Andrew Fekete, The Voyage into Night
The date is 23rd November, 1985. It is my birthday. I am a teacher, working at Victoria College in Jersey.
My brother, Andrew, four and a half years older than me, is living with my mother in London, and has been doing so ever since February of that year, when he feigned a suicide attempt. The attempted suicide Six months earlier, Andrew was in another crisis; he had run out of money, it was a bitterly cold winter that year, and he could not pay the rent of his North London flat. He called me to say he'd taken an overdose. I called an ambulance. When it arrived he sent it away. We spoke again on the phone. His manipulation had succeeded. I called a friend in London and he agreed to drive my brother down to South London where my mother lived. In the meantime, I'd asked my mother to take him in. This was the outcome I had hoped to avoid. I did not want to bring my brother back into a situation of living with my mother, because I knew it could not work. Though I'd not yet come to the conclusion that my brother's condition amounted to psychosis, that was the direction in which my thoughts were heading. I did not think my mother and brother could cohabit yet again. To my surprise in many ways it worked better than I'd expected. Especially at first. My mother was kind and sympathetic, and Andrew adopted some of the house rules. My sister, Liz, collected his books from storage in a cellar, and delivered them to our mother's flat. Andrew even sporadically had temporary jobs. But the tension mounted. He began to suspect that he had Aids, and my mother was deeply anxious. Quarrels developed. I visited them in July to help; the result was a long argument. The quarrels escalated. 23rd November, 1985 My mother is proposing to evict Andrew. She cannot tolerate the situation any more. While I am talking to her on the phone, Andrew attacks her, striking her with an ashtray. My brother's life was one long crisis, punctuated by deeper crises. Two years earlier, in 1983, my brother had attacked and severely beaten my father. They were sharing a flat together in Bayswater. My father was due to move to Finland, and my brother was planning to take over the flat. Andrew was tense and the tension boiled over into violence. He attacked my father who was asleep. It was a severe beating. I was in London to see my father and hopefully broker the agreement between them. I met my father at Victoria station. He was frightened. I took him back to Jersey, and from there arranged his passage to Finland. As for my brother, I saw him once, but he insisted on severing links, he found his own accommodation and I did not hear from him for some time. I was sure he was in acute mental torment, but my father was already staying with me, and pragmatically I could only deal with one problem at a time. Thus, when my brother attacked my mother, I feared the worst. I called the police. Fortunately, she was still alive; and the police evicted Andrew. That week So Andrew was alone in London, suffering a psychosis, without money, and with winter approaching. I had a full-time job in Jersey and still at the early stages of my career as a teacher of English literature. There was a social function at my school later that evening; I asked the Headmaster if I could leave for one week; he refused, I quarreled with him and left anyway. (He was a lovely man, very charming, and he simply misunderstood my request or needs, and subsequently paid my salary in full, despite my sudden disappearance.) The economic resources of our family were scanty, and I did not think we could support Andrew in separate accommodation for any length of time. I decided that the only way in which I could solve the problem was to have Andrew psychologically assessed and admitted to hospital. I did not think he would voluntarily agree to the assessment, so I had to persuade my mother to sign the letter requesting it, and persuade Andrew to visit a psychiatrist It took me one week to achieve both. My brother and I spent the week shifting between boarding houses, sleeping in the same room. He was suffering from anxiety and hallucinations. Furthermore, in a curious episode I also seemed to acquire providential help - a psychiatrist from South Africa, staying in the same lodgings, took it upon himself to visit Andrew in our room when I was out. Then, agreeing with me that Andrew was in a acute state of psychosis, he took it upon himself to visit the hospital where I was arranging the assessment and support my case. His name was Dr, Bernard Hughes. But there was a more bizarre aspect to this. In one of Andrew's diaries there was reference to Bernard Korf as Andrew's name for his own shadow personality; Bernard Hughes saw this and identified himself as Korf. Later that diary went missing. I was present with Andrew when his doctor told him he had Aids. That was the first time I learned of the medical condition that was shortly to end Andrew's life. My final day with Andrew This sees me an hour and a half after Andrew's psychological assessment outraged with disappointment. The hospital had offered him nothing and sent him away. Now I am in one of the rooms of the hospital. The staff have run for their lives. I tell him how much I love him, and that, as the fools in charge of the hospital would not offer him help, then he had to ask for it himself. In other words, I told him the thing I'd feared to tell him all along, that he was ill and had to confront his own psychosis. Then I left him. He had some money and one useful thing I'd achieved