No More Learning

He was quite glad not to see people. People were hard to take. They often had a way of spitting, or of hunching up a shoulder, that made a man feel down in the mouth and ready to drive a fist through their back, like punching a hole in the wall. Moosbrugger did not believe in God, only in what he could figure out for himself. His con- temptuous terms for the eternal truths were: the cop, the bench, the preacher. He knew he could count on no one but himselfto take care of things, and such a man sometimes feels that others are there only to get in his way. He saw what he had seen so often: the inkstands, the green baize, the pencils, the Emperor's portrait on the wall, the way they all sat there around him: a booby trap camouflaged, not with grass and green leaves, just with the feeling: That's how it is. Then remembered things would pop into his head-the way a bush stood at the river bend, the creak of a pump handle, bits of different landscapes all jumbled up, an endless stock of memories of things he hadn't realized he'd noticed at the time. "I bet I could tell them a thing or two," he thought. He was daydreaming like a youngster: a man they had locked up so often he never grew older. "Next time I'll have to take a closer look at it," Moosbrugger thought, "otherwise they'll never understand. " Then he smiled sternly and spoke to the judges about himself, like a father saying about his son: "Just you lock him up, that good-for-nothing, he needs to be taught a lesson. "
Sometimes he felt annoyed, ofcourse, with the prison regulations. Or he was hurting somewhere. But then he could ask to see the prison doctor or the warden, and things fell into place again, like water closing over a dead rat that had fallen in. Not that he thought
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of it quite in these terms, but he kept having the sense almost con- stantly these days, even if he did not have the words for it, that he was like a great shining sheet of water, not to be disturbed by anything.
The words he did have were: hm-hm, uh-uh.
The table was Moosbrugger.
The chair was Moosbrugger.
The barred window and the bolted door were himself.
There was nothing at all crazy or out of the ordinary in what he
meant. It was just that the rubber bands were gone. Behind every thing or creature, when it tries to get really close to another, is a rub- ber band, pulling. Otherwise, things might fmally go right through one another. Every movement is reined in by a rubber b~d that won't let a person do quite what he wants. Now, suddenly, all those rubber bands were gone. Or was it just the feeling of being held in check, as if by rubber bands?
Maybe one just can't cut it so fine? . "For instance, women keep their stockings up with elastic. There it is! " Moosbrugger thought. "They wear garters on their legs like amulets. Under their skirts. Just like the rings they paint around fruit trees to stop the worms from crawling up. " .
But we mention this only in passing. Lest anyone suppose that Moosbrugger felt he had to stay on good terms with everything. It wasn't really like that. It was only that he was both inside and outside.
He was the boss now, and he acted bossy. He was putting things in order before they killed him off. The moment he thought of any- thing, anything . he pleased, it obeyed him like a well-trained dog to whom you say: "Down, boy! " Locked up though he was, he had a tremendous sense of power.
On the dot, his soup was brought. On the dot, he was awakened and taken out for his walk. Everything in his cell was on the mark, strict and immovable. This sometimes seemed incredible to him. He had the strangely topsy-turvy impression that all this order emanated from him, even though he knew that it was being imposed on him.
Other people have this sort of experience when they are stretched out in the summery shade of a hedge, the bees are buzzing, and the sun rides small and hard in the milky sky: the world revolves around them like a mechanical toy. Moosbrugger felt it when he merely looked at the geometric scene presented by his cell.
At such times he noticed that he had a mad craving for good food; he dreamed of it, and by day the outlines of a good plate of roast pork kept rising up before his eyes with an uncanny persistence the mo- ment his mind turned back from other preoccupations. "Two por- tions! " Moosbrugger then ordered. "No, make it three! " He thought this so hard, and heaped up his imaginary plate so greedily, that he instantly felt full to bursting, to the point of nausea; he gorged him- self in his imagination. "Why," he won~ered, wagging his head, "why do I feel so stuffed, so soon after wanting to eat? Between eating and bursting lie all the pleasures of this world! Hell, what a world! There are hundreds of examples to prove how little space it gives you. To take just one, for instance: a woman you don't have is like the moon at night climbing higher and higher, sucking and sucking at your heart; but once you've had her, you feel like trampling on her face with your boots. Why is it like that? " He remembered being asked about it lots of times. One could answer: Women are women and men too, because men chase after them. But it was only one more thing that the people who asked all the questions wouldn't·really un- derstand. So they asked him why he thought that people were in ca- hoots against him. As if even his own body wasn't in cahoots with them! This was quite obvious where women were concerned, of course, but even with men his body understood things better than he did himself. One word leads to another, you know what's what,
you're in each other's pocket all day long, and then, in a flash, you've somehow crossed that narrow borderline where you get along with them without any trouble. But ifhis body had got him into this, it had better get him out of it again! All Moosbrugger could remember was that he'd been vexed or frightened, and his chest with its arms flailing had rushed at them like a big dog on command. That was all Moos- brugger could understand anyway; between getting along and being fed up there's only a thin line, . that's all, and once something gets started it soon gets scary and tight.
