“You might just as well have quoted Freud,” Martine said. “Nietzsche’s Dionysian urge sounds very much like Freud’s death-wish.”
“Precisely,” the amp said, not without respect. “It was the same polarity which Freud had in mind when he posited two great warring impulses: Eros, which is the life-giving and life-saving drive, and Thanatos, which is the passion of the body to throw off all cramping patterns and drip back into oblivion with the inert scattered elements of the cosmos, Thanatos, as he knew very well, was the personification of Death in Greek mythology, brother to Hypnos, the god of Sleep, and Nyx, god of Night—all three of them dwellers of the lower depths.”
“And this is what you have made into a program for the salvation of humanity: universal death?”
“Far from it. You see, there is a paradox here which Freud did not savor fully. The inertness which is variously called sleep, hypnosis, thanatosis—a zoological term which, as you may know, refers to the trancelike state of inanition assumed by beetles and certain other insects when disturbed or threatened—is not a genuine death but the only way of evading the death-ridden flesh. Voluntary thanatosis, therefore, is an affirmation of life through which the totalitarian quakes and spasms of the death-hungry body are overcome and the spirit can soar into the limitless void wherein eternal truth resides. The mind-map becomes one with the world-territory. This, you will recognize, is the genuinely oceanic condition, which Freud discounted as a human possibility.”
“All Yogi and no Commissar,” Martine said, “makes Jack a dull boy.”
“Transcendence,” the amp said, “is possible only through the trance—through the catapulting of the Dionysian, musical self up and out of the Apollonian, chattering body. From this analysis you should appreciate that the Yogi’s state of nirvana has been thoroughly misunderstood. It has been taken for a condition of nothingness, of negation, whereas it is actually everythingness, the only human affirmation. For it is not the antithesis of Eros, but only a strategy for doing what Christianity and many other religions have tried to do without success—for transforming Eros into Agape, bodily self-centered love into spiritual oceanic love, the love that is greedy and sucking into the love that is genuinely agape and open to everything. For through nirvana, the mystic’s self-willed thanatosis, the Yogi manages to elude the flesh and merge in spirit with the Other, with the primordial Oneness, in the true oceanic experience, the ultimate orgasm. The animal, slave to erotic tropisms, can only cry, ‘Give to me! More! More!’ The liberated spirit, giving itself freely over to Agape, murmurs over and over again, ‘Om, Om, Om’—Om being the mystic Vedantic word, compendium of all man’s oh’s and ah’s, essence of all human sound-making, the all-sound whereby the spirit is projected into the ripples of infinity to become one with the ocean beyond. Immob has simply discovered the underlying law which governs such rising above and beyond: full spiritual clutching is impossible until the agencies of physical clutching are removed—and, with them, the dictatorial thirsts of the body. The Yogi must slough off the Commissar.”
Martine shook his head, making a supreme effort to dispel the agitation. “Seriously, I see a certain flaw in your argument.”
“The flaw is in your vision,” the amp said. “Kindly be more specific.”
“When Orwell and Huxley looked into the future, they both concluded that sex was not among the things-to-come. In the scientific society, they foresaw, sex would be pretty drastically curtailed or eliminated altogether. You, however—”
“You are suggesting,” the amp said, “that our program of amputeeism is incomplete?”
“I am. If you’re going to hack off four of the trouble-making appendages, shouldn’t you, in the interests of consistency, also hack off, or at least immobilize, the fifth and most troublemaking? The organ you might call Immob’s anatomical fifth column?”
The amp yawned. “Under your flippancy,” he said, “there is an astute question. As a matter of fact, we are now holding policy discussions on the question of castration. One faction maintains quite seriously what you have just suggested in jest. In their view, the spiritual orgasm which takes place in oceanic Agape must be crippled or even excluded altogether so long as the physical orgasm of bodily Eros remains a possibility.”
“That makes sense to me. Oms do not make the man.”
“I myself feel that sex does not have to be eliminated because it contains within itself the seeds of its opposite—it can become oceanic once a man is spiritually transformed into a complete Immob. Physical orgasm, properly savored, is a haunting harbinger of the spiritual one, a stepping stone from Eros into Agape, from the cage to the ocean.”
“My friend,” Martine said, “you want to eat your cage and have it too.”
“Nothing of the sort. Sex as it has been practiced and experienced until now, by half-human beasts, has been only a frantic Dionysian effort to break through the boundaries of skin by a violent merging of two separate bodies. It cannot work, of course: it is like beating two bricks together in an attempt to make them one brick—in the end they both crack and crumble. Therefore sex has always been the supremely frustrating experience for human beings, as witness the age-old saying, Post coitum tristrea. Of course man is always sad after coitus. For man is essentially an animal, and animals cannot merge and blend with one another—they are forever trapped in their own tormented mounds of flesh.”
“Freud put it much more simply and less ominously,” Martine said. “He suggested that there is simply something in the nature of the sex drive itself which precludes full satisfaction.”
“Quite so, but he could not say what that something is. We have isolated this mysterious X-quantity and thus solved the conundrum of the ages. It is the hunger of the animal for the oceanic.”
