It doesn’t really feel like that. It feels as though he’s been somewhere—out there, over the rim of the world, beyond individuation—to an extreme place which is both entirely desirable and entirely appalling. He knows what we want to know and are afraid of knowing. He’s our talisman, that’s it, he’s our talisman. He talks to us harshly and beautifully, and we listen to the voice of experience, beyond the inadequate words (in the sense in which words are always inadequate).
Anyway, to retreat from the ineffable to gossip, which persists.
We received an odd visit today. From the improbable Eva Wijnnobel, the Vice-Chancellor’s wife, who holds sessions on astrology in the Anti-University. Gideon really wants this place to be like a mediaeval way-station, a religious House that succours travellers. His desire to invite everyone in—and to charm them with his attentiveness—borders on the pathological, I sometimes think nastily. (But we are, truly, almost never nasty, now, and he did look magnificent with his white-gold mane and beard and his religious symbols dangling over his loose white shirt. Ankhs, snakes, crosses, the ourobouros, a kind of plastic mermaid, he is eclectically weighted.) Anyway, he welcomed her in, and she stood blackly and hot and dark and absolutely not shining, even though her face was sweaty with the effort of walking, and her black hair does have a greasy sort of gloss. She came accompanied by two rather nasty, rump-waggling dogs. There’s something rather disgusting about perverting a beast as beautiful in itself as a border collie into a fat subservient grinner.
They are called Odin and Frigg, but she inclines heavily towards the Egyptian, via anthroposophy, I’d guess. She’s got an Egyptian haircut. And a kind of stagy black cloak over a priestess-like black garment with purple bindings here and there. And fingernails. Bloody fingernails, incongruous. Zag has rainbow-coloured fingernails, every one iridescent with fish-scales (I’m told), pearly blues and mauves and yellows and oranges. The really odd thing—I am jumping forward in my narrative, forgive me—the really odd thing is that Zag seems to have formed some sort of relationship with her, between their stints at the Anti-University. How to describe this. Complicity; yes, but that’s too weak. She paws him. Very well, dear Kieran, writing like an analytic session in a kind of spiritual dustbin, I am tempted into words that reveal wicked feelings I trusted no longer to have.
I feel physical revulsion for this woman, and she paws Zag, and Zag pats her hand, and grins sexily at her, and hugged her when she departed. They sat next to each other at lunch and talked about Gemini, twinned unbounded Souls, and the alchemical Work (Jung again) where the Stone is the hermaphrodite who is manifested as Mercury, quicksilver in a bath of coloured light becoming white. She ate rather a lot of Clemency’s vegetable shepherd’s pie, and alternated between Holding Forth (rather as I imagine she must in her anti-u-chapel), and a kind of grim silence, like a volcano working itself up. One of our members, Lucas Simmonds, who is some sort of “social worker” and has been a teacher, and has certainly been in institutions like yours, possibly Cedar Mount itself—Lucas S. also knows a lot about alchemy and hermaphrodite Mercury, and the mysterium coniunctionis and became excessively smiling and dog-like in his eagerness to partake. Canon Holly said it was easy to make a fantasy mishmash out of this material and was almost spat at, or cursed.
The women don’t like her. Ellie went and sat at the other end of the table. Clemency tried very hard, and was treated as a kind of superior house-servant. She took this in a Christian way, redoubling her hostess-ly attentions, but she was miffed, her light dimmed a bit. As for Lucy, who only really comes to life in Joshua Ramsden’s presence, she was seriously upset by a nasty attack made by Odin and Frigg on her pet sheep, Tobias. Tobias is very much a member of the Hearers. He is vegetarian and woolly and entirely good-natured. We have children here—some are Quaker offspring, some come to classes in pottery and weaving and cookery and story-writing which Clemency—our total guarantee of sane respectability—has set up. The more nervous ones love to play with Tobias, who butts them very very gently, and lets them thread things in his fleece. He was driven into the chimney-corner with snarling and snapping, and stood at bay, looking confused. Eva W. ordered everyone to pay no attention. She said it was the dogs’ nature, they were simply herding the sheep. Gideon said that the sheep believed himself to be a dog, and she said that that was inappropriate, and belled out “Odin, Frigg,” which elicited no response.
