Lynda was sitting on the floor, swaying. Back and forth, and from side to side. From side to side and … on and on. She crooned or sang, then was silent. Then said, aloud, a word, and listened to it. Martha listened too. Lynda said: ‘Bread, ’ and listened. Martha listened and the word reverberated with inner messages, each one precious, as if the word itself contained little depth charges that went off in the mind: bread, bread. Bread. Or Lynda said, ‘Wine, ’ and listened.
The words kept dropping into the listening space that was Martha’s mind. She knew that if a person were to take one word, and listen; or a pebble or a jewel and look at it, the word, the stone, would give up, in the end, its own meaning and the meaning of everything. But she had known that before, and had let it slide away … Her limbs, her body kept twitching with restlessness. She was being swept by small storms, waves of-what? It was a current that made her limbs want to jerk and dance. Lynda sat swaying, back and forth, round and round, and it seemed as if Lynda’s sitting there, moving, made a force, an energy, which got into Martha and prickled along her limbs and made her want to dance, to move, to … do something, she could not remember what.
She understood that it was this that had sent Mark up to Martha, to make love. What an extraordinary phrase that was, ‘make love’. Love, love … Martha sat listening, while the word, love, exploded and bred; and thought of the act in which she had engaged so very many times and with different people: she could see Martha, in different shapes, and sizes, according to the time, her limbs moving and enlaced with this man. that man. always the same way. or so it looked from where she was now, but subjectively, putting herself back inside the act, it was not possible to use the same words for what she had felt. Mark, when he had come upstairs, possessed by the same explosive force which gripped her now, and had made love, made sex, made something; had used a very different energy from what Jack had used, all that time ago when he had made their two bodies like conductors or conduits for the force which moved them and lifted them to-she could not remember where, only that if she did not find a way of getting back there, it would be a self-betrayal. And there was Thomas: oh yes, but that was not a name she could use even now without an emotion shooting across her like a flame from a flame-thrower … She was sitting and muttering as she had years before: We don’t understand the first thing about what goes on, not the first thing. ‘Make love.’ ‘Make sex.’ ‘Orgasms.’ ‘Climaxes.’ It was all nonsense, words, sounds, invented by half-animals who understood nothing at all. Great forces as impersonal as thunder or lightning or sunlight or the movement of the oceans being contracted and heaped and rolled in their beds by the moon, swept through bodies, and now she knew quite well why Mark had come blindly upstairs to the nearest friendly body, being in the grip of this force-or a force, one of them. Not sex. Not necessarily. Not unless one chose to make it so.
Jack had once said: ‘the thousand volts’. He had been talking of hate. ‘The thousand volts of hatred.’ A thousand volts of love? A thousand volts of-compassion? of charity?
When she, Martha, had gone to Jack, as Mark had come to her, to earth his force; and found that Jack had, in the intervening years, become possessed, had succumbed (to what? she didn’t know-unless one chose to use shorthand words like evil, to be done with thinking about it), then she had simply, because she had had to, found that place in herself where the force could be dammed, contained, held. She had had to. But she had forgotten since that time that she had learned to do this because she had had to learn it.
Mark ‘plugged in’ to Lynda, had come to Martha; Martha, ‘plugged in’ to Mark, had gone to Jack. But Jack had moved away, taken a step sideways as it were (any such term would have to do) into a fresh field, on to a different ground. There were plenty of ways one could describe it, or think about it. One was: Jack had allowed himself to be taken over by a low and degraded form of mind, almost like a medieval imp or entity. In the Middle Ages they would have said he was possessed. It was as good a description as any. Or one could say: Jack had become a sadist … good, fine! And what then? This was about as much use as saying that he was possessed. It was a description.
But the point was (her point) with this new Jack (or the old Jack’s shadow side, turned outwards?), she was able to separate off in herself various strands or levels or layers simply because he had gone off into an extreme, and she was therefore forced to define, as an act of self-protection. There was woman coming to man for sex, and her reactions, which were expected, known, understood. There was woman experiencing this new thing; sadism, masochism-succumbing to it then holding it off, refusing it, looking at it. And, different from either, an impersonal current which she brought from Mark, who had it from Lynda, who had it from … the impersonal sea.
