Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  “The polarity is false. There is a Hyphen. Consider, if you will, the problem raised by a dream. We accept this inner nocturnal drama as perfectly natural, and yet it is one of the weirdest and most anomalous phenomena in nature. For it is an event of which we are aware, and yet it transpires in a state of sleep. How to explain this consciousness in coma? Obviously our old-fashioned ideas about such polarities must be revised. There is a fundamental difference between day-consciousness and night-consciousness, and it consists in this: that what our awareness is keyed to in the day is the ‘real’ outside world which impinges on us through our senses, while during the night our awareness shifts its focus away from the outside world toward the inner world, the deepest subjective truths which are kept hidden from us during the day. There must be some kind of inner filter, or screening apparatus—what the Freudians called a censor—which operates during the day to keep the inner facts buried in the unconscious; for if they were allowed to intrude into consciousness willy-nilly, to mix with the perceived facts of the outer world, the result would be chaos and fracas—we would lose the sense of demarcation between without and within, would no longer know where the substantial ended and the subjective began. This has been the deadliest fear of man since the beginning, this mixture of inner and outer: see how the public recoiled when the surrealists toyed with it. During the coma of the night, however, the burden of coping with the outside world is removed and, accordingly, the screen which repels the inner facts can be relaxed. As a result, the facts from the mental cellars are sucked into consciousness by the vacuum left there when the facts of the outer world recede. Then a man’s innermost self makes a supreme effort to talk to him.

  “Now the question arises: When is a man closest to reality—when his awareness is flooded with the outer facts of day or the inner facts of night? This question, which has confounded philosophers for centuries, could not be answered before Immob because until now man did not have enough control over his consciousness to experiment with it. Now Immob has answered the question. We have proved conclusively that the so-called real world of which men are monomaniacally aware during the day is entirely ephemeral and deceptive, a world of hallucinating signs and stirrings, all dust in the eyes—because men up till now have been Aristotelian, have seen only the cloak of treacherous verbal symbols which they themselves have flung over the world. But with Immob the mind is free to roll over, so to speak, and open itself to the full flood of facts from the pool inside, to the subterranean inner stream of dream and fancy. It is a revelation. In the Aristotelian’s night life, thanks to his aberrating norns, the unconscious facts protrude only vaguely and meagerly, in the disguise of symbols and concealed hints—the screen has not been relaxed entirely; an iron curtain remains between him and his innermost being, his bottom-shelf memory banks. The non-Aristotelian created by Immob can open himself fully and directly to the contents of his command nakedly, not as fragmentary symbols—for Immob realizes the old Freudian slogan, ‘Where Id was, shall Ego be.’ And this revolutionary thing happens. The moment the unconscious is fully unleashed, man finds that what he has been carrying about in himself all along is the world, the cosmos, infinity, the whole undulating ocean of reality. For in his original passive state, before he was invaded by norns, before he was forced to make the cruel and hallucinating cleavage between ‘I’ and ‘It,’ he was in the whole world and the whole world was in him. Now, with his passivity regained and all his Hyphens restored, he heals the split. For the first time, merely by plunging into his inner reality, he makes the leap that lands him foursquare in outer reality. The dive into himself is the dive into the world. Night becomes day. Dream becomes reality. What the surrealist toyed with, Immob realizes.”

  “And then?” Martine said softly.

  The amp’s eyes narrowed, clouded over. “Then everything becomes possible. Once thoughts are oceanically in tune with the pulse of the world, keyed to its vibrations, man’s cortical pulsations will move mountains. Literally. The map will for the first time overtake the territory—and then reshape it. Man’s charismatic magic will flow from his liberated mind out into the entire universe, not only exploring it but altering it at will. Telepathy and dream transmission, extra-sensory perception, divination of the future as mind roams the space-time continuum, levitation as mind invades outside objects and dominates them just as it does body, mesmerism of objects as well as of animals—all these wonders will become commonplaces. Who can tell what marvels lie ahead? You may know of John Wharton’s theory of mattergy—the theory, based on Einsteinian logic, that there is a prime element in the universe called mattergy, which can at any moment change from matter into energy and back again. Perhaps the human mind will subdue mattergy and learn the trick of materialization and dematerialization—perhaps it will so thoroughly master the physical that it will be able to command the body to appear and disappear at will, or dart from planet to planet with the speed of light. Yes, the mind will be powerful enough to do everything. It will receive, finally, the music of the spheres—the buzz of the quanta, the swish of cosmic dust, the grinding of the planets, the whirring of electrons in the atom. And who knows? Perhaps ultimately, when mind becomes omnipotent, it will achieve that state which up to now has only been dreamed of as an attribute of the mythical superman we call God, grab bag of all man’s yearnings for himself—the state of immortality, pure, immutable being.”

