by Tom Stacey
Merciful God, the act of love which generates your species Man endorses that uniqueness. You endorse this act. Wherever and however Man’s uniqueness is violated, Lord, the flesh of Your making is at odds with the spirit, a violation least expungible.
Yea, Lord, it pleads redemption. The least betrayal of human love forfeits the right to share the presence of Your Divinity, the singleness of Your love.
Lord, have mercy.
Let me now find oblivion here, beneath this storm.
Christ have mercy. If the first gift of Your love is life, the next is death.
By your mercy, recognise me in my readiness to be gone to You.
XI
I have awoken upon the entire and perfect stillness of a forest dawn… Pale dawnlight strikes the underside of the sweet chestnut canopy high above my head in this steep flanked gully. In a disorder of dark rocks and vegetation I am cramped and cold and thirsty. My dream as yet unfinished is of this very forest rallied to my cause, the horde of trees mobilized and marching as to war with me and for me, their distinguished commander, with the ark of their covenant, yet the trees nobler than man and woman in their withstanding of the storm, in the grandeur of their reaching for the light, and in their marching and singing and unfurling of banners of their branches, breaking the skyline with pennants and paeans in certitude of victory. We are to conquer together the topmost heights of the world to establish new peace upon it.
By means of my dreaming and of being dreamt, the forest has evaluated me and initiated me into its company of members, which are its creatures and trees and and their saplings and all the vibrant kinder of its garten. I am admitted now by consent of its inner council into its lit glades and dark gulches and beneath its ever-spreading canopies – admitted, known and welcomed. All these components rejoice for and with me. At their behest I have inherited the forest mantle of my human predecessors here, who are numbered among us sometimes as trees but also as miniature people. The Bambuti of my old companionship are, in my dream, here among us, unexpectedly and with a frisson of shock perceptible: Aüsu, Moke, all the others, stock still at the entrance to a glade, played upon by dappled light and shadow as am I also, in green shirt and russet trousers cramped into this hollow … played upon by dappled dawnlight.
All of us forestiers have adopted the slogan THE WAY OUT IS IN: we take up this cry and we brim with love for one another and for the commanding Hand by which we are accorded our eternal being. Yet, in my dream, I who am their latest initiate, am of secret and unique significance for the entire forest as the articulator of their truth for each one of them, indeed, and together. This secret significance, in my dream, has placed on me now, on my waking, a secret and undying obligation of allegiance and of speech.
Holy, holy, holy. Sabaoth forest Lord.
Let all that hath breath, praise you Lord.
Black-backed beetle, you are my small sabreur, busy in your corner amid the leaf mould of your kingdom. How kingly you render black on the backplate of your cuirass to celebrate this sunshaft filtered privately and horizontally to you and me. What transfiguration is this, scarab? With this primavera rising out of creation’s waters, from your blackness you have made indigo, cobalt, cerulean, sapphire blue and the green of every ocean in the world, you are the vitreous invention of a thousand eyes, expectant for recognition. You slept the storm out. You are oblivious now of nothing but the dazzling darkness of your joyful being.
All is utterly silent. Beetle, nothing moves but your six legs, your quivering antenna, as you ease your way up this green stalk and are now in active contemplation of a transom stem, a crucifix which in silent metaphor pierces the universe with the crux of nullity and all that is, Seen and Unseen.
Silence peals the thunder – who told me that?
Absence experienced proclaims the presence.
My cavity here is where the boar was. Even now I scent the comfort of it. I can see where it has foraged and broken twigs. If there were husks here it rejected, I would eat them. Soon I will extricate myself and follow its track down to where there’s a waterhole. There I will lap the pigs’ mud and slime. I am reduced to nothing. So I rejoice. Even my reputation has been trampled into the mud: I’ll be laughed to scorn. I am impervious to shame. I have attained to nothing!
All you good friends, besieged in Colin’s villa, have been outflanked by me here in this wood in secret. You in your elegant villa; every one of your guests, Clare, and you yourself, surrogate of your absent son, have been trumped by the true prodigal. I have been brought poverty that I may know riches.
