Fatso thought that was pretty funny the way Lila come in. He said she come in like the Queen of Diamonds and wished to know where Mr Jamison could be found. Fatso can imitate anybody, perfect.
Fatso said he didn’t tell her nothing but he just listened. She said she’s on her way to Florida for the season. She was on a yacht with a gentleman and she wished to stop by and renew old acquaintances.
When Fatso said that Jamie broke up laughing.
If she’s with a gentleman what does she want to see me for? Jamie said.
I guess she misses you.
She wants something.
One way to find out, Fatso said.
So the next day they went to where she told Fatso she would be. She wasn’t there so they sat down. Then she come in the door. Sad. She was really looking old. She used to be a real looker. Getting fat too. Drinking too much beer. She always did like her beer. She better take care of herself. Lila saw them and come over to the table where they was sitting. Jamie got up and opened up his arms for a big hug. He said, You really came all the way here just to see me? That’s too much. Too much!
Then he saw the man coming in behind her was with her. He caught one look in that man’s eyes and his muscles went tight… He hugged Lila but he watched that man. His hair was all white… like snow, and his eyes was cold real cold… Like looking in a refrigerator… at the morgue… Bad vibes all over him… All the time he was holding Lila that man was watching them…
What the hell’d she bring him here for? Fatso didn’t say nothing about that. He told her a hundred times not to bring the clientele around. That was the rule. What was the trouble now?
The man put out his hand to shake.
Jamie shook it.
He put out his for Fatso to shake.
Fatso shook it.
This is the Captain, Lila says.
Pleased to meet you, Cap’n, Jamie says.
The Cap’n looks like he wants to sit down.
He sits down.
The Captain is full of smiles like he’s the nicest man ever lived. Nobody fooled. He wants to buy drinks for everybody. Everybody drinking. Everybody smiling. Everybody just sits around and talks nice now till their teeth drop out, if that’s what they want. But that isn’t what they want.
Jamie had nothing to tell. They all looked at him like he was supposed to say something but he didn’t.
Fatso started asking questions then. He asked the Captain where he was from and where they’re going and all about that. He asked about what kind of boat they had and how big it was and how fast it went. Jamie never heard Fatso ask so many questions.
The Captain just sat there with the cold eyes and answered everything just exactly right. Like some kind of detective, maybe. Watch out, Fats, don’t tell him nothing, Jamie thought.
Lila kept looking over like she wanted Jamie to do some talking. Then she said, What are you doing these days, Jamison?
Jamison!?? She never called him that before. What kind of air was that? He thought about it. Then he said, I don’t know, Mizz Lila. He said it that way to mock her a little. Not much of anything, I guess. He made it sound like he just up from Alabama.
Nothing at all?
No ma’am. Every year I’se just a little lazier. Don’t want to do nothing I don’t have to. All wore out with things I don’t have to do.
He watched the Captain when he said this. The Captain just smiled. That made Jamie feel better. If he was a detective he gonna know what that’s about.
We have an opportunity for you, Lila said, which we hope might interest you.
Oh, you do? Jamie said. Let’s hear it.
Lila looked at him funny like she saw how it was going. She said, The Captain has been advised that he needs another crew member for his ocean voyage and we have been hoping that you might consider an offer. I’ve told him you are an excellent person, she said.
Jamie caught her wink. He smiled a little. Then he had to laugh.
What are you laughing at? Lila said.
You sure haven’t changed. Crazy Lila! Always thinking something crazy. That’s why you came all the way here just to talk to me? Just for that?
Yes, she said, and looked at him. She turned her mouth down like he busted every nice feeling she ever had. What’s wrong with that?
Oh, Lila, he said. You sure come a long way.
He looked at both of them for a while. He wondered what kind of place they come from that they could come here and talk to him like that.
He said, You mean you and the Captain here want to sit on your luxury yacht, sippin’ Juleps and watchin’ the sunset go down, while I stand there and say "Yessah, yessah"?
Not like that, Lila said.
What the hell do you think I am? Jamie said. It really made him mad, coming all the way down here just to hear this. And they thought they were being nice to him.
He turned to the Captain. Is that all you came here for? To find yourself a cheap nigger to work on your boat?
The Captain looked like he never heard it. Like what he said to him just bounced off some stone wall. It’s not my idea, he said.
Then what did you come here for?
I don’t know, the Captain said. That’s what I was trying to find out.
The Captain got up. I’ve got an appointment now. He picked up his coat. I’ll take care of the bill on the way out, he said. He looked at Lila real pissed. See you later, he said. Then he went.
Lila looked scared.
What the hell you up to, Lila? Jamie said.
You said you weren’t doing anything, she said. Why did you put him down like that? He didn’t do anything to you.
You know what he’s thinking, Jamie said.
You don’t know anything about him, Lila said. He’s just a nice man and a real gentleman.
Well, if you’re making it with this nice gentleman, what are you bringing him here for? If you’re making it with this nice old cracker you better keep right on making it with him, Lila, because you sure ain’t making it anywhere else.
I was just trying to do you a favor, Lila said.
What kind of favor is that?
Well, think about it, Lila said. What do you think is going to happen if we go sailing down to Florida with him? Do you think he’s going to live forever?
Jamie looked at Fatso to see if he heard what she was saying. Fats looked back at him the same way.
You mean you want me to be there to help in case he accidentally happens to fall overboard, or something? Jamie asked.
Yes.
Jamie looked at Fatso again and then looked down. He shook his head and laughed. Then he thought about it some more.
Then he looked up at her, Sometimes I think I’m bad, Lila, and then someone like you comes along and shows me how.
They talked about old times. Millie’s gone. Nobody knows where. Mindy got married, he told her. It’s no good any more, he told her. You don’t know how bad it’s got.
She didn’t listen. All she wanted to do was talk about Florida.
After she left Fatso asked, How long did you know her?
Long time, Jamie said. She used to be good. But she always talked back. That old fart she was with, that’s what she’s good for now. That’s her speed. With him. She walked out on me and I never did nothing to her. Now she should stay the hell away.
I’m so tired of them, Jamie said. Long time ago I used to think they was everything. You know, all the money and the big cars and the big smiles and the big-looking clothes. You know? Padded shoulders. I thought that was really it. Then I got to see what really went on with them and why they have to have all that — that money and boats and furs and padded shoulders and everything.
Why?
Why? Because if they ever lose that big money they got nothing. Under all that big money there is nothing there! Nobody! Nobody home.
I mean it, Jamie said. That’s what drives them people day and night. Trying to cover that up. What we know. They think they fool you. They ain’t foolin' nobody.
They know we got something they haven’t got. And they come here and they going to try to take it away from us. But they can’t figure out what it is. It just drives them crazy. What is it we got they can’t get away from us?
Fatso wondered how far the boat can go.
Did you hear what she said? Fatso asked. That boat can go all the way to South America.
Fatso said he heard about a man out on Long Island who buys boats, no questions.
How much do you think that boat is worth? Fatso said.
Sure would be nice to have a big boat like that, Fatso said. Go sailing down to Florida. Lots of nice stuff down there in Florida.
All kinds of stuff, Fatso said. You know Belford? He goes down to Andrews Island down there and gets all kind of good news. Can make a lot of money that way. If you was on a boat you might put some of that good news where nobody can find it and when you come back take it off again. Nobody know the difference.
Fatso smiled. And if they find it that nice friend of Lila might have to go to jail.
Jamie didn’t say any more to Fatso. But he was thinking.
It was a long way to the hotel but Phædrus felt like walking it. After that blow-up with Lila he needed to walk. This city always made him feel like walking. In the past whenever he’d come here he’d always walked everywhere. Tomorrow he’d be gone.
The skyscrapers rose up all around him now and the street was crowded with people and cars. About twenty or thirty blocks to go, he figured. But these were the short blocks going up and down the island, not the long blocks going across. He could feel himself speeding up.
The New York eyes were everywhere now. Quick, guarded, emotionless. Watch out, they said. Concentrate! Things happen fast around here… Don’t miss those horn honks!
This city! He would never get used to it. He always wanted to fill up with tranquilizers before he arrived. Some day he’d come here without being manic and overwhelmed, but that day hadn’t arrived. Always this wild crazy exhilarated feeling. Crowds, high speed, mental detachment.
It was these crazy skyscrapers. The 3-D. Not just in front of you and in back of you and right of you and left of you — above you and below you too. Thousands of people hundreds of feet up in the air talking on telephones and staring into computers and conferring with each other, as though it were normal. If you call that normal you call anything normal.
A light turned yellow. He hurried across… Drivers run you down and kill you here. That’s why you don’t take tranquilizers. Take tranquilizers and you just might get killed. This adrenalin is protection.
At the curb he hoisted his canvas bag full of mail on his shoulder so he could carry it better, then continued. There must be twenty pounds of mail in it, he thought, all the mail since Cleveland. He could spend the rest of the day reading it in his hotel room. He was so full from that lunch with his editor he could skip supper and just read until his famous visitor showed up.
The magazine interviews seemed to have gone well enough — predictable questions about what he was doing now (writing his next book); what his next book was about (Indians); and what changes had occurred since his first book was written. He knew what to tell them because he’d been a reporter himself once, but for some reason he didn’t tell them about the boat. That was something he didn’t want to share. He’d always heard celebrities led double lives. Here it was, happening… Junk in store windows… radios. Hand-calculators… A woman coming toward him hasn’t clicked yet, that quick New York dart-of-the-eyes, but she will… Here it comes… Click!… Then looks away… She passes by… Like the click of a candid-camera shutter…
This was manic New York, now. Later would come depressive New York. Now everything’s exciting because it’s so different. As soon as the excitement wears off depression will come. It always does.
Culture shock. People who live here all their lives don’t get that culture shock. They can’t go around being overwhelmed all the time. So to cope they seem to pick some small part of it all and try to be on top of that. But they miss something… Someone practicing the piano upstairs… Eee-oh-eee-oh… police wagon… White flowers, chrysanthemums, 70 dollars… Guy in the street on a skateboard, Korean-looking, headed for Leo Vito’s delicatessen. Transients, like himself, who are overwhelmed and get manic and depressive are maybe the ones who really understand the place, the only ones with the Zen shoshin, the beginner’s mind… There he goes… Lovers hand in hand. Not so young either… A pennant of some kind in a half-open window two stories up… Too far away to read. Will never know what it says.
All these different patterns of people’s lives passing through each other without any contact at all… Smells… all different kinds of food odors… Cigars… Above the window with the pennant, a billboard for Marx Furs. Something angering… The model… High-fashion, high-class. I am so desirable, I am so unapproachable. But if you have the price (you cheap bastard), I am for sale. That price… Was it all for sale if you had that price?… Do women really act like that here?… Some, he supposed… it must sell furs. And jewelry and cosmetics… Ahh, it was just an advertising cliché. Those guys were for sale… More candid-camera eyes, some cynical. If he wasn’t up to something, why was he here?… It wore on you, that guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude. He didn’t want to prove anything to anyone. He was done with that.
That was it. He didn’t want to prove anything. Not to Rigel, not to Lila, not to her friends… God, what a shock that was. If those were her friends he sure didn’t want to meet her enemies.
He wondered what it was about himself that she couldn’t see when he was getting angry. Just now at the café she’d gone on for fifteen minutes about what great people they were and she never saw what was coming. She missed the whole point of everything. She’s after Quality, like everybody else, but she defines it entirely in biological terms. She doesn’t see intellectual quality at all. It’s outside her range. She doesn’t even see social quality.
That whole thing with her on the river was like Mae West and Sherlock Holmes. What a mismatch. Sherlock lowers his standards by having anything to do with Mae, but Mae is also lowering her standards by having anything to do with Sherlock. Sherlock is smart, all right, but that isn’t what interests Mae. These biological friends of Lila: that’s what she goes for… They can have her. She’d be off the boat tonight. If this last meeting at the hotel went as smoothly as the others he’d be out of here tomorrow and heading south… More eyes… They weren’t watching you so much as watching out for you. Survivors' eyes.
He had to step off the sidewalk to get around a steel mesh fence in front of a huge hole that went down now where there used to be something. Cement trucks, at the bottom of the hole were pouring concrete. On the other side of the hole the adjacent building looked all scarred and damaged. Maybe that was coming down next. Always something going up. Always something coming down. Change and change, on and on. He had never come here when there wasn’t all this demolition and construction going on.
Suddenly he was back into posh fabrics and clothing stores. Saying what this city is like is like saying what Europe is like. It depends on what neighborhood you’re in, what time of day, how depressed you are.
He buttoned the top of his jacket, put his free hand in his pocket, and walked more briskly. He should have worn a sweater under this jacket. The weather was turning cold again.
The first time he was alone here, when was it? In the Army maybe? No, it couldn’t have been. Some time around the Second World War. He couldn’t remember. All he could remember was the route. It was from Bowling Green all the way up Broadway to somewhere past Columbus Circle.
He remembered it was a cold day like this one so that when he slowed down he got chilly. So instead of getting tired and slowing down more and more he kept going faster and faster until in the end he was running through crowds, up blocks and across intersection after intersection with sweat soaking his clothes and running down his face. The next day in his hotel room his legs were so stiff he could hardly move.
It must have been on his way to India. Breaking out of this whole system. Running to get free. He couldn’t run like that any more. He’d never make it. Now he had to go slow and use his mind more.
What was he running from? He didn’t know then. It seemed like he’d been running all his life.
It used to fill his dreams, night after night. When he was little it was a giant octopus that he’d seen in a cartoon movie. The octopus would come up on the beach and wrap its tentacles around him and squeeze him to death. He would wake up in the dark and think he was dead. Later it was a huge shadowy faceless giant who was coming to kill him. He would wake up afraid and then slowly realize that the giant wasn’t real. He supposed everyone had dreams like that although he doubted whether most people had them so often.
He had come to think of dreams as Dynamic perceptions of reality. They were suppressed and filtered out of consciousness by conventional patterns of static social and intellectual order but they revealed a primary truth: a value truth. The static patterns of the dreams were false but the underlying values that produced the patterns were true. In static reality there is no octopus coming to squeeze us to death, no giant that is going to devour us and digest us and turn us into a part of its own body so that it can grow stronger and stronger while we are dissolved and lost into nothingness.
But in Dynamic reality?… These manhole covers always fascinated him. Many intersections seemed to have nearly a dozen of them, some new and rough, others worn smooth and shiny from so many tires rolling over them. How many tires did it take to wear a steel manhole cover smooth?
He’d seen drawings of how the manholes led down to staggeringly complex underground networks of systems that made this whole island happen: electric power networks, telephone networks, water pipe networks, gas line networks, sewage networks, subway tunnels, TV cables, and who knows how many special-purpose networks he had never even heard of, like the nerves and arteries and muscle fibers of a giant organism.
The Giant of his dreams.
It was spooky how it all worked with an intelligence of its own that was way beyond the intelligence of any person. He would never know how to fix one of these systems of wire and tubes down below the ground that ran it all. Yet there was someone who did. And there was a system for finding that person if he was needed, and a system for finding that system that would find him. The cohesive force that held all these systems together: that was the Giant.
When he was young Phædrus used to think about cows and pigs and chickens and how they never knew that the nice farmer who provided food and shelter was doing so only so that he could sell them to be killed and eaten. They would oink, or cluck, and he would come with food, so they probably thought he was some sort of servant.
He also used to wonder if there was a higher farmer that did the same thing to people, a different kind of organism that they saw every day and thought of as beneficial, providing food and shelter and protection from enemies, but an organism that secretly was raising these people for its own sustenance, feeding upon them and using their accumulated energy for its own independent purposes. Later he saw there was: this Giant. People look upon the social patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a farmer; different from themselves, incomprehensible, but benevolent and appealing. Yet the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its own purposes just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher organism is feeding upon a lower one and accomplishing more by doing so than the lower organism can accomplish alone.
The metaphysics of substance makes it difficult to see the Giant. It makes it customary to think of a city like New York as a work of man, but what man invented it? What group of men invented it? Who sat around and thought up how it should all go together?
If man invented societies and cities, why are all societies and cities so repressive of man? Why would man want to invent internally contradictory standards and arbitrary social institutions for the purpose of giving himself a bad time? This man who goes around inventing societies to repress himself seems real as long as you deal with him in the abstract, but he evaporates as you get more specific.
Sometimes people think there are some evil individual men somewhere who are exploiting them, some secret cabal of capitalists, or 400, or Wall Street bankers, or WASPs or name-any-minority group that gets together periodically and has secret conferences on how to exploit them personally. These men are supposed to be enemies of man. It gets confusing, but nobody seems to notice the confusion.
A metaphysics of substance makes us think that all evolution stops with the highest evolved substance, the physical body of man. It makes us think that cities and societies and thought structures are all subordinate creations of this physical body of man. But it’s as foolish to think of a city or a society as created by human bodies as it is to think of human bodies as a creation of the cells, or to think of cells as created by protein and DNA molecules, or to think of DNA as created by carbon and other inorganic atoms. If you follow that fallacy long enough you come out with the conclusion that individual electrons contain the intelligence needed to build New York City all by themselves. Absurd.
