In summary, we come round again to the human objective. In the first four million years of man’s existence, or, even more pointedly, in the scant second’s tick during which he has inhabited cities and devoted himself to an advanced technology, is it not premature to pronounce either upon his intentions or his destiny? Perhaps it is—as the first man-ape could not have foreseen the book-lined room in which I write. Yet something of that creature remains in me as he does in all men. I compose, or I make clever objects with what were originally a tree dweller’s hands. Fragments of his fears, his angers, his desires, still stream like midnight shadows through the circuits of my brain. His unthinking jungle violence, inconceivably magnified, may determine our ending. Still, by contrast, the indefinable potentialities of a heavy-browed creature capable of pouring his scant wealth into the grave in a gesture of grief and self- abnegation may lead us at last to some triumph beyond the realm of technics. Who is to say?
Not long ago, seated upon a trembling ladder leading to a cliff-house ruin that has not heard the voice of man for centuries, I watched, in a puff of wind, a little swirl of silvery thistledown rise out of the canyon gorge beneath my feet. One or two seeds fell among stony crevices about me, but another, rising higher and higher upon the light air, ascended into the blinding sunshine beyond my vision. It is like man, I thought briefly, as I resumed my climb. It is like man, inside or out, off to new worlds where the chances, the stairways, are infinite. But like the seed, he has to grow. That impulse, too, we bring with us from the ancestral dark.
Another explosion of shimmering gossamer circled about my head. I held to the rickety ladder and followed the erratic, windborne flight of seeds until it mounted beyond the constricting canyon walls and vanished. Perhaps the eruption of our giant rockets into space had no more significance than this, I saw finally, as in a long geological perspective. It was only life engaged once more on an old journey. Here, perhaps, was our supreme objective, hidden by secretive nature even from ourselves.
Almost four centuries ago, Francis Bacon, in the years of the voyagers, had spoken of the new world of science as “something touching upon hope.” In such hope do all launched seeds participate. And so did I, did unstable man upon his ladder or his star. It was no more than that. Within, without, the climb was many-dimensioned and over imponderable abysses. I placed my foot more carefully and edged one step farther up the face of the cliff.
FIVE
The Time Effacers
The savage mind deepens its knowledge with the help of imagines mundi.
—CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
THERE ARE TWO diametrically opposed forces forever at war in the heart of man: one is memory; the other is forgetfulness. No one knows completely the nature of the inner turmoil which creates this struggle. Some rare individuals possess almost total recall; others find certain events in life so painful that they are made to sink beneath the surface of consciousness. Sigmund Freud himself learned, as he practiced the arts of healing, to dip his hands into the dark waters which contain our lurking but suppressed memories. There are those among us who wish, even in death, not a name or a memory to survive.
Once I sat in the office of a county coroner, having come there at his request. We had previously had many discussions involving cases of human identification that had come his way. Some of his problems demanded the specialties of my own field, and though I am not an expert in forensic medicine I had been glad to listen to his experiences, as well as occasionally to offer advice on some anatomical point.
When I was ushered into his office on that particular afternoon, a carefully prepared skull gleamed upon his desk. My friend looked up at me with a grin of satisfaction. “You have told me something about what the archaeologist is able to infer concerning the habits of our remote ancestors,” he said. “Now I would like you to look at this specimen. The body from which it came was discovered by accident in a drained pond. It had been there for some time and was almost totally decomposed.”
I picked up the skull and slowly turned it over. A glitter of platinum wire immediately caught my eye. I drew the mandible aside. “Look,” I said in surprise, “this is one of the most expensive and elaborate pieces of dental work I have ever seen.”
“Precisely,” said my friend. “The job was obviously done by a gifted specialist, and it could easily have cost a thousand dollars. So we know what?”
“That the individual had means and took care of himself,” I sparred. “Surely an identification can be made on this basis.”
Slowly the coroner shook his head. “We have tried,” he said, “tried hard. The man did not come from around here. He came most probably from a far-off big city. It is in such places that this kind of work is done, but which place?”—he shrugged—“One could spend years on such a task and come up with nothing. Our office has neither the time, the staff, nor the money for such investigations, particularly if no evidence of a crime exists.”
“You mean—?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, “it was very likely suicide by drowning.”
“Then shouldn’t there be some identification remaining—a wallet, a ring, something?”
My friend eyed me quizzically. “I wanted you to see this,” he said, “not because skulls are new to you, but because you have always worked in the past—with another set of problems. What you see here in this individual specimen we encounter as a single category.” He tapped the magnificent bridgework with a pencil to emphasize his point. “We find a certain persistent number of suicides—people like this one, very likely a man of wealth—who, when they have decided to depart this life, do so with the determination at the same time to obliterate their identity.
“Sometimes they travel far before the final act is carried out. At the last, every conceivable trace of identity is abandoned. Wallets with their cards may be hurled away, jewelry similarly disposed of; it is as though the individual were not satisfied to destroy himself, he must, as this man apparently did, bury his name so thoroughly that no one will be heard to pronounce it again.”
