White Mythology
Page 1
WHITE
MYTHOLOGY
Two Novellas
By W.D. Clarke
WHITE
MYTHOLOGY
—SKINNER BOXED—
—LOVE’S ALCHEMY—
Two Novellas by W.D. Clarke
Copyright 2016 W.D. Clarke
Ontario, Canada
This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical without the express written consent of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Cover design & book typography by Dave Bricker
ISBN: 978-0-9917100-2-7
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.
For my father, W.A. Clarke III
It began when Weissmann brought him to Europe: a discovery that love, among these men, once past the simple feel and orgasming of it, had to do with masculine technologies, with contracts, with winning and losing.
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
This tune goes manly.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
Skinner Boxed
WEDNESDAY
Pure Bull***t
Run-of-the-Mill
Dispassionate
Santa Claustrophobia
Whose Disembodied Head
Free Will
2.5 Things About Her
… Along With Max
2 Chocolate Freak-outs
Re: Mrs. Missy Plumtree
Her Diagnosis
This Just In
THURSDAY
Never Wonder
A ‘Switch’ To ‘Flick’
Jumping To Conclusions
Unusual Levels of Activity
An Orphan
The Pynchon Method
Western Hemisphere, The Earth
Cloud Illusions
Some Deterioration
The Iceberg
FRIDAY
Babyfresh Atom Bomb
Holy Shit
Fucked in the Head
What Do Numbers Mean?
Empty
Love’s Alchemy
Horticulture: 1977, Duxbury, Massachusetts
The Story: 1997, Toronto
The Interregnum: 1988, Tokyo
Truth Telling: 1997, Toronto
The One That Got Away: 1991, Montreal
Like Soldiers Do: 1985, Montreal
Death and the Honor System: 1976, Duxbury
He Grew Out Of It: 1997, Toronto
The Extasie: 1977, Duxbury
Acknowledgements
WEDNESDAY
—XMAS PAST—
In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge observed that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head. The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light, which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.
—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
1
Pure Bull***t
Dr. Ed Woke Up sweating and breathing heavily, and sat bolt upright, with an instant-on alertness that he had not experienced in years. His heart ‘felt’ dangerously fast, and he immediately ‘thought’ of his computer, which had recently been tampered with by his ‘son’ and whose cpu was now running ‘overclocked’. There followed hard upon this naggingly recurrent worry a rumbling in Dr. Ed’s lower abdomen, and he made an anxious dash for the master bedroom’s en suite toilet.
The upshot of what disappeared into the downspout hardly deserved the appellation ‘stool’, and was not at all what Dr. Ed was accustomed to (firm, long, and in terms of odour, sweetly horse-like). Rather, today’s effluent was a curious (and, as it would turn out, portentous) mixture of gas and, not quite metaphorically speaking, what his more nautically inclined colleagues termed ‘black water’.
Naturally, Dr. Ed was not at all content to greet the dawn in such a disquieting manner as this. His wife, thankfully, had not been roused by his helpless bleating, honking and groaning. She also failed to be stirred by the subsequent, more quotidian noises of Dr. Ed completing the trinity of his morning ablutions with a shower and a shave. And she snored right through the sliding and banging of various dresser drawers and kitchen cupboards, through the dentist-drill-whine of the coffee grinder, and through the banal enthusiasms of the Snooze You Lose morning show on 1040 CRUZ. She was a self-medicating sleep-walker and an enthusiast of the narcotic action of (both over-the-counter and prescription) nighttime cold and headache medications, and would not regain consciousness until she was good and ready.
After his coffee (psychotropic Honduran beans that came in smallish, cheap cellophane packs, which Dr. Ed’s wife poured by the dozen into a large Chock Full O’ Nuts tin and kept, erroneously, in the freezer—a continual replenishment of which was couriered to him on a regular basis by an ophthalmologist colleague who performed charity work in that Central American hot spot), Dr. Ed found that he had to go again. His subsequent visit was as unusual, as discomfiting and as murkily unfathomable as the first, but this second passing left him feeling temporarily less ill-at-ease, in relative terms, than before. But … relative … to what, exactly? Oh, he calculated, he figured, as was his wont, that this nascent little ‘situation’ of his was somewhat analogous to the manner in which nicotine works its own small-scale ‘wonders’ on the central nervous systems of those habituated to its charms. That is, there is a momentary release of and relief from ‘pressure’, relief which is always accompanied by and predicated upon the knowledge, the foreknowledge, statistically speaking, that more of the same is assuredly on its way.
