OPUS 21 (43 page)

He said he'd always wanted to meet me and I said I'd never heard of him and he laughed because he was amused, not because he laughed when he didn't know what else to do, like an American businessman.

He sat down in one of my chairs and refused a drink and said, "Tell me all you think I ought to know about Paul."

Three hours and several hundred questions later he left.

Paul was going to be all right.

Not soon--but someday when he'd learned the masochisms, sadisms, castration complexes, repressed homosexual feelings, mistaken anima identification, archetypal possessions, and other data not shown by the meters in his laboratory.

Hargrave H. P. Adams had plenty of what it would take. I wouldn't have minded asking him some of my own questions. He had come up with a few suggestions and formulations unknown to me. . . .

That brought the evening up past midnight.

I felt wretched.

You are apt to, when you think they're going to stand you against the stone wall the next morning. There were, of course, Tom's pills. I rolled them out in my hand and just looking at them gave me a fuzzy taste in my mouth so I rolled them back.

It was one to think yourself out of.

I went into the living room and climbed through the window and peered down into the glittering slot of Madison Avenue until, all of a sudden, I began to shake. I almost threw up before I could scramble back into the apartment.

I sat down and stared at the sky.

You could still see a few stars in the haze. The night was as close as a pressure cooker.

My nausea left slowly; my shakes subsided.

In states of this sort I usually try, if possible, to make a list of Things to Do.

Things to Do on Sunday Night in the Big City, after the witching hour.

One can walk the streets.

Go to the Park.

Read.

Eat.

(But not sleep.)

One can take a sightseeing bus to Chinatown.

The taxi dance halls are open.

The all-night movies.

Any of numerous friends--

or my brother--

would sit up and talk till morning.

I could

by simply lifting the telephone and dialing a number fill my apartment with assorted pretty girls.

Or just Gwen.

Why not?

The image appeared

the woman-lines, the dry-martini taste of a woman's libido Gwen's cuprous hair;

and it was not Gwen at all

but an image in myself.

Who she was, I had no idea.

But I knew

I'd had enough of the Gwens in this world

to last until my next reincarnation

or, possibly,

the second coming of Christ

in Anno Double-Domini.

(Tomorrow, I thought, begins

another reincarnation)

It was enough of a list.

I had now collected sufficient Things to Do so as to go on sitting in my chair, which was all I desired to do: I had somewhat collected myself.

The sky belched light.

I leaned forward, looked, and half of the hazy stars were erased, gone, done for, hidden behind an invisible tumble of nimbus.

My nerves let themselves down another degree.

I went around the room, emptying an ashtray the night maid had overlooked, fixing myself a glass of hot, powdered coffee.

And back to my chair.

Now, across the parapet, across the well-learned silhouette of buildings opposite, the undersides of clouds were heated up. Their contours showed in brief, stammering flashes of lavender, as if they were gigantic lamps which some celestial electrician was trying to connect with a frayed cord.

At my side, the exhausted curtain came to momentary life--then perished again in the swelter of the room.

Gwen was an image. Whoever she was, I saw what I saw, looking from within to what lay within. Another item for Forbisher-Laroche: Why visit the fille de joie? Because she is more I than She.

Yvonne, then?

I gave the matter my consideration--and half an eye to the approaching weather.

"Blow, blow, thou bitter wind

Thou art not so unkind

In this man's latitude."

Hark ye, Sir Bughouse:

You don't know anything.

All you know about Yvonne is what you read in the newspaper advertisements.

She is a collection of costly, streamlined surfaces.

An accumulation from high-class department store counters.

And a statistic from a book that has not yet been published owing, doubtless, to pressures from the Neo-Christian-Centrist-Totalitarian Rennaissance.

Did you think she was a woman?

She was a dream.

An arrangement of electrons, a mess of mesons, in your cranium, Sir Spatterwit.

There must be blah-diddie-blah-blah (statistics, pal) happy homosexual hours for housewives and houris

ergo

we, Wylie, have witnessed Onesuch.

What a premise! What a casual conclusion.

O Lydian ease!

O languorous Lesbos!

(O legislators!

You left out the ladies!

And our legally innocent Yvonne has homed to Pasadena's passes, also Healthy, wealthy and wise.)

Must it not be assumed that blah people are happy and blah people are given to such excursions, wherefore blah per centum of the excursionists are happy?

Certainly.

But Yvonne?

What is she?

Sir Psychologist, Lord Hack, Keeper of the Happy Ending, can you not also hypothesize a hundred different valid denouements?

Certainly.

When the poor, unknown child returns, what Weltschmerz may not seize hold upon her? What nostalgia? What fantasy or recollections? What esoteric envies? What odd curiosities? What cooling after the confidences? What illogical new distastes? What unexpected spousely piques? What dither? What clandestine or common experiment with all what unsweet ensuite?

Never congratulate the Fates, emir;

it makes them self-conscious . . . undependable.

A point to remember should you ever set down a hundred hours of pseudo-autobiography:

Lessons in Light Lycanthropy:
seven essays by Philip Gordon Prismaggot.

Now came thunder, like sounds in the intestines of distant elephant herds; now, my curtain rose as eerily as a medium's table and flopped back to lank alignment with the wall.

I saw the point:

In the quest for the woman-in-skirts, some of us fail to notice that the woman--

within may be partly and helplessly a perverse wench, attesting by default to all the oversights of her masculine lord: us.

It was a remarkable discovery and explained occasional tendencies of numbers of my gentlemen companions.

Given another five years, caliph, and you could resolve this situation--this exotic act of the inner She who rules whatever crannies her master shuns in conscious male conceit.

If you happen to be the kind of person who, out of mere idleness, or from scientific motive, or in our poor common cause, is willing to trephine his own soul for a better look, you will find such dances going on there, such images and integers of the complicated flesh.

