“In other moods, however (he was as given to moods as I), his theorizing would become half-serious, so it seemed to me, especially upon the subjects of Fate and Immortality, to which our youthful conversations often turned. Then his harangues, if no less fantastical, grew solemn and obscure, and if he was still baiting us, his passion undid the joke. His objection to popular opinions of the hereafter, he would declare, was their claim to general validity. Why need believers hold that all the drownèd rise to be judged at journey’s end, and non-believers that drowning is final without exception? In his opinion (so he’d vow at least), nearly everyone’s fate was permanent death; indeed he took a sour pleasure in supposing that every ‘Maker’ made thousands of separate seas in His creative lifetime, each populated like ours with millions of swimmers, and that in almost every instance both sea and swimmers were utterly annihilated, whether accidentally or by malevolent design. (Nothing if not pluralistical, he imagined there might be millions and billions of ‘Fathers,’ perhaps in some ‘night-sea’ of their own!) However—and here he turned infidels against him with the faithful—he professed to believe that in possibly a single night-sea per thousand, say, one of its quarter-billion swimmers (that is, one swimmer in two hundred fifty billions) achieved a qualified immortality. In some cases the rate might be slightly higher; in others it was vastly lower, for just as there are swimmers of every degree of proficiency, including some who drown before the journey starts, unable to swim at all, and others created drowned, as it were, so he imagined what can only be termed impotent Creators, Makers unable to Make, as well as uncommonly fertile ones and all grades between. And it pleased him to deny any necessary relation between a Maker’s productivity and His other virtues—including, even, the quality of His creatures.
“I could go on (he surely did) with his elaboration of these mad notions—such as that swimmers in other night-seas needn’t be of our kind; that Makers themselves might belong to different species, so to speak; that our particular Maker mightn’t Himself be immortal, or that we might be not only His emissaries but His ‘immortality,’ continuing His life and our own, transmogrified, beyond our individual deaths. Even this modified immortality (meaningless to me) he conceived as relative and contingent, subject to accidental or deliberate termination: his pet hypothesis was that Makers and swimmers each generate the other—against all odds, their number being so great—and that any given ‘immortality-chain’ could terminate after any number of cycles, so that what was ‘immortal’ (still speaking relatively) was only the cyclic process of incarnation, which itself might have a beginning and an end. Alternatively he liked to imagine cycles within cycles, either finite or infinite: for example, the ‘night-sea,’ as it were, in which Makers ‘swam’ and created night-seas and swimmers like ourselves, might be the creation of a larger Maker, Himself one of many, Who in turn et cetera. Time itself he regarded as relative to our experience, like magnitude: who knew but what, with each thrash of our tails, minuscule seas and swimmers, whole eternities, came to pass—as ours, perhaps, and our Maker’s Maker’s, was elapsing between the strokes of some supertail, in a slower order of time?
“Naturally I hooted with the others at this nonsense. We were young then, and had only the dimmest notion of what lay ahead; in our ignorance we imagined night-sea journeying to be a positively heroic enterprise. Its meaning and value we never questioned; to be sure, some must go down by the way, a pity no doubt, but to win a race requires that others lose, and like all my fellows I took for granted that I would be the winner. We milled and swarmed, impatient to be off, never mind where or why, only to try our youth against the realities of night and sea; if we indulged the skeptic at all, it was as a droll, half-contemptible mascot. When he died in the initial slaughter, no one cared.
“And even now I don’t subscribe to all his views—but I no longer scoff. The horror of our history has purged me of opinions, as of vanity, confidence, spirit, charity, hope, vitality, everything—except dull dread and a kind of melancholy, stunned persistence. What leads me to recall his fancies is my growing suspicion that I, of all swimmers, may be the sole survivor of this fell journey, tale-bearer of a generation. This suspicion, together with the recent sea-change, suggests to me now that nothing is impossible, not even my late companion’s wildest visions, and brings me to a certain desperate resolve, the point of my chronicling.
“Very likely I have lost my senses. The carnage at our setting out; our decimation by whirlpool, poisoned cataract, sea-convulsion; the panic stampedes, mutinies, slaughters, mass suicides; the mounting evidence that none will survive the journey—add to these anguish and fatigue; it were a miracle if sanity stayed afloat. Thus I admit, with the other possibilities, that the present sweetening and calming of the sea, and what seems to be a kind of vasty presence, song, or summons from the near upstream, may be hallucinations of disordered sensibility.…
“Perhaps, even, I am drowned already. Surely I was never meant for the rough-and-tumble of the swim; not impossibly I perished at the outset and have only imaged the night-sea journey from some final deep. In any case, I’m no longer young, and it is we spent old swimmers, disabused of every illusion, who are most vulnerable to dreams.
“Sometimes I think I am my drownèd friend.