If it’s possible to imagine two red blood cells sitting side by side asking, Will there ever be a higher form of evolution than us? and looking around and seeing nothing, deciding there isn’t, then you can imagine the ridiculousness of two people walking down a street of Manhattan asking if there will ever be any form of evolution higher than man, meaning biological man.
Biological man doesn’t invent cities or societies any more than pigs and chickens invent the farmer that feeds them. The force of evolutionary creation isn’t contained by substance. Substance is just one kind of static pattern left behind by the creative force.
This city is another static pattern left behind by the creative force. It’s composed of substance but substance didn’t create it all by itself. Neither did a biological organism called man create it all by himself. This city is a higher pattern than either a substance or a biological pattern called man. Just as biology exploits substance for its own purposes, so does this social pattern called a city exploit biology for its own purposes. Just as a farmer raises cows for the sole purpose of devouring them, this pattern grows living human bodies for the sole purpose of devouring them. That is what the Giant really does. It converts accumulated biological energy into forms that serve itself.
When societies and cultures and cities are seen not as inventions of man but as higher organisms than biological man, the phenomena of war and genocide and all the other forms of human exploitation become more intelligible. Mankind has never been interested in getting itself killed. But the superorganism, the Giant, who is a pattern of values superimposed on top of biological human bodies, doesn’t mind losing a few bodies to protect his greater interests.
The Giant began to materialize out of Phædrus' Dynamic dreams when he was in college. A professor of chemistry had mentioned at his fraternity that a large chemical firm was offering excellent jobs for graduates of the school and almost every member of the fraternity thought it was wonderful news. The Second World War had just ended and good jobs were all that anyone seemed to think of. The revolution of the sixties was still twenty years off. No one had thought of making the film, The Graduate, back then.
Phædrus had always believed science is a search for truth. A real scientist is not supposed to sell out that goal to corporations who are searching for mere profit. Or, if he had to sell out in order to live that was nothing to be happy about. These fraternity brothers of his acted like they never heard of science as truth. Phædrus had suddenly seen a tentacle of the Giant reaching out and he was the only one who could see it.
So here was this Giant, this nameless, faceless system reaching for him, ready to devour him and digest him. It would use his energy to grow stronger and stronger throughout his life while he grew older and weaker until, when he was no longer of much use, it would excrete him and find another younger person full of energy to take his place and do the same thing all over again.
That was why he had run that day through all this traffic — through all these systems and sub-systems of the island. He was on his way to India, done with this corporate pseudo-science, still pursuing truth, knowing that to find it he would have to get free of the Giant first.
Here up in the sky above him right now were the heads of the corporation that had prompted the chemistry professor to make that talk to that fraternity so many years ago. This was the brain center of that corporate network, surrounded by other networks: financial networks, information networks, electronic transmission networks. That’s what all those tiny bodies were doing up there suspended so many hundreds of feet up in the sky. Participating in the Giant.
So Phædrus had been right in running then. But now — funny thought — this was actually his home. All his income came from here. His only fixed address now was right here — his publisher’s address on Madison Avenue. He was as much a part of the Giant as anyone else.
Once you understand something well enough, you don’t need to run from it. In recent years each time he’d returned to New York he could feel his fear of this old monster lessening, and a kind of familiar affection for it growing.
From a Metaphysics of Quality’s point of view this devouring of human bodies is a moral activity because it’s more moral for a social pattern to devour a biological pattern than for a biological pattern to devour a social pattern. A social pattern is a higher form of evolution. This city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was creating something better than any biological organism could by itself achieve.
Well, of course! My God! Look at it! The power of this place! Fantastic! What individual work of art can come anywhere near to equaling it? Sure: dirty, noisy, rude, dangerous, expensive. Always has been and probably always will be. Always been a hell-hole if what you’re looking for is stability and serenity… But if you’re looking for stability and serenity, go to a cemetery, don’t come here! This is the most Dynamic place on earth!
Now Phædrus felt it all around him — the speed, the height, the crowds and their tension. All the early strangeness was gone now. He was in it.
He remembered that its great symbol used to be the ticker tape, ticking out unpredictable fortunes rising and falling every second, a great symbol of luck. Luck. When E. B. White wrote, If you want to live in New York you should be willing to be lucky, he meant not just lucky but willing to be lucky — that is, Dynamic. If you cling to some set static pattern, when opportunity comes you won’t take it. You have to hang loose, and when the time comes to be lucky, then be lucky: that’s Dynamic.
When they call it freedom, that’s not right. Freedom doesn’t mean anything. Freedom’s just an escape from something negative. The real reason it’s so hallowed is that when people talk about it they mean Dynamic Quality.
That’s what neither the socialists nor the capitalists ever got figured out. From a static point of view socialism is more moral than capitalism. It’s a higher form of evolution. It is an intellectually guided society, not just a society that is guided by mindless traditions. That’s what gives socialism its drive. But what the socialists left out and what has all but killed their whole undertaking is an absence of a concept of indefinite Dynamic Quality. You go to any socialist city and it’s always a dull place because there’s little Dynamic Quality.
On the other hand the conservatives who keep trumpeting about the virtues of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own self-interest. They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in their age-old exploitation of the poor. Some of them seem to sense there is also something mysteriously virtuous in a free enterprise system and you can see them struggling to put it into words but they don’t have the metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the socialists do.
The Metaphysics of Quality provides the vocabulary. A free market is a Dynamic institution. What people buy and what people sell, in other words what people value, can never be contained by any intellectual formula. What makes the marketplace work is Dynamic Quality. The market is always changing and the direction of that change can never be predetermined.
The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody richer by preventing static economic patterns from setting in and stagnating economic growth. That is the reason the major capitalist economies of the world have done so much better since the Second World War than the major socialist economies. It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less moral as static patterns go. What makes the free-enterprise system superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and objectively, have inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the buying and selling of things. They closed it because the metaphysical structure of their objectivity never told them Dynamic Quality exists.
People, like everything else, work better in parallel than they do in series, and that is what happens in this free-enterprise city. When things are organized socialistically in a bureaucratic series, any increase in complexity increases the probability of failure. But when they’re organized in a free-enterprise parallel, an increase in complexity becomes an increase in diversity more capable of responding to Dynamic Quality, and thus an increase of the probability of success. It’s this diversity and parallelism that make this city work.
And not just this city. Our greatest national economic success, agriculture, is organized almost entirely in parallel. All life has parallelism built into it. Cells work in parallel. Most body organs work in parallel: eyes, brains, lungs. Species operate in parallel, democracies operate in parallel; even science seems to operate best when it is organized through the parallelism of the scientific societies.
It’s ironic that although the philosophy of science leaves no room for any undefined Dynamic activity, it’s science’s unique organization for the handling of the Dynamic that gives it its superiority. Science superseded old religious forms, not because what it says is more true in any absolute sense (whatever that is), but because what it says is more Dynamic.
If scientists had simply said Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong without any willingness to further investigate the subject, then science would have simply become another minor religious creed. But scientific truth has always contained an overwhelming difference from theological truth: it is provisional. Science always contains an eraser, a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight could wipe out old static patterns without destroying science itself. Thus science, unlike orthodox theology, has been capable of continuous, evolutionary growth. As Phædrus had written on one of his slips, The pencil is mightier than the pen.
That’s the whole thing: to obtain static and Dynamic Quality simultaneously. If you don’t have the static patterns of scientific knowledge to build upon you’re back with the cave man. But if you don’t have the freedom to change those patterns you’re blocked from any further growth.
You can see that where political institutions have improved throughout the centuries the improvement can usually be traced to a static-Dynamic combination: a king or constitution to preserve the static, and a parliament or jury that can act as a Dynamic eraser; a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight can wipe out old static patterns without destroying the government itself.
Phædrus was surprised by the conciseness of a commentary on Robert’s Rules of Order that seemed to capture the whole thing in two sentences: No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organization. No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become a majority. The power of those two sentences is that they create a stable static situation where Dynamic Quality can flourish.
In the abstract, at least. When you get to the particular it’s not so simple.
It seems as though any static mechanism that is open to Dynamic Quality must also be open to degeneracy to falling back to lower forms of quality.
This creates the problem of getting maximum freedom for the emergence of Dynamic Quality while prohibiting degeneracy from destroying the evolutionary gains of the past. Americans like to talk about all their freedom but they think it’s disconnected from something Europeans often see in America: the degeneracy that goes with the Dynamic.
It seems as though a society that is intolerant of all forms of degeneracy shuts off its own Dynamic growth and becomes static. But a society that tolerates all forms of degeneracy degenerates. Either direction can be dangerous. The mechanisms by which a balanced society grows and does not degenerate are difficult, if not impossible, to define.
How can you tell the two directions apart? Both oppose the status quo. Radical idealists and degenerate hooligans sometimes strongly resemble each other.
Jazz was generally considered degenerate music when it first appeared. Modern art was considered degenerate.
When you define morality scientifically as that which enhances evolution it sounds as though you have really solved the problem of what morality is. But then when you try to say specifically what is and what isn’t evolution and where evolution is going, you find you are right back in the soup again. The problem is that you can’t really say whether a specific change is evolutionary at the time it occurs. It is only with a century or so of hindsight that it appears evolutionary.
For example, there was no way those Zuni priests could have known that this fellow they were hanging by his thumbs was going to turn into some future savior of their tribe. Here was a drunken bragging window-peeper who told the authorities they could all go to hell and they couldn’t do anything to him. What were they supposed to do? What else could they do? They couldn’t let every damn degenerate in Zuni do as he pleased on the ground that he might, at some future date, save the tribe. They had to enforce the rules to hold the tribe together.
This is really the central problem in the static-Dynamic conflict of evolution: how do you tell the saviors from the degenerates? Particularly when they look alike, talk alike and break all the rules alike? Freedoms that save the saviors also save the degenerates and allow them to tear the whole society apart. But restrictions that stop the degenerates also stop the creative Dynamic forces of evolution.
It was almost a custom for people to come to New York, prophesy a doomsday of one sort or another and then wait for it to descend. They’re doing it now. But so far the doomsday has never come. New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there. Always changing. Always changing for the worse, it seems, but then right in the middle of the worse comes this new Dynamic thing that nobody ever heard of before and the worse is forgotten because this new Dynamic thing (which is also getting worse) has taken its place. What looks like hell always turns out to be something else.
When something new and Dynamic wants to come into the world it often looks like hell, but it can get born in New York. It can happen. It seems like it could happen anywhere but that’s not so. There has to be a certain kind of people who can look at it and say Hey, wait a second! That’s good! without having to look over their shoulder to see if somebody else is saying the same thing. That’s rare. This is one of the few places in the world where people don’t ask whether something’s been approved somewhere else.
That, Phædrus thought, is how the Metaphysics of Quality explains the incredible contrasts of the best and the worst one sees here. Both exist here in such terrific intensity because New York’s never been committed to any preservation of its static patterns. It’s always ready to change. Whether you are or not. That is what creates its horror and that is what creates its power. Its strength is its looseness. It’s the freedom to be so awful that gives it the freedom to be so good.
And so things keep happening here all the time that have this Dynamic sparkle that saves it all. In the midst of everything that’s wrong, it sparkles.
Like the kids. You don’t see them but they’re here, growing like mushrooms in secret places. Once Phædrus went to a museum on a weekday morning and there were hundreds of them pointing at all the minerals and dinosaurs and grabbing each other’s arms and holding hands, laughing and watching their teacher from time to time to see if everything was all right. Then suddenly they all vanished and it was as though they had never been there.
What you see in New York depends on your static patterns, What makes the city Dynamic is the way it always busts up whatever those patterns are. This morning, in the restaurant, this black, jet-black thug-like guy with a dirty wool cap pulled over his head comes in. Dirty blue satin sports jacket, Reebok shoes, also dirty. Orders a coffee which they have to serve him because it’s the law and then what does he do? Does he pull out a gun? No. Guess again. He pulls out a New York Times. He starts reading. It’s the book review section. He’s some kind of an intellectual. This is New York.
Wham! You’re always seeing something you’re not set up to see. It’s not been all bad, this rich-poor contrast. When you pass a lot of static laws to cut out the worst, the best goes with it, the sparkle disappears and what’s left is just a lot of suburban blandness. It’s been a psychological fuel that’s jet-propelled a lot of people into doing things they might have been too lazy to do otherwise. If everybody here had the same income, same clothes, same background, same opportunities, the whole city would go dead. It’s this physical proximity and incredible social gulf that gives this place such power. The city brings everyone up a notch. Or down ten notches. Or up a hundred notches. It sorts them out. It’s always been that way, millions of rich and poor all mixed together, skyscrapers and parks, diamond tiaras in the windows and drunken vomit on the street. It really shocks you and motivates you. The Devil is taking the hindmost right before your eyes! And just beyond the beggars go the frontmost, chauffeur-assisted, into their stretch limousines. Yeow!! Keep moving! Don’t slow down!
You see the people who smile at you and are ready to cheat you. Sometimes you miss the ones who scowl at you but secretly support you in every way they can.
When you talk to them they treat you with a ten-foot pole, but at the other end of it you sense this guarded affection. They’re just survivors whose rough edges are all worn smooth. They know how this celebrity of a city works.
It was getting darker now. And colder too. An edge of depression was approaching. Sooner or later it always appeared. The adrenalin was about normal now and still dropping. His walking had slowed down.
Phædrus reached what he recognized was the edge of Central Park. It was windier here. From the northwest. That’s what was bringing all this cold weather. The trees were dark now and billowing heavily in the wind. They still had their leaves, probably because it was nearer the ocean here and warmer than back at Troy and Kingston.
As he walked along he saw the park still kept its quiet, genteel look despite everything.
Of all the monuments the Victorians left to the city, this masterpiece of Olmstead and Vaux’s was the greatest, he thought. If money and power and vanity were all they were interested in, why was this place here?
He wondered what the Victorians would think about it now. The skyscrapers all around it would astonish them. They would like the way the trees have grown so big. He had an old Currier and Ives print of the park that showed the park almost barren of trees. Probably they would think the park was fine. Elsewhere in New York they would have other opinions.
They certainly put their stamp on this city. It’s still here, under all the Art Deco and Bauhaus. The Victorians were the ones who really built New York up, he thought, and it’s still their city deep down inside. When all their brownstones with their ornate pilasters and entablatures went out of style they were considered the apotheosis of ugliness, but now, as their buildings get fewer every year, they give a nice accent to all the twentieth-century slick.
Victorian rococo brickwork and stone work and iron work. God, how they loved ornateness. It went with their language. The final ultimate proof of their rise from the savages. They really thought they had done it in this city.
Everywhere you still see little signs of what they thought about this city. All the baroque brownstone friezes and gargoyles waiting for the wreckers' ball. The riveted iron bridges in Central Park. Their wonderful museums. Their lions in front of the public library. They were sculpting an image of themselves.
All this unnecessary ornateness they left behind: that wasn’t just vanity. There was a lot of love in it, too. They gussied this city up so much partly because they loved it. They paid for all these gargoyles and ornamental iron work the way a newly rich father might buy a fancy dress for a daughter he’s proud of.
It’s easy to condemn them as pretentious snobs, since they openly invited that opinion, and ignore the history that made them that way. They did everything they could to ignore that history themselves. What the Victorians never wanted you to know was that actually they were nothing more than a bunch of rich hicks. For the most part they were rural, backwater, religion-bound people who, after the Civil War had disrupted their lives, suddenly found themselves in the middle of an industrial age.
There was no precedent for it. They really had no guidelines for what to do with themselves. The possibilities of steel and steam and electricity and science and engineering were dazzling. They were getting rich beyond their wildest dreams, and the money pouring in showed no signs of ever stopping. And so a lot of the things they were later condemned for, their love of snobbery and gingerbread architecture and ornamental cast-iron, were just the mannerisms of decent people who were trying to live up to all this. The only wealthy models available were the European aristocracy.
What we tend to forget is that, unlike the European aristocrats they aped, the American Victorians were a very creative people. The telephone, the telegraph, the railroad, the transatlantic cable, the light bulb, the radio, the phonograph, the motion pictures and the techniques of mass production — almost all the great technological changes that are associated with the twentieth century are, in fact, American Victorian inventions. This city is composed of their value patterns! It was their optimism, their belief in the future, their codes of craftsmanship and labor and thrift and self-discipline that really built twentieth-century America. Since the Victorians disappeared the entire drift of this century has been toward a dissipation of these values.
You could imagine some old Victorian aristocrat coming back to these streets, looking around, and then becoming stony-faced at what he saw.
Phædrus saw that it was nearly dark. He was almost at his hotel now. As he crossed the street he noticed a gust of wind swirling dust and scraps of paper up from the pavement before the lights of a taxi. A sign on top of the taxi said SEE THE BIG APPLE and under it the name of some tour line, with a telephone number.
The Big Apple. He could almost feel the disgust with which a Victorian would greet that name.
They never thought of New York City that way. The Big Opportunity or the Big Future or the Empire City would have been closer to their vision. They saw the city as a monument to their own greatness, not something they were devouring. The mentality that sees New York as a "Big Apple,"' the Victorian might say, is the mentality of a worm. And then he might add, To be sure, the worm means the name only as a compliment, but that is because the worm has no idea of what the effects of his eating the Big Apple are.
