Young Blood

by Brian Stableford

  I quite liked the essay, but I assumed that Dr Gray wouldn't. I knew that he thoroughly disapproved of Rousseau and that if ever there was a man who wholeheartedly believed that the ideal state of mind must be subject to the uncompromising tyranny of reason, Dr Gray was he. For once, though, he didn't start chipping away at Daniel's argument with sly, loaded questions. Instead he chose to point out, rather laboriously, that Daniel had somehow failed to include the relevant ideas of Nietzsche, whose contrasting of the ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’ elements of Greek tragedy had been borrowed by later writers to describe phases through which whole cultures might pass, in the one striving for the rule of calm reason, in the other for the wild abandonment of ecstasy. Nietzsche, Dr Gray scrupulously observed, had argued in his later work that the relationship between the two tendencies could be complementary rather than conflicting.

  By this time, Cynthia was completely at sea, and even I—who had taken the trouble to read the relevant chapters of the books I'd borrowed from the library—felt that my resources were stretched to their limit. I hadn't managed to progress much further than the ideas of Spinoza, who seemed to me undeserving of Daniel's rapid dismissal as one more boring dualist. My own essay quoted Spinoza's disapproval of those who ‘prefer rather to abuse and ridicule the emotions and actions of men than to understand them’ and his determination to explore and explain ‘those things which they cry out against as opposed to reason, as vain, absurd and disgusting'. My essay concluded with Spinoza's assertion of the essential naturalness of the emotions and his declaration that ‘nothing happens in nature which can be attributed to a defect of it'. But that wasn't the direction in which Dr Gray chose to go.

  'The idea of emotions,’ he observed, ‘is intricately tied up with questions of moral responsibility. We're sometimes ashamed of our desires and our actions, and we try to disown them. “I just couldn't help it” we say. “I was overcome. I was seized by blind rage; I fell in love; I was transfixed by fear". We conceive of our emotions as things which happen to us rather than as things we do, and so they become excuses for our failings.'

  'But it's true,’ said Cynthia, bitterly. ‘These things do just happen to us. Some things do just well up inside us: anger, grief, fear. They're not things we choose. Even love isn't something we choose. Maybe we can control them to some extent, get a grip on them, act in spite of them, but that only proves that they're there—that it requires tremendous effort to suppress them.'

  I could see Dr Gray's eyes shifting uneasily. He didn't want to put any pressure on Cynthia. He was afraid of the emotion pent up inside her—afraid that anything he might say might tip her over the edge into tears, hysterics or blind fury.

  The situation was, to say the least, ironic.

  His flickering gaze finally came to rest on me. It was neither commanding nor pleading—just hopeful. He wanted to be baled out. He wanted to pass the buck.

  'I think,’ I began, hesitating to give me time to make it true, ‘that we need to ask where there is, exactly. Are our emotions part of us, or are they outside us, laying siege to the fortress of the mind? The answer to that depends on the definition we have of the self. What exactly do I mean by “I"? What does “I” include and what do I exclude from my concept of self? If I say that I'm just the reasoning part of my mind, which is constantly at war with the animal passions, aren't I making a rather primitive and probably unjustified distinction between my mind and my body? Plato and Descartes were happy to do that, imagining an immortal soul temporarily bound to a body, but I don't know ...'

  I stopped there. I knew I'd done enough. In philosophy, honest and articulate doubt is always respectable.

  'That's right,’ said Daniel. ‘We have to get rid of that sort of stuff. We can't disown our feelings simply by defining ourselves so as to exclude them.'

  'That's just confusing the issue,’ Cynthia complained. ‘What's disowning got to do with it? My anger is my anger, my grief is my grief, but they're things I can't help feeling. They're things nobody can help feeling, when the things which cause them happen. The best you can do—the very best—is to try to carry on in spite of them, and it isn't easy. Sometimes, it's just not possible ...'

  I could see that philosophy wasn't going to be much help to Cynthia. There was nothing Dr Gray could say that would make her feel better, and while he couldn't say anything that would make her feel better, whatever he did say was bound to seem irrelevant. She was too emotional to think rationally about her emotions. It was almost funny, in a way, but it was too serious to laugh at.

  Dr Gray looked at me again, because I was up the same creek as Cynthia, but not quite without a paddle. I was the one who had the power to ease the situation down. I was the one who could speak without my words being construed as some kind of personal attack, intended to devalue and denigrate her experience. Effectively, I had both a licence and a responsibility to say whatever came into my head, to heal the yawning breach which had opened out between the four of us because philosophy, whatever its intellectual merits, was no cure for Cynthia's condition.

  'The thing is,’ I said, more vaguely than I might have hoped, ‘that we have this idea of ourselves as coherent, organised wholes. Even if we accept the idea of conflict within ourselves, we want to see it in terms of a defined content of opposites, like a football match. Sometimes the emotions win three-nil, sometimes reason takes it into extra time and eventually wins on penalties. Maybe both ways of looking at it are too simple-minded. Maybe it isn't reason versus emotion, or superego versus id, or order versus chaos; after all, those ideas are all products of reason themselves—they're all biased, all circular. How can we describe ourselves, and see ourselves as we are, when we're all the time inside ourselves? How can we possibly step outside ourselves to see ourselves as objects?

