LOST IN THE COSMOS: THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK

IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE reading a book about the Cosmos. You find it so interesting that you go out and buy a telescope. One fine clear moonless night you set up your telescope and focus on the brightest star in the sky. It is a planet, not a star, with a reddish spot and several moons. Excited, you look up the planets in your book about the Cosmos. You read a description of the planets. You read a sentence about a large yellowish planet with a red spot and several moons. You recognize both the description and the picture. Clearly, you have been looking at Jupiter.

You have no difficulty at all in saying that it is Jupiter, not Mars or Saturn, even though the object you are looking at is something you have never seen before and is hundreds of millions of miles distant.

Now imagine that you are reading the newspaper. You come to the astrology column. You may or may not believe in astrology, but to judge from the popularity of astrology these days, you will probably read your horoscope. According to a recent poll, more Americans set store in astrology than in science or God.

You are an Aries. You open your newspaper to the astrology column and read an analysis of the Aries personality. It says among other things:

You have the knack of creating an atmosphere of thought and movement, unhampered by petty jealousies. But you have the tendency to scatter your talents to the four winds.

Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.

Suddenly you realize you’ve made a mistake. You’ve read the Gemini column. So you go back to Aries:

Nothing hurts you more than to be unjustly mistreated or suspected. But you have a way about you, a gift for seeing things through despite all obstacles and distractions. You also have a desperate need to be liked. So you have been wounded more often than you will admit.

Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.

The first question is: Why is it that both descriptions seem to fit you — or, for that matter, why do you seem to recognize yourself in the self-analysis of all twelve astrological signs? Or, to put it another way, why is it that you can recognize and identify the planets Jupiter and Venus so readily after reading a bit and taking one look, yet have so much trouble identifying yourself from twelve descriptions when, presumably, you know yourself much better than you know Jupiter and Venus?

(2) Can you explain why it is that there are, at last count, sixteen schools of psychotherapy with sixteen theories of the personality and its disorders and that patients treated in one school seem to do as well or as badly as patients treated in any other — while there is only one generally accepted theory of the cause and cure of pneumococcal pneumonia and only one generally accepted theory of the orbits of the planets and the gravitational attraction of our galaxy and the galaxy M31 in Andromeda? (Hint: If you answer that the human psyche is more complicated than the pneumococcus and the human white-cell response or the galaxies or Einstein’s general theory of relativity, keep in mind that the burden of proof is on you. Or if you answer that the study of the human psyche is in its infancy, remember then this infancy has lasted 2,500 years and, unlike physics, we don’t seem to know much more about the psyche than Plato did.)

(3) How do you explain these odd little everyday phenomena with which everyone is familiar:

You have seen yourself a thousand times in the mirror, face to face. No sight is more familiar. Yet why is it that the first time you see yourself in a clothier’s triple mirror — from the side, so to speak — it comes as a shock? Or the first time you saw yourself in a home movie: were you embarrassed? What about the first time you heard your recorded voice — did you recognize it? Clearly, you should, since you’ve been hearing it all your life.

Why is it that, when you are shown a group photograph in which you are present, you always (and probably covertly) seek yourself out? To see what you look like? Don’t you know what you look like?

Has this ever happened to you? You are walking along a street of stores. There are other people walking. You catch a glimpse in a store window of a reflection of a person. For a second or so you do not recognize the person. He, she, seems a total stranger. Then you realize it is your own reflection. Then in a kind of transformation, the reflection does in fact become your familiar self.

One of the peculiar ironies of being a human self in the Cosmos: A stranger approaching you in the street will in a second’s glance see you whole, size you up, place you in a way in which you cannot and never will, even though you have spent a lifetime with yourself, live in the Century of the Self, and therefore ought to know yourself best of all.

The question is: Why is it that in your entire lifetime you will never be able to size yourself up as you can size up somebody else — or size up Saturn — in a ten-second look?

Why is it that the look of another person looking at you is different from everything else in the Cosmos? That is to say, looking at lions or tigers or Saturn or the Ring Nebula or at an owl or at another person from the side is one thing, but finding yourself looking into the eyes of another person looking at you is something else. And why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

(4) The following experiment was performed on a group of ten subjects. See how you would answer the questions.

Think of five acquaintances, not close friends, not lovers, not family members.

Describe each by three adjectives (in the experiment, a “personality characteristic chart” was provided on which one could score an acquaintance on a scale of “good” and “bad” qualities, e.g., more or less trustworthy, attractive, boring, intelligent, selfish, flighty, outgoing, introspective, and so on). Thus, you might describe an acquaintance named Gary McPherson as fairly good company, moderately trustworthy, funny but a little malicious, and so on. Or Linda Ellison: fairly good-looking (a 7 or 7½), more intelligent than she lets on, a good listener. And so on.

Note that most if not all of your adjectives could be placed on a finite scale, say from a plus ten to a minus ten.

Now, having described five acquaintances, do the following. Read these two sentences carefully:

(a) You are extraordinarily generous, ecstatically loving of the right person, supremely knowledgeable about what is wrong with the country, about people, capable of moments of insight unsurpassed by any scientist or artist or writer in the country. You possess an infinite potentiality.

(b) You are of all people in the world probably the most selfish, hateful, envious (e.g., you take pleasure in reading death notices in the newspaper and in hearing of an acquaintance’s heart attack), the most treacherous, the most frightened, and above all the phoniest.

Now answer this question as honestly as you can: Which of these two sentences more nearly describes you? CHECK (a), (b), (neither), (both).

If you checked (both)—60 percent of respondents did — how can that be?

(5) Do you understand sexuality?

That is to say, are you happy with either of the two standard versions of sexuality:

One, the biological — that the sex drive is one among several needs and drives evolved through natural selection as a means of sustaining the life of the organism and ensuring the survival of the species. Thus, sexual desire is one item on a list which includes other such items as hunger, thirst, needs of shelter, nest-building, migration, and so on.

The other, the religious-humanistic — sex is an expression, perhaps the ultimate expression, of love and communication between a man and a woman, and is best exemplified in marriage, raising children, the sharing of a life, family, home, and fireside.

Or do you see sexuality as a unique trait of the present-day self (which is the only self we know), occupying an absolutely central locus in the consciousness particularly as it relates to other sexual beings, of an order and magnitude of power incommensurate with other “drives” and also specified by the very structure of the present-day self as its very core and as its prime avenue of intercourse with others?

If the sexual drive is but one of several biological needs, why are we living in the most eroticized society in history? Why don’t TV, films, billboards, magazines feature culinary delights, e.g., huge chocolate cakes, hams, roasts, strawberries, instead of women’s bodies?

Or are you more confused about sexuality than any other phenomenon in the Cosmos?

Do you know why it is that men and women exhibit sexual behavior undreamed of among the other several million species, with every conceivable sexual relation between persons, or with only one person, or between a male and female, or between two male persons, or two female persons, or two males and one female, or two females and one male; relationships moreover which can implicate every orifice and appendage of the human body and which bear no relation to the reproduction and survival of the species?

Is the following statement true or false:

Pornography is not an aberration of a few sexually frustrated middle-aged men in gray raincoats; it is rather a salient and prime property of modern consciousness, of three hundred years of technology and the industrial revolution, and is symptomatic of a radical disorder in the relation of the self to other selves which generally manifests itself in the abstracted state of one self (male) and the degradation of another self (female) to an abstract object of satisfaction.

(6) Consider the following short descriptions of different kinds of consciousness of self. Which of the selves, if any, do you identify with?

(a) The cosmological self. The self is either unconscious of itself or only conscious of itself insofar as it is identified with a cosmological myth or classificatory system, e.g., totemism. Ask a Bororo tribesman: Who are you? He may reply: I am parakeet. (Ask an L.S.U. fan at a football game: Who are you? He may reply: I am a tiger.)

(b) The Brahmin-Buddhist self. Who are you? What is your self? My self in this life is impaled on the wheel of non-being, obscured by the veil of unreality. But it can realize itself by penetrating the veil of maya and plumbing the depths of self until it achieves nirvana, nothingness, or the Brahman, God. The atman (self) is the Brahman (God).

(c) The Christian self (and, to a degree, the Judaic and Islamic self). The self sees itself as a creature, created by God, estranged from God by an aboriginal catastrophe, and now reconciled with him. Before the reconciliation, the self is, as Paul told the Ephesians, a stranger to every covenant, with no promise to hope for, with the world about you and no God. But now the self becomes a son of God, a member of a family of selves, and is conscious of itself as a creature of God embarked upon a pilgrimage in this life and destined for happiness and reunion with God in a later life.

(d) The role-taking self. One sociological view of the self is that the self achieves its identity by taking roles and modeling its own role from the roles of others, e.g., one’s mother, father, housewife, breadwinner, macho-boy-man, feminine-doll-girl, etc. — and also, as George Mead said, upon how one perceives others’ perceptions of oneself.

(e) The standard American-Jeffersonian high-school-commencement Republican-and-Democratic-platform self. The self is an individual entity created by God and endowed with certain inalienable rights and the freedom to pursue happiness and fulfill its potential. It achieves itself through work, participation in society, family, the marketplace, the political process, cultural activities, sports, the sciences, and the arts. It follows that in a free and affluent society the self should succeed more often than not in fulfilling itself. Happiness can be pursued and to a degree caught.

(f) The diverted self. In a free and affluent society, the self is free to divert itself endlessly from itself. It works in order to enjoy the diversions that the fruit of one’s labor can purchase. The pursuit of happiness becomes the pursuit of diversion, and in this society the possibilities of diversion are endless and as readily available as eight hours of television a day: TV, sports, travel, drugs, games, newspapers, magazines, Vegas.

(g) The lost self. With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of the identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world it wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance — so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly.

(h) The scientific and artistic self. Or that self which is so totally absorbed in the pursuit of art or science as to be selfless. The modern caricature is the “absentminded professor” or the demonic possessed artist, which is to say that as a self he is “absent” from the usual concerns of the self about itself in the world. E.g., Karl von Frisch and his bees, Schubert in a beer hall writing lieder on the tablecloth, Picasso in a restaurant modeling animals from bread.

(i) The illusory self. Or the conviction that one’s sense of oneself is a psychological or cultural illusion and that with the advance of science, e.g., behaviorism, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, the self will disappear.

(j) The autonomous self. The self sees itself as a sovereign and individual consciousness, liberated by education from the traditional bonds of religion, by democracy from the strictures of class, by technology from the drudgery of poverty, and by self-knowledge from the tyranny of the unconscious — and therefore free to pursue its own destiny without God.

(k) The totalitarian self. The self sees itself as a creature of the state, fascist or communist, and understands its need to be specified by the needs of the state.

(CHECK ONE)

IN ALL SOAP OPERAS and in many films and novels, a leading character will sooner or later develop amnesia. He will not necessarily develop pneumonia or cancer or schizophrenia, but inevitably he will be overtaken by amnesia. He (or she) finds himself in a strange place, having forgotten his old place, his family, friends, business. He begins a new life in a new place with a new girlfriend, new job. After a while in his new life he begins to receive clues about his old life. A stranger stops him in the street and calls him by a strange name. The best exploitation of the pleasures of amnesia occurred in Hitchcock’s Spellbound where Gregory Peck had amnesia and Ingrid Bergman was his psychiatrist. For the moviegoer there occurred first the pleasure of the prospect of a new life and the infinite possibilities of the self as represented by Gregory Peck. The second pleasure is the accidental meeting with Ingrid Bergman, who is sensitive to the clues that Gregory misses, and who is a reliable guide, his Beatrice, who can help him recover his old life — for even amnesia, if prolonged, can become as dreary as one’s old life.

Here is a nice example of Ingrid picking up clues to his past identity, a search which will allow them to have the best of both worlds, a discovery of oneself and one’s past without the encumbrances of the past, and a joining of hands with Ingrid for a new life in the future:

INGRID (psychoanalyzing him in a hotel room): I would like to ask you a medical question.

GREGORY: All right.

INGRID: How would you diagnose a pain in the right upper quadrant?

GREGORY: Gall bladder — pneumonia—

INGRID: It is obvious you are a doctor.

Here is an extra dividend for the moviegoer who is identifying with Peck or Bergman. Ingrid is on the track of who he is (who you are). You are a doctor, an identity which seems to interest women more than, say, a banker or an auto dealer.

Question: Is amnesia a favorite device in fiction and especially soap operas because

(a) The character in the soap opera is sick and tired of himself and his life and wants a change.

(b) The writer is sick and tired of his character and wants a change.

(c) The writer is sick and tired of himself and his life and wants a change.

(d) The reader or moviegoer or TV-viewer is sick and tired of himself and his life and wants a change — and the housewife is the sickest and tiredest of all.

(e) The times are such that everyday life for everybody is more or less intolerable and one is better off wiping out the past and starting anew.

(CHECK ONE)

A variant of the amnesic-plot device is the inadvertent return of the amnesiac to home territory, where he is welcomed by a lovely woman, unknown to him, who is evidently his wife. The crucial scene is his being led off to bed.

A non-amnesic equivalent is a twin or look-alike who is mistaken for someone else — by a beautiful woman. Invariably she finds him not merely oddly different but somehow better, more attractive, than the original. After a love scene, she looks at him wide-eyed and smiling (you were never like this before!).

This version demonstrates that the source of pleasure for the moviegoer is not the amnesia but the certified and risk-free license to leave the old self behind and enter upon a new life, whether by amnesia or mistaken identity.

Thought Experiment: Test your response to vicarious loss of self by imagining amnesia raised to the highest power. Imagine a soap opera in which a character awakens every morning with amnesia, in a strange house with a strange attractive man (or woman), welcomed by the stranger, looking out a strange window with a strange view, having forgotten the past each morning and starting life afresh, seeing the window, the view, himself, herself, in the mirror afresh and for the first time. Does this prospect intrigue you? If it does, what does this say about your non-amnesic self?^*

IN A RECENT ISSUE of a home-and-garden magazine, an article listed fifty ways to make a coffee table.

One table was made of an old transom of stained glass supported by an antique brass chandelier cut ingeniously to make the legs.

Another was a cypress stump, waxed and highly polished.

Another was a big spool used for telephone cable set on end.

Another was a lobster trap.

Another was a Coca-Cola sign propped on Coke crates.

Another was a stone slab from an old morgue, the blood runnel used as an ash tray.

Another was a hayloft door set on cut-down sawhorses.

Another was the hatch of a sailboat mounted on halves of ships’ wheels.

Another was a cobbler’s bench.^*

Not a single one was a table designed as such, that is, a horizontal member with four legs.

Question: Why was not a single table designed as such rather than being a non-table doing duty as a table?

(a) Because people have gotten tired of ordinary tables.

(b) Because the fifty non-tables converted to use as tables make good conversation pieces.

(c) Because it is a chance to make use of valuable odds and ends which otherwise would gather dust in the attic.

(d) Because the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.

(CHECK ONE)

Thus, ordinary four-legged tables have long since been emptied out and rendered invisible.

Even the cobbler’s bench, which, for a while, resisted the ravenous self and for some years remained a cobbler’s bench upon which one could set drinks and art books, has now disappeared into the vacuole and become as invisible as a Danish modern. The cobbler’s bench has become in fact a table. Tables are now being manufactured which look like cobblers’ benches but are not.

Thought Experiment: Try to imagine the circumstances under which the fifty non-tables converted to use as coffee tables would become less and less desirable until one would actually prefer an ordinary table constructed of four legs and a top. E.g., imagine you are an archeologist of the twenty-first century, exploring the abandoned beach cottages of Martha’s Vineyard and finding all manner of strange artifacts used as tables — pieces of driftwood, capstans, shark jaws— and that you need a good worktable and, not recognizing these objects as tables, you construct a simple and sturdy table from a plank of wood and four lengths of two-by-fours.

Thought Experiment (II): Consider to what extent an “antique” is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self — just as a pine piling saturated in creosote resists corrosion by the sea — and thus possesses a higher coefficient of informing power for the nought of self.

If you say that a writing table made by Thomas Sheraton is of value because it is excellently made and beautiful, how would you go about making a writing table now that would be similarly prized as an antique two hundred years from now?

The real question of course is whether the twentieth-century self is different from the eighteenth-century self, both in its reliance on “antiques” to inform itself and in its ability to make a writing table which is graceful and useful and for no other reason. Was a well-to-do eighteenth-century Englishman content to buy a Sheraton writing table, or would he have preferred a fifteenth-century “antique”?

THERE IS NO FASHION so absurd, even grotesque, that it cannot be adopted, given two things: the authority of the fashion-setter (Dior, Jackie Onassis) and the vacuity or noughtness of the consumer. E.g., bustles in the West, bound feet in the East.

