We were all trying not to be characters in the Garden: characters are what are formed by families and by society: characters are what stop you growing, like a shell. But then – in what way do you know people which is not to do with their characters? What do you know of a society of people trying to know themselves?
I thought – We have come to this cave: we know we are shadows –
– Those people who think they see substances, they do not have the substance to know they are shadows?
‘Hullo.’
‘Hullo.’
‘How are you?’
‘I’m sorry if I was rude.’
‘Oh that is all right.’
I had come across the Indian boy again a few evenings later outside the gate of the Garden. He was sitting by a rug on which there were exotic shells for sale. The shells had spikes like crowns of thorns. It seemed already that I had been a long time in the Garden.
‘I didn’t feel very well.’
‘Is this your first time in the Garden?’
‘Yes.’
‘How does it strike you here?’
I picked up one of the shells. I thought – Don’t do this: put it down: I have been only a few days in the Garden.
I said ‘Did you collect these yourself?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’re very beautiful.’
I thought – But you do not protect yourself here, do you, you are protected: and it is true that this shell is beautiful.
He said ‘It is not a good environment in the Garden.’
‘Why not?’
‘The sanitary conditions are not good.’
I thought – Good heavens, it is true that the sanitary conditions are not good!
He said ‘There is offensive behaviour, and drugs.’
I put the shell back on the rug. I thought – You give up, don’t you; you let things go their own way, behind your back.
I said ‘No drugs of any kind are allowed in the Garden.’
‘But they are allowed outside.’
‘Yes.’
‘So what is the difference?’
I thought – You mean, you want me to tell you the difference?
He said ‘Will you come for a walk with me?’
He was tall; much taller than the Indian boy in London. He wore a white shirt and black trousers.
I thought – Oh well, what is the point of an experiment if you do not sometimes look, even in these early days, to see how it is getting on?
He said ‘What this country needs is agricultural techniques and machinery.’
I said ‘Have you always lived here?’
He said ‘I live in the village.’
We had gone a short way into the scrubland at the side of the track that went down the estuary. We stopped. I thought – Where are those three dogs that were playing in that picture?
I said ‘The local people don’t like the Garden?’
‘No.’
‘It isn’t doing any harm. It isn’t stopping anyone bringing in agricultural techniques, and machinery.’
‘It spreads superstition. This country has enough superstition.’
‘But the Garden is against superstition. It is trying to make people look at what is actually happening.’
I thought – But, indeed, what is the use of words; did not that girl get the wound in her throat to tell her this about talking?
He said ‘You are clever. But you do not know what it is like to live in a country that is not clever. People want to go on as before.’
I thought – Supposing he were the snake: supposing Eve just gave up arguing, and stood with the snake by the track that goes down towards the river –
Then – You mean, this is the sort of projection I put on to people?
I said ‘But you are clever. You speak English very well.’
He said ‘I teach in the school.’
I said ‘What do you teach?’
He said ‘Mathematics, and English.’
I thought – And you will want someone to help you with your English in the evenings?
He hitched up his trousers and tucked in his shirt. There were bones jutting out of him as if he had once been wrapped too tightly, like a plant with wires cutting into it.
He said ‘You want to be careful. The police will come and clear you out.’
I said ‘You can’t say – The police will come and clear you out!’
He stared at me. He had clear skin, and a small moustache. I thought – But still, projections are energy; they are like gravity; what is the relationship between good and evil? He said ‘I am sorry.’
I said ‘These people in the Garden are just the same as you: they have their fears, miseries, rages.’ He said ‘They have more money.’ I said ‘Some have more money.’
I waited. I thought – And enmity stirs up lust: or is it lust that stirs up enmity?
He took hold of my hand.
I thought – But if I know it makes no difference whether or not he takes hold of my hand –
He said ‘I was hoping to find someone who will help me with my English in the evenings.’
I said ‘Look, I will try to help you with your English one day. I can’t do it now. I’ve not been well.’
He said ‘Thank you.’ Then – ‘What has been wrong with you?’
I said ‘I’m all right.’
He said ‘Tomorrow?’
I shouted ‘No!’
I thought I might turn and run. But this, of course, would make things more interesting.
Eve, of course, at some level must have wanted to destroy the snake.
I thought – So it is important, is it, in order that projections should be freed, that nothing much should seem to be happening in the Garden?
After a time I felt that he would understand when I said I had to go back into the Garden.
Life began in the Garden each day while it was still dark: ghostly figures converged from the huts, from the road to the village and the town, from the track up from the estuary. At the entrance to the Garden there was one small lantern: bicycles were piled beneath it like dead moths. It was as if souls were hurrying to be in time for the Resurrection.
Under the roof of the enormous hall there was still almost no light: figures like pieces of sculpture were already there – to be discovered within the stone. From the loudspeakers under the roof music began – a quick drumming. This was an exercise, a meditation, to do – what? – to reach to the being that you really were: to draw it up, free from the stone.
