by Tim Robinson
Turn, Professor! Seek the glimmerings of sense in the thickets of your theory. There is a pool in which you figure, ringed by fleeting diagrams of your inconsequential algebras. Superior intelligence, this structure of fears you think of as yourself reflects you well – and thus the affronted incalculable outwits you! Self-description is the cuckoo’s egg of contradiction among your sterile clutch of theorems – and an unexpected proof of kinship with the birds! From a contradiction all things follow; it is the all-devouring foster-child that bursts apart your systems and teaches you to fly. Follow its derisive voice, poor pipit, beyond the circles of your Boolean mind! Become insatiate of possibilities, watch Venn’s amoebae spiral out in unbelievable evolutions: multimen with flocks of voices, wind-tossed clouds of faculties and appetites juggled by perspective into momentary beings, infinities of selves lovingly nested one within another …
So, crazed by mad analogies of sanities yet to be invented, the sad profes sor mounts St Francis’s pulpit, humbly resolved to speak only as a bird speaks, for the pleasure of hearing a like voice return. And when the sun sets in his mind, as now, his thought flies inwards to its own dark woods, leaving a silence where it sang.
The last of the daylight hangs between the crooked treetops. As the silence lengthens we begin to stir, look about us, call across to friends and wave, feeling our arms stiff and fingers numb. The lecturer is almost invisible between two breast-like swellings of the oak. We slide to earth through crackling twigs, find ourselves deep in the night, and grope our way together. At the edge of the wood we loiter to discuss the lecture and admire the fraudulent transactions of the dusk. Below us the sail of a little boat glimmers on the reservoir, a heavy procession of lit windows marks the road beyond, and in the distance where the city diffuses into its own sky, the long wail of a jet bears a star down towards Heathrow.
Terminal Deity
How lazy even flame is nowadays. Drowsing on my rooftop I watched a house burn down throughout this afternoon. Fire heaved and murmured in the basement for hours before the weight of flames dragged down the floor above. And now evening is delayed by the glowing sheets that seep and hang and flap from the upper windows. A little clan forced to shift by rolling smoke-banks carries its accumulations the length of the street to another empty house. I see a loving couple borne on a bed. The figure slipping from shadow to shadow behind them is their rat-god. When the darkly gaping door and windows have absorbed the last of his people the parasite shows briefly at the fall-pipe, a blur moving smoothly upwards to a hole under the eaves. The domains of his kind, and of mine, are suites of skeletal rooms left by the slow falling away of the flesh of these houses. Below, shapeless families nest in cellars full of rubble. Now that fire has so little infective power the few houses left could stand for some indefinite forever. These mild dunes of ash that sift around us, giving out moonlight for the sun they absorb, image our future: ever, never, the same, day by day. At a distance stand other groups of gapped streets, villages spared out of the city as history lost its appetite. I see their lights by night. I suppose they have their gods, to whom are prayed the same prayers, and who have, like me, but one thing in their gift.
Time is long past
Deliver us from the moment
says a message I found scratched on a wall some yesterday like this. The same plea arises with the scent of crushed nettles from the calendrical zero my people trample out in dew each morning. And I consider and reconsider, weighing in my hand the orb that could impose nothing, once and finally. Shall it be tonight? At this hole in the roof I would begin my ceremonial descent. I often prowl at night through the cagework of joists; I would not have to grope, my hands extend surely through the darkness to known points of support worn smooth: angle of a waterpipe, post of an interrupted balustrade. I am silent as dust. Not a flake of plaster would flutter down to announce my coming. Shall it be tomorrow?
A brief fount of laughter arises from the street below where the dust-worshippers gather each evening. This corner used to be famous for little whirlwinds, but of recent years they have become rare. Now one has occurred, quite a successful one to judge by the clapping and the gaiety. Sometimes a whirl of dead leaves is long-lived enough to initiate a dance. The glee, fading already, has an undertone of sadness; this game will not be played many times more. Now no doubt they hope to evoke another epiphany – two in one evening, how ridiculous! – by laying out tempting scraps of newspaper and wisps of straw. Girls with long scarves around their waists will be whirling gently, while the men sitting on the garden wall blow soft kisses of smoke among them. I no longer need to lean from my rooftop to savour the fading scene. And this evening a qualm of impatience runs through me. Nature – do you not realize? – has long lost sympathy with sympathetic magic. The air is unresponsive. They will soon lose faith and drift indoors.