It happens that a woman will see a new fashion, a certain kind of hat, a new hairstyle, the cut and length of a skirt, a French-wrap swimsuit, and she will want it. She buys it. Often the source of the fashion is a famous and attractive person or a well-known couturier.

It is illuminating that some fashions are set by mistake. It is reported, for example, that when Wallis Warfield Simpson appeared at Ascot with the second button of her blouse left inadvertently unbuttoned, millions of women followed suit. And when John Wayne’s belt buckle slipped to one side in a scene in the movie Red River, thousands of urban cowboys began to buckle their belts to the side.

In a certain New York disco located near a hospital, interns and nurses would drop in at all hours wearing their hospital greens. Whereupon it became fashionable for non-medical people to go discoing in wrinkled hospital greens — which are now sold at J. C. Penney.^*

The efficacy of fashion turns on the self’s perception of itself either as a nought or at least as lacking something, and its perception or misperception of the splendid wholeness of public figures as evidenced by even the most carelessly worn badges of their substantiality — when in truth the selves of Jackie Onassis and Wallis Simpson and John Wayne are probably more insubstantial than most.

Question: What does the saleslady mean when she fits a customer with an article of clothing and says: “It’s you”?

(a) She means the same thing the customer means if you should ask her: It is becoming to me. It looks nice. I don’t have a thing to wear.^* It does something for me.

(b) She means that it — the hat, blouse, hairstyle, dress — actually accentuates your best features — eyes, hair — while minimizing your worst: no neck, etc.

(c) It will please your husband or lover.

(d) It will impress other women.

(e) Most other women are already wearing it and you look dowdy without it.

(f) The saleslady means what she says. It really is you. That is, you are not much without it, you perceive yourself as mousy, and you are a something — your self in fact, your new true self — with it.

(CHECK ONE)

ON THE JOHNNY CARSON Show, it always happens that when Carson or one of his guests mentions the name of an American city, there is applause from those audience members who live in this city. The applause is of a particular character, startled and immediate, as if the applauders cannot help themselves.

Such a response is understandable if one hails from a hamlet like Abita Springs, Louisiana, and Carson mentioned Abita Springs. But the applause also occurs at the mention of New York or Chicago.

Question: Do Chicagoans in Burbank, California, applaud at the mention of the word Chicago

(a) Because they are proud of Chicago?

(b) Because they are boosters, Chamber of Commerce types, who appreciate a plug, much as a toothpaste manufacturer would appreciate Carson mentioning Colgate?

(c) Because a person, particularly a passive audience member who finds himself in Burbank, California, feels himself so dislocated, so detached from a particular coordinate in space and time, so ghostly, that the very mention of such a coordinate is enough to startle him into action?

(CHECK ONE)

A RECENT POLL ASKED people what they feared most. A majority of respondents agreed in ranking one fear above all others, above fear of sickness, accidents, crime, war, even death. It is the fear of speaking before a group, stage fright. Yet in the conventional objective scientific view, man is an organism among other organisms and a man should therefore not be terrified to be surrounded by his own kind, other like organisms who are not merely not hostile but by the very nature of the occasion well disposed, and to open his mouth and speak in a language he has learned from his fellowmen. A wolf howling alone in a wolfpack doesn’t get stage fright.

Question: What is so frightening to so many people about speaking to an audience?

(a) Is it because the ever-present chance of making a fool of oneself is multiplied by the number of listeners, so that an audience of 50 persons is 50 times more terrifying than one? Is an audience of 50 million a million times more terrifying than 50?

(b) Is it because, since one person, friend or stranger, is often difficult to deal with, 50 people are 50 times more difficult?

(c) Is it because, say with an audience of 500, you are being looked at by at least 499 people whose gaze you cannot defend against by looking back, that is, you are being seen from this or that vulnerable angle where your mask or persona may not be in place?

(d) Is it because you fear a total failure of performance such as never happened in the history of the world, so that not one word will come to your mind and world chaos will follow? As evidence of such a danger, note the uneasiness of a playgoing audience when an actor forgets his lines or a congregation when a preacher falls silent for no apparent reason. The escalating terror of such a silence is a public phenomenon: five seconds of such silence is a very long time, ten seconds is almost intolerable.

(e) Is it because you know that what you present to the world is a persona, a mask, that it is a very fragile disguise, that God alone knows what is underneath since you clearly do not, perhaps nothing less than the self itself, and that if the persona fails, what is revealed is unspeakable (literally, because you can’t speak it), like what was revealed when the Phantom of the Opera had his mask ripped off, a no-face, a vacancy, a hole which is much worse than the ugliest face — so frightening, in fact, that you remember, as a child, crawling under the seat in the movie?

Thought Experiment: If you are a shy person, which of the following situations is the most terrifying to you? Which is the least terrifying?

In the first, you are a mid-echelon executive in the sales division of a large company in which you are both successful and well liked. You are scheduled to deliver a speech at the annual banquet, an honor. You have months to prepare.

In the second, you are the character Richard Hannay in Hitchcock’s The Thirty-nine Steps. Pursued down a street by his enemies, he ducks into a doorway which happens to be a stage door and finds himself on stage at a political rally where he is mistaken for the guest speaker and introduced. He has not the faintest idea what he is supposed to talk about.

In the third, the world’s population has been destroyed by nuclear wars. Only you have survived. The earth is invaded by extraterrestrial beings. They capture you and haul you up before a large tribunal and make it known to you that you must give an account of yourself, what you are doing here, why you should be spared, etc.

Explain your choice.

Thought Experiment (II): Explain why Moses was tongue-tied and stagestruck before his fellow Jews but had no trouble talking to God.

Explain on what grounds Christ told his followers not to worry if they were arrested and required to testify before a court of their enemies. You will know what to say, he told them. Did he imply that it is easier to talk to enemies than to friends and that the real problem arises when one is required to address one’s fellow Christians in the church at Corinth?

JOHNNY CARSON, WHEN QUESTIONED about his aplomb on the stage before a TV audience of millions, replied: Sure, I’m at ease up here — because I’m in control — but when I’m at a cocktail party and caught in a one-on-one conversation: panic city!

Question: What do Johnny Carson and other shy people fear when they are caught in a “one-on-one” conversation at a cocktail party? That is, what is the worst case, the worst thing that can happen?

(a) That you can’t think of anything interesting to say and the other person will be bored?

(b) That the other person has nothing to say that you want to hear and you know you will be bored?

(c) That neither of you has anything to say and therefore the world will come to an end, or rather, something worse than the end of the world, or, as Carson would say, panic city — that is, a predicament in which all options open to you are more intolerable than the end of the world?

(d) That there are only two means of escape, both of which are intolerable: either you leave, which will hurt the other person’s feelings, or the other person leaves, which will hurt your feelings?

(e) That you will be exposed, that is, that the unique unformulability, the singular nought, which you secretly believe yourself to be, will be exposed at last, the one black hole among a billion other ordinary stars?

(CHECK ONE)

QUESTION: IF YOU ARE a shy person, is it better to accept your shyness, or to seek help from a psychotherapist in order to become an assertive outgoing person, or perhaps to read a book about overcoming shyness?

(a) It is better to seek help from a psychotherapist because it is better not to suffer than to suffer. Psychiatrists and psychologists treat disorders. Shyness is a symptom of such a disorder. Therefore, it is reasonable to seek such help.

(b) It is better to read a book about how to get over being shy, anxious, insecure, and so on, than not to read such a book, because one might learn a helpful thing or two, even from a book.

(c) It is better not to read such a book because the effects of such books last only during the reading of the book and perhaps fifteen minutes after finishing it, and therefore your despair is only increased.

(d) It is better to listen to Leo Buscaglia, because he speaks of such things as love, hugging, and being open to people.

(e) It is better not to listen to Leo Buscaglia, because though Leo’s entertaining, both you and Leo are going to feel worse afterward.

(f) It is better to read the book you are presently reading, though not much better, because it does not tell you how to get over shyness, anxiety, and such, but only raises them as subjects between writer and reader and renders the unformulable formulable, for a while perhaps even tolerable.

(g) It is better not to seek help from a psychotherapist but to accept your shyness, painful though it is, because it is better to be your shy self than the sort of person the psychotherapist may want you to become, i.e., like the psychotherapist.

(h) It is better to seek help from a psychotherapist if the psychotherapist knows what not many psychotherapists know, namely, that the shy person may know something the non-shy person does not know, that your self is indeed unformulable to yourself, that you are entitled to your shyness, that, indeed, varying degrees of idiocy are required not to be shy, that the very unformulability of your self is the only clue you have to the uniqueness of yourself, that otherwise one will become yet another Ralph among a thousand Ralphs, or worse still, become an imitation of the psychotherapist.

(CHECK ONE)

A FILMMAKER REPORTED the following experience with his film company, especially the actors, while on location in a small Midwestern town.

The townspeople showed a tremendous excitement about the presence of the film company in their midst. Not only did they make the town and even their homes available to the film crew, allowing their very lives to be disrupted, some town folk even expressed the strongest possible desire to be in the film, if only in the most insignificant roles. A quiet woman, the librarian, said that it would be the greatest event of her life.

The actors also enjoyed their stay in the town and the attention they were getting. Even though they, the actors, were not held in the highest regard by the filmmakers — producers, directors, cinematographers, etc. — were in fact often referred to by the latter as “pieces of meat,” “talking faces,” “hollow heads” among other uncomplimentary expressions — they, the actors, found themselves playing enjoyable roles in the town. What roles? They were playing the roles of the superb human beings the town folk believed them to be. Everyone in town remarked what nice people they were. So they became nice. They became nicer than saints. One famous actress in particular, noted for her childish and difficult ways, became a very model of friendliness and graciousness, astounding even the film crew and the town folk by her small acts of kindness, such as inquiring after the health of a stagehand’s sick child, remembering the name of the A & P checkout lady.

Question (I): Which of the two, the actors or the townspeople, are the more real, that is, perceive themselves as more nearly what they are?

(a) The townspeople because they have no illusions about themselves, their humdrum lives and workaday selves, whereas the actors not only live in a tinsel world but are themselves forever playing roles, are always “on” even when they walk into the town drugstore.

(b) The actors, particularly the actress who, by very reason of her finding herself in a real place among real people and removed from the fakery of Hollywood, is able for once in her life to become herself, her true best self.

(c) Neither town folk nor actors, because both are equally displaced, equally deprived of themselves, though in different ways. The town folk are deprived because, though they live in a “real” town, through an optical illusion they perceive the actors to be more splendidly real than they themselves and perceive the actors’ lives to be both more glamorous and more of a piece (to judge from the films) than their own, which seem somewhat dim and tentative by comparison. Through a different sort of optical illusion, the actors are able for a while to take on the very reality imputed to them by the town folk, wear it like a costume and with the greatest of ease because they’ve been doing nothing else most of their lives. Thus, they cloak the nought and nakedness of their selves, which are perhaps no different in kind from anyone else’s but perhaps more acutely felt.

Note that the felt “reality” of the actors in the town is as brief as any other performance. After six weeks on location, even the gracious actress said she “couldn’t wait to get out of the boonies.” For their part, too, the town folk might get sick and tired of the antics of, say, Mel Brooks.

Though both actors and town folk have reached for what they perceived to be a heightened reality, it, reality itself, has somehow fallen between them, like a dropped ball.

Question (II): Test your own index of misplacement.

(1) Imagine meeting Robert Redford under the most ordinary circumstances: you’re a bank teller and he comes in to cash a check. He is very nice, almost preternaturally nice. You perceive that Redford’s self has, perhaps by virtue of his film image, a higher or at least a different reality from your own.

(2) Imagine that you are a movie star finding yourself in a small town, you with all the well-known self-problems of movie stars — What if these people recognize me and hassle me, about autographs? What if they don’t recognize me? — and all the anxiety caused by three failed films, dearth of good scripts, unsympathetic directors, producers, and moneymen. Now imagine you as such a movie star watching the locals at work and play; you envy the A & P manager perched in the manager’s box keeping an eye on the checkout lines, watering the lawn of a late summer evening.

Which of the two would you rather be, the bank teller or the movie star?

(CHECK ONE)

A RECENT SURVEY in a large city reported that 95 percent of all video tapes purchased for home consumption were Insatiable, a pornographic film starring Marilyn Chambers.

Of all sexual encounters on soap opera, only 6 percent occur between husband and wife.

In some cities of the United States, which now has the highest divorce rate in the world, the incidence of divorce now approaches 60 percent of married couples.

A recent survey showed that the frequency of sexual intercourse in married couples declined 90 percent after three years of marriage.

On a talk show a female sexologist reported that a favorite fantasy of American women, second only to oral sex, was having sex with two strange men at once.

According to the president of the North American Swing Club Association, only 3 percent of married couples who are swingers get divorces, as compared with over 50 percent of non-swinging couples.

In large American cities, lunch-break liaisons between business men and women have become commonplace.

Sexual activity and pregnancy in teenagers have increased dramatically in the last twenty years, in both those who have received sex education in schools and those who have not. In some cities, more babies are born to single women than to married women.

A radio psychotherapist reported that nowadays many young people who disdain marriage, preferring “relationships” and “commitments,” speak of entering into simultaneous relationships with a second or third person as a growth experience.

In San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, to the outrage of local middle-class residents, homosexuals cruise and upon encountering a sexual prospect, always a stranger, exchange a word or a sign and disappear into the bushes. In a series of interviews, Buena Vista homosexuals admitted to sexual encounters with an average of more than 500 strangers.

A survey by a popular magazine reported that the incidence of homosexuality in the United States had surpassed that of the Weimar Republic and is approaching that of England.

Question: Do Americans, as well as other Westerners, prefer sexual variety, both heterosexual and homosexual, because

(a) The sexual revolution has occurred, which is nothing else but the overthrow of the unnatural repressions and taboos of 1,900 years of Christianity and the exploration of the free and healthy practices of a sexually liberated society.

(b) Humans are biologically as promiscuous as chimpanzees. It is only the cultural constraints of society, probably imposed by the economic necessities of an agricultural society, which required a monogamous union and children as a reliable labor source.

(c) No, man is by nature monogamous, as ethnologists have demonstrated in most cultures. It is Western society which is disintegrating, to a degree remarkably similar to the decline of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, when similar practices were reported.

(d) No, Western man is promiscuous because promiscuous sexuality is the obverse or flip side of Christianity and is in fact specified by Christianity as its opposite. Thus, pornography is something new in the world, having no parallel in ancient, so-called pagan cultures. Accordingly, there is little if any difference between present-day promiscuity and that of, say, the Victorian era. The so-called sexual revolution is nothing but the legitimizing of the secret behavior of the Victorians and its extension to women.

(e) Western man is promiscuous because something unprecedented has happened. As a consequence of the scientific and technological revolution, there has occurred a displacement of the real as a consequence of which genital sexuality has come to be seen as the substratum of all human relationships, of friendship, love, and the rest. This displacement has come to pass as a consequence of a lay misperception of the physicist’s quest for establishing a molecular or energic basis for all interactions and of what is perceived as Freud’s identification of genital sexuality as the ground of all human relationships.A letter to Dear Abby: I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It’s getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don’t know him well enough to discuss money with him.^*

(f) The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but is rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one’s own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being. Amazing! Indeed, the most amazing of all the creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection! Yet not really amazing, for only if the abstracted ghost has an erection can it, like Jove spying Europa on the beach, enter the human condition.

(g) It’s not that complicated. It’s simply that people nowadays have too much money and time to spend and don’t know what to do with themselves and so will try anything out of boredom.

(h) Why go further than the orthodox Judaeo-Christian belief that monogamous marriage was ordained by God for man’s happiness, that the devil goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, and that as a consequence modern man has lost his way, has not the faintest notion who he is or what he is doing, and nothing short of catastrophe will bring him to his senses. At the height of a hurricane, husbands come to themselves and can even embrace their wives. During Hurricane Camille, one Biloxi couple, taking refuge in a tree house, reported that, during the passage of the eye, they had intercourse for the first time in years.

(i) No, the explanation is biological. Man is undergoing a mutation in sexual behavior which will in the end, like the tooth of the saber-toothed tiger, render him extinct. Since most of the emerging varieties of sexual expression — homosexuality, anal and oral sex — do not reproduce the species and therefore have no survival value, the species will become extinct.

(j) None of the above. It has always been so. That is to say, the sexual behavior of humans has not changed. Therefore, there is nothing to explain.

(CHECK ONE OR MORE)

EVERYONE REMEMBERS WHERE he was and what he was doing when he heard the news of the Kennedy assassination — or, if he is old enough, Pearl Harbor.

Why?

