Murder in the Dark

by Margaret Atwood

  Forget about tough and competent, I can pour boiling lead from the battlements with one hand, I’m used to it by now, I hardly even look at the scorched faces down there, open mouths with their needle-pointed weasel teeth and all those enraged flags waving around. That’s what I do on weekdays, during invasions, but today is Sunday and I’m hopeless, we’re hopeless. Hope needs the future tense, which only makes you greedy and a hoarder: the future is what you save up for but like thunder it’s only an echo, a reverse dream. Hope is when you expect something more, and what more is there?

  Outside, the plague bulges, slops over, flows down the streets and so we stay here, holding on and holding on, to the one small thing which is not yet withering, not yet marked for death, this armful of words, together, with. This is as good as it gets, nothing can be better and so there’s nothing to hope for, but I do it anyway. In the distance, beyond the war in the midground, there’s a river, and some willows, in sunlight, and some hills.

  A Parable

  I’m in a room with no windows that open and no doors that close, which may sound like an insane asylum but is actually only a room, the room where I’m sitting to write to you once more, one more letter, one more piece of paper, deaf, dumb and blind. When I’m finished I will throw it into the air and as we say it will disappear, but the air will not think so.

  I’m listening to your questions. The reason I don’t answer them is that they are not questions at all. Is there any answer to a stone or the sun? What is this for? you say, to which the only possible reply is that we are not all utilitarians. Who are you really is the question asked by the worm of the apple on the way through. A gnawed core may be the centre but is it the reality?

  As for me, I may not be anything at all but the space between your right hand and your left hand when your hands are on my shoulders. I keep your right hand and your left hand apart, through me they also touch. It feels like silence, which is a sound also, I am the time it takes you to think about that. You enter my time, you leave it, I cannot enter or leave, why ask me? You know what it looks like and I don’t. Mirrors are no use at all.

  Ask me instead who you are: when you walk into this room through the door that isn’t there, it’s not myself I see but you.

  Hand

  Your body lies on the floor, with or without you. Your eyes are closed. No good to say you are your body, though this also is true, because at the moment you are not; you are only a fist tightening somewhere at the back of the neck. It’s this fist that holds you clenched and pushes you forward with short jabs of pain, it’s this fist that drives you through time, along those windowless corridors we know so well, where the yellowish-white light sucks the blood from the surface of your face and your feet in their narrowing shoes hit cement, a thud and then another, clockwork. This fist is what I must open: to let you in.

  I begin with the back of the neck, lightly, feeling the involved knot of muscle, in its own grip, a puzzle. A false start, to press too hard here would bruise you. I move to the feet and begin again.

  The feet must be taught to see in the dark, because the dark is where they walk. The feet learn quietly; they are wiser than the eyes, they are hard to fool, like stones they are heavy and grave, they desire nothing for themselves, once they have seen they remember. I move my thumbs down between the tendons, push on the deaf white soles of the imprisoned feet.

  This is your body I hold between both of my hands, its eyes closed. Now your body has become a hand that is opening, your body is the hand of a blind man, reaching out into a darkness which may in fact be light; for all you know. Behind your closed eyes the filaments of a tree unwind, take shape, red and purple, blue, a slow glow. This is not a lovers’ scenario. This is the journey of the body, its hesitant footsteps as it walks back into its own flesh. I close my own eyes so I can see better where we are going. My hands move forward by knowledge and guess; my hands move you forward. Your eyes are closed but the third eye, the eye of the body, is opening. It floats before you like a ring of blue fire. Now you see into it and through it.

  Everlasting

  I reach down and what do I come up with? Something early, a small dry white flower. Everlasting, it was called. Picked by the roadside, highway, near a rockface shot through with quartz; on which the sun shone as it rose, lighting up the rock like glass, like an entrance into light. Right then the world was something you could walk through, into.

  You could tent then, anywhere, just beside the road, any wide place. The tents were heavy canvas and smelled of tar. The others put the fire out. There were almost no cars; it was because of the war. The war was happening somewhere, and the devil’s paintbrushes, red and orange, grew there in clumps, purple vetch, daisies with their heavy smell, tiny black ants on the petals. A stream too, the water brownish and clear.

