What else can love do? If we’re selling it, we’d better point out that it’s a starting-point for civic virtue. You can’t love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can’t be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that’s not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers. By which I don’t mean great fuckers; we all know about power as an aphrodisiac (an auto-aphrodisiac too). Even our democratic hero Kennedy serviced women like an assembly-line worker spraying car bodies.
There is an intermittent debate, in these last dying millennia of puritanism, about the connection between sexual orthodoxy and the exercise of power. If a President can’t keep his pants on, does he lose the right to rule us? If a public servant cheats on his wife does this make him more likely to cheat on the electorate? For myself, I’d rather be ruled by an adulterer, by some sexual rogue, than by a prim celibate or zipped-up spouse. As criminals tend to specialize in certain crimes, so corrupt politicians normally specialize in their corruption: the sexual blackguards stick to fucking, the bribe-takers to graft. In which case it would make more sense to elect proven adulterers instead of discouraging them from public life. I don’t say we should pardon them – on the contrary, we need to fan their guilt. But by harnessing this useful emotion we restrict their sinning to the erotic sphere, and produce a countervailing integrity in their governing. That’s my theory, anyway.
In Great Britain, where most of the politicians are men, there’s a tradition among the Conservative Party to interview the wives of potential candidates. This is, of course, a demeaning occasion, with the wife being vetted by the local members for normality. (Is she sane? Is she steady? Is she the right colour? Does she have sound views? Is she a tart? Will she look good in photos? Can we let her out canvassing?) They ask these wives, who dutifully vie with one another in supportive dullness, many questions, and the wives solemnly swear their joint commitment to nuclear weapons and the sanctity of the family. But they don’t ask them the most important question: does your husband love you? The question shouldn’t be misunderstood as being merely practical (is your marriage free from scandal?) or sentimental; it’s an exact enquiry about the candidate’s fitness to represent other people. It’s a test of his imaginative sympathy.
We must be precise about love. Ah, you want descriptions, perhaps? What are her legs like, her breasts, her lips, what colour is that hair? (Well, sorry.) No, being precise about love means attending to the heart, its pulses, its certainties, its truth, its power – and its imperfections. After death the heart becomes a pyramid (it has always been one of the wonders of the world); but even in life the heart was never heart-shaped.
Put the heart beside the brain and see the difference. The brain is neat, segmented, divided into two halves as we imagine the heart should obviously be. You can deal with the brain, you think; it is a receptive organ, one that invites comprehension. The brain looks sensible. It’s complicated, to be sure, with all those wrinkles and frowns and gulleys and pockets; it resembles coral, making you wonder if it might be surreptitiously on the move all the time, quietly adding to itself without your noticing. The brain has its secrets, though when cryptanalysts, maze-builders and surgeons unite, it will surely be possible to solve those mysteries. You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible. Whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a fucking mess.
Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that’s why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn’t be in charge. Religion has become either wimpishly workaday, or terminally crazy, or merely businesslike – confusing spirituality with charitable donations. Art, picking up confidence from the decline of religion, announces its transcendence of the world (and it lasts, it lasts! art beats death!), but this announcement isn’t accessible to all, or where accessible isn’t always inspiring or welcome. So religion and art must yield to love. It gives us our humanity, and also our mysticism. There is more to us than us.
The materialist argument attacks love, of course; it attacks everything. Love boils down to pheromones, it says. This bounding of the heart, this clarity of vision, this energizing, this moral certainty, this exaltation, this civic virtue, this murmured I love you, are all caused by a low-level smell emitted by one partner and subconsciously nosed by the other. We are just a grander version of that beetle bashing its head in a box at the sound of a tapped pencil. Do we believe this? Well, let’s believe it for the moment, because it makes love’s triumph the greater. What is a violin made of? Bits of wood and bits of sheep’s intestine. Does its construction demean and banalize the music? On the contrary, it exalts the music further.
And I’m not saying love will make you happy – above all, I’m not saying that. If anything, I tend to believe that it will make you unhappy: either immediately unhappy, as you are impaled by incompatibility, or unhappy later, when the woodworm has quietly been gnawing away for years and the bishop’s throne collapses. But you can believe this and still insist that love is our only hope.
