Her sense of her own knowledge gives her a sense of beauty—something that represents what she knows . . . A representation of truth is beautiful, just perfectly beautiful. When she feels knowledgeable, she is nearly beautiful; her intelligence about the world shows as such in her posture and in her face. Not in her words: “I know how to win—you have to have spirit and you just keep hitting the ball back more times than the other person.” Nonie liked unarguability in speech; that is, for her the world of the mind, no matter how public it is, is not in the open air where things are contested—it’s in houses, it’s more like the talk in houses: it’s more certain—it’s subject to control by a woman. (Momma said, You never liked her from the beginning—I’m glad you never went after me.)
Bits of the real day cling to her. She holds me between her legs, and my jealousy included a blaze of longing to experience the world that seemed to live, fresh but logical, grand, adumbrated, in Nonie’s speeches: it was real to me, that ecstatically calculated world: I thought she knew a lot; I thought she went from our house into that reality; I thought her talk adequately, directly, honestly spoke of that world: and I wanted it—that world, that power of entering it—that clarity about it. Nonie liked a certain flatness of speech which was like driving a ball: she swatted the Local World in her talk. Jealousy is an openness of attention. A brilliant disorder of attention. Of deduction. Nonie half knows what to say if she wants me to listen. Nonie’s courage is not experimental: it’s acquisitive. Grief, for her, is a thing of being poisoned and helpless, boiled in humiliation. A fever of it’s unbearable—it’s unbelievable it’s so bad. Her eyes get funny. She wants to shrink the world to a matter of inherited laws, set rivalries, modes of peace and of alliance—a burst of girl’s common sense, above all of privilege separate from character and from freshly interpreted adventure. Separate from one’s own pained learning. (“His people are trash, but you’d never know it to look at him.”) What do I inherit? An underdog has the simpler will of existent hurt, of no victory so far, no victory as yet. Nonie has won twice on her way up the ladder in a tournament: she’s never won a tournament—but she tries. She gets to the quarterfinals. Why do we have to take her seriously? Do I distort what is there? I mean, when I see? When I feel? When I speak? We go outside in the dark after dinner onto the back lawn—she wants to dance. She’s not a holy or mad angel of movement, she’s not God’s pantomiming sweetie; she sways, she’s bunches of limber sticks; she’s been taught; her physical intelligence produces pale musicality: glides, sweet turns. She is slenderly visible in the local dark—perhaps everyone will come to desire her now. The kid dances, too—well, he runs, he spins, he does interpretations of what she does, of the prettiness of what she does. He is mad. He is a mad angel of movement. He does half-cartwheels, roll-overs, runs and leaps, somersaults.
“Look at Angel Pie—ain’t he wonderful?”
“Wiley, you’re in the way.” She kicks at the child.
“Nonie, don’t do that. It’s ugly. Kids are a pain in the ass—you know that—but you just put up with him now.”
Nonie tore up handfuls of grass, she dropped grass on the kid in rapid quantities; she threw or dropped handfuls of dirt until he couldn’t see or breathe: he’s stained: he stops: she pushes him: she trips him: his shin is bleeding: “I’m not sorry; he interferes.” She won’t dance or be present if he dances. “I don’t blame her. The littlest ones always get all the credit—when they’re young, like that, they’re all heart, and he’s learned he’s adorable; he makes himself look adorable compared to her.” The child stands quietly. Nonie is in a state of displeasure, suspicion—extreme, and with funny admixtures of thwarted pleasure, terrible pleasure, frustration, longing; she has silenced him; she wants to dance again; she dances formally on the site of his nutty exhibition to test her powers and to erase his performance. “Don’t, Nonie—that’s silly, what you’re doing,” Lila says. Nonie turns to me. “You’re silly, you’re terrible, you need lessons. You ought to be like me. I’d be ashamed to be like you. You’re a little sissy.” And: “Lessons would be wasted on you. He’s too crazy, Momma. You should be worried about him.” A girl’s mode of argument. One time, she ran at him and hit him while he was in midair: “Nonie! Wiley! Okay, we’ll have none of this. No dancing if you can’t be peaceful.”
