Lila didn’t know he was here. She was sound asleep, apparently in some fearful dream. In the darkness he heard a grating sound of her teeth and felt her body suddenly turn as she struggled against some menace only she could see.
The light from the open hatch above was so dim it concealed whatever lines of cosmetics and age were there and now she looked softly cherubic, like a small girl with blond hair, wide cheekbones, a small turned-up nose, and a common child’s face that seemed so familiar it attracted a certain natural affection. He got the feeling that when morning came she should pop open her sky-blue eyes and they should sparkle with excitement at the prospect of a new day of sunlight and parents smiling and maybe bacon cooking on the stove and happiness everywhere.
But that wasn’t how it would be. When Lila’s eyes opened in a hung-over daze she’d look into the features of a gray-haired man she wouldn’t even remember — someone she met in a bar the previous night. Her nausea and headache might produce some remorse and self-contempt but not much, he thought — she’d been through this many times — and she’d slowly try to figure out how to return to whatever life she’d been leading before she met this one.
Her voice murmured something like Look out! Then she said something unintelligible and turned away, then pulled the blanket up around her head, perhaps against the cold breeze that came down through the open hatch. The berth of the sailboat was so narrow that this turn of her body brought her up against him again and he felt the whole length of her and then her warmth. An earlier lust came back and his arm went over her so that his hand held her breast — full there but too soft, like something over-ripe that would soon go bad.
He wanted to wake her and take her again but as he thought about this a sad feeling rose up and forbade it. The more he hesitated the more the sadness grew. He would like to know her better. He’d had a feeling all night that he had seen her before somewhere, a long time ago.
That thought seemed to bring it all down. Now the sadness came on in full and blended with the darkness of the cabin and with the dim indigo light through the hatch above. Up there were stars, framed by the hatch opening so that they seemed to move when the boat rocked. Part of Orion momentarily disappeared, then appeared again. Soon all the winter constellations would be back.
Cars rolling over a bridge in the distance sounded clearly through the cold night air. They were on their way to Kingston, somewhere on the bluffs above, over the Hudson River. The boat was berthed here in this tiny creek for a night’s rest on the way south.
There was not much time. There was almost no green left in the trees along the river. Many of the turned leaves had already fallen. During these last few days, gusts of cold wind had swept down the river valley from the north, swirling the leaves up off their branches into the air in sudden spiraling flights of red and maroon and gold and brown across the water of the river into the path of the boat as it moved down the buoyed channel. There had been hardly any other boats in the channel. A few boats at docks along the river bank seemed abandoned and forlorn now that summer had ended and their owners had turned to other pursuits. Overhead the Vs of ducks and geese had been everywhere, flying down on the north wind from the Canadian Arctic. Many of them must have been just ducklings and goslings when he first began this voyage from the inland ocean of Lake Superior, a thousand miles behind him now and what seemed like a thousand years ago.
There was not much time. Yesterday when he first went up on deck his foot slipped and he caught himself and then he saw the entire boat was covered with ice.
Phædrus wondered where he had seen Lila before, but he didn’t know. It seemed as though he had seen her, though. It was autumn then too, he thought, November, and it was very cold. He remembered the streetcar was almost empty except for him and the motorman and the conductor and Lila and her girlfriend sitting back three seats behind him. The seats were yellow woven rattan, hard and tough, designed for years of wear, and then a few years later the buses replaced them and the tracks and overhead cables and the streetcars were all gone.
He remembered he had seen three movies in a row and smoked too many cigarettes and had a bad headache and it was still about half an hour of pounding along the tracks before the streetcar would let him off and then he would have a block and a half through the dark to get home where there would be some aspirin and it would be about an hour and a half after that before the headache would go away. Then he heard these two girls giggle very loudly and he turned to see what it was. They stopped very suddenly and they looked at him in such a way that there could have been only one thing they were giggling at. It was him. He had a big nose and poor posture and wasn’t anything to look at, and tended to relate poorly to other people. The one on the left who looked like she had been giggling the loudest was Lila. The same face, exactly — gold hair and smooth complexion and blue eyes — with a smothered smile she probably thought covered up what she was laughing at. They got off a couple of blocks later, still talking and laughing.
A few months later he saw her again in a downtown rush-hour crowd. It happened in a moment and then it was over. She turned her head and he saw in her face that she recognized him and she seemed to pause, waiting for him to do something, say something. But he didn’t act. He didn’t have that skill of relating quickly to people, and then it was too late, somehow, and they each went on and he wondered for a long time that afternoon, and for days after that, who she was and what it would have been like if he had gone over and said something. The next summer he thought he saw her at a bathing beach in the south part of the city. She was lying in the sand so that when he walked past her he saw her face upside down and he was suddenly very excited. This time he wouldn’t just stand there. This time he would act, and he worked up his courage and went back and stood in the sand at her feet and then saw that the right-side-up face wasn’t Lila. It was someone else. He remembered how sad that was. He didn’t have anybody in those days.
But that was so long ago — years and years ago. She would have changed. There was no chance that this was the same person. And he didn’t know her anyway. What difference did it make? Why should he remember such an insignificant incident like that all these years?
These half-forgotten images are strange, he thought, like dreams. This sleeping Lila whom he had just met tonight was someone else too. Or not someone else exactly, but someone less specific, less individual. There is Lila, this single private person who slept beside him now, who was born and now lived and tossed in her dreams and will soon enough die and then there is someone else — call her Lila — who is immortal, who inhabits Lila for a while and then moves on. The sleeping Lila he had just met tonight. But the waking Lila, who never sleeps, had been watching him and he had been watching her for a long time.
It was so strange. All the time he had been coming down the canal through lock after lock she had been making the same journey but he didn’t know she was there. Maybe he had seen her in the locks at Troy, looked right at her in the dark but had not seen her.
His chart had shown a series of locks close together but they didn’t show altitude and they didn’t show how confusing things could get when distances have been miscalculated and you are running late and are exhausted. It wasn’t until he was actually in the locks that danger was apparent as he tried to sort out green lights and red lights and white lights and lights of locktenders' houses and lights of other boats coming the other way and lights of bridges and abutments and God knows what else was out there in that black that he didn’t want to hit in the middle of the darkness or go aground either. He’d never seen them before and it was a tense experience, and it was amidst all this tension that he seemed to remember seeing her on another boat.
They were descending out of the sky. Not just thirty or forty or fifty feet but hundreds of feet. Their boats were coming down, down through the night out of the sky where they had been all this time without their knowing it. When the last gate opened up from the last lock they looked on a dark oily river. The river flowed by a huge construction of girders toward a loom of light in the distance. That was Troy and his boat moved toward it until the swirl of the confluence of the rivers caught it and the boat yawed quickly. Then with the engine at full throttle he angled against the current across the river to a floating dock on the far side.
We have four-foot tides here, the dock attendant said.
Tides! he had thought. That meant sea-level. It meant that all the inland man-made locks were gone. Now only the passage of the moon over the ocean controlled the rise and fall of the boat. All the way to Kingston this feeling of being connected without barriers to the ocean gave him a huge new feeling of space.
The space was really what this sailing was all about and this evening at a bar next to the dock he had tried to talk about it to Rigel and Capella. Rigel seemed tired and preoccupied and uninterested, but Bill Capella, who was his crewman, was full of enthusiasm and seemed to know.
Like at Oswego, Capella said, all that time we were waiting for the locks to open, crying about how terrible it was we couldn’t get going, we were having the time of our lives.
Phædrus had met Rigel and Capella when rain from a September hurricane caused floods to break through canal walls and submerge buoys and jam locks with debris so that the entire canal had to be closed for two weeks. Boats heading south from the Great Lakes were tied up and their crewmen had nothing to do. Suddenly a space was created in everyone’s lives. An unexpected gap of time had opened up. The reaction of everyone at first was frustration. To sit around and do nothing, that was just terrible. The yachtsmen had been busy about their own private cruises not really wanting very much to speak to anyone else, but now they had nothing better to do than sit around on their boats and talk to each other day after day after day. Not trivially. In depth. Soon everyone was visiting somebody on somebody else’s boat. Parties broke out everywhere, simultaneously, all night long. Townspeople took an interest in the jam-up of boats, and some of them became acquainted with the sailors. Not trivially. In depth. And more parties broke out.
And so this catastrophe, this disaster that everyone originally bewailed, turned out to be exactly as Capella described it. Everyone was actually having the time of their lives. The thing that was making them so happy was the space.
Except for Rigel and Capella and Phædrus the tavern had been almost empty. It was just a small place with a few pool tables at the far room, a bar in the center opposite the door and a lot of dingy tables at their own end. It omitted all appearances of style. And yet the feelings were good. It didn’t intrude on your space. That’s what did it. It was just a bar being a bar without any big ideas.
I think it’s the space that does it, he’d said to Rigel.
What do you mean? Rigel asked.
About the space?
Rigel was squinting at him. Despite Rigel’s jaunty striped shirt and knit sailor’s cap he seemed unhappy about something he wasn’t talking about. Maybe it was that his whole purpose for this trip was to sell his boat down in Connecticut.
So as not to get into an argument Phædrus had told Rigel carefully, I think what we’re buying with these boats is space, nothingness, emptiness… huge sweeps of open water… and sweeps of time with nothing to do… That’s worth a lot of money. You can’t hardly find that stuff any more.
Shut yourself up in a room and lock the door, Rigel had said.
That doesn’t work, he had answered. The phone rings.
Don’t answer.
UPS knocks at the front door.
How often? You don’t have to answer.
Rigel was just looking for something to argue about. Capella joined in for the fun of it. The neighbors will take it, Capella said.
Then the kids will come home and turn up the TV.
Tell them to turn it down, Capella said.
Then you’re out of the room.
OK, then just ignore them, Capella said.
OK, all right, fine. Now. What happens to someone who sits in a locked room and doesn’t answer the phone, and refuses to come out when someone is knocking at the front door, even when the kids are home and have turned up the TV?
They thought about it and finally smiled a little.
The bartender’s face, when they had come in, had been completely bored. He had hardly any business. But since they had arrived four or five more customers had come in. He was talking to two of them, old customers it looked like, relaxed and used to the place. Two others were holding pool cues, apparently from some tables in an adjoining room.
There isn’t any space, Rigel said. He still wanted to quarrel. If you were from here you’d know that.
What do you mean?
There’s no space here, Rigel repeated. It’s all crowded with history. It’s all dead now but if you knew this region you’d see there’s no space. It’s full of old secrets. Everyone covers up around here.
He asked Rigel, What secrets?
Nothing’s the way it seems, Rigel said. This little creek we’re on here, do you know where it leads? You wouldn’t think it goes back more than a few hundred yards after it completes that turn back there, would you? How far would you guess you could go, on this little tiny creek here, before it stops?
Phædrus guessed twenty miles.
Rigel smiled. In the old days, you’d go forever, he said. It goes all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. People don’t know that any more. It goes behind the whole state of New Jersey. It used to connect to a canal that went over the mountains and down into the Delaware. They used to run coal through here on barges all the way from Pennsylvania. My great-grandfather was in that business. He had money invested in all sorts of enterprises around here. Did well at it, too.
So your family comes from around here, Phædrus said.
Since just after the Revolution, Rigel said. They didn’t move from here until about thirty years ago.
Phædrus waited for Rigel to go on but he didn’t say any more.
A cold draft hit as the door opened and a large crowd came in. One of them waved at Rigel. Rigel nodded back.
Do you know him? Phædrus asked.
He’s from Toronto, Rigel said.
Who is he?
I’ve raced against him, Rigel said. They’re all Canadians. They come down at this time of year.
One Canadian wore a red sweater, a second had a blue Navy watchcap cocked back on his head and a third wore a bright green jacket. They all moved together in a way that indicated they knew each other very well but did not know this place at all. They had an outdoorsy exuberance, like some visiting hockey team.
Now he remembered he had seen them before, in Oswego, on a large boat called the Karma, and they had seemed a little clannish.
They act like they don’t think much of this place, Capella said.
They just want to get south, Rigel said.
There’s something about them though, Capella said. Like they don’t approve of what they see.
Well, I approve of that, Rigel said.
What do you mean? Capella asked.
They’re moral people, Rigel said. We could use a little of that.
One of the Canadians who had been studying jukebox selections had pushed some buttons and lights now radiated from it and rotated around the room.
A blast of noise hit them. The speaker was set way too loud. Phædrus tried to say something to Capella. Capella cupped his hand to his ear and laughed. Phædrus threw up his hands and they both sat back and listened and drank their ale.
More people had come in and now the place was really getting crowded; a lot of local people it seemed like, but they seemed to mix with the sailors just fine, as though they were used to each other. With all the ale and noise and friendliness of strangers this was beginning to be sort of a great little joint. He drank and listened and watched little patches of light from some sort of disco machine attached to the jukebox circle around on the ceiling.
His thoughts began to drift. He thought of what Rigel had said. The East was a different country. The difference was hard to identify — you felt it more than you saw it.
Some of the Hudson valley architecture had a Currier-and-Ives feeling of the early 1800s, a feeling of slow, decent, orderly life that preceded the Industrial Revolution. Minnesota, where Phædrus came from, never shared that. It was mostly forests and Indians and log cabins back then.
Traveling across America by water was like going back in time and seeing how it must have been long ago. He was following old trade routes that were used before railways became dominant. It was amazing how parts of this river still looked the same as the old Hudson River school of painting showed it, with beautiful forests, and mountains in the distance.
As the boat moved south he’d seen a growing aura of social structure, particularly in the mansions that had become more numerous. Their styles were getting more and more removed from the frontier. They were getting closer and closer to Europe.
Two of the Canadians at the bar were a man and a woman up against each other so close you couldn’t have slipped a letter-opener between them. When the music stopped Phædrus motioned to Rigel and Capella to notice them. The man had his hand on the woman’s thigh and the woman was smiling and drinking as though nothing was happening.
Phædrus asked Rigel, Are these some of your moral Canadians?
Capella laughed.
Rigel glanced over for a second and glanced back with a frown. There are two kinds, he said. The one kind disapproves of this country for all the junk they find here, and the other kind loves this country for all the junk they find here.
He motioned with his head to the two and was going to say something but then the music and the lights started up again and he threw up his hands and Capella laughed and they sat back again.
After a while, it began to feel cold. The door was open. A woman stood there, her eyes combing the room as though she was looking for someone.
Someone shouted, CLOSE THE DOOR!
The woman and Rigel looked at each other for a long time. It looked as though he was the one she was looking for but then she kept on looking.
CLOSE THE DOOR! someone else shouted.
They’re talking to you, Lila, Rigel said.
Apparently she saw what she was looking for because suddenly her entire expression turned furious. She slammed the door with all her might.
That SUIT you? she shouted.
Rigel looked at her without expression and then turned back to the table.
The music stopped. Phædrus asked with a wink, Is that one of the ones who love us?
No, she’s not even a Canadian, Rigel said.
Phædrus asked, Who is she? Rigel didn’t say anything.
Where’s she from?
Don’t have anything to do with her, Rigel said.
Suddenly they were hit again by another blast of noise.
TAKE A BREAK!… it blared out.
The colored lights flashed around the room again.
LET’S GET TOGETHER!…
ME AND YOU!
Capella held up an ale can questioningly to see if anyone wanted more. Phædrus nodded yes and Capella went off.
AND DO THE THING…
AND DO THE THING…
THAT WE LIKE…
TO DO!…
Rigel said something, but Phædrus couldn’t hear him. The tall Canadian with the roving hand and his girlfriend were on the dance floor. He watched them for a while, and as you might know, they were good.
DO A LITTLE DANCE…
MAKE A LITTLE LOVE…
GET DOWN TONIGHT…
GET DOWN TONIGHT
Sensual. Short driving bursts of sound. A black sermon, up from the ghetto.
He watched Lila, who was now sitting by herself at the bar. Something about her really held his attention. Sex, he guessed.
She had the usual junk cosmetics; blond tinted hair, red nails, nothing original, except that it all came out X-rated. You just sort of felt instantly right away without having to think twice about it what it was she did best. But there was something in her expression that looked almost explosive.
When the music stopped the sexy Canadian and his girl came off from the dance floor. They saw her and almost stopped, then went forward slowly to the bar. Then Phædrus saw her say something to them and three people around them suddenly stiffened. The man turned around and actually looked scared. He took his arm off the girlfriend and turned to Lila. He must have been the one Lila was looking for. He said something to her and she said something back to him and then he nodded and nodded again, then he and the woman looked at each other and turned to the bar and said nothing to Lila at all. The others around them gradually turned back to talking again.
This ale was getting to Phædrus. Still his head seemed strangely clear.
He studied Lila some more: her legs were crossed and her skirt was above her knees. Wide hips. Shiny satin blouse. V-necked and tucked tight into a belt. Under it was a bustline that was hard to look away from. It was a defiant kind of vulgarity, a kind of Mae West thing. She looked a little like Mae West. C’mon and do something, if you’ve got the nerve, she seemed to say.
Some X-rated thoughts passed through his mind. Whatever it is that’s aroused by these cues isn’t put off by any lack of originality. They were doing all kinds of things to his endocrine system. He’d been alone on the water a long time.
DO A LITTLE DANCE…
MAKE A LITTLE LOVE…
GET DOWN TONIGHT…
GET DOWN TONIGHT…
Do you know her? he shouted at Rigel.
Rigel shook his head. Don’t have anything to do with her!
Where’s she from?
The sewer! Rigel said.
Rigel gave him a narrow-eyed glance. Rigel sure was giving a lot of advice tonight.
The door opened and more people came in. Capella returned with an armload of cans.
DO A LITTLE DANCE…
MAKE A LITTLE LOVE…
Capella shouted in Phædrus' ear, NICE, QUIET, REFINED PLACE WE PICKED!!!
Phædrus nodded up and down and smiled.
He could see Lila start to talk to one of the other men at the bar and the man seemed to answer familiarly. But the others kept a distance and held their faces stiff as though they were on guard against something.
DO A LITTLE DANCE…
MAKE A LITTLE LOVE…
GET DOWN TONIGHT…
GET DOWN TONIGHT…
GET DOWN TONIGHT!
GET DOWN TONIGHT!
He wondered if he had the nerve to go up and talk to her.
BABY!!
He sure as hell had the desire.
He took his time and finished his ale. The relaxation from the alcohol and tension from what was coming just exactly balanced each other in an equilibrium that resembled stone sobriety but was not. He watched her for a long time and she knew that he was watching her and he knew that she knew he was watching her, and he knew that she knew that he knew; in a kind of regression of images that you get when two mirrors face each other and the images go on and on and on in some kind of infinity.
Then he picked up his can and headed toward the spot next to her at the bar.
At the bar-rail the smell of her perfume penetrated through the tobacco and liquor smells.
After a while she turned and stared into him. The face was mask-like from the cosmetics, but a faint smile showed pleasure, as though she had been waiting for this a long time.
She said, Where have I seen you before?
A cliché, he thought, but there was a protocol to this sort of thing. Yeah, Where have I seen you before? He tried to think of the protocol. He was rusty. The protocol was you’re supposed to talk about the places you might have seen her in and who you know there, and this is supposed to lead to further subjects in a progression of intimacy, and he was trying to think of some places to talk about when he looked at her, and my God, it was her, the one on the streetcar and she’s asking, Where have I seen you before? and that was what started the illumination.
It was stronger toward the center of her face but it didn’t come from her face. It was as though her face were on the center of a screen and the light came from behind the screen.
My God, it was really her, after all these years.
Are you on a boat? she said.
He said he was.
Are you with Richard Rigel?
You know him? he asked.
I know a lot of people, she said.
The bartender brought the ales he ordered, and he paid for them.
Are you crewing for Richard?
No. My boat’s rafted against his. Everything’s crowded with all these boats coming down at the same time.
Where have you been all this time? he wanted to say, but she wouldn’t know what he was talking about. Why did you go away in the crowd that time? Were you laughing at me then too? Something about boats. He was supposed to say something about boats.
We came down the canals together from Oswego, he said.
Then why didn’t I see you there? Lila said.
You did see me there before, he thought, but now the illumination had disappeared and her voice wasn’t the way he had always thought it would be and so now this was just another stranger like all the others.
She said, I saw Richard in Rome and Amsterdam but I didn’t see you.
I didn’t go into town with him. I stayed on my boat.
Are you all alone?
Yes.
She looked at him with a kind of question in her eye and then said, Invite me to your table.
Then she said loudly enough so that the others could hear, I can’t stand the trash at this bar! But the two she intended it for just looked at each other knowingly and didn’t look over at her at all.
Rigel was gone from the table when they got there but Capella gave Lila a big hello and she flashed a big smile on him.
How are you, Bill? she said.
Capella said OK.
Where’s Richard? she asked.
He went to play pool, Capella said.
She looked at Phædrus and said, Richard’s an old friend.
There was a pause when he didn’t answer this.
Then she asked how far he was going.
Phædrus said he wasn’t sure yet.
Lila said she was going south for the winter.
She asked him where he was from and Phædrus told her the Midwest. She didn’t have much interest in that.
He told her about seeing someone like her before in the Midwest but she said she’d never been there. Lots of people look like me, she said.
After a while Capella left for the bar. Phædrus was alone with her, facing up to a kind of emptiness. Something needed to be said but he didn’t know what to say. He could see it was beginning to bother her too. He wasn’t her type, she was beginning to see that, but the ale was helping. It obliterated the differences. Enough ale and everything got reduced to pure biology, where it belonged.
After a while Lila asked him to dance. He said he didn’t and so they just sat there. But then the tall Canadian and his girlfriend got on the floor and started to dance again. They were good. They really moved together but when Phædrus looked over at Lila he saw the same look she had when she first came in.
Her face had that explosive look again. That son-of-a-bitch! she said. He came with me. He invited me on this trip! And now he’s with her. God, that just kills me.
Then the music started again and the disco lights rotated and Lila looked at him in a curious way. It was just a glance, and the disco light moved on but in just that moment he noticed what a beautiful pale blue her eyes were. They didn’t seem to match the way she talked or the way the rest of her looked either. Strange. Out of memory. They were like the eyes of some child.
The ale cans were empty and he offered to get some more but she said, C’mon, let’s dance.
I’m no good, he said.
That doesn’t matter,' she said. Just do anything you feel like, she said. I’ll go along.
He did, and she did go along and he was surprised. They got into a sort of a whirl thing. Going round and round with the disco lights and they began to get into it more and more.
You’re better than you think, she said, and it was true: he was.
GET DOWN TONIGHT…
GET DOWN TONIGHT
He was aware that people were watching them, but all he could see was Lila and the lights whirling around and around.
Around and around. And around and around — red and blue and pink and orange and gold. They were all over the room and they moved across the ceiling and sometimes they shined on her face and sometimes they shined in his eyes — red and pink and gold.
DO A LITTLE DANCE…
MAKE A LITTLE LOVE…
GET DOWN TONIGHT…
GET DOWN TONIGHT
The hesitation was gone and the ale and the music and the perfume from Lila took over and her pale blue eyes were watching him with that strange look of are you the one? and his mind kept saying to her yes, I am the one and this answer extended slowly into his arms and hands where he held her and then into her body and she could feel it and she began to quiet down from her anger and he began to quiet down from his awkwardness.
DO A LITTLE DANCE…
MAKE A LITTLE LOVE…
GET DOWN TONIGHT…
GET DOWN TONIGHT…
Once the Canadian dancer came over and wanted to cut in. Lila told him to get lost and he could tell from a change in her body how good she felt about that. After that they both knew that something had been settled, for tonight at least, and beyond that was too far to think about.
He could hardly remember how he got back to this boat with her. What came through in memory was the beat of the music and that pale, blue-eyed questioning look, and then here on the bunk the way she embraced him, clinging with all her might, like a drowning person holding on for dear life.
Do a little dance…
Make a little love…
Get down tonight…
Get down tonight…
He began to feel sleepy.
It’s so strange, he thought. All the tricks and games and lines and promises to get them into bed with you and you work so hard at it and nothing happens. And then someone like this comes along and you don’t try much of anything at all and then she’s the one you wake up next to.
It doesn’t make any sense at all, he thought sleepily… no sense at all. And the tune kept playing on and on in his mind — over and over again and again until he fell asleep.
Do a little dance…
Make a little love…
Get down tonight…
Get down tonight…
When Phædrus awoke he saw through the hatch that the sky had become less black. Dawn was coming.
Then he realized he wasn’t alone. In fact he was blocked physically from getting out of the bunk by a body between him and the boat’s passage way. This was Lila, he remembered.
He saw that with some careful maneuvering he could slink up through the open hatch and come around on deck and re-enter the cabin from the cockpit.
He lifted himself up carefully and then got through the hatch without disturbing her.
Nice work.
The cold deck on his bare feet really woke him up. He couldn’t feel any ice, but the fiberglass coachroof was the next thing to it. It helped to shake off all the alcohol fumes in his head. Nothing like walking around bare-naked on top of a freezing boat to wake you up for the day.
Everything was so quiet now. The dawn was still so early the turn of the creek in the distance was barely visible. Hard to believe what Rigel said: that around that turn a coal-barge could go all the way to the ocean.
He went over and checked the lines going over to Rigel’s boat. They were a little loose and he took up on one of the spring lines and then tightened all of them. He should have done that before he went to bed. He’d been too drunk to take care of details like that.
He looked around and, despite the cold, a dawn mystery took hold of him. Some other boats had come in since he had, and were rafted ahead and behind him. Possibly one of them was the boat Lila had come on. The harbor looked scuzzy and old in places but showed some signs of gentrification in others. Pseudo-Victorian, it looked like, but not bad. Off in the distance was a crane and other masts. The Hudson River was completely out of sight.
It felt good not to be related to this harbor in any way. He didn’t know what was above the banks of the river or behind the harbor buildings or where the roads led to or who the houses belonged to or what people would appear here today or what people they would meet. It was like a picture-book and he was a child, watching it, waiting for a page to be turned.
Shivering broke the spell. His skin was covered with goose-bumps. He went back to the stern of the boat, hung off the boom gallows with one arm and relieved into the creek. Then he stepped down to the cockpit, pushed the heavy teak hatch cover back and let himself down with the grace that came from a familiar motion. It was a grace he’d acquired the hard way. When he first got the boat he walked around like it was a house, slipped on some diesel oil, plunged head-first down the companionway ladder, and broke a collar bone. Now he’d learned to move like a spider monkey, particularly in storms when the whole boat rose and pitched and rolled like a flying trapeze.
In the cabin he felt his way to an overhead light and flicked it on. The darkness was filled instantly with familiar teak and mahogany.
He went forward into the deck forecabin and found his clothes in the bunk opposite Lila. She had evidently rolled over since he left. Her shadowy shape looked about the same from this side as it had from the other a few minutes ago.
He closed the forecabin door and went into the main cabin where he pulled open a wood bin-cover, took out his old heavy brown sweater and drew it over his head. When he pushed the cover shut, the snap of its catch disturbed the silence. He went back to the companionway ladder, put the hatch’s drop-boards in place, and slid the heavy hatch-cover shut.
This place needed some heat.
Next to the ladder, by the chart table, he found matches and alcohol. He carefully brought a little cupful of the alcohol to a small coal stove mounted on a bulkhead at the other end of the cabin and poured the alcohol over some charcoal briquets inside. On the picture-book shore out there everything was done by magic. They got their heat and electricity without even thinking about it. But in this little floating world, whatever you needed you had to get for yourself.
He lit a match, tossed it in and watched the alcohol go Pouf! and fill the stove with a pale, blue-purple flame. He was glad he’d loaded the stove yesterday. He wouldn’t want to have to do it now… Was that just yesterday? It seemed like a week…
He closed the stove door, watched it for a moment until out of the corner of his eye he saw an enormous suitcase that he had never seen before.
Where did that come from? he wondered.
It wasn’t his.
Lila must have brought it with her.
He thought about it as he struck another match at a gimballed brass kerosene lamp. He adjusted the wick until the flame seemed right. Then he turned off the overhead electric light and sat down on the berth under the lamp, his back against a rolled sleeping bag.
As far as he could figure he must have made some sort of deal with her to come on the boat or she wouldn’t have brought this suitcase.
Now the kerosene light glowed over all the wood and bronze and brass and fabric shapes of the cabin and another invisible glow of warmth came from the black coal stove that now made cricking heating noises. Soon it would heat everything enough to make it all comfortable.
Except for that suitcase. What was coming back to mind wasn’t making him comfortable at all. He remembered she’d dropped the suitcase on Rigel’s deck. Really hard. When they walked across to come aboard he’d turned and told her to keep it quiet. He remembered she shouted, Don’t you tell me to keep it quiet! in a voice you could hear all over the harbor.
It was all coming back: going over to her boat, waiting for her to pack, listening to her talk about that dirty double-crosser George and his whore, Debbie.
Oh-oh.
He guessed it couldn’t be so bad, though. Just a couple of days into Manhattan and then she would be gone. No harm done.
He saw that her suitcase had shoved all his trays of slips over to one side of the pilot berth. They were for a book he was working on and one of the four long card-catalog-type trays was by an edge where it could fall off. That’s all he needed, he thought, about three thousand four-by-six slips of note pad paper all over the floor.
He got up and adjusted the sliding rest inside each tray so that it was tight against the slips and they couldn’t fall out. Then he carefully pushed the trays back into a safer place in the rear of the berth. Then he went back and sat down again.
It would actually be easier to lose the boat than it would be to lose those slips. There were about eleven thousand of them. They’d grown out of almost four years of organizing and reorganizing and reorganizing so many times he’d become dizzy trying to fit them all together. He’d just about given up.
Their overall subject he called a Metaphysics of Quality, or sometimes a Metaphysics of Value, or sometimes just MOQ to save time.
The buildings out there on shore were in one world and these slips were in another. This slip-world was quite a world and he’d almost lost it once because he hadn’t written any of it down and incidents came along that had destroyed his memory of it. Now he had reconstructed what seemed like most of it on these slips and he didn’t want to lose it again.
But maybe it was a good thing that he had lost it because now, in the reconstruction of it, all sorts of new material was flooding in — so much that his main task was to get it processed before it log-jammed his head into some kind of a block that he couldn’t get out of. Now the main purpose of the slips was not to help him remember anything. It was to help him to forget it. That sounded contradictory but the purpose was to keep his head empty, to put all his ideas of the past four years on that pilot berth where he didn’t have to think of them. That was what he wanted.
There’s an old analogy to a cup of tea. If you want to drink new tea you have to get rid of the old tea that’s in your cup, otherwise your cup just overflows and you get a wet mess. Your head is like that cup. It has a limited capacity and if you want to learn something about the world you should keep your head empty in order to learn it. It’s very easy to spend your whole life swishing old tea around in your cup thinking it’s great stuff because you’ve never really tried anything new, because you could never get it in, because the old stuff prevented its entry because you were so sure the old stuff was so good, because you never really tried anything new… on and on in an endless circular pattern.
The reason Phædrus used slips rather than full-sized sheets of paper is that a card-catalog tray full of slips provides a more random access. When information is organized in small chunks that can be accessed and sequenced at random it becomes much more valuable than when you have to take it in serial form. It’s better, for example, to run a post office where the patrons have numbered boxes and can come in to access these boxes any time they please. It’s worse to have them all come in at a certain time, stand in a queue and get their mail from Joe, who has to sort through everything alphabetically each time and who has rheumatism, is going to retire in a few years, and who doesn’t care whether they like waiting or not. When any distribution is locked into a rigid sequential format it develops Joes that dictate what new changes will be allowed and what will not, and that rigidity is deadly.
Some of the slips were actually about this topic: random access and Quality. The two are closely related. Random access is at the essence of organic growth, in which cells, like post-office boxes, are relatively independent. Cities are based on random access. Democracies are founded on it. The free market system, free speech, and the growth of science are all based on it. A library is one of civilization’s most powerful tools precisely because of its card-catalog trays. Without the Dewey Decimal System allowing the number of cards in the main catalog to grow or shrink at any point the whole library would soon grow stale and useless and die.
And so while those trays certainly didn’t have much glamour they nevertheless had the hidden strength of a card catalog. They ensured that by keeping his head empty and keeping sequential formatting to a minimum, no fresh new unexplored idea would be forgotten or shut out. There were no ideological Joes to kill an idea because it didn’t fit into what he was already thinking.
Because he didn’t pre-judge the fittingness of new ideas or try to put them in order but just let them flow in, these ideas sometimes came in so fast he couldn’t write them down quickly enough. The subject matter, a whole metaphysics, was so enormous the flow had turned into an avalanche. The slips kept expanding in every direction so that the more he saw the more he saw there was to see. It was like a Venturi effect which pulled ideas into it endlessly, on and on. He saw there were a million things to read, a million leads to follow… too much… too much… and not enough time in one life to get it all together. Snowed under.
There’d been times when an urge surfaced to take the slips, pile by pile, and file them into the door of the coal stove on top of the glowing charcoal briquets and then close the door and listen to the cricking of the metal as they turned into smoke. Then it would all be gone and he would be really free again.
Except that he wouldn’t be free. It would still be there in his mind to do.
So he spent most of his time submerged in chaos, knowing that the longer he put off setting into a fixed organization the more difficult it would become. But he felt sure that sooner or later some sort of a format would have to emerge and it would be a better one for his having waited.
Eventually this belief was justified. Periods started to appear when he just sat there for hours and no slips came in — and this, he saw, was at last the time for organizing. He was pleased to discover that the slips themselves made this organizing much easier. Instead of asking Where does this metaphysics of the universe begin? — which was a virtually impossible question -all he had to do was just hold up two slips and ask, Which comes first? This was easy and he always seemed to get an answer. Then he would take a third slip, compare it with the first one, and ask again, Which comes first? If the new slip came after the first one he compared it with the second. Then he had a three-slip organization. He kept repeating the process with slip after slip.
Before long he noticed certain categories emerging. The earlier slips began to merge about a common topic and later slips about a different topic. When enough slips merged about a single topic so that he got a feeling it would be permanent he took an index card of the same size as the slips, attached a transparent plastic index tab to it, wrote the name of the topic on a little cardboard insert that came with the tab, put it in the tab, and put the index card together with its related topic slips. The trays on the pilot berth now had about four or five hundred of these tabbed index cards.
At various times he’d tried all kinds of different things: colored plastic tabs to indicate subtopics and sub-subtopics; stars to indicate relative importance; slips split with a line to indicate both emotive and rational aspects of their subject; but all of these had increased rather than decreased confusion and he’d found it clearer to include their information elsewhere.
It was fascinating to watch this thing grow. No one that he knew had ever written a whole metaphysics before and there were no rules for doing it and no way of predicting how it would progress.
In addition to the topic categories, five other categories had emerged. Phædrus felt these were of great importance:
The first was UNASSIMILATED. This contained new ideas that interrupted what he was doing. They came in on the spur of the moment while he was organizing the other slips or sailing or working on the boat or doing something else that didn’t want to be disturbed. Normally your mind says to these ideas, Go away, I’m busy, but that attitude is deadly to Quality. The UNASSIMILATED pile helped solve the problem. He just stuck the slips there on hold until he had the time and desire to get to them.
The next non-topical category was called PROGRAM. PROGRAM slips were instructions for what to do with the rest of the slips. They kept track of the forest while he was busy thinking about individual trees. With more than ten-thousand trees that kept wanting to expand to one-hundred thousand, the PROGRAM slips were absolutely necessary to keep from getting lost.
What made them so powerful was that they too were on slips, one slip for each instruction. This meant the PROGRAM slips were random access too and could be changed and resequenced as the need arose without any difficulty. He remembered reading that John Von Neumann, an inventor of the computer, had said the single thing that makes a computer so powerful is that the program is data and can be treated like any other data. That seemed a little obscure when Phædrus had read it but now it was making sense.
The next slips were the GRIT slips. These were for days when he woke up in a foul mood and could find nothing but fault everywhere. He knew from experience that if he threw stuff away on these days he would regret it later, so instead he satisfied his anger by just describing all the stuff he wanted to destroy and the reasons for destroying it. The GRIT slips would then wait for days or sometimes months for a calmer period when he could make a more dispassionate judgment.
The next to the last group was the TOUGH category. This contained slips that seemed to say something of importance but didn’t fit into any topic he could think of. It prevented getting stuck on some slip whose place might become obvious later on.
The final category was JUNK. These were slips that seemed of high value when he wrote them down but which now seemed awful. Sometimes it included duplicates of slips he had forgotten he’d written. These duplicates were thrown away but nothing else was discarded. He’d found over and over again that the junk pile is a working category. Most slips died there but some reincarnated, and some of these reincarnated slips were the most important ones he had.
Actually, these last two piles, JUNK and TOUGH, were the piles that gave him the most concern. The whole thrust of the organizing effort was to have as few of these as possible. When they appeared he had to fight the tendency to slight them, shove them under the carpet, throw them out the window, belittle them, and forget them. These were the underdogs, the outsiders, the pariahs, the sinners of his system. But the reason he was so concerned about them was that he felt the quality and strength of his entire system of organization depended on how he treated them. If he treated the pariahs well he would have a good system. If he treated them badly he would have a weak one. They could not be allowed to destroy all efforts at organization but he couldn’t allow himself to forget them either. They just stood there, accusing, and he had to listen.
The hundreds of topics had organized themselves into larger sections, the sections into chapters, and chapters into parts; so that what the slips had organized themselves into finally was the contents of a book; but it was a book whose organization was from the bottom up rather than from the top down. He hadn’t started with a master idea and then selected in joe-fashion only those slips that would fit. In this case, Joe, the organizing principle, had been democratically elected by the slips themselves. The JUNK and TOUGH slips didn’t participate in this election, and that created an underlying dissatisfaction. But he felt that you can’t expect a perfect system of organization of anything. He’d kept the JUNK pile as small as possible without deliberately suppressing it and that was the most anyone could ask.
