What?
I’m really sick of talking about me. Let’s talk about something else.
It’s getting cold out here, the Captain said.
He got up. I didn’t get any real sleep last night, he said, I’m going to bed early.
Lila got up and followed him into the cabin. He went into the bunk at the front of the boat and she could hear him lie down and then he was quiet.
She looked around the cabin. All this food and things to put away. What a mess.
Suddenly she remembered the chocolate pudding never got made.
She would probably never get to eat it, she thought.
15
In the forecabin Phædrus turned back the bed covers, then sat on the bunk and slowly pulled off his sweater and his other clothes. He felt weary.
Some archaeological expedition, he thought. Garbage and more garbage.
That’s what an archaeologist is, really — a highly trained garbage man. You see all the great finds in museums. You don’t see what they had to go through to find them… Some of those ancient ruins, Phædrus remembered, were located under city dumps.
Rigel would really be gloating now. What do you think now? he’d say. Does Lila have Quality? What’s your answer?
A light flashed through the porthole and then disappeared. Somebody’s searchlight, or a beacon maybe. But it was too irregular to be a beacon. Phædrus waited for it to reappear, but it didn’t.
This really wasn’t his day. Funny how everything kept going back to high school with her. That’s what this was. This was one of those high school disasters where you take the girl home early and do not kiss her good night and if you call again later and ask her out she is going to be doing something else.
She really was that girl on the streetcar.
And he really was that guy. That was him. The guy who doesn’t get the girl.
What was it she had said about Sad Sack?… He was quiet most of the time… You thought it was because he was listening to you… but he wasn’t. He was always thinking about something else. Chemistry, I guess… I felt sorry for him… He knew a lot but he just didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t understand women because he didn’t understand anybody… You never could get close to him. He was very smart in some ways, but in other ways he was very stupid, you know what I mean?
Phædrus knew what she meant. He knew who she meant.
He slowly stretched his legs out down under the blankets, and remembered something else he hadn’t thought of for years.
It was a movie he watched long ago when he was a chemistry student. There was a pretty girl, played by Priscilla Lane, he seemed to remember, who was having romantic difficulties with the handsome young leading man — maybe it was Richard Powell. For comic relief Priscilla Lane had a dumb-cluck girlfriend who gave everybody laughs and warm feelings of self-importance because they knew that stupid as they might be they weren’t as stupid as she was. They loved her for that.
In one scene the dumb-cluck girlfriend came home from a dance and met Priscilla Lane and Richard Powell who were standing arm in arm — blue-eyed, radiant and beautiful — and they asked her, How was the dance?
She said, Awful. I danced every dance with a chemistry professor.
He remembered how the audience tittered.
Have you ever danced with a chemistry professor? the dumb-cluck girlfriend asked. The audience laughed. Ohhhwww, my feet! she groaned.
The audience howled with laughter.
Except one. He sat there, his face burning, and finished the movie with the same kind of stunned depression he felt now, a feeling of dislocation and paralysis, devoured for a moment by this other pattern that made himself and everything he believed in worthless and comic.
He didn’t remember what he did after that. Maybe just got on the streetcar and went home.
That could have been the night Lila was on the streetcar… That smile. That’s what he remembered most. There it was. Lila on the streetcar. Lila and the lilacs in spring. The little suppressed smile. The little half-hidden contempt. And the sadness that nothing he could do or say could ever make her smile at him in any other way.
He remembered once there was a huge cottonwood tree in the night and he stood alone under it and listened and its leaves rattled slightly in the night breeze. It had been a warm night and there was a smell of lilacs in the breeze.
These patterns of his mind slowly vanished into sleep.
After an unknown time some new patterns returned in the form of shimmering water. The shimmering was above him. He lay at the bottom of the ocean shoal on a bank of sand. The water was faintly bluish but so clear he could see little hills and ripples in the surface of the sand as clearly as if no water were there.
Growing from the bottom were dark green blades of eel-grass that rippled in the current of the water like eels struggling to get free of the sand. He could feel the same currents against his own body. They were pleasant gentle currents and he felt serene. His lungs had stopped their struggle long ago and everything was quiet now. He felt like he belonged here. He had always belonged here.
Above the tips of the grass in the faint blue water were hundreds of milky pink and white jellyfish floating through the water. They seemed to drift at first but then as he watched closely he saw they propelled themselves by pulsing in-and-out, in-and-out, as if they had some mysterious goal. The littlest ones were so thin and transparent he saw them mainly by refraction of the shimmering water above them as they passed between him and a dark shape suspended on the surface. The dark shape was like that of a boat which from the bottom of the ocean seemed more like a spaceship suspended in the sky. It belonged to another world that he had come from. Now that he was no longer attached to it he felt better.
One of the peculiar milky-white creatures swam toward him and nudged against his body, first on his arm and then on his side, alarming him a little. Was the creature being friendly? Was it hungry for something? He tried to get up and move away from it but found he couldn’t. He had lost all power of motion. The creature nudged and stroked and nudged and stroked until he gradually felt himself being released from a dream.
