by A. S. Byatt
Propelled by springs and coils and hairlike fronds
Like whales athwart the oceans of the globe.
The optic lens is like a slicing sword.
It multiplies the world, or it divides—
We see the many in the one, as here,
We see the segments of what once seemed smooth,
Rough pits and craters on a lady’s skin,
Or fur and scales along her gleaming hair.
The more the Many were revealed to me
The more I pressed my hunt to find the One—
Prima Materia, Nature’s shifting shape
Still constant in her metamorphoses.
I found her Law in the successive Forms
Of ant and butterfly, beetle and bee.
I first discerned the pattern of the growth
From egg to simple grub, from grub encased,
Shrinking in part, in other putting forth
New organs in its sleep, until it stir,
Split and disgorge the tattered silk, which fast
Trembles and stiffens and then takes the air
Unfurled in splendour, tawny, sapphire blue,
Eyed like the peacock, tiger-barred, or marked
Between its wings with dark death’s eyeless head.
Within the crystal circle of the lens
My horny thumbs were elephantine pads.
I fashioned me a surgeon’s armoury—
Skewers and swords, scalpels and teasing hooks—
Not out of steel, but softest ivory,
Sharpened and turned beyond our vision’s range,
Lances and lancets, that the naked eye
Could not discern, beneath the lens’s stare.
With these I probed the creatures’ very life
And source of life, of generation.
Their commonwealths are not as we supposed.
Lay out the ant-hill’s Lord, the beehive’s King
The centre of the patterns that they weave
Fetching and carrying, hurrying to feed,
Construct and guard their world, the pinnacle
Or apex of the social hierarchy—
Lay out this creature on the optic disk,
Lay bare the seat of generation
The organs where the new lives lie and grow,
Where the eggs take their form. She is no King
But a vast Mother, on whose monstrous flanks
Climb smaller sisters, hurrying to tend
Her progeny, to help with her travail,
Carry her nectar and give up their lives
If needs be, to save hers, for she is Queen,
The necessary Centre of the Brood.
It was these eyes first saw the Ovaries,
These hands that drew them, and this fading mind
Discerned the law of Metamorphosis
And wrote it down to show indifferent men.
I had no honour of it. Not at Home—
My father cast me bankrupt in the street—
Nor ’mongst my peers in Medicine. When, by Want
Driven to sell my library of slides,
My demonstrations and experiments,
I found no Buyer, nor no man of Science,
Philosopher or Doctor, who would take
My images of Truth, my elegant
Visions of life, and give them hope to last.
And so I came to penury and beg
For sops of bread and milk and scraps of meat
Scattered with maggots of the self-same flies
I marked the breeding of.
Great Galileo with his optic tube
A century ago, displaced this Earth
From apprehension’s Centre, and made out
The planets’ swimming circles and the Sun
And beyond that, motion of infinite space
Sphere upon sphere, in which our spinning world
Green grass and yellow desert, mountains white
And whelming depths of bluest sea, is but
A speck in a kind of star-broth, rightly seen.
They would have burned him for his saying so,
Save that the sage, in fear of God and strong
In hope of life, gainsaid his own surmise,
Submitted him to doctors of the Church
Who deal in other truths and mysteries.
It was one step, I say, to displace Man
From the just centre of the sum of things—
But quite another step to strike at God
Who made us as we are, so fearfully
And wonderfully made our intellects,
Our tireless quest to know, but also made
Our finitude, within His Mystery,
His soft, dark, infinite space, wherein we rest
When all our questions finish and our brain
Dies into weeping, as my own taxed mind
Died in dissecting the Ephemera.
I found their forms, those dancing specks of life,
The one-day flies, I gave my years to them,
Who live one day’s space, never know the night.
I ask myself, did Galileo know
Fear, when he saw the gleaming globes in space,
Like unto mine, whose lens revealed to me—
Not the chill glory of Heaven’s Infinite—
But all the swarming, all the seething motes
The basilisks, the armoured cockatrice,
We cannot see, but are in their degrees—
Why not?—to their own apprehension—
I dare not speak it—why not microcosms
As much as Man, poor man, whose ruffled pride
Cannot abide the Infinite’s questioning
From smallest as from greatest?
[Desunt cetera.]