Fortunately, perhaps, at that moment, Ramsden came in. He calmed them all down, with his new authority. She fell for him. I heard her telling Zag, over lunch, that his hair was white like wool. He sat frowning, himself, between Clemency and Lucy, with the sheep bundled under his chair. I sometimes think he comes in late because he doesn’t eat, and doesn’t want to be seen not eating. A man can be ill, in our old sense, our “professional” sense, yet be a spiritual leader, that is what we have learned, in our time. The way is not round, but through, and I suppose that applies to that woman, too.
I hope she doesn’t come again. I know she will, of course. She snuffed him out, she gravitated towards him, and she won’t let go. He looks very calm, but not happy.
Maybe she’s necessary to our new life in some way. You’re the Group groupie. You know how groups have an irritant which causes them to coalesce—like the grit in the pearl? Or maybe she’ll cause us all to fly apart, like a stink bomb. Or maybe—as we sail heavenwards in our silvery skin of sky-balloon, she’ll be the heavy black ballast holding down our basket and its burners? I get tearful these days, what with the after-acid and the overoxygenation of spiritual extremism. I am sitting here sniffing to myself, and giggling over my own cleverness in reducing that silly and dangerous woman to cheap metaphors. God forgive me. What has happened to charity? The new spirituality is not long on charity, Kieran. Ask Zag, who waits impatiently for a Dionysiac dismemberment and release. I wonder how the V-C has lived with her for so long? How he could bear those monumental limbs burning in the same bed? How could he sit by the hearth with those denatured dogs? Marriage is a mystery to me, mysterium coniunctionis, as the alchemists, and Eva W. and the blessed Carl Gustav would say.
Ramsden saw Eva and recognised an opponent. When she saw him, she walked straight up to him, and stood close, head down. Too close. He wanted to step back, or push her away, and did not. The two dogs bustled up behind her, and suddenly shot forward, in a whirling twist of fur, teeth, claws and feathery tails, as they perceived Tobias the sheep, who had come in, with Lucy, at Ramsden’s heels. Tobias gave a high bleat of fear, and retreated into the great chimney-space. Odin and Frigg hurtled after him, pinning him against the wall.
“Stop that,” said Ramsden.
“It’s their nature,” said Eva Wijnnobel. “Down, my darlings. Come to mother. Come to mother.”
Odin and Frigg snarled and worried. Tobias shivered. Eva Wijnnobel went down on her knees in front of the silent, motionless audience, and pulled at rumps and waving plumes.
“Bad dogs. Bad dogs. Mother is very cross,” she said. Her voice was thick and not motherly. The dogs were finally pulled out, and Lucy with a little cry knelt to comfort Tobias, whose ankle was bleeding. Eva Wijnnobel went back to Ramsden. There was a smudge of blood and wood-ash on her right cheek.
“It is only collie nips,” said Eva Wijnnobel. “They are herding animals. I hope you will not send us away.”
Her breath was hot on his face. He could see into her dark mouth. He saw her exhale damp air, meat-juice, curdled milk. He wanted to step back and did not. Her black-rimmed eyes stared into his over the smudge on her skin.
“I think you may have, I think you may be, what I need, what I am seeking,” she said, in an urgent undertone. She was fawning on him, and at her feet, the dogs writhed in parallel subservience. She hissed in his ear
“Hair as white as wool, it is written. And I see the film of blood, oh yes, I see it, the sign of the master, the rosy sweat, the red tears, I see who you are.”
He wanted to send her away. His everyday self, an
entity always tenuous and wraith-like, knew that she was “a charlatan,” an unreality that would eat up the work of the spirit. His spirit knew that she saw him, his hair white as wool, his body washed white in blood, for what he was being driven to become. He could not bear to be touched, and she was crowding him, breathing most literally down his neck. He feared his own anger, which he believed he had never allowed to break out or show itself. He knew the Hearers were afraid of his anger, which was right, yet indicated a secret sharing, for he had never showed anger to them, never, only patience, gentleness and understanding.
