Charles Newman - In Partial Disgrace

Here my memory falters, as it will when the subject is the falling out of fast friends, for friendship is a steady state in which all theories are held in abeyance, and the after-the-fact is never envisioned. For my father, the Professor was the childhood sidekick he never had, and in return he brought out both the adventurer and the keen observer in the Professor, so locked in the mire of family, city, and profession. Father brought him back into the world, and more than once when they were standing in the fields he quoted the great Goethe to him in the vernacular: “Quit squinting at the heavens, man. Stand firm and look around you!”

Father also understood his boon companion enough to know this was a man who would find what he was looking for, despite all odds and contradictions, and their friendship depended on him, their forays appearing wholly spontaneous. The Professor’s fascination with my father was that he could not but admire a man who loved his culture, meager as it was, and pressed it to his breast, extracting from his environment every ounce of reinforcement, like a cellist who practices all day and receives so much feedback that he rarely feels the impulse to perform, and lives easily to one hundred.

Only one thing didn’t quite reach Papa’s rich and benevolent skepticism, and that was in noticing that our region, which had sprung up where a dozen tongues and civilizations had clashed, had been created out of the wind and would disappear into it. Our culture, if one could call it that, was not like a horse, which you could pick up positively with your will and put right down again at the front of the race. He spent his life amazed that the Enlightenment his family had brought to the frontier did not take root anywhere, that in Cannonia rights and obligations never moved together.

While he was fully prepared to be the last of his kind, and I suppose took pleasure from it, the rankling question of the breeder still remained. Without rigid controls nothing gets passed on, yet to break the deadlock of mediocrity required something of a revolution. These questions were uppermost in his banter with the Professor about religion, which was something of a soft spot, as you might expect.

“You’re no Jew, Berganza,” he often giggled, “just a Calvinist with a sense of irony.” Add to that his derision of all things German in the clearest and the most precise Hochdeutsch , his love of tradition and contemptuous dismissal of it in the same breath, as well as his distinctly Protestant contribution to Jewish advice — that there is no such thing as a symbol, that depth is just as illusory as surface, that you can make more money selling advice than following it.

Of course, I took my cues from the dogs, for when danger threatens, dogs run away without apology. I had no theory, I didn’t question motives, I made my shifting alliances as best I could. Consistent in my friendliness and friendlessness, I didn’t differentiate. I went to those who were kindest to me, who fed me. I would form new bonds but I was always looking for a better master, so I tended to like everyone.

Eventually the day came when Father’s savage debates with the Professor became subsumed not by discretion, friendship, or even exhaustion, but by having generated such wild analogies that they might as well have been speaking in tongues — though they showed no embarrassment at Mother’s yawning or my own, or at the fact that people moved away from them in pubs.

On one subject they were agreed, that it is in one’s own class that the traitor conceals himself. The lesser nobility’s natural enemy is the nobility, the wealthy, the state from which they extract their privileges. The peasants’ bane is their own kulaks; the bourgeoisie fears only its own petit bourgeoisie, the gentry, its own bailiff. It is one’s truest self, in other words, the self you have just shed, or the one you aspire to, the soul slightly removed and granted a temporary advantage, who thunders down the pass dressed in party clothes and takes no prisoners. This is the sad story of men who do not make their antecedents clear. And one day while the two of them were riding on the American steam tractor, the Professor straddling the hood and facing Father at the wheel, they agreed that the only interesting philosophical question left was whether it was possible to pass on what one had acquired.

The Professor was obsessed with the fact that human self-consciousness was different from anything else that previously existed, and he admired the dog because his purposiveness was less complicated — he did not spend his days watching himself and doing nothing. Having learned to be actively passive, the dog did not waste time stressing the difference between himself and everything that had gone on before.

Father knew this to be the response of one raised without pets. Against the Professor’s romanticism of the dog and its infelicities, Father had projected his own theory of the mind, based on observation.

“Did you know,” Scipio, the Professor had said proudly one day, prying open Wolf’s jaws, “that there are less bacteria in this lout’s mouth than ours?”

Father did know, but he knew something else as well. He knew it most when the Professor discoursed upon the center of the brain, its hidden problems and purposes, a space in which everything important in the world was essentially left unexplained. He knew it from dogs who had been eviscerated, died on him, or been split open by a bear, and it was this: at the center of the brain lies not a knot of history or chemistry, but an empty cavern, and none the less mysterious for that. In this echoing sinus, laced with veins and covered by the dome of the hippocampus, there exists no idea or thought, only emotional energies which eventually find their way into thought to be filed under “Useless Suffering.” The dog retains two arteries from the nose directly into this cavity, men do not, which is why our first reflex is to deny reality and complicate associations. The female of our species does not use her nose, or rather she uses it differently. Her nose is connected to her ear, while in men it is to the eye, a most savage degradation.

This was the basis of the friendship: the Professor couldn’t understand how Scipio, far more darkly pessimistic than he, could act so cheerfully and not project panic. And my father admired in Berganza the fact that he had developed an intellectual method to make up for his lack of nose, his poor judge of character.

Both may have underestimated me. For the dog gets our admiration because he is sniffing every moment of the day and does not confuse devotion with romance, which is why he is always emergent. His senses are attuned to snuffing out evidence of betrayal, and he transforms his deep cynicism into requests for constant attention. The dog is the only true detective, just as he is the only survivor without guilt. Men never get over the fact that the mind seems superior to the experiences presented to it. This basic misconception arises not because their mind is superior but because their sense apparatus is fooled.

One day after an exhausting ramble they returned to Father’s den for some serious libation, and while Father was pouring single-malt whiskeys, the Professor snuck up behind him and slipped the collar of Dresden rings about his neck.

“Easy, Scipio,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.”

Father didn’t move a muscle.

“You know there are few men whose society I can tolerate with equanimity, Berganza.” Handing a whisky to the Professor, the collar closing only slightly, he proceeded to unlock a vitrine and take an artifact from the glass shelves. “The Oriental snaffle bit,” he announced. “The swivel action allowed the barbarians to outmaneuver the Western centurions, and was the single most important accouterment in their success. Here, try it on.” As he went round behind him, the leash went slack. He slipped the bit between Berganza’s beard and mustache, holding the delicate reins of amaranthine leather above his head. As they wolfed down their Scotches Russian-style, the Professor’s jaw jutted out, and a light appeared in the black eyes as he dropped to all fours.