“Other remarks of Freud suggest that this X-quantity may be something less spectacular. Ambivalence, to be specific. More than once he speculated that sex and aggression, the two original drives in the id, are closely linked, and that the one constantly glides over into the other. A provocative idea, that. As an existentialist writer pointed out long ago, the rhetoric of love is remarkably like the rhetoric of war, the lover has a soldier’s ardor, he talks of his phallus as though it were a firearm, when he ejaculates he ‘discharges,’ he speaks of his erotic campaigns in terms of attack, assault, siege, capitulation, victory. What’s more, the lobotomists, I’m told, have found that whenever they dig the aggression out of a human brain the eroticism goes too. Very well—then couldn’t we say that, because there’s an aggressive tinge to even the purest sex act, the guilt which results is the reason for the touch of melancholy at the end? And wouldn’t this mixture of embracing and alienating motives be what you mean by the tension between Agape and Eros? But let’s not argue about that, there’s another point I want to make. You insist that all movement is war. O.K., but sex is the quintes-sence of movement. Ergo, on your own premises, sex is war.”
“It is indeed—for animals, which are engines of war. But once the two partners genuinely become one, in the great oceanic melting of orgasm, how can it be war? It takes two to make war. The solution to the war problem is also the solution to the sex problem: to blend the opposites and thus eliminate the spiritual gaps across which hostilities are carried on.”
“What!” Martine exclaimed. “You mean—according to your school of thought, we drop bombs on each other simply because we don’t have real orgasms?”
“Is it such a surprising idea? If in your animal state you cannot conceive of the selfish and the outgoing strands of personality melting together and sex becoming the ultimate in human transcendence, I can only assure you that it happens. Under such circumstances, if a man were to drop bombs it could only be on himself.”
Martine was stunned.
“Through sex—through sex you destroy the body?” His voice was incredulous. “Shades of the Manichees!”
“Ah.” The amp’s eyes opened wide. “You are familiar with the history of the Manichean heresy?”
“I know a little something about it.”
“What, exactly?”
“Oh, wait a minute, I know, for example, that the Manichees began in Persia as a Christian sect which preached that the soul, springing from the Kingdom of Light, seeks escape from the body, agency of the Kingdom of Darkness. They argued, accordingly, that the historical, flesh-and-blood Christ was a false Messiah, since the flesh is so vile that the spirit of God would never choose to inhabit a corporeal form—and so the whole idea of the Incarnation of God was an obscenity. Let’s see. The logic of the Manichean doctrines, of course, led inevitably to the idea that salvation, the liberation of the spirit, is possible only through suicide; and, in fact, come to think of it, the final step in the initiation rites of certain early Manichees was suicide, the endura, I believe it was called.”
“Excellent. Really excellent. Let me only add that in the eleventh century, when Pope Innocent decided to suppress the important Manichean areas of Western Europe in the blood bath of the Albigensian Crusade, the heretical doctrines did not die but only went underground. Without some knowledge of this ideological sediment it is impossible to explain the downcast eyes and flat gold otherworldly backgrounds in the medieval paintings of saints; the castration of choirboys; Henry of Navarre’s refusal to let his mistress wash under the armpits; the terrible filthiness of monks after the tenth century and, contrariwise, the stricture that cleanliness is next to godliness; the Huguenot hymn which is entitled, ‘Everything Stinks But God.’ The basic dualism upon which Christian thought subsequently rested can hardly be understood unless its furtive roots in Manicheism are dug out and examined. It is the key, for example, to the love stories derived, as most modern ones are, from the Tristan and Isolde legends of the troubadours—love stories in which a sexual relationship is sought, not for gratification of the senses, but only because it serves as a springboard into death.”
“I remember, a big literature on Manicheism grew up earlier in the century, some of it after the First and a lot more after the Second,” Martine said.
“Yes, and not accidentally. The new theologians were forced to recognize that modem global warfare was only a mass eruption of Manicheism—people would simply not fight such suicidal wars unless there was a terrible mass malaise over all things bodily and a real mass craving for endura.”
“I see, I see,” Martine interrupted. “Then isn’t your version of Immob, if not Immob itself, the final flowering of Manicheism? Isn’t it, in a sense, what’s left of the Christian ethos once its id breaks loose and floods its ego and superego?”
“Very perceptive,” the amp said, yawning again. “It is indeed. But Immob has not only brought the Manichean content of Christianity out into the open—in the process we have also corrected its doctrinal distortions. For, you see, while the Manichees were right in positing the vileness of the body and the need for liberation from its trap, they were wrong in assuming that this liberation could only be accomplished through suicide. They made the same mistake later made by thinkers like Freud—a Manichean par excellence, by the way—namely, that the urge to escape from the body is a death-urge. Immob has revealed the thirst for the oceanic behind the so-called thirst for oblivion, and it has discovered the instrument for such a spiritual leap into everything: not the suicide’s razor but the surgeon’s scalpel.”
“Maybe,” Martine said, “you’re just substituting the martyr for the suicide?”
“Nonsense—the martyr gives up something, the Immob gains everything.”