I didn’t speak yet, but I looked at her with contempt on the dark lawn—a version of disdain, anyway. She tried to grab me from S.L.’s arms when he lifted me. He held me away from her. “I’m not mad at him, Daddy,” she said. “Let me hold him.” She dribbled at the mouth with the vigor of her insistence that her anger, her blows, her jealousy were not serious, not an issue. Momma said, “If you ask me, children go too far—it doesn’t make any sense.”
Daddy said, “They’re all little wonders—I’ve read that they are.”
In the matter of emotions, here’s a sample: Nonie likes Katie Rogers. Sometimes if Katie is available Nonie snoots me: it hurts, it burns. “Momma, I have to go see Katie—she wants me to come over and be with her.” Nonie is infatuated; and tough about having attention paid to her as someone afflicted with intense (and okay) feelings, as the wooer of the other girl; then, too, she makes a point of demeaning whomever she woos. “She’s just someone I like, she’s not special, she’s not an a-ath-alete.” And overpraising her: “She’s so nice, she comes from a very distinguished family, she’s just so A-I smart, it scares me.” And she practices outgrowing that-which-infuriates-her: “Momma, Katie’s not real smart—she doesn’t know anything about clothes.” She tries to make whomever she woos into an immediate servant, a dependent, someone to be used: “Katie, you’re my hostess. I get to go first in everything, I pick the game. You better do as I say. I don’t like people who don’t act right. Be careful or you’ll make me laugh at you.” Momma says that everyone does a version of this: she calls it breaking-your-spirit, or breaking-you-in, or trying-to-get-hold-of-you-by-putting-a-ring-in-your-nose or a ring-a-ring-in-your-heart. Getting you where they want you. Momma says Nonie’s stupid in how she goes about it.
Nonie believes that servants and dependents don’t have to compete: winning is Nonie’s job, she’s the flag, the young woman. She says often to Anne Marie, “YOU BE QUIET AND JUST HELP ME.” You don’t have to think, you don’t have to live: I do.
I do the living around here . . .
Her bravery carries so bureaucratic a charge of emotion about herself that it is serviceable in attracting the devotion of some frightened and uneasy and uncomfortably cautious people. Not Lila, though, or S.L. She is rarely in their terms in a state of grace. In a sense, no one loves her—or ever did or ever will.
But in another sense, there will always be people who care about her . . .
She charges the net, a pudgy, pink-thighed girl, small muscles taut. The other girl is amazingly thin but thick-thighed; she is freckle-cheeked, and she wears glasses that cloud over. She’s already at the net, where she jerkily intercepts Nonie’s floppy drive with a sort of half-remarkable lurch and interposition. Her tightly gripped racquet shudders but stays mostly forward. The ball’s flight reverses abruptly, arrhythmically—Nonie raises her racquet; the ball is sailing past. I look at Nonie’s face, the scene goes so fast that I only think I see Nonie’s face, Nonie’s racquet. The ball bangs on the side of Nonie’s racquet, Nonie’s racquet comes down and strikes the wrist of the big-thighed girl at the net. Nonie’s tender-boned wrist and hand, with the puffed fingertips and pink and puffy palm, some fingers roughened, and the bitten fingernails, is a familiar sight, a commonplace memory of mine.
The court—the tennis court: if I put in sunlight, real light, not painted, not any construct of the mind, but drenching light, hot and much larger than me, and then if I grant peculiarities of curvature and of vividness to the air, if I stick to the real light of that real day, I see a child’s foot in a child’s sandals: mine: and Daddy’s bulgy shadow as a semi-cavern in the drenching light—my white-hatted head is near his ribs: both girl
s are at the net: I see the ghost-tail, ghost-cherub face of the ball go past Nonie . . . A pause . . . Nonie’s racquet moves . . . That’s all I see.
And the big-legged girl screams—I see then but that’s because I hear the very loud scream: her head goes back, her eyes bulge . . . What has happened? What has been done to her? Nonie’s motion was that of trying to slam the ball—nothing held back—the motion was full.
Was Lisa’s wrist broken? Bruised? Was it a bone bruise?
It is a local and seedy reality, the afternoon’s blast of heat and light, the real air lionlike and aroar.
