Does Lila have Quality? The question seemed inexhaustible. The answer Phædrus had thought of before, Biologically she does, socially she doesn’t, still didn’t get all the way to the bottom of it. There was more than society and biology involved.
Phædrus heard some voices in the corridor become louder and closer, then fade away again.
What had happened since the end of the First World War was that the intellectual level had entered the picture and had taken over everything. It was this intellectual level that was screwing everything up. The question of whether promiscuity is moral had been resolved from prehistoric times to the end of the Victorian era, but suddenly everything was upended by this new intellectual supremacy that said sexual promiscuity is neither moral nor immoral, it is just amoral human behavior.
That may have been why Rigel was so angry back in Kingston. He thought Lila was immoral because she’d broken up a family and destroyed a man’s position in the social community — a biological pattern of quality, sex, had destroyed a social pattern of quality, a family and a job. What made Rigel mad was that into this scene come intellectuals like Phædrus who say it’s unintelligent to repress biological drives. You must decide these matters on the basis of reason, not on the basis of social codes.
But if Rigel identified Phædrus with this intellect-vs.-society code and the social upheavals it has produced, he certainly picked on the wrong person. The Metaphysics of Quality uproots the intellectual source of this confusion, the doctrine that says, Science is not concerned with values. Science is concerned only with facts.
In a subject-object metaphysics this platitude is unassailable, but the Metaphysics of Quality asks: which values is science unconcerned with?
Gravitation is an inorganic pattern of values. Is science unconcerned? Truth is an intellectual pattern of values. Is science unconcerned? A scientist may argue rationally that the moral question, Is it all right to murder your neighbor? is not a scientific question. But can he argue that the moral question, Is it all right to fake your scientific data? is not a scientific question? Can he say, as a scientist, The faking of scientific data is no concern of science? If he gets tricky and tries to say that that is a moral question about science which is not a part of science, then he has committed schizophrenia. He is admitting the existence of a real world that science cannot comprehend.
What the Metaphysics of Quality makes clear is that it is only social values and morals, particularly church values and morals, that science is unconcerned with.
There are important historic reasons for this:
The doctrine of scientific disconnection from social morals goes all the way back to the ancient Greek belief that thought is independent of society, that it stands alone, born without parents. Ancient Greeks such as Socrates and Pythagoras paved the way for the fundamental principle behind science: that truth stands independently of social opinion. It is to be determined by direct observation and experiment, not by hearsay. Religious authority always has attacked this principle as heresy. For its early believers, the idea of a science independent of society was a very dangerous notion to hold. People died for it.
The defenders who fought to protect science from church control argued that science is not concerned with morals. Intellectuals would leave morals for the church to decide. But what the larger intellectual structure of the Metaphysics of Quality makes clear is that this political battle of science to free itself from domination by social moral codes was in fact a moral battle! It was the battle of a higher, intellectual level of evolution to keep itself from being devoured by a lower, social level of evolution.
Once this political battle is resolved, the Metaphysics of Quality can then go back and re-ask the question, Just exactly how independent is science, in fact, from society? The answer it gives is, not at all. A science in which social patterns are of no account is as unreal and absurd as a society in which biological patterns are of no account. It’s an impossibility.
If society enters nowhere into the business of scientific discovery then where does a scientific hypothesis come from? If the observer is totally objective and records only what he observes, then where does he observe a hypothesis? Atoms don’t carry hypotheses about themselves around as part of their luggage. As long as you assume an exclusive subject-object, mind-matter science, that whole question is an inescapable intellectual black hole.
Our scientific description of nature is always culturally derived. Nature tells us only what our culture predisposes us to hear. The selection of which inorganic patterns to observe and which to ignore is made on the basis of social patterns of value, or when it is not, on the basis of biological patterns of value.
Descartes' I think therefore I am was a historically shattering declaration of independence of the intellectual level of evolution from the social level of evolution, but would he have said it if he had been a seventeenth-century Chinese philosopher? If he had been, would anyone in seventeenth-century China have listened to him and called him a brilliant thinker and recorded his name in history? If Descartes had said, The seventeenth-century French culture exists, therefore I think, therefore I am, he would have been correct.
The Metaphysics of Quality resolves the relationship between intellect and society, subject and object, mind and matter, by embedding all of them in a larger system of understanding. Objects are inorganic and biological values; subjects are social and intellectual values. They are not two mysterious universes that go floating around in some subject-object dream that allows them no real contact with one another. They have a matter-of-fact evolutionary relationship. That evolutionary relationship is also a moral one.
Within this evolutionary relationship it is possible to see that intellect has functions that predate science and philosophy. The intellect’s evolutionary purpose has never been to discover an ultimate meaning of the universe. That is a relatively recent fad. Its historical purpose has been to help a society find food, detect danger, and defeat enemies. It can do this well or poorly, depending on the concepts it invents for this purpose.
The cells Dynamically invented animals to preserve and improve their situation. The animals Dynamically invented societies, and societies Dynamically invented intellectual knowledge for the same reasons. Therefore, to the question, What is the purpose of all this intellectual knowledge? the Metaphysics of Quality answers, The fundamental purpose of knowledge is to Dynamically improve and preserve society. Knowledge has grown away from this historic purpose and become an end in itself just as society has grown away from its original purpose of preserving physical human beings and become an end in itself, and this growing away from original purposes toward greater Quality is a moral growth. But those original purposes are still there. And when things get lost and go adrift it is useful to remember that point of departure.
The Metaphysics of Quality suggests that the social chaos of the twentieth century can be relieved by going back to this point of departure and re-evaluating the path taken from it. It says it is immoral for intellect to be dominated by society for the same reasons it is immoral for children to be dominated by their parents. But that doesn’t mean that children should assassinate their parents, and it doesn’t mean intellectuals should assassinate society. Intellect can support static patterns of society without fear of domination by carefully distinguishing those moral issues that are social-biological from those that are intellectual-social and making sure there is no encroachment either way.
What’s at issue here isn’t just a clash of society and biology but a clash of two entirely different codes of morals in which society is the middle term. You have a society-vs.-biology code of morals and you have an intellect-vs.-society code of morals. It wasn’t Lila Rigel was attacking, it was this intellect-vs.-society code of morals.
In the battle of society against biology, the new twentieth-century intellectuals have taken biology’s side. Society can handle biology alone by means of prisons and guns and police and the military. But when the intellectuals in control of society take biology’s side against society then society is caught in a cross-fire from which it has no protection.
The Metaphysics of Quality says there are not just two codes of morals, there are actually five: inorganic-chaotic, biological-inorganic, social-biological, intellectual-social, and Dynamic-static. This last, the Dynamic-static code, says what’s good in life isn’t defined by society or intellect or biology. What’s good is freedom from domination by any static pattern, but that freedom doesn’t have to be obtained by the destruction of the patterns themselves.
Rigel’s interpretation of recent moral history is probably a pretty simple one: old codes vs. new chaos. But a Metaphysics of Quality says it’s not at all that simple. An analysis of separate moral systems sees the history of the twentieth century in an entirely different way:
Until the First World War the Victorian social codes dominated. From the First World War until the Second World War the intellectuals dominated unchallenged.
From the Second World War until the seventies the intellectuals continued to dominate, but with an increasing challenge — call it the Hippie revolution, — which failed. And from the early seventies on there has been a slow confused mindless drift back to a kind of pseudo-Victorian moral posture accompanied by an unprecedented and unexplained growth in crime.
Of these periods, the last two seem the most misunderstood. The Hippies have been interpreted as frivolous spoiled children, and the period following their departure as a return to values, whatever that means. The Metaphysics of Quality, however, says that’s backward: the Hippie revolution was the moral movement. The present period is the collapse of values.
The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a moral revolution against both society and intellectuality. It was a whole new social phenomenon no intellectual had predicted and no intellectuals were able to explain. It was a revolution by children of well-to-do, college-educated, modern people of the world who suddenly turned upon their parents and their schools and their society with a hatred no one could have believed existed. This was not any new paradise the intellectuals of the twentieth century were trying to achieve by freedom from Victorian restraints. This was something else that had blown up in their faces.
Phædrus thought the reason this movement has been so hard to understand is that understanding itself, static intellect, was its enemy. The culture-bearing book of the period, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, was a running lecture against intellect, … All my New York friends were in the negative nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytic reasons, Kerouac wrote, but Dean (the hero of the book) just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other.
In the twenties it had been thought that society was the cause of man’s unhappiness and that intellect would cure it, but in the sixties it was thought that both society and intellect together were the cause of all the unhappiness and that transcendence of both society and intellect would cure it. Whatever the intellectuals of the twenties had fought to create, the flower children of the sixties fought to destroy. Contempt for rules, for material possessions, for war, for police, for science, for technology were standard repertoire. The blowing of the mind was important. Drugs that destroyed one’s ability to reason were almost a sacrament. Oriental religions such as Zen and Vedanta that promised release from the prison of intellect were taken up as gospel. The cultural values of blacks and Indians, to the extent that they were anti-intellectual, were mimicked. Anarchy became the most popular politics and squalor and poverty and chaos became the most popular lifestyles. Degeneracy was practiced for degeneracy’s sake. Anything was good that shook off the paralyzing intellectual grip of the social-intellectual Establishment.
By the end of the sixties the intellectualism of the twenties found itself in an impossible trap. If it continued to advocate more freedom from Victorian social restraint, all it would get was more Hippies, who were really just carrying its anti-Victorianism to an extreme. If, on the other hand, it advocated more constructive social conformity in opposition to the Hippies, all it would get was more Victorians, in the form of the reactionary right.
This political whip-saw was invincible, and in 1968 it cut down one of the last of the great intellectual liberal leaders of the New Deal period, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate for president.
I’ve seen enough of this, Humphrey exclaimed at the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention, I’ve seen far too much of it! But he had no explanation for it and no remedy and neither did anyone else. The great intellectual revolution of the first half of the twentieth century, the dream of a Great Society made humane by man’s intellect, was killed, hoist on its own petard of freedom from social restraint.
Phædrus thought that this Hippie revolution could have been almost as much an advance over the intellectual twenties as the twenties had been over the social 1890s, but his analysis showed that this Dynamic sixties revolution made a disastrous mistake that destroyed it before it really got started.
The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just two directions to go: toward biological quality and toward Dynamic Quality. The revolutionaries of the sixties thought that since both are antisocial, and since both are anti-intellectual, why then they must both be the same. That was the mistake.
American writing on Zen during this period showed this confusion. Zen was often thought to be a sort of innocent anything goes. If you did anything you pleased, without regard for social restraint, at the exact moment you pleased to do it, that would express your Buddha-nature. To Japanese Zen masters coming to this country this must have seemed really strange. Japanese Zen is attached to social disciplines so meticulous they make the Puritans look almost degenerate.
Back in the fifties and sixties Phædrus had shared this confusion of biological quality and Dynamic Quality, but the Metaphysics of Quality seemed to help clear it up. When biological quality and Dynamic Quality are confused the result isn’t an increase in Dynamic Quality. It’s an extremely destructive form of degeneracy of the sort seen in the Manson murders, the Jonestown madness, and the increase of crime and drug addiction throughout the country. In the early seventies, as people began to see this, they dropped away from the movement, and the Hippie revolution, like the intellectual revolution of the twenties, became a moral rebellion that failed.
Today, it seemed to Phædrus, the overall picture is one of moral movements gone bankrupt. Just as the intellectual revolution undermined social patterns, the Hippies undermined both static and intellectual patterns. Nothing better has been introduced to replace them. The result has been a drop in both social and intellectual quality. In the United States the national intelligence level shown in SAT scores has gone down. Organized crime has grown more powerful and more sinister. Urban ghettos have grown larger and more dangerous. The end of the twentieth century in America seems to be an intellectual, social, and economic rust-belt, a whole society that has given up on Dynamic improvement and is slowly trying to slip back to Victorianism, the last static ratchet-latch. More Dynamic foreign cultures are overtaking it and actually invading it because it’s now incapable of competing. What’s coming out of the urban slums, where old Victorian social moral codes are almost completely destroyed, isn’t any new paradise the revolutionaries hoped for, but a reversion to rule by terror, violence and gang death — the old biological might-makes-right morality of prehistoric brigandage that primitive societies were set up to overcome.
Phædrus looked at the glass window across the hotel room and at the darkness beyond it. The question that seemed to grow in his mind every time he came back to New York was: is this city going to survive or isn’t it? It’s always had social problems, and it’s always survived them, and somehow it’s always been strengthened by them, and maybe that will happen again. But this time the odds didn’t look bright. He remembered the title Rudyard Kipling had used for Calcutta back in Victorian times, The City of Dreadful Night. That’s what this city was becoming.
It was the most Dynamic place on earth, but the price of being Dynamic is instability. Any Dynamic situation is vulnerable to attrition and corruption and even to complete collapse. When you take steps forward into the unknown you always risk being smashed by that unknown. There had always been a battle here between intense legions of the most Dynamic and most moral on one side, confronting the most biological and least moral on the other; between A-class people and F-class people. The Bs and Cs were out in the other boroughs and suburbs, doing static things. But now, here, the Fs seemed to be winning.
From the hotel window, looking out across the park, it seemed as if you could see from the north, from the ghetto areas there, a dreadful night, an eclipse of social patterns by invading unchecked biological patterns, closing in and gradually putting New York into a sleep from which it might never recover. It isn’t a war of races or of cultures. It’s war of society against patterns of reason and patterns of biology that have been set loose by the mistakes of this century.
The most sinister thing about the fall of the Roman Empire was that the people who conquered it never understood that they had done so. They paralyzed the patterns of Roman social structure to a point where everybody just forgot what that structure was. Taxes became uncollectible. Armies composed of hired barbarians stopped receiving pay. Everything just lapsed. The patterns of civilization were forgotten, and a Dark Age settled in.
Phædrus wasn’t sure but he seemed to detect a peculiar gentleness here on the streets now that he didn’t remember from the past. It was an ominous gentleness found in old and corrupt cultures, the gentleness one hears in Neapolitan street songs and in old Mexican cancidnes. It comes not from an absence of violence but from an excess of it. Live and let live. Avoid trouble. It was the gentleness of someone who has given up fighting openly because it is too dangerous to do so. He had the sickening feeling that something like the fall of the Roman Empire was beginning to happen here. What was so sinister now about New York was that the patterns that built it no longer seemed understood — those who understand the patterns are no longer in control of those who don’t.
What seemed to allow this deadly night to descend was that the intellectual patterns that were supposed to be in charge of things, that should comprehend the threat and lead the fight against it, were paralyzed. They were paralyzed, not by any external force, but by their own internal construction, which made them unable to comprehend what was happening.
It was like watching the spider waiting while the wasp gets ready to attack it. The spider can leave any time to save its life but it doesn’t do so. It just waits there, paralyzed by some internal pattern of responses that make it unable to recognize its own danger. The wasp plants its eggs in the spider’s body and the spider lives on while the wasp larvae slowly eat it and destroy it.
Phædrus thought that a Metaphysics of Quality could be a replacement for the paralyzing intellectual system that is allowing all this destruction to go unchecked. The paralysis of America is a paralysis of moral patterns. Morals can’t function normally because morals have been declared intellectually illegal by the subject-object metaphysics that dominates present social thought. These subject-object patterns were never designed for the job of governing society. They’re not doing it. When they’re put in the position of controlling society, of setting moral standards and declaring values, and when they then declare that there are no values and no morals, the result isn’t progress. The result is social catastrophe.
It’s this intellectual pattern of amoral objectivity that is to blame for the social deterioration of America, because it has undermined the static social values necessary to prevent deterioration. In its condemnation of social repression as the enemy of liberty, it has never come forth with a single moral principle that distinguishes a Galileo fighting social repression from a common criminal fighting social repression. It has, as a result, been the champion of both. That’s the root of the problem.
Phædrus remembered parties in the fifties and sixties full of liberal intellectuals like himself who actually admired the criminal types that sometimes showed up. Here we are, they seemed to believe, drug pushers, flower children, anarchists, civil rights workers, college professors — we’re all just comrades-in-arms against the cruel and corrupt social system that is really the enemy of us all.
No one liked cops at those parties. Anything that restricted the police was good. Why? Well, because police are never intellectual about anything. They’re just stooges for the social system. They revere the social system and hate intellectuals. It was a sort of caste thing. The police were low-caste. Intellectuals were above all that crime-and-violence sort of thing that the police were constantly engaged in. Police were usually not very well educated either. The best thing you could do was take away their guns. That way they’d be like the police in England, where things were better. It was the police repression that created the crime.
What passed for morality within this crowd was a kind of vague, amorphous soup of sentiments known as human rights. You were also supposed to be reasonable. What these terms really meant was never spelled out in any way that Phædrus had ever heard. You were just supposed to cheer for them.
He knew now that the reason nobody ever spelled them out was nobody ever could. In a subject-object understanding of the world these terms have no meaning. There is no such thing as human rights. There is no such thing as moral reasonableness. There are subjects and objects and nothing else.
This soup of sentiments about logically non-existent entities can be straightened out by the Metaphysics of Quality. It says that what is meant by human rights is usually the moral code of intellect vs. society, the moral right of intellect to be free of social control. Freedom of speech; freedom of assembly, of travel; trial by jury; habeas corpus; government by consent — these human rights are all intellect-vs.-society issues. According to the Metaphysics of Quality these human rights have not just a sentimental basis, but a rational, metaphysical basis. They are essential to the evolution of a higher level of life from a lower level of life. They are for real.
But what the Metaphysics of Quality also makes clear is that this intellect-vs.-society code of morals is not at all the same as the society-vs.-biology codes of morals that go back to a prehistoric time. They are completely separate levels of morals. They should never be confused.
The central term of confusion between these two levels of codes is society. Is society good or is society evil? The question is confused because the term society is common to both these levels, but in one level society is the higher evolutionary pattern and in the other it is the lower. Unless you separate these two levels of moral codes you get a paralyzing confusion as to whether society is moral or immoral. That paralyzing confusion is what dominates all thoughts about morality and society today.
The idea that man is born free but is everywhere in chains was never true. There are no chains more vicious than the chains of biological necessity into which every child is born. Society exists primarily to free people from these biological chains. It has done that job so stunningly well intellectuals forget the fact and turn upon society with a shameful ingratitude for what society has done.
Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level’s role in keeping the biological level under control. Intellectuals have failed to understand the ocean of biological quality that is constantly being suppressed by social order.
Biological quality is necessary to the survival of life. But when it threatens to dominate and destroy society, biological quality becomes evil itself, the Great Satan of twentieth-century Western culture. One reason why fundamentalist Moslem cultures have become so fanatic in their hatred of the West is that it has released the biological forces of evil that Islam has fought for centuries to control.
What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth-century intellectual faith in man’s basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is disastrously naive. The ideal of a harmonious society in which everyone without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating fiction.
It isn’t consistent with scientific fact. Studies of bones left by the cavemen indicate that cannibalism, not cooperation, was a pre-society norm. Primitive tribes such as the American Indians have no record of sweetness and cooperation with other tribes. They ambushed them, tortured them, dashed their children’s brains out on rocks. If man is basically good, then maybe it is man’s basic goodness which invented social institutions to repress this kind of biological savagery in the first place.
Suddenly we have come full circle at the American culture’s founders, the Puritans, and their overwhelming concern with original sin and release from it. The mythology by which they explained this original sin seems no longer useful in a scientific world, but when we look at the things in their contemporary society they identified with this original sin we see something remarkable. Drinking, dancing, sex, playing the fiddle, gambling, idleness: these are biological pleasures. Early Puritan morals were largely a suppression of biological quality. In the Metaphysics of Quality the old Puritan dogma is gone but its practical moral pronouncements are explained in a way that makes sense.
The Victorians didn’t really believe in those old Puritan biological restraints the way the Puritans did. They were in the process of breaking away from them. But they paid them lip-service and the old spare the rod and spoil the child school of biological repression was still in fashion. And what one notices, when one reads the works of the children of those traditions, is how much more decent and socially mature they seemed than people do today. The 1920s intellectuals strove to break down the old social codes, but they had these codes built into them from childhood and so were unaffected by the breakdown they produced. But their descendants, raised without the codes, have suffered.
What the Metaphysics of Quality concludes is that the old Puritan and Victorian social codes should not be followed blindly, but should not be attacked blindly either. They should be dusted off and re-examined, fairly and impartially, to see what they were trying to accomplish and what they actually did accomplish toward building a stronger society. We must understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good. These moral bads and goods are not just customs. They are as real as rocks and trees. The destructive sympathy by intellectuals toward lawlessness in the sixties and since is derived, no doubt, from what is perceived to be a common enemy, the social system. But the Metaphysics of Quality concludes that this sympathy was really stupid. The decades since the sixties have borne this out.
Phædrus remembered a conversation in the early sixties with a University of Chicago faculty member who was moving out of the Woodlawn neighborhood next to the university. He was moving because criminal blacks had moved in and it had become too dangerous to live there. Phædrus had said he didn’t think moving out was any solution.
The professor had blown up at him. What you don’t know! he had said. We’ve tried everything! We’ve tried workshops, study groups, councils. We’ve spent years in this. If there’s anything we’ve missed we don’t know what it is. Everything has failed.
The professor added, You don’t understand what a defeat this has been for us. It’s as though we never even tried.
Phædrus had had no answer at the time, but he had one now. The idea that biological crimes can be ended by intellect alone, that you can talk crime to death, doesn’t work. Intellectual patterns cannot directly control biological patterns. Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun. All the laws of history, all the arguments, all the Constitutions and the Bills of Rights and Declarations of Independence are nothing more than instructions to the military and police. If the military and police can’t or don’t follow these instructions properly they might as well have never been written.
Phædrus now thought that part of the professor’s paralysis was a commitment to the twentieth-century intellectual doctrines, in which his university has had a prominent role. A second part of the paralysis probably came from the fact that the criminals were black. If it had been a group of trash whites moving into the neighborhood, robbing and raping and killing, the response would have been much fiercer, but when whites denounced blacks for robbing and raping and killing they left themselves open to the charge of racism. In the atmosphere of public opinion of that time no intellectual dared to open himself to the charge of being a racist. Just the thought of it shut him up tight. Paralysis.
