Night Soil

by Dale Peck

  Later he learned that his wife had eased his passage with a smear of rendered fat. At first this disappointed him. He had thought the electric smoothness a natural thing, perhaps even a blessing of marriage. But he came to appreciate her thoughtfulness, as when she served him the biggest piece of meat or instructed her daughter to remove his boots and rub his feet when he returned from the forest or the sea. As his aunt she had heckled him with the other women, belittling the hare he brought back for not being a deer, a deer for not being a moose, a moose for not being a bear. But as his wife she defended him, chasing away even his mother from his kills until she had cut out the choicest meats for him, the tenderloin, the haunch, the liver. She never faced him when they coupled or engaged in any of the play that he had seen her enjoy with his uncle, but she never denied him either, and was often more conscious of his physical state than he was; that first night’s awakening was repeated so often that he came to think of it as part of sleep. Indeed, he was erect now, and he dribbled a bit of blubber into his hand and curled it around his penis. It was his first time masturbating, although he was aware of the practice, and he tried to imitate the speed of his wife’s hips, the soft even pressure of her flesh around his. But it was the image in his head that most compelled him. He had fantasized before. He had just never been aware he was doing it, because he had been coupling with his wife at the same time, and it was she he thought of. He was surprised by the power of the mental image. Not so much by its vividness—he had nothing against which to compare it—as its potency, its ability to excite him, and he reached fruition almost as quickly as he did with his wife.

  Afterwards he lay still, his eyes closed, contemplating what had just happened. The image in his head had not been a memory. Although it was similar to things he had done, it was wholly new, and he found himself wondering if his wife had entered his mind, like an arrow piercing the eye of a fox, or if he had built her there, the arrow crafted from wood and stone and feathers. But no, he thought. The image in his head was not his wife, just as the fur of his clothing was no longer caribou or seal. A transformation had taken place. Something had been lost, but something had been made too. Or perhaps something had been revealed—the part of his wife that was not contained by her flesh. Her spirit, yes, but he had always believed the spirit remained in the body until the body died. Now he understood that it could go out into the world while the flesh yet lived. Could his spirit do the same thing? It seemed improbable that it could not, but how did it work? Was it a directed action, like throwing a harpoon or calling a dog, or did it happen of its own accord, like blinking against blackflies or flinching from a flame? He thought of the caribou whose trail he had followed. There was no evidence to suggest they had passed by recently. He had been aware of the stillness of the weather; knew very well that the tracks could have been older than they appeared. But he had wanted to return to his tribe—to his family, to his wife—with meat rather than wood, and it was this vision he had trailed, not the herd, which in his mind was not composed of animals but of so many servings of food. But without that vision—without spirit venturing into the world—what was there? Spirit saw the arrowhead inside the piece of stone, the waterproof boots in a seal’s skin, the bow in a curved tree branch. Spirit saw the tree and the seal and the stone even—without spirit the world was undifferentiated. The world did not recognize animal or plant nor make a distinction between earth and sea and sky. It was spirit that broke the world into pieces and saw how those pieces could be recombined to make new things, that named the pieces, and the new things made from them, and in so doing left a piece of itself behind, as his wife had left the feeling of her body in his flesh, so that the gift of her touch would always be with him.

  A drop of water fell on his skin then. All his senses concentrated on the spot of bitter, burning coldness, so that it seemed as if it was his thought—his spirit—that warmed the water until it became indistinguishable from the sweat rolling off his body. Another drop. He threw his spirit at the frigid corona, obliterating it. Another drop. Another. Another. A sheath of ice was trying to form around him but his spirit glowed like a coal, melting it. But a part of him wanted to let the ice take him. It would protect him, he told himself. From what? From the snow. From the—

  With a start, he remembered where he was. He shook himself awake, sucking in air, but could not take a full breath. His smoke hole had filled with snow. He grabbed his lucky arrow and stood unsteadily, supporting himself on the frame of his shelter. He jabbed the arrow into the icy hole. Snow fell into his fire, sizzling there, creating even more smoke, but the hole remained blocked beyond the reach of his arrowhead. He jabbed and swirled, the arrowhead scratching audibly against the ice that lined the shaft, but it remained blocked. He tried to jump and crashed through his platform to the frigid air beneath. He grabbed his bow and aimed up the narrow tube. Taut sinew twanged, the arrow disappeared. Smoke continued to fill his shelter. The man was reaching for a second arrow when a fist-sized clump of snow fell into the fire, and a shaft of silver light appeared. The smoke hole had opened. The sun had come up. The man stared at the circle of blue-gray sky far above him, sucking in air, but then just waiting—waiting for his lucky arrow to reappear. He waited a long time, but all that came down his smoke hole were snowflakes, dancing and dying in the shaft of light. When, finally, he was convinced his arrow was not coming back, he stripped a few branches from the frame of his shelter, and began to make a pair of snowshoes for the long walk home.