  'I talked to Professor Viners last week about something Gil wrote in his notebook. It's just science fiction, utterly unprovable, but it made me think. We think of ourselves—our conscious selves—as a natural and inevitable extension of our brains. We assume that our brains, unlike animal brains, are complicated enough to generate conscious minds, and that that's all there is to it. Suppose, though, that that's only partly true. Suppose that consciousness is a collaborative endeavour, something that arises in brains only because they're infected with outside agents: viruses, say, or bacteria, or other things which aren't just parts of our own brain cells defined by our own genes but are actually just parasites. Suppose consciousness, even at its most calm and philosophical, is much more like delirium than we ever imagined. What if mind itself is just a kind of infection, which our bodies can sometimes fight off, so that we become autistic or catatonic, but which can also sometimes be enhanced by new and further infections? What if our perception of the world—not just our notion of what things look like but our notion of what exists and what doesn't, and our notions of cause and effect—can be changed dramatically by alterations in the populations of infectious agents which swarm in our brains, engaged in a constant struggle for existence and thus in a process of natural selection, which inevitably produces mental evolution?'

  'You mean that each emotion might just be a virus, like a cold in the head?’ said Daniel, radiating contemptuous astonishment, and betraying his unfortunate inability to think in any but the crudest terms when he hadn't got a textbook to plagiarize.

  'No, that's not what Anne means,’ said Dr Gray, who was inevitably quicker on the uptake. ‘What she actually said is rather more interesting than that. Every particular organ in our bodies is produced by the collaboration of thousands of genes; if what Anne suggests were true, then each identifiable emotion might be produced by the combined effect of many agents. That way, modification of any one of the agents might produce a modification of the emotion.’ He didn't add anything else: no criticism; no objection. He was prepared to let the flight of fantasy run, for the sake of amusement, and for the sake of getting to the end of the allotted hour without anyone bursting into tears.

&n
bsp; 'Reason too,’ I said. ‘Maybe all the gods which people once took for granted were actually available to their consciousness as objects of perception. Maybe all the wars of religion were just contests between diseases of the brain. Maybe the world really was full of monsters once: ghosts and ghouls, vampires and werewolves. Maybe it will be again, if the cut and thrust of natural selection so decides. Maybe scepticism, atheism and rationalism are just temporary colds in the head, from which our poor brains will all recover in time—except for those of us who die of them. Maybe the questions of whether we can or can't control our emotions, or whether we should or shouldn't be able to, or to what extent they're things that happen to us as opposed to things we do, are just ... symptoms. Maybe all our tutorials and all our dreams are just different reflections of the struggle for existence of our internal parasites. I think that's what Gil was trying to get at, in the notes he scribbled in his lab book.'

  It was all wide open to wisecrack put-downs, but I wasn't particularly worried. Nobody was going to be so insensitive as to point out, with scathing sarcasm, that these were the ideas of a man who had committed suicide, relayed by his flaky girlfriend. The two untroubled men weren't going to trample on Gil's grave and my feelings, any more than they were going to trample on Janine's grave and Cynthia's feelings. Only Cynthia had a licence to hit out at me, and she didn't have the strength to make her blows count.

  'It's all nonsense,’ said Cynthia, helplessly. ‘It's all just stupid talk, and it doesn't help. It doesn't help!’ Her voice was almost a whine, but she wasn't about to cry. She wasn't about to break down and embarrass us all. She was just complaining that for her, things weren't getting any better. For her, they weren't. But for me...

  Cynthia was quite right, of course, but she was also quite wrong. I knew full well that it might be all nonsense, fantasy and madness; but she was dead wrong to say that it didn't help.

  It helped me.

  More than anything Plato had ever thought, or Spinoza, or Nietzsche, or anyone else, what Gil had written and Professor Viners had explained in his half-hearted way really did help me to understand, to get a grip on things. It all helped me to understand not only what already had happened to me, but what might still happen in the future. It helped me to understand what ambitions I might entertain, and what kind of life I might yet be able to live within the borderlands where the bats flew in darkness and the owls hid in light.

  It helped me, immeasurably and irreplaceably, to be myself.

  13

  When the time eventually came to finish the job I had to do I was ready, mentally and physically. It was so easy to melt into the shadows and move through them to emerge on the other side that it had become a pleasurable experience. When I came to stand beneath the star-filled firmament, in the lurid red glare of the otherworldly sun, I felt that I was coming home to the land where I had dwelt before my embryonic consciousness had ever set forth upon its troublesome journey to the world of time and matter. I felt that I genuinely belonged to that warm, moist world—that it was and always had been the one true womb and well of all my experience.

  The house which had fallen half into ruins was whole now, its towers and turrets lustrous in the many-coloured light which fell from the crowded sky. Its walls were as silver-bright as the distant desert sands, save where they were decked with verdant ivy, whose shadows were purple and blue. The ancient idols looked upon it now with envy, their swinish faces chagrined and forlorn.

