OPUS 21 Read online

"I believe it's the function of consciousness to rediscover instinct, understand it, and pursue it--in the ways that it has to go. That it does go--people by the billions to the contrary notwithstanding. So far, people have made only blind efforts in that direction.

  Unconscious efforts. Their religions--according to the soundest hypothesis I've encountered--are the results of such attempts: expressions of animal instinct, as it appears in men--and in men wholly unaware of what they are expressing."

  "Is that Freud?"

  "It's Jung. Freud never got that far. He merely demonstrated that instinct exists in man. The id--he called it. The raw cravings of the infant. To Freud--the id was pretty much what sin is to a preacher. A disgraceful bunch of bestial lusts and impulses.

  Society--through the parents, mostly--disciplined the id by disciplining the infant and the child; this produced the superego--or conscience, according to Freud. As far as Freud could see, man would always live amidst conflicts set up between his id and whatever superego, or culture, had been hammered around it--plus his own common sense, if any.

  Dismal view."

  "And Jung?"

  "Well--Freud showed that instinct exists as a basic motivation of mankind. Not that anybody but a few psychiatrists have ever paid attention to the discovery. But there it was--the beginning of a science of psychological evolution of people. Jung asked what instinct was and how it worked. Jung found out several things Freud only began to realize. For instance, Jung looked at animals and perceived that their instincts unfold in them, individually, as they mature."

  "You mean, new-born beavers don't start building dams immediately?"

  "Exactly. So the id of infancy is only part of instinct. More instinct appears as the person ages--which is in line with the nature of instinct in all other living beings. Next, Jung noticed that instinct in. animals, and in primitive people who hardly ever use reason and logic abstractedly, takes care of the whole life cycle of every species. So it cannot be viewed as mere lawless, infantile lust. If it were only that, animals, and primitive men, would tear up each other and themselves; all life would commit suicide. From the animal viewpoint--instinct includes whatever animals do that men would call 'good,' 'virtuous,'

  'unselfish,' 'self-sacrificing,' and so on. Do you follow?"

  "I think so."

  "There are--so to speak--checks and balances--compensations--counterinstincts.

  That's the idea embodied in Chinese philosophy. In Taoism, for example. That's the concept symbolized by the yin and the yang. It's the idea embodied in Toynbee's theory of history, too-right up till the present, when his own ego confuses its own description of instinct with history. At that point, Toynbee decided that the Church of England--his personal patternization of instinct--might salvage civilization. Which, of course, is pathetic. But let's drag this bundle a little bit further before we drop it and go back to you.

  If all animals have a proper pattern of instinct-man has. But man is to some extent conscious--and therefore to some degree able to separate out a personal identity of himself--an ego--from the older, more powerful compulsions and countercompulsions of his instinct. And he has used his consciousness--largely--not to maintain and enhance the liaison between his ego and the forces that drive him statistically forever--but to swell up his ego and to conceal from it those fundamental forces."

  "I don't understand that."

  "Well--man tries to deny he's an animal. Or to hide the fact. To call everything that is animal subhuman. To call every success he makes his own achievement. To call every disaster no fault of his own. Because he is conscious--he has slowly learned to extend the physical capacities of every kind of animal--for his own, immediate benefits.

  He has telescope-microscope-X-ray eyes. He has atomic energy muscles. Brighter light at night than the fireflies. He can fly faster than any bird--speed through the water faster than any fish--store food for decades when a ruminant or a pelican can store it only for days. He has even developed quite a few techniques that have no good animal correlative, though most of man's inventions were made ages before even apes appeared on the planet. Man has merely learned. But he tells himself he discovered and invented. It gives him a preposterous arrogance. And that's largely what he has used consciousness to swell up."

  "We just skip his ideals--and philosophies--?"

