A Nest of Anarchists. By JBP.

Part 4. The Joker and more about The Forum.

 

    Laurie Hislam was Fredrick's oldest friend among the anarchists. He had dark red hair, a red beard, blue eyes, and rebellion written into his genes. If born in hospital he probably howled violently at the nurse because she was wearing a uniform. It was a hazardous venture to go out with Laurie. He argued with bus conductors, insulted train guards, riled commissionaires and resented policemen. All this he did with great good cheer.

    Although one of the few practical men likely to accompany Frederick on his abortive community project, Laurie's tendency to attack any proposition which was advanced even when he agreed with it, would make arriving at decisions an arduous process.

    Laurie had a vigorous and macabre sense of humour. At the time of the Munich crisis he went to Downing Street carrying a small attaché case. There was a crowd waiting for news. Laurie opened the attaché case, shouted, and threw it without letting go. A policeman shouted 'Get down' and everyone fell to earth. A dozen tennis balls with 'Why war?' painted on them with great care sailed into the air and bounced harmlessly on the road. The magistrate took a jaundiced view of this incident and Laurie spent a month in jail.

    He could not resist baiting the authorities. Conscientious objectors were given a card to return to the place of issue if they changed their name, job, or address. Where the card read 'I have changed my name to . . .' Laurie wrote 'Bamboozle.U' and put it in the post box.

    The jokes were not all Laurie's. Fredrick had an old corduroy jacket of a faded green of which he was very fond. At one point Laurie was devoid of a wearable jacket and had no money to buy one. Oxfam shops did not exist in those days. Fredrick knew that Laurie was both a devoted admirer of Tolstoy, and too prickly to accept cast-off clothing. In a burst of inspiration he found a method of ensuring that Laurie would take the jacket. He told him that the jacket had been a gift from a Russian refugee who swore that it had once belonged to Tolstoy. Laurie wore the jacket until it dropped to pieces.

    When we left for Scotland in January 1946, Laurie moved into our flat. His adventures when he visited us in the Highlands will be recounted later.

 

The Forum

    Fredrick gave different accounts of the origins and intentions of the Forum. He said at the 1959 debate which proved to be the beginning of the end, 'The original idea of the Forum was - speak your mind.' It was to be a psychological and spiritual exploration conducted in total freedom. 'The Forum was the one place where we need not worry about expediency of conduct. That was the condition of Forum membership.'

    In Fredrick's view it must never be a conventional discussion group, run on the lines, as he put it, 'We have a little time to spare and go along for a chin-wag. I do not regard that as valid. What I believed about the Forum was this. There was a radical experience which could be assisted provided it germinates in a person coming to the Forum. My idea of the Forum is that there comes out of it a capacity to see in a way that cannot be contradicted.' This did not mean the establishment of some formula of belief or practice, but the effort, through examination of the ego at work, to achieve the state of 'innocence' described by Coupe - that is, the willingness to see what is in fact the case. A permanent ego by-pass was never attained by anyone present, but the process certainly increased awareness.

    Fredrick's own starting-point was the state of crisis in which he envisaged Western society to exist in 1941. He made several efforts to describe the situation as being 'a collapse of belief and any sense of meaning, brought about by the will . . .in its attempt to dominate life by the intellect alone.'

    'It is quite clear,' he wrote, 'that by intellectual process we shall never get beyond the fact that matter disappears upon analysis, that consciousness is reduced by questioning to a dubious hypothesis, and that all expressions of Being, Form, and Meaning are purely arbitrary devices of the ego seeking to escape loneliness.' He probably saw Cecil as a living embodiment of this state.

    He likened the mood of the Forum to that of existentialism - a deep disenchantment with accepted explanations of the world in the face of war, oppression, holocaust and the collapse of Europe, and an insistence on relating intellectual explanations of phenomena to the reality of emotional life. 'The whole man is the primary truth,' he said. 'Intellect must serve life, not destroy life by analysis. Man is a responsible creature.' Coupe might have replaced thee 'whole man' with the word 'soul.'

    Fredrick's 1945 lectures, and his eventual pamphlet 'The Grand Inquisitor', which embodies them, confronted the problem that if meaning is not to be found in investigation of the self, which disappears on examination, then it must be found outside - but where? Not in science, not in nature: then in faith? But faith must be based either on the discovery of objective vision, or in revelation and the authority built on revelation.