“Out with it: I’ve begun to believe, not only that She exists, but that She lies not far ahead, and stills the sea, and draws me Herward! Aghast, I recollect his maddest notion: that our destination (which existed, mind, in but one night-sea out of hundreds and thousands) was no Shore, as commonly conceived, but a mysterious being, indescribable except by paradox and vaguest figure: wholly different from us swimmers, yet our complement; the death of us, yet our salvation and resurrection; simultaneously our journey’s end, mid-point, and commencement; not membered and thrashing like us, but a motionless or hugely gliding sphere of unimaginable dimension; self-contained, yet dependent absolutely, in some wise, upon the chance (always monstrously improbable) that one of us will survive the night-sea journey and reach … Her! Her, he called it, or She, which is to say, Other-than-a-he. I shake my head; the thing is too preposterous; it is myself I talk to, to keep my reason in this awful darkness. There is no She! There is no You! I rave to myself; it’s Death alone that hears and summons. To the drowned, all seas are calm.…
“Listen: my friend maintained that in every order of creation there are two sorts of creators, contrary yet complementary, one of which gives rise to seas and swimmers, the other to the Night-which-contains-the-sea and to What-waits-at-the-journey’s-end: the former, in short, to destiny, the latter to destination (and both profligately, involuntarily, perhaps indifferently or unwittingly). The ‘purpose’ of the night-sea journey—but not necessarily of the journeyer or of either Maker!—my friend could describe only in abstractions: consummation, transfiguration, union of contraries, transcension of categories. When we laughed, he would shrug and admit that he understood the business no better than we, and thought it ridiculous, dreary, possibly obscene. ‘But one of you,’ he’d add with his wry smile, ‘may be the Hero destined to complete the night-sea journey and be one with Her. Chances are, of course, you won’t make it.’ He himself, he declared, was not even going to try; the whole idea repelled him; if we chose to dismiss it as an ugly fiction, so much the better for us; thrash, splash, and be merry, we were soon enough drowned. But there it was, he could not say how he knew or why he bothered to tell us, any more than he could say what would happen after She and Hero, Shore and Swimmer, ‘merged identities’ to become something both and neither. He quite agreed with me that if the issue of that magical union had no memory of the night-sea journey, for example, it enjoyed a poor sort of immortality; even poorer if, as he rather imagined, a swimmer-hero plus a She equaled or became merely another Maker of future night-seas and the rest, at such incredible expense of life. This being the case—he was persuaded it was—the merciful thing to do was refuse to participate; the genuine heroes, in his opinion, were the suicides, and
the hero of heroes would be the swimmer who, in the very presence of the Other, refused Her proffered ‘immortality’ and thus put an end to at least one cycle of catastrophes.
“How we mocked him! Our moment came, we hurtled forth, pretending to glory in the adventure, thrashing, singing, cursing, strangling, rationalizing, rescuing, killing, inventing rules and stories and relationships, giving up, struggling on, but dying all, and still in darkness, until only a battered remnant was left to croak ‘Onward, upward,’ like a bitter echo. Then they too fell silent—victims, I can only presume, of the last frightful wave—and the moment came when I also, utterly desolate and spent, thrashed my last and gave myself over to the current, to sink or float as might be, but swim no more. Whereupon, marvelous to tell, in an instant the sea grew still! Then warmly, gently, the great tide turned, began to bear me, as it does now, onward and upward will-I nill-I, like a flood of joy—and I recalled with dismay my dead friend’s teaching.
“I am not deceived. This new emotion is Her doing; the desire that possesses me is Her bewitchment. Lucidity passes from me; in a moment I’ll cry ‘Love!’ bury myself in Her side, and be ‘transfigured.’ Which is to say, I die already; this fellow transported by passion is not I; I am he who abjures and rejects the night-sea journey! I.…
“I am all love. ‘Come!’ She whispers, and I have no will.
“You who I may be about to become, whatever You are: with the last twitch of my real self I beg You to listen. It is not love that sustains me! No; though Her magic makes me burn to sing the contrary, and though I drown even now for the blasphemy, I will say truth. What has fetched me across this dreadful sea is a single hope, gift of my poor dead comrade: that You may be stronger-willed than I, and that by sheer force of concentration I may transmit to You, along with Your official Heritage, a private legacy of awful recollection and negative resolve. Mad as it may be, my dream is that some unimaginable embodiment of myself (or myself plus Her if that’s how it must be) will come to find itself expressing, in however garbled or radical a translation, some reflection of these reflections. If against all odds this comes to pass, may You to whom, through whom I speak, do what I cannot: terminate this aimless, brutal business! Stop Your hearing against Her song! Hate love!
