Judith

by Nicholas Mosley

  So – This is the nature of this strange territory?

  Or do you think it was all to do with the angle of the late afternoon sun which was shining quite brightly now: like the face of a drunk man falling behind a table?

  What one has to get used to, I suppose, is living and not just striving like this: chipping at the stone: being at home with what is there; watching with reverence in this strange territory. Not asking what it is – or how can you find it? Of course the language is difficult. It has to circle itself: at the centre there is silence.

  If one is able to walk at all in this strange territory (humans or post-humans coming down from the plains) would there not be the impression, yes, of its being precisely oneself and yet not oneself walking (the pencil or brush or whatever moving), this conjunction of what is one and what is the other being just what is emergent in the landscape – what one is discovering. And then one would know, yes, what is to be done as one knows this with a piece of writing or in a painting: just going along, in some sort of transport – of ecstasy or despair. You once said, did you not – Ecstasy and despair are the only two emotions worth having.

  Or – The state of grace is where the two mean the same thing.

  I was walking over the rolling grassland down to the house by the road. There were the trees dotted about like bright black holes or stars. There were not many sheep on the slope; they were farther down in the valley.

  I wondered – What one cannot bear about the sun, perhaps, is simply the excitement.

  Of course there might still be danger! Those bits and pieces of bombs like splinters coming down from a skylight –

  The building that I was approaching – something that could be drawn in a second or two, perhaps: four lines and a roof like a hat with a bobble of a chimney on top – would be a diagram representing – well, what? the family as a statistical unit? whatever it is that is the average? the subject (or object) of an advertisement on television? Take the lid off and you would see – the family of four to six people round the breakfast-table; consuming the things they have seen a family like themselves consuming on television; smiling and looking rather daft as people do when posing for a camera. When I got close I saw that it was indeed a mock-up of a house: four walls and a roof but no doors or windows; these were just painted on; there was even painted, roughly, a figure of what might be a father or a mother or a child (or an enemy) leaning out of one of the windows. The construction had been used, obviously, in the games of war: in war you do not need real buildings; you like knocking them down, so why not have something you can put up again quickly? But was not this, indeed, somehow representative of the games of the family of four to six people around the breakfast-table? a board perhaps upon which two or more people try to occupy the same space at the same time; on which someone succeeds, and someone fails, and someone is sent back to the beginning? I thought – Or perhaps the house has just been dumped at the side of the road like the Holy House of Loreto – come whizzing through the air as some encouragement or warning: the warning being just that this is, indeed, what families are like: unless – unless what? – you get away? whizz yourself like a bird over landscapes? There were perhaps, inside the house, my own father and mother arguing, complaining, cajoling: but I had seen myself in this, had I not? and forgiven it. All this was now like a stage-set. That one could move round it, through it, might be holy.

  I walked round the building to find out if I could see inside: there might even be a further peephole: having taken the lid off the box, one might see beyond. One end of the construction was not bricked up: it was barricaded roughly with corrugated iron sheeting. There was indeed some crack or peephole through: at first I could see nothing. I thought – Don’t be taken in by this! nothingness in the holy of holies? Then as my eye became accustomed I could make out – hay, fodder, racks for feeding sheep. I thought – Well, this is a bit corny: you mean just – Feed my sheep? The family of four to six around the breakfast-table? Perhaps I should go on? There was a board at the side of the corrugated sheeting which had on it in antique lettering ‘The Old Mill’. I thought – Well, what might be a more recent dispensation?

  The road went on towards the brow of a gentle hill. Everything was bright, and still, and exact: to do with the senses. The senses were not what interpreted the outside world: they were part of the outside world themselves: each composed, was composed of, the other. This was the at-oneness, the identity, that people longed for, I suppose, with drugs: but it was with drugs that the sun burned: in the state of grace I had gone round the sun, as it were, and here was the back way. I thought – It is as if we ourselves, now, through some further peephole, are bits and pieces of light.

  The sheep and lambs were innumerable here. They were lying in the road; the road was warm to lie on; traffic seldom came. As I went past, the sheep watched me; they stretched their necks; they did not move to get out of the way. I thought – Even when people come to play games here, the sheep know that what they are doing is playing games.

  The lambs stood sometimes and shook their tails so that little bits of light seemed to fall.

  The column of smoke, in the direction of the airbase, was dispersing in a cloud. I thought – The tablecloth is shaken by those reclining figures; crumbs like bits of grey dust fall to the ground.

  There were some strange blue flowers at the edge of the road. Their heads were like small sunflowers, their stems like trees. I thought – They are eyes? they are mutations? there is dust at the side of the road.

