Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  It was true that Victor already felt distinctly more intelligent than when he had worked for a living. This was not necessarily saying very much because he was a modest and realistic man very well aware of his intellectual limits. He often considered himself shockingly witless, in fact. Not in relation to anyone else, at least no one he knew personally, but—and he struggled to understand how this could be so—in relation to himself. If, by my own judgment and without any exterior intervention, I can and very often do feel mentally deficient, this supposes a superior individual within me capable of making that assessment, he reasoned. Could I not, then, claim that this fellow, striding imperiously around my brain casting imprecations as though he ran the place, might just as legitimately be considered to be me, Victor? It isn’t anybody else. Can’t I take the credit for him too? Beats me, he thought. He had once tried to understand the question by reading up on Freud, who had a thing or two to postulate about the divisions of the mind, but he had kept running into the doctor’s sexual problems with his parents (he had, after all, declared that his father was a pervert) and questions of punishment and phalluses, of abuse, guilt and morals, none of which reflected his own situation, and so had abandoned the Austrian guru as a potential source of knowledge on the subject. Victor’s other self, if that was indeed how to describe him, was not only superior in intelligence, but he was morally admirable in ways that Victor was often unable to emulate, though he tried. His chief rôle seemed to be to chastise Victor when he lied to himself; he was also lucky enough not to have a life as such to bother about. He didn’t need to go to the supermarket or to earn his living. Victor wondered whether one day this chap and he could perhaps swap places, so that instead of feeling constantly crushed by this paragon of virtue, he could just ignore or look down on him, smiling sardonically as he went about his business without interference.

  One of his first actions after liberating himself from the office had been to take stock again of what he felt he knew “about life and the world,” as Harry had put it, and what he felt continued to escape him but might perhaps, given time and effort, one day be within grasping distance. He was aware, for example, that despite the considerable efforts he had made in the early years of manhood to excise all within him that he knew to be mere prejudice, he had over the years accumulated afresh—it was inevitable—a whole new set of spurious and baseless notions through sheer laziness, apathy and convenience. These ideas didn’t even try to hide themselves; they simply lay idly around his mind, waiting to be casually enounced when the occasion arose. To rid himself of these charlatans required only time and attention, both of which he now possessed in abundance.

  But there are more vital questions than this, thought Victor. Disencumbering myself of these commonplace idiocies, which are, after all, the lot of most if not all men, is certainly necessary but does not perhaps call for an immediate purge. Now that I have all my time to think for myself again and no one to give account to, it may even, I guess, be a natural process of waste rather than a conscious effort. He was no longer called upon to continuously express opinions, at office lunches and in the pub after work for example, and these accumulated fatuities, in which he only believed half-heartedly anyhow, would presumably simply fall by the wayside. What luxury to have no opinion at all, none whatsoever, about something! That he looked forward to, and already the list of subjects about which he now thought absolutely nothing was growing considerably.

  No, it was more urgent to define an overall objective for his thinking life than to deal with the detritus that the tides of the age had washed up on the shores of his mind. What should I try and achieve, he asked himself? In what mental and spiritual condition would I ideally like to age and then, eventually, die? I can’t simply leave it to chance; I need something like a plan.

  “Be Yourself!” Nietzsche had exhorted, followed by twenty thousand ‘self-development’ authors in his wake. Victor had jumped on this as a young man struggling for sense, but, though he adored Nietzsche, the advice, which he had taken too lightly and too seriously, had almost castrated him. He had scraped away level after level of falsehood and everything that was decidedly not himself, eager to find the authentic shining treasures beneath, but had found absolutely nothing all, a bottomless black hole of absolute nothingness, in fact. Happily, after stumbling anguished and ashamed around this meaningless hole for a few years, he had chanced on the words of the wily old fox George Bernard Shaw, who had said that life was not at all about ‘finding’ yourself, or ‘being’ yourself, but about ‘creating’ yourself. That, in his case at least, had not only made much more sense but had become a necessity, since his demolition job had effectively produced a human being as close to nobody as one could get. Even though he hadn’t known how to go about it, and was in any case too busy either earning a living, having sex or pursuing his fantasies of love, he knew it was right. Now I have time, he thought, to do something about it. To finally create myself.

