CHAPTER THREE

 

            WHEN a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder or suicide.  Or both.  These failing, one becomes a buffoon.

       Amazing how active one can become when there is nothing to contend with but one’s own desperation.  Events pile up of their own accord.  Everything is converted to drama … to melodrama.

       The ground began to give way under me feet with the slow realization that no show of anger, no threats, no display of grief, tenderness or remorse, nothing I said or did, made the least difference to her.  What I called “a man” would no doubt have swallowed his pride or grief and walked out on the show.  Not this little Beelzebub!

       I was no longer a man; I was a creature returned to the wild state.  Perpetual panic, that was my normal state.  The more unwanted I was, the closer I stuck.  The more I was wounded and humiliated, the more I craved punishment.  Always praying for a miracle to occur, I did nothing to bring one about  What’s more, I was powerless to blame her, or Stasia, or anyone, even myself, though I often pretended to.  Nor could I, despite natural inclination, bring myself to believe that it had just “happened”.  I had enough understanding left to realize that a condition such as we were in doesn’t just happen.  No, I had to admit to myself that it had been preparing for quite a long while.  I had, moreover, retraced the path so often that I knew it step by step.  But when one is frustrated to the point of utter despair, what good does it do to know where or when the first fatal mis-step occurred?  What matters – and how it matters, O God! – is only now.

       How to squirm out of a vice?

       Again and again I banged my head against the wall trying to crack that question.  Could I have done so, I would have taken my brains out and put them through the wringer.  No matter what I did, what I thought, what I tried, I could not wriggle out of the straitjacket.

       Was it love that kept me chained?

       How answer that?  My emotions were so confused, so kaleidoscopic.  As well ask a dying man if he is hungry.

       Perhaps the question might be put differently.  For example: “Can one ever regain that which is lost?”

       The man of reason, the man with common sense, will say no.  The fool, however, says yes.

       And what is the fool but a believer a gambler against all odds?

 

Nothing was ever lost that cannot be redeemed.

 

       Who says that?  The God within us.  Adam who survived fire and flood.  And all the angels.

       Think a moment, scoffers!  If redemption were impossible, would not love itself disappear?  Even self-love?

       Perhaps this Paradise I sought so desperately to recover would not be the same…. Once outside the magic circle the leaven of time works with disastrous rapidity.

       What was it, this Paradise I had lost?  Of what was it fashioned?  Was it merely the ability to summon a moment of bliss now and then?  Was it the faith with which she inspired me?  (The faith in myself, I mean.)  Or was it that we were joined like Siamese twins?

       How simple and clear it all seems now!  A few words tell the whole story: I had lost the power to love.  A cloud of darkness enveloped me.  The fear of losing her made me blind.  I could easier have accepted her death.

       Lost and confused, I roamed the darkness which I had created as if pursued by a demon.  In my bewilderment I sometimes got down on all fours and with bare hands strangled, maimed, crushed whatever threatened to menace our lair.  Sometimes it was the puppet I clutched in a frenzy, sometimes only a dead rat.  Once it was nothing more than a piece of stale cheese.  Day and night I murdered.  The more I murdered, the more my enemies and assailants increased.

       How vast is the phantom world!  How inexhaustible!

       Why didn’t I murder myself?  I tried, but it proved a fiasco.  More effective, I found, was to reduce life to a vacuum.

       To live in the mind, solely in the mind … that is the surest way of making life a vacuum.  To become the victim of a machine which never ceases to spin and grate and grind.

       The mind machine.

       “Loving and loathing; accepting and rejecting; grasping and disdaining; longing and spurning: this is the disease of the mind.”

       Solomon himself could not have stated it better.

       “If you give up both victory and defeat,” so it reads in the Dhammapada, “you sleep at night without fear.”

       If!

       The coward, such as I was, prefers the ceaseless whirl of the mind.  He knows, as does the cunning master he serves, that the machine has but to stop for an instant and he will explode like a dead star.  Not death … annihilation!

       Describing the Knight Errant, Cervantes says: “The Knight Errant searches all the corners of the world, enters the most complicated labyrinths, accomplishes at every stop the impossible, endures the fierce rays of the sun in uninhabited deserts, the inclemency of wind and ice in winter; lions cannot daunt him nor demons affright, nor dragons, for to seek assault, and overcome, such is the whole business of his life and true office.”

       Strange how much the fool and coward have in common with the Knight Errant.  The fool believes despite everything; he believes in face of the impossible.  The coward braves all dangers, runs every risk, fears nothing, absolutely nothing, except the loss of that which he strives impotently to retain.