  I came to the brow of a hill where the road went over to a valley. I stopped: there was the same, but different, landscape below. I could see much farther – to a whole world of planes, slopes, curves, lines, parkland. It was framed by the sky. In a hollow, not far away, was a village: it was of course a toy village: six or seven houses of the same kind as the one I had left – brick walls and a roof with doors and windows painted on: shadows out of the cave-box, for people to play with. And just beyond, on a slight rise in the ground, was a church. This seemed to be a real church. I mean, it was made of stone; it had a high wire fence around it; it looked derelict, destitute; which the other buildings, the toys, did not. I thought – You mean, it is one of those forbidden areas within the forbidden area, like the façade, the tomb? The church, I mean, had presumably been preserved because it was some ancient and sacred monument: it was one of those lumps beneath the skin: it was dead or dying: all its openings were boarded up. But it did have, yes – this was what Eleanor had told me to look for – a piece knocked out of its spire, which hung at an angle. I thought – You mean this X marks the spot? If it cannot be the spot itself (poor church!) it can be that cross: a finger?

  It seemed that there must once have been a real village here – which had been knocked down, to be put up again as toys, so that people could knock it down and put it up more easily.

  Also – The spire of that church is like the flailing arms of Petrouchka?

  I went down towards the village. The houses were in a group round a village square; there was (surprise!) nothing in the square; it was one of those spaces from within which it seems that things are going on elsewhere. You know those pictures in which there are colonnades and arches; a statue on a pedestal, perhaps; smoke as if from a train round some corner: well, what is it round the corner? why is there an impression of fear? This is in our minds: what is it that we do not want to look at? I stood in the middle of the square. One of the buildings had its corrugated-iron covering at the end pulled back: just inside this opening there seemed to be – you remember fear? is it not like a bottom falling out? – just inside the opening there was what seemed to be a pair of legs sticking out: legs with no feet, covered with old sacking. I thought – But of course, if they were legs, they would have feet: in this place, of course, it is a toy. There were heartbeats going off in small explosions in my ears. I approached the building. The ground was dusty: no flowers grew: I thought – This is the nest of stones? Within the entrance, prop
ped up with its back against the wall, was a dummy: you know those pictures? heads stitched up and stuffed with straw? It was wearing some sort of uniform – Russian or German or American or whatever: I mean a life-size dummy of a soldier, propped up against the wall just inside the entrance of the building as if it were on guard: a wooden rifle even across its knees; an old cap stitched on to its head; but no feet; I thought – In such circumstances, indeed, why should it have been given feet? The dummy was lolling sideways; it seemed to have been stuck through, at some time, with a bayonet. I thought – But who has placed it here now? What an enigmatic angel to be guarding the back way!

  It was difficult to see inside the building because there was no light except from the opening in which I stood: so when you moved, it was yourself, as usual, who made the shadows. There was a faint smell: I had wondered – Perhaps I am going into some sort of charnel-house? But the smell was not of anything rotting: it was dry, acrid: of things that have remained the same for a very long time; almost of incense. When my eyes became accustomed to the dark I saw that this was, yes, a building where bodies were piled up and stored: the bodies, of course, were dummies: it was like the burial ground of some old king; a heap of heads and arms and legs – perhaps even those spectacles in piles – against a side wall almost to the roof: an atrocity, perhaps: but, as always here, for the purposes of a game. You remember those businessmen in Düsseldorf who bought flocks of plastic sheep and piled them into attics? I thought – Well here, in some storehouse of the mind, are businessmen who are kept as food for sheep? At the edge of the pile of bodies there was even a pram. I thought – What on earth would these people want with a pram? Except that, I suppose, if you want to play at killing, it would be quite fashionable to find some representation of children.

  – And the child – he would have been looking up towards the leaves, the shadows?

  – Or is he looking down at the temple where he might see himself being dismembered by hags.

  I moved further into the building. At the end on the left (left as you look at it; right, do you think, if you are looking at the brain?) tucked away behind the pile of bodies as if it might be of old hair, teeth, spectacles, there was an area which had been cleared and in which some sort of order had been formed. I do not know, as usual of course, how to talk about this: but it does not seem too difficult. There had been set up, had occurred, a group of figures (of course we have been here before!) in a semicircle facing inwards: some of them were propped with their backs against the walls: one or two were wedged with their legs in positions as if they were kneeling: I mean there was a group of these stuffed dummies, three or four in uniform, one or two with sacking round their shoulders – well, do you not know where this is that we have been before? They were facing towards the centre where indeed there was, of course, nothing; or no more than an empty nest of stones. But one of the group of these adoring figures, as if in that painting in the National Gallery, was a sheep. I thought at first it must be a dummy sheep: it sat, or lay, with its legs underneath it so still: and I thought – But this is not quite right, is it? again a bit corny? But then I realised that the sheep was alive, and that it had two heads. This is a shock (you have thought you know where you are?). One head might have been growing out of the other: but each head seemed to be equal in relation to the other: it was as if each had grown to balance the whole – as if on some tightrope. As I approached, the sheep did not move. I thought – Poor old humanity! of course we are on some tightrope: if I move straight enough, you may be still. When I got close to the sheep I saw that, although one side of each head had a perfectly formed ear and eye and even a nose, in between – and it was this that was stretched like a tightrope – was a third eye. I suppose it was some conjunction of what might have been the other eyes of the two heads: an enormous eye, watery and flickering: some heroic attempt to attain that third eye – I mean, the eye of Shiva. This is the eye that looks inwards, isn’t it? Perhaps it was just the strain of this attempt that made the third eye, in what was otherwise so still, seem always to be moving. I knelt down in front of the sheep. I thought – What can I offer you? – frankincense, love, myrrh? Precious humanity! You are at least honoured: you are, I mean, able to offer worship in terms of that painting. In addition to what seemed to be the semicircle of adoring figures, I noticed that there had been placed in front of the sheep, as if it had come from the place where the nest of stones had once been, a bowl of what looked like milk and a tray of greenstuff. I thought-Dear God, so where is the child? Then – You mean, he is, this is, somewhere just outside the picture?