If you announce the results, however, you are liable to go to Hecate. Hecate County, I mean.

Unless you do so, that is, in plain wrapper and with a Ph.D. Cf.:

"The inner natures of all men and women partake of the natures of the opposite sex--a psychological phenomenon in some forms openly expressed by modern society (O

moms, O Mummers!), but in other forms suppressed with the full force of public opinion.

What public opinion suppresses, the individual endeavors to conceal both from himself and from society. Nevertheless, were the individual
not
equipped with the psychological elements of the opposite sex, comprehension and sympathy between the two would be impossible. And this 'feminine' quality of a man--for example--may even project on real women, in inverted form, those universal, adolescent feelings toward his own sex which the conscious adult man repudiates. Hence, as Cadwallader, Pratt and Razzle say, in their lucid monograph--"

But if you express the results in terms of palpable feelings and acts--rather than in this lack--life lingo of pedagogy--the very gents and gals who share the same sensations will rise as one (owing to the general habit of suppression) and breathe down your neck with a blowtorch.

When you see them coming you will know what troubles them that they do not know.

It is, always, their responses to your perceptions.

Themselves--not you.

Yvonne, to put it in the terse form, like Gwen,

was also in a sense a shimmering fragment of a dislocated inner me.

If you are distressed by her,

the time has come to bore a hole in the thick skull of your own soul and see the remarkable tittup going on there.

Lightning struck a graph on the sky.

I sat learning about myself.

If, indeed, the Final Report was due, I might as well review my material. At God's Great Judgment Seat, witnesses who did not bother to notice what was really happening inside themselves--and, of course, prejudiced or dishonest witnesses--will undoubtedly go to the Hotter Hecate.

I thought about Paul for a while and decided it was time for Paul to think about himself.

I thought of Socker Melton and perceived there was no reason, any more, for a single soul to go to any church, save instinc--

which the churches denied thrice whenever they opened their sanctimonious mouths three times.

I thought lovingly of my country

and lovingly of the whole world.

I sent greetings to the Chinese and the Hindus and the Africans.

I wished that I might live to see if the bombs fell and what the people did afterward.

Then I appreciated that, following any resolution of such affairs--

of bombs or none, airborne plagues or none--

I would wish in this same fashion to live to see

what they did

when a billion starved

when four or five billions, produced in the uncontrolled birthorgies of the devout and the innocent, over-horded this little globe what they did when the metals ran thin--in a century or so

when idiotic breeding decayed the human line to a rabble incapable of sustaining liberty or order or technology

when the last water under the earth dried up

when the sea thickened

when the moon approached.

Indeed, there is no limit to wishing one might assist at meeting challenges old Toynbee may never have thought of--

inevitabilities that only man can avoid and that, as yet, he does not even consider as Necessary Works. They are denied by
Time
magazine.

Aortas of lightning and branched arteries of electric fire now diagrammed the clouds. Across the roofs, thunder ricocheted; it rolled like tumbrils in the avenues.

A steady press of air flapped the curtains and I moved my chair a little to escape their nervous abrasion.

This fetid wind depressed me.

My thoughts settled in a muddy ooze and lived beneath the riffled surface enviously, for that it seemed alive.

And in this separation I saw more views.

The intellectual, I deplore--scholar, economist, sociologist, big literary man. The sorry lot have spent half the twentieth century admiring the engines of their minds and not bothering to feed knowledge into them or raw materials; now, with the gauges falling, they have nothing to say excepting only to repeat their proud, intellectual admission of obsolescence.

The critic, I deplore; he sits upon his flagpole with his radio, his sandwiches and his displayed latrine, handing down opinions of what is happening under the earth, from which he sees an occasional man emerge whom he invariably deduces to be a Troglodyte or a Morlock.

The philosopher of modern times is my favorite joke; he stands at the head of the Faculty--without faculties of his own; he sums up the wisdom of the mind without appreciating he no longer understands what his own mind is. Were he even as honest as the psychiatrist he disdains, he would get his psyche analyzed before he undertook to forward the discussion of awareness. But what philosopher ever consented to an effort at learning something of himself before pontificating upon the All of everybody else? That still, small science of psychology, which he elbows behind his panoply of classic names.

has turned him into a quack--an astrologer among astronomers and the barker for a medicine show at a convention of true physicians.

The preacher--dressed in the anonymous odds and ends of all the instincts of the animal kingdom and holding this shoddy surplice to be a white and spotless raiment--the one, true robe for Ascension--is my jester, for being mad and comical and also for speaking so much wisdom and for his good heart, when he has one.

This is what I believe about them--

and they are what I am:

Intellectual, critic, philosopher, and preacher.

Hoist by my own plutonium petard.

For all my data have, still, an inadequate access to my heart. It laughs and weeps too often without consulting the encyclopedia in my head or the new Book of Rules I have commenced there.

I saw Excalibur and could not wrench it from the sea, Touched the Grail--and could not swallow,

Wandered the far mountains, came upon a new Decalogue, and could not lift the tablets to bring them down.

Prophet, maybe.

Pilgrim, perhaps.

But only in

the intellectual, critical, philosophical, evangelical senses. . . .

Happy?

The ego was often happy--his big ego.

At Peace?

He had tranquility where other men did not and joy where they were only confused; but, in their simple pleasures, it was he who felt confusion, he who too frequently was but a spectator, he who failed with his blood to pursue the truth his brain so lucidly, so uselessly delineated.

Human nature, he decreed, need not be dishonest or dishonorable; let us throw off this old-church myth, this pew-filler, that men are by their very substance evil and undependable. Having said his say he daily marched into the humanities and acted with a good deal less than integrity complete. Like a very ass.