The Revolt of Aphrodite

by Lawrence Durrell

  “Then think how puerile is our conception of such men we label with the word genius—it’s on the level of Santa Claus! There isn’t such an animal. But when a link is broken these rare men address themselves to the problem. What we call genius occurs when a gifted man sees a relation between two or more fields of thought which had up till then been believed to be irreconcilable. He joins the contradictory fields in an act of intellectual harmony and the chain begins to hold once more. The so-called genius of the matter is merely the intuitive act of joining irreconcilables. There is nothing new added, how could there be? But these men realise that when you wish to do something new you must go tranquilly ahead in the full knowledge that there can only be new relations, new combinations of the age-old material. The kaleidoscope must be given a jolt, that is all.

  “I have always wondered whether the firm could not invent something like a death-predictor; most of our troubles come from the feeling of human transitoriness, of the precarious nature of our hold upon life. But if you knew, for example, that on the 3rd March next year you were going to die it would change your whole attitude to people and things. It would make for resignation, compassion and concentration on the precious instant. It’s anxiety over that unknown date which causes so much of the hysteria and consequently panicky judgement and thinking.”

  “Death” I said. “But the firm itself inflicts death.”

  Julian nodded quietly. “Merlin deliberately inured us to death—it was part of his code of things. So that from the firm’s point of view death itself was only a pastime. One tried to keep one’s hand in simply to make sure that one felt nothing about it one way or another. I must confess it meant next to nothing to me: until—well, I should say that I have only once experienced death with its full force and that was not my own but someone else’s. I shall tell you more about that anon. But for the moment let me just say that the firm itself, being an organism, feels neither compunction nor conscience nor doubt: it has no guilt—how could it since nature in making indiscriminate use of her raw material has none either? Felix, a culture is based upon an act of association—a kiss or a handshake or a firm or a religion. It communicates itself, flowers, perpetuates itself through a single basic principle, which is sharing. In the genetic twilight of the firm, then, I have had a close look and found it wanting in much. Could we not make a model perhaps, trace out the pathology of memory to follow the broad furrow of the genetic code with its basic structure of the male and female elements? Sex might be the great clue here; certainly the pathology of the imagination was nourished in it, or so I thought. We are still so backward in so many respects—I mean that we so often have to make a model to comprehend a little bit.”

  In a clean bit of snow at his feet he scratched a few words, but absentmindedly, as if he were doing it for himself rather than for his audience. Like this:

  pro CREATION re CREATION.

  Then he went on, still half musing. “Such simple acts and such preposterous results! Because every desire wins its reponse. Hence the danger. Nature is so rich that people only have to wish and they quite literally get what they want. As most of us have unpurged desires the child born of the wish is so often a changeling—in fact the last thing one, in fact, wanted. It is too late by then. This so often happens to the mob-wish. Inferior slaves beget inferior masters to parody the awful distortions of the psyches which wish them up. Think of the mob-creations like Nero, Napoleon and Lenin—flowering from the bad dreams of masterless men who desired only to be led to their deaths—and had their wishes answered.

  “I was thinking of course of the type of human association which gives rise on the one hand to the sexual compact—you’ll say that love is more a seizure like epilepsy than a sober and conscious entry into a bond; but it contains in its genes, if you like to put it that way, the basic male-female dichotomy which mirrors itself in every manifestation of language, science or art even. Whether a cave-culture, city culture, or a religious culture, or even in inventions like tools or wheeled things, chariots or motor-cars. I was forced to consider all this in order to try to understand a little bit what I was doing, sitting in the cockpit of the firm, trying to direct its motions. I didn’t hope for much—but I would have liked very much to become a sort of goldsmith of its ideas. Nor is anything I say the usual criticism which one hears all the time of an age of technology. Technology in every age is simply the passive miracle which flows of our attitude to nature, helping the chrysalis to turn itself into the butterfly. It has nothing to do with the worry about raping nature—you can’t: because nature will round on you and punish you for transgressions of this sort. But the idea of push and bite, the hand’s scope allied to bronze or steel, gave us a new concept, namely ‘spade’. In other words technology comes after the Fall and not before it.

