The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell [411]
‘A good doctor, and in a special sense the psychologist, makes it quite deliberately, slightly harder for the patient to recover too
easily. You do this to see if his psyche has any real bounce in it, for the secret of healing is in the patient and not the doctor. The only measure is the reaction!’
I was born under Jupiter, Hero of the Comic Mode! My poems, like soft music invading the encumbered senses of young lovers left alone at night…. What was I saying? Yes, the best thing to do with a great truth, as Rabelais discovered, is to bury it in a moun-tain of follies where it can comfortably wait for the picks and shovels of the elect.
Between infinity and eternity stretches the thin hard tight-rope human beings must walk, joined at the waist! Do not let these unamiable propositions dismay you, Brother Ass. They are written down in pure joy, uncontaminated by a desire to preach!
I am really writing for an audience of the blind — but aren’t we all? Good art points, like a man too ill to speak, like a baby! But if instead of following the direction it indicates you take it for a thing in itself, having some sort of absolute value, or as a thesis upon something which can be paraphrased, surely you miss the point; you lose yourself at once among the barren abstractions of the critic? Try to tell yourself that its fundamental object was only to invoke the ultimate healing silence — and that the symbolism contained in form and pattern is only a frame of reference through which, as in a mirror, one may glimpse the idea of a universe at rest, a universe in love with itself. Then like a babe in arms you will ‘milk the universe at every breath’! We must learn to read between the lines, between the lives.
Liza used to say: ‘But its very perfection makes one sure that it will come to an end.’ She was right; but women will not accept time and the dictates of the death-divining second. They do not see that a civilization is simply a great metaphor which describes the aspirations of the individual soul in collective form — as perhaps a novel or a poem might do. The struggle is always for greater con-sciousness. But alas! Civilizations die in the measure that they become conscious of themselves. They realize, they lose heart, the propulsion of the unconscious motive is no longer there. Des-perately they begin to copy themselves in the mirror. It is no use. But surely there is a catch in all this? Yes, Time is the catch! Space is a concrete idea, but Time is abstract. In the scar tissue of Proust’s great poem you see that so clearly; his work is the great
academy of the time-consciousness. But being unwilling to mobil-ize the meaning of time he was driven to fall back on memory, the ancestor of hope!
Ah! but being a Jew he had hope — and with Hope comes the irresistible desire to meddle. Now we Celts mate with despair out of which alone grows laughter and the desperate romance of the eternally hopeless. We hunt the unattainable, and for us there is only a search unending.
For him it would mean nothing, my phrase ‘the prolongation of childhood into art’. Brother Ass, the diving-board, the trapeze, lie just to the eastward of this position! A leap through the fir-mament to a new status — only don’t miss the ring!
Why for example don’t they recognize in Jesus the great Ironist that he is, the comedian? I am sure that two-thirds of the Beati-tudes are jokes or squibs in the manner of Chuang Tzu. Gener-ations of mystagogues and pedants have lost the sense. I am sure of it however because he must have known that Truth disappears with the telling of it. It can only be conveyed, not stated; irony alone is the weapon for such a task.
Or let us turn to another aspect of the thing; it was you, just a moment ago, who mentioned our poverty of observation in all that concerns each other — the limitations of sight itself. Bravely spoken! But translated spiritually you get the picture of a man walking about the house, hunting for the spectacles which are on his forehead. To see is to imagine! And what, Brother Ass, could be a better illustration than your manner of seeing Justine, fitfully lit up in the electric signs of the imagination? It is not the same woman evidently who set about besieging me and who was finally driven off by my sardonic laughter. What you saw as soft and appealing in her seemed to me a specially calculated hardness, not which she invented, but which you evoked in her. All that throaty chatter, the compulsion to exteriorize hysteria, reminded me of a feverish patient plucking at a sheet! The violent necessity to incriminate life, to explain her soul-states, reminded me of a mendicant soliciting pity by a nice exhibition of sores. Mentally she always had me scratching myself! Yet there was much to admire in her and I indulged my curiosity in exploring the outlines of her character with some sympathy