“But murder,” I interjected.
“Of course, of course, we have such cases and such concealment.” He turned once more to the skull. “I tell you now, however, that their number is minute compared to these.” He elevated the face and looked into it as if for an answer, but the skull stared beyond him unheeding and stubbornly triumphant.
The coroner sighed once more and eased the skull back upon the desk, a certain gentleness evident in his manner. “Well,” he said, “I rather think this one will have his wish to be forgotten.” He fingered one of the fine wires of the bridgework. “Strange,” he added. “He took care of himself—up to the last, that is. You can see it here. But then this thing—this shadow, whatever it was—came on him until he was forced to flee out of the body itself. But no one, if there was by then anyone, was to witness his final defeat. He saw to it well; he had given it thought, he left us a blank wall. Except for a new drainage ditch we would not have found even this.”
My friend gestured politely. “A kind of gentleman’s end, don’t you think?” he said. “Perhaps there was an intent to spare someone, somewhere; who knows? It would appear he came a long way for this and went to some trouble. I won’t bother you with any more details. I just wanted you to know what can lurk in these little boxes you and your colleagues handle with such scientific precision. Here in this office we are forced to build a different world with the same bones.” He gently touched the skull again. “They are individuals to me, not phenotypes.”
“You mistake us,” I countered, “if you think we are not aware of the darkness in the human mind. Have you never heard of the damnatio memoriae?”
The coroner’s eyes twinkled.
“Of couse not,” he said. “That is what I got you in here for, to stir me up.” He leaned back expectantly.
“It is a different matter from the case of your anonymous client here,” I explained slowly, “and is frequently done for obscure or deprave
d reasons. Do you know that history is full of evidence of hatred for the past, of a desire on the part of some men to destroy even the memory of their predecessors? Public monuments are effaced, names destroyed, histories rewritten. Sometimes to achieve these ends a whole intellectual elite may be massacred in order that the peasantry can be deliberately caused to forget its past. The erasure of history plays a formidable role in human experience. It extends from the smashing of the first commemorative monuments right down to the creation of the communist ‘non-person’ of today. Carthage was a victim of that animus. So was the pharaoh Akhenaton, who introduced solar monotheism into Egypt.”
I paused, but my friend the coroner only nodded. “Go on,” he said.
“The French revolutionists sought from 1792 to 1805 permanently to eliminate the Christian calendar. Today’s youth revolt is partly aimed at the destruction of the past and the humiliation of the previous generation. Just as the individual mind thrusts unwelcome thoughts below the level of consciousness, so there are times, when, in revulsion against painful or uncontainable thoughts and symbols, the social memory similarly reacts against itself. Or, again, it may reclothe old myths and traditions in new and more pleasing garments.”
I pointed at the skull upon which my friend’s hand rested. “Men get tired, you see. This man in the end wanted complete oblivion—not alone for his physical body—he wished to make sure he lived in no man’s mind.
“The masses,” I continued, “can be stirred by the same impulse. There are times of social disruption when they grow tired of history. If they cannot remake the past they intend at least to destroy it—efface the dark memory from their minds and so, in a sense, pretend that history has never been. There are plenty of examples—the assault of Cromwell’s Puritans upon the statuary in the English cathedrals, or earlier, in Henry the Eighth’s time, the breaking up of the great abbeys and the reckless dispersal of their ancient documents and treasures. Even worse was the total overthrow of Inca and Aztec civilization at the hands of the Spaniards. An entire writing system perished on the verge of the modern era.”
The coroner’s office seemed to grow darker from an impending storm gathering outside. For a moment I had a feeling of inexplicable terror, as though both of us crouched in some cranny beside a torrent that was sweeping everything to destruction.
“What you are saying”—the coroner’s voice came from somewhere beyond the skull—“is that to know time is to fear it, and to know civilized time is to be terror-stricken.”
I nodded. The room grew oppressively dark. I felt an impulse, somewhat against my better judgment, to speak further. The skull had taken on a faintly watchful expression, as though it had in reality projected my thought. Beyond it, all seemed slipping into shadows.
“I am speaking as a gravedigger only,” I said, my eyes fixed blindly forward. “But there is a paradox to all digging that only an archaeologist would understand. The best way to be resurrected is to be forgotten. Consider the case of Tutankhamen.”
The coroner opened his window. The rain had begun to fall and its scent stole into the room along with a fresh breath of air.
“I know what you mean,” he said, as the skull with its gleaming denture was deposited in a drawer. “Sometimes an individual, perhaps a great artist, or a civilization, has to be held off stage for a millennium or so until they can be understood. Like the art of Lascaux, fifteen thousand years forgotten in a sealed cave. In a case like that, even time has to be rediscovered. Not even discovered, but interpreted. It consists of more than the marks on a dial.”
I arose and stood beside my friend, looking down on the wet pavement beneath us, where the rain was pushing fallen leaves along the gutter.
