Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  Harry’s words had shaken Victor. Did these men and women really care to that extent what he thought? Couldn’t they make their own judgments about the quality of their work, as he did about his? Wasn’t it downright condescending and pretentious to go around handing out plaudits, giving gold or silver stars as though they were all back at school? Wouldn’t they laugh in his face and say, “Fuck you!” and “Who are you to judge”?

  “Try it,” said Harry.

  He had. And had been amazed by the result. Calls of “Thanks boss” resounded from all four corners of his department. He saw more and more smiles; people whistled to themselves in their cubbyholes; the mood of the whole office improved measurably; his staff fell over themselves to stay late and achieve ever higher standards in their work. He shook his head with incredulity that people should have such modest self-esteem that they depended on him—of all people!—for their daily happiness in this way. And perhaps went home to their spouses boasting that he had eulogized them. You still have an awful lot to learn about other people, he had told himself.

  Now, the office was well behind him and no one counted on his blessings for their achievements. That was a relief, because though he had done his best, he had never been able to feel wholly comfortable about handing out laurel wreaths like a benevolent emperor. And he could spend much more time examining and judging his own case.

  Not only had Victor always disliked himself, but he had always been fully conscious that he disliked himself. If he believed what he read and heard, there were many people who were actually unaware of their self-loathing, had not articulated it to themselves. They were often the most cruel people of all, blindly punishing others for their self-contempt. Others knew well they had a problem with themselves but couldn’t really fathom the reasons, since they weren’t fat, stupid or ugly and hadn’t done anything particularly reprehensible. This left a great door open for the psychological and psychoanalytical community, of course, and it had duly charged in, scattering childhoods and unconscious minds all over the place.

  But Victor held the secret of his own lack of affection for himself: he deserved it! He saw absolutely no reason why society should try and convince people that they should like themselves, since very few of them indeed could justify any kind of favorable judgment and he was no exception. He saw himself at exactly his just worth, which when all was said and done was really not much. He was sure beyond doubt that his appreciation was realistic and fitting. He took pains not ever to compare himself with others in establishing this verdict. That was absurd and useless, for each man has in him only a certain potential that he can exploit. The only possible measure he could employ was his success or failure to rise to his own height, the height of a shadow figure he had always faintly perceived at a certain distance from himself. He had thus spent his life coldly identifying the worst features of his character—his jealousy, his occasional bouts of anger, his bad faith in discussions and arguments, his lack of generosity to other people, his egocentrism, the ease with which he lied to render his stories and memories more poetic or funnier—and had one by one eliminated them or greatly diminished their importance. And he had found a rather good man beneath all this, somewhat to his surprise.

  If praise made him feel uncomfortable, he was greatly at ease with criticism and even encouraged it. All he demanded was that it should be accurate, truthful. And could he judge that? Absolutely. But no one believed him of course.

  He felt that he had now very little left to adjust within his personality to ensure that it was a true image of the man he had from time to time identified as his prospective self and who now had emerged slowly but surely from the mist, had moved silently towards him, had embraced him warmly and all but vanished in his arms. He was almost one with him, at last. And he knew with absolute certainty that sooner rather than later this process of coalescence, this unification, would come to completion and give him a sense of being a whole man, for the first time in his life.

  These thoughts had come to Victor as he made his way home from the meeting in the pub with Harry and Ron. He still didn’t know quite what to think about all that. On the one hand, he felt embarrassed that he had so readily spouted off his theories to a complete stranger, Her Majesty’s spy or not; on the other, listening to himself had made him even more sure that his ideas held together, were coherent and insightful, and perhaps even opened up new perspectives. For the human race? I would die in shame rather than ever to suggest that, thought Victor. At least publicly. But at the same time, no one ever speaks about these things, to my knowledge at least. They would rather ferret around in the so-called unconscious and dark childhoods and act as though a man couldn’t get a grip on his mind and his emotions through sheer effort and will and, above all, honesty and self-contradiction. Is this impossible for wholly subjective people, he wondered, owing to some stunted brain structure or whatever? Or are they just bigger liars than the others, telling themselves fairy stories all the time? The devil knows. And maybe one day the counter-terrorism agency.

