Op. 28
MILLENNIAL PROJECTIONS
Short Prose
Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin
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CONTENTS
1. Millennial Projections
2. Musical Evolution
3. Concerning Black Holes
4. A Very Civilized Man
5. The Two Literatures
6. Wisdom
7. A Public Writer
8. Understanding Sex
9. Space Philosophy
10. Universal Language
11. A Private Introduction
12. Space Journal
13. The Spell
14. Concerning a Tree
15. Musical Theories
16. Two-Way Switch
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MILLENNIAL PROJECTIONS
Recently my
trips have been getting better. I no
longer panic, as I used to do, when the benevolent stimulant first takes
possession of my superconscious mind. Neither do I suffer from those debilitating
after-effects to anything like the same extent as before, doubtless because my
brain has grown accustomed to accommodating it, and knows what to expect in
advance. Nowadays I look forward to each
trip with relish, eager to return to that blessed state of contemplation from
which I'm temporarily ejected whenever the stimulant's effects begin to wear
off, and one slides back into ordinary waking-life consciousness. I still manage to sleep quite well during the
afternoon though, and can often remember some dream fragments shortly after
returning to full wakefulness. Sometimes
one gets a daymare - as, for example, when visions
from the pre-millennial past crowd in upon one's subconscious mind, and one
perceives strange autonomous shapes parading before the mind's eye. Mostly, however, one's dreams are pleasant -
at any rate, relatively so! For no dreams are considered of much spiritual value these days,
largely because they pertain to the subconscious as manifestations of sensual
indulgence. We dream, but we
don't boast of or take especial interest in our dreams. Rather, they're to be endured.
Last night's trip was particularly vivid
and engrossing, so pregnant with spiritual content were the static shapes the
benevolent hallucinogen revealed to me!
I am really quite proud of myself, to be able to create and experience
such psychic treasures! I was especially
captivated by the globes of transparent jewel-like lustre which issued,
unimpeded, from my freed superconscious. They kept changing colour and size, sometimes
becoming more numerous, and at other times appearing to expand into one another
and thereupon become unified. I liked, too, the sickle moons and strange
palatial edifices which emerged, as if from nowhere, to illuminate the
darkness. They were like so many sequins
studded on a black velvet cushion. I
have never actually seen a cushion, but I do believe I've dreamt of one. Certainly I've occasionally heard mention of
sequins.
My nearest companions here all seem to be
in a good frame-of-mind this evening, eager, no doubt, to leave their mundane
thoughts behind them. Companion 6 to my
immediate left and Companion 8 to my immediate right are both quiet and
positive. They haven't yet sought
recourse to the Internal Communications Network which links each of us to the
Spiritual Leader of our particular commune.
The Spiritual Leader seems relatively quiet himself, though he did offer
a few words of encouragement to Companion 12, who apparently didn't sleep very
well. More usually he is in contact with
the Controllers now, though we lay supermen don't hear
what passes between them. They prefer to
keep us in the dark, so to think, concerning their plans and intentions for
fear that we should become distracted from our own business of cultivating the superconscious as much as is superhumanly possible. Should I wish to convey something to the
Spiritual Leader while he's still in conversation with the Controllers, my
communication will be diverted to the nearest unoccupied Spiritual Leader in
this section of the community. Since
there is one Spiritual Leader to every 100 Supermen, and there are 6000
Supermen in our particular commune, I should be guaranteed thought-access to at
least one of the ten nearest unoccupied Spiritual Leaders at any given
time. Except, of
course, when I'm tripping. But then
one is usually too engrossed by the heavenly visions being vouchsafed one to be
mindful of the Spiritual Leaders anyway - unless, however, one is experiencing
a bad trip, when recourse to the Internal Communications Network becomes
virtually imperative.... Not that the Spiritual Leaders encourage any of us to
use it then. For as often as not they
are tripping themselves and sometimes resent being disturbed. Nevertheless, access to a Spiritual Leader,
even if not to one's own, remains technically possible at all times of the
night and even at certain times of the day as well. If too many companions are seeking spiritual
advice at once, however, one may have to wait some time before one can get
through to a Leader. Fortunately, I
don't experience bad trips all that often, as I hope to have already made
clear. Nor, for that matter, does anyone
else. Though that doesn't prevent a
queue from forming, as it were, to obtain some spiritual guidance - especially
since most of those in it have no real business being there at all, considering
that they are not usually in such a bad way as they may like to imagine. Recently, however, the Spiritual Leaders have
tended to turn a deaf ear, so to think, to certain supermen whom they know,
from bitter experience, to be unduly alarmist.
Needless to say, this has dramatically improved connections for those
who really do need some spiritual advice!
It is strange our being in the dark about
the Controllers. None of us has ever
seen them because no Superman, whether lay or clerical, has a pair of eyes to
see with. Neither do we have ears to
hear with or a tongue to talk with. Our
internal communications are entirely psychic, as our thoughts are channelled,
through the Internal Communications Network, to the Spiritual Leaders. Thus none of us knows what a Controller
actually looks like, though we are told that they are humans and walk on two
legs. This gives us some idea, but by no
means an exact picture. For the nearest
we come to seeing human beings is, as I've already intimated, in our dreams,
and then more often than not in a distressing context, less because they are
particularly nasty than because the dreams are largely atavistic. However, if contact with the Controllers is
impossible for us lay supermen, it is of course quite otherwise for the
Spiritual Leaders, who are connected to the external environment via special
artificially-constructed hearing and speaking devices - the former enabling
them to understand what the Controllers are saying to them at any given time,
the latter transposing their own thoughts into speech for the Controllers'
benefit. This two-way External
Communications Network is invaluable to the Controllers; for it enables them to
keep in touch with the overall psychic position of the superhuman communes and
to regulate their behaviour and attitude towards them accordingly. Provided the Spiritual Leaders don't pass on
false or misleading information, we get the trips we deserve.
But we're still literally in the dark at
the moment, since the next spiritual flight isn't due to start until shortly
after everyone has been woken-up by the Internal Alarm System at 20.00 hrs this
evening. I happened to wake up early for
once - perhaps by as much as half-an-hour before take off. At one time the trips wouldn't begin until
some 2-3 hours after our waking up. But
now that they are becoming longer and stronger, with the sleep period becoming
correspondingly shorter and weaker, the Controllers waste much less time in
getting the spiritual flight under way for us.
Admittedly, this may seem odd to anyone not acquainted with our
situation. But it conforms to a very
cogent logic - namely the need to step-up the spiritual life by degrees while
the sensual life ... of sleep ... is cut back, in order to bring us closer to
the next stage of evolution, which won't only be above trips but ... above
sleep as well, and thus nearer to the supra-atomic absolute of transcendent
spirit. My hunch is that we are drawing
closer to that climatic day when the old brain will be surgically removed from
each one of us and we shall no longer be a collection of superhuman individuals
but ... a Superbeing, or tightly-packed cluster of
new brains, whose only raison d'être will be to directly cultivate
the superconscious through hypermeditation,
until it attains to independence of the new brain and so becomes
transcendent. Well, we're still at quite
an evolutionary remove from transcendence at present. But whether we're at quite such a remove from
elevation to the post-visionary consciousness of a Superbeing
... is another thing! My guess is that
the Controllers will operate on us at some time during the next decade. Having cut our sleep period down to less than
four hours and extended our tripping period to approximately sixteen, which is
more than twice what it was when millennial life first began some eighty-odd
years ago, there would seem to be little progress left for them to impose upon
us in this superhuman context - a fact which would suggest that the major
turning-point of the post-human millennium lies just a few years ahead. Certainly, there has been a steady increase
in our tripping capacity and spiritual satisfaction during the past 15-20
years. Had someone informed me, 20 years
ago, that I would be tripping sixteen hours a day seven days a week at the
strength to which we've since grown accustomed, I'd have dismissed it as
absolute nonsense! But times have
changed, and now that hitherto improbable situation has become a reality. Possibly we shall soon be in spiritual flight
for even longer, though I can't imagine us being obliged to go without sleep
altogether. Somehow that would be quite
impossible, given the psychological and physiological constitutions of our
brains. Only when the Controllers
elevate us to the superbeing stage of evolution will
we or, more correctly, the ensuing Superbeing be in a
position to go entirely without sleep.
And then because it won't have a subconscious mind to contend with, but
be completely above sensual indulgence and, by implication, the unheavenly prospect of having to endure periodic daymares!
None of us can know, at present, exactly
what such a perpetually wakeful life would be like, for we are unacquainted
with post-visionary consciousness. What
we are acquainted with, however, is the highest form of visionary
consciousness, as induced by the benevolent hallucinogen, and are generally
satisfied by our experiences. We are
each of us a supreme artist when we tune-in to our visionary trips and
contemplate the translucent gems of psychic art which enrich our superconscious minds.
Appearance has therein attained to its highest, most sublime
manifestation in a quasi-essential context, and all that remains now is for it
to be totally eclipsed by pure essence, with the advent of the superbeingful millennium, for us to approximate to the
Absolute. I, for one, am distinctly
looking forward to going up higher, much as I appreciate the spiritual flights
we have grown accustomed to making on the gentle wings of the divine
stimulant. For then there will be no bad
trips, and consequently no mental queues forming for the Spiritual Leaders'
advice. Indeed, there won't be any
Spiritual Leaders either and, thus, no class distinctions. The Superbeing will
know only itself, which is, after all, the condition of the Omega Absolute
towards which it tends, as it hypermeditates in
collectivistic freedom.
But I digress slightly! We Supermen mustn't long too ardently for
that which is above us, otherwise we may grow dissatisfied with our present situation,
which is by no means a bad one. The
Controllers will act when they consider it propitious to do so.... In point of
fact, they are acting, in some sense, at this very moment. For the Internal Alarm System has just come
into service, to wake the more sensual Supermen from sleep and prepare them for
the higher wakefulness to come. Were the
Controllers to postpone implementing the next trip for any length of time, as
used to be the case, some of those less than mindful Supermen might well
relapse into sleep, and thus inhibit the subsequent efficacy of the
mind-expanding stimulant. But, these
days, the precipitous haste with which we are encouraged to take off on our
spiritual flight precludes any such inhibition - a fact which testifies, I
should imagine, to the strong desire the Controllers must have to pilot us
safely to our journey's end in ever-expanding degrees of pure
spirituality. Companions 64 and 97 are
no longer as sluggish as before in coming awake, but they are still less than
truly responsive, and thus responsible!
They have only just communicated, it would
seem, with the Spiritual Leader who pertains to our section of the community,
to assure him of their full wakefulness.
Once he knows that everyone is ready and waiting, he'll give the
Controllers the all-clear. Should anyone
prove recalcitrant, he will personally intervene with a brisk call to duty,
which is slightly humiliating for the companions concerned! Nevertheless, it usually produces the desired
effect.
Ah, now I feel a change coming over me as I
grow more wakeful! The Controllers have
evidently turned us on again and soon we shall be flying in the opposite
psychic direction from dreams. This is
when we really begin to live, to transcend our mundane selves through complete
absorption in the trip, at one with our spiritual potential. I shall soon cease thinking, since thoughts
are both superfluous and an impediment to visionary experience. Once properly launched on the spiritual
flight, one has no time or inclination for thoughts!
Ah, already I can discern faint luminous
shapes appearing before the inner eye on the impalpable screen of my superconscious mind!
They never move, for that would be contrary to their omega-oriented
essence. But they change colour and shape, they come and go, fuse and expand, retaining one's
spiritual attention. Once fully
underway, there is no possibility of one's relapsing into sleep. Nor can one crash, though one will eventually
have to return to ordinary waking consciousness again as the spiritual journey
draws to a close. This is precisely the
consciousness, however, from which I'm now in the process of gratefully
escaping. I look forward to a psychic bon voyage!
* * *
Their trip
has been underway at least three hours now and I've only received one
communication and that from Unit 37, who has suffered a little insomnia
recently and finds, from time to time, the higher wakefulness a trifle
unnerving in consequence. I advised the
Controllers, a couple of days ago, to slightly reduce his dosage of LSD, in
order not to overburden his superconscious. But I doubt if they took much notice,
especially in view of the fact that Unit 37 has been conspicuous, on a number
of previous occasions, for a tendency to react and lag behind. They probably thought his insomnia more of a
ruse than a reality, and so decided to keep the spiritual pressure on him just
in case he began to trail too far behind the others. Bluffing occasionally pays off, though not so
much these days as when we were all comparative beginners. The Controllers are more usually sceptical
than sympathetic now, because they are determined to encourage evolutionary
progress along as quickly as possible, transforming us into a post-visionary life
form as much for their own benefit as for ours.
After all, some of them get rather bored with the status quo and are
anxious, in consequences, to do away with it at the first possible
opportunity. Now such an opportunity
depends on two vital factors for its ultimate realization: the external and the
internal realms must be aligned in developmental readiness for
transformation. It is only very recently
that the Controllers have mastered the requisite technology for removing the
old brain from a Superman and realigning new brains in such fashion as to
create a Superbeing.
For several decades they laboured in vain, always falling short of their
ultimate goal. Yet that wasn't simply
because they lacked the requisite technology for effecting such a radical
upgrading of millennial life. Indeed,
they had possessed the rudiments of such a technology for years. It is just that a Superbeing
can't be created until all the Supermen in any given
community are brought to a uniformly high pitch of evolutionary development;
until, in other words, their respective superconscious
minds have been opened up and expanded to a point where post-visionary
consciousness not only becomes possible for them or their successors but ...
acceptable and intelligible to them as well.
By itself, technology isn't enough to establish a post-visionary life
form. Rather, it must synchronize with a
certain degree of spiritual development in each Superman,
else the ensuing operation to transform Supermen into Superbeings
will fail in all but appearances. Until
recently, the Controllers haven't desired or been able to fully appreciate this
crucial fact - with consequences less than encouraging for both themselves and
their superhuman 'guinea pigs'.
But now all that has changed and they are
more keenly aware of the need to bring the Supermen's spiritual life into
approximate harmony with their technological plans. Thus they are now less sympathetic towards
and indulgent of spiritual slackness in the superhuman community than was
formerly the case and more inclined, in consequence, to scepticism than to
either compassion or leniency. This,
hopefully, is only a temporary situation on their part; for, to be sure,
they've already had to face one or two grave crises concerning individual
Supermen, and will doubtless be obliged to recognize and come to terms with
similar crises in the foreseeable future, assuming they persist with their
current, rather hard-line tactics. I
refer, in particular, to the case of Units 15 and 84, who each complained to me
of insomnia and a correlative inability to properly integrate their LSD trips,
which, in their opinion, lasted too long, under the circumstances, and were too
powerful - given their comparatively-weakened psychological condition. I duly passed this information on to the
relevant Controllers, adding, on their behalf, that I considered a reduction of
their dosage advisable, in view of their evident lack of adequate sleep. It was noted by the Controller directly
responsible to my sector of the superhuman community and, for a few nights, the
LSD dosage was accordingly reduced.
Units 15 and 84 - who, incidentally, weren't alone where this problem
was concerned, but were simply the ones whom it affected most gravely -
continued, however, to complain of insomnia and to request a further reduction
in their dosage. Under previous
circumstances and external regimes, such a request, duly passed via me to the
Controllers, would almost certainly have been granted. But now that they had perfected the external
aspect, as it were, of effecting a transformation in the level of life from
superhuman to superbeingful stages, the Controllers
were determined to crack down on laggards, or those whom they chose to describe
as such, and summarily dismissed my request as detrimental to the overall
psychic integrity of the community, which it was in their interests, they
maintained, to safeguard from possible sabotage or subversion from within. The upshot of this intransigent attitude on
their part was that Units 15 and 84, together with a number of other Supermen
in a similar predicament, had their LSD dosages returned to the previous, from
their point of view, unacceptably high level ... with, as it transpired, fatal
consequences! For within a week both
Supermen had suffered nervous breakdowns and had to be removed from the
community - never, one suspects, to return to it. However, their more fortunate
fellow-insomniacs quickly progressed to a spiritual level on a par with the
generality of Supermen, bearing the psychic burden of renewed high-level trips
with a pressurized though firm mind.
Nevertheless, the lesson - and there have been quite a few similar cases
in recent years - must have gotten through to both leaders and led alike,
though not, one can only suppose, to the former as much as to the latter! I only hope that Unit 37, with his slight
insomnia, will duly pull through, else he, too, may 'go the way' of his less
fortunate companions. And who knows but
that such victims of evolutionary pressures serve the Controllers, in due
course, as the most useful 'guinea pigs' on which to experiment - assuming they
can be maintained elsewhere in some kind of alternative living context?
Perhaps I have burdened myself overlong
with depressing thoughts? But I can't
ignore the plight or problems of my Supermen.
I am partly responsible for their individual wellbeing, both spiritual
and material, and when something tragic befalls any particular one of them, I
feel more depressed by it than anyone else, mainly because, together with my
colleagues, I get to know directly about it, whereas each lay superman remains
relatively ignorant of what happens to all but a few of his companions in the
immediate vicinity. This is a
consequence of how the Internal Communications Network is wired - each of the
100 Supermen in my sector being able to contact me but not one another,
although some tangential contact on a very localized basis remains possible,
some of the time, for those in any given vicinity of the sector. If matters were arranged differently, say
more expansively, it is feared that Supermen would become distracted from their
spiritual duties and might even collectively succumb to rebellious thoughts or
ploys in the face of evolutionary requirement.
Clearly, this isn't a situation the Controllers wish to encourage, since
they have enough trouble with various individual Supermen without wishing to
create additional trouble for themselves vis-à-vis the
collectivity.
Even I am relatively ignorant of the goings-on of
Supermen in sectors outside my own, since as a Spiritual Leader one is brought
into psychic contact with just a handful of those from adjacent sectors, and
then only in an emergency - as when a Superman from some neighbouring sector
desires spiritual counsel during a difficult trip but is unable to contact his own
Spiritual Leader either because the latter is already engaged or, just as
often, tripping himself, and therefore unavailable. Where more distant sectors of the community
are concerned, one's ignorance is total.
Our interconnectivity doesn't extend all that far afield.
Admittedly, there are advantages to being a
Spiritual Leader, as opposed to a lay superman, perhaps the chief of which is
that one doesn't trip every night but, mercifully, every other night, so that
one isn't quite so pressurized as the generality of Supermen but is
comparatively free, on the non-tripping night, to meditate and thus intimate of
the coming hypermeditation in the next evolutionary
stage - namely that of the Superbeings. This arrangement enables one to think about
various matters if thinking is what one desires or needs to do, and I have
certainly taken full advantage of the opportunity this evening, mindful that
the Controllers aren't particularly interested in communicating with one now,
and won't be listening-in to me in consequence.
Usually one does of course meditate; for that is far more spiritually
rewarding. But a little thinking now and
then doesn't come amiss, and in any case is often provoked by the
communications one may have received from certain Supermen. After all, it is largely to be on-hand to
receive such communications that one is intermittently exempted from the
trip. Now although meditation is
important, it plays only a secondary role, being, to put it crudely, a kind of
sideline. Whether in decades to come -
assuming our status as Spiritual Leaders lasts for decades - we shall still be
exempted from nightly tripping in this fashion ... remains to be seen. Though it's not impossible that the
Controllers will eventually bring us into line with the majority of Supermen
and oblige us to abandon our mediating and meditating roles in the process,
always assuming that we can be brought into line with them - a thing which, for
a variety of reasons, must remain open to doubt! The only alternative would seem to be our
destruction when the generality of Supermen are transformed into a superbeingful entity.
However, that isn't something I should like to dwell on, even though
there may be a grain of consolation in knowing - if one could know for certain
- that one's brain wasn't destined to be operated on and wouldn't therefore be
fated, in its ensuing new-brain guise, for subsequent evolutionary struggles
and experiences, about which, in the nature of things at present, one can have
only the faintest inkling.
But that is rather negative, and I have a
duty to remain as positive as possible, if only for the sake of those Supermen
to whom I'm personally responsible. They
are now some four hours into their current trip, and I have yet to receive an
additional communication to Unit 37's.
At this rate, I might as well be tripping myself, though etiquette
demands that one remains at the ready and, anyway, I don't particularly mind
being obliged to think or meditate instead.
I reckon the Controllers must be afraid that if we Spiritual Leaders
trip-out as often as the generality of Supermen, we shall be unable to
communicate with them as they would wish, since too much under the stimulant's
hallucinogenic influence. They require
middlemen, as it were, to liaise with them from the vantage-point of a kind of
spiritual no-man's-land in-between the opposing sides, and wouldn't want us to
become too spaced-out and, hence, at too great a psychological remove from
them. We are wired into the community in
such a way as not to threaten, by our less uniform spiritual performance, its
overall psychic integrity. Thus we're
spokesmen for the superhuman flock, but aren't directly of the flock. I fear that we shall be destroyed when the
time comes for Supermen to be superseded by Superbeings. Or perhaps...? Yes, the thought now occurs to me that maybe
we will be removed from our respective sectors and turned into a separate
community of lay supermen, with but a relatively tiny percentage of us still
being obliged to play the role of Spiritual Leader to it? Well, that may seem unduly optimistic, but
one shouldn't rule that possibility completely out-of-account. The only snag is ... could we become genuine
Supermen after having functioned as go-betweens for so long? And, to be perfectly honest with myself, I
can't be confident that we could.... Ah, something is happening at last! "Hello, A5 receiving."
"SL5, this is Unit 13, Sector 4,
thinking through. I'm beginning to grow
bored with my trip and wonder whether you could obtain me a stronger dose in
future. Psychic contents aren't coming
across as clearly or sharply as I'd like."
"Well, just make do with what you've
got, Unit 13, and I'll try my best to get your quota upgraded."
"Much obliged, SL5."
So what do you know! And not even one of my own sector! These precocious Supermen can be just as big
a problem for the Controllers to handle as the laggards!
* * *
Apart from
the regular beat of the large mechanical pump, which was functioning as normal
in its capacity as life-sustainer for the 27th
Superhuman Community of New Cork North-West, the only other sound for the past
twenty minutes had come from the tall, thin, elderly comrade to Controller 16's
left, who was still engaged in dusting the control panels to each of the three
large computers that stood against the wall there. Not just the sound of the small mechanical
duster in his bony hand, whining unobtrusively as it sucked-up whatever dust
its insatiable mouth came into contact with, but the no-less unobtrusive sound
of Controller 9's footsteps and body movements reached Controller 16's acute
ears, where they were channelled to a mind that was becoming increasingly bored
by a lack of both interesting thoughts and interesting stimuli, intellectual or
otherwise, coming to it from without.
Languidly, Controller 16 noted on his plastic wrist-digital that it was
barely 08.00 hrs, which meant that he still had another half-hour on duty
before he could retire to his living quarters and settle down to some diverting
holography or computer graphics, such as few people bothered to contemplate
these days but which, more out of perversity than genuine interest, he
nonetheless persisted in contemplating, if only to prepare himself for a decent
sleep. Later, if Comrade 98 was in the
mood, he would recount his recent social escapades with Comrade 52, who had a
reputation for eccentric behaviour.
Comrade 98 was bound to be intrigued, providing, that is, he wasn't
tripped-out like a Superman and in need of supervision - as occasionally
happened when he was off duty! At
present, however, Comrade 98 was sitting in front of the dashboard in one of
the remoter parts of the Tripping Centre, mindful, no doubt, of his duties as
Principal Controller for sectors 25-30 of the Superhuman Community in question.
At that moment the whirr of Controller 9's
mechanical duster ceased and, with delicate footsteps, he returned to his
customary post beside his rather bored colleague, bringing with him the now
dust-gorged contraption which, with scant formality, he duly dispatched into
its container at the base of the dashboard-cum-desk-cum-drawer in front of
which he was now standing.
"Well, Comrade 16, how goes it at
present?" he politely asked.
"Looking forward to your break?"
Comrade 16 nodded his clean-shaven head and
simultaneously answered the first question by informing his senior colleague
that 'it', meaning life or things or duty, was still going rather quietly. There had occurred but one communication from
Sector 3 of the community in the past forty minutes, which totalled, with
Sectors 4 and 5 included, no more than eleven communications during the entire
session - from 02.30 through to 08.00 hrs.
"Very quiet this morning,"
Comrade 9 agreed, as he sat down in front of his dashboard. "They were busier during part of the
first session than we've been throughout the entirety of the second. Which is pretty much to
form these days."
Comrade 16 nodded in tacit confirmation and
remarked that Coms. 11 and 35 of the first session
had noted twenty-four communications from 20.30-02.30 hrs, most of them from Superlink A2, who had to cope with an overspill from
Sectors 1 and 3, as well as attend to his own.
Superlink A5, on the other hand, had been
relatively quiet, despite his having to stand-in for Sectors 4 and 6 when
required. Only two
communications from him, and that late in the first session - at 00.15 and
01.30 hrs respectively. Otherwise, merely routine communications on the hour.
"I expect Comrades 8 and 54 will
receive more communications than we've had, when they come on duty for the
third session at 08.30 hrs," Comrade 9 opined.
"Yes, the late-period trip can be
rather more exciting from a Controller's standpoint," Comrade 16
confirmed, drawing on a combination of experience and imparted information from
successive third-session comrades.
"It's then that some tripping units begin to weary of or grow
impatient with things appertaining to their respective psychic experiences. No two units ever share exactly the same
trip, you know."
The pigtailed head of the Senior Controller
bobbed in sagacious acknowledgement of that fact! "Each Superman is virtually a law unto
himself," he declared, a shade wistfully.
"Not that their experiences differ to any marked extent. After all, one trip is pretty much like
another when you come down to the basic psychological facts of the matter. But, of course, not all brains respond to the
stimulant in exactly the same way. The
better-constituted ones respond to it with more alacrity, as a rule, than do the
less well-constituted ones, whose superconscious is
not so far evolved. Also you have to
make allowances for the sleep record of any given tripping unit. A Superman whose subconscious has inflicted a
daymare upon him during the afternoon will be less
well-disposed towards LSD in the evening than those of his companions who
dreamt pleasantly. If he recalls parts
of his daymare during the trip, he may slant his
attitude towards it in a negative direction, and that, as we both know, can
lead to a less than satisfying experience!"
"Though if the daymare-haunted
Superman gets in touch with his Spiritual Leader in good time, the latter
should be able to recondition his attitude and thus return him to a calmer
frame-of-mind," Comrade 16 remarked with purposeful calm. "Superlinks A2
and A5 each came through once during our session with accounts of this problem,
which, fortunately, they seem to have solved."
"Just as well for us!" Comrade 9 rejoined, a wan smile on his thin lips. "Otherwise we'd have had to bring the
Supermen concerned down from their trips with a local injection of counter-acid
solution, before their negative attitudes began to affect those in their
respective vicinities." He paused a
moment, as if absorbed in deep reflection, then asked: "What about the
first session? Did Comrades 11 and 35
receive similar communications?"
