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CHAPTER 1
Father
The source of the Douro River is in the lakes of the Sierra Negra a little east of Soria in the northern centre of Spain and this dusty brown river winds its way past Vallodolid through the port wine vineyards of Portugal and ends by cutting the town of Oporto into two distinct parts — Porto to its north and Vila Nova de Gaia to its south, before pouring past a long sandbar and tumbling into the Atlantic Ocean. Three brothers lived north of the river but worked together on its southern bank. Those three brothers, who were English, between them fathered eight sons and four daughters. Seven of those eight sons live and work in Portugal in business. An eighth son lives in Australia and works as a psychoanalyst. This book is an inquiry into why that eighth son, the author, journeyed down a different path.
These three brothers, of whom my father was one, were the sons of Andrew James Symington, a Scotsman who was brought up in Paisley and who migrated to Oporto in 1880; there he married Beatrice Atkinson whose father was English and mother Portuguese. Andrew and Beatrice produced six children, five boys and a girl. So all those children which included my father were three quarters British and one quarter Portuguese. Two of the boys, the eldest and the youngest, died and the daughter married a soldier in the army and lived her adult life in England. My grandfather started as a humble clerical worker in a firm owned by a fellow Scotsman. He later moved into a port wine firm, was made a partner and when the owner, a bachelor, died he left the business to my grandfather. The firm flourished and his children were born into a prosperous inheritance.
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I believe what led me along this unusual pathway was a mixture of two conflicting elements: a capacity for leadership in the field of psychological and philosophical understanding and an angry resentment towards an undigested authority that proclaimed and commanded how life on this earth should be lived. The understanding of this problem and its attempted resolution has been my life's emotional task. Someone who has in himself an inner aptitude may need to separate himself from his origins in order to develop it. To possess in one's heart a talent that is undeveloped can lead to extreme frustration. Arthur Bryant, the historian, clearly understood this when he said:
Man is by nature, a producer or creator as well as a consumer, and unless the instinct to create and produce implanted in him by nature is satisfied, he will to a greater or lesser degree, be an unsatisfactory and discontented being.
So I galloped away down a track where I was able to develop and exercise my potential. When I listened to my first lecture in philosophy I breathed a happy sigh of relief. At last I had come home and found my true love. So I could have become a philosopher and worked away happily in a university and seen out my days as a familiar figure on a campus: that was where my intellect would have taken me but my emotions could not let this happen; they had a different destiny for me. This is where turmoil lay and has found its lair within my soul and given me torment throughout life.
I have been torn between passionate love and violent hatred; the management of these emotions has been more than I could handle for long stretches of my life but I had a potent yearning to control these tidal waves within me. I am a wild creature required to live within civilised society and smile and be polite. I learned both of these arts from my father and to a lesser extent from my mother. That wildness, those extremes of emotion came from my mother. My father was kind and polite to an almost absurd degree. He had an old-fashioned courtesy; he was a gentleman to his fingertips. Outsiders thought he was gentle but, although he could be, there was violence in him also. You only had to see him praying in church to see that. Passionate love of God is not possible without violent hatred of the devil. These storms were hidden away within my father; in my mother they were more apparent, and, for some reason, I became the repository of their concentrated essence. The great puzzle for outsiders, even intimate outsiders, has been that this essence of my being has been hidden. I have been constrained to don the mask of civilised society and the mask has been a very good one — so good that the disguise has been thought to be the genuine article. However, there have been individuals all my life who have seen through the mask and met my concentrated essence and with these I have forged deep friendships. Life would not have been bearable without these friendships. Friendship and wisdom are the most precious fruits of civilisation.
