Tim knew all this. It didn't help him. But he did his best; he tried.
Practical men do not do what Jeff did and Kirsten did; practical men fight that drift because it is a romantic drift, a weakness. It is learned passivity; it is learned giving up. Tim could ignore his son's death as unique-reasoning that no contagion was involved-but when Kirsten went the same way, Tim had to change his mind, return to Jeff's death and reappraise it. He saw in it, now, the origins of later disaster, and he saw that disaster shaping up for himself. This caused him immediately to jettison all the claptrap notions that he had picked up beginning with Jeff's death, all the weird and shabby ideas associated with the occult, to borrow Menotti's apt phrase. Tim suddenly realized that he had seated himself at the table in Mme. Flora's parlor, for the purpose of contacting the spirits-for the purpose, really, of delivering himself over to folly. He now did what characterized him throughout his life: he abandoned that route and sought another; he dumped that malicious cargo and reached around for something more stable, more durable and sound, to replace it. If the ship is to be saved, cargo must sometimes be flung overboard; when something is jettisoned, it is dumped calculatedly-heaved away, to float off, leaving the ship intact. This moment only comes when the ship is in trouble, as Tim now was. Dr. Garret had pronounced doom on both himself and Kirsten, beginning with Kirsten. The first prophecy had come true. He could expect, then, to be next. These are emergency procedures. They are employed by the desperate and the smart. Tim was both. And out of necessity. Tim knew the difference between the ship (which was not expendable) and the cargo (which was). He viewed himself as the ship. He viewed his faith in spirits, in his son's return from the next world, as cargo. This clear distinction was his advantage, inasmuch as he could discern it. Throwing away his beliefs did not compromise him, nor did it vitiate him. And there existed a slight chance that it might save him.
I rejoiced in Tim's newfound lucidity. But I felt deeply pessimistic. I viewed his clearheadedness as a surfacing of his basic determination to survive. This is a good thing. You cannot fault the drive to endure. The only question that frightened me was: had it come soon enough? Time would tell.
When the ship is saved-if it is saved-necessary jettison gives the right of general salvage to the owner or owners of the goods. This is an international rule of the seas. This is an idea basic to human beings, of whatever place of origin. Tim consciously or unconsciously understood this. In doing what he was doing, he partook of something venerable and universally accepted. I understood him; I think anybody would. This was not the time to whine over lost battles involving the issue of whether or not his son had returned from the next world; this was the time for Tim to fight for his life. He did so, and he did the very best he could. I watched, and where possible I helped. It failed in the end, but not for want of effort, not for a failure of trying, a decline of nerve.
This is not expedience. This is rousing oneself to a final defense. To view Tim in his final days as a cheap man devoted to animal survival at all costs-abandoning all moral conviction- is to misunderstand totally; when your life is at stake, you act in certain ways if you are smart, and Tim acted in those ways: he dumped everything that could be dumped, should have been dumped-he bared his dog-tooth and offered to bite, and that is what a man does in the sense of man the creature who is determined to survive, and to hell with the cargo. Upon Kirsten's death, Tim stood in danger of imminent death himself and he understood it, and for you to understand him in that final period you must take his realization into consideration and you must also understand that his perception, his realization, was correct. He was, as the therapists put it, in touch with the reality situation (as if there is some kind of distinction between "situation" and "reality situation"). He desired to live. So do I. Presumably, so do you. Then you should be able to figure out what Bishop Archer had in mind during the period following Kirsten's death and preceding his own, the first a given, the second an ominous but dubitable possibility, not a reality, not then, at least, although from our standpoint now, as hindsight, we can comprehend it as inevitable. But this is the famous nature of hindsight: to it everything is inevitable, since everything has already happened.
Even if Tim regarded his own death as inevitable, willed by prophecy, willed by the sibyl- or by Apollo, speaking through the sibyl as a mouthpiece-he was determined to confront that fate and put up the best fight he could manage. I think that is quite remarkable and to be lauded. That he jettisoned a whole lot of claptrap that he once believed in and preached is of no importance; should he have hugged all that crap and died in a curled-up abreactive posture, his eyes shut, his dog-tooth not bared? I am of firm conviction in this; I saw it; I fathomed it. I saw the cargo go. I saw it heaved overboard the instant Dr. Garret's first prophecy came true. And I said, Thank God.
I think, though, he should have withdrawn that goddamn book from publication, that Here, Tyrant Death, as I had titled it. But he did have thirty thousand dollars riding on it, and perhaps this determination to let it get into print was simply further evidence of his practicality. I don't know. Some aspects of Tim Archer remain a mystery to me, even to this day.
It simply was not Tim's style to abort a mistake before it happened; he let it happen and then-as he put it-he filed a correction in the form of an amendment. Except insofar as his physical survival was involved; there he calculated activity in advance. There he looked ahead. The man who had run through his own life, outpacing himself, outdistancing himself as if urged on by the amphetamines he daily swallowed-that man now all at once ceased to run, turned instead, gazed at fate and said, as Luther is supposed to have said but did not, "Here I stand; I can do not otherwise (Hier step' Ich; Ich kann nicht anders)." The German ontologist Martin Heidegger has a term for that: the transmutation of inauthentic Being to true Being or Sein. I studied that at Cal. I didn't think I would ever see it happen, but it did and I did. And I found it beautiful but very sad, because it failed.
Within my mind I conceived of the spirit of my dead husband penetrating my thoughts and being highly amused. Jeff would have pointed out to me that I viewed the bishop as a cargo ship, a freighter, baring its dog-tooth, a mixed metaphor which would have kept Jeff in a state of rapture for days; I would never have heard the end of it. My mind had begun to go, due to Kirsten's suicide; at work, comparing the content of shipments to the listings on the invoices, I barely noticed what I did. I had withdrawn. My fellow workers and my boss pointed this out to me. And I ate little; I spent my lunch hour reading Delmore Schwartz, who, I am told, died with his head in a sack of garbage that he had been carrying downstairs when he suffered his fatal heart attack. A great way for a poet to go!