Comrade 16 checked through the electronic
record notes of the session in question and answered affirmatively. "That's usually the worst session for
this particular problem," he continued, "because the closest in time
to the Supermen's sleep period. With the
second and third sessions, by contrast, it's generally the insomniacs who begin
to pose problems - our session providing three cases of psychic strain
again. It's a wonder we don't inject
more powerful sleeping draughts into them."
Comrade 9 sighed faintly while gently
shaking his aged head. "We used to
many years ago," he confessed, for the benefit of his junior colleague,
"but these days we're afraid of the consequences of such an action on
their tripping capacity. It wasn't
simply that a drugged Superman would sleep longer than his companions; he'd
sleep deeper as well, a thing which had a counter-productive effect on the
quality of his trip, and tended to undermine the psychic integrity of those
tripping units in any given sector of the community where heavily-drugged
insomniacs were to be found. So
gradually we cut down on sleeping draughts, until, as per current procedure, we
scarcely ever apply them at all - not even in genuine cases of insomnia, such
as are still encountered from time to time.
The emphasis in the superhuman millennium is on upward
self-transcendence, in consequence of which it would be morally wrong of us,
and bad for the more spiritually-advanced tripping units, to simultaneously
cater to downward self-transcendence in all but a minor and, on the whole,
tangential way, such as pertains to the occasional application of weak sleeping
draughts to those whose persistent insomnia might otherwise pose a subversive
threat to the psychic wellbeing of the community in general." Having said which, Comrade 9 relapsed into
one of his customary reflective silences, which was just as well from Comrade
16's point of view anyway. For, within
less than a minute, a communication came through from Sector 5 of the
community, obliging him to resort to headphones as he acknowledged its
reception.
"Go ahead, A5, this is Con. 16
receiving."
"For the second time this day, I must
report that a Superman has requested an increase in his dosage of LSD,"
the artificial voice of the superlink in question
responded. "And all because he
claims that his current dosage is insufficient to last as long as he would
like. He's beginning to lose height in
his spiritual flight and is afraid that the next few hours, before he can
return to sleep, will be less than rewarding."
"Which unit is this?" Controller
16 asked, as he recorded the communication in shorthand on his computer (the
voice recorder normally employed in this service being temporarily
out-of-order).
"Unit 63 from my sector," A5
promptly answered.
"Very good A5. I'll look into this request and see what can
be done."
The amber communication light on the
dashboard in front of him duly receded and, removing his headphones, Controller
16 turned to his senior colleague and said: "Thus has another tripping
unit requested a stronger fix!
Apparently, the first request A5 put through on this subject concerned
Unit 13 of Sector 4, and it came through to Comrade 35 at 01.30 hrs," he
added, consulting the record notes of the previous session.
"There would seem to be a growing body
of discontent, as it were, with current LSD dosages in certain sectors of the
community," Comrade 9 observed, as he scanned other recent record notes
for Sectors 1-5 on the bright visual-display screen in front of him. "At least 10% of the 500 tripping units
in those sectors are dissatisfied with their current doses - as compared with
20% who take the opposite view, for one reason or another, that their trips are
too protracted and powerful. Whilst
in-between, some 70% who appear resigned to what they get."
Comrade 16 noted the respective percentages
in his computer and opined that the only reasonable thing they could do now was
to remove the precocious tripping units from the sectors in question and create
a more advanced community out of those and other such units from other nearby
sectors, in accordance with the newly-discovered technique for removing
Supermen from any given community and transferring them elsewhere.
Comrade 9 grunted judiciously and agreed,
over a brisk nod of his head, that that was probably the most viable solution
these days. "Thus are 'the quick'
weeded-out from 'the slow'!" he added, not without a flicker of
amusement. For in his mind's eye he saw
comrades at work removing a brain from 'the tree', as the support system was
colloquially called, and transferring it, with the assistance of a special
trolley on which a small mechanical pump and an oxygen container deputized,
along with plastic tubing, for the collective sustain apparatus of its previous
life-support system, to a new Tripping Centre where, hopefully, it would be
reintegrated, though this time into a spiritually more advanced, and hence
elitist, superhuman community. Thus did
a Superman 'go up' in the post-human millennium. Although, as Comrade 9 well knew, it was also
possible for such an entity to 'go down' in it, and more than a few had
recently been transferred from an average community to a community of laggards,
where they would thenceforth exist on the bottom rung, so to speak, of the
superhuman ladder, until such time as evolutionary pressures forced them up
again or even, in the paradoxical nature of things, transformed the entire
laggard community into an above-average one.
These measures, however, were still
relatively novel and thus in the experimental stage. Nevertheless a pattern was gradually emerging
which reflected, across a wide spectrum of Tripping Centres, a disparity in
spiritual development, and it now seemed not unlikely that some communities
would attain to a maximum superhuman development and undergo superbeingful transformation long before others, so that
Supermen and Superbeings would probably co-exist in
the post-human millennium for a considerable period of time. The question was: How long would it take a Superbeing, or new-brain collectivization, to attain to
transcendence? For if transcendence
could be attained to within 50-100 years of the creation of a Superbeing, there might well be a number of laggard
superhuman communities still in existence which could find themselves
threatened with destruction by the proton-proton reactions or explosions
stemming from it. And even if it took longer
than a century for any given meditating unit to evolve towards complete
electron freedom, and all superhuman communities had in the meantime been
transformed into Superbeings, might not the first
new-brain collectivizations to attain to
transcendence pose a holocaustic threat to those still hypermeditating
towards it? If a fierce proton-proton
reaction were to occur in the wake of departed electrons, it might sweep from
centre to centre, engulfing the less-evolved Superbeings
in a destructive apocalypse of raging flame.
Or perhaps the latter could be safely sealed off from such a
possibility?
At
present no-one could tell, because the superbeing
millennium was still some decades away, even in its inceptive manifestations,
and no Superbeing had as yet been created. In all probability, transcendence would take
longer than a century to occur, and there wouldn't be too great a disparity
between the time-scale appertaining to the creation of one Superbeing
and another - though it now looked certain that some disparity would duly
arise, if only because the Controllers would be unable to operate on all
superhuman communities simultaneously, for physical as well as spiritual
reasons. But, of course, the laggards
were constantly being encouraged forwards, while the precocious were being
restrained from becoming too precocious, so that the disparity between them was
never allowed to become too great. The
least advanced of all Supermen, ironically, were the Superlinks,
who didn't have to trip-out as often as the others. But it was an accepted fact, if carefully
guarded secret, among the Controllers ... that these Superlinks
would probably have to be disposed of in due course, since they couldn't be
integrated into a superbeingful entity with new
brains that were less highly evolved than the generality of Supermen. And to attempt to create a laggard community
of tripping units out of them would be impractical, because such a fledgling
community would lag too far behind even the worst laggards of the existing communities,
and probably succumb to the negative side-effects of superbeing
transcendence before they were even ripe for transformation into a new-brain
collectivization themselves. Thus it
seemed they would be invalidated and their Controllers along with them, which
wasn't a very encouraging prospect for Comrade 9, who preferred not to envisage
it. Indeed, the sooner all tripping
units were transformed into Superbeings, the safer it
would be for the Controllers. For if
they didn't delegate supervisory responsibility to their computers and robots
in good time, they might well become engulfed by the hells of forsaken protons,
too! Better, reasoned Comrade 9, for
Controllers to die quietly and calmly in their own time. Since there wasn't much fresh human propagation
going on these days (the new generation of Controllers probably being the
last), it was imperative for them to upgrade the Supermen within the next 10-20
years, before humanity completely died-out and no-one remained in service to
create the meditating units and set them directly on course for transcendence
and, thus, definitive salvation in the heavenly Beyond.
It was with such pessimistic thoughts in
mind that Comrade 9 almost jumped with fright when he heard, as out of a corner
of his consciousness, a voice saying: "Well, our session has come to an
end, so we'd better retire and leave the precocious tripping units to their
dosage dissatisfactions for the time being."
"What, is it 08.30 hrs already?"
the elderly controller responded incredulously.
"And only twelve communications to
leave on record, not counting the routine ones," Comrade 16 declared. "Ah, here comes the new shift now! We'd better clear out before they detain us
for questioning! It looks like Comrade
8's going to be in my seat and Comrade 54 in yours."
"They're damn clever guys,"
Comrade 9 remarked, as he vacated his seat.
"And as good as anybody at transferring Supermen
from one centre to another. We'll
be leaving our duties in capable hands there!"
"Leaving our problems, would be nearer
the truth!" chuckled Comrade 16, who, having
acknowledged the incoming controllers from a polite distance, dutifully
followed his senior colleague towards the nearest exit.
MUSICAL EVOLUTION
Professor
Burke listened in silence to the Shostakovich symphony he was playing on his
stereo before asking me, as if in need of reassurance: "Do you listen to
much orchestral music yourself these days, Justin?"
"Yes," I replied, glad of an
opportunity to speak again. "Although I tend to listen to as much Modern Jazz in the
evenings - always using headphones instead of speakers."
Professor Burke looked puzzled. "Why is that?" he asked.
"Partly because the acoustics in my
room aren't the most suitable for musical appreciation, but also because I believe
that using headphones constitutes a superior way of listening to music."
The professor looked even more
puzzled. "How did you reach that
belief?" he wanted to know.
"By bearing in mind the distinction
between appearance and essence," I straightaway replied. "The object of evolutionary progress, so
far as I'm concerned, is to extend the sphere of essence at the expense of
appearance, and this applies as much to the evolution of music and its
appreciation as to anything else. By
using headphones, music is brought closer to one's head, one even gets the
impression that it's actually playing in one's
head, which, though a delusion, is nevertheless conducive to the progress of
musical appreciation, as essence would seem to have triumphed over appearance."
The professor's puzzlement appeared to have
reached a veritable climax by now.
"How d'you distinguish
between them?" he demanded.
"Well, essence pertains to the spirit
and is therefore an internal phenomenon, whereas appearance pertains to the senses
and is accordingly external," I replied.
"Music played through headphones approximates to essence by seeming
to be internalized, whereas music played, by contrast, through speakers comes
at one from outside the self and can therefore be equated with appearance. Now my contention is that it's better to
listen to music which seems to come from inside one's head than to music which
is distinct from one, and precisely because its evolution and appreciation
presuppose, in advancing, greater degrees of interiorization. The apparent stems from the
solar roots of the Universe, in complete contrast to that which aspires, as
essence, to the future consummation of evolving life. Thus as we approximate more and more to the
latter, it's logical that headphones should supersede speakers as the
appropriate means through which to cultivate ends, which is to say, listen to music."
Professor Burke appeared to have grasped
the gist of my brief exposition and now looked slightly less puzzled than
before. I had almost convinced him, he
admitted, although he made it clear to me that his personal preference for
speakers was unlikely to be undermined in consequence! He was far too set in his ways for that! "And do you prefer orchestral music to
Modern Jazz?" he asked, having decided to continue the conversation along
similar lines.
"Frankly, it depends on the type of
orchestral music or Modern Jazz in question, as well as on my mood, so I cannot
claim to be entirely consistent in my musical preferences," I
confessed. "But I know that I have
too much culture, in a manner of speaking, to be greatly given to the prospect
of only listening to Modern Jazz. Even
after long confinement in the metropolis, which I know to be basically hostile
to my environmental needs, I haven't become completely proletarianized
or, for that matter, Afro-Americanized.
Yet I couldn't resign myself to orchestral music alone, for I'm
essentially too ambivalent, by nature and circumstances, to be capable of an
exclusive preference. A somewhat 'Steppenwolfian' predicament, if you know anything about
Harry Haller."
The professor smiled guardedly. "Not very much," he confessed. "Although I've read a
little Hermann Hesse. What particularly intrigues me about what
you've just said is the implication that Modern Jazz is somehow proletarian,
whereas orchestral music, even when Soviet, is not. Can you justify that?"
"I think I can," was my fairly
self-confident response. "The chief
distinction at issue lies in whether the music is naturalistic, and therefore
acoustic, or artificial, and therefore electric. Clearly, an orchestra should be described as
naturalistic, whilst a typical modern-jazz group, being electric, can only be
comparatively artificial. That, as I
say, is the chief distinction."
"But surely Shostakovich's symphonies
are proletarian even though acoustic?" Professor Burke objected.
I resolutely shook my head. "Shostakovich's symphonies are no more
proletarian than the orchestral works of any other composer," I
retorted. "And
for the simple reason that they're comparatively naturalistic, not artificial,
and thereby pertain to a bourgeois stage of evolution."
"The Soviets would surely have
objected to that opinion," the professor countered in no uncertain terms.
"Maybe," I conceded. "But, there again, the leaders of Soviet
Russia had little option but to pass orchestral music off as proletarian, since
they lived in what purported to be a proletarian state. Yet the fact nevertheless remains that
serious music which is not electric but acoustic is fundamentally naturalistic,
and by implication bourgeois, whether or not it's called proletarian."
"Even with an anti-formalist, and
hence programmatic, bias?" the professor queried, still evidently unconvinced.
"Even then," I assured him,
"since the anti-formalist line only resulted in the bitter pill of
bourgeois music being coated, as it were, in a thin layer of proletarian sugar,
which usually took the form of a programmatic musical commentary on some Soviet
achievement and/or a verbal dedication to it.
Hence Shostakovich's October
1917 symphony, which you're now playing. A quite remarkable work by any standards, but
not a genuinely proletarian one! For
proletarian music, properly so-considered, is distinguishable from bourgeois
music by being electric, as already remarked.
I have yet, however, to mention two other
important distinctions which should be borne in mind when we endeavour to
ascertain the class status of any given type of music. The first is that proletarian music reflects
a materialistic contraction over bourgeois music by utilizing a group or band
of, usually, between three and six musicians.
Compared with the two hundred or more players in a modern orchestra,
this is a significant distinction which represents a degree of evolutionary
progress that should not be underestimated!
For the contraction of the material side of the world, in whatever
context, is the antithetical corollary of the expansion of its spiritual
side. In the case of the development
from orchestras to groups, we are witnessing a sort of convergence from the
Many to the One or, rather, the Few, with the numerous instruments and
instrumental combinations of the former being superseded by the comparatively
few instruments and instrumental combinations of the latter. However, while the material side contracts,
the spiritual side expands through utilization, by the jazz group, of
instruments which produce an artificial as opposed to a naturalistic sound, and
consequently result in a more transcendent music which aspires, in a manner of
speaking, towards the divine flowering of evolution, rather than stems from the
diabolic natural roots of life. The
spiritual also expands in a second way - namely, through the emphasis jazz
musicians generally place on essence rather than appearance in the retention,
through memory, of the music they're playing, instead of reliance on a printed
score. This is the other important
distinction between bourgeois and proletarian music. For the bourgeois musician, be he a member of
an orchestra or of a chamber ensemble, is dependent on music scores, which
means that he is partly tied to appearances.
The proletarian musician, by contrast, memorizes his music, and so
approximates it to essence, which reflects a superior development in the
gradual interiorization of music, as required by
evolutionary progress. There is,
however, an exception where bourgeois musicians are concerned, and that is the
concerto soloist, who normally memorizes his part whether he be a pianist, a
violinist, an organist, a cellist, or whatever.
Thus he is distinguishable from the rest of the musicians with whom he
is performing not only by dint of his greater part, but also by dint of his
commitment to essence rather than to appearance. The fact that he plays his concerto part on
an acoustic instrument, on the other hand, keeps him tied to the naturalistic,
and hence to the realm of bourgeois music."
Professor Burke gave me the impression of
being grudgingly impressed by what I had just said, and ventured to inquire
whether, in that case, jazz musicians who played acoustic instruments were not
fundamentally bourgeois, too?
"In a sense, I suppose they generally
are," I replied, following a brief reflective pause, "because the use
of, say, an acoustic as opposed to an electric guitar would tie the musician in
question to the naturalistic in pretty much the same way that a concerto
performer was tied to it, and so preclude his producing a truly transcendent
sound. In Modern Jazz, however, the
emphasis is on electric guitars, as on electric keyboards, so regular use of an
acoustic instrument tends to be the exception to the rule. Most jazz guitarists retain a distinct bias
for the electric, which is only to be expected, considering that Jazz is
essentially a proletarian music and therefore calls, appropriately, for
electric instruments. And it usually
transpires that the finest guitarists are the most consistently transcendental,
because exclusively, or almost exclusively, electric. Those who regress to acoustic instruments
simply produce an inferior sound - naturalistic as opposed to artificial."
The professor's face suddenly reflected a
degree of acquired enlightenment at this point, and he briefly shook his head,
as if to say: 'Well, I never!' Then he
asked: "So what of those modern composers like Stockhausen, Boulez,
Bedford, and Kagel, who make use of electronic means
in the production of their so-called avant-garde music - are they proletarian,
too?"
I could tell by his sceptical tone-of-voice
that he rather doubted it, but I was fairly convinced to the contrary and
answered: "It would depend on whether or not their music was exclusively
electronic, since an avant-garde musician who was exclusively dedicated to atonal
electronics would, in my view, amount to a proletarian composer. Yet there doesn't seem to be all that many
such musicians in action in this rather transitional age. For even Stockhausen, who until his recent
demise was one of the world's most radical composers, also uses traditional
means, including orchestras and scores.
Consequently most avant-garde composers tend to be bourgeois/proletarian
rather than genuinely proletarian in their musical integrity. Some, like Stockhausen, will be more artificial
than naturalistic, because more electronic and atonal than acoustic and tonal,
whereas others, like Tippett, will be more
naturalistic than artificial, because more acoustic and tonal than electronic
and atonal."
"To the best of my knowledge Michael Tippett's music isn't electronic at all, Justin," the
professor corrected.
"No, but then his orchestral music
often has a degree of atonality which places it in a kind of transitional,
semi-essential context, albeit one firmly rooted in the apparent. His Concerto for Orchestra is a case
in point, being typically bourgeois/proletarian in its mixed tonalities and
atonalities. But, fundamentally, Tippett is musically conservative and therefore he doesn't
depart from dualistic or bourgeois precedent to any radical extent, scarcely at
all in a majority of his works. At best,
he could hold his own with a number of moderate Continental composers, like Honegger and Martinu, but he
wouldn't wish to emulate composers like Stockhausen or Kagel
who, in any case, appertain to a more advanced transitional, i.e.
bourgeois/proletarian, civilization.
Only, as a rule, from countries like Germany, Italy, and the United
States does one get the most radical musical experiments, since they're in the
front rank of contemporary civilization, having superseded Britain and France
on the dualistic level. A majority of
British composers are musically rather conservative, producing, like Walton,
neo-romantic or neo-classical or some other more traditional type of bourgeois
music. Of course, from a conservative
point-of-view their music is often excellent, as anyone who has listened to
Walton's or Berkeley's or Rubbra's more tuneful works
will doubtless agree. But if it is one
thing to bring a given tradition to a head, it's quite another to forge a
completely new orientation, and this, as a rule, the British are reluctant to
do!"
"Not surprisingly, Justin,"
opined Professor Burke, allowing himself the brief luxury of a passing smile,
"since British civilization is rather more static
and reactionary, these days, than dynamic and revolutionary."
I nodded affirmatively. "Whereas the German and American
civilizations are still capable of some musical progress," was my due
comment. "However, there are limits
to the degree of musical progress they can evolve, limits which in part stem
from the transitional nature of such civilizations and in part from the
instrumental resources, some of which are rather crude, to hand. I do not anticipate a consistently full-blown
transcendental approach to music before the official beginnings of
post-dualistic civilization become manifest in the world."
"And presumably such an approach to
music would be both electronic and atonal," the professor suggested.
"Indeed," I replied. "With a corresponding materialistic
reduction of instruments to a bare minimum and total elimination of scores in
the interests of greater interiorization, as required
by the preponderance of essence over appearance in proletarian music - which
will mostly be listened to through the medium of headphones."
"And what of Modern Jazz - how will
that develop?" an ever-curious Professor Burke wanted to know.
"It will probably become increasingly
atonal and electronic, thus tending to become indistinguishable from the best
proletarian music or, rather, to evolve into the latter," I boldly
speculated. "For Modern Jazz is
fundamentally a secular rather than a religious music, a kind of musical
equivalent to Socialist Realism or Modern Realism, whereas the best electronic
music tends to reflect a religious bias ... commensurate with its atonality,
which places it in a position equivalent to abstract or transcendental art, as
developed, in the past, by painters like Mondrian and
Kandinsky, but, in the present, by light or
technological artists like Kepes and Peine. A paradox
really, in that quite a lot of Modern Jazz is concerned, at least
intermittently, with transcendent values - as mainly signified by
meditation."
"Which, presumably, indicates that
it's evolving towards musical transcendentalism?" the professor solemnly
conjectured.
"Yes, but from a tonal rather than an
atonal base, and thus in an apparent rather than an essential context," I
contended. "After all, tonality in
music is equivalent to representation in painting or to narration in
literature, and is therefore aligned with the apparent, which is why, despite
its transcendental pretensions, I described Modern Jazz as Social Realist. The bulk of it is certainly tonal, and
consequently exists on a lower, i.e. popular, evolutionary level than the
atonal. Eventually Modern Jazz will
cease to exist, as people gravitate from the apparent to the essential in
accordance with the demands of evolutionary progress on the post-dualistic
level. Everything secular will be
transcended in the wholly religious music of the future, just as Socialist
Realism will be eclipsed by the relevant types of transcendental art, as
appropriate to a full-blown post-dualistic civilization. From being concrete, or partly concrete,
everything will become abstract, pursuing the path of maximum essence, even
though a wholly essential art is unobtainable through apparent means. Headphones may, for instance, give one the
impression that the music is taking place inside one's head, but such an
impression still falls short of reality, and must inevitably remain so. Only with the ensuing post-human millennium
will art become completely interiorized.
But by then - possibly some 2-3 centuries hence - all forms of musical
and pictorial creation will have been superseded by the synthetically-induced
artificial visionary experience of the Superman. In the meantime, however, we will require
music as before, since we'll still be men and thus dependent on the senses,
including the sense of hearing, for our aesthetic appreciation. However, once we completely transcend the
senses, as brains artificially supported and sustained, we'll also transcend
the fine arts. But throughout the
duration of the next and final human civilization, we can do no better than to
spiritualize them to a greater extent ... using apparent means."
The professor coughed slightly and
admitted, with a brief shrug of his shoulders, that I may well be right.
CONCERNING BLACK HOLES
(From a journal by the writer Jeff Stafford)
I often wonder whether those so-called
Black Holes in space, to which astronomers often draw our attention these days,
are really collapsed stars, as is supposed, and not Spiritual Globes tending
towards ultimate unity in some transcendental Beyond. Would a collapsed star really leave a black
hole behind, I ask myself? And, despite
my respect for professional opinion, I remain sceptical. The Universe is undoubtedly a strange place,
but is it necessarily as strange as some authoritative people would have us
believe? I mean why, for instance,
should Multiple Universes come to supplant the old universe, which, in any
case, is probably the only one? I
cannot, as yet, find a satisfactory answer to this question, since there is no
clear evidence that Multiple Universes do in fact exist, even though some
people now talk of them.
4th May.
Yes, the thought grows on me that Black
Holes could well be Spiritual Globes rather than collapsed stars. After all, there is no reason (short of
ignorance) to assume that transcendent spirit, to which certain more advanced
life-forms could already have given rise, is necessarily bright and shiny, like
a star. If you associate God with the
Clear Light of the Void, then you might think so. But, to me, God ... as a condition of supreme being ... is essence rather than appearance, and
therefore not something that could be seen.
In fact, God isn't a 'something' at all, and so the term 'Clear Light of
the Void' seems to me inadequate for defining what would be a state of supreme being in a consummate mind.
5th May.
You cannot really see a Black Hole, even
through the most powerful telescope, but only a void that appears denser than
the surrounding void of space.
Doubtless, the Spiritual Globes tending towards one another in the
transcendental Beyond would be different from space - a presence of pure spirit
in each globe that might well suggest, to an inquisitive telescoped eye, a
denser void than the void surrounding it.
After all, there could be no greater antithesis than that between the
stars, as the most primal doing, and these hypothetical Spiritual Globes, as
the ultimate being - except, perhaps, the numerical antithesis between stars as
multiple and, when all Spiritual Globes have finally converged together into
one ultimate Spiritual Globe, the Omega Absolute as indivisible. But that would be a quantitative difference,
whereas the former is qualitative, as between doing and being.
6th May.
Apparently the position of these Black
Holes in space is constantly changing, so that a kind of kaleidoscopic pattern
appears against the void to suggest to some astronomers and scientists the
possibility of Multiple Universes.
Again, my old scepticism leaps to the fore and I wonder whether a collapsed
star would really need to change its position in the aforementioned manner,
thereby giving rise to the analogy with a kaleidoscope? But if a Black Hole was really a Spiritual
Globe instead of a collapsed star, then their constant changes of
position would make more sense to me, since it would be in the order of
Spiritual Globes to converge towards one another in an ever-growing process of
drawing towards ultimate oneness in the final Spiritual Globe of ... the Omega
Absolute. Those constant changes of
position in space which Black Holes are alleged to undergo would thus signify
the convergence of pure spirit towards larger wholes, and would accordingly
have nothing whatsoever to do with the supposition of Multiple Universes, which
is more than likely an aspect of contemporary scientific subjectivity, in
conformity with the quasi-mystical requirements of the age.
7th May.
I wrote yesterday that a convergence of
transcendent spirit towards the objective of the Omega Absolute could already
be happening on the transcendental plane, and am no less convinced today that
this could actually be the case. After
all, there is no reason why a more advanced life-form than ourselves, elsewhere
in the Universe, shouldn't already have attained to transcendence, and so have
become Spiritual Globes. Such a life
form would have been at the superbeing stage of
evolution ... as new brains artificially supported and sustained in maximum
collectivization. Every planet on which
intelligent evolving life exists would sooner or later have to become populated
by Superbeings, if transcendence was to be
achieved. Life would have to pass
through the successive stages of post-human evolution throughout the Universe
... before Spiritual Globes became possible.
You cannot jump from the human level straight to the transcendental
Beyond, no matter what the traditional ignorance of fools or superstitious
people might suggest to the contrary!
Everything must await its proper time, and every life-sustaining planet pass through a post-human millennium ... before life can
gravitate to that ultimate peak.
8th May.
The transcendental Beyond is above and
beyond the human, superhuman, and superbeing stages
of evolution. The stars don't exist in
the transcendental Beyond but in space, which is
timeless and void. The stars are the
roots of evolution, so to speak, and thus, in comparison with the sun, even the
earth is a bit transcendent - a stalk on which the flower of humanity develops
and must continue to develop through successive post-human life forms, before
transcendence can be attained to in the bliss of pure spirit, which may well
appear like a Black Hole from Earth. For
a Black Hole is certainly antithetical to a white presence, or star, and
thereby suggestive of the furthest possible evolutionary remove from the stellar
roots of the Universe.
9th May.
