by Marco Vassi
“What you call stale rituals,” said Fick unexpectedly, breaking in on the line of tension between Lydia and the chief interrogator, “are modes of analysis which have proven themselves to be the most sound approach possible, despite the vogues which appear and disappear every few years. You know, since Freud developed his theory and technique, a hundred new ideas have been tried. Character analysis, drugs, massage, behavior modification, ego education, and so forth. And each has been like one of the blind men who held a piece of the elephant and thought he had the whole thing.
Only Freud saw the whole, and only his approach gets to the heart of the matter. Now, I understand that you work with people lying on their backs. Well, you see, the circle comes back to the beginning. Freud discovered that. Of course, the posture is ancient, appearing in yoga and other disciplines. But he was the one to link it with free-association.
Then the innovators came along and had the patient sit up. And after all the possible variations in that were tried, you come along and ‘discover’ what we have been doing all along. The difference is, we know that material cannot be pulled by force out of a patient, or seduced out of him. Freud used hypnosis and discarded it because of its artificiality. And as soon as you rediscover the analytic wheel, which Freud described more than seventy years ago, long before you were born, you get impatient, and want to rush in, inducing psychotic episodes, bringing about a melodramatic acting-out. And even this might not be bad.
Not for theatre, perhaps, or for an evening’s entertainment instead of playing charades. It is a game. And if you want to play, please go ahead. Some of my colleagues are outraged at your behavior, but I have seen much foolishness in my life and am no longer astonished at anything. But please, do us all a favor, including yourself, and turn in your license. And then you can let your conscience be your guide.”
For a few moments Lydia was taken by the eminent level-headedness of the man who had just spoken to her. He seemed to let the air out of the balloon that Zugzwang seemed intent on blowing up so he could burst it.
In a way, Fick appeared to be sympathetic to her, but he couldn’t let himself be open to recriminations by Zugzwang. So he added, “If you have a conscience left. Which I doubt. In any case, it has been interesting meeting you. I see your type on the street, of course, and, in modified form, on my couch, but this is the first time I have actually heard one of your kind in a context like this, one in which I am constrained to treat you as a balanced human being. I think you are sick, Doctor Stone. And I think you will cause great harm to a great many people. But please, do it without the benefit of your title.”
“Yes, yes, well put,” said Schaatz. “We imagined you would offer us some material to deal with, give some rational argument to defend what you are doing. If you could at least attempt to operate at a reasonable level, we might help you. But you are so perverse that you flaunt your condition.”
As he spoke, his eyes were riveted on Lydia’s nipples.
A long silence stretched over the room. The men, operating as a collective awareness, gradually recoiled from their own rambunctiousness. The shock of Lydia’s vital and challenging presence, although it could be largely obviated by their ability to rationalize it, threw their attitude into a highlight of fanaticism. They could not admit this but were nonetheless affected by it. On her part, Lydia wondered why she had appeared in such a foolish costume. At her apartment, drenched in the giddy enthusiasm of the family, wearing the hotpants had sounded like a marvelous idea. But in the same way that marijuana notions dissipate in the arena of rigid social perception, this venture began to risk seeming silly.
Zugzwang was also having second thoughts. For months he had nurtured a slow dislike and hatred of Lydia, and he had spent agonizing hours analyzing his reactions. He was intelligent enough to realize that he was going overboard in this matter.
The thing he held in a back corner of his mind, however, was the certain knowledge that the totality of his life and work had amounted to nothing. Like most other people in the world, Zugzwang had made the error of equating his preoccupation with reality itself, and as the end of his life neared and his involvement with analysis proved to be no defense against death, the rubrics and relics of his crusade showed up as trivial toys.
The criticism most often brought against Freud in later years was that he was hopelessly provincial, not only culturally but cosmically. The power of his genius lay in its limitation. Who else could latch onto such stupendous banalities as the fact that children have erotic impulses and build an entire conceptual monument around it.
Zugzwang, like most of Freud’s strict adherents, shared the tunnel vision of the Master, but lacked the burning intensity, or even the true spirit of innovation. Zugzwang would never consider snorting cocaine, or leaving cigarettes by the couch for one of his patients, things that Freud did as a matter of course. For Zugzwang, the central issue now was to avoid seeing his entire life as a grotesque parody, an inconsequential exercise in the obscure. The only thing that prevented this insight from crashing through was the constant reassurance by his peers. And the unrelenting attack he carried on against deviationists. He had planned on demolishing Lydia and thus provide himself with his most invincible bulwark to date against the encroachment of acid self-evaluation in terms outside the Freudian loop. But in her helter-skelter fashion, she had broken the spearhead of his attack.
Finally, von Gule, who was disposed to take the avuncular attitude, cleared his throat. The sound exploded in the tense silence of the space.