But she had known very well that bringing this current to Jack, who was now plugged in (a term that did as well as another) to hate, as he had once years before feared he could be, she was in danger. She had known she was in danger. The impersonal sea could become the thousand volts of hate as easily as it could become love-much more easily, human beings being what they are.
She had left because she had to leave. Having to leave, she had learned to contain what Mark brought from Lynda and what she experienced first as a drive to move-a need for any kind of movement at all, whether dancing, or walking, or exercising; and this before she had thought (and acted); ‘Sex-who, though? Yes, Jack.’ Leaving Jack, returning to Mark, she contained. She had forgotten that she had learned to contain. Yet, forgetting, forgetting again and again, life brings one back to points in oneself, to that place where the check is, over and over again in different ways, saying without words: this is a place where you could learn if you wanted to. Are you going to learn this time or not? No? Very well then, I’ll wait for you. If you’re not ready now, too bad! I’ll find ways of bringing you back to it again. When you are ready then …
Martha sat still in her chair, feeling herself shake, almost shake apart with the force of whatever power it was that was being generated in that room, and made herself remember what she had learned through leaving Jack. Essentially, it was keeping still, holding, waiting. She sat still; and instead of letting her limbs, or even her imagination-the same thing? move her around the walls, crave for movement, sway like Lynda, back and forth, and around and around, instead of spilling, or using, this energy in any way whatsoever, she let it accumulate—yes, that was it, of course, she had learned that too, and had forgotten it-you must let it build up…
Her head became very clear, very light, receptive, a softly lit bubble above the violence of a body whose limbs wanted to move, to jerk, even to dance; whose sex was alert, ready to flare up, and demand; where waves of-what? came and went, running and ebbing as from another invisible sea of power. If she sat quite still, or walked steadily up and down, the space in her head remained steady, or lightening and darkening in a pulse, like the irregular pulse of the sea. She had known this lightness and clarity before-yes, walking through London, long ago. And then too, it had been the reward of not-eating, not-sleeping, using her body as an engine to get her out of the small dim prison of every day. But how could she have allowed herself to forget and not have spent every moment of her time since trying to regain it, to get back here where at least one could begin to see the way out, and forward?
Martha sat, or gently walked; she was listening, receptive, waiting. And Lynda sat on the carpet, swaying, sometimes humming or crooning, nursery songs mostly, and sometimes silent. The two took no notice of each other at all.
Martha could easily hear what Lynda was thinking. Being more sensitive now, by far, than normally, she heard better: normally she could hear an odd phrase, or a key word, or a sentence or two, summarizing what was going on in somebody’s head: now it was not far off being inside Lynda’s head, for the jumble of connected words and phrases linked together by past experience, which is how we ‘think’, most of the time (a mechanical association of notions, like strings of sausages), this stream ran through h
er mind beside her own stream, or sometimes displaced it. Lynda was thinking not of the present, but of what her life would have been if she had not got ill-had not (Martha heard the words) ‘been so silly as to tell what I know’. Lynda was thinking, not violently, or even with grief, but dispassionately, how she would have liked to grow up quietly in the country, with brothers and sisters, and a simple relationship with parents, and then to marry a farmer, or a gardener, and have a large family. It was a fantasy so plain and wholesome, like Nanny Butts’s butter cake, so divorced from anything that happened now, that it had the effect of making Lynda seem capricious and spoiled, as if she had said: ‘I want to live in a marzipan house.’ And then her thoughts ran on Mark: if only Mark had not sent her to the doctor, if only Mark had trusted her-and then, earlier than that, if only her father had not made her see the doctor, and if only she, Lynda, had not said what she knew, if only she had known enough then to keep quiet…
Behind these rivulets of words was a great chaos of sound. Martha could just hear it. She thought, or wondered: is it in Lynda’s head or in mine? And, with a shock of impatience against her own obtuseness (for surely she had been here often enough not to have to ask, or wonder): well, of course, it is not a question of ‘Lynda’s mind’, or ‘Martha’s mind’; it is the human mind, or part of it, and Lynda, Martha, can choose to plug in or not. Which she had known, had known well-this business of charting the new territory meant a continual painful effort of discovery, of trying to understand, to link, to make sense, and then falling back again, ‘forgetting’; and then an effort forward again—a baby trying to walk, that was what she was; but surely there was no need for it, it was inefficient, for obviously it was not possible that Lynda, Martha, were the only two people who tried to make maps of these territories. It must be a question of looking for, and finding, the right guides.