A description of this system makes it all sound a lot easier than it actually was. Often he got into a situation where incoming TOUGH slips and the JUNK slips would indicate his whole system of making topics was wrong. Some slips would fit in two or three categories and other slips would fit into no categories at all and he began to see that he would have to tear the whole system of organization apart and begin to reorganize it differently, because if he didn’t, the JUNK pile and the TOUGH pile and the GRIT pile would start howling at him louder and louder until he had to do it.
Those were bad days, but sometimes the new reorganization would leave the JUNK piles and the TOUGH piles bigger than they were when he started. Slips that had fit the old organization now didn’t fit the new one, and he began to see that what he had to do now was go back and redo it all over again the old way. Those were the really bad days.
Sometimes he would start to make a PROGRAM procedure that would allow him to go back where he started, but in the process of making it he saw that the PROGRAM procedure needed modification so he started to modify that, but in the process of modification he saw that the modification needed modification, so he started to modify that, but then he saw that even that was no good, and then just about at this time the phone would ring and it would be someone wanting to sell him something or congratulate him on the previous book he had written or invite him to some conference or get him to lecture somewhere. They were usually well-intended callers, but when he was done with them he would just sit there, blocked.
He began to think that if he just got away from people on this boat and had enough time it would come to him, but it hadn’t worked out as well as he’d hoped. You just get other kinds of interruptions. A storm comes up and you worry about the anchor. Or another yacht pulls up and they come over and want to socialize. Or there’s a drunken party down on the dock… on and on…
He got up, went over to the pilot berth, got some more charcoal briquets and put them on the coal stove. It was getting nice and warm now.
He picked up one of the trays and looked at it. The front of it showed rust through the paint. You couldn’t keep anything of steel from rusting on a boat, even stainless, and these boxes were ordinary mild-steel sheet metal. He would have to make some new ones out of marine plywood and glue when he had the time. Maybe when he got South.
This tray was the oldest one. It had slips he hadn’t looked at for more than a year now.
He brought it over to the table with him.
The first topic, at the very front of the tray, was DUSENBERRY. He looked at it nostalgically. At one time he had thought DUSENBERRY was going to be at the center of the whole book.
After a while he took a blank pad from the back of the tray and wrote on the top slip, PROGRAM, and then under it, Hang up everything until Lila gone. Then he tore the slip off the note pad and put the slip in the front of the PROGRAM pile and put the note pad in the back of the tray. It was important, he’d found, to write a PROGRAM slip for what you are currently doing. It seems unnecessary at the time you are writing it but later when interruptions have interrupted interruptions which have interrupted interruptions you’re glad you did it.
The GRIT slips had been saying for months that DUSENBERRY had to go but he never seemed to be able to get rid of it. It just stayed there for what seemed to be sentimental reasons. Now it had been shoved into lesser and lesser importance by incoming slips and was just hanging on, teetering on the edge of the JUNK pile.
He took the whole DUSENBERRY topic section out. The slips were getting brown around the edges and the ink was turning brown too, on the first slip.
It said: Verne Dusenberry, Assoc. Prof., English Dept., Montana State College. Died, brain tumor, 1966, Calgary, Alberta.
He’d made the slip, probably, so he’d remember the year.
Nineteen-sixty-six. My God, how the years had sped up.
He wondered what Dusenberry’d be like now if he’d lived. Not much, maybe. There were signs before he died that he was going downhill, that he’d been at the peak of his powers at about the time Phædrus knew him in Bozeman, Montana, where they both were members of the English department.
Dusenberry was born in Bozeman and had graduated from the college there, but after twenty-three years on the faculty his assignment was just three sections of freshman composition; no literature courses, no advanced composition courses of any kind. Academically he had long before been placed on the TOUGH pile of scholars whom the department would just as soon have gotten rid of. Tenure was all that saved him from the JUNK pile. He had little to do with the rest of the department socially. Other members seemed to be in various degrees of alienation from him.
This seemed odd to Phædrus because in his own conversations with him Dusenberry was not at all unsociable. He sometimes looked unsociable with his arched eyebrows and downturned mouth, but when Phædrus had gotten to know him, Dusenberry was actually gabby in a high-spirited, gleeful, maiden-auntish sort of way. It was a slightly gay style; tart, and somewhat backbiting; and at first Phædrus thought this was why they were so down on him. Montanans in those days were supposed to look and act like Marlboro ads, but in time Phædrus saw that wasn’t what caused the alienation. It was just Dusenberry’s general overall eccentricity. Over the years small eccentric differences in a small college department can grow into big differences, and Dusenberry’s differences were not so small. The biggest difference was revealed in a line Phædrus heard a number of times, a disdainful: Oh, yes, Dusenberry… Dusenberry and his Indians.
When Dusenberry spoke of other faculties it was with equal disdain: Oh yes, the English department. But he seldom spoke of them at all. The only subject he spoke about with any sincere enthusiasm was Indians, and particularly the Rocky Boy Indians, the Chippewa-Cree on the Canadian border about whom he was writing his Ph.D. thesis in anthropology. He let it be known that except for the Indians he had befriended for twenty-one of his twenty-three years as a teacher he regarded all these years as a waste of his life.
He was the advisor for all the Indian students at the college and had held this post for as long as anyone could remember. The students were a connecting link. He’d made a point to know their families and visit them and use this as an entry point into their lives. He spent all the weekend and vacation time he could on the reservations, participating in their ceremonies, running errands for them, driving their kids to the hospital when they were sick, speaking to state officials when they got in trouble, and beyond that, completely losing himself into the ways and personalities and secrets and mysteries of these people he loved a hundred times better than his own.
Within a few years when his degree was completed he would be leaving English teaching forever and teaching anthropology instead. One would guess that this would be a happy solution for him, but from what Phædrus heard it was already apparent that it would not be. He was not only an eccentric in the field of English he was an eccentric in anthropology as well.
The main part of his eccentricity seemed to be his refusal to accept objectivity as an anthropological criterion. He didn’t think objectivity had any place in the proper conduct of anthropological study.
This is like saying the Pope has no place in the Catholic Church. In American anthropology that is the worst possible apostasy and Dusenberry was quickly informed of it. Of all the American universities he had applied to for Ph.D. study, every one had turned him down. But rather than change his beliefs he had gone around the whole American university system to Prof. Åke Hultkranz in Uppsala, Sweden’s oldest university, and was about to receive his Ph.D. there. Whenever Dusenberry talked about this, a cat-who-ate-the-canary smile would come over his face. An American taking a Ph.D. in Sweden on the Anthropology of American Indians? It was ludicrous!
The trouble with the objective approach, Dusenberry said, is that you don’t learn much that way… The only way to find out about Indians is to care for them and win their love and respect… then they’ll do almost anything for you… But if you don’t do that… He would shake his head and his thoughts would go trailing off.
I’ve seen these "objective" workers come on the reservations, he said, and get absolutely nowhere…
There’s this pseudo-science myth that when you’re "objective" you just disappear from the face of the earth and see everything undistorted, as it really is, like God from heaven. But that’s rubbish. When a person’s objective his attitude is remote. He gets a sort of stony, distant look on his face.
The Indians see that. They see it better than we do. And when they see it they don’t like it. They don’t know where in hell these "objective" anthros are at and it makes them suspicious, so they clam up and don’t say anything…
Or they’ll just tell them nonsense… which of course a lot of the anthros believe at first because they got it "objectively"… and the Indians sometimes laugh at them behind their backs.
Some of these anthropologists make big names for themselves in their departments, Dusenberry said, because they know all that jargon. But they really don’t know as much as they think they do. And they especially don’t like people who tell them so… which I do… He laughed.
So that’s why I’m not objective about Indians, he said. I believe in them and they believe in me and that makes all the difference. They’ve told me things they’ve said they never told any other white man because they know I’ll never use it against them. It’s a whole different way of relating to them. Indians first, anthropology second…
That limits me in a lot of ways. There’s so much I can’t say. But it’s better to know a lot and say little, I think, than know little and say a lot… don’t you agree? Because Phædrus was new to the English department Dusenberry took a curious interest in him. Dusenberry was curious about everything, and as he got to know Phædrus better the curiosity grew. Here to Dusenberry’s surprise was someone who seemed even more alienated than he was, someone who had done graduate work in Hindu philosophy at Benares, India, for God’s sake, and knew something about cultural differences. Most important, Phædrus seemed to have a very analytic mind.
That’s what I don’t have, Dusenberry had said. I know volumes about these people but I can’t structure it. I just don’t have that kind of mind.
So every chance he got he poured hours and hours of information about American Indians into Phædrus' ears, hoping to get back from him some overall structure, some picture of what it all meant in larger terms. Phædrus listened but he never had any answers.
Dusenberry was particularly concerned about Indian religion. He was sure it explained why the Indians were so slow in integrating into the surrounding white culture. He’d noticed that tribes with the strongest religious practices were the most backward by white standards and he wanted Phædrus to provide some theoretical support for this. Phædrus thought Dusenberry was probably right but couldn’t think of any theoretical support and thought the whole thesis was somewhat dull and academic. For more than a year Dusenberry never tried to correct this impression. He just kept on feeding information about Indians to Phædrus and getting back Phædrus' lack of ideas. But then, a few months before Phædrus was to leave Bozeman for another teaching job, Dusenberry said to him, There’s something I think I have to show you.
Where? Phædrus asked.
On the Northern Cheyenne reservation, down in Busby. Have you been there?
No, Phædrus said.
Well, it’s a wretched place but I’ve promised to take some students down and you should come along too. I want you to see a meeting of the Native American Church. The students won’t be going to it, but you should.
You’re going to convert me? Phædrus said facetiously.
Maybe, Dusenberry said.
Dusenberry explained that they would be sitting in a teepee all night long until sun-up. After midnight Phædrus could leave if he wanted, but before that no one was permitted to leave.
What do we do all night? Phædrus asked.
In the center of the teepee there will be a fire, and there will be ceremonies connected to it, and a lot of singing and drumming. Not much talking. After the meeting is over in the morning there’ll be a ceremonial meal.
Phædrus thought about it and then agreed and asked what the meal was like.
Dusenberry smiled with a kind of arch smile. He said, One time they were supposed to have the food, you know, from before the white men came. Blueberries and venison and all that and so what did they do? They broke out three cans of DelMonte corn and started opening all the cans with a can opener. I stood it as long as I could. Finally I told them "No! No! No! Not canned corn," and they laughed at me. They said, "Just like a white man. Has to have everything just right." Then after that, all night long they did everything the way I said and they thought that was an even bigger joke because now they weren’t only using white man’s corn they were having a white man run the ceremony. And they were all laughing at me. They’re always doing stuff like that. We just love each other. I just have the best time when I’m down there.
What’s the purpose of staying up all night? Phædrus asked.
Dusenberry looked at him meaningfully. Visions, he said.
From the fire?
There’s a sacramental food that you take that induces them. It’s called "peyote."
That was the first time Phædrus had ever heard the name. This was just before Leary and Alpert’s notoriety and the great age of hippies, trippers and flower children that peyote and its synthetic equivalent, LSD, helped to produce. Peyote back then was all but unknown to almost everyone except anthropologists and other specialists in Indian affairs.
In the tray of slips, just back of the ones on Dusenberry, was a section of slips on how the Indians had quietly brought peyote up from Mexico in the late nineteenth century, eating it to induce an altered mental state that they considered a form of religious communion. Dusenberry had indicated that Indians who used it regarded it as a quicker and surer way of arriving at the condition reached in the traditional vision quest where an Indian goes out into isolation and fasts and prays and meditates for days in the darkness of a sealed lodge until the Great Spirit reveals itself to him and takes over his life.
On one of his slips Phædrus had copied a reference that showed the similarity of the peyote experience to the old vision quest descriptions. According to the description it produces light-headedness, a state of well-being, and increased attention to all perceptions, sensations, and inner mental events.
Perceptual modifications follow, initially manifested by vivid and spontaneous visual imagery, which evolves to illusions and finally to visual hallucinations. Emotions are intensified, vary widely in content, and may include euphoria, apathy, serenity, or anxiety. The intellect is drawn to the analysis of complex realities or transcendental questions. Consciousness expands to include all these responses simultaneously. In later stages, following a large dose of a hallucinogen, a person may experience a feeling of union with nature associated with a dissolution of personal identity, engendering a state of beatitude or even ecstasy. A dissociative reaction, in which the subject loses contact with immediate reality, may also occur. A subject may experience abandonment of the body, may see elaborate visions, or feel the imminence of death, which could lead to terror and panic. The experience is determined by the person’s mental state, the structure of his or her personality, the physical setting, and cultural influences.
The source Phædrus had taken this material from concluded that current research and discussion are clouded by political and social issues, which since the 1960s has certainly been true. One slip noted that Dusenberry had been asked to testify before the Montana legislature on the matter. The president of the college had told him not to say anything, presumably to avoid political repercussions. Dusenberry complied, and told Phædrus later how guilty he felt about this.
After the sixties the whole issue of peyote became one of those no-win political contests between individual freedom on the one hand and democracy on the other. Clearly LSD was injuring some innocent people with hallucinations that led to their death, and clearly the majority of Americans wanted drugs such as LSD made illegal. But the majority of Americans were not Indians and certainly they were not members of the Native American Church. There was a persecution of a religious minority going on here, something that’s not supposed to happen in America.
The majority opposition to peyote reflected a cultural bias, the belief, unsupported by scientific or historical evidence, that hallucinatory experience is automatically bad. Since hallucinations are a form of insanity, the term hallucinogen is clearly pejorative. Like early descriptions of Buddhism as a heathen religion and Islam as barbaric, it begs some metaphysical questions. The Indians who use it as part of their ceremony might with equal accuracy call it a de-hallucinogen, since it’s their claim that it removes the hallucinations of contemporary life and reveals the reality buried beneath them.
There is actually some scientific support for this Indian point of view. Experiments have shown that spiders fed LSD do not wander around doing purposeless things as one might expect a hallucination would cause them to do, but instead spin an abnormally perfect, symmetrical web. That would support the de-hallucinogen thesis. But politics seldom depends on facts for its decisions.
Behind the index card for the PEYOTE slips was another card called RESERVATION. There were more than a hundred RESERVATION slips describing that ceremony Dusenberry and Phædrus attended — way too many. Most would have to be junked. He’d made them because at one time it looked as though the whole book would center around this long night’s meeting of the Native American Church. The ceremony would be a kind of spine to hold it all together. From it he would branch out and show in tangent after tangent the analysis of complex realities and transcendental questions that first emerged in his mind there.
The place can be seen from U.S. 212, about two-hundred yards from the highway, but all you see from the road is tar-papered shacks and grungy dogs and maybe a poorly dressed Indian walking on an earth footpath past some junked cars. As if to make a point of the shabbiness, a clean white steeple of a missionary church stands in the middle of all this.
Away from the steeple, off by itself (and probably gone by now) was a large teepee that looked like it might have been put up as a tourist attraction except that there was no way you could drive to it from the road and there were no billboards or signs around advertising anything for sale.
The physical distance to that teepee from the highway was about two-hundred yards, but culturally the distance bridged with Dusenberry that night was more like thousands of years. Phædrus couldn’t have gone that distance without the peyote. He would have just sat there observing all this objectively like a well-trained anthropology student. But the peyote prevented that. He didn’t observe, he participated, exactly as Dusenberry had intended he should do.
From twilight, when the peyote buttons were passed around, until midnight he sat staring across the flames of the ceremonial fire. The ring of Indian faces around the edge of the teepee had seemed ominous at first in the alternating light and shadow from the fire. The faces seemed misshapen, with sinister expressions like the story-book Indians of old; then that illusion passed and they seemed merely inscrutable.
After that there was a scaling down of thoughts that occurs whenever you adjust to a new physical situation. What am I doing here? he wondered. I wonder how things are doing now back home?… How am I going to get those English papers corrected by Monday?… and so on. But the thoughts gradually became less and less demanding and he settled down more and more into where he was and what he was watching.
Sometime after midnight, after he had listened to the singing and beating on the drum for hours and hours, something began to change. The exotic aspects began to fade. Instead of being an onlooker, feeling greater and greater distance from all this, his perceptions began to go in the opposite direction. He began to feel a warmth toward the songs. He murmured to John Wooden Leg, the Indian sitting next to him, John, that’s a great song! and he meant it. John looked at him with surprise.
Some huge unexpected change was taking place in his attitude toward this music and toward the people who were singing it. Something in the way they spoke and handled things and related to each other struck a resonance too, way deep inside him, at levels that had seldom resonated favorably to anything.
He couldn’t figure out what it was. Was the peyote just making him sentimental? He didn’t think so. It ran deeper than sentimentality. Sentimentality is a narrowing of experience to the emotionally familiar. But this was something new opening up. There was a contradiction here. It was something new opening up that gave the sentimental feeling someone might get from his childhood home when he sees a tree he once climbed or a swing he used to play on. A feeling of coming home. Coming home to some place he had never been before.
Why should he feel at home? This was the last place on earth where he should feel that.
He really didn’t. Only a part of him felt at home. The other part still felt estranged and analytic and watchful. It seemed as though he was splitting into two people, one of whom wanted to stay there forever, and the other wanted to leave immediately. The latter one he understood, but who was this first person? This first person was a mystery.
This first person seemed like it must be some secret side of his personality, a dark side, that seldom spoke and didn’t show itself to other people. He guessed he knew about it. He just didn’t like to think about it. It was the side with the sullen, scowling, outlook; a side that didn’t like authority, had never amounted to anything, and never would, and knew that, and was sad about it, but couldn’t help it. It could never be happy anywhere but always wanted to move on.
This wild side was saying for the first time, stop wandering, and these are your real people, and that was what he began to see there, listening to the songs and drums and staring into the fire. Something about these people seemed to say to this bad side of himself, We know exactly how you feel. We feel this way ourselves.
The other side, the good analytic side, just watched, and before long it slowly began to spin an enormous symmetrical intellectual web, larger and more perfect than any it had ever spun before.
The nucleus of this intellectual web was the observation that when the Indians entered the teepee, or went out, or added logs, or passed the ceremonial peyote, or pipe, or food, they just did these things. They didn’t go about doing them. They just did them. There was no waste motion. When they moved a branch into the fire to build it up they just moved it. There was no sense of ceremony. They were engaged in a ceremony but the way they did it there wasn’t any ceremony.
Normally he wouldn’t have attached much importance to this, but now, with the peyote opening up his mind and with his attention having nowhere else to go, he bored in on it with intensity.
This directness and simplicity was in the way they spoke, too. They spoke the way they moved, without any ceremony. It seemed to always come from deep within them. They just said what they wanted to say. Then they stopped. It wasn’t just the way they pronounced the words. It was their attitude — plain-spoken, he thought…
Plains spoken. They were speaking in the language of the Plains. This was the pure Plains American dialect he was listening to. It wasn’t just Indian. It was white too. It was a kind of Midwestern and Western accent you hear in Woody Guthrie songs and cowboy movies. When Henry Fonda appears in The Grapes of Wrath or Gary Cooper or John Wayne or Gene Autry or Roy Rogers or William S. Boyd appear in any of a hundred different Westerns this is how they talk, not like some fancy college professor, but Plains spoken; laconic, understated, very little tonal change, no change of expression. Yet there was a warmth beneath the surface that you couldn’t point to the source of.
Films have made the whole world know the dialect so well it’s almost a cliché, but the way these Indians were speaking it wasn’t any cliché. They were speaking the American Western dialect just as authentically as any cowboy he had ever heard. More authentically. It wasn’t something they were putting on. It was them.
The web expanded when Phædrus began to consider the fact that English wasn’t even the native language of these people. They didn’t speak English in their homes. How was it that these linguistic foreigners spoke the Plains dialect of American English not only as well as their white neighbors but actually better? How could they possibly imitate it so perfectly when it was obvious from their lack of ceremony that they weren’t trying to imitate anything at all?
The web grew wider and wider. They were not imitating. If there’s one thing these people didn’t do it was imitate. Everything was coming straight from the heart. That seemed to be the whole idea — to get things down to a point where everything’s coming straight on, direct, no imitation. But if they weren’t imitating, why did they talk this way? Why were they imitating?
Then the huge peyote illumination came:
They’re the originators!
It expanded until he felt as though he had walked through the screen of a movie and for the first time watched the people who were projecting it from the other side.
Most of the rest of the whole tray of slips, many more than a thousand of them before him here, was a direct growth from this one original insight.
Tucked in among them was a copy of a speech made at the Medicine Lodge council of 1867 by Ten Bears, a Comanche chief. Phædrus had copied it from a book on Indian oratory to use as an example of Plains speech by someone who could not possibly have learned it from the whites. Now he read it again.
Ten Bears spoke to the assembled tribes and specifically to the representatives of Washington, saying:
There are things which you have said to me which I do not like. They were not sweet like sugar, but bitter like gourds. You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and to make us Medicine lodges. I do not want them.
I was born on the prairie, where the wind blew free, and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there were no enclosures, and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there, and not within walls. I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have hunted and lived over in that country. I lived like my fathers before me, and like them I lived happily.
When I was at Washington, the Great Father told me that all the Comanche land was ours, and that no one should hinder us in living upon it. So why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and the sun, and the wind, and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep. The young men have heard talk of this and it has made them sad and angry. Do not speak of it any more. I love to carry out the talk I get from the Great Father. When I get goods and presents, I and my people feel glad since it shows that he holds us in his eye. If the Texans had kept out of my country, there might have been peace.
But that which you now say we must live on is too small.
The Texans have taken away the places where the grass grew the thickest and the timber was the best. Had we kept that, we might have done this thing you ask. But it is too late. The white man has the country which we loved and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die. Any good thing you say to me shall not be forgotten. I shall carry it as near to my heart as my children and it shall be as often on my tongue as the name of the Great Spirit. I want no blood upon my land to stain the grass. I want it all clear and pure, and I wish it so, that all who go through among my people may find peace when they come in, and leave it when they go out.
As Phædrus read it again this time he saw that it wasn’t quite as close to cowboy speech as he’d remembered — it was a damn sight better than cowboy speech — but it was still closer to the white Plains dialect than is the language of the European. Here were the straight, head-on, declarative sentences without stylistic ornamentation of any kind, but with a poetic force that must have put the sophisticated bureaucratic speech of Ten Bears' antagonists to shame. This was no imitation of the involuted Victorian elocution of 1867!
From that original perception of the Indians as the originators of the American style of speech had come an expansion: the Indians were the originators of the American style of life. The American personality is a mixture of European and Indian values. When you see this you begin to see a lot of things that have never been explained before.
Phædrus' problem now was to organize all this into a persuasive book. It was so radically different from the usual explanations of America, people would never believe it. They’d think he was just babbling. If he just talked in generalities he knew he would lose it. People would just say, Oh yes, well, that’s just another one of those interesting ideas people are always coming up with, or You can’t generalize about Indians because they’re all different, or some other cliché like that and walk away from it.
He’d thought for a while he might come at it obliquely, starting with something very concrete and specific such as a cowboy film that people already know about, for example, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
There is an opening scene in that film where everything is shown in brown monochrome probably to give a historic, legendary feeling to it. The Sundance Kid is playing poker, and the scene is slowed a little to give it a dramatic tension. The Kid’s face is all you see. Only a fragment of one of the other players is sometimes seen, and an occasional wisp of smoke passing before the Sundance Kid’s countenance. The Kid is without expression but is alert and self-controlled.
The voice of an unseen gambler says, Well, it looks like you cleaned everybody out, fella. You haven’t lost a hand since you got the deal.
There is no change in the Kid’s expression.
What’s the secret of your success? the gambler’s voice continues. It is threatening. Ominous.
Sundance looks down for a while as if thinking about it, then looks up unemotionally. Prayer, he says.
He doesn’t mean it but he doesn’t say it sarcastically either. It’s a statement poised on a knife edge of ambiguity.
Let’s just you and me play, the gambler says.
A showdown is about to occur. It is the cliché of the Wild West. It has been repeated in hundreds of films shown in thousands of theaters and millions of TV sets again and again. The tension grows but the Sundance Kid’s expression doesn’t change. His eye movements, his pauses, are in a kind of relaxed harmony between himself and his surroundings even though we see that he is in a growingly dangerous situation, which soon explodes into violence.
What Phædrus wanted to do now was use just that one scene as an opening illustration. To it he would add just one explanation which no one ever notices, but which he was sure was true. What you have just seen, he would explain, is a rendition of the cultural style of an American Indian.
Then would be seen, identified for what they were, the famous old traits of the American Indian: silence, a modesty of manner, and a dangerous willingness to sudden, enormous violence.
It would be a dramatic way of making the point, he thought. Before you are alerted to it you don’t see it, but once you become aware, it’s obvious. The source of values that Robert Redford tapped and that the American public overwhelmingly responded to is the cultural value pattern of the American Indian. Even the color of Redford’s face in the sepia monochrome was changed to that of an Indian.
Certainly it wasn’t the intention of the film to personify an Indian. It came naturally as a way of showing the Wild West. But the point of Phædrus' thesis was that the reason it came naturally and that audiences responded to it naturally was that the film reached into a root source of American feelings for what is good. It is this source of what is good, this historic cultural system of American values, which is Indian.
If you take a list of all the things European observers have stated to be the characteristics of white Americans, you’ll find that there is a correlation with the characteristics white American observers have customarily assigned to the Indians. And if, furthermore, you take another list of all the characteristics that Americans use to describe Europeans you’ll get a pretty good correlation with Indian opinions of white Americans.
To prove this point Phædrus intended to reverse the situation: instead of showing how a cowboy resembles an Indian, he would show how an Indian resembles a cowboy. For this he’d found a description by the anthropologist, E. A. Hoebel, of a Cheyenne Indian male:
Reserved and dignified… [the Cheyenne male]… moves with a quiet sense of self-assurance. He speaks fluently, but never carelessly. He is careful of the sensibilities of others and is kindly and generous. He is slow to anger and strives to suppress his feelings, if aggravated. Vigorous on the hunt, in war he prizes the active life. Towards enemies he feels no merciful compunctions, and the more aggressive he is the better. He is well versed in ritual knowledge. He is neither flighty nor dour. Usually quiet, he has a lightly displayed sense of humor. He is sexually repressed and masochistic but that masochism is expressed in culturally approved rites. He does not show much creative imagination in artistic expression but he has a firm grip on reality. He deals with the problems of life in set ways while at the same time showing a notable capacity to readjust to new circumstances. His thinking is rationalistic to a high degree and yet colored with mysticism. His ego is strong and not easily threatened. His superego, as manifest in the strong social conscience and mastery of his basic impulses, is powerful and dominating. He is mature, serene and composed, secure in his social position, capable of warm social relations. He has powerful anxieties but these are channelized into institutionalized modes of collective expression with satisfactory results. He exhibits few neurotic tendencies.
Now if that isn’t a description of William S. Boyd playing Hopalong Cassidy in twenty-three or fifty or however many films, there never was one. With the single exception of the Indian mysticism the characterization is perfect.
Whether the American cowboy ever really was like William S. Boyd is not really relevant. What is relevant is that in the 1930s, during the darkest days of the Great Depression, Americans shoveled out millions of dollars to look at his movies. They didn’t have to. Nobody forced them to. But they went anyway, just as they later went to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
They did so because those movies were a confirmation of the values they believed in. Those movies were rituals, almost religious rituals, for transmitting the cultural values of America to the young and reconfirming them in the old. It wasn’t a deliberate, conscious process; people were just doing what they liked. It is only when one analyzes what they liked that one sees the assimilation of Indian values.
Others of the thousands of slips in Phædrus' trays continued this analysis: many Europeans think of white Americans as a sloppy, untidy people, but they’re not nearly as untidy as the Indians on the reservations. Europeans often think of white Americans as being too direct and plain-spoken, bad-mannered and sort of insolent the way they do things, but Indians are even more that way. In the Second World War Europeans noted that American troops drank too much, and when they got drunk they made a lot of trouble. The comparison with Indians is obvious. But on the other hand, European military commanders rated the stability of American troops under fire as high, and that is also an Indian characteristic.
That steady When you say that, smile! look the cowboy movies love to portray (and Europeans tend to abhor) is pure Indian, except that when the Indian looks that way it doesn’t necessarily mean he is threatening. What causes that steady look comes from something much deeper.
Indians don’t talk to fill time. When they don’t have anything to say, they don’t say it. When they don’t say it, they leave the impression of being a little ominous. In the presence of this Indian silence, whites sometimes get nervous and feel forced as a matter of politeness or kindness to fill the vacuum with a kind of small-talk which often says one thing and means another. But these well-mannered circumlocutions of aristocratic European speech are forked-tongue talk to the Indian and are infuriating. They violate his morality. He wants you to either speak from the heart or keep quiet. This has been a source of Indian-white conflict for centuries and, although the modern white American personality is a compromise of that conflict, the conflict still exists.
To this day Americans are mistakenly characterized by Europeans as like children, naive, immature and tending toward violence because they don’t know how to control themselves. That mistake is also made about Indians. To this day white Americans are also mistakenly characterized by Indians as a bunch of snobs who think you are so stupid you can never see how phony they are. That mistake is also made about Europeans.
This anti-snobbery of all Americans, particularly Western Americans, is derived from this Indian attitude. The Cheyenne name for white man is wihio, meaning spider. Arapaho use niatha to mean the same thing. To the Indian, whites seemed like spiders when they talked. They sat there and smiled and said things they didn’t mean, and all the time their mind was spinning a web around the Indian. They got so lost in their own web-spinning thoughts they didn’t even see that the Indian was watching them too and could see what they were doing.
The American politics of isolationism, in its refusal to become entangled in the meshes of European polities comes from this root, Phædrus thought. Most of American isolationism has come from regions that are closest to the American Indian.
The slips went on and on detailing European and Indian cultural differences and their effects, and as the slips had grown in number a secondary, corollary thesis had emerged: that this process of diffusion and assimilation of Indian values is not over. It’s still with us, and accounts for much of the restlessness and dissatisfaction found in America today. Within each American these conflicting sets of values still clash.
This clash, Phædrus thought, explained why others hadn’t seen long before what he had seen at the peyote meeting. When you borrow traits and attitudes from a hostile culture you don’t give them credit for it. If you tell a white from Alabama that his Southern accent is derived from Negro speech he is likely to deny and resent it, although the geographical congruity of the Southern accent with areas of huge black population makes this pretty obvious. Similarly if you tell a Montana white living near a reservation that he resembles an Indian he may take it as an insult. And if you’d said it a hundred years ago you might have had a real fight on your hands. Then Indians were fiends from hell! The only good one was a dead one.
But even though Indians were never given proper credit for their contribution to the American frontier personality values, it’s certain that these values couldn’t have come from anyone else. One often hears frontier values spoken of as though they came from the rocks, the rivers or the trees of the frontier, but trees, rocks and rivers do not by themselves confer social values. They’ve got trees, rocks and rivers in Europe.
It was the people living among those trees, rocks and rivers who are the source of the values of the frontier. The early frontiersmen such as the Mountain Men deliberately and enthusiastically imitated Indians. They were delighted to be told that they were indistinguishable from Indians. Settlers who came later copied the Mountain Men’s frontier style but didn’t see its source, or if they did, denied it and credited it to their own hard work and isolation.
But the clash between European and Indian values still exists, and Phædrus felt he himself was one of those in whom the battle was taking place. That was why he had the feeling of coming home at that peyote meeting. The division he’d felt within himself and thought was something wrong with himself was not within himself at all. What he was seeing was a source of himself that had never been formally acknowledged. It was a division within the entire American culture that he had projected upon himself. It was in many others too.
In one of his long contemplations of this subject the name of Mark Twain appeared. Twain was from Hannibal, Missouri, along the Mississippi, the great dividing line between the American East and West, and one of his most fearsome villains was Injun Joe, who personified the Indian the settlers feared at that time. But Twain’s biographers had also noted a deep division in his own personality that shaped his choice of heroes. On the one side was an orderly, intelligent, obedient, clean and relatively responsible young lad whom he fictionalized as Tom Sawyer; and on the other, a wild, freedom-loving, uneducated, lying, irresponsible, low-status American he called Huckleberry Finn.
Phædrus noticed that the division of Twain’s personality fitted the cultural split he’d been talking about. Tom was an Eastern person with the manners of a New Englander, much closer to Europe than to the American West, but Huck was a Western person, closer to the Indians, forever restless, unattached, unbelieving in the pompousness of society, wanting more than anything else just to be free.
Freedom. That was the topic that would drive home this whole understanding of Indians. Of all the topics his slips on Indians covered, freedom was the most important. Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest. It was fought for in the American Revolution and confirmed in the Civil War. To this day it’s still the most powerful, compelling ideal holding the whole nation together.
And yet, although Jefferson called this doctrine of social equality self-evident, it is not at all self-evident. Scientific evidence and the social evidence of history indicate the opposite is self-evident. There is no self-evidence in European history that all men are created equal. There’s no nation in Europe that doesn’t trace its history to a time when it was self-evident that all men are created unequal. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes given credit for this doctrine, certainly didn’t get it from the history of Europe or Asia or Africa. He got it from the impact of the New World upon Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of individual who lived in the New World, the person he called the Noble Savage.
The idea that all men are created equal is a gift to the world from the American Indian. Europeans who settled here only transmitted it as a doctrine that they sometimes followed and sometimes did not. The real source was someone for whom social equality was no mere doctrine, who had equality built into his bones. To him it was inconceivable that the world could be any other way. For him there was no other way of life. That’s what Ten Bears was trying to tell them.
Phædrus thought the Indians haven’t yet lost this one. They haven’t yet won it either, he realized; the fight isn’t over. It’s still the central internal conflict in America today. It’s a fault line, a discontinuity that runs through the center of the American cultural personality. It’s dominated American history from the beginning and continues to be a source of both national strength and weakness today. And as Phædrus' studies got deeper and deeper he saw that it was to this conflict between European and Indian values, between freedom and order, that his study should be directed.
After Phædrus left Bozeman he saw Dusenberry just twice: once when Dusenberry came for a visit and had to rest because he felt strange; a second time in Calgary, Alberta, after he had learned that the strangeness was brain cancer and he had only a few months to live. Then he was withdrawn and sad, preoccupied with internal preparations for his own end.
Some of his sadness was caused by the feeling he’d failed the Indians. He’d wanted to do so much for them. He spent so many years accepting their hospitality and now there was nothing he would ever do in return. Phædrus felt he’d failed Dusenberry’s plea to help analyze all his data, but Phædrus was involved in enormous problems of his own and there was nothing he could do about it, and now it was too late.
But six years later, after publication of a successful book, most of these problems had disappeared. When the question arose of what would be the subject of a second book there was no question about what it would be. Phædrus loaded his old Ford pickup truck with a camper and headed back into Montana again, to the eastern plains where the reservations were.
At this time there was no such thing as a Metaphysics of Quality and no plans for one. His book had covered the subject of Quality. Any further discussion would be like a lawyer who, after swinging the jury in his favor, keeps on talking and talking until he finally swings them back the other way again. Phædrus just wanted to talk about Indians now. There was plenty to say.
On the reservations he talked to Indians he had met when he was with Dusenberry, hoping to pick up the threads Dusenberry had left. When he told them he was Dusenberry’s friend they would always say, Oh yes, Dusenberry — he was a good man. They would talk for a while, but before long the conversation would become difficult and die down.
He couldn’t think of anything to say. Or when he did, he would say it so awkwardly and self-consciously that it disturbed the flow of the conversation. He didn’t have the knack for casual conversation that Dusenberry had. He wasn’t the person for the job. Dusenberry could sit there all weekend and gab on and on with them about their families and their friends and anything they thought was important, and he just loved that. That’s what he was really in anthropology for. That was his idea of a wonderful weekend. But Phædrus had never learned how to make small-talk like that and as soon as he got into it his mind always drifted off into his own private world of abstractions and the conversation died.
He thought that maybe if he did some reading in the field of anthropology he might know better what to ask the Indians. So he said goodbye for a while and drove from the hot plains up into the Rocky Mountains near Bozeman. At the college there, now a university, he took out the best books he could find on anthropology, then drove up to an old remote campground near the timberline and settled down to do some reading. He hoped to stay there until he had some kind of plan for a book sketched out.
It felt good to be back in the stunted pines and wild flowers and chilly nights and hot days again. He enjoyed the ritual of getting up in the morning in the freezing camper, turning on the heat, and then going for a jog up a mountain trail. When he came back for tea and breakfast the camper would be all warm and he could settle down to a morning of reading and note-taking.
It could have been a great way to do a book but unfortunately it didn’t turn out that way. What he read in the anthropology texts slowed him down more and more until it stopped him.
Phædrus saw with disbelief at first and then with growing anger that the whole field of anthropology was rigged and stacked in such a way that everything he had to say about Indians would be unacceptable. There was no question about it. Page after page kept making it clearer and clearer that there was no way he could continue. He could write a totally honest, true and valuable book on the subject, but if he dared call it anthropology it would be either ignored or attacked by the professionals and discarded.
He remembered Dusenberry’s hostility and bitterness toward what he called objective anthropology, but he always thought Dusenberry was just being iconoclastic. Not so.
The professionals' refutation of his book would go something like this:
A thesis of this sort is colorful and interesting but it cannot be considered useful to anthropology without empirical support. Anthropology tries to be a science of man, not a collection of gossip and intuitions about man. It is not anthropology when someone with no training or experience spends one night on a reservation in a teepee full of Indians taking a hallucinogenic drug. To pretend he has discovered something that hundreds of carefully trained methodical workers who have spent a lifetime in the field have missed, exhibits a certain overconfidence that the discipline of anthropology tries to restrain.
It should be mentioned that such theses are not at all unusual in anthropology. In fact, during the early history of anthropology, they dominated the field. It was not until the beginning of this century, when Franz Boas and his co-workers started to ask seriously, Which of this material is science and which is not? that speculative intuitive rubbish unsupported by any real facts was methodically weeded out of the field.
Every anthropologist at one time or another arrives at speculative theses about the cultures he studies. It is part of the fascination that keeps him interested in the field. But every anthropologist is trained to keep these theses to himself until he is sure, from a study of actual facts and proofs, that he knows what he is talking about.
