.i“ * ^ / . . . . . ` `~

I: The Ambassador Bug: the ring

Shoe Selection

My lips were still wet at that time from the ladle-full of water I’d sipped out back, a mere thirty yards behind me, as I stared at the assortment of shoes by the door. I hadn’t even closed the door to the house (really more like a pool house or carriage house or shed than a house) or walked fully into it yet.

The wedge of sunlight, widening with the door, struck the edge of the rectangular mat where the row of shoes I was to select from had been laid side by side. They were correctly paired, to each left a right, to each right a left, and so forth, and in good condition, on the whole, but still disorderly in feeling: with the lace of the one hanging over the toe of the other and the toe of the shoe beside that one having its toe facing the heels of the two shoes that were adjacent, and the one heel on the toe of another, and some of the tongues hanging out, and some of the other tongues smushed into the toe, and one pair of shoes in particular contributing to the general sense of disorder by not being in any disorder apparently: by being orderly in an arrangement whose rule of composition seemed to exclude only that; – in an arrangement in which only the off notes, so to speak, could be struck, those two shoes were striking the right ones, and those were the two that I took.

The Door, The Bug

Because I had tucked the shoes beneath my left arm, very little alteration of trajectory was needed for my now empty right hand to find its way to the door’s knob. And with great confidence, the very sort I would show at a business meeting, putting forth my strong hand to the strong hand of the person rising from behind their desk to welcome me to the serious meeting, one bold confident person meeting another such bold confident person in a serious spirit, (Hi I’m Bob. Hi nice to meet you Bob. It’s great to be here)— with such confidence, I now say, I reached for and twisted the knob of the door, which gave way before my strong resolve and revealed what you might call the world at large beyond it, an area of significant space and ornament, fluctuating color and air, which I then stepped into, and I thought to myself, perhaps a little grandiosely, as I closed this same door behind me, “and what am I but a door that opens only on an inside? With what knob might you open yourself up to this world?” And then I saw at the sill of the door I’d just closed, as if trying to get in through it, a small ambling bug.

Bug

I must now report that I have somewhat of a concern about bugs, which will seem to me the emissaries of an unseen world. “Yes, just as foreign countries send us ambassadors that speak our language, the unseen world sends us beings we can see,” goes my logic, and just such beings are bugs.

The unseen world they represent is of a distinctly fearsome character, moreover. For it was not an unseen “spiritual world” of heaven and hell, and of spirits and angels and demons, that I was aware of not seeing and of not being able to see (though this, too, might have been there without my seeing it); nor a “formal world” composed of the perfect true essences of the world’s false imperfect things (though this, too, might have been there without my seeing or otherwise sensing it); but the world I was aware of not seeing was a rather frightening and also quite dreary unimaginative one, an actually real one, comprised mainly of very specific forms of microbial life, of gasses, of radiation, of minute dank jungles, all of which or many of which, under certain conditions, had the power to kill or injure me, the power to end my life. An unseen world of unchecked nature, of chemical warfare, of untold trillions of billions of hostile creatures, and worse.

I would, of course, try to put out of my mind this invisible anxiety-inducing world out of a preference for the world that I could see and sense: the world of the simple sun-splashed weathered grey boards of the porch was what I understood to be heaven, visible heaven, heaven in which boards were as simple, manifest and real, as the word “boards” is, if you like, and in which the sun was not a swirl of particles continuously engaged in violent processes, but as simple as the word that stood for it, the word “sun”, – and there was nothing hidden and monstrous lurking around the word, neither microbes nor gasses nor waves nor atoms, but only the blank space that a space bar will produce. There was not the future lurking around this board nor were there government regulations lurking around this board, I supposed, but each thing was a simple and straightforward as a word.

This was not, mind you, the sort of bug one would have much minded having around on the inside or the outside of one’s personal space, being a slow and ambling easy-going sort of animal, or seeming so at first, the sort of bug who I imagined, now that the door was closed, would come to the door, knock his head against it, walk farther down, knock his head against it, try to climb it, be unable to, walk further down, knocking his head against it, still not be able to climb it, then stop awhile, as if considering, but not actually considering, not doing anything like considering or thinking, but just having stopped, waiting, wishing it could dignify its having stopped with something like giving meaningful consideration to his problem, then moving on, having solved nothing, having no notion of where it was going, having convinced no one at all that it could dignify its confusion and ambivalence in the face of something impossible with “thinking.” It was that kind of bug — it was me, to some degree, an ambassador of a sort in my own right — and suggested nothing on its own of the terrors of the world I thought it represented.