  “I find this being unbecoming,” Martine said in a whisper. It was all outrageous, shameful—but at the same time he found himself somehow caught up in the appalling grandiosity of the man-infant’s vision, in the lulling, Mosaic rhythms of his phrases. “Isn’t there an easier road to immortality?”

  “Name it, please.”

  “Well, death is very probably a psychosomatic excess anyhow. So, if mind achieves complete mastery over the body, why doesn’t it simply instruct the body to stop dying and live forever? In that way, it seems to me, the spirit might solve its housing problem permanently.”

  “You do not understand,” the amp said. “To grant the body such importance—to imply that any bodily vessel is worthy of living forever—is to put it on a par with spirit. Why bother? When mind becomes as potent as it is capable of becoming, surely it will not die—as God does not die. At best it will only materialize and dematerialize, as God does in his Incarnations. Out of nothingness everything is possible. On the condition that nothing is desired—nothing but pure contemplative being, the triumph of the vegetative principle, the end of striving. Oh, believe this. . . .”

  Logical progression. Saint on a flagpole: saint in a cave: saint on a soapbox: saint in a department-store window with a powder-blue baby blanket for a sackcloth. St. Simeon: St. Augustine: St. Helder: St. Severe-Sphere. Yes, it was logical as hell. From washing irregularly and leaving the lice in the scalp and wearing hair shirts, it was a short step to thunderous pacifism and then to voluntary amputeeism and the full unabashed womby-comfy huddle. The saint become a basket case! He lay there now, this amp, with his pouty juvenile-senile features composed in that otherwordly calm often found on the rather absent-minded faces of anointed ones in early Christian paintings—on the enrapt irony-shorn faces of political saviors—on the face of, say, a Helder. Was there something obscene about the picture? Well, sure. There was always something obscene about a man drawing back from the challenge of complexity and whittling himself down into a simpler form through pseudo-infantilism, pseudo-imbecility, pseudo-simplism, pseudo-holism, pseudo-Helderism; sloughing off dimensions in the futile effort to make himself unilinear and unwavering; trying to amputate himself back into the monocellular compactness which precedes multifid turmoil; like a Christ, a Gandhi, a Helder.

  There was a staggering paradox in the situation of sainthood because, while it denied all taint of duality, it was actually the most dualistic situation of all, a condensation of all human ambivalence. Take the Christian precept that it is more blessed to give than to receive. The saint, of course, went about giving all over t
he place and indicating no desire whatsoever to receive—all Agape and no Eros, apparently. And yet he was not quite without ulterior motive after all, for, according to his own dogma, all his demonstrative giving was motored by the conviction that through his glad-hand dispensations he would receive the most prized dispensation of all, namely, the state of blessedness. Instead of being spurred by altruism, he thirsted for special favors not available to the poor wretches to whom he doggedly gave, and in the very giving established that they were swine forever doomed to limbo because they were greedy enough to snatch like hungry giraffes what he thrust upon them. Eros under the Agape.

  Yes, this latter-day Immob saint was no different from the rest, his endeavors to lead mankind into an allegedly better state were inspired by a hunger for the powers he felt would accrue to him in the process: hypnotic powers, levitational powers, the megalomaniacal magic which has been dreamed of from the beginning by all cherubs and crackpots, messiahs and mountebanks, all healers and helders. A spectacular case of double-entry moral bookkeeping; some people were more careless about keeping books, he, Martine, had not kept many books, some of the key volumes in his collected works had disappeared to helder and gone. . . .

