The Ruined House

by Ruby Namdar

  Modern Western civilization has excelled in analyzing one side of the equation: that which describes how human consciousness perceives the world. It has, however, dismissed (perhaps in the hope of making it disappear) the other side—how this consciousness creates and influences the world—by disparagingly referring to it as “mysticism,” “magic,” or “shamanism.” Yet other cultures have explored their frames of reference no less deeply than has our own. Their researchers, known to us as “magicians,” have exercised their consciousness in order to create new existents (in the actual, noumenal, not just the phenomenological, world). These existents, it needs to be stressed, have an ontological and not just an epistemological status, a real and not just a psychological dimension.

  Aha, cultural relativism! Andrew put the essay down and permitted himself another, not entirely convincing smile at having theoretically placed it. Half-conscious of a twinge of disappointment, he reached into a drawer for some stationery of his own that bore his personal letterhead underneath the emblem of the university and wrote in as polite, even friendly, a manner as he could:

  Dear Anonymous,

  Your paper is highly interesting and has no little poetic power that stimulates the intellectual imagination, which is something that I greatly value and encourage in my students. At the same time, it belongs to no genre taught within the framework of the course. I’m sorry to say, therefore, that I can’t give it a grade in its present form, there being no uniform standard of evaluation that can be applied to it. Since I do recognize your seriousness, however, you have my permission, should you wish to be given a final grade, to submit another paper or rewrite this one to make it conform more to the subject matter of the course. Before doing so, I would recommend that you consult the available academic guidelines to scholarly writing, as well as some of the papers submitted by your classmates. These will give you an idea of the kind of content and style of presentation expected of you. If you would like, I would be happy to meet with you during my office hours to advise you as best I can. As I say, I respect your creativity and wish to see you channel it in a way that will meet with the appreciation it deserves.

  Sincerely,

  Andrew P. Cohen

  Andrew reread what he had written. Its almost effortlessly achieved tone of firm yet not patronizing authority should have pleased him. Instead, though, he had a vague sense of a missed opportunity—and of something else. Could it be guilt? But what was there to feel guilty about? Neatly arranging the thin pages, he clipped his note to the first of them, pausing to regard it while fingering its margins, and slipped them into his leather briefcase, together with the other term papers, with yet another pale, disconcerted smile.

  9

  April 23, 2001

  The 30th of Nisan, 5761

  Nine a.m. Spring break was over. Andrew was glad to return to the academic whirl and be back in contact with the world. Lathering himself before shaving, he whistled gaily. Ann Lee was still sleeping soundly like a teenager. The razor glided over his cheek, skimming off its bristles and leaving fresh trails of bare skin in the clouds of white foam on his face.

  An unpleasant memory came to mind: the image of a slim young woman with large, firm breasts and a smooth, shiny, closely shaved skull, sitting stark naked in front of a mirror, her faced covered in a foamy white coat of shaving cream, holding a large, old-fashioned barber’s razor blade in her hand. It was a black-and-white photograph hanging on the door of a student at Berkeley, a sadistically seductive girl who had baited him mercilessly during his first months on the West Coast, exploiting his natural delicacy and the feminist mores of the times to bring him repeatedly to the verge of consummation, only to impose a sudden change in the rules of the game at the last moment. She had made him feel ashamed to desire her, ashamed to be a heterosexual male. How many years ago had that been? How many women ago? The razor glided effortlessly down his cheek, descended to his throat, and finished up under his chin. A nice, smooth, clean job. What if he were to shave the rest of his head, his eyebrows, too? What if he were to shave his whole body, even his pubic hair and armpits? The image of the sleek, ageless hermaphrodite he would have become made him shudder. Yet the strange thought of so much naked, white, sensitive skin exposed to daylight for the first time in years was also somehow pleasurable.