Very formidable. First you say things our way and then we’ll listen to you. Phædrus had heard it before.
What it always means is that you have hit an invisible wall of prejudice. Nobody on the inside of that wall is ever going to listen to you; not because what you say isn’t true, but solely because you have been identified as outside that wall. Later, as his Metaphysics of Quality matured, he developed a name for the wall to give it a more structured, integrated meaning. He called it a cultural immune system. But all he saw now was that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with his talk about Indians until that wall had been breached. There was no way he was going to make any contribution to anthropology with his non-credentials and crazy ideas. The best he could do was mount a careful attack upon that wall.
In the camper he did less and less reading and more and more thinking about the problem. The books that surrounded him on the seat and floor and shelves were of no use to him. Many of the anthropologists seemed to be bright, interested, humane people but they were all operating within the wall of the anthropological cultural immune system. He could see that some of the anthropologists were struggling to get outside that wall, but within the wall there were no intellectual tools that would let them out.
As he reflected further on that wall he thought about how all paths within it seemed to lead to Franz Boas, who in 1899 had become Columbia University’s first professor of anthropology, and had so completely dominated his field that most of the anthropology in America today still seems to lie in his shadow. Students working within his intellectual domain became famous: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber, Paul Radin and others. They produced a flowering of anthropological literature so great and so rich that their work is sometimes mistaken for all of cultural anthropology. The key to getting through the wall lay in re-examining the philosophical attitudes of Boas himself.
Boas' training was in mathematics and physics in nineteenth-century Germany. His influence lay not in the establishment of a single particular theory of anthropology but in the establishment of a method of anthropological investigation. This method followed the principles of the hard science he had been trained in.
Margaret Mead said, He feared premature generalization like the plague, and continually warned us against it. Generalization should be based on the facts and only on the facts.
It is indubitable that science was his religion, Kroeber said. He called his early convictions materialistic. Science could tolerate nothing "subjective"; value judgments — and by infection even values considered as phenomena — must be absolutely excluded.
On one slip, headed Goldschmidt, Phædrus copied down the statement that This empiricism, this concern with fact, with detail, with preserving the record, Boas transmitted to his students and to anthropology. It is so major an element in anthropological thinking that the term "armchair anthropologist" is one of opprobrium, and two generations later we still insist on field work as a requisite to any claim for anthropological competence.
By the time Phædrus finished reading about Boas he was confident he’d identified the source of the immune system he was up against, the same immune system that had so rejected Dusenberry’s views. It was classical nineteenth-century science and its insistence that science is only a method for determining what is true and not a body of beliefs in itself. There have been many schools of anthropological theory other than Boas' but Phædrus could find none that opposed him on the matter of scientific objectivity.
As he read on, Phædrus could see more and more of what the negative effects of this application of Victorian science to cultural anthropology had been. What had happened was that Boas, by superimposing the criteria of the physical sciences upon cultural anthropology, had shown that not only were the theories of the armchair anthropologists unsupported by science but that any anthropological theory was unsupported by science, since it could not be proved by the rigorous methods of Boas' own field of physics. Boas seemed to think that someday such a theory would emerge out of the facts but it’s been nearly a century since Boas had those expectations and it hasn’t emerged yet. Phædrus was convinced it never would. Patterns of culture do not operate in accordance with the laws of physics. How are you going to prove in terms of the laws of physics that a certain attitude exists within a culture? What is an attitude in terms of the laws of molecular interaction? What is a cultural value? How are you going to show scientifically that a certain culture has certain values?
You can’t.
Science has no values. Not officially. The whole field of anthropology was rigged and stacked so that nobody could prove anything of a general nature about anybody. No matter what you said, it could be shot down any time by any damn fool on the basis that it wasn’t scientific.
What theory existed was marked by bitter quarrels over differences that were not anthropological at all. They were almost never quarrels about accuracy of observation. They were quarrels about abstract meanings. It seemed almost as though the moment anyone said anything theoretical it was a signal for the commencement of an enormous dog fight over differences that could not be resolved with any amount of anthropological information.
The whole field seemed like a highway filled with angry drivers cursing each other and telling each other they didn’t know how to drive when the real trouble was the highway itself. The highway had been laid down as the scientific objective study of man in a manner that paralleled the physical sciences. The trouble was that man isn’t suited to this kind of scientific objective study. Objects of scientific study are supposed to hold still. They’re supposed to follow the laws of cause and effect in such a way that a given cause will always have a given effect, over and over again. Man doesn’t do this. Not even savages.
The result has been theoretical chaos.
Phædrus liked a description he read in a book called Theory in Anthropology by Robert Manners and David Kaplan of Brandeis University. Scattered throughout the anthropological literature they wrote, are a number of hunches, insights, hypotheses and generalizations. They tend to remain scattered, inchoate, and unrelated to one another, so that they often get lost or are forgotten. The tendency has been for each generation of anthropologists to start afresh.
Theory building in cultural anthropology comes to resemble slash-and-burn agriculture, they said, where the natives return sporadically to old fields grown over by bush and slash and burn and plant for a few years.
Phædrus could see the slash and burn everywhere he looked. Some anthropologists were saying a culture is the essence of anthropology. Some were saying there isn’t any such thing as a culture. Some were saying it’s all history, some said it’s all structure. Some said it’s all function. Some said it was all values. Some, following Boas' scientific purity, said there were no values at all.
That idea that anthropology has no values Phædrus marked down in his mind as the spot. That was the place where the wall could best be breached. No values, huh? No Quality? This was the point of focus where he could begin an attack.
What many were trying to do, evidently, was get out of all these metaphysical quarrels by condemning all theory, by agreeing not to even talk about such theoretical reductionist things as what savages do in general. They restricted themselves to what their particular savage happened to do on Wednesday. That was scientifically safe all right — and scientifically useless.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. wrote, The very term "universal" has a negative connotation in this field because it suggests the search for broad generalization that has virtually been declared unscientific by twentieth-century academic, particularistic American anthropology.
Phædrus guessed anthropologists thought they had kept the field scientifically pure by this method, but the purity was so constrictive it had all but strangled the field. If you can’t generalize from data there’s nothing else you can do with it either.
A science without generalization is no science at all. Imagine someone telling Einstein, You can’t say E=mc2. It’s too general, too reductionist. We just want the facts of physics, not all this high-flown theory. Cuckoo. Yet, that’s what they were saying in anthropology.
Data without generalization is just gossip. And as Phædrus continued on and on that seemed to be the status of what he was reading. It filled shelf after shelf with volume after dusty volume about this savage and that savage, but as far as he could see, anthropology, the science of man, had had almost no guiding effect on man’s activities in this scientific century.
Whacko science. They were trying to lift themselves by their bootstraps. You can’t have Box A contain within itself Box B, which in turn contains Box A. That’s whacko. Yet here’s a science which contains man which contains science which contains man which contains science — on and on.
He left the mountains near Bozeman with boxes full of slips and many notebooks full of quotations and the feeling that there was nothing within anthropology he could do.
Back down in the plains, in a country motel one night with nothing to read, Phædrus had found a small dog-eared Yankee magazine, thumbed through it, and stopped on a brief account by Cathie Slater Spence entitled In Search of the April Fool.
It was about a child prodigy who had possibly the highest intelligence ever observed, and who in his later life went nowhere. Born on April 1, 1898, it said, William James Sidis could speak five languages and read Plato in the original Greek by the age of five. At eight he passed the entrance for Harvard but had to wait three years to be admitted. Even so he became Harvard’s youngest scholar and graduated cum Jaude in 1914 at the age of sixteen. Frequently featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Sidis made the front page of The New York Times nineteen times.
But after graduating from Harvard, the Boy Wonder pursued his own obscure and seemingly meaningless interests. The press that had lionized him turned on him. The most scathing example came in the New Yorker in 1937. Entitled April Fool, the magazine article ridiculed everything from Sidis’s hobbies to his physical characteristics. Sidis sued for libel and invasion of privacy. Though he won a small out-of-court settlement for libel, the invasion of privacy charge was dismissed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a landmark decision. The article is merciless in its dissection of intimate details of its subject’s personal life, the court conceded, but Sidis was a public figure and thus could not claim protection from the interest of the press, which continued to hound him until his death in 1944. Obituaries called him a prodigious failure and a burnt-out genius who had never achieved anything of significance despite his talents.
Dan Mahony of Ipswich, Massachusetts, read about Sidis in 1976 and was puzzled. What was he really doing and thinking all that time? Mahony wondered. It’s true he held low-paying jobs, but Einstein came up with the theory of relativity while working in a patent office. I had a feeling Sidis was up to more than most people thought.
Mahony has spent the last ten years looking into Sidis’s work. In one dusty attic, he found a bulky manuscript called The Tribes and the States in which Sidis argues persuasively that the New England political system was profoundly influenced by the democratic federation of the Penacook Indians.
At this sentence, a kind of shock passed through Phædrus, but the article went on.
When Mahony sent Sidis’s book The Animate and Inanimate to another eccentric genius, Buckminster Fuller, Fuller found it a fine cosmological piece that astoundingly predicted the existence of black holes — in 1925!
Mahony has unearthed a science fiction novel, economic and political writings, and eighty-nine weekly newspaper columns about Boston that Sidis wrote under a pen name. The amazing thing is that we may only have tapped the surface of what Sidis produced, says Mahony. For instance, we’ve found just one page of a manuscript called The Peace Paths, and people who knew Sidis have said they saw many more manuscripts. I think Sidis may still have a few surprises in store for us.
Phædrus set down the magazine and felt as though someone had thrown a rock through the motel window. Then he read the article over and over again in a sort of daze, as the impact of what he was reading sank deeper and deeper. That night he could hardly sleep.
It looked as though way back in the thirties Sidis had been on exactly the same thesis about Indians. He was trying to tell people some of the most important things that could be said about their country and they were rewarding him by publicly calling him a fool and failing to publish what he had written. There didn’t even seem to be any way to find out what Sidis had said.
Phædrus tried to contact the Mahony mentioned in the article but couldn’t find him, partly, he supposed, because his effort was only half-hearted. He knew that even if he did get a look at Sidis’s material there wasn’t much he could do about it. The problem wasn’t that it wasn’t true. The problem was that nobody was interested.
It felt cold again and Phædrus got up and reloaded the coal stove with more charcoal briquets.
After that depressing experience in the mountains he had wanted to give the whole thing up and move on to something more profitable, but as it turned out, the depression he was feeling was just a temporary setback. It was a prelude to a much larger and more important explanation of the Indians. This time it would not be just Indians versus whites, treated within a white anthropological format. It would be whites and white anthropology versus Indians and Indian anthropology treated within a format no one had ever heard of yet. He would get out of the impasse by expanding the format.
The key was values, he thought. That was the weakest spot in the whole wall of cultural immunity to new ideas the anthropologists had built around themselves. Value was a term they had to use, but under Boas' science value does not really exist.
And Phædrus knew something about values. Before he had gone up into the mountains he had written a whole book on values. Quality. Quality was value. They were the same thing. Not only were values the weakest spot in that wall, he might just be the strongest person to attack that spot.
He found surprising support for this attack from one of Boas' students, Alfred Kroeber, who with Harvard anthropology professor, Clyde Kluckhohn, had led a drive for the reinsertion of values into anthropology. Elsewhere Kluckhohn had said, Values provide the only basis for fully intelligible comprehension of culture because the actual organization of all cultures is primarily in terms of their values. This becomes apparent as soon as one attempts to present the picture of a culture without reference to its values. The account becomes a meaningless assemblage of items having relationship to one another only through coexistence in locality and moment — an assemblage that might as profitably be arranged alphabetically as in any other order; a mere laundry list.
Kluckhohn conceded that, The degree to which even lip-service to values has been avoided until recently, especially by anthropologists, is striking. The hesitation of anthropologists can perhaps be laid to the natural history tradition which persists in our science for better or worse. But in Culture: a Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions they said that, culture must include the explicit and systematic study of values and value-systems viewed as observable, describable, and comparable phenomena of nature.
They explained that negativism toward the use of values resulted from attitudes of objectivity. It was the same objectivity, Phædrus noted, that Dusenberry had so much trouble with. It is this subjective side of values that led to their being long tabooed as improper for consideration by natural science, Kroeber and Kluckhohn said. Instead [values] were relegated to a special set of intellectual activities called "the humanities" included in the "spiritual science" of the Germans. Values were believed to be eternal because they were God-given, or divinely inspired or at least discovered by that soul part of man which partakes somewhat of divinity, as his body and other bodies and tangibles of the world do not. A new and struggling science, as little advanced beyond physics, astronomy, anatomy and the rudiments of physiology as Western science was only two centuries ago, might cheerfully concede this reservation of the remote and unexpected territory of values to the philosophers and theologians and limit itself to what it could treat mechanistically.
Kluckhohn conceded that values are ill-defined and subject to a multiplicity of competing definitions, but asserted that verbal definitions of values are not necessary to field work. He said that whether they were well-defined or not everyone agreed with what they were in actual practice. He tried to solve the problem by allowing everyone in his Values Project to define values any way they wanted to, but in formal social science that’s unacceptable.
In his Values Project Kluckhohn described five neighboring Southwest American cultures in terms of their evaluations of their neighbors, and provided a good description of these cultures by this method. But as Phædrus continued reading elsewhere, he discovered that values, like every other general term in anthropology, were subject to the usual bilious attack. Sociologists Judith Blake and Kingsley Davis had the following to say about values:
As long as the cultural configurations, basic value attitudes, prevailing mores or whatnot are taken as the starting point and principal determinant, they have the status of unanalyzed assumptions. The very questions that would enable us to understand the norms tend not to be asked, and certain facts about society become difficult if not impossible to comprehend.
Mores, determinants, norms… these were the jargon terms of sociology into which they converted things they wanted to attack. That’s how you know when you’re within a walled city, Phædrus thought. The jargon. They’ve cut themselves off from the rest of the world and are speaking a jargon only they can really understand.
Worse yet, they went on, the deceptive ease of explanation in terms of norms or value attitudes encourages an inattentiveness to methodological problems. By virtue of their subjective emotion and ethical character, norms and especially values are among the world’s most difficult objects to identify with certainty. They are bones of contention and matters of disagreement… an investigator… tends to be explaining the known by the unknown, the specific by the unspecific. His identification of the normative principles may be so vague as to be universally useful, i.e. anything and everything becomes explicable. Thus, if Americans spend a great deal of money on alcoholic beverages, theater and movie tickets, tobacco, cosmetics and jewelry, the explanation is simple: they have a good-time ideology. If, on the other hand, there is a lack of social intimacy between Negro and white, it is because of a racism value. The cynical critic might advise that, for convenience in causal interpretation, the values of a culture should always be described in pairs of opposites.
Explicit definitions, when given, demonstrate the nebulous character of "value", Blake and Davis said. Here, for example, is the definition of "value-orientation" in a 437-page book on value orientations:
Value orientations are complex but definitely patterned (rank-ordered) principles resulting from the transactional interplay of three analytically distinguishable elements of the evaluative process — the cognitive, the affective, and the directive elements — which give order and direction to the ever-flowing stream of human acts and thoughts as these relate to the solution of common human problems.
Poor Kluckhohn, Phædrus thought. That was his definition. With that lead balloon for a vehicle there was no way he could succeed.
The attack made Phædrus want to get in there and start arguing. The statement that values are vague and therefore shouldn’t be used for primary classification is not true. There’s nothing vague about a value judgment. When a voter goes to the polling booth he’s making a value judgment. What’s so vague about that? Isn’t an election a cultural activity? What’s so vague about the New York stock exchanges? Aren’t values what they’re dealing in? How about the US Treasury? Who in this world is more specific than the Internal Revenue Service? As Kluckhohn kept saying, values are not the least vague when you’re dealing with them in terms of actual experience. It’s only when you bring back statements about them and try to integrate them into the overall jargon of anthropology that they become vague.
This attack on Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s values was a good example of what had stopped Phædrus' own entry into the field. You can’t get anywhere because you are forced to resolve arguments every step of the way about the basic terms you are using. It’s hard enough to talk about Indians alone without having to resolve a metaphysical dispute at the end of each sentence. This should have been done before anthropology was set up, not afterward.
That was the problem. The whole field of cultural anthropology is a house built on intellectual quicksand. As soon as you try to build the data into anything of theoretical weight it sinks and collapses. The field that one might have expected to be one of the most useful and productive of the sciences had gone under, not because the people in it were no good, or the subject was unimportant, but because the structure of scientific principles that it tries to rest on is inadequate to support it.
What was clear was that if he was going to do anything with anthropology the place to do it was not in anthropology itself but in the general body of assumptions upon which it rests. The solution to the anthropological blockage was not to try to construct some new anthropological theoretic structure but to first find some solid ground upon which such a structure can be constructed. It was this conclusion that placed him right in the middle of the field of philosophy known as metaphysics. Metaphysics would be the expanded format in which whites and white anthropology could be contrasted to Indians and Indian anthropology without corrupting everything into a white anthropological walled-in jargonized way of looking at things.
Whew! What a job! He wondered if he was biting off ten times as much as he could possibly chew. This could fill a whole shelf full of books. A whole corridor of shelves! But the more he thought about it the more he saw that the only alternative was to quit entirely.
There was a sense of relief though. Metaphysics was an area of study that had interested him more than any other as an undergraduate philosophy student in the United States and later as a graduate student in India. There was a sense of opening up after the endless tangles and nettles of unfamiliar anthropology. He had finally landed in his own brier patch.
Metaphysics is what Aristotle called the First Philosophy. It’s a collection of the most general statements of a hierarchical structure of thought. On one of his slips he had copied a definition of it as that part of philosophy which deals with the nature and structure of reality. It asks such questions as, Are the objects we perceive real or illusory? Does the external world exist apart from our consciousness of it? Is reality ultimately reducible to a single underlying substance? If so, is it essentially spiritual or material? Is the universe intelligible and orderly or incomprehensible and chaotic?
You might think from this primary status of metaphysics that everyone would take its existence and value for granted, but this is definitely not so. Even though it has been a central part of philosophy since Ancient Greek times it is not a universally approved field of knowledge.
It has two kinds of opponents. The first are the philosophers of science, most particularly the group known as logical positivists, who say that only the natural sciences can legitimately investigate the nature of reality, and that metaphysics is simply a collection of unprovable assertions that are unnecessary to the scientific observation of reality. For a true understanding of reality, metaphysics is too mystical. This is clearly the group with which Franz Boas, and because of him modern American anthropology, belongs.
The second group of opponents are the mystics. The term mystic is sometimes confused with occult or supernatural and with magic and witchcraft but in philosophy it has a different meaning. Some of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus, Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is undivided. Zen, which is a mystic religion, argues that the illusion of dividedness can be overcome by meditation. The Native American Church argues that peyote can force-feed a mystic understanding upon those who were normally resistant to it, an understanding that Indians had been deriving through Vision Quests in the past. This mysticism, Dusenberry thought, is the absolute center of traditional Indian life, and as Boas had made clear, it is absolutely outside the domain of positivistic science and any anthropology that adheres to it.
Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too scientific. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand page menu and no food.
Phædrus thought it portended very well for his Metaphysics of Quality that both mysticism and science reject metaphysics for completely opposite reasons. It suggested that if there is a bridge between the two, between the understanding of the Indians and the understanding of the anthropologists, metaphysics is where that bridge is located.
Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he considered the mystics' hostility the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you’ve opened the door to metaphysics you can say goodbye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.
The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phædrus had called Quality in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn’t have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn’t any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a Metaphysics of Quality is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity.
It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The more you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes. Or zero, or space for that matter. Today these terms have almost nothing to do with nothing. Zero and space are complex relationships of somethingness. If he said anything about the scientific nature of mystic understanding, science might benefit but the actual mystic understanding would, if anything, be injured. If he really wanted to do Quality a favor he should just leave it alone.
What made all this so formidable to Phædrus was that he himself had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was about to define it. Was this some kind of a sell-out? His mind went over this many times.
A part of it said, Don’t do it. You’ll get into nothing but trouble. You’re just going to start up a thousand dumb arguments about something that was perfectly clear until you came along. You’re going to make ten-thousand opponents and zero friends because the moment you open your mouth to say one thing about the nature of reality you automatically have a whole set of enemies who’ve already said reality is something else.
The trouble was, this was only one part of himself talking. There was another part that kept saying, Ahh, do it anyway. It’s interesting. This was the intellectual part that didn’t like undefined things, and telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover afterward, like too many cigarettes, or a party that has lasted too long. Or Lila last night. It isn’t anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever. What would you call it? Degeneracy, he guessed. Writing a metaphysics is, in the strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity.
But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That’s the degeneracy fanatics are made of. Purity, identified, ceases to be purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. The only person who doesn’t pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn’t yet been born — and to whose birth no thought has been given. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure. Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of life.
That was all he had to say to the mystic objections to a Metaphysics of Quality. He next turned to those of logical positivism:
Positivism is a philosophy that emphasizes science as the only source of knowledge. It sharply distinguishes between fact and value, and is hostile to religion and traditional metaphysics. It is an outgrowth of empiricism, the idea that all knowledge must come from experience, and is suspicious of any thought, even a scientific statement, that is incapable of being reduced to direct observation. Philosophy, as far as positivism is concerned, is limited to the analysis of scientific language.
Phædrus had taken a course in symbolic logic from a member of logical positivism’s famed Vienna circle, Herbert Feigl, and he remembered being fascinated by the possibility of a logic that could extend mathematical precision to solve problems of philosophy and other areas. But even then the assertion that metaphysics is meaningless sounded false to him. As long as you’re inside a logical, coherent universe of thought you can’t escape metaphysics. Logical positivism’s criteria for meaningfulness were pure metaphysics, he thought.
But it didn’t matter. The Metaphysics of Quality not only passes the logical positivists' tests for meaningfulness, it passes them with the highest marks. The Metaphysics of Quality restates the empirical basis of logical positivism with more precision, more inclusiveness, more explanatory power than it has previously had. It says that values are not outside of the experience that logical positivism limits itself to. They are the essence of this experience. Values are more empirical, in fact, than subjects or objects.
Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow.
The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally inherited blind spot here. Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot stove that directly causes the oaths. It teaches that the low values are a property of the person uttering the oaths.
Not so. The value is between the stove and the oaths. Between the subject and the object lies the value. This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any self or any object to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.
Once this primary relationship is cleared up an awful lot of mysteries get solved. The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is that empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You can’t do it. You get all mixed up because values don’t belong to either group. They are a separate category all their own.
What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent — fabulously more coherent — when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world… but showing that, of course, was a very big job… He noticed a strange noise, unlike any boat sound he was used to. He listened for a while and then realized that it was coming from the forecabin. It was Lila. She was snoring. He heard her mutter something. Then she was quiet again…
After a while he heard the putt-putting of a small boat approaching. An early fisherman, probably, heading down the creek. Soon the entire cabin rocked gently and the lamp swung a little from the boat’s wake. After a while the sound passed and it became quiet again… He wondered if he was going to get any more sleep himself. He remembered when he used to be a night person, going to bed at three or four in the morning and waking up at around noon. It seemed then that nothing of any importance could ever happen during the hours between dawn and late afternoon, and he avoided them as much as possible. Now it was the opposite. He had to be up with the sun or something was missing. It didn’t matter that there was nothing to do.
He picked up the slips on Dusenberry, put them back into the tray where they had been removed and then got up and tucked the tray into the pilot berth where it had come from. Above the pilot berth the portholes of the cabin showed light outside. He saw that the sky was somewhat overcast. It might clear up. The buildings across the harbor were gray. Some trees on the bank still had their leaves but they were brown and ready to fall. October colors.
He pushed the hatch back and stuck his head out.
It was cold out, but not as cold as before. A mild breeze rippled the water toward the stern of the boat, and he felt it on his face.
Richard Rigel awoke and looked at his watch. It was 7:45 already. He felt tired and cross. He had not had much sleep since that fool author and Lila Blewitt stumbled across his deck.
All night long, in and out, in and out, the wakes from passing boats caused that author’s barge next to him to push his own boat in and out against the dock like a railroad Pullman car. And there was nothing he could do about it.
He could have gotten up and adjusted the author’s lines himself. But that wasn’t his job.
What was really angering was that he hadn’t even granted the author permission to raft. The author had been told in Oswego he could raft because of the emergency there and evidently had taken it as a lifetime privilege.
Now no more sleep was possible. He would have to make the best of it. Bill would have to get up too. There was much to be done today.
Richard Rigel went to the forecabin of the boat, found Capella with a pillow over his head and pulled it off. Get up, Bill, he said.
Capella opened his eyes, looked startled and then sat up quickly.
Much to do today, Rigel repeated.
Capella yawned and looked at his watch. They said they’d take us at nine to get the mast up.
Rigel replied, We should be ready for an earlier opening.
He went back to his aft cabin, removed his pajamas, carefully folded them and put them in the drawer. Only a week left before going back. He could get Simonsen to take over his court appearances, but if he were lucky and there were no more delays he might still get back in time… What a completely rotten vacation.
Capella’s voice said, What about next door?
You mean the "Great Author"? Rigel replied. I don’t think the "Great Author" will be up this morning.
Why not? Capella asked.
Didn’t you hear him last night?
No.
You certainly must have been sleeping soundly… Of course! You were forward. He fell on my cabin.
He fell?
Yes, he and that woman he was dancing with stumbled across the deck and fell evidently. I didn’t want to get into it so I didn’t go up there. What a commotion!
In the boat’s head Richard Rigel drew a basin of heated water with which to wash his face and shave. He said loudly, We’ve got to get free of his boat before we can move. You’ll have to go over and wake him up.
Wake him up? Capella repeated.
Yes, Richard Rigel replied. He was in no condition to set an alarm clock.
He added, more softly, I wonder what his situation is, to pick up someone like her.
The water was steaming hot but there wasn’t much satisfaction in that now. Two years ago it had cost him an arm and a leg to have this hot water system installed. He had to wait a whole summer for it. Now he was selling the boat. Everything changes. Nothing is predictable any more.
Rigel vigorously soaped the warm wash cloth and applied it to his face. He thought the Great Author’s respectful readers should have seen him last night dancing with Lila. They probably wouldn’t have minded though. Among his respectful readers drunkenness and whoring were probably considered some form of Quality.
It was interesting to get a look at someone like him up close. In Oswego he seemed so reserved. They look so fine from a distance but when you see them up close for what they really are then all the cracks and blemishes appear. He wasn’t reserved. He was just boorish.
Last night was typical. After listening to the author talk on and on about some pet idea about nothingness, Rigel had tried to illustrate the point with a fishing story. The Great Author didn’t even listen. Rigel had tried to warn him about sailing alone off shore and he wouldn’t listen. And then after he had warned him about Lila he had the nerve to invite her to their table.
Boorish. What made it so hard to stand was that it wasn’t deliberate. He just didn’t know any better… He seemed so naive most of the time and yet there was something… clever about him that infuriated. He shouldn’t let him make him so angry like this. He didn’t really matter that much… If he wasn’t careful he was going to cut himself with this razor.
There were enough people like that, of course, but what made this all so insufferable was that here was a man who was passing himself off as an expert on Quality, with a capital Q. And he got away with it! It was like watching some ambulance chaser sway a jury. Once he got them emotionally on his side there wasn’t much you could do about it.
Richard Rigel emptied the basin, rinsed it neatly, then folded the towel and put it on its rack to dry properly.
Capella said, If I’m going to wake him up, what am I going to tell him about his boat?
Rigel thought for a while. I suppose I should be the one to talk to him, he said.
He would do it tactfully. He’d invite him to breakfast, and then when the author turned the invitation down, he would be up and awake so that he could be told his boat needed moving.
Now clean and shaven Richard Rigel felt a little better. He watched in the mirror as he combed his hair into respectability, then tried on a tie. It didn’t look right. With Gary Grant features like his own it would be inappropriate to be overdressed, particularly in a place like this. He removed the tie, unbuttoned the collar and carefully opened it a little. Much better.
He climbed to the deck and looked around at the harbor. There were old rotting timbers and hulks that had to be crossed by a series of precarious gangplanks to get to dry land. One was lucky if he didn’t break his neck. Probably it would be a whole day wasted here.
Richard Rigel turned and was surprised to see himself being watched. The Great Author himself was in the next cockpit.
Hello! Richard Rigel said loudly.
Hello.
His neighbor’s expression seemed bland. He was wearing the same blue chambray shirt he had worn yesterday, with the same food stain above one pocket.
I didn’t expect to find you up this early, Richard Rigel said.
The author replied, If you want to take your boat down to the crane dock I can cast off now.
He must be some sort of a mind-reader, Rigel thought. He said, There may be another boat at the dock.
No, I checked.
He seemed to be in remarkably good shape after his performance last night. He would be, Rigel thought.
It’s still too early, Rigel said. There may be a boat scheduled ahead of me. Are you interested in breakfast?
As he said it he realized it was no longer necessary to invite the author to breakfast, but it was too late.
That sounds good, the author answered. I’ll see if I can get Lila up.
What? Richard Rigel was startled. No, of course not. Let the woman have her sleep. Just you come.
Why? the author asked.
There it was again, that boorishness. He knew perfectly well why. Because this is undoubtedly the last time we will be seeing one another, Rigel smiled. And I would prefer to chat alone.
Capella appeared on deck and the three crossed the gangplanks to shore in a single file.
Inside the restaurant Capella said, It’s hard to believe this is the same place.
Rigel saw the juke box silent in one corner. Be thankful for small favors, he said.
A blackboard in front of the bar mirror contained the breakfast menu. Beside it an old woman talked across the bar to three workmen eating breakfast at the table beside them. Probably the wife of last night’s bartender, he thought.
The author was being his indifferent self again. His attention seemed to drift outside the window toward the boat-yard debris and docks where they had come from. Perhaps he was looking for Lila.
Capella said to him, Where did you learn to dance like that? You really stopped the action.
The author’s attention returned. Why? he asked. Were you watching?
Everybody was, Richard Rigel said.
No. The author grinned. I don’t know how to dance. He looked quizzically at both of them.
You’re way too modest, Rigel smiled. You dazzled us all… particularly the lady.
The author looked at them suspiciously, Ah, you people are teasing.
Maybe you had so much to drink you don’t remember.
Capella laughed, and the author exclaimed, I wasn’t so drunk.
No, you weren’t so drunk, Rigel said. That’s why you tiptoed so softly across my deck at two.
Sorry about that, the author said. She dropped her suitcase.
Rigel and Capella looked at each other. Suitcase! Capella said.
Yes, the author answered. She’s leaving the boat she was on and coming with me to Manhattan to stay with some friends there.
Wow! Capella said, winking at Rigel. One dance with him and they pack up their suitcases. He said to Rigel, I wish I knew his secret. How do you suppose he does it?
Richard Rigel frowned and looked around. He didn’t like the direction this was going. He wondered when the old woman was going to take their order. He motioned to her to come.
When she arrived he ordered ham and eggs and toast and orange juice. The others ordered too.
While they were waiting Richard Rigel said that the tide would turn at about ten. He told the author his best strategy was to wait until about nine o’clock, which was the last hour of the flood tide, then go as fast as possible with the ebb tide as far as he could before the tide changed again, moor for the night and wait for the next day’s ebb into Manhattan. The author thanked him for the information.
They ate most of the breakfast in silence. Rigel felt stymied, pushed into a corner by this person. There was something about him that prevented you from saying anything to him, something that didn’t leave you any room to say it. He was in such another world, talking away so glibly about Quality.
When they were finished eating Richard Rigel turned to the author. He didn’t like what he had to say to him but he felt an obligation to say it anyway.
It’s none of my business whom you select for company, he said. You seemed to pay no attention to me at all last night. But I think I have an obligation to advise you one last time to get Lila off your boat.
The author looked surprised. I thought you said I needed a crew.
Not her!
What’s wrong with her?
There it was again. You’re not that naive, Rigel said.
The author mumbled, almost to himself, Lila may be better than she looks.
Richard Rigel contradicted him. No, Lila is much worse than she looks.
The author looked at Capella, who was smiling, and then at Rigel with narrowing eyes. What makes you think that? he said.
Richard Rigel studied the author for a while. The author really was innocent. I’ve known Lila Blewitt for a long, long time, he said. Why don’t you just take my word for it?
Who is she? the author said.
She’s a very unfortunate person of very low quality, he said.
At the word quality, the author looked up as though it was some kind of challenge thrown at him. It was, of course.
The author’s eyes shifted. What does she do for a living? he asked, evasively.
When Capella glanced at him Richard Rigel couldn’t resist a smile. She meets people like you, my friend, he said. Didn’t anyone ever tell you about people like her?
Another challenge. The wheels were turning almost visibly inside the author’s head.
Rigel wondered whether to push it any farther. There was no point in doing so, really. But there was something about the author’s complacency, particularly after last night, that made him want to do it anyway. But then he decided not to. If you need a crew, he said, why don’t you wait a few days in Manhattan and then Bill will be available. I think Bill knows enough that the two of you could make it.
Bill nodded with a smile.
They talked more about the sail into Manhattan. It was all straightforward. They should call ahead to the 79th Street Marina since even this late in the year it was hard to get in there without a reservation. An October cruise to the Chesapeake might be something he would enjoy himself, Rigel said. But of course, he wouldn’t have the time.
The author said suddenly, I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. How do you know that?
Know what? Rigel asked.
About Lila.
I know it from the experience of a very close friend whose divorce case I handled, Richard Rigel answered. In his memory a picture returned of Lila, arm in arm with Jim, coming into his office. Poor Jim, he thought. Your friend Lila completely ruined his life.
She used to be much more attractive than she is now, Rigel added. She seems to be going downhill fast.
Capella said, You never told me about that.
It’s not a public matter, Rigel said, and I won’t mention his name, Bill, or you’d recognize it.
Then he looked at the author seriously. You’ve never seen such a sad, forsaken man. He lost his wife, his children, most of his friends — his reputation was gone. He had to quit his job at the bank where he had a promising future — in fact was scheduled for a vice-presidency. Eventually he had to move to get re-established. But knowing the bank’s president I’m sure he put it on Jim’s record, and that was the end of his career, I’m afraid. No board will ever promote him to any position of real responsibility.
That’s really bad, the author said, and looked down at the table.
It was completely necessary, Richard Rigel said. No one wants to trust millions of dollars to a man who hasn’t enough self-control to keep his hands off a common bar-whore.
Another challenge. This time the author’s eyes hardened. It looked as though he was going to take it.
Who was to blame? he said.
What do you mean? Richard Rigel asked.
I mean was it Lila who was to blame for your friend’s misfortune or was it his wife and his so-called friends and his superiors at the bank? Who really did him in?
I don’t follow, Richard Rigel said.
Was it her love or was it their hatred?
I wouldn’t call it love.
Would you call it hatred on their part? What exactly did he do to them that justified their hatred?
Now you’re no longer being naive, Richard Rigel said. Now you’re being deliberately stupid. Are you trying to tell me his wife had no right to be angry?
The author thought for a while. I don’t know, he said, but there’s something wrong there.
I think there is, Richard Rigel said.
There’s always been something wrong, logically, the author went on. How can an act of love, that does no injury to anyone, be so evil?… Think about it. Who was injured?
Richard Rigel thought about it. He said, It wasn’t any act of love. Lila Blewitt doesn’t know what love means. It was an act of deceit.
He could feel anger growing. I’ve heard that word "love" so many times from the mouths of so many people who don’t know what it is. He could still see Jim’s wife sitting in his office. She had shielded her eyes with her hand and tried hard to keep her voice steady. There was love.
He said, Let me try another word: "Honor." The person we are talking about dishonored his wife and he dishonored his children and he dishonored everyone who put trust in him, as well as himself. People forgave him for his weakness, but they lost respect for him and that was what finished him for any position of responsibility.
But it wasn’t weakness on Lila’s part. She knew what she was doing.
The author stared at him. Dumbly it seemed.
And I don’t know what the circumstances of your own personal family are my friend, but I warn you, if you’re not careful she’ll do it to you.
As an afterthought he added, If she hasn’t already.
Rigel looked at the author to see what the effect was. There was no change of expression. Nothing, apparently, penetrated that thick crust.
But who did she hurt? Capella asked.
Rigel looked at Bill with surprise. Him too? He thought Capella was more sensible. It was a sign of the times.
Well, there are some of us left, he said, returning to the author, who are still holding out against your hedonistic "Quality" philosophy or whatever it is.
I was just asking a question, the author said.
But it’s a question that expresses a certain point of view, Richard Rigel answered, and it’s a point of view that some people, including myself, find loathsome.
I’m still not sure why.
God, he was insufferable. All right, I’ll tell you why. Will you listen?
Of course.
No, I mean really listen?
The author was silent.
You made a statement in your book that everyone knows and agrees to what "Quality" is. Obviously everyone does not! You refused to define "Quality," thus preventing any argument on the subject. You tell us that "dialecticians" who debate these matters are scoundrels. I guess that would include lawyers too. That’s pretty good. You carefully tie your critics’ hands and feet so that they cannot give you any opposition, tar their reputations for good measure, and then you say, "OK, come on out and fight." Very brave. Very brave.
May I come out and fight? the author said. My exact statement was that people do disagree as to what Quality is, but their disagreement is only on the objects in which they think Quality inheres.
What’s the difference?
Quality, on which there is complete agreement, is a universal source of things. The objects about which people disagree are merely transitory.
My oh my, what smart talk, Richard Rigel thought. What "universal source of things"? Some of us can do without that universal source of things, that no one else seems to be able to talk about but you. Some of us would rather stick with our good old-fashioned transitory objects. By the way, how do you keep in touch with that marvelous "universal source of things"? Do you have some sort of special radio set? Hmmm? How do you keep in touch?
The author did not answer.
I’m waiting to hear, Richard Rigel said. How do you keep in touch with Quality?
The author still didn’t answer.
