Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  How he had suffered! Such agonies! And who could possibly understand them? He was barely able to do so himself. Honest-to-God suffering had to have reasons, causes, any idiot knew that. Grief, anguish, the fear of death, the fear of life, the torments of jealousy, failed love, shame, guilt. The sadistic bastard had a veritable panoply of psychological and physical tortures up his sleeve, the list was endless! And what did he have to offer in these departments? No one dear to him had departed or been the victim of grave misfortune; he had no great unrequited love to regret; he had no thwarted ambitions. He nevertheless swore before the High Court of Suffering (or the Low Court—who was he to say to which he should be summoned?) that his distress had been as real as if a nail had been stuck in his head. And the only sensible conclusion he could draw from his ruminations about what had happened was that it was ideas that had caused him pain! Or rather questions without resolution, hammering ceaselessly in his mind. It seemed so impersonal and abstract as a concept that no one had believed it, and he doubted whether any one ever would. But it had been so. He had done nothing much more than ask: who am I? what is true in me? what is life?

  How long did you dare to keep a question open? Wasn’t that the measure of a man? When the question, and most likely not just one—two, fifty of them—pursued you relentlessly, day and night, preventing you even from sleep? When the option of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or even ‘why don’t I forget it?’ simply wasn’t available? No wonder people really did stop or never started these dialogues, ceased asking themselves personal questions, thought Victor. That they took refuge in what they were and what they thought they knew and left it at that. And the others? Those who couldn’t shut down the machine? Well, among them were to be found many of the demented, of that he was sure. Just listen to a madman in the street. Shouting his certainties in the face of all and sundry. He does so not because he believes them—he is only playing at his dogmatism—but because he can no longer bear to hear his doubts, his questions. He can no longer reopen the debate.

  It was getting dark in the room. Victor saw that Yorick was sleeping, or at least dozing, his head lying on his back among his feathers, and he slipped out quietly to his study. His next lesson would have to wait, after all.

  Victor felt well with himself. How peaceful I have become, he thought. It’s astonishing that I lived through all that. At moments, I even forget that I did, so little do I have to show for it, at least in the manner of wounds or scars. Man adapts to almost everything, even to his own happiness, and if there are no bodies, real or figurative, lying around in his past, it can at times seem that none of it had actually been lived. What did it all mean? Absolutely nothing, apparently. Nothing that I can really articulate, anyhow. Though it was true that he had finally felt a clear and compelling sense of redemption. Not only was there a man waiting for him at the end of his Via Dolorosa (it could, after all, have been his crucifixion) but he was a good, attractive man, whom people liked and who could possibly finish by liking himself, if he put enough effort into it, though to what end he might do so he couldn’t imagine. So all his suffering had in a sense been worth something, or if not ‘worth’, for there was no meaningful currency to measure such things, had resulted in, or paved the way for, or had at least revealed, somebody. Him. Like everything else, this sense of redemption had been provisional, had eventually faded away to nothing except a memory. But he had enjoyed it as long as it had lasted. And it was a good thing that it had finally vanished. Had it not disappeared into thin air like that, he might have wasted a great deal of time, going around saying to himself: “I have been redeemed!” and thinking that this in itself was the ultimate goal of his existence, a finality. No, it was necessary to move on again. To wipe the slate clean afresh. To start life all over again, and this forever more. There were no finalities. And to hell with suffering!

  It was getting late. Victor wondered whether Helen might be idle and wish to see him. It was possible, but again did he really wish to see her? Probably not. Not tonight. He was in such a good mood and that was sometimes such a delicate thing that he didn’t want to run the risk of breaking the spell. No, he was happy here in his study; only scotch was missing and that was quickly fixed. He would rather go on thinking this evening, profiting from his newfound ability to hold an idea steady, fixed, and to move around it, poke it, examine it from above and below, and thus to get a sense of what he was dealing with. It was quite different from before, from his past, when ideas slipped away into nothingness almost as soon as he set his gaze on them.

  He rose from his armchair in a studied, elegant manner, raising his chin a little and trying to look noble. He pushed his shoulders slightly backwards, straightened his back and drew himself to his full height. Yes, the maharaja. He was sure that he had got him, spot on. He would soon have to try him out in the supermarket; even indeed while walking in his own street.

  Back in his chair with a prince-sized tumbler of whisky, he wondered what subject to turn to next in his thoughts. The whole of life, the whole of his life, offered itself willingly, even supinely now, as a matter for contemplation, evaluation and even jest. It seemed almost as though a boulevard of happiness lay stretched out before him.

  This was not to say that he did not still have moments of unhappiness, of spleen. They had not altogether disappeared. But, then, they were quite different from suffering, which was elusive in its nature only when the mind failed to identify it, failed to put words to it. But unhappiness? That little fellow was a lot more deceitful, shifty, malicious; he went about his ways in numerous disguises, hardly if ever revealing his true self and perhaps not even having one. Like everything else about himself, Victor had studied his unhappiness too. And he had more or less learned to master it. He saw it creeping up on him from time to time, in the most underhand way imaginable, and when he saw it coming he grabbed it by the throat, held it at the end of his arms, and without pity throttled it. It was simply unworthy of him, he decided. He had become very vigilant about this.