It was dark now and he felt the nudging again. It was a hand. He didn’t move. The hand moved up and down his arm, carefully and deliberately, then began to make further and further adventures across his body. By the time the hand had reached far enough to arrive at its destination, its destination was rigid and waiting. The dream-like feeling of helplessness and motionlessness persisted and he lay silently as he had lain at the bottom of the ocean, letting this happen to him, as if he were watching it from afar, a kind of spectator to some ancient ritual he was not supposed to see or understand.
The hand continued to stroke and caress and gently grasp and then, slowly in the darkness the body of Lila rose above him, and slid itself over him, kneeled and lowered itself gently and slowly down until it enveloped what it had come for… Then it tightened. Then, slowly, it lifted and paused. Then it eased and descended. Then it lifted and tightened — and released and descended again. Then again. And again. Each time a little less slow. Each time a little more coaxing. Each time a little more demanding of what it was there to receive.
Surges of excitement in his body grew with each demand. They became stronger and stronger until his hands rose up and seized her hips and his own body began to move with hers in each rise and fall. His thoughts were swamped by this ocean current of feeling and the huge jellyfish-like body hovering over him pulsing in and out, in and out, expanding and contracting on and on. He could feel huge waves of emotion that were not directed by anything. He could feel the explosion almost coming…
Then ALMOST coming…
Then… her body was suddenly tense and rigidly hard around him and she gave a crying-out sound and his whole self let go into her and his mind leapt out to some place beyond anywhere… When it returned he could feel the vulval pressure slowly releasing and the flesh of her hips became soft aga
in.
She was still for a long time.
Then a tear fell on his cheek. It surprised him.
I do that for someone I like very much, her voice whispered. It seemed to come from some place other than the body that was above him; from someone who perhaps had also been an onlooker at all of this.
Then Lila lay back beside him, stretched the full length of her body against him and wrapped her arms around him as if to possess him forever.
They lay there together for a long time. Her arms held him but his mind began to drift free in an ebb tide of thought nothing could hold.
After a time he heard a steady breathing which told him she was asleep.
Sometimes between sleep and waking there’s a zone where the mind gets a glimpse of old active subconscious worlds. He’d just passed through that zone and for a moment had seen something he would forget if he went back to sleep. But he’d forget it if he became any more awake too.
This was the first time he’d been passive like this. Before it had been his idea, his aggression, his carnal desires. Now this passivity seemed to open something up.
What he seemed to have seen was that maybe he hadn’t had anything to do with it at all. He tried to hang on to it, half awake, half asleep.
A light shone again in the port. Maybe a car headlight from shore. Lila turned under the covers and brought her arm up over her face so that her hand opened upward toward him. Then she lay quietly.
He put his own hand up next to it. They were the same. The pattern that had caused her to come in and do this had also made these two hands alike. They were like leaves of trees, with no more knowledge than leaves have of why their cells produced them or made them so alike.
That was it, maybe. That was the thing, the other thing that was doing this that was not Lila and not himself.
The car headlight vanished and then, in the fading mental image of her hand, he thought he had seen something else. On her forearm near the wrist had been long scars, one of them slightly diagonal to the others. He wondered if it was something she had done herself.
He turned and put the tip of his forefinger against the wrist. The scars were there, all right, but they were smooth. It must have been long ago. It could have been a car accident or some other trauma, of course, but something told him it wasn’t. It seemed like more evidence of some past internal war with the thing that had brought her here tonight — some enormous battle between the intelligence of her mind and the intelligence of her cells.
If that’s what it was, the cells had won. Probably they had bled enough to throw off infection, then swelled to slow down the bleeding, clotted, and then slowly, with the special intelligence of their own that had nothing to do with Lila’s mind, they remembered how they had been before she had cut them apart and they carefully joined themselves back together again. They had a mind and will of their own. The mental Lila had tried to die but the cellular Lila had wanted to live.
That’s the way it always is. The intelligence of the mind can’t think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can’t think of any reason to die.
That explained what had happened tonight. The first intelligence out there in the cabin disliked him and still did. It was this second intelligence that had come in and made love. The first Lila had nothing to do with it.
These cellular patterns have been lovers for millions of years and they aren’t about to be put off by these recent little intellectual patterns that know almost nothing about what is going on. The cells want immortality. They know their days are numbered. That is why they make such a commotion.
They’re so old. They began to distinguish this body on the left from this body on the right more than a billion years ago. Beyond comprehension. Of course they pay no attention to mind patterns. In their scale of time, mind is just some ephemera that arrived a few moments ago, and will probably pass away in a few moments more.
That was what he had seen that he was trying to hang on to now, this confluence where mental and the biological patterns are both awake and aware of each other and in conflict.
The ebb-tide feeling. At ebb tide this cellular sexual activity is all so intellectually vulgar and shunnable, but when the flood tide returns the vulgarity magically turns into a high-quality attraction and there’s a deflection of mind by something that isn’t mind at all and there’s some feeling of awe in this. The mind sitting detached, aloof and discerning is suddenly rudely shoved aside by this other intelligence which is stronger than its own. Then strange things happen that the mind sees as vulgar and shunnable when the tides are out again.
