The Metaphysics of Quality translated karma as evolutionary garbage. That’s why it sounded so funny as the name of a boat. It seemed to suggest she had arrived in Kingston on a garbage scow. Karma is the pain, the suffering that results from clinging to the static patterns of the world. The only exit from the suffering is to detach yourself from these static patterns, that is, to kill them.
A common way taken to kill them is suicide, but suicide only kills biological patterns. That’s like destroying a computer because you can’t stand the program it’s running. The social and intellectual patterns that caused the suicide have to be carried on by others. From an evolutionary point of view it’s really a backward and therefore immoral step.
Another immoral way of killing the static patterns is to pass the patterns to someone else, in what Phædrus called a karma dump. You invent a devil group, Jews or blacks or whites or capitalists or communists — it doesn’t matter — then say that group is responsible for all your suffering, and then hate it and try to destroy it. On a daily personal level everyone has things or people they hate and blame for their suffering and this hatred and blame brings a kind of relief.
Back in Kingston Rigel’s whole breakfast sermon was a karma dump. Lila’s accusation just now was another one. That’s what made it so sad. She’d received too much karmic garbage in her life and she couldn’t handle it and that’s what was making her crazy and now she’s dumped some of it and that will probably make her less crazy, for a while at least, but that’s not the moral solution.
If you take all this karmic garbage and make yourself feel better by passing it on to others that’s normal. That’s the way the world works. But if you manage to absorb it and not pass it on, that’s the highest moral conduct of all. That really advances everything, not just you. The whole world. If you look at the lives of some of the great moral figures of history — Christ, Lincoln, Gandhi and others — you’ll see that that’s what they were really involved in, the cleansing of the world through the absorption of karmic garbage. They didn’t pass it on. Their followers sometimes did, but they didn’t.
On the other hand, Phædrus supposed, when you’re on the receiving end of some karma dump like that it sets you free. If he’d thrown Lila out when she was insane it would have bothered him afterward as something he shouldn’t have done. But now, this way, with both Rigel and Lila rejecting him, there was no way he was going to feel guilty about her departure. The bond of obligation was broken. If Lila had been full of gratitude and attachment he would still be stuck with her. Now Rigel had that honor… Across the cabin, on the pilot berth, Phædrus saw that her suitcase was gone. There was a nice empty hole there. That was good. That meant he could get the trays of slips back out and have room to get to work on them again. That was good too. He remembered that PROGRAM slip he wrote to wait until Lila gets off the boat. He could cross that one off now.
He wondered if he really did want to go back to all those slips. In their own way they were a lot of karmic garbage too. Strictly speaking, the creation of any metaphysics is an immoral act since it’s a lower form of evolution, intellect, trying to devour a higher mystic one. The same thing that’s wrong with philosophology when it tries to control and devour philosophy is wrong with metaphysics when it tries to devour the world intellectually. It attempts to capture the Dynamic within a static pattern. But it never does. You never get it right. So why try?
It’s like trying to construct a perfect unassailable chess game. No matter how smart you are you’re never going to play a game that is right for all people at all times, everywhere. Answers to ten questions led to a hundred more and answers to those led to a thousand more. Not only would he never get it right; the longer he worked on it the wronger it would probably get… Then as he thought about this gloomily he saw something else in a shadow at the back of the berth:
It was the doll.
She’d left it behind.
That was sort of sad too. After all the fuss she’d made over it, now she just walks off and leaves it. It left a feeling of immorality too. What do you think of a small girl who goes off and leaves her doll alone and abandoned? Will she do that when she grows up?
He got up and looked at it.
It was just an ordinary machine-molded rubber doll — not a very expensive one. It had no moving eyes. Its brown hair was part of the machine-molding. He saw that one spot on the head was abraded where it had evidently rubbed against something in the river for a long time. But probably if it had been glued-on hair it would have all come off by now.
There was something really sad about it, sitting there all bare-naked and sexless. Something innocent. Something wronged. He didn’t like to look at it. He didn’t want to be involved with it… What the hell was he going to do with it?… He didn’t want to keep it on the boat.
He supposed he could just throw it overboard. It’d look like all the other trash on the beach. No one would know the difference. Probably that’s where it was headed anyway before Lila fished it out of the river.
Beside it was a shirt that didn’t look like one of his. It looked new and clean. He picked it up. There was a sharp pin in it which he pulled out and set on the chart table. It must really be new, he thought, if it’s still got pins in it.
When he tried to put it on he couldn’t get the buttons buttoned without exhaling. It was too small. It couldn’t be one of his. Lila must have left it. What was Lila doing with a man’s new shirt? Now he was beginning to remember she had wrapped the doll in something that looked like this. That’s probably where it came from. But why should she have bought a shirt for the doll? She really was into some kind of fantasy world.
Well, if that’s what she bought it for, to cover up this doll, that seemed like a perfect use for it right now. Maybe it would help overcome this wronged feeling the doll gave off.
He slipped the shirt over the doll’s head. It came down way over the doll’s feet like a nightshirt. That looked better. He buttoned the collar around its neck. Something about this doll was giving it all kinds of Quality the manufacturer had never built into it. Lila had overlaid a whole set of value patterns on top of it and those values were still clinging to it. It was almost like some religious idol.
He set it on the edge of the pilot berth, and went back and sat down and stared at it for a while. It looked better with the shirt on.
An idol, that’s what this doll was. It was a genuine religious idol of an abandoned religion of one. It had all those formidable characteristics that idols always have. That’s what spooked him. Once they’ve been ritualized and adored, these idols change in value. You can no more throw them away casually than you can throw an old church statue on the dump.
He wondered what they actually did with old abandoned church statues. Did they have a desanctification ceremony of some sort? He remembered he’d been going to have a funeral for this idol for Lila’s benefit. Maybe he ought to give it one for his own benefit. Just to put it somewhere without turning it into trash.
Funny feelings. Anthropologists could do a lot with idols. Maybe they already had. He seemed to remember a book he’d always wanted to read called The Masks of God. You could discover a lot about a culture by what it said about its idols. The idols would be an objectification of the culture’s innermost values, which were its reality.
This doll represented Lila’s innermost values, the real Lila, and it said something about her that completely contradicted everything else. It indicated there were two contradictory patterns conflicting with some enormous force and what had happened was some kind of shift in these tectonic plates that had produced a kind of high Richter-scale earthquake. The one pattern, the one Rigel denounced, was going one way. This doll represented a pattern that was going another way, and so this idol allowed Lila to objectify the other pattern and ease the pressures that were causing the earthquake. And now she’s abandoned it — evidence that she’s going back to something worse. Maybe not.