OPUS 21 (44 page)

Still he believed it.

The truth shall make ye free.

Still he cried out that men are born for freedom.

And he died, a prophet without particular honor in the home town of himself.

He shouted:

Forever learn the new

Down with everything as is

Seek God beyond his Holy Names

Behold yourself

(Intellectual, critic, philosopher, preacher)

The while, he beheld but morsels of himself, and--like other men--admired them as if they were the fabric of reality and not the gingerly scissored swatches of one awareness.

Well, go away now, Wylie.

It is the time, as you so intellectually predicted, for an improved you or a better somebody to take over the problem. Good night, sweet hypocrite. Dauntless disappointment. Oaf. Of course, I argued with myself against self-condemnation.

I am a contemporary man, I insisted.

Too conditioned by father and mother, school, church, America, the common law, and this and that, and you, and you, to expect in a single lifetime (not too long, either) that I could, by whatever authenticity of effort, penetrate thousands, thousands, thousands of years of the unpenetrated stuff in my superego and discover the true whole of me beyond: the conveniently overlooked, the misrepresented, the tabooed, the forgotten, the unfrocked, the submerged structure of humanity itself.

And I argued:

Even if I did this, it would be nothing.

What I said was reason, they would say was sacrilege.

What I said was love, they would call obscene.

What I said was truth, they would call nonsense.

My hope would bring them but despair.

My laughter would wring their panicky tears.

My God would also be their Devil.

And some of my ideals would seem un-American.

They would call my route to understanding a blind labyrinth.

Their scientists would find me emotional.

Their priests--cold, analytical, and heartless.

Every instinct of my society would belabor me whenever I pointed out its valid opposite. And when I said, These are but local, temporal contradictions--seen together, they can be transcended, understood, contained by a man who rises above them to look down upon them, or by a man who shoulders them, why!!! All who live by the exploitation of one side of any paradox, all the mighty engineers and all the honored men of God, would jump at me.

And they would finally corner me somewhere, breaking my own rules.

The storm was upon the city, now. The oncoming cold front had won the battle of the isobars. Lightning hissed and hit some nearby edifice, accompanied by a blast of thunder. The hammer of Thor, the flashbulbs of Zeus flooded the metropolis with pale, stroboscopic light. Buildings quivered under the cannonade. Inside them the millions cowered and crossed themselves or stood admiring at their windows, each, according to his nature, responding to the grandeur of liberation.

The first drops splashed upon my parapet. My curtain stretched like a flag. Papers blew. I shut the window and ran about in the pleasant excitement of the arriving storm, making fast my small interior. The world beyond churned in ecstasies of rain, din, and colored light that showed no more than light's existence. My lamps glowed for a moment a sinister red, and came up again.

I sat there after finishing my little errands, preoccupied with the loud allegory in the street. The psyche has its climate.

Every burning drought serves by its precise degree to lift the waters of the earth for rains--and floods, too. Every deluge brings fertile substance to the spirit's plains and exposes the rich minerals on its crags. In the cold, the plants rest; in summer, they make ready the ice-resistant seeds. The trick is not--as men believe--to become but a willful rainmaker--endeavoring by rites, fasts, dances, or sleets of solid carbon dioxide to alter the immutable for some hour's advantage. This is failure; whatever such methods steal here must be repaid elsewhere. The great accomplishment of man is to understand the relationships of climate, appreciate them all, adapt his soul to every temporal vicissitude--

in the knowledge that whoever is free from pride in this one good or prejudice against that special evil cannot be engulfed, or eroded, or burned alive, or frozen into the sparse tundra of intellect, of asceticism.

He--and he alone---conveys the mutations of consciousness who tends his green valley undismayed by knowing it is the valley of winter shadow. And could he own all the reasoning power of man--could his soul present within him all that women know but cannot say--he would be as God.

After a time the storm somewhat diminished. The city hissed like the embers of a great fire that resists hose and bucket.

