“You don’t watch your movie?” Frigate said.
“No. I’m not interested in it.”
“You don’t care to see your parents when they were young, your playmates?”
Nur tapped his head. “They’re all in there. I can summon them up when I wish.”
“If the movie is a waste of time, then why did the unknown fix it so that it would be with us every second of waking time?”
“The unknown did not arrange just that. The unknown fixed it so that we could see the movie if we wished to. She wasn’t unaware of the possibility that we’d paint the walls and so block out the movie. Perhaps, by painting, we failed a test.”
“And what would the penalty for flunking it be?”
Nur shrugged.
“I’d guess that the penalty would be self-inflicted. It’d be a failure to progress.”
“But you said that you didn’t need to see your past.”
“I don’t. But I am not you or the others.”
“Isn’t that arrogant?”
“One man’s arrogance is another’s realism.”
“You Sufis like to proverb your way through life,” Frigate said.
Nur only smiled. This made the American feel as if he had failed to pass a test. For some time, Frigate had suffered from the belief that he had let Nur down—and himself—because he had quit being Nur’s disciple. He had lost faith in his own ability ever to attain to Nur’s lofty stature as a complete master of himself, free from neurosis and weakness, always logical yet compassionate. He just could not make it. So, rather than not succeed and be humiliated when Nur discharged him, flunked him, as it were, Frigate had resigned as Nur’s disciple. “A Sufi does not fear failure,” Nur had said. “What if I change my mind and ask you to take me as your pupil again?”
“We’ll see.”
“I’ve quit a lot of things or been forced to quit,” Frigate said. “But I always went back and tried them again.”
“Perhaps it’s time that you got rid of this start-and-stop habit. You need to form a psychic momentum that won’t run out so quickly.”
“The great perhaps.”
“What does that mean?”
Frigate did not know, and that made him angry. “You haven’t yet learned, after one hundred and thirty-two years, to meld your opposites into a smooth cooperating whole,” Nur had said. “You have always had within you a conservative, which isn’t always bad by any means, and a liberal, which isn’t always good by any means. You have within you a coward and a brave man. You detest and fear violence, yet there is someone violent within you, a person you’ve tried to repress. You don’t know how to make your violence creative, how to control it so that it discharges into the right paths. You—”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Frigate had said and had walked away.
He sometimes got the same sort of philosophical drum-beating from Li Po. The Chinese liked to tell him about the process of becoming “round,” that is, making one’s self into a “whole” man. Balancing his yin and yang, his negative and positive qualities. But Li Po, in Frigate’s estimation, was very unbalanced. He admired Li Po’s energy and poetical creativeness and compassion and self-confidence and linguistic mastery and courage untainted by fear. On the other hand—people were bimanual in more than one sense—Li Po had an excessive drive to dominate, was too self-absorbed, and utterly failed to see that these qualities often made him tiresome and offensive. He also was a drunk, though unlike any Frigate had ever known.
Frigate believed that Li Po, despite his apparent superiority, had no more chance of Going On than he. Indeed, of the eight, only Nur and perhaps Aphra Behn and Alice were at this moment promising candidates for Going On. Which might or might not be desirable. The theory was that such a state was the end-all and be-all because it could be attained only if you were ethically perfect or near-perfect. The wathan of such a person just disappeared from all detectors and thus, so the reasoning went, was absorbed into the Godhead or God or Allah or What-Do-You-Call-It.
The theory also claimed that the wathan then became part of the Creator, lost its individuality, and experienced from then on an eternity of ecstasy. Ecstasy undescribable, unknown in the physical state.