The hotel doorman seemed to recognize Phædrus as he approached and opened the gold-lettered, mono-grammed glass door with a professional smile and flourish. But as Phædrus smiled back he realized the doorman probably seemed to recognize everybody who came in. That was his role. Part of the New York illusion.
Inside, the lobby’s world of subdued gilt and plush suggested Victorian elegance without denying the advantages of twentieth-century modernity. Only the howl of wind at the crack between the elevator doors reminded him of the world outside.
In the elevator he thought about the vertical winds that must be in all these buildings, and wondered if there were compensating vertical downdrafts outside. Probably not. The hot elevator winds would just keep rising into the sky after they left the building. Cold air would fill in from horizontal currents on the streets.
The room had been cleaned since he’d left and the bed had been made. He dropped the heavy canvas sack of mail on it. He wouldn’t have much time to read mail now. That walk had taken longer than he’d thought it would. But he felt sort of tired and relaxed and that felt good.
He turned on the living room light and heard a buzzing sound by the bulb. At first he thought it was a loose bulb, but then he saw that the buzzing was coming from a large moth.
He watched it for a moment and wondered, How did it get up this high in the sky? He thought moths stayed close to the ground.
It blended with the Victorian decor of the place as it fluttered around the lampshade.
It must be a Victorian moth, he thought, aspiring eternally to higher things. And then, reaching its goal, burning to death and falling to the dust below. Victorians loved that kind of imagery.
Phædrus went to a large glass door that seemed to open onto a balcony. There was too much reflection from the room to see what was on the other side, so he opened it a little. Through the opening he could see the night sky, and far away, the random patterns of window lights in other skyscrapers. He opened the door wider, stepped out onto the balcony and felt the cold air. It was windy up here. And high, too. He could see he was almost at a level with the tops of the buildings way over on the other side of the huge dark space of Central Park. The balcony seemed to be made of some sort of gray stone, but it was too dark to see.
He stepped to the stone rail and looked over… YEEOW!!…
Way down there the cars were like little ladybugs. They were yellow, most of them, and they crawled along slowly, just like bugs. The yellow ones must be taxis. They moved so slowly. One of them pulled to the curb directly below him and stopped. Then Phædrus could see a speck that had to be a person get out and go into the entrance he himself had come in…
He wondered how long it would take to fall all the way down there. Thirty seconds? Less than that, he figured. Thirty seconds is a long time. Five seconds would be more like it…
The thought started a tingling in his body. It rose to his head and made him dizzy. He stepped back carefully.
He looked up for a while. The sky was not really a night sky. It was filled with the same orange glow he and Lila had seen at Nyack. Only much more intense now. He supposed it was atmospheric pollution or even normal sea mist or dust reflecting the street-lights from below back down from the sky, but it gave a feeling of not being really outdoors at all. This Giant of a city even dominated the sky.
How quiet it was now. Almost serene. Strange that way up here, looking down on all the noise and jangle and tension below, is this upper zone of silence. You don’t even think about it when you’re down on the street.
No wonder multi-millionaires paid huge sums for space up here in the sky. They could endure all that competitive life down below when they had a place like this up here to retreat to.
The Giant could be very good to you, he thought… If it wanted to.
Lila didn’t care where she was going. She was so mad at the Captain she could spit. That bastard! Who the hell did he think he was calling her that — A bitch setting up a dog fight. She should have hit him!
What did he know? She should have said, Yes, and who made me one? Was it me? You don’t know me! She should have said, Nobody knows me. You’ll never know me. I’ll die before you know me. But boy oh boy, do I ever know YOU! That’s what she should have told him.
She was so sick of men. She didn’t want to hear men talk. They just want to dirty you. That’s what they all want to do. Just dirty you so you’ll be just like them. And then tell you what a bitch you are.
This is what she got for being honest. Wasn’t that funny? If she’d lied to him everything would be fine. If she was really a bitch did he think she would have told him all that stuff about Jamie? No. That was really funny.
What was she going to do with these shirts now? She sure wasn’t going to give them to him now. She was tired of carrying them. She spent hours looking for them and now she had to take them back. Why did she have to try to be nice to him? She never learned. No matter what you do they always want to make you look worse than they are.
You’re not doing anything wrong, you know, you’re not hurting anybody and you’re not stealing anything, you know, and still they just hate you for it anyway, for making love. Before they get on you’re a real angel, but after they get off you’re a real whore. For a while. Until they get ready again. Then you’re an angel again.
She’d never been on the street every night. She wasn’t one of the bad ones. Just sometimes when she felt like it. She liked it. She always did. She liked it all the time. Every night. So what? And she didn’t like it always with the same man. And she didn’t care what people thought about her. And she liked money too, to spend. And she liked booze too and a lot of other things. Put all that together and you got Lila, she should have told him. Just don’t try to turn me into somebody else. 'Cause it won’t work. I’m just Lila and I always will be. And if you don’t like me the way I am then just get out. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone. I’ll die first. That’s the way I am. That’s what she should have told him.
A store window showed her reflection. She looked like she was hurrying. She should slow down. She didn’t have to hurry so fast. She didn’t have anywhere to go except to the boat to get her things off.
It was dumb to tell him anything. You can’t tell people like him anything. If you do, they’re gone. All he wanted her for was to prove how big he was. He didn’t care what she said, he just wanted her to be some kind of guinea pig to study or something like that, when he really thought all those bad things about her all the time.
He never talked straight, but she could tell he was picking on her in his mind all the time for things she said. Trying to treat her so nice. He always wanted to know what she thought but he’d never tell her what he thought. Always playing around the edges. That’s what she couldn’t stand. She never should have told him that stuff about nerds like him. That’s what did it. Nerds like him couldn’t stand to hear that.
She knew how to handle people like him. They’re not hard to live with. All you have to do is let them talk. You’ve got to build someone like him up all the time or they get rid of you. She’d probably be going on the boat to Florida tomorrow if she’d kept her mouth shut. She could have taken care of him whenever he wanted it. Jamie didn’t mind. Jamie didn’t care who she slept with. Everybody could have been happy.
Jamie didn’t like the Captain either. Jamie always knew what people were thinking. If somebody thought he was going to make trouble for Jamie, Jamie had him all figured out.
A black witch on a broom looked at her through a display window. It was almost Halloween time.
She didn’t know this part of the city. If she’d ever been here before, she’d forgotten it. Or maybe it had changed so much she didn’t recognize it. Everything was always changing here. Except the big buildings.
When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what’s going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody knows what’s going on.
Why wouldn’t Jamie even give her his address? He acted so different. Something was wrong. She didn’t like that friend of his. Maybe it was just the Captain being there.
She had never been on this street before. There was something about it she didn’t like. It didn’t look dangerous, just grungy. Jamie always told her, Look around, and if you don’t see any women walking by themselves, watch out! But there was an old lady with a dog farther up the street… So, if the Captain was all done with her, that was nothing new… She was used to that. She’d find something… She always landed on her feet.
A little shop had some bottles in the windows and dirt and junk. She always thought they were going to fix things up some day around here but nobody ever fixes anything. It just gets worse and worse.
An old church had a padlock on the doors and a sign saying it was closed. The sign was all faded so it must have been closed for a long time. In a wooden box under the window all the plants were dead. It didn’t look like her grandfather’s church. Her grandfather’s church was bigger and it wasn’t in a dirty city like this.
She’d get a room for a while, a few days maybe, and then look around. That sounded good. She didn’t want to go back on the street. It wasn’t worth it. Jamie said not to do it, and he knows. He said it was too dangerous. It isn’t like it used to be.
She didn’t like this street.
She could always get a job waitressing. She knew how to do that. Then after a while something better would turn up. If she tried to think that way it would make her feel better. But first she had to find some place to stay.
She walked for block after block. She kept an eye out for room signs, but didn’t see any.
She passed a big hole in the street with orange and white stands around it to keep people away. There was steam coming out of the hole. A man with a cement sack was staring at her. He wasn’t going to do anything. Just staring.
She started to read the writing on all the other signs. Leave Fire Lane for Emergency Vehicles… Snow Route… No Standing During Emergency… Vehicles Towed, Moving $9.95 An Hour… Painting. Get Free Estimates. 10% off…
Maybe the signs would tell her what was going on… Drugs Rally… They meant no drugs rally… Irving’s Pantry Deli… Greyer Butcher Block… Clothes Closet King… Audio breakthroughs… We Sell Kosher and Non-Kosher Foods… Natural Health Food store. 20% Off All Vitamins…
Behind an iron fence was a tree with red-orange berries. She remembered a tree like that in her back yard. She used to pick the berries but they were never any good for anything. What’s it doing here? The big steel fence kept people from picking the berries. If she tried to go over there they’d throw her out. Some pigeons were there under the trees… The pigeons could be there but she couldn’t.
Somebody got inside the iron fence and did spray paint all over the wall. She could never figure out what all that writing said. It looked like just names or something. But they write it so funny you can’t see what they’re trying to write. They never say Fuck You or anything. They just write these strange things like there’s something they know that nobody else knows… Driver… Electric Company… Keep Driveway Clear… One Way… They never tell you what you want they only tell you what they want…
Some words in Hebrew on a wall. Napoli Pizza. Franklin Cleaners. Since 1973… Police Line. Do Not Cross Blue Lines. Police Department… A lot of barbed wire on the buildings. There didn’t used to be all that barbed wire on the buildings. There didn’t used to be all that barbed wire.
There is a guy lying on the sidewalk. Some people are walking by him without looking at him…
Personal Touch. Fine Laundering And Dry Cleaning. Hotels, Hospitals and Clubs… Athens Plumbing and Heating… Hilarious Non-Stop Laughter. I Couldn’t Stop Laughing — McGillicudy, New York Times. Winner Tony Award.
Lots of plastic bags were lying around… One Way… They never tell you what you want they only tell you what they want…
These shoes hurt. This street was getting worse. Sidewalks were coming apart here. They’re all broken and slanting so that if she didn’t watch out she’d turn an ankle. She could fall on all that broken glass. The glass was from an empty window where it looked like somebody had tried to break in.
It was beginning to get cold.
She should be doing something different than this. What was she doing here? Something was wrong that she should be living like this. She should be somewhere better.
She crossed a street and when she looked down it, it looked like there was water down there. That must be the river, she thought.
She decided to get a cab. She still had to get to the boat and get her suitcase off before it got dark. It was too far to walk. Already her legs felt worn out. She hadn’t walked this far in a long time. A cab would cost a lot but there wasn’t anything else to do. If only she hadn’t bought these dumb shirts.
But when she came to a corner she saw a restaurant sign down across the street at the other end of the block. That looked really good. She could rest and get something to eat and call a cab from there.
When she looked through the restaurant window she saw that the menu was expensive. The tables inside had cloths on them and cloth napkins.
Oh, what the hell, she thought. It was time to celebrate something. Being through with the Captain, maybe.
Inside it wasn’t crowded. A little old lady waitress was laying out napkins on the other side of the room. She saw Lila and gave her a little smile and came over slowly and showed her to a table by the window.
At the table Lila sat down. It felt really good to sit down.
The waitress asked her if she would care for anything to drink before eating.
I’ll have a scotch and soda, Lila said. No, make that a Johnnie Walker Black and soda, she smiled. The waitress didn’t seem to have much expression. She went off to the bar.
The street out the window looked like some of the streets in Rochester. It was old, without many people on it. In some dirt by the gutter under an old fire escape a cat walked slowly, looking for something. It pawed the dirt first to one side and then to the other. It couldn’t seem to find what it was looking for.
Lila still had her old address book. She could call up some old friends and maybe they would invite her over and they could talk about things. She could call them up and maybe they would be able to tell her where she could find a good room. They might even let her stay with them for a while. You could never tell.
She saw through the window that across the street the cat was gone.
The trouble with seeing all her old friends again was that she didn’t want to. It didn’t feel good to think about it. She didn’t want to talk to any of them. She wanted to be done with all that. She didn’t want to talk to anybody.
When the waitress came with the drink Lila gave her a big smile and a big thank you. The waitress smiled a little and then went away.
Lila took a sip of her drink. Oh, did that ever taste good!
She looked at the menu to see what to have to eat.
She ought to just get something cheap. The trouble was she was really hungry. Those steaks really looked good. And French fries. With all the calories. She had better be careful. She didn’t want to get into that. She already had too much of that. But it sure sounded good, anyway. She remembered the French fries she made on the boat. Oh, why did she ever tell him anything? She could be making French fries all the way down to Florida if only she had kept her mouth shut.
As she thought about this Lila saw a man’s face staring at her through the window. It startled her for a second. But then she thought, what’s the matter, Lila, you getting scared of men?
He wasn’t bad looking.
She smiled at him…
…He just looked at her. Then he looked away.
Then he looked at her again.
She winked to see what that would do.
He smiled a little bit and then pretended he was reading the menu in the window. She stared down at her own menu but watched out of the corner of her eye.
After a while he moved on. She waited to hear the door open, but it didn’t. He was gone.
She wondered if she said something that made Jamie angry. He was so different this time. Something was wrong. Something had happened to him, and that was why he wouldn’t give his address. He was the kind who didn’t tell you. He didn’t want to hurt your feelings. That was the way he was.
The Captain wouldn’t know anything about that. People like him never do. They just get it off and think they’ve done something big. That’s all they know how to do. That’s why they have to pay. You try to show them something and you just waste your time. They don’t know what you’re doing. The Captain never knew what she tried to do for him. That nerd never would. He probably wouldn’t even pay for the shirts.
She had to stop thinking about him.
The waitress came to take her order but Lila still hadn’t made up her mind. I guess I’m not ready yet, she said. She looked inside her glass. Why don’t you bring me another one of these?
She didn’t want to get boozy, she still had a lot of things to do, but this really felt good. It would be a long time until the next one, she thought.
She didn’t know what she would do next. It seemed like she’d done it all. She didn’t have as much strength any more, or something. She was tired.
Out the window she could see the street was already starting to get old and gray and dark. She wondered where the cat went to that was prowling in the dirt across the street.
She didn’t like the dark.
In Rochester it was even darker, she thought.
Maybe she could just go back to Rochester and get a regular job.
She couldn’t go back. They all hated her there. That’s why they fired her. Because she told them the truth.
Everybody wants to turn you into a servant. And when you won’t be a servant for them then you’re no good. Then you’re bad. No matter how hard you try to please them you’re still no good. You can never serve them enough. They’ve always got to have more. So it doesn’t matter; sooner or later they’re going to hate you no matter what you do.
She shouldn’t have left the Karma. If she just hadn’t got mad at George she’d still be there. On her way to Florida now. In Florida it was lighter. Because it was South. She sure had some happy times there. She’d still get there, but now she’d have to get some money first.
Maybe she could just go and tell the Captain she was sorry and he’d change his mind. She didn’t want to do that. Then she’d have to put up with his nerd talk all the way to Florida. She didn’t want to do that. Besides he already told her she had to get off his boat.
She wondered what he did in New York. She wondered where he was going tonight. He sure didn’t want to take her with him. She didn’t care. She didn’t want to go with him. But she knew why. As soon as any of their wife’s friends are around they get rid of Lila.
Anyway, it didn’t matter.
What was it she wanted to do? It was something but she didn’t know what.
There wasn’t anything she wanted to do. That was the trouble. She didn’t want to have anything more to do with people. She was tired of people. She just wanted to go off somewhere and be by herself and all alone.
The waitress came again. Lila ordered another drink. That wasn’t good. Not on an empty stomach. Her stomach still hurt. She should have taken some Empirin earlier.
Lila reached into her purse to get her Empirin. She couldn’t find them. That was funny. She knew they were right there. Her other pills weren’t there either! She felt around with her hand to find the round plastic bottle. She could always find it by its shape. It wasn’t there.
She poked harder and harder through the lipstick and mirror and cigarettes and Kleenexes.
She didn’t leave them in the boat because she took three this morning. She brought the purse up and looked inside. Then she looked in the other pocket of the purse. But they weren’t there.
Then Lila suddenly knew that the billfold wasn’t inside the purse either. She looked up and felt frightened. Outside the window the street had become darker.
She reached all through everything all over again, all her pockets, everywhere in her purse… but it was gone. It was really gone.
That was all the money she had!
Some other customers were coming in. They looked cold. Lila didn’t see the little old lady waitress. It looked like another waiter had come on duty in her place. He had a bow tie. She didn’t like his looks.
She still couldn’t believe it. How could she lose it? All her money was in there. It couldn’t possibly have dropped out. She had it this morning. She bought the shirts with it. She remembered because she put the receipt in the billfold in case she had to take them back. Now that was gone too.
The new waiter was looking over at her.
She remembered that friend of Jamie’s. He sat next to her. The purse was between them.
It had to be him. She knew there was something wrong about him the way he looked at her. Wait till she told Jamie.
Lila looked down at her glass. It was empty.
She didn’t have Jamie’s new number. He didn’t give it to her. What was she going to do now? She couldn’t even order dinner. She had to stop and think. She couldn’t even think straight. Is that why Jamie didn’t give her his number? So there was no way she could tell him?
So he could set her up?
The waiter came over.
I’m not ready yet, Lila told him.
