The only sign of life aboard now is the faint trickle of smoke from the stack above the shanty-like cabin. They’re probably cooking something. It’s too warm for a fire.
The operator is turning again towards the crane whose grab lies like an armoured fist on my load of gravel. I return to the cabin.
There are moments when I despair of others, give them up, let them stray out of the circle of light and definition, and they are free to come and go, bringing panic, or chaos, or joy, depending on my own mood, my state of readiness. Readiness – as every Boy Scout knows – there is the virtue of the citadel.
From the bundle of papers which have withstood my periodic prunings I select a couple of sheets and read:
– The fix: a purposive spoon in the broth of experience. (Il vous faut construire les situations.)40
To move is not difficult. The problem is: from what posture? This question of posture, of original attitude: to get at its structure one must temporarily get outside of it. Drugs provide an alternative attitude.
On the virtues of heroin. Possibility waits beyond what is fixed and known; there is no language for it; dies zeigt sich...41
Heroin is habit-forming.
Habit-forming, rabbit-forming, Babbitt-forming.42
For conventional men all forms of mental derangement save drunkenness are taboo. Being familiar, alcoholism can arouse only disgust. The alcoholic humiliates himself. The man under heroin is beyond humiliation. The junkie arouses mass hysteria. (The dope fiend as the bogeyman who can be hanged in effigy and electrocuted in the flesh to calm the hysteria of the citizens.)
It is a significant measure of a society to scrutinize its sewage and abominations. Doctors know this, and police, and philosophers of history.
I remember thinking that only in America could such hysteria be. Only where the urge to conform had become a faceless president reading a meaningless speech to a huge faceless people, only where machinery had impressed its forms deep into the fibres of the human brain so as to make efficiency and the willingness to cooperate the only flags of value, where all extravagance, even of love, was condemned, and where a million faceless mind doctors stood in long corridors in white coats, ready to observe, adjust, shock-operate... only here could such hysteria be. I thought that there were werewolves everywhere in the wake of the last great war, that in America they were referred to as delinquents, a pasteurized symbol, obscuring terrible profundities of the human soul. And I thought: Now I know what it is to be a European and far from my native soil. And I saw a garbage truck, one of those great grey anonymous tank-like objects which roam the streets of New York, move beetle-like out of 10th Street into 6th Avenue, and on its side was a poster which read: “I am an American, in thought and deed.” And there was the Statue of Liberty too.
Sometimes, at low moments, I felt my thoughts were the ravings of a man mad out of his mind to have been placed in history at all, having to act, having to consider; a victim of the fixed insquint. Sometimes I thought: What a long distance history has taken me out of my way! And then I said: Let it go, let it go, let them all go! And inside I was intact and brittle as the shell of an egg. I pushed them all away from me again and I was alone, like an obscene little Buddha, looking in.
At what point does liberty become licence? And a question for the justices: How many will hang that the distinction may crystallize?
Whenever I glance back through the notes accumulated over the years I am struck by their haunting sense of dispossession. The image of the hanged man recurs frequently. (I even went so far not long ago as to fashion a doll out of an old sack and some rope, its face greenish-grey with streaks of red and black paint, and to suspend it in a hangman’s noose from the yard of the mast. It is a common practice among scowmen to fix some emblem or other to the mast. But mine was unusual. It caused too much comment, and with junk aboard I felt it prudent to remove it.) It is as though I have been writing hesitantly, against the tide, with the growing suspicion that what I have written is in some criminal sense against history, that in the end it can lead me only to the hangman.
– Notes towards the making of the monster... That was one title I considered. At those bad moments when the dykes crumble there is a certain relief in inventing titles. On one scrap of paper I find the following notation: In its lust after extinction the human soul has learnt promiscuous ways. I can’t remember when I wrote it nor to what precisely it referred. The notes are not consecutive; they go on and on, like tapeworm; Cain’s testament, the product of those moments when I feel impelled to outflank my deep desire to be silent, to say nothing, expose nothing.
When I write I have trouble with my tenses. Where I was tomorrow is where I am today, where I would be yesterday. I have a horror of committing fraud. It is all very difficult, the past even more than the future, for the latter is at least probable, calculable, while the former is beyond the range of experiment. The past is always a lie, clung to by an odour of ancestors. It is important from the beginning to treat such things lightly. As the ghosts rise upwards over the grave wall, I recoffin them neatly, and bury them.
It is, I suppose, my last will and testament, although in so far as I have choice in the matter I shall not be dying for a long time. (One can only cultivate oneself as one awaits the issue.)
If eternity were available beyond death, if I could be as certain of it as I at this moment am sure of the fix I have only to move my hand to obtain, I should in effect have achieved it already, for I should be already beyond the pitiless onslaught of time, beyond the constant disintegration of the present, beyond all the problematic struts and viaducts with which prudence seeks to bridge the chasm of anxiety, with the ability to say, avoiding unseemly haste: “I’ll die tomorrow,” without bothering to intend it, or not to intend it, as bravely as the fabled gladiators of ancient Rome. It is because it is not so available (– I beg of you, Abel, refrain from flaunting your faith at me) that I have to suffer the infinite degenerations of objective time... a past that was never past, was, is always present; a present past and a past present both distinct from the present prospect of the past degenerating already into a future prospect which will never be... suffer that, be prey to anxiety, nostalgia, hope...
