Briefing for a Descent Into Hell

by Doris Lessing

  Oh yes, that’s what our mind does most easily, but right here, in close, so close it is locked with us in a dance that moves waters and earth in tides twice a day, and swings in our veins and arteries and the tides of thought in our minds—close, flesh of our flesh, thought of our thought, Moon, Earth’s stepchild, setting our stature, setting our growth, feeding appetites and making them. Moon spinning closer in to Earth makes animals and plants such and such a size and Moon lost or disintegrated or wandering further away changes animals, plants, the height of tides and probably the movement of land masses and ice masses, changes life as draconically as a sudden shower in a desert will change everything overnight. On the surface of the little Earth, a little green film, and part and parcel with this film, being fed by it, the crust of microbes, mankind, mad, moonmad, lunatic. To celestial eyes, seen like a broth of microbes under a microscope, always at war and destruction, this scum of microbes thinks, it can see itself, it begins slowly to sense itself as one, a function, a note in the harmony, and this is its point and function, and where the scummy film transcends itself, here and here only, and never where these mad microbes say I, I, I, I, I, for saying I, I, I, I, is their madness, this is where they have been struck lunatic, made moon-mad, round the bend, crazy, for these microbes are a whole, they form a unity, they have a single mind, a single being, and never can they say I, I, without making the celestial watchers roll with laughter or weep with pity—since I suppose we are free to presume compassion and derisiveness in the guardians of the microbes; or at least we are free to imagine nothing else—compassion and amusement being our qualities, but who knows what sort of a colour or a sound laughter, tears, make there in that finer kind of air?

  Some sort of a divorce there has been somewhere along the path of this race of man between the “I” and the “We,” some sort of a terrible falling-away, and I (who am not I, but part of a whole composed of other human beings as they are of me) hovering here as if between the wings of a great white bird, feel as if I am spinning back (though it may be forwards, who knows?) yes, spinning back into a vortex of terror, like a birth in reverse, and it is towards a catastrophe, yes, that was when the microbes, the little broth that is humanity, was knocked senseless, hit for six, knocked out of their true understanding, so that ever since most have said, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, and cannot, save for a few, say, We.

  Yes, but what awful blow or knock? What sent us off centre, and away from the sweet sanity of We? In a moment I’ll know, I’m being sucked back like a mite revolving in the vortex of the bathwater, eddying into the millrace, back, back, and then, Crash! the Comet; it comes hurtling out of the dark space, gives Earth a blow to midriff, and, deflected in its course, rushes off into the dark again, taking some of the atmosphere with it, and, leaving Earth no longer circling sane and steady, but wobbling back and forth, gyrating like a top, and all askew, which is when the seasons were born, beloved of poets, but worse, the air changed, the air that they breathed which kept them sane and healthy, saying We in love and understanding for the developing organ in a celestial body which they were. The air that had been the food of sane and loving understanding became a deadly poison, the lungs of these poor little animals laboured and changed and adapted, and their poor brains, all muddled and befuddled laboured to work at all, and worked badly, a machine all awry, but always teased and tormented by a queer half memory of the time before they became poisoned and spoiled and could not think and hated each other instead of loving. And there hung Earth, a casualty, all amiss, but soon they forgot, their newly-poisoned air became their normality, a forgetting by vanity, and … but Crash, look, I’m on the other side of the Catastrophe, I’m before it. Though I’m free, too, to say “after,” since like “up and down” it is interchangeable and entirely how you look at it, how you are situated, as is backwards and forwards. But man-wise, microbe-wise, I am before the Crash and in a cool, sweet, loving air that rings with harmony, is harmony, Is, yes, and here am I, voyager, Odysseus bound for home at last, the Seeker in home waters, spiteful Neptune outwitted and Jupiter’s daughter my friend and guide.

  All men make caves of shadow for their eyes

  With hats and hands, sockets, lashes, brows,

  So tender pupils dare look at the light.

  In Northlands too where light lies shadowless

  A man will lift his hand to guard his eyes;

  It’s a thing that I’ve seen done in strong moonlight.