  “The first man to put one stone upon another may or may not have been aware that he was building a wall but his delight was great when his sheep could shelter from the snow behind it; but when the stones grew too big or too many to lift he was joined by his nearest neighbour, and then he by his; and so gradually you got a wall-culture based on an act of free association—you got the Great Wall of China, if you wish.”

  “Yes but free association” I said peevishly.

  “The minute you join in the act you are no longer free, you are bound by the articles of association not less than by the natural obstacles which are posed the minute you start messing about with the natural order of things. Nature did not invent stones to stand up on one another, and will hasten to overturn them. This problem created a secondary one—either stone pruned so accurately that it could stand the ground-swell (the Romans, say) or else some new idea—like sheer weight, or another still, mortar. It is when you are in the act of working on your wall that another idea strikes you, namely if ever one did not have a trust in nature and its basic benevolence one would have none in death, and none in man.”

  He sat there looking at me, a strange blood-caked goblin of a man in his heavy ski-clothes and with his mica-tinted glance. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something, but I remained obstinately silent. I still wasn’t clear in my mind about where he proposed to lead me. At last he himself sighed and rose to take a turn upon the terrace and gaze out across the dazzle of mountains dancing and shimmering with such purity in the light of the slowly westering sun. He spoke again, but it was almost musing once more, almost as if he were refuelling his mind to carry the argument forward upon another plane. “So little time,” he said “in which to realise ourselves, one iota of our selves; and life so precarious in this pathetic overcoat of flesh and muscle; and there he goes, man, babbling about freewill with gravity following him about like a salt bitch! The leaden pull of the grave on the one hand and these huge towering structures in stone or paper which he has built to keep out the thought, the unbearable thought of his disappearance. And moreover, each man with different needs, a different rate of acceleration, different physique even. O I forgot, Felix. Koepgen asked for this to be sent to you so I brought it with me.” He dug into his breast and produced the slim volume of which Vibart had spoken. I put it carefully away in my pack without stripping it of its cellophane covering. He sat down again, smiling a little, and said: “Koepgen has earned an honourable retirement and he has just realised that many of the infuriating things the firm made him do actually belonged to the plan of self-realisation which he had set himself—he’s an alchemist by temperament and has spent his adult life trying to smelt himself out.”

  “You sent him to Russia to buy mercury.”

  “Yes, Felix. It must have seemed an arbitrary or even harsh decision. But later on he realised that it was a fruitful one on completely non-material grounds. You probably know that what the sea was for Plato, and indeed for Nash’s famous Freudian unconscious, namely the symbol of rebirth—mercury is for the alchemist? It is their primal water! I deliberately did not tell Koepgen this; indeed at times I held my breath because he was on the point of disappearing or resignin
g. Then one day, just in time, he discovered that what he was doing for the firm on the material plane he was also doing unconsciously on the spiritual. He is glad now that he carried out the task.”

  “Where is he?”

  “On an island. He has discovered that prayer, if rightly orientated, can become an exact science. I am quoting, of course, because all that line of enquiry isn’t within my own interests. It’s the purest rubbish I believe. But there you are, it makes him happy to think so. Besides, just suppose it were true—prayer-wheels for the lazy. We are making some already for the Tibetans….” He smiled a smile of sad malice and shook his head ruefully, as if at the pure extravagance of human beliefs. Then he looked up and said: “I tried to kill you, Felix, and you tried to kill me—in both cases it was a near thing. But you lost a child, and I have been rendered incapable of making one. In a way this makes us quits.”

  “Yes.”

