Obituary: Barry Palmer

Among the many who have come to the Maenllwyd over the years we count a number of social work professionals of the highest distinction. What brings them to the heart of Wales often seems mysterious. It is as if in these caring professions there is no adequate sharing among the professionals themselves. In a sort of loneliness they have to seek elsewhere and it is to the hills that they come. Barry Palmer and John Broadbent both belong in their distinctive ways to this category. They came a few times and that was enough. They both tell me their lives were changed by the experience. They had no need to take up Zen or Buddhism. But the shift began. The 'Who am I' question had happened and that was enough. Here John, formerly a professor of English at Cambridge and now an artist with a recent exhibition of painting to his credit, writes of his long association with Barry whose early loss is a tragedy for many. To celebrate his life we present two of his accomplished poems chosen for us by Jane Aron. (Ed)

Barry Palmer died on 29 October 1998 after a series of heart attacks, aged 63. He introduced me to Maenllwyd. We did not coincide there but it opened up both our lives into deeper streams.

Barry read science at Oxford and then theology at Cambridge with a view to the priesthood, for he had had early experience of evangelical Christianity. He decided against the church but went to work with the Rev. Bruce Reed at the Grubb Institute in London, which deploys the Tavistock-style study of group relations, often within religious settings such as churches, charities and caring organisations. This suited his cast of mind and he stayed there for half a career, working with the interaction of systems theory with psychoanalysis which drives the Tavistock method. It was, though, a time of mainly backroom activity.

On first acquaintance Barry seemed undernourished, as well as diffident; you could find this irritating in situations that called for banging about. Then you would begin to recognise the fine inner balance, his independent judgement, and, especially after Maenllwyd, the bravery that led him into new work and new love.

In his mid-40s everything began to change, some of it with the painful awkwardness of a chrysalis breaking open. Who can account for these changes? I don't even know what order they came in. Explanations are given in studies of the male life-cycle by such writers as Gould, Levinson and Erikson. I think most often of John Crook's take on Erikson in a chapter called 'The dialectics of change' in his book The Evolution of Human Consciousness: an inability to face crises produces either a foreclosure in which the crisis is denied or a moratorium consisting in a persistent but low-profile identity problem that remains unresolved. The moratorium reminds me of the character in a Jacobean tragedy who is stabbed on stage and says, "I have caught an everlasting cold". Is it the misery of the persistent cold that forces change? Peter Marris, in his great, neglected book Loss and Change (Routledge 1974), writes: "revolutions... happen when the meaning of human life has already disintegrated... from contradictions and anomalies... pervading society with a troubled, inexplicit sense of loss..."; thus the characters in a Chekhov play seem to prefigure the Russian revolution in the whole texture of their lives.

At any rate, Barry found his way to Maenllwyd. After that, he left the Grubb and set himself up as an independent consultant to institutions. This was risky but he was remarkably successful, packed with work to the last. One of the contracts of which he was most proud was with a synagogue community facing dissension. At the same time he was consultant in Dublin on the training of Roman Catholic priests. He began to write more poetry, some of it of high quality; and together with Colin Evans of Cardiff, and Jon Cook of East Anglia, and myself, he developed creative writing workshops. He began to write more professional articles, and a book with Nano McCaughan. He separated from his marriage and embarked on a new partnership, to be tested by differences of distance, language, occupation; they overcame.

Within all this, and in a similar state myself, I asked him to join the staff of DUET, the first of a series of experiential workshops designed to help lecturers in English make radical shifts in their teaching. The workshop was experiential: the lecturers became students. One of the strands was a series of group sessions run on Tavistock lines - no agenda, but an interpreting consultant. Needless to say, there was tension and some resentment among the lecturers; and the workshop was scary to run. The group sessions especially needed firm control, and clarity about objectives.

Barry supervised them, with great success, complete calm and no casualties. His combination of science with humanities gave him credibility with the academics; but real authority came with his being so notably an intellectual person - even though not an academic he was for ever scrutinising. David Punter, professor of English at Stirling, friend and colleague of us both, has written about Barry: "What comes back to me most strongly at the moment is a facial expression: a curiously interrogatory tilting of the lip, as though to say, 'Good Lord - can you really believe that life is like that?' But that makes it sound scornful, and I mean the reverse, a kind of informed incredulity at the things people might get up to, or believe about themselves; but always without any sense that I, Barry, of course, know better than that; despite what was obvious, really, which was that he did know a lot more about people than most of us."

As he lay in his last bed in a stressed London hospital he made notes about the different vocabularies that nurses and doctors on the ward used to describe the same medical events in a patient; and wondered how that difference of language might mirror boundaries higher up in the system of the NHS. Much of his professional work was with health trusts, housing, the Probation Service, and with socialwork teams and managers, striving always to clarify, elucidate, encouraging confused people to look at the enterprise as a whole and to define exactly their own role within it. Behind that, he was himself in analysis, and counselling, for many years; and he attended to his own development by studying with a colleague the meaning that Lacanian analysis might have for systems theory, and by meeting with a co-mentor once a week, or once a month. To say nothing of his devout practice of meditation.

There is something in all this perhaps too good to be true; but it did not feel like that. I have seen him at the end of his tether, brought low, at a loss; laughing and laughing on a sailing trip (he could not sail, nor barely swim) which took us to Ithaca, the island of Odysseus; and then writing a wonderful poem based on a story at the end of the Odyssey. A god - or was it Tiresias? - told the ageing voyager to take a well-carpentered oar and carry it so far inland that the people there would never have seen the sea. Eventually he would meet a man who said, "Why are you carrying a winnowing-fan over your shoulder?" To that place death would come peacefully to him. When he sent me the poem, I painted a picture about it; but I had forgotten the story and in my picture Odysseus plants the oar in the earth and its blade bursts into flames. At his funeral one of the other poems that Jane Aron asked us to read aloud began and ended like a koan. It's coming up below...

Two Poems on Departing

Barry Palmer

The Three Sages

I asked three sages: What happens when we die?
The first said: when we die the spirit strikes off the fetters of the flesh. Beneath the stone we thrust through darkness, mole beneath wire and tower, and beyond the perimeter, make our  break to liberty.
The second said: we sleep until the time capsule of our acts is opened, sifted, judged, and all we gave is gold, and all we hoarded, ash, and now is ever love or ever loss.
The third said: when we die the body ceases selfing. Nothing goes nowhere. Nature knew herself in us, and knows herself in others. Where does the fist go from the unclenched hand?

At a loss

He slipped away unnoticed in a low black car, With no luggage, only  some flowers, Without his cough, in the  failing sunlight of this November  afternoon.
We have sung quaint songs to glassy saints And benefactors' urns, grasping the old tunes Like a handrail in fog. He has spared us The plush obscenity of the crematorium.
Now the men from the market and the golf club Stand, stiff and helpless in their dark overcoats. The tears stand in the wings, awaiting the cue That never comes, to step on and fall.
Death is a street corner where the names On the signs, as on these stones, have faded. No one asks the way, knowing Each of us is a stranger here himself.