Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  “So, Sir, apart from these frauds, with whom a truthful discussion is impossible anyhow, what would you say to adding, as another key criterion to our ideal political system, free expression, fair laws, an independent and competent judiciary and regular, free and fair elections? Yes? Good. And what do we then note? That none of these things have ever existed in communist societies, nor fascistic for that matter. They are the attributes, uniquely, of democracy.”

  What else? Arbitrarily. “The Prime Minister is a whore.” “Fashion is futile.” These statements too were either truthful or false; he was convinced of it. Again, in each case, it sufficed to agree on the meaning of the affirmation, on its terms. If this wasn’t possible, then language itself was useless and we might as well all stop talking right now! Sometimes he did indeed think that all words should be scrapped and that language should be invented all over again on the basis of a new consensus of sane men and women. After all, our first words, or their derivatives, were concocted in idle moments during mammoth-hunting expeditions!

  Throughout his working life he had seen grown people argue passionately over issues without appearing aware that each other’s understanding of the sense of his or her words could be radically different. They seemed to live and think under the illusion that the words themselves had some incontrovertible meaning and life of their own and that they had somehow been discovered by men, like natural gas. Victor had felt more and more uncomfortable in these discussions as it had increasingly become obvious to him that words were often no more than approximations whose meanings varied significantly according to the sensibility of their users.

  In any case, Victor had no trouble at all, in two or three steps, in establishing, according to common meanings and the facts, and in agreement with the man in the corner of his room, that the Prime Minister indeed deserved to be called a whore and that, on the contrary, fashion could not at all be judged, in fairness, to be without value and that its positive rôle in society was easy to demonstrate.

  What have I proved, Victor asked himself? I know. That if, between men of good faith, honest men, one can agree on the parameters for judging the veracity of a statement, then everything outside questions of taste, ruled by the senses, can indeed said to be either true or false. Not for me or for you or for him or for her, but for all of us, united and universally. The truth is almost always there to be found, it’s just a question of making the effort. And where the number of parameters is too great or would require unreasonable research to identify them, well then the truth of the matter might only be said to be temporarily unavailable pending further work. And in the meantime, it belongs to no one, and no one has the right to act on it over the interests of the others. No right, above all, to add to the piles of bodies.

  Well, I certainly haven’t found anything revolutionary here, Victor admitted. Perhaps this is all infantile or bloody obvious. Perhaps philosophers established all this two and a half thousand years ago. I must check. But then again, it won’t matter to me if this is so or not. The whole objective of my new thinking life is to come to conclusions about existence and the mind on the sole basis of my own efforts. However crude, however simplistic, he was establishing truth for himself, not borrowing it, as he had so often done. He swore he would no longer be lazy in this.

  And what if all men did this, what if all men acted only on the basis of the truth, of only that which they knew to be true? It would signal the end of war and conflict overnight. But what men are capable of dealing only in truth? How do they achieve this … objectivity? That was the question to which he would likely have to apply himself. He thought he glimpsed some of the answer, hovering around his skull somewhere, but he would have to put words to it, to articulate it. And he was tired and it would have to wait.

  It had grown dark in the room while he was thinking. He turned on three of his favorite lamps and, to spite them, left two others unlit (he had been against buying these monsters, but his former wife had prevailed) and decided that he deserved a very large scotch, which would end all rational thought for that evening and in its place infuse him with tenderness and optimism, and a degree of affection and tolerance for himself and, more importantly, the human race.

  “Tu attends Godot, chéri?”

  Victor suspected that he knew where he wanted to take Yorick, but he also knew that it wasn’t time to go there yet. It’s odd, he reflected, that one can sense ideas forming in one’s brain, even that they already exist, and that one can hold them there silently until one chooses, with more or less rigor and finesse, and usually after trial and error, the words which will best express them. And this has nothing to do with some bloody unconscious! he protested to any passing psychoanalysts, known to him personally or not, because I am perfectly aware that they’re there. These silent ideas procured him a great deal of pleasure. Like the perfume of delicious dishes wafting in from the kitchen before one has set eyes on them and knows exactly what they are. Victor was now only really happy when he could sense two or three embryonic ideas in the antechamber of his mind. He often delayed the moment when he would coax them into life, articulate them, for fear of finding himself without any, feeling impotent and barren. Those are the times when I feel closest to madness, he said to himself. When I am condemned only to repeat endlessly what I already know. What torture for a conscious man to listen to an unchanging dialogue in his mind! As though one were sentenced to listen and watch the same play over and over a thousand times for the rest of one’s life.

  Well, I can’t complain about it. I wanted and chose this freedom to think. I can’t extract myself from it now. I can’t distract myself from it either, as I’ve been doing for the last thirty years. But it’s certainly exhausting. And dangerous, he thought. If I run out of new words and new ideas and new insights, I shall end up alongside the woman in front of my house.

