The God of the Labyrinth

  At this point, the man turned away and said: ‘I think I’ll go and bathe in the stream.’ He walked away quickly with his back to us. I said: ‘I’m afraid he’s not dead to the sins of the flesh’, and she burst into a gurgle of laughter that broke off in a gasp as I applied a fresh and cold bundle of grass. She said dreamily: ‘I wish we were in a bedroom.’ ‘I didn’t think you were allowed that kind of thing.’ ‘We’re not, strictly. But we haven’t all got your control.’

  Sighing, she moved on to her elbows, then buried her head against my thighs. The warmth of her mouth around me was delicious, but I was nervous in case anyone should come; we were completely exposed, with the house on one side—and anyone who might be looking out of the windows—and the man who might return from the stream at any moment. I put my hands in her hair and gently pressed her away. ‘Later. Not now.’ She said: ‘Promise?’ I said yes, and she moved back on to the grass. It cost an effort to cause my flesh to subside, but I succeeded.

  I heard a car arrive on the other side of the house. The man was returning from the stream. I said: ‘I think I ought to go and look for Dr Körner.’ As I pulled my clothes on again, I noticed that my loss of control had lowered the level of the intensity I had felt earlier. The girl lay there in the sun, her eyes closed, a smile on her parted lips, looking as if she was having a slow-burning orgasm.

  It was not Körner, but a car containing four bespectacled young women, looking like schoolteachers or computer operators, and a thin young man wearing thick glasses. But I found Körner inside, in the large, bleak hall that seemed to be full of battered statuettes of Greek discus-throwers and goddesses with bunches of grapes. Körner looked busy, directing where these should be placed; but when he saw me, he came over with a warm smile, shook my hand heartily, then held up his hand for silence. The others came and gathered round, and Körner introduced me as the well-known author and philosopher. They all looked im­pressed. I found the build-up embarrassing; they were looking at me as if they expected me to rise slowly from the ground. Körner took me by the arm. ‘One of our group is an antique dealer, and he has presented us with these. Some of them are not very artistic, but we shall allot them as symbols to individual members.’

  ‘Symbols?’

  ‘For them to meditate on.’ He evidently felt that this was self-explanatory, for he said: ‘Let me show you the rest of the house.’

  It was large and rather draughty, the kind of place that could only be made comfortable by a millionaire. Körner and his students were trying to do it themselves; and certainly a few of the rooms were impressively comfortable, indicating that at least some of the students could afford to present good furniture.

  Körner showed me to a sunlit bedroom. ‘This is where you will sleep. Unless, of course, you prefer to join the intimacy group below.’

  ‘They sleep together?’

  ‘Yes, but with perfect chastity, of course. It is no hardship for them to restrain their desires. They know they are gaining a new intensity by doing so.’ He went off into his lecturing manner, picking up a chunk of electric wire that some electrician had left on the window-seat. ‘You see, the reason that sex is so dis­appointing to most people is that they are like a thin wire that can hardly carry any current. You will agree that sexual ecstasy is like an electric current? If you are healthy and you have been restraining your desires for a long time, it becomes a high-voltage current. That is our whole aim—to turn us into a heavy wire, like this one.’ He waved the thick copper wire under my nose. ‘Once the wire can carry the current, the current will not be lacking. I think you would agree with this?’

  I said I did; I knew that intense self-discipline increases one’s capacity for ecstasy. But before I could express certain reserva­tions, Körner laid his hand on my arm.

  ‘And now, I wish to speak to you. You will gather that I have a purpose in bringing you here. Come and sit down.’ He evidently felt that this was serious. We sat in the sunlight in the window-seat. ‘It is not simply that I want you to become a member of our group—that is self-evident. You are completely qualified for it. I would like you to become my second-in-command, my lieutenant—and eventually, my successor.’ He held up his hand to stop me interrupting. ‘You do not have to make a decision now, or even next week or next month. I want you to see how we work, see whether you feel we could help you, or you could help us. You see, you have integrity. Most of the people around me are good students, but so far I do not see the qualities necessary for a leader. The Dunkelmans wanted to be leaders—but they would simply have turned our group into a kind of brothel, a personal harem for the two of them. Work like this requires pure dedication, the scientific spirit. You have this.’

