by Philip Wylie
Certainly.
When the poor, unknown child returns, what Weltschmerz may not seize hold upon her? What nostalgia? What fantasy or recollections? What esoteric envies? What odd curiosities? What cooling after the confidences? What illogical new distastes? What unexpected spousely piques? What dither? What clandestine or common experiment with all what unsweet ensuite?
Never congratulate the Fates, emir;
it makes them self-conscious . . . undependable.
A point to remember should you ever set down a hundred hours of pseudo-autobiography:
Lessons in Light Lycanthropy: seven essays by Philip Gordon Prismaggot.
Now came thunder, like sounds in the intestines of distant elephant herds; now, my curtain rose as eerily as a medium's table and flopped back to lank alignment with the wall.
I saw the point:
In the quest for the woman-in-skirts, some of us fail to notice that the woman--
within may be partly and helplessly a perverse wench, attesting by default to all the oversights of her masculine lord: us.
It was a remarkable discovery and explained occasional tendencies of numbers of my gentlemen companions.
Given another five years, caliph, and you could resolve this situation--this exotic act of the inner She who rules whatever crannies her master shuns in conscious male conceit.
If you happen to be the kind of person who, out of mere idleness, or from scientific motive, or in our poor common cause, is willing to trephine his own soul for a better look, you will find such dances going on there, such images and integers of the complicated flesh.
If you announce the results, however, you are liable to go to Hecate. Hecate County, I mean.
Unless you do so, that is, in plain wrapper and with a Ph.D. Cf.:
"The inner natures of all men and women partake of the natures of the opposite sex--a psychological phenomenon in some forms openly expressed by modern society (O
moms, O Mummers!), but in other forms suppressed with the full force of public opinion.
What public opinion suppresses, the individual endeavors to conceal both from himself and from society. Nevertheless, were the individual not equipped with the psychological elements of the opposite sex, comprehension and sympathy between the two would be impossible. And this 'feminine' quality of a man--for example--may even project on real women, in inverted form, those universal, adolescent feelings toward his own sex which the conscious adult man repudiates. Hence, as Cadwallader, Pratt and Razzle say, in their lucid monograph--"
But if you express the results in terms of palpable feelings and acts--rather than in this lack--life lingo of pedagogy--the very gents and gals who share the same sensations will rise as one (owing to the general habit of suppression) and breathe down your neck with a blowtorch.
When you see them coming you will know what troubles them that they do not know.
It is, always, their responses to your perceptions.
Themselves--not you.
Yvonne, to put it in the terse form, like Gwen,
was also in a sense a shimmering fragment of a dislocated inner me.
If you are distressed by her,
the time has come to bore a hole in the thick skull of your own soul and see the remarkable tittup going on there.
Lightning struck a graph on the sky.
I sat learning about myself.
If, indeed, the Final Report was due, I might as well review my material. At God's Great Judgment Seat, witnesses who did not bother to notice what was really happening inside themselves--and, of course, prejudiced or dishonest witnesses--will undoubtedly go to the Hotter Hecate.
I thought about Paul for a while and decided it was time for Paul to think about himself.
I thought of Socker Melton and perceived there was no reason, any more, for a single soul to go to any church, save instinc--
which the churches denied thrice whenever they opened their sanctimonious mouths three times.
I thought lovingly of my country
and lovingly of the whole world.
I sent greetings to the Chinese and the Hindus and the Africans.
I wished that I might live to see if the bombs fell and what the people did afterward.
Then I appreciated that, following any resolution of such affairs--
of bombs or none, airborne plagues or none--
I would wish in this same fashion to live to see
what they did
when a billion starved
when four or five billions, produced in the uncontrolled birthorgies of the devout and the innocent, over-horded this little globe what they did when the metals ran thin--in a century or so
when idiotic breeding decayed the human line to a rabble incapable of sustaining liberty or order or technology
when the last water under the earth dried up
when the sea thickened
when the moon approached.
Indeed, there is no limit to wishing one might assist at meeting challenges old Toynbee may never have thought of--
inevitabilities that only man can avoid and that, as yet, he does not even consider as Necessary Works. They are denied by Time magazine.
Aortas of lightning and branched arteries of electric fire now diagrammed the clouds. Across the roofs, thunder ricocheted; it rolled like tumbrils in the avenues.
A steady press of air flapped the curtains and I moved my chair a little to escape their nervous abrasion.
This fetid wind depressed me.
My thoughts settled in a muddy ooze and lived beneath the riffled surface enviously, for that it seemed alive.
And in this separation I saw more views.
The intellectual, I deplore--scholar, economist, sociologist, big literary man. The sorry lot have spent half the twentieth century admiring the engines of their minds and not bothering to feed knowledge into them or raw materials; now, with the gauges falling, they have nothing to say excepting only to repeat their proud, intellectual admission of obsolescence.
The critic, I deplore; he sits upon his flagpole with his radio, his sandwiches and his displayed latrine, handing down opinions of what is happening under the earth, from which he sees an occasional man emerge whom he invariably deduces to be a Troglodyte or a Morlock.
The philosopher of modern times is my favorite joke; he stands at the head of the Faculty--without faculties of his own; he sums up the wisdom of the mind without appreciating he no longer understands what his own mind is. Were he even as honest as the psychiatrist he disdains, he would get his psyche analyzed before he undertook to forward the discussion of awareness. But what philosopher ever consented to an effort at learning something of himself before pontificating upon the All of everybody else? That still, small science of psychology, which he elbows behind his panoply of classic names.
has turned him into a quack--an astrologer among astronomers and the barker for a medicine show at a convention of true physicians.
The preacher--dressed in the anonymous odds and ends of all the instincts of the animal kingdom and holding this shoddy surplice to be a white and spotless raiment--the one, true robe for Ascension--is my jester, for being mad and comical and also for speaking so much wisdom and for his good heart, when he has one.
This is what I believe about them--
and they are what I am:
Intellectual, critic, philosopher, and preacher.
Hoist by my own plutonium petard.
For all my data have, still, an inadequate access to my heart. It laughs and weeps too often without consulting the encyclopedia in my head or the new Book of Rules I have commenced there.
I saw Excalibur and could not wrench it from the sea, Touched the Grail--and could not swallow,
Wandered the far mountains, came upon a new Decalogue, and could not lift the tablets to bring them down.
Prophet, maybe.
Pilgrim, perhaps.
But only in
the intellectual, critical, philosophic
al, evangelical senses. . . .
Happy?
The ego was often happy--his big ego.
At Peace?
He had tranquility where other men did not and joy where they were only confused; but, in their simple pleasures, it was he who felt confusion, he who too frequently was but a spectator, he who failed with his blood to pursue the truth his brain so lucidly, so uselessly delineated.
Human nature, he decreed, need not be dishonest or dishonorable; let us throw off this old-church myth, this pew-filler, that men are by their very substance evil and undependable. Having said his say he daily marched into the humanities and acted with a good deal less than integrity complete. Like a very ass.
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.
PART FIVE: Coda
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. Wy
lie, 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
