Nicholas Mosley - John Banks Interviews Transcript 3

   This is one of the sections of the transcript that is particularly relevant to Nicholas Mosley's Judith and his most recent  novel, Inventing God. It was taped during a lovely Spring afternoon on the lawn outside Peaklet cotttage.
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Peaklet Cottage, Sussex, May 1991

N - I'm going to read from the last section of the novel Judith, where Judith goes into this strange landscape where human beings normally don't go. It's an old battle area in the heart of the English countryside which is no longer used by soldiers as a battle area but the general public are kept out because there's danger of unexploded bombs, that sort of thing. So it really is like some Garden of Eden, with a wall round it, that humans are not allowed to go back into. And this is what Judith gets the impression of as she goes into this landscape. 

"You know how when you are writing or painting (have I said this before!) there is the impression that you are not creating but discovering what it already there..."  Judith  pp. 282-284 (Secker & Warburg 1986) 

   JB - Could you just briefly tell the story of Judith?
   N - Well Judith is the story of a young actress. She's an English actress but she's been brought up in the Far East, in Hong Kong and Singapore, of English parents, but she comes to London in the 70's.  And she's a very self-possessed, what's called a "street wise", young woman, because she's been around the Far East and on her way to Europe she stopped off in Nepal and this sort of thing. And she sort of knows a lot about life, and thinks she knows a lot and she feels she isn't going to be one of those young women who get mucked about; she's going to be in control of things. And she comes to London and lands small parts as an actress, and she gets herself up in the social world a bit, she becomes the girlfriend of a fashionable writer on a satirical magazine. So she is doing okay, but at the same time she feels that what is doing okay in the social and the professional acting sense of course isn't really anything of any interest at all, as much as the things going on inside her. And so she lets herself be led along a path of more and more wild things. She gets into a drug scene, gets hooked up with a very rich, tough, older man, a sort of painter and stage designer, who's a very cool unscrupulous chap, and she really lets herself be taken along into more and more strange, exotic territory of drugs and sex and so forth. And she half knows what she's doing, she half knows that she is doing this for some purpose, she's not just letting herself go: she's not only letting herself go, she's letting herself go because she wants to get somewhere where she can learn something and she can change.  .... 

   And what she does is what quite a lot of those sort of young women - girls - did in the 1970's: she takes herself off to India and she becomes an inmate of an ashram where things are fairly crazy. She doesn't learn anything very straight but she is given space in which to sort things out for herself. She's given space to do this, and after a time she does this. Now I actually got the idea for this ashram scene because in the end of the 1970's I myself was traveling around India. I'd been on a package tour seeing art stuff in southern India, and at the end of it I had time on my own so I went off to this ashram that was run by that old rogue of a guru - I think he wouldn't mind one calling him that himself, though he's dead now - Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who became famous in the 70's. He became famous both for helping people - they did find their lives altered - but also for being a rogue and making no bones about being a rogue. And this was what was interesting about him.

   What was interesting about that ashram at Poona in 1979....  about Rajneesh, was that he used to tell jokes. He used to say, "We all think much too much about ourselves when we're meditating, I'm now going to tell you a joke."  ... This was in a big sort of sermon; he used to give these addresses to a great crowd of two thousand people every day.  .... Then he said, "Now we're not thinking so much about ourselves I can go on talking about Zen and Buddha and about the Tao and Christ's teaching in the New Testament and so on." And this was an extraordinary idea, that you got the very serious teaching and then you sort of "blew it up"! Because you couldn't be taken over by the teaching; you had to both hear the teaching and yet be distanced from it, so you yourself could be in relation to the teaching and not just take the word of the guru. In fact when I was there one of the things he kept on saying was, "I do not want to be a god to you, I do not want to be a father figure to you. My job is to teach you to think for yourself, to know for yourself.  If you just take what I say, I haven't done anything, I haven't done what I'm trying to do." And then of course there are all these two thousand people sitting around saying, "Yes Bhagwan, we must all think for ourselves." [mimics humorously] And that was hopeless. ....