  Victor toyed with images of an ideal man, a model of what he might aspire to. He thought that he had seen him once—only once in a lifetime! That was extraordinary in itself. It was in an airport terminal, while he and a couple of hundred other passengers were waiting to board a flight to India. A slim, tall, handsome, finely dressed and ineffably elegant gentleman (a maharaja at least, Victor had thought; a true prince!) in search of a waiting room seat had, in the most exquisitely delicate fashion, moved another man’s bag from in front of a vacant place with the tip of his shining boot in order to sit down. Just six or seven inches along the floor, softly and without the least fuss. The owner of the bag, a rough-looking fellow, sweating, harassed and stressed, had growled a surly protest at this act which Victor hadn’t quite caught. But he did hear the Prince. In the sweetest and calmest voice, with impeccable diction, a noble smile and not a trace of irony or contempt he had told the man: “My dear Sir, you really shouldn’t be so touchy.” Which had deflated and crumpled the complainer as though he had actually received the bag itself on his head. Yes, Victor had thought then and ever since, yes, that princely composure and Olympian calm, detachment and confidence, all of which this man had exuded in bucket loads, those are characteristics to strive for. Imagine if all men were thus! It would change the world!

  He had occasionally told his Indian prince story to this or that person, often a girlfriend. No one thought it extraordinary; no one thought anything much about it at all, actually. No one could understand why it had marked him so. Some, many even, in defense, he supposed, of democratic values, even took the ‘side’ of the offended bag man. But several had come up with the same notion—that at root it was a question of ‘breeding’, as though maharajas were racehorses. Victor thought that profound equanimity, a noble mien and exquisite manners were most certainly cultivated in the princely houses of India, but he was deeply convinced that with will and effort we—and certainly he—could all comport ourselves in such a manner. It sufficed to want to and to be sufficiently conscious and masters of ourselves.

  Yes, he would certainly strive to adopt the posture and acquire the behavioral attributes of a maharaja. That would more than adequately serve as an example for his external appearance and comportment. A greater, much greater task was to sort out the shambles within his mind and to give his thinking life real purpose, substance and direction. It was, he thought, very important to make his mental development linear. For the present, he had the distinct impression that he was turning in circles. Repeating endlessly the few things that he was sure he now understood. Even beginning to teach them to Yorick! But such was the mind, his mind at least, that he was obliged to recite to himself at least a hundred times, in every imaginable combination of words, each and every enlightenment, every moment of clear understanding, every breakthrough in perception, before it finally took root and became natural to him. Well, it was an inconvenience, but it was worth the effort. For it was one of those rare things that enabled a conscious man to believe that he was truly alive in a way that could not b
e claimed, for example, by the average lobster.

  Is there anything at all in a man’s life more exalting than the emergence of new thoughts, Victor asked himself? Perhaps in younger years, yes, when the senses were keener and one’s whole body and mind could explode without warning, just walking down the street on a sun-filled morning, with an exquisite and unutterable sensation of limitless wellbeing and power. But these moments, so frequent in early manhood, disappeared in time, in his case at least, and though he had often tried to resuscitate them, they stubbornly failed to reappear, even as their distant memory remained wonderfully sweet. But thoughts! The joy of giving existence, giving birth, to new insights, of finding for the first time the exact right words to express perceptions, moments of understanding … Not only did this rapture never wane, but he experienced it more and more frequently and intensely. Victor was agreeably surprised and pleased about this and attributed it to incessant self-questioning. He likened the process to gathering eggs from chickens that had finally come home to roost and was pleased with his analogy.

  “All this twaddle won’t feed a parrot!” Victor suddenly said out loud to himself, laughing at his self-indulgence. “And, as is well known, hungry parrots won’t talk. Haha!”