Relief poured through Richard Rigel. He suddenly felt better than he had all morning. He had finally communicated something to him. There are answers, the author finally said, but I don’t think I can give them all to you this morning.
He wasn’t going to get off that easy.
Let me ask an easier question then, Richard Rigel said. You are in contact with this "universal source of things," aren’t you?
Yes, said the author. You are too, if only you’d understand it.
Well, I’m trying, said Richard Rigel, but you’re just going to have to help me a little. This "universal source of things" moreover tells you what’s good and what’s not good, doesn’t it? Isn’t that right?
Yes, said the author.
Well, we’ve been talking in a rather general way so far, now let me ask a rather specific question: did the universal source of things, that is responsible for the creation of Heaven and Earth, broadcast on your radio receiver as you stumbled across my boat at two a.m. this morning that the woman you were stumbling with was an Angel of Quality?
What? the author asked.
I’ll repeat, he said. Did God tell you that Miss Lila M. Blewitt of Rochester, New York, with whom you stumbled across my deck at two this morning, has Quality?
What god?
Forget God. Do you personally think Miss Lila M. Blewitt is a Woman of Quality?
Yes.
Richard Rigel stopped. He hadn’t expected this answer.
Could the Great Author really be so stupid?… Maybe he had some trick up his sleeve… Richard Rigel waited but nothing came.
Well, he said after a long pause, the Great Source of All Things is really coming up with some surprises these days.
He leaned forward and addressed the Great Author with deep gravity. Please will you, in future days, consider the possibility that the "Great Source of All Things," that speaks only to you and not to me, is, like so many of your ideas, just a figment of your own fertile imagination, a figment that allows you to justify any act of your own immorality as somehow God-given. I consider that undefined "Quality" to be a very dangerous commodity. It’s the stuff fools and fanatics are made of.
He waited for the author to drop his gaze or wince or blanch or get angry or walk out or give some sign of defeat, but he seemed to just settle back into his usual detachment.
He’s really out of it, Richard Rigel thought. But no matter. The spine of his whole case for Quality was broken.
When the old woman came to take their dishes the author finally asked, Do you get along entirely without Quality?
He can’t defend himself, Richard Rigel thought, and now he wants to cross-examine me. He looked at his watch. There was enough time. No, I don’t get along without Quality entirely, he said.
Then how do you define it?
Richard Rigel settled back in his chair. To begin with, he said, quality that is independent of experience doesn’t exist. I’ve done very well without it all these years and I’m sure I will continue without any difficulty whatsoever.
The author interrupted, I didn’t say Quality was independent of experience.
Well, now you asked me to define quality, Richard Rigel snapped, and I’ve started to do that. Why don’t you just let me continue?
All right.
I find quality to be always involved with experience of specific things, but if you ask me which things have quality and which don’t I’d have a hard time answering without enumerating. But I’d say that in general, and with many qualifications, quality is found in values I’ve learned in childhood and grown up with and used all my life and have found nothing wrong with. Those are values that are shared by personal friends and family, my law associates and other companions. Because we believe in these common values we’re able to act morally toward one another.
In the practice of law, he said, we come into contact with a fair-sized number of people who do not share traditional moral values, but feel rather that what is good and what is bad is a matter of their own independent judgment. Does that sound familiar?
The author nodded. He’d better. He could hardly do anything else.
Well, we give them a name, Rigel continued. We call them criminals.
The author looked as if he wanted to interrupt again but Rigel waved him down. Now you may argue, and many do, that the values of the community and the laws they produce are all wrong. That’s permissible. The law of the land guarantees you the right to hold that opinion. And moreover, the laws provide you with political and judicial recourses by which to change the "bad" laws of the community. But as long as those recourses are there and until those laws are changed neither you nor Lila nor anyone else can just go acting as you please in disregard of everyone else, deciding what does and what does not have "Quality." You do have a moral and legal obligation to obey the same rules others do.
Rigel continued, One of the things that angered me most about your book was its appearance at a time when so many young people all over the country put themselves above the law with criminal acts -draft dodgers, arsonists, political traitors, revolutionists, even assassins, all of them justifying themselves with the belief that they alone can see the God-given truth that no one else can see.
You talked for chapter after chapter about how to preserve the underlying form of a motorcycle, but you didn’t say a single word about how to preserve the underlying form of society. And so your book may have been a big seller among some of these radicals and cult groups who are looking for that sort of thing. They’re looking for anything that will justify their doing as they please. And you gave them support. You gave them encouragement. He felt his voice becoming angry. I’ve no doubt that your intentions were good, but whatever your intentions may have been it was the devil’s work you were doing.
He sat back. The author looked stunned. Good. Capella looked sober too. Good. Bill was a good boy. These radical intellectuals can sometimes get hold of people his age and fill them with their damned fads and get them believing them because they aren’t old enough yet to see what the world is really like. But Bill Capella he had hopes for.
It’s not the devil’s work I’m doing, said the author.
You’re trying to do what has "quality," isn’t that right?
Yes, the author said.
Well, do you see what happens when you get all involved in fine-sounding words that nobody can define? That’s why we have laws, to define what quality is. These definitions may not be as perfect as you’d like them but I can promise you they’re a whole lot better than having everybody run around doing as he pleases. We’ve seen the results of that.
The author looked confused. Capella looked amazed. Richard Rigel felt pleased at that. He had made his point at last, and he always enjoyed that, even when he wasn’t getting paid for it. That was his skill. Maybe he should write a book about quality and what it really was.
Tell me, he said, do you really and sincerely believe that Lila Blewitt has quality?
The author thought for a long time. Yes, he said.
Well, why don’t you just try to explain to us how on earth you can possibly think that Lila has quality. Do you think you can do that?
No, I don’t think I can.
Why not?
It’s too difficult.
It wasn’t the answer Richard Rigel had expected. He saw it was time to put an end to this and leave. Well, he said conciliatingly, maybe there’s something I don’t see.
I think so, the author said.
He sounded sick. He had been sailing alone for a long time now. Richard Rigel looked again at his watch. It was time to go. Let me say just one last thing, he said, and I hope you will not take it as a personal insult but rather as something to think about: I’ve noticed last night and in Oswego that you’re one of the most isolated individuals I have ever seen. I think you will always be that way unless by some possibility you find your way to understanding and integrating yourself with the values of the community around you. Other people count. You should understand that.
I understand that… the author began. But it was clear to Rigel that he didn’t.
We must go, he said to Capella, and got up from the table. He went to the bar, paid the check and joined the author at the door.
I’m surprised that you listened to me just now, Richard Rigel said as they walked toward their boats at the dock. I didn’t really think you were capable of that.
As the boats came into view they saw Lila standing on the deck of his boat. She waved to them. They all waved back.
In Kingston Phædrus' boat had been a tethered home from which the dock and harbor seemed like a local neighborhood. But here, out on the broad river, the neighborhood was gone and that below-decks home was just a storage area in which the chief concern was that things did not shift and crash when the boat heeled in the wind. Now, above deck, his attention was given to sail shape and wind direction and river current, and to the chart on the deck beside him folded to correspond to landmarks and day beacons and the progression of red and green buoys showing the way to the ocean. The river was brown with silt and there was a lot of debris in it but nothing he couldn’t avoid. There was a nice running-breeze, but it was gusting and shifting a little, probably from deflection by the river valley.
He felt depressed. That Rigel had really gotten to him. Someday, maybe, he would develop a thick enough skin to not get bothered by someone like that, but the day hadn’t arrived yet. Somehow he’d gotten the idea that a sailboat provided isolation and peace and tranquillity, in which thoughts could proceed freely and calmly without outside interference. It never happened. A sailboat under way means one hazard after another with little time to think about anything but its needs. And a sailboat at the dock is an irresistible magnet for every conversation-making passer-by in sight.
He’d gotten resigned to it, and Rigel, when he’d met him, was just one of the hundreds of here-today-gone-tomorrow people that cruising causes you to meet. Lila was in that class too… and there was a lot to be said for the kind of wandering life where you never knew who you would be tied up against — or sleeping with — the next night.
What depressed most was the stupid way he had let himself be set up for Rigel’s attack. He had probably been invited to breakfast just to receive that little sermon. Now he’d brood for days and go over everything that was said and recycle every word over and over again and think of perfect answers that he should have said at the time.
A small power boat approached, coming the other way. As they passed, the helmsman waved from inside the cabin, and Phædrus waved back.
The weather was turning out better than he’d thought it would. Yesterday’s stiff north wind was dying and warm southwesterlies would probably take over, which meant a few days of good weather. The river was broad here and the current would be with him for most of the day. This would be a nice day if it hadn’t been for that scene this morning.
The feeling left was one of enormous confusion and weariness, a kind of back-to-the-drawing-board, back-to-square-one feeling you get where you’re thinking you’re making great progress and then suddenly some question like this comes along and sets you back to where you started. He didn’t even want to think about it.
There are so many kinds of problem people like Rigel around, he thought, but the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There’s an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn’t matter what the moral code is — religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals — they’re all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same.
The trouble was, pure meanness didn’t completely explain what happened this morning. Something else was going on. Why should Rigel be so concerned about morals at that early hour in the morning? It just didn’t scan right… Not for some yachtsman-lawyer like that. Not in this century anyway. Maybe back in 1880 some church deacon lawyer might have talked like that but not now. All that stuff Rigel was referring to about sacred duties and home and family went out fifty years ago. That wasn’t what Rigel was mad about. It didn’t make sense for him to go running around sermonizing people on morals… at eight o’clock in the morning… on his vacation, for God’s sake.
It wasn’t even Sunday.
It was just bizarre…
He was mad about something else. What he was trying to do was catch Phædrus in the old trap of sexual morality. If Phædrus answered that Lila had Quality then he would be saying sex was Quality which was not right. But if he said Lila had no Quality the next question was, Why were you sleeping with her? That had to be the world’s oldest guilt trap. If you didn’t go for Lila you’re some kind of prissy old prude. If you did go for her you were some kind of dirty old man. No matter what you did you were guilty and should be ashamed of yourself. That trap’s been around since the Garden of Eden, at least.
A broad lawn rising back from the bluff above the water’s edge led to a grove of trees that partly concealed a large Victorian fin de siécle mansion. The lawn had the same deserted look he’d seen yesterday — uninhabited. No children or animals played anywhere.
He noticed again, as he had coming down here, how this old Hudson River valley looked like paintings of it made more than a hundred years ago. The banks of the river were steep and heavily forested, giving the river a quiet and tranquil look. Things seemed to have been the same here for a long time. Since he’d entered the Erie Canal system he’d noticed how things seemed older and more tired. Now that feeling was even more dominant.
Hundreds of years ago these old waterways were the only way to travel in this continent. For a while he had wondered why his boat always seemed to stop in the oldest part of each city it came to, and then he realized that small boats stopping right there is what got the city started in the first place.
Now there’s a sadness that attaches to these old river and lake ports that were once bustling and important. Before the railroads took over, this Hudson River and Erie Canal system were the main shipping route to the Great Lakes and the West. Now there’s almost nothing, just an occasional oil barge. The river is almost abandoned.
A depression always came over him when he came East like this, but the oldness and abandonment weren’t the only reasons for it. He was a Midwesterner and he shared the prejudices of many Midwesterners against this region of the country. He didn’t like the way everything gets more stratified here. The rich start looking richer and the poor start looking poorer. What was worse, they looked as though they thought this was the way things ought to be. They had settled for this. There was no sign it was going to change.
In a state like Minnesota or Wisconsin you can be poor and still feel some sense of dignity if you work hard and live fairly cleanly and you keep your eye on the future. But here in New York it seemed as if when you’re poor you’re just poor. And that means you’re nobody. Really nobody. And if you’re rich you’re really somebody. And that fact seemed to explain 95 per cent of everything else that went on in this region.
Maybe he was just noticing it more because he’d been thinking about Indians. Some of these differences are just urban-rural differences, and the East is more urban. But some of these differences reflected European values too. Every time he came this way he could feel the people getting more formal and impersonal and… crafty. Exploitative. European. And petty too, and ungenerous.
Out West among the Indians it’s a standing joke that the chief is the poorest man in the tribe. Every time somebody needs something he’s the one they go to, and by the Indian code, the generosity of the frontier, he has to help them. Phædrus didn’t think you’d see much of that along this river. He could just imagine some strange riverboat man pulling up at Astor’s mansion and saying, I just saw a light on and thought I’d stop in and say "hello". He wouldn’t get past the butler. They’d be horrified at his impertinence. Yet in the West they’d probably feel obliged to invite him in.
It just got worse and worse around here. The rich got glitzier and glitzier and the poor got scuzzier and scuzzier until you finally got to New York City. Homeless crazies hovering over ventilator grates while billionaires are escorted past them to their limousines. With each somehow accepting this as natural.
Oddly it’s this valley that’s the worst. If you cross into Vermont or Massachusetts it starts to weaken. He didn’t know how to explain that. Something historical maybe.
New England was settled by a completely different pattern of immigration. That was it. In the early days New England was all one big WASP family staying put, but this valley was everybody on the move. Dutch, English, French, German, Irish — and their relations were often hostile. So right from the start there was this aggressive, exploitative atmosphere. Maybe they had just as much class distinction and exploitativeness in New England, maybe even more, but they muted it so as not to upset the family. Here they just flaunted it openly. That’s what these Castles on the Hudson were: an open flaunting of wealth.
He supposed maybe some of Rigel’s morality this morning was Eastern too… No, that wasn’t it. It was something else. If he were a true Easterner he would have just kept quiet about it and increased his distance. Why did he want to get involved? He didn’t have to. He was angry… The celebrity thing maybe.
Once you become a celebrity it satisfies some people to try to tear you down, and there’s not much you can do about it. Phædrus hadn’t seen any of that all summer: where someone suddenly jumps on you for no reason at all just because they think you’re a celebrity. Maybe that’s what it was. In the past when it occurred it was usually at parties when someone had a few drinks in them. Never at breakfast.
Usually you get a warning when they’re all over you with praise. Then you know they’ve got some false image of you they’re talking to. Rigel was that way in Oswego, but it had been so far back Phædrus had forgotten about it.
That celebrity business is another whole phenomenon that’s related to Indian—European conflict of values. It’s a peculiarly American phenomenon, to catapult people suddenly into celebrity, lavish praise and wealth upon them, and then, at the moment they at last become convinced of their worth, try to destroy them. At their feet and then at their throat. He thought the reason was that in America you’re supposed to be socially superior like a European and socially equal like an Indian at the same time. It doesn’t matter that these goals are contradictory.
So what you get is this tension, this business executives' tension, where you’re the most relaxed, smiling, easy-going guy in the world — who is also absolutely killing himself to beat the competition and get ahead. Everybody wants their children to be valedictorians, but nobody is supposed to be better than anybody else. A kid who comes out somewhere near the bottom of his class is guilt ridden, self-destructive, and he thinks, It’s not fair! Everybody’s equal! And then the celebrity, John Lennon, steps out to sign an autograph for him. That’s the end of the celebrity, John Lennon.
Spooky. Until you’re the celebrity you don’t see how spooky it is. They love you for being what they want to be but they hate you for being what they’re not. There’s always this two-faced relationship with celebrity and you never know which face will appear next. That’s how it was with Rigel. First he was smiling because he thought he was talking to some big shot and that satisfied his European patterns, but now he’s furious because he thinks the big shot is acting superior or something like that.
The old Indians knew how to handle it. They just got rid of anything anybody wanted. They didn’t own property, they dressed in rags, some of them. They kept it down, laid low, and let the aristocrats and egalitarians and sycophants and assassins all look on them as worthless. That way they got a lot accomplished without all the celebrity grief.
This boat was good for that. When you’re moving along like this on these old abandoned waterways you can relate to people on a one-to-one basis, without all the celebrity business standing in between. Rigel was just a fluke.
Some noises came from the cabin. Phædrus wondered if something had broken loose. Then he remembered his passenger. She was probably getting dressed or something.
There’s no food on this boat, Lila’s voice said.
There’s some down there somewhere, he answered.
No, there isn’t.
Her face appeared in the hatchway. She looked belligerent. He’d better not tell her he’d already had breakfast.
She looked different. Worse. Her hair wasn’t combed. Her eyes were reddened and lined underneath. She looked a lot older than she did last night.
You didn’t search around enough, he said. Look in the icebox.
Where is that?
That huge wooden lid with the ring in it by the post there. Her face disappeared again and soon he heard some more noises of her rummaging.
There’s something near the bottom, it looks like, she said. There are three boxes of junk food and one jar of peanut butter. The jar is almost empty… That is all. No eggs, no bacon, no nothing…
Well, we’re under way now, he said. We have to use this current while it’s with us or we lose a whole day. Tonight we’ll have a big meal.
Tonight?!
Yeah, he said.
He heard her mutter, Peanut butter and junk food… Don’t you have anything at all?… Oh, wait a minute, she said. Here’s a half a bar of chocolate.
Then he heard her say Ugh!
What’s the matter? he asked.
There’s something wrong with it. It tastes stale… How about some coffee? Do you have any coffee? Her voice sounded pleading.
Yes, he said. Come on up and steer and I’ll go down to make some.
As she rose from the hatchway he saw that she wore a white T-shirt, skin-tight, with the word, L-O-V-E, printed in large red block letters.
She saw him stare and said, Summer clothes again. Pretty good weather.
He said, I’ll bet you never expected yesterday it would be like this.
I never know what’s going to happen next, she answered. I thought I was going to have breakfast next.
She moved to sit across from him. The four letters of L-O-V-E shifted around in provocative directions.
Do you know how to steer one of these boats? he asked.
Of course, she said.
Then keep to the right of that red nun-buoy up there. He pointed to make sure she saw it. Then he stood up, stepped out of the cockpit into the hatchway, and went below.
He started to search through some storage bins for food, but after looking for a while he saw that she was right, there wasn’t any food on this boat. He hadn’t known his supplies were so low. He found a box of cheese crackers that looked about a third full.
How about some cheese crackers and coffee? he said.
No answer.
He tried again. With peanut butter… sort of a "Continental breakfast." After a while her voice said, All right.
He unlocked the gimbals from the stove so that it levelled itself against the boat’s heel; then from a shelf he brought out a propane torch to pre-heat the stove’s kerosene burner.
This burner was a real problem. It had delicate brass needle valves attached to doorknob-sized handles which meant that one normal turn wrecked the whole mechanism.
How soon until we get somewhere? Lila asked.
We can’t stop, he said. I told you. That would get us out of phase with the current and we’d have to buck it down around West Point. He wasn’t sure if she knew this river flowed backward twice a day.
Rigel says there are moorings at Nyack, he added, and from there it’s an easy sail into Manhattan. I want to keep that last distance short… Leave some margins… There’s no telling what’s down there.
With a match he lit the propane torch and then directed the flame onto one side of the burner so that it would become hot enough to vaporize the kerosene. These stoves could not burn kerosene liquid — they could only burn kerosene gas.
Is Richard going to be there? Lila asked.
Where?
Where we stop.
I doubt it, Phædrus said. In fact I’m sure he isn’t.
When the burner was red hot from the propane torch he turned its doorknob handle a crack. A hot blue flame took hold. Phædrus shut off the propane torch and put it on a shelf where the hot tip couldn’t touch anything. Then he filled a kettle of water from the galley sink and put it on top of the burner.
Lila said, How long have you known him?
Who?
Richard.
Too long, he said.
Why do you say that?
I just like to be by myself, he said.
You’re a loner, eh? Lila said. Just like me.
He went up the ladder halfway and looked out to see if she was still on course. It was all right.
It must be nice to have a boat like this all your own, she said. Nobody ever tells you what to do. You just move on.
Yeah, he said. It was the first time he had ever seen her smile. Im sorry about breakfast, he said. That was a working dock we were at. We were right next to the crane. We had to get off so they could use it.
When the coffee was done he brought it up, and sat across from her and took the tiller.
This is nice, Lila said. That last boat I was on was too crowded. Everybody was in everybody else’s way.
That’s not a problem here, he said.
Do you always sail alone? she asked.
Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.
You’re married, aren’t you?
Separated.
I knew it, Lila said. And not very long, either.
How do you know that?
Because there isn’t any food on this boat. Real bachelor men always cook. They don’t just have junk food in the icebox.
We’ll have the biggest steak in town when we get to Nyack, he said.
Where’s Nyack?
It’s just a little way from Manhattan, on the New Jersey side. From there it’s just a few miles.
Good, she said.
Do you know a lot of people in New York?
Yes, she said. Lots.
Did you use to live there?
Yes.
What did you do?
She glanced up at him for a second. I used to work there.
Where?
Lots of different jobs.
What did you do?
Secretary, she said.
Oh, he said.
That sort of exhausted that. He didn’t want to hear about her typing.
He tried to think of some other topic. He wasn’t any good at small talk. Never was. Dusenberry should be here. This was getting like the reservation again.
Do you like New York? he asked.
Yes.
Why?
The people are so friendly.
Was she being sarcastic? No, her expression didn’t show it. It was just blank. Like she’d never been to New York.
Where did you live? he asked.
West Forties, she said.
He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. That, apparently, was it. Real chatterbox. She was worse than the Indians.
What a change from last night. No illumination today. Just this kind of dull face staring ahead not looking at anything in particular.
He watched her for a while.
It certainly wasn’t an evil face, though. Not low quality. You could see it as pretty if you wanted to.
Her whole head is wide, he thought. Brachycephalic, a physical anthropologist would call it. A Saxon head, probably, judging from her name. A commoner’s head, a medieval yeoman’s head, good for cudgeling, with the lower lip ready to curl. But not evil.
The eyes were out of place somehow. Her whole face and body and style of talking and action were all tough and ready for anything, but those eyes when she looked right at you were something else, like some frightened child looking up from the bottom of a well. They didn’t fit at all.
This was a beautiful valley, spectacular valley, the day was great, but she wasn’t even noticing it. He wondered why she had come sailing in the first place. He supposed all that break-up with those people on the previous boat was depressing her but he didn’t want to get into it.
He asked, How well do you get along with Richard Rigel?
She seemed a little startled. What makes you think I don’t get along with him? she said.
Last night when you first came in the bar he told you to shut the door, remember? And you slammed it and said "Does that suit you?" and I got the impression you knew each other and were both angry.
I know him, Lila said. We know some of the same people.
Well, why was he mad at you?
He wasn’t mad at me. He just talks that way.
Why?
I don’t know, she said.
She finally said, He’s very moody. One moment he’s very friendly and the next moment he acts like that. That’s just the way he is.
To know that much about him she had to know him very well, Phædrus thought. Obviously she wasn’t telling everything, but what she said certainly rang true. It explained Rigel’s attack this morning in a way that had never occurred to him. Rigel was just cranky and quixotic and attacked people without any explanation.
But something in him didn’t buy that explanation either. There was a better one. He just hadn’t heard it yet. All this didn’t explain why Rigel was attacking her and why she seemed to defend him. Usually when one person hates another the feeling is mutual.
How is Rigel regarded back in Rochester? he asked.
How do you mean? Lila said.
Do people like him?
Yes, he’s popular, Lila said.
Even though he’s moody and turns on people who haven’t done anything to him?
Lila frowned.
Would you say he’s a very "moral" person? Phædrus continued.
No, not particularly, Lila said. Like anyone else. She looked really annoyed. Why are you asking all these questions? Why don’t you ask him? He’s your friend, isn’t he?
Phædrus answered, He seemed to act awfully stuffy and moral and preachy this morning, and I thought that if you knew him you might be able to tell me why.
Richard?
He seemed to object to my being with you last night.
When did you talk to him?
This morning. We had some conversation before the boat got off.
It’s none of his business what I do, Lila said.
Well, why should he make such a fuss?
I told you, that’s the way he gets sometimes. He’s moody. Also he likes to tell other people what to do.
But you said he was not especially moral. Why would he pick on morals?
I don’t know. He gets it from his mother. He gets everything from his mother. That’s the way he talks sometimes. But he doesn’t really mean it. He’s just moody.
Well, what…
A really angry glare came into Lila’s blue eyes. Why do you want to know about him so much? she said. It sounds like you’re trying to get something on him. I don’t like your questions. I don’t want to hear about it. I thought he was your friend.
Her jaw clamped shut and her cheek muscles were tense. She turned away from him and stared down over the boat’s bulwark at the passing water.
A railroad train came along the shore, on its way to Albany probably. There was a roar as it went by and then disappeared to the north. He hadn’t even known that the track was there.
What else hadn’t he noticed? He had a feeling there were a lot of things. Secrets, Rigel had said. Forbidden things. This was the Atlantic Seaboard starting up now: a whole other culture.
Back from the shore stood another mansion like the one Phædrus had noticed earlier. This one was of gray stone, so bleak and oppressive it looked like a setting for some great historic tragedy. Another old Eastern robber-baron, Phædrus thought. Or his descendants… or maybe their creditors.
He studied the mansion for a while. It was set back above a huge lawn. Everything was in its place. All the leaves were raked and the grass was mowed. Even the trees were carefully spaced and carefully trimmed. It looked like the work of some obedient caretaker who had been at it, patiently, all his life.
Lila got up and said she needed to wash. She looked angry but Phædrus didn’t know exactly what to do about it. He told her how to pump the water to wash with, and she picked up the empty box of cheese crackers and her cup and stepped into the hatchway.
Halfway down the ladder she turned and said, Give me your cup, and I’ll wash it. No expression. He gave her his cup and then she disappeared.
He kept looking back again at the mansion rising back of the trees, as the boat moved away from it. It was huge and gray and shabby, and somewhat frightening. They sure knew how to dominate the spirit.
He picked up the binoculars for a closer look. Under one small grove of oak trees by the shore were empty white-painted chairs around a white table. From their curlicued shapes he guessed they were made of ornamental cast-iron. Something about them seemed to convey the mood of the whole place. Brittle, cold and uncomfortable. That was the Victorian spirit: a whole attitude toward life. Quality, they called it. European quality. Full of status and protocol.
It had the same feeling as Rigel’s sermon this morning. The social pattern that created that sermon on morality and the one that created these mansions were the same. It wasn’t just Eastern; it was Victorian. Phædrus hadn’t thought about that factor so much, but these mansions, and lawns and ornamental iron furniture made it unmistakable.
He remembered his graduate school advisor, white-haired Professor Alice Tyler, at the beginning of her first lecture on the Victorians saying, This is the period of American history I just hate to teach. When asked why, she said, It’s so depressing.
Victorians in America, she explained, were nouveaux riches who had no guidelines for what to do with all their sudden wealth and growth. What was depressing about them was their ugly gracelessness: the gracelessness of someone who has outgrown his own codes of self-regulation.
They didn’t know how to relate to money. That was the problem. It was partly the new post-Civil War Industrial Revolution. Fortunes were being made in steel, lumber, cattle, machinery, railroads and land. Everywhere one looked new innovations were creating fortunes where there was nothing before. Cheap labor was pouring in from Europe. No income taxes and no social codes really forced a sharing of the wealth.
After scrambling for their lives to get it, they couldn’t just give it away. And so the whole thing became involuted.
That’s a good word, involuted. Twisted in upon itself like the curves of their ornamental woodwork and the paisley patterns of their fabrics. Victorian men with beards. Victorian women with long involuted dresses. He could see them walking among the trees. Stiff, somber. It was all a pose.
He remembered elderly Victorians who had been nice to him as a child. It was a niceness that set him on edge. They were trying to improve him. It was expected that he would benefit from their attention. The Victorians always took themselves seriously, and the thing they took most seriously of all was their code of morality, or virtue, as they liked to call it. The Victorian aristocrats knew what quality was and defined it very carefully for persons with a less fortunate upbringing than their own.
He got an image of them standing back of Rigel’s shoulder at breakfast this morning endorsing every word Rigel said. They would have, too. That superiority Rigel asserted this morning was exactly the pose they would have affected.
You can duplicate it perfectly by pretending you’re a king of some European country, preferably England or Germany. Your subjects are devoted and demanding of you. You must show respect to your own station in life. It is not permitted that your inner personal feelings be publicly displayed. Your whole Victorian purpose in life is to capture and maintain that pose.
The tormented children of the Victorians often spoke of their morality as Puritanism but this really slanders the Puritans. The Puritans were never the gaudy, fraudulent, ornamental peacocks the Victorians were. Puritan moral codes were as simple and unadorned as their houses and clothes. And they had a certain beauty because, in their early period at least, the Puritans really believed in them.
It wasn’t from Puritans but from contemporary Europe that the Victorians got their moral inspiration. They thought they followed the highest English standards of morality, but the English morality they looked up to wasn’t anything Shakespeare would have recognized. Like Victoria herself, it was more out of the German Romantic tradition than anything English.
Smug posing was the essence of their style. That’s what these mansions were, poses — turrets and gingerbread and ornamental cast iron. They did it to their bodies with bustles and corsets. They did it to their whole social and psychic lives with impossible proprieties of table manners and speech and posture and sexual repression. Their paintings captured it perfectly — expressionless, mindless, cream-skinned ladies sitting around ancient Greek columns, draped in ancient Greek robes, in perfect form and posture, except for one breast hanging out, which no one noticed, presumably, because they were so elevated and so pure.
And they called it quality.
For them the pose was quality. Quality was the social corset, the ornamental cast iron. It was a quality of manners and egotism and suppression of human decency. When Victorians were being moral, kindness wasn’t anywhere in sight. They approved whatever was socially fashionable and suppressed or ignored anything that was not.
The period ended when, after having defined for all time what Truth and Virtue and Quality are, the Victorians and their Edwardian successors sent an entire generation of children into the trenches of the First World War on behalf of these ideals. And murdered them. For nothing. That war was the natural consequence of Victorian moral egotism. When it was over the children who survived never got tired of laughing at Charlie Chaplin comedies of those elderly people with the silk hats and too many clothes and noses up in the air. Young people of the twenties read Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald, drank bootleg gin, danced tangos into the night, drove fast roadsters, made illicit love, called themselves a lost generation, and never wanted anything to remind them of Victorian morality again.
Ornamental cast-iron. If you hit it with a sledgehammer it doesn’t bend. It just shatters into ugly, coarse fragments. The intellectual social reforms of this century just shattered those Victorians. All that’s left of them now is ugly fragments of their ornamental cast-iron way of life turning up at odd places, such as these mansions and in Rigel’s talk this morning.
Instead of improving the world forever with their high-flown moral codes they did just the opposite: left the world a moral vacuum we’re still living in. Rigel too. When Rigel starts all that breakfast oratory about morals he’s just blowing hot air. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s just trying to imitate a Victorian because he thinks it sounds good.
Phædrus had told Rigel he couldn’t answer Rigel’s question because it was too difficult, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be done. It could be done, but not with direct answers. Clever, hip-shot answers have to come out of the culture you’re living in and the culture we’re living in doesn’t have any quick answer to Rigel. To answer him you have to go all the way back to fundamental meanings of what is meant by morality and in this culture there aren’t any fundamental meanings of morality. There are only old traditional social and religious meanings and these don’t have any real intellectual base. They’re just traditions.
That’s why Phædrus got such a weary feeling from all this. All the way back to the beginning. That’s where he had to go.
Because Quality is morality. Make no mistake about it. They’re identical. And if Quality is the primary reality of the world then that means morality is also the primary reality of the world. The world is primarily a moral order. But it’s a moral order that neither Rigel nor the posing Victorians had ever, in their wildest dreams, thought about or heard about.
The idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value sounds impossible at first. Only objects are supposed to be real. Quality is supposed to be just a vague fringe word that tells what we think about objects. The whole idea that Quality can create objects seems very wrong. But we see subjects and objects as reality for the same reason we see the world right-side up although the lenses of our eyes actually present it to our brains upside down. We get so used to certain patterns of interpretation we forget the patterns are there.
Phædrus remembered reading about an experiment with special glasses that made users see everything upside down and backward. Soon their minds adjusted and they began to see the world normally again. After a few weeks, when the glasses were removed, the subjects again saw everything upside down and had to relearn the vision they had taken for granted before.
The same is true of subjects and objects. The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into these glasses. If someone sees things through a somewhat different set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glasses off, the natural tendency of those who still have their glasses on is to regard his statements as somewhat weird, if not actually crazy.
But he isn’t. The idea that values create objects gets less and less weird as you get used to it. Modern physics on the other hand gets more and more weird as you get into it and indications are that this weirdness will increase. In either case, however, weirdness isn’t the test of truth. As Einstein said, common sense — non-weirdness — is just a bundle of prejudices acquired before the age of eighteen. The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation. The Metaphysics of Quality satisfies these.
The Metaphysics of Quality subscribes to what is called empiricism. It claims that all legitimate human knowledge arises from the senses or by thinking about what the senses provide. Most empiricists deny the validity of any knowledge gained through imagination, authority, tradition, or purely theoretical reasoning. They regard fields such as art, morality, religion, and metaphysics as unverifiable. The Metaphysics of Quality varies from this by saying that the values of art and morality and even religious mysticism are verifiable, and that in the past they have been excluded for metaphysical reasons, not empirical reasons. They have been excluded because of the metaphysical assumption that all the universe is composed of subjects and objects and anything that can’t be classified as a subject or an object isn’t real. There is no empirical evidence for this assumption at all. It is just an assumption.
It is an assumption that flies outrageously in the face of common experience. The low value that can be derived from sitting on a hot stove is obviously an experience even though it is not an object and even though it is not subjective. The low value comes first, then the subjective thoughts that include such things as stove and heat and pain come second. The value is the reality that brings the thoughts to mind.
There’s a principle in physics that if a thing can’t be distinguished from anything else it doesn’t exist. To this the Metaphysics of Quality adds a second principle: if a thing has no value it isn’t distinguished from anything else. Then, putting the two together, a thing that has no value does not exist. The thing has not created the value. The value has created the thing. When it is seen that value is the front edge of experience, there is no problem for empiricists here. It simply restates the empiricists' belief that experience is the starting point of all reality. The only problem is for a subject-object metaphysics that calls itself empiricism.
This may sound as though a purpose of the Metaphysics of Quality is to trash all subject-object thought but that’s not true. Unlike subject-object metaphysics the Metaphysics of Quality does not insist on a single exclusive truth. If subjects and objects are held to be the ultimate reality then we’re permitted only one construction of things — that which corresponds to the objective world — and all other constructions are unreal. But if Quality or excellence is seen as the ultimate reality then it becomes possible for more than one set of truths to exist. Then one doesn’t seek the absolute Truth. One seeks instead the highest quality intellectual explanation of things with the knowledge that if the past is any guide to the future this explanation must be taken provisionally; as useful until something better comes along. One can then examine intellectual realities the same way one examines paintings in an art gallery, not with an effort to find out which one is the real painting, but simply to enjoy and keep those that are of value. There are many sets of intellectual reality in existence and we can perceive some to have more quality than others, but that we do so is, in part, the result of our history and current patterns of values.
Or, using another analogy, saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. A map with the North Pole at the center is confusing at first, but it’s every bit as correct as a Mercator map. In the Arctic it’s the only map to have. Both are simply intellectual patterns for interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances rectangular coordinates provide a better, simpler interpretation.
The Metaphysics of Quality provides a better set of coordinates with which to interpret the world than does subject-object metaphysics because it is more inclusive. It explains more of the world and it explains it better. The Metaphysics of Quality can explain subject-object relationships beautifully but, as Phædrus had seen in anthropology, a subject-object metaphysics can’t explain values worth a damn. It has always been a mess of unconvincing psychological gibberish when it tries to explain values.
For years we’ve read about how values are supposed to emanate from some location in the lower centers of the brain. This location has never been clearly identified. The mechanism for holding these values is completely unknown. No one has ever been able to add to a person’s values by inserting one at this location, or observed any changes at this location as a result of a change of values. No evidence has been presented that if this portion of the brain is anesthetized or even lobotomized the patient will make a better scientist as a result because all his decisions will then be value-free. Yet we’re told values must reside here, if they exist at all, because where else could they be?
Persons who know the history of science will recognize the sweet smell of phlogiston here and the warm glow of the luminiferous ether, two other scientific entities which were arrived at deductively and which never showed up under the microscope or anywhere else. When deduced entities are around for years and nobody finds them it is a sign that the deductions have been made from false premises; that the body of theory from which the deductions are made is wrong at some fundamental level. This is the real reason values have been avoided by empiricists in the past, not because values aren’t experienced, but because when you try to fit them into this absurd brain location you get a sinking feeling that tells you that somewhere back down the line you have gone way off the track and you just want to drop the whole subject and think about something else that has more of a future to it.
This problem of trying to describe value in terms of substance has been the problem of a smaller container trying to contain a larger one. Value is not a subspecies of substance. Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a stable pattern of inorganic values. The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values are unified.
This inability of conventional subject-object metaphysics to clarify values is an example of what Phædrus called a platypus. Early zoologists classified as mammals those that suckle their young and as reptiles those that lay eggs. Then a duck-billed platypus was discovered in Australia laying eggs like a perfect reptile and then, when they hatched, suckling the infant platypi like a perfect mammal.
The discovery created quite a sensation. What an enigma! it was exclaimed. What a mystery! What a marvel of nature! When the first stuffed specimens reached England from Australia around the end of the eighteenth century they were thought to be fakes made by sticking together bits of different animals. Even today you still see occasional articles in nature magazines asking, Why does this paradox of nature exist?
The answer is: it doesn’t. The platypus isn’t doing anything paradoxical at all. It isn’t having any problems. Platypi have been laying eggs and suckling their young for millions of years before there were any zoologists to come along and declare it illegal. The real mystery, the real enigma, is how mature, objective, trained scientific observers can blame their own goof on a poor innocent platypus.
Zoologists, to cover up their problem, had to invent a patch. They created a new order, monotremata, that includes the platypus, the spiny anteater, and that’s it. This is like a nation consisting of two people.
