The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  That is an idle and perhaps trivial speculation. But it suggests the arbitrary fashion in which genus homo often applies choice to certain functions and rejects choice in the matter of the results of many of his elected acts-which is still another dichotomy I shall touch on.

  Mankind has everywhere emphasized the sex differences. He has only recently known much of the identities and parallels.

  In the human embryo, until the fifth or sixth week (a period corresponding with geological ages of evolution), the genital ridge of both sexes is much the same. But as

  “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (in that great, pregnant pattern of all nature!) each sex produces the same cell groups, which only gradually take on separate shapes.

  The epithelial cords form the seminiferous tubes—or the mesenchyme. The graafian follicle comes into being in one sex; in the other, from the same tissue, a transitory network in the mesovarium. The mesovarium in the female is, in the male fetus, the mesorchium. Paroöphoron and organ of Giraldes; common Wolffian duct—and Müllerian duct, becoming Fallopian tubes, uterus, and perhaps vagina in the female, uterus masculinus in the male. So, endlessly, the anatomical parallel continues. And while each emergent body of protoplasm takes up its appointed form and situation, neither male nor female lacks in embryo the same entities, or their rudiments or vestiges.

  Our outward organs appear greatly different only to the mind that does not intimately know how alike they are and of what identical tissues they have been composed. How superficial, then, how ignorant it is to postulate an important differentness of spermatozoa or ova, clitorises or penes or any other aspect or characteristic of the sexes!

  But, again, the blunder is ageless. Again, humanity has done its utmost to enhance the final apparent differences. Once, long ago, we may have had the sensations of equality and complement which are, alone, implicit in the protoplasmic truth; we have lost them, traded them for sham and vanity, for illusion and delusion.

  Modern insight into these objective identities has not been employed by us to influence the mistaken concepts. It is forbidden to discuss such matters! The object rules; the truths about it, and all suitable fresh inferences, are repressed. The parallels of the embryo are ignored; so are the likeness of girls and boys. The small differences of adults are exaggerated to crowd and color every nook of consciousness and natural empathies are thereby pushed into the limbo of the subconscious. We see a man, a woman; we have made ourselves unable to see two alikes in all but minor ways and even there, in process, similar.

  Lately we have discovered “sex” hormones: male, female. To the disquietude of some, we have also learned that each sex possesses both and that no more than a slight preponderance of one over the other exists in either sex. With pragmatic zeal we have caused cocks-combs to grow on hens and found that female hormones relieve to some degree cancerous conditions of the prostate. We have even somewhat changed personality by injection, and disoriented libido. We might have done better. We might, for instance, have wondered more what such facts mean.

  It could plausibly be inferred (for instance) that the psychological nature of men and of women is not, intrinsically, as different as the average person thinks—and all biology might be turned to evidence. It could be imagined that nature had no intention of causing the two sexes to take such opposed attitudes toward each other—that two very similar physiologies with one common end in view were not designed to sustain ideas of inferiority and superiority, of uncleanliness and hence of comparative cleanliness, of strength and weakness, modesty and valor, and the rest. Even though a division of the social responsibilities is implied by the ultimate differences, the common aim suggests that the duties of neither sex are lesser or greater and should be con joined.

  It must be assumed in consequence that all our inequities are the product of gross, calamitous, long-standing error. The motivative basis for such assumption is plain. When burgeoning “reason” ranged itself against the “blind” instinct of prior apes, and vanity was sired by success, the product (calling himself man and stripped of such automatic

  “divine” guidance as was available through instinct to a billion years of man’s) became so entranced with himself that he never found enough objects of odious comparison to satisfy the greed of his inner conceit. He went to war with other men exactly like himself, always on the grounds of their “inferiority.” Not satisfied even by that, he declared another war on the still-more-similar half of his own tribe: woman. She was necessary to him, so he could not exterminate her; but he put her in her place to give his own a more exalted seeming.

  It is a hypothesis worthy of intense reflection—nowadays.

  And woman’s new place, essentially “inferior,” was not in any way the place nature had created her to fill. For her, the game of life then perhaps became a game of wits and of revenge and mankind has not known any happiness since that hideous day.

  The legend of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from “Eden” is an excellent allegory for what thus may truly have happened in the dawn ages. (Those psychologists who find legends to be the allegories of instinct, accounts of its evolution in man, will see that story in such a light-see it with depth and clarity.) Note, first, that, since it was Adam who got the upper hand over Eve, the legend attributed the “original sin” to woman! In “Christian” civilization that pagan fable has been used to short the psychological circuit and slam the book. The old, universal “sin” is certainly man’s and certainly was man’s; its fearful consequences obtain everywhere without regard to the particular religion underlying any major culture. In that sense, it is fitting that that Saviour who is presumed to have died for our sins was a man—for the women were innocent. (What shall we say of them now?) And although women have abetted the ignominy—the blasphemy of the species by itself-they have done so with the pitiful motive of regaining some favor amongst the men they had to love no matter what men imagined of them or did to them!

  The atmosphere of such argument may seem rarefied. Let readers endeavor, in that case, to bear in mind they have never before come in contact with it, in all likelihood.

