13

At first silence greeted Lao’s proposal. No one moved. Mistletoe went on drawing. She was becoming her own ideal.

Then to everyone’s astonishment, Husk suddenly spoke.

‘If it’s on my account you’re all keeping quiet, then speak. Your silence only amplifies what I’m going through.’

Then all at once, and all in a rush, as if stones had obeyed an injunction to babble, as if brooks had all broken into so many soliloquies, as if vacant heads had become occupied by vying oracles, the group began to pour forth words, dissent, disagreement, collisions, agreements, in every direction, all unheard by the others, till Lao said:

‘For God’s sake, no one can hear anyone else. Can we be orderly about this?’

Then Propr took up the mantle, and spoke first. He said:

‘Left to me, I don’t understand this Arcadian business. I tend sheep. I am a plain man. I don’t even think of myself as a shepherd. I don’t understand things that I can’t see. I don’t understand things that I can’t hear. I’m a practical man. Anything that doesn’t turn into bread doesn’t really interest me. I have children to feed. I’m getting on a bit in years and hate to admit it. The miracles of Jesus only make sense to me when he turns water into wine. I can always do with wine. The human race understands wine. Multiplying loaves and fishes is wonderful as well. A lot of starving people in the world could do with loaves and fishes. But the miracle of multiplying things is not a regular activity, and no one does it nowadays. So that bit is best left to intelligent human governments and enlightened politicians that care for the feeding of the world’s starving masses. Personally, I’m only interested in money and contentment. I don’t believe in going to far off places searching for ideals and ideal places and paradises that don’t exist. I prefer to find what can be found here, where I find myself, in my backyard, in my home. I’m not keen on seekers. They are too restless and confused. Worse, they are lazy. They don’t want to work. They don’t respect the work ethic on which society is founded, and sustained. They want easy cures and easy miracles. They want complete instant solutions to all their problems. They don’t want to work, or to think things through. And they tend towards fanaticism. They join cults, and abandon them. They are quitters. Always quitting their jobs, their relationships, their homes. Always quitting the latest idea they’ve just enthusiastically converted to. Always quitting their support for the latest band that offered them instant nirvana or an immediate oasis in music designed to make them part with their money and make the moronic musicians uselessly rich. These seekers are always joining, but never staying; always looking, but never seeing; always travelling, but never learning. They are always collecting interesting new bits of new-age information, but never integrating what they collect into a practical life. Seekers are actually very arrogant people, thinking that they know more than their fathers and mothers, always judging the previous generation, always thinking that they know better, that all previous knowledge is useless, that the system is useless because it doesn’t give them the easy things they want. Seekers are usually very insecure and judgmental people who haven’t grown up, haven’t accepted the fact that they have to settle down and earn a crust like everyone else. They are always reading their tarot cards, burrowing into the I Ching; mispractising tantric sex, visiting fortune tellers, fiddling with astrological charts, delving cross-eyed into hermetic texts, wearing exotic clothes from Japan, Africa, India, Thailand, dabbling with Buddhism, Islam, Taoism, American Indian rituals, and the Kabbala, gulping down the latest sensational nonsense about Aztec temple prophecies, Mayan contact with aliens, hidden revelations of history coded in the Bible, messing about with tea-leaves, African sorcery and herbalism, the Kamasutra, and a thousand other such things that they never study deeply, always passing through, mixing the whole confusing mess, till they are a confusing mess themselves. They are always running from one guru to another, from one fraud to another. They listen, but never hear. They have plenty of information, but no understanding. They are thoroughly insubstantial and unreliable people. They have no philosophy, no backbone. They are easily duped, and they dupe others. They are selfish and egotistical. I know of some who spend their time chanting mantras for their own glorification and for selfish needs, chanting for success, without working for it, chanting for a lover without being able to inspire or sustain love. Seekers mostly have deep character problems: they have no character. They never stay in one place, always dropping out, always looking for fringe causes to justify their laziness, when all they really want is personal success by the back-door. These seekers speak of seeking for wisdom, but they have no humility. When they should listen, they talk. When they should be silent, they spout other people’s ideas. They have no patience, or tolerance, really, and the wise words they quote are merely quotations, never lived through with consistency, and so they yield no tangible fruitful results in the real world. Nothing they touch endures. Nothing they plant grows. Because they never stick around to nurture anything. They are always flying off in meditation and talking about peace and freedom, when in fact they have no freedom, because they don’t understand the place of money in the world. They think they are independent, but in fact they are the most dependent of all because they depend on all that they reject: society, tradition, civilisation. And seekers have no peace, because they are escapists, and sooner or later reality comes into the picture and exposes all their catch-phrases as hollow nonsense. No, my friends, I am a practical man. The world must be faced. Reality must be faced. Life must be addressed squarely. At some point a man or woman gets married and has children, and has to raise them. And even if they don’t get married, or are single, and never have children, they still need to survive. They will grow old. They need money. They need solid values. Ideals alone can’t do the job. And if they insist on feeding themselves on ideals alone, then they eventually get into a lot of trouble. And the worst is when seekers, facing the chilling years of failure, stop seeking. The worse is when they stop believing. They become the worst cynics in the world, and the bitterest people. God save us from them. I tell you this. Society has many faults, but the way it is is the way it is. And one must accommodate oneself to society, even if one is a genius. And so while you’re all off searching for Arcadia or paradise, I’m coming with you purely as the sound man, sound in terms of film, and sound in terms of having my feet solidly planted on the ground. I therefore don’t have a private Arcadia, only a life that I’m trying to live, and not all that successfully. But at least I’m not escaping my responsibilities by chasing dreams. Now I’d like some wine, Jim, if you don’t mind. This Arcadia business has made me very thirsty.’