Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  Life was often torture for those who, like Victor, lived by words. He was addicted to them. There must already be a medical appellation for this condition, he thought, in our age so anxious to establish that everyone is, in one way or another, sick in the head; he’d have to check.

  Perhaps the worst aspect of the addiction was a compulsion to read absolutely everything. The back of his breakfast cereal packets, the warning notices in aspirin boxes (which he found quite chilling), the promotional offers in supermarkets, the menu card of every restaurant he encountered on his walks, the words on T-shirts worn by people in the street (he would even turn to check their backs), the stupid ‘ticker’ information on TV news channels which prevented one concentrating on the programs—virtually any and every word and text that passed in front of his eyes, in fact.

  He was particularly mortified by his inability to ignore the advertising hoardings that polluted the town’s thoroughfares. Nothing was too crass or too stupid for him to overlook, to disregard. He read and absorbed it all, he simply couldn’t help himself. His only vengeance, minor in its impact on the advertisers but good for his soul, was to consciously avoid buying any product whatsoever for which he could recall having seen an advertisement. This was not so easy as it might seem. The hand reached automatically for the toothpaste on the shelf that had promoted itself most and longest and insinuated thus its name deepest in your brain. When any idiot knew that one paste was much like another and that none could stop your teeth from rotting at the speed they chose. And often, of course, he instantly recognized the names of all the options available for one product or another. In these cases, he had tried changing shops, or simply doing without the goods, but he was forced from time to time to buy an advertised product anyhow and to mutter defiantly in front of the shelf: “You’re not fooling me! I know what I’m doing.”

  As Victor walked to the fruit and vegetable shop, in search of some tasty supplements for Yorick’s diet, which out of laziness he had already allowed to become dominated by food pellets, he looked anew at the billboards and, to cheer himself up, secretly raised an invisible glass to the Chinese Communist Party. These mediocre, corrupt and lying bastards (having met several members of the Politburo in his working life, he would tolerate no contradiction in his judgment of these characters) had recently come up with a most genial scheme, which raised extraordinary metaphysical questions almost certainly beyond their suspicion. They had decided, in order to “resolve evolving social conflicts,” to ban a selection of words from the advertising hoardings contaminating the streets of Beijing and Chongqing. ‘Luxury’, ‘supreme’, ‘royal’, ‘high class’, ‘best’, ‘unique’—these had all come in for the chop as words that were likely to create a politically ‘unhealthy’ climate!

  Priceless, thought Victor. Try and kill desire, envy and unrest in the bud by eliminating the words that might stimulate them or confirm the existence of their objects. He wondered how long these mandarins could keep up the masquerade, could continue their contortions, to reconcile capitalism, one-party rule and its obligatory control over ideas and the words that expressed them. It will all explode one day, he said to himself confidently. Then, of course, advertising would completely take over again, in the same way it relentlessly drove market democracies; but the price was worth paying in this case. He recalled one of the first post-communist advertising slogans that, according to a Hungarian friend, had appeared on the streets of Budapest to boost commerce in the new free market: “Buy Your Shoes In the Shoe Shop!” They had had a good laugh about that.

  Yes, words were both the agony and the ecstasy of Victor’s existence. A long time ago, he had actually had a war of sorts with them. He wasn’t certain how and why it had happened (though he had three dozen different potential explanations, as for most other matters concerning himself), but at some moment in early manhood all the words at that time in his possession had decided to stage a revolt. They had made it clear to the young Victor that they would henceforth refuse to be abused, misapplied, misunderstood or, above all, misused to represent ideas which were most clearly deceitful or frankly mendacious.