Prior to me, humanity had no knowledge of
Spiritual Globes, not knowing anything much about Supermen or Superbeings either.
Consequently one cannot be surprised that astronomers should interpret
Black Holes as collapsed stars, since they do at least know something about
stars and would therefore be inclined to relate a Black Hole to them. But relating Black Holes to stars or, rather,
to collapsed stars doesn’t explain why such stars should leave a black hole
behind, nor why the hole so left must continue to change positions with other
such holes in a seemingly never-ending kaleidoscopic pattern! The lack of a transcendental perspective
doesn't help to explain what does exist, but, on the contrary, leaves certain
loose-ends and absurdities unaccounted for.
10th May.
What really happens when a star
collapses? Does it become matter, like
the moon, or does it fade into nothingness?
If the former, could one see it from millions of miles away, even with
the help of a giant telescope? If the
latter, why should nothingness be perceptible as a dense void, or Black
Hole? For me, the latter likelihood
takes precedence over the former one, though I cannot rule it out as an impossibility. A
star may collapse into a dense substance or it may explode into dust and
eventual nothingness. Either way, we're
unlikely to see it as a Black Hole. In
fact, we're unlikely to see it at all!
11th May.
But if a Black Hole really is a Spiritual
Globe, how long will it take before evolution runs its course and reaches an
eternal consummation in God, which is to say, the ultimate Spiritual
Globe? We cannot of course be certain,
though we can hazard a guess that it will take millions of years, bearing in
mind our own relative backwardness in regard to our pre-millennial status as
human beings. For there is no
possibility of the Omega Absolute coming to pass until every life-sustaining
planet throughout the Universe has delivered-up its quota of spirit to the
transcendental Beyond, and all such quotas have converged towards one another
to establish an ultimate unity - in complete contrast to the divergent nature
of the numerous stars. Evolution being a
journey, as it were, from the Alpha Absolutes (of the stars) to the Omega
Absolute (of the supreme level of being) via life-sustaining planets such as
the earth, there can be no question of God truly coming to pass in the Universe
before this ultimate unity has been achieved.
Only then will God be fully manifest - the quantitative and the
qualitative coming together in a synthesis which transcends all opposites, the
stars passing or having passed away ... to leave the void to the perfected
being, whose condition is eternal bliss.
Perhaps that bliss will fill the ultimate Black Hole?
A VERY CIVILIZED MAN
Michael
Giles was a very civilized man for his time.
In fact, much the most civilized man I had ever met! Not only was he exceptionally well-bred, and
therefore highly cultured; he was exceptionally well-read and therefore highly
educated as well.
When I first met him he had a small flat in
Crouch End, the north
This opportunity only came, however, when
he had tracked down the publisher who was destined to keep him in money for the
remaining years of his life. His first
publication was a novel of mainly autobiographical tendency, and, to his
considerable surprise, it sold reasonably well, enabling him to fulfil his
long-standing ambition. For, to tell the
truth, he loathed
But he had grown up in
I digress slightly, but only because I wish
to emphasize the connection between Michael Giles' highly civilized lifestyle
and his solitary background in north
Well, he finally got out of that hellish
city and, moving to
Let me give you some examples. In London he had occasionally bought men's
magazines which he would briefly look through, perhaps masturbate over an
alluring photograph, and then throw away, as though in disgust. In
As regards certain other aspects of his
evolving lifestyle, I can only remark that while he could occasionally be seen
without a jacket on during a hot summer's day in London, with his shirt-sleeves
rolled up and collar open at the neck, one could never, no matter how hot the
weather, have seen him in anything but a jacket in Dublin, with matching or
complementary shirt, the sleeves of which would have been firmly buttoned down
and the collar of which just as firmly buttoned up. Neither would one have encountered him in a
pair of open sandals, feet bare and ankles on display, as sometimes happened in
Yes, there could be little doubt that
Michael Giles was becoming steadily more civilized, as the years went by, and
his allegiance to artificial criteria strengthened. He no longer took short strolls around the
neighbourhood, as in London, but spent most of his time indoors, attending to
his writings and, when a sufficient amount had been done for the day, passing
the remaining time with a book, some records, a little conversation (usually
over the telephone) with one or two close friends, and, as often as not, a
stint of Transcendental Meditation. His
meals were increasingly eaten indoors, prepared by a lady friend whose
relationship with him, however, was more intellectual than carnal. That he occasionally had sex, or a kind of
sex, with her ... I don't doubt. But
they had been drawn together by common cultural interests that, appertaining
mainly to literature and music, remained, I think, the bedrock of their
relationship. He always spoke of her
with great respect, regarding her as one of the most enlightened and liberated
of women; although, regrettably, he refused to elaborate on this opinion. As to the fact that she cooked his meals, he
would simply say that this was one of the few concessions to tradition she was
prepared to make, but he was damn glad she was prepared to make it, since it
delivered him from the tedious necessity of having to prepare them himself - a
task he had been obliged to perform quite often in London. By way of expressing his gratitude to this
lady friend, he would send her, from time to time, a bouquet of artificial flowers,
which he considered more civilized than natural ones. She, I think, accepted them with pleasure,
though not, I suspect, without a degree of nostalgia for more natural
growths! Her apartment - a mere stone's
throw from his - soon became rather crowded with these artificial bouquets,
which there seemed to be no cause to throw away, since they were incapable of
wilting. Michael took pride in surveying
them all whenever he paid her a social visit.
"This is infinitely superior to anything Huysmans
ever dreamed of," he could be heard to remark, referring to the
over-sophisticated author of À Rebours.
And she had little option but to agree!
However, there were some aspects of Michael
Giles' hypercivilized lifestyle which only a person
thoroughly familiar with his writings would have appreciated or, indeed, become
aware of in the course of time. I
allude, for instance, to the habit he had of keeping his hands away from his
face whenever in company, so that there was never a contact of skin to
skin. His hands would invariably be
resting on his trouser legs and/or on the arms of his easy chair, thereby
ensuring a contact with artificial materials as appropriate to an anti-natural
lifestyle. For such materials as were
employed in both his clothes and his furniture were invariably artificial or,
to be more precise, synthetic, having been invented by man. Thus his clothes were mostly of nylon or
acrylic, hardly ever of cotton, and reflected his transcendental predilection,
a predilection which ensured that artificial rather than natural things, or things made from natural materials, greatly
preponderated. It was for this reason,
too, that aluminium and plastic figured largely in the composition of his
furniture, including his easy chairs, which were almost entirely of synthetic
construction and dark appearance, like his clothes. Garish colours were rigorously avoided, since
connoting, in his estimation, with an alpha-stemming, diabolic orientation. Only a man thoroughly familiar with his
writings would have appreciated this point and thereupon come to equate his
dark clothes with a more spiritual bias.
Even indoors, he would keep himself buttoned-up and fully dressed. No man was every less of a nudist than he!
But although these and other aspects of his
hypercivilized lifestyle continued to develop and
enhance his reputation as a modern saint, a kind of latter-day Mondrian whose distaste for natural things attained to
quite fanatical proportions, a subconscious opposition within him to such a
lifestyle was also developing, preparing to assert itself and threaten his
ascetic reputation at its very roots. At
the beginning of this account I said that Michael Giles "was a very
civilized man for his time", and for no small reason. For what was no longer is the case, since the
pressures of such a lifestyle were, in the end, too much for him, and duly led
to consequences which can only be described as contrary to the interests of his
ascetic reputation! The reformation of his
previously too ascetic lifestyle, which I had expected to come with his
departure from London, clearly had to come sooner or later, and when it did -
much later than I would have expected, in view of the severity of his
long-standing depression - it came with redoubled might, precipitating him into
the life of sensual indulgence for which he has since become notorious. For not only did he move out of Dublin in
order to take-up permanent residence in his country retreat; he took with him a
number of young women whom he personally selected from amongst a list of
well-known libertines, and installed them there for purposes of sexual
experimentation and sensual gratification.
Beginning as a latter-day Mondrian, he became,
with this volte face, a
sort of latter-day Sade, forbidding himself no excesses
with them in pursuance of a return to full mental health. From being hyperascetic
he had become hypercarnal, and was to remain so
until, due to over-indulgence no more than a week ago, he suffered a severe
heart attack and died. May death grant
him the peace that life never could!
THE TWO LITERATURES
Deirdre
Crowe had long been interested in literature and had written quite a few short
stories since first embarking on a literary career, some three years ago. But Patrick Moran had never much liked her
work and wasn't afraid to tell her so, when he chanced to meet her at a
literary party one summer's evening. She
hadn't expected this dark-haired, handsome-looking young man to reveal his
dislike of her work to her shortly after they were introduced to each other,
and found it difficult to conceal her disappointment in him. Nonetheless she was curious to learn why he
hadn't got a better opinion of it?
He smiled defensively at first, surveying
her through half-closed eyes, then replied: "Because your work has always
struck me as being too bourgeois, by which I mean traditional. God knows, short stories aren't the most
ingratiating form of literature at the best of times! But when they're so carefully written, so
artfully shaped, as yours tend to be, then I'm afraid any chance of my being
ingratiated by them must be completely ruled out! The attention you give to appearances is, in
my opinion, quite excessive."
Deirdre found this explanation no less
baffling than she had found his first comment disappointing. She considered him slightly insulting. Appearances? What-on-earth did he mean by that? Swallowing her pride with the help of a
mouthful of sweet wine, she put the question to him.
"Ah, I ought to have suspected!"
he responded, as though to himself. And,
again, he looked at her through half-closed eyes, the way Lenin must have
looked at H.G. Wells from time to time during that fateful interview in the
Kremlin. Or, rather, looked through
him. Yes, a middle-class philistine was
what one was up against here!
"Well?" she insisted, becoming a
trifle impatient.
"By appearances, I primarily mean that
which pertains in literature to a description of or orientation towards
external phenomena, particularly when such phenomena are naturalistic, as in
the case of your writings," he declared.
"But I also mean, albeit to a lesser extent, that which pertains to
matters grammatical and involves the author's dedication to careful phrasing, the
construction of sentences which, from a pedant's standpoint, are above reproach
and consequently reflect a traditional or conventional adherence to syntactic
custom. Both these aspects of literary
activity can be found, to an alarmingly high degree, in your short stories,
which is the chief reason why I've never been able to admire them."
Deirdre was unable to prevent herself
blushing at this juncture, despite the precautions she had taken to remain as
cool as possible, which included an inclination to drink wine rather more
quickly and copiously than was her habit.
"But shouldn't literature bear witness to external phenomena, as
well as be constructed along the most careful and grammatical lines?" she
objected.
"Not at its highest level," Moran
averred, while sportingly pouring some more wine into the young lady's by-now
empty glass. "The highest
literature concentrates much more on internal phenomena, or noumena,
and is accordingly essential rather than apparent. It deals to a greater extent in matters
intellectual and spiritual than with their converse in the material world, and
does so, moreover, in an appropriately essential way - namely by the employment
of a fairly spontaneous technique, freed from grammatical fetters, which
attests to the preponderance of creative free will over grammatical determinism. English civilization has long been a victim
of grammatical determinism. For its
Calvinistic roots, stressing predestination and thus the necessity of adherence
to the 'Laws of Providence', preclude the radical development of creative free
will and ensure that culture remains, by and large, on a bourgeois level of
grammatical propriety. Admittedly, most
other Western countries aren't much different.
But none of them can match
There issued from Deirdre's throat an
impulsive laugh which she had a job controlling, and which threatened to cause
her glass-holding hand to precipitate some of its alcoholic contents over her
colleague's jacket. But the jacket
escaped relatively unscathed nonetheless, for she was able to bring her
laughter under control before things got completely out-of-hand, so to
speak. "And you evidently consider
me one of them?" she at length surmised.
He smiled benignly, but said nothing.
So she continued: "Yet I don't care for a spontaneous or fairly
spontaneous approach to my work, since it would lead to scrappy writing, and I
cannot equate such writing with the highest literature."
"I didn't say the highest literature
had to be scrappy or slapdash," corrected Moran, who had ceased to
smile. "Simply
that it should entail a greater degree of freedom from grammatical determinism
than is evinced by your work. You
won't get me worrying over the regular placement of prepositions, at any
rate. Nor do I give undue attention to
the construction of a sentence or to the shape of a phrase. I leave that kind of thing to bourgeois
anachronisms, who are better qualified than me to treat appearances with more
respect. To me, the most important
thing, on the contrary, is what I'm saying, not the way I'm saying it! Though one cannot deny that, on the highest
level, what one is saying to some extent conditions the way
it's being said.
For to write about spiritual or intellectual matters
with a technique that gave undue importance to grammatical appearances ...
would constitute a contradiction in terms, unworthy of truly advanced
literature. If one writes about
the inner world more than the outer one, it's only proper that one should
employ a suitably essential technique, in order to avoid compromising oneself
with undue attention to pedantic details.
One doesn't wish to be bothered or impeded by apparent considerations
... in the form of grammatical determinism.
For a truly essential content can only be sustained with the aid of a
relevant technique, one which is sufficiently liberated as to make for an
unprecedented degree of creative freedom.
Free thought requires free expression - that's the inescapable logic of
the matter!"
Deirdre Crowe politely nodded her head in
apparent agreement. "You may be
right, Patrick," she conceded, "but I could never write like
that. Maybe I'm too old-fashioned and
maybe, for all I know, the fact that I'm a woman has something to do with
it. But I could never satisfy myself
that I was working properly if my technique was too spontaneous. To me, literature involves struggle and is
jolly hard work!"
Moran shook his large round head and sighed
in a nasally ironic fashion.
Fundamentally, all these bourgeois writers were the same, whatever their
sex. They were using brooms while more
contemporary people were using vacuum-cleaners.
What is more, they elevated their dependence on brooms, and hence manual
labour, to an artistic virtue! "You
sound like you derive a certain masochistic pleasure from this literary
struggle," he duly commented.
"I simply derive pleasure from a job
well done," Deirdre admitted in a self-justificatory tone.
"Yes, but your job tends to resemble a
representational canvas focusing, in minute detail, upon natural phenomena,
whereas mine corresponds to a quite radical expressionist canvas focusing on
the inner world," Moran asseverated.
"I don't claim to be a literary abstractionist; for such a status
would involve the manipulation of a technique far more radical than my own - indeed,
would constitute a literature such as we haven't yet seen, in which descriptive
or narrative intelligibility was reduced to a bare minimum. But even a literary expressionist or, for
that matter, impressionist ... is further up the ladder of literary evolution
than a naturalistic representationalist, like
you. Literature may, thanks or no thanks
to agents and publishers and their commercial requirements, lag behind art and
music in technical progress. But that
shouldn't preclude one from being as radical as possible, under the
circumstances. There has been some
evolutionary progress, even since James Joyce, whose Finnegans
Wake bordered on literary abstraction."
Deirdre Crowe was unconvinced and looked
it. She couldn't understand how a
spontaneous approach to literature could possibly constitute progress, not even
after what her colleague had told her about needing to use an essential
technique to do adequate justice to essential expression. To her, literature was hard work and that was
what it would continue to be for as long as it existed. "I can't see how you can possibly deny
the value of good, honest, hard labour!" she retorted, defiantly
brandishing a half-empty glass of wine in front of Moran's sober face.
"Quite easily," he
responded. "One of the most
important aspects of evolutionary progress in the world is to make life easier
for people, to save them unnecessary struggle and labour. We have lifts to save people the
inconvenience of climbing umpteen flights of stairs in tall buildings. We have buses and taxis to save them the
inconvenience of having to walk, assuming it were possible, from one part of
town to another. We have washing
machines to save them the inconvenience of washing clothes by hand. And so on.
As life progresses, so the hardships are minimized and the pleasures
maximized. Now literature, believe it or
not, is no exception to this general rule, since progress entails, amongst
other things, that writing should become less of a struggle or hardship for the
modern author than it was for his literary forebears. Instead of keeping him the slave of
grammatical convention and syntactic elaboration, spontaneity of approach frees
the writer (sic.) - for he is more often than not a key-punching utilizer of typewriters and/or word processors these days -
from such slavery, and ensures that his vocation won't prove unduly difficult,
by which I primarily mean drudge-ridden and unnecessarily complex. The higher the type of writing, the freer
from literary hardship the writer will be.
For he, too, must profit from the benefits of
evolutionary progress in a world tending away from hardship towards greater
degrees of ease and comfort. To boast of
one's literary struggles is simply to affirm one's comparatively inferior
status as a literary masochist - a kind of social dinosaur who probably prefers
to write than to type and/or key-in, in any case."
Deirdre felt personally offended by this
allusion to herself. But the mentally
numbing effects of all the wine she had imbibed, during the trying course of
events that evening, precluded her from adequately
expressing her offence. Instead she
meekly shrugged her shoulders and said: "You may be right, though maybe
that's only because I'm incorrigibly masochistic." For a moment he almost felt sorry for her, so
downcast did she look. But he was also
amused at her expense and couldn't help revealing some of this amusement to
her. Again she shrugged her shoulders,
and he noticed that they were freckled.
"Tell me," she resumed, "would you consider an artist who
was ahead of his time superior to one who reflected it?"
Moran hadn't expected such a ponderous
question and gently frowned, drawing himself a pace away from her, as though to
give himself room in which to think.
Finally he replied: "No, I believe an artist should reflect his
time and thus remain intelligible to it.
Otherwise he runs the risk of becoming completely ostracized and
regarded as a crank. One should, I
think, take account of what has immediately preceded one in one's particular
domain of creative endeavour and then proceed to carry on from there, so that a
continuity of progress is maintained. Of
course, one won't necessarily get to that level overnight. But once one has got to it,
then one is on the way to becoming a master and should be able to extend
literary progress quite some way beyond the heights attained by one's immediate
predecessors or, at any rate, by those authors whose works especially appealed
to one and had some influence on one's own literary development."
"And who would they be in your
case?" Deirdre asked, focusing rather larger than usual eyes on her
fellow-writer.
"Principally those authors, like Henry
Miller, Hermann Hesse, Aldous
Huxley, and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose works generally correspond to the kind of religio-philosophical integrity sympathetic to my own
bent," Moran replied.
"Artists, as you know, come in various categories, so one can't be
influenced by them all. One simply
carries on from where certain others left off, along a path congenial to one's
temperamental bias. I've gone some way
beyond those artists now, including Huxley, who was the most influential on my
own literary development. Even his late
work is something I'm obliged to look down on from a greater height."
"And what about James Joyce - do you
look down on his late work, too?" Deirdre wanted to know, almost
petulantly.
"Yes, but for a different
reason," Moran confessed, frowning.
"Less because I've gone beyond it than because his work pertains to
a category of writing that I've always spurned as being inferior to what
reflects a religio-philosophical bent. Joyce wasn't an essential writer but an
apparent one. He was more of a pure
artist than, say, Huxley, and consequently he corresponds to the traditional category
of novelist in a way which Huxley rarely if ever did. He may have taken the development of that
kind of writing further than any of his contemporaries. But he remained, till the end, an artist in
the traditional, i.e. apparent, sense, and therefore corresponded to a literary
social realist rather than to a transcendentalist. Incidentally, one of Roland Barthe's best essays concerns a distinction between
'authors' and 'writers', which may loosely be interpreted as applying to
artists and philosophers respectively.
Our age, contends Barthes, is transitional
between 'authors' and 'writers', being insufficiently advanced, as yet, to be
content with only the latter. And I have
to agree with him. The traditional type
of writer, i.e. 'author', finds broad support among the semi-literate masses
and various sections of the political establishment, who prefer his crude
fictions to the more subtle truths of the revolutionary author, i.e. 'writer'
in Barthe's sense of the word. Consequently the latter isn't generally
enabled to support himself, on account of the
democratic limitations of the age, and so he's also obliged, as a rule, to be
an 'author'. Yet a time must come when
only 'writers' will exist, and these men won't stem from Joyce, nor from his latter-day
descendants, but from the religio-philosophical
categories of 'author/writer' like Miller, Hesse,
Huxley, Sartre, and me. It won't be
necessary for the future 'writer' to also be an 'author', nor, alternatively, a
professor, like Barthes, since the public will
respond to his writings with sufficient enthusiasm to enable him to dedicate
himself more exclusively to them. Thus,
to return to the traditional dichotomy between artist and philosopher, one
might say that literary evolution will culminate in the philosopher, the
highest type of writer, whose work will be the most essential, and hence
truth-orientated. Exactly when that
future epoch will come, I don't pretend to know. But at least we're creeping towards it. Or, at any rate, some of us are!"
Deirdre Crowe blushed in self-deprecatory
acknowledgement of the fact that she wasn't among the 'some' to which Moran was
evidently alluding, and vaguely agreed with a concessionary grunt. "Yet, presumably, one shouldn't jump the
gun, as it were, but take the progress of higher literature in its rightful
stride?" she remarked.
"Correct," he agreed,
smiling. "Even if one can
anticipate what the highest stage of literary development will be, as I believe
I for one can. For to jump the gun, as
you crudely put it, would be to sever connections with the age and place one's
work way beyond public reach.
Unfortunately that wouldn't guarantee one an income, even if, by any
chance, one could find a publisher for one's precociously futuristic work. No, if we're to end with a multilingual
abstraction in collectivistic terms, we must first of all pass through the
intermediate stages, including the impressionist/expressionist stage at which
the bulk of my work is currently to be found, in conformity with the continuity
of literary progress. Even my work, with
its fairly spontaneous impressionistic technique placed at the service of an
essential content, is too radical for most people, a majority of whom are
perfectly content to wade through the illusory fictions of the latest adventure
story, thriller, or romance ... in thrall to a sort of literary
philistinism. However, that is only to
be expected. For while the higher writer
may be of his time in relation to his professional forebears and
contemporaries, he will always be a little ahead of the general public. If this were not so, he wouldn't be producing
genuine literature."
"But presumably only what I produce,
is that it?" Deirdre objected.
Moran was about to say 'Yes' when he
decided it would be more tactful simply to pour some more wine into her glass,
since it had once again become empty.
She might not be the best of writers, but she didn't have a bad figure,
all things considered, and he was beginning to wonder whether a night spent in
bed with her wouldn't prove more fruitful than an evening spent discussing
literature, freckles or no freckles? If
he couldn't teach her to improve her literary style, he might at least be able
to learn a thing or two from her body which could be used to metaphysical
advantage in some future projects. Yes,
indeed he might!
WISDOM
I have no
more intentions of writing a short story than André Breton would of reading
one. I don't write short stories,
monsieur, but short prose, which is to say, a kind of literary philosophy. Yes, I'm probably the inventor, as it were,
of this genre, though I don't ordinarily boast of the fact! What fusion music is to the modern composer
of electric music, literary philosophy or, alternatively, philosophical
literature is to me. You might say that
I'm an 'author' and a 'writer' combined, speaking in Barthian
terms, and that I vary the degree the one preponderates over the other from
work to work, depending on the context and in the interests of literary
variety.
Yes, quite so, signor! Each short-prose piece is distinct from the
others and could well be compared, as you suggest, with each of the separate
tracks on a modern jazz or fusion album.
For a collection of short prose is essentially akin to such an album
because all of its contents are distinct, complete in themselves, and
constructed along individual lines, just as each track of a jazz album is
composed in a different fashion, with a specific tempo, texture, form,
atmosphere, pitch, and so on. A novel,
on the other hand, being an integral whole, is akin to a symphony. For each chapter relates to the others, just
as each movement in a symphony relates to the others in an overall symphonic
integrity. Yes, precisely! But the days of the symphony are numbered,
and so, too, are the days of the novel.
The future will belong to philosophical literature, which may include
something akin to a novel or, rather, novella in its overall framework, but
will never be subordinate to it. The
production of separate novels will be superseded by collectivized formats, with
or without short prose. No-one will ever
think of writing a short story, at any rate, since such a thing would be
thoroughly anachronistic - as, indeed, it appears to be to the more advanced
literary minds of today! But short prose,
however, is much more respectable, being the modern equivalent, if you like, of
a short story.
Ah, you've read my poetry, monsieur! I'm glad you liked it. Not everyone does, least of all those who
respect the poetic tradition. To them,
on the contrary, Brian Flynn suggests anarchy and a total absence of
craft. But, permit me to say, they're
really quite mistaken. For Flynn knows
what he's doing all right, of that you can rest assured! Oui, absolument. And my poetry is still developing; it hasn't
yet reached a climax, by any means! With
each fresh batch of poems I become increasingly conscious of what needs to be
done to improve the quality of my verse.
I don't tamper with the poems just written but reserve improvements for
the next batch, perhaps three or four months later. In this way I continue to progress, to
progress, it could be said, towards the ultimate poetry. For such poetry would be a poetry in which
appearance had been reduced to a minimum and essence, by contrast, expanded to
a maximum!
No, I don't say, signor, that the
individual poem would have to be very short.
For that would preclude the maximization of essence. Simply that it would have to be free from enslavement
to those traditional ingredients of the poetic craft which kow-tow to
appearance. Ingredients like rhyme,
metre, assonance, alliteration, stanza divisions, punctuation, and so on. The higher poetry says the highest and most
important things, which of course pertain to the spiritual life, but it says
them in a way which avoids drawing undue attention to the technical side of
poetry, and largely because that side has been reduced to the minimum verbal
level necessary to conveying one's thoughts.
Bien sur, monsieur! No
stanza divisions, since they would appeal to the eye as apparent
distractions. No rhymes, for they
likewise distract from essence. No
sequential repetition or staging of phrases, since any kind of word pattern
repeated two or more times suggests a concession to appearances. No regular metre, since that is ever a
distraction from the content of a poem.
No punctuation, for commas, full-stops, semi-colons, colons, etc.,
appeal to the eye more than to the intellect.
Yes, you're in the picture now, so I
needn't continue. Danke shön. An intelligent young lady like you, Fraulein Hochmeister, will always be in tune with the Zeitgeist. You understand my intentions well enough to
be a poet yourself - as do you Monsieur Paume, mon vieux
ami. Yes,
though I wager that Signor Cranetto is not so
ill-equipped to comprehend the logic of my poetic endeavour as he so modestly
pretends! Ah, no, you're no philistine,
signor, but an accomplished pittore whose most
sought-after works make very few concessions to appearances.... But I
digress! You asked me, fraulein, whether one should jump the gun, as it were, and
proceed to the highest, most essential poetry in order to be ahead of one's
fellows. But that would be a mistake
quite unworthy of one's poetic integrity.
Just as it would be a mistake for anyone to attempt to rise to my level
whose inner development didn't warrant it. One must be true to oneself, the extent of
one's spiritual development, and thus produce work which reflects that fact as
accurately as possible. A man who
abandons rhyme, metre, stanzas, punctuation, et cetera, just because he sees
that I have or has read about my endeavour somewhere ... is being untrue to
himself, and what he produces, in consequence, won't be authentic poetry but a
sham which someone like myself could easily see through, inasmuch as the level
of thought expressed in the poems would be incompatible with the technique
employed in its expression. Sham poets,
dear fraulein, are no less plentiful than sham
painters, composers, and sculptors, and should, if possible, be avoided! Only a certain level of thought will justify
a certain corresponding technique, and to get to that level of thought, which
we're contending to be a high one, may take years, if not decades.
