Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  They began by having lunch together. Victor cleared out the meal he had offered Yorick the previous evening (looking for traces, which he couldn’t find, that the bird had eaten something) and replaced it with a new plate of pellets and fruit. He also refilled the water container, which he was relieved to see had clearly been used. Yorick surveyed these operations from the middle of the three perches in the cage. It doesn’t look frightened thought Victor, only attentive, watchful. He made himself a sandwich and sat down at the dining table, quite close to the cage.

  I guess he should get used to my voice first, Victor said to himself.

  “Yes, Yorick, I have to talk to you a lot these first few days. Not lessons, those are still premature. Though nothing precludes me from giving you a few ideas of what I want you to learn. For the moment, I’m just mulling over options. In the meantime, I’ve spent the whole morning gathering information about how to make you a happy little parrot!” The bird was this time actually looking him in the eyes and seemed to be listening.

  “How about an old joke?—Two behavioral scientists meet each other in the street: ‘You’re fine’, one says to the other, ‘How am I?’ Haha!” To Victor’s joy, Yorick distinctly chirped. “Plenty more where that came from!” he told the bird.

  He would tell Helen about Yorick that evening. He wondered how she would react. Women were as unpredictable as Belgians. (Except on the road, he remarked. Whereas Belgians were cranky, insanely illogical, behind a steering wheel as elsewhere, women on the whole drove very rationally, even if this was contrary to common belief and prejudice). To the constant disapproval of his more fair-minded friends, Victor absolutely loved generalizations and stereotypes and found in them many truths, but he still wrestled with the woman question and was unwilling to cede to easy collective observations. Penetrating a woman’s soul was probably impossible, anyhow, even if we are condemned, he thought, to go on trying. Even that old bastard Freud, who was never short of a dubious theory, had given up, admitting rather pompously: “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’” A fair question, Sigmund, Victor had thought on reading this. It nevertheless continued to occupy fully half of his thinking life. For the moment—everything could always change—he had decided to suspend judgment, to admire, to listen, to wonder and to love when he could, which was not as often as he wanted. And essentially to leave it to women to decide if they needed him, and for what.

  The Compassionate Waiter

  “God is dead.”

  “I think I’ll take the mushroom risotto,” said the woman.

  He tried again: “God is dead.”

  “And you? I bet you’ll go for the lobster salad”.

  “Are you listening to me?” Victor asked.

  “Contrary to what they say about women being able to do several things at the same time, I can’t simultaneously listen to you and choose what I want to eat. What did you say, darling?”

  Darling? It was the first time she had called him that. The first time, in fact, she had used any term of endearment. Did it mean anything? Probably not. Just an upper class affectation; she might distractedly have addressed her dog in the same fashion. And who cares, anyhow? he said to himself. He didn’t even know whether he wanted or intended to go on seeing her after that evening. As some notorious wit or other had once said: “It’s not polite to sleep with anyone less than three times”—and he had already conformed to this moral etiquette.

  “I said ‘God is Dead’. That’s where I think I should start with Yorick. What do you think?”

  After a life of failed relationships with women (in the sense that he had never been entirely happy with any of them and, despite himself, had suffered from this) he had still not decided whether it was either possible or necessary to achieve a high degree of understanding with them. He didn’t care in the slightest about agreement; that was of no importance at all. Not to be understood, however, whatever he tried to tell himself, was an extremely painful torture which systematically drove him away from them. The worst, as he struggled to make an argument or to express his opinions with greater clarity, was when they said, even with the sweetest of smiles: “Oh, it doesn’t matter. Let’s drop the subject.” Murder was never far from his mind when he heard that, as he had more often than he could bear to remember.

  “That’s not very original,” said the woman. “We all know that.”

  “In the Nietzschean sense?”

  “Yes, of course, you’re not the only person who’s read Nietzsche, you know.”