  He had become very pale now, and his nostrils were drawn in. He stared at his ungloved hand as it lay upon his knee with great intensity, as if he had never seen it before. After a long pause, and without looking up, he said quietly: “Benedicta, will you do us the favour of leaving us alone together for a moment? I want to talk to Felix about Iolanthe.” Obediently Benedicta rose, lit a cigar, and kissing me lightly on the cheek, walked away across the snow towards the tree where Julian had propped his skis. So we sat immobile as the half-finished snow man on the tree stump. I could see that he was wondering where to begin. He wrote in the snow the word “Io” and then raised his head to look me in the eyes. His whole posture reflected a tremendous contained tension—sometimes if a powerful but delicate dynamo isn’t properly anchored to its base its vibrations can make the whole housing ripple and tremble. But his voice was deadly calm, deadly calm. “It’s strange the things people have to say about love” he said surprisingly. “About love at first sight, or love at no sight at all, or the love of God or of man. It’s a real honeycomb of a sound. But from my point of view, and yours and the firm’s, the genetic shadow of the love-child is always there, its silhouette hangs over the love-match. It is generated by the eyes and the mind perhaps less than by the body. The child is implicit in the transaction. When it goes wrong of course you get monsters; changelings, like the umbratiles of Paracelsus or the angels of Swedenborg, are such productions, formed, so to speak, from sperm which has missed its mark or gone bad.

  “I did not” he went on “choose my own ground for this duel either, the encounter with this weird sort of animal, love. It was chosen for me by Merlin. I saw her, having always believed she did not exist, and the blood rushed to my head—and all the Petrarchian rubbish of our civilisation with it! The anaconda coils of an immense lethargic narcissism wrapped themselves round me! But unlike Dante, unlike that fool Petrarch, I could not ingest the love-object and transform it into self-love. I suppose because I wasn’t that other kind of impotent, an artist. No, I was a whole man in every sense but this vital one—this insult to my honour and my very being.”

  He had swollen now with suppressed rage, and his face had become flushed, feverish-looking, while the fine controlled voice shook slightly. It was deeply moving to have this tiny glimpse of the driving power of Julian—sexlessness, impotence, fury, rage, sexual ferocity. “I received sex and death in one blood-stained package, thrown in my face like the bundle of discarded bones a butcher wraps up for the dog.” He paused to master his breathing and then went on. “One minute you are still there, breathing and planning and hoping: the next you are this appalling beautiful toy which will not respond to the controls. Reality rushes in like some fearful bat and circles round the room, knocking over the candles and banging against the white screens. I learned all this from Iolanthe.” He looked quickly around him, as if looking for something against which he could dash a clenched fist, or bang his head; and I was reminded of what Mrs. Henniker had told me of the last night of his vigil, of what she had seen in a brief moment between sleep and waking. It must have been the critical moment.

  In his confusion he had been completely disoriented. He was hardly aware that he had a tremendous erection—the death-wish of the flesh itself. Little incoherent sounds escaped his lips, little sighs and whimpers. He snatched off the hanging cylinder of transfusion-blood which was hanging over the bed, stripped the needle, and drank it thirstily off, putting the rubber capsule in his mouth like a teat. Never had he known such a thirst. Then, with the same little soundless sobs he went to the mirror of the hanging cupboard and made up his face with her lipstick, staring like a ghoul. He took the candle from in front of the ikon in order to light the spectacle of himself standing here, staring abstractedly at the man called Julian whom he hardly recognised. “Julian” I said, with compassion for his wretchedness. “Steady on.” But he was already calm once more, in full control of body and voice. He looked once more at me with a piercing calm and said: “So I come at last to the whole point of the matter. If the firm could be freed, Felix! On such a notion we could base a hope however faint of the freedom which you so desperately seek, which I too need. But the only road to freedom of such a kind lies through an aesthetic of some kind. Beauty, from which alone comes congruence and the harmony of dissident parts and which echoes back the great contrivances of nature.” He gave a harsh bark of a laugh, as if at the very hopelessness of such an idea. “Beauty, whatever it is, is the only poor yardstick we have; and in my own case Iolanthe’s image is the model which suits our book, a universal beauty which has sent her round and round the world in celluloid and which has made her what she is for so many. She has exemplified, projected the wild notion of this inner freedom which we can realise only through the female. She is there like cumulus, she is everywhere like a world-dream—O! a twentieth-century shallow trashy dream, if you wish. But not less real than Helen of Troy. Only on her image can be built, only through her can we realise our mad experiment. It is Iolanthe that we must try to realise.”