It’s our only hope even if it fails us, although it fails us, because it fails us. Am I losing precision? What I’m searching for is the right comparison. Love and truth, yes, that’s the prime connection. We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what ‘really’ happened. This God-eyed version is a fake – a charming, impossible fake, like those medieval paintings which show all the stages of Christ’s Passion happening simultaneously in different parts of the picture. But while we know this, we must still believe that objective truth is obtainable; or we must believe that it is 99 per cent obtainable; or if we can’t believe this we must believe that 43 per cent objective truth is better than 41 per cent. We must do so, because if we don’t we’re lost, we fall into beguiling relativity, we value one liar’s version as much as another liar’s, we throw up our hands at the puzzle of it all, we admit that the victor has the right not just to the spoils but also to the truth. (Whose truth do we prefer, by the way, the victor’s or the victim’s? Are pride and compassion greater distorters than shame and fear?)
And so it is with love. We must believe in it, or we’re lost. We may not obtain it, or we may obtain it and find it renders us unhappy; we must still believe in it. If we don’t, then we merely surrender to the history of the world and to someone else’s truth.
It will go wrong, this love; it probably will. That contorted organ, like the lump of ox meat, is devious and enclosed. Our current model for the universe is entropy, which at the daily level translates as: things fuck up. But when love fails us, we must still go on believing in it. Is it encoded in every molecule that things fuck up, that love will fail? Perhaps it is. Still we must believe in love, just as we must believe in free will and objective truth. And when love fails, we should blame the history of the world. If only it had left us alone, we could have been happy, we could have gone on being happy. Our love has gone, and it is the fault of the history of the world.
But that’s still to come. Perhaps it will never come. In the night the world can be defied. Yes, that’s right, it can be done, we can face history down. Excited, I stir and kick. She shifts and gives a subterranean, a subaqueous sigh. Don’t wake her. It seems a grand truth now, though in the morning it may not seem worth disturbing her for. She gives a gentler, lesser sigh. I sense the map of her body beside me in the dark. I turn on my side, make a parallel zigzag, and wait for sleep.
9
PROJECT ARARAT
IT IS A FINE afternoon and you are driving the Outer Banks of North Carolina – the Atlantic Coast’s austere rehearsal for the Florida Keys. You cross Currituck Sound from Point Harbor to Anderson, then south on 158 and you soon reach Kitty Hawk. Across the dunes you’ll find the Wright Brothers Nation
al Memorial; but maybe you take a raincheck on that, and in any case this isn’t the thing you remember from Kitty Hawk. No, you remember this: on the right-hand side of the road, the west side, its high prow pointing towards the ocean, stands an ark. It’s large as a barn, with slatted wooden sides, and painted brown. As you turn an amused and passing head, you realize that it is a church. Where you might normally see the ship’s name and port of registration perhaps, you read instead the ark’s function: WORSHIP CENTER, it says. You have been warned to expect all manner of religious excrescence in the Carolinas, and so this strikes you as a piece of fundamentalist rococo, rather cute in a way, but no, you don’t stop.
Later that evening, you take the seven o’clock ferry from Hatteras to Ocracoke Island. It’s chill, early spring, and you feel a little cold and lost in the darkness, on the black water, with the Plough hanging upside down above you in a blazing sky rented from Universal Pictures. The ferry feels anxious too, its huge searchlight charging the water twenty yards ahead; noisily, but without conviction, it shrugs its course between the marker lights, red, green and white. Only now, as you step out on deck and your breath turns solid, do you think back to that replica ark. It is there, of course, for a purpose, and had you stopped to think instead of merely lifting your foot from the gas pedal in a merry way, you might have felt its meaning. You had driven to the place where Man first took to the air; and you are reminded instead of an earlier, more vital occasion, when Man first took to the sea.