The self deceives itself by saying that it is natural that such terrible events should be etched in the memory.

It is not so simple.

The fact is that the scene and the circumstances of hearing such news become invested with a certain significance and density which they do not ordinarily possess and with which ordinary events and ordinary occasions contrast unfavorably.

Two such recollections as reported to me:

(1) I was standing outside a grocery store on the corner of St. Charles and Jackson avenues in New Orleans when a stranger came up to me and said that the President had been shot and killed. I can remember noticing that the stranger wore an old-fashioned shirt, the kind with a tab collar and a gold pin which fitted little holes in the tabs and kept the collar snug against the neck. Everything seemed amazingly vivid and discrete. I could even see the threads sewn in the little holes of the man’s tab collar. Then he began to tell me the story of his life. He, too, felt curiously dispensed. I can even remember exactly where I stood on the sidewalk and a sycamore tree growing through a hole in the concrete. I can still see the bark.

Question: Had you noticed the tree before?

No.

Question: Have you noticed it since? No.

(2) I was watching the soap opera As the World Turns on TV. It was a scene between Chris Hughes and Grandpa. A bulletin was flashed on the screen. Bulletin: Shots have been fired into the Presidential motorcade in Dallas. As the bulletin came on, Grandpa was saying to Chris Hughes something like: “Now let’s don’t be too hasty, Chris. I don’t believe Ellen would do such a thing.” I can remember thinking how unimportant the soap opera seemed compared with the events in Dallas.

Question: But before that, the soap opera seemed more interesting than the events in Dallas?

Yes.

Question: And since? Have you resumed watching As the World Turns?

Yes.

Question: During the week following Pearl Harbor, the incidence of suicide declined dramatically across the nation. Was this decline a consequence of

(1) A rise in patriotic fervor and a sense of purpose?

(2) A new sense of interest (e.g., something, even war, is better than nothing. Peace in the 1930s was like nothing)?

A Short Journal Chronicling Certain Events in Our Town

Monday. Everyone is cheerful today. Mr. D—, a well-known judge and gubernatorial candidate, was detected in an act of fellatio with a bellboy in the men’s room of the Roosevelt Hotel during lunch hour. He was arrested by the vice squad. It is on the five o’clock news. Men stop each other in the street, shaking their heads: “Did you hear the awful thing that happened to Judge D—?” “Yes. I don’t believe it. I think it’s political. He was set up.” “Right. Clearly, entrapment.” Telephone lines are buzzing all over town. Housewives stop watching talk shows and soap operas to call each other.

Tuesday. Everyone in town is moderately depressed. Mr. L—, a highly successful attorney, a cheerful and generous man, wins the biggest lawsuit of his career, a ten-million-dollar judgment against A.T.&T. On the same day, he learns that his wife has been awarded the Times-Picayune cup for outstanding service to the community, his son has won a Rhodes Scholarship, and his daughter has been chosen to be Queen of the Comus Ball. His friends congratulate him. “You really hit the jackpot!” they exclaim and turn away with preoccupied expressions. The telephone wires do not hum. Housewives watch more soap operas than ever.

Wednesday. The ex-Premier of France, General de Gaulle, has died and the President of the United States attends his funeral. He looks very solemn and dignified sitting in Notre Dame cathedral. Later he confides to an aide that he enjoys state funerals more than anything he does in Washington or even Camp David because he can relax and let his mind go blank and yet be admired for paying his respects and taking so much trouble when all he has to do is look solemn. And also because there is de Gaulle dead as a duck and here I am alive and kicking.

Questions: Imagine yourself in a place most familiar to you and therefore most nugatory; e.g., standing on the platform of the commuter station at 8:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning waiting for the 8:05 to New York. Or walking across your front yard in Montclair for the eight thousandth time to pick up the morning paper.

Now imagine that in these circumstances you receive a piece of news, either by way of a newspaper headline, by word of mouth from a neighbor, or perhaps by overhearing a radio bulletin from a black youth carrying a Sony CF-520.

In each instance of news, check the correct answer. Hint: Use as your guide your altered perception of your surroundings and any change in mood — e.g., whether, as a result of hearing the news, your front yard becomes visible for the first time since you moved in, or whether it becomes more nugatory than usual; whether your usual morning depression deepens or lifts.

There are four possible answers: (a) The news is unrelievedly bad. (b) The news is putatively bad, that is, news which by all criteria should be bad but in which you nevertheless take a certain comfort. (c) The news is unrelievedly good. (d) The news is putatively good, that is, news which by all criteria ought to be good but which you find secretly depressing.

(1) News bulletin: A UFO has landed in Nebraska and vaporized Omaha. This news is for you

(a) Unrelievedly bad: After all, there is nothing good about the loss of several hundred thousand people.

(b) Putatively bad but secretly not so bad: I don’t know anybody in Omaha and there is something extremely interesting about an authenticated UFO visitation — which I had never really credited until now.

(CHECK ONE)

THE WORD BOREDOM did not enter the language until the eighteenth century. No one knows its etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff.

Question: Why was there no such word before the eighteenth century?

(a) Was it because people were not bored before the eighteenth century? (But wasn’t Caligula bored?)

(b) Was it because people were bored but didn’t have a word for it?

(c) Was it because people were too busy trying to stay alive to get bored? (But what about the idle English royalty and noblemen?)

(d) Is it because there is a special sense in which for the past two or three hundred years the self has perceived itself as a leftover which cannot be accounted for by its own objective view of the world and that in spite of an ever heightened self-consciousness, increased leisure, ever more access to cultural and recreational facilities, ever more instruction on self-help, self-growth, self-enrichment, the self feels ever more imprisoned in itself — no, worse than imprisoned because a prisoner at least knows he is imprisoned and sets store by the freedom awaiting him and the world to be open, when in fact the self is not and it is not — a state of affairs which has to be called something besides imprisonment — e.g., boredom. Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

(e) Is it because of a loss of sovereignty in which the self yields up plenary claims to every sector of the world to the respective experts and claimants of these sectors, and that such a surrender leads to an impoverishment which must be called by some other name, e.g., boredom?

(f) Is it because the self first had the means of understanding itself through myth, albeit incorrectly, later understood itself through religion as a creature of God, and now has the means of understanding the Cosmos through positive science but not itself because the self cannot be grasped by positive science, and that therefore the self can perceive itself only as a ghost in a machine? How else can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?

(CHECK ONE OR MORE)

THE SUICIDE RATE among persons under twenty-five has risen dramatically in the last twenty years.

A recent survey disclosed that the symptom of depression outnumbered all other medical symptoms put together.

On a daytime radio psychotherapy talk show, 80 percent of all women calling in reported that they were depressed.

The incidence of drug use in teenagers and preteens has increased an estimated 3000 percent in the last thirty years. On a recent talk show on “tough love,” it was claimed that about one-third of all teenagers were depressed. Of the one-third, as many as 75 percent were on drugs.

In one small Southern city, a study of the families of the upper socioeconomic class revealed that 79 percent of the daughters left home after high school, moved into apartments, and either attended college or got jobs. After five years, 53 percent of the unmarried daughters had returned to the homes of their parents and 43 percent of the married daughters … Typical responses: “I didn’t like it out there.” “It is too much.” “I couldn’t cope.” “I got sad.”

In one Midwestern town, 27 percent of high-school students dropped out and stayed home. Chief complaint: “I can’t cope.”

Question (I): Are people depressed despite unprecedented opportunities for education, vocations, self-growth, cultural enrichment, travel, and recreation

(a) Because modern life is more difficult, complex, and stressful than it has ever been before?

(b) Because, for men, competition in the marketplace is fiercer than ever?

(c) Because, for women, life as a housewife is lonelier than ever, what with the vanishing of the traditional community of women around the well, sitting on stoops, gossiping over back fences?

(d) Because, for young people, education is more inferior than ever, leaving one unprepared to face the real world?

(e) Because belief in God and religion has declined and with it man’s confidence in the place of the self in the Cosmos, in the Chain of Being, and in its relation to others?

(f) Because the self nowadays is other-directed rather than inner-directed and depends for its self-esteem on its perception of how others evaluate it — something like a beggar in a crowd with his hand out?

(g) Because the self, despite an embarrassment of riches, is in fact impoverished and deprived, like Lazarus at the feast, having suffered a radical deprivation and loss of sovereignty? With the multiplication of technologies and the ascendance of experts and expertise in all fields, the self has consented to the expropriation of every sector of life by its appropriate expert — even the expropriation of its, the self’s, own life. “I’m depressed, Doctor. What’s wrong with me? If you are not an expert in the field, a doctor of depression, can you refer me to one?”

Thus, the rightful legatee of the greatest of fortunes, the cultural heritage of the entire Western World, its art, science, technology, literature, philosophy, religion, becomes a second-class consumer of these wares and as such disenfranchises itself and sits in the ashes like Cinderella yielding up ownership of its own dwelling to the true princes of the age, the experts. They know about science, they know about medicine, they know about government, they know about my needs, they know about everything in the Cosmos, even me. They know why I am fat and they know secrets of my soul which not even I know. There is an expert for everything that ails me, a doctor of my depression, a seer of my sadness.

(h) Because modern life is enough to depress anybody? Any person, man, woman, or child, who is not depressed by the nuclear arms race, by the modern city, by family life in the exurb, suburb, apartment, villa, and later in a retirement home, is himself deranged.

(CHECK ONE OR MORE)

MOTHER TERESA OF CALCUTTA recently remarked about some affluent Westerners she had met — including Americans, Europeans, capitalists, Marxists — that they seemed to her sad and poor, poorer even than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor, to whom she ministered.

Question: What kind of impoverishment can be attributed to the denizens of Western technological societies in view of the obvious wealth of such societies in such categories as food, shelter, goods and services, education, technology, and cultural institutions?

(a) There is no such sadness and impoverishment. Mother Teresa makes such a charge because Western societies, with their increasing acceptance of contraceptive birth control and abortion, offend her Roman Catholic religious beliefs.

(b) There is, in fact, such a sadness and an impoverishment, due at least in part to a loss of respect for human life as evidenced not only by the acceptance of abortion but by mounting child abuse, euthanasia, and indifference to human suffering. Recent studies have shown, however, that Westerners, that is, Europeans and Americans, own more pets than ever and spend more money on pet food and veterinarians than the food costs of the entire Third World.

(c) There is such a sadness and impoverishment because in an affluent society, where there is a surfeit of goods and services, there is a corresponding devaluation. Whereas the poor peoples of the Third World, despite or because of their material deprivation, appreciate the simple things in life. Small is beautiful, the best things in life are free, etc.

(d) Because the poor in heart are blessed, i.e., receptive to the Gospel, whereas the rich may gain the whole world but lose their souls.

(e) Because Western society is an ethic of power and manipulation and self-aggrandizement at the expense of the values of community, love, innocence, simplicity, values encountered both in childhood and in non-aggressive societies (e.g., the Eskimo). As Ashley Montagu says, adulthood in the Western world is a deteriorated and impoverished childhood.

(f) Because Western society is itself a wasteland, its values decayed, its community fragmented, its morals corrupted, its cities in ruins. In the face of the deracination of Western culture, all talk of self-enrichment through this or that psychological technique is cosmetic, like rearranging the deck chairs of the Titanic. The Moral Majority is right. The only thing that can save us is a return to old-time religion, a revival of Christian Fundamentalism.

(g) None of the above. All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only are unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring — no small contributor indeed to the dreariness of Western society in general. The so-called détentes and reconciliations between “Science” and “Religion” are even more boring. What is more boring than hearing Heisenberg’s uncertainty relations enlisted in support of the freedom of the will? The traditional scientific model of man is clearly inadequate, for a man can go to heroic lengths to identify and satisfy his needs and end by being more miserable than a Calcuttan. As for the present religious view of man, it begs its own question, the question of God’s existence, which means that it is not only useless to the unbeliever but dispiriting. The latter is more depressed than ever at hearing the goods news of Christianity. From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives.

Such an anthropological model might be provided by semiotics, that is, the study of man as the sign-using creature and, specifically, the study of the self and consciousness as derivatives of the sign-function.

Thought Experiment: If Mother Teresa is right and there exists in modern technological societies a paradoxical impoverishment in the midst of plenty, in the face of what is by traditional objective scientific criteria the most extensive effort in all of history to identify and satisfy man’s biological, psychological, sociological, and cultural needs, consider a different model. Consider a more radical model than the conventional psycho-biological model, a semiotic model which allows one to explore the self in its nature and origins and to discover criteria for its impoverishment and wealth.

The following section, an intermezzo of some forty pages, can be skipped without fatal consequences. It is not technical but it is theoretical — i.e., it attempts an elementary semiotical grounding of the theory of self taken for granted in these pages. As such, it will be unsatisfactory to many readers. It will irritate many lay readers by appearing to be too technical — what does he care about semiotics? It will irritate many professional semioticists by not being technical enough — and for focusing on one dimension of semiotics which semioticists, for whatever reason, are not accustomed to regard as a proper subject of inquiry, i.e., not texts and other coded sign utterances but the self which produces texts or hears sign utterances.

A Semiotic^* Primer of the Self

A Short History of the Cosmos with Emphasis on the Nature and Origin of the Self, plus a Semiotic Model for Computing Impoverishment in the Midst of Plenty, or Why it is Possible to Feel Bad in a Good Environment and Good in a Bad Environment

SCENE: A CORN DANCE at the Taos Indian pueblo in the 1940s. There has been a long dry spell. The dancers invoke the kachinas (god-ancestors) of the West who will come at the winter solstice and leave at the summer solstice. The dancers supplicate the kachinas by a monotonous and rhythmic pounding of bare feet on the hard-packed earth.

It is not a notable festival. There is not much masking or face and body-painting, nor any sign of the flamboyant buffalo and deer totemism of the hunting dances. The costumes are dark, drab kilts. The dance itself is perfunctory, more light-footed and syncopated than most Pueblo dances.

But it is a magical place.

Over there is the squat adobe church of San Francisco de Ranchos de Taos. But here in the vast open plaza there is also the sense of the mysteries conducted within the old Great Kiva, of which hardly a trace remains.

The setting sun is already reddening the upper slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Not far away, nestled in the pines of the same Blood-of-Christ Mountains is a small shrine commemorating D. H. Lawrence, with a monstrance purporting to contain his ashes. Atop the shrine is a queer-looking epicene eagle with breasts: Lawrence as Phoenix rising from the ashes.

All manner of artists and writers, mystics, dropouts, and peyote-poppers live in the foothills. But a little farther north, at Los Alamos, an elite group of scientists is conducting an experiment which will fatefully alter the entire course of human history.

It is as if all the forces of the Cosmos had intersected here. The old cosmological gods remained even after the new God came. The new God remains after the transcending spirit of science and art has come. Even the old Brahman self-god of the East has lately arrived.

It is a haunted place, haunted by old gods and now by new people possessed by spirits all their own. Jungians from all over are drawn here as irresistibly as flies to pheromones, knowing that they can find in this enchanted sky-country the very incarnations of their archetypes and demons.

CAST OF CHARACTERS: Among those present at the Corn Dance are a nuclear physicist, his assistant, an old Pueblo Indian dancer, a young Pueblo Indian dancer, an English novelist, a divorcée, a tourist from Moline, Illinois, a Catholic priest, a radio repairman, a Marxist technician.

Some of the ten feel that they transcend the others. That is to say, he or she may feel that by virtue of a certain education, a certain wisdom, a certain talent, a certain gnosis, he stands in such a relation to the others that he can understand them and they can’t understand him.

For example, the English novelist can perhaps be said to transcend the Illinois tourist, understand him and his camera — in fact, has written about him — in a sense in which the tourist does not understand the novelist.

The physicist and his assistant, both of whom are amateur anthropologists, profess to have an understanding of both the Indian dancers and the Catholic priest which neither the priest nor the dancers profess to have of the physicist and his assistant.

The young Indian dancer believes that he transcends the old Indian dancer because he, the young Indian, has put behind him myth and superstition for a world of science and progress.

The old Indian dancer believes that he transcends the young dancer because he, the old Indian, has kept the cosmological myths by which the world, life, and time are integrated into a meaningful whole while the deranged Western society in Albuquerque goes to pieces.

A similar symmetrical relation of transcendence exists between the physicist and the novelist. The physicist believes that science — i.e., psychology — can at least in principle explain what makes the novelist tick by taking account of his early repressions, his later sublimations, and so on. Whereas the novelist, famous for his sharp eye and his knack for sizing up people and rendering them with a few deft strokes, has already “placed” the American scientist just as he has placed the tourist and the Indians.

There are three questions to keep in mind while reading the following summary of the various modes of transcendence and immanence of the ten characters.

