The Heavenly Council, Part I

A group of eleven geniuses responds to Doris Lessing’s question in her 1985 series of CBC lectures, The Prisons We Choose to Live Inside: “How is it that we had all the information we needed to save ourselves, and we failed to do it?” This group is a council, but also a counsel. Below is their response to Lessing, and their ideas on how we might be able to save ourselves.

-W.H. Auden

-André Breton

-Federico Fellini

-Antonio Gramsci

-Mikhail Lermontov

-George Orwell

-Theodore Roethke

-Wallace Shawn

-Lytton Strachey

-Andrei Tarkovsky

-Leo Tolstoy

All of these thinkers had pondered the human condition at great length. At their first meeting (it was unclear if there would be more), it was decided that Tolstoy should be the chairman, the facilitator of the discussion. The title of the session would be: “Living Differently, and How to Achieve It.” After a brief introduction by Tolstoy, he calls on Theodore Roethke to get the ball rolling.

(Note to the Reader: The event described by Tarkovsky that he says happened in his early twenties, never happened to him, as far as I know; it happened to me.)

Roethke

I suppose I am most well-known for my poem “The Waking,” which contains the line, “I learn by going where I have to go.” Antonio Machado’s version of this was “Se hace camino al andar,” we make the road by walking it. I guess what the two of us are saying is: take it slow, stay aware, think by feeling, and by so doing life will make itself clear to you. I still believe that, and I believe death is part of the natural process. Of course, I am talking about individuals here; the goal of this Council, however, is to see what can be done for society, for humanity as a whole. This is where another poem of mine might be relevant. It’s called “In a Dark Time.” Here is how it starts: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” Clearly, we are living in a dark time. What, then, does the eye see? And is the vision strictly an individual one, or can it be a social and political vision as well?

Shawn

Theodore, let me address that last question, if I may. If the vision is only an individual one, then this group will be of no help to humanity at large. It has to be political, and I make that point in my play The Fever. The play has only one actor in it, of unspecified gender, so let’s say it’s a woman. She is a well-off American intellectual or artist, a privileged person, who decides to visit a Third World country to see first-hand how the less fortunate live. The elite rule the nation with an iron hand, i.e., by means of torture and repression, which keep the masses in line. She gets sick in her hotel room when she figures this out, a sickness caused by self-disgust, since she realizes that the comforts of her American life are made possible by the violence of this regime. At the end of the play her eye begins to see in a very political, self-transparent sense. This is her revelation:

“The life I lead is irredeemably corrupt. It has no justification… The chambermaid’s condition is not temporary. A life sentence has been passed on her: she’s to clean for me and sleep in filth. Not, she’s to clean for me today, and I’m to clean for her tomorrow…No. The sentence says that she will serve, and then on the next day she will serve, and then she will…right up until her death.”

The text ends with this person begging forgiveness from the audience; which is, of course, only a first step. What has to follow is the dismantling of the oppressive regime, which America has up to now supported, for our own economic benefit. How to do this remains the crucial question.