  A ridiculous fantasy! He had better get on with it. He rinsed the last lather from his face and leaned over the sink to inspect himself in the mirror, stretching the skin to make sure no stray hairs were hiding under his lip or chin while regarding, with a small smile of satisfaction, the handsome man staring back at him. Although he did not look exceptionally young, his fifty-two years had preserved his golden features, the clean Matisse-like contours of the cheeks and chin that were the stock-in-trade of many a plastic surgeon. His fingers probed the corners of his eyes, searching for hidden crow’s-feet, and lingered by his forehead to brush back a thick lock of hair. There was a small, nearly invisible cut near his right ear. He touched it with a reassuring fingertip and gently took hold of the earlobe with his thumb and forefinger. Tantalizing traces of memory breached the surface of his mind and dove back down like clear-finned flying fish. His hand slid over his still reasonably trim belly and on to the love handle of his hip, which passed muster, too. But though the middle-aged man facing the mirror was in good shape, never again would he have a boy’s smooth skin—not in this incarnation, anyway. If only one could shed one’s epidermis like a snake and let the fat trickle slowly out like warm drops of urine—have muscles that once again were hard, strong, and supple—jump into a cleansing pool and emerge new, fresh, and purified!

  An itch beneath his right nostril caused Andrew to peer into the mirror again. An odd, reddish-white rash had appeared on his freshly shaven skin. He ran a finger over it. Could it be an allergic reaction to something? Spring was one big allergy, especially if you lived near the park. It was nothing. It would go away by itself.

  He surveyed his bottles of shaving lotion and chose one that Rachel jokingly liked to call “Dad’s English squire fantasy” because it smelled, she said, like an old stable. He poured a bit of the clear green liquid into the hollow of his right palm and rubbed it into his face and neck. The alcohol stung refreshingly, its scent of raw leather, moss, and cedar wood dilating his nostrils. He glanced at his watch: twenty past nine. He’d buy his second cup of coffee at Starbucks, by the entrance to the subway. The meeting was scheduled for 10:30. At two he had a class, the first of the week.

  10

  April 23, 2001

  The 30th of Nisan, 5761

  Ten a.m. Andrew, his battered but elegant briefcase in one hand and a paper cup of fine-smelling coffee in the other, descended the subway stairs while humming a bar of an unidentifiable aria. He was in the habit of buying the morning’s second cup of coffee, a small cappuccino lightly sprinkled with cinnamon, at the Starbucks on Broadway and 110th Street. He liked the good-natured bustle of the place, its smell of freshly ground beans, and the little drama enacted each time its scalded milk was poured frothing into a pitcher. What could be more New Yorky than heading into the subway with a paper cup of coffee in hand?

  Andrew liked the subway, too, perhaps because he almost never had to travel in the hellish rush hours that not unjustifiably gave the New York mass transit system its bad name. He liked the mystery of its dark, Tolkienesque tunnels, the cleanly styled, gleaming aluminum cars that sped through them, and the steady, meditative rhythm of the ride itself. Swiping his MetroCard, he pushed his way through the turnstile. The platform was almost empty, as was the train that soon arrived. He settled into his seat, carefully balancing his coffee on his knees while looking in his briefcase for a book. He always read on the subway—books, magazines, or the inner pages of the Times. Reading was part of the subway experience, a Pavlovian reflex.

  His freshly shaved face itched and smarted. The distress this caused him seemed greater than was called for. Nervously, he felt his face. The reddish-white rash had spr
ead over his right cheek, causing him to think, with an atypical hypochondria that was not like him, of rare skin diseases like psoriasis, leprosy, or scabies. Across from him was an advertisement for Dr. Jonathan Zizmor, “New York’s dermatologist” or “Doctor Z.,” as it referred to him. It featured the usual “Before” and “After” photographs, the first of tormented faces looking mournfully at the camera, disfigured by their fungal blotches and pussy pimples, the second of their healed doppelgängers, their newborn skin rejuvenated and their eyes shining in newfound vitality. At the bottom were fervent appreciations in large block letters, punctuated with multiple exclamation points. THANK YOU, DOCTOR Z.! THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY FACE!! THANK YOU FOR CHANGING MY LIFE!!!