  I made apologetic noises, and said I would need time to make up my mind. Deep inside me, I knew this was out of the question; I am a loner, not simply by inclination, but by nature. I didn’t want to mix with all these people.

  He patted my shoulder. ‘Of course. Take as long as you like. But there is one thing I had better tell you frankly. So far, we have tried to keep our activities fairly quiet, because they could be misunderstood. But now the time has come to go out and show ourselves openly, to make converts, to tell the world of our aims. Because our aim is to prove that civilisation will never be stable until everyone thinks as we do.’

  He had become very serious, and I was not entirely unsym­pathetic; but suddenly I thought of Anna Dunkelman’s picture of strangers masturbating one another on buses, and found it necessary to stare out of the window to control my face. As we went downstairs, I said:

  ‘I think this is a great idea. Angela and Alastair were com­pletely bowled over last night. You’ve made two enthusiastic converts there.’

  ‘Good. But we shall not be satisfied until I can say the same of you.’ As we approached the group, still busily arranging statues, he gripped my arm. ‘For the moment, treat what I have told you in strict confidence.’

  At two o’clock, lunch was announced. In the dining room, look­ing out on the lawn, a simple meal had been laid out on trestle tables—two huge tureens of soup, plates piled with cubes of cheese, whole-wheat rolls and biscuits. Körner introduced me to a bearded young man named Paul, who seemed to be his assist­ant. Paul had horn-rimmed glasses, a northern accent, and an intensely serious manner. He explained:

  ‘We try to eat light meals. Otherwise, the body has too much trouble digesting food, and the discipline does no good. This is actually a pretty large meal. Our other group—the over-forties—eat much less.’ I gathered that Körner kept the two groups separate, and had meetings on alternate weekends. Paul said:

  ‘We have to be practical about this. Theoretically, there’s no age limit, of course. But it’s our experience that older people are more interested in sex than young ones. And if we allowed too many of them to join, the young ones would leave. A lot of young girls don’t seem to mind older men, but young boys don’t often take to women over forty. Of course, the groups can inter­mingle, to some extent—but only by special invitation.’ This, apparently, explained the presence of a number of men and women who were obviously over forty—even over fifty.

  There were about sixty people present in the hall, with a slight predominance of women. They struck me as a fairly average group of people. I noticed that there seemed to be a fashion among the women for long-sleeved dresses and spectacles with rather heavy frames, giving them a studious appearance. There were no teenagers present; the girl I had seen in the garden seemed to be one of the youngest there. I observed that a large proportion of the men seemed strongly built, or wore bulky polo-neck sweaters to give an impression of size. Very few of those present were strikingly good-looking, but I saw no one who was downright unattractive. The women, on the whole, were more intelligent-looking than the men. I saw very few men whom I would describe as ectomorphic types. For all their appearance of being an ‘average’ group, I got the feeling that these might hav
e been more carefully selected than at first appeared.

  They seemed to know one another very well; there was a great deal of laughter, of pushing and jostling, of hand-shaking and kissing between acquaintances, and offering of plates and bowls of soup to one another. I found the friendly atmosphere impressive, although I seemed to feel a certain tension behind it, a lack of casualness and relaxation.

  Paul went off to speak to someone; a voice in front of me said: ‘Hello’, and I found myself looking down into the brown eyes of the girl I had met on the lawn. We were pressed together in the crowd, and as she smiled up, her hand reached behind her and gave my genitals a friendly squeeze. She said: ‘My name’s Tessa’, and beckoned me to bend my head. She whispered: ‘I don’t want lunch. Let’s go to bed.’ ‘I’m hungry.’ ‘Spoilsport.’ ‘Besides, they’d notice. I’m being given special treatment.’ Paul came back, and frowned at her disapprovingly; I got the feeling she was regarded as a disruptive influence.

