The Revolt of Aphrodite (65 page)

Julian said: “Freud says that all happiness is the deferred
fulfilment
of a prehistoric wish, and then he adds: ‘That is why wealth brings so little happiness; money is not an infantile wish.’” He sat down, musing deeply for a moment; then he got down softly upon one knee and began to do up the little green loaf in its brown paper, tying the string carefully round it. Having secured it he replaced it once more upon the window-sill, in the folds of his overcoat, under the topper. “I have been studying the demonic of our capitalistic system through the eyes of Luther—a chastening experience in some ways. He saw the final coming to power in this world of Satan as a capitalistic emblem. For him the entire structure of the Kingdom of Satan is essentially capitalistic—we are the devil’s own real
property, he says: and his deepest condemnation of our system is in his phrase ‘Money is the word of the Devil, through which he creates all things in exactly the way God once created the True Word.’ In his devastating theology capitalism manifests itself as the ape of God, the
simia
dei.
It is hard to look objectively at oneself in the shaving-mirror once one has adventured with this maniac through the ‘Madensack’ of the real shared world—this extended worm-bag of a place out of which squirm all our cultural and gnomic patterns, the stinking end-gut of a world whose convulsions are simply due to the putrefying explosions of faecal gas in the
intestines
of time.” He paused, musing and shaking his head. “And then gold itself, as Spengler points out, is not really a colour, for colours are natural things. No, that metallic greenish gleam is of a satanic unearthliness; yet it has an explicit mystical value in the iconography of our Churches.” He relit his cigar with a silver lighter.

“And then from gold to money is only a very short jump, but a jump which spans the shallow trench of our whole culture and offers us some sort of rationale for the megalopolitan men we are and our ways;
our
ways
!
For money is the beating heart of the New Word, and the power of money to bear
interest,
its basic
raison
d’être,
has created the big city around it. Money is the dynamo, throwing out its waves of impulse in the interest principle. And without this volatility principle of Satan’s gold there would have been no cities. The archaeologists will tell you that they have noted the completest rupture of the life-style of man once he had founded his first cities. The intrusion of
interest-bearing
capital is the key to this almost total reorganisation of man, the transvaluation of all his rural values. From the threshing-floor to the square of a cathedral city is but a small jump, but without interest-bearing capital it could never have been made. The economy of the city is based wholly upon economic surplus—it is a settlement of men who for their sustenance depend on the production of agricultural labour which is not their own; it is the
surplus
produce of the country which constitutes the subsistence of the town. But Nash will hasten to tell you that for the unconscious the sector of the surplus is also the sector of the sacred—hence the towering cathedral-city with its incrustation of precious gems and sculptures and rites; its whole economy becomes devoted
to sacred ends. It becomes the ‘divine household’, the house of God.”

He put back his head and gave a sudden short bark of a laugh, full of a sardonic sadness. He looked so strange, Julian, bowed under the weight of these speculations; he looked at once ageless and very old. “I’ve had difficulty in convincing Nash that our science is still so very backward that for comfort’s sake we still feel the need to build ourselves working models of things—whether trains, turbines, or angels! In aesthetics as against technics, of course, a whole new flock of ideas come chattering in like starlings. We are at the very beginning of a phase—one can feel that; but one wishes that the bedrock were newer, fresher, contained fewer archaic features. No? The old death-figure is there side by side with creative Eros, longing to pull us back into the mire, to bury us in the stinking morasses of history where so many, innocent and guilty, have already foundered. As far as Iolanthe is concerned I freely confess that I am at a
disadvantage
as compared with you; you knew her, you knew the original, you have something real to compare her with. But I have only a set of data, like outworn microscope slides, with which to compare her; her films, her life—I have assembled the whole dossier. But when I meet her it will be a momentously new experience—I feel so sure of that. Yes.”