Under the slant of the roof here is an empty watertank, and behind it a hermit had his triangular cell. The hollow zinc used to thunder under the drumming of his fists and feet in his convulsive ecstasies. Now he is gone, leaving a row of open books nailed facedown along a beam. Their titles propose some dry exegetical chaff The whole house is cobwebbed with futile cults. Being the object of one saps my self-belief But I can still fulfil their longing for emptiness! I shall, tonight, come down, seeping from floor to floor, the hollowness of the house distilled into a heavy globe of liquid, oozing, elongating, re-accumulating, until I hang just above their heads poised to overwhelm … But now:
Rape a witch, rot to death:
so in those days ran the law.
Knowing himself hunted from within …
Ah, once more! Vesper rehearsal of my acts and passions, scraps of chant filtering up through the grids of rafters, through my sardonic commentary. I love to hear it – acts and passions! – however incomprehensible it is. That introductory phrase seems to reflect a medieval chapter of my existence, I smell the charcoal of the great forests. And this, prehistoric, prebiotic?
… laid himself down
where the earth opens its skin
onto beds of glowing coals,
and when the shrieking of the blood was over,
creature of ash and twisted wire …
It seems I have left shreds of myself on the briars of all ages! Would that I had such freedom of the epochs, rather than suffer the recurrent moment! And now to tender modern times, for the riddle of the potato-crisp:
… kneeling by the road
took with his lips
from the hand of a child
the crooked wafer.
Traditional argument for my immortality follows, resigned and fearful, from an atomic future:
Having found the little catch
that holds the world together,
is he the most powerful of men
or, all decisions waiting on this,
the least?
… together with the usual scholastic speculations as to the nature of this catch:
blade of grass bent under a stone,
two hairs of the thigh twisted together?
Ah, absurdity! Evening after evening, incense of absurdity!
How do the graffiti of midnight skies depict him?
What is the object hard to make out he bears in his hand?
Is it a bud? – It is scaled like a bud …
Indeed, my children, you shall learn what flowers from this metal bud so cool and fitted to my hand. Oh, the avidity of my imagination! Now I shall come down, now I shall materialize in your midst, now exhibit this dormant sphere to your wondering gaze, now release the catch that holds our world together, now place it in the middle of our circle. In another moment perfect peace, perfect darkness, will unfold themselves about us.
The Heavens Fall
First I construct a windy darkness out of shreds of memory. With the wind I swing open the church-hall door and clatter a quadrilateral of light down across the asphalt forecourt. I borrow the smile of a passerby to witness the child backing out of the hall wield
ing a pingpong bat as if it were a rapier. The invisible attacker forcing him to yield the golden ground is his smaller brother, delayed within the door by adult hands buttoning his coat, but fencing vigorously. ‘Come on, pest!’ cries the one outside, flickering in and out of the light-path. I release the little one: he charges out, head down, set, grim, pingpong blade at rigid arm’s length. The door slams.
I let the exhilaration of the night work on them until they are wildly orbiting the forecourt with owl-hoots and wolf-howls. Then I allow a narrower strip of light to fall from the door, and as the adult, the curate or scoutmaster, within I call to them, ‘You two! Run along home, it’s late!’