“Well, she is just a child, isn’t she?” he began. “She does not mean harm, she is not evil. Perhaps she truly thinks she has made a discovery. Perhaps she is filled with the zeal of the missionary. How much harm can she do? The people who follow her are all neurotic. So, she may make them a little more smug in their neurosis. She will either become a cult leader, or else come to her senses. What does it have to do with us? This is not a question for us to decide. I recommend that we turn it back to the License Board.”
“I agree,” said Zwischen. “They want our recommendation, I believe we can make a recommendation. Obviously, this woman is not qualified to hold the title of Psychologist.”
The five men nodded at one another as though they were puppets connected by a single string. Zugzwang, who still hoped in part for a knock-down battle of ideas, was frightened enough to agree. He gave the final and definitive nod.
“Yes, Doctor Stone,” he said to Lydia. “I can inform you that we shall simply send our recommendation that you have your license revoked to Albany. As you say, it means little enough to you, so I don’t feel that we are harming you at all.”
Lydia leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath.
“Actually, you are relieving me of a burden.”
“Yes,” added Fick, “if you had continued in this way, sooner or later someone would have brought a criminal suit against you.”
“To be truthful,” Zugzwang went on, “I am a bit disappointed in you. I had expected to find someone serious, someone who was trying to hurl a challenge against the tested Freudian understandings of the human psyche. And I would have welcomed discussing this with you, for I am positive that you would see the poverty of your ideas. You know, so many of the modern therapists denigrate analysis. I wonder what would happen if they, or you, would undergo a full seven year treatment. I think you might discover that all of your enthusiasms are merely one or another level of unfulfilled wish/projections that take shape because so many people out there are looking for the lost father or mother. Does this make sense to you?”
“Of course it does,” Lydia answered. “I’m not an innocent or a fool. But everything you say is valid only within one context, on one level of consciousness. It is a definition of reality within which all the structures are self justifying and mutually supporting. What I have stumbled into is another truth altogether, and not a very novel one at that. It is the t
ruth that Jesus and Buddha spoke of, that the mystics try to tell us about, and that most recently Don Juan has described. Essentially, I am learning about what I can only call The Source. I am learning about a space where everything is pure becoming, and the forms which result are incidental. You know, creation grows out of chaos, and chaos is then replenished by creation. But what you have done is to get stuck in the cauldron of creation, and you are afraid to let go, to let yourself come apart and realize that your form—that is, your body and thoughts and beliefs and artifacts—are just temporary, little better than an illusion. Thus, you are cut off from what really gives you energy, and so cannot feed anything back into the origin of all things. In a word, you have become stale. You have been afraid of love and death, and have sought refuge in conceptual perfection. You are your own museums.”
She and Zugzwang stared at one another over the abyss of their mutually untranslatable languages, like two people from different countries who have tried, though hand signals and facial expressions to discuss something of ultimate meaning and subtlety and finally given up, retreating to their individual thought-forms.
Each was correct in his and her unique view of truth, and no consensus was possible. From the context of his world, he had done all he could do: he would see to it that Lydia lost her license. From the context of her world she had done all she could do: she had seen to it that Zugzwang would never venture outside the boundaries of his realm again.
“We are each living out our own fantasies,” Lydia said to herself. “He has completely identified with his image of the world. He has his own private dream world, the same as anyone else, but he also possesses the arrogance to equate that with the actual flux of which we are momentary eruptions.”
Then her vision became complete, the notion she’d been struggling to find, to defend. Each human being is an entire universe of possibilities in terms of the way he or she sees the world. This private vision meets two antagonists. One is the world of brute physical reality, the enormous supra-galactic space in which the earth is an unmentionably tiny and irrelevant cinder. The second is the world of other human beings. And the whole question of survival in its widest sense involves those three points.
There has to be a way for each individual to bring his or her unique world view into harmony with those of every other human being, and then for all these to cooperate in dealing with the necessities of making it on the planet.
All the ills of the species involve disregarding one of the three points. Those who would discount the reality of the actual universe are escapists who fall into ersatz spirituality, cheap occultism, and other-worldly religions. Those who ignore the necessity for cooperation become the overlords, the competitors. And those who do away with the necessity to maintain the integrity of each individual’s link to the source through fantasy are the fascists, the totalitarian tyrants.
Other variations are possible, such as the one represented by Fred, who maintained that these three aspects existed but should have nothing to do with one another. It was all right to dream but not to infuse one’s dream world into the jungle of day-today survival.
Doctor Zugzwang’s dilemma, which he did not recognize as such, was his inability to understand that each view of reality rarely included more than one person. And when there were more, these constituted a true family, a conceptual karaas. He had already put together his family, at the Institute, but he wasn’t able to accept that, in the same way that Freud had to drive off each of his “sons”. And, cut off from the succor of their actual families, such men drove themselves desperate trying to climb higher and higher cliffs of cerebral success, growing more bitter all the while.
