"They're all-"
I turned from the miasmas of Holland Lake.
"-all finished for the afternoon," Brother Randy said from the corner. "He'll talk with you. Mr Calkins said he'll talk with you a little while. The Father says it's all right." (I started toward him and he still said:) "You just come with me." I think he was surprised it had worked out like that. I was surprised too; but he was unhappy about it.
"Here" was a white wood lawn chair on a stone porch with columns, along the side of the building.
I sat and gave him a grin.
"They're finished, you see," he offered. "For the afternoon. And the Father says it's all right for him to talk now, if it isn't for too long."
I think he wanted to smile.
I wonder if that thing up under his hood hurt.
"Thanks," I said.
He left.
I looked around the patchy grass, up and down the porch, at the beige stone; inset beside me in the wall was a concrete grill, cast in floral curls. Once I stood up and looked through it close. Another grill behind it was set six inches out of alignment, so you couldn't see inside. I was thinking it was probably for ventilation, when my knee (as I moved across the stone flowers trying to see) hit the chair and the feet scraped, loudly.
"Excuse me ... ?"
I pulled back a few inches. "Hello?" I said, surprised. "I didn't realize you were out there yet-until I heard you move."
"Oh." I stepped back from the grill. "I thought you were going to come out here on the porch . . ." (He chuckled.) "Well, I guess this is okay." I pulled my chair around.
"Good. I'm glad you find this acceptable. It's rather unusual for the Father to allow someone seeking an understanding of the monastic community-as they describe the process here-to have any intercourse at all with people outside the walls. Converse with members is limited. But though I've been here several days, I don't officially start my course of study till sundown this evening. So he's made an exception."
I sat on the arm of the lawn chair. "Well," I said, "if it goes down this evening . . ."
He chuckled again. "Yes. I suppose so."
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"I guess the best way to describe it is to say that I'm about to embark on a spiritual course of study. I'm not too sure how long it will last- You catch me just in time. Oh-I must warn you: You may ask some questions that I'm not allowed to answer. I've been instructed by the Father that, when asked them, I am simply to remain silent until you speak again."
"Don't worry," I said, "I won't pry into any secrets about your devotional games here," wishing I sort of could.
But the voice said: "No, not questions that have anything to do with the monastary."
And (While he considered further explanation?) I considered the tower exploding slowly, thrusting masonry on blurred air too thin to float brick and bolts and bellrope.
"I don't think there's anything about the monastery you could ask I wouldn't be allowed to answer-if I knew the answers. But part of the training is a sort of self-discipline: Any question that sparks certain internal reactions in me, causes me to think certain thoughts, to feel certain feelings, rather than rush into some verbal response that, informative or not, is still put up mainly to repress those thoughts and feelings, I'm supposed to experience them fully in the anxiety of silence."
"Oh," I said. "What sort of thoughts and feelings?" After ten quiet seconds, I laughed. "I'm sorry. I guess that's sort of like not thinking about the white hippopotamus when you're changing the boiling water into gold." "Rather."
"It sounds interesting. Maybe I'll try it some day," and felt almost like I did the morning I'd told Reverend Amy I'd drop in on one of her services. "Hey, thanks for the note. Thanks for the party, too."
"You're most welcome. If you got my letter, then I must restrain from apologizing any more. Though I'm not surprised at meeting you, I wasn't exactly expecting it now. Dare I ask if you enjoyed yourself-though perhaps it's best just to let it lie."
"It was educational. But I don't think it had too much to do with your not showing up. All the scorpions had a good time-I brought the whole nest."
"I should like to have been there!"
"Everybody got drunk. The only people who didn't enjoy themselves probably didn't deserve to. Didn't you get any reports back from your friends?" First I thought I'd asked one of those questions.
". . . Yes . . . Yes, I did. And some of my friends are extremely colorful gossips-sometimes I wonder if that's not how I chose them. I trust nothing occurred to distract you from any writing you're engaged in at present. I was quite sincere about everything I said concerning your next collection in my letter."