  The ramped tunnel, the labored strides.

  The infinity of white, the phantoms of marauding whales.

  The falling light and the realization that he was lost.

  The step that completes the circle. The step that starts its eternal revolution.

  The novices revisit each stage of the man’s journey. Their focus this time is not on logistics but on state of mind—above all on this notion of spirit, which they sense is intrinsic to the parable’s resolution.

  But when they quiz the master, he tells them that the man’s sudden awakening had all but wiped the idea from his memory. Further, the master says, he cannot rule out the possibility that the man’s reverie was nothing more than an hallucination borne of oxygen deprivation. The novices have done their work too well, he says: their syncretic approach has created a seamless linguistic version of what, for the man, was a fractured progression of images and emotions of which he remembers only vague, conflicting premonitions: a disquieting sense that the world is not what it appears tempered by a comforting oneness with everything around him. Now, as he labors against the snow, he no longer thinks of his spirit, a finite or contingent entity, but merely spirit, a universal intention permeating all living and nonliving things, a metaphysics fully in line with his tribe’s beliefs.

  To the resolutely materialist novices, the familiar animism of the man’s tribe seems a kind of deistic translation of the contemporary idea of culture, whereas the more idiosyncratic notion from the man’s dream, of a personal spirit, seems like a prepsychological attempt to recognize one’s own consciousness —culture being shared ideas, consciousness being the mediator between external information and the individual. Long before they approach the parable, the novices will have rejected the dichotomy that posits culture as all human activity that is not biological or, in the more common, though even less precise, term, natural. It will have been drummed into them that human beings are animals like any other; their brains, while capable of prodigious feats of mentation compared to other species, are still biological organs, and as such any activity they engage in, any thought they produce, is inherently natural. The novices define culture instead as any mental activity that classifies the world—divides its unity and gives the pieces names—as well as any physical action that stems from those classifications. On this they agree. What divides them is culture’s relationship to consciousness, with some claiming that consciousness is anterior to culture, while others argue that culture not o
nly comes before consciousness but is a necessary cause of it. But how can you share ideas, the former ask, without first having ideas? To which the latter respond: the emphasis should be on sharing rather than on ideas. After all, many if not most animals demonstrate the ability to teach and learn without possessing consciousness, at least not in the ratiocinating form possessed by human beings.

  In the end anthropology carries the day: before Homo sapiens developed the sorts of mental functions contemporary human beings would recognize as consciousness, our behavior was instinctual and genetic, including our ability to learn. There was no speech with which an idea could be communicated, no logic, no metaphor. Nevertheless behaviors did accumulate from generation to generation, and in a manner distinct from other species; were assimilated at a younger age and progressed further until, over the course of thousands of years, human beings began to engage with mental symbols of the world as well as with the world itself. It is likely that the interaction with this collective store of information led to the development of the construct of the self—another mental symbol—as people came to require a mediator between their bodies and the increasingly complex behaviors available to them. But this mediator was itself a collective development. No one stood up one day and said “I”; “I am”; “I am I”; “I am that I am.” The development was gradual and species-wide. But when it was complete—or, at any rate, when it had reached a certain threshold—humanity had created a mode of being that separated it from other animals. It had become the creature that thinks of itself rather than is itself. This is not to say that previous generations lacked a sense of themselves as discrete beings, only that they spent no time wondering what that meant—what the self was, and if and how it was distinct from the flesh and blood and bone of the body. But once a person starts talking about “myself” a split occurs. There is a physical entity that is the self and a mental entity in search of it. This split is the ultimate origin of the Oedipus narrative: we hunt for something that is us, never suspecting that the only way to find it is to stop looking. To realize that the search is what is preventing us from finding it.

  So. The self. A mental construct that says “I,” but is in fact saying—is only capable of saying—“we.” An infinite we, comprising all who have gone before and will come after; a unifying we, slipping the bonds of biology and time; but a we that obliterates the individuality whose illusion it fosters. Is this the crisis at the heart of the parable? Was the man led astray by culture’s inability to reconcile the world with an idea of it, rather than by his own poor judgment? And if so, can culture save him? Or, failing that, can it predict how he will respond to his situation?

  A sense of unease has grown in the novices during these latter discussions. Because they have spent so much time exploring the ways in which the man is like them, they inevitably find themselves asking if their own selves are collectively created—if consciousness, which they have always thought of as oceanic in its drift and swell, is nothing more than a runnel in the narrow flume of culture. They feel tantalizingly close to completing the parable, which has occupied most of their first year in fifth form, yet are frightened of the conclusions they might reach, of the implications their work may have for their own lives—their own selves. But narrative moves in only one direction, and, tentatively, they begin to parse the relationship between culture and consciousness as it exists in the parable’s hero.

