Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (44 page)

To exculpate himself in
my
eyes he would wind up by explaining to my
wife that I was a born anarchist, that my sense of freedom was a peculiarly personal one, that
the very idea of discipline was abhorrent to my nature. I was a rebel and an outlaw, a
spiritual freak, so to say. My function in life was to create disturbance. Adding very soberly
that there was need for such as me. Then, as if carried away, he would proceed to rectifiy the
picture. It was also a fact, he had to admit, that I was too good, too kind, too
gentle, too patient, too indulgent, too forbearing, too forgiving. As if
this balanced the violence, the ruthlessness, the recklessness, the treachery of my essential
being. At this point he might even say that I
was
capable of understanding
discipline, since, as he put it, my ability to write was based on the strictest kind of
self-discipline.

“C’est un être bien compliqué,”
he would conclude. “Fortunately, I
understand him. I know him inside out.” With this he would press his thumb against the table
top, as if squashing a louse. That was
me
under his thumb, the anomaly which he had
studied, analyzed, dissected, and could interpret when occasion demanded.

Often an evening that began auspiciously would end in an involved discussion
of our domestic problems, something which I abhorred but which wives seem to enjoy,
particularly when they have a sympathetic listener. Since I had long resigned myself to the
futility of arriving at any understanding with my wife through discussion—I might as well have
talked to a stone wall—I limited my participation to rectifying falsehoods and distortions of
fact. For the most part I presented an adamant silence. Quite aware that there are always two
sides to the picture, poor Moricand would struggle to shift the discussion to more fundamental
grounds.

“One gets nowhere with a type like Miller,” he would say to my wife. “He does
not think in the way you and I do. He thinks in circular fashion. He has no logic, no sense of
measure, he is contemptuous of reason and common sense.”

He would then proceed to describe to her
her
virtues and defects, in
order to demonstrate why we could never see eye to eye, she and I. “But I understand you both.
I can act as arbiter. I know how to put the puzzle together.”

As a matter of fact, he was quite correct in this. He proved to be a most
excellent referee. In his presence, what might have ended in explosions ended only in tears or
mute perplexity. Often, when I prayed that he would grow weary and take leave of us for the
night, I could sense my wife doing the very opposite. Her only
chance of
talking with me, or at me, was in his presence. Alone we were either at one another’s throats
or giving each other the silence. Moricand often succeeded in lifting these furious and
prolonged arguments, which had become routine, to another level; he helped us, momentarily at
least, to isolate our thoughts, survey them dispassionately, examine them from other angles,
free them of their obsessive nature. It was on such occasions that he made good use of his
astrological wisdom, for nothing can be more cool and objective, more soothing and staying to
the victim of emotion, than the astrological picture of his plight.

Not every evening was spent in argument and discussion, to be sure. The best
evenings were those in which we gave him free rein. After all, the monologue was his forte. If
by chance we touched on the subject of painting—he had begun life as a painter—we were sure to
be richly rewarded for hearing him out. Many of the now celebrated figures in French art he
had known intimately. Some he had befriended in his days of opulence. His anecdotes concerning
what I choose to call the golden period—the two or three decades leading up to the appearance
of
les Fauves
—were delicious in the sense that a rich meal is delicious. They were
always spiced with uncanny observations that did not lack a certain diabolical charm. For me
this period was fraught with vital interest. I had always felt that I was born twenty or
thirty years too late, always regretted that I had not first visited Europe (and remained
there) as a young man. Seen it
before
the First World War, I mean. What would I not
give to have been the comrade or bosom friend of such figures as Apollinaire, Douanier
Rousseau, George Moore, Max Jacob, Vlaminck, Utrillo, Derain, Cendrars, Gauguin, Modigliani,
Cingria, Picabia, Maurice Magre, Léon Daudet, and such like. How much greater would have been
the thrill to cycle along the Seine, cross and recross her bridges, race through towns like
Bougival, Châtou, Argenteuil, Marly-le-roi, Puteaux, Rambouillet, Issy-les-Moulineaux and
similar environs circa 1910 rather than the year 1932 or 1933! What a difference it
would have made to see Paris from the top of a horse-drawn omnibus at the
age of twenty-one! Or to view the
grands boulevards
as a
flâneur
in the
period made famous by the Impressionists!