  Victor had been a happy, insouciant child who had trusted without thought his parents, his teachers, his friends, any and everyone, in fact, with whom he had any contact. If he had ever been asked about it, which was not the case, he would most certainly have said that the world was an amiable place which wished him no harm and that he was happy in it. Since he was gay, garrulous, witty and generous, this world, his little world, liked him in turn and allowed him to live out his childhood without unreasonable opposition or violence. It amazed him now, in view of subsequent developments, that in all those young years he had displayed no signs of introspection. It was not encouraged, either. His countrymen were not intellectuals and actually appeared to have a genetic contempt for anything philosophical. Thinking too profoundly or at length about any aspect of life or themselves was rather bad taste and led to pretentiousness and the belief that one was superior, which was socially unacceptable. Sadly, it was often equated with masturbation.

  The completely unsolicited revolt of the words in Victor’s mind thus came as a real surprise to him and, he often thought, seriously complicated his life for the next thirty years. It didn’t happen overnight, of course. It began, in late adolescence, with grumbling in the ranks, the gradual insinuation of doubt as he expressed this or that opinion to his classmates, then work colleagues and friends. He had always loved arguments, the clash of opposing views, but had equally always insisted that he was right. One can be right in many things but not in all, he discovered later in life. He hadn’t known this at that time. Vociferous but good-humored, Victor would berate his ‘opponents’ with the mass of words, prejudices, half-cock ideas and random information which he had unquestioningly absorbed and, indeed, taken as his own in his formative years. He nearly always ‘won’ his arguments, but not in any objective sense, not on the basis of truth, reality and justice; simply because he met no one who cared enough or who had the stamina to fight it out with him. They all capitulated in the face of his passion to be right and moved on with their lives. These victories had become less and less satisfying because Victor little by little heard a voice in his head which told him not to kid himself, that there was no merit or glory winning this way.

  There was worse to come. The voice also began to mention, almost in passing at first, then more insistently, that if he wished to be a trifle more honest with himself, he would admit that nearly all of his opinions were groundless, that most of his ‘facts’ were frankly invented, that almost all of his convictions were only other people’s prejudices to which he hadn’t given a moment’s thought, and that he had even stooped to the manipulation of his own sentiments by qualifying them by quite inappropriate words.

  The accumulated result of these revelations, which Victor had initially tried with complete failure to ignore, was dramatic. He became rapidly ignominious to himself. He could hardly bear the sound of his own voice and soon fled discussions about any serious matter. No one at all had noticed any of this, partly because he took pains to keep it a secret and, more importantly, because no one was in the slightest bit interested. No man is an island, wrote the poet. Wishful thinking, in Victor’s view. Misleading and dangerous. We are all islands, stuck in a sea of indifference, unrelated and condemned to solitude. Once we have grasped that, he suspected, we can begin to live more or less freely and to really enjoy ourselves. Perhaps it was the starting point of his recovery. (There might be something in this to teach Yorick; he would come back to it.)

  Wandering the highways and byways of his town, Victor thought incessantly about such questions. He had come to the provisional conclusion that if people didn’t know each other and suffered little or no grief from this ignorance, it was because they made little or no effort even to understand themselves. What could you gain from it, after all? If nothing or no one compelled you to interrogate and investigate yourself, to call yourself to accoun
t, why give it a second’s thought? As for other people, if they behaved decently and minded their own business …

  Only the occasional case of outrageous crime led briefly to a public examination of these matters, as had indeed happened recently in a nearby town. Mr X had killed his three children and his wife, apparently without passion; premeditated and in cold blood. And had then put a bullet through his own head. Mr X worked at the local bank, appeared to be a loving husband and father, was pleasant and cheerful in the office and when encountered on the street. The neighbors, interviewed by the newspapers, couldn’t even begin to understand it; they were stunned, gobsmacked. Mr X’s mother said it was impossible, that it couldn’t be him, despite all the evidence, such a nice boy. The psychiatrists, psychologists and psychoanalysts were dragged out of their clinics to formulate hypotheses, rather vague for the most part and, in any case, largely contradictory.