Question (I): Is there any sense in which it can be said truthfully that this or that member of the cast does in fact transcend some other member? Or are the ten no more or less than as described, a cast of characters, and therefore no judgment of transcending superiority or immanent inferiority can be objectively arrived at?

Question (II): But in a play it is sometimes fair to say that one character is better or worse than another. There are, after all, good people and bad people. Can you say, then, that some of the ten are better or worse than the others? If so, are the best also the most transcendent?

Question (III): Which character do you most nearly identify with? Which character would you rather be?

(a) A nuclear physicist: a youngish scientist, hard at work on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. He is having, as Freeman Dyson put it, the best time of his life, embarked as he is on a top-secret project set down in a wilderness with an elite of an elite, the best scientific brains in the Western world, even though he knows he is making a weapon which will almost certainly kill thousands of human beings and may very well spell man’s ultimate self-destruction. Yet he is no narrowly educated scientist. His interests are far-ranging. He is by way of being an amateur ethnologist, a student of Oriental philosophy, and a member of a competent if unprofessional string quartet. He can speak as readily of Ramakrishna and Beethoven’s last quartets as he does of Planck and Fermi.

As he watches the Corn Dance, he is engaged in an animated conversation with his assistant, a handsome blond girl. It is mostly a lecture, to which she gives her rapt attention. He compares the festivals and ceremonials of the different pueblos. Taos is rather ordinary. She ought to see the Corn Dance at Santo Domingo! On the feast day of the saint, the Catholic and tribal religions converge in a nice way characteristic of the tolerant pueblos. The statue of St. Dominic is taken from the church, paraded through the streets to the accompaniment of snare drums and gunshots, then stuck up on a cottonwood branch to enjoy the native ceremonial. In his low, earnest voice, he tells her of the pueblo equivalent of the Virgin Mary: “They call her the Spider Grandmother or Thought Woman, who created all things by thinking them into existence. Rather nice, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes! Oh yes!” murmurs his assistant, leaning toward him.

(b) His assistant, a tall striking blonde, a graduate student from Berkeley who shares the scientist’s every interest but one: she is deeply and frantically in love with him and therefore is both miserable for fear he may not love her and also ecstatically transcendent toward the crowd of tourists, feeling sorry for them not only because they have been transcended but also because they are not in love.

(c) An old Pueblo Indian dancer, who has never left the pueblo, who believes the cosmological myths of the pueblo and who further believes that the Corn Dance will invoke the kachinas of the West and that rain will come to the parched fields in consequence.

(d) A young Pueblo Indian dancer, a sophomore at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, a major in business administration, a promising basketball forward, for whom it goes without saying that the cosmological myths of his tribe are just that, myths, to be taken no more seriously than what he considers the Judaeo-Christian myths of the Catholic Church in which he was baptized. He joined the Newman Club of U. of N.M. to meet girls and did. It is with a complex good-natured irony that he paints his body and dons the costume and enters into the Corn Dance, an irony compounded of a gentle forbearance toward his elders and a sardonic contempt for the camera-clicking Anglos and tourists. He can also use the money he’ll make from the photography fees.

The young dancer feels that he transcends the old dancer. He sees into the old man’s credulity and the superstitious absurdity of the myth and rites of the rain god.

The older dancer is no less certain that he transcends the young dancer because the young Indian has left an intact society in which life and time and place are given meaning by belief for the deranged world of the latter-day Americans who clearly do not know who they are or what they are doing.

The scientist understands both and thinks that each is right in his own way. He sees the psychological “truth” of the cosmological myths of the old dancer. He sees the value of the skepticism of the young dancer. So he, the scientist, attempts the difficult feat of having it both ways — of not really believing in the kachinas of the West but of extracting the psychological value of the rite nevertheless.

(e) The English novelist settled here in Taos after sojourns in Italy and Mexico. His pallor and frailty — he looks for all the world like a non-conformist minister from his native Midlands — contrast with his writings, which celebrate savage good health, sexuality, and the dark gods of the blood. Self-contradicted or not, he has a miraculous eye for seeing into things, getting the hang of things, getting a fix on people. For him, no more than a single glance is needed to size up everyone here: the young Indian dancer with a quite conscious irony written on his Oriental-Pueblo face, as well as a deeper, darker inscrutability which he, the dancer, is not even aware of. He sees into the scientist and his girlfriend and their somewhat naïve, even callow, American lordliness — they think they’re the god and goddess of a new world, what with their secret science and their secret sidelong looks at each other, each with arms folded so that his fingers can touch hers.

(f) A divorcée from Westchester. Still young, her face ravaged by something other than years, she has left the dim sorrowful East and a sorrowful marriage for the bright clean sunlit purity of the desert. It seems to her that her very self has been transformed by the crystalline air, the rosy light of sunset on the Sangre de Cristo range, the tang of piñon smoke in the evenings. Surely she has come to the right place! She paints, has fallen under the spell of Georgia O’Keeffe, and for the first time in her life expects to come to herself, recover herself, make a new life in this place. She has talent, is taking lessons in oils, lives on a ranch, rides daily, and is becoming brown and strong. She is considering having an affair with a cowboy.

(g) A Catholic priest, assigned to the adobe church in the pueblo, an aging Hispanic-Irishman who watches the dance with an indifference amounting to boredom. He is thinking about his added chores for tomorrow — a Monday and therefore ordinarily a holiday, but this year a Holy Day, the Feast of the Assumption, entailing three masses, homilies, and confessions — and about his bad back and his broken radio, an old Philco console. Tonight, unless the repairman shows up, he won’t be able to listen to Lux Radio Theater.

(h) A radio repairman from Santa Fe, looking for the priest in the crowd. He has fixed the radio. The pueblo, the Corn Dance, the spectacle are old stories to him. All he wants is to find the priest, deliver the Philco, get paid, and get home in time for a cold beer or two before supper.

(i) A technician from the metallurgy lab at Los Alamos, a pale, plump, mustachioed, youngish man, native of Camden, New Jersey, employed by the Manhattan Project but also by an attaché in the Soviet Embassy in Washington. Only son of not impoverished but nonetheless dreary middle-class parents living in the dreariest double-house on the dreariest street in Camden. For him, revelation broke like sunlight through the Jersey winter when he discovered Marx and read him sitting there in a public library like Marx himself, constipated and alone and exhilarated among strangers as the light broke around him. All at once, he saw how it all worked, saw the very mechanism of his sadness and therefore the means of rising above it. Above it he was and above all this, the people whom now he understood, the Indians, the tourists, even the scientist whom he knew by reputation. They, not he, were puppets worked by strings they could not see. But he knew, could see the strings and, best of all, work them himself — for the good of the Soviet Union and therefore for world peace.

(j) A tourist from Moline, Illinois, who is too busy taking pictures with his excellent Leica even to take a look for himself, whose concern is only with lighting, focus, composition; who is already casting ahead in his mind to the slide show he’ll give at Rotary, and then perhaps he’ll take time to take a look at what he recorded — or will he watch the faces of the viewers to gauge his worth from their approval, the way a joke-teller watches the face of the joke-hearer? Yet by no means is he a discontented or unworthy man, being a good husband and father, operating, as he does, a successful chain of dry cleaners in northwest Illinois and even in Davenport, enjoying not only his family but his bowling team and his Masonic lodge. He is an American Legionnaire, a decorated veteran of World War I, holder of the Distinguished Service Cross, an authentic hero who risked his life to save a comrade and who has thought not much about it since.

(CHECK ONE)

IN THE AGE OF science, scientists are the princes of the age. Artists are not. So that even though both scientists and artists achieve transcendence over the ordinary world in their science and art, only the scientist is sustained in his transcendence by the exaltation of the triumphant spirit of science and by the community of scientists.

It is perhaps no accident that at the high tide of physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the great revolutionary physicists — e.g., Faraday, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein — were also men of remarkable integrity and exultant wholeness of character, of generosity and benignity. Compare the lives and characters of the comparably great in literature at the same time: Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway.

With the disappearance of the old cosmological myths and the decline of Judaeo-Christianity and the rise of the autonomous self, science and art, one the study of secondary causes, the other the ornamental handmaiden of rite and religion, were seized upon and elevated to royal highroads of transcendence in their own right. Such transcendence was available not only to the scientists and artists themselves but to a community of fellow scientists and students, and to the readers and listeners and viewers to whom the “statements” of art, music, and literature were addressed.

But what is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?

The only exception to this psychic law of gravity seems to be not merely the great physicists at the high tide of modern physics but any scientist absorbed in his science when the exaltation of science sustains one in a more or less permanent orbit of transcendence — or perhaps the rare Schubert who even during meals wrote lieder on the tablecloth or the Picasso in a restaurant who instead of eating bread molded it into statuettes.

But the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by artists and writers. They, especially the latter, seem subject more than most people to estrangement from the society around them, to neurosis, psychosis, alcoholism, drug addiction, epilepsy, florid sexual behavior, solitariness, depression, violence, and suicide.

Question: Is this the case because

(a) Genius is close to madness (Plato)?

(b) Modern society, especially American, is crass, materialistic, money-grubbing, and status-seeking, a nation of Yahoos and Babbitts, and the artist who is in pursuit of truth and beauty is entitled to be alienated (Gauguin, Flaubert, Lewis, et al.)?

(c) Art is an expression of sublimated libidinal energies (Freud)? Since the artist is presumably either oversupplied with such energies or overly repressed, it is only to be expected that he or she might also be subject to the various maladies attendant upon repressed sexuality.

(d) Art, unlike science, is a kind of play (Dewey)? Therefore, artists are expected to behave like children.

(e) Both art and science are ways of knowing and as such are the greatest pleasures of which man is capable (Aristotle, Aquinas)? So great, in fact, that the ordinary pursuits of life are spoiled by contrast and so the artist must go to heroic lengths to render life intolerable outside his art. What Einstein said of science might be said of art: I went into science to escape the intolerable dreariness of everyday life.

(CHECK ONE)

WHY DO SCIENTISTS DISLIKE what is apparently the case, that Homo sapiens appeared very recently and very suddenly, in a few hundred thousand years more or less of the Late Pleistocene, perhaps even less — in a word, in less time, cosmologically speaking, than it takes to tell the Biblical story of creation; that the peculiar characteristics of man, the explosive growth of the cortex and 60 percent increase in brain volume, emergence of language, consciousness, self, art, religion, science, occurred in cosmic time in the wink of an eye; that though it is Darwin, not Wallace, who gets the credit for the theory of evolution, it was Wallace, not Darwin, who seems to be right in saying that all men, even the most primitive, come fully equipped with the same neo-cortex and that all men have made the same unprecedented crossover into language and culture; that the brain of the most “primitive” man is not discernibly different from the brain of Beethoven and therefore cannot be accounted for by Darwin’s theory of the gradual adaptation of a species to its environment by the natural selection of those traits which best equip it for survival?

Two dogmas:

One, neo-Darwinian theory: Man arose through the chance encounter of molecules and the survival of those aggregations of molecules, i.e., organisms which through the gradual accumulation of random mutations are best equipped to live in changing environments. If Darwin was right, asked Wallace, why does the Tierra del Fuegan possess a brain not discernibly different from, say, Einstein’s or Beethoven’s, which he does not need?

Two, so-called scientific creationism: The origin of the species did not occur through evolution over millions of years but through separate acts of God.

Both appear to be unlikely.

Darwin was right about the fact of evolution, and his contribution was unprecedented. Evolution is not a theory but a fact. For a fact, the dinosaurs were here 75 million years ago and were supplanted by mammals. For a fact, man arose from more primitive hominids.

Current evolutionary theory, however, has trouble accounting for the facts of evolution. So unsatisfactory is neo-Darwinism that some scientists have gone far afield for explanations. Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations. Sir Fred Hoyle suggests the bacteria might have arrived through encounters with the tails of comets. As fanciful as such notions are, they seem to these scientists less inadequate than the current evolutionary theory.

Difficulties arise when triadic creatures (scientists) try to explain evolution through exclusively dyadic events. Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth. It gives an admirable account of the variations in the beaks of Galapagos finches, but what does it have to say about Darwin himself, sitting by his fireside in Kent and hitting on a theory which assigns all of life into a sphere of interaction and immanence while covertly elevating himself into the sphere of transcendence, and worrying about whether he or Wallace was going to publish first?

The current heated controversy between evolutionists and “scientific creationists” is one of the most peculiar in the history of science, peculiar in the way in which dogma is concealed and smuggled in by both sides.

Scientific creationist: there is scientific evidence of a historical deluge, the Biblical flood, of the separateness of the species, and little or no evidence of intermediate forms. (Concealed dogma: as a fundamentalist Christian, I believe literally in the Genesis account of creation and require that scientific theory be harmonized accordingly.)

Neo-Darwinian: the overwhelming evidence is that evolution occurred through the natural selection of those organisms which through the accumulation of random mutations are best adapted to a changed environment. (Concealed dogma: I, the scientist, a triadic creature possessed of a transcending objective consciousness and a desire to write papers which will be confirmed or disconfirmed by my colleagues, also require that my data conform to the dyadic principles of interaction which obtain in physics, chemistry, and the biology of lower organisms.)

As unsatisfactory as the battle lines, as presently drawn, may be, one must nevertheless throw in with the modern evolutionist, if only for the reason that his position, if wrong, is in the end self-correcting, whereas that of the scientific creationist is not.

The battle is, in fact, a marvelous waste of energy.

The Christians need not have got in such a sweat. The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.

Scientists should be less worried about overt intrusions by religion upon science, which never succeed, and more worried about covert scientific dogma, e.g., that we triadic scientists require that only dyadic events be admissible to scientific theory. For example, scientists have never seriously addressed themselves to the phenomenon of language, considered as a natural phenomenon and not as a formal structure, that salient triadic property of man. It is only when science is willing to focus on what Sebeok calls “the intersection of nature and culture” that the full import of man’s emergence in the evolutionary scheme can be calculated.

Question: Why does it make scientists uneasy that it appears to be the case that Homo sapiens sapiens, a conscious languaged creature, appeared suddenly and lately — when scientists profess to be interested in what is the case, that is, the evidence?

(a) Because scientists are understandably repelled by the theory of the special creation of man by God, in Biblical time, say 6004 B.C. at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday morning.

(b) Because scientists find it natural to deal with matter in interaction and with energy exchanges and don’t know what to make of such things as consciousness, self, and symbols and even sometimes deny that there are such things, even though they, the scientists, act for all the world as if they were conscious selves and spend their lives transacting with symbols.

(c) Because scientists are uneasy with discontinuities, even when there is evidence of such discontinuity in the appearance of man in all his contrarieties. Revealed religion has its dogmas, e.g., thou shalt not kill. But so does science: thou shalt not tolerate discontinuities. The question is which is the more entitled.

(d) Because scientists in the practice of the scientific method, a non-radical knowledge of matter in interaction, often are not content with the non-radicalness of the scientific method and hence find themselves located in a posture of covert transcendence of their data, which is by the same motion assigned to the sphere of immanence. Hence, scientists operate in the very sphere of transcendence which is not provided for in their science. Given such a posture, it is not merely an offense if a discontinuity turns up in the sphere of immanence, the data, but especially if the discontinuity seems to allow for the intervention of God. A god is already present. A scientist is a god to his data. And if there is anything more offensive to him than the suggestion of the existence of God, it is the existence of two gods.

(CHECK ONE)

IN RECENT YEARS a tremendous amount of effort and money has been spent by the government and primatologists in the effort to demonstrate that chimpanzees and other apes can learn human language. Chimps were adopted like children and, unlike children, were subjected to years of concentrated lessons in speech. When attempts to teach chimps to speak failed, sign language was substituted. Glowing successes were reported. Some chimps became famous.

Yet the most recent assessments by responsible scientists are that the primatologists have either deluded themselves or at least made exaggerated claims. It now appears that chimps are not using language after all but are, rather, using signs and responses in order to obtain rewards (e.g., bananas). The basic elements of language are missing: symbols, sentences, productivity, cultural transmission. Now even some of the most evangelical primatologists have modified their claims.

In short, it appears that chimps can’t talk, with either their voices or their hands. Or, as Sebeok puts it, animals have communication but not language.

Yet the public perception is that chimps, and perhaps dolphins and the humpback whale, have crossed the language barrier. There are speculations about the mathematical and metaphysical knowledge of dolphins. For example, according to a recent newspaper account, the song of a humpback whale has ten times as many phonemes as does human speech.

Question: Why do people in general want to believe that chimps and dolphins and whales can speak, and why do some scientists in particular want so badly to believe that chimps can speak that they will compromise their own science?