12
What is a House? So strong—so square
Making a Warmth inside the Winds
We walk with lowered eyelids there
And silent go—behind the blinds
Yet hearts may tap like loaded bombs
Yet brains may shrill in carpet-hush
And windows fly from silent rooms
And walls break outwards—with a rush—
—CHRISTABEL LAMOTTE
They stood on the pavement and looked up at the carved letters over the porch: BETHANY. It was a sunny day in April. They were awkward with each other, standing at a distance. The house was spick and span, three storeys high, with sash windows. Prettily sprigged curtains hung on carved wooden rings from a brass rail. Inside the front window a maidenhair fern stood in a large Minton pot. On the front door, painted a deep Delft blue, hung a sinuous brass dolphin door-knocker. There were buds on the roses and a sea of forget-me-nots at their feet. There was a frieze of bricks with moulded sunflowers between storeys. Every brick breathed fresh air; each had been stripped and drenched with blow-torch and high-speed jet, so that the house lay revealed beneath its original skin.
“It’s a good restoration job,” said Maud. “It makes you feel funny. A simulacrum.”
“Like a fibre-glass copy of the sphinx.”
“Exactly. You can just see a very Victorian fireplace in there. I can’t tell if it’s an original or a vamped-up one from a demolition lot.”
They looked up at the bland or blind face of Bethany. “It would have been sootier. It would have looked older. When it was younger.”
“A postmodern quotation—”
There was a porch now, with the first tendrils of a very new clematis advancing up it, a porch of new white wooden arches, a miniature bower.
Out of here she had come, stepping rapidly, in a swirl of determined black skirts, lips tight with determination, hands compressed on her reticule, eyes wide with fear, with hope, wild, how? Had he come down the road from St Matthias’ Church, in his tall hat and his frock coat? Had she, the other, peered through her rimmed glasses from an upper window, her eyes blurring?
“I’ve never been much interested in places—or things—with ass
ociations—”
“Nor I. I’m a textual scholar. I rather deplore the modern feminist attitude to private lives.”
“If you’re going to be stringently analytical,” Roland said, “don’t you have to?”
“You can be psychoanalytic without being personal—” Maud said. Roland did not challenge her. It was he who had suggested they come to Richmond to discuss what to do next, and now they were here, the sight of the little house was indeed disturbing. He suggested that they go into the church at the end of the road, a huge Victorian barn, containing modern glass-walled galleries and a quiet coffee bar. The church was full of children’s activities, prancing and bedizened clowns, fairies and ballerinas, easels and scraping violins and piping recorders. They settled in the coffee bar, in a reminiscent patch of stained-glass light.
Nothing had been heard from Sir George since they had despatched their fervent thank-yous in January. Maud had taught a difficult term. Roland had applied for jobs—one in Hong Kong, one in Barcelona, one in Amsterdam. He had little hope of these—he had once seen a copy of Blackadder’s standard reference for him, lying around in the Ash factory, which praised his diligence and thoroughness and caution, making him sound thoroughly dull. They had agreed, Roland and Maud, to say nothing to anyone, and to do nothing until they either heard from Sir George or saw each other again.
Roland had said to Maud, on that last cold day in Lincoln, that it looked as though perhaps Christabel had contemplated accompanying Randolph on his natural history expedition to North Yorkshire in June 1859. This had seemed obvious to him; he had not taken into account Maud’s complete lack of knowledge of R. H. Ash’s movements. He elaborated. Ash had been gone for a month, travelling alone, walking along shores and cliffs, studying geology and marine life. He was to have been accompanied by Francis Tugwell, the clergyman author of Anemones of the British Coast, but illness had prevented Mr Tugwell from coming. Critics ascribed to this studious month, Roland told Maud, a shift in the subject-matter of Ash’s poetry, from history to natural history, so to speak. Roland himself did not subscribe to this view. It was part of a general intellectual movement at the time. The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Ash’s friend Michelet, the great historian, had at this time taken to nature study and had written four books related to the four elements—La Mer (water), La Montagne (earth), L’Oiseau (air), and L’Insecte (fire, since insects lived in the hot underneath). Ash’s “natural” poems were like these, or like Turner’s late great paintings of elemental light.
Ash had written to his wife, most days, if not every day, during this tour. The letters were in Cropper’s edition; Maud and Roland had brought photocopies to their meeting.