  In any case, I mustn’t leap ahead of myself. Step by step. For the moment, I can’t even come up with something essential to teach Yorick about truth, however much I believe that there is little more important than this question in the affairs of men.

  He took up Keats’ words again. Truth is beauty, beauty truth. What did that mean?

  Victor sat down at his computer and sought out the wisdom of literary academics on the Internet. What had they to say about it? Reams, tomes, every imaginable dimension of byte. Absolutely endless. He soon gave up, overwhelmed though not a little impressed by the ingenuity and capacity of invention and imagination of the savants. In our age, things would have been simpler. The good man would have appeared on a television book program to promote his poems and been challenged brutally to explain himself: “Mr. Keats—may I call you John?—what exactly did you have in mind when you wrote …” But even then, of course, mind doctors would have declaimed without shame that what he really meant, unknown even to himself, was in fact this, that and the other and something quite different than what he supposed!

  Victor’s thoughts turned from Keats to Samuel Beckett, perhaps the most analyzed writer of the twentieth century. The academics had gone to town on his Waiting for Godot, producing thousands of kilos and bytes of interpretations, largely theological, about the sense of this little masterpiece and particularly its title. Beckett had pleased him immensely with his retort, settling once and for all the question, for Victor at least. He explained that he had once been waiting for a friend on the corner of the Rue Godot de Mauroy, a street just behind the Madeleine church in Paris, staked out, then as now, by whores, and that one had finally asked him: “Tu viens, chéri? Ou tu attends Godot?” In fact, Beckett’s little story had silenced no one. An author clearly gave up his rights to the meaning of a literary work once it was out in public. So be it, thought Victor, I’m sure that Beckett didn’t give much of a hoot about that and was more amused than anything else by the elucubrators.

  He had seen Samuel Beckett once on the street during his posting in Paris. It was, he remembered, a very hot August day and the city was virtually deserted. He had b
een sitting in the shade of a café terrace when the author had walked by, tall, slim, his shirt hanging out of his trousers, his eagle’s nose seeming to pull him forward in a slight stoop.

  At that time a rather desperate, empty and tortured young man, Victor was convinced that he owed his continued existence to Beckett, who had shown him that laughter at oneself and man’s complete futility was the only possible alternative to jumping off the nearest cliff. He had wanted to leap out of the shadows, grip Beckett’s hand and tell him, simply and without fuss: “I just want to thank you for saving my life.” He had not done it. His desire to respect the privacy and peace of the great man had prevented him from moving. But ever since, recalling that moment, he had dreamed that if he had indeed thrust himself on Beckett, the notoriously kind writer would have replied: “Thank me? Are you really sure you want to thank me?” Nothing less would have been enough from this man, who, Victor well understood, would himself rather not have lived at all.

  But all this reminiscing isn’t getting me any closer to a truth about truth, thought Victor. It was probably absolute heresy, trite and not at all in the poet’s mind, but if Keats had only been saying that truth was beautiful, that would have indeed been worthy as an idea for any poem, indeed for any life. It was so.

  Victor took another tack. Simply in order to go on thinking and not to stall. What in my life has not disappointed me? Beauty, in itself, has often left me indifferent. Love has alternately, but in too brief succession, at one moment thrilled me and at another left me feeling cheated and betrayed, not least by the fickleness of my own sentiments. The pleasures of wealth, luxury, have come and gone, and their satisfaction been largely ephemeral. Sex? Now there was something that had never let him down. He needed little or no time to confirm that to himself. Nothing in his whole life stood up for comparison to the orgasm for its consistent and absolutely certain pleasure. Even when you had to take care of it for yourself.

  So, ‘sex is truth, truth sex’? he giggled. No, that wouldn’t do at all. Maybe, indeed, simply, ‘truth is beautiful’? He wouldn’t dare tell Helen, that’s for sure. She would have to hear it directly from Yorick. That won’t exonerate me, of course, from charges of absolutely bloody obviousness and banality, but it is essential to give truthfulness its honors and due and place in the importance of things.

  Mass Murder on a Lovely Morning

  Victor sat in the café and thought: when reasonable, decent people are faced with hatred, torture, murder and other atrocities, or even simple acts of vandalism and common crime, they feel helpless and mumble about the need for “education,” “values,” “morality” in order to prevent their endless renewal. These were important, of course. But education could also be impotent against great evil. The Nazis, for example, had comprehensively proved it in their reforms of Germany’s school curricula in the early 1930s, and this regardless of their devotion to Schiller, Goethe, even Shakespeare. And the great murderers of the twentieth century were hardly deficient in it. Pol Pot had studied engineering in Paris, while many of his fellow assassins had gone to the Sorbonne; Stalin had attended a theological seminary; Hitler went to the same school, at the same time, as Ludwig Wittgenstein; Mao Zedong had been to both law school and teacher training college. Between them, they had knowingly provoked the deaths of at least one hundred and thirty million people. As for values and morals, the number of murders for which learnéd priests of various ranks and religions could be held responsible was simply incalculable. No, reasoned Victor, the real key to the elimination of violence was clearly not to be found in learning! It lay, he was convinced, in the way the brain actually functioned and, he suspected, in this imprisonment in subjectivity that he remarked all around him.

