Mickelsson's Ghosts by John Gardner (guided reading books .TXT) 📕

None of the others, it seemed, had reservations about Garret’s wit. The singer, Kate Swisson, listened with her head slanted far over, as if fascinated, gazelle eyes wide, her long narrow fingers draped casually over Blassenheim’s arm, her soft lips puckered as if for a kiss. Hardly aware that his gloom was deepening, Mickelsson bulldozed the plate toward her, urging her to take an hors d’oeuvre. “Oh!” she said, smiling brightly, and, lifting her hand from Blassenheim’s arm, wide eyes unblinking, carefully took the nearest on the plate.

“The trouble is,” Garret said, twisting the cap onto an invisible pot, “trying to look deep inside ourselves is like trying to see the monster through the silt of Loch Ness.”

Phil Bryant, with a floor-grabbing lift of the head, cleft chin thrust forward, tried to toss in a remark—”Wolves, thine old inhabitants!”—but Garret’s rush buried it. “It looked very hopeful in the early days of psychoanalysis,” Garret said, “nice, neat system of ‘super-ego,’ ‘ego,’ ‘id,’ ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious,’ and so forth and so on. ‘Extrovert,’ ‘introvert.’ But I’ll tell you what modern experiments seem to show.” He pointed to his head, then to his chest, and grinned. “No connection.” He held his hand toward Blassenheim, palm out, preventing anyone from breaking in. “I’ll tell you a typical experiment. We take Brenda here and we wire her up—cardiograph, encephalograph, rapid-eye-movement tapes, and so forth and so on—and we put her in a room; then we take Katie here and put her in another room and give her random electric shocks”—he leaned forward quickly and touched her, as if to relieve her anxiety—“nothing that hurts, just enough that she feels ’em, right?—and we tell Brenda to write down guesses of when the shocks are being administered. You know what we find?” He grinned, his chin pulled back. “What we find is that all of her guesses are wrong, but according to the cardiograph and so forth her body knew exactly when Katie was getting zapped! So you see? No connection! What’s happened is, we’ve evolved this massive super-ape brain—ape brain layered over snake brain layered over who-knows-what, each one foreign to the next, just foundation; no more real connection than there is between the bird’s egg and the nest. I exaggerate, right? OK, OK. Point is, simpler brains may possibly know a lot of things we can’t, things of certain kinds, the kinds of things Brenda here knows with her body. But once you’ve evolved the super-ape brain, well, except on rare occasions, what it does is it locks the body out. Good-bye, Eden!” With two fingers Garret showed the turning of a key in a lock. Lightly, merrily, he threw the key away. “Any way you look at it it comes out the same: you just can’t get to the bottom of things. Matter, for instance.” He leaned forward, grinning, to block interruption. “We’re made of matter, right?” He grinned more widely, delighted by the strangeness of the universe. “Hey, listen, down to a certain point we are, but then we get to what’s known as the sub-atomic particles, which in fact aren’t particles or waves or numbers or anything else we can sensibly think of; they’re just some kind of craziness, maybe Biblical demons.” He laughed. “Neutrinos, for instance, neither matter nor energy. I can’t even understand ’em when I find ’em in a book! Or quarks—we’re told there are three quarks to a proton, and one quark is thirty times as massive as a proton. Help! How am I supposed to know that part of myself? Can’t do it, that’s all! Yet it could be there’s something very powerful down there—Tillich’s ‘ground of being,’ maybe. God Himself! We know there are some pretty wacky things in the world, ‘More than your philosophy dreams of, Horatio,’ ”—he winked at the English professor, Bryant, and sprinted on—“the shroud of Turin, which could be, according to one theory, the kind of picture that’s left by an atomic explosion, like the shadows burned into the concrete in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Or there are, apparently, people who can move objects without touching them, even set walls on fire—or out-of-the-body experiences, ‘Oobs,’ as they call ’em, the kind of thing they’ve been documenting like crazy out at Stanford. And psychics, good old psychics, like the woman at Bank of America in San Francisco who writes down the addresses of people who’ve passed bad checks. It’s all there inside us, in some sense it is us—that’s the theory—and maybe the Hindus are right that if we do the right yoga we can see it, grab right hold of it; but from a Western point of view it’s as separate from us as the planet we stand on, we’ve just got to ride it, hopefully enjoy the ride.” He turned, briefly glowing, a phenomenon himself, pleased with his oration, and looked at Mickelsson’s scowling face, then Phil Bryant’s absent-mindedly interested smile.

“I must say,” Bryant said, “you don’t seem to offer much hope for an eager young philosopher!” He laughed. So did Blassenheim, but with a gloomy look in Mickelsson’s direction.

“In my view,” Garret said, “philosophy’s like any other human activity—just a craft.” He raised his open hand as if setting a bird free. “For the kind of people who naturally take to it, it’s a joy to work at, just like pottery, or leathercraft, target-practice—whatever. But the old idea that philosophers are doing something huge and wonderful, well, it just ain’t so, or anyway not anymore. There’s a great pleasure to be gotten out of getting a few ideas right—just as there’s pleasure in getting your garden to grow, or in painting a picture of it. But it’s no big deal. You want to be a big deal—” He turned to Blassenheim, grinning, threw his head back and reached up to put his hand on the young man’s shoulder.