  Victor had met so many happy and accomplished people who were bereft of any insight into themselves or others that he had often thought that this blindness might even be desirable. At other times, he became convinced that a high degree of, and perhaps even absolute, self-consciousness was a necessary and unstoppable development in the human species, another evolutionary threshold. That there was actually no return from this path, even though, in the case of both peoples and individuals, the human clock had been broken, smashed, and evolution thrown completely out of control, moving at a thousand different speeds and thus impossible to measure. Only one thing was sure: the tracks which led back to the caves had now been completely covered over and forever lost.

  Why me though? Victor repeatedly asked himself. What is it that compels me to take myself to pieces, word by word, thought by thought, emotion by emotion, belief by belief? I’m not especially intelligent; my education was poor; I have never been intellectually challenged by anyone I knew personally; there have been no shattering events, no great revelations in my life; nothing really ever happened to me, actually. Except this.

  He suspected that the woman who paced up and down outside his house had lived something similar and that she had not been able to take the strain, had snapped; that at some moment she had abandoned for ever the narrative which unites each one of us with his or her self, the personal story which holds us together and enables us to get out of bed each morning and face other people and the world. One day, one day, he would pluck up the courage to talk to her. Victor thought that he had resisted, had survived; that his tale might signify nothing, of course, and that it would forever remain unfinished and finally inexplicable, but that he could go on living with and by it and, indeed, be happy. Which, whatever anyone said, he thought the only real measure of the success of a life.

  The Crazy Monk

  He had now had Yorick for a week and decided it was time to give him the first speaking lesson. The bird seemed to be in good dispositions; he was eating normally; he seemed relaxed in Victor’s presence; he chirped when Victor spoke to him. According to experts, the ideal length of training sessions was fifteen minutes. Birds were unable to concentrate for longer than that. Victor also suspected that repeating the same words more than two or three hundred times in succession might eventually challenge his own mental health, so he was happy to accept this time limit.

  Parrots learn to speak at varying speeds, according to their age and individual personalities. The bird shop proprietor had said that Yorick was seven months old (he could live fifty or more years) and that this was an ideal age to start talking. It was recommended to begin with single words and to build on each acquired word to form phrases. In time, parrots could apparently choose to make their own word combinations, though Victor doubted and slightly feared this prospect.

  Victor had read that one should ideally hold one’s bird gently in the hand and close to one’s mouth while giving lessons. He certainly didn’t have the courage for such an approach yet; holding a bird in such a way, with confidence that it wouldn’t bite your nose, was a whole other training program, which he had decided to leave well alone for the time being. Let’s first see what’s possible separated by bars, he thought, even though it’s a bit like meeting in a prison visiting room.

  Like some crazy monk who has lost his mind from solitude, Victor repeated, over and over and over again, in a deliberately monotonous tone, with occasional pauses, “God, God, God, God,” all the while keeping an eye on his watch. They were practically nose to beak; Yorick was clearly paying careful attention, chirping at all the fun and moving his head up and down and from side to side. At one moment, he slipped in a couple of “Bollocks,” just to engage conversation, but sensing that Victor was not impressed and didn’t echo the word, he fell silent again.

  This first training session bore no results at all, but Victor had been led to expect this and didn’t hold it against Yorick. At least the bird had shown interest; they would resume later or the next day. In the meantime, he had a lunch date at the café in the park.

  Cruel Tricks of Nature

  “Bulgarian,” said Victor.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That girl walking over there.” He pointed at a robust woman striding through the park in front of them, who was wearing white plastic boots—in mid-summer—a sky blue velvet zipped jacket and a skirt covered with bright flower patterns.

  “Do you know her?” asked Helen.

  “No, not at all. What else could she be, though? Romanian? Perhaps, at a push”.

  “Rubbish,” said Helen. She knew well, thought Victor, that this woman indeed must be East European, a communist fashion victim even twenty years after the fall of the Soviet empire, but she didn’t want to admit it and appeared ready for a discussion, for once.