In a subject-object classification of the world, Quality is in the same situation as that platypus. Because they can’t classify it the experts have claimed there is something wrong with it. And Quality isn’t the only such platypus. Subject-object metaphysics is characterized by herds of huge, dominating, monster platypi. The problems of free will versus determinism, of the relation of mind to matter, of the discontinuity of matter at the sub-atomic level, of the apparent purposelessness of the universe and the life within it are all monster platypi created by the subject-object metaphysics. Where it is centered around the subject-object metaphysics, Western philosophy can almost be dejined as platypus anatomy. These creatures that seem like such a permanent part of the philosophical landscape magically disappear when a good Metaphysics of Quality is applied.
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do. There are always some pieces like platypi that don’t fit and we can either ignore these pieces or we can give them silly explanations or we can take the whole puzzle apart and try other ways of assembling it that will include more of them. When one takes the whole ill-shaped, misfitting structure of a subject-object explained universe apart and puts it back together in a value-centered metaphysics, all kinds of orphaned puzzle pieces fit beautifully that never fit before.
Almost as great as this value platypus is another one handled by the Metaphysics of Quality: the scientific reality platypus. This is a very large monster that has been disturbing a lot of people for a long time. It was identified a century ago by the mathematician and astronomer, Henri Poincare, who asked, Why is the reality most acceptable to science one that no small child can be expected to understand?
Should reality be something that only a handful of the world’s most advanced physicists understand? One would expect at least a majority of people to understand it. Should reality be expressible only in symbols that require university-level mathematics to manipulate? Should it be something that changes from year to year as new scientific theories are formulated? Should it be something about which different schools of physics can quarrel for years with no firm resolution on either side? If this is so then how is it fair to imprison a person in a mental hospital for life with no trial and no jury and no parole for failing to understand reality? By this criterion shouldn’t all but a handful of the world’s most advanced physicists be locked up for life? Who is crazy here and who is sane?
In a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality this scientific reality platypus vanishes. Reality, which is value, is understood by every infant. It is a universal starting place of experience that everyone is confronted with all the time. Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.
A third major platypus handled by the Metaphysics of Quality is the causation platypus. It has been said for centuries that, empirically speaking, there is no such thing as causation. You never see it, touch it, hear it or feel it. You never experience it in any way. This has not been a minor philosophic or scientific platypus. This has been a real show-stopper. The amount of paper consumed in dissertations on this one metaphysical problem must equal whole forests of pulpwood.
In the Metaphysics of Quality causation is a metaphysical term that can be replaced by value. To say that A causes B or to say that B values precondition A is to say the same thing. The difference is one of words only. Instead of saying A magnet causes iron filings to move toward it, you can say Iron filings value movement toward a magnet. Scientifically speaking neither statement is more true than the other. It may sound a little awkward, but that’s a matter of linguistic custom, not science. The language used to describe the data is changed but the scientific data itself is unchanged. The same is true in every other scientific observation Phædrus could think of. You can always substitute B values precondition A for A causes B without changing any facts of science at all. The term cause can be struck out completely from a scientific description of the universe without any loss of accuracy or completeness.
The only difference between causation and value is that the word cause implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of value is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that cause is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles prefer to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences. Therefore when you strike cause from the language and substitute value you are not only replacing an empirically meaningless term with a meaningful one; you are using a term that is more appropriate to actual observation.
The next platypus to fall is substance. Like causation, substance is a derived concept, not anything that is directly experienced. No one has ever seen substance and no one ever will. All people ever see is data. It is assumed that what makes the data hang together in consistent patterns is that they inhere in this substance. But as John Locke pointed out in the seventeenth century, if we ask what this substance is, devoid of any properties, we find ourselves thinking of nothing whatsoever. The data of quantum physics indicate that what are called subatomic particles cannot possibly fill the definition of a substance. The properties exist, then disappear, then exist, and then disappear again in little bundles called quanta. These bundles are not continuous in time, yet an essential, defined characteristic of substance is that it is continuous in time. Since the quantum bundles are not substance and since it is a usual scientific assumption that these subatomic particles compose everything there is, then it follows that there is no substance anywhere in the world nor has there ever been. The whole concept is a grand metaphysical illusion. In his first book, Phædrus had railed against the conjuror, Aristotle, who invented the term and started it all.
But if there is no substance, it must be asked, then why isn’t everything chaotic? Why do our experiences act as if they inhere in something? If you pick up a glass of water why don’t the properties of that glass go flying off in different directions? What is it that keeps these properties uniform if it is not something called substance? That is the question that created the concept of substance in the first place.
The answer provided by the Metaphysics of Quality is similar to that given for the causation platypus. Strike out the word substance wherever it appears and substitute the expression stable inorganic pattern of value. Again the difference is linguistic. It doesn’t make a whit of difference in the laboratory which term is used. No dials change their readings. The observed laboratory data are exactly the same.
The greatest benefit of this substitution of value for causation and substance is that it allows an integration of physical science with other areas of experience that have been traditionally considered outside the scope of scientific thought. Phædrus saw that the value which directed subatomic particles is not identical with the value a human being gives to a painting. But he saw that the two are cousins, and that the exact relationship between them can be defined with great precision. Once this definition is complete a huge integration of the humanities and sciences appears in which platypi fall by the hundreds. Thousands.
One of the first to fall, he was happy to note, was the one that got all this started in the first place — the Theory of Anthropology platypus. If science is a study of substances and their relationships, then the field of cultural anthropology is a scientific absurdity. In terms of substance there is no such thing as a culture. It has no mass, no energy. No scientific laboratory instrument has ever been devised that can distinguish a culture from a non-culture.
But if science is a study of stable patterns of value, then cultural anthropology becomes a supremely scientific field. A culture can be defined as a network of social patterns of value. As the Values Project anthropologist Kluckhohn had said, patterns of value are the essence of what an anthropologist studies.
Kluckhohn’s enormous mistake was his attempt to define values. He assumed that a subject-object view of the world would allow such a definition. What was destroying his case was not the accuracy of his observations. What was destroying his case were these substance-oriented metaphysical assumptions of anthropology that he failed to detach from his observations. Once this detachment is made anthropology is out of the metaphysical quicksand and onto hard ground at last.
Phædrus found again and again that a Quality-centered map of the universe provides overwhelming clarity of explanation where all has been fog before. In the arts, which are primarily concerned with value, this was expected. A surprise, however, came in fields that were supposed to have little to do with value. Mathematics, physics, biology, history, law — all of these had value foundations built into them that now came under scrutiny and all sorts of surprising things were revealed.
Once a thief is caught a whole string of crimes is often solved.
In any hierarchy of metaphysical classification the most important division is the first one, for this division dominates everything beneath it. If this first division is bad there is no way you can ever build a really good system of classification around it.
In his book Phædrus had tried to save Quality from metaphysics by refusing to define it, by placing it outside the dialectical chess board. Anything that is undefined is outside metaphysics, since metaphysics can only function with defined terms. If you can’t define it you can’t argue about it. He had demonstrated that even though you can’t define Quality you still must agree that it exists, since a world from which value is subtracted becomes unrecognizable.
But he realized that sooner or later he was going to have to stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something positive for a change. Sooner or later he was going to have to come up with a way of dividing Quality that was better than subjects and objects. He would have to do that or get out of metaphysics entirely. It’s all right to condemn somebody else’s bad metaphysics but you can’t replace it with a metaphysics that consists of just one word.
By even using the term Quality he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality. The use of the term Quality sets up a pile of questions of its own that have nothing to do with mystic reality and walks away leaving them unanswered. Even the name, Quality, was a kind of definition since it tended to associate mystic reality with certain fixed and limited understandings. Already he was in trouble. Was the mystic reality of the universe really more immanent in the higher-priced cuts of meat in the butcher shop? These were Quality meats, weren’t they? Was the butcher using the term incorrectly? Phædrus had no answers… That was the problem this morning too, with Rigel. Phædrus had no answers. If you’re going to talk about Quality at all you have to be ready to answer someone like Rigel. You have to have a ready-made Metaphysics of Quality that you can snap at him like some catechism. Phædrus didn’t have a Catechism of Quality and that’s why he got hit.
Actually the issue before him was not whether there should be a metaphysics of Quality or not. There already is a metaphysics of quality. A subject-object metaphysics is in fact a metaphysics in which the first division of Quality — the first slice of undivided experience — is into subjects and objects. Once you have made that slice, all of human experience is supposed to fit into one of these two boxes. The trouble is, it doesn’t. What he had seen is that there is a metaphysical box that sits above these two boxes, Quality itself. And once he’d seen this he also saw a huge number of ways in which Quality can be divided. Subjects and objects are just one of the ways.
The question was, which way was best?
Different metaphysical ways of dividing up reality have, over the centuries, tended to fan out into a structure that resembles a book on chess openings. If you say that the world is one, then somebody can ask, Then why does it look like more than one? And if you answer that it is due to faulty perception, he can ask, How do you know which perception is faulty and which is real? Then you have to answer that, and so on.
Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can’t do it. It’s out of the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a metaphysical question someone will always start masking questions that will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries without any such checkmate being agreed upon.
Phædrus had spent an enormous amount of time following what turned out to be lousy openings. A particularly large amount of this time had been spent trying to lay down a first line of division between the classic and romantic aspects of the universe he’d emphasized in his first book. In that book his purpose had been to show how Quality could unite the two. But the fact that Quality was the best way of uniting the two was no guarantee that the reverse was true — that the classic-romantic split was the best way of dividing Quality. It wasn’t. For example, American Indian mysticism is the same platypus in a world divided primarily into classic and romantic patterns as under a subject-object division. When an American Indian goes into isolation and fasts in order to achieve a vision, the vision he seeks is not a romantic understanding of the surface beauty of the world. Neither is it a vision of the world’s classic intellectual form. It is something else. Since this whole metaphysics had started with an attempt to explain Indian mysticism Phædrus finally abandoned this classic-romantic split as a choice for a primary division of the Metaphysics of Quality. The division he finally settled on was one he didn’t really choose in any deliberative way. It was more as if it chose him. He’d been reading Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture without any particular search in mind, when a relatively minor anecdote stopped him. It stayed with him for weeks. He couldn’t get it out of his mind.
The anecdote was a case-history in which there was a conflict of morality. It concerned a Pueblo Indian who lived in Zuni, New Mexico, in the nineteenth century. Like a Zen koan (which also originally meant case-history) the anecdote didn’t have any single right answer but rather a number of possible meanings that kept drawing Phædrus deeper and deeper into the moral situation that was involved.
Benedict wrote: Most ethnologists have had… experiences in recognizing that persons who are put outside the pale of society with contempt are not those who would be placed there by another culture…
The dilemma of such an individual is often most successfully solved by doing violence to his strongest natural impulses and accepting the role the culture honours. In case he is a person to whom social recognition is necessary it is ordinarily his only possible course.
She said the person concerned was one of the most striking individuals in Zuni.
In a society that thoroughly distrusts authority of any sort, he had native personal magnetism that singled him out in any group. In a society that exalts moderation and the easiest way, he was turbulent and could act violently upon occasion. In a society that praises a pliant personality that talks lots — that is, that chatters in a friendly fashion — he was scornful and aloof. Zuni’s only reaction to such personalities is to brand them as witches. He was said to have been peering through a window from outside, and this is a sure mark of a witch. At any rate he got drunk one day and boasted that they could not kill him. He was taken before the war priests who hung him by his thumbs from the rafters till he should confess to his witchcraft. This is the usual procedure in a charge of witchcraft. However he dispatched a messenger to the government troops. When they came his shoulders were already crippled for life, and the officer of the law was left with no recourse but to imprison the war priests who had been responsible for the enormity. One of these war priests was probably the most respected and important in recent Zuni history and when he returned after imprisonment in the state penitentiary he never resumed his priestly offices. He regarded his power as broken. It was a revenge that is probably unique in Zuni history. It involved, of course, a challenge to the priesthoods, against whom the witch by his act openly aligned himself.
The course of his life in the forty years that followed this defiance was not, however, what we might easily predict. A witch is not barred from his membership in cult groups because he has been condemned, and the way to recognition lay through such activity. He possessed a remarkable verbal memory and a sweet singing voice. He learned unbelievable stores of mythology, of esoteric ritual, of cult songs. Many hundreds of pages of stories and ritual poetry were taken down from his dictation before he died, and he regarded his songs as much more extensive. He became indispensable in ceremonial life and before he died was the governor of Zuni. The congenital bent of his personality threw him into irreconcilable conflict with his society, and he solved his dilemma by turning an incidental talent to account. As we might well expect, he was not a happy man. As governor of Zuni and high in his cult groups, a marked man in his community, he was obsessed by death. He was a cheated man in the midst of a mildly happy populace.
It is easy to imagine the life he might have lived among the Plains Indians where every institution favoured the traits that were native to him. The personal authority, the turbulence, the scorn, would all have been honoured in the career he could have made his own. The unhappiness that was inseparable from his temperament as a successful priest and governor of Zuni would have had no place as a war chief of the Cheyenne; it was not a function of the traits of his native endowment but of the standards of the culture in which he found no outlet for his native responses.
When Phædrus first read this passage he felt a kind of eerie feeling — a feeling he might have had if he had passed in front of a strange mirror and suddenly seen a reflection of someone he’d never expected to see. It was the same feeling he got at the peyote meeting. This Zuni Indian was not exactly someone else.
This was not just an isolated tribal incident going on here. This was something of universal importance happening. This was everyman. There is not a person alive who is not in some way or other in the kind of situation this witch was in. It was just that his circumstances were so exotic and so extreme one could now see it, by itself, out in the open.
The story was of a struggle between good and evil, but the koan it raised was, Which was which? Was this person really good or was he perhaps also evil?
At first reading he might seem a model of goodness, a lone, virtuous man surrounded by wicked persecutors, but this was too facile. Circumstances of the story argued against it. One of his tormentors was probably the most important and respected person in Zuni history. If his tormentor was so evil why was he so respected? Was the whole Zuni culture evil? That was ridiculous. There was a lot more to it than that.
Phædrus saw that the question was thrown off by a connotation of witch. This word alone loaded the case against the priests since anyone who calls someone else a witch is obviously a bigoted persecutor. But did they really call him a witch? A witch is a Druid priestess reduced by legend to an old crone who wears a pointed black hat and rides a broomstick in front of the moon on Halloween. Was that what they were calling him?
In his koan-like recycling of the event in his mind Phædrus came to think that Benedict had given the event an interpretation that didn’t do it justice. She was finding stories to support her thesis that different cultures create different personality traits, which is important, and undoubtedly true. But this man was more than just a misfit. There was something deeper than that going on.
Misfit is one of those words that seem to explain things but does not. Misfit says only that something is not explained. If he was a misfit why didn’t he leave? What persuaded him to stay? It certainly wasn’t timidity. And why did the citizens of Zuni change their minds and make this former witch their governor? There’s no indication that he changed or they changed. She said he turned an incidental talent to account in order to satisfy his need for social recognition. Probably so, but Zuni or no Zuni, it takes stronger social forces than a good singing voice and a need for social recognition to turn a misfit and torture victim into a governor.
How did he do it? What were his powers? Was there something special in the way Pueblo Indians think that after ten thousand years of continuous culture they would let a drunkard and a window-peeper get away with this?
Phædrus did not think so. He thought a better name for him might have been sorcerer, or shaman, or brujo, a Spanish term used extensively in that region that denotes a quite different kind of person. A brujo is not a semi-mythical, semi-comic figure that rides a broomstick but a real person who claims religious powers; who acts outside of and sometimes against the local church authorities.
This was not a case of priests persecuting an innocent person. This was a much deeper conflict between a priesthood and a shaman. A passage from the anthropologist, E. A. Hoebel, confirmed Phædrus' idea:
Although in many primitive cultures there is a recognized division of function between priests and shamans, in the more highly developed cultures in which cults have become strongly organized churches, the priesthood fights an unrelenting war against shamans… Priests work in a rigorously structured hierarchy fixed in a firm set of traditions. Their power comes from and is vested in the organization itself. They constitute a religious bureaucracy.
Shamans, on the other hand, are arrant individualists. Each is on his own, undisciplined by bureaucratic control; hence a shaman is always a threat to the order of the organized church. In the view of the priests they are presumptive pretenders. Joan of Arc was a shaman for she communed directly with the angels of God. She steadfastly refused to recant and admit delusion and her martyrdom was ordained by the functionaries of the Church. The struggle between shaman and priest may well be a death struggle.
For weeks Phædrus returned to these questions before he saw that the key lay in the war priest’s statement that his powers had been broken. Something very grave had occurred. The priest refused to return to a priestly office after return from the penitentiary. What had occurred had been enormous.
Phædrus concluded that a huge battle had taken place for the entire mind and soul of Zuni. The priests had proclaimed themselves good and the brujo evil. The brujo had proclaimed himself good and the priests evil. A showdown had occurred and the brujo had won!
Phædrus began to suspect that Benedict missed all this because she was trained in the objectivity of science by Boas. She tried to show only those aspects of Zuni culture that were independent of the white observer.
This explains why the brujo is analyzed only in terms of relations within his own culture, although by her own accounting he was very much in contact with the whites. It was the white man to whom he sent for help and who saved him. It was the white anthropologists, presumably, who took dictation of all his songs and stories and made him well known in books of which his tribesmen could not have been ignorant.
Phædrus concluded that the real reason the people of Zuni made the brujo governor had to be because of this. The brujo had shown he could deal successfully with the one tribe that could easily wipe them out any time it wanted to. It wasn’t just a sweet singing voice that made him governor of Zuni. He had real political clout.
Sometimes you can see your own society’s issues more clearly when they are put in an exotic context like that of the brujo in Zuni. That is a huge reward from the study of anthropology. As Phædrus thought about this context again and again it became apparent there were two kinds of good and evil involved.
The tribal frame of values that condemned the brujo and led to his punishment was one kind of good, for which Phædrus coined the term static good. Each culture has its own pattern of static good derived from fixed laws and the traditions and values that underlie them. This pattern of static good is the essential structure of the culture itself and defines it. In the static sense the brujo was very clearly evil to oppose the appointed authorities of his tribe. Suppose everyone did that? The whole Zuni culture, after thousands of years of continuous survival, would collapse into chaos.
But in addition there’s a Dynamic good that is outside of any culture, that cannot be contained by any system of precepts, but has to be continually rediscovered as a culture evolves. Good and evil are not entirely a matter of tribal custom. If they were, no tribal change would be possible, since custom cannot change custom. There has to be another source of good and evil outside the tribal customs that produces the tribal change.
If you had asked the brujo what ethical principles he was following he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you. He wouldn’t have understood what you were talking about. He was just following some vague sense of betterness that he couldn’t have defined if he had wanted to. Probably the war priests thought he was some kind of egotist trying to build his own image by tearing down tribal authority. But he showed later on that he really wasn’t. If he’d been such an egotist he wouldn’t have stayed with the tribe and helped keep it together.
The brujo’s values were in conflict with the tribe at least partly because he had learned to value some of the ways of the new neighbors and they had not. He was a precursor of deep cultural change. A tribe can change its values only person by person and someone has to be first. Whoever is first obviously is going to be in conflict with everybody else. He didn’t have to change his ways to conform to the culture only because the culture was changing its ways to conform to him. And that is what made him seem like such a leader. Probably he wasn’t telling anyone to do this or to do that so much as he was just being himself. He may never have seen his struggle as anything but a personal one. But because the culture was in transition many people saw this brujo’s ways to be of higher Quality than those of the old priests and tried to become more like him. In this Dynamic sense the brujo was good because he saw the new source of good and evil before the other members of his tribe did. Undoubtedly he did much during his life to prevent a clash of cultures that would have been completely destructive to the people of Zuni.
Whatever the personality traits were that made him such a rebel from the tribe around him, this man was no misfit. He was an integral part of Zuni culture. The whole tribe was in a state of evolution that had emerged many centuries ago from cliff-dwelling isolation. Now it was entering a state of cooperation with the whites and submission to white laws. He was an active catalytic agent in that tribe’s social evolution, and his personal conflicts were a part of that tribe’s cultural growth.
Phædrus thought that the story of the old Pueblo Indian, seen in this way, made deep and broad sense, and justified the enormous feeling of drama that it produced. After many months of thinking about it, he was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic good and static good, which became the basic division of his emerging Metaphysics of Quality.
It certainly felt right. Not subject and object but static and Dynamic is the basic division of reality. When A. N. Whitehead wrote that mankind is driven forward by dim apprehensions of things too obscure for its existing language, he was writing about Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality is the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, the source of all things, completely simple and always new. It was the moral force that had motivated the brujo in Zuni. It contains no pattern of fixed rewards and punishments. Its only perceived good is freedom and its only perceived evil is static quality itself — any pattern of one-sided fixed values that tries to contain and kill the ongoing free force of life.
Static quality, the moral force of the priests, emerges in the wake of Dynamic Quality. It is old and complex. It always contains a component of memory. Good is conformity to an established pattern of fixed values and value objects. Justice and law are identical. Static morality is full of heroes and villains, loves and hatreds, carrots and sticks. Its values don’t change by themselves. Unless they are altered by Dynamic Quality they say the same thing year after year. Sometimes they say it more loudly, sometimes more softly, but the message is always the same.
During the next few months that Phædrus reflected he began to transpose the static-Dynamic division out of the moral conflict of Zuni into other seemingly unrelated areas. The negative esthetic quality of the hot stove in the earlier example was now given some added meaning by a static-Dynamic division of Quality. When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think, This stove is hot, and then make a rational decision to get off. A dim perception of he knows not what gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation.
A subject-object metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive and negative, even the Dynamic ongoing edge of thought itself. Phædrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study only subject-object science and those who study only meditative mysticism, it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove first. The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one’s self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past.
In a subject-object metaphysics morals and art are worlds apart, morals being concerned with the subject quality and art with object quality. But in the Metaphysics of Quality that division doesn’t exist. They’re the same. They both become much more intelligible when references to what is subjective and what is objective are completely thrown away and references to what is static and what is Dynamic are taken up instead.
He found an example within the field of music. He said, imagine that you walk down a street past, say, a car where someone has the radio on and it plays a tune you’ve never heard before but which is so fantastically good it just stops you in your tracks. You listen until it’s done. Days later you remember exactly what that street looked like when you heard that music. You remember what was in the store window you stood in front of. You remember what the colors of the cars in the street were, where the clouds were in the sky above the buildings across the street, and it all comes back so vividly you wonder what song they were playing, and so you wait until you hear it again. If it’s that good you’ll hear it again because other people will have heard it too and have had the same feelings and that will make it popular.
One day it comes on the radio again and you get the same feeling again and you catch the name and you rush down the street to the record store and buy it and can hardly wait until you can get it home and play it.
You get home. You play it. It’s really good. It doesn’t quite transform the whole room into something different but it’s really good. You play it again. Really good. You play it another time. Still good, but you’re not so sure you want to play it again. But you play it again. It’s OK but now you definitely don’t want to play it again. You put it away.
The next day you play it again, and it’s OK, but something is gone. You still like it and always will, you say. You play it again. Yeah, that’s sure a good record. But you file it away and once in a while play it again for a friend and maybe months or years later bring it out as a memory of something you were once crazy about.
Now what has happened? You can say you’ve gotten tired of the song but what does that mean? Has the song lost its quality? If it has, why do you still say it’s a good record? Either it’s good or it’s not good. If it’s good why don’t you play it? If it’s not good why do you tell your friend it’s good?
If you think about this question long enough you will come to see that the same kind of division between Dynamic Quality and static quality that exists in the field of morals also exists in the field of art. The first good, that made you want to buy the record, was Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality comes as a sort of surprise. What the record did was weaken for a moment your existing static patterns in such a way that the Dynamic Quality all around you shone through. It was free, without static forms. The second good, the kind that made you want to recommend it to a friend, even when you had lost your own enthusiasm for it, is static quality. Static quality is what you normally expect.
Soon after that Phædrus ran across another example that concerned neither art nor morality but referred indirectly to mystic reality itself.
It was in an essay by Walker Percy called The Delta Factor. It asked,
Why is a man apt to feel bad in a good environment, say suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon? Why is the same man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say in an old hotel in Key Largo, in a hurricane..? Why is it that a man riding a good commuter train from Larchmont to New York, whose needs and drives are satisfied, who has a good home, loving wife and family, good job, and enjoys unprecedented cultural and recreational facilities often feels bad without knowing why?
Why is it that if such a man suffers a heart attack and, taken off the train at New Rochelle, regains consciousness and finds himself in a strange place, he then comes to himself for the first time in years, perhaps in his life, and begins to gaze at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight?
These are haunting questions, but with Quality divided into Dynamic and static components, a way of approaching them emerges. A home in suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon is filled with static patterns. A hurricane in Key Largo promises a Dynamic relief from static patterns. The man who suffers a heart attack and is taken off the train at New Rochelle has had all his static patterns shattered, he can’t find them, and in that moment only Dynamic Quality is available to him. That is why he gazes at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight.
Phædrus saw that not only a man recovering from a heart attack but also a baby gazes at his hand with mystic wonder and delight. He remembered the child Poincare referred to who could not understand the reality of objective science at all but was able to understand the reality of value perfectly. When this reality of value is divided into static and Dynamic areas a lot can be explained about that baby’s growth that is not well explained otherwise.
One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the baby doesn’t. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn’t identify them as that. From the baby’s point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention. This generalized something, Whitehead’s dim apprehension, is Dynamic Quality. When he is a few months old the baby studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with the same sense of wonder and mystery and excitement created by the music and heart attack in the previous examples.
If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to Dynamic Quality he will soon begin to notice differences and then correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an object to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience.
Once the baby has made a complex pattern of values called an object and found this pattern to work well he quickly develops a skill and speed at jumping through the chain of deductions that produced it, as though it were a single jump. This is similar to the way one drives a car. The first time there is a very slow trial-and-error process of seeing what causes what. But in a very short time it becomes so swift one doesn’t even think about it. The same is true of objects. One uses these complex patterns the same way one shifts a car, without thinking about them. Only when the shift doesn’t work or an object turns out to be an illusion is one forced to become aware of the deductive process. That is why we think of subjects and objects as primary. We can’t remember that period of our lives when they were anything else.
In this way static patterns of value become the universe of distinguishable things. Elementary static distinctions between such entities as before and after and between like and unlike grow into enormously complex patterns of knowledge that are transmitted from generation to generation as the mythos, the culture in which we live.
This, Phædrus thought, was why little children are usually quicker to perceive Dynamic Quality than old people, why beginners are usually quicker than experts, why primitive people are sometimes quicker than those of advanced cultures. American Indians are exceptionally skilled at holding to the ever-changing center of things. That is the real reason they speak and act without ornamentation. It violates their mystic unity. This moving and acting and talking in accord with the Great Spirit and almost nothing else has been the ancient center of their lives.
Their term manito is often used interchangeably with God by whites who usually think all religion is theistic and by Indians themselves who don’t make a big deal out of any verbal distinctions. But as David Mandelbaum noted in his book The Plains Cree, The term manito primarily referred to the Supreme Being but also had many other usages. It was applied to manifestations of skill, fortune, blessing, luck, to any wondrous occurrence. It connoted any phenomenon that transcended the run of everyday experience.
In other words, Dynamic Quality.
With the identification of static and Dynamic Quality as the fundamental division of the world, Phædrus felt that some kind of goal had been reached. This first division of the Metaphysics of Quality now covered the spectrum of experience from primitive mysticism to quantum mechanics. What remained for Phædrus to do next was fill in the gaps as carefully and methodically as he could.
In the past Phædrus' own radical bias caused him to think of Dynamic Quality alone and neglect static patterns of quality. Until now he had always felt that these static patterns were dead. They have no love. They offer no promise of anything. To succumb to them is to succumb to death, since that which does not change cannot live. But now he was beginning to see that this radical bias weakened his own case. Life can’t exist on Dynamic Quality alone. It has no staying power. To cling to Dynamic Quality alone apart from any static patterns is to cling to chaos. He saw that much can be learned about Dynamic Quality by studying what it is not rather than futilely trying to define what it is.
Static quality patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live, these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world. Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other.
If one inserts this concept into a case such as that of the brujo in Zuni, one can see the truth of it. Although the Dynamic brujo and the static priests who tortured him appeared to be mortal enemies, they were actually necessary to each other. Both types of people had to exist. If most of Zuni went around drunk and bragging and looking in windows, that ancient way of life could never have lasted. But without wild, disreputable outcasts like the brujo, ready to seize on any new outside idea and bring it into the community, Zuni would have been too inflexible to survive. A tension between these two forces is needed to continue the evolution of life.
The beauty of that old Indian, Phædrus thought, is that he seemed to have understood this. He wasn’t interested in just knocking things down and walking off into the sunset with some kind of a moral victory. The old priestly ways would have come back and all his suffering would have been wasted. He didn’t do that. He stayed around the rest of his life, became a part of the static pattern of the tribe, and lived to see his reforms become a part of the tribe’s ongoing culture.
Slowly at first, and then with increasing awareness that he was going in a right direction, Phædrus' central attention turned away from any further explanation of Dynamic Quality and turned toward the static patterns themselves.
Lila sat on the cabin berth and thought about the bad taste in her mouth from the coffee. There was something wrong with it. It was that rubbery taste in the water. That was bad too. It was in the coffee too.
She didn’t feel good. Her head still hurt. From last night. How much had she spent? she wondered. She didn’t have much money left. Then she remembered: he paid for most of it… Her head really hurt bad.
God, she was hungry. At least she’d get him to buy her a big steak tonight… with mushrooms… and onions… Oh, she could hardly stand it!
Everything was all changed again. Yesterday she was going to Florida on the Karma. Now she was on this boat. Her life was really getting worse and worse. She knew it. She used to at least plan things a little. Now everything happened without any plans at all.
She wondered where the Karma was now. And George and Debbie. He was probably still shacked up with her! She hoped they’d both drown. She didn’t even ask for her money back. She knew they wouldn’t give it to her.
She should have asked for it, though. She really needed it. She was getting that old feeling again. It meant trouble. She always got into trouble when she got mad. If she hadn’t got mad at George and Debbie she’d be on the Karma right now. She could have got George back. That was dumb to get mad at him. That just made things worse.
And now she was mad at this new Captain. She was mad at everybody these days. What was the purpose of that? There wasn’t anything really wrong with him. He was just a dumbbell, that was all. All those dumb questions about Richard. She wondered why Richard had anything to do with him. Probably just someone he met and she thought they were good friends.
Maybe Richard would be in New York when they got there.
Anyway she was stuck with this Captain now. At least until New York, or wherever they were going to stay tonight. She could stand him that long.
She might need him when they got to New York.
She watched him for a while over the top of the stairway. He looked like a school teacher, she thought, the kind that never liked her. Like someone who was always getting mad at her for doing something she shouldn’t. He looked like he’d been frowning about her for a long time.
She had to get out of these bad feelings. She knew what would happen to her if she didn’t. She ought to try going up one more time. She didn’t have to look at him. She could just sit there.
She watched the Captain for a while longer then braced herself, put on a smile, climbed the stairs to the deck and sat down again.
There, that wasn’t so hard.
She brought her sweater with her and now she stood up to put it on. It’s gotten cool, she said.
We’re lucky it isn’t any colder, the Captain said. At this time of year we can’t count on anything any more.
It’s the wind, he added. Watch out for the boom. The winds are fluky in river valleys like this.
Where are we? she asked.
We’re south of Poughkeepsie, he said. It’s getting a little more industrial now. You can see some mountains up ahead.
I was watching you, she said.
When?
Just now.
Oh.
You frown a lot. You were talking to yourself a lot. That’s the way Morris was.
Who’s Morris?
A friend of mine. He would just sit for hours and not say a word and I’d think he was really mad at me and he wasn’t mad at all. Some men are like that. He was just thinking about something else.
Yes, that’s the way I am too.
After a while she saw there was all sorts of stuff floating in the water. She saw some branches and what looked like grass and there was foam all around it.
What’s all that in the water? she asked.
It’s from the hurricane, he said. We seem to hit thick patches of it and then it thins out for a while.
It looks awful, Lila said.
They were talking about it back in Castleton, he added. They said everything’s been coming down the river. Trees, garbage cans, old picnic benches. A lot of it’s half-submerged… One of the reasons I’m using the sails is so we don’t hit anything with the propeller.
He pointed up ahead. When we get to the mountain up there the wind will probably start doing funny things. We’ll have to stop sailing and run the engine. Where he pointed, the river seemed to run right into some mountains. At a turn called World’s End, he added.
A few minutes went by and then she saw that far ahead, by a branch or something sticking up out of the water, it looked like some animal was floating with its feet up.
They got closer and she saw it was a dog. It was all swelled up and it was on its side with two of its feet up in the air.
She didn’t say anything.
The Captain didn’t say anything either.
Later, after they got by it, she could smell it and she knew he could smell it too.
These rivers are like sewers, the Captain said. They take all the debris and poisons from the land and carry them out to sea.
What poisons?
Salts and chemicals. If you irrigate land without drainage it loads up with poisons and becomes dead. Nothing grows. The rivers keep the land clean and fresh. All of this debris is on the same journey we are.
Where? What do you mean?
To the ocean.
Oh… Well, we’re just going to New York, she said.
The Captain didn’t say anything.
How soon will we be there? Lila asked.
Tomorrow, unless something goes wrong, the Captain answered. Are you in a hurry?
No, Lila said. She really didn’t have to get there at all. She really didn’t know anybody to stay with except Jamie and some of the others but that was so long ago they were probably all gone by now.
She asked, Is your buyer going to be there?
What buyer?
For your boat.
Not me. I’m going to Florida. Florida? Lila wondered. She said, I thought you said you were going to sell your boat in New York.
Not me.
You said so last night.
Not me, the Captain said. It was Rigel. I’m going to Florida. You must have heard me wrong.
Ohhhh, Lila said, I thought Richard was going to Florida.
No… I want to get south of Cape Hatteras before the end of the month, the Captain said, but everything seems to slow me down. The fall storms are in now and these could pin the boat down for days.
Florida, Lila thought. In Florida the light was always golden orange and everything looked different. Even the light on the sand was different in Florida. She remembered the beach at Fort Lauderdale and the palm trees and the warm sand under her towel and the hot sun on her back. That was so good.
You’re going to go all by yourself? she asked.
Sure.
With no food?
I’ll get food.
In Florida there were all kinds of good food. Good seafood — pompano, shrimp and snapper. She sure could go for some of that now. Oh, she shouldn’t think about it!
You need a cook, she said. You don’t cook. You need someone to cook.
I get along, he said.
Once she went shrimp fishing at night under a bridge with lights and afterward they all cooked the shrimp and took it to the beach and drank cold beer and there was more than anyone could eat. Oh, they were good. She could remember how soft and warm the wind was and they were all so stuffed and they laid down under the palm trees and they drank rum-and-Coke and they talked and they all made love all night long until the sun came up over the ocean. She wondered where they were now, those guys. She’d probably never see them again.
And the boats, she thought, the boats were everywhere.
How long will it take you? she asked.
A long time, he said. A month maybe.
That’s a long time… How long have you been sailing like this?
Since August eleventh.
Are you retired?
I’m a writer, he said.
What do you write about?
Traveling, mostly, I guess, he said. I go places and see things and think about what I see and then I write about that. There are lots of writers who do that.
You mean you would write about what we’re seeing right now?
Sure.
Why would anyone want to write about this? Nothing is happening.
There’s always something happening, he said. When you say "nothing is happening" you’re just saying nothing is happening that fits your cliché of what something is.
What?
It’s hard to explain, he said. Something is happening right now and you think it’s unimportant because you’ve never seen a movie of it. But if you saw three movies in a row of people sailing down the Hudson River and maybe a TV documentary about Washington Irving and the history of the Hudson River and then you got on this trip you’d say, "Boy, this is sure something," because what you were seeing fit some mental picture you already had planted in your mind.
Lila didn’t know what that was all about. He said it like he thought it was pretty smart.
She looked at him for a long time and wondered whether to say something, but changed her mind. She watched the water pass under her elbow.
After a while she asked, You want to have a really good dinner tonight?
Sure, he said.
I’ll make it, Lila said.
You will?
We’ll bring the steaks and you just watch how I cook them. Is it a deal?
You don’t have to, he said.
No, that’s all right, she said, I can cook. I just love to cook. Cooking is one of my favorite things to do.
She looked at the shirt he was wearing. There was a big food spot over the front pocket. She wondered how long he’d worn that shirt. He hadn’t changed shirts for days.
I’m going to put that shirt in the laundry in New York, she said.
He smiled a little.
She thought some more about Florida.
After a while she turned to him again and asked, Do you want to see something really beautiful?
What? the Captain asked.
I’ll show you, she said.
She went below, got out her suitcase, spread it on the berth and opened it. Inside one corner pocket was a bundle of papers with a red ribbon around it. She untied the ribbon and removed a colored pamphlet with JUNGLE QUEEN printed in big red letters across the top. Beneath it was a picture of the most beautiful boat in the world. Lila spread the picture out and carefully turned back one corner that had got folded over.
She brought it up to the deck and sat down next to the Captain and showed it to him. She hung on to it hard so it wouldn’t blow away.
That’s a boat I was on in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, three years ago, she said. With my girlfriend. See where that "X" is? That’s where we used to sit.
The boat looked like a great big beautiful wedding cake with two layers and covered with curlicued frosting. On the front was the state flag of Florida. She knew everything about that boat. Because she had been on it. Many times. The sky was sort of pink and blue with big cottony clouds blowing by in the wind. The boat left just before sunset and that’s how the sky looked. All the flags on the boat were fluttering in the breeze. That was the trade wind. And all around were dark green coconut palm trees waving in the trade wind and the water was pink and blue all around the boat from the sunset with ripples from the breeze. That’s the way it really was. The picture looked so real you wanted to stick your finger in it and feel how warm the water was.
The Captain took the pamphlet in one hand while he steered with the other. He looked at it for a while and then she could see he was reading the part at the bottom. She knew it by heart:
A MUST in Fort Lauderdale.
WORLD FAMOUS ORIGINAL
JUNGLE QUEEN
Acclaimed Florida’s Finest Evening
Come aboard our new 550 passenger boat.
