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MADNESS AND MORALS
First Published in Counterculture (1970) edited by Joe Berke [abridged version]
by Morton Schatzman
Kingsley Hall is the name of a building in the east end of London. It was built about sixty years ago. It is three floors in height. About thirteen people can live their comfortably, each with there own room. A large ground floor hall, a ‘games room’, a dining room, a meeting room, two kitchens, and three other rooms, used by the occupants now as a ‘meditation room’, ‘chapel’ and a darkroom for photography, comprise the ‘common rooms’. The roof is open and has a garden.
The Philadelphia Association LTD. leased the building from the Kingsley Hall board of Trustees in June 1965. The ‘community’ which I describe here began then and has included over one hundred individuals. The ‘P.A.’ also has created two other smaller communities similar in aim to ‘Kingsley Hall’. The people in each household make the rules which govern their life together. The three households comprise a major social experiment.
The ‘community’ has been a link in a chain of ‘counterculture’ centres. Experimentaldrama groups, avant-garde poets, artists, musicians, dancers and photographers, social scientists of the New Left, classes from the Anti-University of London, and leaders of the ‘commune’ movement have met at Kingsley Hall with the residents in the last three and a half years. The Free School of London met their for the first time. The founder members of the ‘Kingsley Hall’ hope to fulfil in the ‘community’ their seed-idea that lost souls may be cured by going mad among people who see their madness as a chance for them to die and be reborn.
To discover the intelligibility of a social situation one must undergo an experience which is constitutive and regulative of it and which is constituted and regulated by the experiences of each of the others in the situation. Information about the experience of living at Kingsley Hall is revealed only to observers living within the building. I asked people at Kingsley Hall when I lived there to discuss with me their experiences there. Here is what three people said to me.
1. My first experience at Kingsley Hall was that I was taking a role very different from any other role I’d taken : instead of being one always looking at other people … um … like father-figures … I think I was mainly in the position where I was told what to do and somehow expected this … looking for some sort of guidance, I suppose. And then initially when I came here I seemed to be the one who was arranging things and making decisions arranging things and taking quite an active part…
�Text on newspapers by David Bell; a resident of KH...with history of being diagnosed as psychotic, with hospitalisations...a highly intelligent, sensitive and decent man who often sounded like an ancient bard and often spoke as though spokesperson or vehicle for a host of characters (nine monads)“
I think one of the best things here is that one doesn’t have to be right … Being here, anything goes sort of. I think of a word an ‘acceptance’ of people as they are which I’ve never found anywhere else… Here one can make a kind of contact - a kind of understanding it’s easy to make some sort of contact without words, whereas outside one is limited to making certain sorts of sentences. There is something very unique about it. You’re not bogged down by conventionalities of having to be polite or make statements which are regarded as conventional forms of politeness, things like: ‘Come and sit by the fire’ and ‘Have you had a good day?’ and the other person is expected to go through what sort of a day he’s had. Here, people don’t do that. One feels under no obligation to do that. I think it’s more honest. People aren’t afraid if they don’t particularly like the person they’re not afraid not to be friendly.
2. The main thing about my family and mental hospitals as opposed to Kingsley Hall is that here a number of divergent people come together to meet and to try to live out a life with one another where they can live out their differences have rows, disagree intently, decide to do things in ways that will offend others and still for them to be tolerated, and for people doing this gradually to become aware of other people and their inter-effects upon one another. I’m convinced this doesn’t happen in a mental hospital: I know it doesn’t.
3. One becomes here increasingly sensitive to the importance to people who maintain those very deluded mystiques of where it’s at who keep cheating themselves. When I’d be at home it would seem quite important that the table would be set in a certain way and that one ate one’s sweet with a fork and how in all these little things the justification is claimed to be just solely: that this form of behaviour is right because it exists… I was always taught that work was a ‘good thing’ because it was, just because it was work and ‘everybody worked, didn’t they?’ I feel that it is of course necessary to do work of some kind in order to keep myself alive. However, I don’t believe any more in the very complicated mystique surrounding the necessity for work I mean pointless and unfulfilling work which has nothing to do with this fundamental physical necessity.
I’ve discovered this here because here I find that many people question things with a greater honesty. People with obvious honesty question many things that one has been taking to be unconditionally true and valid. I feel that this very situation which makes retreat form social reality well, external reality possible; in fact eventually, paradoxically, makes facing reality in general almost unavoidable.
