I am pained by this; after all, it is only my abject humility which has created this omnipotent attitude in Tarquin, which he glorifies as a superiority.
“No, but you don’t understand me, really,” insists the hero. “You only see the façade: underneath there are enormous reserves of strength, withstanding crisis after crisis. If there weren’t I should be dead by now.”
I close down and sit at the desk, reading some of the latest love lyrics that the new mode of life has been hatching out for him. “The springtide of desire, my dear,” Tarquin said to me. “Positively a lyric vein running through me—a nerve of lyricism.”
There is no news. Day by day we are breaking down, boring down, into the pulp chamber of matter, and day by day the world becomes less integral, less whole; and the unison with it less pure. This is the ice age of components.
At night I fuel the car and set off on immense journeys of discovery, plotting my path across the icefields, the land of polarized light where everything is lunacy and lanterns, and the Ganges of the spirit flows between the banks of black sand. On the eastern shores the boats snub quietly at anchor. The snow pelts them, and rimes their rigging. All sorts of new languages seem to be coming within my grasp: the formulae of the sciences, the runes, the surds; I am such a vatful of broken, chaotic material that it will be a miracle if anything can ever reassemble this crude magma, detritus, gabbro, into a single organic whole—even a book. But the hunger, the ravening at the bottom of all this, I recognize at last. It is not a thirst for love or money or sex, but a thirst for living. The pulp chamber is desire, the principle a sort of mania, a love—in which you play almost no part whatsoever. I refer to you now as I refer to the moon, anoia, or sordes. In my journeys I puzzle over our relationship, our mutual acts, our occasional miseries; and find them always outside the mainspring of this principle, this progressive dementia, in which I am reaching out, forever reaching out with crooked arms and empty mind towards the inaccessible absolute. This is the theme of travel whether the towns whirl by me under the moon, or whether I am at my deal desk in the Commercial School. Thule, ultima Thule. There is a stepping-off place—a little Tibetan village, stuck like a springboard in the side of the mountains. There are no friends to see us off: our banners, our catchwords, our heroism—these things are not understood here. The natives have other criteria. Beyond us the passes open like flowers in the setting sun, the delicate gates of the unknown country’s body, the Yoni of the world, luteous, luteous, unbearably lonely. Is the journey plural or am I alone? It is a question only to be answered at the outposts. I will turn perhaps and find a shadow beside me. No tears can scald the snow, or the malevolence of the white peaks. I can invoke no help except the idiotic squeaking of the prayer wheel. We move softly down the white slopes, irresistible as a gathering landslide, towards the last gaunt limit of flesh. Now we have nothing in common but our clothes and our language. The priests have stolen the rest as gifts for God. The ice under our hoofs aches and screeches, murderous as the squeegee. This is the great beginning I planned for so long. How will it end?
I am recalled from this excursion by a rap at the door. Chamberlain. “What do you think?” he says, throwing his hat on the rack with the air of a matador. “She’s pregnant.” We sit down on the sofa and he collapses with laughter, showing every tooth in his head. Then he sits a while sniffing hysterically, stroking my knee and talking about morning sickness, evening sickness and midnight belly bumping. He is all unnerved, but filled with a kind of fanatical happiness. “So everything seems settled. God! what fools we make of ourselves. All the agony I’ve been through, over a damn ten-centimetre foetus. By the way, I’ve got a marvellous job, two hundred a year more. I’m through with the body mystical and all that stuff from now, I can tell you.…” He is planning a beautiful suburban existence, complete with lawn-mower and greenhouse, I can see that. I have not the will to mutter anything but compliments to him. The child will be stillborn, I know, but I am not allowed to tell him that. I try to see him not as a person but as part of the active world—the world I am trying to create here: the snow, I mean, the blind crooked snow like soft immense drifts of needles, and the unresponsive hotel beds to which my other mimes go at night, expecting to draw comfort from them, but get none. Lobo and Tarquin facing each other over the fire, the muffins, the counterpoint of the third Brandenburg. Two separate continents. Spanish America like the crucifix over the bed the thin gold chain round his hairy little wrist. The rows of coloured shoes in their ballet. Perez, the most elegant loafer of five continents, in whom all languages blend and become accessible, all women become a single archetype. Morgan the comic fiend of the Inferno stoking the boilers of God. Bazain, Farnol, Peters petering out in saltpetre. Or Tarquin, his great grammarian’s cranium spinning like a top in the candle-shine; his great white feet frozen in their furred slippers: participant in a European death as yet incomprehensible to most Europeans. Or Perez, on his huge twinkling feet, sparring with Morgan in front of the boilers at midnight. “Pull your punches, now. Don’t forget,” he says; and this idea Morgan holds in his mind with great difficulty, ponderously, like a dog. But when there is blood soaking into the soft leather of the gloves; blood in a long wave flowing over Perez’ mouth and chin; blood that marks his man wherever he hits him; then the control goes, and the butcher lights up in Morgan. An almost visible light, like candles shining under the skin. And the air is thick with their shuffling bodies, falling, chopped, panting.
