"This is better," Will insisted.
"You mean, it's more delicious. That's why it's such an enormous temptation. The only temptation that God could succumb to. The fruit of the ignorance of good and evil. What heavenly lusciousness, what a supermango! God had been stuffing Himself with it for billions of years. Then all of a sudden, up comes Homo sapiens, out pops the knowledge of good and evil. God had to switch to a much less palatable brand of fruit. You've just eaten a slice of the original supermango, so you can sympathize with Him."
A chair creaked, there was a rustle of skirts, then a series of small busy sounds that he was unable to interpret. What was she doing? He could have answered that question by simply opening his eyes. But who cared, after all, what she might be doing? Nothing was of any importance except this blazing uprush of bliss and understanding.
"Supermango to fruit of knowledge--I'm going to wean you," she said, "by easy stages."
There was a whirring sound. From the shallows, a bubble of recognition reached the surface of consciousness. Susila had been putting a record on the turntable of a phonograph and now the machine was in motion.
"Johann Sebastian Bach," he heard her saying. "The music that's closest to silence, closest, in spite of its being so highly organized, to pure, hundred percent proof Spirit."
The whirring gave place to musical sounds. Another bubble of recognition came shooting up; he was listening to the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto.
It was the same, of course, as the Fourth Brandenburg he had listened to so often in the past--the same and yet completely different. This Allegro--he knew it by heart. Which meant that he was in the best possible position to realize that he had never really heard it before. To begin with, it was no longer he, William Asquith Farnaby, who was hearing it. The Allegro was revealing itself as an element in the great present Event, a manifestation at one remove of the luminous bliss. Or perhaps that was putting it too mildly. In another modality this Allegro was the luminous bliss; it was the knowledgeless understanding of everything apprehended through a particular piece of knowledge; it was undifferentiated awareness broken up into notes and phrases and yet still all-comprehendingly itself. And of course all this belonged to nobody. It was at once in here, out there, and nowhere. The music which, as William Asquith Farnaby, he had heard a hundred times before, he had been reborn as an unowned awareness. Which was why he was now hearing it for the first time. Unowned, the Fourth Brandenburg had an intensity of beauty, a depth of intrinsic meaning, incomparably greater than anything he had ever found in the same music when it was his private property.
"Poor idiot" came up in a bubble of ironic comment. The poor idiot hadn't wanted to take yes for an answer in any field but the aesthetic. And all the time he had been denying, by the mere fact of being himself, all the beauty and meaning he so passionately longed to say yes to. William Asquith Farnaby was nothing but a muddy filter, on the hither side of which human beings, nature, and even his beloved art had emerged bedimmed and bemired, less, other and uglier than themselves. Tonight, for the first time, his awareness of a piece of music was completely unobstructed. Between mind and sound, mind and pattern, mind and significance, there was no longer any babel of biographical irrelevances to drown the music or make a senseless discord. Tonight's Fourth Brandenburg was a pure datum--no, a blessed donum--uncorrupted by the personal history, the secondhand notions, the ingrained stupidities with which, like every self, the poor idiot, who wouldn't (and in art plainly couldn't) take yes for an answer, had overlaid the gifts of immediate experience.
And tonight's Fourth Brandenburg was not merely an unowned Thing in Itself; it was also, in some impossible way, a Present Event with an infinite duration. Or rather (and still more impossibly, seeing that it had three movements and was being played at its usual speed) it was without duration. The metronome presided over each of its phrases; but the sum of its phrases was not a span of seconds and minutes. There was a tempo, but no time. So what was there?
"Eternity," Will was forced to answer. It was one of those metaphysical dirty words which no decent-minded man would dream of pronouncing even to himself, much less in public. "Eternity, my brethren," he said aloud. "Eternity, blah-blah." The sarcasm, as he might have known it would, fell completely flat. Tonight those four syllables were no less concretely significant than the four letters of the other class of tabooed words. He began to laugh.
"What's so funny?" she asked.
"Eternity," he answered. "Believe it or not, it's as real as shit."
"Excellent!" she said approvingly.
