The Limits of Vision

by Robert Irwin

  Actually there are flecks of white on the sheets. I can see them now, but they aren’t moving. They must be bits of scurf from the skin. Every flake of scurf will have a tiny army of mites toiling over it – they are that small, but I can’t see them. I can only think about them and marvel at their infinite littleness. I marvel at them, but at the same time their silence, their invisibility and their mystery terrify me, but that is by the way. I would never dare mention such thoughts to others. But now, just this morning, for the first time, it occurs to me that others may have similar thoughts and be similarly afraid of speaking. I resolve now to broach the subject at the coffee morning this very day and as I so resolve I am filled with an uneasy fluttering sensation. It would be a fearful thing to talk of. The silence of those tiny mites terrifies me. And I know why. The shapes I have been seeing, the forms that they are taking …

  But no. This business with the sheets, it is only a game I think, something to pass the time while doing something dull. Things are never out of control, though I sometimes play with the idea that they are. Anyway the sheets have all been smoothed out and by now my thoughts have carried me downstairs to the back cupboard and I have the Hoover out. I stand at the end of the hall, one hand on the handle at the top of the casing, the other near the head of the nozzle. I drag it forward like a trainer handling a reluctant mastiff. The hall will have to be hoovered starting from the end nearest the staircase. I press the ‘on’ switch, revelling as I do so in the power that lies in the touch of a finger. I force the Hoover’s head down so that it is made to eat the dirt that lies at my feet. It snuffles and snorts around my ankles. As long as I have the Hoover I know that I have nothing to fear from the dirt. Princess and domesticated monster, we are figures from some mysterious book of emblems. A metal chain connects us. It is not clear to me who is in bondage to whom.

  We are halfway along the hall carpet when I realize that, though my dragon still roars and whistles, he is no longer eating the dirt. I kneel to look. The bag is not full. It must be one of the tubes blocked. I dismantle the tubes that lead to the head and poke and blow through them all. It is no use, there is no suction.

  Now I begin to shake. My most powerful ally has died on me. (It is true that there is the washing-machine in the bathroom, but though my washing-machine has been useful in the past in detaining, interrogating, even eliminating dirt, I can hardly bring the machine with me as I move from room to room.) I look on the area of the hall carpet that remains to be done. I am still on my knees and on my knees I can feel the draught coming in under the front door. It is perhaps this that accounts for my shaking.

  Only a few minutes ago the Hoover was the wise woman’s helper. Now, unless I can make it work again, it has joined the enemy, become rubbish. A valued renegade, it will crown one of the rubbish dumps of South London, its hose, curled as a dragon’s tail curls, coiled round its heap of untreasure. No Hoover and the coffee morning ladies will be here in less than an hour! Whatever shall I do? At moments like this I wish that someone really helpful would pop in – a sunny smiling neighbour eager for a chat about liquid cleansers while we sip our instant coffee, or a bustling Scottish charlady who is a demon for waxing floors, or an expert from the Institute of Whiteness. I know no such persons. Still I do have other unpredictable visitors. I am sure that my coffee morning ‘friends’ would be surprised if they met these visitors. Perhaps my visitors may come today and help me with my work …

  CHAPTER THREE

  The coffee morning people will come. They must see that not all the carpet has been hoovered. What will they see? Still on my knees, I let my gaze fall from the door to the floor.

  Down and down. An old grey carpet, in patches worn down to its foundation of warps and wefts, and beyond the carpet bare boards. I smooth my skirt and bend closer. My face is drawn down to a worn corner of the carpet where only islands of wool remain on a sea of lattice threads. Here there are a hundred islands not of delight but of darkness. Only on some of the islands through the thick wool foliage something glitters and beckons – tiny grits of glass which miraculously survived my last hoovering a fortnight ago, now the glittering fragments have been cast up on the islands. Marooned. Marooned. All is flotsam and jetsam here. I ask myself what it would be like to sail on that darkness and visit those greyly haunted isles.

