Eleanor Anstruther on the Importance of Imagination, What Happens When You’re Severed, and How To Recover Reality
A contemplation of the nature of reality, the legacy of the British Empire, and the impact of Boarding School Syndrome
I first met
when she filled in the Beyond Questionnaire. It was immediately apparent that she was brilliant and tender and a total badass. We also had a lot in common—for one thing, she talks to ants! After that, I was lucky enough to chat with her at her book party in New York City, and then we had the most glorious lunch in London’s Holland Park. We spoke for two and a half hours straight and only stopped because my sometimes glitchy brain went into overload. All of which confirmed that she’s brilliant and tender and a total badass. Also that she’s incredibly kind and funny and generous. And she’s quickly become of one my favorite writers. I adore her Substack and often start my morning by listening to her read one of her short daily posts. They’re transportive. She’s also written A Perfect Explanation and In Judgement of Others both of which are fantastic.So, of course, I asked Eleanor if she’d write an essay for Beyond. And lucky us, she said, yes! “I’ve been thinking a lot about British Boarding School Syndrome and about how we’re increasingly cut off from nature and this severing is creating a distortion of reality and we need to connect with our imaginations and the divine and the material to find our way back,” she said, or words to that effect. “Does that sound interesting?” Um, yes. The result of which, the essay you’re about to read, knocked my proverbial socks off.
Enjoy! I so look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments!
Reality Calling
I’ve been thinking about reality, what it is, what it means, how I sit at this table, and the trees can speak, and you are another myself. I’ve been thinking about a woman sitting on the shores of the Mediterranean, staring out to sea, her back to a sea of tents, her family gone, her possessions blown up, and what does she have left? And I’ve been thinking about the British Empire; the schools it built, the structures it designed, how the Silver Guillotine in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials ripped me to shreds, and what happens when humans are severed. Do you remember the scene? Children are put in a box and cut from their Daemons.
Earlier this year I visited the Giant’s Causeway, a Paleogenic wonder on the northern coast of Ireland; gargantuan in proportion and megalithic in display which geologists will explain with scientific exactitude, but I prefer to believe it was the giants. Why? Because it’s more fun. And also without infinite figments of our imagination what do we have left? A finite material world and a prescriptive god, and that doesn’t sound like living to me. It sounds dull.
I write this in my home in the south of France, a place singing with aesthetic beauty, thin veils and mystery. Here, a picture book existence makes me wonder at my luck, a door audibly bangs to another world, and angels appear. Time spent here is to know fully that reality is part material, part imaginary, part divine, that this physical aspect which allows me to type is but a fraction of the whole. As I wrote that sentence, a box fell off the shelf behind me containing a 3d puzzle of Stubb’s painting of Whistlejacket. I’ve been here a week with no one moving anything. That painting has been my go-to love of the wild unseen since I was a child. This is what I’m talking about. Things happen here. I once dreamt I came down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to find a whole set of other beings leaning at the island stove, people that weren’t humans at all, who could see me but were uninterested, who inhabited a much higher plain. No doubt one of them thought it would be funny to push the puzzle off the shelf, or apposite. Maybe they just wanted a mention. Either way, whichever way you slice it, there’s invisible life in this house that witnesses me as I witness the characters in a book. I am the three dimensions to their fourth. I know it and they know it and that dream, and the puzzle falling from the shelf, are two occurrences of many.
I also write this as a survivor of early childhood sexual abuse, a kind of severing of reality from which I have fought my way back. What god would allow this? There must be no god. How do I survive? I will leave my body. And my imagination swelled, grew unbalanced, and became infected by fantasy in a world dictating that only the material is real. I write this in recovery of true reality. These things happened and I am here and I am not singularly flesh or non-existent or all mighty but in equal parts all three.