(a) Because anyone who has invested reputation, a great deal of effort, time, and money in an experiment wants it to succeed.

(b) Because the last three hundred years have seen the dethronement of man from what he believed to be his central position in the Cosmos to an insignificant planet (Copernicus, Galileo), from his uniqueness among the species as the only besouled creature and as created by God in His image (Darwin), and even from the sovereignty of his own consciousness (Freud). Only language and other symbolic behavior (art, music) seems to remain as the sole remaining indisputably unique attribute of man. If language can be shown to be within the capability of apes, dolphins, and humpback whales, the dethronement of man will be complete.

(c) Because man is a lonely and troubled species, who does not know who he is or what to do with himself, feeling himself somehow different from other creatures, both superior and inferior — superior because, after all, he studies other animals and writes scientific articles about them, and other animals don’t study him; inferior because he is not a very good animal, is often stupid, irrational, and self-destructive — and solitary in the Cosmos, like Robinson Crusoe marooned on an island populated by goats. Therefore, he would like to discover his place in the Cosmos, discover a man Friday, or, failing that, at least teach goats to talk. So anxious, in fact, have some people been to communicate with Washoe, the most famous chimp, that in the attempt to make signs for Washoe three psychologists have had their fingers bitten off for their pains. Alas for man: rebuffed again.

(d) Because a primatologist is competing with other primatologists and therefore feels alone even among his colleagues. If he could converse with his chimpanzee, he would have the best of both worlds: (a) beat other scientists, and (b) have someone to talk to.

If man cannot communicate with other creatures, he is alone with himself. Dr. John Lilly, after claiming all manner of mystical and philosophical knowledge for the dolphin and after spending years trying to communicate with dolphins, changed his profession: to the study of the effect of mind-altering drugs on the individual human consciousness. He jumped from a tank of dolphins into the tank of himself.

Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are the scientist who has at last succeeded in puncturing the last of man’s inflated claims to uniqueness in the Cosmos. Now man is proved beyond doubt to be an organism among other organisms, a species in continuity with other species, a creature existing in interaction with an immanent Cosmos like all other creatures, like all elements, molecules, gaseous clouds, novas, galaxies.

Now, having placed man as an object of study in the Cosmos in however an insignificant place, how do you, the scientist, the self which hit upon this theory, how do you propose to reenter this very Cosmos where you have so firmly placed the species to which you belong? Who are you who has explained the Cosmos and how do you fit into the Cosmos you have explained?

Having proved your hypothesis, what do you do next? (1) Publish a paper in Science? (2) Begin to lobby for the Nobel? (3) Worry about three other scientists who are working on the same project? (4) Get drunk? (5) Go home and quarrel with your wife? (6) Take a girlfriend to a motel and watch Deep Throat on closed-circuit TV?

If the last is your choice, explain the connection between the triumph of science as a form of transcendence of the world and pornography as one of the few remaining avenues of reentry.

CARL SAGAN IS RIGHT in ridiculing the absurd pseudosciences now so popular. He is admirable in his defense of science as a reliable and self-correcting method of attaining truth.

Yet the fact is that nowadays there is no piece of nonsense that will not be believed by some and no guru or radio preacher, however corrupt, who will not attract a following.

Question: Why are people these days generally indifferent to science and yet willing to believe any absurd claim and any rascal who puts it forward?

(a) Because there is a need in humans for myth, for symbols, to construe and order a confusing and hostile environment — just as there is a need for food, water, shelter, and sex — and the abstract truths in science do not provide this myth.

(b) Because, as Chesterton said, when man stops believing in God, he will believe in anything at all.

(CHECK ONE)

SÖREN KIERKEGAARD MADE a very strange statement. He said that Christianity first brought the erotic spirit into the world. In his arcane style, which often seems designed as much to obfuscate as to enlighten the reader, he wrote: “Sensualism, viewed from the standpoint of Spirit, was first posited by Christianity.” Which is to say, not that sensuality had not existed in the world before in paganism, perhaps in its most perfect expression in Greece, “but not as a spiritual category.” It existed rather as an expression of harmony and unison. “In the Greek consciousness, the sensuous was under the control of the beautiful personality or, more rightly stated, it was not controlled, for it was not an enemy to be subjugated, not a dangerous rebel who should be held in check.” But in the Christian era the sensuous-erotic becomes “a qualified spirituality, that is to say, so qualified that the Spirit excludes it; if I imagine this principle concentrated in a single individual, then I have a concept of the sensuous-erotic genius. This is an idea which the Greeks did not have, which Christianity first brought into the world, even if only in an indirect sense.”

The highest expression of the sensuous-erotic genius, in Kierkegaard’s view, was Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “Mozart is the greatest of classic composers and Don Giovanni deserves the highest place among all classic works of art.”

What is arresting here is Kierkegaard’s view that the Don is to be understood not merely as a roué, a dirty old man reverted to his animal appetites, a sinner, or even as a good pagan, a Greek hedonist, but rather as “the inspiration of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh.”

Nor is the “sensuous-erotic” to be understood in modern biological terms as the sex drive and need-satisfaction, but rather as the sensual “spirit” and therefore, in Kierkegaard’s word, as the “demoniac.”

It is this “demoniac” spirit of the erotic which is “posited” by Christianity.

Presumably, Kierkegaard would have no difficulty explaining that national characteristic which has astounded so many foreign visitors to this country: that the United States is at once the most Christian of nations (at least in numbers of churchgoers) and at the same time the most eroticized society in all of history.

For our purposes, which is a much more modest and dialectically less sophisticated approach to such matters, there are two things of value in Kierkegaard’s notion of the “spirit of the sensuous-erotic,” and I acknowledge the debut fully aware that this particular passage from Kierkegaard was written under one of his pseudonyms and in “the esthetic stage of existence” and hence not necessarily approved by Kierkegaard writing in his “religious stage.”

One thing of value is his setting aside the “sensuous-erotic” as a category to be examined in its own right, a category which not only is not to be dismissed as simply sinful but which can in fact produce works of the highest genius, in Kierkegaard’s term, “the musical-erotic genius” of Don Giovanni. Thus, we are dispensed from the necessity of uttering the usual denunciations of the present age, familiar from both Christian and non-Christian sources, and adducing the usual statistics about the rise in teenage pregnancies, pornography, sex in the media, child molestation, rape, and so on. And dispensed as well from the usual rhetoric of the “sexual revolution”—the Don would have made an ideal subject of a Playboy interview or Playgirl centerfold (Hugh Hefner in fact might be described as a latter-day, rather washed-out Don; if he were set to music, it would not be by Mozart but by Mantovani) — even to the point of blaming all the woes of the Western world on the repression of sexuality by Christianity. Such denunciations and defenses are remarkable chiefly for their sterility. There is something more than a little dreary about the present standoff between the “sexual revolution” and the Christian counterrevolutionaries. It usually comes down to the Reverend Jerry Falwell confronting Bob Guccione, editor of Penthouse, on a talk show. Both men do their usual numbers, the viewer takes sides, and that is that.

But Kierkegaard gives us leave to see both, both Jerry Falwell and Bob Guccione, from a different perspective, as if the TV camera had been dollied backstage, from which vantage point we can see both Guccione and Falwell plus the talk-show host plus the studio audience and form some notion of what is going on with all of them.

Even more valuable is Kierkegaard’s characterization of “the spirit of the sensuous-erotic” and his use of the quaint word “demoniac.”

“Demoniac” implies possession of the soul by an unbenign spirit. Such a notion comports well with our far more modest semiotic description of the self, not necessarily as a soul or spirit, but in minimal terms as that semiotic entity which is unique in its ability to understand the world but not itself. The science of the scientist can understand everything in the Cosmos but the self of the scientist. It, the self, is therefore a “spiritual” entity, if you like, but an entity anyhow subject to its own modes of existence, triumphs, and disasters and, in this age, its own peculiar predicaments. Not the least benefit of semiotics and Kierkegaard is that we are delivered from the debilitating strictures of modern psychology, which has not the means of saying anything at all about the self, let alone spirit.

Both Kierkegaard and modern semiotics give us leave to speak of the self as being informed—“possessed,” if you like, at certain historical stages of belief and unbelief. It becomes possible, whether one believes in God or not, soul or not, to agree that in an age in which the self is not informed by cosmological myths, by totemism, by belief in God — whether the God of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam — it must necessarily and by reason of its own semiotic nature be informed by something else.

Kierkegaard wrote of the relationship between Christianity and “the spirit of the erotic.” I wonder what he would have made of the influence of the technological revolution on the spirit of the erotic and whether it is a coincidence that this country is not only the most Christian and most eroticized of all societies but also the most technologically transformed and the most violent. Is there a relationship between the “spirit of the erotic,” technology, and violence?

At any rate, one may state the fact in Kierkegaardian terms without pretending to solve the riddle of the relationship:

The fact is that, by virtue of its peculiar relationship to the world, to others, and to its own organism, the autonomous self in a modern technological society is possessed. It is possessed by the spirit of the erotic and the secret love of violence.

The peculiar predicament of the present-day self surely came to pass as a consequence of the disappointment of the high expectations of the self as it entered the age of science and technology. Dazzled by the overwhelming credentials of science, the beauty and elegance of the scientific method, the triumph of modern medicine over physical ailments, and the technological transformation of the very world itself, the self finds itself in the end disappointed by the failure of science and technique in those very sectors of life which had been its main source of ordinary satisfaction in past ages.

As John Cheever said, the main emotion of the adult Northeastern American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment.

Work is disappointing. In spite of all the talk about making work more creative and self-fulfilling, most people hate their jobs, and with good reason. Most work in modern technological societies is intolerably dull and repetitive.

Marriage and family life are disappointing. Even among defenders of traditional family values, e.g., Christians and Jews, a certain dreariness must be inferred, if only from the average time of TV viewing. Dreary as TV is, it is evidently not as dreary as Mom talking to Dad or the kids talking to either.

School is disappointing. If science is exciting and art is exhilarating, the schools and universities have achieved the not inconsiderable feat of rendering both dull. As every scientist and poet knows, one discovers both vocations in spite of, not because of, school. It takes years to recover from the stupor of being taught Shakespeare in English Lit and Wheatstone’s bridge in Physics.

Politics is disappointing. Most young people turn their backs on politics, not because of the lack of excitement of politics as it is practiced, but because of the shallowness, venality, and image-making as these are perceived through the media — one of technology’s greatest achievements.

The churches are disappointing, even for most believers. If Christ brings us new life, it is all the more remarkable that the church, the bearer of this good news, should be among the most dispirited institutions of the age. The alternatives to the institutional churches are even more grossly disappointing, from TV evangelists with their blown-dry hairdos to California cults led by prosperous gurus ignored in India but embraced in La Jolla.

Social life is disappointing. The very franticness of attempts to reestablish community and festival, by partying, by group, by club, by touristy Mardi Gras, is the best evidence of the loss of true community and festival and of the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection.

But there remains the one unquestioned benefit of science: the longer and healthier life made possible by modern medicine, the shorter work-hours made possible by technology, hence what is perceived as the one certain reward of the dreary life of home and the marketplace: recreation.

Recreation and good physical health appear to be the only unambivalent benefits of the technological revolution.

Five modes of recreation might be deduced from the semiotic which follows upon the placement of an autonomous unspeakable self in its world. The recreational modes of the autonomous self are understandable in terms of the semiotic options open to it, that is, those transactions with its world, itself, and other selves which are specified by its own placement in its world and its perception of itself as unspeakable.

They are:

Travel, the actual movement of the self in its world.

Sports, the disposing of oneself by contest and in team sports, the creation of a quasi community and territory, and the consequent identification of self with us against them.

Media, those transactions in which the self receives signs from other selves through a medium. Such a category can include sign-transactions as diverse as reading War and Peace, watching Dallas on TV, listening to The Grateful Dead on tape, hearing Dan Rather on the five-thirty news.

Drugs: the alteration of consciousness or the anesthetizing of the unspeakability of self.

Sex: the cheapest, most readily available and pleasurable mode of intercourse with our selves and the only mode of intercourse by which the self can be certain of its relationship with other selves — by touching and being touched, by giving and receiving pleasure, by penetrating or being penetrated.

Polarities of the “authentic” vs. the “inauthentic” are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but have rather to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience.

For example, in travel, the actual movement of the self in the world to escape the expanding nought of the autonomous self at home, different selves will be disappointed or satisfied or delighted according as the trip falls short of, meets, or exceeds the expectation of the self. But the expectation of the self, to be informed in its nothingness — if only I can get out of this old place and into the new right place, I can become a new person — places a heavy burden on travel.

Three people take a bus tour of Mexico.

The bus breaks down and the tourists have to make an unscheduled stop, an old abandoned monastery converted to a questionable hotel by a questionable hotelier, like Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana.

Traveler A is unhappy. She paid for certain accommodations and expects them. Things have gone awry. She makes everyone miserable with her complaints.

Traveler B is delighted. Having set great store by this trip, he is disappointed by its routineness, by Latinized Holiday Inns, by condo-rimmed beaches, by his boring fellow tourists. Now the unexpected happens. He feels he has left the beaten path. With satisfaction he surveys his new lodgings, a monk’s cell with adobe walls yea thick — he tells his friends later — and a single window overlooking a lush jungle. An adventure. What next?

Traveler C is neither happy nor unhappy. She knows all about standard bus tours of Mexico and she knows all about the unhappiness of Traveler A. But she also knows all about the happiness of Traveler B and the getting-off-the-beaten-path syndrome. In fact, she’s even heard of certain tours where “breakdowns” and “wrong turns” by wayward buses are prearranged. There are any number of converted monasteries in Mexico ministering to this new spiritual need. Yet she wants to make the tour, if only to get away and be let alone, and with minimal expectations. In fact, it is the very ordinariness of the tour and the ordinariness of the breakdown which she enjoys. She cultivates the routine as such. Rather than watch the picturesque Mexicans, she finds herself watching her fellow tourists watching the picturesque Mexicans. Joan Didion immortalized Traveler C.

Question: Do you identify with one traveler more than with the others? If you do, are there objective grounds for your preference?

(a) I might identify with one or another traveler but it is a subjective choice depending on one’s own experience — how many Mexican bus tours you’ve made, your life situation, and so on. One might be looking for adventure, sex, who knows? — or perhaps one has a rotten job and a rotten marriage and so may want nothing more than a mindless hiatus, so that it doesn’t matter whether the bus is lost or found or touring Mexico or Ireland. It’s too bad that A is unhappy, it is nice that B is happy, and a matter of indifference that C is neither. But what more is there to say?

(b) No, an objective judgment of sorts can be made. Traveler A is a nerd, your sub-ordinary unreflective American tourist, not to be identified with and certainly not to be preferred. B is better off, but not much. C knows this, and though she may not be happy and may not have any expectations, she is nevertheless to be preferred to A or B. For she is at least coming to the end of her rope, the same rope A and B have hold of, and will at least find out what is at the end. It is better to know than not to know.

(CHECK ONE)

A STARSHIP FROM EARTH is traveling in the galaxy, its mission to establish communication with extraterrestrial intelligences and civilizations.^*

For years SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) has explored the 200 billion stars of the galaxy, huge dish antennae searching for something, anything other than the random noise of the Cosmos. At last, the computer of the spectrum analyzer which reads the tapes of all the received transmissions picked up a pattern, that is, a repeated signal, which, however, could not be interpreted. Was it a signal from an intelligence or was it like the Coke bottle in the movie On the Beach, which was leaning on a telegraph key in deserted California and which a fitful breeze blowing a curtain caused to send out a random letter or two?

The starship has a transmission-receiver capability for the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but especially in the range of radio signals, since it is known of course that the Cosmos is filled with emissions in this part of the spectrum, from pulsars, quasars, radiation belts, and so on.

The objective of the starship is to exchange information with other civilizations comparable with or superior to our own. It has been calculated that the probability that such civilizations exist is overwhelming. What the designers of the project hoped to learn was the level of technology of other civilizations, the degree of evolution, biology, type of metabolism, etc.

The time is the year 205 °C.E. (Common Era, so called because, though the era is post-Christian, it proved useful to retain the year of Christ’s birth). The acceleration of vehicles to speeds approaching the speed of light is possible, the aging process is accordingly reduced, and the problems of communication delays are minimized.

The assumption was made that as organisms evolve in the Cosmos, a level of intelligence will be reached so that it will be possible to transmit information. Mathematics and science might be used as the basis of a common language. Mathematics is the same everywhere. The prime numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 … are prime everywhere. The physics of the Cosmos is the same. For example, since hydrogen is the most abundant atom in the Cosmos, one might use the proton and electron spin of the neutral hydrogen atom as the binary number 1. Using such a binary system, the project designers hoped that it might be possible to establish a vocabulary and transmit information about the earth and its star, for example, its position in relation to the fourteen major pulsars of the galaxy, and to put similar questions to other intelligences.

