The Dissertation, page 58
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
The value varies, though, in different times and climes. Some societies allocate countervailing value to artistic talent, commercial acumen, martial courage, intellectual brilliance, scholarly erudition, technological expertise, or religious piety. In the Republic of Tinieblas, however, the market for these commodities is chronically depressed, so that those few Tinieblans who cultivate them to any degree of quality commonly export them elsewhere. The market for political influence is correspondingly firm and bullish. The manufacture and sale of political influence is the chief national industry. The acquisition of political influence is the favorite occupation. Speculation in political influence is the most common vice.
Considering the paucity of its population and the brevity of its history, Tinieblas has produced a surprising number of hypnotic demagogues, wily intriguers, and other masters of the manipulative skills. But ability aside, rare is the Tinieblan so poor in spirit as to doubt himself supremely gifted for a political career—as rare as the Italian who admits to being tone-deaf, or the Semite who confesses that he has no head for trade. Be he never so brutish, never so innocent alike of mother wit and formal education, your Tinieblan can envision himself President of the Republic, directing the nation to wealth and global puissance and meanwhile disposing of joyous support from an immense majority. Politics is the national art.
Tinieblan housewives do not gossip about who goes to bed with whom; they gossip about who goes to bed with which members of the government. When young Tinieblans couple up at parties, their ardent whispering is likely choked with ideology, not endearments. And while Tinieblas still enjoyed freedom of speech, one might on almost any evening hear Tinieblan schoolboys deliver up in public squares orations worthy in sonority and emptiness, in sophistry and outright bleeding falsehood, of a national convention in the United States. Political discourse is the national literature.
Like food in France, drink in Sweden, suffering in Russia, and fratricide in Ireland, politics is the Tinieblan national obsession. For polities doctors neglect their patients, merchants their businesses, students their studies, wives their husbands, and husbands their concubines. Our land now seethes with discontent, not so much because jails are full and larders empty, but because, under the fecearchy imposed upon it, politics is the private amusement of Genghis Manduco and a few smaller lumps.
My father did not share the national obsession, He was able to find gratification in the other possibilities of life. He had the energy and talent to flesh his private dreams; he needed no public stage to act them out on. That is why he was able to use power without abusing it.
“The problem with power,” he told me, “is that the people most likely to get it are the people most likely to abuse it.”
We lay in the central pen of Victim, which you may get an idea of, inquisitive examiners, by imagining a tire tube about a kilometer thick and thirty kilometers in circumference, with twelve valves (the sets of locks) projecting from the outer wall. A little ways off Adolf Hitler (Who is in Victim as a result of a deal made with a recruiter after the Munich Putsch) stood ranting about what he meant to do when his term was up and he transferred to Politics and the Committee for the Dissemination of Terror and Despair.
“Take a poor devil like that,” my father continued, gesturing at Adolf. “Impotent. jumble-headed. Talentless. Utterly incapable of any private joy, be it physical or intellectual or emotional. Hideously deprived and hideously frightened. Too loathsome to give anybody pleasure. Too cowardly to inflict pain on his own. Too empty to find fulfillment in a solitary thing like art. His existence is constant pain and isolation. For a fellow like that, politics is the only hope. He can get a faint impression of being alive by manipulating others into doing great, dramatic things, things he can’t do himself or paint pictures of. And because politics is his only hope, he is never distracted from it, not even for an instant. He can’t even perceive the things that distract others from the pursuit of power, things like love or pleasure or intellectual curiosity. With that kind of single-minded concentration, he’s more likely than most to reach power. And the monomania that is his chief advantage over others in obtaining power makes him incapable of using power moderately once he gets it.
“Hitler’s an extreme case, but you can guide by him. Private joys are best. People who miss out on them need public platforms. The people who want power most are the most likely to get it, and the most liable to misuse it once they do. Perhaps a society might be created where happy, balanced men were sentenced to short terms in public office. That would be something new.”
