What Sandi Sees

23 January 2007

Almost sixteen years ago now I attended a five week course at Schumacher College led by Rupert Sheldrake. My hope and expectation of the course was that it would be an opportunity to discuss how Rupert’s ideas might help change the world. Surely, I felt, knowing how everything, including human thought and behaviour, is subject to reinforcement due to repetition and habit: ‘morphic resonance’, might help people to resist these pressures and bring about change. It wasn’t like that. Mornings were spent gathered at Rupert’s feet, as it were, listening to him go over his ideas. The other students were content with this since most of them had not read his books, or had not understood them. The rest of the time was taken up with activities: meditation, book binding, etching, dowsing, housekeeping jobs, and so on. Plus of course the students talked to each other, and relationships became quite intense, and I found a sympathetic ear for my frustrated hopes in a woman called Sandi. I was grateful for her seeing into my mind, and I wrote her this poem. To be clear, the poem is about what I was feeling and thinking – and seeing, and still do.

What Sandi Sees

Oh for shades to stop the seeing

Hide the truth that burns, the incoming hurt that sears

Pleading, aching, crying need that finds no rocking breast

With open heart – there to notice, ask, listen

And get, get, get – Tell me – Yes. Tell me – Ah.

So many starving babies, crying needs denied

While all life’s journey’s spent in pleading –

Hear me, know me – get, get, get – for once, dear God!

See that there’s someone here paralysed with yearning.

Hush – soft – be a vessel made just to receive

This particular truth I am living my life to say.

 

Take off the shades, strip the cataracts that blind

let in the Medusa rays that sting soft hearts to stone

Rays of piteous hopelessness that could not bear

At last to be heard – scarred tough with the only certainty:

Never, never, never can, will, should anyone listen now.

Now seeing, what do you see? Ridiculous babes

Drumming heels of frustration, bawling at blank walls, closed doors

Building strong the kicking sinews, the lashing tongue

To fight the silly fight, endlessly, generation by generation

Now knowing how to stop – to listen – to be heard.

For Sandi, with my love and gratitude, Chris, 1st May 1991

In the intervening years I have not found anyone with quite that ability to listen, and see into another’s mind, which Sandi had. She had her own problems, only sometimes, and then insecurely, set aside to make room for listening to another. We did not stay in touch. I have not found anyone since with that degree of receptivity. Maybe it was unreal then, a product of my hopes and needs.

Recently I’ve been dipping into writings on the Enlightenment, and it seems that philosophers throughout those questioning centuries were encountering the same dilemma: how to make contact mind to mind, and heal the existential loneliness we all feel – if we remove, or were never supplied with, the comforting assumptions that reassure us that somehow all is well. They did so much wrestling with big ideas and ultimate truths: what is real? is it what we find in the mind, or is that mere subjectivity? is deductive logic true, or is empiricism and inductive logic the way to truth? what is fundamental, is it extension and momentum? but if there have to be forces on things to explain what we observe, what are they? if they act at a distance, what is really going on? are there causes and purposes out there in the world, or are they all in the mind? surely all knowledge comes from the senses?, but aren’t all our sensations merely expressions of our own modes of being?, how do we see? or hear? is proof of reality available through touch? That last point by Condillac is deeply moving. It can seem that the existential loneliness of the mind can be healed and comforted through touch, particularly the intimacy of mother love, later in life through sex, but the closest intimacy, in my view, would be mind to mind, and that seems to be hardest of all to find.

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