Those people who were always using those foreign words and were always sitting in judgment on him would keep throwing this up to him: "But you don't go and kill a man just for that, surely! " Moos- brugger only shrugged. People have been done in for a few pennies, or for nothing at all, when someone happened to feel like it. But he had more self-respect than that, he wasn't one of that kind. In time
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the rebuke registered with him; he found himselfwondering why he felt the world closing in on him, or whatever you might call it, time and again, so that he had to clear a space for himself by force, in order that the blood could drain out of his head again. He thought it over. But wasn't it just the same with thinking too? Whenever he felt in the right mood for doing some thinking, the pleasure of it made him want to smile. Then his thoughts stopped itching under the skull, and suddenly there was just one idea there. It was like the dif- ference between an infant's toddling along and a fine figure of a woman dancing. It was like being under a spell. There's the sound of an accordion being played, a lamp stands on the table, butterflies come inside, out of the summer night-that was how his thoughts came fluttering into the light of the one idea, or else Moosbrugger grabbed them with his big fingers as they came and crushed them, looking for one breathtaking moment like little dragons caught there. A drop of Moosbrugger's blood had fallen into the world. You couldn't see it because it was dark, but he could feel what was going on out there. The tangled mess smoothed itself out. A soundless dance replaced the intolerable buzzing with which the world so often tormented him. Everything that happened was lovely now, just as a homely girl can be lovely when she no longer stands alone but is taken by the hand and whirled around in a dance, her face turned upward to a staircase from which others are looking down at her. It was a strange business. When Moosbrugger opened his eyes and looked at the people who happened to be nearby at such a moment,
when everything was dancing to his tune, as it were, they, too, seemed lovely to him. They were no longer in league against him, they did not form a wall against him, and he realized that it was only the strain of getting the better of him that twisted the look of people and things like some crushing weight. At such times ·Moosbrugger danced for them. He danced with dignity and invisibly, he who never danced with anyone in real life, moved by a music that increasingly turned into self-communion and sleep, the womb of the Mother of God, and finally the peace of God himself, a wondrously incredible state of deathlike release; he danced for days, unseen by anyone, until it was all. outside, all out of him, clinging to things around him like a cobweb stiffened and made useless by the frost.
How could anyone who had never been through all this judge the
rest? Mter those days and weeks when Moosbrugger felt so light he could almost slip out of his skin, there always came those long stretches of imprisonment. The public prisons were nothing by com- parison. Then when he tried to think, everything inside him shriv- eled up, bitter and empty. He hated the workingmen's study centers and the night schools where they tried to tell him how to think-after all, he knew the heady feeling of his thoughts taking off with long strides, as if on stilts! They ~ade him feel as if he had to drag himself through the world on leaden feet, hoping to f'md some place where things might be different again.
Now he thought back to that hope with no more than a pitying smile. He had never managed to find a possible resting point midway between his two extremes. He was fed up. He smiled grandly at on- coming death.
He had, after all, seen quite a bit ofthe world. Bavaria and Austria, all the way to Turkey. Arid a great deal had happened during his life-· time that he had read about in the papers. An eventful time, on the whole. Deep down he was quite proud to have been a part of it all. Thinking it over bit by bit, he had to take it as a troubled and dreary business, but his own track did run right across it; looking back, you could see it clearly, from birth to death. Moosbrugger was far from feeling that he would actually be executed; he was executing himself, with the help of those other people, that was the way he looked at what was coming. It all added up to a whole, of sorts: the highways, the towns,the cops and the birds, the dead and his own death. It wasn't altogether clear to him, and the others understood it even less, though they could talk more glibly about it.
He spat and thought of the sky, which looks like a mousetrap cov- ered in blue. "The kind they make in Slovakia, those round, high mousetraps," he thought.
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88
ON BEING INVOLVED WITH MATTERS OF CONSEQUENCE
It is now high time to consider something previously touched upon in various connections, which might be formulated as: There is noth- ing so hazardous to the mind as its involvement with matters of great consequence.
A man wanders through a forest, climbs· a mountain and sees the world spread out below him, stares at his infant just put into his arms for th{l first time, or enjoys the good fortune ofholding a position in life envied by all. And we ask: What is it like for him? Surely, he thinks, this is all many-layered, deep, important; it's just that he doesn't have the presence of ~ind to take it at its word, so to speak. The marvel that is facing him and outside him, enclosing him like a magnetic casing, drains his mind and leaves it a blank. While his gaze is held fast by a thousand details, he secretly feels as if he had spent all' his ammunition. Outwardly the soul-drenched, sun-drenched, deepened or heightened moment glazes the world with a galvanic silver coating, down to the tiniest leaflets and their capillaries, but here inside, at the world's personal end, a certain lack of inner sub- stance makes itselffelt, in the form ofa big, vacuous, round 0. This condition is the classic symptom of making contact with all that is eternal and great, like dwelling upon the peaks of humanity and na- ture. Those of us who prefer to live with greatness-first and fore- most among whom will be found those great souls for whom little things simply don't exist-find their inward life drawn out of them involuntarily and stretched into an extended superficiality.
The danger ofhaving to do with great things may therefore also be regarded as a law ofthe conservation ofspiritual energy, and it seems to be more or less generally valid. The utterances of socially promi- nent persons of great influence are usually more vacuous than 'our own. Ideas closely involved with particularly estimable subjects usu-
ally look as though it is only their privileged status that saves them from being regarded as not up to snuff. The causes dearest to our hearts-the nation, peace, humanity, character, and similarly sacred objectives-sprout on their backs the cheapest flora of the mind. This would make ours a topsy-turvy world, unless we assume that the more significant the subject, the more inanely it may be discussed, in which case the world is turned right side up again.