   Anyway, in my book Judith she goes out to some ashram, which I based vaguely on this ashram in Poona where I'd spent a fortnight - ten days - not as a devotee, I never felt the need to be any sort of devotee of Rajneesh, but I certainly found him interesting. I felt this attitude of both doing the teaching and then, as it were, blowing it up, was interesting.  This girl, my girl Judith, goes out to India, she stays there six months or so, and then she feels she's learnt all she can, so she then gets out and comes home. And she is changed, she has hit some sort of rock bottom, she has picked herself up out of rock bottom, she has had some time in this ambiance, and now she goes out and she comes home. And the last section of Judith is seven years later, and you see Judith and all the other characters in my books. They all come together in some big demonstration outside a big American airbase where they have nuclear bombs on the planes. There's a demonstration, anti-nuclear and so forth, and next to the airbase there is this empty battle area which, again, is like some sort of Garden of Eden where no one comes now. It becomes a complicated story then...   What do you feel about the Bomb?  The Bomb is something evil but it's also something, as people keep on pointing out, that has probably kept the peace of the world, which is like some terrible fearsome Old Testament God hanging over one, telling one that if you take too many steps out of line you'll all blow yourselves up. This might be the symbol of the human race reaching some rock bottom: they've bloody well got to start thinking for themselves now or they're going to blow themselves up.  ....

   Judith goes into this area looking for the child that has got lost - the child of Jason and Lilia, two other characters in these books - and then my characters go into this empty area looking for the child... ....  ...and there's the imagery here to do with Kleist's idea that one couldn't go back to the Garden of Eden - that is, one couldn't go back to a state of innocence. He had this image that human beings had to go right round the world and then in again at the back way: you have to go through a lot of experience and then you come back to... not a state of innocence, but a state of knowingness that isn't all that different. It's that you sort of know what the ropes are, so you're not helpless, like innocent people feel they're not helpless, though perhaps they are. Then when you know a bit more you feel yourself driven by all the winds of fate; then if you go right round the world and in at the back way, then your acceptance of knowingness gives you perhaps some sort of freedom like that of innocence again. 

   JB - Now Judith begins with that story from the Apocrypha about Judith cutting off Holofernes' head. Is there some connection between that theme and the later story about the Garden of Eden and the necessity of somehow undercutting mind and cerebral things?  N - The idea of my book Judith was in a sense taken from the Apocrypha story... .... ... Judith becomes the saviour of her people through a ruthless act of using love, using her sexual attraction, to cut off the man's head, to save her town. And I think there is that sort of imagery here, yes; it's a sort of masculine way of thinking that you attack towns and you fight and you pillage, and the symbol of that is the masculine head, as it were. So Judith uses her feminine wiles to cut off this masculine "aggro" way of looking at things and save her town.  ...  So that's at the back of my idea of Judith, that she sort of learns to change the, as it were, masculine, aggressive go-getting side of herself into something more that listens and watches and discovers, like an artist discovers what he wants to paint, or a sculptor discovers what he feels is in the stone, which is not an "aggro" business. It's a business of going on a journey, where you listen and look and try this and try that, it's a very gentle and tentative kind of process.

   JB - I think the idea you've used is of becoming "transparent" to the way things are. N - One of the words that I use is becoming "transparent," yes, but I don't know whether that's all that helpful a word.... I think the idea of watching and listening.... I think these Holy Men that pop up - not so much Bhagwan Rajneesh out in India, I don't think he was particularly transparent, he was an actor, he wanted to make the whole business of being a guru a joke - but my friend who I was greatly influenced by, Father Raynes, who was Anglican monk who influenced me very much when I was in my late twenties - the word I would have used about him was "transparent". When one was talking with Father Raynes there was the impression that he was emptying himself of his own personality, of his own will, and he was listening and watching, which of course is the Christian business about prayer:  I mean, the point of Christian prayer is that you should listen: you utter your words and then you listen. Your words are really a hint that you are ready to listen. Of course the way an awful lot of people pray it's not like that at all, it's just ordering God about - 'God would you please do this or that' - it's like a sort of Nanny telling God what He ought to do. But of course that's just simply wrong. Real prayer is in silence: You say, "Here I am, hello, this is my situation, or these are my problems..." and you then listen. When I was in the presence of Father Raynes there was very much this feeling, that he was listening and becoming transparent to what would come through him.

