The terrain of his eternal amnesia

Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely loved! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate. For them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

Albert Camus, The Fall

—

A moment of inattention to his own grief and such a flighty expression – where did it come from, at what depths did it soil its wings, this expression – ‘And Why Not?’

The first time he had considered socialising with her, he didn’t think about what he was saying – he had no real opinion, it was neither here nor there. But at the core of it, there was the inkling that he didn’t want to let go of her – not just yet.

His proposition was born from the moment. He was the one who suggested they go and see a movie to celebrate. This was the small step towards closing the lawyer-client relationship or obscuring that line, the way language is obscured in moments of opportunism disguised as scampering confusion. The mad scram – the psychic scuffle.

Her response to his suggestion summed her up quite well. No hint of cruelty, but something much more undefined and unknown. At that point he decided she was fleeting trouble, the consolation in the moment being ‘fleeting’. For she didn’t gracefully decline his offer, she was no demurrer, as they say. But she laughed in his face because she found the situation a laughing matter. Her crime was that she was full of innocent wit and sarcasm, which just spilt out in perfect formation with no ill intent. They were half-way through the game – life would appear to even out the scores one way or another.

What he didn’t understand about her was, all this time she lived in a kind of reverie and in the realm of poetic gestures. He could only read her response to his childlike offer as a pathetic demonstration of her will and a shameless display of her naïvety.

So, he thought he’d try to invite her out a second time, ‘And Why Not?’ The same expression, but born out of what could only be described as an attempt to recapture the moment lost – to go back to where the adversarial monster lurks, bobbing its head up every now and then, whipping its tail against the polite mask every time they agreed to meet.

This agreement was hypothetical until transacted. And in the hypothetical realm he could afford to act as carefree as he wished, though in truth there was no one more incarcerated. And yet he acted as though he was untroubled and so true to the moment and true to his word. She couldn’t understand this continual game of accepting and declining offers. But this was the ferocious creature unable to distinguish its desires from anti-desires. A strange predator, that abides by the laws about inflicting pain on other creatures in such an absent-minded manner.

So, on being asked to be more precise with his intentions through the use of language, to put someone out of their misery, he smiled like some mythical figure and came up with another one of those expressions…about him being in the moment and being in the moment as a lover of free and frank discussion.

When he laughed, it was difficult to gauge whether his laughter was stemming from conceit, or was it nervousness, or pleasure? She doubted that it stemmed from a cruel streak. He was another confused human being who had no idea what he was asking for and had even less intention to comply with any agreements, in the hypothetical or the real. He was what you might call a passive demurrer out of his depth.

They could have argued about the legal status of deception and its accomplices, illusion and expectation. What subclause it took up in an agreement scrawled on the heart of the matter.

On a wider scale they could have argued how deception is a form of confusion. Some might argue that deception is aligned with atrocities committed in history. Surely, to damage someone’s soul, must amount to some type of crime.

Her eye caught sight of him walking towards her wearing a new suit. She remembered an expression where you asked the suit ‘Where are you taking the gentleman?’

As he approached, he thought about all the phone calls he should be making, dealing with business, dealing with profitability not liability. Yet, he genuinely enjoyed the obscure un-nameable feeling he got from just talking to her.

But to be ‘in the moment’ requires an ability to commit yourself unconditionally to the future – Oh and what an ideal this is – divorced from reality and glittering away on a vast ocean. Who would be capable of this unconditional commitment to the essence of the future? What is the cost of being in the moment?

He had continually absented himself from any laboured thought about people. He had forgotten her, until now. The last time he had spoken to her they discussed intentions in such an allegorical way that they felt an illusory intimacy. Smiling and nodding as they agreed about indescribable matters and indefinable pockets of reality.

Had he put a moment’s thought into the premise that ‘intentions can only be inferred through words’, she needn’t have suffered at all. In a strange way, this was her plight, to take the emotional misdemeanor and turn it into an identifiable act.

