King Lamus made Hermes lead up the most astonishingly precipitous crags, with little advice and no assistance. But his hand was always within reach of the boy; so that if he made a mistake and fell he could immediately be caught without hurting himself.
But the child himself did not know how carefully he was being watched and guarded. Basil treated him in every way as a responsible leader.
Their progress was necessarily slow; but so was ours. Both Lou and I found it impossible to go more than twenty paces or so without a rest. We had plenty of time to watch them, and it was amazing to see the working of the mind of Hermes as problem after problem presented itself to him.
There were many occasions on which it would have been easy for him to go around an obstacle, but he never attempted to do so. King Lamus had already implanted in his mind the idea that the fun of rock climbing consisted in attacking the most difficult passages.
The child would occasionally stop at the foot of a pitch, and contemplate it as if it were a mathematical problem. Once or twice he decided that it was too hard for him. On these occasions, King Lamus would go up first, calling out instructions to note the exact places where he put his hands and feet; and when it was the turn of Hermes to follow, as often as not he did so on a slack rope. His leader’s example had taught him how to negotiate the difficulty.
As for Dionysus, his methods were entirely different. He had neither the intellectual power of the elder boy nor his prudence, and he climbed with a sort of tempestuous genius.
At the top of the tongue, the goat track bends suddenly to the right, under the wall, to a point where there is a breach where one can crawl through very comfortably. Here we rejoined the climbers.
“Tomorrow,” said Hermes, “I shall take you up the Great Gully,” with the air of a full-fledged alpine guide.
Dionysus shook his little head. “I don’t know if he tan det through the hole,” he lamented.
King Lamus had taken off the rope and made it into a coil by winding it around his knee and foot. We plodded painfully over very rough ground to the top of the rock. It was both exhilarating and disheartening to see the way the two boys scrambled from boulder to boulder.
At last we reached the top. The two brethren who had carried up the provisions in knapsacks had already begun to spread them out on a level patch of grass.
Chapter VI
THE TRUE WILL
Lou and I were both utterly exhausted by the climb; and King Lamus reminded us that this was the formula of the Abbey of Thelema at Telepylus, that every one had to reach the top, step by step, through his own exertions. There was no question of soaring into the air by alien aid; and in all probability coming to earth with a bump.
We had found ourselves repeatedly out of breath during the ascent, though it had only occupied three-quarters of an hour, and we should certainly never have reached the top without recourse to heroin.
But all the time we were lost in amazement at the behaviour of the boys; their independence, their fearlessness, and their instinctive economy of force. We had no idea that it was possible for children of that age to achieve, even physically, what they had done, apparently without effort.
And as for their moral attitude, it was entirely outside our experience. I said something of the sort; and King Lamus retorted at once that it was the moral attitude which made possible the physical attainment.
“You will find that out for yourself in the case of your own experiment. It will do you very little good to break off your present practice. When you begin to tackle a subject, you must endure to the end, and the end never comes until you can say either yes or no, indifferently, to physical considerations.”
But for all that, both Lou and I were exalted by our physical triumph over the rock, trifling as it was; and our situation on the summit reminded us of some of the sensations of flying. There was the same detachment from the affairs of the world, the same visions of normal life in perspective; the ruddy brown roofs of the houses, the patches of tilled land, the distant hillsides with their fairy-like remoteness, the level plain of the sea, the receding coast line; all these things were so many witnesses of one great truth – that only by climbing painfully to a spot beyond human intervention, could one obtain a stable point of view from which to regard the Universe in due proportion.
At once we drew the moral analogy to our physical situation, and applied it to our immediate problem. Yet, in spite of what Lamus had said, we were both obsessed by the idea that we must stop taking heroin.
The next few days passed in strenuous efforts to reduce the number of the doses, and it was then that we began to discover the animal cunning of our bodies. Do what we might, there was always a reason, an imperative reason, for taking a dose at any given moment.