The people who live near Kingsley Hall never let those who live inside the building forget that the inside is inside an outside that has a different view of what is True and what is Real, where the source of Light is, and who is in Exile and who is in the Kingdom. One Friday night four men whom none of the residents knew, who had been drinking in a nearby pub, broke into the building at midnight and shouted that we were ‘loonies’, ‘drug-addicts’, ‘layabouts’, and ‘perverts’ who were ‘stinking’ and were ‘desecrating’ a community shrine by our ‘foul’ behaviour. A lady in a nearby shop called us ‘a bunch of nutters and homosexuals’. The neighbourhood children carried on the eighteenth-century French custom of week-end visits to the lunatic asylum to view the inmates: they frequently entered the building on the week-end afternoons by self-invitation, ‘just to look around’ and giggle. Boys broke the windows facing the street with stones so many times that one winter we decided to freeze rather than spend money to repair them again. Children repeatedly broke empty milk-bottles left near the front door, smashed the front door with an axe, unscrewed the doorbell, and once put dogs’ faeces in the ground-floor hall.
The issue between the people who live in the building and those who do not is a disagreement about morals. All people decide which thoughts, feelings, acts, persons and groups of persons to call ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’, ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘real’ or ‘unreal’, ‘sane’ or ‘insane’, and so on. Western society interrogates people to learn if they assign to particular thoughts, feelings, acts, persons and groups of persons the labels which they ‘should’. Those who live at Kingsley Hall often do not and know it. If people do not, do they have a right to live within Western society, outside a mental hospital? Those who live at Kingsley Hall affirm that they do. Not all who live outside the building agree.
Residents alarm the people who live outside of the building when they behave in ways which are considered strange. A man aged twenty-eight who lived at Kingsley Hall would walk into neighbourhood pubs and coffee-shops, pick up glasses from tables or counters, drink the contents, and walk out without saying a word to anyone. If a door in a house was left open he would enter and sit on a chair in the drawing room until someone of the house would see him. Then he would get up and walk out quietly. He never said anything to threaten anyone and he never touched anyone, but he unnerved people. People would approach him in the street to offer him the unsolicited advice that he would “feel better” in a mental hospital. One resident kept people in the house next door awake at night by playing his record player as loud as he could. He was experiencing his body as “numb” and found that he could give it life if he played music loudly. He did not wish to disturb anyone, and when those whom he disturbed, complained, he stopped and apologised.
The residents at Kingsley Hall have tried several times to build a dialogue with people in the neighbourhood. We felt that the children that harassed us were refracting upon us their parents fears and resentments of the “community”. Once people in Kingsley Hall invited several hundred people in the neighbourhood to a “tea” to discuss with them why they lived together and to answer their questions. Only about twelve people showed up and when they left they still did not seem to grasp the purpose of the “community”.
People who live, work, or play together, make rules to govern which parts of one’s bodies one may bring into contiguity with which parts of the bodies of others. To know which rule applies in a specific case one must know the sex of the persons, their age, their marital status, their ‘feelings’ towards each other, their ‘consent’, the ‘consent’ of those nearest and dearest to them, the visibility of the relation to others and so on. People forbid each other to talk about some of these rules and to even know that they exist, although they punish those who break them. No mental hospital permits a male psychiatrist to insert his penis into the anus of a male patient, although I doubt whether many people in mental hospitals are aware of such a rule or mention it ever at ‘therapeutic community’ meetings. Talk about the existence of such a rule would, I believe, be against the rules of mental hospitals, and talk about these latter rules would violate some other set of rules that are never talked about. ‘It’ may be what some male patients want most, although they may be ‘treated’ if they say so. ‘It’ never occurs and one thinks much about why it does not, because it is unthinkable in a mental hospital to consider the topic as one about which one might think.
At Kingsley Hall no rule prevents the discovery of the ‘secret’ rules that forbid some sexual acts and permit others. No rule stops anyone from saying: ‘we in the building are behaving as if there was a regulation that said, “all ‘A’ people are prohibited from ‘X’, ‘Y’, or ‘Z’ with all ‘B’ people”. Why are we? This is important, since studies of families of ‘schizophrenics’ show that these families confuse their children by making rules that forbid awareness of other rules. The parents of ‘schizophrenics’ punish their children when they disobey the ‘first order’ rules of the family, and when they show that they know they exist a knowledge which violates rules of the ‘second order’.
