David Beresford
ANOTHER COUNTRY
The worst moment of my life came when I was about 15 years old and at boarding school. Two prefects came through to my dormitory and said the housemaster wanted to see me. I walked into his study to be told my brother was dead.
The next clear memory I have is of reading a comic book in the housemaster’s home across the road and of his wife peeking around the door and whispering to someone behind her: “I think he’s OK, he’s reading.” I remember being vaguely troubled by that comic book; feeling that it was somehow inappropriate to be reading one and hugely enjoying it on such an occasion. But, peering back across the decades at the boy that was me, I can understand the compulsion in the need to escape reality.
When Hansie Cronje appeared before the commission of inquiry into the match-fixing scandal last week Judge Edwin Sharky King quoted St John’s Gospel to the disgraced cricket captain: “The truth will make you free.” The advice, which was presumably of a psychological nature – rather than a biblical justification for the tawdry indemnity deal offered by the prosecuting authorities – strikes me as debatable.
As I have observed before, the line of argument is undermined by the fact that it is carved in stone above the lobby at CIA headquarters in Virginia, which prompts immediate suspicion of duplicity. As any intelligent intelligence agent could testify, if they were stupid enough to do so, too much truth can just as easily blow the circuits as set one free, not to mention their impact on personal expense claims.
Cronje started testifying last Friday, his appearance having been brought forward from this week, seemingly on psychiatric advice that he could commit suicide if he had to wait any longer. Whether the concern was well-founded one has no way of knowing, but suicide must be a temptation for anyone whose public and personal humiliation has been as great and sustained as that suffered by Hansie Cronje.
Just as extreme physical pain will trip a safety fuse in the brain, allowing an escape into unconsciousness, so too the mind looks for ways to flee mental pain. Suicide is the ultimate escape from reality and Cronje’s need for escape was self-evident long before his betrayal became public.
What better escape was there for a sporting legend confronted by the private demons of his own duplicity than the tent of a steroid-inflated evangelist peddling notions of Satan to celebrity sinners with an “aw shucks, folks” grin for the television cameras.
But betrayal of oneself and of the great sporting public is not the only vicissitude of the mind which prompts an impulse to escape. “Life is hard and then you die,” goes the gospel of Woody Allen, and in the fearful anticipation of those twin certainties is born the longing to control the uncontrollable – an impulse in which much can be discovered by way of human behaviour.
What is the attraction of wealth if not the potential it offers for the construction of an alternative reality in which the plumber will be too overcome by admiration for one’s golden taps to sneer at one’s ignorance about the nature and the whereabouts of the stop-cock?
For those who do not have access to the pretensions of money, escape tends to be into virtual realities created by others – notably those of popular culture in which the good guys not only always win, but are never known to suffer haemorrhoids. But how much more powerful is a custom-made, controllable reality in which the dreams are summonsable and the author is oneself.
The promise of such an escape route was there in the endlessly switchable, multiple channels of satellite and cable TV. The realisation of it is seemingly to be found in the addictive popularity of e-mail and the other forms of Internet chatter in which pseudo-identities offer endless means to the reinvention of personal reality.
In the search for the Unified Theory of Everything I have recently developed a hypothesis that existence is not, as I had previously thought, a practical joke dreamed up by a Cosmic Jester, but more of a scientific experiment, or a space mission in which we are individual probes sent out to test a hostile environment – in much the same way as we sent the Viking probes (and more recently, the Mars Polar Lander to test conditions on that planet).
If I am right then we can expect some cosmic disturbances by way of tantrums as it dawns on the Great-Lab-Assistant-in- the-Sky that there is something phony about the signals He/She/It has been monitoring. His/and so on’s irritation is likely to be commensurate to that which will be felt at Nasa if they finally re- establish radio contact with Mars Polar Lander only to hear it croon in a comforting voice to Viking 1 and Viking 2: “Once upon a time …”
Once upon a time … Lights were out in the dormitory when I got back, so the comic book was no more help. In its place, in that long boarding school night, I created an alternative reality that my brother had gone to save the world on a mission so secret that nobody was allowed to know that he was still alive. So they pretended that he had died.
One day, I told myself, I would see him across a street. I could never figure out if I should say hello to him when I saw him or if that would put his life in danger. So I decided that I would just smile and he would smile back and we would walk on by. As if it was a conspiracy between us, a conspiracy not to die.