Bar-B-Q and Shrimp Dinner Cruise — 7 p.m.
Alcoholic Beverages Available.
Make reservations at your Hotel or Motel or Phone.
His expression didn’t change. He squinted at it like a doctor examining somebody. Then he frowned and said, Do you know the owners, or something?
No, Lila said. It’s just a boat we rode on a few years ago.
That’s a head-boat, he said.
What’s a head-boat?
Where they charge by the head to go cruising.
Of course, Lila said. She didn’t understand why he was frowning. But they don’t charge very much. Open it up.
The Captain opened up the pamphlet to a big picture of the Jungle Queen. He asked, Why is this so important to you?
I don’t know, Lila said. She looked up at him to see if he was really listening. I can remember so many worlds, she said, I’m not sure what I mean by that… but there are so many worlds and I just touch them and I’m in them for a moment and then I’m out of them again… Things like my grandfather’s house where I used to play. And my dog that I used to have… things like that. They don’t really mean anything to anybody else except once in a while you can share them with someone.
The Captain looked down and read, A Lauderdale tradition for over thirty years… the "all you wish to eat" dinner, the vaudeville show and the sing-a-long have made it a "must" in Fort Lauderdale. There is nothing else like it…
The Captain looked up. What’s a sing-a-long? he asked.
She was my favorite, Lila said.
Who?
The woman who led the sing-a-long. She could have been my sister. I wish she was my sister. At first everyone was so stuffed with food no one wanted to sing very much, but she got them all going.
She’s not like me at all, Lila said. She had dark hair, really beautiful dark hair and a beautiful figure and she had what you call a "magnetic personality." You know what I mean? She really liked everybody who was there and they all liked her too. She didn’t act like she thought she was any better than anybody else… There was this old man sitting in front of us and he wouldn’t say anything… he was just like you… Lila watched the Captain. So she sat next to him and put her arms around him and started to sing "Put Your Arms Around Me Baby" to him and pretty soon he couldn’t keep from grinning. She wouldn’t let anybody sit there and act like they were all alone.
You could see she was very smart. I mean how quick she was to catch on to everything. One man tried to grab her and she just smiled as sweet as if he handed her a ten-dollar bill or something. She said, "You just save that for your wife, honey," and everybody laughed. And he liked it too. She knew how to take care of herself.
She sang "Oh, You Great Big Beautiful Doll," and "Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby," and "Nothing Could Be Finer Than to be in Carolina," and lots of others. I wish I could remember them all. And all the time the boat was floating down the river through the palm trees in the dark and it was so beautiful. And then she sang, "Shine On Harvest Moon," and just as the boat came around a corner of the river the palm trees opened up and there it was. A full moon. Everybody went "Ohhhhhh!" See, she planned it that way so that she would be singing that just as they came around the corner.
Ugh. The Captain looked angry.
What’s the matter?
That’s too much.
What’s too much? Lila asked.
That’s all static, he said.
What’s that?
It’s just cliches, one after another!
He pointed to the picture of the Jungle Queen. Look at those smokestacks coming out the top. Those are for a steamboat. That isn’t any steamboat.
They’re just there to look pretty.
They don’t look pretty. A pretty boat doesn’t have all that fake gingerbread and phony smokestacks.
Lila took the pamphlet back. It’s a very beautiful boat, she said.
The Captain shook his head. Beauty isn’t things trying to look like something else.
He’s something else, Lila thought.
Beauty is things being just what they are, he said. There probably isn’t one thing on that boat that’s original.
Why does it have to be original?
It’s play-acting. It’s make-believe.
What difference does that make? If it’s what people like?
He didn’t have any answer for that.
Disneyland’s all fake too, Lila said. I suppose you don’t like that either?
No.
How about movies? TV? That’s all fake too, I guess, huh?
It depends on what they do, the Captain said.
You sure must enjoy yourself a lot, Lila said. She folded up the pamphlet carefully. Arguing with him seemed to make the Captain mad. He didn’t want anybody to argue with him.
He said, I suppose if the boat gave three million rides they must be doing something right. But it’s all - he shook his head prostitution.
Prostitution?
Yeah. It’s all taking the customer’s money and giving him exactly what he wants and then leaving him poorer than when he started. That’s what that singer was doing with those songs. She could have sung something original and left them richer, but she didn’t want to do that, because if she sang something they never heard before they might not like that and might ignore her or turn on her and she’d lose her job and she wouldn’t get her money any more. And she knew that and that’s why she never sang anything that was really her own, did she? She was just imitating some kind of person she was sure they liked and they went along with it. That’s why she’s a hustler. They were paying her to imitate someone making love to them.
Watch out, Lila, she thought. She was really getting mad. She was herself! He was the phony! How did he know what she was like? He wasn’t even there.
People should be themselves, he went on. Not phony singers on a phony boat.
Hang on, Lila.
She smiled a little and said, I’m getting cold. She got up carefully and went back down inside the cabin again.
There she let out her breath.
God, that made her mad!
Oh boy! Oh boy!
A smokestack. A big blowhard smokestack, that’s what he is. Yeah! A big phony smokestack. That’s exactly what he is. He thinks he’s so smart. It’s all over his face. And he’s not smart. He’s stupid. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t even know what a hustler is. He doesn’t even know how stupid he is.
Lila opened her suitcase again, carefully folded the brochure, tied it together with her other things with the red ribbon, and then put it in its special compartment and closed the suitcase and locked it.
Hang on, Lila. Never get mad at people like that, she thought. Don’t let yourself get angry. That’s what they want.
Her hands were shaking.
Oh-oh.
She knew what that meant.
She got her purse from the berth, opened it and took out the pills, got a plastic glass by the sink and pumped some water into it and then swallowed them. She had to do that quick, or they didn’t work. She’d been feeling the wave coming all morning. She’d been riding in front of it too long. She should have blown up at him. Then this wouldn’t have happened.
Smokestack! He looked at that picture like it was some kind of an ant or something. That’s what smokestacks like him do. Just to prove how smart they are. She knew what they were like. Just when you start being nice to them they turn on you like that. There’s just one thing someone like him loves — to hear himself blow smoke.
Well, that was that, she guessed. Nothing more to do on this boat until they got to New York. And then get off.
Suddenly she felt cold. That always happened after her hands started to shake. She hoped the pills would work in time. Sometimes they didn’t. She unlocked the suitcase again, took out another sweater and put it on over the one she already had on, then closed the suitcase and locked it again and put it away on the upper berth.
It would be good to get back to living on land again, Lila thought. She was really done with all this boat life. It wasn’t the way she thought it was going to be. Nothing ever was. She didn’t have to put up with him one more night, but she didn’t want to pay for a bus.
On the ledge back of the berth was a radio. Lila opened it and tried to turn it on. It wouldn’t work. She turned on all the switches, back and forth, but none of them worked. Then she found a switch and she could hear some static noise. It worked.
There were lots of stations. One of the announcers said something about Manhattan.
She listened for a while. They were close now. Some music from one station was close and dreamy, the kind anyone could dance to.
She just wanted to get to New York now. Would it be four years now? No, five! Five whole years. Where did they go so fast?
Jamie would never be there. Just to see him again the way he used to look, the way he used to smile at her when he was feeling good. That’s all she wanted. And a little money too.
He’d be hard to find. She would have to ask around. Mindy might know. Probably she was gone too. No one ever stayed any place long. She’d find someone who knew.
She wondered what the old place looked like now. Once in a while they would play an old slow one like that and Jamie would go slow with it. The way he held his hands on her. The way he touched and handled her. It all came back with the music. She was a real princess then, but she didn’t know it.
Lila, she could hear him say, you got something on your mind. I can just tell. What is it? And then after a while she’d just tell him and he’d always listen and he’d never argue with her no matter what she told him. She was crazy to leave. She never should have left.
Even with two sweaters on Lila was still cold. She needed a blanket. She remembered now that she’d had one when she woke up last night but now it wasn’t here. She got up, went to the front of the boat, took the blanket off the bed and brought it back to the main cabin.
The shaking of her hands was getting worse. It always happened after she got mad like that and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She should have screamed at the Captain but it was too late for that now. When she could scream or hit somebody or even just swear at them then sometimes the wave would stop.
She turned off the radio.
She listened to the sound of the wind above and the lapping sound of water on the hull. So quiet. So different from the Karma.
She wondered what she would do in Manhattan. To get money. Waitressing probably. She wasn’t much good for anything else any more. She’d find somebody. She always did. She wished the Captain was different and they could sail all the way to Florida together. But he was a stupid smokestack. He reminded her of Sidney. Sidney was the kind you always knew was going to be a doctor or lawyer or something like that. He was always supposed to be so nice but you could never talk to him really. He was always looking down on you and he thought you didn’t know it.
That’s the kind her mother always wanted her to pay attention to. The Captain had the same expression — like he was always thinking about something. Sidney was a pediatrician now making lots of money and had four kids, she had heard. See! her mother’d say.
Oh, God, not her. Why was it her mother appeared when her hands started shaking? The men her mother liked were always rich. Like the Captain here. And Sidney. They’re the real hustlers. The women who marry for the money. She shouldn’t think that about her mother. She shouldn’t think about her mother at all.
It was coming. The wave was coming. The pills weren’t going to stop it.
The Captain wasn’t Sidney though. He was something different. Really strange, like he knew something he wasn’t telling.
When she danced with him last night, she remembered, it was like at first he was just an ordinary person but then it got more and more like he was somebody else. He got real light, like he didn’t weigh anything at all.
He knew something. She wished she could remember what he said. He talked about some Indians and he said something about good and evil.
Why should he talk like that?
There was something else. It had something to do with her grandfather’s house.
She tried to remember.
Her grandfather always talked about good and evil. He was a preacher.
Something to do with the Captain. The way he looked at that dead dog and didn’t say anything. No, he did say something! He said they were all going where the dog was going!
On her grandfather’s wall, she remembered now, there’d been a great big picture in his living room where a man was standing in a boat going across a river to an island. At the bottom it said something in German. Her grandfather said it meant Island of the Dead. Then her grandfather was dead and she always thought of him as going to that island. Where Lucky was. Lucky met him when he got there.
He was always talking about good and evil and how she would go to hell for her sins if she wasn’t good. The boatman was taking people across the river to hell to the island because they had sinned.
Lucky, her black and white dog. He looked just like that dog today, floating with his two feet up in the air.
Why did she remember it now? That picture burned up in a fire when her grandfather’s house burned down. That’s why God burned her grandfather’s house down. To send him to hell. It was all mixed up.
Nothing makes any sense, Lila thought. Nothing ever did but now it was worse.
Who was he? she wondered. Everything seemed so dreamy. Like she didn’t really belong here. There was something wrong with her, she knew there was. But nobody would tell her what it was.
She listened to the wind. It was getting louder. The boat was tipping more and more on its side. Why was this river so empty? Why was this river so lonely? Weren’t they supposed to be getting near New York? Where were the other boats?
Why was the wind getting louder?
The people along the bank of the river. They never made a sound when the boat went by. It was as if they couldn’t even see the boat.
A sudden gust of wind hit and the boat rocked way over to one side and Lila hung on and looked up through the hatchway and could see the Captain. He couldn’t see she was watching him and his face was sad and serious as though he was at a funeral. As though he was carrying a coffin. Something was wrong.
Something terrible was coming. Something was going to happen. It couldn’t go on like this. She could just feel it in her bones. It was coming. Seeing that dog like that in the water.
It looked like Lucky. Why should he come back now?
She knew! They were coming to that place in the mountains! What did the Captain say it was? End of the World. What did he mean by that!?
What did he MEAN!
Lila sat back on her berth. She pulled the blanket up around her face and listened. All she could hear was the howl of the wind and the sound of the water against the side of the boat.
Suddenly came a huge RRRRROAR!!!…
She screamed!
Phædrus throttled the engine back to a fast rumbling idle. Then he headed the boat up into the howling wind which caught the sail and cracked it like a whip. He dashed forward and freed the halyard. He pulled the sail down as fast as he could, furled it with a single stop and got back to the tiller again before the boat lost its heading.
Crazy wind. Damn gale through here. They didn’t tell him about this in Castleton. Whew!
The water was full of whitecaps and spray. He should have seen that before he reached it. He wasn’t paying attention.
He uncleated the topping lift and lowered the boom into its gallows notch, then sat down again.
With the sail down and the engine guiding the boat everything now seemed under control. Storm King Mountain loomed over him to the right and Breakneck Ridge to the left. Up ahead was West Point and the dog-leg in the river called World’s End. Apparently this wind was some sort of funnel-effect from the mountains.
After a while he saw that the wind wasn’t getting any worse. It just seemed to hold at a mild gale force.
He’d bought this boat with the illusion that when you sailed you just sat and admired the scenery. It seemed like he hadn’t sat still for five minutes in all these days without something needing attention.
Now he saw that he’d furled the sail too sloppily and it was blowing loose. He tied the tiller, went forward again, and this time got all the sail tucked in properly and the stops carefully knotted.
He wondered why Lila was still below somewhere and hadn’t reacted to all this. He supposed he could have gotten her up here to take the tiller while he fixed the sail but something told him it would be easier just to tie it off himself. She wasn’t the aye-aye-sir sort of crewman you needed for jobs like this.
Up ahead were waves caused by the change in the direction of the river. The water looked angry at having been forced to change its path. As he approached he saw it boil up from below and whirl around in strange eddy currents. He headed the boat away from them.
Everything he said turned out wrong with her. No point in aggravating the situation any further. She lived in another world. She really did. And you could never break into this world by superimposing on it patterns of your own.
What he’d told her about that head-boat was valuable if she’d been listening. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t a listener. She had a set of fixed static patterns of value and if you argued with her she’d get mad at you and maybe spite you in some way and that’s about all. He’d seen enough of that. He’d been bucking that stuff all his life.
At the south entrance to the military academy the wind died away to a mild breeze. The boat passed under the high castle-like walls and he thought of calling Lila up to look at it but decided he’d better not. She wouldn’t be interested.
After a while the academy was out of sight and the wind started to pick up again into a sailing breeze. He decided not to put up the sail. The day was running on. He felt tired now. The engine could do it from here.
He sure didn’t feel like going anywhere tonight. All he wanted to do was sleep.
Does Lila have Quality? There it was again, Rigel’s infuriating question. It would come back again and again like that until he had an answer for it. That was the way his mind worked. Why did he ever answer yes? She seemed determined to prove Rigel was right. He shouldn’t have given any answer at all.
Does a dog have a Buddha-nature? It’s the same question. It’s exactly the same question.
You could transpose it right into that whole Zen verse by Mumon:
Does Lila have Quality?
That’s the most important question of all.
But if you answer "yes" or you answer "no", You lose your own Quality.
That’s a perfect transposition. That’s exactly what happened. He answered yes. That was his mistake. He let himself get caught in the kind of picking-and-choosing situation that Zen avoids, and now he was stuck… It wasn’t that the question wasn’t answerable. It was answerable but the answer went on and on and you never got done… It isn’t Lila that has quality; it’s Quality that has Lila. Nothing can have Quality. To have something is to possess it, and to possess something is to dominate it. Nothing dominates Quality. If there’s domination and possession involved, it’s Quality that dominates and possesses Lila. She’s created by it. She’s a cohesion of changing static patterns of this Quality. There isn’t any more to her than that. The words Lila uses, the thoughts she thinks, the values she holds, are the end product of three and a half billion years of the history of the entire world. She’s a kind of jungle of evolutionary patterns of value. She doesn’t know how they all got there any more than any jungle knows how it came to be.
And yet there in the middle of this Lila Jungle are ancient prehistoric ruins of past civilizations. You could dig into those ruins like an archaeologist layer by layer, through regressive centuries of civilization, measuring by the distance down in the soil, the distance back in time.
That was an intriguing idea. You could structure a whole analysis around this one person, interview her, find out what her values were and then show the entire metaphysics in terms of one specific case… This whole metaphysics was crying for something to bring it down to earth. He could ask her questions all the way to Florida.
He thought about it for a while.
It would be an ideal interviewing situation.
What could she tell him, though? Those patterns might be there but she doesn’t know what they are. She’d just sit there and tell him about her typing and her head-boat and all the different kinds of food she likes, and complain about the coffee and he wouldn’t get anything. Some trip that would be.
Something else sounded wrong too. It was too contrived, too full of objective observational stuff. It ignored the whole Dynamic aspect. There is always this open end of Dynamic indeterminacy. It would be impossible to predict anything from what she said.
Also, she didn’t think much of him. She probably wouldn’t tell him anything. Just like the Indians and the objective anthros.
Dusenberry should be here. He could get it out of her. All I’m good for is theory, Phædrus thought.
But the theory was OK. Lila is composed of static patterns of value and these patterns are evolving toward a Dynamic Quality. That’s the theory, anyway. She’s on her way somewhere, just like everybody else. And you can’t say where that somewhere is.
The theory had arrived in his mind several months ago with the statement, All life is a migration of static patterns of quality toward Dynamic Quality. It had been boiling around in his mind ever since.
In traditional, substance-centered metaphysics, life isn’t evolving toward anything. Life’s just an extension of the properties of atoms, nothing more. It has to be that because atoms and varying forms of energy are all there is. But in the Metaphysics of Quality, what is evolving isn’t patterns of atoms. What’s evolving is static patterns of value, and while that doesn’t change the data of evolution it completely up-ends the interpretation that can be given to evolution.
Historically this assumption by a subject-object metaphysics that all the world is composed of substance put a strain on the Theory of Evolution right from its beginning. At the time of its origin it wasn’t yet understood that at the level of photons and electrons and other small particles the laws of cause and effect no longer apply; that electrons and photons simply appear and disappear without individual predictability and without individual cause. So today we have as a result a theory of evolution in which man is ruthlessly controlled by the cause-and-effect laws of the universe while the particles of his body are not. The absurdity of this seems to be neglected. The problem doesn’t lie in anyone’s department. Physicists can ignore it because they are not concerned with man. Social scientists can ignore it because they are not concerned with subatomic particles.
So although modern physics pulled the rug out from under the deterministic explanation of evolution many decades ago, it has survived by default because no other more plausible explanation has been available. But right from the beginning, substance-caused evolution has always had a puzzling aspect that it has never been able to eliminate. It goes into many volumes about how the fittest survive but never once answers the question of why.
This is the sort of irrelevant-sounding question that seems minor at first, and the mind looks for a quick answer to dismiss it. It sounds like one of those hostile, ignorant questions some fundamentalist preacher might think up. But why do the fittest survive? Why does any life survive? It’s illogical. It’s self-contradictory that life should survive. If life is strictly a result of the physical and chemical forces of nature then why is life opposed to these same forces in its struggle to survive? Either life is with physical nature or it’s against it. If it’s with nature there’s nothing to survive. If it’s against physical nature then there must be something apart from the physical and chemical forces of nature that is motivating it to be against physical nature. The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems run down like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only runs up, converting low energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep running up faster and faster.
Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What’s the motive? If we leave a chemistry professor out on a rock in the sun long enough the forces of nature will convert him into simple compounds of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and small amounts of other minerals. It’s a one-way reaction. No matter what kind of chemistry professor we use and no matter what process we use we can’t turn these compounds back into a chemistry professor. Chemistry professors are unstable mixtures of predominantly unstable compounds which, in the exclusive presence of the sun’s heat, decay irreversibly into simpler organic and inorganic compounds. That’s a scientific fact.
The question is: Then why does nature reverse this process? What on earth causes the inorganic compounds to go the other way? It isn’t the sun’s energy. We just saw what the sun’s energy did. It has to be something else. What is it?
Nowhere on the pages of all that he had read about evolution did Phædrus see any answer. He knew of theological answers, of course, but these aren’t supported by scientific observation. Evolutionists, in their reply, simply say that in the scientific observation of the facts of the universe no goal or pattern has ever appeared toward which life is heading.
This last statement so neatly sweeps the whole matter under the carpet one would never guess that it was of much concern to evolutionists at all. But a reading of the early history of the theories of evolution shows this is not true. The first major evolutionist, who was not Darwin but Jean Baptiste Lamarck, maintained that all life was evolving toward perfection, a synonym for Quality. Alfred Wallace, who forced Darwin to publish by independently arriving at an almost identical theory, also maintained that natural selection was not enough to account for the development of man. After Darwin many others continued to deny the goallessness of life.
Phædrus had found a good summary of the entire matter in a Scientific American article by Ernst Mayr.
Those who rejected natural selection on religious or philosophical grounds or simply because it seemed too random a process to explain evolution continued for many years to put forward alternative schemes with such names as orthogenesis, nomogenesis, aristogenesis or the Omega Principle of Teilhard de Chardin, each scheme relying on some built-in tendency or drive toward perfection or progress. All these theories were finalistic; they postulated some form of cosmic teleology or purpose or program.
The proponents of teleological theories, for all their efforts, have been unable to find any mechanism (except supernatural ones) that can account for their postulated finalism. The possibility that any such mechanism can exist has now been virtually ruled out by the findings of molecular biology.
Evolution is recklessly opportunistic: it favors any variation that provides a competitive advantage over other members of an organism’s own population or over individuals of different species. For billions of years this process has automatically fueled what we call evolutionary progress. No program controlled or directed this progression. It was the result of spur of the moment decisions of natural selection.
Mayr certainly seemed to consider the matter settled and this attitude, no doubt, reflected a consensus among everyone except anti-evolutionists. But after reading it Phædrus wrote on one of his slips, It seems clear that no mechanistic pattern exists toward which life is heading, but has the question been taken up of whether life is heading away from mechanistic patterns?
He guessed that the question had not been taken up at all. The concepts necessary for taking it up were not at hand. In a metaphysics in which static universal laws are considered fundamental, the idea that life is evolving away from any law just draws a baffled question mark. It doesn’t make any sense. It seems to say that all life is headed toward chaos, since chaos is the only alternative to structural patterns that a law-bound metaphysics can conceive.
But Dynamic Quality is not structured and yet it is not chaotic. It is value that cannot be contained by static patterns. What the substance-centered evolutionists were showing with their absence of final mechanisms or programs was not an air-tight case for the biological goallessness of life. What they were unintentionally showing was a superb example of how values create reality.
Science values static patterns. Its business is to search for them. When non-conformity appears it is considered an interruption of the normal rather than the presence of the normal. A deviation from a normal static pattern is something to be explained and if possible controlled. The reality science explains is that reality which follows mechanisms and programs. That other worthless stuff which doesn’t follow mechanisms and programs we don’t pay any attention to.
See how this works? A thing doesn’t exist because we have never observed it. The reason we have never observed it is because we have never looked for it. And the reason we have never looked for it is that it is unimportant, it has no value and we have other better things to do.
Because of his different metaphysical orientation Phædrus saw instantly that those seemingly trivial, unimportant, spur of the moment decisions that Mayr was talking about, the decisions that directed the progress of evolution are, in fact, Dynamic Quality itself. Dynamic Quality, the source of all things, the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality, always appears as spur of the moment. Where else could it appear?
When this prejudice against spur of the moment Dynamic Quality is removed new worlds of reality open up. Naturally there is no mechanism toward which life is heading. Mechanisms are the enemy of life. The more static and unyielding the mechanisms are, the more life works to evade them or overcome them.
The law of gravity, for example, is perhaps the most ruthlessly static pattern of order in the universe. So, correspondingly, there is no single living thing that does not thumb its nose at that law day in and day out. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. Thus, while the simple protozoa just barely get around on their cilia, earthworms manage to control their distance and direction, birds fly into the sky, and man goes all the way to the moon.
A similar analysis could be made with other physical laws such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and it seemed to Phædrus that if one gathered together enough of these deliberate violations of the laws of the universe and formed a generalization from them, a quite different theory of evolution could be inferred. If life is to be explained on the basis of physical laws, then the overwhelming evidence that life deliberately works around these laws cannot be ignored. The reason atoms become chemistry professors has got to be that something in nature does not like laws of chemical equilibrium or the law of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics or any other law that restricts the molecules' freedom. They only go along with laws of any kind because they have to, preferring an existence that does not follow any laws whatsoever.
This would explain why patterns of life do not change solely in accord with causative mechanisms or programs or blind operations of physical laws. They do not just change valuelessly. They change in ways that evade, override and circumvent these laws. The patterns of life are constantly evolving in response to something better than that which these laws have to offer.
This would at first seem to contradict the one thing that evolutionists insist upon most: that life is not responding to anything but the survival of the fittest process of natural selection. But survival of the fittest is one of those catch-phrases like mutants or misfits that sounds best when you don’t ask precisely what it means. Fittest for what? Fittest for survival? That reduces to survival of the survivors, which doesn’t say anything. Survival of the fittest is meaningful only when fittest is equated with best, which is to say, Quality. And the Darwinians don’t mean just any old quality, they mean undefined Quality! As Mayr’s article makes clear, they are absolutely certain there is no way to define what that fittest is.
Good! The undefined fittest they are defending is identical to Dynamic Quality. Natural selection is Dynamic Quality at work. There is no quarrel whatsoever between the Metaphysics of Quality and the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. Neither is there a quarrel between the Metaphysics of Quality and the teleological theories which insist that life has some purpose. What the Metaphysics of Quality has done is unite these opposed doctrines within a larger metaphysical structure that accommodates both of them without contradiction.
The river was opening up now into a broad lake that the chart beside Phædrus identified as the Tappan Zee. Like the Zuider Zee, he supposed. Nice that they’d kept the old Dutch name. He turned and looked behind him and there was the mountain range that he’d passed through. The last range. The American continent was coming to an end. Soon this strong heavy boat would be out in the Atlantic for the first time, where it really belonged. That felt exciting after all these weeks. The boat was built to cross oceans and circumnavigate continents, not just run the buoys down placid inland waterways.
It was still early afternoon. The boat was making ferocious speed. He supposed that contraction of the river by the mountains must have made it speed up. Now, according to his calculations, the tide would begin to reverse and it would be slower going.
Anyway, that migration of static patterns toward Dynamic Quality he’d been thinking so much about seemed to hold up so far. In the past when ideas like it had been defeated they were always knocked down by the assumptions of a conventional metaphysics of substance, but with the Metaphysics of Quality behind it, it stood up. He’d tried dozens of times to think of how it could be knocked down with one argument or another but he’d never found anything that worked. And so in the months since it had emerged he had tried to work out various refinements.
The explanation of life as a migration of static patterns toward Dynamic Quality not only fitted the known facts of evolution, it allowed new ways of interpreting them.
Biological evolution can be seen as a process by which weak Dynamic forces at a subatomic level discover stratagems for overcoming huge static inorganic forces at a superatomic level. They do this by selecting superatomic mechanisms in which a number of options are so evenly balanced that a weak Dynamic force can tip the balance one way or another.
The particular atom that the weak Dynamic subatomic forces have seized as their primary vehicle is carbon. All life contains carbon yet a study of properties of carbon atom shows that except for the extreme hardness of one of its crystalline forms there is not much unusual about it. In terms of other physical constants of melting point, conductivity, ionization, and so on, it does just about what its position on the periodic table of the elements suggests it might do. Certainly there’s no hint of any miraculous powers waiting to spring chemistry professors upon a lifeless planet.
One physical characteristic that makes carbon unique is that it is the lightest and most active of the group IV of atoms whose chemical bonding characteristics are ambiguous. Usually the positively valenced metals in groups I through III combine chemically with negatively valenced non-metals in groups V through VII and not with other members of their own group. But the group containing carbon is halfway between the metals and non-metals, so that sometimes carbon combines with metals and sometimes with non-metals, and sometimes it just sits there and doesn’t combine with anything, and sometimes it combines with itself in long chains and branched trees and rings.
Phædrus thought this ambiguity of carbon’s bonding preferences was the situation the weak Dynamic subatomic forces needed. Carbon bonding was a balanced mechanism they could take over. It was a vehicle they could steer to all sorts of freedom by selecting first one bonding preference and then another in an almost unlimited variety of ways.
And what a variety has been chosen. Today there are more than two million known compounds of carbon, roughly twenty times as many as all the other known chemical compounds in the world. The chemistry of life is the chemistry of carbon. What distinguishes all the species of plants and animals is, in the final analysis, differences in the way carbon atoms choose to bond.
But the invention of Dynamic carbon bonding represents only one kind of evolutionary stratagem. The other kind is preservation of what has been invented. A Dynamic advance is meaningless unless it can find some static pattern with which to protect itself from degeneration back to the conditions that existed before the advance was made. Evolution can’t be a continuous forward movement. It must be a process of ratchet-like steps in which there is a Dynamic movement forward up some new incline and then, if the result looks successful, a static latching-on of the gain that has been made; then another Dynamic advance, then another static latch.
What the Dynamic force had to invent in order to move up the molecular level and stay there was a carbon molecule that would preserve its limited Dynamic freedom from inorganic laws and at the same time resist deterioration back to simple compounds of carbon again. A study of nature shows the Dynamic force was not able to do this but got around the problem by inventing two molecules: a static molecule able to resist abrasion, heat, chemical attack and the like; and a Dynamic one, able to preserve the subatomic indeterminacy at a molecular level and try everything in the ways of chemical combination.
The static molecule, an enormous, chemically dead, plastic-like molecule called protein, surrounds the Dynamic one and prevents attack by forces of light, heat and other chemicals that would prey on its sensitivity and destroy it. The Dynamic one, called DNA, reciprocates by telling the static one what to do, replacing the static one when it wears out, replacing itself even when it hasn’t worn out, and changing its own nature to overcome adverse conditions. These two kinds of molecules, working together, are all there is in some viruses, which are the simplest forms of life.
This division of all biological evolutionary patterns into a Dynamic function and a static function continues on up through higher levels of evolution. The formation of semi-permeable cell walls to let food in and keep poisons out is a static latch. So are bones, shells, hide, fur, burrows, clothes, houses, villages, castles, rituals, symbols, laws and libraries. All of these prevent evolutionary degeneration.
On the other hand, the shift in cell reproduction from mitosis to meiosis to permit sexual choice and allow huge DNA diversification is a Dynamic advance. So is the collective organization of cells into metazoan societies called plants and animals. So are sexual choice, symbiosis, death and regeneration, communality, communication, speculative thought, curiosity and art. Most of these, when viewed in a substance-centered evolutionary way are thought of as mere incidental properties of the molecular machine. But in a value-centered explanation of evolution they are close to the Dynamic process itself, pulling the pattern of life forward to greater levels of versatility and freedom.
Sometimes a Dynamic increment goes forward but can find no latching mechanism and so fails and slips back to a previous latched position. Whole species and cultures get lost this way. Sometimes a static pattern becomes so powerful it prohibits any Dynamic moves forward. In both cases the evolutionary process is halted for a while. But when it’s not halted the result has been an increase in power to control hostile forces or an increase in versatility or both. The increase in versatility is directed toward Dynamic Quality. The increase in power to control hostile forces is directed toward static quality. Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed.
Now when we come to the chemistry professor, and see him studying his empirically gathered data, trying to figure out what it means, this person makes more sense. He’s not just some impartial visitor from outer space looking in on all this with no purpose other than to observe. Neither is he some static, molecular, objective, biological machine, doing all this for absolutely no purpose whatsoever. We see that he’s conducting his experiments for exactly the same purpose as the subatomic forces had when they first began to create him billions of years ago. He’s looking for information that will expand the static patterns of evolution itself and give both greater versatility and greater stability against hostile static forces of nature. He may have personal motives such as pure fun, that is, the Dynamic Quality of his work. But when he applies for funds he will normally and properly tie his request to some branch of humanity’s overall evolutionary purpose.
Phædrus had once called metaphysics the high country of the mind — an analogy to the high country of mountain climbing. It takes a lot of effort to get there and more effort when you arrive, but unless you can make the journey you are confined to one valley of thought all your life. This high country passage through the Metaphysics of Quality allowed entry to another valley of thought in which the facts of life get a much richer interpretation. The valley spreads out into a huge fertile plain of understanding.
In this plain of understanding static, patterns of value are divided into four systems: inorganic patterns, biological patterns, social patterns and intellectual patterns. They are exhaustive. That’s all there are. If you construct an encyclopedia of four topics — Inorganic, Biological, Social and Intellectual — nothing is left out. No thing, that is. Only Dynamic Quality, which cannot be described in any encyclopedia, is absent.
But although the four systems are exhaustive they are not exclusive. They all operate at the same time and in ways that are almost independent of each other.
This classification of patterns is not very original, but the Metaphysics of Quality allows an assertion about them that is unusual. It says they are not continuous. They are discreet. They have very little to do with one another. Although each higher level is built on a lower one it is not an extension of that lower level. Quite the contrary. The higher level can often be seen to be in opposition to the lower level, dominating it, controlling it where possible for its own purposes.
This observation is impossible in a substance-dominated metaphysics where everything has to be an extension of matter. But now atoms and molecules are just one of four levels of static patterns of quality and there is no intellectual requirement that any level dominate the other three.
An excellent analogy to the independence of the levels, Phædrus thought, is the relation of hardware to software in a computer. He had learned something about this relationship when for several years he wrote technical manuals describing complex military computers. He had learned how to troubleshoot computers electronically. He had even wired up some of his own digital circuits which, in those days before integrated circuit chips, were composed of independent transistors, diodes, resistors and capacitors all held together with wire and solder. But after four years in which he had acquired all this knowledge he had only the vaguest idea of what a program was. None of the electrical engineers he worked with had anything to do with programs. Programmers were off in another building somewhere.
Later, when he got into work with programmers, he discovered to his surprise that even advanced programmers seldom knew how a flip-flop worked. That was amazing. A flip-flop is a circuit that stores a 1 or a 0. If you don’t know how a flip-flop works, what do you know about computers?
The answer was that it isn’t necessary for a programmer to learn circuit design. Neither is it necessary for a hardware technician to learn programming. The two sets of patterns are independent. Except for a memory map and a tiny isthmus of information called the Machine Language Instruction Repertoire — a list so small you could write it on a single page — the electronic circuits and the programs existing in the same computer at the same time have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.
The Machine Language Instruction Repertoire fascinated Phædrus because he had seen it from such different perspectives. He had written hardware descriptions of many hundreds of blueprints showing how voltage levels were transferred from one bank of flip-flops to another to create a single machine language instruction. These machine language instructions were the final achievement toward which all the circuits aimed. They were the end performance of a whole symphony of switching operations.
Then when he got into programming he found that this symphony of electronic circuits was considered to be a mere single note in a whole other symphony that had no resemblance to the first one. The gating circuits, the rise and decay times, the margins for voltage levels, were gone. Even his banks of flip-flops had become registers. Everything was seen from a pure and symbolic world of logical relationships that had no resemblance at all to the real world he had worked in. The Machine Language Instruction Repertoire, which had been the entire design goal, was now the lowest element of the lowest level programming language. Most programmers never used these instructions directly or even knew what they meant.
Although both the circuit designer and the programmer knew the meaning of the instruction, Load Accumulator, the meaning that each knew was entirely different from the other’s. Their only relationship was that of analogy. A register is analogous to a bank of flip-flops. A change in voltage level is analogous to a change in number. But they are not the same. Even in this narrow isthmus between these two sets of static patterns called hardware and software there was still no direct interchange of meaning. The same machine language instruction was a completely different entity within two different sets of patterns.
On top of this low-level programming language was a high-level programming language, FORTRAN or COBOL in those days, which had the same kind of independence from the low-level language that the low-level language had from electronic circuits. And on top of the high-level language was still another level of patterns, the application, a novel perhaps in a word-processing program. And what amazed him most of all was how one could spend all of eternity probing the electrical patterns of that computer with an oscilloscope and never find that novel.
What makes all this significant to the Metaphysics of Quality is its striking parallelism to the interrelationship of different levels of static patterns of quality.
Certainly the novel cannot exist in the computer without a parallel pattern of voltages to support it. But that does not mean that the novel is an expression or property of those voltages. It doesn’t have to exist in any electronic circuits at all. It can also reside in magnetic domains on a disk or a drum or a tape, but again it is not composed of magnetic domains nor is it possessed by them. It can reside in a notebook but it is not composed of or possessed by the ink and paper. It can reside in the brain of a programmer, but even here it is neither composed of this brain nor possessed by it. The same program can be made to run on an infinite variety of computers. A program can change itself into a different program while it is running. It can turn on another computer, transfer itself into this second computer and shut off the first computer that it came from, destroying every last trace of its origins — a process with similarities to biological reproduction.
Trying to explain social moral patterns in terms of inorganic chemistry patterns is like trying to explain the plot of a word-processor novel in terms of the computer’s electronics. You can’t do it. You can see how the circuits make the novel possible, but they do not provide a plot for the novel. The novel is its own set of patterns. Similarly the biological patterns of life and the molecular patterns of organic chemistry have a machine language interface called DNA but that does not mean that the carbon or hydrogen or oxygen atoms possess or guide life. A primary occupation of every level of evolution seems to be offering freedom to lower levels of evolution. But as the higher level gets more sophisticated it goes off on purposes of its own.
Once this independent nature of the levels of static patterns of value is understood a lot of puzzles get solved. The first one is the usual puzzle of value itself. In a subject-object metaphysics, value has always been the most vague and ambiguous of terms. What is it? When you say the world is composed of nothing but value, what are you talking about?
Phædrus thought this was why no one before had ever seemed to have come up with the idea that the world is primarily value. The word is too vague. The value that holds a glass of water together and the value that holds a nation together are obviously not the same thing. Therefore to say that the world is nothing but value is just confusing, not clarifying.
Now this vagueness is removed by sorting out values according to levels of evolution. The value that holds a glass of water together is an inorganic pattern of value. The value that holds a nation together is a social pattern of value. They are completely different from each other because they are at different evolutionary levels. And they are completely different from the biological pattern that can cause the most sceptical of intellectuals to leap from a hot stove. These patterns have nothing in common except the historic evolutionary process that created all of them. But that process is a process of value evolution. Therefore the name static pattern of values applies to all.
That’s one puzzle cleared up. Another huge one is the mind-matter puzzle.