Like many of us, Dr. Ed was accustomed to spending more time in the washroom than was strictly necessary to the performance of the various bodily functions to which that part of every modern house is dedicated. And like many of us, Dr. Ed filled those 5-10 ‘extra minutes’ a day with some unchallenging, often demulcent reading material. Unlike many of us, however, Dr. Ed had done the math, had crunched and digested the numbers involved, and had assimilated their significance: those 5-10 minutes of lavatorial seclusion equalled approximately 150-300 minutes a month, which worked out to about 30-60 hours per year, time literally wasted, sitting down, reading, to be honest, crap. Stool softeners for the constipated ‘mind’. Unguents for those haemorrhoids of the soul. It made him shudder to ‘think’ of the number of New England Journal of Medicine and Psychiatry Today articles he had neglected to wrestle with over the years, favouring in their stead such frothily diverting and easily catabolised tales from the likes of the ubiquitous John Bull and its (somewhat less popular) sequel, Commodore Commode.
Today, however, Dr. Ed uncharacteristically if understandably eschewed these rough-but-ready, populist certitudes, in favour of several minutes of quiet reflection, reflection upon the arresting, rather unusual dream from which he had, not quite 30 minutes previously, so abruptly awoken.
Now, Dr. Ed was ‘certainly not’ the kind of ‘frivolous charlatan’ to get his patients wrapped up in the interpretation of the endless winding sheet of their dreams. For Dr. Ed, the entire field of psychotherapy was suspect, replete as it was with, as Dr. Ed put it, ‘the frippery and quackery of feather-bedding timewasters’. Freudian, Jungian and other, more contemporary and trendy varian
ts of depth psychology were ‘beyond the pale’. They were relics from a pre-scientific pre-history, the almost-unrecognizable ancestral kin of ‘proper psychiatry’, of which he was a professor at the university and the department head at University Hospital. Truth be told, a small but statistically significant number of his patients had reported having considerable success with a ten-session course of Cognitive Therapy (which taught them the pragmatics of recognizing and refraining from acting upon pernicious, self-injurious ‘thought’ patterns), but then again a number of patients had reported having had success with a ten-session course of Rolfing too for G-dsake, so, well, go figure.
So Dr. Ed maintained no active professional interest in dreams, neither in the diagnostic fruits which are allegedly borne of their interpretation, nor in the therapeutic efficacy that supposedly arises from bringing them from the ‘unconscious’ to the ‘conscious’ ‘mind’. Nor, it must be added, was he the least bit interested in either the form or the content of his own nocturnal narratives. Indeed, it was something of a personal joke of Dr. Ed’s that Freud, that ‘great’ dream-reader (Traumdeuter), that puffed-up old spinner of yarns, had ‘discovered’ or rather imagined there was a connection between an adult individual’s dream-states and the ‘repressed’ but psychically active traumas of childhood, and that the patient’s dream was therefore the ‘royal road to the unconscious’. And this imagined connection, as Dr. Ed saw it, was based upon some rather spurious etymologizing on Freud’s part, or to use Freud’s own terminology against him, upon some unconscious ‘wish-fulfilment’ of the late, great Viennese witch-doctor’s. Freud may have considered himself a scientist, but Dr. Ed’s pin had him wriggling in an entirely different collection of exotic specimens: amongst the family of august, Germanic theoreticians, the species of the ‘professional’ philologist. Like his forerunners Hegel and Nietzsche, Freud’s reputation rested not so much upon empirical research as upon the ‘creative’ misinterpretation (the Kleinamen) of, and the invention of novel terminology for, previously extant phenomena. Thus: the significance of the dream (das Traum, a word of Old High German origin, a variant of which is also found in Old Norse), in terms of both theory and praxis, is for Dr. Ed’s Freud inextricably linked to an etymological consanguinity with the Ancient Greek traumatikos, or ‘wound’, from which both the modern German das Trauma and the English ‘trauma’ are derived. In short, Freud was, or rather ‘thought’ he was, lifting from the ancients again, and dreams are old traumas that present themselves in disguised or displaced form, so as to prevent injury to their dreamer.
