Point Counter Point - Aldous Huxley [65]
Rampion was full of his subject. He had been busy all day on a drawing that symbolically illustrated it. Jesus, in the loin-cloth of the execution morning, and an overalled surgeon were represented, scalpel in hand, one on either side of an operating table, on which, foreshortened, the soles of his feet presented to the spectator, lay crucified a half-dissected man. From the horrible wound in his belly escaped a coil of entrails which, falling to the earth, mingled with those of the gashed and bleeding woman lying in the foreground, to be transformed by an allegorical metamorphosis into a whole people of living snakes. In the background receded a landscape of hills, dotted with black collieries and chimneys. On one side of the picture, behind the figure of Jesus, two angels—the spiritual product of the vivisectors’ mutilations—were trying to rise on their outspread wings. Vainly, for their feet were entangled in the coils of the serpents. For all their efforts, they could not leave the earth.
‘Jesus and the scientists are vivisecting us,’ he went on, thinking of his picture. ‘Hacking our bodies to bits.’
‘But after all, why not?’ objected Spandrell. ‘Perhaps they’re meant to be vivisected. The fact of shame is significant. We feel spontaneously ashamed of the body and its activities. That’s a sign of the body’s absolute and natural inferiority.’
‘Absolute and natural rubbish!’ said Rampion indignantly.’shame isn’t spontaneous, to begin with. It’s artificial, it’s acquired. You can make people ashamed of anything. Agonizingly ashamed of wearing brown boots with a black coat, or speaking with the wrong sort of accent, or having a drop at the end of their noses. Of absolutely anything, including the body and its functions. But that particular shame’s just as artificial as any other. The Christians invented it, just as the tailors in Savile Row invented the shame of wearing brown boots with a black coat. There was precious little of it before Christian times. Look at the Greeks, the Etruscans.’
The antique names transported Mary back to the moors above Stanton. He was just the same. Stronger now, that was all. How ill he had looked that day! She had felt ashamed of being healthy and rich. Had she loved him then as much as she loved him now?
Spandrell had lifted a long and bony hand. ‘I know, I know. Noble and nude and antique. But I believe they’re entirely a modem invention, those Swedishdrill pagans of ours. We trot them out whenever we want to bait the Christians. But did they ever exist? I have my doubts.’
‘But look at their art,’ put in Mary, thinking of the paintings at Tarquinia. She had seen them a second time with Mark—really seen them on that occasion.
‘Yes, and look at ours,’ retorted Spandrell. ‘When the Royal Academy sculpture room is dug up three thousand years hence, they’ll say that twentieth-century Londoners wore fig-leaves, suckled their babies in public and embraced one another in the parks, stark naked.’
‘I only wish they did,’ said Rampion.
‘But they don’t. And then—leaving this question of shame on one side for the momen—what about asceticism as the preliminary condition of the mystical experience?’
Rampion brought his hands together with a clap and, leaning back in his chair, turned up his eyes. ‘Oh, my sacred aunt!’ he said. ‘So it’s come to that, has it? Mystical experience and asceticism. The fornicator’s hatred of life in a new form.’
‘But seriously…’ the other began.
‘No, seriously, have you read Anatole France’s Thais?’
Spandrell shook his head.
‘Read it,’ said Rampion. ‘Read it. It’s elementary, of course. A boy’s book. But one mustn’t grow up without having read all the boys’ books. Read it and then come and talk to me again about asceticism and mystical experiences.’
‘I‘1I read it,’ said Spandrell. ‘Meanwhile, all I wanted to say is that there are certain states of consciousness known to ascetics