  Others are there before me. Dustballs sail like galleons on the dry sea. From one end of the hall carpet to the other is one hundred and twenty-eight days for an individual dust particle travelling steadily by day and by night. A dustball however can do the journey in less than a week. These apparently unwieldy structures are in fact well designed to catch the draughts that come in under the front door. I marvel at their construction. For instance, the piece of fluff nearest me has a structure based on interlocking helixes. Weaker threads, which coil in looser arabesques, run up and down, linking one curve of the spiral with the next, and serving to trap dust particles and other fragments within the structure.

  The strongly coiling helixes are made from human hair – mine and Philip’s mostly. The threads without much spring in them seem to come from a dog, though when we last had a dog in the house I really can’t remember. Never mind all that now. They are showing me fear in a dustball.

  Magnificent though the dustballs are – as complex as a human brain while yet as graceful as a sand-yacht – they are only the crippled and mindless emissaries of their master. Their complex cerebral coils do not allow them to speak. Nevertheless it is plain that they have been sent to summon me. I dare not breathe, watching to see what the dustball’s message to me is. Like all others its twisted skeleton is made of human hair and in this case mostly mine. It was a sly joke on the part of the master to send this creature to me – a sly joke or a grim warning.

  My hairs cannot be rescued from the thrall of the dustball. They are so fine and the convolutions they have been put through are too intricate. They would snap before I could actually extricate them. The dustball itself teeters for a moment and then succeeds in anchoring itself on the fibres of the carpet. It displays itself to me with all the pride of a herald. Its web gleams and sparkles in the artificial illumination of the hall light. Through the grey fibres of its belly-lining I can just make out an angry core of red fluff, some breadcrumbs, even a couple of pieces of wood. Tendrils of the dustball reach up at me. It means that I am to follow it.

  Silently we move off. How can I describe it all? Me with my impoverished vocabulary. For instance only a minute or two ago I described the carpet I kneel on as ‘grey’. Now that my eye follows the dustball as it navigates its course between the islands of carpet wool, I see what an inadequate word ‘grey’ was, for the islands even in this poor light are a riot of greens and ochres and other colours that are unknown to the larger world of nature. Nor is it true that if one lands on one of these islands one will find only grits of glass, for now when I look upon the forests, which like mangrove swamps come down to the edge of sea, those forests which first seemed deserted are in fact aswarm with tiny specks of white dust, thousand upon thousand of them. Sometimes they sit alone; sometimes they come together in shapes vaguely reminiscent of human faces and dance as dust-devils. Further inland in these forests of mystery one sees tendrils of hair raising their necks like dinosaurs. Towering over the rest of the forest they are yet sensitive to the slightest breeze.

  And the sea itself! The sea which is not a sea. There are so many sorts of sea down here. Many are like the one we travel on now, fixed and rigid with its waves set in dead matter. But there are other seas which are vast pools of dancing energy. Indeed there are seas within seas, so that within this Sargasso expanse of stagnation there are areas of uncontrollable turbulence. Within the dead sea, other microscopically small seas move, and down here there are philosophies which we know nothing of.

  No, I can never describe it all. And in any case I am quite distraught with fear, thinking of my destination. By now the dustball I am following has reached the edge of one of the larges
t islands. This time the dustball does not so much anchor itself on the coast but wreck itself against it. Marooned, marooned. There are nothing except wrecks that travel in or on this sea.

  The dustball can go no further. I am to make my way into the interior alone. I will find other guides shortly. The tresses of the dustball wave as if in farewell – but there are I am sure more complex messages in the pattern of the curving of its tresses, if only I could read that pattern.

  Reluctantly I turn to press on through the woollen jungle alone. Rather, my eyes do. It is my eyes, only my eyes, that travel, for my body, my huge and earthy body, lies collapsed on the carpet behind my eyes. I cannot imagine that I shall ever have the power to move my body again, now that the glittering dust is in my eyes. The weirdest thing about my journey now is the silence of the forest. The carpet is alive with activity and its undergrowth rich in smells – old socks and mouse-droppings particularly – but everything in the forest proceeds in perfect silence. Threads are snapping and crumbling into dust, small clouds of bluish gas break free from decomposing fragments of food, mites toil through the pile forest looking for stain pools to browse beside, tiny eggs are being laid and hatched, at every moment more tiny particles of dust descend from the upper air to land in the forest – and all in perfect silence.