"Yeah."
"After some of my friends-my spies-finished their account of the evening, Thelma-do you remember her?- said practically the same thing you just did, almost word for word, about anyone who didn't enjoy himself not deserving to. When she said it, I suspected she was just trying to make me feel better for my absence. But here it is, corroborated by the guest of honor. I best not question it further. I hadn't realized you were a friend of Lanya's."
"That's right," I said. "She used to know you."
"An impressive young lady, both then and, apparently, from report, now. As I was saying, after my spies finished their account, I decided that you are even more the sort of poet Bellona needs than I'd thought before, in every way-except in literary quality which, as I explained in my letter, I am, and intend to remain, unfit to judge."
"The nicest way to put it, Mr Calkins," I said, "is I'm just not interested in the ways you mean. I never was interested in them. I think they're a load of shit anyway. But . . ."
"You are aware," he said after my embarrassed silence, "the fact that you feel that way makes you that much more suited for your role in just the ways / mean. Every time you refuse another interview to the Times, we shall report it, as an inspiring example of your disinterest in in publicity, in the Times. Thus your image will be further propagated- Of course you haven't refused any, up till now. And you said 'But . . .'" Calkins paused. " 'But' what?"
I felt really uncomfortable on the chair arm. "But. . . I feel like I may be lying again." I looked down at the creases of my belly, crossed with chain.
If he picked up on the "again" he didn't show it. "Can you tell me how?"
"I remember . . . I remember a morning in the park, before I ever met Mr Newboy, or even knew anyone would ever want to publish anything I ever wrote, sitting under a tree-bare-ass, with Lanya asleep beside me, and I was writing-no, I was re-copying out something. Suddenly I was struck with . . . delusions of grandeur? The fantasies were so intense I couldn't breathe! They hurt my stomach. I couldn't . . . write! Which was the point. Those fantasies were all in the terms you're talking about. So I know I have them . . ." I tried to figure why I'd stopped. When I did, I took a deep breath: "I don't think I'm a poet . . . any more, Mr Calkins. I'm not sure if I ever was one. For a couple of weeks, once, I might have come close. If I actually was, I'll never know. No one ever can. But one of the things I've lost as well, if I ever knew it, is the clear knowledge of the pitch the vanes of my soul could twist to. I don't
know . . . I'm just assuming you're interested in this because in your letter you mentioned wanting another book."
"My interest," he said, coldly, "is politics. I'm
only out to examine that tiny place where it and art are flush. You make the writer's very common mistake: You assume publishing is the only political activity there is. It's one of my more interesting ones; it's also one of my smallest. It suffers
The advantage of transcribing your own conversation: It's the only chance you have to be articulate. This conversation must have been five times as long and ten times as clumsy. Two phrases I really did lift, however, are the ones about ". . . the clear knowledge of the pitch the vanes of my soul could twist to . . ." and ". . . experience them in the anxiety of silence . . ." Only it occurs to me ". . . the vanes of m
y soul . . ." was his, while ". . . the anxiety of silence . . ." was mine. accordingly, and there's nothing either of us can do about it with Bellona in the shape it is. Then again, perhaps I make a common mistake for a politician. I tend to see all your problems merely as a matter of a little Dichtung, a little Warheit, with the emphasis on the latter." He paused and I pondered. He came up with something first: "You say you're not interested in the extra-literary surroundings of your work-I take it we both refer to acclaim, prestige, the attendant hero-worship and its inevitable distortions- all those things, in effect, that buttress the audience's pleasure in the artist when the work itself is wanting. Then you tell me that, actually, you're no longer interested in the work itself-how else am I to interpret such a statement as 'I am no longer a poet'? Tell me-and I ask because I am a politician and I really don't know-can an artist be truly interested in his art and not in those other things? A politician-and this I'll swear-can not be truly (better say, effectively) interested in his community's welfare without at least wanting (whether he gets it or not) his community's acclaim. Show me one who doesn't want it (whether he gets it or not) and I'll show you someone out to kill the Jews for their own good or off to conquer Jerusalem and have it dug up as a reservoir for holy water."