    Fredrick's psychological situation was therefore complex, and contained intense contradictions. His sense of vocation was the result of inner recognition, of personal insight, a liberation into a perceived state of authenticity. This insight is seen as having a source other than the ego. What source?  There is no need to interrogate the state too closely while the sense of vocation remains strong. Coupe asserted that 'The service of one's vocation is a service of one's real and true self.' And Cecil? Did he have a vocation for the destruction of illusory concepts?

    If the realisation of vocation is a birth into freedom, then any movement towards dogmatic doctrines and obedience to a Church or outside authority may prove to be a denial of vocation itself.

    The method which the Forum employed was to explore the identification principle - that is, the ego's identification with doctrines, ideals, opinions, codes, crusades, organisations, and explanations of the world. This identification is seen as a way of self-aggrandisement.

    That is where the contributions of Cecil and Coupe were particularly useful. Cecil's scientific knowledge, and Coupe's scholarship, could be relied upon to provide food and fuel. Cecil's relentless examination of statements and concepts.. which invariably denied them reality and meaning, reinforced the message. His nihilism seemed in itself symptomatic of the peculiar swing into spiritual crisis.

    Coupe's interrogation of words, separating their original and developed meanings from the way in which they were carelessly used, led in the same direction. It often seemed that Coupe found some sort of esoteric concealed in words themselves.

    A few examples can be drawn from the 'Coupologues'. Forum Member (i.e. Coupe) remarks, 'The London Forum never invents anything, unless you use the word 'invent' in its original meaning of 'to find', from the Latin 'invenire.' The London Forum simply finds what is before it.' Again, 'the root of the word 'innocence' is the Latin intransitive verb 'noceo' and means 'I hurt', or rather 'I am harmful', but cannot have an object, so that the sense is indeterminate. 'Innocens' is the adjectival present participle with a negative prefix, and means to be harmless and aimless.' Fredrick himself referred to 'primordial intuitions expressed in language.'

    The Forum approach was once defined by Fredrick as 'provocative contradiction, drawing the ego into the open.' That was certainly achieved. The wildest and most direct expressions of opinion resulted from the process of interrogation - Communists, nationalists, racists, anarchists, Zionists, humanists, atheists, pacifists, occultists, religionists of all kinds, expressed increasingly ferocious views and doctrines as they grew more intense. One particularly vocal individual was devoted to the blood-and-race expositions of D.H.Lawrence, refusing to see anything in them which resembled the doctrines of the Nazis. He returned again and again to the place from which he started no matter how many times he was diverted into other channels. Eventually he grew so excitable and frustrated that he stormed out after a final explosion and was seen no more.

    Nobody was immune from investigation. Indeed, it was dangerous to make a statement. 'The ego,' Coupe wrote, 'wills above all to assert itself. Frustrated in its direct assault, it resorts to cunning.' The efforts of opinionators to dodge and twist in order to retain self-respect in the fact of relentless probing was often a sad, painful, or embarrassing spectacle. But it was soon realised that to humiliate a participant was to lose his attention forever; and whenever a speaker felt triumphant, authenticity was lost. Pride, vanity, despair, struggled in the dark. Many - most, I think - did not fully understand what was going on. They wanted to be told to believe and what to do, and when they were not told, resented it, and grew angry. They flew up against analysis when it was directed against their own views, and since analysis as a method was continually criticised, they had ample justification. Justification, of course, increases resentment, and the most dangerous form of indignation is the righteous kind.

    How much good did all this do? How much light shone on the assembled company? Not much, in many cases, because the ego is adroit at rebuilding shattered walls in different designs. Destruction of opinion only leads to authentic insight when a gift arrives suddenly 'from the ceiling', as Thornton Wilder put it. Coupe said that he regarded the work of the Forum as 'the recovery of lost innocence.'  He never achieved such innocence himself, and I certainly didn't. But awareness increased, and the possibility of waking up and seeing something as it really is became more than a possibility. Fredrick referred to the work as the process of 'breaking open mind.' This is revealing and accurate. Speaking personally, I took away from the Forum a habit that has proved invaluable. Let's call it the pursuit of uncomfortable light.

    Always painfully honest, Fredrick remarked, 'From the beginning I hoped that the Forum would reveal something which I lacked', and 'The Forum is a living thing. We are all subject to our own natures and temperaments. I do not think anyone here is a standard for anyone else. I am subject to moods and doubts; as we develop in understanding the ground can often be shaky.'

    At its best the Forum was undoubtedly a living thing - living noisily at times - which in its acrobatic performances gave attenders unforgettable visions of the ego at work. They could not afterwards free themselves from the inner witness which observed the play. Indeed, the discovery of that inner witness in individuals was the purpose of the community. 

 

Coming soon: Part 5, The Idealist.

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