Meetings with RR Skinner

 

Photo of RR Skinner provided by Patricia Proenza in 1988

                                    

Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
Beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags, some in jags,
And some in velvet gowns.

-- Quoted by RR Skinner

What follows (in the following posts) are the events and narrative of meeting RR Skinner; our first meeting was in 1974, the last meeting was in 1986. This is taken from notes I made after these meetings; they were marathon sessions of talking with (mostly listening to) Reg, including what he told me about himself, his life, his family, and his observations on life. When I told Reg in 1985 that I would like to write about him he gave me a thick manila envelope containing copies of his various essays written over a thirty year period, I returned these papers to him later. The manuscript that I wrote became "Meetings with RR", it’s 125 pages of double-spaced text; it is unpublished and probably will never be published.

RR Skinner was born on  03 July 1909; he died at Bognor Regis on 31 December 1999 (these dates may not be accurate). From age eight to eleven he did not attend school because of frail health, he had a tubercular bowel and spent these three years in hospital or convalescing at home; this was a time of relative isolation and solitude. After returning to school he found that he couldn't pronounce certain words because of a stammer, but he overcame this through an effort of will. He was the seventh of fifteen children, plus two adopted children. Reg's mother, who ran and ministered her own spiritualist church in Bethnal Green, London, believed that her son would be the next world-teacher and she raised him for that position (this sounds terribly inflated today but it was also the aim of the Theosophical Society to find the next messiah or world teacher, a Buddha, and the person they eventually found was Jiddu Krishnamurti who eventually renounced this idea). In a letter to a friend RR's mother said that the child she was carrying, the future RR Skinner, would be the next messiah. RR told me that his ability to vet people was part of his training at his mother's church, it was his training to be a psychic and spiritual teacher. Many years ago I attended a few spiritualist meetings, these aren't seances but church services, sometimes these services were held at rented spaces in office buildings, and once at the Unitarian Church of the Messiah or, at other times, the Spiritual Science Fellowship, both located in Montreal; there is usually a non-denominational religious service, including hymns, followed by the medium addressing the congregation and communicating messages allegedly from the departed to their family members. I believe RR's mother, Elizabeth Mary Eagle Skinner, was the main influence of his life.

Oral history is an important source of information on the past; some of us, but not many, listen to the old folks and write down what they say. My mother spoke to me often about our family history, in fact it’s what we talked about the most and, now, years later, I am still impressed at the accuracy of what she remembered; I still have notes -- written on the backs of envelopes and scraps of paper -- recording what she said about our family's history. Part of my interest in family history is that my mother would mention relatives that I had never heard of and I wanted to know who they were, how they were related to me, what was my place in the genealogy of the family, I needed to make sense of what she said; I was the youngest member of our family and I wanted a record of what people said, what people did, and who these people were; I knew even then that no one lives forever and this might be my only chance to record what happened in the past. This wasn't for entertainment, it was to make sense of life by writing things down, writing as a way to understand something; and writing is a way of finding order in things, of putting things into their proper order. I am neither obsessive nor compulsive but I am serious and I know that I have a calling to write poems and a great need to make sense and order of this life, to remember the ancestors, and to record the events of my own life; towards this end I have kept a diary everyday since January 1965 and I have written books of poetry and literary criticism. This has been my life’s journey. From my interest and research in family history I have compiled our Morrissey family history; and I have written about my paternal grandmother, and her central place in our family, in Remembering Girouard Avenue. 

Address of RR's sister, Rosemary Skinner on RR's appointment card;
I was leaving for Ireland and RR suggested meeting his sister,
but this meeting never happened. Summer 1978.

"September 1913" by W.B. Yeats

 

What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone;

For men were born to pray and save:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,

The names that stilled your childish play,

They have gone about the world like wind,

But little time had they to pray

For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all that blood was shed,

For this Edward Fitzgerald died,

And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,

All that delirium of the brave?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were

In all their loneliness and pain,

You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son’:

They weighed so lightly what they gave.

But let them be, they’re dead and gone,

They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

"September 1913" by W.B. Yeats

 

William Butler Yeats in 1923

What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone;

For men were born to pray and save:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,

The names that stilled your childish play,

They have gone about the world like wind,

But little time had they to pray

For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all that blood was shed,

For this Edward Fitzgerald died,

And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,

All that delirium of the brave?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were

In all their loneliness and pain,

You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son’:

They weighed so lightly what they gave.

But let them be, they’re dead and gone,

They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

“The Stare's Nest by My Window”, by W.B. Yeats

 

The bees build in the crevices

Of loosening masonry, and there

The mother birds bring grubs and flies;

My wall is loosening; honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We are closed in, and the key is turned

On our uncertainty; somewhere

A man is killed, or a house burned,

Yet no clear fact to be discerned:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;

Some fourteen days of civil war;

Last night they trundled down the road

That dead young soldier in his blood:

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare;

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; O honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Note: the more times I read this poem by Yeats the more impressed I am by it, especially the last stanza. Re. "the stare", it reads on the Internet: "The first urban roost ever recorded was in Dublin's downtown plane trees in the 1840s, when the starling was the "stare" (an Old English word for the bird) and bought for food in city markets."