He gave her a nothing look and went away.
Jamie wouldn’t have done that. When Jamie wanted money he just said so. He didn’t have to steal from her.
It was so hard to think. She wished she hadn’t had these drinks. There was a coin purse inside. He didn’t take that. She took it out and counted it. Two quarters, four nickels, and seven pennies.
She didn’t even have enough to even pay for the drinks. There was going to be trouble.
She felt sick. She had to go to the toilet.
When she went past the waiter he looked like he already knew she wasn’t going to pay.
The toilet stunk. She tried to wash but there wasn’t any soap. This was a god-damn dump, this place. Her face was dirty too, but there was nowhere to wash. This dirty city. She saw in the mirror that her hair was dirty too. She needed to wash.
If she used the coins to call some friends they could come and help. But it was four years now. Nobody stayed still for four years in New York.
When she got to the phone, on the first coin, she tried Laurie’s number. The phone rang and rang. While it was ringing she realized that if she wanted to she could go out the door right from where this phone was and they wouldn’t be able to stop her.
The waiter was watching her. He’d stop her. He looked mean. He looked like he’d been around.
Laurie’s phone didn’t answer. That was all right. That meant she got the coin back. But then it answered and the voice asked who was calling. She said, Lila Blewitt. The woman went away and Lila waited. Thank God Laurie was still here.
But then the voice came back and said, You must have the wrong number, and hung up.
What did that mean?
She tried two other numbers and got her coin back. She was going to call another address but she realized she really didn’t know her. She wouldn’t help even if she remembered her. The waiter was still watching.
Lila thought about him for a while. What could he do? She might as well get it over with.
She braced herself and went over and told him. Somebody stole my money. I can’t pay.
He just looked at her. He didn’t say anything.
She wondered if he heard what she said.
Then he said, What were you puttin in the telephone?'
That was coins, Lila said. They took my billfold.
He just stared at her some more. She could see he didn’t believe her.
After a while he said, They took your billfold.
Yes, she said.
He stared some more.
Then he said, I just work here. The manager isn’t here.
He turned and went out to the kitchen.
When he came back he said, They said to leave your name and address.
I don’t have an address, she said. He stared some more.
You don’t have an address, he repeated.
That’s what I said.' She was starting to get mad.
Where do you live?
On a boat.
Where’s the boat? he asked. She wondered why he wanted to know that. What was he going to do now?
On the river, she said. It doesn’t matter. I have to leave tonight. I don’t know where the boat is.
The waiter kept staring at her. Jesus Christ, what a starer!
Well, just sign the name of the boat, he said.
He looked at where she signed the piece of paper. Then he gave her a dirty look and said, And now, when you get back to your boat please get some money from your boat and bring it back here, OK? Because other people gotta live too, ya know?
She picked up her purse and shirts from the floor by the telephone and saw him smile at somebody back in the kitchen and shake his head as she went out the door. At least he wasn’t as bad as she thought he was going to be. He could have called the cops or something. He probably thought she was some kind of crazy person.
It was getting cold and the street looked spooky now in the dark.
The restaurant door closed behind her. She could have left this box of shirts to pay for it, she thought. Now she had to carry them. But he never asked.
She thought about going back and giving them to him… No, it was all over. He wouldn’t take them, anyway…
But there was no reason for him to look dirty at her like that, Lila thought. She buttoned her cardigan. They didn’t pay him to look like that.
Maybe the Captain would like them when he saw them. Then he could give her some money to pay the restaurant and they could go back and have a meal and he wouldn’t give the waiter any tip. No, they’d give him a super big tip just to make him feel bad.
She didn’t have any money to take a cab now. She couldn’t call the police. Maybe she could call the police. They probably wouldn’t remember her. Nobody remembered her. But she didn’t want to do that.
Everybody was gone. Where has everybody gone? she wondered. What’s happening that everybody’s gone? First the Captain is gone and then Jamie is gone. And Richard too, even Richard is gone. She never did anything to him. Something really bad was happening. But they weren’t telling her what it was. They didn’t want her to know.
Lila began to feel her hands shake a little.
She reached in her handbag for her pills and then remembered they were gone too.
She began to feel scared.
This was the first time since the hospital that she didn’t have them.
She didn’t know how far it was to the boat… It was toward the river, in this direction, she thought… Maybe not… She’d try not to think about anything bad and maybe her hands would stop shaking… She hoped this was the right direction… It was so dark now.
It’s dark out, Phædrus thought. Beyond the large sliding glass doors of the hotel room there was no trace of light left in the sky. All the light in the room came from the wall lamp where the moth was still fluttering.
He looked at his watch. His guest was late. About half an hour late. That was traditional for Hollywood celebrities. The bigger they are the later they come, and this one, Robert Redford, was very big indeed. Phædrus remembered that George Burns had joked that he’d been at Hollywood parties where the people were so famous they never showed up at all. But Redford was coming now to talk about film rights and that was vital business. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t be here.
When Phædrus heard the knock on the door it had that special metallic sound of all the fireproof hotel doors in the world, but this time he was suddenly filled with tension. He got up, walked over to open it, and there in the corridor stood Redford with an expectant, unassuming look on his famous face.
He seemed smaller than his film images had portrayed him to be. A golf cap covered his famous hair; odd, rimless glasses drew attention away from the face behind them and a turned-up jacket collar made him even more inconspicuous. Tonight he didn’t look anything at all like the Sundance Kid.
Come on in, Phædrus said, feeling a real wave of stage fright. This was suddenly real time. This is the present. It is as though this is opening night and the curtain has just gone up and everything is up to him now.
He feels himself force a smile. He takes Redford’s coat, tensely, trying not to show his nervousness, being smooth about all this, but accidentally he bunches the coat in the back, clumsily, so that the Kid has trouble getting one arm out… My God, he can’t get his arm out… Phædrus lets go and the Kid gets the coat off by himself, and hands it to him with a questioning glance, then hands him the hat.
What a start… Real Charlie Chaplin scene. Redford goes ahead into the sitting room, walks to the glass doors and looks over the park, apparently orienting himself. Phædrus, who has followed behind, sits down in one of the overstuffed silk-upholstered gilded Victorian chairs they have put in this room.
Sorry to be so late, Redford says. He turns from the glass doors and then moving slowly, at his own discretion, settles down on the opposing couch.
I just got in from Los Angeles a half-hour ago, he says. You lose three hours coming this way. At night they call it the "Red-Eye" flight… His eyes dart in for a reaction. Well named… you don’t get any sleep at all…
Redford is saying this but as he is saying it he is becoming somebody real. It’s like The Purple Rose of Cairo, where a character comes off the screen and shares the life of one of the audience. What is he saying?
Every time I go back I like it less, he says. I grew up there, you know… I remember what it used to be like… And I resent what’s happened to it… He keeps watching Phædrus for reactions.
I still have a lot of beautiful memories from California, Phædrus says, finally taking hold.
Did you live there?
I lived next door once, in Nevada, Phædrus says.
He is expected to speak. He speaks: a jumble of random sentences about California and Nevada. Deserts and pines and rolling hills, eucalyptus trees and freeways and that sense of something missed, something unfulfilled, that he always gets when he is there. This is just rilling time now, developing rapport, and as Redford listens intently, Phædrus gets the feeling this is his normal habit. Real stage presence. He’s just flown across the whole country, probably talked to a lot of people before that, yet he sits right here with his famous face listening as though he had all the time in the world, as though nothing of any importance had occurred before he walked in this room and nothing of importance was waiting for him after he walked out.
The rambling goes on until a common point of connection is found in the name of Earl Warren, the former Supreme Court chief justice, who Phædrus says represents a kind of personality not too many people think of as Californian. Redford concurs wholeheartedly, revealing personal values. He was our governor, you know, Redford says. Phædrus says yes, and that Warren’s family came from Minnesota.
Is that right? Redford says, I didn’t know that.
Redford says he’s always had a special interest in Minnesota. His movie Ordinary People was a Minnesota story, although they filmed it in northern Illinois. His college roommate came from Minnesota, and he’d visited his house there and never forgotten it.
Where did he live? Phædrus asks.
Lake Minnetonka, Redford says. Do you know that area?
Sure. The first chapter of my book touched down for a second at Excelsior, on Lake Minnetonka.
Redford looks concerned, as though he had missed an important detail. There’s something about that area… I don’t know what it was…
There was a certain "graciousness," Phædrus says.
Redford nods, as though that is right on.
There was a Minneapolis neighborhood called "Kenwood" that was the same way. People there seemed to have that same Earl Warren "charm" or "graciousness" or whatever it was.
Redford stares at him intensely for a moment. It’s an intensity he never shows on the screen.
What caused it? he asks.
Money, Phædrus answers, but then, realizing that isn’t quite right, he adds, and something else too.
Redford waits for him to continue.
There was a lot of old wealth out there, Phædrus says. Fortunes from the lumber days and the early flour mill days. It was easier to be gracious when you had a maid and chauffeur and seven other servants running around the place.
Did you live near Lake Minnetonka?
No, nowhere close, but I used to go to birthday parties there back in the thirties when I was a kid.
Redford looks engrossed.
Phædrus says, I wasn’t one of the rich kids. I was on a scholarship at a school in Minneapolis where the rich kids went… by chauffeur usually.
In the morning these big, long, black Packard limousines would pull up outside the school and a black-uniformed chauffeur would jump out and dash around and open up the back door and this little kid would pop out. In the afternoon the limousines and chauffeurs would all be back again and the kids would pop in, one kid to a limousine, and they’d be off to Lake Minnetonka.
I used to ride my bike to school and sometimes I’d see in my mirror one of these big Packards was coming up behind me and I’d turn and wave to the kid inside and he’d wave back and sometimes the chauffeur would wave too, and the funny thing is I always knew that kid was the one who envied me. I had all the freedom. He was a prisoner in the back of that black Packard, and he knew it.
What school was that?
Blake.
Redford’s eyes become intense. That’s the school my roommate went to!
Small world, Phædrus says.
It certainly is! Redford’s excitement indicates something has connected here, a high spot in the surface of things that indicates some important structure underneath.
I still have kind memories of it, Phædrus says.
Redford looks as though he would like to listen some more but that, of course, is not why he is here. After some more conversation about desultory subjects, he comes to the matter at hand.
He pauses and then says, I guess I should say, first of all, that I admire your book greatly and feel challenged and stimulated by it. The ideas about "Quality" are what I’ve always thought. I’ve always done it that way. I first read it when it first came out and would have contacted you then but was told that someone else had already bought it.
A funny woodenness has crept into his speech, as though he had rehearsed all this. Why should he sound like a poor actor? I really would like to have the film rights to this book, Redford says.
You’ve got them, Phædrus says.
Redford looks startled. Phædrus must have said something wrong. Redford’s biographies said he was unflappable, but he looks flapped now.
I wouldn’t have gotten this involved if I hadn’t intended to give it to you, Phædrus says.
But Redford doesn’t look overjoyed. Instead he looks surprised, and retreats to somewhere inside himself. His engrossment is gone.
He wants to know what the previous film deals were. It’s had quite a history, Phædrus says, and he relates a succession of film options that have been sold, and allowed to lapse for one reason or another. Redford is back to his former self, listening intently. When that subject is covered they turn cautiously to the question of how the book will be treated. Redford recommends a writer whom Phædrus has already met. Phædrus says OK.
Redford wants to make full use of a scene where a teacher faces a classroom of students for a whole hour and says nothing, until by the end of the hour they are so tense and frightened they literally run for the door. Apparently he wants to build the story in terms of flashbacks within that scene. Phædrus thinks that sounds very good. It is remarkable the way Redford has homed in on the book. For that scene he completely bypasses all the road scenes, all the motorcycle maintenance, where other script writers have bogged down, and goes right to the classroom, which was where the book started — as a little monograph on how to teach English composition.
Redford says that the road scenes will be made on location. He says that Phædrus can visit the sets whenever he wants to, but not every day. Phædrus doesn’t know what this involves.
The central problem of abstract ideas comes up. The book is largely about philosophic ideas about Quality. Big commercial films don’t show ideas visually. Redford says you have to condense the ideas and show them indirectly. Phædrus is not sure what that means. He would like to see how this is going to be done.
Redford senses Phædrus' doubts and warns that, No matter how the film is done, you won’t like it. Phædrus wonders if he says this just to keep himself covered. Redford talks about how the author of another book he filmed saw the movie and tried to like it but you could see that no enthusiasm was there. That was hard to take, Redford says, and then adds, But that’s the way it always seems to happen.
Other subjects come up but they don’t seem to be quite to the point. Eventually Redford looks at his wrist watch.
Well, I guess there are no big problems at this point, he says, I’ll go ahead and call the writer and see where he’s at on this.
He sits forward. I’m really tired, he says, and there’s no point in romancing you all night about all this… I’ll call the others and then, sometime after that, our agency will get in touch with you.
He gets up, goes to the hall closet and, by himself, gets his cap and coat. At the door he says, Where are you living now?
In my boat. Down on the river.
Oh. Is there any way of reaching you there?No, I’ll be gone tomorrow. I’m trying to get south before it freezes around here.
Well, we’ll contact you through your lawyer then. At the door he adjusts his hat and glasses and jacket. He says goodbye, turns and moves down the corridor with a tense springiness, like a skier or a cat — or like the Sundance Kid — and vanishes around a corner.
Then the corridor becomes just another hotel corridor again.
Phædrus stood in the hotel corridor for a long time without thinking about where he was. After a while he turned back, went into the room and closed the door.
He looked at the empty couch where Redford had been sitting. It seemed like some of his presence was still there but you couldn’t talk to it any more.
He felt like pouring himself a drink… but there wasn’t any… He should call Room Service.
But he didn’t really want a drink. Not enough to go to all that trouble. He didn’t know what he wanted.
A wave of anticlimax hit. All the tension and energy that had been built up for this meeting suddenly had nowhere to go. He felt like going out and running down the corridors. Maybe a long walk through the streets again until the tension wore off… but his legs already ached from the long walk getting here.
He went to the balcony door. On the other side of the glass was the same fantastic night skyline.
It looked more stale now.
The trouble with paying high prices for places with a view like this was that the first time it’s wonderful but it gets more and more static until you hardly notice it’s there. The boat was better, where the view keeps changing all the time.
He could see from the blurring of the skyline lights that rain had started. The balcony wasn’t wet, however. The wind must be blowing the rain away from this side of the building.
When he cracked open the door a howling rush of cold air poured through. He opened the crack wide enough to pass through, then stepped out onto the balcony and closed the door again.
What a wild wind there was out here. Vertical wind. Crazy. The whole night skyline was blurring and clearing with squalls of rain. He could only see distant parts of the park from the way the lights stopped at its edges.
Disconnected. All this seemed to be happening to somebody else. There was excitement of a kind; tension, confusion; but no real emotional involvement. He felt like some galvanometer that had been zapped and now the needle was jammed stuck, unable to register.
Culture shock. He guessed that’s what it was. This schizy feeling was culture shock. You enter another world where all the values are so different and switched around and upside-down you can’t possibly adapt to them — and culture shock hits.
He was really on top of the world now, he supposed… at the opposite end of some kind of incredible social spectrum from where he had been twenty years ago, bouncing through South Chicago in that hard-sprung police truck on the way to the insane asylum.
Was it any better now?
He honestly didn’t know. He remembered two things about that crazy ride: the first was that cop who grinned at him all the way, meaning We’re going to fix you good, boy — as if the cop really enjoyed it. The second was the crazy understanding that he was in two worlds at the same time, and in one world he was at the rock bottom of the whole human heap and in the other world he was at the absolute top. How could you make any sense out of that? What could you do? The cop didn’t matter, but what about this last?
Now here it was all upside-down again. Now he was at some kind of top of that first world, but where was he in the second? At the bottom? He couldn’t say. He had the feeling that if he sold the film rights big things were going to happen in that first world, but he was going to take a long slide to somewhere in the second. He’d expected that feeling might go away tonight, but it didn’t.
There was a something wrong — something wrong -something wrong feeling like a buzzer in the back of his mind. It wasn’t just his imagination. It was real. It was a primary perception of negative quality. First you sense the high or low quality, then you find reasons for it, not the other way around. Here he was, sensing it.
The New Yorker critic George Steiner had warned Phædrus. At least you don’t have to worry about a film, he’d said. The book seemed too intellectual for anyone to try it. Then he’d told Steiner his book was already under option to 20th Century-Fox. Steiner’s eyes widened and then turned away.
What’s the matter with that? Phædrus had asked.
You’re going to be very sorry, Steiner had said.
Later a Manhattan film attorney had said, Look, if you love your book my advice is don’t sell it to Hollywood.
What are you talking about?
The attorney looked at him sharply. I know what I’m talking about. Year after year I get people in here who don’t understand films and I tell them just what I told you. They don’t believe me. Then they come back. They want to sue. I tell them, Look! I told you! You signed your rights away. Now you’re going to have to live with it! So I’m telling you now, the attorney said, if you love your book don’t sell it to Hollywood.
What he was talking about was artistic control. In a stage play there’s a tradition that nobody changes the playwright’s lines without his permission, but in films it’s almost standard to completely trash an author’s work without even bothering to mention it to him. After all, he sold it, didn’t he?
