Lucky Jim

Kingsley Amis

Dixon didn't trust himself to speak. Quite apart from his own convictions in the matter, his experience of Margaret had been more than enough to render repugnant to him any notion of anyone having any special needs for anything at any time, except for such needs as could be readily gratified with a tattoo of kicks on the bottom. Then he realized that Christine must perhaps unconsciously, be quoting her boy-friend, or some horrible book lent by her boy-friend, whose desire to range himself with children, neurotics, and invalids by thus specializing his needs was not, at the moment, worth attacking. Dixon frowned. Until a minute ago she'd been behaving and talking so reasonably that it was hard to believe she was the same girl as had helped Bertrand to bait him at Welch's arty week-end. It was queer how much colour women seemed to absorb from their men-friends, or even from the man they were with for the time being. That was only bad when the man in question was bad; it was good when the man was good. It should be possible for the right man to stop, or at least hinder, her from being a refined gracious-liver and arty-rubbish-talker. Did he think he was the right man for that task? Ha, ha, ha, if he did. 

'Well, it's this. From what you've seen of us both, do you think it would be a good thing if I got married to Bertrand?'
Dixon felt a slight twinge of distaste he couldn't quite account for. 'Isn't that rather up to you?'
'Of course it's up to me; I'm the one who's going to marry him or not marry him. I want to know what you think. I'm not asking to be told what to do. Now, what do you think?'
This was clearly the moment for a burst of accurate shelling from Dixon in his Bertrand-war, but he found himself reluctant to fire. A reasoned denunciation of the foe, followed up by a short account of his recent conversation with Carol, would stand a good chance of bringing total victory in this phase, or at least inflicting heavy losses. He felt, however, that he didn't want to do it like that, and only said slowly: 'I don't think i know either of you well enough.'
'Ah, to hell, man' - had she picked that up from Uncle Julius? Dixon wondered - 'you're not being asked to do a thesis on it for your doctorate.' As Carol might have done, she pinched his arm too hard, making him cry out, saying to him in vocal italics: 'What do you think?'
'Well, it's...I must say what I think, you know.'
'Yes, yes, of course, that's what I asked for, isn't it? Do get on with it.'
'Well, then, I should say No.'
'I see. Why not?'
'Because I like you and I don't like him.'
'Is that all?'
'It's quite enough. It means each of you belongs to the two great classes of mankind, people I like and people I don't.'
'It sounds a bit thin to me.'
'All right, if you want reasons, remember they're my reasons, though that doesn't mean to say they oughtn't to be yours as well. Bertrand's a bore, he's like his dad, the only thing that interests him is him. On any issue you care to mention he can't do otherwise than ignore your side of things, just can't do otherwise, see? It's not just him first and you second, he's the only bloody runner. My God, what you said about him putting you int eh wrong by starting rows shows you've got his number. I don't see why you have to have someone else to say it for you.'
She said nothing for a moment, then spoke rather in her censorious manner: 'Even if that were true, it needn't prevent me from marrying him.'
'Yes, I know women are all dead keen on marrying men they don't much like. But I'm saying why you oughtn't to marry him, not whether you want to or are going to or not. I think that once the things that are supposed to wear off wear off, you'll have a hell of a time. You couldn't trust the fellow with your best...I mean, he'd always be having rows, and you say you don't like rows. Are you in love with him?'
'I don't much care for that word,' she said, as if rebuking a foul-mouthed tradesman.
'Why not?'
'Because I don't know what it means.'
He gave a quiet yell. 'Oh, don't say that; no, don't say that. It's a word you must often have come across in conversation and literature. Are you going to tell me it sends you flying to the dictionary each time? Of course you're not. I suppose you mean it's purely personal - sorry, got to get the jargon right - purely subjective.'
'Well, it is, isn't it?'
'Yes, that's right. You talk as if it's the only thing that is. If you can tell me whether you like greengages or not, you can tell me whether you're in love with Bertrand or not, if you want to tell me, that is.'
'You're still making it much too simple. All I can really say is that I'm pretty sure I was in love with Bertrand a little while ago, and now I'm rather less sure. That up-and-down business doesn't happen with greengages; that's the difference.'
'Not with greengages, agreed. But what about rhubarb, eh? What about rhubarb? Ever since my mother stopped forcing me to eat it, rhubarb and I have been conducting a relationship that can swing between love and hatred every time we meet.'
'That's all very well, Jim. The trouble with love is it gets you in such a state you can't look at your own feelings dispassionately.'
'That would be a good thing if you could do it, would it?'
'Why, of course.'
He gave another quiet yell, this time some distance above middle C. 'You've got a long way to go, if you don't mind me saying so, even though you are nice. By all means view your own feelings dispassionately, if you feel you ought to, but that's nothing to do with deciding whether (Christ) you're in love. Deciding that's no more difficult than the greengages business. What is difficult, and the time you really need this dispassionate rubbish, is deciding what to do about being in love if you are, whether you can stick the person you love enough to marry them, and so on.
'Why, that's exactly what I've been saying, in different words.'
'Words change the thing, and anyway the whole procedure's different. People get themselves all steamed up about whether they're in love or not, and can't work it out, and their decisions go all to pot. It's happening every day. They ought to realize that the love part's perfectly easy; the hard part is the working-out, not about love, but about what they're going to do. The difference is that they can get their brains going on that, instead of taking the sound of the word "love" as a signal for switching them off. They can get somewhere, instead of indulging in a sort of orgy of emotional self-catechising about how you know you're in love, and what love is anyway, and all the rest of it. You don't ask yourself what greengages are, or how you know whether you like them or not, do you? Right?'

