Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  “The time for loom weaving is definitely past,” Martine whispered huskily, mechanically. “Gone forever.”

  “I am glad you agree,” the living doll said.

  It gave Martine a start: obviously there must be microphones installed somewhere on the street to pick up voices and carry them inside.

  All these figures were quadro-amps—without prosthetics. Their limbless bodies, ovaloid, spheroid, stripped of geometric irrelevancies, were hidden under blue silk-edged baby blankets, which was why it had been easy at first glance to take them for dolls: only their heads were exposed. These were the basket cases, the ceiling gazers and navel explorers.

  “The issue is clear,” the amp went on in a monotone. “Arms mean armaments, legs mean marching orders. Men must stop moving or they move to their doom.”

  “The time for doom leaving is past,” Martine muttered.

  “It is clear,” the amp continued. “If the tiger’s claws are removed by surgery and replaced with cybernetic superclaws, will it stop slashing the other beasts of the jungle? If the lemming’s legs are amputated and replaced with superlegs, will it refrain from hurling itself suicidally into the ocean? The energies heretofore trapped by the body’s ‘Its’ must be placed at the disposal of the cerebrum—so that, at last, the cerebrum will be able to perceive and conceive truthfully, uncorrupted by animal lusts. These lusts cannot be shaken off until their agencies, the limbs, are removed. Prosthetics do not prod the brain into expanding and becoming a more perfect organ. This is a perfection of the brain in nothing but a bestial, jungle sense.”

  Why, Martine wondered in a sudden rush of pique, was the amp addressing these remarks exclusively to him? Why were his, Martine’s, limbs considered such special prizes? Was it—was it because of what he’d been doing with them for eighteen years, was it because for eighteen years he’d been standing alongside an operating table in the Mandunga cave, fashioning with his hands a race of emotional amps, a race of mushrooms, non-laughers, snorers, their psyches holed up in a basket whether or not they happened to retain their limbs? But the Mandungabas should be a delight to this amp, why was he eyeing his, Martine’s, limbs so hungrily? Just plain gluttony? Or was it because of his, Martine’s, own guilt, guilt that once, nearly eighteen years ago, he had not snored nor even slept. . . .

  “Cybernetics has only bolstered the beast in man, tied him to the jungle life of tooth and claw. We have a choice: to rain blows with our limbs, or caresses with our liberated spirits; one or the other. Let Vishinu have all the columbium, it is a trap.”

  “It is too late for womb leaving,” Martine whispered.

  “That is correct,” the amp said. “As Martine said, it is too late for loom weaving.”

  Strange, how hypnotic the man’s voice was. More, almost uncanny. An hour before, Martine had quickly spotted the Pro-Pro speaker for what he was: only the Immob variant of the traditional soapbox polemicist, with all the folksy flimflam of the demagogue. But this Anti-Pro was something new under the political sun, his whole polemical style was that of murmurous serenity. He did not harangue, he expounded. He knew. He chose now to pass his knowledge along to the world, without sales pressure. This total lack of salesmanship, Martine reflected, was the shrewdest selling technique he had ever run into in a rabble rouser. To challenge him would be like challenging the voice of God, (Helder, holding forth in the upper bunk, had often sounded like God.)

  Part of the effect, no doubt, was due to the fact that the man was lying on his back, an unagitated position seldom cultivated by agitators. But it was much more than that. Apart from his immobilized state, or perhaps because of it, the young man—he was hardly more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight—spoke with the pontifical last-wordism of Solomon, of Methuselah. He drawled obscenities, dispensed nightmares in a placid whisper. His oratorical style (like Helder’s) was that of a superb machina ratiocinatrix. . . . But maybe, after all, the deepest secret of this impact was the fact of his spectacular maiming. One could to some extent fight off the hypnotic verbal blandishments of a Pro-Pro spellbinder, it was not too hard because the man’s crippled state was so thoroughly compensated for by artificial limbs that it did not call for pity. The Anti-Pro, on the other hand, was so demonstratively damaged that the mere sight of him lying in his basket was enough to stir up all sorts of sympathetic vibrations—and these vibrations were what gave to the experience its uncanny quality, its eeriness.

