The Last of England

My aim in this blog is to write a series of 'occasional pieces' during our travels, with professional colleagues in mind.

This is the first one.

The Last of England

In Haruki Murakami’s story ‘The Second Bakery Attack’ the protagonist of the story and his wife are hungry in the night. There is no food in the refrigerator. But this is a special type of hunger. The protagonist experiences the special hunger in the form of a revelation, which occurs in a few seconds. I would call this a ‘reverie’. He presents it to the reader in the form of a ‘cinematic image’:

‘One, I am in a little boat, floating on a quiet sea. Two, I look down, and in the water I see the peak of a volcano thrusting up from the ocean floor. Three, the peak seems pretty close to the water’s surface, but just how close I cannot tell. Four, this is because the hypertransparency of the water interfers with the perception of distance.

‘This is a fairly accurate description of the image that arose in my mind during the two or three seconds between the time my wife said she refused to go to an all-night restaurant and I agreed with my ‘I guess not’. Not being Sigmund Freud, I was, of course, unable to analyse with any precision what this image signified, but I knew intuitively that it was a revelation.’ (p.38, The Elephant Vanishes, trans. GB 2001).

This little boat, and my leaving to travel, I associate with Ford Maddox Brown’s painting ‘The Last of England’ (Birmingham Art Gallery). The image focuses on a couple (in 1855) sitting on the open deck of a storm lashed boat on a choppy English channel with the white cliffs of Dover about to recede behind them.

I might describe this as the difficulty of leaving for an extended period, the loss and letting go of work, place and identity. I’ve jokingly thought of this as pre-holiday tension, or PHT. It’s something that Bion refers to as an experience of ‘catastrophic change,’ the fear that such change (any change) might well bring about the death of the sense of self; this sense of self. It’s what many of us fear I think, and many clients. Despite age and experience, it always surprises me that with the prospect of change and moving out of my comfort zone I can be gripped so powerfully with such fear. The volcano is perhaps not very far beneath the surface. There are plenty of them in the physical world of Indonesia, where we are going first, though not, hopefully, active on the island of Bintan.

Of course the positive and exciting side is the possibility of new experience. Sartre refers to the need to let go of the idea of having to create a substantial self. The future is always a choice of being-in-the world (ref. Betty Cannon, and I must have read that somewhere in Being and Nothingness during one of my several attempts to read it).

What we are is the ‘stuff that dreams are made on’ (The Tempest). That’s for my next ‘occasional piece’.

Later with Murakami’s ‘I’ protagonist, the sea waters cloud over (lose their transparency) again and he is less anxiously bobbing on the quiet waters.

Once I’m on the plane there then has to be a letting go – there’s nothing further one can do about what is being left behind.

Hopefully, when we take off, the clouds will form underneath and the volcano will be far below.