“You must be swimming in the stuff,” interjected Helen.
“… which procures, of course, an addictive pleasure,” continued Victor, without a hint that her dagger had pierced him. “And do you know an initial conclusion of this discovery? It could be the reason for the obsession with ‘social networks’, where people write endlessly about themselves and their lives.” (He thought, but did not say, that it might also explain the whole psychoanalytical industry.) “Fascinating, no?”
Helen’s response could best be described as a grunt, so he left it at that. He suspected, not for the first time, that she unconsciously (hah! that would be a fine thing) resented the growing encroachment of neuroscientists on the private hunting grounds of psychoanalysis, where they threatened to expose a lot of the shrinks’ hocus-pocus for what it was, as they had indeed already done in the case of autism, for example, after a generation of psychoanalysts had led parents, especially mothers, totally up the garden path with their haphazard theories and guesswork.
Helen soon left to open her clinic. Victor stayed in the café and mulled once more over his love life. What was he looking for, he asked himself for the thousandth time? The word best suited to this holy grail was always the same, invariable: closeness. Even his best love stories fell short of achieving this state, which he had lived only in his imagination and which seemed truly blessed. It was easy to define; less simple was it to understand why it should be so important to him. Why couldn’t he make do with the kind of relationship which was his usual lot and which he thought he saw all around him: agreeable company, mutual affection, tenderness, a few laughs, good sex, all of which in the right combination at the right moments could clearly produce the indefinable sentiment of ‘love’?
Victor wanted more, if only for the very good reason that this did not feel to him to be enough—not as an intellectual question, as a matter of principle, but in his heart, soul or wherever amorous longings lodged, and where an unmistakable hunger gnawed relentlessly. Closeness. In truth, he had perhaps perceived it a handful of times but never with anyone he had known. Once, blocked in a traffic jam at a crossroads, at arm’s length from a car stuck alongside his and going in the opposite direction, his eyes and those of the woman driver had met and held each other for a handful of seconds and provoked an extraordinary explosion of warmth in his spirit and throughout his whole body, right down to his toes. And then she was gone, and he was left weak and shaking. He was sure beyond any doubt that she had shared this terrible moment of intensity with him. It had been fifteen years ago, and he hadn’t forgotten the woman’s face, even though there was absolutely nothing striking or beautiful about it. And, yes, another time: he had gazed into the brown, burning eyes of a black, middle-aged mounted policewoman in front of the Washington Monument and had been so overcome with desire for her that he had stumbled and almost fallen under the hooves of her horse. She had looked at him in amazement and common recognition of this unspeakable intimacy they had shared. Private moments between souls, he supposed, right over the heads of the protagonists.
Anyhow, it’s probably all narcissism, thought Victor, this desire for closeness. We are surely only seeking mirrors for our own souls so we may better admire them. We can call it communion or whatever, but it’s only self-love, and if the Christians and Eric Fromm aren’t against that, I certainly am. And who cares about that, he laughed to himself? Perhaps Yorick, my new confidant? I’d be better off getting back to him than staying here stewing in my regrets. Victor paid the coffees, gathered up the newspapers and left the café, declaiming to himself: “Yorick is life, Yorick is the future, Yorick is a blank sheet of paper on which shall be written the new Holy Scriptures!”
Offending the Believers
Unaware of his vital rôle in man’s search for truth, one man’s at least, Yorick was crunching food pellets. He looked up when Victor came into the room and jauntily cocked his head, which, since parrots couldn’t smile, Victor had already interpreted as a bird’s best effort at a grin.
“Nice to see you too, old boy!”
“God,” said Yorick almost casually, as though unwilling to appear too proud at his grasp of the word. Then twice more, “God, God.”
“That’s brilliant! Well done, Yorick. Good boy!” Victor paused, then added: “No, that’s how one addresses obedient dogs, not parrots. Good chap, perhaps?”
Yorick had switched his attention back to the food pellets, so Victor let the discussion drop. A few household chores, and he would be back, though, to coach Yorick in the rest of this definitive statement. “We can’t have him squawking ‘God’ alone, can we?”
Constantly aware and repeatedly reminding himself that unlearning a phrase was not an option, short, he supposed, of a lobotomy (did veterinarians do those? he’d have to check), he had given a last thought or two to the relative importance of reiterating God’s demise through Yorick. After all, did anyone really take that nonsense seriously any longer? Aside from four fifths of the human race? At least. With most of the remaining twenty percent stumbling and muttering embarrassed inanities about the question when pressed to clarify their position. The statistics, which he had arbitrarily invented to support his argument, did it. No further debate. He certainly didn’t mind offending any Christians or Muslims, or Hindus, come to that, who might be passing through his dining room. He had always thought that they should look incredibly smug and full of pity in the face of blasphemy and the unbelieving, rather than wanting to burn you or lop off your head. Though they did tend to look smug after they had done this, it’s true.