Now, I was invaded by that projection of self-pity which Catholics think is love and Protestants believe is duty. I saw Ricky and Karen and my family, all my fond, patient friends--in sorrow. Great tears glistened inside me and their tiny counterparts ran on my cheeks.

No, I cried. Spare me not for myself--I am reconciled; but for them.

I investigated such intricate delicacies in Ricky as I have not attempted to describe here and I saw how sorrow would run through them all; I watched the infinite loyalty of a daughter turned by the slab of a tomb; I saw my family lifting up the load of their one more bereavement and my friends kicking stones, not selfishly, but for the world they hoped I might someday somehow bring my jot of meaning to.

I paced the muggy flat and cursed.

And more.

I shall not tell you for you already know the sentiments whereby love, and duty, too, are transferred. Only at long, long last I realized how much I, who own nothing but my inner self, had imagined I owned them.

It was an injury I'd done them.

And so one more illusion set aside its mask, at least for that while, that now.

How many there were!

How often I saw them on other countenances; how rarely I lifted them from my own.

Finally, I fell asleep.

An old, old man-sitting in a chair.

RAIN TEEMED in the stone-gray morning.

My little Big Day.

A tepid stew was strained from the colander of heaven and dripped in lachrymose gray juice that steamed on every brick and tile and slate and on the asphalt acreage of the street.

I sent for my drab breakfast. You are familiar with its one element. A cup and a cup and a cup.

I set myself to my last installment. For a while, the inked deletions wavered and ran off the track. I went to the window and watched the rain smoke on my parapet--

looked up at the insipid sky--found no one there--and finally turned to the roses which drooped a little in the corner of the room--drooped but glowed--and perfumed every glaucous shadow of the morning with fond recollection. The lines came straighter, after that.

By and by I called Hugo about my ticket.

"Closed in," he said. "They're landing a few planes still--but they've delayed departures. Later, it's supposed to clear--and it'll be cooler. This is the front of a high coming in from Canada."

Closed in.

"Shall I try the evening flight?"

"Sure," I said.

I gave the number of the sanitarium.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Wylie, Mr. 'Wilson had a comfortable night. He's talking to Dr.

Adams, now. I couldn't interrupt.

He seems quite cheerful--said if you phoned to tell you he'd call back when he finished his consultation."

I turned over the last page--read, cut one more paragraph, marked the lines on my long tally sheet, counted them, and felt, suddenly, the negative pressure of completion--

the vacuum's strain, the sense of deprivation. Work can be addictive--one more self-enchantment of the cortex--another of the infinite autohypnoses. And when the addict's done with it, what comfort is there for his unemployment?

I stacked the many pages, scribbled a note to Harold, and phoned to his office that the manuscript would be ready for his messenger at the desk. A few merry hours and a little excitement for the profligate, dun days of my fellow citizens, God bless and pity them--a vicarious trip beyond the confines of mass production--a description of the flavor of a few of the trees they had cut down.

Bill came for it and carried it to the lobby.

Now, my clothes.

My costume.

Everything was finished

with the possible exception of me.

Rain fell all around the marquee--in a wet, funereal fringe.

The doorman stood in the street beneath his great umbrella, whistling. Two old ladies waited impatiently, jostling each other and batting annoyedly at their pocketbooks.

They seemed to expect the whistle to conjure up a yellow taxi from the fourth dimension and because it took Al five minutes to hail an empty, the elder of the two put back her dime in her purse and snapped it with the righteous authoritative sound of a Norn's shears.

"Let's go to Gimbel's first," she said.

But the other wanted to start in Lord and Taylor's.

They whisked away debating this.

And I went soon--through the leaden atmosphere, on the black and slippery pavement.

The people were there in the office ahead of me.

Mr. So-and-so. Mrs. So-and-so. Miss So-and-so.

The nurse was there, too.

It was where we had come in. Where we all do. Where we leave.

I sat, batting the drops from my trouser cuffs, smelling the damp feathers of the anxious poultry.

I found my magazine.

