Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  John hoped his smile covered his surprise. It was hard to picture a beast more unpalatable-looking than this armadillo, now performing the mesmerizing contortion of rounding itself into an armoured ball. His host watched with him. “Protection against predators,” he explained, “but fortunately ineffective against the truly curious gourmand.”

  John felt at a loss to comment, and decided it might not be necessary.

  It was not. Buckland straightened up and declared his intentions to the neophyte.

  “It is my goal to eat my way through the animal kingdom––mainly at these little dinners I give––and so far my efforts have proceeded admirably.”

  Liddell groaned a protest, which Buckland smilingly ignored. He took up a slender notebook from one of the sideboards and flipped through it. “Let’s see, in the last few months we’ve enjoyed”––here Liddell coughed––“loin of horse, Icelandic style. Tail of beaver––also North American––poached in broth and Bordeaux.” Their host sighed. “Poor Hardy. I really was fond of him. But he was growing old and going fast.” He looked down at his list. “Yes––haunch of same, braised. And there is a great deal of good meat on a sixty-pound river rodent, I assure you.”

  “But where, sir––” began John. Buckland nodded towards the largest window. “Mostly right out there, in the garden. I have a series of little pools, a few kennels, and a large assortment of wire cages.” He turned and pointed to the hyaena eternally snarling on the bookcase. “Bessie lived there for a while; I would have eaten her but I had already done so with her sister.” He smiled brightly at John. “You do know they’re all hermodrophites, don’t you?”

  “I did not,” admitted John. He could not quite imagine a mammal possessing the reproductive characteristics of both sexes. He moved to one of the sideboards. The trays and baskets of specimens were guarded by a sign that read “Paws Off”. Dust was very thick upon them. “Wonderful thing, dust,” noted Dr. Buckland. “It is a nearly perfect preservative. It protects against the bleaching of the sun, absorbs errant moisture before it can stain, and lends a ghostly beauty to the surface of objects. Take care not to sneeze.”

  When they sat down, John, as initiate, was given the place of honour, directly facing the grinning jaws of the levitating crocodile. A few things were already upon the table, including plates of uncooked greens which he could only assume would be consumed in the same state as Aldabrachelys gigantea had enjoyed them, raw. A large Chinese pottery cup at each place setting held two each of what seemed to John to be shelled, boiled goose eggs. Buckland said a brief grace “for what we are about to receive” and John caught both Liddell and Darwin smiling. Then their host speared one of the eggs, and quartering it, popped a segment into his mouth. His guests followed. To John it tasted much like an ordinary vinegar-egg, perhaps stronger and chewier, but perfectly eatable. “Excellent, sir,” John said.

  “The pickled eggs of the caiman, a small South American crocodilian,” Buckland explained. “Think of it as our friend’s little brothers,” he said, gesturing with his fork to the huge reptile suspended above. “Home-pickled, too. Mrs. Buckland, my most able assistant, and a fine collector in her own right, helped prepare them.”

  Wheels creaked outside the door, accompanied by the shudder of tinkling crockery, followed by a knock. Buckland rose and pulled a trolley inside and up to the table. He lifted a silver dome covering four small plates, and set one down before each of his guests and himself.

  John looked appraisingly at his portion. It certainly smelled delicious. Before him was a thick slice of bread, delicately toasted, and streaming with butter. Atop the slice lay two small oval lumps of browned meat, which yielded easily to the pressure of his fork. He exchanged glances with Darwin and Liddell as he raised his fork to his mouth. He bit down and chewed. The meat was almost sweet, and reminded him of the very young calves’ meat he had eaten in Italy. Darwin and Liddell knew that their host would not reveal what they had just partaken of until he was complimented upon it, and John quickly grasped the rule.

  “Truly first rate,” said Liddell, laying down his cutlery.

  “Tender to a fault,” said Darwin.

  “Quite delicate,” offered John.

