Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  He rolled his trousers back down in place and looked again at his head. “No, truly I don’t like you,” he said. “Physically, I mean. Not only are your features unattractive, in this particular combination at least, but I don’t even much like your look. A bit surly; almost sinister.”

  Well, nothing much could be done about all that. For the rest, his personality for example, the jury was still out. At best he tolerated himself. But he was not unhappy, and things were getting better by the day, thanks to his new freedom and thinking life and Yorick.

  Fortunately, he had always ignored the vain and presumptuous Christian instruction to “love your neighbor as yourself.” My neighbors, let alone anyone else, can count themselves bloody lucky I’ve never followed that precept, thought Victor. I might have strangled a few over the years, or poisoned their dogs. No, personally he tried to love himself as he had come to love others, not without some effort it was true. With tolerance and as much understanding as he could muster.

  Boredom Beyond the Sufferable

  The sculptor Alberto Giacometti had once been run down by a car in the Place Denfert Rochereau in Paris while out walking with his friend Beckett. As he lay writhing in the gutter, a few bones broken, he was heard to exclaim, “Enfin, quelque chose m’arrive!” Finally, something is happening to me!

  Victor knew what that meant and had often felt that way, indeed felt it still. As now, he sometimes sat at his desk at home and realized, against all the instincts which nature had given him, that if he did nothing, if he simply continued to sit there, then nothing indeed would happen, nothing at all. One day the stench of his rotting corpse would attract the attention of the neighbors; the police or fire brigade would break open his door or take a ladder and smash a window; probably by then a skeleton, he would still be sitting there staring at the wall. In this respect, we weren’t even as lucky as flowers; they just sat there prettily and waited for the birds and bees to come to them, for it to rain or for the sun to shine or for the wind to blow them this way and that. There was a good chance that on any given day something or other would happen to them. Perhaps some one would even cut their heads off. But something. Humans didn’t have this fortune. It made Victor think.

  In the quiet and sleepy summer months, when criminals, politicians and sportsmen were off on holiday somewhere or other, the television channels struggled to find events to report and often sent their reporters out to explore forgotten areas of the country for features on cheese making or carp fishing. He remembered a reporter who had found nothing except two cheerful and decrepit old boys on a bench in some lost village or other. “What do you do, then?” the nosy young journalist had asked one of them. His friend had replied: “Him? He don’t do nuthin’ at all. He ‘asn’t got the time!” The old buggers had roared with glee, slapping their thighs with joy at this wit and waving off the young man with their canes.

  There were also people, Victor had met them, who appeared astonishingly busy and complained that they never had any time. Even at cocktail parties, these people never had more than a minute with which to grace you, and half that time was spent looking over your shoulder for the next person to whom to accord a similar audience. At the beginning of his career, Victor had taken this personally. Am I so boring? he asked, and inevitably concluded: yes. In time, of course, he noticed that these characters couldn’t stay in front of anyone, were perpetually on the move, in action. They simply didn’t have the time. Thus, the importance of observation, thought Victor. We take upon ourselves a lot that has absolutely nothing to do with us.

  He had always had time. Even when he had been incredibly occupied, his mind had remained available, to himself and to the others. The second he finished any task, time immediately spread out before him in all its eternity, begging to be dealt with again, imploring his attention. Yet the office was full of people sighing and groaning about how busy they were and how they couldn’t handle it all. Personally, he had never said, “Not now,” “Please come back,” “Let’s discuss this later,” “Let’s leave it for another day,” though he had twice the work of many of the others. Girlfriends who called the office and almost always reached him instantly assumed that in fact he had nothing to do, that he just sat there with his feet on the desk. It was though he sensed time more acutely than other people and thus had much more of it. He was aware of it; it was always there for him to use; it never escaped him. What did all that mean? He tried to understand: time only disappears when you forget yourself, perhaps. Which was something he could rarely if ever do. Yes, that was it. He always had time because he was conscious of it, like everything else, most especially himself.

  Now he thought about it, he saw that here perhaps was also the explanation why he had never felt the same as most other people about the speed of our journey through life. “Time flies?” Not for him. It might occasionally flap its wings, but it never got off the ground. He did not, as many of his friends, constantly look back with regret at time lost, time wasted, time that had rushed by so quickly that they now found themselves shaking their heads about where it had all gone.

  No, he had been forced to give time to time, to give it its due. His life had not been richer than the lives of other men, indeed he could say it had been poorer than most. He had simply been aware, at any moment, of time’s existence. He now saw that here was quite possibly the explanation for another phenomenon which had never ceased to handicap and also astonish him. Boredom. He had been bored virtually all of his life. Bored beyond the sufferable. Epically bored. In his capacity for boredom, he would bow before no man. However immodest that might be. This extraordinary faculty for boredom had often set him apart from the others. Some people, he discovered, had never been bored! Never in their lives, they claimed. This was extraordinary to him. Others found boredom almost pleasurable, a simple parenthesis from excitement and activity. In his case, it was torture, as terrible as sleep deprivation. That’s an interesting parallel, he thought. Perhaps boredom is a disability, a disorder, of people who are deprived of refuge in the silence of a dis-activated mind. When, as slumber descends, unthinking beckons, the mind’s lights dim, the objective self bursts in clanging bells and shouting at the top of its voice: awake, awake, this really won’t do! But I have nothing to think about, protests this man. Nothing currently in stock. I just want a break, with perhaps a few, lazy subjective reflections now and then. Sit up straight and out with it! No, no, I can’t, I’m exhausted, empty, barren. How does one explain such pain, Victor wondered? It’s like toothache. Just try and explain toothache to someone who has never truly suffered from it! These people with perfect, well-behaved teeth existed, he had met them. Well, it was a stupid image, he thought, but it did well illustrate the excruciating nature of boredom. It was beyond the imagination of anyone who did not know it, did not live it.

