There are about 70 people living here. In addition, the staff
(doctors, nurses, office staff, etc.) come to just over 20. It's
such a wide-open place, these are not big numbers at all. Far from
it: it might be more accurate to say that the place is on the empty
side. It's big and filled with nature and everybody lives quietly -
so quietly you sometimes feel that this is the normal, real world,
which of course it's not. We can have it this way because we live
here under certain pre-conditions.
I play tennis and basketball. Basketball teams are made up of both
staff and (I hate the word, but there's no way around it) patients.
When I'm absorbed in a game, though, I lose track of who are the
patients and who are staff. This is kind of strange. I know this
will sound strange, but when I look at the people around me during
a game, they all look equally deformed.
I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told
me that, in a sense, what I was feeling was right, that we are in
here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to
it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and
accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain
idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have
idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, and
though you might want to correct them, it doesn't happen overnight,
and if you try to force the issues in one case, something else
might go funny. He gave me a very simplified explanation, of
course, and it's just one small part of the problems we have, but I
think I understand what he was trying to say. It may well be that
we can never fully adapt to our own deformities. Unable to find a
place inside ourselves for the very real pain and suffering that
these deformities cause, we come here to get away from such things.
As long as we are here, we can get by without hurting others or
being hurt by them because we know that we are "deformed". That's
what distinguishes us from the outside world: most people go about
their lives unconscious of their deformities, while in this little
world of ours the defoemities themselves are a precondition. Just
as Indians wear feathers on their heads to show what tribe they
belong to, we wear our deformities in the open. And we live quietly
so as not to hurt one another.
In addition to playing sports, we all participate in growing
vegetables: tomatoes, aubergines, cucumbers, watermelons,
strawberries, spring onions, cabbage, daikon radishes, and so on
and on. We grow just about everything. We use greenhouses, too. The
people here know a lot about vegetable farming, and they put a lot
of energy into it. They read books on the subject and call in
experts and talk from morning to night about which fertilizer to
use an the condition of the soil and stuff like that. I have come
to love growing vegetables. It's great to watch different fruits
and vegetables getting bigger and bigger each day. Have you ever
grown watermelons? They swell up, just like some kind of little
animals.
We eat freshly picked fruits and vegetables everyday. They also
serve meat and fish of course, but when you're living here you feel
less and less like eating those because the vegetables are so fresh
and delicious. Sometimes we go out and gather wild plants and
mushrooms. We have experts on that kind of thing (come to think of
it, this place is crawling with experts) who tell us which plants
to pick and which to avoid. As a result of all this, I've gained
over six pounds since I got here. My weight is just about perfect,
thanks to the exercises and the good eating on a regular
schedule.
When we're not farming, we read or listen to music or knit. We
don't have TV or radio, but we do have a very decent library with
books and records. The record collection has everything from Mahler
symphonies to the Beatles, and I'm always borrowing records to
listen in my room.