  Absolutely Groundless Guilt

  Two small children gamboled along the street in front of him, as crazy and senseless in their movements and pronouncements as if they had been drunkards. They leapt and danced madly and shouted gaily, completely ignoring the remonstrations of their mother, who, in any case, was more concerned with the telephone pressed to her ear. “Pee-pee!” they yelled. “Poo-poo!” Collapsing upon and colliding with each other joyously.

  Victor felt very inclined to shout ‘Pee-pee’ too, but didn’t want to spoil the children’s fun. If adults also ran down the street shouting naughty words, there wouldn’t be any point in being a child, after all.

  He felt at least as innocent as these children, perhaps more, somehow. He just prayed that once liberated from her telephone conversation, the mother would laugh and feel boundless love for her little transgressors and express a secret wish that they would remain as long as possible so wild and innocent and lacking in self-consciousness.

  His mother had certainly not been like that. She was an adept of gratuitous chastisement. Though he was sure that she had never thought about her educational techniques, they were essentially aimed at producing guilt and shame. And they had been effective in this beyond the dreams that she had never had. Victor had carried an immense sense of guilt through his life. He knew now beyond contradiction that it was not only causeless but that he was incapable of excising it from his personality. He had been extremely fertile ground for the sowing of this guilt, which surely wreaks the greatest harm, he thought, above all on the innocent. What did he have to feel guilty about? A chocolate figurine of Father Christmas stolen from a department store? The photos of women’s tits that he had cut out of one of his mother’s lingerie shopping catalogues (a crime never discovered, since he had buried the catalogue in the forest)? The kiss he had proclaimed—and taken—as the prize for finding pretty Anne’s jacket, which he had himself hidden under the slide in the children’s playground? The badly cooked meat he refused to eat “while children are starving in Biafra!” This was, incredibly, the more or less exhaustive list of the misdemeanors he remembered having committed as a child. And yet … “You should be ashamed of yourself! Don’t try and hide it from me. I know you did something you shouldn’t have.” The accusatory words, repeated constantly in the presence or absence not only of proof of crime but often even of crimes; such was his unhappy mother’s compulsion to throw blame around indiscriminately. He hung his head in the house, a permanent suspect, while the worm of guilt bore into his soul, never to leave. Together with shame, guilt’s pernicious blood-brother. When a clip round the ear, now but not then frowned upon or banned in civilized countries, would not only have been so much more effective in preventing him from committing these real or imagined crimes, but would have had no lasting life-long psychological effects, he felt.

  As an adult, he was even less guilty. In fact, he could think of only one single offense, as serious and repeated as it
might be, which merited his remorse: being completely uncooperative with the women who sought to change and reform him, as they invariably did try to do. And leaving them when they refused to abandon their reform programs.

  His guilt and shame had only one positive effect, which led, it was true, to many others: it proved to him beyond any doubt that one could experience such emotions without there being any empirical grounds whatsoever for their existence. He knew that he was innocent and yet felt no less guilty for that. And no effort at reason could talk him out of it. His mother’s work had been effective—though in truth there was no proof at all that it was the cause. After all, not only did other children, including his siblings, have at least as many reasons, most probably many more, to feel guilty for real or imagined crimes, but they carried no trace whatsoever of this emotion into their adult lives. Which brought Victor to two possible explanations: either he had been an excessively sensitive child, deeply, durably and quite senselessly wounded by his mother’s unjustifiable rebukes and accusations; or that there was an as yet undiscovered physiological cause, a gene for example, responsible for producing guilt feelings which were as natural to man as his eye pigmentation. In any case, the idea that understanding his guilt, identifying its origins, would help him eliminate it, had proved completely illusory, leading him to thumb once more his nose at the psychotherapists. He had even noted in an eminent psychologist’s Definitive Guide to Guilt that his kind of guilt wasn’t recognized at all, though he was certain that he couldn’t be the only person to feel it. According to this specialist, echoed by many others, there were only five types of guilt: guilt for something you did; guilt for something you didn’t do, but want to; guilt for something you think you did; guilt that you didn’t do enough to help someone; guilt that you’re doing better than someone else. The guide had completely missed his case: absolutely groundless guilt. For nothing either general or particular, for a crime which he had not only failed to—and did not want to—commit, but a crime which simply didn’t exist.

