Island - Aldous Huxley [131]
The lute player plucked a queer unfamiliar progression of chords, followed them with a ripple of arpeggios and began to sing, this time in English.
“Everyone talks of sex; take none of them seriously—
Not whore nor hermit, neither Paul nor Freud.
Love—and your lips, her breasts will change mysteriously
Into Themselves, the Suchness and the Void.”
The door of the temple swung open. A smell of incense mingled with the ambient onions and fried fish. An old woman emerged and very cautiously lowered her unsteady weight from stair to stair.
“Who were Paul and Freud?” Mary Sarojini asked as they moved away.
Will began with a brief account of Original Sin and the Scheme of Redemption. The child heard him out with concentrated attention.
“No wonder the song says, Don’t take them seriously,” she concluded.
“After which,” said Will, “we come to Dr. Freud and the Oedipus Complex.”
“Oedipus?” Mary Sarojini repeated. “But that’s the name of a marionette show. I saw it last week, and they’re giving it again tonight. Would you like to see it? It’s nice.”
“Nice?” he repeated. “Nice? Even when the old lady turns out to be his mother and hangs herself? Even when Oedipus puts out his eyes?”
“But he doesn’t put out his eyes,” said Mary Sarojini.
“He does where I hail from.”
“Not here. He only says he’s going to put out his eyes, and she only tries to hang herself. They’re talked out of it.”
“Who by?”
“The boy and girl from Pala.”
“How do they get into the act?” Will asked.
“I don’t know. They’re just there. ‘Oedipus in Pala’—that’s what the play is called. So why shouldn’t they be there?”
“And you say they talk Jocasta out of suicide and Oedipus out of blinding himself?”
“Just in the nick of time. She’s slipped the rope round her neck and he’s got hold of two huge pins. But the boy and girl from Pala tell them not to be silly. After all, it was an accident. He didn’t know that the old man was his father. And anyhow the old man began it, hit him over the head, and that made Oedipus lose his temper—and nobody had ever taught him to dance the Rakshasi Hornpipe. And when they made him a king, he had to marry the old queen. She was really his mother; but neither of them knew it. And of course all they had to do when they did find out was just to stop being married. That stuff about marrying his mother being the reason why everybody had to die of a virus—all that was just nonsense, just made up by a lot of poor stupid people who didn’t know any better.”
“Dr. Freud thought that all little boys really want to marry their mothers and kill their fathers. And the other way round for little girls—they want to marry their fathers.”
“Which fathers and mothers?” Mary Sarojini asked. “We have such a lot of them.”
“You mean, in your Mutual Adoption Club?”
“There’s twenty-two of them in our MAC.”
“Safety in numbers!”
“But of course poor old Oedipus never had an MAC. And besides they’d taught him all that horrible stuff about God getting furious with people every time they made a mistake.”
They had pushed their way through the crowd and now found themselves at the entrance to a small roped-off enclosure, in which a hundred or more spectators had already taken their seats. At the further end of the enclosure the gaily painted proscenium of a puppet theater glowed red and gold in the light of powerful flood lamps. Pulling out a handful of the small change with which Dr. Robert had provided him, Will paid for two tickets. They entered and sat down on a bench.
A gong sounded, the curtain of the little proscenium noiselessly rose and there, white pillars on a pea-green ground, was the façade of the royal palace of Thebes with a much-whiskered divinity sitting in a cloud above the pediment. A priest exactly like the god, except that he was somewhat smaller and less exuberantly draped, entered from the right, bowed to the audience, then turned towards the palace and shouted “Oedipus” in piping tones that seemed comically incongruous with his prophetic