John Hawkes - Travesty

Who in the very depths of the dry well of his "worthless" soul does not loathe the stage setting that holds him prisoner? Who does not fear the inexplicable fact of his existence? Who does not dread the unimaginable condition of not existing? It is easy enough to say that tomorrow you are going to turn into a rose or a flower. But this optimism of the believer in the natural world is the cruelest ruse of all, a sentimentality worthy of children. Of course I am overstating the situation grossly. But if you cannot find the rift in your selfconfidence or admit to the pale, white roots of your cowardice where it thrives in your own dry well, then you will never ride the dolphin or behave with the tenderness of the true sensualist.

Only a bumpkin would call your cowardly bad- dreamer "silly."

What, cher ami, still arguing? Still unable to put aside self-preservation, the survival instinct, the low- level agitation of the practical mind, the whole pack of useless trumps of the ego? (In the deck that represents the ego all the cards are the same and each one of them is a trump. But these are the liars, the worthless trumps.) But why continue wasting your time and mine by inventing false arguments which I will only refute? Your arguments are hardly gifts to the mind. You are not interested in what they mean. It pains me to see you pulling them out of your sleeve-another argument, another trump-and in each one to hear you shout what you have been shouting the whole night: stop talking, stop the car, set me free. That has been your only refrain, through all I have said. But why can't you listen? Tonight of all nights why can't you give me one moment of genuine response? Without it, as I have said, our expedition is as wasteful as everything else.

Let me repeat: you do not want me to take you seriously but only to heed your shouts in the dark, which is why for the first time in your life you are not only wheezing but wheezing on the very brink of savagery. You are strangling in the ill-concealed savagery of your resistance. But you know my position. It will not change. Surely I must be able to strike that one slight blow that will cause all your oppressive defenses to fall, to disappear, leaving you free indeed to share equally in the responsibility I have assumed, short-lived or not.

As it so happens, this particular argument of yours is just as obvious but perhaps a little more interesting than the rest, and I have long ago faced it studiously. Some men, or so goes this line of reasoning, search with uncanny directness for what they most fear to find. We rush off to die precisely because death's terrible contradiction (it will come, we cannot know what it is; it is totally certain, it is totally uncertain) for some of us fills each future moment, like tears of poison, with an anguish finally so great that only the dreaded experience itself provides relief. We are so consumed by what we wish to avoid that we can no longer avoid it. "Now" becomes better than "later." We run to the ax instead of allowing ourselves to be dragged. And so forth. And as one of the few interesting efforts to make sense of suicide (except for the clinical, to which I do not subscribe) this particular argument of yours has its appeal. We have heard it before, we have listened, it has a good ring. We can imagine the shoe fitting. It is possible, it is exactly the kind of paradoxical behavior that engages all but the bumpkins. And who knows? Perhaps it has cut short the lives of a few bumpkins as well.

But this one is not the lever to pry me from my purpose. My clarity is genuine, not false, while my dread, as you in your pathetic hope imagine it, does not exist. What more can I say? I respect your theory; I respect the fear from which you yourself are suffering (though it oppresses me horribly, horribly); perhaps it would be better for all concerned if. just this once I could find you in the right and could hear the shell cracking, so to speak, and all at once find myself overcome with fear and so pull to the side of the road, thus ending our journey, and in rain and darkness sit sobbing over the wheel. Then I could take Chantal's place back there on the floor and slowly, slowly, you could drive the three of us to Tara. In that case you would take to your bed for two days, Chantal would return to her riding lessons, I would follow your lead to the asylum that effected your famous cure.

So it would go, if you were in the right. But you are not. If I could discover that my clarity is a sham and that I am afraid of death and have devised the entirety of our glassy web because of that same fear of death, I would give myself happily to sobbing over the wheel and spend the rest of my days (after undertaking the cure) in trying to make restitution to you and Chantal. But I can make no such discovery, because there is no such discovery for me to make. Of course I have my qualms. Who would not? But as for this maniacal dread of death that would explain my planning, my determination, my mounting exhilaration as well as my need for a couple of companions, witnesses, supporters to accompany me in the final flash of panic-well, it is unknown to me, your maniacal dread.

But let me be honest. Let me admit that it was precisely the fear of committing a final and irrevocable act that plagued my childhood, my youth, my early manhood, and that drew me with so much conviction and compassion to those grainy, tabloidal, photographic renderings of bodies uniquely fixed, but nonetheless fixed, in their own deaths. And in those years and as a corollary to my preoccupation with the cut string I could not repair, the step I could not retrieve, I was also plagued by what I defined as the fear of no response. It is true. I have nothing to hide. In those days (needless to say I was then no sensualist) I required recognition from girls behind counters, heroes in stone, stray dogs. Let a policeman dip his stick in the wrong direction and I suffered chills in the spine. The frown was my bete noire. If the world did not respond to me totally, immediately, in leaf, street sign, the expression of strangers, then I did not exist-or existed only in the misery of youthful loneliness. But to be recognized in any way was to be given your selfhood on a plate and to be loved, loved, which is what I most demanded. But no more. The heat of those feelings is quite gone. I have long since known what it is to be loved. Now, tonight, I want not relief but purity.

But of course I have just now asked you for "one moment of genuine response." So you see how close you have come to the mark.

I do not know why that figure of speech (the kneeling marksman, the drawn bow, the golden arrow) reminds me so insistently of little Pascal. But so it docs, the great naked hunter calling forth the little child like a voice from the shadows. Perhaps little Pascal was destined to become a larger-than-lifesize hunter, naked (except for the silver bow, the golden arrow) and stalking his invisible victim among the white boulders beneath a vast sky of unchanging blue. At least I always saw the grown man in little Pascal. By the time he died, when he was not yet three years of age, he had already become a child god, an infant Caesar. Yes, he had already attained his true character by the time he died.

It is a pity that you had no children. So much intimacy with Chantal surely precludes your thinking of her as your own child. But perhaps it is time for you and me to share Pascal-since anything is possible, and since nothing matters, and since he only exists among the white boulders. But it is true: Pascal has been dead for so many years that he might as well be your son as well as mine. What's that? You long ago decided against fathering children? But everything considered, how right you were. Now that you mention it, the thought of a child surviving you is out of the question. But of course little Pascal survives nothing at all.