  Yes, that could be it. For it is uncanny whenever some sight or sound arouses a person’s deepest unconscious hungers—and the sight of a grown man reduced to complete uterine-infantile helplessness must mobilize in everyone the yearning, thrust very far from consciousness and bedded in churning guilts, to achieve the same spectacular regression, to draw back from the grueling effortfulness of adult life into the sheltered megalomaniacal crib of babyhood. Everybody hungers for passivity and must deny that guilt-laden hunger in bursts of feverish activity; no doubt much of human tonus derives from just this ambivalence, seeping insidiously into the nervous system. And the hidden urge must begin to dance at the sight of any person, crippled in birth or by accident, who wanders into view. He is a dramatization of the forbidden. The looker, in his first spurt of reaction, identifies with the maimed one, empathizes into his condition, thrills to this eerie charade of his own taboo wishes; but as the taboo wish is activized, draws perilously close to awareness, there rise with it all the unbearable guilts which ordinarily keep it safely anchored. These guilts must not be allowed to break through into full consciousness, it would be too painful. Accordingly, the stirred-up yearning must be warded off, driven back into its subterranean hiding place—and this is accomplished by striking another, cover-up attitude, not one of identification with the maimed but one of removal from him. One thinks then, reassuringly, how infinitely worse off the cripple is than oneself, secretly complimenting oneself on escaping such a cruel fate. Finally, if this attitude of contented superiority becomes too uncomfortable—the ethic of communal living requires that one feel for the unfortunate, not lord it over them—the looker covers up all his urges and counterurges with a topmost cloak of polite sympathy. This stereotyped, socially dictated attitude of sympathy, finally, allows a bit of the original identification to be discharged surreptitiously. In short, one becomes the cripple, then revels in being utterly unlike the poor fellow, and finally is politely but distantly sorry for him—while secretly feeling a bit like him after all. All because his mere presence agitates one’s innermost yearning to crawl back to the crib and curl up cozily, to be taken care of by a universe now, as in the paradisiacal beginning, cringing under the whiplash of one’s imperious will, terrorized by one’s every whimper.

  But suppose the damaged one is transparently not the victim of a mishap? Suppose it is quite clear that he has deliberately, programmatically, voluntarily performed the mutilation on himself—and as a result is officially showered with kudos and plaudits by his whole society? What then? The sight of such a cripple would become so uncanny as to be unbearable. For the entirely willful nature of his misfortune would dramatize not only the beatific state of passivity but even more, and with harrowing starkness, the fact that one’s fascination by that state is, at its furtive heart, a masochistic one. When one secretly identifies with this cripple, one identifies not only with mutilation but also with the wish to be mutilated, to do the mutilating oneself. The voluntary side of ampism, in other words, highlights in the observer his own hidden volitions in all their self-destructive import—and, most sickeningly of all, with all the social onus removed from them—and whenever this masochistic layer of the psyche is prodded in the slightest it must send off evil odoriferous fumes of shame. So the voluntary basket case must be an infernally potent magnet for everyone’s deepest guilts, since he focuses attention on everyone’s desire to do damage to himself, the masochistic essence of every man’s interest in all damaged people. No psychic distance from this self-made baby is possible: this is no victim. The spotlight now is o
n the “I,” not this or that “It.” This must be the key to the Immob’s charisma—the fact that he served as a living uncanny symbol of all men’s drives to wound themselves, annihilate themselves, the masochism which motors all human urges to move backwards in time toward the blessed megalomaniacal state at the beginning—and to punish oneself for so desiring. The amp dramatized, indeed, the fact that one could not backtrack in psychic time without self-mutilation. Once dispossessed from the womb and the nursery, no man could buy megalomania save at the cost of slashing violence to his own person and personality.

