Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  “In any case, his was the first to be drawn. I sensed he could hardly contain himself, but still only he and I knew that it was his signature … The ‘judgment’ was of such cruelty that only the anonymity of the exercise could have ever permitted the girl to speak in such terms. I don’t remember it all, but “megalomaniac,” “pompous,” “superiority and inferiority complexes,” “deeply vain,” “shallow” were among the niceties. It was him! He completely betrayed his personality in the scrawl which represented his name.

  “I was really surprised. The description could not have applied, in any way at all, to any other of the guests, let alone the average human being who might be passing on the street. Frankly, I didn’t dare look at my neighbor, and so cannot tell you if he unmasked himself or looked demolished. Though I do remember he was heard a lot less for the rest of the evening.

  “In time, my signature came up—I can’t recall a thing about any other analysis than that concerning my idiot neighbor and myself.”

  “And?” interjected Helen, who was listening with interest to the story.

  “What a shock, what an earthquake. In three or four sentences, the woman split my carapace wide open, took out my heart, brain and soul, examined, described, then analyzed them. To absolute perfection. My deepest thoughts and secrets laid out there on the table. I swear to you, Helen, no other human being, before or after, has ever managed to suspect five percent of what my signature revealed or offered to graphological science. It’s mind-blowing.”

  Helen heard him out and then asked again: “And?”

  “And what?” Victor responded disingenuously.

  “You know—what did she say?”

  Victor adopted a contrite mien. “I’m sorry, my dear, I really don’t want to say, not just yet. We don’t really know each other that well; I’ll get to it in time.”

  Helen was greatly miffed by this secrecy. All that for this!

  “As you like,” she said coldly. “I just hope you’re not a serial killer or a pedophile or God knows what.”

  Victor smiled: “No, nothing even dramatic, let alone evil. Just too close to the bone, too true to share it easily”.

  The conversation stopped there, with a chill in the air between them. Victor was conscious of it and regretted it. It’s so fucking difficult, he said to himself, to achieve closeness with someone. You can’t go around spilling your guts, analyzing yourself to other people. Apart from anything else, they’ll only finish by using it against you in a weak moment or when your relationship runs into problems. Fuck it.

  Though he dismissed the question in this way, it made him unhappy. Like most sensitive men, he dreamt of finding closeness with a woman (and supposed the reverse was true), and it increasingly seemed like he was pursuing a chimera. If I haven’t lived this closeness by now, at fifty, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll never find it, he had finally concluded. It’s just one more of those perversities of the human condition, the same kind that’s at the root of the whole religious nonsense. People imagine that because they desire and need there to be a God, he must—logically—exist. By the same reasoning, Victor had assumed that the longing he felt to be close to a woman was evidence that such closeness must be possible. It had taken a very long time to dawn on him that the concept of logic had been invented by man and that nature didn’t give a hoot about it. We were full of desires which had no chance at all of being assuaged. The challenge was to come to terms with these cruel tricks of nature and not to elude the truth of the matter. No one told me that life would be simple or logical, after all! he said to himself cheerfully. In fact, no one told me a damn thing about life, one way or the other!

  As he walked home from the park, turning these thoughts over in his mind once more, Victor consoled himself with the prospect that he might perhaps develop a close relationship with Yorick. At first, he said it to ridicule himself but then thought: Why not? If a dog can be man’s best friend, why indeed not a parrot?

  Victor wondered what Yorick had made of his earlier bombardment by the ‘God’ word. He would test him as soon as he got back.

  A Stupid Confession

  He found Yorick at play. The bird was clinging to the rope which Victor had hung from the top of the cage and seemed to be swinging on it. Victor watched him quietly from the doorway of the dining room; Yorick hadn’t seen him yet. The bird had invented a little game for itself. When the rope stopped moving, he hopped back on his perch, turned round and then leaped back onto it. He swung back and forth for a few moments, then repeated the routine when it became still again.

  “That looks great fun, Yorick!” Victor exclaimed, coming up close to the cage. The bird didn’t immediately interrupt its prank. That’s good, he’s getting use to me, Victor said to himself.

  “So, God, God, God?” Yorick looked at him but remained silent. “God, God, God, God, God.” The bird said nothing.

  “Oh well, it really would have been too much to ask for your first lesson. Let’s drop it for the moment and talk about something else. I’ll just arm myself with a scotch—is there anything you’d like?”

  Victor checked the water basin and the food containers; they were both sufficiently full. He then went to his study, picked up a bottle of whisky and a tumbler, returned and settled at the dining room table, at a seat next to the cage.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you’re doing here, Yorick. Or rather what I’m doing here with you. The human mind is a strange affair. It’s full of nooks and crannies, of dark hollows and hidden chambers, where some of our deepest thoughts like to hide from us, hoping that they may perhaps be forgotten? The devil knows. In many cases they are not yet really thoughts at all, actually, but seeds of thoughts, waiting to be fertilized by the words which will give them shape and substance and make them grow into ideas. That’s how it seems to me, in any case. The mind as womb! What do you think about that?