  At any blaze too fierce, that warden hand

  Goes to its post, keeping a dark:

  Like cats’, men’s eyes grow large and soft with night.

  New eyes they are, and still not used to see,

  Taking in facets, individual,

  With no skill yet to use them round and right.

  Think: beasts on all fours we were, low,

  With horizontal gaze kept safely from

  That pulsing flaming all eye-searing bright.

  Yet had to come that inevitable day

  A small brave beast raised up his paw to branch,

  Pulled himself high—and staggered on his height.

  Our human babes have shown us how it was.

  They clamber up; we, vigilant,

  Let them learn the folly of their fright.

  At that first venture, light stooped in salute,

  Like to like, a shimmer in the mind,

  And the beast thought it “angel”—as indeed we might.

  One paw, earth-freed, held fast the slippery branch;

  The other, freed, waited, while the eyes

  Lifted at last to birds and clouds in flight.

  And so he balanced there, a beast upright,

  And the angel, saving what he’d hardly won

  Jerked up that idle hand to guard his sight,

  In that most common gesture that is done.

  Man may not look directly at his sun.

  I gotta use words when I talk to you. Probably that sequence of words, I’ve got to use words, is a definition of all literature, seen from a different perspective.

  Enmeshed like a chord in Bach, part of a disc as exquisitely coloured as a jellyfish, all pulsing harmonies, the disc being a swirl or spiral, made up of sun and planets and baby planets and all their accretions, enmeshed, too, in Andromeda time, galaxy time, moon time (oh woe and alas) looking at the thing from any point of view but Earth Time, it is possible a change of emphasis from Saturn to Jupiter involving a change in all conditions on Earth and taking centuries (our time) may perhaps have had to find its message thus: That Jupiter fought Saturn (or Zeus, Chronos) fair and square in mortal (or immortal) combat and—not killed—but defeated him, and thereafter Jupiter was God to Earth. But here is a thought and not for the first time—of course not, there is no thought for the first time—why God? The vastest, most kingly and, so they say, most benign of planets whose rays envelop Earth in justice and equanimity (so they say) and touching certain sections of humanity, that grey mould struggling for survival in its struggling green scum, with more particularity than other sections. And on Mount Olympus bearded Jove, or Jupiter, lorded it over the subsidiary Gods—not without a certain magnificent tetchiness. But why Father? Why Father of Gods and Men? For who is our Father? Who? None other than the Sun, whose name is the deep chord underlying all others, Father Sun, Amen, Amen, as the Christians still pray. Why not Father Sun, as Lord on Olympus, why Jove, or Jupiter, Zeus? For on that mountain Phoebus Apollo was a god like others, among others—very odd, that! Of course, man cannot look directly at his Sun. Gods go in disguise, even now, as then they were, or might be, Pillars of Fire—Forcefields, Wavelengths, Presences. It is possible that the Sun, like other monarchs, needs deputies, and who more suitable than Jupiter, who is like a modest little mirror to the Sun, being, like the Sun, a swirl of coloured gas, and having, like the Sun, its parcel of little planets. After all, Sun is an item in the celestial swarm on an equal basis with the other stars, chiming in key with them, and having its chief business with them�
��for this is nothing if not a heirarchical universe, like it or not, fellow democrats. Sun can probably be viewed, though for any mortal to think such a thought comes hard, a lèse-majesté indeed, as an atom on a different time-and-motion scale, having comradeship with other, equal atoms, all being units of the galaxy, while galaxies are units and equals on another level, where suns are as tinily swarming as men (that broth of microbes) are to planets. Russian dolls, Chinese boxes!—and this is why it is not unreasonable to imagine the Great Sun, giving Jupiter a careless nod: “Be my deputy my son! I have other more important business to attend in my peer group!”

  Why Jupiter at all, if Saturn once held that place?—or at least, so the old myths do suggest. But why is it unreasonable to suppose that planets, as indeed, stars—like people—change character; for a weighty, responsible old planet in its maturity may give a very different report of itself than the same creature in its skittish youth. Perhaps Jupiter grew into the post, Lord of the Gods (as butlers are lord in the servants’ hall, the Master and Mistress being too far out of sight to count), a deputy God, while Saturn got too bad-tempered for the position. After all Saturn ate his children. They do say that Saturn’s rings are the smashed remnants of former planets.