  Buckland beamed at them and then took up another forkful. “So glad you are pleased, gentlemen. A very simple and domestic preparation. It is toast of mice.”

  Michaelmas term at Oxford was followed by Hilary term, and in late Spring by Trinity. These academic rhythms ebbed and flowed around John Ruskin. He applied himself with utmost rigour to his studies, staying cordial with the Gentlemen-Commoners for his parents’ sake––and that of his own immediate peace while at Christ Church––and saw as much as he could of his new scientifically-minded friends. Yet regardless of the task or pleasure before him, always in the background of his mind was the image of blonde Adèle, away in Paris, living her life, and laughing.

  He worked as hard as he could bear at Oxford. With his parents and cousin he went to Switzerland each summer, where he collected alpine plants and glacial rocks. He came of age and his father made over an income to him of £200 per year. He wrote letters to Adèle he couldn’t send. He was made a Fellow of the Geological Society. He wrote his long essay ‘The Poetry of Architecture’, for the Architectural Magazine, urging the use of local materials in building, and signed it Kataphusin––Greek for ‘according to nature’. The Times spoke kindly of it. His father gave him two more Turner watercolours, one of which he was allowed to bring back to his rooms at Christ Church. He worked for weeks at a long poem on a set subject, the Christianisation of two islands off the coast of India, and won the Newdigate Prize. He read it aloud before two thousand listeners at Commemoration, speaking after Wordsworth. Mrs. Ruskin was too overcome by the honour to attend.

  Then his father wrote to say Adèle had been wed to the Count Duquesne.

  I have lost her, was all he could write in his diary. Too staggered to go down to dinner or leave his rooms, he sat through the night stunned and mute, working at problems from Euclid. Three weeks later, mired in misery and alone in his rooms, he felt a tickling in his throat and gave a cough. He reached for water but another taste came into his mouth. He touched his handkerchief to his lips and saw a trace of blood. He slipped on his coat, wrapped a shawl around his stock, and walked to his mother’s rooms on the High Street.

  Chapter Three

  The Lamp of Memory

  Chamonix: Summer 1842

  John’s fingers were cramping and his cuff spotted with ink. His hand could not keep up with his thoughts, and his anger outstripped them both. Two days ago, in Geneva, he and his father had opened the thick parcel of English newspapers that had been forwarded to them. His father addressed the political and commercial news; his mother did not look at papers.

  John turned first to the literary features and reviews, read a series of indifferent poems, and then found the review detailing a few of the offerings on view at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Turner was being excoriated. Turner had five paintings in the exhibition this year, and John had spent long hours before three of them. He took up another newspaper. No mention of the exhibition. A third discussed Turner’s entries in damning terms. The fourth was worst of all, a few lines dismissing the old artist as either half-blind or half-crocked. Turner’s colours were outrageous. He was accused of smearing his canvas with cream, chocolate, yolk of egg, and currant-jelly. At times the subject of the painting itself––though attached to laughably long and descriptive titles–– was indecipherable, lost in a swirling maelstrom of brushwork. His recent work was not True to Nature.

  It had been Sunday; and twenty-two year old John Ruskin could do nothing but kneel during the evening Protestant service and pray to God to aid him in what he was about to undertake. They removed to Chamonix next day, to an inn with views to Mont Blanc and the Aiguille du Midi. John felt a reverential appropriateness in this majestic setting for his task. By Tuesday morning at four a.m. he
was seated at the wobbly desk in his room, looking across the still-dark valley at the ghostly peaks. Shaking his hands out before he took up his pen, he recalled his physical response when he stood before a fine Turner: a warming in the core of his being, every sense thrummingly alive. He would write a fitting defence of the greatest of landscape painters. He envisaged a pamphlet of some four or five thousand words; it would be finished by eight that morning.

  By breakfast, writing as rapidly as his quills would allow, he had not even one sentence each on the points he felt he must touch upon. The viciousness and vapidity of the press, and the impressionability of its readers infuriated him.