in the week I lived with him was to get him to sign on for social security. After three weeks in boarding houses, he returned to my mother's, where he spent a peaceful month. In March he called me, and, in my last conversation with him ever, I told him again that he had to ask the hospital for help. On March 6th, 1986 he committed himself to St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington (the same hospital where he was born) for psychiatric treatment, and the following day he had a respiratory failure and was taken into Intensive Care and placed on a life-support machine. He did not regain consciousness and died on March 31st, 1986, of respiratory failure brought on by Aids. Bernard Hughes vanished. Six months later, police in North London called me - they were investigating a disappearance. A suitcase had turned up containing clothing belonging to Dr. Hughes, and all my correspondence with him. Why this book? Andrew is an artist, poet and diarist. His diaries comprise over 1 million words, and after his death I set about reading and editing them; the result of which is The Voyage into Night, a work comprising about 1/3rd of the material available, and telling the story of his life from adolescence to terminal breakdown. As I read the material I realised I was handling an incredible opus. It is a complete life-story whose theme is breakdown. The three parts to this opus, the art, the poetry and the diaries, could all stand alone, but together they formed an intense interwoven narrative, each part of which informed and elucidated the other. I consider him to be an important artist. I see some comparison with the work of Paul Klee. The works of Paul Klee are abstract, tend to the geometric, very strong on colour meanings, and, even more important, small. However, point for point, painting for painting, I would say Andrew's were better. But if that is the case, what are they still doing in folders? Why are then not seen? The same question was asked by one of ex-pupil of mine, a man who achieved the highest honours at Oxford university, when he saw them. He turned to me, and said, "What are these doing here? Why aren't they in a museum?" It was an accusation. Why haven't you done something about this? It was not for want of effort on the part of my mother and I in the years immediately following Andrew's death. I strove to get the poetry and diaries published, she to get the paintings seen. Fundamentally, I believe that there was a spiritual block, and the time was not right. At another level, we live in an age where art is not important, and where, metaphorically or literally, you have to daub the equivalent of the side of a skyscraper in excrement in order to get attention. As a younger man, I did not really believe in Andrew's work - the criss-crossing geometric patterns seemed not particularly important. Between 1979 and 1983 he underwent a revolution in method and composition and produced all his best work, leaving behind the "adolescent" phase. When I saw the work, only in 1983, I immediately recognised their value - just as my distinguished ex-pupil when I pulled them out of the folders. Nonetheless, to the outsider there is journey to be made: composition in pure colour and form is not easy, and to appreciate such thinking is also hard. Part of the key to this is to understand that abstract art does not really exist. What goes for abstract art is usually expressionist art, or, if you like, abstract expressionist. That is to say, abstract works are expressions of pure emotion. So it is with my brother, and certainly, it helps when looking at his work to see the emotional, life-context in which they were made. Unless that connection is made, then the works look merely decorative, small and insignificant. You actually have to look very carefully at his works to see in them the hallucinogenic faces, forms and figures; you cannot appreciate these unless you actually see them in the first place. Furthermore, they are incredibly well-drawn; the work of a master. Technically, it is work of a virtuoso; his handling of oil-wash is revolutionary, and he transforms a graphite pencil into an instrument to make darkness visible. If you don't believe me, take a graphite pencil and see if you can get that amount of contrast and depth with it. I promise you, you won't! Perhaps there is a caveat that goes to the very heart of the issue of genius. Andrew's method was not a conscious one. He used the method of automatic painting and automatic composition. Thus, his works are not the products of conscious striving as such, but he allowed the unconscious to paint through him and communicate through him. However, does this matter? If you want to live, yes! If you want to be an artist, no - not really! Those whom the gods love, die young! Andrew gave his life to be an artist. That was his sacrifice. And, for that matter, you will see the motif of sacrifice in the dreams that he records in his diaries. From the psychological point of view he was torn apart by his material; he knew nothing of the magic circle that protects the adept in his evocations. Thus, to understand the paintings, read the diaries. And if this is true of his paintings, then it is all the more true of his poetry, which is complex and problematic when read in isolation. The reason for this is simple: all his poetry is based on private associations of his inner life and his outer experience, and without those connections, you do not see the relevance. To take an example, his self-revelatory poem, Punishment for the