DR. BERGEN: Thank you. You have been candid today. Frietsch.
FRIETSCH: Last night I said to myself: what is there left of the day’s activity? Can anything be said of it but this, that it consisted of waiting for the moment of lucidity and prayer? We know not what we do from day to day until some external demand compels us, creates a great unrest and we work with immense nervousness until a whole is completed, so that we will be able to return to the other unrest of waiting. If it were true that our lives were created by our own wills… but the will is said to be a myth, hypostatized. This is the most modern belief, that what we call the will is muscular tension.
DR. BERGEN: Thank you, Frietsch. Your testimony is completely adequate. You too raise a problem demanding intuitive consideration. Rosenberg!
ROSENBERG: I considered the poor, how their lives are sucked from them in a thousand unseen ways. In work is happiness. Such is the old thought, I said to myself, old and no longer true for the work of the poor is the degradation of the automaton, the acquisition of perfectly behaving nervous reflexes until all sensitivity and imagination have been destroyed. Yet who would be happy? Children give no thought to happiness. Only brides embarking upon marriage think in such terms. The word “embark” betrays the inexactitude of the thought. Yet happiness may be the only term for the possession of all intrinsic goods.
DR. BERGEN: Thank you, Rosenberg. You are still concerned, quite rightly, with the injustices of society. Perry!
PERRY: I was concerned with understanding my adolescent passions — professional baseball and playing cards. I saw that the essence of baseball was constituted by the element of contingency. The game was a framework for spontaneous drama, quickly-rising. I remembered my greatest excitement: the World Series in which the conclusion was this — a base runner attempting to score from second base on a sharp and hard-hit single to right field. If he was safe, the score would be tied. The right fielder threw perfectly to the catcher on one bounce, a long and fatal arc, and the base runner was tagged out sliding into the catcher in a burst of dust, and the team for which I rooted had been defeated in the contest for the world’s championship. Reflecting upon this and gazing upon the sky, I understood that contingency is the most intoxicating of liquors, and I saw that this obsession also created the love of gambling. It was an interest in the processes of chance, which in turn depended upon our hope and poverty and wish to get rich quick, a sudden vast acquisition, which was in turn our enormous interest in the grace of God.
DR. BERGEN: Thank you. That is very interesting and useful. Porter!
PORTER: Dr. Bergen, I too considered games and remembered how in playing tennis, the racquet with which I swung toward my opponent seemed to me to be my will, and his racquet, his will — both adolescent swords.
DR. BERGEN: You are permitting your fellows to suggest the terms and the character of your thought to you. You ought to look into your own mind with greater care and freshness, Porter. Montez!
MONTEZ: I looked at the heaven at night, and it seemed to me, Dr. Bergen, that the stars might be compared to diamonds, and diamonds might in turn be compared to the values which surround the heart of man, so that there was this triple analogy — stars, diamonds, values, and the heart of man in the midst of them.
DR. BERGEN: I would say the same to you as to Porter. You are not using your own experience sufficiently, but merely my terms. Martha!
MARTHA: In my dream at night I wished with all my heart to participate in the minds of the people I like very much, I mean directly, not indirectly: to feel their consciousness as they do. And in my dream I was trying to open Eleanor’s forehead and look inside. And I told her how noble she had been to kill herself and how it had helped all of us. [MRS. BERGEN suppresses an outcry.]
DR. BERGEN: Thank you, Martha. You have done well. My own thoughts, which I must now testify, concern Eleanor also. She died in her enactment of the method of our belief. By gazing at the sky until the self-evident intuition was given to me, I have again confirmed my previous announcement of the reason for her death. She killed herself because she had come to the impasse where she could not understand her own heart and could not decide once for all what she wanted, except by examining her heart in the perspective of death. It is a method which we must use only as a last resort; but it was her last resort and she recognized it, and accepting our belief she killed herself and thus became our first witness. Let us hear once more the poem she wrote and made a recording of when she still hoped to find in poetry a way of life for herself.
[There is a victrola on the terrace, unseen by the audience. PORTER gets up and starts the victrola. The voice which issues from it is distant, low, husky yet feminine, and in a way, oracular and dramatic. It actually comes from a victrola record, and is not an off-stage voice.]
ELEANOR’S SONG:
I said, as by the river, we
Gazed at the sliding water’s gray,
“This life’s a dream, as others say,
A dream confirmed when memory
Holds up the past and dims the day,
As in the future we shall see
The present quickly passed away,
Irrelevant to our belief,
Misunderstood as every play,
Full of a secret actuality
Which worked its wish consummately
And held the conscious will at bay.”
[Enter ANTHONY, at right of living room. He walks toward the terrace and mounts the steps.]
ANTHONY:
Was that her voice? That was her voice indeed.
Who can distinguish now between the ghost
And the actual, the living and the immortal?
One hundred times the globe has whirled about,
Carrying her small grave in its turning ground.
One thousand times the I beneath my face
Has winced to think that she surpassed my love.
One million times a single question raises
Its expectation, its unfinishedness,
In the unending corridors of unconsciousness.
Why did she kill herself? The phonograph
Speaks only what’s plausible to the small ear.
But death in Gothic letters confronts my face,
Cannot be read, too near, cannot be known.
DR. BERGEN [obviously annoyed]: We are glad to have you here, Anthony, you are always welcome. But it is unnecessary for you to affirm continually your refusal to accept our reason for Eleanor’s death. [Turning to his DISCIPLES.] To conclude today’s ceremony we will have a second antiphony devoted to each one’s thoughts of Eleanor, our witness. Martha! And then all of you in that order.
MARTHA: I remember the day we went shopping together. Eleanor bought some things at Wanamaker’s, I do not remember what. We both had ice-cream sodas at their fountain, and then drove to Long Beach and went swimming. She was very excited. She swam as if she were hysterical or drowning.
MONTEZ: I remember how charming and vivacious she was last summer.
PORTER: I remember how devoted and loyal she was to her father.
PERRY: I remember with what poise and grace she tidied her hair before the looking-glass. She was very beautiful.
ROSENBERG: I remember her coming from the telephone one day and looking like one who has just taken off her glasses and has a dazed look and a welt on the bridge of the nose between the eyes.