  When I looked into the huge central eye of the sheep there did seem to be both reflections of the building – the charnel-house and the semicircle of figures – and things going on within the eye: here were snakes, and networks, and notes of unheard music: here were the nerves and branches of a tree.

  And I was sure that there was someone watching me. I did not want to look round. I thought – We are all in this painting: we will be getting on with whatever we are to be doing.

  Then – The child is in the branches of the tree which is all around me.

  What had he hoped for when he tended the sheep? that it would live? that he would help it to die?

  I felt that the child might be up on one of the cross-beams of the roof. He would have hidden because he would not know who might be coming into this strange territory.

  I thought – You mean, within the eye, there is that which we would discover: which is watching: which is also in the outside world all the time?

  Lilia had said – Bert told him stories of a place where there is the Tree of Life.

  I became aware – perhaps as a reflection of what was going on in those branches – that the child, in fact, was climbing down from one of the cross-beams that supported the roof; he had been lying there, I suppose, like the snake: no, not the snake! what was it that you thought was in the corner of the ceiling looking down?

  Hullo, hullo, my little one.

  He was seven or eight years old at the time. (Of course, you know this: you see, now, I am talking to you!)

  He had a round face and fair hair. He was dressed in jeans and a football jersey.

  Everything was happening at once. I felt I should not move.

  When he had climbed down he came and knelt beside me and together we looked at the sheep. I thought – How long did this journey take? thousands of years – from the time when those first men came down from the trees?

  He said ‘It’s called Hopeful Monster.’

  I said ‘That’s a good name.’

  I had feared that one might not be able to speak at all in this strange territory.

  He said ‘What is a hopeful monster?’

  He pushed the bowl of milk towards the sheep.

  I said ‘It’s when something is born which things outside are not quite ready for. Or perhaps they might just about be ready; that is the hope.’

  He said ‘I sometimes feel like that.’

  I said ‘Yes.’

  He said ‘Do you?’

  There is something here that perhaps I should put in about the child.

  You can guess how difficult it had been for me to see the child; I mean, because of Lilia. Then there had been a time when I did; when I came with Bert to the seaside to visit where they were staying (you see I am saying ‘they’ not ‘you’!). In the afternoon we played a catching game among the sand-dunes: there is a catcher, and when you are caught you have to stand still until you are rescued by being touched. The child and I had both been caught: we were standing quite close; we were in a hollow of the sand-dunes. The main part of the game seemed to get farther and farther away – the catcher, I suppose, driving the baby turtles towards the sea. The child said – Can I ask you something? I said – Yes. He said – Why does Mummy hate you? He was at that time – what? – five or six. We were in this little grove of trees in the sand-dunes: old hags, I suppose, were dismembering a child. I said – There’s often hate,
somewhere, you know, where there is love. He said – Who does Daddy love best, her or you? I said – He loves her: he loves your mummy: he loves her far the best! He said – Then why does she say he loves you? We were in this sort of temple: the hags do go on and on, don’t they? so methodically dismembering a child! I said – It’s all a game: people do play games: you know this, don’t you? He said – Yes. I said – What’s not a game, is that your mummy loves you. He said – Yes. Then he shouted – Rescue! Then Bert came roaring over the sand-dunes like some great lion, and he touched us and we were free.

  The child and I were now kneeling side by side watching the sheep.

  I said ‘Yes, I sometimes feel like that.’

  He said ‘Can I ask you something?’

  I said ‘Yes.’

  He said ‘Did Mummy want to die?’

  There were two long shadows coming in from the door. I did not think they had been there before. They went past us, on either side of us, as if they were some contraption to hold us, to pick us up, like tongs. I thought for a moment that they might be our own shadows, but they came from behind us; then I thought, I do not know why, that they might be the legs of a horse.

  I said ‘No, she didn’t want to die.’ Then – ‘People sometimes have to fight in extraordinary ways to live.’

  He said ‘That’s not a game.’

  I said ‘No, that’s not a game.’

  He said ‘She wants us all to live.’

  He knelt down. He seemed to be hanging something round the neck of the sheep.

  The light coming in through the door behind us did appear to be strangely red and bright. I supposed it to be the sun beginning to set behind the trees. It made bars and networks through the cracks and holes in the corrugated doors; these spilled all over us, around us, in the air, on the ground. I thought – This is the grid, the riddle, through which we do not fall: it is the branches of the Tree.