Transgressors. But who is the transgressor? Andrew! In this work he discusses the torment of Acteon, the mythological figure devoured by wolves for daring to take a glimpse at the revealed, naked body of the Goddess Artemis. And who is Acteon? Why Andrew! And who is Artemis? To find out, read the diaries! The diary of a man who is on a journey into Darkness could be very hard reading. In truth, taken as a whole, I suspect that one needs a strong stomach to read them cover to cover; perhaps they should be dipped into. On the other hand, I promise you that the story will not be without humour; that, while there may be one or two heavier passages, taken as a whole they will entertain. Another aspect is that my brother has a very likeable personality. Of course, if you are me and you happened to be the victim of my brother's persistent and increasing scrounging, and you see your hard earned money being spent by a profligate older brother, then it can be hard at times. But you do not have that problem. Let me quote from a letter sent to me by my sister Liz dealing with this aspect: "Anyway, I've just put down Andrew's chapter. It was quite strange, because I must say I found him rather endearing, which is so far from my memory." My sister and I were discussing the choice of first chapter to serialise, First Love; it deals with Andrew's only mature relationship with a woman; all his other relationships are with men, though he did have two girlfriends in teenage years. My sister writes, "... I think anyone reading the chapter would form a favourable picture of the woman - the story is not about her - as a real character - but the story is about what's going on in Andrew's brain, which is alternatively funny, chaotic, desperate, brimming with life, sad. I think you could do a few lines - somehow drawing out the humour of the situation, he has the idea of entering into a 'marriage of convenience' to sort out his financial problems, but then ends up starting a genuine friendship which then draws his attention to his own contradictions, his homosexuality, at the same time desperate need for an archetypal supportive 'woman figure', desire to have his own family, children, where he could at last feel secure." My sister has written those few lines for me. Was it a psychosis? Did my brother suffer a psychosis? Was his life, as I thought at the time, just one continuous psychosis? You may read a single chapter of his diary and say "no" - in fact, and this is the terrible truth, it reads more or less like a regular chapter from a particularly acute crisis in the life of everyone - you and me included. Indeed, if you are interested in understanding your own crises, read about Andrew's! However, I do not wish to exaggerate these points. Read three chapters in a row, and a very different impression is formed. While crises constitute periods in every one's lives, in Andrew's it was a continual succession of crises. In the end, it was Aids that killed my brother, not his psychological state; nonetheless, many physical ailments begin in the psyche. On the other hand, I see an important caveat. One sign of Andrew's breakdown was his inability to support himself, at first intermittently, and by the end, completely. However, suppose one took away that condition; suppose, by hazard, our family was rich and that we could have afforded to support Andrew to a degree of luxury; would Andrew's condition, then, have constituted a psychosis? I have come to the conclusion that the answer to that is no! R.D. Laing tells us that schizophrenia is a relationship between the individual and his society; it is defined not so much by what is going on inside the individual's consciousness, but by the pattern of communication between that individual and his society - perhaps his family primarily. Andrew wanted exclusively to be an artist. He wanted to be nurtured, supported and listened to (and, he could talk for hours about himself), and to have his bills paid for, so that he could create in peace and serenity, and when not working have ample funds to meet with his friends. Grant him those conditions, then, yes, he might have been what many people describe as a "normal" person. Just a normal person who does not earn his own living; and the kind of person who, when he gets famous and recognised, then earns a lot of money. Therefore, seen in another light, Andrew's story can be interpreted as a family psychodrama, a conflict between my brother's egocentric desire to be an artist, and thereby to subordinate all the resources of the family to that end, and my more traditional approach to family norms, based on honouring thy mother and father. Symbolically, the fact that I helped my father in preference to my brother, when I took my father to Jersey, represents that deep conflict of values. Though, I did strive for compromise - the Christmas before Andrew's fake suicide attempt at my request my mother, sister and I gathered together and agreed to pay Andrew's rent. The plan was foiled, again by Andrew. He refused to attend that Christmas day, and made himself un-contactable. Instead, in abject and self-imposed isolation, he wrote the fascinating entry into his diary, the extended Journal of Active Imagination. Also, the reader is also implicated, because Andrew's fate illustrates the disastrous and deleterious pattern of communication that subsists right now between the hero and society. We call it the death of the hero, and that is literally what it is. As witness of this, consider the dreadful position of the artist in society today - I