  The poisonous notions that pervade their minds are all they have known.

  Doubting readers will not deny the rage that has characterized humanity in all its known periods. The fact that the males of the world, stricken by what is likely to prove a mortal blow, should, in the very moment of catastrophe, turn to hurling hydrogen bombs on one another is a proper criterion of that state. Hatred is man’s principal characteristic; hostility and aggression are the chief manifestations of it in the objective realm; ideas of superiority and inferiority are the constant subjective shapes of the condition; and his history is the story of war. The urge to love—the real message of every sincere, sane messiah-is always ignored, save briefly or locally. By man, the greater appeal has always been found in the instrument of his own destruction: hate.

  It was this deadly wishing that the Greek tragedians took for granted. It was the evidence of this that made a man of such insight as Freud pessimistic about his species.

  Two thousand years ago—and yesterday—able minds have accepted the massive illusion as inevitable—taken it, even, for a “natural law”!

  And the hatred cannot be denied. But a question can be asked: If their sexes so revile each other, how can a species love? How, if one sex regards itself as superior, can it refrain from detesting the “inferior” sex? And how in the name of nature and of God can beings regarded as inferior by their mates bear toward those mates a whole affection? Creativeness, that ineffable First Principle of life, is not possible where the creators are at such odds, and have been for hundreds of generations.

  A hate of life is inevitable.

  We were reared in that madness of our forefathers, and they in the insane evaluations of theirs, and thus it has gone, back to the caves and back to the forest fringe, until we have come so to adore our hateful composition that we found our religions upon it, incorporate it in all our virtues,
make our laws from it, declare wars because of it, practice it by the wayside and in the seats of the mighty, and we cannot see behind it, or beyond it, or know what to do about it, because we do not truly know any longer that we hate, and most of us would rather perish than be reinformed of the Truth. From that one illusion may stem all our sorrow; it may be, in solemn fact, the original sin.

  We—male and female—are the same flesh and the flesh is beautiful. We have all the same organs, differing only in specialty. The same chemicals course in us both. When we love each other it is the same love. When we lie together we are in solemn truth that One. And until men made it so, in prestigious excesses of egotism, no such thing existed as a woman and no such thing existed as a man. The fact ought to be exceedingly plain today, since, without females, we males are in a lingering death. We do not exist—alone.

  We cannot.

  A “person” is a-man-plus-a-woman; with one or the other absent, there is no person. Hate is still possible but not love. Destruction is still easy but creativity is done for. In the world we so recently inhabited, where woman existed and the pride of man has sullied all, we had reached the very edge of that circumstance in which we now find ourselves! The soul of woman had long ago been slaughtered; our women were spiritually dead—so we were dead also. We were both dead sexually; the mind of man had grown as morbidly demented as it was gigantic; the long paroxysms of instinct that our harsh history exhibits were approaching some final masochism; life to nearly all of us was inner anathema.

  In a mystical sense it might be said that, since the women vanished, they were probably spared (owing to their innocence of original blame) from the dreary spectacle of slow death that now confronts the cruel and idiot descendants of the cruel and idiot sponsors of the blight: ourselves.

  The sin was shame, as the legend implies. But not the hateful shame we bear today. The sin was to convert sexuality itself to a shame and, in the dire doing, to shame women especially. We have (inevitably) taken the very opposite of the true position in defining the “original” sin. Our common sexuality, which was intended to be the ecstasy of our species, as a flower is the sexual organ and the ecstasy of a plant, was turned to shame—in order that we would appear (to our conceited human selves) loftier than other beasts, better even than nature, superior to law, even to God as men, so far, have invented Him.

  Those advanced psychologists and psychologically informed philosophers who deal with the relationship of mythology to instinct will find—as I said—in the fundamental ideology of that “Old Testament religion” which underlies this civilization a clear “statement” of a dawn-age double error which has never been corrected. To some of these thinkers, the “Garden of Eden” is an archetypal memory of man’s “peace of mind”

  in the days when pure instinct guided him. His effort to “sanctify” himself by shaming instinct, and the sexual instincts especially, has left him with a second archetypal memory; it appears in his legend of being driven from the Garden. What that “means” is, merely, that there exists in man an indelible, protoplasmic recollection of a happier estate, of a blunder (sin), and of the stemming of all subsequent woe from that first error.

  What it “means,” again, is that the back-brain of man—perhaps the very spinal column—

  recalls and turns into legend the fact that he has cut off his consciousness of the instinctuality of all life and now suffers for the unwarranted, arrogant deed.

  The story of Genesis is reflected not only in other old legends but also in the universal hope of “hereafters” which will restore the estate that is man’s “due.” The ubiquity and vehemence of human beliefs in humanesque hereafters becomes, by such logic, a measure of the strength of instinct still at work in genus homo!

