The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

  Lynda giggled a great deal when she was at her worst. She even said herself that it was a bad sign when she started to giggle. Now Martha lay and giggled. She did not wish to stop. She lay behind a barrier, which was the act of giggling.

  A shock of alarm or warning reached the outer defences; but this alarm was not one she chose to listen to. Or not now. She was thinking: better mad, if the price for not being mad is to be a lump of lethargy that will use any kind of stratagem so as to remain a lump, remain non-perceptive and heavy.

  She would lie on the floor and watch the magic lantern slides … she shut her eyes, saw the glow of light through her lids from the ceiling, and waited for the pictures. But her lids stayed dark. Why? Why sometimes pictures, but not at others? Why the sound-length sometimes, and not others? Why some people at some time in their lives? Why some people with one or more of these capacities who were not afraid to develop them, while others hastily suppressed or hid or ran away into dark corners with them? Why did some people have to hurt others who had these capacities, while some people helped and developed.

  The first intimations of this capacity had been in childhood, just before sleep or on awakening: a faint flash of colour, a couple of pictures perhaps, or a fragment of music, or some words, or her name called as if in warning or reminder: Remember, remember. Well, a great many people experienced this, but being well-ordered, well-trained, docile, obedient people, they heard the doctors or the priests say-whatever the current dogma ordered, and that was that: they were prepared to bury the evidence of their own senses, they ran away. And, like any neglected faculty, it fell into disuse, it atrophied.

  Later, she had had experiences when she had been very tired, or slightly ill, or under strain, or when making love, but only with Jack.

  And then, during the battle for her memory, something had opened, changed-for that was when the pictures, sounds, had become more than flashes or intimations or an occasional thing, but something that might happen often. But not controlled … suppose one could learn to control… how?

  Where were the people who knew? It couldn’t be possible that everyone in the world had been frightened into obedience.

  No. For one thing, there was Rosa Mellendip, a perfectly sensible woman, if bound by her packs of cards and her tea-leaves. Yes, but that was not where what was needed could be found. That world was cosy, self-satisfied, stagnant, the mirror and shadowside of the orthodox scientific world which was also cosy, self-satisfied, stagnant. One was a rationalism which once had been useful, a patterning of habit-thoughts already outdated by what was happening on its own outposts. The other, formed by coming into existence in opposition to ‘science’, and then having to maintain itself as a humoured and tolerated minority, had the same quality of lifelessness.

  Elsewhere was the sense of sharp change, of old thought breaking up, of flow and of movement; in life, that is-in what one experienced, in where one learned. There was a prickling challenging liveliness, a vitality at work. But not in the backwaters of ‘rationalism’ which was the official culture, and not in the mirror of that official culture, Mrs. Mellendip-now a rich woman (using her money well and wisely as a good business-woman should, and as charitable and kind as anybody else) and indeed rather respectable; for ‘everyone’ now had their fortunes told, and from her office in Kensington, she advised some of the largest businesses in the country about how to harmonize their activities with those of the stars. There was nothing shady or dubious or to be hidden about her now; she had come into her own, for as she said in her homely way that yet managed to suggest depths of wisdom: ‘What goes up must come down.’ Very true indeed, but it was the apotheosis of Rosa Mellendip as a respectable woman that signalled the end of the two worlds, conformist rational and nonconformist/eccentric; for one can be certain that when a formerly rejected movement or stand in society becomes tolerated by what fought it, that both are about to be depth-charged from somewhere else.

  But the prickling liveliness, as if the substance of ordinary life were being drenched or bombarded by a particularly vivid type of atom-that feeling she, her world, conveyed no more than did, let’s say, Graham Patten, whose programmes on ‘the occult’ on television (very popular) always managed to suggest a sixth-form debate between prize pupils, one on the ‘literary’ side (there are more things in heaven and earth) and one ‘doing’ science.

  And it was precisely this quality at work everywhere, the lively yeast, which made Martha hold on to that prime thing she had learned in her life, had been made to learn over and over again, so that she knew it as one does know things that have become part of one’s substance, to be acted from because the knowledge is oneself: it was that if she was feeling something, in this particular way, with the authenticity, the irresistibility, of the growing-point, then she was not alone, others were feeling the same, since the growing-point was never, could never be, just Martha’s; could not be only the property or territory of one individual. No, if she experienced and was asking questions, then others like her were experiencing and asking questions, others looked for her as she looked for them. Somewhere near there were people to whom she might say ‘television’, ‘radio’, ‘radar’, time machine’, ‘camera’ - or whatever other shorthand phrases were suitable, and these people would not reply: ‘You’re hallucinated/sick/imagining it.’

  Nor would they say, as in Rosa Mellendip’s country: Of course, we know that …’ there being no more to say about it, since everything was being said: nor, as in Jimmy Wood’s territory, would they look at you in surprise at the suggestion there might be a connection between what people wrote and what they thought was possible.

