I shook my head.
‘The temple rising from lush jungle below, the sense of primordial grandeur issuing from ancient stone. The major structure of Angkor Wat is the pinecone. But this is hardly surprising, because the major structure of the world in general is the pinecone. Not the earth. The earth is not exactly shaped like a pinecone. It is spherical, but it lacks the Fibonacci overlapping structure. It is a shame that the earth is not precisely a pinecone, as this would explain a great deal. But the world itself is defined and orchestrated by the pinecone, and its buried symbolism lurks within everything. It is associated with fertility, rebirth, sexuality, and also the deepest impulses of the inner eye, spiritual revelation. The integral reality of the Self.’
Now Port hit his stride. He was escalating. The entire room was a pinecone, and he was a pinecone and now he explained to me that reality was a pinecone as well. If you weren’t a pinecone, you were essentially not real. I felt myself fading at the edges as he showed me Marduk, the Sumerian god, who was holding a pinecone.
Then, an Assyrian genie, holding a pinecone.
Osiris of the Egyptians, with a pinecone staff, as well as Dionysus of the Greeks.
Lord Shiva, with pinecone hair.
The Freemasons built so many edifices defined by pinecone imagery, that we might become overwhelmed if we tried to represent them all. Port told me that one of his favourite of all the pinecone edifices of Freemasonry is a former Masonic temple in Pennsylvania.
The Nazis, who stole so much from ancient religions, including the Swastika, also appropriated the pinecone.
‘The Pope entered London a few years ago,’ said Port, ‘and people were raging and crying and saluting him on the streets, the usual mania but more importantly, what did he greet them with?’
‘A pinecone?’ I said.
‘Good!’
In his zeal, Port opened a book and showed me – another pinecone. This time, we were in Rome, at the Vatican. A vast stone pinecone, an edifice to another era.
The pinecone was, Port explained, the navel of the world. Omphalus. In the original stories, the world emerged from primordial chaos. In the depths of night, a strange sound and a movement and then – the first hill. A protrusion into the nothingness. And that protrusion was the pinecone. Not initially. At first it just looked like a mound, but then, gradually, myth and fable perfected it and it became shaped with celestial scales, the Fibonacci wonders, and then it became the original force field of life, and then of course it was linked to the human spine and the brain. The spine is the tree of life. The staff. Each one of us has life within us. Creation within us. And at the tip of the staff, at the end of the spine, is the pineal gland. A small endocrine gland, as the contemporary scientists define it, producing melatonin, which affects the circadian rhythms. Sleep and waking, rise and fall. It is shaped like a pinecone. The ancients may not have known this. Or perhaps they did – those embalming lizard men who kept their famous dead so pristine. To enunciate the grave regions of antiquity – and the contemporary formulation of the brain – nearly all vertebrate species have a pineal gland. Yet not the hagfish. And alligators don’t have pineal glands and perhaps this is why they are destroyers and indeed hateful. Little eyes. The ancients regarded the pineal gland as the third eye. The sacred all-seeing register of the human being. Of being in general.
‘The pineal gland is the only region of the brain that is not divided. It is whole. Integral. And of course you know about Descartes who tried to link the tangible world with the spiritual world, through this tiny gland in the brain. The pineal gland was the seat of the soul, he argued, and therefore where the material and the immaterial might merge and belong, briefly, to each other’s remit. This was how Descartes solved his philosophical problems.’
With the pinecone. It was completely logical and no longer surprising. I submitted entirely to the argument. I had no choice. As we sat in the lighted dust of his room, as the sparkling dust settled on pinecones, as the dust was illuminated, Port said that Descartes had enforced the ancient distinctions between the material and the spiritual world, and now we call this Cartesian Dualism. Mind versus body. The church was delighted, and Descartes was spared from censorship, or death. Meanwhile Descartes, who was after all, attempting to be rigorous about his binary division of the universe, realised that if the mind and body were resident in entirely different regions – one physical, one immaterial – then there was no logical way in which they might interrelate. Thus, how could the mind influence the body? How could the mind have dominion over mute matter, and so on? How could the ensuing project of the enlightenment, man as lord of nature, have any meaning at all?
