RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR

by Philip Hoare

  Up there is the scary otherworld with its mask off, the infinity into which we are all falling. The green lights flash across the bay. I’m sailing on an uncharted sea. Starry animals dance across the sky, born out of the water. My heavens, I think: sea or sky, it doesn’t seem to matter which. Everything is the same.

  I’m not even sure which way is up any more.

  SOMETHINGAMAZING

  In March 1845, Henry David Thoreau left the New England town of Concord and set out for the woods around Walden Pond and, having borrowed an axe for the purpose, began to cut down white pines on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. As Thoreau shaped the timbers, he stopped to eat his lunch of bread and butter, reading the newspaper in which it was wrapped. He was constructing a hut, an unfixed locality, citing Indian teepees as eminently suitable to their purpose and eschewing the mortgages to which his fellow Concordians were shackled. The philosopher hoped for a reconnection, albeit a temporary one. ‘We no longer camp as for a night,’ he wrote, ‘but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.’ He sought utopia by the water’s edge, just as William Blake, after ‘three years’ slumber on the banks of the Ocean’ in his Sussex cottage, had proposed a new Jerusalem.

  The son of a pencil-maker, Thoreau was educated at Harvard University, and had briefly been a teacher – he gave it up after finding corporal punishment an offence to his sensibilities. In 1842 his twenty-six-year-old brother had died in his arms, from lockjaw caught after cutting himself shaving. Thoreau was consumed with grief. He later proposed marriage to a young woman, and was rejected. Thereafter he would work as a surveyor, measuring out the land while pondering its metaphysics. Now he had retreated to a New England wood (the same wood he and his friend Edward Hoar had managed to set on fire when camping there the previous year). Even in his attempt to distil utopia into a commune of only one, Thoreau could not help but be part of the greater world. When he bought the frame of his shanty from an Irish navvy – for four dollars and a quarter – there was another price to be paid: by the family effectively evicted by the transaction, and by their cat, which went feral and was killed when it trod in a trap laid for woodchucks.

  By the sandy shores of Walden, in among its trees, Thoreau unpacked his shack and trundled it, bit by bit, by cart to his pondside site, laying out the parts to dry and bleach in the sun (having been told by ‘a young Patrick’ that another Irishman had already stolen all the nails). He excavated a cellar underneath the hut where he could overwinter his potatoes; all houses, he wrote, were ‘but a sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow’. He was digging into the land like a badger.

  Friends helped him raise the frame of his house, in the way Shaker barns were raised as communal efforts, and he took possession on the Fourth of July. Construction continued as he built his chimney using stones from the pond, claiming them, as he did the timber, under squatter’s rights. Thoreau relished labour for its own sake. If we all built our own houses, he said, ‘the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged’. Instead, ‘we do like the cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built’.

  Thoreau saw transcendence in everything he did and wove philosophy out of the commonplace. He lived in his own quietude, finding it more fruitful than the alternative. ‘The man I meet,’ he said, ‘is seldom so instructive as the silence he breaks.’ Made insular by the beauty of the natural world, he wrote about himself, reasoning that ‘I should not talk so much about myself if there were any body else whom I knew as well.’ And if he lived in a dream, what of it? What else should we do with our hours of wakefulness? Nothing more useful than the hours we spend dreaming.

  Shingled and plastered, ten foot wide by fifteen foot long, with eight-foot-high posts, Thoreau’s hut contained an attic and a closet, a tiny cellar with two trapdoors, and a brick fireplace. Outside was a woodshed. All built by himself, for $28.12½, including $1.40 transportation (‘I carried a good part on my back’). He reckoned the price to be less than the annual rent paid by most of his townsfellows, another good reason to recommend the effort. ‘I brag for humanity rather than for myself.’

  Walden Pond is wonderfully cold on a late spring afternoon. I push out from shore, reluctant to go far, knowing Thoreau’s plumbline drew more than one hundred feet as he surveyed its dark extent. In midsummer this place is alive with people and noise, with children and picnics and canoes. Today, it is silent and still, save for the concentric rings sent out by my body. It’s hard to believe that Boston is only half an hour away. The railway runs close by; it did so in Thoreau’s day, although the whistling trains merely reminded him of his solitude. On the other side of the road there’s a replica of his hut, complete with a bunk covered with a green woollen blanket; a single bed is as eloquent as any obituary, or any passing star. ‘Why should I feel lonely? is not our planet in the Milky Way?’ reasoned its sole occupant. ‘We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system … I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.’

  Thoreau’s daily swims were a communion, undertaken at dawn. ‘I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things I did … Morning brings back the heroic ages.’ Ever analytical, he tried to examine the very colour of the water – ‘lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both’ – and noted that a glassful held up to the light was crystal clear. And in a dreamlike image, he observed that when the body of a bather – presumably his own – was seen through the water, it was ‘of an alabaster whiteness’, the limbs ‘magnified and distorted withal’. Nowadays analysis of the pond water in summer betrays a high volume of human urine.