So let’s get to the point. A world dictating that only the material is real. Let’s zero in on that. At the dawn of the Age of Reason when Science challenged God the English invented schools; specifically Public Schools, so called, not because they were for the public, (they were fee-paying and only the rich could afford them), but so as to pay no tax. Public Schools were (up until this year) by default, registered charities with a scholarship quota. That’s the “Public” bit. The British were empire building, and in order to get away with the genocide necessary to turn up uninvited in someone else’s country and take it over, they needed foot soldiers cut off from the neck down. They needed all head and no heart and certainly not the imagination which might have imagined what they were doing was wrong. Boys as young as eight were sent away with their little trunks of possessions, not to see their parents again until Christmas. They were beaten and sexually violated, cordoned off from anything approaching art, and in all ways severed from what made them human. They were made “men” of; meaning male humans who could watch another die and not be shattered by it unless that other human looked and spoke and behaved exactly like them. Imagination was allowed for very small children but only if they understood it wasn’t real. The divine was allowed as long as you met Him in church and on your knees.
Midway through this great enlightenment the Industrial Revolution marched in to carry thousands of not at all rich from country to city, slaying their quotidian engagement with nature. The British Empire grew, outstripping Genghis Kahn and Ivan the Terrible, controlling at its height over 400 million people, (not counting the souls of those foot soldiers), and wiping out, over four bloody centuries, immeasurable knowledge, uncountable cultures and the very soul of magic. It was no wonder, then, that the birth of The British Empire and the Age of Reason coincided, and that the British Empire took one look at the condemning of The Unseen and the severing from Nature and used these twin forces as their twin weapons of choice. Feathers in their hair! Savages. No shoes on their feet! Uncivilised. Before you could say, “dunking stool”, we were shaming dreamers and ridiculing shamans and science had become another battle ground. You’re either with us or against us but you can’t have both.
Then along came the Victorians and their do-gooding attitude to the poor, followed swiftly by socialism and the call for a state school system that actually was for the public. The British Empire, not nearly ashamed enough, rebranded itself as The Commonwealth, but instead of acknowledging that multiple generations had been laid waste by a system devoid of the basic understanding of what makes us tick, the British Government copied the old system to the letter, albeit with fewer beatings, and sexual exploitation limited by dint of the pupils going home at night. Creative play was for primary school, at eleven we put those dreams away, and if you didn’t, it was made clear that you were not half as valuable as a scientist or mathematician, philosopher or doctor. Lawyers were, and still are, better than sculptors. In short, if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, and if it doesn’t exist it’s no use.
This sensibility persists. If you creep out on the ledge of make believe there’s a good chance you’ll be laughed back inside. If you dare to propose that the Aztecs were onto something, or Atlantis exists or what about alien spaceships you’ll be sent to the back of the class. And don’t, for the love of god, admit to hearing voices.
Cue a multitude fixated on material solutions to this problem called life, a conviction of absolute explanation and finite power, and the emergence lately, as men born in the 60’s reach mid-life in an era of therapy, of Boarding School Syndrome, a condition so acute and widespread they had to name it. A person suffering this condition will present, among other things, a fear of intimacy, emotional suppression, low self-esteem, avoidance of vulnerability, distrust of others, a persistent fear of abandonment, problems with anger, depression, anxiety – need I go on? It sounds like the last six Prime Ministers of Britain and all of the leaders of the free, and not so free world today. If I am only my body, and the visible world is all there is, if I am, in short, alone, then what’s the point? If your gain is my loss then why would I not fight you for it? Sometimes I wonder if all those with their finger on the trigger, dropping bombs and starting wars, if on their deathbed when reality comes crashing at their shore they’ll think, Oh shit. What a colossal waste to have brutalised millions only to discover that the demon they were running from was in their head. Or that they never got over that other severance, the original, necessary one when their umbilical was cut and by mistake they took it personally. What a shame. Better luck next time.
But let’s be kinder. What if they tried really hard to remain whole, to keep rotating in their childish systems the holy trinity of realms that every newborn knows. What if they began believing in The Little People and talking to Giants, playing with Fairies at the bottom of the garden only to be told they were wrong? What if the monsters under the beds were real? What if, like me, they left their body, their imagination became infected by fantasy, and god was put in a box? I didn’t start a war, but I could have done.