My dearest Ellen,
I and my tall basket of specimen jars arrived in one piece in Robin Hood’s Bay—though much bruised and dirtied from the shaking of the train and the continuous rain of smuts and live sparks from the engine, most particularly in the tunnels. The Pickering-Grosmont line travels through the Newtondale Gorge—a cleft formed during the Ice Age—where the engine produces, amongst romantically desolate moorland, a sublime volcanic eruption of its own, due to the steepness of the gradient. It put me in mind of Milton’s Satan, winging his black way through the asphaltic fumes of Chaos—and of Lyell’s solid, patient yet inspired work on the raising of the hills and the carving of the valleys by ice. I heard curlews, making their peremptory, desolate sound, and saw what I like to believe was an eagle, though it was probably no such thing—at all events, a hovering predator, floating on the invisible element. Strange narrow-chested sheep bound away, scattering stones, and swaying their woolly integument in the air like banks of weed in the sea-water—heavy and slow—They stare from crags—I was about to write inhumanly—but that goes without saying—they have a look almost daemonic and inimical, for domesticated animals. You would be interested by their eyes—yellow with a black bar of a pupil—horizontal, not vertical—which gives them their odd look.
The train is a modern successor to a successful horse-drawn railway designed and built by George Stephenson himself. I should almost have preferred that more decorous conveyance to the snorting firedragon who ruined my travelling-shirt (no, I shall not send it home; my landlady, a Mrs Cammish, is an excellent laundress and starcher, I am assured).
Here everything seems primaeval—the formations of the rocks, the heaving and tossing of the full sea, the people with their fishing boats (called cobles in the local speech) which I imagine are not much changed from the primitive if versatile little craft of the early Viking invaders. Here on the shore of the German Ocean I feel the presence of those Northern Lands across its cold grey-green wastes—very different from the close civilised fields of France across the Channel—Even the air is somehow both ancient and fresh—fresh with salt and heather and a kind of absolute biting cleanness, resembling the taste of the water here, which has bubbled deliciously from perforated limestone, and is more surprising than wine—after the turgid Thames.
But you will be thinking I have no regret for my warm house and library and smoking-jacket and desk, and for the company of my dear wife. I think of you steadily and with steady love—of which you need no assurance. Are you well? Are you able to go about and to read without headache? Write and tell me of all your doings. I shall write more, and you shall see that I am become a diligent anatomist of simple life-forms—a vocation more satisfying at the moment than the recording of human convulsions.
JUNE 15
I have been diligently reading at Lyell in my long evenings, when I have done with my dissection, which I try to do whilst the light is good, between coming in from the walks and dining. I have abandoned the tall specimen-jars for a series of plain yellow pie dishes which sit about on all the available surfaces of my dining-room, containing Eolis pellucida, Doris billomellata, Aplysia and several varieties of polyps—Tubularian, Plumularian, Sertularian—exquisite little Aeolides and some compound Ascidians. It is hard indeed, Ellen, not to imagine that some Intelligence did not design and construct these perfectly lovely and marvellously functioning creatures—and yet it is hard also not to believe the weight of evidence for the Development Theory, for the changes wrought in all things, over unimaginable Time, by the gradual action of ordinary causes.
Tell me, were you indeed able, or well enough, to hear Professor Huxley’s paper on “The Persistent Types of Animal Life”? He must argue, like Darwin, against repeated acts of Creation in the setting of a distinct species on the face of the earth—but rather for the gradual modification of existing species. Were you able to make any notes? They would be of the greatest value—in assuaging curiosity at least—to your enthusiastic amateur husband.
Today I walked down the cliffs from Scarborough to see the awesome Flamborough Head, where so many have met terrible deaths, in the race of water and the powerful currents—which you can almost see and hear, chuckling beneath the slap of the high waves even on a good smiling day, as this was. The cliffs are chalky-white and carved and faceted and sliced by the elements into fantastic shapes—which the superstitious might take for Divine sculptures, or petrified ancient giants. One stands out to sea—raising an impotent or menacing stump—like a bandaged member eaten by some white leprosy. There were two Rocks known as the King and Queen—of which the latter only is still standing. Lyell describes the whole of this coast as subject to gradual dilapidation and writes of the waste of Flamborough, which is being decomposed by the salt spray, the process, lower down the coast, being facilitated by the throwing out of many springs from the argillaceous beds.