Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  “Good morning, my friend,” said Victor coming into his salon.

  Yorick said nothing.

  “Had your breakfast? Ready for a lesson?”

  “Bollocks,” said Yorick meekly.

  “Well, yes. It must be frustrating to have a vocabulary of only four words, eh? No worry, we’re going to fix that! We’ll have you dissertating about life and the world in no time at all.”

  Victor knew that he would soon have to allow Yorick out of his cage, but for the moment he was frightened with the idea of this bird flying around his house, so he again put it off for another time.

  ‘Provisional’? That would be difficult. Maybe he should keep it for later, dream up a few simpler, shorter wisdoms in the meantime. But then again, perhaps Yorick could deal with it as though it were four words—pro-vi-sion-al? It was worth a try.

  “All is pro-vi-sion-al,” Victor muttered, running it by himself one more time before setting to work. Was it true? “Is it truly true?” he said aloud playfully. Or did the words perhaps nullify themselves? If all is provisional, that includes the statement itself. Does that make it false, since at some time in the future it will necessarily no longer be true? Or does the statement actually confirm itself, by reason of its intrinsically temporary validity? “Bloody hell!” thought Victor, “I’m no philosopher, that’s for sure. But what fun, though!”

  The immense pleasure of exercising his brain in this way, something he had almost completely avoided for most of his adult life, thrilled Victor, even if he had doubts whether the question at hand was of any importance whatsoever. What does it mean to me that everything is provisional, he asked himself? It’s certainly humbling, for one thing. Clearly a discouragement from expressing too volubly and definitively one’s opinions. But then I have kept mine largely to myself anyhow, so I haven’t sinned too frequently, or at least publicly, in that direction.

  Now he thought about it, he realized the extent to which he had always been uncertain about the handful of convictions he possessed. This struck him particularly when he was listening to others express themselves. Notably politicians, journalists, cultural critics, ‘experts’ of all kinds, sometimes even the ‘man in the street’! The aplomb with which, called upon day or night, on the spur of the moment and with the switch of a microphone, they emitted striking and definitive views, whether insightful or stupid, had never ceased to astonish him and make him feel insufficient in his own eyes. I don’t, on the whole, feel less clever than they and yet I could never do what they do, thought Victor—not without instantly contradicting myself or qualifying my words with so many ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and ‘on the other hands’ that I would render them absolutely meaningless. Happily, he reminded himself, no one is asking for my opinion on anything any longer, so I’m quite safe in my prevarications!

  “At least until you start broadcasting my views to all and sundry, Yorick!” he laughed gaily, bringing his chair up to the cage. The bird looked pleased to be addressed directly again, hopping about and jerking his head up and down.

  “But you have to admit it’s an inextricable dilemma in which we find ourselves, my friend. Not you, of course. Man. At what point does, or should, a man stop asking himself questions about existence, about his life, about his ideas, his beliefs, his future? Because I persist in thinking that there is free will in this, that we do have a choice, that it is not a ‘natural’ phenomenon that one day a man’s brain says to him suddenly: ‘That’s it, chum. Let’s stop questioning anything, anymore. Let’s be satisfied with what we have here and get on with life’. As though ‘life’, evoked in this way, is supposed to constitute the opposite of reflection! It’s certainly a view which a lot of people like and embrace. Gets them off the hook, actually, if they’re a bit lazy in the mind department. ‘It’s not words, thoughts and ideas that count’, a dear woman once said to me, ‘it’s action!’ Bless her. She was an honest girl. Sincere.” Even though, despite his otherwise irreproachable behavior towards her, it had been on account of a handful of loose, alcoholized words including, she reminded him when sober, “bitch,” that she had left him, presumably for a man of action with a better grip on his tongue. He had learned since then not to take women too literally.

  Enough, thought Victor. I mustn’t exploit and overburden my captive little audience. To work! Learning words is, they say, as exhilarating to a parrot as it is to a man, and I do want him to be happy, truly.

  “So here we go, Yorick. ‘All is pro-vi-sion-al’. Quite a mouthful, heh? But we’ll get you saying it in no time at all.”

  The Poisoned Vagina

  Victor met Harry in the pub, near his old offices. Harry looked troubled.

  “Tough day? Haha! Glad to be out of it, you can’t imagine,” said Victor.

  Harry carried his moods and his feelings on his face like no one else whom Victor knew. If men wore masks to hide their real selves, Harry certainly hadn’t heard about it. He couldn’t care less what people thought about him and what he did, said or thought. This was one of the many traits that so endeared this old colleague to Victor. What guts he has to be only himself to the others, Victor had often thought. Many people found Harry rough and even obnoxious. Harry thought that that was their problem and not his.

  “Nothing that a few beers couldn’t fix,” said Harry. “But actually it’s not got anything to do with work.”

  “Come on, old boy, spill the beans.”

  “Do you remember Joyce? You met her a couple of times, here in the pub I think.”

  “Yes, of course. Blond, nice looking girl, a bit clinging, I thought, to be honest. She pinned you down as if she was afraid you would run off. One arm permanently around your neck, the other gripping your elbow.”