Tonight Phædrus had hoped to get a contradiction of all this from Redford, but it was just the opposite. Redford had confirmed it. He agreed with Steiner and the attorney.
So it looked as though this meeting wasn’t as important as Phædrus had expected. The celebrity effect had created all the excitement, not the deal itself. He’d told Redford, You’ve got it, but nothing was settled until the contract was signed. There was still a price to settle on and that meant there was still room to back off.
He felt a real sense of let-down. Maybe it was just normal anticlimax, maybe Redford was just tired from his flight in but whatever he was really thinking about, Phædrus didn’t think he’d heard it tonight, or at least not all of it, or even very much of it. It was always exciting to see a famous person like that up close but when he subtracted that excitement he saw that Redford was just following a standard format.
The whole thing had a lack of freshness about it. Redford had a reputation for honest dealing but he operated in the middle of an industry with the opposite reputation. No one was expected to say what they really thought. Deals are supposed to follow a format. Redford’s honesty wasn’t triumphing over this format or even arguing with it.
There was no sense of sharing. It was more like selling a house, where the prospective owners don’t feel any obligation to tell you what color they are going to paint it or how they are going to arrange the furniture. That’s the Hollywood format. Redford gave the feeling he’d been through so many of these bargaining sessions it was a kind of ritual for him. He’d done it a dozen times before, at least. He was just operating out of old patterns.
That’s probably why he seemed surprised when Phædrus said, You’ve got it. He was flapped because the format wasn’t followed. Phædrus was supposed to do all his bargaining at this point. This was where he could get all his concessions, and here he was now, giving it all away: a big mistake in terms of a real-estate type of legal adversary format where each side tries all the tactics they can think of to get the best deal out of the other side. Redford was here to get rather than give, and when he was suddenly given so much more than he expected without any effort on his part it seemed to throw him off balance for a second. That’s how it seemed anyway.
That comment about visiting the sets, but not every day, also spelled it out. Phædrus would never be a co-creator, just a visiting VIP. And that bit of film jargon about romancing was the real key. Romancing is part of the format. The producer or screen-writer or director or whoever’s getting the thing started begins by romancing the author. They tell him how much money he’s going to get, they get his signature on an option, and then they go and romance the financial people by telling them what a great book they’re going to get. Once they get both the book and the money, the romance is over. Both the money-man and the author get locked out as much as possible and the creative people go ahead and make a film. They’d change what Phædrus had written, add whatever stuff they thought would make it work better, sell it, and go on to something else, leaving him with some money that would soon disappear, and a lot of bad memories that wouldn’t.
Phædrus began to shiver, but still he didn’t go in. That room on the other side of the door was like some glassed-in cage. Outside here the rain seemed to have died and the lights were so intense now they made the clouds in the sky seem like some sort of ceiling. He preferred it out here in the cold.
He looked over the city and then down at the little bugs of cars way down on the street below. It was a lot easier to get there from here than to here from there. Maybe that’s why so many jump. It’s easier that way.
Crazy! He backed off from the concrete railing. What puts thoughts like that in a person’s head?
Culture shock. That’s what it was. The gods. He’d been watching them for years. The gods were the static culture patterns. They never quit. After trying all these years to kill him with failure, now they were pretending they’d given up. Now they were going to try the other way, to get him with success.
It wasn’t the crazy wind or the rain-blurred light along the sky across the park that was making him feel so strange. What caused the culture shock were these two crazy different cultural evaluations of himself -two different realities of himself — sitting side by side. One was that he was in some kind of high voltage celebrity world like Redford. The other was that he was at ground-level like Rigel and Lila and just about everybody else. As long as he stayed within just one of those two cultural definitions he could live with it. But when he tried to hang on to both wires simultaneously, that’s when the shock hit.
If you get too famous you will go straight to hell, a Japanese Zen master had warned a group Phædrus was in. It had sounded like one of those Zen truths that don’t make any sense. Now it was making sense.
He wasn’t talking about anything Dante would have identified. Dante’s Christian hell is an after-life of eternal torment, but Zen hell is this world right here and now, in which you see life around you but can’t participate in it. You’re forever a stranger from your own life because there’s something in your life that holds you back. You see others bathing in the life all around them while you have to drink it through a straw, never getting enough.
You would think that fame and fortune would bring a sense of closeness to other people, but quite the opposite happens. You split into two people, who they think you are and who you really are, and that produces the Zen hell.
It’s like a hall of mirrors at a carnival where some mirrors distort you one way and some distort you another. Already he’d seen three completely different mirror reflections this week: from Rigel, who reflected an image of some kind of moral degenerate; from Lila who reflected a tedious old nerd; and now Redford who was probably going to cast him into some sort of heroic image.
Each person you come to is a different mirror. And since you’re just another person like them maybe you’re just another mirror too, and there’s no way of ever knowing whether your own view of yourself is just another distortion. Maybe all you ever see is reflections. Maybe mirrors are all you ever get. First the mirrors of your parents, then friends and teachers, then bosses and officials, priests and ministers and maybe writers and painters too. That’s their job too, holding up mirrors.
But what controls all these mirrors is the culture: the Giant, the gods; and if you run afoul of the culture it will start throwing up reflections that try to destroy you, or it will withdraw the mirrors and try to destroy you that way. Phædrus could see how this celebrity could get to be like some sort of narcosis of mirrors where you have to have more and more supportive reflections just to stay satisfied. The mirrors take over your life and soon you don’t know who you are. Then the culture controls you and when it takes away your mirrors and the public forgets you the withdrawal symptoms start to appear. And there you are, in the Zen hell of celebrity… Hemingway with the top of his head blown off, and Presley, full of prescription drugs. The endless dreary exploitation of Marilyn Monroe. Or any of dozens of others. It seemed like it was the celebrity, the mirrors of the gods, that did it.
A subject-object metaphysics presumes that all these mirrors are subjective and therefore unreal and unimportant, but that presumption, like so many others, seems to deliberately ignore the obvious.
It ignores the phenomenon of someone like Redford walking down the street and observing that people, in his own words, goon out when they see him. His manager said it’s almost impossible for him to attend public meetings because when people see he’s there they all turn around and watch him.
Phædrus remembered that he himself had started to goon out when Redford came to the door. All that Charlie Chaplin stuff with the coat. What is this goon-out phenomenon? It was no subjective illusion. It’s a very real primary reality, an empirical perception.
It seems to have biological roots, like hunger or fear or greed. Is it similar to stage fright? There seems to be a loss of real-time awareness. A fixed image of the famous person, like the Sundance Kid, seems to overwhelm the Dynamic real-time person who exists in the moment of confrontation. That’s why Phædrus had so much trouble getting started.
But there is much more than that.
This whole business of celebrity also had something perceptibly degenerate about it. Vulgar and degenerate and enormously fascinating and at times obsessive, very much in the same way that sex seemed to be vulgar and degenerate at some times, and enormously fascinating and obsessive.
Sex and celebrity. Before Phædrus got his boat and cleared out of Minnesota he remembered ladies at parties coming over to rub up against him. A teenage girl squealing in ecstasy at one of his lectures. A woman broadcasting executive grabbing his arm at lunch and saying, I must have you. I mean you. You’d think he was a sandwich or something. For forty years he’d wondered what it took, that he was so obviously lacking, that made women look at you twice. Was celebrity it? Was that all? He thought there was more to it than that.
There’s a parallel there, he thought. There’s something slightly obscene about the whole celebrity feeling. It’s that same feeling you get from sex magazines on the newsstands. There’s something troubling about seeing those magazines there. And yet if you thought no one would notice you might want to take a look in those magazines. One part of you wants to get rid of the magazines; one part wants to look at them. There’s a conflict of two patterns of quality, social patterns and biological patterns.
In celebrity it’s the same — except that the conflict is between social and intellectual patterns!
Celebrity is to social patterns as sex is to biological patterns. Now he was getting it. This celebrity is Dynamic Quality within a static social level of evolution. It looks and feels like pure Dynamic Quality for a while, but it isn’t. Sexual desire is the Dynamic Quality that primitive bioIogical patterns once used to organize themselves. Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves. That gives celebrity a new importance.
None of this celebrity has any meaning in a subject-object universe. But in a value-structured universe, celebrity comes roaring to the front of reality as a huge fundamental parameter. It becomes an organizing force of the whole social level of evolution. Without this celebrity force, advanced complex human societies might be impossible. Even simple ones.
Funny how a question can just sit there and then suddenly, at a time you least expect it, the answer starts to unfold.
Celebrity was the culture force. That was it. It seemed like it, anyway.
It was crazy. People going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and killing themselves just for the celebrity of it. Assassins murdering for it. Maybe the real reason nations declared war was to increase their celebrity status. You could organize an anthropology around it.
Sure, of course. When you look back into the very first writings in the history of the Western world, the cuneiform writings on the mud tablets of Babylon, what are they about? Why, they’re about celebrity: I, Hammurabi, am the big wheel here. I have this many horses and this many concubines and this many slaves and this many oxen, and I am one of the greatest of the greatest kings there ever was, and you better believe it. That’s what writing was invented for. When you read the Rig Veda, the oldest religious literature of the Hindus, what are they talking about? The heavens and earth themselves have not grown equal to half of me: Have I not drunk the soma juice? I in my grandeur have surpassed the heavens and all this spacious earth: Have I not drunk the soma juice? This is interpreted as devotion to God, but the celebrity is obvious. Phædrus remembered now that it had bothered him a little that in the Odyssey, Homer seemed at times to be equating Quality and celebrity. Perhaps in Homer’s time, when evolution had not yet transcended the social level into the intellectual, the two were the same.
The Pyramids were celebrity devices. All the statues, the palaces, the robes and jewels of social authority: those are just celebrity devices. The feathers of the Indian headdress. Children being told they would be struck blind if they ever accidentally looked at the emperor. All the Sirs and Lords and Reverends and Doctors of European address, those are celebrity symbols. All the badges and trophies, all the blue ribbons, all the promotions up the business ladder, all the elections to high office, all the compliments and flattery of tea parties and cocktail parties are celebrity enhancements. All the feuding and battling for prestige among academics and scientists. All the offense at insults. All the face of the Orient. Celebrity. Celebrity.
Even a policeman’s uniform is a kind of celebrity device so that you will do what he says without questioning him. Without celebrity nobody would take orders from anybody and there would be no way you could get the society to work… High school. High school was really the place for celebrity. That’s what had those jocks out playing football every afternoon. That’s what the pom-pom girls were all about. It was the celebrity. They were all swimming up the celebrity stream. And Phædrus hadn’t even known it was there. Or he knew it was there but he didn’t understand how significant it was. That’s what made him such a nerd, maybe. That’s what separated him from that eager-eyed, beautifully dressed, smiley-talky crowd.
At the university he remembered the celebrity force was still there, especially in the fraternities and student activity groups. But it was weaker. In fact you can measure the quality of a university by comparing the relative strengths of the celebrity patterns and the intellectual patterns. You never got rid of the celebrities, even at the best universities, but there the intellectuals could ignore them and be in a class by themselves.
Anyway there it was: another whole field Phædrus would never have time to study — the anthropology of celebrity.
Some of it had been done: anthropologists study tribal patterns carefully to see who kowtows to whom. But that was nothing, compared to what could be done.
Money and celebrity are fame and fortune, traditionally paired, as twin forces in the Dynamic generation of social value. Both fame and fortune are huge Dynamic parameters that give society its shape and meaning. We have whole departments of universities, in fact, whole colleges, devoted to the study of economics, that is fortune, but what do we have that is similarly devoted to the study of fame? What exactly is the mechanism by which the culture controls the shapes of the mirrors that produce all these different images of celebrity? Would analysis of that mirror-changing force enable the resolution of ethnic conflicts? Phædrus didn’t know. Why is it you can be a great guy in, say, Germany, and then walk across the border into France and suddenly find you have become a very bad guy without having done anything? What changes the mirrors?
Politics, maybe, but politics mixes celebrity with static legal patterns and isn’t a pure study of celebrity. In fact, the way political science is taught now, celebrity is made to look incidental to politics. But go to any political gathering and see what’s making it run. Watch the candidates jockey for celebrity. They know what’s making it run.
On and on the ideas went.
But it was an assertion of the Metaphysics of Quality that there exists a reality beyond all these social mirrors.
That he had explored. In fact there are two levels of reality beyond these mirrors: an intellectual reality and beyond that, a Dynamic reality.
And the Metaphysics of Quality says that movement upward from the social mirrors of celebrity is a moral movement from a lower form of evolution to a higher one. People should go that way if they can.
And now Phædrus began to see how all this brought him full circle with what had started all this thinking about celebrity: the film about his book. Films are social media; his book was largely intellectual. That was the center of the problem. Maybe that’s why Redford was so closed. He had reservations about that too. Sure, it’s possible to use film for primarily intellectual purposes, to make a documentary, but Redford wasn’t here to make a documentary, or anything close to it.
As Sam Goldwyn said, If you got a message send a telegram. Don’t make a movie out of it. Pictures aren’t intellectual media. Pictures are pictures. The movie business belonged to the celebrity people and they wouldn’t begin to know how to portray an intellectual book like his. And even if they did, the public wouldn’t buy it, probably, and that would be the end of their money.
Phædrus still didn’t want to commit himself yet. He would just have to think about it for a while and let things settle down and then see what he wanted to do.
But what he saw at this point was a social pattern of values, a film, devouring an intellectual pattern of values, his book. It would be a lower form of life feeding upon a higher form of life. As such it would be immoral. And that’s exactly how it felt: immoral.
That’s what had produced all these something-wrong, something-wrong, something-wrong feelings. The mirrors were trying to take over the truth. They think that because they pay you money, which is a social form of gratification, they are entitled to do as they please with the intellectual truth of a book. Uh-uh.
Those gods. They’ll pull anything.
It was really getting cold out here.
Phædrus went to the big glass sliding door, pulled it open and with a wooshhhhh of inrushing wind went inside.
Ahh. Here it was warm again. And quiet. The room still seemed like some empty stage after the audience has gone home. The moth that he had noticed before now circled the wall lamp just above the davenport where Redford’s head had been. It went under the shade, made a little noise against the shade and then stopped. He waited for it to start again but it didn’t. Resting, maybe… Maybe burned by the heat of the bulb…
That’s what celebrity can do for you…
Phædrus heard a noise that sounded like a flow of water from some pipe draining above and then a wail that sounded like a small girl crying. She seemed about three. Maybe it was just TV. A woman’s voice was trying to console her. The woman’s voice sounded good. Well bred. Not trash. Then it stopped. Not TV.
He wondered how old this hotel was. Something from the twenties, maybe. The best period. The Victorians created this city, but in the twenties it really flowered… The joke about that Victorian moth metaphor is that according to science the moth isn’t really flying toward the flame. The moth is really trying to fly straight. Moths steer by keeping a constant angle with the sun or the moon, which works because the sun and moon are so far away a constant angle with them is virtually a straight line. But with a close-up light bulb a constant angle makes a circle. That’s what keeps the moths spinning round and round and round. What’s killing the moths is not a Dynamic aspiration for a higher life. That’s just Victorian nonsense. It’s a static biological pattern of value. They can’t change.
That was the feeling Phædrus got from this city. He was like a moth in danger of drifting in circles into some kind of celebrity orbit. Maybe at some prehistoric time, before celebrity became important, people could trust their natural desires to keep them going in a straight-forward direction. But once the artificial sun of celebrity was invented they started going in circles. Brains were capable of handling physical and biological patterns in prehistoric times but are brains Dynamic enough to handle modern social patterns? Maybe that scientific explanation didn’t weaken the Victorian metaphor. Maybe it fitted in with it.
It was strange the way the talk with Redford had suddenly converged on Blake school. When Phædrus said he’d gone to that school Redford had looked up with surprise. He’d looked as though he expected Phædrus to supply something he’d wanted to know for a long time.
Small world, Phædrus had said, and Redford agreed. Phædrus was going to tell him something more but they didn’t get into it. What was it?
Oh yes, what he was going to tell him was that there was more than just money involved, despite all the Packards and Minnetonka mansions and all the other capitalist symbols. The graciousness that he’d talked about was a left-over from Victorian days.
Those Victorians seemed to light Redford up too. He’d made a lot of films about that era. Something about them probably interested him as it does many other people. The Victorians represented the last really static social pattern we’ve had. And maybe someone who feels his life is too chaotic, too fluid, might look back at them enviously. Something about their rigid convictions about what was right and what was wrong might appeal to anyone brought up in laid-back Southern California of the forties and fifties. Redford seemed to be a rather Victorian person himself: restrained, well mannered, gracious. Maybe that’s why he lives here in New York. He likes the Victorian graciousness that still exists here in places.
It was too much to get into but Phædrus could have told Redford about the fifth grade school play called The Miser’s Dream in which he had played the miser who learns generosity through various events. For Blake school it was well chosen. That tiny stage was loaded with little future millionaires. Afterward a bald-headed old Victorian had come down to the locker room and shaken his hand and congratulated him and talked for a long time with a kind of gracious interest, and one of the teachers asked later, Do you know who that was? and of course Phædrus didn’t. But twenty years later when he was reading a magazine article about General Mills, the world’s largest flour milling company, he suddenly recognized the face of this little old bald-headed man. He was the founder of General Mills.