If the world consists only of patterns of mind and patterns of matter, what is the relationship between the two? If you read the hundreds of volumes of philosophy available on this matter you may conclude that nobody knows — or at least knows well enough to convince everybody else. There is the materialist school that says reality is all matter, which creates mind. There is the idealist school that says it is all mind, which creates matter. There is the positivist school which says this argument could go on forever; drop the subject.
That would be nice if you could, but unfortunately it is one of the most tormenting problems of the physics to which positivism looks for guidance. The torment occurs not because of anything discovered in the laboratory. Data are data. It is the intellectual framework with which one deals with the data that is at fault. The fault is within subject-object metaphysics itself.
A conventional subject-object metaphysics uses the same four static patterns as the Metaphysics of Quality, dividing them into two groups of two: inorganic-biological patterns called matter, and social-intellectual patterns called mind. But this division is the source of the problem. When a subject-object metaphysics regards matter and mind as eternally separate and eternally unalike, it creates a platypus bigger than the solar system.
It has to make this fatal division because it gives top position in its structure to subjects and objects. Everything has got to be object or subject, substance or non-substance, because that’s the primary division of the universe. Inorganic-biological patterns are composed of substance, and are therefore objective. Social-intellectual patterns are not composed of substance and are therefore called subjective. Then, having made this arbitrary division based on substance, conventional metaphysics then asks, What is the relationship between mind and matter, between subject and object?
One answer is to fudge both mind and matter and the whole question that goes with them into another platypus called man. Man has a body (and therefore is not himself a body) and he also has a mind (and therefore is not himself a mind). But if one asks what is this man (which is not a body and not a mind) one doesn’t come up with anything. There isn’t any man independent of the patterns. Man is the patterns.
This fictitious man has many synonyms; mankind, people, the public, and even such pronouns as I, he, and they. Our language is so organized around them and they are so convenient to use it is impossible to get rid of them. There is really no need to. Like substance they can be used as long as it is remembered that they’re terms for collections of patterns and not some independent primary reality of their own.
In a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality the four sets of static patterns are not isolated into separate compartments of mind and matter. Matter is just a name for certain inorganic value patterns. Biological patterns, social patterns, and intellectual patterns are supported by this pattern of matter but are independent of it. They have rules and laws of their own that are not derivable from the rules or laws of substance. This is not the customary way of thinking, but when you stop to think about it you wonder how you ever got conned into thinking otherwise. What, after all, is the likelihood that an atom possesses within its own structure enough information to build the city of New York? Biological and social and intellectual patterns are not the possession of substance. The laws that create and destroy these patterns are not the laws of electrons and protons and other elementary particles. The forces that create and destroy these patterns are the forces of value.
So what the Metaphysics of Quality concludes is that all schools are right on the mind-matter question. Mind is contained in static inorganic patterns. Matter is contained in static intellectual patterns. Both mind and matter are completely separate evolutionary levels of static patterns of value, and as such are capable of each containing the other without contradiction.
The mind-matter paradoxes seem to exist because the connecting links between these two levels of value patterns have been disregarded. Two terms are missing: biology and society. Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of biology which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, said, We are suspended in language. Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.
The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social mediation whatsoever. It is easy to see the historic reasons for this myth of independence. Science might never have survived without it. But a close examination shows it isn’t so.
A third puzzle illuminated by the Metaphysics of Quality is the ancient Free Will vs. Determinism controversy. Determinism is the philosophic doctrine that man, like all other objects in the universe, follows fixed scientific laws, and does so without exception. Free will is the philosophic doctrine that man makes choices independent of the atoms of his body.
This battle has been a very long and very loud one because an abandonment of either position has devastating logical consequences. If the belief in free will is abandoned, morality must seemingly also be abandoned under a subject-object metaphysics. If man follows the cause-and-effect laws of substance, then man cannot really choose between right and wrong.
On the other hand, if the determinists let go of their position it would seem to deny the truth of science. If one adheres to a traditional scientific metaphysics of substance, the philosophy of determinism is an inescapable corollary. If everything is included in the class of substance and its properties, and if substance and its properties is included in the class of things that always follow laws, and if people are included in the class everything, then it is an air-tight logical conclusion that people always follow the laws of substance.
To be sure, it doesn’t seem as though people blindly follow the laws of substance in everything they do, but within a Deterministic explanation that is just another one of those illusions that science is forever exposing. All the social sciences, including anthropology, were founded on the bed-rock metaphysical belief that these physical cause-and-effect laws of human behavior exist. Moral laws, if they can be said to exist at all, are merely an artificial social code that has nothing to do with the real nature of the world. A moral person acts conventionally, watches out for the cops, keeps his nose clean, and nothing more.
In the Metaphysics of Quality this dilemma doesn’t come up. To the extent that one’s behavior is controlled by static patterns of quality it is without choice. But to the extent that one follows Dynamic Quality, which is undefinable, one’s behavior is free.
The Metaphysics of Quality has much much more to say about ethics, however, than simple resolution of the Free Will vs. Determinism controversy. The Metaphysics of Quality says that if moral judgments are essentially assertions of value and if value is the fundamental ground-stuff of the world, then moral judgments are the fundamental ground-stuff of the world.
It says that even at the most fundamental level of the universe, static patterns of value and moral judgment are identical. The Laws of Nature are moral laws. Of course it sounds peculiar at first and awkward and unnecessary to say that hydrogen and oxygen form water because it is moral to do so. But it is no less peculiar and awkward and unnecessary than to say chemistry professors smoke pipes and go to movies because irresistible cause-and-effect forces of the cosmos force them to do it. In the past the logic has been that if chemistry professors are composed exclusively of atoms and if atoms follow only the law of cause and effect, then chemistry professors must follow the laws of cause and effect too. But this logic can be applied in a reverse direction. We can just as easily deduce the morality of atoms from the observation that chemistry professors are, in general, moral. If chemistry professors exercise choice, and chemistry professors are composed exclusively of atoms, then it follows that atoms must exercise choice too. The difference between these two points of view is philosophic, not scientific. The question of whether an electron does a certain thing because it has to or because it wants to is completely irrelevant to the data of what the electron does.
So what Phædrus was saying was that not just life, but everything, is an ethical activity. It is nothing else. When inorganic patterns of reality create life the Metaphysics of Quality postulates that they’ve done so because it’s better and that this definition of betterness — this beginning response to Dynamic Quality — is an elementary unit of ethics upon which all right and wrong can be based.
When this understanding first broke through in Phædrus' mind, that ethics and science had suddenly been integrated into a single system, he became so manic he couldn’t think of anything else for days. The only time he had been more manic about an abstract idea was when he had first hit upon the idea of undefined Quality itself. The consequences of that first mania had been disastrous, and so now, this time, he told himself just to calm down and dig in. It was, for him, a great Dynamic breakthrough, but if he wanted to hang on to it he had better do some static latching as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
Latching was what was needed all right. Historically every effort to unite science and ethics has been a disaster. You can’t paste a moral system on top of a pile of amoral objective matter. The amoral objective matter never needs this paste job. It always sloughs it off as superfluous.
But the Metaphysics of Quality doesn’t permit this slough-off. It says, first of all, that amoral objective matter is a low-grade form of morality. No slough-off is possible. It states, second of all, that even if matter weren’t a low grade form of morality there still would be no metaphysical need to show how morals are derived from it. With static patterns of value divided into four systems, conventional moral patterns have almost nothing to do with inorganic or biological nature. These moral patterns are superimposed upon inorganic nature the way novels are superimposed upon computers. They are more commonly opposed to biological patterns than they are supportive of them.
And that is the key to the whole thing.
What the evolutionary structure of the Metaphysics of Quality shows is that there is not just one moral system. There are many. In the Metaphysics of Quality there’s the morality called the laws of nature, by which inorganic patterns triumph over chaos; there is a morality called the law of the jungle where biology triumphs over the inorganic forces of starvation and death; there’s a morality where social patterns triumph over biology, the law; and there is an intellectual morality, which is still struggling in its attempts to control society. Each of these sets of moral codes is no more related to the other than novels are to flip-flops.
What is today conventionally called morality covers only one of these sets of moral codes, the social-biological code. In a subject-object metaphysics this single social-biological code is considered to be a minor, subjective, physically non-existent part of the universe. But in the Metaphysics of Quality all these sets of morals, plus another Dynamic morality are not only real, they are the whole thing.
In general, given a choice of two courses to follow and all other things being equal, that choice which is more Dynamic, that is, at a higher level of evolution, is more moral. An example of this is the statement that, It’s more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than to allow the germ to kill his patient. The germ wants to live. The patient wants to live. But the patient has moral precedence because he’s at a higher level of evolution.
Taken by itself that seems obvious enough. But what’s not so obvious is that, given a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality, it is absolutely, scientifically moral for a doctor to prefer the patient. This is not just an arbitrary social convention that should apply to some doctors but not to all doctors, or to some cultures but not all cultures. It’s true for all people at all time, now and forever, a moral pattern of reality as real as H2O. We’re at last dealing with morals on the basis of reason. We can now deduce codes based on evolution that analyze moral arguments with greater precision than before.
In the moral evolutionary conflict between the germ and the patient, the evolutionary spread is enormous and as a result the morality of the situation is obvious. But when the static patterns in conflict are closer the moral force of the situation becomes less obvious.
A popular moral issue that parallels the germ-patient issue is vegetarianism. Is it immoral, as the Hindus and Buddhists claim, to eat the flesh of animals? Our current morality would say it’s immoral only if you’re a Hindu or Buddhist. Otherwise it’s OK, since morality is nothing more than a social convention.
An evolutionary morality, on the other hand, would say it’s scientifically immoral for everyone because animals are at a higher level of evolution, that is, more Dynamic, than are grains and fruits and vegetables. But the moral force of this injunction is not so great because the levels of evolution are closer together than the doctor’s patient and the germ. It would add, also, that this moral principle holds only where there is an abundance of grains and fruits and vegetables. It would be immoral for Hindus not to eat their cows in a time of famine, since they would then be killing human beings in favor of a lower organism.
Because a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality is not tied to substance it is free to consider moral issues at higher evolutionary levels than germs and fruits and vegetables. At these higher levels the issues become more interesting.
Is it scientifically moral for a society to kill a human being? That is a very big moral question still being fought in courts and legislatures all over the world.
An evolutionary morality would at first seem to say yes, a society has a right to murder people to prevent its own destruction. A primitive isolated village threatened by brigands has a moral right and obligation to kill them in self-defense since a village is a higher form of evolution. When the United States drafted troops for the Civil War everyone knew that innocent people would be murdered. The North could have permitted the slave states to become independent and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. But an evolutionary morality argues that the North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body, and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation. John Brown’s truth was never an abstraction. It still keeps marching on.
When a society is not itself threatened, as in the execution of individual criminals, the issue becomes more complex. In the case of treason or insurrection or war a criminal’s threat to a society can be very real.
But if an established social structure is not seriously threatened by a criminal, then an evolutionary morality would argue that there is no moral justification for killing him.
What makes killing him immoral is that a criminal is not just a biological organism. He is not even just a defective unit of society. Whenever you kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too. A human being is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over a society. Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of evolution than social patterns of value. Just as it is more moral for a doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a society than it is for a society to kill an idea.
And beyond that is an even more compelling reason: societies and thoughts and principles themselves are no more than sets of static patterns. These patterns can’t by themselves perceive or adjust to Dynamic Quality. Only a living being can do that. The strongest moral argument against capital punishment is that it weakens a society’s Dynamic capability — its capability for change and evolution. It’s not the nice guys who bring about real social change. Nice guys look nice because they’re conforming. It’s the bad guys, who only look nice a hundred years later, that are the real Dynamic force in social evolution. That was the real moral lesson of the brujo in Zuni. If those priests had killed him they would have done great harm to their society’s ability to grow and change.
It was tempting to take all the moral conflicts of the world and, one by one, see how they fit this kind of analysis, but Phædrus realized that if he started to get into that he would never finish. Wherever he looked, whatever examples came to mind, he always seemed to be able to lay them out within this framework, and the nature of the conflicts usually seemed to be clearer when he did so.
And as a matter of fact that looked like the answer to Rigel’s question that had been bugging him all day: Does Lila have Quality?
Biologically she does, socially she doesn’t. Obviously! Evolutionary morality just splits that whole question open like a watermelon. Since biological and social patterns have almost nothing to do with each other, Lila does and Lila does not have quality at the same time. That’s exactly the feeling she gave too — a sort of mixed feeling of quality and no quality at the same time. That was the reason.
How simple it was. That’s the mark of a high-quality theory. It doesn’t just answer the question in some complex round-about way. It dissolves the question, so you wonder why you ever asked it.
Biologically she’s fine, socially she’s pretty far down the scale, intellectually she’s nowhere. But Dynamically… Ah! That’s the one to watch. There’s something ferociously Dynamic going on with her. All that aggression, that tough talk, those strange bewildered blue eyes. Like sitting next to a hill that’s rumbling and letting off steam here and there… It would be interesting to talk to her more.
He stepped forward to the hatchway and looked down. It looked as though she was sleeping on the bunk down there. He could use some of that himself. Tonight she’d probably be wide awake and raring to go. He’d be all zonked out.
Phædrus saw that an approaching buoy was slanting slightly toward him and that at its base was a little wake from a current running against him. The river was flowing backward now and it would be slow going. It would be dark soon too, but fortunately they didn’t have far to go.
The position of a barge up ahead indicated his boat was getting too far over on the New York City side of the river. He brought his bow back a few degrees so as to stay out of any oncoming traffic. On the big expanse of water before him he saw a barge being pushed from behind by a tug-boat. The barge had pipes along the top that meant it was probably carrying oil or chemicals. It was heading toward him and although he figured there was no danger of collision he set a course anyway that would give it an even wider separation.
The banks of this sea were far away but he could see that the buildings and shore installations were metropolitan. No hills rose back of them, only a dull industrial haze. He looked at his watch. Three-thirty. A couple of hours of sunlight yet. It looked like they would get to Nyack before dark. This boat had really made time today. All the hurricane flood water on top of the tides on top of the natural river current had done it.
Anyway that was the answer to Rigel’s question. Phædrus could relax now. Rigel was just pushing a narrow tradition-bound socio-biological code of morals which it was certain he didn’t understand himself.
As Phædrus had gotten into them he had seen that the isolation of these static moral codes was important. They were really little moral empires all their own, as separate from one another as the static levels whose conflicts they resolved:
First, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of biological life over inanimate nature. Second, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the social order over biological life — conventional morals — proscriptions against drugs, murder, adultery, theft and the like. Third, there were moral codes that established the supremacy of the intellectual order over the social order — democracy, trial by jury, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Finally there’s a fourth Dynamic morality which isn’t a code. He supposed you could call it a code of Art or something like that, but art is usually thought of as such a frill that that title undercuts its importance. The morality of the brujo in Zuni — that was Dynamic morality.
What was emerging was that the static patterns that hold one level of organization together are often the same patterns that another level of organization must fight to maintain its own existence. Morality is not a simple set of rules. It’s a very complex struggle of conflicting patterns of values. This conflict is the residue of evolution. As new patterns evolve they come into conflict with old ones. Each stage of evolution creates in its wake a wash of problems.
It’s out of this struggle between conflicting static patterns that the concepts of good and evil arise. Thus, the evil of disease which the doctor is absolutely morally committed to stop is not an evil at all within the germ’s lower static pattern of morality. The germ is making a moral effort to stave off its own destruction by lower-level inorganic forces of evil.
Phædrus thought that most other quarrels in values can be traced to evolutionary causes and that this tracing can sometimes provide both a rational basis for classification of the quarrels and a rational solution. The structuring of morality into evolutionary levels suddenly gives shape to all kinds of blurred and confused moral ideas that are floating around in our present cultural heritage. Vice is an example. In an evolutionary morality the meaning of vice is quite clear. Vice is a conflict between biological quality and social quality. Things like sex and booze and drugs and tobacco have a high biological quality, that is, they feel good, but are harmful for social reasons. They take all your money. They break up your family. They threaten the stability of the community.
Like the stuff Rigel was throwing at him this morning, the old Victorian morality. That was entirely within that one code — the social code. Phædrus thought that code was good enough as far as it went, but it really didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t know its origins and it didn’t know its own destinations, and not knowing them it had to be exactly what it was: hopelessly static, hopelessly stupid, a form of evil in itself.
Evil… If he’d called it that one-hundred-and-fifty years ago he might have gotten himself into some real trouble. People got mad back then when you challenged their social institutions, and they tended to take reprisals. He might have gotten himself ostracized as some kind of a social menace. And if he’d said it six-hundred years ago he might have been burned at the stake.
But today it’s hardly a risk. It’s more of a cheap shot. Everybody thinks those Victorian moral codes are stupid and evil, or old-fashioned at least, except maybe a few religious fundamentalists and ultra-right-wingers and ignorant uneducated people like that. That’s why Rigel’s sermon this morning seemed so peculiar. Usually people like Rigel do their sermonizing in favor of whatever they know is popular. That way they’re safe. Didn’t he know all that stuff went out years ago? Where was he during the revolution of the sixties?
Where has he been during this whole century? That’s what this whole century’s been about, this struggle between intellectual and social patterns. That’s the theme song of the twentieth century. Is society going to dominate intellect or is intellect going to dominate society? And if society wins, what’s going to be left of intellect? And if intellect wins what’s going to be left of society? That was the thing that this evolutionary morality brought out clearer than anything else. Intellect is not an extension of society any more than society is an extension of biology. Intellect is going its own way, and in doing so is at war with society, seeking to subjugate society, to put society under lock and key. An evolutionary morality says it is moral for intellect to do so, but it also contains a warning: just as a society that weakens its people’s physical health endangers its own stability, so does an intellectual pattern that weakens and destroys the health of its social base also endanger its own stability.
Better to say has endangered. It’s already happened. This has been a century of fantastic intellectual growth and fantastic social destruction. The only question is how long this process can keep on.
After a while Phædrus could see the moorings ahead at the Nyack Yacht Club, just where Rigel said they would be. They were about done sailing for the day. As the boat drew closer he throttled the engine down and unlashed the boat hook from the deck.
Lila’s face appeared again in the hatchway.
It startled him for a moment. She was real, after all. All this theoretical thought about this advanced metaphysical abstraction called Lila, and here, before him, was what it was all about.
Her hair was combed and a cardigan sweater covered all but the O-V of her T-shirt.
I feel a little better now, she said.
She didn’t look better. Her face had been changed with cosmetics into something worse… a kind of a mask. Skin white with powder. Alien black eyebrows perjured by her blond hair. A menacing death’s-door eye-shadow.
He saw that some of the mooring floats ahead had red and white markings that looked like they were meant for guests. He throttled the engine down and turned the boat in a wide arc so as to approach the outermost one. When he reckoned that the boat had just about enough momentum to reach it by itself he shifted to neutral, grabbed the boat hook and went forward to pick up the mooring float. It was just light enough to see the float. In a half-hour it would be dark.
Lila looked around at where they were. Ahead of them was a long, long bridge. It stretched out way over to what looked like the other shore of a big lake they were on. A lot of cars were moving on the bridge. Probably going into New York City, she thought. They were close now.
Other boats were around them on moorings in the water but no one seemed to be on board them. Everything looked empty and deserted. It looked like everyone had just gone off and left. Where was everybody? It was like the river coming down here. It was too quiet. What had happened this afternoon? She couldn’t remember very well. She got frightened about something. The wind and the noise. And then she fell asleep. And now she was here. Why?
What was she doing here? she wondered. She didn’t know. Another town somewhere, another man, another night coming on. It was going to be a long night.
The Captain came back and gave her a funny look and said, Help me get the dinghy in the water. I can do it myself but it’s easier with two.
He took her over to the mast and asked her if she knew how to use a winch. She said yes. Then he hooked a line from the mast on to the dinghy which was lying upside down on the deck in front of them and told her to start cranking. She did but it was heavy and she could see he didn’t like the way she was doing it. But she kept on doing it and after a long time the dinghy was hanging in the air from the line and the Captain swung it over the side of the boat. He told her to lower it slowly. She let out the line on the winch.
Slowly! he said.
She let it out more slowly and the Captain held his hands out to guide the dinghy into the water. Then he turned and said, That’s good. At least she did one thing right. He even smiled a little.
Maybe tonight wouldn’t be so bad.
Lila went below and from her suitcase got her old towel and her last change of clothes and her blow dryer and makeup. She wrapped a bar of soap from the sink into a washcloth to take with her.
When she got on deck again the Captain had a little ladder hooked to the side of the boat so that they could step down to the dinghy. She went down and got in and then he followed with some canvas tote bags. She wondered what these were for.
He hardly had to row at all. It was just a little way to the shore where there were just some wooden posts sticking out of the water and a rickety-looking wooden dock and a white building next to it. Back of the building was a hill that went up to a town, it looked like.
Inside the white building a man told them where the showers were. The Captain paid him for the mooring and the showers. Then they went down a long hallway and she went through the Ladies door. Inside was a sort of dark dingy shower and a wooden bench just outside. She had to look for a long time for the light switch. She turned on the shower to let it warm up and then took off her clothes and put them on the bench.
The shower was good and hot. That was good. Sometimes in these places all you get is cold water. She stepped under it and it felt good. It was the first shower since the Karma had been at Troy. She never seemed to get enough showers. Boats aren’t clean.
Men aren’t clean either. She cleaned herself extra well where the Captain had been at her last night.
He needed somebody like her. He smelled like a truck engine. That shirt he was wearing, it looked like he hadn’t changed it in weeks. She’d be doing him a favor to go with him to Florida. He didn’t know how to take care of himself. She could take care of him.
She didn’t want to get involved with him, though. She didn’t want to get involved with anybody. After a while they want to get involved, like Jim, and that’s when the trouble begins.
Lila dried herself with the towel and started to dress. Her blouse and skirt were wrinkled but the wrinkles would shake out. She found a plug-in by a mirror next to the wooden bench and plugged in her blow dryer and held it to her hair.
Manhattan was so close now. If Jamie was there he’d take care of everything. It would be so good to see him again. Maybe. You never knew about him. He might not be there. Then she was in trouble. She didn’t know what she would do then. She didn’t want to think about it.
She remembered now she told the Captain she was going to cook the supper.
That’s what he brought these canvas tote bags for; to carry the food. Maybe if she made him a really good meal he would take her all the way to Florida.
She put on her mascara slowly and carefully and when she was done she walked down the hall and around a corner there was the Captain, waiting. As she walked toward him she could see he looked better now. He was washed and shaved, and he’d changed that shirt.
Outside it had gotten dark. They walked under some street lights along the street up a hill. Some people walked by and didn’t look up.
It didn’t seem like a little town. It seemed more like part of a city. The street wasn’t very wide and was sort of dirty and depressing the way big cities get. When they got into the town she looked in some store windows and saw there wasn’t much to look at.
She thought she smelt French fries. But she didn’t see any McDonalds or Burger King or any place like that around.
Would she ever like some French fries! She was starving!
Maybe they could buy some, she thought. But then the trouble was they’d get all cold by the time they got to the boat. Maybe she could cook some. You needed something to cook them in, though. She asked the Captain if he had a deep fryer. He said he wasn’t sure. She hoped he did.
At the supermarket the prices were high. She got two expensive filet mignons and big Idaho potatoes and oil to make French fries from and some chocolate pudding for dessert and some bread for toast in the morning. And some eggs and some butter and some bacon. And some milk.
As she bent over to pick up the milk a shopping cart bumped into her. Lila said, Oh, I’m sorry. It wasn’t her fault, but the woman, who looked like she worked for the store just gave her a mean look and didn’t excuse herself in any way.
Lila got enough groceries to fill two big bags. She was starving. She liked to buy food anyway. She probably wouldn’t get to eat most of it.
But you could never tell. Maybe she and the Captain would get along tonight. Then they could go shopping in New York. She needed a lot of things.
When she finished filling the shopping cart she went to the checkout counter and saw that the checkout lady there was the same lady who bumped into her. With the same mean look on her face. She reminded Lila of her mother. Lila asked, as nicely as she could, if they could use the shopping cart to take the groceries back to the boat. It would be a lot easier than just carrying those tote bags. But the answer was No.
Lila looked at the Captain but he didn’t say anything. He just paid without any expression.
They each picked up a bag of groceries and started on their way out the door when suddenly there was a loud OW!! and then YOU LET GO OF ME! and then I’LL TELL MY MOTHER!!!
Lila turned and saw the store lady had her hand on a black girl’s collar and the girl was hitting at her and shouting, LET GO! LET GO!! I’LL TELL MY MOTHER!!
I told you to stay OUT of here! the store lady said.
The girl looked like she was about ten or twelve years old.
Let’s go, the Captain said.
But Lila heard herself say, Leave her alone!
Don’t get into it, the Captain said.
I CAN COME IN HERE IF I WANT TO! the girl shouted. You can’t tell me what to do!
LEAVE HER ALONE! Lila said.
The woman looked at her in astonishment. This is OUR STORE! she said.
Jesus Christ, let’s go, the Captain said.
The woman still didn’t let go of the girl.
Lila exploded, Just LEAVE her ALONE or I’ll call the police!
The woman let go of the girl. The girl ran out past Lila and the Captain through the doorway of the store. The store woman glared at her. Then she glared at Lila. But there was nothing she could do now.
It was over. Lila and the Captain went out. Outside the girl looked at her and did a quick little smile, and then skipped away.
What the hell was that all about? the Captain said.
She made me mad.
Everything makes you mad.
I have to do that, Lila said. Now I’ll feel fine all night.
At a liquor store they bought two fifths of blended and two quarts of mix and a bag of ice. They were really loaded down now as they walked back down the narrow street to the little white house where the boat was.
What did you get into that argument for? the Captain asked. It wasn’t any of your business.
People are so mean to kids, Lila said.
I would have thought you might have enough problems of your own, the Captain said.
She didn’t say anything. But it felt good. She always felt better after she lost her temper like that. She didn’t know why but she always did.
As they walked down to the river the Captain didn’t say a word. He was mad. That was all right, she thought. He’d get over it.
At the dock it was so dark the dinghy was hard to see. She had to watch her step. She didn’t want to drop all this food.
The Captain set his bag full of groceries down on the dock and untied the dinghy. Then he told Lila to get in. Then he handed everything to her and then he got in himself. With all the bags between them it was hard for him to row so he took just one oar and paddled on one side and then the other.
As she looked back she could see that the big long bridge was like a shadow, all lit up from behind with the light in the sky from New York. It was so beautiful. She put her hand in the water and it felt warm.
Suddenly she felt really good. She knew they would go to Florida together. It was going to be a good night.
When they reached the dark side of the boat the Captain held the dinghy steady while Lila climbed up the ladder. Then in the dark he handed her the tote bags full of groceries again and she set them on the deck.
Then while he climbed aboard and tied off the dinghy to the boat she carried the bags down below.
She pushed a light switch on the side of what looked like an overhead light and it worked, although it wasn’t very bright. She took the bottles of whiskey and mix out of a tote bag, and stored the extra mix and the ice in the icebox. The rest of the food she took out of the bags so she could get her shower stuff. She got it all out and went over and put it in her suitcase on the pilot berth, except the towel which was damp. She hung that on the edge of the pilot berth to dry.
The Captain said to come up and hold the flashlight.
She went up and held it while he opened up a wooden cover in the deck and reached way down inside. First he pulled out a pile of old rope. Then some hose and an old anchor. Then some wire and then an old rusted iron bowl with four legs and a grill over it.
He held it up in the light of the flashlight. Hibachi, he said. Haven’t used it since Lake Superior… There’s some charcoal down on the pilot berth.
Meaning, Go get it. She went down to the berth and found a bag of charcoal and handed it back up. At least he was talking again.
From the companionway she watched him pour the charcoal in from the bag. You just go where you feel like with this boat, don’t you? she said. Nobody to give you any orders. Nobody to argue with you.
That’s right, he said. Now pass up the kerosene that’s behind the chart table there… in that little shelf. Right behind where I am.
He reached around and pointed to it. She got it and handed it to him.
I’m going to start making the French fries, Lila said, if you’ll tell me where the pots and pans are.
In back of the chart table. Deep inside one of those bins, the Captain said. Just pull off the cover and you’ll see them.
Lila turned on another electric light over the chart table and found a deep bin where a dozen or so different types of pots and pans were dumped together in a cluttered jumble. The bin was at the back of the counter, so that the only way to reach them was to lie on her stomach on top of the chart table and hang her arm down inside the rectangular hole, and fish. The fishing for pans made a tremendous clanging racket. She hoped the noise would impress on the Captain the condition of his housekeeping.
There wasn’t any deep fryer. She felt a large frying pan and pulled it out. It was a good stainless steel pan, almost new. But it wasn’t deep enough for cooking oil.
She went back in the bin and clanged some more and this time came out with a deep pot and a matching lid. That should work.
I don’t suppose you have a wire basket for French fries, she said.
No, the Captain said, not that I know of.
It was all right. She could get by with a slotted spoon.
She looked for one and found it and also a vegetable peeler next to it. She tried the vegetable peeler on one of the potatoes. It was nice and sharp. She started peeling. She liked to peel long, hard, smooth Idaho potatoes like this. These were going to make good French fries. She let the peels shoot into the sink, so when she was done she could scoop them out with her hand.
What will you do after you get to Florida? she said to the Captain.
Just keep going, probably, he said.
A flame came up from the Hibachi and she could see his face suddenly in the light. It looked tired.
Just keep going where? she asked.
South, he said. There’s a town where I used to live in Mexico, down on the Bay of Campeche. I’d like to go back there for a while. And see if some people I used to know are still around.
What were you doing there?
Building a boat.
This boat?
No, a boat that never got finished, he said. Everything went wrong.
He poked the charcoal in the Hibachi with the edge of the grate.
With boats you always get seven kinds of trouble at once, he said. The keel was done and the frames were up. We were ready to start planking, and the Government declared the forest we were in to be "veda," I think they called it, meaning no more wood.
We went to Campeche for some more wood, paid for it — it never got sent. No way for a foreigner to sue them in Mexico. They knew that.
Then all our fastenings from Mexico City "disappeared." The paint got delivered but it disappeared after we put some on a dinghy.
Who’s "we"? Lila asked.
Me and my boat-carpenter.
While she peeled the potatoes the Captain came down the ladder. He lit the kerosene lamp, then turned off the electric lights, then took out some glasses from a shelf, then opened the icebox. He filled the glasses with ice, opened the mix and poured it. When he poured the whiskey he held up her glass and she told him when to stop.
Then he said, Here’s to Pancho Piquet.
Lila drank. It tasted fine.
She showed him the peeled potatoes. I’m so starved I could eat them raw, she said, but I’m not going to.
She found a cutting board and started to cut the potatoes, first the long way, making them into ovals, then cutting them again into pencil-thick sticks. Beautiful knife. Really sharp. The Captain stood watching her.
Who is Pancho Piquet? she asked.
The carpentero de ribera. He was an old Cuban. He spoke Spanish so fast even the Mexicans had trouble understanding him. Looked like Boris Karloff. Didn’t look Cuban or Mexican at all.
But he was the fastest carpenter I’ve ever seen, the Captain said. And careful. He never slowed down, even in that jungle heat. We didn’t have any electricity but he could work faster with hand tools than most people do with power tools. He was in his fifties or sixties and I was twenty-something. He used to smile that Boris Karloff smile watching me try to keep up with him.
So why are we drinking to him? Lila asked.
Well, they warned me, "El tome." He drinks! And so he did, the Captain said.
One night a big Norte, a norther, blew in off the Gulf of Mexico and it blew so hard… Oh, it was a big wind!
Almost bent the palm trees to the ground. And it took the roof off his house and carried it away.
But instead of fixing it he got drunk and he stayed drunk for more than a month. After a couple of weeks his wife had come to begging for money for food. That was so sad. I think partly he got drunk because he knew everything was going wrong and the boat would never get built. And that was true. I ran out of money and had to quit.
So that’s why we’re drinking to him? Lila said.
Yeah, he was sort of a warning, the Captain said. Also, he just opened my eyes a little to something. A feeling for what the tropics is really like. All this talk about going to Florida and Mexico brought him back to mind.
The potato sticks were growing into a mountain. She was making way too many. But it didn’t matter. Better to have too many than too few.
What do you want to go back there for? she said.
I don’t know. There’s always that feeling of despair down there. I can feel it now just thinking about it. "Tristes tropiques," the anthropologist, Levi-Strauss, called it. It keeps pulling you back, somehow. Mexicans know what I mean. There’s always this feeling that this sadness is the real truth about things and it’s better to live with a sad truth than with all the happy progress talk you get up here in the North.
So you’re going to stay down in Mexico?
No, not with a boat like this. This boat can go anywhere — Panama, China, India, Africa. No firm plans. You never know what’ll turn up.
The potatoes were all cut. So how do I turn this stove on, then? she asked the Captain.
I’ll light it for you, he said.
Why don’t you teach me? said Lila.
It takes too long, the Captain said.
While the Captain was pumping up the stove she finished her drink, freshened up his and poured another for herself.
He went up on deck to watch the Hibachi and she set the pot on the stove and filled it with the entire bottle of oil they purchased at the supermarket and then put on the lid. All that oil would take a while to heat up.
She took the steaks out of the supermarket wrappers to sprinkle them with salt and pepper. In the golden lamplight they looked gorgeous.
The pepper worked but the salt shaker was clogged. She took the lid off and whacked it on the chart table, but the holes still were clogged, so she pinched a hunk of salt with her fingers and dusted it on that way.
She handed up the steaks to the Captain. Then she got to work on the salad, shredding piles of lettuce on to two plates, and using that sharp knife to slice a tomato. As she worked, she stuffed some hunks of lettuce into her mouth.
Oh! Oh! Oh! she said.
What’s the matter? he asked.
I forgot how hungry I was. I don’t know how you can stand it, going on like this without any food all day long. How do you do it?
Well, actually, I had breakfast, he said.
You did?
Before you got up.
Why didn’t you wake me up?
Your friend, Richard Rigel, didn’t want you along.
Lila looked up through the hatchway at the Captain for a long time. He was looking at her to see what she would say.
Richard does that sometimes, she said. He probably thought we were going to have lunch somewhere.
He really had it in for Richard, she thought, and he was trying to get her mad again. He wouldn’t leave it alone. On a nice night like this you’d think he’d leave it alone. It was such a nice night. She could feel the booze coming on.
If you want me to go to Florida with you, I’ll go with you, Lila said.
He didn’t say anything. He just poked the steak with a fork.
What do you think? she said.
I’m not sure.
Why aren’t you sure?
I don’t know.
I can cook and fix your clothes and sleep with you, Lila said, and when you’re tired of me you can just say goodbye and I’ll be gone. How do you like that?
He still didn’t say anything.
It was getting very hot in the cabin so she lifted her sweater to take it off.
You really need me, you know, she said.
When she got the sweater off she could see he’d been watching her take it off. With that special look. She knew what that meant. Here it comes, she thought.
The Captain said, What I was thinking about this afternoon while you were sleeping was that I want to ask you some questions that will help me fit some things together.
What kind of questions?
I don’t know yet, he said. About what you like and don’t like, mainly.
Well, sure, we can do that too.
He said, I thought maybe I could ask questions about what your attitudes are about certain things. What your values are and how you got them. Things like that. I’d just like to ask questions and jot down answers without really knowing where it’s going to lead to and then later maybe try to put something together.
Sure, Lila said. What kind of questions? He’s going to go for it, she thought. She saw his glass was just about empty. She reached up through the hatchway and got it, then filled it.
What holds a person together is his patterns of likes and dislikes, he said. And what holds a society together is a pattern of likes and dislikes. And what holds the whole world together is patterns of likes and dislikes. History is just abstracted from biography. And so are all the social sciences. In the past anthropology has been centered around collective objects and I’m interested in probing around to see if it can be better said in terms of individual values. I’ve just had feelings that maybe the ultimate truth about the world isn’t history or sociology but biography, he said.
She didn’t know what he was talking about. All she could think of was Florida.
She handed him up his glass. The blue flame of the stove was hissing away under the oil. She lifted the lid on the pot and saw the heat stirring the liquid inside, but it was so dark she couldn’t really tell if it was time to start the potatoes.
You’re sort of another culture, he said. A culture of one. A culture is an evolved static pattern of quality capable of Dynamic change. That’s what you are. That’s the best definition of you that’s ever been invented.
You may think everything you say and everything you think is just you but actually the language you use and the values you have are the result of thousands of years of cultural evolution. It’s all in a kind of debris of pieces that seem unrelated but are actually part of a huge fabric. Levi-Strauss postulates that a culture can only be understood by reenacting its thought processes with the debris of its interaction with other cultures. Does this make sense? I’d like to record the debris of your own memory and try to reconstruct things with it.
She wished he had a frying thermometer. She broke off a bit of potato and dropped it in the pot, and it swirled slowly but didn’t sizzle. She fished it out and had another bite of lettuce.
Have you ever heard of Heinrich Schliemann? he asked.
Heinrich Who?
He was an archaeologist who investigated the ruins of a city people thought was mythological: ancient Troy.
Before Schliemann used what he called the strato-graphic technique, archaeologists were just educated grave-robbers. He showed how you could dig down carefully through one stratum after another, finding the ruins of earlier cities under later ones. That’s what I think can be done with a single person. I can take parts of your language and your values and trace them to old patterns that were laid down centuries ago and are what make you what you are.
I don’t think you’ll get much out of me, Lila said.
The booze is really getting to him, she thought. All day he’s been so quiet. Now you can’t shut him off.
She said, Boy, I sure pushed a button when I asked about going to Florida with you.
What do you mean?
All day I thought you were one of those silent types. Now I can’t get a word in.
He looked like she’d hurt his feelings.
Well, I don’t mind, she said. You can ask me all the questions you want.
Finally the oil looked hot enough. She used a slotted spoon to lower the first batch into the pot with a roar of bubbles and a cloud of steam. Are the steaks getting close to done? she asked.
