Darconville's Cat (63 page)

  3. The worthlessness of the body

  4. The immortality of the soul

  5. The duality of man, i.e., the two-sided existence
of body and soul (
rouma
,
psischon
)

  And what precisely have these tenets wrought? Stop
up your mouth if you’d say little and say little if you’d say much.
They raised everyone to indiscriminate equality. They effeminized
society, leveled excellence, diluted the Greek ideal, and—our
immediate concern in this chapter— put a megaphone into the hands
of certain women whose hysterical neesings have deafened the ears
of logic ever since in spite of the fact that the difference
between the sexes happens to be a little matter Nature, I suggest,
will never be so obliging as to alter.

  Enter the feminists, however, gravid with this
thesis, that if the body could be considered negligible, if
physiological differences didn’t really matter, if men and women
were equal where it really counted—
inside
, you see—why,
clearly it was the sudden solution to their persistently gnawing
feeling of inferiority! And how swiftly women snatched at the idea!
Witchwives, whores, all womanity! For if the body was negligible,
equality was assured and the struggle for domination and
sovereignty was theirs to win! The logic was as simple as
sophistry, for if woman, essentially and chiefly of the body, could
now ignore her bodily role in society —and with lofty philosophical
reasons!—she would be that much more elevated to the very positions
to which she aspired but from which, by every other standard, she’d
been judiciously and legitimately prevented from holding, the
remarkable first step, this, in allowing them to disassociate
themselves from the unilaterally despicable and patently unfair
obligation, reactionary and patrivincialistic in intent, of bearing
children, suckling them, and dutifully standing by them in trial
and trouble. Thus do they act as acted Mother Eve whose unnatural
and vaulting ambition for equality took her to the fruit and bade
her eat, destroying every one of us in the sudden committing at
once of
all
sin: disobedience, covet-ousness, pride,
unbelief, mistrust of divine veracity, gluttony, vainglory,
parricide, jealousy, theft, invasion, sacrilege, deceit,
presumption to godly attributes, fraud, arrogance, and sloth of
thought. Nothing is less different from a woman than the very woman
herself. There is only one woman, though there are a million
versions of her. Ask my mother.

  Darconville read on in disbelief, quite wondering as
he turned the profane pages whether the author of this thing were
actually human!

  Socrates’ philosophy at its very conception bore the
seeds of its own corruption for it immediately gave birth to those
whose existence rendered it worthless: he himself created his
termagant wife—and in his pathetic defense of that marriage with
his late espoused saint (
Xen
. Symp.
II
,
10
) proceeded to make of the married philosopher a
music-hall joke. The little catosopher created millions of
catosophresses who went on to catosophrize: the soul is the only
essential
part of a human being, the soul can have no sex,
so the body shall no longer discriminate against the soul! Does a
woman betray you, murder, deceive? Her excuses sit in the soul,
pure, inviolate, a law unto itself. Her excuse
is
the
soul, the one you had no reason to enjoin to that body you
mistakenly assumed it animates.

  Feminism inevitably arises out of a body-despising
doctrine. To the envious, the bitchy, the grasping, the iniquitous,
and the congenitally dissatisfied, Socraticism was a philosophy cut
to measure. Indeed, in almost every example of the vile sisterhood,
Goody Rickby and her noisy forges, the flight from domesticity and
motherhood—never mind from one’s very self—is always aligned to the
flight to a “higher sphere.” The Socratic doctrine, animating the
impulse to emancipation which of course animates the mood to
androphobia, becomes a free-ticket to Cloud Cuckoo Land where the
mind/soul nexus relegates the distinguishing body to a pile of
excess baggage.