  I ate my bread and cheese, and drank my soup. Then we went out of the french windows and on to the lawn. A group of people were standing in a circle, and seemed to be doing some kind of exercises. They placed their hands on each other’s shoulders, then moved forward, then leaned forward and drew together in a sharp knot like a Rugby fifteen. Paul said:

  ‘This is a warm-up intimacy group. They’re trying to get rid of the constraint of urban life—touching one another, doing things together, trying to get rid of the feeling of separateness.’ A young man in a white polo-neck sweater was calling out in­structions to the group, occasionally moving in among them and slapping someone on the shoulders or back. As I stood there, he went up to a woman of about forty, and did something to her breasts—apparently rearranging her bra through her sweater—and ending by sharply slapping her buttock as if she was a cow being driven into a field. Paul said:

  ‘You see, they like being given orders. It helps them to throw off the feeling of responsibility—civilisation neurosis. The aim is to make them feel like innocent children again.’

  I noticed that the people in this ‘intimacy group’ were all dressed rather heavily, in view of the heat. Paul explained that this was part of the procedure; as they got rid of their sense of oppression, they could dress in lighter clothes. ‘You’ll see what I mean this evening.’

  I mentioned my chief misgiving: that since sex comes so naturally to human beings, all the high-minded aims of a group like this would tend to blur into mutual sexual excitation. He nodded in agreement.

  ‘In a group of this size, it’s bound to happen to some extent, of course. We try to take precautions. But you’d be surprised how little it happens. There are no taboos here, no repressions, and that makes a great difference.’

  We went back in the house. I asked him what he meant by ‘precautions’. ‘I’ll show you.’ We went up to a room on the first floor which I knew to be a women’s dormitory. Paul walked in without knocking. Half a dozen women were lying on beds powdering their noses, and one was sitting in a bra and panties, taking off her stockings. They smiled at us, and seemed uncon­cerned. Paul went over to a bed that had an open case lying on it, and tipped it upside down on the bed. He scattered its con­tents over the surface of the bed—a grey woollen mini-dress, tights, underwear, some cosmetics—and glanced into a pink washing-case. No one seemed to pay any attention. ‘I’m looking for contraceptives. It’s the surest way of telling if anyone intends to break the rules.’ He picked up the case belonging to the woman who was still dressing. She said: ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t mess everything up. Let me show you.’ She took the gar­ments out one by one, opened them out and gave them a brief shake. Paul pointed to a pair of pink French knickers. ‘They’re not much good.’ ‘I know. I left in a hurry and threw in the first thing I saw.’

  Outside, he explained: ‘We have spot checks every weekend, to see if they’ve brought contraceptives. Of course, we’ve no way of knowing if they’ve taken the Pill.’

  ‘Doesn’t that rather invalidate it?’

  ‘Oh no. Otto advises against the Pill for health reasons any­way.’

  ‘How about the men?’

  ‘They’re checked by women. Anyone’s allowed to check anyone else. We try to be a single family.’

  ‘Why did you object to that girl’s knickers?’

  ‘Wide legs. There’s no rule about it, of course, but if people intend to have sex, those panties are ideal—if the lights go on suddenly, the girl’s fully dressed.’

  ‘The women are supposed to keep their panties on, then?’ I asked, thinking about Tessa on the lawn.

  ‘Oh no.’ He looked almost shocked. ‘That would miss the whole point of our group—intimacy. But if they’re going to be caressed, they have to pull them down, at least around their thighs.’ He went on earnestly: ‘You don’t seem to understand. We’re not trying to regiment people. But you know yourself that the more obstacles there are, the more interesting it becomes. So we try to prescribe silk panties with fairly tight legs, so that if they’re tempted to have intercourse, the girl would have to take them right off. We don’t much like crêpe nylon or French knickers because you can pull the leg aside too easily. Some of these things are no protection at all.’

  There was the sound of a gong from the hall. ‘What happens now?’

  ‘We have lectures until five. I have to lecture myself, so I shall have to leave you. Attendance at lectures is compulsory, by the way. Anyone who skips lectures is not really serious. We don’t tell newcomers that—it helps us to weed out people who come for the wrong motives.’ He advised me to wander around the various lectures, and to ask questions if I felt so inclined.