As he made his bed, burying his face deep in the sheets to inhale any lingering scent of last night’s sex, Victor wondered whether he should take “is” and “dead” separately or together. On the one hand, the specialists advised teaching a word at a time, particularly with a novice like Yorick; on the other, one must presumably ensure that the parrot didn’t link up disparate words or switch the order, even before he had mastered the whole idea. He knew already that the most adventurous and lively of these birds deliberately improvised and jumbled their vocabulary for the sheer fun of it. “Dead bollocks,” for example, just wasn’t on.
He decided he would take the most difficult course and teach Yorick his declaration in a single move. To push the brain’s learning capacities to their limits was a sound educational method for humans, though abandoned in the nation by some idiotic postwar government with a hazy grasp of psychology and a desire to avoid suffering, and he couldn’t see why it wouldn’t be so for birds too.
Yorick seemed to positively welcome his return to the salon, wagging his tail, chirping and even flapping his wings a couple of times. I think he’s beginning to enjoy my company, thought Victor; I’ll try and spend even more time around him.
Victor gave his “God is dead” recital over and over again for the regulatory fifteen minutes. Once more, as he had found in the first few days, Yorick was an exemplary, serious student, peering at him attentively through the bars and interrupting him from time to time to say “God,” which he recognized, at which point Victor would take care not to complete it with “is dead,” but to repeat the full three words.
Consciousness and the Kitchen Sink
“I have a theory about human evolution …”
“Go on, Mr. Darwin.”
“But would you first tell me something from your own field of expertise?”
“I’ll give it a try.”
Here we go, thought Victor.
“What do you understand by consciousness?”
“In the philosophical or physiological sense?” asked Helen.
“I don’t know. How about in the sense that an ordinary man like me could understand easily.”
“The problem,” said Helen, “is that there is precisely no generally-agreed definition. Philosophers have wrangled over it for centuries, and now psychologists and neuroscientists are struggling with it. And few of them believe the same thing, in truth.”
“But you, as
a psychoanalyst, make your bread and butter exploring our UN-conscious minds, so you presumably must have your own idea about what constitutes the conscious, no?”
“Are you being aggressive?” asked Helen.
“No, no,” Victor shook his head. “I really do want your opinion, your own understanding on the matter.”
“Well, to keep it simple for you, Mister Ordinary Man, let’s just say then that consciousness is the quality of being aware of oneself and of the external world.”
“Wouldn’t dogs meet that definition, too? Do they have conscious minds? Or African grey parrots, for that matter,” he added as an afterthought.
“We can drop it here, you know,” Helen said sharply.
“No, please,” said Victor a little pathetically. “I’m only trying to grasp this better.”
“Well, why not indeed dogs, parrots, horses, fleas, for all I care? Some animal experts believe it. But we’re talking about humans, so I’ll let my superficial definition stand.”
“Fine. No problem.”
“What’s the point you want to make? You were just about to tell me your theory on human evolution.”
Victor was already losing the desire to share his revelation. Why did she have to turn every serious conversation into some form of duel?
“Well, here it is. You must understand that this insight came to me only recently and that I haven’t had time to think it through completely. And since I’m not an anthropologist and don’t intend to become one, I probably never shall.”
“Go on.”
“All right. I’ve always been struck by the fantastic difference in consciousness—in the layman’s sense as you have kindly defined it for me—between human beings. We are not equal in this matter. I hope that you can agree?”
“Give me an example.”
“Just to avoid any confusion, I’d like to make it clear from the start that what I’m saying is completely independent of the level of intelligence of the people I’m talking about. Take a bore. Think of a very boring person you know, but make sure that he’s an intelligent bore and not simply a fool. And don’t look at me like that!”
Helen laughed. “OK. Go on.”
“Bores can very roughly be divided into two categories. Those who are aware, often painfully so, that they are boring, and those who are absolutely blithely unaware of the fact—think of the fellow at my graphology dinner. At a completely equal level of intelligence, culture, knowledge, whatever, one finds in one individual extreme awareness—a condition of consciousness, as you have defined it—and in another, total blindness, an inaptitude to judge either the interest of what he or she is saying in itself or its effect on the audience. Can you explain that?”
“I’ll think about it. Other examples?”
“I have known intelligent men, I’m sure you have too, of consummate moral mediocrity, mendaciousness, pomposity, arrogance, cowardice, who have lived their whole lives in the sincere certainty that they have served humanity well and have been a true gift to their friends, family and society. They have gone to their graves with regret, certainly—but invariably with smiles on their faces, sure in the knowledge that their personal actions have left the world a better place than they found it. I have known, too, admirable, fine, modest men, noble in their motives—though not especially more honorable than any of us—who have suffered their whole lives from a powerful sense of their own limitations and mediocrity and who have died shaking their heads with bewilderment at the senselessness of their existences and their failure to have had an influence on anything or anybody.
“And all this, in both cases, absolutely independently of the judgment of others; nothing to do with what they are thought to have achieved in the eyes of society. In the first case, perhaps a man draws nothing but contempt and hatred from the others. In the second, perhaps love and admiration. But it makes no difference to either of them, except that—and this is important, key in my view—our man who feels himself mediocre is aware that others respect and admire him, but it changes nothing whatsoever about his judgment on himself. In other words, he is his own judge. And a harsh one.”