  The amp yawned again, a cavernous unhinging, then his authoritative hobbledehoy-hoary papoose-patriarch younger-helder pout relaxed and he closed his eyes. Something was happening to his breathing, it was becoming deeper and much slower, his chest rising and falling under the blanket at such a lazy pace that Martine wondered if he might be ill—it was not the shallow respiration that ushers in sleep. Finally, without any change in his slow-motion breathing, the amp opened his eyes again, fixed them on Martine’s image, and began once more to speak.

  “You do not know,” he said. “You. Do. Not. Know. Problem is to shed the skin. Animal covered with fur. Semi-human man smooth-skinned. Next step for man to become fully human shed skin altogether. Sex cannot be encased. With skin you have sex but you do not know what sex is you know only the animal agony. Animal. Agony. Impotence. Like animal you strive strive in quivering and sweat to merge with loved one become one with her. Never. Always it fails. Orgasm never complete. Orgasm must be bursting of all skins but at the end your skin is there and her skin there and between them the void. Barricades of skin. Over these barricades men fight their wars. Orgasm. No man or woman an island is. Orgasm. The great melting melting. At last the one world. But for you never one world always many worlds. Never can you melt. Always you try. Caressing her making love to her holding her desperately tight in attempt to penetrate one into the other you look down upon her closed eyes her clenched twitching lips her head as it sways from side to side and you wonder. In agony and terror you wonder. Make the movement of love and you wonder you think I feel this this I know I feel but what does she feel? What. Does. She. Feel. Ask the question make the movement ask the question. No answer. There. Is. No. Answer. She is there beneath you skin assaulting skin yet she is a million lightyears away from you. This the maddening enigma of the Mona Lisa of all women known transepidermally. In the act of supreme intimacy you find you are lying with the supreme stranger. You increase the tempo and thrust of your love-making rise to peak of frenzy sex becomes not melting but assault you interpret this as frenzy of passion but it is only frenzy of isolation frustration. You cannot bear to be by yourself at this moment of dissolution yet you find yourself more alone than ever. Unbearable. You shriek you moan you wail and babble. Sounds grow wilder and wilder at moment of crisis the movements more violent they are taken for the ravings and spasms of orgasmic ecstasy but they are not that. They are the horrible cries and writhings of a maniac in irons inmate of an asylum. At moment of orgasm you are inmate of the asylum of skin. Asylum. Of. Skin. Smashing your head helplessly against its steel doors. For you know only what is happening inside your own skin you do not know what is happening inside your beloved’s. She is the unknowable Other snatched from you in the nursery long ago your frantic attempts to overwhelm and penetrate have all been repulsed. You. The Other. Between you the void heritage from the nursery. Void which no burst of orgasm can fill. Skins drip with sweat. No wonder. The violently insane those who are forcibly restrained they always sweat as they struggle to break loose from the strait jacket. Afterwards two strangers side by side panting separately panting smoking separate cigarettes staring up separately at separate spots on the ceiling nourishing their separate furies muttering their separate curses. Separate. Only one thing do these two share the pool of sweat beneath them. No ocean of meltingness but only this pool of sweat anxiety’s sap. The. Pool. Of. Sweat.

  “Listen. Let me tell you what it can be like when sex ceases to be straining and shrieking of the insane becomes the blending. Becomes the floating rippling bobbing oceanic. Listen. This is how it is with me. You and she are one from the beginning. One. Together. Interpenetration of opposites and all poles hyphenated and contraries wandering into each other. There is a meltingness. No barricades between. Thus a great ease and flow. Serenity. The overwhelming soothing lulling calm. Sex is not tension not tonus. Tonus comes from the anxiety of separation the anxiety of not knowing what is inside the Other. Not knowing if the orgasm the flight into Everything the burst into Everything is rising in her as well as in you. But now you know for she is you and you are she and what happens to both of you is happening at every moment to you. You know. Know. At ease. Unhurried flowing as of tides. Flowing. Tides. You do not make the movement of love love moves you. You feel it on your side. Simultaneously you feel it also on her side you are the thrust-into as well as the thruster the done-to as well as the doer stimulus and response and the Hyphen between. You give and simultaneously with each giving you receive. Here the barrier between giving and receiving melts away altogether. Giving. Receiving. Are. One. And what you feel at each moment is what each party to the two-become-one feels apart from the blending and within the blending too. You know what it is like to be enfolded in her skin as well as in yours. At last at last there are no more skins just a great placid outflowing-inflowing vibration which you lie back and receive. Eros is Agape.

