Judith

by Nicholas Mosley

  And what might be a father?

  Is not this vision to do with what making love is – the acceptance of what might seem to be worms in a can; that by this vision, by its being beautiful, you may seem free? I mean, the acceptance is in the mind: so what would it be in reality? Well, there are those jostling, fighting, childish things, are there not: to gain identity, to lose it: sperms, to be accepted by the egg. But whether they are accepted, or are not, it is they who are lost: what is found, if anything, is the child. I mean something new might be born – anywhere. You take this chance, don’t you? But the egg too is another dimension. You accept the bitching, the cheating, the pain, the betrayal – if you are the egg: if you are creating the child.

  The room was still half in darkness. The curtains were not yet opened. I thought – It is not difficult to accept this.

  Do you remember how you told me a story about Lilia – about the first time that you met her? She had said – I only go to bed with people I don’t like: and you had said – Then that’s all right, either we go to bed or else we like one another. Well, when I came to the cottage with the Professor he said – Shall I tell you a story about Lilia: the first time I met her she said – and so on. And I thought – Good: so what? and I think this now. This makes me love Lilia. Here we all are, these worms in the box: you take the lid off: why should we not also be bits and pieces of light?

  Of course, the child was not in the cottage. There did not seem to have been anyone in the cottage for some time. I thought – Why not: too many of us have been here?

  – We are all now out in the sun!

  Bert said once – I came down here to see Lilia when she was pregnant. She wanted to get rid of the child. I told her not to. I told her to marry Jason.

  Is this true?

  There is that empty nest in the dust.

  I thought I would draw the curtains from the window. There would be the unmowed lawn, the hedge, the field across the plantation of fir trees. Beyond that was the battle-area. Of course, I had not gone into the battle-area when I had stayed here: I had only gone that once to the flint-mines.

  I thought – So where is the child?

  Did you not say that you had the impression, once, that he was looking down from a corner of the ceiling?

  I drew back the curtains from the picture window. There was the lawn, the hedge, the field, the line of fir trees. Beyond that was the battle-area.

  The window was made of plate glass. I could see behind me, half-reflected, the images of the room; not now only the shadows superimposed on the rug in front of the fire, but the chairs, bookcases, the dresser on the shelves of which bits and pieces of past lives were sometimes displayed – that pennant from the Spanish Civil War; Bert’s machine for demonstrating Catastrophe Theory; the medallion you picked up from the sea near Masada. Also reflected in the plate glass was my own face: a face which seemed to contain – such was the effect – both the lawn and the hedge and fir plantations out in front and the room with its images of the past behind: containing these as if they were in some box, but now, indeed, with the lid half off; the light making everything semi-transparent, semi-opaque; but (again) what was light? I had been staring at my image in the window for some time. There is a technique – do you know it? – to make your reflection disappear: you stare at yourself without blinking: you have arranged beside you a small source of light like a candle: after a while your face begins to take on shapes and sizes that you have never seen – those unborn might-have-beens of yourself, do you think, in their corners of the ceiling – and then in time you disappear: I mean your face in the glass disappears: in the place where it was there is simply nothing: or light. Well, I had been looking at myself like this for some time; and I had been thinking – You do not want yourself exactly to disappear! You say you love yourself: and now you love all those shadows in the room behind: so what you want, as usual, is to have everything all ways: to be yourself, to contain multitudes, and at the same time to get out. I thought – Well, all right, have I not said I accept just such proliferation? And the danger of being burned outside, as if by the sun – do I not accept this too? I made a joke – After all, is not fire light? And at this moment the window – now you will not believe this; there may be several things here you may not quite believe, but least of all this; I mean, I don’t really know if I believe it – the window broke. I mean, there was pressure going in and out against my eardrums, eyeballs, mind: the impression of a musical instrument being played but nothing heard because what one was involved with was simply vibrations: the light itself, like something material, seeming to go in and out: and then the window disintegrated, collapsed outwards, in bits and pieces on the grass. I mean, there might have been explanations for other things that had happened this odd day: but not for just this moment, as I looked into the glass as if it were the wall of that cave containing shadows, and it dissolved so delicately, so precisely, like pieces of light. I mean, I had been thinking of that cave in which people were trapped and whatever it was stopped them from going out into the sun: and now – well, does there not have to be some chance coming in from outside? It became apparent quite soon, I suppose, that some sort of bomb had gone off: the glass had seemed to bulge outwards for a moment and then in and then out again; it had been like water breaking (well, yes, a birth?) then bits of light fell very gently to earth. I did not know where the bomb had gone off. There had been the pressure, and then the bang sometime later: the bomb must have been at some distance away. I went on trying to explain this to myself. The pressure did not seem to have come from in front; how had the glass fallen outwards? but how could it have come from behind, since the doors of the room were closed. And so on. Unless it had come from (another joke!) my mind. But would not that indeed be (and in what sense?) how a person in the cave might get out? – to the lawn, and the hedgerow, and the battle-area beyond. I thought – Oh well, if it has been the fear of death that has stopped is getting out – it is too late now to worry, surely, even if (or because) there has been that bomb. If we are to survive, if we want to survive, do we not have to say – So what? – to those bits and chances of death; to those portentous figures on clouds even: you think they want not to want us to get out?