  Guilt of this kind, his kind, he concluded, was nothing more or less than a primary emotion without cause or need for grounds. It could live just as well with an object as without it. In this, he saw that it was the same as jealousy, anxiety and perhaps even love. He had suffered from jealousy, sexual jealousy, that is, all his adult life. He was consumed by it when he was with a woman, but it was no less strong when he and a woman had split up, even when this had been at his instigation. He was jealous of women’s pasts and of their futures without him. And it was completely senseless! It was not associated with anything real or even imagined and, in this, was absolutely incomprehensible to women, who insisted on denying the thoughts or actions of which they were not even accused. Jealousy lies coiled up in a man’s soul like a poisonous snake and spreads its venom without threat nor even purpose, except perhaps antediluvian and lost in time. Perhaps he had been breast-fed for too long, after all? Or not long enough? Or not at all? In any case, it was too late to ask his mother. And, either way, it would make no difference at all to know. So, to hell with it!

  Anxiety was exactly the same, he saw now. He had always been anxious. As in the case of guilt, there were a hundred different reasons why a man should feel anxiety and thus no shortage of causes to blame. He, like others, he supposed, had all his life incriminated a plethora of potential causes for his terrible anxiety. Then, just recently, he had decided to put the cart before the horse, to see what conclusions he could draw. And it became evident to him that the obnoxious state of anxiety existed quite independently of, and indeed preceded, the reasons to which he attributed it! That being anxious was his natural condition and that he had simply clothed it at one time or another in this or that gown of real distress.

  Could love, he wondered, be like this too? He knew from experience that a man can find himself full of amorous passion, bursting with love, even in the absence of a woman who inflames these emotions. This, he thought, was doubtless why he and so many other passionate men and women could make terrible errors and persuade themselves that they were in love with people who had done nothing more than cross their paths and been more or less agreeable. So many women had accused Victor of betraying them! Had indicted him on charges of inconstancy, falsehood and dark scheming to bed and leave them. It had not been so. He was innocent. Guilty only of wanting and needing to love and finding each time to his astonishment that he had once more misplaced this love in someone for whom he had not actually felt it but had sincerely believed that he had.

  Guilt, jealousy, anxiety, love … He had identified them within himself, isolated them and found them to be possible without cause nor healing. All that remained was to live with them. To push them at great effort from the middle of his chest down to his stomach, for those were the places where their drama played out. He was discovering, learning so much about himself, he felt. God, it was exciting!

  The children now out of sight, Victor began to skip down the street, restraining himself only from shouting rude words aloud. In his head, they sang in chorus: Bollocks, wanker, pee-pee, poo-poo. He laughed to himself like a madman.

  To Hell with Suffering!

  Victor found Yorick listening to Gustav Mahler.

  “Beautiful, beautiful. The andante moderato of the sixth symphony,” said Victor.

  He had been quick to discover Yorick’s taste for classical music and had taken to leaving the radio on in the dining room when he went out of the house.

  Music calmed and to all appearances chastened Yorick. It sent him into an almost trancelike state. And of all the composers that Victor played from time to time, Mahler appeared to be his favorite, since he chirped gaily when the first notes of any of his works began, before settling down silently to listen.

  “Da da dah dee dee dah, da da dum da deee, da dee dee dah dah da da da da da dah deeee …,” sang Victor softly, as he took a seat at the dining room table, to hear the movement out with Yorick.

