by Tim Robinson
Had she lifted her head from my shoulder to listen to something? To listen for something?
It began to be cold.
She stepped into the bedroom with her arm raised to take her gown from the back of the door, and stood, arm still raised, eyes widening towards me, hearing the quiet weeping of the telephone in my lap.
Someone lifted the distant receiver, and I replaced mine.
She lifted the two gowns off the hook with one grasp, separated them and tossed me mine. She sat beside me, found a box with one match in her pocket. We bent our heads together to light our cigarettes at the single flame.
‘I was looking for you in the garden‚’ she said. ‘You weren’t in the house.’
‘I looked for you too, in the house and in the garden; you weren’t there.’
The loose hoof-falls had scanned themselves again; the line of ponies was passing the gate, with laughter of the girl riders.
I laughed too and fell back on the bed. ‘Well, and how was that managed? Everyone got out of the world for a while then got back into it? Except me!’
‘No, I was the sole exception! But I can imagine how it was done, though I’m not a scientist. A crowded train comes into a crowded station; if you are on the train you see everyone else get out, if you are on the platform you see everyone else get in.’
‘That was very clever! But what about aeroplanes in the sky at that moment? The risk of disasters?’
‘You talk as if I masterminded it all! You’re the one who tells me about automatic pilots and computers that can keep things going for a while. Probably the little planes that don’t have computers all happened to have alighted just before it happened. Everything that couldn’t be sustained in motion was gently brought to rest and nothing broken. We’ll read about it in the evening paper.’
‘I think we won’t. Perhaps a few rationalizations, why the power-supply faltered, why the countdowns were held up. I think anyway these moments are briefer for other folk than us; they skip over them. But you are not like that. Please tell me where you were?’
‘Not for an instant was I not here! Looking for you, every moment of the time!’
I pulled her face down to me and looked into her grey eyes, as I have often done since, not pressing the question but waiting until she murmurs, as she did then, teasingly or reproachfully, I do not know which, ‘But you were the one that went away …’
Orion the Hunter
I read too much, remember little, understand nothing – nothing to its core, that is; on the outer surfaces of knowledge I handle myself well enough, browsing with a goat’s eclecticism. Piles of books by my bed, tottering like the jungle cities I used to dream of as a teenager, occasionally fall by night and frighten my little terrier bitch asleep in her basket.
The following happened at some late hour. The dog went to the door – the bedroom opens onto the garden – and whined. After a while I closed my book on the name of Chios, and got up to let her out. A vertical blade of cold air entered. Small-eyed from print, I peered through the gap. The leafless birch at the end of the lawn was motionless, blanched by the shaft of light from the door. Above, spanning the perfect blackness, hung a huge empty framework of stars. My breath caught in my throat, as always when I’m confronted. Orion the Hunter, a mile high, a thousand miles high.
Orion is at once the most overbearingly transcendent of constellations, and the most immediately, most humanly, identifiable. One notices his belt first, three stars of equal magnitude evenly spaced, slanting up the sky in a line almost exactly straight but just perceptibly upcurved too, like sequent notes of a scale, a hunting horn’s bright echoing challenge. Above that, a perfect (to my eye) Pythagorean 3:4:5 triangle, the longest side horizontal and marked out by two bright stars, the vertex a little fainter, the whole tensed across a wide sector of the night. As a child I learned from my father that this was Orion’s bow, raised and drawn, but star charts now tell me it is his club or his shoulders. The hero’s sword is a line of dim stars depending from his belt, and his feet are two very prominent stars. Farther down the sky to the east is the most brilliant of all, Sirius, the Dog Star; I remember my father pointing out how it followed its master through the night.
On my way back to bed I picked out a few reference books from the shelves: Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, some modern equivalent of it, and Graves’s crotchety old Penguins of Greek myths.