This law, however, helpful a5 it was toward our understanding of European culture, is not always clearly in evidence, and in times of transition from one group of great causes to another, the mind th1~t seeks to serve some great cause may even seem subversive, although it is only changing its uniform. A transition of this kind was already noticeable when the people we are speaking of were having their anxieties and triumphs. There were already, for instance--to start with a subject of special concern to Amheim-books enjoying huge sales, though these were not yet the books most respected, even though great respect was reserved only for those books that had im- pressive sales. Footb'an and lawn tennis had already become influen- tial industries, but thertl was still some hesitation at the institutes of advanced technology when it came to setting up professorial chairs for teaching them. All in all, whether it was in fact the late lamented rakehell and admiral Drake who introduced the potato from Amer- ica, heralding the end of recurrent famines throughout Europe, or the less lamented, highly cultivated, and equally pugnacious Admiral Raleigh, or some anonymous Spanish sailors, or even that worthy ras- cal and slave trader Hawkins, it was a long time before it occurred to anyone to consider these men more important, thanks to the potato, than, say, the physicist AI Shirazi, who is known only for his correct
explanation of the rainbow. But with the bourgeois era a revaluation of such achievements began, which in Amheim's time was far ad- vanced and hindered only by some residual old-fashioned preju- dices. The quantity of the effect, and the effect of quantity, as the new, self-evident object of veneration, still struggled against an aging, blind, aristocratic regard for quality, but in the popular imagi- nation this struggle had already spawned fantastic hybrids, quite like the concept of the "great mind" itself, which, in the form we have come to know it in the last generation, is a blend of its significance-
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as-such and its potato-significance, for we lived in expectation of a man who would personify the solitary genius and yet be instantly un- derstandable to all and sundry like a nightingale.
It was hard to tell what to expect along these lines, since the haz- ~dousness of being involved with greatness is usually not perceived until such greatness is halfway past and gone. Nothing is easier than to look down on the flunky who visibly condescends to His Majesty's guests in His Majesty's name, but whether the man who treats Today respectfully in the name ofTomorrow is a flunky or not is usually not known until the day after Tol! lorrow. The hazard of being involved with great things includes the unpleasant certainty that while the things change, the hazard remains the same.
8g
ONE MUST MOVE WITH THE TIMES
Dr. phil. Arnheim had received a scheduled visit from two top execu- tives of his firm and had held a long conference with them; in the morning, all the papers and calculations still lay in disorder in his sitting room, for his secretary to deal with. Amheim had decisions to make before ·his firm's emissaries left by the afternoon train, and he always enjoyed this sort of situation for the pleasurable tension it never failed to arouse. In ten years' time, he reflected, technology will have reached the point when our firm will have its own business planes, and I shall be able to direct my team long distance during a summer vacation in the Himalayas. As he had reached his decisions overnight and had only to go over them and confirm them in the light ofday, he was at"the moment free. He had ordered his breakfast sent up and was relaxing with his first cigar of the day, mulling over last night's gathering at Diotima's, which he had been obliged to leave rather early.
This time, it had been a most entertaining party, with a large num-
her of the guests under thirty, few over thirty-five, almost still bohemians but already beginning to. be famous and noticed in the newspapers: not only native talents but visitors from all· over the world attracted by word that in Kakania a lady who moved in the highest circles was blazing a trail for the spirit to penetrate the world. It was, at times, like finding oneselfin a literary cafe, and Am- heim had to smile at the thought of Diotima looking almost intimi- dated under her own roof; but it had been quite stimulating on ~he whoJe and in any case an extraordinary experiment, he felt. His friend Diotima, disappointed with the fruitless meetings of the very eminent, had made a determined effort to give the Parallel Cam- paign an infusion of the latest trends in thought and had made good use of Amheim's contacts for the purpose. He merely shook his head when he remembered the conversations he had been obliged to lis- ten to, crazy enough, in his opinion, but one must give way to youth, he told himself; to simply reject them puts one in an impossible posi- tion. So he felt as it were seriously amused by the whole thing, which had been a bit much. all at once.
They had said to hell with . . . what was it, now? Oh yes, experi- ence. That personal sensory experience the earthy warmth and im- mediacy ofwhich the Impressionists had apostrophized fifteen years earlier, as though it were some miraculous flower. Flabby and mind- less, was their verdict on Impressionism now. They wanted sensual- ity curbed and a spiritual synthesis.
Now, synthesis probably meant the opposite of skepticism, psy- chology, scientific study, and analysis, all the literary tendencies of their fathers' generation. ·
So far as could be gathered, theirs was not so much a philosophical stance as, rather, the craving. of young bones and muscles to move freely, to leap and dance, unhampered by criticism. When they felt like it they would not hesitat,e to consign synthesis to the devil too, along with analysis and all reflection. Then they maintained that the mind needed the sap ofimmediate experience to make it grow. Usu- ally it was members of some other group who took this position, of course, but sometimes in the heat ofargument it could tum out to be the same people.
What fine slogans they came up with! They called for the intellec- tual temperament. And lightning thought, ready to leap at the
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world's throat! Cosmic man's sharply honed brain! And what else had he heard?
A new human race, restyled on the basis of an American world plan for production by r'nechanized power.
Lyricism allied to the most intense dramatism of life. Technicism-a spirit worthy ofthe machine age.
Bleriot-one of them had cried out-was at that very moment
soaring. over the English Channel at thirty-five miles an houri Ifwe could write this "Thirty-five Mile" poem we would be able to. chuck all the rest of our moth-eaten literature into the garbage!
What was needed was accelei:ationism, the ultimate speeding up of experience based on the biomechanics learned in sports training ll;lld the circus acrobat's precision of movement!
Photogenic rejuvenation, by means offilm . . .
