Edward Aubyn - A Clue to the Exit

She was arguing, but who was she arguing with? Who were these people in white coats and black overcoats? As she recognized what she was doing, the argument began to fade. The thoughts were all hers. They settled back at their source. Her shoulders sank. She breathed out more slowly. She had retracted her attention from the contents of her thoughts — in this case a make-believe argument with a make-believe audience — and returned it to the subject, the thinker. But she was still observing herself, and thereby observing herself observe herself, in the infinite regress of the witness box. When the fixation on the object of thought had gone, there was still the witness observing its absence. Then there was no observer, just an experiencer. Then there was no experiencer, just experience. At last.

I have to stop writing my novel. I rang Heidi today and she told me that Ton Len will not be coming to see me after all. Someone called Dunan Rimpoche is doing a special healing ceremony, and Heidi has been told by her therapist that she ought to take Ton Len ‘to heal the wound of her absent father’. She’ll be in touch with me soon.

‘When will that be?’ I asked, trying to stay calm.

‘I don’t know. I don’t like to set my plans in concrete.’

‘I’m up to my mouth in concrete,’ I said, ‘and it’s pouring in through every vent.’

‘Oh, God, you’re such a drama queen,’ said Heidi. ‘Anyhow, I’m not going to argue with you. I know how to set my boundaries these days and you can’t make me feel guilty.’

‘Why don’t I come over and see you both tomorrow?’

‘I don’t think that would be very appropriate,’ said Heidi.

Since then I’ve been lying on my bed. Through the warped windowpanes, the torn mosquito net and the half-closed shutters, I can see the corner of a plane tree, the seagulls drifting through a slit of sky, and some shivering bushes on the hillside, shining in the north wind, as if they had been splashed with cold water.

I could say that it is death that frightens me, but that would be too reassuring. It would give the impression that I know what is going on. Every day, it’s true, I wake to the winning image of a revolver fired into my temple. It’s true that my brains splash onto white tiles and my body slides down and slumps at the foot of a wall. I can’t deny that it’s upsetting, but why would my imagination go to so much trouble if suicide wasn’t less upsetting than this limitless white terror, bleaching every object in its universe? I marvel at the optimism of suicide, expecting to bring torment to an end. Not to mention the executive elan, the rush of impatience that comes at the end of a long history of failed delegation — everybody employed to console you has let you down, and so you sigh and load the gun and say, ‘It’s always the same story: if you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself.’

The allure of suicide is to avoid the white terror and the allure of everything else is to avoid suicide. Reactions react to reactions like worms impaling themselves more deeply on the hooks they try to escape. If I refuse to elaborate this feeling, maybe it will fold in on itself. An infinity of unease, given no trade, might shut up shop and turn out to be as small and fleeting as happiness and love and vitality. Why should fear have any more substance than the rest of them, unless I sustain its life with evasion and credulity? Yes, I accept it all, the shame, the cirrhosis, the stupid and unkind things I’ve said, the boredom of this fucking personality which has stopped me doing anything I don’t regret. The unacceptable has finally found its natural dumping ground. Truckloads of hospital waste rain down on me and I wait imperturbably for more. The white terror folds up like a sheet, corner to corner, crease to crease. It can’t stand being recognized for what it is: just another feeling. But what a feeling. I think I’d better go for a walk.

It was late afternoon by the time I set out for my walk. Restless a few moments before, my limbs turned to coffins at the garden gate. If death is the end, terror. If it’s not the end, terror too. Terror if nothing matters. Terror if it all matters absolutely. I haven’t murdered anyone. I haven’t raped anyone. I haven’t stolen, or committed acts of arson. But I have had thoughts, and that’s been more than enough.

I persevered and set off towards the southern coast. Everything was oppressively symbolic. I was chained to a rock having my liver eaten by vultures. If I had gone to the trouble of stealing fire from the gods, it might have seemed worthwhile. How could Heidi cocoon herself in frivolity and pettiness, while those sharp beaks tore at the last shreds of my life? It isn’t achievement that makes our actions immortal, it’s death. Whatever we’ve done when we die lasts for ever. If we’ve failed, we’ve failed for ever. There is so little time to pass on my love to my daughter, and when I die the catastrophe will be incorruptible. A spasm of loathing for Heidi suddenly animated my body and I stormed towards the Gorge du Loup, breathless with fury and panic. No human sounds distracted me from my state of mind, just the wind combing the pines and the sporadic clocking of the pheasants in the wood.

The path forked, both branches leading to the coast. I tried to gild my mood by taking the high road, but it turned out to curve towards the village. I doubled back and took the other path. The cheap symbol of the high road usurped by the cheap symbol of the wrong path. A lifetime of choosing the wrong path, I thought grandly.

I struggled to the clifftop, the sweat drying icily on my chest. The waves boomed in the Gorge du Loup. The wind was solid enough to support my leaning body and loud enough to make my screams inaudible. Although I was shouting, I couldn’t quite make out what I was saying. I realized how little substance any of my feelings had without the loop of listening to myself think and speak. Better to stay on this clifftop having my thoughts ripped from me by a gale.

As the sun bled into the sea, the full moon surged out of the forest, stained red by the dying light. I fell silent, my mood shattered like the waves exploding on the coast below. Soon enough the colour drained from the moon and it turned back into sizzling white rock, making its arching progress over the island.

After this hammer blow of awe, I started to look suspiciously at what had happened. If terror was just another feeling, why was the sense of beauty any different? Wasn’t it a ‘quale’ among ‘qualia’? It was easy to prefer it to terror, but that didn’t make it any more essential. From the point of view of consciousness, the fact that it derived from something out there in the world didn’t alter the situation either. Consciousness was my total present awareness, whatever its content or the origin of its content.

I struggled to find something essential in the beauty itself, to give it some absolute independence. The moon rising opposite the setting sun, their perfect opposition turned into perfect intercourse, the sun and the moon mingling blood, the poignant clash of scales, an effect with a lifespan even shorter than mine, acted out on a celestial plane.

There were rules to these pleasures, I thought irritably, as I pounded down the silvery track to the Calanque de la Bréganconnet, where I intended to hide from the wind and the mesmeric curiosity of the lighthouse beam which had started to sweep the eastern end of the island. Under the wrapping paper of individual occasions there were always the same characteristics to aesthetic success, the stale surprises of conflict and reconciliation, variety and unity, symmetry and asymmetry. This and that were sometimes thrillingly supplemented by The Other. The Other was probably something Jean-Paul should think about. Not a bit of the other, but The Other, the French philosopher’s d’Artagnan, always ready to leap from the rooftops and create a diversion. My thoughts were all over the place; even my own characters weren’t safe.