The big-legged girl screamed, “YOU HIT ME!” Then she stared at Nonie. She yelled, “YOU DID THAT ON PURPOSE—YOU’RE TERRIBLE.” A sort of convulsion took her as she tried to speak, tried to fit a name to her thought. “NONIE!” she said in a deep, racked voice. Lisa chopped at Nonie, slung her racquet sideways—at Nonie—she wanted to hit Nonie. Then she clutched her own wrist. I can rerun this part of the memory. The girl wears white, white clothes like a boy’s undershirt and little, full white pants. She’s overdoing it to get Nonie in trouble. Nonie rears back, away from the whirling racquet; she moves minimally, staringly—too much evidence lies in that calm movement: the dreamily contemptuous movement of evasion. The scene grows gray-toned as if at twilight—half clear, half uncertain. Lisa sinks—her legs out straight; she holds her hurt wrist like a dog’s paw. She howls, sort of: she howls and yells, “Help me; it hurts.” She stares at Nonie; her look has the aim and anger of how much she wants Nonie harmed. Her head sinks forward. No one screams or anything. The event is left unsettled—we’re peaceful here.
Nonie: “I didn’t hit her—” A blunder can’t be called a hit—it’s to be considered a miss.
What’s in Lisa’s eyes is more negotiable now than what was in them before.
The moral reality of women, the moral reality of men . . .
It is somehow part of the substance, the very quality of my mind, to conceive of goodness as absolute, unchanging, as solid and philosophical, and of evil as cloudy, interpretable, changeable, capable of redemption, worldly, temporal. But that is the mind’s doing. That conception hardly matches actuality or my own thought but is a shadowy thing, an absolutist notion of the matter . . . traditional . . . since goodness is temporal, too, is as cloudy, interpretable, changeable, as ridden by storyness. After all, time exists with such entirety that what the conscious mind mostly does is calculate-and-remember chiefly in regard to the future—near and far future—what is approaching us is what we keep in mind. But not exactly. We do it in terms of laws, with a sense of predestination, of fixity—we make it one thing with memory—but I think that is nerves . . .
Do I think that goodness is a set of laws negotiating the decisions of this moment relieving, diminishing the element of gambling? One argues about what goodness is—as a final thing . . . And no one is reasonable about this. I mean, for instance, whether all the laws are known or not, or if we are still guessing. And if we are behindhand in figuring out a little about the recent past so that we might half know what to do next, that is, if we can’t guess, we argue about that. The future is oddest and we are most unreasonable in real life when we believe all the laws are known, known by us almost, and then accepted, and the future is foretold, grinned at, sort of, when one is good—or bad if you believe bad is good in this world, if you think practical evil rules this world . . .
But if we say goodness is real, is changeable, is freedom itself, is not fixed and unchanging, then no one listens, perhaps. What will I think of Nonie when I am on my deathbed? Doesn’t it depend on how my life turns out? When I was a child I was good in relation to her, but I have been a man for a long time now.
What the conscious mind does meantime is remember itself at earlier moments in regard to the future: that is what I think. I mean it tends to prefer its earlier decisions about physical reality to physical reality now, and not only now but to physical reality long ago: it imprisons it in laws. The bodily real is too hard to remember. Too embarrassing. It teaches a different morality . . . it has too many forms of moral responsibility . . .
So that the mind’s testimony is as if mostly at a court-martial of itself at which it lies triumphantly and cleverly—and wickedly—in favor of itself—and its moralities, most of which are Utopian lies with only the thinnest tie to real events and to actual moments and the lives of others. The mind does an odd and conceited thing of perverting and tampering with its own sense of justice, its own perspectives in order to claim Perfect Justice, Complete Innocence . . . I don’t know which. It is enraged and caught—in a punished way—when it gives in to truth and to the real . . . I, Wiley, think my mind is trained primarily by my dreams—and by things that imitate my dreams—and by the structures and purposes—fascist, Fascist, separated from the real, focussed on me and what I know and on what happens to me—those structures of my dreams . . .
I think that my mind, besides remembering itself, remembers other minds and bans the world—the world and the wind and the actuality of eyes. The sadness of the mind at not being an animal is a complex thing.
Are we evil? I suppose so . . . if we live . . .
But that isn’t the end of it . . .
