by Conrad Aiken
—Now you’re getting pretty close to home, aren’t you.
—Oh, am I. You think so. I’m discussing general principles, Bill, general principles. Nothing homelike about it. To be aware is to suffer. One of the cornerstones of existence, you can’t dodge it, you know you can’t. It’s all very well to say to the child, crawling there in the dark, listening and spying, don’t whimper, don’t listen, don’t spy—it’s all very well to say to him you don’t need your mother any longer, she doesn’t belong only to you, nothing belongs only to you—or to say the same thing to him when he’s grown up—but the fact remains he can never get over that suffering. Never. All he can do is translate it into other terms, pretend it’s something else, give it a lot of fool names, or comfort himself with the discovery that every one else is suffering in the same way. The right to suffer in our own way—that’s what we demand, by God. And we won’t be deprived of it. No.
—Who the hell is stopping you?
—Not you, anyway, you damned fool!
—Of course. You’re projecting. You set me up in order to knock me down. I grant you your little necessity to suffer—you’re not unique in that. Go ahead and suffer. Howl your head off. And if it will do you any good, abuse me for appearing to stand in your way. It’s all part of the same picture, isn’t it?
—Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry. I seem to have missed my step somewhere. Tell me what to do, Bill. Hit me with an ax and sober me.
—You’ll sober yourself when you’re ready. Meanwhile go on howling. I’ll lie down if you don’t mind.
—You’re tired.
—Kind of. But it doesn’t matter—go ahead—I’m listening.
—Now you make me feel ashamed, selfish.
—Oh, for God’s sake don’t worry about that. You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you? Or I hope so.
—Of course I would, Bill. Of course I would. We’re interchangeable. But where was I.
—You were suffering, I believe.
—So I was. I was demanding the right to suffer in my own way. In my own terms. And not to have some one come along in a purple airplane, a kind of bloody little deus ex machina of psychology, and tell me that my little suffering—which we’ll call x—wasn’t really x at all but y—as if to call it by another name made it any the less suffering. That’s what makes me sore with you fellows—you seem to think that merely by driving us back from one set of phrases to another, by a series of historical substitutions, you’ve settled everything. Childish, by God. Childish. I say sweetheart to you, and you reply, brightly, mother. I say drawers, and you say diapers. I say whisky, and you say breast. All wrong. All completely wrong. Mere jugglery. Granted that the child’s suffering is the exact equivalent of the man’s—for the sake of argument—you’re left just where you started. You’ve still got on your hands the initial quantum of suffering, unanalyzable, the burden which we pick up in the act of birth and carry until we damned well die. Perhaps you’ll argue that my suffering in the present case, my loss of balance, is excessive, and that to force me to revalue it in terms of my childhood experiences will bring me back to my senses. But will it? I wonder.
—Try it and see, why not. Isn’t it at least useful to observe that it’s all relative? And that it’s all determined? If you’ll take the trouble to know a little about the aetiology of behavior, and of emotions and feelings, then you can’t take yourself so damned seriously. You can laugh at yourself.
—I don’t want to laugh at myself—not yet. I want to indulge in a good primitive yell. Good God, Bill, do you mean to say we aren’t to be allowed to know pain? What’s the good of being conscious, then? Of being a man? Hell’s delight, it’s something, isn’t it, to know what crucifixion is, in a complicated modern form, and to make an outcry about it! If we find ourselves here, on the surface of this little planet, and feel like shaking our fists at God, and cursing Him for giving us the thing we call life, is some paltry little society for the prevention of unkindness to gods going to rush up and say No, no, you can’t do that, you aren’t really suffering at all, and even if you were you have no right to say so, you only misunderstand things, everything is for the best, come along now and see the sunrise? I like to think that this existence here is hell. That’s what, hell. We ourselves are the doomed, and our pitiful little ideals and hopes are precisely our torment.
—Very ingenious. Our little pewter Christ is now ready for the great betrayal.