This was all just pure bull***t, of course.
Dr. Ed had only taken two courses in which Freud had even been mentioned: he had had one-half of a lecture on Freud in an undergraduate arts elective course (A History of Western Thought: From Plato to Nato); and ‘The Case of Anna O.’ was the subject of a two-hour seminar in History of Psychiatry I in med school, but Dr. (then just plain) Ed hadn’t read the text, and the presenter had succeeded in inducing much needed sleep, and etc. etc. But any fool knew that dreams are randomly produced by the pons or primitive part of the brain as a by-product of the initiation of REM sleep, and … and, for G-dsakes, that was, G-dammit, that: that was all the hell there was to it.
But today, this lumbering dream of his own held him in what was for Dr. Ed a kind of Gothic thrall, held him in that mixture of credulity, scepticism and involuntary awe experienced by a child viewing, back to back, Godzilla and Godzilla vs. Megalon, a double bill on the small screen for a grey, late autumn Saturday afternoon. There, giddiness tag-teamed with dread, and brute freedom was, if endangered, always dangerous. And yet it was still to be prized, prized above all else. And what if an entire city of concrete and tarmac had to be destroyed in the process? The human world, revealed as a prison-house of bureaucratic unreason (intuitively understood as such even by the pubescent, nascent Dr. Ed), deserved to be razed to the ground, didn’t it, after all? But after all, after all the bullets, mortars and missiles (greedily consumed by young Ed as so much tea, so many cakes and ices), after all the name calling and cursing, it was discovered that the beast was our servant—nay—our ally and protector! Godzilla would defend to the death—he would!—the very human civilization which had sought to destroy him! He was our friend, he was our friend indeed, but no, he could not be tamed!
For the first time in years, Dr. Ed remembered having dreamt; he had forgotten the details, but, significantly, he remembered the ‘feeling’: the sensation of a peculiar kind of presence, the presence of a kind of absence, in the thoracic region of his anterior body, slightly to the left of midline. And although it was definitely an absence that he sensed, it was not as if he was lacking anything that he had had the night before. Rather, it was as if the dream had been a sea creature that had briefly come ashore, and had laid an egg—a hollow egg—in his chest, and had then departed, leaving him to be the incubator of a (parasitic?) nullity. What’s more, he found himself ‘thinking’ about this Leviathan and imagining its shape, its proportions and features, from time to time throughout the morning. He’d admired it, had stared semi-consciously at its jagged outline for those couple of minutes on the can, but then it crouched away, back to the anterior regions of his ‘mind’ as he brushed his teeth, where it lingered, teasingly, while he searched for and eventually located the diaspora of items he required for his journey to work—his hospital security pass, his wallet, his keys, his gloves, his galoshes, his hat.
The dream’s tail-end boldly surfaced three more times, indeed: the first was when he took a brush to his shoes for a quick spiffing-up at the front door; the second was shortly thereafter, when he remembered that he had forgotten his Day-Timer upstairs and dashed up to retrieve it (the Day-Timer was lying on his bed-side table, and there he once more encountered his still-sleeping and evidently faithful wife, and proceeded to give her his usual, casual valedictory kiss on the forehead); the third occurred in his car, a (for North America) rare Peugeot 405 sedan. Dr. Ed was driving along Highway 2 to the hospital, and once more, and for a few teraseconds only, it flashed its serpentine luminosity towards him as he sipped coffee from a wide-bottomed travel mug and returned to the morning show with DJ Carl di Souze on AM1040. By the time he became aware of the dream’s sudden reappearance it had already departed, already retreated to its unfathomable lair, where it hibernated all day, awaiting the night.
