The Manticore Page 28

  – There's nothing more to be said?

  – Oh, volumes more, but what does all this saying amount to? Boy is dead. What lives is a notion, a fantasy, a whim-wham in your head that you call Father, but which never had anything seriously to do with the man you attached it to.

  – Before I go: who was Eisengrim's mother?

  – I spent decades trying to answer that. But I never fully knew.

  Later: Found out a little more about the super-chess game this eve. Each player plays both black and white. If the player who draws white at the beginning plays white on boards one, three, and five, he must play black on boards two and four. I said to Liesl that this must make the game impossibly complicated, as it is not five games played consecutively, but one game.

  – Not half so complicated as the game we all play for seventy or eighty years. Didn't Jo von Haller show you that you can't play the white pieces on all the boards? Only people who play on one, flat board can do that, and then they are in agonies trying to figure out what black's next move will be. Far better to know what you are doing, and play from both sides.

  Dec. 23, Tues.: Liesl has the ability to an extraordinary extent to worm things out of me. My temperament and professional training make me a man to whom things are told; somehow she makes me into a teller. I ran into her – better be honest, I sought her out – this morning in her workshop, where she sat with a jeweller's magnifying glass in her eye and tinkered with a tiny bit of mechanism, and in five minutes had me caught in a conversation of a kind I don't like but can't resist when Liesl creates it.

  – So you must give Jo a decision about more analysis? What is it to be?

  – I'm torn about it. I'm seriously needed at home. But the work with Dr. von Haller holds out the promise of a kind of satisfaction I've never known before. I suppose I want to have it both ways.

  – Well, why not? Jo has set you on your path; do you need her to take you on a tour of your inner labyrinth? Why not go by yourself?

  – I've never thought of it; I wouldn't know how.

  – Then find out. Finding out is half the value. Jo is very good. I say nothing against her – But these analyses, Davey – they are duets between the analyst and the analysand, and you will never be able to sing louder or higher than your analyst.

  – She has certainly done great things for me in the past year.

  – Undoubtedly. And she never pushed you too far, or frightened you, did she? Jo is like a boiled egg – a wonder, a miracle, very easy to take – but even with a good sprinkling of salt she is invalid food, don't you find?

  – I understand she is one of the best in Zurich.

  – Oh, certainly. Analysis with a great analyst is an adventure in self-exploration. But how many analysts are great? Did I ever tell you I knew Freud slightly? A giant, and it would be apocalyptic to talk to such a giant about oneself. I never met Adler, whom everybody forgets, but he was certainly another giant. I once went to a seminar Jung gave in Zurich, and it was unforgettable. But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature; Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power; and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. All men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?

  – I'm no hero, Liesl.

  – Oh, how modest and rueful that sounds! And you expect me to think, isn't he splendid to accept his limitations so manfully. But I don't think that. All that personal modesty is part of the cop-out personality of our time. You don't know whether or not you are a hero, and you're bloody well determined not to find out, because you're scared of the burden if you are and scared of the certainty if you're not.

  – Just a minute. Dr. von Haller, of whom you think so little, once suggested that I was rather inclined toward heroic measures in dealing with myself.

  – Good for Jo! But she didn't encourage you in it, did she? Ramsay says you are very much the hero in court – voice of the mute, hope of the hopeless, last resort of those society has condemned. But of course that's a public personality. Why do you put yourself on this footing with a lot of riff-raff, by the way?

  – I told Dr. von Haller that I liked living on the lip of a volcano.

  – A good, romantic answer. But do you know the name of the volcano? That's what you have to find out.

  – What are you suggesting? That I go home and take up my practice and Alpha and Castor and see what I can do to wriggle crooks like Matey Quelch off the hooks on which they have been caught? And at night, sit down quietly and try to think my way out of all my problems, and try to make some sort of sense of my life?

  – Think your way out… Davey, what did Jo say was wrong with you? Obviously you have a screw loose somewhere; everybody has. What did she find at the root of most of your trouble?

  – Why should I tell you?

  – Because I've asked, and I truly want to know. I'm not just a gossip or a chatterer, and I like you very much. So tell me.

  – It's nothing dreadful. She just kept coming back to the point that I am rather strongly developed in Thinking, and seem to be a bit weak in Feeling.

  – I guessed that was it.

  – But honestly I don't know what's wrong with thinking. Surely it's what everybody is trying to do?

  – Oh yes; very fine work, thinking. But it is also the greatest bolt-hole and escape hatch of our time. It's supposed to excuse everything… "I think this… I thought that… You haven't really thought about it… Think, for God's sake… The thinking of the meeting (or the committee, or God help us, the symposium) was that…" But so much of this thinking is just mental masturbation, not intended, to beget anything… So you are weak in feeling, eh? I wonder why?