The Ring

I should be up for anything, I thought, (having begun to consider that that bug at the closed door was somewhat like myself to my closed self, miniscule and powerless against a closed door) like that friend of mine I so admire, who was so spontaneous, rather than being as I am, requiring months of forewarning and preparation in advance of the slightest proposed deviation from my routine. I am up for anything! I next suddenly found myself saying, and I fully believed myself to be so for a few moments, for why not? Why shouldn’t I be as a I think I am? But now, I watched the bug surprisingly draw from out of its back, like two long knives, two long wings, and he rocketed away out of sight, so that once I’d gotten over the fright of having nearly been touched by it, and by that world, I was compelled to sense how stuck and how earthbound I remained, powerless to open or move from this door.

This reminded me of what I had come to call The Ring. I had done much (the barrel, the shoes, the bug) and I had much yet to do (thinking in particular of the barrel and plant) but nothing could really be done (though the actions might be performed) nothing could be done in any sense that could be considered true or real or my own unless it had the blessing and the sanction of what I had come to call The Ring. My doing was really fake doing, and my successes and failures fake both in failure and success, an empty and repetitive game, treading water, life without traction, unless I could find “the ring” in myself, which alone made everything I touched something real.

This ring, which so rarely came to mind, seemed all important when at last it did. I envisioned it as a sort of unadorned gold wedding band in myself, through which all of my behavior and each of my thoughts must pass, every impulse to action and expression, in order truly to be itself, and for it to be appropriate to myself. My rational thoughts were not rational, my friendly acts were not friendly, my courtesy was cast into question, unless on the way from their point of origin to their exterior expression or manifestation they passed through this vital center of myself, this so-called Ring, which was, in short, what made my behavior authentic.

This ring seemed, too, to have an anatomical location — although this location was as much spiritual as it was physical, and seemed both to be in my abdomen and several miles down. Everything else, on the other hand, everything beside the ring, occurred in my head: I was really just comprised of three things: my head, the ring, and their mucous like casing. So that getting things through the ring always involved this process of wrestling things down from the area of the head, bringing these buoyant things down through the mucous through to my “center” several miles below, then thrusting them through the rather small ring, whereupon these Intentions, for lack of a better word, now made utterly authentic and pure, drifted back up to the head and were performed.

(There was a natural drifting upward and buoyancy of everything in me, a levity, and once anything had been forced down and thrust through, one need worry no further about its upward return, which occurred naturally.)

My thoughts were: — considering options, forming resolves and opinions, full of worry, engaged in escapist fantasy scenarios, attending to sensations. Some of my observations and conjectures and formulations of thought would seem to me on occasion quite memorable and profound and worthy of exterior articulation – but none of these thoughts could be written down or spoken at once — telepathy itself could not meaningfully communicate my thought — but it must first be sent down to the “area of the ring” — as it was The Ring would decide what could be spoken, what could be written, what could be meant in the exterior world. Which is why, when people say to me, why did you write that? I say don’t blame me, blame The Ring! And when they say, why didn’t you write speak or write about that thing, which is so important. I say agree that it is important, and I myself don’t understand this ring! And when they say, why did you write this thing you didn’t mean? I say — I was well-intended! I thought it went through The Ring but was wrong!

I who called myself myself could of course decide to be or not be obedient to the ring and its decisions. I could bypass the ring’s authenticating procedures altogether and decide myself to exteriorize one of my sentiments or impulses, if I chose. If I felt hot, I could say “Oh God am I hot!” and, giving to my mouth direct access to my impulses, I could thus peremptorily deny The Ring its traditional offices.

But doing this exposed me to the great peril that, sooner or later, I would “forget that I was an idiot,” was how I would put it to myself; that I would begin to think I was far smarter than I actually was, is another way of saying it, of thinking that I knew things that I actually I didn’t; which was the cruel punishment of the ring, one that inevitably followed (by I do not know what mechanism) from failing to submit to it.

Yes, flush with a sense of my genius, with a sense I was a cut above the crowd, I would indeed look on this idiocy with great pride, when The Ring punished me — not seeing my stupidity, my meanness, for what it was, and indeed imagining it to be great intelligence, to be extremely courtly, a sign of my high breeding. I was being a great idiot when I thought myself most a great genius, was the punished wrought by The Ring.