‘Perfectly, and beautifully, Descartes crafted a fudge,’ said Port. ‘A big fat fudge. You understand? You understand what I mean by fudge?’
He was leaning towards me. He was intent on the definition of fudge. His pinecones were glistening in the light, surrounded by swirls of illuminated dust.
‘Descartes fudged his philosophy, so he might live. And thus the pineal gland was rendered once more integral. Always integral. This thing of myth and physical embodiment. A thing both physical and immaterial. The little pineal gland, said Descartes, was where the impossible occurred, and the mind communed with the body. Immateriality with materiality. And the church wandered away, nodding its clerical heads and Descartes breathed a sigh of relief. Is not life absurd and beautiful at the same time?’
*
I had no idea. But it was undeniably true. Whatever it was. While I was trying to work out what the hell he meant, Port showed me another of his sculptures – a bronze hand. It was beautifully rendered. It was lustrous, undeniably elegant and on the thumb there was a pinecone, attached and somehow fused with the hand.
‘The pinecone hand is the emblem of the Dionysian, who sees another dimension in madness,’ said Port. ‘This isn’t an original sculpture. I had to copy it myself. The Dionysians of course went into frenzies. In this way, they participated in the divine.’
‘Was Solete a Dionysian?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not many Dionysians about, these days.’
‘Why did Solete want a pinecone in his house?’ I said, trying again.
‘The inner eye sees, but not as our ordinary eyes do. It sees something else. And it fears not the heat of the sun. Or the treachery of the Moon. It is free. It can see what is intrinsic, and it is not distracted by the glittering forms that flicker and confuse the waking eye.’
‘Do you have the Field Guide to Reality?’
He shook his head. ‘Solete would never have given me anything important like that. He knows I’m not remotely interested.’
‘In reality?’
‘Words are terrifying. They are not real. I prefer shapes.’
I didn’t know how to answer that. He gazed at me for such a long time I became convinced he had fixed me under a piney thumb. I thought for a moment I might have to ask him to stop, and he was so insistent, with his fixed stare and his conical nature, I became uncomfortable. I felt incredibly hot and my head pounded, at the top of my spine. This was plainly illogical, but it is hard to maintain the tenets of logical deduction when your head is pounding as if it might explode.
‘You could try Lydia Cassavetes,’ he said, eventually. Now he was urbane again. I felt enervated, as if something was awry. And I was still wondering if Port was, for the time being, sole arbiter of whether things were awry or not. Then I dismissed the thought. Of course he wasn’t! He couldn’t be! It was just in the pinecone glade, that he was pre-eminent. I had to get out. I felt slightly stifled. It was unfair, he had poured me tea, and told me everything about the pinecone and even now, he was saying –
‘She’s a bit of a weirdo, but she knew Solete extremely well. She was his greatest friend, after his wife died. We keep strange company in times of crisis.’
He took a pen, and smiled at me. Then, he seemed to be quite harmless. An eccentric sculptor, who spent his life remaking the natura
l world. Crafting unnatural versions of objects that nature made, effortlessly, spontaneously. It was parody, or a creation fantasy. Or, he liked pinecones. Certainly, that seemed to be undeniable.
He wrote out something, and handed me the piece of paper.
‘You’ll be lucky if she’s there,’ he said. ‘Or unlucky.’
*
As he waved me off, he was smiling. I tried to smile back. As I stepped into the torpid ether, my head was still aching. I realised I hadn’t eaten for hours. Diaphaneity was elsewhere. The inner eye was closed. Port was blithely issuing me into the further reaches of the unknown.
I came to Oxford once, when I was fourteen. Before the incident with the Tradescantian Ark and Professor Roberts and Dr Canterbridge. Before the whole thing with the velociraptors. Before that minor stripping of the self I went to Oxford on a day trip, to see the shrine to Shelley the Romantic poet and to venerate antiquity in general. I bowed before the pallid statue, noted the inscription. Then a student in a wound-around scarf asked me if my name was Michelle. It was a joke – I was a parochial fool, he had realised, and so I had gone to the Shelley memorial, simply because I was called Shelley. No matter that in my naïve youth I woke quoting Shelley . . .