  Why do you blame Turner because he dazzles you? Does not the falsehood rest with those who do not?

  He wrote every morning beginning at dawn, stopped upon his mountain hikes to jot down thoughts, excused himself early from table at night. The torrent of words continued. He understood, and must convey, that the greatness of Turner’s genius stood predicate on elemental ideas, ideas of truth, of beauty, of relation––and he would provide demonstrations of these ideas that, once understood, would stand as authoritatively as Euclidian proofs.

  He must discuss the ways in which the ancient painters had shown water, hills, trees and sky, and look at the efforts of artists as varied in approach and result as Poussin and Vandevelde, Titian, Gorgione, and Claude. All major and many minor English landscape artists must be examined, held up to the light, their excellencies noted, and their inferiority to Turner explained.

  But the vastness of his undertaking began to reveal itself to John. Everything is interconnected, he saw. He could not critique the depiction of mountains without discussing their actual geologic structure. To consider the painting of clouds without an examination of their formation and behaviour in the sky was impossible. The majority of people had looked at the natural world, but few had seen. Turner saw, and of all men living or dead came closest to the truth of God’s magnificent creation. John realised that looking at a good painting was a religious act, and that the greatest works of Turner were themselves prayers.

  The greatest picture is that which conveys to the mind of the spectator the greatest numbers of the greatest ideas.

  Turner had never sacrificed a greater truth to a lesser, John saw; Turner’s latest works, if they had fault at all, were the embodied passion of one who feels too much, knows too much. He did not know how he recognised this in the man, or what mirror he had found to hold to his own face and glimpse the same truth about himself.

  He wrote all the way through the tour, thought all the way down the Rhine, spent hours gazing into the churning water or up to the castle-rimmed cliffs. He told no one but his father of his efforts, or his aims. For the first time on their annual tour he was eager to return home, free from the distractions of scenery and disruptions of travel.

  But first there was the imposition of the removal from Herne Hill. John James Ruskin had in the spring bought the lease of a far grander Georgian house, and when the family returned to the south London suburbs, they and cousin Mary Richardson decamped with the servants to Denmark Hill.

  “You’ll have no hesitation in inviting your Christ Church friends there,” John James Ruskin had told John when obtaining the place. Unbeknownst to his wife and son he had been looking about for almost two years for a large, solid, and quiet property, one which reflected both his mounting prosperity and dislike of fashion. “And your mother will have more staff to order about.”

  There were very few of his Oxford acquaintances John wished ever to see again, and those he did were the sort of men who were more or less unmoved by the trappings of worldly success.

  John loved Herne Hill and was secretly pained that his parents did not share his affectionate association. Here, in his mother’s little parlour, the two of them had five times read aloud the entirety of the Bible, from Genesis to Apocalypse, all the hard names sounded out and repeated until he had mastered them. Here in the brick enclosed garden he had studied the movements of ants for endless hours, and grieved silently when the gardener swept them away. Here his beloved Newfoundland dog had bitten him when he was five and left the scar on his lip.

  “I would like to pet Lion,” he had told Barkin, their coachman, who for a reason John could not now remember was carrying him in his arms across the stable yard. The odour of tobacco and horses surrounded John as the man lowered him to where the dog’s great head was buried in his bowl. Barkin laughed as John reached down with both chubby arms to encircle the huge muzzle. Lion’s possessive startle, and reactive snap at him was a blur. He cried out; and then his mother was before them all, scolding, holding her handkerchief to his streaming lip. He barely felt the lashing canine tooth. Most of all he remembered his surprise at being hurt by one he loved.

  Here at Herne Hill he watched with delight the unfolding of the rose blossoms, tight bud to blown and spent petals to hard and unyielding rose hip. At seven he had, in secret, pulled a few of those tiny firm fruits from their thorned stems and crushed them between his teeth, to wonder how a flower so sweet could end in a fruit so bitter. In Spring he would sit in the chair his mother brought him and observe from a safe distance the activity of bees in the peach blossoms, and in August it was the red and dripping Herne Hill peaches he was forbidden to eat for fear he disrupt his digestion. Adèle had slept here, walked here, laughed at him here. All his young delight, and many of his frustrations, lay enclosed in those brick walls.