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So, you will need to know what my father was like. He was an unsophisticated man. He loved nature and, what to many would seem a contradiction, he loved shooting. His greatest pleasure was to go shooting snipe on the marshes of northern Portugal. This was rough shooting — walking the birds up in the large Aveiro marshes to the south of Oporto. He would wear fisherman's waders, ploughing through watery rushes for mile after mile and would jump even quite wide canals to reach a bird that had fallen to his gun on the wrong side of a ditch. A boat punted by a Portuguese boatman would accompany him so that he could cross the wide canals from one part of the marsh to another. He would start from home early in the morning and arrive at the marsh as daylight was breaking. He would keep going all day and only finish as light was failing. Then, back at the car, he would pour himself a cup of tea from a thermos and put into it a measure of whisky which he believed relieved tiredness and eased the long drive home. The day was interrupted by two important events: a boucha at eleven o'clock and a full-scale lunch in the middle of the day. And the lunch really was a lunch. When I was with him we would have soup, bolinhos de bacalhau, meat croquettes, and cheese and biscuits, and we would wash it down with strong red wine of which we would drink a bottle each and finish by demolishing a bottle of port between us. My father believed that he always shot better after this lunch. The art of shooting with a shotgun is to be spontaneous, and a little oiling with alcohol assisted the enterprise. I loved those shooting expeditions with him more than anything else. I started going with him when I was about eight and I would carry with me an air gun with which I would try to pot the odd lark or sparrow. When I was fifteen my father gave me a twenty-eight bore shotgun and I can still remember shooting my first snipe with it. I was walking up beside a ditch, my father on one side and Joaquim Manuel Calem on the other, and a snipe got up between me and our Portuguese friend. I raised the gun to my left shoulder, fired and the bird dived into the ground. Joaquim Manuel was delighted and so was my father. It was my initiation into adulthood. Now, surely I was a man.
On the long drive home every shot was discussed but especially the ones we had missed. When he shot a bird my father hardly mentioned it but it was the ones that he missed that were discussed from every angle. My father was a pessimist, even something of a defeatist. When the port trade was doing badly in the early 1950s he said the situation was hopeless. People were no longer interested in drinking port. There was nothing to be done about it. He was not motivated by the sense of challenge that this might present, how one might market port differently or adapt it to people's new eating habits. Port went with servants and large dinners and that era was over now. When criticised for this defeatist attitude he retreated into himself like a wounded animal. He was criticised particularly by my mother. I know now that he was very depressed and my guess is that he had been so all his life. His mother died when he was sixteen and, I believe, this was a tragedy for him from which he never recovered. My mother was also depressed. I don't know whether this depression of hers went back to her childhood. I have also been depressed all my life. It has always been an effort to summon the energy to fulfil the aspirations of my imagination. I also find it much easier to spend time in verbal conversation or in writing than doing practical tasks. Later in life, as a psychologist, when I did the IQ Test I learned that this was the classic sign of depression.
Concentrating on failure rather than success I later realised was not peculiar to my father. In spiritual devotion it was associated with "peccato-centrism". In psychiatric lingo the same quality is known as "negativism" which is one of the defining features of mental illness. When I first read this I thought it was so common that I could not reconcile it with the idea that someone imbued with it could be mentally ill. I later came to think that mental disease is extremely common and that people who are officially ill mentally are only caricatures of the normal run of ill health. Would it be fair to say that Dad was mentally ill? He was. I think he was quite severely ill. One sign of it was in his unhappy marriage.
In later life I read the Journal of a Soul which was the private record of the examination of conscience of that most benign of popes, Pope John XXIII. The early period of his life as a seminarian and then a young priest is full of attention to his sins, his faults, his failings, but in maturity he changed and wrote this:
Above all, I am grateful to the Lord for the temperament he has given me, which preserves me from anxieties and tiresome perplexities. I feel I am under obedience in all things and I have noticed that this disposition, in great things and in small, gives me, unworthy though I am, a strength of daring simplicity, so wholly evangelical in its nature that it demands and obtains universal respect and edifies many.
Surely this is a sign that he had soared out of illness into the fullness of health.
My father went to church not only on Sundays but every day and he suffered from religious scruples to an agonizing degree. He could not take criticism, had very fixed attitudes, and his religion was coloured by obsessional ideas. He believed in many superstitious devotions. For instance he believed that if he went to Mass on the first Friday of every month for nine consecutive months he would have a happy death. It was not a robust piety that sustained him through painful times. When pain and torture came his way he backed away to his inner hiding place. He was not a happy man; he and my mother were not happy together. He became increasingly deaf as he grew older, developed Alzheimer's, and finally died in a home in England. He did not have a happy death.
He was the most unworldly man I have ever known. The world of sexual diversity, the Wolfenden Report, the welfare state, prison reform, drug abuse, birth control, or social science were unknown to him. Nature was his ruling passion. He loved the countryside and had a particular love of bichos. He had one of the best butterfly collections in Portugal. He knew all the butterflies and moths that exist in Portugal. I would go with him in search of specimens that were missing in his collection. Once a butterfly or moth was caught in the net it was put into a killing-bottle. Back at home it would be "set" on a setting-board and I learned how to set butterflies and moths at the age of six. I loved going on butterfly expeditions with him — such as for white and yellow orange tips in springtime along the Tabuaço valley in the Douro. Loving nature is compatible with killing and collecting. A few specimens of each butterfly or moth were all we wanted. We reached a point when it was rare to choose to catch a butterfly or moth because we had examples of all of them in our collection.
