Arthur Koestler's memoir Arrow in the Blue—a book that held great personal meaning for me when I first read it as a young aspiring writer and aspiring lefty activist—begins by introducing us to a sort of private cosmology that Koestler developed in childhood. It was largely a Manichaean universe, in which two countervailing forces battled each other eternally, with no ultimate victor.
On one side of the fight was Ahor—which stood in Koestler's mind for "Ancient Horror." It was a presence that Koestler associated in childhood with visits to the dentist; but which in adulthood would assume much more serious forms—his stint in a French concentration camp at the outset of the war, for example; or his sentence to prison in Franco's Spain for his reporting on the civil war. In essence, Ahor represented the forces of writhing, squirming evil—ever present in posse—that lie just beneath the superficial appearance of normality and stability in human life.
Set in the very floor of ordinary human life, in other words—there is a sort of trap door. One could fall through it at any point and find oneself in the clutches of the ancient demon: the forces of death, chaos, randomness, violence, pain, and heartbreak that can never truly be separated from our existence.
One is going about one's day, when suddenly one appears to slip into an alternative dimension—one branches off into a "dark timeline," as people often say nowadays. "A monstering horror swallows" us, to borrow a line from E.E. Cummings—who clearly saw in certain political states the presence of Koestler's "Ahor."
I am reminded of Louis MacNeice's description, in "The Suicide," of human life as a "flowery maze" through which the subject of the poem "wandered deliciously till he stumbled / [...] On a manhole under the hollyhocks." Ahor can get you in his clutches at the least expected times, in short. Indeed, that is his speciality.
This was a week when Ahor suddenly caught up with me, for example. I started off my week attending a staff retreat for work in Boston. It could not have been more ordinary (apart from the fact that I was perpetually keeping one eye on the news each day to see if Trump had just ignited World War III, for the sake of seizing sovereign territory from a loyal ally, whose name he cannot even bother to remember (repeatedly in the past week, Trump has referred to the land mass he wants to seize from Denmark (incorrectly) as "Iceland")).
That staff retreat was what I figured would be the main theme of the week—until Thursday morning; when I found out about my dad's cancer diagnosis. Now, I am suddenly staying with family in a completely different part of the country. We are dealing with tests and surgeries and chemo and radiation therapy and a hundred other things which, as of Wednesday evening, I would not have imagined I would have to deal with for years to come—let alone the very next day.
There was indeed a trap door hidden beneath the apparently comfortable surface of our lives. The path through the flowery maze had taken an unexpected turn and dropped us into the claws of the ancient nemesis. And this is not even to mention the fact that the country meanwhile appears poised on the brink of civil war because Trump insists on treating our own American communities as war zones.
There is more to be said about all this than can be said in this post today. We are all reeling from the cosmic unfairness of it. The fact that my dad's the last person who would ever deserve this. The fact that he still has so much to give the world. We are grieving the loss of the years we thought we still had together—the comfortable future that we imagined stretching off into a point so distant we all assumed it would be more or less perpetuity. Now we're having to face the sudden absence of all of that. Ahor has paid us a visit indeed.
But there is a second force in Koestler's cosmology that resists the presence of Ahor: the "Baron in the Bog." Koestler took the inspiration for this countervailing being from a tale in the adventures of Munchausen—when the titular baron falls into a bit of quicksand, but manages to extricate himself by grasping the top of his own head, and lifting himself up beyond the reach of danger.
The meaning of this anecdote for Koestler was that every problem has a solution. And indeed, one can see his resourcefulness and instinct for survival on display in his other recorded memories—as in that moment in Scum of the Earth when he talks his way out of a forced deportation, and goes on to join the Foreign Legion at the last possible instant, in order to get himself some proper demobilization papers and thereby escape Vichy France.
I ask myself—in the face of my family's own news this week—what would the Baron in the Bog do? He would keep fighting. He would fight for one day more. He would fight for a little bit more life together. "With a hit-hit here and a hit-hit there" to let in a little more air, as D.H. Lawrence would put it. That's what we have to do personally, as a family; and what we have to do as a country. Fight for one day more; just a little bit more air; just a little bit more light; and take every day we get, every breath of life, as a victory.
I love you!
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