  Walden Pond became an extension of Thoreau’s hut; he even used its white sand to scrub his floor, wetting and scattering it before brushing it clean. Were all these activities, so exactingly and intensely enumerated, ways of forestalling darker thoughts? The black water offered liberation. ‘After hoeing, or perhaps reading and writing, in the forenoon, I usually bathed again in the pond, swimming across one of its coves for a stint, and washed the dust of labor from my person, or smoothed out the last wrinkle which study had made, and for the afternoon was absolutely free.’

  In nearby Concord, after swimming in the clear green weedy river behind Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house, hoping he wouldn’t mind, I visit the basement of the town library, where the curator emerges from the vaults with an armful of oversized documents protected by plastic sleeves. They flap rather worryingly in her hands as she lays them out on the table with a mixture of reverence and familiarity. I am allowed to inspect, but not photograph these relics, prophylactically sheathed in mylar. The air has been sucked out of them; the human has been excluded. Seen through thin plastic they remain remote, even though they’re lying in front of me.

  Thoreau’s fine draughtsmanship charts the pond as carefully as a navigator might chart the sea; as his plumbline drew water, so Thoreau drew the pond. Tiny numerals record the depths – 30', 91', 121' – and ruled lines divide its expanse in precise, faint ink, as though he had trailed a sepia fishing rod behind him as he rowed across the pond. Thoreau may have sought to disprove those who believed Walden to be bottomless, but in the figures an implicit poetry seeps out; mere mathematics could not confine his thoughts. These points could be constellations as much as charts of a body of water. To him, ‘there was no such thing as size’, his friend Emerson wrote. ‘The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws.’ Walden was a microcosm of everything. ‘It is earth’s eye,’ Thoreau said, ‘looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.’ Yet in imposing his lines on the wilderness, wasn’t he destroying what he observed, even as he’d managed to burn three hundred acres of it by mistake?

  In a tall glass case against a pillar
that supports the silent mass of books upstairs – who reads them now? Certainly not the people sitting at the tables, their faces turned pale by their laptops – Thoreau’s instruments are displayed. The polished wooden tripod and theodolite mark the measure of the man, as if he’d just stepped away to take account of the land around, taking in all that beauty and not believing it.

  In 1862, as he lay in a Concord attic, dying of the disease that consumed him at the age of forty-four, Thoreau edited his final text, ‘Walking’. It’s here, on the table. I copy the words from his own hand, closing the gap between his then and my now. It is his last will and testament, by default: ‘I wish this evening’ – the two words excised in the edit for posterity’s sake – ‘to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and a culture merely civil, – to regard man as an inhabitant or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.’

  New England lay empty and full of history, settled and unsettling; it allowed such transformations for its utopians and its Transcendentalists. Emerson had experienced a panoptic epiphany on Boston Common: ‘Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all.’ Other peers of Thoreau took matters to an extreme. Samuel Larned was the son of a Providence merchant who had become obsessed with his own consumption. He’d spent a year living only on crackers; the next year devoted to eating only apples. When he stayed at Brook Farm he declined to drink milk and wore vegan shoes. He also swore at everyone he met: ‘Good-morning, damn you.’ We might diagnose Tourette’s syndrome, but Larned believed that profanities uttered in a pure spirit ‘could be redeemed from vulgarity’.

  Larned and his young friends were the Apostles of the Newness, marked out by their ‘long hair, Byronic collars, flowing ties, and eccentric habits and manners’. In 1842, three of them set off on a walking tour, wearing broad-brimmed hats, sack coats and as-yet unconventional beards. They took no money with them, relying on people they met to provide them with food, although, as Richard Francis comments, ‘given their severe dietary restrictions, that wasn’t asking much’. When they arrived at Emerson’s house, he quickly moved them round to the back door where their swearing wouldn’t disturb the neighbours. Their appearance was becoming more outrageous: by the time Larned and his friends came visiting the following year, they were ‘peculiarly costumed’ in smocks belted about the waist and made of ‘gay-coloured chintz’.

  The sight of these visionary young men dressed in what looked like blouses got up from flowery curtains must have made a certain impression in the streets of Concord and Boston, as similarly dressed young men would do in Woodstock the following century. Even at the time they were referred to as ‘ultra’, as if set beyond the pale. That year, 1843, Larned found his natural home in the nearby commune of Fruitlands, whose members declined to enslave animals to plough their fields and used, ate or wore nothing animal or produced by slavery, from cotton to whale oil. Some went naked under the New England sun, while their leader, Bronson Alcott, bathed in cold water, rubbing his body afterwards with a ‘friction brush’. He also claimed to be able to enter a kind of altered state, with sparks flying from his skin and flames shooting from his fingertips, ‘which seemed erect and blazing with phosphoric light’, as if he were a Blakean being. When he closed his eyes, they ‘shot sparkles’, and in his ears he heard a melody, ‘as of the sound of many waters’.