The ark was not yet there back in 1943 when Spike Tiggler, only a year or two out of short pants, was taken to Kitty Hawk by his father. You remember Spike Tiggler? Hell, everybody remembers Spike Tiggler. The guy who threw the football on the moon. The guy who threw the god-damned football on the moon? That’s right. Longest pass in the history of the NFL, four hundred fifty yards into the leaping hands of a volcanic crater. Touchdown! That’s what he shouted, and it came crackling back to us, down here on earth. Touchdown Tiggler, that’s what the crick-necked world knew him as, least for a summer or two. Touchdown Tiggler, the guy who snuck a football into the capsule (how’d he do that?). Remember when they asked him why he did it, and he just kept that poker face on him? ‘Always wanted to try out for the Redskins,’ he said. ‘Sure hope the fellas were watching.’ The fellas had been watching, just as they watched his press conference, and they wrote Touchdown asking if they could have the football, offering to pay what strikes us even now as a decent price. But Spike had left it far away in that ashen crater – in case some running-back from Mars or Venus happened by.
Touchdown Tiggler: they called him that on the banner across the street in Wadesville, North Carolina, a little one-bank town where the gas station had to double as a liquor store to make anything half-way near a profit. WADESVILLE PROUDLY WELCOMES ITS FINEST SON, TOUCHDOWN TIGGLER. Everyone turned out that hot morning in 1971 as Tiggler rode through in a movie star’s limousine with the top down. Even Mary-Beth, who twenty years earlier had allowed Spike certain liberties and spent a week or two worrying, and who’d scarcely had a good word to say about him until he was selected for Project Apollo, turned out for the occasion, and reminded those around her – she’d already refreshed their memory a couple of times before – that there’d been a time when she and Spike were, well, real close. Even then, she professed, she could see that he would go far. How far did he go with you, Mary-Beth, asked one of the sharper young wives of the town, and Mary-Beth smiled beatifically, like a Virgin in a coloring book, knowing that either way her status could only rise.
Meanwhile, Touchdown Tiggler had reached the end of Main Street and turned by the hairdresser called Shear Pleasure, which would care for your poodle too if you took him round the back, and while the public address endlessly played ‘I am just a country boy/Who’s always known the love and joy/Of coming home …’ Spike Tiggler was welcomed three times from one direction and three times from the other. The convertible moved slowly, because after the first triumphal sweep Spike got perched up on the back so that everyone could see him, and each time the limo tortoised past the gas-station-cum-liquor-store its proprietor Buck Weinhart shouted ‘Drive it or milk it!’ in remembrance of Spike’s habit of abusing slow drivers when the pair of them used to stir up the town all those years before. Six times Buck bellowed, ‘Hey, Spike, drive it or milk it!’ and Spike, a stocky, dark-haired figure, waved back with a good-ole-boy inclination of the head. Later, at a civic lunch in the Wadesville diner, which Spike had once thought very grand but which now reminded him of a funeral parlor, the returning hero, at first unfamiliar in his astronaut’s crewcut and city suit which made him look like he was trying out for President Eisenhower, gave a speech about always remembering where you come from however far it is you go, which was accounted fine and dignified by those present, and one of those who spontaneously replied to his words even proposed that in honor of the achievement of their favorite son they should strike Wadesville and rename the town Moonsville, an idea which flourished for a few weeks and then quietly died, partly because of opposition from Old Jessie Wade, last surviving granddaughter of Ruben Wade, a travelling man who way back at the start of the century had decided that pumpkins might grow well on the land hereabouts. The pumpkins failed, as it happened, but that was no reason to dishonor the man now.
Spike Tiggler had not always been as popular in Wadesville as he was that day in 1971, and it wasn’t just Mary-Beth’s mother who’d thought him wild and regretted that the war had ended too soon for them to ship young Tiggler out East and fight the Japs instead of fighting half the town. He was fifteen when they dropped the Hiroshima bomb, an event Mary-Beth’s mother deplored for purely local reasons; but in due course Spike got his war, flying F-86s up to the Yalu River. Twenty-eight missions, two MiG-15s shot down. Reason enough for celebration in Wadesville, though Tiggler did not return at that time, or for a while afterwards. As he was to explain it in 1975, during his first appeal for funds at the Moondust Diner (a change of name approved even by Jessie Wade), the movement of a man’s life, of every life, is marked by escape and return. Escape and return, escape and return, like the tides that play in Albermale Sound and up the Pasquotank River to Elizabeth City. We all go out with the tide, and then we all come back in on the tide. Some of the audience hadn’t ever much left Wadesville in most of their lives, so couldn’t be expected to have an opinion, and Jeff Clayton remarked afterwards that the other year when he’d driven through Fayetteville and around Fort Bragg to visit the World Golf Hall of Fame at Pinehurst and come home in time for his beer ration from Alma, it hadn’t felt to him much like the tides in the Pasquotank River; still, what did Jeff Clayton know, and everyone agreed to give Spike the benefit of the doubt, since Spike had not just been out inta the world but – as old Jessie Wade herself so memorably put it – had been out outa the world as well.