For the first ten minutes you stand with your feet apart and pump the air out of your lungs using your elbows like bellows; you blow through your nose; you do this in time to the music. You fan an almost dead fire; you are raising from the bottom of the ocean an old wrecked ship. Of course this is ridiculous. It is to do, is it not, with the supply of oxygen to the brain. Sooner or later you begin to float; to be on fire; why should it not be to do with oxygen to the brain? So why not do it then? – if you are a bit of dead wood at the bottom of the ocean.
There were all these hundreds of people in the enormous hall pumping away at their sunken ships; the dome in the dark above like a sky that they might shoot up into like heartbeats.
This goes on for what seems to be more than ten minutes: nothing much, as usual, seems to be happening. You do not see, do you, the connections between your body and your brain; why should you see the connections between yourself and the universe? The mechanisms of life go on in secret: you know this: you would destroy them if you dug them up to see.
The music stops: starts again in a faster rhythm. You now have to shake off all the bits and pieces that might be preventing you from rising: stones, sands, limpets, encrustments; weeds that have grown like lovers’ arms around you. You let go, shout, yell: it is when pieces fly off that you create some space. Then you can grow. The air comes in, takes hold, forms some bubble around you. Do you not think God lets himself go from time to time: smashes the rocks and crocker
y? Then there is a seed, a homunculus, in a cell.
How much do you know about this sort of thing: have you ever tried it? You are becoming that part of yourself that can be looking down on yourself; and laughing. This goes on for ten minutes. Then the music stops. It starts again in a faster rhythm.
Now what you have to do is to raise your hands above your head and jump up and down on the same spot for ten minutes. Who has ever heard of jumping up and down on the same spot for ten minutes? And so on. You are trying to get a balloon up into the air; you have thrown bits of ballast out; as you jump up and down you are one of those contraptions roaring with flames and hot air: will the fabric of the balloon fill; will the whole apparatus burst into flames; on what sort of apotheosis will you be carried up to heaven? You have begun: you think – Well, I will carry on as long as I can; then I will stop. For what is not possible is not possible: you are, after all, this bag of old bones, flesh, offal; you have been dumped on the earth; how can you suddenly go shooting in a chariot-rocket to heaven? By pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings, I suppose. But then – whatever is happening is happening secretly. You jump up and down: you find, at least, that there is no necessity to stop; you get in the way of it; perhaps you are becoming that puppet, are you, with its centre of gravity tied to heaven. And what is gravity except that which can jump up and down, as it were, for ever – its arms up through the universe! Or there is that snake – itself, after all, an old body of blood and bones – that lies curled up at the bottom of your spine; that when it is aroused shoots up like a rocket through your womb, heart, mind, and out beyond, into the sky. Or what is making love, I suppose, except jumping up and down on the same spot for ten minutes – and then, with luck, the snake bursts inside you, above you, like stars. And so then where are you? Not quite yet floating serene above what strange landscape. The point of heaven is, I suppose, that when you have come you are once and for all and for ever there. All this goes on for what seems, yes, to be ever. The experience is that you are held, moved, as if by a line at your centre of gravity.
The music stops. You stand still where you have landed for ten minutes.
Or it is not exactly that you are still: you are breathing so heavily that the fires of your rocket-chariot, still roaring, seem to be consuming you: but you are not consumed; you are yourself; what have gone are your ropes to the sky and ground; you are liberated from the stone. And so, yes, you are on the rim of some new world; you have landed. You cannot remember, quite, how you got here: you were blowing, shaking, jumping; you were working with bellows and cylinders: now here you are – in this strange landscape. While all this has been going on the sun has come up; I mean, the exercise has been timed so that at this point the sun should come up; so it is as if you have been, indeed, working hand in hand with gravity. We had not noticed the sun previously, of course; we had been so intent on the firing of our chariot-rocket to heaven. But now there we were, exactly at, within, outlined by the rose-pink fires of sun and sky: statues standing in the enormous hall released, discovered, set down from the stone. It was as if we had created this light, this freedom, together with the sun; what a miracle it is after all for the sun to come up each day! And had not the same force been within us rising and bursting like stars? We had to try to stay very still, of course; for were we not, on this strange planet, like babies on the edge of a bed. Sweat poured off us. Might we not bring life to the dying earth, our mother.
The music started again.
For the last twenty minutes you have, simply, to dance. You dance in celebration of – what? – the fact that you have come through? that you have been dead, sunken, and now are alive? What else are you doing when you dance? The hook has been taken out; you have been lifted, set up; you have a centre of your own. All dancing is a form of celebration – perhaps of the fact that a human can be, on his own, neither an animal nor a god; but something of both; which is more than either. Dancing, we were the snake and the tree and the person watching the tree. I have always loved dancing. Dancing is to do with what cannot be put into words: you move, and you are completely yourself; your limbs are part of everything around you.
In the Garden I got a job in the cloth-making workshop. I also helped in the kitchen in the evenings.
