Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. [Leviathan, Pt. I, Ch. 13.]

  Hobbes carries the dot-matrix theory of society back to its atomistic source. The leviathan he calls the State is built up like a photographic image. Each man is a dot, a body in motion. Each man is driven, willy-nilly, by desires, and everywhere seeks their satisfaction. The power over available means, which men need to dampen those drives, will be given up only when they realize the futility of going it alone. Civilization is therefore based upon the mutual surrender of rights, the ceding of individual sovereignty. Freud would say that it depends upon the sublimation of instincts.

  So we begin our story in a state of war, where every man has a right to everything, and nothing is unjust because nothing is just, and we end it by establishing a power which is absolutely sovereign, and therefore in a state of peace. Narrative beginnings are necessarily unstable, whereas the endings of most every narrative are calm, resolved, steady.

  The historical reality of the state of nature has always been a problem, and even a rationalist like Hobbes is tempted, now and then, by the idea of an actual and absolute starting point, just as others are seduced by utopian dreams—the narrative’s ultimate, and triumphant, ending.

  It may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before. [Leviathan, Pt. I, Ch. 13.]

  When beginnings are described in absolute and complete terms, it becomes difficult to find a fatal flaw or, amid the war of all, the small reign of reason, which can move matters off the mark. When Aristophanes said that we were once round and therefore that we thought we were perfect, he avoided the problem, since, clearly, we were not what we thought, and obviously full of false pride, and consequently in the wrong, and justly punished by our division; but we ought to have no such misapprehensions about any paradise that is truly a peaceable kingdom. Is a garden perfect if it may be improved by cutting down one tree? Paradise is a theological puzzle the way the Big Bang is a theoretical one. Why fall at all? Just in order to have a story? What made the Big Bang go boom? Do we begin with an instability raised to its highest power and end with a tranquillity so smoothly even everywhere energy cannot pilot-light a stove? If square one is impure, why call it square one? Are there going to be handicaps imposed before the race is run? Adam obeyed his wife, not God, but this result could scarcely have been a surprise. On the other hand, if square one is without blemish, why budge? Hobbes tries to have his cake remain as whole and untasted as when first baked, while eating it bit by bite from frost to crumb, but such a desire cannot be satisfied inside consistency.

  It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this Inference, made from the Passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by Experience. Let him therefore consider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he armes himselfe, and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when even in his house he locks his chests; and this when he knowes there bee Lawes, and publike Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow Citizens, when he locks his dores; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words? [Leviathan, Pt. I, Ch. 13.]

  What experience confirms (by counting our locks, our looks, our fears) is that society is at war with itself, as Rousseau suggested, not that nature necessarily is. But if nature is as warlike as Hobbes insists, we shall be as unable to release ourselves from its grip as we shall be powerless to prevent peace should we ever reach our absolute sovereign’s final society.

  6. LIFE IS LIKE THAT

  Let us now imagine another game, one unlikely to be popular except with the kinky, which we might call Death March or, alternatively, Life Is Like That. The game gets going at a womb-shaped space on the playing board (discreetly rendered, of course, as if there were a sheet over the feet depicted in the stirrups, and we didn’t begin in a puddle of amniotic fluid). At this point, a good roll of the dice may furnish us with a head start: hardy genes, moderate passions, an optimistic outlook, accurate senses, and a few brains; whereas a bad roll could send us limping, poor, blind, sickly, into the world. As in golf, in this game, low scores are the ones sought. The white pieces come from the best Boston families and are heavily favored to win. The black pieces are Ethiopians or Congolese and aren’t given a chance. So, as the game goes on, the several players will experience various fates; a few will go to the best schools, most to the worst; many will endure every childhood illness, some suffer none; there will be those who will eat paint and be poisoned by its lead, those whom rickets will cripple and scurvy get; and, in the card pile, from which players often have to draw, there will be many more cards which say something like “Experience epileptic seizure due to mother’s drug habit. GO FIVE SQUARES STRAIGHT AHEAD” than those that read: “Your father has given you a set of golf clubs for Christmas. LOSE A TURN.”

  The ghetto will kick a lot of kids along into middle age, or kill them right away, riddled while sitting on their front porch, beaten in an alley, stabbed in a bar. Others will be smoking at ten, and drinking, too, and hanging out at fast-food joints in their teens, speeding on speed, stuffed as a goose, drunk as a lord. So car crashes will erase a lot of players, as small wars will, overdoses, bad choices of career, falls in the tub, getting too sincerely mugged, contracting AIDS, being done in by despondency, cancer, colas, cigars. Failing at business, falling out of love, becoming bored by bodies and indifferent to ideas, aging at everything—memory going, beauty fading—vital fluids disappearing in a gurgle like water down a drain: none has been the fun that this game makes them. They are, in their petty details, the stuff of every story. Unhappy marriage? drop a decade of expectancy. Lost job? zip up six. Raise ungrateful kids? jump four. Lousy sex? cut out eight. Overweight? shorten by seven. Tense? tired? transferred to L.A.? made unwise investments? hit the skids? Watch the years blow away in the wind. So why not retire? but resting easy will cost you a couple. Take walks. Keep a pet. Have an interest. Bet on bingo. Stay off the streets. Eat out of tins. Good luck to all. The player to die last wins.

