point of nullity. Perhaps now the very emptiness of life will take on meaning, will provide the clue.”
He came to a dead stop, remained absolutely immobile for a space, then raised himself on one elbow.
“The criminal aspect of the mind! I don’t know how or where I got hold of that phrase, but it enthralls me absolutely. It might well be the overall title for the books I have in mind to write. The very word criminal shakes me to the foundations. It’s such a meaningless word today, yet it’s the most—what shall I say?—the most serious word in man’s vocabulary. The very notion of crime is an awesome one. It has such deep, tangled roots. Once the great word, for me, was rebel. When I say criminal, however, I find myself utterly baffled. Sometimes, I confess, I don’t know what the word means. Or, if I think I do, then I am forced to look upon the whole human race as one indescribable hydra-headed monster whose name is CRIMINAL. I sometimes put it another way to myself—man his own criminal. Which is almost meaningless. What I’m trying to say, though perhaps it’s trite, banal, oversimplified, is this . . . If there is such a thing as a criminal, then the whole race is tainted. You can’t remove the criminal element in man by performing a surgical operation on society. What’s criminal is cancerous, and what’s cancerous is unclean. Crime isn’t merely coeval with law and order, crime is prenatal, so to speak. It’s in the very consciousness of man, and it won’t be dislodged, it won’t be extirpated, until a new consciousness is born. Do I make it clear? The question I ask myself over and over is—how did man ever come to look upon himself, or his fellow man, as a criminal? What caused him to harbor guilt feelings? To make even the animals feel guilty? How did he ever come to poison life at the source, in other words? It’s very convenient to blame it on the priesthood. But I can’t credit them with having that much power over us. If we are victims, they are too. But what are we the victims of? What is it that tortures us, young and old alike, the wise as well as the innocent? It’s my belief that that is what we are going to discover, now that we’ve been driven underground. Rendered naked and destitute, we will be able to give ourselves up to the grand problem unhindered. For an eternity, if need be. Nothing else is of importance, don’t you see? Maybe you don’t. Maybe I see it so clearly that I can’t express it adequately in words. Anyway, that’s our world perspective. . . .”
At this point he got out of bed to fix himself a drink, asking as he did so if I could stand any more of his drivel. I nodded affirmatively.
“I’m thoroughly wound up, as you see,” he continued. “As a matter of fact, I’m beginning to see it all so clearly again, now that I’ve unlimbered to you, that I almost feel I could write the books myself. If I haven’t lived for myself I certainly have lived other people’s lives. Perhaps I’ll begin to live my own when I begin writing. You know, I already feel kindlier toward the world, just getting this much off my chest. Maybe you were right about being more generous with myself. It’s certainly a relaxing thought. Inside I’m all steel girders. I’ve got to melt, grow fiber, cartilage, lymph and muscle. To think that anyone could let himself grow so rigid . . . ridiculous, what! That’s what comes from battling all one’s life.”
He paused long enough to take a good slug, then raced on.
“You know, there isn’t a thing in the world worth fighting for except peace of mind. The more you triumph in this world the more you defeat yourself. Jesus was right. One has to triumph over the world. ‘Overcome the world,’ I think was the expression. To do that, of course, means acquiring a new consciousness, a new view of things. And that’s the only meaning one can put on freedom. No man can attain freedom who is of the world. Die to the world and you find life everlasting. You know, I suppose, that the advent of Christ was of the greatest importance to Dostoevski. Dostoevski only succeeded in embracing the idea of God through conceiving of a man-god. He humanized the conception of God, brought Him nearer to us, made Him more comprehensible, and finally, strange as it may sound, even more Godlike. . . . Once again I must come back to the criminal. The only sin, or crime, that man could commit, in the eyes of Jesus, was to sin against the Holy Ghost. To deny the spirit, or the life force, if you will. Christ recognized no such thing as a criminal. He ignored all this nonsense, this confusion, this rank superstition with which man has saddled himself for millennia. ‘He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone!’ Which doesn’t mean that Christ regarded all men as sinners. No, but that we are all imbued, dyed, tainted with the notion of sin. As I understand his words, it is out of a sense of guilt that we created sin and evil. Not that sin and evil have any reality of their own. Which brings me back again to the present impasse. Despite all the truths that Christ enunciated, the world is now riddled and saturated with sinfulness. Everyone behaves like a criminal toward his fellow man. And so, unless we set about killing one another off—worldwide massacre—we’ve got to come to grips with the demonic power which rules us. We’ve got to convert it into a healthy, dynamic force which will liberate not us alone—we are not so important!—but the life-force which is dammed up in us. Only then will we begin to live. And to live means eternal life, nothing less. It was man who created death, not God. Death is the sign of our vulnerability, nothing more.”
He went on and on and on. I didn’t get a wink of sleep until near dawn. When I awoke he was gone. On the table I found a five-dollar bill and a brief note saying that I should forget everything we had talked about, that it was of no importance. “I’m ordering a new suit just the same,” he added. “You can choose the material for me.”
Naturally I couldn’t forget it, as he suggested. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything else for weeks but “man the criminal,” or, as Stymer had put it, “man his own criminal.”
One of the many expressions he had dropped plagued me interminably, the one about “man taking refuge in the mind.” It was the first time, I do believe, that I ever questioned the existence of mind as something apart. The thought that possibly all was mind fascinated me. It sounded more revolutionary than anything I had heard hitherto.
It was certainly curious, to say the least, that a man of Stymer’s caliber should have been obsessed by this idea of going underground, of taking refuge in the mind. The more I thought about the subject the more I felt that he was trying to make of the cosmos one grand, stupefying rattrap. When, a few months later, upon sending him a notice to call for a fitting, I learned that he had died of a hemorrhage of the brain, I wasn’t in the least surprised. His mind had evidently rejected the conclusions he had imposed upon it. He had mentally masturbated himself to death. With that I stopped worrying about the mind as a refuge. Mind is all. God is all. So what?
3
When a situation gets so bad that no solution seems possible there is left only murder or suicide. Or both. These failing, one becomes a buffoon.
Amazing how active one can become when there is nothing to contend with but one’s own desperation. Events pile up of their own accord. Everything is converted to drama . . . to melodrama.
The ground began to give way under my feet with the slow realization that no show of anger, no threats, no display of grief, tenderness or remorse, nothing I said or did, made the least difference to her. What is called “a man” would no doubt have swallowed his pride or grief and walked out on the show. Not this little Beelzebub!
I was no longer a man; I was a creature returned to the wild state. Perpetual panic, that was my normal state. The more unwanted I was, the closer I stuck. The more I was wounded and humiliated, the more I craved punishment. Always praying for a miracle to occur, I did nothing to bring one about. What’s more, I was powerless to blame her, or Stasia, or anyone, even myself, though I often pretended to. Nor could I, despite natural inclination, bring myself to believe that it had just “happened.” I had enough understanding left to realize that a condition such as we were in doesn’t just happen. No, I had to admit to myself that it had been preparing for quite a
