by A. S. Byatt
Of angels to the perfect shape of man.
There it came again, the clay and the mould and the moulding. You wrote something easily in youth, and later you came to see how difficult it all was. As a young boy he had been struck by one of his father’s books which told how Gabriel and the angels compassionated the earth’s distress at her fear of being involved in man’s offence. The angels had kneaded the clay into human form in forty days. That was one of the sources of his interest in mould and moulding. There were others, of course. Watching his father preside grimly, trumpet-tongued and not always uninflamed by brandy, at burials in Bag Enderby and Somersby. The clay on the walls of the graves, sliced by the sextons’ shovels, wet with rain. (He himself had added the tears of the angels.) Now there was Darwin, grubbing away at the life of the earthworm, throwing up mould and humus all over the place. Of the earth, earthy, humankind. But also, all the same, the round of green, the orb of flame, existed. Arthur had liked the Nightingale in his poem on the Arabian Nights, ‘Apart from place, withholding time’ in its singing. And the Nightingale had found its defiant voice in his poem for Arthur. It was there in opposition not only to the birds drawn down by the charming serpent, but to the nicely innocent, ‘I pipe but as the linnet sings,’ or the idea of language and song as a sad narcotic, dulling pain.
The Nightingale was the secret voice of the Art Trench had told him he could not live in. Now he was old, he was somehow more tempted to live in it again, as the child had lived in the Arabian Nights. Sometimes he saw dearest Emily and dutiful Hallam and his thousands of admirers and sycophants and people asking for things as shadows racing on a hillside, and heard the voices of the invisible as the only reality.
Wild bird, whose warble, liquid sweet,
Rings Eden through the budded quicks,
O tell me where the senses mix,
O tell me where the passions meet,
Whence radiate: fierce extremes employ
Thy spirits in the darkening leaf,
And in the midmost heart of grief
Thy passion clasps a secret joy:
And I—my harp would prelude woe—
I cannot all command the strings;
The glory of the sum of things
Will flash along the chords and go.
The glory of the sum of things’ was a good phrase. He had written rhetorically—a Shakespearian touch—to Arthur of his
knowing Death has made
His darkness beautiful with thee.
But he had made his poem beautiful with Arthur’s death, and was afraid that that very beauty was something inhuman, animal and abstract at once, matter-moulded and shadowy.
A long thought, along accustomed tracks, can pass in a flash, as though the images and conjunctions and hurtful memories and brightnesses of which it is made up are wound into a tight ball, not strung out on thread like a necklace, and are then rolled at speed all at once, through the tunnels of the brain. He had still not manipulated the button into the hole, and now gave up trying and approached the mirror with his candle, though he knew mirror-images of buttonholes could be as confusing as feeling them out. The flame, in front of the black pool of glass, bellied and flared, white and murky yellow in an unexpected draught, and he saw a dark smear of smoke running backwards over his shoulder. He put the candlestick down on the dressing-table and saw himself like a bearded demon, his eyes glittering under bushy brows, his yellow teeth bared between tendrils of hair. He saw his own skull shaping his soft flesh and its covering of stretched wrinkled skin. He saw the huge bone-pits inside which his eyes were dark reflecting brilliants—wet jellies, he said to himself, pitying his thinning lashes, studying the caverns of his nostrils. He saw his invisible breath curl out of his mouth, and disturb the candle-flame, send wavering loops into its stream of smoke. It came in uncontrolled flickerings and jets, the little light. The spirit does but mean the breath.
This decaying, handsome face peers at me. He touched its cheek. Icy. The body of this death. He said to it, ‘Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson.’ Neither of them, the looker inside his warm motion, the ghostly cold starer, were what everyone thought of as Alfred Tennyson. ‘Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson,’ he said, and then faster, more nervously, ‘Alfred Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson,’ unmaking both of them with every naming of this nothing, this incoherent and terribly brief concatenation of nerves and mind. Pitying his white throat, the skin as innocent as a baby’s below the shirtline, he finally did up the button, with peg-fingers that no longer belonged to him. The whole room, all space, was turning vertiginously round him. He fended off himself with a movement of his arms, flattening the flame with the sleeves of his nightshirt, making a stink of singed cloth and wax-fall. He staggered across to his bed and fell awkwardly into it, aware that he was not losing consciousness but was losing himself. His feather mattress shifted and billowed under his bones, his brain-box sank into the feathers of his pillow that shifted and sighed. He was a sack of bones borne up on a sack of plucked plumes. He was light as air, he was light and air. The voices sang and sang. He had been afraid, sickly afraid of this loss of coherence in youth, had suffered fit after fit of falling-sickness. First the too-bright aura, then the dizzying fall and the howling, like the Soul in the Palace of Art. He had written a poem, The Mystic, in 1830. He remembered, line by line:
Angels have talked with him, and showed him thrones …
Always there stood before him, night and day,
Of wayward varycoloured circumstance
The imperishable presences serene
Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound,
Dim shadows but unwaning presences
Fourfacèd to the comers of the sky:
And yet again, three shadows, fronting one,
One forward, one respectant, three but one;…
One shadow in the midst of a great light,
One reflex from eternity on time,
One mighty countenance of perfect calm,
Awful with most invariable eyes.…
He often lying broad awake, and yet
Remaining from the body, and apart
In intellect and power and will, hath heard
Time flowing in the middle of the night,
And all things creeping to a day of doom.