2
Run-of-the-Mill
But Then Again: that morning, from 08:00 until noon, Dr. Ed, very much the active choleric and not at all the contemplative melancholic, saw 15½ patients, each of whom was granted 0.25 hours of his time. 8 of these were run-of-the-mill exogenous depressives, female, all on tricyclics, all now relatively stable, and all fat. 2 were bipolar endogenous males, both in their early 40s, one of whom was setting sales records at the ailing firm of Underwood Olivetti, while the other was driven to his appointment by his mother, with whom he lived.
One of the low-lights of the forenoon was a patience-trying but admittedly intriguing pair of pre-pubescent male twins, whose parents were both psychologists and, he guessed, both completely insane. Dr. Ed wisely insisted upon interviewing the progeny separately from the progenitors. The parents elected to go first, and were all business. They instructed Dr. Ed upon the overdetermined hornet’s nest of reasons why the twins had set fire to the middle school cafeteria the day before. What it all boiled down to, however, Dr. Ed learned, was that the twins had simply overreacted to a commission of grave injustice against them: they had been ‘caught’ by their English teacher ‘plagiarizing’ each other’s work, and the teacher had made matters worse for herself by drawing the class’s attention to the brothers’ symbiotic learning partnership, and by insisting upon giving them a ‘0’ for the assignment in question. It was all very plain and clear, as the parents then informed Dr. Ed of their intention to sue the local school board for creating a learning environment that was injurious to their sons’ self-esteem, and wanted Dr. Ed to issue a stateme
nt in support of their claims.
Upon interviewing the twins, Dr. Ed discovered that the boys harbored a number of grievances, all of which departed quite significantly from the outline described by their sperm-and egg-donors. First of all, there was a woeful lack of choice of dessert items in the cafeteria, which was run by ‘dog-faced old cows’ who spoke like the poor people who, in fact, they were. Second, the school was ‘friggin’ old and grimy’, and, although there was indeed a nice shiny new one not far from where the boys lived, it was (by bureaucratic edict, this much was true) in a different school catchment area entirely. The third reason was related to the second, but Dr. Ed put it down to proleptic sexual posturing on the boys’ (who were not yet twelve) part: apparently, the ‘bitches’ at their school were ‘poor, butt-ugly pancakes’, while the ones at the new school were ‘juicin’ and ‘ripe for breakin’-in’, and the boys wanted to get to the new school as quickly as could be.
Dr. Ed then showed the boys to the waiting room, entered the nurse’s station via another door, wrote in their files a quick preliminary diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and possible severe personality disorder (for further study, thrice weekly), scribbled a prescription for Haldol and Ritalin, and told his nurse to inform the parents that the boys should take the medication until further notice, that he would pull as many strings as he could to get their sons into a special clinic for ‘Gifted-At-Risk’ children in the City, and that he would indeed be sending a letter both to the Principal and to the school board.
Dr. Ed then returned to his office (with no immediate intention to follow through on any of the above), closed his door, and took a couple of deep breaths. 2½ more appointments until lunch, 2 of which were heartbreaking, because they involved medication-resistant teenage-onset schizophrenics. Dr. Ed made a mental note to have Nurse Sloggett schedule all future appointments with them for earlier in the day, if possible. The appointment with the ½, on the other hand, was always a good way to round out a morning, for she was a pleasant patient of some years standing, a privately paying queue-jumper. She was also a pharmaceutical tourist and (for the last six months, anyhow) a self-diagnosed multiple personality disorder whose other half consistently failed to show. She and Dr. Ed would usually revert to discussing such matters as current and forthcoming FDA trials and recent drug patents until their time ran out. She was an eccentric, assuredly, but a consistently harmless, harmlessly consistent one. She listened ‘thoughtfully’ to what he had to say, was polite in her manner of questioning, and showed due deference to the profession. And so he was thankful for her, for his ½. Ah, if only (he had often said to her at the close of a congenially fruitless session), if only there were more patients like her, the world would be a far, far saner place!