That charge is part of the paralysis of this city here. Right now.
The root of the racism charge goes all the way back to square one, to the subject-object metaphysics wherein man is an object who possesses a set of properties called a culture. A subject-object metaphysics lumps biological man and cultural man together as aspects of a single molecular unit. It goes on to reason that because it is immoral to speak against a people because of their genetic characteristics it is therefore also immoral to speak against a people because of their cultural characteristics. The anthropological doctrine of cultural relativism reinforces this. It says you cannot judge one culture in terms of the values of another. Science says there is no morality outside of cultural morality, therefore any moral censorship of minority patterns of crime in this city is itself immoral. That is the paralysis.
By contrast the Metaphysics of Quality, also going back to square one, says that man is composed of static levels of patterns of evolution with a capability of response to Dynamic Quality. It says that biological patterns and cultural patterns are often grouped together, but to say that a cultural pattern is an integral part of a biological person is like saying the Lotus 1-2-3 program is an integral part of an IBM computer. Not so. Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.
A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not. It is immoral to speak against a people because of the color of their skin, or any other genetic characteristic because these are not changeable and don’t matter anyway. But it is not immoral to speak against a person because of his cultural characteristics if those cultural characteristics are immoral. These are changeable and they do matter.
Blacks have no right to violate social codes and call it racism when someone tries to stop them, if those codes are not racist codes. That is slander. The fight to sustain social codes isn’t a war of blacks vs. whites or Hispanics vs. blacks, or poor people vs. rich people or even stupid people against intelligent people, or any other of all the other possible cultural confrontations. It’s a war of biology vs. society.
It’s a war of biological blacks and biological whites against social blacks and social whites. Genetic patterns just confuse the matter. And this is a war in which intellect, to end the paralysis of society, has to know whose side it is on, and support that side, never undercut it. Where biological values are undermining social values, intellectuals must identify social behavior, no matter what its ethnic connection, and support it all the way without restraint. Intellectuals must find biological behavior, no matter what its ethnic connection, and limit or destroy destructive biological patterns with complete moral ruthlessness, the way a doctor destroys germs, before those biological patterns destroy civilization itself.
This city of dreadful night. What a disaster!
Phædrus wondered what was going to happen to Lila, just shifting around here from one scene to another. She’d been around long enough to know how to take care of herself, he supposed, but it still spooked him. He was sorry to see her go like that.
He got up, went into the bedroom, and looked at the bed wondering whether he should go to sleep now. He decided to take a shower instead. It would be the last one for a while.
There really wasn’t much purpose in being up here in this hotel room, he thought. His business with Redford was all done. He really should be back down there on the river watching after things. He’d checked the boat lines yesterday, but you never know. Some tug could throw a wake in there and really mess things up. Lila had said she would just go down and take her suitcase off, but under the circumstances, with her mad at him like that, it was probably something he should check into. Particularly in this city. In this dreadful night.
By the time he was done showering he had decided to pack and get back and sleep on the boat.
He dressed and packed his duffel bag and got ready to go. Then, with his tote bag full of unread mail over one arm, and a duffel bag balancing it in the other hand, he passed through the sitting room toward the door. There he noticed that the moth was still buzzing under the lamp shade, still engaged in its own personal war with the forces of darkness. He took one last look at the magic balcony window on the other side of the room and then closed the door on it forever.
In the hallway, waiting for the elevator, he listened to the howling windy sounds of the elevator shaft. Howling wind sounds. They have a meaning for boat people that others seldom understand.
Suddenly it came to him that the moth didn’t struggle to get up here at all. That moth rode up here on the elevator like everybody else. That was a twentieth-century moth. Only Victorian moths struggled against the darkness.
He smiled a little at that.
When Phædrus' taxi arrived at the 79th Street Boat Basin he could see that the wind coming in over the river had shifted to the northwest. It was a sign the rain would stop soon.
By the gate, sitting on a rail, was a black man who stared at him. Phædrus wondered for a moment why he was there. Then he realized he must be a guard. He didn’t have any uniform though.
Phædrus paid the driver, gathered his luggage from the seat of the taxi, and stepped out.
You keeping things quiet here? he said to the guard.
The man nodded and asked, Is that your boat way out on the end?
Phædrus said it was. What’s wrong with it?
Nothing. He looked at Phædrus. But there’s someone on it.
What’s he doing?
It’s a lady. She’s just sitting there. No raincoat. I asked her what was the matter, said she "belonged" there. She just looked at me.
I know her, Phædrus said. She must have forgotten the combination.
The boards of the dock were slippery, and as he walked carefully with all his luggage he could see her out there under the boom gallows.
He didn’t like it. She was supposed to be gone for good. He wondered what she had in store for him now.
When he got there Lila’s eyes were wide and staring. She acted as if she didn’t recognize him. He wondered if she was on drugs.
He swung his luggage over the life lines and stepped aboard himself. Why didn’t you go in? he asked.
She didn’t answer.
He’d find out soon enough.
He rotated the combination wheels of the lock in the dark, counting clicks, then gave a sharp tug on the lock, and it opened. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t get in.
Couldn’t you get the lock to work?They stole my purse.
Oh, that was her problem.
He felt a little relieved. If money was all she needed, he could give her enough of that to get her going in the morning. No harm putting her up for one more night.
Well, let’s get down inside, he said.
We’re ready to go now, Lila said. She got up strangely, as if she was carrying something heavy all wrapped in her arms.
Who is we? Phædrus wondered.
Down below he gave her a towel, but instead of wiping herself with it she opened up what she had been carrying and began to stroke what looked like a baby’s face.
As he looked closer he saw that it wasn’t a baby. It was the head of a doll.
Lila smiled at him. We’re all going together, she said.
He looked at her face carefully. It was serene.
She came back to me, Lila said, from the river.
Who?
She’s going to help us get to the island.
What island? he wondered. What’s this doll?… What are you talking about? he asked.
He looked at her very closely. She returned his gaze and suddenly he saw it again — the thing he had seen in the bar at Kingston, the light, and he felt inappropriately relaxed by it.
This wasn’t drugs.
He settled back on the berth, trying to find some space to think this through. This was coming at him too fast.
After a while he said, Tell me about the island.
Lucky’s probably already there, she said.
Lucky?
We’re all going, she said. Then she added, You see, I know who you are.
Who? he asked.
The boatman.
There was no point in asking her any more questions. All he got was still more questions.
She looked down again at the doll with an adoring look. This wasn’t any kind of drugs, he thought. This was real trouble. He recognized the style of what she was saying, the salad of words. He had been accused of it himself, once. They meant something to her but she was leaving things out and skipping and hopping from place to place.
He watched her for a long time, then saw she was getting dreamy.
You’d better dry off and change clothes, he said. She didn’t answer. She just looked down at the doll and made little cooing sounds.
Why don’t you go up forward and rest? he said.
Still no answer.
Do you want something to eat?
She shook her head and smiled dreamily.
He got up and tugged at her shoulder. Come on, he said, you’re falling asleep.
She woke a little, looked at him blindly, then carefully wrapped the doll again and got up. She stepped ahead of him like a sleepwalker into the forecabin and there placed the doll carefully in the bunk ahead of her and then slowly climbed in.
Sleep as long as you want, he said.
She didn’t answer. She seemed to be asleep already.
He went back and sat down.
That wasn’t so hard, he thought.
He wondered what he would do with her in the morning. Maybe she’d snap out of it. That sometimes happened.
He got a flashlight and lifted the cabin sole boards to check the level of water in the bilge.
It was still quite low.
He then got a wrench and opened the top of the drinking water tank and shone the flashlight beam inside. It looked about half-full. He could fill it tomorrow morning, he thought, just before he left.
What the hell? How could he leave tomorrow? What was he going to do with her?
He went back and sat down again. He wasn’t really coming to grips with this.
After a while he supposed he could call the police.
And say what? he wondered.
Well, you see, I’ve got this crazy lady on my boat and I’d like to have you get her off.
How did she get on your boat? they would ask.
Well, she got on at Kingston, he would say… ridiculous. There was no way he was going to win that conversation.
He supposed the easiest legitimate way out of the whole mess would be to get her to see a psychiatrist. Then, whatever happened to her, he’d be done with her. That’s what they’re for. But how was he going to talk her into that? He could barely get her into the bunk up there.
And who was going to pay? Those guys don’t come cheap. Would they take her as a charity case? An out-of-towner in New York? Hardly. And anyway just the paper-work of it, the bureaucracy, could make it days before he got out of here.
Slowly the predicament he was in began to dawn on him. Boy! There’s no such thing as a free lunch. She really had him trapped. There was no way he could get rid of her now. What the hell was he going to do?
This wasn’t tragic. This was so dumb it was comic. He was really stuck with her!
He could see himself spending the rest of his life with this crazy lady up in the forecabin, never daring to report her, traveling from port to port like some yachting Flying Dutchman — a servant to her for the rest of his life.
He felt like Woody Allen… That’s who should play him in the movies. Woody Allen. He’d get it right.
What to do? This was impossible.
He realized he could just take her out and dump her overboard. He thought about it for a while, until it started to give him a sick depressed feeling. No sense in being ridiculous. He was really stuck.
It was cold in the cabin. The shock of all this must have prevented him from noticing it. He got out the charcoal briquets and built a fire in the heater, but all of the matches went out. More Woody Allen. All of a sudden nothing was working.
He went over in his mind all the things that had happened since he first met her in Kingston. She had given little warnings that something like this might happen. She was such a stranger he just hadn’t recognized it. The sudden anger over nothing, that crazy sex episode in the forecabin in Nyack. She had been acting that way all along.
He guessed that’s what Rigel was trying to warn him about.
He thought of starting up the stove for some coffee, but decided not to. He should try to get some sleep himself. There was nothing he could do now that couldn’t be done in the morning. He rolled a sleeping bag out on the bunk, undressed and got in.
The talk about the boatman, what was that about?
He wondered why she picked him up, of all people, at that bar.
She must see him as some sort of refuge. Some sort of savior.
He began to think about how isolated she really was.
After a while he guessed that must be the whole explanation. That’s why she came back here tonight. Apparently he was the only person she could come to.
He didn’t know what he was going to do with her.
Just listen to her for a while, he supposed, and then figure it out. That’s all he could do.
The absence of any harbor sounds here was strange. Here in New York Harbor he’d expected tugboats and barges going through the night and heavy ocean vessels. Not this. This was like some peaceful inland lake somewhere…
Sleep didn’t come… That light he saw around her. It was trying to tell him something.
It was saying, wake up.
But wake up to what?
Wake up to your obligations, maybe.
What were they?
Maybe not to be so static.
It was a long time now since those years when Phædrus had been a mental patient. He’d become very static. He was more intelligible to the sane now because he’d moved closer to them. But he’d become a lot farther away from people like Lila.
Now he saw her the same way others had seen him years ago. And now he was behaving exactly the way they did. They could be excused for not knowing better. They didn’t know what it was like. But he didn’t have that excuse.
It’s a legitimate point of view. It’s the lifeboat problem. If you get too involved with too many people with too many problems they drag you under. You don’t save them. They sink you.
Of course she’s unimportant. Of course she’s a waste of time. She’s causing an interruption of other more important purposes in life. No one admits it, but that’s really the reason the insane get locked up. They’re disgusting people you want to get rid of but can’t. It’s not just that they have absurd ideas that nobody else believes. What makes them insane is that they have these ideas and are a nuisance to somebody else.
The only thing that’s illegitimate is the cover-up, the pretense that you’re trying to help them by getting rid of them. But really there was no way Lila was going to sink him. She was just a nuisance now, and he could handle that. Maybe that’s what the light was trying to tell him. He had no choice but to try to help her, nuisance or not. Otherwise he would just injure himself. You can’t just run off from other people without injuring yourself too.
Well, he thought… she’s either come to the best possible person or to the worst possible person. No way yet to know which.
He rolled over and lay quietly.
He knew he had heard that talk of hers before, that style, and now he remembered some of the people he had talked to in the insane asylum. When people are going insane they tend to get very ingenuous like that… What did he remember? It all seemed so long ago.
Aunt Ellen. When he was seven.
There was a noise in the downstairs in the dark. His parents thought it was a burglar, but it was Ellen. Her eyes were wide. Some man was chasing her, she said. He was trying to hypnotize her and do things to her.
Later, at the asylum Phædrus remembered her pleading, I’m all right. I’m all right! They’re just keeping me here when I know I’m all right.
Afterward his mother and her sisters had cried as they left. But they didn’t see what he saw.
He never forgot what he saw, that Ellen wasn’t frightened of the insanity. She was frightened of them.
That was the hardest thing to deal with during his own commitment. Not the insanity. That came naturally. The hardest thing to deal with was the righteousness of the sane.
When you’re in agreement with the sane they’re a great comfort and protection, but when you disagree with them it’s another matter. Then they’re dangerous. Then they’ll do anything. The sinister thing that struck the most fear in him was what they’d do in the name of kindness. The ones he cared about most and who cared about him most suddenly, all of them, turned against him the same way they had against Ellen. They kept saying, There’s no way we can reach you. If only we could make you understand.
He saw that the sane always know they are good because their culture tells them so. Anyone who tells them otherwise is sick, paranoid, and needs further treatment. To avoid that accusation Phædrus had had to be very careful of what he said when he was in the hospital. He told the sane what they wanted to hear and kept his real thoughts to himself.
He turned back again. This pillow was like a rock. She had all the good pillows up there. No way to get one now… It didn’t matter.
That was what was wrong with making a film about his book. You can’t film insanity.
Maybe if, during the show, the whole theater collapsed and the audience found themselves among the stars with just space all around and no support, wondering what a stupid thing this is, sitting here among the stars watching this film that has nothing to do with them and then suddenly realizing that this film is the only reality there is and that they had better get interested in it because what they see and what they are is the same thing and once it stops they will stop too…
That’s it. Everything! Gone!!
Nothing left!!
And then after a while this dream of some kind going on, and them in it.
That’s the way it was. He’d gotten so used to being in this dream called sanity he hardly ever thought about it any more. Just once in a while, when something like this reminded him of it. Now he could see the light just rarely, once in a while, like tonight. But back then the light had been everything.
It wasn’t that any particular thing looked different. It was that the whole context of everything was completely different although it contained the same things.
He remembered a metaphor that had occurred to him of a bug that had been crawling around in some smelly sock all his life and now someone or something had turned the sock inside out. The terrain he covered, the details of his life, were all the same, but now somehow everything seemed open and free and all the horrible confining smell of everything was gone.
Another metaphor that had occurred to him was that he’d been on a tight-rope all of his life. Now he’d fallen off and found that instead of crashing he was flying, a strange new talent he never knew he had.
He remembered how he kept to himself the feeling of exhilaration, of old mysteries being solved and new mysteries being explored. He remembered how it seemed to him that he hadn’t entered any cataleptic trance. He had fallen out of one. He was free of a static pattern of life he’d thought was unchangeable.
The boat rocked a little and he became aware again of where he was. Crazy. He was going to be insane again if he didn’t get some sleep. Too much chaos… streets, noises, people he hadn’t seen for more than a year, Robert Redford, suddenly juxtaposed against all this boat background… and now this Lila business on top of it all. Too much… It all keeps changing, changing, changing. He’d wanted not to get stuck in some static pattern, but this was too fluid. There ought to be some halfway mixture of chaos and stability. He was getting too old for all this.
Maybe he should read for a while. Here he was, at a dock, all plugged into 120-volt power for the first time in weeks and he hadn’t enjoyed it once. He could read all the new mail. That would calm him down, maybe.
After a while he got up, got the 120-volt reading lamp out of its bin, plugged it in and switched it. It didn’t work. Probably the power line was disconnected at the dock. That always seemed to happen. It was cold in here too. He would have to get the fire going again.
He put his trousers and sweater on, got a flashlight and a voltmeter from the tool box and opened the hatch to fix the light.
Outside, the rain had stopped but the sky was still overcast and reflecting the lights of the city. The rain would continue later, maybe. He’d find out in the morning.
On the dock he saw his electric cord was plugged in. He went over to its post, unplugged it and substituted voltmeter leads. No electricity there.
It wasn’t so good, he supposed, to stand barefoot on a wet dock checking 120-volt circuits. He opened a cover on one side of the post and found it, a switch that, sure enough, was OFF. They always do that to you. When he turned it on, the voltmeter showed 114 volts.
Back in the boat the lamp worked too. He got some alcohol and restored the fire in the stove.
He guessed he didn’t want to read the mail yet. That took special concentration. After hundreds of fan letters saying almost identical things it got harder and harder to read them with a fresh mind. More of the celebrity problem, and he didn’t want to get into that any more today.
There were those books he’d bought. He could read them. One of the disadvantages of this boat life is you don’t get to use public libraries. But he had found a bookstore with an old two-volume biography of William James that should hold him for a while. Nothing like some good old philosophology to put someone to sleep. He took the top volume out of the canvas bag, climbed into the sleeping bag and looked at the book’s cover for a while.
He liked that word philosophology. It was just right. It had a nice dull, cumbersome, superfluous appearance that exactly fitted its subject matter, and he’d been using it for some time now. Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing. It’s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior.
Literature people are sometimes puzzled by the hatred many creative writers have for them. Art historians can’t understand the venom either. He supposed the same was true with musicologists but he didn’t know enough about them. But philosophologists don’t have this problem at all because the philosophers who would normally condemn them are a null-class. They don’t exist. Philosophologists, calling themselves philosophers, are just about all there are.
You can imagine the ridiculousness of an art historian taking his students to museums, having them write a thesis on some historical or technical aspect of what they see there, and after a few years of this giving them degrees that say they are accomplished artists. They’ve never held a brush or a mallet and chisel in their hands. All they know is art history.
Yet, ridiculous as it sounds, this is exactly what happens in the philosophology that calls itself philosophy. Students aren’t expected to philosophize. Their instructors would hardly know what to say if they did. They’d probably compare the student’s writing to Mill or Kant or somebody like that, find the student’s work grossly inferior, and tell him to abandon it. As a student Phædrus had been warned that he would come a cropper if he got too attached to any philosophical ideas of his own.
Literature, musicology, art history and philosophology thrive in academic institutions because they are easy to teach. You just Xerox something some philosopher has said and make the students discuss it, make them memorize it, and then flunk them at the end of the quarter if they forget it. Actual painting, music composition and creative writing are almost impossible to teach and so they barely get in the academic door. True philosophy doesn’t get in at all. Philosophologists often have an interest in creating philosophy but, as philosophologists, they subordinate it, much as a literary scholar might subordinate his own interest in creative writing. Unless they are exceptional they don’t consider the creation of philosophy their real line of work.
As an author, Phædrus had been putting off the philosophology, partly because he didn’t like it, and partly to avoid putting a philosophological cart before the philosophical horse. Philosophologists not only start by putting the cart first; they usually forget the horse entirely. They say first you should read what all the great philosophers of history have said and then you should decide what you want to say. The catch here is that by the time you’ve read what all the great philosophers of history have said you’ll be at least two hundred years old. A second catch is that these great philosophers are very persuasive people and if you read them innocently you may be carried away by what they say and never see what they missed.
Phædrus, in contrast, sometimes forgot the cart but was fascinated by the horse. He thought the best way to examine the contents of various philosophological carts is first to figure out what you believe and then to see what great philosophers agree with you. There will always be a few somewhere. These will be much more interesting to read since you can cheer what they say and boo their enemies, and when you see how their enemies attack them you can kibitz a little and take a real interest in whether they were right or wrong.
With this technique you can approach someone like William James in a much different way than an ordinary philosophologist would. Since you’ve already done your creative thinking before you read James, you don’t just go along with him. You get all kinds of fresh new ideas by contrasting what he’s saying with what you already believe. You’re not limited by any dead-ends of his thought and can often see ways of going around him. This was occurring in what Phædrus had read so far. He was getting a definite impression that James' philosophy was incomplete and that the Metaphysics of Quality might actually improve on it. A philosophologist would normally be indignant at the impertinence of someone thinking he could improve on the great Harvard philosopher, but James himself, to judge from what Phædrus had read so far, would have been very enthusiastic about the effort. He was, after all, a philosopher.
Anyway, the reason Phædrus bought these books on James was that it was necessary to bone up a little in order to protect his Metaphysics of Quality against attack. So far he had pretty much ignored the philosophologists and they had pretty much returned the compliment. But with this next book he was unlikely to be so lucky, since a metaphysics is something anyone can pick to pieces. Some of them, at least, would be at it, picking and sneering in the time-honored tradition of literary critics, musicologists, and art historians, and he had better be ready for them.
A review of his book in the Harvard Educational Review had said that his idea of truth was the same as James. The London Times said he was a follower of Aristotle. Psychology Today said he was a follower of Hegel. If everyone was right he had certainly achieved a remarkable synthesis. But the comparison with James interested him most because it looked like there might be something to it.
It was also very good philosophological news. James is usually considered a very solid mainstream American philosopher, whereas Phædrus' first book had often been described as a cult book. He had a feeling the people who used that term wished it was a cult book and would go away like a cult book, perhaps because it was interfering with some philosophological cultism of their own. But if philosophologists were willing to accept the idea that the Metaphysics of Quality is an offshoot of James' work, then that cult charge was shattered. And this was good political news in a field where politics is a big factor.
In his undergraduate days Phædrus had given James very short shrift because of the title of one of his books: The Varieties of Religious Experience. James was supposed to be a scientist, but what kind of scientist would pick a title like that? With what instrument was James going to measure these varieties of religious experience? How would he empirically verify his data? It smelt more like some Victorian religious propagandist trying to smuggle God into the laboratory data. They used to do that to try to counteract Darwin. Phædrus had read early nineteenth-century chemistry texts telling how the exact combination of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water told of the wondrous workings of the mind of God. This looked like more of the same.
However, in his rereading of James, he had so far found three things that were beginning to dissolve his early prejudice. The first wasn’t really a reason but was such an unlikely coincidence Phædrus couldn’t get it out of his mind. James was the godfather of William James Sidis, the child prodigy who could speak five languages at the age of five and who thought colonial democracy came from the Indians. The second was a reference to James' dislike of the dichotomy of the universe into subjects and objects. That, of course, put him automatically on the side of Phædrus' angels. But the third thing, which might also seem irrelevant, but which was doing more than anything else to dissolve Phædrus' early prejudice, was an anecdote James told about a squirrel.