—Gosh, yes. It’s all arranged. Did I arrange it? Months ago? Did I will it? Zingoids. What depths there are in the hell of human nature. What a theme for a play that would be—think of it, Bill. Myself willing my own betrayal: myself my own Galeoto: sowing the seeds of my own dishonor. Did I do it? How can I prove I didn’t. I see them coming together—watch them approaching each other—encourage them subtly to see more and more of each other—to go to concerts, dances, parties—I stay away myself, get drunk night after night, confess my delinquencies with Molly—seize every occasion to discuss the necessity for complete freedom in such matters, so as to accustom them to the idea—and then when the situation is ripe I go away to New York and leave the coast clear for them, thus providing the final temptation. Clear as a nutshell. It isn’t their fault at all, is it? No. Step up, ladies and gents, and see the man who cuckolded himself. See the man who grew his own horn in a window box, watering it with his tears. But if I did it, why did I do it? What does it mean. Could I prove, psychologically, that I didn’t want to do it? Doubtful. You’re asleep. You aren’t listening. Why should you.
—Saint Pandarus.
—Yes, fry, lechery, fry. Isn’t it wonderful. Along the banks of the Styx on the obscenic railway. In that room once, in that bed once. But it’s impossible that I should have willed it, Bill, impossible. Why should I want to do such a thing? Or half want to do it. Am I in love with Bertha? The angels are coming to tell me what love is. I can hear them: they are galloping along Massachusetts Avenue in a fleet of—. What. They are giving tongue. The snowflakes are their voices: innumerable: I hear them calling me. I shall attend the convention of angels in the ballroom of the Statler Hotel, and make an inaugural address on the nature of love. Love is cruelty. Love is hate. Love is a desire to revenge yourself. It’s a bloody great butcher’s cleaver, that’s what it is. It has eyes of a ferocity known only to comets, its hands are red, its feet are claws, its wings are scythes of jealousy. Its will is destruction: it tears out the heart of the beloved, in order that its own heart may break. Love is murder. It’s a suicide pact, and all for what? All for death.
—The little boy has been reading Latin poetry again. Odi et amo. Ah, yes, the cruel ambivalence of life, poor Andy. Where have I heard all this before. Who bit you.
—I bit myself, in the cradle, when I first puked my mother’s milk.
—I thought so. Little Andrew Suck-a-Thumb.
—So this is love: we reach a new conception of love, Bill, and one that does us credit. I see it exactly—exactly. It’s nothing on earth but a domestication of death. Our little domestic death. It’s a ballet. See them go to bed together—listen to them murmuring adoration—hear them whisper and kiss—O God, all that silken sinuosity and hypocrisy and ecstasy—the beautiful painful dance—which twinkles starlike, moves so swift and fine—and all of it a thin masque to cover the raw red tomb-face of primordial hatred. Skull purring at skull, death’s-head kissing death’s-head, the caress a strangle, consummation a swordthrust. It’s killed me: I’m dead. I’ve eaten my father’s skeleton and I’m dead. I shall never love again, any more than I’ll ever be able to stop loving. Christ, what a fix we’re in. Helpless. Burn off our hands. Drink ourselves into permanent unconsciousness. Love—don’t make us laugh. It’s automatic—no virtue in it—might as well praise the grassblade for being a grassblade—the weather vane for turning in the wind—the blood for pouring from a wound. In the spring the young libido lightly turns to thoughts of lust. Pressure of the seminal vesicles, and Tom falls in love with my wife. And mea
nwhile what am I doing? What indeed: the answer is nothing. I stand still like a whirlwind that hangs in one spot, uncertain where to go. Enormous concentration of energy, aimless, like an undischarged lightning flash. What in the name of God shall I do—where shall I go—tell me.
—Go back to Bertha. And hurry up about it. Try to be civilized. Or pretend to be, if you can’t. Give the poor girl a break, why don’t you. She probably hasn’t slept a wink for a week.
—Doesn’t deserve to, either. No. Plenty of time for sleeping later on. Let her lie awake for a while and think: she’s put it off too long. She ought to have done her thinking beforehand. Now it’s a battle of wits. And do you know what I think I’ll do? Gosh, I’ve got an idea. Yes, I see it all of a sudden, and it’s going to be good. This bottle’s empty. I’ll have to go back to whisky.
—Well, what’s the bright idea.
—I’m going to surround them.
—What do you mean.