I would believe I was most on the right track when I was on the wrong one; I would thunder and cry out that others were stupid while lustily clinging to my own logical blunders – to my math errors, errant assumptions, misremembered facts. Ha! Remember when you said there were 184 countries in Africa when there were only 84? This was what inevitably happened when the severe discipline of The Ring was abandoned. And though it was for me a fearsome contemplation, to believe myself incredibly intelligent when I was in fact incredibly stupid, even so, it was not feared nearly strongly enough, complacency always easily setting in, so it was something I would have to  I repeat to myself again and again, that I need to be mindful of The Ring. In fact, I would so infrequently remember the existence of the ring, it is a sort of miracle that it had come to mind just now.

The Nature of The Ring and its Meaning

So what was the nature of the ring and its meaning? The nearest I can figure, the ring has something to do with self-respect. That this is a sort of sin qua non of everything, the keystone of all serious human adult behavior, of everything done in earnest. Without this, nothing I might do was “real”, because, lacking in integrity and strength, it was eminently changeable — it might as soon become something else — the convenient lie rather than the seriously meant truth. Any yes could be changed easily to a no, as easily as saying it, unless it had that stamp of Self to make it something sure. Nor was I exactly real myself without self-respect, being the changeable performer of these changeable acts. A person whose Yes and No came not from himself, from his “center,” but from his changing circumstances, was not quite real.

Alas, the person who addresses you now has to confess (dreadful admission!) that self-respect does not, or has not always come so naturally to him, but respect for others and for authority much more so — for society, for things not himself, which were sometimes good things and sometimes bad things… perhaps he couldn’t really say. And whenever he “reached down deep” and tried to put things “through The Ring”, as it were, whenever he tried to be authentic, he felt how very many miles down it was from him, his true self, how little time there was to reach down and find it in – how little time there was to find his sensitivity and courage– and came up empty quite a lot. Dreadful admission that this character did not always act with self-respect!

Not Including The Peanut Episode

I will not be including here the “peanut episode” but so as to give the reader some clue as to its substance: I had found myself beside a bag of unshelled peanuts, compulsively cracking and eating them, and telling myself to stop, and telling myself that I could stop if I wanted, but somehow not stopping, somehow I kept cracking and eating nut after nut in way that seemed like it would go on forever even though I felt empowered to stop at any time, until finally I came to one of those peanuts that you just can’t crack with your hand – you’re sure to encounter several in every bag – and however hard I pressed it it would not crack, and (as if this hard nut had somehow been stuck in the cog of the clock of time) I became aware of all the time I’d lost eating peanuts – lost because of my self-abandonment – but with this nut that would not crack my experience of time had returned.

II

At odd times of day I will remember this or some version of this: the mother having just removed the plant from the backseat of the car ( I did not see her remove the plant, I could not be sure she was the child’s mother, I certainly didn’t know the car was indeed her car); the child, perhaps her daughter, scrambling up the nearby grassy bank or slope or escarpment, on the way to their house; not a stand alone house, not a single family dwelling; the plant about waist height or better; and the mother, the woman, the adult, the parent, stooping to tend to it, the plant, as I passed between her and the girl, a girl who was probably her niece or her daughter, and who was about seven, on the sidewalk (not really a “plant” but a tree, a conifer, a bush, but tall and thin, if it was a bush). The woman fluffing it out and adjusting its branches so that none were entangled or caught up in the other branches, so that none were bent or awkwardly contorted or restrained, it having perhaps been transferred from the plant nursery to the home in a cramped area of the car, for instance, the trunk.

Passing so near to her I made ready to nod soberly and smile pleasantly, in acknowledgment of the presence of these two, if I was called upon to do so — but (and this was the thing) I was not called upon to do so, nor was I otherwise acknowledged. I was acknowledged neither by the grown woman, the parent, nor by the small child, the adult woman’s relation or charge, which naturally didn’t much surprise me (though I passed in between them so I couldn’t be missed) as it is such a common occurrence; didn’t offend or surprise me, I say, though we were so near together, and though, in a certain sense, I had “come in between” the mother and child, (between “the mother and her cub” I may even have remarked to myself at the time) albeit only in a spacial sense. I’m quite sure of all this, but for some reason the event (“the event” I have taken to calling it — as if it were an “event”) — for some reason, the circumstance has stuck with me, just like the memory I had of the cat which I saw a few days after these events, and which I also was thinking of while the men were by the barrel.