James and a group of friends were on an outing somewhere and one of them chased the squirrel around a tree. The squirrel instinctively clung to the opposite side of the tree and moved so that as the man circled the tree the squirrel also circled it on the opposite side.
After observing this, James and his friends engaged in a philosophic discussion of the question: did the man go around the squirrel or didn’t he? The group broke into two philosophical camps and Phædrus didn’t remember how the argument was resolved. What impressed him was James' interest in the question. It showed that although James was no doubt an expert philosophologist (certainly he had to be to teach the stuff at Harvard) he was also a philosopher in the creative sense. A philosophologist would have been mildly contemptuous of such a discussion because it had no importance, that is, no body of philosophical writings existed about it. But to a creative philosopher like James the question was like catnip.
It had the smell of what it is that draws real philosophers into philosophy. Did the man go around the squirrel or didn’t he? He was north, south, east and west of the squirrel, so he must have gone around it. Yet at no time had he ever gone to the back or to the side of the squirrel. That squirrel could say with absolute scientific certitude, That man never got around me.
Who is right? Is there more than one meaning of the word around? That’s a surprise! That’s like discovering more than one true system of geometry. How many meanings are there and which one is right?
It seems as though the squirrel is using the term around in a way that is relative to itself but the man is using it in a way that is relative to an absolute point in space outside of the squirrel and himself. But if we dop the squirrel’s relative point of view and we take the absolute fixed point of view, what are we letting ourselves in for? From a fixed point in space every human being on this planet goes around every other human being to the east or west of him once a day. The whole East River does a half-cartwheel over the Hudson each morning and another one under it each evening. Is this what we want to mean by around? If so, how useful is it? And if the squirrel’s relative point of view is false, how useless is it?
What emerges is that the word around, which seems like one of the most clear and absolute and fixed terms in the universe suddenly turns out to be relative and subjective. What is around depends on who you are and what you’re thinking about at the time you use it. The more you tug at it the more things start to unravel. One such philosophic tugger was Albert Einstein, who concluded that all time and space are relative to the observer.
We are always in the position of that squirrel. Man is always the measure of all things, even in matters of space and dimension. Persons like James and Einstein, immersed in the spirit of philosophy, do not see things like squirrels circling trees as necessarily trivial, because solving puzzles like that are what they’re in philosophy and science for. Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider.
That includes the consideration of people like Lila. This whole business of insanity is an enormously important philosophical subject that has been ignored — mainly, he supposed, because of metaphysical limitations. In addition to the conventional branches of philosophy — ethics, ontology and so on — the Metaphysics of Quality provides a foundation for a new one: the philosophy of insanity. As long as you’re stuck with the old conventions, insanity is going to be a misunderstanding of the object by the subject. The object is real, the subject is mistaken. The only problem is how to change the subject’s mind back to a correct comprehension of objective reality.
But with a Metaphysics of Quality the empirical experience is not an experience of objects. It’s an experience of value patterns produced by a number of sources, not just inorganic patterns. When an insane person — or a hypnotized person or a person from a primitive culture — advances some explanation of the universe that is completely at odds with current scientific reality, we do not have to believe he has jumped off the end of the empirical world. He is just a person who is valuing intellectual patterns that, because they are outside the range of our own culture, we perceive to have very low quality. Some biological or social or Dynamic force has altered his judgment of quality. It has caused him to filter out what we call normal cultural intellectual patterns just as ruthlessly as our culture filters out his.
Obviously no culture wants its legal patterns violated, and when they are, an immune system takes over in ways that are analogous to a biological immune system. The deviant dangerous source of illegal cultural patterns is first identified, then isolated and finally destroyed as a cultural entity. That’s what mental hospitals are partly for. And also heresy trials. They protect the culture from foreign ideas that if allowed to grow unchecked could destroy the culture itself.
That was what Phædrus had seen in the psychiatric wards, people trying to convert him back to objective reality. He never doubted that the psychiatrists were kind people. They had to be more than normally kind to stand that job. But he saw that they were representatives of the culture and they were always required to deal with insanity as cultural representatives, and he got awfully tired of their interminable role-playing. They were always playing the role of priests saving heretics. He couldn’t say anything about it because that would sound paranoiac, a misunderstanding of their good intentions and evidence of how deep his affliction really was.
Years later, after he was certified as sane, he read objective medical descriptions of what he had experienced, and he was shocked at how slanderous they were. They were like descriptions of a religious sect written by a different, hostile religious sect. The psychiatric treatment was not a search for truth but the promulgation of a dogma. Psychiatrists seemed to fear the taint of insanity much as inquisitors once feared succumbing to the devil. Psychiatrists were not allowed to practice psychiatry if they were insane. It was required that they literally did not know what they were talking about.
To this, Phædrus supposed, they could counter that you don’t have to be infected with pneumonia in order to know how to cure it and you don’t have to be infected with insanity to know how to cure it either. But the rebuttal to that goes to the core of the whole problem. Pneumonia is a biological pattern. It is scientifically verifiable. You can know about it by studying the pneumococcus bacillus under a microscope.
Insanity on the other hand is an intellectual pattern. It may have biological causes but it has no physical or biological reality. No scientific instrument can be produced in court to show who is insane and who is sane. There’s nothing about insanity that conforms to any scientific law of the universe. The scientific laws of the universe are invented by sanity. There’s no way by which sanity, using the instruments of its own creation, can measure that which is outside of itself and its creations. Insanity isn’t an object of observation. It’s an alteration of observation itself. There’s no such thing as a disease of patterns of intellect. There’s only heresy. And that’s what insanity really is.
Ask, If there were only one person in the world, is there any way he could be insane? Insanity always exists in relation to others. It is a social and intellectual deviation, not a biological deviation. The only test for insanity in a court of law or anywhere else is conformity to a cultural status quo. That is why the psychiatric profession bears such a resemblance to the old priesthoods. Both use physical restraint and abuse as ways of enforcing the status quo.
This being so, it follows that the assignment of medical doctors to treat insanity is a misuse of their training. Intellectual heresy is not really their business. Medical doctors are trained to look at things from an inorganic and biological perspective. That’s why so many of their cures are biological: shock, drugs, lobotomies, and physical restraints.
Like police, who live in two worlds, the biological and the social, psychiatrists also live in two worlds, the social and the intellectual. Like cops, they are in absolute control of the lower order and are expected to be absolutely subservient to the upper order. A psychiatrist who condemns intellectuality would be like a cop who condemns society. Not the right stuff. You have as much chance convincing a psychiatrist that the intellectual order he enforces is rotten as you have of convincing a cop that the social order he supports is rotten. If they ever believed you they’d have to quit their jobs.
So Phædrus had seen that if you want to get out of an insane asylum the way to do it is not to try to persuade the psychiatrists that you may know more than they do about what is wrong with you. That is hopeless. The way to get out is to persuade them that you fully understand that they know more than you do and that you are fully ready to accept their intellectual authority. That is how heretics keep from getting burned. They recant. You have to do a first-class acting job and not allow any little glances of resentment get in there. If you do they may catch you at it and you may be worse off than if you hadn’t tried.
If they ask you how you’re feeling you can’t say, Great! That would be a symptom of delusion. But you can’t say, Rotten! either. They’ll believe it and increase the tranquilizer dosage. You have to say, Well… I think I may be improving a little bit… and do so with a little look of humility and pleading in your eyes. That brings the smiles.
In time this strategy had brought Phædrus enough smiles to get out. It made him less honest and it made him more of a conformist to the current cultural status quo but that is what everyone really wanted. It got him out and back to his family and a job and a place in the world again and this new personality of a conforming, role-playing, ex-mental patient who knew how to do as he was told without protest became a sort of permanent stage personality that he never dropped.
It wasn’t a happy solution, to always role-play with people he had once been honest with. It made it impossible to ever really share anything with them. Now he was more isolated than he had been in the insane asylum but there was nothing he could do about it. In his first book he had cast this isolated role-player as the narrator, a fellow who is likable because he is so recognizably normal, but who has trouble coping with his own life because he has destroyed his ability to deal honestly with it. It was this isolation that indirectly broke up his family and led to this present life.
Now, years later, his resentment against what had happened in the hospital had lessened, and he began to see that there is, of course, a need for psychiatrists just as there is for cops. Somebody has to deal with the degenerate forms of society and intellect. The thing to understand is that if you are going to reform society you don’t start with cops. And if you are going to reform intellect you don’t start with psychiatrists. If you don’t like our present social system or intellectual system the best thing you can do with either cops or psychiatrists is stay out of their way. You leave them till last.
Who do you start with then?… Anthropologists?
Actually that’s not such a bad idea. Anthropologists, when they’re not being self-consciously objective, tend to be very interested in new things.
The idea had first come to Phædrus in the mountains near Bozeman, Montana, where he first began reading anthropology. It was there he read Ruth Benedict’s implication that the way to correct the brujo’s problem in Zuni would have been to deport him to one of the Plains tribes where his temperamental drives would have blended in better. What about that? Send the insane to anthropologists rather than psychiatrists for a cure!
Ruth Benedict maintained that psychiatry had been confused by its start from a fixed list of symptoms instead of from the case study of the insane, those whose characteristic reactions are denied validity in their society. Another anthropologist, D. T. Campbell, agreed, saying, Implicitly the laboratory psychologist still assumes that his college sophomores provide an adequate basis for a general psychology of man. He said that for social psychology these tendencies have been very substantially curbed through confrontation with the anthropological literature.
The psychiatrist’s approach would have analyzed the brujo’s childhood to find causes for his behavior, shown why he became a window peeper, counseled him against window-peeping, and, if he continued, possibly confined him for his own good. But the anthropologist on the other hand could study the person’s complaints, find a culture where the complaints were solved and send him there. In the brujo’s case anthropologists would have sent him up north to the Cheyenne. But if someone suffered from sexual inhibition by the Victorians, he could be sent to Margaret Mead’s Samoa; or if he suffered from paranoia, sent to one of the Middle Eastern countries where suspicious attitudes are more normal.
What anthropologists see over and over again is that insanity is culturally defined. It occurs in all cultures but each culture has different criteria for what constitutes it. Kluckhohn has referred to an old Sicilian, who spoke only a little English, who came to a San Francisco hospital to be treated for a minor physical ailment. The intern who examined him noted that he kept muttering that he was being witched by a certain woman, that this was the real reason for his suffering. The intern promptly sent him to the psychiatric ward where he was kept for several years. Yet in the Italian colony from which he came everybody of his age group believed in witchcraft. It was normal in the sense of standard. If someone from the intern’s own economic and educational group had complained of being persecuted by a witch, this would have been correctly interpreted as a sign of mental derangement.
Many others reported cultural correlations of the symptoms of insanity. M. K. Opler found that Irish schizophrenic patients had preoccupations with sin and guilt related to sex. Not Italians. Italians were given to hypochondriacal complaints and body preoccupations. There was more open rejection of authority among Italians. Clifford Geertz stated that the Balinese definition of a madman is someone who, like an American, smiles when there is nothing to smile at. In one journal Phædrus found a description of different psychoses which were specialized according to culture: the Chippewa-Cree suffered from windigo, a form of cannibalism; in Japan there was imu, a cursing following snake-bite; among Polar Eskimos it is pibloktog, a tearing off of clothes and running across the ice; and in Indonesia was the famous amok, a brooding depression which succeeds to a dangerous explosion of violence.
Anthropologists found that schizophrenia is strongest among those whose ties with the cultural traditions are weakest: drug users, intellectuals, immigrants, students in their first year at college, soldiers recently inducted.
A study of Norwegian-born immigrants in Minnesota showed that over a period of four decades their rate of hospitalization for mental disorders was much higher than those for either non-immigrant Americans or Norwegians in Norway. Isaac Frost found that psychoses often develop among foreign domestic servants in Britain, usually within eighteen months of their arrival.
These psychoses, which are an extreme form of culture shock, emerge among these people because the cultural definition of values which underlies their sanity has been changed. It was not an awareness of truth that was sustaining their sanity, it was their sureness of their cultural directives.
Now, psychiatry can’t really deal with all of this because it is pinioned to a subject-object truth system which declares that one particular intellectual pattern is real and all others are illusions. Psychiatry is forced to take this position in contradiction to history, which shows over and over again that one era’s illusions become another era’s truths, and in contradiction to geography, which shows that one area’s truths are another area’s illusions. But a philosophy of insanity generated by a Metaphysics of Quality states that all these conflicting intellectual truths are just value patterns. One can vary from a particular common historical and geographical truth pattern without being crazy.
The anthropologists established a second point: not only does insanity vary from culture to culture, but sanity itself also varies from culture to culture. They found that the ability to see reality is not only a difference between the sane and the insane, it is also a difference between different cultures of the sane. Each culture presumes its beliefs correspond to some sort of external reality, but a geography of religious beliefs shows that this external reality can be just about any damn thing. Even the facts that people observe to confirm the truth are dependent on the culture they live in.
Categories that are unessential to a given culture, Boas said, will, on the whole, not be found in its language. Categories that are culturally important will be found in detail. Ruth Benedict, who was Boas' student, stated:
The cultural pattern of any civilization makes use of a certain segment of the great arc of potential human purposes and motivations just as… any culture makes use of certain selected material techniques or cultural traits. The great arc along which all the possible human behaviors are distributed is far too immense and too full of contradictions for any one culture to utilize even any considerable portion of it. Selection is the first requirement. Without selection no culture could even achieve intelligibility and the intentions it selects and makes its own are a much more important matter than the particular detail of technology or the marriage formality that it also selects in similar fashion.
A child in a money-society will draw pictures of coins that are larger than a child in a primitive culture. Moreover the money-society children overestimate the size of a coin in proportion to the value of the coin. Poor children will overestimate more than rich ones.
Eskimos see sixteen different forms of ice which are as different to them as trees and shrubs are different to us. Hindus, on the other hand, use the same term for both ice and snow. Creek and Natchez Indians do not distinguish yellow from green. Similarly, Choctaw, Tunica, the Keresian Pueblo Indians and many other people make no terminological distinction between blue and green. The Hopis have no word for time.
Edward Sapir said,
The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group… Forms and significances which seem obvious to an outsider will be denied outright by those who carry out the patterns; outlines and implications that are perfectly clear to these may be absent to the eye of the onlooker.
As Kluckhohn put it,
Any language is more than an instrument of conveying ideas, more even than an instrument for working upon the feelings of others and for self-expression. Every language is also a means of categorizing experience. The events of the real world are never felt or reported as a machine would do it. There is a selection process and an interpretation in the very act of response. Some features of the external situation are highlighted, others are ignored or not fully discriminated.
Every people has its own characteristic class in which individuals pigeonhole their experiences. The language says, as it were, notice this, always consider this separate from that, such and such things always belong together. Since persons are trained from infancy to respond in these ways they take such discriminations for granted as part of the inescapable stuff of life.
That explained a lot of what Phædrus had heard on the psychiatric wards. What the patients showed wasn’t any one common characteristic but an absence of one. What was absent was the kind of standard social role-playing that normal people get into. Sane people don’t realize what a bunch of role-players they are, but the insane see this role-playing and resent it.
There was a famous experiment where a sane person went onto a ward disguised as insane. The staff never detected his act, but the other patients did. The patients saw he was acting. The hospital staff, who were playing standard social roles of their own, couldn’t detect the difference.
Insanity as an absence of common characteristics is also demonstrated by the Rorschach ink-blot test for schizophrenia. In this test, randomly formed ink splotches are shown to the patient and he is asked what he sees. If he says, I see a pretty lady with a flowering hat, that is not a sign of schizophrenia. But if he says, All I see is an ink-blot, he is showing signs of schizophrenia. The person who responds with the most elaborate lie gets the highest score for sanity. The person who tells the absolute truth does not. Sanity is not truth. Sanity is conformity to what is socially expected. Truth is sometimes in conformity, sometimes not.
Phædrus had adopted the term static filter for this phenomenon. He saw that this static filter operates at all levels. When, for example, someone praises your home town or family or ideas you believe that and remember it, but when someone condemns these institutions you get angry and condemn him and dismiss what he has said and forget it. Your static value system filters out the undesirable opinions and preserves the desirable ones.
But it isn’t just opinions that get filtered out. It’s also data. When you buy a certain model of car you may be amazed at how the highways fill up with other people driving the same model. Because you now value this model more you now see more of it.
When Phædrus started to read yachting literature he ran across a description of the green flash of the sun. What was that all about? he wondered. Why hadn’t he seen it? He was sure he had never seen the green flash of the sun. Yet he must have seen it. But if he saw it, why didn’t he see it?
This static filter was the explanation. He didn’t see the green flash because he’d never been told to see it. But then one day he read a book on yachting which said, in effect, to go see it. So he did. And he saw it. There was the sun, green as green can be, like a GO light on a downtown traffic semaphore. Yet all his life he had never seen it. The culture hadn’t told him to so he hadn’t seen it. If he hadn’t read that book on yachting he was quite certain he would never have seen it.
A few months back a static filtering had occurred that could have been disastrous. It was in an Ohio port where he had come in out of a summer storm on Lake Erie. He had just barely been able to sail to windward off the rocks through the night until he reached a harbor about twenty miles down the coast from Cleveland.
When he got there and was safely in the lee of the jetty he went below and grabbed a harbor chart and brought it up and held it, soaking wet, in the rain, using the boat’s spreader lights to read by while he steered past concrete dividing walls, piers, harbor buoys and other markers until he found the yacht basin and tied up at a berth.
He had slept exhausted for most of the next day, and when he woke up and went outside it was afternoon. He asked someone how far it was to Cleveland.
You’re in Cleveland, he was told.
He couldn’t believe it. The chart said he was in a harbor miles from Cleveland.
Then he remembered the little discrepancies he had seen on the chart when he came in. When a buoy had a wrong number on it he presumed it had been changed since the chart was made. When a certain wall appeared that was not shown, he assumed it had been built recently or maybe he hadn’t come to it yet and he wasn’t quite where he thought he was. It never occurred to him to think he was in a whole different harbor!
It was a parable for students of scientific objectivity. Wherever the chart disagreed with his observations he rejected the observation and followed the chart. Because of what his mind thought it knew, it had built up a static filter, an immune system, that was shutting out all information that did not fit. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.
If this were just an individual phenomenon it would not be so serious. But it is a huge cultural phenomenon too and it is very serious. We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past facts which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern we don’t throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too.
Just as the biological immune system will destroy a life-saving skin graft with the same vigor with which it fights pneumonia, so will a cultural immune system fight off a beneficial new kind of understanding like that of the bruj’o in Zuni with the same kind of vigor it uses to destroy crime. It can’t distinguish between them.
Phædrus recognized that there’s nothing immoral in a culture not being ready to accept something Dynamic. Static latching is necessary to sustain the gains the culture has made in the past. The solution is not to condemn the culture as stupid but to look for those factors that will make the new information acceptable: the keys. He thought of this Metaphysics of Quality as a key.
The Dharmakaya light. That was a huge area of human experience cut off by cultural filtering.
Over the years it also had become a burden to him, this knowledge about the light. It cut off a whole area of rational communion with others. It was not something that he could talk about without being slammed by the cultural immune system, being thought crazy, and with his record it was not good to invite that suspicion.
But he had seen it again on Lila tonight and he had seen it very strongly back in Kingston. That’s sort of what got him into all this. It told him there was something of importance here. It told him to wake up and not go by the book in dealing with her.
He didn’t think of this light as some sort of supernatural occurrence that had no grounding in physical reality. In fact he was sure it was grounded in physical reality. But nobody sees it because the cultural definition of what is real and what is unreal filters out the Dharmakaya light from twentieth-century American reality just as surely as time is filtered out of Hopi reality, and green-yellow differences mean nothing to the Natchez.
He couldn’t demonstrate it scientifically, because you couldn’t predict when it was going to occur and thus couldn’t set up an experiment to test for it. But, without any experimental testing, he thought that the light was nothing more than an involuntary widening of the iris of the eyes of the observer that lets in extra light and makes things look brighter, a kind of hallucinatory light produced by optic stimulation, somewhat like the light that comes when one stares at something too long. Like eye blinks, it’s assumed to be an irrelevant interruption of what one really sees, or it’s assumed to be a subjective phenomenon, which is unreal, as opposed to an objective phenomenon, which is real.
But despite filtering by the cultural immune system, references to this light occur in many places, scattered, disconnected, and unrelated. Lamps are sometimes used as symbols of learning. Why should they be? A torch, like the old Blake school torch, is sometimes used as a symbol of idealistic inspiration. When we suddenly understand something we say, I’ve seen the light, or, It has dawned on me. When a cartoonist wants to show someone getting a great idea he puts an electric light bulb over the character’s head. Everybody understands instantly what this symbol means. Why? Where did it come from? It can’t be very old because there weren’t any electric bulbs much before this century. What have electric light bulbs got to do with new ideas? Why doesn’t the cartoonist ever have to explain what he means by that light bulb? Why does everybody know what he means?
In other cultures, or in the religious literature of our past, where the immune system of objectivity is weak or non-existent, reference to this light is everywhere, from the Protestant hymn, Lead Kindly Light, to the halos of the saints. The central terms of Western mysticism, enlightenment, and illumination refer to it directly. Darsana, a fundamental Hindu form of religious instruction, means giving of light. Descriptions of Zen sartori mention it. It is referred to extensively in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Aldous Huxley referred to it as part of the mescaline experience. Phædrus remembered it from the time with Dusenberry at the peyote meeting, although he had assumed that it was just an optical illusion produced by the drug and not of any great importance.
Proust wrote about it in Remembrance of Things Past. In El Greco’s Nativity the Dharmakaya light emanating from the Christ child provides the only illumination there is. El Greco was thought by some to have defective eyesight because he painted this light. But in his portrait of Cardinal Guevara, the prosecutor of the Spanish Inquisition, the lace and silks of the cardinal’s robes are done with exquisite objective luster but the light is completely absent. El Greco didn’t have to paint it. He painted what he saw.