  “It’s a nice metaphor, in any case, no? We all give birth, all of us, constantly, to thoughts, in our every living moment: stupid, mediocre, brilliant, beautiful, ugly, perverse, generous, truthful, mendacious, profound, ordinary. Our creativity, potentially, is incredible! The art, of course, is to constantly refine, refresh, educate, inform, evolve, examine, interrogate these thoughts; never to let our guard drop, never to become complacent, never to be afraid to deny them when, one bright morning, in one of those unique moments of light, lucidity and honesty, one suddenly understands that one has been harboring a complete lie, a total falsification, and repeating it endlessly, not only to the others, but to oneself!”

  Victor paused for breath. My God, he thought, it’s good to speak to someone who listens for once. So many parallel monologues in our lives which pass for ‘conversations’! Who gives you time any longer to develop an idea? Three sentences without interruption? A dream! Everyone is supposed to have an opinion about everything, an obligation most readily complied with by those who, precisely, have no opinions of their own at all.

  “Anyhow, Yorick,” he continued, “this is what I wanted to come to: I may have given you the impression that I intended to sacrifice so much time and effort to teaching you to speak principally for your pleasure and gratification. I confess that’s not the whole story and that I have a much more selfish motive: we humans need, constantly, to be reminded of the essential, which we are perfectly capable of identifying but which—infuriatingly—proves so damn difficult to fix, to keep present in our minds as we make our way through this life, face decisions, undertake actions, confront others. We’re all of us always going off on tangents, wasting time and energy over the superfluous. I need you to help me in this. I need you to keep me on the right track, moving always forward, upwards, towards …”

  Victor suddenly found himself on the brink of tears. He turned his head away, so Yorick wouldn’t see his emotion. Bloody fool! he said to himself. Working yourself into such a state with your feeble efforts to poetize the human lot. Get a grip! He discretely wiped away a pearl of water in the c
orner of his eye and turned back to the cage.

  “But let’s get one thing clear, my friend, right now. I’ll not hold my thoughts back from you. We’re in this adventure together, and we owe it to each other to be frank and honest. I’ve spent my whole adult life censoring myself in front of others, afraid of offending them and challenging their comfort and complacency, afraid of making myself disagreeable, when, like everyone, I actually only want to be liked—even loved, probably. For once—with you—I don’t want to do it any longer.”

  “Bollocks,” said Yorick helpfully.

  “Hahaha!” laughed Victor. “Spot on! We’re really going to get on well together, I know it.”

  Om, Om, Om

  But what if I stopped thinking, thought Victor? If I still can, that is. He resolved to try, right there and then. Just for a short moment, an experiment; he didn’t want to cause himself any brain damage, after all. He stared in front of him. The first few words that tried to present themselves in orderly, comprehensible formation were easily repulsed, before he even clearly identified what they were and what they were endeavoring to say to him. He flicked them deftly aside with an imaginary swatter. Take that, you swine! And you too! And you! He sensed that, though driven back on their first assault, they were regrouping somewhere for another try. He felt them coming again and began to hum under his breath. That should deal with them. One cannot hum and think at the same time, after all. At least that is what he discovered. No, it was impossible. How unusual. Perhaps I have stumbled on an extraordinary neurological insight, he thought. He was thinking again but was pleased with both his discovery and the fact that he had indeed succeeded in suspending thought, if only for a minute or so. And then it suddenly dawned on him: that’s why these Hare Krishna fellows are always chanting that senseless mantra. This is behind the Buddhist ‘Om’. Driving out thoughts! No wonder they’re so happy. Clever devils.

  In fact, though he was now probably condemned to it, in truth Victor could never decide whether thinking was a good thing or not. Even if a man had a choice in the matter, which didn’t seem to be his case, short of humming and chanting his way through existence. Did thinking take you forward or backwards? Though thought was the source of nearly all of his woes, he suspected that only more and more reflection could lead him towards greater happiness, only more thought could help him find the path out of the labyrinth. The flaw in the argument, thought Victor, who could never resolve the matter, was to suppose that there was indeed a way out. Perhaps not, after all. Again, this was the real drama of the human condition, analogous to the religious and romantic desires: the assumption that happiness existed, if only we knew where to find it. And solely on the grounds that we wanted it. Victor had once believed, as perhaps his only consolation in the matter, that thinking all the time was a mark of genius, or at least a sure sign of superior intelligence. In time, he had come to the conclusion that it was also common to all truly crazy people, constantly chasing the tail of their own thoughts, and this, indiscriminately, to the genial insane as well as the intellectually impoverished crackpots.

  But when all was said and done, Victor could only agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Life consists in what a man is thinking all day.” Regardless of whether—or perhaps even proving that—he is an idiot or a genius, or, in the vast majority of cases, something between the two. For the moment, he dared hardly judge what his own thoughts amounted to and would say only that his life was becoming richer. He was moving in the right direction.