Someone pointed out that a man was a mysterious innerspace, who should be helped to fmd his place in the cosmos by means of the cone, the sphere, the cylinder, and the cube. Whereupon an oppos- ing voice made itself heard, to the effect that the individualistic view of art underlying that statemen~was on its way out and that a future humanity must be given a new sense of habitation by means of com- munal housing and settlements. While an individualistic faction and a socialistic one were forming along these lines, a third one began by voicing the opinion that only religious artists were truly social- minded. At this point a group of New Architects was heard from, claiming leadership on the grounds that religion was at the heart of architecture, besides which it promoted love of one's country and stability, attachment to the soil. The religious facti<:>n, reinforced by the geometric one, averred that art was not a peripheral but a central concern, a fulfillment of cosmic laws; but as the discussion went on, the religionists lost the cubists to the architects, whom they joined in insisting that man's . relation to the cosmos was, after all, best ex- pressed through spatial forms that gave validity and character to the individual element. The statement was made that one had to project oneself deep into the human soul and give it a fixed three-dimen- sional form. Then an angry voice dramatically asked all and sundry what they really thought: What was more important, ten thousand starvinghuman beings or a work ofart? Since almost all ofthem were artists of one kind or another, they did in fact believe that art alone
could heal the soul of man; they had merely been unable to agree on the nature of this healing process, or on what claims for it should be put to the farallel Campaign. But now the original social group came to the fore again, led by fresh voices: 'the question whether a work of art was more important than the misery of ten thousand people raised the question whether ten thousand works ofart could make up for the misery of a single human being. Some rather robust artists proposed that artists should take themselves les's seriously, become less nar-cissistic. Let the artist go hungry and develop some social concern! they demanded. Life was the greatest and the only work of art, someone said.
A voice boomed out that it was not art but hunger that brought people together! A mediating voice reminded everyone that the best antidote to the overestimation of the self in art was a thorough grounding in craftsmanship. After this offer of a compro- mise, someone made use of the pause, born of fatigne and mutual revulsion, to ask serenely whether anyone present really supposed that anything at all could be done before the contact between man and space had even been defined? This became the signal for tech- nologists, accelerationists, and the rest to take the floor again, and the debate flowed on, this way and that, for a good while longer. Eventually an accord was struck, however, because everyone wanted to go home, but not without reaching some kind of conclusion, so they all fell in with a statement to the general effect that while the present time was full of expectation, impatient, wayward,. and miser- able, the messiah for whom it was hoping and. waiting was ·not yet in sight.
Amheim reflected for a moment.
He had been the center of a circle throughout all this; whenever those on the outer fringe who could not hear or make themselves heard slipped away, others immediately took their place; he had clearly become the center of this gathering too, even when this was not always apparent during the somewhat unmannerly debate. After all; he had for a long time been well up on the subjects discussed. He knew all about the cube and its applications; he had built garden housing for his employees; he knew machines, what made them work, their tempo; he spoke effectively on gaining insight into the self; he had money invested in the burgeoning film industry. Recon- structing the drift of the discussion, he realized besides that it had by
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no means gone as smoothly as his memory had represented it. Such discussions move in odd ways, as though the contending parties had been assembled blindfolded in a polyhedron, each armed with a stick and ordered to go straight ahead. A confused and wearisome spec- tacle devoid of logic. But isn't this an image of the way things gener- ally go in life? Here, too, control is gained not by the restraints and dictates of logic, which at most function like a police force, but only by the untamed dynamic forces of the mind. Such were Arnheim's reflections as he remembered the attention that had been paid to him, and he decided that the new style in thinking could be likened to the process of free association, when the conscious mind relaxed its controls, all undeniably very stimulating.
He made an exception and lit a second cigar, though he did not normally give in to such sensual self-indulgence. And even·as he was still holding up the match and needed to contract his facial muscles to suck in the first smoke, he could not help smiling as he thought of the little General, who had started a conversation with him at the party the night before. Since the Arnheims owned a cannon and armor-plate works and were prepared to tum out vast quantities of munitions, if it came to that, Arnheim was ready to listen when the slightly funny but likable General (who sounded quite different from a Prussian general, far more unbuttoned in his speech but also, one might say, more expressive of an ancient culture-though, one would have to say, a declining culture) turned to him confidentially and-with such a sigh, downright philosophicl-commented on the discussion going on around therp, which at least in part, one had to admit, was radically pacifist in tone. ,
The General, as the only military officer present, obviously felt a little out ofplace and bemoaned the fickleness ofpublic opinion, be- cause some comments on the sanctity of liuman life had just met with general approbation.
"I don't understand these people," were the words with which he turned to Arnheim, seeking enlightenment fro~ a man of interna- tionally recognized intellect. "I simply don't see why these new men in all their ignorance keep talking about generals drenched in blood! I think I understand quite well the older men who usually come here, even though they're rather unmilitary in their outlook as well. When, for instance, that famous poet-what's his name? -that tall
older gentleman with the paunch, who's supposed to have written those verses about the Greek gods, the stars, and our timeless emo- tions: our hostess told me he's a real poet in an age that turns out nothing but intellectuals . . . well, as I was saying, I haven't read any of his works, but I'm sure I'd understand him, if it's true that he's noted mainly for not wasting his time on petty stuff, because that's what we in the army call a strategist. A sergeant-if I may resort to such a humble example-must of course concern himself with the welfare of every single man in his company; the strategist, on the other hand, deals with at least a thousand men at a time and must be prepared to sacrifice ten such units at once if a higher purpose de- mands it. I see no logic in calling this sort of thing a blood-drenched general in one case and a sense oftimeless values in the other! I wish you'd help me understand this if you can. "
Amheim's peculiar position in this city and its society had stung him into a certain, otherwise carefully watched, impulse to mockery. He knew whom the little military gentleman meant, though he did not let on; besides, it didn't matter, since he himself could have men- tioned several other·varieties ofsuch eminences who had unmistaka- bly made a poor showing this evening.