He who feeds on death, that feeds on men, possesses life supereminently. This ‘metaphysical mystery’ of William James that I quote to my Oxford students is the mystery that meets the secret demands of the universe. It is the truth of which the true ascetic has been the faithful champion. Listen on, my pupils in the class of life. ‘The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has, yet, its indestructible, vital meaning.’ And the naturalistic optimism of wealth-makers, economic planners, aid distributors, benefit dispensers, elective politicians of every hue, is ‘mere syllabub and sponge cake’.
Beetle, you and I know that.
Whatever primal man was here in this ravine in this forest of this vast massif, learned that. He toiled in mines and scraped out pits for the ore of reddened earth and streaked rock with which his ancestors dyed the bones of their dead. Maybe these faced slabs which rise to a pygmy’s height out of the roots and saplings to make a windowless wall now ruined, were slabs for your primal smelter.
You are gone and it was vain. You are all but blotted out from the book of life as utterly as these my Maures who too were children of the forest, rootling and hunting, trusting their forest as we of the faith trust our Maker, glad of its bounty, in harmony, in reverence, as utter children, children to this same god I have been schooled in, these five or ten millennia since our forest days. I am one with you now and have lived among you for ever and have loved you for ever, naming this Love. So you Maures, so you Bambuti, thus contained, shall have outlived all those others who have come and gone, those men of moment, fame and money and flashes of power for whom the forest is unknown to their world of getting and spending yet of all that is, what we see and cannot see, begotten not made, and of one substance with Him by whom all things are made. Here is my nothingness. I am of you by my love and for you, my fellows, mes frères.
My Bambuti, you and I know that it was vain and not vain. The gift of life the forest gave you could not be refused. My vocation to be with you could not be declined. All was vain and all was likewise holy. God of mystery and indefinability be praised. God be praised, Father, Holy Ghost and Son. I have had no function among you except to interpret your darkness for an ignorant world and find in your deep forest gloom and pitchy cave a source not of dark but of light; find in what pain you knew and sorrow and evanescence of life the concomitant of eternal joy; find in acceptance of death the sine qua non of life; find in weakness the first criterion of strength; find from strife and stress the sweet converse of peace; find in being marooned in the last of the pristine forest your ground of love and holy trust. You would say, Death is a ‘big thing; it is of the forest’, which is the guardian of Life.
You give me my release by the last embers of the nightly logs that our six mongongo-leaf shelters encircle beneath the canopy of mighty trees. You were locked into the treedom like Ariel, and I would free you from the outside world of enslavement to booze and beggardom at Bubandi, jigging asses for the tourist lens, weaving from forest stems purposeless trippers’ trinkets, corralled by Game Wardens bearing guns, demeaned, degraded, violated by schooling and raped by religion. God forbid, my beloved charges of the forest, you of raw creation, of the divine whole, of that which is One, of the bed of language. I pray to God to spare you preachers who deny your home Truth they know nothing of.
Out of that One let there issue from your throats and musical artefacts sounds of infinite primality, warnings of
leopards, greetings, homing signals, appeals for help, pleas of need, coos of content, of mutual recognition; whoops of the chase, ‘vocalise’, as once you said, Marigold, and out of vocalise the first person singular – I, then Thou. You, my Bambuti, from ancient times took on the lingo of whichever Bantu tribe settled nearest to you, to cultivate with hoes (possessing iron) half as big again as you, to whom you were linked by barter, medicine, bushmeat and music. You feigned obeisance for those Baamba of the mountain foothills, yet you were always fortressed by your own domain, your magnificent sanctuary, your forest which they feared. You cast for them the stem-fluted erirenga, you brought them boles of the omwamba, from secret places, as yet unhewn, for the hollowed-out communion of the drum. Those Baamba would confide to me that you Bambuti still had your own language but so secretly that you would not permit another ear to hear it or even know of it.
