I forget the exact sequence of events, but I think it was at the Manchester STAT Conference that Marjory Barlow invited Erika to come and visit her when she was next going to be in London. When that time came Erika was staying with me, so I drove her to Marjory’s apartment near Swiss Cottage and joined them for tea.

After my spell of lessons with Marjory in the mid-eighties I had only intermittent contact with her at various STAT meetings. On one occasion, when I was still Chair of STAT, I asked Marjory to host a meeting of senior representatives of the different “streams” of the Technique at which the question of what to do about a school that was considered by some to have “gone rogue” would be addressed. Marjory had to play the role of “the authority”; the representative of the dharma, so to speak. Whilst the discussion about the various “goings-on” at the school in question was progressing, Marjory at one point gave me a dig in my ribs with her elbow and whispered, “Well you know what old Gurdjieff said don’t you; that sooner or later everything turns into its opposite, and this is an example of just that.” ¹

With this in mind, and already by then being quite familiar with Erika’s views on a number of Alexander-related matters, I was anticipating another fascinating encounter. I had seen them together before of course; at Erika’s Memorial Lecture in 1985 (when they had a different recollection about the role of table-work during the Ashley Place training course), at the Brighton Congress in 1988 and more recently at the Manchester STAT Conference, but this was something more intimate. How were they going to interact? Given all that Erika and, to a lesser extent, Margaret Goldie had told me about the development of Alexander’s work and the split between the two groups of students at Ashley Place (see The First Training Course in 1931: a different perspective), I felt that here was an opportunity to gain some insight into the fruits of their different understanding and focus.

Most of the conversation was very light – chit-chatting about people they knew or had known. It was, in fact, at this tea party that I heard Marjory’s story about Margaret Goldie and FM’s ashes (see Lessons With Miss G, 10: Some Meaningful Tittle-tattle). At some point Marjory began to talk about the need to keep Alexander’s teaching just as it had been taught to them. I knew that Erika had a different perspective on this issue, and wondered how she might deal with it. But Erika could always find an angle from which to respond which neither complied with nor contradicted what another person was saying. She just moved the conversation seamlessly along – something at which she was a master. “Well” she would often say, “one has to get along with people.” What I witnessed in her, however, evidenced an inner freedom from reaction. She could allow another person to have their own opinion without it disturbing her equanimity.

Somehow the interaction reminded me of Hermann Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund ²; not by any means in the personal details of their lives – the parallel does not stand up to scrutiny as Erika could not at all be described as Dionysian any more than Marjory could be described as Apollonian. No! It was the fact that Marjory, despite the quarrel with FM in the 1950’s, had – like Narcissus in Hesse’s novel – stayed, as it were, “in the monastery” and risen to be the “abbot”, whereas Erika had, like Goldmund, gone out into the world in search of adventure and knowledge, and had a different understanding of Alexander, his ideas and life itself. Marjory had a mission; to look after the Technique and to transmit it in its purity; to not change a thing. Erika chose to put it and herself to the test in the maelstrom of Life, and thereby to hone her understanding on the wheel of experience. Both of these octogenarian “living treasures” were indubitably evolved human beings; not only did they have the wisdom which comes from a long life, but also they were replete with the palpable energies which ensue from several decades of work on oneself. I had and have tremendous respect for both of them.

My personal impression was that whereas Marjory was a very big fish in the Alexander pond, Erika swam free in the sea of life.

1. G I Gurdjieff (1866-1949). In his theory of Octaves, Gurdjieff states that “…we can observe how the line of development of forces deviates from its original direction and goes, after a time, in a diametrically opposed direction, still preserving its former name.”: In Search of the Miraculous, P D Ouspensky; published by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., London 1950. See also www.gurdjieff.org.uk

2. See: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/299/299707/narcissus-and-goldmund/9780141984612.html

© 2020 John S Hunter