The Revolt of Aphrodite: Tunc and Nunquam

by Lawrence Durrell

  Baynes must long since have gone to bed; so while foraging for a cigarette I implored Benedicta to put some coffee on the hob. “You were right, Julian” I said, and all of a sudden I recognised my own relief by the tone in which I uttered the words. “But you gave me the devil of a start. What you suggested was impossible at this stage without outside aid, and when I rang Marchant he swore that he hadn’t taken a hand in it. All kinds of gross scientific short-circuits flashed into my mind. But of course we had both forgotten Said—he provided the number and arranged the call. Phew!” I sank down in front of the fire, and a silence fell—the deep rich silence of the countryside; I could feel him drinking it in with nostalgia, his head cocked like a gun-dog. “How still it is here” he said, in a wondering sort of way. “Somehow much stiller than the big house—there were always noises there. It’s the small rooms I expect.” Benedicta came with coffee on a tray; she had already changed into her pyjamas and combed out her hair. We sat down before the fire, stirring it into flame, and pouring ourselves mugs of the steaming stuff.

  Julian stared hard into the fire over our shoulders. He seemed very calm, very much at peace—and yet with the sort of peace which suggested the resignation of old age rather than the inner resolution of, say, conflicting anxieties. “You said she would be ready next month, didn’t you? We must start of course insinuating her into our lives a little, no? She is after all, from her own point of view, taking up a long life from the point at which she left it off. One wouldn’t want her to have the cold comfort of being some scientific orphan.” I was very touched by a curious sort of plangency in his tone, rising and falling like the rosined note of a viol; it had an accent of rather naïf sympathy. Even his face looked somehow juvenile and unlined in the firelight as he spoke. “Wouldn’t you say, I mean?” he ended a trifle lamely, but with the same unemphatic wistfulness which I found somehow touching. “I only hope” I said “that you don’t identify too closely with the model we’ve made, and mistake it for the actual subject! It wouldn’t be too difficult as a matter of fact—she’s so damn true to life, if I may use such an expression. Indeed Marchant and I have both found ourselves thinking of her as if she were real and not merely a man-made doll, however word-perfect.” He nodded once or twice as I spoke. “I know,” he said softly “I know.” And his lips moved as if he were whispering some sotto voce admonitions to his inner self. I suddenly said impulsively: “Julian, how did it come to you to … think of having her copied, made?” He looked at me now with such a reproachful sadness, such a concentration of unanswering pain, that the superfluousness of my question became all too clear. Damn! “One does the obvious thing in given circumstances” he said at last. “It never occurred to me that anything else was possible.” He was right. What question was there to be answered which could not be so within the terms of the experience we had both undergone with Merlin’s? The apprenticeship I myself had served, for example. No, the fantastic was also the real. It was all as clear as daylight, as the saying goes.

  He lowered his head for a moment and hooded his dark eyes like some bird of prey, and watching him there in the reflection of the vellum shade I could not help reflecting that the whole power behind his mental drive, and indeed that for the firm itself (they had become co-equal) rested really upon impotence; the slowly spreading stain of a self-conscious ignominy, a shame, and all the spleen which flowed from it. Nothing much more than that—as if that wasn’t enough! But it was something at least to be able to formulate it, to indicate the region in which it lay. It threw into relief so much that I had wondered about, so much that I had been quite unable to explain to myself before. Indeed the article of value about which we were all fighting, brandishing each his sterile and desexualised penis, was the eternal anal one—the big tepid biblical turd of our culture which lay under the vine-shoots of modern history, waiting to be…. (“The Moldavian penis is all back and no sides” writes Tinbergen, while Umlaut adds the rider, “And not seldom glazed like the common eggplant”. Where would we be without the studies of these northern savants?) The enormous cupidity of impotence!