Once when Phædrus was standing in one of the galleries of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he saw on one wall a huge painting of the Buddha and nearby were some paintings of Christian saints. He noticed again something he had thought about before. Although the Buddhists and Christians had no historic contact with one another they both painted halos. The halos weren’t the same size. The Buddhists painted great big ones, sometimes surrounding the person’s whole body, while the Christian ones were smaller and in back of the person’s head or over it. It seemed to mean the two religions weren’t copying one another or they would have made the halos the same size. But they were both painting something they were seeing separately, which implied that that something they were painting had a real, independent existence.
Then as Phædrus was thinking this he noticed one painting in the corner and thought, There. What the others are just painting symbolically he is actually showing. They’re seeing it second-hand. He’s seeing it first hand.
It was a painting of Christ with no halo at all. But the clouds in the sky behind his head were slightly lighter near his head than farther away. And the sky near his head was lighter too. That was all. But that was the real illumination, no objective thing at all, just a shift in intensity of light. Phædrus stepped up to the canvas to read the name-plate at the bottom. It was El Greco again.
Our culture immunizes us against giving much importance to all this because the light has no objective reality. That means it’s just some subjective and therefore unreal phenomenon. In a Metaphysics of Quality, however, this light is important because it often appears associated with undefined auspiciousness, that is, with Dynamic Quality. It signals a Dynamic intrusion upon a static situation. When there is a letting go of static patterns the light occurs. It is often accompanied by a feeling of relaxation because static patterns have been jarred loose.
He thought it was probably the light that infants see when their world is still fresh and whole, before consciousness differentiates it into patterns; a light into which everything fades at death. Accounts of people who have had a near death experience have referred to this white light as something very beautiful and compelling from which they didn’t want to return. The light would occur during the breakup of the static patterns of the person’s intellect as it returned into the pure Dynamic Quality from which it had emerged in infancy.
During Phædrus' time of insanity when he had wandered freely outside the limits of cultural reality, this light had been a valued companion, pointing out things to him that he would otherwise have missed, appearing at an event his rational thought had indicated was unimportant, but which he would later discover had been more important than he had known. Other times it had occurred at events he could not figure out the importance of, but which had left him wondering.
He saw it once on a small kitten. After that for a long time the kitten followed him wherever he went and he wondered if the kitten saw it too.
He had seen it once around a tiger in a zoo. The tiger had suddenly looked at him with what seemed like surprise and had come over to the bars for a closer look. Then the illumination began to appear around the tiger’s face. That was all. Afterward, that experience associated itself with William Blake’s Tiger! Tiger! burning bright.
The eyes had blazed with what seemed to be inner light.
In the dream he thought someone was shooting at him, and then he realized no this was no dream. Someone was pounding on the boat hull.
OK! he shouted. Just a minute. It must be the marina attendant wanting to get paid or something.
He got up and, in his pajamas, slid the hatch cover open. It was someone he didn’t know. He was black, with a big grin on his face and a white tunic that was so bright and clean it knocked out everything else. He looked like he’d just stepped off an Uncle Ben’s rice package.
First mate Jamison reporting for duty, sir! he said and snapped a smart salute, still grinning. The tunic had big shiny brass buttons. Phædrus wondered where he had found something like that. He seemed to be grinning at his own ludicrousness.
What do you want? Phædrus said.
I’m here to start workin.'
You’ve got the wrong boat.
No I ain’t. You just don’t know me in this uniform. Where’s Lila? he said.
Phædrus suddenly recognized him. He was Jamie, the one he had met in that bar.
She’s still sleeping, Phædrus said.
Sleeping!? Jamie threw his head back and laughed. Man, you can’t let her get away with that. It’s past ten in the morning.
Jamie pointed to his gold wrist watch. Time to get her up! His voice was very loud. Phædrus noticed a head from another boat was watching them.
Jamie started to laugh again, then looked up and down the boat with a smile. Well, you sure had me fooled. The way Lila told it this boat was at least five times this big. And all you got is this pee-wee little thing.
He glanced twice at Phædrus to check the reaction to this. That’s all right. That’s all right. It’s plenty big enough for me. It’s just Lila had me fooled.
Phædrus tried to shake the cobwebs out of his head. What the hell was this all about?
What did Lila tell you? he asked.
Lila told me to come here for work this morning. So here I am.
That’s crazy, Phædrus said. She told you wrong.
The grin disappeared from Jamie’s face. He looked puzzled, hurt. Then he said, I think I gonna have a little talk with her, and stepped aboard. The way he jumped over the life-line showed he was no sailor: no permission, dirty street shoes on. Phædrus was about to call him on the dirty shoes but then suddenly he saw Richard Rigel coming down the dock. Rigel waved to him and came over. Where did he come from?
I’m going down to talk to her, Jamie said.
Phædrus shook his head. She’s tired.
Jamie shook his head back. No offense, he said, but you don’t know shit about Lila.
No, she’s tired.
No, man. She always talks like that. I know how to fix that. Jamie went down the hatchway. We’ll be right up, he said.
Phædrus started to feel alarmed. He saw that Rigel was staring at him. He said to Rigel, I didn’t know you were here.
I’ve been here for a while, Rigel said. Who is that?
He’s some friend of Lila’s.
Is she still here?
She’s in trouble. He looked up at Rigel. She’s really in trouble… Rigel squinted. He looked as though he was going to say something but then he didn’t. Finally he said, What are you going to do about it?
I don’t know, Phædrus said, I just woke up. I haven’t got anything in mind yet.
Before Rigel could answer they heard a low deep noise below, then a shout, then a scuffling sound, and then another shout.
Suddenly Jamie’s face appeared. His white Uncle Ben jacket had a big spot of blood by one of the buttons. His hand against his cheek had blood on it.
That fuckin’ whore! he shouted.
He came out the hatch on deck.
He reached for the hatch rail and Phædrus saw his cheek had a bloody gash.
God-damn bitch! I’m gonna kill her!
Phædrus wondered where he could find a rag to stop the bleeding. Maybe below somewhere.
Let me off here, Jamie said, I’m callin’ the police!
What happened? Rigel said. Over his shoulder the face of another boat-owner now stared.
She tried to kill me!
Jamie looked at him. Something in Rigel’s expression seemed to stop him. Jamie stepped over the boat’s life-line to the dock. He looked at Rigel again. She did! he said, She tried to kill me! Rigel’s expression didn’t change. Jamie then turned and walked down the dock toward the marina office. He jerked his head over his shoulder and looked back, I’m goin’ to call the police. She tried to kill me. She’s going to get it.
Phædrus looked up at Rigel and the other man who was still staring. I’d better go down and see what happened, Phædrus said.
You had better get out of here, Rigel said.
What? Why? I haven’t done anything.
That doesn’t matter, Rigel said. His face had that same angry look he had had at breakfast in Kingston.
At the far side of the marina Phædrus could see Jamie at the marina office saying something to the people standing there. He was gesticulating, waving one arm, holding his face with the other. The man behind Rigel started to walk over there.
Rigel said, I’m going over there too, to see what he’s saying. He left, and Phædrus could see that at the marina office where Rigel was headed some sort of argument was going on.
What was Lila doing now? Down below it was ominously quiet. He stepped down the ladder and saw that the door to the forecabin was shut.
Phædrus went to the door, opened it slowly, and saw Lila on the bunk. Her nose was bleeding. In her hand was a pocket knife. The hypnotic look of last night was all gone. The sheet underneath her had some small blood spots.
Why did you do it? he asked.
He killed my baby.
How?
She pointed to the floor below the bunk.
Phædrus saw the doll lying face down on the floor. He watched her for a moment, wanting to be careful what to say.
Finally he said, Shall I pick it up?
Lila didn’t say anything.
He picked up the doll very carefully, using both hands, and carefully set it beside her.
This is a bad place, Lila said.
Phædrus stepped into the head and got a handful of toilet paper for the nosebleed and brought it to her.
Let me see, he said.
Her nose didn’t look broken. But she was starting to puff up under one eye. He saw that her hand was clenched tight on the jackknife.
This wasn’t the time to talk about it.
He heard a rapping on the hull.
When he got up the ladder he saw it was Rigel again.
He’s gone, Rigel said, but they’re upset. Some of them want to call the police. I told them you were just leaving. It will be a lot easier if you just left now.
What are the police going to do? Phædrus says.
Rigel looked exasperated. You can be here five more seconds or you can be here five more weeks. Which do you want?
Phædrus thought about it. OK, he said, untie the bow line.
You’ll have to untie it yourself.
What’s the matter with you?
Aiding and abetting…For Christ’s sake.
I’ve got to face these people after you leave.
Phædrus looked at him and shook his head. God, what a mess. He jumped onto the dock, grabbed the electric power cord and threw it aboard, uncleated the stern line and threw it aboard too. As he went forward to take off the bow lines he saw that people who had gathered at the office were looking down his way. Crazy how Rigel had shown up just at this minute. And he was right, as usual.
Phædrus threw the bow lines aboard, and with his hands on the boat’s bow, shoved with all his might to get the heavy hull clear of the dock. The current was already starting to move the stern away. Then he grabbed a stanchion and pulled himself aboard.
There’s an anchorage inside Sandy Hook, Rigel said. Horseshoe Bay. It’s on the chart.
Phædrus moved aft smartly over the tangled lines to get control of the boat but in the cockpit he saw the key was out of the engine. The boat was out of control now but for the moment it didn’t matter because the current was carrying it into the river and away from the dock. He jumped down below, opened the top drawer under the chart table and found the key, then scampered up again and inserted it and turned over the engine.
This would be a great time for it to fail.
It didn’t. It took hold and he let it idle for a while.
At the dock, now sixty or seventy feet away, Rigel was talking to some people who had gathered around him. Phædrus shifted into gear, increased the throttle and waved to them. They didn’t wave back, but they were watching him.
One of them cupped his hands and shouted something, but the sound of the diesel was too loud for it to be heard. Phædrus waved to them and headed out into the river toward the New Jersey shore.
Whew!
As he looked back over his shoulder he saw the water of the river between the boat and the marina become wider and wider, and the figures become smaller and smaller. They seemed to diminish in importance as they diminished in size.
The whole city was starting to take shape from the perspective of the water now. The marina was sinking back into the skyline of the city. The green trees of the parkway dominated it now and the apartments rising above the parkway dominated the trees. Now he could see some large skyscrapers at the center of the island rising above the apartments.
The Giant!
It gave him an eerie feeling.
This time he’d just barely slipped out of its grasp.
When he neared the far side of the river, Phædrus swung the boat so that it headed downstream. Already he could feel the open water and the distance between himself and the city start to calm him down.
What a morning! He wasn’t even dressed yet. The dock was getting really far away now, and the people who had been watching him seemed to be gone. Up the river the George Washington Bridge had begun to recede into the bluffs.
He saw there was some blood beginning to dry on the deck by the cockpit. He slowed down the engine, tied off the rudder, and went below and found a rag. He found his clothes on the bunk, and brought everything up on deck. Then he freed the rudder and put the boat back on course again. Then he scrubbed away all the blood spots he could find.
There was no hurry, now. So strange. All that rush and calamity, and now suddenly he had all the time in the world. No obligations. No commitments… Except Lila, down there. But she wasn’t going anywhere.
What was he going to do with her?… Just keep going, he supposed.
He really wasn’t under any pressure. There weren’t any deadlines…
Except the deadline of ice and snow. But that was no problem. He could just single-hand south and let her stay there in the forecabin if that’s where she wanted to be.
Dreamy day. The sun was out! Still hardly any boats in the river.
As he dressed he saw that along the Manhattan shore were old green buildings that looked like warehouses sticking out into the water. They looked rotted out and abandoned. They reminded him of something.
Long ago he’d seen those buildings… There was a gangplank going up, up, up, way up — into a big ship with the huge red smokestacks and he had walked up it ahead of his mother — she looked terribly worried — and when he stopped to look down at the cement below the gangplank she told him to Hurry! Hurry! The ship is going to leave! and just as she said this there was an enormous noise of the fog horn that frightened him and made him run up the gangplank. He was only four and the ship was the Mauritania going to England… But those were the same pier buildings, it seemed, the ones the ship had left from. Now they were all in ruins.
That was all so long ago… Selim… Selim… what was that about? A story his mother had read to him. Selim the fisherman and Selim the baker and a magic island that they just barely escaped from before it all sank into the sea. It had been connected with this place in his memory.
So strange. Other than a barge and one other sailboat way downstream, there was still nothing on the river. Far to the south, among all the clutter of buildings on the horizon, he could see the Statue of Liberty.
Strange how he could remember the old Mauritania docks from that childhood voyage but not the Statue of Liberty.
Once on a later visit to New York he had joined a crowd of other tourists and climbed up inside the Statue of Liberty. He remembered it was all greenish copper and old looking, supported with riveted girders like an old Victorian bridge. The iron staircase going up got thinner and smaller and thinner and smaller and the line of people going up kept getting slower and slower and suddenly he’d gotten a huge wave of claustrophobia. There was no way he could get out of this procession! In front of him was a very fat lady who acted like the climb was too much for her. She looked like she might collapse any minute. He could envision the whole procession collapsing beneath her like a row of dominoes, with himself in it, with no hope but to crash with the rest of them. He’d wondered if he’d have the strength to hold her there if she collapsed… Trapped and going crazy with claustrophobia underneath a fat lady inside the Statue of Liberty. What a great allegorical theme, he’d thought later, for a story about America.
Phædrus saw the deck was still a mess of lines that needed to be put away. He tied off the rudder, went forward, gathered up a dock line, brought it back to the cockpit and then, while steering back on course again, coiled the line and stowed it into the lazarette; then tied off the rudder again and repeated the process until he had all four lines and the electrical power cable stowed and the fenders brought inboard. By the time he was done downtown Manhattan was approaching.
There were rather pleasant-looking Victorian houses over on the Jersey side. Some high-rises, but surprisingly few. There was some sort of a cathedral up high on the shore and a road going up the bluffs. He could see how steep the bluffs are. That might be why there’s so little development there compared to the other side of the river.
As the statue drew nearer Phædrus could see the old Blake School torch still held on high; a Victorian statue but still impressive, particularly from the water like this. It’s the size that does it, mainly. And the location. If she were just an ordinary park-statue most of that inspiration would be gone.
There was more water traffic now. Over by Governors Island some tugs were moving a big ship toward the East River. He could see what was probably a Staten Island ferry boat in the distance. Nearer, a river tour was coming in his direction.
He wondered why it was so heeled-over, then realized it was because all the passengers were on the Manhattan side of the boat, watching the skyline that loomed up above everything.
What a skyline! The clouds were reflected in the glass of some of the tallest buildings. Rhapsody in Blue. For the moment the towers of the World Trade Center seemed to have won the race upward but those other skyscrapers seemed not to know it. All of them together were no longer just buildings or part of a city, but something else people didn’t know they could be. Some kind of energy and power that wasn’t anything planned seemed to constantly surprise everyone at how great it all was. No one had done this. It had just done itself. The Giant was its own creation.
The Verrazano bridge was drawing closer and closer. Underneath it he could see a line that might be the far side of the lower bay. This was the last bridge. The last one!
As Phædrus approached the bridge he felt the beginning of a deep, periodic swell. It was a kind of a trapeze-like feeling. But slow. Very slow. It lifted and lowered the boat. Then it lifted it and lowered it again. Then again. It was the ocean.
Suddenly he realized he didn’t know where he was going. He tied off the rudder again and went down below and got a pile of charts from the chart drawer — still no sign of Lila — and went back up on deck. He paged through the charts until he found one that said New York Harbor. On the back side of the chart was the Lower Bay, speckled with buoys that marked channels for ships. At the bottom of the Lower Bay was Sandy Hook, and in the middle of Sandy Hook was Horseshoe Cove. That had to be the cove Rigel had told him about.
The chart showed about ten nautical miles from the bridge to the cove. There were so many buoys in the bay it was hard to tell which was which, but the chart said it didn’t matter, there was no way he could go aground.
In fact he was safer outside the channel where the big ships couldn’t go.
As the bridge moved farther and farther behind he noticed the engine sounded a little odd, and he saw the temperature gauge was up near the red range. He throttled down to just above an idle.
It was probably some debris in the water that had gotten into the engine’s cooling water intake. That had happened before. The trouble was the intake was so far below the water line and the curve of the hull was so great he couldn’t see the debris or get it with a boat hook. He had to get out into the dinghy and try to pull it off. Now he couldn’t do that because the ocean surge coming into the bay would clunk the dinghy all over the place. He’d have to wait until he got into the cove.
A fresh breeze seemed to be building from the southwest New Jersey shore. He might just as well sail the rest of the way.
He shut off the engine and for a moment enjoyed the silence. There was just the faint sound of the breeze and the sound of the waves against the hull, getting quieter as the boat slowed. With what momentum was left he headed the boat into the wind and went forward to the mast to put up the main sail.
The roll of the boat from the surge made it tricky to keep his balance, but once the sail was up and the boat came off the wind, it steadied on a slight heel, picked up speed, and he suddenly felt very good. From the cockpit he put her on course, rolled out the jib and the boat speeded up some more. He was feeling some of the old sea fever again. This was the first real open water since Lake Ontario and the surge was bringing it back.
To the east, there it was out there, the landless horizon. Some sort of ship way off in the distance, apparently heading this way. No problem. He would just keep the sailboat outside the channel.
Old Pancho would be smiling now.
This sea fever was like malaria. It disappeared for long periods, sometimes years, and then suddenly was back again, like now, in a wave that was like the surge itself.
He remembered long ago being taken by a song called The Sloop John B., that had an unusual speed-up and slow-down rhythm. He didn’t know why he liked it so much until one day it dawned on him that the speed-up and slow-down was the same as the surge of the sea. It was a running surge where the wind and sea are behind you and the boat rushes forward and rises as each wave passes underneath and then descends and hesitates as the wave rolls on ahead.
That motion never made him uncomfortable, probably because he loved it so much. It was all mixed up with the sea fever.
He remembered the day the fever started, Christmas Day, after his sixth birthday, when his parents had bought him the most expensive globe they could afford, heavy and on a hardwood stand, and he had turned it on its axis around and around. From it he’d learned the shapes and names of all the continents and most of the countries and seas of the world: Arabia, Africa, South America, India, Australia, Spain and the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea. He was overwhelmed with the idea that the whole city he lived in was just one tiny dot on this globe, and that most of this globe was blue. If you wanted to really see the world you couldn’t go there except over all that blue.
For years after that his favorite book had been a book about old ships, which he’d paged through slowly, again and again, wondering what it would be like to live in one of those little ornamented aft cabins with the tiny windows, staring out like Sir Francis Drake at the surging waves rolling under you. It seemed as though all his life after that, whenever he took long trips, he ended up on a dock in a harbor somewhere, staring at the boats.
Sandy Hook, as the boat approached it, looked like it hadn’t changed much since the wooden ships of Verrazano and Hudson sailed by. There were some radio towers and old-looking buildings on the northern tip which seemed to be part of some abandoned fortification. The rest seemed almost deserted.
As the boat moved inside the hook’s protection from the sea the surge died and only a ripple from the southwest wind was left. The bay became like an inland lake, calm and surrounded by land wherever Phædrus could see. He furled the jib to slow the boat a little and stepped below for a moment to turn on the depth sounder. Still no sign of Lila in the forecabin up there.
Back on deck he saw that the cove looked quite good. It was exposed to wind from the west, but the chart showed shallow water and a long jetty off to the west that would probably keep big waves out. There certainly weren’t any now. Just a quiet shore, and a couple of sailboats at anchor with no one on deck. Beautiful.
When the depth sounder showed about ten feet of water he rounded up into the breeze, dropped the sail and anchor, started and reversed the engine to set the anchor, then shut it off, furled the main and went below.
He put away the chart, then turned on the Coast Guard weather station to see what was predicted. The announcer said a few more days of light southwest winds and good weather before turning colder. Good. That gave him a little while to figure out what to do with Lila before heading out on the ocean.
He heard Lila move.
He went to her door, knocked and then opened it.
She was awake but she didn’t look at him. He saw now for the first time that the right side of her face was discolored and swollen. That guy had really slugged her.
After a while he said, Hi.
She didn’t answer. She just looked straight ahead. The pupils of her eyes seemed dilated.
Are you comfortable? he asked.
Her gaze didn’t alter.
It wasn’t a very bright question. He made another try: How is everything?
Still no answer. Her gaze just looked right past him.
Oh-oh. He thought he knew what this was. He supposed he should have known this was coming. This is how it looked from the outside. The catatonic trance. She’s cutting off everything.
After a while he said gently, Everything’s all right. I’ll be taking care of you for a while. He watched for a flicker of recognition but didn’t see any. Just the hypnotic gaze — straight ahead.
She knows I’m here, he thought, she probably knows I’m here better than I know she’s here. She just won’t acknowledge it. She’s like some treed cat, way out on the end of a limb. To go after her just scares her farther out on the limb, or else forces her into a fight.
He didn’t want that. Not after what happened back at the dock.
He softly closed the door and went back into the cabin again.
Now what?
He remembered from his anthropological reading that these trance-like states are supposed to be dangerous. What happened back there at the dock fit the description of Malayan amok — intense brooding that’s sometimes followed by sudden violence. But from what he remembered personally it wasn’t so dangerous. If there’s violence it’s provoked by hostile people trying to break the trance and he wasn’t about to do that.
Actually, he had a feeling the worst was over. The ominous thing about last night back in Manhattan was that she seemed so happy. She wasn’t suffering. When she hugged and rocked that doll it was like listening to someone freezing to death say they feel warm. You want to say No! No! Feel the cold! As long as you’re suffering you’re all right.
Now she’s changed. The question is, changed for the better or for the worse? The only thing to do now, he thought, is just to wait it out for a while and see which way she goes. It looked like this good weather might hold for a while. He had plenty of things to do to keep himself occupied… Such as eat. It was already afternoon. He’d planned to tie up at Atlantic Highlands and buy food there, but now that was a couple of miles away. Maybe tomorrow he could put the outboard on the dinghy and putt over if the weather was calm. Or maybe see if there’s a bus on shore somewhere and take that. For now they’d have to get by on what food was left from Nyack.