He sat there motionlessly attentive, following with ear and inward eye the interwoven streams of sound, the interwoven streams of congruous and equivalent lights, that flowed on timelessly from one sequence to another. And every phrase of this well-worn familiar music was an unprecedented revelation of beauty that went pouring upwards, like a multitudinous fountain, into another revelation as novel and amazing as itself. Stream within stream--the stream of the solo violin, the streams of the two recorders, the manifold streams of the harpsichord and the little orchestra of assorted strings. Separate, distinct, individual--and yet each of the streams was a function of all the rest, each was itself in virtue of its relationship to the whole of which it was a component.
"Dear God!" he heard himself whispering.
In the timeless sequence of change the recorders were holding a single long-drawn note. A note without upper partials, clear, pellucid, divinely empty. A note (the word came bubbling up) of pure contemplation. And here was another inspirational obscenity that had now acquired a concrete meaning and might be uttered without a sense of shame. Pure contemplation, unconcerned, beyond contingency, outside the context of moral judgments. Through the uprushing lights he caught a glimpse, in memory, of Radha's shining face as she talked of love as contemplation, of Radha once again, sitting cross-legged, in a focused intensity of stillness, at the foot of the bed where Lakshmi lay dying. This long pure note was the meaning of her words, the audible expression of her silence. But, always, flowing through and along with the heavenly emptiness of that contemplative fluting was the rich sound, vibration within passionate vibration, of the violin. And surrounding them both--the notes of contemplative detachment and the notes of passionate involvement--was this network of sharp dry tones plucked from the wires of the harpsichord. Spirit and instinct, action and vision--and around them the web of intellect. They were comprehended by discursive thought, but comprehended, it was obvious, only from the outside, in terms of an order of experience radically different from that which discursive thinking professes to explain.
"It's like a Logical Positivist," he said.
"What is?"
"That harpsichord."
Like a Logical Positivist, he was thinking in the shallows of his mind, while in the depths the great Event of light and sound timelessly unfolded. Like a Logical Positivist talking about Plotinus and Julie de Lespinasse.
The music changed again, and now it was the violin that sustained (how passionately!) the long-drawn note of contemplation, while the two recorders took up the theme of active involvement and repeated it--the identical form imposed upon another substance--in the mode of detachment. And here, dancing in and out between them, was the Logical Positivist, absurd but indispensable, trying to explain, in a language incommensurable with the facts, what is was all about.
In the Eternity that was as real as shit, he went on listening to these interwoven streams of sound, went on looking at these interwoven streams of light, went on actually being (out there, in here, and nowhere) all that he saw and heard. And now, abruptly, the character of the light underwent a change. These interwoven streams, which were the first fluid differentiations of an understanding on the further side of all particular knowledge, had ceased to be a continuum. Instead, there was, all of a sudden, this endless succession of separate forms--forms still manifestly charged with the luminous bliss of undifferentiated being, but limited now, isolated, individualized. S
ilver and rose, yellow and pale green and gentian blue, an endless succession of luminous spheres came swimming up from some hidden source of forms and, in time with the music, purposefully constellated themselves into arrays of unbelievable complexity and beauty. An inexhaustible fountain that sprayed out into conscious patternings, into lattices of living stars. And as he looked at them, as he lived their life and the life of this music that was their equivalent, they went on growing into other lattices that filled the three dimensions of an inner space and changed incessantly in another, timeless dimension of quality and significance.
"What are you hearing?" Susila asked.
"Hearing what I see," he answered. "And seeing what I hear."
"And how would you describe it?"
"What it looks like," Will answered, after a long silence, "what it sounds like, is the creation. Only it's not a one-shot affair. It's nonstop, perpetual creation."
"Perpetual creation out of no-what nowhere into something somewhere--is that it?"
"That's it."
"You're making progress."
If words had come more easily and, when spoken, had been a little less pointless, Will would have explained to her that knowledgeless understanding and luminous bliss were a damn sight better than even Johann Sebastian Bach.
"Making progress," Susila repeated. "But you've still got a long way to go. What about opening your eyes?"
Will shook his head emphatically.
"It's time you gave yourself a chance of discovering what's what."
"What's what is this," he muttered.