Or even Miss Smith, if you like: carried on a pole before the tribe, yet sitting in the corner of the car, tittering at Lobo’s gallantries. Diving into her handbag to produce more powder, which runs off her face into her lap. Talking to Eustace Adams in tones completely inaudible. Being afraid of Marney. And above all mugging up Chaucer’s obscenities solemnly in the notes. Incomprehensible, incomprehensible.
There is a lot about death in this; too much perhaps, for I have subscribed very heavily to Tarquin’s bucket-shop ideals. For him it is really the death—the Bastard Death, if you like, or the Death Under the Shield—really a death to the ultimate cinder; but for us, why, we are vividly alive as yet. That is why this cathedral absolute appals us. Your hands as they turn outward to take flight, for example; the action of the bee, the tree, the fistful of feathers my brother murdered last winter with his gun. All living in an exquisite tactuality by their action, ultimately living. Under the bone the living twigs of the cypress, the beak of the snipe, the foggy klaxons of the mallard coming up across the guns. Or asleep, and the fingers laid about your face, and hair washing up under the house in a long swish, a sea of hair breathing under the windows, over our dreams, into the night. If there is any passion in this writing, anywhere, it is because I am creating a death I almost shared. I mistook if for my own property. I know now, for the first time, where I stand. We are nothing if we cannot convert the dross of temporal death; if we cannot present our cheque at the bank, and receive for our daily death, a fee in good clean sovereigns—images, heat, water, the statues in the park, snow on the hills. The terrific action of the senses. The dead bullion of dying cashed in clean coin day by day, and every morsel of broken tissue redeemed for us; by this love, perhaps, this winter comet, a poem, the landlady, scholarship, Zarian or the shape of Mexico. My battle with the dragon has intoxicated me. Day by day now, increasingly day by day, I can feel the continents running in my veins, the rivers, the oceans balanced in a cone on my navel. I am no longer afraid of this heraldry. I have given myself to it utterly.
“Come,” says old Tarquin, afraid to be left alone in the dimension he has begun to inhabit. “Come, share with me. We shall control the temporal world. We shall be monarchs of all we survey. Look. In this room I have the sum total of all human and esoteric knowledge, printed on paper. Need we ever stir outside to examine the apparent reality? The essential truth lies within us. Come.”
But already I am too concerned with the details of the journey even to answer him. I try sometimes to explai
n to him what I am feeling, but it is no good. “Why move?” he demands indignantly. “What is wrong with my intellectual attitude, sitting still in the Lotus pose? It is airtight, my dear.”
Well, incomprehensibly enough, I decide to go my own bloody way, whether he understands it or not. I have entered into the personality of the external things, and am sharing their influences. I skate along the borders of the daily trivialities like a ghost, observing but withholding myself from them. There are such things as the Banquet of the Sydenham Cycling Club, for example, which I would write about if I were less tired. There is Honeywoods and the vexed problem of the drainage. There is Marney talking about getting married; and a host of other data for which there is no room. There is Eustace, going down, as he says, “into the valley of the shadow” as his wife has her fourth. There are also the incest ceremonies in the Spice Islands, the five-foot negrito with the everted lips, and races dying out in Iceland because of pelvic rickets.… Above all there is the journey. It has become so real to me that I have developed a sort of evasiveness when refusing invitations. “If I am here”, I say, “on Tuesday I’d love to come.” Or, “Tuesday? Well, I may not …” Etc., etc. Very soon I shall have to take at least a week-end return to Cherbourg in order to satisfy my friends. Everyone inquires solicitously: “Let me see, you’re going away, aren’t you?” Or, “By the way, when did you say you were leaving?” I shall begin on the first fine day in spring. May will find me scudding southward under the trades, in the direction of the quest—perhaps in the wrong direction. There is only trial and error on a journey like this, and no signposts. The end is somewhere beyond even Ethiopia or Tibet: the land where God is a yellow man, an old philosopher brooding over his swanpan.