  Victor knew little or nothing about Giacometti, but he was certain that this man too suffered from his awareness of time; that it hung around his neck like a hundred anvils. No wonder he frequented Beckett.

  Finally, something is happening to me, he had cried! Bless him, thought Victor.

  Homo conscius. He will have to live with these burdens too, with boredom and with the weight of time, Victor was convinced of it. But that’s just tough. It will be quite useless to complain and to whine about it. There will be another step, in any case. Something beyond him too. Yes, I’m quite optimistic, thought Victor. As science little by little masters nature, so shall we find a way out of our own predicament in time. Not only shall we finish up solving all these problems one day or another, but we’ll perhaps even find happiness.

  Ironic Mexicans and Clever Greeks

  “Truth is truth.” Yes, Harry was quite right about that. Man complicated the question, often for reasons he didn’t realize or couldn’t confess, but it all came down to that. Someone had probably said it before Harry. He checked. Mahatma Gandhi! “Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” Quite so, thought Victor.

 
Victor liked Gandhi, who had once been asked by an earnest reporter, probably an American (no one is embarrassed by earnestness over there, he thought): “What do you think about Western civilisation?” To which Gandhi had replied: “Yes, it would be a very good thing.” Haha! Victor wondered if the reporter had got it. According to Philip Roth, there were only three people in America who understood irony, and he claimed to be one of them. The reporter was statistically unlikely to have been one of the other two, thought Victor.

  What was irony though, he wondered? And then: Is it really possible that a whole nation should be retarded in that way? It’s true, the United States is a long way from anywhere. That’s presumably why no one except Americans turns up when they organize the baseball World Series, for example. On second thought, Canada and Mexico are next door. Surely, there were ironic Mexicans, at least. He’d have to check.

  But I mustn’t storm too many bridges at the same time, thought Victor. I have the suspicion that irony is a big one and may hold many implications about other matters and most certainly concerning consciousness. And I can’t do everything!

  He was nevertheless unable to resist checking the dictionary for a definition, since, though he knew irony when he used it or heard it, he didn’t have the wit to readily explain it to himself. “Irony: Expression of one’s meaning by language of opposite or different tendency, especially simulated adoption of another’s point of view or laudatory tone for purpose of ridicule.” Excellent, he thought. That certainly requires a high degree of consciousness. But the dictionary editors had decided that this wasn’t the whole story, so they continued with other options: “Ill-timed or perverse arrival of event or circumstance in itself desirable, as in mockery of the fitness of things.” That was good too. And a third: “Use of language that has an inner meaning for a privileged audience and an outer meaning for the persons addressed or concerned.” Clever Greeks! All that resumed in the nice little word ‘eironeia’ they had come up with twenty-eight centuries ago. It was clearer to him now, though, why the good-natured and straightforward Americans struggled with it.

  Premature Ejaculation

  Dreams are messages sent to us by our unconscious minds, read Victor. It was his favorite page in the newspaper’s magazine supplement. People wrote in to describe their problems; a psychologist endeavored to untangle them and give advice. Often, but not always, about love and sex, apparently the two most important subjects on most people’s minds. My boyfriend looks at other women all the time; does he really love only me, as he says? My wife has become cold and pushes me away when I try to have sex with her; will her desire return? In general, the psychologist was really first rate, thought Victor, and useful for these and other people who appeared unable to think for themselves. But dream ‘messages’ transmitted from the unconscious? The ‘truth’ revealed in clever coded dispatches from the ‘real’ self? As though dreams had a meaning where conscious life was unable to come up with one? In the case at hand, a married woman kept dreaming about a previous love, felt guilty about doing so, and as a result questioned the sincerity of her attachment to her current man. The ‘message’, according to the psychologist? The famous unconscious was in fact telling her: “You haven’t yet laid to rest the first love; you are perhaps bored in your present relationship; you doubt the quality of this affair, something is missing in your life.” None of which was apparent to the woman from her conscious mind.

