Odd John

by Olaf Stapledon

  For the present the only kind of illumination which came to John was apparently a devastating conviction of the futility of the normal species. To this discovery he reacted sometimes with mere contempt, sometimes with horror at the doom which awaited the human world, and with terror at his own entanglement in it. But on other occasions his mood was com passion, and on others again sardonic delight, and yet on others delight of a more serene kind in which compassion and horror and grim relish were strangely transmuted.

  CHAPTER X

  THE WORLD'S PLIGHT

  I SHALL now try to give some idea of John's reactions to our world by setting down, more or less at random, some of his comments on individuals and types, institutions and movements, which he studied during this period.

  Let us begin with the psychiatrist. John's verdict on this eminent manipulator of minds seemed to me to show both his contempt for Homo sapiens and his sympathetic appreciation of the difficulties of beings that are neither sheer animal nor fully human.

  After our last visit to the consulting-room, indeed before the door was closed behind us, John indulged in a long chuckling laugh that reminded me of the cry of a startled grouse. "Poor devil!" he cried. "What else could he do anyhow? He's got to seem wise at all costs, even when he's absolutely blank. He's in the same fix as a successful medium. He's not just a quack. There's a lot of real sound stuff in his trade. No doubt when he's dealing with straightforward cases of a fairly low mental order, with troubles that are at bottom primitive, he fixes them up all right. But even then he doesn't really know what he's doing or how he gets his cures. Of course, he has his theories, and they're damned useful, too. He gives the wretched patient doses of twaddle, as a doctor might give bread pills, and the poor fool laps it all up and feels hopeful and manages to cure himself. But when another sort of case comes along, who is living habitually on a mental storey about six floors above our friend's own snug little flat, so to speak, there must be a glorious fiasco. How can a mind of his calibre possibly understand a mind that's at all aware of the really human things? I don't mean the highbrow things. I mean subtle human contacts, and world-contacts. He is a sort of highbrow, with his modern pictures and his books on the unconscious. But he's not human in the full sense, even according to the standards of Homo sapiens. He's not really grown up. And so, though he doesn't know it, the poor man is all at sea when he comes up against really grown-up people. For instance, in spite of his modern pictures, he hasn't a notion what art is after, though he thinks he has. And he knows less of philosophy, real philosophy, than an ostrich knows about the upper air. You can't blame him. His wings just wouldn't carry his big fleshy pedestrian mind. But that's no reason why he should make matters worse by burying his head in the sand and kidding himself he sees the foundations of human nature. When a really winged case comes along, with all sorts of troubles due to not giving his wings exercise, our friend hasn't the slightest perception what's the matter. He says in effect, 'Wings? What's wings? Just flapdoodle. Look at mine. Get 'em atrophied as quick as possible, and bury your head in the sand to make sure.' In fact he puts the patients into a sort of coma of the spirit. If it lasts, he's permanently "cured," poor man, and completely worthless. Often it does last, because your psychiatrist is an extremely good suggestionist. He could turn a saint into a satyr by mere sleight of mind. God! Think of a civilization that hands over the cure of souls to toughs like that! Of course, you can't blame him. He's a decent sort on his own plane, and doing his bit. But it's no use expecting a vet to mend a fallen angel."

  If John was critical of psychiatry, he was no less so of the churches. It was not only with the purpose of studying Homo sapiens that he had begun to take an interest in religious practices and doctrines. His motive was partly (so he told me) the hope that some light might be thrown upon certain new and perplexing experiences of his own which might perhaps be of the kind that the normal species called religious. He actually attended a few services at churches and chapels. He always returned from these expeditions in a state of excitement, which found outlet sometimes in ribald jests about the proceedings, sometimes in almost hysterical exasperation and perplexity. Coming out from an emotional chapel service of the Bethel type he remarked, "Ninety-nine per cent, slush and one per cent.—something else, but what?" A tensity about his voice made me turn to look at him. To my amazement I saw tears in his eyes. Now John's lachrymatory reflexes were normally under absolute voluntary control. Since his infancy I had never known him weep except by deliberate policy. Yet these were apparently spontaneous tears, and he seemed unconscious of them. Suddenly he laughed and said, "This soul-saving! If one were God, wouldn't one laugh at it, or squirm! What does it matter whether we're saved or not? Sheer blasphemy to want to be, I should say. But what is it that does matter, and comes through all the slush like light through a filthy window?"