It was as if a million radio sets ran simultaneously, and her mind plugged itself in fast to one after another, so that words, phrases, songs, sounds, came into audition and then faded. The jumble and confusion were worse when she allowed the current that pumped through her to get out of control, to rise and jerk and flood; the sea of sound became more manageable as she held herself quiet and contained. Yet even so, it was all she could do to hold on; Martha rode the current, a small boat on a fast river, or a tiny aircraft in a storm, her own body bucking and rolling under her; and words, shrieks, gunfire, explosions, sentences, came in, faded, or stayed. When something stayed then it, they, might develop or grow loud and accumulate around it other words, sounds, phrases, of the same kind or texture, like a bit of metal attracting to it particles of substances of a certain nature, so that a word, ‘bread’ proliferated into the phrase ‘bread of life’, burst into a pure high song like a thrust, from the Ninth Symphony, then jangled into banality with You can’t have bread with one meat ball, gave snatches of recipes for loaves as they were once made on a hearth, leered, jeered, threatened, on a wavelength of mockery, until suddenly-while Martha understood (again) how the words, phrases, sounds, came in from that sound-length in an exact relation to some mood or impulse in herself (as faint and as fleeting as you like) she realized that she was being taken over; she was taken over because she had allowed herself to become frightened. Her whole body, organism, vibrated, shook, was being shattered to bits, by the force with which the sea of sound entered her. Her head was a jar, a bedlam; but, as she was about to cry out, scream, let go of control, perhaps bang her rioting head against the walls, she looked at Lynda sitting quiet on her part of the carpet, and remembered that some days before, during Lynda’s long progress around and around the walls, she had remarked: ‘I must get through the sound barrier. Here is the sound barrier. I must get through it.’ As Martha remembered Lynda saying this, Lynda said, ‘You can, but it’s difficult. If you let it take over, then it is hard to make it go away again. Be careful.’ These words threw Martha first into a panic; then, as she flung herself down on the floor beside Lynda, thinking that it was not possible to ‘get through’ and that she was doomed forever to be shattered by sounds as powerful as pneumatic drills at work inside her brain, her whole person, apparently on the point of explosion and shaking and trembling, resisted the invasion, clenched itself in self-defence, and held, contained, gripped tight, calmed. Martha dropped off to sleep suddenly, totally, but probably not for more than a few moments, the space of some heartbeats. When she woke, or came to, her body was rested and her mind back at that point where it was soft and clear and listening, with the ocean of sound a low retreating booming noise safely far away.
She rested, face down on the carpet, eyes closed, her mind empty, as if she rocked on long waves inside a reef beyond which crashed the roaring sea.
Resting, refusing to admit the sea of sound, she saw that the small moving pictures ran before her eyes. Was it then that when in this heightened condition one was closer to, or vulnerable to that more perceptive or intelligent place in oneself that (who?) could communicate through sound, or through the small moving pictures, or. if one was in a phase of sleeping well and alertly, dreams? Was it that something that needed, that had to get itself communicated simply found, like water, the easiest channel through the lump of incomprehension which was Martha in her daylight or normal condition?
Lynda said: ‘I keep trying to find people who know but I haven’t yet. But they must be somewhere.’