  A bird writhed in the priest’s hand. A shining thread of scarlet blood dripped into a clay bowl, forming delicate red cloudlets in the living waters. Andrew shut his eyes hard and then opened them wide, blinking in the neon light of the subway car while groping blindly in his briefcase for the binding of a book. He felt the need not only to read but, even more urgently, to take refuge in the printed page from the brutally invasive images assailing his consciousness. Damn! Where had he put it? He lifted the briefcase and peered inside. The book wasn’t there: he had left it at home, on his desk. Though his disappointment was out of all proportion, like a child’s who has lost a piece of candy, he mastered it at once. One had to forgive oneself one’s little oversights. Fumbling some more in his briefcase, he came up with a sheaf of thin pages. The term paper! He took it out and stared at it, still puzzled by its handwriting, its dense blue letters a maze of hatchings and incisions. Reminded of the vague guilt he had felt when stuffing it into his briefcase as if to make it disappear there, he turned it in his hands, separated its pages, and read a few lines. Why, lurking all along in the back of his consciousness, had it made him feel so uncomfortable? It was simply a crude intellectual provocation—and a childish one, too. He began to reread it, sounding its circuitous sentences to himself as if in the hope of making more sense of them.

  The modern, Western, scientific paradigm (or, more exactly, model) is unique in insisting that the relationship between consciousness and reality is a one-way street. This being the case, is it not our philosophical duty to take time out to reexamine our post-Cartesian arrogance with its patronizing, primitive modernism that heedlessly denies the existence of any dimension of reality not in accordance with our narrow view of the world—a view that is more often ideological than theoretical, not to mention empirical?

  Andrew put down the pages, stroked his forehead, and massaged his smarting eyes at length. The morning had lost all its freshness, yielding to a brackish, stinging fatigue. He stared into the darkness racing past the car’s long window. The rumble of the wheels on the tracks grew louder as the train traveled faster. Turning more pages, his eyes fell on another passage.

  What this amounts to is the claim that all the historians, philosophers, scientists, and other meaning-makers of premodern times were either liars, fools, or hallucinators. The first possibility calls for absurd conspiracy theories and needn’t be taken seriously. Would it not be wildly irresponsible of us to assume that entire cultures, with their educated elites, their merchant classes, their craftsmen, and their rank and file deliberately spent all their time propagating falsehoods?

  The second possibility, according to which our predecessors were superstitious dolts, is the spoken or unspoken starting point of most contemporary investigations of culture and in fact the basis of all modern thought.

  The next sentence was incomprehensible. Andrew briefly struggled to decipher it and skipped to the sentence after it.

  Not only do we have no reason to believe that the academic establishments of civilizations prior to our own were hallucinating, or composed of fools or madmen (just as, returning to Possibility 1, there is no reason to think that they consisted of inveterate liars), such an argument is diametrically opposed to the cultural relativism that is upheld today. There are those who will rush to protest that the experiences and sense impressions of our predecessors (and of other non-Western cultures that still exist) were mediated by the prism of the ingrained cultural attitudes of their time and place. Yet this claim, too, as tempting as it may be, must be rejected. We can hardly believe that entire populations, generation after generation, accepted as true and reliable descriptions and analyses that contradicted their everyday experience, which included sensory data and not just ideas and concepts. We are thus called upon to take seriously the possibility, even if it does not accord with our own scientific views and prejudices, that the scholars, historians, clergy, etc., of the past were neither liars nor fools, and that the populations that accepted their views of the world were far from being the blindly believing dupes that we find it convenient to picture them as. We must honestly confront the possibility that events and phenomena that strike us as supernatural and therefore impossible actually occurred in the world and not just in the confused minds of those who lived before us, and that the descriptions of them that have come down to us are as accurate and trustworthy as those that will come down to our successors from us.