mean, the bulk of the artists, not the select few, who are by no means heroes, but careful managers of their reputations - and diplomas. Another possible solution to Andrew's problem would have been to find a true patron. So this book is written for this dark age, where patrons have ceased to exist and the State occupies whatever is left of that ground. So from another point of view, Andrew was the victim of society's indifference; and hence also my anger with the incompetence of those doctors at the time of the final conflict. In the final analysis, the question of Andrew's psychosis is the question. I offer this material to the world of psychological investigation, to all schools, Freudian, Jungian, Laingian, Behavioural, Cognitive, Existentialist, and what not. And ask each school to decide. About enlightenment Before I continue, let me say something for the benefit of those readers who are atheists and materialists. Simply this, there is much in this book for you. For you are entitled to your interpretation and understanding of reality and the psyche, and we have much to learn from each other. This section is written primarily for those, like myself, who believe in Enlightenment, or at least, suspect that there is a spiritual path. Chapter headings are almost always taken from some phrase or expression that Andrew himself uses in that very chapter. The chapter headings themselves should give the reader a frisson - the tremour in the blood at the suggestion of a secret unmasked. a veil to be torn. The book is organised into three sections: (1) On the Edge; (2) The Voyage into Night; and (3) The Antinomian Divide. This organisation reflects my earlier theory formed at the time of editing (now 26 years ago) that the theme of the work is a voyage of dissolution, of a crossing from psychological health into psychosis. Logically, such a story has three phases: (1) an exposition in which the basis of the problem is laid bare; in this case, the inner turmoil that means that integration is not the likely path, though from the dramatic point of view, salvation remains as yet a possibility and a hope, and one, certainly, that the narrator himself believes in; (2) a transition from health into disease; the voyage across the edge into the land of no-return; (3) the description of what the voyager sees in the mystic land, leading to his inevitable disappearance beyond the veil of all veils. For the price the voyager has paid for his illicit glimpse into that land, is death. As the hero, he transmits his findings to those of us who remain on this side of the divide. It is his gift to mankind, his opus. The term, Antinomian indicates "one who maintains that the moral law is not binding on Christians, under the law of grace." It is justification by faith alone. In its extreme version it leads to the concept of the justified sinner, because one who has faith is not bound by any moral consideration. As with the other titles I used in this edition, the term was used by Andrew himself in an essay, now lost, on that topic. The material for that essay is contained in his essay, Symbols of Creation and Destruction. The term opus also derives from the diaries themselves; Andrew describes the diaries and his life work as an opus. It is stated in the diaries, when his death is approaching and he finally accepts that he is moribund, that he will pass the opus to me. He meant this in two senses: in the literal sense that I would become the guardian of his opus; in the other sense, that I would continue the voyage that he had begun. He knew this, for we were brothers. We spoke about it. My brother had the illusion that he was treading the path of enlightenment. It is part of his not-quite-delusional delusion of grandeur. In more lucid moments, he writes of Enlightenment experiencing him. He says, not that he has achieved Enlightenment, or is treading that path, but that Enlightenment is using him as a vehicle for its self-expression. I find two narrators in this opus; the Ego and Self. The Ego is the self-conscious troubled part of the psyche, that part which experiences the unfolding of events in time - in my brother's case, dissolution and pain. The Ego is in time; the Self is not. The Self looks from eternity through the portal of consciousness into the temporal world and sees the image of itself passing through time. We experience these two voices in Andrew's diaries; the loud, insistent voice of the time-bound ego, constantly complaining and struggling, trying to master the demands of conforming to the material conditions of this world and the infantile refusal to comply. Over and above this, we hear the commentary of the eternal Self, not touched in the slightest by the suffering of the outer man, but always inviolable, and if moved, then moved to laughter. Wherever my brother is now, it is a better place. One journey is over, another begins. Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter, Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. [From T.S. Eliot: Burnt Norton. This was Andrew's favourite poem.] To understand enlightenment, read this book - and not because my brother's journey was the journey of one who in any simple sense could be said to have attained Enlightenment - in a vision described in the diaries, the Buddha himself appears to my brother to refute this suggestion. Instead, read it in connection with the following words of C. G. Jung: "The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. It is well that these things are difficult to understand and thus enjoy a wholesome concealment, for weak heads are only too easily addled by them and thrown into confusion." (Mysterium Coniunctionis) To understand the path of enlightenment, study its inverse in this story: the path of dissolution. Also, bear in mind, since this path is a narrative told by the Self, then it too, at a higher level, is a path of integration. The privilege My brother was four and half years older than me; for the first sixteen years of my life we shared the same bedroom, punctuated only by the fact that in the last two of those, he was attending Liverpool University, so I had the room to myself when it was term time. By my brother's own account he was already hallucinating at the age of three. In my experience, he was always deeply disturbed. I was my brother's chief confidant. All his projects, all his ambitions, all his beliefs in his destiny were communicated to me, and for the first sixteen years of my life, to me first. When he ran away from home, at the age of 16, I, at the age of 12, was the first to hear of the plans for his journey. I did not understand what he was talking about until he disappeared for a week, but to this day I can still visualise the route he was going to take - he conceived it as a sight-seeing tour around some of the historic cities of middle-England: Coventry seemed to figure a lot in the diagram. In practice, he only reached Hyde Park. Subsequently, I spent a lot of time with him, and was again, as all his friends were, the constant listener of his plans, the unwilling admirer of his doodled mandalas. Therefore, I have spent a good deal of my childhood and early adult life in intimate contact with a man treading the path of dissolution. It is an extraordinary privilege. It has taken some twenty-six years to reach the stage of this partial publication of Andrew's diaries. At first, as I have already related, I tried to get a publisher for them, but this did not succeed. I then came to the conclusion that there was a "spiritual block" to their publication - that is, the time was not right. My mother was always in favour of publication. We both believe in Andrew's genius, and, want recognition for it. Elsewhere in the family, there was reluctance. My father was especially reluctant; he could not read the diaries, nor countenance their publication. He was an extraordinary man, and I have a double privilege in that I am the inheritor of his story as well, a project that has turned into a novel, and is described elsewhere on this website. It is easy to see why my father was reluctant. He would have liked to have been able to do more for Andrew. Falling foul of the problem of corruption in society, he was forced to retire somewhat earlier than necessary, and in fact, had to leave me to be the guardian of his fatherly duty towards my brother. Hence the spiritual block. My father died two years ago after a long and very happy retirement. With his passing the spiritual blockage has now been removed. I never do anything without a prior consultation with the I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes), with commentary by Richard Wilhelm. (A most profound commentary, the only contemporary one worth reading, and one that makes you think - how can any man know so much?) Regarding this publication and these words that I have written here, I drew 26, Ta' Chi, The Taming Power of the Great, followed by 11, Tai, Peace. Both hexagrams promise good fortune and success. The first hexagram talks of the effort to store up creative powers for a long time awaiting the right moment to release them. The moving line reads, "One attains the way of heaven. Success." Wilhelm comments as follows: "The time of obstruction is past. The energy long dammed up by inhibition forces its way out and achieves great success." I believe now is the time for an appropriate serialisation of selected chapters of the Voyage Into Night. The plan for serialisation There will be a publication on this website of selected chapters on an approximately fortnightly basis. In 1980 Andrew wrote an essay entitled Voyage into Night. It is autobiographical in content (Andrew could not write anything else) but it is also a fictional and literary work, so it describes his experiences from the viewpoint of someone who is treading the path of Enlightenment. From this chapter I have drawn the title to the book as a whole, which tells the story of his whole journey, but from a different perspective. The essay, Voyage into Night is already available for download. The serialisation will follow in some ways my own experience of reading Andrew's diaries. Imagine that you are confronted with a box full of diaries. You pull them out one at a time, but not necessarily in order. That is how the diaries will be published. The first chapter to be published will be Chapter 26, First Love, the first chapter of the third part of the work, The Antinomian Divide. It tells the story of how an attempt at an arranged marriage developed into friendship and love, only to dissolve into separation and futility. To follow this serialisation, please return to this website regularly. Alternatively, please follow me on Twitter, where I will announce the publications. |
Andrew Fekete, 1954 - 1986
Paul Klee - Ustrujiestpragova - 1929
Andrew Fekete - Compositional Study II - 1979
Andrew Fekete - The Sentinel - 1979
Andrew Fekete - The Lake Has Risen up to Heaven - 1980
Andrew Fekete - Detail from the Living Rock - Gotama Gate - 1981
Andrew Fekete - The Gate to the City of the Scream - 1980
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