He looked at the woman, and saw the phantom blood he had watched since the day of the terror of the plump, pitiable boy, well out from among the thick black hair and run down her wide cheeks and thick neck. He thought, with a moment of illumination, that she was the Smudge into which dark matter would be gathered at the end of the process, when the light was separated out. She smiled, as though she heard his thoughts.
“I have studied the mysteries,” she said. “I know things about how to bring the Work to completion. Do not reject me.” She said “Everyone has a seed of the light in them, you know that.”
“Sit down,” he said. “You are welcome to eat with us, as everyone is welcome. But the dogs must not touch the sheep.”
“Come with Mummy,” she said, taking her gaze off his face, cutting the electric current between them.
He sat at the table with them, but he didn’t eat. He didn’t eat at all, that day, and every day he ate less. He knew that they liked him to be with them when they ate their lovingly cooked feasts, and he sampled things to please them, flakes of oats, spoons of lentils, grains of wheat. Eating was necessary to life. But his body appeared not to need to eat. It appeared to him to be becoming transparent. Sometimes he spoke to them, whilst they ate. He told them about the Manichees’ respect for the particles of light trapped in seeds and apples. He told them about the spirit, trapped in flesh, which could be released into light by disciplining and diminishing the flesh. He knew, when he began to speak, that the whole air in the room became still and heavy with the mass and energy of their attention, like the concentration of power around lightning-conductors, before thunder. He looked into their upturned faces, and their faces shone a mild light, a pale gold warmth on him. But also the dark holes of their eyes, and their open mouths, with the wet shine on their teeth, took him in and ingested him, consumed his body of light as the flame consumes the candle.
They were eating him, and he was a trained theologian and knew to what this thought related. Gideon still broke bread ceremonially at all these meals, bustling from seat to seat with his warm-smelling basket of crust and crumb. If he was eaten up, would he become light, or nothing, or be scattered and broken into dispersed specks of light-energy? He was not a god, he was a being, he did not understand his own nature, he only knew that it was not what he had been told it was. The Syzygos knew what he was, but had not been seen for some time. And now this semi-Egyptian mummy was come. He saw blood on Gideon’s bread. He had never told any of them about the blood. Like the whiff of the flame of his anger it needed to be hidden until it broke out and drowned everything.
They were emptying him out, the marrow of him, leaving the ice-glass husk walking in the light.
He walked, too, when it was dark, most of the night. As he did not eat, so he did not sleep. He prayed, if it could be called prayer, his white head and his pale face turned up, as he strode across the dark pastures, to the pale stars and the white moon. He walked more, and faster, by full moon. He did not believe that light was flowing in brimming bucketsful to the well of the moon, for he knew a little, though not much, about the planetary system and the modern cosmos. He knew that the moon pulled the great mass of the oceans around the rocky sphere of the planet he stood on, with its molten centre, and he knew that the pale light pulled him, pulled the life out of him. He knew a body needed sleep, as it needed food, and he knew his own body was in revolt, was trying to dispense with both. His cold energy was coming from elsewhere. His inner flame was diminishing to a pinhead, like the stuttering bubble on the wick of an almost-empty lighter. He felt his own blood running like lighter-fuel, and knew enough to know that it was full of red corpuscles and white, and in his mind’s-eye he saw his veins transparent, and the dangerous red turning white, the pale seeds of light extinguishing the blood-red which tried to ingest them, escaping, bubble by bubble, from bloodstream to innocent air. He cat-napped after walking. If he was exhausted in his body, he didn’t dream, and he didn’t like to dream.
He also instituted what he called “Night Watches.” He liked to sit motionless, on the floor, in front of the empty television, which he liked to have on when it was transmitting nothing, full of whirling snowflakes of light. He had devised a spiritual exercise in which he poured the blood into the glass tank of the box, and the snowflakes soaked it up, and dispersed it, as though it had never been. He did not tell the others about the blood. He kept his most secret things in his heart. He was strong and very fragile. He permitted occasional privileged Hearers to watch with him in the dark hours. Lucy came and sat quietly. Lucas Simmonds was banished: he was told courteously that he perturbed the currents in the box. This remark was and was not a joke. Gideon—who did not often come—was twice asked to leave because Joshua could smell sex on his clothes. He did not give this reason. He said Gideon’s spirit was disturbed, and Gideon accepted his judgement with a soft smile in his beard. Ruth came, now and then, and Canon Holly, who was forbidden to smoke, but stank of dead burning. Clemency came. Zag came, but could not keep still for long.
