Shikasta

When 42 married, he chose a woman, who like nearly everyone he met, thought about food more than almost anything else. Their household was dominated by the buying, cooking, and eating of food. Their children were brought up to consider food of supreme importance. Agent 9 in the report before this one explained that it was arranged for 42 suddenly to lose his livelihood, and positioned where he could choose to run a restaurant. The intention was he might come to regard the processes of eating and cooking in a more objective light. But he, his wife, his children, and some of their friends became obsessed with a restaurant that was famous not only in his own country but in several others. Food was never out of their minds, and it was clear that things were worse than before. I have arranged for him to be invited by a certain international agency because of his knowledge of every aspect of nutrition to become adviser to a nutritional programme in certain extremely poor areas in Southern Continent I. I believe that he and his wife may accept this invitation, and they, plunged into daily, hourly contact with the extremes of hunger, may be shocked out of their preoccupation. This leaves the problem of the children, additional to my assignment, and I have asked Agent 20 to intervene here.

17. She undertook to risk her sanity - in a time when more and more people become mad, or live on the edges of madness, or who can expect to "break down" several times in a life - in order to explore these areas calmly and chart them, for the benefit of others. This was more than she was able to sustain. She had to undergo more and worse pressures than we expected, due to the early death of her mother. Some individuals near her have learned from her as to the possibilities and risks and lessons of mental imbalance, but she herself has not kept balance. A great part of her life has been spent in mental hospitals, or in sheltered situations, at the others' expense, both financial and emotional. A previous report described her condition, with suggestions for positive intervention, but these did not lead to improvement. I contacted her in a mental hospital where she was by choice, and found her stubborn and recalcitrant: to keep herself going with even the intermittent and tenuous hold on sanity she does possess, means that she has to be stubborn and suspicious: she has been treated with stupidity and brutality too often. I have arranged that a certain doctor with unusual insight into these conditions, working silently and with discretion inside his profession, shall contact her and work with her, suggesting ways in which she may describe what she experiences so as to help others. This will be of benefit to both, but I do not hold out much hope.

NOTE- I was wrong. See added material, Lynda Coldridge, attached.

4. At a time when the convention has been that information about scientific discovery should be freely available, but when in fact great areas of research mostly, but not all, to do with military possibilities, have remained concealed, so that the public knows only part of the horrors being brewed for them, this man undertook to work inside a military scientific research establishment. He has been remarkably good at his work, and early became eminent in his field, though his name was not known outside a small circle of similar searchers. But he has been and is in a key position. Slowly he became obsessed with the horrific nature of his work, which resulted in neurosis - conflicting duties to "country," "science," "family," etc., and so on, which he was unable to solve, made him ill. He was ill, privately, and secretly, for years, for there was no one with whom to discuss his situation. While maintaining an ability to work, and even furthering discovery in a field which he increasingly considered criminal, inwardly he has been in a nightmare of guilt. I arranged for him to meet, at an international conference on another topic, a man working in the same field as himself in an "enemy" country - I put this in quotes because these are times when enemy countries may become allies overnight, or may be secretly allied in some ways while at war in others. These two men, both with difficulty carrying the weight of their burden of knowledge, encountered each other at once, drawn together because of their real i

Now follow the individuals whose situation was brought to my attention as needing assistance. I number them according to System 3.

1 (5). This individual's chief characteristic was a critical sense: accurate, and keen. Various influences during upbringing reinforcing this equipment, any situation he found himself in was "seen through" by him at once. He left his own milieu early, rebelling against a parental situation in which he could see nothing but hypocrisy, and married young. He had three children, found himself entombed in mediocrity and hypocrisy" and left for various unconventional arrangements with women, three illegitimate children resulting. He married again, had two children, but the marriage did not hold. Again he married, and divorced, with one child. At the age of fifty-five he was alone, much impaired and made nonproductive by guilt. He has earned his living always on the fringes of the arts, often as critic and satirist. But a sense of derision that has never allowed him to succumb to any situation has always been complicated by a warm and generous heart - which attribute is strengthened by guilt, and causes him continually to fluctuate from "no" to "yes."

After discussion with Agent 20, we arranged matters so that one of his progeny was inspired to turn to him for help. He has taken her in and become responsible for her. Others of his offspring, hearing of it, appealed to him for refuge. At this time when children often flee their parents as if to remain in contact with them is to perpetuate in them selves all the vices of Shikasta, it is common for adolescents to leave home and seek surrogate parents: in this case, he is the surrogate parent, for he had not seen any of them for years. This man found that his home was crammed full of children and adolescents and young adults in various difficulties, and moved to a large house in the country. His attitude towards "ties," "duties," "conventions," "false allegiances," "hypocrisies" being well known, he has become quite an exemplar. Much more than an ordinary conventional man, whose children will have left home by the time he is in his fifth decade, he is burdened with postdated responsibilities. A former mistress, becoming ill, has been taken in. Another, in breakdown, followed. A husband of a former wife, falling into financial difficulties, is being assisted by him. This man is now responsible in one way or another for some twenty people, and has been cured of his stagnant and unwholesome condition. For one thing, his critical sense is now usefully at work in the diagnosis of his charges' ills and needs. As he carries such a heavy burden, I have arranged that Agent 20 keep a check on him, with powers to intervene if necessary.

1 (13) This man, after a hard struggle in childhood and youth against poverty and lack of education, became a journalist. For many years he was a dubious figure in the eyes of the authorities, for he was one of those - sharing a critical and analytical capacity not dissimilar from that of 1 (5) - who were continually attempting to present a factual picture of events and processes to the public very different from that of the majority view. This from a nonpolitical viewpoint, though he was branded as a socialist at a time when it was unfashionable and ill regarded. As happens often on Shikasta, the viewpoints he had represented for three decades, side by side with a minority of similar men and women who had a hard time of it, suddenly became a majority view, and almost overnight he was something of a hero, particularly among the young. There are areas of Shikasta where critics of society may be hunted and persecuted all their lives. In others, they are absorbed. Over and over again, people who have been kept on the move mentally, always having to defend and sharpen and refine their perceptions of events, will suddenly find themselves in a spotlight focussed on them by the many publicity machines, will be made national figures, will be frozen, in fact, in public attitudes. Again and again, valuable people become neutralised, made into - often - figures of fun, at the least lose their impetus, their force. The man listed here fell into this trap, and had not understood that he was repeating and repeating old attitudes. I have arranged for him to meet a woman from Southern Continent I, who has had to fight so hard all her life even to survive that she has energy for two: he will marry her, and become revivified, and forced out of his pattern. Their children may be expected to be remarkable, and I have arranged for them to be watched by Agent 20.