Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  What the systematizers always left out of their neat packages, of course, was the one prime ingredient of reality—what the existentialists used to call the absurd. In their passion for explaining and relating all things they never stopped to examine the inexplicable and unrelated—that whimsical element which seems to mock all orderliness. The pigeon that refuses to fit into any holes. The duck-billed platypus that keeps a Darwin up nights. The playful meteor that hightails out of the firmament and lurches smack into the Yuma desert, to the consternation of the entire staff at the Mt. Wilson observatory. The particular blood vessel that chooses to hemorrhage in a particular cortex. The conductor who sneezes in the middle of the Eroica. Hobo touches in a strictly determinist world.

  Yes, yes: these whimsical events follow laws too, maybe, every meteor’s zag, every maestro’s itch, every lesion. But where is the super-Newton or the super-Einstein or the super-Brodmann—or even the super-EMSIAC—who can store up enough information to be able to predict the specific lurch, the specific sneeze, the specific arterial rupture?

  So, in the end, Immob, which outlaws the pratfall. Outlaws Dostoevsky’s fatal fantastic element, Mann’s criminal disorder and disease, Gide’s gratuitous act; that satisfying quirkiness in Nature that sometimes produces an upstart event without discernible rhyme or reason, apparently just for the hell of it. But an occasional vagrant atom with baggy pants and putty nose sometimes meanders along in even the most unified of fields—Martine pops up as Lazarus. Who knows when or in which direction the specific electron—or martyr-will chose to dart? In fact, science long ago stopped talking about the laws of Nature and came around to the idea of probability—but the moment you concern yourself with the probable you have to allow for the improbable, the case in which twice-two can equal any number of absurdities. For areas of nonsense and non sequitur and nihilistic horseplay, in which a man with a stomach for that kind of thing can live on a diet of miracles. All that is ruled out by Immob. Immob does not acknowledge that even into the most steadfastly cortical universe a little multi-making thalamus must fall. The blind, parading as authorities on myopia. But this lust for Hyphens would never have gotten so far out of hand if the gaps found in Nature hadn’t been exaggerated by men until they became intolerable—that’s the history of the West, in one neat package. . . .

  Naturally, there’s a joker. In Immob, which pretends to be the healer of all gaps, all the old, old splits are perpetuated, and aggravated into monstrosities. Immob pretends to have surmounted the cleavage between mind and body—true enough, it’s been expunged from their vocables, but is it really gone from their lives? Far from it. The time-honored breach between matter and spirit, cornerstone of the whole Judeo-Christian ethos, has reached its fullest expression in Immob. Underneath the smug verbal unification a more deadly war than ever is being waged between the bodily vessel and its spiritual contents—otherwise why the dizzy seesawing, now toward contempt for the body (Anti-Pros), now toward deification of the body (Pro-Pros)? Why the terrible urge to annihilate the body, which was the wellspring of Immob altogether, only thinly covered up with artificial limbs and Olympics and much talk about the electronic body beautiful? Why the Manichean grimness which seems to have settled over the whole sex life? What, indeed, is the manic compulsion to battle the elements, transform them, humiliate and punish them, if not a searing disdain for the world of gross matter which they compose? You would not march against Nature as on a punitive expedition unless you first felt a bilious disgust with Nature. This is more than ego-push. This is endura.

  They’ve invented Moral Equivalents, all right. Moral Equivalents for the bodily. The urge to give battle to the elements derives from the same source as the urge toward amputation—a horror of things physical, the things of the material world and of the body—a moralistic, puritanical need to lash and lacerate thingness. All this, of course, under the guise of unifying man with himself and with the world which surrounds him. This is paranoia become a whole way of life.

  In outlawing the absurd, Immob has installed it still deeper at the heart of reality. And the most absurd thing of all is that these hyphenating fools, who see oneness everywhere, haven’t yet found a single Hyphen, any political pineal gland, that will bind the East and West together. . . .

  Better cut this short—I’m in danger of making a new integrative system out of absurdity, the existentialists sometimes went overboard in that direction. . . .

  OCTOBER 3, 1990

  Lodge

  The nineteenth century worked out a neat, rationalistic, hyphenated picture of homo sapiens: Economic Man. Economic Man was a very logical and calculating fellow who, if given half a chance, would weigh all the possibilities of action in a coldly analytic fashion and then unerringly choose that course of behavior which would be to his own interest. Self-interest, that was the human prod. And it was upon the primacy of self-interest in human motivation that the great minds of the century, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Marx, premised their predictions of social development. Economic Man was expected to be capitalism’s savior, also its gravedigger. Obviously you wouldn’t have much of a class struggle unless the members of both contending classes could be counted on to defend and enhance their own interests.

  The twentieth century worked overtime at one big project: to blast all the Hyphens of the nineteenth century off the map, to expose Economic Man as a low comic figure; to shatter the monistic view of human behavior and show man as a bundle of the most contradictory feeling and drives, very few of them consonant with self-interest. To reveal the Dostoevskian under the Marxian. Freud called the turn at the beginning of the century by supplanting the concept of Economic Man with the concept of Ambivalent Man. The century has done a good job of proving him right.