   JB - Is there a connection between Greville [the male protagonist of Natalie, Natalia] plunging into life, shaking things up, and what Judith is doing in London, and is there something here about getting out of convention, seeing a wider life than what is provided by convention?  N - Judith is not unlike the hero of my earlier novel Natalie, Natalia, Greville, in that they both want to learn something about life by a process of finding out for themselves. They see that convention, in which they've been brought up... isn't a bad thing - one must have conventions, rules of the game, or life doesn't work at all, everything packs up into anarchy - you have to have convention - but at the same time, if you only have convention then convention grows moribund and dead and one gets trapped, and what was once a life-giving thing becomes a shell and a fossil and starts stopping any further growth. So what both Judith and Greville know is that it's not a case of either accepting convention or throwing the whole thing over and just going your own way - either of these things is a sort of death - as usual the liveliness is held by - what we were saying yesterday - "having one's cake and eating it", but this isn't quite the way to put it!  Trying to get both things, holding the knowingness of the necessity of convention and the necessity of - if one is to stay alive, if the human race is to stay alive - always learning something of ways in which convention might be modified, stepping outside convention, being able to see it and thereby it being modified, and so on. And more and more it seems that there is a call on human beings to learn to be responsible for themselves. Growing up, children have to learn to be responsible for themselves. The human race for centuries thought it was really rather helpless: there was fate, there was doom, there was God who was fixing everything, or the Devil was fixing everything, or just Fate, and that in a sense was necessary in a certain stage of evolution, but now it seems a sort of infantile state perhaps and humans have to learn to be responsible for themselves or they're in trouble, what with their technology, the Bomb, and so on.

   So that was the idea. Judith and Greville go outside convention, not just to be selfish and have an anarchic time on their own. They go outside because they feel the urgency that this what a human being should be doing, having one foot always in the knowledge of the way things work, which is the convention that has been worked out over the years, and then one toe or two toes outside, so you're testing the necessary ways in which things have to change if there is to be any liveliness. 

   JB - And the responsibility you mentioned is to create something? Is that where the Garden imagery comes in? You don't just find a garden: it's partly there, but you have to find some order in it, or some potential order. N - The way that I use the image of the Garden, that you go right round the world and in at the back way... yes, if you do this journey, as I say, with one foot recognizing what convention is - this is what human life has required to stay alive, - and yet with one foot out, and therefore you go on some journey, learning, you do have the experience that you are learning something, something that is actually there. There is some pattern that you are moving through; you actually aren't moving in chaos, you're moving in a sort of pattern. There's a pattern you're learning in your mind, and there's a pattern hand-in-hand with this that seems to be in the outside world. What you're learning in your mind is a reflection of the pattern that is in the outside world, otherwise there is no learning. Now this is difficult to put into words, all the words are paradoxical, what do they mean - but this is an experience that people have, it seems to me. And they know they have it, this correlation between what they're learning, some creative process of forming the patterns in their minds and the pattern that they are moving through, moving into, observing, finding out about, discovering, in the outside world. And this is a very potent experience. And the image of the Garden, that you go right round the world and in at the back door, is the image that there is this feeling that you are discovering an order in the world, but the way you're discovering this is... By this process there is being ordered in you a pattern in your mind. There is being ordered in you a Garden in your mind.  And these words are very difficult, they're poetic roundabout imagery, metaphor, and so on, but they're efforts not at building castles in the air but efforts at describing the sort of experience that people have and people write about. This is what poets have always written about, this sort of thing. 

   JB - In many of your writings you've heavily used horticultural metaphors - we've joked about this. Do you believe there's a Garden? Do you believe there's a God?  N - I think "God" is a word for the way things work. I think it's a word for the way that we can understand the way things work. I think this is such an extraordinary thing - I mean, there is pattern, things work in patterns, there is creativity. Our minds and beings can understand this, and we can feel that we are in harmony with the way things work, the inside and the outside, and I can't think of a better word for this fact of experience than "God".  I don't think it's of any use - as indeed the Bible keeps on saying - it's no use trying to pin God down to what he is: you can have the image of him as an old man in the sky, you can have the image of him as some universal force or something, you can have the image of him as - what was that phrase they used to use in the Bo's, "the ground of our being" or something. These are all words for this experience, this knowledge, that things work in this way, that there is a correlation between our understanding and the way things work; we are able to understand it and we are able to be in harmony with it, and in harmony with the creative process. Einstein had a phrase which was something like, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible". And this is an extraordinary fact. Einstein believed in what he was quite happy to call “God” - he said, God does not play dice. He was a hard-headed scientist who looked into the way things actually were, deeper at the time than anyone had done before. It was incomprehensible to him that there wasn't something going on, some structure of being, some relationship between comprehensibility and what was out there, that he was quite happy to call "God", and, God knows, I'm happy to call it "God". Of course the use of the word "God" is dangerous because everyone has their own little set, pet, image of God, but if they think you're referring to their pet image, rather than to one's own very obscure, tentative paradox, that's their problem and not one's own perhaps. 

