For TV dramatist and screenwriter Dennis Potter belief and betrayal became linked early on in life. He felt that he betrayed his commitment to local and working class culture through his early work in journalism, politics and television. Then the onset of psoriatic arthropathy brought to a premature end all hope of a public career. It seemed that through a combination of circumstance and choice Potter’s beliefs had led him into betrayal.
But, “all of a sudden, there was a whispering seduction within that despair, saying, 'Now you can do whatever you choose. Now you don't have to go out and fend in that way, with those people, with those things.' It took some time to start writing, but that was the breeding ground for it.” The knowledge of what the significance of his life was supposed to be - his vocation as a writer – enabled him to re-invent himself. The impact of this thinking he describes in religious terms as “physically like a visitation, and it was a crisis point, an either-or situation; either you give in, or you survive and create something out of this bomb-site which you've become - you put up a new building. That's what it amounted to."
His dramatic structures echo this thinking either by tracking the shattering of the psyche (Pennies From Heaven) or uses it as the trigger for exploring the act of re-building the shattered psyche. For Philip Marlow in The Singing Detective an acceptable cause (the onset of illness) triggers the crisis but in Brimstone and Treacle, more controversially, the trigger is an act of out and out evil, a rape committed by a devil. The trigger, then, is rarely good in and of itself in the conventional sense but may be good in its results - good may come from evil. For this good - the promise of redemption, of wholeness - to come from this evil there must be the response of seeking to know oneself through the gathering up of the fragments of one’s shattered psyche.
Potter has explained how this can take place in speaking of his intentions in writing The Singing Detective. “What I was trying to do with The Singing Detective was to make the whole thing a detective story, but a detective story about how you find out about yourself, so that you’ve got this superfluity of clues, which is what we all have, and very few solutions - maybe no solution - but the very act of garnering the clues and the very act of remembering, not merely an event but how that event has lodged in you and how that event has affected the way you see things, begins to assemble a system of values, and only when that system, no matter how tenuous it might be, is assembled was Marlow able to get up out of his bed”.
It is this examination of the past in order reassemble yourself in the present that Potter sees as the essential act for human beings to undertake. It’s result is maturity and balance – self understanding. He views this as a common aim of both religion and psychiatry. For Potter it as the only real way to deal with the guilt of betrayal. "There is no way you can discharge guilt. What is, is. What you've done, you've done. What you've lived through, you've lived through. You cannot bend the knee and say mea culpa and ask for the past to be wiped away. But you can use guilt. I don't mean by exploiting it, but you can live within it and show it, which is the only possible form of absolution. It's not a case of, 'I am guilty, therefore forgive me,' but of re-inhabiting the guilt in order to understand it."
Ultimately this act is seen by Potter as a revelation of “that sovereignty that we have … the most precious of human capacities“. “By showing or attempting to assert how sovereign you are as an individual human being, if you knew it. And that means contending with all the shapes, all the sorts of half-shapes, all the memories, all the aspirations of your life - what, how they coalesce. How they contradict each other, how they have to be disentangled as a human act by you yourself. This sovereign self beyond, behind all those other selves that are being sold things, remains the other unique, sovereign, individual.”
This description of the sovereign self and its discovery corresponds closely to his description of God. “I see God in us or with us, if I see at all, as some shreds and particles and rumours, some knowledge that we have, some feeling why we sing and dance and act, why we paint, why we love, why we make art. All the things that separate us from the purely animal in us are palpably there and you can build great structures of belief about them. The fact is they are there and I have no means of knowing whether that thereness in some sense doesn’t cling to what I call me.”
Hear Potter interviewed by clicking here and see an extract from an interview by Alan Yentob.
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Check out Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel.
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