And it is late. Suddenly quietened, they climb over the low wall separating the forecourt from the cobbled lane that runs back along the side of the church hall; from its tall windows behind dirty wire mesh I let dim slopes of light cross their way, to be extinguished as soon as they have passed. They walk quickly, pingpong bats under their arms, hands in pockets, collars turned up; the wind at their backs sometimes pushes them into a few running steps. On either hand are high stone walls with little wooden gates into backyards at regular intervals, mostly in darkness; but here and there I leave a kitchen light on to accentuate the perspective. And now I touch the sky, clear a patch, a black space among the clouds pressing by overhead, just enough to frame a single star that is briefly revealed and then eclipsed. The children have their heads down, they didn’t notice. I let the gap flow further away ahead of them until it shows another star for a few moments just as the elder boy looks up. He sees it. The wide vague movement of the clouds makes the point of light appear to be travelling in the opposite direction. Before it has disappeared the child has understood the illusion. (They think he will be a scientist; they are wrong.) I send another space over their heads and down the sky in front of them, and two stars show apparently climbing the sky, with a third close behind and then a fourth nearer the horizon. The sailing constellation vanishes, but as the clouds begin to break up others appear. The elder child is about to nudge the younger to attention, but stops himself. I let an idea form in him, and a temptation. He glances measuringly at his brother. Then he suddenly shouts and points: ‘Look! Shooting-stars!’ The little one stops and looks up with his mouth open. ‘Gosh, I never saw shooting-stars before. They’re always gone by the time you tell me. Look, three in a row! Where are they going to?’
‘Oh, they go on and on, for ever. And once in every million years they fly past the earth.’
‘Shall we run home and tell them?’
‘They’ll all be passed by that time. We are the only ones to see them.’
‘Well, isn’t it lucky we were out late tonight!’ The young one stands with his head thrown back, round-eyed. His brother points out other arrays of stars, great and small, serenely trekking onwards through vast depths of space, disappearing, being replaced by identical arrays. I let him feel the joy of constructing a universe out of light, building a wonder in the mind of his brother. But further over on their right the clouds are parting now and the moon will soon be revealed. The elder child sees its glimmer through the thinning films; creator and destroyer, he keeps his eye on it, timing his effects, learning his craft. Half the sky is filled with the sublime procession now and the younger child is leaping up and down as if he were trying to join it, when the elder cries, ‘The moon! It’s going with them!’ The young one turns and sees the clouds’ edge fleeing across the moon. He stops jumping, puzzled. ‘Silly idiot!’ yells his brother, and starts to run.
In the mind of the young one I feel the cosmos shudder to a stop. The stars are still, dimmed by moonlight. The wind falls away. Then: ‘Pig!’ he shrieks, and hurls his bat after his brother; ‘You pig! Pig! Pig!’ The bat clatters in the gutter.
I lock up the church hall and throw away the key. I turn out the kitchen lights along the alley. I see the children turn in at the gate of their home, and I shoulder another continent of cloud over the scene.
Finally, thirty years later, I use the pen of the elder brother to apologize to the younger.
The Objective Reality of Purgatory
A breeze touched the blonde curls of the girl on the doorstep. ‘Hello,’ she said, ‘sorry to wake you at this hour of the morning, but we found a man lying in the road out there. Do you think you could phone for an ambulance?’ I peered past her, dazzled by the summer morning. Outside the gate another girl was kneeling at the roadside. A tress of red-gold hair hid her face and that of the long blackish bundle she was bending over. ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘I won’t be a moment,’ and I turned and ran back up to my flat.
When I came down again the girls were poised on slim legs at the gate. ‘We must run or we’ll miss the bus,’ the blonde one called. ‘We moved him into your garden.’ She brushed something off the hip of her rose-pink pullover. ‘There’s your bus now,’ I said, hearing its familiar roar at the corner. The other girl was already scampering to meet it before I had had a chance to see her properly, leaving an impression of multicoloured stripes and patches. The first girl hovered in the gateway a moment longer. ‘Maybe he doesn’t really need an ambulance, maybe he just needs food,’ she said with a smile. ‘Have no fear; I will do whatever is best for him,’ I replied, and my rather solemn phraseology made her blue eyes widen for an instant, before she turned and fled after her friend. The glimpses I caught of her bright hair as she appeared and disappeared between the lilacs along the garden wall were like the flicking on and off of a light, I cried ‘Goodbye, and thank you!’ after her. They certainly could both run like deer, and they did catch their bus, for when it swept past the gate a minute later they were on its platform, gasping, laughing, clinging to each other and waving to me. Might they be models, I wondered, going off to be photographed for a magazine of fashion? Were they not too brightly dressed to be, say, receptionists in an exclusive hotel? Would Personal Assistants be travelling so early, with the dew still shining on the ground?