  “You have been lucky in a way,” said Julian slowly while my attention had been wandering “in that you came to us fresh from the outside. What you had to fight—or felt you had to fight—was something quite apart from yourself. But if, as in my case, your adversary is more than half yourself …? What then? I found myself trying to do two different things at the same time which were mutually contradictory—trying to harness and direct the firm’s drive, and at the same time to enlarge the limits of my own personal freedom within it. I belonged to Merlin, you see; you never did. And yet I feel a greater need for freedom than you ever could. And then, other things which nail me down—family, race, environment … all these things held me spellbound and still do. Benedicta, don’t cry.” Unaccountably Benedicta had given a brief sob before bowing her head upon her knees; but it was only the noise of a child troubled in sleep by some fugitive day-memory of a quarrel over a toy.

  “Her death halted Me” said Julian with a meek softness of tone which carried a sort of weird hidden intonation in it—the provisional hint perhaps of a madness which one had come increasingly to feel was not so far away? No, this is too strong. “This week” he went on wearily “has been a week of great misgivings, all due to Nash, who has suddenly appeared on the scene with all kinds of new questions to ask about her. None of which I am able to answer, though I am quite as much up in the lingo, and anal-oral theology, as you are. Nash, incidentally, wants to have her destroyed.”

  “Destroyed!”

  “‘She will do us no good’ he says. ‘Indeed she carries buried fatally in her construction the thumbprints—the Freudian thumbprints of her makers.’ So he says. In other words, she can’t as I suggested stand for an aesthetic object related to our culture because you have deprived her of the very organs upon which it is based. I am repeating only what he said. Where is the merde that sank a thousand ships? That is what he asks. In fact he has been trying in his clumsy way to analyse why I should have decided to have her created, and specially in the image of the only person….” He broke off and stared into the fire, following with restless intentness the shifting flames as they patterned themselves upon the wall. “They are satisfied with so little,” he went on “these psychologists, and the most trifling analogy offers them an apparent explanation to something. As when Nash analyses why I should choose her, above all women, as my prime symbol—the money goddess, the goddess of the many. It smells too easy, doesn’t it? And analysis is often along a very shallow trench; it isn’t very far down to the Palaeolithic levels either. But on Nash plods, with his free association. The screen itself is a sterile thing in essence—bed-sheet or winding-sheet, or both; but lightly dusted over with alchemical silver the better to capture the projected image so dear to the collective unconscious—the youthful mother-image with its incestuous emphasis…. On the one hand one would have the right to burst out laughing, no? Yet on the other … ah! Felix.

  “Yes, this week of misgiving has been chock full of questions about Iolanthe; it would have been better if you yourself had been there to answer them, however provisionally. I tried my best to get Nash to see her as simply a small observation-post upon the field of automation—nothing much more. But that does not quite satisfy him. It was a mistake in the beginning to talk to him about culture or aesthetics—unconsciously we were all trying to disguise the base metal of our search in a number of pretty ways. Yes. To the psychoanalyst it is dirt. By the way, have you ever seen a gold brick? I happen to have one with me; I am taking it off to Jamaica. Let me show you.”

  It couldn’t well have been more incongruous the juxtaposition of tailcoat, top hat, and the small brown paper parcel which lay under them, tied up with string. A middle-class enough looking parcel which he undid with an air of dogged, modest triumph and then set the little greenish loaf with its deeply indented seal squarely upon the carpet between us. It sat there glinting saturninely in t
he firelight.