97. Karl Marx
German-Jewish fantast (1818-1883).
An heir to the Romantic Movement and a forebear of science fiction, Marx was (along with Sigmund Freud) the greatest German novelist of the nineteenth century. Like Freud and many other geniuses, however, Marx misunderstood his gift. He believed himself to be a political economist. An equally deluded world has taken him at his own word.
Marx’s work has the appealing dignity of such huge and useless constructs as the pyramids. Read properly, it emerges as an immense prose epic. The heroine is called History, the hero Proletariat, They endure a long and tormented separation, but finally marry and live happily ever after.
Marx’s chief contribution to philosophy is found in the following phrase (the reference for which I’ve lost): “The only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain.” (See notes 20, 68, and 88.)
After his “death,” Marx managed to unite his conscious drive to manipulate men with his unconscious drive to amuse them. After wandering from activity to activity for some six decades, he, applied for Sex Change and Return. His spirit now inhabits the body of an employee of a massage parlor on Eighth Avenue near Forty-fourth Street in New York City.
98. Love and jealousy are mutually exclusive
This will be vigorously contested by those who shop their attitudes from such flea markets of the emotions as pop fiction, TV serial drama, and the periodicals subscribed to by beauty parlors, and who consequently hold love to be the cause of jealousy. The best criticism and statement of this view is found in Shakespeare, who creates a great booby, makes jealousy flog love from his large but cheaply-furnished heart, and then has him claim to have “lov’d not wisely, but too well.” Othello speaks with the sincerity of boobyhood and loves himself excellently well throughout, but his love for Desdemona is on the run early in Act III.
Similarly, garbage brains believe that jealousy can be a cause of love: viz., the many real-life and staged dramas whose plots turn on an attempt by A to engender or revive love in B by flirting with C; that jealousy constitutes proof of love; and, conversely, that absence of jealousy argues absence of love. I have of late tried to wean my wife from this rancid dogma—strange in her, since she had glimpsed the true relationship between love and jealousy earlier (see note 54).
“You were really jealous, weren’t you?” she purred to me happily last night. Since the light was out, I couldn’t see the canary feathers on her chops, but I could hear them plainly enough.
I grunted assent.
She snuggled. “You must really love me.”
“Right and wrong. I love you now. I didn’t love you in the slightest then. My jealousy proves that.”
I went on to point out that jealousy depends on the territorial instinct common in man and other animals and that it involves classing a fellow human as a piece of property, a chattel, which one does not wish alienated or used by others. Jealousy is an inflammation of the possessive, not the affective urge. It assumes rights of ownership and thereby debases its object from a person to a thing. It concerns itself with the enforcement of those assumed rights, frequently by violent means. But although rights of ownership are written into the marriage contract—“to have and to hold”—they have nothing to do with loving or cherishing. Love is concern for another, not for oneself and one’s rights. Therefore, insofar as one loves, one cannot feel jealous, while insofar as one feels jealous, one does not love.
My wife fell asleep somewhere during the course of this exposition, as she often does when I attempt serious conversation after dark, but that does not in any way reduce the force of my argument. My current freedom from jealousy is not due to my wife’s current fidelity—or, to be prudent, to the appearance thereof. That jealousy can invent a “cause” is shown in note 23. My capacity for love has recently been augmented (see note 95); hence I am no longer particularly given to jealousy.
My mother, Soledad Fuertes, was and is wholly committed to love; hence she was and is unable to feel the slightest twinge of jealousy, hence her reaction to the incident described in text above.
99. The universe owes us nothing
The statement implies a view of the universe, but since my father, León Fuertes, did not work that view out in detail until after his “death,” I cannot properly present it in my text. However, since it bears on his earthly life, which is the subject of this dissertation, it merits mention in these notes.