“Still alive, afloat, afire. Farewell then my penultimate hope: that one may be sunk for direst blasphemy on the very shore of the Shore. Can it be (my old friend would smile) that only utterest nay-sayers survive the night? But even that were Sense, and there is no sense, only senseless love, senseless death. Whoever echoes these reflections: be more courageous than their author! An end to night-sea journeys! Make no more! And forswear me when I shall forswear myself, deny myself, plunge into Her who summons, singing …
“ ‘Love! Love! Love!’ ”
AMBROSE HIS MARK
Owing to the hectic circumstances of my birth, for some months I had no proper name. Mother had seen Garbo in Anna Christie at the Dorset Opera House during her pregnancy and come to hope for a daughter, to be named by some logic Christine in honor of that lady. When I was brought home, after Father’s commitment to the Eastern Shore Asylum, she made no mention of a name nor showed any interest in selecting one, and the family were too concerned for her well-being to press the matter. She grew froward—by turns high-spirited and listless, voluble and dumb, doting and cynical. Some days she would permit no hands but hers to touch me, would haul me about from room to room, crooning and nuzzling: a photograph made by Uncle Karl on such a day shows her posed before our Concord vines, her pretty head thrown back, scarfed and ear-ringed like a gypsy; her eyes are closed, her mouth laughs gaily behind her cigarette; one hand holds a cup of coffee, the other steadies a scowling infant on her hip. Other times she would have none of me, or even suffer me in her sight. About my feeding there was ever some unease: if I cried, say, when the family was at table, forks would pause and eyes turn furtively to Andrea. For in one humor she would fetch out her breast in any company and feed me while she smoked or strolled the garden—nor nurse me quietly at that, but demand of Aunt Rosa whether I hadn’t Hector’s eyes.…
“Ja, well.”
“And Poppa Tom’s appetite. Look, Konrad, how he wolfs it. There’s a man for you.”
Grandfather openly relished these performances; he chuckled at the mentions of himself, teased Uncle Konrad for averting his eyes, and never turned his own from my refections.
“Now there is Beauty’s picture, nicht wahr, Konrad? Mother and child.”
But his entertainment was not assured: just as often Andrea would say, “Lord, there goes Christine again. Stick something in his mouth, Rosie, would you?” or merely sigh—a rueful expiration that still blows fitful as her ghost through my memory—and say nothing, but let Aunt Rosa (always nervously at hand) prepare and administer my bottle, not even troubling to make her kindless joke about the grand unsuckled bosoms of that lady.
To Rosa I was Honig; Mother too, when “Christine” seemed unfunny, called me thus, and in the absence of anything official, Honey soon lost the quality of endearment and took the neutral function of a proper name. Uncle Konrad privately held out for Hector, but no one ventured to bring up her husband’s name in Mother’s presence. Uncle Karl was not in town to offer an opinion. Aunt Rosa believed that calling me Thomas might improve relations between Grandfather and his youngest son; but though he’d made no secret of his desire to have my older brother be his namesake, and his grievance at the choice of Peter, Grandfather displayed no more interest than did Andrea in naming me. Rosa attributed his indifference to bruised pride; in any case, given Mother’s attitude, the question of my nomination was academic. Baptism was delayed, postponed, anon forgot.
Only once did Mother allude to my namelessness, some two or three months after my birth. I was lying in Aunt Rosa’s lap, drinking from a bottle; dinner was just done; the family lingered over coffee. Suddenly Andrea, on one of her impulses, cried “Give him here, Rose!” and snatched me up. I made a great commotion.
“Now, you frightened it,” Rosa chided.
Andrea ignored her. “ ’E doesn’t want Rosie’s old bottle, does Christine.”
Her croon failed to console me. “Hold him till I unbutton,” she said—not to Rosa but to Uncle Konrad. Her motives, doubtless, were the usual: to make Aunt Rosa envious, amuse Grandfather, and mortify Uncle Konrad, who could not now readily look away. She undid her peignoir, casually bemoaning her abundance of milk: it was making her clothes a sight, it was hurting her besides, she must nurse me more regularly. She did not at once retrieve me but with such chatter as this bent forward, cupped her breast, invited me to drink the sweet pap already beading and spreading under her fingers. Uncle Konrad, it was agreed, at no time before or after turned so crimson.
“Here’s what the Honey wants,” Andrea said, relieving him finally of his charge. To the company in general she declared, “It does feel good, you know: there’s a nerve or something runs from here right to you-know-where.”
“Schämt euch!” Aunt Rosa cried.
“Ja sure,” Grandfather said merrily. “You named it!”
“No, really, she knows as well as I do what it’s like. Doesn’t she, Christine. Sure Mother likes to feed her little mannie, look how he grabs, poor darling.…” Here she was taken unexpectedly with grief; pressed me fiercely to her, drew the peignoir about us; her tears warmed my forehead and her breast. “Who will he ever be, Konrad? Little orphan of the storm, who is he now?”
“Ah! Ah!” Rosa rushed to hug her. Grandfather drew and sucked upon his meerschaum, which however had gone dead out.
“Keep up like you have been,” Konrad said stiffiy; “soon he’ll be old enough to pick his own name.” My uncle taught fifth grade at East Dorset School, of which Hector had been principal until his commitment, and in summers was a vendor of encyclopedias and tuner of pianos. To see things in their larger context was his gentle aim; to harmonize part with part, time with time; and he never withheld from us what he deemed germ
ane or helpful. The American Indians, he declared now, had the right idea. “They never named a boy right off. What they did, they watched to find out who he was. They’d look for the right sign to tell them what to call him.”
Grandfather scratched a kitchen match on his thumbnail and relit his pipe.
“There’s sense in that,” Uncle Konrad persevered. “How can you tell what name’ll suit a person when you don’t know him yet?”
Ordinarily Rosa was his audience; preoccupied now with Andrea, she did not respond.