Glumly thinking it over, Amheim held back the smoke of his cigar between parted lips. His own situation in this circle had also been none too easy. Despite all his prominence, he had overheard quite. a number of nasty remarks that could have been aimed at him person- ally, and what they condemned was often nothing less than what he had loved in his youth, just as these young inen now cherished the pet ideas of their own generation. It was a strange feeling, almost spooky, to find himself revered by young men who, almost in the same breath, savagely ridiculed a past in which he had a secret share of his own; it gave him a sense of his own elaSticity, adaptability, and enterprising spirit-almost, one might say, the reckless daring of a well-hidden bad conscience. He swiftly pondered what it was that differentiated him from this younger generation. These young men were at odds with one another on every single point at issue; all they unambiguously had in common was their joint assault on objectivity, intellectual responsibility, and the balanced personality.
There was one thing in particular that'enabled Amheim to take a kind of spiteful joy in this situation. The overestimation of certain of
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his contemporaries, in whom the personal element was especially conspicuous, had always irked him. To name names, even in his thoughts, was a self-indulgence that so distinguished an opponent as himselfwould never permit, ofcourse, but he knew exactlywhom he meant. "A sober and modest young fellow, lusting for illustrious de- lights," to quote Heine, whom Arnheim secretly cherished, and whom he recruited for the occasion. "One is bound to extol his aims and his dedication to his craft as a poet . . . his bitter toil, the inde- scribable doggedness, the grim exertions with which he shapes his verses. . . . The muses do not smile upon him, but he holds the genius of the language in his hand . . . the terrifying discipline to which he must subject himself, he calls a great deed in words. " Arnheim had an excellent memory and could recite pages by heart. He let his thoughts wander. He marveled at Heine, who, in attacking a man of his own time, had anticipated phenomena that had only now come fully into their own, and it inspired him to emulate this achievement as he now turned his thoughts to the second representative of the great German idealistic outlook, the General's poet. This was now, after the lean, the fat intellectual kine. This poet's portentous ideal- ism corresponded to those big deep brass instruments in the orches- tra that resemble upended locomotive boilers and produce an unwieldy grunting and rumbling. With a single note they muffle a thousand possibilities. They huff and puff out huge bales of timeless emotions. Anyone capable of trumpeting poetry on such a scale- Arnheim thought, not without bitterness-is nowadays rated by us as a poet, as compared with a mere literary man. Then why not rate him as a general as well? Such people after all live on the best of terms with death and constantly need several thousand dead to make them enjoy their brief moment of life with dignity.
But just then someone had made the point that even the General's dog, howling at the moon some rose-scented night, might if chal- lenged defend himself by saying: "So what, it's the moon, isn't it? I am expressing the timeless emotions of my race! " quite like one of those gentlemen so famous for doing the very same. The dog might even add that his emotion was unquestionably a powerful experi- ence, his expression richly moving, and yet so simple that his public could understand him perfectly, and as for his ideas playing second fiddle to his feelings, that was entirely in keeping with pre-
vailing standards and had never yet been regarded as a drawback in literature.
Arnheim, discomfited by this echoing of his thoughts, again held back the cigar smoke between lips that for a moment remained half open, as a token barrier between himself and his surroundings. He had praised some of these especially pure poets on every occasion, because it was the thing to do, and had sometimes even supported them with cash, though in fact, as he now realized, he could not stand them and their inflated verses. "These heraldic figures who can't even support themselves," he thought, "really belong in a game pre- serve, together with the last of the bison and eagles. " And since, as this evening had proved, it was not in keeping with the times to sup- port them, Arnheim's reflections ended not without some profit for himself.
go
DETHRONING THE IDEOCRACY
It probably makes sense that times dominated by the spirit of the marketplace see as their true counterpart those poets who have noth- ing at all to do with their time, who do not besmirch themselves with the topical concerns of their daybut supply only pure poetry, as it were, addressing their faithful in obsolete idioms on·great subjects, as though they were just passing through on earth, coming from eter- nity, where they live, like the man who went to America three years ago and is already speaking broken German on his first visit home. This is much the same as compensating for a big hole by setting a hollow dome on top of it, and since the higher hollowness only en- larges the ordinary one below, nothing is more natural, after all, than that such a period fostering the cult of personality should be followed by one that turns its back on all this fuss over responsibility and greatness.