  Yes, unhappiness was hardly worth bothering about and he had already given far too much importance to it. Though this was contentious, perhaps even artificial, he preferred to consider unhappiness as a largely physiological phenomenon. He chose, and this was his right, to blame his mournful moods on his abuse of caffeine, for example. Or if not that, a hormonal imbalance. Or a surfeit of green beans in his diet. Because if you wasted your time looking for events or experiences or frustrations to blame for your melancholy, there was simply no end to the number of potential malefactors. There were always numerous such beasts lying nonchalantly around your mind stirring up trouble. In no life were they absent. To hell with them too!

  Victor was happy to discover that he was well on the way now to sanctuarizing the real heart of his being. To building a small but impenetrable bunker in his soul within which he could keep alive forever the flame of life and of joy and of love and of passion. In doing so, he believed he was becoming untouchable. And, after all, this was only a just return to the real essence of his self, to the gay and happy little boy he had always been. How extraordinary, how remarkable, he thought, that nothing in his life, none of the trials and tribulations he had lived through, had either eliminated or even contaminated this wonderful treasure with which nature had endowed him.

  The Yoke of Subjectivity

  “Victor Andrews, Lieutenant-Colonel, serial number 381-223-32.”

  “That’s good, funny,” said Ron without conviction.

  Ron’s colleague, who had not been introduced by name, clearly found Victor’s response even less amusing than did Ron. He simply repeated his question:

  “Tell us something about yourself,” he said to Victor.

  Though he had agreed to it reluctantly, Victor found that he was looking forward to the interrogation. He had always been envious to hear that “suspect X” was being “questioned by the police” and wished often to be in his or her place. In the same way, he regretted not ever having been discretely pu
lled aside for “a chat” by the somber men and women who surveyed arriving passengers at frontier airports and train stations. He had failed to incite the slightest interest on the part of these people, even when he had put on the most sinister facial expression he had been able to come up with or tried to behave in an unusually bizarre manner. This desire to be investigated by someone or other was probably, he thought, the result of his frustration at the total lack of inquisitiveness he had encountered in the course of even normal human contacts. By nature almost completely incurious about others, he had nevertheless cultivated the virtue or vice, he knew not which, of asking everyone whom he knew or met—even strangers—numerous questions about their lives. In doing so, he had discovered that nothing pleases most men or women more than to talk about themselves. Once they were launched, one could just sit back and listen, or not, depending on one’s mood. It killed time at least. He was never repaid in kind by questions of any order. He found this disheartening. On the one hand, he was a secret man who had no intention at all of revealing his true self to idle inquisition; on the other, he was incredibly anxious to talk about himself, both in the cause of equality, as a mark of shared attentiveness, and because like all men, he supposed, who spend their lives in intense dialogue with themselves, he needed to air his thoughts from time to time with another human being.

  “Ron promised that nothing that I might say will go out of this room. That’s understood, I hope?”

  Victor was unsure of the hierarchical relationship between these two men and wanted to make sure that Ron’s word was good too for his interrogator. The man cast a glance at Ron, who nodded vigorously, settling the matter.

  “It’s not that I have any secrets; it’s just that in rambling on about oneself one is bound to be indiscreet,” said Victor.

  The men both stared silently at him.

  “Where to start, then? My ‘biographical’ information is absolutely without interest, as with most of us. My childhood? The most striking thing about it is that nothing whatsoever that I lived through, at home or in school, ever stuck to me. I might as well have grown up alone in a cave in the hills, the childhood that Kafka would readily have exchanged for the one he actually had to live. Except inasmuch as that in a handful of matters I subsequently did exactly the opposite of that which I was taught or that for which I was persecuted. Cleaning my neck, for example. The devil knows why, but my mother had an obsession with clean necks. Every evening, as I was taking my bath as a child, she would unfailingly scream up the staircase, ‘Have you washed your neck?’ And do you know what? For a good ten to fifteen years after leaving home I never washed my neck again. This was not spite, nor conscious neglect. I simply didn’t feel inclined to do so any more.”

  Victor paused, waiting for a reaction or a question. But the men just continued gazing at him, so he went on.

  “I think that this has some significance in judging what kind of person I am. Not a rebel, certainly not. I never showed the slightest inclination to revolt and indeed did all I could to please and agree with everyone. Later, as I realized that an incalculable number of people did in fact merit my antipathy, I was saved from an exertion of useless, negative energy by my timely discovery of Chateaubriand’s dictum: ‘One must be thrifty with one’s contempt; so many people deserve it’. But I am always struck when I hear of or meet people who by some strange process of osmosis are almost perfect reproductions of one or both of their parents, and who share their opinions or their behavior, or even affect their physical tics. Yes, of course, it may be that they simply have similar personalities to their fathers or mothers. But clearly there are also many who are just too lazy to think for themselves or develop their own manner of conduct and slide effortlessly into adulthood in the slipstream of their parents attitudes and views. I wanted, by the way, in case you are asking yourselves the question, to kill my mother, but only from time to time. Though I had no desire, it should be said, to sleep with my father.”