Organisms transmitting signals were, in fact, encountered. The trouble was that the responses received were not acknowledgments or statements of information but were rather countersignals of one sort or another, responses which seemed to express something like excitement or alarm or anger, often actual movements of the organisms themselves. Thus, rather than information being obtained, various behaviors were encountered — hostile, aversive, coming close or going away, flight or fight, and in one case what appeared to be an attempt at sexual union.

In fact, two such creatures were encountered in the solar system.

(1) In the outer atmosphere of Jupiter, large gaseous clouds were sighted. It was determined that they were self-contained organisms of some intelligence because they were self-propelled, moving about by emitting jets of hydrogen. They injested organic molecules and excreted helium and methane, and were observed to reproduce by fission. But despite every effort to communicate, e.g., by transmitting prime numbers in various frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, the only response of the clouds was to speed away or come close and surround the ship like a sportive school of whales — or to rise and sink like so many hot-air balloons.

(2) Skirting Saturn’s moon Titan with its heavy atmosphere of methane, another sort of creature was encountered, small glittering anemone-like organisms with spicules of methane crystals and a beak-and-sucker mouth for devouring the brown sludge of organic molecules formed on Titan’s surface by the ultraviolet light of the sun. Upon the transmission of radio waves of the frequency 1420 megahertz, the creatures were thrown into violent excitement, for all the world like the behavior of male gypsy moths upon the reception of the female pheromone. They flocked to the ship and attached themselves to its tiles and windows, using their sucker-like mouths. It was not clear whether such a response was a manifestation of hunger or hostility or an attempt at sexual union.

At last, five years later, near Proxima Centauri, communication was established with an extraterrestrial intelligence. Orbiting the third planet of Proxima Centauri (PC3), of PC’s twelve planets the one most resembling Earth, the earthship transmitted the prime numbers in the radio range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Almost immediately, the signal was returned — and imitated. But when the excited earthlings tried to descend, a glitch occurred in the controls, not once, but repeatedly — until it finally dawned on the crew that they were being held in orbit. Evidently, the earthship was being detained at a kind of checkpoint until its credentials were approved.

It was necessary to hit upon a mathematical and semantic vocabulary. The former was easy, again using the physical properties of the hydrogen atom, assigning the binary number 1 to the transition between the parallel and antiparallel proton and electron spins of the neutral hydrogen atom. Such a transition emits a radio-frequency photon of wavelength 21 centimeters and a frequency of 1420 megahertz — the reason for selecting this channel of transmission. An indexical lexicon was agreed upon. Thus, certain binary numbers were assigned to the suns of Centauri by transmitting the number along with the angle or declination of the suns from the path of transmission. Similarly, other names were assigned to other features, the other referents being “pointed at” and “named,” e.g., light, dark, other planets, pulsars, big, little, red, blue, near, far, down, up, here, there, I (the earthship), you (PC3), and so on. Plurals and abstractions and tenses were agreed upon. Goodness was a property attributed to cosmic particles which were beneficial to the metabolism of the PC3 organisms, evil to the ultraviolet rays, which were harmful. Even metaphor was arrived at: I am M4 today, meaning I am your fourth moon, PC3's fourth moon being bright, small, racy, refractile as a diamond. Or I am M6—sluggish, blue, misshapen, bored. Consciousness was defined as that property of a creature by which he draws attention to something, talks about it, or thinks about it. It was designated by a binary number which we shall call C.

A lexicon and syntax agreed upon, it was now possible for the earthship to transmit basic information about its origin, its sun, the geology, atmosphere, age of the planet earth, the biology of its organisms (e.g., C, H, O, S, H₂O, PO₄; deoxyribonucleic acid; mobile heterotrophs; surface dwellers; O₂ breathers; sexual mammals, etc.), its technology (nuclear energic), its culture (two hundred nation-states, five global powers, sporadic brushfire warfare, environmental pollution), its science, its art (literary, iconic, musical) — a message ending with a sign-off and an invitation: Over and out — come back.

There followed a long pause, then an explicit warning: Maintain orbit until certain questions are answered—then the transmission of a binary symbol which the earthlings translated as something like the Hebrew shalom—then the transmission of comparable summary of PC3 information, indicating an organism with a bromine metabolism, an older civilization than that of Earth, and a superior technology (exponentiating, approaching asymptotic limit). Culture: global, gregarious, 40,000 genera, one symbolic language (!) (cf. Earth’s thousands), reproduction: sexual (!), biology: non-senescent (!): did that mean they did not age or die?!???; art: mathematical-poetic.

There then followed several transmissions from PC3 which the earthlings did not understand. They were

T, Si → Sy = 1.35 × 10¹² years (breakthrough)

Si = atmospheric wave motion, tactile, radar return

Sy = variable pitch frequencies combined with radar-return configurations, or SRs (sound-radar)

Sn = SR, + SR₂ (+ = assert)

C = 1 (Int, Soc, Sy)

Each item of information was followed by the query: “What’s yours?” Then: “What’s your C-type? Are you C1? C2? C3? Over and out. Come back.”

A puzzled silence from the earthship transmitter, then: “Say sgain.” Then: “Say again longer [i.e., Explain]. What is C-type? What is Si? Sy? Si ? Sy breakthrough? T? Sn?

After many weeks of transmissions, dogged human effort, and an unflagging good-humored patience from the PC3 transmitter, the following explanations were spelled out:

T = time

Si = sign

Sy = symbol

Sn = sentence

T, Si → Sy 1.35 × 10¹² years means how long ago in PC3 years we made the breakthrough from sign communication to symbol communication, i.e., 13,500,000 years.

Before that, we communicated by touch, sounds of different pitches, and a radar-like reception of reflected sound. Like a bat, said an earthling. Imagine bats flying blind and emitting squeaks of different musical pitches.

Sy, or symbols, were formed by combining frequency clusters (e.g., chords of musical squeaks) with the percept or radar configuration formed by the radar-return of this or that object. Thus, instead of the word ball being applied to the round thing you earthlings play with, our primitive word was applied to the jagged radar-configuration of the double-bladed sickle with which our ancestors harvested our atmospheric algae. Our “words” or symbols are combinations of musical chords (for objects), arpeggios (for action words, verbs) with the corresponding radar percepts, just as your words ball, yellow, slice are combinations of sound configurations and visual percepts (though we don’t quite understand what you mean by “visual” and “see”).

Sn is a sentence, uniting two of these sound-radar configurations, so:

A STARSHIP IS RETURNING to earth after a voyage of eighteen years.^*

It set out with hope and excitement and good reason to expect success.

After many years of fruitless monitoring of radio emissions from space, the spectrum analyzer at SETI picked up a patterned transmission in the 1400-megahertz range which could not, apparently, be accounted for by the random noise of the Cosmos. The source was the region of Barnard’s Star some six light-years distant. There were bursts of energy with a lesser radiation in between. The configuration was repeated over and over again. Some of the clusters could be countered as prime numbers. Very possibly it was a message in a nested code: a kind of palimpsest consisting of an overlay of prime numbers (but somewhat garbled) to make contact, and under it a primer to establish a language, and under that, the message.

Hopes were raised further by an analysis of a perturbation of Barnard’s Star suggesting an orbiting planet, perhaps two, and now confirmed with such a high degree of accuracy that only two planets approximately the size of the earth could cause it.

But the message, if it was a message, could not be decoded. No doubt it was garbled by some intervening source of radiation.

Finally, it was decided at NASA to send a manned vehicle, the Bussard interstellar ramjet, which accelerates to velocities approaching the speed of light by means of a frontal scoop that funnels hydrogen atoms into a fusion engine and ejects them through a rear jet.

Some extraordinary considerations went into the planning. One was the generally accepted, though not yet proved, consequence of Einstein’s general theory, namely that — and here the mind boggled — though the voyagers on the starship would experience time as a lapse of eighteen years and would be eighteen years older when they returned, between 400 and 500 years would have elapsed on earth upon the return of the starship — depending on how close to the speed of light the Bussard ramjet could drive the ship.

The human problems were unprecedented. Friends and family of the crew, and fellow scientists, would be as long dead to them as Galileo and Columbus are to us. A crew must be found who shared the following unusual characteristics: they must be willing and able to live together in close quarters for eighteen years; they must be willing to leave behind family, husbands, wives, forever; they must be prepared to return to an earth which would either be destroyed or so technologically advanced that their homecoming in the ancient ramjet would be something like Rip Van Winkle riding a mule into the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Finally, in the event of the former, they must reproduce themselves.

The first problem was approached by calling for volunteers who for their own good and sufficient reasons were willing to leave — perhaps, as in at least one case, for patriotic reasons: somebody has to do it, we’re in trouble, and maybe the civilization on Barnard P1 can help us. Or for less admirable though just as compelling reasons: wanting out, bad marriages, wanderlust in the old U.S. head-for-the-territory, walk-out-the-front-door-and-hit-the-road tradition, or just being sick and tired of the old earth with its sad past and sadder prospects for the future, sick and tired of living in the gloomy condos of Houston, Pasadena, and Canaveral. Whatever. Volunteers were not hard to come by. NASA was deluged by thousands of applicants, not merely nuts, but qualified scientists. Apparently, many people wanted out. The main problem was not the choice of individual crew members but rather the social composition of the crew. After a careful review of cultural trends, such as the breakdown of monogamous marriage and the newest experiences in communal living, open marriage, serial monogamy, polygamy, and in the light of recent discoveries of genetic differences in the right and left-brain cortices of men and women, a crew of four was hit upon. One man and three women. Consultation with the best American neurologists and behaviorist psychologists and group-psychotherapists and with the most highly regarded Moslem sociologists and neo-Mormon marriage counselors confirmed the decision. The projected life style was to be called “programmed serial monogamy.”

Different social combinations had proved disastrous in simulated environments. Two couples or a triangle, one man and two women, or one woman and two men, failed to tolerate a year’s confinement. A single couple, married or not, either fell to murderous quarreling or became so bored with each other that performance fell off. In the case of two couples, it generally happened that one couple fell out and the spouse of one sex took up with the spouse of the opposite sex in the second couple. But it did not generally happen that the leftover pair bonded. There seldom occurred a symmetrical swap. Triangles were always disrupted by destructive pair-bonding. Somebody got left out and either sulked or became violent.

One-man-three-women teams seemed to get along best. In a post-Christian and post-feminist era, it appeared that women generally accept a polygamous relationship, given a reasonable respect for their persons and professional skills, while men were at the least less bored and at the most quite pleased. Women, it seemed, were different from men after all, not worse or better, but different. In the event of pair-bonding between man and woman, the two surplus women seemed content with a relationship, not necessarily homosexual, with each other. The sole man was enjoined, however, to treat all three women with loving and impartial care insofar as he was able. The men in the sealed-environment experiments readily agreed and by and large succeeded.

The captain was a native of Rye, New York, of Dutch descent, and named after a Roman emperor: Marcus Aurelius Schuyler. Thirty-two years old, once a history major at Harvard, he changed course, graduated from the Air Force Academy, and went to M.I.T. for astronomy. A somewhat wayward, wintry, and sardonic man, as wintry as his namesake — he was the sort who could sit in Robinson Hall listening to a lecture on the Battle of Verdun, gaze out the window at the tender green of the spring trees, suddenly reach a decision, close his book, and walk away forever, head for Colorado to fly. His consciousness was reflected and folded in upon itself. Though he might appear as stolid and as steady as one of the old astronauts or a commercial airline pilot — even a little dumb — in fact he was very much conscious of doing just that: playing the unflappable captain. It was his complex way to make the untoward odd decision and to take pleasure both in savoring the very oddness of it and in sticking to it. For example, after the launch of the shuttle to the orbital platform from which he would depart in the starship Copernicus 4, the shuttle crossed the Northeast coastline some hundred miles up and rising. Looking down through the clouds, he could just make out Long Island nuzzling into the continent like a great whale. There, just off its nose and in a sheltered cove, his thirty-foot ketch Andrea, he knew, was bobbing gently at her mooring. His pleasure came from not looking down again and in not thinking that he would never see it, the boat Andrea, or her, the woman Andrea, again.

Why did he volunteer for the mission? Because it was both the odd and the necessary thing to do and the pleasure came from it being both. Though he took as dark a view of the human condition as the Emperor, like the Emperor he also took his pleasure in acting well even though he knew it probably would not avail and that things would end badly. Like the early twentieth-century psychologist Freud, he believed that there is no end to the mischief and hatred which men harbor deep in themselves and unknown to themselves and no end to their capacity to deceive themselves and that though they loved life, they probably loved death more and in the end thanatos would likely win over eros. He and his fellowmen, he knew, loved themselves and war too well and nothing short of a miracle would save them and he did not believe in miracles. But he volunteered nonetheless, or rather because he didn’t believe. He was like a Christian who had lost his faith in everything but the Fall of man. In another time he might have said that earthlings were like the Gadarene swine, who were possessed by demons and were rushing headlong to destruction.

So why not try for Barnard’s Star’s planet for this very reason, that even if there were an ETI there, he could not imagine what it could tell a human that would help the earth four hundred years from now.

Neither the captain nor his superiors were hopeful about the earth’s prospects. Indeed, he had been given secret orders that in the event of a catastrophe on earth during his voyage, he had permission either to request sanctuary on Barnard’s Star’s planet or to colonize it. Surely, one man and three young women had at least as good a chance of starting a new race as Adam and Eve.

And why was he chosen from the thousands of volunteers? Perhaps because of the very complexity and reflectedness of his character: that he knew how to perform as coolly as the most stolid astronaut, and had also this odd “humanistic” background, a history major who specialized in the old twentieth century. So, with only the vaguest notion that somehow a scientist and pilot with a “humanistic” background might somehow be able to get along with three women for eighteen years — or for the next fifty years — and with an intelligent being on Barnard P1, NASA chose him. His father being Governor of New York didn’t hurt him either.

The crew members were:

Tiffany, a tall blond astrophysicist-psychotherapist, from Cal Tech, age 27. In her vita she listed her hobbies: cross-country skiing, wok cooking, “giving and receiving strokes in a creative stroke field.”

Kimberly, a petite brunette linguist-semioticist from Bloomington, Indiana, age 22, the youngest but also the best and the brightest in her field, who, if anyone could, could decipher the code from the ETI on Barnard P1. She liked, besides semiotics: walking in the autumn woods, reading the Vedas in the original Sanskrit, gazing into firelight with a kindred spirit.

The third crew member was the medical officer, Dr. Jane Smith of Nashville, age 23. The oddity about her was that she had been married, listed no hobbies, and put herself down as a Methodist. Hers was old Tennessee Scotch-Irish stock. “You must be the last Methodist in Tennessee,” said the Captain, thinking to make a pleasantry. Her smile was thin. The rumor was that, competent though she was, and brilliant though her contributions to hypothermic hibernation were, her “religious preference” had not hurt her with NASA. The Christian minority was as loud as it was small, as shrill as it was shrinking. Affirmative action for minorities in the space program had been sustained by the Supreme Court. The last mission to Pluto had been manned by a black and Hispanic crew who had not been heard from. Some bad jokes were told. So the present mission was manned by three women and one WASPP (White Anglo-Saxon Post-Protestant) male. Jane Smith had graduated from Vanderbilt, taken her residency in aerospace medicine, and contributed valuable papers on hypothermic hibernation techniques. Her discovery was that both the tissue damage and the discomfort (excruciating pain, if the truth be known) of the hibernation cycle could be minimized by the injection of an endomorph (already known as the Smith-Bowers endomorph). Indeed, the usual cramps and bends of the thaw were replaced by a mild euphoria, as if one had been awakened from a pleasant dream. (“You look just like Scarlett O’Hara waking up,” said the Captain, a student of old twentieth-century culture, to Kimberly the first time she came out of the deep freeze.)

In a word, the Captain suspected Jane might have exaggerated her Methodism in her application, for had she not also signed the “sexual access” form? — that is, the consent agreement by which she contracted to make herself, “her person,” available for “the biological and social objectives” of the mission, which objectives also included “the emotional needs” of her fellow crew members. (Let it be added quickly that the Captain had to sign the same contract. This was no seraglio.)

The shifts were arranged so that the Captain took his watches with successive partners or second officers. The shifts were of six months’ duration: two astronauts in hibernation, the other two “awake,” that is, alternating eight-hour watches, with an hour or so overlap to allow for scientific experiments and whatever social interaction or “stroke field” might seem appropriate. Thus, in a three-year period, each crew member would have spent six months “awake” with each other crew member.