Our minds, too, began to play us false. We found ourselves arguing as to what a dose was. As the doses became fewer, they became larger. Presently, we arrived at the stage where what we considered a fair dose could not be conveniently taken at a single sniff. And then, worst of all, it broke on me one day, when I was struggling hard against the temptation to indulge, that the period between doses, however prolonged it might be, was being regarded merely in that light. In other words, it was a negative thing.
Life consisted in taking heroin. The intervals between the doses did not count. It was like the attitude of the normal man with regard to sleep.
It suddenly dawned upon me that this painful process of gradually learning to abstain, was not a cure at all in any right sense of the word.
Basil was perfectly right. I must reverse the entire process and reckon my life in positive terms. That’s what he means by “Do what thou wilt.” I wonder what my true will is? Is there really such a thing at all? My mathematics tells me that there must be. However many forces there may be at work, one can always find their resultant.
But this was all terribly vague. The desire to take heroin was clear-cut. It no longer produced any particular effect to take it. Now that I was getting down to two or three doses a day, at the most, it seemed as though there were no particular object in taking it, even as dulling the craving for it. I found it increasingly difficult to fill column two.
King Lamus descended on me one morning, just after I had taken a dose, and was raking my brain for a reason for my action. I was alternately chewing the end of my pencil and making meaningless marks on the paper. I told him my difficulty.
“Always glad to help,” he said airily; went to a filing cabinet and produced a docket of typed manuscripts. He put it in my hand. It was headed, “Reasons for taking it.”
1. My cough is very bad this morning. (Note: (a) Is cough really bad? (b) If so, is the body coughing because it is sick or because it wants to persuade you to give it some heroin?)
2. To buck me up.
3. I can’t sleep without it.
4. I can’t keep awake without it.
5. I must be at my best to do what I have to do. If I can only bring that off, I need never take it again.
6. I must show I am master of it – free to say either “yes” or “no”. And I must be perfectly sure by saying “yes “at the moment. My refusal to take it at the moment shows weakness. Therefore I take it.
7. In spite of the knowledge of the disadvantages of the heroin life, I am really not sure whether it isn’t better than the other life. After all, I get extraordinary things out of heroin which I should never have got otherwise.
8. It is dangerous to stop too suddenly.
9. I’d better take a small dose now rather than put it off till later; because if I do so, it will disturb my sleep.
10. It is really very bad for the mind to be constantly preoccupied with the question of the drug. It is better to take a small dose to rid myself of the obsession.
11. I am worried about the drug because of my not having any. If I were to take some, my mind would clear up immediately, an
d I should be able to think out good plans for stopping it.
12. The gods may be leading me to some new experience through taking it.
13. It is quite certainly a mistake putting down all little discomforts as results of taking it. Very likely, nearly all of them are illusions; the rest, due to the unwise use of it. I am simply scaring myself into saying “no”.
14. It is bad form morally to say “no”. I must not be a coward about it.
15. There is no evidence at all that the reasonable use of heroin does not lengthen life. The Chinese claim, and English physicians agree, that opium smoking, within limits, is a practice conducive to longevity. Why should it not be the same with heroin? It has been observed actually that addicts seem to be immune to most diseases which afflict ordinary people.
16. I take it because of its being prohibited. I decline being treated like a silly schoolboy when I’m a responsible man. (Note: Then don’t behave like a silly schoolboy. Why let the stupidity of governments drive you into taking the drug against your will? – K. L.)
17. My friend likes me to take it with her.
18. My ability to take it shows my superiority over other people.
19. Most of us dig our graves with our teeth. Heroin has destroyed my appetite, therefore it is good for me.
20. I have got into all sorts of messes with women in the past. Heroin has destroyed my interest in them.
21. Heroin has removed my desire for liquor. If I must choose, I really think heroin is the better.
22. Man has a right to spiritual ambition. He has evolved to what he is, through making dangerous experiments. Heroin certainly helps me to obtain a new spiritual outlook on the world. I have no right to assume that the ruin of bodily health is injurious; and “whosoever will save his life shall lose it, but whoever loseth his life for My sake shall find it.”
