Freshly Laundered & Hanging Out to Dry: Chapter3, Part2

On Saturday night, Mick leads a laughing group of us on a path through the woods, probably not more than a quarter of a mile long, over to the local Social Club in nearby Sherborne village. Because it is a private membership pub, children are allowed. For a nominal annual fee of one pound, whole families come to watch TV and play games—chess, checkers, cards, and pinball. Its two well-lit rooms are filled with small game tables, chairs, and couches, just like the interior of a home. Music, TV shows, beeping and buzzing pinball games, and the murmur of a couple dozen people chatting fill the room. The local hairstyles and clothing look just foreign enough to suggest the early ‘50s. Adults enjoy bottles of beer or ale on tap while the children purchase snacks and soft drinks, playing games with others outside their immediate family. It’s much cheerier than a bar and not so isolated as being at home.
The Sherborne students join in, joking with the villagers, drinking beer, and playing games. I start out trying to be sociable, drinking juice and eating some chocolate, making stilted conversation; but it isn’t long before I return to Sherborne House, seeking out my dorm, hoping that everyone is either asleep or still out. As much as I wish to feel connected, I’m also starved for time alone.

The town of Sherborne is a dead ringer for old illustrations I’ve seen in children’s books. Having always thought they were fantasy pictures of fairy dwellings, now I understand that they had been realistic renderings of Cotswold villages. Lining the street are little stone row houses with peaked roofs of slate or an occasional rounded one of thatch, walls covered with ivy, flower gardens instead of front lawns, and flowers cascading from window boxes. Thick grass or mowed chamomile paths look like shag carpeting leading to the front doors or around the side to backyard gardens.

The next time I speak with Mick about practical work, he says, “Last year’s students did a lot around here. The building had been abandoned for years. Before that, right after World War II, it had been a boys’ school infamous for inspiring the 1968 film If. Did you ever see it?”
Not that avid of a filmgoer, nevertheless, I had seen it. It was about an armed rebellion in an exclusive boys’ school.
“Remember how the film presented society there as being so authoritarian and hypocritical? The class system is more distinct here than in America.”
I was picturing the phantoms of those suffering young men drifting through the halls. Would we have to exorcise them from the building? Mick’s voice shook me from my reverie.
“The first year students shoveled away rubble and dust, replaced broken windows, patched holes in the walls, painted the entire inside from top to bottom, and brought in the kitchen equipment, maintenance supplies, and bedding. They also had to establish accounts with all the vendors—dairy, groceries, coal delivery, electric power, and waste service—everything an institution this size needs for daily life. And they couldn’t do any of it until they were living here.”
I cringe to think of how it must have been to live in such a mess. “It’s hard to believe what they accomplished in ten months,” I said. Yet, as busy as we were with the ordinary running of the house before the course even began, I was speculating about whether there were any important things left for us to do.

Having fun should be taken seriously. _Stephen Millich

Students from the first year who were staying during the transition were passing on their knowledge to us, whether it had to do with animal care or how to replace windows. Bob was described as an inventor, his head of curls seeming to illustrate creative ideas springing from his brain. Apparently he invented ways to solve mechanical difficulties in old equipment with missing parts. Tom was watching over the greenhouse. Most of the students seemed appreciative of each other’s talents and, in contrast to my own nervousness, they radiated a soothing peace.

Tom, a tall brown-haired Englishman with a serious face, broad forehead, and large blue eyes, is leaving soon and asks me if I would take on the greenhouse cucumbers and tomatoes he’s been nurturing. The task for the cucumbers is to pinch off the male flowers, leaving only the female ones that grow cucumbers. The tomatoes are buggy with aphids. As he is showing me how to cut away the worst branches, I ask him why some of the staff acts so grumpy. His forehead furrows as he tells me they are emulating a teaching style that aspires to be unsentimental.
“We call it ‘the Gurdjieff Work face’” To illustrate, he turns his expression to stone with such skill that it startles me to laughter.
Any discomforts I have about the patches of excessive solemnity are balanced with waves of love I feel for the other students and optimism about the course.

Only occasionally did the first year students speak of the philosophy underlying their studies. Mr. Bennett, the driving force behind the school, had studied with both G.I. Gurdjieff and Gurdjieff’s most renowned expositor, the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky. Their path was called The Work or The Fourth Way. The Fourth Way referred back to the three traditional spiritual paths: the fakir whose mastery is of the physical body, the monk whose path is devotion or the heart, and the yogi whose path is knowledge. Each of their methods emphasized only one aspect of human nature and usually isolated the student from everyday life. The Fourth Way was a spiritual path without permanent institutions. It was for people who were fully engaged in the world—in it but not of it.
According to Bennett’s autobiography, Witness, he had heeded his own spiritual path while remaining busy with daily life. His profession in the coal industry had required him to travel extensively in the near and far East. While there, exercising his gift for languages, he had met respected spiritual teachers and explored techniques and exercises that were still an active part of Eastern spiritual experience. Mr. B intended to share what he thought was needed and appropriate for people in our culture. Sherborne was to give us a foundation of spiritual education, separate from the dogma of a specific religion, while we remained involved in the activities of mundane life. It seemed an ideal way to learn.
As a youngster, the lack of answers to my ordinary childhood questions made me lose interest in asking. Only after becoming an adult, did I grasp that they were the kind of questions children and philosophers have always asked. What is it like not to exist? I couldn’t remember not being alive and couldn’t imagine non-existence either. What was the meaning of life? What are we here for? Why is there so much suffering and what can we do about it? Just formulating the questions had made the adults around me anxious.
“There is no meaning.”
“You shouldn’t be thinking about things like that. You’re just a little girl.”
When they answered like that I would choke back my tears. I didn’t understand I was being reprimanded for putting them on the spot. Reading Witness reawakened those childhood questions. Bennett believed it imperative to ask what our purpose on earth was and intimated it had to do with becoming capable of cooperating with greater powers.
My early forays into philosophy were too frustrating to continue on my own. Answers I read or heard to the questions seemed theoretical in addition to being conflicting and obscure. I didn’t know how to unravel them; Bennett, however, promised practical applications.

If we don’t change direction soon,
we’ll end up where we’re going. _Professor Irwin Cory