Runaway Horses

Yukio Mishima
Tr. Michael Gallagher

I'm not a beginner at this any more, Honda mused. I've done my work without being swayed by the opinions of others, and I can say that I've met the prescribed standards. I've become thoroughly adept at my profession--like a potter whose clay seems to shape itself, taking the form that he wants it to.
Suddenly he realized that he was on the verge of forgetting the face of the defendant who had just stood trial before him. He shook his head. Try as he might, he could no longer clearly visualize the man's features.

Two men may talk together enthusiastically for an hour or so about shared experiences, and yet not have a true conversation. A lonely man who wants to indulge his nostalgic mood feels the need of someone with whom to share it. When he finds such a companion, he starts to pour out his monologue as though recounting a dream. And so the talk goes on between them, their monologues alternating, but after a time they suddenly become aware that they have nothing to say to each other. They are like two men standing at either side of a chasm, the bridge across has been destroyed.

I don't understand. I don't understand it at all. And then, after we did the killing, not one of us would have disregarded his vow to kill himself at once. So if we could have done as we had meant to, not a single branch, not a single leaf of the tangled thicket of the law would have brushed so much as the tip of our sleeve or the hem of our kimono. We would have slipped marvelously through the thicket and gone rushing headlong up into the bright sky of heaven. So it was the with the League of the Divine Wind. Though, I know, the tangled underbrush of the law didn't grow as thick in the sixth year of the Meiji. The law is an accumulation of tireless attempts to block a man's desire to change life into an instant of poetry. Certainly it would not  be right to let everybody exchange his life for a line of poetry written in a splash of blood. But the mass of men, lacking valor, pass away their lives without ever feeling the least touch of such desire. The law, therefore, of its very nature is aimed at a tiny minority of mankind. The extraordinary purity of a handful of men, the passionate devotion that knows nothing of the world's standards...the law is a system that tries to degrade them to 'evil', on the same level as robbery and crimes of passion. This is the clever trap that I fell into. And because of nothing else but somebody's betrayal!

The Lazarus Project

Alexandar Hemon

I used to tell stories to Mary, stories of my childhood and immigrant adventures, stories I had picked up from other people. But I had become tired of telling them, tired of listening to them. In Chicago, I had found myself longing for the Sarajevo way of doing it--Sarajevans told stories ever aware that the listeners' attention might flag, so they exaggerated and embellished and sometimes downright lied to keep it up. You listened, rapt, ready to laugh, indifferent to doubt or implausibility. There was a storytelling code of solidarity--you did not sabotage someone else's narration if it was satisfying to the audience, or you could expect one of your stories to be sabotaged one day, too. Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story, and maybe, passing it off as their own. It was different in America: the incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth--reality is the fastest American commodity.

I was still too weak to pursue my pleasures at the expense of others, certainly not at the expense of Mary or this wretched harlot who was probably going to be slapped by her pimp for failing to fuck a God-given American. And I was not unselfish enough not to be tempted by pursuing pleasure with abandon. Forever stuck in moral mediocrity, I could afford myself neither self-righteousness nor orgasmic existence. That was one of the reasons (unspoken, to Mary, or anybody) why I absolutely needed to write the Lazarus book. The book would make me become someone else, go either way: I could earn the right to orgasmic selfishness (and the money required for it) or I could purchase my moral insurance by going through the righteous process of self-doubt and self-realization.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Oliver Sacks

He was understandably discouraged by this experience--and this thought--and also by another thought which he now expressed. 'Suppose you could take away the tics,' he said. 'What would be left? I consist of tics--there is nothing else.' He seemed, at least jokingly, to have little sense of his identity except as a ticqueur: he called himself 'the ticcer of President's Broadway' and spoke of himself, in the third person, as 'witty ticcy Ray', adding that he was so prone to 'ticcy witticisms and witty ticcicisms' that he scarcely knew whether it was a gift or a curse. He said  he could not imagine life without Tourette's, nor was he sure he would care for it.