Non, it's
not just a question of age, monsieur, but of lifestyle as well. For only a consistently ascetic lifestyle
will permit the emergence of a consistently high level of spiritual
thought. The sensualist is doomed to
write about his sensuality, and thus remain chained to a comparatively inferior
level of poetic endeavour. The romantic
poet is ever inferior to the religious one, his subject-matter leaving room for
much improvement. As is invariably the
case, monsieur, the lifestyle of the individual conditions the quality of the
poet's work! One cannot live like a
sinner and write like a saint, no matter what certain superficial poets may
like to imagine in the throes, presumably, of some liberal delusion. And neither can one live like a poet. For a poet is only such when actively engaged
in the poetic craft, not when wiping his arse or, if you'll permit me an
additional vulgarism, screwing his mistress!
Ah! I thought that would make you blush, fraulein, since the presence of three men at table is a
sufficient pretext for feminine modesty.... No, one cannot make love like a
poet. For a poet has
no more to do with making love than has a doctor or an engineer. A poet has to do with writing and reciting
poems, that's all! But a collectivist
must be more than just a poet; he must also be a writer of short prose, an
aphorist, and a few other things besides, since only by being the most
comprehensive of writers ... can he transcend the separate categories of
traditional genres, and thereby reflect a convergence to omega, so to speak, on
the level of literary progress.
Yes, I'll admit that sounds rather
esoteric, signor. Nonetheless, one must
grasp the essence of evolutionary progress if one is to understand exactly why
literature should develop in this more comprehensive way. We're not in the world simply to enjoy
ourselves, you know, but to evolve towards a condition of transcendent spirit
in the future Beyond, a condition which may well take centuries to bring
about. Only shallow-pates imagine that
life should be lived for its own sake, as though life were inherently something
good from which a steady quota of enjoyment could be obtained! There is enjoyment to be derived from it,
I'll admit. Yet such enjoyment shouldn't
be considered as an end-in-itself but, rather, as the by-product of one's daily
struggles with the world. Anyone who
enjoys the world shows himself to be lacking in spiritual insight, since it's
precisely the world that needs to be overcome ... if we're ever to get our
species, or what may emerge from it, firmly on the road to Heaven.
Ah, you accuse me of moralizing,
monsieur! But I assure you it's only
through moralizing that one can keep the world in perspective, and accordingly
direct one's steps along truly progressive lines. Anyone who doesn't moralize sooner or later
stumbles into reaction and becomes a victim or accomplice of the world. But the wise man desires to overcome the
world, not be overcome by it. Only
through his efforts can mankind go forward.
And if his efforts lead to the redemption of literature along collective
or essential lines, then good for him!
For by making literature more moral, he helps the people to become more
moral as well. Just as his lifestyle
conditions the quality of his work, so the quality of his work partly
conditions the people's lifestyle.
Ah, I see you all agree, even you Fraulein Hochmeister, who is too good-looking to be highly
moral. Your wisdom consists less in
striving to emulate the wisdom of the great philosophers ... than in reducing
the extent of your folly. Mine consists,
on the contrary, in expanding my literary horizon towards the Infinite!
A PUBLIC WRITER
There are
writers who keep most of their thoughts and beliefs to themselves, but Sean
Costello was never one of them. He was
much the most outspoken writer of his generation, having the courage to commit
most of himself to paper regardless of what other
people would think of him. He thus
exposed his inner life to public scrutiny and allowed people to learn about his
social history. This he considered a
duty of the modern writer. For to
withhold oneself from the reader was bourgeois, to be in favour of private
thoughts, and, somehow, private thoughts and a refusal to reveal one's past
were incompatible, in Costello's eyes, with literary progress!
"The writer who keeps most of his self
to himself is on the wrong side of history," he once said, and few
left-wing people would disagree with him there!
Another writer, belonging to an older generation, had said: "The higher
the artist ... the more distance he will put between himself and his
work." This meant that the pure or
great writer would never put himself into his work but would stand back from
it, letting it speak on its own fictitious or illusory terms. Sean Costello, however, absolutely rejected
this objective viewpoint, deeming it only relevant to a bourgeois stage of
literary evolution. The man who hid
behind his work, in his opinion, was not on the right side of history but an
enemy of progress. T.S. Eliot may have
been such a man, but, in Costello's estimation, Henry Miller certainly
wasn't. For Miller had exposed his inner
life and social past to the public eye with a consistency and depth surpassing
any of his contemporaries, thereby proving that he was in favour of making the
private self public.
Sartre, too, was in favour of making all
things public or, at any rate, such things as would prove of interest to
others, and can therefore be identified, in large measure, with his work. "When the work and the man are the
same," Costello had written, "one is in the highest domain of
literature - the socialist literature of the age of the public spirit."
Costello would never have agreed with that
man who criticized a conversational passage in one of D.H. Lawrence's novels
for being implausible, since according to him - a fellow writer - no two people
would ever have spoken to each other in such fashion in reality. No, the little Irishman particularly revelled
in passages, conversational or otherwise, that seemed implausible from a
naturalistic or a realistic standpoint.
"It's not our duty, as modern artists, to mirror the world around
us in the interests of bourgeois realism," he said to me one day,
"but to create a higher, artificial level of thought which transcends the
philistine dictates of the natural-world-order." By this he meant that the modern writer
should aim to contrive a supernatural level of conversation rather than remain
enslaved to conversational levels which could well take place in reality, and
on the lowest and most commercially-oriented levels of reality to boot, as
though between two stockbrokers or estate agents! The fact that no two people would have spoken
to each other in quite the way the characters did, in the novel the bourgeois
writer chose to criticize, was a credit, in Costello's opinion, to D.H.
Lawrence's style of writing, since the primary duty of all higher art was to
transcend nature, not remain its philistine victim in wilful objectivity!
Yes, I agree with Costello, and so, too,
does my wife, Jayshree, who reminded me, the other
day, of that character in Costello's first novel, 'Starbreak',
who lectures to a gathering of students with a saucepan tied to his head - much
as
Take, for example, this descriptive passage
from his second novel: "She stood before me dressed in her most artificial
clothing, her high heels reflecting the glare of the lighting apparatus
overhead. I asked her to raise her
miniskirt in order to expose her suspenders, and this she duly did, holding a
fraction of its nylon material between the forefinger and thumb of each
hand. Then I knelt down before her and
smacked a gentle kiss on the front of her pale pink panties, whose nylon
cloaked a dark mound of pubic hair beneath."
This brief extract reveals the artificial
nature of the sexual foreplay which takes place between the novel's male
protagonist and his sexual antagonist.
For rather than bestowing a kiss upon the young woman's flesh, as most
ordinary real-life men would probably have done in the circumstances, our
literary lover selects a part of her panties upon which to bestow one. Later on, as the foreplay is superseded by
the main course, as it were, of the protagonist's loving, we find this even
more artificial passage: "I was now squatting between her legs and able to
apply a pair of scissors to the nylon material of her panties, while she
continued to hold her miniskirt up as before.
In this way I slowly cut open her panties along the groove of her sex,
exposing, in the process, her now-naked treasure to my inquisitive eyes. After I had looked at it and sniffed the
musky aroma which emanated from the inviting gap between her legs, I delved
into my jacket pocket for the vibrator I had bought her as a special birthday
present and which I knew she would appreciate.
Turning it on, I gently placed its buzzing tip between the eager lips of
her labial crack and steadied myself for the final push. This came when I thrust the delightful
substitute up into her soft flesh, causing her to giggle aloud and squirm
slightly in the process. I placed a
finger against its base and waited patiently for it to do my pleasure-arousing
job."
Such a passage, it need hardly be
emphasized, could only have been written by a man whose mind scorned
naturalistic criteria in the interests of a superior literature. Only in adherence to writings of this kind
... does the artist redeem himself as a spiritual leader. The more he extends the domain of creative
freedom over natural determinism, the greater he becomes. Sean Costello was undoubtedly one of the
greatest!
But there was another side to his writings
which should not be forgotten in any attempt to evaluate his status, and we may
describe it, in Barthe's famous distinction, as the
'writer' as opposed to 'author' side. In
other words, the philosopher in him could not be ignored in deference to the
artist, and it was as a philosopher, or 'writer', that he most liked to be
known. "I often feel that
literature, considered in any strictly fictional sense, is mostly a waste of
time and also, from the publisher's viewpoint, a waste of money. The amount of time and money wasted on the
production of inconsequential novels ... would stagger anyone foolish enough to
make an attempt at ascertaining the sum total!
In an age beset by the twin evils of inflation and recession, one ought
only to offer for publication those works which are dedicated to Truth. All others are comparatively frivolous."
There are times, certainly, when one can
sympathize with the sentiments expressed in that utterance, but I rather doubt
that Costello really meant what he said.
After all, he knew the value of literature, considered from an
artificial angle, as well as anyone, even though he preferred the
responsibilities of a truthful 'writer' to those of a fictional 'author'. His philosophical writings, however, are
easily as voluminous (though this is hardly the most apt choice of
terminology!) as his literary ones, and will doubtless rank higher in the
estimation of posterity. Like Huxley and
a number of other twentieth-century 'authors/writers', he took greater pride in
the philosophical side of his work, and always put more effort into writings
intended to enlighten than into those intended, in part at any rate, merely to
entertain. But he was never a bourgeois
writer, like Huxley, and made a point of emphasizing his commitment to abstract
generalities over concrete particularities.
He wasn't interested, like
UNDERSTANDING SEX
"Adults
are never strictly asexual," Andrew Foley was saying to a gathering of
friends in the newly-furnished sitting-room of his three-roomed flat. "They are either positive or negative,
depending on their sex. Only children
and the very old could be described as asexual - the former because they
haven't yet come-of-age, the latter because they've gone way past it."
Muffled laughter broke from the throats of
some of his guests, and someone said: "Post-sexual would be a better
definition of the aged!"
On a more serious note I volunteered the
suggestion that children were neutron equivalents, and this brought raised
brows from a number of quarters.
"Ah, so you're back to your subatomic
theories again, Gerald!" observed the host, who then asked me to explain,
for the benefit of those who hadn't heard such theories before, how they
applied to the sexes.
"Traditionally, women have usually
functioned as proton equivalents and men, by contrast, as bound-electron
equivalents, with children coming in-between as neuters, or neutron
equivalents," I obligingly affirmed, for the benefit of all but a few of
the gathering. "But nowadays the
atomic integrity of the traditional family unit is being superseded by the
elevation of women to quasi-electron equivalents and the elevation or, rather,
transformation of men into free-electron equivalents, with children still
remaining neutral. Thus marriage is on
the way out because it conforms to an atomic age rather than to an incipiently
post-atomic one."
"How very interesting!" exclaimed
a white-haired gentleman of elderly years, who prompted a grudging
acknowledgement of the probable veracity of my theory from a couple of females
seated close-by.
"A free-electron equivalent is more likely to be a man for the men
than one for the women, is that it?" he conjectured on a mischievous note.
"Not necessarily," I hastened to
assure him, while simultaneously casting a slightly embarrassed glance in the
direction of my girlfriend, who sat to my left.
"He will simply be a man who isn't tied down by marriage to any
particular woman. But to the extent that
a woman functions as a quasi-electron equivalent, she is effectively a superman
and therefore not someone to discriminate against as a woman. A quasi-electron equivalent and a
free-electron equivalent don't form an atomic integrity, and unless such an integrity is formed,
there can be no justification for marriage."
"Here, here!" shouted a young
woman farther to my left, whose overall appearance suggested that she
habitually thought of herself in superhuman terms. Especially notable, in this respect, were her
short hair, absence of make-up, T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. She was also wearing steel-rimmed spectacles.
"Well," said Foley, following a
brief pause in the conversation during which Gerald Riley's standard theory of
protons and electrons was juggled about in more than a few minds, most of whom
were thoroughly perplexed by it and somewhat sceptical if not downright
dismissive, "I'm married, so I must be a bound-electron equivalent and my
wife, by contrast, a proton equivalent."
Doris Foley, true to her station of affable
hostess and compliant wife, nodded her head without, however, showing any
facial signs of approval. Indeed, her
face was virtually impassive.
Nevertheless she did ask: "And what would you describe yourself as,
Gerald?"
"Undoubtedly a free-electron
equivalent, albeit one more heterosexual than homosexual," I assured her,
before casting another glance at my girlfriend, as though for confirmation.
"Perhaps it would be more accurate to
describe yourself as quasi-homosexual," the young woman in steel-rimmed
spectacles suggested. "You're not
married to Deborah for the simple reason that, like me, she's a quasi-electron equivalent,
otherwise known as a liberated female, whose standing not only precludes the
formation of a genuine atomic integrity between you, but simultaneously
prevents your relationship from being genuinely heterosexual. Were she a woman, in the traditional sense,
then things would of course be different.
But Deborah is effectively a superman, so your relationship is, I
repeat, quasi-homosexual."
There were titters of admiring laughter
from all sections of Foley's rather crowded sitting-room, and the white-haired
gentleman, quick to rise to the occasion, said: "My goodness, girl, what
hair-splitting logic!"
"Or side-splitting
nonsense!" Foley opined, eyeing its alleged instigator with mock
reproof. "So it transpires that
you, Gerald, are quasi-homosexual because your girlfriend is effectively a
superman."
"Thanks for the honour!" I
jokingly responded, and noticed that Deborah was blushing madly behind her
makeshift fan - a folded newspaper.
Despite her good intentions, she could never get used to the idea of
being regarded in such a post-atomic light.
In every liberated female there existed an old-fashioned streak of basic
femininity. Would they ever succeed in
eradicating it, I wondered, or would we, their spiritual superiors? Superior in degree of superhumanity,
it may be, but unable or disinclined to discriminate against them as women.
A sudden eruption of ostentatious
flatulence from the white-haired old gentleman brought a moment's almost
surrealistic reprieve from the sententious austerity of the debate, but it was
soon rejoined again when Foley, taking-up the distinction of positive and
negative sexual characteristics once more, asseverated that, traditionally,
women were the negative and men the positive sex. "And so far as I'm aware, that's generally
still the case today," he concluded.
"Bullshit!" I countered. "For these days the transformation of
women into supermen is giving rise to a situation where they're becoming less
negative and correspondingly more positive in their relations to sex. Which means they're
becoming more like men - passive rather than active."
Andrew Foley was clearly not impressed,
since he immediately retaliated with: "D'you mean to tell me that you equate positivity
with passivity and negativity with activity?"
"Most assuredly, because that is
really closer to the truth," I replied.
"Men are positive to the extent that they're spiritual, women
negative to the extent that they're sensual, and nowadays women are becoming
more spiritual and less sensual. Thus
they aren't as sensuously active as formerly, though that applies more to the
strategies of seduction than to their actual vaginal contribution to
coitus. After all, the vagina's a pretty
active thing when a man has part of himself inside it, and the clitoris has rarely
been outplayed, as it were, by the penis.
Au contraire!"
There were various expressions of amusement
at large in the air no sooner than I had said this, and although one or two of
the guests couldn't prevent themselves reacting with disapproving looks, the
general consensus of opinion was nevertheless such as to suggest an affirmation
of my viewpoint. The mannish young woman
in steel-rimmed spectacles seemed particularly impressed by it, and accordingly
voiced the opinion that quasi-electron equivalents were less inclined to flirt
with men than their proton precursors, being more inclined, by contrast, to
improve their commitment to cultural or intellectual affairs.
"Yes, that would generally appear to
be the case," I confirmed, not exactly to the pleasure of my host and
hostess, who were each showing signs of unease - the former by turning pale,
the latter by turning red.
"Would you not then say that coitus
involved the application of the positive male principle to the negative female
one?" Foley somewhat ironically inquired of me.
"No, I wouldn't," came my
confident response. "For coitus
only takes place by dint of the man's lowering himself to the negative
principle and thereby drawing on the feminine, active side of his atomic
constitution. Love-making is the result
of two types of negative functioning, the woman's and the man's, and is only
possible to the extent that men are capable of behaving negatively. Should the positive and truly spiritual side
of a man's constitution develop to any significant extent, he'll be much less
inclined to have sex with a woman. In
fact, the highest, most spiritual men have usually been the ones whose
intellectual or cultural commitments kept them celibate. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche afford us two
notable examples."
"How extraordinary!" exclaimed
the white-haired old fart, who had sufficiently recovered from his bout of
flatulence to be capable of playing an active role in the discussion again. "I had
always imagined that the real philosophers were great lovers, like Bertrand
Russell or Voltaire! Just shows how
mistaken one can be!"
Not everyone was as honest as him, but no
overt dissent was expressed, not even by Andrew Foley, who had better reasons
than most to be dissentient! However,
his wife, having recovered from her embarrassment, was now eyeing me
suspiciously. What could she be
thinking, I wondered?
SPACE PHILOSOPHY
The Earth
looked like a cannonball to Captain Anderson as he eyed it from the
vantage-point of his spacecraft, several thousand miles into space. He had heard the usual clichés about
footballs and baseballs, but to him the analogy with a cannonball, despite its
anachronistic nature, appeared more appropriate. He cast a glance over his right shoulder at
Major Jim Green, who at that moment was staring down at the central control
panel, and said: "You know, every time I take a good look through that
porthole, I get kinda mystical about things down
there, including the Earth. It seems odd
that most people should be leading fairly humdrum lives on that planet of
ours."
Major Green gently nodded and then briefly
glanced through the same porthole, behind which the Earth lay static and
diminutive, no bigger than an average football.
"The oddest thing for me is that people should be living there at
all!" he exclaimed on a softly humorous note.
Colonel Timothy Boyd, the third astronaut
on board Craft AV6, volunteered the opinion that nothing was odder than space
flight, especially with two nuts aboard.
"You'll be saying that Earth looks like a goddamm
cannonball next!" he snapped at
"You've seized on that analogy more
from the planet's size at this distance than from its overall appearance,"
Major Green conjectured.
"Could be," admitted Captain
Anderson, who fell to speculating again.
To think that people should be standing on their feet on opposite sides
of the Earth, never doubting they were the right way up! Given the planet's circularity, you'd think
those underneath would fall into space, did you not also know that the Earth
rotated so rapidly on its axis ... as to preclude anyone's being upside down
long enough for that to happen. Then he
heard Colonel Boyd saying, as though to himself: "It ain't
usually the mystical types who get sent up here, but more goddamm
down-to-earth guys!"
"That's right," Major Green
seconded. "Guys who want a
spiritual trip through space can't be trusted to take the material one. My guess is that the material trip is a prelude
to the spiritual one, seeing as the latter can't be made just yet."
Colonel Boyd guffawed dismissively, but
Captain Anderson protested that his mystical feelings were fundamentally of a
materialist order and simply pertained to the so-called heavenly bodies, which
seemed to function like clockwork.
"After all, the Earth is basically in the position of an electron
circling the proton nucleus at the heart of the Solar System," he went on,
"and the resulting pattern conforms to an atomic integrity. You can't expect the planets to break loose
from their solar moorings, so to speak, and soar towards the heavenly Beyond,
like pure spirit. They're stuck with
their proton control for as long as it exists."
"Unlike ourselves, whose spacecraft is
free to voyage in any given direction as far as its fuel tanks will allow,
before it begins to drift," Colonel Boyd postulated.
"And yet, you can't voyage to the
Infinite in a spacecraft," Major Green objected, showing no fear of his
superior officer. "The spiritual
journey and the material one are entirely different. Besides, space is finite, so you'd be bound
to return to your starting-point eventually."
"I've always found that difficult to
believe, since space is spatial and can't have a beginning or an end,"
Captain Anderson demurred. "Only
the mind is finite, whereas space goes on and on forever, as you can see."
Colonel Boyd winced in response to the
apparent lack of Einsteinian perspective in his
junior officer. In all probability space
was infinite, but in an age when man's mind was expanding towards the Infinite,
it didn't do to regard space in a similar light. "What you've always overlooked,"
the Colonel said, "is the fact that space is curved. For once you've grasped that fact, you'll understand why a body will return to its
original starting-point if it persists long enough in a uniform
direction."
Major Green nodded his confirmation. "A serious lapse of scientific
subjectivity in relation to the higher subjectivity of the superconscious
mind!" he solemnly averred for the benefit of his junior colleague. "You shouldn't allow yourself to be
influenced by those anachronistic quasi-Newtonian notions that were officially
discountenanced some decades ago. You'll
be telling us, before long, that not curved space but goddammed
force and mass keep the planets in rotation around the Sun!"
Captain Anderson demurred with, for the
environment, a quite vigorous rejection of that assumption. "I shall do absolutely no such
thing!" he assured the major. "A post-atomic age demands a post-atomic
world view. A Newtonian/Einsteinian compromise would simply be out of the
question."
"Glad to hear you say so,"
Colonel Boyd remarked in a conciliatory tone-of-voice. "We don't want to look at the planets
too objectively these days.... By the way, did you ever read Locklin's account of antithetical equivalents?"
"Unfortunately not," Captain
Anderson replied, with a slightly guilty look on his face.
"Well, I did," Major Green
admitted, smiling.
"Really?" the colonel
responded. "Well, there were one or
two antithetical equivalents that Locklin didn't
think of," he proudly informed them, "and you'll never guess
what." He paused to allow his
second-in-command to ponder the matter a moment but, since Major Green made no
comment, continued by saying: "The first one concerns the antithesis
between moons and satellites, that is, between natural satellites and
artificial, or man-made, ones - the latter functioning on an entirely different
plane, superior in every respect, to the former. And the second one, believe it or not,
concerns the antithesis between shooting stars and spacecraft or, as they used
to be called, rockets. This second antithesis
directly concerns us; for whereas shooting stars shoot naturally through space,
with their solar propulsion and flying tail, we, their antithetical
equivalents, shoot through it artificially, driven-on by the engines of our
craft, which leave a comet-like streak in their goddammed
wake. Should either of you spot a
shooting star today, you'll be looking at our near-absolute antithesis, which
could be defined as a natural rocket."
"Remarkable!" Major Green
exclaimed. "You must write about
that when we get back to base."
"And thereby expand our knowledge of
antithetical equivalents," Captain Anderson added half-jokingly. "Say, Locklin
didn't write anything about British astronauts, did he?"
Colonel Boyd guffawed and resolutely shook
his head. "The day the goddamm Brits get into space will be the day I quit!"
he cried, and, for once, both of his colleagues were inclined to believe him.
UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
"A
short story shouldn't have too many characters in it," Dr. Murray declared
for the benefit of his two prettiest students - Linda Bell and Pauline Dyer,
who were seated opposite him at the table nearest to the door in what was, by
any standards, a busy lunch-time restaurant.
"Though it should have more characters than a
dialogue and less than a novel.
What particularly justifies a work the length of a novel is the fact that
the author intends to introduce more characters to us than he'd be able to do
in a short story. To write a novel with
as few as two or three characters, on the other hand, would be no less absurd
than to write a short story with ten or more!
One would be writing a novel as though it were a dialogue or a short
story, and that can only be mistaken.
Unless one knows why one is writing a novel, one has absolutely no
business writing it!"
Dr. Murray said this with such force of
conviction, such self-righteous indignation, that both his students blushed and
started back from the table slightly. It
was as though they were personally being scolded by the pedagogue for having
infringed the rules of literature in the above-mentioned way, even though
neither of them had so much as contemplated doing any such thing before.
"You'd therefore describe a novel with
only a few characters as bogus?" Linda tentatively ventured of her tutor,
once she had recovered from her momentary discomfort.
"Oh, yes!" he confirmed. "You can't write a novel like a
monologue or a dialogue, you know. A
dialogue's a dialogue."
"Emphatically!"
Pauline agreed with an emphatic nod of her dark-haired head, which contrasted
sharply with her fellow-student's very blonde one. She was especially keen to agree with him,
since he was both hale and handsome.
Quite the most handsome man on the university staff, she thought. Although, when one really came to think of
it, there weren't that many there who could be described as even moderately handsome. Admittedly, a few of them just might have
been passably handsome once. But, if so,
they were by now long past recognition as such!
"But can't literature kind of converge
to a literary Omega Point on the basis of a one-character novel?" queried
Linda, who had no personal designs on the man herself.
"No!" came his quick
response. "One character would not
signify progress over ten or twelve, but simply testify to the degeneration of
literature to a level way beneath the accepted norm! A novelist who utilized just one character
would be no novelist at all, in my opinion, but a lazy or degenerate person
given to writing monologues. Now a
monologue can of course be extended to virtually any length, but that won't
make it a novel!"
Linda Bell felt relatively satisfied by
this line of argument and decided against challenging it. Her fledgling novel had five characters at
present, so it could hardly be regarded in a bogus or absurd light on that
account. Should a few more characters be
added before the end, Dr. Murray would doubtless find her work even more
meritorious than it was already. Yet
there existed a limit as to how many characters one could reasonably employ in
a short novel, since too many would be even worse than too few. She frowned to herself and stared ruefully at
the table.
Meanwhile, Pauline Dyer was asking her
tutor whether he thought there was any real possibility of literature being
created, in the future, through Esperanto, or some such international
language. When, to her surprise, he
wanted to know why she should ask him this, she replied: "Well, I had read
somewhere that literature was destined to become more international in
character, and just wondered whether the eventual use of a completely new,
universal language would not be preferable to the simultaneous use, in one
work, of various languages, as in James Joyce and Ezra Pound. After all, few people can understand more
than three or four languages at the best of times, whereas a fresh language,
understood the world over, would surely make for universal acceptance?"
"That's an interesting point!"
Dr. Murray commented. "For all I
know, you may well be on to something there, since the use of various
languages, as with the authors to whom you allude, could well be a stage on the
road to a completely new language. If
so, then we needn't expect any future literature to be created on multi-lingual
terms but, rather, on terms more akin to Esperanto. Yet one ought also to remember that
literature is destined to become completely abstract, so that intelligibility
won't necessarily be a prerequisite for its appreciation."
Miss Dyer smiled ironically and confessed
that she couldn't envisage herself reading a literature that made no sense.
"Neither can I
actually," Dr. Murray admitted, smiling.
"Though that's no reason for us to suppose people in the future
will share our limitations. On the
contrary, they'd probably be unable to envisage themselves reading a literature
that made sense, in that it would run contrary to their more mature post-atomic
bias, a bias aligned with free-electron criteria in opposition to all forms and
degrees of proton determinism.
Literature, you see, can only change and, hopefully, for the better. Naturally, it is perfectly logical that each
age should prefer its own level or stage of creativity to any other, since
that's usually what is most intelligible at the time."
Linda
"That's really a distinction between
the tragic and the trivial planes, isn't it?" interposed Pauline, who
found herself sliding towards Koestlerian
logic.