"Artists can," I said. "Some very good emperors have been the patrons of some very good poets. But a lot more good poets seem to have gotten by without patronage from any emperors at all, good, bad, or otherwise. Okay: a poet is interested in all those things, acclaim, reputation, image. But as they're a part of life. He's got to be a person who knows what he's doing in a very profound way. Interest in how they work is one thing. Wanting them is another thing-the sort of thing that will mess up any real understanding of how they work. Yes, they're interesting. But I don't want them."
"Are you lying?-'again,' as you put it. Are you fudging?-which is how I'd put it."
"I'm fudging," I said. "But then . . . I'm also writing."
"You are? What a surprise after all that! Now I've certainly read enough dreadful things by men and women ' who once wrote a work worth reading to know that the habit of putting words on paper must be tenacious as the devil- But you're making it very difficult for me to maintain my promised objectivity. You must have realized, if only from my euphuistic journalese, I harbor all sorts of literary theories-a failing I share with Caesar, Charlemagne, and Winston Churchill (not to mention Nero and Henry the Eighth): Now I want to read your poems from sheer desire to help! But that's just the point where politics, having convinced itself its motives are purely benevolent, should keep its hands off, off, off! Why are you dissatisfied?"
I shrugged, realized he couldn't see it, and wondered how much of him I was losing behind the stonework. "What I write," I said, "doesn't seem to be ... true. I mean I can model so little of what it's about. Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses. In my loft, alone, in the middle of the night, it comes blaring in. So I work at culling enough from it to construct moments of order." I meshed my fingers, which were cool, and locked them across my stomach, which was hot. "I haven't been given enough tools. I'm a crazy man. I haven't been given enough life. I'm a crazy man in this crazed city. When the problem is anything as complicated as one word spoken between two people, both suspecting they understand it ... When you touch your own stomach with your own hand and try to determine who is feeling who . . . When three people put their hands over my knee, each breathing at a different rate, the heartbeat in the heel of the thumb of one of them jarring with the pulse in the artery edging the bony cap, and one of them is me-what in me can order gets exhausted before it all."
"You're sure you're not simply telling me-Oh, I wish I could see you!-or avoiding telling me, that the responsibilities of being a big, bad scorpion are getting in the way of your work?"
"No," I said. "More likely the opposite. In the nest, I've finally got enough people to keep me warm at night. And I can feel safe as anyone in the city. Any scorpions who think about my writing at all are simply dazzled by the object-the book you were nice enough to have it made into. A few of them even blush when descriptions of them show up in it. That leaves what actually goes on between the first line and the last entirely to me. The scorpions caught me without a fight. My mind is a magnet and they're filings in a field I've made- No, they're the magnets. I'm the filing, in a stable position now."
"You're too content to write?"
"You," I said, "are a politician; and you're just not going to understand."
"At least you're giving me a little more support in my resolve not to read your work. Well, you say you're still writing. Regardless of any personal preface you might make, even this one, I'm just as interested in your second book as I was in your first."
"I don't know if I'm about to waste any time trying to get it to you."
"If I must arrange to have it hijacked, ink still moist, from beneath the very shadow of your dark quill, I suppose that's what I'll have to do. Let's see, shall we?"
"I've got other things to do." For the first time, I was really angry at his affectation.
"Tell me about them," he said, in a voice so natural, but following so naturally from the archness, my anger was defeated.
"I... I want you to tell me something," I said.
"If I can."
"Is the Father, here at the monastery," I asked, "a good man?"
"Yes. He's very good man."
"But for me to accept that, you see," I said, "I have to know I can accept your definition of good. It probably isn't the same as mine ... I don't even know if I have one!"