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Arnheim tried ca~tiously,experimentally, and with the cozy sense of being personally insured against damage, to feel his way into this conjectured future development. This was certainly no minor under- taking. He had to take into account everything he had seen in recent years in America and Europe: the new dance fanatics, whether they were jazzing up Beethoven or transposing the new sensualism into fresh rhythms; the new painters, who tried to express a maximum of meaning by a minimum oflines and colors; the art of the fllm, where a gesture universally understood, presented with. a new little twist, took the world by storm; and finally he thought of the common man, who already, as a great believer in sports, was kicking like a furious baby in his efforts to take possession of Nature's bosom. What is so striking about all this is a certain tendency to allegory, if this is under- stood as an intellectual device to make everything mean more than it has any honest claim to mean. Just as the world ofthe Baroque saw in a helmet and a pair of crossed swords all the Greek gods and their myths, and it was not Count Harry who kissed Lady Harriet but a god of war kissing the goddess of chastity, so today, when Harry and Harriet are smooching, they are experiencing the temper of our times, or something out ofour array of ten dozen contemporary myths, which of course no longer depict an Olympus floating above formal gardens but present the entire modem hodgepodge itself. On screen and on stage, on the dance floor and at concerts, in cars, on planes, on the water and in the sun, at the tailor's and in the business office, there is constantly in the making an immense new surface consisting ofim- and expressions, ofgestures, role-playing, and expe- riences. All these goings-on, each with its distinct outward forms, in the aggregate suggest a body in lively circular motion, with every- thing inside it thrusting out toward the surface, where it enters into combination with all the rest, while the interior goes on seething and heaving with amorphous life. Had Amheim been able to see only a few years into the future, he would have seen that 1,920 years of Christian morality, millions of dead men in the wake of a shattering war, and a whole German forest of poetry rustling in homage to the modesty ofWoman could not hold back the day when women's skirts and hair began to grow shorter and the young girls of Europe slipped off eons of taboos to emerge for a whUe naked, like peeled bananas. He would have seen other changes as well, which he would hardly
have believed possible, nor does it matter which of those would last and which would disappear, if we consider what vast and probably wasted efforts would have been needed to effect such revolutions in the way people lived by the slow, responsible, evolutionary road trav- eled by philosophers, painters, and poets, instead of tailors, fashion, and chance; it enables us to judge just how much creative energy is generated by the surface of things, compared with the barren conceit of the brain.
Such is the dethronement of ideocracy, of the brain, the displace- ment of the mind to the periphery: the ultimate problem, Amheim thought. This has always been life's way with man, of course, restruc- turing humankind from the surface inward; the only difference is that people used to feel that they in tum should contribute some- thing from their inside to their outside. Even the General's dog, which Arnheim now kindly remembered, would never have under- stood any other line of development, for this loyal friend of man's character had still been formed by the stable, docile man of the pre- vious centuxy, in that man's image; but its cousin the prairie wolf, or the prairie rooster, would have understood readily enough. When that wild fowl, dancing for hours on end, plumes itself and claws the ground, there is probably more soul generated than by a scholar link- ing one thought to another at his desk. For in the last analysis, all thoughts come out of the joints, muscles, glands, eyes, and ears, and from the shadowy general impressions that the bag of skin to which they belong has of itself as a whole. Bygone centuries were probably sadly mistaken in attaching too much importance to reason and intel-
ligence, convictions, concepts, and character; like regarding the rec- ord office and the archives as the most important part of a government department because they are housed at headquarters, although they are only subordinate functions taking orders from else- where.
All at once, Arnheim-stimulated perhaps by a certain dissolving of tensions under the influence of love--found his way to the re- deeming idea that would put all these complications in perspective; it was somehow pleasantly associated with the concept of increased turnover. An increased turnover of ideas and experiences was unde- niably characteristic of the new era, if only as the natural conse- quence of bypassing the time-consuming process of intellectual
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assimilation. He pictured the brain of the age replaced by the mech- anism of supply and demand, the painstaking thinker replaced, as the regulating factor, by the businessman, and he could not help enjoy- ing the moving vision of a vast production of experiences freely min- gling and parting, a sort of pudding with a nervous life of its own, quivering all over with sensations; or a huge tom-tom booming with immense resonance at even the lightest tap. The fact that these im- ages did not quite jell, as it were, was already owing to the state of reverie they had induced in Arnheim, who felt that it was just such a life that could be compared with a dream in which nne finds oneself simultaneously outsidt::, witnessing the strangest events, and quietly inside, at the very center of things, one's ego rarefied, a vacuum through which all the feelings glow like blue neon tubes. It is life that does the thinking all around us, forming with playful ease the con- nections our reason can only laboriously patch together piecemeal, and never to such kaleidoscopic effect. So it was that Arnheim mused as a man of business, while at the same time electrified to the twenty tips of his fingers and toes by his sense of the free-flowing psycho- physical traffic of the dawning age. It seemed to him far from impos- sible that a great, superrational collectivity was coming to birth and that, abandoning an outworn individualism, we were on our way
back, with all the superiority and ingenuity of the white race, to a Paradise Reformed, . bringing a modem program, a rich variety of choices, to the rural backwardness of the Garden of Eden.
There was only one fly in the ointment. Just as in dreams we are able to inject an inexplicable feeling that cuts through the whole per- sonality into some happening or other, we are able to do this while awake-but only at the age of fifteen or sixteen, while still in school. Even at that age, as we all know, we live through great storms offeel- ing, fierce urgencies, and all kinds ofvague experiences; our feelings are powerfully alive but not yet well defined; love and anger, joy and scorn, all the general moral sentiments, in short, go jolting through us like electric impulses, now engulfing the whole world, then again shriveling into nothing; sadness, tenderness, nobility, and generosity of spirit form the vaulting empty skies above us. And then what hap- pens? From outside us, out of the ordered world around us, there appears a ready-made form-a word, averse, a demonic laugh, aNa- poleon, Caesar, Christ, or perhaps only a tear shed at a father's
grave-and the "work" springs into being like a bolt of lightning. This sophomore's "work" is, as we too easily overlook, line for line the complete expression of what he is feeling, the most precise match of intention and execution, and the perfect blending of a young man's experience with the life of the great Napoleon. It seems, however, that the movement from the great to the small is somehow not reversible. We experience it in dreams as well as in our youth: we have just given a great speech, with the last words still ring- ing in our ears as we awaken, when, unfortunately, they do not sound quite as marvelous as we thought they were. At this point we do not see ourselfas quite the weightlessly shimmering phenomenon ofthat dancing prairie cock, but realize instead that we have merely been howling with much emotion at the moon, like the General's much- cited fox terrie. r. ·
So there was something not quite in order here, Amheim thought, arousing himselffrom his trance-but in any case, a man must move with the times, he added, now fully alert; for what, after all, should come more naturally to him than to apply this tried-and-true princi- ple of production to the fabrication of life as well?