  There are breaking-points to substances, are there not? These are almost unexplained: they are called catastrophes: they are to do with birth and death: why are you laughing?

  I could now step out into the sun.

  There might be, of course, a real danger of being burned as if by some sun; if it was that sort of bomb that had gone off.

  There was a column of smoke going up from somewhere in the direction of the American airbase.

  I thought – The column, drawn by six white horses, rose to a height of several thousand feet –

  Let’s have one more effort at practical explanation, shall we?

  There had been an explosion, at some distance, because of the gap between the pressure and the sound. There was no evidence that the explosion had occurred in the battle-area (though no evidence that it had not): there was evidence from the smoke that it had come from the direction of the airbase. There was no knowing why this particular window had blown: you can break a glass by singing, can’t you? Perhaps someone had sung: perhaps some finger had come down: had I not been singing in my mind: you do not call such explanations practical? You used to say – I mean everyone who arrives in this sort of area is accustomed to say – that there are states which are best described by metaphors. I stepped into the sun through the jagged splinters of light which were like glass. I thought – Perhaps what I am stepping into is, yes, a painting, a picture; the realisation of a metaphor.

  Hullo, hullo, can you hear me?

  I thought I would walk across the lawn to the small gate in the hedgerow. Perhaps the child had come this way.

  The sun is death: the sun is life. I am practising.

  I thought suddenly – Lilia, Bert, will be all right by the airbase?

  The lawn was unmown;
the gate through the hedge was on rusty hinges. I thought I should go out of the gate, across the field, and into the wood. And thus into the battle-area. Of course, I was looking for the child.

  I wanted to go back again over what had happened – but you must not look back, must you, now you are here.

  The experience does seem to be aesthetic. Have you not often said – One should know what to do, or rather do without exactly knowing, in the same way that one knows, or at least does, about a painting or a piece of writing? I mean by looking at it, having learned, you know you should do this or that (you can’t always) but it goes if you try to explain it.

  I used to say – Is not this also a characteristic of a madman?

  You had said – The fact that you can say that, is not a characteristic of a madman.

  Between the gate of the hedgerow and the fir plantation was rolling, pitted ground – this was another of the places where primitive men had looked for flints. And had found – what? – that in order to stay alive you had to eliminate this or that, as in a painting? –

  I thought – But how do you bear this?

  In one of the hollows of old pits there was a child’s bucket and spade. It looked as if he had been digging.

  I thought – One day, with other humans, we will stay alive without killing: or if we do not, what is the difference?

  I did not think that the child’s bucket and spade meant that he must just now have come this way: but it did seem to be some sign, as if it were a note of music hung from a tree, that I was following him.

  You know the message: this sort of thing is the code?

  – A fossil, planted by God, to remind you that the world might be recreated each day –

  – A feather, from the wings of the bird that went its own way with an olive-branch in its mouth –

  – Someone trying to dig a deep shelter through to the antipodes?

  I was crossing the field to the line of fir trees which, I knew, was the boundary of the battle-area. This part of the boundary was distant from the ruined façade and the garden with a tomb: it was also distant in the other direction from the American airbase. In the latter direction the column of smoke bulged in the middle like some genie released from its bottle; perhaps those figures reclining on clouds were giving it a puff every now and then. At the edge of the field there was a fence with the usual notices: KEEP OUT and DANGER OF UN-EXPLODED BOMBS: there were the signs of the skull and crossbones. I thought – You need courage, do you, if you are facing the blank canvas of a painting? There was an old farm gate: a single strand of barbed wire along the top. I thought – Perhaps those angels with flaming swords are just the fear of appearing to have no hold on what you are doing; but then, if you know this, perhaps the hold is there. I prayed – I hope to God those others are all right.

  I climbed the gate. I thought – I am one of those humans or pre-humans not quite yet down from the trees, setting out on my journey to the plains. My new-found language would be – silence? But I would not be all right if those others were not all right.

  The silence in the trees was such that it was more than if you could hear it. I thought – Perhaps it was because those men could not bear silence that they invented speech; silence carried them like unheard music; it was this that did not seem to be in their control.

  That tower that they were building up to heaven – the language of this had been silence? Speech had to come to imprison them: to give them the illusion of control?

  I was over the gate and going through the fir plantation. I trod carefully: there were no paths: might there be tripwires?

  – Supposing the American airbase was a place where were stored the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil (those missiles like snakes with death in their heads); of course here what we should now be looking for is the Tree of Life.

  I mean, what child might be able to live in this strange territory?