Nyack. That was a long time ago. Everything would be stale.
He pulled up the icebox top and looked inside. He reached down into the icebox and pulled up what he could find and placed it on the galley counter… There were some cocktail hot dogs in little jars… some small cans of meat and ham and roast beef… The bread was still there. He picked it up and it felt stiff… He opened the bread wrapper… It looked still edible… canned tunafish… peanut butter… jelly… The butter looked OK. One nice thing about cruising in October is that the food goes bad slowly… some chocolate pudding… He’d have to get groceries very soon. That was going to be a problem.
What to drink, though? Nothing but whiskey and water. And mix…
These cocktail hot dogs were stuck in the jar. He held the jar upside-down over the galley sink until all the juice around them ran out, but the dogs were still stuck. He got a fork and pried one out over a plate. It came out in pieces. Then suddenly they all came out in one big plop! They were kind of soft and squishy but they smelled all right.
He supposed he might just as well give her the whiskey and mix to drink. Yes, that ought to be good. She might refuse the food but the booze would be a little more tempting…
He spread some of the butter on the stale bread, put three of the cocktail hot dogs on top and another slice of bread on top of that. Then he poured her a really stiff one and put the glass on the plate with the sandwich and brought it up forward.
He knocked lightly, and said, Lunch. Beautiful lunch!
He opened the door and put the tray on the bunk across from her. If I’ve made the drink too stiff let me know and I’ll add some water to it, he said.
She didn’t answer but she didn’t look angry or disconnected either. Some progress, maybe.
He closed the door and went back into the main cabin and started to fix his meal…
There are three ways she can go, he thought. First, she can go into permanent delusions, cling to this doll and whatever else she’s inventing, and eventually he’d have to get rid of her. It would be tricky, but it could be done. Just call a doctor at some town they came to and have him look at her and figure out what to do from there. Phædrus didn’t like it, but he could do it if he had to.
The trouble is there’s a self-stoking thing where the craziness makes people reject you more and more, which makes you crazier, and that’s what he would be getting involved in. Not very moral. If it went that way she’d probably spend the rest of her life in an insane asylum, like some caged animal.
Her second alternative, he thought, would be to cave in to whatever it was she was fighting, and learn to adjust. She’d probably go into some kind of cultural dependency, with recurring trips to a psychiatrist or some kind of social counselor for therapy, accept the cultural reality that her rebellion was no good, and live with it. In this way she’d continue to lead a normal life, continuing her problem, whatever it was, within conventional cultural limits.
The trouble was, he didn’t really like that solution much better than the first.
The question isn’t What makes people insane? It’s What makes people sane? People have been asking for centuries how to deal with the insane and he didn’t see that they’d gotten anywhere. The way to really deal with insanity, he thought, is to turn the tables and talk about truth instead. Insanity’s a medical subject that everyone agrees is bad. Truth’s a metaphysical subject that everyone disagrees about. There are lots of different definitions of truth and some of them could throw a whole lot more light on what was happening to Lila than a subject-object metaphysics does.
If objects are the ultimate reality then there’s only one true intellectual construction of things: that which corresponds to the objective world. But if truth is defined as a high-quality set of intellectual value patterns, then insanity can be defined as just a low-quality set of intellectual value patterns, and you get a whole different picture of it.
When the culture asks, Why doesn’t this person see things the way we do? you can answer that he doesn’t see them because he doesn’t value them. He’s gone into illegal value patterns because the illegal patterns resolve value conflicts that the culture’s unable to handle. The causes of insanity may be all kinds of things, from chemical imbalances to social conflicts. But insanity has solved these conflicts with illegal patterns which appear to be of higher quality.
Lila seems to be in some kind of trance-like state up there but what does that mean? In a subject-object world, trance and hypnosis are big-time platypi. That’s why there’s this prejudice that while hypnosis and trance can’t be denied, there’s something wrong about them. They’re best nudged as close as possible to the empirical trash heap called the occult and left to that anti-empirical crowd that indulges in astrology, Tarot cards, the I-Ching and the like. If seeing is believing then hypnosis and trance should be impossible. But since they do exist, what you have is an empirically observable case of empiricism being overthrown.
The irony is that there are times when the culture actually fosters trance and hypnosis to further its purposes. The theater’s a form of hypnosis. So are movies and TV. When you enter a movie theater you know that all you’re going to see is twenty-four shadows per second flashed on a screen to give an illusion of moving people and objects. Yet despite this knowledge you laugh when the twenty-four shadows per second tell jokes and cry when the shadows show actors faking death. You know they are an illusion yet you enter the illusion and become a part of it and while the illusion is taking place you are not aware that it is an illusion. This is hypnosis. It is trance. It’s also a form of temporary insanity. But it’s also a powerful force for cultural reinforcement and for this reason the culture promotes movies and censors them for its own benefit.
Phædrus thought that in the case of permanent insanity the exits to the theater have been blocked, usually because of the knowledge that the show outside is so much worse. The insane person is running a private unapproved film which he happens to like better than the current cultural one. If you want him to run the film everyone else is seeing, the solution would be to find ways to prove to him that it would be valuable to do so, Phædrus thought. Otherwise why should he get better? He already is better. It’s the patterns that constitute betterness that are at issue. From an internal point of view insanity isn’t the problem. Insanity is the solution.
What it would take that’s more valuable to Lila, Phædrus wasn’t sure.
He finished his sandwich, put away the food and cleared off his plate in the sink. He guessed the next thing to worry about would be that engine, and why it was overheating.
If he was lucky it would be something caught in or over the through-hull water intake for the engine cooling system. If he was unlucky it would be that something had clogged up in the water passages inside the engine itself. That would mean taking the cylinder heads off and fishing through the heads and jackets to find it. The thought of that was awful. Really stupid, when he bought the boat, not to have bought a freshwater cooling system that would have prevented the second possibility.
You can’t think of everything.
Up on deck he raised the dinghy with the mast halyard, held it suspended over the side of the boat and lowered it gently so that its transom didn’t go under. Then he got in, unsnapped it from the halyard, and by hand-over-handing along the boat gunwale, worked it to the stern of the boat.
He took off his shirt, lay flat in the dinghy and reached down with his hand into the water until it almost was up to his shoulder. It was cold! He felt around but there didn’t seem to be plastic bags or other debris covering the engine intake. Bad news. He pulled his arm back up again and wiped it dry on his shirt.
He supposed whatever it was could have dropped off after the engine stopped, while he was sailing. He should have run the engine for a while before he got into the dinghy to see if it was still happening. You always think of these things too late. Too much other stuff on his mind.
He tied the dinghy to a stanchion and got aboard. He went back to the cockpit and started the engine. While it was warming up he began to think about Lila again.
She’s what you could call a contrarian. You’re a loner, just like me, she had said the day they left Kingston. That stuck in his mind because it was true. But what she meant by it was not just someone who’s alone, but a contrarian, someone who’s always doing everything the wrong way, just out of pure willfulness, it would seem.
Contrarians sometimes just seem to savagely attack every kind of static moral pattern they can find. It seems as though they’re trying to destroy morality as a kind of revenge.
He’d gotten that word out of his anthropology reading. It indicated there’s more to contrarians than just individual wrongness. It’s common to many cultures. That brujo in Zuni was a contrarian. The Cheyenne had a whole society of contrarians to assimilate the phenomenon within their social fabric. Cheyenne contrarians rode their horses sitting backward, entered teepees backward, and had a whole repertoire of things they performed in a contrary way. Members seemed to enter the contrary society when they felt a great wrong, a great injustice, had been done to them and apparently it was felt that this was a way of resolving the injustice.
Once you see it in another culture like that and then come back to our own you can see that in an unofficial way we have our contrarian societies too. The Bohemians of the Victorian era were contrarians. So, to some extent, were the Hippies of the sixties… The engine didn’t seem to be overheating now. Maybe the problem was gone?… Hah — not very likely… Probably it was just because the engine was in neutral and wasn’t working very hard. Phædrus shifted into reverse to let it tug against the anchor for a while. He waited and watched the temperature dial.
Anyway, it seemed to him that when you add a concept of Dynamic Quality to a rational understanding of the world, you can add a lot to an understanding of contrarians. Some of them aren’t just being negative toward static moral patterns, they are actively pursuing a Dynamic goal.
Everybody gets on these negative contrarian streaks from time to time, where no matter what it is they’re supposed to be doing, that’s the one thing they least want to do. Sometimes it’s a degenerative negativism, where biological forces are driving it. Sometimes it’s an ego pattern that says, I’m too important to be doing all this dumb static stuff.
Sometimes the contrary anti-static drive becomes a static pattern of its own. This contrary stuff can become a tiger-ride where you can’t get off and you have to keep riding and riding until the tiger finally throws you and devours you. The degenerative contrarian stuff usually goes that way. Drugs, illicit sex, alcohol and the like.
But sometimes it’s Dynamic, where your whole being senses that the static situation is an enemy of life itself. That’s what drives the really creative people — the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the like — the feeling that if they don’t break out of this jailhouse somebody has built around them, they’re going to die.
But they’re not being contrary in a way that is just decadent. They’re way too energetic and aggressive to be decadent. They’re fighting for some kind of Dynamic freedom from the static patterns. But the Dynamic freedom they’re righting for is a kind of morality too. And it’s a highly important part of the overall moral process. It’s often confused with degeneracy but it’s actually a form of moral regeneration. Without its continual refreshment static patterns would simply die of old age.
When you see Lila that way it’s possible to interpret her current situation as much more significant than psychology would suggest. If she seems to be running from something, that could be the static patterns of her own life she’s running from. But a Metaphysics of Quality adds the possibility that she’s running toward something too. It allows a hypothesis that if this running is stopped, if any static patterns claim her — if either her own insane patterns claim her or the static cultural patterns she is shutting out and running from claim her — then she loses.
What he thought was that in addition to the usual solutions to insanity — stay locked up or learn to conform — there was a third one, to reject all movies, private and cultural, and head for Dynamic Quality itself, which is no movie at all.
If you compare the levels of static patterns that compose a human being to the ecology of a forest, and if you see the different patterns sometimes in competition with each other, sometimes in symbiotic support of each other, but always in a kind of tension that will shift one way or the other, depending on evolving circumstances, then you can also see that evolution doesn’t take place only within societies, it takes place within individuals too. It’s possible to see Lila as something much greater than a customary sociological or anthropological description would have her be. Lila then becomes a complex ecology of patterns moving toward Dynamic Quality. Lila individually, herself, is in an evolutionary battle against the static patterns of her own life.
That’s why the absence of suffering last night seemed so ominous and her change to what looked like suffering today gave Phædrus a feeling she was getting better. If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There’s no evolution. Those species that don’t suffer don’t survive. Suffering is the negative face of the Quality that drives the whole process. All these battles between patterns of evolution go on within suffering individuals like Lila.
And Lila’s battle is everybody’s battle, you know?
Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change. They’ve taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle to solve their own problems they’re solving problems for the culture as well.
So the third possibility that Phædrus was hoping for was that by some miracle of understanding Lila could avoid all the patterns, her own and the culture’s, see the Dynamic Quality she’s working toward and then come back and handle all this mess without being destroyed by it. The question is whether she’s going to work through whatever it is that makes the defense necessary or whether she is going to work around it. If she works through it she’ll come out at a Dynamic solution. If she works around it she’ll just head back to the old karmic cycles of pain and temporary relief.
Apparently whatever caused that engine overheating was gone. He sure couldn’t reproduce it now. He shut off the engine and the boat eased forward toward the anchor.
The sun across the water was getting on to the end of the afternoon and he began to get a slightly depressed feeling. Not the best of days. He noticed a seagull pick up an oyster or a clam or something from the sand on the shore and fly up into the sky and then drop it. Another seagull was homing in and diving to take it away from him. Pretty soon they set up a real screeching. He watched them for a while. Their fighting depressed him too.
He noticed on one of the other boats at anchor there was someone aboard. If he stayed up on deck they might start waving and want to socialize. Not something he wanted to do. He picked up his stuff and went below.
It had been a long week. God, what a week! He needed to get back to the old life. That whole city and all its karmic problems, and now on top of it Lila and all her karmic problems, were just too much. Maybe he should just take it easy for a while.
On the pilot berth was the tote bag with all the mail. At last he could get started with that, a good diversion. He opened up the leaf of the dining table, put the tote bag on top of it and took out the top bunch of letters and spread them out.
For the rest of the afternoon he sat with his feet propped up on the table, reading the letters, smiling at them, frowning at them, chuckling at them and answering each one that seemed to call for it, telling them no when they wanted something with as much grace as possible. He felt like Ann Landers.
He heard Lila stirring once or twice. Once she got up and used the head. She wasn’t that catatonic. This quietness and boredom of a boat at anchor was the best cure in the world for catatonia.
By the time it was dark he began to feel stale at answering mail. The day was done. It was time to relax. The light breeze of the day was now completely gone, and except for a slight rock of the boat now and then everything was still. What a blessing.
He took the kerosene lamp from its gimbaled mounting, lit it and placed it near the galley sink. He made another meal out of the left-over food from Nyack and thought about Lila some more, but didn’t reach any conclusion except the one he had already reached: there was nothing to do but wait.
When he brought in Lila’s food he saw the plate and glass he’d brought in earlier were empty. He tried again to talk to her but she still didn’t answer.
He felt it getting colder now that the sun was down. Rather than start up the heater tonight he thought he’d just get into the sleeping bag early. It had been a long day. Maybe make a few slips on these new books on William James.
These books were biography. He’d read quite a bit of James' philosophy. Now he wanted to get into some of his biography to put some perspective on it.
He wanted particularly to see how much actual evidence there was for the statement that James' whole purpose was to unite science and religion. That claim had turned him against James years ago, and he didn’t like it any better now. When you start out with an axe like that to grind, it’s almost guaranteed that you will conclude with something false. The statement seemed more like some philosophological simplification written by someone with a weak understanding of what philosophy is for. To put philosophy in the service of any social organization or any dogma is immoral. It’s a lower form of evolution trying to devour a higher one.
Phædrus removed the bag of mail to the pilot berth, then placed the kerosene lamp on top of the icebox where it would be over his shoulder and he could read by it, then sat down and began to read.
After some time he noticed the lamp had become dim and he stopped reading to turn up the wick.
Some time later he got his little wooden box from the pilot berth to make some slips about what he was reading.
In the hours that continued he made a dozen of them.
At another time he looked up from his reading and listened for a moment. There was not a sound. A little tilt of the boat now and then, but that was all.
There was nothing in what he was reading that suggested James was some kind of religious ideologue interested in proving some foregone conclusion about religion. Ideologues usually talk in terms of sweeping generalities and what Phædrus was reading seemed to confirm that James was about as far as you can get from these. In his early years especially, James' concept of ultimate reality was of things concrete and individual. He didn’t like Hegel or any of the German idealists who dominated philosophy in his youth precisely because they were so general and sweeping in their approach.
However, as James grew older his thoughts did seem to get more and more general. This was appropriate. If you don’t generalize you don’t philosophize. But to Phædrus it seemed that James' generalizations were heading toward something very similar to the Metaphysics of Quality. This could, of course, be the Cleveland Harbor Effect, where Phædrus' own intellectual immune system was selecting those aspects of James' philosophy that fit the Metaphysics of Quality and ignoring those that didn’t. But he didn’t think so. Everywhere he read it seemed as though he was seeing fits and matches that no amount of selective reading could contrive.
James really had two main systems of philosophy going: one he called pragmatism and the other radical empiricism.
Pragmatism is the one he is best remembered for: the idea that the test of truth is its practicality or usefulness. From a pragmatic viewpoint the squirrel’s definition of around was a true one because it was useful. Pragmatically speaking, that man never got around the squirrel.
Phædrus, like most everyone else, had always assumed that pragmatism and practicality meant virtually the same thing, but when he got down to an exact quotation of what James did say on the subject he noticed something different:
James said, Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. He said, The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.
'Truth is a species of good.' That was right on. That was exactly what is meant by the Metaphysics of Quality. Truth is a static intellectual pattern within a larger entity called Quality.
James had tried to make his pragmatism popular by getting it elected on the coattails of practicality. He was always eager to use such expressions as cash-value, and results, and profits, in order to make pragmatism intelligible to the man in the street, but this got James into hot water. Pragmatism was attacked by critics as an attempt to prostitute truth to the values of the marketplace. James was furious with this misunderstanding and he fought hard to correct the misinterpretation, but he never really overcame the attack.
What Phædrus saw was that the Metaphysics of Quality avoided this attack by making it clear that the good to which truth is subordinate is intellectual and Dynamic Quality, not practicality. The misunderstanding of James occurred because there was no clear intellectual framework for distinguishing social quality from intellectual and Dynamic Quality, and in his Victorian lifetime they were monstrously confused. But the Metaphysics of Quality states that practicality is a social pattern of good. It is immoral for truth to be subordinated to social values since that is a lower form of evolution devouring a higher one.
The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous, according to the Metaphysics of Quality. There are different kinds of satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The Holocaust produced a satisfaction among Nazis. That was quality for them. They considered it to be practical. But it was a quality dictated by low-level static social and biological patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and Dynamic Quality. James would probably have been horrified to find that Nazis could use his pragmatism just as freely as anyone else, but Phædrus didn’t see anything that would prevent it. But he thought that the Metaphysics of Quality’s classification of static patterns of good prevents this kind of debasement.
The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, which he said was independent of pragmatism, was his radical empiricism. By this he meant that subjects and objects are not the starting points of experience. Subjects and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more fundamental which he described as the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical: it logically precedes this distinction.
In his last unfinished work, Some Problems of Philosophy, James had condensed this description to a single sentence: There must always be a discrepancy between concepts and reality, because the former are static and discontinuous while the latter is dynamic and flowing. Here James had chosen exactly the same words Phædrus had used for the basic subdivision of the Metaphysics of Quality.
What the Metaphysics of Quality adds to James' pragmatism and his radical empiricism is the idea that the primal reality from which subjects and objects spring is value. By doing so it seems to unite pragmatism and radical empiricism into a single fabric. Value, the pragmatic test of truth, is also the primary empirical experience. The Metaphysics of Quality says pure experience is value. Experience which is not valued is not experienced. The two are the same. This is where value fits. Value is not at the tail-end of a series of superficial scientific deductions that puts it somewhere in a mysterious undetermined location in the cortex of the brain. Value is at the very front of the empirical procession.
In the past empiricists have tried to keep science free from values. Values have been considered a pollution of the rational scientific process. But the Metaphysics of Quality makes it clear that the pollution is from threats to science by static lower levels of evolution: static biological values such as the biological fear that threatened Jenner’s small-pox experiment; static social values such as the religious censorship that threatened Galileo with the rack. The Metaphysics of Quality says that science’s empirical rejection of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns.
But the Metaphysics of Quality also says that Dynamic Quality — the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one — is another matter altogether. Dynamic Quality is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress Dynamic Quality as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself.
Anyway, all this certainly answered the question of whether the Metaphysics of Quality was a foreign, cultish, deviant way of looking at things. The Metaphysics of Quality is a continuation of the mainstream of twentieth-century American philosophy. It is a form of pragmatism, of instrumentalism, which says the test of the true is the good. It adds that this good is not a social code or some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute. It is direct everyday experience. Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the Metaphysics of Quality paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism has not been able to cope with.
Phædrus supposed he could read on into all this James material but he doubted that he would find anything different from what he had already found. There is a time for investigation and there is a time for conclusion and he had a feeling that that latter time had come. His watch showed it was only nine-thirty but he was glad the day was done. He turned down the wick on the kerosene lamp, blew it out, placed it in its wall-holder and then settled down into the sleeping bag.
Good old sleep.
He awoke to a tugging motion. There was a low sound of wind and a lapping of water. The wind must have changed direction. He hadn’t heard that for a long time. The boat was tugging a little to port, then after a time tugging back to starboard… and then after another long time another tug to port again… On and on. The portlights showed an overcast sky.
Loneliness was what he always associated with these sounds and motions of the boat. A boat out on anchor exposed to a steady wind is almost always in some lonely place, a place only boats can get to.
It was a relaxing sound. Gray skies and wind mean a kind of day when it’s pleasant not to go anywhere, just putter around the cabin fixing up things that you’ve been putting off, studying charts and harbor guides and planning where you will be going.
Then he remembered that today he was going to go into town and try to get some food.
Then he remembered Lila. Maybe today he’d find out if she was any better.
He got out of the sleeping bag. When he put his feet down on the cabin sole he didn’t get the usual shock. The cabin thermometer showed 55 degrees. Not bad.
The ocean was doing that. The lakes and canals back inland would start icing up in a month or so, but he doubted whether this water would freeze at all. The tides and currents would keep it moving. Certainly on the other side of this hook the ocean never froze, so he had escaped that danger. He could always get out. The ice couldn’t get him any more.
He stepped up the ladder, pushed open the hatch and put his head out.
It was beautiful. Gray skies. South wind. Warm wind with an ocean smell in it. The other two boats that had been at anchor were gone.
The curve of the hook concealed Manhattan and Brooklyn. All he could see across the bay to the west was a barge at anchor and a high-rise apartment from another world miles away.
He suddenly felt a wild freedom.
The change in the wind had placed his boat a little closer to shore now and he noticed something he hadn’t paid much attention to yesterday. The shore was piled with debris. There were plastic bottles, an old tire and, farther off, what looked like old creosoted telephone poles half buried in the sand next to a boat hull with its transom knocked out. Sandy Hook seemed like some final resting place for all the junk of civilization that had come down the Hudson River.
He looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. He’d really slept. He went back below, rolled up the sleeping bag and put away the books and slips from last night’s reading. He built a new fire, noting there were only about two days of charcoal left. When the fire was going he went to the chart table and opened the second drawer down. He pulled out all the Hudson River charts, gathered them into a pile and carried them to a bin above the settee berth where he stored them. He wouldn’t be needing those again. To take their place he brought out a roll of charts from Sandy Hook to Cape May and the Delaware River. At the chart table he unrolled them and studied each one.