Moricand could summon all the splendor and misery of this epoch at will. He
could induce that
“nostalgie de Paris”
which Carco is so adept at, which Aragon,
Léon-Paul Fargue, Daudet, Duhamel and so many French writers have given us time and again. It
needed only the mention of a street name, a crazy monument, a restaurant or cabaret which
exists no more, to start the wheels turning. His evocations were even more piquant to me
because he had seen it all through the eyes of a snob. However much he had participated, he
had never suffered as did the men he spoke of. His sufferings were to come only when those who
had not been killed in the war or committed suicide or gone insane had become famous. Did he
ever imagine in his days of opulence, I wonder, that the time would come when he would be
obliged to beg his poor friend Max Jacob for a few sous—Max who had renounced the world and
was living like an ascetic? A terrible thing to come down in the world when your old friends
are rising on the horizon like stars, when the world itself, once a playground, has become a
shabby carnival, a cemetery of dreams and illusions.

How he loathed the Republic and all it represented! Whenever he made mention
of the French Revolution it was as if he were face to face with evil itself. Like Nostradamus,
he dated the deterioration, the blight, the downfall from the day
le peuple—la
canaille
, in other words—took over. It is strange, now that I come to think of it, that
he never once spoke of Gilles de Rais. Any more than he ever spoke of Ramakrishna, Milarepa,
or St. Francis. Napoleon, yes. Bismarck, yes. Voltaire, yes. Villon, yes. And Pythagoras, of
course. The whole Alexandrian world was as familiar and vivid to him as if he had known it in
a previous incarnation. The Manichean world of thought was also a reality to him. Of
Zoroastrian teachings he dwelt by predilection on that aspect which proclaims “the reality of
evil.” Possibly he also believed
that Ormuzd would eventually prevail
over Ahriman, but if so it was an eventuality only realizable in a distant future, a future so
distant as to render all speculation about it, or even hope in it, futile. No, the reality of
evil was undoubtedly the strongest conviction he held. He was so aware of it, indeed, that he
could enjoy nothing to the full; actively or passively he was always exorcising the evil
spirits which pervade every phase, rung and sphere of life.

One evening, when we had touched on things close to his heart, he asked me
suddenly if I had lost all interest in astrology. “You never mention it any more,” he
said.

“True,” I replied. “I don’t see what it would serve me to pursue it further. I
was never interested in it the way you are. For me it was just another language to learn,
another keyboard to manipulate. It’s only the poetic aspect of anything which really interests
me. In the ultimate there is only one language—the language of truth. It matters little how we
arrive at it.”

I forget what his reply to this was precisely, only that it conveyed a veiled
reproach for my continued interest in Oriental thought. I was too absorbed in abstract
speculations, he hinted. Too Germanic, possibly. The astrologic approach was a corrective I
stood in need of. It would help to integrate, orient, and organize much in me that was
flou
and chaotic. There was always a danger, with a type like me, of becoming
either a saint or a fanatic.

“Not a lunatic, eh?”

“Jamais!”

“But something of a fool! Is that it?”

His answer was—Yes and No. I had a strong religious strain, a metaphysical
bent. There was more than a touch of the Crusader in me. I was both humble and arrogant, a
penitent and an Inquisitioner. And so on.

“And you think a deeper knowledge of astrology would help overcome these
tendencies?”

“I would not put it exactly like that,” he said. “I would say simply that it
would help you to see more clearly … see into the nature of your problems.”