  “One cannot rise to the climax without the other. If one has orgasm the other must have orgasm for both are one. There is no void. There. Is. No. Void. Only one orgasm it belongs to both. It. Is. The. Ocean. You shriek now and she shrieks but these are no longer the sounds of the insane behind the asylum walls this is the final Dionysian music the geysering of the oceanic of Nature’s Primordial Unity restored of the ultimate healing of Om. Joy. It is the cry of joy in the extinction of skin-tight selfness. Cry of joy to be inside her as well as yourself and to feel her inside you and know the oneness. Joy finally to know a woman. Always sex was said to be the knowing of a woman of course of course for the whole drive of sex was finally to know another person. But now for the first time it happens. You are she. You quiver with the spasms of your penis and also with the hurricanes of her vagina and those hurricanes are felt now not only from the outside through one skin-encased organ touching another skin-lined organ but from the inside of her from within her skin from the racing tremors of her autonomic nervous system and the convulsive pulsations of her thalamus and the ecstatic throbbings of her prefrontal cortex and all the while knowing that as she feels these tremors and pulses and throbs she is within you within the skin of your genitals permeating your autonomic pathways and thalamic-cortical connections. No more from outside the skin. You. Know. From. Inside. All. Skins. You. Are. Inside. Everything. You. Flow. Inside. You. Are. The. Ocean. Meltingness. Everywhere. Orgasm. Everywhere. World no more in fragments. Whole again. No more war. World an ocean. Om.”

  The amp’s eyes were open just a slit, thin bands of white showing. “Tired,” he said, lips hardly moving. “Very tired. Oh, I could tell you. There are many things I could tell you but only on the silent level for the rest there are no words. Must leave you now. So very tired. Must—”

  “Listen,” Martine said in great agitation. “Don’t go away yet. I just thought of something, I’
ve got to ask you one more thing, the most important thing of all. How is it possible? How, without making Immobs of the women too? And if both men and women are Immobs, then how can you, how is it possible—”

  The amp seemed finally to have heard him. “Yes,” he said wearily, his voice faint as though it came from a great distance and from some unlikely place, from the top of Olympus, inside of a whale, bottom of a barrel, bubbling up through the amniotic bath of a womb, ink of a fountain pen. “It is a question. What to do with women. To make them amps or not. Still holding policy discussions on the subject. Two schools of thought. But we have a few Immob women. Purely experimental so far.”

  “But? If women are Immobs too. . . . Sex is movement, you said so yourself, you spoke of the movements of love. But if the man and the woman are both Immobs?”

  “Sex is not movement. Sex is the great peace, the passive inert flowing. Sex is not war. There are ways. We are working on it. It is a transitional period, it is all very experimental so far, much remains to be done.”

  “First one thing, then another,” Martine snapped. “You keep shifting, you’ve got to stop doing that to me, do you hear? He was always saying that too. It was a transitional period, he would say. When we talked back and forth in our bunks he would say it needed more discussion, the program had to be hammered out more fully, that was always the thing. I’d put my notebook down and try to talk to him about Rosemary. . . .”

  The amp’s eyes flickered slightly. His breathing had become very slow now, it was distressing to watch the blanket as it billowed out for long seconds and then collapsed again.

  “Tired. No, more, talk. Go, away, now. Tired, from, trying, to, reach, you, you, come, close, then, you, fight, me off. Do not, fight, any, more. You, are, on, the, verge, of, believing. Believe. Come, into, the, ocean, of, serenity, and, sex. Behind you, is, the, recruiting, booth. Go, and, sign. To, your, right, there, the, rack, the, rack, with, our, amp pocketbooks. Take some. Take, Number, One, especially, Basic, Amp, Text, Number, One, take, that. Entitled, Dodge, the, Steamroller. Study. Sign. You, are, already, one, of, us, in, your, heart. Take, the, last, step. Going, now. Must, go. Off. Drifting. Peace. . . .”