THE HUMAN CONDITION · SPECULATIONS · UNDER THE PIANO STILL
Images of magic have abounded in this book, wizards and wise women, miracles and virgin birth. I interpreted my journey from the start as a quest, sacramental or visionary, and in retrospect it has assumed for me a quality of epic, its purpose unyielding, its conclusion inevitable.
I am well aware, though, that to others the story will seem very different, less heroic than peculiar, with its central figure not so much inspired as half daft. For me an enigma lies at the root of my dilemma, and I am content to leave it so; others may hope for a more exact diagnosis, and would prefer me to worry the problem further still, pursuing its echo down the paneled corridors of psychiatry, or looking for its shade in halls of social science. Acquaintances often treat me as a sounding board for their own neuroses, just as many readers will doubtless have read this book hoping for sidelights on their own confusions.
I made a first attempt at writing it years ago during a visit to Russia, and when I left the country for Finland the customs official at Leningrad, searching my possessions, came across the manuscript. He looked at it with suspicion, but after reading a few sentences nodded his head sagely. “Ah,” he said, “a psychological novel, I see”—and returning it to my case he gestured me through the barrier with respect. Many people believe that what has happened to me reflects more than a rare predicament, but in some way illustrates la condition humaine, like a Dostoevsky story; and perhaps it does.
Certainly some of my conflicts have been conflicts of the general. There is, for example, the conflict of self-determination—the degree to which a human being is entitled to choose his own identity. I felt a slight chill when the man from the Ministry, delivering my new social security card, showed me my own dossier, taped and sealed with wax, ready to be delivered to the national register at Newcastle. “Nobody,” he said, “will be allowed to look inside that file without special permission”—but I noticed that he did not invite me to see inside it, either. I sometimes feel that I have struck a small blow for liberty, changing my persona in a Moroccan boulevard; but at other times it occurs to me that one day the man from the Ministry, drawing upon such precedents, may feel entitled to choose our persona for us, to seal in that dossier not just a discarded pension card, but ourselves.
Then again I wonder if, by denying physical sex a supreme importance in my life (for such of course must be one moral of my epic) I am ahead of my time. I notice that a change of sex surprises and excites the middle-aged far more than the young, and I wonder if this means that sex is past its heyday. It has long lost the sanctity it commanded in our grandmothers’ day. Degraded by publicity, made casual by tolerance, defused by post-Freudian psychiatry, made unnecessary by artificial insemination, it is already becoming a matter not of the spirit but of the mechanism. Hymen has lost its mystery. Babies may be prevented or aborted, as you will. Boys and girls mingle promiscuously, only switching on their sexual roles, it seems, when the urge arises. Sexual intercourse will always remain a pleasure, of course, but I suspect it will become a pleasure entirely functional, like eating or drinking; and I am not the first to discover that one recipe for an idyllic marriage is a blend of affection, physical potency, and sexual incongruity.
Gender is a different matter. I foresee the day when scientists can evolve a reproductive system of choice, so that parents or more likely Governments can decree the sex of anyone, or organize the sexual balance of society. It will be harder to systematize gender. It is a more nebulous entity, however you conceive it. It lives in cavities. It cannot be computerized or tabulated. It transcends the body as it defies the test tube, yet the consciousness of it can be so powerful that it can drive someone like me relentlessly and unerringly through every stage of life.
I have collated it with the medieval idea of soul; but I am prepared to concede that one’s sense of gender may be partly acquired, as the psychologists say, or at least powerfully influenced by the state of society. Would my conflict have been so bitter if I had been born now, when the gender line is so much less rigid? If society had allowed me to live in the gender I preferred, would I have bothered to change sex? Is mine only a transient phenomenon, between the dogmatism of the last century, when men were men and women were ladies, and the eclecticism of the next, when citizens will be free to live in the gender role they prefer? Will people read of our pilgrimage to Casablanca, a hundred years hence, as we might read of the search for the philosopher’s stone, or Simeon Stylites on his pillar?
I hope so. For every transsexual who grasps that prize, Identity, ten, perhaps a hundred discover it to be only a mirage in the end, so that their latter quandary is hardly less terrible than their first.
But I think not, because I believe the transsexual urge, at least as I have experienced it, to be far more than a social compulsion, but biological, imaginative, and essentially spiritual, too. On a physical plane I have myself achieved, as far as is humanly possible, the identity I craved. Distilled from those sacramental fancies of my childhood has come the conviction that the nearest humanity approaches to perfection is in the persons of good women—and especially perhaps in the persons of kind, intelligent, and healthy women of a certain age, no longer shackled by the mechanisms of sex but creative still in other kinds, aware still in their love and sensuality, graceful in experience, past ambition but never beyond aspiration. In all countries, among all races, on the whole these are the people I most admire: and it is into their ranks, I flatter myself, if only in the rear file, if only on the flank, that I have now admitted myself.
But if my sense of isolation has gone, my sense of difference remains, and this is inevitable. However skillful Dr. B——, however solicitous the Department of Health and Social Security, I can never be as other people. My past is with me, and there is more to come. For to my journey there was always that trace of mysticism, madness if you will, and the unity I sought, I know now, was more than a unity of sex and gender, and reached towards the further vision that Henry saw for me: “a higher ideal—that there is neither man nor woman.”
So I do not mind my continuing ambiguity. I have lived the life of man, I live now the life of woman, and one day perhaps I shall transcend both—if not in person, then perhaps in art, if not here, then somewhere else. There is no norm, no criterion, and perhaps no explanation. What if I remain an equivocal figure? I think of the man who touched doors in Kampur, armored in his strangeness; I think of the herons I used to catch poaching on the river at Trefan, so solitary, so angular, so self-sufficient; I remember the Kenya wart-hogs, “beautiful to each other”; and looking at my continuing loves, amazed still at the universal sensuality of life, I reach the conclusion that there is nobody in the world I would rather be than me. “Today,” says a Californian slogan I admire, “is the first day of the rest of your life!”
Yet I know it to be partly illusion, and sometimes if I stand back and look at myself dispassionately, as I looked that night in the mirror at Casablanca—if I consider my story in detachment I sometimes seem, even to myself, a figure of fable or allegory. I am reminded then of the African hunter and the forbidden room, and I see myself not as man or woman, self or other, fragment or whole, but only as that wondering child with a cat beneath the Blüthner—which is mine now, by the way, but which plays not a bar of Sibelius from one year to the next, none of us being accomplished enough to tackle that master.