Dhalgren

mentioned wanting another book.'

'My interest,' he said, coldly, 'is politics. I'm only out to examine that tiny place where it and art are flush. You make the writer's very common mistake: You assume publishing is the only political activity there is. It's one of my more interesting ones; it's also one of my smallest. It suffers

The advantage of transcribing your own conversation: It's the only chance you have to be articulate. This conversation must have been five times as long and ten times as clumsy. Two phrases I really did lift, however, are the ones about '…the clear knowledge of the pitch the vanes of my soul could twist to…' and '… experience them in the anxiety of silence…' Only it occurs to me '… the vanes of my soul…' was his, while '… the anxiety of silence…' was mine.

accordingly, and there's nothing either of us can do about it with Bellona in the shape it is. Then again, perhaps I make a common mistake for a politician. I tend to see all your problems merely as a matter of a little Dichtung, a little Warheit, with the emphasis on the latter.' He paused and I pondered. He came up with something first: 'You say you're not interested in the extra-literary surroundings of your work — I take it we both refer to acclaim, prestige, the attendant hero-worship and its inevitable distortions — all those things, in effect, that buttress the audience's pleasure in the artist when the work itself is wanting. Then you tell me that, actually, you're no longer interested in the work itself — how else am I to interpret such a statement as 'I am no longer a poet'? Tell me — and I ask because I am a politician and I really don't know — can an artist be truly interested in his art and not in those other things? A politician — and this I'll swear — can not be truly (better say, effectively) interested in his community's welfare without at least wanting (whether he gets it or not) his community's acclaim. Show me one who doesn't want it (whether he gets it or not) and I'll show you someone out to kill the Jews for their own good or off to conquer Jerusalem and have it dug up as a reservoir for holy water.'

'Artists can,' I said. 'Some very good emperors have been the patrons of some very good poets. But a lot more good poets seem to have gotten by without patronage from any emperors at all, good, bad, or otherwise. Okay: a poet is interested in all those things, acclaim, reputation, image. But as they're a part of life. He's got to be a person who knows what he's doing in a very profound way. Interest in how they work is one thing. Wanting them is another thing — the sort of thing that will mess up any real understanding of how they work. Yes, they're interesting. But I don't want them.'

'Are you lying? — 'again,' as you put it. Are you fudging? — which is how I'd put it.'

'I'm fudging,' I said. 'But then… I'm also writing.'

'You are? What a surprise after all that! Now I've certainly read enough dreadful things by men and women who once wrote a work worth reading to know that the habit of putting words on paper must be tenacious as the devil — But you're making it very difficult for me to maintain my promised objectivity. You must have realized, if only from my euphuistic journalese, I harbor all sorts of literary theories — a failing I share with Caesar, Charlemagne, and Winston Churchill (not to mention Nero and Henry the Eighth): Now I want to read your poems from sheer desire to help! But that's just the point where politics, having convinced itself its motives are purely benevolent, should keep its hands off, off, off! Why are you dissatisfied?'

I shrugged, realized he couldn't see it, and wondered how much of him I was losing behind the stonework. 'What I write,' I said, 'doesn't seem to be … true. I mean I can model so little of what it's about. Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there's so much of it, blaring in through the five senses. In my loft, alone, in the middle of the night, it comes blaring in. So I work at culling enough from it to construct moments of order.' I meshed my fingers, which were cool, and locked them across my stomach, which was hot. 'I haven't been given enough tools. I'm a crazy man. I haven't been given enough life. I'm a crazy man in this crazed city. When the problem is anything as complicated as one word spoken between two people, both suspecting they understand it… When you touch your own stomach with your own hand and try to determine who is feeling who… When three people put their hands over my knee, each breathing at a different rate, the heartbeat in the heel of the thumb of one of them jarring with the pulse in the artery edging the bony cap, and one of them is me — what in me can order gets exhausted before it all.'

'You're sure you're not simply telling me — Oh, I wish I could see you! — or avoiding telling me, that the responsibilities of being a big, bad scorpion are getting in the way of your work?'

'No,' I said. 'More likely the opposite. In the nest, I've finally got enough people to keep me warm at night. And I can feel safe as anyone in the city. Any scorpions who think about my writing at all are simply dazzled by the object — the book you were nice enough to have it made into. A few of them even blush when descriptions of them show up in it. That leaves what actually goes on between the first line and the last entirely to me. The scorpions caught me without a fight. My mind is a magnet and they're filings in a field I've made — No, they're the magnets. I'm the filing, in a stable position now.'

'You're too content to write?'

'You,' I said, 'are a politician; and you're just not going to understand.'

'At least you're giving me a little more support in my resolve not to read your work. Well, you say you're still writing. Regardless of any personal preface you might make, even this one, I'm just as interested in your second book as I was in your first.'

'I don't know if I'm about to waste any time trying to get it to you.'

'If I must arrange to have it hijacked, ink still moist, from beneath the very shadow of your dark quill, I suppose that's what I'll have to do. Let's see, shall we?'

'I've got other things to do.' For the first time, I was really angry at his affectation.

'Tell me about them,' he said, in a voice so natural, but following so naturally from the archness, my anger was defeated.

'I… I want you to tell me something,' I said.

'If I can.'

'Is the Father, here at the monastery,' I asked, 'a good man?'

'Yes. He's very good man.'

'But for me to accept that, you see,' I said, 'I have to know I can accept your definition of good. It probably isn't the same as mine … I don't even know if I have one!'

'Again, I wish I were allowed to see you. Your voice sounds as though you might be upset about something.' (Which I hadn't realized; I didn't feel upset.) 'I'm not oblivious to your efforts to keep our talk at a level of honesty I might find tedious if I didn't have the respect for truth a man forced to tell a great many lies for the most commendable reasons must. I'm not very satisfied with myself, Kid. In the past months, a dozen separate situations have propelled me to the single realization that, to be a good governor, if it is not absolutely necessary to be a good man, it is certainly of inestimable help. Bellona is an eccentric city that fosters eccentric ways. But the reason I'm here, of all eccentric places in this most eccentric place, is because I really want to —'

Dust or something blew into my mouth, got down my throat; I cleared it, thinking: Christ, I hope he doesn't decide my voice is breaking with emotion!

'— to remedy a little of that dissatisfaction. If he is not a good man, the Father is certainly a generous one. He is allowing me to stay here… Of course there's always an odd relation between the head of the state and the head of the state-approved religion. After all, I helped set up this place. Same way I helped set up Teddy's. Of course in this case, the biggest — if easiest — job, given my position with the Times, was making sure there was no publicity. In your present mood, you can probably appreciate that. But, no, my relation to the Father is not that of commoner to priest. On my side, at any rate, it is duplicitous, fraught with doubt. If I didn't doubt, I wouldn't be here now. I'm afraid the politics works through the spiritual like rot. The good governor at least wants it to be the best rot possible.'

'Is the Father a good man?' I asked again and tried not to sound at all like I was upset. (Maybe that backfired?)

'Has it occurred to you, my young Diogenes, that if you polished up the chimney of your own lamp, you'd be a little more likely to find this mysterious and miraculous Other you are searching out? Why does it concern you so?'