In the light of Sunday afternoon this must be read quaintly. On Sundays we have a nice matey card party in Hilda’s room, at the bamboo table with three legs. The wireless is turned on full, and occasionally we get most beautifully incongruous things through it The Ninth Symphony, for example, or an aria for the toothbrush. No one is worried, not even Peters, who feels compelled to acknowledge art even if he has no taste for it. “Ah!” he will say cleverly, “Bach.” He is puzzled when we laugh at him. Imagine it. That stale room with the Ninth Symphony scratching away and Clare smoking his scented fags and polishing his fingernails; and the stuffed owls on the mantelpiece looking so damned critical and deprecating that one could weep with hysteria. Hilda in her scarlet flannel nightgown pouring weak tea for us and losing farthings at vingt-et-un. Or Lobo crossing himself over every natural he gets. I tell you it is a sort of picture for a Spanish almanac.
Upstairs, in the long room overlooking the Adriatic, where the tide blows up clean from Africa, you are lying. Your face is as clear as water. Softly posed in the moonlight like a forgotten desert you are lying, living and dying, lulled, systolic, diastolic motion, as the waves shiver their enormous spasms on the beach. What is poignant is this hour, this late waning moonlight, the Pleiades wheeling over your dramatic Sapphic, the enormous clouds, the surf, the monk shivering in his cell among the candles, the dolphins turning, and the face, the white face turned up blind to Africa like a pilgrim blind with dream. Nothing else. In this dead night under a dead Greek myth I tell you finally that it is not death. It is life in her wholeness from which one draws this terrible system of love, of creation, of loss. In Cyprus under the trees, Athens, Sicily, the same long purifying tides throw up their pure lotion across the statues, the robes, the eyes of the huddled philosophers who outfaced the truth. The churches are stiff with beards and candles, celebrating the dark mass of the spirit as it enters its absolute aloneness. In the cathedrals under the sea we tread the aisles of weeds, and listen for the long chime of bells, bubbled under the water for centuries, among the cargoes of grain and millet, raisins and fruit: argosies which are reckoned on no merchant’s sheets. Cross over to Bethlehem. They will be able to tell you for certain whether something has been born from this discord of the elements, or whether the fiat has gone forth; whether this is a pre-nativity or a post-mortem!
Out of that void in which the dream lies, coiled and fatal as the dragon, I conjure these few pieces of religion above a body lying silent as death, and as spacious. Hushed, in a new temperature, as if under glass the single dark candle of the torso ended in little blunt pebbles, toes. Or hair like a soft bed of breathing charcoal laid about the islands, twisting up its coils in soft explosions on the beaches. Outside on the beach the old women are sweeping up the seaweed in a heavy wind. Can you hear what is said in the screaming of the olives, in the dramatic archery of the cypresses? Verminous, the top-hatted monks huddle to mass in Athos, going through the familiar litanies, without comfort. What does it mean, this language, this voice raised to the roof like a thick stump of sound, these vulgar armed candles? In England there is an old man who feeds the swans, slowly burning down, damp, rheumy, sour, into the hollow socket of his breast. The poets hymn his simplicity. What does this mean? If he were an old bun-nosed Tibetan feeding the wild swans under the Greek Islands, they would deplore the incongruity of the world.
Then there is that other moment when I come into the room just as the dawn is breaking. You are alive. There is a lot to say, but the morning is so reverent, the smoke on the bonfire lies about in parcels, the ice on the pond like an altar cloth, morning … The first long hush, like a breath drawn taut before the swimmer dives into the icy river. There are huge warm places in the field-grass where the cattle lay. Dew heavy. The black jersey still lying out over your left shoulder like a sofa on a green field. Dew heavy. The deep scent of the castle standing charred on the hill. There is much to be said, but no possible way of saying it. I can hear the ivy crawling on the walls. The sun is shining on the spoon, the toast, on your tongue. The chickens are going to market, very chilly and disgruntled. Someone is cutting wood for the fires. I am as nerveless as the morning sausages on the board. The knife slits, the sun strides up over the hill and we are able to talk again, slowly and without emphasis. Italy is mentioned. There are four gutted candles in the room. Yes, and the first edition of Baudelaire. Your voice starts queer responses in one: a bone in the groin, mastoid, the nerves of the throat, the fibres of the tibia. I cannot tell for certain, but I am bound to get a letter within a day of two. Let us walk quietly in the declension of the season, smoke a pipe over the gate, take note of how the asphodels are doing. In the little house run over the accounts, select a book, doze over the fire, or at bedtime light the candles and start the piano hymning. It is all the same, for this is a piece out of another book. It is significant merely because Tarquin is mentioned. Over the fire and the crusader’s hearth, in the smoke of pipes, Tarquin is mentioned. It is a strange immortality to be consummated here, in this cottage, drowned in flowers, under the glimmering bottoms of the books. I record it now merely to reassure myself that we are never forgotten. There is always the strange consummation of memory taking place, over the whole world, the whole of time even, until the vocabularies in which you are created fall away and are renewed.
