At first I didn’t understand, but then C. explained that it depended on the image, its qualities. A uroboros, for example, is an image of closure, a frightening image of compulsive, ritualistic repetition. To have one’s life organized under the dictates of a uroboros would be painful, indeed, and if one were unfortunate enough to be conscious of that image, one might find it even more painful, for all one could do would be to raise the repetition to a higher level, hoping to avoid it there, only to find oneself once again repeating oneself. What one would have in that case would be a spiraling uroboros, as it were. In Hamilton’s case, by becoming conscious of his compulsive attraction to women who wanted to “smother” him and his resultant revulsion at the indebtedness incurred, that is, his “guilt,” his only recourse seems to have been to introduce “wrath,” so as to speed up the process, to spin the wheel a little faster, hoping thereby (one must assume) that the pain for the woman and confusion for himself would be lessened.
Rochelle’s demon Asmodeus was not a wholly imprecise way of perceiving her father’s behavior, C. reminded me. It explained a great deal — his fervent seductions, his cold withdrawals, and, finally, his wrathful rejections. If you concede sincerity to such a man, then his behavior does indeed seem possessed. The difficulty with the image of Asmodeus, however, is that it holds out the possibility of exorcism. Magic. The right combination of aspects of the moon, chants, artifacts and fetishes, and voilà! he’s free. A daughter’s love, a spurned daughter’s love, explains her attraction to it.
But, I, as C. quite rightly pointed out, I was no man’s daughter, spurned or otherwise. Which was doubtless why I had chosen to describe the same man with the image of the holy man, the man outside all social prescriptions for meaningful behavior, the man who uses his life as allegory, who, to demonstrate human ordinariness, heaps ashes on himself, who, to demonstrate the vanity of human wishes, forgoes all normal access to praise and achievement, the man who, to demonstrate the possibility of self-transcendence, denies the claims the rest of us honor.
We are the only creature that does not know what it is to be itself, C. went on. We are the only creature that must perceive itself through the use of images. The limits and the possibilities implied by those images, then, are the limits and possibilities for our perceptions of ourselves. And because we can hardly be expected to exceed the morphology of our perceptions, then it’s clear that our images of ourselves determine the morphology of our very lives. Rochelle saw her father through the image of a particular kind of demon-possession, one that combined and thus explained his peculiar juxtaposition of drunkenness, lust and rage. I had tried to convert her to my point of view, which depended on her coming to see him as a holy man. C., in his turn, was recommending that I see Hamilton as a spiraling uroboros. We were all three trying to perceive him, to imagine him into a reality in our own lives, by means of a coherent image. Yet he persisted in resisting our imaginations. The demon had fallen away in the face of Hamilton’s obvious intentionality. No man possessed could be that willful. And the holy man was rapidly being secularized by what appeared to be compulsive behavior rather than self-conscious, exemplary behavior designed to be taken as allegorical. And now this somewhat pathetic and depressing image of the self-devouring serpent had come to control my perceptions of the man. The time had come to try to discover how Hamilton perceived himself, if at all. And if this could not be determined, to ask oneself if, indeed, one had invented him altogether.
Thank heaven for C.! If it hadn’t been for his presence in my life, his very presence that evening in my library, I would at that moment have felt wholly alone.
CHAPTER 10 Graveside
THIS IS A painful chapter for me to write. Before I’m through with it, I will have lost my best friend, will have sent him from my house into the snowy cold, leaving me behind, remorseful and, to counter remorse, desperate for justification. A dangerous state for a rationalist: it’s when he is most tempted to depart from reality and fly off into the soothing heavens of reason.
It began with the death of Alma Stark — not the actual fact of her dying, but later, in my describing it. It’s possible that it began earlier, of course, in Chapter Nine, where I told of Hamilton’s meeting and consequent marriage to Jenny, but I was not aware then of any irreconcilable differences between my and C.’s points of view. At that time, despite the differences between us, I was still able to use C.’s point of view to inform my own, as I had been doing all along. So that at the end of Chapter Nine, while I may have seemed disconsolate at having to lose Rochelle, I could still console myself with the continued presence of C. But all that was before I had told of the death of Alma Stark.
The death itself was not especially poignant or wrenching. It was expected. She had been ill for most of the previous winter and had fended off an attack of flu and then pneumonia, but clearly she was weakening and, in fact, had not been expected to survive the winter at all. She was eighty, still mentally alert, but no longer able to resist ordinary onslaughts against her body. The following November, she came down with a strep throat, and despite massive doses of antibiotics, she developed double pneumonia and had to be hospitalized in Concord, where, after struggling on for two more weeks, she died, quite peacefully in her sleep, of heart disease.
Though her last years obviously had been scarred by the wound Hamilton had inflicted on her when he had evicted her — a wound she could close only by refusing after that night ever to see her son again, refusing and regularly renewing that refusal, for the cut was deep and could be staunched only with difficulty — those last years, nevertheless, had been relatively comforting to her. She was able to convert her dependence on her daughters, Jody and Sarah, into something which caused her to suffer, and thus the integrity of her personality was sustained. Her daily round of activities included helping Jody with housework, cooking and cleaning up after the children (twin boys entering adolescence, people who, to her tongue-clucking satisfaction, seemed to regard her presence as they would a maid’s — or at least that’s how, sighing, wringing her hands and tweaking her throat, she would put it to her friends at the Ladies’ Aid Society, always adding, of course, “It must be hard for them, having an old lady suddenly come to live in a crowded little house with them”). After the first year, Chub had added a small bedroom to the trailer, off the back at the middle, like an awkwardly placed appendage, and she spent most of her evenings there, and while her daughter, son-in-law and their two children watched TV in the living room, she crocheted, wrote letters to the Barnstead boys in Vietnam, and read the Bible. It was a nice room, pine-paneled, with a single window that faced Chub’s gravel pit (a supplementary source of income for the family). She had her own bed, a dresser, a small desk under the window, and even a closet of her own, which she had filled with the rest of her possessions — her clothes, photograph albums, Christmas tree decorations, and the quilted spread that she had made the spring she married Hamilton’s father and that she had used on their bed for over forty years. But now she slept alone on a narrow, cotlike bed. It would look foolish, she remarked, if she used the quilt to cover this little bed. But she couldn’t bring herself to give it over to Chub and Jody, to lay it across their wide Hollywood bed in the master bedroom. She thought maybe she’d just leave it to them in her will. She’d leave the photograph albums to Sarah, who seemed more interested in them anyhow, perhaps because she was childless. At least that’s what she told the ladies at the Ladies’ Aid Society while they knitted, sewed, crocheted, and wove handy, warm articles for the Barnstead boys in Vietnam. As it turned out, however, she wrote no will; Sarah ended up with the quilt and Jody took the photographs and Christmas tree ornaments.