  There was nothing to do, there was all that time, which did not need to be filled. I knelt down, bare skin on the damp ground, and reached into the absence of time and came up with a handful of stems, on their ends the light reflecting from the stream, the dry white flowers, already eternal.

  Instructions for the Third Eye

  The eye is the organ of vision, and the third eye is no exception to that. Open it and it sees, close it and it doesn’t.

  Most people have a third eye but they don’t trust it. That wasn’t really F., standing on the corner, hands in his overcoat pockets, waiting for the light to change: F. died two months ago. It’s a trick my eyes played on me, they say. A trick of the light.

  I’ve got nothing against telepathy, said Jane; but the telephone is so much more dependable.

  What’s the difference between vision and a vision? The former relates to something it’s assumed you’ve seen, the latter to something it’s assumed you haven’t. Language is not always dependable either.

  If you want to use the third eye you must close the other two. Then breathe evenly; then wait. This sometimes works; on the other hand, sometimes you merely go to sleep. That sometimes works also.

  When you’ve had enough practice you don’t have to bother with these preliminary steps. You find too that what you see depends partly on what you want to look at and partly on how. As I said, the third eye is only an eye.

  There are some who resent the third eye. They would have it removed, if they could. They feel it as a parasite, squatting in the centre of the forehead, feeding on the brain.

  To them the third eye shows only the worst scenery: the gassed and scorched corpses at the cave-mouth, the gutted babies, the spoor left by generals, and, closer to home, the hearts gone bubonic with jealousy and greed, glinting through the vests and sweaters of anyone at all. Torment, they say and see. The third eye can be merciless, especially when wounded.

  But someone has to see these things. They exist. Try not to resist the third eye: it knows what it’s doing. Leave it alone and it will show you that this truth is not the only truth. One day you will wake up and everything, the stones by the driveway, the brick houses, each brick, each leaf of each tree, your own body, will be glowing from within, lit up, so bright you can hardly look. You will reach out in any direction and you will touch the light itself.

  After that there are no more instructions because there is no more choice. You see. You see.

  Afterword

  BY STEVEN HEIGHTON

  “To disabuse” is a powerful verb. Then the Achaeans emerged from their wooden horse and the Trojans, murdered in the dark of night, were disabused of their illusions. Much of the power of the verb consists in what it implies: that the purveying and implanting of illusions are a kind of abuse. Pseudo-mystics abuse by pushing the notion that our most poignant hopes – that nothing happens by mischance, that our lives are guided from beyond, that we live on as conscious, separate selves after we die – are really intuitions that such things must be true. Simplistic romantics abuse by cashing in on our natural hope that there’s one perfect person for each of us and if we find that person our trials will be over and our lives an endless
honeymoon. Blood-and-thunder types abuse by encouraging the belief that moral issues are black and white, that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys and that killing the bad guys solves problems both planetary and personal.

  Margaret Atwood is a committed disabuser. In all her books she exposes illusions, and in Murder in the Dark she goes so far as to spell out her credo, writing, of life’s “worst scenery,” that “someone has to see these things.” Of course on some level all serious writers play the thankless role of sceptic and disabuser – pointing out that the Trojan horse is hollow – but Atwood has always done it with unusual zeal. Often her approach is overtly comic, as when she writes that “Women’s novels leave out parts of the men … sometimes it’s the sense of humour. It’s hard to have a sense of humour in a cloak, in a high wind, on a moor.” Often her ironies are delivered by means of deflationary metaphors or similes, as when a boyfriend, finally seen at close quarters, “like Mars from a landed rocket … no longer shone.” And sometimes her ironies veer off into something far harsher, bleaker, as when she foregrounds “the gassed and scorched corpses at the cave mouth, the gutted babies.”