Then there were the “simul-dehibes”—that is, periods of simultaneous dehibernation when all four crew members were “awake” for a period of one month annually, at which time the progress of the mission could be assessed, scientific and group-interaction experiments performed, and just plain socializing could take place, e.g., bridge, Scrabble, Monopoly, books read aloud, playlets performed, video-stereo-hologram tapes played, dancing in place. For a while, earth TV could be watched, for about a month into the mission — but as the ramjet accelerated, the TV action slowed in a Doppler effect, so that in old reruns of M*A*S*H, a favorite, Hawkeye and the nurses spoke in ever lower and more sepulchral tones and moved like dream figures walking in glue.

An open and free sexuality was programmed, based on Prescott’s statistical analysis of pre-industrial societies and his conclusion that, in those societies in which sexual activity and the pleasures of the body are not repressed, theft, violence, war, and religion are minimal. Whereas, in those societies in which infants are disciplined and adults are inhibited, there tends to be a high incidence of murder, war, and belief in a supernatural being. Hugging and touch were encouraged even during routine scientific experiments.

The starship was therefore equipped with a nursery. The project planners had two goals in mind: one, to devise a mini-society in which affection was lavished freely between adults and upon children; and two: just in case Homo sapiens sapiens had been destroyed on earth, then at least a tiny remnant would have survived, either as refugees on Barnard P1 or as colonists elsewhere, or perhaps even to return to earth.

The worst case: the earth five hundred years later, blasted and depopulated but perhaps habitable, and Copernicus 4 returning, limping home with four middle-aged astronauts and x number of children ranging from one to seventeen years old.

Even in the worst case, life might not only survive but prevail and multiply and once again fill the earth, with a new variety of Homo sapiens sapiens, an affectionate, hugging, promiscuous, peaceful breed. (Genetic inbreeding was something to worry about, but the most exhaustive genetic studies of the four ruled out all known pathogenic genes.)

SCENE: Three days after launch from orbital platform and one week before the first hibernation.

The crew: taking their ease for the first time since the rigors of launch, instrument check, adjusting the hydrogen scoop, counting hydrogen atoms, calibrating the engine. The steady Bussard acceleration is mild, scarcely more noticeable than the slight heavy-footedness one feels in a swift elevator.

It was like moving into a new house. Furniture is placed, beds are made, the kitchen stocked, and the folks sit down in the living room, exhausted but relaxed, to have a look around, to savor their new dwelling.

The four are sitting at their consoles in the command module. It is hardly larger than a big bathroom. From the command module a good-sized tube, not unlike the tunnel in the old B-52, leads aft to rec-room-gym, to hibe units (which look like Sears’ Best freezers) and bedrooms (smaller than an Amtrak roomette: here intimacy need not be encouraged, it is obligatory), nursery and supply rooms, and finally the engine.

The four chairs in command are comfortable, can tilt, vibrate, or swivel to face each other or the computer displays.

For some reason, no one looks directly at anyone else — except Jane Smith, who — perhaps because she is flight surgeon — gazes curiously from one to the other:

Tiffany: sprawled, long-legged and handsome in her jumpsuit, yawns and stretches more perhaps than she needs to.

Kimberly: frowning, preoccupied, a book open in her lap (volume 15 of The Complete Works of B. F. Skinner), chewing on a fingernail for all the world as if she were sitting in the library of the Indiana University.

Jane Smith: watching them, taking note of the angle at which the chairs are swiveled and toward whom, which leg is crossed, etc. She is smiling slightly. She and the Captain have the first six-month watch — that is, they will alternate eight-hour watches for six months while the other two hibernate.

Notice the Captain.

He is every inch the professional, lounging at his ease the way a professional does after doing his thing and doing it well, a bit weary after the hundreds of items on the checklist, after cranking up the ramjet, a bit red-eyed and unshaven, eyes half-closed, rocking just enough in his chair to flex his neck while he massages it gently. But wait. Is he as simple as that? You would perhaps notice, as Jane Smith does (that is why she is smiling) that he is complex and somewhat folded upon himself. Which is to say not only that he is lounging at his ease, which is what one would expect, but that he is quite conscious of doing so and of how he does it. Would he be lounging in quite the same way, massaging his neck in quite the same way, if the women were not present? Indeed, he is first-rate at his job, but he is also something like jetliner Captain Dean Martin in an Airport movie who has just made a successful landing of a disabled 747—while three stewardesses watch. That, too, is a pleasure for Deano the actor sitting in his mockup jet. But Captain Schuyler has the best of both worlds: he is a real pilot but he is also a good actor, which is to say he knows how to do what he does and also how to do it with an actor’s calculated effect. He is aware of his effect on the women.

Accelerating toward the speed of light as he exits his world, he was never more successfully and triumphantly in his world.

The eyes are important. The women make a point of watching him while not appearing to, except Jane Smith. He makes a point of not watching them, while appearing watchable.

Can it be said of him what the Apostle John wrote in his first letter, that he had the best of this world even as he left it, the pride of life and the lust of the eyes?

Hardly, not lust exactly, in the current meaning, but lust rather in the Old English sense of lysten, to please or take delight. Because lust is a craving and lysten is a taking and giving of delight. Delight in the three women. He wished to delight them in return. A twofold delight in playing out the role of Captain, doing his job, and lounging at his ease, and the added aesthetic delight of consciously doing so in the way the women would expect, and so as a preliminary stratagem, a male display, in what would surely be a complex courtship.

The stratagem is partially successful. It “works” with Tiffany and Kimberly in the way it is calculated to, just as the sight of weary Deano, collar unbuttoned, tie loosened, massaging his neck in the 747, worked with the stewardesses. In this case, “working” means that they are attracted to him for reasons which he knows about but they don’t. But it doesn’t work with Jane Smith because she knows what he is doing: hence the ironic smile through her eyes. But wait. Does it not work for this very reason? That he knows that his little ruse will not succeed with her and that she will know that he knows that it won’t. At any rate, the encounter between the Captain and Dr. Jane Smith is of a different order of complexity.

Years pass. Kimberly and Tiffany were impregnated three times outward bound. Dr. Jane Smith refused sex on the first watch with the Captain. Her excuse: Somebody has to run the nursery. Her second excuse: We’re not married. Her third excuse: I’m married to someone else.

THE CAPTAIN: But we’re a year into the flight. Your husband is 123 years old, or dead.

DR. JANE SMITH: We can’t be sure.

THE CAPTAIN: But you signed the sexual access form.

DR. JANE SMITH: I lied.

THE CAPTAIN: Don’t you like me?

DR. JANE SMITH: Very much.

THE CAPTAIN: I like you very much. More than the others.

DR. JANE SMITH: I know — though you seem to like them well enough.

THE CAPTAIN: Good God. You’re jealous.

DR. JANE SMITH: Yes.

THE CAPTAIN: This is the first day of our second six-month watch together. Are we going to do crosswords and Great Books again? I love you.

DR. JANE SMITH: I know. Marry me.

THE CAPTAIN: Marry you! Why? How?

DR. JANE SMITH: You’re the captain. The captain of a ship can—

THE CAPTAIN: The captain of a ship cannot marry himself.

DR. JANE SMITH: Who says? You stand there, say the words, then move over here, give the response.

THE CAPTAIN: What words? I don’t have the book.

DR. JANE SMITH: I do.

THE CAPTAIN: Good Lord. What about the others?

DR. JANE SMITH: Don’t tell them.

So they were married. Dr. Jane Smith conceived and delivered herself of a son. She baptized him, not by pouring, sprinkling, or immersion — what with zero gravity — but with a squirt from the drinking tube.

The names of the first seven children were Krishna, Vishnu, Indira (out of Kimberly), Anna Freud, Oppie, Irene-Curie (out of Tiffany) and John (out of Dr. Jane Smith).

The “message” from Barnard’s Star turned out to be a false alarm, a non-message. It was no more than an interference effect from the powerful magnetic fields of the two Barnard planets, producing a complex pulsar transmission in the radio frequencies — much like two metronomes set at different speeds. Thus, where a single pulsar would go tick-tick-tick, this “message” went something like tock-tick-tock-tick-tick-tick-tock, a non-message fiendishly close to a message.

Barnard’s two planets were dead. They were also without oxygen and water and hence not colonizable.

More ominous than the bad news from Barnard was the bad news from home. Even as the ramjet approached the speed of light, it should have been overtaken by a few messages from earth. But after five years starship time — ninety years earth time — the messages ceased altogether.

Nevertheless, the crew took comfort. Any number of technical things could have gone wrong. After the disappointment at Barnard, everyone secretly looked forward to the return voyage after the great swing around the star when they should be running into a regular blizzard of outgoing messages from earth.

But earth was silent. Even after repeated queries: JPL, do you read? Do you read? Respond on any or all of designated frequencies—and even after five years of allowing for responses: silence.

Everyone knew what had happened. The Richardson survey, from his The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, had proved all too reliable. The only unknown quantity was the magnitude of the final war. Was it an M10—the end of human life on the planet? an M9? an M5?

The long voyage home was like a dream. Five more children were born. Carl Jung out of Tiffany, Siddhartha and Chomsky out of Kimberly, Sarah and Mary Ann out of Dr. Jane Smith.

Other than the begetting, the care and feeding of infants, the education of children and teens, the adults were mostly silent — silent, until, as the starship neared earth, there came the inevitable speculation:

How bad is it? or was it? Even if it were an M10, 90 percent of the Cesium 137 radiation would have decayed after a hundred years. But the nitrogen in the upper atmosphere would have been oxidized, destroying significant amounts of ozone. The resulting solar ultraviolet effect would last for years. Birds would go blind — blind birds can’t find insects and so they die. Blind bees can’t pollinate plants. Would it be an earth swarming with locusts, seas teeming with blind fish? Even if there were survivors, how many would develop skin cancers? All the light-skinned? How would crops and microorganisms be affected?

But the favorite, the endless, the obsessive speculation of which they never tired:

Where will you go? What will you do? What about the children?

There was only one agreement. After eighteen years of living together in a space the size of a 727 fuselage, they were all thoroughly sick of each other and wanted to go their separate ways. With two exceptions.

THE CAPTAIN: Where do you want to go?

TIFFANY: I’m going to the coast of Oregon, where I once spent the summer doing anthropology with an Indian tribe. They were fishermen. They lived well and simply. It should be the safest spot in the U.S. from fallout. And the first are least likely to be contaminated by radiation or ultraviolet.

KIMBERLY: I want to go to Uxmal in the Yucatan. I have an idea about deciphering the glyphs. I lived there once in a pyramid next to a lovely deep cenote. I have a feeling that if anything has survived, it has.

THE CAPTAIN: What about your kids?

TIFFANY-AND-KIMBERLY: Oh, they all think they’re Jane’s anyhow.

THE CAPTAIN: What about you, Jane? Where do you want to go?

DR. JANE SMITH: Lost Cove, Tennessee. I was born there. It’s a tiny valley of the Cumberland plateau sealed off by a ridge. No roads, no phones, no TV. Only three farms and a cave. Good water, sweet white corn, quail, squirrel, deer, fish, wild pig. I haven’t had pork sausage, grits, and collards in twenty years. All projections of East-West fallout patterns missed it. I think I’ll take my chances.

THE CAPTAIN: Would you take the children?

DR. JANE SMITH: Sure. Can you fly us there?

THE CAPTAIN: Yes, but we have to land in Utah first.

DR. JANE SMITH: What will you do, Captain?

THE CAPTAIN: (Why didn’t she invite me to come with her to Tennessee?) I’m going back to Long Island. I don’t care what they’ve done to it. I’m getting in my ketch and sailing to Montauk.

DR. JANE SMITH (shyly): Wouldn’t you rather come with me to Tennessee?

THE CAPTAIN: Yes.

The starship made two low orbits before landing at Bonneville: the first fly-by to see the Eastern Hemisphere by night; the second, the Western. Silently, like Lucifer in starlight, leaning on his great wings, they flew low over the dark northern continents.

London was dark. Europe was dark. Moscow was dark. China was dark. Japan was dark. San Francisco was dark. Chicago was dark. New York was dark.

At dawn on April 12, eighteen years after launch in starship time, 457 years in earth time, the starship Copernicus 4 set down on schedule on the salt flats at Bonneville, Utah, the captain landing at 190 knots as easily as an ancient airline pilot landing a 727. One does not forget how to ride a bicycle, swim, or fly an airplane.

After a long silence, the Captain requested an external radiation reading from Kimberly. Negative.

There was no one and nothing to be seen except the rusty shards of old steel maintenance sheds from the twenty-first century.

They stepped out into the sweet, heavy desert air. The problem was walking — but not for the children! Perhaps they were like the newborn of the Arctic tern who fly to the Dry Tortugas, never having been there before, yet land and know it for home.

Despite Dr. Jane Smith’s careful program of exercise and calcium maintenance, the adults were limber-legged as sailors and blind as bats in the dazzling Utah sun.

The children ran and fell and jumped and fell like the Beatles on a soccer field.

They made for the nearest shade and the nearest shelter — of all things, the ruins of a rest stop on old Interstate 80 between Salt Lake City and San Francisco.

They sat at a picnic table, the returning earthlings, speechless and bemused. The rusting hulks of ancient eighteen-wheelers, Airstreams, and twenty-first-century camper-choppers (helicopters-with-tents) littered the parking area. Close by, the broken concrete of old 1-80 was drifted by salt and sand like a Roman road in Cyrenaica. But a single aspen shaded them, its crisp new leaves shivering and glittering like new money in the rising sun. A single buzzard wheeled high in the sky. As they watched, a green lizard crawled on the table, elbows sprung, cocked an eye at them, and inflated a red bladder.

The earth was alive.

There were also human survivors. And an odd lot they were, the four who rescued the stranded astronauts.

One was Aristarchus Jones, an astronomer who lived in the old SAC headquarters under a mountain at Colorado Springs.

The other three were Benedictine monks from a nearby abbey where Jones had been living for a month.

What was he, Jones, doing here? Why, he had come to meet them. They were expected. Or rather, Jones had years ago come into possession of some documents from the old JPL in Pasadena and had made the calculation that if Copernicus 4 had failed to colonize Barnard’s P1, it would return to earth — ETA: some time in April of this year.

So here he was. In February he had ridden a horse out old I-80 from Denver, taking two weeks, and had been put up by the Benedictines while he searched the skies for Copernicus 4.

The Benedictines? They were even odder. The three were all that remained, the remnant of a thriving community which at its peak, a period of religious revival after the second of the great wars of the twentieth century, had as many as three hundred men.

Now there were three: the abbot, a dried-up old sourdough with a wisp of a beard and a nose like a buzzard’s beak, and a running sore on his forehead; and two black monks, not “black monks” as all black-robed Benedictines used to be called, but black men, Negroes in the old usage, who were monks. Four white monks had died within the decade, of assorted cancers. Black men, it seemed, had the skin melanin to withstand the noxious ultraviolet.

The community had managed to survive, if this odd trio could be called a community, thanks to the prescience of an abbot of the twenty-first century who had foreseen WWIII of the year 2069 and had excavated a huge shelter in the sandstone under the abbey deep enough and well-stocked enough to survive the hundred-year decay time of Cesium 137.

The eighteen astronauts, young and old — the youngest, Sarah, a babe in arms, in the arms of Dr. Jane Smith — took their ease in the monastery garden next to an undistinguished barracks-like church and cloister built of twentieth-century cinder blocks, ugly but durable. The children watched in astonishment as the monks walked in tiny procession, bearing aloft fronds of a desert plant. It was Palm Sunday.

There were also children at the abbey, a dozen or so, mostly genetically malformed and misbegotten: retardates, dolichocephalics (“steeple-heads”) bilateral cleft palates (“wolf-snouts”), armless, legless, depigmented, multipigmented (“harlequins”) — yet a remarkably cheerful and playful lot.

The two groups eyed each other. The first, the earthlings, looking more like visitors from space than the visitors from space: three monks in black, and Aristarchus Jones, a young blond Californian who wore a loose white garment fitted with a hood with eyeholes which protected him from the ultraviolet but made him look like a Ku Kluxer from olden time.

Abbot Leibowitz, ex-physicist, ex-Brooklynite, looked like a shtetl shopkeeper stranded in the Sinai desert for forty years.

The two black monks looked like Amos ‘n’ Andy, one small and sober and smart as Sidney Poitier; the other ponderous, windy, and funny.

The Captain had some questions, while the space children, who after a week had got the hang of earth, climbed trees, pulled grass, shied rocks as if they’d been born to it. They, the space children, after their initial astonishment, got along fine with the “misbegotten,” learned baseball from them, took them aboard Copernicus 4, taught them video-computer games.