“Look,” he said, waving a hand toward the street, “every culture in the world has a built-in clock, but in what other culture than ours has time been discovered to contain novelty? In what other culture would leaves, these yellow falling leaves, be said to be emergent and not eternal?”
“Evolutionary time,” I added, “the time of the world eaters—ourselves.”
We both stood silent, watching below the window the serrated shapes of the leaves as they spun past in the gathering dark.
II
“Every man,” Thoreau once recorded in his journal, “tracks himself through life.” Thoreau meant that the individual in all his reading, his traveling, his observations, would follow only his own footprints through the snows of this world. He would see what his temperament dictated, hear what voices his ears allowed him to hear, and not one whit more. This is the fate of every man. What is less well known is that civilizations, which are the products of men, are in their way equally obtuse. They follow their own tracks through a time measurable in centuries or millennia, but they approach the final twilight with much the same set of postulates with which they began. In Ruth Benedict’s words, they resemble a human personality thrown large upon the screen, given gigantic features and a long time span.
Of these personalities the most intensely aggressive has been that of the West, particularly in the last three centuries which have seen the rise of modern science. When I say “aggressive,” I mean an increasingly time-conscious, future-oriented society of great technical skill, which has fallen out of balance with the natural world about it. First of all, it is a consumer society which draws into itself raw materials from remote regions of the globe. These it processes into a wide variety of goods which a high standard of living enables it to consume. This vast industrial activity, in turn, enables the scientist and technologist to take command of business.
Scientists are not necessarily rich or the owners of business. The process is more subtle. With the passage of time and the growth of the urban structure, funds for research and development take up a far greater proportion of the budget of a particular industry. So long as the industry is in competition with others, it cannot afford to cling for long to a particular industrial process because of the fear that rival technicians will develop something more attractive or cheaper. The drive for miniaturization in the computer industry is a case in point. Thus the laboratory and its priesthood take an increasing share of the profits as they become a necessity for business survival. They also intensify the rate of social change which contributes both to human expectations and the alienation between the generations. Advertising becomes similarly important in order to encourage the acceptance of the new products as they are made available to the public. National defense is swept into the same expensive pattern in the technological war for survival.
In simple terms, the rise of a scientific society means a society of constant expectations directed toward the oncoming future. What we have is always second best, what we expect to have is “progress.” What we seek, in the end, is Utopia. In the endless pursuit of the future we have ended by engaging to destroy the present. We are the greatest producers of non- degradable garbage on the planet. In the cities a winter snowfall quickly turns black from the pollutants we have loosed in the atmosphere.
This is not to denigrate the many achievements and benefits of modern science. On a huge industrial scale, however, we have unconsciously introduced a mechanism which threatens to run out of control. We are tracking ourselves into the future—a future whose “progress” is as dubious as that which we experience today. Once the juggernaut is set in motion, to slow it down or divert its course is extremely difficult because it involves the livelihood and social prestige of millions of workers. The future becomes a shibboleth which chokes our lungs, threatens our ears with sonic booms, and sets up a population mobility which is destructive in its impact on social institutions.
In the extravagant pursuit of a future projected by science, we have left the present to shift for itself. We have regarded science as a kind of twentieth-century substitute for magic, instead of as a new and burgeoning social institution whose ways are just as worthy of objective study as our political or economic structures. In short, the future has become our primary obsession. We constan
tly treat our scientists as soothsayers and project upon them questions involving the destiny of man over prospective millions of years.
As evidence of our insecurity, these questions multiply with our technology. We are titillated and reassured by articles in the popular press sketching the ways in which the new biology will promote our health and longevity, while, at the other end of the spectrum, hovers the growing shadow of a locust swarm of human beings engendered by our successful elimination of famine and plague. To meet this threat to our standard of living we are immediately encouraged to believe in a “green revolution” brought about by ingenious plant scientists. That the green revolution, even if highly successful, would not long restore the balance between nature and man, goes unremarked.
Thus science, as it leads men further and further from the first world they inhabited, the world we call natural, is beguiling them into a new and unguessed domain. In a world where contingencies multiply at a fantastic rate and nations react like fevered patients whose metabolism is seriously disturbed, the scientist is forced into a new and hitherto unsought role in society. From the seclusion of the laboratory he is being drawn into the role of an Eastern seer, with all the dangers and exacerbations this entails. To shepherd the recalcitrant masses, or indeed to guide himself safely through a world of his own unconscious creation, is a well-nigh impossible task which has come upon him by insidious degrees. He does not possess marked political power, yet he has transformed the world in which power operates.
The scientist is now in the process of learning that the social world is stubbornly indifferent to the elegant solutions of the lecture hall, and that to guide a future-oriented world along the winding path to Utopia demands an omniscience that no human being possesses. We have long passed the simple point at which science presented to us beneficent medicines and where, in the words of José Ortega y Gasset, science and the civilization shaped by it could be regarded as the self-objectivation of human reason. It is one thing successfully to plan a moon voyage; it is quite another to solve the moral problems of a distraught, unenlightened, and confused humanity.
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