Norman Rush - Mating

First I came up with all the cavils I could think of, the flaws in his assumptions about what would happen postrental. But in fact, underneath, I saw his point. I did come up with one idea he liked: the rule should be that women were always included in any hunting parties and women were to be trained in the use of rifles and incorporated into every facet of what was ostensibly going on. This provision obviously couldn’t stop the particular devolutionary process Nelson was afraid of, but it seemed to me that it might slow it down. I made my case. Do you get it? I asked, when he was taking too long to brighten up.

Gotcha, Buthelezi, he said, a pun on the name Gatsha Buthelezi, and another good omen. He was showing more willingness to be jocular about serious things. Gotcha was another entry in a jeu I had initiated between us when for no reason I had described some position he had taken as Highly Selassie or Fairly Dickinson or that some notion of his was Utter Pradesh. He had been longsuffering at first about this game, but lately he’d been more willing to join in the fun and had introduced inversions, such as Ansermet, Ernest.

But alas, even with good-faith efforts on his part, he resuccumbed to gloom over the rifle question. Again he as much as said Help me with this. Again we sat down together. Before I even had time to try for some new approach, he was saying he thought he knew what it was that he couldn’t overcome.

His problem was, in his words, metaphysical. He was being very confessional. He had a conviction about Tsau that could only be called metaphysical, which was that somehow Tsau would prosper only if it, as a created or guest organism superimposed on a large organism, the desert, an organism that could be hostile, would or could prosper only if it took what it needed from the desert in order to be there, and nothing more. He was the one who described this as tantamount to an idée fixe. I was sympathetic throughout, although a little confused. After all, this was the same man who referred to organized religion as organized superstition. This is superstitious, he said. If rifles came in, the fear was that there would be competitive and unnecessary hunting and killing on behalf of the population that already had enough, the people of Tsau. There was a brief divagation on the Basarwa, pointing out that the only people who had made it in the burning desert for thousands of years were people who always asked forgiveness of the deity of the species they had taken the life of a representative of, and who only and always took as much as and not more than they needed to survive. Very hangdog, he said I have the feeling that I’m right about all this in a baseless way, which I need to expel if I can, and if I should.

He then went on a tack I had difficulty relating to what he’d just presented. There were things about his mother, who was so intuitive. I gathered I was supposed to be the voice of reason on this. There was a story involved that he wanted me to hear.

About his mother: the fact is that he would say she would have to be considered psychic, genuinely, but at a trivial level. As in knowing twenty minutes before guests were going to arrive, when she would begin bustling to prepare, and so on.

I said Totally unexpected guests or expected guests who happened to be late?

Both, he said, both. If they were late, she had started preparing late. She would know. Also she could find lost objects, a useful gift since for his father losing things had been almost a hobby. Nelson said There was a period when the domelight kept coming on in our car when it was locked and parked in our driveway and we knew it had been off the night before. This trivial poltergeist phenomenon drove his father the archempiriocritical materialist crazy, and not because he was worried about the battery being run down. You should have seen it, Nelson said. My father went through a period of damn near paranoia directed at me and my brother. He made sure he had the only keys to the car safely in his possession and went out of his way to see that the car was locked tight every night and that the domelight switch was set at off. The mystery went on sporadically over a period of a few weeks, then stopped. My father eventually associated my mother with this oddness, and it did seem to be true that sometimes the light went on when my mother was in the vicinity of the car, taking out the garbage or putting mail in the mailbox. Then he had the wiring taken apart, without the garage finding anything.

He said She was clairvoyant, but not flamboyantly clairvoyant, so to speak. She seemed to know where you were when you weren’t home, whose house to call, for example, to locate my brother, who was someone who could be anywhere. She was a sort of physical medium, I think, and ironically enough her attitude to her powers was that they were nothing, they were coincidences. She had the traditional Catholic attitude toward the paranormal — it was illicit and probably demonic. And of course to my father the paranormal was all bunk, all charlatanism. His suspicion fell on me because I was learning to do a few card tricks at the time.

He said The coup de grace in all this came near the end of my father’s life, when he had gone abstinent and become very meek toward my mother. His liver was gone, and he was dying. I think he may have been on the point of becoming actually pious, but he managed to die before that could happen. In any case there was nothing he could do for my mother that was too much, including taking her to Europe so that she could inter alia visit shrines and cathedrals she had read and dreamed about her whole life, including Notre Dame, the jewel in the forehead of her idea of Catholic Europe.

They go into Notre Dame and for the hell of it he decides he’ll buy some of those centime votive candles they sell in racks in the back and take them up and light them and add them to the array already burning that you see up at the end of the aisle. My mother buys a handful of candles, and he does too, and they go up. He stands waiting while she places and lights her candles. And then he takes his out and not one of them will light. Not one of the wicks will take the match. He goes back and gets more, a selection from the different zones of the rack, but the result is the same. He takes some back to the hotel and three candles light right up. She was all wonderment and astonishment, I gather. And when my father asked me how I could explain it and I said maybe it’s a reverse poltergeist effect, that is, instead of repressed feeling showing up in spontaneous fires in the curtains and woodwork, which is the standard explanation of the poltergeist phenomenon, maybe you produced a fire suppression effect. He was very unhappy and he wondered what good a college education had done me, because of the bunk I was coming up with.

This account is something I now associate with another remark of Denoon’s, to which at the time I paid no attention, to the effect that when you’re really happy and doing the right thing with your life, including morally — for example not living in evasion — in that situation you should expect to have repeated trivial instances of the odd happening to you. You’ll have correct intuitions. For no reason an obscure or archaic word will come into your mind and in a week you might discover it’s exactly the word you need for a difficult passage in a piece of writing you’re doing. I remember wondering at the time if he meant to be saying that the more rightly you’re living, the more odd things will be peripherally happening to you, so that as you get to actual secular sainthood you’d find matchbooks levitating toward you when you need a light and your weight going down no matter how much Black Forest cake you eat.

I know now that I should have plunged to the root of all that in the man, because I was the right person to do it, believing in nothing as I do unless it is proved to me to my entire satisfaction, and the first thing to be proved is that nobody is lying, nobody lying, nobody wanting to lie, nobody lying — my utopia and good luck to me.