Homo Conscius

by Timothy Balding

  Getting Close to Something

  What had the graphologist said about his scribbled name? He knew that pride would prevent Helen from ever asking him again. Once you foul up a conversation with a woman, he thought, it’s well nigh impossible to make amends or to redeem yourself. It was as though what you said—or the stain left by what you didn’t say—was absolutely indelible. Nothing you could ever do would wash it out of their minds. Like that word “bitch” he had once used in a moment of irritation with a woman and which he supposed long forgotten—he, indeed, had forgotten ever having pronounced it—only to be reminded of it several months later. Were men the same? He thought not, but short of undertaking an opinion poll he couldn’t be certain. He did, though, tend to think that men were much less likely than women to stow away an insult or a reproach like squirrels their nuts, only to bring them out and throw them at your head in the most unexpected moments long afterwards. Words are not important, only acts. Yes, that was indeed a good woman’s joke.

  In any case, the handwriting specialist had said that he was a man “imprisoned in himself.” She even used an image: that he lived in a castle with immensely thick stone walls, into which he let no man or woman enter, though from time to time he would stand on the ramparts and survey the crowd, or even—though this was rare—let down the drawbridge and wander out briefly to mingle with it. She had not stopped there. The main room in the castle, she said, was a hall of mirrors, where the man would wander day and night, surveying himself from the front, from the back, from one side, then from the other, turning and turning upon himself in a vain search to understand who it was he saw in his reflections.

  All that deduced from his signature! Her portrait had shaken Victor to his roots, for nothing in his behavior had ever led anyone to suspect he was such a man. He didn’t ever behave in an aloof, let alone arrogant, manner. He had a kind word for everyone and would make extraordinary efforts to make other people feel comfortable. In his office, his door always open, and even in his personal life, he was readily available to share ideas and experiences with everyone or simply to exchange pleasantries. He was taken as a true democrat and a humanist, as indeed he was. So what did the graphologist see that no one at all had caught sight of or was previously able to say about him? He had stared at length at his signature, but there was nothing there that he could even begin to decipher without some code or another. Only perhaps, crudely, that the “V” of his first name and the final “S” of his last were unintentionally exaggerated and disproportionate in size from the other letters and, indeed, could be said to be enclosing with strong, high boundary posts the rest of his name. She had been dead right, though. Since as long as he could remember, he had indeed been watching the others from a distance; he had, indeed, at the same time also protected himself from prying and was on truly intimate terms with nobody but himself. He had friends, of course, and lovers, but they knew no more about his “real” self than anybody else, since he had abandoned so early in his adult life all hope that anybody would grasp the struggles engaged in his mind. This wasn’t simply a presupposition; he had tried valiantly to explain himself at the outset, but it had been completely meaningless to everybody and provoked nothing but boredom. So he had locked himself up and kept his mouth shut! Yes, that was why he thought the graphologist’s characterization of him as “imprisoned” was so felicitous. But what did she mean about the mirrors? At the time, this remark had struck him as meaningless, but now he thought he had grasped it. He had, in fact, in some way been like those babies he had read about, but presumably for different reasons. He didn’t recognize himself in the mirror! His image had nothing to do with him! The man he saw was no more than the sum of his emotions and an amalgamation of his thoughtless prejudices. He was a shadow figure, with neither substance nor meaning. He tried to date this time within the chronology of the history of his development. Yes, yes, it could well have been the great epoch of his absolute nothingness, the years when he had, without knowing it, been crossing the barren no man’s land of the accidental Victor, the man who had simply been, without rhyme or reason or personality, an embryo, no more, of a human.

  Have I changed fundamentally since that time, Victor wondered? Certainly, everything about myself seems to have become transparent, where once I was more or less opaque. I do also feel that I am now incomparably freer than I was, than I have ever been. Why is this, he asked himself? From what exactly have I now been freed, completely unchained, let loose? I’ve got it! Myself, of course! Idiot. How could I have not seen it before? The struggle of my life has been to detach and emancipate myself from my subjective being, to leave him to lead his life as he will, but only to the extent that I allow it! When I am drunk, for example, or when overcome with love. For a woman or even just for a moment of beauty.

  I’m getting close to something, thought Victor. Something fundamental about myself and, thus, fundamental about human life, for what is true about me is necessarily also true about men in general, because I am no more and no less than absolutely every one of them.

  Savoring the moment, delaying for a second the thought in its short voyage from the corner of the brain where ideas are born to the place—it was perhaps something like a haberdashery, he imagined, with shelves lined with words, singly or in sentences—where they dress themselves up for articulation and exhibition, he was sure that he had seen his truth: “I have finally become an absolute object to myself!” he said quietly.

  Could he ever prove it to the others? Why on earth should he want to?

