My paranoia was not unfounded. The rhythms of the main house were so erratic as to be mystifying. Since dinners were communal, I gained a quick introduction to the seven tenants. One played bass for a band perpetually and tediously about to get work. One studied midwifery. One proofread for a Buddhist press. One couple seemed to do nothing but drift in and out, vanishing sometimes for days. Once I came back from a walk to find them studying my cottage through its one window; they did not return my greeting. Their eyes were like oil.
My landlord liked to complain to me, as if thereby forming an alliance, and confided that he was owed over a thousand dollars in back rent; yet he was not indigent, and as far as I could see had no other income. He went out in his battered Karmann-Ghia only for tennis and movies. His way of life at least had an easy explanation; I found out he had a trust fund and sold drugs. But the overall logic of the house was that of a dream. Its structure was a holdover, or recapitulation, of the communes of the sixties, with the difference that I had more privacy than if I had lived alone. A nearly pathological avoidance of questions ruled the dinner conversation. I could have said I was a Nobel laureate and drawn no comment.
Murphy and I crossed campus. I did not like it. Architecturally it was American, which is to say a hodgepodge. Beaux-arts styles had been lifted and laid with the care of a rich parvenu moving a castle across the ocean stone by stone. The buildings declared that culture could be bought, transported, and legitimated in a new context. To stare at them too long invited dislocation; the classical style was subtly wrong, the air too raw, the flora too luxuriant and primitive. A controlled hysteria, very like the defensive edges of Murphy’s drawings, made a thin halo around the pale granite and red-tiled roofs to hold back the corrosive blue sky.
I picked up an application anyway. Girls passed, slit skirts swinging, on the plaza that thirteen years before had been flooded with tear gas and riot police. Two corner prophets, not yet extinguished by the natural selection of social history, hung on the edge of campus, one reading scripture from file cards, the other preaching a philosophy of hate, their voices oddly twinned. Undergraduates crowded the Avenue, clutching parcels. And I saw that here was a sinking of history, a twisting of time, unlike anything I had seen in the East. I was not badly matched, in my motives of denial and escape, to this place of lost connections and vanished history.
Murphy’s connection was real enough. He was a street vendor with a long folding table in front of the Bank of America. He accepted the rolled sheaf of drawings and shook his head.
—My man, why don’t you get yourself a matte knife? Now I have to take these to the frame place, and you know it comes out of your money.
Murphy shrugged. The vendor counted off several twenty-dollar bills and pushed them across the table. He left his hand on top.
—Listen, you want some coke?
Murphy said no.
—All right. The hand came off the bills. The vendor smiled. —But don’t tell me you do this stuff straight. Take it in trade sometime, okay? You’re giving me cash-flow problems.
From here Murphy crossed to a bookstore with an Indian name. He circled the shelves deliberately, pulled down six or seven books without examination, and laid them on the counter. I read the title on top.
—Bergson? Jesus, I read him when I was seventeen, and I thought he was flaky then.
I knew I was being a swine. The Harvard habit dies hard. For apology I was going to broaden my comment into self-parody, but as the cashier went through the rest of the titles, I was silenced. Flying saucers. Gods. Magic.
—It’s bull, said Murphy pleasantly. —But it’s also true.
So I learned by the way that he had a fear of words. He would scruple to use certain common phrases, as if in dread of what they might call up, whereas I tended to be profane, as if a dare to scatology or blasphemy might keep the named thing at bay.
—I’m sorry, I said. —I shouldn’t criticize. It’s just my goddamned training talking.
—Oh, I knew you were a biologist.
—What? How? How did you know? I felt violated. This secret had been easy enough to keep at the dinner table.
—By the way your eye traveled over my drawings.
I did not believe he had seen this. I could not. Yet somehow he had known.
—You see, when you look at things ... He seemed suddenly panic-stricken at the crowds. —Do you mind if we take the long way home?
We followed a road up past a stadium and some practice fields and into the hills. We were entering a botanical garden when I heard an insistent shrieking.
—What’s that?
—Dogs. The university has labs up here.
We toured the garden. Murphy stopped by a large cactus and broke off a lobe. Gingerly he slid it into his shirt pocket. We went on past succulents, camellias, rhododendrons, eucalypti, sage, manzanita, and we stopped in a stand of sequoia, the ground thick with ferns. My sense of time suffered a shift: in these plants, in the shape of these hills, was a vast sense of a young Earth. Everything here looked prehistoric. Cars took the curves below us dreamily, carapaces gleaming.
Murphy picked a cone from the ground and looked at it curiously.
—They won’t grow . . . unless there’s been a fire. He said this with wonder, as if he had just discerned it. He turned to me. —You see, if you look at things, after a while something emerges, you find that, that things want to change into other things. And you can draw that, you can see what they were or want to be. And in, in people too.
—In people?
He looked at me. —For example, you want to be dead.
I stood appalled. And then I laughed. —Murphy, you’re an idiot.
—You mean that I can’t speak, I don’t know how to communicate with others. That’s so. But you see it’s a, a ceding of self to be understood.