  As for happiness … Victor had come very late to the conclusion that the pursuit of happiness was, in fact, the only sensible objective for a life, however much one might reasonably doubt its existence. One might assume that any schoolboy would have understood that without any particular effort. But it wasn’t so. Victor had early fallen victim to an ambient prejudice that happiness as an ambition for a life was more or less acceptable for supermarket cashiers but frankly unbecoming and crude for a thinking man. Not that he had often been accused of being happy. The women in his life, for example, had in unison accused him of actively seeking unhappiness by torturing himself about what seemed to them to be gratuitous and quite useless metaphysical questions (while none of them felt contradicted or in the slightest bit challenged when he remarked that if he was happy being deliberately unhappy then he could nevertheless be said to be seeking happiness). Such had been their consistency in this accusation that anyone would have thought they had consorted and then, from one woman to the next, handed on the baton to beat him.

  What was happiness, though? Victor had also wrestled over this question endlessly. It certainly wasn’t anything to do with the state one might procure by having a good time, enjoying oneself. One might feel good, great even, in many of these moments. But there was no sense of exaltation to be had simply in pleasure, as there was in times of true and durable happiness, which appeared to him to reflect an inner concord, harmony, a state essentially beyond thought, which could and did often occur at the most unexpected moments, independently, it appeared, of external factors and events. It was the fruit of an absence—the absence of desire, the absence of conflict, the absence of anxiety or of anguish. Perhaps the Buddhists had something, after all. The pure, undefiled mind. The union of wisdom and emptiness as the essence of the true self and of wellbeing. I’m probably on the right track, thought Victor. If only I could stop thinking more often and at greater length, stop thinking for whole hours, days!

  Perhaps this is worthy of Yorick? “Om, om, om.” The first Buddhist in the history of feathered vertebrates.

  Sex-Starved Flies

  Victor began now to wonder whether he had perhaps been born without an unconscious mind; he had looked for it in vain. And why not, when all was said and done? Some people were born without arms or legs, or with various parts of their brains missing or damaged. Anything was possible. Or perhaps his unconscious had simply been stillborn. Instead of developing and filling up with all sorts of unspoken horrors, it had shriveled up, inert. He conceded that it might perhaps also have existed in his early years and, at first, have become a repository for this or that mystifying impulse or phobia, or briefly become a haven for all sorts of terribly unclean childhood thoughts and God knows what, but even if this were the case, he was now convinced that he had long since cleared it out, cleaned it up, emptied it. He was not, of course, ready to believe for the moment that the unconscious was a hoax, like God and flying saucers, and didn’t actually exist! One would be taken for a complete madman to suggest that, when the entire world was thoroughly convinced of the opposite. No, he was just different, and he was just fine with that. In any case, one thing was sure: he didn’t have an unconscious mind today, or if he had one, it was quite barren. And, in truth, perhaps it had happened during that football match when he was fourteen, when in a death-defying (as he liked to remember it) dive on a center-forward’s boot (he was a goalkeeper) he had been soundly kicked in the head, quite possibly in the region of the unconscious mind.

  He would talk to Helen about it if he found the courage. She was a psychoanalyst, after all, and that was their thing as far as he understood anything about it. It would be sure to bring her out, to defend the cause, if nothing else. Up until now, she had spoken little, if at all, of her calling or indeed much else. She kept a bronze bust of Freud by her bedside, and if their conversation ever moved in this direction, she would simply sigh and look at the old Viennese bastard.

  In any case, what was in the newspaper this morning worthy of his attention? He quickly found two stories of fundamental and unusual interest to him personally and probably to the rest of the human race as well. As usual, the amount of space devoted to them was in inverse proportion to the desire one might have to read them. Two whole pages on the Greek economic crisis! No one could possibly wish to learn so much about the relative importance of maintaining the Euro against a return to the Drachma, even if the future of the civilized world depended on it. But this little story about flies, on the other ha
nd … People who conduct research on flies (“What do I do for a living? Well, I work with flies,” Victor muttered to himself) had discovered that male flies, when deprived of sex (“I prevent them from having sex”), go and get drunk on the alcoholic nectar of certain plants and flowers. Wonderful! The article, being typically only one paragraph long, did not specify whether a parallel might, after further research, be drawn with Homo sapiens, but it was clearly to be expected that this would be the case and would not be difficult to prove, he guessed. If not a justification, at least an explanation for his habit of drinking far too much and too often, thought Victor.

  “Listen to this!”

  Helen had still felt kindly to him in the morning, so instead of lying late in bed idly caressing each other, he had proposed (to his instant regret) that they go to the café together. He had taken the precaution of saying, “We could each read our newspapers,” because that was a pleasure he simply could not do without, and she had replied, without conviction, “Why not?”—which was an expression he disliked.

  So here they found themselves. He was tempted to talk about the flies but knew that Helen also would draw a moral for his personal case, and he didn’t need that. So instead he shared the other story which had tickled him.

  “Neurologists have discovered that talking—or writing—about oneself excites the brain’s mesolimbic system, releasing large quantities of dopamine …”