  The feminist of the radical stamp, however, is moved
not by a concern for her own sex, public spirit, or female
self-identity but rather, ironically, by the very grudge she bears
against herself—the male element in her, perhaps, that lies at the
actual
source
of her craving for emancipation— and yet if
self-belittlement can be reduced by belittling what we compare
ourselves to, it is not surprising to see to just what extent women
act to belittle men. A nowt to catch a naught: it is advanced that
to be anti-male is to be pro-ideal; sex becomes either the enemy of
female virtue or, in war-like fashion, is used manipulatively to
subject the weakest males to the female point of view which with
the feminist, as it was with Socrates, turns out to be nothing more
than self-loathing, the refusal to accept themselves as
philosophically one, whole, complete—a calumny against themselves I
find myself too ill-disposed to modern terminology to investigate
here. A divided woman, simply, is a tautology.

  Madness, thought Darconville, madness!

  Socrates, often asked to absent himself from
duplicity awhile, was soon accused by citizens Lycon, Meletus, and
Anytus of corrupting youth; tried; and then sentenced to death by a
majority far greater than diat by which he had been pronounced
guilty—and this during a period of time when, sadly, almost as a
sop to the contemporary mood, female statues were curiously
becoming altered: the leg-torso ratio grew to resemble that of the
male! Indeed, the whole of Greek art progressively began to reveal
a gradual increase in the length of the female leg relative to the
torso and the modification of the female form. Or was it satire? A
sudden decadence? A last vigorous outcry for the old stability and
order that became revenge? Or was it simply a general acquiescence
to the upheaval that soon put paid to the glory that was Greece?
Conjectures are welcome. The philosopher, in any case, was given
his cup of hemlock, died, and three days later there wasn’t so much
as a peep heard from the tomb!

  But what of that hemlock on the skirt you paw at,
reader? Beneath it a body, within it a soul, above it a head that
titters? It is a Socratic labyrinth you have the choice of either
entering or refusing to enter. I leave you this Pantagruelian
advice, in any case, if enter you must:

        
When you
dwell in Satan’s arms,

        
Should his
wife prefer your charms

        
Taking it
into her noodle

        
To enjoy
your great whangdoodle

        
And accept a
few fell stitches

        
From the awl
inside your breeches,

        
Pluto surely
will not wrangle

        
While you
and his lady brangle.

        
So, live
happy and fare well

        
In your
marriage bed in hell.

  On the other hand, you can escape that hell and
manifest in a terrible freedom what you’d save yourself from, lest
otherwise you become determined by the very value you are not
indiffèrent to! To be attached is to depend on, and to depend on
something is to have one’s freedom restricted. If women are the
force that figuratively deny the body, perhaps he who literally
denies it denies them and in so doing finds the freedom he’d seek.
As in all ages of luxury, women usurp the functions of men and men
take on the offices of women. Ours is a poor, weak age, with the
sexes nearly assimilate and neither known by the knowledge of what
they were. The epoch of viragoes was ever the epoch of eunuchs.

  Irony, finally, used to interest me when I was
younger and more impressed by the hollowness of the thing it
castigates, but perhaps it should be pointed out that to become
whole again man must take up a part: what depends, de-pend; what is
attached, disattach. “
I hunted the beaver who, giving up, got
away
,” once riddled a Skopt. (You see, I’m much more fun, may
I say, than I seem?) The scriptural commonplace that has it that to
find oneself one must lose oneself is true. I vouch for it myself.
But I can go further. I can personally testify—
O castigat
ridendo mores
!—to what you surely rnust see is the only
essential lesson Socrates ever left us: sacrifice is self-interest.
Sacrifice
must
be self-interest!

  The air outside felt good to Darconville who left
the library with a particular sense of grief he’d not quite felt
before, and, too melancholy after attending to the reading to make
an accurate report of his reflections, he found himself walking out
along the granolithic walk by the football stadium, the huge
emptiness of which he entered to spend most of the afternoon
sorting out the many questions in his mind. What, he wondered, had
this haughty and disordered malefactor named Crucifer to do with
him? Had the rumors been true of his extensive power there? Why in
fact had he himself been asked to come to Harvard?