   N - There was a time when I liked to think there was some network in between what one was doing inside oneself - one's spiritual activity, or whatever one would like to call it - and what went on in the outside world. And I think there was a time when I used to think that in a naive way. This was in my early time, when I was trying to be a committed Christian. But I still think it is right to feel something like that. I don't think there's any sense in trying to make any statement about what might objectively be happening. But I think the phrase I used to use, like "It is the job of a human being to look to the means, and then the ends look after themselves" or "The humans look to the means and God looks after the ends" - whatever one says - I think this is true, I think certainly this is a valid way... a rule of behaviour in one's own life.  ... You have to learn a style of means, a style of doing ... ...always keeping an open mind, and by so doing - with any luck - usually the ends do seem to look after themselves. Then one learns this; this actually happens. Well now, I think you stop there, you don't ask any further questions about how this works, what the tie up is between one's own, as it were, "keeping open to the means" and what happens in the outside word. The ends do more often than not finally - eventually - seem to look after themselves, after a good deal of roundabout, having to go down into the dark perhaps, sure. And then having noticed this, I think one doesn't say any more; one doesn't say, Oh, how does this happen? One doesn't know how it happens. And if someone says they think it is a load of old rubbish, you say, Okay, you think it is a load of old rubbish. It simply doesn't matter if anyone thinks it's a load of old rubbish; that's their problem, it's not your problem. If one’s life seems to make sense, to have pattern and meaning, if you don't think it's a load of old rubbish, then that's fine. ... 

   JB - Well toward the end of Judith you describe your characters as bits and pieces of light. Might they, as bits and pieces of light, have a means of observation, or knowingness, which enables them to sense connection, or to be connection?  N - I'm not sure whether the "bits and pieces of light" image really carries all that weight, you see, because light in fact is part of the scientific realm, because light travels at a certain speed, and in the old Newtonian physics - I suppose  the Einsteinian physics - there can be nothing faster than the speed of light, it's a sort of ultimate. You couldn't send a message faster than the speed of light. But this sort of network on which the knowingness seems to operate, operates instantaneously: it is not bound by the laws of light, actually. So I think the phrase - I think I thought this at the time, but I didn't alter it because it's not a very heavy image in the book - but in fact perhaps we aren't bits and pieces of light in the traditional sense, we're part of a network other than what scientists call light. But these words are absurd, you know. ...

   JB - Would you say that art, or an aesthetic sensibility in general, is essential, or necessary, for giving meaning to experience?  N - Yes, I think meaning is, for want of a better word, an aesthetic concept.. I mean, rationality seems so often to be a hidden tautology: 2+2=4 because you've said that two is such that... etc.... Or rationality is so often arguing a case, rhetoric, arguing your own case. But I think the aesthetic sense is a matter of listening and watching, and the impression of meaning comes to one at such moments as one is watching a famous painting, a piece of sculpture, one is reading a book. One says, "Ah yes, that has meaning." You sort of look at the roof of the Sistine Chapel and you say, "Meaning!" [gestures, laughs] You don't say it; you feel "Ah ha!"  And if a rational person comes along and says, "Would you kindly explain to me exactly what you mean by "meaning"?" you just have nothing to say. You just say, "When I looked at that thing I thought, Yes... oooh ahhh...!" 

   JB - What of the moments of illumination, when something in ordinary life, something quite ordinary, suddenly seems to be like a painting, or a story?   N - That is it. That's the moment when you see, you feel, very clearly, the existence of this network of meaning that you can't put into ordinary language. You can hold it somewhere in your mind. You can't put it into language; it just isn't there in ordinary language. But you know it, and people do know it, and they have the choice of either holding it in their hearts or minds, or killing it, because they wish to... If I can't put it into ordinary language, it doesn't exist... and then you can kill it, sure. And then you go rattling on, you have a busy life knocking down skittles, getting your own way, having an okay time. But you aren't onto much about meaning. 