The coast had many little criss-cross marks showing wrecks. Rigel had warned him not to get caught off the New Jersey shore in a northeaster. But it looked like an easy three days to Cape May if the weather was good, with an easy run to Manasquan Inlet and a longer one to Atlantic City.
Phædrus folded the charts and placed them in the chart table drawer. He prepared a simple breakfast for himself, ate it, and then made one for Lila.
When he brought it in she was awake. The swelling of her face didn’t seem to have gone down much but she was looking at him again, really looking at him now: making contact.
Why is the boat swinging? she said.
It’s all right, he said.
It’s making me dizzy, she said. Stop the boat from swinging.
She’s not only talking, he thought, she’s complaining. That’s real progress. How does that eye feel? he asked.
Awful.
We can put hot rags on it or something.
No.
Well, here’s breakfast, anyway.
Are we at the island?
We’re at Sandy Hook, New Jersey.
Where is everybody?
Where?
On the island, she said.
He didn’t know what she was talking about, but something told him not to ask.
It’s not an island, it’s a spit of land. There’s nobody here, at least on this part. Just a lot of junk lying around.
You know what I mean, she said.
He sensed there was a problem coming up. If he rejected what she was telling him then she’d reject him. He didn’t want that. She was trying to reach out to him now. He should try to meet her halfway.
Well, it’s almost an island, he said.
Richard is coming.
Rigel?
She didn’t say anything. He supposed she must mean Rigel. There weren’t any other Richards.
Rigel said he was going to Connecticut to sell his boat, Phædrus said. This is New Jersey now, so he won’t be coming this way.
Well, I’m ready, Lila said.
That’s good, he said. That’s very good. I’m going down the road to try to find some groceries. Do you want to come along?
No.
OK. You can rest here as long as you feel like, he said. He stepped back and closed the door.
Ready for what, he wondered, as he entered the main cabin. They want to superimpose their movie on you. It’s like talking to some religious nut. You can’t argue with her, you’ve just got to find some common ground. She was sure a lot better but there was a long way to go.
He wondered if it was safe to leave her here alone. There wasn’t much else he could do. It was a lot safer than at a dock where she might start to interact with people on other boats. God knows what would happen then.
The chart showed a road right next to shore here where he could hike or hitchhike about three miles south to a place called the Highlands of Navesink that might have a grocery store.
He got his billfold from a small drawer, filled it with twenties and from the wet locker by the chart table got out two canvas tote bags to carry the groceries. He said goodbye to Lila, and from the deck got down into the dinghy again and rowed ashore.
The beach seemed to be grayish fine sand. He stepped out onto the sand and pulled the dinghy way up on the beach, then tied it off to an iron spike sticking out from the end of a large driftwood pole. The junk he’d noticed from the boat was everywhere and he studied it as he walked to the road — some glass bottles, a lot of small bleached driftwood pieces worn round at the corners and ends, an innersole of a shoe, a box with a faded Budweiser label, some old cushions, a wooden toy locomotive.
He wondered if he would come across a doll like Lila’s, but he didn’t see any.
Farther on was a Styrofoam coffee cup, a tire, another coffee cup, some more big burned timbers with rusted steel spikes that he had to step over. It all looked worn and bleached and seemed to have drifted in from the bay, not brought by any tourists who were here. It looked too trashy here for tourists. Strange how you could be so close to Manhattan yet in such a remote rural place. It wasn’t rural exactly. It wasn’t anything exactly except abandoned. It was a ruins of something. The vegetation was ruins vegetation.
Back of the debris were some evergreens that looked like yews or junipers. Other bushes had only a few red leaves left. Still farther back were marsh grasses of various species, mostly gold but still a little green. They looked as pure and delicate as prehistoric plants.
Off on the far side of marsh by an abandoned day beacon stood a white egret.
Phædrus found the road where the chart said it would be, nice asphalt, clean, deserted. He enjoyed the stretch of his legs.
The sumac here was just turning red.
Another road. How many had he hiked like this?
October was a good month for hiking.
He walked down the tree and shrub-lined road feeling sort of marvelous about the fact that somehow he was right here. Dynamic.
Lila was talking. That was an accomplishment. It showed he was on the right track.
She wasn’t making much sense yet with all that talk about the island and Rigel, but that would come in time. The thing was not to force it, not to set up a confrontation. It was an intriguing idea to send someone like Lila to Samoa for a cure but it wouldn’t work. What’s wrong with insanity is that she’s outside any culture. She’s a culture of one. She has her own reality which no other culture is able to see. That’s what had to be reconciled. It could be that if he just didn’t give her any problems for the next few days her culture of one might just clear the whole thing up by itself.
He wasn’t going to send her to any hospital. He knew that now. At a hospital they’d just start shooting her full of drugs and tell her to adjust. What they wouldn’t see is that she is adjusting. That’s what the insanity is. She’s adjusting to something. The insanity is the adjustment. Insanity isn’t necessarily a step in the wrong direction, it can be an intermediate step in a right direction. It wasn’t necessarily a disease. It could be part of a cure.
He was no expert on the subject but it seemed to him that the problem of curing an insane person is like the problem of curing a Moslem or curing a communist or curing a Republican or Democrat. You’re not going to make much progress by telling them how wrong they are. If you can convince a mullah that everything will be of higher value if he changes his beliefs to those of Christianity, then a change is not only possible but likely. But if you can’t, forget it. And if you can convince Lila that it’s more valuable to consider her baby to be a doll than it is to consider her doll to be a baby, then her condition of insanity will be alleviated. But not before.
That doll thing was a solution to something, some child thing, but he didn’t know what it was. The important thing was to support her delusions and then slowly wean her away from them rather than fight them.
The catch here, which almost any philosopher would spot, is the word, delusion. It’s always the other person who’s deluded. Or ourselves in the past. Ourselves in the present are never deluded. Delusions can be held by whole groups of people, as long as we’re not a part of that group. If we’re a member then the delusion becomes a minority opinion.
An insane delusion can’t be held by a group at all. A person isn’t considered insane if there are a number of people who believe the same way. Insanity isn’t supposed to be a communicable disease. If one other person starts to believe him, or maybe two or three, then it’s a religion.
Thus, when sane grown men in Italy and Spain carry statues of Christ through the streets, that’s not an insane delusion. That’s a meaningful religious activity because there are so many of them. But if Lila carries a rubber statue of a child with her wherever she goes, that’s an insane delusion because there’s only one of her.
If you ask a Catholic priest if the wafer he holds at Mass is really the flesh of Jesus Christ, he will say yes. If you ask, Do you mean symbolically? he will answer, No, I mean actually. Similarly if you ask Lila whether the doll she holds is a dead baby she will say yes. If you ask, Do you mean symbolically? she would also answer, No, I mean actually. It is considered correct to say that until you understand that the wafer is really the body of Christ you will not understand the Mass. With equal force it is possible to say that until you understand that this doll is really a baby you will never understand Lila. She’s a culture of one. She’s a religion of one. The main difference is that the Christian, since the time of Constantine, has been supported by huge social patterns of authority. Lila isn’t. Lila’s religion of one doesn’t have a chance.
That isn’t a completely fair comparison, though. If the major religions of the world consisted of nothing but statues and wafers and other such paraphernalia they would have disappeared long ago in the face of scientific knowledge and cultural change, Phædrus thought. What keeps them going is something else.
It sounds quite blasphemous to put religion and insanity on an equal footing for comparison, but his point was not to undercut religion, only to illuminate insanity. He thought the intellectual separation of the topic of sanity from the topic of religion has weakened our understanding of both.
The current subject-object point of view of religion, conventionally muted so as not to stir up the fanatics, is that religious mysticism and insanity are the same. Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything and the whole world was sinking deeper and deeper into filth and disease and poverty and ignorance. It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved.
Until quite recently Oriental religions and Oriental cultures have been similarly grouped as backward, suffering from disease and poverty and ignorance because they were sunk into a demented mysticism. If it were not for the phenomenon of Japan suddenly leaving the subject-object cultures looking a little backward, the cultural immune system surrounding this view would be impregnable.
The Metaphysics of Quality identifies religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality. It says the subject-object people are almost right when they identify religious mysticism with insanity. The two are almost the same. Both lunatics and mystics have freed themselves from the conventional static intellectual patterns of their culture. The only difference is that the lunatic has shifted over to a private static pattern of his own, whereas the mystic has abandoned all static patterns in favor of pure Dynamic Quality.
The Metaphysics of Quality says that as long as the psychiatric approach is encased within a subject-object metaphysical understanding it will always seek a patterned solution to insanity, never a mystic one. For exactly the same reasons that Choctaw Indians don’t distinguish blue from green and Hindi-speaking people don’t distinguish ice from snow, modern psychology cannot distinguish between a patterned reality and an unpatterned reality and thus cannot distinguish lunatics from mystics. They seem to be the same.
When Socrates says in one of his dialogues, Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness provided the madness is given us by divine gift, the psychiatric profession doesn’t know what in the world he is talking about. Or when traces of this identification are found in the expression touched in the head meaning touched by God, the roots of this expression are ignored as ignorant and superstitious.
It’s another case of the Cleveland Harbor Effect, where you don’t see what you don’t look for, because when one looks through the record of our culture for connections between insane understanding and religious understanding one soon finds them everywhere. Even the idea of insanity as possession by the Devil can be explained by the Metaphysics of Quality as a lower biological pattern, the Devil, trying to overcome a higher pattern of conformity to cultural belief.
The Metaphysics of Quality suggests that in addition to the customary solutions to insanity — conform to cultural patterns or stay locked up — there is another one. This solution is to dissolve all static patterns, both sane and insane, and find the base of reality, Dynamic Quality, that is independent of all of them. The Metaphysics of Quality says that it is immoral for sane people to force cultural conformity by suppressing the Dynamic drives that produce insanity. Such suppression is a lower form of evolution trying to devour a higher one. Static social and intellectual patterns are only an intermediate level of evolution. They are good servants of the process of life but if allowed to turn into masters they destroy it.
Once this theoretical structure is available, it offers solutions to some mysteries in the present treatment of the insane. For example, doctors know that shock treatment works, but are fond of saying that no one knows why.
The Metaphysics of Quality offers an explanation. The value of shock treatment is not that it returns a lunatic to normal cultural patterns. It certainly does not do that. Its value is that it destroys all patterns, both cultural and private, and leaves the patient temporarily in a Dynamic state. All the shock does is duplicate the effects of hitting the patient over the head with a baseball bat. It simply knocks him senseless. In fact it was to imitate the effect of hitting someone over the head with a baseball bat without the risk of skull injury that Ugo Cerletti developed shock treatment in the first place.
But what goes unrecognized in a subject-object theoretical structure is the fact that this senseless unpatterned state is a valuable state of existence. Once the patient is in this state the psychiatrists of course don’t know what to do with it, and so the patient often slips back into lunacy and has to be knocked senseless again and again. But sometimes the patient, in a moment of Zen wisdom, sees the superficiality of both his own contrary patterns and the cultural patterns, sees that the one gets him electrically clubbed day after day and the other sets him free from the institution, and thereupon makes a wise mystic decision to get the hell out of there by whatever avenue is available.
Another mystery in the treatment of the insane explained by a value-centered metaphysics is the value of peace and quiet and isolation. For centuries that has been the primary treatment of the insane. Leave them alone. Ironically the one thing the mental hospitals and doctors do best is the one thing they never take credit for. Maybe they’re afraid some crusading journalist or other reformer will come along and say, Look at all those poor crazies in there with nothing to do. Inhuman treatment, so they don’t play that part of it up. They know it works, but there’s no way of justifying that because the whole cultural set they have to operate in says that doing nothing is the same as doing something wrong.
The Metaphysics of Quality says that what sometimes accidentally occurs in an insane asylum but occurs deliberately in a mystic retreat is a natural human process called dhyana in Sanskrit. In our culture dhyana is ambiguously called meditation. Just as mystics traditionally seek monasteries and ashrams and hermitages as retreats into isolation and silence, so are the insane treated by isolation in places of relative calm and austerity and silence. Sometimes, as a result of this monastic retreat into silence and isolation the patient arrives at a state Karl Menninger has described as better than cured. He is actually in better condition than he was before the insanity started. Phædrus guessed that in many of these accidental cases, the patient had learned by himself not to cling to any static patterns of ideas — cultural, private or any other.
In the insane asylum this dhyana is underrated and often undermined because there is no metaphysical basis for understanding it scientifically. But among religious mystics, particularly Oriental mystics, dhyana has been one of the most intensely studied practices of all.
This Western treatment of dhyana is a beautiful example of how the static patterns of a culture can make something not exist, even when it does exist. People in this culture are hypnotized into thinking they do not meditate when in fact they do.
Dhyana was what this boat was all about. It’s what Phædrus had bought it for, a place to be alone and quiet and inconspicuous and able to settle down into himself and be what he really was and not what he was thought to be or supposed to be. In doing this he didn’t think he was putting this boat to any special purpose. That’s what the purpose of boats like this has always been… and seaside cottages too… and lake cabins… and hiking trails… and golf courses… It’s the need for dhyana that is behind all these.
Vacations too… how perfectly named that is… a vacation, an emptying out… that’s what dhyana is, an emptying out of all the static clutter and junk of one’s life and just settling into an undefined sort of tranquillity.
That’s what Lila’s involved in now, a huge vacation, an emptying out of the junk of her life. She’s clinging to some new pattern because she thinks it holds back the old pattern. But what she has to do is take a vacation from all patterns, old and new, and just settle into a kind of emptiness for a while. And if she does, the culture has a moral obligation not to bother her. The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move onward.
The Metaphysics of Quality associates religious mysticism with Dynamic Quality but it would certainly be a mistake to think that the Metaphysics of Quality endorses the static beliefs of any particular religious sect. Phædrus thought sectarian religion was a static social fallout from Dynamic Quality and that while some sects had fallen less than others, none of them told the whole truth.
His favorite Christian mystic was Johannes Eckhart, who said, Wouldst thou be perfect, do not yelp about God. Eckhart was pointing to a profound mystic truth, but you can guess what a hand of applause it got from the static authorities of the Church. Ill-sounding, rash, and probably heretical, was the general verdict.
From what Phædrus had been able to observe, mystics and priests tend to have a cat-and-dog-like coexistence within almost every religious organization. Both groups need each other but neither group likes the other at all.
There’s an adage that Nothing disturbs a bishop quite so much as the presence of a saint in the parish. It was one of Phædrus' favorites. The saint’s Dynamic understanding makes him unpredictable and uncontrollable, but the bishop’s got a whole calendar of static ceremonies to attend to; fund-raising projects to push forward, bills to pay, parishioners to meet. That saint’s going to up-end everything if he isn’t handled diplomatically. And even then he may do something wildly unpredictable that upsets everybody. What a quandary! It can take the bishops years, decades, even centuries to put down the hell that a saint can raise in a single day. Joan of Arc is the prime example.
In all religions bishops tend to gild Dynamic Quality with all sorts of static interpretations because their cultures require it. But these interpretations become like golden vines that cling to a tree, shut out its sunlight and eventually strangle it.
Phædrus heard the sound of a car coming closer from behind. When it approached he held out his thumb and it stopped. He told the driver he was looking for groceries and the driver took him to Atlantic Highlands where the car was going anyway. At a supermarket Phædrus filled the tote bags with all the food he could find that looked good, then found another ride back as far as the junction in the road where Sandy Hook started. He shouldered his bags, now pretty heavy, hoping another ride would come along, but none came.
He thought some more about Lila’s insanity and how it was related to religious mysticism and how both were integrated into reason by the Metaphysics of Quality. He thought about how once this integration occurs and Dynamic Quality is identified with religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of information as to what Dynamic Quality is. A lot of this religious mysticism is just low-grade yelping about God of course, but if you search for the sources of it and don’t take the yelps too literally a lot of interesting things turn up.
Long ago when he first explored the idea of Quality he’d reasoned that if Quality were the primordial source of all our understanding then it followed that the place to get the best view of it would be at the beginning of history when it would have been less cluttered by the present deluge of static intellectual patterns of knowledge. He’d traced Quality back into its origins in Greek philosophy and thought he’d gone as far as he could go. Then he found he was able to go back to a time before the Greek philosophers, to the rhetoricians.
Philosophers usually present their ideas as sprung from nature or sometimes from God, but Phædrus thought neither of these was completely accurate. The logical order of things which the philosophers study is derived from the mythos. The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible. Most of this old religious talk is nonsense, of course, but nonsense or not, it is the parent of our modern scientific talk. This mythos over logos thesis agreed with the Metaphysics of Quality’s assertion that intellectual static patterns of quality are built up out of social static patterns of quality.
Digging back into ancient Greek history, to the time when this mythos-to-logos transition was taking place, Phædrus noted that the ancient rhetoricians of Greece, the Sophists, had taught what they called areté, which was a synonym for Quality. Victorians had translated areté as virtue but Victorian virtue connoted sexual abstinence, prissiness and a holier-than-thou snobbery. This was a long way from what the ancient Greeks meant. The early Greek literature, particularly the poetry of Homer, showed that areté had been a central and vital term.
With Homer, Phædrus was certain he’d gone back as far as anyone could go, but one day he came across some information that startled him. It said that by following linguistic analysis you could go even farther back into the mythos than Homer. Ancient Greek was not an original language. It was descended from a much earlier one, now called the Proto-Indo-European language. This language has left no fragments but has been derived by scholars from similarities between such languages as Sanskrit, Greek and English which have indicated that these languages were fallouts from a common prehistoric tongue. After thousands of years of separation from Greek and English the Hindi word for mother is still Ma. Yoga both looks like and is translated as yoke. The reason an Indian rajah’s title sounds like regent is because both terms are fallouts from Proto-Indo-European. Today a Proto-Indo-European dictionary contains more than a thousand entries with derivations extending into more than one hundred languages.
Just for curiosity’s sake Phædrus decided to see if arete was in it. He looked under the a words and was disappointed to find it was not. Then he noted a statement that said that the Greeks were not the most faithful to the Proto-Indo-European spelling. Among other sins, the Greeks added the prefix a to many of the Proto-Indo-European roots. He checked this out by looking for arete under r. This time a door opened.
The Proto-Indo-European root of arete was the morpheme rt. There, beside arete, was a treasure room of other derived rt words: arithmetic, aristocrat, art, rhetoric, worth, rite, ritual, wright, right (handed) and right (correct). All of these words except arithmetic seemed to have a vague thesaurus-like similarity to Quality. Phædrus studied them carefully, letting them soak in, trying to guess what sort of concept, what sort of way of seeing the world, could give rise to such a collection.
When the morpheme appeared in aristocrat and arithmetic the reference was to firstness. fit meant first. When it appeared in art and wright it seemed to mean created and of beauty. Ritual suggested repetitive order. And the word right has two meanings: right-handed and moral and esthetic correctness. When all these meanings were strung together a fuller picture of the rt morpheme emerged. Rt referred to the first, created, beautiful repetitive order of moral and esthetic correctness.
Interestingly, in the sciences today arithmetic still enjoys this status.
Later Phædrus discovered that even though the Hebrews were from across the river and not part of the Proto-Indo-European group, they had a similar term, arhetton, which meant the One and which was considered so sacred it was not allowed to be spoken.
The right-handedness was also interesting. He had come across an anthropology book called La Preeminence de la Main Droite by Robert Hertz, showing how condemnation of left-handedness as sinister is an almost universal anthropological characteristic. Our modern twentieth-century culture is one of the few exceptions, but even today when legal oaths are taken or military salutes are given or people shake hands or when a president is inaugurated and agrees to uphold the first created beautiful repetitive order of moral and esthetic correctness of his country, it is mandatory that he raise his right hand. When school children pledge allegiance to the flag as a symbol of this tribal beauty and moral correctness they are required to do the same thing. Prehistoric rt is still with us.
There was just one thing wrong with this Proto-Indo-European discovery, something Phædrus had tried to sweep under the carpet at first, but which kept creeping out again. The meanings, grouped together, suggested something different from his interpretation of areté. They suggested importance but it was an importance that was formal and social and procedural and manufactured, almost an antonym to the Quality he was talking about. Rt meant quality all right but the quality it meant was static, not Dynamic. He had wanted it to come out the other way, but it looked as though it wasn’t going to do it. Ritual. That was the last thing he wanted arete to turn out to be. Bad news. It looked as though the Victorian translation of arete as virtue might be better after all since virtue implies ritualistic conformity to social protocol.
It was in this gloomy mood, while he was thinking about all the interpretations of the rt morpheme, that yet another find came. He had thought that surely this time he had reached the end of the Quality-areté-rt trail. But then from the sediment of old memories his mind dredged up a word he hadn’t thought about or heard of for a long time:
Rta. It was a Sanskrit word, and Phædrus remembered what it meant: Rta was the cosmic order of things. Then he remembered he had read that the Sanskrit language was considered the most faithful to the Proto-Indo-European root, probably because the linguistic patterns had been so carefully preserved by the Hindu priests.
Rta came surrounded by a memory of bright chalky tan walls in a classroom filled with sun. At the head of the classroom, Mr Mukerjee, a perspiring dhoti-clad brahmin was drilling dozens of ancient Sanskrit words into the assembled students' heads — advaita, maya, avidya, brahman, atman, prajna, samkhya, visistadvaita, Rg-Veda, upanisad, darsana, dhyana, nyaya — on and on. He introduced them day after day, each in turn with a little smile that promised hundreds more to come.
At Phædrus' worn wooden desk near the wall in back of the classroom, he had sat sweaty and annoyed by buzzing flies. The heat and light and flies came and went freely through openings in a far wall which had no window-glass because in India you don’t need it. His notebook was damp where his hand had rested. His pen wouldn’t write on the damp spot, so he had to write around it. When he turned the page he found the damp had gotten through to the next page too.
In that heat it was agony to remember what all the words were supposed to mean — ajiva, moksa, kama, ahimsa, susupti, bhakti, samsara. They passed by his mind like clouds and disappeared. Through the openings in the wall he could see real clouds — giant monsoon clouds towering thousands of feet up — and white-humped Sindhi cows grazing below.