  – Because of Dr. von Haller, I can tell you. In my life feeling has not been very handsomely rewarded. It has hurt like hell.

  – Nothing unusual in that. It always does. But you could try. Do you remember the fairy-tale about the boy who couldn't shudder and was so proud of it? Nobody much likes shuddering, but it's better than existing without it, I can assure you.

  – I seem to have a natural disposition to think rather than feel, and Dr. von Haller has helped me a good deal there. But I am not ambitious to be a great feeler. Wouldn't suit my style of life at all, Liesl.

  – If you don't feel, how are you going to discover whether or not you are a hero?

  – I don't want to be a hero.

  – So? It isn't everybody who is triumphantly the hero of his own romance, and when we meet one he is likely to be a fascinating monster, like my dear Eisengrim. But just because you are not a roaring egotist, you needn't fall for the fashionable modern twaddle of the anti-hero and the mini-soul. That is what we might call the Shadow of democracy; it makes it so laudable, so cosy and right and easy to be a spiritual runt and lean on all the other runts for support and applause in a splendid apotheosis of runtdom. Thinking runts, of course – oh, yes, thinking away as hard as a runt can without getting into danger. But there are heroes, still. The modern hero is the man who conquers in the inner struggle. How do you
know you aren't that kind of hero?

  – You are as uncomfortable company as an old friend of mine who asked for spiritual heroism in another way. "God is here and Christ is now," he would say, and ask you to live as if it were true.

  – It is true. But it's equally true to say "Odin is here and Loki is now." The heroic world is all around us, waiting to be known.

  – But we don't live like that, now.

  – Who says so? A few do. Be the hero of your own epic. If others will not, are you to blame? One of the great follies of our time is this belief in some levelling of destiny, some democracy of Wyrd.

  – And you think I should go it alone?

  – I don't think: I feel that you ought at least to consider the possibility, and not cling to Jo like a sailor clinging to a lifebelt.

  – I wouldn't know how to start.

  – Perhaps if you felt something powerfully enough it would set you on the path.

  – But what?

  – Awe is a very unfashionable, powerful feeling. When did you last feel awe in the presence of anything?

  – God, I can't remember ever feeling what I suppose you mean by awe.

  – Poor Davey! How you have starved! A real little work-house boy, an Oliver Twist of the spirit! Well, you're rather old to begin.

  – Dr. von Haller says not. I can begin the second part of this exploration with her, if I choose. But what is it? Do you know, Liesl?

  – Yes, but it isn't easily explained. It's a thing one experiences – feels, if you like. It's learning to know oneself as fully human. A kind of rebirth.

  – I was told a lot about that in my boyhood days, when I thought I was a Christian. I never understood it.

  – Christians seem to have got it mixed up, somehow. It's certainly not crawling back into your mother's womb; it's more a re-entry and return from the womb of mankind. A fuller comprehension of one's humanity.

  – That doesn't convey much to me.

  – I suppose not. It's not a thinker's thing.

  – Yet you suggest I go it alone?

  – I don't know. I'm not as sure as I was. You might manage it. Perhaps some large experience, or even a good, sharp shock, might put you on the track. Perhaps you are wrong even to listen to me.

  – Then why do you talk so much, and throw out so many dangerous suggestions?

  – It's my metier. You thinkers drive me to shake you up.

  Maddening woman!

  Dec. 24, Wed. and Christmas Eve: Was this the worst day of my life, or the best? Both.

  Liesl insisted this morning that I go on an expedition with her. You will see the mountains at their best, she said; it is too cold for the tourists with their sandwiches, and there is not enough snow for skiers. So we drove for about half an hour, uphill all the way, and at last came to one of those cable-car affairs and swayed and joggled dizzily through the air toward the far-off shoulder of a mountain. When we got out of it at last, I found I was panting.

  – We are about seven thousand feet up now. Does it bother you? You'll soon get used to it. Come on. I want to show you something.

  – Surely the view elsewhere is the same as it is here?

  – Lazy! What I want to show you isn't a view.

  It was a cave; large, extremely cold as soon as we penetrated a few yards out of the range of the sun, but not damp. I couldn't see much of it, and although it is the first cave I have ever visited it convinced me that I don't like caves. But Liesl was enthusiastic, because it is apparently quite famous since somebody, whose name I did not catch, proved conclusively in the nineties that primitive men had lived here. All the sharpened flints, bits of carbon, and other evidence had been removed, but there were a few scratches on the walls which appear to be very significant, though they looked like nothing more than scratches to me.

  – Can't you imagine them, crouching here in the cold as the sun sank, with nothing to warm them but a small fire and a few skins? But enduring, enduring, enduring! They were heroes, Davey.

  – I don't suppose they conceived of anything better. They can't have been much more than animals.