"Again, I wish I were allowed to see you. Your voice sounds as though you might be upset about something." (Which I hadn't realized; I didn't feel upset.) "I'm not oblivious to your efforts to keep our talk at a level of honesty I might find tedious if I didn't have the respect for truth a man forced to tell a great many lies for the most commendable reasons must. I'm not very satisfied with myself, Kid. In the past months, a dozen separate situations have propelled me to the single realization that, to be a good governor, if it is not absolutely necessary to be a good man, it is certainly of inestimable help. Bellona is an eccentric city that fosters eccentric ways. But the reason I'm here, of all eccentric places in this most eccentric place, is because I really want to-"
Dust or something blew into my mouth, got down my throat; I cleared it, thinking: Christ, I hope he doesn't decide my voice is breaking with emotion!
"-to remedy a little of that dissatisfaction. If he is not a good man, the Father is certainly a generous one. He is allowing me to stay here ... Of course there's always an odd relation between the head of the state and the head of the state-approved religion. After all, I helped set up this place. Same way I helped set up Teddy's. Of course in this case, the biggest-if easiest-job, given my position with the Times, was making sure there was no publicity. In your present mood, you can probably appreciate that. But, no, my relation to the Father is not that of commoner to priest. On my side, at any rate, it is duplicitous, fraught with doubt. If I didn't doubt, I wouldn't be here now. I'm afraid the politics works through the spiritual like rot. The good governor at least wants it to be the best rot possible."
"Is the Father a good man?" I asked again and tried not to sound at all like I was upset. (Maybe that backfired?)
"Has it occurred to you, my young Diogenes, that if you polished up the chimney of your own lamp, you'd be a little more likely to find this mysterious and miraculous Other you are searching out? Why does it concern you so?"
"So I can live here," I said, "in Bellona."
"You're afraid that for want of one good man the city shall be struck down? You better look back across the train-tracks, boy. Apocolypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes. That simply isn't our problem any more. If you wanted out, you should have thought about it a long time back. Oh, you're very hig
h-minded- and so, at times, am I. Well, as the head of the state religion, the Father does a pretty good job; good enough so that those doing not quite so well would do a bit better not to question-especially if that's all we can get."
"What do you think about the religion of the people?" I asked.
"How do you mean?"
"You know. Reverend Amy's church; George; June; that whole business."
"Does anyone take that seriously?"
"For a governor," I said, "you're pretty out of touch with what the people are into, aren't you? You've seen the things that have shown up in this sky. There're posters of him out all over town. You published the interview, and the pictures that made them gods."
"I've seen some of it, of course. But I'm afraid all that black mysticism and homoeroticism is just not something I personally find very attractive. And it certainly doesn't strike me as a particularly savory basis for worship. Is Reverend Tayler a good woman? Is George a good .. . god?"
"I'm not that interested in anybody's religion," I told him. "But if you want to bring the purpose of the church down to turning out people who do good things: When I was awfully hungry, she fed me. But when I was hurt and thirsty, someone at your gate told me I couldn't get a glass of water."
"Yes. That regrettable incident was reported to me. Things do catch up to you here, don't they? When you were unpublished, however, I published you."
"All right." My laugh was too sharp. "You've got the whole thing down, Mr Calkins. Sure, it's your city. Hey, you remember the article about me saving the kids from the fire the night of the party? Well, it wasn't me. It was George. I was just along. But he was down there, searching through the fire, seeing if anybody needed help. I just wandered by; and the only reason I stayed was because he told me the ones who'd started out with him from Teddy's had gotten too chickenshit and run. I heard the kids crying first, but George was the one who busted into the building and got the five of them out alive. Then, when your reporter got to him later, George made out like it was all me, because he didn't want the acclaim, prestige, and attendant hero-worship. Which, in the mood I am now, I approve of. Now is George a bad man?"
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