The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Read online

  The Minotaur enjoyed his small celebrity. ‘I’ve become’, he said one night at dinner, lowering his head shyly, ‘a minotaurist attraction.’

  8

  One noon, however, the Minotaur came galloping back from the drag-hunt and thundered into the palace blowing and whinnying with fear.

  It took Theseus and Hippolyta an hour to quieten him. Finally, as Theseus gently scrunched the curls on his forehead, which was resting on Hippolyta’s lap, he managed to blurt out:

  ‘In the wood – I saw a monster: a man with the head of an ass.’

  ‘It’s all right. Quiet now,’ Theseus said, stroking away. ‘It’s just that you have a poetic imagination. As imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure, Theseus,’ Hippolyta objected, whispering above the Minotaur’s head. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it more witnesseth than fancy’s images.’ She looked down thoughtfully at the huge head and then, adding her gentle caresses to Theseus’s, said sweetly: ‘He grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable.’

  The Sage on Democracy

  ‘I must say,’ said one of the disciples, ‘I’m glad I live in a democracy.’

  ‘Why?’ the sage asked.

  ‘Surely it’s obvious. In a democracy, I have a right to a say in shaping the system I live under. Am I not justified in being glad?’

  ‘Certainly,’ the sage replied, ‘—if you’re correct in thinking you have such a say.’

  ‘I have a vote. I have freedom of speech. I am free to join a political party – or even to start one. Can you deny that I have a say?’

  ‘I neither deny nor affirm it,’ the sage said. ‘I don’t know whether you have a say. To find out, I should have to ask many questions.’

  ‘Ask away.’

  ‘It is not you I should have to ask. However, without knowing whether you in fact have a say, I know that whether you have a say or not is a matter of pure chance.’

  ‘I foresee the point you’re going to make,’ the disciple said. ‘Let me save you trouble by admitting at once that the amount of say a person has may be affected by chance. A person who chances to be born into the ruling class or to be rich may well have extra opportunities to influence public opinion. In a sense I should have more freedom of speech if I could afford to become a newspaper proprietor than if I merely have to address myself to passers-by from the street corner. However, it is already possible to rise to power without chance giving you a good start. And increasingly democracies are ironing out the chance factors.’

  ‘I am not sure that democracies are,’ the sage said, ‘but I readily grant that they could iron out those chance factors if they set their mind to it. However, those were not the operations of chance that I meant. Let us suppose that a democracy had ironed out all the uneven starting-points you mentioned. You would still say you were glad to live in a democracy?’

  ‘More fervently than ever.’

  ‘And would you say that, in such a democracy, you and I had equal opportunities to make our will prevail?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what’s good about a democracy.’

  ‘Let us say that you want X and I want anti-X to be made part of the system we live under. Which of us will get his way?’

  ‘Obviously, we can’t tell until we know which of us is supported by the majority of our fellow-citizens.’

  ‘Then you and I’, the sage said, ‘do not have equal opportunities to make our wills prevail. If it turns out that 51% of the population support me, I will get my way, and you will be frustrated. We do not know which of us will have more supporters. It is a matter of pure chance. All we can say is that one of us has the right to have his will put into operation, and the other has no right. The distribution of right and no-right between us depends on chance.’

  ‘Not on chance,’ the disciple said, ‘but on the will of the majority. The great advantage of democracy is that it is not the will of one man that prevails, but the will of the majority.’

  ‘Is there a being that can think to itself “I am the majority, and this is my will”?’

  ‘No of course not. The majority is merely a large number of individuals.’

  ‘Then the will of the majority is the will of one man?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Surely, it is the will of one man, which chances to accord with the will of another man and another man and another man … and so on, up to the number required to make a majority?’

  ‘You could put it thus.’

  ‘When you shape your political will, on a matter that has not yet been tested at the polls, you do not know how many other wills coincide with yours?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘From your point of view, whether you will in fact have a say in shaping any given part of the law or of the political constitution is a toss-up?’

  ‘From my point of view, perhaps. But the majority—’

  ‘Yet you said the majority is only a large number of individuals. For each individual citizen, whether he will have a say in shaping things is a toss-up? His say depends entirely on the chance of how other people see the matter?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Then in fact no citizen has a right to a say in shaping the system. All that a citizen has is a chance that he will turn out to belong to the majority, in which case he will acquire the right.’

  ‘Do you imagine you’ve shewn me that I ought not to be glad I live in a democracy?’

  ‘Of course not. What I’ve shewn you is that, if you are glad, what you are glad of is that you live in a lottery.’

  Disjecta Membra

  ‘There’s no point in going on asking what my fee is. My fee doesn’t exist, because I won’t perform the operation.’

  ‘Your fee exists all right. The doubt is whether it’s worth my while to pay it. Your fee is the sum that would persuade you to perform the operation.’

  ‘Nothing will persuade me.’

  ‘You mean you’ll do it for nothing?

  ‘I mean no such – Sorry,’ the surgeon said. ‘I’m not used to millionaires’ humour. I see it’s as specialised as medical humour. However, the answer is that I won’t do the job. So I’ll be getting back to the hospital.’