There was a wooden loom with a shuttle that went to and fro: to and fro: nothing much (are you surprised?) seemed to be happening. After a time there was a small length of cloth where there had not been one before. We made clothes the colour of flames; of the sun.
There was an extraordinary air of stillness combined with busy-ness in the Garden. A thousand or so people came in each day: some for their therapy groups, encounter groups; some for cooking and cleaning; but it was as if everyone was aware of something slightly different going on; some part of them which had chosen to be still, to watch, to listen: to try to become conscious of their being part of the whole.
The shuttle of the loom went to and fro. There was the sound of drumming, of music, round some corner. It was as if one were part of some blood, liver, heartbeat.
At meal-times people queued for their bread, soup, vegetables and fruit: the canteen was a long low building with urns like those in a laundry. We ate outside on wooden benches beneath a bamboo canopy. The sun made stripes through the bamboos so that the setting seemed to be some sieve, or riddle. I thought – The old dying bits of us are flaking off, falling through.
One of the points of the Garden was that we should learn to meditate; meditation was an attitude of mind: it was the looking down on oneself, whatever one was doing. The point of meditation was that it should go on, like a heartbeat, all the time. People had grown hard shells around themselves: if they became watchers, listeners, in whatever it was they were doing, that which was hidden inside the shells might grow: after a time, the shells would fall off. There was a myth that snakes were immortal, because they were such that their skins fell off.
I did not join any of the therapy groups or encounter groups: I thought – This is not my need: I have banged about enough, have I not, with worms in the tin can.
But there were flies that still buzzed in my mind. The mind was the shell, or bottle, in which these flies were trapped. One could look down on it for a time: then suddenly it was so awful; so awful!
Often during my first days and weeks in the Garden I looked for the woman who had gathered me in at the gate; who had held me that first day in the enormous hall. When I did not find her, it did not seem that I minded. I thought – I suppose she is one of the events that are like a heartbeat, that go on around some corner.
The flies were memories, like devils, like bombers coming in: where do they come from, how do we stop them? Were they the demons that Lilith sends from her rock? Might not Lilith come back to save us?
I wondered – Is the woman who took me in at the gate Lilith: Adams’s first wife, and his equal, in the Garden of Eden?
The memories that came in were to do with all those poor worms treading on each other’s heads in the mud of the tin can; the people scratching in the rubble for where their homes had once been and for food. There had been that terrible tube down Oliver’s throat like a horse’s penis; his fingers clutching, clutching, like crabs tearing at flesh. I had tried to help him: how I had helped him! There had been a broken body on the pavement beneath the window of the flat, kicking, kicking. A child had fallen off the end of the bed while the doctors had tended to the dying earth, its mother.
My mother had been in a Japanese prison camp during the war. She had been fifteen. She had once told me a story. They had all been very hungry in the prison camp: certain prisoners were suspected of hoarding food. She was with her own mother – my grandmother – in a hut: she looked over the edge of her bunk one night and saw her mother eating tinned milk with a spoon. I mean she was giving none to her child, my mother, who was starving.
It is a baby who kicks out at the edge of the bed. Someone falls over.
On the pathways of the Garden between hibiscus and o
leander there used to be people striding forwards with those smiles like mad archaic statues and I sometimes wanted to puncture them with arrows as if they were those inane St Sebastians; but this might have given them pleasure! Or I might pile them into the huge urns of the canteen as if these were jaws and seed-pods in a painting of hell by Hieronymus Bosch.
My father was a professor of anthropology. I think he had fallen in love with my mother out of pity. There is a terrible power in the hands of a person who is pitied. Of course, my father wanted to pity: I think he also wanted to love.
Sometimes in our thatched hut at night Belle would weep; Sylvester would hold her; Ingrid would stride off like a horse into the night. The gentle flames from the oil-lamps made our skin appear thin, almost transparent. What hope was there for people who might cast off their shells? Would they not be exposed to the worms of blowflies coming in?
Then one day when I seemed to be reaching some impasse in my feelings about the Garden – had I not been here long enough: what was I doing: where else had I to go? – I came in the course of some errand to that part of the Garden where there was God’s inner garden: I mean God lived within the compound of the Garden but he had his own house-and-garden like the nucleus of a cell. This had a gate, and a hedge, and a smaller fence around it. There was always something mysterious about God’s inner garden. I had stopped on the path because some memory, or even presentiment, had struck me: these images made you listen as if for bombs coming down: I was on the path with my hands held out as if for rain: what must it have been like for birds, those bombs coming down! Someone appeared at the gate of God’s inner garden. I realised it was the woman with short fair hair like Lilith and the aura of light around her. She stood quite still when she saw me. I thought – You do not speak: I do not want you to speak! except to say – nothing. The last time I had seen her was when she had taken me to the door of my hut and had left me there. I thought – Of course, this is why I have not seen her: she lives in God’s inner garden. So it is true she is like Lilith! Then – But she was at the gate of the Garden that day to welcome me!
Judith Page 13