  It struck Martine now that it might provide new insights into the political process to draw up, a rank order of panics. On the lowest level would be the reaction of the normal, intact man when he is solicited on the street by a crippled beggar rattling a tin cup: he either turns aside or flings the unfortunate a coin to remove him hurriedly from sight and conscience. However, the same normal man will often forget his self-protective reactions when the same beggar appears before him, not as bum, but in the guise of saint (Christ) or artist (Rimbaud) or political leader (Helder? Helder?)—this normal man then, surprisingly enough, prostrates himself. Obviously something has happened to his defenses, he is so deeply shaken, thrown into such overwhelming oscillations by his panic, that he cannot recognize the solicitor as the same raggedy panhandler, now juggling a slightly shinier and more streamlined cup—a cup which by some infernal magic is disguised as a gift from the solicitor to the solicited. Why the astounding psychic shift in the normal man before the cripple-fanatic, the disintegration of all his psychic safeguards, the hurried passage from contemptuous retreat to adoring self-subjection? Maybe just because the saint-artist-politico—as against the street-corner beggar, who was haphazardly mauled by poliomyelitis or ack-ack or some other “It”—is the epitome of the self-mauled. Maybe because, bringing to life as he does a terrible reminder of the urge toward death in all of us, he leaves us too guilt-ridden to put up much of a fight against his spell: in dramatizing the universal death-wish, he reduces all men whom he touches to living corpses.

  But the doll was still talking to him, the big round blue eyes flashed authoritatively at him alone. . . . “I would like to speak with you,” he said. “It is important. Would you be good enough to come inside?”

  Outraged to be singled out so, astounded at this exclusive interest in him, quite sure that it would be much, much safer to go away, thinking again of the perversity that makes a man probe an aching tooth with his tongue, hot, sweaty, drenched, stomach a rock, breathing hard, throat choked, Martine proceeded to the entrance of the store and went through the revolving door, revolving, around in a circle, vicious circle, around and around a word and a sound and a guilt, steamily, rollingly. Somewhere overhead a jet plane thrummed and whined, making a noise like a man in an upper bunk breathing hard in laughless sleep.

  chapter fourteen

  ABOVE THE basket was a mirror tilted at a sharp angle, in it the amp could see the faces of those standing behind him and they could see his. He looked hard at Martine’s reflection. “You are troubled,” he said without preliminaries.

  The flat statement caught Martine off guard. “What?”

  “You are uneasy, you perspire.”

  “Oh—I’m not troubled, really. A bit puzzled, that’s all.”

  “You are an unusually sensitive and intelligent man, my intuition tells me that. Why are you not one of us?”

  “I’ve been away. I had no idea how Immob was developing back here.”

  “You agree with Immob?”

  “It’s several cuts above any other philosophy I ever heard of.”

  The amp’s face showed no response to the joke. “Why are you not even a mono or a duo?”

  Martine thought fast. “For a very good reason. I am a parasitologist. In order to do worthwhile research I had to spend long years in the African jungle. Unfortunately, when I left for Africa prosthetics had not yet been developed, so if I’d had any limbs removed I couldn’t have gotten replacements for them. Under the rugged conditions of life in the jungle, an amputee without pros wouldn’t survive very long, let alone get any research done. It was simply in the interests of my own Moral Equivalent that I had to forego the initiation rites of Immob.”

  He considered his improvisation almost inspired, but the amp seemed not at all impressed. “Your logic is entirely spurious, of course,” the young man said. “Short of total passivity there is no Moral Equivalent for war. Why, may I ask, do you not begin your initiation now?”

  “Ah,” Martine said, “I’m afraid I’m too old for that sort of thing now.”

  “And uneasy. You are too intelligent a man not to see the contradiction in the non-amp state.”

  “Oh—maybe. I must say, though, that I can’t help seeing a few contradictions in the amp state too.”

  “The contradictions are all in the Pro-Pro camp. The only way to end the disastrous movements which have always plagued mankind—individual and mass movements both—is, quite simply, to stop moving. That is Martine’s whole lesson about the steamroller effect. Gandhi’s too. Perhaps you remember the tactics employed by Gandhi’s followers in the face of overwhelming odds—they simply lay down on the railroad tracks in front of an oncoming locomotive. They were never run over. The locomotive stopped. In every case, the locomotive stopped.”

  “Why?”

  “Those early practitioners of passivity had triumphed inwardly over the locomotive. They projected charismatic power, not panicky animal impotence. Therefore the locomotive became impotent. Long before Martine, Gandhi had found the way to dodge the steamroller—by lying down in front of it. . . .”