Now I was agitated. It was not just my vanity. True, I prized observation as the first skill of a good biologist, and I thought myself that; and now an amateur was outclassing me at my one pride. But it was also that he did not know how to talk to people, that he was picking at my wounds, and by not ceding an atom of his self he was taking mine. For I had long behaved as if sheer observation could give answer, as if a complete description contained an inevitable and correct course of action in its terms—and how wrong I had been, how much I had lost by it, I could still not confess.
—Do you know much about genetics? he asked abruptly.
—No one does. They all pretend.
—I read a story. It was about books, a library made of all the combinations of letters . . .
—Permutations, yes. The library of Babel.
—You know it? It exists?
—Murphy, it’s a story. An intellectual fantasy.
—Yes, but DNA is like letters of the alphabet, and, and if you rearrange them . . .
—You could have a menagerie of Babel.
—Yes. Yes, that’s right.
—No, it’s not right. DNA is not like letters. There are laws . . . And I stopped. For I realized that this was indeed the premise of Darwin’s theory—that, as Julian Huxley said, “Given sufficient time anything at all will turn up” from this promiscuous shuffling of genes—and I realized also, hardly for the first time, that the theory was therefore as fantastic as any of Murphy’s, acceptable to scientists only because it fit the historical form of their method. What were those laws, which could give this opening of all possibility a human meaning? No one could say. The function of DNA is to copy itself. Yet it does not, not exactly. There are sports and mutants. So life diversifies—not, we must believe, aimlessly—but we are unable, I think reluctant, to learn the laws. If we knew them, it would change us.
—This was my work, I confessed. —I majored in genetics.
—But you quit.
—I was eased out.
—You let them? But this is important! This is my work, too.
—What do you mean?
—I draw only to learn. If you draw
things, using always the same kinds of lines, you can learn about . . . growth. My books help, they don’t all use the same methods, but I can see that they’re right. Just look! Look at it all! The plants, the animals, the superabundance, the excess, and no why to it except nature’s in— . . . insatiable hunger for new forms, why, on this planet alone the diversity is appalling! Life is, is nothing but a freak show! Look at it! Just look!
I had been following him to learn, as I said, the habits of his delusion. Now he had touched the core of his obsession, and his lean nervous body shook with zeal, his thin stuttering voice driven wholly by its force. I may have been his first audience. He spoke of the forces which could thrust up from common proteins a whale, a hummingbird, or any of a thousand different cacti, and of the family resemblances in the enzymes of sharks and grasses. But if this was a source of wonder to me, to him it was a horror. His world was no plenum. He spoke as if all life were the fever dream of a mad, insomniac intelligence. I remembered the old anthropologist’s saw that intelligence is pathological; the rapid evolution of man’s forebrain, that diadem of the species, is anomalous by any current knowledge. And more than one scientist, trying to explain it, has desperately likened it to a cancer. I wondered again if Murphy was sane. Certainly if an intelligence governed his cosmos, it was pathological; and its means were near to Darwinism, which also limited the instruments of creation to permutation and mindless competition.
It was almost touching. He was well read, if indiscriminate, and his attempts to find an order were like mine in everything but direction. My work too was heretical and against the dogmas of science, though constituted by them. So I did not tell him that the idea of an ordered world had always faced contradictions and inadequacies, from Plato through Spinoza, Leibniz, Schelling, and beyond Darwin. Its history was a history of failure, though of a kind I aspired to. The idea had been such a grand failure. It was an idea born of humanity, reason, and purpose, when those abstractions had seemed incorruptible, and it was the only opposition to the brute mechanistic world that the current paradigms of science told us existed. I would rather fail on that path than succeed by the other, if I had the choice. For I knew there was an order to life. I knew it was possible to live. I had seen it done. But I did not know how. I had to know not first for my own existence, but to have a whole picture in which I could strive to place myself. Was the world indeed a nightmare of congenital competition, or was there yet some kind of cooperation at the center of being? For my own reasons I needed to believe the latter; I needed also, unlike Murphy, to know that I was not deluded in my belief.
—And you, he said, you can help me.
If Murphy would use me to work out his obsession, I could use him as proof against delusion. This cold quid pro quo was still a form of cooperation. So I said mildly, —Murphy, you ought to get some history. This idea is as old as the Timaeus.
Still, I knew that history would not help him. Even if he read Plato, he would only seize on the myth of Atlantis. In his way he was as betrayed by history as I by method. It was fitting that we meet at this place and time, under a primal sun that subsumed history. I could see the beasts of Murphy’s fantasy taking color in this light, engaging in their unthinkable activities; but not with his innocence. No, I saw them body forth under the pervasive smutching shadow of method, a mockery and reproach to all I had learned and suffered for.
But he was not done. He spoke of his splendid drawings, calling them tools of inquiry, experiments, with their own methodology of rigid line and black ink, and with the beginnings of a new woe I interrupted him.
—You have no pride in your art? For I thought that he, at least, had an arena of action in which he was free. But he looked utterly stunned.
