Norman Rush - Mating

I thought that by listening to his story of the candles, I’d done all that was expected. But Nelson wanted to know what I thought, seriously.

So I told him I thought probably someone was lying, telling a story. I asked Is it possible this was a folie à deux somehow proceeding from your mother? I have never made a more unpopular suggestion. My idea was to reconstruct exactly and from whom and in what he had gotten the original story, but he was more than resistant.

But who was lying? he said. There has to be a reason for lying!

No there doesn’t, I said, and that’s the problem.

The rifle question then did seem to go away, but whether I had done more than reinforce a certain fatalism he was feeling on the subject, I don’t know. I am exactly the wrong person to discuss the psychic realm socalled with. I have no sympathy. I’d thought, on the basis of everything he’d said up to then, his manifest attitudes to the notional and the church up to then, that we were birds of a feather, but clearly there was an inclusion or residue or cavity of the sublunary in him. I hate the mysterious, because it’s the perfect medium for liars, the place they go to multiply and preen and lie to each other. Liars are the enemy. They transcend class, sex, and nation. They make everything impossible.

The Better Happiness

The question of when you’re living rightly and not in evasion with a capital E, which had emerged proximately to our talk about his mother’s psychiana, began to preoccupy me subliminally because I was feeling very happy, day to day, and I felt Nelson was saying that there was some definable difference between brute happiness, which can occur to anyone anywhere, and this other and better happiness whose reality he had insidiously half convinced me of. The better happiness arises out of a sense of alignment between your powers and the world’s woe, so far as I could tell. Or at least this is a necessary condition for it. I tried to get at this a little by asking if it wasn’t slightly Hegelian. What a mistake. He hated Hegel and told me in detail why. It went deep with Nelson. It even ended with a sort of quiz, he was so anxious that I not in any way mix up his notions with anything related to terrible Hegel.

I was happy. How was Nelson?

One datum I had was that he was having, recently, a recurrent dream he associated with feeling high or very good. I always had to be careful handling his dreams, because I found them so transparent, this good luck dream not excluded. It was a landscape dream. He is at a height above the landscape, either on an overlook or in the air over the main item in it. He’s looking down onto a wooded countryside, a wilderness with a circular lake at the heart of it, the lake featuring a round island at its center, and in the center of the island a circular pond. The unfailing association for this dream was with the good junctures in his life. Could this be anything but a breast analog? I’m sure that’s what it was, because his association for what was going on down on the island and around the pond was, he thought, he surmised, perhaps naked young women lounging or going for a dip. If this scene is anything, it’s a breast inside a moat. The island was described as mounded, not flat. I hinted at my interpretation, but he seemed not to want to go where it was pointing. This is another example of the complexity of his dream constructs: he’s in the Grand Vefour, he’s been seated, but they’ve run out of silverware.

I think what I was experiencing was a period of freedom from basic striving, made even sweeter by small things like feeling freer increasingly to come and go in Nelson’s various realms, such as the glassworks — which since the maiming of his apprentice had been essentially his sanctum sanctorum — and such as certain tenderer areas of his past. There were fewer checkpoints between incidents in the present and interesting nexi back in his personal history. For example, lately he was pleased with himself sexually, especially when it happened that I might have to request him to desist, let me rest. Somehow this led to the evocation of his father as a sort of 1920s armchair sex radical with a locking glass-fronted bookcase containing The Man Who Died, by D. H. Lawrence, about a sex-mad Christ, and Edward Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age, a sort of bible of that milieu, and The Body’s Rapture, by Jules Romains, wherein someone’s penis is referred to as The Lord God of the Flesh, which Nelson found hilarious of course. Naturally he found a way to penetrate this collection. How the sacred reading cache fit with his father’s having chosen for a mate someone so hermetically sealed off from cultural tastes like his was a serious question. It created a bond, was Nelson’s thought, something his father could lacerate himself with equivalent to his mother’s separate and different suffering. Nelson was certain his mother thought sex was strictly for procreation and that any other application was sinful, something to be endlessly atoned for. He was equally sure his father had been unbrokenly faithful throughout their marriage, although I wouldn’t trust an alcoholic to be faithful for a minute. What have they got to lose that they haven’t already lost? We talked about how wonderful it must have been, say circa 1923, to be under the impression that once sex freedom dawned in the world human institutions would relax into utopia.

Another sign of being in equilibrium must be repeated feelings of equanimity about things that would normally bother you. I was enjoying work that was by definition boring, like passing bricks up the hillside as part of a chain of women so that the catchment system could be repaired. Then I even enjoyed some rather grueling forays out into the desert to harvest grapple plant. This was actually one of the sub rosa products of Tsau, and it was another case of being honored by being asked to join the teams, which were made up exclusively of senior — and so presumably more trustworthy — women, and women for the most part without male collaterals of any sort on the scene. Tsau received a huge price for the plant, whose leaves went into a potion supposed to cure impotence. The buyer was a consortium of West German health food stores. The truncate, exoteric name for the teams was Kokotsetsa, the Upholders, but the true, esoteric full name was Upholders of the Far Fallen Down Penises of the Europeans. I only went two or three times on day-trip gathering expeditions; in fact other teams scoured deep into the countryside, overnight and longer. The take for Sekopololo was fairly astounding, which I was delighted to find out because it demystified things and assuaged my drive toward a marxist interpretation of every institution that manages to persist over time, id est where does the money come from? I think marxism should be called cui bonism, from cui bono, which is what it comes down to. That year the harvest was immense. The runs I made were really gleaning exercises, decided on because of the unusual rain, which meant that this late second harvest was a good idea.

I put the climax of this period at my return from one of the grapple plant expeditions, probably the last. It was toward two or three in the afternoon. Nelson was nowhere, no one had seen him, so I sought him in a place I knew he liked, a ledge on the south side of the koppie, high up, overhung with mopane trees, and there he was.

There he was, on a goatskin, prone, furiously reading his Nonesuch Blake, doing something he was always haranguing the world, through harangues to me, to do — that is, stop and read during the prime part of the day, not when you’re at the end of your strength and when reading competes with television and paying your bills. In the good society you would see people reading during the heart of the day: there would be provision for it. Nelson was lying on the goatskin with two pillows under his chest, wearing canvas shorts, no socks or sandals, and a bulky black cowl sweater I didn’t know he owned.