A Question of Characterization
The everlasting crisis of identity, of course, has no meaning except in terms of characterization. . . .
Perhaps I should say that the crisis of identity has all meanings — is, in fact, total meaning. But identity is a question of self, and here, ipso facto, where there is no being there is no self. Only ego.
Who am I?
Certainly not Harker Lee, who is blasted into every last cranny of this crazy nonworld. Here, there is no Harker Lee, because there is only that which is Harker Lee, and the name becomes meaningless. I cannot be Harker Lee — I am a character in Harker Lee’s dream, and I must find a part to play, a character to be.
It is not the character who becomes real in the actor, but the actor who becomes unreal in the character. So to be given access to an unreal frame of reference and context of experience is a privilege, for it gives us a viewpoint from which to see ourselves, not as others see us, but as we might see ourselves if we were not cursed with subjective existence tainted with the objective selfhood. By virtue of characterization we become free to act, to know what it is like to be without a being-in-the-world in a world without real being.
I am here, dwelling with the stars, in the guts of what was once Harker Lee and is now a universe.
I am in inner space, the inner space of ego. Perhaps I might clarify my position better by asking: Who are you?
Who are you?
Not pure ego, nor id, and certainly not superego. What are you made of, shards of Harker Lee? You are a God, and I am your Doppelgänger, your gray brother, your son of the shadows. I am your alter ego.
I am a traveler upon the face of your Earth, an observer and a commentator. I am your judge and your jury, but I am your prisoner and your victim also.
I am your biographer, your prophet, your friend. I am also your guardian, who will see that you return safe and sound to your existence.
Who am I? What is my name and my part?
What can my part be but that of Lucifer, of Iblees, of Beelzebub?
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
I am the devil.
I dance as Judas dances, to the madman’s tarantella. We are allies, Judas and I. If you get out of line, Godman, we will straighten you out. Look out for us, Godman. Judas and I are a red-hot team.
You cannot drown us with your dreams. . . .
Her hair swirls like marsh mist about her shoulders and her neck. Its fragrance is cold and fragile — a breath of morning wind would blow it all away with a touch of its self. Her entire form is crystalline in the clouded darkness such as lingers after dawn, and she flees to her daylight slumbers within the casket of a dead tree in a stagnant swamp.
She is as old as the stones which mark her resting place. A whole far-away world that is long forgotten but which never died is hiding in the canyons of her memory. She is sister to the darkness beneath the earth, and the unlit oceans and the anaerobic fires.
You want me to follow her there, to her rendezvous with the bones of men and the stony imprints of the passage of the evolutionary procession. You would have me ride upon the frail carriage other floating tresses, or let her ride upon my own broad back to wherever she cares to spur me. You would have me share her deathlike dreams and her dreamlike days. You want me to go with her to her distant destinies and her macabre ports of call. You want me to drink the death that is her life from the same carven cups, and open wide my embrace to encompass all her multitude of forms, and guard her from all anger and harm.
You know that I should love to plunge myself into the black depths of her nightshade existence, and swim in her sea of shadow and shame, to stay by her side whether she was allowed to fly or condemned to crawl. My mind could always tell the truth, and I could not be deluded by the mocking tyranny of your bribery. But nevertheless . . .
She dreams of an everlasting, moonless midnight, lit only by the quiet, careless stars. She dreams of a cloak of shadows which might hide her tenderness from the brightest lightning. She dreams of the ultimate end to time, when all is night and desolation, and she is equal with the whole stock of the tired human race, and the sun is an ember.
I will pass by her then, for but a moment, and perhaps I will offer her small gifts of pearls and diamonds, pouring them liberally into the ocean of her hair. She would know me even then, and we might laugh together, and make a chrysalis of our dreams in the blackened ruin that was once the universe, knowing that long after we are gone it will break and give birth to a new monadic existence.
In the meantime, we might drink strange drinks and build ruined, night-filled cities out of poisoned memories. And we would not dread the second morning of time. But while there is life in everywhere, our marriage is not even the stuff of dreams. It is a futile temptation.
Get thee behind me . . .
I am forced to pass through a town infested by a foul plague. I walk quickly along the sweat-stained, tear-stained, blood-stained, tainted road, with my collar upturned and my eyes entrenched behind guarded lids, and my tongue pressed to the floor of my mouth. I pause only once, daring no more, as my feet grow heavy, and I watch a young man who cradles in his arms a sleeping girl-child whose body is marled with the signs in red and black.
“Awaken,” murmurs the youth, into the ear of the sleeper, breathing on her pockmarked cheek. Slowly, she stirs, and her dead eyes look into his.
“I am dead,” she says quietly, and without remorse.
“I have healed you,” he says. “I am a healer of the dead.”
“Only the dead may heal the dead, may love the dead, may dance with the dead, may pay the dead their due,” quotes the child. “Are you dead?”
“No,” answers the young man, “I live yet a while.”
But he falls upon the road, and the child runs away to command the driver of the death-cart to bring his cargo this way, as the darkness eats his eyes and gorges upon his virility.
The child, which was only a lifeless burden, becomes so once more as the driver of the death-cart reaches down to greet her, and the driver spits on the young man, saying, “Healer of the dead, heal thyself!”
We will never have enough of masks, you and I. They are the moves in our game, the substance of our existence.
But let me test your pride, for just one moment. Let me tempt you. Let’s not think that because you have all the power and all the knowledge, that I am completely without talent in this matter.
Think on this.
You have set stars in your sky as stars were set in ours. Can you conceive that it will be a civilized man who can reach out his hands into the sky and say, “These stars are mine”? Could that be a safe man, a sure man, a military man, a man of the law or . . . even this — a man of God?
It will be a man with a storm in his being, a lust for pride and life, blood and dominion. It could never be a man who lived within the confines of his own skull, who knows what he sees and hears and feels, and all that it means, who understands the nature of the universe and the cheating of false gods.
It will be a man who lives without himself, whose sensations are a part of an unknown pattern, who places his faith, deliberately, in false gods, idle dreams, and impossible desires.
It cannot be a man who believes in reality, but a man who believes in destiny.
If there are in the race of men those who can conquer the stars — and to conquer the stars, remember, the stars have to become a part of their lives — they will always be men of torment, outcasts, and barbarians.
Dancers in the madman’s mime . . .
You and I, Harker Lee, we pieces of Harker Lee. They can’t take the stars away from us. If we go home, we take the stars as part of us. They can’t ever put us back in ourself, let alone in our cage. Remember that, Godman, and remember the way home. . . .