  Someone may have to see these things, but most of us would rather not read about them in our scant free time. Yet Atwood is not only a disabuser, she is also hugely popular – an unusual pairing of attributes for a poet, fiction writer, and literary critic. In fact, if Atwood were only a disabuser and a breaker of spells, the extent of her celebrity would be paradoxical; but her aggressive scepticism is balanced by a passionately mystical vein. This is the balance which not only sets her apart from most of her contemporaries but makes her work so attractive and accessible – and honest, since the hard-edged truths of satire and irony are not the only truths, are only half the truth, as anyone with both eyes open to the world can attest.

  Like her scepticism, Atwood’s mysticism is a strain present from her earliest work. When the protagonist of her second novel Surfacing (published eleven years before Murder in the Dark) begins to identify with the animals of the north country and to shun the blind, disingenuous human world, she sounds a kind of neo-primitivist motto – “the animals don’t lie” – which mystics like Gwendolyn MacEwen or D.H. Lawrence would surely second, but which a writer more purely sceptical than Atwood could never write with a straight face. Likewise, in Murder in the Dark, Atwood implicitly sides with the animals – in this case the instinctive animal of the human body – by asserting that “the feet learn quietly; they are wiser than the eyes.” And in “Instructions for the Third Eye” she gives brief guidelines for meditation – clear evidence that she trusts the oracular unconscious, and the realm of instinct it opens on, at least as much as she trusts the discriminating, sceptical brain. For Atwood’s purpose is not only to write with both eyes unsentimentally open but also to see with the third eye, her “eye of the body.” “Instructions for the Third Eye” is an apt finale to Murder in the Dark because the book, like the children’s game of the title, is about learning to see in darkness, in a dark time, when our daylight eyes are not enough – a perennial Atwood theme. In fact, Murder in the Dark is an important book in Atwood’s canon precisely because of the way it encapsulates in its modest span and brief dense sections so many of her primary concerns.

  Atwood’s persistent verbal venturing through the world’s surfaces into underrealms – whether the depths of the lake in Surfacing or the “echoing African caves” and Toltec-Maya tombs of Murder in the Dark – gives her work an archetypal undercurrent, an atmosphere of flickering Gothic shadow distant from, yet complementary to, the harshly rational light she trains on so much of her material. Purely sceptical writers tend to shun the materials of the unconscious, like dreams, drug-induced visions, and meditative reveries, as somehow slippery and suspect. But while Atwood’s work is often fiercely sceptical, dreams and eerie transformations are always at the heart of it – as when, in the mordantly ironic “Liking Men,” a pair of “grassy and fatherly” golf shoes metamorphose into jackboots, one of them presently raised to stomp on the reader’s face, then multiplying into a legion of boots, an army, until the point of view also changes: “Yours is the street-level now, because you are lying down.” In the same passage Atwood uses a kind of homonymic sleight-of-hand to effect a fleeting confusion and displacement, as when “power is the power to smash, two hold your legs, two your arms” (italics mine) – this scene thrusting us out of the wartime streets into a present-day children’s playground.

  Such “sleight-of-hand” might seem to suggest mere trickery – which raises a problem Atwood broaches in Murder in the Dark. Since all good writing involves artifice, since all good writers cast spells by arranging and rearranging words in rhetorical patterns meant to produce certain effects, how can serious writers be sure they’re not also building wooden horses, pushing pretty illusions? As Atwood asks, how can readers be sure that what she shows them isn’t “just a hallucination I’ve somehow duped [them] into seeing”? This self-questioning, this caveat emptor, is fair warning to readers – a reminder that artifice can be used to erect walls of sound that hide bad ideas, that even a debunker can be spurious, and it’s up to the reader to investigate and decide. In part the problem is semantic and rests in the difference between types of “illusion” – between the artifice necessary to art, and the lies that keep us in thrall and slumbering. Writers like Atwood offer “lies” – made-up stories told in artful language – that bring us closer to some tentative human truth, whether beautiful or painfully disabusive; the work of abusive writers is like that wooden horse wheeled with its covert, injurious cargo into the duped city.

  Atwood’s strikingly antithetical temperament puts her in the strange position of being a consummate magician suspicious of spells; both mystic and demystifier, prophet and iconoclast; a double-agent in Plato’s imagined war between the poets and the philosophers; the perpetrator of the perfect crime (as in that game of Murder in the Dark) and the detective.