He thought he’d forgotten all those words years ago, but now here was rta, back again, Rta, from the oldest portion of the Rg Veda, which was the oldest known writing of the Indo-Aryan language. The sun god, Surya, began his chariot ride across the heavens from the abode of rta. Varuna, the god for whom the city in which Phædrus was studying was named, was the chief support of rta.
Varuna was omniscient and was described as ever witnessing the truth and falsehood of men — as being the third whenever two plot in secret. He was essentially a god of righteousness and a guardian of all that is worthy and good. The texts had said that the distinctive feature of Varuna was his unswerving adherence to high principles. Later he was overshadowed by Indra who was a thunder god and destroyer of the enemies of the Indo-Aryans. But all the gods were conceived as guardians of rta, willing the right and making sure it was carried out.
One of Phædrus' old school texts, written by M. Hiriyanna, contained a good summary: Rta, which etymologically stands for "course" originally meant "cosmic order," the maintenance of which was the purpose of all the gods; and later it also came to mean "right," so that the gods were conceived as preserving the world not merely from physical disorder but also from moral chaos. The one idea is implicit in the other: and there is order in the universe because its control is in righteous hands… The physical order of the universe is also the moral order of the universe, Rta is both. This was exactly what the Metaphysics of Quality was claiming. It was not a new idea. It was the oldest idea known to man.
This identification of rta and areté was enormously valuable, Phædrus thought, because it provided a huge historical panorama in which the fundamental conflict between static and Dynamic Quality had been worked out. It answered the question of why areté meant ritual. Rta also meant ritual. But unlike the Greeks, the Hindus in their many thousands of years of cultural evolution had paid enormous attention to the conflict between ritual and freedom. Their resolution of this conflict in the Buddhist and Vedantist philosophies is one of the profound achievements of the human mind.
The original meaning of rta, during what is called the Brdhmana period of Indian history, underwent a change to extremely ritualistic static patterns more rigid and detailed than anything heard of in Western religion. As Hiriyanna wrote:
The purpose of invoking the several gods of nature was at first mostly to gain their favor for success in life here as well as hereafter. The prayers were then naturally accompanied by simple gifts like grain and ghee. But this simple form of worship became more and more complicated and gave rise, in course of time, to elaborate sacrifices and also to a special class of professional priests who alone, it was believed, could officiate at them. There are allusions in the later hymns to rites which lasted for very long periods and at which several priests were employed by the sacrificer. [A change] came over the spirit with which offerings were made to the gods in this period. What prompted the performance of sacrifices was no longer the thought of prevailing upon the gods to bestow some favor or ward off some danger; it was rather to compel or coerce them to do what the sacrificer wanted to be done…
There was a profound change in the conception of sacrifice, and consequently in that of the relation between gods and men. All that came to be insisted upon was a scrupulous carrying out of every detail connected with the various rites; and the good result accruing from them, whether here or elsewhere, was believed to follow automatically from it… Ritualistic punctilio thus comes to be placed on the same level as natural law and moral rectitude.
You don’t have to look far in the modern world to find similar conditions, Phædrus thought.
But what made the Hindu experience so profound was that this decay of Dynamic Quality into static quality was not the end of the story. Following the period of the Brahmanas came the Upanisadic period and the flowering of Indian philosophy. Dynamic Quality reemerged within the static patterns of Indian thought.
Rta, Hiriyanna had written, almost ceased to be used in Sanskrit; but… under the name of dharma, the same idea occupies a very important place in the later Indian views of life also.
The more usual meaning of dharma is, religious merit which, operating in some unseen way as it is supposed, secures good to a person in the future, either here or elsewhere. Thus the performance of certain sacrifices is believed to lead the agent to heaven after the present life, and of certain others to secure for him wealth, children and the like in this very life.
But he also wrote, It is sometimes used as a purely moral concept and stands for right or virtuous conduct which leads to some form of good as a result.
Dharma, like rta, means what holds together. It is the basis of all order. It equals righteousness. It is the ethical code. It is the stable condition which gives man perfect satisfaction.
Dharma is duty. It is not external duty which is arbitrarily imposed by others. It is not any artificial set of conventions which can be amended or repealed by legislation. Neither is it internal duty which is arbitrarily decided by one’s own conscience. Dharma is beyond all questions of what is internal and what is external. Dharma is Quality itself, the principle of lightness which gives structure and purpose to the evolution of all life and to the evolving understanding of the universe which life has created.
Within the Hindu tradition dharma is relative and dependent on the conditions of society. It always has a social implication. It is the bond which holds society together. This is fitting to the ancient origins of the term. But within modern Buddhist thought dharma becomes the phenomenal world — the object of perception, thought or understanding. A chair, for example, is not composed of atoms of substance, it is composed of dharmas.
This statement is absolute jabberwocky to a conventional subject-object metaphysics. How can a chair be composed of individual little moral orders? But if one applies the Metaphysics of Quality and sees that a chair is an inorganic static pattern and sees that all static patterns are composed of value and that value is synonymous with morality then it all begins to make sense.
It occurred to Phædrus that this was one answer, perhaps the basic answer, to why workmen in Japan and Taiwan and other areas in the Far East are able to maintain quality levels that compare so favorably to those in the West. In the past the mystics' traditional low regard for inorganic static patterns, laws of nature has kept the scientifically derived technology of these cultures poor, but since Orientals have learned to overcome that prejudice times have changed. If one comes from a cultural tradition where an electronic assembly is primarily a moral order rather than just a neutral pile of substance, it is easier to feel an ethical responsibility for doing good work on it.
Phædrus thought that Oriental social cohesiveness and ability to work long hard hours without complaint was not a genetic characteristic but a cultural one. It resulted from the working out, centuries ago, of the problem of dharma and the way in which it combines freedom and ritual. In the West progress seems to proceed by a series of spasms of alternating freedom and ritual. A revolution of freedom against old rituals produces a new order, which soon becomes another old ritual for the next generation to revolt against, on and on. In the Orient there are plenty of conflicts but historically this particular kind of conflict has not been as dominant. Phædrus thought it was because dharma includes both static and Dynamic Quality without contradiction.
For example, you would guess from the literature on Zen and its insistence on discovering the unwritten dharma that it would be intensely anti-ritualistic, since ritual is the written dharma. But that isn’t the case. The Zen monk’s daily life is nothing but one ritual after another, hour after hour, day after day, all his life. They don’t tell him to shatter those static patterns to discover the unwritten dharma. They want him to get those patterns perfect!
The explanation for this contradiction is the belief that you do not free yourself from static patterns by fighting them with other contrary static patterns. That is sometimes called bad karma chasing its tail. You free yourself from static patterns by putting them to sleep. That is, you master them with such proficiency that they become an unconscious part of your nature. You get so used to them you completely forget them and they are gone. There in the center of the most monotonous boredom of static ritualistic patterns the Dynamic freedom is found.
Phædrus saw nothing wrong with this ritualistic religion as long as the rituals are seen as merely a static portrayal of Dynamic Quality, a sign-post which allows socially pattern-dominated people to see Dynamic Quality. The danger has always been that the rituals, the static patterns, are mistaken for what they merely represent and are allowed to destroy the Dynamic Quality they were originally intended to preserve.
Suddenly the foliage by the road opened up and there it was: the ocean.
He stopped for a second by the beach and just stared at the endless procession of waves moving slowly in from the horizon.
The south wind was stronger here and it cooled him. It was steady, like a trade wind. Nothing interfered with its flow toward him over the huge ocean. Vast emptiness and nothing sacred. If ever there was a visible concrete metaphor for Dynamic Quality this was it.
The beach looked much cleaner here than on the other side of the hook and he would have liked to walk for a while, but he had to get back to the boat… And to Lila.
Where to start with her? That was the question. The rta interpretation of Quality would say that more ritual is what she needs — not the kind of ritual that fights Dynamic Quality, but the kind that embodies it. But what ritual? She wasn’t about to follow rituals of any kind. Ritual was what she was fighting.
But that could be an answer. Lila’s problem wasn’t that she was suffering from lack of Dynamic freedom. It’s hard to see how she could possibly have any more freedom. What she needed now were stable patterns to encase that freedom. She needed some way of being reintegrated into the rituals of everyday living.
But where to start?… That doll, maybe. She had to give up that doll. She wasn’t going to convert anyone to that religion. The longer she hung on to it the firmer the static pattern was likely to get. These defensive patterns were not only as bad as the patterns she was running from, they were worse! Now she’s got two sets of patterns to break away from, the culture’s and her own… He wondered if it was possible to put these defensive patterns to sleep by means of the doll. Just accept the idea that the doll is her real child and treat the doll in such a way as to quiet down all those longings. She says the doll, her baby, is dead. She thinks this is some sort of island. Why not bury the doll with full honors?
That would be a ritual, Phædrus thought. That’s exactly what Lila needs. Don’t fight her patterns. Amalgamate them. She already seemed to think of him as some sort of priestly figure. Why disappoint her? He could use this image to try to bury her insane patterns with the baby. It would be sort of theatrical and fake, he supposed, but that’s what funerals were: theater. They weren’t for the corpse, certainly, but to help end the longings and old patterns of the living, who had to go on. The funeral would be real to Lila. That baby probably embodied just about every care she had.
Rta. That’s what was missing from her life. Ritual.
Arriving at work Monday morning is rta. Getting paid Friday evening is rta. Walking into the grocery store and taking food off the shelf to feed one’s children is rta. Paying for it with the money received on Friday is more rta. The entire mechanism of society is rta from beginning to end. That’s what Lila really needed.
He could only guess how far back this ritual-cosmos relationship went, maybe fifty or one hundred thousand years. Cave men are usually depicted as hairy, stupid creatures who don’t do much, but anthropological studies of contemporary primitive tribes suggest that stone-age people were probably bound by ritual all day long. There’s a ritual for washing, for putting up a house, for hunting, for eating and so on — so much so that the division between ritual and knowledge becomes indistinct. In cultures without books ritual seems to be a public library for teaching the young and preserving common values and information.
These rituals may be the connecting link between the social and intellectual levels of evolution. One can imagine primitive song-rituals and dance-rituals associated with certain cosmology stories, myths, which generated the first primitive religions. From these the first intellectual truths could have been derived. If ritual always comes first and intellectual principles always come later, then ritual cannot always be a decadent corruption of intellect. Their sequence in history suggests that principles emerge from ritual, not the other way around. That is, we don’t perform religious rituals because we believe in God. We believe in God because we perform religious rituals. If so, that’s an important principle in itself.
But after a while, as Phædrus walked along, his enthusiasm for the baby funeral started to go downhill. He didn’t like this idea of going along with some ritual he didn’t really believe in. He had a feeling that real ritual had to grow out of your own nature. It isn’t something that can be intellectualized and patched on.
The funeral would be a pretense. How are you going to bring someone back to reality when the reality you bring them back to is a deliberate fake? That’s no good. He had never gone along with that fakery in the mental hospital and he was sure it wouldn’t work now. Santa Claus stuff. Sooner or later the lie breaks down… and then what’s your next move?
Phædrus continued to think about it, leaning first one way and then another, until he got to a sign that indicated he was back at Horseshoe Cove.
When the cove came into view his boat was there all right, but another boat was alongside of it, rafted on.
A wave of very un-mystic anxiety came over him.
As he got closer Phædrus saw that it was Rigel’s boat. What a relief. But Rigel was supposed to be going to Connecticut. What was he doing here?
Then Phædrus remembered Lila had said Rigel was coming. How had she known that?
When Phædrus got to the dinghy he set down his tote bags of groceries and began to untie its painter from the steel spike in the log.
Wait! he heard.
He turned and saw Rigel standing on deck of his boat, his hands cupped over his mouth.
I’m coming ashore, Rigel shouted.
Phædrus stopped untying the dinghy. He watched Rigel get down into his boat’s dinghy. He wondered why Rigel didn’t just wait for him to get there.
He watched Rigel row the short distance, looking over his shoulder slowly, his aristocratic features becoming closer and more distinct. He was smiling. When he got the boat beached, Phædrus helped him lift it up onto the sand.
I just thought I’d come ashore and talk for a while with you, Rigel said. His smile was formal, calculated — a lawyer’s smile.
What’s up? Phædrus asked.
Well, first of all I’m here to collect some money, Rigel said. I paid your bill back at the marina.
My God, Phædrus said, I completely forgot about that.
Well, they didn’t, Rigel said, and brought out a receipt from his pocket.
While Phædrus looked at the receipt and fished out his billfold, Rigel said, I gave them a little extra to calm them down. They thought it was some sort of a drug transaction and didn’t want to be involved in it. As soon as you were gone they calmed down and forgot about the whole thing.
That’s good, Phædrus said.
As Phædrus paid him, Rigel asked, What have you been doing?
I’ve just been getting some groceries, Phædrus said, enough to get us to Atlantic City, at least.
Oh, Richard Rigel said. That’s good.
There was a pause and his face became a little tense.
Where’s Bill Capella? Phædrus asked.
He had to go back, Rigel said.
That’s too bad.
Rigel seemed to wait for him to go on talking but somehow he wasn’t in the mood. As neither one of them said anything Rigel seemed to get visibly nervous.
Why don’t we go for a walk for a while, Rigel said, down this path here.
Well, you can if you want, Phædrus said. I just want to get back to the boat. I’ve been going all day.
There are some things I’d like to talk about, Rigel said.
Like what?
Important things.
Rigel had always seemed bothered by something he wasn’t talking about but now it seemed even worse. His verbal language and his body language seemed to go in different directions.
You remember our conversation about Lila back in Kingston?
Yes, Phædrus replied, I remember it well. He tried to say it flatly but it sounded sarcastic anyway.
Since then, Rigel said, what you said has been going round and round in my mind.
Is that right?
I can’t seem to stop thinking about it, and I’d like to talk about it some more and since we can’t very well do that with Lila present, I thought perhaps we could go for a walk.
Phædrus shrugged. He retied the painter of the dinghy to the rusty spike and then with Rigel headed up the path away from the road.
The path in this direction was carpeted with wood shavings, and as they continued walking he saw it changed to a covering of fine black stone. A sign on one side that he hadn’t noticed before said US Interior Dept. The marsh with the old day beacon in it looked the same as before but the white egret was gone.
You remember that you said Lila has quality, Rigel said.
That’s right.
Would you mind telling me just how you came to that conclusion?
Oh, for God’s sake, Phædrus thought. It wasn’t a conclusion, he said. It was a perception.
How did you come to it?
I didn’t "come" to it.
They continued to walk quietly. Rigel’s hands were clenched. He could almost hear wheels going around in his head.
Then he said exasperatedly, What was there to perceive!
The Quality, Phædrus said.
Oh, you’re being ridiculous, Rigel said.
They continued to walk.
Rigel said, Did she tell you something that night? Is that why you think she has Quality? You know she’s mentally ill, don’t you?
Yes.
I just wanted to be sure. I’m never much sure of anything where she’s involved. Did she tell you she’s been chasing me all the way across New York ever since I left Rochester?
No, she didn’t tell me that.
Every damn bar. Every damned restaurant, wherever I turned there was Lila. I told her I didn’t want anything to do with her. That case with Jim was over and I was done with it, but by now I’m sure you know how well she listens.
Phædrus nodded without adding anything.
The reason she came to that bar in Kingston was because she knew I was there. That was no accident, you know, her taking up with you in the bar that night. She saw you were a friend of mine. I tried to warn you but you weren’t listening.
Phædrus remembered now that Lila had asked a lot of questions about Rigel in the bar. That was true.
Then he remembered something else: I was so drunk it’s hard to remember anything that happened, he said, but I vaguely remember one thing. Just as we were crossing the deck of your boat to get to ours I told her to be very quiet, not to make any noise because you were probably sleeping right under the deck. She said, "Where?" and I pointed to the spot and then she picked up her suitcase way up over her head and slammed it down with all her might right on that spot.
I remember that! Rigel said. It was like an explosion!
Why did she do it?
Because I wasn’t having anything more to do with her! Rigel said.
Why was she chasing you?
Oh, that goes back forever.
To the second grade, she said.
Rigel suddenly looked at him with an almost frightened look. Whatever he was so nervous about had something to do with this.
She said she was the only one who was nice to you, Phædrus continued.
That’s not true, Rigel said.
Ahead, overgrown by bushes, was some unidentifiable concrete wreckage, like a modern sculpture growing in weeds. Rusted metal bolts emerged from concrete slabs broken up by goldenrod. It looked like the base of two steel cranes.
She’s different from what she used to be, Rigel said.
You wouldn’t believe it now, but back in grade school Lila Blewitt was the most serene, pleasant-natured girl you could ever meet. That’s why I was so shocked when you said she had "quality." I wondered if you saw something there.
What happened to change her?
I don’t know, Rigel said. I suppose the same thing happens to all of us. She grew up and she discovered the world is not the place we think it is when we are children.
Did you ever have sexual relations with her? Phædrus asked. It was a shot in the dark.
Rigel looked at him with surprise. Then he laughed deprecatingly. Everybody has! he said. You’re no exception in that regard!
Did she become pregnant after that? Phædrus asked.
Rigel shook his head and made a pushing-away motion. No, don’t jump to conclusions like that. That could have been anyone.
They walked on and Phædrus began to feel depressed. This path seemed to go on and on without getting anywhere. We’d better turn around, he said.
He was beginning to feel like the detective at the end of the murder mystery, except that the detective gets a feeling of satisfaction from having finally run some quarry to the ground, and Phædrus wasn’t getting any satisfaction from this at all.
He just really didn’t want to have anything to do with this person any more.
They turned around, and as they walked back Rigel said, There’s still one other question to be taken up.
What’s that?
Lila wants to go back with me.
Now?
Yes.
Where?
To Rochester. I know her family and friends and can get her taken care of.
Taken care of?
Certified.
Oh my God, Phædrus thought. Institutionalized.
A real wave of depression hit.
He just walked for a while, not saying anything because he didn’t want to say anything wrong.
Finally he said, I think that’s an exceptionally poor idea. She’s all right on my boat.
She wants to go back.
Because you talked her into it.Absolutely not!
The last time I talked to her she said she wants to go south, which is where we’re heading.
That isn’t what she wants, Rigel said.
I know what she wants, Phædrus said.
Now Rigel didn’t say anything.
They continued to walk and before long the boats were back in sight again.
Rigel said, I don’t know quite how to tell you this. But you’d better hear it.
Hear what?
Lila said she wants me to take her back to Rochester… He paused. … because you’re trying to kill her.
Phædrus looked at him. This time Rigel looked straight back at him and his nervousness seemed gone. So you see what the problem is, Rigel said.
That’s why I wanted to take this walk with you, Rigel continued. I didn’t expect this when I came down here. I just came to see if everything was all right. But under the circumstances… I rather got you into this… although I certainly tried not to…
I’ll talk to her, Phædrus said.
She’s already transferred her suitcase and other things onto my boat, Rigel said.
Then I’ll talk to her there! Phædrus said.
This was a real disaster coming. But blowing up now would just make it more likely. He got into his dinghy and Rigel let him row ahead. He tied off on his own boat, went aboard, and on the other side crossed over the life-lines to Rigel’s boat before he arrived.
When he looked down below he saw Lila’s poor bruised face looking up at him with a smile. Then the smile disappeared. Maybe she’d thought he was Rigel.
He went down below and sat across from her. Now she looked as nervous as Rigel had been.
Hello, he said.
Hello, she said back.
I hear you want to go back.
She looked down. Guilt. This was the first time he had ever seen her look guilty.
He said, I think that’s a very bad mistake.
She still looked down.
Why are you going back?
Lila looked up and then finally said, I wanted to go with you. You don’t know how bad. But now I’ve changed my mind. There are a lot of things I want to do first.
Phædrus said, There’s nothing but trouble waiting for you back there.
I know that, but they need me.
Who?
My mother and everybody.
He looked at her. Well, he wanted to ask, if they need you so badly then why the hell were you heading south in the first place? But he didn’t ask it. What’s changed? he wanted to ask. Did Rigel put you up to this? Who put you up to this? Do you know what’s going to happen to you back there? Is this some kind of suicide? My God, Lila, you haven’t done one single solitary smart thing since the moment I met you, do you know that? When are you going to start?
But he didn’t say all this. He just sat there like a child at a funeral, watching her.
There was really nothing more he could say. She wanted to go back; there was nothing he could do about it.
You’re absolutely sure? he said.
Lila looked at him for a long time. He waited for a flicker of doubt to appear and waited some more but she just sat there and then she said it so quietly he could hardly hear it… I’m all right… Then he thought for a while longer, wondering, in what he knew would be the last chance, if there was something missing that he should say.
He couldn’t think of anything.
Finally he got up and said, OK.
He climbed up to the deck where Rigel was standing. He said, She wants to go… When are you leaving?
Right now, Rigel said. She wants to leave right away and I think that, under the circumstances, it’s better.
As Phædrus watched him start up his boat’s engine he felt somewhat dumbstruck. He crossed over to his own boat, helped Rigel cast off the lines and then watched with a strange sort of paralysis as Rigel’s boat turned and then headed back north across the bay.
It was going to take a while to get all this sorted out.
An hour ago he was planning to spend the rest of his life taking care of Lila. As of this minute he was never going to see her again. Wham. Wham. Just like that.
His mind felt like the beach out there, all full of old tires and derelict hulls and bleach bottles after the hurricane had passed through.
He guessed what he needed now was some time and silence to get back to where he was before.
All these events seemed to have completely cut off his past. Whatever was, was gone. It was really behind him. The ocean was right here now, just on the other side of this sand barrier. Here, now, this was a whole new life starting. Soon there’d be no trace of his ever having been here.
The boat swung a little in the breeze. It seemed empty now. Silent. He was all alone again. It was as though Lila had never been here…
He supposed he should be overjoyed. He didn’t know why he felt so let down. This was what he wanted. He should be celebrating…
But it was really sad that she had to end it like that. Why did she tell Rigel he was trying to kill her? That was really bad. She knew he wasn’t trying to kill her. Her whole attitude when she talked to him wasn’t the attitude of someone who thought that… Of course he never heard her say he was going to kill her. He just heard Rigel say she said it… But Rigel wouldn’t have lied about something like that. She must have said something of the sort… What made it so sad was it was the first really immoral thing she had done to him in all that time he was with her. Sure, she called a him a lot of bad names and stuff. But that had been more a defense of herself than any overt wickedness. She had just been trying to tell him the truth. But this time she was lying. That’s why she wanted to get out of here so fast.
