1078 Perception and Pain

Like Sophie Calle I have been fascinated how the same object, the same experience, can appear from the different perspectives of space, time and people. I studied perception both when taking Psychology as part of a Public and Social Administration Diploma at Oxford and then while studying to become a child care officer. I still have a yellowing copy of the Pelican paperback edition of Professor Vernon's Psychology of Perception. I remain fascinated by the interaction between what we believe we see, what the brain tells us we are looking at and experiencing, and how our memory recreates that experience for us, and how it is possible to write about the same experience from different viewpoints.

Even when we have some memento, a photograph, a film, a sound, do we remember the objective reality, our response to it, our feelings, the colours, the smells, how things felt when we touched them, and how does our experience correspond to others who were there at the time or who come to the object, or reported experience, some time later. My interest has increased following the gradual grip of the illness of severe memory loss on my mother, with the consequential slipping in and out of time and place periods without any evident relationship to the present stimuli.
Recently I was asked for my memories of my first school. I have one photograph of myself with six other boys in white and three girls in their brides dresses after we had made our first communion and returned to school for our special breakfast in the school hall. I never went back inside the building, although it continued for another decade or so before being rebuilt as part of a then horrendous housing development on the former Croydon airport for inner London overspill, and heralded the end of the home town as peaceful surrey suburb for those who could afford to live there. I did go on special mission, but the building was closed for the summer. After in had become a children's day nursery. I took a couple of photos and decided not to return, remembering the fear.

Ever since, I have been unsure about the inside of the main building which was more a hall with an entrance, classrooms to one side and possibly at the back. The inside of the hall is a memory, but not if there was a stage at one end. I remember the corridor, the side class rooms, and the semi detached house which the school acquired during my period there from 1944 to 1951, a longer time that usual because I was kept down having to repeat a year at the age of ten, losing all my former class mates and having to get used to new ones. The decision was humiliating and proved a double disaster because I still failed the eleven plus.

I have memories, some already written about in 101 in Black and White, the printed but unpublished work which is to be exhibited as a contemporary art work, one day, in black and white boxes grouped according to the day month and year of birth, and others where I hesitate, do I really want to parade the details of the fear?

It was long time before I understood some of the origins of the fear. There was the normal healthy fear from not wanting to be blown to bits and dying in agony, from some German bomb, dropped by someone ordered to do so, or with enthusiasm because the pilot and crew identified with the concept of the supremacy of one race upon others. One of my many contradictions is that I continue to believe that only through non violent action can violence be defeated, but I also believe it is the responsibility of the state to protect its citizens from the threat of all those prepared to kill indiscriminately and part of me does not care how the state decides to do that.

Some of the fear was psychologically transferred because my very existence had to be a secret. What if i was asked who my mother was? Worse still who was my father? When I first went to school I had no idea what part a father played in the creation of ones being. It was only an awareness that other children lived with a mother and a father. When you have a weird childhood upbringing you tend to make assumptions about everyone else being normal.

Then there was fear of hell and the devil created, primarily by the devout Catholic head of school. Once I had what can only be described as a waking dream, when I was in bed in daytime during one of my many childhood illnesses. I still retain the feeling and something of the image which has been captured by others in their description of the devil, in their writing and on film, but then I thought the experience was unique.

Because my childhood was weird it did not mean that I was unhappy, or that I dreaded going to school. I was just afraid.

It seems to me that we do ourselves and our children wrong by pretending that we are not afraid of much of what happens to us in life. What we should do is on focussing on the ability to be afraid and to cope, and do what we know to be right regardless of consequence. And his includes facing the reality of death.

Most of my life I lived experience intensely, understanding that life as it was known to me could end at any second. It was not that I was afraid of death although I did not and do not want life to end.
I am not sure how I will cope with prolonged physical pain. I managed to stifle tears when I was given the strap at school by a French Teacher who lost it and lashed out on a dozen of us, and who disappeared immediately afterwards. Today we would have sued for what was unjustified criminal assault. Then I was more afraid of what the aunties would say, so I said nothing.

When I entered the school boxing competition I was hit hard in the face several times, as in those days head helmets were not worn, and was unhappy about the decision to call the fight off as I was able to prove to myself I could take a beating, and was subsequently upset when the aunties refused to let me join the boxing club. I was once thrown repeatedly in the air and fell down on others and the roadway but do not remember feeling pain as such.

I have also known emotional pain, I say emotional rather than mental because it is a feeling condition, but unlike that of a physical experience, which I have known through the usual knocks and falls.

It is impossible to feel the pain of others but one can experience an agony of mind at the emotional horror which others experience. The agony arises because of helplessness at having failed to prevent, even more so when the event is unrelated to you, and you cannot provide direct comfort and support. You also know something of what is to be endured.

In my work it is easy to recreate the good and happy times, but recreating and reporting ones stupidity and humiliation is a challenge I am just beginning to face.