  He involuntarily put his hand to his chest, as though she had bent across the table and stuck a dagger in him. One or two more remarks like that and yes, indeed, she was finished as far as he was concerned. Helen is dead, he said to himself. Sounded good.

  “Perhaps not original, I accord you. But I’m not trying to be original. I’m trying to be essential.”

  The waiter interrupted the exchange to ask for their orders. “Mushroom risotto for me please,” said Helen. “God is dead,” said Victor, looking defiantly at the waiter to see whether he was actually a human being or an order-taking robot. “I’m sure he is, Sir,” replied the waiter with a hint of compassion.

  Victor had trouble dropping the subject. “Have you noticed how the devil has fallen completely out of fashion, has gone on permanent vacation?” he asked Helen. “In the good old days, as we praised God for our greatest achievements and for bestowing success and joy, we also blamed old Lucifer for our crimes and misdemeanors. Now, in our eternal masochism, God continues to get the credit for the sublime and good, and we take on ourselves the whole blame for the evil and bad. All these Latin American footballers, for example, crossing themselves and pointing at the sky when they score—perhaps the church should strike a deal with them for payment, according to results … Have you ever heard one exclaim, after a truly lousy match and missed opportunities, ‘It was the devil’s work! He made me shoot wide!’?

  “A propos God and football,” he continued, “there’s a lurid poster outside the Pentecostal church just round the corner from my house which proclaims ‘Jesus Saves’. I noticed on my way here that one of our local wits has scrawled underneath: ‘And Rooney scores from the rebound!’”

  He was disappointed to find that Helen thought him not original but completely mad to have bought a bird. “Why on earth did you do that?” she asked with unfeigned incredulity as they had sipped a pre-dinner drink in the restaurant bar. Though they hadn’t known each other for more than a few weeks, he was sure that she had pretty much summed him up: a bit of a wind-bag (but then weren’t most men?), it was clear; but reliable, courteous, generous, reasonably bright (though rather pedantic), a good, attentive lover, predictable. He could live with this portrait of himself. These were fair judgments. Except, perhaps, predictable? Apparently not so! To buy a parrot, to decide on an impulse, just as you were ambling without purpose down the street! Helen visibly couldn’t resolve whether this made Victor more interesting or rather pathetic. He saw her searching her mind for any useful preconception she might harbor about people who owned parrots but none at all appeared to come to her. The only prejudice she could turn up was, “Isn’t that awfully working class?”—before conceding, faced with his injured silence, that this “might be rubbish.”

  The evening was not a success. Victor was so full of his parrot and speculation about what he should teach it that Helen soon looked bored and, worse, neglected. The closeness that they might otherwise have sought, with tender gestures and words, as a necessary prelude to sleeping together again, was far from Victor’s mind, as he rambled on about the challenge of identifying the essential truths in life to share with his bird. Though he saw her displeasure, he couldn’t help his gushing enthusiasm, nor was he inclined to stem it. And he was not surprised when he thought, without certainty, that he heard her say softly: “You can go and fuck your parr
ot, as far as I’m concerned.” Her decision, taken even before the main course had been consumed, did, though, come as a surprise to Victor when she changed his order for a taxi into two taxis. Oh well, he consoled himself, her presence might in any case be too much for Yorick for the moment; I’m sure he’s quite fragile.

  A Conga in the Dining Room

  Victor stood at the window and looked down at the street. She was there again. He tried not to watch but as usual felt compelled to do so. She strode slowly but with seeming confidence nine or ten paces from his right to the left then halted, ran her hand through her hair, turned and walked nine or ten paces in the direction from which she had come. Then, as though she had suddenly forgotten something she again stopped, again turned, and retraced her steps, coming to a new pause at about the same point as before. Whereupon with the same gesture of her hand in her hair, perhaps accompanied this time with a tap on her forehead with the palm (as though she had become aware that he was observing her and felt that she had to justify herself), she set off once again from left to right.

