Jeremy uttered a little cough. “I can think of some pretty adequate statements about . . .” he paused, beamed, caressed his polished scalp; . . . “well, about the more intime aspects of our animal nature,” he concluded demurely. His face suddenly clouded; he had remembered his treasure trove and Dr. Obispo’s impudent theft.
“But what does their adequacy depend on?” Mr. Propter asked. “Not so much on the writer’s skill as the reader’s response. The direct, animal intuitions aren’t rendered by words; the words merely remind you of your memories of similar experiences. Notus color is what Virgil says when he’s talking about the sensations experienced by Vulcan in the embraces of Venus. Familiar heat. No attempt at description or analysis; no effort to get any kind of verbal equivalence to the facts. Just a reminder. But that reminder is enough to make the passage one of the most voluptuous affairs in Latin poetry. Virgil left the work to his readers. And, by and large, that’s what most erotic writers are content to do. The few who try to do the work themselves have to flounder about with metaphors and similes and analogies. You know the sort of stuff: fire, whirlwinds, heaven, darts.”
“ ‘The vale of lilies,’ ” Jeremy quoted, “ ‘And the bower of bliss.’ ”
“Not to mention the expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” said Mr. Propter; “and all the other figures of speech. An endless variety, with only one feature in common—they’re all composed of words which don’t connote any aspect of the subject they’re supposed to describe.”
“Saying one thing in order to mean another,” Jeremy put in. “Isn’t that one of the possible definitions of imaginative literature?”
“Maybe,” Mr. Propter answered. “But what chiefly interests me at the moment is the fact that our immediate animal intuitions have never been given any but the most summary and inadequate labels. We say ‘red,’ for example, or ‘pleasant,’ and just leave it at that without trying to find verbal equivalents for the various aspects of perceiving redness or experiencing pleasure.”
“Well, isn’t that because you can’t go beyond ‘red’ or ‘pleasant’?” said Pete. “They’re just facts, ultimate facts.”
“Like giraffes,” Jeremy added. “ ‘There ain’t no such animal,’ is what the rationalist says, when he’s shown its portrait. And then in it walks, neck and all!”
“You’re right,” said Mr. Propter. “A giraffe is an ultimate fact. You’ve got to accept it, whether you like it or not. But accepting the giraffe doesn’t prevent you from studying and describing it. And the same applies to redness or pleasure or notus calor. They can be analysed, and the results of the analysis can be described by means of suitable words. But as a matter of historical fact, this hasn’t been done.”
Pete nodded slowly. “Why do you figure that should be?” he asked.
“Well,” said Mr. Propter, “I should say it’s because men have always been more interested in doing and feeling than in understanding. Always too busy making good and having thrills and doing what’s ‘done’ and worshipping the local idols—too busy with all this even to feel any desire to have an adequate verbal instrument for elucidating their experiences. Look at the languages we’ve inherited—incomparably effective in rousing violent and exciting emotions; an ever-present help for those who want to get on in the world; worse than useless for any one who aspires to disinterested understanding. Hence, even on the strictly human level, the need for special impersonal languages like mathematics and technical vocabularies of the various sciences. Wherever men have felt the wish to understand, they’ve given up the traditional language and substituted for it another special language, more precise and, above all, less contaminated with self-interest.
“Now, here’s a very significant fact. Imaginative literature deals mainly with the everyday life of men and women; and the everyday life of men and women consists, to a large extent, of immediate animal experiences. But the makers of imaginative literature have never forged an impersonal, uncontaminated language for the elucidation of immediate experiences. They’re content to use the bare, unanalysed names of experiences as mere aids to their own and their reader’s memory. Every direct intuition is notus calor, with the connotation of the words left open, so to speak, for each individual reader to supply according to the nature of his or her particular experiences in the past. Simple, but not exactly scientific. But then people don’t read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.”
