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Which doesn’t mean that Christ regarded all men as sinners. No, but that we are all imbued, dyed, tainted with the notion of sin. As I understand his words, it is out of a sense of guilt that we created sin and evil. Not that sin and evil have any reality of their own. Which brings me back again to the present impasse. Despite all the truths that Christ enunciated, the world is now riddled and saturated with sinfulness. Everyone behaves like a criminal toward his fellow man. And so, unless we set about killing one another off—worldwide massacre—we’ve got to come to grips with the demonic power which rules us. We’ve got to convert it into a healthy, dynamic force which will liberate not us alone—we are not so important!—but the life-force which is dammed up in us. Only then will we begin to live. And to live means eternal life, nothing less. It was man who created death, not God. Death is the sign of our vulnerability, nothing more.”
He went on and on and on. I didn’t get a wink of sleep until near dawn. When I awoke he was gone. On the table I found a five-dollar bill and a brief note saying that I should forget everything we had talked about, that it was of no importance. “I’m ordering a new suit just the same,” he added. “You can choose the material for me.”
Naturally I couldn’t forget it, as he suggested. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything else for weeks but “man the criminal,” or, as Stymer had put it, “man his own criminal.”
One of the many expressions he had dropped plagued me interminably, the one about “man taking refuge in the mind.” It was the first time, I do believe, that I ever questioned the existence of mind as something apart. The thought that possibly all was mind fascinated me. It sounded more revolutionary than anything I had heard hitherto.
It was certainly curious, to say the least, that a man of Stymer’s caliber should have been obsessed by this idea of going underground, of taking refuge in the mind. The more I thought about the subject the more I felt that he was trying to make of the cosmos one grand, stupefying rattrap. When, a few months later, upon sending him a notice to call for a fitting, I learned that he had died of a hemorrhage of the brain, I wasn’t in the least surprised. His mind had evidently rejected the conclusions he had imposed upon it. He had mentally masturbated himself to death. With that I stopped worrying about the mind as a refuge. Mind is all. God is all. So what?
3
When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder or suicide. Or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon.
Amazing how active one can become when there is nothing to contend with but one’s own desperation. Events pile up of their own accord. Everything is converted to drama . . . to melodrama.
The ground began to give way under my feet with the slow realization that no show of anger, no threats, no display of grief, tenderness or remorse, nothing I said or did, made the least difference to her. What is called “a man” would no doubt have swallowed his pride or grief and walked out on the show. Not this little Beelzebub!
I was no longer a man; I was a creature returned to the wild state. Perpetual panic, that was my normal state. The more unwanted I was, the closer I stuck. The more I was wounded and humiliated, the more I craved punishment. Always praying for a miracle to occur, I did nothing to bring one about. What’s more, I was powerless to blame her, or Stasia, or anyone, even myself, though I often pretended to. Nor could I, despite natural inclination, bring myself to believe that it had just “happened.” I had enough understanding left to realize that a condition such as we were in doesn’t just happen. No, I had to admit to myself that it had been preparing for quite a long while. I had, moreover, retraced the path so often that I knew it step by step. But when one is frustrated to the point of utter despair what good does it do to know where or when the first fatal misstep occurred? What matters—and how it matters, O God!—is only now.
How to squirm out of a vise?
Again and again I banged my head against the wall trying to crack that question. Could I have done so, I would have taken my brains out and put them through the wringer. No matter what I did, what I thought, what I tried, I could not wriggle out of the straitjacket.
Was it love that kept me chained?
How answer that? My emotions were so confused, so kaleidoscopic. As well ask a dying man if he is hungry.
Perhaps the question might be put differently. For example: “Can one ever regain that which is lost?”
The man of reason, the man with common sense, will say no. The fool, however, says yes.
And what is the fool but a believer, a gambler against all odds?
Nothing was ever lost that cannot be redeemed.
Who says that? The God within us. Adam who survived fire and flood. And all the angels.
Think a moment, scoffers! If redemption were impossible, would not love itself disappear? Even self-love?
Perhaps this Paradise I sought so desperately to recover would not be the same. . . . Once outside the magic circle the leaven of time works with disastrous rapidity.
What was it, this Paradise I had lost? Of what was it fashioned? Was it merely the ability to summon a moment of bliss now and then? Was it the faith with which she inspired me? (The faith in myself, I mean.) Or was it that we were joined like Siamese twins?
How simple and clear it all seems now! A few words tell the whole story: I had lost the power to love. A cloud of darkness enveloped me. The fear of losing her made me blind. I could easier have accepted her death.
Lost and confused, I roamed the darkness which I had created as if pursued by a demon. In my bewilderment I sometimes got down on all fours and with bare hands strangled, maimed, crushed whatever threatened to menace our lair. Sometimes it was the puppet I clutched in a frenzy, sometimes only a dead rat. Once it was nothing more than a piece of stale cheese. Day and night I murdered. The more I murdered, the more my enemies and assailants increased.
How vast is the phantom world! How inexhaustible!
Why didn’t I murder myself? I tried, but it proved a fiasco. More effective, I found, was to reduce life to a vacuum.
To live in the mind, solely in the mind . . . that is the surest way of making life a vacuum. To become the victim of a machine which never ceases to spin and grate and grind.
The mind machine.
“Loving and loathing; accepting and rejecting; grasping and disdaining; longing and spurning: this is the disease of the mind.”
Solomon himself could not have stated it better.
“If you give up both victory and defeat,” so it reads in the Dhammapada, “you sleep at night without fear.”
If!
The coward, and such I was, prefers the ceaseless whirl of the mind. He knows, as does the cunning master he serves, that the machine has but to stop for an instant and he will explode like a dead star. Not death . . . annihilation!
Describing the Knight Errant, Cervantes says: “The Knight Errant searches all the corners of the world, enters the most complicated labyrinths, accomplishes at every step the impossible, endures the fierce rays of the sun in uninhabited deserts, the inclemency of wind and ice in winter: lions cannot daunt him nor demons affright, nor dragons, for to seek assault, and overcome, such is the whole business of his life and true office.”
Strange how much the fool and coward have in common with the Knight Errant. The fool believes despite everything; he believes in face of the impossible. The coward braves all dangers, runs every risk, fears nothing, absolutely nothing, except the loss of that which he strives impotently to retain.
It is a great temptation to say that love never made a coward of anyone. Perhaps true love, no. But who among us has known true love? Who is so loving, trusting and believing that he would not sell himself to the Devil rather than see his