The night of the day of the coming of Eva Wijnnobel, he was perturbed. He went up to the Night Watch room, and turned away those who timidly, or meekly, tried to join him. I must be alone, he said, not wishing to be weak enough to ask for their understanding, and therefore speaking forbiddingly. Lucy nevertheless had the temerity to say “I want to watch with you,” and because he had to say “Not tonight” he had also to touch her hair, and her tremulous red cheek. She kissed his fingers, and withdrew. Then he was alone with his own disturbance.
He lit the box, but did not sit down in his usual meditative position. He walked restlessly, and became aware that the rectangle of glitter was reflected like a ghost of itself both in the dark window of the room, and in the skylight. He took off his shoes and stood in the place where the lines which joined the shadows to their origin crossed and recrossed, as he turned his head. He had a sense of power, and recognition, as though this bare room was a lovely place he had known, and been seeking, all his life. The face of the Syzygos, unlined and smiling, appeared on the black windows and the bright box. The Other said, as he had said before, come out, come out in the moonlight, and Ramsden saw the full moon hanging in window and skylight, perfectly framed, hugely sailing, clouded, clear, clouded, clear, dizzying. He went out, purposeful and barefoot, slipping the back-door catch with confident stealth, striding silently across the farmyard, under the trees, which blackened the moon with turbulent spikes, and out on to the moor, where it sailed high, the shreds of cloud dropping away like dead skin, dead lashes, leaving the great silver eye staring blankly. The Other came to him barefoot, dressed in white, over the heather. His hair gave out white light, his smile was lightness. You have had the sign, the Other told him. His voice was unbearably pleasant. You have been visited, now you are ready to make the descent. It will be hard and hurtful, but if you return, you will be able to save them. To save yourself, and all of them.
Will you come, with me, he asked the Other. The Other smiled more and more. I must come, he said. I am the executioner. I conduct the evacuation. I will be there. We will go down into the dark together.
Then he knew he was having a fit in the moonlight, and he was cast down on the heather. In foam and froth, bones and teeth jerking and jangling, flesh bruised and bleeding.
They went down together a long way, into a funnel of rock so deep that the orifice was smaller than the illusory mo
on, and then smaller than a pinhead, and then it was dark. His feet were cold, the uneven stairs were icy and slippery. He found his voice, and asked the Other, whom he could no longer see, if he was now dead. The Other replied cheerfully that he was not dead, no, but they were going among the dead, and when he had spoken to them, he would know death. I do know death, he told the Other, death is what I know. The Other told him that he did not know that he had been excluded, evacuated, eliminated. The dead, the Other told him, hang on the underground roots of the Tree, and cannot leave them. They have their own moon, but it is only a makeshift, and you may not be able to see by it. It is a fake moon they made from stolen light. They make fake living-things in their heads, the dead, though they would do better to let go.
Then after a long, or a short, an immeasurable time, he began to be aware of the dead hanging like black fruit, or folded bats, or bundles of tubing, from the immense knot of violently-probing iron-hard roots he saw above him, moving through earth-crust like great blind worms, hung about with hairs that also thrust out, clung, thickened, entered cracks and crevices. The dead were fitfully restless. There was a smell of humus, and a sickly smell he remembered.
They went on, and on. He had been in that place long enough to know that simply being there, in that stultifying closeness, was worse than torture. He asked if the dead had faces. They make fake faces, he was told. With an effort of will, they make fake faces. You will see faces. He said he did not want to see faces, and was told brightly that it was not a question of want or not want. The Syzygos’ voice reminded him of something. His father’s church voice, telling him what was good for his soul. He did not want to see his hanged father but his mouth would not form those words. To be helpless in dream, or vision, or dream-vision, is to be more helpless than anything living, with any semblance of will or thought, can comprehend.