  Though questioning her own spells, Atwood casts them here with a trademark virtuosity. In the book’s opening piece, “Autobiography,” she evokes a path where “oats fallen from the nosebags of loggers’ horses during some distant winter had sprouted and grown”; then, in “The Boys’ Own Annual, 1911,” there is her conjuring of “echoing African caves where the underground streams ran, lightness, haunted by crocodiles, white and eyeless.” This is prose with the lyric lilt and inner euphonies of poetry – or of chant, as in the final lines of “Everlasting,” a mystical evocation of Atwood’s haunted north country, where the pulsing run-on rhythms give an elevated incantatory tone so the passage becomes prayer, hymn, mantra – at any rate the kind of writing that purely sceptical writers scrupulously avoid. Yet Atwood will also use poetic techniques to demystify, as in “Women’s Novels,” where she laments her inability to enjoy a “romantic frisson” that she cannot believe in. Here the conventionally poetic – yet comic – internal rhyming of “gazelle’s” and “smells,” “reach” and “peach,” “swallow” and “wallow” not only give the writing an extraprosaic musicality but poke fun at the world of simple romantic harmonies and poeticisms the disabused writer can no longer enjoy.

  So is Atwood trying to have it both ways? Is she trying to address a public that craves mysticism, mystery, murder, and that “romantic frisson,” while at the same time reassuring the hardened sceptics that she isn’t fooled? Yet in her work the two modes – the sceptical and the mystical, the critical and the oracular, the satiric and the reverent – are seamlessly fused, as if they are organic halves of a unified vision. The child in the attic of “The Boys’ Own Annual, 1911” looks out a window blurred not only by “golden dust” but by “flyhusks”; the spring evening of “Boyfriends” smells of “mud and the full moon”; the poet of “Mute” searches for the alchemical word to conjure into life the “mud and light.”

  But more than anything else it’s the treatment of sex in writing that divides and reveals writers – that leads them to stand on one slo
pe or the other of the great watershed of temperament. And here too Atwood’s work has a foot on both sides of the divide. In “Worship” she writes of sex with a chant-like, almost liturgical tone: “Prayer is wanting. Jesus, Jesus he says, but he’s not praying to Jesus, he’s praying to you, not to your body or your face but to that space you hold at the centre, which is the shape of the universe.” Then, staking this cadenza to the cold ground of dailiness: “How does it feel to be a god, for five minutes anyway? Now you know what they have to put up with.”

  In “Women’s Novels” Atwood writes that if she could compose, or read, a sentence like [she had] a body like a gazelle’s she “would be able to pass [her] allotted time on this earth like a pearl wrapped in velvet.” Comfortably fooled. But a gazelle’s body, though beautiful, also entails “intestinal parasites … and smells.” “We do not need more literalists of the imagination,” Atwood adds ironically, suggesting again that we would all be more content if we never had to question the lyric fuzziness of a sentence like She had the startled eyes of a wild bird: “Ah, but which one? … It does make a difference.” Here the insistence on specificity is a demand for honesty, for metaphorical accountability – an invitation to clear-seeing and disabuse.

  Yet despite these sardonic reality checks, Atwood is still a mystic – an explorer of worlds beyond the scope of sceptical reason – who like any mystic dreams of learning and speaking the true names of things. “You can’t take another poem of spring,” she writes in “Mute” – and yet she describes the poet waiting, in silence, “for the word, the one that will finally be right.” Not the overused word “green,” but the word or combination of sounds and conjured images that is greenness itself, and Eden: “A compound, a generation of life, mud and light.” After all, at day’s end or at century’s end, the stomping jackboots and the “scorched corpses at the cave mouth,” the love gone sour, the bad faith and the hollow gifts and the murders in the dark are not the only reality, not “the only truth. One day you will wake up and everything, the stones by the driveway, the brick houses, each brick, each leaf of each tree, your own body, will be glowing from within, lit up, so bright you can hardly look. You will reach out in any direction and you will touch the light itself.”