He Who Shapes Read Online Free PDF Page A

realm held court in the
    dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Greek
    tenor sax play at sunset.
    "The Greek, of course, was a patient of mineparanoiac.
    The etiology of the thing is rather complicated, but that's what
    I wandered into inside his mind. I gave him free rein for awhile,
    and in the end I had to split Atlantis in half and sink it full
    fathom five. He's playing again and you've doubtless heard his
    sounds, if you like such sounds at all. He's good. I still see him
    periodically, but he is no longer the last descendant of the
    greatest minstrel of Atlantis. He's just a fine, late twentieth-
    century saxman.
    "Sometimes though, as I look back on the apocalypse I
    worked within his vision of grandeur, I experience a fleeting
    sense   of lost beautybecause, for   a single moment, his
    abnormally intense feelings were my feelings, and he felt that
    his dream was the most beautiful thing in the world."
    He refilled their glasses.
    "That wasn't exactly what I meant," she said.
    "I know."
    "I meant something real."
    "It was more real than real, I assure you."
    "I don't doubt it, but . . ."
    "But I destroyed the foundation you were laying for your
    argument. Okay, I apologize. I'll hand it back to you. Here's
    something that could be real:
    "We are moving along the edge of a great bowl of sand," he
    said. "Into it, the snow is gently drifting. In the spring the snow
    will melt, the waters will run down into the earth,   or be
    evaporated away by the heat of the sun. Then only the sand
    will remain.   Nothing grows in the sand,   except   for   an
    occasional cactus. Nothing lives here but snakes, a few birds,
    insects, burrowing things, and a wandering coyote or two. In
    the afternoon these things will look for shade. Any place where
    there's an old fence post or a rock or a skull or a cactus to block
    out the sun, there you will witness life cowering before the
    elements. But the colors are beyond belief, and the elements
    are more lovely, almost, than the things they destroy."
    "There is no such place near here," she said.
    "If I say it, then there is. Isn't there? I've seen it."
    "Yes . . . You're right."
    "And it doesn't matter if it's a painting by a woman named
    O'Keefe, or something right outside our window, does it? If
    I've seen it?"
    "I acknowledge the truth of the diagnosis," she said. "Do
    you want to speak it for me?"
    "No, go ahead."
    He refilled the small glasses once more.
    "The damage is in my eyes," she told him, "not my brain."
    He lit her cigarette.
    "I can see with other eyes if I can enter other brains."
    He lit his own cigarette.
    "Neuroparticipation is based upon the fact that two nervous
    systems can share the same impulses, the same fantasies . . ."
    "Controlled fantasies."
    "I could perform therapy and at the same time experience
    genuine visual impressions."
    "No," said Render.
    "You don't know what it's like to be cut off from a whole area
    of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience
    something you can never knowand that he cannot appreciate
    it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court
    of biological happenstance, in a place where there is no justice
    only fortuity, pure and simple."
    "The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately,
    man must reside in the universe."
    "I'm not asking the universe to help meI'm asking you."
    "I'm sorry," said Render.
    "Why won't you help me?"
    "At this moment you are demonstrating my main reason."
    "Which is . . . ?"
    "Emotion. This thing means far too much to you. When the
    therapist is in-phase with a patient he is narco-electrically
    removed from most of his own bodily sensations. "This is
    necessarybecause his mind must be completely absorbed by
    the task at hand. It is also necessary that his emotions undergo
    a similar suspension. This, of course, is impossible in the one
    sense that a person always emotes to some degree. But the
    therapist's emotions are sublimated into a generalized