Sophy Sheekhy saw the terrible face, with its flaring lights, and its smoke and its bone-pits peering as it were through an invisible window into her room. The dead cold weight was heavier on her each moment, pinning her down so that she could move not the smallest muscle, not an eyelid, not her dry throat to swallow. The thick, mumbling tongue asked with difficulty, next to her ear, ‘What do you see?’ and she saw, as though through very thick glass, the old figure in its nightshirt stumble towards its bed, and stretch itself out under the folds of its sheets, and then she saw a kind of haze of spinning threads emanating from it, as though it were some white grub making a cocoon. The shining threads emanated from the mouth and wound about the face, transparent at first, then denser, leaving only a craggy profile, smoothing steadily, and the spinning went on until the whole form was bound into a kind of long bundle of bright woven matter, still, yet glowing and moving and busy and shining.
‘I can’t say what I see.’
‘Everything is—dim. I—cannot—see.’ She felt him grasp at her with disintegrating fingers that tried to pry into her flesh like roots searching for a vantage. She thought she had been afraid in trances before, but that that fear had been nothing compared to this, pity and fear, fear and pity, each making the other harder to bear. He wanted to feed off her life, and was invading the very fibre of her nerves with his death. The surface of her thought was that she would never again, never again try to come into the presence of the terrible dead, and this time too the depths of the still dark places of her were stirred with terror too, his terror, her terror, the terror of the tearing-out of life from flesh and of the energy of love for whatever remained when that was gone. He was being unmade, undone,
and she could not, lying there, hold him together with her arms, or hear his voice any more in her ears, he had no more face, or fingers, only clay-cold, airless, stinking mass, plastering her mouth and nostrils.
XI
The day of the Angel was heavy with approaching storm. Mrs Papagay and Sophy Sheekhy, proceeding along the Front, trod between shining dark wind-ruffled puddles and patches of dull grey. There were gusts of wet, slaty wind in their skirts and they had to hold on to their hats, which threatened to take wing and bowl out to sea. White birds swooped and screamed and cackled, bobbed negligently on slaty waves streaked with sand, or strutted arrogantly in the puddles. Sophy looked at their cold feet in the cold water, clawed and wrinkled, and shuddered. Mrs Papagay sniffed the salt and asked Sophy if she felt ill. ‘You look grey, my love, there is a grey tinge to your skin I do not like, and you have become very subdued.’
Sophy said guardedly that she did not, in fact, feel very well. She said, almost in a whisper, her words carried away by the wind, that she was not sure she was equal to the stress of the séance. Mrs Papagay cried bravely, ‘I will take care of you, I will rescue you the moment I perceive you in any distress.’ Sophy muttered that it was not too easy to rescue anyone from spirits. It was a weight on her mind, she said, gripping the brim of her struggling hat with white knuckles. ‘It may be,’ she said to Mrs Papagay, stopping her and peering into her face, with the movement of the sea behind it, ‘it may be we are not meant to spend our time trying to make contact with them, Mrs Papagay. It may be against Nature.’ Mrs Papagay replied robustly that it was, as they were taught, a natural aptitude of human beings in most societies to wish to speak with the dead. Look at Saul and the Witch of Endor, said Mrs Papagay, look at Odysseus offering Tiresias beakers of blood, look at the Red Indians, who live peaceably among the spirits of their ancestors. Spiritualists were always being exhorted to look at the Red Indians, whose English-speaking souls were regular guests to many British drawing-rooms, among antimacassars and stuffed parrots they must have had trouble in understanding. Mrs Papagay was worried that Sophy, usually so placid, should stop in a storm to express doubt. She peered under Sophy’s hat and saw that her eyes were full of standing tears. ‘Dearest Sophy,’ said Mrs Papagay, ‘you must never be led into doing anything against your own nature, anything you are not equal to. We can make our living in some other way, we can take in lodgers and do fine sewing. We will talk of this.’
Sophy stared through her tears at the iron water, at the rocking line of the horizon, at the iron sky. White spume, white birds, white fringes of fast cloud, sailing on grey. She said, ‘You are very kind, and I am very grateful, indeed I love you for your kindness, and I do not intend to let you down. I feel less afraid, now I have spoken. I am happy to go on.’
The wind squealed past, mocking these sober words of human trust with its whining. The two women took each other’s arms, and leaned into each other, then proceeded united through the gusts and into the town.