  Julian said: “Freud says that all happiness is the deferred fulfilment of a prehistoric wish, and then he adds: ‘That is why wealth brings so little happiness; money is not an infantile wish.’” He sat down, musing deeply for a moment; then he got down softly upon one knee and began to do up the little green loaf in its brown paper, tying the string carefully round it. Having secured it he replaced it once more upon the window-sill, in the folds of his overcoat, under the topper. “I have been studying the demonic of our capitalistic system through the eyes of Luther—a chastening experience in some ways. He saw the final coming to power in this world of Satan as a capitalistic emblem. For him the entire structure of the Kingdom of Satan is essentially capitalistic—we are the devil’s own real property, he says: and his deepest condemnation of our system is in his phrase ‘Money is the word of the Devil, through which he creates all things in exactly the way God once created the True Word.’ In his devastating theology capitalism manifests itself as the ape of God, the simia dei. It is hard to look objectively at oneself in the shaving-mirror once one has adventured with this maniac through the ‘Madensack’ of the real shared world—this extended worm-bag of a place out of which squirm all our cultural and gnomic patterns, the stinking end-gut of a world whose convulsions are simply due to the putrefying explosions of faecal gas in the intestines of time.” He paused, musing and shaking his head. “And then gold itself, as Spengler points out, is not really a colour, for colours are natural things. No, that metallic greenish gleam is of a satanic unearthliness; yet it has an explicit mystical value in the iconography of our Churches.” He relit his cigar with a silver lighter.

  “And then from gold to money is only a very short jump, but a jump which spans the shallow trench of our whole culture and offers us some sort of rationale for the megalopolitan men we are and our ways; our ways! For money is the beating heart of the New Word, and the power of money to bear interest, its basic raison d’être, has created the big city around it. Money is the dynamo, throwing out its waves of impulse in the interest principle. And without this volatility principle of Satan’s gold there would have been no cities. The archaeologists will tell you that they have noted the completest rupture of the life-style of man once he had founded his first cities. The intrusion of interest-bearing capital is the key to this almost total reorganisation of man, the transvaluation of all his rural values. From the threshing-floor to the square of a cathedral city is but a small jump, but without interest-bearing capital it could never have been made. The economy of the city is based wholly upon economic surplus—it is a settlement of men who for their sustenance depend on the production of agricultural labour which is not their own; it is the surplus produce of the country which constitutes the subsistence of the town. But Nash will hasten to tell you that for the unconscious the sector of the surplus is also the sector of the sacred—hence the towering cathedral-city with its incrustation of precious gems and sculptures and rites; its whole economy becomes devoted to sacred ends. It becomes the ‘divine household’, the house of God.”

  He put back his head and gave a sudden short bark of a laugh, full of a sardonic sadness. He looked so strange, Julian, bowed under the weight of these speculations; he looked at once ageless and very old. “I’ve had difficulty in convincing Nash that our science is still so very backward that for comfort’s sake we still feel the need to build ourselves working models of things—whether trains, turbines, or angels! In aesthetics as against technics, of course, a whole new flock of ideas come chattering in like starlings. We are at the very beginning of a phase—one can feel that; but one wishes that the bedrock were newer, fresher, contained fewer archaic features. No? The old death-figure is there side by side with creative Eros, longing to pull us back into the mire, to bury us in the stinking morasses of history where so many, innocent and guilty, have already foundered. As far as Iolanthe is concerned I freely confess that I am at a disadvantage as compared with you; you knew her, you knew the original, you have something real to compare her with. But I have only a set of data, like outworn microscope slides, with which to compare her; her films, her life—I have assembled the whole dossier. But when I meet her it will be a momentously new experience—I feel so sure of that. Yes.”

  Suddenly he seemed to be almost pleading, like a schoolboy, his hands pressed between his knees, his eyes searching mine for a trace of reassurance. I felt it was in some way unhealthy to become so intense about a dummy—the whole thing filled me with unease, though it would have been hard to explain to myself why. Nothing could have been saner than his glance, nothing more unflinching than his grasp on language when it came to trying to disentangle all these interlocking concepts. Julian sat for a long moment staring into the fire and then continued. “I am probably ready for her in this new form. I have always behaved as much like an immortal as I could—the negative capability, you might say, of deprivation. Like a Jap prince or a Dalai Lama I have been forced to develop in captivity, all by myself. But if I haven’t been evil I have been a keen student of evil—in alchemical terms, if you like, I was prone to the white path by nature; but I trod the black in order to divine its secrets. Some few I managed to appropriate for myself—but pitifully few. I wanted like everyone else to assuage the aches and pains of humanity. What an ambition.”