The man was lying on his back by the dustbin. I went and squatted beside him. ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I thought it might be you.’ His eyes were closed. His mouth was quite lost among the matted and streaky hair of his beard, as if he had had no use for it in recent weeks. There was dirt in the furrows of his scalp. ‘You don’t know me,’ I told him, ‘but I know you. I see you every day, several times a day usually, walking past. But you are preoccupied, you never look up. You never stop except to put down your plastic bag of things for a moment while you shift that bundle of old greatcoats over from one arm to another. I see that those two kind, iridescent creatures have spread them out for you to lie on. Where’s the plastic bag, though?’ I got up and went to the gate. The bag was in the gutter; I brought it in and placed it within reach of his hand, which soon began to stir, stretch and grope, as I had expected, until it knotted itself into the handles of the bag and fell inert again. ‘That’s better! I said encouragingly. ‘You feel better holding onto your bag. What’s in it, I wonder? May I look? Old shoes, of course! I should have guessed. Not so old as the pair you’re wearing, though; I suppose by your standards the ones in the bag are new shoes. Walking is all you do, isn’t it. It is all you have to do. Listen, open your eyes, will you? You have to get moving. I phoned the ambulance; it didn’t occur to me it was you, one of you walking people, until I was coming downstairs again. Naturally I hadn’t associated girls like that, so sweet-smelling, with your sort. I understand the problem though; I do understand. You can’t wash while you’re walking, and walking is all that matters, the moving on from place to place, even if the places recur again and again on your little round. You always cross the road at the bus-stop, don’t you, and put your bag down and change over your armload of coats when you reach the other kerb. You go round the corner then, out of sight from my window. Where do you go next? I’ve passed you up at the tube-station often enough. Do you turn down that long back-street, I forget its name, from there to the High Road? How many times do you change arms going down that street? It
really is the most boring street in London, isn’t it, with the endless wall of the railway sidings, and whatever is on the other side, terrace houses I suppose, I really can’t call it to mind, and a scrap-merchant’s lot fenced off with corrugated sheet. Come on now, wake up! Don’t you want to walk the length of that street again? Don’t you want to turn down the High Street and step into the doorway of the Bank as you always do, so that you can put down your plastic bag and heave your heavy old coats over onto the other arm without being jostled when the street is crowded? Though I did notice you doing just that, in that doorway, once when I was coming home from a late-night film-show and there was nobody about at all. So that little step aside and pause and out again is part of your routine. You have to do it again, quite a few times today, and tonight if you carry on all night, which it seems you do, for I have seen you approaching that particular spot very early in the morning, once when I was hurrying to catch the first train to Scotland. Yes, come on, that’s right, open your eyes. Keep them open! Let me help you sit up. You’re only allowed a couple of minutes more, until we hear the bell of the ambulance. You can hide round the back of the house; I’ll send them off in the wrong direction and then you can come straight back through the gate and onto your old route again. That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want that and only that. You wish you could want something else, but you can’t; that’s the catch, isn’t it. Sit up properly now. You fell, I know. Did a car brush against you? Never mind, you’ve fallen before, I’m sure, many times – many more than three times, for instance! You will fall again, of course, though that isn’t a specified part of your penance; it’s just a side-effect of being human. But – listen to me carefully now! – this does not go on for ever. Do you hear? It does not go on for ever! It goes on for a very long time, longer than you can imagine; you will cross this road and stop and put down your bag and change over the coats onto the other arm, the less-tired arm, and pick up the bag again, more times than anyone has ever counted up to – but not an infinite number of times. Do you understand the difference between a finite number, however huge, however multiplied by millions and billions, and infinity? It’s not fair really, they should explain the difference before you set out. There is a difference, as you will discover. I know, because I am an agent – that’s why I’m getting you moving again. I didn’t believe in the objective existence of Purgatory until I became one of its agents, but I do understand and I always did; that’s why those two angels brought you in to me. Now, I hear the bell. Get up, come on, be quick! There you are, on your feet again. Lean on the wall as you go along the side of the house. Wait round the back until I call you.’