  After watching this pantomime for two or three minutes, Victor turned away with difficulty from the scene. “There but for the grace of God …,” he muttered to the curtains, before walking from the bedroom to the dining room, picking up a chair from the table and setting it and himself down in front of the cage.

  “‘God is dead!’—That’s a good place to begin, isn’t it Yorick? Whatever Helen thinks. The time we shall gain if we strangle the religious red herring and then set off to the heights beyond! I fear that neither you nor I will live long enough to finish the task otherwise. You think it’s too banal, ‘old hat’ even, like her? You’re mistaken, my friend. You wouldn’t credit it, but there are otherwise sane, cultured and intelligent men and women—I have met many of them, lovely people—who haven’t grasped or won’t accept this yet or, worse, have their suspicions but prefer the lazy comfort of suspending judgment in the matter.”

  No, nothing else will be possible, thought Victor, without definitively dismissing the God question and consigning it to the past; this, the most absurd and outrageous, though rather beautiful, lie not only of our times but of the brief history of men.

  He turned again to Yorick, who seemed to be attentive to his speech.

  “I’m not talking about the dévots, of course, a dwindling number it’s true, who spend their Sunday mornings getting knee-cramp in chilly churches, but about the great mass of men who will confess—after a bit of malicious poking, which I have come to enjoy—that they do not of course believe in ‘God’ as such, ‘Ho-ho-ho, I’m no fool I’, but in something ‘bigger, higher, than man’, which remains inexplicable. And then rapidly seek to change the subject.

  “And contrary to what you might assume, Yorick, it is they and not I who lack modesty, humility. You laugh! Or would if you could. You ask why? Legitimate question. I’ll tell you: because, paradoxically, they have the presumption to think that man is the only measure of reality and the nameable and that when he cannot grasp or explain a phenomenon—particularly his own states of mind, his moments of ‘spirituality’, his too-rare ecstasy—it is necessarily because there are supra-human ‘things’ and ‘powers’ afoot, lurking around unnamed and pouncing on our hearts and brains from time to time. When the logical and most obvious explanation lies, of course, in our excruciatingly limited intellect, our own feeble powers of insight and analysis and lack of words! No, this absurd hubris really won’t do any longer.

  “I, on the other hand, see this clearly and humbly for what it is: an incomprehensible refusal, a dreadful failure to accept ourselves as the unique source and home of these mysteries, these moments of joy or dread or ineffable elevation.”

  “Yes! Yes! God is Dead!” Victor rose from his chair and began a solitary conga around the room, clutching an imaginary partner in front of him. “Bang-the-drums,” tap, “God-is-Dead,” tap, “Sound-the-trumpets,” tap, “God-is-Dead,” tap, thrusting first his left and then his right foot to the side, as though aiming a kick at an idol. “God-is-Dead! God-is-Dead! God-is-Dead …,” he chanted and laughed, before falling in a heap on the settee.

  After a moment regaining his breath, he turned back to the cage. “And do you know what we must do, Yorick, when we have finally buried his cadaver and destroyed his places of adoration? We shall have to create temples to man. Where we can all go and worship ourselves, or at least those of us who deserve our respect, however few they may be. For I don’t believe that man is capable yet of living without genuflection to something or somebody or other. I shall even put in a good word for you when the first temple is erected, as the official Temple Bird. You will greet all comers with our first words, Yorick, and remember fondly our first lesson, ‘God is Dead!’”

  Victor felt liberated and exhilarated by his words and, since Yorick did not protest or turn away, he went on:

  “For the next ten thousand years, give or take a century or two, you and your successors—for we shall have no priests there to proffer their joyless inanities—will have to continue with this incantation. It will take at least that time for man to fully accept that he is incontrovertibly and eternally alone and that his greatness is within him and not in some ethereal sphere. And do you know how we shall furnish our temples? With the creations of the greatest among us: Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare, Nietszche—bless him, the finest of us all—Dostoevsky, Van Gogh and so many, many others like they, who have raised us to such dizzying heights, heights to which we must all aspire, however lamentably we shall fail to join them there!