"I guess so," Linda conceded,
before turning back towards their tutor for an answer.
"Yes, well, I prefer the serious to
the comic myself," he replied, blushing slightly in the process,
"because, to my mind, it's an altogether superior type of literature. In the Koestlerian
distinction between the 'Ha-ha' - the 'A-ha!' - and the 'Ah ...'
reactions, the humorous novel appertains more to the first than to the third
category, and is accordingly a self-assertive rather than a self-transcending
kind of literature. It trivializes and is
therefore of diabolical orientation.
Huxley's earliest novels were more humorous than serious in content, and
so conformed to the trivial plane in fidelity to a variety of self-assertive
tendencies. As he matured as both a man
and an artist, so Huxley became more moral-minded, producing a number of novels
which approximate to the tragic plane in their self-transcending
qualities. If I remember correctly, his
final novel,
Of the two students, only Linda Bell had
read the novel in question, and she confirmed the truth of what Dr. Murray was
saying with a gentle nod. Slightly
piqued, however, by what she took to be an allusion to youthful immaturity, she
said: "Are we students to assume that we'd be incapable of similarly
pursuing a more moral-minded stance ourselves?"
The question almost confounded her lecturer
who, taken by surprise, assumed a mildly ingratiating tone in
self-defence. "On the contrary, I'm
confident that both of you would be capable of attaining to the tragic plane in
any prospective literary endeavour upon which you happened to be engaged,"
he assured them. "Yet I doubt that
you could hope to emulate the later Huxley much before your mature years! Youth is, I regret
to say, rather more self-assertive than self-transcending, as a rule. The destructive instinct usually prevails
over the, eh, constructive one.... No, in spite of the fact that I'm a
university lecturer, I must confess to not holding a particularly high opinion
of youth. I look back on my own with
distinct misgivings, wondering how I could have done what I did and said what I
said and believed what I believed and thought it all so important at the
time. Believe me,
youth leaves a lot to be desired - namely maturity!"
Both the students had by now become quite
embarrassed by Dr. Murray's unprofessional candour, and Pauline, in particular,
wondered why he had to succumb to it, especially since she and Linda were
technically youths themselves.
"Naturally, one can't always be frank
about such matters to the wrong people," he continued, as though he had
read their minds and divined their humiliation from the shocked expression on
their faces, "else open civil war would ensue between the different
age-groups and classes, whereas normally it's only a covert, largely
unconscious civil war that prevails.
Most of the time we have to endure adversity, not speak out against
it! Thus we usually keep these things to
ourselves. So the fact that I've been
taken for a bastard by people who knew no more about me than that my lips were
rather tightly sealed at the time, is something I'm obliged to take for
granted. But, in reality, no such
tight-lipped 'bastard' exists in complete isolation, as a kind of independent
entity. On the contrary, one is to a
large extent what other people - very often fools, vulgarians,
aggressive louts, boors, ignoramuses, philistines, barbarians, etc. - oblige
one to be! So if one's lips are a little
too tightly sealed on occasion, it's likely to be either because one is
disgusted by someone or something plaguing one at the time or, alternatively,
because one's facial expression is the result of long experience of such
disgusting circumstances! To be sure, it
would make a refreshing change if the contribution others had made to one's
bastard-like appearance was occasionally borne in mind by would-be
detractors!"
Although spoken in earnest and with a
degree of self-consciousness, Dr. Murray's remarks produced an amusing effect
upon his two students, neither of whom were prepared to regard themselves as
either actual or potential contributors to his allegedly acerbic
character. "Isn't it only by
misunderstanding that the world goes around?" retorted Linda, alluding to
a contention from Baudelaire's Intimate Journals.
"Yes, since most people, as a rule,
aren't disposed or in a position to understand one's point of view,"
declared Dr. Murray, who broke into a broad smile, much to the relief of his
two companions at table.
"Maybe in the future, when Esperanto
is being spoken the world over, the degree of misunderstanding between peoples
of diverse national background will be minimized?" Pauline suggested, tactfully manoeuvring the
conversation back to an earlier topic.
"That would be a good thing, since a
convergence to unity on the level of language is certainly needed," her
tutor averred.
"Especially in the European
Parliament," Linda opined.
"Frankly, I think it would be sadly
out-of-place there," Dr. Murray remarked, to her surprise. "For a multilingual set-up would seem
pertinent to a bourgeois/proletarian stage of evolution, a stage of transition
from dualistic to post-dualistic criteria.
Only a future proletarian civilization could reasonably endorse the
introduction of a completely fresh language of post-nationalist
constitution. A typical petty-bourgeois
argument, however, will be one that insists, as many Englishmen now do, on a
language like English being adopted as the official
universal tongue. Yet the adoption of
such a tongue universally would not correspond to a convergence to unity on the
level of language, such as would signify the supersession
of all traditional languages in a transcendent fashion, but amount to the
adoption of one national language at the expense of the others - a no-less
unacceptable procedure than the adoption of one so-called world religion, like
Buddhism, at the expense of the others, or the adoption of one literary genre,
like poetry, at the expense of the others, and so on.... No, a truly global
civilization will require a truly universal language, like Esperanto. Those who desire to impose such a language on
multinational bourgeois/proletarian civilization are simply being
precocious. Everything must abide its
rightful time!"
"Absolutely," said Pauline, who
began to wonder whether that didn't also apply to the development of a romantic
relationship between Dr. Murray and herself?
A PRIVATE INTRODUCTION
We had gone
along, Mary and I, to hear Mr. Kells expatiate on
modern art, which he had arranged to do for the benefit of a select gathering
of students, one Thursday evening, in the privacy of his suburban home. Ordinarily his lectures were confined to the
rather stuffy lecture theatre at
We had expected, on arrival, to be
introduced to the former before the latter but, as things turned out, found
ourselves being escorted round the drawing room, in which the greater part of
his art collection happened to be hung, and introduced to the paintings almost
as soon as we had removed our coats. It
appeared that none of the other students, of which there were to be about ten,
had as yet turned up, and that, since we ourselves were late in arriving, the
host had decided to proceed with his lecture irrespective of whether to a small
gathering or to a mere couple of students.
His wife, he assured us, would bring some refreshment at a later hour,
though to sustain us in the meantime he kindly offered us a glass of sherry,
which we thankfully accepted.
There were some fifty paintings of unequal
size and diverse technique on display in what was, by ordinary standards, a
fairly large room, and they had been arranged in closely-packed order,
occasionally in tiers of four, all around the walls, so that scarcely any space
remained between them, suggesting the possibility that they had come to
represent, in their owner's eyes, a substitute for wallpaper. The effect was at first somewhat confusing,
especially since some of the larger and brighter works on display tended to
smother the smaller and duller ones beneath the dazzle of their overbearing
effulgence. I remarked on this
impression to Mr. Kells, during the course of our
slow perambulation around the room, and he surprised me by replying that the
apparent confusion was only an illusion introduced by the mind unaccustomed to
such profusion and that, after a while, things would begin to sort themselves
out, as they had long ago done in his own mind.
"By the way," he added, as if in
parentheses, "the emphasis in this particular part of my collection, which
means the majority of paintings on these walls, is on mindlessness, though to varying extents, depending on the type of art in
question."
Mary, who was always the more courageous
where owning-up to ignorance is concerned, asked: "In what way are they
mindless?"
A gleam of triumphant satisfaction came
into Mr. Kells' cold eyes, and he replied: "Ah,
that's what I had hoped you'd ask, since I was intending to explain it to
you!"
We stopped suddenly in front of a number of
various-sized surrealist paintings, one or two of which were immediately
recognizable to me as works by famous masters, British and Irish as well as
Continental, and waited for him to continue, which of course he was to do with his
tongue.
"The chief impression one gets from
Surrealism," he announced, with apparent gusto, "is that mind has
been left in abeyance whilst objects, people, nature, or whatever, are
juxtaposed in incongruous contexts: a horse standing with a football on its
head, a man nearby with a fishing rod between his teeth, the intrusion of a
skyscraper into a swimming pool, and so on, being examples of this seemingly
arbitrary positioning of diverse phenomena.
But, in point of fact, that is an illusion, because no matter how
seemingly incongruous the juxtaposition, the phenomena in question have been
painted, as a rule, with fastidious application. The impression of mindlessness, of the
selective mind's having been withdrawn from service, is merely on the surface
of the painting. For underneath, in its
technical depths, the application of mind to the structuring and colouring of
phenomena is no less vigorous - and in some cases even more so - than in
so-called conventional or realistic paintings.
Thus Surrealism is a kind of hoax or, at best, transitional painting
between Realism and Abstract Expressionism.
The interesting paradox is that the artist's mind has been applied to
the work in such a way as to create an impression that mind is absent from it,
that these incongruous juxtapositions one sees are really the product of
mindlessness."
I looked more carefully at the nearest
paintings, one after another, and saw that there was indeed some truth in what
he was saying, though it had never occurred to me to consider Surrealism in
such a mindless light before! Presumably
automatic writing, as practised at one time by André Breton and a number of his
surrealist colleagues, was designed to give a similar impression, not simply to
reveal the subconscious mind but to by-pass the conscious mind altogether, in
an attempt to record mindless thought - the nadir of psychic materialism in
response to merely physiological promptings.
I savoured these conjectures while we moved on a little way and Mary
took up the theme of Abstract Expressionism from the reference Mr. Kells had earlier made to it, inquiring of him whether such
abstract-expressionist canvases as he possessed were the truly mindless ones.
"In a certain sense they are," he
duly replied, positioning himself, and therefore us,
in front of a selection of radically abstract works which appeared about as
chaotic-looking as such art could do.
"In these examples, the artist has simply allowed the paint to drip
onto the canvas and form its own patterns, or lack of them, while keeping most
of his creative mind in abeyance. They
are the nearest one can get to mindless art, though, naturally, a degree of
conscious mind had to be applied to them in order to ensure that the paint actually
got onto the canvas and didn't completely smother it. One might say that mind has been applied in a
tenuous way, a good deal less fastidiously or vigorously than in most of the
examples of Surrealism just viewed."
I had to agree with that assumption and
responded with a curt nod for our host's psychological benefit. But it was clear to me that no matter how
seemingly tenuous the connection between mind and art, a connection still
existed and couldn't, in the nature of things, be completely negated. A totally mindless art was impossible, even
in a materialistic age like the twentieth century. For art reflected mind, was, in a sense, mind
objectivized, and never more so than in the case of
truly modern art, as represented, on a variety of levels, by the paintings in
Mr. Kells' private collection.
Meanwhile Mary was asking our exhibitionist
host whether the application of paint to canvas didn't resemble the application
of mind to thought, that is to say, whether there wasn't a direct correlation
between a brain and its thought and a paintbrush and its paint. "For if mind arranges thoughts in such a
way as to form coherent sentences, then surely the arrangement of paints on a
canvas to form coherent patterns is an analogous process?" she added.
"Oh, indeed!" he concurred. "Though if there is very little
arrangement of paints on a canvas, then it must follow that there will be very
little mind there.
This is why I describe these works as virtually mindless. And, for that reason, they're very
superficial, very ..." he scratched his head while searching for the right
word ... "extrovert. They reflect
an extreme form of romanticism and are accordingly rather materialistic, the
sort of art one might associate with Socialism."
"But isn't Socialist Realism the sort
of art one usually associates with that?" Mary naively objected, as we
moved on again to a different wall, where some minimalist paintings were hung.
"To be sure," our host admitted,
smiling shrewdly. "But such art is
created on bourgeois/proletarian representational terms, whereas these abstract
works were created, it seems to me, on petty-bourgeois avant-garde terms, such
as are only permissible or truly intelligible within the confines of Western
civilization. They signify the
materialist side of this civilization, in contrast to those works which
emphasize mind on levels suggesting a superconscious
affiliation or influence."
I wondered for a moment exactly what such
levels could be, and was about to air my uncertainty when Mr. Kells graciously continued by informing us that Mondrian's mature work, which involved grids and squares,
afforded us perfect examples of the opposite, or spiritual, kind of
petty-bourgeois art, of which, alas, only one example was available in this
room, and that an incomplete one.
However, there were some neo-plastic and kindred works on display in
another room of the house, and this he promised to introduce us to in due
course. Apparently, the mindless and the
mindful couldn't be hung in the same room, and so, for reasons of propriety, he
had arranged to divide his collection into two main parts - the bigger, or
secular, part in the drawing room, the smaller, or religious, part in the
sitting room opposite. The narrow
hallway in between he described as a kind of
intermediate, composite realm of conflicting influences, with one or two
examples from each side on display there.
But we had started our tour of his collection on the lower, or romantic,
level, and would duly proceed to the higher, classical one. Not until we had run the gamut of
petty-bourgeois art from bottom to top, as it were, would we be in a position
to properly appreciate the creative scope of contemporary Western civilization,
which, so he contended, was anathema to both Western bourgeoisie and Eastern
proletariat alike - the one because beneath it, the other because potentially
above it and, in any case, outside the existing confines of
bourgeois/proletarian civilization.
I was surprised that he knew so much and
told him, as we made for the door to exit ourselves from the materialist part
of his collection, that my bias had always been for
the spiritual, which I considered an apt reflection of my temperament.
"But the trouble with you,
"That isn't true!" I responded,
blushing violently. For
I realized that Mr. Kells was a better mind-reader
than I had suspected.
Nevertheless, I received Mary's ironic smile with grace and was relieved
to behold Mrs. Kells suddenly entering the room,
followed by her daughter and son, with a tea tray in her hands. Our visit to the smaller collection would now
be postponed for a few minutes while we sipped hot tea, paid one another a few
gratuitous compliments, and wondered to ourselves just where the other students
had got to this evening. At least, Mary
and I would.
SPACE JOURNAL
Living up
here in space, one gets an intimation of what it would be like as absolute mind
in the transcendental Beyond. Only an intimation, mind you. For, of course, we're only human beings, and our
minds are relative, not absolute. We
have carnal lusts to satisfy and, on top of that, the captain occasionally
issues a stern order or reprimand to certain members of his crew, including
myself, which creates feelings quite the reverse of heavenly! No, we can never get a particularly clear
idea of what absolute mind would be like.
But, even so, we're privileged when compared with some people. I prefer life on this space station, at any
rate, to life on Earth, regardless of what other people may think.
I was glad to get a letter from mother,
whom I hadn't heard from for a number of months. She posted it early this morning, and it
reached me by space mail in the afternoon.
The service is getting better these days, though there is still some
delay from time to time. Someone told
me, the other week, that they might reintroduce distinctions between stamps,
making some more expensive than others in the interests of a quicker service. But I rather doubt it. Class distinctions are, by and large, a thing
of the past - certainly so far as stamps are concerned!
Mrs. Sewell seems to be keeping well,
though still a little overweight. She
worries about my social life, wondering whether I get enough company up
here. By which she primarily means
female company. She needn't worry,
though; there's never any shortage of bags to fill, if you like that kind of
thing. Young ones are especially
plentiful - about twenty in all. The
captain keeps his beady eyes on them for a variety of reasons, not least of all
personal. But I'm not particularly
sensual. Prefer my sexuality sublimated,
as a rule, which is why I keep a few pin-ups in my cabin. Not just to look at them, either. I take a pleasure in stroking them, or
whichever parts of them happen to be most conspicuous, on the odd
occasion. Odd in more senses than one,
according to my colleague Second-Lieutenant Wilkins. But he doesn't appreciate such subtleties. He is a flesh-monger to the core, even up
here, and for that reason a rotten spiritualist! Thinks I am mad when, in point of fact, old
Shane Sewell is simply saner than him.
My favourite pin-up, by the way, is a blonde Continental of Germanic
origin called Eva. I stroke her cheeks
more often than I stroke the more blatantly seductive parts of anyone else. She is a high-grade temptress and, frankly, I
find it difficult not to be seduced into admiring her. I won't share her with anyone else, not even
the captain. Though I do occasionally
lend my blonde inflatable to Second-Lieutenant Wilkins, who sometimes grows
dissatisfied with his own, and thereby cater to his ingrained predilection for
bigamy. Sublimated bigamy, you could
call it. I have named her Eva, after my
pin-up heroine.
A more serious note now! I have been reading about theories concerning
the so-called Worm Holes which criss-cross space in every direction and are
considered to bring distant parts of it together in a multi-dimensional
framework of interconnected universes. I
used to believe such theories, but now I incline to reject them on the grounds
that they are improbable. Living up
here, thousands of miles from the Earth, one gets a better view of these Worm
Holes and, in my opinion, what one sees has nothing to do with separate
universes being interconnected through kaleidoscopic tunnels in superspace, but ... the gradual convergence and expansion
of millions of separate globes of transcendent spirit en route,
so to speak, to an ultimate unity in ... the Omega Point, or spiritual
culmination of evolution as defined by Teilhard de Chardin. I am now
quite convinced that these so-called Worm Holes, of which there are countless
millions, are fragments of absolute mind existing, in space, in a context of
Heaven. I think one is looking at
individual manifestations of the transcendental Beyond
when one gets these things into psychic perspective.... Not that you can see
them very clearly. For they are pretty
dark, darker even than space. But, then,
transcendent spirit wouldn't be conspicuously apparent, since spirit pertains
to essence and is consequently invisible to the senses - noumenon
rather than phenomenon, so to speak. Nevertheless, still constituting a presence in space, still there, and not simply a void inseparable
from space itself. A deeper deep within the depths of space. Or, as seems to be the case
at present, millions of deeper deeps there.
Of course, I'm aware that Black Holes are
also deeper deeps, only they're not in continuous motion, like the Worm Holes,
so could hardly be assumed to be converging towards and expanding into one
another, creating, in the process, this kaleidoscopic illusion. To tell the truth, I used to think that Black
Holes could be Spiritual Globes en route to the Omega
Point. But now I incline to agree with
scientific opinion ... that they represent the antimass
of a star which has suffered gravitational collapse and perished as a
light. I therefore reserve the
supposition of Spiritual Globes for the so-called Worm Holes which, to my mind,
would serve a more useful purpose as transcendent spirit than simply as tunnels
linking one part of space to another! Is
it necessary, I wonder, for distant regions of space to be brought into
periodic contact? And are there, in fact,
Multiple Universes in this so-called superspace?
No, I respond negatively to both questions,
my artistic conscience reminded of its insightful prerogatives. For, to my mind, they pertain to the realm of
scientific subjectivity, in which space, meaning the Universe as a whole, has
come to appear possessed of certain quasi-mystical qualities that would
formerly have been confined, albeit on different terms, to the subconscious
mind; evolutionary progress having required that the transformation from
external, or cosmic, objectivity to internal, or superconscious,
subjectivity be paralleled by a transformation from internal, or subconscious,
objectivity to external, or cosmic, subjectivity, which has resulted in the
growth of scientific subjectivity as applying, amongst other things, to the
Universe in response to 'theological' expedience - 'theology' having been
transferred from the inner to the outer world, in accordance with psychic
evolution from a predominantly subconscious to a predominantly superconscious affiliation.
Without their realizing it, the champions of the more unorthodox
theories of cosmic reality are the modern equivalents of medieval theologians -
purveyors of a contemporary idealism, the reverse side of the contemporary
realism which pertains to superconscious
subjectivity. Space was once simple and
religion complex. Now religion is
becoming simple and space, by contrast, highly complex. This is an inevitable pattern, not to be
derided! The philosopher, however, is
entitled to view things in a different and more objective light. For philosophy upholds a chink of sanity in a
largely insane world, is the essential truth behind theological illusions. As a philosopher, even one writing in space,
I continue to represent philosophical objectivity in the face of theological
expedience. I remain the 'evil'
conscience of the age, a closed book for most, an enlightening one for those
who, in their capacity as leaders, require to know what, intellectually
speaking, is really going on in the world and why, if they're to keep in touch
with the truth, they mustn't succumb to illusions, necessary or otherwise, in
the manner of priests.
Enough for today! I must shortly give myself up to the world of
dreams and let the subconscious take over.
One cannot live as an absolute when one is still only a man, even if transcendental!
THE SPELL
It is
difficult when one isn't a human sheep to conceal the fact that one is
different. And yet, at the same time, it
would be even more difficult to admit that one was different to a human sheep. This fact I have come to realize all too poignantly
during my occasional visits to Mrs. Daly, an old widow who lives in another,
generally more affluent part of north London than I, and whose acquaintance
with some of my relatives in Ireland led one of them to put her in contact with
me several years ago. Consequently I was
to receive, over the years of my residence in London, a number of invitations
to visit Mrs. Daly, most of which I accepted, though with certain definite
qualms, since, as I soon discovered, this old woman was by no means a kindred
spirit but, rather, the converse of one, as I hope to explain. But not knowing anyone else or having any
other contacts to speak of, I was prepared to spend a few hours, once every
three or four months, in the company of a person whose petty-bourgeois
mentality proved to be at such variance with my own rather more radical, if not
proletarian, one. Since she would
invariably cook me lunch, and quite a good lunch at that, I considered it
expedient to persevere with her small-chat, thus saving myself the price of a
meal in one or another of the local cafés.
But perseverance it certainly was and,
often enough, the strain of having to listen to her opinions and beliefs was so
great ... that, fearful of snapping, I would feel obliged to excuse myself from
her company and spend a little while longer than usual in the toilet. Occasionally too, when even that stratagem
proved inadequate, I would exempt myself from her company altogether and
dejectedly return, by way of a flat-fare bus, to my single bedsitter
in Crouch End. There I would endeavour
to recover from the old woman, vowing to myself that never again would I accept
an invitation to visit her! And yet, the
next time one came - usually in the form of a short letter wondering how I was
and inquiring whether I'd like to come over for lunch one day - I would succumb
to the temptation and ring her up to confirm my willingness to do so on a
specific day - usually a Wednesday. I
would later regret this decision, but never went back on my word. I was as though under a spell beyond my
control.
And so, when the dreaded day arrived, I
would be prepared for the worst. I knew
that her conversation had its limits and knew, too, how easy it was for her
senile mind to wander afresh over the same retrospective ground on each
occasion. There were, to be sure, a
number of recollections concerning her late-husband and family which had
acquired, over the years, the status of an obsession, an idée fixe, and I was invariably destined, on each succeeding
visit, to witness most of them for at least the fifth or sixth time, though I
graciously refrained from reminding her of this somewhat humiliating fact! As her guest, it was my duty, I reasoned, to
grant her the privilege of an attentive ear.
Though this duty became diluted in the course of time as, growing
over-familiar with her memories, I permitted half my conscious mind to wander
off at a tangent, so to speak, while with the other half, more usually the
emotional half, I mimicked the semblance of undivided attention. And yet, if I was prepared to show patience
with such foibles of old age as were to be found in Mrs. Daly's fixed repertory
of reminiscences, I drew the line where matters connected with my own interests
were concerned, rushing to their defence or charging into the attack with
something approaching passionate conviction, such as even someone so obtuse as
my hostess couldn't fail to appreciate!
I refer here, in particular, to religion, which was the most consistent
source of friction between us - Daly esteeming Roman Catholicism, I, a free
spirit, advocating the virtues of transcendentalism, neither of us giving an
inch of ideological ground to the other.
Here is an example of a typically heated conversation: "But
Matthew, how can you not believe in God?
He made you!"
"I refuse to accept that!" comes my rejoinder.
"The God to which you allude, namely 'the
Creator', is an abstraction from cosmic reality and has no existence except in
relation to the subconscious mind. In
all probability, He was originally derived, knowingly or unknowingly, from the
governing star at the centre of the Galaxy, since monotheism presupposes a
centralizing tendency commensurate with the real beginnings of
civilization. Our ancestors inherited
Him from the ancient Hebrews, who called Him Jehovah, and then transformed Him
into 'the Father' in order to accommodate both a Mother and a Son, namely
Christ. He's an anthropomorphic figure
with, in the traditional iconography, long white hair and a flowing white beard
to stress his age."
"Yes, but didn't that cosmic reality
make you?" Mrs. Daly objects.
"I refuse to accept that a star, any
star, even one as intrusive as our sun, had any part to play in my birth or in
fashioning my bodily form," I tell her.
"If one chooses to equate the governing star of the Galaxy with
'the Creator', which, however, would not be exactly theologically orthodox, one
will come to understand that it had a direct hand, so to speak, in creating
smaller stars and planets, since they must have arisen from the explosive
origin of each galaxy in what we now regard as the central, or governing,
star. But if stage one of evolution was
responsible for creating stage two, if the stars led to the planets, then it's
difficult to see how subsequent stages of evolution, from plants to animals and
on to man, could also have been created by it, since they arose at considerable
evolutionary removes from the direct influence of the one huge star in each
galaxy on the formation, through explosive extrapolation, of the millions of
smaller ones, and over a period of millions of years. In fact, they constitute a series of ever
more radical falls from it, using the word 'fall' in its morally opprobrious
sense."
It is obvious, by this juncture in the
conversation, that Mrs. Daly has completely lost track of my logical
progression or is unable, for reasons best known to herself,
to comprehend it. Yet she has a stock
counter-argument to hand, which my reference to stars has engendered, and now
she hurls it into the fray by asking me: "But who created the stars, or
the governing star of each galaxy?"
"Not 'the Creator'," I
reply. "For the stars arose from
gaseous explosions in space, and before those
explosions took effect ... there was nothing but potentially explosive gas at large. You can't conjure-up a 'Creator' out of
nothingness, the void of space. And
neither can you equate 'the Creator' with those gases, as if they alone were
responsible for the smaller stars and subsequent planets. For gases come and go, and after they've gone
... there would be nothing left to pray to there. Thus the stars are at the root of evolution,
even if they owe their existence to explosive gases."
"Well, I can't agree with you,"
Mrs. Daly confesses, somewhat truculently for a woman of her age. "God made the stars and He also made
you. And you should be grateful, as I
am, for all the blessings He has given us!
I am constantly thanking God for the use of my sight, my hearing, my
sense of smell, my good health, the use of my arms and legs.... Really,
Matthew, we have so many things for which to be grateful!" (It is almost
as though she were afraid that she would lose the use of her senses and limbs
if she didn't keep offering-up prayerful thanks for them, and that her advanced
age has more than a little to do with it, since they're now manifestly past
their prime and therefore not quite what they used to be!)
At this more critical juncture in the
conversation, however, the argument will either terminate or take a different
line, since I am unable to apply rational persuasion to such irrational
faith. I attempted to indicate that God,
in the rather basic sense she meant, is a theological entity connected with the
subconscious, but she persists in ascribing the creation of the Universe and
all that is naturally in it to this abstraction. She won't see that before the stars there was
nothing, and that stars, or certain stars, were responsible for the emergence
of planets. She prefers to think
theologically and, like all psychically backward people, she mistakes this
theological idealism for reality. As I said, a sheep. The product of many decades of clerical conditioning. Whereas I am a free spirit. I cannot impress my intellectual superiority
upon her for, stupid old woman that she is, she would
simply think I was being impertinent and presumptuous. She cannot see me in my true light, as a
philosopher-king and potential leader.
