by Norman Lock
Perhaps he is taking the measure of Nothing, I thought; perhaps he is discovering the mathematics of death in order to make a final survey of the afterlife. Or perhaps he has vanished at last inside the dream, which he has all his life been resisting. I stood just as the wind rose and watched it swell and billow in the tall grass all around me. Clouds herded across the sky, dragging their shadows over the plain. The river, which moments before had been glittering as if with the surveyor’s thousand points of light, blackened.
I watched, calmly, the earth register its vexations and alarms. I was becoming accustomed to immensity; I was no longer made sick by the blaring sun or the striding moon. I continued along the river, like a prospector determined to stake a claim to the land.
5.
Beyond a reach in the river, I happened on a man asleep in a willow’s green shade. Close by, a deep hole had been dug into the riverbank, enclosed by ramparts of dark earth. A ladder led down into the hole, whose bottom and purpose were obscured by darkness. Across the river, another man sat on a rock and smoked.
“Why are you sitting here in the middle of nowhere?” I asked, having crossed over to him on stepping-stones.
He took the pipe from between his teeth and, stabbing at the air with it, said, “Waiting for the professor to finish with his folly.”
“What folly is that?”
“The university sent him to collect broken vases. I bought the deed to this part of the river to build a mill. But the authorities ordered me to desist until every last sliver of antiquity has been mined and cataloged. I’d shoot him, but they would only send someone else to dig in the dirt!”
He had shouted this last sentence, flinging it across the river like a taunt or a challenge sufficiently loud to wake the sleeper.
“Money-grubber!” he shouted in turn. “Philistine!”
“Crackpot!” the would-be miller volleyed. “Dreamer!”
Intrigued, I recrossed the river and, sitting next to the professor, asked him about his dreams.
“I dream of Italy’s vanished past,” he said, gazing at the plain as if he might find it there. “Of the ancient Villanovans, who crossed the eastern Alps, bringing with them the Iron Age and the practice of cremation. They buried their ashes in funerary urns along the Po. I am looking for them.”
“Enemy of progress!” the miller shouted. “Enemy of the living!”
The professor took my arm and led me away from the river, beyond the reach of the miller’s denunciations.
“My enemies say I would prefer to live in the past. Not so. What pleases me is to regard the past from the vantage of the present. It is one of history’s paradoxes that the past can be possessed—never the present; for the present is occurring and therefore impossible to gauge, and what cannot be gauged cannot be grasped. With each shard, I enlarge my title to the ancient world. With each fact I hold up here”—he tapped with a finger his temple—“I strengthen my claim to it.”
“And the plain?” I asked, which was, at this hour, touched with gold.
“I don’t understand you.”
“What do you see when you look at it?”
“Ancient settlements. Extinct races. The necropolis at Ver-ruchio. All that was on the Adriatic coastal plain—before the Romans, before even the Etruscans. Their light—the light of their skies—is entombed with their dust. If I were to unearth it, what a blinding fulguration there would be!”
“But what is it that you see now—at this moment?” I persisted. I was growing angry, for obscure reasons, which may have had to do with the fugitive beauty of the landscape.
“Nothing. A kind of scab that time has formed over the past, which was vital and alive. Only the past lives, for me,” he said gloomily.
His lament was interrupted by a fusillade of stones launched by the miller.
“He prefers millstones,” the professor shouted in return. “To make cakes and money with!”
I remembered how, in the forest, I had imagined the plain as a space in which to be in time without encumbrances. To satisfy the desire to walk, coiled in the muscles of the legs. To see the sky disentangled from the oppressive trees, inscribed by the wide flights of birds and luminous traces of the flying stars. I began to understand that space is subjugated to each person. That it is only a screen on which the magic lantern of our thoughts casts the images of our desires. In the forest, we dwelled within; the trees forbade any turning outward to embrace the world—an embrace that inevitably becomes possession, covetousness, and the murder of what we cannot own. Slowly, I was becoming aware that the forest was not so much a place as prelude to self-awareness, a condition of the mind’s infancy.