She was humming lightly to herself. How many miles to Babylon? Three score miles and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again. These lines seemed full of information, just beyond Martha’s reach, but which she would one day be able to grasp. Meanwhile, before her eyes were displayed gardens rising vertically in receding banks till the plumes of fountains moved among moving white cloud; and water fell, trickled, ran, splashed, sang. She smelled sun on wet foliage.
Now Martha saw Lynda in a pale shaggy coat sitting in a kind of tea-room or self-service place, opposite a fattish, smiling Indian gentleman.
‘I can see you with an Indian in a restaurant, ’ said Martha.
Oh, yes, that’s right. It must be the flower guru, you know, he was here. I heard of him through all those books, you know. I met him in a Lyons. He kept sitting there smiling and saying God is Love. And I kept saying yes I’m sure that’s true-because I don’t feel people like us have the right to talk about God, Martha.’
Martha, watching this scene and not wanting it to be shaken away by her speaking, said nothing.
‘He gave me a large pink rose and he said, “This is Love.” So I put it in my frock.’
‘No you didn’t, you sat holding it in your hand, ’ said Martha, speaking in a fast monotone, to keep the scene steady.
Oh. did I? I thought I-then I said, “I don’t know anything about love. Other people have to look after me. I’ve never known how to love anybody. I loved my child but I couldn’t look after him. I can’t even love my husband. I’ve made him miserable for years and years because I can’t bear him to touch me.” Then he said, the Great Mother had perhaps chosen me as one of her daughters who had been freed of the tyrannies of the flesh-lust, he said. I said, nuts to that. I said, if I could go to bed with my husband and let him be happy I’d feel I’d made a step forward to love. He said, I was a victim of Western thinking. I said, if God is a rose, then God is sex. East, West, home’s best. He sat there smiling and smiling, knowing quite well in his heart that I’d see it his way as I matured-like Dr Lamb. So I got up and left.’
‘You handed him back the rose, ’ said Martha.
‘Did I? Was it then when I…? ’
Martha laughed; it was sad and funny, the soft round smiling Indian man, while Lynda stood there tall and smiling politely, holding her great pale fur around her with one hand, clutching the pink rose. Then she suddenly leaned forward to hand it to him, not meaning to, but feeling she ought to be polite, like a little girl.
Lynda walked out of the restaurant, and the scene switched off.
‘Machines, ’ remarked Lyn
da.
‘Yes. But how many? ’
‘What we want, I suppose
Martha was certainly a radio: so was Lynda. Martha was a television set, only, unlike a television set, not bound by time. She was a camera: you could take pictures of any object or person with your eyes, and bring it out afterwards to examine it-that is, depending on how you had concentrated when you looked at it. What else?
Lynda said: ‘In that first hospital where Dorothy was ill first she had a friend. She was Hortense. Hortense knew what moods the doctors were in, by the colours in the air around them. The doctor before Dr Lamb was very bad, he was always an awful dirty yellow colour, like fog, or bad breath, and when he was angry it got streaked with red.’
‘I saw red, ’ said Martha. ‘It was when I was angry.’
‘Well, so she used to scream when he came near, she said she felt suffocated. So he put the machines on her head. After she’d had the machines a few times, she didn’t see colours any more. And I used to see pictures, before the machines on my head.’
‘I wonder what colour Dr Lamb would be? ’
‘Oh, I don’t want to know. Grey. Cold. A bright cold grey-there was a nurse in that hospital, and she was always a sooty black, so said Hortense, for feet around her, the air was sooty black, except when she was giving injections-she’d stand there smiling, and the black started to have flames through it, like fires in hell, but the thing is, we’ve got it all wrong, we say men invent machines, but we make machines to do what we can do ourselves. If we didn’t have the machines and someone told us, You don’t need machines, it’s in your minds, you don’t need computers, there are human computers, perhaps we’d never have to make the machines. What do we need machines for? To dig ditches and make roads, but our brains could be rockets and space probes, if they can be radios and television sets.’