23. So-and-so has taken it for years, and is all right.
24. So-and-so has taken it for years, and is still taking it, and he is the most remarkable man of his century.
25. I’m feeling so very, very rotten, and a very, very little would make me feel so very, very good.
26. We can’t stop while we have it – the temptation is too strong. The best way is to finish it. We probably won’t be able to get any more, so we take it in order to stop taking it.
27. Claude Farrere’s story of Rodolphe Hafner. Suppose I take all these pains to stop drugs and then get cancer or something right away, what a fool I shall feel!
“Help you at all?” asked Lamus.
Well, honestly, it did not. I had thought out most of those things for myself at one time or another; and I seemed to have got past them. It’s a curious thing that once you’ve written down a reason you diminish its value. You can’t go on using the same reason indefinitely. That fact tends to prove that the alleged reason is artificial and false, that it has simply been invented on the spur of the moment by oneself to excuse one’s indulgences.
Basil saw my perplexity.
“The fact is,” he said, “that you’re taking this stuff as the majority of people go to church. It’s a meaningless habit.”
I hated to put that down on my paper. It was confessing that I was an automaton. But something in his eye compelled me. I wrote the word, and broke out as I did so into a spasm of internal fury. I recollected a story from my hospital days, of a man who had committed suicide when it was proved to him that he couldn’t move his upper jaw.
Meanwhile Lamus was looking at my average. I had got down to less than two doses daily. But the rest of the twenty-four hours was spent in waiting for the time when I could indulge.
I knew that Lou was ahead of me. She had gone on what Basil called his third class. She was taking one dose a day; but every day she was taking it later and later. She had about an hour of real craving to get through, and Sister Athena or Sister Cypris, or Sister some one would always intervene, as if by accident, and take some active steps to keep her mind off the subject during those critical minutes.
As soon as one had reached an interval of forty-eight hours between doses, one entered class four and stopped altogether unless some particular occasion arose for taking a dose.
I was very annoyed that Lou should have got on faster than myself. Basil told me he thought I needed more active exercise, though already I had begun to take some interest in the sports of the place. I had even got through a whole game of Thelema without having to sit down and gasp.
But there was still an obscure hankering after the drug life. It had been burnt into me that normal interests were not worthwhile.
King Lamus had taken me out climbing several times; but while I experienced profound physical satisfaction, I could not overcome the moral attitude which is really, after all, expressed in Ecclesiastes, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity!”
My relations with Lou herself were poisoned by the same feeling. The improvement in our physical health, and the intoxicating effect of the climate and the surroundings urged us to take part in the pageant of nature. Yet against all such ideas we could not help but hear the insistent voice of Haidé Lamoureux, that the end of all these things is death. She had deliberately renounced existence as futile, and there was no answer to her pleadings.
Besides this, my mind had eaten up its pabulum. I had literally nothing to think of except heroin, and I discovered that heroin appealed to me behind all veils, as being an escape from life.
A man who has once experienced the drug-life finds it difficult to put up with the inanity of normal existence. He has become wise with the wisdom of despair.
The Big Lion and Sister Athena exhausted their ingenuity in finding things with which I might occupy my weary aimless hours. But nothing seemed to get me out of the fixed idea that life was heroin with intervals that did not count.
For about a week King Lamus tried to get me out of my groove by giving me cocaine, and asking me to employ my time by writing an account of my adventures from the time when I began to take it. The drug stimulated me immensely; and I was quite enthusiastic for the time. I wrote the story of my adventures from the night of my meeting Lou to our return to England from Naples.
But when the episode was over, I found the old despair of life as strong as ever. The will to live was really dead in me.