       It is a great temptation to say that love never made a coward of anyone.  Perhaps true love, no.  But who among us has known true love?  Who is so loving, trusting and believing that he would not sell himself to the Devil rather than see his loved one tortured, slain or disgraced?  Who is so secure and mighty that he would not step down from his throne to claim his love?  True, there have been great figures who have accepted their lot, who have sat apart in silence and solitude, and eaten out their hearts.  Are they to be admired or pitied?  Even the greatest of the lovelorn was never able to walk about jubilantly and shout – “All’s well with the world!”

       “In pure love (which no doubt does not exist at all except in our imagination),” says one I admire, “the giver is not aware that he gives nor of what he gives, nor to whom he gives, still less of whether it is appreciated by the recipient or not.”

       With all my heart I say “D’accord!”  But I have never met a being capable of expressing such love.  Perhaps only those who no longer have need of love may aspire to such a role.

       To be free of the bondage of love, to burn like a candle, to melt in love, melt with love – what bliss!  Is it possible for creatures like us who are weak, proud, vain, possessive, envious, jealous, unyielding, unforgiving?  Obviously not.  For us the rat race – in the vacuum of the mind.  For us doom, unending doom.  Believing that we need love, we cease to give love, cease to be loved.

       But even we, despicably weak though we be, experience something of this true, unselfish love occasionally.  Which of us has not said to himself in his blind adoration of one beyond his reach – “What matter if she be never mine!  All that matters is that she be, that I may worship and adore her forever!”  And even though it be untenable, such an exalted view, the lover who reasons thus is on firm ground.  He has known a moment of pure love.  No other love, no matter how serene, how enduring, can compare with it.

       Fleeting though such a love may be, can we say that there had been a loss?  The only possible loss – and how well the true lover knows it! – is the lack of that undying affection which the other inspired.  What a drab, dismal, fateful day that is when the lover suddenly realizes that he is no longer possessed, that he is cured, so to speak, of his great love!  When he refers to it, even unconsciously, as a “madness”.  The feeling of relief engendered by such an awakening may lead one to believe in all sincerity that he has regained his freedom.  But at what price!  What a poverty-stricken sort of freedom.  Is it not a calamity to gaze once again upon the world with everyday sight, everyday wisdom?  Is it not heartbreaking to find oneself surrounded by beings who are familiar and commonplace?  Is it not frightening to think that one must carry on, as they say, but with stones in one’s belly and gravel in one’s mouth?  To find ashes, nothing but ashes, where once were blazing suns, wonders, glories, wonders upon wonders, glory beyond glory, and all freely created as from some magic fount?

       If there is anything which deserves to be called miraculous, is it not love?  What other power, what other mysterious force is there which can invest life with such undeniable splendour?

       The Bible is full of miracles and they have been accepted by thinking and unthinking individuals alike.  But the miracle which everyone is permitted to experience some time in his life, the miracle which demands no intervention, no intercessor, no supreme exertion of will, the miracle which is open to the fool and the coward as well as the hero and the saint, is love.  Born of an instant, it lives eternally.  If energy is imperishable, how much more so is love!  Like energy, which is still a complete enigma, love is always there, always on tap.  Man has never created an ounce of energy, nor did he create love.  Love and energy have always been, always will be.  Perhaps in essence they are one and the same.  Why not?  Perhaps this mysterious energy which is identified with the life of the universe, which is God in action, as someone has said, perhaps this secret, all-invasive force is but the manifestation of love.  What is even more awesome to consider is that, if there be nothing in our universe which is not informed with this unseizable force, then what of love?  What happens when love (seemingly) disappears?  For the one is no more indestructible than the other.  We know that even the deadest particle of matter is capable of yielding explosive energy.  And if a corpse has life, as we know it does, so has the spirit which once made it animate.  If Lazarus was raised from the dead, if Jesus rose from his tomb, then whole universes which now cease to exist may be revived, and doubtless will be revived, when the time is ripe.  When love, in other words, conquers over wisdom.

       How then, if such things be possible, are we to speak, or even to think, of losing love?  Succeed though we may for a while in closing the door, love will find the way.  Though we become as cold and hard as minerals, we cannot remain forever indifferent and inert.  Nothing truly dies.  Death is always feigned.  Death is simply the closing of a door.

       But the Universe has no doors.  Certainly none which cannot be opened or penetrated by the power of love.  This the fool at heart knows, expressing his wisdom quixotically.  And what else can the Knight Errant be, who seeks assault in order to overcome if not herald love?  And he who is constantly exposing himself to insult and injury, what is he running away from if not the invasion of love?

 

In the literature of utter desolation there is always and only one symbol (which may be expressed mathematically as well as spiritually) about which everything turns: minus love.  For life can be lived, and usually is lived, on the minus side rather than the plus.  Men may strive forever, and hopelessly, once they have elected to rule love out.  That “high unfathomable ache of emptiness into which all creation might be poured and still it would be emptiness”, this aching for God, as it has been called, what is it if not a description of the soul’s loveless state?