Between that submarine cottage and this fanatic Adriatic landscape, where the tides beat up carrying us away in the impetus of their struggle towards history, there is a gulf fixed. More vast, more unexplored than the Challenger Deep. In that gulf, dancing, as in a coloured shadow-show, are the figures I keep talking about. Their shadows lie across the paper. Yachts cross, and rolling caiques; occasionally a grey warship slides across the windows, but the shadows are constant. The dolphins idle all day in clumsy regiments, mixing into the picture, crowding it. Embassies from Minos and the litmus Cretan women, but we do not forget, we do not forget, we do not forget. In spite of the immense sea, steering up and down, attacking, feinting, wheeling its range of colours under the house which stands like a white ark on the black rock. Within the thirtieth parallels North and South of the Equator like a huge humming-bird ultramarine to the South of lat. 30. S. a deep swollen indigo. Under the terrible fires of the Antarctic Circle, a glib and fearful
olive-green; always the old nurse, the Poseidon, cherishing her dead like a bear, washing through the imploded strongrooms of liners, breaking open the trunks of sailors, with a maniac love, cherishing. This is the element to which we shall be delivered up at the final moment, lulled, kneaded, softened and gushed. Smooth round shot, footfirst, parcelled in linen, shrived. Then with a long cool drop to drift down, adamant, to the planktonic organisms dither and skate, sprouting exotic eyes on floating stalks; where the sperm whales munch dredgefuls of cuttlefish and prowl like bardic Tennysons, muttering in their beards.
Come, I am always saying to Tarquin. There are still new universes to be inhabited, if you have the authentic disease and the courage. Come, drop down with me to the limits of the photic zone. Let us construct out of the sensitive bodies of this twilight race our new systems that we talk about all day long. Bathypelagic, myopic, optical, shall we dawdle away the aeons over this one problem, making a little personal propaganda as we go? At a hundred fathoms fish like silver bullets. Under the viscous scalp itself phenomena like Porpita and Ianthina, blue smoke in water. At three hundred rufous, brick, claret. The violet flesh of pteropods, wicked wicked, wicked. Here is a philosophic reality whose terminology is lying there, complete but unused. Come, you white-livered tapeworm, let us get busy. The problem is how to destroy the fatal passivity of the plankton, and give it the nektonic virtues; the ability to move with the time, and against tide. I am not concerned with the Benthos, the mud eaters, shit gobblers, and their brood. We must concentrate only on those who have a chance of being saved. (Hilda, the great sonsy whale, for instance. I have seen her dragged out on the beach and hacked open from chin to navel. Her belly so crammed with crustaceans that they put spades to work on her.) Hilda, one realizes, has fulfilled the primary law in her way. She has a baroque nobility because her gift is total. She lives with her great swollen dugs pressed out against time, in a perpetual delirium of service. And now, in the winter of our discontent, she has given up all she had to the poor. Watch her. She is sitting there calmly drinking tea, with one shoe off. Her nostrils are cut like ancient anchor ports of a ship. One expects at any moment that a length of hawser will clatter out of them and—splash!—anchor her in her own teacup. Indifferently clare clips his frayed cuffs with her scissors. And Peters sits lugubriously on the bed and wishes he were dead. Peters? A nicely clothed dummy fresh from school. The kind of waxwork that has given the English their reputation abroad. He has read all that the well-dressed man should read. His poise is superb with members of his own class. One has the idea that he could pick his nose with a cigar in his mouth and still look genteel, old cottage English, pure, bred on the bottle, etc. In the drab vertigo of Sunday afternoon we perform our motionless almanac together. We share with painted things the loss of personality, sitting here in this exotic gas-lit hothouse, among the owls and cosmetics. Hilda I know is not with us, but already entering that third ocean which has been prepared for her. Crossing the zodiac of the new universe alone, pioneer, adventurer, forerunner: from house to house, her great turbines shaking her free of the muddy littorals. Nosing down with that predatory beak of hers deeper and deeper, across the fucoid belt, the laminarian, the zosteran belt toward the absyssal deep which is marked on no card. Yes, beyond the territory of those remote tribes we only live in illuminated names: the pycnogonida, the nudibranchia, the brittlestars, the chitons, the crinoids, and the pennatulids—away beyond these into that region from which we are going to receive the new myth.