   N - The idea that there is some connection between what's going on inside oneself and... what's going on in the outside world... is an experience that one has if one has the idea of it. [chuckles]... I think because it's always something outside the area of words, it's something quite difficult to come by. I think people have this experience. It's a very in-built feeling that if I do the right thing here, whatever the right thing is, then with any luck it will all come out right there. ... There is the experience, humans have the experience, of some aesthetic, sort of moral, network, which are not separated - I mean, they're slightly different, the moral and aesthetic, but they're certainly not antithetical....  ...

   JB - Can you relate that to the sense sometimes that what is happening in ordinary life is related to what you've seen in art or in stories?  N - I think there are moments in ordinary life when things seem to make sense, to have some pattern, on an extraordinary level, a level that one hadn't expected or... yes, hadn't easily been able to think about. These are moments of feeling Ah, yes! I see, right, that's it!  And this kind of feeling is the same feeling one gets in front of a real work of art: Yes, that's it!  I think there are these are moments in life; these are moments [and] you can't say anything more about them. Things seem to have meaning in the way in which a work of art seems to have meaning. The thing about works of art is that if one lays oneself open to works of art then they do have this effect; there is such a thing as a work of art, and there is such a thing as seeing the similar kind of patterning in one's life, in one's story.  But if you ask, what is this quality of a work of art, what is this patterning, it is very hard to put into words, words are not suited for it. Because it's a sort of embracing of the whole, it's a vision of the way everything fits in, oneself as part of the larger process, oneself as part of human - cosmic - insight, and so on. You can't put it into knock-down words.

   JB - Is there a kind of environment or pattern of interaction or social circumstance in which beautiful things, happy events, are more likely to occur? Does that exist now?  N - I don't think the areas in which this kind of attitude, this kind of state of mind, this tie up between the inside and the outside happens, is anything to do with social worlds or forms of society. Of course people have very often thought it was, they've tried to make perfect communes, perfect societies in which there'd be a natural aesthetic moral vision, a way of behaviour. I don't think that's ever worked, it hasn't ever worked as far as one knows. Historically it's never worked. It hasn't worked with the church: the church was bickering almost as soon as Christ had gone, all the disciples were bickering the whole time. I don't think it is a matter of social structure; if it was it would be very nice, but it just isn't. So I think it's something one learns in oneself, in one's own heart and mind, and then one recognizes it in other people. But the thing about all my characters in this book [Judith] - there are six characters, two old, two middle-aged, and two young - they all recognize each other, they're fond of each other, they recognize each other, they come and go, they meet, they form patterns, they form interlocking patterns, in one another's lives, but, God knows, one thing they specifically never try to do is form any sort of group - "Now we will all meet on Thursday evenings and talk about this" or "We will all go and live on a farm in the Welsh mountains" - that would kill it dead!  In fact they're quite scared when they meet, they do get quite awestruck by the patterning they see in the interaction of their lives and they really want to just sort of recognize and then go away. There's this image I use of when they meet, all they really just want to say: they want to wave and say "Cooee!" [gestures] - Cooee! - then recognizing that they're all on this patterning, this network. But what they don't want to say is, "Now let's form a committee about it, or have a little group!" God help, if they did; He wouldn't.

   JB - Well, He could help them... through the bird imagery, the spirit?  N - Well the image for this network in Christian terminology, theology, is the Holy Spirit, which will - what are the words of the New Testament? - which will be that inside you that will lead you into all truth. And of course the Holy Spirit is the great unspoken-of process - being - in Christian theology. And I used to be really outraged about this: Why are all these books about God the Father but not God the Spirit? But of course this is quite realistic, no one talks about Him because one can't talk about Him. He is the symbol about that which one cannot talk. Alright, there is the image of the bird, there's the image of the tongue of fire, there are these metaphors, these images, but of course the extraordinary thing about the Holy Spirit is that He's been co-equal in Christian theology with God the Father who makes the rules and God the Son who does the sacrifice, who loves - been co-equal in Christian dogma for all these two thousand years. But everyone recognizes that they can't talk about Him. And quite right. But one can know Him, with any luck!