Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, Page 3

  “On the death of my benefactor in 1985, Rachel herself became my protector. There was no question of my remaining in the gazebo. Using funds provided for this purpose in her father’s will, Rachel moved me to a retreat that had been prepared in advance.”

  Once again Ishmael fell silent for several minutes. Then he went on: “In the years that followed, nothing worked out as it had been planned or hoped for. I found I was not content to ‘retreat’ having spent a lifetime in retreat, I now wanted somehow to advance into the very center of your culture, and I proceeded to exhaust my new protector’s patience by trying one bothersome arrangement after another to achieve this end. At the same time, Mrs. Sokolow was not content to leave things as they were and persuaded a court to cut in half the funds that had been allocated to my support for life.

  “It was not until 1989 that things came clear at last. In that year I finally comprehended that my unfulfilled vocation was to teach—and finally devised a system that would enable me to exist in tolerable circumstances in this city.”

  He nodded to let me know this was the end of his story—or was as much of it as he meant to tell.

  6

  There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little. I could think of no way to respond adequately or gracefully to such a tale. Finally I asked a question that seemed no more or less inane than the dozens of others that occurred to me.

  “And have you had many pupils?”

  “I’ve had four, and failed with all four.”

  “Oh. Why did you fail?”

  He closed his eyes to think for a moment. “I failed because I underestimated the difficulty of what I was trying to teach—and because I didn’t understand the minds of my pupils well enough.”

  “I see,” I said. “And what do you teach?”

  Ishmael selected a fresh branch from a pile at his right, examined it briefly, then began to nibble at it, gazing languidly into my eyes. At last he said, “On the basis of my history, what subject would you say I was best qualified to teach?”

  I blinked and told him I didn’t know.

  “Of course you do. My subject is: captivity.”“Captivity.”

  “That’s correct.”

  I sat there for a minute, then I said, “I’m trying to figure out what this has to do with saving the world.”

  Ishmael thought for a moment. “Among the people of your culture, which want to destroy the world?”

  “Which want to destroy it? As far as I know, no one specifically wants to destroy the world.”

  “And yet you do destroy it, each of you. Each of you contributes daily to the destruction of the world.”

  “Yes, that’s so.”

  “Why don’t you stop?”

  I shrugged. “Frankly, we don’t know how.”

  “You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.”

  “Yes, that’s the way it seems.”

  “So. You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That’s what’s at stake, isn’t it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.”

  “Yes, that’s so. I’ve just never thought of it that way.”

  “And you yourself are a captive in a personal way, are you not?”

  “How so?”

  Ishmael smiled, revealing a great mass of ivory-colored teeth. I hadn’t known he could, until then.

  I said: “I have an impression of being a captive, but I can’t explain why I have this impression.”

  “A few years ago—you must have been a child at the time, so you may not remember it—many young people of this country had the same impression. They made an ingenuous and disorganized effort to escape from captivity but ultimately failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the cage. If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.”

  “Yes, that’s the sense I have of it.”

  Ishmael nodded.

  “But again, how does this relate to saving the world?”

  “The world is not going to survive for very much longer as humanity’s captive. Does that need explication?”

  “No. At least not to me.”

  “I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity.”

  “I agree.”

  “What prevents them from doing this?” “I don’t know.”

  “This is what prevents them: They’re unable to find the bars of the cage.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I see.” Then: “What do we do next?”

  Ishmael smiled again. “Since I have told you a story that explains how I come to be here, perhaps you will do the same.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, perhaps you will tell me a story that explains how you come to be here.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Give me a moment.”

  “You may have any number of moments,” he replied gravely.

  7

  “Once when I was in college,” I told him at last, “I wrote a paper for a philosophy class. I don’t remember exactly what the assignment was—something to do with epistemology. Here’s what I said in the paper, roughly: Guess what? The Nazis didn’t lose the war after all. They won it and flourished. They took over the world and wiped out every last Jew, every last Gypsy, black, East Indian, and American Indian. Then, when they were finished with that, they wiped out the Russians and the Poles and the Bohemians and the Moravians and the Bulgarians and the Serbians and the Croatians—all the Slavs. Then they started in on the Polynesians and the Koreans and the Chinese and the Japanese—all the peoples of Asia. This took a long, long time, but when it was all over, everyone in the world was one hundred percent Aryan, and they were all very, very happy.

  “Naturally the textbooks used in the schools no longer mentioned any race but the Aryan or any language but German or any religion but Hitlerism or any political system but National Socialism. There would have been no point. After a few generations of that, no one could have put anything different into the textbooks even if they’d wanted to, because they didn’t know anything different.

