Doris Lessing
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
To think that in-sane is the opposite of sane is as ridiculous as thinking male is the opposite of fe-male. We exist on a continuum that changes or better yet, like light motes in a web: we are all connected. Our human reality is, I believe, based more on consciousness than on the structures that compose our everyday. To see beyond the limits of the human intellect and senses is not a transcendence of life, it is to join it.
If we all exist together and one of us goes bad like an egg sat too long, leaves the so-called-reality of our day-to-day and enters into a consciousness very different from our own; if the words and images used to describe this experience are familiar, isn’t it our responsibility to listen? Wouldn’t it be possible to find within those familiar words and images another sense? another kind of sane?
In Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell there is no tinge of romanticism for the mentally ill as genius. No, Doris Lessing is making us listen to the “ravings” of a man found “mad.” Not ravings really, but visions, experiences lived out solely in the mind. So goes the first half of this book.
The Professor found himself on a raft stuck to the Equatorial current, around and around and around until the doctors gave him drugs more potent. Instead of the visions going they intensified. He drifts to a pristine shore, a peaceful place at first. Near to the end of this first half, as I was thinking, “Come on Doris, come on, the man needs some grounding,” as the Professor’s celestial view of the cosmos was growing, I was struck with the near resemblance to Shikasta. I almost saw its birth. But that’s another book.
The mad man saw lights, some brighter than the others; he saw how there was formed on Earth an inexorable web between people, nature and the cosmos. Unity. Wholeness.
And this was the truth that gave the utter insignificance of these motes their significance: in the great singing dance, everything linked and moved together. My mind was the facet of a mind, like cells in a honeycomb.
The second half of the book gives the man some context, as the doctors try to find out who he is and what happened to him for he was without memory. The visions, no matter how colorful and poetic, couldn’t exist without this grounding.
Doris Lessing has called this book, Inner-Space Fiction: for there is never anywhere to go but in. … And in we go! Was the Professor breaking down or was he merely adapting, for a time, a different angle, a different view of the same things that had been present during his “normal” life? Doubt had been present: does the teaching of the Classics have any purpose at all? He had fought in the War. His emotions were not up to par. He never had had a good memory.
—when any of these or you or I ask ourselves, with all the weight of our lives behind the question, What am I? What is this Time? What is the evidence for a Time that is not mortal as a leaf in autumn, then the answer is, That which asks the question is out of the world’s time…
Another wave-length, a glance through the rip down the shoulder, of reality’s veil: abnormality. What is normal anyway? Normal, as described by Rosemary Baines, is a kind of sleepiness, the opposite of wakefulness; it is the strongest current in humanity’s stream, a standard, a status quo that most have internalized to keep us in tip-top sanity. We are our own self-normalizers. When this function goes bust or there is an odd screw thrown into the machine, then we are called mentally troubled or in-sane.
Normality’s not what it’s cracked up to be. There is plenty of healthiness in a skewed view—within limits of course! What a blessing to let go of those limits, to not give a damn about you nor me, to just go where the Equatorial current or the stately white wings of a big bird takes you. Warning: the trip won’t be all good, there’s a lot of darkness inside. (Note: the Professors strained relationship with the moon.)
When I get terrific visions of the world I am happy for a little insanity. When I see the rising normality of plastic bodies, I know I would rather be on the crazy side. When I hear about writing classes and writing workshops my neurons fire on the defense: don’t cover up your motives with things like grammar and plot for the ultimate goal and penultimate goal is to assist in my acceptance. Acceptance sounds like a lot of normalizing bullocks to me. Acceptance is the last thing I want from my words.
The predecessor to Briefing for a Descent into Hell was the final book of the Children of Violence series, The Four-Gated City. In it Doris Lessing writes Martha into a situation of self-imposed insanity, just to see what would happen. I can’t remember what happened, but the scene in the room alone with Martha was stunning. The whole book blew my mind. Doris Lessing challenges the line drawn between normal and abnormal.
If it sounds like I’m having trouble writing about this book, that’s because I am. Like Memoirs of a Survivor this book will haunt me. There is so much unexplored that lies within.
It was as if the knowledge of what I would see caused me to see what otherwise I could not—for I already half-believed that my seeing had created what I saw.
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