558
PARTISAN REVIEW
the prisoners to be sure; the hand moves off, and all this time we have
not paused, the distance travelled being possibly by now a hundred
yards. Well, this is one way of walking to the Aral Sea, northwest of
here, or to Tashkent and Samarkand, to the south, the neighboring
desert to the west, the Kara-Kum, or to the Muyun-Kum, to the east. No
matter, the thing no doubt bends at some point and restores us to the
foot of the shaft, where I will be none the wiser, not even better
informed. Trouble is, the human mind resists like madness the
unverifiable object, is ill-equipped to accept the thing-in-itself; uneasy
with quasars, dung-beetles and quartz, gets to work to fit them into
systems, and it's to the system we've invented that we respond. Oh,
Purpose, thy maw is gross, thy tentacles never quit, thy policies come at
a low premium.
You think I was breaking down? Am? It's true. Handy Man is
better at self-stifling than I, has rigors implanted in his brain such as I
have never dreamed of, enzymes that restrict the amount of chemical
transmitters available and help him to clam up. I, on the other hand,
leap
to
interpretation like a bridegroom into the chamber; have
already, let me confess it, summed up this giant underground prolifera–
tion as a giant squash, edible vegetable marrow, elongated against
famine, analogous perhaps with the longest bread ever baked, 66 feet
and one inch, by
IT.
Gould in Ohakune, New Zealand, or the 34, 591-
pound cheese made by the Wisconsin Cheese Foundation in 1964, or
the 3,OOO-foot sausage concocted by thirty butchers in Scunthorpe,
England. Thus the busy mind at its most pragmatic. That this thing,
which I haven't even seen, can be useless, simply something to torment
political prisoners with (and Cartesian-minded tourists), seems an
intolerable idea, quite contrary to
nous.
I may have just encountered
the first centrally-heated edible squash in human history; for all I know
it may have buses running through its interior, glorious heraldic
designs on its flanks, a
Cucurbitan
anthem all to itself fudged up by
Dimitri Shostakovich, a symphony for squash and troglodytes. I don't
care. I tread sideways on, as before, happy to obey now I know what it
is that I'm touching as I go. And when, after another fifteen minutes or
so, I find myself at a ladder, and am urged to mount it, and so climb up
and over and down, and begin to sidestep on the return journey, I
rejoice, having arrived al a positive conclusion in the absence of all , or
almost all, evidence, and knowing that our mind is given us to be
useful to us, not
to
leave us in the lurch.