Performing with them on the reed-flute, Marigold, you yourself overheard Aüsu and his fellows exchange the gutturals of that pre-speech of theirs such as is never uttered but in intimate collaboration as when working upon the omwamba bole to extract by bellowsed fire the sacred resonance of that dark secret wood. We jointly, Marigold, were intruders upon the intensity of the ngoma-maker’s craft, fashioning exquisite resonance, spellbinding those children with sound that preceded speech and superseded it. The drum-sound was the Word sans words, as in the manner and authority of the kiss of love that silences speech with communication far sublimer, infinitely sublime. For that non-speech you and I shall ever vouch, Evie. What you and I thus know, we know.
All scripture is vain, saith Augustine.
Let us be as little children, as pygmies.
You, pygmy ngoma-maker, Masalito, worked to make the perfect emptiness, first with a gouge of metal got from the Baamba out of the metal-yielding Ruwenzoris, and finishing it by red embers and hot stones churned in the sacred cavity to harden yet further the wood and smooth its inner belly. You click and turn to your sister’s son-child apprenticed to you, to guide and approve. Only the pygmy hand is small enough, and the strong arm slim enough, to enter the collar of that cavity to work it. In ancient days, so you revealed to me, before the proximity of Bantu, when there were no others than those who lived and died by gathering and hunting, you made the drum’s hollow by fire alone.
You would live here contentedly, my Bambuti, proto-Moors of Africa, in this very forest-massif of my present entrapment You would never have hunted the forest out, you would have revered its treasures. So in Ituri you stripped the omutoma for no more than the bark you need to keep you warm and sling your papooses. On my massif here the natives strip the bark for gain, for industry.
Before my eyes, where I am crouched to lap at the waterhole I have tracked to, a rotten cork-oak has fallen to the forest floor, just such a toppling as you Bambuti would instantly be delving for its teeming source of nourishment: a city of clandestine life and privacy entire in itself between trunk and loosened bark, dank and dark, a teeming community of grubs, mites, tribes of woodlice, centipedes and millipedes, ants upon excursions, pupae, larvae, myriad eggs, slugs asleep each of its own beauty in the streaked and swirling beauty of its own world of fallen and decaying tree … My black beetle was an envoy to this inner universe of beauty, as gratuitously bountiful of hue and flow as a woman’s hair unpinned.
Everywhere is resurrection, look! – out of what has died, this treasure-house. I praise you, Jesus. Amid the bounty and fellowship and beauty and grace I give thanks for what has overflowed in creation to its overflowing. Look how the beetle has outlived the storm and how it is so intent and full of wonder climbing stems and exploring the underside of leaves, their veined beauty as exquisite as the wings of angels, and having discovered hastens on to repossess as heir the inheritance of the entirety all that is. This busy beetle is my soul, catching the sun on its black back and moisture on its belly, known to all creation, to its engenderer, and blessed by Him, granted life by Him – look, how my soul has wings of infinite delicacy. In your scarab casing are all my pygmies and all my mills of love and joy, the healing of my infirmities, the forgiveness of my sins.
Lord, you have put forth your hand and touched my eyes and opened them to the singleness of Your love which boils over in purity and peace and grace and life eternal. I praise you Lord, who knew me in my mother’s womb, knew Marigold, knew Evie, knew Beatrice: Know us yet and cup us in Your redeeming hand.
In Ituri you would capture these tiny creatures for me, would you not, my wee folk, smoke them in a covered pot and make a breakfast for me. I have no fire, I have no pot, I have no breakfast. Yet I know where due east lies, or lay an hour or so ago. If I aim northwards from wherever I have got to, is there not a fair chance of meeting the road running west from Cogolin to where the villa stands?
My waterhole has proved no part of any stream, but a stagnant sump, perhaps an ancient iron-dig. I have yet to discern the tilt of the land or any alignment of the dry stream-beds in successive gullies and ravines. Meanwhile, tramping north, my feet take me to higher ground and undergrowth less dense.
Look, it is already nine o’clock and Maïté’s Henri from Clare’s household, wearing a vest, will be at Marseilles airport greeting Evie with the news that her old friend from university has been mislaid and the hunt is on. Or rather, Clare, you will already have tried to reach Evie by mobile phone just as soon as she will have landed, or failing Evie, Victor. You are competent at these things, Clare. Maybe you will have caught Evie before she boarded at Heathrow – Evie – I’ll not be at Marseilles to meet you. Simon’s gone missing in the forest here. Failed to return last night. We’re worried he’s broken a leg, or simply hopelessly lost. Not like him, I know. There are search parties – locals who know the forest … Yes: he’s got us worried sick.