My father’s position may be called ecological stoicism: ecological because he saw the universe as a single, integrated system (which is, of course, what the etymology of the word “universe” implies); stoicism because he accepted it. His attitude toward Victim, for example, was an expression of this view.
“Don’t wallow, but accept,” he told me once soon after my arrival. We had been sent to Oppressor with a hundred or so others, as black slaves on a replica of a Louisiana cane plantation. Participants rode in among us, flogging us as we toiled. “Don’t try to enjoy being a victim. But accept it. Bear it. Learn from it.”
This attitude contrasted on the one hand with the oh-yes-please-flog-me mewlings of some, and on the other with Herr Hitler’s alternating threats and pleas for mercy. Similarly, the philosophical position from which it grew contrasted with positions of partial or total rejection. Hitler, for example, endorsed flogging but objected to being on the sharp end of the whip. Prince Alexei, in the manner of true revolutionaries, was ready to scrap everything to eliminate cruelty, which he perceived as a defect. Each, in his way, lacked a sense of unity.
My father spoke to me during one of our recuperation periods about the difficulty of reaching and keeping this sense. Victims lay staring at the vaulted ceiling, or crept about whining, or yammered of escape and vengeance, or tried in one way or another to absent their thoughts. A few meters off, a little Jew named Levitski stood with his eyes closed, his chin tucked to his chest, his left arm crooked, his right arm sawing. up and down. He had been concertmaster of an orchestra in Poland and had entered the next world via the chimney of one of Herr Hitler’s camps. He’d had a place in a Performing Arts chamber ensemble but had tried to gamble his way into Idyll and had lost. Now he spent his recuperation periods playing Mozart on an imaginary Stradivarius.
“What else?” he said to us once. “A real Strad I never touched, but why not dream first class?”
Farther off, Herr Kafka entertained a group of German -speakers with a story. They sat around him belching out gasps of laughter, though some of the women dabbed their eyes too now and then. He had volunteered for Victim—to be near his characters, he said—and seemed so perfectly at home I was unable to imagine he had ever known a different manner of existence.
“Consciousness,” my father said, “is a bamboozling mechanism. It fosters the delusion that we are in the universe, not of it. I spent almost my entire life on earth considering myself a separate, independent entity. But we and everything else are woven into the whole. During my last weeks on earth I began to sense this. When I came over into this world, I lost that sense of unity. Applause crushed it from me. Now, here in Victim, I have regained it.
“Consciousness,” he went on, “operates by organizing perceptions into separate categories. It invents conceptual tools like ‘you’ and ‘me’ and ‘now’ and ‘then,’ which work like dividers in a notebook. These divisions are imaginary and arbitrary. They have the same kind of reality as Levitski’s fiddle. It helps him get along, so he imagines it. It might as well be a Guarneri as a Strad; matter of taste. Levitski couldn’t endure Victim without his fiddle. People couldn’t think consciously without their dividers. The trouble is it’s hard to realize that they’re arbitrary figments. Most people believe the universe is set up in neat divisions according to the way they organize their perceptions. I bathed in that error for most of my life on earth, and dove back into it as soon as I came to this world. I lived by the principle of separation, mainly the principle of the separate self. I’m over it now, hopefully for good.”
On another occasion he went further, this time in the vestibule of Insult and Abuse while we were waiting to be called, for we lost no chance to converse. “There is a universal mind,” he declared. “I don’t mean it resides in one person or personage, such as the Director—who, by the way, doesn’t direct as much as He thinks he does. It is everywhere.
“I’m not being mystical. I’ve no talent for mysticism. If I ever had one, I wrecked it by exclusive cultivation of intellect, which is the trick of separating. Consider half a hectare of our Tinieblan jungle. Hundreds of thousands of species, millions for all I know—I’m no biologist—interact in balance with each other and with things like dirt and sunlight, which may or may not be living depending on how you define life. That half-hectare system regulates itself maintains all kinds of balances. An oxygen-CO2 balance in the air, a balance of nitrogen and other chemicals in the soil, a population balance among the species. And when we split the half hectare away for consideration, we were being arbitrary. The system encompasses the entire earth, and the sun too, of course, and all the stars, and this world of spirit, which is apparently distinct from the world of matter, but only apparently. Everything is connected. The segments we may choose to discern as separate—you, me, this kind of animal, that kind of flower—are interwoven. The universe is an integral, self-regulating system, and where one finds control, the concept ‘mind’ is perfectly applicable.”