  "No. But we note that, to extend his physical capacities, he has used logic and reason. He has sometimes tried to employ them on his consciousness; but never--except intuitively, till recently--has it dawned on him that he is usually unconscious of his own real motives. That his cultures represent guesses--or trial and error. You take a creature that is governed by instinct--and doesn't realize it--one who confuses instinct with deity and identifies deity with himself--a creature who has made logic work in every dimension of the objective world and is extremely smug about himself in view of the results--and you have an animal cut off from its own nature and hence from Nature itself. Modern men can't tell whether anything they think or say or do is suitable to them, or merely the result of a tradition--as the semanticists claim--or whether, perhaps, their motives rise in a desire to hide instinct, to deny the animal, to inflate ego, or what not."

  ' I'm confused again."

  "Put anybody through psychoanalysis--all the way, not just far enough to scare the wits out of him, and so make him hide his fear from himself by turning upon and ridiculing psychoanalysis--and that person will discover there is more instinct in him that he didn't know about than there is ego that he knew. Awful shock. Then put the same person through an analysis by a Jungian, and he will get numberless dues about the images and dreams and the feelings we have which are intended, by Nature, to make us conscious of the whole of human instinct as a pattern."

  Yvonne shook her head. "Let's talk about me."

  I wanted--I always want--to continue that line of explanation. It seems logical to me that man would have in his head the means to recover a consciousness of instinct--and to find, in that recovered awareness, not just the psychological history of the past, as man finds history in his body, but intimations of the future, which also exist in his body, as countless extrapolating anthropologists have shown. There must be some way, I have always thought, to shove aside the immature id and also the disguising images, taboos, compulsions, and descriptions of the modern superego, and to see what lies beyond them both--looking backward and looking forward. Having at long last followed Jung's inquiry into this process, having grasped his techniques and repeated, through idioms of my own personality, the same empirical experiences which Jung has demonstrated in hundreds of other human beings as well as in societies seen as wholes--I have been afflicted with an urge to bring the steps to wider attention and understanding.

  And I suppose I shall try to do so, sporadically, all my life. But I realize now the futility of the effort as a "cause."

  I am the man who wanted, from childhood's earliest dreams, to know what men would think in the future. And now that I believe I know I find that--save for individuals-

  -present men cannot even reach toward such ideas and concepts. Could they, the better world would be at hand, and not a mere ignorant wish. It is a simple irony--an operation of the very law I learned--the law that I imagine all men will finally discover. And, while it supplies me with hope for my species, it condemns me to general incomprehensibility.

  If you wished for the future--and were given it--you couldn't use it today. Because it is the future.

  Physicists feel this way--and rightly--concerning their urgent, brilliant, all-but-fruitless efforts to explain ideas in comparatively familiar and acceptable fields--ideas such as Relativity or the Quantum Theory. How much more, then, will psychologists feel it! The wide world of their awareness has as yet not even a basic glossary among people; they do not yet even use the arithmetic of that science in their daily lives.

  Indeed, the psychiatrist, the practitioner of certain known principles of human psychology, the physician, is still prone to dod
ge the central fact of his science.

  "Psychology," he says, dogmatically identifying his opinion with the science, "does not conflict or interfere with religion. There are areas in which the minister or priest is better equipped to deal than the psychologist. Psychiatry does not attempt to change a man's beliefs. And it is not 'all sex'--as is so often claimed. It is not concerned with sex morals, or any moral law."

  So, in his time, the churches made old Galileo lie, too.

  Made him lie to live at all.

  And so the same churches in our day cause comparably enlightened men to lie concerning their knowledge--in order that any people may benefit by it at all. In order, truly, to go on living. It is one more expedient dishonor of scientists.

  For psychology--though a thousand Presbyterian and Roman Catholic practitioners of its minor branches may not admit it--and though ten thousand better psychologists lie their faces black--has already put a period to orthodox religion. The old astronomers did away with the old cosmology for all the churches. The new investigators of awareness have done away with the ancient theologies and "moral" systems as completely--whether it takes the people a generation or a thousand years to find it out.