"It isn't," she assured him. "All you've been seeing and hearing and being is only the first what. Now you must look at the second one. Look, and then bring the two together into a single inclusive what's-what. So open your eyes, Will. Open them wide."
"All right," he said at last and reluctantly, with an apprehensive sense of impending misfortune, he opened his eyes. The inner illumination was swallowed up in another kind of light. The fountain of forms, the colored orbs in their conscious arrays and purposefully changing lattices gave place to a static composition of uprights and diagonals, of flat planes and curving cylinders, all carved out of some material that looked like living agate, and all emerging from a matrix of living and pulsating mother-of-pearl. Like a blind man newly healed and confronted for the first time by the mystery of light and color, he stared in uncomprehending astonishment. And then, at the end of another twenty timeless bars of the Fourth Brandenburg, a bubble of explanation rose into consciousness. He was looking, Will suddenly perceived, at a small square table, and beyond the table at a rocking chair, and beyond the rocking chair at a blank wall of whitewashed plaster. The explanation was reassuring for in the eternity that he had experienced between the opening of his eyes and the emergent knowledge of what he was looking at, the mystery confronting him had deepened from inexplicable beauty to a consummation of shining alienness that filled him, as he looked, with a kind of metaphysical terror. Well, this terrifying mystery consisted of nothing but two pieces of furniture and an expanse of wall. The fear was allayed, but the wonder only increased. How was it possible that things so familiar and commonplace could be this? Obviously it wasn't possible; and yet there it was, there it was.
His attention shifted from the geometrical constructions in brown agate to their pearly background. Its name, he knew, was "wall" but in experienced fact it was a living process, a continuing series of transubstantiations from plaster and whitewash into the stuff of a supernatural body--into a god-flesh that kept modulating, as he looked at it, from glory to glory. Out of what the word bubbles had tried to explain away as mere calcimine some shaping spirit was evoking an endless succession of the most delicately discriminated hues, at once faint and intense, that emerged out of latency and went flushing across the god-body's divinely radiant skin. Wonderful, wonderful! And there must be other miracles, new worlds to conquer and be conquered by. He turned his head to the left and there (appropriate words had bubbled up almost immediately) was the large marble-topped table at which they had eaten their supper. And now, thick and fast, more bubbles began to rise. This breathing apocalypse called "table" might be thought of as a picture by some mystical Cubist, some inspired Juan Gris with the soul of Traherne and a gift for painting miracles with conscious gems and the changing moods of water-lily petals.
Turning his head a little further to the left he was startled by a blaze of jewelry. And what strange jewelry! Narrow slabs of emerald and topaz, of ruby and sapphire and lapis lazuli, blazing away, row above row, like so many bricks in a wall of the New Jerusalem. Then--at the end, not in the beginning--came the word, in the beginning were the jewels, the stained-glass windows, the walls of paradise. It was only now, at long last, that the word "bookcase" presented itself for consideration.
Will raised his eyes from the book-jewels and found himself at the heart of a tropical landscape. Why? Where? Then he remembered that, when (in another life) he first entered the room, he had noticed, over the bookcase, a large, bad water color. Between sand dunes and clumps of palms a widening estuary receding towards the open sea, and above the horizon enormous mountains of cloud towered into a pale sky. "Feeble," came bubbling up from the shallows. The work, only too obviously, of a not very gifted amateur. But that was now beside the point, for the landscape had ceased to be a painting and was now the subject of the painting--a real river, real sea, real sand glaring in the sunshine, real trees against a real sky. Real to the nth, real to the point of absoluteness. And this real river mingling with a real sea was his own being engulfed in God. "'God' between quotation marks?" enquired an ironical bubble. "Or God (!) in a modernist, Pickwickian sense?" Will shook his head. The answer was just plain God--the God one couldn't possibly believe in, but who was self-evidently the fact confronting him. And yet this river was still a river, this sea the Indian Ocean. Not something else in fancy dress. Unequivocally themselves. But at the same time unequivocally God.
"Where are you now?" Susila asked.
Without turning his head in her direction, Will answered, "In heaven, I suppose," and pointed at the landscape.
"In heaven--still? When are you going to make a landing down here?"