  – They were our ancestors. They were more like us than they were like any animal.

  – Physically, perhaps. But what kind of brains had they? What sort of mind?

  – A herd-mind, probably. But they may have known a few things we have lost on the long journey from the cave to – well, to the law-courts.

  – I don't see any good in romanticizing savages. They knew how to get a wretched living and hang on to life for twenty-five or thirty years. But surely anything human, any sort of culture or civilized feeling or whatever you want to call it, came ages later?

  – No, no; not at all. I can prove it to you now. It's a little bit dangerous, so follow me, and be careful.

  She went to the very back of the cave, which may have been two hundred feet deep, and I was not happy to follow her, because it grew darker at every step, and though she had a big electric torch it seemed feeble in that blackness. But when we had gone as far as seemed possible, she turned to me and said, "This is where it begins to be difficult; so follow me very closely, close enough to touch me at all times, and don't lose your nerve." Then she stepped behind an outcropping of rock which looked like solid cave wall and scrambled up into a hole about four feet above the cave floor.

  I followed, very much alarmed, but too craven to beg off. In the hole, through which it was just possible to move on hands and knees, I crept after the torch, which flickered intermittently because every time Liesl lifted her back she obscured its light. And then, after perhaps a dozen yards of this creeping progress over rough stone, we began what was to me a horrible descent.

  Liesl never spoke or called to me. As the hole grew smaller she dropped to her knees and crawled on her belly, and there was nothing for me but to do the same. I was as frightened as I have ever been in my life, but there was nothing for me to do but follow, because I had no idea of how I could retreat. Nor did I speak to her; her silence kept me quiet. I would have loved to hear her speak, and say something in reply, but all I heard was the shuffling as she crawled and wriggled, and now and then one of her boots kicked against my head. I have heard of people whose sport it is to crawl into these mountain holes, and read about some of them who had stuck and died. I was in terror, but somehow I kept on wriggling forward. I have not wriggled on my belly since I was a child, and it hurt; my shoulders and neck began to ache torturingly, and at every hunch forward my chest, privates, and knees were scraped unpleasantly on the stone floor. Liesl had outfitted me in some winter clothes she had borrowed from one of the workmen at Sorgenfrei, and though they were thick, they were certainly not much protection from the bruises of this sort of work.

  How far we wriggled I had no idea. Later Liesl, who had made the journey several times, said it was just under a quarter of a mile, but to me it might have been ten miles. At last I heard her say; Here we are, and as I crawled out of the hole and stood up – very gingerly because for some reason she did not use her electric torch and the darkness was complete and I had no idea how high the roof might be – there was the flash of a match, and soon a larger flame that came

  from a torch she had lit.

  – This is a pine-torch; I think it the most appropriate light for this place. Electricity is a blasphemy here. The first time I came, which was about three years ago, there were remains of pine torches Still by the entry, so that was how they must have lit this place.

  – Who are you talking about?

  – The people of the caves. Our ancestors. Here, hold this torch while I light another. It takes some time for the torches to give much light. Stand where you are and let it unfold before you.

  I thought she must mean that we had entered one of those caves, of which I have vaguely heard, which are magnificently decorated with primitive paintings. I asked her if that were it, but all she would say was, "Very much earlier than that," and stood with her torch held high.

  Slowly, in the flic
kering light, the cave revealed itself. It was about the size of a modest chapel; I suppose it might have held fifty people; and it was high, for the roof was above the reach of the light from our torches. It was bitter cold but there was no ice on the walls; there must have been lumps of quartz, because they twinkled eerily. Liesl was in a mood that I had never seen in her before; all her irony and amusement were gone and her eyes were wide with awe.

  – I discovered this about three years ago. The outer cave is quite famous, but nobody had noticed the entrance to this one. When I found it I truly believe I was the first person to enter it in – how long would you guess, Davey?

  – I can't possibly say. How can you tell?

  – By what is here. Haven't you noticed it yet?

  – It just seems to be a cave. And brutally cold. Do you suppose somebody used it for something?

  – Those people. The ancestors. Look here.

  She led me toward the farthest wall from where we had entered, and we came to a little enclosure, formed by a barrier made of heaped up stones; in the cave wall, above the barrier, were seven niches, and I could just make out something of bone in each of these little cupboards; old, dark brown bone, which I gradually made out to be skulls of animals.

  – They are bears. The ancestors worshipped bears. Look, in this one bones have been pushed into the eyeholes. And here, you see, the leg-bones have been carefully piled under the chin of the skull.

  – Do you suppose the bears lived in here?

  – No cave-bear could come through the passage. No; they brought the bones here, and the skins, and set up this place of worship. Perhaps someone pulled on the bear skin, and there was a ceremony of killing.

  – That was their culture, was it? Playing bears in here?