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
And so on. The student made an assumption, and then a joke. It was a great joke, by an anointed wit, and I didn’t understand it – lacking wit – until I turned away. Then I hovered on the steps, wondering if I should go back and remonstrate but thinking I would only embarrass myself. So, I went away, with this small stigma attached.
*
Shelley the poet, and Shelley the unknown imaginary schoolgirl, walked together hand in hand along the river. Then, Shelley threw the schoolgirl in. She bubbled for a while and then like a painting by Millais, she lay on her back and drifted – downstream . . .
Fear not for the future, weep not for the past – Fear not!
*
I snapped back from – wherever I was – and found my phone was ringing. It was Anthony Yorke and he was saying, ‘Nothing. Nothing. At all.’
‘Clues?’
‘A small statue of a pig.’
‘Did it have anything inside it?’
‘You mean like a piggy bank? No, it wasn’t like that.’
‘What was the point of it, then?’
‘The point of a statue of a pig? I’ve no idea.’
*
When Yorke arrived he was wearing the same ragged suit, inadequate to the prevailing cold, and he looked even more gaunt and pale, as if he were trying to camouflage himself. He was shaking his head.
‘We have to walk, before I get hypothermia.’
‘Then let’s walk.’
*
We walked with shared determination not to freeze. We turned onto the path along the Isis, winding upstream towards Port Meadow. Beyond, the mist haze and the orange-black sky. Anthony’s fingers trembled as he rubbed his forehead. He started telling me about a henge under the Parkland, which had been lost for centuries until it was rediscovered last year. Solete had been greatly interested in the henge because it originally ran past his house.
‘Imagine it; running all round the Parkland, they think . . .’ he said, waving his arms. ‘Don’t you see? Solete’s house, it’s just on the eastern edge. And then Nightingale Hall is just slightly further along, to the south-east. Aristotle Hall is at the southern tip. Pie Hall, the western edge. Solete walked around it every day. He existed in the henge – woke and slept and worked. Me too, that’s why he’s dragged me in.’
‘I really don’t think the henge has anything to do with it,’ I said.
‘Well what do you know? You’ve spent the afternoon discussing pinecones.’
‘With a man who actually resembled a pinecone.’
‘Well, that’s even more ludicrous.’
Anthony was moving hastily away. ‘You’re moving too slowly,’ he said, over his shoulder. ‘My wardrobe is calculated on the basis that I move swiftly, all day. If I slow down, I die pretty immediately.’
*
The city was adrift in mist and when you reached the outskirts, when you slunk beyond the streets and lost the punctuations of lamps and cars and people, there was just this dim slur of land, with coils of mist above it, around it. Engulfing you as you tried to cross it. There was a general hum emanating from somewhere. Occasional rustling in the hedgerows, and, from the river, the sudden splash of an animal diving in.
‘Transparency is an aspiration,’ I said. ‘But wouldn’t it be strange, if you could see things clearly? I mean, all things?’
Anthony didn’t reply. He was too busy trying not to freeze.
*
The shadows lengthened. The mist turned silver. We turned to the west, into the realm of the dying sun. The trees whispered above, and I was thinking how long-gone people had walked the banks of the Isis, and vanished, one by one. We were on Port Meadow, heading north, and now I heard the sound of singing. Mournful, soft, drifting on the currents of mist. I wondered, anyway, why I was pursuing this trail of debris. Pinecones and the inner eye. I am a pig and I like to emanate. A sacrifice? A pineal pig? Then I was furious with myself. I thought – you don’t have to believe that man Port, with his house cluttered with unnatural objects! I saw a bird, darting above the treetops, darting out of the creeping shadows of the forest into silent spaces of cloud and mist. The bridge creaked as we passed over it and then I heard the song –
Millions of years is the name
Green lake is the name of the other a pool of cool liquid
Otherwise said millions of years is the name
I had no idea what that meant. For a moment I wasn’t even entirely sure where I was, but then I saw Anthony hurrying along ahead of me, and that recalled me to the present. I saw a boat, moored under a bridge, and now I could just discern the name on the bow: HYPATIA.