It seems that Sirius is not in fact Orion’s dog; its legend is quite separate, part of a horrible mutual engendering of monsters from the most primitive level of myth. Echidna, half woman, half snake, mates with Typhon, and gives birth to Hell’s three-headed watchdog Cerberus, the many-headed Hydra, the Chimaera, and Sirius, a two-headed dog which later belonged to the robber Geryon and itself sired two baleful creatures on its own mother, the Sphinx and the Nemean Lion. Both Sirius and the lion were to be killed by Heracles. All this from Hesiod’s Theogony – but my father’s word prevails over this most ancient and therefore probably corrupt source: a hunter needs a dog, and Sirius is Orion’s, and always will be. The bow too is not in the ancient sources, according to which Orion flourishes his club at a flock of doves, the little constellation of the Pleiades, fluttering just beyond his reach to the west. When Odysseus, on the shores of the River of Ocean, fills a trench with sacrificial blood and stands over it with drawn sword to keep back the mighty dead who come to drink, he sees among them ‘the giant hunter Orion, rounding up game on the meadows of asphodel, the very beasts his living hands had killed among the lonely hills, armed with a club of solid bronze that could never be broken’. The name Orion means ‘dweller on mountains’.
What is this tale of the Pleiades? They were the seven virgin companions of Artemis the Huntress, whom the gods turned into doves to save them from Orion’s pursuit. Orion had been hunting with Artemis, and her brother Apollo was concerned for her chastity too, and incited Mother Earth against him by telling her of Orion’s boast that he would kill off all beasts and monsters. Earth sent a huge scorpion against Orion, who leaped into the sea and swam towards Delos, where once he had slept with Eos, the goddess Dawn. Apollo pointed out the distant figure among the waves to Artemis and told her that it was a villain who had seduced one of her priestesses, and in her anger she shot an arrow through Orion’s head; then, grief-stricken, she placed his image in the stars, where it is eternally pursued across the sky by the constellation Scorpio.
Eos, I read, still blushes in remembering her affair with Orion. Their meeting is part of another legend in which the hunting of beasts is entangled with the violation of woman. Orion had promised to rid the island of Chios of wild beasts, in return for the king’s daughter Merope; but when he came to claim his reward the king put him off with false reports of other beasts to be killed. The frustrated hunter got drunk, burst into Merope’s room and raped her, and then fell into a stupor on the shore. The vengeful king found him there, and put out his eyes as he slept. The oracle later told Orion that he could regain his sight by travelling east until he faced Heleus, the sun, rising from the Stream of Ocean. So Orion rowed out to sea, and followed the sound of hammers until he came to Vulcan’s forge, where he snatched up an apprentice, Cedalion, to be his guide. Cedalion led him to the farthest ocean, where Eos saw and fell in love with him – for he was ‘the handsomest of men’ – and persuaded her brother Heleus to cure him.
What is one to make of this barbaric stuff? Searching for solace in the brutal rigmaroles of the Orion legend, my mind went back to a painting that arrested me once and made me stay and wonder, as I was making my way footsore and eye-sated out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Poussin’s ‘Landscape with Orion’. I wished I had a clearer memory of it, or a reproduction. The landscape radiates cool light like cumulus clouds from which dawn is about to break. Cedalion is a tiny figure perched on Orion’s shoulder and bending to his ear with encouraging words. Vulcan indicates the way ahead, a sheep-track winding through a tender, spacious countryside with nobl
e trees in the middle distance and a richly various mountain skyline; one imagines birdsong and rippling streams. In the twilit sky Artemis observes the hero protectively from a pearly cleft in the clouds like the aperture of a cowry shell. Orion is huge but not monstrous, a splendid golden-skinned figure of a man, striding forward in joyful expectation, his arms swimming before him in the air. I may have misremembered the details, but of this I am sure, that every form in the painting is opulent, restorative, pregnant with happiness and perhaps with reconciliation, between the terrible hunter and the peaceful hills, between gods and mortals, and even, without forcing the sense of the legend too much, between man and woman.