Inside the house, there was an atmosphere of ill-temper and constraint which daunted Mrs Papagay immediately she entered. She had not seen Mr Hawke since the ill-fated discussion of marriage in Heaven, and feared that at the very least his ruffled feathers would need smoothing. She saw immediately that it was worse than that. He was seated in a corner, lecturing Mrs Jesse and Mrs Hearnshaw on Swedenborg’s physical apprehension of evil spirits, who persisted in thinking that their smoky darkness and foul odours were clearest air, and their loathsome appearance beautiful, who ‘clung to the corresponding part of him of their own place in the Divine Human and emitted sensations of anguish—’. He had brought Mrs Jesse a large, pallid bouquet of hothouse roses, which the maid had arranged in a silver rose-bowl in the centre of the table. He acknowledged the arrival of Mrs Papagay and Sophy Sheekhy with no more than a cursory nod. Mrs Hearnshaw’s condition made her nauseous. She put a lace handkerchief frequently to her lips, and kept her left hand clasped to her ribs under her bosom, as though holding her emotions, and her unborn child, together in her body. Mrs Jesse herself seemed edgy and tired. Captain Jesse was for once not talking. He was standing in the bay of the window, his white mane rimmed with reflected light from the oil-lamp, staring into the thickening gloom, as though, Mrs Papagay thought, his right place was out there, in the weather.
They sat round the table in an apprehensive silence. Mr Hawke’s face was red anyway, and was further reddened, a shiny apple, an angry cherub, by the reflected firelight. He offered no opening to Mrs Papagay, but said he had solemn matters to impart to them, as they settled their spirits to receive messages from the world of spirits and angels. He had been thinking, he said, about the peculiarly material nature of the Swedenborgian witness, and its relation to the spiritualist faith. He had been much struck, when he first read Swedenborg’s accounts of his journeys to Heaven and Hell, by the sage’s claims to have taught the angels in heaven many truths. But why should this not be so? A man who lived in two worlds at once would, by his very doubleness, learn and teach something that no single-world denizen could suspect. The angels did not know, until Swedenborg’s visit, what matter was, or that it was distinct from spirit. It was only when a man came, who embraced at once matter and spirit and the difference between them, that an experience was given which taught what the difference is. You might argue that Swedenborg’s visit was in the way of a scientific experiment for the angelic hosts, a positive experience, as needful for archangels and angels as for chemists, philosophers and mechanics. In fact, in all wisdom, there is no substance but fact, nothing so divine as experienee. This is why the Divine Human is higher than the Angels, because His nature is Human, and corresponds perfectly to the human doubleness, matter and spirit.
There were things moreover, it was needful to know, about the material nature of the Divine Human. It was rightly said that even as the angels in heaven, joined in conjugial love, were both male and female, so was the Divine Human Himself. True it was, as Swedenborg had borne eloquent witness, that at one particular moment and spot in time and space, on one planet of all the inhabited planets, the Divine Human had taken on a particular human form and become an earthly man, of the earth earthy, as Saint Paul had written. True it was, that the heavens were male and female, for they proceeded from mankind, which was male and female, ‘in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them’ (Genesis 1, 27). But there was a further Doctrine of Swedenborg’s about the Humanity of the Lord which it was essential to know and understand. Whilst He was incarnate here on earth, the Lord had had both a human form from His human mother and an eternal human form from the fact of His Divine Self, the Father. And Swedenborg taught that the Lord successively put off the Human assumed from the mother, and put on the Human from the Divine in Himself. He had two states on earth, one called the state of humiliation or exinanition, the other the state of glorification or union with the Divine, which is called the Father. He was in the state of humiliation so far as, and when, He was in the Human from the mother; and He was in the state of glorification so far as, and when, He was in the Human from the Father. In the state of humiliation he prayed to the Father as a being distinct from Himself; but in the state of glorification he spoke with the Father as with Himself. His Crucifixion was a necessary shedding of the corrupt humanity He had from the mother, in order to experience glorification and union with the Father.
‘The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.
As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly.
And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.
Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption.
Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall s
ound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
‘I Corinthians 15, 47 to 52,’ said Mr Hawke.
There was a glum silence amongst the predominantly female members of his audience, who felt themselves individually and generally chastised, found wanting, or rather, not wanting, but too abundantly fleshly. Mrs Hearnshaw clasped her arms tighter around the prison of whalebone that held in the surge of her flesh inside which her own bones caged her growing child, precariously alive. Mrs Papagay fingered the little purse of her flesh under her chin, looking down, not meeting Mr Hawke’s eye. Sophy Sheekhy shivered and shrank further into her clothes. Mrs Jesse stroked Pug’s gentle, ugly, snoring head. Captain Jesse gave a sort of snort and trumpeted inconsequentially, ‘And the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair.’
There was a silence. Mr Hawke said, ‘Excuse me—I fail to see the relevance—’
‘I just like the sound of that saying, Mr Hawke, it cheers me, it suggests a kind of happy union of the earthly and the heavenly, you know, the beauty of women, and the admiration of the sons of God for that, in the oldest days you know, in Paradise, I suppose.’
‘That is a very wrong interpretation, Captain Jesse. Very wrong. The authorities agree that those so-called sons of God are the fallen angels who fell into corruption out of their lust for earthly beauty, as certain among the angels are prone to do, as Swedenborg has also revealed. Even Saint Paul, I may tell you, in a most interesting text, warns against the excessive angelic desire for female corporeality. He requires women to be covered in the congregation, for a reason, which is that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is the man, so the man ought not, Saint Paul says, to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.
‘For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man.