—Just exactly that. I’m going to surround them. That’s my one great advantage, don’t you see? I know more about it than they do. I know more about Berty than Tom does, and more about Tom than Berty does. And there I am, and there by God I’ll stay, like a third consciousness, present at every damned thing they think or do. I’ll haunt them like a ghost. I’ll go to bed with them and get up with them. I’ll make them so self-conscious that they’ll go crazy. I’ll be everywhere—they’ll find me in the bathtub, at the piano, on the pillow, in the kitchen sink. My whole history constantly before them. How can they empty their memories of Andrew One-eye Cather, overnight? Can’t be did. All the habits they’ve shared with me for hundreds of years—the jokes, the odds and ends of intimacy each of them has in common with me—how can they escape? They can’t. And here’s the point—they love me. Don’t they? Well, that makes it all the worse. If I just stand aside with meditative irony now—if I just watch them cynically from across the street, as it were—saunter by from time to time—send them a picture postcard from Montreal or Timbuctoo—reappear before them at a Sander’s Theater concert, disguised as one of the bats that circle above the orchestra—speak to them from the forsythia bushes in the spring—eat hot dogs with them at John’s—laugh at them from the comic strips at breakfast—Christ, Bill, it’s going to be good. Don’t you see. I’ll surround them like a cloud. When Bertha kisses Tom, she’ll think—this isn’t Andy. This is Tom. He doesn’t kiss in quite the same way. He doesn’t place his arms in quite the same way. And what’s the result—she’s kissing two people at once. Now I ask you, Bill, can she be happy, doing that? For long? No. Nor Tom either. He’ll be thinking—she has kissed Andy like this. Ten years. Night after night. He has seen her in this hat, this dress, this nightgown, these tarpaulin knickers. He is here now. And is she thinking about him when I slip my arm under her left shoulder—is she wishing, at the bottom of her heart, that it were he. Will they discuss that, I wonder. And what good would it do if they did. None. They would at once begin to tremble on the brink of the unspeakable, the unformulable, the realm of doubts and suspicions, where passionate reassurances drop dead like birds into a volcano. Isn’t it wonderful? Hrrrp. Excuse me.
—You’re insane. I never heard anything so disgusting and cruel in my life. You ought to be ashamed.
—Not at all. All’s fair. Love and war. I think I’ll do it. But come to think of it, I don’t have to do it. It will do itself. I can’t even help it, if I wanted to. Automatic. Guilt. Suppose I decide to be a trumpeting little angel about it, take it all with good grace and magnanimity, tell them to go ahead and make a bright little affair of it for as long as they like, Andy standing meekly and beautifully aside—all right, you fool, suppose I do. What then. It will be all the worse for them. I was just exaggerating, you see. I really have nothing to do with it. Just one of those assumptions of imaginary power. The truth is, I can’t help it. Two rapid falcons in a single snare condemned to do the flittings of the bat.
—Nice. A wonderful vision. But there is something else——
—You’re asleep.
—No. But there is something else——
—Well, all right, all right, go ahead, spit it out. Don’t goggle at the ceiling like a pekingese.
—It’s my business to goggle, you poor prune. The Freudian technique of the colorless and dispassionate auditor.
—Dispassionate hell.
—But just the same, I’ll give you an idea.
—Oh, very kind of you, darling little Bill. How much will I owe you.
—Your life, very likely.
—Keep the change. Do you think we’ll have an early spring? Will the Bruins win the Stanley Cup? Or what have you.
—If you’ll shut up and stand still for a minute, instead of running up and down the room like a——
—Pterodactyl.
—I’ll tell you. That is, if I can get hold of it. Wait. This idea of the surrounding consciousness—there’s something in it. Yes, something in it. But not as you foresee, quite—no—because you want to use it as an instrument of revenge. That wouldn’t do any good—in fact, it would ultimately punish yourself most of all. But suppose you do it with real kindness—I mean, real love—for both of them. You admit you love them. Presumably, therefore, you want their happiness. Don’t you?
—Well, for the love of mud.
—Don’t you?
—I don’t like this turn. You’re disgusting.
—You know you do. That’s why it hurts you so much, of course: that’s simple enough.
—As simple as murder.
