When Max returned to England at the end of the 1950s he became involved almost immediately again in controversies concerning the Bomb. At the end of the war he had achieved some notoriety for first having helped to construct the Bomb and then having disassociated himself from the dropping of it — and now there was not only the Atomic but the Hydrogen Bomb. In England, Max was approached by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; he went to their first large-scale rally in Trafalgar Square; he found himself joining their protest march to Aldermaston which was where components for the British Bomb were said to be being made. On the road near Maidenhead he was spotted by a journalist who knew him: he was carrying a pole which supported one end of a banner which proclaimed 'Let's Go Back to Bows and Arrows': carrying the pole at the other end was a pretty girl. The journalist wrote the story in his paper the next day with a headline — 'British Physicist Renews Anti-Nuclear Attack with Arrows'. By the time the march reached Aldermaston Max was marching with the banner folded and his arm round the girl; there was a posse of reporters waiting for him by the side of the road. Max explained — He had a great respect, yes, for the aims and especially the sprit of people in CND but he did not agree with them, no: he was still glad that the Bomb existed on account of the depravity of human nature; it was only through something like the existence of the Bomb that human nature might be kept within bounds or even change. Then why, he was asked, had he been carrying a banner which advocated a return to bows and arrows? Because, Max said, he had wished to be of assistance to people to whom he felt friendly. He was asked by reporters — Was this a responsible attitude for a physicist in a matter of such importance? Indeed, Max said, just as it had seemed to him sensible years ago to have helped in the construction of the Bomb and then to have protested against its use in war, so now it seemed
sensible to show sympathy with the good people of CND even though he was doubtful about their aims: what mattered in such a business was to distinguish between means and ends: if each person practised what he or she thought was right and recognised the obligations of others to do this, then ends could be left to themselves. In fact this was just the sort of attitude that might be required for, and indeed exemplify, a proper change in human nature, Max went on — but by this time most of his audience had drifted away. One or two papers the next day printed a photograph of Max leaning so heavily on the pretty girl that it was as if he were having to be propped up. A month or two later Eleanor came across a copy of one of these papers in Borneo: she sent Max a postcard saying — Indeed who but you and I would understand this business of levels! Eleanor had gone to Borneo after West Africa. In her profession as anthropologist she was still pursuing the idea that had come to her during her first period in Africa — the question of how there could be a form of anthropology that was not just to do with the recording of events and processes but which would include a consideration of the function of the recorder in organising them into systems. An anthropologist was the filter through which events and systems came to mind; yet anthropologists wrote as if they themselves did not exist. Eleanor's first published book was a collection of essays mainly about her time as an anthropologist. On one level the book was a straightforward tabulation of ethnographic facts; on another there was the arrangement of these facts to give the picture of a culture; both these levels were in the area of traditional anthropology. But then on a third level (Max wrote to her — 'This is our level!') Eleanor tried to speculate on her own activity as picker of facts and recogniser of patterns: what as an operator was she doing: was it not a characteristic of life, this forming and recognising of patterns? To understand living systems, perhaps one had to understand what one was doing in trying to understand living systems: they themselves were of the same nature as the activity of mind. It was by this that from what otherwise seemed to be at random there was produced orderliness: and to have a vision of one's own role in this would one not have to have an experience like the appreciation of what is called 'aesthetic'? At this point, to many of Eleanor's readers, she seemed to be dabbling in the occult. Her book was published at much the same time as Max had published his. Max wrote to her — 'And you hadn't even read
my book!' Eleanor replied — 'But of course I didn't have to: and of course I will read your book!'
Eleanor left Borneo and was with Max again in England for a time; then she went back to Zurich to complete her training to be a qualified analytical psychologist. She wanted, I suppose, to find out more about mind. She had already done her years of training as a medical student, and then her psychological studies in Zurich. She became one of the acolytes around Jung during his last years: she was in Zurich when he died. Then she left the entourage that had formed round him and came back to London: one of the things she had learned, she said, was that a prophet's teaching was likely to be distorted by his disciples organising themselves into something like a church after his death. This was a difficult time for Eleanor; she had disagreements with many of her friends. But the best form of promulgation for a prophet's ideas, she said, was, as always, for seeds to become scattered.
Eleanor wrote a short book about Jung's alchemical studies: this book was an elaboration of her thesis of 1939. Towards the end of his life Jung had become obsessed with alchemy: alchemists, he suggested, had used materials and material symbols but in fact they were trying to deal with states of mind. Eleanor elaborated on this: it had been necessary, she said, for alchemists to have spoken in riddles about what they were doing because what they were dealing with were processes rather than states — and the experience of a process had necessarily to be that of a journey in the dark. A too well-lit imaginative idea of what was happening would result in an end being assumed and thus the function of a process being destroyed — this function being a search, a testing, a trying-out of this or that, in recognition of the necessity that one should learn to learn for oneself. If an end was clear then there would be no process but a following of what was given; and from this, what could be learned for oneself? What was required of every organism if it was to develop or even survive was to learn to be flexible, to deal with whatever unexpectedly turned up: of what help in such practisings would be journeys in the light! The business of learning to learn as opposed to learning to follow a line would be learning on a higher leveclass="underline" a level of openness and testing on which there might be furtherance of life.
Eleanor did not settle down to earn her living as an analytical psychologist straightaway: she continued to travel; she obtained grants from universities and academic foundations for her work
abroad. She and Max continued, in their different disciplines, to echo and interweave with one another — about the business oflevels, of patterning, of the way in which by the recognition of such structuring there were made possible what otherwise seemed to be impossibilities about life. Max persevered in the areas of his scientific disciplines: he toyed with the idea that had first come to him on the mountain-top in Spain — Granted that in some sense the observer brings into existence that which he observes (there are potentialities from which he chooses) then indeed what should be the criteria by which he chooses; should not these indeed be called 'aesthetic', since he appears to act like an artist — trying out, testing, this or that? Why are scientists in their experimenting so reluctant to recognise their creative role? At the same time Eleanor noted how even writers in modern literature carried on as if people like themselves did not exist: they wrote of people who were helpless or comic victims: they did not write of people, that is, who were able to recognise and deal in patterns. And thus there was a contradiction in their work: the helplessness that they wrote about was belied by the skill of their performances: their description of other people's despair seemed to offer a successful protection perhaps against their own and that of others, but why could they not even try to write about the implications of this? At this point in her essay, however, Eleanor seemed suddenly to change tack: she said -