The rules of ‘Kingsley Hall’ force no one to work to earn money if he does not wish to, nor do they oblige anyone not to work. Everyone pays ‘rent’ money into a communal fund. One’s ability to pay rent and the solvency of the ‘cash box’ determine the amount one pays. The ‘community’ uses the money in the communal fund to pay for food, heating, electricity, repairs and maintenance of the rooms in the buildings and other items which they choose to buy. People can, and do, ‘turn night into day’ and, if they wish, do not get out of bed at all. A resident who tried to compel another resident to do something for his ‘own good’ would violate the rules of the group.
If someone wishes to live at Kingsley Hall he meets some or all of the residents first. Sometimes they invite him to stay for an evening meal, or the week-end. The residents ask those whom they like, or feel would benefit at Kingsley Hall. The residents consider it best for a balance to exist between those who are free to deal with ordinary social economic needs: to shop for food, wash dishes, scrub floors, clean toilets, stoke the furnace, repair broken fuses, pay the bills and so on; and whose who cannot or choose not to, and wish to work upon themselves. The men who seek the priceless Pearl in the depth of the ocean may drown if no one is topside to monitor their oxygen supply. They need others to look after their physical requirements.
No one who lives at Kingsley Hall sees those who perform the work upon the external, material world as ‘staff’ , and those who do not as ‘patients’. There is no ‘caste’ system whereby people are forbidden to more freely from one sub-group to another as in mental hospitals. No locus of institutional power subordinates everyone, by an innate sovereign right, to a command-obedience structure that forces those at the ‘top’ to force those they command to force others, to force others, etc., to limit the freedom of those at the ‘bottom’, for whose limitation of freedom the institution exists. No organization, no ossified ‘apparatus’, imposes upon anyone the need to ‘administrate’ others: to distribute communal tasks, to allocate responsibilities and to make rules. Each person at Kingsley Hall may choose to assume the obligations of a reciprocal or non-reciprocal bond with another person, or other people, or the ‘group’. He ‘pledges’ to do so, or dissolves his pledge by an initiative that originates in his own interior.
Some visitors are curious as to which of the residents had been labelled ‘schizophrenic’ by hospital psychiatrists before they came to live at Kingsley Hall, and which of the residents had previously worked as ‘staff’ at mental hospitals as psychiatrists, nurses or social workers. Their wrong guesses can be amusing. Guests, in staff positions at mental hospitals, not infrequently suppose that those who had previously been labelled ‘schizophrenic’ are ‘really’ doctors and nurses, and vice versa.
Where is the ’machinery’ for decision-making? How are issues discussed, clarified, classified? How are agreements reached and implemented? The ‘community’ answers these questions at different times and places. Gatherings are most frequent at meals around the table, or wherever people sit when they eat. People sometimes bring up issues at dinner. An issue might be that nothing ‘important’ is being discussed. Matters of the life and death of the soul are more ‘important’ than whether anyone shops, cooks or cleans, but someone must do these things. Who? But why should anyone live at Kingsley Hall if ‘only’ to concern himself about things like that? People sometimes agree to meet at regular intervals, at set times, just to see what they ‘have on their minds’. But can a genuine ‘meeting’ be scheduled? The most common occasion for a meeting is when some people feel the need to come together to talk about a specific matter.
When I came to live at Kingsley Hall several people meditated together daily from 6 to 7 a.m. Later, some of us gathered for a couple of hours early each morning for weeks to discuss our dreams of the night before. We asked each other: ‘Do different people weave their dreams out of “day-residues” that derive from the same events? Do we live out with each other our dreams of the night before? Or of the next night? Can we stop assigning to each other roles to play in our dream-scripts during the sleep we sleep when we suppose we are awake? People symbolized ‘Kingsley-Hall’ in their dreams as a ‘rocket-ship in space’, a ‘makeshift camp in an Israeli desert’, a ‘children’s house’, a ‘chalet for skiers on a mountain-side’, a ’Jacob’s ladder’ and a ‘Sinbad’s roc’.
Situations which are permitted to unfold at Kingsley Hall would not be allowed to progress so far in other social contexts. Joseph, aged twenty, came to live at Kingsley Hall after three years in mental hospitals. He revealed that ‘voices’ which were ‘plotting’ against him, were frightening him. ‘They’ were regarding his thoughts as ‘bad’ and ‘they’ were talking to each other about the need to condemn and punish him. He had to be careful since ‘they’ were seeing his belief that they were plotting against him as a ‘bad’ thought.