  Hold the Front Page!

  The star of the local zoo, a male orangutan, was celebrating his fiftieth birthday, and since they were the same age Victor decided it would be fun to join the open party thrown by the administration to mark the occasion. A few tables had been set up in front of the moat separating the public from the playground and cage of the orangutans and sparkling wine and cakes offered to the first arrivals. Bright-colored balloons were attached to the cage bars. Nelson—the birthday boy—his two female mates and four of his offspring had obligingly come out in the sunshine to meet the guests and were lolling around on the grass.

  Mark, Nelson’s keeper and “greatest—actually only—friend,” as he introduced himself, cleared his throat loudly and called for the attention of the small crowd. “I’m very happy so many of you could make it to Nelson’s party! It’s really quite rare that an orangutan should reach the august age of fifty, especially in captivity, and I’m sure you’ll agree that he’s still in great shape.”

  A few members of the crowd muttered assent.

  “Let me tell you a bit about him. As you may know, he’s now been with us here at the zoo for almost forty-five years. He originally came from the forests of Sumatra, where there are today less than seven thousand orangutans living in the wild. Orangutan means ‘forest man’ in Malay, by the way. Nelson—I hope he’ll cover his ears from modesty—has been a prolific father, siring no less than twenty children with eight partners!”

  Again there were whispers in the crowd, some of them clearly bawdy, judging from the giggling of the women.

  “It’s been our custom,” Mark resumed, “to give Nelson a strawberry cake on his birthday. We’d like to have fifty candles, but he eats those too, so it’s better not! Just wait here for a few moments, and I’ll go and give him his gift.” With that, the keeper took a box from under one of the tables and disappeared into the building housing the cage.

  Nelson, in the meantime, had decided he had his own way of celebrating his birthday. All the while that Mark had been talking, he had been sniffing around one of the females while unmistakably caressing his penis, an organ which Victor had thought absurdly small for such a beast. As the keeper emerged from the cage, holding out his offering, Nelson, with a velocity of which one would not have suspected such a heavy beast capable, threw himself on his companion and began copulating frenetically.

  “Not so much as a ‘by your leave,’” laughed an older woman among the spectators, diffusing a moment pregnant with embarrassment for the bystanders. Everybody laughed heartedly at this remark, except Mark, who stood there with his strawberry cake looking disappointed with his protégé and, felt Victor, a little betrayed.

  “Well,” said the keeper hastily, “par for the course, I’m afraid. Sorry folks! Fifty and still lustful, I have to admit it.” The crowd laughed again, as some of the men gave way to an irresistible desire to be vulgar, with shouts of “Go for it Nelson!,” “I prefer a tart to a cake, too!” and worse.

  Mark asked for questions to divert attention from the scene.

  “She doesn’t look very willing, does she?” reflected the same old woman, with a guffaw.

  “I didn’t see much resistance,” laughed a man next to her.

  Mark’s pedagogical instinct took over. “Well said, Madam. You’re right. But that’s life among the orangutan! Nelson is usually quite a gentleman—tender and a good father, who takes care of his kids. But when … when he gets the ‘urge’, for want of a better expression, there’s no stopping him. He’s not very romantic, to say the least, and absolutely unfaithful. As for Nancy—that’s her name—she’s become realistic: it’s difficult to resist twenty stone of hurtling ape, after all.” He was getting into the swing of it now. “All the poor girls can do is to close their eyes and think of Sumatra, whether they’re ready or not.” The crowd laughed once more. Mark lay the strawberry cake, which he was surprised to find still in his hands, down in front of the cage and made his way back to the spectator area.

  Victor was standing next to a young man taking numerous photographs of the scene and couldn’t resist asking: “For your grandchildren?” The man smiled. “The Chronicle, local paper.” “How will you handle this?” asked Victor. “No idea. Pretty salacious. And we’re a family paper.” Ever alert, the reporter suddenly started taking shots again, over Victor’s shoulder. Nelson had abandoned his love and was now fully occupied with his strawberry cake in the entrance to the cage. “Great. Honor saved. Got my picture. Cheerio.” “Hold the front page!” Victor called after him.