The Cat

The cat had crossed the road ahead of me just after sunset while I was on my way home. When I arrived at the place where he had reached my side of the road, I looked at the residential lawn to my right to see if he was still visible, and yes, yes, he was just barely still visible, in the last light of the summer day: I saw a dark batch of trees in the background, a pale darkness of grass in the foreground, and yes, yes, there I saw, in the center of my field of vision, walking in an unhurried way, away from me, the black outline of the just then disappearing dark cat.

I suppose, too, the grass had been mowed recently and this caused me to reflect on things I don’t now care to name, they seem so difficult to me now. I mean things such as youth and cut grass, things such as the pleasure of walking around in the dusk, things such as the pleasure of one’s own home when one is young, particularly if it includes grass that is cut, and hoses, many rubber garden hoses… It could never be the same when one grows older. I feel so much regret.

Freedom of Thought

Of the woman with the plant, I take it that in some sense what I so admired about her was her freedom, meaning, in particular, her freedom of thought. For in passing between the two of them, the mother and daughter, and even from the very first moment I saw the mother and daughter, even while I was still at a considerable distance from the two, the thought of them, of the mother and daughter, that I would be approaching them, these two people, dominated all my thoughts. That I was within five yards of them, became my thought. That I was within two yards of them, became my thought. That I would soon be passing in between them, that I was right now in the very midst of them! such thoughts crowded out every other thought I might have had; of no other thing, past, present or future, personal, political, historical, philosophical, had I a thought; of no such thought could I have been conscious did it not in some-wise concern the near presence of these persons to myself. And she? She never thought: “here he comes, there he is, he has left,”; she did not think “he” or “there” or “here” but thought only about her own business, was focused on what she was doing, as was clear from her calm unhurried conduct. She had, it was clear, as I later put it, “complete freedom of thought.”

And it was equally clear, weeks later, I believe it was, as I watched the men while they were gathered at the barrel, that I still had yet to learn the lessons of this encounter, which I only sketchily recalled, it’s true; — for to all appearances I was gazing elsewhere, and minding my own business, and engaged in the calm conduct of my private affairs, deeply focused on the issues pertaining solely to myself, while in fact my thoughts had been made the prisoner of the men by the barrel and were actually intensely trained on them. So that it occurred to me (and I apologize if this metaphor will strike you as a stretch) that my appearance was a little like the appearance of the mother of my memory, free and uninfluenced by the presence of the men, minding my own business, while my thoughts were actually like the plant in the car’s trunk of the car, its branches sadly bent and constrained (with the trunk, in this metaphor, being like the two men; or, if you prefer, my thought of them and of what they themselves were thinking.)

And This is To Be The Addendum

Just by way of addendum or conclusion, I will remark that these days my memory of the episode of the mother and daughter is badly deteriorated, so that, although it happened only a few weeks ago, all that is left of it –I mean, all that I can visualize of it– is the plant. I don’t “see” the woman or the child or the opened car door anymore, but just the thin potted conifer on the grass beside the curbing. And yet it would not in the least surprise me to learn that this plant should remain with me, in memory, for all time, immune to the deterioration that has corrupted the rest of “the file,” so to speak, an adamantine kernel in the mind. It is to be one of those statues in the world my memory has set up, I can tell, -– as I pass the physical place where the memory first arose, there shall it stand, among many places else — the dedicatory plaque of which mentions something about my want of focus, dedicated to a person easily rattled, if you like, dedicated to a person who hasn’t any real “freedom of thought.”

Barrel & Trunk

Now, the idea that had come to me was that the plant was to the trunk like the water was to the barrel, and the men, whom I watched, were to the barrel, as I was to the woman, as I passed her, or would have been were it not that my thoughts, meanwhile, were still in the trunk (while her thoughts remained with her and free and somewhat directed toward the plant and not even constrained by the child). Or the woman was to me, as the barrel was to the men. Or some mix of all of these. And I certainly felt myself to be boxed or hemmed in (as with the barrel and trunk) while at same time seeing it from the outside. And this reminded me of an occasion the previous winter, or Spring it must have been, when I had actually been digging in the garden; when what was supposed to have been a small hole became, through my inattention, a giant pit. And the empty space filled what had formerly been the empty space of my mind with many many reflections of it, and my jaw gaped and hung, creating still more empty space, still another gaping pit.