  Let us consider another game, I suggested, but it was not truly “other,” for all these games are quite the same. Death or treasure—praise or blame—cautionary or heedless—Huffalump or Market Crash—there are only plastic players, dice cups and spinners, playmates or pirates, honey or money—even in what we want to call “real life” there is simply a series of steps or stages of achievement: standing, walking, talking, going to nursery school, making the grades, graduating, first from high school, then from college, getting a job, getting laid, getting married, going in debt, having kids; what are they? only colored squares and illustrated patches, pretended punishments, imaginary rewards.

  I can insist on this essential identity, and make this dizzying deduction, if I
can also persuade you to accept a separation between the little elementary mathematics involved and counting’s lurid embellishments—between “one” and what “one” is one of—between the shape of a sentence and its sense—between structure and texture, form and content—the joke and its versions, the tale and its telling—because, like man and society, I can regard the first term as the seed or source, some pure position, and the second term (everything that comes afterward) as a kind of encrustation (either by barnacles or by gems), as superficial, as cosmetic, the result of training and the minding of manners, as including what is now ever so commonly called “lifestyle.”

  We were without fire until Prometheus stole it for us; but the really important thing about this story, as with all the others, is that we were at all before we had fire or suffered our fall or signed our social contract; and that we are definable apart from sin, science, or society. We are wild animals who have been taught to jump through corporate hoops. We are honest rustics who have been corrupted by cynical city ways. Our id is deeply dark and wet within us like a hidden cistern. Mother and father, teachers and statesmen, athletes and idols of screen and guitar: none of them put that black well of restless wishes there. Civilization is a veneer—cheap and vulgar sometimes like aluminum siding, rich and costly like ivory and bird’s-eye maple. We were once without sin, round as the round world, swollen with pride the way that fruit we stole was fat with juice, or we were once barely alive in a quarterless war, without helpmate or friend, ally or even a rational enemy, as full of fear as a field mouse, speechless as a stone, heartless as the wind. Once upon a time. By stages we have declined: from gold to silver, silver to bronze, bronze to iron, and thence to tin, until we are now made mostly of plastic. Or by steps we shall ascend: from the solidarity of tribe and family to the unity of the city-state, from neighborhood to nation, hence to the whole world, overcoming classes on the way, stifling economic strife, reaching an Eden in which ego will dance where id cooled its heels, and every will will give orders to itself that will be in harmony with every other order. So our history extends from what we were once upon a time toward what we shall become. Yet we can’t have a story unless we have an identity. The pronoun “I” must sit like a cap on the same head for a whole life. Like the id, like every essence, like substance itself, the soul endures.

  Another example. Suppose we related the myth, once more, concerning the pure realm of Forms, a paradise of principle and perfect law, of notions uncontaminated by notation or by any way of being “put” or “presented.” And suppose we repeated how the Demiurge, Plato’s creative god, made Time, the moving image of eternity, like a light lit in the sky, so that the history of the world could commence … once and for all, once upon a time. Suppose we told it, and have come to represent its end, when the souls of living things have reassembled in the radiantly angelic company of the Forms; when Time is no more because nothing moves, including the hands of the clock; at the end, when stasis takes over and concludes every story. What then? We shall have added only another great game to our fund of amusements, of things to say while huddled around a campfire on a dark and stormy night, of brave things to sing while the ship is sinking, of country tales to tell the way Boccaccio told them while the Black Plague was raging through the cities.

  And we can make these differentiations: we can consider color apart from shape, the use of a word instead of its mention; we can study the motion of a bullet while indifferent to the bullet itself or the heart it enters; we can treat even the sorriest individuals as nonetheless ends-in-themselves, or play with frictionless systems; and it is often very useful to do so, to conceive of extents and extremes, of a pure poetry, for instance, or a world without hunger, to violate hitherto inviolate states to see if the wall falls instead of Humpty Dumpty, or the bubble bursts from a too intense spread of iridescence over its surface, or to estimate the degree of skill and level of emotion with which the first sin was committed.