“He tilts at windmills because he is afraid of life!” the miller screamed as he splashed across the shallows, gravel rattling underfoot.
I fled them both as I would a plague. Looking over my shoulder, I saw them rolling on the ground, hands at each other’s throat.
6.
“You are standing in my light!” he said, much annoyed.
Bewildered, I replied that I did not understand.
“You are causing your shadow to fall on the plain—there.” He pointed to the darkness that unrolled at my feet. “It is foreign to my picture, which is of this desolate landscape. I wish to paint only what belongs to it. Your shadow does not.”
I noticed, then, the palette in his hand.
“So you are a painter!” I said hopefully. Here, I thought, is someone who sees truly what is, who pays so scrupulous an attention to actuality that even an extraneous shadow offends him. Here at last is someone who does not project his own desires onto the world. “I am glad to meet you!” I said, shaking his free hand.
My admiration appeased him.
“You are welcome,” he said, wiping his brush with a rag fragrant with linseed oil.
I went round behind the easel and looked at his painting.
“I’ve nearly captured it,” he said smugly. “Only a few more brushstrokes.”
“It is beautiful,” I conceded.
“Yes.”
“Tell me. Does the plain narrow just as you’ve painted it?” I asked after a moment’s study.
“See for yourself!” He pointed with his brush to the far edge of the plain, trembling in the summer’s heat. “Space tends toward a vanishing point.”
“But is it really like that?” I asked.
“Have you never heard of the rules of perspective?” he said in a way calculated to belittle me. “Is the name Brunelleschi completely unknown to you? Have you never perused Alberti’s treatise Della Pittura? We artists employ stratagems—tricks of the eye—to mimic what the eye sees. Art is the skillful rendering of appearances.”
“And this elephant-shaped cloud you’ve drawn …”
“You must admit it does resemble an elephant?” he said, looking at the sky, where a grizzled cloud was slowly unraveling.
“To me, it looks like—well, a cloud.”
“You lack imagination!” he chided.
“And this purple …” I indicated a haze of color on the painted grass.
“A scumble of Tyrian purple,” he intoned pedantically.
“And if I were to walk out there now, wouldn’t the grass be green—as green as that we’re standing in?”
“Verona green with admixtures of yellow ocher, cerulean blue, and, where the evening sun is transfiguring the horizon, Tyrian purple. Grass is green—any fool knows that! But the eye sees otherwise. I paint what is—for the eye—the truth.”
“But what about the truth of the plain?”
“My aim—the aim of all art—is to create beauty. Beauty is a separate category, independent of real objects, to which it alludes.”
Not even this man who looked so intently at the plain, who shaded his eyes and squinted as if through cataracts, saw what was really there. He, too, had his own idea of space.
“Do you dream?” I asked slyly. I hoped for a further revelation of his egotism, like a pessimist listening exp
ectantly for overtures of tragedy.
“Constantly!”
“Of what do you dream?”
“Of voluptuous women whose flesh is Tuscan red, Dutch pink, and umber.”
I followed the river, which went its own way—telling, in liquid syllables, a story to itself that had nothing to do with men.
7.
In the forest, we had heard of the balloon; but never could I have imagined what I now saw suspended above the riverbank. In its shape, it recalled a woman’s breast; and it was this association that inclined me toward an affection for the thing that was tugging at the rope by which it had been made fast. To say that the balloon was beautiful is only to admit what any eye will readily confirm. It was more, but what that more might be lay between religion and science. The balloon, however, existed only to ascend. As if in scorn of my opinion of it, I heard in the guy rope a strain of opposition and in the wickerwork basket beneath it a whining impatience to be off again.
I was startled by a voice from above. “Are you a Frenchman?” it demanded.
“No!” I shouted at a face overcast by a shako’s brim and smudged with a mustache.