  ‘Sit down. You’ve established good personal relations with me. You’ve made me laugh. This is obviously the most advantageous moment for you to start to negotiate.’

  ‘I don’t want to negotiate. There’s nothing to negotiate.’

  ‘No, of course there isn’t: yet. I haven’t made you an offer yet.’

  ‘Look, I realise you can offer me – by my standards – the earth. But you must realise in your turn that I already make – again by my own standards – a very adequate living. I have few extravagant tastes. Those I have I can afford. I’m not pathologically greedy. So if you offer me the earth, my answer is, quite frankly, “Thanks, but I don’t need the earth.”’

  ‘Splendid. It looks as if I shan’t have to pay as much as I feared.’

  ‘Listen,’ the surgeon said, rearranging his posture in the chair as though thereby to rearrange his posture in the argument. ‘Can’t you just accept the fact that you’ve come up against medical ethics?’

  ‘I’m not asking you to perform an abortion. Or euthanasia.’

  ‘What a conventional view you take of medical ethics. There’s more to it than that.’

  ‘What more?’

  ‘Put it like this. My life’s work – my vocation, if you prefer – consists of removing damaged or unhealthy tissue, to the benefit of the patient’s general health. To remove undamaged, perfectly healthy tissue –’

  ‘Suppose I asked you to remove an inch of undamaged, perfectly healthy nose and thereby give me a handsomer face?’

  ‘I don’t do cosmetic surgery.’

  ‘That’s mere personal chit-chat. Do you in principle condemn those of your colleagues
who do do cosmetic surgery?’

  ‘No. But they’re taking into consideration the patient’s general health, including his state of mind. If an ugly nose is rendering a patient liable to depression—’

  ‘And what about my state of mind? What about the depression I feel at the sheer waste involved in maintaining a long, heavy left arm that does nothing to earn its keep?’

  ‘Listen,’ the surgeon said patiently. ‘Listen.’ He rose and walked to the window, which was covered by a Venetian blind. He peered between two of the slats and managed to see a little light. ‘I don’t understand what you hope to gain. Do you imagine you could save on your food bills if you had one limb fewer to support? Have you some naïve idea that food intake is directly related to body weight? Is that it? Well, you’re wrong. What one eats is largely a matter of habit. And even if you managed to re-train your appetite, how much would you save? Ten pence a day? 20 pence a day? You don’t need to save 20 pence a day.’

  ‘And you said I was naïve,’ the businessman said. ‘You think of finance as just getting and spending. Perhaps it’s the fault of your medical training. You see it in terms of the alimentary tract.’

  ‘All right. If I’m naïve, explain to me. What is this idea all about?’

  ‘Well, primarily, it’s a matter of principle.’

  ‘Principle?’ said the surgeon, shocked into turning round.

  ‘Yes. Did you think only you had them? Waste consists of letting someone’s work – someone’s energy – dribble away into an unproductive dead end. Waste is death. Like you, I’m engaged in a war against death. So: my first principle is that anything that doesn’t contribute to life – to efficiency, to production – must be cut out. My left arm contributes nothing. I’m not merely right-handed; I’m extremely right-handed. With my left hand I can’t so much as turn a doorknob or unzip my trousers. I have to maintain – foodwise, energywise, washing-wise, warmthwise, clothingwise – all this muscle power in my left arm but I can’t apply it.’

  ‘You use your left arm in ways you’re not aware of. To maintain balance, and so on.’

  ‘I’ve come down from the trees. Mobility, for me, is pressing the buttons on the intercom. That’s how I got you to come here. You have to be mobile. I just have to get you to come. And I push the buttons with the fingers of my right hand.’

  ‘The whole idea is monstrous,’ the surgeon said.

  ‘You mean logical.’

  ‘Yes, all right, logical – but totally unreasonable. Such a drastic remedy – merely to save ten pence a day.’

  ‘You have the characteristic mentality of the professional classes’, the businessman said affably. ‘You professional men know about making money. You enjoy making it. You yourself have probably made, in one sense of the word, as much as I have. But when you’ve made it, you can’t think of anything to do with it except spend it. That’s why you’re merely comfortably off, whereas I’m what you call a millionaire.’

  ‘Why do you say what I call a millionaire? Aren’t you a millionaire?’

  ‘Frightened my offer won’t be as much as you’d hoped?’

  ‘I tell you there’s no question—’

  ‘Just my little millionaire’s joke’, the businessman said calmingly. ‘No, when you talk about a millionaire, I feel as you medical practitioners must when a patient says “Doctor, my blood’s over-heated” or “Doctor, I’m having trouble with my nerves”. I can tell that you don’t know what you mean yourself. You’ve no clear picture in your own head whether your millionaire is someone who could raise a million or someone who could realise a million or just someone whose holdings are worth a million on paper so long as he doesn’t try to realise them. I wouldn’t even be surprised if you visualise a millionaire as someone who keeps a million in cash in cardboard boxes under the bed.’

  ‘I don’t profess to be a financier.’

  ‘Yet you think you know you can afford to refuse my offer before you’ve even heard it.’

  ‘I know I can live comfortably without your offer.’