—If you love them, then you want to keep them. And you must choose that course of action which is most likely to keep them. And this is where magnanimity of consciousness comes in. Go ahead and be conscious—let them feel that you are constantly there with them—but let them feel that you are there in the role of the person who most loves them. Why not. If anything could be calculated to bring things to a happy issue, that’s it. In this way, you will absorb or digest the whole situation—embrace both Bertha and Tom—and as a result of it, you will grow: you will become the wisest of the three: and the strongest. If there are latent wrongnesses in their position, this will bring it to the surface. If they are weak, or guilty, or not profoundly set on this thing—as I suspect—then this will sooner or later make them horribly aware.… That’s all.
—Well, for the—if somebody was to—and so saying he knocked me down with a fountain pen. Just like that. He drove up in his chariot and blew me over with a whisper, that’s what he did. With bright little words of love and kindness, too, and adjurations to Christlike mercy. You make me sick. You’d better go to sleep, if that’s the best you can do, that’s all I can say. Your complete lack of comprehension simply staggers me—if I weren’t already staggering. Yes yes yes yes yes. I ought to do everything for them. I love them dearly. They’re so kind to me, day and night, aren’t they. So considerate of me. They put me first every time, don’t they. Tom, that God-damned snob—what did he ever do for me. What. Oh yes, he got me into the Institute of 1770 as an honorary. I forgot that. And tried to get me into the Gas House. Helped me get the football managership. Long ago and far away. Wonderfully kind, he was—I’ll never forget it as long as I live. I owe him everything. So now that he presents his bill, of course I’ll pay on the nail. Yes. I’ll help him in every way. I’ll give him five dollars for the Sacco-Vanzetti fund, and make speeches for his parlor Reds at Ford Hall. I’ll run his errands for him. I’ll mix his prussic acid for him. I’ll give him my rum, my Hogarth prints, my first editions of Henry James, and my collection of pressed flowers. From Duxbury, too. Why not. And all as a preliminary to the greatest gift of all, which you foresee already. Little Bertha, the Brattle Street Bovary. Let him have all he can get of her, and all he can keep. With both hands, with auricle and ventricle, with liver and lights, I give her up. And she too. The immaculate. Whom I had to teach, whom I taught, whom I made what she is today. What is she today? She is Andrew Cather, that’s who she is. S
aturated solution of A. One-eye Cather. What would her hair have been without me? Her hats? Her music? Her mind? Her body? A few timid Vincent Club jokes, a conversation about maids at the Sewing Circle lunch, a hundred visiting cards left in silver dishes in Brattle Street and Marlborough Street and Scott Street and Highland Avenue. I made her over in my image. Is that why I don’t know whether to hate her or love her? I made her over, gave her one eye in exchange for two—ah, but what an eye, what an eye—myopic but precise—the eye of imagination—taught her the animal pleasures and with them gave her the great gift of horror—and now that she is a Cather, now that she is Andy, Tom wants her. Oh yes. He is moving in on me, closing in on me. It’s the Michelangelo thing. Hello, Mike old boy—are you still there? Keep one eye on me—we’re going on to bigger and better things. Dawn of the artist’s consciousness, which is consciousness awaking with the last beat of the dying heart. The eye that opens in the coffin. Monsieur Valdemar—the mind that blossoms to terrific thought with the energy thrown off by the final catalysis of corruption. Christ, I must get away from here. Not geographically, but on the wings of Father Imago. Did you ever hear of him? My best friend. Myself. The one who was left—who was left—what was I about to say. I’m going too fast. Left high and dry. I must maneuver back to the sea, that’s it. I knew that all along, too, and wanted it before. Yes, I told you about it. The long, blond beach in moonlight, the bronze waves in moonlight, the dory whose name was Doris, named of course after my mother, the dry curled waves of seaweed, the blackened stones left from clambake fires, the Indian arrowheads of white quartz—there it all is, spread out, miles long, worldlong, on the way to the Gurnett. I shall go to the Gurnett. Along that frightful beach. At midnight, in mournful moonlight, alone, or with a whore.
—Take Bertha with you.
—That’s rather witty of you, my boy. I might do worse. I could point out the exact spot where we always had the picnic, the annual picnic, the clambake. On clear days, the mirage of Provincetown, and the smoke of the Provincetown steamer streaked along the horizon. Yes. And the Plymouth boat too, closer in, white and glittering. And all the dead fish on the sand, stinking in the sun. Shall we take off our clothes and bathe? Have we brought our bathing suits? Shall we divellicate? You’re snoring, Bill. Go to bed.