  The door of the house was no longer rotten; it stood proud and stubborn in its great arch, its weathered oak as tough as stone, studded with chromium-plated bolts of steel. It opened easily for me, and closed just as easily behind me. It was no longer dark and dismal in the upper rooms and hallways; light poured into them all through huge casement windows. There was a sturdy hook set into the wall beside the door from which my unbreakable thread still extended into the cellars below, marking out the route that I must follow. Down below, darkness still waited, and worse than darkness, but I was armed and armoured now. In my left hand I carried the sharpened stake which I had brought to drive into the heart of my one-time lover Maldureve, in order to pin him down forever to the silken pallet of his narrow bed.

  I knew what to expect, and I was not afraid. I had not come alone, and I knew how best to deploy the forces at my disposal.

  My last descent into the labyrinth was in some ways very much worse than the first. The first time I had come here, my reluctance to confront the actual contents of my inner world had hidden a great deal behind the walls whose twists and turns I laboriously traced. Then, the corridors had been empty of all life but the lowliest: moulds and rusts, mere stains upon walls which had once been whitened by emulsion. Now, even the walls themselves presented the appearance of life. They were possessed of countless arms, which sometimes reached out for me, and mouths which sneered and slobbered as I passed. Every corner had its eyes, which stared at me balefully as I approached and passed. Most of these arms and mouths and eyes were my own, and recognizably so, but there were other protrusions of various insectile and molluscan kinds: palps and tentacles and trailing antennae.

  All the faces which I had earlier seen, on high in the mountains and fugitive in the volcanic fissures of the plain, now sought to leer at me wherever the light of my torch fell, as if determined to intimidate me with vile grimaces and lascivious leers. But here too they seemed all too well aware of their own impotence, regretful of the loss of that implicit menace which once had forced me to hide them away. I knew now what the owls had taught me. I could tame them and defeat them all, if only I could look them in their myriad faces, and know them for what they were.

  They were the diseases of my soul, but they were products of my own nature: understandable, explicable, accountable.

  Many of the mouths were incapable of speech, and those which had the power spoke only the language of insult and abuse: Bitch! Whore! Cunt! They could not argue with me; they had nothing intelligent to say. I could no longer feel the force of the accusations which were their sole recourse. I could no longer feel the horror of their sordid implications.

  The hands occasionally succeeded in grabbing my ankles or pulling my hair; the tentacles and the antennae sometimes contrived to stroke my face with slimy tenderness or stinging sharpness. I brushed them off, contemptuously. I was no longer willing to turn on myself, to pluck at the scabs of my guilt and shame. I did not hesitate to walk through it all, even the worst of it. I no longer wanted anything held back. I wanted nothing omitted or erased or repressed. I wanted to go through it all, for as long as it might be necessary to do so. I wanted to get to the heart of things without skulking or sneaking or becoming in any way surreptitious. If I were indeed diseased, then I wanted to sicken and rot and be damned. I felt that the wisdom of the owls was means enough to any end.

  I followed the route mapped out by the silken thread which extended before and behind me. I had never been entirely certain that it could withstand the corrosive attentions of the creatures I passed by, but I was confident enough that I would not and could not be trapped, because the morbidity of my own inner being had not sufficient strength to crush me, cut me to ribbons or suck the blood from my body and the marrow from my bones. Only others could do that to me; I was not prepared to do it to myself—and in this particular region of the borderlands, I had nothing to fear but fear itself.

  My certainty was not an indication that I was completely under the sway of the owls. Now that I was free of the cage of light I felt perfectly justified in holding reservations about some of their dicta. I didn't think it was true, for instance, that we are all our own worst enemies. Only some of us are. And we, I think—those of us who are our own worst enemies—are the lucky ones, because we are the ones who do not have to go outside ourselves in order to defeat our enemies, or at least to have the chance. Those people who have enemies worse than themselves—hunger, cancer, the hatred of torturers—have no recourse but grace in the face of dire adversity, and the h
ope of miraculous release; but those of us who are weighed down by our own chimeras, crippled by our own doubts and fears, are already in possession of the keys to our own prisons. The fact that there are other prisoners who have no keys to unlock their troubles makes it all the more necessary that those of us who have should make our escape. That way, there's a chance—however slim—that we may become the miracle the others need: the tillers of the ground, the sisters of mercy, the deliverers.

  The enlightenment of the owls, you see, is not in itself enough—but without it, the night will last forever, and the stars will fall from the sky like overripe and rotting figs.

  As things are, only some of us have to go into the borderlands to save ourselves, and only some of us can save ourselves even when we do, but those who have to and can must do it. I had to. I could. And therefore I did.

  I don't say that I wasn't scared, but if you're not scared, how can you be a hero?

  In time, when my feet ached enough, and the thirst burning away inside my gut was fierce enough, and my face was scratched enough, and my eyes were red-rimmed enough, I came again to the threshold at which I had hesitated: the open doorway dressed with the gauze of spider webs, which taunted me with their insubstantiality while their dark and poisonous spinners lay in wait.

  'This time,’ I said to them, in Gil's voice, ‘it won't be enough. This time, I'm coming through.'