He listened to the even breathing of this body next to him. That twilight zone was gone now. His mind was getting the upper hand, getting more and more awake, thinking about what he’d seen.
It fitted into the independence and opposition of levels of evolution that was emphasized in the Metaphysics of Quality. The language of mental intelligence has nothing to say to the cells directly. They don’t understand it. The language of the cells has nothing to say to the mind directly. It doesn’t speak that language either. They are completely separate patterns. At this moment, asleep, Lila doesn’t exist any more than a program exists when a computer is switched off. The intelligence of her cells had switched Lila off for the night, exactly the way a hardware switch turns off a computer program.
The language we’ve inherited confuses this. We say my body and your body and his body and her body, but it isn’t that way. That’s like a FORTRAN program saying, This is my computer. This body on the left, and This body on the right. That’s the way to say it. This Cartesian Me, this autonomous little homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. This self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that collapses the moment one examines it. This Cartesian Me is a software reality, not a hardware reality. This body on the left and this body on the right are running variations of the same program, the same Me, which doesn’t belong to either of them. The Me’s are simply a program format.
Talk about aliens from another planet. This program based on Me’s and We’s is the alien. We has only been here for a few thousand years or so. But these bodies that We has taken over were around for ten times that long before We came along. And the cells — my God, the cells have been around for thousands of times that long.
These poor stupid bodies that We has invaded, he thought. Every once in a while, like tonight and last night, they overthrow the program and go about their ways leaving We mystified about how all this could have happened. That’s what happened just now.
Mystified, and somewhat horrified too at the things bodies do without its permission. All of this sexual morality of Rigel’s — it wasn’t just social codes. It was also part of this sense of horror at these cells We has invaded and the strange patterns of Quality that existed before We arrived.
These cells make sweat and snot and phlegm. They belch and bleed and fuck and fart and piss and shit and vomit and squeeze out more bodies just like themselves all covered with blood and placental slime that grow and squeeze out more bodies, on and on.
We, the software reality, finds these hardware facts so distressing that it covers them with euphemisms and clothes and toilets and medical secrecy. But what We is covering up is pure quality for the cells. The cells have gotten to their advanced state of evolution through all this fucking and farting and pissing and shitting. That’s quality! Particularly the sexual functions. From the cells' point of view sex is pure Dynamic Quality, the highest Good of all.
So when Phædrus told Rigel that Lila had Quality he was telling the truth. She does. This same attraction which is now so morally condemned is what created the condemners.
Talk about ingratitude. These bodies would still be a bunch of dumb bacteria if it hadn’t been for sexual quality. When mutation was the only means of genetic change, life sat aro
und for three billion years, doing almost no changing at all. It was sexual selection that shot it forward into the animals and plants we have today. A bacterium gets no choice in what its progeny are going to be, but a queen bee gets to select from thousands of drones. That selection is Dynamic. In all sexual selection, Lila chooses, Dynamically, the individual she wants to project into the future. If he excites her sense of Quality she joins him to perpetuate him into another generation, and he lives on. But if he’s unable to convince her of his Quality — if he’s sick or deformed or unable to satisfy her in some way — she refuses to join him and his deformity is not carried on.
Now Phædrus was really awake. Now he felt he was at some sort of source. Was this thing that he had seen tonight the same thing that he had glimpsed in the streetcar, the thing that had been bothering him all these years? He thought about it for a long time and slowly decided that it probably was.
Lila is a judge. That’s who lay here beside him tonight: a judge of hundreds of millions of years' standing, and in the eyes of this judge he was nobody very important. Almost anyone would do, and most would do better than he.
After a while he thought, maybe that’s why the famous Gioconda Smile in the Louvre, like Lila’s smile in the streetcar, has troubled viewers for so many years. It’s the secret smile of a judge who has been overthrown and suppressed for the good of social progress, but who, silently and privately, still judges.
Sad Sack. That was the term she used. It had no intellectual meaning, but it had plenty of meaning nevertheless. It meant that in the eyes of this biological judge all his intelligence was some kind of deformity. She rejected it. It wasn’t what she wanted. Just as the patterns of intelligence have a sense of disgust about the body functions, the patterns of biology, so do Lila’s patterns of biology have a disgust about the patterns of intelligence. They don’t like it. It turns them off.
Phædrus thought about William James Sidis, the prodigy who could read five languages when he was five years old. After discovering what Sidis had said about Indians, Phædrus had read a full biography of him and found that when Sidis was a teenager he announced he would refuse to have anything to do with sex for the rest of his life. It seemed as though in order to sustain a satisfactory intellectual life he felt he had to cut himself off from social and biological domination except where they were absolutely necessary. This vow of ancient priests and ascetics was once considered a high form of morality, but in the Roaring Twenties of the twentieth century a new standard of morals had arrived, and when journalists found out about this vow they ridiculed Sidis mercilessly. That coincided with the beginning of a pattern of seclusion that lasted the rest of his life.
Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals Page 22