  ‘By “comfortably”, you mean having plenty of cash to spend. If I offered you a million – and don’t get excited; I shan’t – you’d ask for it to be delivered in cardboard boxes.’

  ‘Well, if it was tied in some investment and I couldn’t get it out without destroying its value, I wouldn’t get much fun out of it.’

  ‘A millionaire who keeps his million under the bed will never be a multi-millionaire.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a multi-millionaire.’

  ‘You don’t want! It all turns on what you personally want. You professional classes are so selfish. You think of me as a greedy capitalist. You imagine you’re well to the liberal side of me. And all you want is cash to spend, regardless of what you do to the economy. Just because you work hard at a skilled, socially useful job, you think you’re entitled to a high income – and you believe that income to be your reward. You feel entitled to get fun out of it: by spending it. You take the money out of the economy and drop it through a hole in your pocket and then you righteously say you’re not pathologically greedy. What you do is convert capital into waste matter. When you divert money from its productive function of making money, you kill it. I look on you as a deadly amateur, just as a brewer or a baker would if you told him you collected yeast not in order to brew or bake with it but just to get fun out of it.’

  ‘All this rhetoric is quite pointless,’ the surgeon said. ‘It’s high time I got back to my selfish if socially useful job.’

  ‘I’m offering you the chance to do something extra socially useful by helping me plug the holes through which my efficiency goes to waste. And you arrogantly reply that I don’t need to save ten pence a day, so the job’s beneath you. Suppose I did need to? Suppose I was a pauper? Would the operation suddenly become ethical?’

  ‘A pauper has never made me such a monstrous proposition.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be worth his while. He’d never save enough by it to cover his expenditure on your fee. His saving would be in proportion to his tiny outgoings. My outgoings, on the other hand, are enormous. Look at the gadgetry and hardware in this office. It’s all worth it, because it multiplies my efficiency.’

  ‘I advise you to have one gadget fewer and keep your arm.’

  ‘Your advice is uneconomic. I would gain the cost of the gadget but lose the efficiency it gives me, which multiplies in geometric progression. You constantly overlook the factor of progression. You estimate I might save ten pence a day on food. Now if you saved ten pence a day, your ten pences would merely mount up in an old jam jar on a shelf in your kitchen. If I save ten pence a day, each ten pence will be put to work to make more pence. If you and I each save ten pence a day, I will end up with a great deal more money than you will. My saving will be in terms of compound interest. You think of coins and notes as things. I know they are processes. You think of my office equipment as a collection of things. I know they are processes – and, what’s more, I know they are processes of two opposite kinds, going in opposite directions. They’re processes that multiply my efficiency. But at the same time they represent an investment of my capital, and as such they are processes of deterioration. Now food intake, you pointed out, is not directly related to body weight. But wear and tear on, for instance, this fitted carpet and these office chairs is. If I reduce wear and tear on them, I postpone the moment when I shall have to invest a capital sum in their replacement. If I postpone it by, let us say, a year, I gain a year’s usufruct of the capital sum involved. Do you begin to see? With your professional-class habit of thinking of money in static terms, you underestimated both the extent of the saving I shall make and the value of making the saving.’

  ‘You’re very plausible,’ the surgeon said. ‘But I’m not going to be talked into anything.’

  ‘I’ve given you enough to think about. To say any more now would be a waste of my energy. There comes a point in all negotiations where the person who is going to yield closes his ear
s: in order to concentrate on how, and how far, he’s going to yield. My assistant will phone you tomorrow about the fee.’

  2

  ‘It’s not too late to change your mind.’

  ‘If you make it up in accordance with clear principles in the first place,’ the businessman replied from the operating trolley, ‘you don’t need to waste energy changing it.’

  ‘I still think it’s one of the morbidest, unnaturallest ideas I’ve ever heard.’

  ‘“Unnatural,”’ the businessman mocked. ‘All your medical expertise rests on the biology of myth. What’s “natural” for human beings? You’re not natural. Natural human beings don’t perform skilled surgery.’

  ‘Yours is an idea that could only occur to an abnormal mentality.’

  ‘If I had a normal mentality I’d have a normal income. And if I had a normal income, you wouldn’t be getting the fee you are.’

  The surgeon had arranged the matter furtively, concealing from his assistants and the nursing staff the circumstances of the operation. He was sure that what he was doing was professionally disreputable. He was not even confident of its legality. He had made the businessman sign a paper which he hoped (he didn’t like to consult a lawyer) would protect him against a later accusation of unprofessional conduct or a suit for damages. In return, the businessman made the surgeon sign a contract stipulating the fee in advance.

  Soon after the operation, the surgeon transferred his patient to an expensive nursing home in the country, where he visited him only once.

  ‘I feel fine,’ said the businessman, who was sitting up in a chair, the left sleeve of his dressing-gown pinned across his chest. ‘I’ve experienced none of the difficulties you predicted in keeping my balance. Did you have any success in selling my arm to the medical school?’

  ‘No. They’re not short of material to dissect. I had the arm incinerated.’

  ‘Wasteful.’

  ‘Or actually, if you want to know, I didn’t try to sell it.’