Summer Detour II: Get it out of your system

It’s life, death and the whole cyclical thing we can’t stand. We are appalled by life’s fertility, and anything that reminds us of it, especially anything that provokes thoughts of excess, will be found vile. What is most disturbing about lower forms of life is their teeming, swarming, seething, rotting, regenerating nature. So we are disgusted by the nature in human nature.

Descartes thought the brain functioned as a system of hydraulics, much like the statues he saw in the gardens of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Later thinkers also saw in the brain what they saw around them: electricity, or magnetism, or Boolean logic, or Bayesian logic, or computers that question us about our mothers. Androids do dream of electric sheep. What’s remarkable is that our body of knowledge grows out of these dreams, albeit erratically.

On entering their cell for the first time, the recludensus (novice recluse) would climb into a grave dug inside the cell. The enclosure ritual is a piece of macabre high drama. In places the liturgy is indistinguishable from a funeral service. When the moment for enclosure arrived, the anchoress-to-be would process with the celebrant, choir and others out of the church and into the graveyard, as the choir sang ‘In paradisum deducant te angeli’ – traditionally sung as a body is conveyed to a grave.

It is the environment that must be held responsible for causing panic, not individual perversity. The wonder now is not that some of us sometimes can’t step out through the front door, but that any of us ever do.

Each cell wall had a list showing the daily prison routine. The day began at 5.45 a.m. in summer and 6.45 a.m. in winter (‘Rise, open ventilator, wash, fold bedding’) and ended at 9 p.m. (‘Sling hammock and prepare for bed … lights out’). ‘The light goes out,’ wrote Sylvia Pankhurst, who was imprisoned at Holloway in 1906, and then ‘darkness, a long, sleepless night, and the awakening to another day like yesterday and like tomorrow’.

I am haunted by the figure of Rolanda Polonsky, walking through the hospital corridors. If my eight-year-old self had opened the doors that frightened me I might have found her, back then, exactly as she is now in the film I watch on my laptop. And it appears to me now that that’s why I was fearful: I didn’t want to hear the message she had for me.

The front door is a flat’s or a building’s mouth; to see it smashed open, its power to let in and keep out challenged, makes for anxiety. The affront goes deep. Doors are symbolic as well as functional.