Relegated to the terrain of his eternal amnesia…as if she were someone who gave him a bit of her innocence and he disdainfully smiled at how worthless even this small piece of innocence was.

Can such an act go unpunished? But it does – this is the micro-level where masculine and feminine relations are established so stupidly over eons. Was this never to change? If the act could be so removed from the soul – this is where the human animal can be likened to a robot. And if the act was examined most thoroughly, you would discover the gaping wounds that language can’t absolve – the politics of intentions and misgivings.

So, who was this exquisite person who had been scared into being an automaton which came out with ready-made expressions and used quaint phrases, while she extended herself to engage with humanity, hovering between nobility and utter stupidity?

The little phrases he used were like a safety rail while all hell was breaking loose, the earth swallowing up people and fire descending from the skies. This was the voice of sanity and she came to depend on his presence, but to reach him was another matter all together.

It was as if she were to lure him out of himself – that place where he embedded himself – a place he put together over time – with perseverance, chance and deliberation, where he sat, where even his conceit was feigned. The moment she realised he was not a robot was when he smiled at the small green lizard brooch she wore.

Every now and then he was gripped by something you could call hope. But he thought, sadly, who would save him from this hope? His bad memory would save him, for everything eventually just slid off him. People were not worth the effort, for anything to do with people inevitably turned sour or brought him closer to the terror of being, that stinging feeling. This bad memory is the necessary fertile ground for ambiguities and equivocations. Amorality in the process of language.

When she laughed at the thought of socializing with him, it was an honest reaction. To her, he was another dead soul who had read too many law books and had calcified his brain.

She could remember that image of him in the corridors of the court, running from one person to the next, from one door to the next – like some infernal messenger, doomed, with no message – that soulless look on his face – he looked like the living dead – what could have killed his spirit like that? At what price did he decide his soul was worth so little? And what about her, on the other extreme, all soul and no where to go.

He was a bird hovering over a ship, waiting for the scavenging to commence. And what do these images indicate? Is he adept at getting what he wants? Probably not. He was just another tormented soul that had stopped asking questions about his passions. He had gathered momentum then extinguished this frightening force with vast amounts of oblivion, and oblivious thoughts.

He sensed her arrogance, that she thought so little of him. He found her irritating and interesting at the same time. Always about to say something meaningful. Coming out with some polite ambiguity that could be taken either way.

‘Well I can relax, I haven’t become a character out of a Kafka novel,’ she said as he arrived at the table.

‘No, there is no resemblance,’ he responded. ‘You didn’t come anywhere near a Kafka character.’

‘Oh yes I did – I felt the horror of the randomness of the institutional machine about to descend on me.’

‘But you had me to represent you, to look after your interests – your legal counsel.’

‘Then, tell me why I was convinced you would smile in your civil and polite way, and come up with one of those phrases like, we’ll see about that. All the time I was sure that if I was in dire straits you’d say, sorry I can’t help you.’

He smiled but was insulted that she had so little faith in him, although she was correct in her assumption.

From this little exchange he became acutely aware that she had expectations, not of romance or frivolity, but something of a more serious nature, dealing with what she perceived to be his spiritual mess. And she had no rights to any aspect of him, particularly his psyche.

‘So you think I would turn into a devil?’ he said, annoyed.

‘No – I’d be more afraid you’d be human.’

With all her faith in the precision of language, despite this project – the mission of precision in communication – being doomed to fail, and her predisposition to ambiguities and ironies – the thing that seized her in the middle of a rational discussion about banal topics, like the energies between words and the effect these words have on the psyche, was, when all is said and done it’s all completed in civil polite conversation. When all along, the thing that gripped her, locked her into a labyrinth of misdiagnosed morality – the thing that she couldn’t fathom – was that he was in another realm and the only thing that momentarily connected them was the illusion of language, and those ready-made expressions criss-crossing the patches of oblivion.

She was convinced he had a beauty about him, a halo of martyrdom, you could call it. This halo was made of thorns worn tightly, but looked like dainty white flowers spuriously held together with discontent. At least that’s how it appeared from a distance.