       Into something bordering on this condition of being I had now entered fully equipped with rack and wheel.  Events piled up of their own accord, but alarmingly so.  There was something insane about the momentum with which I now slid downward and backward.  What had taken ages to build up was demolished in the twinkling of an eye.  Everything crumbled to the touch.

       To a thought machine it makes little difference whether a problem is expressed in minus or plus terms.  When a human being takes to the toboggan it is virtually the same.  Or almost.  The machine knows no regret, no remorse, no guilt.  It shows signs of disturbance only when it has not been properly fed.  But a human being endowed with the dread mind machine is given no quarter.  Never, no matter how unbearable the situation, may he throw in the sponge.  As long as there is a flicker of life left he will offer himself as victim to whatever demon chooses to possess him.  And if there be nothing, no one, to harass, betray, degrade or undermine him, he will harass, betray, degrade or undermine himself.

       To live in the vacuum of the mind is to live “this side of Paradise”, but so thoroughly, so completely, that even the rigor of death seems like a St. Vitus’ Dance.  However sombre, dreary and stale everyday life may be, never does it approach the aching quality of this endless void through which one drifts and slithers in full, waking consciousness.  In the sober reality of every day there is the sun as well as the moon, the blossom as well as the dead leaf, sleep as well as wakefulness, dream as well as nightmare.  But in the vacuum of the mind there is only a dead horse running with motionless feet, a ghost clasping an unfathomable nothingness.

       And so, like a dead horse whose master never tires of flogging him, I kept galloping to the farthest corners of the universe and nowhere finding peace, comfort or rest.  Strange phantoms I encountered in these headlong flights!  Monstrous were the resemblances we presented, yet never the slightest rapport.  The thin membrane of skin which separated us served as a magnetic coat of armour through which the mightiest current was powerless to operate.

      

If there is one supreme difference between the living and the dead it is that the dead have ceased to wonder.  But, like the cows in the field, the dead have endless time to ruminate.  Standing knee-deep in clover, they continue to ruminate even when the moon goes down.  For the dead there are universes upon universes to explore.  Universes of nothing but matter.  Matter devoid of substance.  Matter through which the mind machine ploughs as if it were soft snow.

       I recall the night I died to wonder.  Kronski had come and given me some innocent white pills to swallow.  I swallowed them and, when he had gone, I opened wide the windows, threw off the covers, and lay stark naked.  Outside the snow was whirling furiously.  The icy wind whistled about the four corners of the room as if in a ventilating machine.

       Peaceful as a bedbug I slept.  Shortly after dawn I opened my eyes, amazed to discover that I was not in the great beyond.  Yet I could hardly say that I was still among the living.  What had died I know not.  I know only this, that everything which serves to make what is called “one’s life” had faded away.  All that was left me was the machine … the mind machine.  Like the soldier who finally gets what he’s been praying for, I was dispatched to the rear.  “Aux autres de faire la guerre!”

       Unfortunately no particular destination had been pinned to my carcass.  Back, back, I moved, often with the speed of a cannon ball.

       Familiar though everything appeared to be, there was never a point of entry.  When I spoke my voice sounded like a tape played backward.  My whole being was out of focus.

      

ET HAEC OLIM MEMINISSE IUVABIT

 

I was sufficiently clairvoyant at the time to inscribe this unforgettable line from the Aeneid on the toilet box which was suspended above Stasia’s cot.

       Perhaps I have already described the place.  No matter.  A thousand descriptions could never render the reality of this atmosphere in which we lived and moved.  For here, like the prisoner of Chillon, like the divine Marquis, like the mad Strindberg, I lived out my madness.  A dead moon which had ceased struggling to present its true face.

       It was usually dark, that is what I remember most.  The chill dark of the grave.  Taking possession during a snowfall, I had the impression that the whole world outside our door would remain forever carpeted with a soft white felt.  The sounds which penetrated to my addled brain were always muffled by the everlasting blanket of snow.  It was a Siberia of the mind I inhabited, no doubt about it.  For companions I had wolves and jackals, their piteous howling interrupted only by the tinkling of sleigh-bells or the rumble of a milk truck destined for the land of motherless babes.

       Towards the wee hours of the morning I could usually count on the two or them appearing arm in arm, fresh as daisies, their cheeks glistening with frost and the excitement of an eventful day.  Between whiles a bill collector would appear, rap loud and long, then melt into the snow.  Or the madman, Osiecki, who always tapped softly at the windowpane.  And always the snow kept falling, sometimes in huge wet flakes, like melting stars, or in whirling gusts choked with stinging hypodermic needles.

       While waiting I tightened my belt.  I had the patience not of a saint nor even of a tortoise, but rather the cold, calculating patience of a criminal.

       Kill time! Kill thought! Kill the pangs of hunger!  One long, continuous killing…. Sublime!