  Mahler. Victor felt so close to himself, so complete, when he heard the composer’s symphonies. It was a feeling that perhaps music alone could provoke. All of life, all of his life, came together and was reflected and represented and in fortunate moments also reconciled. Not only the sublime, the noble, the beautiful; nor only the suffering and the chagrin; but so truly also the banal, the trivial, the absurd, the inconsequential, the completely laughable. Not separately but simultaneously, for life was like that.

  As the movement came to its close, Victor found himself lost … not in thoughts, for there were no words in him. Nor in memories—neither of people nor places nor moments. Not in sorrow, nor in joy. But instead, simply full of a consummate peace. It was quickly gone, though, fleeing guiltily in the same way as always the best moods in life.

  “So, Yorick. A lesson, I think?”

  He had dealt with God. He had grasped and taught to Yorick the transitory nature of everything, including man and parrot. He had expressed, in contradicting the poet, the absolute nature of our isolation and our solitude. He had encircled and fixed truth as only, and above all, that which it was. These were important, even essential questions, whose resolution allowed Victor to go on in confidence. For imagine that one should live by a question mark, or worse, a lie, lies? No, he would no longer stumble over or skirt around these questions, no longer be dragged down by doubt about them.

  “Onwards, Yorick!” he exclaimed cheerfully.

  But what next? What could he conclude, for example, from his explorations of man’s potential for absolute consciousness, for complete objectivity? What had he learned from these perceptions? Where had they taken him?

  He cast his mind back into his past, to the very worst moments of his life, to the time when he had little or no idea what was happening to him; when he had found himself lost in an unnamable and unspeakable struggle taking place on the stage of his mind. He remembered one phenomenon that had caused him immense confusion. He had not been able to choose between two equally plausible actions. In his house,
he could not decide which room to stay in. When he was in the dining room, he asked himself why he was not in the kitchen. When in the kitchen, he could find no reason why he was not rather in his study. When he went out of the house for a walk, he could not decide whether to turn left or to turn right, for both actions had their merits and inconveniences and he had no destination that might have decided the question for him. When he was able to drag himself to the cinema, he found that he could not choose between the various films showing that day, which seemed equally attractive or equally mediocre, and he had often turned his heels and slunk miserably back to his home instead of entering. He had spoken to no one about all this. And in his work life, curiously, there had been no such moments, no such doubt. He did what he had to do and no one thought that he was anything except decisive. He could only suppose it was because in work there had been little or no liberty to choose one’s destination, that the road had been traced and, even though there were countless opportunities for creativity and imagination, the objectives for which one strove were clear and fixed. No one could claim that about one’s personal life. Five minutes out of the office, and you were on your own again, with no particular reason to do this rather than that, no especial end in sight. Perhaps that was why some men lost themselves entirely in their professions, and their work became their life. It was a lot simpler that way.

  Victor laughed now about those times. Was I on the brink of lunacy, he wondered? It certainly seemed like it. At the same time, some very strong force had always held him together, or at least he felt it so, and had invariably persuaded him that he would retain his grip, despite his absolute bewilderment. After all, even then he had been watching himself. Even then, though fearful at each moment that he might slip beyond his own grasp, he had been able to return to … what? What could one call it? The sense of a different self, even one not yet attained, one glimpsed only rarely, a ghostlike figure in the mist? This self was not anything that could be related to a ‘past’, to a personality formed through time by the accumulation of memories, of people, of ideas, of emotions, of things heard or thought or lived. Struggling for an image, Victor thought of being lashed to a stone totem inscribed with fundamental moral tenets and obligations, demanding … not much, really—perhaps only, in fact, honesty, one of the most spoken about and least prevalent characteristics of man. Could one really hold grimly in such moments only to a handful of ideas, values, as a temporary substitute for actually being anything, anybody? Was it enough only to retain this sense of one’s own truth, one’s own authentic and truest self, however tenuous and fragile it might appear to be at certain moments? It had been his chance to do so, anyhow. Like a man in a broken boat on the high seas clinging solely to a sturdy mast, his vessel in pieces at his feet, waiting for the storms to subside so that he might drift on in to firm land.