Humboldt's Gift (1976 Pulitzer Prize) - Saul Bellow [26]
Again his method worked. The stricture went away. Others may see in George a solid high-colored good-humored building contractor; I see a hermetical personage; I see a figure from the tarot deck. If I was on my head now I was invoking George. When I’m in despair he’s always the first person I telephone. I’ve reached an age at which you can see your neurotic impulses advancing on you. There’s not much that I can do when the dire need of help comes over me. I stand at the edge of a psychic pond and I know that if crumbs are thrown in, my carp will come swimming up. You have, like the external world, your own phenomena inside. At one time I thought the civilized thing to do was to make a park and a garden for them, to keep these traits, your quirks, like birds, fishes, and flowers.
However, the fact that I had no one but myself to turn to was awful. Waiting for bells to ring is a torment. The suspense claws at my heart. Actually, standing on my head did relieve me. I breathed again. But I saw, when I was upside-down, two large circles in front of me, very bright. These occasionally appear during this exercise. Reversed on your cranium, of course you do think of being caught by a cerebral hemorrhage. A physician advising against the headstand said to me that a chicken held upside-down would die in seven or eight minutes. But that’s obviously because of terror. The bird is scared to death. I figure that the bright rings are caused by pressure on the cornea. The weight of the body set upon the skull buckles the cornea and produces an illusion of big diaphanous rings. Like seeing eternity. Which, believe me, I was ready for on this clay.
Behind me, I had a view of the bookcase, and when my head was readjusted, with more weight shifted to the forearms, the pellucid rings swam away, the shades of a fatal hemorrhage with them. In reverse, I saw rows and rows of my own books. I had stacked them at the back of my closets, but Renata had brought them out again to make a display. I prefer, when I’m on my head, to have a view of the sky and the clouds. It’s good fun to study the clouds upside-down. But now I was looking at the titles which had brought me money, recognition, prizes, my play, Von Trench, in many editions and languages, and a few copies of my favorite, the failure Some Americans: The Sense of Being in the USA. Von Trench while it was running brought in about eight thousand dollars a week. The government, which had taken no previous interest in my soul, immediately claimed seventy percent in the result of its creative efforts. But this was not supposed to affect me. You rendered unto Caesar what was Caesar’s. At least you knew that you should. Money belonged to Caesar. There was also Radix malorum est cupiditas. I knew all that, too.
I knew everything I was supposed to know and nothing I really needed to know. I had bungled the whole money thing. It was highly educational, of course, and education has become the great and universal American recompense. It has even replaced punishment in the federal penitentiaries Every great prison is now a thriving seminar. The tigers of wrath are crossed with the horses of instruction, making a hybrid undreamed of in the Apocalypse. Not to labor the matter too much, I had lost most of the money that Humboldt had accused me of making. The dough came between us immediately. He put through a check for thousands of dollars. I didn’t contest this. I didn’t want to go to law. Humboldt would have been fiercely delighted with a trial. He was very litigious. But the check he cashed was actually signed by me, and I would have had a hard time explaining this in court. Besides, courts kill me. Judges, lawyers, bailiffs, stenotypists, the benches, the woodwork, the carpets, even the water glasses I hate like death. Moreover, I was actually in South America when he cashed the check. He was then running wild in New York, having been released from Bellevue. There was no one to restrain him. Kathleen had gone into hiding. His nutty old mother was in a nursing home. His uncle Waldemar