91
SPECULA TIONS ON THE INTELLECTUAL BULL AND BEAR MARKET
The gatherings at the Tuzzis now resumed their regular and crowded course.
At a meeting of the Council, Section Chief Tuzzi turned to the "cousin," saying: "Do you realize that all this has been,done before? " With a glance, he indicated the seething human contents of the
home of which he was currently dispossessed.
"In the early days of Christianity, the centuries around the birth of
Christ. In that Christian-Levantine-Hellenistic-Judaic melting pot
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where innumerable sects crystallized. " He launched on a list: "Ada- mites, Cainites, Ebionites, Collyridians, Archontians, Euchites, Oph- ites . . . "With a funny, hasty deliberateness of tempo that comes of slowing the pace in order to conceal one~s fluency on a subject, he recited a long series of pre- and early-Christian sect names, as if he were hying to give his wife's cousin to understand that he knew more about what was going on in his house than, for reasons ofhis own, he usually cared to show.
He then went on to specify that one of the sects named opposed marriage because of the high value it placed on chastity, while an- other, also prizing chastity above all, had a funny way ofattaining this aim by means of ritual debauchery. One sect practiced self-mutila- tion because they regarded female flesh ~ an invention ofthe Devil, while another made its men and women attend services stark naked. There were those who, brooding on their . creed and coming to the conclusion that the Serpent who had seduced· Eve was a divine per- son, went in for sodomy, while others tolerated no virgins among their flock because their studies proved that the Mother of God had borne other children besides Jesus, so that virginity was a dangerous heresy. Some were always doing the opposite of what'others were doing, for more or less the same reasons and on the same principles.
Tuzzi. delivered himself of all this with the gravity appropriate to a historical disquisition, however peculiar the facts, yet with an under- tone of what were then called smoking-room stories, They were standing close to the wall; the Section Chief threw his cigarette stub into an ashtray with a grim little smile, still absentmindedly eyeing the throng of guests, as though he had meant to say only enough to last the time it takes to finish a cigarette, and ended with: "It seems to me that the differences ofopinion and points ofview in those days show a state of affairs not too dissimilar to the controversies among our intellectuals today. They'll be gone with the wind tomorrow. If various historical circumstances had not given rise at the right mo- ment to an ecclesiastical bureaucracy with the necessary political powers, hardly a trace ofthe Christian faith would be left today. . . . "
Ulrich agreed. "Properly paid officials in charge of the faith can be trusted to uphold the regulations with the necessary firmness. In general I feel that we never do justice to the value of our vulgar qualities; if they were not so dependable, no history would be made
at all, because our purely intellectual efforts are incurably controver- sial and shift with every breeze. "
The Section Chief glanced up at him mistrustfully and then imme- diately shifted his gaze away again. That sort of comment was too unbuttoned for his taste. He nevertheless acted in a noticeably friendly and congenial fashion, even on such short acquaintance, to- ward this cousin of his wife's. He came and went and had the air, amid all that was going on in his house, of living in some other, closed world, the loftier significance ofwhich he kept hidden from all eyes; yet there were always times when he could hold out no longer and had to reveal himself to somebody, if only indistinctly, for an instant, and then it was always this cousin with whom he struck up a conver- sation. It was the natural human consequence of feeling neglected by his wife, despite her occasional fits of tenderness for him. At such times Diotima kissed him like a little girl, a girl of perhaps fourteen, who out of heaven knows what affectation suddenly smothers an even littler boy with kisses. Tuzzi's upper lip, under its curled mus- tache, would then instinctively draw back in embarrassment. The new c01iditions in his household got him and his wife into impossible situations. He had certainly not forgotten Diotima's complaint about his snoring, and had also, meanwhile, read the works of Arnheim and was prepared to discuss them with her; they contained some things he could accept, a great deal that struck him as all wrong, and a cer- tain amount he did not understand, though serene in the assumption that this was the author's. problem rather than his own. But he had always been accustomed in such matters simply to state the authori- tative opinion of a man experienced in these things, and. the present likelihood ofDiotima's contradicting him every time, ofhaving to de- bate with her points he considered to be beneath him, struck him as so unfair a change in his private life that he could not bring himselfto have it out with her; he even caught himself in vague fantasies of having it out in a duel with Arnheim instead.
Tuzzi suddenly narrowed his beautiful brown eyes in irritation and told himself that he must keep a sharper watch on his moods. The cousin beside him-not at all the sort of man Tuzzi would normally want to become too closely involved with-only reminded him of his wife through an association ofideas that hardly had any real content, the mere fact of their being blood relatives. He had also noticed for
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some time that Arnheim seemed, rather cautiously, to be·favoring this young man, who for his own part did not conceal his marked antipathy to Arnheim: two obselVations that did not really amount to much, yet were enough to make Tuzzi aware of his own inexplicable liking for Ulrich. He opened his eyes again. and stared briefly like an owl across the room, without really looking at anything.