  “But one day two young students were conversing at the University of New Heidelberg in Tokyo. Both were handsome in the usual Aryan way, but one of them looked vaguely worried and unhappy. That was Kurt. His friend said, ‘What’s wrong, Kurt? Why are you always moping around like this?’ Kurt said, ‘I’ll tell you, Hans. There is something that’s troubling me—and troubling me deeply.’ His friend asked what it was. ‘It’s this,’ Kurt said. ‘I can’t shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we’re being lied to about.’

  “And that’s how the paper ended.”

  Ishmael nodded thoughtfully. “And what did your teacher think of that?”

  “He wanted to know if I had the same crazy feeling as Kurt. When I said I did, he wanted to know what I thought we were being lied to about. I said, ‘How could I know? I’m no better off than Kurt.’ Of course, he didn’t think I was being serious. He assumed it was just an exercise in epistemology.”

  “And do you still wonder if you’ve been lied to?”

  “Yes, but not as desperately as I did then.”

  “Not as desperately? Why is that?”

  “Because I’ve found out that, as a practical matter, it doesn’t make any difference. Whether we’re being lied to or not, we still have to get up and go to work and pay the bills and all the rest.”

  “Unless, of course, you all began to suspect you were being lied to—and all found out what the lie was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you alone found out what the lie was, then you’re probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you all found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.”

  “True.”

  “Then that is what we must hope for.”

  I started to ask
him what he meant by that, but he held up a leathery black hand and told me: “Tomorrow.”

  8

  That evening I went for a walk. To walk for the sake of walking is something I seldom do. Inside my apartment I’d felt inexplicably anxious. I needed to talk to someone, to be reassured. Or perhaps I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having impure thoughts about saving the world. Or it was neither of these—I was afraid I was dreaming. Indeed, considering the events of the day, it was likely that I was dreaming. I sometimes fly in my dreams, and each time I say to myself, “At last—it’s happening in reality and not in a dream!”

  In any case, I needed to talk to someone, and I was alone. This is my habitual condition, by choice—or so I tell myself. Mere acquaintanceship leaves me unsatisfied, and few people are willing to accept the burdens and risks of friendship as I conceive of it.

  People say that I’m sour and misanthropic, and I tell them they’re probably right. Argument of any sort, on any subject, has always seemed like a waste of time to me.

  The next morning I woke and thought: “Even so, it could be a dream. One can sleep in a dream, even have dreams in a dream.” As I went through the motions of making breakfast, eating, and washing up, my heart was pounding furiously. It seemed to be saying, “How can you pretend not to be terrified?”

  The time passed. I drove downtown. The building was still there. The office at the end of the hall on the ground floor was still there and still unlocked.

  When I opened the door, Ishmael’s huge, meaty aroma came down on me like a thunderclap. On wobbly legs, I walked to the chair and sat down.

  Ishmael studied me gravely through the dark glass, as if wondering if I was strong enough to be taxed with serious conversation. When he made up his mind, he began without preamble of any kind, and I came to know that this was his usual style.

  TWO

  1

  “Oddly enough,” he said, “it was my benefactor who awakened my interest in the subject of captivity and not my own condition. As I may have indicated in yesterday’s narrative, he was obsessed by the events then taking place in Nazi Germany.”

  “Yes, that’s what I gathered.”

  “From your story about Kurt and Hans yesterday, I take it that you’re a student of the life and times of the German people under Adolf Hitler.”

  “A student? No, I wouldn’t go as far as that. I’ve read some of the well-known books—Speer’s memoirs, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and so on—and a few studies of Hitler.”

  “In that case, I’m sure you understand what Mr. Sokolow was at pains to show me: that it was not only the Jews who were captives under Hitler. The entire German nation was a captive, including his enthusiastic supporters. Some detested what he was doing, some just shambled on as best they could, and some positively thrived on it—but they were all his captives.”

  “I think I see what you mean.”

  “What was it that held them captive?”

  “Well … terror, I suppose.”

  Ishmael shook his head. “You must have seen films of the prewar rallies, with hundreds of thousands of them singing and cheering as one. It wasn’t terror that brought them to those feasts of unity and power.”

  “True. Then I’d have to say it was Hitler’s charisma.”

  “He certainly had that. But charisma only wins people’s attention. Once you have their attention, you have to have something to tell them. And what did Hitler have to tell the German people?”

  I pondered this for a few moments without any real conviction. “Apart from the Jewish business, I don’t think I could answer that question.”

  “What he had to tell them was a story.”