  But, terminologically at least, we can go a bit further, as some post-Freudian analysts began to do. After three world wars, after EMSIAC, after Immob, we can find a better name for Ambivalent Man, give him a tag which will indicate the source of his ambivalence. What else can he be called but Masochistic Man? (Name first proposed by Freud’s student, Dr. E. Bergler, who brought to light the mechanisms of psychic masochism.) Economic Man standing on his head?

  The twentieth century has dragged into the open a pretty startling fact: when given his head, man’s inclination is to pursue self-destruction rather than self-interst. Economic Man was a cover-up for Masochistic Man, under the cool Apollonian cloak was a wild death-seeking Dionysian—and now the cloak has been ripped off. The perfection of war by itself accomplished the denuding. According to all the nineteenth-century rationalists, pro-capitalist Smiths and anti-capitalist Marxes alike, nations went to war only for material advantages—but who can pretend, after this century of world wars, that advantage is a motive in these global holocausts when the upshot, economically as well as every other way, is sheer disaster for all the combatants? When to win is every bit as costly as to lose? When, after the smoke from the last hydrogen-atom explosion has cleared way, it is impossible to tell victor from vanquished?

  Before the Third, capitalist and communist alike dreaded to rip the rationalistic mask from the masochistic skeleton of mankind. And today each half of the Immob world, for all its semantic training, persists in viewing the other as imperialistic, seeking some material advantage. As though there were a real material advantage in cornering the world’s supply of columbium—which you wouldn’t have any need for unless first you’d cut your arms and legs off!

  But maybe they’re getting scared at having exposed themselves so. Maybe they can’t go on indefinitely destroying themselves without the pretense that it’s in their own interest. Immob man hastily generates plastic limbs. Maybe Masochistic Man will have to slip on the mask of Economic Man again. It looks like yet another war is in the making.

  Funny, this whole idea about masochism has a familiar ring. It’s exactly what I was trying to say in my old notebook, in the last entries I made just before I deserted; it’s what I was beginning to get at in my an
alysis, too. . . .

  Lately my thoughts keep spiraling down to the old notebook, seems the big secret is somehow there if only I could figure out this business about masochism and see how it applies to me exactly but Christ I can’t think everything gets fuzzy I try to get the thing straight and I begin to go around in circles and sit and look at the television and I can’t even

  OCTOBER 4, 1990

  Lodge

  Immob is the full flowering of man’s capacity for masochism. Born of a joke that miscarried. All right—but then, doesn’t that mean the joke itself was a pretty revealing one? The kind of joke nobody but an eighteen-karat masochist—trying to shrug off his own flaw by making a joke of it, in the spirit of l’humeur noir—would have thought of?

  Is that the secret I’ve been trying to dig out of my notebook?

  Good God, have I found my hidden identity in that old notebook? Via a perambulator in the Martine Home? Have I come nine thousand miles to find under all the incognitos nothing more distinctive than an ambulatory basket case?

  The ambulatory basket case—that’s what everybody is, Immob just removes the pretense.

  Nothing at all under the incognitos but life’s delicate child, Homo Dei, the doG-God: Solomon Bloom and Stephen Daedalus, Naphta and Settembrini, Hans Castorp, Mr. K: Mr. Everyman, Mr. Here Comes Everybody—Masochistic Man in person, in the maimed flesh? After all the stock-taking?

  Can’t think.

  Aching for Ooda. Nap this afternoon, dreamt about her. She was pushing a baby carriage up the mountain toward the Mandunga Circle. I kept leaning over but I couldn’t see who was inside. “Why do you make me do this?” she asked. “What’s the sense to pushing a gangster around in a perambulator? When you get the skull off you better look in the prefrontal lobes and see if you can locate the baby in the miscarriage. Let some light into that cave. I dare you.”

  Games start tomorrow.

  Wish

  Part Six

  GAMES

  chapter twenty

  EIGHT, NINE, ten days it went on. A sequence of kinesthetic marvels—whirlings, lunges, soarings, flipflops, heaves, spins—cybercyto feats such as no Immob eyes had ever seen. All of them performed nonchalantly, with debonaire ease, by the Unioneers—who, like the Strippers, all wore large blue “M’s” on their jerseys. With each passing day the sports-caster’s voice lost a few more decibels of its professional bounce, grew more and more puzzled; after a while he began to stutter badly, it looked to Martine as though he was a bit frightened.

  “What d’you know!” he said the first day. “The Union team has just won the decathlon! They ran up twenty-eight points over the world’s record, heck—”

  And soon after, sputtering now: “Seventy-three feet! Imagine that, ladies and gentlemen, seventy-three feet! Nobody’s ever broad jumped anywhere near that far before! That’s, why, see now, that’s thirty-two feet more than the world’s record established by Theo in ’83! Say, what’s happened to these Union boys?”

