Four

Forty years What's that? What did you say? ALICE

Uh nothing, nothing. It was Kosemary.

ROSEMARY

I agree—nothing! Nothing at all. I was just interested in your debate. Do go on.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

I have forgotten what I was saying. These women butted—I mean—'said' something.

ROSEMARY

Ah—these women! Always our fault!

ALICE

I see your 'gallantry' remains unimpaired.

TWENTY YEARS

Where would you have been if we had not fought?

MAN

And won. Don't forget you won too!

ROLAND

We did our best, you sneering lout.

MAN

A girl friend of mine taught me how to sneer. She said she had learned it from an English soldier who threw his cigarette butts on the ground to see smoke-crazed German women fight for them in the dust.

ALICE

Gallant as always.

ROSEMARY

Alice and I keep our butts for—

ROBIN

Please, please! Don't be vulgar.

458EIGHTEEN YEARS

I used to think my oid school was marvellous.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

I had almost forgotten how quaint you were. The distant tape and the runner beside.' How it brings it back to me! But 'Qù sont les neiges d'antan?' They don't come back—only slush.

EIGHTEEN YEARS

'His own name over all!' It is too sad to think about.

P.A

That is a common fallacy, though it is a habit to which a psycho-analytic intercourse seems prone. But that is not the aim which the analyst pursues.

FORTY YEARS

What is his aim?

P.A

That depends on a great many factors, notably on whether he has a disposition compatible with the work he does, his age and experience—

FORTY YEARS

Are you referring to his training?

P.A

In part. I do not mean to restrict it to his analytic training, or even to his university, school or home training. All those are important; but I have in mind the need to distinguish between experience of knowledge imparted by others and knowledge derived from the analyst's ability to turn what his senses tell him into nourishment.

FORTY YEARS

I don't think I understand.

P.A

As an example of what I mean, I take your last statement. In so far as you do understand, I suspect the 'thing' you understand will contribute to your growth. In so far as you don't understand, I suspect that it cannot and does not lead to growth.

FORTY YEARS

You are very cautious; why do you say you 'suspect' that it does or does not? Or am I being pedantic?

P.A

Not at all. I try to be precise and therefore 'suspect'. I cannot know because even if I do not understand I may be able to turn that fact to good account by learning that there are some things which I do not understand; whereas if I were an intolerant man I would dismiss the experience before I had time to learn from it.

ROLAND

Then I can't have learned much from war, because if I had gone through all this palaver before I pressed the button of my machine gun—well, I wouldn't have 'gone through all this 459palaver'; I would have been shot like your Lossiemouth captain before I had thought a single word.

P.A

That is why you went through a machine gun course at Grantham so that you could automatically press the button in a crisis without going through all this palaver. But you must sometimes have waited, when your patrols were out, to see if it was friend or foe. That would be knowledge acquired, and for it to be 'automatically' available you must have made it your own.

ROBIN

I vouch for it—Roland did a lot of 'swotting' on that course.

P.A

Well then—you must have gone through the palaver beforehand. You must be capable of going through it at some time. If you had got drunk instead, you would have been unable to press the button when you were 'sober' and under fire.

ROSEMARY

How extremely interesting. What is the button?

P.A

I am sorry—we are boring you.

ROSEMARY

You are not sorry; nor am I bored. But—

ROBIN

But what? Or is that a secret between you and Alice?

P.A

If it is, I might suggest a psycho-analytic interpretation. But this is not a psycho-analytic occasion and therefore the minimum conditions for a verbal, audible interpretation don't exist.

ROBIN

Something sexual, I bet.

P.A

A sexual situation affords the conditions for a sexual interpretation, an analytical situation affords an opportunity for a psycho-analytic interpretation.

ALICE

What is a psycho-analytic interpretation?

P.A

It must be perspicacious and perspicuous. That is—

ROLAND

These long words!

P.A

—an expression of a scientifically accurate insight which is phrased in a language comprehensible by the listener. It must be believed to be true by the analyst, and his formulation should be in terms that would penetrate the barriers of the listener's incomprehension.

ALICE

Oh, I know—that would get through my thick feminine skull.

ROSEMARY

Well, I don't know!

P.A

You both give an example of the difficulty I am talking about. Alice, hostile, 'thinks' I am an obtuse male; Rosemary 460'remembers' my learnedness. Both—feelings, and ideas remem-bered—produce an obscurity.

SOMITE TWENTY-FOUR

I've got a stomach ache.

ALICE

At last—something I do understand; I have the advantage of knowing pregnancy.

FOURTEEN YEARS

Neither of you knows how painful it is to have an idea.

TWENTY-TWO YEARS

You? I didn't know you ever had an idea.