“There’s something I don’t quite get. How did a cultism of trance, such as Anti-Pro represents, manage to take hold in this country? Traditionally our people have always shied away from the contemplative and dreamlike. Pro-Pro, which offers a program of superaction, seems much more in tune with the ethos of the country, and I’m not at all surprised to find that it’s the ruling party rather than yours.”
“Splendid—when you are not making laborious jokes your insights are admirable. It is certainly true that, from frontier days on, America was a country devoted to manic activity and mobility. Quite so. But for a variety of reasons—among them the absence of a long cultural tradition whose dead weight would act as a brake on the individual—the urge to plunge inward and explore the gopher holes of the subjective through trance and dream was always present under the surface too. When people are not told very clearly who they are by voices from the past, they are driven to find out who they are by exploring their own insides—they cup their ears for inner voices. The Americans always suffered from this split—and so did the Russians. . . .”
The amp yawned again, deeply and luxuriously this time, his whole face screwed up. It was beginning to annoy Martine: when they used to crawl into their bunks in the plane Helder always yawned over and over, loudly, sighingly, a ritual of voluptuous whews. . . .
“It has been a hard day,” the amp said. “I am tired.”
“Maybe you’d like to sleep a little,” Martine said.
“No, no, that can wait. Let us go back to the point about charisma.”
“Yes, that interested me. What, exactly, is this charismatic charm?”
“Toynbee,” the amp mumbled, “said that the sheer sight of a great man will electrify the masses. He used the word ‘electrify’ advisedly. Do you know, perhaps, Wilhelm Reich’s theory of orgone energy?”
“Yes, quite well. He maintained that there is a vital energy in the cosmos whose color is blue. It was his idea that human organisms, all living things, are infused with this cosmic energy, charge themselves from the environment and then discharge themselves through the full orgasm.”
“That is indeed orgone energy. Reich, however, was wrong about one point, because he did not understand the distinction between animal orgasm and oceanic orgasm. You see, when a man becomes fully human through Immob, his orgone energy leaps from all his parts, from his head as well as his genitals, from his entire skin. When he is photographed with the proper apparatus at the moment of orgasm, he seems wrapped in a halo of flaring blue. I know, I have seen it in our laboratories. This overall discharge of vital energy, however, can take place more modestly even without orgasm, from moment to moment. That is the physiological basis for the electrifying effect which Toynbee described. That is charisma.”
The amp closed his eyes for a moment and lay perfectly still, then he opened them and looked at Martine. “Charisma,” he said, “is only an example in the so-called psychic field of the universally valid second law of thermodynamics. According to this law, when there are two organized systems of unequal potency, energy will always flow from the higher and more powerful to the lower and less powerful. Now, what is the fully human organism but the highest and most potent system of organization in the animal kingdom? I am talking, of course, about myself, for only the Immob is fully human. You are still an animal, a lower and less potent system of organization. Therefore, when I am juxtaposed to you, my energy will flow outward to you. That is the whole secret of how, as a fully human creature in a universe of the less-than-human, I achieve the oceanic: my psychic energies constantly go from the high of me to the low of the Other, in invisible ripples, and as a result I am always enmeshed with my surround. And when I choose to, I can sometimes place a word, a phrase, a fragment of a thought, into the psychic stream and let it be carried out to other, less highly organized minds.”
“It’s very fortunate for me that I’m less organized than you are,” Martine said. “According to the second law of thermodynamics, that means I can read your mind but you can’t read mine.”
“When we have perfected the technique,” the amp said, “I shall be able to read all minds, for then my consciousness will encompass everything. But I will not pretend to be expert even in the limited projection needed for thought transference. None of us is, as yet. It was only a few years ago that we discovered it could be done at all, and our experiments in parapsychology have only begun. In the end, of course, we shall dispense entirely with hallucinating
vocabularies. When we are fully attuned to Korzybski’s silent level we shall exchange only speechless truths.”
“I have observed,” Martine said, “that Immob seems to make people extremely eloquent about the virtues of silence. There are professional lecturers on the subject. Do you know what somebody said about Carlyle? He extolled the virtues of silence in nineteen volumes.”
“Nothing more natural. In this transitional period proselytizing is still necessary, there are many false prophets to be exposed.”
“Orgonize ’em till they’re blue in the face.”
“It is not as far-fetched as you think. Remember what we have learned from the psychosomaticists. We know that the psyche can make the soma do its most extreme bidding: it can raise huge blisters on the skin, cause false pregnancies, produce embolisms. All such effects, of course, are brought about by the unconscious part of the psyche. Suppose that this power to mold the body were placed at the disposal of the conscious mind? Immediately there is a revolution: man ceases to be an animal at the mercy of his inner mechanisms and becomes a full human, the executive of his body. His sense of power, his exultation, begins to fan off from him in a shimmering aura. More, since he is in charge of all bodily functions, he can even will his orgone energy to beam out. He glows with charisma.”
“It seems to me that you constantly confuse the inner and the outer. One moment you speak as though all reality is to be found inside the self, the next you—”
Limbo Page 21