Superficially she was a mass of handicaps and incapacities, with the intense frustrations and anxieties attendant on these; at this level she was, and felt herself to be, a mental cripple--beneath the effortless skills, the happy capacities, of others; but at some deeper level there was no sense of handicap or incapacity, but a feeling of calm and completeness, of being fully alive, of being a soul, deep and high, and equal to all others. Intellectually, then, Rebecca felt a cripple; spiritually she felt herself a full and complete being.

'She is an idiot Ecclesiastes, I said to myself. And in this phrase, my two visions of her--as idiot adn as symbolist--met, collided and fused. She had done appallingly in the testing--which, in a sense, was designed, like all neurological and psychological testing, not merely to uncover, to bring out deficits, but to decompose her into functions and deficits. She had come apart, horribly, in formal testing, but now she was mysteriously 'together' and composed.
Why was she so decomposed before, how could she be so recomposed now? I had the strongest feeling of two wholly different modes of thought, or of organisation, or of being. The first schematic--pattern-seeing, problem-solving--this is what had been tested, and where she had been found so defective, so disastrously wanting. But the tests had given no inkling of anything but the deficits, of anything so to speak, beyond her deficits.

This was my human, as opposed to my neurological vision.

Is it possible, I wondered, that this being before me--at once a charming girl, and a moron, a cognitive mishap--can use a narrative (or dramatic) mode to compose and integrate a coherent world, in place of the schematic mode, which, in her, is so defective that it simply doesn't work?

It didn't work with Rebecca, it didn't work with most of them. It was not, I came to think, the right thing to do, because what we did was to drive them full-tilt upon their limitations, as had already been done, futilely, and often to the point of cruelty, throughout their lives.

The power of music, narrative and drama is of the greatest practical and theoretical importance. One may see this even in the case of idiots, with IQs below 20 and the extremest motor incompetence and bewilderment.

This is the positive side--but there is a negative side too (not mentioned in their charts, because it was never recognised in the first place). Deprived of their numerical 'communion' with each other, and of time and opportunity for any 'contemplation' or 'communion' at all--they are always being hurried and jostled from one job to another--they seem to have lost their strange numerical power, and with this the chief joy and sense of their lives. But this is considered a small price to pay, no doubt, for their having become quasi-independent and 'socially acceptable'.

Written before 1985, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat continually uses a terminology of idiot, moron, retard to refer to mental conditions. Reading the book now you get a strangely shocked sense as though Sacks were insulting his patients, yet loves the people he serves. So you find yourself cornered: he clearly does not mean to demean but it cannot be denied that he is speaking for society when he speaks here.

This barbaric way of speaking of those with mental health conditions and the revolution in sensistivity that occured and is occuring within it, is something that should and will begin in the homelessness world. Now we speak of and see homelessness and poverty with the insensitive and uncaring and unrecognizing eye that was so characteristic of how the people with mental conditions were seen in the '80s. Of course, you can err on the side of too much sensitivity, but what is called for is an eye that sees as God sees and recognizes the humanity, which is to say usefulness of each person.

But this leads me to ask, where is Mark useful? Or, where is Alvin useful? I really don't know, at all really. See, Mark is a difficult case: he's violent and has been drunk for so many years you think his brain is fried. So is Alvin: he's a hoarder and a health hazard to himself and doesn't seem to understand the realities of society. So is Michael, so is Mike so is and now I'm just filling in these names without thinking. There were so many instances in Sacks where what we took to be a problem, what was seen as a flaw actually became something entirely else as he began to see it with different eyes. In a way his book is almost a step by step walking you out of the one and into the other.

What I see in Sacks is the beginning of a desire to move from problem-centered therapy to gift-centered therapy. What happens in the case of many people with severe mental conditions is that in our attempt to discover what is 'wrong' so that we can fix it, we end up 'driving them full-tilt upon their limitations' like sailing a boat onto a reef in order to see where it is leaking. And so you get this sense that medicine is more concerned with what's wrong than what's right. But what if the best way to bring about a good (the best?) equilibrium is to focus on what's right in Sacks' case histories? Seeing the artist in the autism and the music in the 'mental retard'. So then what would this look like for homelessness?

Right now we ask, 'What do you need?' but waht if the more important question is 'What don't you need?' Because if we can figure that out, then we know what they are good at and we know what we can start with, what can be the basis of 're-entry into society'.What if the most important thing for us to be asking is what is good here? What is good about who this person is, what is good about their situation?

Now, all this is a load, a bunch of crap because, frankly, I haven't done anything yet to see if good things happen. I ahven't helped anyone yet. But time isn't up yet and we will see.

Problems: medical, mental, societal, emotional, attitudinal, economical, whatever, are only ever part of the whole, and if you give them a veto over the things that are going better than perfect, the gifts, the goods, then you'll never really get anywhere. It's like a black and white drawing: to see only one color is really to see a distortion or a half, no matter how much color there is. The shape of the other color is just as much a shape as the first. So the good is just as much a reality as the bad.