  Who knows but that our little system is an unfortunate one, and peculiarly vulnerable to visiting comets and intermittent visitors of various kinds? Or perhaps all stars, planets, planet’s planets, are as subject to sudden calamity as men are, and the correct government and management of a star and its planets, or indeed, a galaxy and its suns, is a prudent balancing and husbanding of probabilities and substances? Who knows but that beings are not moved about among the planets, in one shape or another, as plants are moved about in a garden, or even taken indoors when frost is expected? When that comet came winging in from the dark beyond Pluto and went Bang! into poor Earth, perhaps there were warnings sent then from Jupiter (or Saturn, if it was his regency)—Take Care, Earth! the message might have gone. Or even: “Poor Earth, would you like to send us some of your inhabitants to live out a hundred or so generations as Our guests, until the unfortunate results of that Collision subside. Not on Us, of course: pure flame we are, burning Gas, like our Father, the Sun—but one of our planets would do nicely, with a little adaptation on your part.” For we may suppose, I am sure, that Planets are altogether gentler and more humane than poor beast Man, lifting his bloody muzzle to his lurid sky, to howl out his misery and his exhaustion in between battles with his kind.

  And who would convey these messages? (They have to use words when they talk to us.) For one may imagine that Hermes or Mercury (or Thoth or Buddha), the planet nearest to the Sun our Father, may transmit messages from the Gods by the fact of his condition, the shifting and meshing of the planets causing him (at certain times) to shed substances on Earth as invisible to Earth’s senses (though not to her new and her soon-to-be-invented or re-invented instruments) as the solar wind. But why Mercury—why Mercury messenger to Jupiter … there is an idea of doubleness here, of substitution, like Jupiter with the Sun. For consider how Athene, Minerva, is as much a messenger as is Mercury, the Sun’s nearest child. We may play with the idea—why not? Gnats may sing to kings, and their songs have to be guessing games. Gnats are sure they have a few ideas of their own, for the seconds their lives last. But perhaps Minerva, Jupiter’s daughter, has the same position vis-à-vis Jupiter as Mercury with the Sun. Our great lump of cold glassily ringing Moon, planet to our planethood, is in intimate enough relation with us, what of Jupiter with his—is it now twelve, subsidiaries? Perhaps the largest of them, a healthy, bouncing, rather managing girl, but handsome enough with her flashing blue eyes, runs errands for her father. A pulse darts earthwards from Jupiter’s child, a synchronising in the machinery of Jupiter, the other planets, his planets, makes an impulse that becomes thoughts in the minds of men.

  Or, words having to make do for pulses, impulses, dartings, influences, star-stuff, star-winds, up she gets, that responsible elder Daughter, and says to Jupiter: “Father, isn’t it about time you gave a thought to poor humanity in its plight, poor Odysseus pining there in the arms of the enchantress and wishing only to go home. Haven’t you punished him enough?”

  “I?” says her Father. “You are always so personal, my dear, so emotional. In the first place, I’m as bound by the cosmic harmonies as everyone else. And in the second place, it wasn’t me at all—surely you remember it was Neptune who hated him? He fell foul of the sea, that favourite of yours.”

  Who was Neptune, when Homer lived and sung. Oh, the sea, of course … but then, as now, seas like all the other forces and elements had their sympathetic planets. Neptune the planet is a new discovery, or so we think. However that may be, Odysseus the brave wanderer was hated by some force to do with the sea, the ocean in its drugged condition, its moon-madness, always tagging along after the moon. It was the ocean Odysseus displeased, could not remain in harmony with, the ocean, our moon’s creature and slave.

  Neptune had not been discovered, was discovered by us, modern man. So we know, quite definitely.