  He felt his gorge rising. They had to stop kicking his name—his mottled pen name?—around like this! He had reached the limit of his patience, how long was a man expected to go on being muddled and mottled and penned up and perspiring and feeling sick to his stomach and his breath coming in quick fluttering gasps—by God, he would put and end to it! make them eat their abominable obscene words!

  His throat was terribly dry, it was hard for him to keep the agitation from flooding into his face, he looked away from the amp’s reflection in the mirror and out the window. He was suddenly crafty, he thought that if he could change the subject his stomach might quiet down. “Everybody around here seems to poo-poo Vishinu’s speech,” he said.

  “Vishinu’s attack means that the final crisis has come.”

  “What’s the nature of this crisis?”

  “Simple: the moment amps acquired new limbs they regressed from Immob into the old pattern of activity. And activity means war.”

  “Why? The caress is also an act.”

  “The hand was and remains an instrument for animal aggression. Therefore, when it fondles and strokes there is a blow lurking in the caress. Hands are made to grasp with. So long as men are graspers, they must compete. This competition, which originated in the primordial slime, reaches the peak of frenzy at the present moment. Now, in the cybernetic limbo, men grasp for the instruments of grasp: the means have become the end. The final war which writes finis to the human race, the half-human race, will be one waged by clawing men for their man-made claws.”

  “So there’s no way out? No escape claws?”

  “Only a very uneasy man jokes so obscenely. Once you join us this glandular panic will subside. . . . No, men must lay down their arms—and legs—quite literally, or the steamroller triumphs. The only way out of the vicious circle is to recline in the center of it and turn the thoughts inward where there are no circles, no boundaries for the mind, only a serene infinitude.”

  “You evidently place little stock in Moral Equivalents?”

  “None whatsoever. Gandhi thought to de-energize men’s aggressions by turning their efforts to wholesome pursuits, he invented one of the first M.E.’s in loom weaving. It could not work, he who sits down at the loom to make cloth can rise again to make war.”

  “Do you really think the Untouchables on the r
ailroad track, simply through lying down, unnerved the locomotive?”

  “Certainly. Is it not a rule that a lion tamer is perfectly safe in his cage—until he betrays a touch of animal terror?”

  “Maybe it is. But there’s an old joke about such rules: You know it, and I know it, but does the lion know it?”

  “Of course the lion knows it. That is why it never bites a man unless he is afraid.”

  “You must know more non-Aristotelian lions than I do,” Martine said. “The lions back in Africa would lunch on any man within pouncing distance, charisma and all. Anyhow, isn’t it true, as the Pros claim, that this detachment you advocate is the very negation of the oceanic? How can you be in touch with anything when you pass your days flat on your back, with your eyes on your navel?”

  “Do not scorn the navel,” the amp said. “It is infinity’s aperture. It is the door that leads everywhere.”

  “Mine’s pretty clogged,” Martine said. “Collects a lot of lint.”

  “The man who transcends his body does not simply retreat into his own isolated deeps. When the gaze turns inward the spirit suddenly leaps into the innermost being of the world, into the hearts of all universal matters—Thou art That. When a man’s own skin is his horizon he touches nothing but himself, an eternal exasperated self-fondling. Bodies prevent the merger of human beings with each other and with the world. Do you, by chance, know the text of Nietzsche entitled The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music?”

  “Vaguely.” Back before the Third, Martine remembered, he had once picked up a second-hand copy of the book in a Greenwich Village shop.

  “A remarkable work. In it, you may recall, Nietzsche distinguishes between the two motifs in the Greek spirit: the plastic, which glorifies human separateness in statuary and whose form of expression is a measured eloquence; the musical, which represents a cry of anguish from man yearning to break out of the bodily trap and whose form of expression is nonsemantic sound, song. Sculpture, according to this view, is Apollonian, reveling in the restraint imposed on the spirit by the body, in physical definition and containment, and music is Dionysian, the shriek of those who yearn to lose their bodily separateness and melt into the herd and the landscape and the void. From this frustrated Dionysian urge Nietzsche derives the whole quality of tragedy, and he is quite right: the tragedy of the human condition is precisely the entrapment by the vile engine of bone and muscle, the cursed armoring of the self by the engulfing skin. The navel is the only escape hatch from the trap.”