  What rubbish, thought Victor. These people really should make up their minds. Either this woman has failed to reconcile herself with losing her previous love or she hasn’t. She only has to ask herself the question, instead of writing to magazines to explain her dreams to her. He simply couldn’t understand how anyone who had ever dreamt could give credit to such theories. It was enough to look coldly at your own dreams. Setting aside the more outrageous symbolic interpretations—that teeth falling out signified fear of impotence; or missing a departing train, the fear of premature ejaculation, or whatever—it was self-evident that dreams were by their very nature absurd and without meaning. Or, if they had meaning, it was only the meaning within the dream itself, not a means of circumventing or prompting one’s woken self, which was, after all, the only true arbiter of these matters. Victor thought of dreams like the exciting kaleidoscope he had adored as a child. A tube full of brightly colored chips of glass which glittered in a thousand different tableaux each time you shook it up and peered into it again. In sleeping hours, the brain became his kaleidoscope, as a myriad fragments of images, thoughts, events, ideas, memories swirled around arbitrarily and meaninglessly, producing often insane, frequently banal, mainly nonsensical stories. Awake, a man directed and controlled his mind as best he could, like a schoolmaster in a class of rowdy and undisciplined adolescents. Asleep, all hell let loose as the teacher left the classroom.

  Yes, if my dreams are supposed to represent what I ‘really’ think, I should have been locked up, probably garroted, a long time ago, thought Victor. Happily, no one is sending me ‘messages’ of this kind. But if other people had unconscious minds at work twenty-four hours a day transmitting coded signals, even in sleep, well that was their problem. One might only doubt that they knew what they were talking about. Though he was sure that on the whole they didn’t care one way or another whether they were making any sense. It made them just a little bit more interesting, at least to themselves. As for the others … Is there anyone apart from me who wants to kill himself when someone insists on describing his or her dreams, wondered Victor? To think that Helen can listen to dream telling all day! That’s truly heroic, he thought, even if she gets paid for it. I’ll certainly have to ask her how she does it.

  They Died but Came Anyhow

  Victor received an invitation to have lunch with former colleagues in an organization that he had worked for and left thirty years before. He had maintained contact with none of them, but they had tracked him down anyhow. That was kind, he thought. He nevertheless had trouble convincing himself to join them, recalling a similar reunion of classmates at his former school, which had turned out badly, for him at least. They had split up at sixteen, and he had been curious to see who they were twenty years later. He had been excited at the prospect of hearing how each had developed in his or her thoughts and ideas about existence; about how they had exploited the life of independence and freedom they had yearned for when they were prisoners together at school and in their families. He assumed that they, as he, would be entirely different people, and he was intrigued to find out how they had evolved and what they had become.

  Theirs had been a strange generation, he thought. Everyone without exception had been in conflict with his or her parents, more often than not violently so. Looking back, he understood that they had been adolescents at a time of tectonic shifts in the social landscape. Their mothers and fathers had been brought up by parents born for the most part at the end of the nineteenth century who had inevitably carried within them many of the behavioral codes and values of that epoch. To their consternation, they found themselves confronted, in their own homes, with the rebellious children of rock and roll and to hell with authority and everything else, and simply hadn’t known how to handle this revolt against their persons and their adopted beliefs. Absolute foreigners to their parents, who spoke a language completely incomprehensible to them, these children had subsequently become a generation, perhaps the first in a long time, almost totally unmarked and uninfluenced, positively or negatively, by their families. They had no particular morality to fight or to revise, because they had rejected their moral inheritance even while youngsters. They found themselves on their own, free to invent their own values or to jump on those of others, even complete strangers. Or, indeed, to live by no particular moral code whatsoever.

  To say that Victor had been disappointed about the school reunion would have been an understatement. He was crushed. He had found his old classmates almost exactly as they had been at sixteen, just looking twenty years older. Though he dug and poke
d in search of interesting insights and perceptions and confessions about their lives and their opinions, no one had any inclination at all to speak intimately about how he or she had really fared since leaving school. Yes, of course, there were marriages and divorces, children and illnesses, career successes and failures and so on and so on. Certainly all that was interesting and at times quite moving. But what about the essential, Victor had wondered? Life? Twenty years beyond where they had all left it. Well, life as such, as an ontological question, clearly hadn’t become more complicated for these people, unlike for Victor. Or if it had, they were keeping it to themselves. Personally, he was ready to confess everything, had even tried once or twice. But no one seemed in the slightest bit interested, and his words fell silently among shuffling feet, averted eyes and creased foreheads when he tried talking honestly about himself. He didn’t believe that anyone was hiding anything. He didn’t judge them, it was none of his business. They simply appeared to have given up thinking about any of the things that Victor thought were essential, if ever they had actually begun. He soon fled the gathering. In the middle of dinner, without a word to anyone.

  This lunch of old colleagues will be different, he told himself as he sent off an e-mail of confirmation that he would be delighted to attend. First of all, I have no expectations or illusions. I know a little more about people than I did before the school reunion, and, more importantly, I expect much less of them. So much less, it bordered on nothing, actually. They were all adults when he had worked with them, all at least a few years older than he, and as such he presumed, and would accept, that they were simply what they had been then, no more nor less. Since it had been his first real job, he even looked back at them, his first ever workmates, with affection, warmth. Yes, he decided, it will be a true pleasure to spend a few hours with these good people, just for old time’s sake. There had only been one or two bastards among them, and he could now deal with those people too with equanimity and humor, both qualities he learned at meetings in foreign places with much more consequent and maliciously clever bastards than they.