Let me take you back to that moment. I’ve just laid my trowel beside a hole I have dug: a hole I now judge to be too wide and too deep for the purpose I have assigned to it: a purpose, which is to hold securely, and to be the new home of, the small flowerless plant that now sits at the top of the southernmost lip of the hole, a hole which seems gaping and huge as I now see the two together, the hole and plant. The hole, with respect to the plant, is so disproportionately enormous, I have no idea what I could have been thinking, if I had been thinking at all.

The size of the plant makes it seem to me, rather, the more appropriate companion of my trowel, which I’ve just laid onto the huge pile of dirt I’ve exhumed. (“Exhumed” is perhaps a funny word to use here. And the funny thought occurs to me, as I look on the dirt, that it is dirt I’ve removed from its grave – that the entire planet serves as a kind of grave to its dirt, and that gravity is the undertaker, constantly shoveling in all the dirt – and that I, by shoveling it out, am no mere “exhumer” but an actual life giver of some sort… Or is that Gravity is the grave and all matter is always falling into it?) And the trowel, likewise, seems to have so much more to do with the plant than it does with the pile of dirt on which it now rests, and with which, until just recently, it’s had so much to do, so much contact. In a word, as the plant appears very small relative to the hole it’s to be placed in, so does the trowel appear very small with respect to the pile it has dug for the plant. The hole is so large, one wonders how I could have thought it appropriate for the plant, and the trowel is so small, one wonders how I could have made a whole so large without having once considered it was entirely too big. The trowel is of such size indeed that barely one or two swipes of its would have created an ample plot for the plant; so that the idea I had been so absentminded (if that’s what it was) to do so much unnecessary work, so much counterproductive work, was truly extraordinary and dumbfounding.

Now, however, something has caused me to stop and question the whole arrangement. It occurs to me that my absentmindedness (again, assuming it was this and not the result of some misguided notion I had) has just made a portrait of itself in the earth with this hole – that I, gazing into the hole I created absentmindedly and am now gazing also into a near approximation of what my absent mind really looks like – but this is not what has caused me stop, and I don’t know to this day what has caused me to stop. But with my left hand on the side by the plant, which is still in its potter; and with the right hand on the other side by the trowel, gripping with both hands the cold dirt, I lean over the hole I have made and gaze in, rocking back and forth, watching my head’s silhouette as it enters and then again exits the pit, slipping over the rocks and soil, the cool shadow of my shoulders on the exposed warming clay. I was in the posture of a man who was about to vomit, but rather, something had come out of my mind; it was as if my spine, rather than my stomach, had vomited, and the vomit was an idea that went up to my brain, rather than food and liquid out through my mouth, so that what now came to mind most was a situation of the previous day: a memory in which I found myself standing in an upright position staring vacantly into the “hole”, so to speak, of my opened knit cap. (But it was actually the day previous to the previous day, as I know by the fact that the episode with the peanuts had occurred the previous day, and many times while I ate at those nuts without self control, I thought of the rain of the previous day I’d been caught in, holding my cap.)

I had just come in from the rain, seeking the shelter of the overhang of a strip mall; and removed this cap from my head, my left hand on the left side of the overturned cap, and my right hand on the right side of the cap, (though this was a beanie or ski cap and didn’t really have what you would properly call sides.) I was holding it at around waist height, a bit higher, and looking into it, just as I was now looking into the hole I had made in the dirt, bent over it and with my hands braced on either side, though the hole was perhaps four or five times the diameter of my cap. (The hole was bigger than absolutely everything, it would seem.) And in fact, as I think of it, if I had made the hole have the same diameter as the cap, it would have been almost the perfect size for the plant. Exactly the sort of head-sized space that would have been perfect for my trowel. The plant would have been like an idea in my head, the hole, an idea I had worked to have, through my digging, with the trowel. An ideal sized plant for the head.

Well, then I thought: whereas now, looking into the hole, it is like I am staring into my stomach, my huge stomach, yesterday, when I was staring into my cap, it was like I was staring into my mind, my empty mind. Then I thought: no, now I am looking into my grave, then I was looking into heaven, into the afterlife, into my mind. Then I thought: “the knitted cap.” Then I thought: “the knitted earth.” And I wondered if, having dug this pit for the plant, had I in fact dug a cap out for myself? Was the most needed thing now for me to put my head into the newly knitted cap, a reciprocal or opposite of Atlas, to balance myself upright in it? to pretend I was walking somewhere very fashionably with my new hat, which was nothing other than the earth?