  The Sin of Wanting More

  Dostoevsky—the only man from whom I have learned anything about psychology, wrote Nietzsche—said through the voice of his basement hero that “to be too acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease.” It would, he grumbled, “have been quite sufficient for the business of everyday life to possess the ordinary human consciousness, that is to say, half or even a quarter of the share which falls to the lot of an intelligent man of our unhappy nineteenth century …”

  A disease? Certainly a serious affliction, thought Victor; in the effects it could engender, at least. But an affliction that could and must be overcome, that must be transformed into some other condition if one was to survive among men without constant anxiety and grief, casting blame left, right and center, cursing one’s fate to the bitter end, or simply edging away into the silent shadows like a leper.

  Slipping into bed to read again a few pages of the Russian’s Notes from the Underground before sleep, Victor once more recognized himself in the figure of this lonely, imprecating outcast settling imaginary scores with his contemporaries but also with himself, mocking them and their foolishness and his own. His condition, this too-conscious man, this objective man constantly laughing at and condemning his own judgments, his pride, his intolerance and his unfairness, was both tragic and jubilatory. But it could not be an end unto itself, thought Victor; one could not remain such a man; there was no happiness to be found in standing aside from oneself and from the others; it could only end badly.

  The Consul, shot, his body dumped down a ravine, lying next to a dead dog. Klingsor, at the end of his last summer of creativity and debauchery, disappears—dead, too, certainly, by his own hand, or such were the rumors. Nagel, whether or not wearing his yellow suit we would never know, jumping from the pier into the sea, his last trace a few bubbles rising to the water’s surface. Victor’s literary heroes, mostly drunkards like him, had been unable to live out their condition as conscious men, had succumbed, exhausted, to their desire to kill their minds once and for all. He would not join them. He would keep going.

  One could not, certainly, ever be fully reinstated among the community of men as they were, he thought. One was condemned, certainly, to remain apart in many ways. But it was important to grasp that one was also only a stepping stone in the development of mankind, as it adapted, evolved, mutated, again and again and again. The story, man’s story, was yet still at its beginning. One could
only recognize with a certain pride that one was part of it. And, above all perhaps, to set oneself the immodest ambition, if ever one were in any way in such a position, to make some small, even microscopic, addition to the great edifice of life being built by man at each moment.

  In the meantime, his only sin, he reflected, was to want more: more love, more passion, more tenderness, more sex, more beauty, more laughing, more intellectual excitement still. Life was about wanting more, more, more, without allowing this to drive you crazy when it failed, as it must, to live up to your ambitions and aspirations and the plenitude of your desires.

  Victor’s good fortune was that he was now able to see all this from beyond himself, a neutral witness to his own struggles; not uninvolved, certainly, but finally liberated from the emotional and intellectual burden of the self with which nature had entrusted him. He realized that he had in fact always watched over this self protectively, with more or less success, it was true. But he felt that he had been as loyal as humanly possible. Though a harsh judge at times—at others a little too tolerant—he had always sought to preserve what was best in him and to excise not only what was damaging to himself but what was also hurtful to the others. He had, often with great impatience, watched his development; how he had with astonishing sluggishness crawled inch by inch out of the mental sludge in which he had been born and brought up, towards … what? Enlightenment? He struggled to put a word to it. What was clear, though, was that his subjective self, that mediocre amalgam of dried straw and dung, had been dragging him around for the last thirty-five years like a ball and chain and that he wasn’t going to put up with it a moment longer. To hell with him! A new man was in charge now.

  We are condemned, each and every one of us, essentially to one thing only: to live within our own minds, Victor realized. Did this imply that we could never thus attain the freedom that all of us in our own way so ardently desired, even if we didn’t necessarily put this name to our yearning? He had up until now been chained to himself—yes, that had been his life-long problem. And now? Had he, in breaking those chains, perhaps become some kind of floating spirit? Haha! That would be a fine thing, he thought. It was true in any case that he did not any longer feel weighed down by himself. Yes, he felt lighter … And he saw, suddenly and more clearly than he had ever been able before, that it was precisely his hard-won objectivity that made him a free man.

  Objectivity is freedom! The words exploded in his mind. Yes! That was where all this had been leading. That was the truth waiting for him at the end of the long and perilous voyage into his mind. That was the lesson of lessons that he would now have to teach Yorick.

  It was this freedom—he was sure of it now—which would allow him right up to the conclusion of his own insignificant story to remain a happy man.

  A Crash of Glass in the Night

  It was a Council or Board meeting, perhaps even an Executive Committee, so few were they around the table. Victor knew none of them and they didn’t apparently know each other. A man with shoulder-length hair and a beard, sitting at the head of the table in a smart dark-blue suit, called the meeting to order and invited the attendees to “introduce yourselves—or,” he added smiling broadly, “perhaps I should say your … selves,” at which they all laughed.