  On Armistice Day he persuaded me to go with him to a service in a Roman Catholic cathedral. The great building was crowded. Artificiality and insincerity were blotted out by the solemnity of the occasion. The ritual was somehow disturbing even to an agnostic like me. One felt a rather terrifying sense of the power which worship in the grand tradition could have upon massed and susceptible believers.

  John had entered the cathedral in his normal mood of aloof interest in the passions of Homo sapiens. But as the service proceeded, he became less aloof and more absorbed. He ceased to look about him with his inscrutable hawklike stare. His attention, I felt, was no longer concentrated on individuals of the congregation, or on the choir, or on the priest, but on the totality of the situation. An expression strangely foreign to all that I knew of him now began to flicker on his face, an expression with which I was to become very familiar in later years, but cannot to this day satisfactorily interpret. It suggested surprise, perplexity, a kind of incredulous rapture, and withal a slightly bitter amusement. I naturally assumed that John was relishing the folly and self-importance of our kind; but when we were leaving the cathedral he startled me by saying, "How splendid it might be, if only they could keep from wanting their God to be human!" He must have seen that I was taken aback for he laughed and said, "Oh, of course I see it's nearly all tripe. That priest! The way he bows to the altar is enough to show the sort he is. The whole thing is askew, intellectually and emotionally; but—well, don't you get that echo of something not wrong, of some experience that happened ages ago, and was right and glorious? I suppose it happened to Jesus and his friends. And something remotely like it was happening to about a fiftieth of that congregation. Couldn't you feel it happening? But, of course, as soon as they got it they spoilt it by trying to fit it all into the damned silly theories their Church gives them."

  I suggested to John that this excitement which he and others experienced was just the sense of a great crowd and a solemn occasion, and that we should not "project" that excitement, and persuade ourselves we were in touch with something superhuman.

  John looked quickly at me, then burst into hearty laughter. "My dear man," he said, and this I believe was almost the first time he used this devastating expression, "even if you can't tell the difference between being excited by a crowd and the other thing, I can. And a good many of your own kind can, too, till they let the psychologists muddle them."

  I tried to persuade him to be more explicit, but he only said, "I'm just a kid, and it's all new to me. Even Jesus couldn't really say what it was he saw. As a matter of fact, he didn't try to say much about it. He talked mostly about the way it could change people. When he did talk about it, itself, he nearly always said the wrong thing, or else they reported him all wrong. But how do I know? I'm only a kid."

  It was in a very different mood that John returned from an interview with a dignitary of the Anglican Church, one who was at the time well known for his efforts to revitalize the Church by making its central doctrines live once more in men's hearts. John had been away for some days. When he returned he seemed much less interested in the Churchman than in an earlier encounter wit
h a Communist. After listening to a disquisition on Marxism I said, "But what about the Reverend Gentleman?"