Victor paused for a moment, but Helen only sighed, a nasty habit that he didn’t much like. “I can go on.”
“I don’t doubt it!”
“These examples come off the top of my head, but I could find dozens of others. There are fools who know they are fools. There are—this is more frequent—fools who believe that they are clever. There are clever people who are persuaded that they are fools. There are ugly people who find themselves beautiful and fine-looking people who can’t stand the sight of themselves in the mirror. The gradations and options are numerous. But we are absolutely unequal in this matter of consciousness. Why is that? You will tell me that …”
“Don’t tell me what I’d tell you,” Helen interrupted. “Has anyone told you that you’re great at answering your own questions? But if you want to provide both the questions and answers, I could leave you here to have this conversation with yourself.”
“I’m sorry,” said Victor. “You’re right. It’s a bad habit. Please, tell me what you think.”
“I would be inclined to say that each of us is unique and that it’s impossible to find two people as similar as you would have it. But that’s not so important. The explanation lies in the lives they have led, which bring them to where you find them, which shape their personalities and their behavior. Their upbringings, their relationship with their parents and their siblings, their education, the events of their lives, particularly in their formative years, their maturity, their respective natures.”
And the kitchen sink, said Victor to himself.
“How, in any case,” she went on, “do you think that you can judge another person’s level of consciousness from your own, highly subjective, perspective? Do you really think one can truly know anything about another person?”
She had said it. Oh God, Subjectivity! What, in our time, was not explained away by that notion! If you didn’t agree with someone—‘subjectivity’! No right or wrong, the devil with reason and truth! Victor held his tongue.
“So, you don’t think I’ve got a point? Is that it?” said Victor.
“What did you want to prove, anyhow?” she asked. “If I were prepared, for hypothetical reasons, to concur that we all have different levels of consciousness?”
Victor simply didn’t dare tell her his evolving theories about the demise of the unconscious mind; about the possibility of absolute consciousness and of objectivity. If she refused to accept even the blindingly obvious fact of the radical division in man between those who possessed consciousness and those who did not, he couldn’t possibly take her through the other steps in his argument.
“It will make you laugh,” said Victor, deciding that he would simply skip his reasons and give her his wild conclusion. “My strong suspicion is that mankind is undergoing, in our age, before our very eyes, a new mutation; that we are seeing the emergence of a new species, or at least sub-species.”
“Have you been smoking illegal substances?” Helen joked.
“No, no. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s the only explanation, in my mind, and with due respect for your remarks about education and environment, for this extraordinary crevice that has opened up between those who are fully conscious, of themselves and of the ‘world’, for want of a better word, and those who continue to live within the confines of their single and undifferentiated perspectives, however broad they may be.”
“Heavy stuff,” Helen intervened. “A new species! How can I recognize them? Any of your neighbors, for example?”
“You may well mock me, Helen, but it’s not so very improbable as you may imagine. After all, when Homo sapiens emerged, the Neanderthal was still treading the earth, and they are thought to have coexisted for thirty thousand years, living side by side, even interbreeding!”
“It’ll make life hell!” said Helen. “I’ve always wondered about that period—how one
organized dinner parties, for example. ‘Now, my dear, we simply can’t invite your friend Harry, we already have far too many Neanderthals, and we did agree always to try and balance the numbers evenly with Homo sapiens’. It must have been an incredible headache! Do we really have to go through all that again?”
Victor smiled, resignedly, and thought, that wasn’t very kind about Harry.
He hadn’t expected her to fully embrace his shattering anthropological discovery but did think that she might have listened patiently as he talked her through it and then consider it. No, it was no good, you had to reserve the best of your insights for yourself, particularly ones of this magnitude. Maybe he should have actually tried it first on Harry? He would have instantly said “tosh” or “crap,” but they would have laughed, and Harry would also have calmly identified a few faults in his arguments. He was good at that.
No, for the time being, he would just brief Yorick, where he could expect a much kinder and thoughtful reception for his Homo conscius.
Punishment and Phalluses
It had been three months since Victor had given up his job and embraced a life of leisure, delayed only briefly by his new heart operation. When he had quit the office, his colleagues had unanimously claimed that he was a fool and would be unable to live without his work and, of course, without their daily company. “You’ll miss us, Victor,” had been a common statement. As with most human beings, they knew much better than you what you ‘really’ thought and were generous in sharing their insights and advice, whether you wanted them or not. In any case, his inheritance had freed him to find out for himself; left to wander without constraint other than its own limitations, his mind was even now leading in many new directions. He had worked for thirty years, in positions that everyone supposed were mentally engaging, which was true to the extent that they hardly, if ever, left him the time and energy to further explore, as he had done in his adolescent years, the confines of his mind. In itself, he didn’t feel that the work had enlarged his understanding of anything at all, and he knew that he wouldn’t regret quitting the office for five minutes. And so it had been. Alone among his friends, only Harry had been constructive: “Enjoy it, Victor,” he had said. “I once took a sabbatical, and after six months I felt ten years younger and twenty years smarter.”
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