Another bubble of memory came up from the silted shallows. "'Something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light'--of something or other."
"But Wordsworth also talked about the still sad music of humanity."
"Luckily," said Will, "there are no humans in this landscape."
"Not even any animals," she added, with a little laugh. "Only clouds and the most deceptively innocent-looking vegetables. That's why you'd better look at what's on the floor."
Will dropped his eyes. The grain on the floorboards was a brown river, and the brown river was an eddying, ongoing diagram of the world's divine life. At the center of that diagram was his own right foot, bare under the straps of its sandal, and startlingly three-dimensional, like the marble foot, revealed by a searchlight, of some heroic statue. "Boards," "grain," "foot"--through the glib explanatory words the mystery stared back at him, impenetrable and yet, paradoxically, understood. Understood with that knowledgeless understanding to which, in spite of sensed objects and remembered names, he was still open.
Suddenly, out of the tail of his eye, he caught a glimpse of quick, darting movement. Openness to bliss and understanding was also, he realized, an openness to terror, to total incomprehension. Like some alien creature lodged within his chest and struggling in anguish, his heart started to beat with a violence that made him tremble. In the hideous certainty that he was about to meet the Essential Horror, Will turned his head and looked.
"It's one of Tom Krishna's pet lizards," she said reassuringly.
The light was as bright as ever; but the brightness had changed its sign. A glow of sheer evil radiated from every gray-green scale of the creature's back, from its obsidian eyes and the pulsing of its crimson throat, from the armored edges of its nostrils and its slitlike mouth. H
e turned away. In vain. The Essential Horror glared out of everything he looked at. Those compositions by the mystical Cubist--they had turned into intricate machines for doing nothing malevolently. That tropical landscape, in which he had experienced the union of his own being with the being of God--it was now simultaneously the most nauseating of Victorian oleographs and the actuality of hell. On their shelves, the rows of book-jewels beamed with a thousand watts of darkness visible. And how cheap these gems of the abyss had become, how indescribably vulgar! Where there had been gold and pearl and precious stones there were only Christmas-tree decorations, only the shallow glare of plastic and varnished tin. Everything still pulsed with life, but with the life of an infinitely sinister bargain basement. And that, the music now affirmed, that was what Omnipotence was perpetually creating--a cosmic Woolworth stocked with mass-produced horrors. Horrors of vulgarity and horrors of pain, of cruelty and tastelessness, of imbecility and deliberate malice.
"Not a gecko," he heard Susila saying, "not one of our nice little house lizards. A hulking stranger from outdoors, one of the bloodsuckers. Not that they suck blood, of course. They merely have red throats and go purple in the face when they get excited. Hence that stupid name. Look! There he goes!"
Will looked down again. Preternaturally real, the scaly horror with its black blank eyes, its murderer's mouth, its blood-red throat pumping away while the rest of the body lay stretched along the floor as still as death, was now within six inches of his foot.
"He's seen his dinner," said Susila. "Look over there to your left, on the edge of the matting."
He turned his head.
"Gongylus gongyloides," she went on. "Do you remember?"
Yes, he remembered. The praying mantis that had settled on his bed. But that was in another existence. What he had seen then was merely a rather odd-looking insect. What he saw now was a pair of inch-long monsters, exquisitely grisly, in the act of coupling. Their bluish pallor was barred and veined with pink, and the wings that fluttered continuously, like petals in a breeze, were shaded at the edges with deepening violet. A mimicry of flowers. But the insect forms were undisguisable. And now even the flowery colors had undergone a change. Those quivering wings were the appendages of two brightly enameled gadgets in the bargain basement, two little working models of a nightmare, two miniaturized machines for copulation. And now one of the nightmare machines, the female, had turned the small flat head, all mouth and bulging eyes, at the end of its long neck--had turned it and (dear God!) had begun to devour the head of the male machine. First a purple eye was chewed out, then half the bluish face. What was left of the head fell to the ground. Unrestrained by the weight of the eyes and jaws, the severed neck waved wildly. The female machine snapped at the oozing stump, caught it and, while the headless male uninterruptedly kept up his parody of Ares in the arms of Aphrodite, methodically chewed.