Conrad Aiken - Great Circle

— Of course I do, dammit! I’m trying to. I want to. I stand here, perfectly still, don’t I, except that I rock a little — I stand here before you perfectly still — but inside I’m rushing from one end of the world to the other. Speed. I’m everywhere at once. There and back. Torrents of things rushing with me. All the dead men. All the living women. What stopping place is there — where can I rest for a moment and pick up one bright single detail and begin? I’m afraid, precisely because I can’t stop, because there’s no one thing that I want to hold on to more than anything else. Can I hold on to you? No. The truth is, there’s not a damned thing or person or idea in the world you can trust, not one. You’re alone. You run about falling in love with people, with things, with flowers, with surfaces, with weather, with ids and quods and quids , and what the blazes do you get in return? Nothing: or only a fleeting reflection of your own putrid little face flung back at you crookedly from a broken mirror. Isn’t that it? Have I lost my self-love? Has it been devoured by the totem-animal? I think I’ll be a pansexualist, and become a child again.

— You are one now.

— Of course. To be sure. I’m clinging to my mother’s skirts again. I’m crying at the encroachment of the dark. I hear my father going to bed with my mother, hear them talking together tenderly, and in the horror of night I become once more a crawling little inspectionist. I creep to and fro, whimpering. What are they doing. What are they saying. Why have they hidden. Have I a right to know what they are doing or saying? Is it a real need or an imaginary one? But why do I want to know at all? Is it worth knowing? Or would knowing be any less painful than imagining? How can you decide not to know, or not to imagine? It can’t be done. If you don’t know, you imagine; and once you’ve imagined, you want to know. One of the penalties of consciousness.

— Now you’re getting pretty close to home, aren’t you.

— Oh, am I. You think so. I’m discussing general principles, Bill, general principles. Nothing homelike about it. To be aware is to suffer. One of the cornerstones of existence, you can’t dodge it, you know you can’t. It’s all very well to say to the child, crawling there in the dark, listening and spying, don’t whimper, don’t listen, don’t spy — it’s all very well to say to him you don’t need your mother any longer, she doesn’t belong only to you, nothing belongs only to you — or to say the same thing to him when he’s grown up — but the fact remains he can never get over that suffering. Never. All he can do is translate it into other terms, pretend it’s something else, give it a lot of fool names, or comfort himself with the discovery that every one else is suffering in the same way. The right to suffer in our own way — that’s what we demand, by God. And we won’t be deprived of it. No.

— Who the hell is stopping you?

— Not you, anyway, you damned fool!

— Of course. You’re projecting. You set me up in order to knock me down. I grant you your little necessity to suffer — you’re not unique in that. Go ahead and suffer. Howl your head off. And if it will do you any good, abuse me for appearing to stand in your way. It’s all part of the same picture, isn’t it?

— Yes. You’re right. I’m sorry. I seem to have missed my step somewhere. Tell me what to do, Bill. Hit me with an ax and sober me.

— You’ll sober yourself when you’re ready. Meanwhile go on howling. I’ll lie down if you don’t mind.

— You’re tired.

— Kind of. But it doesn’t matter — go ahead — I’m listening.

— Now you make me feel ashamed, selfish.

— Oh, for God’s sake don’t worry about that. You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you? Or I hope so.

— Of course I would, Bill. Of course I would. We’re interchangeable. But where was I.

— You were suffering, I believe.

— So I was. I was demanding the right to suffer in my own way. In my own terms. And not to have some one come along in a purple airplane, a kind of bloody little deus ex machina of psychology, and tell me that my little suffering — which we’ll call x — wasn’t really x at all but y —as if to call it by another name made it any the less suffering. That’s what makes me sore with you fellows — you seem to think that merely by driving us back from one set of phrases to another, by a series of historical substitutions, you’ve settled everything. Childish, by God. Childish. I say sweetheart to you, and you reply, brightly, mother. I say drawers, and you say diapers. I say whisky, and you say breast. All wrong. All completely wrong. Mere jugglery. Granted that the child’s suffering is the exact equivalent of the man’s — for the sake of argument — you’re left just where you started. You’ve still got on your hands the initial quantum of suffering, unanalyzable, the burden which we pick up in the act of birth and carry until we damned well die. Perhaps you’ll argue that my suffering in the present case, my loss of balance, is excessive, and that to force me to revalue it in terms of my childhood experiences will bring me back to my senses. But will it? I wonder.

— Try it and see, why not. Isn’t it at least useful to observe that it’s all relative? And that it’s all determined? If you’ll take the trouble to know a little about the aetiology of behavior, and of emotions and feelings, then you can’t take yourself so damned seriously. You can laugh at yourself.

— I don’t want to laugh at myself — not yet. I want to indulge in a good primitive yell. Good God, Bill, do you mean to say we aren’t to be allowed to know pain? What’s the good of being conscious, then? Of being a man? Hell’s delight, it’s something, isn’t it, to know what crucifixion is, in a complicated modern form, and to make an outcry about it! If we find ourselves here, on the surface of this little planet, and feel like shaking our fists at God, and cursing Him for giving us the thing we call life, is some paltry little society for the prevention of unkindness to gods going to rush up and say No, no, you can’t do that, you aren’t really suffering at all, and even if you were you have no right to say so, you only misunderstand things, everything is for the best, come along now and see the sunrise? I like to think that this existence here is hell. That’s what, hell . We ourselves are the doomed, and our pitiful little ideals and hopes are precisely our torment.

— Very ingenious. Our little pewter Christ is now ready for the great betrayal.

— Gosh, yes. It’s all arranged. Did I arrange it? Months ago? Did I will it? Zingoids. What depths there are in the hell of human nature. What a theme for a play that would be — think of it, Bill. Myself willing my own betrayal: myself my own Galeoto: sowing the seeds of my own dishonor. Did I do it? How can I prove I didn’t. I see them coming together — watch them approaching each other — encourage them subtly to see more and more of each other — to go to concerts, dances, parties — I stay away myself, get drunk night after night, confess my delinquencies with Molly — seize every occasion to discuss the necessity for complete freedom in such matters, so as to accustom them to the idea — and then when the situation is ripe I go away to New York and leave the coast clear for them, thus providing the final temptation. Clear as a nutshell. It isn’t their fault at all, is it? No. Step up, ladies and gents, and see the man who cuckolded himself. See the man who grew his own horn in a window box, watering it with his tears. But if I did it, why did I do it? What does it mean. Could I prove, psychologically, that I didn’t want to do it? Doubtful. You’re asleep. You aren’t listening. Why should you.