His wife's cousin, incidentally, was staring straight ahead just as Tuzzi was, bored but at ease with him, and had not even noticed the pause in their exchange. Tuzzi felt obliged to say something, like a man who fears that his silence might give away his inwardly troubled condition.
"You like to take a cynical view," he said with a smile, as if Ulrich's remark about the bureaucratic administration of religious faith had only just been allowed to come to his attention, "and I daresay my wife is not unjustified in fearing to count on your support, despite her sympathies for you as a ~ousin. If I may say so, your views on your fellowmen tend to be on the bearish side. "
"What an excellent term for it! " UlriGh said, clearly please~. "Even though I'm afraid I don't quite live up to it. It's really history that has always taken a bearish or a bullish line with all mankind-bearish when it is using trickery or violence, and bullish more or less in your wife's manner, by trying to have faith in the power of ideas. Dr. Arn- h~im, too, ifyou can believe what he says, is a bull. While you, as a professional bear amid this choir of angels, must have feelings I would be interested to hear about. "
He regarded the Section Chief with a sympathetic expression. Tuzzi drew his cigarette case from his pocket and shrugged his shoul- ders. 'What makes you think that my outlook must be different from that of my wife? " he countered. He had meant to discourage the per- sonal turn the conversation had taken, but his retort had only rein- forced it. Luckily, Ulrich had not noticed this, and went on: 'We're made of stuff that takes on the shape of every mold it gets into, one way or another. "
"That's over my head," Tuzzi replied evasively.
Ulrich was glad to hear it. Tuzzi's way was the opposite of his own, and he took real pleasure in talking With a man who refused to be goaded into an intellectual discussion and had no other defense, or would use no other, than to interpose his whole person as a shield.
His original dislike of Tuzzi had long since reversed itself under the pressure of his far greater dislike of the doings under Tuzzi. 's roof; he simply couldn't understand why Tuzzi put up with it, and could only try to guess. He was getting to know him only very slowly, as one keeps an animal under observation, outwardly, without the ease of insight their words give us into people, who talk because they are clearly impelled to. What appealed to him at first was the dessicated look ofthe man, who was ofjust middle height, and the dark, intense eye, betraying much uneasy feeling, not at all the eye of a bureaucrat, t nor did it seem to fit in with Tuzzi's present personality as revealed in conversation; unless one assumed something not altogether unusual, that it was a boy's eye peering out from among the man's features, like a window opening out of an unused, locked-up, and long-forgot- ten part of the interior. The next thing Ulrich had noticed was Tuzzi's body odor, something of china or dry wooden boxes or a mix of sun, sea, exotic landscapes, an obdurate hardness and a discreet whiff of the barbershop. This odor gave Ulrich pause; he had come across only two people with a distinct personal odor; the other onl:l was Moosbrugger. When he called to mind Tuzzi. 's sharp yet subtle smell and also thought of Diotima, whose ample surface ~manated a fine powdery scent that did not seem to mask anything, it came to contrasting kinds of passion that seemed to have nothing to do with the actual life this rather incongruous couple shared. Ulrich now had to make an effort to call his thoughts to order before he could re- spond to Tuzzi's cool disclaimer.
"It's presumptuous of me," he resumed, in that faintly bored but resolute tone in which one apologizes for having to be a bore in one's tum, because· the situation leaves one no alternative, "it certainly is presumptuous of me to offer you my definition of diplomacy, but I do it in the hope that you will straighten me out. Let me put it this way: diplomacy assumes that a dependable social order can be achieved only by mendacity, cowardice, cannibalism, in short, the predictable baseness of human nature. It is based on a bearish ideal- ism, to resort once more to your admirable expression. This is sad in a fascinating way, because it goes with the assumption that our higher faculties are so ambiguous in nature that they can lead us equally well to cannibalism as to the Critique o f Pure Reason. "
"It really is too bad," the Section Chief protested, "that you have
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so romantic a view of diplomacy and, like so many others, you con- fuse politics With intrigue. There may have been something in what you say when diplomacy was still being conducted by highborn dilet- tantes, but it no longer applies in an age of responsible social leader- ship. We are not sad, we are optimistic. We must have faith in the future, or we could not live with our conscience, which is no differ- ent from everyone else's. If you must talk of cannibalism, then all I can say is that diplomacy can take credit for keeping the world from turning cannibalistic; but to do so, one has to believe in something higher. "
· "What do you believe in? " Ulrich demanded bluntly.
"Oh, come now," Tuzzi said. ''I'm no longer a boy, who might an- swer such a question point-blank. All I meant was that the more a diplomat can identify himself with the spiritual currents of his time, the easier he will fmd his profession. And vice versa: we have learned in the course of a few generations that the more progress we make in every direction, the greater our need for diplomacy-but that's only
natural, after all. "
"Natural? But then you're saying just what I've said! " Ulrich ex-
claimed, with all the animation consistent with the image they wished to present, of two civilized men engaged in casual conversa- tion. "I pointed out with regret that our spiritual and moral values canriot sustain themselves in the long run without support from what is material and evil, and you reply, more or less, that the more spiri- tual energy is at work, the niore caution is needed. Let us say, then, that we can treat a man as a worm and by this means get him to do not quite everything, and we can appeal to what is best in him and by this means get him to do not quite everything.