“If you were, I would have to drop this bomb on you!”
A hand appeared and menaced me with a dark object.
“Is there war?” The ancient forest kept all but the rumor of war from entering.
“Certainly! With Bonaparte! The Monster of Europe hopes to seize Italy. I am on reconnaissance.”
He sounded as if he might be preening in a mirror. He would have minced had there been room enough.
“Can you see the sea?” I called.
“From up there.” He pointed at the sky. “The Adriatic is on the other side of the horizon. That way.” He pointed east, where grass and sky converged on a dark ribbon of river.
“Can you take me to it?” I asked, never imagining that he would agree. But he did agree, assuring me that opportunities for reconnaissance were abundant on the coast.
“I shall watch for Napoléon’s ships,” he said cheerfully. “And if I see one—boom!”
He let down a rope ladder; and after having loosed the anchor from a tree root, I climbed quickly aboard the balloon just as it was seized by the wind. In a moment, we were rushing toward the plain’s western edge, at an altitude that erased most evidence of man’s intervention. Here, I thought, is space unencumbered by others’ ideas of it. But my pleasure was cut short when I understood that the aeronaut also conceived of the vast plain unreeling behind us in terms peculiar to his calling.
“It is perfect for a major engagement!” he said, pronouncing his judgment on it. “I can see the formations drawn up on either side of the river—there and there. And there, the engineers are throwing a bridge over the river. And where the ground rises to a plateau, I would deploy my artillery. The enemy will be at its mercy! And that narrow defile? What an ambush might be laid in such a place! Not a man would come out of it alive!”
Then he sang an aria of ranks, files, phalanges, ditches, palisades, fortifications, redoubts, breastworks, legions, cohorts, velites, principes, acies, maniples, centuries, wedges, squares, quincunxes, tortoises, enfilades, and others lost to my ears in the rush of our flight.
I did not need to ask him what he dreamed, but he told me it without my asking. How it was I heard him in the noise of our career above the retreating plain, I did not know, unless the vividness of his reverie, together with his fervent interest in the art of war, communicated itself to me telepathically.
“I dream,” he said, “of Titus Labienus’s charge and its repulse by Caesar’s legions at the foot of Mount Dogandzis and the rout of Pompey’s army.”
I kept silent—my mind a blank—so as not to encourage further revelations of his martial fancy. But he was now engaged with a cannoli.
In the trees, war and art, industry and business were unknown. One man might murder another or take what did not belong to him, but there was not the conspiracy of violence that, from time to time, swept the plain. We fought, courted, loved, traded, dug wells, built houses and decorated them with birds’ eggs, twigs, stones, and flowers, according to the dimensions of our individual imaginations. We sinned and were virtuous according to our own limited capacities. Our dreams were correspondingly small and somber, always, with the twilight of the forest. Where all was only trees, there was nothing onto which to project our desires, except one another. Our desires were common, in any case. And so I had come out onto the plain to experience space and to alter the aspect of my dreaming self. But I had found only other people’s ideas of it, against which I was helpless to propose one of my own. And what of the plain? Ought it not be allowed its own idea of itself and might not this idea be greater than all others and, in the long run, better for us all? For it was to destruction that those others were tending, even the painter’s which exalted the facsimile over the plain itself. For in his eyes, the plain could vanish unlamented into oblivion so long as the painting remained.
As if to confirm my fears for the destruction of that space (which must have a form of its own, though it was not mine to grasp), we flew over a makeshift cemetery—remnant of some recent battle with the French.
“See how neatly we have buried them!” the aeronaut shouted into my ear. “Hardly have they finished dying when they are shoveled underground!”
What comedy is this? I wondered, that he should admire the formations of the dead? And then I thought that this, too, was an idea of space imposed on the plain. I shuddered and would have pushed him out of the basket in which we dangled if for no other reason than to mar the deadly order of those earthen ranks.
