And you, he said, you can help me. You've studied this, you can show me. I go to the university library, but there are hundreds of books, th-thousands, I don't know where to start.
Well, first you should get some history. This idea is as old as Plato's
Timaeus.
But history could never help him. Even if he read Plato, he would only seize on the myth of Atlantis. In his way he was as marooned by history as
I by method. So. If Murphy would use me to work out his obsession, then I might use him as proof against my own delusions. With his example before me I might be less likely to fall into error. This cold quid pro quo, perhaps the nearest thing to friendship that I could offer, was at least some form of cooperation.
As we walked back I imagined the beasts of Murphy's fancy taking form in this primal sun that subsumed history, but not on the canvas of his innocence. No, I saw them body forth under the pervasive smutching shadow of method, the issue not of imagination but of these hillside laboratories so busily unlocking the genetic codes, the same burgeoning industry that all my classmates had been so eager to join, a mockery and reproach to all
I had learned and suffered for.
And still Murphy was not done. He spoke of his drawings, calling them tools of inquiry, experiments, with their own methodology of rigid line and black ink, and with the beginnings of a new woe I interrupted him. For
I had thought that at least he had an arena of action in which he felt free.
And is that all it is to you? A means of inquiry? No pride in your art?
He looked stunned. Pride? In c-copies of copies?
I understood. The grandest Chartres could not rival the balance of a bumblebee, nor the finest pigment more than mock the glint of snakeskin.
But you say that life is monstrous, I said.
It is.
Then why draw it? Don't you have to look at things with love in order to see their pasts and futures?
Yes. That's the worst. I do, I do love all this. Have you read Rilke?
No.
He speaks of beauty. That it is the beginning of terror. That every angel is terrible.
Then why is it beauty? Why does it hold us?
Because it suffers us to live.
Overhead a firespotting plane droned, crossing and recrossing the grass-brown hills. Below us a million souls sprawled round the borders of the shallow bay.
I don't know what to tell you, Murphy. But it's foolish to pursue something that puts you in pain.
He regarded me skeptically. Is it?
Another touch. I was uneasy, I wanted to be left out of it. Yes. It is.
I'm at a dead end with my drawings anyway. Maybe there's another way.
.
But I did not want to hear any more just then. I told him that I needed to pick up an application to the university. I would see him later at the house.
One of my friends from Cambridge now lived in Berkeley. Homi had put me up my first week in California. He was from New Delhi originally. When I told him about Murphy he smiled and asked if Murphy was a Krishna.
I can't think of anything less likely to attract him.
Oh, it's not so unlikely. This horror of life can become quite ecstatic.
And he told me a Hindu legend about Shiva and his consort Parvati. One day a powerful demon came to Shiva and demanded Parvati. Angry Shiva opened his third eye, and at once another demon sprang from the ground, a lionheaded beast whose nature was pure hunger. Thinking quickly, the first demon threw himself on Shiva's mercy, for it is well known that when you appeal to a god's mercy he is obliged to protect you. So the anguished lionhead asked, "Now what? What am I supposed to eat?" And Shiva said, "Well, why not eat yourself?" And so the lion did, starting with his tail, eating through his groin, belly, and neck, until only his face was left.
And to this sunlike mask, which was all that remained of the grim leonine hunger, exultant Shiva gave the name Kirttimukha, or Face of Glory. He decreed it should stand over the doors to all his temples, and none who refused to honor it would ever come to any knowledge of him. Those who think the universe could be made another way, without pain, without sorrow, without time or death, are unfit for illumination. None is illumined who has not learned to live in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of this knowledge of life, in the radiance of the monstrous face of glory which is its emblem. This is the meaning of the faces over the entrances to the sanctuaries of the god of yoga, which word is cognate with yoke.
Homi had a hypnotic voice, his faint Indian accent falling on American idioms was beguiling, and as he spoke I thought of my demonic angels of choice, their twin faces merging into Kirttimukha, the glorious sun-faced lion of life, and for the moment I felt at peace.
Before I left, Homi asked: Have you spoken to. anyone back east?
I said no. Seeing me out, he touched my arm.
The next time I saw Murphy he had a fantastic book on human cloning and a practical guide to the grafting of cacti.
One evening, more from obligation than desire, I began to fill out my application to the university, as an earnest that a new life could start for me here. Evidently I could still not imagine a life apart from a university. But the first thing the gatekeepers of the future ask is where you come from.
Let me tell you, then, about Paul Kammerer. He was an Austrian biologist who set out to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired traits. This evolutionary doctrine was anathema to Darwinists then and is still. In 1926, after a long and distinguished career, Kammerer blew his brains out in disgrace over a badly preserved and ineptly doctored specimen of Alytes obstetricans, the midwife toad, the main evidence for his theory. A discoloration on the toad's hand was supposed to be a nuptial pad, a feature present in most water-mating toads, but normally absent in this landmating species. Forcing his Alytes to mate in water induced the pads, which, after several generations, were passed to their offspring. Or so Kammerer claimed. The specimen was examined by a hostile critic ten years after its preservation. On examination the discoloration proved to be fresh India ink. Kammerer could have had nothing to do with this botch of a hoax, which proved only that some lab assistant had tried clumsily to help him or maliciously to discredit him. But his critics were to tie the validity of all his work to the fraud of this specimen.
No attempt had ever been made to duplicate Kammerer's experiment. I decided to do it.
My advisor had urged me to work in recombinant DNA. I demurred, and in one step moved from the cutting edge of my field to the backwaters of Lamarckism. We will not speak here of my apparent need to doom myself. I had good reasons as well. I thought that too many favored Darwin's fiction of life because it tacitly endorsed every murder as life-furthering. A being, or an idea, that could not or would not compete for its survival, or which failed in the effort, was de jure useless surplusage. In itself the theory was flawed, but its analogs were simply appalling. "Survival of the fittest" justified every cutthroat act from personal betrayal to corporate capitalism to genocide. Nor could I return to the moral paradigms that had held good before the Age of Reason and the supposed fall of God; in that, at least, Darwin and entropy and experience agreed: time could not be turned back nor innocence regained. In any case
Lamarck's earlier myth of evolution, that no useful effort is wasted, that children may inherit the acquired traits of their parents, was too wistful and consoling for me to swallow whole. But I used it as a name for my ignorance.
If the ideas of my science were hard on me, the politics were impossible.
I lost standing I never knew I had. A scholarship student, I was now outcast. The great burnished doors of privilege, power, prestige, and profession commenced to swing shut on their oiled bearings. Notices of picnics, parties, softball games, and seminars ceased to appear in my box; I was snubbed by a professor who two weeks earlier had spent an afternoon with me joyfully criticizing strict Darwinism.