Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (45 page)

“Life is nothing but a Calvary,” he said. “Not even a knowledge of astrology
can alter that stern fact.”

“What about the exceptions? Surely…”

“There are no exceptions,” he replied. “Everyone, even the most enlightened,
has his private griefs and torments. Life is perpetual struggle, and struggle entails sorrow
and suffering. And suffering gives us strength and character.”

“For what? To what end?”

“The better to endure life’s burdens.”

“What a woeful picture! It’s like training for a contest in which one knows in
advance he will be defeated.”

“There is such a thing as renunciation,” he said.

“But is it a solution?”

“For some Yes, for others No. Sometimes one has no choice.”

“In your honest opinion, do we ever really have what is called choice?”

He thought a moment before answering.

“Yes, I believe we do have a measure of choice, but much less than people
think. Within the limits of our destiny we are free to choose. It is here precisely that
astrology is of great importance: when you realize the conditions under which you have come
into
the world, which astrology makes clear, you do not choose the
unchooseable.”

“The lives of great men,” said I, “would seem to tell us the opposite.”

“As you say,
so it would seem
. But if one examines their horoscopes
one is impressed by the fact that they could scarcely have chosen other than they did. What
one chooses or wills is always in accordance with one’s character. Faced with the same
dilemma, a Napoleon would act one way, and a St. Paul another.”

“Yes, yes, I know all that,” I interrupted. “And I also know, or believe, that
St. Francis would have been St. Francis, St. Paul St. Paul, and Napoleon Napoleon, even if
they had had a profound knowledge of astrology. To understand one’s problems, to be able to
look into them more deeply, to eliminate the unnecessary ones, none of that really interests
me any longer. Life as a burden, life as a battleground, life as a problem—these are all
partial ways of looking at life. Two lines of poetry often tell us more, give us more, than
the weightiest tome by an erudite. To make anything truly significant one has to poetize it.
The only way I get astrology, or anything else, for that matter, is as poetry, as music. If
the astrological view brings out new notes, new harmonies, new vibrations, it has served its
purpose—for me. Knowledge weighs one down; wisdom saddens one. The love of truth has nothing
to do with knowledge or wisdom: it’s beyond their domains. Whatever certitude one possesses is
beyond the realm of proof.

“The saying goes, ‘It takes all kinds to make a world.’ Precisely. The same
does not hold for views or opinions. Put all the pictures together, all the views, all the
philosophies, and you do not get a totality. The sum of all these angles of visions do not and
never will make truth. The sum of all knowledge is greater confusion. The intellect runs away
with itself. Mind is not intellect. The intellect is a product of the ego, and the ego can
never be stilled, never be satisfied. When do we begin to know that we know?
When we have ceased to believe that we can ever know. Truth comes with surrender. And
it’s wordless. The brain is not the mind; it is a tyrant which seeks to dominate the mind.

“What has all this to do with astrology? Nothing perhaps, and yet everything.
To you I am an illustration of a certain kind of Capricorn; to an analyst I’m something else;
to a Marxist another kind of specimen, and so on. What’s all that to
me?
What does it
concern me how your photographic apparatus registers? To see a person whole and for what he is
one has to use another kind of camera; one has to have an eye that is even more objective than
the camera’s lens. One has to see through the various facets whose brilliant reflections blind
us to the real nature of an individual. The more we learn the less we know; the more equipment
we have the less we are able to see. It’s only when we stop trying to see, stop trying to
know, that we really see and know. What sees and knows has no need of spectacles and theories.
All our striving and struggling is in the nature of confession. It is a way of reminding
ourselves that we are weak, ignorant, blind, helpless. Whereas we are
not
. We are as
little or as much as we permit ourselves to think we are.