At last

"Mr. Wylie."

It was still a different doctor--a plump little man wearing glasses which took the radiance of his floor lamps as a shield so I could not see his eyes. His neutral hair was cut as short and even as fur.

"I'm glad to make your acquaintance," he said. "Have a cigarette. I've read your books."

I took his cigarette. Inauspicious token.

The condemned man smoked a hearty breakfast.

"Not all of us physicians deserve such a keel-hauling." He laughed at the way I'd rubbed the nose of his trade in its sins and pomposities. This was to show me his nose was immaculate.

"Sure."

He lighted his own and smoked the way doctors often do--like schoolkids with Cubebs.

"Personally, I think it's a shame a man with ability like yours for putting words together should get mixed up in this Jungian stuff."

The place had been done by a decorator--a decorator who saw a surgeon's waiting room as something soothing in ivories and sepia and faint gold. And putting words together is just a trick, too; it doesn't involve knowledge or sense--just lucky knack.

I cut a smile in my face for him. "Talk it over, sometime," I said.

He smirked interest in himself. ''I'm a sort of cross between a Freudian and a semanticist, Wylie. What do you think of semantics?"

"The poets understood it before Korzybski."

"Very good! Very! Still--"

"--a means. A useful insight." I felt a bead of sweat roll from my armpit down my corrugated ribs. "The basic assumption is mistaken, though. It omits instinct. No cortical rearrangement will accomplish much, even with semantics, until it admits instinct--"

"I always wondered whether you understood the subject. Guess you do. But I still don't see Jung's slant."

How cleverly the thumb and finger de-wing the caught fly! And how the fly beats its legs in satisfactory protest! If I had injured his composure in some book or other, some essay, he would avenge it now. I stared at the flaring spectacles of this penny-ante sadist and swore to myself that he could sweat me--and all his full waiting room--till Gabriel put his brass horn to his lips before I'd twitch my foot. And in this outlandish, familiar crisis of our everyday relations, I brought forth with the energies of wrath another formulation.

I blew smoke at the fat little hamster. "You can put it this way. Jung sees the source of the superego as unconscious, too--just as Freud sees the id. To Jung--both are continuums of instinct. That's all. Any culture--even the culture of you physical scientists, which is mostly yet to come--rises from instinct, not from the frontal lobes. If you think of superego as subconscious in source and merely the opposite of id, you can understand Toynbee--and Toynbee's error about a churchly salvation for this day and age. You might actually understand Jesus--and what Christianity was intended to be to people. You can understand a great deal that even most psychologists don't know about."

"Interesting," he said, and he gave up. There were papers on his desk. "Like to mull it over with you someday." He discarded two or three sheets. "I've got a report on you here somewhere." He found it, finally. "Negative." He glanced at me and chuckled.

"Cobb, my associate, was fooled. Told me he was all but sure of carcinoma. The thing--"

he read to himself--His a rather rare lymphatic growth. But two or three mild doses of X

ray will obliterate it. You'll never be able to see the site. Cobb will give you the first treatment straight off. Only take a few minutes. Just hold your mouth open--and shed your troubles." He chuckled again. "Mighty glad to meet you, Wylie. Maybe, someday, you'd come up to Westchester and talk to a little group I'm a member of--"

I said I would, breaking my rule. And that was that.

It happens to millions. The frightful diagnosis, the aching interlude, the laboratory check, reprieve. Till next time. It is one of the you-knows.

Half an hour later I went down to the level of the street. The lobby of this particular medical building was a poorly lighted, sparsely furnished marble sepulcher and along it lay a track of corrugated rubber matting upon which were the coming and going footprints of us all. I sat on a stone bench.

Weakness was for a while my only sensation.

My thoughts ran feebly.

They had given it back to me.

I was getting used to the process.

I should exult--

deliver myself of some noble message, immediately.

I have nothing to offer you but the Four Biles: blood and sweat and tears and W.C.

A doorman appeared from behind a fern that had been handed down from Pharaoh.