Mr. Propter looked down again at the close-set lines of Molinos’ epistle. “ ‘Oirá y leerá el hombre racional estas espirituales materias,’ ” he read out once more. “ ‘Pero non llegerá a comprenderlas’ He’ll hear and read these things, but he won’t succeed in understanding them. And he won’t succeed,” said Mr. Propter, closing the file and handing it back to Jeremy, “he won’t succeed for one of two excellent reasons. Either he has never seen the giraffes in question, and so, being an hombre racional, knows quite well that there ain’t no such animal. Or else he has had glimpses of the creatures, or has some other reason for believing in their existence, but can’t understand what the experts say about them; can’t understand because of the inadequacy of the language in which the fauna of the spiritual world are ordinarily described. In other words, he either hasn’t had the immediate experience of eternity and so has no reason to believe that eternity exists; or else he does believe that eternity exists, but can’t make head or tail of the language in which it’s talked about by those who have had experience of it. Furthermore, when he wants to talk about eternity himself—and he may wish to do so either in order to communicate his own experiences to others or to understand them better, from the human point of view, himself—he finds himself on the horns of a dilemma. For either he recognizes that the existing language is unsuitable—in which case he has only two rational choices: to say nothing at all, or to invent a new and better technical language of his own, a calculus of eternity, so to speak, a special algebra of spiritual experience (and if he does invent it, nobody who hasn’t learnt it will know what he’s talking about). So much for the first horn of the dilemma. The second horn is reserved for those who don’t recognize the inadequacy of the existing language; or else who do recognize it, but are irrationally hopeful enough to take a chance with an instrument which they know to be worthless. These people will write in the existing language, and their writing will be, in consequence, more or less completely misunderstood by most of their readers. Inevitably, because the words they use don’t correspond to the things they’re talking about. Most of them are words taken from the language of everyday life. But the language of everyday life refers almost exclusively to strictly human affairs. What happens when you apply words derived from that language to experiences on the plane of the spirit, the plane of timeless experience? Obviously, you create a misunderstanding; you say what you didn’t mean to say.”
Pete interrupted him. “I’d like an example, Mr. Propter,” he said.
“All right,” the other answered. “Let’s take the commonest word in all religious literature: love. On the human level the word means—what? Practically everything from Mother to the Marquis de Sade.”
The name reminded Jeremy yet again of what had happened to the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.” Really it was too insufferable! The impudence of it ... !
“We don’t even make the simple Greek distinction between erao and philo, eros and agape. With us, everything is just love, whether it’s self-sacrificing or possessive, whether it’s friendship or lust or homicidal lunacy. It’s all just love,” he repeated. “Idiotic word! Even on the human level it’s hopelessly ambiguous. And when you begin using it in relation to experiences on the level of eternity—well, it’s simply disastrous. ‘The love of God.’ ‘God’s love for us.’ ‘The saint’s love for his fellows.’ What does the wor
d stand for in such phrases? And in what way is this related to what it stands for when it’s applied to a young mother suckling her baby? Or to Romeo climbing into Juliet’s bedroom? Or to Othello as he strangles Desdemona? Or to the research worker who loves his science? Or to the patriot who’s ready to die for his country—to die, and, in the meantime, to kill, steal, lie, swindle and torture for it? Is there really anything in common between what the word stands for in these contexts and what it stands for when one talks, let us say, of the Buddha’s love for all sentient beings? Obviously, the answer is: No, there isn’t. On the human level, the word stands for a great many different states of mind and ways of behaving. Dissimilar in many respects, but alike at least in this: they’re all accompanied by emotional excitement and they all contain an element of craving. Whereas the most characteristic features of the enlightened person’s experience are serenity and disinterestedness. In other words, the absence of excitement and the absence of craving.”
“The absence of excitement and the absence of craving,” Pete said to himself, while the image of Virginia in her yachting cap, riding her pink scooter, kneeling in her shorts under the arch of the Grotto, swam before his inward eye.
“Distinctions in fact ought to be represented by distinctions in language,” Mr. Propter was saying. “If they’re not, you can’t expect to talk sense. In spite of which, we insist on using one word to connote entirely different things. ‘God is love,’ we say. The word’s the same as the one we use when we talk about ‘being in love,’ or ‘loving one’s children’ or ‘being inspired by love of country.’ Consequently we tend to think that the thing we’re talking about must be more or less the same. We imagine in a vague, reverential way, that God is composed of a kind of immensely magnified yearning.” Mr. Propter shook his head. “Creating God in our own image. It flatters our vanity, and of course we prefer vanity to understanding. Hence those confusions of language. If we wanted to understand the world, if we wanted to think about it realistically, we should say that we were in love, but that God was x-love. In this way people who had never had any first-hand experience on the level of eternity would at least be given a chance of knowing intellectually that what happens on that level is not the same as what happens on the strictly human level. They’d know, because they’d seen it in print, that there was some kind of difference between love and x-love. Consequently, they’d have less excuse than people have today for imagining that God was like themselves, only a bit more so on the side of respectability and a bit less so, of course, on the other side.