It was the first time he’d ever seen her look down like that. That was what was so sad to see. The thing that was most attractive about her was that straight-forward, eyes-ahead look of someone who’s honest to themself, whatever others might think. Now that was gone. It meant she was turning back to the static patterns she came from. She’s sold out. The system beat her. It’s made a crook out of her at last.
It was as though she had just one more step to take and she was out of hell forever, and then instead of taking that one step she turned back. Now she’s really done for. That bastard will commit her for life.
Anyway, Phædrus supposed he would have to get busy and get ready to leave tomorrow. He’d get everything set to head out at daybreak. Possibly he could make it all the way to Barnegat inlet if he could get in there. He’d have to look at the charts again.
Somehow he didn’t feel like moving. He didn’t feel like doing anything… He supposed he shouldn’t be too hard on Lila. What had happened to her was very scary stuff. If she wants to go back to some place she thinks is safer who’s to blame her?… The funny thing was that when she said he was trying to kill her, that was insane — but it wasn’t entirely incorrect. He was trying to kill her — not the biological Lila, but the static patterns that were really going to kill her if she didn’t let go.
From the static point of view the whole escape into Dynamic Quality seems like a death experience. It’s a movement from something to nothing. How can nothing be any different from death? Since a Dynamic understanding doesn’t make the static distinctions necessary to answer that question, the question goes unanswered. All the Buddha could say was, See for yourself.
When early Western investigators first read the Buddhist texts they too interpreted nirvana as some kind of suicide. There’s a famous poem that goes:
While living,
Be a dead man.
Be completely dead,
And then do as you please.
And all will be well.
It sounds like something from a Hollywood horror-film but it’s about nirvana. The Metaphysics of Quality translates it:
While sustaining biological and social patterns
Kill all intellectual patterns.
Kill them completely
And then follow Dynamic Quality
And morality will be served.
Lila was still moving toward Dynamic Quality. All life does. This breaking up of her life’s patterns looked like it was part of that movement.
When Phædrus first went to India he’d wondered why, if this passage of enlightenment into pure Dynamic Quality was such a universal reality, did it only occur in certain parts of the world and not others? At the time he’d thought this was proof that the whole thing was just Oriental religious baloney, the equivalent of a magic land called heaven that Westerners go to if they are good and get a ticket from the priests. Now he saw that enlightenment is distributed in all parts of the world just as the color yellow is distributed in all parts of the world, but some cultures accept it and others screen out recognition of it.
Lila probably will never know what’s happened to her and neither will Rigel or anyone else. She’ll probably go through the rest of her life thinking this whole episode has been some kind of failure when in fact what had happened might not have been failure, but growth.
Maybe if Rigel hadn’t shown up she would have killed all the bad patterns right here in Sandy Hook. But it’s too late now to ever know… Strange that she’d come to Kingston on a boat called the Karma. It was unlikely anyone aboard knew what that word really meant. It was like naming a boat Causal Relationship. Of all the hundreds of Sanskrit words he had learned so long ago, dharma and karma had hung on longest and hardest. You could translate and pigeon-hole the others but these never seemed to stop needing translating.
The Metaphysics of Quality translated karma as evolutionary garbage. That’s why it sounded so funny as the name of a boat. It seemed to suggest she had arrived in Kingston on a garbage scow. Karma is the pain, the suffering that results from clinging to the static patterns of the world. The only exit from the suffering is to detach yourself from these static patterns, that is, to kill them.
A common way taken to kill them is suicide, but suicide only kills biological patterns. That’s like destroying a computer because you can’t stand the program it’s running. The social and intellectual patterns that caused the suicide have to be carried on by others. From an evolutionary point of view it’s really a backward and therefore immoral step.
Another immoral way of killing the static patterns is to pass the patterns to someone else, in what Phædrus called a karma dump. You invent a devil group, Jews or blacks or whites or capitalists or communists — it doesn’t matter — then say that group is responsible for all your suffering, and then hate it and try to destroy it. On a daily personal level everyone has things or people they hate and blame for their suffering and this hatred and blame brings a kind of relief.
Back in Kingston Rigel’s whole breakfast sermon was a karma dump. Lila’s accusation just now was another one. That’s what made it so sad. She’d received too much karmic garbage in her life and she couldn’t handle it and that’s what was making her crazy and now she’s dumped some of it and that will probably make her less crazy, for a while at least, but that’s not the moral solution.
If you take all this karmic garbage and make yourself feel better by passing it on to others that’s normal. That’s the way the world works. But if you manage to absorb it and not pass it on, that’s the highest moral conduct of all. That really advances everything, not just you. The whole world. If you look at the lives of some of the great moral figures of history — Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi and others — you’ll see that that’s what they were really involved in, the cleansing of the world through the absorption of karmic garbage. They didn’t pass it on. Their followers sometimes did, but they didn’t.
On the other hand, Phædrus supposed, when you’re on the receiving end of some karma dump like that it sets you free. If he’d thrown Lila out when she was insane it would have bothered him afterward as something he shouldn’t have done. But now, this way, with both Rigel and Lila rejecting him, there was no way he was going to feel guilty about her departure. The bond of obligation was broken. If Lila had been full of gratitude and attachment he would still be stuck with her. Now Rigel had that honor… Across the cabin, on the pilot berth, Phædrus saw that her suitcase was gone. There was a nice empty hole there. That was good. That meant he could get the trays of slips back out and have room to get to work on them again. That was good too. He remembered that PROGRAM slip he wrote to wait until Lila gets off the boat. He could cross that one off now.
He wondered if he really did want to go back to all those slips. In their own way they were a lot of karmic garbage too. Strictly speaking, the creation of any metaphysics is an immoral act since it’s a lower form of evolution, intellect, trying to devour a higher mystic one. The same thing that’s wrong with philosophology when it tries to control and devour philosophy is wrong with metaphysics when it tries to devour the world intellectually. It attempts to capture the Dynamic within a static pattern. But it never does. You never get it right. So why try?
It’s like trying to construct a perfect unassailable chess game. No matter how smart you are you’re never going to play a game that is right for all people at all times, everywhere. Answers to ten questions led to a hundred more and answers to those led to a thousand more. Not only would he never get it right; the longer he worked on it the wronger it would probably get… Then as he thought about this gloomily he saw something else in a shadow at the back of the berth:
It was the doll.
She’d left it behind.
That was sort of sad too. After all the fuss she’d made over it, now she just walks off and leaves it. It left a feeling of immorality too. What do you think of a small girl who goes off and leaves her doll alone and abandoned? Will she do that when she grows up?
He got up and looked at it.
It was just an ordinary machine-molded rubber doll — not a very expensive one. It had no moving eyes. Its brown hair was part of the machine-molding. He saw that one spot on the head was abraded where it had evidently rubbed against something in the river for a long time. But probably if it had been glued-on hair it would have all come off by now.
There was something really sad about it, sitting there all bare-naked and sexless. Something innocent. Something wronged. He didn’t like to look at it. He didn’t want to be involved with it… What the hell was he going to do with it?… He didn’t want to keep it on the boat.
He supposed he could just throw it overboard. It’d look like all the other trash on the beach. No one would know the difference. Probably that’s where it was headed anyway before Lila fished it out of the river.
Beside it was a shirt that didn’t look like one of his. It looked new and clean. He picked it up. There was a sharp pin in it which he pulled out and set on the chart table. It must really be new, he thought, if it’s still got pins in it.
When he tried to put it on he couldn’t get the buttons buttoned without exhaling. It was too small. It couldn’t be one of his. Lila must have left it. What was Lila doing with a man’s new shirt? Now he was beginning to remember she had wrapped the doll in something that looked like this. That’s probably where it came from. But why should she have bought a shirt for the doll? She really was into some kind of fantasy world.
Well, if that’s what she bought it for, to cover up this doll, that seemed like a perfect use for it right now. Maybe it would help overcome this wronged feeling the doll gave off.
He slipped the shirt over the doll’s head. It came down way over the doll’s feet like a nightshirt. That looked better. He buttoned the collar around its neck. Something about this doll was giving it all kinds of Quality the manufacturer had never built into it. Lila had overlaid a whole set of value patterns on top of it and those values were still clinging to it. It was almost like some religious idol.
He set it on the edge of the pilot berth, and went back and sat down and stared at it for a while. It looked better with the shirt on.
An idol, that’s what this doll was. It was a genuine religious idol of an abandoned religion of one. It had all those formidable characteristics that idols always have. That’s what spooked him. Once they’ve been ritualized and adored, these idols change in value. You can no more throw them away casually than you can throw an old church statue on the dump.
He wondered what they actually did with old abandoned church statues. Did they have a desanctification ceremony of some sort? He remembered he’d been going to have a funeral for this idol for Lila’s benefit. Maybe he ought to give it one for his own benefit. Just to put it somewhere without turning it into trash.
Funny feelings. Anthropologists could do a lot with idols. Maybe they already had. He seemed to remember a book he’d always wanted to read called The Masks of God. You could discover a lot about a culture by what it said about its idols. The idols would be an objectification of the culture’s innermost values, which were its reality.
This doll represented Lila’s innermost values, the real Lila, and it said something about her that completely contradicted everything else. It indicated there were two contradictory patterns conflicting with some enormous force and what had happened was some kind of shift in these tectonic plates that had produced a kind of high Richter-scale earthquake. The one pattern, the one Rigel denounced, was going one way. This doll represented a pattern that was going another way, and so this idol allowed Lila to objectify the other pattern and ease the pressures that were causing the earthquake. And now she’s abandoned it — evidence that she’s going back to something worse. Maybe not.
Maybe to keep from going to something worse himself he should bury it with dignity, he thought, just for his own benefit.
He heard a klunk and realized it was the dinghy. The groceries were still down there. Everything had happened so fast he’d forgotten all about them.
He went up on deck, lowered himself into the dinghy and then lifted the grocery bags up onto the deck of the boat. Now, with Lila gone, he had enough food to get to Norfolk, at least. It would probably go bad before then.
He got back on deck and lowered the canvas bags one by one down into the cabin where he set them on the berth and then brought out their contents and put them into the icebox. Then he looked at the doll-idol.
He picked it up and tucked it under one arm like a child of his own and brought it up on deck, where he set it down carefully. Then he stepped down into the dinghy again and brought the doll down and placed it on the stern thwart ahead of him and rowed ashore. Good thing he had this shirt to wrap over this idol if he needed to. If someone came along he’d have a hard time explaining.
The trail passed by low shrubs with small thick leaves and tiny blue-gray berries. It was paved with small orange-tan stones and sand, and there were pieces of dry grass on it — hollow round reeds broken into six-inch pieces, about a quarter of an inch thick, laid in whirligig patterns. He wondered if the hurricane had done that. Ahead, on one side by some fading goldenrod was a Department of Interior survey marker.
Later on was a nicely-made painted sign asking people to keep out of the marsh to protect the wildlife. It was good that the main road to town didn’t have access to this area. It made it much more isolated.
He heard a honking of geese overhead. He looked up and saw about thirty or forty geese flying in a V-formation, northwest, the wrong way… Crazy geese. This warm spell must have gotten to them.
Walking along with this idol Phædrus felt as if the two of them were sharing this experience, as though he were back in childhood again and this were some imaginary companion. Little children talk to dolls and grown-up adults talk to idols. He supposed that a doll allows a child to pretend he’s a parent while an idol allows a parent to pretend he’s a child.
He reflected on this for a while and then his mind framed a question: What would you say, he asked the idol, if we were in India now? What would you say to all this?
He listened for a long time but there was no response. Then after a while into his thoughts came a voice that did not seem to be his own.
All this is a happy ending.
Happy ending? Phædrus thought about it for a while.
I wouldn’t call it a happy ending, he said, I’d call it an inconclusive ending.
No, this is a happy ending for everyone, the other voice said.
Why?
Because everybody gets what he wants, the voice said.
Lila gets her precious Richard Rigel, Rigel gets his precious self-righteousness, you get your precious Dynamic freedom, and I get to go swimming again.
Oh, you know what’s going to happen?
Yes, of course, the idol said.
Then how can you say it’s a happy ending when you know what’s going to happen to Lila?
It’s not a problem, the idol’s voice said.
Not a problem? He’s going to try to lock her up for life and that’s not a problem?
Not for you.
Then why do I feel so bad about it? Phædrus asked.
You’re just waiting for your medal, the idol answered. You think maybe they’re going to turn around and come back and hand you a citation for merit.
But he’s going to destroy her.
No, the idol said. She isn’t going to let him get anything on her.
I don’t believe that.
She owns Rigel now, the idol continued. He’s had it. From here on he’s putty in her hands.
No, Phædrus said. He’s a lawyer. He isn’t going to lose his head over her.
He doesn’t have to. His head’s already lost, the idol said. She’s going to use all those morals of his against him.
How?
She’s going to become a repentant sinner. She may even join a church. She’s just going to keep telling him what a wonderful moral person he is and how he saved her from your degenerate clutches, and what can he do? How can he deny it? There’s no way he can fight that. That just keeps his moral ego blown tight as a balloon and as soon as it starts to sag he will have to come back to her for more.
Whew, this was some idol, Phædrus thought. Sarcastic, cynical. Almost vicious. Was that what he himself was really like underneath? Maybe it was. A theatrical ham idol. A matinee idol. No wonder somebody threw it into the river.
You’re the winner, you know, the idol said, … by default.
How so?
You did one moral thing on this whole trip, which saved you.
What was that?
You told Rigel that Lila had Quality.
You mean in Kingston?
Yes, and the only reason you did that was because he caught you by surprise and you couldn’t think of your usual intellectual answer, but you turned him around. He wouldn’t have come here if it hadn’t been for that. Before then he had no respect for her and a lot for you. After that he had no respect for you, but some for her. So you gave something to her, and that’s what saved you. If it hadn’t been for that one moral act you’d be headed down the coast tomorrow with a lifetime of Lila ahead of you.
Phædrus didn’t like it. Judgments of this sort from a branch of his own personality were very confusing — and somewhat ominous. He didn’t want to hear any more of them.
Well, idol, he said, you may be right and you may be wrong but we are coming to the end of the road here.
They had arrived at what looked like the ruins of an old fortress. It looked somewhat the way old ruins in India looked, except those were many centuries old. It looked sort of like a castle but it was concrete and broken in places with thick rusted reinforcing rods emerging from the breaks in the concrete. Part of it looked like the wall of a small amphitheater. Apparently it was the parapet of an old fort. In one area were remains of an overhead trolley system that might have been for hauling military shells. Huge rings were in a wall apparently to take the recoil of a large cannon that was now gone. There was a beautiful leafless tree growing out of the middle of the parapet like an enormous umbrella. It was only about ten feet tall but was much wider than that.
As he walked to the northwest he could see more clearly how the remains of the old concrete structure had broken into fragments, tilted to one side and fallen into the water.
There were square holes in the concrete you could fall through. It looked as though the cracks in the concrete under his feet were ready to break any time. Apparently the breaking up and erosion were being caused by settling and probably by the action of the sea. But he guessed that the real destroyer was not the sea but that great ravager of most military installations, lack of appropriations.
It was sort of wonderful to see this old fort, built to assert man’s domination over the earth, slowly sinking into the Atlantic Ocean. It certainly looked like an auspicious place for the interment of this idol.
He found a gate that led below the concrete to a dark chamber where he could hear water down below gurgling loudly. He entered a door with vertical spiked iron posts and I-beams. It was dark inside like a grotto. The only illumination came from below.
He turned to the right by a pockmarked wall and descended five steps leading down to a small drop-off. He descended the stairs, testing the concrete carefully with his foot, went left, went forward, and then right again, into a dark tunnel. There he saw that the light came through a smashed portion of the concrete under which swept the water of the Atlantic.
There was enough light to show a dark high-water mark of the tide against the wall. He set the idol against the wall in a sitting position facing the entrance to the sea and arranged the shirt around it carefully. Within a few hours the tide should come and lift it out of here.
His mind said to the idol, Well, little friend, you’ve had quite a busy existence.
He stepped back, did a small bow with his hands clasped together in the manner he had once learned in India, and then, feeling that things were right at last, turned and left.
Back to daylight and good old sanity. A few crickets were chirping. He heard a roar in the sky and looked up and saw a Concorde airplane slowly circling to the south then rising and speeding.
Good old technology. All this twentieth-century sanity wasn’t as interesting as the old days of his incarceration but he was getting a lot more accomplished, at a social level at least. Other cultures may talk to idols and animal spirits and fissures in rocks and ghosts of the past but it wasn’t for him. He had other things to do.
He had a feeling of freshness as he walked back to the boat. What a fantastic day this was. How many people are ever lucky enough to clean the slate like this? They’re all stuck with their endless problems.
He stood on a mound of sand beside some juniper bushes and said Ahhhh! He threw out his arms. Free! No idols, no Lila, no Rigel, no New York, no more America even. Just free!
He looked up in the sky and whirled. Ahhh, that felt good! He hadn’t whirled like that for years. Since he was four. He whirled again. The sky, the ocean, the hook, the bay, spun round and round him. He felt like a Whirling Dervish.
He walked back to the boat in a kind of relaxed, nothing-to-do way, thinking of nothing whatsoever. Then he remembered when he had been walking down a dirt road like this one near Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. It was with Dusenberry and John Wooden Leg, the tribe’s chief, and a woman named LaVerne Madigan from the Association of American Indians.
So long ago. So many things had happened. He would have to get back to the Indians someday. That was where he had started from and that was where he had to get back to.
He remembered it had been spring then, which is a wonderful time in Montana, and the breeze blowing down from the pine trees carried a fresh smell of melting snow and thawing earth, and they were all walking down the road, four abreast, when one of those raggedy non-descript dogs that call Indian reservations home came onto the road and walked pleasantly in front of them.
They followed the dog silently for a while.
Then LaVerne asked John, What kind of dog is that?
John thought about it and said, That’s a good dog.
LaVerne looked curiously at him for a moment and then looked down at the road. Then the corners of her eyes crinkled and as they walked on Phædrus noticed she was sort of smiling and chuckling to herself.
Later, when John had left, she asked Dusenberry, What did he mean when he said, "That’s a good dog?" Was that just "Indian talk"?
Dusenberry thought for a while and said he supposed it was. Phædrus didn’t have any answer either, but for some reason he had been as amused and puzzled as LaVerne was.
A few months later she was killed in an airplane crash, and a few years after that Dusenberry was gone too and Phædrus' own hospitalization and recovery had clouded over all memory of that time and he’d forgotten all about it, but now suddenly, out of nowhere, here it was again.
For some time now he’d been thinking that if he were looking for proof that substance is a cultural heritage from Ancient Greece rather than an absolute reality, he should simply look at non-Greek-derived cultures. If the reality of substance was missing from those cultures that would prove he was right.
Now the image of the raggedy Indian dog was back, and he realized what it meant.
LaVerne had been asking the question within an Aristotelian framework. She wanted to know what genetic, substantive pigeonhole of canine classification this object walking before them could be placed in. But John Wooden Leg never understood the question. That’s what made it so funny. He wasn’t joking when he said, That’s a good dog. He probably thought she was worried the dog might bite her. The whole idea of a dog as a member of a hierarchical structure of intellectual categories known generically as objects was outside his traditional cultural viewpoint.
What was significant, Phædrus realized, was that John had distinguished the dog according to its Quality, rather than according to its substance. That indicated he considered Quality more important.
Now Phædrus remembered when he had gone to the reservation after Dusenberry’s death and told them he was a friend of Dusenberry’s they had answered Oh, yes, Dusenberry. He was a good man. They always put their emphasis on the good, just as John had with the dog. A white person would have said he was a good man or balanced the emphasis between the two words. The Indians didn’t see man as an object to whom the adjective good may or may not be applied. When the Indians used it they meant that good is the whole center of experience and that Dusenberry, in his nature, was an embodiment or incarnation of this center of life.
Maybe when Phædrus got this metaphysics all put together people would see that the value-centered reality it described wasn’t just a wild thesis off into some new direction but was a connecting link to a part of themselves which had always been suppressed by cultural norms and which needed opening up. He hoped so.
The experience of William James Sidis had shown that you can’t just tell people about Indians and expect them to listen. They already know about Indians. Their cup of tea is full. The cultural immune system will keep them from hearing anything else. Phædrus hoped this Quality metaphysics was something that would get past the immune system and show that American Indian mysticism is not something alien from American culture. It’s a deep submerged hidden root of it.
Americans don’t have to go to the Orient to learn what this mysticism stuff is about. It’s been right here in America all along. In the Orient they dress it up with rituals and incense and pagodas and chants and, of course, huge organizational enterprises that bring in the equivalent of millions of dollars every year. American Indians haven’t done this. Their way is not to be organized at all. They don’t charge anything, they don’t make a big fuss, and that’s what makes people underrate them.
Phædrus remembered saying to Dusenberry just after that peyote meeting was over, The Hindu understanding is just a low-grade imitation of this! This is how it must have really been before all the clap-trap got started.
And he remembered that Franz Boas had said that in a primitive culture people speak only about actual experiences. They don’t discuss what is virtue, good, evil, beauty; the demands of their daily life, like those of our uneducated classes, don’t extend beyond the virtues shown on definite occasions by definite people, good or evil deeds of their fellow tribesman, and the beauty of a particular man, woman or object. They don’t talk about abstract ideas. But Boas said, The Dakota Indian considers goodness to be a noun rather than an adjective.
That was true, Phædrus thought, and that was very objective. But it was like an explorer noticing that there’s a huge vein of pure yellow metal emerging from the side of a cliff, jotting the fact down in his diary, and then never expanding on the subject because he’s only interested in facts and doesn’t want to get into evaluations or interpretations.
Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phædrus had been looking for. That was the homer, over the fence, that ended the ball game. Good as a noun rather than an adjective is all the Metaphysics of Quality is about. Of course, the ultimate Quality isn’t a noun or an adjective or anything else definable, but if you had to reduce the whole Metaphysics of Quality to a single sentence, that would be it.