The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos

by Walker Percy

  (c) An old Pueblo Indian dancer, who has never left the pueblo, who believes the cosmological myths of the pueblo and who further believes that the Corn Dance will invoke the kachinas of the West and that rain will come to the parched fields in consequence.

  (d) A young Pueblo Indian dancer, a sophomore at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, a major in business administration, a promising basketball forward, for whom it goes without saying that the cosmological myths of his tribe are just that, myths, to be taken no more seriously than what he considers the Judaeo-Christian myths of the Catholic Church in which he was baptized. He joined the Newman Club of U. of N.M. to meet girls and did. It is with a complex good-natured irony that he paints his body and dons the costume and enters into the Corn Dance, an irony compounded of a gentle forbearance toward his elders and a sardonic contempt for the camera-clicking Anglos and tourists. He can also use the money he’ll make from the photography fees.

  The young dancer feels that he transcends the old dancer. He sees into the old man’s credulity and the superstitious absurdity of the myth and rites of the rain god.

  The older dancer is no less certain that he transcends the young dancer because the young Indian has left an intact society in which life and time and place are given meaning by belief for the deranged world of the latter-day Americans who clearly do not know who they are or what they are doing.

  The scientist understands both and thinks that each is right in his own way. He sees the psychological “truth” of the cosmological myths of the old dancer. He sees the value of the skepticism of the young dancer. So he, the scientist, attempts the difficult feat of having it both ways—of not really believing in the kachinas of the West but of extracting the psychological value of the rite nevertheless.

  (e) The English novelist settled here in Taos after sojourns in Italy and Mexico. His pallor and frailty—he looks for all the world like a non-conformist minister from his native Midlands—contrast with his writings, which celebrate savage good health, sexuality, and the dark gods of the blood. Self-contradicted or not, he has a miraculous eye for seeing into things, getting the hang of things, getting a fix on people. For him, no more than a single glance is needed to size up everyone here: the young Indian dancer with a quite conscious irony written on his Oriental-Pueblo face, as well as a deeper, darker inscrutability which he, the dancer, is not even aware of. He sees into the scientist and his girlfriend and their somewhat naïve, even callow, American lordliness—they think they’re the god and goddess of a new world, what with their secret science and their secret sidelong looks at each other, each with arms folded so that his fingers can touch hers.

  (f) A divorcée from Westchester. Still young, her face ravaged by something other than years, she has left the dim sorrowful East and a sorrowful marriage for the bright clean sunlit purity of the desert. It seems to her that her very self has been transformed by the crystalline air, the rosy light of sunset on the Sangre de Cristo range, the tang of piñon smoke in the evenings. Surely she has come to the right place! She paints, has fallen under the spell of Georgia O’Keeffe, and for the first time in her life expects to come to herself, recover herself, make a new life in this place. She has talent, is taking lessons in oils, lives on a ranch, rides daily, and is becoming brown and strong. She is considering having an affair with a cowboy.

  (g) A Catholic priest, assigned to the adobe church in the pueblo, an aging Hispanic-Irishman who watches the dance with an indifference amounting to boredom. He is thinking about his added chores for tomorrow—a Monday and therefore ordinarily a holiday, but this year a Holy Day, the Feast of the Assumption, entailing three masses, homilies, and confessions—and about his bad back and his broken radio, an old Philco console. Tonight, unless the repairman shows up, he won’t be able to listen to Lux Radio Theater.

  (h) A radio repairman from Santa Fe, looking for the priest in the crowd. He has fixed the radio. The pueblo, the Corn Dance, the spectacle are old stories to him. All he wants is to find the priest, deliver the Philco, get paid, and get home in time for a cold beer or two before supper.

  (i) A technician from the metallurgy lab at Los Alamos, a pale, plump, mustachioed, youngish man, native of Camden, New Jersey, employed by the Manhattan Project but also by an attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Only son of not impoverished but nonetheless dreary middle-class parents living in the dreariest double-house on the dreariest street in Camden. For him, revelation broke like sunlight through the Jersey winter when he discovered Marx and read him sitting there in a public library like Marx himself, constipated and alone and exhilarated among strangers as the light broke around him. All at once, he saw how it all worked, saw the very mechanism of his sadness and therefore the means of rising above it. Above it he was and above all this, the people whom now he understood, the Indians, the tourists, even the scientist whom he knew by reputation. They, not he, were puppets worked by strings they could not see. But he knew, could see the strings and, best of all, work them himself—for the good of the Soviet Union and therefore for world peace.

  (j) A tourist from Moline, Illinois, who is too busy taking pictures with his excellent Leica even to take a look for himself, whose concern is only with lighting, focus, composition; who is already casting ahead in his mind to the slide show he’ll give at Rotary, and then perhaps he’ll take time to take a look at what he recorded—or will he watch the faces of the viewers to gauge his worth from their approval, the way a joke-teller watches the face of the joke-hearer? Yet by no means is he a discontented or unworthy man, being a good husband and father, operating, as he does, a successful chain of dry cleaners in northwest Illinois and even in Davenport, enjoying not only his family but his bowling team and his Masonic lodge. He is an American Legionnaire, a decorated veteran of World War I, holder of the Distinguished Service Cross, an authentic hero who risked his life to save a comrade and who has thought not much about it since.