As I reached for a pen to make a note of this, I heard my little dog’s excited voice from the shrubbery, more of a whimper than a bark, and then a deep baying that seemed to roll around some huge unidentifiable volume of space. The door, which I had left slightly ajar for the dog when it should choose to come in, was pushed a little wider open. Something blackish disengaged itself from black night in the gap, and slipped inside. Every instinct in my body cried out that it was an animal – its scent immediately filled the room, as complicated as a thicket, with flowers and bitter berries and foxy dung beneath – but I could see that it was human: a slight, ragged, dark-visaged male. My breath stopped in my throat, but he immediately showed he meant no harm by turning to leave his stick propped in a corner. He was so thin he looked as if he were edgeways-on even when he turned to me, and perhaps only four or five feet high but so crooked and angular he might have been able to stretch up to the ceiling. I would have spoken, but he glanced at my mouth as if it were an unusual plant, and this silenced me. He looked around for a place for himself; I indicated the chair opposite the foot of the bed, but he settled down into the space between it and a lamp on the floor, entwining his fingers on one bent knee and resting his chin on them. His eyes were blue like clear zenith sky, but fixed, as if they were part of a frozen mass filling his skull. He was old; he might have been newly delivered out of the ages like a corpse given up by a glacier. It was difficult in the complicated half-lights of my various lamps to distinguish his tattered, thong-tied clothes from his skin, which was seamed and scarred; even the backs of his hands buckled in ridges as he flexed his fingers. His tawny, ash-streaked hair was tied back with a convolvulus stem that carried two or three dying blossoms of stained ivory. But there was wealth about him too, gleams of amber and quartz in the caverns of his sleeves. The perspective of the room seemed to have reorganized itself around him, as if his body were of such a density as to distort space; he lay at the bottom of a depth; I was clinging to the rim. I could make nothing of him; incomprehensibility was engrained in him like a darkness. He projected shadows round the room, wolf-packs of them shifting in corners, isolated scraps of spiderweb drifting across the ceiling. These appearances were his language, I knew, as were the effluvia filling my nostrils: spore-borne fungal damps, aromatic mist-globules sprayed from trodden beechmast, hazy reek of grass-fires beyond the horizon; and even closer feelings: a sliver of muddy ice in my mouth, a river-cold nugget of gold in my palm, the suck of a snail pulled off my forehead. I could do nothing with these forcings of my senses; I opened books – astronomy came to hand – and flung my thoughts against him.
Orion! I began, mighty hunter! – and suddenly all the scents and skin-touchings were withdrawn and the flickering shades became still and attentive. – Can you conceive of the vastness of space, and how you are honoured in it? Consider the fundamental datum of our cosmos, the speed of light, a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second, large beyond imagination, but crucially not infinite, whose finitude in fact gives scale to all things. Even at that unsurpassable velocity light takes six hundred and fifty years to reach Earth from your left foot, the star called Rigel. That’s how many trillions of miles? Those numbers: quadrillions, sextillions! I used to mouth them like mantras as a child, and last night I came across them for the first time for years in Walt Whitman: ‘I hold a leaf of grass to be the journeywork of the stars … and the mouse is a miracle to confound a quadrillion atheists!’ What’s the relationship of the leaf to the star? A poet friend once remarked on the accuracy with which the sunbeam strikes the seed – being ignorant of the sun’s copious output of light in all directions, falling indifferently on good grain or stony ground or, most of it, on nothing, anywhere, ever. Unimaginable floods of photons poured forth by distant suns, that we can see them! Do you know anything of stars? Your eastern shoulder: Betelgeuse, a ‘red giant’ in the star-catalogues, and noticeably reddish on a clear night, four hundred times the diameter of the sun, ten thousand times as luminous, but a mere dot to us, being two hundred and seventy light years away. I’ll tell you what the visibility of that dot implies. Betelgeuse emits so many photons that even when they have spread out over the surface of a sphere two hundred and seventy light years in radius – that’s one and a half million billion miles – they are still dense enough for our eyes to detect them, so there must be several of them passing through each little area the size of the pupil of an eye every second. Imagine that spherical surface divided up into elements a tenth of an inch across, like an composite insect eye of a zillion facets, but introverted, focused on its own centre, absorbing