  “Clinging, that’s her all right, very clinging,” said Harry. “Actually, I quite like to be clung to, now I think about it. I’m sure you would know why, clever psychologist that you are. I can’t analyze that kind of thing.”

  “I can only get worse, I’m afraid, going out with Helen. If you don’t watch out, I’ll start talking about foetuses—or perhaps foeti?—your nostalgia for the womb and your relationship with your mother.”

  “Spare me, spare me!” laughed Harry. “Keep that for your own bedroom conversations, if it turns you on.”

  “And so, Joyce?”

  “Well, I think I’m in love, I think we’re in love,” said Harry matter-of-factly.

  “So that’s why you’re looking so grim. I might have guessed! Terrible news. My profound sympathy.”

  “Oh, piss off,” Harry laughed again. “That’s not the problem, of course—I think not, anyhow. The problem is that she wants us to start living together and, frankly, I simply can’t make up my mind about it. I really don’t know whether I want that or not. Awful dilemma which keeps me awake at nights. I easily see the good in it, but I force myself to see the down side too. And it always comes out about even.”

  Harry looked quite desultory. Victor patted him tenderly on the shoulder as he got up to get them both another beer at the bar.

  Victor loathed platitudes and instant reactions to other people’s problems, so he was glad it took time to get the drinks and that he could think over what it might be useful to say, or not to say, about love and living together. In fact, he and Harry had an unspoken pact that they would not inflict their opinions on each other if they really had nothing worth saying. This was almost the heart of their friendship and their affection for each other. Both had briefly “done time” in Tokyo and had greatly admired the complete absence of compulsion among the Japanese to make conversation purely from the fear of silence. They had become masters of this art themselves.

  “I was thinking about the Japanese,” said Victor as he put the beers on the table and sat down again.

  Harry remained silent.

  “Do you remember how well we were briefed before we went out there about how to behave in discussions with our Japanese colleagues? ‘Never hold the gaze of a Japanese’, a cardinal
rule. ‘He will think you are rude and aggressive. Look at his neck or his tie when you’re talking to him’. The only problem was that the Japanese had apparently been briefed about us as well and what offends us. ‘Don’t avert the gaze of the Westerner, or he will think that you are a shifty little bastard.’ So there we were staring at their necks while they were desperately trying to make eye contact with us! What a farce.”

  They both laughed. “Oh, those were the days, my friend,” said Harry. “But if it proved useless in Japan, our training comes in bloody useful around here. ‘Never hold the gaze of a neighborhood yob or you’ll get punched in the head’. Sound advice. But what about Joyce?”

  This was another joy about talking with Harry. He never lost the thread. They had digressions within digressions, parentheses within parentheses, endless detours, sidetracks. But in some mysterious way, they never lost sight of their point of departure and would always return to it with ease. A word, no more, would suffice. “I really should be married to Harry,” Victor often told himself. “What a shame we’re not queer.”

  “Joyce,” said Victor weightily, as though putting a heavy box on the table. “Harry, old boy, what you need to do is to put the litmus test of love to yourself”.

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “Aha. It’s you who gave it to me in the first place. In less amorous days, perhaps. Don’t you remember? It’s: ‘On a warm Saturday afternoon, what frankly would you rather do: watch the Manchester football derby on television, lying on your couch with a couple of chilled beers and a stack of cheese and beetroot sandwiches piled up on your fat belly—or go for a picnic in the woods hand in hand with your loved one?”

  “Fuck you, Victor,” said Harry gaily. “No more debate. My troubles are over. That settles it once and for all. Even Fulham against Queen’s Park Rangers! Thanks, mate.”

  As they sat there drinking, grinning, sharing in silence the satisfaction of their complicity in this small and asinine victory in the war of the sexes, Victor reminded himself that he didn’t any longer believe in the virtue of talking about one’s problems with anyone. Not in his own case, anyhow. For a single useful piece of advice (and he struggled to recall even one that he had ever received) he had had to bravely face a thousand commonplaces and irrelevancies. Maybe he was alone in this. All around him, he heard people talking to each other about their woes and seeking others’ opinions. No, for Victor the poet was wrong: every man is an island. He felt untouchable and untouched in this matter. The whole problem was to admit it. Until then, one remained either hostage to the others or deeply frustrated by them. Well, that’s how he saw it, anyhow.

  “How’s your unconscious mind today, Harry?” Victor asked suddenly.

  “How would I know?” said Harry, without a second’s reflection. “That’s the point of it being unconscious, isn’t it? Un-conscious, not conscious, in other words. In any case, I have enough problems with my conscious mind, without delving into the black pit of the unknown and unrevealed. What kind of question is that, anyhow?”

  Harry made it a point of honor never to be surprised by anything whatsoever one asked or told him. He seemed to think this was virile. If Victor had announced gravely that he had just the previous night been kidnapped by aliens for a quick visit to their planet, for dinner perhaps, Harry would merely have shrugged his shoulders and at most said: “What did you eat?”

