Carlos and Shimmy Kunitz fired together. Mike threw back his head, spread his arms, stood up to his full height, in the dynamic, tensed attitude which his statue standing today in the hall of our union local in Hoboken has caught so well. Then he fell forward into the cement. I heard a strange sound and quickly turned my head. Carlos was crying. Tears were flowing down the heavy face that pity, anger, shame and confusion wrought into a mask of tragic greatness.
“They got him,” he murmured. “They got the best of us all. I loved that boy like a son. But at least he’s no longer suffering. Now, all that counts is his life’s work. Mike Sarfatti’s name can still remain a guidance and an inspiration to us all. It will last as long as the Hoboken waterfront—and that’s where he’ll have his statue. We’ll just ship him home in one of these crates, since they’re leaving tomorrow. He’ll be all set when he gets there.”
He took off his coat and got to work. We helped him as best we could, and soon the impressive, indomitable statue that everyone can admire today in the hall of our Hoboken local began to take shape. Now and then Carlos stopped, wiped his eyes and glanced with hatred at the shapeless lumps of cement around us.
“Decadence,” he murmured. “Decadence, that’s what it is.”
Yes, but how do you know it when you see it? Or, rather, how do you know it when you see it? Is there any objective means of identifying it? Or is “decadence” one of those things which only afflict other people with different values and standards?
I keep thinking of that sentence in Tom Disch’s autobiographical note: After “Descending,” things picked up. Are evolution and devolution necessary reciprocals, in a closed (or even spiraling) cycle? Then the “decadent” can hardly be distinguished from the “renascent.”
Is E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, or H. G. Wells’ Things To Come, a better description of decadence? Is it decadent or efficient to have two cars in a two-driver family? Is it decadence or hardihood to pace city sidewalks in bare sandals and dirty feet?
Is alcohol or marihuana more decadent? Pepsi-Cola or cigarettes? Chewing gum or the electric toothbrush? Is Librium as decadent as opium? Will the true decadent please stand up!
Let me return briefly to Dr. Leary: “The science game, the healing game, the knowledge game are magnificent human structures. They are our proudest game accomplishments. But they are great only so long as they are seen as game. When they go beyond this point, the trouble begins—claims to a nongame reality status: the emergence of experts, professionals, priests, status-favored authorities; claims to power and control and priority. Look at the A.E.C. Look at the A.M.A. And watch out! At this point you will find that games which began with the goal of decreasing human helplessness end up increasing it.”
Is that it? Can we measure it in terms of “human helplessness”?
Fritz Leiber’s 1964 novel, The Wanderer, was a vivid, multi-faceted study of the varieties of human helplessness, and human responses to. helplessness, providing sharp contrasts in “decadent” and “renascent” scene-painting.
In this short story, the helplessness is of a very different sort
BE OF GOOD CHEER
Fritz Leiber
from: Josh B. Smiley
Bureau of Public Morale
Level 77
The White Pentacle
Manhattan, D.C.
10011100011110
to: Hermione Fennerghast
10001377 Sunset Blvd.
Santa Barbara, Big Angeles
1010001001001111
Dear Senior Citizen,
I have in hand your letter of fears and surmises regarding the end of the world: the chilling absence of people on the streets and slideways and in neighboring houses (which understandably depresses you); the vanishment of friends and relatives; the cessation of all personal mail (this letter at least is an exception!); the decline in news of human interest on your mass mediator and its replacement by what you call Picasserie or robo-blobs; the surliness of robots when you address questions to them; the invasion of your home at all hours by other robots (who, however, I note, continue to deliver to you your wheat germ, yogurt, and other necessities); the failure of indoor and street lights (though not of robo-supply electricity itself and other basic utilities); the labor you have been put to digging a latrine in your garden; the urge you feel to laugh and babble wildly (which you do well to repress—Congratulations on your courage!); the ominous and evil-smelling gray fogs which roll along the streets and often blanket most of the city; the fine metal filaments which have recently crawled like wire-worms or fairy ivy into your home; your wee-hour-of-the-night dreads that some cold mindless machine is running the cosmos and not a warmly personal God; the darkness; the damp; the dimming of the stars; the smell of mold; the fading forever of childish voices; the unintelligible croaking coming closer every night; the rustle of dry leaves across the floors of long-empty swimming pools.
All these signs and portents, and the others to which you allude, have been carefully probed by our Fear Scanners and investigated by our Bugaboo Teams.
I have, believe me, turned them over more than once in my mind before dictating this answer. I am troubled myself at times by dreads, let me confess. And so I feel an especial sympathy for your apprehensions!
But first I must reveal to you that your experience has been unique. Yours is the first and only letter about end-of-the-world fears to be received by this bureau since its establishment during the period of the Dark Prelude. In fact, your letter caused quite a commotion here!—exclamations of amazement, faint odor of overheated insulation, St. Elmo’s fire playing about the robo-sex. (Short for robo-secretaries; no impropriety intended.) You are the only human on Earth (save myself) ... I repeat, you are the Only Human Being on Earth to have felt even the cool shadow of such fears. Elsewhere the world is merry and progresses toward ever dizzier and more delirious heights of achievement.
We must suppose that your experience is due to a concatenation of circumstances having a probability of inverse infinity.
You know how such things go: a few weeks or months of total solitude, a scratching at the door by night, a creaking in the hall, a tall thin shadow trembling on the bedroom doorsill in the hoarded candlelight. .. and hey, presto! we have a ghost.
Also we must assume that you possess an exceptional sensitivity. You are, figuratively or literally, the princess who slept on the many mattresses. While coarser natures revel in the downy pneumatic softness, you feel only the pea. Or ball bearing, perhaps.
Don’t be offended for one instant at this assessment. The contrary rather. Your sensitivity is a great gift, whereby you can relieve and enrich your loneliness until you are quite unaware of it and almost oblivious of the gray fog lapping ever higher each evening against your view window. Try to discern the subtle meanings that lie behind the abstract robo-blobs racing across the screen of your mass mediator. (I sometimes do myself, though must confess I find little beyond a pattern as random as that of the fading stars—still, it induces sleep with the help of barbiturates.)
Commune with pets! Of course dogs and cats and rats and snakes are gone, not to mention the winsome, portly, elf-footed mice. But some of our correspondents report establishing a rewarding rapport with cockroaches, flies, silverfish and sexton beetles.