“And naturally what applies to the word ‘love’ applies to all the other words taken over from the language of everyday life and used to describe spiritual experience. Words like ‘knowledge,’ ‘wisdom,’ ‘power,’ ‘mind,’ ‘peace,’ ‘joy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘good.’ They stand for certain things on the human level. But the things that writers force them to stand for when they describe events on the level of eternity are quite different. Hence the use of them merely confuses the issue. They just make it all but impossible for any one to know what’s being talked about. And, meanwhile, you must remember that these words from the language of everyday life aren’t the only trouble-makers. People who write about experiences on the level of eternity also make use of technical phrases borrowed from various systems of philosophy.”
“Isn’t that your algebra of spiritual experience?” said Pete. “Isn’t that the special, scientific language you’ve been talking about?”
“It’s an attempt at such an algebra,” Mr. Propter answered. “But unfortunately a very unsuccessful attempt. Unsuccessful because this particular algebra is derived from the language of metaphysics—bad metaphysics, incidentally. The people who use it are committing themselves, whether they like it or not, to an explanation of the facts as well as a description. An explanation of actual experiences in terms of metaphysical entities, whose existence is purely hypothetical and can’t be demonstrated. In other words, they’re describing the facts in terms of figments of the imagination; they’re explaining the known in terms of the unknown. Take a few examples. Here’s one: ‘ecstasy.’ It’s a technical term that refers to the soul’s ability to stand outside the body—and of course it carries the further implication that we know what the soul is and how it’s related to the body and the rest of the universe. Or take another instance, a technical term that is essential to the Catholic theory of mysticism, ‘infused contemplation’ Here the implication is that there’s somebody outside us who pours a certain kind of psychological experience into our minds. The further implication is that we know who that somebody is. Or consider even ‘union with God.’ ,What it means depends on the upbringing of the speaker. It may mean ‘union with the Jehovah of the Old Testament’ Or it may mean ‘union with the personal deity of orthodox Christianity’ It may mean what it probably would have meant, say, to Eckhart, ‘union with the impersonal Godhead of which the God of orthodoxy is an aspect and a particular limitation’ Similarly, if you were an Indian, it may mean ‘union with Isvara’ or ‘union with Brahman’ In every case, the term implies a previous knowledge about the nature of things which are either completely unknowable, or at best only to be inferred from the nature of the experiences which the term is supposed to describe. So there,” Mr. Propter concluded, “you have the second horn of the dilemma—the horn on which all those who use the current religious vocabulary to describe their experiences on the level of eternity inevitably impale themselves.”
“And the way between the horns?” Jeremy questioned. “Isn’t it the way of the professional psychologists who have written about mysticism? They’ve evolved a pretty sensible language. You haven’t mentioned them.”
“I haven’t mentioned them,” said Mr. Propter, “for the same reason as in talking about beauty I shouldn’t mention professional aestheticians who had never been inside a picture gallery.”
“You mean, they don’t know what they’re talking about?”
Mr. Propter smiled. “I’d put it another way,” he said. “They talk about what they know. But what they know isn’t worth talking about. For what they know is only the literature of mysticism—not the experience.”
“Then there’s no way between the horns,” Jeremy concluded. His eyes twinkled behind his spectacles; he smiled like a child, taking a sly triumph in some small consummation of naughtiness. “What fun it is when there isn’t a way between!” he went on. “It makes the world seem so deliciously cosy, when all the issues are barred and there’s nowhere to go to with all your brass bands and shining armour. Onward, Christian soldiers! Forward, the Light Brigade! Excelsior! And all the time you’re just going round and round—head to tail, follow-my Fuehrer—like Fabre’s caterpillars. That really gives me a great deal of pleasure!”