“How much farther to the sea?” I shouted back at him.
“It comes soon.”
Why did I wish for the sea if not in hopes of finding what none could annex?
8.
I had no words with which to tell how it was the sea came upon me, for I did not come upon it, but, rather, found myself there, at the foot of it, as if having wakened from a dream or into one—ankles bound with dirty rags of foam. I say I had not the words: It beggared me. And so I borrowed them from what I had known before laying eyes on it, standing on the beach, with the plain darkening at my back, while the comical balloonist, mustache stiff with ricotta, reconnoitered—his balloon become a comma dragged northward by the mounting wind.
Saturnine, the sea slid down and, turning, folded beneath a contrary motion while waves knotted, wringing out heavy drops of water, only to unknot again, loosening a music made of sighs and seething. I wondered at such sounds, knowing them to be without end since Creation’s third day.
Everywhere was sea and only that, and I knew that no one could withstand it—no one could match his mind with its. I wondered what the sea thought as it heaved itself up out of its bed and, shuddering, lay down again, then, without resting, rose and moved restlessly on. If thoughts it had. The sea was without face or features, yet it adjured my eyes to follow it; I could not disenthrall myself. It must be instinct with mind, some capacity of will to bind me to its moving self.
The sea moved in me a sympathetic motion—an emotion that was sadness and pity for everything that was not it and must end. My eyes became wet with it and with tears of self-pity. I was too small to stand against the Absolute. But neither had I wish to return to the plain inscribed by others’ desires; and the forest, like childhood, was lost to me.
I felt in my body a will not my own.
I felt the sundering of what bound me to myself.
In my mind, already I had walked into the deepening water. Already, I was letting it into my mouth, tasting salt. In a moment, I would sleep in its wet folds—illusions scattered like paper flowers on the waves. And then I saw out the corner of my eye a woman, standing, like me, on the gray sand with eyes, like mine, gazing out to sea. Her hair was writhing in the wind; her clothes were roughly handled by it. To be so entirely still, I thought, so spellbound by these somber cadences—she, too, must have been brought to the edge of d
isillusion and found it almost past enduring.
With my eyes, I measured the space between us, calculated how many steps. I almost spoke to her. Muffled like drums in a cortege in which we walked toward our separate ends, hearts (terrified by the sea’s indifference to our ideas of it) beat. I almost turned to speak, but what could love—that last illusion—do here? I might have drowned then, and gladly, had not the tide gone out.
The Sleep Institute
For Gordon
I met Myra at the Sleep Institute. She suffered from narcolepsy; I was there for my dreams. Not that my dreams were bad, no; but they were obsessive. They visited me each night with an inevitability that wearied, then rankled, then maddened. Think of watching the same movie night after night: Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker, for example, overrun by red ants in The Naked Jungle. Not that I dreamed of red ants. Thank God I did not! But Africa—always Africa! For five years, the same: Anna surprised by the lion among wild olive trees. Sikh rickshaw drivers and Persian traders languid against a wall in Mombasa. Kemp in the Lorian Swamp, eating a rhinoceros liver. And Kong dressed to kill in tuxedo and top hat, escaping through the topiary with Mrs. Willoughby. Those dreams had nourished my storytelling. But I resolved to quit Africa for good and find another landscape to dwell upon. One closer to home, with taxicabs and all-night movies, and the mild indignities of the street.
“It has rooted in you,” the therapist had pronounced after “the incident.” “Africa has.”
He leaned back in his chair and swiveled toward the window. Outside, a cloud very like a camel was roaming the blue Sahara. (Ha!)
“And may I point out that your Africa is not the real Africa.”
No … but it has been a cherished illusion, dangerous—who knows?—to challenge.
“I would like to dream of other things,” I replied after a small silence. “Of Antarctica, snow—of a woman who does not wear a pith helmet. Anna—no, not Anna, or Mrs. Willoughby. Some other woman. Let me please for once fixate on someone new!”