The face stuck in his mind as one of those fragments of memory that don’t fit. Here was one of the great giants of the evil greed-ridden Victorian capitalist tradition, but the direct primary impression was of a kind and friendly and gracious man.
Phædrus didn’t know what Blake was like today but back then it was grounded in Victorian traditions and values. The headmaster sermonized in chapel each morning on Victorian moral themes with the dedication and vigor of Theodore Roosevelt. He was so intense that after all these years Phædrus would be able to recognize his face instantly if he saw it in a crowd.
There was never any hesitation in the headmaster’s mind as to what quality was. Quality was the manner and spirit that a man of good breeding exemplified. The masters understood it and the boys did not. If the boys studied hard and played hard and showed that they were in earnest about their lives there was a good chance they would some day become worthy people. But there was no sign in the masters' eyes they had any confidence this would occur soon. The masters were always so sure of what was good and what was right. You knew that no matter how hard you tried you would never measure up to their standards. It was like Calvinistic Grace. There was a chance for you. That was all. They were offering you a chance.
Grace and morals were always external. They were not something you embodied. They were only something you could aspire to. You did bad things because you were bad and when you got whacked for doing something wrong it was an attempt to mold bad old you into something better. That word mold was important. The stuff they were trying to mold was inherently unchangeably bad, but the masters thought that by trying to shape it like modeling clay, through whacks and detentions and obloquy, they could mold it into something that gave it the appearance of goodness even though everyone understood it was still the same old rotten stuff underneath.
Truth, knowledge, beauty, all the ideals of mankind, are external objects, passed on from generation to generation like a flaming torch. The headmaster said each generation must hold them up high and protect them with their very lives lest that torch go out.
That torch. That was the symbol of the whole school. It was part of the school emblem. It should be passed on from one generation to another to light the way for mankind by those who understood its meaning and were strong enough and pure enough to hold to its ideals. What would happen if that torch went out was never stated, but Phædrus had guessed it would be like the end of the world. All of man’s progress out of the darkness would be ended. No one doubted that the headmaster’s only purpose in being there was to pass that torch to us. Were we worthy enough to receive it? It was a question everyone was expected to take seriously. And Phædrus did.
In some diluted and converted sense, he thought, that’s what he was still doing. That’s what this Metaphysics of Quality was, a ridiculous torch no Victorian would accept that he wanted to use to light a way through the darkness for mankind.
What a cornball image. Just awful. Yet there it was, burned into him from childhood.
Twenty and thirty years later he still dreamed of following the path that led between brown-leaved oaks up the hill to the Blake School buildings. But the buildings were all locked and deserted and he couldn’t get in. He tried every door but none were open. He looked in the library window, cupping his hand so that the reflection would not prevent him from seeing inside. There he could see a grandfather clock with a pendulum swinging back and forth, but there was nobody in the room. The only movement was the pendulum. Then the dream ended.
That moth was buzzing again by the lamp.
Maybe he should open the huge glass door to the balcony and shoo it out into the night…
Would that be moral?…
He really didn’t know enough about moths to know whether it was or not.
It would probably just find another light somewhere, a searchlight probably, and really get zapped.
But suppose it flew up from the balcony so high it got free of the lights of the city and saw the moon and began to fly straight. Would that make releasing it moral? What does the Metaphysics of Quality say to that?
Better not to interfere. Maybe that moth had its own patterns to fulfill, and he had his, whatever they were. This Metaphysics of Quality, maybe. Certainly not running around like some Victorian romantic, shooing moths outdoors.
That was the Victorian stance, affecting some romantic notion of social quality without any real intellectual penetration of the meaning of Quality.
Anyway, today they are all gone, those gracious Victorian dinosaurs, and it is possible now to look at them with a little less anxiety and opposition than when they were looking back at you.
Phædrus thought that the reason his thoughts kept returning to them — and maybe Redford’s thoughts, and maybe a lot of other people’s thoughts too — is that something enormously important and mystifying has happened in the time that separates us from them. He thought that in returning to them and trying to fathom who they were, one can begin to make some sense out of the social forces that have upheaved the world since their time. What makes them stand out today like dinosaurs is that a gulf exists between us and them. A huge cultural mutation has taken place. They really were a different cultural species. What the torch of the Metaphysics of Quality seems to illumine is an understanding of this gulf and a recognition that this gulf is one of the most profound in history.
If he were going to be precise in talking about the Victorians he would have to be careful not to imply he was talking about a specific group of people. Victorian, as he used the term, is a pattern of social values that was dominant in a period between the American Civil War and the First World War, not a biological pattern. Mark Twain’s life coincided with this period but Phædrus didn’t think of him as a Victorian. His stock-in-trade was humor that poked fun at Victorian pompousness. He was a relief from the Victorians. On the other hand, Herbert Hoover and Douglas MacArthur were biologically outside the Victorian period most of their lives. But they were Victorians, nevertheless, because their social values were Victorian.
Phædrus thought the metaphysics of substance fails to illuminate the gulf between ourselves and Victorians because it regards both society and intellect as possessions of biology. It says society and intellect don’t have substance and therefore can’t be real. It says biology is where reality stops. Society and intellect are ephemeral possessions of reality. In a substance metaphysics, consequently, the distinction between society and intellect is sort of like a distinction between what’s in the right pocket and what’s in the left pocket of biological man.
In a value metaphysics, on the other hand, society and intellect are patterns of value. They’re real. They’re independent. They’re not properties of man any more than cats are the property of catfood or a tree is a property of soil. Biological man does not create his society any more than soil creates a tree. The pattern of the tree is dependent upon the minerals in the soil and would die without them, but the tree’s pattern is not created by the soil’s chemical pattern. It is hostile to the soil’s chemical pattern. It exploits the soil, devours the soil for its own purposes, just as the cat devours the catfood for its own purposes. In this manner biological man is exploited and devoured by social patterns that are essentially hostile to his biological values.
This is also true of intellect and society. Intellect has its own patterns and goals that are as independent of society as society is independent of biology. A value metaphysics makes it possible to see that there’s a conflict between intellect and society that’s just as fierce as the conflict between society and biology or the conflict between biology and death. Biology beat death billions of years ago. Society beat biology thousands of years ago. But intellect and society are still fighting it out, and that is the key to an understanding of both the Victorians and the twentieth century.
What distinguishes the pattern of values called Victorian from the post-First World War period that followed it is, according to the Metaphysics of Quality, a cataclysmic shift in levels of static value; an earthquake in values, an earthquake of such enormous consequence that we are still stunned by it, so stunned that we haven’t yet figured out what has happened to us. The advent of both democratic and communistic socialism and the fascist reaction to them has been the consequence of this earthquake. The whole Lost Generation of the twentieth century which continues, as lost as ever, through generation after generation, is a consequence of it. The twentieth-century collapse of morals is a consequence of it. Further consequences are on their way.
What distinguishes the Victorian culture from the culture of today is that the Victorians were the last people to believe that patterns of intellect are subordinate to patterns of society. What held the Victorian pattern together was a social code, not an intellectual one. They called it morals, but really it was just a social code. As a code it was just like their ornamental cast-iron furniture: expensive looking, cheaply made, brittle, cold and uncomfortable.
The new culture that has emerged is the first in history to believe that patterns of society must be subordinate to patterns of intellect. The one dominating question of this century has been, Are the social patterns of our world going to run our intellectual life, or is our intellectual life going to run the social patterns? And in that battle, the intellectual patterns have won.
Now, with that illumination, all sorts of things clear up. The reason the Victorians sound so superficial and hypocritical to us today is because of this gulf in values. Even though they were our ancestors they were another very different culture. Trying to understand a member of another culture is impossible without taking into account differences in value. If a Frenchman asks, How can Germans stand to live the way they do? he will get no answer as long as he applies French values to the question. If a German asks, How can the French stand to live the way they do? he will get no answer as long as he applies German values to the question. When we ask how could the Victorians stand to live in the hypocritical and superficial way they did, we cannot get a useful answer as long as we superimpose on them twentieth-century values that they did not have.
If one realizes that the essence of the Victorian value pattern was an elevation of society above everything else, then all sorts of things fall into place. What we today call Victorian hypocrisy was not regarded as hypocrisy. It was a virtuous effort to keep one’s thoughts within the limits of social propriety. In the Victorian’s mind quality and intellectuality were not related to one another in such a way that quality had to stand the test of intellectual meaning. The test of anything in the Victorian mind was, Does society approve?
To put social forms to the test of intellectual value was ungracious, and those Victorians really did believe in the social graces. They valued them as the highest attributes of civilization. Grace is an interesting word with an important history, and the fact that they used it the way they did makes it even more interesting. A state of grace as denned by the Calvinists was a state of religious enlightenment. But by the time the Victorians were through with it, grace had changed from godliness to mean something close to social polish.
To the early Calvinists and to ourselves too this debasement of the word seems outrageous, but it becomes understandable when one sees that within the Victorian pattern of values society was God. As Edith Wharton said, Victorians feared scandal worse than they feared disease. They had lost their faith in the religious values of their ancestors and put their faith in society instead. It was only by wearing the corset of society that one kept oneself from lapsing back into a condition of evil. Formalism and prudery were attempts to suppress evil by denying it a place in one’s higher thoughts, and for the Victorian, higher spiritually meant higher socially. There was no distinction between the two. God is a gentleman through and through, and in all probability, Episcopal too. To be a gentleman was as close as you would ever get, while on earth, to God.
All this explains why Victorian robber barons in America aped European aristocracy in ways that seem so ludicrous to us today. It explains why it was so fashionable for Victorian nabobs to pay large sums to be included in biographies of distinguished citizens. It explains why Victorians so despised the frontier part of the American personality and went to ridiculous extremes to conceal it. They wanted to strike it from their history, conceal it in every way possible.
It explains why the Victorians were so vehement in their loathing of Indians. The statement, The only good Indian is a dead Indian, was a Victorian statement. The idea of extermination of all Indians was not common before the nineteenth century. Victorians wanted to destroy inferior societies because inferior societies were a form of evil. Colonialism, which before that time was an economic opportunity, became with Victorians a moral course, a white man’s burden to spread their social patterns and thus virtue throughout the world.
Truth, knowledge, beauty, all the ideals of mankind, are passed on from generation to generation like a flaming torch, the headmaster said, which each generation must hold up high and protect with their very lives lest that torch go out. But what he meant by that torch was a static Victorian social value pattern. And what he either did not know, or found it convenient to ignore, was that the torch of Victorian romantic idealism had gone out long before he spoke those words in the 1930s. Perhaps he was just trying to relight it.
But there is no way to light that torch within a Victorian pattern of values. Once intellect has been let out of the bottle of social restraint, it is almost impossible to put it back in again. And it is immoral to try. A society that tries to restrain the truth for its own purposes is a lower form of evolution than a truth that restrains society for its own purposes.
Victorians repressed the truth whenever it seemed socially unacceptable, just as they repressed thoughts about the powdery horse manure dust that floated about them as they drove their carriages through this city. They knew it was there. They breathed it in and out. But they didn’t consider it socially proper to talk about it. To speak plainly and openly was vulgar. They never did so unless forced by extreme social circumstances because vulgarity was a form of evil.
Because it was evil to speak the truth openly, their apparatus for social self-correction became atrophied and paralyzed. Their houses, their social lives became filled with ornamental curlicues that never stopped proliferating. Sometimes the useless ornamentation was so heavy it was hard to discover what the object was for. Its original purpose had been all but lost under the gee-gaws and bric-a-brac they had laid upon it.
Ultimately their minds became the same way. Their language became filled with ornamental curlicues that never stopped proliferating until it was all but incomprehensible. And if you didn’t understand it you dared not show it because to show it meant you were vulgar and ill-bred.
With Victorian spirits atrophied and their minds hemmed in by social restraints, all avenues to any quality other than social quality were closed. And so this social base which had no intellectual meaning and no biological purpose slowly and helplessly drifted toward its own stupid self-destruction: toward the senseless murder of millions of its own children on the battlefields of the First World War.
Where the physical climate changes suddenly from high temperature to low temperature, or from high atmospheric pressure to low atmospheric pressure the result is usually a storm. When the social climate changes from preposterous social restraint of all intellect to a relative abandonment of all social patterns, the result is a hurricane of social forces. That hurricane is the history of the twentieth century.
There had been other comparable times, Phædrus supposed. The day the first protozoans decided to get together to form a metazoan society. Or the day the first freak fish, or whatever-it-was, decided to leave the water. Or, within historical time, the day Socrates died to establish the independence of intellectual patterns from their social origins. Or the day Descartes decided to start with himself as an ultimate source of reality. These were days of evolutionary transformation. And like most days of transformation, no one at the time had any idea of what was being transformed.
Phædrus thought that if he had to pick one day when the shift from social domination of intellect to intellectual domination of society took place, he would pick 11 November 1918, Armistice Day, the end of the First World War. And if he had to pick one person who symbolized this shift more than any other, he would have picked President Woodrow Wilson.
The picture of him Phædrus would have selected is one in which Wilson rides through New York City in an open touring car, doffing the magnificent silk hat that symbolized his high rank in Victorian Society. For a cutline he would select something from Wilson’s penetrating speeches that symbolized his high rank in the intellectual community: We must use our intelligence to stop future war; social institutions cannot be trusted to function morally by themselves; they must be guided by intellect. Wilson belonged in both worlds, Victorian society and the new intellectual world of the twentieth century: the only university professor ever to be elected president of the United States.
Before Wilson’s time academicians had been minor and peripheral within the Victorian power structure. Intelligence and knowledge were considered a high manifestation of social achievement, but intellectuals were not expected to run society itself. They were valued servants of society, like ministers and doctors. They were expected to decorate the social parade, not lead it. Leadership was for practical, businesslike men of affairs. Few Victorians suspected what was coming: that within a few years the intellectuals they idealized as the best representatives of their high culture would turn on them and destroy that culture with contempt.
The Victorian social system and the Victorian morality that led into the First World War had portrayed war as an adventurous conflict between noble individuals engaged in the idealistic service of their country: a kind of extended knighthood. Victorians loved exquisitely painted heroic battle scenes in their drawing rooms, with dashing cavalrymen riding toward the enemy with sabers drawn, or a horse returning riderless with the title, Bad News. Death was acknowledged by an occasional soldier in the arms of his comrades looking palely toward heaven.
The First World War wasn’t like that. The Gatling gun removed the nobility, the heroism. The Victorian painters had never shown a battlefield of mud and shell holes and barbed wire and half a million rotting corpses — some staring toward heaven, some staring into the mud, some without faces to stare in any direction. That many had been murdered in one battle alone.
Those who survived suffered a stunnedness, and a lostness and felt bitter toward the society that could do that to them. They joined the faith that intellect must find some way out of old Victorian nobility and virtue into a more sane and intelligent world. In an instant it seemed, the snobbish fashionable Victorian social world was gone.
New technology fueled the change. The population was shifting from agriculture to manufacturing. Electrification was turning night into day and eliminating hundreds of drudgeries. Cars and highways were changing the landscape and the speed with which people did things. Mass journalism had emerged. Radio and radio advertising had arrived. The mastery of all these new changes was no longer dominated by social skills. It required a technologically trained, analytic mind. A horse could be mastered if your resolve was firm, your disposition pleasant and fear absent. The skills required were biological and social. But handling the new technology was something different. Personal biological and social qualities didn’t make any difference to machines.
A whole population, cut loose physically by the new technology from farm to city, from South to North, and from East to West Coast, was also cut adrift morally and psychologically from the static social patterns of the Victorian past. People hardly knew what to do with themselves. Flappers, airplanes, bathing beauty contests, radio, free love, movies, modern art… suddenly the door had been sprung on a Victorian jail of staleness and conformity they had hardly known was there, and the elation at the new technological and social freedom was dizzying. F. Scott Fitzgerald caught the giddy exhilaration of it:
There’d be an orchestra
Bingo! Bango!
Playing for us
To dance the tango,
And people would clap
When we arose,
At her sweet face
And my new clothes.
No one knew what to do about the lostness. The explainers of that period were the most lost of all. Whirl is King, wrote Walter Lippman in his Preface to Morals. Whirl, chaos seemed to be in control of the times. Nobody seemed to know why or where they were going. People raced from one fad to another, from one headline sensation to the next, hoping this was really the answer to their lostness, and finding it was not, flying on. Older Victorians muttered about the degeneracy that was tearing society apart, but nobody young was paying any attention to old Victorians any more.
The times were chaotic, but it was a chaos of social patterns only. To people who were dominated by old social values it seemed as though everything valuable had ended. But it was only social value patterns being destroyed by new intellectual formulations.
The events that excited people in the twenties were events that dramatized the new dominance of intellect over society. In the chaos of social patterns a wild new intellectual experimentation could now take place. Abstract art, discordant music, Freudian psychoanalysis, the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, contempt for alcoholic prohibition. Literature emphasized the struggle of the noble, free-thinking individual against the crushing oppression of evil social conformity. The Victorians were damned for their narrow-mindedness, their social pretentiousness. The test of what was good, of what had Quality, was no longer Does it meet society’s approval? but Does it meet the approval of our intellect?