“Sometimes I think that astrology must have had its inception at a moment in
man’s evolution when he lost faith in himself. Or, to put it another way, when he lost his
wholeness. When he wanted to know instead of to be. Schizophrenia began far back, not
yesterday or the day before. And when man split he split into myriad fragments. But even
today, as fragmented as he is, he can be made whole again. The only difference between the
Adamic man and the man of today is that the one was born to Paradise and the other has to
create it. And that brings me back to the question of choice. A man can only prove that he is
free by electing to be so. And he can only do so when he realizes that he himself made himself
unfree. And that to me means that he must wrest from God the powers he has given God. The more
of God he recognizes in himself the freer he becomes. And the
freer he
becomes the fewer decisions he has to make, the less choice is presented to him. Freedom is a
misnomer. Certitude is more like it. Unerringness. Because truthfully there is always only one
way to act in any situation, not two, nor three. Freedom implies choice and choice exists only
to the extent that we are aware of our ineptitude. The adept takes no thought, one might say.
He is one with thought, one with the path.

“It seems as if I were straying far afield. I’m not, really. I’m merely
talking another language. I’m saying that peace and joy is within everyone’s province. I’m
saying that our essential being is godlike. I’m saying that there are no limitations, either
to thought or action. I’m saying that we’re one, not many. I’m saying that we are there, that
we never could be anywhere else except through negation. I’m saying that to see differences is
to make differences. A Capricorn is a Capricorn only to another astrologer. Astrology makes
use of a few planets, of the sun and the moon, but what of the millions of other planets,
other universes, all the stars, the comets, the meteors, the asteroids? Does distance count,
or size, or radiance? Is not all one, interactive, interpenetrating? Who dares to say where
influences begin and leave off? Who dares to say what is important and what is not? Who owns
this universe? Who regulates it? Whose spirit informs it? If we need help, guidance,
directions, why not go straight to the source? And what do we want help, guidance and
direction for? To make things more comfortable for ourselves, to be more efficient, to better
achieve our ends? Why is everything so complicated, so difficult, so obscure, so
unsatisfactory? Because we have made ourselves the center of the universe, because we want
everything to work out as we wish it. What we need to discover is what
it
wishes,
call
it
life, mind, God, whatever you please. If that is the purpose of astrology, I
am all for it.

“There’s something else I would like to say, to finish with the subject once
and for all. It’s about our everyday problems, principally the problem of getting along with
one another, which
seems to be the main problem. What I say is, if we are
going to meet one another with a view or an awareness of our diversity and divergences we will
never acquire enough knowledge to deal with one another smoothly and effectively. To get
anywhere with another individual one has to cut through to the rock-bottom man, to that common
human substratum which exists in all of us. This is not a difficult procedure and certainly
doesn’t demand of one that he be a psychologist or a mind reader. One doesn’t have to know a
thing about astrological types, the complexity of their reactions to this or that. There is
one simple, direct way to deal with all types, and that is truthfully and honestly. We spend
our lives trying to avoid the injuries and humiliations which our neighbors may inflict upon
us. A waste of time. If we abandoned fear and prejudice, we could meet the murderer as easily
as the saint. I get fed up with astrological parlance when I observe people studying their
charts to find a way out of illness, poverty, vice, or whatever it may be. To me it seems like
a sorry attempt to exploit the stars. We talk about fate as if it were something visited upon
us; we forget that we create our fate every day we live. And by fate I mean the woes that
beset us, which are merely the effects of causes which are not nearly as mysterious as we
pretend. Most of the ills we suffer from are directly traceable to our own behavior. Man is
not suffering from the ravages wrought by earthquakes and volcanoes, by tornadoes and tidal
waves; he is suffering from his own misdeeds, his own foolishness, his own ignorance and
disregard of natural laws. Man can eliminate war, can eliminate disease, can eliminate old age
and probably death too. He need not live in poverty, vice, ignorance, in rivalry and
competition. All these conditions are within his province, within his power, to alter. But he
can never alter them as long as he is concerned solely with his own individual fate. Imagine a
physician refusing his services because of danger of infection or contamination! We are all
members of the one body, as the Bible says. And we are all at war with one another. Our own
physical body possesses a wisdom which we who
inhabit the body lack. We
give it orders which make no sense. There is no mystery about disease, nor crime, nor war, nor
the thousand and one things which plague us. Live simply and wisely. Forget, forgive,
renounce, abdicate. Do I need to study my horoscope to understand the wisdom of such simple
behavior? Do I have to live with yesterday in order to enjoy tomorrow? Can I not scrap the
past instantly, begin at once to live the good life—if I really mean to?
Peace and
joy
. … I say it’s ours for the asking. Day by day, that’s good enough for me. Not even
that, in fact. Just today!
Le bel aujourd’ hui!
Wasn’t that the title of one of
Cendrars’ books? Give me a better one, if you can….”