  “I’m not talking about those deadly museums which celebrate the past, Yorick,” he continued, “with stones and metal and wood and canvasses and parchment gathering dust. I’m talking about great and profound and living words and images, ideas that will shake and challenge us, exquisite music, astonishing paintings, all designed to rattle our cages, Yorick, because I will have you believe, which I grant may be difficult from your perspective in there behind bars, that we too live in cages, quite often, though not always, cages of our own making.

  “Yorick, I want you to listen to something,” said Victor, getting up once more and going over to his hi-fi system, where he instantly found what he was looking for. As the first notes of the cello glided into the room, Victor instinctively reached for the nearest wall for support lest he tumble, physically overwhelmed by an indescribable sensation of plenitude which cascaded through his chest, his loins, his limbs.

  “Johann Sebastian Bach, Yorick. The prelude to his first cello suite. Yes, yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking: Bach wrote to the glory of God and found his expression in devotion to religious themes. And so what? Do you imagine that in the absence of the God fiction, which dominated his epoch, he should have written any less? That his passion, his very human passion, and his genius would have remained silent, locked up in his heart, and that he would rather have gone trout fishing?

  “Yorick, when you hear Bach I don’t want you to think of the celestial, of heaven, of something ‘beyond’ man, ‘above’ and out of him, but of the absolutely finest expression of the great within us, our joy, our profound sense of beauty, our melancholy, our longing for love, for peace and the resolution of our conflicts. The religious sentiment, so often and cruelly betrayed by those even who profess and defend it, is in fact our human capacity for beauty, for love, for compassion. Did these come from the story of Christ, of God? No, the story of Christ and God came from them. No fascist could have invented God. Though many of them have been ingenious at using him in their service.”

  “Well, that was quite a speech, wasn’t it, Yorick?” said Victor playfully. “I didn’t even know I had it in me! But, by the way, the Bach has to be played by Yo-Yo Ma! The most sublime of all versions. The great Rostropovich played this as though he had a train to catch—far too fast!”

  “I think you deserve a good break from me now,” Victor concluded. “That was a lot to absorb, I know. In a couple of days, we’ll actually have to
begin to teach you to talk!”

  Korean Devils

  There was one pleasure in Victor’s life that never failed him, never fell short of his hopes and expectations. Each and every morning he went to his local café, got seriously charged up on espresso coffee and read two or three of the daily newspapers. He kept up to date on the great questions of the moment of course and watched the world move from one catastrophe to the next, but what he was really looking for was one of those gemstones of information which gives spice to an ordinary, dull existence such as his. This morning he was lucky.

  South Korean researchers had discovered that there was a perfect mathematical correlation between the difference in length of a man’s index and ring fingers and the size of his penis. These Korean devils! What had put them on to it, he wondered? He placed the newspaper to one side, laid his hands on the table and examined them. There was a pretty respectable size difference, he thought, though when he tried unsuccessfully to increase it, his hands hurt. Foolishly, the newspaper had failed to publish the mathematical formula from which you could deduce penis length. What had they been thinking about? This story could not fail to interest absolutely every living man and probably an awful lot of women, and they couldn’t even find the space to print this simple data. He looked around the café, fixing his gaze on other hands, but they waved and fidgeted too much for him to judge properly. And he soon realized that he would rather not think about other men’s penises anyhow; that made him feel quite sick, and he pitied women for having to deal with them, though none had asked him for his sympathy. But he would lodge the story, in any case, securely in his memory. He knew that it would be a great hit at the next dinner party he attended. He would first ask the men to hold out their hands … What a giggle! He could hear the women shrieking with laughter already when he revealed his purpose. Boys being boys, it would likely end up, after a few more whiskies, in the toilets for empirical tests, like the pissing contests of his youth. He would definitely pass on that.