Suddenly he seemed to be almost pleading, like a schoolboy, his hands pressed between his knees, his eyes searching mine for a trace of reassurance. I felt it was in some way unhealthy to become so intense about a dummy—the whole thing filled me with unease, though it would have been hard to explain to myself why. Nothing could have been saner than his glance, nothing more unflinching than his grasp on language when it came to trying to disentangle all these interlocking concepts. Julian sat for a long moment staring into the fire and then continued. “I am probably ready for her in this new form. I have always behaved as much like an immortal as I could—the negative capability, you might say, of deprivation. Like a Jap prince or a Dalai Lama I have been forced to develop in captivity, all by myself. But if I haven’t been evil I have been a keen student of evil—in alchemical terms, if you like, I was prone to the white path by nature; but I trod the black in order to divine its secrets. Some few I managed to appropriate for myself—but pitifully few. I wanted
like everyone else to assuage the aches and pains of humanity. What an ambition.”

“I wonder, Julian” I said, gently caressing the nape of Benedicta’s neck. “I see you rather as enjoying it as pure experience, for its own pure sake.” He gave a soundless little chuckle and half admitted the truth of the charge. “Perhaps. But then that
is
the black path. It admits of no compromise, one has to become it, to tread it; but there is no obligation to remain fixed there, like a joker in a pack. One can extricate oneself—albeit after a long struggle against the prince of darkness, or whatever you might call the luciferian principle. The struggle of course makes one unbelievably rich; if you keep your reason, you emerge from the encounter with a formidable body of psychic equipment at your disposal. Not that that does much good to anyone in the long run….” He yawned deftly, compactly, like a cat, before resuming. “I must be on the high seas tomorrow. Look, Felix, you do understand why I have been having these long sessions with Nash? I wanted to plumb as far as possible the unconscious intentions behind my desire to make a neo-Aphrodite—one who cannot eat, excrete, or make love. In terms of her own values—and I use the phrase because I know that you have endowed her with a built-in contemporary memory which can give an account of any contingency. Total memory, seen of course from our own vantage point in time. But suppose her to be free—suppose the world were in charge of a dozen models as perfect as she is—various other factors would obviously come into play. What, for example, would be their attitude to money? What sort of city could such creatures come to found and finally to symbolise? Eh? It’s worth a thought. Then, what would happiness represent for her since she is free from the whole Freudian weight of everything that makes us ‘un’; could you arrange for her, ideally, to have the free play of a natural lubricity, an eroticised function which ideally need never rest? No, because she isn’t fertile—that’s the answer isn’t it? And yet she is word-perfect, she walks in beauty like the night. Felix … could such a thing … could Iolanthe in her dummy form
love
?
And what form would such an aberration take? I suppose when we have Adam we will be able to see a little more clearly into this abyss. I am so looking
forward
to seeing her, knowing her in natural surroundings—pardon
the phrase. This free woman, free from the suppurating weight of our human mother-fixation. She can neither love nor hate. What a marvellous consort she might make for someone. Does she know good from evil? There is no such question; does anyone? We are impelled to act before we think. No, let me finish….

“Action, whatever they tell you, in almost every case precedes reflection; what we recognise as right and wrong action is almost always the fruit of a retrospective judgement. God, what a host of ontological problems she could raise … could she, for example, realise she is a dummy as much as, say, you realise that you are Felix? We don’t really know, do we, until we ask her? And even then, one slip on the keyboard might give one totally unknown factors to consider. At what point could she invent, could she be original, supposing she slipped among the mnemonic signatures?”

He had begun to walk slowly up and down the room with a kind of burning, I could say “incandescent” concentration upon this
conversation
to which I myself did not wish to add a word. I was an artificer, I was simply there to wait and see at which angle the thing went off; and then to correct its trajectory whenever possible like a good mathematical papa. No, this isn’t quite true; it would be truer to say that when one is dealing with inventions it is safer to go step by step, and not lose oneself among theoretical considerations before the actual model can start ticking over.