‘More scraps,’ said Anthony, dolefully. ‘I bet she’s mad.’
‘In what sense of the word?’
‘Oh don’t start. She’ll be a raving mad hippy with wild staring eyes. She’ll offer you a joint and you’ll start raving about pigs, until we have to go home.’
‘Sounds like a delightful evening.’
We stood at the edge of the boat, looking at the neat word: HYPATIA. Someone who could paint so neatly couldn’t be raving mad.
Surely?
Now the voice intoned again –
Millions of years is the name
Green lake is the name of the other
A pool of cool liquid, otherwise said
Millions of years is the name of the one
Green lake is the name of the other . . .
I knocked. The singing stopped.
There was a pause.
*
The cabin door opened, abruptly. A woman appeared. She was a beautiful thin hippy with long black hair. She didn’t have wild staring eyes at all. She had considered and quite frightening eyes, and she turned them on me so I was flamed by the fiery force of her gaze, as she looked us up and down. Then I waited for her to open her elegant mouth and say Begone! Strangers! Fade into the ethereal night! While we all waited, Anthony started shivering violently.
‘He has to move, or he dies,’ I said.
‘Tell him to move, then. Away from my boat. And off to where he wants to go,’ said the hippy who must be Cassavetes.
‘The song was very nice,’ I said.
‘I’m busy,’ she said. ‘Entirely. What’s your problem?
Did someone tell you to come?’
‘Roland Port.’
‘What does that freaky Ptolemite want with me? Tell him to get off back to his pinecones.’
‘I did the whole pinecone thing with him, in fact, but when the pinecones were all done, and we had traversed the whole of history via the pinecone he still couldn’t help me.’
Anthony was stamping his feet, puffing on his hands and doing a remarkable impression of a man who was about t
o succumb to the elements.
‘What do you need help with?’ said Cassavetes. At this point she was not exactly friendly, but it seemed she was other than overtly hostile. This was a beginning. It was an improvement.
*
Therefore, I explained that Solete had given me a task.
It was ironic, I said. And now Port. His house of many cones. He had sent me over to her. It was a long walk in the mist. Everything was so indeterminate. Anthony kept complaining about the weather. This thick gelid air, it got into your lungs, so you thought you might choke on the cold. Really we just wondered if she had the book.
‘Which book?’
‘It might be called A Field Guide to Reality. Or it might be called something else. But it was by Solete. We think. We hope anyway.’
At that, she shook her head. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘You don’t?’ said Anthony, hurtling into the conversation. ‘Or you don’t want to tell us?’
‘I don’t have it, and I wouldn’t give it to you, even if I did,’ she said.
‘Fucking fine. Let’s go.’ Anthony started to trudge away, head down. I was about to go after him when the hippy relented.
‘Oh come in,’ said Cassavetes. ‘Just come down into the boat. You ridiculous parody of a faint-hearted academic and you – you, who keeps talking about pinecones. Just come into the boat. I was just making some food. Solete was a great old friend of mine. I’ve been ill since he died. One of the last people I liked.’
Yorke shrugged off her insult, and stumbled onto the boat. He seemed not to care who she was, so long as he was warm. As he went down the companionway he started sneezing violently. ‘Christ, do be quiet,’ said Cassavates. But when we entered the cabin she threw him a blanket. He huddled into it, sitting on a low bunk, rubbing his nose.
An oil lamp was swinging above our heads. The place was rammed with books and detritus. If books are detritus too, then the place was simply rammed with detritus. Every surface, every region, was full of papers, books, pencils, drawings of the river, tastefully executed, musical instruments, compasses, maps, pot plants, plates, cups, teapots. A cat mewed from below; Cassavetes leaned down and stroked it. There was a pan steaming on the stove, and Cassavates dished out bean stew. We ate on tin plates.
A Field Guide to Reality Page 6