star-dazzle in its totality into retinal blackness! But the adjustment of star to eye is illusory; a nearer or brighter star would burn out the optic nerve, and there are uncountable fainter and farther ones peppering the void in bottomless gradations whose photons arrive too thinly for our senses. Do these abysses make you dizzy? They are as nothing to the background, the Galaxy as a whole, the Catherine wheel we see from within as the Milky Way, a hundred thousand light years across, built of a hundred billion stars. Which itself is as nothing, among some hundred billion galaxies spattered throughout space and fading out of vision fifteen billion light years away Your stars are bright because they are comparatively near, they all belong to the same spiral of our Galaxy as the Sun; we call it the Orion Arm, you are part of our address. The familiar constellations are the nursery decorations of life, though, that’s their significance. Do you want to know how life begins, oh great engenderer? It could be happening within you at this moment! Consider that vague smudge of light among the stars of your sword – or is it an ejaculation of your phallus? – the Orion Nebula, a cloud of matter millions of miles across, all of a glow from the birth of stars within it. Whorls of gas pulled in on themselves by their own gravity, condensing into spheres, pressures rising, atomic reactions beginning. And when stars have gone through their long evolution – almost as long as all the past – and ever more complex processes in them have built the heavier nuclei out of hydrogen, the simple primordial stuff, they collapse inwards, and then explode, and suffuse space with carbon, nitrogen, iron and the rest, the rich and rare. In the hearts of nebulae like yours, sheltered from the ultraviolet radiation that disinfects open space, these elements can settle in the microscopic grooves on grains of dust and combine themselves into molecules even as complex as amino acids, the keys to self-replication, to life itself. The journey-work of the stars! Then all they have to do is fall with meteors onto a hospitable planet like ours, not too far from a decent star, and in no time at all – amoebae, birds of paradise, pyramids, computers! Perhaps it’s all happened elsewhere a trillion times, perhaps it has only happened once, and that’s why you have had to come here to learn about yourself. But note this: the distances from here to your several stars are quite various; I have the statistics. Your dog Sirius is only the brightest star in our sky because it is one of the nearest, just 8.8 light years, that’s no more than fifty million million miles. So your splendid outline is a. trick of perspective. Viewed from the Pole Star, for instance, you do not exist. ‘Constellation’ is the name of an act, the quintessentially human act of joining up the dots, leaping over the dark, stringing events into stories, stories into persons, persons into history. Before we came, stars unnamed bloomed and seeded and blew away like dandelion fluff. And we may
not always be here to keep up the pretence of meaning. We could, out of shame at the brief trouble of thought, memory and lust we have brought upon the earth, commit suicide. We have the means, we have the bombs, it only needs the will. I like to imagine a few uncomprehending survivors – descendants of prisoners forgotten in a saltmine, say – emerging generations later into a world of calcined cities and caramelized nature; they explore, they come to understand that humanity has done away with itself, they creep back underground and immure themselves, to keep faith with our ultimate loss of faith. That could be how it ends. Or indefinitely else-wise, with slow trailing edges, stories petering out into points of suspension, constellations drifting out of shape. And afterwards, just the dislocated clockwork bits of heaven ratcheting away, to no end, world without end. Or can you see better in the future? Einstein wondered if a traveller at the speed of light carrying a mirror would find himself reflected in it. What did you see, riding time into my quiet historical garden, oh Dweller on the Mountains?
The figure opposite me remained absolutely silent and still. All the wild sensations had withdrawn into him and the room was left an empty geometry. Time must have flowed on, though, like a trickle of melt-water under a glacier, for in the end a signal came: a bark, that rattled the windows like a cannon-shot, from the end of the garden, or the end of the world, I couldn’t tell which. The hunter stood, and stretched and yawned, took up his stick – it was a little bow, I saw, with a thin knotted thong for a string – and stepped out into the glow of dawn. Very slowly the room was emptied of strangeness, as if he were drawing after him long dim tatters, glittering streamers, dazzling billowy starry banners.
After a while my dog came in, momentarily turned the unreadable black roundels of her eyes and nose towards me, and hopped into her basket. And I lay down, stretching out my hand to her who sleeps beside me.