“But I have no problems,” I replied. “Unless they are
cosmological ones. I am at peace with myself—and with the world. It’s true, I don’t get along
with my wife. But neither did Socrates, for that matter. Or….”

He stopped me.

“All right,” I said, “tell me this—what has astrology done for
you?
Has it enabled you to correct your defects? Has it helped you to adjust to the world? Has it
given you peace and joy? Why do you scratch yourself like a madman?”

The look he gave me was enough to tell me that I had hit below the belt.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but you know that I’m often rude and direct for a good
reason. I don’t mean to belittle you or make fun of you. But here’s what I would like to know.
Answer me straight! What is the most important—peace and joy or wisdom? If to know less would
make you a happier man, which would you choose?”

I might have known his answer. It was that we have no choice in such
matters.

I violently disagreed. “Perhaps,” said I, “I am still very much of an
American. That is to say, naive, optimistic, gullible. Perhaps all I gained from the fruitful
years I spent in France was a strengthening and deepening of my own inner spirit. In the eyes
of a European, what am I but an American to the core, an American who exposes his Americanism
like a sore. Like it or not, I am a product of this land of plenty, a believer in
superabundance, a believer in miracles. Any deprivation I suffered was my own doing. I blame
nobody but myself for my woes and afflictions, for my shortcomings, for my transgressions.
What you believe I might have learned through a deeper knowledge of astrology I learned
through experience of life. I made all the mistakes that it is possible for a man to make—and
I paid the penalty. I am that much richer, that much wiser, that much happier, if I may say
so, than if I had found through study or through discipline how to avoid the snares and
pitfalls in my path…. Astrology deals in potentialities, does it not? I am not interested in
the potential man. I
am interested in what a man actualizes—or
realizes—of his potential being. And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum
of all that is human?
Divine
, in other words? You think I am searching for God. I am
not. God is. The world is. Man is. We are. The full reality, that’s God—and man, and the
world, and all that is, including the unnameable. I’m for reality. More and more reality. I’m
a fanatic about it, if you like. And what is astrology? What has it to do with reality?
Something, to be sure. So has astronomy, so has biology, so has mathematics, so has music, so
has literature; and so have the cows in the field and the flowers and the weeds, and the
manure that brings them back to life. In some moods some things seem more important than
others. Some things have value, others don’t, we say.
Everything
is important and of
value. Look at it that way and I’ll accept your astrology….”

“You’re in one of your moods again,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“I know it,” I replied. “Just be patient with me. You’ll have your turn….
Every so often I revolt, even against what I believe in with all my heart. I have to attack
everything, myself included. Why? To simplify things. We know too much—and too little. It’s
the intellect which gets us into trouble. Not our intelligence.
That
we can never
have enough of. But I get weary of listening to specialists, weary of listening to the man
with one string to his fiddle. I don’t deny the validity of astrology. What I object to is
becoming enslaved to any one point of view. Of course there are affinities, analogies,
correspondences, a heavenly rhythm and an earthly rhythm …
as above, so below
. It
would all be crazy if it weren’t so. But knowing it, accepting it, why not forget it? I mean,
make it a living part of one’s life, something absorbed, assimilated and distributed through
every pore of one’s being, and thus forgotten, altered, utilized in the spirit and the service
of life. I abhor people who have to filter everything through the one language they know,
whether it be astrology, religion, yoga, politics, economics or what. The one thing about this
universe
of ours which intrigues me, which makes me realize that it
is
divine and beyond all knowing, is that it lends itself so easily to any and all
interpretations. Everything we formulate about it is correct and incorrect at the same time.
It includes our truths and our errors. And, whatever we think about the universe in no way
alters it….

“Let me get back to where I started. We all have different lives to lead. We
all want to make conditions as smooth and harmonious for ourselves as possible. We all want to
extract the full measure of life. Must we go to books and teachers, to science, religion,
philosophy, must we know so much—and so little!—to take the path? Can we not become fully
awake and aware without the torture we put ourselves through?”