—Pride? In copies of copies? As, as if the grandest Chartres could approach the balance of a bumblebee, or, or the finest pigment ever more than mock the glint of snakeskin . . .
—But you say that life is monstrous.
—It is.
—Then why draw it? Don’t you have to look at things with love in order to see their pasts and futures?
—Yes. That’s the worst. I do, I do love all this. Have you read Rilke?
—No.
—He speaks of beauty. That it is the beginning of terror. That every angel is terrible.
—Then why is it beauty? Why does it hold us so?
—Because it suffers us to live.
Overhead a fire-spotting plane droned, crossing and re-crossing the dry grass-grown hills. Below us a million souls sprawled round the borders of the shallow bay.
—I don’t know what to tell you, Murphy. But it’s foolish to pursue something that puts you in pain.
He regarded me skeptically. —Is it?
Another touch. I wanted to tell him to leave me out of it, but I doubt he knew he was hurting me. He just knew what he could see. So I said: —Yes. It is.
—Maybe . . . I’m at a dead end with my drawings anyway. Maybe another way . . .
But I did not want to hear any more just then. I suggested that we descend.
* * * *
One of my friends from Cambridge now lived in Berkeley. Homi had put me up my first week in California. He was from New Delhi originally. When I told him about Murphy he smiled and asked if Murphy was a Krishna.
—Offhand I can’t think of anything less likely to attract him.
—Oh, it’s not so unlikely. This horror of life can become quite ecstatic.
He told me then a Hindu legend about Shiva and his consort Parvati. One day a powerful demon came to Shiva and demanded Parvati. Angry Shiva opened his third eye, and at once another demon sprang from the ground, a lion-headed beast whose nature was pure hunger. Thinking quickly, the first demon threw himself on Shiva’s mercy, for it is well known that when you appeal to a god’s mercy he is obliged to protect you. So the anguished lionhead asked, “Now what? What am I supposed to eat?” And Shiva said, “Well, why not eat yourself?” And so the lion did, starting with his tail, eating right through his belly and neck, until only his face was left. And to this sunlike mask, which was all that remained of the grim leonine hunger, exultant Shiva gave the name Kirttimukha, or “Face of Glory.” He decreed it should stand over the doors to all his temples, and none who refused to honor it would ever come to knowledge of him. Those who think the universe could be made another way, without pain, without sorrow, without time or death, are unfit for illumination. None is illumined who has not learned to live in joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of this knowledge of life, in the radiance of the monstrous face of glory which is its emblem. This is the meaning of the faces over the entrances to the sanctuaries of the god of yoga, which word is cognate with yoke.
Homi had a hypnotic voice—his faint Indian accent falling on American idioms was beguiling—and as he spoke I thought of my demonic angels of choice, their twin faces merging into Kirttimukha, glorious sun-faced lion of life, and for the moment I felt at peace.
Before I left, Homi asked: —Have you spoken to . . . anyone back East?
I said no. Seeing me out, he touched my arm.
The next time I saw Murphy he had a fantastic book on cloning and a practical guide to the grafting of cacti.
* * * *
Let me tell you about Paul Kammerer. He was an Austrian biologist who set out to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired traits. This evolutionary doctrine was anathema to Darwinists and is still. In 1926, after a distinguished career as long as my life, Kammerer blew his brains out, thoroughly disgraced. The cause of his disgrace was a badly preserved and ineptly doctored specimen of Alytes obstetricans, examined by a hostile critic ten years after its preservation. A discoloration on the toad’s hand was supposed to demonstrate Kammerer’s thesis. On examination the discoloration proved to be fresh india ink. Kammerer had nothing to do with this botch of a hoax, and it proved only that some lab assistant had tried clumsily to support him or maliciously to discredit him. But his critics’ tactics were to tie the validity of all his wo
rk to the fraud of this one specimen.
This is a parable in the politics of natural selection. That Darwin’s work is based on a tautology his supporters like to forget. Survival of the fittest means only this—that creatures with the most offspring have the most offspring. Or, to put it academically, those with tenure keep tenure.
No attempts had ever been made to duplicate Kammerer’s work. I decided to do it.
My advisor had urged me to work in recombinant DNA. I demurred, and in one step moved from the cutting edge of my field to the backwaters of Lamarckism. We will not speak here of my apparent need to doom myself. I had good reasons as well. I thought too many favored Darwin’s fiction of life, because it tacitly endorsed every murder as life-furthering. A being, or an idea, that could not or would not compete for its survival, or which failed at the effort, was de facto useless. I could not endorse this. In itself the theory was badly flawed, and its analogs were appalling—”survival of the fittest” could excuse every cutthroat social act from betrayal to corporate capitalism to genocide. Nor could I return to the moral paradigms that had held good before the fall of God to Reason. Even Lamarck’s earlier myth of evolution—that no useful effort is wasted, that children may inherit the acquired traits of their parents—was too wistful for me to swallow. But I used it as a name for my ignorance.
Universe 14 - [Anthology] Page 14