  "Oh, yes, of course, there was the Reverend Gentleman, too. A dear man, so sensible and understanding. I wish the Communist bloke could be a bit sensible, and a hit dear. But Homo sapiens evidently can't be that when he has any sort of fire in him. Funny how members of your species, when they do get any sort of real insight and grasp some essential truth, like Communism, nearly always go crazy with it. Funny, too, what a religious fellow that Communist really is. Of course, he doesn't know it, and he hates the word. Says men ought to care for Man and nothing else. A moral sort of cove, lie is, tull of 'oughts.' Denies morality, and then damns people for not being communist saints. Says men are all fools or knaves or waiters unless you can get 'em to care for the Class War. Of course, he tells you the Class War is needed to emancipate the Workers. But what really gets him about it isn't that. The fire inside him, though he doesn't know it, is a passion for what he calls dialectical materialism, for the dialectic of history. The one selfishness in him is the longing to be an instrument of the Dialectic, and oddly enough what he really means by that, in his heart of hearts, is what Christians so quaintly describe as the law of God, or God's will. Strange! He says the sound element in Christianity was love of one's fellow men. But he doesn't really love them, not as actual persons. He'd slaughter the lot of them if he thought that was part of the Dialectic of History. What he really shares with Christians, real Christians, is a most obscure but teasing, firing awareness of something super-individual. Of course, he thinks it's just the mass of individuals, the group. But he's wrong. What's the group, anyhow, but just everybody lumped together, and nearly all fools or limps or knaves? It's not simply the group that fires him. It's justice, righteousness, and the whole spiritual music that ought to be made by the group. Damned funny that! Of course, I know all Communists are not religious, some are merely—well, like that bloody little man the other day. But this fellow is religious. And so was Lenin, I guess. It's not enough to say his root motive was desire to avenge his brother. In a sense that's true. But one can feel behind nearly everything he said a sense of being the chosen instrument of Fate, of the Dialectic, of what might almost as well be called God."

  "And the Reverend Gentleman?" I queried. "The Reverend Gentleman? Oh, him! Well, he's religious in about the same sense as firelight is sunshine. The coal-trees once lapped up the sun's full blaze, and now in the grate they give off a glow and a flicker that snugs up his room nicely, so long as the curtains are drawn and the night kept at arm's length. Outside, every one is floundering about in the dark and the wet, and all he can do is to tell them to make a nice little fire and squat down in front of it. One or two he actually fetches into his own beautiful room, and they drip all over the carpet, and leave muddy marks, and spit into the fire. He gets very unhappy about it, but he puts up with it nobly because, though he hasn't a notion what worship is, he does up to a point try to love his neighbours. Funny, that, when you think of the Communist who doesn't. Of course, if people got really nasty, the Reverend would phone the police."

  Lest the reader should suppose that John was not critical of the Communists, I will quote some of his comments on that other Communist, referred to above. "He knows in an obscure way that he's an utter waster, though he pretends to himself that he's noble and unfortunate. Of course he is unfortunate, frightfully unfortunate, in being the sort he is. And of course that's society's fault as much as his own. So the wretched creature has to spend his life putting out his tongue at society, or at the powers that be in society. He's just a hate-bag. But even his hate isn't really sincere. It's a posture of self-defence, self-justification, not like the hate that smashed the Tsar, and turned creative and made Russia. Things haven't got bad enough for that in England yet. At present all that can be done by blokes like this is to spout hate and give the other side a fine excuse for repressing Communism. Of course, hosts of well-off people and would-be-well-off people are just as ashamed of themselves subconsciously as that blighter, and just as full of hate, and in need of a scapegoat to exercise their hate upon. He and his like are a godsend to them."

  I said there was more excuse for the have-nots to hate than for the haves. This remark brought from John a bit of analysis and prophecy that has since been largely justified.