  “I’ve fallen out with Helen over it. Well, not really fallen out, but she took it as an insult when I proposed, as a hypothesis, that the ‘unconscious mind’ didn’t exist.”

  “Indeed, blasphemy!” boomed Harry. “Wasn’t very smart, anyhow. And you, a former diplomat. Tut-tut.”

  “I can’t see the problem in discussing it, keeping an open mind. After all, there’s no proof of its existence. It is not scientifically established”.

  “That’s not the point, my friend,” said Harry. “It’s tantamount to telling her she’s a fake, that all her dearest and profoundest beliefs are fabrications, that she’s spent the last thirty years mystifying her patients with cant.”

  “Steady on, Harry. Don’t get carried away. I was only suggesting that one might be permitted to doubt …”

  “No,” said Harry definitively. “I can see how she might be gravely wounded—and with justification.”

  Victor didn’t believe that Harry really thought any of this. He just enjoyed sparring with him. And having little or no interest in the question at hand, Harry quickly changed the subject.

  “Did you hear about the poisoned vagina?”

  “No. Is it a new French film?”

  “No, no. All over the newspapers this morning. A Brazilian woman who wanted to get rid of her husband rubbed poison on her fanny and asked him to give her oral sex. Poor bastard ended up in hospital and she at the police station.”

  Victor exploded with laughter. “Then I should think that we should count ourselves lucky with our own little feminine problems—living together or disagreeing about the unconscious mind.”

  “Indeed,” Harry said soberly. “Let’s have another beer and toast our good luck.”

  A Faux Pas in Bed

  Yes, perhaps I went too far, thought Victor. I really should have kept my mouth shut. I’m not an impassioned youth any longer, after all. I should have known better than to broach the subject again with Helen so quickly after our first skirmish on the question. Life’s odd like that. You learn important lessons, understand things, in the abstract, but it can take years, decades even, to harmonize your behavior with your psychological insights and your hard-won wisdom.

  He knew very well that not everything that one thought was proper to tell others, and most particularly not those closest to you. The human species might well be endowed with reason, but in the hierarchy of the motives for our actions and opinions it decidedly preferred to take a back seat and let emotion and instinct drive. One could by and large only tell the others what they were capable of hearing, and the risk of offense was, he had found, considerable when one went outside the range of another’s understanding or simple willingness to accommodate reason, however implacable.

  What a confused lot we are, said Victor to himself. What nonsense to oppose emotion and reason! As if you could change anything at all in yourself, even a single one of your instincts, your reflexes, your views, a single feeling, your jealousy, for example, or anger, or your prejudices, without the intervention of the rational, thinking mind, without a deliberate effort of thought! He was not far from agreeing with Baudelaire about this: Tout ce qui est beau et noble est le résultat de la raison et du calcul. Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. And to hell with our ‘natural’ emotions and instincts! For Baudelaire, nature taught us pretty much nothing at all, constraining us only to sleep, drink, eat and protect ourselves against the climate, while all the time pushing us to kill our own kind, or at least to sequestrate and torture them.

  Victor had committed his faux pas in bed. It had begun when Helen had enquired about the sex life of his new mutant species. Despite his better judgment, he had taken the cue and launched into a halting explanation of another facet of his evolving theory: the possibility of objectivity, which he had avoided when their previous conversation had turned sour.

  “When we—that is, mainly I—were talking about the new, conscious man the day before yesterday, you questioned my ability to apprehend the level of another person’s consciousness and suggested that it was a ‘highly subjective’ perspective.”

  “Not only your ability, anybody’s.”

  “Yes, granted. And I concede to you without hesitation that we are all largely unknown to each other, now and always.”

  “Thanks,” said Helen with a shade of sarcasm.

  “But I wouldn’t like my baby to be thrown out with the bath water, so could I come back to the question of subjectivity?”

  Victor saw Helen struggling with the desire to yawn and turn her back on him, but she only puckered
her upper lip, a gesture he had always found incredibly attractive in her. I wonder if I would have fallen for this woman without her pout, he asked himself?

  “Well, I’m troubled by this subjectivity-objectivity business,” said Victor. “Particularly, its widespread abuse. People telling me, or each other, ‘Well, that’s subjective’, simply because they don’t like what they hear, have another opinion. It’s a lot of crap, as far as I can judge. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and want to get to the bottom of it.”

  “Go on,” said Helen without enthusiasm.

  “I have come to the conclusion that a wholly conscious man, if you’ll concede for a moment that he can exist, is capable of attaining absolute objectivity. Yes, that’s become a certainty for me.”

  “And how is that so?”

  This was good. For once she wasn’t looking for an argument. Not yet, at least.

  “In his fully conscious state, our new man sees at any and all times, because of his savage lucidity and truthfulness with himself …”

  “Savage lucidity,” interrupted Helen, “I like that.”

  “Because of this lucidity and honesty, he is fully capable of making a distinction between those of his thoughts he knows to be the product of his past, his feelings, his tastes, his prejudices, his instincts, his personality, or what-have-you, and those of his thoughts which are free of any of these factors and emerge solely from pure—objective—reasoning, ‘untainted’, if you like, by his individual characteristics.