  It was totally preposterous. Andrew found himself seething at this brash, nameless young man who had the impudence to make demands on his valuable time with such gobbledygook. America had fallen on intellectually hard times. The smug, pompous language, the baseless assumptions, the sweeping, wild-eyed generalizations! And all this apart from the flagrant violations of academic style: where were the footnotes, the bibliography, the political and historical context? Who on earth still handed in handwritten papers?

  The rash on his cheek was aflame. His face burned like a brush-fire. He should throw the essay in the nearest trash bin. Instead, however, he turned a few more pages, smoothing them out as though he had already crumpled them with an eye to discarding them, and went on reading.

  If we challenge (as we are doing) the arbitrary post-Cartesian distinction between subject and object, the thinker and the thought, we must seriously face up to the possibility that consciousness and the world are parts of a single system, ruled by the same laws, of which our limited minds perceive only a part. The world and the laws of nature do not just construct consciousness; consciousness constructs them, too. Wherever consciousness allows miracles to happen, they will happen—happen in reality and not simply in credulous minds—exactly as they were described on the basis of personal experience or firsthand knowledge by the serious, trained historians of the period they occurred in! Their actual, ontological existence legitimates their existence in consciousness. The stronger the epistemological status of a given phenomenon, the greater the belief in it becomes and the more basis it has in reality. And vice versa: the more a belief’s epistemological status weakens, the weaker is its ontological status, until it vanishes completely or lingers on as the ghost of itself. The reason it is possible today to accurately foresee natural phenomena like hurricanes and earthquakes is not just, as is generally thought, our improved predictive technology. It is also the fact that the more faith we have in this technology, the more pronounced are the laws of nature it relies on. Natural forces were wilder in times and places when they were thought to be arbitrary and unpredictable, agents of God’s will and wrath; it is our belief that nature has clear, rational, quantifiable laws on which predictions can be based that creates a reality in which nature behaves according to such laws. Although the consciousness of plants and animals is also a determinant of the real world, human consciousness, being consciousness’s strongest and most concentrated manifestation, affects the world, nature, and the laws of nature more. There is, of course, a “snowball effect” here, too: the stronger grow the laws of nature, the more convinced human consciousness is of their existence; the more convinced it is, the stronger they grow. This also holds true for miracles: they occurred as long as human beings believed in them. No less than rain and snow, day and night, they were natural, not psychological phenomena. The earth began to orbit the sun only w
hen it was collectively thought to do so; before the Copernican revolution, it was indeed a stationary mass. The Nile really turned to blood at the time of the Ten Plagues and the Red Sea really split in two. (No, it was not the result of an earthquake or of mass autosuggestion!) Houses in England are actually haunted by the ghosts of those who died unnatural deaths in them, and these will continue to return to the scene of the crime as long as they are believed in. The Brahmins of India remember their previous incarnations as clearly as we remember our own childhood because they really lived them . . .

  It’s actually interesting, Andrew thought, feeling calmer. Infantile, intellectually irresponsible, and of no relevance to anything—but still interesting. What should he do with it, though? Give it an F? Ask whoever wrote it to come see him? There was no way of grading such a work. He had a sudden urge to meet its anonymous author, even though this would surely be as pointless as was such a textual escapade itself, which he had let himself be caught up in. It had been happening to him too much lately. He was feeling too vulnerable. Something in him had let down its guard. He reassembled the pages, clipped his note to them again, and returned them to his briefcase. Would the student, he wondered, get in touch with him? But even if he would agree to rewrite the paper, how, in all seriousness, could this be done?

  The train pulled into Andrew’s station. He had better do something about his rash. How could he walk around with something like that on his face? He needed to see a pharmacist or a doctor.

  11

  April 27, 2001

  The 4th of Iyar, 5761

  Four p.m. Andrew hesitated slightly before opening the door to his apartment and paused for a second in the doorway as if irrationally afraid of what he might see. The apartment was bathed in an afternoon light that colored it a fruity orange. Spring had arrived; the days were getting longer. All was spick-and-span. Nothing was left of last night’s horrendous drama.