  "You talk," he said, "as if hate were rational, as if men only hated what they had reason to hate. If you want to understand modern Europe and the world, you have to keep in mind three things that are really quite distinct although they are all tangled up together. First there's this almost universal need to hate something, rationally or irrationally, to find something to unload your own sins on to, and then smash it. In perfectly healthy minds (even of your species) this need to hate plays a small part. But nearly all minds are damnably unhealthy, and so they must have something to hate. Mostly, they just hate their neighbours or their wives or husbands or parents or children. But they get a much more exalted sort of excitement by hating foreigners. A nation, after all, is just a society for hating foreigners, a sort of super-hate-club. The second thing to bear in mind is the obvious one of economic disorder. The people with economic power try to run the world for their own profit. Not long ago they succeeded, more or less, but now the job has got beyond them, and, as we all know, there's the hell of a mess. This gives hate a new outlet. The have-nots with very good reason exercise their hate upon the haves, who have made the mess and can't clean it up. The haves fear and therefore zestfully hate the havenots. What people can't realize is that if there were no deep-rooted need to hate in almost every mind the social problem would be at least intelligently faced, perhaps solved. Then there's the third factor, namely, the growing sense that there's something all wrong with modern solely-scientific culture. I don't mean that people are intellectually doubtful about science. It's much deeper than that. They are simply finding that modern culture isn't enough to live by. It just doesn't work in practice. It has got a screw loose somewhere. Or some vital bit of it is dead. Now this horror against modern culture, against science and mechanization and standardization, is only just beginning to be a serious factor. It's newer than Bolshevism. The Boishies, and all the socially left-wing people, are still content with modern culture. Or rather, they put all its faults down to capitalism, dear innocent theorists. But the essence of it they still accept. They're rationalistic, scientific, mechanistic, brass-tack-istic. But another crowd, scattered about all over the place, are having the hell of a deep revulsion against all this. They don't know what's the matter with it, but they're sure it's not enough. Some of them, feeling that lack, just creep back into church, specially the Roman Church. But too much water has passed under the bridge since the churches were alive, so that's no real use. The crowds who can't swallow the Christian dope are terribly in need of something, though they don't know what, or even know they're in need at all. And this deep need gets mixed up with their hate-need; and, if they're middle class, it gets mixed up also with their fear of social revolution. And this fear, along with their hate-need, may get played on by any crook with an axe to grind, or by any able man with an itch for bossing. That's what happened in Italy. That sort of thing will spread. I'd bet my boots that in a few years there'll be a tremendous anti-left movement all over Europe, inspired partly by fear and hate, partly by that vague, fumbling suspicion that there's something all wrong with scientific culture. It's more than an intellectual suspicion. It's a certainty of the bowels, call it a sort of brute-blind religious hunger. Didn't you feel the beginnings of it in Germany last year when we were there? A deep, still-unconscious revulsion from mechanism, and from rationality, and from democracy, and from sanity. That's it, a confused craving to be mad, possessed in some way. Just the thing for the well-to-do haters to use for their own ends. That's what's going to get Europe. And its power depends on its being a hotch-potch of self-seeking, sheer hate, and this bewildered hunger of the soul, which is so worthy and so easily twisted into someth
ing bloody. If Christianity could hold it in and discipline it, it might do wonders. But Christianity's played out. So these folk will probably invent some ghastly religion of their own. Their God will be the God of the hate-club, the nation. That's what's coming. The new Messiahs (one for each tribe) won't triumph by love and gentleness, but by hate and ruthlessness. Just because that's what you all really want, at the bottom of your poor diseased bowels and crazy minds. Jesus Christ!"

  I was not much impressed by this tirade. I said the best minds had outgrown that old tribal god, and the rest would follow the best minds in the long run. John's laughter disconcerted me.

  "The best minds!" he said. "One of the main troubles of your unhappy species is that the best minds can go even farther astray than the second best, much farther than the umpteenth best. That's what has been happening during the last few centuries. Swarms of the best minds have been leading the populace down blind alley after blind alley, and doing it with tremendous courage and resource. Your trouble, as a species, is that you can't keep hold of everything at once. Any one who is very wide awake toward one set of facts invariably loses sight of all the other equally important sets. And as you have practically no inner experience to orientate you, compass-wise, to the cardinal points of reality, there's no telling how far astray you'll go, once you start in the wrong direction."

  Here I interjected, "Surely that is one of the penalties of being gifted with intelligence; it may lead one forward, but it may lead one badly astray."

  John replied, "It's one of the penalties of being more than beast and less than fully human. Pterodactyls had a great advantage over the old-fashioned creepy crawly lizards, but they had their special dangers. Because they could fly a bit, they could crash. Finally, they were outclassed by birds. Well, I'm a bird."