“Julian” I said. “Give yourself time; you will soon be able to call on her in her own snug villa, take tea with her, converse on any
subject
under the sun; listen to her as she plays jazz to you, cherish her in every way. We can promise you a degree of the real which you will find quite fascinating, quite disturbing. I wouldn’t myself have believed that our craftsmen at Merlin’s could have been capable of such fine workmanship. Indeed she’s so damn near perfect that Marchant suggested that we built a small fleet of them—our ‘
love-machines
’ he called them; we could turn them out on the streets and live on their immoral earnings. From the customer’s point of view they would be virtually indistinguishable from the real article—better dressed and better bred, perhaps, that is all. And from a legal point of view our position would be quite unassailable. They would, after all, be dummies: nothing more.”

He smiled and shook his head: “I wish you wouldn’t use that word” he said softly. “It always suggests something old and
primitive
and creaking, studded with levers and buttons. Not something sophisticated, something of our decade. By the way, when she is launched will there be any way of controlling her?” It was my turn to stretch my aching legs, and prop B.’s head with a pillow. “That’s the whole point, Julian. Once launched there is no stop-go button or rewind or playback; she is as irrevocably launched as a baby when you hit it on the bottom and force it to utter the birth-cry. I had to confer full human autonomy on Iolanthe, don’t you see? Otherwise our whole experiment would have been diminished; I could not have given her the mnemonic range if we had had to allow for cutting out the current every ten days, rewiring, recharging—as if she were a model train or yacht, run by remote control. We simply leaped over all these considerations; and when she rises from her bed of sickness and roams abroad in the world there will be no calling her back! We’ll have to take her as she is, for better or for worse, in
sickness
or in health, in fair weather or foul. But that is how you wanted her, isn’t it?”

“God, of course!” he cried softly but passionately. “I wanted her absolute in every way.” I heard the words with a pang, so charged were they with love, with desolation, with hunger. “She’s breakable, of course, and ultimately wear-outable I suppose, but probably less than you or I. She will outlive us all, I dare swear, if she isn’t smashed or run over by a car. The organisation is pretty delicate but the substitutes we’ve used for bone and cartilage and vein-paths is a hundred times more durable and dependable than what God gave us poor folk. And of course she won’t age, relatively speaking; her hair and skin will keep their gloss longer than yours or mine.”

Benedicta said suddenly, without opening her eyes, “Julian, I’m afraid of this thing.”

“Of course. You must be” said Julian, his voice full of a vague reassurance. “Nothing like it has ever been done.”

“What good can come of it?” said Benedicta. “What will you do with her—she cannot breed, she’s just a set of responses floating about like a box-kite, answering to every magnetic wind. Will you just sit and watch her?”

“In holy wonder,” said Julian greedily “and with scientific care.”

“Benedicta, there hasn’t ever been one” I said mildly.

She lay there still, my wife, her head supported by the cushion, her eyes closed, but with an expression of intense concentration on her face—as if she were fighting off a painful migraine.

“No” she said at last, almost below her breath, with a tone of firm decision. “It won’t do. Something will certainly go wrong.”

Julian looked at his watch and whistled softly. “My goodness it’s getting late and I haven’t yet come to the real subject of my visit to you two; of course I was worried about that phone-call but really there was something else on my mind. It concerns my brother Jocas in Polis.”

“Jocas.”

The wind rose suddenly and skirled round the house. I had not thought of Jocas for ages now; and the memory of him, and of Turkey, had faded like an old photograph. Or perhaps it was simply that in this rain-and snow-swept countryside it was hard to evoke the bronze-stubbled headlands where the sturdy little countryman rode to his falcons, calling out in that high ululating muezzin’s voice of his as he urged his favourite bird in to the stoop. Jocas existed now like a sort of coloured illustration, an illuminated capital, say, in some yellow old Arabic text; yet he was after all in Merlin terms all of Africa, all of the Mediterranean. “First of all Jocas believes he is dying, and perhaps he isn’t wrong, although the information comes to him from his Armenian astrologer—a very acute man I must admit, who has seldom been at fault. Well, anyway, there he is, for what it’s worth. He has several months ahead of him, he believes, in which to prepare himself, and is apparently doing it in customary Merlin style, in the high style, that is to say. In my own case, this new turn of events has sort of blunted the edge of the lifetime of enmity I have borne him—I can confess it freely only now. It had ebbed away now, the hate, leaving only respect and regret for the man.”