It was this issue of intellect versus society that made the Scopes trial of 1925 such a journalistic sensation. In that trial a Tennessee schoolteacher, John Scopes, was charged with illegally teaching Darwinian evolution.
There was something not quite right about that trial, something phony. It was presented as a fight for academic freedom, but battles of that sort had been going on for centuries without the kind of attention the Scopes trial got. If Scopes had been tried back in the days when he might have been tortured on the rack for his heresy his stance would have been more heroic. But in 1925 his lawyer, Clarence Darrow, was just taking easy shots at a toothless tiger. Only religious fanatics and ignorant Tennessee hillbillies opposed the teaching of Evolution.
But when that trial is seen as a conflict of social and intellectual values its meaning emerges. Scopes and Darrow were defending academic freedom but, more importantly, they were prosecuting the old static religious patterns of the past. They gave intellectuals a warm feeling of arriving somewhere they had been waiting to arrive for a long time. Church bigots, pillars of society who for centuries had viciously attacked and defamed intellectuals who disagreed with them, were now getting some of it back.
The hurricane of social forces released by the overthrow of society by intellect was most strongly felt in Europe, particularly Germany, where the effects of the First World War were the most devastating. Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control over society, were confronted by the reactionary forces of fascism, a program for the social control of intellect. Nowhere were the intellectuals more intense in their determination to overthrow the old order. Nowhere did the old order become more intent on finding ways to destroy the excesses of the new intellectualism.
Phædrus thought that no other historical or political analysis explains the enormity of these forces as clearly as does the Metaphysics of Quality. The gigantic power of socialism and fascism, which have overwhelmed this century, is explained by a conflict of levels of evolution. This conflict explains the driving force behind Hitler not as an insane search for power but as an all-consuming glorification of social authority and hatred of intellectualism. His anti-Semitism was fueled by anti-intellectualism. His hatred of communists was fueled by anti-intellectualism. His exaltation of the German volk was fueled by it. His fanatic persecution of any kind of intellectual freedom was driven by it.
In the United States the economic and social upheaval was not so great as in Europe, but Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, nevertheless, became the center of a lesser storm between social and intellectual forces. The New Deal was many things, but at the center of it all was the belief that intellectual planning by the Government was necessary for society to regain its health.
The New Deal was described as a program for farmers, laborers and poor people everywhere, but it was also a new deal for the intellectuals of America. Suddenly, for the first time, they were at the center of the planning process — Tugwell, Rosenman, Berle, Moley, Hopkins, Douglas, Morgenthau, Frankfurter — these were people from a class that in the past could normally be hired for little more than laborers' wages. Now intellectuals were in a position to give orders to America’s finest and oldest and wealthiest social groups. That Man, as the old aristocrats sometimes called Roosevelt, was turning the whole United States of America over to foreign radicals, eggheads, Commies and the like. He was a traitor to his class.
Suddenly, before the old Victorians' eyes, a whole new social caste, a caste of intellectual Brahmins, was being created above their own military and economic castes. These new Brahmins felt they could look down on them and, through the political control of the Democratic Party, push them around. Social snobbery was being replaced with intellectual snobbery. Brain trusts, think tanks, academic foundations were taking over the whole country. It was joked that Thorstein Veblen’s famous intellectual attack on Victorian society, The Theory of The Leisure Class, should be updated with a new one called The Leisure of The Theory Class. A new social class had arrived: the theory class, which had clearly put itself above the social castes that dominated before its time.
Intellectualism, which had been a respected servant of the Victorian society, had become society’s master, and the intellectuals involved made it clear they felt that this new order was best for the country. It was like the replacement of Indians by pioneers. That was too bad for the Indians but it was an inevitable form of progress. A society based upon scientific truth had to be superior to a society based on blind unthinking social tradition. As the new scientific modern outlook improved society, these old Victorian hatreds would be lost and forgotten.
And so, from the idea that society is man’s highest achievement, the twentieth century moved to the idea that intellect is man’s highest achievement. Within the academic world everything was blooming. University enrollments zoomed. The Ph.D. was on its way to becoming the ultimate social status symbol. Money poured in for education in a flood the academic world had never seen. New academic fields were expanding into new undreamed-of territories at a breathless pace, and among the most rapidly expanding and breathless fields of all was one that interested Phædrus more than any other: anthropology.
Now the Metaphysics of Quality had come a long way from his days of frustrated reading about anthropology in the mountains of Montana. He saw that during the early decades of this century anthropology’s unassailable Olympian objectivity had had some very partisan cultural roots of its own. It had been a political tool with which to defeat the Victorians and their system of social values. He doubted whether there was another field anywhere within the academic spectrum that so clearly revealed the gulf between the Victorians and the new twentieth-century intellectuals.
The gulf existed between Victorian evolutionists and twentieth-century relativists. The Victorians such as Morgan, Tylor and Spencer presumed all primitive societies were early forms of Society itself and were trying to grow into a complete civilization like that of Victorian England. The relativists, following Boas' historical reconstruction, stated that there is no empirical scientific evidence for a Society toward which all primitive societies are heading.
Cultural relativists held that it is unscientific to interpret values in culture B by the values of culture A. It would be wrong for an Australian Bushman anthropologist to come to New York and find people backward and primitive because hardly anyone could throw a boomerang properly. It is equally wrong for a New York anthropologist to go to Australia and find a Bushman backward and primitive because he cannot read or write. Cultures are unique historical patterns which contain their own values and cannot be judged in terms of the values of other cultures. The cultural relativists, backed by Boas' doctrines of scientific empiricism, virtually wiped out the credibility of the older Victorian evolutionists and gave to anthropology a shape it has had ever since.
That victory is always presented as a victory of scientific objectivity over unscientific prejudice, but the Metaphysics of Quality says deeper issues were involved. The phenomenal sales of Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture and Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa indicated something else. When a book about the social customs of a South Sea island suddenly becomes a best seller you know there’s something in it other than an academic interest in Pacific island customs. Something in that book has hit a nerve to cause such a huge public acclaim. The nerve in this case was the conflict between society and intellect.
These books were legitimate anthropological documents but they were also political tracts in the new shift from social to intellectual dominance, in which the reasoning ran: If we have seen scientifically that they can have free sex in Samoa and it doesn’t seem to hurt anybody, then that proves we can have it here and not hurt anybody either. We have to use our intellect to discover what is right and wrong and not just blindly follow our own past customs. The new cultural relativism became popular because it was a ferocious instrument for the dominance of intellect over society. Intellect could now pass judgment on all forms of social custom, including Victorian custom, but society could no longer pass judgment on intellect. That put intellect clearly in the driver’s seat.
When people asked, If no culture, including a Victorian culture, can say what is right and what is wrong, then how can we ever know what is right and what is wrong? the answer was, That’s easy. Intellectuals will tell you. Intellectuals, unlike members of studiable cultures, know what they’re talking and writing about, because what they say isn’t culturally relative. What they say is absolute. This is because intellectuals follow science, which is objective. An objective observer does not have relative opinions because he is nowhere within the world he observes.
Good old Dusenberry. This was the same hogwash he had denounced in the 1950s in Montana. Now, with the added perspective on the twentieth century provided by the Metaphysics of Quality, you could see its origins. An American anthropologist could no more embrace non-objectivity than a Stalinist bureaucrat could play the stock market. And for the same kind of ideological, conformist reasons.
Now, it should be stated at this point that the Metaphysics of Quality supports this dominance of intellect over society. It says intellect is a higher level of evolution than society; therefore, it is a more moral level than society. It is better for an idea to destroy a society than it is for a society to destroy an idea. But having said this, the Metaphysics of Quality goes on to say that science, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed to take over society, has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science has no provision for morals. Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no objective reality. You can look through a microscope or telescope or oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never find a single moral. There aren’t any there. They are all in your head. They exist only in your imagination.
From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery. There is nothing morally wrong with being lazy, nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft, with suicide, with murder, with genocide. There is nothing morally wrong because there are no morals, just functions.
Now that intellect was in command of society for the first time in history, was this the intellectual pattern it was going to run society with?
As far as Phædrus knew, that question has never been successfully answered. What has occurred instead has been a general abandonment of all social moral codes, with a repressive society used as a scapegoat to explain any and every kind of crime. Twentieth-century intellectuals noted that Victorians believed all little children were born in sin and needed strict discipline to remove them from this condition. The twentieth-century intellectuals called that rubbish. There is no scientific evidence that little children are born in sin, they said. The whole idea of sin has no objective reality. Sin is simply a violation of a set of arbitrary social rules which little children can hardly be expected to be aware of, let alone obey. A far more objective explanation of sin is that a collection of social patterns, grown old and corrupt and decadent, tries to justify its own existence by proclaiming that all who fail to conform to it are evil rather than admit any evil of its own.
There are two ways to get rid of this sin, said the intellectuals. One is to force all children to conform to the ancient rules without ever questioning whether these rules are right or wrong. The other is to study the social patterns that have led to this condemnation and see how they can be altered to allow the natural inclinations of an innocent child to fulfill his needs without this charge of sinfulness arising. If the child is behaving naturally, then it is the society that calls him sinful that needs correction. If children are shown kindness and affection and given freedom to think and explore for themselves, children can arrive rationally at what is best for themselves and for the world. Why should they want to go in any other direction?
The new intellectualism of the twenties argued that if there are principles for right social conduct they are to be discovered by social experiment to see what produces the greatest satisfaction. The greatest satisfaction of the greatest number, rather than social tradition, is what determines what is moral and what is not. The scientific test of a vice should not be, Does society approve or disapprove? The test should be, Is it rational or irrational?
For example, drinking that causes car accidents or loss of work or family problems is irrational. That kind of drinking is a vice. It does not contribute to the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number. On the other hand, drinking is not irrational when it produces mere social or intellectual relaxation. That kind of drinking is not a vice. The same test can be applied to gambling, swearing, lying, slandering or any other vice. It is the intellectual aspect not the social aspect that dictates the answer.
Of all the vices none was more controversial than premarital and extramarital sex. There was no depravity the Victorians condemned more vehemently and no freedom the new intellectuals have defended more ardently. Scientifically speaking, sexual activity is neither good nor evil, the intellectuals said. It is merely a biological function, like eating or sleeping. Denial of this normal physical function for some pseudo-moral reasons is irrational. If you open the door to premarital sex you simply allow freedom that does nobody any harm.
Books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer were defended as great salients in the struggle against social oppression. Prostitution and adultery laws were eased. It was expected that with the new application of reason, sex could be handled much like other commodities without the terrible tensions and frustrations of social repression exposed by Sigmund Freud.
Thus, throughout this century we have seen over and over again that intellectuals weren’t blaming crime on man’s biological nature, but on the social patterns that had repressed this biological nature. At every opportunity, it seems, they derided, denounced, weakened and undercut these Victorian social patterns of repression in the belief that this would be the cure of man’s criminal tendencies. It was as a part of this new dominance over society that intellectuals became excited about anthropology in the hope that the field would provide facts upon which to base new scientific rules for the proper governing of our own society. That was the significance of Coming of Age in Samoa.
Here in this country, American Indians — who since Custer’s Last Stand had been reduced to near-pariahs by the Victorians — were suddenly revived as models of primitive communal virtue. Victorians had despised Indians because they were so primitive. Indians were at the opposite extreme of society from the Europeans that the American Victorians adored. But now anthros from everywhere swarmed to huts and teepees and hogans of every tribe they could find, jockeying to be in on the great treasure hunt for new information about possible new moral indigenous American ways of life.
This was illogical since, if subject-object science sees no morals anywhere, then no scientific study of any kind is going to fill the moral void left by the overthrow of Victorian society. Intellectual permissiveness and destruction of social authority are no more scientific than Victorian discipline.
Phædrus thought that this lapse in logic magically fitted the thesis he had started with: that the American personality has two components, European and Indian. The moral values that were replacing the old European Victorian ones were the moral values of American Indians: kindness to children, maximum freedom, openness of speech, love of simplicity, affinity for nature. Without any real awareness of where the new morals were coming from, the whole country was moving in a direction that it felt was right.
The new intellectualism looked to the common people as a source of cultural values rather than to the old Victorian European models. Artists and writers of the thirties such as Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, James Farrell, Faulkner, Steinbeck and hundreds of others dug deep into the illiterate roots of white American culture to find the new morality, not understanding that it was this white illiterate American culture that was closest to the values of the Indian. The twentieth-century intellectuals were claiming scientific sanction for what they were doing, but the changes that were actually taking place in America were changes toward the values of the Indian.
Even the language was changing from European to Indian. Victorian language was as ornamental as their wallpaper: full of involutions and curlicues and floral patterns that had no practical function whatsoever, and distracted you from whatever content was there. But the new style of the twentieth century was Indian in its simplicity and directness. Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Dos Passos and many others were using a style that in the past would have been thought crude. Now this style was a reincarnation of the directness and honesty of the common man.
The western movie was another example of this change, showing Indian values which had become cowboy values which had become twentieth-century all-American values. Everyone knew the cowboys of the silver screen had little to do with their actual counterparts, but it didn’t matter. It was the values, not the historical accuracy, that counted.
It was in this new world of technological achievement, of weakening social patterns of authority, of scientific amoralism, of adoration of the common man, and of an unconscious drift toward Indian values, that Phædrus grew up. The drift away from European social values had worked all right at first, and the first generation children of the Victorians, benefiting from ingrained Victorian social habits seem to have been enormously liberated intellectually by the new freedom. But with the second generation, Phædrus' own generation, problems began to emerge.
Indian values are all right for an Indian style of life, but they don’t work so well in a complex technological society. Indians themselves have a terrible time when they move from the reservation to the city. Cities function on punctuality and attention to material detail. They depend on the ability to subordinate to authority, whether it is a cop or an office manager or a bus driver. An upbringing that allows the child to grow naturally in the Indian fashion does not necessarily guarantee the finest sort of urban adjustment.
In the time that Phædrus grew up, intellect was dominant over society, but the results of the new social looseness weren’t turning out as predicted. Something was wrong. The world was no doubt in better shape intellectually and technologically but despite that, somehow, the quality of it was not good. There was no way you could say why this quality was no good. You just felt it.
Sometimes you could see little fragments of reflections of what was wrong but they were just fragments and you couldn’t put them together. He remembered seeing The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, in which one edge of the stage had an arrow-shaped neon sign flashing on and off, on and off, and beneath the arrow was the word, PARADISE, also flashing on and off. Paradise, it kept saying, is right where this arrow points:
PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→
But the Paradise was always somewhere pointed to, always somewhere else. Paradise was never here. Paradise was always at the end of some intellectual, technological ride, but you knew that when you got there paradise wouldn’t be there either. You would just see another sign saying:
PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→
and pointing another direction to go.
On a theater marquee, the title Rebel Without a Cause caught his attention in the same way. It pointed to the same low-quality thing that he saw everywhere but which couldn’t be put into words.
You had to be a rebel without a cause. The intellectuals had preempted all the causes. Causes were to the twentieth-century intellectuals as manners had been to Victorians. There was no way you could beat a Victorian on manners and there was no way you could beat a twentieth-century intellectual on causes. They had everything figured out. That was part of the problem. That was what was being rebelled against. All that neat scientific knowledge that was supposed to guide the world.
Phædrus had no cause that he could explain to anybody. His cause was the Quality of his life, which could not be framed in the objective language of the intellectuals and therefore in their eyes was not a cause at all. He knew that intellectually contrived technological devices had increased in number and complexity, but he didn’t think the ability to enjoy these devices had increased in proportion. He didn’t think you could say with certainty that people are any happier than they were during the Victorian era. This pursuit of happiness seemed to have become like the pursuit of some scientifically created, mechanical rabbit that moves ahead at whatever speed it is pursued. If you ever did catch it for a few moments it had a peculiar synthetic, technological taste that made the whole pursuit seem senseless.
Everyone seemed to be guided by an objective, scientific view of life that told each person that his essential self is his evolved material body. Ideas and societies are a component of brains, not the other way around. No two brains can merge physically, and therefore no two people can ever really communicate except in the mode of ship’s radio operators sending messages back and forth in the night. A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement, unable to talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one another because scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so. Each individual in his cell of isolation was told that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how hard he worked, his whole life is that of an animal that lives and dies like any other animal. He could invent moral goals for himself, but they are just artificial inventions. Scientifically speaking he has no goals.
Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian virtue ever was. That streetcar ride with Lila so long ago. That was the feeling. There was no way he could ever get to Lila or understand her and no way she could ever understand him because all this intellect and its relationships and products and contrivances intervened. They had lost some of their realness. They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying
PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→ PARADISE -→
but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself — and from each other.
It seemed to Lila that all this was some kind of a dream she was in. Where did it start? She couldn’t remember. Her mind always went faster and faster like this when she got scared. Why did he have to take the pills out of her purse? The pills could have made it not so scary. He must have thought those pills were dope or something. That’s why he took them. She could tell when she needed them by how scary everything got. Now she needed them bad.
She should have got her suitcase this afternoon like she said she was going to. Then she wouldn’t have to go back to the boat like this. Now it was dark.