The problem has always been to fuse the fragments of eternity, more precisely, to attain from time to time the absolute serenity of timelessness; not easy in the era of pushing, aggressive democracies when all revolt not subsumed under the symbol of the juvenile delinquent tends to be regarded as either criminal or insane or both. (Revolt, my child, revolt is a quick axe cleaving dead wood in the forest, by night. The woodsman of the day is the executioner.)
A FEW WEEKS AGO I tied up next to Bill’s scow. There was no sign of Jake about whom I had been thinking a great deal since the night at the stake boat. I asked him where she was and he said he didn’t know, that she had gone to visit her mother in North Dakota but that he hadn’t heard from her for two months. I went for a drink with Bill and I had vague thoughts about splitting from New York and going after her. I didn’t suppose I would. Bill’s talk about her, his saying how mixed up she was... all that depressed me.
Tired of the scows and of New York, my New York, the limits that make my going there from where I am tied up in Flushing at the Mac Asphalt and Construction Corporation uninteresting... I think, Why go? Why go anywhere?... A familiar sound. Like the end is the beginning and vice versa. Though nothing is ending in spite of the bust which Fay comes all the way from Manhattan to tell me about:
From Tom Tear’s loft you can look down on the Bowery. It is on the top floor, three flights up, of a building that appears derelict from a distance. On the ground floor, a wholesaler of cheap felts; on the first, a name painted in black on two musty frosted-glass panes of two dingy doors, one at either end of the landing, O. Olsen Inc., Exterminators; on the second, a glass door boarded unevenly up, marked “Store”, and this absent sculptor, Flick, who shares a WC with Tom. The WC has no door to it, but it is set slightly back fro
m the stairs so that someone going up- or downstairs won’t necessarily see the occupant.
Fay saw the police go up, heard the shouts, and watched them all come down, three cops, she said, first, in uniform, called off the beat probably, and then a plainclothesman holding on to Jody’s arm and talking into her ear, and then Tom with another plainclothesman, and wearing his cap... no doubt he’d made them wait while he put it on... and then the rest, Og, who looked like something the cat brought in, and Beryl – you must meet her, Joe – whom Fay had brought with her, and Geo, and Mona crying, he almost carried her, Fay said, and a cop bringing up the rear. There were three cars and one paddy wagon outside on Bond Street.
“How do you know that?”
“I ast a man after,” Fay said. “They was standin’ outside that bar, all the bums cheerin’ the heat on. They didn’t get Ettie either. She left five minutes before they came.”
Fay sat through it all, her knees bare, in her fur coat, on the WC between the second and third landings, amongst the spiders and the dust under the unshaded fifteen-watt electric light bulb, battling her chronic constipation. She didn’t risk a move in case they had a man on the street but she unscrewed the bulb and sat in the dark as they came down with the others.
“It was Fink,” Fay said. “He tried to bum a fix offa Geo in Sheridan Square before we all went to Tom’s. Geo told him to fuck off. We shouldn’t have gone there after that. But Tom had a meet with Ettie.”
“How did you find out where I was?”
“I phoned your office.”
“I’m glad you found me. Christ! I nearly went in last night. I could have been there!”
Fay was fiddling around in the tin basin where the dirty dishes were. She came out with a teaspoon.
“You got your works, Joe?”
I gave her the spike and dropper. “I’ll leave you a taste,” she said. “That creepin’ bastard Fink! He gets so much for what they call ‘makin’ a case’... someone’s goin’ to slip him a hotshot...”
“I’ll clean it,” I said, accepting the spike from her when she was finished. I tightened the tie about my arm and watched the veins rise up, a blue network in which the pale liquid would presently move like a mute caress to my brain.
IN EARLY LIFE sensations like metaphysical burglars burst forcibly in(to) the living. In early life things strike with the magic of their existence. The creative moment comes out of the past with some of that magic unimpaired; involvement in it is impossible for an attitude of compromise. Nevertheless it is not the power to abstract that is invalid, but the unquestioning acceptance of conventional abstractions which stand in the way of raw memory, of the existential... all such barriers to the gradual refinement of the central nervous system.
It is not a question simply of allowing the volcano to erupt. A burnt backside is not going to help anyone. And the ovens of Auschwitz are scarcely cold. When the spirit of play dies there is only murder.
Play. Homo ludens.43
Playing pinball for example in a café called le Grap d’Or.
– In the pinball machine an absolute and peculiar order reigns. No scepticism is possible for the man who by a series of sharp and slight dunts tries to control the machine. It became for me a ritual act, symbolizing a cosmic event. Man is serious at play. Tension, elation, frivolity, ecstasy, confirming the supra-logical nature of the human situation. Apart from jazz – probably the most vigorous and yea-saying protest of homo ludens in the modern world – the pinball machine seemed to me to be America’s greatest contribution to culture; it rang with contemporaneity. It symbolized the rigid structural “soul” that threatened to crystallize in history, reducing man to historicity, the great mechanic monolith imposed by mass mind; it symbolized it and reduced it to nothing. The slick electric shiftings of the pinball machine, the electronic brain, the symbolical transposition of the modern Fact into the realm of play. (The distinction between the French and the American attitude towards the “tilt” [“teelt”]; in America, and England, I have been upbraided for trying to beat the mechanism by skilful tilting; in Paris, that is the whole point.)