He was like someone who had clambered through jagged mountains on bare knees to secure a deal. His unexplainable sweetness could only be traced to his lack of ownership over his own persona, the part that makes one true to one’s word. That is why she couldn’t ever hate him.

To not own oneself is a condemnation that only few suffer but none as well as he does. That’s what made him go on those fierce walks that ended at some unknown point where he no longer had cognition of his own self. That’s what made him fly into those blind rages.

‘And most people are a brick wall, look,’ she pointed to some imaginary part of his ether body. ‘Here are the dents where someone tried to reach you.’

He laughed at this. ‘Well I should hope someone tried.’

He had the following thoughts about her: that she spoke of ‘dents’, but of course – every person that came near to reaching him had to contend with a greater rival – a greater contender that always won – that was his fear cloaked as indifference, and his turmoil dressed in a new suit.

He was too polite to make it clear to her that his spirit had vacated long before that day he asked her to go and see a movie. If she wanted to engage in strange and frivolous activities embodying the superficial – he was her man. This was what his soul was asking for. Not undertaking the long and arduous task of finding a trail back from Terra Internalis.

She was trapped in some painful illusion that they knew each other. She sent him a few quotes from Chamfort, underlining the following – ‘One is made happy or unhappy by a multitude of unseen things which one does not refer to and could not describe.’ Although his favourite quote was, ‘Considering that virtue is always dangerous or at least useless, and vice is always fortunate… what is a lofty soul to do? Take refuge in a sensible and unshakable pride, a sort of misanthropy which lets one love mankind in general yet holds individuals at bay, save those to whom he is attached by natural duty.’

She continued the ridiculous pursuit of trying to get him to redeem himself in a minor act, but for him it became crucial to continue the game. The most important weapon he possessed in this game was his politeness. The well trodden circular paths of politeness.

Surely people should be responsible for the way they use politeness. It’s more deadly than cruelty and eats the soul of the offender more than the victim. This is the game that she so beautifully lent herself to.

All the time he agreed to meet her, but trailing behind him, some vague and lost ghost of his third-world poverty. A ghost draped with transient wealth.

If he closed his eyes momentarily, she reminded him of the lizards that ran briskly through the houses near the sea, in those humid afternoons of endless play and mystery, into the night and unaffected sleep. Instead of giving over to this, he used the words that made things tidy and distanced him from the past. This was a form of illusory control over his life. We create and depend on the tools that keep us standing up.

What are all the situations that crossed his path, what are the decisions he made – what well-carved paths had he trodden – what chaos had he avoided – what chaos subsumed him? – like everyone he wanted to feel alive – yet feared where life would hurl him if he stopped to think – what are all the choices he made along the way, and what are the choices he didn’t make? Beaten into a type of spiritual submission, understood only by those who narrowly escaped the same fate.

The first time she saw who he was, much later in their acquaintance, she was astounded at her own awkwardness. She blithered on about misconceptions of historical events and race issues – this was no ‘ready made’ talk. It was pure nervousness at being touched by something unknown. And him, sitting across the table looking bewildered and pleased at the same time. Staring, unknowingly, into her soul.

At the end of their time together she was struck by something quite powerful. She was to realise later that it was the chaotic vacuum of him exiting from her life when she was only getting to know him.

She had feared becoming a character out of a Kafka novel when all the time she was suffering the effects of trying to commune with a character from a Camus novel – and one threatened with a kind of amnesia, at that.

It was like death’s twin visiting without leaving a trace – each time he didn’t keep an engagement she believed he was ill with some serious malady of the soul. And he was. Without a permit or agreement, he took his leave.

—

The words he uses are nothing but simulacra, he fills them with evasions, with equivocations, he turns them into wily devices, he uses them to play tricks… when he is lucky enough to come across someone like her who lends herself to it so beautifully to ‘falling for it’ every time.

Nathalie Sarraute, The Uses of Speech