       If, peering through the faded curtains, I recognized the silhouette of a friend I might open the door, more to get a breath of fresh air than to admit a kindred soul.

       The opening dialogue was always the same.  I became so accustomed to it that I used to play it back to myself when they were gone.  Always a Ruy Lopez opening.

       “What are you doing with yourself?”

       “Nothing.”

       “Me? You’re crazy!”

       “But what do you do all day?”

       “Nothing.”

       Followed by the inevitable grubbing of a few cigarettes and a bit of loose change, then a dash for a cheese-cake or a bag of doughnuts.  Sometimes I’d propose a game of chess.

       Soon the cigarettes would give out, then the candles, then the conversation.

       Alone again I would be invaded by the most delicious, the most extraordinary recollections – of persons, places, conversations.  Voices, grimaces gestures, pillars, copings, cornices, meadows, brooks, mountains … they would sweep over me in waves, always desynchronized, disjected … like clots of blood dropping from a clear sky.  There they were in extenso, my mad bed-fellows: the most forlorn, whimsical, bizarre collection any man could gather.  All displaced, all visitors from weird realms.  Uitlanders, each and all.  Yet how tender and lovable!  Like angels temporarily ostracized, their wings discreetly concealed beneath their tattered dominoes.

 

Often it was in the dark, while rounding a bend, the streets utterly deserted, the wind whistling like mad, that I would happen upon one of these nobodies.  He may have hailed me to ask for a light or to bum a dime.  How come that instantly we locked arms, instantly we fell into that jargon which only derelicts, angels and outcasts employ?

       Often it was a simple, straightforward admission on the stranger’s part which set the wheels in motion.  (Murder, theft, rape, desertion – they were dropped like calling cards.)

       “You understand, I had to….”

       “Of course!”

       “The axe was lying there the war was on, the old man always drunk, my sister on the bum…. Besides, I always wanted to write…. You understand?”

       “Of course!”

       “And then the stars … Autumn stars.  And strange, new horizons.  A world so new and yet so old.  Walking, hiding, foraging.  Seeking, searching, praying … shedding one skin after another.  Every day a new name, a new calling.  Always fleeing from myself.  Understand?”

       “Of course!”

       “Above the Equator, under the Equator … no rest, no surcease.  Never nothing nowhere.  Worlds so bright, so full, so rich, but linked with concrete and barbed wire.  Always the next place, and the next.  Always the hand stretched forth, begging, imploring, beseeching.  Deaf, the world.  Stone deaf.  Rifles cracking, cannons booming, and men, women and children everywhere lying stiff in their own dark blood.  Now and then a flower.  A violet, perhaps, and a million rotting corpses to fertilize it.  You follow me?”

       “Of course!”

       “I went mad, mad, mad.”

       “Naturally.”

       So he takes the axe, so sharp, so bright, and he takes to chopping … here a head, there an arm or leg, then fingers and toes.  Chop, chop, chop.  Like chopping spinach.  And of course they’re looking for him.  And when they find him they’ll run the juice through him.  Justice will be served.  For every million slaughtered like pigs one lone wretched monster is executed humanly.

       Do I understand?  Perfectly.

       What is a writer but a fellow criminal, a judge, an executioner?  Was I not versed in the art of deception since childhood?  Am I not riddled with traumas and complexes?  Have I not been stained with all the guilt and sin of the medieval monk?

       What more natural, more understandable, more human and forgivable than these monstrous rampages of the isolated poet?

       As inexplicably as they entered my sphere they left, these nomads.

       Wandering the streets on an empty belly puts one on the qui vive.  One knows instinctively which way to turn, what to look for: one never fails to recognize a fellow traveller.

       When all is lost the soul steps forth….

       I referred to them as angels in disguise.  So they were, but I usually awoke to the fact only after they had departed.  Seldom does the angel appear trailing clouds of glory.  Now and then, however, the drooling simpleton one stops to gaze at suddenly fits the door like a key.  And the door opens.

       It was the door called Death which always swung open, and I saw that there was no death, nor were there any judges or executioners save in our imagining.  How desperately I strove then to make restitution!  And I did make restitution.  Full and complete.  The rajah stripping himself naked.  Only an ego left, but an ego puffed and swollen like a hideous toad.  And then the utter insanity of it would overwhelm me.  Nothing can be given or taken away; nothing has been added or subtracted; nothing increased or diminished.  We stand on the same shore before the same mighty ocean.  The ocean of love.  There it is – in perpetuum.  As much in a broken blossom, the sound of a waterfall, the swoop of a carrion bird as in the thunderous artillery of the prophet.  We move with eyes shut and ears stopped; we smash walls where doors are waiting to open to the touch; we grope for ladders, forgetting that we have wings; we pray as if God were deaf and blind, as if He were in a space.  No wonder the angels in our midst are unrecognizable.

 

One day it will be pleasant to remember these things.