If you whistle while you're pissing, you have two minds where one is quite sufficient. If you have two minds, you are at war with yourself. If you are at war with yourself, it is easy for an external force to defeat you. This is why Mong-tse wrote, "A man must destroy himself before others can destroy him."
That was all, except for an abstract drawing on page three that seemed to suggest an enemy figure moving out toward the viewer. About to turn to page four, George got a shock: from another angle, the drawing was two figures engaged in attacking each other. I and It. The Mind and the Robot. His memory leaped back twenty-two years and he saw his mother lean over the crib and remove his hand from his penis. Christ, no wonder I grab it when I'm frightened: the Robot's Revenge, the Return of the Repressed.
George started to turn the page again, and saw another trick in Hagbard's abstraction: from a third angle, it might be a couple making love. In a flash, he saw his mother's face above his crib again, in better focus, and recognized the concern in her eyes. The cruel hand of repression was moved by love: she was trying to save him from Sin.
And Carlo, dead three years now, together with the rest of that Morituri group- what had inspired Carlo when he and the four others (all of them less than eighteen, George remembered) blasted their way into a God's Lightning rally and killed three cops and four Secret Service agents in their attempts to gun down the Secretary of State? Love, nothing but mad love…
The door opened and George tore his eyes from the text. Mavis, back again in her sweater and slacks outfit, walked in. For a proclaimed right-wing anarchist, she sure dresses a lot like a New Leftist, George thought; but then Hagbard wrote like a cross between Reichian Leftist and an egomaniacal Zen Master- there was obviously more to the Discordian philosophy than he could grasp yet, even though he was now convinced it was the system he himself had been groping toward for many years.
"Mmm," she said, "I like that smell. Alamout Black?"
"Yeah," George said, having trouble meeting her eyes. "Hagbard's been illuminating me."
"I can tell. Is that why you suddenly feel uncomfortable with me?"
George met her eyes, then looked away again; there was tenderness there but it was, as he had expected, sisterly at best. He muttered, "It's just that I realize our sex" (why couldn't he say fucking or, at least, balling?) "was less important to you than to me."
Mavis took Hagbard's chair and smiled at him affectionately. "You're lying, George. You mean it was
"Well, I guess I mean both," he said cautiously. "You were more emotionally involved than I was
"Ever is a long time. Let's just say you can't have it now."
" 'Humility is endless,' " George repeated.
"Don't start feeling sorry for yourself. You've discovered that love is more than a word in poetry, and you want it right away. You just had two other things that used to be just words to you-
"I'm not complaining. I know that 'humility is endless' also means surprise is endless. Hagbard promised me a happy truth and that's it."
Mavis finally got the pipe lit and, after toking deeply, passed it over. "You can have Hagbard," she said.
George, sipping very lightly since he was still fairly high, mumbled "Hm?"
"Hagbard will love you as well as ball you. Of course, it's not the same. He loves everybody. I'm not at that stage yet. I can only love my equals." She grinned wickedly. "Of course, I can still get horny about you. But now that you know there's more than that, you want the whole package deal, right? So try Hagbard."
George laughed, feeling suddenly lighthearted. "Okay! I will."
"Bullshit," Mavis said bluntly. "You're putting us both on. You've liberated some of the energies and right away, like everybody else at this stage, you want to prove that there are no blocks anywhere anymore. That laugh was not convincing, George. If you have a block, face it. Don't pretend it isn't there."
"That's better. At least you didn't fall into feeling guilty about the block. That's an infinite regress. The next stage is to feel guilty about feeling guilty… and pretty soon you're back in the trap again, trying to be the governor of the nation of Dorn."
"The Robot," George said.
Mavis toked and said, "Mm?"
"I call it the Robot."
