Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)
Studies - Szilvia Nagy: I Can Operate in the Dark—Bodies are Phosphorescent... Occult Modernism and Myth-Making in Djuna Barnes 's Nightwood
preoccupation that soon finds an object in Robin's unattainable love. Robin is awakened from a sleep "incautious and entire" (36) and suffers from being hunted at once by "love and anonymity" (53). And Jenny, in being "a bold and authentic robber" (59) of other people's objects, stories and memories, "defiled the very meaning of personality in her passion to be a person" (60). Their respective claims to personality masquerade as their true nature and longing, but in lieu of the truth of the self they live on substitutes, without knowing. Gurdjieff described this state as the general self-deception of the individual who is in "endless pursuit of social recognition, sensory pleasures, or the vague and unrealizable goal of 'happiness'" (Needleman), notions that cultural conditioning implanted in their minds. This masquerade of illusory senses is, according to Gurdjieff, poor substitute for the autonomous and consciously lived life (Needleman), a sentiment that is also expressed by Matthew O'Connor, who has a 'gift' of verbalizing others' miseries. Although everyone strives to live it to the fullest, "[l]ife is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself' (109), he proclaims, because that would require an awakened consciousness; in fact, people are asleep: Donne says: 'We are all conceived in close prison, in our mothers' wombs we are close prisoners all. When we are born, we are but born to the liberty of the house —all our life is but a going out to the place of execution and death. Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the Cart, between Newgate and Tyburn? Between the prison and the place of execution, does any man sleep?' Yet he says, 'Men sleep all the way'" (82). The curse of the "slain white bull" is sleep itself: ever since the beginning of time, since the alteration of day and night, people have lost their unity, therefore cast to an eternal sleep of self-awareness. O'Connor, self-proclaimed "god of darkness" (106), tells that life — "this extremity, this badly executed leap in the dark" (28)—,as members of society live it, is spent in eternal darkness, "sleep [ing] in a long reproachful dust against ourselves" (72). His view of the human condition as 'sleep' is shared by Gurdjieff (Needleman), a man not unlike Matthew: both share a vast knowledge of ancient wisdoms and traditions. They find it equally impossible to get to the "authentic 'I 74