Naturally, I did not deliver this harangue all in one breath, nor exactly in
these words. Perhaps much of it I merely imagine that I said. No matter. I say it now as of
then. It was all there in my mind, not once, but repeatedly. Take it for what it’s worth.

With the coming of the first good rain he began to grow despondent. It’s true
that his cell was tiny, that water leaked through the roof and the windows, that the sow bugs
and other bugs took over, that they often dropped on his bed when he was asleep, that to keep
warm he had to use an ill-smelling oil stove which consumed what little oxygen remained after
he had sealed up all the cracks and crevices, stuffed the space beneath the door with sacking,
shut all the windows tight, and so on. It’s true that it was a winter in which we got more
than our usual share of rain, a winter in which the storms broke with fury and lasted for days
on end. And he, poor devil, was cooped up all day, restless, ill at ease, either too hot or
too cold, scratching, scratching, and utterly incapable of warding off the hundred and one
abominations which materialized out of the ether, for how else explain the presence of all
these creeping, crawling, ugly things when all had been shut tight, sealed and fumigated?

I shall never forget his look of utter bewilderment and distress when he
called me to his room one late afternoon to inspect the
lamps. “Look,” he
said, striking a match and applying the flame to the wick. “Look, it goes out every time.”

Now Aladdin lamps are quixotic and temperamental, as country people know. They
have to be kept in perfect condition to function properly. Just to trim the wick neatly is in
itself a delicate operation. Of course I had explained things to him a number of times, but
every time I visited him I noticed that the lamps were dim or smoking. I knew too that he was
too annoyed with them to bother keeping them in condition.

Striking a match and holding it against the wick, I was just about to say,
“You see, it’s simple … nothing to it”—when, to my surprise, the wick refused to ignite. I lit
another and another, and still the wick refused to take fire. It was only when I reached for a
candle and saw how it spluttered that I realized what was wrong.

I opened the door to let in some air and then tried the lamp again. It worked.
“Air, my friend. You need air!” He looked at me in amazement. To get air he would have to keep
a window open. And that would let the wind and rain in.
“C’est emmerdant!”
he
exclaimed. It was indeed. It was worse than that. I had visions of finding him in bed one fine
morning—suffocated.

Eventually he devised his own method of getting just enough air. By means of a
string and a series of hooks inserted at intervals into the upper half of the Dutch door he
could obtain as little or as much air as he chose. It was not necessary to open a window or
remove the sacking beneath the door or dig out the putty with which he had sealed the various
cracks and crevices in the walls. As for the bloody lamps, he decided that he would use
candles instead. The candles gave his cell a mortuary look which suited his morbid state of
mind.

Meanwhile the itch continued to plague him. Every time he came down for meals
he rolled up his sleeves or the legs of his trousers to show us the ravages it had made. His
flesh was by now a mass of running sores. Had I been in his boots I would have put a bullet
through my brain.

Obviously something had to be done or we would all go
crazy. We had tried all the old-fashioned remedies—to no avail. In desperation I begged a
friend who lived some few hundred miles away to make a special trip. He was a capable
all-round physician, a surgeon and a psychiatrist to boot. He also knew some French. In fact,
he was an altogether unusual fellow, and generous and frank. I knew that he would give me good
advice if he could not cope with the case.