Point Omega - Don Delillo [15]
“I was a student. I ate lunch and studied. I studied the work of Teilhard de Chardin,” he said. “He went to China, an outlaw priest, China, Mongolia, digging for bones. I ate lunch on open books. I didn’t need a tray. The trays were stacked at the beginning of the line in the school cafeteria. He said that human thought is alive, it circulates. And the sphere of collective human thought, this is approaching the final term, the last flare. There was a North American camel. Where is it now?”
I nearly said, In Saudi Arabia. Instead I passed the bottle back to him.
“You told them things. Were these policy-board meetings? Who was there?” I said. “Cabinet-level people? Military people?”
“Whoever was there. That’s who was there.”
I liked this answer. It said everything. The more I thought about it, the clearer everything seemed.
He said, “Matter. All the stages, subatomic level to atoms to inorganic molecules. We expand, we fly outward, that’s the nature of life ever since the cell. The cell was a revolution. Think of it. Protozoa, plants, insects, what else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Vertebrates.”
“Vertebrates,” I said.
“And the eventual shapings. The slither, crawl, biped crouch, the conscious being, the self-conscious being. Brute matter becomes analytical human thought. Our beautiful complexity of mind.”
He paused and drank and paused again.
“What are we?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.”
I went in for ice. When I returned he was pissing off the deck, standing on tiptoe to get the emerging stream to clear the rail. Then we sat and listened to animal cries somewhere off in the thickets and we remembered where we were and didn’t speak for a time after the sounds died away. He said he wished he had remained a student, gone to Mongolia, true remoteness, to live and work and think. He called me Jimmy.
“You’ll have every opportunity to talk about these things,” I said. “Talk, pause, think, talk. Your face,” I said. “Who you are, what you believe. Other thinkers, writers, artists, nobody’s done a film like this, nothing planned, nothing rehearsed, no elaborate setup, no conclusions in advance, this is completely sort of barefaced, uncut.”
I spoke these lines in a whisky babble, half aware that I’d said all this before, and I heard a deep breath and then his voice, quiet and contained, even sad.
“What you want, my friend, whether you know it or not, is a public confession.”
This could not be right. I told him absolutely not. I told him I had no intention of doing anything like that.
“A deathbed conversion. This is what you want. The foolishness, the vanity of the intellectual. The blind vanity, the worship of power. Forgive me, absolve me.”
I fought off this notion, inwardly, and told him I had no special ideas beyond what I’d described.
“You want to film a man breaking down,” he said. “I understand that. What’s the point otherwise?”
A man melting into the war. A man who still believes in the righteousness of the war, his war. How would he look and sound on film, in a theater, on a screen anywhere, talking about a haiku war? Had I thought about this? I’d thought about the wall, the color and texture of the wall, and I’d thought about the man’s face, the features that were strong but also collapsible in the show of whatever cruel truths might come spilling into his eyes, and then I thought about Jerry Lewis in closeup in 1952, Jerry ripping off his tie as he sang some weepy Broadway ballad.
Before he went inside Elster gripped my shoulder,