  Yet it was Jimmy Wood who had put up a small signpost. He had said to Martha that if she came out to the factory, he would show her where he got plots for his tales. She had imagined that he would perhaps ask her to apply her eye to a microscope to look at animalculae in violent battle for growth and survival which is what a smear of blood or bits of tissue become as the eye descends like a diver to that dimension; or to look through a telescope to see the stars circling, dividing, eating each other, exploding, dancing, singing-animalculae to somebody perhaps. But that hadn’t happened.

  In the store-room of the factory, among shelves full of devices and contraptions which Jimmy said were machines that ‘hadn’t come off yet but would perhaps when he got a hunch about them’, were books which one might have expected to find on Rosa Mellendip’s shelves, but never here.

  There were books on Rosicrucianism and the old Alchemists; Bhuddist books and the dozen or so varieties of Yoga; here were Zoroastrianism and esoteric Christianity; tracts on the I Ching; Zen, witchcraft, magic, astrology and vampirism; scholarly treatises on Sufism; the works of the Christian mystics. Here in short, was a kind of potted library representing everything rejected by official culture and scholarship.

  It appeared that Jimmy’s unfortunate wife (now living a widow’s existence with her sisters, though Jimmy from time to time went to see her saying that they should live together, since as far as he was concerned they got on perfectly well), had taken some years ago to astrology, just about the same time as Jimmy had chanced to read some science fiction and decided he could do as well. To write was clearly not beyond an ordinary person’s capacity, since here, working beside him, was Mark Coldridge; as for the matter, he knew more science than the authors of these books. Plots came plentifully to mind. Most of them, however, had already been used, as he discovered when he efficiently read his way through enormous quantities of science fiction. It was clearly not a question of discovering new plots, but of developing old ideas differently. An article on Yoga in his wife’s copy of Destiny led him to a bookshop specializing in such literature; and what he found there solved his problems. For, since he had not had a literary education, professed himself insensitive to style and taste, he was not put off by old-fashioned or flowery or clumsy language, and was able to extract ideas or information where these existed. From this sort of material he wa
s led to old alchemic material, mostly untranslated and lying unused on the shelves of museums or universities, which he found full of surprises and usefulness.

  And now here Martha had come against-as it seemed, many times before with Jimmy-that barrier of incomprehension which still she could not measure. There he sat, in this dusty little storeroom behind the efficient streamlined modern office, a scientific genius, Mark still insisted, better than any computer, said Mark, since you could feed dozens of facts and figures into him and out would come an answer as if buttons had been pushed; he was an inventor of machines, and as good as a library of scientific information; but when Martha said to him, ‘But, Jimmy, how then do you see all this …’ she couldn’t finish her question. The point was, you have to expect a question to hit home somewhere in a person before you can ask it. His round pinkish face, on his round (probably) pinkish body, presented to Martha his unvarying pink-rubber smile, and the surface of round staring spectacles. And no, he was not embarrassed. Embarrassment is not even a human characteristic: an intelligent cat or a dog, discussed insensitively by humans in its presence will show the distress that is embarrassment.

  Jimmy did not mind being asked questions, did not mind being probed, would probably have spent for as long as Martha wanted explaining to her any problem she needed to have explained. But it was of no use saying to Jimmy things like: What effect does this material, these ideas, have on you, the inner Jimmy Wood? Do you think that at some point three, four hundred years ago, science threw out a very important baby with the bath water? What do you think of those capacities you write about called telepathy, second sight, lévitation, and the rest? Do you wish to develop such capacities, if it were possible? What do you think of… For when she got anywhere near such questions, he looked carefully at her, to see what it was she wanted, and then answered by reaching out and handing her a book in which these beliefs of phenomena were described, or prescribed, or recommended. Or, he handed her with an eager smile which said: I am trying hard to meet your request, a copy of his latest novel.

  It is only when one meets the extreme, or pure type of something, or some person that one can begin to understand the things, people, in between, of the impure, or half-way type: in Jack Martha had known, and had at least begun to understand the existence of such people: a person who functioned, understood, was in his body, his animal being. That was where he lived, had his centre.

  And in Jimmy she met somebody who lived, had his being-where? Easy to say, his mind. As easy to say ‘body’ for Jack-shorthand again, clumsy words for what we don’t understand. The word ‘mind’ covers, for instance, intuition: which in itself can include variations and extremes. The word ‘mind’ wouldn’t do; yet it was as if Jimmy had been born with one of the compartments of the human mind developed to its furthest possibility, but this was at the cost of everything else. Mark said ‘in joke’ that he was a human computer. Good, fine, very helpful; till you remembered that the essential fact about a computer is that it is programmed by human beings. Martha said, defeated by definitions and attempts at them: He’s got a screw loose. Lynda said, He’s not all there. His wife said: He gives me the creeps, I can’t help it, I know I’m wicked.

  Martha asked him if she might borrow these shelves full of books. She put them into laundry baskets, the baskets into a car, and drove them home. There she again went through that process of ripping the heart, the pith, out of a subject, when she was ready for that subject. She stayed in her room with the books; took the car down to the book-selling streets of London and bought more books; got hold of all the books that sounded as if they might give out, from wherever she thought they might be.