  As he left the zoo, Victor thought about the immediacy of sexual desire shared by the males of the orangutan and human species. He recalled with a smile a recent moment with Harry. They had been standing chatting on a street corner when a cluster of young women had walked by, their tiny skirts half way up their arses, two of them in fishnet stockings, all with low-cut dresses and spectacular cleavage. They had smiled at each other, and Victor had said: “Oh God, if they only knew!” “They do, my friend, they do,” said Harry slyly. Was he right? He couldn’t be, surely? If you questioned them, these women, they all said the same thing, and Victor had no reason to doubt them: “We dress for our own pleasure, not for men.”

  Yes, the jury was still out about modern woman and her sexuality, but the verdict on men was definitive. “We’ve come straight from the caves,” Victor was fond of saying. Even two thousand years of brave Christian attempts to gradually castrate men had come to little or nothing. The joys of abstinence, romantic love, marriage, the idea of sin, loyalty, duty—nothing had effectively countered the erection, its readiness, spontaneity, independence, uncontrollability. By some sort of unwritten social contract, most men—though not homosexuals, thought Victor, those lucky buggers!—had been obliged to come to a tacit agreement to keep their pricks in check, largely by endeavoring to ignore them, which was no mean feat. Many wise things had been said and written about the differences between men and women, but they all paled in comparison with the fact that men lived day and night, at home, in the street, in the supermarket, in the office, even in church, he supposed, with this lightly slumbering monster between their legs, ready at the flash of a mere thigh—even, in fact, the mere thought of the flash of a thigh!—to rise up and present itself for engagement.

  Victor, who valiantly resisted the idea that sex was at the root of personality, as many of the psycho-people wished it, nevertheless had come to the conclusion that the notion of time might well have its roots in sexual urgency and the immediacy and undiscriminating nature of desire in males. One of the numerous frustrations with his love life had been his perception that he and women lived in different time dimensions. Women took one thing after the other, could wait with apparent equanimity while their e
motions and sentiments evolved and developed—or not. There was no hurry. The passage of time would take care of everything, decide everything. He, on the other hand, wanted everything right away and would plunge into the whirlpool of sentiment and desire at a second’s notice, whatever might come of it. The result was that he lived for days, weeks, sometimes months in a kind of time warp in relation to the object of his attentions. And, more often than not, made a fool of himself.

  Victor cast a last look back at the ape cages before they were out of sight. Nelson sat there, presumably satiated, staring in his direction. A fuck and a strawberry cake, thought Victor. Not a bad way to celebrate one’s fiftieth birthday.

  Taking Women Too Literally …

  Yorick had now mastered his first declamation and cheerfully announced God’s death without prompting whenever he felt talkative. Sometimes the statement filled Victor with vague regret, at other times it felt exulting and liberating. The regret was not for himself—after all, he had never enjoyed, even briefly, any form of belief or faith—but for the human race. Without the solace and hope of a God and an afterlife, existence on this sorry planet would be even more impossible and miserable for hundreds of millions of poor souls who day in and day out struggled to find a good reason to go on in the face of so much grief. Well, I can’t help that, Victor told himself. We either stop lying or we don’t. We can’t pick and choose our truths according to their convenience, according to the degree of either comfort or anguish they give us. He wasn’t quite sure why this was the case, why man had any obligation at all to the truth, even though he so often chose to turn away and ignore it. Victor found he couldn’t even really justify it. Had any philosopher, or psychologist for that matter, come up with a satisfactory explanation as to why truth should be a necessity, a duty? He’d have to check. In the meantime, he was having none of this ‘my’ truth, ‘your’ truth, ‘his’ or ‘her’ truth nonsense, which was polluting our epoch and equalizing the pronouncements of fools and wise men.