It seemed to Lydia that the room grew dark. All that could be heard was the hum of the air conditioner, chanting monotonously to itself in the corner. The five men lost their features and became black shrouded statues at the edge of a low wall. The time might have been two thousand years earlier, or five centuries in the future. The place might have been anywhere, another planet, another solar system. They might have been any life form, not necessarily human beings. All that remained was consciousness, pure, empty, unattached. The shreds of the social context had burned away. Analytic institutes, licensing boards, orthodoxies, panels of judgment, dogmatic views of the mysterious existence . . . all these became two dimensional, one dimensional, and then disappeared, like Alice’s pack of cards. Lydia could see auras, and fields of force, clusters of emotion, and vagrant thought forms whirring. She could see the whole chain of chaos and creation. All of human civilization, with its languages and arts and sciences and philosophies and religions was nothing more than the flimsiest ankle bracelet on the right leg of a minor god which itself held the most insignificant role in the overall scheme of what is.
In a sense, she did not know what she was doing, and yet she did. What the. five men saw, however, had the effect of a nitroglycerin charge set at the most critical stress point of a delicate bridge. They had a hundred different simultaneous impressions and attitudes. They gaped and looked away. They were aroused and repulsed. And, in short, they felt as though they had been kicked in the solar plexus and then pissed on by someone who did not even wish them harm or hold them in contempt.
Lydia snaked the hotpants down over her thighs. She ran her hands down her belly and pulled her cuntlips apart with her fingers, the violet painted nails glittering against the dark purple skin and the pale pink of the inner organ. The men gazed like children at a dazzling magician’s trick, their eyes held by the magnetism of her crotch, the thatch of hair, the quivering lips, the moist center.
Slowly, deliberately, Lydia slid the middle finger of her right hand into the core and when she pulled it out it was wet and glistening with juice. The drowsy smell of parted cunt licked the air molecules in the room.
Carefully, she pulled her pants back up. She walked to the door and threw her mink coat over her shoulders. Then she turned, and giving the doctors her most enigmatic smile, held the anointed finger straight up in the air.
They were still watching with febrile fascination as the door slammed in their faces.
10
“Well, what do you think?”
“I’m too overwhelmed to think right now. I haven’t assimilated the change yet.”
Fred sat on the edge of the high cliff and looked out three hundred miles into space. The pure air of the New Mexico heartland allowed unobstructed vision to the most extreme horizon and the eye unaccustomed to such a view was stunned that it could see so much. After the experience of sheer immensity, there was the detail. First, the color, the gash-pure vibrancy of hue from sun-shocked desert, wind-hewed outcroppings of ancient rock, and occasional rivers which gleamed like liquid diamonds.
Fred and Lydia sat on the lip of a mesa more than a thousand feet above the earth. She was like a child, her feet dangling into space, while Fred had folded his jacket under him and leaned back against a low tree. She was wearing a pair of overalls and nothing else. No shoes or shirt. Her breasts, brown and firm, showed clearly through the sides of the bib. Her hair had been drawn back into a ponytail, and her face carried no makeup except the effect of sun and wind. She exuded confidence and good health. Fred watched her with paternalistic amusement.
It had been a year since Lydia and twenty-three of her former patients had taken the final step, pulled up roots, and gone to find a place where they might start a new community. John Abbot revealed that he was the heir to a rather large fortune and while he had been using his money to play around in different city scenes, he now wanted to invest it in something he believed in. He made the five thousand acres he had inherited in the south of New Mexico available to Lydia and the group, and they all moved into the two sprawling ranch houses that had already been built on the land, there to begin a new way of being.
They had arrived with an almost even balance of advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side were an abundance of enthusiasm,
no immediate financial worries, and a fairly high degree of personal knowledge about one another. Their most important sources of difficulty lay in culture shock, suffered when transporting oneself from one of the planet’s most intense psychic centers to a space in which the nearest human neighbors were over three miles away; and in urban ignorance: not one of them knew anything about planting, growing, tending animals, or any of the hundred tasks necessary to keep a self-sufficient farm community going. For the first six months they had had to carry most of their food in from open air markets and only gradually made the transition to owning their own cows and sheep and chickens, and to raising their own soy beans and wheat and vegetables.
Learning the difference between actual survival effort and living an ecologically parasitic existence in the city was one of the most difficult tasks any of them had ever faced, especially since they were prone to all the excesses that utopian types fall into when they first find themselves in a secluded spot: nudity, orgies, reveling all night and sleeping through most of each day. Lydia’s job involved getting everyone to do his or her necessary share of the labor while making sure that the group maintained its dedication to their real work.
They had decided, during one of their first meetings, to define themselves as a religious center. There were the usual legal advantages to such a move, but on another level they had all come to consider what they were doing as constituting a new religious sensibility.
As John Abbot put it, “There’s only one true religion and all the religions of the world are more or less imperfect copies of that. So, why not make a new draft?”
Most of them were sophisticated enough to understand that the surest way to kill an impulse is to articulate it. Also, in the scramble to put down the structures, principles, and ground rules of a community, a power struggle is almost certain to ensue. Even though a number of people share the same vision, the formulation of that vision may differ radically from person to person.