Man is forgetting how to play. Yes, we have taught the mass that work is sacred, hard work. Now that the man of the mass is coming into his own he threatens to reimpose the belief we imposed on him. The men of no tradition “dropped into history through a trapdoor” in a short space of 150 years were never taught to play, were never told that their work was “sacred” only in the sense that it enabled their masters to play.
The beauty of cricket. The vulgarity of professionalism. The anthropological treason of those who treat culture “seriously”, who think in terms of educating the mass instead of teaching man how to play. The callow, learned jackanapes who trail round art exhibitions looking for they know not what in another’s bright turd. How soon Dada was mummified by its inclusion in the histories.
Many of the poets and painters in Paris in the early Fifties played pinball; few, unfortunately, without feelings of guilt.
Art as the way, symbol, indirect, transcendence.
Her hands the texture of dried prunes – my mother used a green block of cosmetic called “Snowfire” to take the chapped look out of them, but they were never long enough out of water for it to make any difference. Including the lodgers, she had to launder for twelve people, and cook for them, and clean up their mess. It gave her great pleasure to read about and to see pictures of the Queen.
“What’s wrong, Joe?” she said to me.
“Nothing,” I replied.
Hard work never hurt anyone, I was told, but it killed my mother.
The Industrial Revolution brought in its wake Five Year Plans and possibly something more than lip-service to uncreative work. My natural aversion to such work in the land of the industrious Scot caused me, forcedly, to dissimulate. The fact of my Italian ancestry – the name of my great countryman, Machiavelli, was used in Scotland almost solely as an opprobrious epithet – made the mask inevitable. Later I whispered eagerly the words of Stephen Dedalus: “silence, exile, cunning,”44 but at the time all that was possible was silence, cunning. Meanwhile I preferred brushing my mother’s hair to make it beautiful to breaking sticks, running errands. I came closest to her at night when I brushed her hair. Alone with her in the kitchen I stood behind her chair on a box and brushed her hair until it glowed softly like burnished copper. I never knew my mother when she was young and, they said, beautiful, and sometimes when I passed my hand over her hair I was invaded by a sense of outrage that she was not young and beautiful to have me.
Whenever I contemplated our poverty and how it situated me, apparently at the edge of an uncrossable gulf at whose far side strolled those fortunate few who lived their lives in well-mannered leisure, I felt like a tent pegged down in a high wind. Sermons on the sanctity of hard work, and there were many such sermons, were offensive to me. I thought of my mother’s hands, and of her poor bent body, and of her boundless admiration for the chief symbol of that class towards which all people of my acquaintance aspired, the class which did not work, the class of whose scorn my father was afraid, thinking only of money as he did, because he did not have any, because each shilling was doled out to him until he was driven to pawn the spoons Mr Pitchimuthu from West Africa had given her as a Xmas present in – ? – for getting over her shock of his eating raw eggs directly from the shell, of his frying sardines, more, expecting her to fry them for him, for accepting him black as black coal into her house and allowing him to be known as “Sir” to her children, a politeness we children never thought twice of according. To some black men. “I think I will have a yellow man next,” my mother said, and in spite of my father’s protest went ahead with her experiment in lodgers. I wonder now as I am suddenly overcome with the past’s vast possibilities whether this could have had something to do with the citadel my father constructed in the bathroom, against comers, white, yellow and black. My father, the Italian musician who, when he became unemployable, conducted a cold war no m
ore (perhaps no less) idiotic than the cold war which has been going on since I was first informed men banded together in military groups. I remember one interval of seven years when groups were not at cold war, a period during which “my” group was at war. And beyond the walls of my father’s house all legal precedent seemed to be governed by that class which did not work. It was true more and more of them were beginning to work, even before the Second World War, and some of them even believed that work was good for a man at the same time as they made no practical distinction between creative and mechanical work.
– “Why is work good, Mammie?”
“It wouldn’t be good to play all of the time, Joe.”
“I don’t see why not, Mammie.” Wishing as I brushed her brittle auburn-grey hair that she could play all of the time – from now on. “I don’t like work.”
“Yes you do, Joe.”
“No I don’t. I hate it. I don’t like having to go to school. I wouldn’t go if it wouldn’t get you into trouble.”
“Yes you would, Joe. You like school once you get there. It’s getting up to go you don’t like.”
“Sometimes. I usually hate it. I hate school, Mammie.”
“You learn some nice things at school, Joe.”
“Mammie, why did Daddie sell the teaspoons; do you not think you should leave him for doing that?”
“No, I wouldn’t leave him for doing that, Joe,” and occasionally she would burst out crying and say: “If only he wouldn’t be such a wild bear! If only he would leave me alone. If only he would go away and leave me alone!”
Cain’s Book Page 19