  I took his advice. The ‘students’ divided into four groups. Körner spoke to one; Paul to another; Chris to a third; and an attractive but slightly schoolmistressy woman called Gwyneth to the fourth. I was glad to see that Angela and Alastair were sitting eagerly in the front row of Körner’s group, which was out on the lawn. I sat at the back of this for twenty minutes or so, and heard him explaining why he was a materialist. ‘Idealists’, he explained, believe that such things as life, thought, ideas, can exist apart from matter, in some sense. His arguments against this view were devastating and, for me, completely convincing. As far as I was concerned, of course, they missed the point. I agree that minds and mental processes are inseparably linked with matter; but I still believe that life has somehow entered matter from outside, not that it is an emanation of matter, as fire is an emanation of coal.

  I had a feeling that Körner would not welcome questions, so I moved on to the next group, the lady named Gwyneth. She was giving an enthusiastic but, I thought, rather muddled sum­mary of Reich’s ideas, and her talk about ‘vital fluid’ that accumulates in the loins in sexual excitement seemed to me dangerously close to Reich’s orgone energy. I wondered how Körner would feel about all this. Gwyneth tried to draw me actively into the discussion, which soon became lively. Her group struck me as intelligent, and more independent-minded than I had expected—they disagreed with her on a great many points. I made some attempts to explain my own theories of the origin of the sexual impulse, and my theory of symbolic response, but I could see they found this very strange and, as one lady said, ‘unnecessarily abstract’. The discussion became so warm that we were all surprised when members of other groups strolled on to the lawn and told us it was time for tea.

  In fact, we did not drink tea—which Körner disliked—but sanka—caffeinless coffee. We also ate wheaten biscuits spread thinly with butter. Gwyneth took charge of me, and told me she found my ideas fascinating. I found her very likeable. About forty years of age, with a fresh, pink complexion, and rather large, white teeth that made her smile amiable and dazzling, she tended to exaggerate the school-marmish style that seemed to be the prescribed fashion, wearing a long-sleeved black dress, and a necklace of gold leaves with a cross on it. I gathered she was on her local parish counc
il, and held a good job in a public relations firm. She had an enthusiastic and slightly woolly way of discussing ideas that had its own charm; but I could not imagine how she had got into Körner’s group.

  After tea, we all went into the main room. This had little furniture, but good carpets that looked as if they had cost as much as all the rest of the furniture put together. (Gwyneth explained that they were ‘donations’ from older members; I had my suspicions that some of the older members bought their way into the group with expensive gifts over and above the fees.) Although it was now growing chilly outside, this room was warmed by a log fire that burned in the huge fireplace. Now the people broke up in small intimacy groups, and I moved from one to another, watching their activities with interest. And it soon became clear that the earlier part of the day had been a mere prelude; this was the beginning of the serious part. They joined into tight knots, pressing very close together, running their hands over one another’s bodies, starting at the ankles, moving up to the head. Many of the groups split into pairs, and repeated the pressing and fondling operation. There was nothing specific­ally sexual about this; I noticed that hands lingered only briefly in the erogenous zones, but seemed much more interested in heads and in arms. A tall, thin girl drew me into a group as I stood watching, and began to stroke me, pressing her hands together on my belly or chest, and then drawing them apart, pressing hard. After this, I did the same to her, standing behind her, pressing my hands tight against her belly, then massaging her as far as the hips. I repeated this operation on her breasts and thighs; then, in accordance with her instructions, began to stroke the outsides of her legs, beginning at the waist and running my hands over her dress, down to her feet. I noticed she was wearing a suspender belt and stockings. After this, she caressed my shoulders, arms and head, running her fingers through my hair, along my cheeks, opening my mouth and putting her finger­tips in, inserting her little finger into my ears. What she was doing was caressing me as if we were lovers; but since we remained fully clothed, it had a strange quality of excitement, of the forbidden. If we had been alone, partly undressed, it would have ended in coitus within minutes; this lingering mas­sage in a room with fifty or so other people had the effect of creating a new set of responses, breaking old habits.