He was not sure if he was ‘imagining’ the voices or if he was over-hearing a real plot. If the voices were ‘real’ they were using extraordinary means to discover his thoughts how else could they know them? And they were communicating with each other by unusual means how else could they know them? Maybe they were using ‘aerial control’. If so, where was their ‘apparatus’. He cut some of the electric wires in the building and disconnected the telephone receiver to see if that would stop the voices. He broke into other residents’ rooms to search for concealed communication ‘apparatus’.
One morning he told me that the night before he had experienced ‘the most dreadful thing a human being could imagine’. A ‘fire’ had burned him to ashes and the pain had been unbearable.
In the next few days he began to knock on the doors of girls’ rooms in the building late at night to awaken them for a ‘cigarette’ or to ‘light’ his cigarette. During the day he would come to their windows and stare at them silently. He would also threaten to light fires and to ‘burn down the building’.
People met daily to discuss his behaviour. We invited him to the meetings and sometimes he came. He always left after a few minutes to dash around the building because he suspected that the visible meeting was a ‘decoy’ to distract his attention from the ‘real’ meeting held ‘secretly’ elsewhere.
Was it possible to talk about him without making true in a sense his fantasy that ‘voices’ were ‘talking’ about him? Could we dissolve the ‘plot’ if he saw our efforts to dissolve it as part of the ‘plot’? We revealed our predicament to him. What function did his behaviour serve for us? We were coming together more often to talk to each other because of him than we had been before. Had he elected himself to be our scapegoat, for our sakes?
Once while we met to talk about his behaviour and to decide what our limits of tolerance should be, he put his mattress on the roof and poured methyelated spirits on it. He was going to set it on fire, but a resident saw him and stopped him. The roof is made of cement , so no fire he lit there could have spread. Still, he had frightened us. He could light a fire that would spread when none of us was awake. He could endanger our life as a ‘community’ if the neighbours or the police and fire departments learned we were allowing a man who had been threatening to light fires to live ‘at large’ out of jail or mental hospital.
What did his behaviour mean? Was it worth the nuisance or the risk to us to let him live with us while we tried to find out? What would happen to him if we told him to leave? If we, who wished to understand him and to find a way to live with him, could not do so, could anyone? We chose to attempt a modus vivendi with him a little longer.
Sexual frustration might underlie some of his behaviour. His body had been ‘on fire’. He intruded on girls while they slept to ask them to ‘light’ his ‘cigarette’. He felt communication was going on inside other people’s rooms from which he was excluded. He looked at girls through their windows. Perhaps his thoughts which the ‘voices’ were regarding as ‘bad’ were sexual ones. We confronted him with the sexual ‘meaning’ of his behaviour. Girls told him that he had asked them to light his cigarettes because he lacked enough courage to ask them to make love. Men told him that he had not been able to douse the ‘fire’ in his body, because he had felt forbidden to masturbate and fuck. His threats to light fires stopped. We revealed to him that he had put our patience to a severe test and that he had approached our threshold of tolerance. We found, by frequent confrontation of him with our thoughts about him, that we could cool the intensity of the situation though we could not eliminate it. I am aware of ‘clinical’ and juridical arguments in favour of imposing clear limits to forbid behaviour of this sort soon after it begins. I am also aware of how much everyone can learn that is new if difficult situations are allowed to unfold. No a priori proof exists to show that the traditional and customary ways by which people respond to rule-breaking are the most enlightened of all possible ways. Joseph said that he had never realized before coming to Kingsley Hall that people had sent him to mental hospital in the past because his behaviour had frightened them. He had been too frightened, he said, to be free to see that he had frightened them, and they had not told him.
Another resident said to me: ‘Those who live here see ”Kingsley-Hall” each in his own way … in common to all who live here … is a bafflement or refusal as to fulfilment of “identity” … the problem is for each to discover some inner need and to find a way to trust it … It is in honour of this, that Kingsley Hall is a place, simply, where some may encounter selves long forgotten or distorted …
Does ‘Kingsley-Hall’ succeed? An irrelevant question: it does no harm, it does no ‘cure’. It stands silent, peopled by real ghosts; so silent that, given time, given luck, they may hear their own hearts beat and elucidate the rhythm.
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