  “A story.”

  “A story in which the Aryan race and the people of Germany in particular had been deprived of their rightful place in the world, bound, spat upon, raped, and ground into the dirt under the heels of mongrel races, Communists, and Jews. A story in which, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the Aryan race would burst its bonds, wreak vengeance on its oppressors, purify mankind of its defilements, and assume its rightful place as the master of all races.”

  “True.”

  “It may seem incredible to you now that any people could have been captivated by such nonsense, but after nearly two decades of degradation and suffering following World War I, it had an almost overwhelming appeal to the people of Germany, and it was reinforced not only through the ordinary means of propaganda but by an intensive program of education of the young and reeducation of the old.”

  “True.”

  “As I say, there were many in Germany who recognized this story as rank mythology. They were nevertheless held captive by it simply because the vast majority around them thought it sounded wonderful and were willing to give their lives to make it a reality. Do you see what I mean?”

  “I think so. Even if you weren’t personally captivated by the story, you were a captive all the same, because the people around you made you a captive. You were like an animal being swept along in the middle of a stampede.”

  “That’s right. Even if you privately thought the whole thing was madness, you had to play your part, you had to take your place in the story. The only way to avoid that was to escape from Germany entirely.”

  “True.”

  “Do you understand why I’m telling you this?”

  “I think so, but I’m not sure.”

  “I’m telling you this because the people of your culture are in much the same situation. Like the people of Nazi Germany, they are the captives of a story.”

  I sat there blinking for a while. “I know of no such story,” I told him at last.

  “You mean you’ve never heard of it?”

  “That’s right.”

  Ishmael nodded. “That’s because there’s no need to hear of it. There’s no need to name it or discuss it. Every one of you knows it by heart by the time you’re six or seven. Black and white, male and female, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, American and Russian, Norwegian and Chinese, you all hear it. And you hear it incessantly, because every medium of propaganda, every medium of education pours it out incessantly. And hearing it incessantly, you don’t listen to it. There’s no need to listen to it. It’s always there humming away in the background, so there’s no need to attend to it at all. In fact, you’ll find—at least initially—that it’s hard to attend to it. It’s like the humming of a distant motor that never stops; it becomes a sound that’s no longer heard at all.”

  “This is very interesting,” I told him. “But it’s also a little hard to believe.”

  Ishmael’s eyes closed gently in an indulgent smile. “Belief is not required. Once you know this story, you’ll hear it everywhere in your culture, and you’ll be astonished that the people around you don’t hear it as well but merely take it in.”

  2

  “Yesterday you told me you have the impression of being a captive. You have this impression because there is enormous pressure on you to take a place in the story your culture is enacting in the world—any place at all. This pressure is exerted in all sorts of ways, on all sorts of levels, but it’s exerted most basically this way: Those who refuse to take a place do not get fed.”

  “Yes, that’s so.”

  “A German who couldn’t bring himself to take a place in Hitler’s story had an option: He could leave Germany. You don’t have that option. Anywhere you go in the world, you’ll find the same story being enacted, and if you don’t take a place in it you won’t get fed.”

  “True.”

  “Mother Culture teaches you that this is as it should be. Except for a few thousand savages scattered here and there, all the peoples of the earth are now enacting this story. This is the story man was born to enact, and to depart from it is to resign from the human race itself, is to venture into oblivion. Your place is here, participating in this story, putting your shoulder to the wheel, and as a reward, being fed. There is no ‘something else.’ To step out of this
story is to fall off the edge of the world. There’s no way out of it except through death.”

  “Yes, that’s the way it seems.”

  Ishmael paused to think for a bit. “All this is just a preface to our work. I wanted you to hear it because I wanted you to have at least a vague idea of what you’re getting into here. Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you, ‘How can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?’ And if you do this, people will look at you oddly and wonder what the devil you’re talking about. In other words, if you take this educational journey with me, you’re going to find yourself alienated from the people around you—friends, family, past associates, and so on.”

  “That I can stand,” I told him, and let it go at that.

  3

  “It is my most heartfelt and unattainable fantasy to travel once in your world as you do, freely and unobtrusively—to step out onto a street and flag down a taxi to take me to the airport, where I would board a flight to New York or London or Florence. Much of this fantasy is spent in making delicious preparations for the journey, in pondering what must accompany me in my luggage and what may be safely left behind. (You understand that I would of course be traveling in human disguise.) If I take too much, dragging it from place to place will be tiresome; on the other hand, if I take too little, I will forever be having to break my journey to pick up things along the way—and that will be even more tiresome.”