I thought then of the knitters I knew, and of if they considered their knitting a sort of digging, and of whether or not that was an appropriate contemplation. Then I left the hole, simply left it, leaving behind me the plant, the trowel, the dirt, and some other few items I had lying about; for it had occurred to me that the hole was about bathtub-sized but not quite as long and not quite as shallow and with the tendency more to make me dirty than to make me clean. And then it occurred to me that the earth was like all that was to be thought; and that my hole, in which I could immerse myself as I could in a tub, but which was to the earth an inconsiderable divot, was about all I was capable of thinking; and that my plant was like all that I had or might think, that I really did think, and this contemplation just made me shut off so to speak, made me “sign out”, so that now I was just walking away, with my arm outstretched, in confusion.

An Arm Outstretched

I’m writing all this, with my arm outstretched, several days later. It is now stretched out over the table that supports it, and grasps a pencil at its end. Several hours before being at this table, I was in the attic, and my outstretched arm was holding a framed poster. It was outstretched in the very same fashion, forming a perpendicular with my body, as it was as I was writing and as it was a couple days before, as I was taking a trash bag out to the dumpster; and as it was on the day, which must have been a week ago now, the day on which I tell myself I found the thing I had sought for so long, the day, when slapping my palm face upon my forehead front, I cried out I have done it! I have found it!

The Men by The Barrel

It was in this light (that of memory) that I now gazed upon the barrel which I almost just called a “well.” I almost called it a well because, like a well, the water barrel was a source of water, but even more because the barrel stood directly on the grass. The barrel (which I again almost just called a well) was not among other barrels; it was not on a wood or concrete platform, raised or sunken. It was not in any sort of designated area, designated for the purpose of having a barrel or for any other purpose or reason; nor was it in the presence of any other manufacture, all of which qualities I view as being more characteristic of a well than of a barrel, but perhaps I need to revisit my assumptions on this issue. (Also, I almost just called the barrel a “warrel” but that obviously involves a more mechanical error.) In any case, it was for something like these reasons that I almost just called the barrel a well.

But the men, I found, had just left, or were just now leaving, the area where the barrel was — and now I have an odd situation to report, a situation which I must do my best to make thoroughly clear, though I’ve not yet given it the measure of thought that would render it, through speech, entirely clearly.

For I must admit that, on the one hand, I felt some desire to go to the barrel, and, on the other, felt some trepidation about being with the men. But it now happened that as I lost my anxiety about rising and walking over to the vicinity of the men – my anxiety about standing by and perhaps conversing with the men – as I perhaps even became truly enthusiastic about doing this, feeling increasingly comfortable with the notion; just as all this was happening, the men themselves, in a strange correspondence of outer occurrence and inner suggestion, began to move away from the presence of the barrel (which I again almost just called a well. And perhaps “barrel” sounds a lot more like “well” than we give it credit for, much more like calling the “barrel” a “warrel” than I supposed, and that is the reason for these mistakes I’ve come near, a couple times now, to making).

Now, to restate the point of interest here, this was not an instance of my fears subsiding because of the subsiding of the object of my fears (i.e., the walking away of the men) but an instance of the subsiding of the object of my fears because of the subsidence of my fears, as I thought, which was something truly unusual.

In other words what I thought (and maybe you will say that it is my thought that is the only thing that’s unusual, while the experience, if understood properly, is fairly ordinary) was – that the men, without knowing either that I feared them or that I had ceased to fear them (the men probably not even realizing I was there, or only realizing it dimly, like with mother with the daughter and the plant) had gone away from the barrel simply because I had ceased fear them and had made a firm decision on getting up and walking over to the barrel, and on saying something cordial or even enthusiastic to the men – if, of course, they were still there.

Though the other odd upshot of this was that I lost all desire to go to the barrel around the time I lost my fear of going to it. And I have no idea whether this departure or disappearance of my desire came before or after that of my fear, or before or after the departure or leave-taking of the men, or both. But what at least was clear was this: that the barrel had suddenly lost its designation in my consciousness as something in the least bit notable or special, and seemed even physically less impressive and perhaps a bit smaller than it had before. In short, I no more wanted to be at that location where the barrel was, once the men I supposedly feared had left it, than I wanted to be at any other location I could see.

Perhaps another way of saying it would be this: I had one desire to be with the barrel and another desire to not be with the men, yet when the latter desire was satisfied the former disappeared, and it was a curious incident, and an incident which, furthermore, I hope I have made quite clear. (Though perhaps I need to think a bit more on it. I’m even beginning to wonder a little: had I really been fearing the barrel a bit? had I really desired the men?)