To her, I'm also a sheep, but a younger one and therefore someone who
should abide 'the counsels of the wise', meaning, principally, herself. She would not like to believe this isn't
so. It would reflect poorly on her.
But I reflect poorly on her even while she
is talking. I find this attitude she
adopts of always wanting to thank 'the Creator' for the use of her limbs and
senses a base and, on the whole, somewhat pagan one. Thank you for the use of the natural, what
stems from the natural, and what pertains to the natural. Ah, but religious evolution has to do with a
lot more than that, even on the Christian level!
It has to do, namely, with what aspires towards the supernatural - in a
word, the Divine Omega. Religious
evolution stretches, in a sense, from the Father to the Holy Spirit via Jesus
Christ. It doesn't end in the compromise
realm of Christianity, in which flesh and spirit tend to balance each other and
a diluted paganism co-exists with a diluted transcendentalism ... in fidelity
to egocentric dualism, Christ being a sort of 'Three in One' in his humanistic
relativity. It progresses on up to a
post-humanist orientation, eschewing all reference to a 'Creator' and
refraining, in consequence, from endorsing an attitude of thanksgiving for
natural phenomena, one's own included.
For only by overcoming the natural will evolving life on earth
eventually attain to the supernatural, in transcendent spirit. Such is the irrefutable logic of religious
evolution. But it isn't a logic that
Mrs. Daly shares; for she, after all, is a Catholic and Catholics, being
Christians, are perfectly entitled to give thanks to 'the Creator' for the use
of their natural assets, not to mention the produce of nature in general. Old Mrs. Daly is especially good at this, as
I hope to have indicated, and her feminine, sensuous nature is doubtless part
of the reason. Another part must be her
status as a fairly affluent petty-bourgeois widow, with a nice little pension
to draw on and every incentive to take good care of her health. Eating good food, not just any food but only
'the best', is one of the ways she takes good care of it, and I have had
reason, over the years, to be amazed at the expense to which she will go to
ensure that only 'the best', or what she considers such, finds its way onto her
table.
"I've always said that if you buy only
the best, you can't go far wrong," is an aphorism dear to old Mrs. Daly's
heart, and I have heard it said on more than one occasion, too! Not for this thanker
of 'the Creator' to buy margarine, when she can obtain the best butter with the
funds available to her! Not for her to
eat sliced bread, which she considers spurious, when she can buy a nice
home-made uncut loaf rich in calories instead!
Not for her to buy thin little dehydrated apple pies wrapped in
cellophane, when she can make fat juicy ones in her own kitchen! Oh, the list is virtually interminable! No wonder she revolts against my attitude of
preferring to cultivate the spirit than to stuff the flesh!
But that, of course, is how I see
it. From her point of view I don't
cultivate the spirit at all because, unlike her, I don't attend church but
remain aloof from it in the belief that I know better and have no need of
orthodox faith. No matter if I should
protest that Christianity isn't the end of the religious road, but merely a
stage along it, and a pretty ambivalent stage at that, Mrs. Daly refuses to
accept my opinion and insists that only by returning to the Church will I find
salvation, that only in the Church will I be able to feed
my spirit. No matter if I vigorously
protest this narrow point-of-view, there is no shaking her conviction that the
Church alone is right and Catholicism the one true faith!
Oh hell, what disgust and exasperation
overwhelm me at these moments! How I
loathe this old woman for her sheep-like narrowness of mind, her lack of
evolutionary perspective, her petty-bourgeois philistinism, her love of nature,
her religious limitations, her denominational bigotry, and a hundred-and-one
other things which burden my 'Steppenwolfian' soul
with morose feelings! How I long for the
wide-open spaces of an intelligent mind with whom to communicate for once! It would never occur to her that my spirit is
being fed when I read books, write aphorisms, listen to music, contemplate art,
meditate, play my guitar, etc. Oh,
no! To her way of thinking I don't feed
my spirit at all. And ... all because I
refuse to go to church!
Well, what can one say? A genius confronted by a sheep - it's
terrible! There is no possibility of
understanding. One simply wonders why one
should have allowed oneself to get dragged through the mud of her opaque mind
all over again. Is one under an evil
spell?
I met a number of other people at this old
woman's house in the course of time, friends as well as relatives of hers, but
they were none of them particularly inspiring.
Occasionally her daughter, Maureen, would be there on vacation from
Ireland. She was more broadminded, but
still relatively narrow. Once, too, I met her grandson, Seamus, only
son of Maureen, and decided, after some conversation, that he was probably the
least narrow of the lot, though still far from broad or, at any rate,
enlightened. One sheep begets another,
so that, despite generational variations, the overall pattern of narrowness and
ignorance remains pretty much established in its predetermined mould. Seamus, for instance, was violently opposed
to city life, having spent the past seven years living in a country cottage on
the West Coast of Ireland (I forget the exact location). I had spent approximately the same amount of
time in one of the world's greatest cities and so, not altogether surprisingly,
we failed to see eye-to-eye on a number of counts, not least where religion was
concerned, which only conformed, after all, to precedent. The countryside isn't really the best place for
cultivating a transcendental attitude to life, for turning against nature and
aspiring more ardently towards the supernatural, and
Seamus was hardly one to sympathize with my transcendentalism. Apparently, he wasn't one to regularly attend
church either, which was a disappointment for his grandmother to swallow. He preferred to practise Christianity without
making any formal concessions to ritual, and to adopt Zen, or some variation on
it, to his rural lifestyle, which embraced a variety of outdoor jobs, including
fishing. He was quite capable of
defending himself against allegations, from his grandmother, of being a lapsed
Catholic, maintaining, in the face of heated opposition, that there was more to
Catholicism than going to church and receiving the Eucharist!
That might be true, but I wasn't prepared
to enter into the argument, since I had no particular interests at stake. But when the conversation turned to my religious
beliefs and I was requested to give an outline of them, it soon became clear to
me that a new argument was about to erupt, this time between Seamus and myself,
since he protested my contention that life ceased with death and, true to his
petty-bourgeois nature, insisted that death wasn't the end, that the spirit
could survive it and soar to the Other World.
"But have you ever seen a spirit leave
the body of a dead person?" I incredulously ask him, knowing full-well
that spirit wasn't connected with phenomenal appearances.
Seamus wisely shakes his head. "Can't say I have," he confesses. "Yet I refuse, all the same, to believe
that this life is the only one. It seems
to me that we're here to fulfil a purpose, to work out an individual destiny,
after which we proceed, at death, to the spiritual world."
All very Christian of
course, and half-true in its paradoxical sort of way. Though still falling short of what I knew to
be the literal truth!
As does another thing Seamus says, after
I've voiced an unflattering opinion of his belief: "There have been a number of accounts of
the Other World from people who left their body behind and proceeded, at death,
to the higher plane. I read quite
recently of a man who, having died, recognized his
body lying prostrate on its bed as his soul hovered above it. There he was, a discarnate soul, looking down
from the other side of death at his corpse!
But it transpired that he wasn't ripe, apparently, for the Other World;
that he still had a mission to fulfil on earth, so he was obliged to return to
his body and come back to life, which, for several months thereafter, weighed
heavily on his soul as it adjusted itself to bearing the burden of his flesh
again."
This is the gist, recounted in a touchingly
credulous fashion, of one of Seamus's revelations
concerning life after death, and I must confess to not having been particularly
inspired by it! There is, of course, the
possibility that the example cited by him involved a man who hadn't really died
but had simply fallen into a deep sleep, from which he was eventually to awaken
with the recollection of a dream, involving levitation, which he then mistook
for a revelation concerning the Afterlife.
There is also the possibility of the whole episode being nothing more
than a hoax upon which some unscrupulous person sought to capitalize at the
expense of joe public. This would doubtless apply to a number of
accounts of life-after-death which exploited the general ignorance of most
people concerning such things, in the interests of personal profit from a
sensational story. Where it is believed
that one cannot prove either way whether or not the spirit survives death,
there's obviously sufficient incentive for some people to produce fabrications
on behalf of survival theories. Seamus,
however, isn't really in an intellectual position to know the truth, whereas I,
having spent many years struggling towards it in the development of my
philosophy, believe I am. I know that there is no chance of a relative
mind being able to accommodate itself to absolute mind at death, since death is
the cessation of that mind in consequence of the termination, for one reason or
another, of physiological support. There
is no reincarnation either, though this oriental theory provides us with a
useful metaphor for emphasizing the inability of relative mind to co-exist with
absolute mind in the Beyond.
As to Seamus's
story of the account of a spirit looking down on its corpse from the other side
of death, I was obliged to protest this matter by informing him that such a
situation would be quite impossible since, unless this spirit had a pair of
eyes in its head, which is most unlikely for something beyond the senses, it
would be incapable of identifying anything outside itself, spirit having
nothing whatsoever to do with appearances but being entirely essential -
wrapped-up in its own noumenal
self-consciousness. I could tell,
however, that my argument, despite its reasonableness, would have very little
influence on Seamus's judgement, such as it was, and
that he would continue to believe such accounts of posthumous life as a matter
of course, much the way his grandmother, another sheep, was convinced that she
would be saved at death, and this in spite of her life-long commitment to the
'best' food, supplied and eaten, I should add, in copious quantities!
Well, good fucking luck to them! These simple people are entitled to believe
what they like, since they exist within the Christian civilization as insiders
and relate, in their different ways, to what it upholds. I also exist within this civilization but,
being a Steppenwolf rather than a sheep, as an outsider, for whom such beliefs
as life after death have no substance.
My better knowledge obliges me to rebel against their bourgeois beliefs
as well as to realize that not being a sheep but a philosopher-king and
potential shepherd is as difficult a cross to bear as any, especially when one
is more the victim of sheep than their master, as one certainly is in this
context! Another civilization and
another flock, and one might be on top.
In this damn civilization one is simply outside - a dissident without
the power to alter anything!
Ah, but that is the social macrocosm. I have been describing, for the most part,
the social microcosm, as applying to my periodic visits to old Mrs. Daly. I could never quite understand why I allowed
myself to get dragged into successive humiliations-on-a-religious-theme at her
hands, or at least so I thought. Now,
however, I know differently. It wasn't
just that I needed some company and, if only to escape my solitude once in
awhile, was prepared to tolerate virtually anyone, even someone so incredibly
opaque as her. There was more to it than
that, and I only realized exactly what it was on the occasion of my last visit. I recalled that she had an upright piano in
the front room and asked whether I might have a go on it. I hadn't touched a piano in years, though I
had once been a keen and passably accomplished player. No doubt, that was why I had a vague hankering,
on this occasion, to get the feel of a keyboard under my fingers again. Nostalgia was pervading my soul and I wanted
to give-in to it. Mrs. Daly, however,
wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the idea, probably because she preferred
to talk and was half-afraid that, were I to set the piano keys in motion, I
would disturb her nearest neighbours and thereby invite some kind of
retaliation, either then or, more likely, later that day, after I had
left. Accordingly, she attempted to
dissuade me from making the attempt.
But, contrary to my usual acquiescent nature, I insisted that I
proceed. And so she had no alternative
but to comply with my wish, though not without remarking, in a brazen attempt
to dampen my enthusiasm down a bit, that the piano was very old and seriously
out-of-tune. Nevertheless I succeeded in
obliging her to lead the way into the front room and, when there, to lift back
the piano lid. At last, I thought to
myself, an opportunity to form some broken chords again!
"It's very out of tune," Mrs.
Daly repeats, more for her own benefit than mine, I figured, as I sat on the
piano stool and applied both hands to the tentative formation of a descending
sequence of major and minor chordal structures,
quickly coming to the conclusion that the notes weren't really very out-of-tune
at all but, on the whole, perfectly in-tune.
I ranged over the entire length of the keyboard, black as well as white
keys, and felt, probably for the first time in the entire history of days spent
in Mrs. Daly's boring company, genuinely excited by what I was doing. Not for years had I touched my old love, the
most accommodating of instrumental whores, and now my piano-starved fingers
were tucking-in to the notes with something approaching lecherous
appetite. Mrs. Daly, however, appeared
anything but pleased by circumstances not quite under her control, and hastened
to remind me that it was only an old piano
which had got rather scratched up, thanks to one of her young nephews, who had
used the lid for a playground on several occasions. And to confirm this regrettable fact she
gently returned the lid to its original closed position, obliging me to
withdraw my love-sick fingers from the acquiescent keys.
"There, you see?" she declares,
pointing to a few small scratches superficially etched into the woodwork on top
of the lid. "I'll have to get
someone to come and polish it all over again." And then, abruptly changing track: "Was
that music you were playing?"
"Just a jazzy improvisation," I
modestly confess.
"Not music, then," Mrs. Daly
rejoins, in her customary snobbish fashion.
"Well, music of sorts," I aver,
preferring to ignore a definition of music which applied solely to printed
scores.
"And did you ever take lessons?"
she asks on a faintly sceptical note.
"Indeed I did," I smilingly
reply. "For five
long years."
She looks as though she doesn't quite
believe me. "This was at school,
was it?"
"No, privately," I correct,
conscious, as ever, of the snobbish implications in the old widow's assumption,
but determined not to allow myself to become unduly contemptuous of her. For by now I was beginning to feel an uprush of psychological relief from some remote quarter of
my mind, such as I had never experienced in connection with Mrs. Daly
before. And then, as quick as lightning,
I realized that something I must have wanted to do all along, namely toy with
her piano, had just taken place, in consequence of which I was now free of a
nagging subconscious ambition. It was as
if a spell had been broken and I no longer had anything to keep me there. To Mrs. Daly's surprise, I remarked that I
would now have to be going, since the time was getting late and I had one or
two personal things to attend to before the afternoon was over.
"But it has only just turned
three-thirty!" she protests, turning desperate eyes towards the nearest
clock. "I was about to get you some
tea!"
This, of course, was something she normally
did at around this time, thereby obliging me to persevere with her conversation
until gone four. "Yes, but I've got
to go to the local library today," I obdurately inform her, as I proceed,
without further ado, to the hall in order to retrieve my coat.
"Well, do come again soon,
Matthew," she politely insists, before I could open the door and bid her a
curt goodbye.
"I'll try," I assure her. But, deep down, I felt this was the last
visit I would ever pay her. For I had
broken the spell and now I was free.
From now on, her house would hold absolutely no attraction for me!
CONCERNING A TREE
Mr. Gerard
Keane was kneeling down in front of the medium-sized Christmas tree he had
recently erected and decked-out with coloured lights and silver balls, as
tradition required. His wife had taken
the children for a walk in the snow and he had promised them that the tree
would be fully decked-out by the time they returned. The only other occupant of their sitting room
was Joseph Gill, a bachelor, who sat in one of its three comfortable armchairs
as sole witness to the proceedings. Now
that his next-door neighbour had completed the job, however, he noticed a look
of puzzlement on the man's face and inquired of him, in a leisurely way, as to
the source of this emotion. For he was slightly puzzled, himself, by its presence there. Surely self-satisfaction or pride would have
been more appropriate?
"Ah well, since you ask, I'll confess
it to you," said Mr. Keane, turning fully towards his guest. "We perceive before us a Christmas tree,
no doubt a fairly typical one for a room this size. This is my tree, my family's tree, and I'm
really quite pleased with it. But, you
know ..." and here his face tensed slightly as he sought to convey his
puzzlement more clearly ... "much as I've set up such a tree for a number
of years now, and much as I can recall my father having set up a similar one
when I was a boy and decked it out in a like manner, I've never been able to
understand what it's all about, just why, I mean, we bother to set up Christmas
trees at all. My father would say that
it was to decorate a room in accordance with Christmas tradition, and when my
children ask me, I've replied that it's to bring a little extra light into the
house. Clever young Richard has seen
reason to doubt the validity of this reply, on one or two occasions, by
insisting that there's enough light in it already. Which, of course, is true. So, to save face, I've then copied my father
by referring the tree to tradition. But,
unlike me, who was usually content with some explanation ... no matter how
vague, clever little Richard has to ask: 'Why has it become tradition?' and I,
short of a suitable answer, have to shake my shoulders in a gesture of
ignorance and retort 'It just has'.
After which neither of us are satisfied, and we long for a more
substantial explanation. Unfortunately,
my wife can't provide one. Nor can my
little daughter. So we call it quits and
change the subject. This year, however,
Richard might have an explanation of his own.
For he's sure to be dissatisfied with the same old
story and may not even wish to be confronted with my ignorance again. If only I could think of something more
cogent to tell him!"
Poor Mr. Keane looked quite disappointed
with himself, though he had no reason, thought Gill, to be particularly ashamed
of what was, after all, a fairly general failing throughout Christendom at this
time of year. How many other people
could have offered their children anything more concrete to go on? He, Joseph Gill, had never received a
convincing explanation as a child either, but at least he'd had the good
fortune to work out a pretty convincing one for himself in recent years, and,
seeing that Gerard Keane looked no less puzzled now than previously, he thought
it might not be inappropriate to divulge it to him, as a means to offering some
enlightenment. So he leant back in the
leather armchair and, to Mr. Keane's obvious surprise, proceeded to reveal what
he considered to be the truth. (Doubtless Gerard would be sceptical at first,
like most ordinary blokes when confronted by something original or
profound. Yet such scepticism was but a
temporary barrier to enlightenment.)
"Because man isn't an end in himself
but a means to a higher end, namely the attainment of salvation in the heavenly
Beyond, it follows that he must one day be overcome, to use a Nietzschean-type expression, in the interests of
evolutionary progress. Above man will
come, after the next civilization, the post-human life forms of the
transcendental millennium, which will be derived from him as, in the first
case, brains artificially supported and sustained in communal contexts, and, in
the second case, following the removal or transcendence of the old brain, new
brains artificially supported and sustained in more intensely communal
contexts. These two life forms, the
Supermen and Superbeings respectively, are beyond us
in evolutionary development, and because we aren't simply creatures of the
present, like animals, but capable of projecting our minds backwards or
forwards in time, we intimate of this future millennial stage of evolution by
placing coloured lights and/or silver balls on a Christmas tree every year
which, whether or not we're consciously aware of the fact, symbolize the life
forms in question."
Mr. Keane's astonishment at hearing this
constrained him to silence for several seconds, before he could bring himself
to articulate an incredulous response.
"You mean to tell me that men will one day cease to exist, as we
know them, and instead become so many brains hanging on a tree?" he
well-nigh exclaimed.
"Only the 'tree' will be an artificial
one," Gill said, "and the brains won't so much hang as be
supported. There'll be thousands of
these tree-like supports all over the planet, which will be maintained and
supervised by specially-qualified men, who'll function as technicians. There's no other way to Heaven than via a
post-human millennium."
Mr. Keane scratched his head in manifest
perplexity and turned towards the Christmas tree. There were at least fifty fairy lights in six
different colours on it, and almost as many silver balls. There were also some strands of tinsel and,
right at the top, a plastic angel with a star-tipped wand in its tiny
hand. Having glanced over all this, he
turned back to his guest and asked: "Could it be that I'm intimating of
both the Supermen and Superbeings simultaneously,
then?"
He was of course alluding to the fact that
there were silver balls as well as fairy lights on his tree, and Joseph Gill
quickly cottoned-on to the apparent incongruity of the situation, allowing
himself the ironic luxury of some mild amusement at his neighbour's expense. "That could well be," he smilingly
replied. "Though whether you choose
to equate the silver balls with Supermen or, alternatively, their superbeingful successors ... doesn't really matter. If you want to intimate of only the first
phase of the post-human millennium, you may as well remove the silver balls and
leave the fairy lights to symbolize the Supermen. Alternatively, you could skip the first phase
and have the silver balls symbolizing the second phase of millennial time, that
of our projected Superbeings. Or, assuming you prefer to leave things as
they are, you could intimate of both phases at once - an intimation which,
despite its illogicality from an evolutionary
standpoint, is no less pertinent to the Christmas spirit. Myself, I'd prefer to concentrate on the Superbeings and thus intimate of the millennial phase
immediately preceding transcendence."
Mr. Keane chuckled and, pointing to the toy
angel, said: "For which, presumably, the fairy at the top of the tree
would be an appropriate symbol?"
"Yes, it's towards the angel that
evolution must go when transcendence eventually occurs. For it symbolizes the heavenly goal and is
accordingly positioned on the topmost branch, as at the culmination of superbeingful evolution from which pure spirit will duly
emerge in supra-atomic blessedness. The
angel's tiny wand points in the direction, as it were, of the heavenly Beyond,
and its tip symbolizes pure spirit."
Mr. Keane was visibly excited by now, and
marvelled to think that he had been in the dark about this, metaphorically
speaking, all along! "So pure
spirit would escape from matter," he commented, "leaving behind it
the shattered remnants of a new-brain
collectivization. If one imagines all
these fairy lights smashed to smithereens ... one would presumably have a
symbol for the effects of transcendence."
Joseph Gill winced slightly and took a
sharp breath. "Not a very pleasant
symbol, considering the mess they'd make!" he averred. "And hardly one that
I'd like you to implement, either before or after Christmas. For it would approximate to a diabolical
situation, the kind of situation that could arise were pure spirit to break
free of brain matter and leave a subatomic context of cursed proton-proton
reaction in its heavenly wake! At
Christmas, we prefer to concentrate on the blessed, even if this means that we
can only symbolize what precedes transcendence and thus, in effect, the
ultimate Last Judgement."
"So these fairy lights are to stand
for new brains?" Mr. Keane mused.
"Yes.
And when they're lit up, as at present, they could be regarded as
symbolizing the hypermeditation which Superbeings will be engaged in experiencing."
"And what if they're intended to
intimate of the preceding, or superhuman, phase of the post-human
millennium?" Mr. Keane asked, becoming purposely difficult.
"Well, in that event, their use will
symbolize the LSD trip, or equivalent hallucinogenic commitment, which each
Superman will be experiencing."
Mr. Keane looked slightly puzzled again and
scratched his head to prove it.
"You say 'each Superman'.
Does that mean each light can symbolize a different Superman,
then?"
"Oh,
absolutely!" Gill replied.
"The Supermen would be in the plural on any given support/sustain
system, because each one is an individual by dint of the fact that he retains
the totality of his brain and is therefore capable of a degree of egocentric
consciousness. With the surgical removal
of the old brain, however, the ensuing new-brain collectivizations
would each constitute a single entity, since post-visionary, and so there would
be one Superbeing to each support/sustain system -
indeed, the support/sustain system would be an integral part of the Superbeing, just as, in an antithetical context, trunk and
branches are an integral part of a tree.
In fact, they are the tree. Thus you can regard these fairy lights as
designed to symbolize either a collection of individual Supermen, artificially
supported and sustained, or the principal part of a Superbeing
- namely, the collectivized new-brains.
This latter viewpoint would, of course, be closer to Heaven, since
appertaining to a higher phase of the post-human millennium."
Mr. Keane thought a moment while looking at
his Christmas tree, then said: "I tend to regard
the lights as individual entities, presumably because they're not all that
close together or I'm insufficiently evolved to see them as symbolizing the
principal part of a Superbeing. I'll just have to settle for an intimation of
the lower or first phase of what you call the post-human millennium, I
think."
"Well, that's still a lot better than
not knowing that a Christmas tree intimates of anything at all," his
neighbour declared, smiling. "At
least you're now looking up towards the future in expectation of better things
to come. The Supermen won't attain to
transcendence, but at least they're in a line of ascent leading directly to
what will - namely the Superbeings."
Mr. Keane smiled delightedly, like a child
who had just received a knowledge of something that had hitherto escaped its
understanding. Now at last he could
inform his inquisitive son of the truth about Christmas trees! He was no longer a hapless ignoramus.
"Of course, the average Christian
doesn't equate such a symbol-leaden tree with the post-human millennium,"
Gill continued, ignoring his host's self-satisfaction, "but, rather, with
Heaven, which he doesn't regard as the goal of evolution so much as a world
following on behind this one at death.
There is no place for a post-human millennium in a typical Christian's
account of Christmas trees, even though the symbolism is much more appropriate,
in this context, to a millennial stage of evolution than to the heavenly
Beyond. It will only be with the coming
transcendental civilization that men will look upon the context in question in
a way similar to myself, a way which stresses the role
of the post-human millennium. For by
then they'll have ceased to celebrate Christmas, as we understand it, but be
celebrating some equivalent festival, in which the role of the post-human
millennium will be formally acknowledged.
Whether they'll still refer to this festival in Christian terms ... we
can't of course know. But it oughtn't to
surprise us if it transpires that they adopt a different name - one, say,
associated with the Second Coming - and treat this festival as unique to the
transcendental civilization. After all,
it will eventually be celebrated on a world-wide basis, in accordance with the
global nature of ultimate civilization, and you can't expect people of non-Christian
descent - which includes the vast majority of Third World peoples - to switch
to celebrating Christmas, as though it pertained to world civilization and
should therefore be adopted as the logical successor to whatever analogous
festival they or their ancestors traditionally celebrated. As it happens, Christianity is merely one of
a number of so-called world religions, so its major festival will have to be
superseded by a festival relevant to all peoples
... once the transcendental civilization comes properly to pass. Probably this new festival won't be held on
December 25th or 26th, or at a time corresponding to the analogous festivals of
other world religions, but at some other, more appropriate time. We shall just have to wait and see or,
rather, leave it to posterity to decide for themselves."
Mr. Keane nodded deferentially, though not
without a slightly bemused expression on his handsome face. All this futuristic speculation was too new
and problematic to be properly intelligible to him. Nevertheless it engendered some fresh
curiosity in his fertile mind, which prompted him to ask: "And would
people still erect Christmas trees in their homes, like us?"
It was a difficult question to answer and
Joseph Gill felt obliged to reflect a moment, before replying: "Yes, I
imagine so. Though probably on different
terms and with other materials than your own.
Like, for example, the use of purely synthetic trees or perhaps even
branch-like supports which won't so much resemble a tree as the future collectivized
support/sustain systems of the post-human millennium. Perhaps these branch-like supports will have
more and smaller lights on them than does your
Christmas tree, or perhaps they won't use electric lights at all, but some
superior medium of illumination and symbolism.
Thus the Christmas tree, as we understand it, would simply be an
ancestor of this superior offspring, a sort of symbolic forerunner."
"So you don't think the basic concept
will become anachronistic or obsolete, with the advent of the coming
civilization?" Mr. Keane deduced in a touchingly deferential
tone-of-voice.
Gill gently shook his head. "The post-human millennium will still be
ahead of the men of that ultimate civilization and, as such, there's no reason
why they shouldn't intimate of it in an analogous manner to us. Christianity would seem to be superior to
other world religions to the extent that its chief festival already intimates,
if unconsciously, of the post-human millennium in this way. I don't think you'll find anything that
corresponds to a Christmas tree in Hinduism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Judaism, Shintoism, or whatever.
