Russell Hoban - Turtle Diary

No swimming pools for me. Just a bath that I have to clean Mr Sandor’s pubic hair out of while Miss Neap’s lavender scent marches up and down the walls like a skeleton in armour. The water is not relaxing. Or indeed it may be relaxing, may be totally relaxed but I’m not. I don’t want to be naked with anybody now, especially myself.

Haven’t smoked for three days. Busy night and day not smoking. Already I can climb stairs better but that’s not much of a life. With smoking one has a life while dying. How did the Greeks ever run a whole culture without it? Maybe that’s why there was so much homosexuality. The turtles are no substitute for smoking. I’m tired of playing with pebbles and sucking wine gums. Breathing straight air seems an empty exercise. I may kill somebody if I don’t smoke. Mr Sandor’s life is hanging by a thread if he only knew it.

Shamans in a state of ecstasy fly, travel long distances or think they do, say they do. When 1 was between twelve and thirteen I was lying in bed one night not asleep, not awake, and all at once I was looking down at myself from the ceiling. It wasn’t a dream, I don’t know what it was. I don’t know anything about ecstasy. It happened another time that year too. I was standing by the window looking at myself lying in bed. Twice in my life I’ve been out of myself in that way. I don’t think I’ve been into myself yet. In myself like a prisoner. But not into my self.

Ocean. When I think that word I want to be immersed in it and at the same time contain it all. Great green deeps of ocean. A medium of motion and being. And of course the sharks. Walking on the ground is not comparable to that underwater flying, green water touching every part.

I walk a lot at night now, sit on benches in squares feeling the dark on my face, looking at the street lamps. Most of the other people on the street are young. I don’t want to sit in my room. I don’t want to do anything particularly.

Actually we’re all swimmers, we’ve all come from the ocean. Some of us are trying to find it again.

Eliade says in his book on shamanism:

In the beginning, that is, in mythical times, man lived at peace with the animals and understood their speech. It was not until after a primordial catastrophe, comparable to the ‘Fall’ of Biblical tradition, that man became what he is today — mortal, sexed, obliged to work to feed himself, and at enmity with the animals. While preparing for his ecstasy and during it, the shaman abolishes the present human condition and, for the time being, recovers the situation as it was in the beginning. Friendship with animals, knowledge of their language, transformation into an animal are so many signs that the shaman has re-established the ‘paradisal’ situation lost at the dawn of time.

That’s the crux of it: abolishing the present human condition. Shamans wear bird costumes and they fly. Somehow they experience flying. They’re gone and they come back with answers. Could I abolish the human condition? Could I swim, experience swimming, finding, navigating, fearlessness, unlostness? Could I come back with an answer? The unlostness itself would be the answer, I shouldn’t need to come back.

More and more I feel that I ought not to have forced myself into that man’s turtle thoughts. Perhaps he wasn’t even going to do anything about them, perhaps I’ve precipitated a harmless fantasy into an active crisis. None of us can be sufficiently sensitive. We feel our own pain wonderfully well but seldom attribute agony to others. When we were talking there were moments when his face made me think of the John Clare poem about the badger hunted out of his den by men and dogs and taken to the town and made to fight until he was dead. There’s a line in which he ‘cackles, groans, and dies’. William G. looked as if he might be going to cackle.

I wonder about myself. Why didn’t I simply write a turtle letter to The Times and let it go at that? Certainly I’ve felt like taking some kind of action but I’m not sure I’ll feel that way when the time comes. And now I’ve committed myself with this stranger. I have breached my own privacy as well as his and almost I wish I hadn’t. How on earth are we going to get through all those hours together driving to and from Polperro? I don’t think either speech or silence will be comfortable. I feel terribly uneasy about the whole thing. I haven’t even considered any of the physical problems of getting the turtles into the ocean. I haven’t been practical about it at all.

I’m not committed actually. At any rate I needn’t be. For years now I’ve had only myself and I must be economical with that self. I can simply say that I hadn’t quite understood what we were talking about when he rings me up. Or I can be up to my neck in work which is always true. I’m rather a cheerful person as long as the minutes of my days buzz at home like well-domesticated bees. When I come and go too much I’m afraid that they may fly away to swarm elsewhere. I think there still are people in Norfolk who tell the bees when the owner of the hive has died, even pin a bit of crape to the hive so the bees can mourn. When they’ve done their mourning they get on with making honey. One only owns the hive I suppose, never really the bees. Not like cattle.

Sometimes I think that the biggest difference between men and women is that more men need to seek out some terrible lurking thing in existence and hurl themselves upon it like Ahab with the White Whale. Women know where it lives but they can let it alone. Even in matriarchal societies I doubt that there were ever female Beowulfs. Women lie with gods and demons but they don’t go looking for monsters to fight with. Ariadne gave Theseus a clew but the Minotaur was his business. There are of course many men who walk in safe paths all their lives but they often seem a little apologetic, as if they think themselves not quite honourable. And there are others, quiet men, obscure, ungifted, who yet require satisfaction of some grim thing that ultimately kills them. William G. has found some monster and … What? Almost I think he’s swallowed it. It’s alive and eating inside him, much worse than if it had swallowed him.

There, I’m worrying about him. I’ve breached my privacy badly. There’s not enough of me for that, I have no self to spare. I must keep my bees.

Sometimes I think that this whole thing, this whole business of a world that keeps waking itself up and bothering to go on every day, is necessary only as a manifestation of the intolerable. The intolerable is like H. G. Wells’s invisible man, it has to put on clothes in order to be seen. So it dresses itself up in a world. Possibly it looks in a mirror but my imagination doesn’t go that far.

It’s been at least twenty-five years since I read Crime and Punishment. Now I’m reading it again. I’d forgotten that when Raskolnikov murdered the old lady pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, he also killed her half-sister Lizaveta. Lizaveta was ‘a soft gentle creature, ready to put up with anything, always willing, willing to do anything.’ When she came back to the flat just after Raskolnikov had killed the old woman he had to kill her as well.

Alyona Ivanovna and Lizaveta always do live together, always die together. You try to kill some aspect of the intolerable and you kill the gentle and the good as well. Over and over. And whoever kills some form of the intolerable becomes himself a manifestation of it, to be killed with his good and gentle by someone else. Two by two up the gangway to the ark. But the waters will never recede.

I’m intolerable. It’s got into me, when I feed me I feed it. There’s only one way to kill it.