  “I wonder, Julian” I said, gently caressing the nape of Benedicta’s neck. “I see you rather as enjoying it as pure experience, for its own pure sake.” He gave a soundless little chuckle and half admitted the truth of the charge. “Perhaps. But then that is the black path. It admits of no compromise, one has to become it, to tread it; but there is no obligation to remain fixed there, like a joker in a pack. One can extricate oneself—albeit after a long struggle against the prince of darkness, or whatever you might call the luciferian principle. The struggle of course makes one unbelievably rich; if you keep your reason, you emerge from the encounter with a formidable body of psychic equipment at your disposal. Not that that does much good to anyone in the long run….” He yawned deftly, compactly, like a cat, before resuming. “I must be on the high seas tomorrow. Look, Felix, you do understand why I have been having these long sessions with Nash? I wanted to plumb as far as possible the unconscious intentions behind my desire to make a neo-Aphrodite—one who cannot eat, excrete, or make love. In terms of her own values—and I use the phrase because I know that you have endowed her with a built-in contemporary memory which can give an account of any contingency. Total memory, seen of course from our own vantage point in time. But suppose her to be free—suppose the world were in charge of a dozen models as perfect as she is—various other factors would obviously come into play. What, for example, would be their attitude to money? What sort of city could such creatures come to found and finally to symbolise? Eh? It’s worth a thought. Then, what would happiness represent for her since she is free from the whole Freudian weight of everything that makes us ‘un’; could you arrange for her, ideally, to have the free play of a natural lubricity, an eroticised function which ideally need never rest? No, because she isn’t fertile—that’s the answer isn’t it? And yet she is word-perfect, she walks in beauty like the night. Felix … could such a thing … could Iolanthe in her dummy form love? And what form would such an aberration take? I suppose when we have Adam we will be able to see a little more clearly into this abyss. I am so looking forward to seeing her, knowing her in natural surroundings—pardon the phrase. This free woman, free from the suppurating weight of our human mother-fixation. She can neither love nor hate. What a marvellous consort she might make for someone. Does she know good from evil? There is no such question; does anyone? We are impelled to act before we think. No, let me finish….

  “Action, whatever they tell you, in almost every case precedes reflection; what we recognise as right and wrong action is almost always the fruit of a retrospective judgement. God, what a host of ontological problems she could raise … could she, for example, realise she is a dummy as much as, say, y
ou realise that you are Felix? We don’t really know, do we, until we ask her? And even then, one slip on the keyboard might give one totally unknown factors to consider. At what point could she invent, could she be original, supposing she slipped among the mnemonic signatures?”

  He had begun to walk slowly up and down the room with a kind of burning, I could say “incandescent” concentration upon this conversation to which I myself did not wish to add a word. I was an artificer, I was simply there to wait and see at which angle the thing went off; and then to correct its trajectory whenever possible like a good mathematical papa. No, this isn’t quite true; it would be truer to say that when one is dealing with inventions it is safer to go step by step, and not lose oneself among theoretical considerations before the actual model can start ticking over.

  “Julian” I said. “Give yourself time; you will soon be able to call on her in her own snug villa, take tea with her, converse on any subject under the sun; listen to her as she plays jazz to you, cherish her in every way. We can promise you a degree of the real which you will find quite fascinating, quite disturbing. I wouldn’t myself have believed that our craftsmen at Merlin’s could have been capable of such fine workmanship. Indeed she’s so damn near perfect that Marchant suggested that we built a small fleet of them—our ‘love-machines’ he called them; we could turn them out on the streets and live on their immoral earnings. From the customer’s point of view they would be virtually indistinguishable from the real article—better dressed and better bred, perhaps, that is all. And from a legal point of view our position would be quite unassailable. They would, after all, be dummies: nothing more.”