Life As Performance Art 112

I have mentioned from time to time on these pages, Gentle Reader, the great debt I owe to the British writer, Doris Lessing. I have read many of her books, although I never could really warm to her attempts at science fiction. Each to their own, I suppose. But then, one of her novels, one little or almost never mentioned by the chattering classes (to them, it would seem that Ms. Lessing wrote only one book, the Golden Notebook), a huge sprawling six hundred plus pager, the concluding volume of her five book series "Children of Violence" became for me a constant source of study and contemplation. I must have read this book up to thirty times, already, though I haven't really touched it in almost ten years. It appears to have outlived, for now anyway, its usefulness to me, but I always reserve on my bookshelf a copy, in a place of honour. Even if I never pick it up and read it again, I am holding onto this novel as a way of honouring Doris Lessing's legacy to me. The novel is essentially an exploration of her most famous protagonist, Martha Hesse, who in many ways is Doris Lessing fictionalized, but I also accept her argument that this is not autobiography veiled as literary fiction. It is also a keen critique of the ever changing and morphing political, arts and social culture of the city of London between the end of the Second World War and the close of the Swinging Sixties. There are so many threads in this exploration, that this novel, if not only due to its unwieldy size, merits being read and studied over and over again. This is also a highly ethical novel, not in a moral sense, so much as a series of penetrating questions of what does being human really mean? Martha, her protagonist explores this question throughout the novel, but ends up, in the late sixties, a woman edging on fifty, performing on herself a dangerous and drastic psychological experiment. She has decided to spend several weeks alone in a borrowed room in a house in London, basically fasting and depriving herself of sleep and diversion, until she simulates for herself a state of pure psychosis. She is confronted by, and for a while taken over, by a dark force that she calls the "Self-Hater." This is where she really has to confront her shadow, her dark hidden self. Martha has dedicated much of her adult life to working for and promoting progressive and humanistic causes, under the belief that she is a good person heroically commbatting and resisting the forces of fascism and corporate greed. During her self-induced psychosis, all her lovely liberalism, as she calls it, is dropped on its head. She has to confront her own capacity for hate, for evil, for destruction. Then she sees that in the same breath she can express outrage over the Nazi holocaust against the Jews, then suddenly defend and praise Hitler. This is for her a disturbing, troubling revelation, but nevertheless she opts to reckon with this toxic shadow-side to her nature. That she could be both hero and villain, creator and destroyer, the same darkness and light that is at the essence of our humanity. In a conversation I had yesterday in a coffee shop with a couple of friendly strangers, it was posited that most people can't accept that duality, that their brains don't have the capacity to accept that they can be both good and evil. Well, those who say Israelis occupying Palestine and oppressing the Palestinian people need also to say six million Jews murdered in the Shoah, just as those who can say nothing but Jewish homeland need also to say oppression of Palestinians. Everyone who has been hated can just as easily become a hater. I am not a good person. I am not a bad person. That makes me a person. You are not a bad person, you are not a good person. That makes you a person. We do not give free rein to our shadow, rather, by knowing it,we can train it, tame it, hold it in check, channel it as constructively as we can. We can never eliminate it. Historically oppressed people can very easily become oppressors. We are all culpable.