THE CAPTAIN: What was it, an M7?

ABBOT: The old war? An M9, I’m afraid.

THE CAPTAIN: How many are left?

JONES AND ABBOT (looking at each other): You mean people?

THE CAPTAIN: Yes,

JONES: We don’t know. Not enough.

THE CAPTAIN: Not enough for what?

JONES: To sustain civilization.

THE CAPTAIN: Well, who do you know for a fact to have survived?

JONES: A couple of thousand in California. Six in Colorado Springs.

THE CAPTAIN: New York?

ABBOT: Don’t know. The last courier on his way to the West Coast said there were a hundred or so on Long Island.

THE CAPTAIN (to Abbot): What about Asia? Europe? Don’t you have communication with other monasteries? Churches?

ABBOT (shrugging): Don’t know about Europe. A few Catholics here and there in North America, a few churches, but no bishops.

THE CAPTAIN: The Pope?

ABBOT: Don’t know.

DR. JANE SMITH: Any Methodists?

ABBOT: Very few Methodists.

DR. JANE SMITH (eyeing him): Jews?

ABBOT (reviving): Yeah. A young Israeli came through here several years ago looking for his family in San Francisco. He had made a boat and sailed from Tyre, all alone. He said there were several hundred Israelis holed up in the caves of Qumran.

THE CAPTAIN: To get away from the radiation?

ABBOT: No, to get away from the Arabs.

THE CAPTAIN: Are they still fighting?

ABBOT: Yes. But radiation is no longer a danger. Cesium 137 radiation became minimal a hundred years ago.

THE CAPTAIN: Then why hasn’t the species replenished or begun to replenish? Or has it?

ABBOT AND JONES look at each other.

JONES: There’s another problem.

THE CAPTAIN: What?

JONES: Sterility.

THE CAPTAIN: From the Cesium? How could that be? Your parents were not sterile. The lizards and buzzards are not sterile.

JONES: We don’t really know. Maybe a cumulative effect of Cesium in the food chain. Maybe the ultraviolet, maybe a delayed effect of the chemical warfare. Anyhow, it has been slowly progressive until now—

THE CAPTAIN: Now what?

ABBOT: Now we estimate an incidence of 98 percent sterility in humans. There has not been a recorded birth in Utah, Colorado, or California in more than a year.

THE CAPTAIN (looking at Jones): And you?

JONES: Viable sperm count: zero.

THE CAPTAIN (looking at monks, thinks better of it, looks at Jones): You married?

JONES (looking at Tiffany, another blond Californian): No.

MONK AMOS (solemn and a bit platitudinous, like Amos in Amos 'n’ Andy): It’s tragic to see people want children and not be able to have them. What a joy to see these children!

THE CAPTAIN: How about the sexual drive? Is that affected, too, in some people?

MONK ANDY: In very few white folks and no niggers at all.

THE CAPTAIN: Let me get this straight. What you’re saying is that you’re probably the last generation on earth.

JONES: If not this, then the next is the last, surely.

ABBOT (brightening): Until you came along.

THE CAPTAIN (after a long pause): Do you have a plan?

ABBOT AND JONES: We have two plans. Two irreconcilable plans. Each involves you. I’m afraid you’re going to have to decide.

THE CAPTAIN: Let’s hear them.

Dr. Aristarchus Jones’s Proposal

Here are the facts:

The human species is finished on earth. Due to the delayed and cumulative effect of Ce 137 radiation or the reduction of ozone in the atmosphere by nitrous oxides and the resulting ultraviolet flare, male sterility is approaching 100 percent, and female is not far behind. In a word, we are either the last generation on earth or the next to last. You, Captain, and your crew are obviously fertile, but it is problematical how long you will remain so — a year? a month? And do you imagine that when your children mature sexually, they will be fertile?

My proposal: that we colonize Europa, one of the Galilean satellites of Jupiter. You, Captain, made a fly-by eighteen years ago and know better than I that it is probably habitable: planet-size, covered by water ice, evidence of newly emerging land — the famous greening seen nowhere else but here on earth — no vulcanism, no impact craters, what appears to be a river system and, most important of all, an atmosphere of 10 percent oxygen.

Your starship has sufficient reactor fuel for launch and to attain sufficient ramjet speeds to activate the hydrogen scoop. Hence, a journey of weeks.

Here in the good monks’ cellar I have found a supply of seeds, algae, plants, small mammals, and even insects. I have books, music, Shakespeare on cassettes.

As a matter of fact, we have no choice except to stay here and die. I will go along — you will need me as a technical adviser. Moreover, Tiffany and I already have a relationship. Who knows, I may not be totally sterile — no one ever is 100 percent. After all, it only takes one spermatozoon.

With a bit of luck, we can colonize Europa in much the same way as Europe colonized the New World, except that—and here is the exciting part! — there is no reason why we cannot develop a society such as the one my namesake lived in in ancient Ionia, a society based on reason and science, and do so without repeating the mistakes of the past, for example, the Dark Ages, two thousand years of Plato and Judaism and Christianity — a sexually free and peace-loving society where the sciences and arts can flourish freed from the superstitions and repressions of religion — no offense to the good monks, who are in fact invited to come along. I think it appropriate, with your permission, to change the name of Europa to New Ionia. At long last, we are going to put behind us forever the interminable quarrels of the people of the Book — first the Jews, then the Christians, then Islam. There will be no Middle East on Ionia, no Christian vs. Jew, no Christian vs. Moslem, Shi-ite vs. Sunnite, Moslem vs. Jew, Protestant vs. Catholic.

There is no reason why we cannot start a new society on another planet just as we started a new society in the New World.

In fact, we have no choice. Europa lives. This planet is dying.

There is no time to lose. I calculate that the launch window for Europa will occur for only a few days next month.

That is my proposal.

ABBOT: Are the children invited?

ARISTARCHUS: The space children are. It would make no sense to perpetuate genetic defects.

ABBOT: I see.

Abbot Leibowitz’s Proposal

Here are the facts:

The human species may or may not be finished on earth. Perhaps the incidence of sterility is lower in Seattle or New Zealand. We do not know.

But it makes no difference. In either case, I could not go.

Why not?

Because I believe that God exists and that he created the Cosmos (the Big Bang, as you vulgarly call it, embarrasses you, Aristarchus, doesn’t it?), that he created man through evolution, in the latest moment of which, perhaps the last Ice Age, man became ensouled and came to himself as man, body and spirit; that God thus created man as a person who had gifts of knowledge and love but most of all of freedom, that he somehow encountered a catastrophe, God alone knows what, used his freedom badly, and chose badly — perhaps chose himSELF, the one thing he can never know of itself, rather than God — and has been in trouble ever since. That, as a consequence, God himself intervened in the history of this insignificant planet, through a covenant with an even more obscure tribe, the Jews, through his son, a Jew who actually lived as a man on this earth, him and no other, through founding a church, the Catholic Church based on a very mediocre, intemperate Catholic, Peter, also a Jew; that he, God, is somehow inextricably and permanently, even hopelessly, involved with the two, the Jews and the Catholic Church, until the end of earth time.

In a sense, nothing has changed. Here is the Christian remnant, still hanging on, a slightly mad enclave of odd sorts, gentile-bums collected from the hedgerows and invited to the feast. And over there in Israel, we know, is still the Jewish remnant, still hanging on, long ago dispersed and now come back to the same place, proud and stiff-necked as ever, still persecuted, still fighting Assyrians. What has changed?

I am both. I am both Jew and Catholic, whether Jew or Catholic like it or not, and generally they do not, usually have no use for each other, in fact, and even less use for me. The Jews think I have apostasized, and the Catholics think I am a Jew. They don’t think of Jesus and Mary as Jewish. But me? I’m still a Jew. And they’re right. I am. Catholics are a queer lot — I’ve never really gotten used to them. I admire their, our, faith, adopted it in fact, but I wish they loved learning more, as they loved it in the High Middle Ages, loved science and art more, like our brother Aristarchus here, just as they loved them in the age of the great Giotto and Roger Bacon and the monk Copernicus and the great Galileo; like Moses Maimonides and Einstein; like the monk Gregor Mendel. We are a church of sinners, yes, but can’t sinners love science and art?

But the two, Jew and Catholic, are inextricably attached to each other, like Siamese twins at the umbilicus, whether they like it or not, and they both detest it, until the end of earth time.

I believe that we have the promise of God and his son that he, Jesus Christ, having come once to save us from the death of SELF in search of ITSELF without any other SELF, will also come again at the end of the world. We also have his promise that the Church will endure until the end of the world.

Now, it is also the case that I have no reason to believe that the Holy Father or a single bishop has survived the holocaust. As Dr. Jane Smith recently told me, jokingly but more seriously than she knew, I may very well be the Pope. That is to say, as an abbot, I have the episcopal power of consecrating priests. And if there are no bishops left and no Pope left, guess who that leaves. As abbot, I am in the apostolic succession, the direct line of laying on hands which goes back to Christ himself.

As Pope, my first act will be to revive the University of Notre Dame around a nucleus of Jewish scientists whom I shall lure from Israel. The Catholic Church is responsible for the birth of science in the West, but it got too rich, got distracted by family quarrels, and dropped the ball, which the Jews picked up.

Are you getting the point, Captain? I may be the only man left on earth who can consecrate priests. The only candidates for the priesthood I can see, not counting my little malformed innocents, are these boys, your sons, Krishna, Vishnu, Siddhartha, Oppie, Carl Jung, Chomsky, and John. Whether or not one or another chooses to become a priest is his business and God’s business, but it is my business to be around, to stay here in case the human race survives and needs priests.

And if it is the end, it is still my obligation to remain, because the Church will survive until the end of earth time and until Christ himself comes, and so, if I’m the putative head of the Church, as putative head I stay.

My proposal: Will your craft fly like an airplane? Yes? Can you land it anywhere? Yes? Like a helicopter? Yes? Very well.

I propose a variant of Dr. Jane Smith’s proposal. I propose that you fly Dr. Jane Smith and the children and my odd little brood here and my two monks, yourself, and me, and whoever else wants to go, to Lost Cove, Tennessee.

There, as Dr. Jane Smith and I have reason to believe, the residual radiation is not so bad, that under the blue haze of the Smoky Mountains, the ultraviolet flare may not be excessive, and that your beautiful children may remain fertile.

Accordingly, I propose to you, Captain, that you accede to Dr. Jane Smith’s wish that I marry the two of you properly — your marriage in space by yourself is canonically suspect to say the least — and that I baptize the children in Lost Cove Creek.

I wish to come with you for one reason — otherwise, I would rather remain here in my beloved Utah and be let alone and die in peace — but I am obliged to be present to serve the survivors as priest and ordain as priest any one of them who might wish to become a priest, and to await the coming of the Lord if it is the end. I’d as soon wait for him here, but what can you do? Veh.

Why should you of Copernicus 4 believe any of these things, which must surely seem preposterous to you? The only reason, from your point of view, is that you have no choice. You know now that if what I say is not true, you are like the gentiles Paul spoke of: a stranger to every covenant, with no promise to hope for, with the world about you and no God. You are stuck with yourselves, ghost selves, which will never become selves. You are stuck with each other and you will never know how to love each other. Even if you succeed, you and your progeny will go to Europa and roam the galaxy, lost in the Cosmos forever.

I agree with Dr. Jones: we should leave as soon as possible — but for Tennessee, not for Europa.

Question: If you were the captain, which of the two proposals would you accept? or would you accept neither? Do you have a better idea?

(a) I’d go with Aristarchus Jones and the others to New Ionia.

(b) I’d marry Dr. Jane Smith and take her and the children to Lost Cove, Tennessee.

(c) I’d go to Qumran and fight with the Israelis.

(d) I’d go to Jordan and fight with the Arabs.

(e) I’d drop the abbot and Jane Smith in Tennessee, send the children to Europa with Jones and Tiffany, leaving me and Kimberly to take our chances in Uxmal.

(f) I’d take no chances. I’d cover all bets, even the million-to-one shot that there might be something to Abbot Leibowitz’s preposterous claim. I’d go with him and Jane and the children to Lost Cove, Tennessee, wait for whatever he’s waiting for, monitor my sperm count — yet keep Copernicus 4 fueled and ready to go. (This, roughly, was Dr. Jane Smith’s response, in a rather vulgar aside to the Captain, after hearing the abbot’s proposal, in which she lapsed into a dialect of her Southern Methodist origins: “Well, why not? Who knows? The whole thing is preposterous, of course: two niggers and a Jew claiming to be Roman Catholics, a Jewish pope and two black monks. Popery and monkery in the middle of nowhere. But what have we got to lose? They’re Christians, after all. I’ll go along with it, especially the marriage ceremony and the baptism.”)

(g) Other (specify).

(CHECK ONE)

Thought Experiment: An experiment in shifting one’s perspective toward the end of determining the relative preposterousness of modern Cartesian consciousness vis-à-vis the preposterousness of Judaeo-Christianity — that is, whether they are two unrelated preposterousnesses or whether one preposterousness is a function of another, i.e., whether Judaeo-Christianity is preposterous from the point of view of the modern scientific consciousness precisely to the degree that the latter has elevated itself from a method of knowing secondary causes to an all-construing quasi-religious view of the world — whether, in fact, the preposterousness of Judaeo-Christianity is not in fact an index of the preposterousness of the age.

Play the following game. Adopt the following perspective: the point of view of Aristarchus Jones (little or no effort is required of you if you are a creature of the age, that is, a rational, intelligent, well-educated, objective-minded denizen of the twentieth century, reasonably well versed in the sciences and the arts; we are all Aristarchus Jones):

Judaeo-Christianity is indeed a preposterous religion, far less compatible with the modern scientific temper than, say, Buddhism or Brahmanism.

Judaism, to begin with, is a preposterous religion. It proposes as a serious claim to truth and for our belief that a God exists as a spirit separate from us, that he made the Cosmos from nothing, that he made man, a creature of body and spirit, that man suffered a fall or catastrophe, and that as a consequence God entered into a unique covenant with one of the most insignificant tribes on one of the most insignificant planets of one of the most insignificant of the 100 billion stars of one of the billions and billions of galaxies of the Cosmos.

Protestant Christianity is even more preposterous than Judaism. It proposes not only all of the above but further, that God himself, the God of the entire Cosmos, appeared as a man, one man and no other, at a certain time and a certain place in history, that he came to save us from our sins, that he was killed, lay in a tomb for three days, and was raised from the dead, and that the salvation of man depends on his hearing the news of this event and believing it!

Catholic Christianity is the most preposterous of the three. It proposes, not only all of the above, but also that the man-god founded a church, appointed as its first head a likable but pusillanimous person, like himself a Jew, the most fallible of his friends, gave him and his successors the power to loose and to bind, required of his followers that they eat his body and drink his blood in order to have life in them, empowered his priests to change bread and wine into his body and blood, and vowed to protect this institution until the end of time. At which time he promised to return.

Second Perspective: Now the game requires that you make a 180-degree shift of point of view from the standard objective view of the Cosmos to a point of view from which you can see the self viewing the Cosmos.

From this new perspective, it can be seen at once that the objective consciousness of the present age is also preposterous.

The earth-self observing the Cosmos and trying to understand the Cosmos by scientific principles from which its self is excluded is, beyond doubt, the strangest phenomenon in all of the Cosmos, far stranger than the Ring Nebula in Lyra.

It, the self, is in fact the only alien in the entire Cosmos.

The modern objective consciousness will go to any length to prove that it is not unique in the Cosmos, and by this very effort establishes its own uniqueness. Name another entity in the Cosmos which tries to prove it is not unique.

The earth-self seeks to understand the Cosmos overtly according to scientific principles while covertly exempting itself from the same understanding. The end of this enterprise is that the self understands the mechanism of the Cosmos but by the same motion places itself outside the Cosmos, an alien, a ghost, outside a vast machinery to which it is denied entry.

Are these two preposterousnesses commensurate or incommensurate, related in direct proportion or unrelated?

That is to say, which of these two propositions is correct?

(1) As time goes on and our science and technology advance and our knowledge of the Cosmos expands, the Judaeo-Christian claim becomes ever more preposterous, anachronistic, and, not to mince words, simply unbelievable.

(2) As time goes on and our science and technology advance and our knowledge of the Cosmos expands, the gap between our knowledge of the Cosmos and our knowledge of ourselves widens and we become ever more alien to the very Cosmos we understand, and our predicament ever more extreme, so that in the end it is precisely this preposterous remedy, it and no other, which is specified by the preposterous predicament of the human self as its sole remedy.

(CHECK ONE)