That damn waiter. He could have given her some money to help her out. Then she could have taken a cab. Now she didn’t have anything. He was acting like she had lied to him. But she hadn’t lied. And he knew she hadn’t lied. He could tell. But that didn’t matter. He had to make it look like she had done something wrong even when he knew she hadn’t done anything wrong.
It was so cold now. The wind went right through this sweater. The streets were so dirty here. Everything was dirty here. Everything was worn out and cold.
It was starting to rain.
She didn’t even know if this was the right way. It seemed like she must be getting close to the river.
When she looked down a street she could see a highway where cars were going fast. But the park wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Maybe her directions got twisted and she was walking the wrong way. The rain was shining in their headlights. She remembered when she and the Captain had walked from the boat there was a park.
Maybe she could just take a taxi and not pay. She saw one coming with its light off. She thought about waving to it but she didn’t do it. In the old days she could have done it. And spit in his face when he tried to collect. But she was so tired now. She didn’t want to fight.
Maybe she should just ask somebody for some money. No, that wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t give it. Not here. It was dangerous going up to people in this city without any reason. They could do anything.
She could go to the cops or go to a shelter somewhere… But they’d find out about her. In this town once they know you’ve got a record you don’t want to see them again.
She didn’t want to walk along the river to get to the boat. She didn’t think she’d like it down there. She’d just stay up until she saw where the marina might be. Then she’d cross down.
That man who looked at her through the restaurant window. That was bad. Ten or fifteen years ago he would have been in that door so fast they couldn’t stop him. Now he just walked away. She remembered what Allie used to say: You never change, honey, but they do. She used to say, When you don’t need 'em they’re all over the place. But when you want one you never find him.
She wondered where Allie was now. She must be about fifty by now. She was probably some old bag lady like the ones she saw yesterday. That’s what Lila was going to be. A bag lady. Sitting on a grate somewhere trying to keep warm with all those old clothes on… Like the witch in the store window. With a big nose with a wart on it hanging down over her chin…
She should touch up her hair. She was really looking ratty now. The rain was getting her hair so wet she must be looking like a witch too.
There was supposed to be a big castle with a high green steeple at the top sticking up in the air. That’s what she remembered. When she got to the castle she should turn down to the river and that’s where the boat should be. She remembered that from when they left.
Her shoes were getting all squishy. Like her clothes and this box of shirts. Maybe she should just stop walking and wait for the rain to stop. But then she wouldn’t get to the castle. Until she got to the castle there was nowhere to stop.
Why didn’t she ever learn not to get mad at people? You always think someone’s going to come along and save you but this time it was too late. Some nice man’s going to come along and save you. Like the Captain there. You always think that, don’t you? But they’re all gone now, Lila. The Captain was the last one. There won’t be any more, Lila. He was the last one.
That’s what the one in the window was telling her.
These shirts she bought for the Captain were getting all wet. He wouldn’t even pay her for them now. Maybe if she could stand in a doorway or something until the rain stopped she could keep the shirts dry. She should have kept the bag they were in. That would have kept them dry. Then she could take the shirts back to the store and she could get some money for a taxi. But she needed a taxi to get back to the store. Besides the store was closed by this time.
The receipt was in the billfold. Maybe they would remember her. No they wouldn’t… Maybe there’ll be some money in the boat. She could just go in and look through all the drawers and places like that. But then she remembered she couldn’t get in the boat. She didn’t have the combination. She’d just have to wait until the Captain came to let her in. But then if he was there she couldn’t look through all the drawers. Maybe he’d give her some money then. No, he was really mad. He wouldn’t give her anything.
Maybe she would walk all night and not find the river. Probably she’d passed the castle. She’d walk and walk and never find it. She couldn’t even ask where the boat was. She didn’t remember the name of the place the boat was at. She just thought it was in this direction.
Maybe she would never find it and she would just walk and walk, on and on.
Then the Captain would just go and sail away and she would never see him again. With all her things! He was going to take her suitcase! All her things! Everything she owned was in there!
She didn’t see any sign of the river. She should ask someone where the boat place on the river is but she didn’t know what to ask for. The buildings changed slowly as she walked. She didn’t know any of them.
Someone was coming on a bicycle. He went right by. It was getting quieter and quieter here now. It looked like a better neighborhood, but you never know. This is where they come.
She must have gone too far. She didn’t remember this neighborhood. She should have stayed close to the river. Soon she’d be up in Harlem somewhere and she didn’t want to be there. Not at night. Some of the windows had iron over them and barbed wire underneath.
There wasn’t any castle. The castle would be skinny with a green pointed top that looked like a space ship, but there wasn’t any.
Why did she have to go and call the Captain names and get him mad like that? Now she didn’t know what she was going to do. If she’d just been mealy-mouthed with him instead of telling him off she’d be on her way to Florida now.
She shouldn’t have tried to get him to take Jamie along. She could see how he got uptight the moment she said it. She should have kept her mouth shut.
She shouldn’t have argued with him. If you don’t sneak around and say mealy-mouthed things they’ll get you for that. They’ll make you pay. They’ve all got to show you how big and strong they are. If you ever dare breathe that you don’t think they’re as big and strong as they pretend, they hate you. They can’t take that. That’s what they’ve got to have. Jamie made him look weak. That’s what he didn’t like.
All she wanted to do was show the Captain what she was like really. He wanted to know all about her, he said. He wanted to see what she was really like. So she tried to show him and see what happened. Jamie saw what he was like too. He saw it right away.
You mustn’t ever tell their secret about how weak they are. They think you don’t see. If you tell them they get mad. Then they really hate you. Then they call you names. That’s what they did in Rochester. But she was telling them the truth. That’s why they said she was sick. They don’t want to hear the truth. If you tell them, they’ll try to do things to you.
Her feet were hurting bad. She should take her shoes off and walk barefoot. Even if it was cold. It would feel good to walk barefoot. She would walk for a while more. Then if she didn’t see the river she should maybe take them off. Maybe she would take everything off.
She remembered when she walked home and it started to rain. It was her new dress. She tried to stand under trees and she felt terrible. She knew she would catch it at home and she did. Her clothes were so soaked it was like she’d been swimming in them. The shoes made squeeze sounds when she walked, and she sat down by the gutter with her new dress and cried and just let the water pour all around her. Then she felt better.
Maybe she should sit down now. No, not here. Not yet.
She put one hand against a sign post and took off one shoe and then the other. That felt better. It felt good to walk on her bare feet.
She’d like to take everything off. Just take everything off. Then somebody’d stop and help her. It’s the clothes that make them think you’re not really there. If she took all her clothes off then they’d see she was really here.
'You’ll never find happiness this way, Lila.' Her mother’s face always came back at times like this. Her little pin-eyes. Her mother was always right. There were only two things that made her happy, being right and thinking about how much better she was than everybody else. If you did something good she didn’t say anything. But if you did something bad, she told you about it, over and over again.
But you’re not doing anything wrong, you know. You’re not hurting anybody and you’re not stealing anything, you know, and still people just hate you for it.
If you really love people they’ll kill you for it. You have to hate them and then pretend you love them. Then they respect you. But what’s the purpose of living if all you can do is hate people and have them hate you? She was so sick and tired of this world where everybody is supposed to hate everybody else.
How could they keep going day after day with all this hate? It never stopped. See, now she was getting into it too. Now they got her going too. That’s how it works. Now they got her into it and she couldn’t get out. She kept trying to get out but she couldn’t get out. There’s nothing left. They took it all away.
They just want to dirty you. That’s what they want to do. Just dirty you so you’ll be like them. Shooting their filth into you and then say, Look, Lila, you’re a whore! You’re a slut!
They just hate it when people make love. And then they’ll go to a fist fight where somebody’s really hurt and all covered with blood and they’ll just love that. Or a war and stuff like that. They’re all mixed up and they’re trying to take it out on you so you get mixed up too. They want to mix you up just like they are and then you’ll be all mixed up too and then they’ll like you. They’ll say, Lila, you’re really good. They’re the ones who’re really crazy. They don’t know you, Lila. Nobody knows you. They’ll never know you! But boy oh boy, do you ever know them!
They’re always so calm afterward. That’s when they start thinking about how to leave you. The minute before they come you’re the Queen of the World but the minute after you’re just garbage.
Like the Captain there. Now he had his fun. Now he just wanted her to go. Now he’s going to take his boat and his money and everything down to Florida and leave her here.
There was no one else on the street here but she had the feeling somebody was watching her. It seemed that if she turned her head suddenly she’d see somebody right behind her.
The dark buildings looked like some place she had never seen before. Some bad movie where people get killed.
What did she need to be so scared of? There was nothing to be afraid of. At least she wasn’t going to get robbed. All they’d get would be these shirts. That would be a laugh. Here, she’d say. Have some shirts. They wouldn’t know what to do.
She looked back suddenly to see what was following. There was nothing. Most of the windows were dark. In just a few there was some light behind some shades. There was an orange round little light in one window. It looked like a face.
Somebody had put a Jack O’Lantern in the window. Like the witch in the store window. Halloween.
Like that old bag lady yesterday who looked like a witch. She looked at Lila in a funny way. Like she recognized her. Maybe she was really a witch too! That’s why she had looked at her that way.
She didn’t want to be a witch. When she was little she wanted to wear the pirate costume but Em got to wear it instead. Lila had to wear the witch’s costume. That’s what the old bag lady looked like. Like the mask she wore on that witch’s costume when she was little. She didn’t want to wear it but her mother made her.
Her mother’s face came back. Lila, why can’t you be more like Emmaline?
I hate Emmaline! Lila said.
Em doesn’t hate you.
That’s what you think, Lila said. Lila knew what she really was like. Always getting what she wanted. Always playing up. That’s what her mother wanted.
Lies. Em got all the new dresses. Lila got to be the witch.
At her grandfather’s funeral her mother made her wear Em’s old blue dress, and gave all the blue and white plates to Emmaline. She saw a bee this morning on top of a car and she thought about the island and her grandfather.
She wished she was at the island now. Her grandfather had bees and he used to make toast with the honey from the bees and give her some. She remembered he always used to put it on a blue and white plate. Then the funeral came and they sold his house and gave the blue and white plates to Emmaline and Lila never saw the bees again. She used to think the bees went over to the island with her grandfather. And then sometimes they’d fly back and she’d see them again and they always knew where her grandfather was. That’s what she thought about this morning when she saw the bee on the car.
I told you you’ll never find happiness this way, Lila, her mother said. Her face had that little smile she always got when she made somebody feel bad.
I’m tired of hearing that, Mother, Lila answered. What happiness did you find?
Little pin-eyes, eyes, eyes…
Her mother thought Lila was going to hell because she was bad, but the island, when you went there, it didn’t matter whether you were bad. You just went there. It was in the picture on her grandfather’s wall.
The wind came around the corner and blew through her sweater and blew something into her eyes like sand or dirt or something so she couldn’t see. She had to stop and stand close to a brick wall and blink to get it out.
There! Around the corner of the building she saw it! It was following her! She concentrated on it and concentrated some more with all her might. She really was a witch because slowly the face started to appear. She could make things come to her.
But now she could see it wasn’t a man at all that was following. It was just a dog.
As soon as the dog saw that she saw it, it disappeared back behind the building.
She concentrated some more. After a while, slowly, it started to come again. She didn’t move but held her eyes on it and then slowly step by step it came toward her. By the time it was halfway across the street she saw who it was. It was Lucky! After all these years.
Oh Lucky, you’ve come back, she said. You’re all whole again.
She started to walk toward him. She wanted to reach down and pet him but Lucky backed away.
Don’t you know me, Lucky? Lila asked. You’re all whole again. Don’t you remember me?
It didn’t show where he got hit by the car.
How did you get back from the island, Lucky? Did you swim? Where is the island, Lucky? We must be getting close to it now. You show me the way.
But as soon as Lila walked toward him Lucky walked ahead of her and as she followed him she saw that his feet hardly touched the ground, as though he didn’t have any weight at all.
From the dark far down the street came a truck without any headlights on. It hardly made any sound either. Scary. When the truck got near a street light and she could see whose it was, her heart jumped. Now she was really scared. He was here! He’d found her.
The last time she saw that truck was when they towed it to the junk yard. All smashed up. Just like him. The blood was all over the door of the truck from where his head hung over it. In the morgue she never looked at him. They couldn’t make her look at him.
Here he came now, in his pick-up truck, right down that street there, and he’s going to open the door and say Get in!
Then he’ll know what to do. He’ll find that goddamned bastard friend of Jamie that took her money and he’ll make him give it back. Then he’ll smash him to pieces. With one hand. He knew how to do that. He was always smashing up somebody. The son-of-a-bitch… You shouldn’t say that about somebody when they’re dead. As soon as she’d said it the truck steered to hit Lucky.
But Lucky stepped out of the way.
The truck went right by and she saw it was who she thought it was. He looked at her like she was somebody he didn’t want to have anything to do with. But he knew who she was and she knew who he was and then he sped up and the truck was gone.
She remembered the blood. Everybody acted like they were so sorry for her. All the hypocrites said, Oh Lila, we’re so sorry! But they were just hypocrites. They hated him as much as she did. The bastard. You shouldn’t say that about dead people but that’s what he was. She said it to him when he was alive. No reason to change now. It was the truth.
When she got around the corner, there it was, the castle! Lucky found it! But it was off where she didn’t think it would be. But she saw she could turn here and then down there was the park and the cement place and she thought that the boats were there too.
What a good dog! He was always so good. Someone must have sent him from the island to show her the way. Now she could go to the boat and wait for the Captain and he would take her down the river to the island.
She didn’t remember the cement place very well. It was scary. It looked like something where the lions come out at you. And there were steps going out from the other side and you didn’t know who might be there waiting. She walked slowly, step by step…
She didn’t hear anything, but she was afraid…
She took another step closer. There was nothing else she could do. She had to go past it. She held her breath and looked around the corner…
There was the marina! And all the water of the river. It was all here! Oh, it felt so good to be back again.
She could hear the boat ropes going bing-bing-bing in the wind.
At the gate for the marina was a black man who said something to her but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. He kept waving his hands and pointed to her but he didn’t touch her when she walked past him to the boat.
She walked down the dock and there was the boat! Lucky had found the way.
Where was Lucky?
She looked for him and she didn’t see him. She called, but he didn’t come. She looked into the river to see if he had started to swim back to the island but all she could see was lights far away all blurred by the rain.
After she stepped over the railing onto the boat she sat down in the cockpit. Oh it felt so good to sit down again! Her teeth were chattering and her clothes were all soaked all the way through but it didn’t matter now. All she had to do was wait for the Captain and they would go to the island.
A wake came across from somewhere out on the river. She could see it coming by the way the lights moved from on top of the waves. It lifted up and rocked the boat against the dock and then after a while it died down.
The water beside the boat was mucky-looking with a lot of junk in it. There were pieces of old plastic bottles, and dirty swirls of foam and a sponge and some branches and a dead fish caught on one of the branches. The fish was turned up on its side and was partly gone. Then the fish and the branch moved on by and she could smell the fish. Then the branch came back again and the whirlpool caught it and it went down into the center of the whirlpool and disappeared.
The junk went round and round in a whirlpool. It looked like the whirlpool was sucking all the junk to the bottom of the river. She remembered watching some fish once and how one of them kept turning on its side and the others tried to take bites out of it. Then it straightened up again. But after a while it went over on its side again and then it couldn’t straighten up at all. Then the others started to eat it and it didn’t struggle any more.
She hoped they wouldn’t bite Lucky when he swam back to the island. When you slow down the fish eat you up alive. You can’t do anything that makes them think you’re slowing down, or they’ll come after you.
They wouldn’t dare bite Lucky.
She wished the Captain would come.
She was so tired of this side of the river. She’d even swim if she had to. She didn’t know how long the Captain would take to come and she didn’t want to wait any more.
Lila took off her sweater. That felt better with it off.
Then she put her hand down into the water.
The water felt warm! It was real warm in the river. If she swam to the island she wouldn’t be cold any more.
She looked at the water again.
She didn’t want to be cold any more. She was so tired of fighting it. Just to give up. Just to let go.
Just to let go. Toward that hand in the water. The hand was sticking up out of the water where the branch had been, reaching for her to take it. The hand came close to her and then a little whirlpool in the water carried it away. It was like a baby’s hand sticking out of the water. A baby’s hand.
The little hand was reaching up out of the water. It was a baby’s hand. She could see the little fingers. The hand was just farther than she could reach going into the whirlpool. Then it came closer and she caught it, and her heart held still as she brought it up out of the water.
Its little body was all stiff and cold.
Its eyes were closed. Thank God. She cleaned off the scum from its body and saw that none of the baby seemed to be gone. The fish had not eaten any of it yet. But it was not breathing.
Then she took her sweater from the cockpit floor and put it in her lap and wrapped the baby in it and held it close. And she rocked the baby back and forth until she could feel some of the coldness go out of it. It’s all right, she said. It’s all right. You’re all right now. It’s all over. You’re all right now. No one’s going to hurt you any more.
After a while Lila could feel the baby’s body becoming warm against her own. She began to rock it a little back and forth. Then she began to hum a little song to it that she remembered from long ago.