  A hundred years or so ago (earth time), divines and historians and antiquarians of all kinds stated categorically that the world was created 4000 odd years ago, and anyone who did not go along with this thesis had a hard time of it, as the memoirs, biographies and histories of that period make so sadly clear. What a great step forward into sanity and true thinking has taken place in such a very short time: they’ll concede now that the age of the physical world is longer than that—oh, quite considerably, by many millions. A hundred years of scholarly thinking has stretched back a millionfold the age of the earth. But these same divines, antiquarians and scholars are thinking now as they did a hundred years ago, when it comes to the age of civilisations; they can’t even begin to concede that civilisations might have very old histories. The earth is allowed to be millions of millions of years old, but the birth of civilisation is still set somewhere between two thousand and four thousand B.C., depending on the bias of the archeological school and the definition of civilisation. We, now, are civilisation, we are the crown of humanity, the pinnacle to which all earlier evolution aimed, computer man is the thing, and possessed of wisdom those earlier barbarians did not have: from our heights man dwindles back to barbarism and beyond that to apehood. They say (or sing) that writing was first invented in the third millennium B.C.; agriculture is so old; mathematics so old; and astronomy is dated exactly like the rest, having become scientific at that moment it divorced itself from astrology and superstition. And everything is dated and known by things, fragments of things: the children of a society that is obsessed with possessions, objects, have to think of previous civilisations in this way: slaves of their own artefacts, they know that the old barbarians were too.

  Every time a new city is dug up, the boundaries (in time) are grudgingly shifted back—a couple of hundred years perhaps, half a millennium. On a plateau in Turkey part of a top layer of a city has been laid bare, which takes a high form of human living (one dare not say civilisation) back ten thousand years, and underneath that layer are many other layers, still unexcavated … but do the specialists say: We cannot make any pronouncements at all about human history, because our knowledge (or our guesses) is limited to the last site we have (partly) dug? No, no, not at all, what their present knowledge is—is knowledge, for this is how they always go on, it seems they have to, it is how their unfortunate brains are formed.

  Well, it is at least possible that astronomers of ten thousand, or even twenty thousand, or even thirty thousand years ago were as clever as ours are; it is at least possible that the evidence for this lies easily available in easily excavated cities—available to people whose minds are less bound by the prejudices of our time.

  We may suppose that ancient astronomers did not necessarily believe that the world was created on a certain day four thousand odd years before their own time, and by God in person. That they understood that words had to be used for their benefit�
��and understood what the words were symbols for.

  That long before the Roman Gods and the Greek Gods and the Egyptian Gods and the Peruvian Gods and the Babylonian Gods, astronomers listened to Jupiter and his family, or to Saturn, and knew that Thoth (however he was called then) served Amen the Father, (and here again comes in the idea of deputy, of substitution, for Thoth created the world with a word); and that there were names for planets, suns, stars, and crumbs, blobs, and droplets of earth and fire and water; and that their patterns and sounds and colours were understood, and tales were told of them, instructive of Times and Events—why not? For no one knows what lies under the sands of the world’s great deserts. No one knows how many times poor Earth has reeled under blows from comets, has lost or captured moons, has changed its air, its very nature. No one knows what has existed and has vanished beyond recovery, evidence for the number of times Man has understood and has forgotten again that his mind and flesh and life and movements are made of star stuff, sun stuff, planet stuff; that the Sun’s being is his, and what sort of events may be expected, because of the meshings of the planets—and how an intelligent husbanding of humanity’s resources may be effected based on the most skilled and sensitive of forecasting, by those whose minds are instruments to record the celestial dance.

  “Father,” says Jupiter’s efficient and bossy daughter, “why don’t you send down Mercury to do something about that poor voyager, stranded there on his drugged island? He could ask Neptune to let up a bit. It’s not fair, you know. It’s not just.”

  “Well you see to it then, daughter,” says Jupiter, a busy man, Sun’s deputy, and with all those bounding children, tugged this way and that like a busy housewife and mother with her large brood. “You just see what you can do, but mind you, don’t forget that We, Jupiter, are not the only influence on the traveller’s journey. No, it’s a harmony, it’s a pattern, bad and good, everything in turn, everything spiralling up—but yes, it’s the right moment for a visit to Mercury. It is the exact time—thanks for reminding me.”