This time Mr. Propter laughed outright. “I’m sorry to have to disappoint you,” he said. “But unfortunately there is a way between the horns. The practical way. You can go and find out what it means for yourself, by first-hand experience. Just as you can find out what El Greco’s Crucifixion of St. Peter looks like by taking the elevator and going up to the hall. Only in this case, I’m afraid, there isn’t any elevator. You have to go up on your own legs. And make no mistake,” he added, turning to Pete, “there’s an awful lot of stairs.”
Dr. Obispo straightened himself up, took the tubes of the stethoscope out of his ears and stowed the instrument away in his pocket along with the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome.”
“Anything bad?” Mr. Stoyte asked anxiously.
Dr. Obispo shook his head and gave him a smile of reassurance. “No influenza anyhow,” he said. “Just a slight intensification of the bronchial condition. I’ll give you something for it tonight before you go to bed.”
Mr. Stoyte’s face relaxed into cheerfulness. “Glad it was only a false alarm,” he said and turned away to get his clothes, which were lying in a heap on the sofa, under the Watteau.
From her seat at the soda counter, Virginia let out a whoop o
f triumph. “Isn’t that just swell!” she cried. Then in another, graver tone, “You know, Uncle Jo,” she added, “he’s got me panicked about that cough of yours. Panicked,” she repeated.
Uncle Jo grinned triumphantly and slapped his chest so hard that its hairy, almost female accumulations of flesh shivered like jellies under the blow. “Nothing wrong with me” he boasted.
Virginia watched him over the top of her glass, as he got into his shirt and knotted his tie. The expression on her innocent young face was one of perfect serenity. But behind those limpid blue eyes her mind was simmering with activity. “Was that a close call?” she kept saying to herself. “Gee, was it close!” At the recollection of that sudden violent start at the sound of the elevator gate being opened, of that wild scramble as the footsteps approached along the corridor, she felt herself tingling with a delicious mixture of fear and amusement, of apprehension and triumph. It was the sensation she used to have as a child, playing hide and seek in the dark. A close call! And hadn’t Sig been wonderful! What presence of mind! And that stethoscope thing he pulled out of his pocket—what a brain wave! It had saved the situation! Because, without the stethoscope, Uncle Jo would have put on one of his jealousy acts. Though what right he had to be jealous, Virginia went on to reflect, with a strong sense of injury, she really didn’t know. Seeing that nothing had happened except just a little reading aloud. And anyhow why shouldn’t a girl be allowed to read that sort of thing if she wanted to? Especially as it was in French. And, besides, who was Uncle Jo to be prudish, she’d like to know? Getting mad with people only for telling you a funny story, when just look what he himself was doing all the time—and then expecting you to talk like Louisa M. Alcott, and thinking you ought to be protected from hearing so much as a dirty word! And the way he simply wouldn’t allow her to tell the truth about herself, even if she had wanted to. Making a build-up of her as somebody quite different from what she really was. Acting almost as though she were Daisy Mae in the comic strip and he a sort of Little Abner rescuing her in the nick of time. Though, of course, he had to admit that it had happened at least once before he came along, because if it hadn’t, there’d have been no excuse for him. It had happened, but quite unwillingly—you know, practically a rape—or else some fellow taking advantage of her being so dumb and innocent—at the Congo Club with nothing on but a G-string and some talcum powder! And naturally she was always supposed to have hated it; crying her eyes out all the time until Uncle Jo came along; and then everything was different. But in that case, it now suddenly occurred to Virginia, if that was the way he thought about her, what the hell did he mean by coming home like this at seven-fifteen, when he’d told her he wouldn’t be back till eight? The old double-crosser! Was he trying to spy on her? Because, if so, she wasn’t going to stand for it; if so, then it just served him right that that was what Sig had been reading to her. He was just getting what he deserved for snooping around, trying to catch her doing something that wasn’t right. Well, if that was how he was going to act, she’d tell Sig to come every day and read another chapter. Though how on earth the man who wrote the book was going to keep it up for a hundred and twenty days, she really couldn’t imagine. Considering what had happened already in the first week—and here was she, figuring that there wasn’t anything she didn’t know! Well, one lived and learnt. Though there was some of it she really hadn’t in the least wanted to learn. Things that made you feel sick to your stomach. Horrible! As bad as having babies! (She shuddered.) Not that there weren’t a lot of funny things in the book too. The piece she had made Sig read over again—that was grand, that had given her a real kick. And that other bit where the girl . . .