  Threads from some forgotten fabric loop in vast arches over this part of the forest. Up one of these bridges I can see that a white mite is painfully toiling. It does not know where it is going; its search for decay is random and, since there is no intention behind it, it is perhaps not even a search. My lost eyes follow the mite to the top of the bridge. From here one has a view of some thicker threads lying collapsed below and perhaps what may be a dustball in the earliest stage of its formation. It is a riot of disorder, but a frozen riot, an abandoned dinner-party. It seethes and yet is dead.

  At length I perceive another mite at the far end of the bridge of hair. It rears itself up on its stumpy tail. It has been waiting for me. It will be my appointed guide to my meeting in the forest. It stands at the foot of the bridge waving its two blobby white arms. It reminds me of an air traffic controller. And with reason. I am still too high and too distanced from the forest. I must shrink my concerns.

  It turns away and I creep behind it. There are more of its friends concealed in the foliage near by. We scurry over the rubble of fibres, paper, earth and cloth. Many of the mites we pass in the forest are actually much smaller than my guide and these little creatures scavenge a living from the leavings of the larger mites.

  Here all is in fragments, detached from its origins. And if one comes to one of the roads that run through the forest, one does not follow it, for the roads run nowhere, for these roads have been designed by the principle of evil; that is to say, they have not been designed at all.

  At last we come to a clearing in the forest. The floor of this clearing is formed by the thick brown lattice of the carpet’s warp and weft. The atmosphere is chill and damp. In the midst of the clearing, I see a huge silvery white coil of wool has succeeded in entwining itself round one of the threads of the lattice. Its serpent sheen is streaked with black, it ripples, and I perceive that it is in some sense or other alive, for its shaking comes from its sporing, and its fibrous stuff spreads all the time a little further around it on the base of the carpet. Closer. Closer and closer. Come yet closer. I see that I have arrived at my destination.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  What the Fungus Said (Doubly misleading perhaps, for it was not the fungus speaking for itself, but the fungus as mouthpiece for the Dirt, the Empire of Decay and Ruin, the Principle of Evil – I didn’t know what to call it, or should it be them? Secondly I am not mad. I do not hallucinate. I did not actually hear the fungus speak. Nevertheless the message of the fungus is as plain to me as if it were actually speaking.)

  ME: Unclean thing! What are you? I conjure you to speak.

  THE FUNGUS: For a long time we feared that you would never descend to join us. Now that you have, you are welcome and we doubt that you will ever bring yourself to leave us.

  ME: Unclean spirit, I call on you again to speak your name. (The silkily tressed fungus writhes on its bed of decayed carpet fibre. It is heavy with spores and reluctant to speak. Nevertheless at length it speaks.)

  THE FUNGUS: My name is legion.

  ME: Hello then, Legion.

  THE FUNGUS: Foolish woman! The meaning of ‘legion’ is that we are one and yet also many, and therefore it is difficult for us to speak our true name. But you may call us Master. At least you will learn to do so.

  ME: Ha ha! You’ll feel the imprint of my heel upon your back for this insolence. Ha ha! Why, you are only a little stain of mildew! My foaming carpet-cleanser will have you out in a jiffy.

  THE FUNGUS: Only a little stain of mildew perhaps, yet a similar stain on your heart would kill you. In any event, small white spot though we are, we have been elected to speak to you on behalf of dust, fermentation, dry rot, iron mould, the moth, grease, understains, soot, flies, dandruff, fluff, excrement, bedbugs, mites, rising damp, draught, rust, stale odours, cockroaches, scorch marks, rattles, creaks, bangs, cracks, kettle scale, leaks, rips, mice, rats, scratches – in short, the whole grimoire. Oh, and as to your much vaunted foaming carpet-cleanser, where do you think that I found the moisture that I need to feed on, if not from your last attempt to clean the carpet with that stuff?

  ME: If I were not bored witless, I should not be speaking to you. Nothing can possibly be more trivial than an unhoovered carpet.

  THE FUNGUS: You think that because we are small we are trivial? Look around you, please.