  But Denmark Hill was less than a mile away. His new study would be as large and comfortable as the rest of the place, with ample room for new cases to house his mineral specimens. The house stood in seven acres of meadow and garden, and they could keep cows and pigs and plan flower beds and orchards. And he could walk down the sloping fields to Dulwich Gallery, and take his fill of pictures every day.

  John Ruskin was wandering through the yellowing meadows of Denmark Hill, found them too small to contain his thought, and strode across the downs towards Camberwell. Hands thrust into the recesses of his rear pockets, he waded through ripe grasses and nodding flower heads. He spoke aloud, as he sometimes had need of while describing natural phenomena. That morning he wished to describe a painting by Turner, the noblest seascape that great painter of waters had ever achieved, and therefore the greatest seascape ever attempted. He had seen it three years ago at the Academy show, and had stood before it so long his eyes had blurred. He had been forced by his looking to close his eyes a moment, and when he licked his lips was surprised there was not salt upon them. The great Master had taken him upon that violent sea and set him in another ship from which he watched the awful unfolding of the activity on the first. Now in the fading meadows he understood and could put words to Turner’s accomplishment.

  The painting was more than a masterful recording of elemental forces acting upon the puniness of a man-made vessel. The canvas conveyed heat and oppressive humidity of air. The sky, save for one small and retreating patch of pacific blue, was spasming with ivory, yellow, orange and red. The sea, broken as it was by wave, carried in it the ghosts of those shades upon a base of charry brown and lead gray. The ship being tossed upon that pitiless sea drove forward, stripped of all sail save the smallest foresail. Left in its wake was a quantity of its human freight, cast overboard, arm and leg chains still visible before the suck of water dragged limb and iron below. A phrenzy of fish swarmed the bodies.

  ...its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

  The intense and lurid splendour of it, the flakes of crimson and scarlet mirrored in jagged water peaks, the flaming clouds and white-hot shaft of setting sun, all transfixed John. Turner had light itself on his palette.

  Turner called it ‘Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying––typhon coming
on.’ In his manuscript John would call it simply ‘Slave Ship’, not bothering to mention or correct Turner’s spelling of the storm. He also named it the single work in which all of Turner’s immortality could rest.

  “It’s in way of congratulations on the book––I know you’ve not yet done with it, but for its starting and near completion––and in way of a New Year’s gift, of course.”

  With that his father had thrown back the green baize covering the display easel. There was Turner’s ‘Slave Ship.’ His. The chiefest, the sublimest, the purest and most perfectly realised Truth ever painted.

  John could not speak for a moment. His father was still standing by it, holding one end of the baize in his hand, and his mother, seated by the splayed legs of the easel, began gathering up the pooling covering. His father was grinning, his mother smiling uncertainly, wanting the baize up off the floor.

  “You showed me what you wrote of it–the choice was simple. Turner still had the painting and Griffith was for once not a sharper.”

  John stepped forward to touch the frame, assuring himself.

  “Two hundred and fifty guineas,” his father was saying.

  It was worth kingdoms.

  He turned to his father and extended his hand. His father took it and covered them both with his other. Here was his son before him positively glowing at his gift, and John James almost winced thinking that he might have refused the price asked for it. “A happy new year to you, my boy.”

  They had a glass of sherry and spoke of where it should hang. John did not think it right to take it to his study with the Turner watercolours that had been past birthday gifts; his father, and all who entered the house, should have the pleasure of looking upon it. The breakfast room was covered over in delicate watercolours of roosting doves by William Henry Hunt, and a growing number of Turner lake scenes. They agreed that as subject for a dining room it was not the right choice. And it was so large.