  And the perverse book? It was spawl, a piece of
violent deception, fatally fixed like a grotesque ornament that had
been gradually molded in the cavern of someone’s head by the drip
of calcareous water and hardened into a single point: the hatred of
women. It was an introduction, oh yes. But to whom? To
what
? A spectre waiting upon his past and fathering forth
whispers, orders, commands? But why? Darconville smoked and walked,
walked and smoked, circling round and round the upper ramparts of
the arcaded Coliseum like a pale, deliberating renunciant high
above the abyss that beckons him down. What was he supposed to know
now? And what of what he knew was he then to apply to what he
wanted to know? He didn’t know. There were only silences, echoes,
detached voices on every front, and so he spent the day, brooding
to no consequence, until it grew dark and he left the stadium,
pitching a last cigarette through the dusk and crossing the Weeks
bridge toward Adams House.

  When he opened the door to his room, Darconville saw
a note on the floor. He took it to the window and by the ghostly
light of a streetlamp read what suddenly made him wonder whether
there weren’t more efficients in nature than causes. What
interanimates what, he wondered, in what is foreordained? It was
sinister, all of it, coming for some reason, yet, as no
surprise—the mind, defining reality, creates it! We bless to appear
what to avoid we curse: to loathe too much in the mind is only to
rehearse or ten times twice
affirm
in an act of wild
denial a hated fact. Greetings, conscience! I shall make from fear,
thought Darconville, a rendezvous with dread.

  And so he could do nothing but accept the terrible
sequence of ironies he believed, in compounding, he’d caused—as if,
in having been more willful to learn than willing to abhor, he’d
but burned one candle to seek another. Solon made no law for
parricides because he feared he should put men in mind to commit
such an offense! Chance was only the fool’s name for fate, thought
Darconville, and by the eerie light coming in through the window of
his lonely room once again read the words of the note:

        Sir, this to
entreat you to step up

        to my study for
a word. My occupations

        are all indoor
so that I am always at

        home.

              So
I rest yours to serve,

                          CRUCIFER

  LXVI

  Accident or Incident?

  I would know whether she did sit or walke,

  How cloth’d, how waited on, sighed she or
smiled,

  Whereof, with whom, how often did she talke.

        —Sir PHILIP
SIDNEY

  THE LETTER Isabel promised never came. So
Darconville, again, tried to contact her. He called the house at
Fawx’s Mt.: there was no answer. He called the telephone company in
Charlottesville, re-checked the number, again called the house in
vain, and then thought that he might try the van der Slangs. He
called that number and, identifying himself, expressed his worry
but Mrs. van der Slang said she was sure everything was alright. He
called Annabel Lee Jenks who hadn’t heard a word from her since
graduation and Lisa Gherardini who wasn’t there herself. He called
Miss Trappe who told him about a bad dream she’d had. He even
called the general store in Fawx’s Mt.: they hung up. Later in the
day he finally reached the Shiftlett house again and asked if
Isabel were there, but the reply was only a single diaphonie
mutter: “
thnaowr
.” It meant no.

  It can’t therefore be fully charged against
Darconville for turning where he did—nor perhaps explained, on the
other hand, how in setting out for nowhere in particular he
proceeded straightway out to F-entry and then up the forbidden
stairs.

  LXVII

  Dr. Crucifer

  It is a point of cunning to borrow the name of the
world.

        —FRANCIS
BACON

  THE ROOM UPSTAIRS looked forbidding. The door was
solid, coopered to a great weight and blind-hinged. Its mullions
stifled the sound of Darconville’s repeated knocks; he paused to
listen, then knocked again harder—
dmf
,
dmf
,
dmf
—but there were only echoes down the atrocious
passageway. On the other side, footsteps ran past back and forth.
Again, he struck the panels smartly. Suddenly, a key sprung in the
lock and, slowly, the door opened an inch: a pair of little eyes
glared out. Crossly, Lampblack whispered that Dr. Crucifer was
asleep. But Darconville, with his foot fast on the bottom stile,
told the boy to wake him. Stuttering angrily, Lampblack tried to
shove the door shut, unsuccessfully, for Darconville forcefully
stepped it open and repeated with a cold voice, “Get him.”