  Psychology is the scientific investigation of what man calls awareness and of what prompts him that he is unaware of. As such, it inevitably must analyze and resolve all man's beliefs, religions, faiths and the mechanisms of them, as well as his politics, his economics, the motives of his arts, his morals, ethics and sex manners. Why should anybody be surprised that science, turned finally upon man's inner self, should disclose different shapes from those held real by Stone Age man, barbarians, and a few later millenniums of men who decree that they are Christian but act more viciously than any beast?

  The disavowing psychiatrists, opportunist weaselers or men who do not see that their science has set philosophy aside, will be historically remembered. Their acts will prove the shocking superstitiousness of the twentieth century and--in some cases--

  represent the public persecutions, the subjective witchburnings, which show this era to be a continuum of the Dark Ages.

  As I said earlier, a smug people cannot even find the motive for asking if a science of psychology exists, let alone what it has learned. And we Americans are probably the most self-satisfied people who ever appeared. The whole world starves, brawls, perishes around us. Our own philosophy of progress is leading us to swift, continental exhaustion--to the resourcelessness of our own progeny. Yet we believe we are doing right and thinking rightly--a great, good, wonderful, near-perfect nation.

  It will take generations of disaster to crack the hull of such preposterous self-satisfaction. Only through despair and amidst ruins, in all likelihood, will men discover that humility which may lead to the honest assessment of man's vanities, his insane traditions, pompous faiths, patriotisms, and excesses. But there is not much use talking about it or trying to explain. Knowledge cannot fend where the people refuse to know.

  "Did you ever raise dogs?" I asked Yvonne.

  She had been quietly eating lobster bisque--glancing at me from time to time while I reflected and while I ate, too. She nodded. "Several."

  "Then you've noticed that pups behave in every single way that would, in people, be called sinful, immoral, and perverse."

  "That's the nastiest thing I ever heard in my life! How could animals be perverted!"

  "Did I say they were? I merely said--or tried to--that dogs exhibit all the same curious activities your Professor Kinsey found abundant in human behavior."

  "They do not!"

  I grinned. "Perhaps yours didn't. Perhaps--whenever you saw in your pups a symptom of any sort of sex activity--you yelled at them. Pulled them apart. Swatted them with a switch--"

  "I never used a thing but rolled newspapers!"

  I laughed until she saw why. She flushed. I went on. "You imposed, by force, your sex manners--Episcopalian?--I thought so--on your dogs. If you left them alone--as I do mine--you'd see that pups are every bit as 'perverted' as people. Grown dogs, too, sometimes. So are wild animals. Put a bunch of male monkeys together--without females-

  -"

  "I detest monkeys!"

  "They won't mind. Anyhow--segregate the males and they'll turn homosexual. My caustic acquaintance, Dr. Hooton, the anthropologist, has reported it. He says it is

  'disgusting'--a curiously unscientific term. The monkeys weren't disgusted, after all. Just having fun, getting relief, being excited."

  "What are you trying to prove now?"

  I shrugged. "That mammalian sexual behavior has a pattern and men belong in it."

  "What nonsense! Men know what they are doing! Animals don't!"

  "Then why was Kinsey able to show that men do just exactly what the dogs and monkeys and all the other mammals do--in spite of church, law, state, parents, culture, schools, society, and every other restraint they can dream up, consciously?"

  "Some men--maybe."

  "All I have been trying to point out, Yvonne, is that people who don't know where they are in space-people as ignorant of simple, cultural fact as the average American college graduate--obviously cannot know anything much about their real sex natures, since these have been honestly examined only recently and only by a few men, and since sexual enlightenment is the great taboo in this era. To that I merely add that men do behave sexually like mammals, which has been shown, and mammals do not behave in any fashion resembling the sex mores of this age."

  Her gray eyes were bitter. "You think, then, that it would be perfectly acceptable, if you felt like it, to attack me right here and right now?"