That isn’t all we are. And we aren’t it purely or at least not often. It can’t be a simple story—can it? Look around you. I mean it is an open gamble for each of us, isn’t that so? That we are bad, that isn’t the end of the story, whatever it is . . . The story . . . I am not quite my mind. My body has a mindly quality—and a mind or consciousness of its own and an ability to calculate. My mind, even as a shadow self among shadow selves—as in a law court of shadows or as in a royal court of shadow selves in a dream—or as in a real moment as in a racing courtroom—it is aware of an outside-that-stuff—an outside the aching circle of thought, of theory . . . of myself, then of myself bodily, then of the shadow book of the mind: my mind has a weirdly freed almost-bodily sense of things, perhaps an illusion, perhaps an act of intellect. Thinkers speak of a model-of-the-world that exists in the mind; some psychologists speak of what-is-NOT-I; I think of an outside the mind . . . I am trained primarily, after all, in actuality, I say—in the exigencies of nightmare and, perhaps, of happiness. I am not at home in the exigencies of the mind’s demanding-and-eternal type of happiness or its clear-cut sense of nightmare. I have my life still. I am chiefly aware of those things as they occur in actual life where I study willy-nilly and blindly meanings and Meaning-that-cannot-be-fully-interpreted. In real life, too many real people, too many real moments, too many acts, real acts, are involved for the full interpretation of anything. Thinking about one’s life has to be like giving up on a final determination of π.
If the subject is degrees of evil, I tend to look in immediate moments—as into a closet in a house where I have lived for a long time. I see it in who says what to who and in what words they use with what expression and inflection. I see it in what I thought and did at a given time then, in a story, more generally among my ideas than convention allows . . . My sense of it is determined by my ideas of what reality is, or was, and, in some ways, still is. Moments are explained over and over in my dreams but not as real moments, merely as plausible and willed synopses, quicker and with fewer dimensions and other elements than real life has.
But in my thoughts, it is different; there, moments require practical explanations: in my thoughts, nothing I know in actuality is more certain than a legal truth is—which is uncertain; but precedent and real-life evidence and guesswork and partial laws are useful; no final explanation arrives: only a kind of judgment set within both a patriotism and a policing thing of force—a vast, towering, not entirely honest machinery—it seems to involve even the sky and clouds or, at least, my sight of them, not the shadow world alone, and not the physical world without my mind, the legal truths.
I don’t like lies. False witness. Ugly intentions. I saw when I was young that I could not, without taking sides, foolishly—meanly—judg
e Nonie as someone unlike me or so much unlike other people that she ought to be exiled or ought to be shot . . . She was someone who went too far. Who was stupid and aggressive, dangerously self-willed—maybe sometimes . . . But automatically taking sides against her was unfair, wasn’t it? I remember the taste of fear in my mouth—a scaly snake. Because of Nonie. Still, she has some obvious rights—merely as an element of reality. (If I say truth is not cruel, I mean the brief statements of law people think are true are not truths except as political devices that help them live. They are semi-true as Political Reality, not as emotions can be true, not as one’s own experiences are true . . .)
Lisa’s mother is shouting at Nonie. Daddy says, “Here, here . . . Let’s close the books on this one.” We don’t examine in any detail the actions of girls. A notion of a definition of evil as a state of will and hurt in a girl, a sister, is a joke.
The limits of thought in real life—even of highly specialized thought—are funny, ha-ha, and weird, and scary . . .
“Don’t ask me—I wasn’t looking. But Nonie’s all right—she wouldn’t harm a fly.”
Hey, what happened, what was that, did you see it?
I saw something—it looked bad.
I must’ve missed it—did you see it? What was that all about?
In front of the grown-ups, Nonie symbolically shouts, “Oh, Lisa! Don’t say such things about me!” She swacks her racquet against her own leg as if dismay and despair power her arm. The sound makes Lisa wince—a reminder, a threat, a tic of the reality that has Nonie in it.
Girls grow up to sexual reality from their side, not starting from the reality of men—from our kinds of good and evil. We specialize in kinds of good and evil by sex and by individual souls. No one human being deals with all kinds of good and bad stuff. Nonie had daydreams of violence, of willful assertion that included a lot of people—is it the false innocence of women, their permitted (and unexamined) violence of soul and act that make many men envy women so passionately? Is it that the only way not to be a frontier scout—and ALONE—leads to the imitation and love of women?
The Runaway Soul Page 15