Was it that he wanted to eat perfectly as some kind of moral body English for everybody else in Tsau? Was it magic thinking?
It wasn’t that. No, he said, what I think is you should eat something fresh — not much, necessarily — just something at every meal.
Was it a sort of magic thinking connected with the rather uneven appreciation of sprouting manifest in Tsau? No. Nor was it anything I had said about enzymes, our needing more fresh food as we grow older because we produce fewer enzymes physiologically as we age. No, it predated that, he said.
He supposed this had to be called an intuition. Somehow it had come to him. A noetic experience, not to put too fine a point on it.
So this tic about always something fresh could be called revealed science, I said.
I’ve rarely seen anyone so delighted with a phrase. So much so that apparently he was willing to forgo having escarole only in salad thenceforward. Some could go for soup. This was the way it was in those days. We seemed to coast over everything, up and over, a good thickness of rushing water between us and the boulders underneath.
For me love is like this: you’re in one room or apartment which you think is fine, then you walk through a door and close it behind you and find yourself in the next apartment, which is even better, larger, more floorspace, a better view. You’re happy there and then you go into the next apartment and close the door and this one is even better. And the sequence continues, but with the odd feature that although this has happened to you a number of times, you forget: each time your new quarters are manifestly better and each time it’s breathtaking, a surprise, something you’ve done nothing to deserve or make happen. You never intend to go from one room onward to the next — it just happens. You notice a door, you go through, and you’re delighted again.
This feeling of progress to better and larger was present in our conversation too. I suppose that in a sense the size of the items of his personalia I could now unreluctantly bring up obscured my view of smaller but still critical subjects that stayed difficult for us. And of course every topic I ventured was in reality a Trojan horse containing the questions What are you thinking of doing next? and when? and where do I fit in? Probably that was why it felt so congenial to get him on to the very large question of what a person should best do with his or her life. He was willing to return to this again and again.
As a boy and pre-Gandhian he had had no doubt that the best thing you could do with your life was assassinate Franco. Certainly he had had no doubt it was the best thing his father could have done with the end part of his own life. But then in retrospect it was better that Franco had died naturally, with the falangists sated and out of gas, so that Spain could move to normalcy without spasms of reflexive killing on anyone’s part. His intensity about Evasion, about justifying your life, was so unusual in someone at his stage of the game that I was always struck. Of course how it could be that Tsau wasn’t enough of a crown and pinnacle for anyone’s life was beyond me. He was prickly about it and not willing to talk very deeply about Tsau, because, I gathered, it was too soon to sum it up as a success or failure. We talked about peonage in India, which is growing. He listened, but said tackling peonage would mean another physical project probably, and Tsau was his last project, full stop. He bridled a little when I pointed out that in these discussions he always seemed to present himself as someone radically closer to the end of his working life than someone at forty-eight had a right to feel. What about writing? He could tell me about writing. Writing without personal advocacy, if I meant political writing, was pointless. He had written something he would be glad to show me, something he had put into the right hands, something that in retrospect was absolutely correct. It had been an attack on the ANC embracing dual power as a strategy. Dual power amounts to seizing a cellblock while the rest of the prison remains in the hands of the bourgeoisie or the whites or the fascists, whichever. The great apotheosis of revolutionary dual power had been in Italy in 1920 when the workers had seized the factories in the north and held them just long enough to terrify the bourgeoisie into lining up behind Mussolini. There was no second act for the factory occupiers and none for the ANC once they got hold of the townships. Dual power in the South African context was a recipe for repeated decapitation. I could judge for myself how successful his argumentation had been, since the ANC was more yoked to dual power strategies than ever. I didn’t know what was or was not important in discussions like this, so I went off and wrote down what I could in my journal while what he’d said was still fresh. He was still brooding when I returned, but was willing to talk more.
He said that there was actually one writing project that if carried out successfully would be enough to justify anyone’s life. That would be a convincing essay against violence, against participating in official violence, ever. He had the noumenal form of the essay. It would be brief, it would be secular. The text would be printed on India paper in thirty languages. It would make a book about the size of a deck of cards. There could be a foundation to distribute it to everyone, on the order of the Gideon Bibles, internationally though. Of course the problem was that the essay itself would have to be a thing of genius, of compression, of inspiration. It would be like asking oneself to sit down and write not only a poem but a great poem. It would have to be like Thoreau on civil disobedience or Hume on causality. The fact was, he said, that this essay already existed in him, in his mind and feelings, but that was the problem: it was a conviction about violence, against violence, that overwhelmed any text he had ever tried to confine it in. The text was always pallid and weak compared to what he knew and felt, which was the proof that he lacked the genius to externalize himself on this issue. With this text you could cut the roots of war, of armies, and so on. Telling me this he got slightly flushed.
I was having trouble being sure how completely serious he was, especially when he seemed to remember that there was one other project that would justify his life however everything else he had done to date got ultimately judged. This would be to do something about flight capital, secret accounts, to do something conclusive to make the banksters stop helping the Wabenzi, the kleptocracy, by making bank secrecy illegal everywhere. I didn’t know who the Wabenzi were: it was what the Kenyans called the African civil servants who drive Mercedes-Benzes. If you wanted to accelerate African development by some unimaginable multiple, bank secrecy reform was what a serious person would put his best effort toward. Of course that would involve lobbying, going through the UN, setting up an organization, and he had sworn an oath to himself that he was never going to sit in an office again in his life. So that apparently was that. How seriously in all this I was being taken was not my question at that time.
It ended nowhere. In retrospect I regret being so passive. But I wanted to hear everything. I think I tried to be more probing about the bank secrecy idea — it had some feeling of reality and possibility about it — but I was deflected by his asking from nowhere if I didn’t think it was interesting that there was no term equivalent to cuckold to apply to women when they were being betrayed. Was it because the condition was so far from exceptional that no particular term was needed? He knew of no language in which that was not the case.