Conrad Aiken: Great Circle

But where was it all gone, where was all the tumult gone? Into what remote sunset sound, what slow and distant and delicious thunder of crumbling, as of a world lost in entire peacefulness?

He switched on the light in the silent study, and found that the chaos had been once more reduced to order; the empty bottles had been removed; a new fire of white birch logs had been laid neatly in the brown brick fireplace; the cigarette ends were gone from the ashes and the ash stand. A fresh bottle of whisky stood on the brass tray, and on the table was a folded note, over which lay a small key and a pink ticket. Sanders Theater. Of course, the symphony concert tonight. From Bill. And the small bright key. “Andy. Going to Portland for a few days. Use the ticket if you like. Also my car, at the Church Street garage. Why not go off and think it over quietly, if you can — first telling Bertha, please! Not a bad idea. I suggest Duxbury. Were you saying something about a pig when I fell asleep. Bill.”

The crucified pig, of course! He touched his smoothed chin and smiled, recollecting; feeling again the drunken glass in his hand, the precise torrent of eloquence in his mouth, the spate of ideas and images. Had it been absurd. Had it been as logical as it had seemed. Had he been as wonderfully in control of it as he had thought. He went to the window and looked across at the lights in the Widener Library and Boylston Hall, watched the dark figures going and coming through the gate to the Yard, figures in raincoats, figures hurrying in the soft rain. All the Smiths and Joneses of the world, accumulating knowledge, the ransackers of others’ words, the compilers and digesters. Those who knew nothing, and those who knew a little, and those to whom life would painfully teach more. Were they jealous. Did they betray, or had they been betrayed. Were they sex-ridden, was sex a monster for them, a nightmare, was all this busy come-and-go a mere flight, a disguise, a pretense, a raincoat surface which concealed—

Concealed what.

The slow pang, recapitulative, rose in the darkness of his thought, lazily, languidly, as with the perishing last little energy of an exploding rocket, undecided at the last whether it should be propelled further or fall in a broken and slow dishevelment of fire-streaked pain. Bertha. Bertha and Tom. Yes. This deep violation, which was now past, this blood which was now shed and lost. This wound which was now beginning to be a scar. The inevitable, and God-to-be-thanked-for, cicatrix; the acceptance — but was it cowardly or was it merely wisdom — the acceptance of all of life as a scar. The pig, not crucified, perhaps, after all, but merely cicatrized. Circumscribed. But we mustn’t be misunderstood—! Like that unfortunate fellow in the hospital; who said—“ circumcised — that’s what I meant!”

He poured himself a whisky, smiling, measuring the quantity idly by the deepening of the color in the green glass, held it, looking at the picture of Michelangelo, and walked to and fro slowly, before the hearth, as if for the pleasure of repeating, or re-enacting, a lost attitude. Here’s to you, Mike, old boy. The insufferable vanity of the human being, who identifies himself with everything that’s greater than himself! I identified myself with Michelangelo. With Shakespeare. With Melville. I was their grandchild. And why not, after all. I inherit them. They produced me, I couldn’t escape them. They taught me how to suffer. They taught me how to know, how to realize, gave me the words by which I could speak my pain. They gave me the pain by giving me the words. Gave my pain its precise shape, as they gave me their consciousness. As I shall give my pain, my consciousness, to others. Did I say this to Bill.

He drank the whisky at a gulp, shuddered, set down the glass. The warmth in his belly crawled slowly about, like a crimson rambler and he smiled, putting a cool hand against his forehead. It had been a good show, it had been funny; and it was strange, it was disconcerting, to think that an agony could take such a shape — it made one distrust the nature of agony — was it possible, as this suggested, that all sincerities, even the sincerity of agony, were only sincerities of the moment? Only true in the instant? Relative? And for the rest insincere and unreal? Had it all been a fake? And had Bill seen through it? Absurd. In that case, the present calm was just as unreal, just as insincere, just as much an affair of the precise point in the sequence of cause and effect. How do you know your calmness is real, old crab. Do you really dare to think back, to feel back, into the yesterday which has now made itself into today? Are you really calm, or is it a mask which you have put on in your sleep. Have you changed — have you, have you, have you. Shall we look at the face in the mirror again, to see if it is calm. Look at the hand, to see if it shakes. Take the Binet test, to see if you are intelligent. Could you cry, now, although you think you feel like laughing. And how much part in all this has been played by alcohol. At what point in your spirited dramatization of yourself did the drama become drama for the sake of drama, and cease to be even so justifiable as a dramatic “projection” can be? Ah — ah — and is it true — can it possibly be true — that sudden and terrible idea—

He returned to the window, to gaze downward at the dark wetness of Massachusetts Avenue; emphasized, by the arc lights, between the piled snow; and found himself staring at the idea. Could it be true — and if it was, what a relief! what an escape! — that consciousness itself was a kind of dishonesty? A false simplification of animal existence? A voluntary-involuntary distortion, precisely analogous to the falsification that occurs when consciousness, in turn, tries to express itself in speech? As the animate, then, must be a natural distortion of the inanimate. Each step a new kind of dishonesty; a dishonesty inherent in evolution. Each translation involving a shedding, a partial shedding or abandonment, and an invention of a something new which was only disguisedly true to its origins, only obviously true to itself. But in that case, what was truth. Was truth the suffering, or the calm that succeeds the suffering. Or the comprehensive awareness of both, the embracing concept. Was suffering, as it were, merely an unsuccessful attempt at translation, in this progress from one state to another? An inability to feel what one is, to say what one feels, to do what one wills? A failure, simply, to know? A failure of the historical sense?

He lost himself in the succession of half-thoughts, a genial dissipation of ideas, of which he troubled only to feel the weights and vague directions; feeling that he could, had he wished, have followed each divergent and vanishing fin gleam or tail gleam to its psychological or physiological or metaphysical covert; but that to do so would add nothing to what already he deeply and animally and usefully knew. Bores me, the sum. If it was a fake, all that dramatized and projected agony, it was a genuine fake: suffering, even if it is only a transition, is genuine. Speech, even if it must be only incompletely loyal to its subject, incapable of saying all, is genuine. The fluidity of life, as long as it is life, can never have the immobile integrity of the rock from which it came. It will only be honest rock again when it is dead. And in the meantime, if it suffers, if it is aware that it suffers, if it says that it is aware that it suffers, and if it is aware that it cannot say completely why it suffers, or in severance from what, that’s all you can ask of it. In sum — idiot! — it is only unhappy because it is no longer, for the moment, rock.

He put his hand out of the window to feel the soft rain, as if in demonstration of the smaller uses of feeling; the minor advantages of the temporary emancipation from rock; the pleasures of dishonesty, or treason, to which evolution has led us. Item: rock suffering rain. Rock enduring infidelity. Rock conceiving a philosophical synthesis which explains, if it does not actually diminish, the pain involved in being not-rock. And assures the not-rock that it has, in a sense, a kind of reality. Andrew Cather has really suffered, but his suffering has no importance, except to himself, and only to himself insofar as he fails to realize — what? That rock, sundered from rock, does not cry.