  (CHECK ONE)

  Thought Experiment: Draw up an existential-semiotic self-profile or diagram indicating the self’s relation to its world (transcending? immanent? intact self among other selves?), identity of self (success or failure of self to perceive itself as a self), self’s relation to other selves (world community? elite community? loss of community?), movement of self vis-à-vis world (types of orbit, difficulties of reentry), placement of self in world as evidenced by mood and utterance.

  Thus, each character can be plotted, so to speak, on a system of self-coordinates and a rough-and-ready profile of the self arrived at. Such a profile might be called an “existential semiotic graph” of the self. By means of such graphs, selves can be readily compared and contrasted in their salient features—and one’s own self more easily identified.

  For example, four characters from the Taos Ten:

  (1) The nuclear physicist

  Self’s Relation to World: Transcending.

  Self’s Relation to Other Selves: A restricted community of a transcending elite (scientific, political, philosophical, musical); also a modified transcendent-immanent sexual Jove-Europa community such as his relationship with blond grad student. E.g., she may not be quite fit to discuss the Bhagavad-Gita with or Planck’s equations with, but eminently fit to sleep with.

  Identity of Self: A high degree of correspondence between self’s habitual mode of existence as transcending self and actual here-and-now life, e.g., scientific project at secret mountain installation, small elite community set down in an immanent world—pueblo, Indians, Corn Dance, tourists, priests—of which he is the onlooker.

  Motion of Self vis-à-vis World: Traveling, orbiting, wandering; for a transcending self, one place is as good as any other place to the degree that it provides the immanent raw materials (climate, plutonium, Indians, girls, indigenous culture—Pueblo or Roman Catholic) by means of which the self can both arrive at scientific principles and satisfy its own immanent needs.

  Placement (Mood) of Self: Overtly apocalyptic, covertly exultan
t. Covert exultation accruing from temporary appropriation of godhead by transcending self, e.g., “I am Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds,” “We have known sin,” etc.

  (2) The radio repairman

  Self’s Relation to World: Immanent, with intact elements.

  Self’s Relation to Other Selves: Concentric social communities—family, business, social, marketplace, church (Presbyterian), politics (Republican), American.

  Identity of Self: Unreflective, consumer-oriented, partly specified by being against them (Hispanics, Indians, Catholics), but also against those, the transcenders (scientists, Communists, professors, liberals); yet also to a degree specified as intact self by religious transcendence, i.e., he would say if asked that he believed in God, that he was not God but a son and creature of God, that other men were also sons and therefore his brothers.

  Motion of Self vis-à-vis World: Placed in a place, once Texas, now Santa Fe, New Mexico, but not placed like the old Pueblo Indian at the center and navel of the Cosmos. Mood of placement: often aggrieved and frustrated, but also exhibiting a core geniality, reliability, and goodwill: “How you doin', son? Well, all right. You lookin’ good. Let me give you a hand with that.” Etc.

  (3) The divorcée from Westchester

  Self’s Relation to World: Problematical, with elements of transcendence and immanence. She has left what she conceives as an immanent world of a failed marriage and the boredom of housewifery and is seeking a new world with some vaguely transcending components such as “art.”

  Self’s Relation to Other Selves: Loss of old community; isolated, but with prospects of new community. She envisions both immanent and transcendent relationships, sexual adventures perhaps, but, more important, a meeting of minds with a certain person on such things as reading, ideas, and a co-savoring of local immanent features, e.g., the Corn Dance. Further, she has begun an expensive collection of primitive kachina dolls and regularly visits all festivals at the pueblos. She has also registered for a course in flamenco guitar.

  Identity of Self: Tentative and problematic. Her own perception of herself is subject to others’ perception of her. For example, at this very moment at the Corn Dance she is aware that the scientist and his friend have noticed her, and so she is acutely conscious of not appearing to them either as tourist or as local dried-up leather-skinned dykeish Anglo. So she’s dressed casually in jeans (long before the current craze) and Eastern blouse. Her silver-and-turquoise jewelry is old, heavy, and oxidized and not the new tourist junk. Even her mien, her way of looking at the dancers, is both casual and calculated: I’ve seen this before, true, and some of it is hokey and put on for the tourists, but still it’s a fascinating spectacle, isn’t it?

  Movement of Self vis-à-vis the World: Exilic. She’s left her old home for good, glad to do it, and newly arrived at her new home, where she’ll stay. She’s begun her new life but has not yet quite achieved total reentry into her new world.

  (4) The Catholic priest

  Self’s Relation to World: Specified by relation to God, i.e., self, world, and other selves seen as created by God; selves in the world yet capable of transcending world through love of other selves and of God. Yet this relation has for him grown perfunctory and quotidian over the years, giving ground to loneliness, dislike and fear of bishop, and consumership, e.g., Lux Radio Theater, Brooklyn Dodgers, a nip or two or three of Bushmills before supper. A humble and mediocre man, he is actually a better priest than he knows, a soft touch for beggars and drunks, and dutiful in the discharge of his priestly obligation.