  “You’re so full of stereotypes and easy judgments!”

  “Why don’t I go and ask her?”

  “Don’t be so stupid. You can’t go around accosting women and asking, ‘Are you Bulgarian?’ You’ll get yourself locked up, deservedly in my view.”

  They had, in fact, once before put Victor’s observational powers to test—he had claimed to recognize two Brazilian men by the unique, masculine yet tender way that they touched each other’s arms as they spoke—and he had been right.

  In the same way, he swore that he could recognize absolutely any English person at two hundred yards by the hopeless, ungainly way that he or she walked. Nietzsche (“Not him again!” Helen had protested) had written one hundred and thirty years ago, and it could have been yesterday, that it sufficed to see the English walk to know that they had no desire or feeling either in their bodies or souls for music, for rhythm and dance; it had struck Victor as an astonishingly truthful insight. Any English person should be embarrassed to be found walking alongside an Italian, he thought.

  “Do you think that there’s a science which studies walking styles and psychology?” Victor asked Helen idly.

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “I’ll have to check. If not, it should be invented. It could be a mine of information. A woman following me through one of those endless airport corridors once tapped me on the shoulder as we arrived in front of customs and said to me: ‘You walk so tenderly.’”

  “Trying to pick you up, I suppose. Or frankly nuts.”

  “No, no, it wasn’t either. She was perfectly normal, just smiled and was gone. I’ll never forget it, never.”

  “Did wonders for your ego, I guess,” said Helen.

  “No, it wasn’t that—or maybe it was; she was pretty, it’s true. But I principally remember it because, as I hope you admit, I am indeed a tender man, and I was surprised that the way I moved actually reflected this. It started my whole career as an ardent student of the way people walk.”

  “You’d use any excuse to goggle at the women in the park.”

  Victor laughed. “So, you’ve rumbled me! You’re a clever woman.” He put his arm around her and squeezed her against him. He felt her breasts against his chest through her flimsy blouse and, almost in the same instant, a hardeni
ng in his crotch. “Down boy,” he advised his penis, the sole part of his body which had an entirely independent life, completely beyond his control. It refused, as usual, to obey him.

  “Have you ever had your handwriting analyzed?” asked Victor, hoping very much that Helen would agree to go on discussing these subjects which interested him so much. Or if not exactly discussing, since she was a woman of few words, at least listening to him.

  “No, a lot of nonsense!”

  “You’d be surprised, really very surprised. You know me, scepticism incarnate; I used to assume that graphology was like astrology and other vaguely occult practices, fit only for old women and the weak-minded. And then I was once at a dinner party where it emerged that one of the guests was a professional graphologist. We were nine or ten, nobody knew more than one other person; the graphologist knew only the host. We urged her to show her talents and she reluctantly agreed. Each of us signed our names on a piece of paper—just that, a signature, virtually unreadable to anyone other than the person himself. The papers were jumbled around and given to her. She took them, one by one—remember, she knew no one except our host—and gave a short analysis of what she saw as their personalities.

  “I happened to be sitting next to the great bore of the evening—there’s always at least one. He wasn’t a silent bore, one of those who know they will never say anything interesting and can’t do anything about it and thus keep their mouth shut. He was a noisy, voluble bore who had an opinion on everything and had persuaded himself that the rest of the world lived in expectation of hearing it.

  “The graphologist was, I understood in retrospect, a very kind and precautious girl. She studied each piece of paper, for no more than a minute or so, then rapidly held it out, turned towards all of us, but only briefly enough for the guest whose signature was on it to know that it was he or she in question. I had actually sneaked a look at my neighbor’s paper as he was writing. In truth, he made no effort to hide it; I imagine he thought his signature contained signs of his extraordinary personality and treasures of genius and wisdom. It was, I must say, virtually a work of art. Mountain peaks, arabesques, fireworks. I wondered if he could ever produce the same signature twice …