  To support what is after all the common narrative formula for life and its history seen as a sort of solid-state cinema—one frame following another like the topple of dominoes—is the apparently linear constitution of our languages (the Western ones, at any rate), because each letter, syllable, word, sentence, paragraph, or page pursues its fellow (even Volume Two seeks out its Volume One) like the units of a long parade, bands tootling one after another; and, when spoken, with each significant sound instantly replaced by a pointed pause or pregnant silence or still another meaningful noise, it resembles the way events disappear as the murderous metronome drones on, so the past won’t clog the space of the present, a space that, like our silver screen, frees itself for the oncoming action and is always eager to push its occupant along in order to continue unabated the militant march of sound track and image. Thus conditions in the world, stages on life’s way, states of human consciousness, the scatterings of memory, and all those uttered words seem to proceed in structural unity: a harmony as sequential and evanescent as music.

  It is one of the lovelier illusions. Let us look back a moment at Hobbes and his language, which seems to unwind across the page in a continuous and dutiful line and seems to be presenting us with lively incidents from an old story. Yet the rules of English grammar, which determine word order and the direction of modification, require the reader to return, again and again, to what has gone before; to move the eye, that is to say, not at all like a stylus in a groove, but like a tailor’s needle, loop after loop. When phrases are well turned, we linger over them, which interrupts the narrative; and when predicates lead us back to their subject, we find ourselves looking over our shoulder as we go, instead of straight ahead. “Hereby it is manifest,” Hobbes declares, and we must carry that boast forward over an entire paragraph. What is manifest? That men are, when without a common power, in a condition of war. Hobbes halts his thought to tell us what war is in terms of what weather is. In short, any complex idea is like a territory to be traversed, not the way a number of ticks reach their tocks, but the way we crisscross a neighborhood or inhabit a building, holding the whole in our head as we walk along one walk, watching a florist wrap a bouquet or, through a window, a barber shave.

  Again, when words rhyme or otherwise sing (as when he writes, “without a common Power to keep them all in awe”) (oh’s bending about eee’s to reach ah’s), they form obdurate units like stones that disturb the smooth flow of a stream. When his sentences throw ahead of their arrival patterns of repetition and other rhetorical schemes (“no … Industry … no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation … no … building … no Instruments of moving … no Knowledge … no account of Time … no Arts; no Letters; no Society …”), they are creating blocks of prose with carefully articulated grids like the intermeshing streets of a city; and the very muscular movement of that prose, its gradual accumulation of force and decision (“And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short”), depends on our keeping the beat, retaining the sounds, feeling the accelerating absence of the verb, so that the successive conditions of solitude, poverty, nastiness, and brutishness are compounded, intermingled, caught up and forcefully squeezed into “short”—a word additionally appropriate in its concluding position because the fear of death, for Hobbes, is mankind’s overriding emotion. Finally, the pungency of his style and the concision of its effects frequently depend upon an ironic balancing of one brief statement against a greater mass, a result he brilliantly achieves, finishing off the paragraph in which he defines war (the way we define conditions of our weather) as a continuing disposition to seek violent solutions, by saying, sourly, “All other time is Peace.”

  If we treat Hobbes’s state of nature as a narrative, then we can abstract the tale from its telling the way he dissolves society into solitaries alone with their fears; but if Hobbes is mistaken and men must be defined in terms of communities of some kind, then it might be a similar mistake not to treat a style like his as seamless with its sense and at one with its occasion, just as wit is said to be wed to
its manner and moment, unlike the joke, which will crack wise with anyone and try to find a buyer for its grin under almost any management; because Hobbes may have given us not really an argument to tussle with but a picture to contemplate—a picture that deploys its elements in an intellectual space—a picture whose effect has one cause called “the Whole,” and one form called “Style,” and one skill called “Art.”

  7. I (SPACIALLY) THINK, THEREFORE I (TEMPORALLY) AM

  If narrative is a rhetorical strategy for arranging events in a serial order to suggest causal accountability and purposive direction within a circumscribed scheme (one with a beginning as well as an end); then exposition is a parallel device, one which deals with the exfoliation and orderly exposure of ideas, suggesting logical connection and descent from premises to conclusion within its own complete and consistent system; and its greatest modern exemplar is Descartes, the narrative philosopher par excellence, and one who realized that these two processes were not metaphysically innocent, but had the blood of ontology on their hands.

  Not only does Descartes describe his discovery of the cogito as if it were a western isle, but in his Discourse on Method he composes the ideal narrative-writer’s manual. I use the word “manual” because Descartes employs “making” as his model—making—as we might put together a bike from a box, or guess how to re-create in our own kitchen an elegant restaurant’s dish. We analyze our problem, deconstructing it, identifying the kind and determining the quantity of every ingredient. These elements are then recombined in a specific order, so that the cook or the carpenter proceeds from the simple to the complex, reviewing his procedures to make sure he has not left out the salt or some essential nail.