  Neither Ron nor his colleague appeared to find this humorous.

  “What I want to say,” said Victor, “was that my education had little or no influence, as far as I can see, on what I have become, whether negatively or positively. Except in the most trivial ways. How can I know this, you may ask? The general prejudice is that I cannot know and judge this for myself, a view justified by vague and confused mutterings about subjectivity and, obligatorily, the unconscious mind. But that analysis simply doesn’t add up, doesn’t make any sense in my case. It can only apply to those people who, firstly, have no capacity at all for identifying the origin of their judgments, their opinions, their tastes, their emotions, their characters and personalities, whether given at birth or developed over time in the light of experience and intellectual effort and, secondly, in fact don’t even bother to examine the sense and value of their views with the prospect, for example, of changing them. If you want to be convinced that one can escape the yoke of subjectivity, think about this: it is not at all absurd and far from necessarily negative, despite what psychologists and Christians will tell you, to abhor oneself. And to disagree with pretty much everything one thinks. What could be more normal, balanced and fair? It is the proof even of the development of one’s objective capacities and, after all, outside the rare cases of born saintliness, the sole hope that we as a species possess that we can improve ourselves.”

  Faced with their silence and, he feared, their boredom, Victor thought he should get down to more cutting questions.

  “So, then, do I hate myself? Not now, no. I once did, it’s true. Or, if hate is perhaps too strong a word, let’s say dislike. The best I can currently say is that I think I am a decent man making a better than average effort to be truly good and that in this I have earned a little bit of respect for myself.”

  Victor saw that the interrogator had clearly stifled a yawn, swallowing hard on the air that despite himself had inflated his cheeks.

  This is clearly not an exercise in repartee, thought Victor. He’s probably spent too much time with shrinks. A little discouraged that all his soul baring was failing to surprise, let alone fascinate, either of them, he nevertheless went on:

  “A self-critique, even so? I can observe a lingering bad faith, which manifests itself when I realize that an argument I’m making doesn’t completely stand up. What else? … Occasional minor cowardices, when running away or turning my back, though not very dignified, is the path of least grief. Sporadic envy, though I believe that this has been abusively classified among the deadly sins. Does not envy, do not admiration for and yearning after the achievements of others, push us also to attain new heights? An obviously congenital laziness, which I’ve simply not been able to overcome. An abiding jealousy in relations with women, despite enormous efforts to eliminate it. A lack of generosity and kindness, which seem to be associated with my laziness, since I see their merits but often cannot be bothered with them. And though this has nothing to do with my ability to live up to my own moral standards, unlike my other vices: a definite failure to attain a level of intelligence with which I am comfortable. Yes, this failure above all prevents me from really liking myself.”

  Are they getting the point of this, he wondered?

  “The intelligence thing remains a bit of a mystery to me, to tell the truth,” Victor continued, trying to steer himself towards the questions which had interested Ron in the first place. “But even science understands absolutely nothing about the question of intelligence, so it’s not surprising. Anyhow, to the best of my knowledge, and to my bafflement, most people are satisfied with their brains. Some of them clearly don’t like this and that about themselves, or are pained by their failure to advance professionally, their lack of money, their inability to find someone to love, their incapacity to forget bad things that have happened to them, or whatever. But I don’t come across many people who judge themselves to be deficient in intelligence, at least not to the point that they suffer from it. Aside from the boneheads who find themselves frankly genial, mo
st people take what they’ve got without judging themselves. What does this say about them? Or, better, what does this say about me? I think it suggests something unusual, related to the existence of the two voices within us, which in my case were once largely conflictual but are now, happily, more or less contrapuntal - in other words, clearly exist independently but are harmonically related. Both voices, if that’s what I can call them, are completely conscious and articulate. I can ‘hear’ them both, or hear one with the ears of the other, so to speak, and they express themselves in words. They’ve thus got nothing to do with the psychoanalytic structural models because I don’t commingle—that’s a nice word, isn’t it?—emotion, or instinct, and thought or ideas, as they seem to do. One of these voices—let’s call it the ‘subjective’—has as its principal characteristic the poverty of its critical faculty. It simply isn’t designed to turn on itself and probably can’t. It absorbs information, ideas, ideologies, sometimes adopting them wholesale, and even taking them to be its own, and then regurgitates them. I suppose that the main merit of these subjective postures is that they respond to a need—to hate or love something or other, or to ‘believe’ in something, for example—or that they simply fill a void for, let’s say, social purposes. And the other, ‘objective’ voice? It is independent—I am absolutely persuaded of that—and disincarnate. Although it’s an integral part of my being, in a way it isn’t attached to me at all, not to my past nor to my personality. It makes its judgments without reference to the subjective Victor and very often in contradiction to it, to … him, to me, I should probably say.”