Chapter Twenty-three
The next day the phone rang and there was silence again. Doc wanted to sound loving. He knew it would give him more power. He wanted to sound like someone that this person would want to be kind to. But he couldn’t think fast enough, so he said something weird instead.
“I know you’re reaching out,” he said. “I know you’re doing the best you can. I’ll hang up now and turn on the machine so you can leave a message.”
Only, somehow, saying the words “leave a message” sounded awfully flat. It had become impossible to include them in casual language without sounding robotic. She didn’t call back.
“So, John,” Doc said as he and Cro-Mag wrapped up their final session. “I’d like you to tell me about your artwork. You refer to it regularly but you never say exactly what it is that you do.”
“My art is like … jazz … man.”
“In what way?”
“Well, it comes out of the body.”
“The body?”
“Well, my body. In other words, I’m the one who makes it.”
“But what is it about?”
“It’s about intentionally undermining meaning.”
“Would you say that it’s about being?”
Doc intentionally opened the window.
“No … it’s too ethereal to be summed up.”
“Well, I don’t mean to ask you to reduce your art, but could you tell me what values are at its core?”
“Doc, my work is based in values by chance.”
“You mean it’s about nothing.”
“Well, there are some materials.”
“Which ones?”
“Time and space. Sequence and duration. You know, lack and all that stuff. Naked brain.”
“Naked brain?” said Doc. “Now that’s interesting. How did you think of that?
“I saw it on TV when I was stoned.”
“Do you watch a lot of TV?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you like about TV?”
“It’s so colorfully constructed along the lines of color.”
“Oh, you have a color TV?”
“Yeah, a really cheap one. A lousy one. A broken-down one. I don’t have enough money for anything decent.”
“John, let me ask you a difficult question.”
“Huh?”
“Why do you think that you are poor? What in the world gives you that impression?”
“Doc, the above is equal to the below, so I am as proletarian as the next guy.”
“Frankly that sounds like peripheral logic to me.”
“Peripheral logic? Wow, Doc, now you’ve got a good one. What channel?”
“Uh, I don’t have a TV.”
“So, I’m subletting my apartment - at profit, of course - and going on vacation for a while.”
“Again? Where to?”
“Well, my family has an estate in Georgia. I like to go down there.”
“What kinds of things do you do down there?”
“Oh, you know, going to the dentist, supervising the plantation, fucking slaves.”
Okay, Doc thought. This is my chance. I have a prime example of the oppressor class right here in my living room/office. Someone who knows absolutely nothing about how other people are living, someone who defines the world uniquely by his own experience and is a parasitic complainer. I have to use every element of my analytic ability to find a way to explain to Cro-Mag why that is not an acceptable way of thinking. I have to explain why that way of thinking is a product of, and at the same time a prototype for, a very sick way of life. If I try hard enough and am logical enough and am clear enough, I will be able to save all the people who will have to come into contact with this shmuck.
“You racist maggot,” Doc said.
“What’s your problem, Doc, can’t you take a joke?”
It can’t be, Doc thought. It just can’t be. If Herr K. is right then there is no point to therapy. If you can’t help people be responsible and kind then why be with them at all. Why interact?
Doc had to face the truth, that he was old-fashioned. He was always looking for a simple, familiar, low-tech solution. But people are no longer interested in analysis. They all prefer catharsis now. They all prefer to say that they are helpless and can’t change other people, i.e. the world. Marxism has been replaced by postmodernism. Psychoanalysis has been replaced by twelve-step programs. It was the end of the content. The whole way of looking at things was changing, and Doc was left behind.