  What did the great political assassins, pursuing their objectives without apparent deviation or hesitation about their actions, have in common? These men, Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, so many others, were spectacular liars of course. But what struck Victor forcibly was that they had not doubted and had perhaps lacked entirely the capacity to doubt. They had not mellowed over time and allowed counterviews to influence their thinking and behavior. They had not sought counsel from wise men with contrary views - they had shot or hanged them. Contradiction was impossible, whether from outside or inside their minds. They were absolutely blind and deaf to anything that didn’t comfort their vision of things. They were locked forever in their criminal subjectivity and refused—or were incapable—to hear opposing views, even in relation to the simplest questions.

  “You look very thoughtful.”

  Helen had come in to the café to share a further moment with him before her clinic opened. They had again spent the night together at her place, and he had gone on ahead to buy his precious newspapers and order coffee for them.

  “Yes, I’m thinking about mass murderers,” said Victor.

  “The usual cheerful stuff, then?”

  “Indeed.”

  They had enjoyed a marvelous evening and night together and felt good about each other. They had made love again—Victor thought that, for once, the expression was appropriate—on waking, and their bodies still tingled from the thrill of it.

  “So, why mass murder on such a lovely morning?” Helen asked. “On any day, actually. You seem to have an unholy interest in such questions, if you ask me.”

  Victor thought for a moment or two. My God, I love her pout; she had offered one to him along with her question. Soon, I shan’t be able to live without it, he joked to himself. That’s how it is between men and women. Such small gestures can devastate. One day, after he had given a speech to a hundred or so people at a foreign affairs seminar in Oslo, a Norwegian woman had come up to him and said slowly and gravely: “It’s very moving the way that you run your hand through your hair when you speak.” He had protested, of course, but she had insisted: “No. You don’t realize. I’m sure that half the women here fell in love with you because of that.” And had then walked off. However intimate her remark seemed to Victor, he realized that she might equally have been talking about the price of fish in the market that morning.

  “That’s a fair question,” he said to Helen, running his hand through his hair. “I’ve asked it to myself. It’s not something new. I’ve always, I suppose, thought it was a thinking man’s duty—if you’ll allow me to so describe myself …”

  Helen pouted as an observation to his boast.

  “I’ve always thought that anyone born in our time, a time of continuing murder and mass crime, could not but try and understand its causes, how men could, can destroy each other on such an epic scale. Isn’t it really the only question? If one really cares about the fate of humanity, as opposed to the exclusive future of one’s own arse?”

  Helen laid her hand gently on Victor’s cheek and said: “You’re a good man.” Adding: “Even though I had hoped that you were sitting here thinking tenderly about me and our night together.”

  Victor smiled. And thought: I am a good man, she’s quite right about that. But I must keep quiet about it. One cannot, after all, go around proclaiming one’s benevolence and virtues. It would open one to all sorts of misunderstandings and accusations, of vanity, certainly, and probably simple indecency. And what no one would comprehend or accept, not the lovely Helen nor anyone else, was that his assessment of his goodness was completely objective. It was the result of a completely cold and neutral examination of his soul, which he had located without difficulty somewhere or other in his head, and what it contained. He had gone about the process as simply as one might open up a woman’s handbag, spill the contents on to a table, pick them up one by one and carefully scrutinize them. He had not honestly known what he might find in his depths when he had finally found the courage to embark on this task, when he thought he had cleared away sufficient mental detritus to do it properly. He was ready and prepared to find evil and nameless filth and was sure that he could live with them easily. They might even make him more interesting to himself. But try as he might, he could only
find good. He saw no envy, not a trace of it, for anything or anybody; he could not find the slightest evidence of hatred nor even of a capacity to hate; he was bereft of cynicism; nothing in him called for violence, which he had always abhorred in all its forms; he had no sense or taste for revenge; he wanted only good for other men, individually and collectively; he could not bear to see anyone suffer, nor could he willingly inflict harm and suffering. It could have been otherwise, but it was thus. I would not have denied or failed to recognize even the most repulsive characteristic of my being, thought Victor. I could have been quite another man than I am, and I would have had to live with him too. But this good man is the man I’m stuck with, with whom I have to live.

  He wondered: if, in fact, I had possessed a criminal nature, a desire to rob or to kill, would I have been able to stop myself? Because of my awareness of these compulsions in my personality? He suspected it was so. He supposed also that the tests of mental responsibility for criminal action, which were entrusted to psychiatrists as far as he understood, must take this into account. He’d have to check.