So while meditation would have to be partly adopted from oriental
precedent, there would seem to be no reason why Christmas trees, or something
analogous, shouldn't be adopted from Christianity. They serve a purpose, and that purpose must
continue to remain valid while men are still struggling towards the post-human
millennium rather than actually in it - as more evolved life forms. The Christmas tree serves as a focal-point
for reminding people, at Christmas, what life is really all about, i.e. a
struggle to evolve towards ultimate divinity and eventually become one with
it. This is the highest interpretation
one can attach to life, the only interpretation that really justifies our being
here in this world at all. Anything
less, say sexual or familial interpretations, would simply reduce us to the
level of animals rather than elevate us to the status of potential gods. But that plastic angel at the top of your
tree leaves one in no doubt as to where evolution is tending and how it will
end, irrespective of what worldly or reactionary people may like to imagine, or
how deceptive such symbolism can be when foolishly taken at face-value."
It was at this juncture in their
conversation, however, that Mr. Keane's wife and children returned from their
cold walk, to enter the warm sitting room with vociferous accounts of their
impressions of the snowscape without. Young Richard was especially excited by the
opportunity of relating to his father what he had done and seen while
traversing the snow-clogged paths, while his sister and mother busied
themselves with warming their hands over the electric fire. Gill now realized that there was no possibility
of his continuing to enlighten his neighbour, so resigned himself, in tactful
politeness, to fading into the humble background of inconsequential
chatter. Having listened to and humbly
commented upon his son's manifold impressions, Mr. Keane drew Richard's
attention to the Christmas tree, which was all aglow with the various-coloured
lights and their reflections on the silver balls. Richard stared at it in bafflement a few
seconds, and then asked: "But, papa, why have you put a toy angel right at
the very top?"
"Ah, that would be
telling!" replied the wiser father, who cast his still-seated guest an
ironic wink.
MUSICAL THEORIES
Walter
Brian had theories about everything, including music, of which subject he was
very fond. He was, as they say, a music
lover, and his loving ranged from the classics, preferably modern, to jazz,
also preferably modern, and with a little opera, ballet, soul, and rock
thrown-in for good measure. The classics
pertained to the serious part of his spectrum of musical tastes, jazz, soul,
and rock to its comparatively frivolous part, while ballet, opera, and some
kinds of modern jazz had a place somewhere in-between, in a kind of compromise
zone of frivolous seriousness or serious frivolity. Besides listening to music, Walter Brian
would often expatiate on it to his friends, and sometimes the conversation that
resulted would spill over, as it were, into one or more of the other arts, as
analogies were drawn in relation to the interdependence of the Arts as a whole.
On this occasion, Walter Brian was holding
forth on the subject of what he called 'bourgeois music' to two of his closest
friends, whose eagerness to comprehend suggested that they were closer to
becoming disciples. These were Malcolm
Murphy and Arthur Kearns, who sat on separate cushions facing their host,
himself comfortably seated to one side of a large open window through which the
July sun poured its relentless heat.
"Fundamentally there are two kinds of
bourgeois music, which are the romantic and the classic respectively," he
was saying. "But each kind is
itself divisible into two stages, which we may define as a stage more grand
than petty bourgeois on the one hand, and a stage more petty than grand bourgeois
on the other. This in itself reflects
the relative nature of the bourgeoisie, who are compounded, as it were, of an
amalgam of grand- and petty-bourgeois elements."
There was a murmur of approval from Malcolm
Murphy, while Arthur Kearns simply nodded his bulbous head in apparent
agreement.
"Chronologically considered, the
romantic kind precedes the classic kind," Walter Brian continued,
"and we may ascribe to the nineteenth century a predominantly romantic
bias which was to lead, in the early-twentieth century, to the neo-classicism
of the finest bourgeois music.
Romanticism may be defined as a reaction against; classicism, by
contrast, as an attraction towards. The
former is predominantly materialistic in character, the latter ...
predominantly spiritual. The one signifies a Becoming, the other a
Become."
Malcolm Murphy scratched his right cheek,
pouted slightly ominously, and then languidly said: "Presumably bourgeois
romanticism was largely a reaction against aristocratic classicism, which had
attained to its high-point in the eighteenth century?"
"Indeed it was!" Walter Brian
confirmed with spontaneous exuberance, "and this stage of romantic
reaction was more grand bourgeois than petty bourgeois in character. We're dealing here with composers such as
Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, and Saint-Saëns, who composed in
a relatively tonal manner. With the
twentieth century, however, we enter an age of bourgeois classicism, though
such neo-classicism had also prevailed, to a limited extent and at various
times, in the preceding century, as in certain of the works of Grieg, Bruckner, and Bizet."
"A complicator
could argue that some of it was really an extension of aristocratic classicism
rather than the earliest manifestation of neo-classicism," Arthur Kearns
opined, to the low-key amusement of his companions.
"Certainly he could," Walter
Brian generously conceded. "And
doubtless some of it was, particularly in works of the early Beethoven, in
Weber, Mendelssohn, Gounod, and Reinecke. However, it's only with the twentieth century
that we arrive at the principal age of neo-classicism, which divides, as you
may already have guessed, into two types, viz. a type more grand than petty
bourgeois in character, and, opposed to it, a type more petty than grand
bourgeois. The first type we may define
as tonal, the second as atonal, though still confined to acoustic means. In each case, we're in the realm of a
spiritual Become, but of a Become that varies according to the class bias of
the composer concerned. Thus the first,
or lower, type of neo-classicism had for its chief practitioners composers like
Martinu, Hindemith, Elgar,
Vaughan Williams, Holst, Satie,
Ravel, Poulenc, Stravinsky, and Honegger,
who mostly worked within a tonal context, though not one suggesting an affinity
with the more radical late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century romantic
composers, like Tchaikovsky, Rubenstein, Strauss, Wagner, and Mahler -
complications and complicators aside."
Arthur Kearns chuckled personal
acknowledgement of this allusion to himself, but graciously
refrained from complicating. Malcolm
Murphy smiled benignly, then remarked: "Of all
the composers you mentioned, Martinu was, in my
opinion, the most outstandingly consistent exponent of the first type of
neo-classicism."
Walter Brian raised his brows in sceptical
concession to the possible veracity of this bold contention, and simply said:
"You may well be right. For I often
tend to think of Martinu as a kind of
twentieth-century Mozart, meaning that he was the possessor of a creative
facility reminiscent, in its broad range, of what Mozart possessed in his own
sphere of musical invention."
"In similar vein, I regard Honegger as a kind of twentieth-century Beethoven,"
Malcolm Murphy confessed. "Though
with regard to the classical rather than to the romantic phase of Beethoven's
work. There is certainly a distinct
facial likeness between the two men, at any rate, which suggests to me the
likelihood of a musical link ..."
"I wish I could verify the correctness
of your hypothesis," Arthur Kearns interposed. "But, unfortunately, I've yet to see a
photo of Honegger or hear a major example of his
work."
Walter Brian reflected briefly before
conceding, for Malcolm Murphy's benefit, that there was probably some truth in
what he had said, though he couldn't stipulate exactly how much. Nevertheless, with regard to the second type
of neo-classicism, he had this to say: "Being more petty
than grand bourgeois in character, it pursued a predominantly atonal path,
though not in an anarchic, and hence romantic, manner, but with reference to
certain technical conventions, such as pertained to the adoption of the
twelve-note scale and its serial realization.
This scale, first introduced by Schoenberg and subsequently adopted by
both Berg and Webern, laid the foundations for the
erection of a neo-classicism more petty than grand bourgeois in character,
which found its painterly equivalent in the purist abstraction of neo-plasticism, as practised by, amongst others, Mondrian, just as the first type of neo-classicism found
its painterly equivalent in symbolism, that predominantly representational
art.... Now although these two types of neo-classicism at first co-existed in
the early-twentieth century, the atonal type was destined to supersede the
tonal as the principal mode of bourgeois creativity - a mode which, even now,
continues to be upheld by certain late neo-classical composers, including Tippett and Williamson."
Arthur Kearns remained true to form by
remarking: "The earlier mode also continued to be upheld by certain late
neo-classical composers, including Walton and Berkeley." This remark was respected, though not
commented upon, by Walter Brian, because Malcolm Murphy had something of his
own to contribute to the debate.
"Since the later neo-classicism developed
out of the earlier, are we therefore to suppose that a similar arrangement duly
applies to a new development of romanticism?" he asked.
Walter Brian shook his head. "There's no evidence suggesting that to
be the case," he replied, "because romanticism tends to react against
a previous classical attainment, and this was generally so with the emergence,
earlier this century, of a second type of bourgeois romanticism, which reacted
against the first type of neo-classicism.
As to whether the later type of neo-classicism developed out of the
earlier ... it seems to me that whilst it may have owed something to its
predecessor, the main impetus of development came from a combination of
factors, both in terms of an extension of - though implicit reaction against -
tonal bourgeois romanticism into atonal channels and, by contrast, an
aspiration towards, through experimental precocity, a higher and, as yet,
unrealized ideal. That, I believe, is
the case as regards the second type of neo-classicism.
"As regards the second type of
romanticism, however, the neo-romanticism, as it were, of composers more petty
than grand bourgeois in creative scope," he went on, riding the wave of
his own ebullience, "that was largely a reaction, as I said, against tonal
neo-classicism, and, as such, it scorned any affiliation with tonal
procedures. Neither did it adopt such
serial procedures as applied to atonal neo-classicism, but forged an atonal
style, through acoustic means, independently of them. Thus was it romantic and, by definition,
materialistic, focusing attention upon the surface rather than alluding to some
profounder meaning lying underneath ... in the technical depths, as it
were. Its painterly equivalent was
abstract expressionism, and its chief practitioners included composers like Russolo, Varèse, Cage, Boulez,
Stockhausen, Tavener, and Rawsthorne
- some of whom are still working in a similar vein at present, albeit not
always in acoustic terms."
There ensued a thoughtful pause in the
discussion before Arthur Kearns asked: "Would the use of electronic
instruments alter the class integrity of the music, then?"
Walter Brian nodded briskly. "If used consistently in an atonal
context, electronic instruments would apply to a proletarian romanticism
reacting against the second neo-classicism of acoustic serialists
such as Schoenberg and Webern. Should this music follow a similar or more
advanced serial pattern in electronic terms, however, then it would constitute
a proletarian classicism - the highest possible development of the
classical. But we're unlikely to hear
much of that kind of music before the next civilization gets properly under way
on exclusively transcendental terms. In
the meantime, the voice of serious proletarian music will be predominantly romantic,
as befitting the materialistic nature of the age and in accordance with the
legitimate epochal reaction of such music against neo-classical precedent. This ultimate romanticism finds its visual
equivalent in the neon everywhichway light-art of contemporary
proletarian artists. Such is the
transitional nature of the age, however, that a practising artist or musician
can be petty bourgeois in one context and proletarian in another, depending on
whether he's utilizing natural or synthetic means, and how these means are
being utilized. Stockhausen affords us a
typical example of this indeterminate phenomenon, because some of his atonal
music is acoustic and some of it electronic.
The bulk of it, however, is romantic."
"No man is born an absolute," Malcolm
Murphy declared, a wry smile on his haggard face.
"Apparently not these days,"
Arthur Kearns countered, chuckling aloud.
"Though there were times when a composer's music adhered to a
definite context, as with Mozart, and doubtless such times will arise again ...
come the advent of a more absolutist age."
Walter Brian saw no reason to doubt that
conjecture, and duly offered its instigator a confident nod. "Yes, the future will belong to the
proletarian classicist," he solemnly averred. "As thinkers, however, it's our business
to extricate what sense we can from the seemingly chaotic present, thereby
arriving at certain conclusions about it which may be of service to posterity
and to the future development of music.
We will, of course, be generalizing both composers and movements into
near-absolutist categories. But an age
like this leaves us very little alternative!
If we have brought some order from out the indeterminate muddle, we'll
have served our purpose. Or almost so!"
Malcolm Murphy scratched his right cheek a
moment, and then said: "One thing you haven't told us, and that pertains
to the painterly equivalent of tonal bourgeois romanticism. That's the missing link in the puzzle."
"Ah, perhaps I had thought that too
obvious to be worth mentioning," Walter Brian responded, his face
betraying a degree of surprise.
"Its equivalent is, of course, romanticism - as practised by
artists such as Delacroix, Gericault, Friedrich, and
Turner."
Malcolm Murphy smiled in apparent
satisfaction with this answer and admitted that the puzzle was now solved.
"All except for impressionism,"
Arthur Kearns declared with complicator's zest.
"Which is nothing more than an extreme
manifestation of the first type of bourgeois romanticism," Walter Brian
assured him. "Whether in art or
music, the intention is approximately the same: to give a surface impression in
quasi-abstract terms rather than to hint, like symbolism, at underlying
spiritual depths. Thus it is
materialist, and thereby akin to the romantic."
"I admit defeat," said Arthur
Kearns.
"And I proclaim victory," Malcolm
Murphy added. "For now we can talk
about something else."
"Whatever you like," sighed
Walter Brian, who felt he had theorized long and boldly enough about 'bourgeois
music' for the time being.
TWO-WAY SWITCH
"Literature
can be a lot of things, but one thing it must be, in this day and age, is
anti-natural and, thus, pro-artificial," the writer Gaston Healy was
saying to no-one in particular but to everyone in general ... at the height of
the literary discussion which had evolved, over a number of minutes, in the
sitting room of art-dealer Reginald Rice's two-storied inner-city flat. "So-called realism is strictly passé,"
he continued, "being akin, when it intrudes overmuch, to a cancer that
must be eradicated. People should be
able to behave towards one another in literature as they wouldn't ordinarily
behave in real life but, exceptions to the rule notwithstanding, as the writer
feels they ought to behave and one day possibly will behave
..."
"Or, alternatively, as the writer
feels they ought not to behave, though possibly did behave in the past,"
Judith Hagley interposed with roguish glee. She was Gaston's current girlfriend.
Healy didn't consider that worth a verbal
endorsement, but smiled graciously all the same. Others laughed aloud or chuckled with
intermediate commitment.
"Literature can do lots of things, but one thing it must do, these
days, is provide the reader with a psychological catharsis, in order that he
may be relieved, if only temporarily, from the burden of social repression and
thereby be enabled to acquire the simulacrum of freedom from social
constraint. You may read things in
literature that you would never dare say to anyone in public. You may encounter deeds in literature that
you would never dare commit in person."
"You make it sound rather too much
like the dark side of the moon," Reginald's baritone voice boomed in the
heated atmosphere of the moment. "There's
no reason why literature should be reduced to the status of a kind of
psychological sewer through which the rats of one's mind may swim if they
desire nourishment."
"Here, here!" a shy young man
called Peter Hall affirmed in the wake of a brief burst of applause from those
more actively engaged in the discussion.
"Literature varies to a great extent with the writer, but is
usually of a predominantly philosophical or a predominantly poetical cast,
though a balance between the two biases is technically possible, if not often
achieved these days."
"And what kind of a writer would you
describe yourself as?" Reginald boomingly inquired of him.
"A philosophical one
unfortunately," Hall admitted with disarming modesty, largely for the
benefit of the ladies present. "And
one, moreover, who regards himself as a classicist."
"Really?" the host and one of his
guests responded simultaneously. The
latter was Patricia Doherty, a friend of Judith's, who then ventured to ask
Hall on what criterion this value-judgement was based?
"Oh, on a number of
criteria actually," the latter corrected, becoming faintly embarrassed in
finding himself the cynosure of sceptical curiosity. "But primarily on the fact that the superconscious prevails over the subconscious in such a way
as to ensure a maximum order and logic to one's work, in fidelity to a higher
approximation to perfection. With the
romantic, however, it's usually the subconscious which is given free rein to
disrupt previous patterns of classical convention and forge a new, if
materialistic, path. But this path
should eventually lead not to a romantic dead-end but ... to a higher
classicism, the beginnings, in fact, of a superior pattern of classical
convention in fidelity to a fresh concept of perfection."
There were a number of contradictory
expenditures of breath at large on the air at this point - some expressing
bewilderment, others admiration. It was
apparent that not many people had thought about the distinction between
romantic and classic in such a way, nor formed any clear concept of the
changing criteria of perfection. Miss
Doherty, tall and elegant spinster, was one of those people, and she
accordingly inquired of the philosopher what he meant by perfection.
"In my case," Hall promptly
replied, "it's a matter of orientating one's work towards a condition of
ultimate spiritual freedom, as applying to the freeing of philosophy from
traditional proton constraints and its consequent elevation to a post-atomic
theoretical bias, as would seem to reflect a convergence to unity on the level
of proletarian philosophy. My approach
to perfection doesn't just derive from a desire to emulate 'the Creator', nor
from a desire to create a dualistic balance in deference to atomic criteria,
but is connected with an aspiration towards ultimate divinity, which demands,
in my opinion, a post-atomic approach to the ideal in question."
Somewhat bemused, Reginald Rice now took
over the reins of inquiry by asking whether, in that case, there were not three
levels of perfection to be approximated in the history or unfolding of
classical development - what he described as a pre-atomic, an atomic, and a
post-atomic?
"In point of fact, there are
four," Hall corrected, to the further bemusement of his host. "As regards Western civilization in
particular, one may list classical progress in terms of class distinctions from
the aristocracy to the grand bourgeoisie on the one hand, and from the petty
bourgeoisie to the proletariat on the other.
Aristocratic classicism had for its ideal of perfection the emulation of
nature, and was thus somewhat pagan and/or Catholic in character. Grand-bourgeois classicism, however, was more
given to conceiving of perfection in terms of a compromise between nature and
civilization, since orientated towards Christ rather than the Father, and was
accordingly Protestant in character.
Petty-bourgeois classicism, although subject to a compromise concept of
perfection, strove to emphasize the spirit above the body, and was accordingly
closer to a transcendent attitude to perfection, while yet maintaining
allegiance to naturalistic roots. It
reflected a transition between the atomic and the post-atomic. Only, however, with proletarian classicism
can an exclusive aspiration towards the Divine Omega be endorsed, as perfection
is conceived in terms of a wholly post-atomic transcendentalism requiring the
creation, through literary collectivization, of a fusion literature in fidelity
to the Holy Spirit, which we may regard as the future culmination of evolution
in ultimate spiritual unity.
Collectivization approximates literature, whether philosophical or
poetical, to that divine unity in a format transcending all separate
genres. There is therefore no stemming
from the Diabolic Alpha in separate genres, which reflect the influence of the
solar roots of evolution in the Many, but solely an aspiration towards the
Divine Omega in an approximation, through collectivization, to the future
One."
As the philosopher paused at this juncture
in his rather complex discourse, Judith interposed by asking: "Does this
gradual evolution of classicism from one interpretation of perfection to
another imply a corresponding shift from appearance to essence, as from beauty
to truth?"
"Indeed it does," Hall replied,
quite flushed by the exertion required to concentrate sufficient attention on
his fellow-guest's question. "An
approximation to perfection conceived in terms of emulating the natural works
of 'the Creator' presupposes an emphasis on beauty, whereas the converse of this
approach, in what I've termed proletarian classicism, requires that the
emphasis be placed on truth, which is essential rather than apparent, and thus
akin to the supernatural constitution of transcendent spirit. In between, during the bourgeois phases of
classical evolution, the approach to perfection is atomic, and consequently
balanced, in varying degrees, between beauty, on the one hand, and truth, on
the other."
"'Beauty is truth, truth
beauty'," Gaston Healy quoted, referring the company to the bourgeois
sentiments of atomistic Keats.
"So in swinging from one extreme to
another, as from the Father to the Holy Spirit, the pendulum of classical
evolution tends from emulation of the Diabolic Alpha to an aspiration towards
the Divine Omega via a compromise realm of Christianity coming
in-between?" Miss Doherty tremulously suggested.
"That's approximately correct,"
Hall admitted, "evolution being a journey, so to speak, from the stars to
the ultimate globe of transcendent spirit."
"Which latter has presumably still to
come about?" Judith conjectured in an ambivalent tone-of-voice.
"Correct again," he assured
her. "Considered in any ultimate
sense, God, as the ultimate Spiritual Globe, doesn't yet exist, since
definitive spiritual unity can only be established at the culmination of
evolution in the Universe, and we on earth are still at quite an evolutionary
remove from transcendence, let alone the subsequent fusion of separate
transcendences from whichever part of the Universe into one ultimate globe of
... God the Holy Spirit or, in Teilhard de Chardin's admirable terminology, the Omega Point. It is of course possible - and I incline to
grant this hypothesis credence - that Spiritual Globes from more advanced
planets than our own in the Universe may already be en route,
as it were, to Ultimate Oneness in the heavenly Beyond. But their individual presences in space would
no more constitute the Omega Point ... than the planets, at one evolutionary
remove from the stars, constitute the Alpha Points, so to speak, of the
billions of stellar globes flaming separately in space. What begins in the Many must culminate in the
One, but not until that One is attained to ... will evolution be complete and
the Universe achieve perfection in the ultimate
context of the Omega Point."
"Fascinating!" exclaimed
Reginald, who was unaccustomed to such a high level of philosophical discourse,
whether in relation to Teilhard de Chardin or anyone else, and, for that reason, still
slightly bemused. "Does all this
speculation make you an atheist, then?"
"Yes," Hall replied,
"because I equate God, conceived definitively, with the Omega Point,
which, as I said, can only be in the process of formation, not an
already-existent fact. Numerous
Spiritual Globes may already be converging towards one another in the heavenly
Beyond, but they would be at least at one evolutionary remove from omega unity
and couldn't be substituted for it.
Their essential constitution would doubtless correspond to a heavenly
condition, but they would be more like fragments of Heaven, Omega Absolutes,
than the actual definitive Heaven of the Omega Point. They'd be antithetically equivalent to the
planets, which are material globes.
"As for the alpha absolutes ... of the
stars," he continued, considerably warming to his thesis, "they would
correspond to Hell, their proton-proton constitution embracing the most
inferior doing, not the supreme being of the electron freedom of transcendent
spirit. Of course, Hell and Heaven are
theological postulates involving value judgements unique to religion. We don't consider the stars as Hell when we
look up at the night sky, but simply as stars.
Hell, together with such concepts as the Devil and the Creator, is
loaded with subconscious associations peculiar to theology. But the actual constitution of the stars is,
you'll find, the very converse of what transcendent spirit would be, involving,
as I said, the most inferior doing in a context of diabolical soul. I'm not one to confound the Diabolic Alpha
with the Divine Omega, or to specialize in worshipping the former. Let's simplify: God the Father, God the Son,
and God the Holy Spirit - three stages of godhead from the alpha to the omega
via a dualistic compromise. All very
theological, but highly pertinent to an understanding of the atheistic
position, insofar as a man is an atheist because he doesn't believe in the
existence of God conceived in terms of, say, the Holy Spirit, but contends that
it's destined to arise at the culmination of evolution as the Omega Point. And he is such an atheist because his psyche
is more post-atomic than atomic in constitution, and consequently disinclines
him to relate to the atomic level of God, which is Jesus Christ. Neither can he relate to the pre-atomic level
of God in, for example, the Father, which is the proton level derived, in all
probability, from both the sun and the core of the earth rather than, like
Jehovah, from the governing star at the centre of the Galaxy, from which no
'Son of God' could logically have been extrapolated. His superconscious
mind preponderates over his subconscious one in the ratio of at least 3:1, so
it's quite impossible for him to relate to either pre-atomic or atomic levels
of God. But he desires, instead, to
assist in the development of a post-atomic level such as must correspond, in
its ultimate manifestation, to definitive spiritual supremacy. He turns his back on the Lie and the
half-lie/half-truth in favour of the Truth, which has yet to become manifest in
the Universe."
"But truth about the Truth is
certainly manifest in this room through what you're saying, Peter,"
Reginald Rice's baritone voice declared, as admiration at length got the better
of bemusement in his mind. "Now I
can understand why you're a superior classicist! You've got to the theoretical truth, and are
accordingly obliged to treat your philosophical literature in a manner
stressing being and truth rather than doing and beauty. Essence predominates over appearance in your
work."
"Evidently to a quite considerable
extent," Gaston Healy piped-in, stirring himself from the half-sleep in
which he had wallowed during the greater part of the philosopher's rather
mystical discourse. "The chief
difference between us, Pete, isn't simply that you're a philosopher and I'm, by
contrast, a poet, but that I'm a romantic and you're a classicist. Doing and beauty take precedence over being
and truth in my works, which evidently correspond to a subconscious bias."
"It's just that you're a literary
sinner and he's a literary saint!" Judith opined, allowing herself the
luxury of a teasing smile.
"Yes, one could put it that way,"
Healy conceded.
* * *
Later that
evening, when everyone but Patricia Doherty had left for home, the art dealer
took to thinking about some of the things which had passed for conversation
between his guests, particularly as bearing on Peter Hall's adventurous
discourse, and wondered to himself whether he would ever hear the likes of such
an elevated level of conversation again.
Was it possible, he mused, that man was no more than a relatively
insignificant link in a chain stretching from the alpha absolutes of diabolic
soul to the omega absolutes of divine spirit?
It seemed strange, and yet, if the philosopher's evolutionary theories
were correct, there could be no denying the transitory nature of man, nor any
possibility of refuting Nietzsche's dictum that 'Man was something that should
be overcome'. Humanism could, under
certain circumstances, become an obstacle to that overcoming, a reaction from
the exigencies of evolutionary progress ... as effecting the transformation of
man from one level, namely the atomic, to another level, namely the
post-atomic, such as would become fully manifest in what Hall had termed the
transcendental civilization. For above
and beyond man, apparently, was the millennial Superman, and the Superman would
be post-human to the extent of being a brain artificially supported and
sustained in collectivized contexts - as much post-human, in fact, as apes
swinging collectively in the branches of trees were and remain pre-human. And just as trees pre-dated apes in the
chronology of evolutionary development on earth, so would the Superbeings of the second phase of millennial time
post-date Supermen in that same evolutionary chronology, as new-brain collectivizations forming, on each artificial
support/sustain system, not a gathering of independent beings but ... a
completely new entity, antithetical in constitution to a tree! And from that link in the evolutionary chain,
far more significant from a spiritual point-of-view than the preceding one, it
would be just a matter of time before, accustomed to the utmost dynamic
meditation, spirit became transcendent and broke free of new-brain atomicity to
attain to a free-electron salvation in the context of Spiritual Globes -
fragments, so to speak, of absolute mind converging towards and expanding into
thousands of other such fragments in a process destined to culminate in the ultimate
Spiritual Globe of ... the Omega Point.
Oh my! What reasoning and what
genius! How could any one man think like
that with but a human mind!
Reginald Rice was at a loss to understand
it and, noticing Miss Doherty staring at him with a degree of bemused curiosity
on her attractive face, he said: "You know, that
Peter Hall must be the Messiah. There's
no other explanation of his knowledge."