I loved him dearly and some of my happiest memories are of being with him on the marshes of northern Portugal shooting snipe in the winter or catching butterflies in the spring and summertime and then setting them and carefully putting them into cabinets and tending them with care and devotion. His care and patience and his joy in teaching me the art of collecting butterflies gave me a fond love of him which still lives inside me. He was so kind, so courteous, so loving. It was a tragedy that inwardly he was so tortured and unhappy.
I remember once I was walking with him beside the Boavista fields near our home and he said to me that I would find happiness if I tried to put others first and not myself. It was obvious that this is what he always tried to do. He was loved dearly by his large community of friends in Oporto. He was loved by both the English and the Portuguese. We had many Portuguese cousins and they all loved "Roninho" and always spoke of him with great affection. Because his mother was half Portuguese we were, through her, all Catholics and we had numerous Portuguese cousins. We were not intimate with them but at funerals and weddings we would enjoy a warm communion with them.
He told me several times a story which has recently been repeated by Paulo Coelho in the preface to The Alchemist:
The Virgin Mary, with the Infant Jesus in her arms, decided to come down to Earth and visit a monastery. Filled with pride the priests queued up and each one came before the Virgin to offer her his homage. One recited beautiful poems, another showed her his illuminated script for a Bible, and yet another one recited the names of all the saints. And so it went on with one monk after another giving his homage to the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus.
At the very end of the queue was a priest, the most humble member of the community, who had never learned the wise sayings of the time. His parents were simple people who worked in an old circus and all that they had taught him was to throw balls in the air and juggle with them.
When it was his turn to offer homage, the other priests wanted to end the devotions, because the old juggler did not have anything important to say and might sully the image of the monastery. Nevertheless, at the bottom of his heart, he felt a powerful urge to give something of himself to Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
Ashamed and feeling the disapproving eyes of his brethren he took some oranges from his pocket and began to throw them up in the air and juggled with them, which was the only thing he knew how to do.
It was only at that moment that the Infant Jesus smiled and began to beat the palms of his hands on the shoulders of Our Lady. And it was to this priest that the Virgin stretched out her hands and let him hold the Child for a little while.
I remember how thrilled my father was when he saw this scene depicted in a stone sculpture on the outside of either Reims or Rouen Cathedral. This story obviously meant a great deal to him and I think he must have thought of himself in this way, deep down inside himself. He was a simple man without any pretension. He had no cultured treasures to offer God. He just had his own unsophisticated abilities and it was these that he offered to God. It is very sad that my mother did not appreciate his unpretentious gift, and I regret greatly that I did not recognise it more adequately myself but rather took sides with my mother against him, not all the time but some of the time. I think later when I surged into the Church I took his side against her and then later still swung back to her side against him, and so I swung from one side to the other rather than appreciate the gift I had received from each one.
How does someone like my father deal with his simple innocence? One path, a rare one, is a deep acceptance out of which a new originality bursts forth, but this is neither the road that my father took nor that of the majority. He took the more common pathway: he reached out in obedient surrender to a belief system to camouflage this simplicity. That he liked the story so much indicates a knowledge of his own unpretentious simplicity, but I think then a psychological process kicked in whereby he adopted a system of thinking and belief to hide the simplicity of which he was ashamed. In his case he inserted himself into a system of thinking which, in one way, mirrored his inner simplicity, but in another it left him prey to the thinking of others and, as Steve Jobs said in his amazing talk at Stanford University in 2005, the attachment to the thinking of others results in a despotic dogmatism. What I am trying to get at here is that instead of the simplicity generating thoughts that are deep and true there gets installed a system that is in no way simple; a system that is full of superstitious practices that are far from the innocence of the simple monk of the tale retold by Paulo Coelho. An example of someone who had that strange innocent simplicity within the psychoanalytic world was Frances Tustin; with great courage, she built an understanding from it that has inspired psychotherapists and psychoanalysts ever since. Simplicity, not complexity, has been the great innovator in human affairs.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Different Path"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Neville Symington.
Excerpted by permission of Aeon Books Ltd.
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