  “I’m Kevin,” volunteered a freckled, fair-headed man who looked to be in his early forties. “It was quite a fight,” he said. “An immense struggle. We wrestled day and night, for weeks and months on end, but I finally forced him to the ground, made him beg me to stop beating him, and I think that I can say that I made him submit, tamed him. In any case, he now follows me around slavishly, and though from time to time he complains and says awful, stupid things, he seems at last to know who’s the boss and even checks supinely with me before he acts or speaks!”

  The others laughed again and applauded warmly, with cries of “Yessssss” and punches of their fists in the air. He hadn’t needed to explain what he was talking about; they all apparently knew already.

  After a short silence, a severe, grey-haired older man cleared his throat and addressed the meeting: “Good morning, I’m Bill. I may need your help, to tell the truth,” he said. “I’ll be frank with you, my brothers. I’m afraid, I’m really scared. I too am engaged in such a struggle as that described by Kevin. It’s endless. But it’s not that I don’t think I can win, that I cannot overcome him. It’s that I don’t dare to let him go. He’s all I’ve got, in a way. He’s everything that I was taught, with all his flaws and weaknesses. People recognize him, expect things from him, are attached to him. Supposing that I let him drift away? What will be left? Will I still have my emotions, my loves, my hates? Will …”

  There was a crash of glass. Had someone knocked a carafe of water off the table? Victor shook himself and looked around him. He realized that he was sweating and that it was dark. He reached out his arms and felt with his hands … the sheets and pillows of his bed. He had been dreaming … What about the crashing noise, though? That had seemed real enough. He thrust aside his quilt, slipped his legs to the floor and made a failed attempt to rise. Yes, I drank too much tonight, he remembered. His mind felt thick and numb. He sat on the edge of his bed and shook his head to restart his thoughts. He then made a new effort and hauled himself to his feet, turning on a bedside light and, before moving, listening for other sounds in the house. Nothing. Eerily silent as only night can be. He walked out into the corridor and headed, as he must, towards the dining room. The door was ajar—he thought that he had, as always, closed it when going to bed. Instead of lighting the room—he couldn’t bear the idea of the glare at this hour—he let himself be guided by the luminosity of the lamp in the passageway.

  He saw immediately the cage, its door open. Empty. He felt a searing tear in his heart. He became aware, too, of a chill in his back. Once more in the corridor, he saw this time that the front door of his house was open and that a small pane of glass next to the handle had been smashed. And that on his doormat was a large sheet of white paper. He bent down, let himself fall on his knees, and crouched down like this read the words:

  “I come for Yorick. I need him more you. I teach him Czech. I tell him my story. Sorry. Dobrou noc, good night. Madwoman.”

  They’re Out There, Somewhere

  Victor heard a third and final time from the gentlemen at Vauxhall Bridge. A tumbler of scotch in hand, he was standing at his window one evening, watching the sun set over the roofs of the houses opposite his own, hoping in vain that the pacing woman would appear again, or that Yorick might swoop gaily past his window crying ‘Dobrou noc!’ and yelling about the death of God. As he surveyed the sky, he wondered, as he had always done: “Is there something poetic here which has escaped me? I don’t think so, but I could certainly be wrong.” Before he had time to reflect further on the question, his telephone rang. A gruff voice announced himself as “a colleague of Ron’s” and, without beating about the bush, asked whether Victor could do them a “favor” and drop by a “Care Center”—“well, actually, a mental health establishment,” the voice added—“not far from where you live,” for a “few neurological examinations.”

  Victor declined. No, he said to himself, they’ll have to find themselves another objective man this time.

  As he replaced the telephone and looked at the sky once more, he thought: I’m sure that they’re out there, somewhere, in the falling night.

  Thanks

  To Michael Eskin, my publisher, above and beyond all for the extraordinary and unwavering faith he showed in this book from the first moment the manuscript found its way into his hands. But no less for his charm, great humor, erudition and generosity. To Michael's colleagues at UWSP, for their equally strong and efficient support. To Yolanda, who convinced me that a light would one day finally appear at the end of the tunnel: Gracias, mi amor.

  About the Author

  Born in 1954 in London of mixed Scottish and English parentage, Timothy Balding grew up and was educated on a British military b
ase in Germany. He left school and his family at the age of sixteen to return alone to the United Kingdom, where he was hired as a reporter on local newspapers in Reading in the county of Berkshire. For the ensuing decade, he worked on local and regional titles and then at Press Association, the national news agency, covering politics in Westminster, the British Parliament. He exiled himself to Paris, France, in 1980, and spent the next thirty years working for international, non-governmental organizations. For twenty-five of these, he was Chief Executive Officer of the World Association of Newspapers, the representative global group of media publishers and editors, established after World War II to defend the freedom and independence of the press worldwide. A Knight (First Class) in the Order of the White Rose of Finland—an honor accorded him by Nobel Peace laureate Martti Ahtisaari, former Finnish President—Timothy Balding currently lives between France and Spain and devotes himself to writing. Homo Conscius is his first novel.

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