Maïté’s Henri will drive them. It will take an hour. Victor, to be self-recognisable, must assume command. The villa itself will be hq for Cogolin gendarmerie’s search-and-rescue teams. Maybe there’ll be dogs working away, to the scent of my pyjamas: such pursuits are joy to dogs. This will be a minor branch of Cogolin’s tourist industry: rescue teams amply rewarded in foreign currency for scouring the Massif for blundering hikers from northern Europe. Victor will come forward with a special treat for the first to spot me – a trip, perhaps, to London and dinner in the House of Lords for the lord-less French. Bishops of the C of E must be duly salvaged, and Victor is a Church Commissioner.
Evie, you will have turned pale at the phone call. ‘Your old flame,’ Victor will have consoled. ‘Dearie me! We shall have to track him down … But you had a storm last night, the captain told us on the flight. La tempête, n’est-ce pas? Le Mistral.’
My lifted big-toenail slows my pace. It will take months to grow out black. I am somewhat weak.
Let body be mortified.
Breakfast at the villa will not have been as usual. The same fare but less expansively displayed. The same faces, but one missing leaving his smear of unquiet on all the others – on Fergie, Reggie, Charley, Julian, Sir Gunther, and with varying intensity on the ladies who will have rallied to Clare, absolving her for her choice of so daft a vagrant guest. I join you all my beloveds in pity for my disappearance, adding to all your woes, and in shame of my dereliction as the lover of your souls, as the meister that you deserve and need. For you too are no less unfindably lost than I, who should be not this egregious distraction but a light to guide you. Merger Fergie would be occupied with his devices for making money in a falling market and Chancery Charley with assessing whether an onset of devaluation will not enhance the value of a lawyer’s standard fees, and Julian with watching his bullion scampering up. You are good citizens, my old buddies, my hearties – good enough and well enough brought up, contributing somehow to the weal. And you too Sir Gunther in your adoptive role, taking at face value what you judge to be most esteemed in the England of your adoption. I have no right to smile wryly at you. And as for Reggie, our multi-faceted multi-millionaire, amid this fuss and
flurry over the missing Simon he’d partied with so gaily amid his pop-art murals at Worcester, you’d rather at this very moment be in search not of him but of a haven for this or that parcel of your off-shore wealth.
Each one of you has your stanchion of self-esteem and yours, Reggie is sheer money and the suave adroitness of your financial inventiveness. You and your current Gabby have just spent a few days aboard a friend’s yacht moored in St Tropez bay which the financial storm has left unsunk, making you both bronzed more evenly than the rest of us. Your stanchion requires you not to be seen running scared before the maelstrom. You will already have seized today’s English newspaper Victor and Evie will have picked up on the plane. You have no refuge from yourself, whether or not you find one for yourself. My prayer singles you out. You stay on top: that is what you’re bred to do, what feeds your zest, keeps you sprightly. You have your fitness trainer (so you’ve mentioned), pop your dietary supplements, watch your physique, have toyed with countering the retreat of your hair by judicious implanting like that Italian politico who would stay on top in all departments including hair. I pray for you. Gabby says she likes you as you are since she, lithe divorcee, leather-skinned and ginny-voiced, must have herself liked as she is, needing her drinkie and her fag and in no sense evil either. To gratify your Gabby you have your own Mediterranean villa round the sea’s corner in Catalonia where each of us is half-invited to join you when occasion suits, amid the crowded schedule of seasonal venues. The unexceptionable trick, Reggie, is only staying on top, which is where you are and which the abandonment of a brace of marriages not so much contradicts as endorses. That there were offspring from those evanescent unions might suggest a fleeting moment’s expectation of permanence, but if there was pain you’ve cauterized the sore. ‘Life’s too short’, isn’t it, Reggie, in the vulgar codex, to dwell upon one’s false moves. The candle’s brief enough.