And again, at yet another time: “The universe regulates itself through what—from an individual point of view—appears to be gross waste. One female of a certain kind of beetle pumps out enough eggs during her short life to reproduce herself a hundred thousand times. Her fecundity is balanced by the equally profuse appetite of a certain kind of wasp, who likes to eat beetle larvae. This sort of thing offends our sense of separateness. Why do it that way? What about all those individual beetles potentially present in the gobbled larvae? Continuity and balance are achieved through profusion—profuse generation and profuse destruction—or so the individual point of view judges. Seen close up in nature, this way of doing things provokes disgust. Recognized in human life (which we like to separate from nature), it provokes horror. How many eggs produced in a human ovary, or sperm cells in a human testis? Each a potential human. Each human a potential victim. Each human inevitably a victim—of a germ culture, or an animal, or another human, or himself. Millions turned out, millions knocked off. What a waste! Horror!
“The horror has given rise to some charming dreams of economy, such as two people happy in a garden for ever and ever, if only they obey the rules. More recently it has given rise to vigorous action. Stamp out disease! Stamp out this kind of insect! Stamp out that category of people! Which upsets balances but scarcely reduces ‘waste.’ But there is no waste. The individual viewpoint is wrong because the sense of separateness is a delusion. The universe is an inseparable whole. It has no obligations to those segments of it which imagine themselves separate, nor owes them any explanations. It doesn’t care if we accept it or not, but I think acceptance is the wisest attitude.”
My father’s view included an ecology of the spirit. As the body maintained balance or homeostasis by fluctuating between hunger and satiety, the spirit, he held, fluctuated between assertion and acceptance. In some spirits the swings were small, in others quite pronounced. These last went through a cycle which has been describes as follows: pride to error to suffering to humility to wisdom to mastery to pride, etc. The most common descriptions of this cycle were poetical. They usually focused only on a portion of it: pride to suffering, for example (Oedipus Tyrannus), or humility to mastery (Oedipus at Colonus). In practice, though, the cycle was continual.
“I made two complete circuits during my life on earth,” my father told me. “And since I left earth I’ve made two-thirds of another. Well-balanced spirits like your mother scarcely vary at all.
“What interests me,” he continued, “is that the swings are self-corrective. Near the end of my life I went through a period of suffering. Then, when I learned I was going to ‘die’—and I thought that was the end of everything—I came to an acceptance and, with it, to the full use of my powers. When I passed over into this world, I exercised that mastery in art and won such acclaim that I came to consider myself the center of the universe. Which is ridiculous but not uncommon. The separate self is, as I’ve said, an illusion, and the center of the universe is everywhere. Anyway, I felt that way about myself and spent my time adorning my magnificence, to the neglect of those who cared for me, including—please pardon me, Camilo—you. But applause can be as boring as anything else. Fame too grows tiresome. So I went to Risk. And every time I played, I won. And every time I won, I grew more bored, and then went back again and upped the stakes. Until one day I made a truly crazy bet, and lost it, and came here to Victim.
“We see this all the time and wonder why. Some conjure up an ‘urge for self-destruction’ to explain it, but that’s too limited a view. What you have here is a self-corrective mechanism at work, a built-in balancing device, a homeostatic governor on the spirit. Its function might be stated in the form of a law: When you gain, you lose; when you lose, you gain.”
I said that this coincided with discoveries I had made in the basement of La Bondadosa Prison, and he laughed and nodded.