  She had emerged with two main conclusions. One was that all these different faiths, or sets of ideas, were talking about the same processes, the same psychological truths. She was reading different languages, or dialects, describing the same thing. This was true of all of them from the poems of St John of the Cross to states of mind described in the Upanishads. The second was that it was surely a remarkable fact that her education, the education of everyone of her generation (and of how many generations back?) had been so set, programmed, that not a word of any of this information had been able to come through to her except in odd fragments, phrases, notions, each one soaked in, redolent of, ‘dottiness’, ‘eccentricity’, shadiness, unpleasantness.

  This second conclusion was interestingly reminiscent. For instance, before even approaching this material she had to ñght off the distaste, a reluctance, implanted in her by her environment. Certain terminologies were more distasteful than others. Some phrases and words held so strong a charge of the ‘distaste-factor’ (to coin a term) that she had to stop herself giggling, or beginning to apologize for herself to invisible critics. Words like ‘prana’, ‘aura’, ‘astral’ were particularly powerful-yet they were easily translatable into others from different systems which did not produce distaste, a form of fear. These reactions were identical with those she had experienced in politics. Just as once she had found herself in the state of mind labelled ‘right-wing’, hating and fearing the labels and attitudes ‘left-wing’; and then switching to ‘left’, while the targets for what she hated and feared switched; so that ever since she had been able to put herself, at will, into these attitudes; so now she kept moving in and out of mental positions (but they were emotional, or emotionally reached, guarded, maintained) and looking from one outlook into or at another. The mechanisms were always exactly the same, whether political, religious, psychological, philosophic. Dragons guarded the entrances and exits of each layer in the spectrum of belief, or opinion; and the dragons were always the same dragon, no matter what names they went under. The dragon was fear; fear of what other people might think; fear of being different; fear of being isolated; fear of the herd we belong to, fear of that section of the herd we belong to.

  She had been afraid to approach this mass of material-which, when she had at last dealt with it, had given up so much more than she had expected. (For one thing, a reminder of how easily we are made afraid.) Everywhere in it were gleams of life, the authentic note or throb of vitality, the unmistakable pulse. Yet, while all of it had the same message, or central statement, using different styles, sets of words, terms, historical associations, disciplines, nowhere was the door which Martha knew must be somewhere. Or rather, there were too many doors.

  And so felt Lynda, whom she had asked to read these books. Lynda said that ‘she’d done all that’ in the early days with Rosa Mellendip; she didn’t see the use of it, it wasn’t for her.

  When Mark was asked, he took half a dozen of the books. Read them at least partially, brought them back to Martha in that closed-in reluctant state that says as clear as words: I’m impervious to this, and said: ‘Yes, but what’s the point even if any of it were true? ’; for he was already preoccupied, if you like, obsessed; with the immediate future-of humanity and was spending his time in his study with his charts, his figures, his maps, the pages torn from Dorothy’s diary, and Thomas’s manuscript.

  ‘When the bones of our people’s ancestors rot beneath the waters that will fill this place; and the spirits are drowned, their mouths filled with water and no longer able to guard and cherish the tribe who fed them in death so that they may be kept alive-then will the tribe be taken in lorries to a high dry place hundreds of miles from here, the white police and the black police guarding them. That will be the death of this tribe when the ancestors and the children are separated by water. Afterwards fire will come across the high ground to the new village and destroy it. Many will be burned. Many will have no heart to live after that night. The new village built by the white men will be a place of death. So will our people die.’ Thomas’s note to this: ‘The old man, brother of the Chief’s wife spoke last night. He was in some kind of trance. It was after a beer dance. He said that he foresaw a flood or some kind of inundation in this part of the valley. These savages believe the spirits of the dead are fed by thoughts of the living: the spi
rits in return protect their own, by warning them against dangers and so on. There is a tree near a rock a mile from here: this is a sacred place. The medicine man puts beer and kafñr corn there when the moon changes. Last full moon a herd of eland came to this place and knocked over the crocks; their hoof-prints in the beer-wet earth hardened. The wind blew the corn into the prints. Dew sprouted the corn. The spoor of the animals under the sacred tree were marked in green. Green on dry ground. A sign: the harvest will be good this season.’ Across this diagonally in red pencil: I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine.

  Note by Mark: This was written nearly ten years before the Kariba dam was finished and the valley flooded.

  When Martha did not look at Lynda, but lay listening, the regular thud-thudding of her head on the wall, the irregular breathing which accompanied her rapid mutter, made quite a different kind of message from what Martha heard when she listened to the low muttering by itself. But Martha knew that the thudding, like the sound made by women pounding grain, was for Lynda not sound so much as the sensation in her head as she banged it: and most of the muttering too, was for Lynda herself. The way Lynda was experiencing this, was that everything, thudding, breathing, and the low talking, was private-all except for an odd loud, or louder word which she put in with the intention of communicating with Martha, which sometimes Martha understood and sometimes not. Like ‘Mad’, repeated in a crescendo: mad, mad, Mad, MAD, MAD-which Martha understood perfectly. Yet while Lynda meant just this occasional word as her bridge across to Martha, Martha was, whether looking at Lynda or listening, able to understand Lynda, what Lynda was at the moment, by everything, a whole, the sight, sound, smell, the feeling of Lynda.