  (I look and I see the mites reverently making wide circles round the fungus and behind the fungus the iridescent blue of a dead fly’s carapace and beyond that the forest set out in clumps of red and green, the tips of its foliage in places discolouring to black and white, and gleaming within the forest brilliantly faceted lumps of grit, and far away on the coastline I can just make out a dustball lurching towards landfall, and beyond that … beyond that the whispering of the fungus tells me what I cannot see with my own eyes …)

  THE FUNGUS (continuing): Where can you go? My empire is tiny but vast. Far beyond your eyeline lies the true horizon which is the skirting board – it is stained, and invisible insects eat out its heart within. Above it your bravely papered walls are mottling. You see, this house is your prison; it will be your tomb.

  ME: I can repaper the wall.

  THE FUNGUS: You could. You could even repaper the whole house, I suppose, but it is hopeless. All is falling into decay. Even as we talk the dust is falling, the damp is gaining its ascendancy over the fabrics, a thread is giving way and as it gives way the cushion spills out its stuffing which trickles on to the floor and drifts over to join our dark army. Your whole house weeps for you. Trickles of moisture, coal dust, kapok. And even if you could bring yourself to abandon your duties as a housewife and you fled the house, what then? It is worse outside; it is just more grime and dog-shit and torn newspapers. You can walk for the rest of your life without ever coming near to crossing out of the frontiers of the Empire of the Dirt. Go, foolish woman, to the Gobi Desert and see the dust swarms gathered in their armies and cities. Of what avail are you and your (broken) Hoover and your detergents against our master? Go if you must to the deserts of the Gobi and acknowledge the mastery of the Lord of the Dust.

  (Far in the distance a bell rings.)

  ME: I must go. Not to the Gobi, but someone is calling me.

  THE FUNGUS: You have our permission to leave. We regret that there are no guides available to show you the way out of the forest. Oh – and don’t please think of your departure as an escape. You carry the seeds of your own decay within you. Sooner or later you must come to dust. You will call us Master. In the meantime you may call us Mucor.

  ME: I will have you out, Mucor!

  I spit on Mucor, so that for a moment my enemy is trapped in my gleaming glob of spittle like a fly in amber. The
n I take a hankie from my sleeve and begin to rub furiously. A few spores drift off, but it is useless. The bell rings again. I drop my hankie and my eyes turn to run through the forest, without thinking of which direction they are travelling in.

  As the eyes travel they reflect. The forest is thickly populated. What shall explain its wild proliferation of breeds and forms? It was a Victorian anthropologist, I believe, who maintained that ‘Dirt is matter out of place.’ A thoroughly Victorian and anthropocentric notion, that. Where should dirt be if not on the carpet? Is it not man with his civilizing and cleansing theories the creature who is out of place here? And, to take the argument a little further, is dirt any less dirt when it is in its place in the belly of the Hoover or the dustbin’s sack?

  No, as far as the carpet is concerned, its Decay of Species by Means of Natural Failure, or the Elimination of Unfavoured Types in the Race towards Extinction has yet to be written.

  The bell rang again. I cast around seeking to determine from which direction the sound is coming and seeking also to distance myself from the loathsome Mucor – and even in my terror-stricken flight I do not cease to reflect on the scientific problems that the existence of such a jungle will naturally pose to an inquiring mind. For instance one may well conceive that in another and larger world a struggle for survival has imposed a certain discipline of form. Here it is quite otherwise and what the traveller sees is precisely the breakdown of organic forms, all constraint and symmetry being thrown aside. And just as the uniquely twisted skeletal frames of the dust-towers evade conventional scientific terminology, so also human reason is powerless to explain the sequence of events down here. Here everything is totally determined by chance and insignificance, and everything all around lies in a disorder that is repugnant to man. It is for this reason that this jungle has had few explorers. Here nothing is ever repeated; nothing is a consequence of anything. And yet, and yet … who will not marvel at the antiquity and grandeur of this world for so long veiled from human eyes? I feel a certain unease of the spirit, hard to give name to. It is perhaps because all around me in everything I see things moving towards rest and inertia that I too would like to rest. A great lassitude comes over me. To stay lying on this draughty dirty carpet … To close my eyes … To surrender my body to the maggots …