Spike Tiggler dated the first ratchet-click of the escape-and-return cycle in his life to the day his father took him to Kitty Hawk, way back before the replica ark went up as a worship center. At this time, there was only the flat runway and the flat open sky above, and then, across an empty road with barely the glint of a distant truck, some flat dunes and the softly churning sea. Where other kids found allure in the lipstick and jazz of a brawling city, Spike found it in the calming simplicity of the land, sea and sky at Kitty Hawk. This, at any rate, was how he explained it at another of his fund-raising dinners, and they believed him, even though neither Mary-Beth nor Buck Weinhart had heard him talk like that back at the time.
Spike Tiggler’s home town was strong for the Democrats and even stronger for the Baptists. The Sunday after his trip to Kitty Hawk, Spike was heard displaying a rather too disrespectful sort of enthusiasm about the Wright Brothers outside the Church of the Holy Water, and old Jessie Wade opined to the thirteen-year-old that if God had intended us to fly, he’d have given us wings. ‘But God intended us to drive, didn’t he?’ replied young Spike, a shade too quick for courtesy, and actually pointing at the fr
eshly shined Packard in which his elderly detractor had ridden the two hundred yards to church; whereupon Spike’s father reminded him that if it were not for the Sabbath, the Lord might very well have intended Spike to receive a whack upside the head. The exchange, rather than anything about land and sea and sky, was what the inhabitants of Wadesville recalled of Spike Tiggler’s conversation, c. 1943.
A couple of years passed, the bomb fell on Hiroshima too soon for Mary-Beth’s mother, and Spike discovered that if God hadn’t given him wheels, then at least his father would occasionally loan him some. On warm evenings he and Buck Weinhart would play their game of picking out a slow automobile on a back road and trailing up behind it until their radiator grille was almost in the other fellow’s trunk. Then, as they pulled softly out and swept past, the two of them would yell in unison, ‘Drive it or milk it, fella!’ It was in the same car and at about this time that Spike, his eyes bulging with hope, said to Mary-Beth, ‘But if God didn’t intend us to use it, what did he put it there for?’ – a remark which set back his cause quite a few weeks, Mary-Beth being of a more church-obedient nature than young Spike, and this courting line of his in any case not being the most persuasive ever invented. A few weeks later, however, Spike found himself in the back seat murmuring, ‘I really don’t think I can live without you, Mary-Beth,’ and this seemed to do the trick.
Spike left Wadesville not too long afterwards, and more or less the next thing the town heard was that he was flying an F-86 Sabre jet out in Korea and stopping the Communist MiGs from crossing the Yalu River. It had taken a series of moments and emotions, not all of them logically linked, to get him there, and if Spike tried to reduce his life to a comic strip, as he sometimes did, he would first of all see himself standing on the dunes at Kitty Hawk, looking out to sea; then grabbing at Mary-Beth’s breast without being rejected and thinking, ‘God can’t strike me dead for this, he can’t’; and then driving at dusk with Buck Weinhart waiting for the early stars to come out. Love of machines was there too, of course, and patriotism, and a strong feeling that he looked pretty cute in his blue uniform; but in a way it was the earlier things he remembered the more vividly. That was what he meant, when he gave his first appeal for funds in 1975, about your life coming back to the place where it started. Wisely, no doubt, he didn’t translate this general sentiment into particular memories, else he probably wouldn’t have gotten a contribution out of Mary-Beth for one thing.