  Now something more astonishing happened. He fell on his knees before me and spread his arms in supplication saying: “Felix, for God’s sake help me. We are building her.”

  “Building her?”

  “I know. It will seem to you like one of those fantasies which go with General Paralysis of the Insane. It is nothing of the kind. We are building her and her consort, just to see. It is terrible to have to make models to comprehend, but it is all we can do. Rubber, leather, nylon, steel—God knows in the matter of technological contrivance we have everything at our disposal. But memory, Felix, for the conditioned responses, she will need a vastly extended memory. She must sensitise to sounds, she must be word perfect in her role—(‘Come darling open’). She needs you, she must have you, Felix. Nobody else can do it. We have nobody who could do it for us. You know that for a while we all thought Abel was a typical Felix type of hoax. It was only when the machine made pi come out that I woke up with a start and realised that in fact you had made something extraordinarily strange and original, a mnemonic monster.”

  He sat staring at me with a singular expression of exhaustion and triumph—the sort of relief a lecturer might feel at having completed a triumphant exposé of an abstruse theme. “We dismantled it, you know, with the greatest care. Marchant did it. It was perfectly astonishing as an example of technical virtuosity, of technical insolence if you wish. Parts of it you had only sketched out and tied together with string, so to speak. They were only just holding, only just passing a current. But such elegance of thought!”

  “I know. I went mad with rage against you and Benedicta and the whole set-up. You see I didn’t care if it worked or not; it’s when you don’t care that sometimes things work out. And really I had need of about fourteen people on the technical side to build such a toy.”

  “I know you did.”

  He had by now risen from his knees and dusted himself as meticulously as a cat; he crossed and poured himself a drink with perfectly steady hand. Then he turned to me and said in a low voice, a conspiratorial voice: “I i
mplore you, Felix.”

  But now I was musing, staring at the ground, seeing in my mind’s eye the sweating Marchant taking down Abel, probably with earphones like the people who de-fuse mines (after all the staked shot gun must have worried them); calling back in his firm but squeaky voice the name of every nut and bolt he touched. So they had stolen Abel’s memory, a thing still so terribly imperfect of execution. (I have had since a number of new notions about how to extend it.) Here they were clearly thinking about a mnemonic contrivance which acted directly on the musculature—a walking memory: what else is man, pray? It was breath-taking as an idea, and also monstrous. “Yes” said Julian, as if he were thought-reading. “It’s monstrous all right, but only from one point of view.”

  “Who would have thought it, Julian?” I said. “Iolanthe as the witch-fulfilment, the which fulfilment—how do you prefer it? How did you reduce it all to size to fit it into the confines of the human skull?”

  “We can do almost anything with matter, in the field of imitation; all we can’t do is create it.” He said it with such bitterness that I felt at once that he was thinking of his own castration. And then I looked past him up the hill and saw this other blonde monster Benedicta leaning against a tree and smoking quietly, with her blue eyes raised towards the sunlight which had begun to weaken now, to send blue shadows racing down to the bluer roots of the snowpeaks—and I thought grimly of the long desolating periods of impotent fury I had had to live through because of this man: of the fears and illnesses of Benedicta herself: of a life half lived or at least ill lived (always some cylinders not firing): and thinking the whole damned cartoon-strip through from the beginning I felt a sudden surge of weakness, a lassitude of limb and mind. I took a good swig from the gin bottle and set it carefully back in its place. “So you want me to join forces on the science friction, Julian? I’ll have to think it over, you know.” But he was already smiling at me in a curiously knowing way, as if he realised how deeply his arguments had pierced my armour, my self-esteem; and also how enticing was the prospect he had sketched in for me. I also had the uncomfortable feeling that he had really gone out of his mind in a queer sort of way. I wanted to say “You are schizoid my lad, that’s what you are. But with patience and rest and sedation …” but I said nothing. On the other hand, in a confused sort of way I began to wish I had never heard of this toy of his. But here he was, still smiling at me with a funny hangdog tenderness, quite impenitent over the past and still hungry about the future.