But two evenings later King Lamus came to smoke a pipe with me on the terrace at sunset. In his hand was the Paradiso record which I had written. Sister Athena had typed it.
“My dear man,” he said, “what I can’t see is why you should be so blind about yourself. The meaning of all this ought to be perfectly obvious. I’m afraid you haven’t grasped the meaning of ‘Do what thou wilt’. Do you see how the application of the Law has helped you so far?”
“Well, of course,” I said, “it’s pretty clear I didn’t come to this planet to drug myself into my grave before my powers have had a chance to ripen. I’ve thought it necessary to keep off heroin in order to give myself a show. But I’m left flat. Life becomes more tedious every day, and the one way of escape is barred by flaming swords.”
“Exactly,” he replied. “You’ve only discovered one thing that you don’t will; you have still to find the one thing that you do will. And yet there are quite a number of clues in this manuscript of yours. I note you say that your squad commander, who didn’t become that without some power of dealing with men, told you that you were not a great flyer. How was it exactly that you came to take up flying?”
That simple question induced a very surprising reaction. There was no reason why it should produce the intense irritation that it did.
Basil noticed it, rubbed his hands together gleefully, and began to hum “Tipperary”. His meaning was evident. He had drawn a bow in a venture; and it had pierced the King of Israel between the joints of his harness. He got up with alacrity, and went off with a wave of the hand.
“Think it over, dear boy,�
�� said he, “and tell me your sad story in the morning.”
I was in a very disturbed state of mind. I went to look for Lou, but she had gone for a walk with Cypris, and when she came back, she wore an air of wisdom which I found insupportable. However, I told her my story. To my disgust, she simply nodded as if highly appreciative of some very obscure joke. There was no getting any sense out of her. I went to bed in a thoroughly bad temper.
Almost immediately, the usual struggle began, as to whether I should or should not take a dose of heroin. On this occasion, the controversy was short. I was so annoyed with myself that I took a specially large sniff, apparently less to soothe myself than to annoy somebody else indirectly. It was the first I had had for a week. I had been supplying its place with codeine.
Partly from this and partly from the psychological crisis, its effects were such as I had never before experienced. I remained all night in a state between sleep and waking, unable to call for assistance, unable to control my thoughts; and I was transported into a totally unfamiliar world. I did not exist at all, in any ordinary sense of the word. I was a mathematical expression in a complex scheme of geometry. My equilibrium was maintained by innumerable other forces in the same system, and what I called myself was in some mysterious way charged with a duty of manipulating the other forces, and these evaded me. When I strove to grasp them, they disappeared. My functions seemed to be to simplify complex expressions, and then to build up new complexes from the elements so isolated as to create simulacra of my own expression in other forms.
This process continued, repeating itself with delirious intensity through endless aeons. I suffered the intolerable pang of losing my individuality altogether by confusing it, so to speak, with some of the expressions that I had formulated. The distress became so acute that I felt the necessity of getting Lou to assist me. But I could not discover her anywhere in the system.
And yet, there was something in the nature of the curves themselves which I identified with her. It was as if their ultimate form in some way depended upon her. She was concealed, so to speak, in the expression of the ideas. She was implicit in their structure; and as the worst of the excitement and the anxiety subsided, I found a curious consolation in the fact that she was not an independent and conflicting unit in this complicated chaos of machinery, but was, as it were, the reason for its assuming its actual appearance in preference to any other. And as the night went on, the enormous complexity of the vision co-ordinated itself. There was a sensation of whirling and rising communicated to the entire universe of my thought. A sort of dizziness seized upon my spirit. It was as if a wheel had been set in motion and gradually increased its pace so that one could no longer distinguish the spokes. It became an indefinite whirr. This feeling invaded my entire consciousness little by little, so that it was reduced to an unchanging unity; but a unity composed of diverse forces in regular motion. The monotony devoured consciousness so that my waking sleep merged into true sleep.
Diary of a Drug Fiend Page 33