  Self’s Relation to Other Selves: Good-natured and dutiful, with tendencies to accept both the deferences accorded his social role as priest and the ambiguities of his priesthood as perceived by the Indians who accept him—and the kachinas of the West—with varying admixtures of indifference, belief, and unbelief.

  Identity of Self: Intact and secure in its relation to God, yet hardly afire with love of God and fellow man. Secure also in his identity as a member of a special class of selves, i.e., the priesthood, with its promised reward in heaven, yet aware too of his failings and accordingly staking a great deal on the mercy of God. Differs from transcending community of scientists and artists in his recognition of his own creatureliness and limitations. His major semiotic self-deception is his acquiescence in the sign and role with which the world invests him, that of a priest with attendant mien and costume rather than the signified, a man who has a vocation and acts accordingly.

  Movement of Self vis-à-vis World: Ambiguously at home; that is to say, he is at home in his homelessness in that he would assent to the proposition that, like all men, he is a pilgrim and wayfarer not at home in this world and bound for his true home elsewhere; but he is also at home in the worldly sense of being at home, e.g., like the radio repairman, he enjoys the comfort of his rectory, his good Indian cook, the companionship of two good friends, three Bushmills before supper, and above all the prospect of a Dodger-Yankee World Series. Though he accepts his identity as pilgrim, wayfarer, priest, and servant of God, he dreads the likelihood of being assigned to the Hopi reservation, the true boondocks.

  Now, imagine that you yourself are present at the Taos Corn Dance, where the old gods are still remembered, plus the new God, plus the competing spirits of transcendence of the modern age—something new in the Cosmos—plus the acceptance of the demotion to the pure spirit of immanence—also something new.

  Chart your own semiotic profile.

  (14) The Orbiting Self:

  Reentry Problems of the Transcending Self, or Why it is that Artists and Writers, Some Technologists, and indeed Most People have so much Trouble Living in the Ordinary World

  IN THE AGE OF science, scientists are the princes of the age. Artists are not. So that even though both scientists and artists achieve transcendence over the ordinary world in their science and art, only the scientist is sustained in his transcendence by the exaltation of the triumphant spirit of science and by the community of scientists.

  It is perhaps no accident that at the high tide of physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the great revolutionary physicists—e.g., Faraday, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein—were also men of remarkable integrity and exultant wholeness of character, of generosity and benignity. Compare the lives and characters of the comparably great in literature at the same time: Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway.

  With the disappearance of the old cosmological myths and the decline of Judaeo-Christianity and the rise of the autonomous self, science and art, one the study of secondary causes, the other the ornamental handmaiden of rite and religion, were seized upon and elevated to royal highroads of transcendence in their own right. Such transcendence was available not only to the scientists and artists themselves but to a community of fellow scientists and students, and to the readers and listeners and viewers to whom the “statements” of art, music, and literature were addressed.

  But what is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?

  The only exception to this psychic law of gravity seems to be not merely the great physicists at the high tide of modern physics but any scientist absorbed in his science when the exaltation of science sustains one in a more or less permanent orbit of transcendence—or perhaps the rare Schubert who even during meals wrote lieder on the tablecloth or the Picasso in a restaurant who instead of eating bread molded it into statuettes.

  But the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by artists and writers. They, especially the latter, seem subject more than most people to estrangemen
t from the society around them, to neurosis, psychosis, alcoholism, drug addiction, epilepsy, florid sexual behavior, solitariness, depression, violence, and suicide.

  Question: Is this the case because

  (a) Genius is close to madness (Plato)?

  (b) Modern society, especially American, is crass, materialistic, money-grubbing, and status-seeking, a nation of Yahoos and Babbitts, and the artist who is in pursuit of truth and beauty is entitled to be alienated (Gauguin, Flaubert, Lewis, et al.)?

  (c) Art is an expression of sublimated libidinal energies (Freud)? Since the artist is presumably either oversupplied with such energies or overly repressed, it is only to be expected that he or she might also be subject to the various maladies attendant upon repressed sexuality.

  (d) Art, unlike science, is a kind of play (Dewey)? Therefore, artists are expected to behave like children.

  (e) Both art and science are ways of knowing and as such are the greatest pleasures of which man is capable (Aristotle, Aquinas)? So great, in fact, that the ordinary pursuits of life are spoiled by contrast and so the artist must go to heroic lengths to render life intolerable outside his art. What Einstein said of science might be said of art: I went into science to escape the intolerable dreariness of everyday life.

  (CHECK ONE)

  Art, like science, entails a certain abstraction from its subject matter, albeit a different order of abstraction. And the better the artist, the greater the distance of abstraction. Thus, writers like Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins are as much in the marketplace as any other producer or seller. But writers like Joyce, Faulkner, Proust are able to write about the marketplace and society only in the degree that they distance themselves from it—whether by exile, alcohol, or withdrawal to a cork-lined room.