"What is one supposed to do?" said Lal.
"Perhaps the best is to have some order within oneself. Better than what many call love. Perhaps it is love."
"Please do say something about love," said Margotte.
"But I don't want to. What I was saying you see I am getting old. I was saying that this liberation into individuality has not been a great success. For a historian of great interest, but for one aware of the suffering it is appalling. Hearts that get no real wage, souls that find no nourishment. Falsehoods, unlimited. Desire, unlimited. Possibility, unlimited. Impossible demands upon complex realities, unlimited. Revival in childish and vulgar form of ancient religious ideas, mysteries, utterly unconscious of course astonishing. Orphism, Mithraism, Manichaeanism, Gnosticism. When my eye is strong, I sometimes read in the Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Many fascinating resemblances appear. But one notices most a peculiar play-acting, an elaborate and sometimes quite artistic manner of presenting oneself as an individual and a strange desire for originality, distinction, interest-yes, interest! A dramatic derivation from models, together with the repudiation of models. Antiquity accepted models, the Middle Ages-I don't want to turn into a history book before your eyes-but modern man, perhaps because of collectivization, has a fever of originality. The idea of the uniqueness of the soul. An excellent idea. A true idea. But in these forms? In these poor forms? Dear God! With hair, with clothes, with drugs and cosmetics, with genitalia, with round trips through evil, monstrosity, and orgy, with even God approached through obscenities? How terrified the soul must be in this vehemence, how little that is really dear to it it can see in these Sadic exercises. And even there, the Marquis de Sade in his crazy way was an Enlightenment philosophe. Mainly he intended blasphemy. But for those who follow (unaware) his recommended practices, the idea no longer is blasphemy, but rather hygiene, pleasure which is hygiene too, and a charmed and interesting life. An interesting life is the supreme concept of dullards.
"Perhaps I am not thinking clearly. I am very sad and torn today. Besides, I am aware of the abnormality of my own experience. Sometimes I wonder whether I have any place here, among other people. I assume I am one of you. But also I am not. I suspect my own judgments because my lot has been extreme. I was a studious young person, not meant for action. Suddenly, it was all action-blood, guns, graves, famine. Very harsh surgery. One cannot come out intact. For a long time I saw things with peculiar hardness. Almost like a criminal-a person who brushes aside flimsy ordinary arrangements and excuses, and simplifies everything brutally. Not exactly as Mr. Brecht said, Erst kommt das Fressen, and dann kommt die Moral. That is swagger. Aristotle said something like it and did not swagger or act like a bully. Anyway, by force of circumstances I have had to ask myself simple questions, like 'Will I kill him? Will he kill me? If I sleep, will I ever wake? Am I really alive, or is there nothing left but an illusion of life?' And I know now that humankind marks certain people for death. Against them there shuts a door. Shula and I have been in this written-off category. If you chance nevertheless to live, having been out leaves you with idiosyncrasies. The Germans attempted to kill me. Then the Poles also shot at me. I would have died without Mr. Cieslakiewicz. He was the one man with whom I was not written off. By opening the tomb to me, he let me live. Experience of this kind is deforming. I apologize to you for the deformity."
"But you are not deformed."
"I am of course deformed. And obsessed. You can see that I am always talking about play-acting, originality, dramatic individuality, theatricality in people, the forms taken by spiritual striving. It goes round and round in my head, all of this. I cannot tell you how often, for instance, I think about Rumkowski, the mad Jewish King of Lodz."
"Who is that?" said Lal.
"A person thrown into prominence in Lodz, the big textile city. When the Germans arrived, they installed in authority this individual. He is still often discussed in refugee circles. Rumkowski was his name. He was a failed businessman. Elderly. A noisy individual, corrupt, director of an orphanage, a fund-raiser, a bad actor, a distasteful fun-figure in the Jewish community. A man with a bit to play, like so many modern individuals. Have you ever heard of him?"
Lal had not heard of him.
"Well, you shall hear a little. The Nazis made him Judenдltester. The city was fenced off. The ghetto became a labor camp. The children were seized and deported for extermination. There was famine. The dead were brought down to the sidewalk and lay there to wait for the corpse wagon. Amidst all this, Rumkowski was King. He had his own court. He printed money and postage stamps with his picture. He had pageants and plays organized in his honor. There were ceremonies to which he wore royal robes, and he drove in a broken coach of the last century, very ornate, gilded, pulled by a dying white nag. On one occasion he showed courage, protesting the arrest and deportation, in plain words the murder, of his council. For this he was beaten up and thrown out into the street. But he was a terror to the Jews of Lodz. He was a dictator. He was their Jewish King. A parody of the thing-a mad Jewish King presiding over the death of half a million people. Perhaps his secret thought was to save a remnant. Perhaps his mad acting was meant to amuse or divert the Germans. These antics of failed individuality, the grand seigneur or dictatorial absurdities-this odd rancor against the evolution of human consciousness, bringing forth these struggling selves, horrible clowns, from every hole and corner. Yes, this would have appealed to those people. Humor seldom failed to appear in their murder programs. This harshness toward clumsy pretensions, toward the bad joke of the self which we all feel. The imaginary grandeur of insects. And besides, the door had been shut against these Jews; they belonged to the category written off. This theatricality of King Rumkowski evidently pleased the Germans. It further degraded the Jews to have a mock king. The Nazis liked that. They had a predilection for such Ubu Roi murder farces. They played at Pataphysics. It lightened or relieved the horror. Here at any rate one can see peculiarly well the question of the forms to be found for the actions of liberated consciousness, and the blood-minded hatred, the killers' delight taken in its failure and abasement."
"Excuse me, but I have failed to make this connection," said Lal.
"Yes, I am sure I could be more lucid. It is part of the self-communing obsession that I have. But in the Book of Job there is the complaint that God requires far too much. Job protests that he is magnified unbearably-'What is man, that thou shouldst magnify him? And that thou shouldst set thine heart upon him? And that thou shouldst visit him every morning and try him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle?' And saying 'I would not live always.'
'Now I shall sleep in the dust.' This too great demand upon human consciousness and human capacities has overtaxed human endurance. I am not speaking only of moral demand, but also of the demand upon the Imagination to produce a human figure of adequate stature. What is the true stature of a human being? This, Dr. Lal, was what I meant by speaking of the killers' delight in abasement in parody-in Rumkowski, King of rags and shit, Rumkowski, ruler of corpses. And this is what preoccupies me with the theatricality of the Rumkowski episode. Of course the player was doomed. Many other players, with less agony, have also a sense of doom. As for the others, the large mass of the condemned, I assume, as they were starving, that they felt less and less. Even starving mothers could not feel for more than a day or two the children torn from them. Hunger pains put out grief. Erst kommt das Fressen, you see.