A Dialogue of Self and Soul
From the private correspondence of Egan Chaney: The title of this exercise is from Yeats, dear Ben. The substance of the dialogue, however, has almost nothing to do with the Old Master’s poem of the same name.
I wrote this imaginary exchange in one of my notebooks while waiting out a particularly long night on the edge of the Asadi clearing (just off the imaginary thirty-yard line on the south end of the field, western sideline), and I intend for no one to read it, Ben, but you. Its lack of objectivity and the conclusions drawn by the participants make it unsuitable for any sort of appearance in the formal ethnography I’ve yet to write.*
But you, Ben, will understand that a scientist is also a human being and may perhaps forgive me. Because I’ve withheld my self from you in our many one-sided conversations (you dominate them, I realize, because my silence is a spur to others’ volubility; they speak to fill the void), here I mean to show you the mind these silences conceal.
But since you can’t tell the players without a program, I herewith provide a program. The numbers on the backs of the players’ metaphysical jerseys are Self and Soul.
PROGRAM
Self = The Cultural Xenologist
Soul = The Quintessential Man
Manager(s): Egan Chaney
SELF: This is my eighteenth night in the Synesthesia Wild.
SOUL: I’ve been here forever. But let that go. What have you learned?
SELF: Most of my observations lead me to state emphatically that the Asadi are not fit subjects for ‘anthropological’ study. They manifest no purposeful social activity. They do not use tools. They have less social organization than did most of the extinct earthly primates and hominids, and not much more than chimpanzees and baboons. Only the visit, three days ago, of the ‘old man’ and his frightening companion indicates even a remote possibility I’m dealing with intelligence. How can I continue?
SOUL: You’ll continue out of contempt for the revulsion daily growing in you. Because the Asadi are, in fact, intelligent – just as Oliver Oliphant Frasier said they were.
SELF: But how do I know that, damn it? How do I know what you insist is true is really true? Blind acceptance of Frasier’s word?
SOUL: There are signs, Chaney. The eyes, for instance. But even if there weren’t any signs, you’d admit that the Asadi are as intelligent, in their own way, as you or I. Wouldn’t you, Egan?
SELF: I admit it. Their elusive intelligence haunts me.
SOUL: No, now you’ve misstated the facts – you’ve twisted things around horribly.
SELF: How? What do you mean?
SOUL: You are not the one who is haunted, Egan Chaney, for you’re too rational a creature to be the prey of poltergeist. I am the haunted one, the bedeviled one, the one ridden by every insidious spirit of doubt and revulsion.
SELF: Revulsion? You’ve used that word twice. Why do you insist upon it? What does it mean?
SOUL: That I hate the Asadi. I despise their every culturally significant – or insignificant – act. They curdle my essence with their very alienness. And because they do, you, too, Egan Chaney, hate them – for you’re simply the civilized veneer on my primordial responses to the world. You’re haunted not by the Asadi, friend, but by me.
SELF: While you, in turn, are haunted by them. Is that it?
SOUL: That’s how it is. But although you’re aware of my hatred for the Asadi, you pretend that that portion of my hatred which seeps into you is only a kind of professional resentment. You believe you resent the Asadi for destroying your objectivity, your scientific detachment. In truth, this detachment doesn’t exist. You feel the same powerful revulsion for their alienness that works in me like a disease, the same abiding and deep-seated hatred. I haunt you.
SELF: With hatred for the Asadi?
SOUL: Yes. I admit it, Egan. Admit that even as a scientist you hate them.
SELF: No. No, damn you, I won’t. Because we killed the pygmies, every one of them. How can I say, ‘I hate the Asadi, I hate the Asadi,’ when we killed every pygmy? – Even though, my God, I do . . .
* This was Chaney’s private and idiosyncratic term for the rain forest the rest of us called either the Calyptran Wilderness or the Wild. T.B.
* Even though we shared a dormitory room for a time, Chaney ‘mailed’ me the letter containing this dialogue. We never discussed his ‘letter.’ T.B.
PART TWO
Daily Life: In-The-Field Report
From the professional tapes of the library of the Third Denebolan Expedition: Once again, it’s evening. I’ve a lean-to now, and it protects me from the rain much better than did the porous roof of the forest. I’ve been here twenty-two days now. Beneath this mildewed flesh my muscles crawl like the evil snakes BoskVeld doesn’t possess. I’m saturated with Denebola’s garish light. I’m Gulliver among the Yahoos.
This, however, isn’t what you want to hear.
You want facts, my conclusions about the behavior of the Asadi, evidence that we’re studying a life form capable of at least elementary reasoning and ratiocination. The Asadi have this ability, I swear it – but only slowly has the evidence for intelligence begun to accumulate.
Okay, base-camp huggers. Let me deliver myself of an in-the-field report as an objective scientist, forgetting the hunches of my mortal self. The rest of this tape will deal with the daily life of the Asadi.
A day in