  The novices start by asking the master if the man could have had the same thoughts about spirit had he been awake and in an oxygen-rich environment. The master dismisses the question. The parable is not a quantum state: there is only what is and what is not. The novices ask if the man has a name, and the master tells them that the man has had several names, some concurrently, some successively, for himself, for his wife and stepdaughter and tribe, but that these names are similar to the words he uses for plants and animals and landmarks, characterizing the things to which they refer by virtue of appearance, behavior, or relationality rather than some innate identity. He called his wife one name before she married his uncle, for example, another when she was his aunt, and a third when he married her, just as he has different names for a seal in the water and a seal on dry land, a caribou when it is alive and a caribou after he has killed it. The novices ask if the man thought of himself as an individual—if he thought of his wife and stepdaughter, his mother and the other members of his tribe, as individuals. The master tells them that, though the man does not have the word “individual,” he recognizes that he and the people around him are separate beings, but only in the sense that a single step is a component of walking or running: it’s not that one cannot say where one stride ends and the next begins, but if you take the time to wonder you’ll probably end up falling on your face. The novices ask, finally, if the man is capable of reasoned as opposed to rote response to stimuli. The master tells the novices that in the early stages of the famine that claimed his future wife’s two oldest children, the man shared food with his niece and nephew, but later, when a mouthful of blubber was the difference between survival and death, he turned a deaf ear to their pleas. Moreover, the master tells them, the man’s uncle and aunt did the same, eating such food as there was in front of their dying children, although his aunt continued to nurse her youngest daughter, which is why the girl survived. And when the older girl and boy did succumb, the family said prayers to return their spirits to the gods, then consumed their flesh. They did not ask themselves if they should perform these actions, let alone why; they did not regard their actions as choices. Is this reason? Instinct? Training? Because the people of the man’s tribe did not ask themselves these questions, the master cannot answer them. All he can say is that similar actions had been performed by people who came before the man’s tribe, and would continue to be performed by people who came after, right down to the present day.

  Which demands the question (the novices whisper among themselves, outside of their sessions with the master): perhaps they should not be asking if the man is capable of independent thought. Perhaps they should be asking if they are. Think about it: by the time they came to the Academy as five-year-olds, they had assimilated almost 150,000 years of cultural production. They knew how to speak, for one thing, something that took ancient humans a hundred millennia to figure out, and had at least a rudimentary understanding of reading and writing, which took another 45,000 years or so to emerge. “Or so”: 5,000 years glossed over in four letters. How could a single mind could jump so ingrained a track! More believable that thought, shaped by language and directed inexorably toward speech, would race through the channel previous generations had excavated for it, and the closest it could come to freedom would be a quivering or writhing in its course, like a hose twitching when a spigot is opened and water fills it. Seen in this light, William James’s dictum that the first characteristic of consciousness is its “absolute insulation” from all others, the “irreducible pluralism” of minds, seems not just false but an inversion of the case, with some or all thought—or, more likely, some part of all thought—being shared among all members of an established group, not through telepathy or genetics but through culture. But is this “course” the novices keep invoking—this track, this channel, this hose—pointed toward a single end, or is it part of an irrigation system watering a vast area? Is humanity still wandering the vast snowy plain, as it were, still capable of directing its fate, or has it fallen into the same trap as the man?

  And of course culture’s pervasiveness goes far beyond language. The novices understand rhythm, pitch, melody, and harmony, for example, and make sense of what they hear based on these suppositions; they can look at pictures in a variety of styles, from fingerpainting to photographs, from trompe l’oeil to collage, and not only do they recognize the images there, but they see the world in terms of these modes. They can work all of the simple machines and combine them to make more complex tools. They understand doorknobs, light switches, keyboards. They navigate fluidly between hundre
ds of systems, operating bicycles and telephones and phonographs, and, despite Academy proscriptions, televisions and automobiles and computers. Then there are the institutions, the classrooms and corporations and governmental bodies not even an Academy man can wholly escape, individually monumental but together forming a mechanism whose complexity is beyond the capacity not just of any one person but of any group to comprehend fully—even a group composed of all its members. And this is not just how we live now. It is how we have always lived. To acknowledge it is not to protest. It is to admit that it is what makes us possible. As a species we are not herd but hive. We cannot even conceive of ourselves as individuals. When we attempt to, all we are really calling to mind is an idea—“the individual”—created over the course of what is, in the long view, a handful of generations. We see ourselves as isolated beings in a vast field of snow, when in fact we are more akin to the snowflakes falling from the clouds: fleetingly discrete before being subsumed into that from which we came.