FOURTEEN YEARS

I and my friend Thirteen have had ideas— even religious ones.

PRIEST

I remember; Thirteen's god was the school swimming captain, and Fourteen used to believe in the school rugger captain.

FIFTEEN YEARS

I was—still am—most impressed by Ruskin. Poor Ruskin—I didn't know then what a hell he lived in.

DEVIL

Nothing to do with me; must have been your god. He kicked people about, but I didn't.

SIXTEEN YEARS

I can't imagine your kicking anything about; you always wore morning dress.

DEVIL

You cribbed that idea from Beerbohm.

FORTY

years Did he? I had forgotten he read about poor Soames.

SIXTEEN YEARS

I read a great deal; I also played hard.

PRIEST

And prayed hard.

SIXTEEN YEARS

I may even have done that, but no answering god replied and I gave it up. The devil wasn't muchSEVNTY YEARSr.

SEVENTY YEARS

Poor devil! Blamed for everything—but perhaps he, like the rest of us, had to learn. There are plausible grounds for believing that he exists. He and HIS train ees—

DEVIL

Always ready to learn froM ADAM and Eve.

SIXTEEN YEARS

Seventy owes something to me; his body is in good order considering that he still TOTTERS around.

SEVENTY YEARS

Sixteen is not one of my favourITE CHaTWENTY-FOUR

SOMITE TWENTY-FOUR

Nor mine; such an ugly character!

461ALICE

Oh, poor soul—not as bad as you make out, surely?

SOMITE TWENTY-FOUR

You are prejudiced. If I had known I would grow a soul I would have remained a fetus.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

If I had known I had such an ugly somitic ancestor I would not have tried to cultivate a soul.

EIGHTEEN YEARS

I don't think I knew your somitic friend, but I had my suspicions and thought a soul would be an asset, not an excrescence.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

We all make mistakes. Knowing what I know now I would certainly not choose to be intelligent. Wise perhaps, but not intelligent.

SEVENTY YEARS

That's something you can pat yourself on the back about. I cannot honestly say I feel wise.

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS

Perhaps your honesty is overdeveloped—more pathological than benign.

SEVENTY YEARS

No, I don't think so. In real life it gets worn off as fast as it grows.

FORTY YEARS

You are too personal, Twenty-five. You've leamt that from P.A. He is always being personal.

FIFTY YEARS

Not personal—specific.

P.A

I have great respect for the individual. Do you think that is wrong?

FIFTY YEARS

No, but it is not in keeping with the growth of the Herd. I can see P.A. will be in serious trouble if the Herd develops faster than he does.

P.A

If the development of the Herd is incompatible with that of the individual, either the individual will perish, or the Herd will be destroyed by the individual who is not allowed to fulfil himself.

PRIEST

Surely it depends on whether the Herd develops an intolerance to the individual or the individual to the Herd.

P.A

Some of us think that the development of the individual needs careful supervision.

PRIEST

Of course; we are all agreed about that. The disagreement arises when the agreement is to be translated into action. The executive has to decide what is to be taught, what is to be believed, what is to be painted, or musically or aesthetically created.

462DOCTOR

Or whether the mother or the baby is to live. 'Do not strive officiously to keep alive' is what I was taught.

ROLAND

Am I being 'officious' if I strive to keep myself alive?

ROBIN

Or cowardly? Or suicidal not to?

P.A

Whether it is better to take arms against a sea of troubles. . . .

PRIEST

Who or what decides?

P.A

It appears to be the individual that decides whether to preserve life.

PHYSICIST

Nowadays, thanks to us, one individual appears to be able to decide whether he and people 'not him' are to live or die.

P.A

It appears—to us—to be the case. But is what appears to 'us' to be regarded as identical with fact? Priest and others seem to think that we psycho-analysts claim to know. I regard any thing I 'know' as transitive theory—a theory 'on the way' to knowledge, but not knowledge. It is merely a 'resting place', a 'pause' where I can be temporarily free to be aware of my condition, however precarious that condition is.

PRIEST

John Bunyan described that state in a number of pictorially vivid phrases.

SCHREBER

So did I.

ROLAND

Whoever is that?

P.A

Oh, only a poor devil of a paranoiac.

ROBIN

A what? Crazy, you mean?

P.A

I suppose I do, though I think Freud suspected that what Schreber wrote was worthy of attention. I slipped into the prevalent mental slough. One cannot avoid instinctively conforming to the quagmire—whatever its defects—in which one has survived so far. Bunyan tried to scramble out; so did Schreber. Both thought that Valiant for Truth, though they did not call him that, would help. Schreber, I suppose, thought he would be safe if he was a judge or a psychiatrist.