  In contrast to these urgent eruptions around him, Thoreau’s was a quieter resistance – for all that he practised civil disobedience and even went to prison for one night as a protest against his taxes being used to support war and slavery. If he was said to be an ugly man, he became beautiful by virtue of what he observed and absorbed. ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life …’ He too discovered slowness, seeking meaningful leisure ‘for true integrity’, free of property and employment. At Walden, he found the earth’s eye. And as he looked into the water, he saw the rest of us too. His last words, knowing he was about to die, were ‘Now comes good sailing.’

  Exiled on the island of Crete, Daedalus was imprisoned by the waves and determined to escape. The only way was up. The architect made wings from feathers fastened with wax, hindered in his work by his playful young son. As they set off on their timeless flight, Daedalus told Icarus to ignore Orion the Hunter and be guided only by his father. He must not get too close to the sun or the sea; either would be disastrous.

  They took off into the air, watched by fishermen and shepherds who thought they must be seeing flying gods. But Icarus could not resist going higher; perhaps he wanted to be a god himself. Rising high in his ecstasy, he left his father far behind and soared up towards the sun. As his wings melted, his dreams came apart and the boy tumbled into the sea. His father called for his son in vain. Then he saw the feathers on the waves, and cursed his own invention.

  Something falls out of the sky and into a lake. There’s a burst of white against the blue. His coming is seemingly unnoticed by the rest of the world. He wanders into a one-horse town; the landscape is as arid as the place from which he came. He looks like a comet, his flame-like hair slicked back on entry into the earth’s atmosphere. Even stumbling down what appears to be an enormous cinder pile he is otherworldly, a pale bird of paradise picking his way through blackened coals. As the visitor exchanges his grey overalls for a plain black suit, he assumes a worldly guise and an ordinary name and proceeds to build a secretive corporation, World Enterprises, producing inventions from instant cameras to electronically generated music.

  A lavish art book lands on the desk of a university professor, Nathan Bryce. It is published by WE and entitled Masterpieces in Paint and Poetry. It falls open – to a burst of seagulls on the soundtrack – revealing Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.

  A mere splash of a boy, all kinked knees, plunges into the corner of a world going about its business. A ploughman’s red shirt draws the eye to the centre of the picture; a ship sails on a Renaissance sea. On the facing page are Auden’s lines:

  … the sun shone

  As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

  Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

  Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

  Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

  All these scenes seem to refer to something else before and after, as if, like Orlando, the story was running backwards and forwards in time. As Mary-Lou the hotel maid shows Thomas Jerome Newton to his room, he collapses in the lift. She has to pick him up in her arms – as thin as he is – carrying him down the corridor, his nose bleeding, head lolling and legs dangling like a pietà. The next day she and Newton go to church, where they sing ‘Jerusalem’ – And did those feet, in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green.

  Newton is oddly innocent, both in and out of control, invincible and vulnerable, wide-eyed at the world yet knowing it all. He is a Prospero arriving on island Earth; a refugee from Anthea, his planet from which the sea has disappeared. He is also an omen, a saviour and a sacrifice: seeking to save his own home and warning us of the danger to ours. He might as well walk on water; even his centre-parted hair is reminiscent of Jesus. In the novel by Walter Tevis on which the film is based, the comparison is more obvious. When he sees a painting of Christ on the cross, Newton is startled – ‘with its thinness and large piercing eyes it could have been the face of an Anthean’ – and when Bryce wonders if there will be a second coming, the alien replies, ‘I imagine he’ll remember what happened to him the last time.’

  The way he inhabits the film is unsettling. His performance has an interior, kabuki air – perhaps because he had been trained in mime by a man who had felt ‘confronted by this vision of the beautiful archangel Gabriel, glowing, shining’ (among the star’s improvisations were s
ailors drowning at sea and animals hunting their prey; he and his tutor-lover, Lindsay Kemp, also planned to make a musical of The Water-Babies together, just as two years later, Derek Jarman wanted him to sing Ariel’s songs in his film of The Tempest). On location he kept to his trailer, behind its wooden blinds, declining to mix with the rest of the cast; he told his director, Nicolas Roeg, that he wanted to play Newton as a recluse like Howard Hughes, although he also became addicted to eating ice cream, a habit that had to be curtailed since he started to put on weight, which may explain the corset he wears in later scenes.

  Tevis describes his character’s bones as bird-like; when he is driven about, Newton tells his chauffeur, Arthur, to slow down and keep to thirty because he is unused to earth’s gravity. And in an operation in which he reveals what appears to be his true self, he pulls off prosthetic nipples and penis and takes out his lenses to reveal yellow eyes with vertical slits, like some creature looking out over the veldt. It is another mask. All the time, we are aware that the real person behind those blue eyes – which were in reality odd enough, one permanently dilated pupil ringed with bird-like intensity after a boyhood fight – was a transformer who had moved through animal as well as human guises. Most lately he had become half-canine, half-human, a dog star, dangling a diamond earring and singing with a feral yelp, prowling a post-apocalyptic city whose skeletal wreckage prophesied the future ruins of other towers. Like the wolfish Virginia’s vision of Vita as a porpoise or a stag, he was fabulous in the true sense of the word, since fables are our fates as embodied by animals.