  Well, it has been said often enough, has it not, that there was a prohibition only against eating from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil: there was no prohibition against eating from the Tree of Life. So humans, having language, ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. Language is counter-productive; they did not eat of the Tree of Life.

  But a mutation (like a god) would know all this.

  So the Tree of Life would then still be waiting round some corner – the child with its hand, as it were, on the collar of some fatted calf – or lamb?

  I was treading carefully through the fir plantation. All this was in my mind. What is it that you can or cannot do with your mind: let it run: watch it? I was walking through the battle-area. I knew very little about the battle-area. I did not know about unexploded bombs or mines. I knew there was a sensation as if I were treading lightly on air a few inches off the ground: is this what people in Byzantine frescoes feel – that there might be trip-wires? You have been walking some time through the maze and then the bottom falls out: you hold out your arms: you are like a bird. I mean you are that which remains (are you?) when the rest has fallen through the grid, the riddle; which is the bottom of the maze.

  Do you really think one is not mad if one can refer statements about the possibility back to oneself?

  There were bracken and brambles underfoot: one had to step high to get through. I did not think the child would have come this way.

  The battle-area was somewhere where men went to play games. They went there for no other purpose except for games: so – for once – there was no confusion. Men always play games; so in a place where there were no pretences, might there not also be something quite different – that which might grow apart from the pretences (and the predatoriness) of humans?

  You once got us all into that cell, that stage: the cell was in our minds: we were in a theatre. We had to put up our hands and push against a wall – the front wall of the stage. This wall did not exist. Then we were to be hurled, like seeds, over the ploughed land of an audience.

  The Tree of Life is something whose light contains its own shadow?

  I was going through the wood with the light like bits of stained glass. Then ahead it became whiter. I thought – A rainbow is refracted back to its original sun. Or – A mutation might be something that would refract out, and back, and so be itself; and by this be more than itself.

  I was coming to the edge of the wood. You do not see beyond the front of a stage unless the lights come on in the theatre.

  Then the game is over.

  By the end, the characters on a stage are often dead anyway.

  But you could get up and walk about amongst an audience saying – Is it you? is it you?

  Hullo, my little one.

  I thought – Perhaps the child inside me will grow exposed to this strange sun and will live in its light-and-dark branches?

  I was coming to the edge of the wood. It was here that the light was brighter. It was as if I were about to see through a further peephole of that box: then there would be, would there not, that bright-and-green landscape which makes its own light: and I should be able to walk amongst it.

  The ground seemed to fall away at the edge of the wood. Of course, from that bomb, there might be little bits of death coming down: or seeds – you could tell the difference?

  I sat on a tree-stump. What was it like when the child lay on the edge of that bed; do you remember?

  You know how when you are writing or painting (have I said this before!) there is the impression that you are not creating but discovering what is already there: you have been going along in the dark for some time: is it here, is it there: then suddenly – what else is the excitement! You have been helpless for so long: well not quite helpless because you know (you have had these glimpses!) that what you are doing is uncovering; and so what is to be uncovered is there. The discipline is in the faith: you do not know what, but you know that: there has to be also, I suppose (how can you say this!), courage, skill; the skill being partly perhaps in knowing how to say – Ah, skill, h
ow can you say that! So you let yourself go; with diligence, with pain: and then suddenly – by neither accident nor design; you have been blown round some corner – there is this extraordinary landscape.

  The ground fell away into the rolling green parkland that I had seen before; in which light seemed to come not from reflection but from the objects themselves; in which trees seemed to contain their own shadows and sheep were dotted on the ground like stars. It was like the land of the hills beyond the estuary; the flowers like trees and the trees like large flowers; birds in the air like notes of music. It was also like that courtyard with the bird or finger coming down: also that place beyond the dust, I suppose, beyond the empty nest, beyond the frame, where no one except the child was looking.

  The colours were vibrations; as was the music. It was indeed a landscape into which man might be said not yet to have come: because he came only to play games – and so he might be said deliberately not to have touched it.

  There were thousands of lambs together with the sheep. They were like those seeds, those chances of mutation, fallen on this ground, and waiting to see what might nourish them.

  There was a road running through the landscape at the bottom of a slope – the road might almost be a river by the way it so much glistened. Or a snake – might it not be a snake? – coming down from a tree, and going for a drink along a road that could be a river.

  You know that game in which you are supposed to find out, or test, the patterns of people’s minds: you ask them to draw a house, a road, a river, a horse, a snake, a tree. And according to what story can be inferred from what they draw – the snake crossing the road towards the house: the horse cut off from the tree by the river – you think you can tell what is going on in their minds. But supposing there is in fact a house, a horse, a road, a snake, a tree: you have found out – what? – just that it is a sort of game that goes on in people’s minds?

  There was in fact a house, or what looked like a house, at the bottom of the slope, down by the road or the river. It was a house because it had four walls, a roof, a chimney: but it had nothing else; no attributes; no garden, path, outhouse, fence. It seemed as if it might be an idea of a house, before humans put anything on to it.