PRIEST

Or psycho-analyst? Heaven? Or the 'Law'?

ROBIN

'To be'? Or 'not to be'? Shakespeare, like Bunyan, said it. Extraordinary how these old buffers wrote it all down. Of course they can't have known what they were talking about.

463ROSEMARY

'Of course.' Like women they would not know. I at least had the intelligence not to have children because I had some respect for the pain in my belly. And some respect for my belly. So had you Alice.

ALICE

(deeply distressed) No, no, no! Would God I had died for thee oh Absalom my son—

ROLAND

That was said by a father.

ALICE

I thought I was marrying a father. But a father would have known that I might lay down my life for a son and that he might have to lay down his married life for a daughter. Hopeless, hopeless, hopeless.

ROLAND

I am sorry—I know it's no good, but I am sorry. It was not my fault I survived the war.

MAN

You thought you were winning.

ROLAND

You thought you had won. But you did not.

DEVIL

Allow me to settle it for you. I can't bear to see you quarrelling. I have a nice chain reaction here which one of my scientific friends will gladly teach you to realize. Temporarily, however, I must limit your freedom by using the reaction to chain you. It is only temporary and then—pouff—it will all be over without even a whimper. No one will even hear a bang.

ROBIN

I'm afraid,

ROLAND

I don't like this theatrical pose.

ROSEMARY

It is so seductive, so intelligent.

ROLAND

You bloody women.

DEVIL

Don't quarrel—tell me when you are ready and I will do what I can do for you.

PRIEST

Or just'do for us'.

DEVIL

(bows himself out) At your service. . . .

ROBIN

For God's sake don't exasperate him.

ROLAND

For God's sake don't worship him.

ALICE

I thought you did—especially when you professed to 'worship' me.

ROLAND

I have not forgotten; I was scared of bloody women. Even the first man I saw spread-eagled in the shell hole we shared was not bloody—only faintly green parchment stretched over bones.

P.A

The sight impressed you, lying with him on the brick464dust stained earth—that insalubrious place, the ghost of Wieltje village.

MAN

Our 9.2 Howitzers dealt with that.

P.A

So I understand. As for Roland, I thought you had shot him several times.

ROSEMARY

No one can deal with Roland. I tried to dissuade Man from trying.

ALICE

He did for me.

ROLAND

I died for you; but you thought I was being sentimental.

ROBIN

I liked you, but you always thought I was too much of a coward to be allowed to share your body. All the same, if I hadn't made you duck—more than once I may say—you would not be alive today.

ROLAND

Thank you—for nothing.

ALICE

You only saved his corpse and sent it back for me.

ROLAND

Not so much honouring thee but giving it a hope that there it might not withered be. Alas, I was no rosy wreath.

P.A

I remember a woman whose man came back to her after long years of war when she had prayed to God to bring him back safe. But his leg had been amputated so she quit. He thought she would love him as a wounded hero.

ALICE

How like a man! If she had had a baby by him he would have quit her; if he blushed, which I doubt, he blushed unseen.

P.A

I know a man who was always a deathly white. He was so ashamed that people would see his blushes that he killed himself.

ROLAND

Another of your bloody silly stories.

P.A

No, only a fact. I haven't the imagination to invent a story like that. Alice reminds me of a man who didn't blush, but was seen to blush by himself. I did not find out why because, as I say, he killed himself—more efficiently than Man's efforts with Roland.

ROLAND

Sometimes I think these debates amongst ourselves are most menacing because they are so private—the same family. Why can't we get together? Not only are we all the same 465human family, though artificially split by man's art into individuals, groups, nations, but—

ROBIN

According to Priest not 'artificially', but by God's command linguistically, religiously, aesthetically and in every this-that way for building a ramp which would—

ROLAND

Enable them to storm Heaven and the throne of Heaven's King.

ROSEMARY

How bizarre!

ALICE

Even Man thinks that by murder, contrived by the instrument of masses of disciplined murderers, men would reach the throne of Heaven. Victory! with a capital V.

P.A

Wee, capital wee-wee.

ROLAND

Ghastly pun—even for you.

P.A

What is a ghastly pun for me may be the first step in a new language.

ROBIN

What's fun for you is death to me, as Toad is said to have remarked. What is your new language? It reminds me of puns, as the ideograms of Chinese were 'articulated', though articulating was not the correct method of cohering those elements.

P.A

You mean not correct in accordance with the scheme of the inventors of the ideogrammatic signs. But the articulations, though 'false', enabled Fenollosa to enable Ezra Pound to enable future generations to further the knowledge achieved. Artificial or God-made, these divisions into individuals, into seconds, years, millenia, make it extremely difficult to form a meaningful junction between one ideogram, individual (person, race, nation) and the next. There is a screen, a caesura, a resistant material between one particle and the next.