"Yes, you're probably right," she
agreed, nodding thoughtfully and with a degree of concern. "As Christ said that no-one would enter
the 'Kingdom of Heaven' who didn't come unto Him, meaning of course His
teachings, so this man, who would seem to correspond to a Second Coming in his
messianic insights, says: 'Unless men adopt my teachings and set themselves on
the millennial road to the post-human life forms, they will never attain to the
heavenly Beyond. For spirit can only get
to that transcendent goal via the superhuman and superbeingful
phases of a post-human millennium. He is
saying pretty much the same thing as Christ, only saying it on a higher, more
evolved level."
Reginald smiled appreciatively and lowered
his head in thought a moment. "But
he doesn't say that to everyone," he remarked in due course. "He's not expecting dualists to become
transcendentalists. For, to paraphrase
Nietzsche, 'they're not the ears for his mouth'. He doesn't expect to have any effect on
dualistic civilization, because it would be incapable, in his estimation, of
transforming itself into the ultimate one.
He's too clever to fall into the trap of imagining that he can have any
influence on it, that it can be transformed simply through accepting his
truth. It cannot accept his
truth, for that presupposes a post-atomic will, and where there's no such thing
... there can only be an atomic stasis.
He's an outsider in Britain, a man of the future. The transcendental civilization can only be
brought about following the eclipse of dualistic civilization. He knows that!"
"Knows it too well," Miss Doherty
admitted. "But believes that
dualistic civilization cannot be eclipsed except from without, through the
agency of external pressures from a country or countries more given to
messianic leanings. The upholders of
dualism needn't even fear his work, his philosophical truth, for it couldn't
lead to a revolution because no such thing is possible here."
"It wouldn't be historically
logical," Reginald opined, "since dualistic civilization will
probably persist in its traditional tracks until it's toppled from without ...
presumably through a combination of American and European pressures. The Roman civilization testified to the same
fact, which is, after all, a law of history."
Miss Doherty shook her head in bewilderment
and exclaimed: "To think he did all his great work in London! He was brought-up in England, you know. Has never lived anywhere
else - except, of course, as a child.
Is, I suppose, a sort of Englishman, though an exceptional one by any
objective standards!"
"An interesting parallel with Moses in
a way," Reginald murmured.
"Born a Jew but brought up in
"Yes, I suppose so," Miss Doherty
admitted, smiling briefly. "He
acquired the benefit of an English education, relatively free from religious
superstition or shackles, and became accustomed to living in a more civilized
environment. That's the main reason, I
should think, why he has climbed to such philosophical heights - his work owing
much to the artificial influence of big-city life, which, acting on his native
Irish intelligence, resulted in works of unprecedented truth."
"Quite remarkable, the way environment
can condition intelligence!" Reginald declared. "Live long enough in an intensively
artificial environment and you begin to think transcendentally. Live in a rural environment for any length of
time and, by contrast, you think mundanely - in pseudo-pagan terms. That's the essence of class distinctions, you
know! The gradual
ascendancy of one class over another which corresponds to environmental
differences, as reflecting evolutionary progress from nature towards the
supernatural. It follows that the
last class to arise must, as Marx taught, be the proletariat, who stem, in
their cities, from an intensely artificial environment and thereby approximate
more closely to the supernatural."
"Ironic that Peter should have been
born into a middle-class family but gradually have become proletarianized
through confinement in London for a number of years," Miss Doherty
averred. "Proletarianized,
I mean, to the extent that he began to think in a way reflecting that city's
artificial influence and to endorse, in consequence, post-atomic theories of
evolution. An ordinary, bona fide
proletarian wouldn't have possessed the innate intelligence to get to Peter's
high level of thought. But he had
intellectual blood in him, so to speak, and only required to have his
intelligence refined upon and radicalized by artificial conditioning, to
seemingly achieve the impossible and thus become a new messiah.... Not that he
enjoyed living in the city, as you can well imagine. It made him very depressed. For he was not only cut off, in his
working-class environment, from congenial intellectual and social company, but
cut off moreover from an adequate degree of sensuality necessary to
safeguarding the psycho-physical integrity of his highly-strung constitution,
him being so slender and nervous and all that.
The city made him too spiritual for his own sensual good, his sleep
becoming shallow and intermittent, and that was the main reason, paradoxically,
for his brilliant work."
Reginald nodded knowingly while pouring
himself a drop of sherry from the half-full decanter which had stood on a small
coffee table to his immediate right.
"And his brilliant work is just a little too truthful or
progressive, in consequence, for the bourgeois publishing establishment to
countenance, is that it?"
"I think he prefers not to admit that
fact to himself these days," Miss Doherty responded, "though he's
quite aware of the position. He knows
what it means to be a Promethean equivalent, beyond the pale of ideological
affinity with atomic criteria."
"And consequently what it means to be
alone, eh?" Reginald speculated sympathetically. "Resigned to rejection by a society that
prefers the half-truth to the whole truth in loyalty to its atomic integrity,
and not only as regards religion! You
can be sure that politics, science, and art must also reflect such an integrity. A
bourgeois atomist won't admit to the possibility of post-atomic
development. He sees everything through
eyes conditioned to dualistic compromise, conditioned by a suburban if not
largely rural or provincial environment.
Only the other day I was reading one of Frederick Solomon's books, Critique of
Modern Art I think it was, and what he contended was equivalent to what a
bourgeois politician will contend about atomic democracy, which, of course, he
regards as the only kind of democracy.
Frederick Solomon defended the aesthetic side of bourgeois civilization
by maintaining that art must entail an emotional commitment and is only art to
the extent that it appeals to our feelings in one way or another, preferably, à la Tolstoy, in a positive way. He didn't say that art shouldn't have an
intellectual side, which would have been a quite ridiculous assumption, but
maintained that whatever didn't also appeal to the emotions wasn't art - art
requiring some kind of compromise between emotion and intellect. Well, such a view reflects fidelity to an
atomic integrity, to a psychic dualism between the soul and the spirit, which
is to say, the subconscious mind and the superconscious
mind, and is simply germane to a bourgeois stage of evolution. It reflects a dualistic concept of art and,
to the extent that one may be a dualist, fine!
What's not so fine, however, is the assumption stemming from it that
whatever is purely intellectual isn't art, that paintings which minimize
emotional commitment are necessarily poor art or even no art at all. This is simply to take bourgeois criteria for
the definitive definition of art, and it's no less mistaken, in my opinion,
than to take parliamentary democracy for the ultimate democracy, or Protestant
Christianity for the ultimate religion, or the particle/wavicle
theory of matter for the ultimate physics.
Not altogether surprisingly, there was no reference to Mondrian in Professor Solomon's critique, since Mondrian's great art is quintessentially intellectual or
spiritual, and tends to eschew emotional commitment. Yet it isn't for that reason bogus art but,
on the contrary, a superior type of art than that which partly or predominantly
appeals to the emotions. It's simply
post-atomic, reflecting, in Mondrian's case, what
I've come to regard as petty-bourgeois classicism - the converse of such
petty-bourgeois romantic works as Jackson Pollock and other abstract
expressionists were to create at around the same time."
Miss Doherty smiled widely. For she recalled standing in Reginald's art
gallery, a few days ago, while he expatiated on the difference between Piet Mondrian and Jackson
Pollock, likening the classical abstract of the former to a petty-bourgeois
aesthetic approximation to Heaven and the romantic abstract of the latter to a
petty-bourgeois aesthetic approximation to Hell - the one testifying to a
fairly rigid application of the superconscious mind,
the other, by contrast, betraying a degree of subconscious freedom scarcely
paralleled in modern times. Mondrian's art was transcendental, Pollock's ...
effectively pagan. With typical examples
of these two masters hanging side-by-side in Reginald's small gallery, one's
vision embraced both the spiritual and the soulful sides of petty-bourgeois
civilization simultaneously. Taken for
one work, they would have suggested a rather eccentric atomic painting, the
Pollock appealing to the emotions and the Mondrian to
the intellect. But they were really
quite separate and, in a sense, as separate as such works could get on
petty-bourgeois terms.... Though that fact probably wouldn't have occurred to
one, had not Reginald's genius for distinguishing one type of modern art from
another been put to one's service in such an eye-opening fashion!
It had even gone on, this genius of his, to
point out that Pollock was one of those paradoxical artists whose work tended
to intimate of proletarian romanticism while remaining fundamentally petty-bourgeois. Genuine proletarian romanticism applied,
however, to light art in which, for example, neon tubing was arranged in an everywhichway fashion, reminiscent of Pollock's abstract
expressionism, and a visually chaotic impression, suggestive of subconscious
indulgence, generally prevailed. By
contrast, proletarian classicism would demand a strictly logical ordering of
neon tubing or fluorescent tubes or laser beams in fidelity to the superconscious, the ensuing pattern establishing a new
order of perfection in an approximation to or intimation of a higher level of
truth. Beauty would not be the aim of
this classicism, which would approach truth from a positive, transcendental
base. Neither would it be the raison
d'être of proletarian romanticism, any more than it had been of the
preceding level of romanticism ... in the petty-bourgeois paintings, for
instance, of Jackson Pollock. If the
transcendental bias of the classicist demanded a positive approach to truth, then
the pagan bias of the romantic demanded, by contrast, a negative approach to
beauty, such as could only result in an art of unprecedented ugliness - the
romantic ideal of the modern age.
Anti-beauty romanticism and pro-truth classicism were the two faces of
contemporary art, both petty bourgeois and proletarian, as applying, in
particular, to Western civilization. By
directly turning against nature, the romanticist indirectly assisted man's
progress towards the supernatural. By
directly aspiring towards the supernatural, the classicist indirectly assisted
man's progress away from nature. Such
was the paradoxically dual tendency of modern art, and it reflected the
relative, as opposed to absolute, nature of bourgeois/proletarian civilization. A wholly post-atomic civilization, however,
would have no place for the romantic.
The future proletarian civilization of transcendental man would be
exclusively dedicated to the highest, most truth-oriented classicism. Ugliness in art, like beauty before it, was
destined to be superseded by an exclusive concern with truth. The romantic was a dying breed, like, for
that matter, the unliberated female.
Miss Doherty, however, was a liberated
female and thus very much a factor of contemporary life. She was liberated now, as she sat opposite
Reginald Rice and lent a sympathetic ear to his theories - an equal in a
decidedly intellectual conversation. He,
too, was liberated, though not wholly - unlike Peter Hall who, apparently,
lived by himself and hadn't touched a woman in years. But poor Peter needed deliverance from his
liberation, Patricia could tell that!
His was of the pornographic variety and it was undoubtedly a
contributory factor to his depression.
Reginald's, to the extent that it existed, was gay, if rather more on a
bisexual than a strictly homosexual basis.
Thus part-liberated, he still clung to women out of petty-bourgeois
prudery and a concession to tradition.
But they had to be liberated ones, and Miss Doherty was just that -
certainly as far as freedom from traditional marital constraints and
obligations went! So her presence in his
flat, long after the others had left, was by no means arbitrary, but conformed
to plan, a plan conceived and destined to be fully executed by Reginald Rice
himself! When the conversation had died
down, as it seemed on the point of doing, and other concerns began to flare up,
as they appeared to be doing. When anti-natural sentiments were supplanting pro-supernatural
thoughts. Ah, it wouldn't be long
now! Already Reg
had lost interest in paintings, philosophy, Peter Hall, and was beginning to
eye Patricia in that ironically lecherous way of his. She knew exactly what that meant!
* * *
Arrived
home, Judith Hagley switched on the light and headed
straight for the bed, which she threw herself down upon with provocative
abandon, revealing, as she turned onto her back, the upper half of her dark-stockinged, high-booted legs and the lower half of a pink
slip - revelations which weren't wasted on Gaston Healy, who, having gently
closed the door, was now in a position to properly appreciate them. He smiled to himself and, climbing onto the
bed, bent down to take a closer look at such physical revelations as Judith, in
her languor, saw fit to immodestly display.
His peeping caused her a degree of embarrassment, but she made no
attempt to smooth her skirt down or to draw her legs closer together. He was, after all, her lover, and now they
were in private and not in public, where sartorial etiquette was de rigueur. Let him peep, if that was what he most wanted
to do! He would probably be appraising
her seductive ploys, as he usually did before succumbing to them, like a mouse
to a succulent piece of cheese. She was
his cheese and he would be sure to eat or, at any rate, nibble her all up. She stiffened slightly as she felt his cold
hand, which had scorned a glove, stretch itself flat
against the smooth skin of her upper thigh.
It was a favourite trick of his, to warm himself
on her flesh. And he had written about
it on more than one occasion, too!
She moved over in order to make extra room
for him on the bed, and he obligingly crawled to a near-horizontal position by
her side. Then he started laughing,
though not at her, and she felt obliged to ask him what was so funny?
"I was just thinking about what you
said to me on the way home concerning Peter Hall's having once been in love
with you," he spluttered, after the main paroxysm of humorous excitement
had reluctantly subsided.
"And you find that
amusing?"
Gaston nodded his wiry-haired head while
giving priority of importance to another ejaculation of sarcastic
laughter. "Only because it seems so
incredible to me that that prize prig should ever have been in love with
anybody, not excepting so subtly ravishing a blonde as you!"
Judith blushed graciously and playfully
slapped her lover on the hand. "Oh,
he was in love with me alright!" she averred. "But he wasn't what he has since become,
when I first knew him. He was but a
humble student, an apprentice philosopher, ready and willing to study whatever
he could lay his hands on. He didn't lay
them on me though, because I didn't encourage him to."
"Didn't you like him?" Gaston
asked, still partly amused.
"Oh, I liked him alright! Was even in love with him myself for awhile,
in spite of already having a steady boyfriend at the time. He was just second at the post and thus a
loser."
"He made ovations to you?"
"Oh yes. More than a few, too! But I had to turn him down. And that, believe it or not, is how he was
put on the road to being where he is today, in the forefront of contemporary
philosophy - if you can call what he thinks 'contemporary'."
Gaston looked touchingly puzzled to Judith
as he said: "You mean that your rejections led him to adopt an ascetic
existence, for want of anyone else to fall in love with?"
She nodded in tacit confirmation.
"But how can you be sure?"
"Because he told
me."
"Told you?"
"Shortly after
Patricia and I met him in the street the other week. We returned to his flat, which was nearby,
and it was there he confessed to me that I had played a significant role in
moulding his destiny. No hard feelings,
mind! Just simple facts, such as one
would expect from someone who had become a self-appointed spiritual leader
after years of celibacy."
"So that's how he came to be invited
to Reginald's place, is it?"
Judith nodded again and smiled
self-indulgently. "I thought they
would get on quite well together, and it seems they did. Regie was the one
to ask most of the questions and, so far as I could tell, profit most from the
philosopher's answers. I dare say he and
Patricia are still engaged in fruitful conversation about him even now."
There ensued a brief pause in their
conversation while Gaston adjusted his bodily position to one more advantageous
to a potential ravisher of Judith's prostrate form.
"And does Patricia like him?" he
asked.
"Who, Peter? Why, yes, very much so! She knew him at about the same time as me
and, frankly, was grateful for the opportunity to renew their acquaintance,
having read one or two of his books in the meantime."
"Which is more than I can claim to
have done," Gaston admitted, sighing faintly. "Though being something of an enfant
terrible myself, I suppose I ought to be capable of identifying with some of
what he says, even if I am a romantic and therefore indisposed to
pursue truth at the expense of more traditional values. He would call me a bourgeois romantic, I
suppose, in that my work tends to respect beauty in diluted guise. Including human beauty, I should
add." Which remark, directed
specifically at Judith's feminine vanity, led Gaston to caress her nearest leg,
preparatory to bringing his lips to bear on the smooth surface of her stocking
top. She arched enticingly and he
extended his caressing to a more sensitive erogenous zone conveniently close
to-hand.
"I suppose, given Peter's distinction
between emulating the natural works of the Creator and striving to create
artificial works independently of such a source ... in anticipation of transcendent
spirit, human beauty can only be relative, not absolute," he at length
remarked, returning his mind to intellectual preoccupations, slightly to
Judith's disappointment. "Absolute
beauty would appear to exist only in the stars, of which our sun is but a more
conspicuous example. If evolution
culminates in the absolute truth ... of transcendent spirit, as Peter contends,
then logic would indicate that it began in the absolute beauty of the stars,
from which man's relative beauty signifies a fall.... Though women would
apparently have fallen less far than men," he added, as an afterthought.
"Much less far as a rule," Judith
declared, drawing her legs up closer to her lover and trapping his hand between
them in the process, "which is one of the main reasons why men have
traditionally worshipped or, at any rate, admired women, insofar as they stand
closer to absolute beauty."
"Baudelaire conceived of Satan as the
most perfect manly beauty," Gaston remarked, tensing his brow, "when,
in point of fact, he might have been closer to the mark had he said the most
perfect womanly beauty? Yet, to me,
Satan is an anthropomorphic abstraction from the sun, while the Creator is an
anthropomorphic abstraction from the governing star at the centre of the
Galaxy, from which, we have reason to believe, the majority of lesser stars
originally 'fell' ... with what scientists now posit as a Big Bang. Where Peter seems to differ from the
scientists, however, is that he posits a Big Bang diaspora
of lesser stars for each galaxy, not just one Big Bang for the Universe as a
whole, which, when you bother to reflect more deeply, appears an absurd
theory. After all, there are billions of
galaxies, most of them incredibly vast, and by no stretch of the imagination
can one attribute their individual formation to just one Big
Bang. The Universe couldn't have begun
in unity when it's destined, according to Peter's theories, to culminate in
unity. Besides, the individual galaxies,
of which we know relatively little, don't tend away from one another, as from a
central origin-point, least of all in their billions, but diverge relatively,
which is to say according to their positions in the Universe - those in this
part of it diverging separately from those in more distant parts and creating,
in the process, an uneasy equilibrium of tensions between the various
inter-divergent galaxies."
Judith placed a forbidding forefinger to
Gaston's lips in an attempt to terminate what she was beginning to find too
technical and even wildly speculative for her liking. She knew he had a penchant for adventurous
macrocosmic speculation and was afraid that he would get completely wrapped-up
in it at her expense. Nevertheless, intellectual
curiosity still pervaded her mind as she recalled something Peter Hall had
said, earlier that evening, and now inquired of Gaston whether the distinction
he had just drawn between Satan, as the Devil, and the Creator, as God, didn't
contradict Peter's theory that, considered theologically, evolution proceeds
from a Diabolic Alpha to a Divine Omega via a humanistic compromise in the
person of Christ. "After all,"
she added, "if one begins with the Devil, where does God fit in?"
Gaston frowned in momentary bewilderment as
he attempted to recollect the gist of Peter's argument,
then replied: "Ah, you've quite misunderstood him! It wasn't Satan that was primarily being
equated with the Diabolic Alpha but the Creator. For the Diabolic Alpha was considered, by
him, in terms of the governing star at the centre of the Galaxy, not our little
solar star which stands to the larger one as Satan to the Creator. Peter was in effect saying that, vis-à-vis
Satan, the Creator corresponded to an archdevil
lording it over a petty one, and that, from an evolutionary or alpha-to-omega
point of view, only the archdevil counts. Thus the Creator and Satan are but two
aspects of fundamentally the same diabolical roots of the Universe, the former
simply being bigger and more powerful than the latter. Satan did indeed 'fall' from the Almighty ...
with the origin of the Galaxy in the Big Bang.
Our sun exploded out of the central one.
Theology stands to science as the figurative to the literal."
Now it was Judith's turn to look
puzzled. "Would you therefore deny
that the Creator actually exists out there in space?" she asked.
"Yes, I would," he replied. "For the Creator can only be traced back
to a figurative abstraction from a certain component of cosmic reality, as I've
already suggested."
"So, strictly speaking, it was the
stars, or one particular star, from which subsequent components of cosmic
reality stemmed, not the theological abstraction?" Judith conjectured.
"Yes, the Creator, or God the Father,
didn't literally have a hand in anything," Gaston confirmed, "since
pertaining to the figurative ... as an anthropomorphic extrapolation from
cosmic reality."
Judith was beginning to see the light at
this point and smiled her realization of it with spontaneous relish. "So the Creator exists solely as an
idea, as a psychic content of the subconscious mind, and whether or not one
believes in that psychic content ... will depend on the constitution of one's
psyche, whether or not the subconscious figures prominently in it ...?"
"Yes, that must be so," Gaston
rejoined, nodding. "The Creator is
a fiction, the reverse side of cosmic fact.
But to the extent that our planet was created, in a manner of speaking,
out of an exploding star, then that star was the literal creative source and
doubtless still exists. Thus the First
Cause exists, because one is not dealing with a theological abstraction there
but with something that actually gave rise to other stars and, when planets
were formed, the particular galaxy of which our solar system is but a tiny
component. The First Cause pertains to
the literal explanation of creation, the Creator, or Father, to its figurative
explanation. The one is objective fact,
the other objective fiction. I no longer
believe in the Creator, even though I'm a romantic, but I do believe in the First
Cause. For something did, after all,
give rise to this planet, which in turn gave rise to plants, and so on. We didn't have a hand in creating nature, any
more than we created the animals or, for that matter, ourselves. A baby is more the creation of nature than of
its parents, since they cannot fashion natural limbs the way a sculptor
fashions artificial ones. Man creates
artificially, by contrast to nature."
"While woman, who stands closer to
nature in her bodily capacities, creates naturally, by producing babies,"
Judith averred. "That, at any rate,
was the traditional norm and, to some extent, it still obtains today, in an age
of so-called Women's Lib." She
smiled in ironic deference to this fact, and then asked whether or not the
First Cause could be identified with nature?
"It depends how you define
nature," Gaston replied, as he endeavoured to extricate his by-now warm
hand from Judith's possessive grip.
"The First Cause, conceived in terms of the central star in the Galaxy
from which the millions of lesser stars 'fell', is at the root of nature. What happens, it seems to me, is that a more
intensive nature begets a less intensive nature, which in turn begets a less
intensive nature, and so on, so that nature ascends, in lessening degrees of
fiery emotionality, towards spirit with the inception of autonomous life. The stars begat planets, the planets begat
plants, the plants begat animals, and the animals
begat man. There is still nature in man,
human nature in more than one sense, but it's diluted in proportion to the
degree of spirit to which he attains. At
one point in evolutionary time he's more soul than spirit, at another point
soul and spirit tend to balance each other, and at a still higher point, such
as he is now entering, spirit outbalances soul.
He becomes more truth than beauty.
The stars, remember, are absolute beauty; transcendent spirit, by
contrast, will be absolute truth. The
former are apparent, the latter essential."
"Thus the degree of beauty inherent in
a phenomenon will be proportionate to the intensity of soul there?" Judith
philosophically suggested.
"That must be so," Gaston
affirmed, as he took full possession of his free hand. "If a phenomenon lacks soul, it must
lack beauty. An automobile is for that
reason not beautiful but, rather, streamlined or flash. The great Welsh philosopher John Cowper Powys
contended, in The Meaning of Culture, that beauty is connected
or associated with the poetic, which was his way of saying soul. No car has a soul, so a car can never be
described as beautiful."
Judith was disposed to agree with that, but
wondered whether the same could be said of a painting which strove to emulate
natural beauty. "I mean, many great
naturalist paintings seem beautiful," she averred.
"Yet, in reality, they're not,"
he countered. "For
they lack a soul, the quality of beauty.
They merely give the appearance of beauty,
so can never hope to surpass nature. Man
cannot surpass the beauty of nature in his artificial creations. Art only begins to surpass nature when it
becomes supernatural, reflecting an aspiration towards truth in some degree of
transcendentalism. For centuries man was
a meek imitator of natural beauty, obliged, through the impossibility of
directly investing his work with soul, to play second-fiddle to nature. Only when he turned his back on nature and
aspired towards the supernatural ... did he create works of a higher order,
thus freeing himself from creative inferiority.
For a work indirectly invested with spirit is superior to one directly
invested with soul, i.e. a natural work, insofar as it is not a poor imitation
of the latter but appertains to a superior realm of creative endeavour. It becomes a subjective illusion, mirroring
the spirit, whereas the naturalist painting is an objective fiction."
Judith was clearly puzzled by Gaston's
distinction between illusion and fiction, and wondered how he had arrived at
it. Why, for instance, had he said
'fiction' instead of 'illusion' when referring to the Creator?
"Ah! a basic
philosophical distinction, my dear, between inner and outer, or essence and
appearance," he assured her.
"Fact and fiction apply to appearance, truth and illusion to
essence. The stars, being apparent,
pertain to cosmic fact, whereas theological or figurative abstractions from
that fact constitute fictional psychic contents which, because they exist in
the apparent, or subconscious, half of the psyche are accordingly treated as if
they were external, approximating to pseudo-facts. Conversely transcendent spirit, being
essential, pertains to cosmic truth, as, to a lesser extent, does the superconscious mind, whereas the scientific postulates
derived from this truth, or from the lesser truth of the superconscious,
constitute illusory postulates which, because they're treated on essential
terms, approximate to pseudo-truths.
Appearance has therefore evolved from the objective fact of the stars to
the objective fictions of the subconscious, whilst essence has evolved or,
rather, is in the process of evolving from the subjective illusions of modern
science to the subjective truth of the superconscious
... en route, as it were, to the absolute truth of transcendent
spirit. The Creator is literally a
fiction when considered objectively, in relation to the subconscious, but
becomes, in the practice of theological expedience, a pseudo-fact to the extent
that He is projected out into space by the objective nature of the subconscious
mind. Conversely, the particle/wavicle concept of matter, for example, is an illusion when
considered objectively ... in relation to the solid appearance of matter, but
becomes, in the practice of modern quantum physics, a pseudo-truth to the
extent that it partly derives from the subjectivity of the superconscious
mind in deference to spiritual truth, and accordingly reflects essential
conditioning."
Judith felt puzzled now no less than
previously, not so much by what Gaston had said ... as by the fact that he was
saying it at all. "I didn't realize
you were also a philosopher," she sceptically confessed.
He smiled understandingly. "I'm not, only I once was, before I
became a romantic artist," he confessed.
"A classical philosopher, in fact."
"And you never told me?"
"I didn't think you'd be
interested. Besides, I was never a
particularly good philosopher, unlike Peter Hall. He would probably find fault with some of my
logic, possessing, as he does, deeper insight into metaphysics than me."
"He would certainly be surprised to
learn that you were once a philosopher," Judith averred. "No doubt, you'll be no less surprised
to learn that he was once a romantic artist before becoming, thanks in part to
myself, a classical philosopher."
"Well I never! One would hardly have suspected that from his
discourse earlier this evening. I had
taken him for a philosopher to the core."
Gaston sniffed ironically, smiled, and then said: "Perhaps what he
needs now is Patricia, to transform him into a classical artist."
"And what do you need?" Judith
teasingly asked, edging closer to the writer's body.
"Not a change of profession," he
replied. "Simply, my dear, a change
of communication, in order to bring me back into line with my basic
romanticism."
"You've got it!" Judith assured him, and she straightaway proceeded to cover his spiritual
tongue with her sensual lips.