  Nobody knew what had happened to the Union boys. Five hundred thousand people sat in the great oval stadium in stunned silence, pondering the answer while event after event fell to the visiting team without a struggle. It was not that the Inland Strip athletes were doing badly, not at all: in fact, quite a few of them succeeded in breaking the records chalked up in previous competitions. But no matter how the Strippers outdid themselves and their predecessors, faces contorted with the effort, each time the Unioneers stepped up casually right after and did better without even trying.

  There was unbelief in the announcer’s voice on the tenth day when he muttered, “There’s no longer any question about it, the score card doesn’t lie. Yes, the Unioneers have already piled up enough points to win the Olympics! The first time it’s ever happened! But how, how, how did it happen? What’s the thing mean, cybernetically speaking? That’s the question on everybody’s tongue out here this afternoon. . . .”

  For two weeks Martine sat slouched in a chair, hardly moving, eyes glued on the television screen.

  There were interludes when no matches were going on; then he would wander down to the lake and stretch out on the rotting boards of the little dock to doze in the sun, mind battered into blankness. Only at night did he crawl out of his drugged state for a while—then, for three or four hours at a stretch, to the hooting of owls and the yelping of coyotes in the forest, he would sit at the table under the sputtering oil lamp and read, or write in his notbook. Try to write, anyhow. Often the words refused to come and his scribblings would trail off into an undecipherable scrawl in the middle of a sentence. He lost a lot of weight during this period: his cheeks were sunken and his eyes looked tired and glazed.

  Once in a while, as he sat observing the competitions, the oval of the stadium would turn into a great basket and in it he would see his son, himself, with his mother and Irene hovering solicitously and officiously over the prostrate figure. It would quicken his pulse, make him breathe more rapidly, dilate his pupils, as though he had heard a threatening footfall behind him and were crouching in anticipation of a blow from an unseen assailant—then it was gone and he relaxed again and the droplets of sweat slowly dried on his face. At other times he would suddenly bolt upright out of his lethargy and say aloud, he had fallen into the habit of talking aloud: “They would have killed me. They’ve given the world six months. What’s it all about?” Several times that happened when the television camera left the field and climbed to the officials’ box to pick up Vishinu or Dai or Theo, but then the image would fade away and with it the memory of the automatic and the rubber truncheon and that was all. Often there was nothing in his mind, not even the debris of a percept or a thought, he did not even see the impossible shenanigans transpiring on the television screen, the skipping, hopping, vaulting, catapulting, gyrating, juggling, twitching, twirling; he was as drained of content as a vacuum tube—then he would suddenly say in a loud voice: “What did I do? How did I get into the basket? Rosemary—after all, I didn’t actually—am I really guilty?” At night he slept for long hours, but his rest was broken by bad dreams.

  Toward the end of the second week his cheeks were really cavernous, his pants were bunched at the waist where he had had to pull in his belt several notches to take up the slack. He had even lost interest in writing, in trying to write; his notebooks and reading matter lay in a heap on the table, quite forgotten; he sat before the television dully, unable to think, unable to feel. This was his state of mind and body on the fourteenth day, Peace Day, when the Games came to an end.

  In the morning the Unioneers soundly trounced the Strippers in several track events, the hundred-yard dash, the quarter-mile, the pole vault, javelin throwing, the shot-put, the pentathlon. Then came a break: the officials were preparing for the high jump, traditionally the closing event of the Games.

  During the lull the announcer interviewed various Strip dignitaries about their reactions to the amazing upset; the dignitaries were taciturn, falsely calm, falsely reassuring. Finally Theo appeared: his pleasant youthful face seemed to have aged ten years, he looked worried and there was a distracted air about him.

  “Brother Theo,” the announcer said eagerly, “we’re sure anxious to get your slant on what’s been going on. We’ve seen some mighty strange things out here these past two weeks, a lot of records, including some established by you, have been knocked for a loop. It’s—”

  “I know,” Theo said soberly. “I don’t mind much about the traditional events. What hurts is taking such a shellacking in the d-and-d’s.”

  “But these guys were always such bums at everything, especially the d-and-d’s. How do you figure their suddenly becoming champs?”

  “It’ll all come out in the wash. Just one point I’d like to make—we must all remember that these competitions are entirely friendly in spirit and are always followed by a full exchange of engineering information between the contestants. Anybody who’s been shaken by what he’s seen here ought to remind himself that we don’t go
in for old-style competitive sports any more than we do for war—these are games in the true, innocent, playful sense of the word, carried on without any spirit of rancor”.

  “Well, people are saying, Brother Theo, that there’s a very definite old-style competitive spirit in the Olympics this year. They say Brother Vishinu was being pretty darned competitive in his speech about columbium, and now his athletes have become just as competitive in the Games. Some folks think maybe there’s a connection between the two.”

  “Nonsense,” Theo said firmly, a little too firmly. “That’s just sour grapes. It’s a sure way to bring back the old panicky way of thinking. We’ve got to mobilize our panic controls and keep our heads, all of us.”