ALICE

Unless some person paints on a piece of glass, like Picasso, so that it can be seen from both sides of the screen-both sides of the resistance.

ROBIN

Which 'like a dome of many-coloured glass stains the white radiance of eternity' so that we—minute individual particles that we are—may discern what we think is a meaningful pattern projected against the glass. I agree with Roland—'Why can't we get together?'

466P.A

No reason—in so far as we know that the same person created all of our characters and we should therefore be free to get together and write a single book sired by 'us'.

ROBIN

If it's a book, it has to be split into pages, chapters and so forth. I don't want to lose my identity, swallowed by all you crowd.

ROLAND

You wouldn't. How do you know that our being swallowed up in a group—which would mean all of us—would not be indistinguishable from perfect freedom? It would be our fulfilment.

ROBIN

How do you know it would end in a Pauline freedom? If I had a Shakespearean vocabulary it would be very helpful. Victor Hugo had an enormous vocabulary and was able verbally to paint a visual image of rose petals scattered by the wind over the surface of a pool of water, like an Armada dispersed by the storm. According to Heredia, Anthony saw, in the pools of Cleopatra's eyes, a fleet in flight. All that has been dealt with— not so overtly as in the undergraduate dining club known as The Shakespeare, but just as effectively—by the glorious memorial tomb of Shakespearean Scholarship. Now no one dreams of Shakespeare and I could not mobilize even four thousand words with which to express what I want to communicate. If Shakespeare could not survive—

ROLAND

Or Pythagoras, buried under his triangle—

P.A

Or Freud buried under his oedipal triangle, or Melanie Klein under a mass of evacuated identifications—

ALICE

Or a mass of Kleinian Theories treated to 'introjective projections', or even what I say interpreted, diagnosed, relegated to the lavatory bowl as psychotic distortions by virtue of the neologisms of psychiatry. Time that antiquates antiquity; the neo-news allowed to calcify in the realms of oblivion until the mental archaeologists scrape the arteries free of their horny integuments and display the dead jargons of the past to be admired, re-diagnosed, re-interpreted and re-interred.

P.A

James Joyce tried to break out of the mental ossifications in which his tender shoots of animation were enclosed by the Clongowesian wrappings of Roman Catholicized Semitic Zeus.

467PRIEST

Zeus was a juvenile vulgarian anyway. Truth always has to break out of the wrappings of the latest Enthusiast who wants to bring his pet mummy to life.

P.A

And in doing so dresses it up in the latest fashions of embalming technique. 'Mother' becomes 'Mummy', God borrows the costume of Old Nick, and his son is tricked out, swaddled in his grave clothes. But man only destroys man because he has not yet discovered that minute, ineffable particle which transforms the inanimate and makes it perceptible, distinguishable, noteworthy, because it is alive. 'Though the body dies' the virus shall live for ever. The present is already concealed in Oblivion. Whose finger is on the button?

ALICE

My clitoris is passed by unnoticed by your mouth, 'blinded', 'glutted' by your penitential penis. What you don't know is knowledge; once you know it, and once it is known by you, you are too full of knowledge to be able to be curious.

ROSEMARY

Even if his alimentary canal can learn no more he opens his eyes wide to take in what his belly can't. Then his eyes are so stuffed with Beauty that he cannot see me, Not even Homer had the wit to see that Helen of Troy was not just an ecto-dermal proliferation.

ALICE

They are all the same. I have known no person, clothed in the trappings of the woman's body, that was not imprisoned by those same trappings and unable to break through them to meet her . . . her . . . why, I used to think I could talk, but this same capacity for articulate speech is more an opaque screen than a link which enables me to communicate with something not me.

P.A

Perhaps you could project your ideas on to your resistance; then someone not-you could read the trace left on the resistance.

ROBIN

You mean she might use the delay to think some sense before she opens her mouth again?

P.A

No, I don't. I think it might help you if you could use the hindering obstacle to think; but from what I know of you it is far more likely that you would fill the silence with just such a damn silly remark as you just made.

MAN

Shall I shoot him?

468ROSEMARY

No. (to Alice) Man is a dear, but he has such a one-track mind. Useful enough for bullets, penes and other guided missiles, but no good without either a single track or a guide.

ALICE

The boy scouts and the girl guides—as we used to say at school.

ROSEMARY

I didn't know you were such a dirty-minded lot at your school.

ALICE

Oh yes, we knew quite a lot. Of course we had to hide it from the staff.

VOICE

Of course.