What are you, Giggles?
Giggles: Oh! What does it matter, when I am through you?
Mutig: Which is to say, Giggles is heroic, Fuld, you see? Giggles knows and doesn’t doubt that at every moment I am really entirely what I appear to be at the moment. What more could she ask for?
Fuld: And if at that moment you are really entirely unfaithfulness, repulsion, contempt, hatred?
Mutig: As if it would come to that!
Giggles: Oh, it won’t come to that!
Fuld: Giggles, if he were to loathe you, he would leave you.
Giggles: Oh Fuld, of course. But I am Mrs. Mutig. I cannot and do not wish to be anything but a Mutig. So then why should I gripe if at a given moment Mutig is an unfaithful Mutig—repulsed by me, contemptuous of me, hating me?
Mutig: In short, entirely Mutig. Unspoiled. Giggles has caught on to something that you haven’t. Giggles gets that those who have died away within us will not be resurrected by our sorrow, nor by our pity. Giggles gets that the sole honor we can pay the dead is not to drag them behind us. To bury them quickly. (A loving glance at Giggles.) You see what it means to apply our ethics practically? Giggles, where is the happiness in being loved by me?
Giggles (like a schoolgirl): The happiness in being loved by you is in the certainty that I make allowances for you, and that I fade away.
Mutig (like a teacher testing a good student): What allowances do you make, Giggles?
Giggles: I allow, and in doing so lighten your burden, that you are not omnipotent.
Mutig: Good, Giggles. And if in one moment, if in one moment the only way to ease my burden were—a mere supposition, you understand—to ease it, that is, to deceive it, were only (his words collapsed with a mournful violence) if you, because it’s what I wanted, were to slit your own throat?
Fuld: Let’s say, “If you were to take your own life.”
Mutig (curtly): If you were to slit your own throat . . .
Giggles (with a happy laugh, into which there crept a timid horror): Oh!
Fuld (repentantly): A supposition that . . . (Faster and faster.) Your suppositions are bloody. Mutig, my dear, too gory for a supposition, too figurative, my friend (and suddenly, as if he’d signed and, under some kind of unfamiliar pressure, automatically appended his initials): my dear friend.
Mutig (professorially, but with a touching, youthful awkwardness): To abstract from duration—and why else would we exclude the concept of duration, if not to proceed practically, as though everything in the given moment were always complete? For you, Fuld, and for a great many others, to abstract from duration would mean to turn irresponsibility toward your maximum life potential.
Fuld: That objection . . .
Mutig: You wanted to say that that objection is no objection at all, my dear friend, true? We do not refuse responsibility for our deeds, of course, naturally. We refuse responsibility merely for what we will be in the next moment. Next time.
Fuld: Only that the thing you do next will be a function of what you will be in the next moment. And in that next moment you might be someone who denies responsibility for the consequences of what you just did, when you were different. Therein lies the catch, in my opinion (he said “in my opinion”): for whatever responsibility is, isn’t it responsibility for consequences?
Mutig: My fine friend, we have settled, have we not, that our ethics and our current morality are two separate things. How, then, even in our dreams, could people such as ourselves, living upright, arrive at the thought that we were answerable to someone other than ourselves? Ethics is not the Napoleonic Code. You are perhaps haunted by the idea—allow me to put it like a “man on the street”—that our ethics would not prevent us from leading—as they say—our fellow man unto misfortune, and to leave him lying peacefully on the roadway like a motorist gone mad? It doesn’t stop it. Naturally. – Our interlocutor, for example, is now surely thinking of Giggles. (He turned sharply toward me and was very beautiful.)
Fuld: Naturally.
Mutig: If I say that we do not refuse responsibility for the things we do, this means simply that in the given moment we would consider it a shame to undertake anything so as to evade the natural repercussions of our action.
Fuld: Naturally.
Mutig: At last, then we are agreed! – The only people who can eliminate their regard for duration are those for whom catching fire and living are synonyms, and such people cannot help but eliminate duration. The raison d’être of flame is the verb: to burn; nay, a substantive: that which burns. Is that clear, sir?
I: Giggles!
Mutig: Leave her out of this! Giggles listens to me alone. Don’t bother yourself! She listens to me alone, and only when I address her directly. Otherwise—to her good fortune—she’s deaf. (Expertly.) But since we are speaking of this subject— subject: Giggles—isn’t our ethics a sign of hope for creatures like Giggles; that is, for creatures called upon solely to make allowances?
Fuld (eagerly): Explain. Please, explain.
Mutig: Gladly. Let’s suppose that they’ve died within us. Let’s suppose that Giggles here is, for example, at this moment, dead. Dead within me, that is, for herself and in general. Giggles, who knows me—who has been allowed to know me—won’t say, “Mutig has repudiated me,” so much as . . . What will you say, Giggles?
Giggles: I’ll say, “Mutig still hasn’t come back to me,” “Mutig still despises me.”
Mutig (with triumphant glee): Did you catch the nuance? – And what else, Giggles?
Giggles (reciting): Mutig doesn’t know, but he remembers. He remembers that I have made many allowances for him; that I was making allowances as I faded away; that he endured it, and thus he loved me; that there are many creatures that must allow, because that is the law; that there are few creatures that allow as they are fading away, because that is a rare credit; that is to say, he made me this way; that is, I made myself this way out of love; that it is therefore to my credit; that I may therefore give in to the hope that Mutig has not tired of me as his sla—
Mutig (he waved his hand and snuffed out the last word): You’re golden! That will do! (To Fuld:) And do I recall that it wasn’t so long ago that she wanted to jump out a window because I had cast her off? – What did I teach you when you wanted to jump out the window?
Giggles: You taught me that with you there was hope, because you had repudiated the word “forevermore.”
Mutig (he corrects with playful pedantry): Because, taking no account of duration, I make no distinction between “now” and “forevermore.” Inconsequentiality is a great virtue. Inconsequentiality is the holy name of the act without genealogy. – It’s odd, but doesn’t it seem to you that our allegedly cynical ethics is wondrously similar to caritas?
I: Givers of death and life. Depending on whether you accept or reject your loved one as sacrifice.
Mutig: My dear, that’s rhetoric. Just remember how much stock was put in Yahweh finding the sacrifice pleasing.
I: That was God.
Mutig: And we are the givers of life and death; that’s why we set afire; that is, we burn. –
There was a silence. It had the flavor of a prearranged silence. An entr’acte, you’d say, and we were switching the scenery. All at once, and as if on command, the spectators drew fat cigars from their breast pockets and started to smoke. They whispered, pointing their fingers at us, though their heads were turned away. A moment later the expansive space was filled with smoke. I felt a light breeze. The smoke started to accumulate. Bands started to form, they trailed toward Giggles, they circled around, enveloping her like a mummy’s wrappings. Giggles smiled. Then everything went quiet again, the spectators straightened up in their seats,