooked to flabby brown matter. “

The rose image is figurative, a flight of the mind and Alice is nervous she might not be understood. But Cathy pins it down: “That's hideous. That's how your mother's illness and your father's adultery made you feel?”

Alice: “Yes. A fire that's gone out can be relit, a light switched off can be switched on again,these mechanical processes are reversible. But you can't restore life to something that's been burnt to death. I had to face a world grown nastier because the rose was dead, but I knew it was terribly and horribly wrong. I don't want to die so the Voices must be other, though God help me, I can't imagine the world being different or kinder.”

Cathy: “If God's an idea, that idea is helping us now. Simply because the ideas we're discussing are so difficult, and so dangerous, we face our God in them. Your spiritual crisis, as I see it, is something you have in common with every human being in the age we live in. I've come to terms through my work and my hobby of Raku sculpture. You've insisted your feelings of colour and flavour in words is a you thing not an ill thing, perhaps you'll come to terms, or find relief, in using words?”

Alice feels put on the spot and pinned down, Cathy is so hot on the scent of exactly what she means when she tries to describe things. Dare she use words, is she too mad? But she knows she does feel for words. Cathy interrupts Alice's train of thought with another abrupt question: “ But why Voices? Why a Voice in your head and why the plural?”

Alice: “The Voices voice horrors like murdered eyes, or contradictions, or admonitions in my head and I can't stop them. The plural is because it feels like being in the midst of an angry, hostile crowd all shouting, I'm bewildered and dazed and confused by their noise. That's the only way I can describe the distress, the life denying horrors of hearing them and it's like have a radio on constantly and too loud, it can't be switched off and it's wired into my head! They says the murder of the rose really did destroy love, I hear them because that happened and because I witnessed it, I feel culpable. As a child I'd been instructed in nonconformist Christianity but when Mum died and Dad remarried I hadn't the courage to reaffirm the existence of love. I called all beauties, all truths local, idiot and hence meaningless. I denied God and I denied His redemptive power through the beauty of the living earth. I put myself and my nastily reduced material world beyond redemption and I knew that was wicked, wicked and terribly wrong! But I was angry with both parents and with myself, I let the Voices take over and if you like, consented to their nihilistic shouts, to spite myself and the process took me over and I went mad.”

Alice feels drained, abruptly her mind swerves into gallows humour: “ Hey, science has the answer to all this, in the form of psychotherapy, science says if I blame my mother for everything and slag her off I'll be cured immediately! Seriously, they're always trying to trick me into denouncing Mum, as if more hatred would cure me of hatred and destruction, and as if Dad had nothing to do with it!”

Cathy: “The psychotherapists can't see schizophrenia as embodying the crisis of whether there is anything more than the material world so effectively described by science.”

Alice: “Yes, and to sum it up, put it into a nut shell, they say my craving for redemption and forgiveness is unrealistic! Instead I must carry on the destruction by ruining any good and loving memories of Mum I have, by spewing out a one sided hatred and exonerating my father completely. How can I do that? They were both wrong, but Mum was conscientious and I'm a mother myself, where would one sidedly blaming her leave me?”

Cathy: “Which is to beg the whole question of what the matter is, refusing even to make it possible to be discussed! And don't the Voices say exactly the same things as the psychotherapists?”

Alice: “Indeed they do. They represent the despair of non discussion and the horror of a life bare of the spirit, a hard, violent, sun bleached life among rocks.”

Cathy: “Which leaves us with art – not art without science, I'm not getting into a Two Cultures thing here – but art that uses and understands science and can express itself in the metaphysical terms that underwrite the sciences. Religion is a form of art, religion underwrites all art and gives us the means to discuss art, science and ourselves. Science has neither the power nor the terms of reference to discuss their own assumptions, after all why should things be intelligible and make sense? Why should it make sense, to show you a pertinent example of bloody bad science, for healing to be based on a misogyny that says a mother's place is in the wrong? You see the sciences need the arts in order to understand themselves. Come with me – quick! - come upstairs and see the other room and I'll show you!”

Eyes alight, Cathy bounces to her feet, grabs Alice by the wrist and opens the door to the stairs, and rushes Alice up them to the other room where she displays her Raku sculptures. She is greedily wanting to show Alice the Reader, and her Hidden Dread series she thought up last autumn shortly after meeting Alice. Her wrist caught and her imagination fired, Alice hurries to keep up with Cathy, the two friends go through the door together.