A few minutes more.
Good, she said. The smell of the steaks mixed with the French fries coming up from the stove was making her almost faint. She couldn’t remember when she’d ever been this hungry before. When the potato bubbles quieted down she spooned the potatoes out, spread them on a towel and showered them with salt, then put in the next batch. When these were done, she waited until the Captain said the steaks were ready. Then she handed the plates up for him to put the steaks on.
When he handed them down she thought, Oh! Heavenly! She shook the French fries onto them from the paper towel.
The Captain came down. They opened the dining table leaves, moved the plates and whiskey and mix and extra French fries on to the table, and suddenly there everything was. She looked at the Captain and he looked at her. It could be like this every night, she thought.
Oh! The steak was so good she wanted to cry! The French fries! Oh! Salad!
You don’t know what this is doing to me, she said.
What is it doing? He had a little smile on his face.
Is that one of your questions? she asked. Her mouth was full of French fries. She had to slow down.
No, he laughed, that wasn’t one of them. I just wanted to know more about your background.
Like a job interviewer? she said.
Well, yes, that’s a start.
He got up and refilled their glasses.
She thought for a while. I was born in Rochester. I was the youngest of two girls… Is that the kind of stuff you want to know?
Just a second, he said. He got up and got a notepad and a pen.
You mean you’re going to write all this down?
Sure, he said.
Oh, forget it!
Why?
I don’t want to do that.
Why not?
Let’s just eat and relax and be friends.
He frowned a little, then shrugged his shoulders, got up again and put the pad of slips away.
As she took another bite of steak she thought maybe she shouldn’t have said that. Not if she wanted to go to Florida. Go ahead, ask some questions anyway, she said, I’ll talk. I like to talk.
The Captain handed her drink to her and then sat down beside her.
All right, what are the things you like best?
Food.
What else?
More food.
And after that?
She thought for a while. Just what we’re doing now.
Did you see that light from the city across the bridge? All of a sudden it was so beautiful.
What else?
Men, she laughed.
What kind?
Any kind. The kind that likes me.
What do you dislike most?
Mean people… Like that lady in the store back in town. There’s a million people like her and I hate every one of them. Always trying to make themselves big by tearing somebody else down… You do it too, you know.
Me?
Yes, you.
When?
This afternoon. Talking so big about a boat you never saw.
Oh, that.
Just don’t be mean like that and we’ll get along fine. I only get mad at mean people.
What after mean people? the Captain asked.
People who think they’re better than you are.
What next?
Lots of things.
What?
Well, there’s lots of things I don’t want. I don’t want to get old. I don’t want people to be mean. Oh, I said that.
She thought for a while. Sometimes I don’t want to be so lonely. You know, I thought George and me were really going to make it. And then this Debbie comes along and it’s like he doesn’t even know me. I didn’t do anything to him. That’s just mean.
Anything else?
Isn’t that enough? It isn’t any special thing that makes me feel bad. I don’t know what it’s going to be until it happens. She looked at him. Sometimes there’s something that just comes over me and I get scared… That happened this afternoon.
What?
When you started the engine.
That was a bad wind, he said.
It wasn’t just the wind. It isn’t like anything. It’s like a storm coming and I don’t have any house. I don’t have anywhere to go. She took another bite of steak. I like this boat. Do you have storms on this boat?
Yes, but the boat’s like a cork. The waves wash over it.
That’s good. I like that.
Why are you all alone like this on the river?
I’m not. I’m with you.
Well then, last night, he said.
I wasn’t alone, she laughed. Don’t you remember? She reached over and put her hand on his cheek. Don’t you remember?
Before you met me.
Before I met you I wasn’t alone for five minutes. I was with that bastard, George. Don’t you remember?
All spring I saved money so I could take this trip with him. And then he runs off like that. They wouldn’t even give me my money back… Oh hell, let’s not talk about him. He’s all gone.
Where were you going to go?
Florida.
Ohhh, the Captain said. So that’s why you want to go with me to Florida.
Uh-huh, she said.
While he thought about it she started on her salad. Don’t ever do this to me again, she said. Let’s just fill this whole boat with groceries, OK?
Somehow you didn’t answer my question, he said. Before you met me, before you knew George, why weren’t you married?
I was married, Lila said. A long time ago.
You’re divorced.
No.
You’re still married.
No, he got killed.
Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.
Don’t be.
This steak was cooked just perfectly, but it needed just a little more pepper. She reached over and got the pepper shaker by the cutting board and added just a pinch to the steak, then handed the shaker to the Captain.
That was a long time ago, she said. I never think about him.
What did he do?
He drove a truck. He was on the road most of the time. I never saw him much. And then one night he didn’t come home and the police called and said he was dead. And that was it.
What did you do then?
I got some insurance money. And they had a funeral, and I wore a black dress and all that, but I don’t think about that any more.
Why didn’t you like him? the Captain asked.
We always had fights, Lila said.
About what?
Just fights… He was always suspicious of me. Of what I was going to do when he wasn’t home… He thought I was cheating on him.
Were you?
Lila looked at him. Wait a minute… When I was married I was married. I didn’t do anything like that… Don’t get me mad.
I’m just asking, the Captain said.
She had another bite of the salad. He never had respect for me.
Why did you marry him?
I was pregnant, Lila said.
How old were you?
Sixteen. Seventeen when she was born.
That’s too young, the Captain said.
Those drinks before dinner were making her high now. She’d better slow down, she thought, and watch herself and not do something dumb, like she usually did when she got drunk. She was already talking too much.
She felt dizzy. Then she saw the lamp swing. What’s that? she said.
A wake, the Captain said. A big one… That’s the first one. In a second there’ll be… here it comes…
Another even bigger wave came and the whole boat rocked, and then after a while a smaller one and another one, each one getting smaller.
The Captain got up from the table and went up.
What is it? she said.
I don’t know, he said. It’s not a barge… Some power-boat probably. He may be on the other side of the bridge.
He stood there for a long time looking around outside. Then he looked back down at her.
How old is your baby now? he asked.
That surprised her. That was a new one. What do you want to know that for?
I already told you before I started asking all these questions, he said.
She’s dead.
How did she die? he asked.
I killed her, she said.
She watched his eyes. She didn’t like them. He looked mean.
You mean accidentally, he said.
I didn’t cover her right and she smothered, Lila said. That was long ago.
Nobody blamed you though.
Nobody had to. What could they say… that I didn’t already know?
Lila remembered she still had the black funeral dress. She remembered she had to wear it three times that year. There were hundreds of people who came to her grandfather’s funeral because he was a minister and lots of Jerry’s friends came to his funeral, but nobody came for Dawn.
Don’t get me started thinking about that, she said.
She sat back in the berth for the first time and stopped eating. Ask some other questions, she said, like, how long will it take to get to Florida?
So you never married again, the Captain said.
No! God, no. Never! I would never do that again.
These people who get married, she said. It’s the cheapest trick on a person there is. You’re supposed to give up all your freedom and everything just for sex every night. That doesn’t make them happy. They’re just always looking around for some way out. Don’t you want some more of these French fries?
I just want to be free, she said. That’s what America’s about, isn’t it?
The Captain took some French fries and she got up and took her plate over to the cutting board and took the rest of the French fries and put them on her plate. Give me your glass, she said.
He gave it to her and she lifted the lid of the icebox and scooped some more ice into it. She added mix and booze and then filled her own glass. She saw the booze was halfway down the label already, when she heard a CLUNK! It was against the side of the boat.
Now what? she said.
The Captain shook his head. He said, Maybe a big branch or something. He got up and went past her and up on deck and she felt the boat tip a little as his footsteps went over to the side.
What is it? she said.
It’s the dinghy.
After a while he said, It’s never done that before… Come on up and help me put some fenders down and tie it alongside. We’ll bring it up in the morning.
She came up and watched him take two big rubber fenders and tie them to the rail so that they dangled over the side. He went over to the other side of the deck and came back with a long boat hook. She stood next to him while he reached out with the hook and brought the dinghy up against the side of the boat.
Hold it there, he said, and gave her the boat hook.
He went to a big box by the mast and opened it and took out a rope and then came back. He dropped the rope into the dinghy and then stepped and lowered himself down over the guard rail.
She looked around. It was so quiet here. Just the rolling of the cars across the bridge. The sky was still all orange from the light from the city but it was so peaceful you would never guess where they were.
When he was done the Captain grabbed the guard rail and pulled himself up again.
I figured it out, he said. It’s because the tide is changing… This is the first time I’ve seen this… Look around at all the other boats. You remember when we came they were all pointed toward the bridge? Now they’re all skewed around.
She looked and saw that all the boats were facing in different directions.
They’ll probably all be pointing away from the bridge after a while, he said. It’s warm enough out — let’s sit up here and watch it. I’m sort of fascinated by this, he said.
Lila brought up the bottles and ice and some sweaters and a blanket to put over them. She sat next to him and put the blanket over their legs together. Listen to how quiet it is, she said. It’s hard to believe we’re this close to New York.
They listened for a long time.
What are you going to do when you get to Manhattan? the Captain asked.
I’m going to find a friend of mine and see if he can help me, she said.
What if you can’t find him?
I don’t know. I could do a lot of things. Get a job waitressing or something like that… She looked at him but couldn’t see how he took it.
Who is this person you’re going to see in New York?
Jamie? He’s just an old friend.
How long have you known him?
Oh, two or three years, she said.
In New York?
Yes.
So you’ve lived there a long time?
Not so long, Lila said. I always liked it there. You can be anyone you want in New York and nobody will stop you.
She suddenly thought of something. You know what? she said, I bet you’d like him. You’d get along fine with him. He’s a sailor too. He worked on a ship once.
You know what? Lila said. He could, help us sail the boat to Florida… If you wanted to, I mean… I mean I could cook and he could steer and you could… well, you could give all the orders.
The Captain stared into his glass.
Just think about it, Lila said. Just the three of us going down to Florida.
After a while she said, He’s really friendly. Everybody likes him.
She waited a long time but the Captain didn’t answer. She said, If I could talk him into it would you take him?
I don’t think so, the Captain said. Three’s too many.
That’s because you haven’t met him, Lila said.
She took the Captain’s glass and filled it again and snuggled up to him to keep warm. He just wasn’t used to the idea.
Give him some time, she thought.
The cars rolled over the bridge one after another. Bright headlights went in one direction and red tail lights went in the other, on and on.
You remind me of someone, Lila said. Someone I remember from a long time ago.
Who?
I can’t remember… What did you do in high school?
Not much, he said.
Were you popular?
No.
You were unpopular?
Nobody paid much attention to me one way or the other.
Weren’t you on any teams?
The chess team.
You went to dances.
No.
Then where did you learn to dance?
I don’t know. I went for a couple of years to dancing school, the Captain said.
Well, what else did you do in high school?
I studied.
In high school?
I was studying to be a chemistry professor.
You should have studied to be a dancer. You were really good last night.
Suddenly Lila knew who he reminded her of. Sidney Shedar.
You’re not much of a ladies’ man, are you?
No, not at all, he said.
This person wasn’t either.
Chemistry’s not so bad if you’re into it, he said. It gets kind of exciting. I and another kid got the key to the school building and sometimes we’d come back at ten or eleven at night and go up to the chemistry laboratory and work on chemistry experiments until dawn.
Sounds weird.
No. Actually it was pretty great.
What did you do?
Adolescent stuff… The secret of life. I was working hard on that.
You should have stuck to dancing, Lila said. That’s the secret of life.
I was sure I was going to find it, studying proteins and genetics and things like that.
Really weird.
Is that what this other person was like?Sidney? Yes, I guess so. He was a real nerd.
Oh, the Captain said. And I remind you of him?
You both talk the same way. He used to ask a lot of questions too. He always had a lot of big ideas.
What was he like?
Nobody liked him very much. He was very smart and he was always trying to tell you about things you weren’t interested in.
What did he talk about?
Who knows! There was just something about him that made everybody mad at him. He didn’t really do anything bad. He just — I don’t know what it was — he just didn’t… He was smart but at the same time he was dumb. And he could never see how dumb he was because he thought he knew everything. Everyone used to call him Sad Sack.
And I remind you of him?
Yes.
If I’m such a nerd why did you dance with me last night? the Captain asked.
You asked me.
I thought you asked me.
Maybe I did, Lila said, I don’t know. You looked different maybe. They all look different at first.
You know Sidney really was smart, Lila said. About two years ago I was sitting at a table in this restaurant and I looked up and there he was, much older and he had glasses on and he was getting bald. He’s a pediatrician now. He’s got four children now. He was really nice. He said, "Hello, Lila," and we talked a long time.
What did he say?
He just wondered how I was and everything, and was I married and I said, "No, the right one hasn’t come along yet," and he laughed at that and said, "Someday he will."… You see what I mean? Lila said.
She excused herself and went down to the bathroom. On her way back she had to hang on to things to keep steady. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t going anywhere. She sat down again next to the Captain and he asked, How long have you known Richard Rigel?
Since the second grade, she said.
The second grade!
Surprised, huh?
God, I’ll say! I had no idea.
She arranged the blanket neatly and settled back and then looked up in the sky. There was so much light from the city there weren’t any stars at all. It was just all orange and black. Like Halloween.
Whew! the Captain said.
What’s the matter?
I’m just sort of shook, he said. The second grade! That’s just unbelievable!
Why is that unbelievable?
You mean he used to sit behind you and make faces at the teacher and things like that?
No, we were just in the same class. Why does that seem so unbelievable?
I don’t know, the Captain said. He doesn’t seem like the sort of person who would have had a childhood… But I suppose he must have.
We were good friends, Lila said.
You were childhood sweethearts.
No, we were just friends. We’ve always been friends. I don’t see why you’re surprised at that.
Why, out of a whole classroom full of people, would you pick a person like him for a friend?
He came in at the second grade and I was the only one who was nice to him.
The Captain shook his head.
After a while he made a sound like, Tch!
You don’t know him, Lila said. He was very quiet and shy. He used to stutter. Everybody laughed at him.
He sure doesn’t stutter now, the Captain said.
You don’t know him.
So you went all the way through grade school and high school with him?
No, after sixth grade he went to prep school, and I didn’t see him much.
What does his father do?
I don’t know. They were divorced. He lived in New York somewhere. Or, I think, Kingston, maybe. Where we were last night…Well, I guess what’s bothering me, the Captain said, is, if you’ve known him since the second grade and you’re such good friends, why was he so down on you last night?
Richard likes me, Lila said.
No. Not true, the Captain said. That’s what’s getting me. Why was he so rude to you? Why wouldn’t he talk to you last night?
Oh, that’s a long story, Lila said.
Last night he didn’t even say "hello".
I know. That’s just the way he is. He just doesn’t approve of the way I live.
Well, that’s true, the Captain said.
Lila held up the bottle and showed it to the Captain. You know something?
What?
I think we are getting a little smashed… At least I am. You’re not drinking very much.
But something’s still missing, the Captain said.
What?
You never saw him after prep school.
I saw plenty of him after prep school.
You mean he used to go out with you?
Everybody used to go with me, Lila said. You don’t know what I was like. I wish you could have seen me when I was younger. I had such a cute figure… It sounds like I’m bragging, but it was true. I don’t look like so much now, but you should have seen me back then. Everybody wanted to go out with me. I was popular then… I was really popular.
So you went out with him.
Sometimes we’d go out together and then his mother found out about it and she made him stop.
Why?
Well, you know why. She is very rich and I’m not in their social class. Also women don’t approve of people like me. Especially mothers with little sons who are interested in me.
The booze was hitting real hard now. She had to stop.
Anyway Richie is a real nice guy, she said.
The Captain didn’t say anything.
… And you aren’t, she added.
Rigel said you got someone named Jim in trouble.
Did he talk about that? Lila shook her head.
What was that all about?
Oh, God. I wish he hadn’t talked about that.
What was it about?
Nothing!
We weren’t doing anything… Anything worse than you and me are doing on this boat right now. I told Jim never to tell anyone about us. Then he went and told Richie and Richie told his mother and his mother told Jim’s wife. That’s when all the trouble started. Oh, God, what a mess that was… All because Richie’s mother couldn’t leave us alone.
His mother?
Look, Richie dotes on his mother, morning, noon and night. That’s where he gets all his money. I think he sleeps with her! She really hates me! Lila said.
Why did Rigel’s mother hate you?
I told you. She was afraid I was going to take her little Richie away from her. And she was the one who got Jim’s wife to hire the detectives.
Detectives!
'We were in the motel and they pounded on the door and I told Jim, "Don’t answer it!" but he didn’t listen. He said, "I’ll just talk to them." Sure… that’s all they wanted. Just to talk… Oh, he was so dumb. It was just awful. As soon as he opened the door they came in with flash cameras and took pictures of everything. Then they wanted him to sign a confession. They said they wouldn’t prosecute if he just signed.
You know what he did? He signed…
He wouldn’t listen to me. If he’d listened to me there’s nothing they could have done. They didn’t have a warrant or anything.
Then they left and you know what Jim did?… He started to cry… That’s what I remember most, him sitting on the edge of the bed, with his big eyes all full of tears.
I was the one who should have been crying! And what do you suppose he was crying about?… About how he didn’t want his wife to divorce him… Oh, he made me so disgusted. He made everybody disgusted.
He was weak. He always complained about how she ran his life, but he really wanted her to. That’s why he wanted to go back.
They always talk about how they’re going to leave their wives, but they never do. They always go back.
Did his wife take him back?
No… she wasn’t dumb. She took his money instead. Almost a hundred thousand dollars… She couldn’t stand him any more than I could, after that.
Did you see Jim after that?
For a while. But I never respected him after that. Then he got fired from the bank and I got tired of him and I met this friend from New York, Jamie, and I came down here with him for a while.
I thought Rigel said he was Jim’s lawyer.
He was, but after they got the pictures and the confession there wasn’t much he could do.
Why did he take the case?
Because of me. I’m the one who told Jim to go to him.
The Captain made a tch sound again. He tipped his head back and looked up at the sky.
He didn’t say anything for a long time. He just stared up into the sky like he was looking for some stars.
There aren’t any stars up there, Lila said. I already looked.
Is Rigel married? the Captain asked.
No.
Why not?
I don’t know. He’s all messed up just like everybody else… You know something?
What?
You’re not drinking as much as I am. She held the bottle up to the sky and looked at it. And you know something else?
What?
I’m not going to answer any more of your questions.
Why not?
You’re the detective. That’s what you are. You think you’re going to learn something. I don’t know what, but you’re not going to learn anything… You’ll never find out who I am because I’m not anything.
What do you mean?
I’m not anybody. All these questions you’re asking are just a waste of time. I know you’re trying to find out what kind of a person I am but you’re never going to find out anything because there’s nothing to know.
Her voice was getting slushy. She could tell it was getting slushy.
I mean, I used to play I was this kind of person and that kind of person but I got so tired of playing all those games. It’s such work and it doesn’t do any good. There’s just all these pictures of who I am and they don’t hold together. They’re all different people I’m supposed to be but none of them are me. I’m not anybody. I’m not here. Like you now. I can see you’ve got a lot of bad impressions about me in your mind. And you think that what’s in your mind is here talking to you but nobody’s here. You know what I mean? Nobody’s home. That’s Lila. Nobody’s home.
You know what? Lila said.
What?
What you want to do is make me into something I’m not.
Just the opposite.
You think just the opposite. But you’re really trying to do something to me that I don’t like.
What’s that?
You’re trying to… you’re trying to destroy me.
No.
Yes.
Well, you’ve completely misunderstood what I’m asking these questions for, the Captain said.
No, I haven’t. I’ve completely understood it just exactly right, Lila said. All men do that. You’re no big exception. Jerry did it. Every man does it. But you know something? It won’t work.
I’m not trying to destroy you, he said.
That’s what you think. You’re just playing around the edges, aren’t you! You can’t go to the center of me. You don’t know where the center of me is!
That set him back.
You’re not a woman. You don’t know. When men make love they’re really trying to destroy you. A woman’s got to be real quiet inside because if she shows a man anything they’ll try to kill it.
But they all get fooled because there’s nothing to destroy but what’s in their own mind. And so they destroy that and then they hate what’s left and they call what’s left, "Lila," and they hate Lila. But Lila isn’t anybody. That’s true. You don’t believe it, but it’s true.
Women are very deep, Lila said. But men never see it. They’re too selfish. They always want women to understand them. And that’s all they ever care about. That’s why they always have to try to destroy them.
I’m just asking questions, the Captain said.
Fuck your questions! I’m whatever your questions turn me into. You don’t see that. It’s your questions that make me who I am. If you think I’m an angel then that’s what I am. If you think I’m a whore then that’s what I am. I’m whatever you think. And if you change your mind about me then I change too. So whatever Richard tells you, it’s true. There’s no way he can lie about me.
Lila took the bottle and took a swig down straight. The hell with glasses, she said. Everybody wants to turn Lila into somebody else. And most women put up with that, because they want the kids and the money and the good-looking clothes. But it won’t work with me. I’m just Lila and I always will be. And if men don’t like me the way I am, then men can just get out. I don’t need them. I don’t need anyone. I’ll die first. That’s just the way I am.
After a while Lila looked around and saw that all the boats were lying straight in line just like the Captain said they would be. That’s pretty good. He’d figured that out. She told him about it. He didn’t say anything. He hadn’t said anything for a long time.
A bad feeling started to creep up. He wasn’t drinking. Was he getting mad? That’s what happens when you don’t keep up drinking. You get mad.
She was talking too much. Sober up, Lila, before it’s too late. Hang on. Sober up.
You know what? Lila said.
What?
I’m really sick of talking about me. Let’s talk about something else.
It’s getting cold out here, the Captain said.
He got up. I didn’t get any real sleep last night, he said, I’m going to bed early.
Lila got up and followed him into the cabin. He went into the bunk at the front of the boat and she could hear him lie down and then he was quiet.
She looked around the cabin. All this food and things to put away. What a mess.
Suddenly she remembered the chocolate pudding never got made.
She would probably never get to eat it, she thought.
In the forecabin Phædrus turned back the bed covers, then sat on the bunk and slowly pulled off his sweater and his other clothes. He felt weary.
Some archaeological expedition, he thought. Garbage and more garbage.
That’s what an archaeologist is, really — a highly trained garbage man. You see all the great finds in museums. You don’t see what they had to go through to find them… Some of those ancient ruins, Phædrus remembered, were located under city dumps.
Rigel would really be gloating now. What do you think now? he’d say. Does Lila have Quality? What’s your answer?
A light flashed through the porthole and then disappeared. Somebody’s searchlight, or a beacon maybe. But it was too irregular to be a beacon. Phædrus waited for it to reappear, but it didn’t.
This really wasn’t his day. Funny how everything kept going back to high school with her. That’s what this was. This was one of those high school disasters where you take the girl home early and do not kiss her good night and if you call again later and ask her out she is going to be doing something else.
She really was that girl on the streetcar.
And he really was that guy. That was him. The guy who doesn’t get the girl.
What was it she had said about Sad Sack?… He was quiet most of the time… You thought it was because he was listening to you… but he wasn’t. He was always thinking about something else. Chemistry, I guess… I felt sorry for him… He knew a lot but he just didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t understand women because he didn’t understand anybody… You never could get close to him. He was very smart in some ways, but in other ways he was very stupid, you know what I mean?
Phædrus knew what she meant. He knew who she meant.
He slowly stretched his legs out down under the blankets, and remembered something else he hadn’t thought of for years.
It was a movie he watched long ago when he was a chemistry student. There was a pretty girl, played by Priscilla Lane, he seemed to remember, who was having romantic difficulties with the handsome young leading man — maybe it was Richard Powell. For comic relief Priscilla Lane had a dumb-cluck girlfriend who gave everybody laughs and warm feelings of self-importance because they knew that stupid as they might be they weren’t as stupid as she was. They loved her for that.
In one scene the dumb-cluck girlfriend came home from a dance and met Priscilla Lane and Richard Powell who were standing arm in arm — blue-eyed, radiant and beautiful — and they asked her, How was the dance?
She said, Awful. I danced every dance with a chemistry professor.
He remembered how the audience tittered.
Have you ever danced with a chemistry professor? the dumb-cluck girlfriend asked. The audience laughed. Ohhhwww, my feet! she groaned.
The audience howled with laughter.
Except one. He sat there, his face burning, and finished the movie with the same kind of stunned depression he felt now, a feeling of dislocation and paralysis, devoured for a moment by this other pattern that made himself and everything he believed in worthless and comic.
He didn’t remember what he did after that. Maybe just got on the streetcar and went home.
That could have been the night Lila was on the streetcar… That smile. That’s what he remembered most. There it was. Lila on the streetcar. Lila and the lilacs in spring. The little suppressed smile. The little half-hidden contempt. And the sadness that nothing he could do or say could ever make her smile at him in any other way.
He remembered once there was a huge cottonwood tree in the night and he stood alone under it and listened and its leaves rattled slightly in the night breeze. It had been a warm night and there was a smell of lilacs in the breeze.
These patterns of his mind slowly vanished into sleep.
After an unknown time some new patterns returned in the form of shimmering water. The shimmering was above him. He lay at the bottom of the ocean shoal on a bank of sand. The water was faintly bluish but so clear he could see little hills and ripples in the surface of the sand as clearly as if no water were there.
Growing from the bottom were dark green blades of eel-grass that rippled in the current of the water like eels struggling to get free of the sand. He could feel the same currents against his own body. They were pleasant gentle currents and he felt serene. His lungs had stopped their struggle long ago and everything was quiet now. He felt like he belonged here. He had always belonged here.
Above the tips of the grass in the faint blue water were hundreds of milky pink and white jellyfish floating through the water. They seemed to drift at first but then as he watched closely he saw they propelled themselves by pulsing in-and-out, in-and-out, as if they had some mysterious goal. The littlest ones were so thin and transparent he saw them mainly by refraction of the shimmering water above them as they passed between him and a dark shape suspended on the surface. The dark shape was like that of a boat which from the bottom of the ocean seemed more like a spaceship suspended in the sky. It belonged to another world that he had come from. Now that he was no longer attached to it he felt better.
One of the peculiar milky-white creatures swam toward him and nudged against his body, first on his arm and then on his side, alarming him a little. Was the creature being friendly? Was it hungry for something? He tried to get up and move away from it but found he couldn’t. He had lost all power of motion. The creature nudged and stroked and nudged and stroked until he gradually felt himself being released from a dream.
It was dark now and he felt the nudging again. It was a hand. He didn’t move. The hand moved up and down his arm, carefully and deliberately, then began to make further and further adventures across his body. By the time the hand had reached far enough to arrive at its destination, its destination was rigid and waiting. The dream-like feeling of helplessness and motionlessness persisted and he lay silently as he had lain at the bottom of the ocean, letting this happen to him, as if he were watching it from afar, a kind of spectator to some ancient ritual he was not supposed to see or understand.
The hand continued to stroke and caress and gently grasp and then, slowly in the darkness the body of Lila rose above him, and slid itself over him, kneeled and lowered itself gently and slowly down until it enveloped what it had come for… Then it tightened. Then, slowly, it lifted and paused. Then it eased and descended. Then it lifted and tightened — and released and descended again. Then again. And again. Each time a little less slow. Each time a little more coaxing. Each time a little more demanding of what it was there to receive.
Surges of excitement in his body grew with each demand. They became stronger and stronger until his hands rose up and seized her hips and his own body began to move with hers in each rise and fall. His thoughts were swamped by this ocean current of feeling and the huge jellyfish-like body hovering over him pulsing in and out, in and out, expanding and contracting on and on. He could feel huge waves of emotion that were not directed by anything. He could feel the explosion almost coming…
Then ALMOST coming…
Then… her body was suddenly tense and rigidly hard around him and she gave a crying-out sound and his whole self let go into her and his mind leapt out to some place beyond anywhere… When it returned he could feel the vulval pressure slowly releasing and the flesh of her hips became soft again.
She was still for a long time.
Then a tear fell on his cheek. It surprised him.
I do that for someone I like very much, her voice whispered. It seemed to come from some place other than the body that was above him; from someone who perhaps had also been an onlooker at all of this.
Then Lila lay back beside him, stretched the full length of her body against him and wrapped her arms around him as if to possess him forever.
They lay there together for a long time. Her arms held him but his mind began to drift free in an ebb tide of thought nothing could hold.
After a time he heard a steady breathing which told him she was asleep.
Sometimes between sleep and waking there’s a zone where the mind gets a glimpse of old active subconscious worlds. He’d just passed through that zone and for a moment had seen something he would forget if he went back to sleep. But he’d forget it if he became any more awake too.
This was the first time he’d been passive like this. Before it had been his idea, his aggression, his carnal desires. Now this passivity seemed to open something up.
What he seemed to have seen was that maybe he hadn’t had anything to do with it at all. He tried to hang on to it, half awake, half asleep.
A light shone again in the port. Maybe a car headlight from shore. Lila turned under the covers and brought her arm up over her face so that her hand opened upward toward him. Then she lay quietly.
He put his own hand up next to it. They were the same. The pattern that had caused her to come in and do this had also made these two hands alike. They were like leaves of trees, with no more knowledge than leaves have of why their cells produced them or made them so alike.
That was it, maybe. That was the thing, the other thing that was doing this that was not Lila and not himself.
The car headlight vanished and then, in the fading mental image of her hand, he thought he had seen something else. On her forearm near the wrist had been long scars, one of them slightly diagonal to the others. He wondered if it was something she had done herself.
He turned and put the tip of his forefinger against the wrist. The scars were there, all right, but they were smooth. It must have been long ago. It could have been a car accident or some other trauma, of course, but something told him it wasn’t. It seemed like more evidence of some past internal war with the thing that had brought her here tonight — some enormous battle between the intelligence of her mind and the intelligence of her cells.
If that’s what it was, the cells had won. Probably they had bled enough to throw off infection, then swelled to slow down the bleeding, clotted, and then slowly, with the special intelligence of their own that had nothing to do with Lila’s mind, they remembered how they had been before she had cut them apart and they carefully joined themselves back together again. They had a mind and will of their own. The mental Lila had tried to die but the cellular Lila had wanted to live.
That’s the way it always is. The intelligence of the mind can’t think of any reason to live, but it goes on anyway because the intelligence of the cells can’t think of any reason to die.
That explained what had happened tonight. The first intelligence out there in the cabin disliked him and still did. It was this second intelligence that had come in and made love. The first Lila had nothing to do with it.
These cellular patterns have been lovers for millions of years and they aren’t about to be put off by these recent little intellectual patterns that know almost nothing about what is going on. The cells want immortality. They know their days are numbered. That is why they make such a commotion.
They’re so old. They began to distinguish this body on the left from this body on the right more than a billion years ago. Beyond comprehension. Of course they pay no attention to mind patterns. In their scale of time, mind is just some ephemera that arrived a few moments ago, and will probably pass away in a few moments more.
That was what he had seen that he was trying to hang on to now, this confluence where mental and the biological patterns are both awake and aware of each other and in conflict.
The ebb-tide feeling. At ebb tide this cellular sexual activity is all so intellectually vulgar and shunnable, but when the flood tide returns the vulgarity magically turns into a high-quality attraction and there’s a deflection of mind by something that isn’t mind at all and there’s some feeling of awe in this. The mind sitting detached, aloof and discerning is suddenly rudely shoved aside by this other intelligence which is stronger than its own. Then strange things happen that the mind sees as vulgar and shunnable when the tides are out again.
He listened to the even breathing of this body next to him. That twilight zone was gone now. His mind was getting the upper hand, getting more and more awake, thinking about what he’d seen.
It fitted into the independence and opposition of levels of evolution that was emphasized in the Metaphysics of Quality. The language of mental intelligence has nothing to say to the cells directly. They don’t understand it. The language of the cells has nothing to say to the mind directly. It doesn’t speak that language either. They are completely separate patterns. At this moment, asleep, Lila doesn’t exist any more than a program exists when a computer is switched off. The intelligence of her cells had switched Lila off for the night, exactly the way a hardware switch turns off a computer program.
The language we’ve inherited confuses this. We say my body and your body and his body and her body, but it isn’t that way. That’s like a FORTRAN program saying, This is my computer. This body on the left, and This body on the right. That’s the way to say it. This Cartesian Me, this autonomous little homunculus who sits behind our eyeballs looking out through them in order to pass judgment on the affairs of the world, is just completely ridiculous. This self-appointed little editor of reality is just an impossible fiction that collapses the moment one examines it. This Cartesian Me is a software reality, not a hardware reality. This body on the left and this body on the right are running variations of the same program, the same Me, which doesn’t belong to either of them. The Me’s are simply a program format.
Talk about aliens from another planet. This program based on Me’s and We’s is the alien. We has only been here for a few thousand years or so. But these bodies that We has taken over were around for ten times that long before We came along. And the cells — my God, the cells have been around for thousands of times that long.
These poor stupid bodies that We has invaded, he thought. Every once in a while, like tonight and last night, they overthrow the program and go about their ways leaving We mystified about how all this could have happened. That’s what happened just now.
Mystified, and somewhat horrified too at the things bodies do without its permission. All of this sexual morality of Rigel’s — it wasn’t just social codes. It was also part of this sense of horror at these cells We has invaded and the strange patterns of Quality that existed before We arrived.
These cells make sweat and snot and phlegm. They belch and bleed and fuck and fart and piss and shit and vomit and squeeze out more bodies just like themselves all covered with blood and placental slime that grow and squeeze out more bodies, on and on.
We, the software reality, finds these hardware facts so distressing that it covers them with euphemisms and clothes and toilets and medical secrecy. But what We is covering up is pure quality for the cells. The cells have gotten to their advanced state of evolution through all this fucking and farting and pissing and shitting. That’s quality! Particularly the sexual functions. From the cells' point of view sex is pure Dynamic Quality, the highest Good of all.
So when Phædrus told Rigel that Lila had Quality he was telling the truth. She does. This same attraction which is now so morally condemned is what created the condemners.
Talk about ingratitude. These bodies would still be a bunch of dumb bacteria if it hadn’t been for sexual quality. When mutation was the only means of genetic change, life sat around for three billion years, doing almost no changing at all. It was sexual selection that shot it forward into the animals and plants we have today. A bacterium gets no choice in what its progeny are going to be, but a queen bee gets to select from thousands of drones. That selection is Dynamic. In all sexual selection, Lila chooses, Dynamically, the individual she wants to project into the future. If he excites her sense of Quality she joins him to perpetuate him into another generation, and he lives on. But if he’s unable to convince her of his Quality — if he’s sick or deformed or unable to satisfy her in some way — she refuses to join him and his deformity is not carried on.
Now Phædrus was really awake. Now he felt he was at some sort of source. Was this thing that he had seen tonight the same thing that he had glimpsed in the streetcar, the thing that had been bothering him all these years? He thought about it for a long time and slowly decided that it probably was.
Lila is a judge. That’s who lay here beside him tonight: a judge of hundreds of millions of years' standing, and in the eyes of this judge he was nobody very important. Almost anyone would do, and most would do better than he.
After a while he thought, maybe that’s why the famous Gioconda Smile in the Louvre, like Lila’s smile in the streetcar, has troubled viewers for so many years. It’s the secret smile of a judge who has been overthrown and suppressed for the good of social progress, but who, silently and privately, still judges.
Sad Sack. That was the term she used. It had no intellectual meaning, but it had plenty of meaning nevertheless. It meant that in the eyes of this biological judge all his intelligence was some kind of deformity. She rejected it. It wasn’t what she wanted. Just as the patterns of intelligence have a sense of disgust about the body functions, the patterns of biology, so do Lila’s patterns of biology have a disgust about the patterns of intelligence. They don’t like it. It turns them off.
Phædrus thought about William James Sidis, the prodigy who could read five languages when he was five years old. After discovering what Sidis had said about Indians, Phædrus had read a full biography of him and found that when Sidis was a teenager he announced he would refuse to have anything to do with sex for the rest of his life. It seemed as though in order to sustain a satisfactory intellectual life he felt he had to cut himself off from social and biological domination except where they were absolutely necessary. This vow of ancient priests and ascetics was once considered a high form of morality, but in the Roaring Twenties of the twentieth century a new standard of morals had arrived, and when journalists found out about this vow they ridiculed Sidis mercilessly. That coincided with the beginning of a pattern of seclusion that lasted the rest of his life.
Is it better to have wisdom or is it better to be attractive to the ladies? That was a question debated by Provengal poets way back in the thirteenth century. Sidis opted for wisdom, but it seemed to Phædrus there ought to be some way you could have both.
The question seemed to imply the stupidity of women but a feminist could turn it around and ask, Is it better to have wisdom or be attractive to men! That’s practically the theme song of the whole feminist movement. Although the feminists and the male Provengal poets would appear to be condemning the opposite sex, they are, in fact, both actually condemning the same thing: not men, not women, but static biological antagonism to social and intellectual Quality.
Phædrus began to feel a slow rock of the boat.
His own cells were sick of all this intellectualizing. They’d had enough for one day. They’d had way too much, in fact, and were starting to switch him off. Tomorrow they’d need him when they got hungry, and they would turn him on again to find them some food, but for now they were rubbing him out. He felt like Hal, the computer in 2001, as its internal patterns slowed down. Daisy… Daisy… give me your… answer… true.
Lila, Lila, what is your answer true?
What a strange, strange day this had been.
Phædrus became aware again of Lila’s body next to him, and again the gentle rocking of the boat. That was the only good thing that had happened all day, the way their bodies paid no attention to all their social and intellectual differences and had gone on in as if these people that owned them didn’t exist at all. They had been at this business of life for so long.
Now that he was quiet he noticed that the boat’s motion wasn’t so much a rocking as a surge, a very faint, very slow, lift and drop accompanying the waves. He wondered if that could be a surge coming in from the ocean. Probably not, he thought. They were still way too far up river from the ocean. Still it could be, he thought. If the tides get up to Troy maybe the surge could get this far.
It could be…
He waited for each next faint lift and fall to come, thinking about it, and then after a while didn’t think any more.