  Freud was able to penetrate the ageless layers of credulity laid upon the error, to the degree that he saw, appraised and proved the sexual basis of Western, Christian neurosis. He did not see the still-broader frame of reference from which the situation rose—the development of ego-repressed instincts into myths, legends, and at length into formal regions. That was Jung’s vision. Freud, however, penetrated a curtain of time when he showed that most of modern man’s neuroses and psychoses derive from misinterpretations of the relation of id to ego and to the “superego.” It was the first great clue to the “wherefore” of the Toynbeean rise-and-fall of civilization. With Jung’s formulation of the Freudian discovery into a timeless whole, the means for a renaissance like that of the awakening of the physical sciences become available. It has not much been used, or even studied, as I have said.

  Why not?

  It took man centuries to learn to apply honesty to objects; even today only certain men, called scientists, are honest altogether, and then only where certain objects are concerned. But by such means we have found out what things are! Is it inconceivable that men Chad they yet the chance) might someday apply the identical honesty to the subject?

  Is the definition of man this: he is an everlasting liar to himself about himself? Or would he someday learn—painfully, as he learned the “scientific method”—also to be honest with himself? And would such honesty begin to unlock the greater mystery, the mystery of Why? I believe it would. I believe it is our “sin” that prevents our sciences from asking

  “Why?” There is no reason we should not ask—none to expect the answer is inexplicably denied to those who seek. And the field for the inquiry doubtless lies not amongst comets or bacteria or flying mesons—but within ourselves.

  Such is the substance of my effort to conclude this report with a personal

  “contribution.” I realize that what I have offered is at best but ground for speculation. It is my hope that the ground will be examined, the speculation attempted. For we can be assured that the physical scientists are doing the utmost of which man is capable to resolve the shocking riddle of our days. We can be sure that those psychological scientists who are able are also investing their energies and their best thought in the same effort. But they are very few.

  Perhaps all I have expressed is the wish that more men of imagination, courage and logic would apply their minds in the subjective field.

  I do not intend to suggest, by recommending psychological research, that the disappearance of females is illusion. I do not mean to imply that the sad scenery of our times is the result of some collective, hypnogogic fantasy. Such may be the case, and if it is, not the “physical” but the “psychological” sciences will offer a better approach to what seems so real now, and so terrible, so tragic. I do not wish it inferred, either, that I regard our wretched status as a “punishment” of Nature or God-the working of some unknown, fabulous cosmic Law. What I wish to leave is an impression that we are disoriented in our minds toward sexuality—toward love—and in other ways. Even such a presentation—a philosopher’s poor best—may be regarded as out of place in a “factual”

  report. To all who so regard it, my apologies. To the rest, let us dwell on the sensation of love, imbuing it with all our new objective knowledge, to see what new forms this act may awaken in the mind.

  We have lost everything. With love, with truth, this might not have been.

  14

  A PASSION OF THE ELEMENTS AND AN ELEMENTAL PASSION.

  The women of Florida had no Hurricane Warning Service. Restoration of such technological luxuries was not even on their agenda. Very few ships plied the seas. No planes could be spared to scout low-pressure areas in the distant doldrums. No radio network existed to relay data on humidity, barometric pressure, temperature, and wind velocity. It was a day at the end of October; Florida’s old-timers, if they thought of hurricanes at all, felt relieved that the season of menace had passed uneventfully.

  The early morning was as bland and bright as three hundred others in every year.

  A little hot.

  Paula attended a meeting where half a hundred women, in workaday clothes now, slacks, blue jeans, men’s pants, old riding breeches, endeavored to cope with the incr
easing multitudes who descended upon the state: women from northern towns and cities, with their daughters, seeking refuge from the coming winter, seeking a little plot of ground where vegetables would grow year round and pigs could be fed. They arrived in thousands now, and it was evident that when the northern fall congealed hundreds of thousands more would forsake their homes and move south. Whether to turn them back, or to establish a quota beyond which entry into Florida would be refused, or to accept all comers and hope they could be fed, were questions upon which opinions varied. So the meeting dragged on.

  A rising wind and darkening sky were hardly noticed during the debate. Squalls were expectable at that time of year. . . .

  Kate drove back from Coconut Grove with Alicia, a few precious packets of food at her side. She noticed that gusts of wind wrenched the treetops. Noticing, she slowed and watched. It could be, she thought-in which case, someone should get the shutters out of storage; someone meant her. She stepped on the accelerator, regretting that she had not yet, like most of the others, given up the habit of wearing a fresh dress downtown, to shop. It was Hester’s day off; Kate regretted that too. . . .

  Edwinna’s crew was taken from the fields when the downpour began. The superintendent, after some difficulty, got a call through to Key Largo and learned that rain was incessant to the south. “That’s all today,” she announced. “Pile in the trucks and go home! Gonna rain all the rest of the day, most likely.”

  Toward midafternoon, Edwinna reached home, soaked to the skin, and found Kate panting and sweating as she dragged the storm shutters from the grimy recesses of the tool shed.

  Alicia was staring sulkily from the kitchen window. She had been trying to

  “help,” a nuisance in Kate’s path as she staggered out with the heavy shutters, and a spider in the storage shed had bitten the child. There was a splash of Mercurochrome on the bite and Alicia showed it aggrievedly to her mother.