In Iceland, in order to build a new road, planners must take account of the homes of the Huldefólk; the Hidden People. Still. Now. In 2025. So there is hope. And educators in the UK are waking up to the devastating effects on the psyche of children denied creative play. Yet we still say, “Perhaps I imagined it” to debase something we suspect yet daren’t admit. And by no coincidence at all, “Perhaps I imagined it” is the defence of all survivors who are not yet resourced to go there.
Part of my recovery has been working with a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and in our sessions we work in the realms of material (the body) and imagination (what I see when I close my eyes.) The imaginary realm has served as a conduit to both the divine and the material, a central meeting place where anything is possible, including the healing of ancient wounds. We literally meet in the liminal, I see it as a white space, no up, no down, no judgement, and work with whatever joins us there. It has proved vital, magic and holy. It has been intense. It’s been real. I know this because of the very real material difference I experienced during the recent death of my mother; a difference from those around me who haven’t been lucky enough to do this work. My mother was hardly the stuff of Mary Poppins; she was absent, tough and uncaring, and there was much to be angry about, but when she died I watched her body be carried away not as a daughter lacking in love or a child neglected, but as a human. A flow within me had been reestablished; it kept me grounded through her demise and widened my ability to connect with her in a place of our shared reality. She died and I will die, too. It was less about forgiveness than a complete absence of rancour. I’ve also been microdosing – no surprise there – and again, those conscious magic mushrooms who work between many more dimensions than the three I’ve been focusing on, have wrought actual, materially measurable changes to my life experience. I am kinder. I laugh more. I let be more easily. Without those three working in cohort the very spine of our existence is crippled. They are the discs which keep us moving. The Giant’s Causeway had a point.
I’ve been trying very hard not to end this with unsolicited advice or any sort of call to action. Yes, we’re severed from reality. Millions live by their phones and die under the impression they’re alone, many millions more believe their worth can be measured in numbers. And the woman still looks out to sea, her back to a sea of tents, her children gone, everything lost, and the bombs still drop, and I sit in my beautiful house in the south of France and think who am I to tell you how to live? Who am I to tell her? But, you guessed it. I just can’t resist. So here it is.
In the overwhelm of a world maddened by confusion, the discs which soften our movement ruptured or enlarged beyond reason, when beauty feels like a privilege and grace is all we have, for those of you not with your backs to a sea of tents because surely she knows already, I encourage you to live knowing the three realms we have access to; the material, imaginary and divine, are real. The sum of their parts is reality; everything you see around you was born in someone’s imagination, including you, and time engaged with all three, and with fair shared belief, is time well spent. When we are born we are severed from our mothers, and some of us are relieved (me) and others are devastated, and all of us during our lifetimes must find our way back to the divine by asking the question, Who am I? and imagining the answer. This is the human experience, the collective endeavour that requires all three realms to get there. Let them bring you together. Reality is calling.
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If you enjoyed this essay, you might like this one by Gayle Brandeis:
Thank you for reading! I love hearing your thoughts!
What’s your definition of reality? What’s your relationship with the material, the imaginary, and the divine? Let me know in the comments!
There is nothing better than receiving a reminder of all that is important. Some writers, you Jane, and you Eleanor, can wiggle between the cracks of my tightly bound humanity to the soft, open space where your words create an expansion that leaves me changed. For this I am very grateful. I loved this essay SO much and appreciate that it showed up for me this morning.
I want my definition of reality to be expansive, to be able to walk through every day seeing beyond the current dimensions I'm locked in, to feel the Divine by my side every step of the way, and yet this requires a great deal of effort most of the time. So I make that effort because I want more for my reality.
Thank you both.
Eleanor, my dear friend. This is one of the best things I’ve read of late. I will read it again to let it sink into me.
Would that more of us would embrace these realms, give light and empathy to our own severing, do the work that enables kindness and laughter to pour from the depths of us more freely.
I am grateful to know you and to be in conversation with you through your words and your bright intelligence and your beautiful heart.
Thank you, Eleanor. Thank you, Jane. You’re two of the Substackers I’d be honored and over the moon to commune with in person someday. And I’m so delighted you got to do so with each other.