  "Yvonne. Even if I didn't have vestiges of your Episcopalian superego, or its equivalent, and ideas of my own besides--all the other people here do have your attitude.

  And I'm not a lunatic."

  "You think, though"--her eyes went burningly around the room in search of effective illustration--"it would be perfectly all right for me to get a yen for the cashier, and show it, and let the cashier see it, too! Nobody should mind that--?"

  She spoke with such emotion that I leaned forward to see why she'd selected the cashier. The cashier was a dark-haired girl, a pretty girl, leaning into the rays of a desk lamp to add up a dinner check.

  I said, "Charming."

  "You're an evil person."

  "Did I pick out the cashier--or did you?"

  She considered anger--and settled for laughter. "At least, you have one virtue. A person around you doesn't have to censor what he says."

  "And the devil is shocked by virtue, too--is that right? How perfectly the closed mind bats them back! It must be marvelous never to be able to wonder what goes on outside your own head. The enviable situation of nearly everybody! And the everlasting chute-the-chutes to hell-an-earth. Here comes our next course, Miss Morals."

  "Can I have pêches flambeau?" she asked, somewhat later.

  ' I'll join you."

  "I thought you didn't drink?"

  "I don't. A brandied bonbon? Peaches with the alcohol mostly burned away?

  Sherry in the soup? I'm not absolutist. Yvonne--not stuck with it, quite. I don't accidentally swallow the port in my fruit cocktail and then go out and get roaring drunk--

  excusing myself with the accident of the port. Maybe the sniff of alcohol will fold up the resolution of some reformed drunkards. My own problem--in that case--was different."

  "What was it, then?"

  "It's a long and sordid story that I am not going to tell you now."

  "Do you really understand all these things you're talking about?"

  I thought that one over. "Mostly," I said, "my mental activity relates to errors in the concepts of other people. Let's say--I've come to understand a good deal--by searching for blunder, by hunting for the sense of what brighter guys have learned. By relating them all."

  "If God came in here now, what would you ask Him?"

  It was quite a question and I looked at her with surprise. Her face saddened. "Rol said th
at to me, once. But what?"

  What would I ask?

  I realized, with a strange feeling, that I wouldn't ask anything. No questions. No further privileges. No favors. No additional enlightenment. That last impulse had stayed in my mind for a moment and I had then thought, if you want more enlightenment, the data is there, son. Enlighten yourself. Don't ask, when there's a chance of finding out on your own.

  Superego?

  Had my father told me that?

  Or was that how I felt about life and the world?

  I felt that way.

  My father had his faith.

  So it was not superego.

  I would say hello to God.

  What I did not know, what I knew that I did not express, others would learn, others would say.

  There was a little instant of silence and remoteness around me as I underwent the experience that goes with such realization.

  A calm.

  The Crepuscule was a long way off-the sound and sight and smell of a dim restaurant.

  The trio was playing "Ja-da," I finally realized.

  Yvonne snapped her fingers in my face and laughed.

  "If you must daydream, put me in the act."

  "What part do you want?"

  ''I'm a woman," she said. "And, according to you, I can play only one part. I'll be the sins of your mind. Do your evil for you. Kiss the cashiers and encourage little children to undress each other. Throw stones at cathedral windows--"

  "It's your life. And your sin-list. Go ahead."

  "Your list."

  "You're sticking to acts. And mighty compulsive ones, too. All I've done is to give such matters subjective consideration."

  "The thought is father to the deed."

  "Then for God's sake be more attentive to what you think!"

  "Jesuit!"

  ' I'm the nemesis of that whole philosophy."

  "At least--you're sincere. I didn't believe so, when I read your books. I thought you were just fond of shocking people."

  "I could never shock them a millionth part of the amount they've shocked me."

  "But you did your best?"

  I laughed at that. "Sometimes." A sad confession.